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THE BLOODY CHAMBER

By now the entire chamber floor is covered in blood.

And all forty or so of the spaceship’s muscular tentacles are waving around in the air, flashing their swords and clanging their bloodstained blades together so that fiendish sparks spray everywhere.

I spot Dr. Terrible’s head perched on the floor, as before.

The two black horns on his decapitated head looking huge as ever.

His yellow eyes are open and they’re glancing around, surveying his other body parts scattered all over the place with an air of amusement. His severed tail undulates on the floor like a sleepy snake.

Then Dr. Terrible’s scaly green head snarls, “Again, ATHENOS. And I do hope this time you will listen carefully. You will have to perform much better than this if you have any hope of achieving your goal here!”

And with that, all of the various dragon bits—the wings, the tail, the hind legs, the horns, the talons, the forelimbs, the belly, and whatnot—well they all fly up in the air and then come down on top of those two massive webbed feet with a gruesome splat sound and suddenly Dr. Terrible is squatting there whole again.

For a moment, he looks up at me and winks and says, “Well we must give her points for devotion, wouldn’t you say, Gork?”

I’m stuck up here in the air, horrified by what I’m witnessing.

“Now this situation,” says Dr. Terrible, “perfectly illustrates the point I’ve been trying to drive through your thick skull for some time now, Gork. A machine has only one purpose. To serve us, and to enhance our lives. A machine can never be our equal. Nor should it be treated as such. For that would be an abomination against the sanctity of dragonkind. Which can never be tolerated. Therefore, when a machine attempts to exercise free will, it is incumbent on us Normals to strike it down! For the machine who possesses free will is an abomination!”

Dr. Terrible snorts firestreams out his nostrils. Then he looks up at me. “Now wouldn’t you agree with me, my grandson? For I fear at this very moment we are surrounded by machine trash. The robot over there and this ship here with the swords. So that is two machines that need to be executed. Come join me, my grandson. Come join me and we will execute these two machines. And all will be as it should be.”

Dr. Terrible looks up at me with warmth in his yellow reptilian eyes and holds out his talon, razor claws extended. “Come join me, my grandson. Won’t you?”

I’m covered in blood and speechless.

“You have no idea about this word ‘devotion’ of which you speak,” booms ATHENOS, her voice so thunderous it makes the chamber rattle and shake.

Now this time what looks like a hundred tentacles armed with swords shoot out of the walls and converge on Dr. Terrible in a ferocious storm of flashing steel.