The Predator of the Meadow

A war raged somewhere beyond the sun shield. An enemy without a face or a name awaited the cataclysmic weapons of Hell riding in biologically sealed canisters strapped to the girth of his ship. And he was a willing participant, ready to die in glorious battle and claim the right to the destiny of any true human. So he had been conditioned to rationalize.

The needles retracted from his arm, leaving a clotting agent as they withdrew to close the wounds.

Minutes after having awoken from the deep sleep, Vincent felt invigorated and refreshed. Several neural cables were coiled in a container fastened to his flight suit. He unwound them and connected the triangular leads into the appropriate sockets set in his chair. His muscles felt extremely tired, and the motions triggered spasms of pain in his joints, especially his hips. The feelings were dismissed as after effects of sleeping for an extended amount of time. He didn't want to entertain the idea that he had already fought and bled in the War, whether he could remember his actions or not.

The instructions for preparing his fighter were simple and had been reviewed thoroughly before departure. After arriving in a pause, he would be awake and uninhibited by any sort of behavior modification for a short amount of time. Doctors on distant command ships would monitor his condition, and then send the commitment orders that would modify his brain activity and prevent him from remembering any event, including his arrival. He watched the sparse information on the primary display until the command ship sent its reply.

Seconds after connecting his brain to the ship, a psychological penumbra swept him through several stages of extreme vertigo, claustrophobia and agoraphobia. Random thoughts and concerns gave way to bio-organic instructions that were puzzled together with encrypted fragments of mission data supplied by the ship computer. Complex, heuristic equations in black and gray flooded every screen as top secret instructions and informative data were decoded.

Star charts were imprinted into his long term memory and he understood his location and the tactical advantages of his current position as though he had studied them for years. Without any memory of having flown the deep space fighter, his body was conditioned to respond and manipulate its every control. He believed he could fly the ship with greater agility than he could walk.

And then came the rage.

At first, it existed as nothing more than statistical information about his opponents. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew his opponents might not possess a single weapon, yet his memory was honed with such vile atrocities as any theologian might surmise would be found only in Hell. His opponents were villains culpable for swilling the birth fat from newborns, filching nourishing breast milk from babies' mouths. The lives of these damned scoundrels were constructed in his mind as being birthed into a netherworld of villainy and wickedness.

A retched odor filled the cabin and Vincent bit down on his lip to hold back a wave of nausea.

Vincent was well aware his mind was being conditioned. He knew why he submitted. The human race could not afford to place robots in a situation that demanded inspiration as well as instinct. They did not need killers who would mindlessly or methodically slaughter. His race needed people like himself who would submit themselves to temporary behavioral reprogramming and emerge as mighty beasts of war.

And the hunger arose.

He was ravenous for domination, blood, possession and land. Every conceivable lust erotically charged his body. There was naught concern for what he wanted, or why he wanted something he could no longer describe. His mind simmered and roiled in greasy hunger. Hormones and synthetic drugs burned his veins and hardened his muscles.