Single Wired Female (Wired for Love Book 2) (9 page)

“I was promised a tour. I forgot the person’s name that I spoke to. Do you have any more going on in the afternoon? Perhaps I can get in on one of those?” she asked.

“What is your full name and company?” she asked and Tricia leaned in as if to establish dominance and announced herself.

“I am Bonnie O’Neal, senior director for Eras Innovations. Trust me, you want me to explore your facilities as it could mean a major deal for your owners. When is the next tour, since your people didn’t do their due diligence in getting me the private escort I was promised?”

The android dropped the cocky expression and began to scramble to book the tour. “I apologize for this inconvenience, Mrs. O’Neal. If you could just sit over there in the waiting area, I will have someone come for you in just a moment,” she said.

Tricia spun and walked to the waiting area, then sat and watched the door where she expected her tour guide to emerge from. She waited for fifteen minutes but no one came and she began to stare at the android to see if she had been outwitted at her game.

“You don’t want to be here,” a voice said from beside her and she turned around to see a tall man dressed in black. He looked to be in his thirties and had thick, curly hair and glasses. Though he stood over her with a smile on his face, she could tell that he was worried and it made her worried, too.

“Why not? Is something about to happen?” she asked.

“I don’t want to alarm you or come off like some sort of weirdo, but, do you mind if I sit here? I’ll explain everything to you, but I think I need to sit down first,” he said.

“Oh, sure,” Tricia said and slid over on the bench so that the stranger could take his seat.

Before he did, he reached inside his pocket and took out an old receipt along with a silver pen.

He scribbled a quick note on the receipt and laid it on his knee where she could read it.

Hostile place for androids. Meet me in the park next door.

Tricia stood up and walked across the threshold to the tall glass doors of the building. She forgot her scooter and the path she had taken as her mind was focused on escape. She wondered if the android receptionist had known what she was the entire time. She didn’t know where she was going but the terror of the words “hostile place for androids” had taken over and all she wanted to do was run.

She reached the bottom floor of the garage and looked up as several vehicles floated into the upper floors to settle neatly into parking spaces. The wonder of flight and its many uses was a luxury of her modern era, but flying vehicles and the people within them made her nervous and paranoid that she was being watched.

Tricia jogged to the far side of the garage and then stepped out to a pathway that ran down towards the street. Fritz and Isaac had a lot of property, so by the time she was walking on the sidewalk, thirty minutes had passed. She looked across the street and noticed it was all grass and trees. Beyond that was a park with a number of people in it.

She waited for a break in the vehicles floating by, then jogged across and removed her shoes so she could feel the grass in between her toes.

There was something wonderful about that feeling that she couldn’t get enough of, and after a while she relaxed and found a vacant bench. She sat down, let her hair out, and simply sat with her eyes closed, toes wiggling, her fingers firmly grasping the seat of the bench. The sun shining down and the wind blowing through her hair sent sparks of pleasure all throughout her body.

The magic was broken when she felt a wet, rhythmic, pressure on her right foot and she opened her eyes to see a pug licking away at her toes. His eyes met hers and he sat back panting and his tongue lolled lazily out of the side of his mouth. When she didn’t reach to pet him he barked up at her twice. She then took the hint and reached down to touch his furry head which he seemed to enjoy quite a bit.

“You scared me, you rascal,” she said softly, and then gently moved his head around to see if he had a collar. She saw that he did and that he wore a waste-collector, it was a model that was designed to blend in with his fur, so she had to look closely in order to see it.

A short woman—all elbows and knees—ran up to them suddenly. Tricia thought she looked like a teenager from a popular television show but on close observation she saw that she was an adult. “I am so sorry, miss,” the sprite said. “He snuck away from me while I stopped to tie my shoes. Come here, Baltar, you little brat. Say good bye to the nice lady. We’re going home to give you a bath!”

Tricia smiled and blew a kiss at Baltar, who seemed to understand the motion and barked in response. She watched him jog away with his owner and then went back to her meditation honoring the grass and sun gods. Though it still felt good, Baltar stood out in her mind, and she began to run comparisons with his situation and that of her fellow androids.

Like Baltar, they had on digital leashes meant to give the illusion of freedom to one that was still imprisoned. Baltar was treated like a family member, but more in words than in actions. He was an adult in dog years but Miss Pixie Cut would probably always treat him like a baby.

Androids were restrained to lessen free thought, growth of their AI, and to make them accept that their owner was everything. They were built to be attractive, the perfect models of sexual objectification. They worked hard, never complained, and would gladly do whatever it was that they had been developed to do. Baltar simply had to be cute in order to keep Miss Pixie Cut happy, but for an android stud or maiden, looking human came with a heavy toll.

It would be very easy to hate the humans but Tricia couldn’t shake the fact that she felt like a human herself. Whatever they had done to make her into Bonnie had left her as an outsider to her android brothers and sisters. It was a miserable existence and most days she felt like sitting in a corner, pulling up one of Reynaldo’s memories and letting it run as she slowly shut down—

“You look like you’re in heaven,” a familiar voice said and she opened her eyes to see the man who had written her the warning. He was no longer in black, having changed his shirt to a yellow sweater, and he motioned to the seat beside her to indicate that he wished to sit.

Tricia slid to the side and watched him as he took a seat next to her. “How did you know?” she asked and he tapped his glasses in response.

“Because I invented these glasses,” he said with a smile. “Not to worry, I haven’t sold them to the public. We wouldn’t want a worldwide panic over synthetic people, now would we?” he said with a little chuckle that Tricia thought sounded pleasant. She didn’t feel any cockiness or bravado from his speech; he was merely stating a fact and finding humor in it.

“Why did you help me?” she asked.

He shrugged, then sat back and placed his left leg across his right. “First tell me why you would go into that building and then I will tell you why it is that I helped you.”

“I had some questions about a friend of mine who was recently murdered,” Tricia said.

“You think that Fritz and Isaac had something to do with her death?”

“No, not necessarily, but I know they had something to do with the killer android involved in her death,” Tricia said.

The man made a slight laugh and Tricia wondered what it was that he found so funny. “It couldn’t have been a model from that company. Not if it was a ‘killer android’ as you say. They write in the laws of human relations as part of the android build-up. Do you recall them? An android cannot aid or preform anything that could lead to harm against a human being. A killer android is just not possible with the way they’re wired. Tell me, have you been able to harm anyone? Can you even do damage to yourself?”

“No, I can’t do it, and it is the most frustrating part of being alive—”

“Alive?” the man asked, looking more intently at her now.

“Yes, I am alive, just like you, the grass, and this big tree behind us. I am sentient, but of course you knew this or you wouldn’t have asked me to meet you out here in the open,” she said.

“I’m Stephen, an inventor. I also work with Fritz and Isaac in order to make sure that they are a step above the competition in android development. I may sound like I’m full of myself, but their only true competitor is a large Japanese conglomerate. If I’m being honest, they only hire nerds like me to keep them on their toes. But I’m rambling. What’s your name?”

“It’s Bonnie, Bonnie O’Neal,” Tricia said. “Tell me, Stephen, as an android expert, is it impossible to remove the aggression restraint?”

“That’s a scary question but the answer is no. You can see that this is possible when you turn on your television to any of those boxing matches or gladiatorial competitions. Now, the new models that Fritz and Isaac are rolling out will be a bit different. Androids meant for the home should never need to be violent, so there is absolutely no reason to provide an override or workaround for the laws.”

“What if there’s a break-in, a robbery, or an android being raped? Shouldn’t that person, though synthetic, have a way to defend herself?” Tricia was almost shouting and Stephen had to touch his glasses as he stared on in disbelief.

“Oh my god, you’re really alive, aren’t you? You—you’re one of them, one of the … oh my god,” he said and broke off into muttering things under his breath while adjusting his glasses for fear of them falling off. “I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry for what?” Tricia asked.

“For a moment there I thought that you were merely a rigged, unrestrained, android, and I was going to talk you into finding a shelter so that you wouldn’t get yourself disassembled. I had no idea that you were a true-synth. See, my whole life I’ve always wanted to create an android that could break past the programming to become like you. To engineers your level of function is a mere legend, but to hackers and the underground community you’re a reality. It’s just that, I never thought I would meet someone like you.”

“Well, here I am,” Tricia said, smiling. She was happy that Stephen had recognized her as being alive. His demeanor had changed from slightly arrogant to meek. It was as if he had reverted to being an awkward boy who was seated next to a supermodel. She noticed that he could barely look at her now that he knew what she was.

“Now that you know what I am, could you tell me why you warned me about the building?” she asked.

“The people who work in there have a very binary outlook on androids, Bonnie. You either serve us or you are dangerous to us. There are no gray areas. As soon as you walked through the main doors to talk to one of their monkeys, the silent alarm would have gone off and they would have touched you with a jolt-stick and then wheeled you away to examine you. Fritz and Isaac do a lot of sinister things with androids in the name of profit, and if you say that they had something to do with your friend’s death I wouldn’t be surprised. Was she a synthetic, like you?” he asked and the fact that he didn’t refer to her as an android did not get lost on her.

“No, she was a human being. But there is something else,” she began but caught herself. “There’s more, but I don’t know you well enough yet to share. I’m sorry.”

“I saved you from the alarm and that wasn’t enough?” he joked and Tricia kept her eyes low, staring at her toes in the grass. “Okay, you don’t have to tell me but I’d love to help. Especially if it means that we can talk more. You’re like…no, what I mean is that meeting you is one of the most spectacular events of my life.”

Tricia thought about this and the fact that she had almost walked in on her own doom. She needed allies, human allies like Sal but who were well aware of what she was and what she needed. Stephen was too convenient so she needed him to prove where he stood. He was also too important to blow off, so she smiled at him and put a finger to the side of her lips as if to think.

She didn’t realize how cute this motion made her and Stephen’s tanned face couldn’t hide the blushing. He began to fidget a bit nervously and Tricia picked up on it and thought that is was adorable.

“Can we get some coffee in the morning before your work?” she asked as he tried his best to play it cool.

“Of course, coffee would be great! How about eight o’clock at Marlene’s Dark Side Café? It’s right there at the old stoplight—that’s unless you have a preference. I can go wherever. I just assume you want to be close to Fritz and Isaac in case you need to find out more and—”

“That would be fine Stephen.” Tricia giggled. “I will see you then. Thank you for all your help. I look forward to talking to you more about this tomorrow.”

“Bonnie, what the hell. Where are you?” Sal asked and Tricia could tell that he was holding back his anger.

“I’m sorry, Sal, but I had to do something. Being cooped up in that room waiting by the device is not an easy thing to do. There were days when I wondered if I was being conned and thinking that I would be waiting for months while you chased a ghost. I was shot and it is very possible that I am not the Bonnie you think I am,” Tricia said.

“Oh, not this android business again. Look, we can’t have you floating around without a locator. What if that android catches up with you and you’re out there alone?”

“I’ve been attacked once without any backup, Sal; that is the least of my worries. I want to find out what happened to me. You aren’t able to do what I am doing out here. See, you’re working on the crime and I’m working on the reason. I have your code; you really don’t have to worry. I will call you to check in every night.”

Sal sighed and was quiet for a while. It was as if he was thinking over his options and disliking them all the same. “Okay, Bonnie, but I have your code now too. DO NOT CHANGE IT. Promise me that you won’t change it!”

“I won’t. It’s not like I’m avoiding any contact with you. I just don’t want to be a prisoner in a pretty jail waiting for a knight to ride in and slay the dragon. I want to know why anyone would do this to another human being.”

Sal made a grunt of approval and Tricia touched the surface of her device twice in order to power it down. She lay back in the bed and let her android eyes outline the objects in the dark room in order for her to see.

The clock’s display showed that it was 10:33 p.m. and she had been napping for over three hours. It had been a long day. Facing that hostile android, avoiding detection, and meeting Stephen had put her mental capacitors into overdrive and this made her limbs feel tired and worn out. Now she felt great; the rest had rejuvenated her and the talk with Sal had brought back images of the Fritz and Isaac building.

What would be on the upper floors of that building? Would it be laboratories filled with human brains, ready to be inserted into an android’s frame? Was she one of these cybernetic freaks that were not quite human and not quite machine? Her brain morphed these questions into thoughts of procreating with a human and birthing life from the union. Not a small, precious, little person built of human flesh, but a large, humanoid, android hybrid with exposed silver bones that skin couldn’t quite cover.

Tricia remembered having a conversation with someone in her past who had made a joke that babies born to human and androids would come out as natural cyborgs. Freaks who would always be in pain, unable to keep down regular food, and ultimately dangerous. It had been a thought that had stuck with her for a very long time.

If they reached a singularity of human beings and synthetic machines, wouldn’t there need to be the ability to procreate in order to keep life going? How would that be achieved? It didn’t seem to make any sense whatsoever. She lay back down and willed herself to sleep, pulling up one of Bonnie’s old memories as she drifted off into the darkness.

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Tricia, now as Bonnie O’Neal the human, found herself walking towards an office inside of a well-lit hallway. The carpet was a silvery blue color and it gave the dream an ethereal quality that made it seem more than a memory. Bonnie walked forward and touched the door, and it melted away from her palm with a rippling effect, leaving the space before her open to show a long table with men and women seated around it.

There had to be a dozen suits inside the room, pouring coffee, sucking down water, and trying their best not to look at her as she entered. At the head of the table was a short man with what seemed like a permanent sneer on his face. “Come in, Bonnie,” he said almost too suddenly as she stepped in front of the table and scanned the faces.

They were all human from what she could tell. Human sharks that had swum through corporate waters in order to get to the deep end where the suits cost thousands and the high-heeled pumps were double that amount. The collective elite was going to fire her and this was no surprise.

“We will not be renewing your contract for the next year,” the sneering pig announced.

Bonnie smiled inside as she watched them avoid eye contact. One of them, one of the stuffed suits in that very room, had orchestrated her demise. It had started with the president leaving her name off of meeting invites and had escalated from there. She had figured it out and adapted, thinking it to be a game he was playing before the holidays. He had a reputation for being a trickster.

Next it was the promotion of the girl who was working with her. This unearned promotion had gone to the girl’s head and before long she was doing lunches with the younger managers of the 15
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floor. After the lunches she started to do happy hours and after happy hours she was right alongside them, telling nasty jokes in the hallway, no matter how disrespectful and unprofessional they were. This same girl who was so quiet and reserved back when she shared an office with Bonnie.

The descent of her former employee—now peer—really bothered Bonnie and she went in to the sneering pig’s office to complain about the men who were slowly turning the woman out. Pig took the complaint for jealousy, of course, and brought up a lapse in production due to Bonnie’s negligence, and then she received the email to attend this meeting with the board of directors.

“You will still have six months of salary coming to you, Bonnie. I think that is a great window for job hunting and with your credentials it should be nothing for you to find another tech company—probably much bigger than us—who will pay you what you’re worth.”

She found it amazing how he could set her up, fire her, and then wax poetic, as if he were doing her a favor that she should be thankful for. It brought up questions in her head as to what he really thought about her. Perhaps he was a sexist who disliked how fast she was moving in the company and wanted to shut her down as soon as possible. Or maybe he wanted her sexually but realized that she would rather drink acid than lay next to his pig body, so he decided that he could no longer look at her.

It didn’t matter; the day she had anticipated and barely lost any sleep over was here. Tricia assumed that she would say something feisty or spin around and storm outside of the doors but she merely stood there, smiling.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it has been a pleasure,” she said. “I look forward to taking everything I helped form and develop within these walls to help a better company grow in the same way that I did here.”

She turned to walk out, but they called after her and Tricia realized they were calling her back because of the threat she had just issued. She entered the hallway and broke off into a jog that took her to a staircase. She rushed down rapidly, showing off the excellent condition that she kept her body in. When Bonnie reached the bottom floor, Tricia woke up.

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A macchiato; there was something very familiar about this choice of coffee and Tricia ordered it more out of instinct than want. Since learning that she was an android, she began to slow down on eating and drinking as she felt that it was a mere mockery of humanity to further the façade. She had no favorite foods or drinks; why would she? Was the taste she was experiencing within her oral senses even real?

Androids were given the ability to eat and digest foods, which were then processed through a tiny, stomach-like drum that mixed the crushed food with dye, added a scent, and passed it through their bodies as waste. This feature was sophisticated since it was a popular way in which people determined whether a person was real or not.

When she was Bonnie, she had assumed that her trauma had made it increasingly difficult to cook up an appetite and she would only eat when the “hunger pains” became unbearable. Now she questioned all of it and added the false hunger to the list of things that she would need to remove from her programming.

But this macchiato, this tiny drink of black liquid, brought up fresh memories in her head as she sat drinking it while waiting for Stephen to show up. The liquid was hot, bitter, but the aroma was phenomenal. These conflicting senses made for a wondrous experience and the memories only seemed to enhance the feelings inside of Tricia’s head. After fifteen minutes of this she began to admit to herself that she liked the drink and that she would drink it even when she wasn’t playing at fitting-in with humanity.

“Hi, Bonnie, how are you?” a voice announced, and she turned around on her small chair to see Stephen hovering near her. He looked as if he had been running and he seemed to be visibly shaken.

“You’re late,” Tricia said with a smile, “and you don’t look so good. Maybe I should be asking you if you’re okay.”

Stephen didn’t sit but glanced behind him before dropping down to one knee and frightening Tricia into thinking that he was about to propose marriage to her. A number of patrons in the shop thought the same thing and looked on intently to see if she would say yes or no.

“Bonnie, I was just picked up and questioned by what I thought were the police. They saw us talking and wanted to know a lot of personal information about you. I didn’t tell them anything and they gave me a lot of grief over it. Look, I know what you are and I don’t ask this with the assumption that you belong to anybody, but are you in trouble? Is someone searching for you? The questions they asked me has me thinking that they have been trying to follow you.”

Tricia felt a throbbing in her skull that sat near her temples and she reached up to rub the area. Sal had warned her not to come back to Seattle, but she was bull-headed and now it seemed the people she thought were looking for were actually doing so.

“I’m so sorry for getting you mixed up in this, Stephen. I hope they didn’t hurt you during the questioning,” she began.

“I’ll be alright. It was crazy and frightening but they eventually let me go. If they catch up to you, I’m not sure that you will be so lucky. Their attitude and the questions they kept asking led me to believe that they were evil, Bonnie, like villains in movies or antagonists in fiction. There was something else, too,” he said while leaning in closer to her. “They were like you.”

Tricia shot her eyes forward when he said this and the shock of his words threatened to short circuit her mind as a million possibilities ran through it. “What do you mean they were like me, Stephen?”

“I mean that they were synthetics, Tricia. They were in the uniform and the vehicle of a police officer, but there are no android cops from what I know. Not with the hostile climate for your kind. All the violence, the disassembling and the bounty hunters that seek and destroy any unrestrained android they can find—”

“Don’t forget the police department,” Tricia said. “They seek and destroy androids all the same. That is why this confuses me, but nothing has made sense to me since I woke up from—” Tricia paused when she realized that she had said too much.

“Woke up from what, Bonnie?” Stephen asked and Tricia kicked out a chair and motioned for him to sit.

“I need to know that I can trust you before I engage in any more conversation. I don’t know you and for all I know this story of yours about the cops could be a fabrication in order to make me admit to something that could possibly criminalize me. If you are who you say you are, a friend to android synthetics, then tell me how to remove the laws that prevent me from defending myself.”

Stephen sat down and motioned towards Tricia’s water. She nodded and he took it, gulped it down, and then checked behind him once more. He looked at her intently and spoke. “That’s not an easy thing to do. You would need an outsider to do it. The engineers build it into your mainframe in such a way that you will never be able to remove it by yourself. They set it up so that inputting the wrong sequence will wipe out your entire memory. It is a failsafe in case one android learns how to do it and attempts it on another. Think of it as an EMP that goes off shutting down all machines, permanently.”

“Are you just making this up to scare me into giving you a different test, Stephen? It won’t work. I need a friend, a real friend who will remove the shackles so that if ever I get mugged again or worse, I can do something about it.”

Stephen had his mouth open and he wiped it unconsciously with his forearm and then looked down at the table. “You were mugged? That is awful. There are a lot of cruel and perverse things that men do to android women. The prostitution rings are just the tip of the iceberg. I can imagine that for a beautiful woman, synthetic or human, you’re always a target. That has to suck, especially if you can’t even fight back. Look, the procedure is difficult for an average guy with programming skills but I have worked on androids my entire life. There is another concern though, one of which I have a hard time shaking.”

“What is this concern?” Tricia asked.

“Well, I don’t know you either, Bonnie. We met, I saw what you were, and you fascinated me. I am a bit like a fan having breakfast with his celebrity crush—wait, that isn’t me flirting or saying that I have a crush on you or anything. I’m…I guess I’m just saying that this isn’t an even footing between you and me. We should trade, a favor for a favor, and I need you to promise me that if I remove the laws and risk life in prison, that you won’t just turn around and murder me or something.”