The Bullets II

I was here.

But where was 'here' exactly?

I was standing on a large platform floating in a void. The void seemed to be colored black, green, blue, and red - smooth, flowing swirls of the colors, and the platform was filled with shelves.

Shelves filled with books of which I knew not the contents. I started looking around, and I saw that all the shelves had a label. Physics, Chemistry, Psychology, the Visual arts... all the secrets of the world were in those books. Both the knowledge that humans had managed to acquire and that which was beyond our understanding.

I shuddered unconsciously as I thought about how much knowledge was in here. About how 'sacred' this ground was. About how impossible it would be to even amass all the knowledge in just one walk of life.

Who, or what was I dealing with here.

I heard the faint sound of classical music playing over what sounded like an old gramophone. It was loud, not loud so much that it was booming in my ears, but I could tell the source of the music was quite far away, but I could still hear it clearly.

No, it wasn't that the music was that loud at the source. Something seemed to be distorted here, either space and time, or my perception. As soon as I took a step forward, I was in the center of the platform, and all the shelves were arranged around me in concentric circles.

I was right. It was most likely space-time that was distorted here. And basically, either manually or automatically, it was rigged so that I would appear right in the center, in front of a smaller floating platform on which two beings stood.

A man dressed in black leather armor, his shoulder-length dark hair covering one eye. A gigantic screen hovered before him, and some text has written on it in two columns. Several rows of text, apparently, and since he was looking at it from the back, it was difficult to decipher.

But soon he understood what the text was.

Names. Names of People.

I couldn't read them all, or should I say I didn't want to because what the woman was doing was something more... disturbing.

She was wearing a long black coat, and the coat parted as it reached her midthigh to reveal a pair of long, smooth dark-skinned legs. Her hair was a neat bob wig, and there was a holographic monocle on her right eye. In front of her was a Gatling gun and then another hologram of the Earth.

They both looked at me briefly, before the man spoke up.

"I have updated the list for the next hour, at least that should be enough to deal with our little discrepancy here. You'll get the information now that time.", so you can calibrate the gun for that period of time."

She nodded her acknowledgment of his words, and immediately, red dots popped up, covering most of the miniature globe. Her brows furrowed a bit, but then her face returned to the expressionless mask it was.

"9,000 people die in the next hour. That's an all-time record," she said, looking at him briefly. "Half of those will by disease and other accidents. The other half, by my gun."

"The humans have been playing it safe really. 4500? Impressive. But then again, their lack of natality control ensures we still have to purge continually to ensure they can still barely exist on that spinning ball."

I looked back and forth between them, slowly understanding what was going on. These... b@stards. They were responsible for the bullets, the killings. Everything.

They were some sort of other-dimensional Death Control Squad.

I clenched my lists as a fierce anger overwhelmed me. These people, sitting in this room filled with knowledge, still had no understanding of what people on Earth faced. Of our terrible Mental Health and the traumatizing situation. They knew so much, yet felt so little.

I leapt at them before I could even get a hold of myself, but I soon realized that I had done something stupid.

The man waved his hands, and suddenly, the distance between us increased from mere inches until he was just a speck in the horizon.

And then it rapidly decreased until I was mere inches away from the woman, who planted a solid kick in my abdomen. I coughed up blood and crumpled to the ground, wheezing and gasping for air.

"The impulse-driven nature of humans makes your species very susceptible to completely avoidable harm and death. Even if your brain is far from developed enough to grasp the depth of our power, surely you would have taken a look around and understood that we're in a different league, Jonathan Krest?" the woman asked, jumping down from the platform.

My name... how the hell did they know my name?

"Fire," the woman said, and the gun began to shoot wildly.

But then, the bullets that came out were suddenly warped away as soon as they were fired. Obviously on their way to the skulls of their next unfortunate target.

TO BE CONTINUED.

******

@Hanzell, @Leo_kitti, @gertu13, @Gwenie Even though this story is short (I'll end it with the next part), I kinda like the storyline.