The head engineer's finger hovered over the console with a tremor of finality in the air. Then he felt a sensation, not pain at first, but a shocking, visceral puncture; it was once, twice, driven between his ribs from behind with the force of a piston.
He gasped, a wet, inward sound. He looked down, confused, and saw the front of his pristine white engineer's suit blotched with a dark, spreading green. His blood. The warmth of it flooding his abdomen felt obscenely personal.
He never heard the whisper of the monomolecular blade. There was only a sudden, surreal shift in perspective. One moment he was standing; the next, he was staring at the lower half of his own body, still upright, before it toppled beside him.
The cut was atomically precise and cauterized instantly. He felt no pain, only a vast, hollow cold and the terrifying, silent functionality of his own organs. He was alive, bisected, a spectator to his own end.
