Kind of a boring day here, spent mostly just working on the Sunday crossword and joining my weekly writing group. Every week we do a forty-minute free-writing exercise, based off of some kind of prompt. Here’s what I got this week:
The executioner made an embarrassing mistake when he turned on the computer. He hoped that no one had noticed, or that the fear his station and obsidian garb as a rule instilled in the townsfolk would keep the crowd silent and cowed. Yet, he was no neophyte; he should have known better. The procedures for android execution were not significantly different than any other, and yet there were steps that needed to be followed. There was a process, unique and necessary for the dispatching of this mechanical man beside him, without which there was only anarchy, without which there would be only half-death. And the last thing the executioner needed was another major screw-up, another black mark on his record, another town overrun with hordes of bloodthirsty zombie androids.
He had neglected to intone the proper passage as the computer was booting up, the words from the great book that told not just the crowd, but also the computer itself, the program he had been delegated by his guild to run. Already the android man was hooked up to the machine; the executioner could cover for his gaffe by repeating the passage now, plugging a simple patch on to the source code to prevent the flow of any misinformation, bug, or virus, but it was the principle of the thing that troubled him. It was that he had made the mistake at all that was the problem. He had let himself become distracted, lost in memory, and that was a luxury he could not afford.
If it hadn’t been for her, that last android in that border town whose name he was, by guild law, no longer even allowed to remember, none of this would be happening now. If he had never met her, or if she had lost the devil’s book before he had ever arrived, brought there by guild and local judge advocate, the executioner would be back home now in the capital city. He would have risen in the ranks of the guild, or perhaps even attained a position off-world. He would not be here in this equally unimportant, equally nameless town in the middle of nowhere making dumb mistakes that might lead to embarrassing mechanical zombie outbreaks.
When you got right down to it, his wife was to blame for all of this.
It’s okay, I guess, with a potentially interesting story lurking in there somewhere.
