Jay Kristoff - LIFEL1K3 (LIFELIKE)

She looked sideways at the old man, tried to sound casual.

“How you feeling, Grandpa?”

“Better than I look.”

“How’s the cough? You take your meds? How much you got left?”

“Fine. Yes. Plenty.” Grandpa scowled. “Although I sometimes hear this annoying voice in the back of my head, speaking at me like I was a three-year-old. Is that normal?”

Eve leaned down and kissed her grandpa’s cheek. “You know, the whole lovable grouch thing? Really working for you.”

“I’ll keep it up, then.” He smiled.

Kicking off her heavy boots, Eve made fists with her toes in the temperfoam, relishing the air-con on her bare skin. Then, hoping the desalination still was back online, she hefted her satchel with Lemon’s help and shuffled off in search of something to drink.

Grandpa coughed as she padded up the hall, dragged wet knuckles across his lips. Glancing at Cricket, he muttered softly.

“Salvage in Eastwastes, huh?”

“Yessir.”

“She find anything good?”

Cricket looked from Grandpa to the satchel the two girls were hauling away, the beautiful red prize coiled inside.

“No, sir.” The little bot shook his head. “Nothing good at all.”

“You know, for the reddest of red tech,” said Lemon, “he’s not hard on the eyes.”

Eve looked at the body laid out on her workbench, stripped of its bloody flight suit, a pair of skintight shorts leaving just a little to the imagination. Smooth olive skin, hard muscle, a thousand different cuts from its journey through the windshield scored across tanned pseudo-flesh. Its brow was smashed inward, its right arm sheared off at the shoulder, that coin slot riveted between its pecs. And yet, it was somehow flawless.

More human than human.

“It’s not a ‘he,’ Lem,” Eve reminded her bestest. “It’s an ‘it.’”

Eve leaned close to its face—that picture-perfect face from the cover of some 20C zine. Brown curls, cropped short. A dusting of stubble on a square jaw. Smooth lines and dangerous corners. She tilted her head, ear to its lips. Her skin tickled at the kiss of shallow breath, hair rising on the back of her neck.

“I swear it had no pulse …”

“Am I smoked, or is he a lot less banged up than when we found him?”

Lemon was right. The tiniest wounds on the lifelike’s skin were already closed. The deeper ones were glistening— healing, Eve realized. She peered at the ragged stump where the lifelike’s arm used to be and wondered what the hells she’d signed herself up for.

Lemon pointed to the coin slot riveted into the boything’s chest. “What’s that about?”

“Clueless, me,” Eve sighed.

Lemon hopped up on the workbench, cherry-red bob snarled around her eyes. She brushed the dust off her freckles, poked the six-pack muscle on the lifelike’s abdomen.

“Stop that,” Eve said.

“Feels real.”

“That was the whole point.”

Lemon hooked a finger into the lifelike’s waistband and leaned down to peer inside its shorts before Eve slapped her hand away. The girl cackled with glee.

“Just wanted to see how lifelike they got.”

“You’re awful, Lemon.”

Eve’s work space was a shipping container welded in back of Grandpa’s digs, cluttered with salvaged scrap and tools. Spray-foam soundproofing on the walls, junk in every corner. Flotsam and jetsam and twenty-seven empty caff cups, each with a tiny microcosm of mold growing inside (she’d named the oldest one Fuzzy). The door was a pressure hatch from a pre-Fall submarine, the words BEWARE OF THE TEENAGER spray-painted in Eve’s flowing script on the outside.

“So what we gonna do with him?” Lemon wagged her eyebrows at the lifelike. “Fug’s still breathing. Can’t sell him for parts now. That’d be mean.”

“It’ll be a tough sell, anyways. These things are outlawed in every citystate.”

“What for?”

“You never watched any history virtch or newsreels?”

Lemon shrugged, toying with the five-leafed clover at her throat. “Never had vid as a kid.”

“They were only outlawed a couple years back, Lem.”

“I’m fifteen, Riotgrrl. And like I said, we never had vid when I was a kid.”

Eve felt a pang of guilt in her chest. She sometimes forgot she wasn’t the only orphan in the room. “Aw, Lem, I’m sorry.”

The girl let go of the charm, waved Eve away. “Fuhgeddaboudit.”

Eve dragged her fingers through her fauxhawk, looked back at the lifelike.

“Well, BioMaas Incorporated and Daedalus Technologies are running the show now, but GnosisLabs was another big Corp back in the day. They made androids. The 100-Series was the pinnacle of their engineering. So close to human, they called them lifelikes, see? They were supposed to give Gnosis the edge over the other Corps. But the lifelikes got it into their heads that they were better than their makers. They somehow broke the Three Laws hard-coded into every bot’s head. They ghosted the head of GnosisLabs, Nicholas Monrova. The R & D department, too. Whole company came crashing down.”

“Sounds kiiiinda familiar,” Lemon said. “Gnosis HQ was on the other side of the Glass, right?”

“True cert,” Eve nodded. “They called it Babel. I seen pix. Big tower, tall as clouds. But the reactor inside went redline during the revolt, ghosted everything within five klicks. Babel just sits there now. Totally irradiated. Most peeps figured the 100-Series all got perished in the blast. But Daedalus Tech and BioMaas got together and outlawed lifelikes afterward, all the same. First thing they’ve agreed on since War 4.0. Every pre-100 android got destroyed. And nobody’s seen a 100-Series since Babel fell.”

Lemon nodded to the body on the bench. “Till now.”

“True cert.”

“How you know all this stuff, Riotgrrl?”

Eve tapped the Memdrive implanted in the side of her skull.

“Science,” she replied.

First developed as a rehab tool for soldiers returning from War 4.0 with Traumatic Brain Injury, the Memdrive was a wetware interface that transmitted data from silicon chips to a damaged brain, allowing TBI sufferers to “remember” how to walk or talk again.

In the years after 4.0’s end, the Memdrive was adopted for civilian use, allowing people access to encyclopedic knowledge of almost any topic. For the right scratch, anyone could become an expert on almost any thing, from programming to martial arts. Of course, average peeps could never afford a Memdrive rig, especially not in a hole like Dregs. Grandpa must have pulled some fizzy moves to get Eve’s after the …

… well. After.

The militia raid had taken almost everything from her. Her family. Her eye. Her memories. But Grandpa had given them back, best he could, along with everything he knew about mechanics and robotics from his job on the mainland—all bundled up in clusters of translucent, multicolored silicon inserted behind her right ear.

She supposed he figured a hobby would keep her busy.

Out of trouble.

Her mind off the past.

One out of three isn’t bad.

Lemon hopped off the workbench, did a slow circuit of the body.

“So prettyboy here’s one of these bloodthirsty murderbots, you figure?”

“Maybe.” Eve shrugged. “Other androids always looked a little fugazi. Plastic skin. Glass eyes. This one looks too close to meat to be anything other than a 100.”

“And Fridge Street knows we salvaged him. If they tell the Graycoats—”

“They’re not gonna tell the Law,” Eve sighed. “Not when they got a chance of claiming it themselves. Fridge Street is all about the scratch.”