Dusk the forgotten android

[Anti Hacker]

Chapter 1: Memories

At first, there was a crimson sky. Then came cries, the cries of his master. His master was elderly looking, but seemed to be filled with such energy that you could have mistaken him easily for someone much younger. The master fell, and blood surrounded him. There were howls in the distance and shadowy figures emerging from the undergrowth on all sides. If he could just hold out until dawn, he though, his masters life may be saved - saved from the white light that even now engulfed them both. The white light swallowed them and everything faded away. He woke up.

Dusk was a Hucast, of old and now faulted design. He had been created to serve one of the factions of Coral, before photon technology had been conceived or even thought of. He carried his master’s sword still, a katana with 1975 engraved on one side. This, his master had told him, was the true sword Agito, wrought by great masters of steel long ago. He looked at the blade, it still seemed as sharp as the day he had first been assigned his master, and the day he has first carried his master’s sword when he was too old to fight himself. The metal was folded, and as he had learned through his own endeavours it could only be used in a kind of diagonal - vertical slash or a stab effectively.

When the remaining factions banded together to form the twin pioneer project to escape their doomed planet, destroyed by war and pollution, his master had joined the government and he had stayed in his service. Not so long ago he had been convicted of his master’s murder and had been exiled from pioneer 2 to his own fate. He had explained to the head of office himself that monsters had slain his master, and he had brought him back to pioneer 2 via a teleport gate he had found near by built by the citizens of pioneer 1 before the explosion supposedly in a futile effort to escape the monsters that even now roamed the ruined city of a ship in the hope that he could be revived.

Unfortunately for Dusk, recently a group called Works had been stirring up resentment against the android faction of pioneer 2, saying they had become faulty, corrupt and capable of in-human treatment of others. The old 'A.I. scandal'.

Dusk wondered why he had blacked out; he lay in the forest, rain thundering down all around him. The electrical energy in the air must have interfered with his communications systems and power source, he thought. Maybe the few androids of pioneer 1 developed a cure for this, he should look around. Or else, go deeper, down, down into the abandoned mines where no interference could reach him. He shuddered at this notion, for he had heard of the horrors down in the deep, where the research team went. Where that girl went, that famed red ring Rico. They were lost, also to the deep. The first of the hunters.

He heard growls the other side of the gate, he drew his katana from his side. The gates opened, and he was prepared now for anything that would strike, from the forest or from the deep.

It began with white, he thought, and will end with black. Both can engulf, on both hang a certain sense of mystery.


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More to come soon, feedback is extremely welcome.