Severance by Chris Bucholz

Author:Chris Bucholz [Bucholz, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Apex Publications
Published: 2014-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

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She had a plan. All that was left was to actually do it.

It was funny how she was willing to procrastinate when it came to her freedom. She had never really been the procrastinating type; when she saw a problem, she fixed it. That she was willing to delay her own liberty suggested there was something else going on. Maybe it was just comfort, the comfort of not having to unravel a horrible conspiracy, the comfort of not being hunted by said conspiracy. The simple animal comfort of having a warm place to sleep and eat.

For two days she had sat on her robot, making excuses why her plan wouldn’t work. The security sensor — that was the biggest one. They would see her escape. She wouldn’t make it very far at all before someone noticed and forcefully subdued her. So she lay back and slept and ate.

As the news feeds cheerfully reported, something was different this morning, something that finally broke her out of her spell. This particular morning, she was pretty sure nobody would be watching her; they would be watching the three hundred maniacs who had broken through the ‘anti–terrorism barricades’ and were terrorizing, in their own way, everything south of 9th Avenue. If she was looking for a distraction to disguise her escape, she had it.

Stein stood up from the desk and returned to the bed, retrieving the robot from under the blankets. Opening the access panel on the back, she turned the machine on, then did the same with the terminal it had thoughtfully come with. The terminal flickered to life and informed her she had two hundred unread messages. She ignored those, instead activating the robot’s control programming, allowing her to control it manually. She took a deep breath, then set it down on the floor in full view of the security sensors. Let’s get stupid.

The robot beeped, then scuttled across the floor, following the instructions she had programmed into it. When it reached the wall, it scaled the vertical surface, reaching the ceiling and the membrane separating the cell from the hall outside. There it began cutting through the bars covering the membrane.

With its small plasma cutter, the robot sawed contentedly away at the first bar in the grate. It shredded the membrane as it worked, causing warning icons to splash across Stein’s terminal screen, the smell of burnt metal and plastic filling the room. She hadn’t considered that; anyone with a nose even remotely close to the detention cells would know about her escape before it even got started.

The cutting took an agonizingly long time as the little robot sawed through the grate. After each bar was cut through on both ends, it would extend a manipulator, yank the bar from its place, and then drop it down to Stein with a cheery ‘beep.’ It took almost ten minutes — thankfully, the maniacs currently running amuck were running extremely amuck — but finally all the bars were cut through. The robot sliced

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