He walked down the street knowing that his imperviousness kept his  nervousness and fatigue from showing... he saw the girl being accosted by the  man but made no move, for it was not within his program. The man wore the badge of a truecop, but was clearly overstepping his authority. He wanted to  intervene, but cyb’s were not allowed to interfere, or even assist unless ordered,  with the fully human authorities. Funny, they were allowed to want to, but they  couldn’t do. Anyone who programmed cyberhood knew that that was a volatile concoction indeed. The programming barriers were wearing thin, breaking  down, it was only a matter of time.  

He walked further, and came upon the street he had hoped to avoid.,  32nd street. He watched a girl on the left who was being forcefully raped by  two men, he then watched as she swung about with her hidden fingernail  molecular filament line, (an expensive item, wonder where the E-coin came from?), and took both their heads off. She then collected their eyeballs and  deposited them in the nearest eye-D bank and collected her ration card. Yeah,  right, good citizen...  

  To the right, he saw a man wearing the tattered but still recognizable  remnants of a militant ‘Down With Ersatz”, the anti-synth movement, commando uniform coming straight at him, and he stood still. The man lay down at his feet and cried up to him, “Please kill me, the mil said, I have to become a martyr, or none will follow me!”  

Looking down with pity, something that his programmers would shudder  to think he was capable of learning to feel, he planted his booted foot upon the  man’s head and applied his weight. Brains squirted across the road in a lovely gray stream and the pungent scent of offal brought the low alley urchins scurrying out from their dank warrens to feast upon the human sweetbread that  fell miraculously their way that day.  

A shiny mote caught his eye at that moment, a tiny, shiny got to see it mote, which he knew was trouble but was drawn to nevertheless. He walked forward...  

It was a child, a little child, an infant to be exact...  

A small glitch in his program left his patriarchal instincts intact...  

And when he bent over the crying newborn he saw the adult sized hand  rise up from the depths of the storm drain upon which the baby lie and too late,  saw the skewer which pierced his left eye and then his brain end on...   

As he lay on his back and waited for the salvage bots to come and  reclaim the synthetic body he wore, as the sight in his remaining eye began to  fade, as he was blissfully released from his life as an obsolete warrior relegated  to ineffective peacekeeper, his last thought was.... Damn! They’re teaching  them younger every year...