murderbot (secunit) wrote in valloic, @ 2020-10-09 09:29:00 |
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Entry tags: | ₴ inactive: murderbot |
Briefly, he wished he'd brought his Nintendo Switch here while he patrolled. Murder Island was probably a total shitshow by now.WARNINGS Violence & General Creepiness, some language.
Briefly, he wished he'd brought his Nintendo Switch here while he patrolled. Murder Island was probably a total shitshow by now.
Dawn was still barely out of bed when one of his drones on the building's southern side gave a mechanical screech before its feed winked out entirely. Murderbot rewound the images and played them slowly inside his head, trying to determine what had gotten his drone. Likely just the hotel continuing to fuck with him. It'd been doing that for the last day or two, as if after leaving him largely alone it was warming up to a real pisser of a confrontation. Murderbot had thus far ignored its provocations - he wasn't an idiot lured by a strange noise - but now the Overlook's southern exterior was entirely unwatched by any of his drones. Murderbot gritted the amalgam of ceramic and metal which made up his teeth and tried to ignore the rising concern that was reminding him that any number of people could enter the Overlook from that unguarded side of the building. And he wouldn't know.
"Well, that's just too fucking bad, isn't it?" Murderbot's voice echoed in the early morning mist, and he felt foolish. Only humans talked out loud to themselves.
With a sigh, Murderbot set out the last of his drones to patrol the east, west, and north facades of the building and walked with reluctance to where he'd lost visual. This wasn't the smart thing to do, he knew, but he'd done plenty of dumb things in his time and what was one more, honestly? He passed by the creepy foliage animals, keeping the corner of his vision firmly on them in case they wanted to start shit. Apparently, they didn't want to start shit this morning. Everything was so still. Silent. No bird song. It creeped Murderbot the fuck out. Plenty of Vallo residents had come near the Overlook since he's set up here on an unending patrol. Some of them he'd managed to turn away before they got absorbed by the hotel. Others disappeared despite his best efforts, reemerging minutes later looking haggard and wild-eyed. Whatever the humans saw inside the Overlook, Murderbot wanted no part of it.
The south side of the hotel was a side entrance. A small, dingy-looking door that was obviously intended for the Overlook's non-existent employees was propped open by a small stick of wood, as if a smoker on break had only just stepped inside moments before. The open door was a question, inviting him inside, the door trembling slightly in the manufactured chill which surrounded the hotel.
Won't you come inside?
"That's gonna be a 'fuck no,'" Murderbot answered, scanning the ground for his fallen drone. A flash of silver drew his attention at once: there it was, his drone, smashed upon the brickwork by some heavy force.
But there was nothing here now. Murderbot switched to several different visual modes - UV, night vision, heat vision - ticking through each mode in a bid to catch something spooking about, but the silence lay over the hotel like a constricting blanket. This was beginning to piss him off. Murderbot knew a taunt when it was right in front of him, and drones didn't grow on trees. He was going to have to get Brigitte to look at it, see if she could duplicate it, and he'd be half-blind until it was finished, and that was going to be a pain in the ass ---
--and then--
-- and then he was standing inside the Overlook, thin, garish carpet under his feet.
Murderbot stumbled, every sensor he had flaring as he realized that he'd blacked out whole seconds. No - a half hour. What had he done within the half-hour? When had he gone inside the hotel? His Risk Assessment Module was really losing its shit now, howling at 25% and dropping fast. With a grimace, Murderbot turned it off, muttering a hasty 'never tell me the odds' because it sounded pretty cool, and quoting his favorite media went a long way to providing comfort. Well, clearly the Overlook had messed with him, and that was awful, and also not going to happen again because Murderbot wasn't sticking around, no nope no way. There wasn't an obvious exit, however, just hallways and doors that implied he wasn't just inside the beast but deep within its ribcage, sliding around unknowingly while the machine around him waited for time to do its work. Murderbot took a breath he didn't strictly need and his Performance Reliability hovered around 90%. Not bad. Not great, but fine, whatever, let's get out of here --
...which was when he saw a foot, the sneaker just barely visible, in the door frame of a room to his right.
Murderbot hesitated a moment - technically, it was probably a trick. Not a person. But he couldn't just leave them there if they were injured; the thought gave him an emotion and he hated that emotion. He walked to the foot, keeping his gaze on the room he was entering rather than on the person the foot was attached to. He needed to know if he was walking into a trap, after all. The room was beautiful, if as dated as the rest of the hotel. Clearly a ballroom of sorts, covered in streamers. Banquets of food lay spread out beneath the tastefully-dim light, gelatinous substances in gold tureens and thick, viscous-looking punch he didn't know how to identify. A whole pig, skinned, eyes bulging, half-carved, gut meat strewn greasily across the navy tablecloth. Murderbot turned away, and would have identified the sensation he felt as nausea if he had the capacity to feel nauseous. But looking down at the floor was worse.
It was so much worse.
The sneaker-clad foot belonged to Jack Zimmerman. There was no doubt the human boy was dead; three silver dinner knives had been shoved into his sternum and chest, a dark stain spreading away from the body and washing Lardo's white t-shirt crimson. Her eyes were open, shocked, flat because they saw nothing any longer. Murderbot couldn't tell what had killed her, initially, but as he took a halting step backward (stepping on a body (which body?) who knew, he wouldn't look) he could see the awkward angle of her neck. Murderbot reeled, and there they were - all of his new friends, spread on the floor in horrible parodies of thrown dolls broken beyond repair. Bitty was slumped over the dessert table. Jester beneath the piano bench. Part of Shitty on one side of the room -- Murderbot didn't look for the other part of Shitty. Derek face-down on th-
Performance Reliability: 75%. Falling.
Murderbot didn't need to breathe. He didn't have chemical reactions to stress like humans did - he didn't want to puke, and he didn't shake, he didn't get faint with horror at what he saw. He merely took it in, thin-lipped, expressionless, seeing all these people he was supposed to protect and didn't, couldn't, and as he rewound the missing half-hour in his processor he knew exactly what he would see displayed in his mind.
Yes, there it was. It was him. Stabbing Jack, tossing Jester half-across the room. Silencing Derek's pleas with a punch that had sent other Sec Units into concrete walls. It was him. Doing what he had been built to do, would always do, no matter how careful he was with his programming, no matter how much he grew to like people. It was inevitable, wasn't it? This was what he was.
Murderbot reviewed the footage three times, taking in each detail, each slash of blood as it painted the wall. He heard his name called a dozen ways, first pleading, then accusing, then gurgling. He saw the tableau occur piece by piece, a living diorama dripping with viscera and mixtures of organs. He saw it all, and then he saw it again.
When he was done, he set his internal camera back fully on the scene around him. It hadn't changed in the time he had been reviewing the footage, save a fly alighting on Bitty's shoulder. "You," he said, his voice thick, "are a real son of a bitch, you know that?"
The Overlook trembled, just a little.
"This isn't real," Murderbot said, "but your attempts at authenticity were appreciated. The hockey trophy through that one's stomach is a nice touch. But no. I don't destroy, like this. I'd have no need to murder these people in this way." He paused, letting every mechanical bit of judgmental show through his tone: "You've seen too many horror movies, Overlook."
Later, he got out. He always got out. The hotel wasn't happy, of course, and he got the ol' elevator barfing blood routine on him, and at one point his friends rose from the dead and began recalling the exact nature of their terror as he'd murdered them, which was a nicely cinematic touch, but no. Murderbot out. This wasn't him. He'd almost been fooled, sure, and probably would have been had the Overlook managed a drama level of, you know, a six or something rather than a goddamn twelve, but the Overlook had committed to its dramatic bullshit and wouldn't let up. Murderbot staggered out of the hotel into daylight covered in blood that wasn't his and footage that wasn't real, footage that he cut neatly from its neighboring memory and set aside for the time being. He desperately wanted to see his friends. Because that was what they were, weren't they? Friends.
He staggered toward town, leaving his post for the first time in four days, a drying trail of blood falling behind him until it began to vanish into the fall leaves of the woods.