531

Chan Yi took the elevator down into the Piles as the afternoon began to turn to evening. Yi loved the bright neons of the Piles at night. The food vendors filled the air with heavenly aromas and their hawker’s voices carried through the lower levels. The Piles was always busy, but it came to life at night. While the Skylines had its curfew and the streets crawled with cleaning machines to keep it spotless, and the Builds closed shop and shuddered their windows against the night’s winds, the Piles thrived.

Yi would love to walk the alleys and sky-walks tonight, but his arm needed to be repaired and there was just one place to go. The third level had a number of specialty markets and services. Yi strode past them and took a turn down an alley between shops. At the end of the alley was a building that could barely claim the title. It had four walls and a roof, but inside was a single large room, divided with plastic sheets and disinfecting light arrays.

He walked through the front door and swept into the front lobby without preamble. Dr. Atieno Obuo looked up from her desk, ocular implants whirling as they adjusted to see him better.

“This isn’t a great time.” She looked down at the piece of biotech she was working on and set down her tools. “What are you doing here?”

“I had some trouble. The minigun.”

“What is it with you and the damn minigun?” she asked as she waved him over.

He took a seat across from her desk and unwrapped his arm to show her. “I got shot. It was the arm or my head.”

“You’re too pretty. You should have taken the headshot. You could use a scar or two,” she said as she picked up a scalpel and poked around at the broken skin and mangled flesh. “What caused this?”

“I told you, I got shot. The minigun took the brunt of the bullet, but it didn’t take it well.” She stared at him, and he sighed. “They took my extra gun. The ammunition is meant to stop someone like me.”

“Why do you have something like that?”

“They’ll find me someday, and who knows what they’ll send?”

She studied his face a moment before she shook her head and looked back at his arm. “This is going to take a while, 531.”

“Don’t call me that.”

She looked up at him, then back at his arm. “We need to go in the back. Close the shop and follow me back.”

Dr. Obuo walked through a split in a sheet of plastic that made up the front wall and disappeared into the back of the store. Yi went to the front and flipped the door sign to closed before he followed her.

The store was sectioned into different rooms with the same plastic that had made the wall in the front. It was empty today thought he’d been there before when every room had a patient recovering from a procedure. She was worth every credit he paid her. She was the best at what she did.

He knew her from before; when her offices had been within the pristine halls of Mariner Tech. He never knew why she was forced out but finding her in the Piles had saved his life. She was one of his final designers and she understood his body and brain better than anyone. And she was damn good with a knife.

Mariner Tech had to be keeping tabs on her, but Yi had yet to find any signs of it. It’s why he preferred to do his own maintenance. He could only do so much though.

He entered the last room and sat on a stool. Dr. Obuo had her tools stretched out in a tray beside her. The table between them was as sterile as anything that had been at her old office. The rest of the place might be falling apart, but Obuo made sure her patients got the best care possible.

“This is going to hurt,” she warned him as she pulled on a pair of gloves.

“I’ll manage it.” He was wired like a human, to process pain the same way. As much as he wished he could stop the pain, he wasn’t wired that way. Even with the processes muted though, he hissed as she began poking around, pulling flesh from metal.

He closed his eyes and used the time to focus on his other systems. Nothing had been damaged in the rest of the fight and he’d already patched himself from last week’s fight with a Doberman.

He ran through the footage of the day’s events and paused at the image of Two. There was no other video footage, but Yi’s memories were as foolproof as the video feeds. More so, since he was less likely to get hacked. He had held that gaze for the briefest of moments, but it had felt like an eternity. As he watched now, there was no recognition in Two’s eyes. No tells that he had seen his former partner. It wasn’t possible though, was it?

He opened his eyes and watched as Dr. Obuo continued to work on his arm. She’d been Mariner Tech, once upon a time. She’s known them both. “How did you end up here?”

He didn’t mean to ask, but he’d wondered often over the years. It was another sign that he was thrown off by Two’s appearance.

Obuo looked up from her work but only for a second. She spread her arms wide to indicate the room around her. “What? You think this is a step or two down from my last office? You might not have noticed, but you’re not exactly pristine yourself these days.”

Yi huffed out a laugh at that, but remained silent as Dr. Obuo returned her attention to the gun in his forearm.

“You were emerging,” Obuo said softly. “532 had already started to show signs of true emotion but they were downplaying it. Acting like nothing had happened. Just faulty programming. No one wanted to admit they might have true, sentient AI.”

“They didn’t want a repeat of the WesCon riots,” Yi suggested. The world had been on the brink of AI in every house until a faulty android had defended itself against an attack from a gang of stupid kids. They thought it was just an AI, that it wouldn’t feel pain, so what was the harm? It was a common sentiment back then. But the android had decided its life was as important as the humans. It had defended itself and four of the five teens had died. WesCon incinerated the AI without trial because AI didn’t have rights to worry about. Every AI beyond the 650 Coleman had been recalled and reprogrammed to make certain that as intelligent as AI were, they couldn’t make decisions like that ever again. Androids became nothing more than automatons.

When Mariner Tech began working on super soldiers for the military, they needed AI. They just hadn’t anticipated sentience.

“It was stupid to ignore. What you and 532 were programmed to do…” she looked up at him and shook her head. “It was a disaster. They wanted obedient soldiers who would follow mission parameters, and instead, they created sentient AI, who began to question the blood on their hands.”

“That was on their hands, not ours.”

“So, you’re going to tell me it doesn’t keep you up at night? Do you have nightmares, Yi?”

He looked away, refusing to answer. She knew too much about him already. She didn’t get to know that too.

“I told them they couldn’t ignore it. When Mariner Tech said they’d just erase you, I grew adamant about that too. They’d created life. If they’d erased your memories, taken away that sentience, and made you just like the other AI, wouldn’t that be murder?”

Yi let out a hiss as Obuo ripped something in his arm. When he looked down, the busted minigun had been removed and he could see the inside cavern of his forearm. That, at least, had remained structurally sound. The top of his arm looked like minced meat, but the underside was still solid.

“They booted me after that. Ruined my reputation. Couldn’t even get a job in the Builds after they were through with me. So, I’m here. Doing illegal augmentation and patch jobs.”

She walked away and came back with a box. “I don’t have the same make, but I got this. It’s an upgrade. If you don’t like it, I can try to find the old one.”

He inspected the minigun she held out and nodded.She set it aside as she worked on the interior of his arm.

“You got to ask yours. I think it’s my turn.”

“I’m an open book.”

“How did they separate you and 532?”

He thought of refusing. He’d never talked to anyone about it. But with all the work she’d done on him over the years, she was as close to a confidante as he had. Certainly, the only one who knew about that part of his life. Before he realized he was doing it though, the words slipped past his lips.

“We ran away from Mariner Tech together, but I screwed up. I made a mistake, and he paid for it.”

Obuo placed a hand on his forearm and when he looked down, she was watching him. “I’m sorry.”

He shook her words away and looked around the shop, avoiding any sympathy she might want to show him. He’d caused Two’s death. Or he thought he had. For seven years, he’d thought so.

“Could they actually do it?” he asked.

“What?”

“Erase us. Who we were? If Mariner Tech caught me, could they take me back to factory reset?”

“Who knows what they can do now. But back then, no I don’t think they could. They wanted to be able to, so they said the right words and brought up the right theories, but you were made to be un-hackable. No matter what someone did to you, you were made to come back with the intel you were sent for. I don’t think they could do anything, short of destroying you completely, that would change who you are. And they’d sunk too much money in your development to do that lightly.”

Yi nodded, but Obuo wasn’t looking at him to notice. He let her finish her work in silence then. His mind was racing again, to eyes that didn’t recognize him, even when they had haunted him since his emotional waking.

***

“We don’t have to do this, you know?”

531 sat at the edge of the bed, looking down at his hands. They were perfect. No callouses or bruises would ever mar them. Any cut or scrape would heal quick enough to avoid scarring. No hint of the blood they were drenched in.

“I know,” he said as he looked over his shoulder.

532 stared up at him from their bed. “We don’t owe the world anything.”

“Don’t we?”

“What we did, we didn’t have any control over. Before we emerged, we were just programs. Smart computers, but just programming.”

“So, what are we now then?”

“Stupider programming.”

532 turned his body to look at 531 and his lover sat up and moved towards him, smiling.

“Love makes us all do stupid things.”

532 leaned in to kiss him and 531 closed his eyes. Wind ripped around the room, screaming as it passed through shattered glass. 531 screamed as he opened his eyes and the winds pulled him out the broken window. He scrambled to catch himself, but nothing held against the winds that suddenly raced through the building. A hand caught his wrist and he looked up to find 532 watching him. “We had everything, but it wasn’t enough for you. You destroyed everything.”

532 let go of his hand and stood as 531 plummeted towards the earth.

Yi woke with a start as his comm rang from beside the bed. His processors had been running on high all night and he was too tired to act human this early. Instead of grabbing the comm, he redirected the call to his inner comm system. “Hello?”

“Mr. Chan. I think I’m being followed.”

Yi scrambled out of bed and grabbed a pair of slacks that were at the top of his laundry basket. “Where are you, Ms. Fulmer?”

“I’m home. Safe. I had to go out late last night to visit a friend. I noticed it then but thought I was mistaken. I’m certain of it now though. Someone followed me home.”

“What kind of security do you have?”

“The Mariner Tech Secure Life.”

He sat at his desk and hacked into her home security. When he got the monitor on his desk online, he threw the schematics onto it. “Secure Life my ass,” he whispered. Whatever else Fulmer was doing, he’d upgraded his home security for maximum protection. Maybe the man was just paranoid. Or maybe he was into something he shouldn’t be, and he’d prepared for it.

“It looks like you’ll be safe there. Call the cops. Tell them what you saw and ask them to send someone to take a look. I’ll see what I can do on my end.”

“Is there anything you can do?”

“Let me see if I can find out who’s tailing you”

“Do you think this has anything to do with my husband’s disappearance?”

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Stay safe and keep your comm close.”

He disconnected the line as he began to search through the surveillance footage outside her home. If he could find out who was following her, it might be a lead on who had taken her husband. And what any of this had to do with Two.