Isolation by Dan Wells Page B

different,” said McGuire. “The link lets you know what those emotions are, but it doesn’t make you care about them. This is how you must use emotion—as a tool to be understood, manipulated, and exploited.”
    Heron considered this. “Does that mean Partials have no conscience?”
    “Most of them do,” said McGuire. “By international law, all BioSynthetic sentients must have empathy, and a conscience, to keep them from hurting their creators. It is the primary safeguard that makes you more useful, and therefore more valuable, than robotics.”
    Heron cocked her head to the side. “You said ‘most.’”
    McGuire smiled. “Thetas are designed with no conscience at all. A soldier is different from an assassin—when you kill, you must feel nothing for your target.”
    “Then our existence is a crime,” said Heron. “My life is against the law.”
    “Some laws are made to be broken.”
    The words echoed in Heron’s mind as she stared at Huan Do. I must feel nothing for my target. She stepped forward, as silent as a shadow, and got to work.

ZUOQUAN CITY, SHANXI PROVINCE, CHINA
    June 9, 2060
    H eron’s mind raced through the possibilities: Would NADI really destroy their own Partials? Of course they would—they considered the Partials animals at best, and tools at worst. Ten thousand soldiers were a lot to lose, but they could always make more. It fit with the loss of the factory, too, because no army meant no need for bullets. That’s why my handler seemed so odd about my orders: He didn’t care if I captured the generals, because it genuinely doesn’t matter. Destroy the antiair guns at all costs, enable the air strike, and everything after was a fireball. Confirm?
    A nanosecond passed, and she turned next to her options, thinking first of how she could survive. She could hijack a Rotor and fly clear—it was 2240; there was still plenty of time to escape before the air strike landed. She could even take the satbox with her, as a sign of good faith to her handler for going beyond her orders. She had no great urge to show them good faith, since they had shown none to her, but where else was she to go? She could blend in anywhere she went, especially in China, but . . . did she truly wish to spend her life as a nameless citizen in a conquered country? She was a Partial. She was not built for that.
    But was she built to die?
    She thought then about the rest of the Partials. Every devil in the army, as Wu put it; nearly ten thousand men and women, and in twenty minutes they would all be dead. Heron knew that this should bother her, and it did—on a personal level. She had been betrayed; she had been discarded. But it was more than that. Even as she analyzed the situation, she turned that analysis on herself and saw that she was losing her . . . what? Not her innocence, for she was an engineered assassin; she’d had no innocence to lose since the moment her genome was swirled together in a vat. But she was losing something else: her own illusions about herself, and about the way her mind worked. Ten thousand of her brothers and sisters were being sent blindly to their deaths, and here she sat without an ounce of sadness for them. She had been built to feel nothing, and trained to feel even less. They had made her incomplete, and her reaction to this massive betrayal proved just how deeply that incompleteness ran. She was a broken doll, dancing on the end of their strings.
    She had to save the Partials, not because she loved them, but because she hated their creators.
    Another nanosecond passed, and she began to form her plan. How could she save the other Partials? If she warned the Partial army, then the bait would be lost and the air strike would be canceled. The situation would stay the same, except that she would be known as a traitor and forced out of the loop, completely unable to prevent the same sacrifice when they tried it again in the future. If she called off the Chinese forces, the results