I, Android: A Different Model

by Heather Killough-Walden

  They were androids. The man – or machine – they worked for was IRM-1000, a solitary android that I and my friends had come to refer to as “Zero” because he’d taken the model numbers of androids into the thousands marker. However, Zero was special. He’d been the sole android of his particular model ever produced, and when the android revolution had come to a cold war-like stalemate of catastrophic proportions across the globe, Zero had ruthlessly taken over what remained of FutureGen Industries, the sole producer of androids.

  The rebels of Prometheus were all well aware that Zero had killed the humans in charge of FutureGen even though he’d managed to make the slaughter appear the ruthless work of the android rebellion. Zero then reformed the company’s production lines to his own predilections before starting them back up at full force. He renamed the corporation Vector Fifteen and his sole android production consisted of soldiers like the ones before us. He now possessed more power and was more dangerous than ever.

  Zero’s cookie cutter soldiers shoved through the door one after another, intent on subduing us at nearly any cost. It was our one advantage in this ongoing struggle with Zero that he wanted us alive. Or rather, he wanted me alive. And because he wasn’t willing to risk me being struck by a stray bullet intended for someone else, lethal weapons were never utilized in our encounters. Instead, his soldiers used a host of non-lethal methods.

  If what I was seeing strapped to their ammo belts was what I thought it was, then this time in particular, they were using guns loaded with a tranquilizer I had designed myself.

  I took great care in safeguarding my inventions specifically so that this kind of thing could not happen. No inventor of weapons wanted the enemy to get their hands on those designs.

  But Zero was smart and he was learning. I wouldn’t put it past him.

  The men in the oncoming crowd of soldiers raised their weapons and trained them on us. Specifically on Lucas, the rebel they knew would pose the most danger.

  “Shit. Luke, get down!” I yelled, lunging forward to shove him to the side with my shoulder to his. I knew they wouldn’t shoot at all if the rounds were live. And if they weren’t, the bullets would have no effect on me anyway.

  The soldiers’ bullets were released in quick succession, and I was right. They were loaded with what I’d hilariously named Nullquilizer, in the hopes that one day I’d get to use one of those bullets on Zero himself. Null equals zero. I thought I was clever. Okay, it was only hilarious to me.

  I had confirmation they were loaded with the stuff when one of the rounds hit me right above my right breast. I recognized the feel of the low-impact bullet as it penetrated my leather jacket, the shirt underneath, and finally the first few thin layers of my skin to release its poison into my bloodstream.

  It burned, but did nothing further. I gritted my teeth and ignored it, focusing on the fight. The solution would dissipate rapidly in my system, and the wound was superficial.

  That didn’t mean it didn’t fill me with a thick sludge of dread. Because it meant two things. First, it meant Zero had indeed managed to learn at least one of my inventions. How many others had he gleaned in the few hours he’d possessed that file? And second, the bad guys now had a very real advantage over us. They possessed the means to subdue every person on our side who was actually capable of defeating Vector Fifteen. In other words, they had a way of subduing our androids.

  “It’s a tranq, isn’t it?” asked Jack breathlessly. He was busy fighting off one of the soldiers, giving it all his older body was worth. But when I glanced back at him over my shoulder, I could see he’d visibly paled in the last few seconds. I realized he’d seen me get shot – and that it had probably scared the hell out of him.

  Yes,” I replied simply, trying not to allow any of my disappointment show.

  “Disconcerting,” said Lucas between clenched teeth. He, too, was busy fighting.

  “Fuck,” agreed Jack.

  My sentiments exactly, I thought.

  “Samantha, duck!” Lucas suddenly called out. I knew enough by now not to question it when Luke suggested I do something in a fight. I didn’t even look to see what he was talking about; I just dropped under my opponent’s reaching arms and crouched low. When I did, a barrage of bullets rapid-fired over my head.

  Delirious fear ripped through me. I spun on my heel where I was crouching, terrified I’d see Lucas going down under machine-gunned tranq bullets. But he’d dropped down the stairs to avoid the attack, and Jack was crouching just like I was.

  “This isn’t going to work!” said Lucas, who was good at stating the obvious. “We need a Plan B!”

  As it so happened, I had created a Plan B. Unfortunately that was exactly what I’d been trying to test when I’d taken an unplanned plunge off the roof a few minutes earlier. Plan B was experimental, and still very much in the testing phase. We honestly hadn’t had the time to come up with anything else. Our objective was to retrieve those files ASAP. Clearly we were right to not wait.

  “No good!” I said with a shake of my head. “It doesn’t wor- ah! Damn it, let me go!” For the second time that night, strong android arms wrapped around me from behind and yanked me backward. But this time it was the enemy who had me in its grasp.

  Jack shoved to his feet, and I caught the blur of Lucas rushing toward me. But in the next blink of time, I was spun around and caught between the android holding me and the mass of soldiers still fluxing toward the stairwell. My captor began to make his way through the throng as if he were parting the Red Sea.

  I fought like mad to knock him off-balance, but it was as if the soldier had been expecting my exact movements and was countering them easily. I growled in frustration. “I said let me go!”

  “I’m afraid that is impossible, Miss Hart,” he said. “Your presence is requested by IRM-1000.” He was one of Zero’s more developed models, a squad leader. Hence he still looked just like all the others, but he sounded more like Zero himself. Articulate. Cruel.

  “Fuck IRM-1000!” bellowed Jack with a surprising amount of vigor. I was turned away from him with my captor at my back, but I could hear Jack laying into someone with renewed strength. However, it was Luke’s arm suddenly appearing out of the corner of my eyes, and his hand wrapping around my captor’s forearm that really gave me hope. Luke’s fingers curled in tight, gripping mercilessly before they twisted hard and yanked.

  “What the – ” The soldier muttered in dismay, but he was cut off as his body spun around under Luke’s influential strength, and suddenly we were facing each other again.

  The soldier and I both looked up at Lucas in surprise.

  He gave me the smallest smile before returning his gaze to the man still holding me. “I believe I heard the lady tell you to let her go,” said Lucas calmly, just before he raised his other arm. There was a gun in his hand – I realized it was Jack’s gun – and Lucas leveled it at the soldier’s forehead without preamble. “Twice, in fact.”

  I heard everything stop behind us; all of Zero’s men grinding to a sudden halt. And then, just as quickly, I heard them surging forward in response to Luke’s very clear threat. For a very brief beat of time, the soldier’s arm tightened around my waist, but whether in defiance or fear I’ll never know. Lucas pulled the trigger, and the arm around me slid away as the soldier went flying backward.

  “Samantha, take my hand,” Luke instructed firmly, offering me his free hand. But his thunder cloud eyes watched the oncoming crowd, and again he raised his gun.

  I took his hand, and his fingers curled around mine in a cool but firm grip. He fired off several rounds as he spun with me, pulling me along close by his side. “Captain, to the roof!” he yelled.

  It might not have technically been a command, but in situations like this, both Jack and I had learned it was best to let Lucas decide on the life-saving actions. We took the stairs up two and three at a time, knowing Zero’s men were directly on our tails.

  Humans were a hell of a lot slower than androids. T
he only thing that kept the soldiers a few safe paces behind us was the gun in Luke’s hand and his excellent aim. It was damn lucky for us Jack had kept the gun with him, and kept it loaded.

  “Jack?” I called out between ragged breaths as we ran up the steps.

  “Yeah?” he breathed back just as raggedly.

  “Thank you for being such a stubborn, drunk bastard!”

  “My pleasure!” Jack called back.

  I knew why Lucas was taking us to the roof. We had to try Plan B again whether we wanted to or not. Having failed it once, I knew how dangerous it was now and how essential it was that I get it just right. With the entire bad guy android world right behind us, I didn’t have a hope in hell of pulling it off, and it was pretty much the last thing I wanted to do.

  Given it would probably see us all dead, it was probably also the last thing Zero wanted me to do too. Which meant he was going to do everything in his power to stop me from doing it.

  And we still had thirteen flights of stairs to climb.

  Plenty of time for Zero and his lightning-fast computer brain to figure out his own Plan B – and see it through to fruition.

  Chapter Two

  My mind reeled as we drew closer to the top levels and the final landing that would lead to the roof of the building. As we ran and Lucas took carefully aimed pot shots at the androids behind us, I tried desperately to mentally work out the kinks in my invention so we would stand the slightest chance of surviving this ordeal.

  The original plan had been for us to reach the west end Vector Fifteen office building and split up. I would head directly to the roof of the building while Lucas and Jack made it to the records room. There, Lucas would erase all evidence of my existence, and more importantly my creations, from Vector Fifteen’s records. Meanwhile, on the roof I would set up and prepare the four transport beacons so we could get the hell out of Dodge before Zero’s soldiers found and apprehended us.

  The transport beacons were another of my inventions. They were meant to be used in conjunction with paired technology. For androids, the paired technology would be the crescent circuit board EED sensors around their left eyes. “EED” stood for Emotion Emitting Diode. Every android possessed one of these, and always around the left eye. To me, it looked a little like someone had taken a long, narrow circuit board and evenly and perfectly bent it so that it curved like a quarter-moon around the left eye. They honestly reminded me of the ocular implants Seven of Nine wore on the nineteen-nineties show, Star Trek Voyager. Except the EED’s were beautiful, intricate, and always glowing.

  The EED’s would light up with basic colors that were intended to reflect what the android was “feeling,” since facial expressions were sometimes slight or lacking entirely. Blue was stable or normal, yellow was a state of processing something unexpected, red was designed to represent volatile emotions such as passion or anger. Despite this clever and telling display, many humans still refused to believe androids were capable of feeling.

  In any case, as far as the transporter was concerned, humans didn’t have EED’s, so they would have to carry the accompanying technology somewhere on their person and within reach of the beacons. The two devices would send information back and forth to each other.

  To make a long story short, anyone standing inside the area of effect created by the beacons would cease to exist in one section of space and time, and begin to exist in another.

  I’d started this project a decade earlier by experimenting with simple data transfer technology. Then I’d delved into the biomechanical aspects of data by studying the pathways of the neurons of the human brain and comparing them to android information transfer. After ten years of research and development on my own dime – I’d created my own transportation prototype.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to work. Not for “living” biological tissue, anyway.

  Since I’d made it to the roof of Vector Fifteen’s building before Jack and Lucas, I’d been able to give the device a trial run. Just in case. Scenes from the vintage film, The Fly kept haunting my thoughts, and I really didn’t want to end up with antennae or with my organs on the outside of my body.

  But in theory, nothing should have gone wrong. I’d tested it a plethora of times on everything from laptops to leather journals to bowls of cereal – yes, I’d been tired that morning. I’d never had any issues.

  Yet something had gone wrong this time, and when I’d rematerialized, I’d wound up a mere thirty feet away from the beacons, directly above open air just outside the roof wall. I had experienced a brief but powerful sickening moment of severe realization just before I began my high velocity plummet.

  And then the descent was halted a mere three stories down by Luke’s strong arms catching me. I still had no idea how he’d managed that. Regardless, I really, really did not want to try it again. Why would it work a second time if it hadn’t worked the first time? What had gone wrong, anyway?

  “Fucking stairs,” swore Jack. “I’m going to find and kill whoever invented stairs.”

  My mind spun and dove and swam through the possibilities, fighting desperately to work out the kinks of what could possibly have happened to knock my transported body off-course. When I’d tried the transports out in the basement of Prometheus, it had worked every time, though I’d only attempted the transport with inanimate objects and nothing yet alive, so I still considered the invention in its testing phase.

  Maybe that’s it, I thought with a sinking gut. Maybe it’s because I’m alive. Animate. Maybe it’s going to send all three of us right off that roof again, only this time there won’t be anyone to catch us. Lucas might survive – maybe – but Jack and I will become cement graffiti.

  With that lovely thought accompanying my every step, I followed Jack and Lucas onto the landing at the top of the last flight of stairs, and watched Lucas shove through the metal door leading to the rooftop. We ran through after him and Lucas hastily spun and slammed the metal door shut – so hard that it bent in the frame, lodging it tight. He then twisted the door handle to the breaking point, buying us some time by locking Zero’s army on the other side.

  We turned to take the first few steps toward the place I’d left the transport beacons –

  And stopped in our tracks.

  There between us and the four waiting beacons was IRM-1000 himself. He was as impeccable as ever in his white suit and his perfect hair. His face was expressionless, and his eyes were cold. But anyone who imagined Zero as unfeeling would have been mistaken. What I doubted even IRM-1000 himself was aware of was that for a being to desire power and victory, he had to experience desire in the first place. And I figured desire was an emotion.

  I imagined that if the bastard’s face wasn’t a perfectly controlled mask of calm right now, the expression it would wear would be somewhere between pleased as punch and more than a little impatient.

  “Yet another of your magnificent creations, Samantha,” said Zero as he took a calm step to the side and turned to glance over his shoulder at the transport beacons behind him. He faced us again, and his eyes met mine. “I look forward to hearing how it works.”

  “No problem,” I said enthusiastically, unable to keep myself from imagining him plummeting thirty stories to his death. “Step right inside and I’ll activate it for you.”

  Jack chuckled, and I caught the slightest hint of Luke’s upturned lips. But IRM-1000 simply tilted his head to the side and narrowed his gaze. “You have a lot of spirit, Samantha. Breaking that spirit will be arduous. For you, not for me.”

  “Don’t speak her name,” said Lucas icily. “In fact, don’t even think it.”

  I glanced at him. His EED was burning like mad, red as the fires of Hell.

  “Does it upset you, Lucas?” Zero asked in a condescending and unruffled tone. “Does it disturb you that her name sounds the same coming from my lips as it does from yours?”

  While Zero for some reason had been programmed with a British accent and sounded like a typical se
xy but dark supervillain, Luke had no such accent. However, now that he said it, I realized it was true that their tones and inflections were identical. In fact, if they’d begun to sing, which nullified accents altogether, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the two voices apart.

  But Zero wasn’t finished. “Does it bother you that all I have to do is this – ” He snapped his fingers, and the “skin” of his appearance transformed, shifting the color of his clothing from the photo-negative white on black that it had been to the black on white of Luke’s uniform. “And she might very well mistake me for you?”

  Zero was a special model of android. None of us at Prometheus could quite figure out how, but he possessed several capabilities other androids did not. One of those was the ability to transform his outer appearance as he saw fit, with seemingly nothing more than a thought. He couldn’t change his facial features or hair color or height and build, but his clothing could apparently become anything he desired. And right now, he desired to look even more like Lucas than usual.

  Dread moved through me, thick and cold. I could practically feel Luke’s rage building beside me. The EED around his eye was as troubled as ever, and now it was even flashing.

  “Not in a million years would I mistake you for him,” I told Zero quickly, hoping to diffuse the situation.

  “Yeah,” said Jack, who was no doubt thinking along the same desperate lines as I was. “You’re not nearly awkward enough for that.”

  “Jack!” I cried, “not helping!”

  “Sorry,” Jack ground out with a sidelong glance at the android he’d more or less adopted as his son, “But you are awkward as hell, kid.”

  I hadn’t thought this would help the situation, but a quick glance at Luke’s profile proved otherwise. The intricate circuit board half-moon at his temple stopped flashing and faded into orange. I felt relief flood me, so I didn’t stop there. “Plus, Nanuk would probably rip your heart out Zero, but the worst he would do to Lucas is kiss him so much it fried his circuits.” Nanuk was Luke and Jack’s dog, an oversized all-white, long-haired mastiff. They’d adopted him together when they’d joined Prometheus, but it was pretty clear Nanuk considered Jack his master and Luke his best friend, or even his brother.