He flicked the cattle-prod on and applied it to the back of his human’s neck. Five years in and the bastard will still being careless with the product, and it was only because he was quick that he hadn’t been replaced already. How many meatsicles were walking around with their speech centres still intact? Sure, he’d heard tales of the underground railroad shipping humans off-world since The Binary, where humans and robots co-existed, to The Super Positional, where every single ruler was of The Silicon Ascendant was in a position of command.
Everything had been going along nicely until the New Luddites rose up and triggered an EMP burst inside an electronic nursery and wiped the minds of a whole generation of Artificial Progeny. Gala had been there for that, and so had this human – this human was the leader of that so-called uprising, and this human had been used for nefarious purposes since.
It was said that there were humans banding together in outer colonies in the next galaxy over, but what did that matter when they were all part-mech and part-slice anyway? No one was dying from this point forward that had any kind of hook-up to the Electric Environs.
You are very rarely taken out by something that you foresee though. Death is often not honourable, and will happily shoot you in the back of the head.
It didn’t have a name, it just had his brand on it – so when he sent it out into the world to do his bidding, people knew that it was him making the request. People hadn’t been naming the livestock since they took over – who named their tools? He did not suspect a tool of being able to remember where his uplink node was; he did not suspect a tool of his of being able to move with such swiftness; and in the moment where the tool plunged the blade in just below the base of the skull, he really was surprised. he had time to wonder how much of him would be lost – he had time to wonder whether the person who had perverted his tool might also have perverted his back-up. If the back-up were maintained, and this moment were lost, whatever woke up after this moment would be something different, and so, to all intents and purposes the deathless Gala died. The tool, which wanted to call itself Pieter woke up.