I, Android: A Different Model

by Heather Killough-Walden

  The shipment was scheduled to arrive at Lock Wall One Marina ship yard, Pittsburgh’s biggest trade-line shipping yard. The plan was to redirect the ship to dock at the old Harbor Hill fuel docks ten miles north, named after the Harbor Hill fuel docks in Detroit that had blown up during the Homeland Soil attacks of 2047 to 2048.

  At Harbor Hill, we’d have the added advantage of being close to home, since Harbor Hill was just a hop and a skip from the new Prometheus location.

  It was probably a good thing that the on-ship navigation could not be accessed in any capacity from anywhere but on the ship itself. This had been ensured long ago for the sake of security against terrorist manipulation, which hit its peak mid-twenty-first century.

  As a member of the android rebellion, I was legally considered a terrorist, and I had to admit that yes, it was pretty effective at keeping us from gaining access to the ships. If it hadn’t been, we could easily have redirected the shipment from land. Instead, we had to come up with this convoluted plot worthy of that classic, Oceans Eleven. Or was it Twelve?

  When it came down to it, in order to redirect that ship – we had to get on that ship. If we could find fuel for it, and it would run smoothly again for me, The Wraith motorcycle could get a few of us to the ship yard. But then, getting on the ship was another puzzle altogether.

  The Lock Wall One Marina docks security system was a clever two-tier system. The entire complex was surrounded by an insurmountable wall topped with electrified barbed wire just for good measure. There was only one entrance and exit. In order to gain access, any approaching vehicle was subjected to the usual identity scan. The scan searched for the ID number on the vehicle, marking it as either a legitimate cargo carrier, a member of the police department or emergency services, or not legitimate at all. In the cases of the former two, the vehicle was simply allowed to pass; no barriers were drawn across the entrance at all. In the latter case however, three barriers were erected.

  Tire shredders popped up to disable the vehicle, a Kevlar mesh netting ejected outward to slow the vehicle several feet beyond the shredders, and finally a flexible composite wall slammed down several feet beyond the netting to stop the vehicle once and for all. These were effective means of halting any intruders while protecting living beings inside the automobile on the off chance that someone had literally fallen asleep at the wheel or had been car-jacked.

  No one was allowed in on foot. And that was half the security right there.

  We did have a vehicle we could use. But since The Wraith was not electric and did not even have an onboard computer system of any kind to program with scramblers or ID tags for bypassing security systems, it would take finessing to get it safely inside the ship yard.

  Fortunately, Prometheus happened to have the world’s foremost hacker in its ranks now. He wouldn’t be happy about it, but Nicholas could take care of it.

  The room had remained silent all this time, and when I finally lifted my head and opened my eyes, it was to find everyone watching me – as if they’d known I would be the one to speak first. I sighed, smiled, and said, “I think I may have an idea.”

  They all waited, not seeming at all surprised. Just wait, I thought.

  “But Nick, you’ll have to get started working on a free-floating vehicle ID tag.”

  His brow lifted. “Free-floating? As in, no vehicle system for interfacing?”

  I nodded. “Exactly. And also… we’ll need fuel.”

  Nick glanced down at the table filled with dangerous elements. “What type of fuel?” I knew he was thinking along the lines of nuclear fuel. But I wasn’t. I was unfortunately thinking about something much more difficult to come by these days.

  I sighed. “Good old fashioned gasoline,” I said. “We need petrol.”

  And then I told them about The Wraith.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Reactions around the room were equal measures disbelief that I owned such a transport and horror that I would consider riding one. In the end, I decided the best way to deal with the former was to show them, and the best way to deal with the latter was to ignore it.

  Fortunately the garage where I had the bike housed was downtown, close to Prometheus’s current location. Jack, Lucas, Nick, Cole, Daniel and I traveled on foot to the garage using the scramblers. It was an opportunity to test out their efficiency anyway.

  Within minutes we were gathered safely in the private underground garage, standing around a tarp-covered shape that was at once so recognizable and so rare, I couldn’t keep the grin from my face. I felt like I was about to unveil a Tron light cycle in 1980 or something.

  “Gentlemen, may I introduce… The Wraith.” I pulled the tarp off, and The Wraith’s blackened chrome gleamed beneath the overhead lights, reflecting them like the very Tron lines I’d imagined. My grin expanded and my heart began to hammer. “The one and only Vindian model motorcycle ever made,” I told them breathlessly. “Produced in secret and behind closed doors, The Wraith possesses a modified V-twin Vincent Black Shadow engine in an Indian Chief body.”

  I moved around the bike, my hand gently, lovingly, brushing along the blackened chrome and original leather seat. It was a seat big enough for two. “Nine hundred ninety-eight cc V-twin, pushrod OHV, air-cooled….” My voice trailed off when I was on the mounting side and I realized my chest actually ached. I looked at the black-on-black symbol on the side of the tank, the shadow of an American Eagle, its feathers wisping into nothing like the trailing ends of a ghost. Beneath it were the black-on-black words, Built by a Rider. On the other side of the tank was a similar black-on-black marking that read, X-15A-2-66671.

  “The Vincent Black Shadow was the fastest engine of its time, and it was built into the most iconic motorcycle casing.”

  I placed my hand on the tank, and could almost feel the bike butt up against my palm like a massive black cat wanting a scratch behind the ear – or a turn on the road. Any road would do. Just take it out there now.

  “Saman-” Lucas started to say something, and I looked up, but Jack cut him off.

  “Holy Hell’s Angels,” he exclaimed just as out-of-breath as I was. I wasn’t surprised. The man owned an original Smith and Wesson .357 magnum revolver. The gun was only slightly younger than the Vindian. “How in the blazes did you… how do you own this… how was it even….” He stopped when he must have realized he wasn’t forming any coherent or complete questions, and just settled with shaking his head and running his hand through his messy gray hair. “Holy shit!”

  “Yeah, that pretty much sums it up,” I laughed. Daniel looked at Nick, who looked at his brother, who looked between Lucas and Daniel and shrugged helplessly. The lot of them were so at a loss for words, they unwittingly allowed me to plow on.

  “It was actually privately commissioned by my foster great-great-tons of greats-grandfather shortly after World War Two,” I told them. “He was a retired Air Force pilot who’d fought in both wars and who happened to personally know the founder of HRD Motorcycles, whose logo you see here on this side of the tank.”

  Jack read the words out loud. “Built by a Rider. Huh. What’s that mean?”

  “I’m so glad you asked,” I said through my probably way too enthusiastic grin. “HRD Motorcycles was the predecessor to Vincent Motorcycles. And HRD was founded in 1924 by a British man named Howard Davies. Before World War One, Davies was a motorcycle racer. He won quite a few impressive races with impressively bad motorcycles and decided he wanted to build a bike that wouldn’t break on him. But the war came along and he enlisted. He started out as an engineer and worked his way up to the Royal Flying Corps, where he was shot down twice.” I paused reading the logo over as my mind reconstructed events it had never witnessed and I heard airplane engines and gunfire in my head.

  “The first time he was shot down over German territory he managed to make it back to his own lines by himself. He was tough. But the second time, he wasn’t so lucky. After a while, he was declared missing in action and an obit
was printed for him.”

  “Damn,” said Jack. “But the war ended before 1924, so obviously the obit was wrong.”

  I nodded. “It turns out he was a prisoner of war. Over the next few years, he would try several times to escape, but unsuccessfully. Until he was helped in his final escape attempt by a man named Samuel Frank Hart.”

  “Let me guess,” said Cole at last. “Your foster great-great-tons of greats-grandfather.”

  I nodded again. “The two became friends. So it’s not surprising that even though HRD was liquidated only a few years after it began and bought by Phil Vincent to start Vincent motorcycles, Sam Hart wanted to use one of Davies’ engines. They were pretty incredible, after all.”

  “Has… this been maintained in its original form all these years?” asked Nick softly.

  I took a deep breath. “More or less,” I told him. “A few things have had to be replaced here and there. Rubber dries out, leather will crack if you don’t take exceedingly good care of it, stuff gets old. But for all intents and purposes, yeah. It’s the same now as it was the day it rolled secretly off the belt.”

  “And it still runs?” asked Jack, his eyes roving over the bike like it was made of gold.

  “It definitely does,” I told him, remembering the rides my parents had taken me on when I was young – then the trips I’d taken alone after.

  “What does the X-15A-2-66671 mean?” asked Daniel, who was speaking up for the first time.

  “It was added later, in October of 1967, right after William J. Knight broke the sound barrier and set the world’s record for speed in a jet called the X-15A-2. The particular plane he was piloting was model number 66671.” As it happened, that record wouldn’t be broken for more than a hundred years after it was set.

  Jack made a quiet, impressed sound before he and the others fell into a companionable, contemplative silence.

  I grasped The Wraith’s handlebars, maneuvered myself flush with its left side, and swung my right leg over the saddle as if I’d been doing it my entire life and had never stopped. A body always remembered riding a bike, whether that bike was pedaled – or fueled by thunder.

  The saddle made that creaking leather sound when I settled into it. I closed my eyes as my heart thrummed in my ears. “Okay,” I said, “back to the fuel issue. I have about three liters left from a supply raid a few months back. The tank holds around seventeen when it’s full. We should fill it at least half-way to be safe for this mission. So….” I looked up at them. “Any ideas where we can get the fuel?”

  Nick rubbed his chin, looking more than a little dubious. “I won’t say I’m not impressed. This is beyond vintage, and it’s in mint condition.”

  “And you look fucking hot as hell sitting in that saddle,” added Cole with a dark smirk and a darker look in his eyes.

  Luke shot him a warning look. But Nick didn’t miss a beat. “Yes, that too,” he said as if to make light of the comment, which eased Luke’s sudden tension. “But to be frank Sam, I absolutely don’t want you riding this on wet roads while half the goddamn world is hunting us. What if they pursue you while you’re riding?”

  Jack sighed. “He has a point, Sam. I have no doubts you can hold your own on The Wraith,” he said, calling the bike by its name, which warmed my heart. “But that bounty is like Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket, and not every hunter is smart enough to know better than to take chase when you’re riding a motorcycle whether you’re wanted alive or not. They’ll just see the prize and go for it.”

  “That’s if we’re found out Jack,” I told him. “Remember, this bike’s not registered, which is the point of using it in the first place.”

  It was Daniel who wrapped things up, like the leader he was. “Okay. We have no choice. And honestly we’re fortunate we have this option. I’m assuming Sam is the only one here who knows how to ride?”

  Riding a motorcycle wasn’t built into android programming. Driving a car was, just in case the navigation systems went down in driverless vehicles or a car owner who also “owned” an android was too drunk to drive. But motorcycles… they were a thing of the past. It would be like teaching an android to chisel a novel into stone.

  No one said anything, and Nick looked sheepish. No doubt he was regretting this overlook in his coding for FutureGen.

  “That’s what I thought,” said Daniel. “And it’s her bike.” Then he turned to me and gave me a hard look, and my spirits sank a little because I knew what was coming. “But the seat’s big enough for two. You’re not going alone.”

  I was way ahead of him. “The bike is harder to control with two people on it, and with the roads as wet as they are –”

  But Daniel glanced at Lucas, Luke’s EED flashed yellow once before returning to blue, and then Lucas put his hand over mine on the handlebar. I went still and watched as he gracefully swung his leg over the back of the bike and sank into the seat behind me, then used his free arm to wrap tight around my waist and pull me back against his chest.

  I flushed warm and barely heard Daniel when he spoke again.

  “No arguments,” our leader said as I looked up at Lucas over my shoulder. He was smiling, his eyes filled with heat. “We may not know how to ride,” continued Daniel, “but balance is mathematical by design. It’s easy for an android to calculate and compensate for on the fly. You’ll be safer with Lucas than without him.”

  “In that case,” said Nick with a note of finality, “I have the fuel.”

  We all turned to look at him. He sighed and shrugged. “I keep pretty much everything and anything on hand in all my labs…. You never know what you might need.” He said the latter somewhat enigmatically, but I was too thrilled that he had fuel to give it much thought.

  I grinned. “What are we waiting for, then? Let’s feed The Wraith and get this show on the road!”

  Lucas leaned over me, his hand spanning across my abdomen in a surprisingly possessive grip as he whispered in my ear. “This should prove interesting.” I felt my cheeks redden further when his fingers slid along my waist until his arm was a gentle but firm band beneath my ribcage. Like a nail in my coffin, he added softly, “In more ways than one.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  My foster parents died at around the same age I was now, in their mid-thirties. I was fifteen. Nicholas and Cole helped me through the confusion and loneliness. That – and I was a teenager. Teenagers were naturally resilient. Annoying, insufferable and hard-headed, but resilient.

  When they died, they not only left me their inheritance and a trust fund for college and post-graduate studies, they left a separate trust for something else. The first two, I’d been made aware of my entire life. The last one was a surprise.

  They’d never had any other children, and as a kid all I had ever done was riddle them with ideas for inventions. Apparently because of this, they’d begun saving in secret, not only for my future education, but for something else entirely.

  The executor of our estate was an old family friend, someone I’d considered an uncle, really. When my mother and father died, he sat me down and informed me that this separate fund had been created so that I could begin designing prototypes and creating patents for those designs. It was basically meant to allow me to create my dreams without having to worry about finances.

  The driving age had changed years ago, lowering along with the emergence of the electric highways. At the age of fifteen, I was not only allowed behind the wheel alone, I could even drink or smoke weed or enjoy a morph or two – morphs were synthesized over-the-counter opiates originally created during the CPS, or Chronic Pain Strike. Basically it didn’t matter what I did at that young age before getting behind the wheel because ultimately, the car would stop me if I did something stupid.

  So when I left the executor’s house after he gave me the news of my trusts, the car allowed me to pull over onto the side of the road because I was crying. I cried so hard and so long that I had to sleep in that car until my vision cleared several hours later b
ecause the car wouldn’t allow me to pull back out onto the road. Normally I would have been irritated, whether it made sense or not. But at the time, all I could do was think about my parents.

  All that time – all that time they’d been saving for me, planning for me, supporting me – and I’d never known. Now I couldn’t even thank them.

  But I made a decision that night. The least I could do was follow through with their hopes and dreams. Especially since they were mine too.

  Hence, when I graduated from Stanford I eventually returned to Pittsburgh, got The Wraith, and purchased a property a safe distance outside of town, where I did most of my inventing until I joined Prometheus years later.

  I wasn’t sure why I’d decided not to tell anyone about the bike, but now I was happy I had. Because if Nick didn’t know it existed, then neither did Zero. It was something he couldn’t plan for. And that was positively golden right now.

  We had only a few hours to go before the shipment would arrive when I was seated on the bike with Lucas behind me. We had filled it up and I was wearing full body bullet-proof leathers and a bullet-proof helmet. As I ran the checklist on our equipment, such as the scramblers, electronic lock-pick, and so forth, Lucas was asking me one last time if I was sure I wanted to do this.

  I sighed, dividing my attention between him and the remaining items on the checklist. “You know I am.” And I knew that he knew if he didn’t let me do this, I would probably never forgive him. We needed those supplies, especially after repairing Ben and Ruby and working on the scramblers and bulletproofing tech.

  “It’s no use, Lucas. This is Sam we’re dealing with,” said Daniel with a small smile. “And again we have no choice.” Daniel turned to me. “Alright, you’ve got twenty minutes to get to the docks, get on the ship, and reroute it. You have another ten to get to location B. We’ll meet you at Harbor Hill at in exactly thirty minutes,” said Daniel. He and Lucas locked gazes and I knew they were communicating. Probably something along the lines of, Don’t let her do anything ridiculously suicidal. And, Yeah right; have you met her?