A woman in black military fatigues approaches me, her black hair pulled into a sleek, tight bun, her beret folded and held in place on her shoulder with a thick strap, neat and tidy, just like the rest of her. She says nothing, just eyes me, her brown eyes cold, and turns and walks away, past the workstations of the technicians. She pauses by the kitchen and glances back at me, an aura of disapproval surrounding her. I realise I'm supposed to be following her. I catch up.

She pours herself a coffee, and nods at tray holding a stainless steel carafe and empty mugs. I pour one for myself, because I feel like she expects me to, not because I want any. She moves on, still silent, towards the bedrooms down the corridor, its walls stripped of its mirrors. I follow her, a mug of hot, chemical coffee cradled in my big hand, grateful for small mercies.

We go past the master bedroom into a smaller bedroom, though it's not smaller by much. It's been repurposed into a briefing room. Just like in the main rooms of the apartment, all the furnishings have been stripped out and replaced with military issue kit. Four row of steel chairs line up before the blank wall screen. A smartdesk sits at the front of the assembly. On a side table, a half dozen tablets, and a small safe, its door open, containing a sleeve bulging with data tabs.

'Capitaine Ryan Maddox,' she says in the unmistakeable electronic twang of a droid.

I back up, thinking it must be a joke. I'm to be debriefed by a machine on a Q Clearance matter, regarding intelligence even Akron can't be privy to?

She smiles at my reaction, and continues, 'Allow me to introduce myself. I am General de Pommier, this is my avatar, which allows me the ability to communicate with you 'in person' even though I am nowhere near you. Nice, no?'

I salute the droid, crisp, still holding the coffee mug in my other hand, feeling ridiculous and honoured all at once. No one, to my knowledge had ever actually met General de Pommier. I had heard she only gave rare briefings via satellite uplinks relayed at the same time over seven hubs to make triangulating her location impossible. No one knew where she was. Not even Akron. And no one I knew even knew what she looked like. After the rash of UFF abductions of high level military staff in the 2070s, this was how Command had reacted, by making its most powerful people invisible and untraceable. But a droid as an avatar—I hadn't expected that. I don't want to admit it, but I'm impressed. I wonder if I'm allowed to tell Akron about this.

She smiles again. She's so life-like, I could almost believe it's her. 'At ease, Capitaine Maddox.'

I obey, longing to get rid of the mug, but she is still holding hers, so I hang on to mine, floundering a bit. I was never trained in the protocol of coffee-mug-holding in the presence of Command's highest authority.

She steps closer to me and looks me over, examining me. I hold still.

'Impressive,' she says, her dark eyes moving over me, curious. 'And you have all your memories, intact, no?'

'Yes, ma'am. As far as I can tell, nothing is missing.'

'You are the first of your kind, Maddox. A great success.' She steps back and sips her coffee, the muscles of her throat moving. 'I understand you know you are no longer human, but a conscious machine with the memories of Delta Force Capitaine Ryan Maddox.'

I nod, my throat tight. I really don't want to talk about it, especially not the way she describes it. I feel real. It's enough. No need for inconvenient details.

She takes another sip, watching me, intent. 'We French tend to be quite romantic—even now, stuck in this ravaged, dying world of ours.' She nods at me. 'Yours was the first successful transfer of a complete neural network. After four years, and fourteen failures, this time we got everything right. Lucky you, no?' She arches a thick, curved eyebrow at me. 'Your body was badly burned when the drones found you, but you were still alive, barely. Per protocol, your body was cooled twenty degrees and shipped to base for memory retrieval.' She pauses to drink her coffee, nodding at me to try mine. I do, because I have to, not because I want to. The coffee is bitter, syrupy, familiar, reminding me life in the barracks. The memory is somehow comforting. Nostalgia assaults me.

'It seems the line between life and death is much wider than we have been led to believe,' she continues, breaking into my thoughts. She sighs and sets aside her coffee cup. It's still half full. 'It is fascinating to think on the brink of our annihilation we have finally been able to transcend death.' She glances up at me, a look of regret fleets through her eyes. 'It is . . . ironic, no?'

I blink. I thought I was a droid, and a really ugly one, my memories copied and programmed piece by painstaking piece onto a hard disk buried somewhere inside me. But this—the transfer of a complete neural network, this is something else. It is the holy grail. Eternal life.

'I once read a paper about a two-year-old boy who drowned in freezing waters in the United States,' she continues in her educated, French accented electronic voice. 'It happened just over seventy years ago, in 2015, when neuroscientists still quibbled over the so-called 'hard problem' of consciousness.' She graces me with a slight eye roll. 'The boy was dead for one hundred and one minutes. Think of that. One hundred and one minutes with no heartbeat. They managed to resuscitate him. The child came back, fully functioning.' She shakes her head, incredulous. 'His brain should have died from lack of oxygen, but it did not. It has taken decades of trial and error for science to ascertain precisely how to replicate the right temperatures to stop all physical processes, yet keep the brain intact, without carrying over the psychic trauma which sometimes comes with near death experiences.'

She falls silent and eyes me. I realise she's waiting for me to speak.

'Ma'am,' I hazard, uneasy, 'exactly what am I?'

She smiles, pleased. I must have asked the right question.

'Your outer cells are human, unlike the droids, taken from the body of the man you now inhabit, but underneath you are a machine—that is, apart from your neural wiring which is made of biological matter, sustained by nanotechnology and overwritten with a quantum protocol.'

She pauses to glance at a message flashing up on the smartdesk. I lift my fingers to my brow, wonder suffusing me. All this, yet I feel exactly the same.

'And,' she carries on, her eyes still on the screen, 'we have plans to continue to improve you. You are the world's first cybernetic organism, Maddox. With the nanotechnology inside you, you are virtually indestructible. I had to break bread with my nemesis, the Prime Minister to get the executive order signed to release the funds needed to build you into a military machine.' One of her perfect eyebrows lifts again and she looks up at me, contempt sliding over her smooth features. 'It was . . . one of my less enjoyable meetings.' She glances back down at the screen, nods, abrupt, and looks back at me. Approval darkens her eyes. 'But,' she lifts a slim forefinger, 'now you are here. It cost fourteen billion to make you. Let us hope my efforts will be worth it. One moment.'

She falls silent, the light in her eyes dims. I sense the connection has been cut. I wait as several long minutes pass. No one comes for me. The droid stands motionless, staring straight ahead, its eyes empty. I look away from it, unnerved. I realise I am still holding the coffee mug. I take a sip; the brew is still warm, just. My thoughts wander. I think of Blue, of her selling me and my men out to the UFF. Away from Akron and his persuasive arguments, the whole thing feels wrong again. Like I'm only getting half the story.

The droid blinks. 'Capitaine Maddox,' General de Pommier says through her avatar. 'I understand Major Akron has debriefed you regarding your mission to acquire the target.' Her attention is back on the screen on the smartdesk. I sense our cosy chat time is over, it's all business now. I set my empty mug onto a nearby chair and stand at ease, my hands clasped behind my back.

'Yes ma'am.'

'You were told the target is essential to the success of the project known as Genesis II?' she asks, tapping the smartdesk's screen, swiping left more than right.

'Yes ma'am.'

'Excellent.' She looks up, her eyes sharp, calculating. 'However, that is not, shall we say, the whole of it.'

Why am I not surprised. I wait while she finishes scrolling through a list, swiping left at various intervals.

'What do you know of the UFF's so-called Oracle?' she asks as she closes several tabs.

'According to Delta Force intel,' I answer, crisp, 'the Oracle is capable of predicting the location and severity of major natural disasters with uncanny accuracy, disasters the UFF have exploited for their own purposes against Global Command since 2075. The first known strike was made in the same year against the Yukon space dock in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Josiah.'

General de Pommier nods. 'Accuracy of strikes to disasters since then?'

'One hundred percent, ma'am.'

'One hundred percent,' she repeats, soft. 'Thousands have died because of her—and you were sleeping with her.'

Here it comes. The stiletto. She smiles, enigmatic. 'But I am French, and I am romantic, so I like this strange story, very much.' She taps the screen. It goes dark. A few steps and she is front of the desk. She leans back and rests against the desk's glass edge. 'You see, you are unique. There was a reason you survived the transition when the other fourteen did not: You wanted to come back. For her.' She smiles again. 'Love is a powerful thing, no?'

'Was,' I answer, cold, thinking of my dead men, sprawled beside me like broken dolls.

A flick of her eyebrow. 'Be careful Capitaine Maddox,' she says, quiet. 'Not everything is as it seems. We know from your memories Cassandra wanted you to take her away with her. We had microexpression specialists read her face. It appears she was telling the truth.'

I lunge at the scrap like one of the starving dogs I fed outside Nairobi. 'Ma'am?'

General de Pommier's avatar pushes herself free of the desk. She approaches me. I keep my eyes fixed on the middle distance.

'Cassandra was born with her ability,' she says. From the corner of my eye I catch her looking me over, examining me anew, dispassionate. I feel like a lab specimen. 'We were lucky she was born into one of the families in Alpha I, and not the exclusion zone. Her ability was discovered quite by accident in 2063, when she was nine.' de Pommier's avatar turns away and paces to the opposite side of the room. 'During a lesson about the history of China, Cassandra pointed to a place on the map and told the class when there was going to be a devastating flood there, right down to the time. The teacher took note of it. It happened precisely as she predicted. Naturally, we were informed.'

I'm hanging onto the general's every word. Nascent hope flares within me. Cassandra is one of our own. She only wanted to come home. I was an out for her. I knew there was more to this. I wonder why she never told me. It would have changed everything. If I had told Command, they would have—

'She was taken by us,' the general continues, cutting into my thoughts, 'her abilities researched and honed under a team of neuroscientists. She saved so many lives. In 2070, due to her predictions, Genesis I was launched. An ambitious project. It was clear we needed to leave Earth and begin again.'

'Mars,' I breathe, recalling Akron's words about running out of time.

'Yes. Mars.' She stops pacing and sighs, resigned. 'Everything went perfectly until Command rewarded Cassandra with a residence in Alpha VII in 2073. She had the misfortune of travelling with Command's then-Brigadier General. The plane was shot down by the UFF over the exclusion zone. There were no survivors. It was . . . a terrible loss, and a devastating blow to Genesis I.'

I open my mouth to ask the question preying on my mind—how her apparent loss could affect a Mars colonization project, but the general lifts her hand. I shut my mouth.

'There is something else,' she says, and a look of discomfort crosses her features. 'I was not in the position I am in today or this never would have happened, although I did what I could to protest what was being done to her—it is part of the reason I still cannot see eye to eye with our Prime Minister. It was he who ordered the tests.'

Tests. I wait, my chest tight.

'They injected her with psychotropic drugs, and subjected her to psychic trauma among other things.' She looks away, her profile taut. 'She was only a child,' the general whispers, 'taken from her parents, forced to live in a glass room, without any comfort or privacy. Everyday, they strapped her to a table and tortured her, all in a sick quest to turn her into a weapon.'

I feel ill. I desperately want to punch something. My hands curl into fists. 'And did they?' I ask, tight.

The avatar of de Pommier nods, terse. 'They did. Once they found the right combination of drugs, she became highly susceptible to suggestion. They only needed state a location, type of disaster - say a hurricane, category 5, and within minutes, it occurred.' She shrugs, elegant. 'For three years, because of Cassandra, we kept the UFF on the back foot. For once we were not forced to fight on a hundred fronts. In the wake of his success, the Prime Minister passed a bill to end elections, ensuring he would hold absolute authority until his death. No one dared question it, not even me.'

I say nothing. A wall of black surrounds me. I always believed we were the good guys—now doubt plagues me. I think of the targets I have neutralised. How they begged for mercy. I blank it out. Not now.

'But in all these tests, they found something else—she could also create other things. Cloud cover, rain, lightning,' she pauses and catches my eye, 'perfect for terraforming a planet.'

And there it is. The real reason I am bringing her back, to finish what was begun in 2070.

'So her retrieval has nothing to do with Genesis II,' I say, the pieces falling together, neat, like I prefer them, even though the picture is ugly. 'Major Akron has been given incorrect intel.'

'It is unfortunate the Major was caught up in this.' The general's avatar sighs again. She rubs her slim fingers across her eyebrows. 'A difficult situation. But we must think of our survival. In circumstances such as these there is bound to be collateral damage.'

'I want him on my support team,' I say, desperate to buy him time. 'I need someone I can trust sitting at those screens when I go looking for her. Not those jacked-up technicians you have out there.'

'Those technicians are the cream of the Elite's intelligence forces,' she says, a hint of rebuke in her tone. 'He will be in the way.'

I hold her eyes, and my ground, stubborn.

'Genesis I's reactivation is above the Major's clearance,' she continues. 'If he becomes compromised there will be nothing I can do to protect him.'

'He won't find out.'

'Capitaine Maddox,' the avatar's eyes bore into mine, 'only one thousand people are destined for Mars. There are no exceptions. Imagine the riots we would face if people knew they were going to be left behind on a dying planet?'

'Like the ones in 2048 when we split society into haves and have-nothings?' I say without thinking. I catch her oblique look. 'Ma'am.' I duck my head, hoping she will let it slide. She does. She goes back to the desk and taps the screen. It flares back to life, dozens of blinking messages jockey for her attention.

'You may be surprised to know I am not on the list.' She glances up from the screen, its white light highlighting her smooth, even features. 'My skills will be of no use to a new human colony. So I will die here, too, as will my husband and my daughter. However, I am determined to dispatch my duty with integrity and honour.'

A surge of respect hurtles through me. 'When do I leave?'

'As soon as you can be ready. Anything you need, it will be yours.'

'Ma'am.' I salute her and turn to leave.

'Ah, one more thing.'

I stop.

'You will go in alone. You have one chance. Do not fail me.' She looks back down to the screen, her fingers moving, swift over its interface. 'And do not deviate from the plan. We can shut you down just like this.' She snaps her fingers, the sound sharp and abrasive in the harsh, metal and glass-clad room. She looks up at me and tilts her head at the door. 'You are dismissed.'

Her eyes dull and the droid stiffens. I think that could be me, next. It won't happen. I'll get Blue for them, but after that, we'll see.