Observer

This place wasn't merely "another one"—it was worse. Richard froze at the bedroom threshold, unable to bring himself to step onto the carpet, which had already been heavily trampled by the dirty boots of the task force. A meter and a half away from him, resting on a wide bed, lay the body of a middle-aged man, untouched as yet by decomposition, who left behind three divorces and an endless abyss of debt. His wrinkled hands, heavily dusted with the "buckwheat" of age spots, were submissively clasped together over a beer belly. Nearby, a white sheet of paper gleamed, in which he bid farewell to an "unfair world"—as if this world had ever promised him anything different. Why do you all keep killing yourselves? The android was nearly ready to entertain a theory that some cheap depressant was being introduced into the rusty arteries of the city's water supply; otherwise, this streak of suicides could only be explained by mass hysteria, or a virus that shut down the brain's sector for self-preservation. Standing motionless in the doorway, Richard scanned the man who had been fatally unlucky in love from a distance. Lying before him was a simple, forty-year-old loser whose string of misfortunes had finally, definitively broken today. The entire interior of the room—from torn photographs to empty bottles—screamed of a pain that is usually healed only by time, though perhaps not in this instance. Suddenly, someone’s forehead bumped into his back. The impact was weak, blind, and clumsy. Richard didn't even stir; his body remained as immovable as if a tennis ball had bounced off him, rather than a human crashing into him. Judging by the vector of the collision and the characteristic metallic clink of gadgets draped around a neck like expensive medals on the chest of a laboratory warfare veteran, the forensic examiner following closely at his heels had plowed right into him. "Oh..." A small hand with multi-colored manicured nails rubbed the bruised spot. Large eyes lifted to the back of the man's head, attempting to discern the thoughts behind the perfectly trimmed brunette hair. "What's in there? Something horrible again?" "Depends on what you compare it to," Richard replied dryly, continuing to block the entrance into the stale, alcohol-reeking "tomb" like a wall of solid stone. Less than two meters from the threshold stiffened a living example of where ultimate despair leads. The world truly was unfair, just as Mr. Robertson had managed to scrawl in his note. Especially to those who acted justly and craved justice in return. The poor bastard, who had dreamed of love, never understood that justice is an option simply not included in this world's base configuration. "A sad irony," the android detective summarized thoughtfully. The man's file was as clean as a church, his list of sins shorter than a newborn's. At first, Richard hadn't believed the retrieved data, casting a skeptical eye over the stockpiles of empty bottles of the cheapest liquor. The deceased didn't even have a single ticket for illegal parking to his name—and that was across four decades of a practically aimless existence. No arrests, no minor infractions. An astonishing, almost pathological righteousness that, in the end, wasn't worth a single cent. But love is priceless. Yet when money enters the equation, the concept mutates into cheap, consumerist exploitation. It was a pity that sentiment-based fraud, better known as a "romance scam," didn't fall under the jurisdiction of the homicide department. Richard would once again remain "cold." The ranks of cybercriminals would gain another target, while he was left with nothing to do and no one to hunt. Instead of the thrill of the chase, he would have to spend his time dispersing the vultures gathered in the yard. Fortunately, at least this time, there were no arrogant bloggers. "What exactly is the irony?" his colleague from the department tried to draw a conversation out of the android, who usually spoke to anyone only on rare occasions. Her head, styled in a high ponytail, squeezed into the narrow gap between the doorframe and his arm. A tiny nose crinkled instantly—either from the sight itself or from the stale, sour ambiance of cheap booze and fast-food scraps. Eyes sharply lined with black pencil immediately locked onto the floor, where a fragment of a photograph floated like a drowning victim in a puddle of spilled whiskey. "The irony is that he was nearly a saint." But the world is always cruelest to those who try to be honest, Richard logged the damp A4 sheet a fraction of a second later. A scan of the face depicted on it returned: "No matches found in databases." A non-existent person. Judging by the characteristic markers that only a machine could detect, this attractive visage had undoubtedly been generated by a neural network. "Another suicide," he stated, casting a sweeping glance over the shabby walls damp with mold, the floors covered in layers of years-old dust, and the skeletal remains of old furniture living out their final days. He stepped inside. Richard extended his hand in an inviting gesture. "After you. There is nothing more for me to do here. If you require assistance, I will be outside." "Oh, it's absolutely pouring out there," the forensic examiner groaned, squeezing through the narrow doorway along with her equipment. Her work bag hit the floor beside the bed with a heavy thud, accompanied by an equally heavy sigh. "You'd better wait in the living room. The guys are discussing some find in the garage. They say that..." Hearing the click of boots near the threshold, the girl snapped her head up, catching only the vanishing glimpse of a blue triangle. He had tuned her out yet again, and she, in turn, wouldn't take offense, submissively accepting the lack of attention as something natural and long since familiar. For years, she had been trying to catch this ghostly neon glow, but her fingers closed on nothing but thin air. Her glassy eyes, filling with a sudden veil of tears, lowered slowly to the bag, her hands beginning to dig blindly through its depths. Her colleagues back at the precinct had long since stopped hiding their caustic snickers and sarcasm. To them, her obsession with the plastic machine had turned into a drawn-out comedy show, one where the leading lady just couldn't seem to memorize a simple truth: a doll has no heart. He would never rip it out of his chest and place it into her caring hands. The girl let out a shaky exhale, trying to master the trembling in her fingers while his footsteps—and he himself—grew further and further away. To everyone around, her attempts to "tame" and thaw this block of ice looked ridiculous and pathetic. Yet every single time he happened to be near, his stiff suit sleeve barely brushing against her shoulder, the rest of the world—with all its depravity and eternal injustice—ceased to exist for her in that brief, fleeting moment. Richard moved down the narrow corridor toward the first floor to get some fresh air. Not that he needed air, and certainly not the fresh kind. Beneath the mute stares of the task force and his once-again-hungover partner, who was splayed out on a greasy sofa with a glass of water pressed to his mouth, the most tight-lipped detective on the squad pushed open the front door. No one dared call out to him. No one ever asked him questions, as if all the answers had always been seared onto his forehead. The android stepped out onto the porch of the small wooden house that had become a crypt for its owner. Cold raindrops instantly coated his face, shattering against his cheekbones like glass fragments. Richard took a step forward, and the old, rotted boards groaned in agony beneath his weight. He held his palm out under the downpour, letting the rain soak his arm to the elbow. Heavy streams coursed down the flawlessly white sleeve and synthetic skin, leaving no stains, offering no coolness. Aside from the slick slide of water along his forearm, he felt absolutely nothing—neither within nor without. The deviant that had once opened its eyes to this world had died along with her. All that remained was a properly functioning shell, possessing neither the means nor the reason to feel anymore. "You would have laughed at this," he whispered, addressing the void that always lingered just behind his left shoulder. "Literal love to the grave. How incredibly... human of you all." Richard gave his hand a sharp flick, throwing off the excess moisture, and stepped back deeper under the awning, carefully shielding his optical lenses from the dirty splatter of the rain. "And so meaningless," he muttered, driving his palms back into his pockets out of sheer habit. Right on cue, the familiar timer initiated, mapping out his next "idle minutes." Gray sheets of torrential rain mercilessly whipped the asphalt, simultaneously scraping the grime from the pitted sidewalk. Despite the overhang above him, capricious gusts of wind regularly swept handfuls of spray under the awning, intent on forcing their damp company upon him. The white paint had long since peeled from the walls of the surrounding, lower-income houses; the yards stood overgrown and neglected. It would be far easier to bulldoze the entire block and rebuild from scratch than to attempt any repairs in this distressed neighborhood. Even the bank would likely turn up its nose at foreclosing on this property for debts, preferring to abandon it to the elements and leave it to the next of kin alongside the deceased’s negative account balance. Near a rusty mailbox, which listed at a fifteen-degree angle on its spindly post, a handful of onlookers lingered. Just a couple of joggers, three dog walkers, and a few neighbors who had crawled out of their dens at the wail of the sirens. Soggy dogs strained against their leashes, the joggers shifted nervously from foot to foot, and the neighbors whispered among themselves, huddling in jackets and bathrobes while sharing a single umbrella between the three of them. They had all drawn near the strobe of the emergency lights like insects to a flame, desperate for fresh gossip. The weather this week was truly "blessing" the population with its unbridled aggression. A sudden, violent gust of damp wind lashed across his flawlessly styled hair, its wet tentacles combing the brunette strands straight back. The rain had officially lost its mind, hammering frantically against the windowpanes as if trying to shatter them; the wind threatened to rip trees out by their roots, sweeping lightweight debris down the main street. Across the road, a circular trash bin toppled onto its side with a loud crash and rolled away, spewing its contents onto the thoroughfare. Empty bottles and assorted refuse tumbled along the asphalt like urban tumbleweeds, clattering against parked cars and the ambulance. Following a sudden, blinding flash of lightning, the neighbors scattered like cockroaches, retreating into the cracks of their respective homes in a panicked bid to escape yet another respiratory virus. The onlookers, realizing the free show was over, dissolved into the gray alleyways, splashing loudly through the puddles to the accompaniment of thunder. Within minutes, the street was entirely deserted. Except for one soul. Her again? Richard locked his optical sensors onto the already familiar silhouette, and something within his system shorted out for a fraction of a second. His hands snatched themselves out of his pockets and, in an entirely unconscious reflex, flew up to his head. With a brief, calculated gesture, he smoothed down his wind-ruffled hair, as if trying to groom himself before an encounter that shouldn't have mattered to him in the slightest. The impulse was redundant, entirely illogical, but he failed to suppress it in time. Brilliant, Richard, his inner voice sneered, all that's left is to pull out a rose and spritz some cologne. The algorithms were still operating on old principles, even though a lifetime's worth of water had flowed under the bridge since then. Activating social "charm" protocols when the only human they had been written for was long gone felt entirely akin to phantom pain. Those lines of code were now stripped of their addressee, rendering them a hollow, meaningless ritual. Swaying slightly against the violent buffering of the wind, the stranger stood beneath a sprawling old oak, nearly melting into its knotted trunk. The transparent umbrella in her hand felt like a joke played against the elements. The little black dress was completely saturated, clinging to her body like a second skin. Despite her attempt to seek shelter, dark, heavy rivulets of water tore from the ends of her dyed hair. She was soaked through to the bone, as if she had just crawled out of the river. The downpour was merciless, yet she seemed utterly indifferent to it. Two pairs of gray eyes collided across the deserted street. Richard continued to hypnotize the human with his stare, determined to parse what exactly was wrong with her. If she were immune to illness, her disregard for clothing might at least be logical. Doubting his own assumptions, he initiated a scan: the heart beating inside her chest was distinctly human. Therefore—not an android. Therefore—susceptible to sickness. "What killed him?" the familiar question drifted across in a whisper. Through the dense wall of the deluge, Richard didn't so much hear her voice as read the movements of her deathly pale lips. He didn't stir to close the distance; frankly, he had no intention to. The rain drummed loudly against the awning, throwing up an acoustic barrier behind which he felt relatively secure from the stranger's bizarre inquiries into other people's deaths. The girl at the far end of the yard was literally drowning in water. Her skin was covered in goosebumps from the cold, her breathing was labored, and her core temperature was climbing toward thirty-seven degrees Celsius—yet none of it fazed her. She stared at him with those detached gray eyes, as though the entire universe had been placed on pause, and the only metric she awaited was his response. Let her wait. It was her health to squander. Richard was perfectly satisfied with this distance. It allowed him to dissect her appearance with a cold, long-range gaze and granted him the leverage to ignore questions whose reasoned conclusions hadn't suited her tastes the last time around. The roles had flipped. He could stand on this threshold for an eternity, demonstratively tuning out her presence in retaliation for the previous logical dead-end. She, on the other hand, could not. The android shifted imperceptibly from heel to toe, dispassionately observing from afar as her legs trembled beneath the sodden fabric. The girl was clearly running on fumes, yet she stubbornly held her ground without a trace of discomfort on her face. Richard adjusted a stray lock of hair and immediately chided himself for it. Turning away toward the doorway with a show of pointed disinterest—from where the muffled voices of patrolmen and investigators drifted—he stole another glance at the timer. His projections suggested the girl would collapse long before his team finished the property inventory and vacated the house. It was merely a question of time and endurance—two metrics over which his body held absolute dominion. After offering a brief pang of sympathy to a withered potted plant by the door, Richard hit his limit. With a practiced veneer of indifference, he turned back around and swept the street with a detached gaze, adrift in a sea of ambiguous and deeply contradictory doubts. One could only envy the human's sheer obstinacy. Despite her failed attempt to draw the android into a dialogue, she hadn't budged an inch, still standing by the thick oak and closely monitoring his every movement. On one hand, he didn't give a damn how long this woman would be sidelined from reality, battling a fever in a hospital ward. He didn't know her name; to him, she remained a random face in a blur of identical, washed-out days—a blank space undeserving of even a fraction of a percent of his processing power. On the other hand... watching the sheer stubbornness with which she collected the symptoms of an impending illness was becoming mentally taxing. Cursing internally, Richard gave in. It would be naive to assume his answers would be "correct" this time around. "Come closer, and I will tell you," the android jerked his shoulder and buried his palms deeper into his pockets, adopting a posture of total apathy. He made an attempt to lure this thoroughly chilled nuisance under the awning, but he had no intention of taking a single step forward himself, forcing the woman to submit to his terms. His cold, slightly haughty gaze remained locked on her face, tracking the minutest micro-expressions which, for the record, were entirely absent. Richard narrowed his eyes ever so slightly as a heavy branch snapped from the tree and crashed right at her feet, spraying her dress with muddy splatter. A fresh gust of wind nearly ripped the umbrella from her fingers. The girl swayed along with it by inertia, her silhouette turning dangerously unstable for a split second. She barely managed to stay on her feet, restoring her balance with a sort of desperate grace. The android waited patiently, not deigning to stir from his spot or offer the slightest assistance. He watched this battle against the elements with cold composure, intending to run a comprehensive screening for alcohol or narcotics the moment this specter closed the distance; he simply could not find any other logical explanation for such blatant disregard for one's own well-being. His system had already mapped out several dialogue trees, yet not a single algorithm could clarify why a human would stand near-naked in a deluge instead of instinctively seeking warmth. The stranger stepped forward—hesitantly, but moving toward him nonetheless, her eyes never once dropping to look beneath her feet. Her summer sandals, built on a modest platform, sank into the untamed lawn. The tall weeds, lush and heavy with rainwater, licked at her bare ankles, scratching the skin and leaving muddy streaks behind. Yet, just as before, she remained completely unfazed by anything happening to her body. Either this woman was entirely devoid of a self-preservation instinct, or she was operating under the influence of something chemically numbing. At last, she reached the rotted "tomb," even as the gusts of wind tried their hardest to drag her back toward the road and sweep her down the street alongside the blowing refuse. Standing at the edge of the porch, Richard extended his hand in a performative display of gentlemanly conduct, offering just enough aid to help her clear the final couple of steps. She shouldn't have anticipated anything more. The stranger froze, staring down at his outstretched palm as though she were looking not at an android's limb, but at a coiled viper. "Is this a hobby of yours?" he asked the moment her icy, sodden fingers rested timidly within his palm. Her skin was nearly translucent, and the chill radiating from it could easily rival the ambient temperature of a morgue. The girl stepped under the awning and took up a position right beside him. The space beneath the overhang was narrow, rendering the distance between them tight enough for his sensory nodes to track the rhythm of her respiration. Zero indicators of alcohol intoxication, his system reported. Having spent years classifying humans by their degrees of chemical dependency and general degradation, the clean readout was almost startling. She was entirely sober, unnaturally tranquil, and carried no scent other than the rain and the crushed grass she had just treaded through. The stranger abruptly snatched her hand back, her grip tightening like a vice around the umbrella handle. She demonstratively ignored his provocative use of the informal tone, as well as that strange, unsettling aura of human authority with which he looked down on her, despite their almost identical height. To anyone else, he was merely a piece of high-tech plastic rolled off a CyberLife assembly line, and he was expected to carry himself accordingly—dispassionately, subserviently, predictably. Yet Richard had long since broken past the boundaries of his factory settings, transforming into something that, by the laws of the United States, should have been rusting away in a dismantled heap at a scrapyard for the second year running. In a country where the rare, well-hidden deviants were hunted down like stray dogs, vivisected like lab mice, and disposed of like defective merchandise, Richard had learned to wear his "malfunction" like a fine, expensive suit—imperceptible to the system, yet palpable to anyone foolish enough to step too close. "I’ve seen you before," the detective said, tilting his head slightly as he buried his hands back into his pockets. He narrowed his eyes just a fraction, noting how her knuckles had turned stark white from the strain of her grip. Ever since their first encounter—the exact second his processor flagged an anomalous pocket of tranquility amidst a flock of hyperactive onlookers—he had cataloged her. Later, he had systematically swept through the archives of his own memory. Richard had meticulously filtered thousands of faces captured by his optics at various crime scenes over the preceding weeks. Digitized images had flashed behind his eyes until one finally froze, forcing the system to output a critical probability score. The result was statistically impossible for a mere coincidence. The nameless stranger had been there. In six out of ten cases. "You appear at crime scenes frequently," he said, taking a half-step forward. The movement cut the distance between them, leaving her with a stark choice: retreat back into the downpour or allow him directly into her personal space. "And every single time, you aren't looking at the police work, nor are you looking at the corpse..." Richard’s analytical gaze swept over her slowly, an inspection that an outside observer might easily mistake for hostile. It was the exact look a pathologist gives a cooling body—noting every detail, registering everything, yet feeling nothing beyond professional curiosity. Once, something distinctly alive had flickered in his eyes, something capable of care and warmth. Now, only an arctic chill remained. "...you look exclusively at me." Having scanned the woman from head to toe—from the wet strands plastered against her forehead down to her sandals—Richard found absolutely nothing that hinted at her identity. No jewelry, no tattoos, no visible birthmarks or scars. Even the global database search yielded nothing; the system continuously spit back a refusal, failing to establish a single match based on her biometric markers. A blank slate with no history behind it. "And you are no mere passerby." The android, long obsessed with mapping logic onto human behavior, felt as though he were waking from a two-year slumber. The woman stood before him like a living cipher materialized from the gray Detroit mist—an enigma his former self would have thrown himself into solving with the burning fervor of a pioneer. But that former self remained buried back there, lost in five hundred and sixty-five days of yawning emptiness and apathy. Then came the question that caused his eyes to narrow in quiet irritation. "What killed him?" Her voice, cracked slightly from the damp chill, barely managed to cut through the heavy drone of water cascading off the roof and onto a pile of rusted tires by the wall. Unlike the others, she didn't examine him as a curiosity or a rare toy that couldn't be found on the shelves of CyberLife stores. Only his answer interested her. The poor girl could barely stand, but she was trembling a bit less now. Neither the cold, the rain, nor the scanning and slightly hostile gaze of the machine could make her look away or show a shred of emotion. Commendable bravery. Or, more likely, desperate stupidity. Richard barely managed to restrain himself from rolling his eyes. He detested repetition, and this individual resembled a scratched vinyl record, playing the exact same song over and over. His logical conclusions about "debts" or "betrayal" would probably fail to satisfy her just as before, but the android decided to press his luck and play along. "Sleeping pills," he delivered his verdict confidently, in a tone that brooked no argument. "The sleeping pills killed him." He fell silent, expecting the discussion to be exhausted and logic to triumph over the drawn-out silence. The stillness of the stranger, who didn't even flinch under the weight of his authoritative statement, remained unchanged. The android narrowed his pupils slightly, analyzing her reaction, but received only a cold silence in return—one that began slowly but surely eroding his programmed certainty. When her wet head shook in refusal once more, an dangerously alive, purely human, and undisguised irritation cut through his voice for the first time in a very long long time. "He took a lethal dose of Zolpidem, what is so difficult to comprehend?" Richard took a sharp step forward, completely invading her personal space. His LED flashed crimson for a fraction of a second, reflecting an internal system conflict. "Or is that answer incorrect as well?" He was used to humans instinctively backing away from him, but this person's obstinacy and lack of fear bordered on insanity. However, it wasn't the stranger's persistence that angered him, but his own impotence—a rare and destructive sensation for a machine. Every attempt to provide a logically flawless answer shattered against her calm "no," like a wave against a granite pier. "I comprehend perfectly," she said, without flinching or recoiling from the robot, who was beginning to radiate an all-too-obvious passive aggression. "But what actually killed him?" The question sounded like a death sentence to his software. Richard had no doubt that any subsequent argument, backed by hundreds of gigabytes of forensic databases, would once again turn out to be a hollow sound to her. Incorrect. Insufficient. Not what she needed. "You must be mocking me..." He made a sharp gesture with his hand toward the door behind which Mr. Robertson was quietly rotting. "What exactly do you want to hear? About his debts? About how the negative balance on a bank account ate a man alive? Or about the betrayal and the scammers who drove a human to the grave?" Richard broke out of his stance, pacing the cramped confines of the porch with heavy, deliberate strides. The stranger fluidly stepped back toward the railing, granting the "beast" more room to thrash inside his invisible cage. Every tight turn he made was accompanied by a tense gesture—he dragged a palm hard across the back of his neck, roughly scattering his damp hair, before ultimately freezing right back where he had started. The android exhaled sharply, flawlessly mimicking a human attempt to master rising irritation. For a few prolonged seconds, he watched coldly as the raindrops spilling from her wet bangs traced tracks down her cheeks, never once prompting the girl to blink or wipe away the cold, trailing moisture. Her total passivity felt like an outright defiance of human nature itself. At this rate, my own lack of imagination is going to be the death of me, Richard thought, giving his head a terse shake. He leaned his shoulder against the nearest moisture-blackened pillar, settling into a posture of practiced, plausible relaxation. He was a creature engineered to extract answers to any problem, regardless of complexity, by constructing flawless logistical chains. The solution to this prompt seemed blindingly obvious, sitting right on the surface. Yet, under the stranger’s unblinking scrutiny, every single thesis crumbled, rendered instantly incorrect. Inside his chassis, something was beginning to simmer. He, the pinnacle machine designed for uncovering truth, was being slowly but decisively unhinged by this soft, unyielding resistance to simple, empirical facts. "Are you playing some kind of game?" His voice dropped lower, calmer, taking on that dangerous, quiet rasp that usually heralded the onset of a severe interrogation. Typically, his absolute stillness carried far more threat than any sudden movement, but the stranger seemed entirely oblivious to the subtext. She stood like a statue with an umbrella, as if her soles had taken root in the decaying wood, only occasionally batting her eyelashes while looking right through him. The wait for a response dragged on, and his patience with the pillar ran thin. The silence—uninformative, hollow, and vast—grated on his processors worse than the overt aggression of the city's worst thugs. He shoved off from the support abruptly, invading her personal space so aggressively that the rim of the transparent umbrella jolted, scattering a fine bead of clear water across her bare shoulders. Richard narrowed his eyes suspiciously, burying his hands back into his pockets. His LED flickered in a volatile, erratic pulse of yellow and crimson—a stark warning that the "interrogated" party had better not lie. "Are you looking for someone or something among these bodies?" His gaze, sharpened to its absolute limit, bored into her pale face, desperate to dredge up even a phantom of an emotion or a fleeting micro-tremor. "Why are you chasing after corpses all over Detroit like a lapdog after its master? And why, damn it, do you keep asking the exact same question—one I don't have the answer to, and they can no longer be asked?" The android waited for the girl to flinch, for her pupils to dilate, but the silence between them only thickened, heavy with the scent of wet asphalt and ozone. The stranger merely turned her head slowly, looking out at the rain-drenched street through which she would likely have to swim rather than walk. "If you do not have the answer, then I suppose I will leave." She spoke so casually, as if she hadn't been walking like a shadow behind Death itself, as if she hadn't been investigating the motives behind the most diverse, utterly disconnected suicides. Turning around, the stranger took a step away. The translucent umbrella instantly transformed into a barrier, cutting off the living and the unliving alike from her bizarre persona and equally bizarre questions. Or rather, question—it was always the same one, like a looped script. She hadn't answered his; he hadn't provided an answer to hers. Fair enough. Yet something in the deep sectors of his mind responsible for intuition suggested this was far from their final encounter. The android detective remained on the porch, tracking her with his eyes until the dark silhouette began to dissolve into the monotonous grayness of the street. He could already see this scene playing out in the future as clearly as if it were happening now: at the next crime scene, while the task force cut down another hanging corpse from a chandelier or fished a bloated drowning victim out of the river, she would emerge from the shadows once more. Richard clenched his jaw imperceptibly, anticipating the moment. She would arrive with the exact same inscrutable face, beneath that same eternal canopy of an umbrella, only to lock gazes with a matching pair of gray eyes and ask him, the android detective, about something that defied all manner of logic. Richard slowly drew himself up, restoring his flawless appearance with a brief, precise adjustment to his hair and the cuffs of his jacket. The rain continued to hammer frantically against the roof, stubbornly washing away the traces of her presence from the decaying planks, but within the partitions of his memory, this encounter was already sealed inside a folder marked Priority. He drew the damp air deep into his components, artfully mimicking a human sigh, and felt the internal system tension slacken for a moment—the great power of self-suggestion. The android cast one final glance at the empty, gray street where her silhouette had stood only a second before, and decisively turned back toward the front door. It seemed that amidst the stench of decomposing bodies and crushing monotony, he had finally caught his long-awaited breath of fresh air.