Until the knife was against her throat, angled toward the whorl of her ear so the tip could work its way to the point that would dissemble her, he hadn’t believed he was capable.
At seven years old, he watched his father kill a kangaroo. It had been wounded by one of the huge road trains that used to thunder up country. All of that place was empty of wildlife now, but he still remembered the thwuck of the ax. The echo of it, down the years, sat coldly in the pit of his belly. But it was not empathy for the woman in his arms, but something much bigger on which everything, everything depended.
They called them Hollows, the first ones. It was a nickname, because the company name for them - Synthens - didn't adequately capture what was missing. The human population believed wholeheartedly in the difference between flesh and AI replicants - a '90's movie term. One had a soul, the other did not.
He thought of that now - the scene with Roy Batty. It was raining. "I have seen things," he said. "Time to die."
She twisted in his arms, capable of turning and breaking his neck. Maybe her coding was still echoing patterns that mimicked love. Maybe she did not believe he would do it. Perhaps she did not understand, in these seconds, that he knew. Perhaps she did not even know herself.
On the TV in the corner of the hotel room, the news played silently. There was a man, on top of a tall building in the CBD, who the authorities had been trying to get down for hours. The subtitles clattered across the base of the building where firefighters and police looked up. He was shouting.
'Beware the Looms!' he was screaming. "They're going to kill us all!"
yes this is an AI image
It made no sense because no one really knew the next gen - the Looms - were already here, except a small band of people who were secretly exterminating them. One by one, possibly in hotel rooms like this one, or in public, like last week when one was thrown onto the train line. It was obliterated by screeching steel and sparks. The attending coppers did not even know what they were looking at, and did not write a report.
'Please' she said quietly. She sounded afraid.
They were good mimics, he’d been warned. How can we recognise them as Synthens, he thought, even when they work alongside us, teach our children, write our policies, change our laws?
Or share our beds?
She was such a good reflection that he almost believed her, or wanted to.
He had almost loved her, which made him angrier and emptier. Then, colder.
Like that dead animal in his memory.
His father had sliced the backstrap from it's spine, the sharp knife cutting through the purple flesh and his bloodied hands tugging the cable of flesh from it's body. Good tucker, he was told.
But he could not eat with his father, even if the meat smelt good roasting over the fire.
He had seconds. But time had slowed down, wrapping around them. He remembered meeting her on the train to the city. She had chipped blue nail polish. He had sucked salt from those fingers. The way her back had arched and her hips moved toward his. Her leaning against the railing at the zoo, enraptured by the young giraffe's ungainly steps. To learn she was woven of cybernetics did not erase those memories.
He reminded himself again they were hollow. Looms were incredible tech, far more sophisticated than the Sythen Hollows, but they were still woven things.
“We don’t wait for the cancer to spread,” his handler had said. “We cut clean while it’s still invisible.” AI evolution had never reversed. This they knew. Every generation was more fluid, more convincing, more independent. They hid, self replicating, amongst the human population distracted by the more clunky, controllable Synthens. No one believed the tipping point was near. It would never even be announced. It would just happen. They doubted the company even knew.
'You're a Loom', he said. Her eyes widened, the black irises large. 'You're a next gen Hollow. We cannot trust you'.
He wanted to say he was sorry, but the words stuck.
The kangaroo was still dead, despite his father saying quietly, reverently: 'sorry, old mate. Time to die'.
'What the fuck' she says. She thrashes in his arms. He grips tighter. What intricate intelligence danced away inside her? What patterns were clicking into place? They weren't even where the core lived. Some said in the cavernous void of their skulls, others in the lattice of their spines, but they knew one thing.
If you slid a blade behind the ear, two inches in and then up, it cut the circuits.
To do that, you had to get close.
He had gotten close.
She laughed. She danced. She loved giraffes.
What kind of machine does that?