More Junk
More stuff from my English journal.
~
I, like everyone else, simply assumed the Walker were another weapon born from the aetherturgists; that the bioturges that maintained it were seeing to the living parts that had been made specifically for it. We treated them like living machines, but machines nonetheless. There was little evidence to the contrary, when one was destroyed in battle it was usually utterly obliterated and nothing save small fragments of twisted metal and maybe charred flesh remained. I envisioned something like a brain in a jar, grown simply to be placed into the construct’s body. Nothing was further from the truth. I was scouting when I found a ruined Walker - what I saw… it is hard to relate how it affected me. The horror of it ran deeper in myself because of what my position in the army is and my - special circumstances of service. I found the Walker in a crater, it had been hit hard with rockets or artillery - the weapons were blasted off its frame, the limbs torn off, and its body cracked like a blackened egg shell. I didn’t understand what I was looking at, at first. Recognizing what had oozed out of the burned shell took longer than I care to think on - it was as though the machine had been disemboweled, tubes and cables spilled out of the hole, and on the ground a grayish mass of flesh lay rotting in the summer sun. The mass of flesh had been riddled with shrapnel, but it was still recognizable after a long stare. It had been a man. I say ‘had been’ because what had obviously happened to the body before being entombed in a metal shell. Where there should have been legs, there were stumps, cleanly healed - as though whoever it had been had struck a mine and had the surgery and time to heal from it. One arm was also missing at the shoulder - and from it an assortment of wires still connected to the machine through the hole in its side. It was not simply that the machine housed what had obviously been a disabled soldier, possibly one who would not have lived without being incased in a metal shell to protect his broken body that horrified me. The body had the same modifications that I had gone through - the subtle machinery grafted into his body that allowed him to use the most powerful of the aether weapons. Before becoming a Walker, the man had been a stalker - like myself. It was then, and only then, that what they hold told me in training impacted me truly. My body belonged to the army, and they would get their use out of it.
~
These first two entries seem like preamble to the story -- but I don't know if that's the case, I'm not even sure if they will be in any (story wise) chronological order. Oh well.
~
I, like everyone else, simply assumed the Walker were another weapon born from the aetherturgists; that the bioturges that maintained it were seeing to the living parts that had been made specifically for it. We treated them like living machines, but machines nonetheless. There was little evidence to the contrary, when one was destroyed in battle it was usually utterly obliterated and nothing save small fragments of twisted metal and maybe charred flesh remained. I envisioned something like a brain in a jar, grown simply to be placed into the construct’s body. Nothing was further from the truth. I was scouting when I found a ruined Walker - what I saw… it is hard to relate how it affected me. The horror of it ran deeper in myself because of what my position in the army is and my - special circumstances of service. I found the Walker in a crater, it had been hit hard with rockets or artillery - the weapons were blasted off its frame, the limbs torn off, and its body cracked like a blackened egg shell. I didn’t understand what I was looking at, at first. Recognizing what had oozed out of the burned shell took longer than I care to think on - it was as though the machine had been disemboweled, tubes and cables spilled out of the hole, and on the ground a grayish mass of flesh lay rotting in the summer sun. The mass of flesh had been riddled with shrapnel, but it was still recognizable after a long stare. It had been a man. I say ‘had been’ because what had obviously happened to the body before being entombed in a metal shell. Where there should have been legs, there were stumps, cleanly healed - as though whoever it had been had struck a mine and had the surgery and time to heal from it. One arm was also missing at the shoulder - and from it an assortment of wires still connected to the machine through the hole in its side. It was not simply that the machine housed what had obviously been a disabled soldier, possibly one who would not have lived without being incased in a metal shell to protect his broken body that horrified me. The body had the same modifications that I had gone through - the subtle machinery grafted into his body that allowed him to use the most powerful of the aether weapons. Before becoming a Walker, the man had been a stalker - like myself. It was then, and only then, that what they hold told me in training impacted me truly. My body belonged to the army, and they would get their use out of it.
~
These first two entries seem like preamble to the story -- but I don't know if that's the case, I'm not even sure if they will be in any (story wise) chronological order. Oh well.