She stared at me with her round dark eyes calmly, despite my silver revolver staring her straight in the face, her eyes looking past the barrel to hold my gaze.

How?

Not even a gun to her face could ruffle her calm?

She baffled me like no other mortal had before. I had stared down many with my gun, taking them down one by one on orders of the City. I never asked questions when I was given a target but the ending was always the same, pleading for their lives or the lives of their so called loved ones. And I snuffed them out without so much as a mere thought. For what good would their pleas and cries do me?

And yet this mortal woman did not behave as others in the past have. Not even close. No plea or word had yet to escape her lips, not even when I entered her one room flat at 3:45 a.m.

I had planned to enter when she was dead asleep, wake her up, hear the pleas and cries and then bang! That was how it always went. They were less troublesome when they were half asleep.

But when I entered, she was sitting on the only couch in her apartment facing the door. No TV playing, no music. She didn’t even look like she had been sleeping. Only the soft breeze from the window stirred in the room. It was as if she had been waiting for me. She barely flinched when the door opened and I stepped in. If I could have felt something, I would have been surprised that she was not following the script. But seeing her I merely raised my gun and pointed it at her.

And she just stared at me.

Never in all the years has this happened. I was Prototype PseudoMor, a section of cyborgs that was built to mimic humans for the sake of monitoring them. We were created to keep an eye on the humans and make sure they were obeying the City and it’s rules. A special branch of PseudoMor was sent to dispatch those that were deemed harmful to the City.

Ironically, my kind used to be humans once upon a time but underwent experiments and found capable of becoming a PseudoMor. We are part human but not human. To that end, we were set loose upon the city to get close to the humans for the purpose of keeping them in line. We were expected to act human yet not have allegiances or feelings toward them. Even the City itself hated us and never ceased to remind us of our inferiority to them all the while utilizing us for their own purposes.

Even signs on business stated “No PseudoMors allowed”. That was laughable. How would they even know if one walked into the door?

They wouldn’t.

That was the point. We blended in seamlessly into the human population. The only way you would know we were not human was to break us apart and see our insides. But what human would be strong enough to overpower a PseudoMor?

Be that as it may, humans needed keepers otherwise they would ruin it for the collective. History has shown that, time and time again. Left to their own devices they would self-destruct. They had come close many times, almost taking the whole planet with them. How could they be trusted to govern themselves when they frequently messed it up? Even among them they were so disconnected from one another. This one could turn on that one with a mere provocation. Greed and ego was their failing.

So could one fault the City for such measures as I?