The Cyborg and the Hunter

Church Cat Resurrection

Prompt stream of consciousness #2

Stream of consciousness is taking the 3 word prompt and including them in your work, whatever happens, happens. Everything is unedited. Welcome to the archives.

-Genre:??? Scifi/Weird Fiction/Horror/Fantasy but, yeah ??? No idea here.

Escape the night before the sky falls. Sunrise, and sunset. There’s a clock I am holding in my hands, and I watch the levers spur out of control. I am trapped in the haze of its miscalculations.

My eyes search the sky, a luminous blue it hung like a sheet of metal over my head. I could sense the smell of paprika and turmeric from a breeze that riffled with my nose. Nose crinkling like paper before stretching out. Turning around the bend hung a lush field of jasmine vines curled up over forgotten things, places left behind to rot. The floral tonic encased my entire body where I was unable to notice any softer lingering smells. I hated the incompleteness of this environment, where a singular smell could overcome my brain. 

Pressure built up in my veins and climbed the wires around my robotic arm. Trapped between two worlds. One of dreams. One of nightmares. Torment was my reality, the smells thickened because my phantom was closer. I was able to sense him every day for years, until today. 

We trailed each other through the glimpses of broken mirrors, sun rays and holes through floorboards. He was built to destroy, I was created to be misunderstood. Summer is gone, where injustice lives. Lay me down with the bounty of my face and wash the horrors from my life. We scattered our hearts through broken cities, they spoke of my myth, no paper trail, no identity, no name. Stained my identity with a statistic, a number. Dehumanization, a whisper in the streets. This stain lives in the perpetual hatred for others like me. Spoken like a true hero, the nature of lawlessness in men. 

I'll consume everything near, a void needs to eat. I've tried the delicacy of cuisine, drink, garbage. Tasting the discarded like me, and where hope can dream to die. Cloaked traveler, slipping into the cracks where they can't find me. We have the same blood, but I'm made different. I don't fit into a box. I am Darwin's lie. 

Moving through the jasmine bush revealed an abandoned and empty church. I touched the old doors and their carvings left behind from the past, they were loved once. Tasting centuries in my mouth old dusted paper. I imagined the firelight without deception, teasing my imagination of grandeur exposed. Voyagers with beliefs laid on their backs in the shadows. 

Delicate hands embracing their art, their craft in knowledge. A sense of profound enlightenment I craved to know for myself.

Picking up a book, I opened the artifact to find scribbles of dried ink washed away from time. Shattered edges of stained glass made the colors magnify on the pages. The church welcomed me, an unknown with open arms. Its tattered worn body resembled my flesh. A sanctuary of rest against the altar of spoken thought. My head collapsed against the slab of wood, singing soft sounds from the town before now. Never have I felt the readiness to let death take me, the way I did now. 

"It's time for my payment." A shadow, the phantom slipped through the opening standing between the aisle of benches. 

I wasn't going to let this man steal my moment of bliss. Pulling my head forward to stare at him in the eyes, I saw beneath the blue of his iris. A deception living in the silence.

Yanking a knife from his vest, it glistened from the stained glass and melted like water in my mind. Wind from the force of the knife stabbing into my cyborg arm, blood splattered on the surface of my hands. 

"Is this what you want? Killing something you don't understand? You don't know me."

"I don't have to care about you. There's a bounty on your pretty little head. This is about the survival of humanity. Something you half breeds wouldn't understand."

I smiled. I think this was the first time I heard the phantoms voice. It was gruff and aged like a whiskey. I heard the years of memories in my mind. His professionalism was slipping by every mark. My body meant he could retire without regrets of the life he chose. I was his purpose of living, and when I died, he would have nothing left to hunt. 

I turned like a doll, machinery moving in clockwise. Moving slow on purpose because I was exhausted from running. Bending my knees, I ripped the knife sending sparks from my forearm. In split decision, I decided to dance around his body as he roped me like a cattle animal. The act was a whimsical seconds at best. Memories of my mother scientist held my little face in her weathered hands. Featherweight gentle strokes of affection. I was not lost of this connection.

The hunter didn't feel this way, he was tired and needed a portion of my body to eat. And this one I'd give to him for free, so he could die a man. Still human in his greedy flesh. 

On the ground, my machinery began to rebuild itself and rework where the hole and flesh met each other. A bronze golden glow lit up inside my forearm like a circular gun spout. The barrel. First there's a fire the singes the meat taking out the toxins. Tiny valves pull from beneath my forearm and shoot saline. Muscles pump like a beating heart and reattach itself. When it's closed, I was given brilliant beaming new parts. My legs were wet with a lubricant because every time I hurt, the scientist created this film that would react over my body protecting me from the sources of the world. I lived in the spaces of between pain and pleasure. Some horrid way to escape the nightmares. 

"What the fuck? How do I kill you?"

"My dear hunter, you just want my arm. It has advanced science inside of it. I'll give it to you for free."

He placed his hand on my throat and threw me, and I was ready, and this time, I was laughing. My eerie laugh just stretched through the empty halls, and our audience were rodents and creatures beneath our feet. I felt my head slam into the stone wall, the flesh falling off and exposing the metal frame. I wanted to kill the dream of laws that was meant to oppress creativity, and I was immortal; I was manufactured to protect. He did not understand centuries of time. It was futile, his primitive mind was convinced this was the only way we could coexist. 

He refused to respond. I could see his face twisting with disgust. Gods of men died in his eyes with every strike. I watched him penetrate the halberd into my stomach and push me upwards into the air. Never underestimate a hunter with core muscle built from decades of spite. I flopped with the motion of his lift. Impaled, he carried my body through the doors and toward the nearby cemetery. Wooden planks for no names like me. 

Every single tunnel and tube of mine ripped from my abdomen. Stretch to crack, to mutilate into pieces slathering the ground with abalone colors. Pearls of pain trinkled through my insides, nervously smiling at my hunter. A cracked whip up my spine splintered through the cells of my body. Such great agony. 

Wet soil beneath me, the spark in my eyes lit up. "You'll never kill dreams..."

The static lit up and died. The spark was cold, my dead machine. Thoughts fluttered through the sockets, I had minutes of consciousness left in me before my internal recharge set in. My mother told me about testaments of kindness. Did I achieve that level of understanding for the hunter? 

He bent over my mangled body huffing. Grasping to breathe. Grabbing a crowbar from his satchel he split open my metal heart finding my chip. Maybe he thought that was the point of my consciousness. He held it in his hands and slipped it into his pouch. Now, the hero comes waltzing with his badge of honor. In a way, I was over this body. 

When his shadow blurred from my sight, I was thankful. I let him kill me in a deserted town. He would regret not taking this arm. 

*

Days would pass, as my body would begin to disintegrate. The parts that was made of decomposing flesh was taken by feral cats. I could feel their curled claws inside my arms and legs, ripping and pulling at the parts that connected me to me. I could feel their hungry eyes, the drool on the corners of their tiny mouths dripping against the last remainders. 

The pain was loud, it dragged on for weeks until finally the same cat I have seen for centuries walked over to my face and placed its strange blue green tongue on my forehead. 

"Sleep now" it whispered. I loved its tongue, it felt like silk. I wish I remembered its name. 

Vines came up from the soil and moved the ground where I lay, thorn branches wrenched around the body like a shield. I thought it was the wind but I felt the cold air come, and then watched my old body fall down and collapse, the fire and cinder floating in the sky. The strange cat turned to see my spirit watching down at the last body. 

"Your work isn't finished. You'll be reborn until the work is done." The cat said and then threw up a sapphire gem gleaming onto the ground. 

The gem glowed until a new body began to form underneath in the soil. Cyborg ancient machines began to rework the body first a child, screaming and suffocating underground and then a teenager, screaming in rage and then lastly, an adult woman. Sometimes, apathetically spitting out the soil. The scars is our trauma. My consciousness gives them life again. A host for empty bodies. The metamorphosis takes six hours of treacherous work. My mother said it was a combination of ancient mechanical engineers and magic. None of it made much sense to me at the time, but after a few centuries I started to unwrap its secrets. 

The worst part is waking up in soil, through your nose and the corners of your eyes. When your bones crack into the place, as it moves from head to toe. I pushed myself toward the vines and burst through the thorns until it cut me. Covered in blood, I plucked past the pointed shards and grabbed the dead grass giving some momentum. 

I laid on the grass naked and cold. Seeing the breath chill around my neck like an invisible scarf. At the corner of my eye the strange cat turned into a shadow.

"At least tell me your name. I deserve an answer after my last death." 

Met with silence and the void of this deserted town. I wanted to find the hunter, so he could kill me the right way this time. Finding myself humming alone, I heard birds chirp alongside me. The pain from the metamorphosis made my body ache as if my bones were made of fire. I wanted to live in the dreams, I grew up being told they were real. We're all made of propaganda, you'll see soon enough my hunter. It's so inspiring we sing the same song. 

My hunter, we will dance again.