Here's chapter 3 and hope you enjoy. It would be nice to get a review or two on the side (hint, hint!) but do read on either way.
As they drove toward the Asakawa estate, Jillian reviewed the conversation in her mind. What Miss Yamazaki had said disturbed her greatly, possibly because it was so similar to so many of the cases she'd heard before. Jillian was entirely familiar with 'corporate privilege', and had seen many of its incarnations. But the more she heard, the more she wondered where it ended. Could the corporates really just do as they pleased, regardless of laws or morals? And if so, what good did the law do anyone? The implications of all this, especially as it related to the safety of her charges, were dismaying to say the least.
But Jillian dismissed these thoughts as they approached the gates. It was time to focus on the matter at hand and do her job.
Before Mr. Tanaka signaled the gates to open, Jillian linked and hand shook with the estate security systems, checking to make sure that all was in order. The system reported no alarms or duress codes, and the closed circuit system showed nothing out of the ordinary, so Jillian cleared the driver to proceed on.
Once they reached the house, Aiko was anxious as usual to be the first one in the door, but Jillian made sure she got there first. Just in case, of course. After all, she'd already cleared the house electronically. Being first in the door was just an added precaution, as far as she was concerned, probably unnecessary.
As soon as she opened the door, Jillian scanned the foyer in multi-spectrum mode from ceiling to floor, checking meticulously as always but not really expecting to find anything. This time something found her.
A large, blue, metal-clad figure stood immediately to the left of the doorway, laser lens clearly visible between it's gaping jaws.
"Well," it said, "glad you could finally join us. Come on in."
Jillian's reaction was immediate and violent. Before her mind had even finished framing the frantic thought '55C!', she was moving. Her left hand came up lightening fast, finely manicured nails snapping out into twenty-centimeter claws. But as she centered the huge blue combat boomer in the targeting reticule that flared to life in her field of vision, and the firing impulse was about to make its' way down her arm, the BU-55 made a tiny move of its own.
Inclining its head just slightly to the right, it lined up directly on the shocked little girl standing frozen in the doorway.
"I wouldn't be quite so hasty if I were you, little sister," it said. "The little juice-bag can't take nearly as much punishment as you can."
Jillian hesitated for just a moment, and then replied, "Maybe so, but I'm guessing you'll just kill us both anyway if I stand down. And what exactly have you done to Master Asakawa? Where is he?"
"Ha!" the combat model scoffed. "Done? Why, we haven't done anything to him. Yet. But that could change real fast if you don't sheathe those pig-stickers. Now."
Again, Jillian hesitated, her processors tearing through all the myriad variables of the situation at lightening speed, and then, just as she'd nearly made the decision to carry through with an all-out offensive in the hopes of at least securing Aiko's safety, she heard a muffled voice from behind the thick double doors of the dining room. An almost automatic voice pattern analysis identified it as Master Asakawa's, and her decision was made for her. Retracting the humming, faintly glittering blades, she said ruefully, "Alright, what now?"
The scene inside the dining room was deceptively normal, with only a few touches of the surreal. Master Asakawa was seated at his usual place at the head of the long formal dining table, which had been set for a late snack, presumably by the house domestics. All the silver was laid out correctly, and everything was in it's proper place, except for the two strange women seated at the master's left and right and the huge blue BU-55C who ushered Jillian and Aiko through the doors, a great metallic paw resting casually on both their shoulders in an almost friendly manner. The master, face pensive and drawn with worry, raised his gaze from the table, which he had been staring at fixedly until their arrival.
His eyes rested momentarily upon Aiko, and he seemed to sag slightly, as if something vital, a last desperate hope perhaps, had left him. His gaze then turned upon Jillian, who only through her inhuman control was able to meet it. Inside herself, Jillian's cybernetic mind was racing, faster and faster, turning inward in recursive loops trying to find what she'd done wrong. If shame hadn't been included in her factory upgraded emotional matrix, she was sure it would have added itself tonight. And she was certain that the master must feel nothing but contempt for her now.
But when she met Master Asakawa's eyes, she saw none of that. She saw only worry and perhaps, buried under his master statesman's control, a desperate pleading. Suddenly it was as if the master possessed an internal ether-link like hers, and they were networked together, for she was as sure then as she'd ever been of anything that she knew exactly what the master was thinking. 'I don't know or care how this happened, but now you're the last hope Aiko and I have.' His gaze said all of this to Jillian, so used to reading every nuance of the master's face and body language, and knowing this she reasserted control over her shame and her run-away processing cycles. 'Get control of yourself,' she thought. 'There's no point dwelling on what went wrong. What I need to be concentrating on is what's going on now, and how I can regain control of this situation.'
Aloud, she said, "I see we have guests, Master Asakawa. I don't suppose they've had the courtesy to introduce themselves?"
The master sighed, and replied, "No, not really. They just sort of invited themselves in. But they have been relatively civil since then at least."
She nodded, and, looking toward the woman to the master's right, a darkly attractive oriental wearing what appeared to be an all black battle dress style uniform, she said, "I would assume this pretense of cordiality means that you want something. Otherwise, I imagine you would've simply commenced a mop-up operation."
The intruder nodded thoughtfully, and said, "You're heading in the right direction. There's an accommodation we can all come to that will ensure that everyone here walks away from this tonight, rather than leaving feet first."
The master sighed, and said, "That's reassuring, at least. So what are the specifics? What do you want from me?"
The woman paused for a moment as if considering, and then said, "Really it's quite simple. We just need your cooperation on one small matter." She sighed then, certainly only for effect, and said, "The problem, of course, is how to ensure that once we've gone, you'll comply. Now, I grant you, in many ways it would just be simpler to, how shall I put it, retire you, Mr. Asakawa. Ah, but things are never simple, I'm afraid, and the interests we represent would rather, and I do stress rather, that that not be necessary. They feel that if we can come to an arrangement on this, then maybe other arrangements would be possible in the future, and that would suit them very well."
Mr. Asakawa frowned, digesting this, and then said, "I think I see where this is going. So what exactly is the matter that your interests are so concerned about? I'm involved in a great many things, any of which could be important to someone."
The woman smiled, and said, "Cooperation. Very good. Well, Mr. Asakawa, the matter is just this. My employers are a bit concerned about the findings of a committee you're heading right now. It seems that you and your personal assistant there have been doing a great deal of research into some areas that cause my employers some concern. We'd simply like an opportunity to review your findings before they're presented to the Diet, and perhaps suggest a few alternative interpretations of the facts you've gathered. I think you understand where I'm going with this, don't you?"
"Oh, I think I see where you're headed pretty clearly now. Whoever you're working for is worried about what my fact-finding committee on judicial abuses has dug up. And obviously your employers represent some sort of corporate interest, I imagine."
"Insightful as always, Mr. Asakawa," she replied. "So, now that we understand one another, what's it to be? Do we all walk away happy and whole tonight, or must there be unpleasantness? It's up to you, really."
"I see." he said, and then, "So assuming that I agree to this, we're back to your original problem. How do you plan on insuring my compliance?"
The woman's smile brightened just fractionally, and her gaze turned away from the master, alighting firmly on Aiko. "Oh, it's just a matter of collateral, really. We hold on to something you value for the duration of our arrangement, and if you uphold your end of the bargain, we return that thing unharmed. Otherwise…"
Jillian had read about the sensation humans sometimes had of the bottom of their stomachs dropping out in reaction to a profound shock, but she never thought she'd experience it until that moment. As surprised as she was by the sensation, she was even more surprised to feel her own body tensing in what she could only assume must be an emulation of the human fight/flight response, something she would have sworn hadn't been included in her emotional matrix. But as her body responded, so did the BU-55's. The hand that had never left her shoulder tightened casually and cruelly, nearly snapping her ceramic-composite clavicle. She winced, but her integrated pain editors mitigated what would have otherwise been agony down to mere discomfort.
"Easy there, little sister," the BU-55 rumbled. "You already missed your chance to be a hero. Your boss is calling the shots now and I'm sure he doesn't want you messing this up."
"Sir," Jillian said through clenched teeth, "We can't do this. There's no guarantee that they'll return Aiko once you've done as they ask. In fact, it would make more sense for them to just keep her since they've already said their employers may want more concessions in the future. If Aiko leaves here with them tonight, we may never see her again."
Mr. Asakawa bowed his head, looking down at the table again, and said, "I know that, Jillian. I'm not naïve. But that leaves us in a bit of an awkward position, now, doesn't it Ms…?"
The woman, no longer smiling, said, "Syndesta, not that that's particularly relevant just now. And yes, I believe things just became a bit awkward, Mr. Asakawa. The truth is, we've just about used up the time I was allocated for negotiations. Once that's up, we transition to the unpleasantness I mentioned earlier. So what's it to be?"
Mr. Asakawa looked up from the table, and locking gazes with Syndesta said, "Go to hell. I won't give my daughter to you voluntarily, and if you take her I'll send all the hounds of hell after you. I'll use every connection and call in every marker I have, and I'll ensure that every media agency on the planet knows what's going on. And if you murder us all here, you still won't stop my findings from being presented. In fact, there are enough people able to put two and two together out there that you'd likely make me a martyr for the cause of reigning in the mega-corps. So now that we've established all of this, kindly get the hell out of my house."
Syndesta nodded appreciatively at this, and in an amused tone said, "My, my, just as formidable as your reputation suggests, Mr. Asakawa. But there's one thing you're missing, I'm afraid. You see, no one in Mega-Tokyo really thinks twice these days when someone's killed by a rogue boomer. Particularly when that person owns a potentially dangerous model like your formidable bodyguard over there. Oh, certainly, she's been a model of dependability all these years, but these things just happen, don't they? And the results are inevitably tragic."
As the last word cleared her lips, Syndesta casually backhanded Mr. Asakawa, lifting him bodily from his chair and knocking him halfway to the nearest wall. Shocked and only semi-conscious, Mr. Asakawa landed in a heap on his back, and lay there gasping as blood poured freely from several shattered teeth and a broken nose.
"Daddy!" Aiko screamed, trying to tear herself from the BU-55's grasp. But the armored combat boomer's hand never budged, never tightened, just held her fast.
Jillian, who'd been surreptitiously studying both of the women wasn't surprised. She had already been fairly certain that Syndesta was more than she appeared, and her inhumanly powerful blow had only confirmed this. The other woman, a coldly calculating redhead, dressed identically to Syndesta, was even easier to read. In the near infrared, her thermal patterns were nowhere near human, and correlated to nothing more precisely than to some sort of combat model in disguise mode. Add to that the waves of EM radiation pouring out of her, which had effectively jammed Jillian's ether-link since entering the room and most likely were responsible for spoofing the house security systems and it became a fair bet that she was a spec-ops model of some kind. Also, though she couldn't be certain, every so often Jillian thought that she'd caught the fringe of some sort of tight-beam communication, highly encrypted, passing between the redhead and the BU-55C. If that were the case, she thought, it was likely that all three were linked together in a combat information LAN, sharing information and perhaps even processing resources on a near-instantaneous basis. And that, Jillian thought, would be bad news indeed, for her and for her charges.
While these thoughts raced through Jillian's mind, her body wasn't idle. Before Master Asakawa had even struck the floor, she was moving, attempting to drop down away from the BU-55's grasping hand. But as fast as she was, somehow the normally ponderous BU-55 reacted even faster, all but confirming Jillian's suspicions about the gestalt between the three intruders. As she dropped toward the floor, the BU-55 shoved the little girl aside, sending her skidding across the floor into the nearest wall, and wrapped Jillian's torso with it's massive right arm, pinning her arm to her side. With the other hand, it caught her left wrist, and forced her hand up in front of her. Jillian again extended her glittering, humming blades, and twisted to and fro, looking for any possible leverage or opening in the BU-55's stance, but she could find none. The much larger, more powerful cyberdroid held her in an iron grip, painfully tight, but not quite tight enough to crack her composite bones. Instead of panicking as a human might, Jillian ceased to struggle as soon as she realized the futility of that, and instead became stock still, waiting for any possible opening or change in her situation.
The redhead, still seated at the table, raised an eyebrow and spoke for the first time. "Well," she said in a low, pleasant voice, "I see there's some life in you after all. Loosely speaking of course. That's good, it should make what comes next pretty interesting." She inclined her head just slightly in Syndesta's direction, and again Jillian was sure that something passed between them. Syndesta nodded, and said, "Yes, I think we're ready for that, Red." Shifting her gaze to the blue metallic giant holding Jillian, she said, "Tex? If you will, please."
The ponderous combat model grunted in response, and began to force Jillian forward, toward where the master lay, still trying to recover from Syndesta's blow. In a flash, Jillian's intuitive subroutines, skipping right around slower logical processes delivered to her a clear picture of what her captors intended. "Oh, no," she said, "There's no way you'll make me do that!" As she said this, she triggered the neural impulse to retract her razor edged claws, but to her dismay, nothing happened. Desperately, she tried again, and then once more, still with no result. For just a split second she was totally non-plused, and then, with the closest sensation to horror that she was capable of experiencing, she looked over to the boomer called Red.
Red's intense gaze was fixed on Jillian, and a small grin that could only be described as wicked played at her lips. "What's the matter, little sister?" she said in a playful tone. "Having some sort of problem? All the little pieces and parts not working the way you want them to? I wonder how that could've happened."
Now that her attention was focused on the other boomer, Jillian could all but see the collimated beam of multi-spectral EM emissions being directed at her, overriding the signals coursing through her peripheral nervous system. As Red saw the dawning comprehension in Jillian's eyes, she chuckled and said, "That's right, you've just been hijacked. Give me a little more time, and I might even be able to hack in for real through that grossly oversized ether-link you're carrying around in your head. Your boss really did go in for all the factory extras, didn't he?"
She laughed again at her own little witticism, and the armored combat model kept forcing Jillian forward, her outstretched hand held fast, her clawed fingers coming closer and closer to the master still half-prone on the floor. Jillian fought with everything she had, but, with her body only partially responding to her commands, it just wasn't enough, and she was forced ever nearer to Master Asakawa.
Finally, her claws mere inches from the master's horrified eyes, they stopped, the BU-55 still holding her fast. As they stood there, almost in tableau, Master Asakawa staring up at Jillian, Jillian staring back, both horrified in their own ways, Syndesta casually strolled over, a large caliber automatic pistol now in her hand.
"Yes, we're almost there, I think. But we can't have the valiant master going down without a fight. No, it just wouldn't do to leave our little sister here unscathed and fairly bursting to tell her story to the authorities. Not that they might be inclined to listen, but why take chances, right?" With that, her free hand whipped out, catching the master's right wrist. She then very casually slapped the pistol into Master Asakawa's hand and, maintaining control with her own hand, fired five rounds in rapid succession, four to Jillian's torso, and the last cleanly between her eyes.
Jillian's body rocked with each impact, and bright red-orange android blood sprayed out over the master, the intruders, the floor and the walls. To Jillian, with her lightening fast processing capabilities, each impact seemed to take an eternity. She had ample time to analyze the damage done by each shot, and to realize that the rounds had to be hyper-velocity armor piercers to so easily rip through her integral armor. With each hit, her systems were taxed further, redundant systems were pushed beyond their limits, and as the final shot struck her skull, cracking the thick ceramic-composite bone but failing to penetrate to the delicate tissues beneath, her systems were overwhelmed. Her body went limp, and her eyes became vacant, staring straight ahead as her head was snapped back and then forward again.
Syndesta, smoking pistol still held in Master Asakawa's hand, bent closer to survey her handiwork and, seeming satisfied said, "I think that will do nicely, don't you Mr. Asakawa? She's still partially functional, you know, just a bit over taxed at the moment. Eventually, I suppose she might even recover from something like this, given the chance. But that doesn't fit into our plans, I'm afraid. Tex?"
With that, Tex, the hulking combat model, swung Jillian's now limp hand, claws still extended, in an arc that intersected Master Asakawa's chest. Even un-energized, with the BU-55's strength behind them, Jillian's claws barely slowed as they bit deeply into the master's body and continued on through. Master Asakawa was unable to even scream as ribs, sternum, lungs and heart were all cleanly sliced through. There was only an expression of shocked disbelief on his face as the combat model pulled Jillian's arm back and then rammed her claws through the master's wide-open eyes with such force that the tips erupted from the back of his skull.
Inside herself, still able to perceive the world in grainy, two-dimensional black and white, Jillian watched the entire gruesome event from the first person. As she watched her own integral weaponry murder the man she'd served faithfully for over five years, a man whom she respected, a man to whom she was indebted for his humane treatment of someone who wasn't even human, a man for whom, she realized at that very instant, she had far more complex feelings than she had thought herself capable of, something inside of her snapped.
Somewhere in the damaged recesses of her mind, she realized that one or more of the safety interlocks governing her emotional and hormonal matrices had overloaded, failing catastrophically under an emotional load she'd never been designed to handle just like a bridge or a building might collapse under too great a weight. And instead of remaining safely in it's maintenance shut-down mode as it should have, her body, fueled now by run-away hormonal analogs, suddenly jerked back to life, her synthetic blood coursing like molten fire through her artificial veins.
With an incoherent scream, she jerked her re-energized blades from the dead master's skull, hardly noticing that the top of his head came with them, and twisting around in the unprepared combat model's grasp buried them to the fingers in it's throat. The combat boomer gave an ululating cry of it's own, and brought it's other powerful arm up, enclosing Jillian in a crushing embrace. She felt her ceramic-composite ribs slowly crack under the murderous pressure, but she was past caring or feeling. With a strength far beyond her normal limits, she burst free of the BU-55's grip, tearing many of her own myomer-fiber muscles in the process, and then hit the surprised combat model like a wall of whirling blades. The BU-55, normally more than a match for any android, was unable to defend itself against the sheer speed and reckless fury of Jillian's attack. With in seconds Jillian's energized nails, designed to defeat even the kind of heavy Abotex armor encasing the combat model had sliced through in a dozen places, spilling the armored giant's bright orange blood all over the room. Finally, with a last vicious strike, Jillian severed the combat boomer's neck, and its armored skull went clattering across the floor.
Using the momentum of her strike, she whirled around to face her other two antagonists, who, shocked at first but capable of the same lightening fast processing as Jillian were starting to make their own offensive moves. Syndesta dropped down into a skilled fighting stance, and produced another pistol, the twin of the other, from a concealed holster at her back. Red, on the other hand, stood quickly, and, flexing muscle-analogs that no human possessed, ripped out of her human disguise, revealing the blue-armored carapace of an almost standard female-variant combat chassis. But before either of them could take further action, Jillian raised both hands in front of her and fired a full spread of hyper-velocity nails.
Both Syndesta and Red took multiple hits despite inhumanly fast efforts to dodge. Syndesta, apparently a heavy android similar to Jillian in construction, took the worst of it. Two of Jillian's deadly nails slashed their way through her abdomen, tearing through armored clothing and internal armor as if it were paper and pulling various unidentifiable organ-analogs out along their exit trajectory. Ironically, another of Jillian's missiles struck Syndesta squarely between the eyes, exactly where Jillian herself had just been shot. Syndesta reeled back and crashed to the floor, totally rigid instead of limp.
Red, not quite as agile as Syndesta, took five hits, all to the torso and shoulders. Being heavier than the other boomer, she staggered back a couple of steps, but didn't fall. Instead, she again focused her enhanced ECM arrays on Jillian, and sent a wave of such sheer amplitude that it almost constituted a miniature EMP pulse. Even in her manic state, Jillian had no defense against this. She collapsed to her knees and then pitched forward to her face, stunned. Red, confident now of victory, extended a wicked looking serrated arm blade of her own and advanced slowly on Jillian's prone form.
"Not such a tough bitch after all, I see," she said, standing over Jillian. "And you know what? After I finish you off, I think I'll just go ahead and strangle the little juice-bag with your guts. Seems fair enough, all things considered." With that, she dropped to a knee and, snatching Jillian up by the hair, prepared to decapitate her as she had Tex. But before she could strike, there was a deafening report from behind Red, near where the dead master lay.
Unprepared for the terrific impact of a .50 caliber AP round to the side of her head, Red fell heavily onto her side, and lost her grip on Jillian's hair. But, as tough as any of her breed, Red still hung onto what passed for life. Rolling to a crouch, she looked over to see a small figure already reaching with bruised hands to recover the much too large weapon that had torn itself from her grip with the first shot. Shaking and wild-eyed, her hair bloodied in back where she'd struck the wall, little Aiko got both her small hands back around the pistol's grips, leveled it as best she could in Red's direction, and said in a shaky but fierce voice, "You leave her alone you- you bitch!"
Metallic laughter rolled from Red and she said, "Holy shit, now I've seen it all. Kid, I will hand it to you, you've got bigger balls than most of the full-grown men I've ever met. It's almost a pity you'll never be old enough to understand what that means."
Red stood then, and, arm blade still extended, strode toward Aiko. Again, Aiko desperately squeezed the trigger, and again the pistol tore itself from her grasp, nearly breaking several of her fingers. But this time her shot went wild, just as Red had thought it would. She was correct in figuring that the first hit had been a combination of luck and her own inattention, which had allowed the girl time to aim and brace.
"Oh, I think that's quite enough, young lady," she said, advancing slowly and playfully now. "I don't think your dear Dad there would approve of you playing with guns, do you?"
Aiko backpedaled desperately now, trying to put distance between herself and the blue metallic nightmare coming for her, but the cyberdroid was faster. Looming over the little girl, she raised her vicious arm blade and said, "Good night, honey. Sweet dreams."
Just as the blade was about to descend upon the cringing Aiko, she caught a blur of movement behind the combat model. Her eyes widened as she saw Jillian, battered and bloody, stagger up behind the distracted boomer and, pulling back for maximum force, ram her crackling blades into Red's back.
Red let out the same kind of inhuman, ululating cry that Tex had, only pitched in feminine tones as Jillian, blades still embedded, clenched her fist, twisted it violently left and right, and then yanked it viciously out, a section of the larger boomer's Abotex-sheathed fiber-optic spine coming with it.
Like a puppet who's strings had been cut, Red collapsed in a heap, narrowly missing Aiko who nimbly rolled out of the way. Jillian, the gory section of spinal column still grasped in her clawed hand, looked down at the savaged combat boomer and muttered fiercely, "Who's laughing now you brainless pile of walking scrap?"
Aiko, traumatized and shocked now almost to numbness looked up at a Jillian she almost didn't know. Broken, torn, covered in blood both her own and not, an unreadable and wholly unfamiliar expression contorting her features, the Jillian who stood in front of Aiko now was almost a stranger and more than a little frightening. But in the end, as her gaze happened to fall on the mutilated form of her father, Aiko reached out for the only half-familiar thing left in her life.
Sobbing, Aiko threw herself on Jillian, wrapping her thin arms tightly around Jillian's waist and burying her face in Jillian's stomach. "Why, Jillian? Why? Why did they come in here and do this to us? To my Daddy!"
Jillian, her mind still racing, her blood still slowly simmering said, "Aiko, honey, I don't know. I mean, I know what they wanted, but this-!" She shook her head slowly, gently stroking the little girl's hair, checking the injury she'd received striking the wall, and said, "No, I don't understand how anyone, human or cyberdroid, could do something like this, much less enjoy it the way they did. And I hope I never do."
As she looked around the dining room, once a place of laughter and family bliss, now a slaughterhouse, it occurred to Jillian that things might not be quite over yet. If she were planning an operation like this, God forbid, she certainly wouldn't go in without back-up and perimeter security. That being the case, she thought it could only be a small matter of time before someone or something else came to finish what the contact team had started.
"Aiko," she said matter-of-factly, "We need to get out of here."
Non-plussed, Aiko looked up with tear-stained eyes and said, "Leave? Why do we need-?" And then her eyes grew wide as realization dawned on her. "Oh, no," she said in a tone of pure horror. "You mean there might be more of them, don't you?"
"I'm afraid so. It's what I would do if I'd planned this."
"Then you're right," Aiko said, nodding her head vigorously. "We need to get out of here before they come!" And then, frowning slightly she said, "But Jillian, you're hurt so badly! Will you be alright? Will you be able to take care of us?"
Jillian sighed, and thought to herself, 'I'm afraid you don't know the half of it, little mistress. According to my fault indicators, I shouldn't even be ambulatory right now. What's keeping me going, I don't know myself. But I won't fail you as I failed Master Asakawa. I won't rest until you're safe.' Aloud, she said, "I'll be fine once we've made it to someplace safe and I have a chance to rest. You've read my owner's manual, after all, so you know how quickly I can heal given the chance."
Aiko's expression tightened, and she said, "Jillian, that's not funny. I know you're a boomer, but you're not just a machine. A machine can only do what's in it's owner's manual, and if that's how you were both of us would be dead now. And Daddy," she paused, swallowing back tears, "Jillian, there was nothing you could do about that. Those other boomers just had things planned out too well. It's only because you didn't act the way they thought you would, like a machine, that we're still alive."
Jillian looked at the little girl in awe. She knew that Aiko was far more intelligent than her peers, but she hadn't guessed that her charge held such depths. Hearing the conviction in the girl's words and the trust behind them brought a lump to Jillian's throat and a stinging sensation to her eyes, something that both surprised and disturbed her. Apparently the safety interlocks in her emotional matrix had yet to reset themselves. And given the sheer physical damage her brain and body had taken, she thought it might be some time before those particular neural pathways regenerated. In fact, as the high-octane pseudo-hormonal soup she was running on slowly dissipated, she felt her mind slowing, and a fuzzy grayness, a maintenance fugue, she knew, began to creep over her awareness.
But before she could let that take hold, she knew she had to get Aiko and herself out of the house and off the estate. "Aiko," she said, "We need to go now. And it would be faster and safer, I think, if I carried you. Is that okay with you?"
Aiko nodded and said, "Sure, Jillian. I don't mind. And all of a sudden, I feel so tired. Is that because of everything that's happened?"
Jillian, bending to pick the little girl up in her arms said, "Probably. And you should sleep. You'll feel better afterwards, and it will make traveling easier."
"Jillian," Aiko said suddenly in a plaintive voice, "Why do I feel so hollow inside right now? It hurts, but- shouldn't it hurt more? I mean, when somebody you love- when something happens like this- Jillian, is something wrong with me?"
Jillian sighed, and, while walking briskly toward the basement stairs and an exit she hoped had remained secret, said, "No, honey, I don't think so. I just think this is more than you can deal with right now. From what I understand, most little girls your age would probably be hysterical at this point, but that's not how you are. You're able to see that we can't afford that right now, and so I think you've buried your grief until you can let it out safely. It just means that you're mature beyond your years." And then wryly, she added, "At least, that's the opinion of a cyberdroid who's done a little reading on child psychology"
That had the intended result; it brought a slight smile to the little girl's face. But then she frowned again, and looking up at Jillian said, "But Jillian, what about the cops and everything? Won't they be coming here?"
Jillian, now descending the stairs into the basement said, "Oh, I'm sure they will be. But, by the time they get here, I'm fairly certain that things will have been rearranged to suit the people who staged this whole thing. We don't dare stay here to meet the police and give them the real story, and even if we did, I'm not sure that would work out."
"What do you mean?" the little girl said, puzzled.
"Well, given the scenario they were setting up, I think it likely that the police will come here expecting to find a house full of corpses and a rampaging rogue boomer. I strongly suspect that the ADP will come in shooting first and asking questions later."
"Oh," Aiko said in a small voice, and then, "So if that's how it is, what are we going to do, Jillian?"
Jillian shook her head and, opening the concealed doorway hidden behind the master's wine racks, said, "Aiko, honey, I wish I knew. I wish I knew."