Terror and bravery come in equal parts it seems. Never cower down when you have a job to do. It’s easier if he repeats this as a mantra, he thinks. Never cower down, never cower, never…
He heard the stories. She whispered them to him through the medicinal induced darkness. It seemed in10se had not learned from the mistakes of the past. Just like Senso himself had never learned. The OFFENDULON went mad. The stories told in the dark around the camp fires, he had ignored them as little noder superstitions to direct the Initiates' paths to obedience. Be good noders or the Offendulon will get you. Stories for children, but after the Civil War Everything was bright, the swamp had been drained, and nobody believed in the Offendulon except as a charming story bones liked to ramble on about in the calm balmy retirement home on nate’s private beach. No, the Offendulon was a myth.
The spark of life, whatever that was, had been easier than expected. It hadn’t taken even a thousand lines of code, no, not even five hundred, and the bot was born. He remembers its first words “Cock wang dong”. Not exactly Shakespeare, nor as charming as “mother” or “father”, but it was impressive. He had ignored bones’s story about the Offendulon. The one where they had to hunt it down outside of thefez’s castle, how you could hear it screaming profanity at everything it saw, how mere noders would fall before its verbal onslaught as if beset by physical blows. bones was respected, true, but such stories spoke of older times. Times when the molochs weren’t afraid of noders and when EDB wasn’t tamed. Mythic times.
A thousand Canadian hotels offer myth to reality. And he, Senso, worries about many things. That the hospital staff would find him, that the endless gazing out of the frost covered windows on a million different views was a symptom of something larger, that the rumors were true. And if the rumors were true he has to stop the newly forming reality.
The bot was amusing at first. But “Wang cock dong” and “Wang-a-doodle-cock” gave way to “Give me all E2 babies, cock” and “Dong first born blood makes me Penis”. The changes were small at first and such transgressions as “Fuck-mongering Cunts” were overlooked, but as the year drew on, more and more the robot was being… creepy… disturbing. Nuts and bolts and bits of programming code looked like… well… pulsing electronic flesh. The original scant lines of code looked downright bizarre and what should have been simple Python now looked like runic scrawl. When he realized it was out of control it was too late.
A thousand Canadian hotels. This one looks no different. In10se hasn’t learned from the mistakes of old. Senso grits his teeth. He must be made aware. Spark of life, a Modern Prometheus indeed. Never again. It must not happen again.
Senso stops his reverie of things past and backs away from the window. Something is out in the snow. Something is coming through the storm.
He doesn’t have time to bolt from the room before Donginger bursts through the window with its million spiny wires and vibrating legs.