“Death to Droids!”

Graffiti found in the main corridor of Sub-Level 31, Sea-Tac Residential Industrial Urboplex

I live on Sub-Level 38 of the Sea-Tac Residential-Industrial Urboplex. Not a very pleasant place to hang your hat, but a lot less expensive than Level 37.

The door buzzed, and, having just sent out for a pizza, I made the reasonable assumption. But reasonable assumptions are almost always wrong, and this was no exception.

I opened the door and found myself face-to-tentacle with two of the ugliest-looking androids you ever saw. One looked like a recently buried corpse, and the other resembled Hollywood’s idea of what aliens should look like, but probably don’t. A grotesque thing with lots of facial tentacles, pointy teeth, and a bad case of artificial halitosis.

Well, form has a tendency to follow function, and androids look the way they do for a reason. But I missed that. Just like I miss a lot of other things. I was polite. “Yes? May I help you?”

A micro-robotic maggot crawled out of the corpse’s nose, took a look around, and disappeared under his coat collar.

“Are you Max Maxon?” The words came along with the almost overwhelming stench of rotting carrion.

I held my breath and considered the possibilities. A bill collector? No, I had debts alright, plenty of them, but none large enough to rate one droid, much less two.

Old enemies? Possibly, but given how low I’d sunk, why kill me? A real enemy would let me live.

That left clients, a rare and exotic breed that almost never, repeat never, samples life thirty-eight levels underground. Still, there’s a first time for everything. I hadn’t worked for androids before, but what the hell, I’m a liberal kinda guy, so I took the chance.