I, Android: A Different Model

by Heather Killough-Walden

  But bless him, Lucas didn’t seem to mind my lack of manners. He simply smiled more broadly and explained, gesturing to the glowing blue portion at the back of the pendant. “One, that’s blue gold,” he told me calmly. “An alloy of gold and indium.”

  I knew what blue gold was. What I didn’t understand was the glowing. But at least the blue gold explained the color.

  He gently grasped the swinging pendant between his thumb and forefinger – and the glow intensified, becoming bright enough I could read by it at night if I’d wanted to. My eyes widened.

  “And two, the alloy contains a secret ingredient, an analytic possessing of various substances akin to phenyl oxalate and phthalic ester… along with a dose of my own thorium.”

  I looked from him to the pendant and back again, noting that the blue color was identical to the glow of his EED. Vulcan blood was green – but thorium could glow any color you wanted it to. It was radioactive, a source of power.

  I processed what he was telling me. And what he was basically telling me was that he’d managed to create an entirely new metal, one that was capable of glowing blue. Not only that, it seemed to do so with respect to its creator’s proximity. When he’d touched it, the glow had become brighter.

  As Luke released the pendant and stepped back, the luminosity of the tiny ship’s hyperdrive decreased in response, dimming a little. This confirmed my suspicions that the metal reacted to Lucas. It would light up when he was near, and probably die down to a simple but shiny blue metal when he wasn’t.

  I was blown away. “Well I guess we’ll never have trouble telling you two apart anymore when Zero does the mirror image thing,” I said softly, bewildered.

  I guess he could tell how bewildered I was, perhaps by the fact that I had yet to move, and probably even more so by the fact that I hadn’t looked away from the pendant. He laughed again, taking the chain gently from my frozen fingers before training his gaze on mine. Firmly he said, “Turn around, Samantha.”

  There was that command in his voice again. And that way he said my name. I had to admit that I rather liked it when he got like this.

  I warmed a little, all the way to my previously numbing fingers, as I slowly turned around and Lucas gathered the hair off my neck. Cool air washed in to lick at my exposed skin, but it did nothing to drain the heat from my body when I felt his fingers next, deftly brushing against my collar bones to secure the gold pendant around my neck.

  I felt its weight settle between my breasts and looked down, lifting the pendant again to peer at it in wonder. The length of the chain was perfect for my scrutiny.

  “How did you do this, Luke?” The scientist in me so badly wanted details.

  “I’ll never tell,” he teased, then grasped my upper arms to turn me back around.

  I stared wide-eyed up at him. “Thank you, Lucas. This is the most amazing thing anyone has ever given me.” It meant he not only really knew me and my love of all things Star Wars, he knew what objects within that fandom I loved most – like Han Solo’s ship. The fact that it was gold and gold was so difficult to come by meant he’d put in the work because he also knew I loved gold the best of all metals since it was only ever created when a star went supernova. And that was just cool.

  And for him to make it glow? And place a piece of himself within it the way he had? I didn’t think I could ever top a gift like that. I was pretty sure no one had.

  “You’re welcome, Beautiful.”

  I blinked. He had never used a term of endearment with me before. But ever since we’d escaped the hospital and come to stay with Coach C, Luke had gradually seemed more and more human. For lack of a better word. And now, as he called me “beautiful,” he cupped my face gently and brushed his thumb over my cheek along my cheekbone.

  “I want little more than to stay here and kiss you all night,” he admitted with a rueful smile. But then he dropped his hand, and cold air rushed in to kiss me instead. “But if we don’t get you back inside now, I’m afraid you’ll freeze to the spot.”

  He turned and slid the glass door to the balcony open, pulling me into the living room behind him before sliding the door shut once again behind us. The warm air felt nice, but almost a little stifling with the heavy scent of something delicious baking and the hint of cinnamon in the air and the chatter of Prometheus members talking gladly amongst themselves.

  I scanned the people in the room to find the leader of the rebel group watching us, an enigmatic look on his handsome face. His gaze dropped to the necklace around my neck and back up again, capturing my eyes before turning to Lucas. The EED at Daniel’s left eye flickered, but never changed colors.

  Finally, he smiled. It was a knowing smile.

  “I think it’s time for a toast,” said Daniel loudly enough for everyone to hear. He gestured with his head for us to come the rest of the way inside and join them, then turned to the table to begin pouring and passing out drinks.

  I gave Lucas a sidelong glance and shy smile, and the two of us made our way back into the apartment’s cheery, bright interior.

  The carpet was now decorated with scraps of torn wrapping paper, and I noticed Mabel had the bear I’d given her tucked firmly under one arm. It was an average plush bear about a foot and a half long, with soft light brown fur and big, brown glass eyes. But I’d taken it to a tailor to have a few special touches added. It now wore removable clothes that matched Mabel’s favorite garments, and on its temple was an embroidered EED quarter-moon circuit board design in bright blue.

  There was something glistening on its smiling, embroidered mouth. I glanced at the kitchen table to see another lollipop on a plate. Coach C had come to learn root beer was Mabel’s favorite flavor, and he’d proceeded to provide her with one root beer lollipop a day, despite Charlotte’s weak protests. I couldn’t blame him. Clearly Mabel had “shared” this latest sucker with her new bear. I couldn’t help but wonder what a psychologist would have to say about artificial intelligence associating equal intelligence, and even emotion, with an utterly inanimate object.

  The thought made me grin.

  A glass of pink champagne appeared before my eyes and I looked up to see Lucas had one in each hand and was holding one out for me. The others were taking theirs from Charlotte, who was serving them from a large tray. Coach C was behind her with three bottles of beer. He handed one to Jack and one to Cole. Those guys didn’t do champagne. I grinned at that too.

  I took my glass from Lucas and faced Daniel. When everyone was supplied with drinks, Daniel raised his glass. The room grew quiet. Even Mabel quieted down with her bear in one hand and her bottle of very real A&W root beer in the other.

  Daniel looked at me and winked. “Here’s to a new hope,” he began, and my heart felt warm at his reference to Star Wars, probably brought on by his notice of my necklace. “To the strength it gives and to the change it brings. Here’s to a new year – a new century that dawns before us – to its bright, clean canvas.” He raised his glass a little higher, and everyone else followed suit. Then he returned his eyes to mine. “And the masterpiece it will become.”

  A new century. This was 2099. In six days, it would be the year 2100.

  Prometheus cheered. “Hear, hear!” Glasses chinked in celebration, and I thought about that painting Daniel had made of me, the one he’d considered a masterpiece. The one Zero had told his men to pinch… when he’d attacked Prometheus.

  Then I pushed the thoughts from my head – not now – and I took a sip of my own drink. The champagne was almost ice cold and bubbled across my tongue as it went down. It was wonderful, like a not-too-sweet pink colored grape juice with Poprocks type carbonation that tickled but didn’t burn. And it made me smile just like everything else did that day.

  Out in the living room, we ate and drank and talked. After a while, I felt eyes heavy on me. I glanced over to find Nick’s blue gaze locked on mine. Okay, I thought. I need to talk to you anyway. I nodded toward the door that led to the apartment complex main hall,
and he nodded back, expression serious. We stood as one, and I told the others we were going for a walk. Then Nicholas followed me to the coat rack, where we gathered our cold weather belongings.

  His coat was of course beautifully tailored; the man was all kinds of loaded. But mine was a cheap insulated knee-length jacket that had been purchased in a size large enough to allow for the cast. I could tell that Nick wanted to insist I accept a nicer one from him, but he’d already offered and I’d already turned him down. He’d known me a long time and knew enough not to press the issue when I told him it wouldn’t be safe for him to make purchases right now, as they might be tracked to us.

  That was bullshit, of course. Nick was brilliant and more than capable of carefully getting around any form of trace when it came to his billions of dollars in finances. But like I said, I was stubborn and he knew it, and this was more about principles.

  We opened the main door that led into the hall. On the way through it, I felt more eyes on me and glanced back at the table that nearly everyone sat around.

  Mabel and most of the gang were playing a board game. But two members of Prometheus were watching me. One was Lucas, wearing his usual observant expression – careful and protective. However, his EED was closer to yellow than blue when his gaze slid from me to Nicholas. I chalked it up to jealousy, chose to find it flattering, and glanced at the other person watching me.

  The other was Cole. His dark blue eyes were hard, and I noticed his grip tighten on his beer as we stepped outside together. But my view of him was blocked when Nicholas pulled the door shut behind us.

  I stared at the door for a second. Behind it were more questions. But I had so many I already had to get answers for.

  So at once I spun and blurted, “Nicholas, I need to ask you about Zero,” at the very same time that he said, “Sam, I need to tell you about IRM-1000.”

  We each stopped mid-speech and peered at one another in silence for a moment until Nicholas took a deep breath, letting it out in a surrendering sigh. “I know,” he said. “But not here. Lucas can still hear us, and probably every other android in there can too.”

  I glanced sidelong at the door, hoping Luke wouldn’t take offense to that since Nick was right and he could hear us. Then I nodded at Nicholas. We moved down the hall, took the stairs to the first floor, and popped outside into the cold. I yanked on my insulated jacket, pulling it tighter around me. It was looser than it had been when I’d first purchased it. But I ignored the change and swept my unruly hair out from underneath it before shoving my hands into my pockets.

  “You should eat more, Sam,” Nicholas said. “You’ve lost weight.”

  I chose to overlook the pang of self-consciousness that hit me when he said that. Did I look bad to him? “We’ve been kind of busy.”

  He said nothing to that. We walked together in silence for a bit. I was composing my thoughts, trying to order the plethora of questions I had about IRM-1000, IRM-900, and even IRM-667 – and the ties they seemed to have binding them together. I had questions about FutureGen and why Nicholas had quit the company he’d created, questions about what he’d done in the meantime, and what Nicholas’s enigmatic gift to Jonathan Montgomery – that being the android Daniel – had been all about.

  “I know you have a thousand questions, Sammy,” Nicholas said softly. “I can practically hear your wheels turning.” He was wearing black leather gloves, as expensive-looking as the rest of his clothing. He slipped those hands into the pockets of his wool trench coat, and gave me a look from the corner of his eye that struck me as very “Xanatos,” from that really old cartoon, Gargoyles.

  I was a huge fan of the classics, and I wasn’t ashamed of it.

  “I’m betting you don’t know what to ask first. So why don’t I begin?” he suggested just as softly.

  Since he was right, I shrugged. “Okay. Go for it.”

  He nodded. “You probably want to know why I quit FutureGen.”

  “It’s a start,” I said.

  He sighed again, looked up at the snow in the sky, and said, “It was the day the shareholders came to me with the public’s request for the first Gaius Club. The demand for it was overwhelming. I can’t even tell you what the numbers were.” He shook his head. “And I knew it was going to come to pass one way or another. And I knew… I knew it was the beginning of the end.”

  I looked up at him as we walked. His jaw was tight, his brow furrowed. “So I began making plans.”

  “You didn’t want the Gaius Club?” I asked. To me it was a fair question. The Gaius Clubs were named after the Roman emperor Gaius, who was later known by the more infamous name, Caligula. The Gaius Clubs were legal, government-regulated prostitution dens where male and female androids played the parts humans once played. I found it difficult to imagine a man not getting behind the idea of legal prostitution. At the risk of thinking bigoted thoughts, weren’t most guys sort of… oversexed, for lack of a better term? I’d once had a guy tell me that men thought of sex on average once every eleven seconds. Hell, I was a girl and I wouldn’t have minded sex. Like, really wouldn’t have minded. With Luke, specifically.

  Jesus, grow up Sam, I told myself.

  Nicholas laughed harshly in response to my question. “You mean did I want the answer to humanity’s prayers to be reduced to nothing more than oversized sex toys with the unfortunate ability to reason and feel?

  A nasty feeling went through me, both hot and cold and a little nauseating. The way humans treated androids was akin to the way non-human animals had at one time been rounded up, raised, and slaughtered for meat despite the same mental and emotional capacities.

  I was suddenly once again super grateful that I’d chosen to be a vegetarian when I was younger; it was one of the things that had drawn Nick and I together as friends in school. Now it was unnecessary to make that decision, however, as humans had since learned to produce both meat and leather in labs without the use of animal husbandry.

  The agriculture industry hadn’t been pleased, and every dirty trick in the book had been played to keep progress from happening… but that was a messy story for another day.

  “Okay,” I said softly, looking back down at the ground. “I get it.”

  “No, I don’t imagine you truly do,” he said, but he said it gently, as if he regretted it. “Not entirely, anyway. FutureGen meant almost everything to me, Sammy. The androids I created were all that I wanted to leave behind when I died. They were to be my legacy… the future.” He sighed. “I had dreams of surgeons who could maintain perfect focus after three full days without sleep. I thought of infinitely patient foster parents capable of taking in troubled children to keep them off the streets and out of gangs. I imagined a companion for every aging widow and widower in every empty nest or nursing home around the world. No more loneliness. No more orphans.”

  He gave me a sidelong glance of apologetic acknowledgement to my own orphaned background, and I gave him a small smile.

  He went on. “But when I saw it all begin to go the way of basically everything else humanity’s filthy fingers had ever touched – ” He broke off and ran a hand through his hair. “I knew it was time to back out. And I knew I had all but failed.” He shook his head. “Not to mention the job replacement issues involved with the Gaius Clubs. Let’s be honest – prostitution is history’s oldest profession for a reason. As bad as it sounds to admit, creating those clubs literally took a final, desperate option from many unfortunate souls, leaving them no recourse.”

  “So that was when you sold the company.”

  “Almost,” he said softly. “I made the final decision and signed the papers when Uncle Sam demanded a large portion of FutureGen’s androids be allocated to the military.”

  I remembered that. It had been a huge deal, infuriating both android rights activists and anti-draft activists alike. To them, this was no different than forcing a human slave to take the front lines. When questioned, neither group had any issues with androids enlisting on their own
terms should an android decide to serve their country in that way. What both groups were against was the lack of any kind of choice afforded to the androids in question.

  I glanced at Nick again, taking in his profile while I thought about the past. Nick’s jet-black shoulder-length hair was now damp from the snow, and when he had run his hand through it, it feathered forward a little to frame his handsome face. It looked good. He looked good. I was pleased he’d let it grow out from its length in his advertising images during his time as the head of FutureGen. He’d had it shorter then. But now he looked like the old Nicholas, the one I had such fond memories of from our high school years.

  Nicholas Byron had always been what I considered a moral man. When I’d refused to run any of the dissection requirements or experiments on animals while earning my high school diploma and then degrees, Nick had supported me to the point that he’d refused to do them right along with me. Our decisions had come with difficult consequences, but we’d gotten through them together and never sacrificed our ethics.

  It would seem those ethics had followed Nicholas through the years. They’d dogged his heels right into adulthood to change the course of his fate, along with the world’s, forever.

  After a prolonged silence, I said, “Jonathan told me that Daniel was the first android you created at FutureGen and that you sent him to Jonathan before you left the company.”

  Nick looked over at me. His face lost all its color. He swallowed hard.

  I frowned. He looked dreadfully scared just then, and maybe even a little sick. I felt the stirrings of alarm.

  But then, as quickly as he’d turned to me, he turned away again. Very quietly, he said, “Yes. Daniel was the first, and he was a solitary production.”

  Making him as special and unique as Lucas and Zero, I thought. No wonder he was the leader of the android rebellion.