with the element of surprise I might manage to grab one before the intruder knows I'm there. I have no idea if he or she is even armed, so I don't want to take any chances.

The blur moves like she or he is about to stand up, so I run into the room as quickly as I can and grab a katana. Despite bracing myself, I'm not prepared for what I see next.

The figure dashes for the other katana, then leaps back to the other side of the room so we can properly study each other. I can see her clearly now, from her thermal imprint to the deep brown colour of the artificial eyes hidden behind her epicanthic folds. In every discernible way, she looks identical to me. She's even wearing the fleece, t-shirt and jeans I picked out this morning. Even more incredibly, she looks just as confused as I feel.

"Oh, that's just perfect," she says. "Did Mike send you?"

"What?" I don't take my eyes off her. Her face is serious; her poise calculated. She's ready to attack me without warning, just waiting to know for sure that I'm a threat. I nod, gesturing towards her. "Who are you?"

"Suzi Yamada," she says.

"That's impossible!"

"Evidently it isn't." She speaks without moving her head a single degree, watching me carefully. "Listen, I've had a really bad day today. Some phony doctor tried to kill me earlier, and it doesn't look like you're shaping up to be any friendlier."

"You killed him?" I ask.

"It's a habit." She lunges towards me, her sword pointed directly at my chest, aiming straight for my heart.

I manage to nudge her blade out of the way of my body with my own sword, redirecting the force of her sprint away from me. "I didn't come here to kill you. Can't we just talk like civilised adults?" I then sweep my blade around, aiming to slice off her bicep, but she similarly counters my move. In a weird sort of way, it's exhilarating to finally have a worthy opponent to fight—someone who could actually beat me.

"Let me guess." She swings her blade around to my hip and I counter it. "The last thing you remember is Mike sending you to some creepy bastard who gave you a brain scan, then you just woke up somewhere strange."

"How do you know that?" I try to stab her in the stomach, but she sweeps my blade away.

"Surely it must have occurred to you by now that one of us is an android."

"Actually, I'd kinda been preoccupied."

"So why'd they build you?"

"How do you know they didn't build you?"

"Because androids are damned near infallible," she says as I take one last sweep at her neck. "And you're better than me."

As I'm taking in what she's said, my sword's edge slices through the air towards her neck. I lunge backwards, managing to just barely nick her skin instead of slicing her head clean off. She starts to bleed a tiny dribble of bright red blood, but I know she'll live.

"You've got a point." I stare at the blood. Real blood. "And we've got a problem."

"We can't trust each other?"

"Trust is simply a matter of being able to predict someone's moves. Since I'm a pretty good facsimile of you, I figure we can both predict each other just fine by working out what we would do in each other's situation." It just doesn't feel right calling myself a copy. Have I really become a commodity? I keep my sword raised, on guard just in case the other Suzi tries anything.

"So what's the problem?"

"Our boss tried to kill you."

"You mean you've had a change of heart?"

"I'd like to propose an alternative, but we're going to have to trust each other." I throw my katana onto the floor as a sign of good faith. While I'm not exactly ready to commit harakiri just yet, suddenly my imitation of a life doesn't seem to be worth fighting for so hard. I figure that if either one of us lives on, I haven't really lost much. The gamble's worth it, because if she'll go along with my plan—and I'm pretty sure she will, because I'm pretty sure I