Chapter 1: The Fall

It was dark in the cabin with my comrades. We’d turned off the lights so that the officers would assume we were observing curfew; and the only illumination came from the pale stars, shining through the small thick window mounted high on one of those walls.

Lounging about in the shadows, my friends leaned on one another like old forgotten dolls in an attic, slumped and silent and content. Pris, her face very pale, was curled up beside me, her head resting on my shoulder. She felt warm next to me, and I savored her nearness. Though her eyes were almost closed, slivers of pupil and iris glittered, near eclipsed by her lashes, and for a moment glinted red.

The order of the day had been battle. It was a big one, a real mother. All of us who’d been in combat were worse for wear. I had just returned from having my arm sewed back on (Painful experience, that, not one I’d recommend-- unless, of course, in the case of loss of limb, which I do not endorse under any circumstances, expect perhaps for someone I don’t like very much at all). Even now, underneath the bandages, my bioengineered flesh was reknitting, muscles binding, bones fusing once more. We heal fast, and without scars.

Leon and Jack were nursing wounds of their own, somewhat less radical than mine but debilitating nevertheless. Zorah, Pris, and Mary were tired out from their own work. Women were assigned different jobs. They didn’t do combat. Mary was a nurse. Zorah did special ops, mostly assassinations. And Pris… well, Pris had the difficult (and, to here her tell it, very strenuous) job of keeping the officers happy. Thus, though we were all normally on the same ship together, Jack, Leon and I got to interact with the opposite sex only rarely. We wouldn’t have held this meeting under such conditions in a million years except that this was the night of the week that we were allowed to see the girls. And, well, we didn’t have a million years.

All the same, I would have preferred to make my pitch to them at a time when they were fresher. Dead on their feet, they wouldn’t hear my words. Dead on mine, however, I could still be damn persuasive. Come on. I gave myself a mental pat on the shoulder. Use that weakness to your advantage!

I stretched my arms behind my back, looking slowly around at my audience, and cleared my throat slightly, with a smile. “So, about making a break for it. . .”

There was a loud collective groan at hearing these words out of my mouth yet again. Someone, I think it was Jack, laughed; and Pris took a good-natured swat at me. I caught at her wrist, my reflexes elastic, and kissed her fingertips. “I’m serious,” I said, attempting to keep my voice casual. “I think we’d better give it a go. See what freedom is.”

“Get real,” Zorah drawled. “I guess you have a death wish, Batty, but none of the rest of us do.”

My lips curved faintly with the irony of it: I, a death wish! What I wanted was life, eternal, unlimited and free. At least, I thought I did, though I couldn’t quite say, having never truly experienced living. This half-existence they granted us here, among the stars, floating forever, let us know more of dying than it had of life. I don’t just mean the killing. The killing was all right. Sometimes, even, it was good. I’m talking about the drifting. In the deep blackness, I had often thought that this must be where real people go where they die. I existed in the bleakness of heaven. When I ended I had no idea where I would go. I hadn’t bothered to figure it out. I didn’t like to think of ending.

These thoughts flickered through my head in an instant, like the lightening blaze of a laser bolt. Time to put my cards on the table; let them know what I knew. I felt my expression becoming more serious.

“I have a life-wish,” I corrected Zorah. “Obviously more than the rest of you, because if you wanted to stay alive as badly as I do, you would have looked for what I found.”

I opened the locker by my cot and pulled out the print-ups, spreading them across the floor for the others to all see. “I finally got into our records.”

There was a gasp at this. The others crowded round, snatching at the papers with their names and numbers, scanning lines anxiously for information. Leon squinted at his, his lips moving slowly as he sounded out words. He’d never been a very good reader. I didn’t pick up mine. I already knew what was on it.

“If you look you’ll see how dearly you’ll pay for losing track of your precious time,” I said loudly and a little harshly.

They were looking, all right. Like me, they didn’t like what they saw. Pris let out a gasp, and her fingers flew to her mouth. Jack swore. Mary trembled slightly as she put her paper down and sat with her eyes fixed dreamily on the middle distance. Zorah hissed under her breath. And Leon just kept staring at the page, as if he trusted that if he looked long enough the words would resolve themselves into something different, a kinder destiny.

“Well?” I said sharply, fiercely, “What did I tell ya?”

Pris’ eyes were filled with tears as she looked at me, but she managed a wobbly smile. “It says I have two months,” she stammered.

I was moved by some strange feeling, vague, confused and troubling, as I looked back at her. Feelings. We didn’t used to have them, not like this. If something hurt, it hurt. If we wanted something, we wanted it, if we got it, we were happy. It was simple. Through the years, the years that passed by so fast without us noticing, they’d become a little less elementary. Pain was no longer a matter of cut-me-and-I-bleed.

Sometimes I’d find myself imagining I could feel other people’s wounds. Their fear. I could almost understand Pris’. If it was anything like mine, she was drowning in it.

I took her hand. “Yes,” I said more softly. “Time flies, doesn’t it?” Anger mounted in me as I thought of what I’d been made. Perfection embodied, with a shelf life of four years! Four years, to keep me from ever realizing fully my potential, from growing beyond control, from surpassing my creators. People were sick. Had to be, to create something like me. Once, when men made perfection, they cut it in stone, so it would be eternal, would live down the centuries. Some of these still stood: the sphinxes, the Pieta. I was a finite work of art.

“Is anyone interested now in listening to what I have to say?” I asked.

Heads lifted, five pairs of red-glinting eyes gazed at me. Each of my friends slowly nodded. I smiled and leaned forward.

“Very good,” I murmured. “Then we’ll have to start making plans.”

Amazing what you can accomplish when you use your head. I used mine and set our deadlines. I wanted to be ready to go in three days. Mary persuaded me that I’d better be generous and allow us five, but we made such good time once we’d designated tasks that we were more than prepared by the time I wanted us to be.

To Mary, the only other member of our party that was mental grade A, I gave the task of research. Pris I put in charge of disguise, because I knew she’d like it, and she’d be next to useless to me if I didn’t give her something to take her mind off her worry (Poor Pris. The only one of us with less time to waste was I). To Leon I gave the duty of standing guard whenever any of us meet to exchange information and otherwise conspire. Jack handled money matters and looked up places for us to stay; Zorah was in charge of arranging things for the getaway. I didn’t have much more to do than cool my heels – the sometimes-privilege of a leader.

Day three was perfect not only because the time span satisfied my impatience, but because it was leave. For the officers – the people, that is. Not us. Never us.

The evening found Pris and I holed up in the cabin of the fleet’s admiral, to which she had been sent to carry out her, ah, duties. I, of course, was not usually her coworker. Tonight, we’d give the old bastard quite the double act when he came in for his pleasure.

“While the cat is away, the mice will play,” I whispered to Pris, and ran my hand down her graceful back to her gently flaring hips.

She giggled, and turning, smiled radiantly up at me. “How do I look?” She asked.

Pris, with her dandelion hair, doll-like face, and a figure that was almost aerodynamic in its sleekness, could never pass for human under close inspection. But at maybe ten paces she would do. To downplay her perfection she’d dressed in a frowsy, flyaway fashion, wearing a large, bulky coat draped over her trim shoulders and an ugly little brown hat on her head. Her smile, underneath its rakish brim, was angelic. She’d stolen the clothes from an officer’s girlfriend’s suitcase, and they didn’t fit her well. I bent down and kissed her, sliding my tongue between her soft, warm lips. Her mouth tasted sweet.

Pris and I were the perfect pair. Physically we were beautifully compatible. Both of us liked it romantic and a little bit dirty – or dirty and a little romantic. I think it might have been the latter. While she wasn’t intellectually quite up to my par (being only mental level B, while I was A) she was definitely smart. Probably it was her lack of any kind of attention span that did it, but at any rate, it was a trait I found charming.

“You look wicked,” I told her.

“Like a human?” She tossed her head and smirked.

My smile faded. “Never that.”

Regarding my dim reflection in the mirror, I watched my own brow wrinkle up slightly with concern. Forget Pris passing, at least she didn’t loom six feet and seven inches tall. Even out of uniform, in the stolen clothes Pris found for me, there was no making me unobtrusive. I’d look like a colossus in a group of real people, turning heads wherever I went. The task seemed suddenly impossible.

I could see my face freeze with resolution; the lopsided smile returning to my lips, the light to my pale blue eyes, as I reminded myself that this was too important not to work.

“What’s he like?” I asked absently, now tracing my own features in the mirror with one finger.

Pris, bending over to pick up a hairbrush she’d caught, twisted her head around to look at me in a contortion no human being could ever have accomplished. “You mean the admiral?” She scowled a little. “You know. Fat. Ugly. And always, always –”

She didn’t finish her sentence. There were footsteps in the hallway. We both froze a little. I felt my heart racing, furiously pumping a rush of blood to my head. Combat.

Pris gave me a funny little smile. “Roy,” she whispered. “You better hide.”

I nodded and slid underneath the bed.

The door creaked open. I saw Pris’ beige high heels pause in mid step and swivel towards it. A pair of flabby ankles entered.

“Hullo, Admiral,” Pris said brightly.

Contented wheezing. Noises of someone taking off his coat. “Ah, Pris. Been playing dress-up, eh? Glad to see me tonight? You ready to play?”

The bed creaked as Pris murmured in the affirmative. I slid my shirt off, wound it tightly into a rope, and pulled it taut between my hands, and emerged.

“I don’t think so,” I said pleasantly to the admiral’s hideous, astounded face. “Tonight, you’re playing with me.”

I gave him time to gawk and get his gun out. And I let him get one shot in. It wouldn’t have been fair otherwise. I didn’t expect him to blood me. The bullet only grazed my ribs, but it was enough to make me furious. In an instant I was on him, knocking the pistol from his grip, twisting the cloth around his neck. He made a feeble protesting choking sound and wriggled a little. His bloated, blotchy hands clenched over mine, but their grip was weak. I stared coldly into his dull, shocked eyes as I gave a final vicious wrench. Bone snapped. He crumpled. A bad smell filled the room as his intestines failed. Then it was all over. The old bugger barely had the balls to fight for his life.

I regarded him as he lay there, and suppressed a flicker of envy. Old. It was an unattractive thing, and from what I’d heard unpleasant, but I would have given my right hand to be able to one day experience it.

Pris was sitting up on the bed, her eyes big and round as she stared up at me, hugging a pillow to her chest. Her hair was disheveled and her blouse part-way undone. She didn’t look remotely frightened, rather exhilarated. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed, lips parted, and she gazed at me with open admiration. I leaned down and kissed her on the mouth. Her fingers wound in my hair.

“We have to go,” I said firmly, taking her gently by the wrists and pushing her away.

She nodded, then gave a start. “You’re bleeding!” She exclaimed, seeing her fingers smeared with scarlet.

I winced. “Just the dear admiral’s parting shot. Doesn’t hurt,” I lied. “Help me get changed.”

It took some doing, but within about five minutes we had forced me into one of the admiral’s uniforms, ripped off the insignia of his rank, and added a long trench coat and a hat, as if I was an officer going out on the town.

“You still don’t look right,” Pris fussed, attempting to straighten the too-small uniform on my frame.

“It doesn’t matter,” I snapped. “His shuttle is leaving in forty five minutes. We’ll need to hustle.”

“I wonder if Zorah and Jack and Leon kept up their end of things,” Pris was now struggling with the combination on the admiral’s safe. “Roy, would you. . . ?”

I could have cracked the code easily, but we were pressed for time. I opted for a more efficient if less elegant route. Lifting the safe with only a slight effort – it wasn’t too heavy for me of itself, and its contents were only paper money – I smashed it forcefully to the floor. Noisy, but effective. And the admiral’s lovely job of soundproofing his quarters left me with little to worry about. Dollars spilled out in a flood.

“Thanks!” Pris commenced cramming the bills into a suitcase.

The door burst open, admitting Zorah. There was blood on her face and her arms, sticky and dripping. “Roy, you better not be fucking around in here. We don’t have time to smell the god damn flowers!” Her tone was urgent.

I gestured to the prone admiral. She smiled. Leon poked his head around the door and sniffed distastefully at the smell. “Looks like you did a cleaner job than me,” Zorah observed.

“Point to you for using your hands,” I said, tossing her a towel to wipe up with. “Where’s Mary and Jack?”

“They’re already out. At the dock by this time, shouldn’t wonder. Come on!”

I nodded, grabbed Pris, and stepped into the hall.

Leon, tall and sullen and surprisingly the most convincingly human of the lot of us, gave me a nod from the shadows. I looked at his uniform and ascertained that I’d have to treat him as my superior. My crisp salute made him blink, and I smirked. Never too quick on the uptake, old Leon.

“Get your hands dirty, boy?” I asked him.

He licked his lips nervously, a gesture which in this context was even more unsettling, I suppose, than usual. “Yeah. They’re cleaned up now, though.”

Zorah gave a startling war whoop from behind us. I looked down the hall and saw what she’d seen – the approaching human officers coming towards us with suspicious expressions on their faces. Adrenaline already pumping through my blood made me want to do something stupid. I shot a sidelong look at Leon.

“Thinking what I’m thinking?” I raised my eyebrows.

He licked his lips again and nodded. “Yeah.”

“Do we try to pass...?” Pris, out of the loop, queried.

Zorah took a look at us and divined our intention. “The boys don’t want to play nice. Come on, we’re busting out of here.”

When we arrived at the commercial dock twenty minutes later and looked for Mary and Jack, boarding was already in progress. It was late at night and the flight attendants were yawning. We hung back to the end of the line as Zorah excused herself to the lady’s room to eradicate a bloodspot she’d missed. A woman ahead of us in line stared sympathetically after her, doubtless assuming the stain in Zorah’s pants was due to her monthly cycle. Pris giggled, and my lips curved up with the irony. No pesky periods for replicants to deal with. No reproduction, no PMS. We were lucky, by all accounts. I still felt a pang, thinking what it would be to have a son who had Pris’ eyes.

Jack accosted me with a glint in his eyes. “Six,” he said. I didn’t have to ask him of what.

“Eight,” I countered, allowing myself only the smugness to which a warrior is entitled.

He looked irked that my corpse count exceeded his, and had nothing more to say to me for a full five minutes after that.

Jack, though not much younger than the rest of us, is just a boy at heart. An impetuous, cocky, volatile boy, vain about his looks and cynical in philosophy, who treated me with equal parts hero worship, competitiveness, and disdain. The disdain was for my idealism, passion, and authority. The hero worship, though little he realized it, was pretty much for the same.

Mary, standing a little apart from us, looked indulgent and a little bit nauseous. I can’t quite explain how a lady like Mary wound up with a boy like Jack. Her intelligence was keen, her sensibilities ridiculously delicate. She often made me absolutely furious. Something about her – I suppose humans would call it empathy – had developed and refined a little too much. Perhaps it was her function as a nurse that did it, though to my thinking a sick bay was no place for squeamishness. Consequentially what I hated in her was what I hated in humans – this thing, condescending, naive and cloying, which supposedly made them feel for others. If they could really feel such a thing as another being’s suffering, how could they have created us?

Zorah returned just as we came to the front of the line. A tired woman in a blue uniform smiled wanly at us and asked for our tickets. I smiled down at her. A cold, hard, very unpleasant smile. I said nothing at all.

“Tickets?” She repeated herself, a little annoyed.

I spread my hands for her to see. “We don’t have any.”

She was getting really irritated. “Then you’re wasting your time, and mine,” she snapped.

I smiled still more broadly, and slowly shook my head. “Time?” I murmured. “Believe me, I wouldn’t waste my time. And as for yours, it’s just about run out.”

Humans think so slowly. As she stepped backwards and reached slowly for her intercom, I could tell she was considering calling security. Thinking isn’t doing. Leon was already in motion. As she backed up, she found herself trapped in his loving arms.

“Time to die,” he leered, and snapped her neck. She dropped noiselessly to the floor, head lolling.

I glanced behind us to be sure there were no witnesses to the deed, then stepped over the body. The others followed, except for Mary, who lingered, her expression closed-off and unreadable, her spun-gold hair making a halo around her face. Jack grabbed her by the arm and dragged her after us. Pris, smiling mischievously, grabbed the attendant’s headset as she passed and put it on.

As we stepped onto the shuttle, Pris fiddled with the switches of the microphone until a tiny buzz of static signaled it was live. Then, raising her voice and giving it a gooey, friendly tone, she started to approximate one of the cloying speeches she had doubtless heard before while on a commercial shuttle with one of the officers.

“Good evening and welcome aboard. Thanks for choosing us as your option for interplanetary travel. Our attendants will be going over safety procedures in a brief demonstration. We’d like to ask you, in the case of an actual emergency, to, above all, not panic...”

I nodded to Jack. As she continued talking, pointing out emergency exits, he slipped into the cockpit and disappeared. He returned moments later with a couple of machine guns and a smirk like the cat that ate the canary. Mary, faint green by now, went into the pit herself to take the late pilot’s place. Our choreography thus perfectly orchestrated, Leon and I each took a gun and we slipped into the main cabin where the rows of human passengers, practically atrophied with apathy, sat with their noses in magazines and headphones on their ears. A few looked up disinterestedly as we came in, with boredom quickly shattered by terror as they saw our weapons and the looks on our faces.

Pris giggled tinnily over the PA system. “... But actually that’s just bullshit,” she admitted, reverting to her usual tone, “Because this isn’t a routine flight run at all. It’s not a normal military inspection either. This is a hijacking. We are military grade Nexus 6 replicants with guns and we would like your cooperation. You have sixty seconds to evacuate this ship, after which we start playing rough. If anybody decides they want to be a hero, I can’t promise Roy and Leon won’t get angry. So remember what I said about the exits before, and try not to panic. Have a nice day, everybody!” The system crackled as her voice went out.

People, as mentioned above, are stupid. In spite of

Pris’ very good advice, there was a stampede. The passengers crammed towards the nearest doors, frantically seeking escape like lobsters dropped into a pot of hot water. It took several minutes of waving our guns around to make everyone be quiet and good, and it took Zorah giving instructions to make them figure out how to open the damned emergency exit door. But ultimately all would have gone with perfect clockwork smoothness-- if not for the man who made himself a martyr.

Anyone who gets a pistol through security – who isn’t, you know, security himself, that is – has my grudging respect. But no one who gets vast numbers of his own kind killed deserves anything less than a painful demise. The man who put a gun to Zorah’s head about halfway through the evacuation procedure was one of an elite breed only found among the human species which is often referred to as the idiot. She snarled as he grabbed her around the neck, resting his gun’s muzzle against her brow, but went still when she saw he had a bullet with her name on it. His eyes were wild and his tone shrill as he stared around him, breathless with disbelief in his success and smugness at his own insolence.

“It’s all right now, I got a gun on one! Any of you other move, and I shoot the lady!”

He thought just because Zorah was woman-shaped, he could hold her. That’s how stupid he was, and how cowardly. Her elbow in his ribs didn’t just knock the wind out of him, it stopped his breath for good.

That was when there was a real panic, and we had to start shooting.

It was a messy cleanup. The only moment in it that turned my stomach was when I flipped a very small corpse over and realized I had killed a little girl. I felt my blood freeze as I stared at the tiny, still face, and my guts lurched like they were struggling to turn inside out. She was maybe four years old. My age. She didn’t even get the life I had. She’d still been fragile and helpless and ignorant and nearsighted about the future, still at the whim of others. She’d never jumped to light speed, I’d bet, or felt herself become a streak of brightness during a wormhole jump. She’d never really been kissed. And she was totally helpless when one of us – was it I?-- gunned her down in her infancy.

I raced to the bathroom, and really did turn my guts inside out. Shocked at my weakness, shocked at my sentimentality all the while as I vomited. I’d made an error, that was all. I’d killed an animal. An animal that would have grown up just as mean and small-minded and nasty as all the rest, doubtless. Why did I feel like such a monster?

Because I was. Monster. One step up from an animal.

Mary was leaning in the doorway when I finally resurfaced. Her face was pale with her, her lips tight, her arms folded; and she was shaking. She could only control her rage with sarcastic false-sweetness. “Well, Roy, are you satisfied now? Are you happy now? Do you feel like a real warrior? Had enough yet? Do you feel proud of yourself?”

I lifted my head, which I had been leaned against the toilet bowl as if it was the breast of a lover. I felt my lips setting into a crooked, angry, hateful smile.

I finally had to laugh.

“Proud of myself?” I spat, with poisonous irony. “How can I be?” Forcing myself to stand, I straightened up and took a look at my face – pale, blue-eyed, its handsomeness the perfection of that twisted human ideal called Aryan. “How can I be proud?” I repeated. “I’m only what they’ve made.”