by Mel Odom
This one is for my sons and daughter as they struggle to find their own identities:
Matthew L., Matthew D., Montana, Shiloh, Chandler
© 2012 by Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Ebook edition published in 2012.
Cover illustration by Slawomir Maniak.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
eISBN: 978-1-61661-697-7
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Chapter One
I knew something was wrong even before my deceased partner showed up to warn me about the coming attack. I was lounging in some tropical paradise and watching a woman in a burgundy one-piece bathing suit striding along the beach. She was walking toward me, but her attention was on the waves rolling onto the tan sand visible through the lush vegetation and bougainvillea.
This time I knew her name. The first time I’d seen her—at least, the first time that Drake 3GI2RC had seen her—I had not known her.
Point of fact, I had not known myself.
As a bioroid, I’d been created by Haas-Bioroid, rolled out of a factory with a fully functioning mind. Special software that was deemed to be necessary to my job had been uploaded into me, overlaying the core personality that had been selected. The mind I’d been given had been mapped from a living person, then stripped of identity and reduced to the neural channeling that brought me online.
As far as I knew, every bioroid was constructed the same way, as were many clones. A bioroid’s mind was based on retention of remembered skills, making them fast learners and capable of some intuitive action. But they were still tabula rasa, blank slates that could be written on by the coding and by experiences they gathered out in the world.
Even at our best, bioroids are stunted things, incapable of emotions because those are dangerous and fickle things, as deemed by corporate policy. One of Haas-Bioroid’s primary selling points for units—like me—was the fact that our loyalty was beyond question. Disloyalty wasn’t one of the package features. We were incapable of it.
I have since discovered that most of what I thought I knew is not necessarily true.
I knew the man I’d been imprinted from. His name was Simon Blake, and he’d been the husband of one of the research team members developing the neural channeling procedures. The program had been so successful that Haas-Bioroid had bought the company lock, stock, and barrel.
The chief designer of that effort was the woman I now watched. Her name was Mara Blake, and she had been the driving force behind MirrorMorph, Inc. She was here with me now on this beach, but in the real world she was missing—kidnapped weeks ago by a person or persons unknown. I was trying to find her, but I had to conduct my search quietly. She had enemies, and evidently I had some too. And the police department where I worked didn’t want me taking an interest.
As for Simon Blake, he was dead. I’d suffered with him through his final moments in a hopper crash and discovered that he’d been murdered, shot by an assassin. That crime had been covered up. Being witness to the death of the man responsible—in part—was strange to contemplate because the facts kept worrying at my logic encoding. It also bothered me on a professional level that Simon Blake’s murderer had never been brought to justice. I had no personal interest.
At least, I didn’t have one that the average person riding the Beanstalk would know. I was on the Beanstalk now, deep in my own thoughts. I still didn’t know how these memories surfaced within me. I could not simply access them when I wanted to, and they showed up without preamble.
Mara had modeled me on her dead husband, and I’d been given a secret agenda. Unknown to Haas-Bioroid, Mara Blake had implanted a fail-safe within me. If something happened to her, if she was killed or disappeared—as she had—I was supposed to find out what happened to her. I was supposed to save her if I could. She had enemies, and she knew it.
If my memories—or if Simon Blake’s memories—were correct, I had saved her before.
I wanted to save her again. Doing anything less was not possible. Her disappearance haunted me as much as my dead partner, and I wondered if somehow the two events were connected.
This version of Mara Blake moved along the beach smoothly, her unhurried gaze roving and not missing anything. She was tall and had black hair that swept down past her shoulders. Her skin was pink from the sun. Besides the burgundy swimsuit, she wore a big, floppy straw hat and huge black-lensed sunglasses.
She carried a small basket in one hand and I knew she’d been gathering shells and starfish, any flotsam that caught her attention. She lived in the lab working through neural channeling models, but she relaxed on the beach. Whatever she took from the beach, she later turned into artwork, giving her hands and mind something to do other than run code.
She did not look like a kidnap victim.
“Drake, you need to get up. They’re coming.”
Glancing to my left, I saw Shelly Nolan standing there. Before she’d been killed weeks ago, she’d been my partner at the New Angeles Police Department. When I’d been a new detective at the NAPD seven years ago, one of only two bioroids that had been assigned to the detectives division, none of the other detectives would agree to be my partner.
Shelly had seen past the prejudices the other detectives had against working with bioroids. She had decided to take me as her partner, and she’d trained me in working on the streets, working in Homicide, and keeping myself and other people from getting killed.
Then, only a few weeks ago, Shelly had been shot. There at the site, she had died in my arms. She lived on in my mind somehow, though. A true ghost in the machine that I couldn’t understand and accepted only because she was there and would not be ignored.
I had not told anyone about Shelly. Occasionally bioroids got locked up in logic problems. I didn’t think that was happening to me, but I didn’t know what was. Ever since Mara Blake had disappeared, ever since Shelly Nolan had died, I had changed. I didn’t know how far that change would go, or if I should be wary of it. I knew of no way to stop the progression, which was picking up speed on a daily basis.
I focused on Shelly, taking in the dark red hair cut to match her jawline and collar, a style she’d claimed took her only minutes to manage. While she’d been alive, she hadn’t had much personal time. She had been a detective with a heavy caseload, a husband, and two daughters. She’d had it all, according to her. Keeping everything in balance had been a challenge every day. But she’d met those challenges, and she’d been happy.
She wore the black thigh-length bulletproof jacket that was standard attire while on the job. Under that she wore a black suit. Wraparound black sunglasses hid her eyes, but I knew they were light hazel and that when the wind caught them just right, they were almost colorless.
Some bioroids were programmed to understand emotions on a primitive l
evel. Factory bioroids didn’t need much understanding. They needed to know when they might be in danger from co-workers who had lost emotional control, or when they had frustrated an overseer. A bioroid working in the sex industry would have a host of subroutines that a client would find pleasurable. They were also programmed to “read” their clients and deduce what was wanted or needed to aid in fantasy behavior.
As a detective, I had been upgraded with several psychology indices. I had a greater understanding of the complexity of emotion, of the way it could fuel external and internal motivations for killers. I’d also been given a keen understanding of victimology.
But I didn’t feel things myself. Self-preservation wasn’t instinctual behavior with me. It was a series of carefully encoded patterns designed solely to preserve myself so my employer didn’t lose my skill sets and experience. I was an investment for my creators and for my employers. Haas-Bioroid had a vested interest in such things because they contracted bioroids out and sold them. Having a reputation of building products that wandered out into traffic and got destroyed—in addition to causing further loss of life and property—wouldn’t have been a good thing.
I didn’t feel my partner’s loss on a pain level that her husband and children did, but I felt…incomplete without her. Since I had been at the NAPD, Shelly had been there to guide me and teach me the things and shortcuts about my job as an investigator that Haas-Bioroid hadn’t been able to.
She frowned and crossed her arms over her chest. “Are you just going to sit there, Drake?”
“I’m not sitting.” I was lying on a towel on the beach fifty meters from where Mara strolled. I glanced down at my body, which was not the body of Drake 3GI2RC. This was Simon Blake’s body. He had been a good-looking man with strong features, a formidable jaw, and a shock of dark brown hair. I moved easily as I sat up. “What’s wrong?”
“They’re coming.” Shelly turned away from me and looked out to sea.
I looked out to sea with her, squinting my eyes against the harsh noonday sun. As a bioroid, I had extreme vision capabilities, able to see over long distances, in the dark, pick up heat signatures, and low-level microscopic. However, now I could barely make out the horizon where the blue-green sea met the colorless sky spattered with cloud shreds that floated over from the mainland. I knew we were on an island, but I didn’t know which one. My GPS wasn’t working.
Only the empty sea met my gaze.
I looked at Shelly, who stood pensively nearby. “Who’s coming?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.” She looked at me. “This is your memory. I wasn’t here with you.”
I wasn’t here, either. I refrained from telling her this only because I knew it wouldn’t matter. She was a glitch in my logics cortex, a manifestation of the person I remembered.
This memory, whatever it was, belonged to Simon Blake. I felt a sense of unease shift through me. That was an “emotion” I was capable of. Logic dictated that I play my own devil’s advocate at times, so that response had been programmed in my identity suite as part of the self-preservation subroutine. But I couldn’t help wondering if the unease was from my presence here now, or if it was a phantom feeling left over from Simon Blake’s time here.
“You’ve got to get the woman out of here, Drake. She’s not safe.” Shelly glanced around the beach, then pointed. “Look. There’s a cabin.”
I followed her line of sight and spotted a log cabin up on stilts about a hundred meters away. The structure occupied space under a copse of palm trees. A short distance away, a winding path led down to a truncated dock where a sailboat sat moored. As the waves surged in, they pressed the vessel up against the synth-rubber bumpers. The lines slapped the lone mast and created rhythmic pinging noises that I hadn’t before noticed.
“Get her up there, Drake. That cabin is more defensible than this beach.”
I went to the woman, but I wasn’t certain if it was Shelly giving me orders that got me moving, or if it was something Simon Blake had done whenever this incident had really occurred. The sand crunched underfoot and plumed up between my toes as I walked toward her.
Mara must have heard me coming. She glanced up and smiled beneath the floppy hat. “Simon? I thought you were still sleeping.”
“No.”
“Did you finish your simsensie?” She knelt down to pry a starfish from the wet sand, then eased it into the waves so it would continue to thrive.
I vaguely remembered that Simon had finished the simsensie. The narrative came on a neural patch and stimulated all five senses rather than just vision and hearing the way 3D did. The narrative had been a historical adventure set in the late eighteenth century about a young British naval officer named Hornblower. Mara had gotten the sensie for Simon to celebrate their tropical vacation.
“I did.” I scanned the ocean behind her but only saw the rolling waves at first. A few seconds later, I spotted the solar-powered ocean cruiser sitting in the distance, grey sails almost invisible against the colorless sky.
I felt increasingly uncomfortable.
The breeze blew through the palm trees and the bougainvillea, causing the bright flowers to ripple and dance. Birds sang in the treetops and flew low over the waves, occasionally diving down for choice bits of flotsam.
“Did you enjoy being a pirate?” She smiled at me again as I stopped in front of her.
“Actually, I wasn’t a pirate. I was a young naval officer in dire straits.”
Mara placed her basket on the beach and wrapped her arms around my neck. She leaned in and kissed me, and I let her because I did not know what else to do. I felt the warmth of her against me, her skin against mine, even though I had no skin on my chassis. All I had was synthskin on my face and hands, enough to make me passably human to those who preferred not to talk to an android, the vernacular term for bioroids and clones. But now I felt her skin, her hair blowing against my cheek, and her heart beating below her breastbone.
“Pity. In my mind, there’s always been something piratical about you. Some hint of the bad boy.” She kissed me once more. “I’m sorry you didn’t get to be a pirate. Shame on me. I should have read the information about that sensie better.”
“Nonsense. I enjoyed it. You should have been there with me.”
She grinned at me like I’d suddenly sprouted another head. “Me? On a pirate ship?”
“On a British man-of-war.”
She shook her head. “Not me, Simon. Give me a sensie with a simple love story. Those are always the ones I’ve loved best.” She pushed her head into mine, tilting her face so our foreheads met. “The kind of love story that brought us together.”
I tried to remember how that had happened but couldn’t.
Frowning a little, Mara ran her hands over my neck and shoulders. “You’re tense.”
“Am I?” I felt uncomfortable and that was probably the tension she was feeling. But it didn’t make sense that my feelings would impinge on this memory.
“You are.” She pressed a hand to my forehead. “You feel warm.”
“I’ve been sitting out in the sun.”
A troubled look pulled her face into a frown. “You could have a fever.”
“No.” I put my arms around her and pulled her close again. “We came here to vacation and luxuriate in tropical paradise. We can’t do that if you start worrying.”
“I do worry about you. These past five months that we’ve been together have been everything I could have hoped for. I want you to know that.”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what Simon was going to say. Before either of us could respond, three men and two women in sea suits rose from the waves and ran toward us.
Chapter Two
The sea suits were basically spacesuits for underwater wear. They came with self-contained rebreathers that allowed a swimmer to go under for thirty minutes at a time. During that time, the air was recycled, the carbon dioxide scrubbed and returned clean. They were good down to a hundred an
d fifty feet, more if the swimmer was equipped with respirocytes—modified blood cells specially tailored to help with oxygen efficiency—which would help with increasing the time beneath the sea and with decompression.
The sea suits came with retractable fins on the feet and webbing on the hands to allow stronger and faster swimming. Light colored in front and dark on the back, the suits had been designed for camouflage as well as swimming, the same way any sea denizen was marked to make them hard to see from above and from below.
The men and women were young and moved like soldiers, flicking their hands to clear the swim webs and reaching for the weapons they carried in waterproof holsters attached to their chests. They had a selection of pistols and machine pistols. I cataloged them automatically.
Mara stared at the approaching team. I called them that in my mind because I knew that was what they were.
“Mara Parker, stand your ground and you will not be hurt.”
Parker? I placed the name at once. Parker had been Mara’s maiden name, before she had married Simon Blake. This memory, wherever it was, came from a time before their marriage.
All of this information processed quickly. I uploaded it as a matter of course, then reached out for Mara’s hand and jerked her into motion. I didn’t know if I actually initiated the move or if it was something Simon Blake had done. Parts of the memories that came to me were just that: memories. The past got tangled up in my present. If I didn’t act within the memories, I lost them. I had tried simply being an observer on two of the last sequences that had returned to me. I had lost both of them, and those memories had not come back.
The team charged after us, but they were in the soft sand of the beach and their going was slowed. That gave us a fleeting edge I knew we needed to capitalize on.
At my side, Mara stumbled, then got a rhythm going. She was a natural athlete, had been a runner back in university, and the adrenaline spiking her system increased her ability. That was only temporary, though, and I knew the adrenaline crash that followed would demand heavy payback.
