BIRTHDAY WISHES
By Tom Olbert
Mary screamed and fell to the dusty ground, pressing her
hands to her ears against the deafening burst of gunfire. The light show was brilliant in the black
Utah night as the underground soldiers around her fired on the government robots
surrounding them.
Hideous things, like gigantic eight-legged metal bugs
blasting with built-in machine guns. As
her life flashed before her, she happened to glance at her wrist comp and saw the
red digits come up 12:00 midnight. She
realized it was now May 14, 2042. She
was 17 years old as of this moment.
Happy birthday, me, she thought, laughing hysterically, the light
blurring through her tears. An ice-cold
skewer thrust through her as she thought of the unborn life she carried. The one that would never see a 17th
birthday if she made it to the Canadian border.
As a rebel fighter fell dead into the dust two feet from her, half the
man’s head blown away, the guilt vanished.
“That’s the last of the bots, Nick,” Carlos called over,
his plasma rifle still smoking.
Nick ran over to Mary.
“You okay, darlin’?” he asked softly, kneeling by her. She held back the tears and sniffed, nodding. “All right, turn loose the decoys,” Nick
ordered. “They’ll have DNA trackers out
lookin’ for us.”
Mary drew a deep breath, looking up at the stars and
trying desperately to hold on to sanity.
#
Nick took a swallow from his flask as Mary patched his
ugly shoulder wound, using one of the black market nano-probe surgical devices
outlawed in the American Heartland, for their detrimental effect on healthcare
profits. “We’ll camp here for about an
hour, to give the trackers a chance to fan out,” the big man said, wiping his
whiskered mouth with the back of his hand.
“We should make the Nevada border before first light.” Nevada.
Mary trembled just at the thought of it.
The Republic of Greater Canada.
Freedom. “I’m gettin’ too old for
this,” Nick said with a chuckle, putting away the flask. “Don’t worry, kid,” he said, winking at
her. “We’re almost home.”
She was almost afraid to ask the question that had
burned in her mind since Nick and his squad had rescued her from the redemption
camp where her parents had sent her.
Where she’d been raped by those men who’d promised to “cure” her of her
unnatural attractions. She shuddered as
she shook off the memory. “Why are you
helping me?” she asked.
He leaned back and lit a cigarette. “We all got our stories. Me…I’d just got back from droppin’ bio-toxins
on civvies in Venezuela an’ Mexico…stuff that made unborn babies die in their
mothers’ wombs. I came home to our
beloved nation of life and they told me my baby sister Rose was dead. Rufied and raped by her college prof…who I
killed, by the by. Rose tried to escape
to Canada to abort, and they stuck her in one of those machines where pregnant
girls are fed through tubes like veal until the baby’s ripe. Then, the second the robot cuts the newborn
out of the womb, the blade comes down and chops the girl’s head off.” She winced and lowered her head. “I ‘aint looked back since.”
She touched his hand.
It was the first time she’d been able to touch anyone since the night
her baby was conceived.
#
Mary trembled in fear as she saw the ominous dark shapes
of the cyborg troopers marching towards them out of the night. The cold chorus of their artificial voices
blared through the darkness: WE ARE A NATION OF LIFE. The cyborgs and the rebels opened up on each
other, the night exploding with gunfire.
Mary screamed in rage as men and women died around her. For her.
“No!” she screamed as she bounded forward and stepped protectively in
front of Nick, just as one of the black-armored, faceless monstrosities closed
in on him. Its laser site fixed on her
chest. It didn’t fire. It couldn’t.
It was programmed to protect the life inside her. Nick rolled and fired, blasting the cyborg
wide open.
“Don’t look,” he said as she started towards the smoldering
ruin, but she ran over and looked. She
gasped, looking away in disgust and crying on Nick’s shoulder as he held
her. There, inside the cyborg’s
shattered chassis, hard-wired into its A.I. was the organic component that
served as its brain. A new-born baby.
***
Originally presented in the Science Fiction Microstory Contest:
https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/175537-science-fiction-microstory-contest
***
Originally presented in the Science Fiction Microstory Contest:
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