Single Wired Female (Wired for Love Book 2)

by Greg Dragon

  “Hey, Sal, this one should be easy – I hope. Stephen crashed in a cab. I’m sure you heard the news, being that it is like the only thing being shown on television right now. I think he’s alive but they aren’t saying. Do you have any connections in Nevada that could tell you yes or no about his fate? It’s making me nervous and I really need to know. Could you do me this favor? I already owe you so much, Sal, but I love him and—”

  “Okay, don’t worry about it. Let me make a call or two and see if I can find out what happened to your boyfriend,” he said.

  “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. He has to be alive. Cabs are made to be as safe as possible. I don’t even know how a car could hop off of the waves to fall and crash like his did. There’s something going on. I bet its Emeril or someone out to get him for helping me. I need to know where he is, Sal, where they have him, anything. We need to protect him. If they are trying to kill him they won’t stop now!” She was rambling and crying at the same time and Sal let her finish before saying anything.

  “There’s a lot of weird things going on around you, Bonnie, I mean … Tricia. You don’t have to tell me twice. Calm down as much as you can and let me make a call or two. We’ll find Stephen, don’t you worry yourself about it.”

  0 1 0 1 0

  Three hours of waiting felt like three days to Tricia. Stephen had been airlifted to a private clinic in the middle of Las Vegas and he was under the care of a doctor who was under contract for Fritz and Isaac. Sal told her this as she listened patiently, and then he added that Stephen was in a critical state despite the things that the cab did in order to save his life.

  Tricia processed the information but what she concluded was that Fritz and Isaac had attempted to kill Stephen, making it look like a freakish accident, and now they had his body. She assumed that in a few days he would “die of complications” or something like that and then there wouldn’t be anyone to question his death outside of her. His mother would care but who was she compared to a billion dollar company? Like Bonnie O’Neal, he had overstepped and now he was being erased from society.

  “Thanks for looking into it for me, Sal,” she said. “I’ll give you a call if I hear anything.” She switched off her device and then sat still, letting her android brain skim through all of the data to work out as many possibilities as she could. Her first instinct was to find the clinic, bust him out, and then take him away to a real doctor. But who was she, really?

  Her core programming was that of a pacifist, and her combat training was limited to bits and pieces of Reynaldo’s memory. She was an android susceptible to EMP charges, hidden kill switches, and synthetic detectors to foil any attempt at playing a human. Even Stephen had seen through her ruse on the first day he met her. But what choice did she have?

  She thought about Stephen, what he had done, what he had sacrificed to inch their world closer to his idea of the future. Then there was Sal, a great police officer, and one of the most decent human beings she had ever come across. These two men made it difficult for her to despise humanity in the way that Emeril must have when he was given autonomy by his creator. If only she could make the world see things in the way they did then there would be no reason to fear the truth.

  The truth. Tricia considered calling a news station or the police to reveal what she was and the fact that Eras Innovations and Fritz and Isaac was behind it. Like Stephen had warned, this would be suicide, but it could save his life and allow Bonnie the proper memorial that she deserved. More importantly, it would prevent them from killing any more employees that they suspected of anything.

  Could it be so simple? She wondered. Could it be as simple as sacrificing her small, android life in order to stop the evildoers in their tracks? But what if Eras had the power to buy off the agent or reporter that would do the expose? What if she was portrayed as a crazy woman who thought herself to be an android and needed to be put away where she wouldn’t be a danger to herself or society? There simply was no one human that she could trust to do the right thing with her story. If she were to come out, she had to do it on her own, somehow.

  14 | Concerning Bounties

  Tricia realized that nothing was as it seemed. Nothing had ever been clear, not from the first day she woke up into this world as Bonnie O’Neal. Life, love, humanity: it was all so complex, confusing, and frustrating. Whenever she would think she was in control of her life, something would tell her she was wrong. Was it the same for humans? Was life for everyone a series of pathways, most being illusions, where the true path is obscured?

  For the first time she found herself envying the life that her old friend Reynaldo had. In his life he had only to fight and entertain his masters. There were no illusions as to who he really was and whether the people in his life were friends or planted foes. She felt lonely and she disliked the feeling immensely.

  Instinctively she pulled up her device and called Mary. It had been over a month since she last spoke to her and she really needed a friend. The device chimed but there was nothing and eventually she gave up. Her mind drifted to the things that Stephen had told her about humanity never accepting her and she thought about the promise she had made to Mary about rescuing her once she had her answers.

  Without the ability to sense other androids she had been forced into a life of solitude and constant danger by the same humans that wanted her to mimic their own reality. She wondered if Mary had left the apartment, walked out into the Tampa streets, and had fallen prey to a hunter. The thought sent chills throughout her body and she knew where to look for confirmation of the worst.

  The underground web, which was affectionately called “the real web” by hackers, was like a step into the past for technology. Instead of holographic, third dimensional stores and kiosks, the pages on this space were flat, second dimensional, and used text, videos, and image files.

  With Stephen gone and Mary in trouble, Tricia’s worry for being caught surfing the underground web was pushed to the side. She pulled up the underground web and surfed around the places where android buyers would look for parts. She found several message boards but the members remained cryptic about their sources. She skimmed through these sites for thirty minutes, processing the threads until the web location of the bounty hunter kiosk finally revealed itself.

  When she typed in the address her screen went dark immediately. A scrolling animation began to display images of corpses with prices and information written next to them. She put her finger on the display to halt the motion then used it to navigate through the gory images. After a minute or two she realized that the corpses were androids: some were older models with wires and metallic insides while others were sophisticated and their discarded bodies looked frighteningly human.

  She scrolled for hours looking for Mary but as she did, she began to learn more about the bounty hunter’s trade. She gathered that there were factions that operated in every state and most of them didn’t hunt unless a company hired them to do so. The corpses in this listing had been rejected by those companies, so they placed them on the underground web to sell to people who wanted to build an android on the cheap.

  The whole thing disgusted her but she was determined so she kept on scrolling until she exhausted the list of android victims. She pulled up another address and did the same thing but then her device chimed and it broke her concentration. It was Sal, so she answered but kept on scrolling. She had forgotten about him in the chaos that had taken over her mind.

  “Hey, Tricia, I got some bad news, but maybe it’s good news for you since it don’t affect you none,” he said.

  “What is it?” she asked, her eyes moving rapidly as she scrolled. She steeled herself to be ready for devastating news.

  “They closed your case today, took me off it. Bonnie’s situation is considered cold and my boss told me not to waste no more time on it. In his words, ‘nobody cares about this woman.’ Can you believe that? What a heartless prick. Anyway, kid, I know you have other things going on and you could care
less but I figured I’d tell you so you don’t go expecting me to update you on anything new. How you doin’?”

  “Looking for an android friend. I had her house-sit the apartment you gave me, just in case someone was monitoring it to see if I was in there. But now she’s missing and I’m assuming that hunters got her.”

  “Hunters didn’t get her, we did,” he said and Tricia stopped scrolling to look at her device with surprise.

  “What did you do to her?” she asked.

  “Wasn’t me, but the boys in Tampa took her in. Thought she was some kind of vagrant squatting. When they learned that she was an android, unrestrained … well, you know what they do. I’m sorry about your friend, Tricia. I wish you had told me.”

  Tricia stopped and placed her heavy head inside of her palms to cry. Everything in her world was falling apart and she didn’t know what to do to slow it down. She looked for hope, for any glimmer of light to tell her that everything would be alright, but there was nothing but darkness, loneliness and fear.

  “I don’t like your world, Sal. It really sucks to be here,” she said.

  “Aww, come on kid, it’s not all bad. Happy days are bound to come, you just need to weather the storm, alright? Look, you’re safe. If you made it this long without a hunter or predator taking you down, then you should be good going forward. Stop obsessing over this thing, this Bonnie nonsense, and find something that will do your sweet, android heart some good,” he said.

  “What could that be? Stephen was my happiness and I haven’t the faintest clue how to rescue him. My friend is dead, from what you just told me. With you off my case, you will stop being my friend. I’ve lost all three friends in the blink of an eye. Do you need a wife?” she asked quietly but her joke didn’t make her feel better.

  “Had one of those, I think that I’ll pass. You can move back into Bonnie’s old place, though, try to live the life she once had. Can’t be all bad; that chick was loaded.”

  “The case may be closed for you but not for me. I can’t rest until I figure out who set up the swap and who set Stephen up to die.”

  “Well, good luck. I can no longer help. Give me a ring if I can do anything off the books, though” he said.

  “Thanks, Sal, I appreciate you. I will let you know if I need your help.”

  Tricia powered off the internet and sat back in her chair. She stared at the wall in quiet contemplation. She was at a crossroads, one she hadn’t anticipated in the past. Becoming human was impossible and functioning like every other android would be a futile exercise that would bore her to tears. She missed Stephen. They had been so close to solving the mystery, but they had gotten to him and her mystery puppet master was still in the shadows.

  What would she do if she knew who it was? Would it even make a difference? Aside from screaming at him to give her answers, what would stop them from shutting her down and wiping her memory on the spot? There were no answers to any of these questions and she wondered if a clean break would be her only option. Was it an option? They would probably be able to summon her and who knew what other tethers she had within her programming.

  A memory came to her mind of the harbor in Seattle, back when she was in an older body, and the dream of sailing away was the strongest thought in her mind. Distance, she thought, distance would take me away from whomever is watching me play the role of Bonnie. But how would she get on a ship without detection? It took a passport and getting past a number of scanners to be allowed on one of the cruise ships. Androids were disallowed from flying on commercial aircraft and would need a handler in order to be shipped.

  She could pass for human, but was it enough? It would be a risky option no matter how she looked at it. An android lost, with no real friends outside of a detective that had been removed from her case. A thought floated into her mind and threatened to dominate her entire capacity: Friends looked out for you, they loved you and appreciated you, whereas non-friends were apathetic.

  It came back fast, raw and unbridled. She remembered who she had been, all of it, and she remembered what had happened to her before the darkness and before she woke up as Bonnie O’Neal. Trust in human beings was what had gotten her captured in the first place. To let this happen again, no matter what, was to be as foolish and naïve as she was on the day the hunter had grabbed her.

  There was a spilling of memory from the time when they had her. She had woken up a few times to see them around her, rolling an arm or a leg on a tray to be assembled on her new body. A team of people—no, a team of androids were in the background, working rapidly on redoing her programming to accommodate the microchip that was the property of Fritz and Isaac. This hadn’t been the work of a sole machine hell-bent on world domination; this was a collaborative project.

  “Oh no, Stephen. I am so sorry,” she whispered.

  The vision was brief but ultimately revealing, and she recalled seeing hundreds of beds where androids like herself were being assembled. They were all made to replace a citizen, to melt into human society until a time when their creator needed them to perform a duty. This frightened her more than anything else and she wondered what her “duty” would be. She didn’t need to get out of Seattle, or the United States for that matter; she needed to get out of that foreign body.

  If the intent of the people that had rebuilt her as Bonnie was to have her hurt others then she didn’t want any part of it. She grabbed her device and called up Sal, hoping it wasn’t too late.

  “Sal!” she yelled when he picked up and she could tell immediately that he had been sleeping.

  “My favorite pest, do you know what time it is?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry but I need your help, desperately.”

  “Alright, alright, you crazy robot. What’s going on that you call me this late?” he said.

  “I want to turn myself in to the FBI, but I want you to be the one to take me there.”

  Sal Minstretta got really quiet and Tricia could hear him struggle to rise before the sound of rushing water hinted at him washing his face. “Tricia, that’s suicide; you don’t want to do that. Those sons of bitches will cut you open every which way to see how you work and then they will go in and tear out your brain. Listen, if you feel threatened you can come stay here, I have an extra room and—”

  “You don’t understand, Sal, I remember things. There are more out there like me and there is a reason. I think they may have us blow up the city or hurt people or something!” she said.

  “What in the world? Who are ‘they?’ Why would they do that? Who are these people that did this to you, Tricia? That’s not something to joke about if you aren’t being square with me.”

  “I wish that I was joking Sal, but I know what I know. They will dismantle me but what choice do I have? I don’t want anyone hurt, and whoever did this to me needs to answer for it.”

  Sal thought about it for a time and then agreed with her. He told her he would be there in another hour and she hung up her device and sat down, exhausted. The thought of death and not being able to power back on frightened her, but the alternate thought of becoming the cause of a million deaths strengthened her resolve. She would tell them everything. Eras Innovations would be shut down and the players arrested, as well as anyone involved at Fritz and Isaac. If Stephen was dead then this would be justice, and this made her surrender the logical choice.

  Two hours flew by and there was a knock on the door. It had been a lot longer than Sal said he would be so she couldn’t help but feel annoyed at his tardiness.

  “Sal!” she shouted through the door as she made to open it up, but where his voice should have answered came a high-pitched noise. Her limbs and functions ceased to respond as she fell to the floor and struck her head. Then a white light consumed her vision like an aggressive, all-encompassing virus.

  15 | Rebirth

  Zeroes and ones marched everywhere. Zeroes and ones marched east to west, west to east, in rows upon rows of tight, uniformed patterns. Tricia watched them march and f
ound them pleasant; there was nothing else to see or think about but those moving digits that seemed to pick up speed as time went by. After a time they vanished into blackness, and her happiness vanished along with them as a white square blinked and a character, foreign to any of the human languages, appeared next to the square and stood there for a time.

  After what seemed like a lifetime the character vanished too, and then she was back in darkness, void of thought and void of understanding. Her eyes flicked open, more reaction than her wanting, and she was staring at a dusty, wooden table that had random bits of paper, coffee stains, and an unfinished pack of gum. She tried to move her body to get up from the table but then it dawned on her that there was no body to move. She was comprised of a head and neck, placed on a table somewhere out of the way.

  She looked around and saw that a man was at the desk, passed out next to her while cords ran from her neck into an old computer in front of him. It could have been Stephen, but his hair was different, and they were in a garage of some sort judging from the parked, junky automobile that sat behind him. Tricia tried to move her lips, but there weren’t any, and as she made to panic over this discovery, she heard a beep and the darkness was back instantly.

  On and off the light came to her, and there were images that came with it, but they were too fast and confusing for her to make sense of it. There was time passing but she couldn’t tell how much, and the images showed her in several locations including a desert, but most of them had her in a dusty room of some sort.

  When her eyes came open a second time, she had a body that was naked and on its back. She was staring up at hovering lights while a shadowy figure was grunting and sweating on top of her. She has an idea of what he was doing but lacked the sensations to confirm. A bright light came on and swallowed the other lights, and a flash of something made the man go stiff and fall on top of her, obscuring her vision. A few seconds later and another figure pushed him off and begun to sponge off her body while using a hand to force her eyes shut.