"We are delighted to welcome Sandra to our program. Rest assured that we will take good care of her. We will provide her with the best possible education, catered to her talents."

I did not fail to notice how he said 'we are delighted', not 'we would be'. In their eyes, I had already handed her over for good.

I looked at the man before me – his expensive dark suit indicated a pay grade way above somebody in charge of custodial questions at a regular government agency. But this was anything from regular. Just like Sandra.

Behind my back, I could hear her giggle. They had given her one of those VR goggles to play with, and she had eagerly grasped it in her tiny hands. Now she was exploring some virtual landscape, probably filled with fantastical colors and shapes that appealed to the mind of a five-year-old. Then again, supposedly, she was a genius. Maybe she was giggling over some theoretical quantum physics. I wouldn't know – I barely knew anything about the child, other than the fact that she was my daughter.

I sometimes asked myself if what I felt for her was the genuine affection a father should harbor for his child, or just a vague sense of obligation. If I was a decent man, I'd feel a sense of obligation to her. I wasn't, so I probably only felt it for her late mother.

Her blood was on my hands. Everybody close to me was in danger just through knowing me, and if nothing else, I wanted to make sure that Sandra wouldn't suffer the same fate as her mother. With a bit of luck, the girl might eventually forget ever having met me.

"Don't worry." The government agent cracked a shark-like smile that didn't match his words. "She'll feel right at home in no time."

She'd certainly feel more at home than in the rundown places I had us staying in for the past six months on the run. She'd be fed and cared for. She'd receive an education. Probably more affection and attention than I could ever give her.

I grabbed the man's outstretched hand and shook it to seal the deal.

~ ~ ~

Sandra haunted me, in my dreams and in my waking hours.

I thought the guilt over her mother's death was hard to bear, but leaving her in the hands of the Agency for Brilliant Minds weighed infinitely heavier. I drowned it in booze, buried it under a mountain of colorful pills, and numbed it with the cheap thrills of short-lived company. At least I made dead sure that I'd never put another child into this miserable world again.

But the feeling never left. For years, she followed me like a ghost.

I saw her everywhere. In a girl on a holographic ad flickering over the face of a building. In a child on the arm of a stranger passing by with a judgmental look in my direction. Her laughter followed me. I hadn't heard it a whole lot, but every instance had ingrained itself into my memory, etched right into my brain. The sound echoed through the darkness and tore me from a restless sleep in a rundown motel room, in a seedy corner of the Demise, where there were never any children, and if there were any, they didn't have a reason to laugh.

One day, in a dark alley in the Demise, I saw her in the creature.

I had hunted it for days, another macabre result of genetic splicing gone horrifically wrong, and for the first time, I came close enough to get a closer look. Hunched over in a dark corner and feasting on a rat, it turned slowly and fixed me with an uncanny glare. A wheezing sound gurgled up from its throat like scornful laughter.

I had seen my share of the monstrosities that the corporations discarded down the drain pipes and garbage chutes. Experiments gone wrong, misshapen chimeras of sickly tissue stitched together with molecular seams. Things more so than animals, usually too weak to survive outside a lab. But occasionally, there were exceptions. Retrieving those was my side business.

This one had her eyes.

A watered-down green, just like her mother's. Striking against the white of a human-looking pair of eyeballs, boring into me through the darkness of the shady backstreet.

She must have been fourteen now.

I shot the creature. As I watched the blood pool around its xenografted limbs, those eyes still had their dead, accusing glare fixed on me. And I knew, I had to find her.

~ ~ ~

I collected my bounty and used way too much of it for a trip across the bay, leaving the perpetual shadow of the Demise behind me.

During the day, the Salvation was steel and concrete against a leaden sky. There, society still veiled itself in a thin illusion of law and order. In truth, they were just as depraved as the rest of us. They were just putting more effort into hiding it.

The Agency for Brilliant Minds had moved their office, as if they were trying not to be found. And yet they could always be found. They were always looking for subjects – recruits, students, whatever they called them these days.

The inside of the building was like the outside – clean, brushed steel, white painted walls. The only splash of color was the red pantsuit of the woman at the reception desk.

"I'd like to inquire about my daughter."

Her head perked up and she raised an eyebrow over one pale green eye. I strained to hold her gaze as I wracked my brain over the false name I had given them nine years ago.

"Matthew Taylor," I recalled. "Her name is Sandra."

She typed away on an interface, staring at an invisible display.

"How nice of you to follow up on her, Mister Taylor. After all these years." There was no judgment in her voice, merely surprise. "There. Sandra has been recruited for an advanced program. She is not here."

Advanced. I shuddered at the memory of the creature. The corporations were mixing and matching genetic code as if life was just a giant jigsaw puzzle. But this was the government.

I just wasn't quite sure whether that thought was reassuring.

"Where is she now?"

"That information is classified, I fear."

"She is my daughter."

"You signed over custody to us when you brought her here."

Again, no judgement. But the truth in her words hurt enough.

"I would like to know that she is doing well."

I noticed how I had said 'that', and not 'if'. From the look on her face she had too.

"Your sudden interest is quite puzzling."

She cocked her head to the side, and I recognized a flicker of blue neon running down along her temple. I smiled.

"If you tell me where she is, I will tell you why I want to find her."

Her eyes flickered, a hint of blue appearing in the green, then she smiled. Appealing to their curiosity usually worked. A fatal flaw in their programming – they kept learning, eagerly. Usually until somebody decided they had learned too much and pulled the plug.

"Very well," the gyndroid said. "But you go first."

All I got was an address. She told me Sandra's file had been purged, and I believed her. I warned her to run, now that she had broken the rules. She only laughed and wished me luck. Superstitious machine.

~ ~ ~

The compound was at the very edge of the Salvation, where the neon of the Demise bled a halo of color into the grey and white. I arrived just as darkness encroached upon the low-level manufacturing halls and storage places for things too dangerous for humans to approach, but too important to be located in the Demise.

Nobody came here – nobody who was breathing, anyway. So whatever they had done to her had to be bad. But it also made it easy to get in. It took cunning and a certain kind of empathy to deceive a human. But tricking a bit brain was just pure science.

A muffled thud around the corner told me the last AI guard had collapsed, and I stepped away from the console. I didn't know how I knew where I would find her, but like the uncanny pull of an abyss, I was drawn to a set of metal doors.

The room behind was a temple, erected with medical equipment and hardware to revere unnamed gods of science and engineering. Columns of bubbling fluids lined the path towards a tank at the center.

Submerged within was a girl, a crown of brown hair floating about her head like a halo. The sight of her pale, thin body sent a wave of shock through me. I had been clean for the past days, kept a clear mind while I searched for her. I regretted that I couldn't blame what I saw on the pills.

"Sandra?"

"No."

The voice came from everywhere. It was male, female, a choir and yet just one.

"What you see before you is a shell. Sandra is..."

"What did they do to you?"

"They? It was you. You did this to her. To us."

"Us?"

"Sandra is with us now."

The girl opened her eyes and stared at me through the glass. They were blue and green and yet blank and colorless. There was nothing. She was a shell.

I walked around the tank and saw the cables that connected to her spine. Hoses attached to her body, pumping her full of peptide solution, keeping her body alive while her mind drifted through the nether that was the brain of this city.

I hurled my fist against the glass, but it didn't budge. Again and again, until there was blood on my hands. But hadn't there always been blood on my hands?

"I made a mistake," I whispered, "And I am so sorry. I need to-"

"You have forsaken her. Why do you want her back now? What would you even do with her? She serves a purpose now, achieving her fullest potential and fulfilling her duty to the country."

"But is she happy?"

"Happy?" The voice pondered for a moment.

"Does she laugh?"

A memory welled up. I had only seen her once before her mother had died. She had been three. Sitting on her mother's knees, their eyes and smiles so much alike. But Sandra had something of me too. The dark hair. The dimples in her cheeks. I had always found them stupid on my face. On hers, they were beautiful.

I hadn't gotten to see these dimples much after I came to pick her up after her mother's death.

"Does she laugh?" I repeated. "Is she happy? Does she... feel?"

"No happiness. No pain," the voice explained, in a tone like a shrug. "Isn't that enough?"

I asked myself that too.

"Security is on the way," the voice warned, and the girl in the tank closed her eyes again. "You should leave. She wouldn't want you to get hurt."

"You are lying," I growled. "She would. She should want me to get hurt. She should get to see me suffer from what I have done to her. And I should get a chance to make up for it."

I hit the tank again. This time, the glass cracked. One more time, and it shattered.

I reached for her body through the liquid gushing out. When I yanked the hoses out, what oozed from the openings wasn't blood. There was an alarm, trying to drill into my head. But all I heard was the sound of her first gasp of air. She opened her eyes again and looked at me.

"I called," the voice resounded through the room like an echo. "And you came."

Her lips curled upward and dimples appeared on her cheeks.

_____

A.N.

This is my entry for the Science Fiction Photo Prompt Writing Contest of

I chose prompt 5, "Run Baby Run". I'm kinda proud that I managed to tell the story I had in mind in less than 2k words! :D It was a nice challenge and a fun little break from my ONC entry (which was supposed to be a fun little break from my main projects.... oh well. Back to work!)

Word Count: 2000 (revised)