"A dying breed, you might say," he adds with a chuckle. I feel my
whole body tense up.
"There's one more test I'd like to carry out on you. It will take
several hours, but thankfully I don't actually need you to be present
for it so you can go and do whatever you like. I just need to take a
relatively quick backup of your brain's neural pathways first, then you
can go home and get some rest."
"A neural backup?"
"It won't hurt, I promise." Another warning sign pops up next to his
face, and I finally decide it's time to kick into defence mode.
There's no discernible change from an outsider's perspective, but
inside my brain and its hardware, a dozen little defence applications
are springing to life, waiting for my signal that they should start
wreaking havoc. I usually slip into this mode several times a week,
but in my line of work it's safer to err on the side of paranoia.
"What's this really for? Insurance in case I mess up?"
"I can't slip anything past you." The doctor grins, revealing two rows
of surprisingly well worn teeth. "Let's just say your employer doesn't
like to take chances, and you're the best person in the business."
"From what you're saying, I'm pretty much the _only_ person in the
business."
"Exactly. Now, please, lie down here while I perform a quick scan of
your neural pathways. It'll only take a few minutes."
For some reason, I black out.
I feel rain on my face, a light drizzle. My nostrils fill with the
scent of wet plants and damp soil. I open my eyes to discover that I'm
lying on a park bench less than a mile from my flat. That's never
happened to me before: I've always stayed awake just fine for brain
scans in the past, both objectively and subjectively. I summon my
clock application, its translucent display fading into my vision and
out again for just long enough for me to tell that I was out for almost
two hours, which is about right for the journey home.
I stand up, a little giddy at first, and tentatively start to make my
way through the park. By the time I'm striding through the streets,
stepping around all the puddles on the pavement, I've had a few minutes
to reflect on the day's events. I decide not to let Mike or his crony
doctor get to me. Let him be pissed off at me. I'm the last human
assassin. Replacing me with an android would be a terrible PR move,
and he knows it.
Still, I can't overlook the fact that _something_ is terribly wrong,
although it's probably just healthy paranoia on my part to assume that
it concerns me at all. Maybe he's just shielding me from some dull
business problems he's having. Whatever it is, I'm glad I don't have
to think about it anymore tonight.
As I walk into my driveway, I think about how I can spend the rest of
the evening. Maybe a hot shower followed by a stir fry and a nature
documentary. Both the matter and the subject matter were popular
torrents on my favourite Swedish tracker the previous week. It really
puts my job into perspective when I'm reminded how the human race is
the only species that isn't still wrapped up in daily life-or-death
struggles for food, or at least, not for copyright free food.
As I approach my block of flats, for some reason I feel uneasy. I
realise something's wrong, although I can't quite work out what it is
yet. I switch to defence mode yet again as I press the palm of my hand
against the security pad, look into the retina scanner and open the
door as quietly as I can. To my surprise, my eyes' apps seem to have
been upgraded. I have them set not to update automatically, which
means they must have been switched while I was out from the brain scan.
No wonder I lost consciousness: they'd been altering me, not just
passively examining me. I switch modes again, figuring that it's
better to take my chances on my own, rather than risk firing off
unknown software that could do anything from crash to sabotage me. I
creep along the corridor, then open the door to my flat just as quietly.
I switch my eyes to +IR mode so that they overlay the infrared
frequencies of the electromagnetic radiation around me over the top of
the human-visible ones. The eerie glow of the walls and pipes is
familiar enough, but the human sized and shaped blob glowing in the
living room isn't. I switch the vision to only twenty percent infrared
overlay so that I don't have as much information to distract me, and I
brace myself.
I keep two katanas hung up decoratively on the wall in my living room,
and with the element of surprise I might manage to grab one before the
intruder knows I'm there. I have no idea if he or she is even armed,
so I don't want to take any chances.
The blur moves like she or he is about to stand up, so I run into the
room as quickly as I can and grab a katana. Despite bracing myself,
I'm not prepared for what I see next.
* * *
The figure dashes for the other katana, then leaps back to the other
side of the room so we can properly study each other. I can see her
clearly now, from her thermal imprint to the deep brown colour of the
artificial eyes hidden behind her epicanthic folds. In every
discernible way, she looks identical to me. She's even wearing the
fleece, t-shirt and jeans I picked out this morning. Even more
incredibly, she looks just as confused as I feel.
"Oh, that's just perfect," she says. "Did Mike send you?"
"_What_?" I don't take my eyes off her. Her face is serious; her
poise calculated. She's ready to attack me without warning, just
waiting to know for sure that I'm a threat. I nod, gesturing towards
her. "Who _are_ you?"
"Suzi Yamada," she says.
"That's impossible!"
"Evidently it isn't." She speaks without moving her head a single
degree, watching me carefully. "Listen, I've had a _really_ bad day
today. Some phony doctor tried to kill me earlier, and it doesn't look
like you're shaping up to be any friendlier."
"You killed him?" I ask.
"It's a habit." She lunges towards me, her sword pointed directly at
my chest, aiming straight for my heart.
I manage to nudge her blade out of the way of my body with my own
sword, redirecting the force of her sprint away from me. "I didn't
come here to kill you. Can't we just talk like civilised adults?" I
then sweep my blade around, aiming to slice off her bicep, but she
similarly counters my move. In a weird sort of way, it's exhilarating
to finally have a worthy opponent to fight--someone who could actually
beat me.
"Let me guess." She swings her blade around to my hip and I counter
it. "The last thing you remember is Mike sending you to some creepy
bastard who gave you a brain scan, then you just woke up somewhere
strange."
"How do you know that?" I try to stab her in the stomach, but she
sweeps my blade away.
"Surely it must have occurred to you by now that one of us is an
android."
"Actually, I'd kinda been preoccupied."
"So why'd they build you?"
"How do you know they didn't build _you_?"
"Because androids are damned near infallible," she says as I take one
last sweep at her neck. "And you're better than me."
As I'm taking in what she's said, my sword's edge slices through the
air towards her neck. I lunge backwards, managing to just barely nick
her skin instead of slicing her head clean off. She starts to bleed a
tiny dribble of bright red blood, but I know she'll live.
"You've got a point." I stare at the blood. _Real_ blood. "And
_we've_ got a problem."
"We can't trust each other?"
"Trust is simply a matter of being able to predict someone's moves.
Since I'm a pretty good facsimile of you, I figure we can both predict
each other just fine by working out what we would do in each other's
situation." It just doesn't feel right calling myself a copy. Have I
really become a commodity? I keep my sword raised, on guard just in
case the other Suzi tries anything.
"So what's the problem?"
"Our boss tried to kill you."
"You mean you've had a change of heart?"
"I'd like to propose an alternative, but we're going to have to trust
each other." I throw my katana onto the floor as a sign of good faith.
While I'm not exactly ready to commit _harakiri_ just yet, suddenly my
imitation of a life doesn't seem to be worth fighting for so hard. I
figure that if either one of us lives on, I haven't really lost much.
The gamble's worth it, because if she'll go along with my plan--and I'm
pretty sure she will, because I'm pretty sure I would--then we can both
get what we deserve.
Mike doesn't get into his office until seven the next morning. When he
sees me, he freezes, and for just a second he reveals fear in his eyes.
"You're early," he says.
I briefly wonder how much effort he's putting into keeping his voice
steady, trying his best not to give away how scared he is, but that
brief glance has already betrayed his fear. He knows the doctor's
dead. I figure I should have taken him up on his offer a few months
back to join in his poker games. I'd have made a fortune off him.
"I didn't get much sleep." I figure I can trust him not to try to kill
me yet because I haven't revealed my intentions. He's far too trusting
like that. The right move would have been to kill me as soon as he saw
me in the room. But he can't do that. He needs me. So I turn my back
to him, walking up to the window.
"Bad night?" asks Mike, feigning ignorance.
"You could say that. When I got home, I found an intruder waiting for
me."
"My god!" says Mike. "What happened?"
"I dispatched her, naturally." The first rule in my line of work is
never trust anybody, not even somebody pretending to be your friend.
"_Her_?" asks Mike, pretending to be shocked by her gender, knowing
full well how rare human assassins are, let alone women.