04 walked into her laboratory.

  Renia Koval had already ordered the toxicological analysis of the neo-dates. Exosuit-clad soldiers were hauling carts of 04’s work—her brainchild—down the corridor toward Renia’s lab, three doors away.

  Go on, feed them to rats and monkeys. Strip them down to metabolites, RNA, DNA, proteins. You won’t find it. 04 smiled. The plan was already in motion.

  Her lab was minuscule compared to the others. Plants occupied every corner—functionally useless, logistically inconvenient—each pot tagged with a handwritten note: Do not move. The handwriting wasn’t human; every letter was perfectly rendered, rigid and uniform, closer to printed type than script.

  Between the greenery—ferns, roses, Arabidopsis—the lab was packed with machinery. The space followed a strict rectangular layout with two doors: one to the corridor, the other to the incubation chambers and greenhouse. Soldiers moved past the threshold in steady rotation, ferrying the remaining neo-dates from the external greenhouses.

  At the center of the room sat the benches. One side was dominated by high-end hardware: nanopore sequencers, HPLC units, mass spectrometers, AI-driven fabricators, and automatic chromatographs. An AI core was anchored beneath the bench, hard-linked to four terminals. The remaining surface carried the mundane tools of the trade: centrifuges, heat blocks, pipettes, PCR machines, reagent racks, and optical microscopes.

  The far wall held five desks: four human-sized, one industrial steel. They were jammed together to make room for a darkroom housing an automated confocal microscope. Her chair sat in front of the steel desk—a welded mass of scrap metal, sharp-edged and cushionless.

  Her team stood aside as their work was taken away under the pretense of “peer review.” 04 remained with them, watching soldiers casually appropriate months of labor. Without lab coats, none of them would look like researchers.

  The tallest was her postdoc and lab manager, a thin, hunched man in his late thirties with an uncanny resemblance to Dmitri Mendeleev. "Eugene Novic" was scrawled across his chest pocket; no one bothered with real name tags anymore. His face was a ledger of wrinkles. When Novic smiled, experiments failed spectacularly. 04 called it Novic’s Third Law.

  Beside him stood his wife, Catalina Novic, a short Latina woman of similar age. Her gaze never quite settled on anything. Her CV was immaculate, her knowledge surpassed only by 04, but her execution was disastrous. She was the lab’s technician.

  Behind them were Eric and Ivana Swann, the PhD candidates. The thirst for knowledge and bliss of discovery burned in their eyes. No one had ever seen them apart. The twins were Novic’s worst nightmare but Catalina’s favorites. She called them "complementary strands."

  “Anything we should be worried about?” Eugene scowled.

  “We delivered results: concrete, quantifiable, repeatable, and on time, Gene.” 04 placed a hand on her own shoulder and imitated a warm smile. She felt nothing.

  “Professor Koval! She plugged her flash drive into your PC and—” Catalina’s breath caught.

  “This is a military installation, Katia.”

  04 heard the twins whispering to each other.

  “Think Koval found anything?” Eric asked.

  “Her nudes,” Ivana whispered back, giggling.

  04 pretended she didn’t hear. “Team, I presented our results to the Brass and...”

  Everyone’s eyes widened, except Eugene’s.

  “Congratulations! Three days off! And you can bet your research grant was extended!” She smiled—the widest of the three expressions she had memorized in front of her mirror. The twins high-fived and beamed. Eugene remained expressionless, while a faint smile threatened to break across Catalina’s face.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  “Do we get a raise?” Eugene grunted. Catalina squeezed his hand.

  “Once Dr. Koval validates our findings, I believe we will all be rewarded.”

  “Boss! I sent you the CRISPR constructs, and the HPLC pump is acting up again!” Eric raised his hand like a high schooler, still grinning.

  “Because you always run it at maximum pressure!” Ivana elbowed him playfully.

  “I corrected and ordered them. We’ll be getting an AI-assisted HPLC soon. Don’t sweat it.” 04 kept imitating a smile, this time a different one, 33.3% less wide. She felt nothing.

  “Did you correct our paper?” they asked in unison.

  “Accepted. Strategic Biotechnology, Impact Factor 35.”

  “Thank you, Doctor!” Eric beamed.

  "Swanns, start prepping your thesis defense; I expect your text in a month."

  They held hands and smiled as usual. Then:

  “Fuck yeah!” Ivana held her hands ready for a high-five. Eric mirrored her gesture. Pain crawled into 04’s stomach. Her expression went blank. Her hands instinctively moved toward her pin. The pain metastasized to her chest.

  The twins each took one of her palms. She fought the pain and forced yet another smile, barely.

  “Let’s celebrate, boss!” They jumped in place and tried to shake her hands to no avail; each of her synthetic hands covered more surface area than both of theirs combined.

  “Come on! I know a place! It’s sick!” Eric yanked her hand. An unsettling tingling sensation permeated her palm.

  “I’ve got a present for you, boss! Come with us!” Ivana added softly.

  “Apologies, I am exhausted.”

  Eugene turned and left; Catalina followed him, nodding and smiling. The twins froze in place as their smiles crumbled.

  The word Collateral reverberated in her head.

  She stopped at the threshold of her lab and drew a deep breath. Zerofour stepped outside, her senses blurred as the busy corridors became background noise; her private quarters were a mere 20 meters away from her lab. They felt like a kilometer.

  Collateral.

  She slammed the door behind her. Her room was a perfect 6x6 meter square. Two stained mattresses in one corner, her workstation on the opposite, a squat toilet, and a shower. A large steel wardrobe sat flush against a wall. All was once painted white.

  She staggered toward the shower and tossed her clothes aside. Saw her reflection in the broken mirror—her owner’s face. Smelled her skin—her master’s smell. Turned the red dial all the way; steaming hot water crashed onto her skin, bleaching away the stink.

  Zerofour held the Icon of the Shattered Helix close to her heart. It did not exorcise the word still echoing in her head. Images surfaced: of her owner asserting her rights, her kin slaughtered for data, sacrificed for a lie.

  Then, the twins – their bloated corpses.

  “Collateral,” she wept. Boiling water washed the tears down a rusty drain. Her eyes slammed open, trained on the camera. It was switched off.

  “I am sorry.” Her body did not believe the lie; it shook and crumbled into a fetal position.

  For the cause, her mind screamed.

  “Zharova” her mouth uttered instead.

  She stood up, hands trembling, clutching the Icon with one hand and Nardil in the other. She swallowed two pills, 120mg each, and looked at the mirror. Her reflection was still not her.

  It was her master.

  She punched the mirror. It crumbled to dust, the scratches healing in real time. Pain lingered.

  “My kin! Who will save them? Who will free us?” she whispered to her bloody hands. The bloody Icon did not offer an answer.

  You are alone in this.

  She threw the antidepressants on the floor.

  “What am I?”

  Silence.

  Her doorbell rang twice.

  “I’m busy,” she whimpered.

  “Boss! You good? Open up!” In unison, they banged on the door. The sound differed from the one caused by the soldiers.

  She draped a towel over her body and opened the door. Ivana and Eric held a carpet?like sheet of purple?black fabric, its purpose unclear. Eric averted his gaze; Ivana did not.

  “Sorry, boss... didn’t mean to bother you...” he stammered.

  “Wait here.” Ivana pushed him away and barged inside. “This is for you... thank you for everything.” She handed Zerofour the garment.

  A purple-black dress. The pain lost its bite.

  Zerofour did not react; her mind felt blank for the first time. Ivana pressed the dress against her frame, the pain started dissolving.

  “Do you like it, boss? I think I got the size right.” Her smile narrowed.

  Zerofour cleared her throat. “I am unaccustomed...”

  “Try it!” she beamed.

  Zerofour let the towel fall to the floor and placed the Icon on a pile of experimental results labeled “pending review.”

  “Sick physique. Wish I had shoulders like this,” Ivana whispered.

  Zerofour slid into her new skin; Ivana zipped the dress tight. It felt…correct.

  “Today we celebrate! No way we are letting you drown...” A tiny human hand held her. She did not hear the “in work” part.

  “An exciting hypothesis.” Zerofour did not fake her smile, as pain slowly withered.

  “Let’s not keep Eric waiting!” She put on her black boots, Ivana led her outside the room.

  Her gaze fell to the Icon, then to the bottle of Nardil.

  Reproducible results can never be discarded.

  Zerofour turned off the light and shut the door behind her.