Lilly's Legs

Everything was ready. Just hit the button and the device would activate and at the very same moment a call would go through to the emergency services. There was a tiny risk involved of course, there always was with something like this. A tiny risk that it could all go wrong, but if it was so tiny why had Lilly been sat here for the last 4 hours and 27 minutes with her finger hovering over the button? Sat here doing nothing while every minute she waited her window of opportunity became smaller and smaller.

Preparing everything had actually been far easier than she'd dared hope. A few questions in some of the darker corners of the internet, asked anonymously of course, and people had almost clamoured to tell her everything she'd needed to make the bomb. Instructions on what ingredients she needed, how to find them, precautions on how to avoid being caught. She'd been amazed that something so deadly had been so cheap to produce and had taken so little time to put together. Finding and then setting up the blast shield by herself had been a little trickier but even that had been arranged with plenty of time to spare. Perhaps more important than the practical help had been all the support they’d given her, they promised her that she was doing the right thing, that they had also been scared before but were so much happier with themselves now.

The only hard part was actually doing it. A bead of sweat dripped from her forehead and landed on the trigger button. She pictured pictured a drop of blood in it’s place. The mangled flesh, the jutting bone. It would have to hurt, even though the people on the internet said it wasn't as bad as you imagined, that the body would send a rush of endorphins to kill the pain away. She pictured herself lying there waiting for help to come as the blood drained out of her and wondered what would happen if they didn't find her in time, if they never found her at all. They said that never happened but then again it was only the ones who survived who were there to tell her these things, what about the others? How had it been for them?

Lilly glanced at the clock, just a few more minutes before the law changed. After midnight they wouldn't do the procedure when it was self inflicted. The communities online were in uproar, a mix between those who were disgusted with the government’s short sighted-ness and those who couldn’t understand why there were people who hadn’t already done it. Just a few more minutes. She thought about the pain, she thought about how wonderful things would be, about how marvelous people said it was to have them.

Tomorrow she would have her robot legs.