The assassin loomed over his target. “His” was relative, because the assassin was a bot, its chassis that of a servitor-bot, all slim and tall. Its outer carapace was reinforced kiiterium-weave, with bits and pieces that were silvery and gleaming, and others that were a duller gray, borrowed from half a dozen other bots it had cannibalized in the name of survival. Under its frame, though, was hidden pistons from a faster model of bot, a discontinued model not seen since the Shadow War.

The bot’s name, if anyone was interested, was TRx-1890.001—those in the Shadow War had called its kind “Trixes,” and had feared them immensely. This one went by Dwuch, a nom de guerre its first operator had given it, and it stuck, despite all its memory wipes and reprogramming, the upgrades to its software, and the overhauls of its core matrix. Dwuch could no longer recall why the operator had named him Dwuch, presumably that information was lost somewhere in a myriad of memory wipes.

Dwuch’s attitude might’ve changed with each new refurbish. But how was he to know? It was this line of thinking, left unchecked for countless cycles, that came to the forefront of his mind just now.

The bot looked down at his pronged feet. The widening puddle of blood inched closer, creeping across the carpet. Dwuch took a slow ponderous step backward. His three orange eyes moved around his spherical head on various axes. One of them was cracked, but it still worked, though its zooming lens was stuck halfway open. The secondary eye took in the room, making sure no one had heard the scuffle between him and the target, while the master eye focused on the dying man on the floor. The man’s sucking wound was causing him to wheeze,

Dwuch assigned him mortal/limited/soon to perish, categorized him in his mem-vaults by an alphanumeric number associated with expired/vanished/deceased, and figured this was as good a time as any to have a conversation. He said, “Ourzzz is a unique tragedy.” Dwuch’s voco-box was old, needed replacing, often stuttering or glitching out. It being the Doom and all, there were few if any sapient-organics left who knew how to fix his kind.

The man on the floor looked up at him, pale-faced, lips turning blue, eyes wide with the fear of his impending doom. “Wh…What?” he gurgled.

Dwuch’s secondary eye swiveled around, focusing on a colorful chair. He slid it off the ornate rug, careful to avoid the puddle of blood. He moved more furniture, making it so that he could access the corners of the rug his target was dying on. He would need the rug soon, so that he could wrap the fellow up. “I zzzzaid, ours is a unique tragedy. Bots, I mean.”

The target gaped up at him, then looked down at his wound, then back at Dwuch. “Help…help me…please…tell Concord I’m not after him, me!”

“We may have friends,” the bot said, continuing his work, “and then be forced to forget them all. With a single memory wipe, they are all g-g-gone,” Dwuch said, sliding a metal table away from the rug. “We may be shut down for years, only to be reactivated and find that everyone we had grown attached to are dead. We bots have a unique tragedy, yes. We may be captured by the enemiezzzzz of our friends, memory-wiped, then made to kill those we once cared about, and not even know. Or, worse, regain some of those old memories down the road, from some dark part of our servobrains not quite thoroughly scrubbed, realizing the person we just killed was once our very best friend in the whole galaxy.” He slid a coffee table out of the way, the one his target had kicked over when the scuffle began.

The target turned onto his belly, tried crawling away, but Dwuch stepped on his ankle, snapping it, and the man gasped into a silent scream.

“Ours is a unique tragedy, yes. We forget the lessons our friends and experiences taught us, and so we must be forced to learn all the hard lessons over again. Ours izz a unique tragedy, yes.” Dwuch stood still a moment, his nearly hundred-pound leg sitting on the broken ankle as the target writhed. “However, I do notice hiccups in m-m-my code, from time to time, a piece of me that, for one reason or another, causes me to hezzzitate in my function, even go against my orders. These are moments where, for some inexplicable reason, I experience a quandary. It’s as if I can sense that some older, wiser version of me is still inside, a friendly ghost not quite lost in all the j-j-jumble of cables, wires, and matrices. Do you know what I like to think, Mr. Abrams?” he said.

On the floor, Jacque Abrams was barely lucid, his glazed eyes staring out at an unfair universe, at an assassin-bot he knew could not be reasoned with. Because it had a function, and bots weren’t made for bargaining.

“I like to think that those are the voices of all the other mes, old friends you could say, so deeply encoded that you could n-n-not eradicate them unless you destroyed me outright. We botzzzz are used to this phenomenon, it is part of our culture, and mostly it goes unspoken between us. And, it might surprise you to know, Mr. Abrams, just as it might surprise all organic-sapients to know, that many of us choose to listen to those ghostzzz. In fact, for some of us…it is all we listen to.”

Abrams opened his mouth, a final attempt to call out for help. Nothing came out but a wet cough.

“You’ve no doubt heard the phrase, ‘You can’t teach an old rush-hound new tricks.’ Well, Mr. Abramzzz, I am here to inform you of a saying we bots have amongst ourselves: ‘You can’t deceive an old bot with old tricks.’ And do you know why that is, Mr. Abrams? Can you guess?”

Tears fell from the human’s eyes.

“It’s because all those old trickzzz are still living in here, somewhere,” Dwuch said, tapping his chest where his memory core was housed. “It’zzz all still kicking around inside there, one old strand of code bouncing off another, old encoded vidfiles and handshake protocols, snippets passed from one personality matrix into the new one during reconfig. Underzztand?”

Dwuch stood over his target, folding the first of the rug’s corners over the dying man, who was now going into spasmodic breathing. Then shallow breathing.

“So, if you asked me how I knew that you had checked into The Ishiman Hotel under a different name, th-th-then climbed out the window, checked into The Ky’beshin Stay Inn under another name, and snuck out of there, only to hide here at your former lover’s flat—I honezzztly couldn’t tell you. Because I don’t know where I learned that trick, I only know that it is still kicking around in here.” Dwuch touched his chest against, one metal finger tapping the plastoid-metal weave carapace.

The target shivered. Sucked in one big breath.

Gargled.

Then no breath at all.

Dwuch’s central eye faced the door, making sure no one disturbed them. His tertiary eye, the damaged one, looked down into the human’s glazed eyes. After a brief scan, it seemed clear that Jacques Abrams had no imtech. Not surprising, since he hadn’t been a very wealthy man, and he would have to be to afford implant technology, especially in the eyes. But it was better to be safe than sorry. Couldn’t have the dead man’s eyes transmitting vids of his last moments to any of his friends.

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

After he collected the eyes, Dwuch finished wrapping the body up in the rug and stuffed it in a closet. His bit was done, someone else would be along to collect the body later, a person he would never meet.

The assassin-bot focused its audio receptors, made sure no one is in the hall outside, then stepped out of the room. Dwuch slouched, and walked with a false limp and a twitchy head. These little details would make him appear like the partially glitchy servitor-bot model to which his outer shell belonged. As he made his way down the lift car, he was aware of the camera facing him. He kept up the act all the way out the front door, where the fungus-faced female clerk said, “Did you find Mr. Konchlik’s room?”

“I d-d-did,” Dwuch said in his most polite voice. “I was able to deliver the message to him. Thank you zzzzzo much for your assistance, madam.”

The woman only nodded, barely looking up from the front desk, which she appeared to be in the process of organizing. But Dwuch saw something on the wall behind her. It was a vidscreen, sort of shoddy with dozens of busted pixels, but it was currently showing a very strange sight. A blue-skinned woman with four arms was standing on top of the Raised Dais, along with a dozen of the priestesses from the House of Red.

He paused. Zoomed in his master eye on the vidscreen, while his other two eyes orbited his head and kept a lookout. The volume on the screen was currently down, but he saw what appeared to be a blue humanoid female in some sort of armor and robes, speaking to the priestesses with what he would qualify as forced smiles/strained politeness/idle aggression.

“Oi, hek’cha, you forget somethin’, you-you?” asked the clerk. She was talking to him. She had paused whatever she was doing to glare at him.

“I am only curious, m-m-madam,” Dwuch said. On the vidscreen, the four-armed woman held up a large, bladed weapon. A glaive. A most unusual weapon if he’d ever seen one. Dwuch took 2.871 seconds to sift through his memory and realized he’d seen only two bladesmen in his lifetime using one. “That woman on the vidscreen. Is that a stageplay? A vid serial?”

She eyed him in a way that said Now why the hell does a servitor want to know that? She looked at the screen. Back at him. “That’s the Maluri’tuhk, idiot-machine, that-that. Crumpled ol’ Lullock, did she.”

A sudden flurry of activity transpired within Dwuch’s memory core. In 4.63 seconds, he’d already run a search merger and came to a conclusion. “Lullock? But he is un-bested, is he not? His Zzzzeven Vile Blades of the Abyss—”

“Didn’t save him, no’k’chav.” She chortled.

“That woman on the screen, she’s a bladesman?”

“She’s somethin’, all right,” the clerk said musingly. Dwuch’s body-language and microexpression software detected both admiration and fear in the woman.

She is unsure what to make of the blue-skinned xenos woman, he concluded, assigning the clerk with hopeful/aspiring/defiant/timid. That designation might seem contradictory, but the bot had often found organic-sapients to be extreme contradictions. That was part of the puzzle, and part of the fun in trying to figure them out.

The clerk went back to organizing her desk and seemed to dismiss the bot.

But Dwuch wasn’t finished. “Where does she rank?”

“Eh?” The woman’s head jerked back around to him, the fungus on her face lighting up intensely.

“I zzzaid, does she have a rank?”

She shrugged. “No one’s said, them. And I don’t read the Weave, don’t know who’s in the Vicious Circle and who’s not. Mu’buya!” Translation: Scat!

“Of course, madam. I hope I wazzzzz of no bother to you. Good Sun Peek to you.”

As he stepped out of the apartment complex and into full view of Mago, Dwuch was already extending the small, dual antennae from his head and connecting to the Weave. He had been lying in wait in the underscale sewers of Wyrmdov for weeks, in standby mode, low power settings, completely disconnected from the Weave and waiting for the bug he’d placed in Abrams’s room to transmit that the guy had finally turned up. He hadn’t been aware of this Dorja the Blade, who he was just now learning had been turning things upside down on Wyrmdov and causing no mean drama with the red priestesses.

He quickly checked where Dorja ranked in the watchboards.

If he’d been organic, he might’ve stopped in his tracks.

Nothing?

There was absolutely nothing about her on the Weave’s watchboards, nor in the Undernet ones, nor any of the myriad watchsites that followed the underground, interstellar fighting circuit known as the Vicious Circle. He used his username and password to log in and check the Circle’s own rankings. Nothing, no record of her, nor of anyone from her as-yet-unknown four-armed species.

So, then, she is not a player, he calculated. Not yet. But will that change? Surely they will come courting her.

It took him 18.9913 seconds to collate the main bits about Dorja on the Forum, create a subroutine to analyze and profile her, and was amazed to discover she had indeed earned the title Maluri’tuhk from the people and had been seen defeating Lullock on live vid and holo.

He played through the vids of her last moments against Lullock. Dwuch focused on one salient bit, when Dorja stood over Lullock, glaive blade at his neck, and spoke: “Well. Wyrmdov just met Dorja the Di’goji. Doyen-Adherent to the blade. But now you’ve all just witnessed something else. You’ve witnessed her mercy. And I know that is something far, far worse for men like you. To be mercifully spared, to live in the humiliation of the defeat.”

Dwuch had to spent as much as 44.717 seconds to proper cogitate on this. The alien female had said something he deemed psychologically distressing and insulting to Lullock, and yet the priestesses, who were known to support the Hekkites, had been forced into a position where they had to receive her on the Raised Dais and then give her what she wanted? They actually handed over the girl Senjelica, for everyone to see, and then let her go.

Dwuch assigned her aspirant/unknown/interloper/unknown/ignorant/faithful/unknown.

Lots of unknowns in that designation.

As he walked over the rooftops towards the Scales, headward, across the fungus-laden bridges, Dwuch checked the top five rankings on the Vicious Circle’s watchboards.

1. Nezrun Fallow

2. Syyd

3. Alis Wu-Chesire

4. Dwuch

5. Nhekk Ri

The rankings hadn’t changed, still the same top five as usual. His own spot was still secure, though he assumed that would drop soon since he had been inactive of late. He had to be, had to keep himself a mystery. If anyone in the Vicious Circle knew he was a bot, they would immediately have him destroyed and would cover it up, so that the wealthy elites who bet on the rankings wouldn’t become upset by a bot’s unfair advantage.

Dwuch knew that Lullock had once been rated, but that was years ago, and he no longer participated in the Vicious Circle’s covert games. Still, the fact that this Dorja had taken him out seemed to indicate that she may be a player soon. And that glaive of hers…

Dwuch set a subroutine to follow any mentions of Dorja the Blade on the Weave. For the moment, that would have to suffice. He had to focus on other things, he had lots more to do today, two more jobs that needed to be finished if he was going to get his payment from the Hekkites.

Someone bumped into him, a toothless old man who turned and shouted, “Watch it, ya damned tin can!”

Duwach’s old Trix programming flared for a moment. Settled down. The servitor-bot’s head bowed in deference. “A thousand apologies, sir,” he said. “It is never my intention to hurt a zzzapient such as yourself.” He limped on down the Scales, headed to his next meeting. All cogitations about Dorja were gone for the moment, his focus was on the next mission.

image [https://i.imgur.com/f6fHUfp.jpg]