“Listen,” I said, “if I do anything for you, it will be purely for money, got it? I don’t want you mentioning our past again. It’s just business. We’ve never met. I’m just Dexter Duff, private investigator. You understand? Am I getting through that thick skull of yours, darling?”
She blinked up at me. “So you’re saying you’ll do it?”
I sighed. Same old Ginger. You could talk and talk but she always picked out what she wanted to hear. If I ended up working for her, I knew what I was getting into. She was a liar and a cheat and she was good at getting people to do what she wanted even when they knew what she was.
“I’ll listen,” I said, but I felt like I’d already agreed.
The tramspace was always crowded in the morning, but I was in no mood to travel any farther with Ginger than necessary. A flurry of hoverpods docked and departed all around the giant transparent tunnel, a quarter mile across. The main concourse was filled with every life form and non-life form imaginable—humans, Dulnari, Hasians, and plenty of four-armed Veratians in their spiffy white uniforms directing tourists to different excursions, not to mention all the robots and androids carrying people’s bags. Beneath the invisible walkway—it was like we were all walking on air—dozens of massive white cruise ships floated in the sleek emerald waters of the Versatia’s famous ocean.
We were lucky, and found a table at a bistro not far from the transport tube. The smell of coffee and toasted bagels made my stomach grumble.
“It all started when—” Ginger began.
I held up a hand. “Not until I get my coffee.”
When were finally seated at a corner table, in a glass bubble overlooking the ocean, I kept her waiting until I’d buttered my bagel and put cream in my coffee. She clicked her fingernails on the shiny black countertop.
“All right,” I said.
“Really? I have your permission to speak now?”
“Don’t push your luck, kid.”
She smiled. “Kid? You haven’t called me that since you met me on the asteroid mining outfit where you stopped for repairs.”
“Should have left you there, too. Those miners have probably really missed your services.”
She made a clicking sound of displeasure with her tongue. “Now, now. All right, so where do I start? I assume you know that my husband is Vergon Daughn—”
That made me pause mid-bite into my bagel. “Vergon? Of Vergon Enterprises?”
She sighed. “Don’t you follow the news at all? My wedding four months ago was all over the vids. Yes, that Vergon. He built a fledgling stepdock company a decade ago into a massive corporation employing over a million people on thirty-three different planets.”
She was right that I didn’t follow the news much, but I did know a little about Vergon Daughn. When she’d mentioned being married to one of the richest stepdock manufacturers in the known universe, he definitely wasn’t who had come to mind—for one specific reason. “Um,” I began, “isn’t he… an android?”
“That’s right,” she said.
“You’re telling me you married an android?”
“Uh-huh. I wasn’t the one who liberated him and paid for his humanizing—some old bag who’d owned him did it before she died. But I definitely saw a good thing and went after him. Honestly, he didn’t stand a chance when I came along. He proposed within six weeks.”
I stared at her a long time, soaking all this in. My main complaint about Ginger had always been that she wasn’t born with the same set of emotions as other human beings—like the ability to empathize with someone other than herself—and here she went and married somebody who didn’t have emotions at all. Oh, androids could fake them, and some faked them so well that they could pass for human unless they walked under a bio scanner—but it was all an act. It was why, according to the laws of the Unity Worlds, even a liberated android still didn’t possess the full rights of a biological sentient—or biosen, for short. They would always be considered property. Now property could have a lot of rights, just like intergalactic corporations were property but still had plenty of rights, but it wasn’t the same.
Of course, there were lots of bleeding hearts of every race and planet who argued that liberated androids should be granted the same rights as biosens, but so far the law had been firm. Mostly this was because it was backed by hard science: androids may have been some of the most sophisticated machines every devised, but they were still machines.
Finally, I burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny?” she said.
“You wouldn’t understand,” I said.
She offered up her trademark pout. “It’s not like I’m some lonely heart who bought an android to be my lover. He’s liberated and humanized—he could have chosen anyone, and believe me, he had plenty of women after him. It was love at first light.”
“First sight.”
She frowned. “If you understand what I’m saying, why do you always have to correct me? It’s one of the things that always irritated me about you.”
“If you’re irritated,” I said tersely, “you’re welcome to leave at any time.”
“Oh, no. No, darling. I’m sorry… It’s just this whole thing has me so upset. Forgive me, okay? I just didn’t get all the schooling you did. I’ve had to teach myself—after you taught me a lot of things, that is.” She sighed. “Anyway, to get back to what I was saying, it was love at first sight. But then Vergon went and screwed things up by becoming human.”
I was lifting the coffee cup to my lips, and in my surprise, I spilled some on the table. “What?”
“Oh, I have your attention now? Right before our wedding, he surprised me by showing up at our rehearsal dinner fully human. He showed himself off to our guests by bringing a handheld bio scanner with him. I was… shocked, to say the least. It’s called the BIP—Biological Imprinting Procedure. You grow a biosen in the lab, then use microlasers to imprint the same memories and thought patterns as the android.”
I mopped up the coffee with one of the paper napkins. I’d heard about the procedure, but the last I knew it was still in the research and development phase. There were also all kinds of ethical issues surrounding it. “Is that procedure now authorized by the Unity Worlds?”
“Of course not,” she said. “It’s going to be a lifetime before that happens, if ever. But if you have enough money, you can make things happen. And once he was human, what were they going to do? The bioscans all show him as human, and he made sure to confer all the legal rights on his human body of ownership in Vergon Enterprises just to make sure.”
“Why?” I said.
She grimaced. “To please me, of course.”
“What?”
“He said he wanted to love me for real. He said—he said—” She stopped, and there were tears brimming in her eyes. “He said I might not know the difference, but he would. He would know that he wasn’t feeling it, even if he was showing it.”
I wasn’t quite sure I bought her sudden display of weepiness. “Seems understandable. Do you blame him?”
“No! I don’t blame him. But he’s… not the same, Duff. You may not believe this, but I loved Vergon the way he was before.”
“You’re saying the procedure didn’t work?”
She took one of my napkins and dabbed at her eyes. “Oh, no, it worked,” she said. “It definitely worked. The human Vergon had all of the android Vergon’s memories. He’d made the body to look like him, too. At first, he even acted like him. But… he started changing. He acted moody all the time. He fell into a deep depression. It hurt his company—it began to go downhill. Then—then we had this awful fight. I told him I wished he’d never done it. I told him I loved him more as android.” She sniffled. “I guess that confirms everything you ever said about me… I really am awful deep down.”