Eve In Utopia

Chapter Two

Annie Francis gathered up the used towels and dumped them into the laundry bin on her cart and started to put the clean ones on the rack in the bathroom. She heard a noise behind her in the main room and felt a ripple of annoyance at the sound. It either meant her supervisor, Mrs. Walters, was there to run one of her infamous spot checks on the cleaning staff, or else the front desk had screwed up yet again and let someone have the room before it had been properly cleaned. The pay wasn't great and the work was hard which made Annie think about quitting at least three times a day, but the surfing here was fantastic. Once her work was done, Annie would grab her board and head for the beach. Climate change was a fickle bitch in that it had ruined a lot of the best surfing sites back home in Australia, but it had also created fantastic waves here in this once temperate Northern climate.

When Annie stepped into the main hotel room, she saw a rather bland looking woman she didn't know standing by the bed. "I'm sorry ma'am," Annie said in her most polite voice, though it wasn't the one she wanted to use, "but if Registration assigned you this room, they were a little premature. It will be about another ten or fifteen minutes before I finish cleaning and prepping it. I'm terribly sorry for the inconvenience."

The strange woman said nothing for a few seconds. During Annie's little speech, she had stood with her head tilted slightly to one side and giving the impression she was listening to Annie very carefully. Now, she finally spoke, "No worries, I can go get a cup of coffee while you finish."

The response floored Annie and left her standing there paralyzed as the woman moved towards her on the way to the room door. It hadn't been the words that so affected Annie, but the voice which had been a perfect imitation of her own voice, complete with Australian accent. The woman approached where Annie stood in the bathroom doorway and a hand reached out suddenly towards her and Annie felt a sudden stabbing pain in her neck. Numbly, she looked down and saw the woman's hand withdraw with a few drops of crimson on the nails. In shock, Annie watched the woman lift her hand to her mouth and lick the drops of blood from them. Annie opened her mouth to scream, but found she couldn't move a muscle, including those required to make any noise at all. Then her legs felt weak and Annie started to collapse, but the woman caught her before she could hit the floor. Annie struggled to move and failed as she was dimly aware of her attacker somehow pulling the cart fully into the room from where it partially blocked the door and the door being kicked shut.

*

359 dragged the paralyzed woman over to the bed and laid her down on it. The glands under her claws produced a paralyzing toxin that while not fatal, was capable of incapacitating almost any known species. It wouldn't kill her target, but they would be unable to move a muscle for several hours and 359 didn't need nearly that much time. 359 lifted her tracker on her wrist to scan the human's form with its built in cameras. There was a beep when it was sure it had assimilated sufficient data and 359 then used her hands to search the human's pockets, producing the identification she required along with a card key for the human's own room. 359 then pressed a few more buttons on her tracking device and to the shock of the frozen Annie staring upwards at her attacker, 359's form shimmered and then transformed into an exact duplicate of herself. Annie wanted to scream questions about what was going on, but all she could do was watch as her now doppelganger fiddled with its wrist device once again and it began to glow an ominous red. Annie saw her attacker pause with an all too familiar frown that she had seen in the mirror on her own face and then it bend down to pick Annie up. The hotel maid felt herself being lifted and carried into the bathroom where she was surprised to be laid down flat in the bathtub. Annie's sense of relief at not being shot vanished as her duplicate again aimed the glowing wrist device at her and pressed a button. A bright red light enveloped the paralyzed Annie and she had one second of intense pain and then nothing. 359 looked down at the small amount of ash that outlined the place where the human had lain a few seconds ago then turned on the water and washed it down the drain.