The Android Chronicles Book One: The Android Defense

THE ANDROID
CHRONICLES

BOOK I

The Android
Defense

by

Marling Sloan

This book is a work of
fiction. Names, characters, locations, and incidents are products
of the author’s imagination or else are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead,
is coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 Marling
Sloan

PART ONE

Luke

Chapter 1.

Damian Foster, the CEO and
founder of one of the most powerful and influential innovation
companies in North America, had once been quoted as saying, “Power
looks down. Beggars look up.” The building that headquartered his
company in downtown Los Angeles was an architectural testament to
that quote.

Like a Titan among the other
worthy feats of architecture around it that composed the Los
Angeles skyline, the building stood head and shoulders above the
rest, a towering, 62-story edifice that had taken four years, an
elite Japanese architectural design team, and millions of dollars
to construct. It dwarfed even the famed US Bank
building.

Huge block letters displayed
across the top of the building read: ADVENTIS
TECHNOLOGIES.

The face of the building was
covered in dark glass that reflected everything around it, and
revealed nothing of its inside. On the ground floor, valets in dark
uniforms opened the glass front doors and whisked arriving cars
away to the underground parking garage as though the building was a
first-class hotel. The first thirty floors of the building were
rented to other companies; the remaining upper thirty-two floors
were the domain of Adventis Technologies. Nobody could even access
the upper floors without a key card that had to be inserted into
the elevator.

At 11:30 a.m. on this Monday
morning, when the morning traffic flow of workers through the glass
doors had died down, a long black Maserati pulled up to the
entrance of the building. Like an expertly trained SWAT team four
valets surrounded the car. One of them opened the driver’s side
door, another one opened the passenger door.

A tall, exceedingly handsome
man in a dark blue suit got out of the driver’s seat. He could not
have been older than his mid-thirties. He had dark brown hair,
green eyes, and movie star features. He carried a dark leather
briefcase.

The woman getting out of the
passenger seat was short and slender and extremely pretty. She had
short curly dark hair, gray eyes, and wore a white button down
shirt, a dark blue pencil skirt, and four-inch black heels. She
carried an iPad in a sleeve under her arm, and an expensive looking
handbag over her shoulder.

The man gave the car keys to
one of the valets.

“How are you doing, Mr.
Foster?” the valet asked.

“Not bad, Tom,” Damian
Foster said casually.

He walked into the building,
followed closely by his executive assistant Carlie, who kept a firm
grip on her iPad. They moved through the stark, elegantly-designed
lobby of the building, which was nearly as large as an airport
hangar and decorated much in the same way. The ground was gray
stone, on which the footsteps of hundreds of people walking across
it at any moment echoed loudly. The walls were made of frosted
glass. There was a central coffee shop in the middle of the
lobby.

Damian and Carlie ignored
the crowds of people walking through the ground floor and made
their way to the elevators.

Carlie pressed the button.
As they waited for the elevator Damian checked his
watch.

“The investors are on their
way,” Carlie said. “I just got an email from one of
them.”

Damian nodded.

“Good.”

The elevator doors opened.
Damian and Carlie stepped inside.

Carlie removed a key card
from her purse and inserted it into a slot beside the button panel.
Then she pressed the number 62.

The elevator doors closed
and the two of them were whisked upward. In mere seconds the
elevator stopped and the doors opened into a magnificent office at
the top of the building.

It was surrounded by windows
that looked out over the buildings around it. The floor was covered
in thick gray carpet. There was a sitting area with two
expensive-looking couches, as well as a side table and a flat
screen TV on the wall. A vast desk sat in front of the
floor-to-ceiling windows.

Damian went immediately to
the side table and began mixing himself a drink.

“Want anything, Carlie?” he
asked over his shoulder.

“No thank you, Mr. Foster,”
Carlie said. She looked down at her iPad. “The investors have
arrived. I will meet them and bring them up here.”

“Perfect,” Damian said. He
took a sip of his drink and did not turn around as Carlie left the
room.

Chapter 2.

Across the city from
Adventis Technologies, in the beachside hills of Malibu, there was
a small gray nondescript building situated on a sandy road leading
up into one of the hills. The road was extremely hard to find
unless one knew the way or drove onto it by accident.

The small gray building was
surrounded by a standard black security gate with an intercom. A
sign on the gate read

ARGONAUT
LABORATORIES

A faded dark blue SUV drove
up to the gate. The driver’s side window rolled down and a girl
leaned out of it. She was a pretty girl with long light brown hair,
dark green eyes in a tanned face, and an athletic
figure.

She pressed a button on the
intercom station.

There was a crackling sound
and then a voice answered.

“State your name and purpose
please.”

“Mandelie Miles,” the girl
said. “My purpose is I’m bringing coffee and donuts to the
hardworking staff of this lab.”

“Coffee and donuts and
Mandelie are always welcome here,” the voice said.

The gate opened. Mandelie
rolled up her window and drove her car through.

The low gray building was
about the size of a boutique clothing shop. Its small parking lot
was already filled with several cars. Mandelie parked her SUV in a
free spot.

She descended from the car,
carrying a paper bag and a cup-holder laden with four cups of
coffee. Balancing her things gingerly, she opened the small side
door of the lab.

She walked down a small,
dimly lit corridor and then into the front lobby of the lab. It was
a square, cheerful-looking room with pale blue paint on the walls.
There was a cluttered reception desk where a lanky boy with
dreadlocks was sitting behind a computer. He wore a loud graffiti
shirt and shorts.

“You are the best thing I’ve
seen all day,” he said, eying Mandelie’s bags hungrily.

“Help yourself,” Mandelie
said, setting one of the bags on the desk. Jake Masner, a laid-back
nineteen-year-old who spent most of his time skateboarding at the
beach when he wasn’t working behind the reception desk at the lab,
reached into one of the bags and took out a sprinkled donut. He
crammed it into his mouth and returned his attention to the game on
his computer.

“What level are you on?”
Mandelie asked.

“Six,” Jake said. “But this
one is the one with the huge octopus shark hybrid.”

“Sounds fun,” Mandelie said.
“Where’s my dad?”

“
He’s in the project rooms
with Luke and Trista,” Jake said. He took another donut and ate it
in a single bite.

Mandelie went through the
door into the lab, carrying one of the bags and the coffee. She
walked down a short hallway that resembled a doctor’s office, with
doors on either side of it. All six of the doors were closed, but
she knocked on the first one, which had a nameplate on it that
read

Dr. Jason Miles

“Come in!” a voice
said.

Mandelie opened the
door.

Her father, Dr. Jason Miles,
was sitting behind his desk. His technician Trista Gadkin and the
laboratory android Luke was sitting in chairs in front of it. They
had clearly all been having a conversation before Mandelie
knocked.

Dr. Miles was a tall,
congenial-faced man with light brown hair that was always in a wild
state. He wore a white laboratory jacket over his shirt and pants.
His blue eyes shone with humor and intelligence.

Trista was a stern-looking
girl with shoulder-length curly black hair and a plain, no-nonsense
face. Mandelie had never seen her without her laboratory jacket
on.

Luke, the android, was
lounging back in his chair. His dark blond hair fell into his blue
eyes. His face was hard to read, as it usually was. He wore a
casual blue button-down shirt, faded jeans, and sandals.

“Is that coffee I smell?”
Trista said immediately. Coffee was her sole weakness.

“I got three for all of
you,” Mandelie said. She set the bag on the table.

Dr. Miles rose and pulled an
extra chair up to the desk for her.

“You came just at the right
time,” he said. “We were about to draw straws to see which one of
us wanted to go to the drugstore and get drinks.”

“Why not send Jake?”
Mandelie said.

“He seems pretty busy with
whatever he’s doing on the computer,” Dr. Miles said.

Luke took a cup of coffee
and blew on it. He took a sip and then a bite from a
donut.

“You know, technically, you
don’t have to eat at all,” Trista said, eying his donut. “You could
just give that donut to me.”

“My taste buds are still
activated,” Luke said. “Sometimes I like to make use of
them.”

Trista shrugged. Mandelie
grinned.

“How are the projects
going?” she asked her father.

“The Mind Portal Project is
progressing,” Dr. Miles said. “Luke needs to fine-tune the
diagnostics on it though. And the anti-gravity shoes are still not
repelling gravity.”

“Big words meaning that
whoever wears them and jumps off the roof of the lab still lands on
the ground in a heap of dust,” Trista said. “I mean, a heap of
embarrassment, since we put a mattress near the roof just in
case.”

“Who’s been volunteering to
jump off the roof?” Mandelie said, with a laugh.

“Jake,” Dr. Miles said. “I
tried to talk him out of it, but he refuses to let anyone else take
the honor of being the first person to resist gravity
successfully.”

“I would be willing to test
the shoes,” Luke said. “If Jake tires of falling. I doubt his back
can sustain much more.”

“Well, I have hopes for
tomorrow’s test run,” Dr. Miles said. “I think the tweaks I made to
the shoes should make a difference.”

“Wish I could stick around
and talk more, but I have to go,” Mandelie said. “I have my surfing
lesson in an hour.”

“Alright, see you in a
little while,” Dr. Miles said.

Mandelie got up. Luke rose
as well.

“I’ll walk you to your car,
Miss Miles,” he said.

The two of them left the lab
and walked through the lobby, where Jake was still engrossed in his
computer game.

Outside the air was cool and
misty.

Mandelie stopped in front of
her car and turned to Luke.

“I always wanted to ask you,
Luke, what do you do for fun? Do androids have any concept of
fun?”

“Fun,” Luke said. “You mean,
amusement? I’m programmed to enjoy certain activities. However, I
still have to discover what those activities are. Jake and I played
a game of hockey in the parking lot yesterday. I enjoyed
it.”

Mandelie smiled.

Chapter 3.

Damian Foster sat on one of
the couches in the sitting area of his office, his posture relaxed
but attentive, facing three men in business suits sitting on the
couch across from him.

Carlie sat beside Damian,
her iPad and a touchscreen pen in her hands.

“Make no mistake, Mr.
Foster, Adventis Technologies is at the top of the game now,” one
of the investors was saying. “But the market for innovating
technologies is fierce. We want to be sure we’ve got a strategy for
the long term.”