It ends here, she thinks, opening her eyes to the still monotonous view of the security screens. It all ends here.

Kirsten, for her part, moves silently around the room, keeping her hands prudently away from the equipment, scanning everything with a sharp eye and a sharper mind. Scrolling along the bottom of most of the monitors is an alien script that seems almost…alive. Looking at it makes her, by turns, very uneasy, and very dizzy as her brain tries to make sense of something it has no reference point for understanding. She looks quickly away, then up as Adam’s smiling reflection comes to her in the glass of the table.

“You can turn your implants back on if you like,” he says, smiling. “It’s quite safe in here.”

“That figures,” Kirsten snorts, though her trust of this stranger doesn’t quite extend quite so far as to take him completely at his word. Setting her left implant to its lowest gain, she flicks it on, ready to turn it back off again the very second something seems hinky. She relaxes as only the quiet sound of Dakota’s breathing comes to her over the still, chill air.

Adam moves silently across the thick pile carpeting to a nook in the near left rear corner of the office. An old coffee maker, dirty with the ghosts of coffees past, stands sentry on an impressive credenza, flanked by several equally stained mugs. A matching table stands at a right angle to the credenza, and upon that table rests an old, battered CPU, its nineteen inch monitor huge and bulky and as out of place among the sleek technology as a dinosaur in New York City.

“This was his personal computer,” he remarks, fiddling with the mouse to bring the beast out of hibernation. “It has something on it that I believe you’ll find very interesting.”

Eyeing him warily, Kirsten slowly crosses the room until she is standing beside the much taller man, her face bathed in the ghostly glow of the monitor. Her brows pucker as she quickly scans the text, which looks as if it’s been written by ee cummings on crack. It’s a long, rambling vomit of words written by someone whose mind had clearly left them for far greener pastures quite some time before. “What is this?”

“Look at the header.”

As she looks, her eyes widen. “Me? He wrote this to me??”

Adam nods.

“But…I never received anything like this. Hell, I’ve never received anything from him at all!” She looks closer, frowning. “Shit. I haven’t used that email address in years.”

“And yet you still came here.”

“I had no choice.”

“Indeed.” Reaching out, Adam snags the office chair and pulls it over to Kirsten. “I would suggest reading this missive in detail. I believe it contains most, if not all, of the answers you’re seeking.”

Kirsten rubs her forehead as she looks down at the schizophrenic text again. “You sound like you already know what’s in here, so how about we just cut to the chase and you explain it to me, hmm?”

Adam opens his mouth, then closes it as his attention is distracted by a faint blip on one of the monitors. “They’re coming.”

At his exclamation, Koda turns and stares at the monitor screens. Androids swarm along the corridors of the floors above, pouring down into the stairwell. Most are indistinguishable from humans to the eye, save for the thin metal collars about their necks. Some wear lab whites; others sport security uniforms. All carry weapons: automatic rifles, pistols, stunguns. A couple of the guards sport larger-barrelled arms that look capable of firing tear-gas canisters, possibly even grenades. A second contingent, smaller but just as menacing, files into the elevator from the Institute’s main lobby. There are perhaps forty of them. Thirty-five, easy.

Goddam motherfucking metalheads . . . .

But there is no time. Koda vaults the desk where Kirsten sits looking at her with huge eyes and lunges for a bronze sculpture on the credenza behind. It is something abstract; a flame, perhaps, or a leaf.

A hammer.

“Guard her!” she snaps at Adam and streaks for the door, pausing only long enough to assure herself that it locks securely behind her. She spares a glance for the elevator, descending slowly, still three floors above them. The thunder of running feet on the stairs is much nearer. First things first.

“Dakota!” Kirsten shouts, leaping out of her chair and flying to the door, just as the lock snicks shut. “Dakota!! Wait!!!” When the door doesn’t open, she resorts to ineffectual pounding until some measure of reason returns and she turns on her heel, fixing Adam with a glare that could fuse metal. “Open this door!”

Adam shakes his head slowly. “I’m afraid that’s not possible, Dr. King.”

“Not possible?!? I’ll show you what’s not possible!! Open this goddamned door! Now!!!”

“Dr. King, please. I understand—.”

“You. Understand. Nothing!!” The image would be laughable if it weren’t so deathly serious: a woman, small even for her gender, in the face of a man a full foot taller, hands fisted in the springy fabric of his shirt, shaking him like a rag-doll in the hands of a child having a temper-tantrum. “She is more important than any of this! She is more important than all of this! Where she goes, I go. So open the fucking door right now.”

To his credit, Adam doesn’t look away from the green fire blazing in Kirsten’s eyes. “I can’t.”

“Can’t? Have your fingers suddenly lost the ability to work?!”

In answer, Adam gently pries Kirsten’s hands from his shirt and turns her toward the bank of security monitors. Kirsten watches, grim-faced, as Dakota moves through the hallways, half cat-half snake, slithering noiselessly around corners and curves, sticking to the few shadows available.

“Her one chance, her only chance, to come through this alive rests in your hands, Dr. King. There are over one hundred and fifty androids in this facility at the present time. Not even the three of us could destroy them completely with conventional weapons. They need to be turned off at the source. You are the only one who can do that. And she is risking her life to buy you enough time to do what needs to be done. Don’t let her actions be in vain, Dr. King.”

She watches a moment more, then turns slowly back to him, her hatred and anger making her face, for just a moment, both hideously ugly, and terrifyingly beautiful. “Damn you,” she says, her voice as soft and dead as the bottom of a grave. Damn you straight to Hell.”

*

Turning the sculpture so that the heavy base becomes the hammer’s head, Dakota slams it down on the electronic keypad on the door to the stairwell. The lock shatters satisfyingly, tumbling to the floor tiles in shards of clear lexan and mangled circuit board. The keypad dangles loose, held by a thin strand of multi-colored wire. The steel bolt, though, remains in place. Reversing her improvised maul, Koda jabs the sharp end through the hole in the door, reaming out the remaining circuits and dislodging the mechanism on the other side. It falls onto the landing with a satisfying clatter.

It will not stop them. It will force them to break the door or go around the building to the other stairwell, and that will buy her time. Buy Kirsten time.

She whirls, still holding the sculpture in one hand. The elevator reaches the fifth level as she watches, its slow descent marked by the soft wheezing of its pneumatic pedestal. Without pausing to breathe, Koda unhooks one of the grenades from her belt, pulls the pin and stands waiting, counting the seconds. Ten. Nine. Eight. . . ..

On Two, the elevator door slides open. Koda pitches the grenade straight into the midst of the dozen androids packed shoulder to shoulder into its car and whirls, throwing herself some ten feet down the corridor to land flat on her face. The roar of the explosion washes over her, echoing up and down the length of the six-story deep shaft. Panels of the door slam into the wall behind her, punctuated by a series of small secondary explosions as at least some of the droids’ ammo goes up, the sound ripping through the air like strings of firecrackers. A fine dust drifts through the air, paint and graphite from the shredded drywall behind her.

She coughs once, hard, and scrambles to her feet. The frame of the elevator door curls back from the shaft in jagged metal sheets, its pale green paint burned and blistered. Several other fragments of the door and miscellaneous bits of droid anatomy protrude from the opposite wall, driven into the paneling by the force of the blast. Koda ducks around an especially wicked looking piece that juts halfway out into the passage, its edges bright and sharp as teeth. Holding on to an exposed stud, its metal hot under her hand, she peers into the remains of the elevator.

Half of it is gone, sheered away when the grenade hit its back wall. The remaining half shows little more than a square meter of flooring, held in place by the stump of the telescoping column rising from the lower levels and its now-skeletal frame. Half a droid hangs drunkenly over the far edge, poised above the black cavern below. A second lies half in, half out of the car. From under its torso, the stock and characteristic curving magazine of an AK protrude, together with the muzzle of some larger-bore weapon. Swiftly Koda pulls them both from under the remains of their recent owner. The AK seems to be intact; aiming at the window in the stair door, she pulls the trigger and gives a satisfied grin when the plexiglass shatters in a rain of fragments. Two seconds’ examination shows that the larger item is a shotgun, and another few seconds’ rifling of the droid’s jacket produces a handful of 12-guage shells. Not as good as a grenade-launcher, but useful all the same. For the first time since barreling out of Westerhaus’ office, she pauses to assess the situation.

The elevator: wrecked beyond use or repair.

Droid casualties: perhaps a dozen.

Captured weapons: two, both useful. She still has her own rifle and the sculpture, tucked now under her belt like a knife.

Advantage for the moment: good guys.

*

For the first time since she’s met him, Adam looks a bit unsure. Walking to the credenza, he props a hip against one corner and seems inordinately interested in the weave of his slacks, long fingers brushing along the fabric as if searching for lint. “It’s difficult,” he says softly, “to know where to begin.”

“How ‘bout I help you out, then,” Kirsten replies, sarcasm firmly in place. “Peter Westerhaus, fair haired wunderkind, boon to all mankind, DaVinci, Edison, Bell, Franklin, and Einstein all rolled into one, invents the first working android. Nations fall at his feet. Blondes, brunettes, and redheads fall at his feet. He quickly becomes the most important, not to mention richest, man in the world. More countries fall. More redheads fall. More money falls. And then, when that world least expects it, boom! Instant takeover.” Her smile is as hard and as sharp as a rough-hewn diamond. “That pretty much cover it, Mr. Virgilius?”

His smile is wan. “On the surface of things, perhaps.”

“Well, why don’t you dig it a little deeper for me, then,” she remarks, shooting a quick glance at the monitors, several of which show a blooming fireball shooting out from an elevator shaft. Her breathing eases as Dakota comes into view, apparently unharmed. “And make it quick or I’ll tear down that door with my bare hands and leave you talking to yourself.”

He looks at her for a long moment, then nods. “Peter Westerhaus was an extremely…disturbed individual.” He holds up a hand to forestall Kirsten’s scathing comeback. “Yes, I know you’re well aware of that, Doctor. It is said that many, if not most, geniuses of his type share that particular trait; that brain chemicals which allow extreme creativity and inventiveness also bring with them many kinds of madness, often in the same person.”

“Spare me the biology lecture, Virgilius. Get to the point, if you even have one.”

“Symptoms of what I believe to be schizophrenia were present for many years, long before I came to work for him. There were many stories of the man talking to himself—not, ordinarily, a horrible thing to do, but the reports also stated that he was answering himself, and in voices different than his own. Many workers were convinced that he had a secret partner working with him, based on these voices, but when he was approached, he was always alone.” A wan smile is displayed again. “His interest in robotics and, by extension, android development seems to have been what one might term a classic case of a son trying to win his father’s love. You are aware, I’m sure, of Willhelm Westerhaus, Genitetec’s CEO?”

“My heart bleeds for the whole fucking family,” Kirsten replies. “Can we please just get on with it?!?”