[WP] Tom unscrewed his bionic arm and put it on the hotel counter, "That should cover the bill. Or do you want my leg as well?" [Link to post.]
Frank, the hotel manager looked down at the bionic arm resting on the black marble counter. The exterior of it was covered with a dark grey metal, with golden prongs sticking out of the main joint. The two prongs matched up with two metal lined holes in Tom's left shoulder. Then Frank looked around at the empty lobby. Couches lay on their side, broken and and covered in broken glass. One of the elevator's doors were crumpled inward, the lights inside of it flickered. Several robotic corpses sat in a pile that Tom gathered together before offering his arm to cover the damage.
"How about you keep your arm, and leave me that pile of scraps?" Frank nodded toward the pile. Tom shook his head.
"That's my bounty," Tom said. He picked up his disconnected arm from the table. "Obviously, I don't *have* to give you anything. I thought I'd try to be polite." He socketed the arm back into his shoulder, and flexed the fingers on his left arm to make sure all the connections were made.
"Wait! Waitwaitwait." Frank held his hands out in front of him, with his palms facing Tom. "I will take the arm and the leg after all. That is plenty, but you cannot blame a guy for trying, can you?" Tom gave a slight grin, and shook his head again.
"No, I guess not." He detached his arm and placed it on the black marble again. Then he pulled a small silver cylinder out from a small pack attached to his belt. He leaned down, and Frank leaned over the counter to watch. Tom detached his right leg, and then pushed the silver cylinder into the slot. It extended outward and formed a metal peg-leg for him. He lifted the removed leg by the ankle and placed it on the counter next to his arm. Frank heard sirens in the distance.
"So can you tell me what this was all about? And do not think I will not believe you," Frank said, then pointed to one side of the ruined lobby. "I saw you come out of a blue portal from over there, then you immediately opened fire on those robots that came out of a red portal over there." He pointed to the other side of the lobby. "Not even two minutes before you." Tom gave a shrug.
"That about sums it up, whatever's relevant to you anyway. Those robots are from the future, year 2130 to be exact," Tom said.
"You are from the future too?" Frank asked. His face showed none of the surprise Tom expected to see.
"Yeah, but I'm actually from further in the future. Year 2190. See, humans won the war against the machines. We survived, rebuilt, then decided to start correcting our mistakes. We went back to 2130 to take the robots out early, history is written by the victors and all that," Tom smiled. "But they scattered themselves through time and we have to hunt them down."
"History is written by the victors, huh? I like that," Frank said. He reached under the counter for something while Tom continued to smile at him.
"Yeah. It's an old Winston Churchill quote, I'm surprised you haven't heard it yet. It's closer to your time than 2190." Frank found what he was looking for under the counter and stood upright again to point a shotgun at Tom's face.
"Sorry to inform you, but you are wrong about that," Frank said. "You are from the future of those robots. I am from your future, actually the year 3100. By the way, humans did not really win the war, we just let you think you did. We wanted to give you a chance to repopulate. Humans had no idea how severe their situation was. There was less than 500,000 of you left on the planet when we stopped slaughtering you." Tom moved to speak, but Frank fired. Tom had a bionic arm, and bionic leg, but a regular human head. Then, he had none of those things. "But we started again."
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