krahe prologue

Her head toppled from her shoulders.

When her killer picked up her disembodied head and placed it so that she had a good view of the city, saying that he was sorry, that it was for his family… Only then did the reality of her betrayal sink in. He’d been bought by the same scum who had turned her home to radioactive glass.

Krahe. That had been her name.

In the moment her head was severed from her body, a chain of Dead Man Switches embedded in her cybernetics went off. Among them, turning her body into an autonomous humanoid weapon was the first. The local news cycle that night ran wild with reports of a rampaging “cyber-zombie”.

As the man who she had trusted and who had betrayed her met his end at the radiation-blasters embedded in her arms, the second of Krahe’s Dead Man Switches went off.

The rotten, corporate heart of Megacity Gamma, and with it the HQ of the Whitestone and Bergmann Financial Group… It all went up in nuclear hellfire. Such was the scale and resilience of corporate megastructures; nothing less than a fusion bomb would have sufficed. The megacity’s intranet followed when the last Dead Man Switch activated: a self-replicating AI was unleashed, running rampage through any system even slightly related to Whitestone.

These were the treasures of a woman who had lived through corporate wars and cataclysms without number, who had stood against the closest thing her world had to gods.

The three curses of a righteous warrior whom her own world had rejected.

Brunhilde Krahe died with the image of a nuclear fireball of her own making, burned into her artificial eyes’ corneas. With the last shred of backup power in her head, the cyborg rumbled out her final words.

“I. AM. NOT. DONE…”

She died filled with regret and refusal, for this was a scene she had never wanted to see. The only reason she hadn’t done this of her own volition, why this was a Dead Man Switch to begin with, was the knowledge that the true masterminds of Whitestone would just prop up another finance group in another city with even tighter corporate security.

“It was all for nothing…”

A truth she could not accept, hoping even unto death that her act would at least stir another like herself into action. She hoped that eventually, the subhuman parasites behind the likes of Whitestone would be strung up from their own ivory towers as they rightly deserved.

Those who had killed her thus met the same fate, even if she was not there to see it. No, Krahe had long departed for the timeless journey through the cosmic void between worlds, only to be snatched up by the whims of cosmic coincidence.