Tears in Rain (3 page)

As of that moment, civil rights were progressively won by the reps. These advances were not devoid of problems. The first years after the
Unification
were particularly fraught with conflict, and there were serious disturbances in various cities on Earth (Dublin, Chicago, Nairobi), with violent confrontations between
antisegregationist
pro-rep movements and human
supremacist
groups. Finally, the
Constitution of 2098
, the first Magna Carta of the
United States of the Earth
(
USE
), and still in force, recognized the same rights for technohumans as for humans.

It was also in this same constitution that the term
technohuman
was used for the first time, as the word
replicant
is loaded with insulting and offensive connotations. These days,
technohuman
(or
techno
, as it is used colloquially) is the sole official and acceptable term, although in this article the word
replicant
has also been used to ensure historical clarity. There are, however, groups of techno activists,
such as the
Radical Replicant Movement
(RRM), who reclaim the ancient designation as a banner of their own identity: “I’m proud to be a rep. I’d rather be a rep than a human, never mind a technohuman” (
Myriam Chi
, leader of the RRM).

The existence and integration of technohumans has generated a fierce ethical and social debate that is far from being resolved. There are some who maintain that, since the original creation of replicants as slave labor was an erroneous and immoral act, their production should simply cease. This possibility is rejected outright by the technos, who view it as genocide: “What has once existed cannot return to the limbo of nonexistence. What has been invented cannot be uninvented. What we have learned cannot cease to be known. We are a new species, and like all living beings, we yearn to continue living” (Morlay). Currently, the management of the android production lines (these days referred to as
gestation plants
) is split fifty-fifty between technos and humans. An android takes fourteen months to be born, but once born it has the physical and mental development of a twenty-five-year-old. Despite technological advances, a life span of a decade is still all that has been achieved: at approximately the age of thirty-five, the cellular division of replicants’ tissue accelerates dramatically and they undergo something
like a massive carcinogenic process (known as
TTT, Total Techno Tumor
), for which a cure has yet to be found, and which leads to their death within a few weeks.

Also controversial are the regulations specific to technohumans, especially those dealing with memory and with the period of time dedicated to civic work. A committee consisting of an equal number of humans and technos determines how many androids will be created each year, and with which specifications: computation, combat, exploration, mining, administration, or construction. As the gestation of these individuals is very costly, it has been agreed that all technohumans serve whichever company made them for a maximum period of two years, in work consistent with the area of specialization for which they were created. Thereafter they are granted a license, together with a moderate amount of money (the
settlement allowance
), to help them to set up their own lives.

Finally, all androids are implanted with a complete memory set, together with sufficient actual documentary support (photos, holographs, and recordings of their imaginary past; old toys from their supposed childhood, etc.), since various scientific investigations have demonstrated that humans and technohumans coexist and integrate socially far better if the latter have a past, and that androids are more stable if they are furnished with
mementos. The
Law of Artificial Memory
of 2101, currently in force, thoroughly regulates this sensitive area. Memories are unique and varied, but they all contain more or less the same version of the famous
Revelation Scene
, popularly known as the dance of the phantoms. This is an implanted memory of an event that supposedly took place when the individual androids were about fourteen years old, when their parents told them that they were technohumans and that they themselves lacked reality
and were pure shadows, empty images, a firing of neurons
. Once the memory has been installed, there can be no modification of any sort. The law prohibits and prosecutes vigorously any subsequent manipulation of, or illegal trafficking in, memories, a fact that neither stops the aforementioned trafficking nor prevents a lucrative underground market in memories. The existing regulations governing the lives of technos have been contested by diverse sectors, and both the RRM and various supremacist groups have several appeals lodged against the law. In the past decade, numerous university chairs in technohuman studies have been created (such as the one at the Complutense in Madrid) in an attempt to address the multiple ethical and social questions posed by this new species.

T
here was a time when sexual relations between humans and reps had been forbidden. Now they were simply frowned upon—except, of course, when it came to the ancient and venerable practice of prostitution. Pablo Nopal smiled sourly and contemplated the bare back of the girl warrior. A straight line of elastic skin, the perfect curve of the slim hip. Sitting up in bed, as he had just done, Nopal could also see one of her tiny breasts, which was gently rising and falling in time with her quiet breathing. Despite seeming to be asleep—and she surely was—she would leap up and, for all he knew, land him a forceful blow if he so much as brushed her waist with his finger. Nopal had slept with enough combat reps to be well aware of their habits and their disturbing defensive reflexes. It was safer not to kiss one on the neck in the middle of the night.

Indeed, the best thing to do in the middle of the night after having sex with such a girl was to leave.

The man slid out of the bed, picked up his clothes, which were scattered across the floor, and began to get dressed.

He was in a bad mood.

The hour when dawn was breaking, dirty and faded, with the night dying and the new day not yet arrived, always depressed him. That naked hour when there was no way to disguise the nonsensical nature of the world.

Nopal was rich and he was miserable. Misery was a basic component of his being, as cartilage is to bones. Misery was the cartilage of his mind. It was something he couldn’t get rid of.

As an old writer whom he admired used to say,
Happiness is the same for everyone, but unhappiness is different for each person
. Nopal’s misery manifested itself in a clear incapacity for life. He hated life. This was one of the reasons why he liked androids: they were all so eager, so desperate to keep living. He envied them, in a sense.

The only thing that had kept Nopal going in recent years—the only thing that really warmed his heart—was his search. Now, he tapped his mobile computer, brought up the list of androids onto the screen, and deleted the warrior girl with the thick, curly hair with whom he had just had sex. Obviously she was not the technohuman he was looking for. He gazed almost with affection at her flat profile. It had been an effort to gain her confidence, but now he hoped never to have to see her again. As was his habit, his basic misanthropy had triumphed again.

T
he advantage of dealing with dead reps, thought Bruna as she entered the Forensic Anatomy Institute, was that you didn’t have to put up with tearful relatives: parents shattered by grief; offspring stunned at suddenly becoming orphans; partners, siblings, and other whimpering family members. Androids were solitary beings, islands inhabited by a single castaway in the midst of a motley sea of people. Or at least almost all reps were like that, although there were some who insisted in believing that they were fully human, and established stable, sentimental relationships despite death lurking at their heels, and who even managed to adopt a child—always a sick child or one with some problem—because the early use-by date of replicants prevented them from garnering the points necessary for a normal adoption. As for Bruna’s own story, it had in fact been a mistake. Neither she nor Merlín had wanted to become a couple, but in the end they became trapped by their emotions. Until the inevitable heartbreak occurred.
Four years, three months, and twenty-seven days.

It was three in the morning and the institute was deserted and ghostly, immersed in a bluish half-light. She had come at such a late hour with the intention of meeting up with Gándara, the veteran medical examiner who worked the night shift and was an old friend who owed her a few favors. But when she entered the office next door to Dissection Room 1, she found a young
man with his eyes glued to a pornographic hologram. When he became aware of her presence, he switched off the scene with a flick of his hand and turned toward her.

“What...are you doing here?”

Bruna noted the hesitation, the start, the sudden suspicion in his eyes. She was used to her appearance making an impression, not just because she was a tall and athletic techno, but more than anything because of her shaved head and her tattoo—a fine black line that encircled her entire body vertically, running down the left side from her forehead, through the middle of her eyebrow, eyelid, and cheek, on to her neck, breast, stomach, and belly, her left leg, one of her toes, the sole of her foot and her heel, and then running up the back of the same leg, her buttock, waist, back, and the nape of her neck, completing the circle by traversing the shaved roundness of her head until it met up again with the descending line. Obviously, when she was dressed, you couldn’t see that the tattoo formed a complete circle, but Bruna had verified that the line, which appeared to cut across a third of her head and then disappear down inside her clothes, had an undeniable impact on humans. Moreover, it showed that she was a combat rep: almost everyone in the military had elaborate tattoos.

“Gándara’s not in?”

“He’s on vacation.”

The man seemed to relax a little when he saw that Bruna knew the chief medical examiner. He was a short, pudgy young man who had one of those standard, cheap plastic-surgery faces, a model picked from a catalog, the typical graduation present from parents with a modest income. It had suddenly become fashionable to have face jobs done, and there were half a dozen models that were repeated ad nauseam on thousands of people.

“Fine. Then I’ll talk with you. I’m interested in one of the bodies. Cata Caín. She’s a technohuman, and she’s missing an eye. She died yesterday.”

“Oh, yes. I did the autopsy a few hours ago. Was she a family member?”

Bruna looked at him for half a second, impassively. A rep related to another rep? This guy was an imbecile.