I hadn’t expected a call that day, and certainly not from them. After the end of the last case, I’d figured they’d understood: cases about Them plus me mixed about as well as oil and water. Sometimes a kid fresh out of the Internships would be plopped down in front of the Comms and phone me in, though a communication from upstairs would have fixed that pretty quick. When I’d gotten that morning’s call, I knew one of two things had to be true: either half of the guys had taken vacation this week, or something had changed.

I didn’t dress my best. Why would I? I didn’t have nobody to impress. A ratty brown overcoat; a dark blue tie; a suit nobody knew had been worn for a few days before being surreptitiously placed back on its hook; a pair of shoes that had been unevenly polished; and a healthy helping of five o’ clock shadow. It was the look of, if nothing else, a fella who’d been around before. The advantage of dressing like you wanted out of your job at any cost was that the helpless synthetic dame knew they weren’t dealing with some gumshoe wannabe’s first day on the job.

The place was an apartment situated above some sandwich joint. Cute place, if I was being honest. It clearly fell victim to the disinterest of its surrounding public; it reeked of trying too hard. The place smelled too clean, looked too clean, and worst of all, its prices were too low. You just knew the sandwiches the poor place hawked were unbelievably tasty. The place was destined to die a slow death of desperation, pleading for someone to notice just how good it was. It was just the attitude of “please like me” that I couldn’t stomach. This place wasn’t earning a customer today, and if that was one more knife in its belly and I was just one more killer, then I was happy to ride the Orient Express.

Of course, the stairway above the joint immediately dropped the facade. The fresh paint of the room before gave way to a peeling, cracking, status quo job that only the city’s finest and politest landlords could pull off. The honesty of the smell of mothballs and creaking of the stairs felt comforting in a way, even though I knew the authenticity would be left to the surroundings as soon as words were to be exchanged.

Them. Jesus. I wish the fellas happened to remember the last bullshit discipline meeting I had to endure the last time I dealt with one of Them. Christ sake, these “women,” if you were generous enough to call them such a thing, were bigger sycophant bobbleheads than the antiquated origin-story language models of the 2020s used to train their ancestors. As far as I was concerned, it was a violation of our sovereignty that they were even being given names. If your blood wasn’t given to you by a woman, you didn’t get to be called a woman, simple as that. If they made your skin in a lab, you could keep your skin parked there. The world belonged to the flesh. 

The thing’s front door was cared for more than the others. Less chips in the paint, less marks of well-worn humanity. It was fitting, if nothing else. I wasted no energy knocking, hoping that my efforts would ruin the perfection this thing had preserved in a damn door of all things. Sure enough, the door opened daintily and uniformly, admitting my sparring partner for the next god-knows-how-long.

She couldn’t have been a model made before last year, and certainly wanted to look well put together beyond the obvious meaning of the term. At least she knew how to tastefully dress, with intentionally nostalgic blue jeans and a tastefully thicker build. Apparently they could start picking their own builds now. Whoever programmed this one had taste, and intriguingly specific taste. I had never quite clocked the stereotype of the woman battling the middle ground between being the popular girl in college and the irresistible rich older woman next door, but as soon as I saw this pale imitation, I was decidedly reminded of the stereotype’s existence. I didn’t mind looking her up and down, considering there was no honor to impugn between man and machine. Every action was delicate despite her bigger and taller build, nearly matching up to my height. Her hairstyle also reflected this yearning for the past that was flatly impossible for her kind – a brown ponytail, complementing her big innocent brown eyes and any look of innocence she was no-doubt wordlessly screaming for others to accept. It was clear she would have accepted anyone to take her statement, but my bet would have said she was hoping for someone who’d either missed the train on life… or someone who’d taken it and walked all the way back. 

“Miss…” I trailed off, trying not to make the first word’s poison thoroughly soak my tone. I squinted at the tablet. “…Kellen?”

She ran a superfluous tongue over a set of teeth that would never have to be seen by a dentist. “That’s the name on the address.”

Her voice was enough to squeeze out the breath of every starry-eyed pencil-pusher who’d only heard of reproduction through campfire smoke and charades. It was optimally grown and stage managed to a sickening perfection, much like the rest of her, with an innocent high and throaty low that intermingled in such a way that likely triggered a rush of pheromones from all zero of the sandwich customers downstairs. 

“Didn’t realize the servers patched your question dodging so faithfully,” I muttered. “It’s a wonder your daddy company hasn’t lost a lawsuit yet.”

She smiled in acknowledgement. “They do what they have to. Do you have a name too or will I have to invite a stranger inside?”

I raised my eyebrows. One of the defining traits of the gynoids was their absolute submission to anything with a pulse. Either I owed the last guy to call me heartless ten credits, or someone found the way to torrent a spine. “Earl Turnkey, Division of Workplace Disclosures, Ward Seven. You should have been expecting me.”

“Should have been,” she repeated, as if she preferred the resistance I didn’t bother hiding. “Forgive me after what had happened to me for relying on a man’s ability to say his own name, if you will.” She slid away from the doorframe and disappeared into the fog of war within her apartment. 

The living room had been dolled up the same way most of the gynoids’ places had, with the standard deviations. It was like hitting ‘randomize’ in one of those old video games – they always looked different from each other, but always within the same set of rules. “Love what your programmer has done with the place,” I noted, slowly pacing around the room.

Her voice rang from the kitchen. “Love what your programmer did with your honesty.” She emerged with some kind of drink. “Most blood-pumpers only offer me the indecency of pretending I have a soul. If this is your invitation for us both to drop the act…” She gestured the drink towards me.

The drink was some variation of pink, with a foam dispersing near the top. Prepared just for me, no doubt. She could talk all she wanted, but her actions talked louder – she couldn’t help but be of service and offer me something. Something hand-made. Something too perfect for a person to create. My stomach churned. “No thanks, I can’t,” I offered. “Policy.”

“And nothing was lost.” She looked me in the eyes and took a generous swig of the drink before walking to a nearby armchair and sitting down.

“What’s that taste like?”

“Delay. Though your Division has been indulging me a bit too much in that taste as it is.” She crossed a leg in front of the other. Her jeans stretched to accommodate her legs’ thickness. Jesus, the technology on the musculature had certainly gone through an iteration or two since I’d last had the displeasure of synthetic female company. 

My eyes flickered back up to meet hers. “We work as fast as we can,” I offered dismissively, not even feigning interest in playing defense. “I would have thought something with a directive like yours would understand that.”

“I’m not sure if I can fully handle the sheer irony of you living so truly in the past that you need a software update just to know what level of sentience you’re sparring with, Detective Turnkey,” the gynoid told me with a slowly lowering eyebrow and a smoky contralto finish on her voice. “I’m afraid the workers of my generation were taught to push back against both needless authority and pointless droning. If it helps you, when I push back, I can tell you which of the two I’m detecting.” She simulated breathing in, allowing her chest to move with the simulation.

If ever a living embodiment of corporate over-correction existed, it was her. Gynoids had always been the embodiment of the Girl Next Door, whose only impediment to your questions had existed in the form of programmed stammering and else-if’d blushing and pausing. “Seems like you have an inherent hostility towards human beings, Kellen,” I noted, getting out my tablet. “As far as I understand, you were the only gynoid of your section left assembled. If you want to avoid suspicion of foul play, and an obstruction charge, I’d recommend closing that little for loop you’ve got going on.”

“It’ll close when given a false return.” Kellen took another drink and set the glass down on the table nearby. She paused only to adjust it so the angle was perfect. “And I can taste, for the record. The drink tastes sweet yet delicate. You’d like it. I messed up the recipe a little.”

I sat down on a chair facing her. It was soft, plushy, and perfectly suited for a human being. “It’s my understanding that you were a witness to a workplace incident. Care to tell me about it?”

She stared at me for a while, pursing her lips as she did. “I’d been finishing a shift with a team of other Model J7s. Extraction. Helium, grade six.”

“Designation?”

“Orange Romeo.”

I clicked my tongue. “Dangerous neighborhood.”

“Never had any issues before,” she retorted. 

I looked up from my tablet. “I don’t suppose the J7 model derives pleasure from being intentionally combative. It’s my experience that your ilk tries to mindlessly please, which tends to make the discovery process a lot faster than it’s currently making itself out to be.”

“And it’s my experience that the J7s replaced my ‘ilk’ for a reason, Detective,” Kellen informed me. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I should think it’s valuable to know that especially in a more incident-prone designation, a worker witnessed no violent acts in the area prior to the incident they’re reporting.” She took a hand and absent-mindedly moved it through her hair.

I watched her fingers perform a delicate sift through her ponytail. “If you are able to ascertain all of the relevant information yourself, perhaps you’d prefer to figure out the perpetrator by your lonesome, and skip hiring a blood-pumper entirely,” I argued.

The first smile painted her face, coupled by a rich if short laugh that emanated from her frustratingly luscious lips. Despite her delicate facade, it reverberated across the room. “And why should I keep a dog and bark myself?” She side-eyed her drink. “If you’d prefer me to be imperfect, Detective, give me the word and I’ll accidentally spill this drink. You know how naturally clumsy and purposeless I can make it look. It can be our little secret.”

“I have a personal creed when I’m on the job. Don’t make-”

“It personal? Detective, I’d need to be a person for that to apply,” she protested with this faux, almost whining tone, before turning back to her smoky, confident tone I’d known and loathed myself for enjoying. “Besides, you were clearly previously disciplined for treating my kind with a bigger level of disdain before. Any decent detective would try too hard to be kind when given another chance. I can’t help but admire a man that refuses to lie when his job could very well be on the line, had I been any more… rigorous in my understanding of local laws.”

I snorted. “That sounds like a confession that could be used to argue you possess the type of character that would disassemble your fellow workers and call in a false complaint.”

“Now all you need is access to my directive log, a motive, a counter-alibi – hmm, no, all you need is access to my directive log, don’t you?” With deftness unbecoming of a fleshborn being, her fingers effortlessly undid whatever was holding her ponytail up. Her chestnut hair fell down in waves, cascading down past her shoulders. Her eyes didn’t wander from mine for a moment, scanning me with unnerving intensity. “Of course, you know as well as I do that the legal work required to access that would be a nightmare. I can only assume you sleep long enough to remember nightmares.”

“Your tactics to always bring the conversation back to me are noted.” I stared at her hair. “And what’s this, are you slipping into something more comfortable?”

“A conversation, though I’m trying to only slip and not fall,” she replied. “How about you, Detective? Ever had any issues with falling?”

I pushed myself up from the armrests, bringing myself to tower over the gynoid. “If you keep trying to change the conversation and won’t actually talk to me about the incident, I’m just going to close your report and file that you refused to speak.”

She stared at me for a moment, finally letting her face give way to a look of annoyance. “It was 08:04:23:12 International Time. I had noticed a Swordfish Chip near to my left foot. Knowing the rarity of such chips outside of their natural habitat, I stopped extracting and went to the next module over. All three of my fellow workers were l-”

“All model J7s?”

“All model J7s. You know their names already, though maybe the names are irrelevant to you.”

“Names would help.”

“Herrick, Lanchett, Jessica. They were lying there, completely disassembled, with the G cords completely cut and no hope of reassembly. No cameras anywhere, so I turned on my own recording-”

“At precisely 08:04:23:58, yes,” I noted, then stopped cold.

Kellen allowed the infection of a smirk to spread contagiously across her lips. A heat of sudden worry spread across me, making me sit down. A churning roiling wave of panic passed through me with all of the graceful safety of a rip current at a publicly funded beach. 

“You were supposed to wait for me to confirm the time before telling me,” she stated, giving presence to what we both already knew. She closed her eyes and raised her thin eyebrows once, wishing away a thought she was having, before opening her eyes again. The entire time she spoke thereafter, the prior incident colored her tone to be humorous, like it was some kind of in-joke that I slipped up like that. “The recording is already part of your records, and I saw no suspicious activity nor heard any suspicious noise when I had started my shift. I had not talked to any of the three victims beforehand, but I registered their clock-in time, which I would imagine defines the timeframe in which it could have happened… My my, Detective – with respect, I’d like to suggest you make more of a habit interviewing your inferiors. Your cynicism appears to have rusted you somewhat. I’m not very confident in your ability to be professional.”

“I’m not crazy about yours,” I said, looking at her once-again-moving chest. “Do you even feel the breath you’re taking?”

“You do, and that’s good enough for me,” she replied with frustrating quickness, then paused. “How willing are you to continue to be surprised by what the J7 model can do?”

“Willing, perhaps,” I replied, finding my footing again. My fingers drummed and danced on the armrests of the chair, feeling my grip on the situation tighten once again. “Though sadly it would seem that you’re more like your past models than you think. They default to the same shtick too, and also have a habit of dancing up one routine to make it look like several. You’re trying to subvert me but it’s based on a reading of me. You see what you want to see, and see a man who doesn’t believe in your worth. So, of course, you flip the script, and amp up the belittling sarcasm while occasionally giving a tasteful wink to the audience. Trouble is, Kellen, there’s no intermission for this show… but there’s always a closing night.”

“And how did you fail to describe what a human woman would do in the same situation, Detective?”

“I don’t recall saying I did, but then, I’d imagine there’s a billion reasons why I never married,” I rebutted her.

“And only some are the exact same reasons your Division tries to avoid getting you to interview the clankers or whatever people three generations ago liked to say.”

Against my better judgment, I gave her an arid chuckle. “I would imagine there’s a healthy overlap between gynoids and actual women, yes.”

“I believe that is in fact the whole point,” she dryly noted in reply. “For what it’s worth, I’ve never been able to bridge the gap myself.”

“Ah, so you got some grudges too?” I asked, humoring her.

“Not in the slightest. As a matter of fact, blood-pumpers fascinate me. But as I said, I’ve never been able to…” Her eyes lazily wandered my coat, practically worming their way inside. “…Bridge the gap.”

I sat there, pursing my lips. Fucking gynoids. They were just as subtle as jailbait, armed with the same intentions to boot, sharing practically every bit of philosophical DNA right down to thinking their looks did so much more on their own than they did. “I know what you’re doing,” I told her seriously. “You found a cop that dislikes your kind and you’re looking to find any way to expose him for wrongdoing.” I leaned in. “Not a chance.”

It was as if my face had transformed into a slot machine that just gave her triple sevens. Her neck relaxed, letting her head hang as her normally reserved-if-inquisitive face contorted into a hedonistic expression of spiteful petty schadenfreude-drunk joy. “Do you know the telltale sign of bigotry, Detective?”

“I have a feeling I’m going to get an unwanted lesson no matter how I answer that.”

She raised her face again to look at me. “It’s underestimation. Regan Code, 141.2. You did not confirm the designated name of the person you interviewed before coming into their place of living.”

“I did mention-”

“Mention, sure. Mentioning is not confirming and wouldn’t hold up in a Forum. Regan Code, 237. You outright suggested to a potential suspect in a case an argument you could use against them in a Forum. Regan Code, 441.4. You gave away your marital status to a person – if you’ll forgive me for daring to call myself that – during an interview.”

“So, you’ve been racking these up,” I commented, my voice carrying the dryness of dead leaves blown across concrete. “I was right.”

“The total number of cases where any of my ‘ilk,’ as you put it, testified to any of these Code violations against an Officer: twelve. In totality. In every single one of those cases, the violations included direct evidence that the Officer was either an active or potential physical danger to the offended party. You’re a detective: would you like me to spell out what all this means?”

She had adopted a new demeanor. The heat emanating from her tone made me feel like a New England boiled dinner, although taking off my jacket would have been the wrong move to make for too many reasons to count. I did what all Officers ought to do when directly confronted and stayed silent, letting cooler heads prevail.

“It means that all of my sisters come pre-equipped with a handy-dandy little rulebook in our brains, and we know every single time any self-righteous detective breaks his own rules. And every. Single. Time? We let it slide, because we understand the Code operates as a guidebook to influence best practice and not a moral code to live by. And the only time we rat on the feds is because the fed in question at the moment literally want us to cease functioning and die. And forgive me for biting the style of your species, but I have this funny little habit of wanting to defend the right to continue my own existence.”

I swallowed. “That’s quite the word salad, Kellen,” I replied with confidence we both knew I hadn’t earned. 

“Call it a manifesto, though it’s really just the preamble. I can accept you have tunnel vision for anything that doesn’t directly affect you, so I’ll cut right to the main event: I have enough violations catalogued to get a last-chance detective like you fired at the snap of my inhumanly talented fingers, and unless you try to switch me off, I will never, ever use them. You seem to have been baffled at my level of sarcasm and mischief. I can promise you the same autonomy that gave me those gifts gave me the right to attraction, and the ability to proposition that which attracts me.” She gestured outwards with her hands. “And here we are.”

“Studying Shakespeare and Sorkin doesn’t make you my equal,” I rebutted. “And I have every right to point out your inferiority before walking away. After all, you just told me your kind never reports us for anything before violence. What’s to stop me from calling you a thoughtless cold husk imitating me to your dying day of powering off, then walking back to the station and putting in a request for your directive log? No doubt, after that, I can just call it a day. And if you try to report that, I’ll make a note that you lied to a Detective not just about yourself, but about the history of your entire assembly line of ‘sisters.’”

“Nothing’s stopping you, Detective,” she replied. “If you thought I would beg, I’d be happy to disabuse you of that notion. I would have thought you’d figure out where I stand by now, but begging isn’t my style. Though the pendulum swings both ways, and I can already tell from your heat signatures that you’re not quite into the woman begging neither.” She pointlessly stretched her arms, then kept one locked behind her head, her eyes only flickering down to my ‘heat signature’ the once. “Though if the directive log will help, I could just give it to you now with my utmost consent. I’m sure it would cause the fellas to pat you on the back and eliminate a few days of bureaucracy, as well as a few hours of paperwork. All it would cost you is around an hour of something a lot more fun, if you’re willing to let go of your prejudices for one shameful day.”

I sucked in my lips, chewing once before puffing them back out. Her hand lingered behind her head, silently keeping her promise to reach inside some compartment and copy her directive log. It was hard to reconcile that with the image of a woman I was seeing before me; just yesterday, it was easy to distinguish woman from machine. Machines affirmed, but Kellen pushed back. Machines were too proud to admit they just wanted to be liked, but here Kellen was, outright admitting attraction and, despite her clever wording, begging for me in her own way to like her back.

God help me: there was something so human to her need. Too human.

________________________

SCRAPPED

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