Al1ve

Prologue

The house was a single large room, a hall, and two other rooms the other side of it.
The walls were painted a fading red that was chipped around the door frames where someone had opened them too vigorously and the doorknobs had struck the paintwork. The wooden floors had a thin layer of worn polish on them. Picture frames full of wide smiles and laughter adorned the walls. Embers glowed a soft, steady red in a fireplace - a real one, not virtual, which was rare these days.
Perhaps it would have been cozy under different circumstances.
White light struck the room like a bolt of lightning. It sent the shadows scurrying behind furniture like a hoard of gutter rats, but only for a moment. As it faded they crept back in to resume their feast upon the figure that lay, slumped, across the sofa. Another white flash revealed his bulging eyes. Another, the purple-blue tongue that peeked from between his thin lips. A third and final flash was the brutish bruises that marred his throat.
"I'm gonna go ahead and say it's strangling."
Detective Keller straightened up and  tugged his gloves off finger-by-finger. The photographer sent by forensics climbed off of their knees and strolled across the room. Glass from the shattered sliding door crunched beneath Keller's boots as he paced around the back of the sofa and observed the splatter of a dark substance - they assumed blood -seeping into the wood.
"What do you think?"
The photographer bent over and snapped a photograph.
Flash
A slight movement in Keller's periphery as the woman, who had been stiller and more silent than a mannequin before then, unfolded her arms.
"I think you're right. But that blood isn't his."
"No," Keller scratched his chin, "the vic didn't get cut."
"Just strangled. Lucky him." The figure stepped out of the darkness and into what little light was provided. A smaller flash, outside this time as the photographer traced muddy boot prints on the patio, threw her angular face momentarily into such sharp relief that the contour of her cheekbone appeared as a score in her dark, smooth skin.
"Hey, you know the vic's name? I didn't catch it off Sanchez." Keller asked as his partner crouched down behind the sofa and drew an evidence marker from her pocket. The small tubular light threw off a faint glow beneath her chin as she moved to place it next to the pool of blood on the floor.
Once her hand was about an inch away from its intended destination, it stilled along with the rest of her. Perhaps she's noticed something, Keller thought, and shoved his cold hands into his pockets.
When she didn't move for another half minute, Keller cocked his head and bent slightly at the knees as he peered down at his partner. Her lips were slightly parted and her eyes set wide and round.
"Lexis? You okay?"
As if on command, an acrid scent broke through the sickly-sweet stench of death that hums in the back of your nose and leaps to the front whenever the wind blows a certain way. An acrid scent like gasoline with a strong undertone of copper. Lexis slowly lowered her hand, illuminating the dark puddle by the toe of her boot in a pool of flickering light.
The blood was blue.
"Holy shit." Keller breathed it out and immediately cursed himself for speaking as the odour of the victim's corpse burrowed into the back of his throat. Lexis was suddenly on her feet - somehow he didn't remember her standing up - and beside the body. The latex gloves on her hands creaked as she picked up the limp hand that was twisted at an unnatural angle above the pale face.
"Look!" The room was suddenly filled with silence as every person within it felt the compulsion to stare. All heads turned at once to watch Lexis lift the victim's chubby palm into better light as if it were some sick sacrificial offering. The purpling fingertips were coated entirely with cobalt blue thirium. A strange image came to the front of Keller's mind when he saw them; the victim's hand (when its owner was still alive) dipping into a bag and retrieving a fistful of Android blood as someone might grab a handful of potato crisps.
"We've got an android on our hands!" Lexis announced and sounded for all the world like every word she spoke was a curse. If the brief but collective intake of breath that rose from beneath the silence was anything to go by, they might as well have been. Keller watched his partner stand with extra weight upon her shoulders and suddenly said;
"Listen, forensics will be here any minute and they'll want us gone. We can take care of the paperwork in the morning. Besides - we can't do it all unless we've got the coroner's report."
Lexis glanced at him with eyes the colour of the flames the dying embers behind her once held, supplied him a tired smile - not really a smile, a curve of the lips was all that she seemed to manage most days - and rested her weight on one hip.
"I'd say 'no', but I'm guessing you don't really wanna do this either."
"I'd be lying if I denied it."
He'd also be lying if he denied that his partner's reluctance was the only thing which had spurred him to delay the case. Something had left Lexis's mouth along with her words, and suddenly people's backs were hunched. Their eyes shifted back and forth. Their grips on their equipment was a little tighter. Keller knew why too; when people murder, it's an error of human nature. A crime of passion. A heated moment or a psychological anomaly.
When an android did it?
Was it a sign of things to come? Was this one just faulty, or are the machines turning?
The questions rested on everyone's lips so heavily that Keller could almost see them as he and Lexis passed their somber faces, immobile and plastic in the darkness like a hoard of masks with no bodies except for the hands that worked silently and robotically.
Keller fished for his car keys in his back pocket - he had parked it a little way down the street to give the forensics vehicles room - and glanced over at his partner as she easily matched his pace beside him.
"Need a lift?"
"No thanks, Joe. The station's nearby."
Keller nodded, paused, then did something that only he was allowed to do. The reason that only he was allowed to do this was that he was her friend; Lexis didn't have many of those. He lay his hand lightly on her shoulder and gave it a couple of little pats.
"Take care of yourself."
"You too."
When Keller got into the driver's seat of his car - yes, he was fully aware that automated cars existed, but he just couldn't quite bring himself to trust them. Besides, he enjoyed the sensation of the car responding to his gestures and humming beneath him - he watched his partner's figure receding down the dark street.
A heavy sensation settled in the pit of his stomach and climbed up and over his chest. Keller watched and watched until there was nothing to see anymore but the fog of night and the flickering street lamps that illuminated the pavement in spots. All the while his fingers drummed out snatches of songs on the curve of the steering wheel.
For some reason that escaped rational thought, Joe Keller knew in the marrow of his bones that he would never see Lexis Montgomery again.