"You have the right to remain silent, slag," one of the officers said as he pulled the handcuffs tighter. She recognized him as being assigned to the President's security detail. He was treating her rougher than he would have treated a common criminal. Just this morning he had smiled politely at her as she came through security to start her day.
"What happened?" Sumi-ness said, her face still buried in the grass. Both officers were placing their full weight on her back and legs.
"One of your slag friends just blew up the President of the Alliance!"
Sumi-ness had never been inside a Police Station before, much less bound by her wrists and left alone in a cell surrounded by common thieves, murderers and various other lowlife humans. She felt scared and alone, but more than that, she felt sorry. Sorry for the deaths of President Constantine and her friend Thirty-seven.
Her mind felt like it was stuck in a loop. The events leading up to the explosion replayed over and over, each time more disjointed and unclear. Her internal diagnostics kept coming back incomplete due to the concussion wave of the explosion. It was a madness that she had never known before.
"Hey, Slag. What're you in for?" a filthy human asked from across the cell. He was staring at her like an animal eying its prey.
Sumi-ness didn't know how to answer him. She tried to ignore the man, and hoped that he would lose interest and leave her alone. Her scrambled thoughts were interrupted again.
"Yo, Slag, I'm talking to you!"
"Charges have not been made against me yet," she finally answered in a weak voice.
The man shook his head and swore. "Never heard of no slag being locked up before. You musta done something pretty bad."
Sumi-ness did her best not to agree with the man. There was a woman laying passed out on a metal bench behind her cell. Her snores were ragged and uneven, like only a strung out junkie could manage.
The dirty man suddenly stood up and walked to the bars, sticking his arm through them and pointing at her. "I know who you are. You're that Silicant from the holovision. The one who was ruled to be like us humans."
Sumi-ness nodded but kept her head and eyes down, trying not to draw attention to herself.
"We got ourselves a celebrity slag here people," the dirty man said, his dark eyes coveting her.
The other inmates seemed to move in around her, all staring as if she were some exotic alien animal in a zoo.
"Sumi-ness!" A familiar voice called out, as a policeman approached her cell door.
"Sumi-ness, are you okay?"
It was Kepac, her companion. He moved out from behind the policeman and put his hand on the bars nearest to her. She got up quickly and moved to the door. A second policeman pulled back Kepac by his shoulder and forced them apart. Sumi-ness's fingers never had a chance to touch Kepac. They slipped around the bar he had just gripped.
"You have five minutes," the first policeman said, in a gravely voice.
Kepac's tall frame shook off the hand of the officer as he looked through the bars at Sumi-ness.
"I'll get you out of this, soon. You just have to give me some time," Kepac said. His thin face was a crude copy of a human male, devoid of enough details to signal that he was an android.
"They haven't charged me yet, Kepac. I'm confused and scared," she said. 
"I know. Believe me, that's for the best right now."
The first policeman came between them facing Kepac. "Alright bud, time's up. Step back the way you came."
"It's only been fourteen point two seconds."
The policeman looked perturbed by his response and began pushing him back towards the door. His partner steered Kepac by his shoulder again. Kepac turned back just before being forced through the door.
"Keep calm. I'll be back." The policeman pushed him through the door. He forced his head back in and said, "Soon," before being shoved out for good by the policemen.
 She was alone again with the other humans. All eyes in the cell were upon her as she turned around.
"Was that your lover-boy, slag?" the dirty man asked.
Some of the other men and women started hooting and cat calling at her as she slipped back down on the metal bench and withdrew to her thoughts and fears.
Kepac had to stoop over to let his nearly two meter frame enter the narrow access hatch. He was leaving the surface and heading into the seldom used maintenance tunnels that ran under the city of Soban. The Silicants had literally taken to the underground for their liberation movement. It was easy for them to get around the city without being seen or noticed by the humans who lived above.
Kepac always took care to enter the underground when nobody was looking, to lessen the likelihood of being followed. Once in the dark, empty tunnels, he relied on his internal navigation maps to guide him through the maze of concrete and steel. He never took the same route twice, to further elude any curious human who might have followed him.
Kepac moved with an urgency that could only come from someone who feared time was not on his side. Sumi-ness was at this very minute being introduced as the killer of the President of the Alliance by every media outlet on every free world. The fact that she was an android would set back human-android relations far into the future. He only hoped that this incident didn't spell the end of the Silicant Rights movement.
An automated detection system at the final door stopped his progress until he was able to send it the appropriately encrypted response. A fraction of a second later it popped open. Kepac entered the white antechamber and closed the door behind him. His entire body was scanned quickly for tracking devices, before a second door opened that led into the inner sanctum of the Silicant leaders.
A red colored female android was there to meet him. Her name was Vomisa and she spoke with an urgent tone, her face as unmoving as a doll. "Kepac, what happened up there?"
Kepac moved past her, saying, "I need to talk to Seventy-three."
"He's in the meditation room, but you can't disturb him now."
Kepac ignored the red android and pushed his way through another door into the blinding white light of the Silicant leader's meditation room.
"Seventy-three, we have to free her from prison. She didn't do it!" Kepac pleaded.
Seventy-three was a white, Series 6 android, not much different than Vomisa but for his superficially male, human form. He was sitting on the white floor with his knees pulled up and his arms resting on them. His white, plastic body was shiny and clean, his normally glowing eyes dim. He did not move in response to Kepac's intrusion.
Finally, after a long silence, he spoke. "It seems your student is being charged with aiding and abetting a Silicant who has assassinated President Constantine."
Silicants didn't sigh, but Kepac got the impression that Seventy-three had sighed upon finishing his sentence. The very idea that any android, Silicant or not, would ever harm their greatest advocate was completely illogical.
"There must have been surveillance cameras that could defend her in some way. It was Thirty-seven who malfunctioned, not her."
Vomisa had followed Kepac into the meditation room. She had wirelessly tapped into the same communication channels that Seventy-three had been monitoring.
"Sumi-ness was the last line of defense for anyone seeing the President and she let Thirty-seven into the President's office. Being a Silicant herself, it does not take much to assume she was in on a plot to kill the President," she said.
Kepac threw up his long arms in exasperation. "She's not a killer! Neither is Thirty-seven. Both of them were owned by the President herself."
"We are being singled out as the instigators, in the investigation," Seventy-three said.
"Vomisa, please discourage all Silicants from coming here until further notice. We all had better stay out of sight for a while until this situation calms."
Vomisa nodded, already sending out messages to all the Silicants on Selene.
"How are we going to defend Sumi-ness if we can't go out in public?" Kepac asked.
Seventy-three activated his glowing yellow eye receptors and got to his feet to face Kepac. The more human looking Silicant towered over the older model android who calmly looked up at him.
"As Silicants, we are not allowed to hold positions of authority in professional fields. Therefore we can't practice law."
"Surely we can find someone willing to help us?"
Seventy-three looked away in thought. Then he started to move slowly around the tiny room with his hands clasped relaxedly behind his back.
"No self-respecting human lawyer would take our case, and none of the known Silicant sympathizers are trained at criminal law. Kepac, we might not be able to