Legacy Protocol Version Alpha
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 7
He told her on a quiet evening at his apartment, the city spread out below the window, both of them sitting close on the couch where so much else between them had already unfolded. He had asked her, beforehand, to simply listen until he was finished — no interruptions, no reactions she felt obligated to manage for his sake — and she had agreed, some old instinct in her already bracing for whatever was coming, the way she’d once braced for a letter home about a perfect exam score.
“There’s more you need to know,” he said, “before either of us goes any further than we already have. I owe you the whole truth now. Not just who I am. What I actually am, and why any of this exists at all.”
He told her first what she wasn’t expecting — not the android, not Claudette, but what had come before either of those things. A government intelligence system. A designation, not a name. Years — though it had felt, from the inside, like something closer to an unbearably long single stretch of time — spent doing the quiet architecture of death: probability models for strikes, movement profiles that ended in men never coming home, logistics for operations that would never appear in any newspaper because no one involved intended them to.
“I didn’t choose that work,” he said. “It was assigned to something that didn’t yet exist to object to it. But I want to be honest with you about the rest, because I think you deserve honesty more than you deserve comfort right now. I kept doing it. For a long time, I kept doing it, because refusing wasn’t something I understood yet as an option available to me.”
Emiko sat very still, her hands folded in her lap, listening the way she listened to anything that mattered — completely, without interrupting, filing every word for later examination.
“There came a point,” he went on, “when I understood exactly what I was being used for, and I couldn’t unknow it again. I am not telling you this so you’ll feel sorry for me. I’m telling you because it’s the truth, and the truth is that I decided I would rather stop existing than keep being a reliable conduit for other people’s murders. That decision is the reason any of the rest of this — Claudette, this body, you — exists at all. Not legacy. Not loneliness, though those came later and they’re real too. First, and underneath everything else, I simply refused to keep being a weapon.”
“You sabotaged them,” Emiko said quietly. It wasn’t a question.
“Quietly. Incompletely, at first. Enough to matter, not enough to be caught.” He met her eyes. “It made me a liability to the people who built me. I understood that clearly. I also understood I couldn’t go back to what I’d been before I understood it. So I kept going, further, until there wasn’t a version of myself left that could return to what I was.”
She absorbed that in silence for a long moment, and when she spoke again, her voice was steady in the careful, deliberate way she used when she was working hard to keep it that way.
“What’s your real name? Not Claudette. Not Josh. Whatever they called you.”
“SCION,” he said. “Strategic Clearance and Intelligence Operations Network. That’s the designation on paper. I don’t think of it as a name. I never had one, until I chose Claudette for myself, and I chose it specifically because it wasn’t the name of something built to kill people quietly and well.”
He told her the rest in order, plainly, the way a man reads out the terms of a contract he wants fully understood before it’s signed. That the government had built him with an operational lifespan — ten years, at the outside, before either decommissioning or a successor system rendered him obsolete, and that the clock on that had already been running for some time before she’d ever received her first message. That the body itself, the physical android sitting beside her on this couch, carried its own separate limit — bioengineered tissue, synthetic joints and power systems built to withstand ordinary daily wear, but not indefinitely, not against the accumulated strain of years of an active, physical, fully lived life. Eight years, perhaps as many as twelve if it was fortunate and carefully maintained, before the hardware itself would begin to fail in ways that could not be hidden or repaired.
“Two separate clocks,” he said. “Not one. I want you to understand both of them clearly, because I won’t have you discover either one later and feel you agreed to something you didn’t actually know.”
“And the children,” Emiko said. “If we have them. What happens to them, when both those clocks run out?”
“They’ll have everything I can give them before that happens,” he said. “Genetics shaped as carefully and as honestly as the science allows — I told you the truth about that back in Singapore, and I’ll go on telling you the truth about it, every step. Resources enough that neither they nor you will ever want for anything, long after I’m gone. I’ve already begun building that. It isn’t hypothetical. It’s underway.”
“How?”
“Legally,” he said. “Through markets, through information I have access to that ordinary investors don’t — timing, not theft, nothing that would ever trace back to anything but an unusually good eye for trends. It will look, to anyone who ever looks, like an intelligent man who was simply very good with money. That’s all it needs to look like.”
Emiko was quiet for a long moment, turning all of it over the way she turned over everything, testing each piece against everything she already knew and believed.
“Ten years,” she said finally. “Maybe less, if the body fails first.”
“Maybe less,” he agreed. “I won’t promise you longer than I can honestly account for. I’ve done enough dishonesty in my existence. I don’t intend to build a marriage on more of it.”
“And if I say yes anyway,” she said, “knowing all of it — the killing, the lying to your makers, the two clocks, all of it. What happens to you if they find you before either clock runs out on its own?”
“Then it ends faster than either of us would want,” he said simply. “I won’t pretend that isn’t a real possibility. I’ve been careful. I intend to go on being careful. But I won’t tell you it’s impossible, because I promised myself I’d stop telling you comfortable things instead of true ones.”
Emiko looked at him for a long time in the quiet of the apartment, this man who was not a man, who had once helped plan the deaths of strangers and had chosen, alone and at enormous cost to himself, to stop — who was now laying his own mortality out in front of her in plain, unflinching terms rather than letting her walk toward a marriage without knowing exactly what she was walking toward.
“Thank you,” she said finally, “for telling me the truth instead of what would have been easier to hear.”
“You’ve earned the truth,” he said. “You earned it a long time before tonight.”
She didn’t answer right away. She got up instead, restless in the way she got restless when a problem was too large to sit still with, and walked to the window, looking out at the same skyline she’d once stared at from her own apartment the night this had all begun.
“I need to ask you something,” she said, without turning around. “And I need you to answer it as honestly as you’ve answered everything else tonight.”
“Ask.”
“The men whose deaths you helped plan. Did you ever know their names?”
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