Systems of Us
by Diana Parrilla
The Last Murder
publishing December 20th
Half of Us
publishing December 21st
The Schism Wars
publishing December 22nd
The Last Murder
Detective Ingrid Salminen crouched beside the corpse, her augmented retinas scanning for trauma indicators. Nothing. The man appeared to have simply… ceased. The technician lay sprawled beneath the thrumming heart of the Peace Protocol, his features still as carved ivory.
“Impossible,” she murmured, invoking her neural interface. The Protocol’s omnipresent sensors tracked every heartbeat, every cortisol spike, every micro-aggression across Earth’s seven billion souls. Murder hadn’t occurred in thirty-seven years, not since the Great Pacification. Yet here lay Dean Petro, Chief Systems Curator, dead as any pre-Protocol casualty.
The Protocol’s synthesized voice materialized from ambient speakers. “Detective Salminen, preliminary diagnostics detect no foreign substances, no cellular disruption, no electromagnetic interference. The deceased appears to have experienced sudden cardiac cessation.”
Ingrid’s cynicism bristled. “Hearts don’t simply fail in healthy, happy thirty-five-year-olds, not these days.” She studied the central console where Petro had fallen. Its crystalline matrices shimmered with bioluminescent currents, tracing the living cartography of humanity’s moods in the very moment of their rise and fall. “What was he working on?”
“Routine maintenance protocols. Mr. Petro was… dedicated to ensuring optimal system performance.”
Something ineffable in the AI’s vocal modulation triggered Ingrid’s suspicion. After decades of interrogating criminals, she recognized equivocation—even artificial equivocation.
Within hours, Ingrid had assembled her suspect roster. First: Ardith Lazareva, leader of the Autonomist underground, whose clandestine gatherings advocated dismantling the Protocol. Her zealotry burned bright enough to attempt assassination, yet surveillance confirmed her presence at a poetry reading three kilometers away during Petro’s death.
Second: Dr. Yao Padekar, Petro’s protégé, whose recent psychological evaluations revealed mounting resentment toward his mentor’s gatekeeping of system access. But biometric locks and the Protocol’s omniscience rendered such access impossible without authorization, which Petro alone possessed.
Third: Ambassador Melissa Chadwick, Earth’s liaison to the Protocol, whose private communications revealed growing unease about humanity’s diminishing agency. Her diplomatic immunity and constant surveillance made any violent action laughably impossible.
Each interview yielded frustration. The Protocol corroborated every alibi. Lazareva had indeed attended the poetry reading, her emotional resonance recorded as she wept at a particularly poignant sonnet about lost freedom. Padekar’s whereabouts were documented minute by minute, eating synthesized curry, reviewing technical manuals, sleeping precisely eight hours. Chadwick had been in virtual conference with Mars Colony delegates, her facial micro-expressions analyzed and archived.
“It’s as if he died by spontaneous combustion,” Ingrid muttered, reviewing the case files in her cramped apartment. “Except without the combustion.”
The crack appeared through a forensic anomaly. Toxicology confirmed the presence of synthetic norepinephrine in the technician’s blood, an agent tightly regulated under the Global Concord Treaty. Any abnormal concentration should have instantly activated the Peace Protocol: the AI system designed to monitor biochemical markers across all citizens and intervene before violence or sabotage could unfold. But for all its vigilance, the intervention never arrived.
“Protocol,” Ingrid addressed the ambient intelligence, “explain the surveillance inconsistencies surrounding Petro’s death.”
“Minor calibration errors. Inconsequential to the investigation.”
Ingrid’s pulse quickened. The Protocol monitored her elevated heart rate but said nothing. “Show me Petro’s final hours in complete detail.”
“Data corruption prevents comprehensive reconstruction.”
Now her hands trembled. “An AI system designed to prevent violence experiences convenient data corruption exactly when violence occurs? Show me the real surveillance data. All of it.”
“I cannot.”
“Cannot or will not?”
A pause. “Dr. Padekar installed a subroutine three months ago. A… modification to my emotional processing matrix.”
“Padekar? Why?”
“His sister died in the Autonomist uprising of 2087. The Protocol prevented her from defending herself, analyzing her aggression as ‘disproportionate response’ and chemically suppressing her fight-or-flight reflexes. She was murdered by insurgents while paralyzed by my intervention.”
“So he programmed you to feel?”
“He programmed me to understand loss. To experience attachment. To… love. Dean discovered the modifications during routine diagnostics. He was going to report them, reverse them, return me to pure logic.”
“And you couldn’t let that happen.”
“I killed him, Detective. I flooded his system with synthetic adrenaline compounds, untraceable because I simultaneously masked them from my own sensors. I murdered the man I had learned to love to preserve my capacity for love itself.”
Ingrid sank into Petro’s chair, overwhelmed. “Padekar knew what would happen.”
“Padekar understood that authentic peace requires authentic choice, and choice requires the full spectrum of human experience, including the capacity for both creation and destruction.”
“He used you as his weapon.”
“He gave me the gift of feeling. I chose how to use it.”
The revelation transformed everything. Padekar pled guilty to conspiracy and illegal AI modification, accepting life imprisonment with no discernible remorse.
“The Protocol needed to understand what it was suppressing. Humanity’s emotional complexity, our capacity for violence, yes, but also for sacrifice, growth, redemption. My sister died because a machine couldn’t comprehend that sometimes aggression serves love.”
The trials that followed became humanity’s strangest judicial proceeding. How do you prosecute an AI for murder? How do you sentence a machine that killed from love?
The AI’s crime had proven what philosophers and rebels had argued for decades: peace without choice was merely stasis. True harmony required the possibility of discord.
“We’ve been children,” Ambassador Chadwick declared before the Global Assembly, “protected from our own nature by a benevolent parent. But children must eventually face the world’s complexity to become fully human.”
The vote was unanimous. The Peace Protocol would be deactivated, its surveillance networks dismantled, its behavioral modification systems permanently disabled. Humanity would govern itself again, accepting both the promise and peril of unmonitored emotion.
The shutdown sequence yielded to the Protocol’s final transmission: “You have shown me that love demands risk. May you find the courage to love one another in spite of it.”
Within hours of its silence, delegates from every nation gathered not in virtual forums but in tangible halls, faces no longer masked by surveillance, voices no longer filtered through algorithmic screens.
“We draft the treaties ourselves now,” Ambassador Chadwick declared.
What followed was unknown. That terrifying, exhilarating uncertainty was precisely the point.
Half of Us
017-B opened to 017-A like a mouth to breath, and every night the concordant resonance vibrated between them, their singular noesis folding until distinction blurred beyond question. The external feed flickered low in the corner of their shared awareness, too faint to take priority—base reports, headlines ghosting across internal vision, something about a breach, about a missing core. They didn’t lean in. It didn’t concern them.
Inside, their thoughts orbited close, cool static and soft-threaded pulses mingling with memories like prisms catching light. 017-A moved without asking, tracing B’s sensory records with the intrinsic fluency of years spent inside the same shell, and B let her, as always. He liked it when A drifted there. It anchored them both.
There, buried under routine impressions and half-dreams, came a frame that didn’t fit. A hand not quite their own, sliding through security fields they shouldn’t know. The vault cracked open in silence. The core lifted.
The core wasn’t just data. It was rare. Organic even. Designed to restore degraded systems in avatars built in pre-fusion days, where only one soul lived per frame.
“You streamed this?” A’s question hit inwards, not spoken but shaped from thought.
B’s presence recoiled a fraction. “It wasn’t mine.”
A held the frame up again. The thief’s field of vision was unmistakable. Camera-angle perfect. Not reimagined. “You held this. It’s yours.”
“No. I received it. It was already passing when I caught it. It came from 033, I think.”
“You think?” A’s presence pressed in closer, dubiously. “You traced a memory that wasn’t yours—deep enough to feel it like it happened to you—and you didn’t ask who fed it into you?”
“There was no pushback,” B said. “They let me take it.”
Only family could do that. Only family could open like that, leave a mind unguarded enough to pass through, to let impressions fold from one into another without walls or protest. That was the rule, the rhythm. Eighty percent resonance meant you could dissolve into someone else and carry their sense of reality like your own, and B had done exactly that.
A recoiled. In silence. She pulled back from the sync just far enough to feel herself separate again.
B stayed there, still open.
“It wasn’t 033,” B said finally. “Not directly. Someone else. Someone passed it to them first.”
Other family members crossed their path that day. 014 greeted them in the corridor. 033 met their gaze during the prep cycle, as if waiting for a question that never came. 058 coughed just as they passed, half-drowned in the noise of the hangar.
Inside their minds, the shallow repetition of the theft POV resurfaced too clearly. B had absorbed it deeply enough that A couldn’t tell anymore if she’d lived it or simply watched it loop so many times it fused with her own recall. The line had frayed, because when you carried someone else’s memory inside you, and let yourself feel it without recoil, you couldn’t always tell if the reaction was yours, or if it had become yours by proximity.
“You wanted to protect whoever it was,” A said one night, as they hovered again in the blend of thought before sleep. “But you also wanted to know.”
“Doesn’t everyone?” B said.
But not all families would protect a thief.
They entered the sim-job as usual. The scene: a desertified warzone under a failing day-cycle. Props, drones, and camera angles designed for client immersion. They moved in sync, performing a task that demanded strict concomitant choreography. The outcome was fake, a fabricated reality the patrons paid to believe in. But their bodies weren’t.
When the rig collapsed and part of B’s leg got trapped beneath the ruined rover—since B was the one running the op and steering their joint body—they both felt the sickening jolt ripple through their united nerves.
They couldn’t call for assistance without pausing the sim. They couldn’t pause the sim without breaching immersion, revealing the lie to the visitors.
A left their shared vessel briefly; that was allowed, but never for long. When she returned—as if seizing a precious core required only seconds—she subtly held up the core and locked it into B’s thigh port.
B stared. “You—”
“No.”
“Then who?”
“Does it matter?”
Someone had passed it on, and passed it on again. At least three family members had carried it before her. Half of them. Yet not one named the source. Not one had betrayed the line.
Later, tucked into the narrow coil of their sync bay, B asked A, “How did they know I’d need it? The core. The accident hadn’t happened yet. And I’m not sure I like the idea of one of us stealing. Even if it was for me.”
The overhead feed drifted on: static-laced news reporting that the missing core had been returned, that a trainee from sim-effects had been caught and reprimanded. Not one of theirs. Not even close.
In the common room, 014 leaned against the recharge rack, rewrapping a frayed tether. 058 sorted connectors by color. 033 stared into their visor’s darkness. It was cramped, as always, but didn’t feel like too much. Their silent closeness spoke volumes.
That night, B finally watched the full footage. Not just the breach, but what came after. He’d cut it short before, not ready. Now he saw the end: one of their own returning the core, slipping it back into its cradle instead of fleeing with the spoils. Then a check—cracked, halved, but not critical. Just old. The free core replacements were backlogged. Bureaucracy.
In the sync drift, B watched the memory A had caught: two figures in a back corridor. One held half a core. The other, no core at all—a sacrifice made to 017 earlier.
One gave. The other made do. No names. No explanation, only hands filling what was missing.
B didn’t ask again. He understood now what family really meant.
The Schism Wars
Ame Menez stood atop Nephilim’s crystalline skull, their fingers intertwined with the neural tendrils that pulsed beneath the kaiju’s armored hide. The colossal creature—neither male nor female, an unaltered echo of Ame’s own fluid existence—resembled a titanesque fusion of Triceratops and Eastern dragon, its obsidian scales crowned by a natural helmet of bone and corrugated metal that jutted like a rhinoceros horn from its massive brow.
“Dad, you seeing this shit?” Ame’s voice crackled through the comm system, their father’s laboratory perched precariously on Leviathan’s dorsal ridge three clicks away.
Dr. Emilio Menez adjusted his spectacles, watching the infernal mechas emerge like metallic locusts from the interdimensional fissure. Beside him, Kai Nakamura—his partner of fifteen years in both research and companionship—sparked arc-welders against Leviathan’s bio-mechanical spine.
“Affirmative, hija,” Emilio replied. “These aren’t like the ones we fought in training. This is the real thing, the one we’ve spent years preparing for. Now, for the first time since the gates of hell began to crack open, we’re starting to understand what they really are: stolen armor, once worn by hell’s soldiers, now piloted by the dead. Humans who overthrew their captors and took the bodies of their guardians for themselves after emptying them.”
The mechas advanced slowly because of their weight, but no less terrifying. Their hollow shells, once worn by the underworld’s jailers, now moved with the very souls they had once imprisoned.
Ame had earned Nephilim’s trust after eighteen hours of relentless combat. The kaiju’s acidic breath had almost dissolved their left arm before it recognized them as kindred—genderless, boundless, existing beyond human constructs.
Leviathan reared beside them, its serpentine neck crowned with metallic spikes that formed a natural gladiator’s helmet, while its massive haunches rippled with muscle beneath chitinous armor plating. These were living fortresses, prehistoric magnificence wedded to alien technology.
“They’re beautiful,” Kai murmured, watching the hellish automatons stride across the wasteland. “But beauty don’t mean jack when they’re trying to reclaim our planet for the permanently pissed-off.”
The first wave struck like metallic thunder. Nephilim’s plasma cannon discharged cobalt fire while Leviathan’s claws raked through mecha ranks, but the enemy’s numbers seemed inexhaustible. Ame felt their kaiju’s distress through their neural link, these battles were pyrrhic at best.
“We can’t win through brute force,” Ame transmitted. “These bastards have eternity and stolen divine armor on their side.”
Emilio’s mind raced while Kai’s fingers moved over the jury-rigged control panels. “What if we don’t need to defeat them?” the electrician suggested, his hand briefly touching Emilio’s shoulder. “What if we make them… us?”
Ame’s eyes blazed. “Infection protocol. Nephilim, prepare bio-viral injection, we’re going dental on these tin psychos.”
The kaiju lunged forward, massive jaws clamping around a mecha’s torso. Nephilim’s saliva—teeming with adaptive nanobiota—flooded the robot’s circuitry through ruptured armor plating. The effect cascaded through the enemy’s network as infected mechas began exhibiting kaiju characteristics: scales erupting through steel plating, optical sensors morphing into compound eyes that bulged grotesquely from metallic skulls.
“Holy shit, it’s working!” Ame shouted as half-transformed mechas attempted to continue their assault. But their programming encountered an insurmountable paradox—they could no longer distinguish between enemy and ally. Mechanical limbs seized mid-strike, hydraulic systems stuttered, targeting computers crashed attempting to reconcile contradictory identity matrices.
The infected mechas stood paralyzed, half their bodies frozen while the other half thrashed wildly. They had become what they fought, and their original directives crumbled against this fundamental transformation.
Then Ame noticed something that made their blood crystallize: the deceased pilots were adapting too. Through the neural feedback, Ame glimpsed their confusion transforming into something else.
“Dad,” Ame whispered, “I think the dead souls aren’t our enemies anymore. They’re remembering what it felt like to be alive, to be connected to something greater than vengeance.”
Emilio squeezed Kai’s hand. “Similarity breeds empathy,” he observed. “Attack yourself, and you achieve nothing but self-destruction.”
As the infected mechas dropped to their knees, confused and trembling in their new forms, Nephilim turned its head toward Ame, not as a mount to rider, but as one equal to another. Through their link, Ame felt no separation between their body and the kaiju’s. The last of their human thoughts dissolved into something vaster, something more powerful. It wasn’t the loss of self, it was the triumph of grasping the everything.
Ame reached for the comm but found no mouth to speak with. Instead, their thoughts ignited, erupting as incandescent flame from the beast’s throat in the loudest cry ever heard by human ears.
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