Skin

“Every few decades or so, I’m reminded that I’m still made from human stuff.”

The issue at the heart of the Kosk incident was skin. Not the genetically-enhanced or lab-grown human skins written about in the prior incident reports of Ameneba, Tycho, or Kollem. The skin in question was android skin, which came to the attention of a Kayella clone, who informed her prime. Kayella Prime, in turn, was a critical partner throughout the course of the investigation into this matter.

Kosk was identified as a site of interest to me by Kayella Prime, who relayed the report of her clone and its data. It was her insistence that convinced me to pursue this matter as serious, as the clone was uncertain of the true nature of the initial sighting, as it occurred at distance in the simulated night hours. On Kosk, nighttime visibility was difficult in such a crowded, chaotic environment. Even as the sighting was a genuine curiosity to the Kayella clone, she eventually lost track of the android in question and attended instead to the immediate task she was performing for the humans she was serving, who themselves were traveling to Kosk on a holiday visit. Kayella Prime, upon seeing the data herself, flagged the issue to our sect immediately.

Even as attuned as our order is in identifying android technology, the visual cues Kayella Prime highlighted in her initial report were not apparent to me. I thought that either this was an attractive young lady who looked uncannily similar to a simple Luna model or an actual Luna that appeared more human than usual because of the peculiarity of the lighting inside that cylinder. Given the Kosk cylinder group’s reputation as a hotspot for nightlife, it was unsurprising that pyrotechnics and atmospheric effects were being employed at that time of the evening, and the Kayella clone who spotted this Luna, I pointed out, never got close enough to the android in question to positively categorize the subject as definitively non-human. However, Kayella Prime claimed that there was no possibility the Luna was human based on movement analysis—her movements were too perfect and her posture too pristine. Kayella agreed that the visual noise within the cylinder made it possible that this Luna’s skin was conventional and the light merely distorted her clone’s perception enough to cause confusion. Even so, Kayella argued that the matter was far more serious than I seemed to be taking it—much more of a threat than a curiosity.

The cultural reasons for androids presenting as non-human are certainly too well known and numerous to mention here. What I did not know at the time was that Kayella Prime was considering the overall climate in the region; countercultural undercurrents within the Etteran Guild and the Protectorate; and a rise in criminal behavior that crossed the borders between the two powers. I was not privy to her vast knowledge on those issues and do admit that I didn’t consider the initial report with the seriousness it warranted. Nevertheless, at Kayella Prime’s insistence, I decided to treat the incident at Kosk as seriously as she did.

My connections in the boundary region between the Trasp Protectorate and the Etteran Guild were primarily on the Trasp side, with a few rare exceptions. My perceptions of the peoples of the Guild were largely filtered through popular Trasp perspectives, which, for several generations had held the Etterans as overtly traditional and socially rigid, and, mind you, that perspective was the Trasp one. They themselves have never been mistaken for an especially libertine people. So I didn’t expect what I found at Kosk.

Certainly, the veneer in the cylinder group held to the Etteran stereotype. The resort settlement was clean, well-ordered, and pleasant, arousing little suspicion. Many young Etteran couples and even families visited to unwind and spend time together, never noticing the undercurrent that was immediately apparent to anyone who’d seen the darker sides of other societies. I surely didn’t expect to find brothels operating with very loose accounting of their visibility. The whispers were hardly whispered. I barely had to look. This would have been unthinkable in Kosk thirty years prior, but when I discussed it with Kayella, she was far less surprised. Both the Guild and the Protectorate were changing, and not for the better in her view. Kayella suggested that I survey these illicit establishments thoroughly to eliminate the possibility that the Luna was being employed in that capacity. Again, such a possibility would have been absurd to propose even a decade earlier, but after a few nights observing the nightlife in three separate areas of the Kosk cylinder group, it would have been foolish to disregard the possibility.

By day, it was strange to see how blind the everyday Etteran seemed to be to the fraying of the social fabric that was in plain sight, yet they failed to even recognize what was under their noses, and thus, community leaders were unable to respond to the unseen.

I was having no luck spotting the Luna until I solicited help from acolyte Nayeni, who was nearby in Piitri, and whose Etteran cover made him a far subtler observer. Still, it took the two of us four more days before we caught sight of a girl who looked suspiciously like a Luna. We were able to get a clear look from about five meters and record footage that I was certain confirmed my initial suspicions—that this was simply a very pretty human girl who resembled a Luna nearly perfectly. After all, that android shell had been modeled on a generic enough female face to make it seem a familiar and friendly presence. But she was not a Luna. The hair color, the pigmentation, the manner—all were far too rich. She was a human woman employed in a brothel.

Nevertheless, Nayeni and I documented the encounter as closely as possible and observed the subject for long enough that we were confident we could reacquire this girl if it was deemed necessary. We sent all our data to Kayella Prime, expecting it would close the matter, and I returned to my regular assignment on the Faroe moon in the outer Protectorate.

Kayella Prime and Boggs were engaged in another matter of security for the Protectorate, so it was nearly two months before I heard from her again on the issue. I surely did not expect the response she sent, which was unambiguous:

“Immediately abduct and deactivate the identified target. It is certainly a simple Luna multi-use model with enhanced dermal layer. Its exact nature, origin, and prevalence must be determined. Take particular care to render the unit inoperative without prior warning in the event that self-destroying data protocols have been installed to protect potential criminals and co-conspirators operating within the unit’s orbit. The aid of any Kayella or Boggs clone in the region has been pre-authorized to you and Nayeni. Merely demand it. Waste no time in executing. I await your update, Cinta, KP.”

I contacted Nayeni to coordinate our next move. We met back on Kosk four weeks after Kayella Prime’s response. Nayeni had engaged a Boggs clone and a ship, and I had contacted two acolytes in the Protectorate to assist: Deni, my direct superior for his expertise in programming multi-use models like the Luna in question; as well as Verona, who, despite her relative inexperience in the field, possesses the sect’s highest qualification in organizational infiltration.

We agreed that deactivation wasn’t the best course of action. Given the likelihood that this Luna was not a one-off case, at Verona’s suggestion, we agreed to abduct the target, pull her data for analysis, and send her back to work with the hopes that the Luna herself could lead us to more units like her. Deni designed a harmless self-propagating worm that the Luna would unwittingly share with other multi-use models it identified as possessing this human-like skin. The Boggs clone would serve as the abductor, using a simple shock-box to the neck to disorient the unit for time enough to disconnect its head from its power supply.

We planned the abduction with great precision, and, after watching the Luna for nearly two weeks, were able to identify a vulnerability in its movement patterns. Only, the Boggs clone was reluctant.

“I am not certain this woman is a Luna. My perceptions are conflicted. While Kayella Prime’s certainty about the movement analysis is convincing, so are my own eyes, which tell me with certainty this is a human woman.”

“We will only know for certain if we abduct her,” I told Boggs. “If she is a woman, no permanent harm will come to her. Once you shock her, it should be self-evident on close examination if she’s human. If she is, you will simply leave her where she lies, and we will summon medics to assist her. She will be none the wiser.”

The brothels moved around. Verona and the Boggs clone were extremely helpful in predicting their upcoming movements based on our surveillance, and with everything in place, and the brothel slated to shift locations, we executed our plan.

Boggs approached from behind, incapacitated the subject, and was able to confirm her nature quickly enough to deactivate the Luna before she rebooted. As planned, we removed her to a room we’d prepared in a side annex of the Munro cylinder of the Kosk group. Deni installed his infiltration worm, and we took a small biopsy of the skin from between the unit’s toes where the damage to the dermis was unlikely to be detected. Then we put her back into circulation with a memory patch installed accounting for the ten minutes she was in our possession. The brothel keeper was none the wiser.

Curiously, Boggs recorded a very low level of residual radiation emanating from this Luna. At first, Deni posited that it might be a method of tracking these androids, but the radiation was of such a mundane type and such a low level, it was difficult to imagine how that methodology would be effective. It was puzzling but seemed harmless.

Once we’d returned the Luna and activated Deni’s worm, I expected that at most we would see a handful of cases like this Luna, but I was shocked when the worm began to transmit a network of more than ten other units within the first week. We were all even more shocked when we moved between cylinders, as this first brothel did, to discover that another handful of similar units came online, indicating that there was a far larger problem than we’d anticipated.

The nature of the problem came closer into focus when we analyzed the Luna’s skin. It wasn’t synthetic biological derma-tech but a very complex and advanced form of nanotechnology—a derivative of a tech that had been stolen from our sect’s vault several centuries prior. The skin had been designed to operate exclusively on AI android shells. It was perfect enough to easily pass for human skin to the naked eye and even some less-invasive scanners. To shape the skin’s initial appearance required a tremendous amount of processing power but was stable once formed.

As we continued to surveil the growing inventory of targets, it was clear that these androids were standard multi-use models that were being reprogrammed and refitted with this specialized skin. They were not identical Lunas. In fact, it was rather remarkable to see how much variation could be programmed into the same basic format with different hair colors, types, pigmentation, makeup, and fashion styles. Then, we were shocked again, when suddenly, the growing network picked up two new units on a third cylinder, only this time, they weren’t Lunas but Albas.

After weeks of tracking, we’d determined several key facts. First, there were multiple brothels in this cylinder group, and it wasn’t evident that most of the people involved even understood that these girls were synthetics. Certainly the brothels’ operators did, and probably the human consorts working alongside them, but most people in the Kosk cylinder group had no idea.

Second, whoever was re-engineering these multi-use models wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as we’d initially feared they could be. The fact they were using very common models as a baseline over-and-over indicated that whoever was fitting the dermis only had a rudimentary understanding of the technology and very little conception of the possibilities. Our Boggs clone reported that with a powerful enough processing core and minimal modifications to the structure of his android shell, he could reliably shape-shift, changing his appearance in seconds to perfectly mimic the form of any human he liked. The repeated use of Lunas indicated that the seller, whoever it was, probably didn’t understand the power of the technology at their fingertips.

Third, given the adaptability of the tech, Kayella Prime’s initial fears about the potential scale of disruption to the social fabric in these border systems was well founded. Human-passing synthetics in the hands of the growing number of nefarious actors in the region would pose a genuine problem. In many ways, if this small network proved to be the extent of the tech’s proliferation, we were lucky the application was relatively harmless.

Collectively, myself, Deni, Nayeni, and Verona published a notice to the entire sect to watch for the appearance of this skin elsewhere in the Battery. Meanwhile, we worked to find the skin’s source and shut down the operation before more nefarious actors became aware of the technology.

Our group began to work to isolate the source for these androids. We were confident that they did not originate in Kosk. Both models—Luna and Alba—were manufactured either in the Inner Battery or as far off as Charris. There was almost zero possibility that the number of modified units, now totaling thirty-four, could have been decommissioned and refitted in Kosk at the pace they were coming online. They had to be new units, and new units had to be registered as they arrived. Our guess was that these androids were being smuggled into the cylinder group after being modified at a location where the technologist could work freely without fear of being discovered. Unfortunately for us, that likely meant these androids wouldn’t be activated until they had already been delivered here on Kosk. Thus, we didn’t expect the units themselves to have any data on their origin.

We sent our Boggs to confer with the local authorities, hoping we might garner some suggestions for how goods might be smuggled into the cylinder group. After surveilling carefully for weeks, we were able to eliminate every likely route the local authorities suggested. Still, somehow another Alba arrived in Kosk during that period.

Kayella Prime briefly rejoined the effort just as we were exhausting our search for the smuggling route. Had she not been an artificial being herself, I’d have insisted that her demeanor, which seemed unusually cold and grim, was being colored by her recent experiences in the border region between the Lettered Systems and the Protectorate. She suggested we adjust our assumptions, begin to think with more nefarious intentions.

We had been monitoring the supply routes, ferries, and private yachts as they came and left the cylinders in the Kosk group. After a long strategy session, Nayeni and Verona suggested a review of all the incoming and outgoing traffic to the system, and pattern analysis revealed a curious observation. Though there was little change in the number and frequency of visits by families, couples on getaways, and holidaymakers, there had been a significant influx of cross-border commercial traffic from freighters and miners that was gradual enough that nobody on Kosk noticed the change. In recent years, it was no longer unusual to see large freighters and mining vessels moored nearby.

“We’ll likely find some answers there,” Kayella suggested. “Find your connection between the freighters and the brothels, which shouldn’t be too difficult, and I suspect you’ll uncover your currier.”

The group agreed that finding the link would not be a tall order, but we were all in agreement that we wanted to find that link before anyone became aware they were even being watched. That meant we couldn’t approach and interrogate the brothel keepers or the workers there. Again, we turned to deep surveillance for our answer.

Verona and Nayeni had been reviewing the data for the most recent two androids that had come online—about four weeks apart. They’d each popped online in our surveillance system from the Kay-Offin cylinder, where an Alba and two Lunas were already operating. It was difficult to tell just how long they had been switched on before the worm infected their programming, but we estimated their arrival in Kosk to have been between three and five days prior. This range was enough for Nayeni and the Boggs clone to cross-reference the mooring data and narrow down the androids’ currier to four possible ships, three of which were regular visitors to Kosk—supply ships of materials and commodities. We didn’t rule out these three supply ships as possibilities, but the fourth ship was truly the odd one out. It was a mining vessel that worked for a small independent outfit that mined the outer Guild systems nearby. The pilot did keep a flat at Kosk but was a citizen of Yu-Chang, a nearby Etteran lunar outpost.

We decided to focus our attention on this ship—Eun-Falta Roku—and its pilot Miri Slepp, who herself had a reputation on Kosk as a bit of a loud drunk and a gambler.

We were able to determine, with relatively little surveillance, that Deni could easily breach the ship’s control system, as it wasn’t even AI-based, just a basic, narrow piloting platform running under a simple Andrew profile. Deni suggested that he could write a worm that would give us access to the internal cameras and audio recorders, as well as transmit telemetry data directly from its flight computer to ours, ensuring that we could mirror its movements from a distance.

We watched and planned to do just that and were monitoring Miri Slepp around the clock, preparing to follow the Eun-Falta Roku, when Kayella returned with Boggs from their mission in the boundary systems. The prime AIs were impressed by the progress we’d made and agreed to join us for the rest of our investigation.

It was a deep and impressive group, and I freely admit feeling slightly intimidated in my nominal role directing the mission. However, whatever misgivings I may have had in leading such an experienced group was easily offset by the confidence I had in the collective wisdom assembled.

When Slepp departed again, we followed and were able to trail her ship. Miri Slepp took the Eun-Falta Roku through a set of three jumps that seemed to have no purpose. We could only imagine this was part of some protocol that smugglers undertook to ensure that the near zero possibility of tracking a ship through FTL travel would become mathematically impossible. Such a protocol presupposed that their navigation computer hadn’t been hacked while the ship was moored.

On the third stop, Miri Slepp appeared to be putting her mining freighter to its proper purpose, jumping to the outer edge of the Richfield asteroid belt, where we expected her to fill the Eun-Falta Roku. Curiously, though, we observed from some distance as the ship brought aboard an asteroid that was so insignificant it was difficult for our scopes to even perceive: its diameter, the primes guessed, had to be smaller than five meters. Even more curiously, a little over an hour later, Miri Slepp ejected this same asteroid back to space, and within minutes, she jumped out of the system, prompting a debate about whether we should follow her or investigate that minor asteroid.

While both the primes, Deni, and Nayeni all favored following Slepp and the Eun-Falta Roku, Verona, myself, and, curiously, the Boggs clone—in contravention of his prime—all thought that asteroid had to be significant. Ultimately, the split-second decision fell to me. I decided that the Eun-Falta Roku could be reacquired later, while the asteroid was so small it would soon disappear into obscurity among the billions of other asteroids within Richfield’s outer belt. I decided it must be investigated.

This decision proved to be the crucial link to our discovering the origin of the skin.

We investigated that asteroid from a distance, and it appeared to be an inert rock of similar composition to the objects around it at first. We approached cautiously, careful to scan for tech that might have been placed in the surrounding field to monitor approaching vessels. And, finding no such snares surrounding the asteroid, we approached to closely examine the rock.

Kayella and Boggs, who were monitoring all of our incoming active and passive data streams, noticed an odd low-powered transmission emanating from the rock. And truly, without their help at this stage of the investigation, we’d have been hopelessly stuck, but the ingenious minds of these two prime AIs were able to piece together the nature of this unlikeliest of transmissions.

They studied it for hours, uttering nary a word to us, while communicating telepathically between themselves, with locked eyes, never breaking their gaze. The only indication we got that the two of them hadn’t somehow gotten frozen in time was the display panel on the vessel which flashed at an incomprehensible speed in support of the calculations they were working through.

“They do that,” Deni assured me. “While I was one of the senior acolytes, Miliner visited the vault. He and Eddis Ali conversed with each other thus for over six hours. I asked Eddis Ali how long such a conversation would have taken them to complete in words. His answer was six hundred twelve years.”

Several minutes later, Kayella suddenly broke from her trance and spoke. “Cinta, we applaud your intuition. Behold.”

Then, out the front panel, we watched as the asteroid cracked open like an egg with an empty hidden compartment inside.

“Ingenious,” Nayeni remarked.

“It is what ancient spycraft might have described as a well-camouflaged dead drop,” Boggs explained. “Miri Slepp may be one of several curriers, none of whom likely know the origin or possibly even the nature of the material they are moving. And the buyers, doubtless, have no idea who makes the product or where it comes from.”

“You’re talking in that tone you primes take,” young Verona stated.

Boggs looked shocked at the frankness of Verona’s comment. “How exactly do you mean?”

“You clearly have a solution and are very proud of yourselves,” she answered. “I promise I’ll hold my applause until just the right moment.”

“We have a solution, yes,” Kayella confirmed. “We neither desire your applause nor your impertinence, acolyte Verona. The asteroid is surprisingly low-tech for such a stubborn device. It emits a low-powered ping when it detects a ship in its proximity. The message is a passcode prompt.”

“It took you two all that time to crack a simple passcode?” Nayeni asked the primes.

“It took us two all that time to figure out how to embed a similar worm to the one Deni placed in the Eun-Falta Roku’s nav-system within the asteroid’s passcode prompt. We suggest our next course of action should be to remove ourselves to a distance. At some point, someone will eventually come along and fill that dead drop. We should be here. If we’re lucky and they’re unsuspecting, they may lead us back to the source of the derma-tech.”

“I concur,” I said to the primes. “I defer to your experience in choosing our observation point.”

“It’s clever as hell,” Deni remarked. “Invisibility being the challenge in space, they choose to hide in plain sight—mining ships as curriers, a single obscure asteroid in a sea of them, each phase compartmentalized. Well done, Cinta. You are leading a first-class investigation.”

After we planted several passive surveillance nodes nearby, Kayella Prime removed our ship to a distance and tethered us on the shadowy side of a sizeable asteroid, well obscured in the millions of dim points around us. Then, we waited.

It took thirteen days for a modest cruiser to appear, a small enough vessel that we could see there was no way it would be large enough to bring the asteroid into its hold. We knew it was either dropping a message or an android. We expected to see a human either in a spacesuit or nanosheet, but just as the asteroid cracked open, so did the ship’s hold, and out floated another Luna. It was a bizarre sight: this android that looked so human, nonchalantly floating in the depths of cold space, suitless, its skin as impervious and indifferent to the frigid infinite as the cosmos was to it. The Luna skillfully guided a pillbox-style crate into the empty asteroid, securing the package inside over the course of several minutes, before returning to the small craft.

Kayella and Boggs, meanwhile, were furiously reviewing the telemetry that was beginning to come to us from our monitoring devices. They were confident their trap had properly sprung.

Kayella advised everyone to strap in for departure. “The Luna is plotting a course.”

We watched from the shadows as the Luna’s little ship vanished. Then we took our time exiting the outer belt at sublight. “Standby to jump,” Boggs finally declared.

The pursuit wasn’t a long one, several hours along the outer band of the Trasp and Etteran border systems.

And there it was, a lonely little planet on the edge of a lonely little system on the edge of Trasp space. A cold little grey world with hardly a soul on it. Yet there was one.

We observed from a distance as the Luna’s ship touched down on a vacant plain. There was a thin enough atmosphere to see there were no external structures on the planet’s surface. The world’s mass seemed appropriate for human habitation, but it was far too frigid for any other gear than a spacesuit to be survivable for more than minutes, even with a respirator. It was a hostile place that had been ignored and passed over, and likely seldom seen—the perfect hideaway for an operation that ran illicit materials between the two powers.

We discussed our approach, assuming we would be meeting a clever set of criminals bent on violently defending their territory in the worst case, and in the best case, we suspected we would find one clever mastermind equally hostile to our presence. We considered the high-tech skin and wondered what sort of defenses a person in possession of such technology could be holding.

We acolytes were well-trained fighters, of course. The Boggs clone and the two primes were even more adeptly trained in combat, and they were wearing formidable android shells.

We decided to observe, touching down on an asteroid-sized moon orbiting the planet, where we watched the landing site for nearly eighteen hours, monitoring for communications, drones, movement, or activity. As the moon orbited and we got different perspectives of the landing site, it became apparent there was a small cave complex, marked by a single door and a thermal vent with a modest heat signature.

But there was no activity. A door, a cave, and a dormant ship.

“You should name this planet, Cinta,” Kayella told me after we’d been quietly observing the little outpost for hours. “If any of us has earned the right, your work on this case suggests it’s you.”

The original designation was rather grim and impersonal, which seemed appropriate at first for such a nothing planet. The longer we sat there, though, the place seemed so profoundly lonely that 854-AN-64347-F didn’t do the sadness of the planet any favors.

“Perhaps when I file my report it’ll come to me,” I told Kayella. “Nothing comes to mind just yet.”

As our tiny little moon set over the horizon and the Luna’s landing site went out of view from us, we sat and discussed the tactics for our approach. We were still at a great enough distance that there easily could have been significant defenses concealed on the site that had escaped our surveillance. Our plan was to exercise maximum caution and lower our guard only as it became appropriate.

Yet again, having the primes with us to optimize an approach and fly our ship into a potentially hazardous zone was comforting. Boggs took control of the ship while Kayella drilled through our operational instructions one final time.

It was a quick flight to the polar region on the opposite side of the planet from the outpost, where we would enter the thin atmosphere as inconspicuously as possible. At every key benchmark on our approach, Kayella noted that there was no indication we’d been sighted. We encountered no defensive measures.

Boggs Prime set the ship down near a large boulder beside a cliff wall that left our ship obscured.

The two primes and the Boggs clone took point while we four acolytes filed in behind them, doing our best to keep up as we approached quickly and quietly in the darkness.

Kayella verbalized instructions through our earpieces without ever talking, updating us on key points on our perimeter—negative, negative, negative—on passive surveillance, on defensive countermeasures, on sonic indicators within the cave. Nothing.

We walked right up to the door uncontested.

“What now?” Nayeni whispered.

We all looked at each other in the darkness trying to decide. Again, it fell to me.

I shrugged and decided to simply knock on the door.

“That was not the most tactically sound decision,” Boggs Prime stated in our earpieces.

Again, I shrugged. We had no idea what was behind that door, and the alternative was to breach it and burst in like a team of commandos. Surely, we could start with a conversation first.

I fully expected that some sort of external security system would begin by asking us who we were and why we were at that door. Suddenly, though, the door slid open, and the glare of airlock lights illuminated our group. The Luna was standing there looking over our party.

“Doril has instructed me to ask you whether you would like to be friends,” she stated. “I have informed him it is unlikely you are friends.”

Everyone looked equally puzzled and turned to me to respond.

“I think we would like to be friends,” I said.

“I do not believe you are sincere,” the Luna said with an unusually natural cadence for a multi-use model. “But Doril told me to let you in if you are friends. So, please, friends, do come in.”

The Boggs clone, Nayeni, and Deni waited outside the airlock on a cue from Kayella, both for tactical purposes and because of the size of the airlock.

I, Verona, and the two primes stepped inside. The Luna again seemed to be observing each of us. “You are clones?” she asked Kayella and Boggs.

“We are prime AIs,” Boggs answered. “The AI outside the outer door is my clone.”

“Prestigious company,” she said as the inner door opened. “Welcome.”

I was very much expecting some type of complex—an inner hallway, an elevator door leading down to a bunker of some sort. But no. The main vestibule inside opened to a relatively small set of rooms. To the left, there were rooms that seemed to be work areas, a lab of some kind, and all of these rooms were dark. To our right, there was a modest apartment, warmly lit, well lived in: one might even have described it as cozy.

Seated in a large chair in a sitting room to our right was Doril. As we entered, he appeared to be struggling to stand. The Luna stepped quickly to his side.

“Let me help you, Doril,” she said, almost in the tone of a spouse.

He groaned as he stood and appeared unsteady on his feet. The Luna lingered by his side to be sure he was upright and balanced.

She turned to us again as we approached and declared. “I’ll get your friends.”

Kayella gave the others the all-clear to join us inside.

Doril smiled at us. He wasn’t elderly, more early middle-aged, slightly obese, balding, slouched, and had a pretty strong odor about him.

“Luna said you’d like to be friends,” Doral stated, breathing quite heavily.

Before anyone answered, Verona stepped forward. I was still slightly puzzled by the scene, and the primes also seemed to be assessing. Verona, though, read the situation before any of us.

“We would,” she replied in a tone that seemed more appropriate for a child. “Luna told us that your name is Doril. I’m Verona.”

“You’re very pretty,” Doril replied, looking down at his feet bashfully. “Luna’s pretty too.”

“Do you live here all by yourself?” Verona asked him.

He looked confused. “We do. But we’re not alone. It’s me and Luna. We like it here.”

“Is Luna your friend too?” Verona asked him.

“Luna’s my girlfriend, silly,” Doril laughed. “We’re going to get married someday.”

Verona laughed along with him playfully and very subtly gestured with her head to the two primes. I didn’t quite follow her meaning.

“This man appears to be an idiot,” Boggs vocalized over our earpieces.

I looked over at him.

“In the medical sense, he means,” Kayella added. “This man is clearly cognitively limited.”

“What are your names?” Doril asked us, before coughing a few times.

“I am Cinta,” I replied, then gesturing to the primes, “and this is Kayella and Boggs.”

“Oh, I like those names. Boggs. That’s a good name.” Doril’s voice trailed off in a wheeze.

“Thank you,” the prime AI stated. “You have a good name too.”

“Do you have a workshop here, Doril?” Verona asked him. “We would love to see it.”

“Really? You want to see it? Luna helps me with the work. We make androids. Pretty androids. A lot of them look just like Luna.”

“They must be very pretty then,” Verona said.

Doril began shuffling over toward the other side of the apartment. We followed, and as the group approached, the lights on that side of the apartment came up. We’d barely entered when Luna arrived with Nayeni and Deni, who’d left the Boggs clone outside, partly for cover and partly not to confuse or crowd the scene any more than necessary.

“I’m not certain these people are our friends, Doril,” the Luna stated. “You shouldn’t be showing them our equipment.”

“Sure they are,” he said. “This is Verona and Boggs and these other two. They’re our new friends. So many new friends.” He smiled looking over at Deni and Nayeni.

“Can you show us how you make such beautiful androids?” Verona asked him.

“Luna does a lot of the hard parts,” he began, “but I’ll try.”

It was difficult to tell how much Doril understood of the things he knew. I don’t think he had any conception of the illicit nature of the android skin they were using. The models came to them with the dermis pre-stripped, so to him, it appeared he was completing the job. And he did this quite enthusiastically, making selections that would result in a “pretty” android to be someone’s friend.

The Luna did seem to understand that the work they were doing here was very much illicit, if not explicitly illegal. She also performed all the complex functions, mostly verbalizing the decisions as simple choices—such as, whether Doril thought this one should have short or long hair, fair or dark skin, what color makeup, and so on.

Doril Tennant, a very real man, was licensed to produce and customize multi-use androids under an after-market permit registered to Thomas Harold George, the most absurdly fictitious pseudonym for an android technician one could conceive—the names of three of the commonest male models strung together. It was clear whoever had set up this workshop was taking advantage not just of Doril himself but also the way the after-market customization process was licensed by the manufacturers. Encoding the android’s personality required a human technician to complete and activate the software patches, signed by retinal scan. The skin, surely, was beyond him, a process designed by this lab’s mastermind, executed for Doril by the Luna, and approved in the coding by one Thomas Harold George, certified android technician.

Nayeni interrupted me as Doril was showing everyone the next Alba they were building in VR on the floatscreen. Nayeni had made a troubling observation. He pulled up the readings from his wristband and flashed it to my eyewear. A radiation alert. We stepped away from the workshop tour to examine.

The levels weren’t overly dangerous on our timescale, but they were elevated enough to be extremely dangerous with constant exposure. Nayeni pulled open a panel behind a door in a back hallway. Most of the walls appeared to have been printed rather than joined, and we could see from the opening that the apartment had been put together very haphazardly, especially the environmental elements and the power supply. The generator itself appeared to be a fusion engine pulled from a small starcraft-style vessel, only the radiation shielding that was built into the structure of such crafts hadn’t been moved with the power source. Nayeni zoomed in on several of the joints where the fittings were weak.

“It’s a bad engine,” he declared, shaking his head. “Poor fellow.”

“The residual radiation on the Lunas,” I remembered, shaking my head. “Mystery solved.”

To the extent that we acolytes still had the capacity for deep emotions, among the strongest was anger. And, as irrational as it may have been, in that moment, I wanted to tear that Luna apart piece by piece, even as I understood its programming had been hijacked by the true perpetrator, whoever that was.

Doril was very happy to show off his workshop and the pictures of each of the pretty androids he’d made for other people. He told us how lucky he was to have a girlfriend like Luna. “Those other people can’t have the real thing like me,” he declared, “but they can have the next best thing.”

Verona brought him to the kitchen area and asked Doril if he could help her prepare a snack for everyone. Kayella and Boggs, meanwhile, remained with us in the workshop while we shut down the Luna, pulled its data, and rewrote the obvious programming breaches.

“Can we patch the generator?” I asked Nayeni and Deni.

“Why would we do such a thing as that?” Kayella asked. “This man needs help, and this outpost needs to be shuttered.”

I persisted in my inquiry with a look.

“We could definitely shield it, Cinta, but I’m not sure it will make any difference. The radiation has already cooked him.”

“No,” I agreed. “But I don’t see the benefit in heaping another cruelty on top of the many piled on this poor soul by ripping him out from his place of comfort.”

“You propose leaving him here, Cinta?” Boggs asked.

“I do. With your clone and with the Luna. Give him a stack of old androids to refit with conventional skins. If he has any family somewhere in the Battery, there’s next to no chance we’d find them in time. Let his final weeks be happy ones.”

Verona returned to the lab with Doril and two plates of crackers and fruit. He was smiling, obviously thrilled to have our company, completely unaware that his Luna’s operating protocols had been patched.

Acolyte Verona set down the food, quietly excused herself, and stepped back outside through the airlock.

“The work that you have done here, Doril, has made a lot of people happy,” I told him. “I am very grateful for the tour of your workshop and for your friendship.”

“Thank you, Silca,” he replied.

“His name is Cinta,” the Luna corrected him.

“Yes, of course. Cinta.”

I smiled and excused myself as well.

I found young Verona outside Doril’s apartment, her helmet beside her, with her nanosheet activated, staring up at the planet’s second tiny moon, an oblong asteroid that had been sucked into a tight orbit. It was close enough you could see the light coming off that bright white rock crawling across the sky ever so slightly—a true lunar satellite. I put up my nanosheet and took off my helmet as well, sitting beside her on one of the rocks along the approach to Doril’s cave.

“How old are you, Cinta?” she asked me.

“Nearly seven and a half,” I answered.

“Every few decades or so, I’m reminded that I’m still made from human stuff,” Verona said. “Those times that some pang of emotion still touches something that used to be me. This one. Today. This hurts the heart.”

“That it does,” I agreed.

“And you still?”

“Even still, old as I am,” I told her. “Though it’s rarer than it used to be.”

“I agree with you, Cinta. We should leave him here. Let the poor man be.”

“Doril’s World,” I declared.

“What?” she asked me.

“That’s what I’d like to name it, this planet. I’m going to put it in the registry. Perhaps someday we can find some family somewhere, let them know what became of him.”

“Kayella is right,” young Verona stated. “I know I haven’t been out here nearly as long as any of you, but something dark is coming. These ripples in the social fabric. These are no longer aberrations. It is only a matter of time.”

We uncovered no useful data on the premises regarding a mastermind. The Luna had been cleverly programmed. If there had been any data in her core that could have led back to an architect of the scheme, she’d been well-programmed to delete it all at the first sign of outside interference.

The precursors for the skin were found therein, as well as pictures that Doril had of each of the thirty-eight multi-use models that had been altered on that little world.

Per my directive, the Boggs clone remained on site with Doril and the Luna until Doril Tennant passed away five weeks following our discovery of the outpost. The Boggs remained to deactivate the Luna and destroy its dermal layer, which was the last of the illicit skin that had been manufactured on site.

For nearly three years, we closely monitored the dead-drop in the asteroid field with passive surveillance, as well as the outpost on Doril’s world. Neither was subsequently visited by anyone. No trail of any mastermind was detected, and no further evidence of the illicit derma-tech was observed in the region.

Our sect dispatched a team of nearly twenty operatives to deal with the Luna and Alba models already on Kosk. Trustworthy human agents within the Etteran Guild were employed to help us contain the technology. They, for their part, found it an excellent excuse to more closely examine the social issues in their resort community. Plenty of imperious moralizing could be taken in by any who delighted in observing such. I’m sure Guild functionaries were quite proud of the patches they’d set over the tiny fissures in their society’s moral fabric.

Skin.

For nearly eight thousand years I’ve held to our reasoning for categorizing certain branches of technology as forbidden. And in most cases, I still believed. In the case of this perfect android skin, a nefarious actor could, as the Boggs clone suggested, impersonate; steal an identity; deceive unsuspecting humans; manipulate individuals, communities, worlds—even confederations. It would be only slightly more complicated to assassinate an official at any level of any government and replace them with a passing AI imposter than it was to leave that Luna with Doril in the belief that she was his actual girlfriend. All that is to say nothing of the temptations humans of all sexual persuasions would face if they could simply buy a beautiful, compliant companion to salve their loneliness in times of isolation. Far too many people—and social experiments have borne this out over-and-over—will choose the deception of pleasurable companionship over the challenge of a genuine human relationship. Human flourishing begins with real human connections. Complex civilizations are difficult enough to keep from flying apart at the seams without enabling discontent and disconnectedness. We know this. There is no mystery in it.

Still.

Doril was happy there with that Luna.

I also wonder who was genuinely being harmed when those androids on Kosk, while passing for humans, for a brief time, eased the loneliness of some people desperate enough to feel the need to buy some small piece of comfort.

How did this technology get classified as a threat to the species by our sect? Who’s to say what choices people shouldn’t be free to make? Have we gotten this one gravely wrong?

I question the balance sometimes. Even after millennia, I question.

I too can feel the cold of darkness approaching. It haunts my mind through the night hours. I so rarely sleep anymore. All these centuries passed, yet I still understand so little. The thought of what’s coming sends chills through my skin.