Angel

Angel

A murder mystery with a twist. Set in the near future.

******

Ch1. Angelene

Angelene looked past the shoulder of the older man sat across from her to the city beyond. From this height and at this time of night, the bright multi-colored lights made the city look almost unreal, like a magical kingdom full of hope and possibilities, quite unlike the bleak cesspool of uncaring despair she knew it to actually be.

Christ she was tired.

Today, like most days, had been long and tough, but before she could go home and unwind, she first had to deal with this unpleasantness.

She shifted focus back to the man who had been talking for the last few minutes and cut him off mid-sentence.

"Dennis, please don't beg, be a man about it. When Efastus purchased your company we agreed to keep you on for a minimum of a year. The year is now up, so we are letting you go. It's all according to the contract, and you even get to leave with a more than reasonable severance."

The man was Dennis Holt, former owner of Pri-Tech, currently soon-to-be "former" head of research at Efastus. Six months ago he had sold Pri-Tech to Efastus due to financial difficulties caused by an over-ambitious expansion. At the time he had foolishly thought Efastus would be his financial savor, but now, too late, he had come to realize that he had instead made a deal with the devil.

"Fuck the severance. What about my company? What about my employees?"

he retorted angrily.

"My company. My employees."

Corrected Angelene serenely.

"We now have the patents that belonged to your former company, so now Pri-Tech will get sold on for whatever we can get for it... minus the patents of course."

"But without the patents the rest of the company is worth practically nothing."

"Yes, my thoughts exactly."

agreed Angelene.

"And MY employees?"

"They will get the standard severance package, which admittedly won't be much, given that they haven't been part of Efastus for very long"

Angelene replied with a touch of patronizing sincerity.

"You're a vicious heartless bitch"

spat Dennis,

"Do you know that?"

Angelene still vividly remembered the first time she had been called a vicious bitch during a business meeting.

She had been first called it by a CEO of a company Efastus had been looking to acquire. Even back then she had considered it a compliment, but not so much of a compliment that it wouldn't have consequences. She had immediately called off negotiations with the CEO and his board of lackies and had instead gone straight to her rival's shareholders and had initiated a hostile takeover. Once the takeover was complete, she dismissed the former CEO on the spot without severance and then spent the next four years fighting him in the courts for it until his legal fees exceeded the value of the money he was owed. At that point he was desperate to settle for anything she would give him. It had cost her a lot more to take over the company in this manner, but she did have her reputation as a vicious bitch to uphold.

These days, through repeated use, being called a vicious bitch had lost all the shine it once had. She couldn't even muster enough emotion to be annoyed with Dennis. It was just business after all.

"Your father would be disappointed in you"

she heard Dennis say. Her mind had been wandering, but this last barb had brought her back to full attention. It had stung in a way that other insults couldn't, but with the mild hurt came a barely restrained avalanche of anger.

Of course, a fossil like Dennis would be old enough to remember her father and the early days of the company that he had founded, but he probably hadn't been close enough to know of the utter contempt Angelene felt for her long past father.

Her father had been a mildly successful inventor and had formed Efastus as a research and development company, which had also become mildly successful.

Even at a very early age Angelene realized that her father's heart wasn't really in the business side of the company. For him the business was just a means to let him continue to spend his time tinkering in the research labs or spend hours just chatting with his employees when they should have been working. In short, Angelene's father had been content to maintain a "comfortable" life, and this annoyed Angelene no end. She could see the potential in the business, and it was, as far as she was concerned, being wasted.

But at least the "comfortable" lifestyle had been enough for her to attend the finest universities and major in business law.

Armed with a new sharper understanding of the business world, Angelene finished university and went to work for Efastus as a middle manager. Immediately she and her father started butting heads over the future direction of the company.

Her father thought her ideas too risky and would change the company too much. There was even a sense that her father thought that some of her ideas for growth and expansion might even have been a little immoral. In turn, she thought he was just being weak and shortsighted.

However, three years later her father had finally given in to her suggestion of taking Efastus public. She had persuaded her father that in taking the company public, he could let a board of directors run the actual business side of things, leaving him free to concentrate on the research he loved and spend more time engaging with and managing the staff. A year later Angelene had co-opted the board of directors to her control and had ousted her father as CEO of the company. A year after that her father had decided to leave Efastus completely.

Since then, under her leadership, Efastus has become a world leader in several industries and several countries were now counted as long-term clients of the products and services that her company supplied. Certainly, more than a few people were less than happy with the way that Efastus had conducted business, and more than a few companies had gone to the wall trying to compete with her. But at the end of the day, there were a lot of politicians worldwide that had gotten very rich aligning themselves with Efastus, all of whom now had a vested interest in seeing her company continue to succeed. It was after all, just business.

Her father had died two years after leaving the company he had founded. Her mother had been very vocal about blaming Angelene at the time, insisting her father had died of a broken heart. In fact, her mother hadn't spoken to her since her father's funeral. Angelene didn't consider this any great loss.

So...

If Dennis Holt thought that evoking her father's memory was going to be a good idea, then he was going to find himself skating on very fucking thin ice very quickly.

Angelene was in the process of building herself up to cut this old fart off at the knees when she saw that his last comment had been a final parting shot instead of an opening salvo in a new round of attack. She saw his shoulders slump, his head drop. He was beaten.

"I'll have a word with accounts to see if we can increase the severance for your former employees"

she said in a more conciliatory tone,

"but your company is gone. Sorry."

She wasn't actually sorry, there was no room for "sorry" in business, she just wanted to get this meeting over with as quickly as possible and be on her way home.

It took another twenty minutes to get Dennis out of her office. He was beaten, but he wanted assurances that his former staff would be taken care of. She wouldn't give him any assurances, but she would look into it. She might be a vicious bitch, but she would take no pleasure in kicking someone when they were down, not even an antiquated dinosaur like Dennis Holt.

********

An hour later Angelene was finally back in her apartment.

It was the penthouse suite of a building that had a very exclusive list of occupants. She knew for a fact how difficult it was to acquire residency in the building, mainly because her company owned it, and she personally had the final approval over all new apartment owners.

As always, the apartment was empty when she arrived. Apart from the cleaner, who was only allowed to clean when Angelene was at the office, and the person who restocked her groceries once a week, nobody was permitted in her apartment. She never even allowed guests to visit her here. This was her private retreat from the outside world.

She placed a fillet of tuna in the air-grill then went off to change into something more comfortable whilst it cooked. By the time she had changed, the tuna was ready. She placed the tuna on a plate and added some salad. Whilst the meal would take care of her nutritional needs, the glass of wine she next poured would begin the process of helping her unwind for the evening.

She picked at her evening meal whilst she reviewed a report on a potential new company acquisition in France. The company was doing some potentially interesting work in the field of miniaturizing fission batteries. She made a mental note to ask for a fuller report tomorrow, including any financial weaknesses the prospective company might have. She had already decided to buy the company, although she fully intended to try and drive down it's value first, by fair means or foul.

The meal finished and the cleaned cutlery back where it belonged, it was finally time to properly begin the evening's unwinding session.

Like most people, Angelene had a standard ident chip embedded beneath the skin of her right wrist, which let her do a wide range of tasks, from paying for goods to unlocking her front door. However, unlike most people, Angelene also had a second ident chip embedded in her left wrist. This second ident chip had a far higher level of security and allowed her access to places very few other people even knew about, let alone had access to.

She walked across the room and pressed her left wrist to the frame of an innocuous looking door in one of the walls. There was a soft click as the door unlocked, allowing her to enter her very special room.

Whilst the rest of her apartment was decorated and furnished in that simple minimalist way that made it obvious that it must have cost tens of thousands of dollars to achieve just the right level of emptiness, this new room looked as though it had been decorated by an insane scientist with a cyberpunk fetish.

Most people would have recognized the centerpiece of the room for exactly what it was, a reclining couch used for remote connection to an online avatar or a VR simulation. But what most people wouldn't have recognized was the masses of extra equipment that was connected to the chair. There were metal boxes upon metal boxes, all slowly emitting quiet electronic humming noises, there were banks of monitoring equipment with multiple flashing lights to denote the status of whatever they were monitoring, and off to one side was a desk that contained a simple keyboard and display for user inputs. All of it connected to each other and to the chair with a mass of cables.

The equipment and software that ran it was so complex, it would take an entire team of experts several days to determine that what they were looking at was highly illegal.

Angelene sat at the display and tapped a key to review her schedule for this evening. Satisfied, she tapped a few more keys to start the initiation sequence countdown and then went and lay on the couch. She lowered the 180 degree visor down so that it covered her head. She made a few last-minute adjustments, then waited for the initiation sequence to conclude.

Angelene closed her eyes.

********

Ch2. Angel

Angel opened her eyes.

The apartment Angel stood in was much smaller than Angelene's apartment, although still quite a bit larger than the average person could afford. However, unlike the building where Angelene's apartment was located, Angel's apartment building couldn't exactly be called exclusive. It was in fact located in rabuhoteru, or love hotel.

The uniquely Japanese phenomenon of love hotels had seen a massive resurgence in recent years, closely linked to the development and widespread use of androids. These days rabuhoteru were almost always exclusively serviced by androids, either conforming to the female Andie model or the male Andy equivalent. However, the hotel's management and clients were all exclusively human.

Angel was an Andie, but she was a very unique Andie.

Mentally taking control of the Andie, Angelene walked Angel to the full length mirror that was located on one side of the room and had her slip off the silk wrap she was wearing.

Angel's body and face were exactly copied from Angelene's own features. Although, if Angelene was being honest with herself, the body Angel was modelled on was her own body from about ten years previous, and if she was being unusually honest, Angel's face was probably from an even slightly younger version of herself. Sure, making her Andie a slightly younger version of herself was probably a bit vain, but when you had spent as much money on something as perfectly realistic as Angel was, it was very hard for a little vainness not to creep in.

She admired Angel's body in the mirror. Yes, it was probably quite narcissistic of her to be this pleased with the way Angel looked, but she always got a thrill from admiring her naked body before an evening's entertainment.

Angel's hair was a bit longer than her own. For convenience, Angelene now kept her own hair shoulder length, whilst Angel's gorgeous auburn hair flowed to midway down her back.

Her long limbs were sleek and elegant, toned just enough to hint at the muscles beneath without appearing too muscly. Her stomach was washboard flat and her boobs were firm and didn't yet show signs of sag.

Growing up she had been quite self-conscious about her figure, as in her early teens her boobs and bum had been extremely flat for the longest time and she had been constantly afraid about being mistaken for a boy. Luckily a growth spurt in her late teens had at last granted her the boobs and bum she craved, modest in size but incredibly sexy, even if she did say so herself.

Angelene glanced at Angel's pubic area and mentally gave a sigh. Like herself, Angel was devoid of any pubic hair, but unlike herself, Angel didn't have to worry about regular waxing or the itching of new stubble that drove Angelene mad at times. Still, it was worth it to show off a pussy as gorgeous as the one they shared. Whilst she might have tinkered just a tiny bit with Angel's other proportions, her vulva was an exact copy of her own, as she had always considered it her best feature.

Most Andies and Andys were quite simple models, designed to fulfil basic functions, able to imitate sexual acts by running largely autonomous pre-programmed routines that only mimicked intuitive and realistic movement. The higher class of androids could even mimic a wide range of emotions, with the highest spec models even having AI speech functions that allowed them to have basic conversations with their clients.

But Angel was so much more than that.

Not only were her emotional synthesis functions much more advanced than what was currently available in the public market, and not only were her autonomous sexual routines the product of several years of research, but her entire skin and subframe were almost indistinguishable from a real person's. In fact, the only thing about Angel that didn't look flawlessly human were the pupils of her eyes. Science hadn't yet been able to replicate the complexities of the human eye, so the pupils of all androids were manufactured in the same way that camera lenses were, with very thin interlocking aperture blades.

All of these enhancements meant that Angelene could charge much more than the going rate for Angel's services and at the same time be very decerning regarding her client list. Because after all, Angel was a working Andie that needed to earn her own keep.

But still, it wasn't any of those physical or programming features that made Angel as unique as she was.

For as long as there had been sex, there had been trade. And where sex became the trade, laws tended to get bent, if not broken.

Currently, it was illegal for a person to remotely access the video feed of an Andie or Andy without the express consent of all parties involved. However, it was widely known that the more disreputable love hotels secretly sold this voyeuristic service to people who couldn't afford an hour with a real android.

What was even more illegal was to fit an Andie with recording equipment. Merely owning an Andie that had recording equipment installed carried a mandatory prison sentence.

Not only did Angel have both of these features, but Angelene was able, as she was doing now, to remotely cast into Angel and take over her automated routines. Best of all, whilst a typical Andie had thousands of sensors in order to let them monitor physical stimulation, which in turn was fed to their processing unit so they could emote the correct simulated response, Angel had millions of such stimulation sensors. All of those sensors were fed directly into Angelene's own consciousness, so whatever Angel experienced, Angelene experienced it as if it were happening directly to her.

This was currently about as illegal as it was possible to get.

Through intermediaries, Angelene had for years been lobbying to get these legal restrictions lifted, if not eased, in order to make her proclivity for android sex a little less dangerous. However, after the worldwide AI doxing epidemic of 2038, sentiment towards privacy laws was still extremely hardcoded in society.

All of her adult life Angelene had a love / hate relationship with sex. Whilst she passionately loved sex on a physical level, she absolutely hated the emotional baggage that came with it. She couldn't bear the thought of anyone having either physical or emotional control over her body, even for the smallest amount of time.

Occasionally her sexual urges would become too strong, and she would spend the night fucking total strangers who she was guaranteed to never see again. But always she hated herself afterwards for giving into those urges.

Then, five years ago she had come across a company that was doing extremely advanced work on android sensor feedback and monitoring techniques, and in an instant, the idea of Angel was born.

Within four months Efastus had acquired the fledgling company and within another two months the company was broken up with its various research heads being reassigned to a number of other companies Efastus owned. The researcher's were then encouraged to carry on their individual research projects without being aware of what their former colleagues were now working on.

It had taken another two years for Angel to be born. No more than two parts or sub-systems were ever developed by the same company and the final assembly was undertaken by a single engineer who had been hired by a company that had no provable ties to either Angelene or Efastus. The engineer was paid sufficiently well and threatened sufficiently well, that his silence was all but guaranteed. But even if he did talk, there was no trail back to Angelene.

Officially, Angel was owned by a company operating out of New York, but that company was a shell, as were the next four other companies in the extremely complex ownership chain. The last three companies in the chain were all registered in different countries, all of which took their respective country's business confidentially laws extremely seriously.

In short, Angel's ownership could never be traced back to Angelene.

Whilst having Angel be such an exact copy of herself was an added risk, Angelene hadn't been able to resist insisting on such exacting detail. Besides, creating androids to look like real people wasn't unheard of, on the contrary, it was a growth market. So, if anyone ever did raise the question of Angel looking remarkably similar to Angelene, she could easily dismiss it as just another lookalike fetish.