I, Android: A Different Model

by Heather Killough-Walden

  “That’s Lucas,” I said.

  Sonia nodded, lowering her now empty bottle and swallowing the last of what was in her mouth. “I know.” She sighed, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth. “The room is soundproof. He probably thinks I’m in here getting you off on the table.”

  I looked at the table and grimaced. “An exercise in futility given how cold that table would be on my ass.”

  Sonia blinked – and then she laughed. It was a good, strong laugh, deep and real. She was trying very hard to cut herself loose from the dark embrace of grief. “You ready to head back with the rest of the crew?” she asked.

  “Actually, I’m ready for bed,” I admitted.

  Sonia nodded, still grinning. “I know that too. You’re exhausted.” She stood up, swiveled the chair back under the table, and offered me a hand up. “Let Lucas see you back to your room so he doesn’t blow a fuse, and then get some sleep. And the next time we drink girlfriend, we’re fucking playing a different game.”

  I smiled ruefully. “Deal.”

  We turned to the door, but just before I placed my hand on the scanner, I glanced back over my shoulder at Sonia. “By the way, what happened with Saxon’s body?” It hadn’t been with the others, and his regulator wasn’t included in the canister against the wall.

  Sonia frowned, the lines in her forehead furrowing. “Honestly, we have no idea. We knew he’d been killed because we found so much of his blood, along with a few strands of your hair on the walk in the forested part of Prometheus.” She shrugged. “But his body was gone.” She seemed to think for a second before adding, “Along with the painting.”

  “Painting?” I had a feeling I knew.

  “The one Daniel made of you. You know, it’s really strange. We haven’t talked about it because well, it’s just too soon, and for Daniel it’s too painful. For all intents and purposes, Jonathan was his father…. But for an attack on Prometheus, it was an odd one. Half-way through the strike, the EED’s on Zero’s men lit up bright red. Then they just started pulling out. And it seems like they took two things with them when they went,” she explained. “Saxon and that painting.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  There were two Zeros, not one. One stood in front of Lucas, his left hand wrapped around Luke’s throat. His right pressed a gun barrel so tightly to the underside of Luke’s chin, Luke’s head was forced up at an angle.

  The second Zero stood behind Lucas, his chest to Luke’s back. That Zero’s left hand wrapped around Luke’s upper arm. But his right arm was stretched out to the side along with Luke’s right arm. Their hands were android gray, and IRM-1000’s was placed gently against the back of Luke’s, his fingers curled around it ever so slightly.

  “Now then,” said the second Zero as his hand began to glow, and Luke’s did too. “Let’s find out what you know, shall we?”

  That one was Malcolm. He was the original Zero; I knew in my gut and by the sound of his voice, the choice of his words, and the look in his eyes.

  Lucas made a desperate sound, but gun beneath his chin cocked in warning. At Luke’s back, Malcolm closed his glowing blue eyes. Veins of electricity moved from Luke’s hand into his. I watched them sizzle and spark and I knew those bolts of white-hot power contained information. They possessed in their streams everything Lucas knew and Malcolm wanted to know.

  In the course of seconds, Malcolm learned all he desired about Lucas, about Prometheus, and about me.

  When I awoke a second later, gasping and sitting upright in my bed, I had no idea why I’d experienced such a bizarre dream. But one thing I did have was a more thorough understanding of why IRM-1000 wanted Lucas alive in this bounty hunt of his. What better way to glean everything available on Prometheus and its members than to simply steal it from Luke’s database?

  But if he could do it so easily – with a touch, the way Daniel transferred his protections – why hadn’t he done so to begin with?

  Maybe he did, Sam.

  My eyes grew wide in the darkness at my own internal thoughts. Holy shit. What if he had? What if one of the things he’d done when he’d had Lucas on that horrible, horrible table in that nightmare of a room was steal vital information from his system?

  RIF protected the androids of Prometheus… but if Lucas and Daniel could contact scan, then Zero could do it. It would make sense. So far it was like the song said: Everything they’d been able to do, he’d been able to do better. It wouldn’t be a stretch to think that he’d also found a way around RIF’s built-in protections. Nick and I still couldn’t figure out how Zero had come into being. Nick did say he had a theory, but it was farfetched and he didn’t want to voice it until he had more evidence. As if anything was farfetched any longer.

  What if that was what my dream was trying to warn me about? Did dreams really even do that? Warn people? A form of time travel would have to be possible.

  I’d always wondered….

  I was a lucid dreamer, but I was also a scientist, so I preferred to liken dreams to the “emptying out” of your subconscious, rather akin to your brain taking out the trash. But the fact that I was able to lucid dream and sometimes even control those dreams threw a kink in that belief. How could the subconscious get busy emptying anything out if I was going around sprouting wings and kissing boys in my sleeping hours?

  Now I no longer seemed to have the control I’d once had. At times, I was not in control at all. My thoughts were in control then. Or worse – Zero was.

  Now I wondered if it was possible for something else altogether to be in control. Such as fate.

  Scientists were open-minded by their very nature. We were the first to admit that at any given point in time, magic existed. Lightning had been magic until it was explained. Earthquakes. The aurora borealis. Eclipses or red moons. Just because we would one day explain with science what we believed to be magic now did not make that magic any less real.

  Or any less magical, really.

  Maybe fortune-telling dreams would one day be readily interpreted by the logic of science.

  I sighed heavily and closed my eyes where I sat. The room was quiet around me, or at least as quiet as Prometheus could be. Pittsburgh had rivers. It turned out that moisture in the ground around and above the building was great at conducting sound. I was sure when traffic resumed after the winter storms abated we would catch the constant if muted noises of vehicles overhead and trains at the nearby station coming and going. Even now, we could hear the boats in the harbor.

  There were also sounds like of electricity moving through the facility, the air through the state-of-the-art ventilation system, and the hum and beep of various electronic devices maintaining watch and keeping us safe. During the day when everyone was up and talking and moving around, these noises went unnoticed. But at night, in the dark, in the otherwise silence… I found them cacophonous, and the dark became stifling.

  There was a reason I’d always been a night owl, restless by night, down by dawn.

  It was because in the darkness were layers of distraction: the sounds, the heat, the cold, too many covers, not enough covers, pains or discomforts, and worst of all – the thoughts.

  The goddamn thoughts! My mind wondered about things incessantly. I couldn’t stop asking myself questions. Why was I an orphan? Why couldn’t I remember anything before the age of ten? Where were my birth parents? Were they even alive?

  I’d performed DNA testing on myself when I was old enough to. But oddly, there were no records of my existence before the time I was adopted by the Hart family.

  There was so much I didn’t know. And I wondered about it all.

  Now, in my adult years I not only wondered, but feared. I panicked about the future. I felt trepidation about the past. I lamented the failings of humanity – war, cruelty, injustice. I was terrified of losing more of the people I loved.

  And I was afraid of IRM-1000.

  I feared Zero’s power, his reach, and his mind. And then… I also feared the feelings I h
ad toward him. There was an unfortunate but undeniable attraction that unfathomably existed between us despite the atrocities he’d committed against me and mine.

  In all honesty, that was most frightening of all.

  Clearly my guilty thoughts and mounting fears had even found a way into my dreams. It was cool in my room, but I wiped at my brow and my fingers came away damp. “Damn.”

  There was a knock on the door. As usual, I recognized that knock even though I hadn’t heard his shoes on the floor before it. The knock was gentle but firm, and each rap was a specific and equal measure apart.

  “Come in Lucas,” I said. I didn’t have to raise my voice; I knew he would hear me.

  The door slid to the side like a Star Trek door, another added touch compliments of Lilith and the crew. Luke stood at the threshold, tall and absolutely beautiful as ever. He looked like he’d just run a hand through his thick black hair, messing it up just enough to make it even more sexy than usual. His gray eyes glowed slightly silver, stark and piercing in the dark.

  “You okay, Samantha?”

  No doubt he’d heard me breathing hard with that android hearing, and maybe I’d even said or done something alarming in my sleep. And right now, he could probably detect my stress levels and discomfort. Had he scanned me?

  But all I said was, “I’m fine.”

  He didn’t believe me. If he had, his EED wouldn’t have turned yellow in the darkness, and he wouldn’t have stepped into the room, allowing the door to slide shut behind him. “Liar,” he accused softly and without any real vehemence.

  When he moved, he still made no sound, and I realized he was barefoot. Funny how even android bare feet were quiet on a hard surface.

  “Lock code ten-sixty-six,” he muttered after having entered, using his ability to mimic my voice. The deadbolt system on the door slid into place, and I sat up a little straighter.

  “Lucas, what’s going on?”

  Luke tilted his head in the darkness. With the door shut, all I could see of him was his tall outline and that half-moon sensor on his temple. “I’m locking the door because we need to talk, and I don’t want us to be disturbed.”

  That’s not what I meant,” I told him quickly, but I was pretty sure he already knew as much. “Why the sudden secrecy?”

  “Lights,” Lucas said, mimicking my voice again and sending a shiver through me. The lights in the room came on, momentarily blinding me. I hissed in surprise, raising my hand and blinking beneath their full brightness.

  Lucas immediately rectified his mistake. “Lights at sixty percent.”

  The lights dimmed a little, and I lowered my hand.

  “Sorry,” he said with a small smile. “I sometimes forget a human’s body parts can’t do what an android’s can.”

  I stared at him a moment, wondering if there was innuendo in what he’d just said. But then I just shook my head, running my hand through my hair. “It’s okay,” I told him. “But hearing you use my voice creeps me out, so please stop.”

  His yellow EED flickered to orange and back to yellow. “If you wish. May I join you?”

  “Sure.” I curled my legs under me and pulled the blankets close. Lucas looked down at the empty space on the bed and moved toward it.

  I had to admit I loved watching him move. Even just a few steps was a treat.

  There was something special about Lucas – and Zero – that Nick hadn’t programmed into his other androids, not even Daniel. There was a grace there, tall and capable to the degree that it seemed they were to some extent immune to the laws of physics. Gravity obviously kept them on the ground and prevented them from floating out into space, but that was about it.

  Not only did they possess the infinite, impossible strength-in-grace of lifelong dancers, their mental acuity was off the charts. Zero was perhaps a bit more ruthless in demonstrating his guile than Lucas. But it was there for them both. I knew that. It was in Luke’s eyes, and sometimes in the split-second decisions he made.

  They really were like brothers, the two sides of the human Id. They even technically had the same last name: Antares. The wolf and the tiger. They were a different breed, rare and special.

  Lucas sat down beside me and moved back on the bed, making it sink a little. Androids were heavier than humans, on average. FutureGen had done all it could to make them as comparable as possible, but the average android was still forty percent heavier than a human of the same size. Lucas was six-two and built with broad shoulders, a narrow waist and all the beautiful, literally sculpted anatomy that went with it – not that I’d ever been fortunate enough to see him below the belt. But that didn’t matter to me… I liked everything above the belt just fine. In short, he wasn’t a small man. A human his size would have weighed two hundred pounds easy. So Lucas weighed around two-eighty. And the bed could tell.

  Tonight he and Shawn had guard duty. Jack, Nick, Nanuk, Cole, and I had gone to bed while the kids read quietly in their play room under Charlotte and Lex’s vigilant watch, and most of the other Prometheus members stationed themselves around the new facility to maintain guard. Daniel, Sonia, and Matt had left on a short mission. This one was relatively simple, so it didn’t matter too terribly that Nick and I hadn’t yet figured out how to scramble their signals if they were scanned by other androids. They simply needed to transfer a lot of funds from one not-so-nice company to a specific charity before the tax deadline hit, and they needed a secure, non-related console from which to do it.

  Nick and I had directed them to eBay Bank’s server cache four and a half miles away. No one would know this was something they were planning to do tonight, and since there were plenty of other secure server locations they could hit, it was a safe bet they would make it in and out without being detected. A plethora of security scrambling devices I’d created for them helped with that.

  Tonight Lucas was dressed in a plain light blue T-shirt and a pair of jeans with no shoes. He had nice feet, obviously, since they’d been perfectly created. But if he weren’t an android, I would tell him to get some damn shoes on. I always had empathy pain for people’s bare feet. Seriously, life was just too cold and too hot and too Lego-y to not wear shoes.

  He looked amazing though. Like, edible amazing.

  “What did you want to talk about?” I asked, feeling fatally distracted now that I was noticing his clothing… and the way it molded so well to his hard body.

  “You’ve been hiding something from me these past few days,” he told me in his android-neutral tone but with inquisitive eyes. “It began the night IRM-1000 managed to heal your wounds while you were sleeping.” He paused, glanced at my arm, then back up. “I can tell that whatever it is, it’s upsetting you.” Now he looked away, falling silent for several long seconds as his EED flashed red and returned to yellow. Finally he softly said, “I wish you would confide in me.”

  I wish. It was something you didn’t very often hear androids say.

  He turned his eyes back to mine, and as they searched my face for some sign of something only he would recognize, I melted a little.

  But unfortunately he was right. I was hiding something. I was hiding a few somethings.

  In that dream, Zero had told me, “You make me feel.” And then he’d told me that I was the only one in the world who could do so. His confession had a profound effect on me. It could mean so very many things.

  I knew first hand that androids could feel emotion. They could even feel pain – as long as their receptors were on. They could be happy and sad and everything in-between. So, why had Zero told me that? Did it mean that normally he couldn’t feel? That for some reason his programming didn’t allow it? Or had it somehow been destroyed? And he couldn’t feel what, exactly? Emotions? Or physical sensations? Or was it perhaps both?

  If he was incapable of these sensations, then holy shit. What kind of existence was that? More importantly, if this was the case, then why? I knew Nicholas Byron well enough to know he would never purposefully deny an android something
like emotion. So, why was Zero different in that capacity? Why him? And why only him?

  Was it only him?

  And that was the real question, the one that left me unsettled deep down.

  Yes, it did affect me. Since that night, the dreams I’d had featuring Zero only continued. Nearly every time I closed my eyes now, I saw the man in some capacity. This last dream had apparently left me in a cold sweat.

  Lucas waited quietly beside me, and I closed my eyes. I just didn’t want to tell him any of this. I didn’t want to tell him that it all made me wonder whether Lucas felt the same way as Zero. Or rather, didn’t feel the same. In other words, I was afraid it meant Luke didn’t really have any feelings either.

  I didn’t think it was likely. After all, he seemed to have grown close to Jack and Nanuk. He had friends at Prometheus. And most importantly, he continued to fight for Prometheus. To me, this meant beyond a doubt that he very much knew the difference between right and wrong and wanted to see things rectified.

  But then, Zero continued to fight too. For the wrong side maybe, but he did fight. A lack of emotion or “feeling” didn’t seem to deter his single-mindedness or determination.

  In any case, this was something I just didn’t want to bring up with Lucas.

  And I didn’t want to tell him I’d dreamed about him being tortured for information by his worst enemy.

  “It’s nothing, Lucas.”

  “It’s absolutely not nothing.”

  I looked up at him. His gaze had narrowed, and his tone had a slight edge to it. He was the most agreeable android in the world, but when he was determined…. Yeah, I thought. He’s definitely an alpha.

  “Okay, fine,” I said knee-jerking a little at his tone. “You’re right, okay? I’m distracted. I’m….” I took a deep breath and let it out shakily, running my hands over my face. “Zero told me that I made him feel. And… he told me I was the only one in the world who could do so.”

  Wow, I thought suddenly. I really just blurted it all out there, didn’t I?

  It was several long beats before either sound or movement registered in the room again. I hesitantly dropped my hands from my face. Luke’s EED was pulsing bright, crimson red. His eyes were steady on mine, his body was rigid, and his jaw was set.