“Oh.”
That was a more romantic gesture than I could ever have imagined. I had no idea.
John went to get another beer and offered me one, but I shook my head. I needed to think, and drinking wouldn’t make me any smarter.
“If we were able to replace the parts, would he return to normal?”
For all I knew, the information could be gone forever. Maybe he’d have to relearn a lifetime of knowledge, and remake a lifetime of memories.
“I don’t know. He should be able to rebuild the databases, but it would take time.”
This was a good time to bring up my current main concern. “Do you think it’s wise to bring him back to the Bell like this?”
John leaned back in the chair. “Since you’re asking I guess the right answer is no.”
“I was just thinking, Debana hid him for a reason.”
“What do you want to do? Leave him like this?”
He didn’t sound accusing, more curious.
“No, of course not.”
Poor Adam needed spare parts, just like I had needed medical attention so many times and he made sure I would get it. The Bell had spare parts and engineering geniuses, but if it were that easy, Debana would have taken him to Engineering instead of hiding him in a closet. We wanted to fix him, not get him killed again.
John looked thoughtful. “I could probably replace the parts, we just don’t have any. I’m not even sure the Bell carries everything we need.”
That was definitely a problem. Adam was unique. We couldn’t go to Android-Shack and buy spare gadgets.
“There is one place…” He sounded reluctant.
“What?”
“I’m just thinking, there’s one place where we might be able to get what he needs.”
As averse as he sounded, the place must be awful.
“You look like you don’t want to go there.”
“I certainly do not.”
The puzzle finally came together in my mind. He was talking about the planet where Adam and Eve were built. Cheryl made two androids, and there might be parts there for more.
It sounded like a good idea to me and I was curious to see John’s home and Adam’s birthplace. I could probably learn a lot about my two favorite people in the world from visiting.
“From what I have heard it’s a desolate planet. The place is probably empty.”
He gave a slight shrug. “We don’t know that. I haven’t been there for over a decade, there might be vindictive androids everywhere.”
Adam and Eve might have siblings. Why didn’t I ever think of that?
I was useless. Adam would protect me, but he wasn’t in shape to think of any brilliant plans. If we went there, everything would be up to John. As if asking him to return to the place where everything went wrong wasn’t enough.
John said, “It’s not far from here, should just be a couple of days. I’ll set the course.”
*****
John kept Adam busy with fabricated ship repairs most of the day, but when evening turned into night, all three of us sat in the lounge.
I yawned. “I need to go to bed.”
John smiled. “Good night, honey.”
This was going to be weird. It didn’t matter how I turned, it would be weird. Last night things just happened, not that much happened, but now it involved a conscious decision.
The sofa that had been my bed for so long, our bed for so long, had to return to being a sofa. I needed to stop thinking about this as my bedroom.
I headed for the corridor. Adam didn’t move.
John said, “Go with her.”
I waited by the door. To be honest, I didn’t want either of them to follow me, there was too much to figure out and I could do so better in an empty room, but Adam was my husband, and he was so damaged. He had gone through so much to return to us, to me.
He crossed the floor with a couple of long steps. “May I come with you?”
“Of course. Come.”
I felt like I spoke to a pet and the thought made me feel guilty. John’s mouth twitched and he clearly had a hard time suppressing laughter, so maybe he heard it too. He shook his head as he met my eyes, and allowed himself to grin when Adam couldn’t see him.
Once we reached the relative privacy of the corridor I said, “I’m so sorry you had to be alone for all that time. If I had known, I would have come for you.”
Being locked in a closet alone, without even being able to move, sounded awful beyond belief.
“I know you would have. I wish I could have reached you. You thought I was dead and that’s worse than being alone and broken.”
Broken. What a cold word for such a warm and caring person. I reached my hand out to him and felt a wave of relief when he took it.
“How do you feel?”
“I feel…” He frowned. “Down to twenty-six percent. I know there are many things I should know and care about, but I don’t. I try not to think about it.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I hugged him and he held me carefully. This, at least, remained.
Once we reached my room he stretched out on the bed with all his clothes on, just like the night before. Probably more because he didn’t have anywhere else to go than out of a wish to lie down.
When did life become this surreal? Had it always been and I just didn’t notice?
I sat down with my back to him and lifted my hair to the side. “Would you please unzip me?”
“I don’t know how to do that.”
I glanced back to meet his eyes. He didn’t look like he was joking.
“You know how to fly a spaceship and you were able to track us across the galaxy, but you don’t how to open a zipper?”
“I’m sorry.”
“There’s no need to apologize or be sorry. I’m just surprised.”
I squiggled and managed to reach to pull it down. I got the dress on, so getting it off wasn’t impossible, just tricky. When I pulled it over my head, Adam stared at my underwear. Or maybe at the skin surrounding the underwear.
Flattering, but a bit unnerving.
“You’ve seen this before. Many times.”
“Sure.” He didn’t sound convinced.
“Adam, focus. Look here.”
My skin and underwear were soon forgotten for the miracle of a zipper. He pulled it up and down with an intrigued look on his face.
Great.
The smartest man I ever met had become easier to amuse than a toddler.
If anything, his mental faculties seemed to decline now when he no longer had a goal to focus on. I didn’t have to be a math genius to know that twenty-six percent functionality was less than twenty-eight.
I pulled on my favorite nightie, took the dress away from him and tossed it over a chair, and stretched out next to him.
“This is weird.”
Adam sighed. “I know. You’re used to sleeping with him.”
It was a statement of a fact. How did he know?
“Well, sleeping with him, not sleeping with him. He saved my life.”
“I know.”
“You were dead. For a long time”
“I know.”
He stared up at the ceiling. What could I say? Nothing would make things better.
“Can I… Would it be okay if…”
“Of course.” The time of miracles wasn’t over; he understood my incoherent attempts at forming a sentence, stretched out his arm, and invited me to come closer. I hurried to curl up with my head on his shoulder before he could change his mind.
“This is nice. I’ve missed this.”
He ran his free hand over my hair. “I did too.”
I nudged myself as close as I could possibly come and draped my arm over his chest. In a way, this was the first time I truly relaxed for almost a year.
Adam’s voice whispering, “I love you” wooed me to sleep.
*****
A bad dream woke me in the middle of the night and for a moment imagined horrors
lingered with me. I needed several seconds to recognize Adam’s shoulder under my head and his arms holding me.
I whispered his name and nudged myself closer.
“Nightmare?”
“M-hm.”
He ran a hand over my hair and the gentle touch scattered the last echoes of the dream.
“I didn’t think you’d still be here.” I could count the times he spent a full night with me.
“I’m here.”
I pressed myself closer to him and he kissed my forehead. “I know bad dreams have traditionally been more on John’s work description than mine, but I really want the job if you’d be willing to consider me for the position.”
It was true, John had stayed with me many times Adam couldn’t or wouldn’t, but his words were still funny enough to make me chuckle.
“You got it. You don’t even have to interview.”
With his arms around me it was a matter of seconds before I went back to sleep. He was there. We might not be perfectly alright, but we were safe.
The next time I woke it was from Adam freeing himself from me.
“Where are you going?” My mumble barely even made sense to myself.
“To make you breakfast.”
Why? I wasn’t even awake. Was this some form of android joke?
“Can it wait? It feels really early.”
An uncertain expression flew over his face. “I don’t know. I think I always do it at this time, but I don’t know why.”
Oh. It must be 6:02 AM.
“Lie down again and I’ll tell you.”
He obeyed.
I said, “What do you remember from the Bell?”
“It’s a spaceship. We live there, and I’m fairly sure I work there.”
Fairly sure? He knew about it when he arrived.
Not good.
Where were we now? Twenty-four percent? Twenty-two?
I pushed the thought to the side.
“You do, and you’re very good at it. You command the ship every night. Sometimes it’s from midnight to six, but more often from ten in the evening to six in the morning. When you’re done, you come home and wake me up with breakfast. That’s probably why you think it’s supposed to happen at six.”
Unless the ship was on fire, John would not be awake at six in the morning, and I had adapted to his rhythm just as I once adapted to Adam’s.
“So you don’t want it?”
“Maybe you could stay here for a bit first. We can…” snuggle “talk. Or go back to sleep.”
“You know I don’t sleep.” This time he sounded amused.
“Yeah, well, I sleep.”
I curled up next to him just like my body’s memory claimed it should be. He held me and for a moment, everything felt just like it used to be.
My body pointed out there were other fun things to be done with a husband than just cuddling, but my brain told it to be quiet. It had waited this long and could wait a little longer.
Adam’s hand wandering over my back revealed he thought along the same lines, and my body considered it fantastic.
No harm could come from kissing him, right?
Making love would increase the voltage in his neural net and overload it. In his current state it would probably kill him.
My body put up a good fight against the brain, but I finally pulled back. “This is a bad idea.”
He sighed. “Alright.”
He might think it was worth the risk, but I needed to keep a cool head and a long-term approach. Preferably in a way that put it on me and not on him, so he wouldn’t feel bad.
I needed to say something that was at least sort of the truth. His uncanny ability to sense lies probably remained.
“Adam, I love you. I just need some time. You know that, right?”
“Yes.” He didn’t sound certain.
This couldn’t be easy to understand, it wouldn’t have been even if he weren’t damaged. Maybe it was a good thing he wasn’t himself. If he were, we would probably have been fighting over my many months alone with John.
I leaned on my elbow and ran my palm over his cheek. He caught my hand in his and pressed it against his chest.
“There’s so much darkness in my mind, so much I know I’m missing, and I feel like I’m on the edge of an abyss. My remaining memory circuits are failing. You’re the only thing keeping me from falling, but I don’t know how long you will be willing to hold me.”
There was so much pain in his voice it brought tears to my eyes, and it cooled me off better than any amount of icy water could have. I rested my head down on his shoulder again, hoping he wouldn’t see the droplets that rolled down my cheeks.
I clearly wasn’t doing a good job supporting him.
“I’m here. I love you and I will always love you. If you think I'm acting strange…” I was fairly sure he was the one out of sorts and not me, but one could never be sure. “I just need a couple of days to understand that you’re back and won’t vanish again. Can you give me that?”
“Yes, I can do that.” This time he sounded more confident. He turned his face towards mine. “Don’t cry.”
I didn’t know what to say, couldn’t tell him why tears trickled from my eyes in a way that would make sense to him, so I pressed my lips against his, hoping it would distract him. He returned the light kiss but broke free within a few moments.
“I remember the first time I kissed you. It was in a grocery store. Best thing I ever did.”
If I let him continue down this path he’d have me bawling in no time. “Let’s go do that breakfast thing.”
Chapter Eleven
We were close to Adam’s birthplace and I was the only one excited about it.
On the bright side, not much happened on the way there. John checked his guns over and over again and ran tests on the ship’s shields and weapons. Adam tried to hide his malfunctions, and I pretended I didn’t notice.
One of his hands stopped obeying him and he stared at it for a long moment before it moved again. I couldn’t look away; I hugged him and kissed the corner of his mouth.
“I have worked around the malfunction.”
“That’s good.” Too scary for me to want to talk about, or even think about.
John pulled out of hyperspace well outside the planetary system. He did not look happy and when he sensed me watching him, he said, “I want a drink.”
“What’s wrong?”
He drew a deep sigh. “There’s a pretty intense defense system here.”
“Did you build it?”
“Yeah. I was a drunken and bored idiot with too many gadgets at my disposal. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“You haven’t been here for over a decade. It might not be there anymore.”
“It’s there. The question is whether it’s activated or not.”
The somber look on his face sent a chill down my back. I had assumed my boys didn’t want to go because of bad memories, and I hadn’t considered the possibility of their home-world posing real danger.
“You know, if Eve was the last person here and the last one to leave, she might not have bothered with turning it on. She probably thought she wouldn’t come back.”
He nodded. “Let’s go with that. I doubt my command codes would do us any good, if anything the AI has been programmed to fire at anyone who has them. Are you ready?”
“I’m ready.”
“Alright. Keep your fingers crossed.”
*****
We reached the planet without problems and the ship did not explode, not even when we left it in orbit and took a shuttle to the surface.
John had mentioned Adam came from a hot jungle hell. He wasn’t joking. The dark green foliage had large leaves and between the plants, bursts of steam rose from the ground. Actual steam. Looking at it from the shuttle window made me wish I were back on the ship. Being there alone would have been creepy, but I should still have taken the opportunity when Jo
hn offered it. This wasn’t my best idea ever.
John said, “I never thought I’d return here.”
I reached out to put my hand on his.
“Thank you.”
He winked at me.
Adam said, “I remember this place. We should leave.”
John nodded. “You’re right, but we need items only available here. There are probably traps everywhere.”
He hesitated. “Son, I need you to stay close to your wife and protect her.”
“Of course.”
He wouldn’t let anything happen to me. This had not changed.
We landed smoothly in a clearing and I half expected the shuttle to trigger a mine or something.
Nothing happened.
John turned the engines off. “There’s an underground hangar, but I doubt we can get in there. Walking from here won’t be pleasant, but we can do it.”
*****
The planet wasn’t any better seen from the outside of the shuttle. I was used to an air-conditioned, cool, and dry atmosphere. The air in this place was so thick and humid it barely went into my lungs.
John looked around, squinting at the sun.
“There used to be a village over there.”
“Used to? What happened?”
“Cheryl happened. Come, it’s this way.”
His ex destroyed an entire village? He had said many less than flattering things about her, but I still hadn’t expected that.
Every step was an ordeal, but walking through the dense woods still posed less of a challenge than it could have, at least for me. John and Adam cleared any obstacles, held branches to the side, and made it as easy for me as possible. Being the weakest member in the group had its perks.
I paused and both men stopped with worried looks on their faces.
Adam said, “Do you want me to take you back to the shuttle? You can wait for us there. I will carry you.”
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