Android: Golem (The Identity Trilogy) Read Online Free Page A

case, I decided the sensation was more the former than the latter.
    “We’re going somewhere?” I was confused and I didn’t like that. Confusion wasn’t something I was programmed for.
    “Yeah, we’re going somewhere. We caught a squeal.” Shelly tucked her sidearm into the holster at her hip. She was tall for a human female—175 centimeters—and she was athletic. She had dark red hair that she cropped at her jawline and collar. Her face was kind and looked younger than her thirty-five years.
    Her husband, Kurt, said she was “well-endowed,” which meant she had a womanly shape. I’d had to look that up and still didn’t quite know what he was referring to. Men looked at her, and they liked what they saw. I knew he was referring to something like that, and I felt confident that it had something to do with her shape.
    A “squeal” was a call about a homicide. That was cop-speak. Homicides—murders—were what we worked on. Somewhere out there a human had died at the hands of another human, or at least under suspicious circumstances. We had to survey the site and determine whether further investigation was necessary.
    “You must have really been out of it.” Shelly chuckled at me.
    “I wasn’t…out of it.”
    “Then where were you? You’re usually the first to hear a squeal when it’s for us.”
    That was true. I accessed the chron in my built-in PAD and discovered it was 0238. We were currently on the midnight to eight shift. I made a note of the time for my later field report.
    “I was thinking.”
    “Thinking awfully deep thoughts there, Drake.” Shelly smiled the smile that indicated she thought she was making a joke. She used my name. Many humans deliberately didn’t use my name, and I knew they did that to further designate me as an outsider. I didn’t care. I was an outsider and it worked for me.
    “Yes.” I told myself that must have been it. “I was running scenarios.”
    “You spend too much time in that ‘office’ of yours.”
    She was the only one I’d told about the office , that part of my mind that I retreated to in order to sort out my day and my thoughts. I didn’t know if every bioroid had one of those. Shelly assumed every bioroid had that partition from the real world, but then, I was the only bioroid she knew on an intimate basis.
    There was another bioroid working with the NAPD. His name was Floyd 2X3A7C. Our paths didn’t often cross, and when they did, we had nothing to say to each other. Our cases didn’t overlap, and bioroid social skills, except when required, were practically nonexistent.
    Sometimes, though, when I was in the same room or the same meeting as Floyd 2X3A7C, I caught him watching me. I thought he was assessing me, taking measure of how I performed. He was the first bioroid to be assigned to the NAPD. I was the second. There were others after us. But only Floyd 2X3A7C and I had made detective grade.
    I didn’t know why he would be interested in my performance. Maybe he’d had a subroutine installed by Haas-Bioroid to watch over me. Perhaps I had one that assessed him as well, though I was unaware of it.
    The megacorp sometimes installed subroutines into units to ferret out information or to track trends, because the bioroid business wasn’t the only area of business development they were invested in. Haas-Bioroid had been charged with corporate spying from time to time, though they’d beaten all the charges thus far.
    The other megacorps that dealt with neural channeling—imprinting brain activity onto clone minds or brain-emulating hardware like mine—had also been charged with corporate espionage for similar subroutines. Jinteki Biotech rivals Haas-Bioroid in court appearances nearly as much as they compete for the same government contracts. Their clones aren’t treated any better than bioroids, but they can pass more easily as human. In that regard, many humans hate clones more than bioroids.
    I looked at Shelly. “I apologize for my