An odd noise caused her to pause, and quickly retract her hand.
Tick, tick, tick, whirrrrl…. Tick, tick…
It was familiar, and strangely menacing. She had heard the noise before. Her head slowly spun around.
There was nothing living behind her, just a still, doll-like machine. The gears from inside its body were ticking, and a saw-blade straddled to its arm was slowly spinning. Its eyes examined her, glowing with morbid interest.
“Who—what are you?” she rasped, demanding the creature to speak. She raised up her dagger, but was sure that it would do little good. The robotic creature was covered in shiny metal plates—recent additions, by the look of them.
The bot did not respond. It barely even moved. Only its eyes flickered from one direction to the other as it examined her.
She made a half-hearted wave with her dagger, showing that she was not entirely defenseless. “Did you do this? Did you kill all these people?”
Its head tilted, and it looked from the pile of dead bodies, to her. Then, it took a step forward.
Clank, clank, Craaank… The robotic figure’s mouth twisted into an unnatural smile. Its coiled eyebrows were raised in amusement, and the bloodied saw on its left arm hummed as it slowly spun on a deadly chain.
“Welcome, little darling,” the robotic figure suddenly spoke, looming over her as its legs extended its height, “to my humble workshop. I do hope I can count on your help…” A fire burned in its ember eyes, and saliva-like oil dripped from the edges of its mouth, “You look like you have such… lovely parts to offer to my growing collection.”
She wanted to be brave, to hide her terror, or to think of some daring plan, but she could not.
The bot jumped forward, and then, she screamed.
Chapter 14: Acts of Evil
Is it ever the right answer to do an evil act for a good outcome?
It is a moral dilemma larger than myself, to be sure. For many years I have been forced to dwell and meditate on the answer, and after so much time, I have come to something of a conclusion.
But first, allow me to explain a larger concept.
The greater good does not exist.
Not as you see it.
Humans are only capable of seeing time and reactions from a very small and limited perspective—which isn’t to say that observations are meaningless, it is merely to say that our observations will never be fully complete. If you can understand this concept, then I think we are ready to move on to the next.
So, to rephrase, if you had to kill a good man to stop a war, would that be the right thing to do?
“Surely it would”, the natural thinker might say, “kill one good man to save many more lives, it is simple. Do the one evil act for the greater good.”
But know that it is more than just a simple query. It is a mistake made before.
For this line of thinking has several flaws. First, the greater good is a perspective humans are largely incapable of fully understanding, and second, the good man in question might be more important than the war itself, as your perspective is far too limited to understand his full importance. Stop a war and thousands of lives may be spared, but kill one good man and millions of lives might be lost in unforeseeable consequences. Perhaps the good man had a plan. Perhaps he was only leading the war because of it helped to put an end to a larger war, which his death would then cause. Perhaps he was a man who would create some mechanical or medicinal wonder. Perhaps he was simply a man who would teach a few children how to live correctly, and then those children would go on to do greater good deeds and save many lives, if only the good man was never killed.
Do you understand?
I am not saying that speculation is pointless, I am only pointing out that there will always be unforeseen consequences, and if you are not prepared to embrace the horrors of what one evil act might cause, then it might be best to stay with what is known to be good, rather than to resort to unsavory methods, even when faced with outstanding circumstances, or a seemingly obvious net gain.
To summarize: You may do an evil act for a greater good, and that might even prove to be the best option, however, by doing that one evil act, you risk causing a far greater cataclysm on the horizon, by a chain reaction of unforeseeable events that your one evil act caused. There is a risk involved, and there may be a horrible price to pay.
Don’t make my mistakes.
— The Fragmented Tale of a Rover
“Shhhh…. Shhhh…” the bot robotically cooed as it cradled her, petting her head. “I know I’m a scary thing… all metal and gears and so damned cold and heartless, but you have no need to fear me, darling. None at all.”
Nix had tried to stab the bot, but it had disarmed her in a matter of moments, and then, it had restrained her in an odd, snake-like grip of which she had no escape. She gulped, and managed a reply, “W-what do you want with me?”
“Shhhh… shhh…” it hushed again. “Calm down little one. Ease your heart. It will all be okay…”
She couldn’t help it. Words came rushing from her mouth, and tears along with them. “Y-y-you said you wanted my parts! You killed all those people, didn’t you? What have you done to Nandor?”
“Dear girl, dear girl,” it patted her head, “I don’t want your physical parts. Your mental parts. Don’t you recognize me? We were friends, once, little Nixie. Not too long ago… but I suppose I have changed a bit, haven’t I?”
It released a portion of its vice-like grip, allowing her to swing her head around. She reexamined the bot with a shudder… it did look familiar. The top hat it wore was bloodied, and the formerly vulnerable gears were now covered in metal, but the face was much the same. It was Dorin, the Jack-Bot.
“D-d-Dorin?” she managed to mumble.
“Yes, darling, yes…”
“I-I-I don’t understand!” she blurted.
The bot eased its grip a little more, and pointed from the pile of dead bodies, to Nandor. “What’s to understand, darling girl?” Dark steam puffed from its mouth in laughter. “I saw that my friend Nandor needed help, and so I am helping him. I’d say it seems quite evident.”
“B-but he vanished from the healer’s home! Did you take him? We were already helping him!”
All at once, the bot snorted, released her, and stood to its feet. Nix lay awkwardly sprawled where she had been subdued, unsure of if she should get up again and try to fight. It seemed hopeless. The aches from her battle with Gevor protested even the most basic of movements, and she had no weapon capable of hurting the mechanical monster.
It looked downwards at her, eyes shaking slowly in disgust. “Of course I took him from you,” it proclaimed, not ashamed of the fact in the slightest. It detached the saw from its left arm and set it aside, then it went about readjusting the dark, blood-stained hat on its head. Once it was suitably settled, the creature leaned beside Nandor on the makeshift operations table. “You and the healer were very poor care takers. When I came into the healer’s house, you were sleeping on the floor, the healer was upstairs, and Nandor was slowly dying unattended. Why would I leave him in such hands?”
“I was unconscious! I had slipped and fell! I wasn’t neglecting him!”
Dorin shook its head, and patted Nandor’s chest. “Whether the negligence was from idiocy or carelessness matters little to me—the results are the same regardless, I saw Nandor dying, and he clearly wasn’t receiving the help he needed to survive. So I took him.”
Nix began to breathe heavy and she managed to crawl to her feet. “But what the hell are you doing here!” She waved her hand around the bloodied home. “You call this help? Is he even still alive?” She was quivering badly, and she tried to step forward, but her cut leg flashed in pain, and almost caused her to fall. She steadied herself with a chair by the table of discarded organs.
The bot looked offended. “He—well—there have been some little… hiccups… along the path to his recovery, but I’m not giving up, that’s the important thing. And
I’ve made progress. He may not be breathing, but he’s in better shape than when I found him in your care. His organs are repaired, his spine has managed to regrow where it was split, and I’ve given him infused blood to replace that which was missing. I also did some tinkering with the organs of other creatures and people, some metal work and bone recreation of my own, for learning purposes, but that wasn’t so successful…” it looked downwards momentarily, but there was no shame in its eyes, only contemplation. Suddenly it looked back up. “As best as I can tell, he is currently in a kind of trance-like state, both alive and dead. His body is healed thanks to my work, but he still is missing something to get it all running again.”
Her head was spinning, and she only heard half of the mechanical creature’s words. “He-he’s dead! What have you done?”
Dorin quickly shook its head. “He’s not dead—not entirely, I don’t believe. His body hasn’t started to turn to rot, even when I warm him, so something is still functioning inside his body, anyway.”
Using the chair as a crutch, she took a step towards both Nandor and the bot. Nandor was not breathing. He was completely unmoving. The bot was more than delusional—it was insane. “Y-you’re a monster—you’re the one killing him!” She took another step, managing it without the help of the chair. She did not know why she was so bold. In this place of death, the bot held all the power, and somewhere within she knew it, but seeing Nandor surrounded by bodies—she pictured him being plucked at and tinkered with as if he were some malfunctioning clockwork machinery, and rage filled her.
But Dorin was no longer feeling generous.
Suddenly, the bot’s eyes flicked bright, and burned with a passion. “A monster, am I?” It stood to meet her. They locked eyes, and its metal hands turned to sharp, piercing claws. It held a hand close to her throat, and if it wanted to, it could have ended her with a flick of its wrist.
She gulped, Dobry’s death suddenly rushing back to her head—the way he had turned and choked and curdled on his own blood… a slit throat was a bad way to go. But the bot did not attack. Instead, slowly, the claws retracted back into its hand, it turned, momentarily speechless, then, oil swelled in its mouth, and it spat backwards on her.
The dirty oil landed on her cheek, and sprayed her across her open mouth.
Shocked, she instinctively wiped as much of it as she could away with her sleeve, unsure of if she should be disgusted or startled that the bot could even spit.
But Dorin did not appear the slightest bit amused. It had fully intended on the act being an insult. “I may be a monster, my small, squishy, mortal, fleshy girl, but this monster is the best chance Nandor has at his survival, and you know it.” It sat back down on the operation table, propping its clunky feet up on Nandor. “What would the healer have done, by now?” it asked, a dark, electric smile stringing across coiled lips. “Proclaimed him dead? Given up? Had him buried? Why, I do believe that the healer had already given up before I even came to retrieve him—that’s why he was upstairs, isn’t it? He was ready to let Nandor die, because his conventional teachings said that there was nothing more that could be done to save him. Bah!” It spat again, but this time away from them both. “Healers from the clockwork cities are so boring and traditional. There are so many techniques that they shun and close their eyes to simply because the mere mention of them causes moral distress. Idiots.” It shook its head slowly, as if angered by the senselessness of it all.
Again, Nix found her eyes shifting around the small, deathly home. The bodies, the organs… “W-what-what kind of techniques?”
It shrugged. “Everything within the realms of worldly understanding. Transfusions, alterations, infusions, blood for blood, part for part, exchanges, a little bit of mystic stones for their regenerative energies… you know… the kind of thing that any reasonable person would do. Nothing downright… eh… cruel. Just practical. A few people had to be sacrificed,” it shrugged towards the body pile, “true, but that is a small exchange for the benefit I envision.”
If its words were unfeeling and cold, like that of any other bot, she might have been able to understand. But they were not. The bot did not sound like an indifferent, mechanical creature, doing its best to repair a human. It sounded like a psychopathic megalomaniac, willing to do anything to achieve its goal. She shuddered again, trying to contain her feelings.
“I still don’t understand why you would need me—or my… parts.”
A grin immediately formed, twinkling fire in the bot’s eyes. “Aha! So you are willing to help me! Good, good!” Dorin jumped to its feet. “I had hoped you would understand more of what I might need by now… but perhaps I am expecting too much of a fleshy mortal such as yourself. Don’t you understand anything that I’m saying? The repairs I’ve done on Nandor—at first they were failure upon failure. Loss after loss. I was accomplishing nothing. He was, for lack of a better term, simply, dying. That is, until I discovered the power of mystic life stones—a power written about in this book here!” It loudly thumped the top of a leather-bound hardback. Rorgjor’s Enlightened Powers, was written across the top. “When I discovered what I could do with mystic energies, the exchanges and the tampering, my progress achieved new heights! You can’t imagine!” The bot was working itself into something of an excited fuss, and it begun to dance around the room, kicking up body parts like a playful child might kick a toy.
“I was able to infuse Nandor’s spine with several mystic stones, and then, it simply repaired itself! Imagine! His liver was a little more complicated, had to use some spare parts and then infuse them with the stone to better suit his body—but it worked! The stones are miraculous! They repaired, altered blood—even from animals—to flow inside him as if it were his very own! After milting down several more stones and pumping it into him, even his skin began to repair itself! The scars faded—why, just look at him! It’s as if he’s lost nearly ten years of age! His skin is fresh! Not only have I repaired his wounds from the duel, but wounds decades old have almost faded! Everything has gone even better than I expected!”
Dorin was so happy it was unable to contain its delight. It ran up to Nix and tugged on her hands, beaming up at her full of pride. “He is almost entirely repaired, Nix! Don’t you understand? I’m so close to having him back on his feet again, and better than ever! All I need is a spark to set it all in motion again. A mystic, perhaps like yourself, to channel some energy into him. Isn’t it amazing?”
Nix, however, was horrified. Both with his sudden attitude switch, and what he had done. She pulled her hands away from the bots grip, and shook her head. “Do you even know what mystic life stones are?”
It looked perplexed, unsure of why she was not sharing its delight. “Well, one would assume that they are stones made by mystics, judging by their name,” the Jack-Bot said.
Her reply frothed from her mouth like the cold waves of a stormy sea underneath the ice. “They’re not just stones made by mystics! They are mystics! When a powerful mystic nears death they transmit their energy—their experiences and their life to a special stone, so that their knowledge won’t be lost! It’s their life! Their soul! Their essence! Their knowledge! It’s like a library, but more! The spirit of a person is stored inside!”
The bot raised an eyebrow. “Oh. My.”
“How many did you use?” Nix demanded.
“Ummm… well… the first few didn’t work so well...” it pondered the question for a while. “I was still tinkering with infusing bone with metal and such—turns out that was a bad idea… so in all, I think, six? It was all I was able to get my hands on. Quite rare.”
“Six mystic stones to repair his bones and liver… do you know what you’ve done?”
“Um… no?”
“Neither do I.” She fell into a chair, temporarily ignoring the guts spread across the table. “But let us hope it’s not as bad as I’m imagining…”
“Do you think he is not worth the spirits of a few dead mystics?” The bot asked, turning b
ack towards Nandor. And then it thought again. “And the family that lived in this home. And the nobles I killed to acquire the stones. And my mistress. And the bear I experimented with. And the second bear because the first bear had a mate.”
Nix did not know how to reply. The bodies in the room… all for Nandor? “A bear?”
“Well, human organs weren’t working on Nandor very well…” Dorin confessed, and then protested the accusatory look it was receiving. “What? Was it not natural that I should try other options?”
“Good god of warmth… what have you done?”
“I’m simply trying to help my friend. Isn’t that what friends do?”
Nix looked at the pile of blood and corpses before Nandor’s body... there was the remains of a child. The bot had killed a child. “He would not wish to be brought back this way.”
“He doesn’t have to know.”
“I-I’m not sure I can help with this. I’m not sure this is something I want to be a part of. You could be making a…a… monster.”
Pshhttt… Steam released from the bot’s mouth. “Nonsense. I’m simply repairing Nandor. Perhaps adding a bit here and there—making him a little more… capable. But I’m certainly not making a monster. The only monster here is… well…” It looked around the bloody room, realizing perhaps for the first time the full extent of what it had done. “Arguably, me.”
“Even if we can wake him, he might not be the same. That much mystic life force… it is much like using human souls. There is a reason others in the city wouldn’t even think of doing such a thing. He might be driven insane. And even if he is the same man, he’ll probably wish to kill you for what you’ve done.”
“Bah! I can clean up this mess before he comes to! We’ll simply say we used the parts of a bear and the mystic energy provided by you. That’ll be enough to convince him. I don’t recall him ever being a particularly well-learned man within the realms of mystic forces.”
The Crystal College Page 10
