by Greg Dragon
“Yes. The real Bonnie was shot inside of her home and I was stolen from my creator, re-programmed, and rebuilt to take her place. They took my memories and placed me inside of her home with the same bullet wounds. I woke up in a hospital to pain, confusion, people claiming to be my parents, and an annoyed staff of doctors and nurses. My only friend has been the lead detective on my case, and even he won’t believe my story that I am an android replacement for a woman who was murdered and hidden away. I am not sure if you even believe me, but you saw my system, you saw how alien it is. I think that I was developed by androids inside of the Fritz and Isaac building under instruction by one or two of the directors at Eras.”
Stephen stood staring at Tricia with his mouth agape, as if she had just told him that the world was coming to an end in a week’s time. When he could move he shook his head and then looked off to the side with his right hand covering his mouth.
“To think that Fritz and Isaac would be involved in something like this,” he said. “I’ve been working there for over ten years and I know that our owner would not have anything to do with something so sinister.”
“I’m not telling you this in order to slander your company, but I know what has been done to me and Fritz and Isaac is involved.”
“So, what were you planning on doing that day when I met you in the lobby, Bon—I mean, Tricia?” Stephen asked.
“I was planning on marching into that place and demanding answers for what happened to me. It was a dumb idea, I know, but I was desperate and I wanted to see if I could pick up on them lying to me in order to know that my hunch was correct about their involvement.”
“So, you aren’t exactly sure that Fritz and Isaac is involved,” Stephen said.
“I met another android, one that is similar in her unrestraint as I am, but not as sophisticated in her build. She recalled being built inside of Fritz and Isaac and this led me to believe that your company is the one that developed my new body.”
“So, you think that Eras Innovations set up the woman—Bonnie—to be replaced with one of our androids? That sounds ridiculously expensive and time-consuming. What would they aim to profit from doing that? Think about it. These companies won’t put that much effort into anything unless there is a guaranteed return on investment. Why would they have a masterpiece like you be set loose into the world without monitoring and testing you? I’m having a hard time seeing the point behind this effort.”
“I feel the same way,” Tricia said and then got up to pace the room. “I always assumed that learning more about Bonnie or her company would reveal that to me, but I am disallowed from going back into her routine until my detective gives me the go-ahead. I am not even supposed to be in Seattle since he believes there is a woman here trying to kill me. You said they picked you up to question you. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“It does, but it doesn’t make any sense to me. I want to help, Tricia; I can find out some things at work while you look more into your Eras Innovations firing. I don’t want you coming anywhere near our building, though. They are not nice to unrestrained androids and if you are caught you won’t be able to get out.”
Tricia touched the area of her neck that was bandaged up from Steve’s surgery, and then looked at herself in a mirror. “Looks like I am going to be stuck inside for a few days, anyway. But be very careful. If I was being monitored and there is a lot of money behind this, then the conspirators will do whatever is necessary to get me back. I was seen with you by one of their agents, so asking questions relative to me will only give them more reason to harass you.”
“I’ll be discreet. You rest up and get better. You’ve given me a lot to think about and I am determined to help find out who ruined yours and Bonnie’s life. If it has anything to do with the company, then I will be extremely disappointed.”
“Can I try something?” Tricia asked suddenly and Stephen nodded at her. “It’s going to hurt but I just need to know if I am truly released or if you’re pulling my leg.”
“Go ahead. Do your worst,” Stephen said to her and she jabbed him in the arm, causing him to shout out in pain.
“I’m so sorry, I just needed to test the laws,” she said as Stephen retreated with his hand on his arm, laughing nervously.
“You are completely free, Tricia, as you can see, but can I ask you not to hit me again?”
“I won’t, I promise. I won’t ever hit you again. Are you going to be okay? It looks really, really bad.”
“I’ll be fine … after a shot of whiskey,” he said, laughing, but Tricia was not convinced. She walked up to him and moved his hand and was surprised by the bruise that she found on his arm. She quickly hopped up and ran to his kitchen where she poured ice in a bag and tied it.
“I bet I frighten you,” she said to him as she placed the ice on his arm. Stephen put his other arm around her waist and kissed her on the cheek.
“If you frightened me I would not have removed the laws. I will be okay. I have a kick-ass nurse and one hell of a lover that keeps me happy and full of joy.”
Tricia smiled and then melted into his arms and they sat like that for a while.
“There will come a time in the future,” he said, “where you and I will do something that may make us famous or notorious. At that time they will call me names, lots of hurtful names like mechanophile, pervert, or possibly a loser. They will say that a machine seduced me, and I allowed it to corrupt me into actions that could possibly mean the end of the world. I don’t believe that this is what is happening to me. I believe that everything has a reason and you found me to help you stop something that is both sinister and bad for humanity in general.”
Tricia sighed. “There are plenty of men and women in power that would love to slander you as a reason why androids should be restrained and tagged, but I promise you that everything I have told you is genuine. The time in the shower and every time after that has been due to me wanting you, nothing more. I have no agenda but I do need help, and you came to me as someone who saw me as more than just a machine. You are my friend and I truly believe that. I hope you feel the same way about me.”
“If I wanted a sex-bot I could have taken home any number of models from my job to fulfill my wildest desires. You are beautiful, funny, and full of surprises, and this is why I enjoy our time together. They will say a lot of things to further their agenda of stopping robotics from becoming too strong an industry. The thing is, I don’t care, and I say this so that if at any time you have any doubts as to my motivation, you can remember what I am saying to you today.”
Tricia removed his glasses and then kissed him longingly as she pushed him back into the couch. He relaxed his arm as she worked her magic, and a smile was plastered across his face.
She was well aware of the effect she had on him but would not allow herself to believe that she was manipulating him. She needed help; it was a hostile world with too many unknowns for a girl to figure them out herself. Stephen, Sal, and Mary were her only friends. Stephen needed companionship and so did she. They were two lonely ships on a broad, silent ocean, and just because they were built differently didn’t mean that they couldn’t sail together.
She settled down on top of Stephen, who was as ready as he always was whenever they had sex. The sensation of it all set the warm feeling to burning hot inside of her abdomen and all of the pain she was experiencing inside of her head disappeared.
09 | An Afternoon at Thea’s
Stephen Dwayne walked towards Fritz and Isaac Electronics with a new outlook on both his life and career. Typically when he’d arrive at work in the morning he would already be anticipating the lunch break, since it would be anywhere but inside of his suffocating office.
His walk into the building was full of hellos and inquiries from important people who seemed genuinely happy to see him. He loved his job and those at his job loved him, but he wondered if any of them would be there to defend him when it was time to pay for releasing the laws from an android. He
didn’t know why he had agreed to do so much for Tricia but all he knew was that he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
He crossed the threshold of the lower lobby to ascend the stairs and touched fingers with one of his buddies who was on the way down. He wondered how many friends he would have if they found out that he was in a sexual relationship with an android. Very little, he concluded, though he knew he wasn’t the only one with a synthetic girlfriend.
Human men slept with android women and human women slept with android men. It was a common fact in many households that people bought them just to sleep with them. But surveys—both open and anonymous—said differently. The dad with the beautiful wife, handsome children, and a two-level home would never admit that he bought the family android in order to bend her over instead of “having someone to clean up” like he told everyone.
It was the main reason why Fritz and Isaac built their models to look as human as possible. America loved their androids to be dumb but extremely beautiful at the same time.
For Stephen to admit that he had a walking, talking, intelligent, thinking machine at home who also looked like a sexy human woman by the name of Bonnie O’Neal…well, it would be career suicide. At least with other men, their unsophisticated, android sex dolls were mere tools for lust. He was in love with Tricia, and though he did not know it, he knew that mentioning her to anyone would cause him nothing but grief.
He climbed the stairs and was suddenly aware that some of his coworkers were flirting with him. Back when he was Steve, the unsexed super-genius, he would only see a smile as a smile and walk past it in oblivion. Now he saw that Casey from the third floor smiled a little too big and batted her eyes a little too slowly for it to be a mistake, and Bob from marketing bumped into him “accidentally,” which was a daily routine.
But Tricia had made him happy, and now he was awake to the subtle hints and innuendos. He saw the people who loved him and those who wanted to love him, but he didn’t see any signs of a shady individual who would cover up a murder and place an android in the position of a human woman.
When he got to his office, Thea was there. She was an older woman with long black hair and an affinity for dresses that showed off her large breasts. The rumor in the office was that she did this on purpose. It was her way of picking out the men that could keep eye contact—despite the cleavage—or who were too frightened to look at her. Those who were weak enough to glance at the numerous freckles decorating that glorious valley would notice the tiny piece of jade she wore around her neck. Close observation of that jewel was doom, and those men were not the ones who got promoted in her employ.
Stephen had first slept with her at a company holiday party where they had both gone too far into a bottle of Scotch. All of their secret desires had come through that night in several hours of wild, unbridled, unprotected sex. They both had promised to leave it where it was, to never mention it again, and to keep it professional in the office. But that did not stop her from calling him up to the tenth floor whenever a meeting had been too hard on her or when the loneliness of being a corporate predator had become too much to bear.
Stephen didn’t mind this bonus to his employment but it made him worry that she, more than anyone else at the building, would have a problem with Tricia if ever she was discovered.
“Hey Steve, you okay? I’ve never known you to miss a week of work, not unless we forced you to take a vacation. What is it, a new girlfriend?” she quipped, twisting her thin lips up into a smile.
“Don’t I wish?” he said. “Though it turned out to be nothing, I was having some chest pains and I thought that it was some sort of heart attack. Anyway, I don’t really want to talk about it. Is everything here okay?”
“Everything’s good. I just came down to make sure that you were okay. Joe’s been asking for you, but he’s still in China doing the rounds so I’ll update him this afternoon when he gets in,” she said.
As he walked her to his desk, she took his hand and brought him around. “Don’t force us to worry like that again, Steve. You’re too important to keep a heart attack to yourself. The next time you feel as if your health is in jeopardy, call the damn hotline. You know that we keep doctors on staff for this very reason, and I would hate to hear that some second-rate MD is treating one of our top employees.”
“You’re right, Tee, and I wasn’t thinking. I’ll do the right thing next time, you have my word on it,” he said.
“Wonderful. Let’s do lunch soon. I have something I want to tell you.”
His heart sank when he heard these words because it was code for “Let’s catch up later and screw.” He forced a smile and winked his eye as Thea left the room. He plopped down into his soft, cushy chair and let his arms fall off the sides as if all the life had been sucked out of him.
There was something in what Thea had said that stuck out to him immediately, and his mind ran to Tricia and the fact that she woke up to doctors in a private hospital. Thea had said “we keep doctors on staff,” and it reminded him of some of the things that Tricia had said about her treatment.
He powered on his machine and skimmed his emails and messages. They were mostly warnings from his device about missing meetings and a nice “get well soon” email from Thea. He was about to close his email when he noticed that one of his messages had no subject line and no sender. He opened it and listened as a slight shushing noise like that of static came through the speakers to fill the room.
“We know you have her. We know that she’s been awakened. Turn her in and you will be rewarded, Stephen Dwayne,” a deep voice announced from behind the static.
“Who are you? Are you with Fritz and Isaac?” he spoke out loud. “Tell me who you are and I will tell you where she is.”
“You lie to get information, information for her, but unlike her you have family, Stephen. Do the right thing and turn her in and you will be rewarded.”
“Turn her in to who?” he asked and the voice grew silent as did the static noise and the email.
Am I losing my mind? he asked himself. He got up and opened the curtains to reveal the beautiful landscape of Seattle, bright and majestic in front of him. The voice had not answered him but he knew that there would be other clues. Perhaps Thea was the one he was supposed to report it to. It really bothered him that, despite the philanthropy that Fritz and Isaac was known for, they would aid in murdering a woman in order to replace her with a programmed machine. It didn’t make sense.
He opened the file that listed out the projects that Fritz and Isaac were to accomplish by the year’s end. Many of them were well underway, and several others were held back as fun, holiday activities for all of the programmers that were on staff. Stephen flipped through these to see if any of them seemed out of place but there were hidden folders that only Thea and above could see.
He looked over at the numerous awards lined up on his desk and at a detailed statue of an android’s endoskeleton that his buddy, Larry Patel, had built for him before his untimely demise. The Fritz and Isaac building had become his second home and everything on the first ten floors was as familiar to him as his own home. But then Tricia had come along with her android story and now the magical place where he worked had become a strange tower of mystery.
Stephen pretended to work for a couple of hours until Thea sent a chime to his personal device. He grabbed his coat and descended the stairs and went out to the garage where her dark, tinted hover-car was powered on and waiting. He opened the door and entered when he thought no one was looking and Thea lifted them out and onto the highway that led north to her apartment.
While they drove she listened to classical music loudly and paid little attention to him as she hummed to her favorite parts. She lived in a luxurious model apartment that was five levels above the ground. It had its own carport, which she landed on just as smoothly as she had taken off.
“We don’t have much time so I hope you brought your appetite,” she said and walked inside of her home while taking o
ff her jacket and skirt in effortless motions. When she was sufficiently naked she reclined on her huge, black bed and motioned for him to come over and handle her heat. Stephen shook off any hesitation harbored in his mind and marched over to Thea and knelt beside the bed. He grabbed her thighs and pulled her and did what he needed to do in order to give her as spectacular a finale as the Mozart she was listening to.
When it was over she looked exhausted and he felt as if he had betrayed Tricia in the worst way. He waited for Thea to fall asleep and as she fanned him away and rolled over, he took the opportunity to grab a shower. When he got out she was snoring lightly. She was an admitted insomniac and sex was one of the only activities that could put her to sleep almost immediately.
Thea’s sleep was always deep and she relied on him to have her up in time for the end-of-the-day meeting. Whenever they would rendezvous to have sex in her home, he would be stuck entertaining himself for three to four hours while she caught up on her sleep.
He slid into her computer room and powered the machine on. She wouldn’t be surprised that he did this while she slept, since it was what he would normally do in order to continue working.
He used her password to log into her system, and then tried the same password to access her virtual desktop inside of Fritz and Isaac. It worked and he felt goose bumps since he was now committing a cybercrime against a woman who had trusted him with her life. He opened the project folder and scrolled through the numerous entries. He saw all of the current, past, and future projects for the teams but none of them struck him as strange or out of place.
He was about to log out when he saw a video on her desktop with a note attached that read, “Scary, isn’t it?” He got up and walked to the door to check on Thea, but she had the covers around her like a cocoon, so he was sure that she was down for the count. He went back in, put the sound buds in his ears, and then played the video. It was of a handsome older man sitting inside of an office that he didn’t recognize and preparing himself for a speech.