A short story, for your enjoyment

We Received Your Soul by Email.

I don’t know where I am. My memory is scattered.
I feel injured, I feel like there is something torn from my body. I open my eyes from a blanket of darkness to a dazed highway, empty of traffic. My eyes are not my own eyes. I try to blink but cannot, dust does not gather and bother as it did before.
I am suspended from the overpass, my arms are nailed to the outside edge of it, and my chest has been pierced by a thick steel girder running directly through me. My feet dangle down towards the roadway and make me dizzy. My feet are not my own feet.
I am crucified to the bridge. I am scared now; fearful of what this means. I am dead. But I am not gone to nothing as I feared I would be.
My mind spins backwards, I can remember being down on the highway talking to my sister. I can remember saying something to her…but what had it been?
I hear noises in the gloom, sounds of leaves turning in the wind and people whispering in hushed under-the-table tones. The bushes near the edge of the highway were dark and foreboding, shadows glared out from within their grasp. Darkness swam between their branches.
She had spoken about him wanting mother, wanting mother’s pathway because he had the rest of our family’s pathway but needed our mother’s…but who wanted them? What was a pathway?
I had felt afraid then, but I cannot remember why I just remember that I was afraid. The reason escapes me but the feeling sticks to my mind like a parasitic projection of the devil.
I can feel my face peeling.
It shifts layers of skin in the winds; they take flight and whirl into the gloomy half-night.
I taste my own blood in my mouth and try with all my might to pull free from the nails which hold my hands to the overpass. The streetlights glow in sequence along the highway, their light throwing an even more dangerous look to the highway than what it would have possessed in total darkness.
I am a machine, not metaphorically but literally. I can hear the gears whirling around in my chest and clinking in frustration as the girder that I have been impaled upon stops them from performing their due tasks.
Every time I move my neck to direct my gaze elsewhere I can hear a mechanical whirring or rather a winding sound as miniature pistons and ball sockets bear the weight of my head. But I can still feel the flesh of my face…
How strange.
I want to get off this girder. I try my hardest to move my arms but the circuits that control my arms must have been damaged beyond functioning capabilities. I try to open my mouth to speak but find that no such thing is possible. My jaw no longer opens.
I cast my memory reels back towards where it started: how I came to here, and realized that the things I had invented in my subconscious about the afterlife were tame in comparison to these memories recorded in my head and ready for playback.
RE-WINDING…
PLAY?
Yes.

I saw the truck coming for me, I saw the grille of its engine hitting my face and then there was blood. Blood filled my eyes, my mouth and my nose. I could feel it overflowing and splattering all over the skin of my face. Like branches under a rock my skull imploded with a loud pop. My brain was being ground and folded onto itself, falling apart like wet wood.
Then I was awake, the highway stretching away from me. My sister was lying there sobbing. I walked over to her and as I moved closer I saw that she was no longer entirely herself, pieces of her had been replaced by machinery, her heart it seemed had been one such piece as a large steel panel revealed itself where her left breast should have been.
I wanted to find out what happened to us. I wanted to know where we were.
I had spoken to her then, I had said “what is this?” and held up my hand to see that a mechanical claw now replaced it. I was nothing more than a ghost in a shell.

That’s what I am, I am a ghost in a shell and so was my sister. It makes sense…but what is this place that I am stuck in now?

There was a sudden shuffling of movement coming from the roadway and we both watched as it approached us with speed. It was some kind of bi-pedal creature with an unearthly grin plastered across its face. It looked like some kind of surreal cartoon, having no arms or in fact any body but merely an oversized head and two Ostrich-like legs running it along. It had large human eyes, massive staring things that had no eye-lids, just as its mouth had no lips; showing way too many teeth to feel safe while looking at that smile.
It stopped a few feet short of where my sister and I stood now motionless in fear and shock at this most peculiar creature.
“I have come to eat your souls” it said. Then the creature laughed long and hard into the gloom at his own joke as if it was the most hilarious thing in existence.
I remember looking at it and then...

MEMORY DEPLETED
Oh great.
YOU ARE CURRENTLY RUNNING AT MINUS FOUR PERCENT.
Well what can I do about it? Nobody told me that hell was a material dimension.
WE ARE CURRENTLY SETTING IN MOTION A PROCEDURE THAT WILL REVIVE YOU.
Actually you know I wouldn’t mind you putting me out of my misery.
YOU WILL BE REVIVED BECAUSE YOU MUST SUFFER.
YOU MUST SUFFER_d:453tbol.4, YOU MUST SUFFER.

Technology has come a long way in the afterlife as well - Maul Twilight

Creapy stuff, well thought out. Been watching GITS huh? Keep it up man, if you have more of these, please post them. I'm pretty interested

I do have more Short Stoires, older ones. That one is the most recent and I'm fairly proud of it. That one was one of my few stories that has written itself meaning that I didn't think about anything that was happening while I was writing it, it was a pure subconscious bout. I shall post up another of my pure subconscious work. I think its pretty cool when that happens...

Just reminded me of Ghost in the Shell. Probably 'cause it A. It ponders over the same things, being just a ghost in a shell and B. well, actually saying Ghost in a shell.