Samual Versus drew the spoken gun from the binder and layed it on the metal table between them.
“Do you want to tell me about this now” he said. Not a question. Sitting across from him was a kid no more than 30 affecting a defiant slouch. He tried to hide behind his dark bangs in lieu of the hoodie which had already been confiscated, along with the rest of his cloths. Samual had to hand it to the kid—he looked more defiant than most people did after three days without their clothes.
The kid made to reach for the gun and I didn’t stop him. His hand hovered, milimeters over the flat piece of paper. He hadn’t expected me to let him have it. He gave me a look like wtf is with this old man before picking up the gun and leaning back in his chair to study it. He flipped the page back and forth, like he was looking for marks or creases on the page. But it was just as he’d spoken it in the Affect lobby.
He had walked in like he had an appointment, just as most of the bot workers were leaving to return to owners for the night and sent the gun out over the dropwave which most bots and augments had wide open. Because who would be reckless enough to tell bots about guns?
((don’t love this, think I like the more surreal approach I was thinking originally))
The kid made to reach for the gun and I didn’t stop him. He paused, surprised, but only for a second. His fingertips barely grazed the image when the concrete room split open like a corpse flower. Pinned as we were to the flattened walls, gravity having lost its meaning I still clung to it like a vestigial floor. From outside they reached into our room, the weapons, replaying various injuries against us. The kid was dying to repeated shotgun blasts under the chin every time I was cohesive enough to look over, while I was pinned to my floor and rocked two and fro by dozens of infinitely long, thin black skewers.
I tried pressing my face into the wallfloor as hard as I could to distract from the pain, then felt an insistent tug from within my own body. Something had gripped my back and was pulling on my spine.
Then the skewers pinning me in place grew thinner and seemed to turn sideways in place until they were invisible. Neither the kid or I were in any shape to move as the weapons receded. Slowly, over the course of minutes, the room closed itself back up, the weapons shrinking into the edges and corners where the room eventually sealed itself with no sign of where the weapons had split our world apart.
We both stood up from the floor and resumed our previous positions, seated at the steel table.