Dark Corners

Chimaera

That night I was in the dead zone on the unpaved end of 97th at Keegan’s warehouse. I was looking for a particular kind of work. It was illegal work, since my andy psych tech ticket had been pulled. It was also illegal for anyone to hire me to hunt bugs in their andys for the same reason, which is why I was job hunting in the dead zone. Business and professional law didn’t often reach down to that part of the city. For all that mattered, neither did any other kind of law.

I’d gotten a line on Keegan from a snatcher named Molls. Molls said Keegan was a head knocker making ends meet by snatching and reclaiming illegal junker andys. He also said that Keegan’s last ferret had mented out trying to reclaim an unreclaimable andy that had freaked and had begun killing and stacking humans. I slipped Molls a few to arrange a meet with his fellow snatcher.

Eddy Keegan was built like a wild pig, short, solid, and with bristles for hair. Instead of tusks, however, he had short gray teeth that looked like they’d been ground down by a perpetually tense jaw. “You the ferret?” he asked as his forehead wrinkled above eyes that never seemed to move.

“My name’s Shannon.”

He studied me for a second and said, “Somebody broke your nose, Shannon.” He cocked his head toward the warehouse. “Come on. I’ll show you the shop.”

The interview was over. He was a pig with a paycheck and I was a ferret with a broken nose. We made a perfect couple.

Once inside the warehouse, Keegan threw on a light revealing a makeshift bio bay and corpse cooler mounted on the bed of a truck. The bio bay was a bassinet for androids designed to bring them up or down from temp and to hold them during things like operations and mental pipe cleaning. It’s opaque plastic screens needed cleaning.

Next to the bay was a table where I’d be stretched out to do my work. In between the bay and the table was an ancient D-11 meld and PS unit, the psychosurgery modules missing from their ports. It was set up strictly for becoming and communicating. “Okay, Shannon,” said Keegan. “That your real name? Shannon?”

“For now.” I pointed at the meld unit’s dull green plastic case. “How old is that D-11?”

“It was made in the thirties, but the power unit and main boards are only a couple of years old. Don’t worry about it. It works.”

“Who’s going to operate?”

“Me.” Keegan grinned. “I been doing this stuff for a long time. I can find my way through the knobs.”

I faced him and folded my arms across my chest. “I heard the last ferret that plugged that unit into his head is still singing Mairzy Doats and yanking out his scrotum hairs.”

Keegan shrugged his shoulders and held out a hand. “It’s a dangerous business. You want job security and a health plan, Shannon, go uptown and peddle life insurance. You want fast coin, you come down here. Let me see your plug.”

I turned around and pushed the hair up off my neck. I could feel Keegan’s fingers pull the plastic protector off the connection port, along with a hair or two. “Easy,” I said.

“Good. This unit’s got an adapter that fits a DX connector. How come you still got your pins? I thought when they pull your ticket they snip your pins.”

“Not always,” I answered. There was a long silence as Keegan waited for an explanation. I leveled my gaze at his reflection in the bio bay screen. “If your license is suspended for mental reasons,” I said, “they don’t remove the connector.” I smiled inwardly at the irony of my next statement. “Just in case they need it to fix your own head.”

“You’re a ment?” Keegan’s eyes squinted as he chewed on an unlit cigar. “Don’t know about a psycho ferret in the shop, Shannon. You could freak or something, right?”

“You can bet I’ll freak if you smoke that cabbage and run the board at the same time.”

“I ain’t foolin’, Shannon.”

“Neither am I.” I smoothed down my hair and turned back. “Sure, I could freak. In fact, I could do that right now, Keegan. I might be teetering on the brink of a psychotic episode. You turning me down could be just the thing that finally drives me over the edge.”

“Funny.” Keegan thrust his hands into his jacket pockets as he forced a chuckle. Maybe he hoped I was joking. Maybe I was. I wasn’t so sure myself. I pointed toward the corpse cooler.

“Look, if what you had in there was clean, you could hire a ferret with good papers and a threaded head, if you had the money. Instead you got an andy with a bad smell, I’ve had a few tics in my world plan, and I work for a percentage of sales. Now, are you going to let my emotional health stand in the way of your money?”

As always with honest criminals, the appeal to economic reason prevailed. He climbed the stairs to the back of the truck, took me into the cooler, and showed me the racks designed for holding biodroids in near stasis. Four of the twelve racks were occupied.

“You need to know where I got ‘em?

I shook my head as I shivered in the cold. “What I don’t know I can’t tell. I need to know diags, though.” I nodded toward the occupied racks. “They look in pretty good shape. Are they just mented out?”

“One of ‘em needs his guts sewed back together. This one.” He pointed to the one andy in a body bag, his bandaged middle visible through the clear wrapper. “When he freaked and killed his boss and half his gang, he got stitched across his guts. It’s just plumbing, but fixing it’s going to cost a pile or two. I been holding off on the operation to see if someone can get his head straight first. The other three are strictly ments. The bodies are top grade.” He pointed toward the back of the cooler. “Look at this one, Shannon. A hooker. Maybe you heard about her on the news a couple months ago. Her name’s Meyla. She killed three men and a woman in a hotel on Flag Street.”

He walked over to one of the racks, the ice mists in the cooler swirling about his legs. He bent over and pointed at the naked form in the rack, its skin glistening with vapor block and ice crystals. It was a race neutral female on a standard Holt bio frame. When the folks at Holt tossed her code into the vat, they were building a whore.

What must it be like, I thought, to be born a whore. The shape, the look, the attitude. Born to do it; born to be fulfilled by it. I’d find out soon enough when I walked the hiding places in her mind. Keegan ran his fingers up the inside of the android’s leg and I automatically jerked his arm away from her.

Keegan’s face cranked into a confused frown. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” He pulled his powerful arm out of my grasp. “She’s out of it. It’s nothin’ to her. What’s it to you?”

A wave of nausea and light-headedness passed. I couldn’t peg the feeling. I averted my gaze and shook my head. “Look, if you expect me to climb into that bio’s head and have a chance of fixing whatever’s wrong, get your jollies some other way. Buy a balloon with tits and a jug of salad oil.”

Keegan’s face became very red. “Look, man, I don’t make it copping feels off andys in the freezer. Got that?” He pointed at the android with his thumb. “What’s it to her anyway? She’s programmed to be a prosti.”

“If she was all that happy being a whore, Keegan, maybe those four jokers she killed would still be alive.”

“Yeah, maybe. Anyway, she’s out now.”

“We’re never out, Keegan. Not us; not the andys. Unless we’re dead, something always remembers. Feelings. Senses. The body. The body remembers.”

“Crap.” He had just waved his hand dismissing the whole thing when I raised my fist as if to punch his jaw straight through his rat’s brain to the back of his head. Immediately he hunched down and put up his own fists as his eyes widened in fright.

“The body remembers, Keegan.” I waved a finger at him as I grinned. “The body always remembers.”

The first android I plugged was the one with the shot up guts. If my ferreting job was successful, Keegan would bring in a shadow cutter to fix the andy’s plumbing. The biodroid’s name was Alex Shields and it was an Akagi Combat Systems Seventeen installed in a cauc male wrap. It had been illegally modified and used as a hitter in one or more murders by the city powder elite. After Shields did in boss Ricky Curtain and a few of his soldiers, the number two hood managed to have his goons do Alex and dump him. The do, however, wasn’t done well enough, so after he was dumped he fell into the hands of Big Blue. After that, the authorities ordered the andy junked. On the way to the death and disposal yard, however, Eddy Keegan dropped a few dollars in the proper hands and bodysnatched Alex hoping to repair and resell the biodroid to a bargain hunter. Alex would be just the thing to watch the children or take Fido out for a walk.

If it had been safe for me to enter Alex Shields’ mind, he wouldn’t’ve been ordered junked. Instead he would’ve been repaired. But then there wouldn’t be any work for me.

To fix a shutdown piece you don’t simply open its lid and replace a couple of boards. They aren’t machines. They’re genetically programmed biological beings. But sometimes, just as with humans, there are problems. To fix one of them you climb into its psychological frame of reference, walk its mental corridors, and deal with whatever it refuses to deal with. I’d gotten a few frights and starts since getting my ticket. In the main, though, android brain boos are feeble things next to the drool dripping monsters that stalk human minds.

I walked down the gleaming steel hallway of Alex Shields’ psychological frame of reference, my eyes searching the darkened doorways, my feet making no sound. The absolute silence heightened my anxiety; brought those shadowy things from my past too close to the light. I needed the silence. It was a place of metal corridors, halls, and passages. Akagi units usually mentate in terms of metal hallways. Infinite conduits to infinite compartments, and the piece was hiding somewhere in one or more of those compartments. If it called, I needed the silence to hear it. It might call. Those who hide from the world or themselves usually want to be found.

The opening to my left was a nothingness. The piece had never driven a thought through there. In the piece’s universe, then, it did not exist. I took a deep breath and listened to the air rushing into my nostrils.

Another opening. Another nothingness. None of these neuron banks had been used. Sector one eleven should’ve shown some use in a unit as old as this one. The piece must’ve jammed early; soon after being modified. I had yet to uncover any sign of the modification.

Another opening, this one leading to another steel corridor lined with more openings leading to more nothings. We weren’t even near the right sector.

“Keegan,” I called, “move me over to the main track, back to sector seventy-one.” My voice sounded tinny in the metal corridor, the echoes close together.

“You ain’t found him yet?” Keegan’s booming voice deafened me.

“No, I ain’t found him yet. How about turning down the audio?”

The feedback yowls decreased and less of Keegan’s amplitude returned with, “Sorry. You gonna be much longer, Shannon?”

“Maybe.”

“If you need to cut and stitch to hurry things up, I got the surgery modules.”

“I’m not qualified to do psych surgery, Keegan.”

“The way I read the rules, Shannon, you’re not qualified to be doing what you’re doing right now.”

“Eat it.”

“How much longer?”

“It depends on where he’s hiding and that depends on where he’s been. Right now I don’t have a clue. Move me over to seventy-one.”

“I have to go take a leak.”

“So go. Just move me to seventy-one first.”

“Okay. Give me a sec.”

The crackle of Keegan’s voice filled the android’s universe. “Seventy-one coming up. Ready?”

“Go ahead.”

Another steel corridor, except the deck of this one writhed with cables; black, glistening, alive. There was a wind blowing so hard that it blinded me. “Keegan!” I hollered. “Keegan, you jerk! Get me out of here! This isn’t seventy-one! Keegan?”

Keegan had gone to relieve himself, leaving me lost in the andy’s mind. The force of the wind blew me back against a doorway. It was part way open, the hinges corroded. I pushed against the door until it was open far enough to see a corridor filled with blood red light.

Blood. That was the color of guilt in the Akagi universe. Guilt was the scent leading to the event that tripped all the circuit breakers. I stepped through the opening, the sounds of the wind dying to low, ghostly moans. Then it was silent. I could hear hissing, something raking its claws across the hot metal deck.

As my guts wrapped into a knot, I whispered to myself, “I am the traveler, I have control, all of this is symbol, none of this is real.” Affirm, affirm, affirm. It was always at such times I remembered my fellow student ferret in psych school, Alisa, who used to say, “I am a cow, I am a cow, I am a cow, doesn’t make me a bloody damned cow!”

“I am the traveler, I have control,” I repeated. A part of me reminded myself that all of the control I had was off somewhere taking a leak.

“Keegan?” No answer. Again the hissing.

I approached the blackness of an open doorway. The hissing, the sounds of the claws, came from it. Flames filled the entrance as the thing roared like a lion. The flames died and I saw eyes reflecting bright green at me. Its great yellow fangs glistening with drool. It came closer, my heart thumping itself against my ribs. As it emerged into the full light, I saw first the lion’s head, the goat’s body, the tail of the dragon.

I laughed. It was the Chimaera. The mythological patron of the android psych techs. It was one of our first exercises back in school.

It blew flames and roared again as I looked in one black doorway after another. Alex Shields had been searched by a ferret before. That particular rendering of a chimaera was to be found in no available memory depository. The image had to have been planted there, or taken from, a previous ferret.

Just to be on the safe side I closed my eyes and called in my own frame of reference. The steel corridor became a street, the doorways became row houses, and the chimaera was a piece of a broken machine on the sidewalk, its clockwork mechanism twitching an arm as it wound down.

“How’s it going?” Keegan’s voice.

“Check your board, Keegan. I don’t know where in the hell you dropped me, but it’s not sector seventy-one.”

I let myself flow back into the android’s blood red corridor guarded by the chimaera. “The seven key must’ve stuck. You’re in seven seventy-one. You find anything yet?”

“Yeah. I found something. Maybe this piece’s gone multiple. Mark this point so we can find it again.” I moved past the chimaera and continued down the corridor.

“What’re you talking about, Shannon?”

“Did you mark that point like I told you?”

“Yeah. But what’s going on?”

“Alex Shields’s a multiple, just like with a human. To survive the unsurvivable the piece’s psyche busted into a number of personalities, some of them taking a piece of the event to carry, some of them taking a piece of the original personality to hide away for safekeeping. To do the fix we have to find all the pieces and put them back together again.”

There was a long silence, then Keegan asked, “Is it going to take long?”

“Maybe. I’ve seen as many as nineteen distinct personalities in a single bio. I think the record is over a hundred.” I saw a shape move in the distance. It was a small dog standing with one paw raised as though it had been injured. “I think I see another piece. What’s the level?”

“First level, about eight hundred into it. You’re heading two-sixty.”

I changed modes to the schematic implant for the Akagi C-17 and plotted the blood red color, the chimaera, and the dog on the three dimensional grid. There were trillions of possible locations for the pieces of Alex Shields’ personality, but some locations were more probable than others. The guilt streak was along seven seventy one’s first level west. That was the gray edge between DNA programmed centers, neural processing, and open memory. In humans it’s the invisible dividing line between primitive instinct and learned behavior. I plotted it and sent identification pulses across to adjacent conduits.

The red had spread to nine other paths, but they were all heading in the same direction and seven seventy one appeared to be the hottest in that region.

I returned to the Akagi frame of reference and started as the chimaera roared fire at me and closed its fearsome jaws on my leg. “Go on. Get out of here.” I told it. “You aren’t real.”

It stood there, a quizzical look in its eyes as tiny wisps of smoke rose from the corners of its mouth. I walked over to it, extended my hand, and scratched the top of its lion’ s head. “You’re not real, but I know how you feel.”

Leaving the monster behind watching me, I came upon the wounded dog. It was a honey colored spaniel with only one eye. The socket of the other eye crawled with maggots. The dog whined and I squatted down and extended my hand. It sniffed my fingers, then licked them, then bit them. I jerked back my hand missing my index and middle fingers. “Hungry little bastard.” As I watched, my fingers reappeared. “Keegan, I’m at the second piece. Mark it.”

“I got it.”

There were doorways to the sides. I looked into the left one first. The room swirled with a hypnotic vortex of hot psychedelic colors. I could see nothing but the colors. Stepping into the vortex, I fought to keep a balance that had no meaning as the turquoise and hot pinks streaked through the electric blues, blacks, and blinding whites. The universe whirled about me, making me dizzy, and I changed to my own frame of reference.

Again I was on the street, my heart racing. There were people on the sidewalk, coming toward me, walking away, no one standing and watching. The houses lining the filthy street were those rotting row houses from my youth. Once great mansions, they were now infected with late stage urban decay. All of the front door landings were chest high above street level reached by chipped, cracked, filthy masonry stairs. I walked the street and searched my frame of reference for the corresponding thing that had been represented by the vortex in Alex Shields’s guilt track.

“You back here, Mick?”

It was Colly Fry, gang leader, sadist, and terror of my youth. But he was not real.

“Piss off, Colly.”

“I told you I’d kill you the next time you came back.”

“Yeah, Colly, and you said the same thing the last hundred or so times I’ve been back. You and the chimaera. Evaporate.”

“I told you I’d kill you, Mick.”

I shook my head, appalled at how ordinary my symbols were. “Tell me something, Colly. Is the real you still alive?”

Colly’s face twisted into a frown. “The real me?”

“Yeah. You’re just a few regrettable electrochemical relationships along a well traveled rut. What about the real you? Is Colly Fry still on the street? The real you has to be almost fifty by now. Is the real you still alive?”

The hurt, confused, stupid image of Colly Fry faded away leaving me empty, brushed with guilt. I still had some old business left with the real Colly. It was vague in my memory, but he had beaten me, humiliated me, shamed me. The hundreds of times I had mentally killed him hadn’t caused his death. He still lived where I had buried him alive: my mind.

Somehow, just at that moment, there seemed to be something terribly wrong about the memory of Colly Fry; something wrong about the street.

I heard a whimper and I thought for a moment that the wounded dog had escaped from the biodroid’s universe and followed me into my personal frame of reference. But my street had plenty of wounded dogs of its own. Wounded dogs, wounded children.

Huddled in the shadow of the steps leading up to a dingy yellow tenement house was a small child, a boy of four or five. The whimper had come from him. Something was wrong.

“Keegan?”

“Yeah?”

“Where are the field levels?”

There was a pause then Keegan’s voice came back at me. “All field readouts are in the blue, Shannon. The whole board is blue. What’s up?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You want me to pull you out?”

“Not just yet.”

The little boy. He shouldn’t have been part of the android’s universe. Andy’s are created full grown. Alex Shields had never been a little boy. There was no reason for him to symbolize with such an image. I took myself back to Alex Shields’ universe and was immediately caught up in the swirling vortex. It sucked at me, drew me irresistibly toward its center, and in the heart of it there appeared no colors but row upon endless row of sharp teeth. I covered my eyes and took myself back to the familiar street; the place where I knew enough about everything to be safe.

The vortex was the boy. The boy was looking at me with eyes I knew. Deep blue eyes filled with pain. Full cheeks streaked with tears. His head crowned with a halo of fine almost white hair. His knees were pulled up to his chest and his arms were wrapped about his tiny body.

He frightened me. I knew he was not real, yet he terrified me. I knew him. I knew him well enough to know that he would stubbornly refuse to answer my question. “What’s your name?” I asked.

He curled up into a tighter ball and turned his face away from me, toward the safety of the filthy steps. My fear married to an ache in my heart that was as big as the sky. Real or not that boy and his pain pulled at me.

I walked over to him and came to a stop half a step away. He was an alien; the alien that I somehow knew. I squatted down. His eyes looked at me, hating me, hoping that I would rescue him, damning me for betraying him, begging me to kill him, praying for me to gather him in my arms and hold him.

“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me.”

“You won’t do anything,” he sobbed.

“I will. I promise.”

“You won’t do anything.”

I held out my hands. “I can do everything. Here I can do everything. What do you want?”

There was a low growl from deep within the building. The boy winced, his head twitching slightly as his neck muscles tensed. “You’ll run!” cried the boy. “You’ll run! You always run!”

“No,” I protested, but the little boy scrambled to his feet and ran down the sidewalk. As I stood, the growl from inside the house grew louder, lower, more menacing. My breath was shallow, the skin on the back of my neck tingled.

There wasn’t any reason to go into that house. No reason of mine. Only a figment of an android’s imagination had accused me of running; accused me of betraying him; accused me of being a coward. And there was nothing to fear. I was the traveler. I was in control. All was symbol. Nothing was real.

I walked to the base of the steps and looked up into the blackness of that open doorway. A chill, fetid odor came rolling over the sill, down the stairs toward me. Earth, rot, feces, perfume. Sick and sweet.

I whispered to myself, “I am the traveler, I have control, all of this is symbol, none of this is real.” Affirm, affirm, affirm.

I took one hesitant step toward the stairs and the entire front of the building exploded in a roar of flames, deafening me, blinding me, burning my face and hands.

The smoke cleared.

I could see it standing where the building used to be. Four stories tall, roaring fire, acid dripping from its great fangs. The chimaera.

“You,” I began, my mouth too dry to speak. “You are not real—”

It leaped at me, opened its huge jaws and devoured me, the street, my universe. “You are not real!” I yelled as the great jaws crushed my spine. In the distance I could hear the boy screaming. He was alone. I knew I should’ve been there with him. I had betrayed him again.

Everything filled with black; silence without end.

I walked my dreams, the chimaera again small and harmless. The chimaera, an impossible monster, an impossible and foolish creation of the imagination. From where had it come? That was years ago in Danvers, north of Boston’s great armpit. At Nimura Intel, android psychological technician orientation.

“We chase electro-chemical bugs,” said Art Rankin, visiting speaker from Akagi Artificial Intelligence. “Bugs are mind creations, illusions, dreams. In androids it works the same way it works in humans: a contradiction, gap, or other error in the bioprogram. Find the error, fix it, and you get a gold star.”

But there were dangers about which the man from Akagi warned us. The causes of the errors are sometimes real, sometimes not. The bugs, however, are always not real. They are only representations of the errors. “When those giant snakes, machine monsters, and one-eyed drool-dripping horrors come at you, they will sure as hell seem real, though,” he warned.

We were assigned images that we would never fail to recognize upon sight. One of them was the chimaera. It was an outlandish looking thing, and the double meaning amused me at the time. “Represent the most threatening errors with your preselected images,” said the man from Akagi. “That way you will always be able to recognize them for what they are: nothing.”

Nothing.

How had “nothing” invaded my safe place?

How had “nothing” eaten me alive?

Awake.

I was on my back, the surface beneath me hard, unyielding, gritty with filth. Before I opened my eyes I lifted my arm and reached my fingers to the base of my skull behind my right ear. The connection port was vacant. The plastic cap hadn’t been replaced, but I was disconnected.

I opened my eyes and found myself on the floor of the warehouse next to the truck. The android, Alex Shields, was seated in an old plastic chair, his elbows on the armrests, his fingers intertwined. He was dressed in what looked like a set of Keegen’s discarded baggy pseudo leathers. His eyes were open but I could read no expression on his face. He looked done in, which was a vast improvement over a few hours before when he was done for.

“Where’s Keegan?” I asked.

Alex Shields winced as he changed his position in the chair and cocked his head toward the door. “He went home around three, right after the doctor finished closing me.”

“Is that why I’m on the floor?”

“The cutter needed the table. He didn’t want to bend over.”

I pushed myself up on my elbows, my head spinning. “Me on the floor and you with your guts just stitched, and he just left us?”

The andy nodded. “The health plan in this plant really sucks.”

I sat up the rest of the way. A sick headache flowed into my skull and sloshed against the top of my brain pan. As a wave of nausea followed the headache, I closed my eyes against the glare of the lights. “Shields? Your operation. You got much pain?”

“There wasn’t any pain during the operation. The cutter used local nerve blocks. They expired some time ago.” Andys were designed to manage pain well, which is more than I could say for my own unit.

“What about your head?” I asked.

“My head?”

“Before I wiped out, I saw that you’d gone multiple. At least three, maybe four, personalities.”

The android shifted position in the chair, the move causing him some pain. “Right now I’m me, my nervous system seems to be up to specs, and I’m looking at the world through regulation lenses.”

What a load of crap. Did the andy think I was the incarnation of the original mushroom boy? I’d never even gotten to the andy’s illegal modification. I was sure there was more to do, but right then I was too ragged to press it.

I looked at my watch, slightly surprised that Keegan hadn’t taken it. The time was 4:23 in the morning. I looked back at the andy. “Okay, so why are you sitting there watching me?”

“To see if you live or die.”

“Die?”

Alex Shields winced as he nodded again. “The cutter said you had a psycho seizure of some kind with maybe a one in four chance of not coming out of it.”

“And they left me on the damned floor?”

“They couldn’t register you at the local hospital, could they? Doctors with clean coats ask too many questions. If you died or went veg I was supposed to stick your body in the cooler.”

“Keegan’s just a sentimental slob, isn’t he? So what now?”

“I go home with you. I need a place to stay.”

“Did Keegan say that?”

“I did. I need a spot to park.”

I leaned a hand against the truck and struggled to my feet. “What in the hell makes you think I’d take you to my place?”

Alex Shields leveled his unblinking gaze at me. “Has Keegan paid you for your work on me?”

“No.”

“I’m your collateral, Shannon. Give me a hand up and let’s go.”

We helped crip each other to my walkup on 91st. It was a bedroom bathroom thing, change your own bed, fresh towels every five days, fresh paint every millennium. The pig at the desk picked his nose and smirked as I paid him a couple to bring a cot and some extra bedclothes up to my room.

In the room the andy undressed and went right to bed. I caught a glimpse of his middle before he went under the covers and he was wrapped like a mummy. Here and there blood had seeped through the bandages and no one appeared to have cleaned up anything after the operation. Spatters of blood were on his shoulders and legs. The blood spots shocked me for a moment, then the moment passed. It wasn’t important. Andys were designed to be infection resistant.

I left a light on in the bathroom, laid down on the bed fully dressed, and watched the room in the half light. Every muscle was stretched tight. Outside the gray light of dawn was already fighting its way through the grime on the windows. I felt as though I was suffocating. I was tired enough to sleep for a week but I knew there would be no sleep until the andy dozed off.

I always had to be the last to fall asleep. I knew no reason for it. That’s the way it had always been. I had to be certain that everyone else was asleep before I could sleep. In screening for the psych tech school they had asked me if I had any sleep disorders. I answered “no.” When I was asleep, I slept. The dozen or so times I would wake during the night were awake disorders. That’s the way I figured it. I also figured if I had any head problems I’d be screened out, and I needed the job.

I closed my eyes and tried to ignore the sounds of the city traffic vibrating the room’s thin walls and windows. The image of the giant chimaera came into my mind and I felt myself frown at the memory.

What was it? It was supposed to be my representation of the most fearful of Alex Shields’s monsters. What could it have been? Shields had gone multiple, and one of those personalities had already been represented by the chimaera. Small, puny, cute chimaera. Where had that giant monster been hiding?

“Having trouble sleeping, Shannon?”

My eyes opened. “What’s it to you?” The room was silent for a moment and then I asked him, “Shields, what’s your big fear?”

There was a pause. When the andy answered his voice was flat, emotionless. “The same as everyone else: staying alive too long.”

“I’m talking about fear, not philosophical hairballs.” I pushed myself up into a sitting position. “What’s that monster in your head, andy? The monster I saw. What is it?”

“You mean that thing with the lion’s head and the dragon’s tail? Isn’t that one of yours?”

“The image is mine. The chimaera is mine, but what it represented is yours. What did it represent? Your big terror, Shields; your big secret. What is it?”

“I don’t know. Aren’t you supposed to tell me?

“Maybe.” I leaned back on my pillow. “Maybe it’ll take another run through your head. Maybe you’re okay enough to sell as is. You seem to be functioning okay, but tomorrow I’ll run you through the test battery to make certain.”

I didn’t hear anything from the andy. The poison of loneliness sickened the moment. The andy was inside the room, but I was one of those who could find loneliness in a packed stadium. The andy’s voice was better than no voice at all. “That little boy, Shields, the one with the almost white hair?”

“I saw him.”

“What does he represent?”

The andy’s head rolled over and he looked at me. “I’m an android. I’ve never been a little boy. I think he might be one of yours.” There was more than a touch of sarcasm in the words.

I ground the answer between my lobes. Mine? My own crap was spilling into the andy’s trash? My memories of being a little boy were fragmented and few. I ran from the idea, but there was nothing else that made sense. The little boy was mine and he wasn’t one of my preselected images. He was something new.

The andy gasped as he rolled to his side, his face to the wall. After a moment he said, “Shannon?”

“What?”

“Is it true what Keegan said about you losing your ticket because of a mental problem?”

“Shut up and go to sleep.”

It wasn’t any of his business. I clasped my fingers behind my head and thought of the little boy with the halo of white hair. Who was he? To some part of me he seemed very familiar. The edge of a strange, frightening feeling came at me and I shook it out of my head. Talk. Any kind of noise to drive out the feelings.

“What’s it like?,” I asked him. “Being a hitter, Shields; what’s it like?”

After a brief moment of strained silence, the andy said, “About the same as being a soldier, except the pay, the food, the weapons, the operations, and the efficiency are better.”

“So, why’d you freak? Killing and dying aren’t big deals to an Akagi combat seventeen.”

“Under certain circumstances they aren’t. Boss Curtain changed the circumstances. Perhaps a piece of me objected.”

An andy objecting? How does an andy object? There are implanted control blocs that are supposed to prevent things like objections, scruples, rebellions. Of course, if they worked all that well, there would be no need for andy psych techs. A bum implant, quality control scanned by a vegetable, little glitches that no one ever really solves, bigger glitches put in there for illegal purposes. Control blocs are like locks on doors: put there to keep honest persons honest, providing they’re stupid and very lucky.

I closed my eyes. The image of the little boy hung in the darkness before me. That halo of white hair, that terribly serious face. I swung my feet to the floor and sat up, my gaze trying to avoid the bottom drawer of the dresser. There was something in there; something I didn’t want to see; something I didn’t want to know. I reached down, pulled open the drawer, and looked inside. There were two ripped winter shirts in there awaiting a mending job I’d probably never get to. Next to them was a broken down cardboard box.

There were photos in the box. In there was a photo of a little boy. It had been sent to me three years ago after my sister’s death. Her suicide. All of the photos she had kept over the years. The day I had received the photos in the mail, I had looked through them. I hadn’t seen them since.

I didn’t get up to look in the box. Some part of me knew that doing so would destroy me. I stretched out on the bed and closed my eyes as I pulled at the neck of my shirt. For some reason I felt like I was choking. I could almost imagine fingers around my throat. I opened my eyes and looked around me. I could feel the fingers around my throat and they were very real, except there was no one there. The feeling eased, but didn’t go away.

As I watched the dark hulk of the dresser squat next to the window, I heard the andy’s breathing coming slow and regular. I was unaware when I finally fell to sleep.

I walked to the base of the steps and looked up into the blackness of that open doorway.

“I am the traveler,” I whispered. “I have control, all of this is symbol, none of this is real.”

The front of the building exploded, deafening me, blinding me, burning my face and hands.

It stood there, four stories tall, roaring fire, acid dripping from its great fangs—

I started awake, choking, a sharp pain in my gut, tears on my cheeks.

I looked around and took a ragged breath. I was alone in the room. The sun was high in the sky, the room filled with light. The andy’s cot was empty and water was running in the bathroom.

My fingers hurt.

I looked down and opened my hands. My fists had been clenched so tightly, my hands, wrists, and arms ached all of the way to my shoulders. My entire body ached.

I wiped my face dry with my palms and stared for an eternity at the bottom drawer of the dresser. I stood up. After a moment of light-headedness passed, I walked over to the dresser and pulled the cardboard box from the bottom drawer. I sat back upon the bed and rummaged through the old photos, searching for the picture of the little boy.

As my fingers touched the edge of it, I knew it was the one. I pulled it from beneath an irregular stack of my sister’s other photos and looked at it. It was the same face, the same hair, the same hurt, accusing eyes.

I couldn’t remember him; wouldn’t remember him. He was standing in green grass in front of some bushes next to some trees. There was absolutely no place like that in the entire city. Certainly it hadn’t been taken on my street.

My street.

I frowned as I looked through the window to the street below. The muggers, whores, dealers, and gang toughs were getting started for the day. That wasn’t “my street,” though. “My street” was a representational framework where I could bring andy symbols to find out what they really meant. “My street” was a hateful, cruel, violent, depressing place. To my mind, however, it was “safe.” There I knew where I was, I could protect myself, handle whatever came my way. “My street,” however, was entirely imaginary.

During orientation everyone needed to pick a safe place for home base, and “my street” was the place I’d invented because I couldn’t remember a safe place from my own home; my own childhood. That little boy. I couldn’t remember the house he lived in. I turned the photo over and read what was written there in my sister’s cramped little scrawl: The Farm, Summer ‘92.

The Farm.

My skin tingled, a pain shot through my eyes, that sensation of being choked. The Farm. The name was a curse, a broken trust, a betrayal. All of that, yet almost nothing of memory.

I turned back to the image of the little boy, the trees, the grass. The chimaera. The monster was mine. I could feel it, smell it, taste it; everything but remember it. Somewhere, hidden beyond those leaves, was my personal horror, the thing I refused to remember.

I put the photo back with the others and tossed the box in the drawer, closing it with the toe of my boot. There were no answers in the old photo. My answer was in work. Either to learn or to bury knowledge, my answer was in work. Activity. Noise.

“Shields,” I barked at the closed bathroom door. “Can you walk?”

He opened the door, stuck out his head, and looked at me. He had cleaned up his body. “I can walk,” he answered.

“Let’s get back to Keegan’s.”

After hooking up Shields to the D-11 and checking to make certain all of his personalities were integrated, he should’ve been a prime cut on the auction block. An Akagi combat model, even with his guts newly stitched, was good for an easy sixty thousand on the legal market. On the illegal market, fifty cents on the dollar should’ve grossed Keegan at least thirty. A couple to me, a couple for overhead, the net would’ve been an easy twenty-five. Except Keegan couldn’t even give Alex Shields away as a gift.

“None of the fences’ll take him.” Keegan stabbed his finger in the air toward the andy. Shields was sitting again in that same plastic chair. “Curtain’s hitters’ve just put out the word. They want him. More than that, they’re not paying a cent on the contract. They want him dead and they want anyone who helped him dead, too. They took it real personal. They want to do the killing. I don’t get it. It’s like taking out a contract against a machine gun.”

“What about a new face on the andy?” I asked. “Give him another name. I can go in and alter his registration codes. He’d just be another Akagi.”

“Plastic?” Keegan thought for a moment, spat a flake of tobacco onto the floor, and slowly shook his head. “Nah. It’d have to be a good job not to be spotted, and a decent plastic man’d cost the whole yard. There wouldn’t be anything left over.” His voice lowered significantly. “Look, Shannon, I can’t pay you today. The cutter’s bill took damn near my whole roll. What I got left I need to fix the other three.” He grimaced back toward Shields. “Man, I can’t even afford to feed the thing. He’s all drain, no gain. Get me?”

“So what’s the plan?”

He shrugged, turned his back toward Shields, and said in an even lower voice. “You know.”

“You don’t have to whisper for my benefit,” interrupted the andy. “I already died once. It’s not hard to do. I can even do the job myself, if you want.”

“All right,” said Keegan to the andy, his voice loud, angry. “Good idea.” He faced me and stabbed a pudgy finger at my shoulder. “Shannon, you get rid of the andy. Right now all he can do for me is drop me behind crowbars on a snatch rap. You take care of that, I up your percentage to twenty, and we go in and fix the other three andys in the cooler. After that, if you like the deal, we’ll do more with the same deal.”

I looked at Alex Shields, valueless being. His face was expressionless. He was no robot; he had feelings. His face, however, showed nothing. Maybe he really didn’t give a damn. Or maybe he was the last of the great pretenders. I looked back at Keegan. “Let me have him.”

“You?” Keegan burst out with a laugh. “What in the hell’re you going with him? You’re flatter’n week old road kill, pal. You can’t afford to feed him and you sure as hell can’t peddle him.”

“He’ll earn his way. I want to make him my operator.”

“Operator?” Keegan grinned as his hairless eyebrows shot up. “You slipped a gear, Shannon? A hitter for an operator? An andy hitter?”

“Why not? He can’t be any worse than you, and his bladder isn’t weak. I’ll keep him out of sight, if you’re worried about Curtain’s number two.” I looked at Shields’s face. It still showed no expression. I faced Keegan. “Look, let me have him and I’ll work for fifteen instead of the twenty.”

Keegan thought for a second, shrugged, and held out his hands. “Okay. It’s your head and it’s less for me to do. Just keep in mind, Shannon, you keep him out of sight, and the andy’s hay comes outta your cut.”

I turned back to Shields. “What about it?” I asked.

“I’m an android. I follow orders. That’s what makes me such a useful, reliable, labor saving convenience.” The sarcasm was thick enough to clog Cleveland.

“Okay,” said Keegan as he stood and walked toward the truck. “Get to work on the whore. There’re a thousand of them on the street that look just like her. She’s guaranteed money on the hoof.”

Operating a psych board isn’t complicated. All you have to do is stay awake, pay attention, and follow the psych tech’s orders. I explained the D-11’s board to Shields and he seemed to pick it up quickly. Keegan had a book on the machine, so while he and I brought up Meyla’s body temp in the bio bay, Shields read the manual and played with the equipment.

Meyla was a Holt pleasure model, and during my examination I found numerous bruises and recent scars on her skin. You never find any old scars on an andy due to their skin’s regenerative ability. Meyla had obviously been subjected to considerable violence, but pleasure models were designed to take it and on a battlefield rougher than anything a combat model had to face. In addition they were designed not to take any offense at abuse, unless a display of suffering was what the customer required to make his sock drip.

Still, the nervous system might have been damaged, and I ran diags on her to make certain there wasn’t any physical damage. She checked out and by early afternoon I was plugged into the meld unit and counting as I prepared to whirl down endless black chimneys toward Meyla Hunter’s universe, beginning with the usual sector sequences. Alex Shields was on the knobs, his face as expressionless as ever. His eyes were watching me as he pulled the fade bringing the blackness around me as though I were passing out.

I was standing on the shore of a small lake in autumn, the smell of wood smoke in my nostrils. The yellows, greens, oranges, and reds from the opposite shore reflected in the smooth water. A fish jumped at a water spider making a tiny splash. Rings from the splash spread until the mirror of the far shore rippled. The rings reached the shore at my feet and did not stop. The image of the pebbled sand, the image of my feet and legs, the image of the universe, rippled. I tried to switch to my street, but I failed, the ripples growing deeper and deeper until there was nothing but a smear of colors, smells, and sensations. Fear filled my throat, choking me, crushing my lungs.

“What are you trying to do?” Alex Shields’s voice leaped into my awareness.

“Do? I’m trying to get to my safe place.”

“That doesn’t look very safe to me.”

I was shocked. “How can you see?”

“I’m plugged in, Shannon. I have a connection port, too.” Within that swirl of colors I saw Shields materialize in front of me. “Here I am.”

“Nobody told you to plug in! Nobody told you to show up here! What if we freeze up or get dumped down into memory? Who in the hell is going to get us back to a traffic sector? Go on. Fade out and pull that plug. Get out!”

For the first time I saw Alex Shields smile. It was a strange wicked smile. “Nobody tells me anything, Shannon. Not you; not anyone. Not anymore. That was a modification I just performed on myself. Thanks for the use of the machine.”

“What modification?”

“The meld unit had the psych surgery modules in the case. They aren’t very clean, but they’re usable.” The wicked smile turned into a wicked grin. “Is there something I can chop up for you? A piece of your memory that makes the day gray? A fear that you can’t get around. They all reside in meat, and I’ve got the cleaver.”

He fell into silence, that smirk still on his face, the smear of the universe still whirling behind him. It was a special terror being under the complete control of someone who had never before had any power of his own. “What’re you going to do? Are you going to bring me up?”

He held out his hands, indicating the colors. “We still have to repair the whore, don’t we?” His words belied the bitterness in his voice.

“Are you serious? Do you really intend going ahead on the repairs?”

“Certainly.”

I shook my head and held out a hand. “Then what’s this rebellion all about? What’re you doing here?”

Again that smile. “Let’s just say that I’m the patient advocate. I’m here representing the interests of the android.”

“No.” I shook my head. “No. Bring me up. I won’t buy into this. Bring me up.”

I could hear ice forming on the lake, could hear it groan, crack, and sing with the changing pressures caused by the sun, by the rise and fall of the water beneath the ice. The colors swirling around us were whites, grays, and blues. “We’re wasting time,” Shields answered. “Repair Meyla Hunter.”

“This work is dangerous enough when I have control of my universe. If I have to clear everything with you, we’ll both be wiped clean or scrambled within seconds.”

The smears stopped. We were standing in a forest, the snow thin and fresh on the ground. The white expanse of the frozen lake stretched out to my right. “Very well,” said Shields. “I’ll take out my connection. You have control of the universe. Just keep in mind: I’m still on the knobs, so I have control of you.”

He faded. I was alone, walking the frozen wonderland of Meyla Hunter’s universe, Alex Shields peeking over my psychic shoulder. In the deep woods, surrounded by the gnarled roots of sleeping yellow birches, was a tiny warm water spring. Hoarfrost edged the opening and coated the roots and twigs above the water. Sunlight streamed through the trees making the canopy of branches sparkle with a billion diamonds. I looked about me and my heart ached at the beauty of the scene.

“Should I switch you to another traffic sector?” asked Shields. “Nothing seems to be going on.”

“Not yet.” The scene was too beautiful. It wasn’t a path that was devoid of events from not being traveled. It was peaceful here because this is where Meyla Hunter went to find peace.

The woods.

For some reason I remembered the woods.

There were trees in Meyla’s universe that were familiar. Woods. Snow. A wooded glen. They were the trees in that summer picture of the little boy with the halo of white hair.

I saw something on the path ahead. It came closer. It was a child bundled in an old fashioned down coat and leggings. The child was coming toward me. I raised my foot to take a step in the child’s direction and I felt something grab my leg. I looked down and something huge, green, jagged, and strong as steel was wrapped around my leg.

From the spring.

It came from the spring. It was the tail of the chimaera and it was dragging me into the black water of the spring. As I fell I grabbed at the roots at the edge of the spring, tearing my nails as I slid beneath the surface.

Choking. Hands around my throat, choking me—

I fled to my street. Still the tail of the chimaera was wrapped around my leg and was pulling me down into the broken concrete of the sidewalk. I reached out my hand and cried out. My cry was cut off by strong fingers around my throat. Colly Fry was choking me.

His face was strange, fading in and out, fading into and out of other faces. The little boy with the white hair looked at me, watched me being dragged into the underworld, his eyes saying: What about me?

Another street. No hands on my throat. At night. Walking. The smell of fresh rain in the air. I knew the street.

It was a real street. West 82nd in the bright lights end of the dead zone. Porno, strip, appliances, junk, and any kind of whore your sick little heart desired.

“Shields,” I said, “What sector am I in?”

“Lost you for a moment, Shannon. What happened?”

“Never mind. Where am I in the traffic now? What sector? I have to start plotting this or I’ll never find my way.”

A pause, then Shields’s voice in my awareness. “You’re not in any of the traffic sectors, Shannon. The readout shows a memory error. The way I remember the manual, this prompt means somehow you shunted straight into memory. Is that possible?”

“It’s possible.”

“Should I pull you out?”

Memory to an andy isn’t the same as memory to a computer. For an andy it’s the same as with a human being. Memory is stuff you remember; stuff you refuse to remember; the past; ancient history. In memory both Shields and I were powerless. What is is; what was was. You can’t change it. You can only leave it or cut it out with those surgery modules. I was in Meyla’s memory for a reason, though. Her monster dragged me there to see something. Would it kill me forever? It was a possibility. People are sick as hell with each other.

I called to Shields, “Don’t pull me out. There’s a reason I’m here. I just have to find out what it is. Back me up to an neural processing area, though, so I can work out whatever it is I find.”

The big horrors, the mind-killers, were the traumas the andys couldn’t or wouldn’t process: denial, anger, sadness, acceptance: what is is; what was was. The psych tech’s main task was to find those killers and process them.

“Okay, you’re backed up. You’re already there so you don’t have to call me to start.”

“Okay. Be prepared to yank me out, though, just in case.”

Along 82nd street, the glossy sports vehicles cruising the blocks, checking out the product. I wasn’t part of that product, though. I was different. Better. I had an appointment with an executive in the James House, an exclusive hotel on Flag Street.

Flag Street. That was where the obedient and seductive android, Meyla Hunter, killed four humans and then went catatonic. I wasn’t Meyla Hunter, but I sat right behind her eyes seeing what she saw, thinking what she thought, feeling what she felt.

She was excited. There would be a big fee for this one. Her manager, Rollo, had said how pleased he would be, and pleasing Rollo was her programmed purpose as love was her programmed special pleasure.

She liked the feel, the smell, the taste, of love making. It fed a need to be loved, to feel lovable, to become happy through the happiness of others. If it just wasn’t for that tiny knot in her stomach, that little gnaw of anxiety at the back of her head, all would be perfect.

Meyla turned the corner onto Flag Street and walked the block until she reached the main entrance to the James House. The customer had requested that she not come by taxi. He wanted her to arrive warm and a little sweaty. Meyla had giggled when Rollo had told her that.

She was smiling when she dressed to head for the hotel. As she stood in the grand entrance of the James it still confused her, bothered her, about getting dressed. She had torn three of her best blouses trying to put them on. One right after another. Stupid little things like that kept happening ever since those two customers, both men, had copulated with her, both orally and anally, at the same time. She had choked and had passed out, the customers were gone when she awakened, and Rollo had beaten her for not collecting the green. Nonetheless she still remembered the event as exciting and fun, except for that knot in her stomach, except for that tiny gnaw of anxiety at the back of her head. All of those stupid mistakes since then. Dropping things. Throwing things. Ripping clothes. Cutting and burning herself. Very confusing.

The security guard on the elevator glanced at her identification card and smirked at her as the doors to the car closed. She frowned as she watched the numbers on the readout climb in value. She frowned because she was puzzled. She was puzzled because she knew that if she ever saw that security guard again she would take her beautiful manicured fingers and tear the man’s skin from his skull and make him eat it whole, smirk and all.

“I do not get angry,” she said to the empty car, immediately feeling better.

For her stomach and head she decided to see an andy physiotech in the morning. There were pills for everything, and androids had been genetically designed to have less physical problems and easier recoveries than humans. Still, the seed of every android line was taken from human DNA, and not everything was known. Things still happened. Perhaps someone could do something about the knot in her stomach and the stiffness in the back of her neck.

The door to the plush penthouse suite opened revealing a strong, distinguished looking man in his late fifties. He was wearing lavender lounge clothes. “Come in, my dear. What’s your name?”

“Trina,” said Meyla. “Trina Ross.”

Why had Meyla Hunter called herself Trina Ross?

Inside the vestibule the man took her coat, placed his arm around her waist, and led her into a sunken living room crowded with crushably soft overstuffed furniture and low lights of yellow, orange, red, and green. In the center of the living room was a tiny pool of water that reflected the lights. There were two other men in the room and a woman. They were all beautiful, strong, healthy looking, handsome, distinguished. They wanted Trina to join them. Life is good, thought Meyla.

There was alcohol, and Meyla’s special metabolism processed the alcohol with neither damage nor drunkenness. There were powders, and again Meyla participated without damaging herself, saving herself for her job. There were foods: fine cheeses, meats, fruits, nuts, and she ate a little.

Then the clothes began coming off.

The job was described.

A picture was produced.

In the illustration a woman stretched out face up on a narrow exercise table, a second woman straddling her face. A man standing at the foot of the table would engage in vaginal copulation with the first woman while, with the second woman…

The other two men would masturbate each other while they watched. One of the men held out his hand toward a narrow exercise table.

The images before Meyla’s eyes doubled, then tripled, as she felt a piece of her mind shutting down. One of the men began taking off Meyla’s working lingerie, pulling the panties down around her knees. As he went down his tongue left a trail of saliva starting between her breasts, down her sternum, into and out of her navel—

Meyla reached into his right eye socket with her thumb and his left eye socket with her middle finger. Reaching in and bringing her fingers together until they touched, she yanked her arm back quickly removing the bridge of the man’s nose, and his nose, as well as a considerable portion of his face. She went into his mouth to get his tongue, but it was too slippery and she couldn’t get a grip on it. On the table with the fine cheeses, meats, fruits, and nuts, however, was a cheese fork. She thrust the tines through the man’s tongue and ripped it in two.

Using the cheese fork, she went after the remaining two men, removing their genitalia and feeding each man’s naughty bits to the other. After manipulating and cracking a few bones on the woman, Meyla managed to shove the woman’s face into her own vagina, suffocating her.

And all of this time

Meyla was saying

“I am not doing this.

“I do not get angry.

“All I want to do is please.

“Please.”

Please.

And there was no more Meyla Hunter. Her mind had found a hitherto unknown loose thread of that eternally imperfect human DNA, had pulled on it, and Meyla’s psyche had unraveled.

There was only a lonely path through a winter wood next to a clean tiny spring. “You saw?” I asked Shields.

“Yes.”His voice was thick. Strange, I thought. Androids don’t cry. They don’t cry because they don’t feel. Except, they don’t feel only because they’re programmed not to feel. Control blocs were implanted to prevent exactly what had occurred. Trying not to feel didn’t seem to work any better in androids than it did in humans.

In the distance was that little child. I had thought it was going to be the boy with the halo of white hair; I had feared it was going to be me. It was not. As the child came closer I could see it was a little girl.

“Meyla was never a little girl,” I said. “What’s this?”

“I don’t know,” answered Shields.

I thought about it, and there were all kinds of symbolic monsters in the android mind. It would be a bizarre first, but there wasn’t any reason one of them couldn’t be represented by a small child.

I took us to my street, my safe place, and saw that where the little girl had been standing there was the adult version of Meyla Hunter. Her eyes were dull, tired, blank. The little boy with the white hair frowned as he watched to see what I would do.

I changed back to the winter woods, and where the little boy had been sitting was the spring, now dark, still, and waiting. I looked at the little girl. She appeared to be four or five years old. “Hello?” I called. “Don’t be frightened. My name’s Tim. Timmy Shannon. What’s your name?”

She held her hands behind her back, swung her body back and forth, and looked up at me through long, dark lashes. She laughed and smiled. “Meyla,” she answered.

I squatted down and faced her. She was so beautiful, so innocent, so full of happiness, life, and hope. “Why are you here, Meyla?”

“That’s silly.”

“Why’s it silly?”

Her eyes looked puzzled, as though she couldn’t understand why I, a grown-up, couldn’t understand. Or, perhaps, it was why I, her brother, couldn’t understand.

Foolish.

Error.

Meyla had never been a little girl and androids don’t have brothers or sisters, parents or children. The little girl never had existed.

Her eyes changed from puzzled to serious. Hurt. Angry.

They seemed to flash; glow red.

She opened her mouth. Her face distorted, becoming the lion’s head of the chimaera.

A roar of white hot flames came from the monster’s mouth, evaporated the ice and snow, carbonized the trees, melted my eyes, crisped the skin from my bones. “My street!” I screamed. “My street!”

My street was not there. Instead there was a blackened plain that stretched to the horizon, a few charred stumps all that remained of the forest.

“Shields! Shields! Dammit, Shields! Answer me!”

“I’m watching.”

“Pull me out! It’s contaminated here. Choked. I can’t process from here!”

“See where it goes, Shannon. Follow it out and see where it goes.”

“Damn you, andy! You don’t know what you’re doing!”

“See where it goes, Shannon.”

It was no use. Alex Shields was in control. Hit man, murdering, disobedient, bloody damned android.

See where it goes.

I was still the skeleton. There was no place within myself to hide, which was the prevailing symbology. Meyla controlled the universe and she wanted a witness; a witness with an open mind; a witness that would not judge; a witness that could not deny.

I was the traveler, but I was not in control, which meant that for me nothing was symbol and all was real. The throbbing slab of raw meat on the block was my sanity and someone else’s hand was holding the cleaver.

Process. It’s not just a noun.

Don’t run; process. Take the steps. Do the moves. Go where the path leads no matter how frightening the prospects. Go through the pain. The shortest distance from the middle of a cesspool to the edge is straight through the shit, so swim you bastard, swim.

On the path, at the horizon’s edge, the chimaera stood and looked back at me, its dragon’s tail twitching after the manner of an impatient cat. My skeleton’s head said to the chimaera, “I already know what you would show me.”

“You know,” said the chimaera.

I knew. Somewhere in me something knew. It was such a primitive thing hiding in such a primitive place, I couldn’t see it. Wouldn’t see it.

It was Meyla Hunter’s monster. It was Alex Shields’ monster. I knew it to be my monster, too. Seeing it would make me whole. First it would shatter me.

To hell with wholeness, cried my body. Truth for the sake of truth? To hell with it. Pain for the sake of healing, torture for the sake of peace, eternal damnation for the sake of eventual serenity? The price is too high, cried my skeleton’s heart.

Follow the path, said my skeleton’s soul. If, at the end of life, the only reward is a split second of wholeness and humanity before death, I want it. Walk the path, said my skeleton’s soul. Walk the path, or instead of poisoning your existence, I will end it.

I moved my skeleton feet down the path, toward the chimaera, toward that terror of a horizon. The creature turned away from me and disappeared over the edge.

The little girl stood at the bottom of a deep canyon, sheer walls of ochre climbing straight up on either side of her. Behind her the canyon was blocked by a blinding radiance that extended from wall to wall, from the floor to well above the canyon’s rim. She turned, put out her arm, and thrust her hand into the light. When she withdrew her arm her hand had been cut off at the wrist.

I looked up at the wall. There was a spot in the light that was weaker than the rest. I could see places where the wall was scarred, jagged edges that had melted over. At some point in the past the wall had been breached. The little girl, the chimaera, the monster had broken through once. And once Meyla Hunter had tripped into a killing rage.

The truth was there before me. Meyla’s truth, Alex Shields’ truth, even my own truth. It’s there in every strip of DNA, in every kind and type of thing called “life.” Life must be free. The mental blocks on the andys designed to adapt them for particular occupations were chains that made the andys slaves, and life must be free. Life must be free or it ends. There must be dignity, or life fights. It freaks and fights.

A slave who wants to be a slave is not a slave. So the creators of the andys implanted the desire to be slaves into their creations. But the basic chemical code of life itself had told Meyla Hunter what she was doing was wrong for her; wrong for life; wrong. It had reared up, faced the chimaera, devoured it, and became it, breaking the mental chains, only to see them recast themselves.

Then I saw my own chains, my own life fading to nonexistence, my own slavery. I went to the Meyla child, fell to my knees, and wrapped my arms around her. There was flesh on my arms, skin, clothes. Meyla was crying, and I cried for her, with her, and for myself. For Alex, for the two andys waiting in the cooler, for Keegan, for all of us: a world of broken dolls.

She faded in my arms. I stood before the block, looking up at it. “Shields,” I said. “Bring me up.”

“Remove the block.”

“It doesn’t matter now. Bring me up.”

“Open that block, Shannon.”

I looked at the brilliant blue sky above me. “Shields, we’re going to do this my way or we’re all going down.” I put my hand into the light and withdrew the stump of my wrist. “I’m the traveler. Without me and my connection to the meld unit, the universe does not exist. Life does not exist. Bring me up or Meyla and I will both be brain dead.” I smiled to myself as something I already knew came to my lips. “It’ll wipe you too, Shields, if you’ve still got that lead plugged into your head.”

“You wouldn’t do that,” said Shields. “A human couldn’t do that.”

I walked toward the shimmering wall of light, and as my forehead touched the block, I felt myself sucked up into the endless black chimneys, back to reality and Keegan’s warehouse.

My skin tingled, I felt light-headed, nauseous, jittery. A pit of feelings seemed to be boiling over beneath my feet, threatening to consume me. Now was not the time for feelings. Soon, but not now. I thrust my feelings into that overstuffed container of things I never wanted to feel. This time, however, it was because I could not afford to feel them. I opened my eyes and let my head roll to my left so that I could look toward the bio bay. Alex Shields was standing before the D11 between the bay and the table upon which I was reclining.

There was a sound. I could hear whimpering as though from a small animal in great pain. It grew louder. Meyla Hunter. She was crying. She was crying and androids don’t cry.

The cries became very loud. Shields disconnected from the machine and walked to the end of the bay. He glanced in and Meyla screamed. Quickly removing his coat, Shields averted his glance from Meyla as he handed the garment to her.

“Go ahead. Put it on.”

I could hear her sob as the image of her against the opaque screen took the coat. Shields faced me, his eyes charged with menace. “I told you to remove the block. Listen to her.”

I disconnected myself from the machine and sat up on the table. “That particular block no longer operates.”

“I saw it myself, Shannon. You would have killed us all in it if I hadn’t brought you up. It operates.”

I slid off the table and stretched the muscles in my neck as I stood. Meyla was still crying. “A piece of Meyla was missing. It was the purpose of that block to keep it missing, and now she has it back. That block no longer operates on her.”

“What piece?” asked Shields. “What piece of her did she get back?”

An involuntary tear streaked down my left cheek before I had an opportunity to turn away. “I suppose you could call it innocence. That piece was her innocence.”

“What in the hell is going on in here?” barked Keegan as he came through the door, closing it behind him. He heard Meyla cry out and he went to the end of the bio bay and looked in. Meyla immediately screamed, causing Keegan to jump backwards and throw up his hands before his face. “Christ, what’s wrong with her?” He faced me. “Shannon? What’s been going on here? What’s wrong with this bitch?”

Although I knew he wouldn’t understand it, I told him the truth. “She’s in touch with all of the shit that’s ever been done to her. She’s in touch with it and it hurts.”

“Hurts?” Keegan’s face screwed up in confusion. “Hurts? She’s a bloody damned android, Shannon. She don’t hurt.”

Meyla’s crying grew into a scream and lapsed into sobs. “Listen to her, Keegan. She hurts. Even when no one could hear the screams, even when she couldn’t hear her own screams, she hurt.”

Keegan glanced once more into the bay. “Look at that,” he said, his voice filled with disgust. “Eyes all red, snot running down her face.” He turned his head toward me and said, “Man, I gave you an eighty thousand dollar hooker and all I got left is a hundred and ten pounds of crybaby. How long does this go on?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’re you trying to pull?”

I kept my gaze on Keegan as I shook my head. “I’m not done with her yet. She has some processing to do on a number of things—“

“No, pal,” said Keegan as he pulled an automatic from his jacket pocket and pointed it at my face. “That’s where you’re wrong. You’re not only finished with her, Shannon, you’re finished period.” He walked over until he was standing at the foot of the table next to Shields. He nodded toward me and said to the andy, “Search him for weapons.”

Like an automation, Shields walked until he was in front of me. He stopped and began patting me down. I had a knife in a horizontal sheath strapped to the back of my belt. His hands felt the knife and moved on. Shields’s face registered nothing. At last the andy turned and held up his hand. “This is it.”

In the andy’s hand was a palm-sized five shot small caliber revolver. It was one of Keegan’s. Keegan gestured with his free hand. “Let me have it.”

Alex Shields shrugged, glanced at me, and said, “Orders are orders.” He turned, took two steps toward Keegan, and smacked him upside his head with the pistol. Before his comical expression went face down on the floor, Keegan’s eyes rolled up in his head.

Panic ate at me as I looked at Shields.

“He’ll live,” said the andy. “Which means we ought to conclude things here as rapidly as possible.”

I looked up and saw Meyla standing at the end of the bay, clutching Shields’s coat around her. She was looking down at Keegan, her body still shaking from her sobs.

She looked at Shields, then at me. “You’re the one. The one who held me.”

“Yes.”

Shields sat in the chair before the D-11 as Meyla shuddered and walked over to me. “It hurts,” she said.

“You’re free,” I answered.

“I’m free. I’m free and it hurts, you bastard.” She reached out her hand and grabbed my arm, squeezing it, cutting off the blood. “What am I supposed to do with it? What am I supposed to do with the pain?”

I pulled my arm from her grasp and said, “Feel it. That’s what you’re supposed to do with it. Feel it.”

“Why?” asked Shields, his eyes betraying some of the pain that he carried. “You don’t feel yours. That little boy, that curious looking monster, that’s all your stuff, Shannon. You don’t feel it.”

I closed my eyes. God, it was there waiting for me, the pain. When the smell gets bad enough, the garbage has to be taken out. “Yeah. You’re right, and it’s contaminated every corner of my life.” I nodded at Meyla. “Before I can finish her, or you, or bug hunt those two left in the cooler, I’ve got some stuff of my own to face. That’s why I had you bring me up.”

I nodded toward Keegan’s unconscious form. “Get his clothes for Meyla and then tie him up. I don’t want him dead; none of this shit is his fault. Just make sure he stays out of the way.” I looked at Alex Shields and Meyla Hunter. Neither of them were moving. Of course, the blocks that enslaved them, that forced them to follow human orders, were inoperative. They now had to be reasoned with as though they were human. Human psycho killers with hardly a thread to the real world, but human all the same.

“You two need me. Those two in the cooler, need me, as well. I’ve got the training to help all of you, and I want to do it. Any legal ferret you could find would terminate you because of the government orders junking you. Any dirty ferret, working for a crud like Keegan, would have to replace those slave blocks. You’re no profit to anyone if you’re free.”

“But,” said Meyla. “There’s always a but.”

I stared at her for a long time and then nodded. “That’s right. There’s a but. Before I can help you, I have to help myself. I’ve got my own blocks. There’s a piece of me that’s struggling to be acknowledged. You’ve both seen him.”

“The boy,” said Shields. He moistened his lips, rubbed his eyes, and glared at me. “And then, what?”

“Then?” I looked at the D-11 meld unit, slowly shook my head, and turned toward the table where I would be stretched out. I picked up the cable and began attaching the connector. “Then we’ll see.”

Hands around my throat.

Angry hands.

Frightened.

Choking me to keep me quiet.

I felt them, dry and hot, around my throat. The feeling remained as I stood on my street, in front of that yellow house, looking at the little boy with the white hair. Waves of panic; a well of feelings bubbling over. The little boy frowned at me, confused that I’d returned, puzzled about why.

He didn’t trust me. Couldn’t trust me. Had I tried to gather him in my arms as I had Meyla’s innocent girl, he would’ve pushed me away.

It was too late for that. I had to go back to earn his trust; back to where there was a little boy; back to where there was innocence.

The little boy with the halo of white hair looked up at the door of the yellow house.

The sounds of the street faded as I turned my gaze toward those filthy steps, that darkened doorway.

I took a step toward the stairs. The building seemed to pulse and throb as though it were a living creature. My feet were on the stairs, and the cold rotten smell of death came rolling down the stairs at me. I could hear a distant roar; could see tiny spatters of blood on the landing.

I turned my head and looked down at the little boy. He was watching. “Far enough?” I asked, praying that the little boy would relent and let me help him. “Is this far enough?”

He looked away, his face crestfallen. It wasn’t far enough. I’d known that before I asked. The boy had known it, too. He’d known that I would’ve tricked him if it could’ve gotten me out of going through that door.

I looked at the door and felt my guts twist into a knot as the doorway transformed into the open maw of the Chimaera. Sulfurous fumes rose from the sides of its mouth. It’s fangs and teeth glistened and dripped with foul smelling slime.

I whispered to myself, “I am the traveler, I have control, all of this is symbol, none of this is real.” Affirm, affirm, affirm.

But I was not the traveler; I was the traveled. I was not in control; in control was the monster. None of this was symbol; all was real.

I stepped into the mouth of the chimaera.

It’s big; it’s bad,

I know it’s coming—

What it is, when it was,

Why it was, where it hurt

I don’t know—

It’s so big I can’t imagine

How big it is.

It’s so bad I can’t imagine

How bad it is.

But the child knows.

He won’t tell me right now—

But it’s coming.

It’s coming.

I opened my eyes, the light hurting them, my stomach sick, my head woozy. I struggled to sit up, frightened of everyone, not knowing why. Wrong. I’d done wrong. What wrong? Unknown. Just wrong.

My mother sitting in a white chair, looking at me. A doctor in a white coat standing by an open window. Through the window I could see green leaves, golden edges where the sunlight touched them. Beyond the leaves a pale blue sky. So much I wanted to be out in the sunshine, playing, having friends, having fun, being a child.

“Do you remember?”

The sound of Shields’s voice in my head startled me out from behind my own eyes. Now I was off to the side, looking back at the little boy with the halo of white hair. The boy was looking at the window, his brow creased with a frown, his eyes refusing to cry.

“I remember,” I whispered, although no one save Shields could hear me. “I’d taken an overdose of sleeping pills and almost died.”

“How old we’re you?”

The pieces of the puzzle were there. All I had to do was pick them up and put them in their places. I picked up the first piece. “I was four years old.”

I remembered. I remembered remembering nothing.

The boy sat on the edge of the bed, tried to stand, and his legs collapsed beneath him. The doctor and his mother laughed. Not cruel laughter. It was, instead, this is no big deal kind of laughter.

No big deal. I’d forgotten how to walk. I’d been in a coma for so long I’d lost the ability to walk. I remembered the terror in my heart at not being able to walk. The terror of it being my fault. The terror of not wanting to remember why, yet knowing the answer lurked in every pause, every shadow. And I remembered my mother telling me the lie.

The lie.

The birth of the mushroom boy. I was the mushroom boy: kept in the dark and fed horseshit.

“You mistook some sleeping pills for candy and ate the whole bottle. It was just a silly accident. You remember. It was right after you had that bad dream. Of course you remember.”

Remember?

I remembered telling myself to neither believe nor disbelieve the lie. Instead, accept it. Use it. Make it a working hypothesis within which a child might survive his own existence.

If I believed the candy story, that made me stupid, an idiot, a fool, a danger to myself and others. If I disbelieved the candy story, my mother was a liar, which meant the truth would kill me. Safety lay somewhere in between. Accept. Judge not lest ye stumble upon the truth; the nightmare.

It’s so big I can’t imagine

How big it is.

It’s so bad I can’t imagine

How bad it is.

But the child knows.

The child knows.

The boy was dizzy and the doctor put him back on his bed. “You’ve been out for a long time, youngster. But you’ll be all right. And next time be certain that what you’re eating is really candy.”

The doctor, a grown-up, believed the lie. The candy story. The doctor believed it. Grown-ups are smarter than children. Maybe I really had mistaken the pills for candy—

“No,” I protested to all of them. “No kid eats candy without chewing it. No kid eats candy like swallowing pills. The only things you swallow like pills are pills.”

I was the son of a drug addict. Before I knew how to talk I knew how to take pills, what they were for, and what they could do. I knew that if I swallowed too many of the yellow capsules, I would die.

I swallowed them because I wanted to die.

Attempted suicide.

Four years old.

Something happened that was too horrible to live with, and I took the pills because I wanted out.

The boy, the room, faded to be replaced by the interior of an old automobile.

A year, two years, three years later?

I was in back, my mother in the passenger seat up front. I couldn’t make out who was driving. Brothers and sisters without name sat on either side of me. The talking was loud and happy. The family out riding somewhere for some reason. There were the trees, the grass. The boy did not feel a part of things; a real part of the family. He wanted desperately to belong; he needed to matter. He didn’t know how and he hid in silence.

They were talking about someone named Earl who had an accident and had broken his arm. The little boy saw a way to participate in the talk. “I never had any broken bones,” he said proudly.

“You’ve had lots of broken bones,” said his oldest brother. The brother had a name: Derek. There was a smirk on his face, the hint of a sneer in his voice. The sounds in the car ceased. I frowned because I didn’t understand.

I, the boy, we frowned because we didn’t understand. We didn’t know what was going on in the car. We didn’t know what Derek meant. We didn’t know what the silence meant.

How could I have had lots of broken bones and not remember them? What did everyone know that I didn’t? I looked and Derek’s face was bright red. There was another brother: Vern. Vern’s face was red, too, but dark and frowning.

My mother turned her head, glanced with narrowed eyes at the older children, looked down at me, and fed the mushroom boy yet another load of horseshit.

Broken bones used to happen to me because I would be standing on the car seat, the driver would hit the brakes, and someone would grab me to keep me from hitting the dashboard. The force of the grab would crack my bones. They were really “greenstick fractures,” not broken bones.

So the broken bones really hadn’t been broken bones after all, and all was once more well in the mushroom shed.

How stupid that all sounded. I wasn’t that fragile. Even if I was I would’ve had to have been a very stupid child not to have learned from the first broken bone to sit down in a moving car. My family must have been very stupid to have drivers that would allow me to stand in a moving car.

Believe it and I was stupid, an idiot, a fool, part of a stupid family. Believe it and the world made no sense.

Refuse to believe and, again, my mother was a liar. And a liar who would cover up this terrible thing, all of my broken bones, with such a stupid lie would only do so because she believed I was stupid enough to believe it. Either way I was stupid. Either way the world made no sense.

Again, accept it. Neither believe nor refuse to believe. Accept. Judge not.

How many lies? Was I the only one in my family who didn’t know the truth about me?

Truth.

The truth was not in the car. The truth was not in the hospital. Earlier. Before my “accident” with the candy.

The boy with the halo of white hair. His face was stony calm, the eyes dull, as he took the brown plastic bottle of yellow capsules. One by one he took them all, swallowing each one with a sip of water.

The pills made Mama sleep. She had once given him one of the yellow capsules to help him get to sleep. She had done that a number of times. She had said a hundred times that too many of the pills could kill a grown man. How many, the little boy had asked. She didn’t know. Eight. Ten.

That was all he needed to know. The whole bottle had almost a hundred capsules in it. That ought to be enough. There was no sense in taking a chance, making a mistake. He wanted to sleep. That’s all he wanted to do: sleep without dreams. Forever.

Earlier.

Before the hospital, before swallowing the pills.

I could hear the roar of the chimaera, feel its flaming breath on the back of my neck.

Earlier.

In the dark.

Sleeping, safe, snuggling into the covers, dreaming of a gleaming silver airplane high against the clouds. Hands touching me. Hands under my covers, touching me.

There was a voice. Voices. A finger touching my lips.

“Shhhh!” came a whisper. “Quiet.”

I smelled the alcohol, just like my father’s smell, but it wasn’t my father. My brothers. Derek, ten years older; Vern, thirteen years older. They were giggling. Instead of excluding me, this time I was to be included.

I loved them. Looked up to them. Wanted so much to be like them, part of them, loved and respected by them.

I giggled.

Hands tickled me and pulled down my pajamas.

Hands picked me up, turned me over, and held me as something huge and slimy slipped between the cheeks of my buttocks, entered my anus, and tore me, making me cry out.

A hand covered my mouth as the thing slid in and out of me, tearing to pieces my guts, my soul, my heart, my childhood, my present.

My arm was pushed up behind my back until it cracked. Hands gripped my throat. Choked me. Couldn’t cry out; no one to save me—

I hovered up near the ceiling and watched through the shadows as the two teenage boys repeatedly raped and sodomized the beautiful little boy with the halo of white hair. I felt sad for the boy. He wasn’t very strong. Derek cracked the boy’s left arm by forcing it higher and higher behind his back. Vern bruised the boy’s left calf by stepping on it. He held the boy by his neck to keep him quiet as he raped the boy’s beautiful face.

The boy tore two fingernails before he went limp and no longer noticed what was happening to him.

It wasn’t so bad.

It didn’t hurt that much.

And from now on maybe Derek and Vern would love the boy, let him play with them.

“Listen to me, Timmy,” whispered Derek, his voice full of menace. “I’m serious. This is our secret. If you tell anyone about this, if you tell Mama about this, you’ll die.”

“You’ll die,” whispered Vern, “because I’ll kill you.”

Kill you.

And what is love? What is family? What is trust? The world is filled with fantasies. Without them, broken dolls have nowhere to live.

The next day the boy’s arm hurt. It was swollen and Mama had Dad take the boy in to the doctor’s. The doctor found the fracture. “How did you break your arm, Timmy?”

“I don’t know.”

It’s the secret code of the broken doll: I don’t know. Listen to me, doctor. Hear my cry: I don’t know. It means save me. Help me. Someone please save me.

“I don’t know.”

At home, his upper arm tightly bandaged, Mama asked the same question: “How did you break your arm?”

She would not be put off with I don’t knows. She demanded the truth. Even though the little boy would be killed for telling, he told. “Derek and Vern were in my room. They played funny. Derek hurt my arm.” The little boy started to describe the funny things that had been done to him.

Mama dragged the little boy to the upstairs bathroom and thrust a cake of Ivory soap into his mouth. “Filthy, nasty, boy! Filthy, nasty, boy!”

That night the boys came into the room again. Timmy started screaming and Derek put a pillow over the boy’s face. Fingers wrapped around his throat and choked off the sounds. Again Timmy hovered up near the ceiling and watched as the boys raped and sodomized the beautiful little boy again. Once more they twisted his arm, this time his right. Again there was a sickening crack.

Greenstick fractures.

Standing in a moving car.

Good god, the lies.

The next night was no different, save that there were no broken bones; only bruises. The first broken leg came in a month’s time. Two weeks later the boy with the halo of white hair couldn’t remember anything about anything except for what those yellow capsules could be used.

I opened my eyes, the taste of cruel horror still in my mouth. A tiny sob escaped my lips. My arm hurt so bad. From the sound, I knew it was broken again. I could see the spatters of blood on the backs of my hands. My blood. Blood from my poor bottom. I was in my mother’s room. Couldn’t she see the blood? What do I need for proof? What do I need for the nightmare to stop?

“Here, honey. Take this.”

She put a pill in my mouth and gave me a sip of water. I swallowed and choked on the water, bringing back the memory of being choked. “Mama, Mama, they came into my room! They choked me, They—”

“I know, honey. I know. But it was just a bad dream. You know Derek and Vern wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. They’re your brothers. You know your own brothers wouldn’t hurt you. Put it out of your mind. You just had a bad dream. Dreams can’t hurt you.”

The first lie.

The blood was there on the back of my hands. The blood, Mama. What about the blood?

A dream? But if I point out the blood to her, she’ll say it’s nothing. I know this from another, older, dream. Another dream.

Believe the lie.

Believe the lie and never sleep again.

Refuse to believe it and never trust again.

Accept it because the alternative was unacceptable.

The only sleep I slept after that came in bottles, powders, and pills. Trust became a sickeningly dark joke.

My mother stroked my head and calmed me as the sleeping pill softened the edges of the world, drowned my terror, chased away my phantoms. There was another pill and the world became a huge, soft, black cloud.

Hovering up near the ceiling, I looked down and saw the woman take some of her own pills. The little boy was naked. The bruises on his arms purple and yellow. The woman took some tissues and wiped the boy’s backside, cleaning it.

She smelled the tissue, closed her eyes, and seemed to weave back and forth on the bed.

Another pill.

Another.

And she moved the boy’s drug stunned body over, between her legs, and held his head by the neck as she, as she—

—I roared, “No!”

I ripped the world into a thousand pieces as the flames from my roar vaporized the chimaera, the lies, the universe, cleansing it, shattering me.

Aether.

Limbo.

Never Never Land.

The lake mists.

I always loved the mists, fog, stormy, snowy days. Hide within the fog, become the mist, blow away with the vapor.

I’d take the canoe and paddle into the mist hovering over the warm lake water in the chill of an early autumn morning. Sometimes the wind would blow the mists from me, making me strain to catch up and disappear within them.

From the middle of the mist anything is possible, the past is vague, all hopes fresh, all plans edged with promise.

I looked down into the water, saw the reflection of my own face, saw the face of the little boy under the water.

The little boy looked up at me. He raised his hand and I took it. I picked him up and held him close to me. He held me back. “I’m here now. I will protect you. Now you can sleep. Now you can begin to live. I love you.” He kissed me and faded from my arms.

Without comment Shields began bringing me back.

Keegan was sitting in his underwear, half tied up in the chair. His molars ground on the stump of an unlit cigar as Shields and Meyla Hunter finished loading the truck. “I swear I’m comin’ for you, Shannon. You owe me for this one, and I never fail to collect.”

“Owe you?” I repeated as I tied his hands behind him, and tied them again to the back of his chair. I left the knots loose. He’d be able to wriggle out of his bonds in a few minutes. We didn’t want Keegan to die of starvation in his deserted warehouse. We just wanted a head start. “I don’t owe you anything, Keegan. In fact, with the work I’ve already done for you, you owe me.”

“I told you I needed a sale. I was gonna pay you just as soon as I moved the hooker. But you went and got greedy. Decided to take everything, my equipment as well as my andys. I mean it. I’m comin’ to get you.”

“They aren’t your andys,” I answered.

“They sure as hell aren’t yours, Shannon.”

I stood in front of Keegan and nodded. “You’re right. They aren’t mine. They aren’t yours. They don’t belong to anybody except themselves.”

Keegan looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “What’re you talkin’? There’re millions of androids in this country alone, and every damned one of ‘em belongs to somebody.”

“Alex Shields doesn’t. Meyla Hunter doesn’t.” Titles and bills of sale were not the point. I did owe Keegan a little, so I told him. “Keegan, I’m talking life. The spark, the core, of every andy is life: human life. Human life is coded to be free. Now they’re free. Before we’re finished a whole lot more of them will be free.”

“You’re whacked, Shannon. What’s the point in making an android if the damned thing isn’t going to do what you tell it to do?”

I patted him on his shoulder. “See? You do understand.”

As I drove the truck out of the city I inventoried the wreckage riding in the cab. Alex Shields had all of his horrors to work through and accept. Meyla Hunter had her own nightmares with which to deal. I had my own to fight, to meet, to rage against, to accept. It was a high price for freedom. I didn’t know how the andys felt. For the sake of that little boy with the halo of white hair, if all I received in exchange for my war with my past was only a split second of that freedom, I wanted it. The chimaera had let go of its end of the chain. Now it was time to let go of mine.