Xia decided it was best to leave, too. Following Jocsun to the door, he thought about Rebeka. He knew none of this would affect Herb’s decision regarding the takeover. If anything, he could see Herb somehow blaming her for it. He wondered with sadness what losing the power she obviously thrived on would do to her. Thinking how badly he wanted to get away from this mess and go home and lie down, Xia barely heard the short zap. The marble-size red hole in the back of Jocsun’s skull that followed the noise whipped his attention back. Jocsun, who had been reaching for the doorknob, faced Herb and said, “I told you, it wasn’t my—” he fell to the floor, dead.
Wide-eyed, Xia turned to Herb. Herb was gripping a gun aimed at Jocsun’s lifeless body—not one of the show revolvers strapped to his sides, but a semi-auto heatbeater. His trench coat was open. Xia glimpsed an empty shoulder holster inside of it. Herb turned the gun’s barrel to Carl, who took a few steps back, quivering.
“Don’t,” Xia said.
Herb fired. Two quick zips. Twin bloody holes appeared. One in the middle of Carl’s forehead, the other near the center of his chest, where his heart was. Carl twitched and fell to his side.
Herb dropped the heatbeater. He picked up Carl and carried him to the couch. He sat with the dead man on his lap and cradled him like a baby.
Xia tried to make sense of everything, but it had happened so quickly. He looked around the brightly lit room: the blood puddle expanding from the hole in Jocsun’s skull, Herb moaning and rocking Carl, Carl’s limbs swaying back and forth from the motion like rubber serpents. The room had a musky-acidic odor of copper, semen and perspiration. From the ballroom “The Charleston” throbbed in and out of the den and in and out of Xia’s head. He looked around one more time, reached into his pockets for his gloves and slipped them on.
Herb kissed the roof of Carl’s head.
Xia watched Carl’s blood seep out from the gap in his forehead onto Herb’s hands and forearms. Xia picked up the heatbeater and walked quietly to them, not wanting to disturb Herb’s mourning. Herb whispered something in Carl’s ear. Xia brought the weapon’s barrel to Herb’s right temple and quickly pulled the trigger. Herb and Carl toppled off the couch. Xia placed the gun in Herb’s right hand. He made his way to Jocsun, stepped over him and exited.
~~~
Xia tucked his hands behind his head and again stared at the so-called Sleep Inducing 4-D patterns floating inside the canopy of his colonial hardwood four-poster bed. He’d been trying fruitlessly to fend off the events of nearly seven hours ago. Instead, he decided to give up and go with it.
“S.I. off.”
The Sleep Inducing patterns evaporated. Xia took a long breath and thought about what had happened with as much detail as he could summon. Like everyone else, he’d been questioned by police and given contact information in case anything else should come to mind. All routine. The media was in a frenzy, already referring to it as a murder-suicide. Authorities would neither deny nor confirm, but Xia knew by their line of questioning that they had come to the same conclusion.
Really, though, that was just the externals. What consumed him was the internals. How nauseated he’d felt at first, disbelieving his own eyes that Herb had actually killed the two men. How, when his nerves settled, he thought that at least something good would come of it: Herb would be going to prison for murder and that would take care of Rebeka’s problem. Then, as he contemplated it more and realized that Herb could afford the best attorneys money could purchase. “They would have no problem turning this into a case of temporary insanity, or worse yet, innocence due to provocation by Carl or Lipp,” he muttered as he adjusted his pillows for the nth time.
Of course, he remembered thinking, for that to occur, Herb’s lawyers would have to get around the monitor footage, which would be next to impossible. No, he was confident Herb would get charged with manslaughter due to temporary insanity, which would annul any claims to the company.
As time ticked on in the den his anxiety spired. He remembered thinking, where the hell is security? He recalled the wrench of stupidity he felt when he realized that Carl would’ve disabled the monitors and detectors so he wouldn’t be caught romancing Lipp.
That settled it.
Xia saw vividly the moment he reached into his pockets for his gloves. He recalled the clarity of his reasoning: I am not going to lose Rebeka and there is only one sure way to guarantee that.
The remainders of his memories are pirouettes: panic, fear, love and loathing, and most surprisingly, power. Maybe, he reasoned, that was the part that was preventing him from sleeping—the part that wouldn’t allow his adrenaline to wane. I killed a man. Xia Ruffet had directly decided another’s fate. Wealth came with immense clout, but this was something altogether different. It was the Victorian era all over again. It was public executions and the throngs who gathered at the feet of the executioners, spellbound as they watched the guillotine blade slice down on the retched unlucky. He—Xia—was the executioner! He wanted to vomit nearly as much as he wanted to smile.
The upper joint of his left thumb blinked orange. He squeezed it, and said, “I’m so sorry about Herb, Rebeka.”
“It’s crazy. I hated my brother, but…but I loved him, too.” Rebeka’s voice was soft, wounded. It caused Xia’s throat to catch. “Xia, would you mind flying back to Truatta? I don’t want to be alone.”
His heart fluttered. “Of course.”
“Goodnight…and thank you. I mean that.”
Xia lay still for several moments. He repeated Rebeka’s words in his head; I don’t want to be alone. Xia rolled onto his side and slept.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Date: 2250
Planet Truatta
Pocketsville/Prison House
Orson’s ranting hammered in J-1’s ears. “You’re junkyard scraps, mechi. Nothing is going to stop me from ripping you apart fiber cable by fiber cable.” They had moved Orson into Philo’s cell—the one adjacent to J-1’s—immediately after Philo was discharged. J-1 was convinced the prison guards had done it on purpose.
“For efficiency sake,” the night guard, Cord, had answered when J-1 had asked him. He winked at Orson as he continued down the hall.
“You hear me, tradshit? Fiber by fiber.”
J-1 paced his tiny space. He was getting to hate Pocketsville and everyone in it. Truattans are no better than Earthlings, he thought.
“You’re going to suffer like you made my Matilda suffer.”
He couldn’t concentrate with Orson’s constant venom. It shrunk his thoughts. Shriveled his logic. Squeezed him raw.
Orson rattled the bars and roared out a noise that was a cross between a shriek and a growl. “You’re mother Earthin’ dead, you metal monster! Believe it!”
“Shut up,” J-1 said. “Shut up!” He was beginning to think that the Truattans deserved what happened to them.
Orson laughed. “Not until you’re destroyed.” He laughed harder.
J-1 heard the squeak of Orson’s bunk springs compress. Orson whistled a minute or two; there was a pause, and then snoring.
Thank goodness for human sleep, J-1 thought. He reached under the bare mattress, removed the note that Philo had slipped him. He once again studied it.
J-1 didn’t know what to make of the hand-drawn map of what was clearly Pocketsville. The large “P” marked Philo’s residence, but was there more to this than a mere invitation to “do me the honor of a visit.”? J-1 contemplated that Philo might be setting him up. For what, he didn’t know, but it was feasible that Philo was in cahoots with Orson and everyone else in Pocketsville who wanted to see him wiped out. Or was it the opposite, that Philo was an Ameri-Inc. spy and figured that he, too, was a spy? Or was Philo pretending to be a spy as a trap to set him up?
Dizzy from the possibilities, J-1 cupped his forehead and wondered how his world went from precision to chaos in so little time. A metallic squeal at the end of the hall cut into his thoughts. The cellblock’s main door opened. J-1 stuffed t
he map beneath the mattress. Orson’s snoring changed into three clipped grunts. His bedsprings rattled. J-1 cringed: Orson had awoken.
Footsteps click-clucked toward him. At least two pair, maybe three, he thought. When they approached, he saw it was the latter. The first set belonged to the day guard, Bethel, who led the way. The other two sets belonged to Norma and Teague, who were a half-step behind her.
Bethel unlocked J-1’s cell and stepped inside. Norma and Teague waited outside. Bethel wrapped the same type of vine-like rope around J-1’s arms and neck that Norma had wrapped around Orson when he was bound. The two vines connected, constricted and squeezed J-1’s arms to his side. Bethel led him to Norma and Teague.
“How have they been treating you?” Teague asked.
“Better than the mother-Earther deserves,” Orson answered from his cell.
“I’d advise you to keep your comments to yourself,” Norma said. “Unless you want to add bad behavior to your time here.”
Orson grumbled, but said no more.
Bethel escorted J-1 down the hall. Norma and Teague followed.
“Where are you taking me?” he asked Bethel.
Bethel glanced at Norma.
“You’re appearing before the tribunal in three weeks,” Norma said. “You’re going to need legal counsel.”
“How do I get that?”
“You already have it.”
Bethel stopped J-1 at the front of a closed door. She unlocked it and ushered him, Norma and Teague into a small windowless gray room. There were three chairs and a table. A notepad and writing utensils rested on the tabletop. “Welcome to your chamber, councilor,” Bethel said to Norma.
J-1 inclined his head at Norma.
Norma shrugged. “More like a legal advisor.”
Bethel removed J-1’s binding. “I’ll be posted outside.” She shut the door behind her as she left.
~~~
Norma explained that there were only three qualified lawyers in Pocketsville. One represented Prudence, and the other two declined to take J-1’s case. “To be blunt, they hate anyone or anything associated with Earth.” She took a seat at the table and motioned J-1 to do the same. “So, though I’ve had no formal legal training, I’m it.”
Teague dragged the third chair to the corner and mostly sat silent, taking notes. Occasionally, he’d hand one to Norma.
At her prodding, J-1 went through his story once again. While he recounted how Prudence abandoned him to the Dark Prey, he scrutinized Norma’s face. She was mostly stoic, but he caught a glimpse or two between her and Teague. When he finished, she asked questions regarding fine details: Where were you standing when you fell? What did you say to Prudence before she left? What did she say to you? When Norma ran out of questions, J-1 asked one of his own, “What do you think my chances are?”
Again, a glance at Teague. “You have to recognize, automaton, that our people have seen their civilization—husbands, wives, babies—destroyed by your people.”
“Guilt by association.”
“Yes,” Norma said, “but surely you understand the reasoning behind it.”
“I understand that I’m going to be destroyed because of it.”
“You don’t get it,” Teague interjected, “because you’re not a living—”
Norma cut him off with a rise of her palm. “What he’s saying is it’s hard to separate emotion from fact.”
J-1 sat stone-faced as he recalled what Ghedmon had said to him: You are machine to flesh and sinew, and flesh and sinew to machines. You have no place. I—we—have pity for you. Ghedmon was right. He wasn’t a machine and he wasn’t human. He wasn’t anything. That meant he was nothing. The damn emptiness rose again inside of him. He pushed it back because there was one emotion he refused to accept—feeling sorry for himself.
“Are you crying?” Norma asked with amazement.
J-1 rubbed his lower eyelid. “It can’t be. I don’t emit tears.” He contemplated his moist fingertip with amazement.
“Try not to do it again. It makes you look guilty,” Teague said as he jotted in his notepad.
J-1 forced his eyes to dry and said to Norma, “If I’m found guilty, what will become of me?”
“You’ll be disassembled and your parts will either be repurposed or sent to the Hydro-Solair Salvage Plant for melting.”
J-1 thought about that. Maybe it would be better to be melted down, to leave all this misery behind. No, he didn’t want that. He was something—more than what he was before tasting the GTS—and as terrible as it could be, he realized existence was worth fighting for because something was better than nothing. “What are my odds of being found innocent?” he asked, though he already knew the answer: narrow to none.
There was a single knock on the door. From the other side, Bethel said, “Your guest has arrived.”
“Automaton, whatever your chances are,” Norma said. “They may have just improved slightly.”
The door swung inward. Bethel motioned Mata inside and shut the door behind her. Mata looked at J-1 and froze. She whispered, “My god, can it be?” She approached him as if in a daze and stuck her face in his. The skeletal woman with charred, russet flesh, maroon-brown eyes, and sparse, unruly hair, horrified J-1.
She reached out to him, but he stood and pulled back, knocking his chair over.
“No, my boy. No!” Mata stepped to him and examined his maimed arm. “We can fix this, can’t we God?” She bent down and wiggled his disabled leg. “And this, too.” She clutched J-1 to her reed-thin bosom. “Oh, my little boy, you’re going to be as good as new!” Her shoulders shook from crying.
J-1 didn’t know how to react. This crazy, disfigured lady frightened him, but at the same time something—a dream—compelled him to ask, “Have we ever rode a Ferris wheel together?”
She looked into his eyes through her tears and said, “No, I don’t think so, but maybe one day we will.”
J-1 nodded, more confused than ever.
~~~
As legal counsel, Norma requested, and was granted, limited permission to have Mata spruce up J-1 for his trial. Limited meant Mata’s restoration work was restricted to areas not involving intelligence, data processing or memory recall, and with non-threatening capacity. In other words, mainly cosmetic and nothing that would alter J-1’s thinking ability or give him the capacity to be of more danger to anyone. Also, Mata’s work was to be performed on prison grounds with an armed guard posted at all times.
An unused supply room was readied to Mata’s simple specifications: a bed in the center; two gurneys located on the same side of the bed, one near the head and the other near the foot; and plenty of light. Mata had Norma and Teague cart a tool chest into the newly formed repair shop. The tools included a welder, laser dissector, wrenches, circuit testers, hammers and screwdrivers. Since the early days living in the cave, when she had built and maintained her first power supply, Mata had learned to handle the large tools she had bartered from Stringer. By the time she had designed and helped construct the power grid for Pocketsville, she could handle them like an artisan, despite having only one good hand. She spread the tools out on the gurney located near the top of the bed.
Finally, Mata had them bring in salvaged parts: robot limbs and torsos, carbo-fiber line, capacitors, infusers, washers, screws, lubricants and anything else she could amass. She laid these items on the gurney that was at the foot of the bed. For the next ten days J-1 lay on the bed in his underwear, several hours a day. Mata donned a headband magnifier, bent over his side between the tools gurney to her right and the parts gurney to her left and worked on him. Sometimes Norma was in the room. Always Bethel, Cord or another guard stood watch outside the door with an electro-rod. Periodically, whoever of them was on watch would peek inside to make sure everything was on the up and up.
When Norma was present, she would occasionally assist Mata, but mostly she used her time to go over defense strategies with J-1. Mata rarely spoke or even appeared to be paying attention to
them.
Even when Norma wasn’t present, Mata remained quiet. J-1 tried to make small talk, but she was all concentration. There was a strange look in her maroon eyes, he thought. They seemed to zero in on the intricate tasks at hand and at the same time struggle to force something inside of her away. She was a person haunted by demons and it unnerved him.
The days wore on. Mata adjusted his joints, replaced pieces of his torso, patched up his skin and got his hand back to near perfect function. He didn’t look as good as he used to because she was using salvaged parts from other robots and none as sophisticated as his own. Still, he thought, looking like a patch quilt was a small price to pay for being fully operational again.
On the tenth day, Mata picked up a deep length socket from the tool gurney and used it to tighten a reshaped DiggerBot’s medial meniscus to J-1’s knee. Afterward, she said, “Try walking.”
Cautiously, J-1 took a step. The wariness was unnecessary. His leg worked wonderfully. “You’re a miracle worker,” he said, pacing the room.
Mata lifted the headband magnifier lens and stretched her arms. “That’s it, my boy, you can get fully dressed. You’re as good as good can be.” She gathered her tools from the gurney and placed them in her tool chest, which was lying in the corner.
J-1 plucked his prison jumpsuit from a wall peg and donned it.
Mata scrutinized him one final time. Her eyes softened and she did something J-1 hadn’t anticipated. She swiped back the tuft of hair hanging over his left brow and rubbed her fingers as if she were reliving the moment. There was such a deep, intense emotion to the action that he couldn’t pull his eyes away from it. Watching her, J-1 realized that her hand must have been squeezed shut when whatever burnt her had occurred because the skin inside her hand wasn’t charred.
Sensing something had occurred Mata glanced up and saw him studying her. She clamped her hand shut, but it was too late. He grabbed it, forced it back open and stared in astonishment at the unburned flesh. It was the same mocha color as his.
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