She didn't look like an android. That's what made it so damn hard.
Most androids--however totally their expression, their behavior, simulates a human's--have something that gives them away. Some micron of a difference in the angle of their eyes as they squint past the sun, in the flare of their nostrils when you make a bad joke, shows you immediately that you're dealing with something not human.
But not Shara. Maybe that's why they wanted so badly to kill her. Maybe that's why I felt about her things that could get in the way of my job to protect her--could addle my reason with a spike of emotion at the wrong time...
"You see, it's something I call the paradox of the android in our popular culture," Mark Wolfson, the best of my advisors, was speaking. "If you go back to the beginning, to the Star Trek and Twilight Zone videos a hundred years ago, you find that the androids are of course played by human actors--because of course there were no androids then. And this warped everyone's expectations about androids from the start--when people envision androids, even now, they see the human actors who portray them, and this obviously is quite a different thing from real androids, whatever they are. And that's one of the reasons that real androids make everyone so uncomfortable."
"Makes the Blood Party want to kill them," I added.
Wolfson nodded. "They're religious fanatics, of course.
But they express a deep-rooted public opinion, and they're highly intelligent, as you know from your briefings. They'll watch her constantly, like they did with the others, and at the first moment of vulnerability, the first time you relax, they'll come at you."
"You're still sure that it doesn't make sense to get her to some more remote place--Antarctica, or off-planet all together--where she'll be harder to reach?"
Wolfson shook his head. "I'm not sure of anything. The President's sure. The Committee's sure. They think Shara would only be more conspicuous in an uncrowded place. And they want to smoke out the BPs in a place where they can be traced back to their leaders. So we make our stand here now, in the heart of New York City, a half a mile from the Tappan Zee, with you and
Shara trying to live like two normal people, going about your business like everyone else." I thought I saw a tear glisten in the corner of Wolfson's reconstructed eye. "Shara's the last--at least from me," he said. "I can't build any more. And no one else has my touch..." He turned away, regarded some far wall of his office. "They blinded me, my eyes have been regrown, I'm told I should have 100-percent good vision, maybe I do, I don't know, maybe it's psychological, but I just don't see the way I used to. It's somehow different. I can't build anymore."
"You're lucky you're still alive," I said.
"Luck? No--human life is sacred to the BP. That's what they're all about. They'd never deliberately kill a human being, even me ... Yeah, maybe I am lucky at that--a human being lucky enough to know that he'll never be able to create anything as beautiful as his last creation. All I can do now is talk."
I put my hand on his shoulder. "You love her too," I said.
"I'm her father," he said.
)
