It's a well-known fact that when someone has a good idea someone else will eventually copy it. Take the Roboticops of 2147 for example.
opening has impact
In January of 2147 the police of America finally decided that putting officers on the beat was now too dangerous. Instead, they created the Roboticops programmed to stop crimes, protect innocent people and generally keep the peace.
↓ effective sentencing
People laughed at them first, claiming that they looked like floating dustbins; the laughter stopped abruptly however when they found out how the Roboticops kept the peace. Anyone seen committing a crime was shot. Almost immediately after the Roboticops came into service people complained that people who had a criminal record were getting away with the punishment so they re-called all of them and their programming was changed to include anyone with a criminal record. A lot of people died in those first few weeks but people started to accept them and any programming bugs were reasonably quickly ironed out. Soon the police force was almost completely robotic which also got rid of the problem of officers being bribed.In the February of the same year cyborgs started to commit crimes just about the same time that lots of homeless people began to disappear. The homeless people were the least of the police's problems as they were having a tough time stopping any of these cyborgs and those that they did manage to stop seemed to automatically self destruct. Organised crime was now robotic.
Jack Cutter sat in the middle of a mess of electronic components. At the moment he was trying to fix a large black box, that he had been reliably informed was called a "Seedy player" (good!). Apparently it would play music (If he could get the damn thing to work!) using strange plastic discs which were the seedies of the title. It dated from the late 1990's before everything became super miniaturised. He liked those times more, you could actually drop litter then with out getting shot!
He carefully soldered the last resistor into place and tentatively tapped the on button. The disc holder slowly slid open. He inserted a Compilation disc and pressed play. Nothing happened. Jack looked carefully at the case and then realised he hadn't plugged in the speakers. "Doh!" he exclaimed before plugging the correct wire into place.
"If you ever need anything please don't,
Hesitate to ask someone else first!"
screamed the singer
"I'm too busy acting like I'm not naï
I've seen it all, I was here first!"
Jack liked this kind of music, what was it called? Stoned music, or was it Rock? One of the two, they were possibly much the same anyway. He sat back to listen to the rest of the song. He could tell that the singer was real, not a synthetic singer that everyone else he knew seemed to like. He put a lot more emotion into his delivery of the song despite the fact that Jack had no idea what he was on about. After listening carefully he realised that the drums were real too as the drummer made little mistakes in the beat that a computer wouldn't. Eventually he realised that the guitars were real too as he could hear the fingers sliding up and down the frets. A band where they hadn't used computers at all! That was a rare find!
The next track started.
"If you wannabe my lover," crooned the singer
"Oh no! Not this!" shouted Jack as he switched it off in disgust. He unplugged the player and sat back in his chair again.
Jack looked around the room at his many antique machines. There was a Veedeo Recorder which still refused to work, a game machine from a company called Sega (it was named after one of the planets but he couldn't remember which) and even a working Black and White T.V. His eye caught the picture on his mantelpiece.
Everyone at the orphanage had told him that it was his mother but he had no recollection of her nor of his Father for that matter. He turned and looked at the door to his hovel. It was made of thick, strong oak and was covered in locks, bolts and padlocks. Most of them were new as Jack had heard rumours of some kind of Cyborg recruitment teams that were like the Press Gangs that the navy of old used. Jack had no desire to be turned into some kind of Crime Robot so he had protected himself better.
He was debating whether to have another go at that Sonic game when there was a very loud thump on his door. He was about to get up but there was another louder thump and the door crashed inwards onto the floor. Three tall, muscular looking men stepped in through the splintered wood and started to move towards him. Jack couldn't see their faces as they had hats pulled down covering them and their hands were concealed by gloves.
"You will come with us," one of them said in a very dull voice.
"Why? Are you part of the police?" enquired Jack.
"No," came the answer.
"No way then!" shouted Jack and he jumped forward and swung a fist at one of them.
As the punch connected there was a resounding clang and Jack staggered back in pain.
"Oww! My Feckin' hand!" he shouted in shock. He looked up slightly and saw a hat drifting slowly down to the floor. He looked up at the humanoid he had hit and found himself staring into the cold blue eyes of a Cyborg. As Jack clutched his throbbing hand the other two cyborgs pushed him over and pinned him to the floor. The one he had hit approached slowly and put a mask over his face. Suddenly everything started to . . go . . . black . . . . .
effective
When Jack's eyes slowly flickered open again he met the gaze of a small Chinese man."Ahh, you are Jack Cutter, Yes?"
"Uh, year. I guess so," mumbled Jack as he tried to see where he was. He couldn't move much as he was strapped to some kind of operating table.
"I am the great crimelord Dika 'A' Jang" continued the man "Er, don't get up, He, He my little joke there. Well you are quite privileged really. You're going to become one of my personal cyborgs. The cops don't care when losers like you go missing and according to my records you don't have any friends or family to record the case do you? You were just brought up as an orphan weren't you?"
"Kiss my ar-arrghh!" Jack screamed as about a hundred volts coursed through his body.
"I can't be bothered talking to this bum any more. Just start the operation," ordered Jang
Once again one of the cyborgs walked over to him and put that mask . . over . . . his . . . . face . . . . .
He awoke to find that he could only open one eye. He looked up to see lots of doctors rushing around him, most were looking at his head. From what he could see most of his body was clad in metal, probably toughened titanium steel. He couldn't see his legs. Maybe they were going to add new ones; he had never been very good at running. He stopped thinking about all the and concentrated on what the doctors were saying.
cryptic asides effective
"Okay, this is the last chip we need to add to his brain." There was a short pause "Right you can activate them now."There was a sudden flash of images going through what was left of his brain. It was like a record of everything he had ever seen but he had forgotten. He saw his mother, almost exactly the same as his photograph, he saw his father being brutally murdered which he had tried to block out all of his life and he saw the orphanage that had been his home for more than 16 years. Strangely, amongst this jumble of depressing images he could not see what had happened to Mom. Those chips must have done something to his memory.
When these images passed and he could see again some one else was in control. He walked along a badly lit corridor. he couldn't do anything at all, just walk where he was going. He wondered if anyone knew that he was still conscious, whether it was just a mistake that he could still see.
He lumbered along, stopping at a door marked Briefing Room, waiting as it silently slid open. He stepped in and sat down at a computer, plugging an output device into his right temple. A voice began to speak in his head.
"A simple bank job to test that you have been fully converted. You must raid this branch in the city centre and get away alive." and as the voice finished a holographic image of the bank appeared which the robot half hastily downloaded. He stood up quickly and walked out of the room selecting a fast hover car to travel in. Jack was curious to say the least about what would happen next. When he reached the bank Jack quite calmly walked up to the counter and promptly asked for all of their money. the human cashier almost roboticly gave him everything as she expected the Roboticops to arrive at any minute. She was right too as one of them floated through the bank front doors and within a millisecond started calibrating its aiming programs to make sure it did not hit any innocent civilians. Jacks programming was not as sophisticated but it was quicker. He pulled out an energy weapon and fired three shots. One man fell to the floor but the other two shots were direct hits on the Cop and it fizzed and popped before falling to the floor too. Jack stepped over the man and the Cop and rushed to his hover car, speeding from the scene of the crime within seconds. Jack was amazed that it had gone so smoothly and he was ashamed to admit it but he had quite enjoyed it. Very soon he was back at the headquarters or whatever Dika liked to call it and the money was taken from him while they deactivated him to analyse his responses.
He opened his eyes again and found a similar scenario to when he had last "woken up". He was again plodding along those dark corridors heading he assumed to the briefing room. They had obviously declared his test run a success as he sat down exactly as before and prepared to receive his mission. The recorded voice of Dika 'A' Jang began to speak.
"We have reason to believe that this woman knows of our activities. Your mission is simply to kill her. She has a clean record so if we leave her for too long she might think of going to the police. We are quite close to being able to hack their systems and edit people's criminal records but I am afraid that you will have to kill her this time."
He leaned forward to look closely at the picture displayed on screen. As the Robot half of his brain carefully downloaded the picture into its memory banks Jack finally clicked.
"Hey that's Mom!" he shouted inside his head "I can't kill her!"
At that moment he stood up, methodically walking to the car park. Jack had never felt so helpless in his life. He was thinking "No! No! No!" as hard as he could but it seemed to make no difference. As he reached her address he was beginning to give up hope. He kicked down her door in one blow and looked around until he saw her cowering in a corner. As he raised his pulse rifle he hesitated for a few seconds.
"Maybe I can take control," Jack thought and for one last time he thought "No! Stop!" as hard as he could. He dropped the rifle and for a few brief seconds he had total control. He didn't know why what happened next happened. Maybe it was a self destruct routine or for all he knew it could have been a short circuit. He fell to the floor and he could feel his power draining.
"Oh my God!" his mother whispered in amazement.
"Go to the police . ." Jack stuttered using the last of his vocal energy.
She didn't need telling twice and ran from the house as fast as she could. As what was left of Jack lay in a heap on the floor his final thought was:
"Maybe she can stop what's happened to me happening again . . . maaybee . . . . ."
Tightly structured; well-expressed with varied sentences
and a forward drive that keeps the reader interested.
Good use of irony and bathos, yet you maintain the
impetus and the second half is convincingly dramatic.
A more complete story than the last one then but still feeling somewhere between embarrassing and like it was written by someone else. That teenage attitude of "my music taste is best and I can prove it conclusively" in the opening section now seems funny for the wrong reasons. It also feels like I'd watched Robocop or read Judge Dredd and not realised that they were satire, with the death penalty for even the most minor of crimes hardly being important to the story. Maybe it's something I could build on to write a new story, with one of the last remaining human cops investigating why this cyborg ended up deactivated instead of self destructing...
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