The Android and the Thief

by Wendy Rathbone

  His middle brother, Vance, said, “His lovers are books. He was probably at an all-night storyteller bar.”

  “Genetics wasted good features on him,” said his middle sister, Arla.

  Only Blair remained silent, the one sibling who never taunted him. Maybe it was because Blair was not good-looking and didn’t want to bring unwanted attention to that. In fact, none of Trev’s family were beautiful. Handsome, yes, dark-haired and olive complected, with manners and proper health care, quick minds, bright eyes, solid bodies, but they were all too hard, too spoiled, to be called beautiful. Trev was the beautiful one, people said, the duckling who’d grown into a swan.

  “Well, Trevor?” Dante prompted.

  Trev, who’d been staring at his gigantic piece of cake and clenching his stomach muscles, lifted his chin. “Three, actually.”

  “Three what?” his father asked.

  “I have three lovers.”

  Breq let out a loud guffaw, drawing a glare from Dante.

  His other siblings all snickered.

  Trev continued, not allowing himself to show any irritation. “It’s quite a feat to juggle them all, since all of them are single-partner oriented. And if one chimes while I’m with one of the other two, well, it’s a challenge.”

  Breq said, grinning, “You’re the worst liar ever. And to tell a lie about lying is, well—”

  “Overkill,” Sonye finished. But unlike Breq, she wasn’t laughing.

  Dante spoke. “Of course I allow all of you to have your own private lives, as long as they don’t interfere with our arrangements. But this meal is a prelude to our monthly family meeting. And I expected you all to be here for it.”

  “I’m here in time for the meeting,” Trev replied, returning his gaze. Less than two days, and then he wouldn’t care anymore.

  “The family early breakfast is part of that meeting.”

  Trev wanted badly to argue. But arguing led to punishment. And punishment involved whippings. At twenty-three, he still received them. So did his siblings. Instead he said, “I apologize, Father. Did I miss anything?”

  Dante raised his gilt-edged napkin to his lips. “No. But need I remind you all that if any dalliances outside the family fetch you trouble with the legal system, I will not have your back?” Everyone stared silently at their plates. “Now, eat your desserts.”

  Trev took a long breath, picked up his gold fork, and speared the cake.

  Chapter Two

  SECRET MISSIONS.

  Warehouse-sized sleeping chambers with triple bunks, where the air grew stale even with the compressors on high.

  Flower-shaped black starships built for one purpose: to unfold layers of petals revealing thousands of death lasers. Crewed entirely by android soldiers trained for combat at all levels, the ships were referred to by the rank and file as the Planet Killers.

  It was not a real life.

  But it was Khim’s life. All he’d ever known.

  Android was the term for his kind—vat-grown humans—even though they were all made of flesh and bone and blood, not metal; they were not machines like the early versions of augmented men from centuries ago. They had creative minds and nervous systems that felt pleasure or pain. But none of that mattered. These androids were manufactured, human-shaped toys, sex dolls, soldiers, slaves. Androids programmed to obey, programmed to serve.

  Khim, born with the body of a twenty-year-old and the dubious, chipped-in memories to go with it, had been a soldier for ten years. He crewed on the ship Doom in Shadow. Six foot four, trim and well muscled, he could handle any weapon, knife, laser gun, sunburst cannon, photon rifle. He could even wield a sword. If no weapons were on hand, it didn’t matter. His body was a weapon. And his mind. He could make a weapon out of anything at hand if need be, be it toothpicks or toilet paper, a comm chip or a comb.

  He fought battles without any clue as to why they were happening. He simply followed orders. It was not his place to question politics or learn the reasons behind what he did. When he was younger, he had kept track of his kills. But after the first year, he’d stopped. How many died at his hand did not matter, for he was just a tool. Morality, the evilness of deeds, conscience or lack of conscience, the violence, the battles, the deaths—they were all attributed to those who gave the orders.

  Khim never had any choice.

  It was on the sixtieth morning of his tenth year when everything changed.

  Khim had awakened, as usual, in the dim bay of Doom in Shadow where the sleeping berths lined the decks three-high. Two hundred fellow soldiers slept over, under, or beside him, all gendered male, all of a similar mold, with variations only in hair, eye, and skin color. Blue, green, yellow, or purple were common hair shades, with the occasional blonds and brunets. Khim had won the genetic lottery for blond, with eyes the color of late blue dusk and skin his digital file “paperwork” called henna.

  Something had startled him, and not the sounds of the two androids below him having sex. That was not unusual. Something else had brought his senses to full alert. He sat up, his sheet falling away, and sniffed the air.

  He smelled the air compressors, with their slight metallic sweetness, along with the breaths of two hundred men, sour and humid, making the open area seem closed in and the atmosphere heavy. He smelled the cloying, brackish scent of sex wafting upward to his third-level bunk, but that was it.

  Nothing else stirred him… so then why was his heart pounding?

  All the alarms of the ship sounded at once, loud and clanging. Red strobes bounced off floors, ceilings, walls. It took only seconds for every android in the sleeping bay to don their leather boots and one-piece gray uniforms with the sunburst insignias on their cuffs.

  Orders pounded through a chip in Khim’s head: he was to go to the docking lines. Whether they were boarding another ship or completing a planetfall, he didn’t know. But as he passed the weapons room amid scurrying men and shouted commands, he was handed a gun belt, a shoulder holster, and a backpack of extra ammo. His heart rate increased, but not dangerously. It was only his body reacting to the projected excitement he would face.

  Khim ran with his gear and glanced briefly out the rectangular portholes of the corridors, wondering what they might be facing, but he saw only familiar darkness pricked with stars.

  As he turned away to face the lines of other androids, he lost his sense of balance when a nearly incomprehensible thing occurred. The deck beneath his feet curved up, as if the ship were buckling, and sent him sprawling. He slid fast and dizzily into a bulkhead, watching as cracks began to form in the corridor. A panel exploded to his right in a hot green-and-orange cloud, the pieces of metal slicing through the air, hitting the men in the backs, buttocks, and thighs as they tried to crawl or run away.

  Khim looked down and saw that his right hand was gone. His wrist ended in a red spurt, though he felt no pain yet. Another explosion sounded overhead, and he knew then this was not a survivable event.

  At that thought, miraculously, the bulkheads that weren’t compromised began to form round, black openings. One opened beside him and sucked him in. It was a life pod, and if it still functioned, he might have a chance. But before he could even assess his possible turn of luck, another explosion blotted out all sight, sound, and feeling.

  SOMETHING TASTED green. There was a hot sound. An edge of raving—raving? that didn’t seem right—against his skin felt bright, smelled of tumbling light as white as nerves. He could see only wrongness in the gray fog that surrounded him.

  Khim’s instinct to fight jerked through his body. Jerked again.

  A voice from far away said, “He’s convulsing. Grab him. Hold him down!”

  He did not understand. Was someone in danger? He should get up, see if he could be of assistance. But as he tried, his body jerked tight again as if a hundred ropes embedded in his flesh held him in place.

  He heard the hot sound again. But how could sound be hot? It was as if he inhabited his own blood-rush coursing through his
veins and was drowning in it. He bounced along in red shoutings, corridors of red, oceans of red never-ending, without time or construct. Everything around him seemed to yell like a great wailing wind, and he fell forever through it, limbs flailing for purchase, arms looking for something to wrap around.

  One time he thought he saw a dimmer light, heard voices.

  “Make it work,” one voice said.

  “He’s worth a fortune,” said another. “If you lose him, I’ll have you fired.”

  More uneasy time passed. He was buffeted amid great strands of shining strings that clanged in his ears.

  The voices returned.

  “But the hand was grown from his own cells.”

  “It won’t mesh, I tell you. Too much radiation damage at a cellular level. It won’t kill him, but it won’t allow the fresh hand to reattach.”

  A crackle. A sputter. His own voice coming from a place so deep inside him he could barely imagine it. “Thirsty.”

  Something touched his lips.

  Everything went black.

  When he woke again, his eyes opened this time and a room slowly built itself around him. Layers of soft lights at first, and crisscrossing shadows. Then he saw the walls of dimmed white, but mostly he watched the ceiling staring at him with the texture of thin gravel, gray beyond the strange, boxy machines that hovered over him. His mind tumbled upon itself trying to make sense of it. Sluggish. Communicating recognition failure three times before it whispered a clue.

  Hospital.

  From that one word, he was able to gather more fragments.

  Buckling decks. Warships. Androids. Explosions.

  He remembered a hole in the wall. The escape pod.

  He did not remember anything else, but it was now apparent to him that he was no longer aboard Doom in Shadow.

  He tried to move, but bands held him down at wrists and ankles. At one time he might have had the strength to break them. But not now. His strength was no more than that of a drop of water suspended in zero-g.

  He slept and woke and slept again. After a while he was allowed to sit up with the help of a robot nurse.

  Eventually he saw his new hand, dark silver now, a perfect hand in every way except that it could not feel. It could flex at a thought, could grasp loosely at things like spoons or rails or the edge of a sheet. But it could do little more. It certainly would not be able to wield a weapon.

  The technology of the hand did not seem to mesh one hundred percent with the working of his brain.

  One of his human commanders, a general he’d never met, came to his room after he was mostly healed and said, “You’ll get by, but never again as a combat soldier on the front line.”

  “I understand,” Khim said, though he really didn’t. Because what else could he say?

  As if reading his mind, the general said, “You’ll be auctioned for the best price. The military needs its investment back. But never fear. You’ll simply find placement elsewhere. No more war for you. Which, for many, would be considered a gift.”

  “But I have no other skills.”

  The general frowned, looking at him intently with crisp green eyes. An assessment without affection. A look of almost longing, but with no personal investment in it. He patted Khim’s good hand just above his wrist. “We’ll see. Think of it as an adventure.”

  Khim might have been naive to the ways of real humans, but he was not stupid. He knew the word adventure could never mean anything good for his kind.

  Chapter Three

  ON THE second-story landing, Trev paused, looking down the hall. No one was about.

  After the family meeting, everyone had headed for bed, their minds no doubt filled with visions of their dark plans for the evening to come.

  Trev had the Bradbury stuffed in the waistband of his trousers. He hoped to make it to his bedroom at the far end of the corridor without running into one of his siblings. Two of them, Breq and Blair, shared this floor with him. There were additional guest suites and one other door kept locked.

  The punishment room.

  They’d all visited it many times. A pole stood in the center with chains and cuffs coming off at angles up high and at ankle height. The Damico children might be left locked and cuffed alone to think about what they had done to displease their father, until Dante finally came to finish the punishment. He whipped them enough to hurt but not enough to bleed. The pain always left tears and an immediate will to obey.

  That had been happening since they’d each reached the age of reason.

  Trev remembered his first time in the punishment room. He’d been about six. He also remembered his last time. Six months ago. The worst part of being sent there was the waiting. And being left alone chained up, naked to the waist and naked to the cold air, for that room had never been warm.

  They all had lived so long under the sadistic manipulations of Dante that they never questioned it. Each sibling took their punishment with wordless obedience because the rewards were great. Dante meted out power and money and material goods, effectively spoiling his children so they would do anything for him and put up with anything from him. There wasn’t a better life to be had, Dante often reminded them. And no way out, for the Damico influence reached deep into the civilized galaxy. They all knew if they ran, they could never go far enough, for their father would always find them. Anyway, running out on the Damico family would also warrant a punishment worse than death.

  The money, prestige, and name didn’t matter to Trev and hadn’t for years. The first time he saw his father kill another man—a guard who had supposedly sold information to the competition in some top-secret business deal—he’d decided he would find a way to escape. He’d been seventeen at the time and had run for the bathroom to be sick. Later his father told him, in a kind and loving voice, “You do what you have to do. You get used to it.” And Dante had petted his son’s head, cupped his face gently, and kissed him on the forehead. All with the same hand that had slit a man’s throat fifteen minutes earlier.

  Now Trev had a plan. And if it worked, he’d be free forever from the reach of his father.

  He walked past the punishment room, and a trickle of icy air skittered down his spine.

  When he got to his own room, he stood in the center of the ornate suite, always tidy as he liked it, and surveyed his private domain. From the sweep of maroon curtains to the inlaid marble shelves that held his crystal-encased collection of ancient paper books, to the beautiful bed draped in fog- and rain-colored satins and silks. He would miss it all. Most of his real-books were rare but modern editions. The Bradbury he now took from his pack was worth more than all of them a hundred times over. It was 2632 years old and could never be taken from its case. It would instantly crumble.

  Trev sat on the edge of his bed and stared at it. The gleaming case surrounding it gave it a glow as if it were alive and had been ever since the twentieth century when this author had lived and typed on old mechanical machines in dusty libraries, composing the elixirs of his dreams.

  Trev had dreams, but they weren’t magical. Not like these stories. He lived in a future beyond these stories’ small futures, but he longed for those pasts, those boyhood days in plain green towns, those impossible Martian landscapes where gold-eyed beings lived in chess cities, those nights when real carnivals of dust and autumn arrived on trains. He’d never known anything like that.

  The pounding air-waterfalls of the gardens where he’d grown up, here on this floating mansion estate, might be magical to some, but he’d found the life dull. He’d become the best acrobat thief, the smartest security systems programmer. Books could have been written about his antics, his capers. But he simply did not like the cavalier idea that money was more important than happiness. Or a human life.

  Oh, for the life of a shoe salesman. When he’d once made that comment aloud, his brothers and sisters all laughed. The joke became a family motto of sorts, quoted after a big job or a particularly hard day.

  It wasn’t that Tr
ev really wanted to sell shoes. He did love the challenge of getting himself in and out of tight spaces, as he had done tonight at the museum, but he never felt free. Not for one moment. The perpetual enslavement to his father, no matter how gilded the cage, brought resentments so deep, at times he thought his mind would break.

  Trev lay back on his bed, clutching the Bradbury at his side. He leaned back into the softness of too many pillows.

  Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow, everything will change.

  Chapter Four

  STRANGERS BATHED his body in lilac-scented water. They brushed him down, naked, with gold body powder. They rimmed his eyes with blue shadow and caressed his lips with a soft pink sheen.

  Khim might have fought them off if, beforehand, they hadn’t made him breathe the curling zotic smoke from the pleasure wands the grooms waved all about his face and head. The smoke aroused him against his will, made him pliant, dizzy. Paralyzed his vocal cords—an invisible gag—and took away all aggression. Aggression under command orders for expert frontline fighting was his own past means of survival. Bereft of that, he had no sense of what to do as his body betrayed him by following every command of the grooms, every lead.

  The grooms, three human boys who looked no more than nineteen, seemed pleased at his response. But mostly they seemed bored, applying all the makeup and powder as if they’d done it a hundred times before. Their touches were professional, gentle, not cruel. But except for that gentleness, they seemed uncaring about what he might be going through.

  Created to obey, Khim had no words within him for a protest.

  Brought onto a small lighted stage on a thin laser-leash by a fourth handsome groom, Khim could see nothing beyond the glow that contained him but shadows and darker man-shapes upon those shadows.

  Knowing nothing of this new, nonmilitary world, he felt vulnerable and exposed, and fear fluttered through his stomach and into his chest. He knew what this was about—sex and its darker underpinnings. It couldn’t be otherwise, for he was naked, painted like a doll. He’d witnessed androids fucking without inhibition, but he’d never wanted it for himself. Never felt aroused by his own kind. Never had the sex drive some of the others seemed born with. If something was wrong with him, he never thought about it or cared. He got his pleasure from battle, from storming alien worlds and using his weapons to subvert, kill, destroy. It was enough for him.