Tears in Rain (2 page)

“
We
people? Who are
we
?”

“You...technohumans...reps. You kidnapped me; you infected me; you implanted your filthy things to turn me into one of you. Why have you done this to me? What had I ever done to you?”

Her moans had been increasing in volume and now she was shrieking like a woman possessed.
The neighbors are bound to complain again
, thought Bruna, irritated. She frowned with annoyance.

“What’s behind all this idiocy? Are you mad, or just pretending to be? You’re a replicant, too. Look in the mirror. Check out your eyes. You’re a technohuman like me. And you’ve just tried to strangle me.”

The woman had started to shake violently; she seemed to be suffering a panic attack.

“Don’t hurt me! Please, don’t hurt me! Help! Please!”

Her obvious terror was becoming unbearable. Bruna relaxed her hold a little.

“Calm down. I’m not going to do anything to you. See? I’m letting go. If you stay calm and still, I’ll release you.”

She let go of the woman little by little, as cautiously as she would a snake, and then jumped backward, beyond the reach of her hands. Whimpering, the android dragged herself away a foot or so and rested her back against the wall. Although the woman did seem to be somewhat calmer, Bruna regretted that she wasn’t carrying her little plasma gun. It was hidden behind the stove, and to get it she would briefly have to take her eye off the android. It really was totally stupid to hide a weapon so well that there was no way of using it when it was needed. She glanced at the intruder, who was breathing with difficulty in the corner.

“What did you take? You’re out of it.”

“I’m a human...I’m a human and I have a son!”

“Sure. I’m going to call the police to come and get you. You tried to kill me.”

“I’m a human!”

“What you are is a damned menace.”

The android stared at Bruna in bewilderment. It was a wild and defiant stare.

“You people aren’t going to succeed in confusing me. You won’t trick me. I’ve exposed you. This is what I do with your wretched implants.”

And with that, she twisted her head a little, sank her fingers quickly and violently into the socket of one of her eyes and gouged out the eyeball. There was a soft, squishy sound, a muffled gasp, a few trickles of blood. It was a moment of anguished, petrified madness. Then Bruna recovered her mobility and threw herself on the woman, who had collapsed in convulsions.

“By the great Morlay! What have you done, you wretched woman? A curse on all species! Emergency! Home, call Emergency!”

She was so stressed that the computer didn’t recognize her voice. She had to take a deep breath, make a conscious effort to calm down and try again.

“Home, call Emergency. Call and be done with it, damn it!”

It was a high-speed connection, sound only. A male voice answered: “Emergency.”

“A woman has just...A woman has just lost her eye.”

“Insurance number, please.”

Bruna pulled up the sleeves of her neighbor’s dress and uncovered two bare, bony wrists. She wasn’t wearing a mobile. She searched through the woman’s pockets looking for her ID tag. She even checked around her neck in case she was wearing it on a chain, as many did. She didn’t find a thing.

“I don’t know. Can’t we leave it till later? Her eye is on the floor. She’s pulled it out.”

“Most unfortunate, but if she’s not insured and up to date with her payments, we can’t do anything.”

The man cut the connection. Bruna could feel something firing up inside her, a spasm of anger that she knew intimately and which functioned with the precision of a piece of machinery; in some hidden spot within her brain, the sluice gates of hatred opened and her veins flooded with its thick poison.
You’re so full of fury that you end up cold as ice
, old Yiannis had once said to her. And it was true. The more irate she was, the more controlled she seemed—calmer and impassive, empty of emotions, save for that pure, sharp hatred that condensed in her chest like a black stone.

“Home, call Samaritans,” she enunciated syllable by syllable.

“Samaritans at your service,” replied a robotic voice immediately with its conventionally melodious voice. “Please forgive our delay in attending to you; we are the only civic association that offers health services to those who have no insurance. If you wish to make a financial contribution to our project, say
donations
. If this is a medical emergency, please hold the line.”

The woman moaned softly in Bruna’s arms, and the eye really was on the floor, round and much bigger than one could imagine, a greasy ball with a tuft of pale fibers, like a dead jellyfish or a sea polyp torn from its rock and thrown up on the beach by the tide.

“Samaritans at your service. Please forgive our delay in attending to you; we are...”

Bruna had seen worse things in her years in the military. Much worse. However, she found her neighbor’s unexpected and ferocious action particularly disturbing. Pain and turmoil had erupted in her home early in the evening.

“...say
donations
. If this is a medical emergency, please hold the line.”

And that’s what everyone did, wait and wait, because Samaritans couldn’t cope with all the requests from the uninsured and was always overloaded. It was conceivable that the woman had insurance, but she was still unconscious or perhaps hopelessly deranged; either way, she wasn’t responding to Bruna’s shakes or calls, which in one sense was preferable, as her lack of consciousness was protecting her from the horror of what she had done. Maybe that was why she wasn’t coming around. Bruna had seen it many times in the military: merciful loss of consciousness so as not to feel anything. Night had fallen, and the apartment was nearly dark, illuminated only by the glow of the city and the fleeting lights of the sky-trams.

“Home, lights.”

The lamps obediently switched themselves on, wiping out the urban landscape on the other side of the window and adding a viscous, wet, and bloody sheen to the eyeball on the floor. Bruna looked away from the extracted object, and her glance fell on the woman’s face and the empty socket. A sinister hole. So in order to have something else to contemplate, she gazed at the main screen. She had the sound turned off, but the news was on and they were showing Myriam Chi, the leader of the RRM. They must have filmed her at a meeting, and she was speaking from the stage with her customary virulence. Bruna had no time for either Myriam or her Radical Replicant Movement. She had a deep mistrust of all political groups, and she was particularly repelled by the “we are victims” self-indulgence, the hysterical mythification of the rep identity. And where Myriam was concerned, Bruna knew her type well—people buried deep in their emotions like beetles in dung; junkies dependent on the most aggravating and deceitful sentimentality.

“Samaritans, how can I help you?”

Finally.

“There’s been an incident in District Five, Dardenelles Avenue, apartment 2334. A woman has lost her eye. What I mean
is, she’s lost it completely; she plucked it out. The eyeball is on the floor.”

“Victim’s age?”

“Thirty.”

All reps were around thirty. Between twenty-five and thirty, to be precise.

“Human or technohuman?”

Again the fury, again the rage.

“That question is anticonstitutional, as you well know.”

There was a brief silence at the other end of the line. In any case, thought Bruna, her answer had already betrayed her.

“We’ll be there as soon as we can,” said the man. “Thank you for calling Samaritans.”

Everyone knew that they prioritized humans, of course, a practice that wasn’t legally acceptable, but it was what happened. And the worst bit, Bruna thought to herself, was that it made sense on one level. When a medical service was overloaded, maybe it was sensible to give priority to those who had a much longer life expectancy—to those who weren’t condemned to a premature death, like the reps. Was it more beneficial to save a human who might still live another fifty years or a technohuman who might have only a few months to go? A cold, bitter taste of bile rose in her throat. She looked at the grotesquely incomplete face of her neighbor and felt a stab of resentment toward her.
Idiot, idiot, why have you done this? And why have you done it in my home?
Bruna had no idea what had motivated the woman, the reason for her strange behavior. She might be drugged, or perhaps unwell. But there was no doubting that the unfortunate, crazy woman hated herself—that much was clear—and hatred was an emotion that Bruna could well understand. Nothing better than cold hatred to combat burning anguish.

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Technohumans

Keywords: history, social conflict, Rep War, Moon Pact, discrimination, biotechnology, civil movements, supremacism.

#376244

Entry being edited

Midway through the twenty-first century, projects connected with the geological exploitation of
Mars
and two of
Saturn
’s moons,
Titan
and
Enceladus
, led to the creation of an android that would be resistant to the harsh environmental conditions in the mining colonies. In 2053, the Brazilian bioengineering company
Vitae
used stem cells to generate an organism that was matured in a lab at an accelerated rate and was virtually identical to a human being. It was marketed under the name
Homolab
but quickly became known as a
replicant
, a term taken from a futuristic film very popular in the twentieth century.

Replicants were an instant success. They were used for mining exploration not only in outer space but also on Earth, as well as for deep-sea fish-farming. Specialist versions began to be developed, and by 2057 there were already four distinct types of androids available, for mining, computation, combat, and pleasure (this last specialization was banned years later). In those days it was inconceivable that Homolabs would have any control over their own lives. In reality, they were slave laborers with no rights. This abusive situation became less and less viable, and finally exploded in 2060 when a squad of combat replicants was sent to Enceladus to put down a revolt by miners who were also androids. The soldiers
joined forces with the rebels and assassinated all the humans in the colony. The rebellion spread rapidly, giving rise to what became known as the
Rep War
.

Although the androids were at a clear disadvantage numerically, their endurance, strength, and intelligence were superior to those of the average human. During the sixteen months the war lasted, there were many losses, both human and technohuman. Fortunately, in September October 2061
Gabriel Morlay
, the famous android philosopher and social reformer, assumed leadership of the rebels and proposed a truce in order to negotiate peace with those countries that produced replicants. The difficult negotiations were on the point of failing countless times; among the humans there was a radical faction that rejected the granting of any concessions and advocated prolonging the war until such time as all the replicants started to die, given that in those days their life expectancy was only about five years. There were also humans, however, who condemned the use of slaves and defended the justice of the claims of the rebels. Referred to disparagingly by their adversaries as
replickers
, these androidsupporting humans became very active in their pro-negotiation campaigns. This, together with the fact that the rebels had taken control of various production lines and were making more androids, finally
resulted in the signing of the
Moon Pact
in February 2062, a peace agreement based on the concession of a series of rights to the insurgents. It should be noted that the android leader, Morlay, was unable to sign the treaty, which had been his great work, because just a few days beforehand he completed his life cycle and died
, thus ending his fleeting existence as a human butterfly
.