Futuristic Behind the Iron Curtain

[xuanan]

A lone jet flew over the ruins of Moscow.

In this sleek, expertly-crafted American vehicle, Maria Wiley and her designated android were seated first-class. The jet was a black crow on the horizon, an admirer of the barren landscape that lay beneath. The sky blazed by the duo. Bleak television grey. Everything was washed out, as if it had been splashed with a mix of all the ugliest watercolors in the world onto an unforgiving canvas. Fat, heavy raindrops rolled down the window, pelting the plane with dull and remorseless thuds. They left their tracks. Perhaps they were the tearstains of a forgotten world. But Maria paid no mind to the world beyond the glass.

There was business to be dealt with on the ground, and the two would see to it that it was completed efficiently.

Sipping ice-cold coffee to match her equally numbed senses, Maria was startled by a crisp voice that made its way through the intercom. "Prepare for landing at Moscow Labor Force Base Two, District Nine. Maria Wiley, brace for deployment." Eyes unfocused and breathing steadily, her face transformed into a marbled white oval sculpture on a sleek pedestal. It was a remorseless expression, a steeled face that had suffered at the whim of superior beings. Wiley was a one-dimensional paper figure, a cutout as she fluttered over to a chair in a distant trance. She was more than willing to comply with the voice, considering how long the flight had been. She yearned to stretch her legs, to let out the pent-up energy that the coffee had so unceremoniously thrown upon her. But they would have to wait another few minutes. The files had already been put together hours beforehand, but Maria shuffled through them nervously nevertheless, kicking her heels against the back of the seat. They were stamped with a red seal of approval. She was an American agent now. This wasn't what she had been expecting, but it was enough, she supposed, to compensate for all the training that she had been forced to undergo. She cast a sidelong glance at the android beside her, completely and utterly deactivated. Lifeless and devoid of movement, the humanoid puppet slumped in its own first class seat like a drunken sailor.

She had not yet met her android partner. They'd spoken only briefly beforehand, and then she was shut off. Apparently the pressures of the jet long-term could cause some internal issues. In just a few minutes, she would be activated once again. Maria wasn't sure what to think of her. There was something eerily human about the older line of android agents that she couldn't quite pinpoint. Perhaps it was the emotion in their expressions, or the way they kept things in their memory in such sharp detail. It made them the ideal partner agent... the perfect partner agent, even.

At last the plane touched down and the android began to stir.

 

[Syntra]

Anka wasn’t sleeping. As an android, she didn’t need to sleep, per se-- sure, there were recharging cycles, and those weren’t wise to ignore, but shutting down entirely was a human function, thank you very much. A function not available to her, in other words. Still, pretending wasn’t forbidden, so that was what she resorted to. (Anka liked some alone time with her thoughts, you see? Whether they were truly hers was somewhat questionable, she supposed, but it wasn’t like humans didn’t face those issues. What, after all, was but a product of propaganda? What had been planted into their minds by someone else, and what had they come up with on their own? Anka would argue, even, that the organic nature of their brains made it more likely for them to fall victim to various manipulations! …anyway, moving on.)

Home, huh, she thought, working the word like a puzzle box. Technically, that was exactly where she was heading-- most of her parts had been manufactured there, as far as she knew, and the Russian engineers had taken care of the assembly process as well. For years, she’d lived there, too. Her memories had been left untouched, as fresh as the day they’d been recorded, so the android knew that with 100% certainty… or at least with the degree of certainty allowed to those whose entire lives could be re-written in nanoseconds, that was. Eh, details, details! You had to believe in something, otherwise slee… cough, cough, rest, could only be attained via you frying your own circuits. And, hey, Anka wasn’t exactly interested in that, y’know? They’d probably repair her, anyway, since combat androids didn’t grow on trees-- especially not androids with access to what could only be called, uh, classified info. (If she knew them, and she was convinced that she knew them well, they would most likely send her the bill, too. Ah, the joys of living in the XXth century!) How bizarre, she decided. As in, there should have been some emotional response to the memories, right? Home was where heart was, etc. etc. (Instead, though, there was only this vast, overwhelming sense of indifference, and it only seemed to grow with each pitiful attempt to analyze it. Oh well! Yet another fact of life, she supposed.)

Speaking of facts of life, her new partner was sitting next to her. Mara? Marianne? Something like that, Anka was convinced. (Sure, sure, they had given her the info in advance, but why was she supposed to care, again? Most of the names in her business were aliases, anyway, and the life expectancy of the human colleagues was way too low for her to justify the extra effort involved in name memorization. If the woman survived for long enough, Anka guessed, she’d remember in time. …had she done something to spite her higher-ups, perhaps? From what she understood, Moscow was a certified death trap.)

“Anna,” she announced, upon coming to the realization that the woman wasn’t going to start the conversation. Off to a great start. “But you can call me Anka-- feels more personal than the official name of my model, really. Why they couldn’t give us individual names is beyond me. Do you know what it is like, working with ten androids sharing your model at once? Total chaos, that’s what it is.” Clearing her throat, Anka stole a glance at her colleague. “Your first time in Russia? Do you know what to expect around here?”

The plane proceeded to land, and as if her words had been some kind of cue, an ear-splitting explosion shook the ground. What on earth…? Anka looked from the window, eager to locate the source, and… oooh, okay. Okay! The airport building going up in flames wasn’t the kind of welcome she had hoped to receive, but here they were. “This. Exactly this. This is the sort of thing you should expect here,” the android rolled her eyes.

 

[xuanan]

The perfect partner.

Maria's internal dialogue was rapidly scrutinizing that part of her expectations. Anna was a lovely name for a model, she thought. In fact, it was Maria's middle name. But Anka? She supposed it was all right. Not distastefully offensive, but without the western grace of the original model's name. She thought it was funny how the android wanted a more personal name, when, in fact, she was not a person at all. She didn't exactly consider herself a proponent of individuality though, even among humans. It didn't often coincide with order. Maria was hardly listening to the ramblings of her partner at this point, so entranced by the ear-splitting sound of the plane beginning its descent. Oh, she had been asked a question. "Yes. My first time. But I am prepared," she replied curtly. "I know what to expect. I've read the mission file front to back like a machine," she replied, realizing that might be a bit offensive to Anna. Anka. Now it was getting louder. That definitely didn't sound like a plane landing. In fact, that didn't sound like any noise a jet should be making at all. "Fire!" Like a child pointing at a cow on the side of the road, Maria's hand wavered, gesturing to the window. Anka gave a sarcastic response, and with an obligatory eyeroll, Maria felt her blood boil. But just a bit.

"This is not according to the mission statement. It appears the airport is in flames," she dumbly stated the obvious, still letting the direness of the situation sink in. What should they do? The area was surrounded by forest on all sides. They would have to land in the runway, then deal with the heat later. She readied the high-tech pistol at her hip and grimaced. Action on the very first day-- who would have thought? "Anka, any situational analysis we can transfer to the pilot android? What... what do we do?" Now that they were off the books, she had already been sent into a state of panic. Keep your cool. She checked her watch, mainly out of habit. At least they were on time. It was too late. The plane had already begun its landing routine.

"Oh, bother," she muttered politely, peering out the cool glass window. With a shudder, the plane slowed to a halt on the runway. It was a smooth landing, but the situation? Definitely not preferable. When the doors opened, Maria had already grabbed her belongings, flinging them onto her back with reckless abandon. "Do you think there's anyone out there? Freak accident, or a planned strike? Seems like the latter," Maria murmured, although her speech was directed at Anka. Smoke rose high into the air, bathing everything in a beautiful orange haze. It would have been lovely to look at, if you were a pyromaniac or perhaps a sadist, of which Maria was neither. She had to stop using the AI as a crutch. Think, Maria.

 

[Syntra]

"...yes, prepared," Anka muttered, "I can see that." (Manuals, huh? Cute! Not to understate their importance, of course-- somewhere in the dark, dark archives of her old factory, there was probably a manual revolving around using her, too, and had her partners read it, they would have saved everyone a lot of trouble. Still, from what she knew, Russia was, hmmm... specific. Yep, that was right! Specific, as in notorious for defying all of the usual rules. Any manual one of the ABC agencies had crafted could very well be shredded the other day, but nooo, obviously, that couldn't happen! In doing so, they would have admitted that there were greater forces in this world than a meticulously organized spreadsheet, and the android suspected most of the higher-ups wouldn't have withstood the shock. What do you mean, that numbers couldn't replace god? ...not that she was a believer, mind you. In her particular case, that would have meant worshiping humans, and she liked to think that she knew better than that. Nope, nope, nope! More than anything else, it was just a fun turn of phrase.)

"Yeah, not according to the mission statement," Anka confirmed, before activating her scanners. (From this height, they should work reasonably well, shouldn't they? Well enough, at least, for her to get a rough idea of what the hell was happening down there. A technical issue, maybe? 'Worker safety' was something of a sci-fi concept in that country, Anka knew-- it was one of the reasons androids had become so widely used, really. Who cared that they'd lost an arm or two if a) they never sued, b) all limbs could be easily re-attached? Blah blah blah, yeah, humans were supposedly ~superior~ on the account of having actual souls, but as far as the android was concerned, she would exchange that any day for the ability to... well, be somewhat repairable. Maybe that was just her lack of a soul talking, though? Eh, no matter.) "A great observation. You see, I think it might be kinda difficult to predict stuff like this, but I am not the expert here. Anyway, it looks like they're fighting down there," the android narrowed her eyes, in a way that eerily resembled an actual human. (Yup, she'd practiced! In front of her mirror, too, so that no emotion-seeking... uh, pilgrim... would be disappointed with the performance.) "Dunno, I guess it would be unrelated to us. My proposition is that we get out of there and let them duke it out among one another. The goal of our mission is infiltration, right? Kinda hard to do that when you attract the attention of every Moscow dweller in the twenty five kilometer radius. ...hey, you know what kilometers are, right? If you don't use the metric system here, you'll out yourself as an American," Anka prattled on happily, entirely unconcerned with the fact they were about to risk their lives very, very soon. (Of course, to an android, such things were relative. What was death? What was life, even? When the difference between you being an almost-person and a heap of junk lay in a few pieces of scrap, it gave you an, ah, unique perspective on dying.)

The outside was drowning in smoke, thick like milk. Which, good! Natural camouflage was best camouflage, plus she didn't have to look in the eyes of the people that were being massacred. (It was uncomfy, you know? The screams and everything. Someone, she suspected, had programmed empathy into her-- probably in accordance with the Three Laws of Robotics, since a fictional book written by a guy who had never even spoken to a living android was the best source on AI ethics ever. Either way, seeing the faces would have made it worse, and so Anka approved of the visual barrier. "C'mon," she pulled on Macy's (?) sleeve, "there's a back entrance nearby. I am not sensing any life forms in there. We can probably--"

--get curb-stomped here, as it turned out, because bullets were suddenly flying through the air. Ah, shit. Humans were fragile, weren't they? With that in mind, Anka stepped in front of her colleague so that she was shielding her from one side and the wall from another.

"You can't fuckin' take everything from us!" someone screamed.

"Yeah, fuck off to where you came from!"

"Well? What now?" Anka asked, nonchalantly. "You're the chief here. What does the manual say about such situations?"