Sierra and Reez traveled to a small junkyard the next day. The place was set in an old part of the city, at the very southwestern end. A shack, a few piles of metal and a small crusher had been scattered around.
Reez went to signal the owner of his presence while Sierra dug right in. She selected a pile at random and tossed parts aside, hoping to locate any kind of auto equipment.
She found something long and hard deep inside the pile. A crankshaft? She pulled it.
It was an android's hand.
There was blood on it. The markings were easily recognizable: that hand belonged to Kay, one of Shrike's sidekicks.
She dug deeper and found a flat piece this time. It was the remnants of Kay's face. The plastic was shattered, the only thing holding it together was a layer of more flexible material.
She went around the pile to put it between her and the shack. The junkyard's rusted wall was behind her.
She closed her eyes. Shrike hadn't said a word about what had happened. She only knew that Shrike had been the sole survivor. The other details had never been spoken. That void had to be filled.
The hand had next to no heat, old or new. She knew Kay as being efficiently designed, with her components cool and quiet.
The unique signature wasn't interesting either; Kay was dead, and had just been dragged away into a pile and left there.
The severed end of the arm was belt into an ovoid shape, as if something had crushed it. It was a hypothesis like any other.
She investigated the unique signature a little further. It wasn't as she remembered... She knew Kay as being calm, with a heart made of stone. But the signature had frozen into an expression of shock, as if she had been hit by something she hadn't seen coming. As Sierra dove further into the signature, she found it more disturbing.
Then, an image appeared in her mind's eye: that of black skin covering her entire field of vision, save for a small space at the very top, through which light shone brightly and revealed a narrow pink band on the right side.
That was the back of an android. And at the upper-right corner was her neck and her collar. The pink android was named Elise. Somehow, Elise had managed to crush Kay dead. How?
Answers had brought on more questions, again. It was like a neverending quest. She was stalling! Too much time wasted on making up more and more questions; a nightmare.
She opened her eyes and tossed the arm away. There was nothing more she could do with it.
She walked back to the center of the yard, and Reez was out of the shack, smiling.
"The guy inside says he's got an engine block in working order! A 6-cylinder boxer, came from a car that wouldn't start because of a stupid electrical problem that hadn't been diagnosed."
"And with what kind of money will I get that? I was looking for free parts."
Reez grinned. "I managed to negotiate. The engine is useable and hasn't been used much, but it's old and needs a maintenance and a good scrubbing. The guy has no use for it; he's willing to let it go for a song."
She sighed. "It's still money. Could be a penny but I still couldn't pay it."
"I know. That's why I bought currency that you own: your old body."
He opened the trunk of his car, revealing Sierra's old arms and legs.
She frowned. "This is in poor taste..."
"It's still gold in the face of a junkman."
She stared at these old parts for a while. Nostalgia kept telling her to keep them, to remember the past... But she was an android. Androids never forgot. Still, keeping them would've been the human thing to do.
Nevertheless, she waved Reez to proceed.
The junkman signed a paper confirming the ownership. Reez would just have to come back later on with a truck to carry the block.
On the way back, he grinned at her. "Happy now?"
"Very!"
Sierra spent most of her free time disassembling and cleaning the various engine parts. The metal had dirtied up in several places, and the gunk was hard to remove. Still, it had to be done. The fun would come around later.
The next day, Mr. Karl called her and Reez up to inform them they were receiving payment for the job done so far. He took the opportunity to tell Reez how he appreciated his shaping up and his religiously scheduled reports.
Sierra kept silent throughout the whole conversation. Mr. Karl thought of her as an object, nothing more than an interesting specimen of science. Even though that was his job, she felt he was pushing it much too far.
Reez hung up. "I have good news for you: Karl's happy with the way you behave. He says he's rarely seen someone being under the microscope all the time like that and keep a good face about it. He's giving you three hundred Sterlings and I don't have the right to touch them."
She chuckled. "Is he trying to buy my love?"
Reez shrugged. "I don't know. But it sure is going to help finance your project."
Sierra thought about what she could do with three hundred Sterlings. It was just enough to afford a part or two. Hopefully, Karl would be in a good mood more often to help her some more that way. She was almost done cleaning the engine parts; the gift had come at the right time.
They were scheduled for a meeting with Mr. Karl at four thirty. It was to be the usual inspection that happened every few days, to check up on Sierra's state and development. A different labcoat man did the job each time, taking a small blood sample, looking at the odds and ends like the arm and eye sockets, and asking if anything new had happened lately. Those inspections almost always limited themselves to three phrases: "Thank you. Looks good. Have a nice day." The labcoats did their job with a detachment that betrayed hours upon hours of jotting down notes about this or that person, without any excitement whatsoever. They left to do the blood test, came back, touched and padded here and there, turned around to write some more notes, turned around again and told the usual bunch of questions from a pre-made universal form, which included questions like "Are you pregnant?" or "Have you had blue balls lately?" which they asked anyway even though the answer was obvious.
In the meantime, Reez and Karl would do small talk about her. Of course, they had to do their jobs, and considering the time it took to do her check-up - about a half-hour - the conversations quickly degenerated into stuff about women, drinks, cars and machoism, the latter of which Karl had in spades.
The labcoat man - yet another face she had never seen before - took her blood sample and vanished through the back door. He'd be there for at least fifteen minutes - and judging by his nervous disposition, he was probably a newbie who'd take maybe as much as twenty or twenty five.
Curiosity got the best of her. She decided to take a peek past this mysterious door. If the labcoat saw her, she imagined she could get away with it by claiming interest in what the exact purpose of her blood sample was supposed to be.
She cracked the door open. It led into a corridor. It was dim, as if on emergency lights. A soft hum came from a distance and filled the environment. Was this leading into a mechanical room of sorts?
Opposite the door of the analysis room was a tiny computer lab, with but one computer placed there. To the left, the corridor went for a few dozen feet before curving into a ninety-degree angle. To the right, the corridor seemed to stretch on forever, with some intersections placed at regular intervals.
The hum was coming from the left. Perhaps it was where the blood analyzing equipment was located.
She went into the computer lab. The computer was still on, but was locked whenever it wasn't in use. It required a password.
She closed her eyes. Maybe the heat signature history she could detect would do the trick.
A massive jumble of lines appeared above the keyboard. Her detection was too coarse to make out which keys had been pressed and where. She knew the lines started at the door, and one of the split-offs went for the number nine on the numeric keypad, but that was it...
She fell deeper into her trance. To her surprise, the lines appeared clearer, with more shades and a better resolution. How could her detection tools improve like that for no reason?
She heard a rip, followed by a strange, sticky sound. A brutal sensation invaded her back, and she felt cold air somehow penetrating her body.
Startled, she opened her eyes.
There were things hovering around her. A sensation she couldn't explain filled her... She felt dizzy and weak - although she didn't knew it, it was the sensation of tiredness. But she couldn't have known; she had never slept.
She picked up one of those things. She felt as if her hand was touching her own skin.
She released it, and it went to its original position. The floating little creatures were all organic, black-skinned, with luminescent dots of blue or yellow color.
One of them passed in her field of vision. She recognized its shape... It was exactly like the one Karl had shown Reez several days ago. Kimi.
She reached for it. Kimi was her and she was Kimi. Or rather, that thing was a part of her.
They were all Nova units. Satellite, child Nova units.
Where had they come from? Instantly, a new field of vision came into existence: she was looking at her own back, through the eye of one of the Novas behind her.
She had two wide slits on each side of her spinal cord, about ten inches long, both leading inside her body.
She willed that Nova inside one of them. She cringed at the odd sensation. Each time those slits were open, air rushed in and irritated whatever was inside.
She wiggled the Nova in there just enough to have a clear view. It turned out, in fact, that part of her body was hollow. Placed on each side of some central organs with a near transparent protective covering, was a docking bay of sorts, in which, after a little test, a Nova would place itself in a tiny receptacle, and shrink to the size and shape of a raisin. As she accomplished this maneuver, she felt part of her vigor coming back.
So that was how it worked: she housed a small army of Nova units within her, and activated them by pouring some of her energy into the ones she needed. All it took was a bit of effort to make them break free and loose. The band of skin on her back that had made these openings invisible, this... hymen (she had no idea what else to call it) had been permanently destroyed. Whatever happened, those slits were there to stay, and were very, very visible.
She'd have a lot of explaining to do. Out of all places, this was not the one appropriate to set a point of no return. As soon as she returned to Karl's office, he'd notice, or Reez would notice, and she'd have to make up a story other than the fact that she was trying to crack a computer password!
She recalled most of the little creatures, giving herself some energy to think. She had been thirsty for knowledge about the why and how of the Department for long enough. If that was going to be the point of no return, then so it would be.
She called upon the services of one Nova specialized in energy signatures and examined the patterns closely. The sequence of keys became easy to recognize: the heat of the hand, or more particularly, the finger that pushed the keys was clearly visible: nine, four, seven, six, six, zero, three, zero.
Enter.
Eight, eight, eight, one, two, eight, five.
Enter.
And access granted. Just like in the movies.
She was presented with a text-based menu:
Welcome, D. Carush.
1 - Insert
2 - Update
3 - Drop
4 - Select
5 - View User Grants
sdbqm/?]>
With the press of a number, she could add, edit, delete or view parts of the database. This sounded easy enough.
There was a spike port on the computer's front panel, though. Were some of the labcoat men androids?... She hadn't seen any so far.
It didn't cost anything to try.
She plugged herself in and the system notified her of the connection. Now, she was her own keyboard. The spike had this advantage: she could type as quickly as she could think. And with the little time she had left, who knew how much she could explore before hearing the sound of someone noticing her much too late for an escape?
Wait, she had the Nova units. She sent the two she had for vision and made them look in each direction of the corridor.
A selection of Mr. Karl's recent documents revealed a flurry of entries. She eliminated all the ones opened prior to her first appearance at his office and narrowed her search down to the following documents:
-Kod Regoär Naïnsev
-Shrike "The Shurikane" Naïnsev (Project Syndrome)
-Organic Spike Technology
-Sierra Naïnsev / Ilica (Project Flycatcher)
-Elise Marquis (Document Bootleg)
-Kay (Document Lightray)
-Kestra (Document Headache)
-Asiil (Document Snow Coast)
-Athley (Document Cinnamon)
-Insa-Type Android
-Nova-Type Android
-Reez Lokk
-The Chips
-Dossier Catfight
-Horis Calista
-Armi Prosis (Document Pink Mammal)
All those files had references to each other, forming a tight web of information. Her name was linked to people she did not even know...
She perused those files, gradually reproducing a web of information in her mind, though with a different interpretation. The Department's entries were littered with doublespeak and euphemisms meant to attenuate violent phrases. But as much as she could read, she pieced this story together:
Kod Regoär Naïnsev was the legal owner of Shrike, who had been bought as an empty android shell and programmed to scare and startle bypassers for twenty-four hours as a campus practical joke, after which she would shut down. Poor programming on Kod's part caused Shrike never to actually shut down, and she kept on carrying out her goal until she was found and re-programmed into a free android by The Chips, which were a major group of black market traders and raiders. She stuck with The Chips, making money raiding abandoned bunkers for military-grade equipment to resell to Unionized Mercenaries and street gangs. However, a few months ago, she had an encounter with a Reli Blademaster, with the consequences everyone knows.
Shrike was slated for a complete format, as her hybridized hard disk couldn't be accessed, nor removed, but she erupted in a frenzy and killed the three technicians working on her. By figuring out how to reproduce the transformation that had affected her (linking to the document called Organic Spike Technology,) she managed to recruit and hybridize five other androids: Elise Marquis, Kay, Kestra, Asiil, and Athley, who were named Insa-Type Androids by the Department - the reason for the nomenclature was unknown to her. The hypothesis was that Shrike wanted to gain a legally free status by forcing the Governor, at gunpoint, to pass a law legalizing the existence of all androids of her kind, and void the charges against her. By converting a great number of androids into Insa-Types, she could further advance her cause.
In the meantime, Kod ran into trouble while performing his duties as Section Lead of New Colombus: he ran into Dossier Catfight, a woman engineered from top to bottom to be the perfect sex slave for a man named Horis Calista. Doubtful, Kod began investigating the matter of fabricated sex slaves, eventually leading to the entire political party wishing him out of the picture. This was done through a loophole: once Shrike began her campaign against the Governor, they found out Kod had not released her from his ownership. Thus, he was still her proprietor and had legal responsibility over her behavior. He had been trapped by something as stupid as a college prank.
The document about her was only loosely linked, and the document named Nova-Type Android was essentially a perfect copy of her own file.
The document about Armi Prosis proved more interesting: she was the one who had challenged and thwarted Shrike's entry into the governmental building. Inadvertently infected with a self-activated substance meant to turn an android into an Insa, she became an unnaturally aggressive monster and managed to destroy every android except Shrike, before succumbing to a massive heart attack just hours later. Included in the entry were gruesome pictures of the mutated woman: a six-eyed abomination whose originally harmonious body had been taken over in many places by a spiked, chinitous substance. Her forearms were the prime of the mutation: they each featured a massive pair of curved claw-blades, reaching a good thirty inches past her hands.
Her own document told what she already knew of herself: She was a full-fledged Nova unit, brought into existence by Shrike using what they suspected was Organic Spike Technology. However, the file omitted one thing: the satellite Novas she possessed. They hadn't seen this one coming.
She also saw a correlation in the prefixes of documents: Projects were anything the Department worked on or intended to work on. Documents were closed projects, or projects that had ended with the death of the concerned person. Finally, the Dossiers, which were a list of all the Department's sex slaves made so far.
Shrike was a Project! She was alive!
She had a lot of incriminating information in her head. She knew too much, and the Department would quickly notice she would also tell too much.
She grabbed and saved whatever files she could find. Everything she came across that was remotely interesting, she downloaded. Piles and piles of Dossiers, rarely arousing and mostly frightening, stacked on top of each other in her mind. The Projects were imposing with their sheer number: everything about things leading to Dossiers, to military weapon designs, to even the smallest cellphone technology was saved in these. Documents were for the most part outdated and useless information.
Among the rest of the files, she found the names of some political and other high-placed people, among other odds and ends. That, she downloaded too.
She realized most of the files she had downloaded were only partial versions and amounted to much less as she had expected. The account was the one of a simple worker, and thus he had access to only the basic information from the files that concerned him - hence why he had access to the files about her and her relationships: so he could get an idea of the patient he was about to analyze, and how to proceed with the analysis. Among the text, she found instructions relating to just what exactly should be looked for in her blood sample. This was nothing she could really make out: it only mentioned different substances and their expected concentration.
She stopped her thinking for a moment. There was a strange air about the place - it wasn't normal. The fear she came to experience each time she was analyzed, it was stronger.
The room seemed much darker than before. Had the Department employees found out she was here?
She retracted her spike. Something was oozing out of the port.
She backed away from the machine, disgusted. A horrible sensation invaded her chest. Pain spread all around her body, even her arms and legs.
She lurched forward and vomited on the keyboard.
She had splashed the table with a foul-smelling mixture of oil and blood. The stuff hung in gruesome clumps and slowly oozed off the table, having taken the texture of slime.
The ooze invaded the entire computer, and the stuff leaked from every possible orifice and port. Soon, it had covered the table and spread to the floor, gradually painting it with swirls of black and dark red.
A massive amount of information flooded her brain. She felt a history that wasn't part of her, emotions that weren't in their right place, facts and opinions that were blatantly wrong and yet tried to impose themselves. All of a sudden, she knew she used to belong to a black market trader group, that she got stuck in a fight against a Reli creature, that she became a wanted android, that she had created a daughter for herself.
No, no, that was all Shrike's actions - Shrike's memories. In a flash, she knew everything about her mother, in every single detail.
She felt a warmth in her body - more than that; a hotness. She put a hand below her chest.
Her second hard drive had turned itself on.
She had full access to it. She explored its files, its sounds, its memories. The data was badly arranged, fragmented and jumbled haphazardly. Programs had started running in the background. Her mother's voice began telling her what to do and where to go.
It was the backup made right before Shrike had left for New Colombus for the last time. It contained a wild, arrogant and confident personality.
Another voice spoke: "No! No!" But it was shut down right away. Someone inside her, a third personality, was weakly trying to impose herself. But after just two words, she was gone. A wiser, more humble Shrike had spoken and died in a flash. Where had it come from?
It wasn't part of the backup. It came from somewhere else.
She realized her skin was tense, her eyes wide open. She was in a state of complete panic. Her reflexes caused her to twitch uncontrollably.
Her senses were heightened. She could see signatures of all kinds, everywhere, moving as if she was surrounded by a mass of people all trying to reach for her at once. The room, the corridor flashed red, green, black and blue. The doorways seemed to melt, the ceiling becoming an arch and imprisoning her inside a space ever tighter.
She bolted.
She took turns at random, seeking shelter from the distortion in her eyes. She often turned around and went back on her tracks as that inescapable fear went up and down. She kept laying down a map and changing it, treating it as a concentration, trying to find out where it was coming from and where she could hide from it.
The colors filled the walls, the air, everything around her. They flickered and moved faster and faster, so much that they began to fade into the walls and vanish, invisible... They were gone, but she could still sense an invasion within her.
As she looked around, she realized she was among a network of cages. Some of them had someone in it: people she now knew, Dossiers and Projects she had read. Some of them looked normal, others looked hideous. They all stared at her with pleading eyes.
She had bumped into several labcoat employees. In her frenzy, she had gotten lost inside the building's maze of cells and corridors. As she called up a map to track what her progress had been, she saw Mr. Karl running straight towards her.
The fear showed itself once more. Without really controlling herself, she turned around and ran.