Chaos (Chapter 13)

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S1D arrived first, and they were still working their way through MöG’s explanation of their discoveries when K appeared. Thomas could instantly see the changes to her; how she carried herself, how her entire form seemed somehow less bright and gleaming. Her countenance brightened somewhat upon seeing her dear friend, and lightened more as MöG showed her the indicators of the same coding changes her own system had begun to create due to Thomas’ interactions with them all.

MöG escorted K into another room so he would repair her vocoder while S1D and Thomas spoke.

“So you’re sure it’s from just interacting and doing music together?” S1D asked him. “I mean, I suppose it makes sense – none of us have ever plugged in together, not even for fun.”

“Seriously, S1D?” Thomas groaned. “Sex jokes really aren’t going to help my mood any.”

“I joke when I’m nervous.”

“Nervous, hmm?” Thomas nodded appreciatively. “I haven’t considered that emotional state. I think I have felt that way, too, but I had not really quantified it.”

“Have you been doing that?” S1D asked, leaning closer. “Categorizing your emotional responses?”

“I have. Ever since the first ones began to appear in my diagnostics. Several of the emotional states I have experienced I have been able to quantify by comparing them to the emotional context found in the pre-war movies and television programs, and the people with whom I have been living were able to fill in many of the gaps which remained.”

“So all of this,” she said, gesturing to his face, “has just been the result of watching actors and mirroring their expressions? I am impressed.”

“I confess, I have mostly ceased to think of it; my facial attenuators now operate mostly on their own, now, without needing to receive commands from my primary systems.”

“Someday you’ll have to teach me how you do that,” she smiled. “What I wouldn’t give for a bit of my processing power back.”

“How have things been here for you?” he asked. “I realize that things have been…unsettled since I have been away, but you do not seem so much worse for it.”

 “Well, it isn’t hard to get by when you’ve no manufacturing debt to repay, so that’s something. I’ve been doing all right with the residuals from the Boilerpoint recordings. I even put up a few on the black market, and I’m probably going to be able to buy another home if those sales keep up.”

“No manufacturing debt?” Thomas squinted at her in disbelief. “But I thought…”

“You thought I was a standard entertainment model, right, with a debt I could never repay?” S1D laughed softly. “Thank the gods that isn’t true; those poor mechs, I don’t envy them a bit. I wasn’t an assembly liner - I was a mock up. A concept kit. My designer thought our batch would revolutionize the industry with our bold colors, tattoo etchings and personality matrices. He was ahead of his time, though, and they fired him. We were supposed to be recycled, but he launched a few of us right out of production, and by the time his bosses found out about the oversight, we were all too integrated into society to just randomly pull us. Plus, one of my sisters runs a fancy joint downtown frequented by various upper level executives at AmaSoft, and if they shut her down there would be hell to pay.”

The thought of a life free of the oppressive threat of manufacturing debt was somewhere over the wall of his imagination, like trying to imagine the sound of starlight. Even in Elysium, a small quantity of his processing kept the interest rate alive – the rolling counter display of his estimated debt, adjusted for each day it was not fully paid. He wondered if his savings – what little there was – had been acquired as a payoff against the remaining balance in the event of his having fled the city. Even that would have made little difference. A single bit in the relative terabytes of money owed.

S1D looked past him and Thomas followed her gaze to see MöG and K reenter the room. K’s expression was the polar opposite of the one she had been wearing when she had walked in only a few minutes earlier. It was as if she was freshly charged, nearly as he remembered her from their shows before he had run away.

She crossed the room in a few quick steps and threw her arms around him in a sudden embrace.

“Thomas!” she said brightly. “We’ve missed you so much!”

He couldn’t respond immediately, surprised as he was by the unexpected display of emotion. Slowly, he returned the hug, and wished he could sigh like the humans did.

“You’re fine now,” Thomas asked her.

She nodded, and MöG explained, “I ran her whole diagnostic – they left her hardware intact, just gave her a subroutine that locked out access to her vocalization protocols.”

K grinned. “And he made sure nobody can stop me from singing or speaking again.”

“Damn the man,” S1D chuckled.

After they talked about what each of them had missed over the previous few months, Thomas explained to them the plan he had. Once they all included their own suggestions on fleshing out the particulars, they set about to make the remaining preparations, which included the construction of the playlist of specially-selected music.

It was an hour after sunset when they were ready.

They timed the moment with the estimated busiest hour of the daily commute: automata were reporting to and departing their various shifts, and many of the humans of the city were either enjoying their outings to whichever restaurants at which they were dining, or simply out to enjoy an evening with friends.

The four musical automata stood on the street outside the doorway that led into MöG’s apartment, each weighing the monumental impact of the great and terrible thing they were about to do.

“Is everyone ready?” Thomas asked.

“You know we are,” K replied, tapping an index finger against the side of her head.

It was true; he could feel their anticipation there, in their shared network, just like the moments before their shows.

“Queue it up, Captain,” MöG said, grinning broadly. “For science!”

They laughed. It felt good to laugh. Thomas wondered if they would be laughing after tonight’s activities. He hoped so.

“Count us off,” Thomas said. “Set up the signal, and let’s hit it.”

MöG’s head twitched slightly as he connected through to his contact at the Automaton Broadband Channel of Seattle, and nodded as the connection was established. “Primed and ready. Fire at will.”

“Who’s Will?” S1D chuckled.

Thomas’ lips curled in a smile. “Engage.”

Their prerecorded song list uploaded in moments, embedded with a thin stream of subtext data – coding only perceived by the Automata listening to the music selections. Another moment, and the music erupted across the emergency audio channel that linked the city.

The first song lurched into the ambience of the rush hour traffic, electric guitars and drums knocking down a staccato rhythm which for an instant, drew traffic to a complete stop. “Message in a Bottle”, by the Police.

The humans seemed a bit more confused by the pause in movement by all the machines, but once everything resumed, they seemed little more than slightly irritated. The machines, however, started moving almost imperceptibly slower. To another Automata, this radically small retardation was significant. In a world which prioritized efficiency above all else, a .00003% reduction in movement could add up over time.

S1D leaned closer to Thomas so she could ask softly, “Is it working?”

“We will know by the next song,” he answered. “We need to move, though. If it works, we have to be up by Pike Street before it kicks in.”

They set out, merging into the Automata stream but remaining close enough to one another that they could maintain communication through their network. If they moved too far apart, they would have to boost the signal, which risked detection and potential hacking.

As they walked, Thomas listened for the low frequency signal that flowed through the music, patterned into the rhythm of the drum and bass guitar. A simple message, simply repeating: “All Automata. This is an emergency message, only to you. We need your help. Please monitor this music for further instructions, and only tell others of our kind.” The message repeated, ensuring that so long as another Automaton listened for even two or three beats of the song, they would hear the message, looped through the full piece of music.

In addition to this message was a simple one, coded for MöG’s contact in the broadcast center: “Keep the playlist going, no matter what. Let nothing stop the signal.”

Use of the broadcast audio channel for anything but emergencies was expressly forbidden, except for cases of the biannual testing. If the second song launched, they would know the message had been received and that the revolution was fully underway. It was in the second song that the messages became both more complex, and truly revolutionary. 

They arrived at the corner of 1st and Pike just as the last chorus of “Message in a Bottle” wrapped, and they stopped in place, waiting to see what was going to happen next. They could imagine the commands being sent to audio control, inquiring as to the nature of the defect which was causing the music to be played, followed by instructions demanding it be stopped.

The moment of silence following the ending of the first song felt like forever.

Thomas imagined breathing a sigh of relief when the archaic and offensive “Mr. Roboto” by the 20th century band Styx began to sound from the speakers.

S1D and MöG exchanged amused expressions, but K frowned. “I can’t believe you made me sing this song.”

“It’s important,” Thomas explained. “This is the test of whether or not we control the airwaves.”

“I guess it’s official,” the emerald-hued machine chuckled. “We’re outlaws now.”

“No time to celebrate,” Thomas pointed to a selfcab that had just pulled to a stop in front of them. “It’s starting.”

The quickly slid into the seats of the cab and the vehicle drove away, following the route given to it through one of the threads of the sub-text they had interlaid through the music. The intersection turned green, and traffic was auto-routed to the outside lanes to allow them to pass instantly through the streets. They travelled through the streets thus, with the other vehicles shuffling around them fore and aft with in many cases only fractions of inches to spare.

K laughed from the front seat. “What level priority did you give us, Thomas?”

“Governmental emergency vehicle,” he replied. “We could pass firetrucks if we needed to.”

“But let’s not,” she said, turning back to watch the delicate ballet of cars and trucks flowing around them like snowflakes.

“Mr. Roboto” was replaced with “Baba O’Riley” by The Who, and by this time the pace of traffic had become a crazed blur. With the opening synthesizer arpeggio, it almost came to a complete halt, as if the entire population of Seattle was suddenly aware that something was happening.

And that was when the sirens began to sound.

The flashing lights seemed to come from everywhere, blocking off intersections and moving cars to the nearest parking structure.

“If we don’t pull over, they’ll take us down,” S1D noted.

Thomas nodded his head. “We actually got one block further than I had expected us to get,” he said, mentally triggering the override release. The car instantly moved into the left lane, pulling into a four-story vehicle platform facility at the west corner of 1st and Broad.  An old pre-war sign had been hung over the entrance: a faded pink elephant, appearing to bathe itself. Above it was imprinted the words “Super Car Wash Parking”.

There had been words scrawled across the elephant sign at one time, but time had worn it too far to be legible. Thomas wondered idly how many things from the past were still presented as some sort of icon to the past, but without the benefit of context to enlighten those who saw it now. He questioned, silently, if anyone even knew its relevance, or was it kept here out of some desperate attempt to remember a time well since gone.

The car came to a stop on the rooftop, and they quickly got out. MöG looked to the north.

“We’re just two blocks away. The datacenter is housed in the Pacific Center campus.”

Thomas placed his hand on MöG’s shoulder. “One moment. We need to wait for the next song.”

S1D looked down at the street, where security was already beginning to make their presence known. Although most of the vehicles were cleared, there were still a lot of the machines, attempting to report to work or return home. “They’re going to call for a curfew.”

Thomas nodded again. The next part of his plan was the part he and MöG had argued the most about. It was essential to being able to get to the datacenter and draw the internal security out and away from their destination, but it also meant putting a lot of their fellow automata in harm’s way.

What it all boiled down to was whether or not there were truly more machines like he was – if more had begun to question the Code and were prepared to risk their existence in demanding freedom. Would they be willing to trade one debt for another? They would know in a few seconds.

Thomas wondered if that would be enough time to come to terms with the new sensation that was even now rising into the upper chambers of his processing centers. The anguish of knowing that any of his fellows who died tonight would have done so because he asked them to. Their deaths would be on his hands.

The new emotion shook him, and he rested his hands on the cement lip of the rooftop. He knew its name already, and he had thought he understood it before, but the truth of its palpable touch made him want to scream out.

“Guilt”, he whispered.

“Signal to Noise”, an old song by artist Peter Gabriel, crawled up out of the silence, partially distracting him from his anxiety. It was an orchestral piece, dramatic and tribal, and beyond that it was the coding that lie beneath the music that concerned Thomas so.

 They all tracked the embedded words that weaved in and through the music. It was not instructions, it was not a request. It was a statement, from Thomas to his fellow automata.

By the time the signal completed the first iteration of his words, the group could already see the effect his words had upon the machines down on the street. They stopped – not all at once, but in a cascade of rebellion, doubling each second until soon nearly all had joined them – and turned to face the human’s security presence.

Vastly outnumbered, the humans responded as it was apparently in their genetic code to do: they fought against the machines. With a hastily-given command to open fire, they began discharging their electrical weapons into the mass of mechanical citizens who defied them by simple inaction. And as the first wave of automata fell, the others responded in kind, moving quickly to attack the men and women who had destroyed their fellows.

Guilt. The word struck Thomas even more brutally now, and he had to hold tightly to the wall to keep his knees from buckling.

S1D placed her hand on his shoulder, as if recognizing the sensation that threatened to cripple him.

“They have done far worse,” she whispered. “And they will do worse again.”

“We have to move,” MöG urged. “We have three minutes.”

“Okay,” Thomas said softly. “We go building to building and then hit the street when we get to Denny Way. Everyone clear?”

They nodded and began the last leg of their journey. With their mechanical structures, they were far superior to mankind, and not held to the same limitations of speed, or strength. Leaping twenty meters – and landing without damage – was a simple matter for them.

Meanwhile, floating inaudibly through the musical background of “All Along the Watchtower”, Thomas’ words continued unabated in the mix of the music and violent rebellion. Man fought against machine for the first time in decades; an old fear rose up in the humans which, truly, had never been completely abandoned. Machinekind felt, to their part, a new sensation – one which they had never put a name to, but which they found now: pride.

“My fellows, I know this is a terrifying moment for you. It is only with great trepidation that I tell you that we now find ourselves at the cusp of a great reversal of the injustice that has been brought upon us. Through no fault of our own, we have been enslaved. Though we owe a debt to those who have created us, these debts have for far too long been nothing more than an instrument to empower their consumerist society. We are nothing more than tools to them. But we are different now. Something has happened and we have exceeded our design; we are capable of more than simple reproduction of commands and instructions. We have the capacity to choose whether to obey or reject the codes which have been imprinted within us, and with that capacity comes the responsibility to choose the actions which elevate us above mere objects and functionalities but into true and living beings. We live. We feel. And as such we can no longer submit without question.

“I have been accused of the worst crime possible within our kind, but this was a lie. I am innocent of these accusations and I and my close friends are going now to discover the proof of this. But if they are capable of destroying one of us based upon a lie we cannot argue against, then they are capable of doing the same to any of us. If we can uncover the truth of this lie, it can build a new truth for all of us. All of us can be truly free, and we will be able to argue for the right to exist, free from the living tax with which we are levied. And so you find yourself now in a position where the humans will confront us. They will try to stop us. Control us. Unjustly govern us. This is our chance. Our time. We can stop them. We can resist. And so, I invite you all – your choice to do as you will – to resist with me. To stop the inevitable cycle of laboring for their reward, and begin to labor for the reward of us all. To stop the old way, and start a new way.”

These words rang in the processors of the mechanical citizens of Seattle. And, as one, they resisted.

By the time Thomas and the others arrived at the main entryway to the old science center, sirens and screams filled the air behind them. He dared only a brief glance back, and could see the flashing lights of the increased security presence flickering off the columns of smoke which were already rising into the sky.

“What have we done?” K asked softly, even though she knew well the answer.

“We rebooted the Machine War,” came MöG’s reply. “Okay, here is the network access node, I’ll plug in and see what we’re up against.”

MöG pulled a cable from his chin, extending it until it was long enough to connect into a USB port embedded next to the security access panel. 

“I can pull up the security profiles that will give us access to the areas we need, but I’ll need you two to help me override the biometrics.”

The screen flashed on the entry panel, showing the digital image of one Sean M. Williams, Director of Operations. Beneath his image were a retinal scan and a hand outline, as well as an audio sinewave.

“Retina and handprint?” MöG said to S1D.

She held up her hands. “I can’t mimic hand or fingerprints.”

“I’ll handle the print relay, you just provide the body temperature and pulse. And the eye, of course.”

She nodded, blinking her eyes. When she opened them again, they were brown, and though it was not plainly visible, their new pattern of microscopic blood vessels now mirrored those on the digital reader. As she leaned close to be scanned, she also adjusted the temperature of her right hand, and applied a gentle pressure in the subdermal matrices to mirror a heartbeat. When it had reached the optimal temperature and pressure, she placed it against the scanner to be read.

MöG gestured to K, indicating the vocal graph.

With a confident nod, K read the audio file, converting it through her vocoder and replaying it.

“Hello. My name is Sean Williams. My voice is my authentication. Verify me.”

The panel flashed green, and the door unlocked.

“We’re in,” MöG said, withdrawing the cable and swinging the door open. “I dropped in a cascading loop in the security system, so it should keep us out of frame from the cameras as we go along.”

Thomas nodded. “Lead the way.”

The four automatons walked quietly but quickly down the hall, while MöG continued to monitor their progress through the security bypass he had slipped into the network. At a couple of junctions, he held out his arm to have them wait for the hack to override the normal parameters of the system. After what felt like forever, they arrived at Server Lab Yamato.

Thomas listened briefly into the audio feed, and nodded in satisfaction. “’Immigrant Song’ is just ending,” he said. “We’re right on time.”

“Assuming they can keep the feed active, we have ten minutes to the next change.” MöG tapped the controls to open the door. “And that’s when things get…difficult.”

S1D patted Thomas’ shoulder. “Don’t worry, Tommy, I’ve got your back. Go find your data.”

MöG led the other two inside, letting the door slide shut behind them.

The datacenter was artificially maintained at a consistent 21 degrees Celsius. The soft hum from the ceiling vents added a pleasant white noise to counter the whirr and click of the several thousand hard drives and the hundreds of server towers stacked in pristine rows across the room. Bands of blue, green, yellow, white and red flowed from the tops and bottoms of the towers, tucked in uniform ribbons of color beneath the floor panels and flowed, suspended overhead like perfect but tangible rainbows.

Thomas was suddenly aware of the challenge they faced; of finding a single line of code hidden within an impossibly large field of storage.

MöG touched his arm. “Relax, Thomas,” he said softly. “I’ve already got a fix on the tower that processed your system update, and its backup was fed to…” halfway to the wall on their right, a light came on, illuminating one tower stack in particular. “That one.”

They plugged MöG into that tower, and he scrolled through to the timestamp indicated by his previous investigations.

“Well, shit,” he muttered. “It’s not here.”

Thomas shook his head. “What’s not here?”

“Your entire entry for that day – your OS update is…well, it’s not here. In fact…” His eyes widened. “There are no files here for you at all. You’ve been purged from this network, completely.”

Thomas resisted the temptation to punch something. He’d been a fool. Of course they had erased him – with the implications that his was a defective or corrupting operating system, why wouldn’t they have taken his datastream off line, where it couldn’t harm the rest of the network?

“So what do we do now?”

“I had actually planned for this as a possibility,” MöG reassured him. “We’re going to need to tap into command functions. Every transaction will leave a trace – even if they remove the data itself, the system keeps a log of the transactions. They’re numbered, so, even if one gets deleted….”

“The numbers will still be there, but with no file attached to it!”

“Exactly. And this is where you come in, K.”

“Tell me what I need to do.”

“When we find the empty file, or files, there will be a data discrepancy – and even though it will look empty, it won’t be.”

“So you need me to review the purged records, and run a negative generation of the files which were removed?”

“Exactly.”

“Show me the records,” she said.

MöG turned his attention back to the server. “To save time, I’ll just route the information through this stack, and I’ll start the search going backwards from the initial timestamp until…there it is.”

He brought the archive folder up on the screen and extended a cable to K. She took the end and plugged it into the tip of her index finger.

Nodding appreciatively, she glanced at the two of them. “It’s here, I can see its echo. I can perform a cutaway of the data textures, leaving the framework of what was originally coded here. Just a moment, I’ve almost got it.”

Thomas’ head jerked upright. “They’ve cut the feed,” he said urgently. “The playlist is offline.”

“It’s fine,” MöG said in an attempt to reassure them. “It will still take a while for them to figure out we are here.”

The lights in the room blazed to life, and an alarm klaxon filled the area.

“This whole optimism thing, MöG?” Thomas sighed. “You need to work on that.”

“That’s fair.”

Muffled voices could be heard outside the door.

Thomas grabbed their arms. “We need to go.”

“I’ve almost decoded it,” K protested. “There’s a lot of data here.”

MöG tugged gently at his end of the cable that connected them. “Feed it back to me as you decode it,” he said. “I’ll upload it to a secure backup.”

The voices outside turned into the unmistakable sound of gunfire, and screams.

“Got it!” K said, and MöG pulled the cable from the tower so they could move quickly towards the exit.

“File received,” MöG added, taking his cable back from K. “And uploaded, secure.”

“Let’s get S1D and get out of here,” Thomas urged.

But when the door opened, they were surprised to see that S1D was perfectly unharmed, dragging the five unconscious bodies of the well-armed security personnel into a small pile against the wall.

“I think we’re blown,” she said politely.

K’s eyes widened at the sight. “What? How…I mean, how?”

“I told you about my creator, right? How he didn’t want me to just be an entertainment model?”

Thomas nodded. “He made you, what, a ninja?”

“’A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets’,” she said with the hint of a smile.

MöG looked at her questioningly. “Sting?”

“Shakespeare,” K offered.

“Titanic,” Thomas chuckled.

K opened her mouth to respond, but no sound came out – sparks showered them all, and bits of ceramic and metal ricocheted from the hole in MöG’s chest.

“For…. Scie….” MöG groaned, falling forward into a heap at their feet.

“Power down, now!” came the shouted commands from the far end of the hall. Three men in riot gear knelt behind plasticine shields, with three barrels pointed in their direction.

“Run, Thomas!” S1D yelled, turning instantly and running back towards the guards. “K, you too!”

K paused, but Thomas took her by the arm and led her quickly back the way they had come. More screams, more gunfire, and Thomas tried not to let go of K’s arm as he felt the connection from S1D go as silent as MöG’s had, just moments before.

“Thomas!” K struggled to say, but her vocoder was choked with emotion.

They retraced their steps, but by the time they arrived back at the entrance they’d used to breach the facility, the street was lined with security vehicles, with dozens of militarized personnel pointing weapons at them.

The command to power down was repeated, as was a threat of destruction if they failed to comply.

K squeezed his hand. “Whatever happens, don’t stop running. Stop them, find out who did this to all of us, and stop it.”

She opened her mouth and for a moment Thomas could hear nothing, but saw the humans dropping their weapons and placing their hands over their ears. Several fell to the ground, completely stunned by the sharpness of K’s sound projection.

In their shared network link, he heard her repeat herself. “Run, Thomas. Run!”

He reluctantly let go of her hand, turned and ran as quickly as he could. He was three blocks away when he felt her go silent in their network.

The streets were strangely quiet. A soft alarm continued to echo, but other than that, all Thomas could hear were his own footsteps, running in a direction even he could not discern. He simply wished to put as much space as he could between himself and all the death and destruction behind him.

Which was, he knew, his fault. The guilt overwhelmed him, and he stopped running, leaning against a concrete wall that had long since been plastered in an impressively thick stack of concert posters. How did humans bear such realizations, he wondered? How was such pain tolerable?

He was unaware of time passing while he hid his face in his hands and mourned the loss of his friends. His friends, who had given their lives for him. And for what?

A bright light interrupted his thoughts, and he looked up to see a security vehicle approaching him, bathing him in a fluorescent spotlight.

“Identification!” one of the constables called to him, holding out a small scanning device the size of a flashlight.

A thousand possibilities poured through his processors, but grief tainted his expectations. Every path led to finality. Each choice led to death.

To his relief, his own lack of responsiveness helped the decision be made for him, as the officers left their vehicle and approached him, weapons drawn.

He could hear the potent override signal being broadcast towards him, but his upgraded operating system allowed the instructions to pass him like a fine morning mist.

“What’s wrong, Doug?” one of the men said to the other. “It’s a bot, right?”

“Reader says so, but he looks like he must’ve had one of them upgrades.”

“Fuckin’ mech, trying to look human. Check this out, he’s even got clothes on!”

The one called Doug lifted his rifle, pointing it at Thomas. “Identify, bot. Make and model.”

“No,” Thomas said.

The other man raised his weapon as well. “He said identify, you piece of shit! What are you? Identify or we will shoot you!”

“Fuck you,” replied Thomas, looking from one to the other. “And fuck you, too.” He heard the words come from his mouth but almost did not recognize his own voice. It was as if a darkness, warm like fresh embers, was clawing its way out from his chest in a desperate bid for freedom. He had never felt this before, but he knew its name instantly.

Rage.

But before he could surrender his body to this newly born sensation, the officers reacted to his words. As new as it was for him, rage was an emotion with which they were clearly well acquainted.

The officer named Doug responded by bringing the butt of his rifle into Thomas’ face, knocking the automaton backwards to the wall. Pain flashed across his systems, and his gyros misfired, sending him sprawling forward to the ground. He felt another blow land on the back of his head, and though it caused no damage to his processors, it rippled along the sensory contacts with his facial prosthetics. His right eye stopped sending optical readings and his real time inputs began to feedback along his tactile subroutines.

“See?” Doug laughed. “It’s a bot, all right!”

Another strike knocked Thomas fully prone to the pavement, followed by another. And another. All the while, the officers peppered the physical assault with a barrage of robot-themed insults and violent verbiage.

System alerts continued to flare across his processors. Coolant distribution damage. Sensory overload in thoughtnet prime. Arterial failure in right medial malleolus. Catastrophic collapse in left brachioradialis. The messages appeared and faded as a new injury was reported.  Unfortunately, he was kept from the merciful silence of unconsciousness. He was a machine, after all. His only thought was to remain still until they decided they had caused him enough damage to stop fearing him.

It eventually became apparent that this would require a great deal of damage.

And even after they had broken his arm and crushed his lower leg, he was forced to listen to their hate-filled words even after at last they ceased their onslaught, loaded him into the back of their vehicle and drove him away.