What Lies Behind: A New Adult Dark Science Fiction Romance

by Travis Simmons

  She shook her head. “Just a nightmare,” she said, gripping his hand tightly. He leaned down and kissed her forehead. “We can’t turn Natalia into the police.”

  “Thank God. I don’t want you going anywhere near her. I have you safe now, and the doctor said that you’re fragile right now, she could do so much damage to you,” Brandon said.

  “No, she has to pay, but the cops likely won’t believe me anyway.” Cass looked up into Brandon’s eyes. Desperation tightened his lids. His lips hardened into a line.

  “What do you have in mind?”

  It had taken several days for Brandon to agree that Cass was well enough to confront Natalia.

  Now she stood outside the small office building, staring up at its five floors. Brandon stood beside her, his hand held loosely in her own. Mathilda was behind her. She wasn’t precisely sure what the old automaton was going to do for them, but it was nice having her along.

  The building was an old one made of red brick. The dismal sun shown gray against the sparkling windows. Overhead hover cars whirred about, but none parked on the building, there wasn’t space above. The roof of the building had been converted to a garden in an effort to clean the air.

  “We aren’t going to accomplish anything just standing here,” Mathilda said.

  Brandon knew the way. He lead them through a side door and into a pretty non-descript hallway with white walls and cream carpeting. The five floors housed various offices, but the top floor was dedicated to In Style magazine. The magazine Natalia’s father owned. The magazine Natalia worked for.

  They boarded the elevator and Cass closed her eyes as Brandon entered their destination.

  The elevator hissed up through the floors of the building. Cass rested against the wall of the lift, her hands clasped tightly over her chest. She was all abuzz with circuits and impulses. Her brain, as it were, seemed to jump with each soft ding indicating a new floor overcome.

  She didn’t appear nervous, but she thought that’s what she would be if she could be such a thing. Natalia had been her captor for so long, to think that it was all going to end today. It wasn’t something she could fully comprehend.

  “Nervous?” Brandon asked, putting his arm around her.

  “Just a little,” Cass said.

  “Don’t worry now,” Mathilda said to her. “There’s not a thing she can do to you.” The old robot had dressed more conservatively today. She still wore a head wrap, but it was black, as was the rest of her outfit. It fit in with the posh building.

  “We’re almost there,” Brandon said. “I know right where her office is. We will go in there and search for the device.”

  “Where will we even look?” Cass asked. The lift dinged for the fifth floor, and the doors whooshed open. Brandon steered her out the doors and into a dimly lit white hallway. It ran straight ahead before branching off in three different directions. At the end of the hall straight ahead was a desk with a pretty brunette receptionist.

  “She has a compartment in her desk where she keeps stuff she doesn’t want people to know about. It’s hidden. I’ve seen her open it when she didn’t think I was looking. It will most definitely be in there.”

  Mathilda trailed behind them, down the carpeted corridor. The walls were hung with large banners of models in all their glory. Some of them wore illuminated cyborg parts. Cosmetic surgery had taken a strange turn some years back when robotics became more esteemed. Now the rich and famous had new ways to accessorize, and more things they could lose other than wrinkles, love handles, and unsightly noses. At least they had more control over how perfect their legs were, or their arms. It was a perfection that regular cosmetic surgery couldn’t touch.

  Cass stared at one model who had her leg removed and replaced with a crystal leg equipped with red lighting so her leg glowed whenever she put weight on it. In the picture she was poised on that leg that shown wickedly against the black backdrop and her black chain-mail wedding dress.

  Robots trying to be human and humans trying to be robots. Go figure.

  “This way,” Brandon said.

  Cass followed him down the left hand hallway. The walls here were a rich cherry wood. The offices were all equipped with tall windows that looked out on to the hallways of the fifth floor. Most of the doors were closed, and some of them had blinds drawn down tight for privacy.

  Despite where she was, Cass was already starting to feel more at peace. There was something about all that dark wood surrounding her, and the muted lights, that made her feel less tense.

  “Here,” Brandon said, standing outside the door to one office.

  It was surprisingly small, not something Cass would have imagined Natalia would work in. Especially since her father was the CEO of the magazine. Despite being small, it was decorated lavishly with flowers and lavender drapes and accessories.

  “Mathilda, will you keep watch?” Cass asked.

  The older robot nodded and took up a spot beside the door.

  They entered the room. Cass didn’t want to go behind the desk. For some reason, despite having her programs reconfigured, she thought of Natalia as her owner still, or at least someone she should respect. For that reason, she didn’t want to go behind the desk.

  “Don’t worry,” Brandon said. “I will look for it.”

  He slipped around behind the desk and pulled her chair out. It amused Cass that no matter how many years they had gone through and how many technological advances that had been made, that people still used things like desks and chairs. There was little need for them now, most of the computers were inside people.

  The office was equipped with a computer of its own. That was most likely so that the company couldn’t infringe on people’s personal thoughts. There were a lot of safety measures put on computer implants now, but when it had first became the new thing, a lot of hackers had been able to cause some serious trouble inside the minds and bodies of their victims.

  Businesses weren’t allowed to put programs into a person’s computer implant now. It would be too easy for leaks to happen.

  Brandon grunted and a drawer slipped open behind the desk. It was deep and thin. He reached inside of it and started pulling out all kinds of papers, storage devices, and odd trinkets that Cass didn’t recognize.

  “What is all that?” she asked.

  Brandon shrugged.

  “What do you think she’s hiding on all those storage devices?” Cass asked.

  “Who knows? Do you want to look while I search for the devices?”

  Cass’s hand shook as she reached for the device. She picked up the clear cylindrical crystal and slipped it into a port at the base of her skull. At least that much was like humans who were often equipped with such computer ports in their heads.

  Her visual overlay was populated with all kinds of encrypted messages and correspondences.

  “Who is Chelsea Birch?” Cass asked. “I’ve heard her talking to a Mrs. Birch a lot in the mornings while she’s getting ready for work.”

  “That would be the CEO of our competitor,” a man said from the doorway.

  Cass gasped and her gaze flickered to the doorway. A man stood there in a dark suit. He was bald and his face had the look of power. Even if his brown eyes appeared kind and soft, his mouth was set in a hard line that was nearly as intimidating as Natalia could be.

  “Brandon,” the man said. “I come to take my daughter to lunch, and here you are.” He smiled.

  Brandon smiled. He stood up straighter, trying to close the hidden compartment with his leg, despite the evidence that he had been searching through Natalia’s personal belongings. He itched his head.

  “No need to be coy, I caught you snooping,” the man said and laughed. “I didn’t think you and my daughter were a couple any longer?” he asked.

  “We aren’t, sir,” Brandon said.

  “Please,” Mr. Tupper said. “Call me James, you always have before.”

  James turned to Cass, who had already slipped the storage device
out of her port and was trying to set it down on the desk without drawing attention to herself.

  “Now what’s that?” James asked, holding his hand out to Cass. “You’re my daughter’s personal assistant, right?”

  Circuit breaker, that’s how Natalia referred to her father. She hated him because he was in love with an automaton…but he didn’t refer to Cass as a machine. He called her an assistant.

  This could work out better than taking Natalia to the authorities.

  “I was, sir,” Cass said.

  “Please, you can call me James as well.”

  She nodded and tucked a lock of blond hair behind her ear.

  “Now what’s this were business?” James asked.

  “She disposed of me over a week ago,” Cass told him.

  “Very interesting,” James said, tilting his head back. He picked up the storage device and flipped it over in his hand. “Please, if you would come with me to my office, we can discuss this in further detail.”

  “That sounds great,” Brandon said.

  Cass shot Brandon a look. She didn’t feel like she could trust this man, but Brandon seemed okay with it. She trusted Brandon, so she nodded and followed them.

  They stepped out into the hall. Mathilda fell in step behind them.

  Mr. Tupper’s office was at the end of its own hallway, away from the noise of the rest of the office and out of the way of prying eyes. The walls here were a rich brown. They weren’t wood, Cass realized, but painted. The carpet was a sky blue. Windows lined the hall on the left to look out on the cloudy day.

  “Tabitha, my dear, would you look into what’s on this device for me?” James said, handing the storage device to a plump silver-haired woman behind a desk outside his office.

  She nodded and took the device from him. She didn’t smile. Her face looked like she never really smiled to Cass.

  She didn’t have time to ponder Tabitha and her lack of smiling because James was leading them into his office. The windows looking out into the office were covered with blinds, but the ones that faced out on the city were free of clutter.

  He motioned for them to take a seat and they all arranged themselves around his office, Mathilda further back than Cass and Brandon.

  “Would you like something to drink?” James asked Brandon, who shook his head no. James sat a glass of blue shimmering water before him.

  “Now, you were just about to tell me,” James said, sitting down in his leather chair. “What your part in all of this is. Why were you snooping in my daughter’s office?”

  “That’s actually my fault, sir,” Cass said.

  James turned his brown eyes on Cass, and laced his fingers over his stomach. He didn’t say anything, so she continued. She told him everything that had been going on with Natalia. She told him about the abuse, she told him about the repairs she was constantly having to do to herself, and she told him about the damage his daughter had caused, according to Doctor Stephenson.

  As she told him of the terror she’d experienced living with his daughter, his face grew darker and darker. At first Cass was worried that he didn’t believe her, and that he would have her and Brandon arrested for trespassing on his daughter’s personal property. Cass finished telling the story and she looked down to her hands, clasped in her lap.

  James let out a loud sigh and rested his head back against the chair.

  “I was worried something like that was going on. She never let me see you when I came over. And though her mother and I parted on good terms, she’s always been angry that we split up because of my feelings for an artificial intelligence.”

  He looked at Cass, considering for a moment what to do with what she told him. He leaned forward on his desk. Cass tried to focus on the hover cars drifting by outside, but she couldn’t. His presence was too dominating.

  “EMP. Really?” he shook his head. “What am I to do with her? If I turn her in she will be arrested for using illegal weapons, but she’s my daughter. Could I do something like that?”

  “Sir, she really resents you,” Brandon chimed in, obviously more relaxed with their current situation than Cass was.

  Cass gaped at Brandon. Was he really trying to get Natalia’s father to turn her in?

  Mathilda shifted in her seat behind them, drawing attention to herself. “That doesn’t matter, she’s his daughter. Just because she might hate him, doesn’t mean he’s allowed to hate her.”

  “Thank you,” James nodded to Mathilda. He stood and looked out the window on the left wall. He leaned against the window frame. “But it also means I have to take responsibility for her. I can’t let her get away with this. Who knows what she’s really up to? Torturing someone in her care? Maybe figuring out how to torture other automatons?”

  “What are you going to do?” Brandon asked.

  James took a breath to say something, but a knock sounded on his office door. He frowned and called for them to come in.

  It was Tabitha, and she was wearing a concerned look. James went to her, and as she whispered in his ear, his eyebrows drew down over his nose. Cass hadn’t thought James looked old until that moment, when his face scrunched up with disappointment and maybe anger.

  Tabitha left closing the door behind her.

  James sighed, lowering himself into his chair. He was silent for some time as he watched the day outside his office.

  “There are times when a parent wonders where they went wrong,” James finally spoke. “Was it something we did to Natalia? Was it something she was born with? Do humans have programming at birth like robots? Was she programmed to be like this?”

  “James?” Brandon leaned forward. His eyes were dark.

  “Brandon, you know I’ve always thought of you as a son, even before Natalia got her claws into you, when you were here, working in the mail room. If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t be telling you this now.

  “Natalia has crossed many lines, and if it wasn’t for your little lady here, Cass, I might never have known it. She’s been secretly leaking confidential information to Chelsea Birch. That’s what was on that storage device.” James looked to them. “She’s done many things to disappoint me over the years, but I’m a father, what can I do about that other than love her, hope she can change, and correct her if she’s gone too far?”

  No one spoke.

  “I can’t turn a blind eye to this. She will be punished. You have nothing to worry about,” James said. “And, as my way of thanking you both, let me give you a gift.”

  “We don’t need anything,” Cass said. “Really, we just want to be safe from Natalia.”

  “And you will have that, I’m sure. There’s more, I can tell the way Brandon feels for you. He looks at you the same way he looked at my daughter before she became who she became.”

  “James?” Brandon asked, leaning back. He took a drink of the blue water. His lips shimmered for a moment after his drink, and then faded to their original color.

  “My wife was an automaton at one time. Our house assistant, actually,” James said. He faced both of them, lacing his hands together on the desk. “I thought I loved her then, but when she became an android, my love only grew. She became more and more the woman I’d glimpsed under all of her programming.

  “You’ve both saved my company. If we hadn’t known about Chelsea Birch, Natalia would probably have destroyed what I worked so hard to build. If you two want whatever is happening between you to work, I think you need exactly what Julia and I have. I think Cass needs to become android.”

  Cass stepped out into the open air. The dismal light of the sun shown down on her. She could barely believe what had happened. Without knowing it, Natalia had given Cass exactly what she wanted.

  Android, she thought. It was something she’d wanted for such a short time, but with such a need that Cass could barely think of anything else. Now she had it, or she would have it, thanks to James.

  “This is great news!” Mathilda said, clapping her hands.

  Before
Cass could celebrate, a red light started to pulse in the lower right of her visual overlay. An urgent news broadcast. Without her willing it to, the headline populated.

  Olivia Hamilton announced her bid for Congress.

  All thoughts of being an android drained from her mind. Olivia was the one who did this to her. She knew that now with certainty. Olivia had ordered Janet to make these changes to Cass. Olivia was the true danger here, not Natalia. Olivia had to be stopped. Equal rights was one thing, but that’s not what Olivia wanted. Olivia worked more with subjugation.

  She’d wanted Jack dead because he didn’t see eye to eye with her, Cass thought. Was Olivia willing to keep that kind of mind frame through the entire campaign?

  Something else was happening to her now. Cass wasn’t hearing what was happening around her. Her mind was filling with other thoughts, other needs.

  Other programming.

  Automaton speed activating…speed boost repaired.

  She felt the strength in her limbs. Cass felt the bio fuel pumping to her legs, and before she knew it, she was running, following the urgent red path lit up on her visual overlay. The red path that lead her to Olivia. Led her to her destiny.

  “Where is she going?” Mathilda asked, every inch of her body on edge, ready to spring to action.

  Brandon watched the path that Cass had taken, and the speed with which she’d taken it. There was only one place he could think of that she would be going to with such haste.

  “Her programming,” he said, remembering the eerie encounter with Janet. “Come on, we have to get to the State Office Building.”

  Janet was already standing when Cass rounded the corner to the hallway that led to Olivia’s office. She was smiling at Cass, her hands clasped before her. The look pissed Cass off. It was a look that said Janet had control over her. It was a look that said they only needed to tug the strings, and Cass would jump like a puppet at their bidding.