| From: | Avenger <Avenger@*******.DEMON.CO.UK> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Not so sweet anymore |
| Date: | Wed, 28 Oct 1998 12:10:39 +0000 |
>>>>>[It's been several months now. I've been searching for Monolith,
but, well, he always was good at disappearing. Last I heard he pulled
off some job in Seattle, something lucrative, but I didn't get any
details. I wonder though if it's worth it, and whether I'm doing the
right thing? He didn't pull the trigger, not physically, though his
betrayal of all of us was enough to send her over the edge. He knew she
was always prone to acting first and thinking afterwards, but was he
really responsible?
After all, it was I who invited her into the team. It was my desire to
get us out of the rut we were stuck in that forced her to learn what she
did. I brought the pressure on her. Ultimately, I suppose I am
responsible.
One thing Ralph always taught us was to document what we did, analyse
it, look for the faults and fix them, look for the good points and
concentrate on them. Modern technology has managed to reduce movies to
chips, chips that can store anything you could want to put on them, and
then some. And later, torment yourself by watching them.
I've gone through everything we've done over the last few years that was
filmed. I watched as she turned from a sweet and innocent child into a
rather efficient killer. A soldier of the shadows. What is it the
media calls us? Oh yeah, Shadowruners. Fucking stupid title. I
watched one of the shows that are supposed to show what it's like in the
shadows, and compared that to our own images and vidchips. Fucking
morons haven't even scratched the surface. The guys in the movies
survive gun fights that would shame the Marines, bullet hits that would
down an elephant, and always get the bad guy.
Yeah, right.
It was those fucking shows that made me think about it in the first
place. What drove us out into the world of shadows, to walk on the edge
of darkness. It was my arrogance that got them killed. We'd make it.
We'd make enough money to get out of this business and live comfortably,
to better ourselves. We just needed to watch out for the job that
carried the big payload. I must have been fucking retarded or
something.
How many times did he save her at risk to himself? And I drive him off
by accusing him of murdering her when he did nothing except look for
absolution, to confess what he had done to help another of my "friends"
that I was tormenting. Someone else I forced into death rather than
allow them to leave and simply live.
And Hungry? I wonder how he feels about me now that he's decorating a
goddamn prison? They'll kill him in there. He's too goddamn big and
stupid to survive in that sort of place.
Oh Christ! What have I done?
What /have/ I done?
God she was beautiful. Smooth like silk, graceful as a dancer, deadly
as a cobra. Dead as a doornail. It keeps playing through my mind, in
slow motion. The door swinging open, the gun moving up to her mouth.
The flash, a spray of red, the wall stained, her body falling, bouncing
slightly on the mattress a thin trail of smoke spiralling from her
scorched mouth. Strange that there is no sound, just the imagery...
+++++Inactivity time out.
+++++End session [Y/N] N
And the end result? Slabs of meat in a morgue somewhere. Cut up for
parts, or incinerated. Not even a decent burial and grave marker to
show they had ever existed, just a record in some police computer.
Another runner dead, another statistic. I should have made some sort of
effort. Done something. Thing of it is though. What the hell do I do
now?]<<<<<
-- Marathon <12:09:32/30-10-59>
