“If you were going to die tragically, what message would you leave behind to the person who killed you?” The Machine Lord asked the bound man. 

 

The bound man was strapped to a metal tray, he had a look of terror on his face, below him was a conveyor made of tons of small metal rollers on a large track. This track led into a long chute that had various arms to grab trays that were passing through, these arms would take them into separate chambers. Each one gave off an ominous and eerie feeling. 

 

Behind the bound man on the conveyor were hundreds more just like him, and they all had terrified expressions. Men, women, even children were all bound to these trays, looking around the room David noticed it had a rough texture to it. The Machine Lord wasn’t as finely dressed as he had been before. 

 

“My theory is that killing intent is the final emotions that the dead experienced, these stain the person who killed them, I believe it has to do with the soul itself.” The Machine Lord told the people bound to trays. “A swordsman who has cut down countless challengers will pressure people in a way that makes them feel like they will just be another nameless figure who was cut down by the swordsman. I want to test the limits of this and to do that I will need to kill an unprecedented amount of people but that is a problem for me to worry about.”

 

The Machine Lord turned and looked at the large machine he had designed for the purpose of creating as much death as possible. When he began speaking you could detect pride in his voice, this only made it more terrifying.

 

“To be able to understand killing intent, I will need to stain myself thoroughly, I will also need to see how the different feelings mix on a large scale.” The Machine Lord stated the problems he was facing. “Obviously speed is a very crucial requirement, I can’t afford to spend more than a few moments killing you, there is also a cost to consider, so I had to get creative in my methods. I treat this as an experiment on consciousness itself, and how it operates after death. If I can figure it out I will be one step closer to creating artificial intelligence.”

 

The Machine Lord took a final look at the long line of people on the conveyor, there were even more of them further along in different rooms, he needed to speed this up as much as possible if he wanted the fastest results. Reaching forward, he grabbed a lever and pulled it towards him, this caused everything to begin loudly springing to life. David watched as the people were soon making their way towards the grim machine, its only purpose was to kill people.

 

David felt a deep sense of disgust when he saw the first person being pulled off the conveyor towards the first killing room. It reminded him of a video he had seen about how cattle were handled, all around the Machine Lord were various sensors. All of them were there to detect any changes in the man. 

 

“The first one just died, crushed… so it does work as I thought…” The Machine Lord muttered.

 

In front of the man were various screens that hung on arms with wires going everywhere, it was becoming more clear to David that this was soon after he was unsealed. The Machine Lord was looking from screen to screen, his head constantly snapping around. David could not see his face, all he saw was a ghastly black smoke, with red eyes, and a toothy smile.

 

The red eyes were striking as they seemed to have a whirlpool effect, and David thought that if he stared at it long enough he would get drawn into it. The more dreams he had of the Machine Lord the more striking this face would become, it made him feel like his dreams were slowly being invaded. He still forced himself to continue to watch what was happening, now that Edea was coming to his world he needed to get every detail he could from the Machine Lord’s memory.

 

“Ah, that one is quite interesting, impaling… look at how vivid the emotional spiking is… I think that the material that comprises souls may not be as clean as people think. What if the repository where it is stored treated it like shredded cotton and this is the stuffing for the individual beings.” The Machine Lord hypothesized. “Logically it makes sense that it comes from somewhere and goes somewhere, and each individual is unique in their blend of the different pieces. That is the only way to explain how some of these victims can have such strong reactions to some of these scenarios.”

 

David was forced to stop, as he could feel a change that was happening in the Machine Lord’s body. It was the aura that the man released, it started to rapidly change. David was unable to describe it with any single thought or rationale but the feeling that he needed to run or to get away as soon as possible. The feeling was getting even more and more intense the longer that people were being fed into the machine, the feeling of sheer terror and dread.

 

“I gave their life a purpose, I have even given their death a use.”  It sounded like the Machine Lord was whispering in his ear. “They have achieved more in my hands than they would have ever achieved on their own.  I even properly disposed of their corpses for them and prevented them from rising again.”

 

-

 

David jerked awake when he heard the voice in his dream that seemed to whisper in his ears. Their day had ended much simpler than David had ever expected, his uncle Jeff had claimed he was having a bellyache and hid in his room. They talked and had dinner, his aunt, his mother, his cousins, and Lena had cooked it. 

 

This left David, Dane, and his father to repair the wall with some of the people they had taken in. The wooden fence and some of the solar panels had also been damaged by the large enraged bear. After eating, taking a warm bath, and finally being led to a room with a proper bed, he had immediately fallen asleep. 

 

David could hear whispering coming from the hallway, the only people staying here were supposed to be him and Lena. This caused David some trepidation as he made his way to the door, trying to shake the grogginess out of his mind. He placed his ear to the door and he could hear a male voice that belonged to his uncle, he was pleading.

 

“I didn’t want to participate in that, but Marco forced me to! Think about it, he is now the leader of Denver, I couldn’t have done anything about him, right?!” Jeff was pleading to Lena. “I apologized to you over and over again, why won’t you say anything?! The only thing I did was change the footage around so that he and the nurse could take some pictures and sell them! I didn’t want to do it but he threatened me! His father was the goddamn general at the base!”

 

David slowly pushed his door open, he could see Lena across the hall around his uncle’s back. His uncle was shaking as he tried to convince Lena not to tell her story to the people in the house. Looking at the man with long black hair and a wiry frame, he was suddenly reminded of a rat that was shaking in its boots.

 

When Sarah’s mother died, she was forced to step up to take care of her little sister, she was 19 and was already an accomplished mechanic. Bella was 16 and she had dreamed of being a veterinarian, she had always loved animals. The vast majority of the little girl’s animal rescues ended up living at the junkyard that Dane ran that was a few miles down the road. 

 

Just as David was going to say something and interrupt the situation, he could hear a set of female screams coming from the room below him. David instantly recognized it as the voices of his two cousins, and he looked up to see Lena smiling at the black-haired man. It was the same smile David saw where if you covered her eyes it would almost seem gentle, but her eyes looked like two frozen pools and destroyed the gentle image.

 

“Sarah? Bella? Did you tell them?!” Jeff asked her in shock.

 

Lena, instead of saying anything, just reached behind her and pulled out a hard drive, David recognized it as one of the hard drives from the hospital room. This caused his breath to catch, as shock spread across his face as he realized she had been carrying them with her the entire time. She set it down before she finally answered the question that her uncle had given her.

 

“You did the editing for the private videos that people were requesting, you kept all your prices in a USB that was stored in the red toolbox you carried with you,” Lena told him emotionlessly. “I just gave them that while we were making dinner and told them that it would tell them a lot about their father.”

 

“You found that?!” He said shakily.

 

“When I was locked in the laundry room and left to die, I thought that I would never be able to get revenge for all of the horrors that were inflicted onto me,” Lena said this with the first genuine smile she had shown as she looked at David over Jeff’s shoulder. “The only thing you people couldn’t do was rape me since I was regularly checked upon. I was a virgin but for those women who did not have that protection, you all did disgusting things to them.”

 

Jeff had noticed her gaze and turned his head to see David staring him down like he was seeing trash. He felt conflicted about the methods that Lena was using, he could also hear that the commotion downstairs was only growing louder and louder. Sarah was crying loudly through the floor, and he could hear his aunt starting to rage, it was clear she had just seen whatever Lena had passed to the girls.

 

“Uncle Jeff, you really fucked up,” David said. “There is no excuse for your actions, I was going to let Lena decide what to do with you but I had no idea that you had participated so directly in what was going on. I had wondered how they were able to use the women in an asylum to make porn, but now it all makes sense. You doctored the security footage, were you also the reason I was put in that hospital?” 

 

Denver was so much closer to Boulder than Colorado Springs was, he had even been placed inside of a military hospital. The real issue was that he had no idea where he had been placed before that, before his time at the military hospital he was unable to locate his file. Suddenly seeing those hard drives, he was reminded that he might have a lead as to what had happened to him.

 

“Stay out of this! This doesn’t concern you!” Jeff snarled at David.

 

David was enraged by the sound of a dog that was barking at him, but he didn’t have time to say anything before he heard laughter coming from the bottom of the stairs. David looked over to see a man with a savage smile on his face as he had a duck-billed hat with a bull on the front.

 

“Yer a real piece of shit, ain'tcha,” Dane said this as he spits on the ground.

 

David looked over and saw his uncle in his boxers and a white undershirt, he had been woken up and barely had time to put his hat on his head. From the stern look on his face and the anger in his eyes, it was clear that he was about at his limits. 

 

“Are you going to come with me and have a family discussion, or are you going to make this messy,” Dane told him flatly. “I never thought that I would get to be a sheriff and that I would be charged with arresting my brother-in-law.”

 

“Shut the hell up!” Jeff roared. “When I lost my wife and had two teenaged dau-”

 

SLAP!

 

“Ugh!” Jeff cried out as blood and teeth blossomed from his mouth.

 

“Do you think I give a shit about why you did it? Huh?!” Dane roared. 

 

This time he didn’t just savagely slap him across the face, this time he grabbed Jeff by his scrawny shoulders and drove his knee into the man’s stomach. He then pushed the man back slightly, before pulling him forward into his knee. David watched him do this again and again until his uncle was left wheezing and puking up bile onto the floor.

 

“I figured you must be filled with shit, or there just ain’t no way you would do something like this,” Dane said as he let Jeff fall.

 

This caused the balding man with long hair and a mustache to fall into the food he had vomited onto the ground. He was wheezing as he tried to get his breath back, Dane reached into his pocket for a lighter that he used to light a cigarette he had placed into his mouth. 

 

“Dane, was he up there?” He heard his aunt call from the bottom of the stairs.

 

“You bet your sweet ass he was, you were right that he would try to silence the lady.” Dane shook his head after he said this. “I’m real disappointed in you, now we need to figure out your sentence.” 

 

Dane looked at David then at Lena, he nodded to both of them as he reached down and grabbed Jeff by the back of his arms. He then began to drag the man like a dead fish down the stairs, they could hear his legs banging on the stairs as he was dragged down them. David looked over and saw that Lena had a blank expression, and he wasn’t sure what was on her mind.

 

“Are you okay? I had no idea he was like that, I am really sorry. While I had no part in it, I still feel bad that it happened to you.” David tried to explain to her.

 

Lena looked over at him and smiled gently, this time it was a genuine one.

 

“You didn’t do anything wrong, you are the only one.” She said this quietly.

 

“Did you get all of the hard drives from the hospital?” David asked her.

 

Lena motioned for him to come into her bedroom, she then retreated inside of it. David looked down and saw the vomit that his uncle had left for him, and he stepped around it as he made his way into the room Lena was using. David then made his way into her room and discovered it was a mirror of his own. 

 

It had a queen-sized bed, and a single dresser with a small closet, it was white-walled and plain with a window that had a barred shutter over it. The one thing that caught his attention was a laptop that his mother used, and several hard drives that were connected with a variety of cables. David could see a black screen with white text that he assumed was used to operate the program she was running.

 

“Is this the information that was on the building’s server?” David asked her.

 

She nodded as she sat in front of it on the floor, she then patted the area next to her gently. David scrunched up his brows as he walked up next to her and sat down. 

 

“Can you pull up my file? I want to know why I was sent to that hospital.” He said.

 

She nodded and began to hum to herself as her fingers danced across the keyboard, he could see her entering in lots of different information before a list was opened in front of them filled with documents. Looking at the various titles, he saw a lot of different medical reports, it looked like he had been in the hospital for three months, but he had been somewhere before that, which wasn’t listed.

 

“Can you open this one?” David asked, pointing to the earliest report on him.

 

She clicked on it, it then showed that he was transferred to this hospital due to a request by his parents. His father was a veteran who worked as an engineer for a term of service. But they had scrubbed any information about where he was previously.

 

“I was sent to Denver Health for less than a week, my parents weren’t able to find any information on me for several months. Look, they don’t even mention me having a broken leg anywhere in the reports? Where are my original files from when the hospital first found me?” David was feeling freaked out as he saw this.

 

“David, Lena, are you both okay?” He heard a female voice before he saw a short woman with a bob cut poke her head in through the door.