Category:

ADRIAN

19 SEPTEMBER 2061

The air conditioning was not working in the train car. It had been a long day and would be a longer night. Adrian collapsed onto one of the many free seats with a sigh, crossed her legs, and pulled her bag close to her stomach. There was nothing much of importance in the bag tonight, no classified documents, not even her tablet. Now it was just a waiting game, and all she hoped for was that the corner bodega would still be open so she could grab food before falling into bed, perhaps to sleep, perhaps to wait anxiously for the call.

She glanced at her watch, set to military time. It blinked at her, reminding her of unread mail. 22:14. It was even later than she'd thought. She shifted in her seat. Her right leg, a biomechatronic prosthesis below the knee, generated a small amount of heat, usually unnoticeable, but uncomfortable now in the stuffy car. She scanned the other passengers, who were doing their best to ignore their neighbors, studying their tablets and phones. The train rattled and screeched around a corner in the tunnel.

She read half of a newspaper article through one man's transparent tablet, trying to hold off sleep as she deciphered the story in reverse. The woman beside her, who still looked neat and put together in a tailored suit, noticed her effort, laughed a little, then turned back to her own device.

The train jolted to a stop. Adrian rocked slightly in her seat. The doors hissed open and closed at one of the Metro stops. A pregnant woman got on and sidestepped down the aisle, picking over the feet of those sitting down. She held her hands protectively over her stomach, a large bag swinging at her shoulder. Adrian leaned back to avoid getting hit in the face.

"Here." A thin young man stood up and made room for her near the door. "Take my seat." Adrian couldn't tell if he was impatient or charitable.

He grabbed onto an overhead handrail to steady himself as the woman took his place. She nodded her thanks but didn't say anything. Her lips and face tightened, and Adrian recognized the look. It was not a good look. It was one she'd seen before battle. One she saw now before a particularly bad briefing. The man diagonal from her, a few seats down from the pregnant woman, grunted and muttered something under his breath. She glanced at him and then followed his gaze to the man who had given up his seat. As he had reached for the handrail, the man's shirt had come untucked, leaving a small strip of his back exposed to the other passengers in the car. There, the skin was almost bright pink, like that of a white plastic baby doll. It did not match the tan of his face or hands. She recognized the color, the hallmark of Haven Corp's androids, whose skin naturalized with exposure. Androids for the private market, undoubtedly with the language skills and neural network to match.

She ducked her head and tried to ignore the scene playing out in front of her, pulling out her phone. It was barely the size of her hand, certainly thinner, and she could see her fingers through the screen until it shifted in opacity, registering the pattern of her iris. It had taken her a while to readjust to commercial cell phones after comms in the field. She skimmed the headlines, scrolling past celebrity gossip, lingering briefly on reports from the White House. The man's muttering had grown louder.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the android shift his footing. He was tense, his stance and posture ready to strike. If she had to guess, there were no active protocols limiting an act of self-defense. Her heart began to beat a little bit faster. She was no longer sleepy and, without conscious intent, her muscles tightened. A tiny gear buzzed, almost below hearing, at her ankle. There was a wireless taser in her bag and her hand hovered over the outline of it. It had a charge that could kill a man if applied to the right point.

"Why don't you just keep on moving?" The man finally raised his voice so the whole car could hear. The pregnant woman winced and looked down at her nails. The businesswoman looked at him, side-eyed, and moved to a seat on the other side of Adrian, further away.

The android did not move. He stood so still that Adrian could hardly discern his mimetic breathing.

"Did you hear me, rubber?"

It was an insult that had never made full sense to Adrian, given how much more familiar she was with the hard plastics and metal of military-grade androids, of automated soldiers. But she supposed there was some crude connection to be drawn, some allusion to cast-off condoms. Her niece had used the slur once, casually, over dinner, tearing bread as she did so. Adrian had looked at her sister and her husband, but they had said nothing and so she hadn't either.