2. Tisha

The safehouse they’d put her in was in a secure high-rise in the center of town, where “secure” meant jack shit. As evidenced by someone waltzing through her door with a knife as if they fucking owned the place the night before. How Tisha managed to lock herself in her bathroom long enough to call 911, she had no idea.

By the third assassination attempt, she was surprised the cops even bothered getting there in time to do anything. The hospital patched her up with a few stitches and discharged her just about as soon as Smith could exchange glances with the head doctor. They looked friendly.

So what was the point of all this? If they didn’t care if she lived or died, why assign her an obscenely expensive gadget to force her to be there?

Talk about overkill.

They weren’t even going to give her a car… Just send her out there, walking with a big ass robot following her around. She was meant to be keeping a low profile, and this was not it. Sure, people had bots these days to carry their groceries and shit, but a black nearly-seven-foot enforcer was gonna stand out.

“So what, you gonna follow me like a fucking shadow from now on?” She snapped as she walked home by the riverside, injured head throbbing. On any other day Tisha might assume the heads swiveling her way were just because of her aggressive dialogue with herself, but obviously the mechanical hunk creeping behind her was the draw of attention.

Well… creeping was a slight exaggeration. It was just walking. Creepily.

ANSL-whatever-the-fuck did not grace her with a response, and Tisha refused to look at it. She’d gotten enough of an eyeful back at the station, anyway. The thing was a machine wearing the silhouette of pure fucking idealized masculinity.

She hated it.

Tisha filled the silence by reflecting on all the stupid choices she’d made over the last month and a half. Going to the cops to snitch on Drakov was the biggest mistake of her life. God, how could she have been so stupid? Everyone who’d taken care of her all her life had always told her to stay away from the fucking cops.

Her parents told her that. Her grandpa told her that. Drakov did too, so, so many times. At some point she’d just assumed Drakov’s warnings were for the benefit of Drakov.

She’d seen him do a lot of shit over the years. Done a lot of shit, too, for him and for herself. But when she saw those live bodies in the tanks… Fuck. How long had he been cloning people for harvesting in plain sight? All those rich assholes wanting their organs and willing to grow whole fucking people to sacrifice for them. The weapons, drugs, whores… All that she could handle, no problem. But vatcloning?

Even research into cloning was locked down, and for good reason. When a decade prior some crazy scientist out of Australia had claimed to grow a clone of his dead son in an external womb, everyone guessed shit would hit the fan. Too bad it didn’t happen fast enough.

It took five years for that first kid to develop cysts and tumors all over his body that eventually killed him. The resulting uproar got all further cloning research banned permanently, but by that point it was too late—there had been a dozen other cloned kids out in the world by then, all of them eventually suffering the same fate.

But with Drakov, that wasn’t even all… Tisha didn’t just see clones. She saw adult clones in those vats. What the hell was he doing, and how was he doing it? For Tisha it had been the last straw—hell, the only straw. She went to the cops because that she couldn’t just overlook.

Well, she could sure as shit overlook it now. Tisha couldn’t save the world, and she was an idiot for having thought she could make even a tiny dent in it. Because Drakov was the world. In this city, anyway. Her only option was to get out of dodge and pray he wouldn’t find her. That meant doing something about this stupid robot.

Tisha halted, registering the instant cessation of footsteps on her heels. She looked up and to the left, over the river cleaving the city in half. Iridescent purple, blue, and green whorls of oil slithered atop the water’s surface.

As a kid she would sit on the other shoreline for hours with her siblings, watching those sleek rainbows. The buildings on the other side were a mixture of dilapidated residential districts and skyscrapers pumping neon. Drakov owned the clubs, but was rarely seen in them. Instead, he would be at one of his nondescript offices at the edge of the West Side, smoking an e-cig in his vintage leather chair, shined shoes propped up on a real wood desk as he collected payments or ran reports or sent out a hit.

Or delivered a clone to a doctor who’d slice its heart out and send it to the highest bidder.

Drakov used to call Tisha his little psycho. She wished she were. If she were really an emotionless psychopath, she wouldn’t have freaked out and run to the cops to spill the beans.

Fuck.

“You know who is a psycho, though?” Tisha said as she started walking again, and something about the robot’s muteness coupled with the immediate thump thump thump of its footsteps restarting just destroyed whatever thread of a last nerve she had hanging in there.

Tisha spun and rounded on it, finding its shiny black carapace inches from her nose.

“You,” she shoved her finger at it, almost touching but not quite. Who knew what crazy wires might get crossed if it perceived her as a threat? “You fucking robotic psycho freak! You’re just a goon. Like Drakov’s lackeys. You know that, right?”

She stared up at its blank shell of a mask—smooth black surface reflecting the barest shadow of her face and swallowing the rest into a void. She backed up a step when ANSL-whatever’s chin tilted down slowly, those faint lighted blotches under the visor where its eyes should be shifting a little behind the glass.

“You don’t feel anything for anyone, do you? ‘It’s here to get your ass into that courthouse’,” Tisha deepened her voice and puffed out her chest in an imitation of Smith. “You know what I wanted? Protection. They told me I’d get that. Promised me. And now I got this shit,” she pointed at her cut-up head, “And now you. Just a ball and chain to drag me to testify no matter the cost, right? Right?” Tisha stared up at his stupid fucking nonface. “Answer me, asshole. I know you can speak.”

At least she thought it could. The ones she remembered seeing snippets of on the news could deliver an arrest speech very convincingly.

But when it did what she’d asked, it still jolted the crap out of her.

“Right.”

Tisha wavered, taking a small step back. Damn, it could speak. And it sounded so… human.

“Right…” She tried to muster herself, but now found herself unable to meet its “eyes.” Why did she suddenly feel like a piece of shit?

“You must seek medical attention.” Its visor slanted up toward her forehead.

“What?”

“You are bleeding and require medical attention.”

“Oh.” Tisha pressed her fingertips to the slash where the intruder’s knife had found purchase, and for a moment she thought she saw the robot tense, if that was even possible. “It’s fine. I’ll patch it up at home.”

It scrutinized her for several seconds before advancing a step, and she couldn’t help but take one back. “You have a medical kit at… home?”

“Yeah, I have a medical kit at home.” Tisha rolled her eyes, bristling as she flexed the nerves from her fingers.

“Fine.” There was something unnervingly human about the robot’s curt nod. “Let us go.”

When it started walking unbidden, Tisha was even more unsettled. She moved to action, jogging to catch up.

“Hey!” she called. “Hey, where do you think you’re going?”

The robot didn’t slow its pace, apparently just assuming she’d be following… which, well, she was…

“Home.”

“You mean your closet at the police station?” Tisha snarled. She fell into step beside it. It felt ridiculous, having to take three frenzied steps for every one of his long strides, but no way was she gonna let a robot lead her around.

“We are going to your home, Tisha Varda.” The robot’s calm and collected responses kept sucking the steam out of her frustration, making Tisha wonder for a moment if she should stop lashing out at a thing that was only doing its job. But she was the one getting screwed over here. If she wanted to let off some steam on a damn machine she didn’t even want, who could blame her?

“And you know where that is?” Tisha ignored a gaggling group of teenagers gawking and muttering amongst themselves as they passed, an old whizball bot at their side. It was getting dark, and they shouldn’t be out there this late, but… Tisha had other things to worry about.

“I have all necessary data to perform my duties,” the robot said evenly.

“What does all necessary?—”

She didn’t get to finish her sentence because suddenly there was a big black arm in her face and the robot attached to it was pushing her forward, spinning her around. It all happened before she could even register what it was. Only the next thing she knew, her breath was fogging up a sleek black shell.

Tisha swallowed, dragging her eyes up the length of the robot enforcer’s bulk. The top row of its bulging armored eight-pack was in her face.

She realized she’d heard a thud, but nothing moved—certainly not the wall of… whatever this thing was made of… curled around her.

“Oh shit!” A high-pitched cry came from behind, intermingled with hoots and hollers and a few more choice swear words.

The mass blocking her vision shifted, and that was when Tisha saw the orange whizball shoot and roll into the street, cars screeching to a halt and honking angrily as they swerved.

“Told you not to do it, Jack,” a girl in the group of kids they’d passed elbowed the pimply kid next to her.

“Great,” Tisha said to the robot standing stock-still at her side as she watched the group retreat across the street after the ball. “You protected me from a bunch of kids. Great job, O Mighty Enforcer.”

“Thank you.” It turned back in the direction of ‘home.’

“I didn’t mean…” Tisha threw her hands out, but the robot had already continued to walk. She sighed and scampered to catch up.