Romeo’s eyes flickered open as his systems rebooted — which he wasn’t expecting. On swallowing the poison, he had initiated a system-wide shutdown in despair. Juliet was dead. She lay there in seemingly calm repose, not breathing, the bottle of poison still clasped in her hand. Unable to face marriage to the Count Paris, distraught at the banishment of Romeo, she had ended her life. This seemed entirely illogical to Romeo. To Romeo’s android. Why would the heir to the Capulet Cloning Corporation kill herself over such matters?
He sat up. Apparently, despair was also not a legitimate reason for an android created by Montagu Mechanical Men Incorporated to end its existence. Error messages scrolled across his vision, reset codes and system warnings. His system-wide shutdown had been aborted. He was too valuable to be scrapped.
Dermal sensors informed him that the crypt was cold and damp. The light level was low, so he turned up the sensitivity of his visual systems and looked over at Juliet.
Oddly, she was no longer reclined in tragic repose. She now had a dagger plunged into her heart. His dagger. Her white dress was stained with blood and her face bore an expression of such tragedy that his emotional translation routines had to buffer for a second to process the sight.
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He almost initiated another system-wide shutdown. Apparently, she had not been dead. Analytical subroutines assessed the scene and determined that she had been faking death, awoken to see her erstwhile lover dead, and then genuinely killed herself.
Romeo would not react well to this. No more than he would have reacted well to the initial news that Juliet had poisoned herself. His violent temper would probably lead to severe damage to the android. No worrying about value for the real Romeo, heir to Montagu Mechanical Men — the very reason the android had attempted to shut himself down rather than face his angry original.
Now it seemed he had no choice. If no news was forthcoming, Romeo would track him down. Wherever he went, his inbuilt locator beacon would allow him to be found. He rose to his feet, checked his balancing systems were up to speed, and trudged from the crypt.
*****
Juliet fretted, alone in her room. Why was there no news from her clone? The mission had been simple: switch places, take the poison, wait in the crypt for Romeo, tell him where to meet her, sneak back into the house and switch places again.
Her father thought he was so clever, making a deal with Paris, getting out of it without losing face, waiting for disloyal elements to make a move, before revealing his daughter and heir to be alive after all. He didn’t know that Juliet — sweet, innocent child that she was — had added her own twist to the plan.
She peered out of the window into the gloom. There was nothing for it. She would have to go and find out what had happened.
Easier said than done, with her father’s paranoia, but not something that she hadn’t done before. Dressed in plain trousers and short jacket, she opened the French doors onto her balcony, straddled the balustrade and clambered nimbly down the trellis. With a lot of pausing, ducking and running, she made it off the Capulet estate and headed at a run to the crypt.
Inside was dim and cold. A dark shadow lay across the chest of her clone. Not a shadow. A stain. A dagger; and blood. Real blood. Clones were as human as real humans. Not like those Montagu creations.
“Poor clone,” she said, touching the dead girl’s cheek. She had done a sterling job of standing in for Juliet on numerous occasions deemed too dangerous by her father. She glanced around. There was the poison bottle on the floor, empty. “But who stabbed you?”
The only other person who should have been there was Romeo, assuming he had responded to her secret message. Unless he didn’t show up?
“Really?” she said, stamping a foot. “He didn’t show up? I bet he was off seeing that Rosaline. He swore he’d never look at her again!”
Unless it was Romeo who had plunged in the dagger. Had it been a Montagu plot all along? Had he seduced her with the intention of killing her? Either way, she would have nothing more to do with him. She left the crypt and retraced her steps.
*****
