by Nash, Lisa
Thomas quickly said, “No!” He couldn’t imagine how he could handle Cora if they did anything to raise her levels.”
The group from Grant Bio-Syn collected their gas masks and moved to the elevator.
“Wait,” Thomas said, “What about Cora?”
Ms. Pope held up the clicker. “You’ve had one of these all along, Mr. Miller. Inside pocket of your jacket. I’d wait until we’re on our way down. She’ll be momentarily confused, but it will pass, and she’ll have no memory of us or this whole intrusive incident.”
The elevator door opened and they stepped inside.
“Ms. Pope,” Thomas said running after them. “Can I talk to you about something?”
“I wouldn’t want to take up any more of your Cora time.”
“It’s about that.”
She pushed the button for the lobby. “What about that?”
“I think she’s different… Cora, that is.”
“Different than what?”
“Than the other bio-synthetics. She’s special.”
The men on the elevator let out a half laugh, half groan.
“They all are, Mr. Miller.”
“No, I mean it. You don’t know her like I do. She’s a person like you and me.”
The door started to close. “No, she’s not, Mr. Miller. She’s a bio-synthetic scheduled to be decommissioned in…” She looked at her watch. “Sixty-three hours.” The elevator doors closed.
-22-
They hooked up a live feed from his house so he could do the interview from his study. The nation wanted to know how the legendary Senator was reacting to his friend’s death. He was devastated. He knew that Cornelius had been troubled, but he’d no idea just how deeply troubled he was. He sent out his prayers to Linda, the reverend’s wife, and wished her God’s speed in dealing with the loss. She could count on the Senator for anything she needed.
When the interviewer tried to veer the questions towards his son’s campaign, the Senator admonished the man for the inappropriate timing. It was time to honor Reverend Cornelius Toland not talk about his son’s presidential campaign.
After the interview, Judge Davis called. His voice was weak and shaky. He understood why the Reverend did what he did because he had thought about doing it himself. The Senator advised against it. It would just bring more attention to the connection between the Judge and the Reverend, and the Judge’s daughter would ultimately come under more scrutiny. Such a thing would only ruin her career.
The Senator hung up the phone. He sat in his padded leather office chair and planted his feet on the ground. Once the demands for comments on his friend’s death were completely satisfied, he would have to take charge of the increasingly volatile situation. It was time he took back control.
Until then, he knew what to do to relax. He invited the cameraman and sound man, still wrapping up from the shoot, to get acquainted with his assistant.
-23-
The group of Grant Bio-Syn employees didn’t speak for several minutes as the elevator slowly descended. Ms. Pope stared at her reflection in the polished stainless steel doors and assessed what had just happened. She became irritated when one of the men spoke.
“That guy seem familiar to anyone else?”
She turned to him. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “He just looks… like somebody.”
“Like who?”
The man nervously scratched behind his ear. He wished he hadn’t said anything. He hated getting interrogated by Ms. Pope, or, as some at work called her, stick-up-her-ass Pope. “I can’t put a finger on it.”
“Then why would you say anything?”
He shook his head frantically and backed as far away from her as the elevator would allow.
She turned back around and sighed deeply. She turned to the man to her left. “Hold onto that sample from Mr. Miller.”
He nodded.
“Run a full diagnostic when we get back to campus.”
“Anything special you’re looking for?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said facing front again. She did not elaborate.
The three men covertly exchanged looks of confusion, but didn’t dare question her further.
-24-
Thomas hurried to his jacket and fumbled through his inside pocket. He found the clicker, stood, aimed it at Cora, but stopped short of pushing the button when he saw Duncan standing over her at the edge of the pool.
“Where did you come from?” he asked feeling angry, but sounding panicked. A flood of memories came rushing back to him about his conversation with Duncan in the bathroom at the restaurant. He instantly felt afraid of the man.
“Service elevator.” The lean thug squatted on one knee and examined the lifeless bio-synthetic. “They upgraded the Cora model since the last time I saw one. tits are bigger, got that nice tear drop shape. Used to be small soft mounds.” He mimicked the shape by holding his hands up in front of his chest in an open gnarled gesture. “Nice, but these are much fucking better.”
“What are you doing here?”
Duncan peered through the water at Cora’s backside. “This unit has always had a world class ass, though. Can’t improve on that.”
“I asked you a question?”
“I got fucking nervous when I saw the HAZMAT shitheads moving in. I thought they were going to take my organs.”
“She’s not…!” Thomas was about to tear into him about calling Cora organs, but he realized it wouldn’t help. Duncan was a prick. Pricks just become bigger pricks when you try to take a stand. “They didn’t take her. They just ran some quick tests on us.”
“Tests? What the fuck for?”
“I don’t know. They just did, all right. It must just be something they do.”
“Fuck that. I’ve never seen them do it before.”
Thomas was growing more irritated. “It had something to do with…” He searched his brain for what Ms. Pope had called it. “SSD!” He shouted.
Duncan’s expression went from brutish annoyance to childlike curiosity in an instant. “Fuck me. Drift?”
“Yeah, something, something drift,” Thomas said.
Duncan laughed. “I thought that was a fucking myth. Talked to a guy once who said he got caught up in a drift. Walked in on a synthetic and his match fucking in an empty movie theater. Dude said he couldn’t help himself, choked his chicken on the spot and kept choking it. Nearly pulled his own pecker off. Had to have surgery to save it.”
Thomas closed his eyes and put his hands on his hips. “Feel free to not share those kinds of stories with me in the future, okay?”
“I thought the fucker was full of shit, but if Grant Bio-Syn came running in here in their space suits, it actually might be a real thing.”
“A real thing that didn’t happen to Cora and me. Our levels, whatever the fuck those are, checked out.”
“They do a Schumann’s Resonance test?”
“No… I don’t know… a what?”
“A Schumann’s Resonance test.” Duncan held up his fingers in the shape of a gun. “Did they have something that looks like a scanner, you know like in retail and shit. They use it to check prices.”
“Prices? Cora has a price?”
Duncan rolled his eyes. “No, dumbshit. I’m just saying that’s what the Schumann’s Resonance test device looks like. Did you see something that looked like that?”
Thomas shook his head. “What’s a Schumann’s Resonance?”
“Not a hundred percent sure myself. Has something to do with electromagnetic fields. All I know is if that shit gets out of whack, it can cause a little bit of chaos. Can’t believe they didn’t test for it. Fucking amateurs came up here for nothing?”
Thomas didn’t respond. He was too busy trying to process the events of the last ten minutes.
Duncan pulled a pair of tweezers and magnifying glass from his coat pocket. “Well, let’s make it a little harder for them to find you should they feel
the need to pay you a visit again.” He stooped down, turned Cora’s head toward him, and tilted her chin up.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for a flea’s dick,” Duncan said holding the magnifying glass over Cora’s left ear.
“The GPS tracker,” Thomas said to himself as he moved around the pool towards the woman he loved and the thug who wanted to harvest her organs.
“Got it,” Duncan said straightening his back and holding up the tweezers.
Thomas slowed and stared at Duncan’s outstretched hand as he approached. “I don’t see anything.”
“That’s not too fucking surprising,” Duncan said holding the magnifying glass in front of the tweezers. “I told you it’s small as shit.”
Thomas squinted and finally saw that small sliver of filament. “It looks like…”
“A flea’s dick,” Duncan said standing. “I told you.”
“If you say so.”
Duncan moved around him. He held up his watch. “You got less than 63 hours, kid. Make ‘em count.”
“Wait, wait. I need to tell you something.”
Duncan stopped and turned to him. “You got something like that waiting to fuck your brains out and you want chit-chat with me? They get you the wrong gender, kid? You like your synthetics with a little less tit and a little more dick?”
“No, listen to me.” The panic was back in his voice. “A mistake has been made.”
“What mistake?”
“She’s not a bio-synthetic.”
Duncan turned and looked at her. “Kid, new tits aside, that’s a Cora. There’s no question about it.”
“It can’t be. She’s a person. I know it.”
Duncan shook his head and started to walk away again, but Thomas grabbed his arm. “Not a good idea, kid.”
“Don’t you understand, Duncan? I love her. She can’t be a synthetic if I love her.”
Duncan fought a smile. For whatever reason, he liked the dumbass kid, and he felt a little twinge of sympathy for him. “That’s what synthetics are made for, kid, to fall in love with. And matches always do. They can’t help it. They fall, and they fall hard. But it’s a fake love. It’s not real. It’s all those fucking hormones your body is spitting out. At about hour 68, give or take, the feeling will start to fade. When you’ve spent all 72 with her, you’ll see through the bullshit. It’s possible you won’t care, but you’ll know it’s not real. You may even be anxious to get rid of her. Don’t worry, I’ll be there to help you out, and you’ll get a little reward for your troubles. Three hours after she’s gone, you’ll barely remember her. That’s how it works.”
Dejected, Thomas let go of Duncan’s arm. “That can’t be true.”
“It is,” Duncan said putting some distance between himself and the poor brokenhearted slob. “But two things you should know. A - Once you turn her back on, you’ll refuse to believe what I just told you. It’ll feel like genuine love. And in a purely hormonal way, I guess it kind of is, if you think fucking and sucking is love.
“And two - no matter how many times you tell her you love her, she will never, ever, not once, say it back to you. Grant Bio-Syn has removed that word from her vocabulary. She doesn’t love you back, kiddo. It keeps things less complicated, and helps speed up that fade out period. Sorry to be the one to break it to you.”
Thomas stood dumbfounded as he watched Duncan disappear down the hallway to the service elevator. He thought about stopping him once again to tell him he was wrong. Cora wasn’t like the other bio-synthetics. She did love Thomas. She had said it. The word that was supposedly removed from her vocabulary escaped her mouth in an intense moment of intimacy. But something inside him told him he needed to keep that piece of information to himself.
-25-
She had no memory of the… intrusive event, as Ms. Pope put it. After Thomas brought her out of her catatonic state, her eyes fluttered and she gasped once as if she were taking in oxygen after holding her breath for an unnaturally long period of time.
He jumped in the water and rushed to her. “Are you okay?”
Rushing to him, she said that word she didn’t know three times in rapid secession. “I love you, I love you, I love you.” It was as if she knew that time was running out for them, and she had limited opportunities to let him know just how much she did really love him.
They met in the middle of the pool, water cascading all around them as they embraced, holding on tightly to one another. He blocked out the world that said this wasn’t genuine. She’d opened up her mind to a concept she had not been conditioned to know. The lust that had fueled their time together up to that point was still present and burning, but something bigger outshined it now. It was a feeling of flawless serendipity. That they were exactly where they were supposed to be. That every fabric of space was woven to accommodate this moment of discovery.
This was real love. Thomas was sure of it.
She hugged him tighter and said, “Are you sure you love me?”
“I have never been surer of anything in my life.”
“But I haven’t exactly been…respectable up to this point,” she laughed.
“What do you mean, respectable?”
“I mean I begged you to fuck me on the elevator, not to mention I rode your cock like it was a bull in a rodeo in Sugar’s, and I practically raped you in the dressing room… I use the word cock like it’s going out of style. It’s all been a string of whorish exploits up to this point, and I’m under the impression that men don’t exactly fall in love with whores…”
“First of all, you didn’t beg me to fuck you on the elevator. You more or less ordered me to. Second of all, I love you because of all those things, and I love you because you know how to laugh and smile and you know how to make me laugh and smile. I love you because you treat everyone the same. You’re fearless. You’re funny. You’re a fucking sexual freak. I love you because you know my favorite color and my favorite food, and I love you because I didn’t even hesitate to tell you the quote from my mother. I’ve never told anyone that before. I love you not just because of the person you are, but because of the person I am around you.”
She leaned back and stared at him stunned and then kissed him hard. Pulling her lips away she said, “Question.”
“Yes?”
“Why aren’t you fucking me right now?” She smiled.
“I thought you’d never ask…”
The elevator dinged again followed by the telltale swish of the doors opening. They heard a man hoot with excitement and a woman laugh uproariously.
“Oops,” Cora whispered.
“What?” Thomas asked.
“We’re naked.”
Thomas pulled her in close. “Fuck it. Let them see.”
“That may be the sexiest thing you’ve said all night, Mr. Miller.”
“Well, well, lookie here!” the man yelled. “We got us a couple of nudies in the pool!”
It wasn’t hard to tell the couple was a product of Grant Bio-Syn’s handy work. The man was a potbellied lout in a Speedo with more hair on his back than on his head, and the bottle of Scotch he was carrying was expensive and half empty.
The woman was a bleached blonde with a body that was meticulously built for making men weak in the knees and stiff in the dick. Her perky ‘D’ tits bounced like heavy balloons underneath a bikini top that looked like it was made for a toddler. Her wide hips swayed to and fro as she followed the fat man into the pool area. Her lips, her eyes, her nose, could not have been sculpted any better by the most gifted artist on the planet.
The man raised his bottle of Scotch, “To Grant Bio-Syn!”
Thomas wheeled around still holding onto Cora and moved to the other end of the pool. He desperately tried to come up with a dignified exit so he could get as far away from the fat man and his synthetic.
“Hey,” the drunk man called out. “Look at what my Amber can do!”
Thomas and Cora turned to the two newcomers just as Amber y
anked the unfortunate looking man’s Speedo down to the floor, got on her knees, and started sucking his average sized penis.
“Oh, my,” Cora said.
“What…”
The man hooted again. “Is that fucking amazing or what…? Oh, wait… here it comes… hold on a second…”
“It’s so awful, but I can’t look away,” Thomas said.
“I know,” Cora said.
“Bam!” The man yelled as he came in Amber’s mouth.
“That did not just happen,” Thomas said.
“Wait that’s not the best part!” The main said excitedly.
Amber reached up and grabbed her arm to steady herself as she convulsed and shook. Her moans and euphoric expression suggested she orgasmed, too.
“Can you believe it? She comes every time she blows me.” His belly shook as he let out a disturbing laugh. “Just discovered that this morning. That’s the tenth time we’ve done it since breakfast. And fella, let me tell you, she can suck a goddamn dick.”
“Look at her,” Cora whispered. “She doesn’t look right.”
Thomas suspected Amber was just doing what she was conditioned to do.
“What about yours?” the man said still with his Speedos around his ankles. “What’s yours do?”
They reached the farthest end of the pool. “Kind of having a private moment here, mister,” Thomas said.
“Private?”
“Yeah, with my girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend…?” The man scratched his round belly and then laughed. “I get it. Girlfriend.” He took a swig of his Scotch. “Have your private moment. Me and Amber will have us a sit down. When you’re done, maybe we can swap. Amber will do that dick sucking thing on you and your unit can show me her special tricks!”
Thomas’ blood boiled. He released Cora and raced through the water towards the fat man and his synthetic.
Cora called after him, but he ignored her. He didn’t know if it was the hormones or what, but he wanted to beat the hell out of the potbellied bastard.
Out of the water, Thomas approached the man menacingly. “She’s not a unit!”