“Still have your mind on that bug we found in his office?” Frog caught the pillow, set it to the side, and tapped idly at the tablet.

“Yes,” she said. “By now, the people who left it are probably aware that it’s been compromised. None of the e-mails from the dean suggest that the FBI agents have returned. It’s too late to contact him anyway.”

Elaine felt weary from the long day and a yawn crept up on her. She stretched her aching muscles and gently shook an empty can of Mountain Dew that rested next to her keyboard. She’d spent the last two hours debugging a spellcode application for the Enoch that would enable her to detect the presence of improbability engine magical programming in other people. The quick compile within the virtual Enoch ran fine the last three times and it was ready for a dry run. However, a fully linked, optimized compile that would fit on the Enoch would take several hours.

She decided to make the best of it and catch some sleep.

“Mind if I played some WoW?” Frog asked, gesturing to the looming hulk of Elaine’s gaming rig sitting on the desk next to her programming workstations. “The guild has been wondering where I’ve been for the past few days.”

“Sure,” Elaine said sleepily. She pulled her spectacles and goggles off—her glasses fit snugly within the goggles and a plastic cover clipped over to hold them fast. She slid one arm under her Han Solo pillow and clutched the other, with her goggles in grasp, against her chest. “You don’t really need to ask.”

“Just checking,” her friend said. “I’ll catch some Z’s of my own in a bit on the other bed. See you in the morning.”

As she started the launcher for World of Warcraft, Frog noticed a familiar handle appear in one of Elaine’s chatrooms in the background. The name read “Tagger444” and Frog recollected her friend’s mention that her stalker, Tango, had a penchant for handles that started with the letter ‘T’. Elaine’s chat software flagged the nickname as well based on the IP address it came from as a possible Tango sockpuppet as higher than fifty percent probability. The person behind Tagger444’s keyboard decided to break lurker mode and entered into the discussion of cheating, databases, and statistics.

Tagger444 submitted his own ideas to the conversation but did so amidst asking questions about how people came to the subject. She watched him (or her) skillfully manipulate the conversation towards asking questions about Elaine’s handle, Carmina, without giving much information about himself. It seemed pretty bold. He’d wandered directly into the lion’s den, with one of Elaine’s chatbots watching, and started casting his net.

Frog made sure the bot had started recording the conversation before she clicked Warcraft into full screen and plugged her headphones in.

* * *

Special Agent Ellis Warren rubbed at the ache that had settled directly above his left eyebrow as he adjusted the focus on his binoculars for the umpteenth time since he’d taken up position in the car to watch the Dean of Engineering in his office. ASU campus didn’t make it easy to see into offices near the middle, like the Engineering complexes, but a few surveillance points existed that matched little-known parking lots. At this time of night, so few students left their cars behind that it made it trivial for him to slide into one of those vacancies and use it as a cramped base of operation.

The passenger-side door of his Bureau assigned Prius opened and the smell of a mint latte blew in with the dry desert air as his partner slid into the seat next to him. He winced as the cheap plastic upholstery scraped against her sidearm holster—she quickly adjusted herself and let her suit coat catch up to buffer between it and the seat. Special Agent Kathy Toller went out for coffee and doughnuts over an hour before on a run that shouldn’t have taken her more than twenty minutes.

She patted her coat to check the jingle of her keys as she pulled the door closed and then turned in the seat towards him. The weirdly contoured seats came too small for him, he mused, but they fit her tight fame extremely well. In fact, she was so compact that she could rotate in the seat legs and torso. If Ellis Warren attempted the same maneuver he would get his feet tangled together. It was he curse, he surmised, a little bit on the tall side, with a lot of legs and very little torso.

He lowered the binoculars to give her a piece of his mind but the headache above his eyebrow bit him sharply and settled for a grimace.

“Sorry that too so long,” she said as she withdrew one of the Starbucks cups from a Styrofoam holder and handed it to him. “I brought you a peace offering.”

“I hope you brought some Tylenol with that,” he said. “I might be the first agent to fall in the line of duty from sheer boredom.”

“Gah!” Frog yelped as she jumped from a particularly bright flash of static electricity.

“Sorry,” Hadaly said. “I’ve got the discharge magnitude as low as it will go for the projectors to still function properly. You’re covered in the stuff, you know.”

“It’s just electrostatic residuals taking residence in your body’s cells,” Elaine said. “I warned you not to stand so close to the degaussing coil. The astral energy of the spellcode that Vargas, Pilgrim, and Wright set in their brains had a diffusion radius along the field lines from the solenoid. You caught some of the backwash.”

Frog scrunched up her lips into a pout and blew a puff of air at an errant lock of green hair. “But I love the way it feels. We don’t often get to use that sort of heavy equipment.”

“And now for your front,” Hadaly said with a grin too big for her face—an effect only possible due to the projected nature of the ionizing hologram.

“Oh, Zane would kill to see this,” Frog said as she turned around to face Hadaly and raised her arms over her head. The AI’s luminous grin increased intensity by an erg as she brought her hands up and ran them along Frog’s shoulders. Frog’s face hardened in mock sternness. “One word about this and I’ll kick your virtual ass into the Singularity.”

“You could just take a shower, you know,” Elaine said, gesturing to the door. “Running water will disperse the ionizing phenomena. At this time of night, the communal bathroom will be entirely empty.”

“And pass up a chance to tease your brother about a little girl-on-android action?” Frog said. “You’re recording this, aren’t you?”

“Everything I experience is ‘recorded,’” Hadaly said.

“Maybe we can make a music video out of it.”

“Way ahead of you.”

“I get director’s cut privileges!”

“Can I get you two to focus for just a moment?” Elaine asked. She’d connected the Enoch to her workstation and let the device synchronize all the data it collected from her experimental series in the Law Library with what she’d streamed during the hours she’d spent with the otherARGteam members. Upon returning to her dorm room, she’d also logged into all of her usual hunts: favorite IM chat rooms, dark-side-of-the-web forums, and IRC networks.

The night seemed a little bit sluggish for talk; but she’d already managed to set a few of her confidants arguing over the best ways to use mid-stream SQL hijacking on a database to alter grades without making it obvious cheating had happened. The spellcode used by the Brad’s friends and he had been magical in process, but the underlying effect could still be modeled with computer code. Elaine relied on this fact to translate how the spell functioned into terms her hacker friends could parse.

“Yow!” Frog exclaimed. “…tell me you didn’t do that on purpose.”

“I didn’t do that on purpose,” the AI said. “Also, I’m done. You may now safely interact with equipment in the room without bricking it or toasting yourself.”

“Thank you, Hadaly,” Elaine said. “Frog, you’ve got free range of the room again now that I’m sure you’re not going to fry anything with random lingering ESD. Although cumbersome, this does give me some ideas on how we can track who in the dean’s cheater list could be using a similar effect to what Wright’s friends had encountered.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Hadaly said.

The silvery-blue outline of her projected self dissolved as the air-ionization effect dissapated when she killed the projectors in the room. Elaine watched her vanish with a certain amount of speculation. The AI had once again gone with a long-haired, almost-animé faced female avatar wearing a long lab coat. She’d gone through a long series of visible characters recently that deviated from her usual look (which seemed to template on a taller version of Elaine) but she’d settled back into her old standby: a projected model that looked like a less uncanny version of her android chassis.

She scrolled through her e-mail for the day.

The smart agent that guarded her inbox had chewed through all of the spam that flowed through, caught and parsed important-seeming e-mails and tagged them appropriately, and siphoned confidential mail into its own secure encrypted storage for her later perusal. Outstanding from today’s civilian messages lay one from the Dean of Engineering’s personal Gmail address asking her for an update on her progress. He’d sent the message to one of her dead-drop addresses so it would be unlikely anyone would intercept it, but he still gave away a lot in the text.

“I really need to talk to the dean about being more sensitive about his private e-mails,” she said to Frog. “He sent me three e-mails today through his personal address but the timestamps suggest that he did it at work.”

Frog lay on her bed, twirling a pillow with her hands and feet, one of the many tablet computers from the room on her stomach.

“You think we should leave him one of your burner crypto-phones that you passed out to Zane’s team?” Frog asked. “It might make sense for your future clients to have a safe way to contact you.”

Hadaly slid between the incoming missiles like a burning butterfly—the sentry droids were fast, but she was so much faster. She felt giddy with alacrity. The first one went down in a shower of sparks when she tore through the rusting support struts beneath it. Predictors displayed a wild field of fire that intersected with numerous points in the room as the sentry fell to its death. Alive with motion, she spun out of the way like a ballerina on a razorblade ballroom floor, throwing herself through a thickly denied eigenspace—the fields of fire changed as sentries moved to take the advantage she’d given them.

Doing so, two of them walked right into wild projectile fire vomited from their dying sibling. They both went down in an arterial spray of orange coolant and frangible bits of endoskeleton.

The sentries, unlike the PR droid, looked almost like C3P0 in their construction. Eyeless, uncanny brass men with unmoving features; their guns appeared to be repeating rifles, styled after a Revolutionary musket aesthetic. Unlike the PR droid, they had armored exoskeletons—of course, they had been armed with armor piercing bullets.

The three remaining sentries closed from all directions, maintaining LOS in a collapsing spiral capture pattern. Simple. Efficient. Stupid. The hallmarks of the sentries.

Hadaly cackled aloud as she slid through a window in their closure, using the support columns of the warehouse for cover, and smote another sentry with a section of steel pipe.

With the loss of the previous sentry, the remaining two switched engagement protocol and jettisoned their guns. The jingling rain of gadolinium shells subsided, punctuated by the twin crashes of heavy sentry guns hitting the floor. The sentries’ arms scissored open revealing monofilament reciprocating saws set like Japanese fans. The nearest sentry twirled like a top, hewing through the support between it and Hadaly like an iron through warm solder; it’s companion, not content with its saws, raised a second, heavy-ammo gun, and fired a chain round angled to herd her into the lethal range of its cohort.

She slid beneath the wake of the chain round like a limbo dancer, avoiding the trail of corrosive microfilament wires in its wake; but not before the nearer sentry managed to score a hit across her arm with one of its saws. Alarms went off. An electric discharge followed the instant severing of several myocables, the joint lost motility as a dynamo went critical and ejected itself.

The dynamo arced like a flare away from her as she lost balance after stepping into a bit of powdered concrete and tumbled away. The second sentry, tracking for its next shot, mistook the damaged dynamo’s power output for Hadaly’s primary vector and fired again.

—and punched a chain round directly through its companion’s central mass.

The other robot stopped in place as if confused. It dithered a moment, pondering the tiny, smoldering hole in its exosekeleton, then spasmed as billions of tiny filaments of depleted uranium wrapped inside carbon nanotubes perforated its internal structure. The sentry’s armor crumbled into hot ash and its mechanical internal organs gave way to failure, vomiting out in a gruesome robotic disembowelment.

“Mano-e-macro,” Hadaly said to the final droid. “You want a piece of this? Come and get it.”

Not having the capacity for words—sentries never were programmed to be witty—the sentry responded with gunfire.

She turned on her heel and threw herself into a charge. The remaining sentry had cover, but she had speed and determination. She also only needed one arm to destroy it—but it also only needed one hit to her center mass with a chain round and she’d be finished. She dodged and weaved as it made its last stand, firing its weapon at maximum tolerance; she could hear the internal mechanism shearing and failing from stress. She predicted it had three shots left before it jammed, but by that time her simulations calculated she’d be upon it.

An object smashed through one of the high windows, tilting end over end as it fell. The sentry ignored it, exhausting its ammunition on Hadaly as she closed on its cover.

Then the object exploded.

Blue St. Elmo’s fire washed across every surface as the EMP cascaded over Hadaly and the sentry. Even with her most vital components shielded and safe under Faraday Cages, she felt it hit her—breathing through her like a great numbing wave. Her limbs went rigid, then suddenly slack. Sightless—and suddenly consumed by a strangely sterile sense of terror—she crashed to the floor. She could only hope the same happened to the sentry.

Nanoseconds later her shock-recovery systems dumped into auxiliary mode and her vision returned. She sprang to her feet, the useless limb dangled like a weighty pendulum, threatening her stability.

The sentry was down—not from the EMP grenade—but by way of the steel fixture. In her last moment of sensibility, Hadaly had managed to javelin the pipe. She won.

Shaking on faltering power, the auxiliary systems couldn’t sustain assault configuration, she staggered to the door of the warehouse and threw it open. To find Frog and Elaine.

Elaine appeared flushed and terrified. Frog simply looked smug and nodded in approval. Elaine held a disposable cell phone; she paused amidst franticly programming—anotherEMPgrenade.

Without a word, Elaine dropped the phone.

“Sorry, boss,” Hadaly said when Elaine rushed up to embrace her damaged body. “I felt the need to take out the trash.”

“Promise me you won’t do that again.”

“I promise,” she said. “Can I go home now?”

An alarm went off on the phone.

“Fracking frelle!” she screamed as she bounced off the closed door to the roof. Instead of grabbing the doorknob, she’d lowered the Enoch-phone to look at the screen. “Andromeda Sienna! Do not engage! Don’t touch them! They’re infected! I repeat: Andromeda Sienna. Do not engage!”

No response.

She checked the phone again. The connection had been severed.

The door to the roof resisted momentarily but gave way upon judicious application of shoulder to metal, spilling her onto the gravel. She stumbled before catching herself, scanned the area, found Frog, and rushed to her side.

“I can’t contact Hadaly!” Elaine skidded to a stop next to Frog. The green-haired girl knelt against a guard rail, peering through a pair of binoculars at a building two blocks away. The dilapidated warehouse provoked a prosaic sense of urban decay with its rusted doors, papered over windows, and concrete walls. Although she wasn’t wearing them, Elaine noticed her goggles flashed brightly as she peered in its direction.

“They’ve erected some kind of force field,” Frog said, adjusting the binoculars. “From the brightness on the scope, I’d say that it’s at least a twenty coulomb field. More than enough to fry anything we’ve got and us if we tried to discharge it. Hadaly’s suppression systems can handle that, can’t they?”

“Yes,” Elaine pulled her goggles on. The heads-up display showed the tremendous flux across the surface of the building like a tortured amoeba of energies. “I ordered her to pull out if anything happened. I knew we couldn’t trust those p’tach!”

Frog’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t think she’s coming out,” she said. “I just saw an astral power spike.”

Elaine flipped the Enoch phone open again and spun up a series of programming interfaces. They spread across her vision like blossoming flowers, highlighting Enochian syntax and macros that she could use to build a countermeasure for the force field. Along the side of the heads-up display a series of cell phone icons stacked up like an ammo readout—the burner phones she’d bought for just this purpose, five of them currently clipped to her belt. She selected one and began programming it.

“We need to get her out of there now,” Elaine said. “I can probably overload the field with an EMP bomb, but the backwash could be dangerous to Hadaly, so I’ll modify the bomb to… No, maybe I can shield a phone so that it will pass through the field and direct a shaped EMP back through the… No, what if I formed a Lovecraft-Helsinki bridge between two phones across the transphase and—”

“She’ll be fine.”

Horrorstruck at Frog’s lack of concern, Elaine worked at her phone frantically. “You don’t understand… She thinks she’s invincible!” Her fingers had gone numb with adrenaline; her thoughts refused to compile anything coherent.

Frog sighed, lowered her binoculars, and gave Elaine a sidewise smirk. “Congratulations. Our little girl is officially a teenager.”

Elaine’s message hit Hadaly’s RF receiver like a ton of bricks—“Hadaly! LZ is hot! I repeat, LZ is hostile—no frien—tzzztch!”—her head snapped up and a slow, wicked smile played onto her lips. An algorithm she’d developed from a comparative study of movie villains pondering prey. The android on the other side of the table lifted its head an increment.

“Is there a problem?” it asked in its mechanically sibilant voice.

“I don’t have to be nice to you anymore.”

Assault Mode: ACTIVATED.

The apertures of her eyes widened to their maximum resolution and coolant flooded into her interstitial spaces along with lubricants into the joints through the dynamic fluid system akin to the human lymphatic system. Much unlike a human, however, the locks that prevented her limbs from pivoting in unnatural directions disengaged allowing her unparalleled freedom of motion. Acquisition routines came online devouring the data that she’d been processing since she entered the room. Her Astral processor spun up, breathing coolant into vapor as capacitors opened wide, igniting the dynamos in her joints.

The table flipped vertical in one smooth movement, the droid—only halfway to its feet—caught it in the chin and lost gyrosynch. It toppled backwards as Hadaly ducked behind the metal sheet, blocking LOS with the sentries in her forward arc, but it left her vulnerable to those in her back arc. The room became a map of eigenvectors, luminous spaces of varying lines and values making peril a game of numbers: fields of fire, fulcrum movement arcs, prohibited zones, areas of denial/confidence, best-fit dodge scenarios, escape routes.

Several easy opportunities opened themselves immediately, soft points in the eigenspace. High escape success, over eighty percent likelihood of egress without damage. All excellent odds—except that Hadaly wasn’t in the mood for retreat.

By the time the first bullet fired, she was already in motion; the table in her hands scythed through the droid before it hit the ground, slashing through its papery exoskin and fragile aluminum endoskeleton. The torso twirled away, severed from its legs, limbs pin-wheeling grotesquely as it arced. She winged the table, shattered and unaerodynamic as it was, at the nearest sentry covering her rear arc.

The eigenspace shifted, closing overlapping fields of fire, opening up new spaces. Probabilities and dynamics flared into life as she danced away from the incoming projectiles. The bullets already in flight meant nothing to her, their trajectories were already decided, their fates certain. It was what the sentries hadn’t tried yet that she needed to predict.

“And you can demonstrate that?”

“I demonstrate this every day when I speak the truth from the pages of this book,” Brother Jed said. “You don’t need to observe it, if you have faith in the word.”

Elaine pinched her nose. “So you’re going to buttress your disconfirmed hypothesis with the unobservable, won’t give any demonstrable evidence to support your new claim, and that alone should convince me? How insubstantial of you. It’s hard to believe you found that convincing enough to repeat.”

“You’re all only rebelling because you know that I have the truth,” he said.

Frog leaned in close to her and said, “He’s hilarious, isn’t he?”

“I think he’s some kind of idiot,” Elaine said. She’d fished two sticks of Pocky out of one of her many pockets and munched on both at the same time. If she couldn’t get any work in on her Android project, she’d figured, she’d at least enjoy a little snack while letting Frog and Hadaly have their fun. Where was Hadaly at anyway?

“Are you two girls, lesbians?” Brother Jed asked.

Elaine paused for a very long moment before replying. “We certainly are not.”

A peal of laughter erupted next to Jed and Hadaly spoke up. “Elaine doesn’t get out enough to be a lesbian.”

The android-girl stood immediately next to a boy wearing an orange knit cap with broad fox-ears sewn onto it—a long, fluffy fox tail hung between his legs—and to her other side lounged a tall girl wearing silvered goggles. Between them, they held a neon-green poster-board sign with a message, printed I black bock letters: “BUTT SEX 4 JESUS.”

That caught Elaine’s attention. Of course, Frog only guffawed the moment she saw the sign, and Brother Jed blithely ignored it, continuing on to speak about the evils of being female and homosexual and mentioning how all three girls should get themselves husbands. The Android phone safely stowed in one of the pockets of her cargo pants, Elaine moved through the crowd towards Hadaly. She was garnering too much attention already, ignoring the Daylight Protocol.

“Hadaly, I don’t think that—” she started to say when music started up behind her. She recognized the harsh harmonics and heavy vamping of  some popular post-Industrial band along with a long vocal note keening out the beginning of a word.

“Hold this for me,” Hadaly said, handing Elaine the neon-green sign as she strode boldly past.

She walked a brisk six feet into the clearing in the crowd next to Brother Jed and stopped with adroit suddenness. Her upper body pivoted slightly forward, her hair fluttering around her face, and though Elaine could not see it—she knew the android girl would be smiling.

“Strike a pose,” she said, frozen in place for a scant half-second before she launched into a full turn pirouette, raising one foot off the ground and pivoting on the ball of her foot. Her white lab coat flared out about the bottom as did her brown hair—an interesting blend of polyester fibers woven directly into the skullcap “skin” that covered the skull cavity of her chassis. The fibers glistened in the sunlight as they caught up with her and she, paused again, waited for the music to catch up with her.

The vocalist in the song began to sing in a rhythmic style reminiscent of rap—Linkin Park, Elaine noticed—and Hadaly responded by dropping to one knee and rolling onto her side. She adeptly followed the melody of the music and the vocals and threw herself into a roll, pin-wheeling her legs in a UFO power move. She let the momentum of her legs carry as she bent her back and spun down onto the rough concrete and sprang up again.

Applause crackled from the assembled and the entire crowd shifted to stare at Hadaly and totally ignore Brother Jed—he had gone on to quoting something, but Elaine couldn’t hear it for the thoughts rushing through her head.

Hadaly continued her routine with the music—and against everything she’d agreed to—flashed a huge grin at Elaine as she performed a perfectly calculated sinusoidal motion wave through her arms and torso. An easy feat with the processing power and the gimbal-mounts that articulated her shoulder, elbow, wrist, hip, knee, and ankle joints. After she completed a series of motions mimicking a bowl of very energetic non-Newtonian fluid, Hadaly put one hand on the ground and ran in a circle.

After completing the circle, she lifted herself up, twirled one leg, kicked off with the other, and flipped midair, landing again on her other hand. She continued into other unlikely contortions and configurations, throwing out feet, using hands to prop herself up, elbows set to allow her to pivot-and-spin. Each time she paused within a set, the crowd applauded and cheered; and each time Elaine’s stress and paranoia over what someone might notice about Hadaly’s strangely preternatural abilities mounted.

Until, at nearly the top of the song, a gust of wind and an astonished cry from the preacher provided a distraction.

“Hey, stop!” Brother Jed shouted suddenly. He launched past with surprising speed for his apparent age in pursuit of a black-clad figure—who, from Elaine’s point of view, seemed to be holding onto his crucifix staff. He shouted as he ran. “Stop! Theif!”

With so many eyes on Brother Jed and the thief now running past Danforth Chapel, Elaine grabbed Hadaly by her arm and drew her out of the circle of spectators. Frog quickly fell in behind them both as she quick marched the android towards the MU.

“We’re heading back to the engineering bay,” Elaine said. “We need to power down your chassis for a while.”

“Aw, do I haveta?” Hadaly asid.

“You just violated Daylight Protocol. Of course you have to, and you’re also going to go on the net and make sure nobody got a good picture of you.”

Hadaly moped for a moment, but she didn’t give any resistance as Elaine dragged her towards the dormitories, the underground engineering bay, and thus home.

“The person who just stole the guy’s staff looks awful familiar,” Frog said.

“That was rather strange,” Elaine said, “and a perfect distraction to get Hadaly out.”

“I wonder what’s going on,” Frog said.

“I’m sure we’ll find out later,” Elaine said. “We always do.”

Hadaly simply pouted, but the corners of her synthetically generated lips curled up in triumph anyway.

Elaine almost dropped her phone trying to grab Hadaly’s arm—several feet too late. “Oh fsck,” she said.

Frog looked at Elaine, her expression actually looked to be the conjunction between amusement and concern. Together they ran after the quickly fleeing android girl who now had a good thirty feet on both of them and counting. Unaccustomed to running, Elaine didn’t expect that she’d catch up very quickly, so when Frog touched her arm and nudged her to slow down she paced down from a sprint to a jog.

Elaine caught Hadaly’s arm and looked up at a tall, blonde male student whose stance made it look as if he’d been conversing with her for the entire time it took them to catch up. “You shouldn’t have run off like that,” Elaine subvocalized, knowing that the android’s audio pickups had enough gain to hear her even if nobody else could.

Frog sidled up next to her and looked up at the nearby preacher curiously.

“…his name’s Brother Jed,” the student was in the middle of saying. “He apparently visits campuses all across theU.S.and he comes around here every year or so.”

“We should go,” Elaine said aloud.

“You must be her friends,” the boy said to them. “My name’s Adam. Hadaly said the one with green hair would be hot and her friend would be a cute geek girl.”

“Spot on,” Frog said. “As usual.”

“He’s fun,” Hadaly said. “Can I keep him?”

“Absolutely not,” Elaine said.

Standing on the peach-colored stone embankment in front of the Hayden Stacks, the mall preacher, Brother Jed, concluded a tirade that involved long declarations and swift thrusts with his hands. The preacher’s attire looked back in time to when men wore dark suspenders and vests over light shirts and tan pants. His broad glasses sat on a nose browned and leathered by the sun and below heavy, bushy eyebrows graying with age.

As he shouted, would sit in a folding chair or stand suddenly in order to punctuate his words. Adding to his costume, he carried a long, smooth wooden cane-like staff from-appearance carved from a single branch with a crucifix affixed to the top—the bronzed countenance of Jesus, spikes through the hands and feet crucified. The preacher swung it about with dire emphasis and stamped it on the ground as he prowled around his chair.

“You see, girls, the boys on this campus only see you as a piece of A-S-S,” Brother Jed shouted, pacing back and forth with his staff. His voice warbled in strange inflection as he spoke and he overemphasized the spelling of the word “ass.”  Elaine looked up momentarily from her smart phone programming to track his movement as his shadow crossed her, but quickly returned to her work. “But you are more than that. You also have brains. However, you sorority girls would rather have an orgasm than a bright idea!”

“Why I can’t I have both?” Frog shouted back.

“He’s extraordinarily annoying,” Elaine said, folding her arms.

“Well, when you dress like that, one of these boys here might be willing to help you with that,” replied Brother Jed in a slightly quieter tone. “I see that you know well enough to dress like a lady, in a skirt—” He leaned down a little and cupped a hand as if to whisper something not lowering his voice at all. “—but your bosoms are showing.

“Perhaps you should speak with one of the Muslim girls here about how to dress. Their men, at least, know how to keep their women in line. Neither of them would be out here with green hair, like you, what does your father think about that?”

Frog snorted, placing her arms akimbo and smiling rakishly. “He helped me dye it the first time.”

“Ah he did…did he.” The dark eyes roving underneath bushy eyebrows found Elaine tapping away at her phone and his voice boomed out once again. “Are you trying to be a boy or a girl, young lady? Are you a student here?”

Elaine’s gaze snatched angrily up from her work on the Android—she’d managed to shut him out for most of his bellowing at Frog, after all her friend could hold her own against one such as him—but she wondered what he had against a video game shirt and cargo pants precisely.

“Undergraduate and I am the Secretary at Arms of the ASU Godless Society,” she said.

“Are you with the secular society over there?”

“No. We’re not exactly related.”

“And you belong to a group of atheists?”

“I am, but much of the group isn’t,” Elaine said. “Most of them are some form of Christian, a few Jews, a Buddhist, and several Wiccans.”

“If you’re not atheists,” Brother Jed said, rumbling out the word with a stern emphasis, “why would you call yourselves the Godless Society?”

“That’s easy, it’s because we’ve killed one.”

“Young lady, you should know that you cannot kill God,” the preacher man said, shaking his head. “Even Nietzsche only said, ‘God is dead.’ Now, there have been those who have thought that did. But they were dopefiends and under the influence of L-S-D!” He punctuated each letter of the acronym with a pointed thrust of his index finger.

“Lysergic acid diethylamide?” Frog said. “Why would I go with that when I can make far more interesting pharama in my lab?”

“H-E-double-L awaits you if you don’t give up your druggie, sinful ways,” replied Brother Jed. “Turn from your sin or you will end up in the lake of firrrrre-uh, where there will be screaming and wailing and gnashing of teeeeeeth-eh!” He mimed the actions of gnashing teeth as he did so, running his jaw side-to-side. “You seem pretty smart, young lady,” he added. “Surely you know in your head that you shouldn’t do drugs.”

Elaine shook her head. “And you can know this ‘hell’ with your brain?”

“Yes, the Lord gave you a brain so you could know this,” Jed said.

“Your hypothesis is already disconfirmed, then,” Elaine said. “If brains are the only mechanism by which we can access this ‘hell’ and must first die to do so. Brains cease to perceive when they die, meaning there’s no logical connection between any brain and ‘hell.’”

Elaine powered down the Enoch and put it into energy saving mode. The small handled device, akin to a cell phone dimmed all its lights in her hand; the Enochian symbols shimmering along its keypad lost their luminescence and went dead as matte black. She’d recently been playing with a new Android phone, which she’d loaded with all the proper code to access a lot of the spells she normally used—but she couldn’t get it to operate within three feet of the Enoch without catastrophic interference. A pair of die-cut, steel Space Invader charms jingled from the corner of the smartphone as she powered it on.

Hadaly, an actual android by manifest fact, stood nearby in front of a mirror gazing at her reflection like a bird preening itself. The mannequin chassis had been dressed in a cyan blue dress shirt with the collar flipped up over a shin-length lab coat with the buttons done up to the top. The tan cuffs of her stain-resistant suit pants poked out beneath the while of the lab coat, terminating in a pair of black sneakers that had to be re-stitched because they had been bought for a previous iteration of Hadaly’s body—one that had been half a shoe size smaller. The artificial intelligence had become nostalgic about them and one of them even still had the remnants of battle-scars she’d earned while destroying that body.

“If Hadaly’s done making herself pretty,” Frog said from the doorway. Her green hair bunched up on her shoulder as she contorted her body to peer into the room at an odd angle. “You two prepared for our outing?”

“I am ready,” Hadaly said, flipping her collar down. She turned on her heel with a motion-perfect study of a 180-degree pirouette, addressed Frog and Elaine by describing a bow about her middle, then returned once again to her full height sporting a radiant smile. “How do I look?”

“You’re a picture of mechanical health,” Frog said, entering the room. “Let’s get going before the going gets cold.”

Elaine looked up from her phone—the unintuitive UI had her confounded for a moment until she opened up the engineering interface and made a few tweaks.

“Daylight Protocol is in effect,” she said tonelessly using her gaze to indicate both Frog and Hadaly. The last upgrade she’d given to the android chassis should make her more readily able to integrate with flesh-and-blood humans. Previous incarnations of her body had visible seams and expressions that belied her silicon nature; but with a little chemical engineering, specialized surgical plastics, advanced polymers—and the unknowing aid of ASU’s theater special effects department—she now had a far less uncanny affect than previous models.

Still, the android girl couldn’t withstand anything but the most superficial scrutiny.

Hadaly’s expression went stoic blank, her shoulders squared, back ramrod straight. She saluted and nodded curtly.

“Yes, ma’am. Understood, ma’am.”

Now if only she could get her behavior under control.

Frog patted Elaine on the arm. “I wouldn’t worry about it much, honey,” she said. “Most people are more uncomfortable around you than they are with Hadaly.”

“Why is that, do you think?” Elaine asked.

“You make them feel stupid.” Frog shrugged.

“I am in the top ninety-ninth percentile of the most intelligent people,” Elaine said, “but that doesn’t make the rest of the population stupid.”

“And that’s why I love you,” Frog said. She wrapped both of the other girls up into wide, two-armed hug and squeezed them together. “My two robot girlfriends.”

“I’m not a robot,” Hadaly guffed.

 * * *

Geometry. The ASU campus described itself adequately in a grid of walkways paved with concrete and ground stone. The buildings, while ranging in architectural design, all supported a sort of block-and-brick style like cubes huddled against one another. Trees planted near buildings and in the thick planters near the center of walkways afforded oases of shade in the still-hot winterArizonasun.

“TheGPSon this device is off by twelve meters,” Elaine said as she held the Android phone up—its camera displaying outlines of the ASU classrooms as they passed by. That one, theBusinessCollege; in the distance, the Student Rec center; behind them the once-namedAgricultureBuilding, now the Discovery Hall. Together the trio marched up the center of Cady Mall, past the Memorial Union on their way past the library. “There it goes. It takes it a few minutes to update with the satellite. I can probably fix its predictive algorithm…”

Hadaly walked with a joyful spring in her step and a swing of the arms. The movements weren’t too far outside the human norm, so Elaine didn’t call her on it, and Frog didn’t seem to notice. The latter information was enough to allay any concern that Elaine might have had about the A.I.’s apparent inhumanity when walking amid so many people in broad daylight. Of course, Frog had gotten used to Hadaly’s presence and might miss telltales that other people might catch onto.

Still, not a single passerby had paused for more than a moment to look at the unlikely group, except perhaps to ogle Frog’s green hair or her amply displayed cleavage. She’d gone with a common ensemble of hers displaying a plaid schoolgirl skirt and a white button-down shirt with several of the upper buttons undone. Frog appeared pleased enough with the end effect.

“She seems to be doing pretty well,” Elaine said to her as they weaved through a tour group of teenaged high school students on tour of the campus. She’d debated taking the android through the MU proper, but decided against such tight quarters and close bodies.

“Of course she is,” Frog said, dismissing any concerns out of hand. “I’ve been telling you that she needs to be let off the leash more often. After all, how do you expect to socialize her if she spends all her time on Internet forums? Plus, how often do we get to go out without some pressing drama going on?”

“I guess we don’t,” Elaine mused. “Do you think that’s stunting her psychosocial development?”

“I can hear you,” Hadaly said. “My psychosocial development is going quite well, thank you. I can process over a million relationships and social data points a second, that’s well beyond the capabilities of you meatbags.”

That drew a few raised eyebrows and narrow glances from passersby; but in spite of reaction to Hadaly’s grim language, nobody took pause in their walking, or conversations.

Frog chuckled and shook her head.

“Perhaps we should cut this one short—.” Elaine started to say.

“Hey, a street preacher!” Hadaly said with unrestrained glee, putting both hands to her chin and wiggling her hips. “I haven’t seen one of those up close except for lots of YouTUBE. I’ll be right back.”