"So you're doing this for her?" Tescadji ventured to say. "You're here because of your wife?"

Jenius nodded, and then removed a marble-sized orb from his desk. He switched it on, and it emitted an image of a beautiful elf maiden with an alluring plait of luxurious platinum blond hair. She was dressed in an ATF uniform, but with a slightly older design. Interestingly, she looked almost like her husband, as if they could have been related. Only her hair was longer, and she had a slightly more prominent nose.

"My wife, Raiya, was a special model," Jenius explained, "built by a friend of my foster father's, and so she resembled an elf physically. Even I was none the wiser as we worked together for years. Ultimately, I found out the truth after she was injured during … well … let's just call it a very intense assignment. In the end, it was the nurses at the hospital who told me the truth. They told no one else, so there was no danger of her true identity being exposed. I'd fallen in love with her by then and married her, and to the rest of the elf community, she was an elf. But I knew that because she was truly an android, I needed to work for the ideals of all androids. That's why I chose to stay a part of the force even after she died. So I guess you're right. I did it all for her … Divine rest her soul."

"Sir, how did she die?" Tescadji asked quietly, "if you don't mind my asking, that is."

"Not at all," Jenius replied congenially, shaking his head. "I'm not as sensitive over the subject as I used to be. It was a virus, actually, some kind of data bug a hacker designed to infect androids. It was an amateurish attempt at mass murder, seeing how androids are built with self-evolving virus guards and complex firewalls around their memory cores. So for most of them, it never got through. Unfortunately, my wife was one of the few who were affected. She died slowly afterwards. Her father … or creator, I guess you could say, had died the previous year, and I couldn't risk taking her to a diagnostics center, for fear of being discovered. So I did all the work myself. But in the end, I just didn't have the skills. There was nothing I could do. She died in my arms about two weeks later." A single tear rolled slowly down his cheek.




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