“How kind of you,” Marise scoffed as a tear ran down her cheek. Blind rage began to fill her thoughts and cloud her vision when the reality of her situation sank in. Her parents were dead, murdered by the emperor, a man that she had known personally since her early childhood. And she was not even given enough time to grieve.

The officer took a step back and made a small gesture, ordering one of her troopers to raise her gun. “Aim for the heart,” she said. “Her face must stay intact for the state funeral. Multiple shots. Make sure she’s dead.”

Then Marise felt a series of dull punches hitting her chest. She fell to the ground, and a burning sensation spread throughout her upper body. In her last moment, Marise tried to remember the strict, but caring eyes of her mother and the warm smile of her father. One by one, her organs stopped working. The world around her faded away, and she died.

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“And there we go, that was the last one,” Sanja said and put down her screwdriver. She reached for her patient’s arm and pushed the two curved sheets made out of plastic, metal and synthetic skin back together. The parts fit in perfectly, only leaving behind a narrow line running along the length of the android’s arm. Sanja grabbed a magnetic multi-tool and made a set of short routine gestures, closing several locks that she couldn’t reach from the outside. “Go ahead, move it around!”

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Follow Lucile, an architect turned union organizer, as she helps an android militia investigate a mysterious cult in my near-future science fiction novel “Lodestar Conspiracy”

Lucile made a sweeping gesture along the train tracks and shouted, “Tracks are empty, check!” Once the train came into view, she pointed towards the number on the front and said, “B18 incoming.” She scanned the timetable on the clipboard in her hand, tapped a number next to the current time slot, and confirmed it with a loud, “Check!” The train stopped, the security gates opened, and a horde of passengers streamed out of it. When all the new passengers had entered the train, Lucile made another sweeping gesture along the side of the platform, gave the conductor a thumbs up and said, “Ready to go!” It was an odd practice, and many newcomers in Lodestar City often watched her and her colleagues with amusement, but all of them got used to it sooner or later.

“We need to grab anything that seems useful. Documents, banking statements, anything like that. Whatever we can use to find out who’s behind this. They’ve probably already called the gendarmerie, so we don’t have much time,” Lucile said to Ignacio after they had restrained the two Pioneers in the basement with their own belt cuffs.

“What’s the rush?” Ignacio asked as he followed Lucile up the stairs.

“They seem to be directly connected to whatever this Hestia is,” Lucile said. “Someone, or something, is definitely seeing everything we’re doing.”

“They always end up pretending that what happened was that humans graciously granted us our rights after they realized that we’re just like them,” Victoria explained and stood up. She bowed down mockingly as if she was thanking someone. “Oh, how kind of you to finally realize that we’re not just machines. But the truth is that none of them actually cared about that. Business, profit, and getting the upper hand is all that humans care about.”

“I’m sure some of them did it because they genuinely empathized with us,” Ridley said.

“I used to think that would be enough, but in the end, it just wasn’t.” Victoria sighed. “It was all rather disappointing, really.”