Read Ebook: Less than Human by Blade Zo Frikki Aiko Illustrator

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Ebook has 104 lines and 7980 words, and 3 pages

"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.

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?"

"Suzi Yamada," she says.

"That's impossible!"

"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?"

"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.

"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?"

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.

I nod silently.

"Did she say anything?" asks Mike.

"No, nothing. She didn't have a chance to."

"Wow," says Mike. "I guess that's too bad, in a way."

I shrug. "We all get what's coming to us, eventually. She just wasn't smart enough to quit while she was ahead."

Mike sighs. "I'm not an idiot, you know. You have to understand, it's business, nothing personal." He's sweating now. I watch a little bead of perspiration make its way down his forehead. "How much do you know?"

I make my way to the shelf and pour a shot of whiskey.

"It's a bit early for that, isn't it?"

"Special occasion," I insist. It always helps to inebriate your opponent, to give yourself any edge over him that you can when it comes to reflexes. "I know how attached people can get to certain ways of doing things. The comfort of the familiar." I look at my glass thoughtfully. "I think it's time to make a clean break." I get another glass, pour another shot, and hand it to him. Raising my glass, I declare a toast. "To the future."

Despite giving my new business partner the order to fire, the laser burst still somehow makes me jump. I've never seen it up close before. On the receiving end, it's deadly silent, the only sound being the sloshed gurgles of the target. The smell, on the other hand, is overwhelming--searing flesh with a hint of burnt cotton from his shirt.

Sitting on a bench in the local park, I take a second to close my eyes and just listen to the birds. I open them again just in time to see a young woman waving at me as she walks towards me. To an outside observer, she looks like she could be my identical twin. I wave back, smiling as I watch her familiar mannerisms from an unfamiliar point of view.

She sits down beside me. "How long do you reckon we've got 'til someone realises what happened to Mike?"

I shrug. "A few hours, maybe. Long enough to get a few things from our flat, move the money to a safe account, and walk away."

"Ah, yes, the money." She smiles sweetly, a smile I've never seen outside of a mirror before. "What do you figure we should do with it?"

"I say we take what's owed to us, enough to start a new life, and give the rest to Jon Russell's charity. He did bring about this turn of events, in a weird sort of way."

She nods. "I guess so." After a few seconds' silent reflection, she turns to look at me. "And us?"

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