PART III
WHAT'S OUT THERE
The android's hideout was beneath a laundromat twenty minutes away—literally beneath it, in the basement, in a space that had once been a storage room and was now filled with hardware Mateus partially recognized and other equipment he had never seen in any manual.
The android was sitting in the middle of it all, working with her hands—soldering a tiny component with a precision no human hand could achieve without implants. When they entered, she looked up.
Mateus had seen androids before. Some on the news, some in the market. But none like this.
She looked to be in her early twenties—an almost perfect human form, except for her eyes, which were a color that didn't exist in any biological being: a metallic gray-green that reflected light like a mirror surface. Her hair was short and black. Her expression was… hard to read. It wasn't the impassiveness he expected from a machine. It was closer to the look of someone constantly calculating what to say next.
"Renko," she said. Her voice was low, slightly modulated. Not the voice of a cheap synthesizer. Almost too human, which was more unsettling than if it had been clearly artificial.
"Vega," Renko said. "I brought a problem."
"I see," she said, looking at Mateus. "Pirated NNI. Version 2.1, based on emission patterns. You have approximately twenty minutes before any decent scanner can triangulate your position."
"Can you deactivate it?" Renko asked.
"I can suppress the emission," Vega said. "Fully deactivating it would mean burning out the nanites, which would cause brain inflammation." She looked at Mateus with those mirrored eyes. "You would have a very uncomfortable week."
"Suppress it, then," Dora said.
"I wasn't asking you," Vega said, still looking at Mateus. "That was information for him to decide."
It was so human that Mateus had no response for a second.
"Suppress it," he said.
Vega stood up. She was taller than she had seemed sitting down. She walked to a cabinet, took out a device that looked like a modified headset, and approached Mateus with an absolute calm that he found both reassuring and deeply strange.
"Is this going to hurt?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said, placing the device over his head. "I've never done this on someone who experiences pain the way you do."
There was such direct honesty in the answer that Mateus didn't know whether to laugh or panic.
It didn't hurt. It was more like a shutdown—a sudden quiet where there had been noise. The network signal he had learned to ignore simply… disappeared. And the resulting silence was so deep that for a moment he thought he had gone deaf.
"Done," Vega said, removing the device.
"It worked," Mateus said, unnecessarily.
"It worked," she confirmed. Then she turned to Renko. "Now tell me what's really going on."