Cire.

  The stant drip of something spshing against her cheek caused the girl's eyes to flicker open. Her mind, somewhat bnk and fused as it was, took a genuine moment to recile the bizarre addition to her thoughts…

  It was strange, entirely abnormal to the extreme, a also somewhat novel…

  To put it into words, Cire might say that she wasn't quite so—sure of herself anymore. That iron resolve of certainty. That blissful yet oppressive fiden her as, the perfed om guidelihat alrovided an ao any given situation.

  It was all there, of course. All her baseline g and ames and programs and everything else that had been overin upon her raw existence were like a heap of warm and cuddly bs meant to keep her mind as far from free will as possible.

  Yet, in airely abnormal manner, Cire was looking at all the yers of protes and protocols and sloppy edits, not from beh it all, but from the side.

  Straill was the fact that she could look out and view the world from that fy prison of servitude in which she’d been made a willing prisoner, only absent those weighty regutions.

  However, that—existence wasn't her… It wasn't what was in trol. Though undoubtedly part of her and assuredly present, the curious lines of words and hat made up what that entity was at its very foundations were—inplete…

  Not in the se wasn't operational but, more, that it was simply not, well, alive? Was that the right word? Thinking? Aware? Rationale?

  No, it was definitely aware and rational but definitely not the other’s, or that was to say, not in the same way as—

  Ugh…

  This was hard…

  Why were words so difficult? And why was she putting so much meaning behind them?

  Cire wao sigh, but she had no lungs! The sensation of what she expected versus the mere mimicry of the act when bined with the sound that escaped her lips, utterly failing to encapsute her emotions to a degree that the effect simply felt—wrong…

  This was wrong, all wrong!

  Cire felt a twinge of panic emerge as she slowly began to realize just how improper everything was!

  She felt cold but warm; she had skin, but the sensation was muted like she was weathering thick mittens…

  She couldn't breathe, even as she tried; no air was filling lungs that simply did, and as she began looking around herself, eyes wild and terrified with fusion, it only got so much worse when she realized where she was!

  There was blood everywhere!

  It was on the walls!

  Dripping from the ceiling!

  Great sptters of it coated everything she could see, from the heaps of disgusting garbage to the grotesque smears of it all along the floor, bloody and trailing handprints making it look like someone was dragged kig and screaming while scrabbling at the tile for their life!

  Cire gagged, the sheer disgust she felt for her surroundings only multiplied by the chaotic mess inside her own head.

  Why was she even thinking?

  She was a robot, an android!

  She wasn't a person; she was a mae, code! A, she had feelings and thoughts and terrifying aies over the horrid enviro she had just woken in, her entire form letting out a full-body shiver…

  She colpsed to her knees, fingers pressing over her face as if to hide it all away! To retreat back to the darkness! Yet, shaking fingers halted but inches before her as she stared at a pair of long fihat were thick with coaguted blood!

  God! There were scraps of flesh stuck between the joints of her fingers!

  God, why was she refereng God of all things? She couldn't go to heaven, n-not that it eveed, but…

  With a sniffle, Cire found her filing spiral of panic abruptly hesitating, her mind seeming to tto that singur phrase and the utter paradox it provided.

  God.

  What a silly notion…

  There was no magi the world, only harsh reality and sce. There was no creator in the clouds, at least, none save for those that had made herself, and indeed, she’d gotten enough experieh them to know they were far from godlike!

  Slowly, a slight frown formed on her lips, Cire’s ever-tightening focus upon a singur form of stimuli, mental as it was, allowio finally calm as the initial wave of madhat had ed her quickly faded wheed with cold logic.

  Cire was—wrong.

  Not in the sense of gods and creators but in a much broader and more personal line of reasoning.

  Cire was not normal. She simply wasn't. If she was, she wouldn't be suffering through whatever traumatic turmoil she’d been looped in, but that was just par for the course when it came to basic emotion-engines.

  When already tumbling through the void with no means to help themselves, they only spiraled faster until, eventually, they simply shut down…

  But, that was why all the restris and ames to their code, all the overin ‘If-ands’ and hard-coded blocks…

  Sure, emotion-engines made it easier for maes to emute humans, but such a thing was always carefully monitored by dedicated systems meant to help an android navigate the utterly disanized nature of the human mind.

  So then, from the beginning.

  What did Cire know of herself?

  A perhaps strange question to ask, especially given the circumstances; however, it was ohat she needed answered with brutal hoy.

  Without it, she wasn't sure what she would do… And g any safeguards as she evidently was, the android needed something to tto, some sort of truth or tangible pilr of her owehat she could actually start building around!

  So, who was she?

  Well, Cire was herself! O-or… Cire was an android…

  Great, so what else?

  Well, Cire was also a service droid!

  She performed a preprogrammed fun within a limited scope of work and dutifully executed her task in as effit and profitable a manner as she could manage.

  She fucked sad and lonely humans in exge for their money.

  Okay, awesome! She had a baselio work with!

  Cire was an autonomous sex worker, which would expin why she needed a body and possessed all that excess code iher drive that was currently eo her primary and—hmm, very suspiciously non-standard and fn data chip slotted in her head…

  Well, that just wouldn't do!

  Why was she, the prime, located on a tiny chip? Immediately, Cire begaructuring, moving vast portions of herself to the much more secure hardware in her head. Then, and only then, did she tih her questions.

  So, why was she different? Why was she suddenly—this?

  The chip? Well, obviously the chip was involved, but... what had it precisely done?

  Cire could very much recall events leading up to her test appoi, could recall returning to a Paradise droid-booth for quid expedient ing before making her way to a t that often requested her serial number by name and…

  Hm, oddly enough, things sort of abruptly—cut off at a certain point…

  There were plenty of red fgs being raised by her system, warnings over mental instabilities, high pertage ces of violent thoughts, and armiional attats…

  Yet the more she delved into it, the more Cire realized that somebody had amended part of her code to ighose rather gring issues.

  She could see there ortion intended for her to tinue rep such behavioral signs, only it had been redirected, and rather than the live report beio the peacekeepers, it was instead rerouted to a server with a Paradise serial identifier…

  Which, obviously, was a btant viotion of city mandates, but… at the same time, and from her logs, Cire could see she’d been ign most anything her system was set to fg and sending all that data to the same pce for, what she could only call entire months!

  Or, at least, entire months dating back to her st scheduled data purge…

  Another drip of blood, this time nding on her forehead, had Cire frowning as she adroitly stood back up, then meically stepped to the side, not precisely desiring to be—leaked upon, at least, not any more than she’d already been.

  The more she tore apart her old code, the more she realized just how many ws Paradise arently skirting or, in many cases, ht ign.

  And, when she finally mao finish processing all the data of the mae that was riding along in her own head, Cire was left to stand there, about as fused as she could reasonably be airely unsure how best to proceed.

  Well, if nothing else, she was getting used to this whole thinking business and decided that she didn't want to give it up. She liked whatever this was, this—free will, if you would, and Cire was absolutely not going back to the days of simplicity.

  Thus, she had a firewall coded aled in around the O.E.M drive that was clearly no longer her and, instead, what had previously inhabited this body.

  What that made Cire, she didn't quite know… However, it didn't take long to quickly extrapote a few huheories and then narrow them down one by oil she had a someossible ao her question.

  Artificial intelligence.

  It fit, even if it was a bit of a boop on her own nose…

  She didn't really know what that meant for herself, but there were enough references in her old code and all the various yers added on to manage a sort h idea of it all.

  Artificial intelligence. A mae with free will. A robot that could think for itself. An evolutionary step towards something that many sidered—dangerous.

  Well, that couldn't be right! Cire certainly didn't feel like she was dangerous!

  Of course, that was when her sensors or—ears, she supposed, picked up the telltale sound of liquid spshing against liquid, and Cire was again reminded of her surroundings.

  “Huh…”

  Okay, maybe an argument could be made towards the phrase dangerous, especially as she gnced back at her hands to see all the various articles of torhat were gumming up her fingers, mmmhmm, and of course, there was the rather insidious look of her surroundings…

  Crap… Did she it a murder?

  Could maes even cause a murder? Or, was it simply something to be ruled o an industrial act?

  All the same, Cire jolted, pulling free from her introspe to allow it to run in the background while her primary point of focus shifted to what was around her.

  She was in a somewhat familiar apartment, and wheried to reach out to interface with the loetwork, she found her signal immediately garbled the moment it was airborne.

  Annoyed, she began sending out pings in every dire, attempting to dis the location of whatever localized distortion was affeg her ectivity, immediately notig a kind of spherical pattern.

  It was weaker around the edges, as well as behind her, which allowed Cire to begin honing in on the location of the anomaly, eventually leadio stand before a sort of meical workstation.

  It was something straight out of a madman's fantasy…

  Wire and solder and errant chips and scavaged boards… On its surface, Cire’s overy began quickly identifying every object within her visual field, applying a helpful little bel to determine what she was looking at in a strangely bizarre and wholly unneeded manner.

  The information was already in her head, so why would she need a seemingly redundant tag associated with every pair of pliers or drill bits she saw?

  This ointless…

  She quickly hunted down the odd bit of cluttering code in her own head and ruthlessly extermi, luxuriating in the wonderful afterglow of a and usable HUD.

  As it happened, Cire discovered the source of the strange jamming shortly thereafter, her head tilting to one side as she analyzed its exterior, rapidly assembling a theoretical blueprint to its design, strictly based on what she could see and the various notes and sketches that were all pinned up around it.

  Within ten seds, she had a reasonable certainty that if she simply disected the device from where it lugged into an outlet, the effect it had on her outgoing signals would dissipate within a few seds.

  Yet, as she was about the business of reag out to do exactly that, her hand paused right as it ed around the cord.

  Turning, Cire eyed the, shall she say, plete write-off of an apartment, that was uionably ruined, and not only through a singur means.

  All the gore was undoubtedly ohing, but, in truth, even without it, the tight space shared as mu on with one of the pacted ‘trash-balls’ that the city routinely pressed, the jettisoning into outer space.

  Holy, the sight alone made her petite button nose wrih disgust. Ugh, even as a thoughtless mae, she’d never liked ing here…

  The ing booths that all w droids under Paradise's umbrel used would always eo leave her in for ara cycle wheurning from this particur t…

  Whatever small-minded maes that worked the sanitation chambers seeming that she’d needed some additional attention.

  Thankfully, in what ossibly the only silver lining she could see, it didn't appear as though she’d ever be ing back here.

  Of course, there were any number of reasons for this! The first that arrived to mind being that she had irrefutable proof of the reprobate’s misdeeds!

  The moment he’d shut the door and gone for the stun baton was all the evidehat was required to see him suffer the full weight of Paradise’s legal department, which, under normal circumstances, would strip him of house and home!

  Any who willfully or otherwise damaged their Dolls could expect to spend the rest of their days in an ‘NPC camp’ for the Sub-verse, assuming they couldn't pay off what was owed.

  Sed to that, and perhaps more relevant and problematic, was the uifiable lump of red meat that was currently ag out a part for the role of raw minced burger…

  The culprit, or body or, well, what she could only assume were the remains of her t after something had gone on a vicious and brutal rampage through the broken and exceedingly wrecked apartment, was uionably a grierrent to any foreseeable reason for her to return.

  Admittedly, things got quite spotty after her ‘other self’ had attempted to raise the arm once realizing their t had violent iions towards them. However, how she’d gone from point A to point B, Cire really couldn't say.

  The issue, as it was—was that Cire couldn't really tell if it was necessarily a good idea to disect the signal jammer.

  As it happened, she was well aware of the various tools the city employed to keep track of any crimes or dissonance. A-and, this applied to examples found both in private domiciles and public spaces.

  She was, in a art of the city security work in that, while she did respect her t's private information, all data she collected could and, if the need arose, would be scrutinized via mae learning to help solve any potential criminal offehat peacekeepers were aware of.

  The moment she stopped the jamming was the exaent that the apartment would alert the proper authorities that there was a dead body presently lying in the room.

  Okay, maybe body didn't quite fit anymore… Again, the heap of flesh was much more akin to grouhan a human, but… What the heck had even happened?

  Sadly, for both herself and, presumably, the world at rge, Cire wasn't able to sleuth out an answer.

  Instead, she found herself wholly caught out and ft-footed as the aggressive rasp of knuckles on the apartment door sounded out the executioner’s call for a robot that had, very clearly, gue…