That first time I went to Bag Hall up there in the wilderness beyond the town, that started it. That first time was one of the strangest of strange encounters. My problem was it got me thinking, and in this day and age, you can't let yourself think. If you do, you'll end up doing something you might regret later.
Thinking is dangerous.
"Welcome, Sir," the ragged servant girl opens the door with a bony hand. Of course they were glad to see me; any officer of the guard is welcome at a house. We might be bringing food, soap, or maybe medicants other folk aren't allowed to see. Watch your belongings, I was warned and my friend Hal squeezes my shoulder in reminder as we come through the door.
Have a look to your left and there's the cockroach crawling stealthily up crackling pink paper. This is just behind the smoking buffet of torched creatures caught in the wood, maybe some roadkill pie and beeswax. They are very proud of the beeswax; bees are a luxury these days. The Hagger family of Bag Hall owns a bee farm that is three colonies large, I hear, as I stare at the wilted lettuce and tiny withered carrots and tomatos. The scent of garlic is dense; it hangs in bunches from the cieling, above couplets of folk who do not seem to even notice it. Smoke of cigarrettes and hash mixes with it in the air.
"That's old Gerald Hagger, of Fairfax," remarks Hal who has been here before, as my sight catches a weather-stained portrait of an old gentleman. "Fought in the Revolution of the 1700's. He's originally from Ashton. Moved here in 1896."
"Now Hal, dear, you're taking all my conversation," smiles an older woman, tapping him a little too hard on the shoulder. Her makeup badly conceals several pock marks, and her wig is shabby, her eyes too bright. She smiles at me with overly white teeth, the sign of too much chlorine in the water. Or maybe they of this house have like others resorted to eating fish; I've heard of it happening in the outer towns. She pats my face with a claw and I try not to wince. "There," she says, as if she didn't notice, "that is my family portrait. Lance and I and the children. So long ago," she sighs. "You'll excuse me. Hal, show your young companion the rest of the house, I trust you."
"As I trust you," he bows and she whirls off in her patched gown. It is the only acknowledgement we know.
"She's very, well, odd," I say, watching her go. "Didn't even ask my name."
"To them, we are something else," he shrugs.
"This home is really that old?"
"Oh, yes, it's an ancient place for this country, that is. Camilla told it to me just as I tell you, and the registrar back in town has the same in its records."
"Camilla is her name?"
"Yes. Wife of Lance Hagger. He was killed ten years ago by illness."
"And she?"
Hal sighed. "Ah, well, you know Listen, be very careful what you eat here. I don't want to have to be dragging you back in a contagion suit for quarry burning."
Turn right: here's the overstuffed, motheaten chair where sits the man who's in charge of our little group; he, Captain Polluck, waves us over to meet a young girl. "Natasha," he says and she curtseys as Hal tries to ignore my strange look. She's small of height and her breasts have been bound too tight; obviously her mother is trying to show her off. I wonder if she'll be at Onla-Mart, soon, with the girls, and can picture her there doing the noontime striptease to a thundering crowd who is begging for vegetables from dear old Nan. Yes, she's pretty enough. Oz will be very jealous but he can deal.
"Jeremy Watkins," I nod to her in greeting. "I heard that you didn't give names here."
She blushes a little too obviously, twittering "Oh, that's just customary for the ones not taken yet, if you see what I mean. Call me Tasha, please."
"Tasha. Nice name."
"Oh, yes, I've always liked it," she leans forward and I catch a too-sweet scent of decay on her breath and back away attempting to look polite.
They are trying to sell away their young; I've heard of it in the small towns. Oh, what they won't give for a finger in the gene pool uptown, where we are supposedly better off.
"A cute name, Tasha," grins Nan as she twiddles her hair in my face with a knowing look. Behind us mingle her people, male, female and otherwise, smiling and showing off their bodies to the populace. Some come here just to look at them: they are beautiful figures, always well dressed without a patch or stitch showing, museum relics that you can walk and talk with. There's a door price of $10 so that the house gets that profit at least. "Do you think that's what they'll name the children?" she cackles.
"Oh, that's mean," Oz comes from behind and kisses me on the cheek. He winks at me suggestively as always. "I hear she's lovely."
"She is, or at least she was," I shrug four months after my first meeting with Natasha Hagger. I have been invited to her wedding to the mayor. He's dying, they say; gossip at the trenches says he has a deal with Higher Up to find a cure for him.
"Careful, sweetheart," Oz grins at me; "she'll try and hook your lovely behind."
"More likely kill him for food," Nan says. "Where are you stationed tonight, honey?"
A trio of house strippers pass by, with a small entranced crowd following as they extole the virtues of their greens. Marsha waves to me.
Being of the guard means being homeless. You cannot sleep in one place for too long, because the illnesses that breed around will get to you. We wear gloves and masks when at meetings, once per month; if called to base for a checkup we are in contagion suits. Always, always we search for the cure, as the common cold and bacteria that the enemy uses travel around. It could be anybody, anyone at all, and so we take shots of antibiotic, we antiseptize ourselves. When we find it we destroy it and its carrier: just last week a block downtown was set afire, and then we had to let the folk around know that they had been radiated. The pure are our salvation; they who have not been born with disease of some sort will save us all one day, we are sure. But while that 2% of the population is still in slow growth stage, we of the guard are still required.
"I'm about two blocks from here, Up."
"Ah." In a town of hills, that's all the information you need.
"Hal couldn't come; he's dead," I say to Camilla at the door.
"Pity," she sighs. "Well, come in, then, come in. You folk can sit there."
He's not, of course, but she isn't allowed to know this. Hal was found to carry a special gene two weeks ago, and now they have him in for testing. Hooked up to a bunch of machines, dripping it out of him, they say. But he's sent me one or two messages now to say he's all right. I'll worry when he stops.
The house looks the same, though bees swarm the inner part that is the chapel. This is another out-of-town custom; bee venom supposedly has a medical value to it. It's considered lucky to be stung, luckier to be killed by the sting. If I were diseased as them, I guess I'd consider it lucky too. I throw out a dollar as is also customary, "for the bees."
The ceremony is nice. The old mayor doesn't look quite that close to death yet, I think; maybe he and Natasha will manage to bear young. It does sometimes happen if you have the right amount of hormones.
I wander the large house after the ceremony, to get away from the bees and people for a while. A few others have the same idea; I pass a couple in one doorway just turning on a sex machine. The armory is impressive, as is their computer collection. I stare at the old graveyard of chip and modem.
"It's of course illegal, and they know that, but they don't care," says a voice from the doorway. "Nobody has used it in years anyway."
I turn and find the love of my life standing there. She is plain as might be, her face boxy and round, her nose perky and honest. There is a small pimple on her chin that changes nothing; the way that her blond hair frames those greenish eyes, under an old kerchief, the way that her lips smile at me, sets my heart banging in my chest. She leans on an old walking stick that matches the pale blue pantsuit she wears very well. The patches in it are neater than most I've seen and there is even a bracelet on one wrist.
"You are whom, Miss?"
She strides into the room confidently, ignoring me. " Of course, that's a lie. I used that IBM yesterday to juice old C up myself. She hates it, but I'm the only one who can. Her daughter there couldn't figure it out. No brain, that one."
"That's what they say about a lot of the young in the country," I say carefully.
"I know," she grins, "but in her case it's true. A giggling idiot."
"And so you these computers work?"
The young woman laughs as she settles herself down, legs crossed, next to a German suit of armor with a dusty hatchet. "There's only one of them. But every time I do it, I have to dismantle it afterwards so that it looks as if it's a comp graveyard. Good job, don't you think?"
"Yes. But why? And why tell me? You know I'm from the guard."
"Of course I do," she says. "You could arrest me? Oh, I know that. I WANT that. Do you know how many times I've wished to be free of this house? And HER? THEM?"
What do you know, a country girl with a conscience. Hard to find these days. "And so? I'm assuming C' is Camilla."
She grimaces. "Yes, that's the name. Come here." I follow her into another room, where a beautiful portrait hangs wilting in half darkness. The very likeness of the lady downstairs, give or take sixteen years or so. "That is my mother. Camilla Figg of Newburyport, across the border. She was a Naval officer, very proud of her job. Ten years ago, when I was eleven, she was called upriver to a skirmish. Yet another terrorist snipe; they had to take down a stronghold and by accident set off a few hot bombs. She died there. My father left his practice and a secret job with the guard and went to fetch her dead body. And he made it into a cyborg. THAT is what I am living with now."
I stare at her. There are cyborgs here and there, but I have never heard of one created from dead matter. "They do um, exist, you know cyborgs, I mean."
"I know that," she says distastefully. "But it isn't her that isn't my real mother! It isn't someone you can love and hug and talk to. Cyborgs have no emotion, as you must know. Well, Dad tried to put some into that THING and ended up with a crazy woman. As far as the town knows, Mom went crazy due to some injury caused at the skirmish upriver. And I have to play Ethan Frome with her until the end of time. He told me that: I, because of my computer knowledge, have to do it. I could have joined the guard's special operations: right before she went and had that happen to her, I know he was setting that up. Now I'm stuck here."
"Unless I arrest you."
"Right," she nods.
I shake my head. It is possible that she's telling the truth, but then country folk try the darndest things to get themselves away. Anything is better than this, they say to each other over their diseased gardens and bug-ridden homes. Better than unpredictable mite swarms, better than dying of chill or overheating to the point where blood runs from your pores. They will try anything to leave.
"I'll consider it," I nod politely and turn away, heading downstairs.
"You!" The scream behind me warns me and I duck just in time to miss the evil German axe coming down on my head. I run out of the room, with her following. "Damn it, listen to me!"
"Cindy!" we bang into Camilla on the stairs. "There you are, dear. I was just going up to take a rest. Could you join me for a few minutes?" She is blank-looking, smiles vaguely at me.
To live in the City, you have to sign something within your land contract that says you will be immunized. We deal in needles here. Every year a flu shot is sent around, coupled with pneumonia. Every other year there is a smallpox, an anthrax, an ebola vaccine. You don't go anywhere; we will deliver it to your house on a specific date that we mail to you. If you aren't there we come find you.
I have the fortune this year not to be picked for the vaccine team. As maples become molten gold, I am still on homeless duty, watching the streets, when Varga comes to find me.
"Sir?"
"At ease. Jerry, we've tapped you for the borg team."
Suddenly I'm reminded of that strange upstairs conversation with "Cindy" a few months before. I wonder how she is doing. "I'm not that strong, Sir."
"We need your comp skills."
There really are several types of borg: med borg, who have various body parts of plasticene and metallics, are the most common. Many of them still wander among the population, a hip here, an eyeball there, all carefully monitored by our systems that track every one to make sure nobody's trying to take advantage of the piece, maybe sell it for something better. They do that, you know. Then there are hiborg, who are those nuts plugged in forever to computers in their complexes, kept alive by a constant pump of nutri. There are four small nutri complexes in this town. And then there are true comborgs, that are almost a full half person-half machine creature. We have also several hundred brains on file, their information input into machines, or their physical matter plugged in. They say that there are a few of these single brains that can still communicate, some that are being kept alive for the sake of science. I have sometimes when I thought of that imagined the lab manager sitting in there late at night talking earnestly to a live lump of gray matter, that can talk back, in the dim yellowy light.
"Now it's not going to be a maintenance job, Son," she says taking my silence for disdain. Very few people would willingly volunteer to help check on the hiborg, the disgusting lumps. "Tang asked for you for the comborg suite. It's a step up; he knows about your comp expertise and would like you on his team for a bit." I knew she is trying to make it sound better to me, but there you are. And then, down in the deeps, we don't have to wear the usual quarantine suit; that whole area is airlocked and tight. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out that we don't want.
All right. And so I go down through the secret passages in one of the town potholes, and am debugged and locked in where the public aren't allowed to be. I find myself in a month overwhelmed by the mix of brain and body and mechanics, and am fascinated.
One night, Lina Perez, one of the tecs who have been on this job longest, waves me over. We've had a hard time of it, trying to connect central nervous systems. That's the project Tang wanted me for; all day I've been tapping in programming while he works one bit of a system at a time. I don't want to know where he got this particular subject that looks like a jellyfish, tail and all. We have, in a month, managed to find the correllation between two actions. Tang doesn't want us to think of it in anatomical terms, he says: no, rather think of "lift arm left, straight out at forty-five degrees." Tang is the one who's supposed to be thinking of it in anatomical terms, he says, watching where the reaction occurs at stimulus. "Come on," Lina says, "it'll take your mind off this for a bit."
We go down and to the left. We pass by a tech sitting in the hallway listening to music on the wall. One of our androids, Juicy, watches lights dance. He is checking her pathways.
Far, far down, past unmarked door after unmarked door, we enter a different lab. Lina opens the door. Inside we find the test lab: there are warped fish, plants of all the strange color and shape combinations you can think of, frogs with sixteen legs twirling around like luminescent centipede cousins. I've heard of this bunch, and some of the people who work with them: there is one guy here famous for injecting his own DNA in for the tests, whose skin and body have been slightly altered by all the experiments he's done.
Past another door, down a different hallway, we enter another room. Something blinks on the wall as we come in. "Hi, Bob," Lina smiles though there is no person in there, not even an android. I look around. It's a tiny room, the walls covered in comp terminal fixtures, wires looping about on the floor to a central brain. No joke. On one of the terminals, the words "Hi Lina" wink at us.
She grins at me. "This is the place you've probably heard of. There are a few of these linked brains in the complex, scattered about; all are former scientists who worked with the guard."
"But how is it that if Tang can't even regulate his CNS to comp, these guys can still be useful?"
"Because," she says. "Tang is trying to get the whole banana. Bob and all his compatriots only have to communicate what is in them. We've known for ages that a person can have memory past a comatose state; Bob et al certainly have that much. And since the rest is not required anymore, those sectioons of their selves that commanded motion and so on are smaller, in many cases gone. Most of these brains do not even have emotion anymore; they don't need it."
I look at the lump in the plastic case. Someone put an ancient ball cap on it, and google eyes. One of the eyes bobbles at me and I see words on the wall: "Welcome here, young tec. I am Robert Copenhagen. Call me Bob."
The trees are good to see again, just as it's good to feel dirt under my feet, the springiness of grass. The outside world has germs, yes, but I can't get away from it. I pass the highway bus coming into the City limits, letting off a few site workers, picking up some. You can always tell the site workers, those endless wanderers of the country: they are rugged-looking, tanned or burned from all that time out in the high ozone. They are used to walking long distances, supposedly, and the folk of town and country who are settled tell tales of superhuman powers, or whisper meladromatically that they are a last foothold of a world gone by.
The house is quiet when I reach it, far up in the hills beyond the City. I've been at break for two weeks now, wandering in town, and finally decided to visit Bag Hall again.
As I walk, the brains are in my head. Since that night, I've managed to locate most of them; none of those with whom I've spoken so far know where their companions are or even that they exist, so it's been quite an effort. Elian, a Spanish-speaking physics genius, is the most intelligent of them that I've contacted so far. Bob is more of an artist: they use his creativity, Lina says, for new ideas.
I have never managed to get Camille out of my head, though. If she really is what Cindy says she is, don't I have an obligation to bring her back with me? I've thought about it a lot in the time I've spent talking to the brains. Elian, ever a fan of quantum physics, remarked that such a person is a possibility. He likes to apply varying theories about the concept: the body could or could not have been dead, and now since it has been hooked up it is in limbo again. "There is a new type of consciousness that humans will have to face; it's been coming into the forefront for the past forty-nine years," he says to me in the dim light many times over. "I've heard the stories from the outer towns; yes, they creep down here eventually. We and our kind are monsters, we are strange like the White Dwarf maniac groups. But the Dwarves are symptomatic of a phenomenon of the human race; like speaks to like, most often, much as human beings and political correctness try to change that. We are not conscious like a human would be; but we are also not like comps either." I never told him specifically about her, of course, but the theory interested him. "It is possible because there is still no good definition of death," he told me thoughtfully. "I have often thought that the vampire concept, the idea of undeath', was one of the most misunderstood scientific discoveries of its time. It got blown into something it shouldn't be: a monster. But I'm undead as I am here, and so are the cyborgs that Tang is attempting to create here."
The door is answered by a young maid with the green pox; apparently fishing has been good this year. She gives me a gruesome smile. "The Lady of the house will see you, Sir."
"Hello again, Officer Jeremy!" It is Cindy to my surprise, her face a little redder in one corner, her outfit as usual spotless and good, a heliotrope in a carnation bed. "Good to see you again."
"My greetings, Madam," I bow uncertaintly and she laughs.
"Yes, that it is. Or, rather, I am. Lady Sama, to be more precise. I am wed to the Japanese ambassador."
"Really? When? I mean, congratulations," I stammer.
"Half a month ago, actually."
We sit for a bit, uncomfortable. What do you say when the love of your life has wed another? In the City, there are all kinds of marriage: families, singles, doubles. Here they wed to breed, to survive, to keep what land and money they still have together. The high rich are a dying breed in more senses than one.
"So, your mother" I begin as Sama enters suddenly, taking off gloves from outside. For an instant I catch a flash of something in Cindy's eye, and then it's gone.
"Ah, Sama, here you are - this is Officer Jeremy - my mother is sadly passed away, Sir. She died last month in a sudden plague of the town, one that also struck my sister, sadly enough, and much of the household."
"Yes, it was most unfortunate," he agrees, bowing to me. "It is good to meet you, Officer." He is well-tailored like his wife, finely done up as she is. I think of that "plague" while he rambles on: that team included of one of my friends. We were measuring how fast the new celldex strain spread through the ground, a standard test. For Camille to go at the same time, though, that answers my long-awaited questions about her. In a way I am disappointed.
Sama leaves after a while, to go visit some neighbors, and we are left alone again. "The house must be lonely without them," I remark. "Your sister and mother, that is."
"You won't find them," she says quietly. "The plague was of a type that disintegrates bodies."
I agree, and take my leave soon after. About an hour later, I have snuck back into the house again, and am upstairs in the room. The computers are gone, though I can still see the faint stain on the floor in places where battery acid went through: there is still a bit of chemical in the air, and I can tell that they were melted down. I wonder if it was her or Sama that did this. It doesn't make sense to me.
"You shouldn't be here," she says softly, entering. "There isn't anything left to see."
"Why destroy it if it isn't useful, Cindy?"
"A fire," she murmurs and I grab her arm.
"A fire that didn't touch the rest of the house? Some fire that must have been."
"Please you wouldn't have wanted any of those comps, Officer."
"Why did you keep them so long then? I want to see where you buried your family."
"I told you, nothing remains!"
"What are you trying to hide?" I say, shaking her. "What?"
"They're dead!" she screams. "They're both dead! I told you that they died a month ago!"
"During a convenient plague?"
Cindy sinks to the floor, crying. "Yes I had to get rid of her. Don't you see? You can't imagine what it's like living with that for so long as I did. Of course you can't because there are creatures like it and worse in your City, aren't there? Impure things that you've stuck together like Frankenstein. But we don't live like that here, Officer. We don't want to live like that at all! She had to be gotten rid of"
"What is going on in here?" Sama strides into the room, glaring at me. "What have you done, Officer?"
"Nothing," I bow, "the Lady is simply grieving."
He frowns. "I think you had best go, Officer." And so I really do take my leave this time.
On the way home, I think about it. Cindy destroyed whatever her mother was by destroying the computer hookup, then melting down the comps so they couldn't be used. Her sister must have been in the area, must have come upon them and therefore must be killed as well. I knew the areas that the plague we spread touched; they did not include the house or anywhere near it. I wondered how Sama figured out what was going on.
Not my business anymore, I think. He's obviously blackmailed her into a marriage by saying he won't tell on her. Or maybe he doesn't even know. Amusing, that would be. But it's kind of funny because she wanted to be arrested, I remember. She wanted to leave. "Now that she has her mother and sister gone," I say to myself, "maybe she likes it there. Leave it alone." And I take the picture of her in hysterics out of my head.
Down in the medical labs, I find a new brain. This guy's pretty far from the others; he's also very very strange. "A mind for all minds," he calls himself but he can't remember his name. I ask Lin about him. "He's been electroshocked several times," she says, "because he had seizures. Epilepsy, I think. Everyone down here knows him."
"Everybody knows him" has no name that we can discern, apparently. But he's pleasant enough to talk to, and he actually seems pretty bright. "I'm helping with the cyborgs," he tells me through typing, in a liquid font that looks like something out of Shakespearean times. "You know, the people who are mixed with computers." He types a smiley face as if this is a joke.
"So am I," I tell him. "I'm working with Tang."
"The drink?"
"Um, no. Tang the lab manager in charge of CNS stuff. Oh, never mind. That's his name."
"Tang."
"Yes."
"I don't know anyone named Tang. I'm with a different section." Then he starts quoting Shakespeare and I can't get anything else out of him.
"He's joking with you," Lin tells me. "If anyone's important to our work, it's that guy."
"Who has no name?"
She sighs. "He was in a lot of medical trouble when he came here, you see. That's what they said at least. He's been here a while. But really he's pretty smart."
"And he's working with Tang directly?"
"Yes. He helps with the plug-ins." She lowers her voice a bit. "He's a former criminal, actually, so to speak. They say he once brought a dead person back to life. As a cyborg." She looks at me meaningfully. "Cindy's about to shut down, Officer. She'll be brought here. Tang thought you should know."
I take this in slowly. It makes sense to me: Cindy the cyborg, her mother the cyborg before her, her sister maybe. "Just how many members of that household are human?"
"Lord Sama, these days. Her sister was. Cindy's father brought his wife back from the attack and redid her without permission, and he was taken for that by us. You know how it is: you have to follow the system. These days, we just can't afford to have people randomly doing scientific experiments. Well, that was years ago and the administration's loosened since then; it was right around the time of the nutri break when it became more popular to use. But the deal is the same.
"We only found out recently about his daughter, when they were doing the latest plague thing actually. We got into that room at the hall, found her sister burning the comps there. Unfortunately Cindy broke in at the same time and well, her sister Natasha's death was unavoidable. Who knew Cindy was a cyborg? We never guessed, not till then."
"So now you're going to cut Cindy off?"
"She can't survive much longer as it is. Her battery load will run down soon anyway. With luck we can do it while Sama is away so that she will look normally dead."
I don't tell her that I'm suddenly feeling a little queasy in the stomach. The thought of my love all right, I only saw her a few times, but there was a spark I'm not sure if it bothers me more that she's undead or that other people are going to do something about it.
Bag Hall is empty when I get there. I wander the hallways slowly, thinking of the brick and stucco of the past. Life is an illusion, they say. I wonder how much of that is true. What is the definition of life? It's in my records that I will be plasticized to the extent possible when I become ill, when I have an accident. That's what government workers do these days with tehir contracts. Cindy and her mother were different altogether, another step. And then there are all those people who walk around without plastic parts (yet), and the people with some of them, and the ones who haven't been born.
There is a park downtown where I wander for a while. Bag Hall rises on the hill overhead, casting shadows over it. I wonder if the place will be sold by Sama or if it will simply join the ranks of old buildings from the former time, run down left for the White Dwarfs to settle in between runs or people of the town who have nowhere else to go. Maybe one day it will burn.
"Feeling bitter?" Oz, who came with me, asks, throwing an arm around my shoulder. "Hey listen, you didn't know."
"No, I didn't except I don't realize why if they were doing plague experiments here she didn't die then. Even cyborgs are prone to human illness, Oz."
"She wasn't human," Cindy says, coming up beside me. "I'm an android, Officer. Originally I was a cyborg but the cyborg knew that she was dying. The original Cindy Hagger who made her had caught illness from testing done by the guard several years ago. And then there was that test this past year, and the cyborg knew she had to do something. She'd caught the plague yet again. So she started making me."
"And Cindy's sister found out, and she destroyed the comps so that you the cyborg couldn't go further."
The android nods. "She did a fair job of it, I will say. She was horrified to discover what her mother' and her sister' were, thought it amoral. She didn't realize that the cyborg had hidden me away already."
"You look just like her. Cindy the cyborg was obviously brilliant."
"I thank you; I do have her brain, you know, in a technical sense. I'm just a different form of her. I even have some small bits of what you might call emotion."
"They're coming for you, you know."
"Sure. The guard thinks I'm a cyborg. If it found out the truth about me, that the cyborg really died several months ago from that plague of theirs, it would be up here right now; it wants to keep pure androids in their system. It wants to keep such beings trackable, like the people in your towns. People will allow that because to them we're still a strange thing, unusual, unnatural. Cyborgs of various types wander your streets and your land, and you're working on perfecting them. But androids are still considered something of an unusual bit, like robots. Cindy told me that we're used right now for testing mainly; a few very rich folk have us. But basically we're used."
"So you're just going to let them take you, aren't you?"
"Who said that?" she laughs, the sound a bit tinny. "I'm on the next bus that comes through. Cindy programmed several different abilities into me; I'm going to try out site work for a bit. I have a feeling she always wanted to do it."
To get out of here, I remember her begging me months before. "Yes, she'd like that."
"You loved her."
"I guess I did," I nod slowly. Love? Can you love something that isn't really there? But Cindy, in whatever form, was always very much there. I can even now remember the scent of her, garlic and thyme mixed with lavender and mint. That spark to her green eyes. Desire, maybe. I don't know if it would be called love. The android puts a hand on my cheek.
"She thought a lot of you; it's in my programmed memory. I will always remember you, therefore."
"What will you do when you get out there?" She'd be safe then, for a while at least; the site workers were always hard to keep track of because they ranged so far.
She looks blankly at me. "I might try art work, I think." Yes, I can see her doing that: settled in place, portraying day by day, nine to five, ancient art of some type that is all in the Smithsonian Museum by now. I've seen a few people do it.
"Well, I wish you luck, then," I say slowly, uncertainly, though it goes against everything I've been taught. I should have arrested her then just as she wanted me to at the first meeting. Was that the real Cindy then, who begged me to take her away from the Hall and all its strange denigration? Or had she already changed, morphed herself into the cyborg that was a different person and yet the same, that would make a still more different evolution of herself? Nobody will ever know but her. Maybe the android Cindy doesn't even know. For my part, whatever it is, I wish her luck, knowing I'm doing something a little shady.
It started me thinking, you see, when I first met her.
END