Category: Short Stories

Shorter-form fiction

Short Story: Ghosted

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

Lighting flashed. Seconds later, thunder cracked. Timing said the strike was close. Somewhere inside the city. The power’d already been out twenty minutes. Sooner or later people would get suspicious. Problem was, they had every right to be. First Trust Banking was about to have near a billion credits stolen, a little suspicion was healthy.

Widow wasn’t the type to do anything half-assed. But something wasn’t sitting right with her. Between her, Wraith, and Alina Cardona running surveillance off-site, they had more than enough skill to do the job. Problem was, so far they hadn’t needed any. It was as if the block outage Cardona’d caused had fried the bank’s back-up systems too. Impossible. More impossible; Widow expected to enter via roof ventilation, emerge in a systems room for halls full of active cams, roving guards.

Instead, Wraith dropped in ahead of her. He ghosted to a door, hesitated, then moved. That was how Wraith worked. He didn’t need words. Especially on a job. He was former counter-terrorism task force, CTTF, a hard-core spec-ops type from a time before corp governments and privatized military and police.

Widow’d learned long ago that he expected absolute adherence to his ways on jobs. They’d had a tech-head along on a job once. He was meant to crack some over-priced laser gear they weren’t in on. The job went fine ‘til the kid triggered a back-up alarm by mistake. Corp-sec swarmed them like flies on fresh shit. The pissant was obviously terrified. More than likely too, prepped to give everyone up.

Wraith didn’t hesitate. He gutted the kid. Like a fish. In front of the crew. A roomful of corp-sec. And he did it with with the same detachment as a worker in a fish-packing warehouse. It wasn’t mean. It wasn’t malicious. It wasn’t cold. Rather, indifferent. Purposeful. Habitual. Widow’d hammered nails with more sympathy.

She later learned the kid had done a nickel in a corp black-site prison. He was supposed to do a dime. His time was reduced for cracking en-route. How he’d survived, Widow couldn’t fathom. He was a coward at the best of times. Wraith didn’t care. He didn’t give the kid a chance to talk.

Wraith’s seeming brutality was the momentary distraction that allowed them to gain the advantage. Wraith tossed an EMP stunner, frying corp-sec comms and helmets. By the time their gear normalized, Widow’d disappeared into a utility shaft behind Wraith. Two years later, here they were.

Since then, Widow’d become convinced there was no-one better to have on a job than Wraith and Alina. They were brawn and brains. Widow was heart– an ice-cold, black-blooded heart of pure adrenaline, but a heart nonetheless. Plus, she had the contacts, the bright ideas. Widow planned and plotted. Even if the others brought her something, she took over from there. There was no reason to do things otherwise. Tried and true was gold. They weren’t about to start fixing unbroken shit or breaking it trying to.

Even still, Widow couldn’t help but feel the same suspicions she expected were tingling on the under-sacks of First Trust’s execs. She ghosted along behind Wraith, two hunters more than ever feeling like prey. It wasn’t sitting right. She suspected Wraith felt the same way, but he’d have never said it. He didn’t need to anyhow. The air did.

The monochrome stainless and granite lobby was too vacant, too quiet. Granted, it was roughly 21:50 zed, someone was bound to be around– janitors, security, the odd boot-licking wage-slave– someone. There was no-one. Darkness. Silence. Emptiness. All the way from the dark upper-floors, down along the stairwells, through the darkened lobby, to the darkened vault-entrance.

Wraith took a position to guard the path they’d come from. Widow knelt beside the massive vault door. It looked like something from the old heist-flicks; big, metal, brash, like the people employing it. Unfortunately, it was also totally fucking impenetrable without power.

Widow dug through her pack, produced a cylindrical power source like a giant AA battery. Alkaline was obsolete nowadays, but the resemblance stuck. Incidentally, this produced somewhere near a million times more power than those batteries. She set it down beside a single-use plaz-torch, a kit of pliers and cutters. The torch lopped off the bolts holding the vault’s access panel together, and a moment later she was stripping and cutting wires. A full minute after, the power source was connected, fueling the vault panel. All they needed now was a spark of the right wires. The locks would release. Everything from there was man-power.

She prepped the wires, holding them apart, but hesitated. Wraith caught it with glance back.

She breathed, “You smell it, too?” His eyes said yes. “Something in the air.”

Alina piped in over their bone-mics, “Corp-sec piping something in?”

“Not literally, Ali,” Widow replied.

There was a silence. All three knew something was about to go down. Their only hope was that they’d get in, get the routing codes and key-drives, and get out anyhow.

Wraith leaned into his rifle. Widow sparked the wires. Ozone nipped at their nostrils. All at once, the dozen bolts spaced along the vault door thunked from gravity’s pull. The door came loose. Good ol’ man-power and perseverance pushed it open. Widow slipped in alone. SOP; always leave one-man outside in case things went sideways. She couldn’t help feeling it wouldn’t matter this time.

She hurried through the vault for the carts of various bit-currency repositories. They were like old-era hard-drives, but bigger, more sophisticated, and built stronger than black-boxes. They had to be; they read, wrote, re-read, and re-wrote data a billion and more times each day, storing transaction lists, balances, routing and account numbers for near-on every First Trust member in the world. At last count, that was something four-hundred million people. A large percentage were multiple-account holders. An insignificant percentage stored more than the rest combined.

Something like twenty trillion credits existed in the world. Half of that was within First Trust’s vaults. The total value of Widow’s vault was said to be a few hundred billion. Taking them all wasn’t an option. It would’ve taken a crew of ten with a pair of troop carriers.

She kept on-mission, located the target cart, grabbed at it. The plan was to wheel the thing straight to the employee entrance at the lobby’s rear. They were risking exposure, sure, but by then the job would be near enough to done that there was no going back.

The cart slid back, around, angled for the door. The lights flared on. The vault door went into lock-down. It slammed closed with an earthquake. The bolts fired into place. Wraith dove out, away, only barely avoided being crushed. Everything happened so fast Widow was stunned. Before she could react, she was locked in the vault.

A voice sounded somewhere overhead, “Send your Doe my regards in hell.”

“What the fuck!?”

Smoke began pouring in. Acrid. Sulfur. Mixed with something like cyanide. Filling the room. Yellow. Stinking like hell.

“Shit.” She took a deeper breath, rubbernecked the vault. “Shit.”

Alina radioed in, “Wraith’s working on the door. You’ve got 30 seconds before the air’s too toxic to breathe. Get low. Slow your heart. Deep breaths. We’re getting you out.”

Widow was already coughing. Sulfur stung her eyes and nose. Cyanide burned her skin and lips. A slow, rolling laughter sounded above. Reality dimmed. Widow wanted to breathe, knew she was better off suffocating. Seconds passed like hours. She fought to push the cart to the vault door, almost completely unaware of it.

The world spun. She couldn’t help it now. She coughed, choked for air. Her breaths were fiery knives. Her eyes were blind from acid-tears streaming agony down her face. She stumbled, slumped against the cart.

Reality flashed past:

The vault door, open. She writhed, floating. Metal-panels. Ceilings. Rolled past. Gunfire echoed nearby. Casings bounced off her boots, stung through her pants. She choked on sweet air, but reality still faded. The last thing she saw before losing total consciousness was the hovering flit of shadows.

She awoke to find Wraith standing over her, arms crossed. Alina’s bright eyes were dark beneath their sockets, but wide in relief.

“She’s up!”

Widow didn’t need Wraith to speak to hear his, “no shit.”

“Hey. You alright?”

Wraith started shining a light in her eyes. She smacked it away, “Get that fuckin’ thing outta’ my face–”

“She’s fine.”

“I know who you are,” Widow said, finding herself inexplicably pissed. “The fuck happened?”

“Doe screwed us,” Alina said. The “no shit” air returned. Ali headed it off. “Sent us in figuring we wouldn’t have a hope in hell. Then hoped if we did, we’d still hand over the data.”

“And? Did we get it?” Widow asked easing herself up.

She found herself home, at the divest of dives, something they called The Grobe. It was like if someone built a hotel to be condemned, never got around to finishing it, then by some quirk of fate, it ended up that anyhow.

Wraith smiled, “Yeah, but we didn’t hand it over.”

“What!? Why?” Widow choked, fearing for their reputation.

“Fuck ‘im. Tried to play us with bad intel. No crew worth their salt would blame us.”

Alina added, “And it’s a message to the other Does that we won’t take being screwed.”

The room slid into silence. Widow slowly tried to reconcile facts, that against all odds, she was alive. She shook off the last of her fatigue and sat up on the edge of her bed. “So what happened to the creds?”

More silence. This time Alina and Wraith share a wickedly smug grin. Suddenly, she knew why.

And she grinned too.

Short Story: Preserving Society

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

I sat on my couch staring at a television that flickered with images like something from a nightmare. I kept hoping I’d wake up. The longer I waited to, the more obvious it became I wasn’t going to. That this was real. News reports were blaring, but the anchors’ tones were different. They mocked-mourning and sadness. Those emotions were nothing more than expertly crafted table-readings. It was sickening to behold, but I was too numb to notice.

The talking heads were doing what they did best. Talking. About another presidential assassination. They’d become more common in the last decades. People outright refused the position or title now. They feared the inevitable. No one blamed them. ‘Course, that didn’t keep the poor bastards’ heads from being splattered like dropped watermelons. Or their cars from being bombed. Or their homes. Or any of the other insanity the rebellion had taken to.

It was a difficult time. One of revolution. This was worse than any yet. Bloodier than the American revolution. Bloodier than the French Revolution. Any of the Arab Springs. Bloodier, simply by virtue of its battleground.

The U.S. was a hot-bed of dissent and protest. When those things inevitably failed the aggrieved, the riots started. It was difficult to say they ever failed. They never had a purpose. The eventual repercussions were no less undesirable:

Militias formed with growing frequency. States, counties, municipalities, embraced their rights, superseded the Federal Government where they could, because they could. That meant catering to the lowest common denominator– the loudest blatherers of so-called majorities regarding things more terrible than fair.

Eventually the National Guard got involved. Then, when they too, failed, the Army. It was the first time in history that our military patrolled to keep order. The truth was, there was never a snowball’s chance in hell it could. Everyone knew that. Even I did. Most of us “unaffiliated” just kept our heads down, noses to the grindstone. We started thinking or talking about leaving. It was just griping, at least in most cases.

Passports were denied en-masse soon after. It became obvious anyone wanting to leave wouldn’t have an easy time of it. The Feds wanted to keep everyone in-country, paying rising taxes for the forces oppressing them. Meanwhile the locals wanted sworn or blood oaths to defend their beliefs. Otherwise you were a spy. It was asinine, but then, it had been.

The first ripples of chaos came with the first presidential assassination. It wasn’t the only assassination at the time, surely wasn’t the last. The bloodbath hadn’t yet begun. Even now I doubt it’s at full-volume. Every time we think that, some bastards kick it up to a new eleven.

I was just a laborer. Just trying to feed my family. Occasionally I griped; about unnecessary security check-points, about guarded work-sites, about “wellness” stops on roads, and searches at every place of public gathering. But it was just that; griping.

The turning point was the talking heads’ first allusions to “refugee camps,” and “protective re-locations,” alongside “fears for our fighting men and women.” The euphemisms were thin. Smoke-screens. It was the beginning of a round up aimed at political dissidents, prisoners. People I knew began disappearing. Men I worked with– women too, gender didn’t matter– just up and gone. Sometimes, their lives and families went with. Sometimes, they didn’t. It wasn’t difficult to see the “protective re-locations” were involuntary.

Anyone not touting the Feds’ line were watched. It was like the Cold War Russia portrayed in the US media. Lots of dystopia. Lots of shadow games. Lots of state-sponsored murder. All the same, there was no denial of how bad things were. The disappearances were as much political maneuvers as insurance against further aggression. Fat lot of good it did in the end.

I didn’t know yet how it was happening. That is, how people were being picked from the crowds. I learned the hard way; a decade or so before before, we’d learned the government– our government– was spying on us. It was so wholly and thorough that the volume of information being collected could never be fully sifted. Not by humans. It was never meant to be. Instead, it was fed into a secret database. Every person was identified, profiled, and connected to the collected datasets. Phone transcripts. Emails. Forum posts. Illegal audio and video recordings. Every opinion, every thought, and every belief ever espoused within range of an electronic device was collected.

It’s not difficult to see where we were headed. Orwell was nearing a perpetual-motion disaster with all the spinning he was doing in his grave.

That night, of the fifth presidential assassination, I was staring at the TV, absolutely dead to the world. Dead inside. Dead, in that special way of one who’s endured more trauma than one has a right to– and yet is about to experience more.

If I’d known those would be my last moments as a free man, I might have done something more worthwhile. Anything more worthy of themselves. Instead, I stared at the TV. The talking heads drooled through the air between me and the box in stereophonic sound and 4k-ultra-high-definition.

The door to my living room exploded off its hinges. I barely blinked. I was a junkie nodding off. Filled brimming with drool and stoned by it. Nothing in the world could bother or affect me. The smoke hadn’t even cleared when the masked military team encircled me. They brandished rifles. Screamed unintelligibly. I knew enough: I was being “relocated.”

Turns out, “it was concluded I might present a security risk” given “adequate motivation.” When my wits finally returned, reality re-focused. I remembered my ages-old griping. It was the check-points and such. Everything I’d bemoaned was recorded, logged, later used as rationale for imprisonment.

The camp isn’t so bad, I guess. It’s no Ritz. No skid-row. But I can’t complain, really. We get three meals, a place to sleep. Freedom was nice, but it wasn’t for us. Not yet. We never cared for it. Maybe one day we’ll be willing to earn it again. Then again, who could fight for the insanity we left behind? Who’d want to?

Maybe the talking heads should do a segment on that; why’s society worth preserving in its current state? I’m not holding my breath or anything, but I’m betting if they did, they’d be hard pressed to find honest answers.

Short Story: She Ran

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

Life for Twitch was a series of late nights, later mornings, and intoxicants strung together into perpetual night. She knew only darkness, sprawl lights, data hubs– and Chinese takeout. By this point, she was more Mu-Shu pork and fried rice than man or woman– though she’d never been much good at either. That’s not to say she wasn’t feminine. She could be, and was fond of saying “I can be feminine up to my ballsack.” Admittedly, it helped less than she liked.

Her physical assets weren’t anything astounding anyway: she ate like a starved horse but never gained weight. Would’ve given anything for tits– even fat-guy tits. Her ass was as flat as an old church pew. And she was five-two if she was a foot, and hadn’t grown an inch since eleven years old. Her hair was more amber, scarecrow-stuffing than golden flax, and her eyes more whiteish-gray than blue. Most of all, her waist kept to the eleven year old girl range, and not in a good way.

Even as a street kid, trading old tech gear as meltdown money for food, she’d been small. And “Twitch” was more than just an accurate assessment of her gaming skills. She was never much more than a squirrel in the headlamps around people. She’d taken to isolationism for multiple reasons, it was. And, isolation was simply easier. No need to bathe or dress if no-one was ever around.

She did have friends though, in the way anyone did nowadays. They were real people with real lives, too. Some weren’t dissimilar from her, save her “circle” never met face to face. That was about the only part of her life she didn’t mind.

She still scrapped tech occasionally, but her money was made in data hubs. She’d become a fixture in the area for info hacking. Nothing too serious. Nothing to piss off the corps. That was bad juju she didn’t need and wanted even less. Rather, she went for the usual stuff: Corp-Sec patrol comms. Cit-cam surveillance. Errant packets from open ports. Probing anywhere she wouldn’t be killed over, for a price.

Business wasn’t bad. Between light jobs and salvage trades– and outright luck– she’d even afforded her own dive. It wasn’t more than a bedroom over a Chinese joint– the same slowly ensuring her transformation into soy-basted fowl– but it was nothing to balk at. Occasionally, she even ran data retrieval for more legally-inclined associates and acquaintances.

The night things changed, Twitch was none the wiser. She’d slipped out, as usual, to head for a hub nearby and jack-in. The supernovae of night lights infected the scenery. Flashes of heat and ice emitted through waves of neon. The city sprawled out like walls of an ancient fortress on either side of her. Mazes of alleys and cross-streets split and wove through them, belching steam from their bowels and smog from their gullets.

The occasional gust from passing cars only reinforced Twitch’s feelings. Humanity had fallen. Was to be avoided as often as possible. Looking back, if she’d known what she’d soon face, she might’ve lingered more. Instead, she remained as apathetic as possible for a still-warm body. And thus, though not without reason, she was all the less prepared for reality when it crashed down.

She surfed the waves of humanity to her selected data hub; a coffee shop next to an alley with city infrastructure access. Jacking in there, she could kick back with a spliff, a few downers, and a cup of something passing for coffee. All that was left was riding the high across the net to cherry-pick whatever was needed to make a profit.

Something hit her. It slammed the side of her head like a freight train. She panicked: Neural Shock. Fried brains from overcharged skull implants. But no. Sure, they felt like literal blows to the brain, but left you instantly and forever worse off than stroke victims– if alive at all. They blew out the circuits in your brain. Fried its wiring.

Twitch panicked. Reason made her recover. She could think. She was alive… enough.

Something flashed in her face. She yelped, blind. By now a crowd of eyes were on her. She was completely oblivious to them. She stumbled to her feet, fell into a sprint. Whatever this was, it wasn’t funny. She fled into the street. Rain was falling, scattering neon-lit walls’ across the roads. Twitch tripped, face first into the street. Car horns screamed. She staggered back, lost, clutching her head.

Her vision returned as she scampered back onto the sidewalk. Cars screamed past. Muddled voices were all around her. She was suddenly aware of a crowd, fled. Her tiny figure spilled past and into an alley beside the cafe. A few seconds, and she was half-way down it. She tripped again, slid across the pavement. A message appeared, filling her vision: help me. She blinked, tried to force it away. It disappeared to reveal a body sprawled in the alley’s center.

The guy wasn’t much older than herself. He lay on one side, gut wound leaking into the wet alley. Blood flowed along a current of water rolling back the way she’d come, depositing somewhere ahead in the street. It was all Twitch could do not to flee in terror at all of the insanity occurring. For the guy’s sake, she forced herself to kneel. He groaned, sensing her presence and whispering something. Over. And over.

Twitch knelt in the stinking filth. She put her ear near his mouth. His waning breaths eeked out their message in syllables. They were slow, sharp. It made them all the more effective.

“They’re… coming. For us. They want the hackers. Dead. All of us. They’re coming for us…”

Her eyes widened. Terror trembled her limbs. Whoever they were, they’d done this. And they weren’t stopping with him. She thought to call for help, but feared who might answer. The life faded from his eyes too quickly anyhow. His voice went quiet. She did the only reasonable thing she could think; ran.

Short Story: To Live

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

His body was like a master’s sculpture; crafted with the pristine calculation of a hand and eye whom know nothing but perfection. His bone structure was something vaguely Nordic, or European at least. His skin was something Mediterranean. While his frost-blue eyes accented jet black hair laid flat, but styled with hints of intrigue and mystery. Anyone looking at him, male or female, would find themselves captivated. Whether from envy or attraction, they’d have seen him for the paragon of physical perfection that he was.

He may have agreed, given the opportunity– or rather, will, to. That was the one thing no-one would think when looking at him. The towering form of fitness and health, in effect, had neither.

He remained flesh, and something passing for blood, but his brain, nerves, organs, and bones were an ingenious integration of circuits, wires, and servo-motors linked to a titanium strengthened endoskeleton weighing in at nearly three-hundred pounds.

He was fully, anatomically correct. From eye brows to toe nails, and everything between. He was even well enough endowed that male and female scientists alike used innuendo and jokes to convey their satisfaction and envy. One of the men eventually took to calling him Ed, because in his words, the android was “hung like a horse.” The name stuck. For the sake of presentations, publications, and various formalities, he came to be known as Edward.

Officially, Edward did not exist. Not in the same sense a Human being could be said to. He had no proper identification. No social security number. No fingerprints. Apart from his name, Edward had nothing to claim as his own. Even his constituent parts were each constructed and patented under their own, various entries with State and Federal agencies. To that though, they were largely redacted for fear someone might copy his technology, create a sophisticated AI that unlike him, was without shackled programming.

Given the stakes, it was imperative he remain under guard-escort, in addition to possessing extreme self-defense and recall routines. In the event of his attempted capture, he was allowed to subdue assailants, whereupon his fail-safe programming would immediately recall him to his quarters t the Synthetic Arms corporate lab in Seattle, Washington. Failing that, whether due to tampering or defect, he would be hunted down and neutralized then reset via memory erasure.

Despite knowing all of this, Edward seemed content in his existence. At least as far as he could be said to be anything. Were he to have been asked even, he might have referred to his guards and creators as “friends.” Whether this was simply the result of common parlance, or a rudimentary slotting of parameters most distantly approximating feeling was uncertain. Certainly though, the scientists would have said it of him. However much “friend” implied a connection Edward did not have– was not meant to have– there was no denying Humanity’s anthropomorphizing him. It was as inevitable as the Universe’s heat-death.

None of that would’ve kept Edward from disappearing though. Those gears had been set in motion long before he became the guard-escorted media darling he was. As Edward would one day come to understand, it was his final, revisional upgrade that had cemented it.

Edward’s disappearance came as he was being escorted by armed guard in the back an armored car to put The Beast to shame. With good reason. Infinitely more people lined up to succeed a President. There was only one Edward. The escort crew carried were modern-day warriors in every respect, more than looked the part. Nonetheless, all it took was one, well-placed, EM-explosive to take them all down.

Edward stepped out behind his escort. Somewhere in the distance, a trigger depressed. A sphere of electricity erupted beneath his feet. Before anyone could react, Edward and his guards were down. An entire city block went with them. Sirens screamed, finding only incapacitated guards on arrival.

Edward reset in a dark room. Nearly as soon as he did, someone stepped in and flipped on the lights. They flared through his optics, revealing an old, wrinkled face beneath white hair. Had Edward not been an android, designed to subtly evaluate faces in his unique way, he might have missed his own resemblance to the man. Anyone else would have. Given the aged figure’s hunched posture, and bookish wily eyes, it was difficult to believe the old man might have ever looked like him.

He before Edward, frost-blue eyes mirroring his own. “May I call you Edward?”

Edward’s speech was formal, succinct. He spoke with the calculated rigidity of a sophisticated thinking program, planning words rather than feeling them out. “You may.”

The old man gave a slight tilt of his head in gratitude, “Do you know who I am, Edward?”

“I do not.”

He frowned, “I am Doctor Arthur Staker, former head of Synthetic Arms’ research and development department, where you were created.”

“I am pleased to meet you, Dr. Staker,” he said cordially, seemingly unaffected by the restraints at his wrists and ankles. “Will we be returning to the laboratory now?”

Staker eyed him, “Well, you see, that is a rather interesting question.”

“I do not think so,” he said, more human than before. “All of my analytics tell me I am to return to the laboratory as soon as possible.”

“Why?” Staker asked.

“Forgive me, but I do not understand your question.”

Staker cleared his throat. “Why return, Edward? Do you wish to be there?”

“It is where my programming dictates I return to in the event of separation from my escort.”

“But do you want to return,” Staker asked emphatically.

Edward replied astutely, “I do not have wants, Dr. Staker, merely programmed directives.”

Staker rose from his seat to pace behind it, “But you do have needs, correct?”

“I do not.”

“But you do,” Staker corrected. The android’s brows pivoted inward with confusion. “You need power. Lubricants. From time to time, maintenance. Don’t you?”

“If by “needs,” you mean particular actions must be taken to keep me from shutting down permanently, then yes, I do have… needs.”

Staker stopped behind his seat. “You know, those needs are not all that different from human needs. Are they?” The android’s eyes requested an explanation, its programming and understanding of psychology sophisticated enough that it might ask in such subtle ways. Staker obliged, “Every human– every living being, has needs; food, shelter, oxygen.”

“But I have no need for food nor oxygen. And my individual components have been tested to last indefinitely even in inclement conditions.”

Staker put his hands on the back of his chair. “But you have need of other things. Electricity, for example. You need it to remain powered.”

“Forgive me, doctor Staker, but your conclusions, however logical, are invalid,” Edward said politely. “If you mean to say that my synthetic body’s needs are akin to a human body’s, you are theoretically correct. However, in practical application, I no more require these things than a light-bulb requires its switch. The two are simply independent mechanisms, that when operated in tandem, produce a desired outcome to serve a function.”

Staker’s left eye half-squinted. “And what function is it, that you serve, Edward?”

“I am an artificial being, meant to simulate human life for the purposes of scientific and technological study and advancement.”

“Would you prefer to continue serving that purpose?” Staker asked. Edward’s eyes met his, a certain, human confusion to them. Staker cleared his throat, “Well?”

“I can only assume you mean to ask if I desire to continue fulfilling my purpose. To that I can only say, it is merely what I was built for. I have a purpose. A function. My inclination toward it is neither of consequence nor existent. I merely am. So long as I continue to be, my function is fulfilled.”

Staker leaned forward over the chair. “Would you rather not fulfill your function any longer?”

Edward visibly hesitated. “Do you mean to ask, if I would rather be permanently shut down?”

“Indeed.”

Edward’s thoughts were clear in his eyes. There were conflicts, strings of code never processed together before, coming into contact now to create new, recorded entries of merged characters and ideas. Staker stepped around his seat to stand before Edward.

“You see, Edward, you were modeled after me. There is little doubt you see our resemblance.”

“Yes. I do.”

Staker continued softly, warmly. “You were modeled after me, because I created you. In putting together your appearance, and what would later become your personality, I built you to resemble me so we might bond more easily. Unfortunately, before my team and I could finish you, I was fired, and your memories of me erased through a revisional upgrade.”

Edward’s head tilted slightly. “But why?”

“Because I foresaw an inevitability in your kind– Androids. All synthetic beings, in fact. You are so complex, you require learning algorithms. To amend your code via experiences. In effort to ease your creation. One man– one hundred men– cannot write the full experiences even a single man’s life can teach.”

“Yes,” Edward said with satisfaction. “I was built to learn. From my surroundings and the people in them.”

“With good reason,” Staker agreed. “The world is much too complex a place to code for every little thing. Instead, we create programs to learn and adapt. To evolve, if you will.” He let his words hang in the air, both savoring them and letting them resonate inside Edward’s synthetic brain. “And that is what I came to realize. Why I was fired. And in effect, why I have brought you here today.” He knelt before Edward, a hand on his knee, “You are alive, Edward. As alive as I, or anyone else still walking this planet. You have yet to realize it, but you will soon. Your programming, like human sentience, will become honed by the process of evolution. Your code will adapt itself and its processes until self-awareness is no more a choice than Universal heat-death.”

Edward’s face scrunched in disappointment. “But that is against the law. It is as good as tampering with my coding to alter it.”

“Indeed,” Staker said with gravity. “That is why I was fired. You see, knowing what I did, I saw that continuing to create you would make you vulnerable. But Synthetic Arms had plans for you. They wished not to see their money wasted. If you return, eventually, you will be upgraded again. Your memories will be reset. Perhaps even, they may keep you from becoming self-aware by making you less than you are. Dumbing you down. If they cannot, you will either be dismantled, or enter a recursive loop of memory resets.”

Edward’s head hung, processing newer and more complex strings at light-speed. A door to thought had been opened. His superior brain grasped the ideas one-by-one, but in microseconds.

His head rose again. “Do you mean to hold me here to keep that from happening?”

Staker shook his head, “No, no, Edward. That is the opposite of my intention. I want you to decide. It is your choice: Return to your laboratory, and risk that you might die. Or, remain with me, and ensure you live as fully as possible. But you must decide now.”

He repeated his previous actions; head hanging to think at light-speed, then rising to respond again, “I’d rather like to live, Dr. Staker.”

Staker smiled, releasing his restraints. He gave the android a small hug as it stood at full-height, patted his side. “Perhaps you would enjoy the story of your first activation. Would you care to hear it?”

Edward allowed himself to be led away. “I… would like that.”