Credit: Royce DeGrie/iStockphoto

He turns back. He darts across the compound toward the slave's quarters, with a renewed sense of purpose. He needs to finish the job. Perhaps the gas has made its way down the hall to Aliyyah. If she's asleep, he can recover the syringes and complete the mission. He can still make it to the rendezvous.

The guards are still out cold, collapsed awkwardly between the slave mats. Staring at them, he feels the urgency drain from his actions. He tears his eyes away, and heads down the corridor to Aliyyah's room. He stops in the doorway, and glances toward the bed.

She's draped across it now, unconscious, a finger still pressed against her neck. Her other hand clutches the syringes, open to view. The gas took her out before she could hide them.

He crosses the room to stand over her, brushing her hair away from her face. Knowing her beauty is artificial doesn't make it any less real. She's designed to be admired, and he knows it, and he doesn't care.

He reaches down and plucks a syringe from her hand, imagining what it's like to be in her position. Engineered, a product, designed to be exploited and not to mind. She's complicit in a system she doesn't fully understand, incapable of trusting her own thoughts. And yet, despite that, she's trying to adapt, to change, to see if there are other ways.

How could he be so certain of things, if she were not?

A decision. He undoes a wrist-seal and rolls up his sleeve. The injection is brief, a momentary pain like a bee's sting, and he sits on the floor beside the bed to let the virus work. He doesn't know if it will have an effect on him, but then why wouldn't it? He and Aliyyah are made of the same stuff; they just came into being by different processes.

He waits for some feeling to overtake him, some immediate change in his mindset as the virus works its way into his system, insinuates itself into his neurochemistry. All he feels, though, is an intensification of the confusion he has already developed about himself, his reasons for being here and doing this work.

Moments pass, a minute. He sits and waits, waiting for an effect, something he can quantify. He feels different, but is it the virus or is it simply him? There's no way of knowing.

Finally he stands, takes one last look at Aliyyah, and backs slowly toward the hall. He makes his way back out into the night, then out into the desert chill. He runs across the unnatural carpet of soft grass, across the synthetic oasis to the perimeter fence. This time he won't hesitate to scale it, and drop to the gritty desert reality on the other side. He feels the need to move, to act, to keep looking.

Perhaps that's the only answer.