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Renata comes back out from behind the counter after shutting the other
gates. Her statement stands, that she can’t trust Quidel, but those
motorcycles don’t sound good. They’re so loud and obnoxious. This is a
remote part of town, but it’s not completely cut-off. People can hear them,
and if there’s a shootout, the cops will become involved, whether the alarms
are still working or not. All this running through her mind, she’s starting
to freak out. She didn’t pass the first test—the first test!—for the NSD.
She can’t protect an entire bank from a bunch of shadowy biker spies. She
gets on her knees, and checks for Lazar’s pulse. He doesn’t have one. “How
will they get in? Blowtorches? Explosives? A truck?”
“They’ll use a key,” Quidel answers calmly.
She’s just staring at Lazar’s bloodied face. “If they have access to this
building, why did this guy kill my boss?”
“Because he didn’t have a key. They’re not working together. The
location of this bank was leaked, and multiple parties are coming to claim
it.”
“Are they here for everything, or for one specific thing?”
“Little bit of both. They all have their priorities, but they’ll take
anything they can get their hands on. Grab his gun. Our only hope is to
fight back.”
“Are reinforcements coming?” Renata presses.
“Yes, but they’ll be a while. The Kumati will be inside in seconds, as soon
as they find which key goes to which gate.” They can hear the warble-whang
of the gate as the bad guys begin to try to open it. “Their slight lack of
intel is the only thing protecting us right now, and the clock is ticking.
Please pick up that gun.”
Renata is still not looking up. “If this bank is so valuable, why doesn’t it
have round-the-clock surveillance?”
“Renata! Please!”
“I mean, at least keep a guard here overnight.”
The gate opens. A bunch of men file in, and start waving their guns around,
as if there were more threats than only two people in the center of the
lobby. They’re speaking Kumati, which Renata never learned, but they don’t
sound happy.
“If it were me, I would keep a surveillance house nearby, with officers who
are always on watch. If not every bank employee knows it’s a front, the
panopticons only come in during an emergency.”
“It’s over, Renata.” Quidel drops his gun, holds his hand up to surrender.
“Like this one,” Renata finishes.
More yelling.
“Stand up, Renata,” Quidel urges. “These guys aren’t messing around, and I
don’t know what happens to your consciousness when you die!”
Now she looks up. “Huh?”
“You. Are. A. Ro. Bot.”
She winces.
More yelling. This guy’s right up in her face with his shotgun. And he’s
about to fire it.
She slaps the muzzle of his gun, so it swings to the side. He instinctively
pulls the trigger, shooting a few of his compatriots. She takes the shotgun
with both hands, jams the butt into his toe, then shoots him in the chin. No
more shells. She finally does pick-up the original motorcyclist’s pistol.
She shoots the rest of the attackers in the head, one-by-one, before any of
them can fire back even once. No more bullets.
Two more guys rush into the bank. Quidel has since retrieved his own weapon
from the floor, which he uses to take out these guys. They can still hear
more outside. A lot of people came for the treasure. The two of them swipe
their dead enemies’ guns from their hands, and walk out of the bank
together. They don’t speak, they don’t coordinate. Renata handles the gunmen
who are more on the left side as Quidel takes care of the right. They only
fire as many times as necessary to get the job done, and they don’t take a
single bullet for themselves.
They stand there for a moment, waiting for anyone to come out from behind a
tree, or something. “What did you mean by that?”
“By what?”
“You said I was a robot.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I heard you, plain as day. It...triggered something in me. I felt
invigorated. I felt bulletproof.”
“You may be.”
“Because I’m a robot?”
He shakes his head. “That’s not the right word for it. There’s no such thing
as an intelligent robot. Android, yes. Superintelligence, absolutely. But
robots are just machines with programming. You don’t have programming. Even
when you did, it wasn’t a rigid set of instructions, but a deeply engineered
personality. You still made your own choices. It’s just that you made the
predictable ones, and you didn’t know that they came from implanted
memories, rather than lived experiences, and that you were designed by
another intelligence.”
“What the hell are you going on about?”
Quidel looks at her with what Renata feels is unwarranted sadness. “You’re
not the only one. I just think you were the first. That’s what I’ve been
doing here, in your world. The NSD gives me missions, which I take, but I’ve
been running my own investigation in parallel. It took me a long time to
find you, and I encountered other anomalies along the way.”
“You are not making any sense, as per usual. Maybe the gas that nearly
killed us gave you permanent brain damage.”
“It didn’t nearly kill me, Renata. It did kill me.”
“How is that possible?” she questions.
He gestures all around them. “How is this? Did you take marksmanship
classes? Did you even learn basic gun safety? This is your handiwork, yet as
far as you remember, you’ve never picked up a gun even once. Can you explain
that?”
“No. Can you?”
“Yes. But you won’t believe me, and if I do manage to convince you of the
truth, it’s gonna ruin your life.”
Renata looks around now. “What else is new?”
