The Android and the Thief

by Wendy Rathbone

  “That’s what they’re saying?” Trev asked.

  “Yeah. What are the odds? You know, those guys. They had it in for me.” His smile wavered. His happy-go-lucky countenance was marred for a moment by a sudden spring of tears that did not fall. He looked so pale and vulnerable, wisps of his dirty-blond hair trailing along his cheeks. Trev could not guess at his age, but right now he looked no more than eighteen.

  Trev watched as Khim’s fists closed at his sides. He bowed his golden head. It looked as if Khim might whisk his way past Jay without even acknowledging him. Instead he took a step toward him, raised his flesh hand, and patted him once on the shoulder. “Fortune does not always favor the bold.”

  Jay looked up at him adoringly. “Did you just speak to me?”

  Khim shook his head, looking annoyed.

  Trev felt himself start to smile. Solitary did not seem to have done Khim any harm.

  It had been a long time since Trev had eaten real food. He stood up. “I’m ready. Let’s go eat.”

  JAY HEARD gossip; like a little mouse, he was everywhere at once. He sat across from Trev and Khim at dinner and bent to his food as he spoke.

  “After you guys got taken away, I saw a lot of men called in for questioning. For two days they brought guys in, anyone who had been in the plaza near Weight Room Two.”

  “Why are you telling us this?” Trev asked.

  “Because it’s about you, and I eavesdrop. You know me. I heard a bunch of them talking at dinner one night. Kant, I think his name is, and others. He told them to stay resolute. Yeah, he used that word. Resolute. I heard him say, ‘Don’t mention Damico or that android he has on a leash, or there’ll be hell to pay.’”

  Jay shot Khim an apologetic look and shrugged. “So,” he continued. “I guess they all denied seeing anything in that room where the guys got whacked. But you guys were around there, right? I mean, that’s why you went to solitary.”

  Trev said nothing.

  Khim said nothing.

  Jay said, “So, what happened?”

  “Nothing happened,” Trev replied.

  Jay nodded. “They didn’t believe you. That’s why you were sent to solitary.”

  Trev said very firmly, “They never told us why they sent us there.”

  Jay took a bit of meat and gravy, chewing around a small smile. “So really nothing happened?”

  Trev nodded.

  Jay looked from Trev to Khim and back again. Then he said, after he swallowed, “Thanks for the nothing, then. A whole lot.”

  Trev looked at Khim, who had stopped eating. His hands were in his lap, one placed over the other, the top one—flesh—gripping the metal. Trev looked back at Jay. “We won’t speak of this ever again, you hear?”

  Jay nodded.

  Khim sat like a stone at Trev’s side.

  TREV WATCHED from the edge of the white wall, his back to the stars so he wouldn’t have to see them—the sight still too fresh from solitary—as Khim showed Jay how to work the Artflex 2000. Trev had crossed his arms over his chest, his sweat-damp hair hanging in his eyes as he leaned.

  Khim instructed Jay how to straighten his arms, where to hold the straps, where to place his legs. He helped him adjust the seat. He even set the timer for him.

  This scene sat right next to the one in his memory of Khim standing in a sea of writhing bodies, two dead men at his feet and a third falling from his arms, the body sagging to the floor.

  Trev would never forget it.

  Khim was becoming more human by the day, and more dangerous too. If he hadn’t been an android, it wouldn’t matter. But every step Khim took toward unpredictable emotionality placed him in a position of greater vulnerability.

  Once Khim got Jay going on his own in the exercise machine, he backed away, glancing over at Trev.

  Trev nodded, beckoning him over.

  Khim came without hesitation. His shirt was off. His arms gleamed, copper curved muscles rippling, his strong chest stretching the cotton of his undershirt. It was like looking at a sun god. When he stopped two feet from Trev, Trev smelled the fresh-bread scent again, and a lingering sweetness. A fluttering began in his gut.

  Trev said, “We need to get out of here.”

  “The weight room?”

  They’d had this conversation right before they were taken for questioning and then placed in solitary.

  “This prison. Even when I was sick in solitary, I was thinking about it all the time. About the remote you stole. It’s why I hid it. It’s a start.” His thief instincts had come into play. He saw the challenge—had been seeing it for days now—and knew he could win it. “Tell me the thought hasn’t occurred to you since I brought it up days ago.”

  “It has.”

  “I’ve never told you my story of how I came to be here. Now you’re going to hear it. And then you’ll understand how this can be done.”

  They sat by the stars on one of the couches, and Trev began his story.

  A few times they were interrupted by Jay as he finished one set and moved on to other equipment. Khim assisted him when needed, then came back to sit with Trev.

  “So you see,” Trev finished. “My father cannot be trusted. Not for a moment. But maybe a few of my brothers and sisters can.”

  “But you can’t be sure.” Khim seemed to be gritting his teeth.

  Trev shook his head. “But we’re going to need someone on the outside. Maybe I can think of someone else.”

  “Are you thinking of taking the boy too?” Khim nodded toward Jay, now on the cycle, looking flushed and winded.

  Trev was surprised at the statement. “I think it has to be you and me. Alone. I trust no one else.”

  “You trust me?” Khim asked.

  “Well, we have that deal, right?” Trev let out a small laugh.

  “Right. But that deal was for me.”

  “And me. Friendship, right?”

  But they both knew it was more than that. Trev had witnessed Khim murder three men. It was Khim who was in the position of needing to trust Trev. With his very life.

  “Do you trust me?” Trev sometimes thought the android still resented him, hated him as he had the first day they met.

  “You saved me,” Khim said, looking away. “You never again have to ask that.”

  TREV TURNED over his cards. “Gin.”

  Khim ducked his head as if annoyed, looked up through dark gold lashes. “You didn’t shuffle enough.”

  “Are you accusing me of cheating?” Trev asked.

  “Isn’t that the Damico way?”

  Trev did not get offended when Khim said stuff like that. Anyone else and he would’ve been. He gathered up the cards and handed them to Khim. “Your deal.”

  They sat knee to knee on Trev’s top bunk. It was almost nine. Almost lights-out.

  The remote sat between them, newly programmed and reassembled, hidden under a fold of blanket. They’d been working on it nonstop after dinner.

  They had spent days going over the remote whenever they had the chance, during lockdowns in their cell or in the hours after dinner and before bedtime. They played cards to hide their work. Trev had taken it apart, analyzed the parts, tried to see what he could use to augment the device and give them options so they could begin their plan.

  Trev had computer knowledge and had built a sentry when he was a kid. Khim had excellent knowledge of remotes used in weapons-delivery systems, so his assistance was equally valuable.

  They assessed, analyzed, and tested. They checked out earbuds, one each per night, and programmed some of the information on them into the remote to transmit erroneous behavior into the sentries.

  The first time they tested it on the sentry at the corner of their second-level stairwell, they had transferred a segment from a holo musical into the remote’s delivery system. When they pointed it at the sentry and activated it, the sentry started to sing, in perfect pitch, a horrible song from The Phantom of the Centauri Listening Station. The sentry began to belt out in
contralto, “The void is alive with the sound of quasars….”

  Before the anomaly got the attention of other inmates, Trev hissed through barely repressed laughter, “Turn it off!”

  It was days later now, and they’d fixed the thing so that it had a quick, domino-viral effect, ensuring all the sentries would be infected. They were going to introduce a contagion to the automated sentry systems of Steering Star.

  Now all they had left to do was plan their way out through a series of locked spiral doors, penetrate an air lock, and commandeer a flier. Not to mention evade all the human guards who operated the complex.

  “The rest of our tasks are simple now that we have the remote programmed,” Trev stated, watching Khim shuffle the deck.

  Khim laid the cards on the bed for Trev to cut. “Simple,” he echoed sarcastically.

  Trev reached out, divided the pack, then handed the cards back to him. “I’ve been in complexes with the highest security ratings. I remained undetected.”

  “But you had equipment at your disposal,” Khim said.

  “Yep. Bodysuits. Full-on computers hooked up to the wave. Candle tubes.”

  “You know those are illegal on nine hundred worlds?”

  “Really? I thought it was nine hundred and one.”

  Khim said softly, “With the sentries down, or preoccupied, we can take their wands. But they won’t work unless they are programmed to the user. I think I know a way around that, but—”

  Trev watched him begin to deal. “That’ll get us through the first sets of doors.”

  “I can handle the human guards.”

  “I have no doubt. Can you do it without killing?”

  “Of course. I know quite well how to disarm an enemy.”

  Trev nodded. “They’ll have weapons and more keys. Door 8 is the one where the fliers are parked. We’ll need codes for after we board, too, just to break away. They still might chase us. I can disconnect the tracking system and the computer. I’ve done it on fliers before.”

  “Have you been chased before?”

  “Of course. Cops on my tail.” Trev grinned. “Evasive maneuvers. Loop the loops. My life before now was very exciting and grand.”

  “Then whyever would you wish to leave that life?” Khim asked.

  Trev bowed his head, looking at his cards, organizing them in his hand by ranking. “Hmm,” he said. “Another good hand.”

  Khim was waiting for him to discard.

  Touching each card in turn, Trev said, “If you’d ever met my family, you wouldn’t ask that question.” He discarded the two of diamonds.

  Khim’s wince did not go unnoticed. Trev had seen that look at least two dozen times whenever he mentioned his father, his siblings, his name.

  Khim picked up the two. “I know your father had you put here because you tried to run away. But it seems you did actually have it quite good.”

  Trev tensed at a slight heat in his veins. “Yeah. Putting up with a whipping now and then seems like nothing, I suppose. I had luxury. I was a real good thief. Like you in the military—the best soldier. The most efficient survivor. That’s all we need in life, right? Stuff to do so we don’t have to think ‘what if.’ People to tell us what to do and when. No one expecting us to seriously answer the question, when we were kids or newly born, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’”

  “Young people tend to believe they have infinite choices in life. But when they start making those choices, they find themselves quickly limited. Our plight is no different.”

  “Or maybe that’s what you kept telling yourself for the past ten years,” Trev suggested. “So you could live within the limits and not feel—well, sad.”

  “They have medication for sadness.”

  “I know they do. Isn’t it wonderful? The lengths we go to for control, us wily, conniving humans.”

  Khim looked up, frowning. Trev met his eyes. Then Trev asked the big, nagging question. “How do you know my family name?”

  Khim was the first to look away. Trev watched him shrug, then saw his energy fold into itself almost neatly. He had not yet discarded from his hand.

  Trev tapped the discard pile. “Waiting.”

  Khim seemed to grab a card at random and place it between them.

  Trev took a card from the mystery pile. “You don’t have to tell me. But it seems to me that you react to the name by more than its reputation alone.”

  Trev discarded an eight.

  Khim stared at it, then looked toward the side of the bunk. He lay all his cards down, faceup. They were chaos, unorganized, a mess of a hand in any game, not just rummy. He said, “I’m tired,” and jumped off the bed.

  Trev had been feeling a tiny bead of heat in his stomach for a while now concerning his name and what it might mean to Khim. That heat grew a little hotter as he gathered up the cards, stuck the remote in between the cards so that it lay flat, undetectable, and banded the stack with a short piece of elastic. Then he stuck them down the side of his mattress.

  Khim was at the sink, already getting ready for bed.

  Trev drew his knees up, put his head on them, and waited for lights-out.

  OVER A mouthful of green beans, Khim said, “Where will we go?”

  The question had been asked several times. Neither had answered or ever suggested an answer.

  “I’m working on an idea about that,” Trev said. But in truth he had nothing so far.

  Jay came up to the table, setting down his tray. “What are we talking about?”

  Khim was right with his question. Their biggest problem was, even if their plan succeeded effortlessly, with smooth efficiency, and they managed to get to a flier and managed to evade tracking, a chase, and a long-arm search, where could they go?

  They had no money. No interplanetary ship. No home base.

  Of course, Trev could steal all those things. But on a cloud city or the planet below, there would be more than alerts out for them and the Damico influence to avoid. Doing it all single-handedly would be a stretch, even for him.

  Trev changed the dinner conversation to holovids.

  Jay obligingly chimed in.

  Khim had no comment, as usual. He only talked about things like that to Trev, no one else. But he did not ignore Jay anymore. He at least looked like he was listening these days, even if Trev suspected he wasn’t.

  As they were finishing up and the cafeteria was emptying, Jay said, low, “I know you guys are planning something. I don’t need to be involved or anything. I’m out in six months, free and clear. I’ll be okay. But if there’s anything I can do to help, let me know. Anything. I owe you.” With that, he got up and took his tray to the counter.

  Khim said, “That surprised me somewhat.”

  “Yes,” Trev said.

  TREV SAID, later that night, “We have one chance. That’s all. If we’re caught, I get years tacked on. You may or may not be executed. Which is why we spare the lives of the guards. No killing. No matter what. Escape is one thing, but another murder—”

  “And I’m down for the count. I know,” Khim said.

  The white ceiling light glistened in Khim’s hair; his lashes made the shadows on his smooth cheeks waver. Knee to knee again, they sat on the top bunk, the playing cards between them.

  “Are you okay with this?” Trev asked.

  Khim’s lips curved almost imperceptibly, but Trev saw.

  “Are you?” Khim asked.

  “Very. Maybe I can escape my father once and for all. And you, maybe you can finally live.”

  “The deal we made, it did not foresee this,” Khim said. “Past the time of escape, you don’t need to look out for me. What happens to me after is not your responsibility.”

  Trev looked at him hard. Took a deep breath. Frowned. “The deal was friendship.”

  “Fake friendship,” Khim corrected.

  “I don’t remember that word when we spoke. When we agreed.” Trev filled his lungs. “Khim, I know—I know you don’t particularly li
ke me. Or anyone.”

  “But—”

  Trev held up his hand. “It doesn’t mean I would abandon you. I want you to know that.”

  “You don’t have to think that far. I can take care of myself.”

  A sinking feeling gathered in Trev’s chest. The little bead of pain that disturbed him waking and sleeping, and communicated to him that it was more than just his name Khim despised, coiled close.

  Trev said through his tight throat, “But I don’t know that. Not for sure. And until I’m sure, I say we stick together. I’m not going out there into the unknown only to split ways and never know what happened to you.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “I just—I don’t know. It’s been bothering me. That you’ll go off and get into trouble. I know, I know you can take care of yourself. You’re beyond capable. I’ve seen that, but I want to see this through. All the way.” As he spoke, his words became more and more difficult to say aloud.

  Khim looked speechless, so Trev added, “I just think we can help each other. Stronger together, you understand?”

  “In the battles I was in, men fought stronger together. But that was war.”

  “This is war.”

  Khim nodded. Very slowly, almost whispering, he said, “The deal is just different than I thought it would be.”

  Trev’s lips pressed into a pleased smile because he heard the tone behind the words not as resigned, but open, hinting at a depth of unexpected delight. He couldn’t hold the smile back. This strange man, this golden presence, the way he was like an energy that had coursed along beside Trev for all these past weeks, had had its effect on him. It was strange how it gave him something other than his own wishes and hopes to live for. How that presence made him so determined. How it warmed his heart.

  Chapter Twenty

  KHIM WATCHED Trev shoulder into his shirt, saw the flash of tanned skin above his undershirt, nape, spine, the curve of flesh just below the underarm—It was like seeing something precious for the first time and wanting to come forward, lay a hand there, protect. Unarmored flesh before a skirmish, a landing, an invasion. It just wasn’t right.