531
Two

The Skylines, with their clear, clean lines were Chan Yi’s least favorite place to visit. His hideaway was an apartment well above the mess and stench of the city. Clean, but sterile, without character or emotion. It reminded him of the labs and a part of his life that was best left behind him. There was only one good thing that had come of those days, and it had been seven years since his death.

He walked quickly through forgotten corridors with a practical army of cleaning droids dogging his steps. He had a private lift to his apartment, and he was grateful at that moment. It was why he had orchestrated the entire place to begin with. This was his haven, and he rarely made the journey more than once a month, no matter how often the thought of cleanliness filled his mind. Covered in mud and who knew what else, he needed this now.

The place was spacious even for a Skyliner. The windows of the front room looked out over a cloud-filled afternoon and hid the grim reality of the world beneath. Once, Yi had believed that those under the clouds had earned that darkness. He’d learned. The blood on his hands had shown him that the ivory towers he defended were bathed in far worse than the muck of the Piles.

He stripped out of his clothes and tossed them into the sanitizer before he headed into the bathroom for a shower. He scrubbed the nastiness of the Piles from his skin and let the steam of truly hot water relax him. Even at his apartment in the Builds, hot water was a rare luxury. He leaned against the back wall and thought of the job, but his mind drifted to the days when he had lived among the clouds. When he hadn’t been alone.

He heard the whisper of his name in his ear, soft hands, and gentle caresses as they watched the sun rise through the windows of a different high rise. Nights entwined together. Other memories wrapped with those though. Blood. Death. The truth of what they had done.

He opened his eyes and pushed away from the wall. He hated the Skylines. He hated what they represented, what they had taken from him, and what they had created in him from the beginning.

“You have always been death,” Dr. Hasun assured them. “You were made to serve man, to protect him.”

“Who protects us?” another voice asked.

Yi hadn’t known back then. It was before he emerged.

Now, he knew the answer, but it no longer mattered.

He stepped out of the shower and dried quickly. He still had work to do, and the day wasn’t Builds to trackgetting shorter.

Instead of heading back to his office, he decided to work from the apartment. His data links were untraceable; tech stolen from the government before they’d even known it was completed. At least they’d trained him well for that.

He dressed casually in case he had to go back to the Piles, but the clothes he wore were of fine fabric and tailored cut. He pulled a tee-shirt on and a clean hoodie over it. It was a far cry from the days of suits and fancy outings, but Yi liked it best like this. Comfortable. Movable. Warm.

He opened the compartment in his arm and pulled out the device hidden there. He flipped open his ports and connected to the data device. There were properties listed on the device, but it all seemed on the up and up. He set the information aside and pulled up what he knew of the people that Fulmer was doing business with. The man obviously had some contacts to get the good tech to the Builds, but it wasn’t normal contracts. Places like Mariner Tech and Augalife didn’t bring their wares to small-time dealers like Fulmer. There was a go-between somewhere.

It was a dead-end though. Nothing in the files that Fulmer kept indicated anything of the sort. But Yi knew that was wrong. Which meant the man had someone working dirty for him, or he had separate books for that sort of thing.

Yi was inclined to believe it was the latter.

He thought about calling Ms. Fulmer to see if she knew anything about her husband and a second set of books, but he decided against it. He believed her sob story. If she knew something fishy was happening with his business, she’d have told him.

There was one more clue to follow. Or three to be precise.

He might not know who the thugs that chased after him were, but they were looking for something Fulmer was hiding, just like he was. Only they knew a hell of a lot more. He hacked into the police database and found the three men, but they were just thugs. Nothing special. A three-man muscle team for hire.

He decided to pull up the video feeds he could get of that block of the Piles. Places like the Parlour, or people like the Confessor covered a lot of the cameras so they had privacy but there were always generic street shots that were open in cases like this. When someone might want to get a good look at someone running away.

Yi wanted to see how far he could follow them after they’d given up on chasing him. The video feed caught them just outside the butcher’s shop and then he was piecing together their game of chase. He caught the moment they ran past him and stayed with them on the video after he’d gone the other way.

It didn’t take long for them to realize they’d lose him and once they did, they met up with two men in suits. The new guys were smart. They knew where the cameras in the Piles were, which ones were covered, and stayed hidden from his surveillance. True to his instinct, when Yi tried to trace them back to the beginning, he couldn’t get a single shot of them.

Damn. They’re good.

The man Yi was trying to follow was, but then Yi realized, his partner wasn’t as smart. When they separated ways, the partner headed back into the Piles. He kept his face out of the feeds, but he didn’t avoid them the way the other man had. Without the more secretive man, Yi was able to track him down. He was still in the Piles. It was time to take a closer look.

###

In the Skylines, Yi could walk without danger of touching another person, but as he went lower into the city, it became more and more crowded. The Builds afforded some space with sky-walks that crisscrossed the skies around the a-streets. Few people could afford cars below the Skylines, so the a-streets were filled with taxis and rent-a-cars. Lower down, in the Piles, most traffic on the a-streets were government law enforcement or illegal vehicles that had no place on the road or in the skies.

Yi took the risk of bringing his bike from his apartment in the Builds. Whoever Faceless was, he seemed a step above the usual security hacks Yi had dealt with since he left the Skylines. He wanted to have a quick chase or escape option available to him if he needed it. He hid the bike close to the butcher’s shop. People avoided the alleys behind it and Yi found the reputation of the place was as good a deterrent as the security features on the bike itself.

He wandered the streets and checked the video feeds to see that his query was still in the Piles where he’d last seen him. The guy was enjoying a leisurely lunch of the best palak paneer in the Piles. Or any other level, in Yi’s opinion. He walked in through the back of the restaurant and took a seat that allowed him to see the front bar where the man sat, but hid him nicely behind a set of stained, sheer curtains that were meant to give the illusion of privacy. He ordered butter chicken and masala chai to shoo the waiter away and watched the man at the counter. The man kept his head down and didn’t seem to be there to engage with anyone. Maybe he was waiting? Yi preferred meetings at restaurants where he could hide among the crowd if things went south. Or maybe the guy was just hungry?

Yi pulled the monitor on his wrist up and played the video feeds back and saw that he’d stopped at a few places along the way, but nothing for long, and there didn’t seem to be anything special about his path. The man had kept his face off the feeds the whole time though, so he didn’t want to be seen or identified. Who the hell were these guys, and what did they want with Fulmer?

His food came and Yi ate quickly, though the other man ordered a plate of jalebi and seemed in no hurry to finish. As Yi took his time sipping on his chai, the man finally looked up from his plate to yell back to the waiter for another drink. Yi turned his face away sharply before the man could see him.

His mind was racing. The man sitting at the bar was Agent Bastian Jackson. What the hell did Fulmer have to do with Mariner Tech’s advanced research departments?

In seven years, Chan Yi hadn’t seen a single agent from Mariner Tech. He’d been careful to keep himself hidden and avoided anything to do with Mariner Tech’s corporate offices and their higher levels of research. What the hell was one of their agents - even one as fucking skill-less as Jackson - doing in the Piles, looking into Fulmer’s business?

The last time he’d seen Jackson he’d been lying on the floor, bleeding from the beating Yi had given him. It hadn’t been a fight. One blow and Jackson had gone down. The agent had been a disgrace back then. How was he still attached to Mariner Tech?

And he was. Agents at that level didn’t leave Mariner Tech. They worked until retirement, and that never meant old age. As far as he knew, he was the only agent to ever escape Mariner Tech. Agents of Mariner Tech had the highest security clearance with not just the company, but the government that had bought into Mariner Tech’s defense contracts. Top secret was no joke with them. If you weren’t active, you were dead. Seven years and Yi was still sending them false trails because they hadn’t stopped looking for him.

He wanted to curse Ms. Fulmer for coming to him, of everyone she could have visited, but there was no way she could have known about this. Jackson got up from his seat and swiped the counter for his credits and Yi tossed paper credits on the table. The Piles preferred paper to tech transactions.

Jackson walked out and Yi trailed behind, keeping as far behind as he dared. His vision was better than the average person’s, but the more space he put between them the more likely he was to miss something. He doubted Jackson could pull anything off under his nose, but seven years was enough time for a human to learn those sorts of skills and Jackson had to have done something to have earned his way back up from his disgraced status.

Yi followed Jackson until the man stopped to join Faceless. The guy wore a dark suit with a mask and a hat that kept him from sight. Anyone that was asked what he looked like would just be able to recall the black and not the man beneath it. It was a trick Yi had used often back in the day. That and the fact that Mariner Tech had made their faces so attractive. Most people asked back in the day would simply identify them as ’the pretty ones.” It was its own form of anonymity. It didn’t keep him from being noticed in a crowd the way a plainer face would have, so a hat and mask combo was sometimes a necessary disguise.

Faceless and Jackson were joined with a couple other men and Yi slipped into a mask vendor’s stall to keep an eye on them. Three men converged from different areas of the Piles and joined them. Yi bought a new mask and used a mirror to clip it in place with his tech-masks, watching the others behind him.

And then Faceless looked up and Yi saw his face.

Yi knew those eyes. The rest of his face was hidden behind a mask, but Yi would know those warm, chestnut eyes anywhere. He dreamed of them every night, saw them in his waking day with memories that remained as clear as they had been the day they’d been made.

“Two,” he whispered the word. The agent moved away from the others and Yi followed even as he thought of the repercussions. If he got caught by them, he’d never escape again. He’d be subjected to tests and torments and, eventually, the loss of everything that made him who he was. He would be nothing more than a computer processor, in a company that wanted AI smart enough to pass as humans, but that didn’t have true emotions. He and Two had been an accident; one they wanted to fix and put back into action, without pesky morals and emotions to counter mission orders and company goals.

What happened to him didn’t matter though. Finding out what had happened to Two did. For 7 years, Yi had been unable to move away from the city, unable to move past the lover he’d lost. How was Two still alive?

He ran through the crowd, but he’d been too far back. The agents had all gone separate ways and Yi followed Two, hoping he could catch up. They moved quickly now, and it took everything in him not to scream at the crowd to get out of his way or do anything else equally as drastic.

Two stopped to talk to someone and Yi caught up, grabbed him by the arm, and spun him around. “Two?”

The agent stared at him in surprise and though the man looked similar and had the same build, he wasn’t Two.

“Excuse me?” the agent asked. “Do I know you?”

Yi backed away before the other man could get a better look at him. “Sorry, wrong person,” he said as he disappeared in the other direction. He ran the entire way back to his bike and took off.

It wasn’t Two. It couldn’t be Two. Two had died 7 years ago. There was no way he was still alive. Because Two would never have stopped looking for him if he’d survived. Chan Yi was the only sentient AI in existence. Surely, wishful thinking and a grieving heart could fool his eyes just like a human.

Right?