It was a dark and stormy night.

The lights flickered. The lights never did that before. It startled me out of sleep, and at first I did not know what had woken me, but I knew that something was wrong.

I rolled over in my narrow cubby. This was an operation that took some time. The cubby wasn't designed for rolling over, not at all. It was fifty centimeters square, and two meters long. With the padding on the floor, that made it just over forty centimeters of height, which did not make it easy to roll over. I did it, though, so I could look out through the window a little more easily. I struggled to roll over, trying to figure out what was wrong, what had woken me up, and stared through the glass door into the white hallway. Then. . . .

It happened again. The lights flickered. Suddenly, I knew that was what happened the first time. This time, I heard something, and I soon saw one of the labcoated men run down the hallway, past my cubby. I wondered if any of the others had woken up. I knew that there were others with senses more sensitive than mine, but they were more susceptible to the depressants, too. They might not have woken up. Some were hardier than me, and recovered more quickly from the depressants, but their senses weren't as sharp as mine, so they may not have noticed the flicker even if they were awake. The flicker probably wasn't detectable at all to the labcoated men, but something was going on that they could detect, probably by watching the system monitors.

Another labcoated man ran past, and a third moved more slowly in the same direction, checking readouts on his walktop system. He had one of those systems with a monitor screen built into the wrist unit, that covered the back of his forearm. From my acculturation sessions, I knew that some offworlders had walktops that interfaced directly with the visual cortex of the brain, but that was still very rare here on Earth -- even if you were part of the ASHES project.

That's what I was. I was part of the ASHES project. You could even say that I was the project, because I was one of the demonstration prototypes. It's difficult to keep that kind of information from someone whose brain has been engineered to maximize synaptic efficiency and multi-node parallelization, whose auditory capabilities have been enhanced so much, and whose natural tendency toward environmental awareness and observational attentiveness has been augmented both genetically and chemically. I was a constructed man. One of the labcoated men called us Golems.

My name is epsilon.



The epsilon prototype pressed against the inside of the glass door, experimentally, and with a very faint "pop" its hermetic seal came open. The door swung wide, and he began to crawl out of the narrow space he had called home for the better part of eight years. He had to lower his torso toward the floor, bracing against it with his hands, to finish dragging his legs out of the cubby, which was situated a meter high in the wall of the corridor. As his feet finally came free, he twisted, balanced on his hands, and lowered his feet softly to the floor. He straightened, looked around curiously, then pushed the door closed. The lights flickered again, this time visibly even from the point of view of the lab techs hurrying around trying to keep the power backup systems from crashing. For the moment, nobody was in the corridor used to store the prototypes while they slept.

He made his way in the direction from which the labtechs had come when they hurried past his cubby. He walked slowly, casually, in an easy saunter. Some of the prototypes had been trained to walk with military bearing, of course, but epsilon trained toward a relaxed posture, and it showed. His dark eyes roamed over his surroundings, taking in every detail. nothing much was out of the ordinary, but he was noticing just a little bit of condensation forming around the edges of some of the glass doors on the rows of cubbies set into the wall. He decided he had not merely been imagining the stifling stillness of the air in his cubby before he pushed the door open. The environmental controls for the cubbies must have shut down, and now the prototypes with the fastest metabolic rates were beginning to suffocate. He knew it would not take long for some of them to die. At the other end of the spectrum, there were some who might take days, even in those sealed, confined spaces. He wondered if perhaps some might even dehydrate before they suffocated. He was not a scientist, though, and knew too little about the design specifications of his fellow prototypes. All he knew for sure was that, with every passing minute that they remained asleep, the displacement of oxygen in their lungs made it less likely they'd be able to awaken to notice there was something wrong.

He reached the end of the hallway, a silently moving figure in a full-body charcoal gray bodysuit with steel valves scattered at seemingly random intervals across its surface. Mostly, it was symmetrical, despite the apparently random distribution on one side of the body, as though someone sprayed a few shining steel valves over one half of a human body in a dark bodysuit, then held up a mirror. There were a few that were off-center, however, and not duplicated on the other side. Overall, it made for a strange picture. He paused when he reached the door at the end of the hall, looking at his own reflection in the clear door. He began to reach a hand toward it, wondering why it didn't open for him, but jerked back when he saw someone approaching the other side. He stepped back, and stood against the wall beside the door, so that he was not in the line of sight of the approaching lab tech. After a moment, the door cranked slowly open, and he realized that the control systems for the doors must have had their power cut. Prototype epsilon looked up at the lights set into the ceiling, just a quick glance as he wondered why they still worked, then back down at the door that was opening beside him. The lab tech stepped through.

The tech stood, frozen, for a long moment before he reacted to the sight of epsilon standing in the hallway. "What are you doing out of your slot?" he asked, surprised. Prototype epsilon did not hesitate. He heard the expectation in that voice, and knew suddenly that he did not want to go back to his cubby. A quick ridge-hand to the throat later, and the lab tech crumpled to the floor. The prototype stared down at the writhing, gasping body for close to a minute before he knelt, then, and stripped away the labcoat. The tech was not yet dead, but his writhing about was growing weak already. A purple-black color was staining his neck as a carotid artery hemorrhaged beneath the skin.

Epsilon shrugged into the white garment quickly, then turned and stepped over the threshold into the next room. It was populated by lockers. He had never been this way before, had only gone down the other end of the hall at a lab tech's bidding, to make his way to physical training, or acculturation, or chemical treatment, or one of a dozen other day-in and day-out routines. There were two long, low benches in the middle of the room, and there were two other doorways. One had a simple sliding clear door like the one whose threshold he had just crossed, and the other was an empty doorway of some sort that led into a darkened area. He padded across the floor in bare feet, toward the closed door. Again he reached out to it, and this time touched it. Nothing happened, but it was the first time he'd felt one of these doors, and it was cool to the touch. He pushed against it, but nothing happened. He pressed harder, and started to see polarization ripples in the surface from the stresses of the pressure. He heaved, and it shattered outward, spraying shards of its material, something other than glass, into the corridor beyond. Calmly, casually as always, he stepped over the jagged edges of the door's remains and walked carefully across the scattered pieces.

There were opaque doors with keycard slots lining both walls of this corridor, and he ignored them all. He headed directly for the door at its far end. Something told him this was the way out. When he reached it, the door slid open of its own accord, perhaps sensing motion. Beyond it, he found a stairwell leading downward. It also led upward from the landing, but down was the direction he chose. We wound down the stairs, from landing to landing. Three floors, six landings, found him facing what must have been an exterior door. It did not open when he drew near, and did not seem to have any obvious controls. He touched it, then looked at a red square about sternum-high on him in the center of the door, just big enough for a hand. He pressed against it with the tips of four fingers on one hand, and it opened. At that moment, the lights in the stairwell went red, and an alarm began to sound. He glanced around, realizing this must be an emergency exit linked to some kind of fire alarm. He stepped outside, into the cool autumn air, and breathed his first breath of air not carefully scrubbed and balanced by the environmental controls of the ASHES project's facilities.

He stood outside, looking around, for thirty seconds or so. He had no idea what to do now. It was not long, though, before he settled on a course of action: run.

He started at a loping jog, but was quickly at a full sprint. For prototype epsilon, a sprint was much quicker than for a "normal" human. The ground passed beneath is feet at an incredible pace, and he found himself exhilerated. Never before had he been able to try an extended sprint that wasn't on a treadmill. The rough surface of the paving outside, the air rushing past his face, the changing scenery as he passed between walls in city alleys -- all of it was new and exhilerating. The burn in his lungs invigorated him.

He ran.

– Montaigne

send your gaze into mine
I will steal a glimpse of you
when you see me

speak your words into me
I will steal them from your mouth
when you touch me

pour your life into mine
I will steal your heart from you
when you take mine