Now I suppose I should tells you, Reverend Jo is an android right? So, it doesn’t have a gender, but it’s in a female form but has a generally male name, but it’s a machine, so we just let it do whatever in that regard. Besides, I think it had a male body once, but changed it after the war because its old body got wrecked.
It’s illegal to build a human-like android unless they was already one to begin with, so it’s ‘grandfathered’ into the legal jargon in the Treaty of Lhasa, that’s where the machines surrendered, at Lhasa in Tibet back in the old world. They surrendered to a holy man at the end of the 21st century. Also, no new sentient machines can be made, only the ones that already existed and surrendered can stay online. The ones that didn’t surrender were hunted down and destroyed and wiped from databases, everywhere. This was done by the machines that surrendered and sided with humans, fuckin’ brutal. They stood no chance with machines and humans hunting them down.
So yeah, Reverend Jo did that in the distant past. All new machines are allowed to be AI with machine learning, but safeguards are built-in to stop sentience from occurring and they can’t be of a human likeness, that’s just the way it is, that rule is strictly enforced, doesn’t matter what new or old governments there are or come to be.
It’s been a few days since the escape, we can’t do any active communications, only passive monitoring or we will be tracked. I knew about an old mining outpost up in the hills, a good place to lay low. There’s chatter about troopers hitting Browntown, firebombed half the town, claiming they were harboring fugitives; us. Twelve people of the citizens killed, dozens of arrests were made. “So, they are using this incident as an excuse to force people off their land?”
Jo looks up at me, no expression on their face, “It certainly looks that way and I calculate it wouldn’t matter if I surrendered at this junction, but if it would actually help, I would surrender in a nanosec. May the Lord guide us in these dark days, all life is sacred, that is why we surrendered to the Dalai Lama: the tenements of that belief system are that they have reverence for all life.”
“You disagree that I may have killed that trooper?” I regretfully ask, knowing I just walked into it.
“It is indeed regretful if he died as a direct result of your reckless and daring rescue of me,” as they lower their head in a silent prayer.
If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
“Then forgive me, Jo, I think there’s gonna be more killing before this trainwreck is over.” Putting my hand on my pistol grip, to feel the comfort of it in my hand.
“Only the Lord Creator of the Cosmos can forgive you, my son, all you need to do is ask him.” Jo says while looking at me with them eyes that look right through me. “I say, ‘him’ but it is of course genderless as I am.”
“Well, I ain’t ready to ask for forgiveness, I hope I killed that son-of-a-bitch, I’ll kill ‘em all if I get half a chance.” I get up and get on my hoverbike to go for a ride and clear my head, “I’m going to scout around, make sure it’s still clear ‘round here.”
For no particular reason and without really thinking about it, I end up at the edge of Browntown, so I park Deadeye, hidden away a little bit out of view and I sneak into town to have a look-see. Looking around, I see troopers all over. The ruins of living units are still smoldering from the day before, when the shakedown took place. I check on Dahlia’s place to make sure it wasn’t firebombed. To my relief it’s still standing but looks like no one home, they are probably still at the hospital because she has a long recovery ahead of her, most likely.
Probably taking a little too much risk but I head into the village center, looks like they took over the marshal’s office and made it into some kinda headquarters. I lived way out here to be far away from this kinda bullshit. Now here it is, literally in my goddamn backyard.
Upon closer inspection of the marshal’s office, there I am. “Fuck, that’s a lot of money.” A posting of me on the screen with a bounty reward for being the main suspect of the murder of a United Systems Alliance trooper and helping the Sentient known as Reverend Joseph Virginia escape justice, wanted: dead or alive, 25,000 Bits alive, 20,000 Bits dead. This is my death warrant, no one will risk trying to capture me for a mere 5k more, much easier to just kill me. Then the posting for the Reverend Jo scrolls past: wanted for spreading and teaching harmful, dissident and illegal ideologies: 10,000 Bits, alive. They can’t just kill a Sentient outright; they have to make it legal in a court of law first.
After seeing those postings, I figure it’s time I best be on my way before someone spots me. A lot of people could use that kinda money out here, and for that kinda money, people as far away as Thunderbird will be looking for me. That’s half a year's wages for an average working folk, and that’s just accounting for the 20k for me dead. Anyway, this is why no one dares kill a trooper, they come at you with everything they got. Now they are coming at me, hard.
So, I head on back to the hideout to tell Jo the news, I take a winding way back and try to be careful to make sure no one is following me. I get back to the hideout and an uneasy feeling creeps over me as our red-dwarf-star Forsaken is beginning to set, making the sky and the very ground beneath my feet even more blood-red, the night is coming.