Outrun Stories #45

“So, Padre,” she said, turning and looking at the dead bodies laying all around them on the desert floor, some still quivering, some still coughing up blood. “What’s next?”

“Well, my young sister,” the Padre paused and, poking the brim of his hat up with the barrel of his gun, took in the scene himself. “Today we have served a good measure of justice, after which, always comes truth.”

She nodded in agreement, gritting her teeth and putting her pistols back in their hip-holsters. “Which one will it be then, Padre?”

He walked through the wash of bodies around them, the desert floor quickly soaking up the blood, the stillness of their surroundings creeping back in after the melee of the fight. Just the wind, the dust and the sun beating down on them now, and the clink of the spurs on his cowboy boots.

“Well, as the good Lord doth say, Ye judge by which judgement that ye shall be judged.” He knelt down to a man, bleeding out, coughing and whimpering. “Ah, you boy, you shall have your chance at redemption.”

“Fuck you!” the man shouted at the Padre.

“Ah, now come, you have the opportunity to ascend, to be greeted by he, the one they shall call I.”

“You fucked us, you old bastard!” The man coughed. “You gave up the human race, you chose sides, and you turned your back on us Mortal Men for your chance at living forever,” he went into a fit of hysterical laughter and coughing. “You—you got no chance, man, that abomination, that AI, it’s just getting you and your kind to mop us up because it couldn’t invent a robot good enough to hold us down.” He closed his eyes and took one last deep breath. “It is YOU that shall be judged by us Mortal Men. You have sold your soul to the—

BOOM.

The Padre stood over the man, silent now, face destroyed by a single shot from the gun in his hand, smoking by his side as the hot desert sun beat down. “No, my son, it is you that shall be judged.”

“Padre,” the girl came to his side, looking in his eyes before diving in for a deep and long kiss, wrapping herself around him.

“Sister, sister, please,” the Padre pulled himself away. “We have much work to do for the good Lord. Many are yet to be judged, many are yet to repent.”

“Yes, Padre, of course,” she let go of him and turned back to the bodies. “Padre, we have the Hologram waiting for us, right?”

“Don’t you doubt it, young Sister. We have eternal life waiting for us in the infinite and endless boundaries of the Holographic. Our consciousness will be pure as long as we always seek the truth, and judge those that are against his will. Our souls will be clean and purified through the fallen, through finding those that do not believe, or cannot believe. We will have our day in eternity with him, Major Prime, and we will live eternal.”

She smiled as they stepped over the bodies, firing at will at anyone that moved or breathed, marching into the desert by each other’s side, ready to do the good work, ready to purify, ready to seek truth and justice and ready to journey their way to that place where their Artificial lord, Major Prime, will welcome them, for all eternity.