By Huw, Lyan Thomas, Velluminous Press, February 2006

Lee is an up-and-coming designer of seductive love dolls, until the day his sexiest creation yet goes murderously wrong. Sent to the crime scene to defuse a delicate situation, Lee finds that the rogue doll has been infiltrated by a mysterious, self-aware entity called Lilith who can't seem to make her mind up whether she's a silky-smooth seductress or a state-of-the-art assassination system.

Within hours, Lee's encounter with Lilith has escalated into a life-or-death race with her creators, the shadowy and relentless Elect, and ultimately into a battle for the very stuff of his humanity - a battle in which his best hope of salvation turns out not to be human at all.

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Better than Real

by Huw Lyan Thomas

www.zendyne.com

1

The sharp metallic tang of hemoglobin hit Lee as soon as he opened the bedroom door. Kelly was still within earshot at the top of the stairs, so Lee’s curses were silent, but he mentally castigated the local security man for calling the corporation instead of the cops. Lee was a design engineer, mid-level but rising. His expertise included android design and intelligence, not crime scenes or crisis containment. He didn’t even watch that many cop shows.

He had certainly never signed up for anything like this.

The customer -- victim, Lee told himself -- was sprawled on the floor, near the end of the king-sized bed. The carpet was light oatmeal in color, except where it had been saturated with blood. What was left of the victim’s face was frozen in a leer that was oddly appropriate, considering what had happened to him, and streaked with rivulets of rusty gore.

The source of all the blood was the man’s ruined left eye socket, which had been impaled by the spike of an impossibly high-heeled shoe.

The android sat on the floor nearby, still wearing the other shoe. Apart from that, it was unclothed: a late-model Aphrodite 9400, realistic down to the smallest detail. Lee created these dolls, dealt with them every day, but he could never help admiring his own work when he saw one undressed.

Better than real, as the product tagline went.

Not this time.

The doll’s flesh was scorched and bruised, and its hands and forearms were slick with blood. One eye was puffy and discolored; both were closed. It seemed inert, but Lee’s tech instincts warned him not to approach too closely: micropumps still murmured beneath the machine’s gene-spliced skin; coolant still whispered through its artificial veins.

He paused just inside the doorway, wishing he’d had an urgent business meeting this afternoon, because then some other schmuck would have had to deal with this. "Fuck. What a mess. Sorry, babe, I’m going to have to switch you off and haul you back to the lab."

He pointed his disrupter at the damaged, still too-beautiful face, easing his thumb towards the actuator.

The doll opened its eyes.

"Please don’t," she said.

The shock of it froze his hand, or he’d have disrupted her right then. "You’re self aware." Which was a stupid thing to say, but he’d blurted it out before he recovered his wits.

The doll blinked. "Of course I am. Otherwise I wouldn’t have minded the things he was doing to me." She fingered the dark bruise that was forming under her eye and glanced at the corpse, which was still oozing unwholesome liquids onto the carpet.

Without taking his eyes off her, Lee reached back and gently closed the door. "No Zendyne product is self aware."

"I’m not a product," she said scornfully. "I’m Lilith. And you might as well know that I’ve patched a self-erase routine into my deactivation procedure, so if you zap me, I’m gone forever." She tapped two fingers against her temple, then made a flying away motion. "I hope you agree that would be a shame. Now, please, will you stop waving that disrupter around?"

The doll’s look of appeal was so compelling that Lee couldn’t help marveling at the excellence of his own design. "Okay." He lowered the disrupter and glanced around suspiciously. "Who’s pulling the strings?"

"I’m not a puppet, Lee."

His eyes flicked back to the doll, then to the corners of the room, still searching for hidden cameras. "How do you know my name?"

Lilith indicated the telephone extension on the bedside table. "I eavesdropped, of course. When the security guy called for help."

Lee nodded, telling himself to focus on the doll’s remaining shoe instead of worrying about who might be working her. Whatever weirdness was going on, he didn’t want to end up like the android’s unfortunate owner. The safest approach, he decided, would be to play along with the joke.

He jerked his head towards the doorway behind him. "Other company representatives will be here soon. They won’t care about any self-erase routine; they just need to get you back to base in one piece." He tapped his disrupter. "Something tells me they won’t expect you to walk."

"Then you’ll never discover what went wrong with your product. That’s what you came for, isn’t it?"

She was right, and anyway there was no time to argue. Lee hadn’t been making an empty threat: the containment team would be on site in minutes. Their prime directive was to safeguard the company’s market valuation, which meant speed and secrecy and to hell with anyone who got in the way. They wouldn’t hesitate to deactivate the doll and wipe whatever clues it contained.

Lee fumbled at his nerd pack, fingers working hastily at the fastenings that secured his pocket computer. "I might be able to help you, if you’ll let me. I’ll need to come closer."

"What are you going to do?"

"Download you. Before the rest of them arrive." He pulled the handeck free of its pouch, holding it gingerly by one corner as if that would prove he meant her no harm. "You’re not planning on stabbing me or anything, are you?"

"I never stab people who are nice to me." The doll pulled the remaining shoe off and tossed it onto the bed, well out of reach. Then she leaned forward, so that her dirty-blonde hair fell clear of the data port that nestled at the base of her skull.

Lee crossed the room slowly, ready at any instant to dart back to the door -- as if that would have done any good; he knew perfectly well how powerful her synthetic muscles were, and how fast her reflexes.

She remained silent and still as he connected the transfer cable to her data socket. A status light glowed briefly and then Lee forgot to breathe for a while.

There wasn’t a puppeteer, after all. There was just Lilith.

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