Dusk. Time unknown.

SHE AWOKE SLOWLY.

The air chilled her body. She gradually became aware of the cold, smooth concrete beneath her. She opened her eyes.

Her gaze traveled around her surroundings. The gray concrete. The filthy windows. The large machine. The darkness. Startled, she raised her head.

She was not where she had been before.

Before what?

She grasped at the thought as it threatened to slip away. She did not belong here; she had been somewhere else. Her mind groped for details, but there were none. This was not the place she had been before.

She slowly raised herself up. Her hands pushed against the ice-cold floor. In a sitting position, she examined the area.

She was in a large, dark room, perhaps twice as long as it was wide. Rusted light fixtures dangled from the ceiling high overhead. The only light came from the dirty windows along one wall. Large machines lined the opposite wall. There was a set of double doors on her right. Darkness lay through the doors on her left, at the far end of the room.

Something else was wrong. The air was cold; her breath came in small puffs of steam. She could feel the cold against her naked body, but she was not uncomfortable.

Naked?

She looked down at herself. She wasn’t wearing clothes she recognized; or rather, what she was wearing, she didn’t recognize as clothing. Her body from her neck down was covered with a thick layer of some artificial substance. She touched her arm. The sensation registered acutely through the soft, rubbery material. Her smooth fingertips traced her forearm to her wrist, where the sensation changed. The springy, speckled outfit met a darker, stiffer covering on her hands.

She clasped her hands together. The dark gray, metallic covering flexed freely; she realized with a start that it was fused to her skin. Over her entire body, the skin had been replaced with this flexible, artificial substance. Even more shocking, was that sensations registered at its surface as though it was embedded with nerve endings. She felt a pang of fear: what had happened to her body?

What have they done to me?

She shook off the fear and climbed to her feet. Halfway down her calves the speckled substance disappeared into thick, heavy boots. At her waist was a belt. Both were of the same material that covered her hands.

The buckle on the belt was a metal oval, half an inch thick. Around the rim was a row of small blue lights. On the front was a design she didn’t recognize. On her right was a holster. On her left was a small, rectangular pouch. Extra clip. Both were empty.

What?

She stared at the little pouch at her side. She knew it was for a spare clip for the weapon she was supposed to have. She looked around, trying to spot anything that might trigger another memory. She saw a small object on the floor a short distance away. She walked over to it and picked it up. She held it up in the dim light.

The weapon sent a small signal shock through her hand. It was empty. She hit the drop lever with her thumb and the clip fell to the floor. Her left hand slid her spare clip into the handle of the gun and locked it in place. She turned to fire again. She got two rounds off, when…

She dropped the empty clip and flinched at the metallic clink it made on the floor. She stared at the object for a moment, and cautiously picked it up again. She looked at it closely, turning it over and over. She recognized the clip, and felt that if she could see the gun she could identify each groove, notch, tab, and component. She let her mind wander on the subject, and looked into the gloom around her. As if guided by an unseen force, her hand slipped the empty clip into its pouch and snapped it into place.

She took a few steps toward the filthy windows that constituted most of one long wall of the room. She tried to wipe the dirt off to see outside, but she only succeeded in cleaning one side of window. She was about to investigate the broken window several meters away when she caught her reflection in the newly shined windowpane.

For a long time she stared at the window, and for a long time the reflection stared back at her. Something wasn’t right about the face she saw there. The face was angular, but soft. The eyes were sharp, piercing. The hair was short-cropped and carefully braided into an arrangement of tidy dreadlocks. A pale green headband kept the hair in position.

Something disturbed her about the reflection she saw. Something in her told her it wasn’t right. She jerked her body away from the makeshift mirror and put a hand up to her face. It wasn’t hers. Her hand traced the sharply defined, gently curving cheekbones, the small nose, the thin lips, and the small, sharp chin. They weren’t hers; at least, they weren’t as she remembered them.

Remembered?

She groped through the darkness of her mind for a clue, but found none. She felt as if her head was filled with a think, dark mist, within which lay all the answers she sought. If she could only reach out and grasp them…

Her head whipped to the left, and her gaze fell on the open doors at the opposite end of the chamber. By the time she felt surprise at what was happening to her, she was running toward the shadows that surrounded the nearest machine. She dropped into a crouching position and rapidly assessed the situation.

She looked at the doors, and realized she could see every detail of the rusted fixtures, the hinges that she knew would creak terribly, the concrete floor that led into the darkness. The longer she looked, the easier it became to see through the darkness and out into the hallway from which the doors opened.

Her breathing slowed to a deep, silent pulse as she listened for the sound that triggered this uncontrolled response. Every sound in the structure became distinct and audible: the rodents inside the machine, the wind wafting through the broken window, the settling of the building, and the shuffling footsteps in the hallway beyond the doors.

All this time she felt her brain rapidly calculating. Distances, times, speeds, movements. She knew no numbers, but she knew exactly how long it would take her to reach any given point in the room if it became necessary.

She tensed when the old man came into view. He swayed from side to side as he walked. His body bulged from the many threadbare coats he wore. His feet shuffled across the concrete. His breath came in small puffs, wheezing with the effort of circulating the air through his lungs.

Within an instant she knew exactly how best to kill him, how much time it would take her to do it, and what could happen in the meantime. But he was not an immediate threat to her, and she had no orders to eliminate him, so he passed unabated and unaware of the lethal eyes that followed him across the open doors.

She remained perfectly still until she could no longer hear his wheezing breaths and his shuffling steps.


* * * * *

9:32 PM.

ANDREW DIMITRI KNEW HE WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE HERE, FOR A VARIETY OF REASONS.

The slums were dangerous enough during the day, although it could be argued that they were safer at night, since crime in these areas went virtually unnoticed no matter what time it was. Dimitri wasn’t exactly flaunting the fact that he was considerably wealthier than many people who lived here, but he wasn’t hiding it very well either. He wasn’t visibly armed, and he was alone. And he was here for illegal reasons.

He was going to a “LAN-party”.

Connecting two computers together for any reason without a permit was illegal enough, but they would also be using unregistered, unmonitored machines. These types of standalone computers hadn’t been in widespread use for decades, and they were useless antiques by modern standards. But Dimitri had always carried a fascination with the old computers. He could get a processor implanted in his skull that could perform calculations faster than these old machines, and it would have a simpler interface, as well. But he loved the feel of the hard pointing mouse in his right hand, and his fingers on the noisy keyboard. The two-dimensional output screen. The false-3D animations and digitized sounds.

He walked up to the building. It looked condemned, and it probably had been at one time, when the government still noticed such things. Dimitri cautiously slipped into the alley on the side of the dark brick structure. He had long since learned to avoid the lobby, since it was open and unmonitored and tended to attract people with nowhere else to go. The elevator made frightening noises and had a way of stopping between floors. The stairwell was always very dark, and when Dimitri first explored the building he noticed at least three different body fluids spilled at the foot of the steps.

He determined that the alley was clear, and quietly reached for the fire escape ladder. This was the dangerous part; even though Lisa kept the ladder well lubricated, it still made a lot of noise when it was lowered. He grasped the cold, rusty handle—

—And was thrown against the wall. In an instant he found himself pinned between the brick building and the smooth, cold hand at his throat. It took him a moment to appraise his attacker, all the while fully expecting his life to end with a knife between his ribs. She stared at him with cold, calculating eyes. Dimitri thought of handing over the token valuables he had brought with him, but was afraid to move.

The woman held him tightly for what felt like a long while, as if daring him to make a sound. She’s beautiful, he thought. I guess it takes all kinds to populate a slum.

As he waited for her to either kill him or make a demand, he saw a startling change in her eyes. The icy gaze softened, and her face changed to a look of terrified revelation. Her eyes traveled to her hand, which slowly released him. Dimitri remained pressed against the wall as the woman slowly backed away, still staring at her hand. She stepped back, and looked him in the eyes again.

“What am I?”

Dimitri stood, stunned into silence. She was incredibly attractive, and he thought she must have been freezing in the skintight outfit she was wearing. He wondered if she was sane, and if not, how dangerous she might still be. He was just thinking of formulating a response when she turned and silently ran down the alley. He turned, and slowly followed her. What am I doing? He wondered. She almost killed me. Why am I going after her?

He reached the back end of the alley, and peered around the corner into the narrow cross-alley. She had disappeared.

Dimitri forced himself to turn and head for the safety of his friend’s apartment. If there was going to be any trouble here tonight, he didn’t want to have anything to do with it.


* * * * *

Night. Time unknown.

She wandered the dark alleys for a long time. She encountered two people: a homeless woman slumped in a doorway, asleep or intoxicated or both, and a young man near the street. She was frightened by what had happened with him. It was the same feeling she had in the building in which she had awakened: the feeling that someone or something inside her was controlling her actions. Something calculating, something powerful.

Something deadly.

He had startled her in the alley. Before she realized he was there, she had him by the throat against the wall. She was about to kill him when she managed to suppress the urge and let him go. Then she got as far from the scene as she could.

After many hours of wandering, the back of her mind told her the sun would be rising soon. Sure enough, within an hour she perceived a graying of the sky. For some reason she made her way back to the building she found herself in hours before. She went inside the long room with the machines, and sat down in a dark corner.

There was something about that man she had encountered. She couldn’t identify what it was, but there was something. Recognition, perhaps. She wondered if he might have been someone she knew before. A friend? A lover? A hated enemy? She couldn’t tell.

She had developed a headache over the course of the night, and she suddenly felt very fatigued. She rested her arms on her knees, and laid her head down. Before she realized what was going on, she was asleep.


Late Evening. Time unknown.

She awoke with a start, and felt that cold sensation rising in the back of her mind as she tried to remember where she was. She looked around. The dirty windows. The rusted machine. The cold concrete.

She climbed to her feet, surprised that she wasn’t stiff from the uncomfortable position in which she had slept.

She walked to the broken window and looked outside. She was on the third floor of the building, and the window looked out over what might have once been an industrial park. Buildings and towers and smokestacks rose out of the landscape, but there was nothing to provide her with any hints. Unable to gather any further information from the darkening view outside, she turned her attention to the machine on the opposite wall.

She couldn’t identify the machine’s function, but it was huge and complex. It appeared to be a manufacturing tool of some sort, but it was too foreign for her to name.

An hour later found her wandering the alleys once again, this time with a purpose. She was looking for information. Anything that might give her a clue as to who, where, or what she might be. Near an overflowing garbage bin she found what looked to be a church newsletter, which gave an address in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. For hours that night she searched for more information. She didn’t know much about herself, but she did know that she craved knowledge. She hated not knowing who she was, where she came from, or what her story was. She was terrified by the instinctive mind that she had to fight off whenever she was in danger, and there was something else, too. She had the nervous feeling of being hunted. She didn’t know who or why, but she knew that she would be in danger in the presence of strangers. She kept walking the alleyways, and all the time, she watched for him.

The man in the alley near the street haunted her. She recognized him. She felt she knew him, but had no idea where or when. So she looked for him; somehow she felt he might be a key to her past, and her identity. As the nights went by, she became more and more bold, going so far as to explore some of the old abandoned buildings in the area. But they weren’t abandoned, as she soon discovered; these crumbling structures attracted people as well as they did rats.

She stopped herself suddenly.

She was disturbed that she would make that analogy. As correct as she had to admit it was, she still felt like it was wrong to compare people and rats.

She was in a huge structure, near the one in which she had awakened, in a small room with windows overlooking a large enclosed area. In the dim light, through the sooty windows, she could see small fires burning and people moving around on the floor far below. She estimated there must have been a hundred people down there, huddled next to or moving between shimmering points of fire. The machinery all around threw huge, angular shadows on the floor in the flickering orange light, and transformed the vista below into a complex maze with silent, ghostly figures and shining fires scattered within. All was fairly quiet, except for the occasional reverberating shout or loud voice. Looking down on the commune laid out before her, she thought to herself that these buildings attracted people the same way they attracted rats.

She stood, desperately trying to shake off the thought that the people below were like vermin to her. It came from the same part of her mind that the killing machine came from. She was learning to fear that part of her; it was like a huge, vicious monster lurking in the mist of her memory, appearing at intervals to enslave her, and then vanishing almost as suddenly.

For a moment she thought of going down to the people to see what kind of information they had, but something kept her away. It was the same thing that kept her indoors during daylight and away from the streets; there was a constant, nagging fear that some interested party would spot her, and then she would be in extreme danger. For an instant she worried someone might see her through the glass windows, but she concluded that the light below was too bright and the windows too dirty for anyone below to see her.

She heard a brushing noise behind her, and she suppressed the fighting instinct that she knew would explode out of her subconscious in an instant if she let it. She turned to see what had produced the sound.

A strong, gloved hand caught her by the elbow, and she twisted her arm out of its grasp. She took three quick steps away from her assailant, turned, and found herself facing four men; they were fairly large, bulky, and obviously as destitute as anyone else she had seen that night.

“Whoa, settle down there,” the man closest to her sneered. “I don’t bite, often.” He took a step toward her, confident, but cautious.

“Get out of here,” the woman in green told him. She felt no fear; it was taking all her effort to suppress the fighting instinct that she could feel boiling inside her.

“Hey, it’s okay. We’re just going to have a little quick fun, and leave you alone.” He took another step toward her, and she took a step back. The other three men were circling around behind the speaker, watching her greedily. She scanned their hungry eyes; they didn’t look well fed, but she knew they were hungry for something else.

“I don’t want to kill you.”

“Ooh, she’s a feisty one.” One of the circling men spoke up. “Just the way I like ‘em!” He hissed and spat, doing his best alley cat imitation. He made a sudden lunge, and caught and held her arms from behind. The other three men descended upon her, combining their strength to wrestle her to the concrete floor. One man threw his weight on her shoulders, while another tried to kick the backs of her knees.

At that moment she knew she had to do something. She felt the instinct in her become cold and hard. In the midst of her fear and panic, she coolly realized what needed to be done.

She let it go.

The reaction was instant and intense. She recovered her balance, threw the man’s arms off her shoulders, and drove the man behind her into the concrete wall. He let her go, and she took a quick lunge to recover her stance at the opposite side of the room.

“Aaargh, that bitch broke my fucking ribs!” the man against the wall gasped. The big man in front turned to her.

“Now, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” He drew his hand from a pocket, held it out for a moment, and flipped out a six-inch switchblade. “I prefer the easy way myself, but the hard way is fun too.” He waved the knife at her. “What’s it gonna be, little missy?”

“Vermin,” she hissed. The word was not hers; it was that of her secondary consciousness. She felt like a spectator in her own body, safe and confidant behind the lethal prowess that she had released.

“Your choice.” All four of them lunged at her at once, and the first slumped to the floor, his head twisted at an extreme angle and hanging limp on his shoulders. She nimbly slipped between two of her attackers, and reestablished her position. The smallest one came at her, and she killed him with an upward blow to the nose. The third man stopped himself, looking at his two fellow gang members on the floor. The last thing he saw was her foot coming at the side of his head. The last man stepped back, and smiled.

“Nicely done,” he said. “I thought you said you didn’t want to kill them.”

“I’m not finished yet, street rat.”

“Neither am I, you little slut. Neither am I.” He slowly circled her, and she watched him with cold, almost lifeless eyes. He faked a lunge toward her with his knife, and she braced herself for the impact. He took advantage of her temporary loss of balance, and suddenly she was on the floor, the man kneeling on top of her, with six inches of cold, hard steel in her chest.

She let her eyes droop, and slowly relaxed beneath him. He glanced around, chuckled, and started to stand up.

As he reached down to retrieve his knife, he didn’t notice her hand coming around. He grasped the handle of the blade, and his face turned from horror to surprise when she grabbed his fist, and with one quick motion pulled the knife out of her body and cut his exposed throat wide open. Blood sprayed her face and body, and she rolled out from under him as he slowly settled to the floor. She wiped the blood from her eyes and surveyed the scene. Four bodies lay on the concrete floor, one of them still producing copious amounts of blood.

She noticed a dull ache in her lower chest, and felt a line of blood trickling over her body and down her leg. She took one last glance out the dark windows at the village below, and slipped out of the room.


Outside it was raining, a cold, hard, steady drizzle. In moments the blood was gone from her face and body, except that which continued to seep from her wound. At a loss for anywhere else to go, she went back to the building she was starting to think of as “home.” The ache in her chest had become a fairly distracting pain by the time she reached the machine room, and she held her hand over the area as she crouched in her dark corner.

Her mind began to wander to the events of the evening, and she had a terrible feeling of guilt and remorse wash over her. She knew what she had done was necessary, but she wished it had happened another way. She had warned them to go away, but why didn’t they listen? She had killed them with such practiced ease; she wondered how many others she had killed. She thought of her attitude toward her attackers, and toward the people in the hovel below. She hated them. Despite all her compassion and civility, some part of her thought that they should simply be exterminated. Even more than that, she hated the part of her that had committed these acts. This part was not hers; someone else had infused her with this menace. She began to cry as the pain from her injury and the painful thoughts flooded her. Feeling the blood oozing between her fingers, she soon drifted off into oblivion.


* * * * *


8:18 PM.

Dimitri cursed himself for coming back.

The image of the woman in the alley haunted him. There was something about her; something he couldn’t put his finger on. He felt like he might know her (or have known her at one time), and tried to think of who she might be. Finally the frustration caught up with him, and five days later he was wandering the dark alleys once again.

He searched through winding alleys and nooks and doorways for several hours, but saw no one but a homeless woman huddled in a doorway. There was no trace of the woman he had encountered, and he knew he had no reason to believe that there should be. After a long night of searching for her in the rain, he made his way to Lisa’s building. He knew she wouldn’t be awake this early in the morning, and he worried that Jason might have spent the night again. He had met Jason twice, and he had no desire to encounter him again. Especially in Lisa’s apartment, in the early morning hours.

He quickly climbed the fire escape, and leaned over the railing to see the mirror in Lisa’s bedroom. From this angle he could clearly see her bed, and she was the only one in it. He flicked a coin at her window, and the form under the covers shifted slightly. He flicked another coin, and Lisa sat up and looked at the mirror suspiciously. Recognizing her friend, she climbed out of bed and exited her bedroom. Dimitri climbed in the window of the adjacent apartment, and followed the well-worn path through the empty kitchen and into the hall. He tapped lightly on her door, and she opened it. He stepped inside, and as usual, found himself staring down the barrel of Lisa’s antique nine-millimeter handgun. She kept it on him until she was sure her visitor was a friend, and then she put it back on the table near the door. Dimitri thought of making a joke about it like he used to, but none of the jokes seemed funny after she had killed a burglar and known rapist with it when he surprised her one afternoon.

“What are you doing here this early?” she asked. “It’s not even seven o’clock. And good lord, you’re soaked! Here, let me get you a towel.”

“Thanks, Lisa. I’ve been chasing a ghost all night.”

“Around here? What kind of ghosts are you looking for?” she joked. “The only ghosts I can think of would be either the raped and murdered girls, the guys killed in gang battles, the stupid rich folk out wandering the slums in the middle of the night…” She trailed off as she went into the kitchen to start some coffee. Dimitri laughed at her dark joke.

“I’m looking for a specter of immeasurable beauty, Lisa. I’ve been looking for a woman who’s been driving me crazy all week.”

“Who? And if I may ask, why are you looking around here? I know this isn’t exactly the place to be looking for women of immeasurable beauty.”

“Present company excepted, of course,” Dimitri said.

He really felt sorry for Lisa’s situation, but he knew t would mean bad things for him if he offered to help her. She had been living in the slums since she was fifteen; her parents were fairly wealthy upper-class citizens, and they had both been killed in a bomb blast in Boston when they were there visiting that Mainframe. Lisa had made her way, alone, back to Philadelphia where she discovered that her house had been seized by the government after some organized crime group had planted evidence implicating her family in several huge embezzling schemes. Over the next two days she watched as her life was simply erased while she searched for someone to help her. She had no close living relatives, and the local government was not extremely eager to assist. So she took what she had and what she could steal from her own house and disappeared. Within a week there was no evidence that she had ever existed, except for a few scattered memories of friends. Dimitri had found her by accident in a slum six years later. Granted it was a far nicer slum than others in the city, but it was still a slum. He begged her to let him take her home with him and help her get her life back, but she refused every offer. They had been schoolmates once, and she had always been one of the most determined girls he had ever known. It didn’t take him long to realize that six years in the slums had hardened her into a resolute individual unlike any he was likely to meet. Lisa smiled at Dimitri’s sweet remark.

“Seriously, how did you come to meet this indescribable woman?” she asked him.

“She tried to kill me on Tuesday. I was about to come up here when she suddenly had me by the throat against the wall next to the fire escape. She looked at me for a second, and ran off. I haven’t been able to get her out of my mind since.”

“Sounds like a nice girl,” Lisa said sardonically. Dimitri shrugged.

“Around here, the fact that she didn’t strangle me and take my wallet says a lot about her.” He smelled coffee and glanced from the kitchen to the door. Another thought occurred to him. “You’re not expecting Jason to stop by soon, are you?”

“No, he didn’t say anything about coming over this morning. Why?”

“Oh, no reason, really. I just wouldn’t want to find myself sitting on your couch with a towel at six o’clock in the morning when he comes walking in. I still don’t know what you see in that man.”

“I’m not quite sure myself, to tell you the truth. Sure, he’s a little temperamental, but he can be really sweet when you stay on his good side.” And when he’s stable, Dimitri thought to himself. If there was one thing that worried him about Lisa, it was Jason.

“If you say so. I just don’t want him to catch me alone with you again.” Dimitri grinned. As close as they were, and despite a few flings as young teenagers, they had never really felt any serious romance. Jason was one of the people who didn’t see it that way, and Dimitri knew how jealous Jason could get.

“So anyway, what really happened with this woman you encountered?” Lisa asked, trying to change the subject.

“Well, I was walking down the alley outside the other day, and I was just reaching for the ladder when this shadow yanks me around and slams me against the wall. The next thing I knew I had this woman’s rubbery gloved hand around my throat, and she’s looking at me
like—”

“Lisa!!” Dimitri jumped at the noise of the door slamming open and the sound of Jason’s voice. He and Lisa turned to face the intruder. For a few seconds, Jason stood in the doorway staring at Dimitri. Dimitri got a surge of adrenaline as Jason’s expression quickly changed from one of disgust to one of anger.

“Hi Jason. I wasn’t expecting you here this—” Lisa began.

“You fucking whore!” Jason screamed, and lunged at her. Dimitri caught a glint of metal emerging from Jason’s leather jacket.

Lisa screamed.

“You fucking slut! You just fucking every guy you meet now?” Jason shouted. Dimitri jumped up to pull Jason away from Lisa, but before he could reach them he saw Lisa sink backward into the couch. Her chest and left arm were covered with blood, as was the large kitchen knife in Jason’s hand. Dimitri stopped himself as Jason turned to face him. For a long moment Jason stared at Dimitri, as if daring him to act.

For what seemed like an eternity, no one moved.

“I’ll just leave you two alone,” Jason snarled, began to turn toward the door. He got halfway around when a shot rang out. The impact of the lead bullet spun Jason around and he landed facedown on the floor. Dimitri looked over him at the source of the shot, and saw a startlingly familiar face in the doorway, still aiming the gun. The woman in green lowered the weapon, set it down on the table next to the door, and took a deep breath.

Dimitri quickly broke his trance and turned to his friend on the couch. Her face was relaxed, and her eyes were open slightly. Dimitri leaped to her side, and her eyes traveled to his. She opened her mouth to speak, but coughed up a bit of blood instead. Her breaths were quick and shallow.

“I’m going to get you to a hospital,” he told her. He shook his head and glanced at Jason. “Son of a bitch…”

Jason lay in a small pool of blood on the carpet. His chest rose and fell in quick gasps. Dimitri turned back to Lisa and found the woman in green kneeling next to the couch, quickly tying a strip of cloth torn from Lisa’s shirt over his friend’s profusely bleeding arm. She finished her hasty work and turned to face him.

“I’ll help you if you help me,” she said to the stranger looking back at her.