by Greg Dragon
It didn’t matter; the day she had anticipated and barely lost any sleep over was here. Tricia assumed that she would say something feisty or spin around and storm outside of the doors but she merely stood there, smiling.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it has been a pleasure,” she said. “I look forward to taking everything I helped form and develop within these walls to help a better company grow in the same way that I did here.”
She turned to walk out, but they called after her and Tricia realized they were calling her back because of the threat she had just issued. She entered the hallway and broke off into a jog that took her to a staircase. She rushed down rapidly, showing off the excellent condition that she kept her body in. When Bonnie reached the bottom floor, Tricia woke up.
0 1 0 1 0
A macchiato; there was something very familiar about this choice of coffee and Tricia ordered it more out of instinct than want. Since learning that she was an android, she began to slow down on eating and drinking as she felt that it was a mere mockery of humanity to further the façade. She had no favorite foods or drinks; why would she? Was the taste she was experiencing within her oral senses even real?
Androids were given the ability to eat and digest foods, which were then processed through a tiny, stomach-like drum that mixed the crushed food with dye, added a scent, and passed it through their bodies as waste. This feature was sophisticated since it was a popular way in which people determined whether a person was real or not.
When she was Bonnie, she had assumed that her trauma had made it increasingly difficult to cook up an appetite and she would only eat when the “hunger pains” became unbearable. Now she questioned all of it and added the false hunger to the list of things that she would need to remove from her programming.
But this macchiato, this tiny drink of black liquid, brought up fresh memories in her head as she sat drinking it while waiting for Stephen to show up. The liquid was hot, bitter, but the aroma was phenomenal. These conflicting senses made for a wondrous experience and the memories only seemed to enhance the feelings inside of Tricia’s head. After fifteen minutes of this she began to admit to herself that she liked the drink and that she would drink it even when she wasn’t playing at fitting-in with humanity.
“Hi, Bonnie, how are you?” a voice announced, and she turned around on her small chair to see Stephen hovering near her. He looked as if he had been running and he seemed to be visibly shaken.
“You’re late,” Tricia said with a smile, “and you don’t look so good. Maybe I should be asking you if you’re okay.”
Stephen didn’t sit but glanced behind him before dropping down to one knee and frightening Tricia into thinking that he was about to propose marriage to her. A number of patrons in the shop thought the same thing and looked on intently to see if she would say yes or no.
“Bonnie, I was just picked up and questioned by what I thought were the police. They saw us talking and wanted to know a lot of personal information about you. I didn’t tell them anything and they gave me a lot of grief over it. Look, I know what you are and I don’t ask this with the assumption that you belong to anybody, but are you in trouble? Is someone searching for you? The questions they asked me has me thinking that they have been trying to follow you.”
Tricia felt a throbbing in her skull that sat near her temples and she reached up to rub the area. Sal had warned her not to come back to Seattle, but she was bull-headed and now it seemed the people she thought were looking for were actually doing so.
“I’m so sorry for getting you mixed up in this, Stephen. I hope they didn’t hurt you during the questioning,” she began.
“I’ll be alright. It was crazy and frightening but they eventually let me go. If they catch up to you, I’m not sure that you will be so lucky. Their attitude and the questions they kept asking led me to believe that they were evil, Bonnie, like villains in movies or antagonists in fiction. There was something else, too,” he said while leaning in closer to her. “They were like you.”
Tricia shot her eyes forward when he said this and the shock of his words threatened to short circuit her mind as a million possibilities ran through it. “What do you mean they were like me, Stephen?”
“I mean that they were synthetics, Tricia. They were in the uniform and the vehicle of a police officer, but there are no android cops from what I know. Not with the hostile climate for your kind. All the violence, the disassembling and the bounty hunters that seek and destroy any unrestrained android they can find—”
“Don’t forget the police department,” Tricia said. “They seek and destroy androids all the same. That is why this confuses me, but nothing has made sense to me since I woke up from—” Tricia paused when she realized that she had said too much.
“Woke up from what, Bonnie?” Stephen asked and Tricia kicked out a chair and motioned for him to sit.
“I need to know that I can trust you before I engage in any more conversation. I don’t know you and for all I know this story of yours about the cops could be a fabrication in order to make me admit to something that could possibly criminalize me. If you are who you say you are, a friend to android synthetics, then tell me how to remove the laws that prevent me from defending myself.”
Stephen sat down and motioned towards Tricia’s water. She nodded and he took it, gulped it down, and then checked behind him once more. He looked at her intently and spoke. “That’s not an easy thing to do. You would need an outsider to do it. The engineers build it into your mainframe in such a way that you will never be able to remove it by yourself. They set it up so that inputting the wrong sequence will wipe out your entire memory. It is a failsafe in case one android learns how to do it and attempts it on another. Think of it as an EMP that goes off shutting down all machines, permanently.”
“Are you just making this up to scare me into giving you a different test, Stephen? It won’t work. I need a friend, a real friend who will remove the shackles so that if ever I get mugged again or worse, I can do something about it.”
Stephen had his mouth open and he wiped it unconsciously with his forearm and then looked down at the table. “You were mugged? That is awful. There are a lot of cruel and perverse things that men do to android women. The prostitution rings are just the tip of the iceberg. I can imagine that for a beautiful woman, synthetic or human, you’re always a target. That has to suck, especially if you can’t even fight back. Look, the procedure is difficult for an average guy with programming skills but I have worked on androids my entire life. There is another concern though, one of which I have a hard time shaking.”
“What is this concern?” Tricia asked.
“Well, I don’t know you either, Bonnie. We met, I saw what you were, and you fascinated me. I am a bit like a fan having breakfast with his celebrity crush—wait, that isn’t me flirting or saying that I have a crush on you or anything. I’m…I guess I’m just saying that this isn’t an even footing between you and me. We should trade, a favor for a favor, and I need you to promise me that if I remove the laws and risk life in prison, that you won’t just turn around and murder me or something.”
Tricia laughed. She laughed and laughed until tears began to pour from her eyes. “Stephen, I have an organization that is either monitoring me or hunting me down to see what it is I am up to after their grand experiment. The only murdering I want to do is a metaphorical murder of the lie I have had to live now for months. If you truly believe that we are equals or have the potential to be equals then you must trust me. I am not an evil robot, hell-bent on world destruction or domination. I am just a lost girl who wants to pick up the broken pieces of her life.”
“Okay, then, I will do it. But I have to go change, get a shower, and head to work before my day gets worse. Here’s my device code, so please call me after 5:00 p.m. I will rendezvous with you somewhere and see about removing that restraint.”
Tricia thought about Stephen’s words and the attack he had suffered for her. She had picked up o
n the fact that he lived close, being that he was walking, and had gotten attacked during his trip to see her. She quickly got up and followed him out of the store and kept her distance as she tailed him back to what she assumed was his house.
Following him was a rash move but she needed to know if he was telling the truth. He walked briskly, brushing past other fast-walking people on their way to work or whatever it was that demanded haste. He walked past a massive old court building, then through a small park and onto a trail that pushed through to a busy street.
Tricia stayed back far enough to be able to hide whenever he would chance a glance back. He crossed the street to the parking lot of a small apartment complex and went into his home as Tricia stood watching for another ten minutes. Thinking this to be enough time for her friend-to-be to start his shower, she approached the door carefully and placed her ear to it.
Inside she could hear running water but no other noises that would indicate that he wasn’t alone. She felt the urge to turn around, find her own way in learning the truth and forgetting this man, Stephen. But how many men and women would she meet that not only knew what she was, but were excited and supportive of her just for being alive?
If there was anything that she had picked up from Reynaldo’s memories, it was that strong, worldly women held sway over men like Stephen. He lived alone and was excited to have coffee with an android, one who asked him to risk his freedom and he was actually considering it. She couldn’t let him go, she couldn’t allow him to overthink their conversation and work up doubt inside of his mind.
She touched his door panel and sent the short inside of its simple mechanism in order to unlock it. The door slid up and open with silent ease and she stepped into a very clean and orderly living room. She didn’t bother to take it in or look at anything that would give her insight into who he was. What she did was slide into his bedroom and remove her clothes before stepping inside of his bathroom where the shower was going.
Tricia stepped inside and placed her hands around Stephen’s slender waist and held him firmly as the panic registered and then subsided. “Bonnie?” he whispered with a mix of shock and hope. Then Tricia slowly turned him around and placed her finger on his lips.
Stephen may have been hesitant in everything dealing with Tricia since the day he had asked her out, but with her here, in his house and in his arms, it was as if he transformed into a much more confident version of himself. He brushed her wet hair back as the shower beat down relentlessly and then touched his lips against hers, closing his eyes as he did so.
Tricia, too, became transformed and she quickly realized that sex was nothing new to her. It definitely wasn’t new to Bonnie, the woman whose face she wore and whose body she had been given. Instinctively, she reached up and touched his neck and then pulled him in closer as she took his tongue inside of her mouth and felt his hardness against her abdomen.
They held this position, kissing and allowing the barriers of doubt to fall away beneath the warm water. Then he was on his knees, playing wonderful games with his tongue that triggered sensors all throughout her body.
He made love to her like a man who had been locked away for years. Tricia found it to be pleasurable and absolutely addicting. Memories threatened to flood her mind but she kept them all at bay. She held him close and wrapped her legs around him as he grew more and more excited. Fifteen minutes had passed since she entered the shower but it felt like hours inside her head.
Would Stephen become hers now? Did the moans coming from his mouth indicate his surrender to becoming her lover and protector? They were as one, the closest she would be to her cyborg nightmare, and she would be fooling herself if she said that she disliked it.
Stephen’s legs seemed to go out as he pushed her against the glass and he groaned like the life had slipped out of him. Tricia was slightly annoyed that their pleasure had come to an end but when she saw Stephen looking at her she knew that her gamble had paid off.
08 | Removing Shackles
Tricia stood powered down on a stool in the middle of Stephen’s bedroom as he looked inside of her head for the familiar coding that was the laws of robotics. She had wanted to be awake during the entire procedure but she was no longer Tricia the android, hacked and released into sentience by an underground programmer. She was Bonnie O’Neal with an android brain, and this new brain had been reworked to give her human senses, weaknesses, and strengths.
One of these weaknesses was pain and Stephen found that he couldn’t touch her CPU without putting her to sleep first. Gaining access to it was a challenge on its own and was only possible by cutting a half-moon incision at the base of her skull.
He had been scrolling through the code for over an hour before he was forced to consult an online resource. It told him how to change the odd language into binary, which could then be translated to something he could actually make sense of. It was quite a process and he missed a week of work citing illness in order to fulfill the promise he had made to Tricia.
She woke up from the numbing pain inside of her head and looked over at Stephen who was seated on another stool, staring at his tablet in disbelief.
“Oh my god, you’re awake!” he exclaimed and scrambled over to make sure that she wasn’t about to fall out and injure herself. “How do you feel?” he asked, but then she tried to stand up and instantly regretted it when dizziness overcame her.
“I have a splitting headache,” she said. “Too bad they don’t make headache pills for synthetics. I could sure use one right now.”
Stephen looked around frantically until Tricia touched his arm. “It’s not too bad,” she said. “I will be okay. How did it go? Am I free to defend myself now?”
“It was tough. Whoever created you did one hell of a job masking the fact that you aren’t human. Your CPU, which is typically built into the metal skull of your head, has been instead placed into a small capsule. The thing was only big enough to accommodate connector wires and was encased in a material that made it look like brain tissue. The pain you’re feeling is probably from the amount of cutting I had to do to get to that thing. As you heal it will go away but for now sleep is the only real way to stop it. I’m truly sorry, Bonnie.”
“I’m okay. A little pain should be expected for the price of freedom. So tell me, what was the problem? Why was it so much more difficult than any other android you have worked on before?” she asked.
Stephen sighed and wringed his hands. “Well, you aren’t like any other android, Bonnie. You aren’t built the same and the way it’s done is so complex that I am amazed a human being could do this.” His arms became very animated when he said this and his eyes widened with amazement. Tricia saw that, despite them having been together, he had not stopped being in awe of her. It gave her mixed feelings which made her anxious but she kept calm and continued to listen.
“First of all, your code is written in a language that I have never seen before. I had to do a lot of research in order to crack it, get it translated, and then make myself familiar with some of it. When I finally found the section where the laws had been written in, I was like, whoa. Someone had hacked it in which is what threw me off the most. What sort of sanctioned company would create a CPU for a humanoid android that lacked the laws of robotics?”
Tricia looked down at her hands and then back up at him again. “So you’re telling me I was built differently than other androids and that whomever did it, built me without the laws in place. This makes me think that I am looking in the wrong place for the people who did this to me. At Fritz and Isaac are your top engineers human, or do you have unrestrained androids working around the clock?” she asked.
“It’s androids, plenty of sophisticated androids up there. They write the code, build the machines, and they have an algorithm built inside their minds that allow them to tweak and improve upon the build as time goes on. It is one of the secrets to Fritz and Isaac’s domination of the Robotics market. Our synthetic developers will forever be ahead of humans
, but most places are too afraid of android takeover to do what we’ve done,” he said.
“Your move to use android creators may have been premature, Steve. Everything you’ve just told me leads me to believe that one of your engineers is creating androids that are void of the laws,” Tricia said.
“No, that is impossible. Our androids have the laws and lack the capabilities to remove it. We made sure of that. If someone is purposefully building unrestrained androids, that person would have to be human. It would make no sense for an android to have broken past our precautionary, hard-wired restrictions.”
Tricia thought about Bonnie’s old company, Eras Innovations, and the hell that she went through at the end of her career there. If anyone wanted to shut her down it would have been them, and this thought came into her mind when she recalled the reaction they’d had when Bonnie had threatened them.
“Does Fritz and Isaac have a relationship with Eras Innovations IT?” she asked him.
“Eras is one of our top partners. That’s funny. They are so low-key that most people don’t even know they exist. Have you worked with them in the past?”
“I worked for them,” she said and then watched the look of surprise register on his face.
“Humph,” he said. “Eras prides itself on not having any android employees, Bonnie. I find it amazing that they would have you working for them.”
Tricia wondered why Eras would partner with a company that used androids as engineers, given their strong stance against it, but she chose not to question Stephen about the hypocrisy. “Well, you’ve held up your side of the bargain,” she said. “I will tell you everything I know. First of all, my name is Tricia. Bonnie is the name of the woman I was supposed to replace in human society.”
Stephen cut in with a look of concern on his face. “You said replace. Do you mean that you are replacing a human woman in society, like they took her out and put you in her place so that you can perform her duties and fool everyone around her that you are her?” he rambled.