Tears of Blood

TEARS OF BLOOD by VR

I

A hovercraft, flanked on all sides by six others, descended on Ariel Fran Walter’s villa like locusts on a farm.
The craft touched down noiselessly on the perfectly trimmed grass surrounding the villa, and seven armed security personnel stepped out onto the fresh-smelling grass.
Detective Sharon Cryton had been with the Ur Security Force (USF) for seven years. Most of the Conglomerate worlds had androids instead of humans, so the most able-bodied of people generally found themselves on boundary worlds like Ur.
Sharon signaled for the six troopers behind her to follow silently, and she approached the front door to the villa.
It was an impressive building, featuring large glass windows framed by reinforced steel brackets.
The glass, however, was rumored to be able to withstand a planetary invasion.
The front door would be hard to see for someone who had never visited the villa before, but Sharon had been there on occasion, at the request of Walters.
Sharon typed in the access code for the door on an all but undetectable keypad, and a sheet of the black-tinted glass slid upwards.
The interior of the villa was the perfect example of the luxury of the Conglomerate worlds. Stark white wall interiors, light shining in from all angles through the glass roofs and panes, and not a sharp corner in sight.
The corridors and rooms had rounded edges, and randomly fitted sheets of steel to add to the sterile atmosphere which so characterized the Conglomerate.
Sharon’s trained eye simply skimmed over this aesthetic detail however, and she ran down the central corridor looking for the nearest flight of stairs.
Turning left, she found a grand glass staircase, and called for the troopers to follow her quickly. The emerged from the winding staircase in a large, dome-roofed, circular room with various pieces of furniture and accoutrements organized in a chaotic, and yet somehow organized, fashion.
Three startled people rose from the sofas draped around the room, and turned to face the new arrivals.
The six troopers immediately trained their blasters on the three, scanning their bodies for any sign of weaponry.
‘Any sign of trouble and take them back to base,’ Sharon said, purposefully loudly so that the three shocked politicians could hear her.
Sharon walked around the room to a corridor which led off it to the north. She went through and turned right, and stood stock still.
She could hear someone in the study at the end, moving about carelessly.
Slowly she approached the open door, and jumped into the room, blaster at the ready.
‘Please no!’ The man jumped back in fright, almost knocking over the pile of metal he was intently looking at.
Not lowering the blaster, Sharon saw a woman lying dead in her chair to the left. The metal was directly in front of her.
‘You don’t understand. I am Dr. Randal Dr. Fellows, Director of Robotics on Ur. I received a distress signal from this android. I was a close friend of Ms. Ariel Fran Walters,’ he nodded in the direction of the motionless corpse sprawled in the chair opposite him.
‘Yes, I recognize you. I’m Detective Sharon Cryton,’ she said, slowly lowering her weapon. ‘You’re a Progressor, like she was. I suppose those three weren’t happy to see you?’
‘Absolutely not. One of them even tried to force me to leave, would you believe. Luckily I brought this,’ Dr. Fellows said, brandishing a pulse pistol.
‘That was a robot?’ Sharon walked over to the pile of metal opposite Ariel.
‘No, it was an android. Human capabilities, thought, surely you know it all.’
‘Yes,’ Sharon nodded. Androids were never far from the Regressors “doomsday” predictions arsenal.
The whole debate, Progressors and Regressors, was absolutely pointless. Regressors were traitors that ought to be deemed rogue dissenters, Sharon had always thought.
Ur was part of the Conglomerate whether they wanted it to be or not. Why forsake technologies and other such aids? The Regressors were almost pagan, in their belief in nature and mistrust of technology.
Progressors may as well have been called Conglomerates. All they were fighting for was the rights of every other Conglomerate world: technology.
It was black and white in Sharon’s mind.
‘Anbot,’ Dr. Fellows said, interrupting Sharon’s stream of thought.
‘That’s what Ariel nicknamed the poor fellow. How could they do this to her? Why don’t you just arrest them now?’
‘We need evidence doctor. Besides, how do we know which member of the triumvirate was responsible? Michael Fielding, Portia Crayle or Lauren Place… Any one of them could have done it.’
‘I say all three of them. Those damn Regressors. Ariel only invited them here to reason with them. We’re all sick of the threats, the guerilla-leanings of this bunch.’ Dr. Fellows spat out the last few words. ‘I’d kill them if I could. How dare they do this to Ariel? She was the most peaceful, loving, beautiful woman…’ Dr. Fellows’ eyes began to water.
Sharon took the doctor’s pause as a cue to look around the room.
She stared at Ariel for a long moment. The formerly illustrious Progressor lay slumped like some sort of doll that a child has grown bored of.
A needle was dropped on the ground next to her. It was the kind that you slid a vial into and then injected it.
Sharon took out a blood scanner and stuck it onto Ariel’s arm. The readings were clear. An excessively high amount of mercury was in her body.
She chanced a guess that the killing agent was dimethylmercury. Highly dangerous, even a drop or two. This much and there was no chance of survival. It was like trying to stay out of a black hole.
She left the blood scanner in the arm. It was like a tag, sort of. Normally it was just kept on until cryonic freezing, or the less popular option, cremation.
Sharon now looked across to a large wall mounted display of ancient artifacts from Earth. The cradle, as she was often known, was just littered with this sort of stuff. Worth a fortune in credits.
But Sharon was not looking at the mount; she was looking at a large wooden pole, engraved in some forgotten language, lying near the metal heap. It would be more than enough to destroy a house android.
Finally her eyes drifted back to the android lay sprawled on the floor. Its face was busted apart, liquids and other metallic paraphernalia splattered across the floor.
The body, especially the chest, was pulverized. The plating had buckled, and bits and pieces of silvery inner workings were pushing up in the cracks.
Dr. Dr. Fellows was probing around in the head, a gloved hand reaching in and feeling around.
‘What are you doing?’ Sharon asked, slightly queasy. The android was far too human. Maybe it didn’t have blood, but it still had weird blue-grey liquids pouring out of it. 
‘All androids,’ he said while exerting a large amount of effort delving into the android’s inner workings, ‘have sort of backup memory units. When they are damaged, for instance, often the last moments of their ‘life’ can be saved into the unit. All power goes towards recording these last moments. It was designed to help manufacturers find out about any weaknesses in the design and fix them. But they’re hardly used anymore. Luckily, Ariel told me that Anbot had a backup unit.’
Dr. Fellows grunted and conceded defeat to the mangled head.
‘I can’t do this here. I need to get Anbot back to the Robotics Facility. Can you help me?’
‘I’ll call in a fragile transportation team right away.’ Sharon keyed the command onto her commpad.
‘Do you want to come along?’
‘Definitely. I imagine we can find out more about what really happened from Anbot here, than from those three.’
After a moment, Sharon asked, ‘Surely someone would have heard something like this happen? I mean, whoever did this smashed Anbot to pieces, and I assume Ariel would have screamed.’
‘The walls, at Ariel’s request, were entirely sound-blocked. Even if there is an explosion, you won’t hear it in the next room unless the wall is breached. And clearly, in this case, it was not.’
‘Ok.’
A few minutes later the scattered remains of Anbot, still somehow miraculously connected by various liquids, were gently lifted onto a stretcher and moved out of the villa.
Sharon and Dr. Dr. Fellows flew in the transportation hovercraft with the shattered Anbot away from the villa and back into the City of Ur.

II

Sharon and Dr. Fellows were now standing in the main lab at the Ur Robotics Facility.
Like the villa, the walls were a smooth, seamless white.
Anbot lay on an operating table in the middle of the lab, with a host of apparatuses surrounding him. Dr. Fellows had been murmuring to himself whilst using surgical tools to look into Anbot’s brain. For at least ten minutes, he had been pulling pieces of the android’s silver mechanical brain out and placing them on small trays next to the table. They all refused to lose their connection to the android, however, and were linked by a blue, elastic sort of substance.
‘That’s internal fluids,’ Dr. Fellows had said when Sharon had asked.
Sharon had also noticed some silvery dribbles underneath what once were the holes in which Anbot’s eyes were.
‘Was he crying?’ Sharon said incredulously.
‘Androids have the ability to secrete certain heavy metals, some in the form of tears. Anbot felt pain when this happened… obviously.’
Finally, after an eternity, Dr. Fellows held up a pair of tweezers to the light above the operating table.
‘I’ve found it,’ he said proudly, placing the black cube-shaped device on a separate table a few meters away.
‘I’ve got a special apparatus to access these units,’ he said, plugging the small cube up to various cables and placing it in a small stone groove on the table.
‘It’s only 2D imaging. We can only see what Anbot was looking at.’
‘Hopefully he was looking at who attacked him,’ Sharon said.
A projected screen flickered into life above the small memory unit, and soon came into sharp clarity, accompanied by a faint, barely audible click. 

Anbot was talking to Ariel, standing in the same position that they had found him.
‘Are you sure you do not want me to attend to the triumvirate, Ariel?’
‘No. Stay with me, Anbot. I need to get my thoughts in order. It has been a busy morning has it not? I mean, after the initial round of friendly discussions… Anyway, if they’re not resting like they say they are, or taking an unhealthy interest in my vast collections, all the more fuel for my campaign.’
Ariel was writing furiously, planning a new course of action with which to tackle the basic ideals of the Regressors. She had wanted this meeting so that she could mellow her opposition. At current, that was not likely to happen.
At that moment, the door to the study slid open, and Ariel spun around in her chair to face the newcomer.
A black-cloaked figure stepped in and closed the door.
‘What do you think you’re –’ but she was cut off by her own screams.
The figure had spun the chair around so that he was behind Ariel, clasped her mouth with his left hand, and was fiddling a small vial into a needle with his right.
When a satisfying click was heard, the figure raised a black-gloved hand and plunged the needle into Ariel’s neck, directly below the ear.
She slumped suddenly, and was dead before even a second had elapsed.
Anbot, too weak to stop the attacker and programmed not to attack humans, was cowering opposite the murderer.
The murderer went over to the mount with all the artifacts hanging off it, Anbot’s head following diligently. And then the murderer picked a wooden pole, covered in engravings, and ran towards Anbot, who stood still, not knowing how to proceed.
Not that he had to. The murderer drew the pole back like a club, and swung it at Anbot’s head, smashing into the left of his metal skull.
Just as Anbot collapsed to the right, the memory unit failed, and the screen blanked.

‘There’s the proof we need,’ Dr. Fellows said behind gritted teeth.
‘The triumvirate wears black robes exactly like that.’
‘We don’t know which one of them,’ Sharon said, reminding Dr. Fellows but sharing his anger.
There has got to be some sort of give away, Sharon thought resolutely.
‘Can we watch it again?’ she asked.
‘Certainly. Watch it as many times as you like. I’m not watching that carnage a second time,’ Dr. Fellows said, turning away.
Sharon patted him on the shoulder. The poor man. She wouldn’t be surprised if there had been a thing going on between him and Ariel. He was a handsome man, around forty, and she was a beautiful woman of thirty-five.
Sharon placed her hands on a small metal bar on the table, and drew her finger back across it.
The entire saga unfolded in reverse.
She watched it again, hoping to find any clue. Any small clue that would be helpful.
She must have stayed, staring at that screen, for a good hour and a half, before something, the smallest thing, caught her eye.
It was when the murderer had injected the dimethylmercury (Sharon had received a message on her commpad from an investigator at the villa, confirming her prediction of dimethylmercury), that a splash of hair had just poked out from underneath the black hood.
Sharon touched the floating, non-existent screen, and it zoomed in on the point.
Blonde hair, like hers.
She held her commpad, and typed in the names Michael Fielding, Portia Crayle and Lauren Place. 
Three faces appeared next to each other, two women and one man. Michael Fielding had short grey hair and was at least in his sixties. Lauren Place was about fifty, and had brown hair down to her shoulder line.
Portia Crayle, on the other hand, was about thirty and had long blonde hair which went down to her elbows.
Sharon smiled. It had been time consuming, but simple.
‘Dr. Fellows!’ she cried out, and he returned to her from his blank staring at the wall.
‘I know who murder Ariel Fran Walters! It was Portia Crayle!’
She pointed to the screen, which was still hovering in the air, and was still zoomed in on the blonde hair poking out from underneath the black hood.
Dr. Fellows gave Sharon a hug.
‘You’ve done it; finally Ariel can rest in peace.’
He kissed her on the lips, and embraced her tightly.
‘Why did that girl do it? What have those people done to her?’ he said, euphoria turning to melancholy.
She felt his warm tears drop onto her clothes, and hugged him back.
Carefully, gently, she extracted herself from his grasp.
‘I’ll get her. You can be the first to speak to her,’ Sharon said.
Dr. Fellows nodded and waved as Sharon ran out of the Robotics Facility to capture Portia before she attempted anything.

III

Sharon’s hovercraft touched down on the outskirts of the City Ur, at Ariel’s villa. A junior investigator had contacted her on the way to the villa and told her that the Ariel’s body had been removed and was now at the Ur Security Force base.
Sharon ran through the open front doors which were flanked by Ur troopers, and up the stairs and into the centre room in which the three Regressors of the triumvirate were still detained. They all wore cloaks identical to the one from Anbot’s memories.
Portia Crayle’s hood was not over her head now, and her flowing blonde hair pierced the darkness of her robes.
She was typing into her commpad, but something about her was unsettling. Sharon couldn’t quite place what it was.
She ran over and grabbed the commpad before Portia had time to put it away.
‘What are you up to?’ Sharon said, focusing on the commpad.
It was a message to the Regressor headquarters, about her detainment by the USF. 
Sharon flung the commpad away in disgust. Not only was she disgusted by Portia, but the commpad itself was infinitely inferior to her own one.
‘You are under arrest for the murder of Ariel Fran Walters,’ she said, moving to face Portia.
Two troopers immediately came over and trained blasters on Portia, as if daring her to attempt anything.
‘I swear I didn’t,’ Portia protested, her sweet-girl appearance not fooling Sharon.
‘We have evidence, Ms. Crayle. Is that a foreign term to Regressors?’ Sharon smirked, disgusted by this girl. She realized though, that it was almost definitely the older Regressors that turned her into a self-serving monster.
The two troopers, blasters still trained on the beautiful Portia, nudged her to follow Sharon outside, and brought up the rear.
They almost walked straight into Portia when Sharon stopped suddenly.
‘No!’ she yelled, and quickly turned and told the two troopers to take Portia back to the centre room.
She quickly brought out her commpad, but then decided it would be too fiddly to use and run at the same time, and instead ran straight towards her hovercraft.
She was so stupid not to notice it. Sharon was gripped in fear. Fear for the life of Dr. Fellows.
Portia had been using her left hand to type into the commpad.

IV

She parked the car, and simultaneously jumped and ran into the Robotics Facility, towards the main lab.
Once there, she saw the surprised look on Dr. Fellows’ face as she ran towards him.
‘Get away from Anbot!’ she yelled.
Dr. Fellows backed away, confused.
Sharon let a few shots loose at the mangled corpse of the android, still lying on the bench.
It was propelled onto the floor.
‘Portia is left handed. And yet in the Anbot’s memories, she stabbed Ariel with her right hand. That is impossible. She just wouldn’t do that. Anbot must have fabricated the memories! He must have assumed that all humans are right handed, or not known in Portia’s case that she was left handed, and left it to luck to hope she was. He fabricated the memories, made them up! He is the real murderer! Undoubtedly!’
‘That’s hardly conclusive,’ Dr. Fellows argued. ‘Maybe she did that to confuse us?’
‘But then how do you explain the fact that the murderer hit Anbot to the left of his head, so that he fell right? If the murderer were left handed they would have swung from the left, hitting the right side of his head, causing him to fall to his left! And Portia would not risk Anbot surviving the hit by a poorly calculated swing from the left. No, she would have swung from the right, if she were right handed. But she is not!’
Dr. Fellows nodded, ‘You’re a clever girl aren’t you, Sharon? Too clever, perhaps...’
Sharon didn’t understand.
Suddenly an unnatural noise emanated from behind her. A sort of slurping, clanging, liquid noise.
‘Kill her, Anbot,’ Dr. Fellows said with cool calculation.
The mechanical ‘house assistant’ did anything but assist Sharon. It was a decisive, able-bodied killing machine.
Sharon’s quick instincts kicked in. It was a matter of seconds before the thing reached her.
In a blast of logic, she raised her blaster and aimed at Dr. Fellows.
‘Tell your thing to stop, or I’ll blast your head off.’
Anbot didn’t need instructions, however. It was an intelligent killing machine.
Great, thought Sharon. She wondered how many more of these morphine monstrosities were hidden in this facility, and even on Ur.
‘Tell me everything; I want to know it all.’ Sharon’s curiosity was insatiable, apparently more so than her anger.
Anbot was now lurking a few meters away, ‘breathing’ heavily. The metal carcass, which looked brand new, was moving gently up and down. The face had two glowing white eyes. Any sympathy she had felt for this thing was now long gone.
‘I thought a smart girl like you would have figured it out. No? I was the one who suggested the meeting with the Regressor triumvirate to Ariel. She was such a fool, but so damn charming. Everyone liked her, not a cooped up roboticist like me.
‘Her house assistant… it was easy to replace it with Anbot. The stage was set. The guests arrived, each with the perfect motive for murder. Power,’ he snarled the word, ‘glorious power.
‘Anbot, in preparing breakfast, added a few ingredients that would make Ariel and the guests somewhat tired, after a suitable period of time, of course. Then, he persuaded his foolish master to retire and recoup after the ‘heated’ discussions immediately after breakfast.
‘Anbot had taken drinks to the guests, drinks that would cause them to go to the toilet at different times. Anbot is a clever little pet. As you can see, I did a lot to him.’
The snarling metallic machine seemed only inches from Sharon’s head.
What if it reached her before she could pull the trigger of the blaster? She forced herself to concentrate on Dr. Fellows once again.
‘The drinks, they gave all of the guests the perfect opportunity to murder Ariel. Each one of them, at different times, left the room, thanks to Anbots skills.
‘Immediately after the drinks charade, Anbot attended to his master, Ariel. On the way, he took a needle from the bathroom, you know, the one they give everyone so that new vaccines can be self-administered?’
Sharon just stared.
‘I see you understand now. Anbot, he went to Ariel in the study, and –’
Sharon interjected, ‘and he secreted the dimethylmercury into an empty vial, and then injected it into Ariel Fran Walters’ neck. And then he created the falsified memories for the backup unit, and – and…’
‘So you still don’t understand how he managed to destroy and then reform himself?’
‘The blue liquid?’
‘Yes! It keeps him connected. He can reform and destroy himself at will, but he is never really destroyed. All his systems remain intact. The blue liquid are like connective tissue, but highly durable. Only a single strand is needed to protect the system from internal failure. No one would suspect an android who himself is destroyed for all intents and purposes. And I suppose you know why I did it, don’t you?’
‘You did it to clear Ariel out of the way of your political ambitions, and so that you could blame her death on the Regressors. The perfect situation: you ascend the ranks to become the Progressors’ new leader, and now you can blame everything on the remaining two Regressors. You obviously told Anbot to add that evidence with the hair to point to Portia so that you had two remaining Regressors on who you could blame her ‘corruption’. Perhaps you could even convince Ur that the same would happen to them should the Regressors rule. But you forgot one fatal flaw. Portia Crayle is left-handed. And so your plan collapses because of one simple oversight.’
‘Ah, but it has not collapsed, for you see, there is no one outside this room who knows, and anyone inside this room who knows, well I suppose they had better brace themselves.’
‘Dr. Fellows, I am in control of this situation. Your mechanical freak show will not attack if I have this blaster pointed at your face.’
‘Didn’t I tell you? Anbot has just interfaced with and activated a field which is inbuilt into this room and surrounds it, which nullifies all sudden energy pulses.’
Sharon pulled on the trigger, and a blast of green energy erupted from the blaster.
The blast was then seemingly ripped apart before her eyes.
She dropped the gun.
Dr. Fellows laughed.
‘Now, to edit Anbot’s memories. Thank you for picking out that particular flaw, Sharon. Too bad I can’t help your career advance in return. Anbot, finish her,’ Dr. Fellows said, chuckling and walking over towards the memory backup unit.

V
At that moment a fleet of troopers entered, answering the distress call that Sharon had discretely activated.
‘Your weapons won’t work!’ she yelled. The troopers dropped them and ran towards Anbot.
The android had been temporarily distracted by the new arrivals, but now attacked Sharon.
Dr. Fellows had just finished editing the memories, or more correctly, Anbot, at the instruction of Dr. Fellows, had interfaced with the backup unit and edited the memories, whilst simultaneously dealing with the troopers and Sharon.
‘Help,’ he yelled, cowering. ‘That android is a killer!’
A pair of troopers got the man to his feet.
‘This way!’ they said.
Sharon, meanwhile, was having trouble getting Anbot off, even with the assistance of eight troopers.
The metallic creature was tearing at her clothes, ripping shreds off in its violent mission.
Finally, sick of the pestering troopers, it turned and batted them away like wasps.
‘He’s behin –’ Anbot was back on her, muffling her voice.
She thought she heard someone mentioning an energy nullification field, and mentally urged someone to turn it off.
Suddenly there was a humming sound and all the lights went out.
The troopers threw down red lighters, giving the room a hellish appearance.
They had forgone an arduous search for the energy nullification field’s generator, and had instead opted to cut the power out.
Green blasts pierced Anbot, and at first he merely shook these off while tearing at Sharon. Now he was drawing blood. She screamed in pain, uselessly batting at his metal skull.
And then she heard a crackling noise. The endless shots were working.
The creature released its grip slightly, and Sharon clambered backwards on all fours, with only one priority: stop Dr. Fellows.
Past the eight troopers continually pummeling shots into Anbot, Sharon could see the two troopers evacuating Dr. Fellows from the building.
She ran out of the main lab, and soon saw light coming from the entrance.
Feeling her way through the dark surroundings, she eventually came to the lighted entrance corridor, and ran full speed out onto the concrete pavement outside.
‘That man is –’ but a shot was fired from the group of three men. It was Dr. Fellows’ pistol.
The troopers ran over with Dr. Fellows in tow.
‘No! I didn’t know it was her!’ Dr. Fellows protested profusely.
Sharon raised a hand weakly as one of the trooper called for a medicraft.
One look from the other trooper and Dr. Fellows was silent. 
‘It was him… he made Anbot… kill Ariel ...  he’s a killer… He wants… power…’
The troopers needed no instruction. One bounded his hands while the other officially announced his arrest.
‘She’s delusional!’ he argued, to no avail.
Sharon’s voice was now a whisper.
‘No…you see… I have a slim chance… you have none…’ she trailed off, slipping out of consciousness.
Her last act was to unclasp her right hand which she had been clenching, revealing a tiny camera which she had turned on just before Anbot’s memories had played through. She had caught everything.
Dr. Fellows slumped suddenly in the trooper’s grasp.
A little needle dropped from his hand and clattered to the pavement. It drew blood.

THE END