Teralogos News (series) is a series of free books that revolve around the in-universe, 22nd century news outlet by the same name, in the Transhuman Space setting.
2100, Fourth Quarter[]
Bioroid Implicated in Munich Murder?[]
MUNICH, Germany/Teralogos: October 21, 2100
City police report progress in the investigation of the murder of preservationist activist Friedrich Knodt, who was found with a slit throat in an alley in Munich yesterday.
According to a police spokesperson, hairs were uncovered on the victim’s body that contained DNA fragments common to biological androids, or bioroids as they are colloquially known. Bioroids are rarely seen in Germany, as their manufacture has been banned in European Union for the last decade. However, a small bioroid community does exist, as Germany and other E.U. states have granted refugee status to bioroids who have escaped exploitation in other nations.
Sources in the Munich police department told Teralogos that a trace amount of synthetic sexual pheromones was found at the crime scene, which suggests that the perpetrator was a so-called pleasure bioroid such as the once-popular, but discontinued, Eros or Incubus series. Although these models are no longer nanofactured by major biotechnology companies, offworld factories in L5 and the Belt are rumored to supply an underground black market on Mars, Luna, and Earth.
Police have so far declined to speculate on a motive for the murder. However, Knodt, 51, was the vice president of the German chapter of the Preservationist League, a Europewide non-governmental organization opposed to radical modification of human or animal genomes which has in the past advocated the institutionalization of all bioroid refugees for public safety. Asked to comment on reports that a bioroid may have been the assailant, Markus Lange, German president of the Preservationist League, said he was saddened but not surprised. “We all grieve for the loss of our colleague. Many of us have received death threats from radicals and malcontents before, but we all felt that our work was too important to abandon. And now our dear friend has paid the ultimate price.”
“I would not be surprised if the killer turns out to be a bioroid that was legally granted asylum here. Their thought processes are not their own; while they look human, they are living machines. They remain slaves to their conditioning, which no amount of so-called socialization can truly erase. We should not let these beings run free in our streets merely out of a misplaced sense of pity for their fate.”
Silvie Graf, a spokesperson for the Munich Bioroidenhauser, a pan-sapient rights advocacy group which operates half-way houses for bioroid refugees, responded indignantly to the accusation.
“Let the police finish their investigation before rushing to judgment,” said Graf. “There are many unanswered questions. What was Markus Lange[1] doing with a so-called pleasure bioroid? Some bioroid refugees are forced to hide their identities due to the prejudice that the Preservationist League exemplifies. I cannot speculate here, but in the past, Eros and Tianyi bioroids living as citizens in the E.U. have been blackmailed for sexual favors or subjected to attacks and abuse by unthinking humans. The true perpetrator of this violence may not have been a lost, confused and victimized artificial person, but society itself.”
– filed by Jürgen Hubert
References, Notes and Errata[]
- ↑ Errata, this should be Friedrich Knodt, the deceased, not Markus Lange, the interviewee.