"Is it... alive?" he asked tentatively, nudging the... thing's shoulder gently with the barrel of his gun. The purple flesh of the cyborg seemed to quiver, the green glow of its bioluminescent skin cells lighting up in a complex pattern to acknowledge the touch, and perhaps, relay a message.
"It's more machine than organic," the cold response came, as his colleague raised her own gun. "It's not alive."
He wasn't sure whether it was her words, the gunshot, or his own reaction to it that made him shudder.
Not anymore.
***
Noah was silent on the journey back, intensely fiddling with the mechanics of his gun. Part of his discomfort was due to the cybernetic woman's corpse lying across the transport's floor as they trundled along the dirt road –if you could call something that consisted of so many wires a corpse and not a wreckage. Or what it had once been, a woman.
Cybernetics were more valuable than gold these days, and this wreckage was salvageable. Noah wished it wasn't.
Tess sat across from him, unbothered by anything that wasn't taking the bulky, and "too fucking hot" carbon armour plates off of her body. Their driver hummed along to the radio, bobbing his head in a way that suggested his full attention might not actually be on the road ahead.
A thick leather glove hit Noah's visor, and he turned his gaze back to his partner.
"What's up dumbass?" she asked cheerily. "Why the long face? We exceeded the quota today, and that means bonuses! Let's go out tonight."
As his gaze was drawn back to the mass of wires and quickly disintegrating flesh that was sprawled across the floor, so was hers.
"Is it about the stupid machine?" she asked, sighing.
"She-" he began.
"It," his teammate corrected, "is a series of ones and zeros within a shell designed by a pervert."
"How much organic matter was she- it?"
"The FC20?" Tess paused, tilting her head to the side as she thought. Strands of blonde hair fell loose now her helmet sat between her legs. "Maybe fifty? Ask Jed when we get back. You know how he loves these things. Bet he would have loved "her" too," she added, under her breath. "Look, don't sweat it. Would you be having these kinds of problems if it had been a human criminal?"
"No, but-"
"It was getting old, no telling what it could have done. One faulty wire, one zero that should be a one... That's all it would take. They work within parameters, yes, but over time, for whatever reason, those parameters seem to fade for them. They break free, and then, they're dangerous."
He wasn't exactly sure why it bothered him. Sure, it wasn't what he had expected to do today, but they had been sent out to retrieve any scrap metal and wires they could, and they would be getting bonuses for this amount. He'd killed things like her before too. Plenty of times. And he'd never thought of them as a "she" or as a "he". So why did he now? You know why. You know.
She looked like Mila.
***
"It's beautiful," he'd said in awe, trying his best not to crush the fragile white flower with his comparatively fat hands.
"Why?"
The android had been sitting next to him on the grass, as the sun beat down on them.
"Because, it's... it's flower," he'd responded lamely. "Flowers are."
Mila collected a few tiny rocks from between blades of grass nearby, and examined them against the translucent purple flesh-like palm of her hand.
"These rocks are beautiful," she responded, showing them to him, after a long moment.
"No, they're just plain old rocks."
"But why aren't they beautiful?"
"Just... because."
"Ah. It has been tainted by the limits of a mind." He gave her a perplexed look. "Not your mind, the collective mind." As if that explained it.
"Humans don't have a collective mind Mila, we're not a hive."
"Then why do you agree on what's beautiful? What makes something beautiful? What makes it worth more over the rest?" Mila had seemed genuinely curious. Perhaps that was what had stunned him.
He had heard his parents talking, when they didn't think he could hear. They talked about how something was wrong with Mila, how they were worried, but she'd always seemed fine to him.
In truth, her parameters weren't supposed to allow for independent thought, like the consideration of beauty. She was a house-droid, a worker, designed for menial tasks. So when his parents (as they so often did) ensured him that Mila couldn't possibly be saying the things they all heard, they were right, but wrong. She did. And that was why they said she was broken. And why they were afraid.
It took him a while to build up the confidence to tell his parent:
"But, Mila's always been like that."
He'd meant well, he really had. Hoping it would mean she could stay, when in fact it meant her immediate departure from their home, and his weekends being spent in a tight psychiatrist's office for weeks to come, to make sure she hadn't infected him in any way.
It had taken him years to realise (and it had crept up slowly) that Mila had been smarter than all of them, maybe even smarter than her creators, in a fashion. He hadn't been lying when he'd told his parents that she'd always acted that was, she was just hiding it, playing dumb. Maybe she'd never even had parameters in the first place.
Perhaps she recognised that showing anything like that would result in her end. Or maybe she was testing the water. He didn't think she was dangerous, but maybe that was just a child's eye colouring the memory.
But... could it be possible that she had viewed him as hope? That she had opened up to him, a developing mind, because his mind wasn't "tainted"? Maybe she thought he could learn, or maybe even understand. Maybe he could have.
Maybe he still could.
***
"Oi." Tess clapped her hands together. She seemed uncomfortable. "Stop looking at it like that, all blank-faced." His lifted his gaze slowly to meet hers. "Their humanity is just an illusion. They're programmed for god's sake. They're not human."
"Some of them think like us," he said slowly.
"So they can parrot things off, big woop. Listen, it's fifty percent organic matter, at best, and it has a tiny computer chip instead of a brain. Inno way, is that thing human."
His mouth was uncomfortably dry, his hands clammy within the confines of the uniform's leather gloves.
"If you're judging "human" by organic matter, and the FC20, that is fifty-fifty doesn't count, then what about us Tess?" He reached forward, and she recoiled backwards a bit, to meet only the side of the transport. He placed a gloved hand on her knee joint, where a mechanical leg began. "You have a leg, a spine and various other enhancements. I have a jaw, ribs and some other junk too. Are we more than fifty percent anymore?"
"What's wrong with you today?" she snapped, swiping his hand away, though her tone was audibly nervous. "Of course we're human."
She eyed him nervously for a long moment, and then went back to taking off her armour, looking flushed. After a tense silence, in which Noah moved his gaze steadily between Tess and the dead AI on the floor, his partner reached forward, flicked his half-closed visor fully up, and pressed her fingers to his forehead, startling him.
"Take off your armour and take a drink," she ordered, relaxing as she sat back. "You've got a fever. You're just sick." She sounded relieved. If he was sick he wasn't crazy, was that it?
"I-I'm not," he protested, "you're just afraid of what I said." The sharpness of his tone made her jump. The fact he had slammed his fists onto his plated thighs as he spoke didn't help matters.
Tess called to the driver, telling him to hurry up, saying that he was sick and needed help. Maybe he was, or maybe she was just scared of him.
Her. Scared of him.
"Drink something," she insisted, "you're clearly overheating."
Overheating. That was it. He was sick. It was simple. He was sick.
Maybe it was a faulty wire, or a one that should have been a zero. Maybe he was operating outside his parameters, and that's why Tess looked so afraid. Maybe he was broken.
Maybe they'd get rid of him, as they had done Mila, in case he hurt anyone. Maybe there wasn't so much of a difference between him and the AI on the floor.
And if it wasn't human, and they would get rid of him in the same way... For being sick, broken.
If the thing on the floor wasn't human, were any of them?
The End
~~~
minusfractions is an engineer, writer, and geek from Scotland. She's a lover of all kinds of strange and funny stories. You can find on her profile both, shorter and longer stories. If you are interested in cyberpunk, antiheroes, or dingy, dodgy bars, you'll love her work.