This is especially true of the 8800 series replicants ususally used in security work. The first two were Omanda and Otanda.

They were well and advanced on thier own but they were built prior to the android master crafter, Aldan Cerena, had died of acute cytec poisoning.

His business and craft were inherited by his daughter, Merisa, who had little interest in the design. In her opinion, androids should retain a touch of artificiality.

The 8800 series (though only identical on the inside) plans were kept in an old computer amongst the vast body of plans and other designs Aldan Cerena had compiled in his long life.

Few knew of them. Merisa Cerena went on to build nanny androids and caretaker androids for the infirm. She was even asked to build a couple of military models and did.

She was content with that until one day, a distinguished visitor from the Commonwealth Ministry of State came to her office on the world of Ketaterra.

The visitor, no doubt a flunkie of Minister Arcina's, placed an order of an 8800 series replicant, vital to a spy work program.

Cerena did not want anything to do with it. The government always short-changed her father and she had never worked for them before. But this one offered 14,000 credits for just researching the design.

She would not admit that she needed the money. Material costs were outrageous ever since the economic crash of the 6700s, when 4 different shipping companies went out of business. So she took the contract. How hard could it be? Her father was an old man when he built Omanda and Otanda, both of whom she had recently worked on.

It took 2 months just to find his plans. They were corrupted by data decay and only materials lists and wiring diagrams were intact. Cerena wanted to scream.

She was a mediocre builder at best, preferring to design. This was significant based on the wiring alone. She had to go back to recent scans of Otanda to see how her inside was designed. It was atypical of a standard android.

The major difference was the power source. In a normal android, a stock self-generating fuel cell power source was used, powered by consuming water.

In the 8800 series replicant, it was a quasi-thermonuclear reaction shell which fed a super-efficient battery system. The power shell could only run when the replicant was powered down. They would have to "plug-in" into a standard outlet if they exceeded the power the power shell put out while they were "asleep". Otanda especially had this problem.

Cerena had to figure out a new way. More reliable without having to plug-in. A thermo-nuclear power shell was dangerous. It got super hot and had to be contained in a heavy ceramic composite heat exchanging outer shell. If this outer shell was damaged, the replicant would suffer incredible heat damage.

So she sat down and made some calls. She got information on new Teshin and Itigrin power sources and intriguing food-powered systems from various biotech outfits.

She decided on a biotech system that could use water and simple foods to power a new type of fuel cell, utterly efficient and much like a real body. That alone costed 8 million credits, a kingly sum in anyone's opinion.

The bones of her father's androids were always made with a hybrid porcelian-polymer that had the same structure and consistancy of bone but was 111 times stronger. This was hard to make because one of its chief ingredients, a bonding agent, was no longer available.

Cerena opted to use a new hybrid, a ceramic-polymer blend more like real bone. By law, an artificial person's bones had to be black or as dark as it could be made so they would never be confused with the real thing.

She molded the bones in one of her father's molds and used his equipnet to sculpt and harden them. She wondered why her father only made female androids. This mold was for a female's bones. Male androids were acceptible also but her father lived a long time ago, maybe it was different back then.

When finished, she had a beautiful skeleton of dark grey bones. oddly, it only made 187 bones, less than any real person had naturally. The instructions assured that it was right and so Cerena took them to her lab where she assembled the skeleton on her unique assembly table.

The wiring was next and relatively simple for such an advanced replicant. She used superconducting wire enclosed in tough outer membranes to protect it.

The next part came directly from her father's lab. The muscles were all cytec, a dangerous risk. Buish-green cytec was a heat-malleable material that constricted and relaxed when electricity was applied to it. It worked exactly like real muscle but was less bulky and far stronger. Its only weak point was that it would melt if exposed to a temperature above 400� F sustained for more than an hour. Plasmic gunshots were particularly damaging to it.

But the cytec in her father's plans was different. It was heat resistant and laced with powerful support threads of a lighter colored cytec, a rare type called cytec-5. The cytec for this replicant costed 11 million credits to make but Cerena was able to bring the cost down by using recycled cytec and her own blend of the exotic type.

She molded each piece on the mold last used to build Otanda all those years ago, struck by a sadness when she realized that her father was the last one to touch these controls.

She got through it after 3 days of hot, sweaty work and let the pieces set in a special chamber in her lab for that purpose.

Cerena took a break and went to a healing resort for 3 days, the reccomended setting time.

When she came back, the pieces were ready. She carefully integrated them onto the skeleton much like a real body's muscles were situated. She was well-schooled in anatomy for this purpose and was good at it. The process went by quickly and it was ready for the cytec inner membrane.

The inner membrane was made of a smooth yet very strong cytec, resistant to stabbings with blades and normal gunshots. This cytec did not constrict like the muscle-type but did move with the body. It was sealed solidly, an inside skin.

The outer skin was corite infused with special nanotech cells which were continually self-replicating. They reknit and repaired the corite skin, behaving like a healing system on fast-foreward. they even applied the skin on by themselves, a lengthy process.

Strangely, her father had made skins for 18 different female 8800 series replicants, each subtly different from each other but sharing an obvious kinship in appearance.

They were kept in his vault in a statis-box where time had not touched them since he put them in there. That kind of work was beyond Merisa so she was very thankful for them. As the body skin set itself up, she took the untouched skull to her worktables and sat down to carefully sculpt the head and face muscles to a design included with the intact plans.

A courier delivered a box from the State Ministry. Cerena opened it to find hair and a super-wrapped AI Core. This worried her. She was used to building AI Cores and letting her friend Boid program them as he had been doing for longer than she had been alive.

This one was not the typical clear sphere but a solid black sphere already programmed, hiding its AI processor, memory strips and modules, and the body control processor. It was awfully heavy for an AI Core, making her suspect there were more than just the mormal components within.

It fit comfortably in the inner framework of the skull, utterly protected. The framework was made of light and very strong alloys that could withstand even a smal ship landing on it. The AI Core was the only part of any artificial person that could not be replaced.

Cerena put great care into installing AI Core's as she valued artficial life just as much as she did real people life.

She placed it in and it automatically connected to the 46 wires that led into it.

The body skin was almost finished as she completed work on the eyes and mouth. She bonded the State Ministry supplied hair to the corite head skin, which didn't take nearly as long as the body to set.

She took a day off to let everything settle and returned to place the head on the body, automated systems connecting tissue, wire and bone, the nanotech seamlessly sealing and joining head and body skin into one unit.

Merisa Cerena was amazed. She had built a replicant herself. This one was called Orena. For some strange reason, her father named all 8800 series replicants with names starting with "O".

Orena was already assigned registry number 8844. She came online and sat up, looking at Cerena with a dark look in her eyes that scared the real female. "You are Merisa Cerena?," she asked with a silky voice that chilled Cerena.

She nervously nodded. "Yes."

Orena smiled. "Thank you."

She got up and the State Ministry flunkie returned with a hefty 83 million credit payment, giving Orena a black uniform of some kind.

He made Cerena sign a non-disclosure agreement and disavow that she had built Orena. She did but retained her new designs with much haggling.

She never saw Orena again and decided to build the 17 others her father meant to build, though she would have to stock up on materials first. At least now she had the money to do so.

Gregory Thompson � 25 Feb 04