The Collector

The air was unrelentingly frigid, yet he did not feel its cold. His hands were blood-covered, chafed, and worn. A frozen bloodied body, skull cracked, laid on the white snow beneath him, slowly turning it a deep crimson. The heat, still radiating from the body, melted the surrounding snow like warm butter. The corners of his mouth spread into a satisfied grin; it was his fifth kill today. 

He reached across his body and pulled a serrated knife from its sheath on his hip. The blade glistened in the starlight, blood stains twinkling under the soft glow of the moon. 

He looked down at the corpse below lying on its side, clothed in a black jumpsuit. Steam rose slowly from the dark blood pooling around it. 

With a heavy studded boot, he kicked the body sharply on the shoulder and it rolled onto its back, sprawling across the snow, its chest exposed to the cold night sky.

He knelt beside the body — his matted and stained pants soaking up the pooling blood — and positioned himself over it. He tore open the black jumpsuit at the chest, baring its pale and sickly skin. Placing both hands, one atop the other, he gripped the blade and raised it above his head; a cobra poising before it strikes. 

His thrust came down with a menacing quickness, plunging the blade into the corpse’s sternum. He could feel the consistency of each tissue as he sliced through skin, muscle, and bone. A satisfaction spread through him, a triumph.

With the serrated edge of the blade, he began sawing through the solid bone of the corpse’s sternum. 

CRRRKKK. CRRRKKK. 

Grinding and crunching punctured the silence of the night. 

With a surgeon’s precision, he cut a square into the chest of the body and carefully removed the section of flesh, rib, and muscle. He stared into the cavity of the corpse’s chest and the corners of his eyes raised in delight.

His frozen hands reached into the cavity, red grime spreading through them as he searched for his prize. He felt the familiar round slippery shape, grasped it with both hands, and ripped out the corpse’s heart, glistening and steaming in the cold night air. 

Carrying the heart, he walked over to a black woolen sack, laying on the snow. Dripping blood trailed his snowy footprints like thick blots of ink on a blank page. He carefully untied the sack, looked into it, and smiled. 

Number five, he thought as he tossed his prize into the sack with the other hearts. The quota has been met. 

He tied up the sack with his blood-stained hands, swung it over his shoulder, and started to trudge his way through the snow. 

As he walked, his head swiveled about, scrutinizing the frozen barren wasteland that he called home. Cragged mountains surrounded him, towering walls of rock around a field of white. Outcroppings of black stone pockmarked the arctic expanse. Blistering winds as cold as death blew ceaselessly as if the landscape was ruled by a glacial god, its icy breath immortal. 

He smiled. This was his hunting ground.

In the distance, he heard the pattering of footsteps on ice and the fearful frailness of a far-away voice. He did not see them, but he could hear them, his ears as sharp as a knife. 

Tomorrow. That one is for tomorrow. 

On the frozen field ahead, a small dark building emerged: a cabin, a black island in a sea of ice. A faint light glowered from within its bowels. His feet trudged towards the cabin, the black sack bounding on his back as he dragged a path through the snow.

As he reached the cabin, he saw the large frozen pile behind it. It was growing larger by the day, almost larger than the cabin. They will have to clear it soon. 

He approached the pile, untied the sack, and poured the contents into the pile. 

Five more for the collection, he smiled.

Satisfied, he walked around to the door of the rickety cabin, opened it, and walked in. The glow from the inside lit up the darkness of the night for a moment, a muted glitter in a black ocean. 

He closed the wooden door behind him and his world went quiet.

*

*

She felt the gentle thrum of the aircopter vibrate her feet through the cabin floor as she traveled through the sky. The feeling reminded her of the helicopter simulator that she had experienced at the historical museum a year ago. She thought of how different the world must have been when helicopters had flown the skies. It was her first time in an aircopter; its cabin was much larger and quieter than the simulator. 

“So, what did they get you for?” A silky male voice interrupted the quiet of the cabin.

She looked over to her left at him, standing beside her. His gaze was fixed out of the small round window of the aircopter’s cabin ahead, the sky as black as tar.

“Just, fell out of love,” her voice wavered slightly. She didn’t want to tell him the truth. “Didn’t know they could detect that. You?”

He continued to look out the window. “Abandoned my kids.” He shrugged as if he cared little. “They can detect everything.”

She studied the man: his head and face were shaved bare, he wore a black jumpsuit, and the number 4011 was stuck to his chest in white lettering. She noticed two jagged scars crawling obliquely across his face, chin to forehead. On the crown of his head, a silver metal core emerged from his scalp, flickering with pale blue and white lights.

“Should’ve known better,” she said. “I’m surprised they still have the neurosensors in us.” Her eyes remained on the metal core atop his head. 

“They’ll continue capturing data, as long as they can. They’ll want our emotions… starvation, fear, the moment before death.”

She shuddered. “You’d think after we did our crimes they would let us rot in peace, freedom for once from the never-ending surveillance.”

“I’m not surprised. The data, every second of it matters. Prisoners like us haven’t been granted empathy for hundreds of years, or so the books say.”

She looked down at her feet, the floor of the cabin vibrating beneath her. She thought of the museum she had visited a year prior. “I just don’t understand why they got rid of prisons, the cells behind bars. I know their freedoms were taken, but… at least they had their thoughts.”

“Things have changed,” he said. “Not for the benefit of the commoners.”

She looked out of the round window in front of them and thought she could glimpse the dark outline of mountains ahead. It was so difficult to see in this darkness. “Do you know where we’re going?” 

“Everybody goes somewhere different, depending on the crime. Where we go… I don’t know. But… it’s never good.” 

“Do you think we can make it out?”

He blinked, then turned his scarred face to look at her, his eyes dark and vacant, his face worn as if he had lived ten lives before his own. “Nobody makes it out.”

She shivered and looked away. “There must be something we can do. Maybe… maybe we can work together? If we team up, we’ve got better chances.”

He shook his head. “The Intelligence they built, it’s incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it. When I fought against the Rebellion, I saw the software that they built for the Sentinels, saw them murder entire cities. They are chilling monstrosities, unfeeling butchers. I’ve seen their software…” He turned to look back out at the night sky. “We are being sent to be a part of their training program, the Sentinels, to keep building their Intelligence. We won’t live. We did the crime, we pay the price.”

She felt her stomach drop as the aircopter started its descent.

Quiet filled the cabin. She could hear the pace of her breath increase, her heart beating louder in her chest. She tried to steel herself, to be strong, like her husband taught her, but could only feel her legs tremble beneath her.

She felt tears come. “It’s not fair! How can I be punished for falling out of love? You don’t have control over feelings. They just… they just happen!”

“If you could go back, would you change what you did?”

She stared out the window, into the darkness. A scene flashed into view: a secret rendezvous, a man, his face strong yet gentle. He had a certain confidence, a smile that lit up the world. She felt the soft wet kiss under the twinkling stars in the hills outside of the city. Lying naked, in the dark, her head on his chest. She had felt tenderness, and passion — something she had not felt for a long time. She thought of her husband at home, awake in bed, staring at the ceiling.

Was the moment worth it? Was passion, worth it? 

She looked at him. “Why did you abandon your kids?”

He looked down at his hands, examined them, turned them over a few times. “I couldn’t do it anymore.”

He shifted a bit, put his hands by his side, stood more erect, looked out the window. “We should have stopped the Intelligence long ago, at least controlled it, put ethics around it. They say our emotions are like algorithms. A stimulus arrives… it’s processed… we respond. They say that the feeling of connection is like this, passion is like this, love is like this. How can all of this be reduced to an algorithm? It’s simply a feeling. And by trying to go deeper, to understand it, to examine it under a microscope, we’ve lost the very feeling of it. It is an experience. We feel and we suffer. And we feel others suffer. No amount of understanding can change the experience itself. This experience, it’s the very foundation on which our ethics was built.”

 He slumped his shoulders and looked down at his feet. “What has our world come to when a man can’t bear to see his kids grow up in this world? I abandoned them, committed a sin of the heart, and I get sentenced to death. How can you raise kids, when you know the icy world that awaits them? How can I tell them that everything is going to be OK, that they will be safe when I know they won’t? How can I kiss them goodnight knowing the horrors hiding under their beds? This is what a world looks like, when our humanity is left on a shelf in a museum.”

She felt a sudden thump beneath her feet and she staggered. The aircopter had stopped moving. 

A door slid open behind them and an enormous man emerged, broad and muscled. He was garbed in a white uniform, badges decorating his chest. On his head, a white helmet shone in the cabin’s light, a metal core protruding from it, its pale blue and white lights blinking. Penetrating eyes peered at her beneath a clear visor. In his hand, he carried a large silvery club, sparks of electricity scintillating from its tip.

“We’re here.” His voice was thick and heavy.

She felt herself begin to shake. “Where are we?”

“No questions.” He slammed an oval button on a panel with his massive fist and the cabin door to the outside began to lift open.

She felt a frightening cold rush in as if being plunged into an arctic sea. It shook her to the bone. Colossal drifts of snow whirled in the wind howling across the barren icy landscape. She could see the outline of mountains all around in the distance, a frozen plain barricaded by the surrounding cliffs.

She tried to back up into the safety and warmth of the cabin but was met with a strong hand blocking her path.

“I’M SORRY! PLEASE! I DIDN’T MEAN WHAT I DID! I CAN CHANGE!”

“No second chances.”

She was hit with a jolt of electricity. It shook her body like a rag doll and she reeled over, pain radiating from head to toe.

“That was level one, Miss. Don’t make me go to ten.”

 A sudden terror overtook her, it filled her whole body, rattling her to the core. She wanted to run, to hide beneath warm blankets and sheets, to escape the terror that awaited her in the dark.

“The Collector is waiting.”

The Collector? She thought, her body trembling. What do they collect?

She felt the heavy heel of a boot strike her from behind and she tumbled forward out of the cabin into the freezing night. She fell hard onto her face, landing in the snow.

The biting cold stung her face like a nest of wasps. It was hideously frigid, the wind rushing in like an icy hurricane. She felt its frozen fingers crawl under her jumpsuit and squeeze her skin in a vice. Through the blistering wind, she heard a thud and knew her cabinmate had landed beside her. 

Brushing the snow from her face with quivering hands she could see into the distance.

In the darkness, in the frozen night, she saw something.

She felt a small glimmer of hope, a sanctuary in this icy prison.

It was a cabin, a faint light glowing in the window.

Her heart warmed at the thought of safety.