D.E.I.D.R.A. — Ronnie G. Anderson

Deidra Alpha was the first android produced at M. I. T. not in the usual way of building a form with a computer for a brain and then teaching it how to react as a human; but building a titanium structure with vital organs and brain built from computers and growing a human being around them. Dee, as she called herself, looked like the woman she was cloned after. Aging five years every one year of growth, Dee stopped the aging process after five years. It was estimated that Dee would live to three hundred years in age. Incredibly strong with hydraulically assisted muscles and bones that were not about to break under stress, Dee ran through Doctorate degrees in a hurry. When she discovered emotions and the fact that every ten years she was programmed to self replicate by implanting herself with a form around which to grow another version of herself, she revolted against the lack of free will and disappeared from her maker's control. This story is the story of her survival until at age forty an implanted program hidden deeply within her initial programming began her self termination.