You Passed

• Liam Sinnamon, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2015

The speech was dragging on, surprising nobody. Henry excused himself from the conference and wandered over to the water cooler he'd used in his days working at his accounting firm. And if it wasn’t for his sudden premonition, he'd be wasting more time before inevitably getting back to the speech. Instead, he peered into the dim room and saw what he saw: a woman lying face-down with a cleaver sticking out of her skull.
When the air came back to his mouth, he spent it all chanting "no" as if his life were in as much danger as hers appeared to be. He darted into the room and sent his fingers to her neck, checking hopelessly for a pulse. None.
The more he knelt there, the less he felt his normal timid self and the more he felt an overwhelming surge of curiosity. He began to feel around the spot where the cleaver had hit, scarily calm, before he felt a strange mark right beside the cut. Touching it sent a brilliant yellow light out of where Henry expected the victim’s eyes were.
And to make matters more terrifying, she rose up onto her knees and lolled her head back to look at the man who just revived her. Her voice came out dry and dull.
"I've been killed, haven't I?"
She grabbed the cleaver protruding from the back of her head and yanked it out with one painful-looking tug. On any other day, Henry would have screamed until he suffocated. But Henry got the feeling he knew what she was.
“You’re a robot, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” She pointed towards the doorway. “And so is he. You should know what to do now.”
The robot flipped the cleaver, extending the handle to Henry. And he got the feeling that he knew what to do. In one movement, he swept up the cleaver and buried it into the forehead of the man he hadn’t yet looked at in the doorway.
Cheers erupted behind him. The lights flickered on, glass appeared in the walls with a group in uniform behind it and a single man in a lab coat came out of the closet by the back.
“Neurotransmitter test was a resounding success. You took the target down without even looking at him!” The scientist extended his hand to Henry. “Your memories should be transmitted to you any second now. Thank you so much for this.”
Pictures flooded Henry’s mind. One of him driving to a warehouse. One of him signing his name on a contract. And a single caption stayed with all of them.
“It’s all fake.”
And he got the feeling that he knew what to do. Yanking the outstretched arm towards him, he dug the cleaver into the side of the man’s neck and revelled in the sudden silence. The bloodied robot stepped forward, took a keycard out of a coat pocket and pumped more dopamine into Henry’s brain.
Today, she would finally be free of this damn prison.