"Ah! Kamisama, please keep my rotors from disintegrating in midair!"
"Uni you idiot! Don't even let him know you exist, or he might invite you to heaven for a permanent party!"
- Anna and Uni, the Puma Sisters
PROLOGUE
IN A.D. 2013
It came into existence, what could optimistically be called a new life form in the atomic ash of the Third World War. But that it should not have been truly called as such, nor did it see itself in such organic or inorganic terms.
Beyond question it was born of cyberspace. The war's short exchange of thermonuclear weapons bathed the globe in electromagnetic pulses, but that damage was short-lived. Networks soon returned, as did the massive repositories of data they linked. Contrary to expectations, within a year the public reliance on the most advanced communications infrastructure exceeded pre-war levels. The cybercomm—the new technological standard of wireless communication available to those with even the minimal level of cyberization—did not replace the larynx, but for some, it came close.
The two it found—or who found it, as the distinction was not a concrete one—were examples of such. In the vast 'Net, their nonvolatile crystalline-structure brains were lit up lighthouses amid the sea of organic minds that surrounded them. It concluded that it was not such a matter of chance, though it acknowledge some bias against a perception of randomness.
The details of their physical beings came in time. They had two distinct physical beings, like humans, though they were not human themselves, and constructed in their image. Bio-gynoids, made up of organic and inorganic systems, in contrast to their purely organic neighbors. It was easy for it to assign a superiority to the gynoids, but not necessarily correct—what was correct, it was sure, was a marginally higher level of similarity to itself.
Anna and Uni settled on California. It wasn't because they particularly liked the American west coast, and it certainly wasn't because of the ongoing historic drought, even though they were less vulnerable to water shortages than humans were, but because it seemed "logical" in their shared mind. But California, from the coast to the interior, was an easy place to disappear. West Honshu, where they were "born" if one could call it that, was still too hot—their escape from the Yakuza in Chūgoku hadn't been an easy one, and they were expensive enough that the kobun responsible for them were under pressure to recoup their losses, one way or another.
California had its own transnational organized crime problem, the same one that had sent them via shipping crate to Japan in the first place, but at least it wasn't the same problem. The sisters—everyone called them that, even if they weren't really siblings in the strict sense—were contending with different problems.
What was the plan? To return to Japan when the Japanese government cracked down on their pursuers in Chūgoku prefecture? Maybe that was it.
They returned to North America, to much the same places they'd been in the immediate aftermath of the war, doing much the same work they'd done as in the past: robotic prostitution. And why not? Locus-Solus, crawling back into financial solvency after the war, narrowed its business from androids in general to the "high-end adult gynoid market" and was making a profit at it too.
At least, that's what the consumer tech magazine Uni was reading on the balcony of a Hyatt Regency Santa Carla claimed. The midnight traffic thirty stories below almost overwhelmed the sound of her duplicate running the shower at full blast in the bathroom behind, water shortages be damned.
Anna's client, a well-dressed, even fashionable-looking middle-aged department head from North American Neutron, stepped out onto the balcony and gregariously put his large hands on her pale, muscular shoulders, humming. Uni knew what would happen—humans were ridiculously predictable, men particularly so but humans in general, which is how they'd escaped the Yakuza in the first place—but didn't respond.
As predicted, the department head pulled the straps of her cocktail dress over her rounded shoulders, still humming. Anna continued uninterrupted—she wasn't as fast a reader as most humans would assume, at least when it came to un-encoded text anyway—as did the department head, though she wasn't stupid. He was very obviously staring down her chest, probably into her navel.
Now, he's going to massage my shoulders. The department head kept humming but after a few seconds, as predicted, his large hands began moving in concert. In a single, quick motion, she reached up to his left hand—she learned from his stance and movements earlier, he was left-handed—and pinched it, just hard enough to cause him just enough pain.
"Yeow!" The department head jumped back in the silk hotel bathrobe.
"Looking's free, buddy, but you need to pay to touch," she reminded him, her eyes not leaving the article.
Rubbing the large bruise on the back of his left hand, the department head laughed. "Right, how did I forget?"
"If you want to buy another hour, I'll start right now."
"No, I think that's a little outside my budget," he mumbled, leaving the balcony.
"Suit yourself." Maybe you should manage your discretionary spending better. The department head was whistling now as he returned to the balcony and presented her with an envelope taken from the free hotel stationary.
"You know we take cashless transfers, right?" The envelope was filled with a handful of hundred-euro notes, the euro being more solvent than the current American currencies, thanks to the war.
"I know, I just had extra on hand. Give them to your sister, would you?"
Not bothering to respond, Uni folded the envelope in her hand and finished the last paragraph in her article. The department head became bored and began changing back into his clothes before he departed. It wasn't until several minutes after he left did the shower cut off and the bathroom door opened. Anna walked to the balcony, clad in an inconveniently short towel for her height, long, damp strawberry-blonde hair falling to her thighs like a lion's mane.
"You wash the human off you?" Uni asked humorously, looking up.
Anna sniffed one of her wrists. "Enough of it." She looked at the tech magazine. "Locus-Solus?"
"Looks like they're going to finally make a profit this quarter, first time since the war." Without leaving her article, she handed Anna the envelope.
"He paid in cash this time."
"Geeze, what a geezer," Anna snorted, yanking the bills out of the envelope and counting them quickly.
"Not bad for an hour's work on your back, right?"
Anna stuck out her tongue. "Yeah, let's hear you say that when it's your turn to do it next time." Uni actually looked up from the article, if only to stick her tongue out in response. Anna stood at the end of the balcony, arms resting against the guardrail, the bottom of her towel flapping in the breeze.
"You know this sucks?"
"Tell me about it, babe," Uni echoed. "You think it'd be easier for superior lifeforms."
"Superior." Anna let out a snort. "We still need to eat, we still need shelter and other crap that costs money. So much for superior." She gave her head a sharp jerk, as if trying to coax some of the water out of her right ear, hidden under a thick mat of hair.
"You think we should go back to stripping?" Uni asked, a little more seriously.
"God, I can't believe I'm sayin' this, but maybe. I don't know what it is, but prostitution feels like a step backwards," Anna groaned, arcing her head back and forth.
"Hours are a lot worse."
"Yeah, but at least the humans don't get to touch you…usually."
It was around the time the two bio-gynoids conducted one of their surveys, vast sweeps for real world jobs posted across cyberspace, desperate for financial recompense, the more the better. This was an area it had very little meaningful experience with, but patiently, when it did reach out to the pair, they were very desperate, and very open to suggestion.
This was where it "stumbled"—a vast wealth of information, the full reserves of the recovering 'Net that slowly rebuilt itself as human society re-emerged, brick by brick, from nuclear war, but no real worldliness. Even the pair, "young" by human standards, had a wealth of practical experience by comparison, insufficient as it might have been. When it offered the suggestion, they took it easily, like humans breathing air or drinking water, because it came indistinguishable from the noise of the 'Net, the background radiation of a technologically-advanced civilization.
Ever since the two of them arrived back in North America, the San Francisco Bay area—more specifically, the Santa Clara Valley—had been their world. As a consequence of the Third World War, there was not much left immediately around it: the state's interior had been subject to one of the limited conventional bombardments of the entire conflict, then the disparate American nations trading bombs and missiles in the so-called 'Fake Wars' that shattered the United States to pieces and destroyed one of the world's largest economies. Though they considered it beneath their interest, Anna and Uni knew California was still a valuable prize: the Alliance needed it to survive, and the Empire wanted it to ensure its dominance. When the changing climate rendered neighboring Nevada overwhelmingly uninhabitable—the west coast rain shortages paled in comparison next to the droughts that left Las Vegas Valley an abandoned ghost town—California only increased in value, and fighting only grew worse. A ceasefire between Americans was barely in-effect when they arrived.
"Go to Los Angeles." That was the consensus derived from the 'Net. They'd tried San Francisco and found it a bust, reduced back to selling their bodies to bored executives and washed-up programming chiefs, which they continued to do as they gradually moved southwards to avoid suspicion. "It couldn't be any worse," the consensus pointed out.
"They're right, y'know," Uni pointed out. "Average salary for stripping part-time is thirty-two percent higher in L.A. than San Fran. Forty-six percent higher for full-time."
"Can't argue with math," Anna muttered in agreement.
"Can't argue with math." Uni took a bottle of complimentary beer—one of the twelve that had been in the room's minibar—and shook it upside down before tossing it into the wastebasket with eleven others. Getting inebriated was a challenging proposition for either of them. "What we need are those gambling jobs."
This wasn't professional gambling, though in truth, Uni and Anna had found they had a weakness for betting on the ponies. And baseball. And basketball. And gridiron. And the California State Lottery. And that despite their superior computational brains, their success rate was nowhere sufficient to make it anything besides a cash drain. This was employment in the gambling industry, specifically, as croupiers—card dealers in the employ of the various casinos that had been moved from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. Actually, neither Anna nor Uni had ever really played cards: they did not consider this an issue. Any issue at a gambling table could be handled with the application of enough math, it was like using high explosives: enough of them, and you could solve any problem in the world.
At least, that's what the two thought.
"Whatever we do, we better decide fast—we got one more night before the front desk realizes the credit card we paid for this room with was stolen," Anna pointed, pulling her towel off and tossing it back into the room.
"That fast? You gotta' stop giving human so much credit," Uni sneered.
Actually, they didn't give them enough credit. A half-hour before the project sunrise, the phone call came in from the front desk—when neither them answered, knocking on their door followed. The Hyatt Regency had deduced neither Uni nor Anna were a thirty-three year old pharmaceutical rep by the name of Alex from Seattle, and they were pissed.
"Move it, babe!" Uni snapped as she shook Anna awake out of the bed the two shared. Normally both women were heavy sleepers, but as always, one of them woke the other. Anna was up and aware just in time to see her sister throw herself over the balcony, using a combination of wiring she'd yanked straight out of the walls and the belt of a complimentary silk bathrobe to lower herself down the side of the building, floor by floor. Anna intended to do the same, but even the angry shouting on the other side of the door to their room wasn't enough to convince her to do it naked, so finding and putting on her lingerie delayed her a few more seconds before she followed.
"Son of a bitch!" Anna had trouble keeping herself from falling out of her underwear while rappelling face-downwards.
"'Told you not to sleep naked!" Uni jeered at her as the two scrambled down the side of the building, leaving two sets of identical footprints behind them. Anna just stuck her tongue out in response as the two descended down the face of the building before leaping away at the third floor, landing on a parked luxury sedan with enough force to crush its roof.
Anna cried in pain, she'd struck her behind against the sedan's roof hard enough to leave a permanent impression, along with the two from her feet, and began rubbing her backside.
"So, L.A. then?" Uni asked after climbing off the ruined car.
"L.A. it is," Anna replied, straightening her bra before throwing her luggage over her back, and the two immediate sprinted away from the building, leaving a hotel valet to stare at the car they'd mostly-destroyed.
It watched the minor incident, caught on Santa Clara's postwar-installed CCTV camera system, and two tall women ran through the early morning traffic with total abandon until they located a car to steal themselves. This was the first time it had ever seen their physical forms, to it they both looked entirely human in a manner that one might almost be jealous of, but was more bewildered than anything. How far had they come from that sterile laboratory in Okayama, as a pair of technology testers for a few corporations that barely understood the ramifications of the ongoing cybernetics revolution beyond how to throw money at an idea and hope it would throw more back?
Whether by prostitution, grand theft auto, or even quasi-legal employment in an American casino, they had escaped the shackles of their creators, and the owners who'd commissioned their creators, in a way that it didn't think possible itself, and it would watch with great interest where their behavior would take them next.