warning sign pops up next to his face, and I finally decide it's time to kick into defence mode. There's no discernible change from an outsider's perspective, but inside my brain and its hardware, a dozen little defence applications are springing to life, waiting for my signal that they should start wreaking havoc. I usually slip into this mode several times a week, but in my line of work it's safer to err on the side of paranoia. "What's this really for? Insurance in case I mess up?"

"I can't slip anything past you." The doctor grins, revealing two rows of surprisingly well worn teeth. "Let's just say your employer doesn't like to take chances, and you're the best person in the business."

"From what you're saying, I'm pretty much the only person in the business."

"Exactly. Now, please, lie down here while I perform a quick scan of your neural pathways. It'll only take a few minutes."

For some reason, I black out.

I feel rain on my face, a light drizzle. My nostrils fill with the scent of wet plants and damp soil. I open my eyes to discover that I'm lying on a park bench less than a mile from my flat. That's never happened to me before: I've always stayed awake just fine for brain scans in the past, both objectively and subjectively. I summon my clock application, its translucent display fading into my vision and out again for just long enough for me to tell that I was out for almost two hours, which is about right for the journey home.

I stand up, a little giddy at first, and tentatively start to make my way through the park. By the time I'm striding through the streets, stepping around all the puddles on the pavement, I've had a few minutes to reflect on the day's events. I decide not to let Mike or his crony doctor get to me. Let him be pissed off at me. I'm the last human assassin. Replacing me with an android would be a terrible PR move, and he knows it.

Still, I can't overlook the fact that something is terribly wrong, although it's probably just healthy paranoia on my part to assume that it concerns me at all. Maybe he's just shielding me from some dull business problems he's having. Whatever it is, I'm glad I don't have to think about it anymore tonight.

As I walk into my driveway, I think about how I can spend the rest of the evening. Maybe a hot shower followed by a stir fry and a nature documentary. Both the matter and the subject matter were popular torrents on my favourite Swedish tracker the previous week. It really puts my job into perspective when I'm reminded how the human race is the only species that isn't still wrapped up in daily life-or-death struggles for food, or at least, not for copyright free food.

As I approach my block of flats, for some reason I feel uneasy. I realise something's wrong, although I can't quite work out what it is yet. I switch to defence mode yet again as I press the palm of my hand against the security pad, look into the retina scanner and open the door as quietly as I can. To my surprise, my eyes' apps seem to have been upgraded. I have them set not to update automatically, which means they must have been switched while I was out from the brain scan. No wonder I lost consciousness: they'd been altering me, not just passively examining me. I switch modes again, figuring that it's better to take my chances on my own, rather than risk firing off unknown software that could do anything from crash to sabotage me. I creep along the corridor, then open the door to my flat just as quietly.

I switch my eyes to +IR mode so that they overlay the infrared frequencies of the electromagnetic radiation around me over the top of the human-visible ones. The eerie glow of the walls and pipes is familiar enough, but the human sized and shaped blob glowing in the living room isn't. I switch the vision to only twenty percent infrared overlay so that I don't have as much information to distract me, and I brace myself.

I keep two katanas hung up decoratively on the wall in my living room, and