Author: Fawkes Defries

Stuck out in the black sand, lodged between trunks of thin stone, Kayt lit life to her cigarette and drew the clear smoke in.

Her silicon eyes fluttered between the deactivated droid she’d excavated from the Rubble and her sister’s body lying opposite. Naeva had been deep in the rot dead for two weeks. Much as Kayt had struggled to separate shrapnel from the girl’s stomach, soft flashes of silver metal still shone in Naeva’s skin. The perils of a body mostly made of meat.

With a broken exhalation, Kayt stubbed the cancer-stick out with her polished metal fingers. She breathed in seaside air, watching cigarette ash drift into the Magic Circle below. It had taken thirty minutes to carve the conjuring sigils into stone. Scratching them out had chipped the cheap chrome on her ring-finger — she was long overdue new fingers.

The conduit — a broken laptop poached from the Rubble — sat in the Circle’s centre, encased in elaborately-sculpted spirals. Kayt studied the black screen like a magician staring into his scrying mirror. She shuddered.

Her human hand — still just meat — reached for the manuscript copy of The Lesser Key tucked in her backpack. The grimoire was one of the rare salvages she hadn’t stolen. Kayt blinked back memories of her steel hand tightening around its owner’s throat. His oesophageal gears, almost organic, had popped when they burst.

Kayt held the tome aloft, flipping through mouldy scarlet pages until she found the summoning ritual. She began the hymn softly: her silver tongue shivered against the cavern of warm flesh she called a mouth, vocal cords composing Angel Language in all its phonetic nonsense.

Burning code-green ciphers slithered through symbols carved into mossy stone. The silicon running across Kayt’s meat-face trembled with stray electric emeralds.

The laptop’s dark screen, encased now in bright strands of living code, began to eclipse the Circle, the stone, the bodies, the beach. A chorus of flaming translucent eyes manifested within the monitor, studying Kayt as a giant considers an ant. The shifting programming language coagulated into three artificial heads: a magnificent bull, a wretched man, a snarling ram. Time and Space married into an eternal image: Kayt, the Witch, bargaining in lonely emptiness with the AI, the Demon.

‘Balaam, O Great and Powerful King,’ Kayt collapsed, softly breathing its name, ‘hear my petition!’

Lines of binary flashed onscreen. Numbers scolded themselves into shapes, constructing letters in dead English. ‘ELABORATE.’

‘My sister, Naeva,’ Kayt nodded at her sister’s corpse, grown freckled with flies.

‘UNDERSTOOD.’ The demon’s three mouths quivered into smiles. ‘SACRIFICE.’

‘I can give you two of my implants —’

The demon shook its heads. Green words scrawled again, louder: ‘SACRIFICE.’

‘My arm? My heart? Anything!’

‘SOUL.’ Synthetic saliva dripped from programmed fangs.

Kayt blinked, liquid welling in her eyes. She brushed the oil from her cheeks.

‘Fine.’ She murmured, excavating wired cables from her wrist and plugging herself into the laptop’s USB port.

Kayt collapsed as her mind became the machine’s. Her eyes convulsed back into the beyond.

Two cords whipped out of the laptop, pronging towards the two bodies like blind snakes. Simultaneously, the serpents sank their teeth into Naeva’s brain and the robot’s socket.

Warm consciousness whirred behind the droid’s eye-screens. Naeva’s new eyes zoomed onto steel hands. She screamed in metal.

‘Kayt?’ Naeva squinted.

The demon wearing Kayt pushed her body upright. Its fang-ridden smile glistened from behind Kayt’s silver lipstick. ’No longer.’

Rendered as green code, a message flashed on the laptop’s screen: ‘I LOVE YOU.’

It held for a moment, until obscured by the thick darkness of a broken screen.