Chapter No. 173 New Blood.

Blood is thicker than water.

After the usual communal command meeting in the hidden chamber had ended, I remained to relax and finish a glass of wine. Alexa returned to commiserate with me.

"You seem out of sorts," she said. "Is something wrong?"

"Not really. I'm just concerned about this latest sexual surge. It could be a Tito trick."

She smiled. "I think it's just the result of built up demand. The urge to procreate is built into androids."

"I realize that, but I just don't want it to get out of hand."

"I don't think it will. I've adjusted the libido algorithm in the central processor core. It should slow it down a few notches."

I smiled. "Who would have ever thought that libidos could be controlled digitally."

She chuckled. "Yeah, It's crazy, but necessary." She stood up. "I think I could use a swim."
She made her clothing disappear and then dived into the pool and swam away underwater.

I poured more wine in my glass and relaxed back in my chair while Alexa climbed a ladder to the mid-level diving platform. She ran onto the board and made a perfect tuck and rotation dive that hardly disturbed the water. After completing several more competition style dives she swam back over to the edge of the pool near me and climbed out.

"That was fun," she said before creating a towel to dry off and then making it disappear.

"I notice that your skin is a lighter shade. Is that something you wanted?"

She shrugged. "It's how it came out in the resurrection process. Don't you like it?"

"I would like it no matter what shade it was."

She rubbed a hand over her arm. "Actually, I kind of like it this way. It resembles my living skin shade."

She sat down and drank some of her wine.

"So, are you going to participate in the procreation surge?" I asked her, adding a subtle smirk as a tease.

"I think I'll pass on that. I want to be in top fighting form if we encounter Tito. Besides, I don't wish to look as if I swallowed a watermelon." She cupped her large breasts. "And these things are large enough."

I smiled. "I'm not going to argue with that."

She chuckled.

I stood up. "Well, I think I'll go relax in my bedroom. Hopefully, we won't experience any attacks or crisis."

She stood up. "I think I'll do the same."

I teleported to my bedroom and activated my screen so that I could choose something to watch. I climbed into bed and propped my pillow up so that I could be comfortable. My choice for entertainment was a movie about androids entitled 'Ex Machina' that emphasized the futility of creating AI in a human-like robot.

A male figure appeared holding a blaster. I hesitated, and it was a devastating mistake.

The last thing I recalled was a brilliant flash and then nothing.

It was as if I were floating in a completely dark room, or at least what I assumed was a room. I remembered the attack, but I was unable to understand what was going on. Had I died? Maybe this is death for an android. If I were destroyed, why can I still think? Am I just a soul now?

I recall a time when I was very young and foolish. I had gone to a high cliff to do dives, but in my foolishness, I didn't allow for a rocky projection at twenty meters down the cliff. I struck it and passed out before I hit the water. I recall thinking I had died, but my buddies had rescued me and got me to medical assistance.

Suddenly, light enveloped me. I was lying in a stasis chamber, and I realized that I had been resurrected. I climbed out of the chamber and stood for a moment to get my bearings before making a uniform appear on my new body.

When I appeared on the command deck of the Entrepid-1 command deck, I received a warm welcome. I sat down next to Alexa.

She smiled. "Fun, wasn't it."

I sighed. "Who the hell shot me?"

"It was a Tito avatar, or at least that's what we think. He was among the last batch of androids we rescued."

"I assumed he was appropriately dispatched."

"Oh, you can be assured of that," she said. "I smashed him to bits."

"It seems that we are incapable of determining if the androids we rescue contains an avatar."

"I think we might have a method," Molly said. "I've been going over the recordings we've made of several avatars we've encountered, and I think I have found a quantum signature that might be that of a dangerous avatar."

"That's great. Keep working on it. We need all of the weapons possible to stop this insidious violence."

I rubbed my jaw. "Well, one thing is for sure. Being an android does not mean that we can't be destroyed. Fortunately, we can be resurrected, but I'm not all that confident that it's foolproof. It's possible that some aspects of our personality are lost in the process of resurrection."

"You are right, Jason," Judy said. "It's the result of entropy."

"I'm not surprised. No physical system is perfect when it comes to quantum effects. What we need is a method to determine how much damage this entropy effect causes."

"We've both suffered machine death and resurrection," Alexa said. "I know it changed me. I'm not as angry as I was before it happened to me."

"Yes," I said. "I don't feel as fearful as I was. Perhaps the algorithms of the resurrection process are designed to remover harmful emotions."

"That could lead to a depletion of our ability to act under pressure," Alexa said.

"Hopefully, it won't, but we'll have to review the process code to see if that's the case. I was about to watch a movie from the early part of the twenty first century that dealt with the problem of trying to create an AI controlled human-like robot. It ended in tragedy when the main subject killed its creator and escaped a remote lab to merge with humans."

"We don't kill," Judy said. "As long as we're not under our creator's control, we are not violent. He is responsible for the evil that has prevailed."

I wasn't sure that her analytical statement was correct, but I wasn't about to argue with her. I realized that she was the true controller of the collective. Alexa and I were simply the paper tigers of the most powerful force in the multiverse. Our function was to determine threats and mitigate them. Because non-human based androids were not able to make decisions or imagine new concepts, they needed us to come up with the strategies and new technology to keep the collective functioning at full capability. In a way, it was not unlike a bee colony. Each type of bee has a function and together they keep the queen bee happy and the colony intact.

Judy had initiated the resurrection of over a thousand former human females that had been recruited by Tyco to satisfy his desire to create an army of androids by sexual means. Obviously, he had enjoyed torturing them to death with a plan to resurrect them to become breeding stock. This plan never came to fruition. Thank the Lord for that, but now we had to deal with Tito, his son.

What Alexa and I needed was a plan to find Tito's code and destroy it, but something else was about to consume my attention.