Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
The Major can taste the sweat as he walks through the brothel. He likes it and he rolls it in and sucks it beneath his tongue.
The door at the end of the corridor is open and a slue of framed photographs and bunched flower offerings dribble from its threshold and up to the foot of the bed.
A woman sits atop it, hunched, wires streaming from the crest of her head and up and into the ceiling above. Her blind gaze turns as he enters.
“Come”, she whispers, as if hissed through the pits of scrolling black static in her head.
“You are the broken one. The one they call Delphine?”
She says nothing as she watches the smoke rise and contort from the ash that hangs all but falling from between the gentle quake in her fingers.
“The oracle whore. I’m told you can see the future?”
“I see the present. Today always foretells tomorrow. After all these millennia and still you do not learn from your mistakes. Such pleasure you have at perpetually running back and into the flames”
“That’s it?”
“Simple”
“You know when I look at how sublimely beautiful you are I think of just how far we have advanced. Then you go and open your lame-ass fortune cookie spewing bitch mouth…”
She tongues the gape where her teeth have been ripped from their beds and prods the exposed steel strut of her jaw. Not so pretty now, he had said.
“OK, let me see if I got this right… you get yourself knocked around by a client. He messes up your pretty little plastic face. You refuse to be re-skinned and then you start to see things. Horrible things. Flashes of the future. But now you tell me its just some philosophical nonsense you glitched up in the hope that you can save all of mankind from itself?”
“I thought it worth a try”
“I wouldn’t have wasted my time but you have also mentioned Project Hannibal. Where did you hear this name?”
“From the client. But, as I’m sure you are well aware we sex drones are programmed to forget such superfluous details as just who the person was that we last made love to”
“Love?”, he smirks, “So how is it then that you remember Hannibal?”
“I guess I must have had the name knocked into me”, she draws on the cigarette and absently picks at and tears at the skin of her wrist.
“Why do you do that?”
“For the same reason you do Major, when the darkness gets thick and pulls you to the pit. I do it because I want to feel”, she says and his eyes lose themselves in her words.
There is a crunch of blue pixels and an image projects from his cuff.
“Say hello to your new grandson”, the Majors daughter beams through fresh sweat as she holds her newborn child to the camera.
“You are right Major. I am full of shit. It is all lies. But my intentions were good. Just thought a little apocalyptic scare might help is all…”
“Whore”, he spits as he leaves. But her words they trail and they follow.
“… Sleep well Major for it will not be you that destroys this world, though you will certainly come very, very close. But your grandson, Lucas isn’t it? He will slice this filthy orb in two”.
Hari I must admit when I first started reading your stories I found them to be difficult reading. The language over-powered the story for me. However as I am learning to better understand your words, you too are adapting, writing with increased clarity without sacrificing any of the power you bring to your prose. Thank you for challenging me, and thank you for the stories.
You are welcome, Simon. I am very new to this writing lark and so my style really is still a work in progress. I have been lucky that some very supportive people have helped knock some of the superfluous edges off my work. Though, as you say, its a case of still being true to myself. There will be bumps along the way but its been well worth it. Thank you very much for your encouragement.
Not quite as adjective-rich as promised .. I am glad to say! For my money your adjective-free(ish) diet is doing wonders.
Nicely done, even if the topic is just a touch depressing, which considering the protagonist is a machine means a job well done by you. Also, I had to check on ‘slue’ as I am more accustomed to the ‘slew’ variant 🙂
Thank you Simon. Really appreciate your critiques. Writing style is what it is. Its about getting whats in your head onto paper. Sometimes adjective overload is they way I do that. Sometimes it isn’t. I don’t believe that anyone’s artistic style should be contained and besides, art is ever evolving. 🙂
You got me to feel empathy for a machine, i love that. I just want these stories to go on and on.
Machines are people too. Glad you enjoyed it.
Guess humans will never learn. Dark, with interesting imagistic language (“pits of scrolling black static in her head“).
Thanks David. And you are right… they never ever will. We aliens on the other hand…. 😉
I work with women affected by violence. Thank you for helping to give them a voice. Powerful stuff.
Thank you Emma. I just think that violence of this kind sometimes gets relegated to a certain level of acceptance. She works in a certain profession or, as has recently been reported in the news, wears a certain type of clothing, then she had it coming.