A woman stands in the window. At least, she’s probably a woman--she’s standing still as a droid, but that’s the style nowadays even if you’re made of flesh. She is lit not from behind, but by the faint glow of a streetlamp or the momentary passing of a car. The shifting light throws up shadows on the curtain behind her. It scintillates off the opalescent scales glued to her skin--probably glued, but they might be as real. As real as anything else about droids and replicants. She might be a homebrew from Progitech.
One car stops. It sinks to the ground like an animal at rest. The passenger rises easily from the back. He moves as though to straighten his lapels, but he is wearing one of the vinyl jumpsuits common in the junk neighborhoods, and he has no lapels. The man gestures to the woman, and no movement spoils whether she’s a living person or a skillfully-made droid. She can't be alive, but a droid’d be a lucky find in a bad area like this.
She doesn’t move. She hasn’t as long as I’ve been watching--which means she’s a droid. Must be. Unless she’s an augment with those nictitating membranes. I won’t get to know now--the translucent gas sandwiched between the window panes is being heated up as the man heads inside the ragged building. It becomes opaque and the new curtain obscures whether the one isolating the figure from the rest of the room is pushed aside. But I know he was angling for her.
My bike hums to life; the antigrav skims the street as I turn. They used to growl, properly, but laws against the noise pollution ruined them. You can make them growl again, but it hurts the specs and it’s illegal besides. Worry about the noise pollution, not the kind that’s killing us, right?
It was her. She’d never be seen dead in that haircut, but she’s not--Claire isn’t dead. She’s not dead.
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