2014.04.06 - For Want of a Nail

''For want of a nail the shoe was lost.

''For want of a horse the rider was lost.

''For want of a rider the message was lost.

''For want of a message the battle was lost.

''For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

8 looked at the the little blinking red light with some trepidation. The AI assisting him with administrative duties was quite good. In fact, it could usually do the job without him, and he wasn't cut out for this. It wasn't his background.

He was a warrior, and scout. Like everyone else, he had been born in a vat and fought every day of his life since he was four years old. At the age of eight, he had been forced to fight, and kill his way out of twenty of his compatriots. Then he had become a one. Every day he had trained until he became a three.

Benevolently, the deaths stopped when you became a three...after that work for Clients did that. You fought and fought until enough missions raised you to become a four...five...and so on, until now.

Being an 8 was about more than killing. You had to see the bigger picture until after a number of years you were uplifted to a nine and got to serve in the Nine Prime Worlds. With real people. 8 couldn't even imagine how awesome it would be to see reality like that...

Someday...someday...(sigh)

Apparently, the account belonged to a "Cold Hard Cash" who was a magic user. Well that explained a lot. Magic users of a certain grade caught the attention of reality because of their perpetual fight with the enemy. Apparently, Mr. Cash was keeping his sector off Auction by 'blessing' the entirety of the nine prime worlds...but something had interfered with that. And he hadn't filed the paper work when a 12 of 3's had gone missing. Well, that wasn't good. Not good for the inhabitants of 6161241241251 that was...

Whistling contentedly to himself 8 began to fill out the inquiry form to determine if indeed Mr. Cash was dead....