by James McEwan
The whole takedown took only seconds and when it was over only the bad guys were hurt. A young blond girl of about seven broke the tension, “man that was awesome!” Laughter erupted from the crowd as they were still processing what had just happened. Thad collected the guns and placed them on the bar.
Carl took them and said, “Thanks.”
Thad nodded, “Tie these thugs up, and would someone go and fetch the Sheriff please. Now if you all don’t mind I think I would like to eat my dinner now.” That got a cheer from the crowd.
“Dinner is on the house!” Carl yelled as the crowd cheered again.
Thad sat down, picked up his fork, and started eating as if nothing had happened at all. Doctor Hammer just sat and stared. The missing chunk of Thad’s shoulder was completely healed and left no evidenced that he had been injured at all. Doctor Hammer knew there were things about Thad he did not know and now he was not sure he wanted to know.
The rest of the evening was quiet. The robbers were taken into custody by the Sheriff who remarked that these were the first arrests he had made in years. It also turned out that there was a small bounty on their heads. The Sheriff offered it to Thad, but he suggested Carl get the money to fix the roof, the bar, and maybe the bad air conditioner that just happened to stop working again.
The ride home was quick and quiet. Thad knew something was bothering Doctor Hammer, but he was not sure what it was. He figured Doctor Hammer would tell him if he wanted him to know, so he didn’t press him. Once they reached the compound, Doctor Hammer went into his private study without saying a word. Thad put Rhonda in the garage and promised her he would wash her in the morning.
“I will hold you to that promise,” Rhonda said, as the lights when out in the garage.
Thad made his way to his room where he stripped off his clothes and tossed them in the laundry bin. He stood naked in his bathroom staring at his shoulder in the mirror. No matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t find a scar, nothing-not even a mark. The Nano’s had done their job well he thought. “Shower, hot,” he said to the bath computer. In seconds, steaming hot water poured over his body washing the dust and blood from him.
As he stood in the hot water, Thad went over the events of the evening. He couldn’t understand what about those events so upset the doctor. He finished up his shower, dressed for bed, and finally laid down. In a few minutes, he was asleep not understanding it wasn’t the robbers or the events that upset the doctor, but it was the complete lack of emotion Thad displayed afterward. The doctor was concerned about the way Thad attacked those men with the calm indifference one would have as if they were going about any normal daily task, like brushing one’s teeth.
Chapter 7
The next morning Thad was up early and for the first time in months, he was nightmare free. He entered the kitchen and found it empty. That was strange because he never beat the Doctor to the kitchen in the morning, “Eve, you awake yet?”
“I’m always awake silly,” she replied. “What would you like for breakfast this morning?”
“Nothing, just some coffee please,” Thad said. “Hey have you seen Doctor Hammer?”
“Not today. He was up late in his study last night. I had to beg him to get some sleep, so I don’t think we will see the good Doctor until at least noon or so.”
Thad took his cup of coffee, thanked Eve, and went to the garage to keep his promise to Rhonda. She was waiting for him when he came through the door. She appeared all covered in dirt and grime, towel in hand. “Good morning sweetie, I’m ready for my bath baby!” she said as her dirty clothes slipped from her body leaving nothing, but a slender beautiful naked hologram.
Thad Laughed, “You’re such a bad girl Rhonda.”
She pulled her hands together in front of her while pulling her legs together, to do her best Jessica Rabbit impression. She pushed her butt out, and leaned forward, “Don’t blame me I was programmed this way!”
Eve’s voice came over the speakers in the garage, “Well don’t blame me I programmed you to be a good girl.”
“But I am a good girl, a really good girl,” Rhonda said with an evil grin.
Thad thought it was strange as well as comical that he was in the middle of this discussion at all. It was clear Eve didn’t understand the context in which he was using the word bad, but it seemed Rhonda did. There was a pause then everyone laughed. Thad went about washing the bike down while Rhonda sat in a holographic bathtub, on the handlebars, singing and every now and then, pointing out a spot Thad had missed. He was almost done when he noticed Doctor Hammer in the doorway watching him. Without stopping what he was doing he asked, “Something on your mind Doc?”
Doctor Hammer took a second before he answered, “Yes I think there are a few things you need to know about your past.”
That got Thad’s attention. He put down the polishing rag, and turned to Rhonda, and she waved him off, “Oh go ahead I can get the maid bots to finish up.”
“Thank you,” he said following Doctor Hammer back into the main house. Doctor Hammer led him into his study. Thad had been in his study many times, but this was the first he felt like a kid going to see the principal when he had done something wrong. He sat down and waited.
“Thad, I’m sorry that I have not been totally forthcoming about you or more to the point what I found out about you,” Doctor Hammer said, sliding a small envelope across the desk to him.
Thad looked at it, but not touch it, “Don’t tell me you found out who I was or did you?” Doctor Hammer did not answer, “I’m monster aren’t I?”
Doctor Hammer was a bit taken back by the question, “What makes you think that?”
“It’s the nightmares I have been having. I have been seeing people being killed in different ways, and I think I was the one doing the killing. It really bothers me. However, last night I took those three guys out without a thought, and it didn’t bother me at all. It was if I was…,” he paused.
“Trained to do it,” Doctor Hammer finished for him.
“Yeah, I’m not sure why, but I seem to have very advanced fighting skills and when I grabbed the gun from the guy, it felt normal to me, like I have done this kind of thing many times before.”
Doctor Hammer pointed to the envelope on the desk, “You have, and you see last night wasn’t the first time I have seen you fight. The first time I laid eyes on you I watched you take out a man at Bob’s”
“The man at the bar, the one I smashed out his teeth,” he said as he picked up the envelope.
“Yes, I was there that day. After you left the bar, I followed them out into the desert. That is how I found you.”
Thad opened the envelope and poured out the contents onto the desk. He picked up a burned out microchip, turning it slowly over and over in his hand. “What is it?”
“I found the chip in your head and removed it because it was damaged. I first thought that it was damaged by the trauma you suffered, but later looking at it more closely, it turns out that it was burned out long before that. It seems you must have exposed it to a large amount of electromagnetic energy to disable it, which could not have felt very good.”
Still looking at the chip Thad asked, “So, what is it?”
“It is three things really. It didn’t take me long to figure it out; a nasty piece of work that little thing is. It had been wired into all your senses, and by the looks of it, transmitted all the info wirelessly to someone or something. The second part also sent out a location signal.”
“A tracker,” Thad said as he stared at the chip in his hand.
“Yes, with this baby they could track you anywhere you went.”
“Whoever they are,” Thad said.
“Yes, but this last bit is the really nasty bit. It is a kill chip.”
Thad looked up from the chip, “a what?”
“A kill chip,” Doctor Hammer said, pointing to a small area of the chip “See this part? When the command is issued, it delivers enough voltage to stop your nervous s
ystem. Once that is off-line everything else shuts down and you die.”
Thad set it down on the desk and looked Doctor Hammer in the eyes, “Why did you hide this from me?”
“I’m sorry I did, but at the time I didn’t think you would want to know about it,” Doctor Hammer said as he rocked back in his chair.
“What made you think that?”
Doctor Hammer placed his hands behind his head, “The evidence really, the fact you disabled the chip told me you wanted nothing to do with your former masters, coupled with the fact that no one comes here unless they are looking for a place to fall off the grid. You see, when I first found you, I tried to find out your identity and I sent off a sample of your DNA to see if you were missing or if you had any family.”
“And that is when you found nothing right?” Thad asked.
“Yes, nothing, zip, zilch, not a damn thing, you did not exist anywhere. Which is damn near impossible to do nowadays. It meant only one thing.”
Thad finished this time, “Secret military black ops…”
“Yes, they are the only ones who have the power to make a person vanish from the records, but the question is which military?” Doctor Hammer added.
“That is just one of many questions this raises,” Thad said, his voice trailing off as he was thinking about all the questions racing through his mind.
“You don’t look Fabian, so I don’t think it was them and besides they don’t have the tech to do this anyway. Could be the Rep Com or the Terrain Empire, but my money is on the Federation. They have the more money, tech, and black projects than the rest of the militaries combined,” Doctor Hammer stated.
“So you think odds are pretty good I used to be part of some super-secret military group, and for some reason, I took off and deserted?” Thad said more as a statement than a question.
Doctor Hammer frowned, “I’m not sure what the truth is, but what I do know is the universe is giving you a second chance at life and you seem to be making better choices. Personally, I would not worry about being a deserter. I have the feeling you had a very good reason for leaving that life.”
Thad understood that Doctor Hammer was trying to make him feel better, but it was not working. “So now what do I do, stay here, and hope my past does not come looking for me, or should I run? What should I do?”
“Well you can do what you like, but I feel if they wanted you back they would have come looking for you already. I mean it has been over a year now.”
Thad nodded.
“And besides, you have a good life here, and personally, I really have grown attached to you.”
Thad smiled at that, “Doc, you’re not getting all sentimental on me are you?”
Doctor Hammer laughed, “No, it is just that you are a very good assistant, better than Archie, but don’t let him hear that or he will be moping for a week.”
“So you were up late last night worrying about all of this then?” Thad asked.
“Yes and no. I was building a program for the holo-room.” Doctor Hammer said as he pushed back from the desk and stood up.
“Holo-room? I didn’t know we had one,” Thad said as he also stood up.
Doctor Hammer walked around the desk and towards the door, “Come this way.” He motioned for Thad to follow him. “The reason you didn’t know is we did not have one until last night when I wrote the program and had the fabrication bots build it for me. They just finished.”
Doctor Hammer led Thad down the hallway to a new door that had not been there just a few hours before. He opened the door to a room with black walls and a tiny white grid that covered the whole room. At the intersections of the grid were tiny white lights. Doctor Hammer walked to the center of the room and said, “Doesn’t look like much now, but give it a minute to warm up. Eve can you be a dear and run program Hammer one please.”
Eve appeared next to Doctor Hammer, in full 3-D, not just a hologram. “I would be glad to honey.” She patted him on the backside, which made Doctor Hammer jump a little.
Leaning close to Thad he whispered, “Now you know why I never built one of these before. In here she consists of hard light and has a physical presence.”
Thad could not help, but chuckle.
There was a flash of white light. The black walls disappeared, replaced by what looked like a classroom. On the walls was writing from every known written language. Eve draped her arms around Doctor Hammer’s neck and said dramatically, “Oh my darling you should have built one of these ages ago. Just think of all the fun we could have had together. I love having a physical presence. I think I will have to spend a lot of down time in here.”
Doctor Hammer looked annoyed, “You know Thad I never had a wife, not because I didn’t like women, I just never wanted the distraction, and a wife means family, family means children, which equals no work gets done. So what do I do instead? I have to go and create a computer wife that will not leave me alone to work. I wonder if I should have just gone ahead and gotten a real one. Oh well, I will never know.”
Eve looked hurt. Thad patted him on the shoulder and said, “Hey Doc, you are only human and we humans need to have something to love. I think you should spend some time in here with Eve. I mean after all she can be anything you want in here, and I’m sure she would be better to you than any real woman could be.”
“You do have a point there. Maybe I have been denying myself too much, besides where else is a wrinkled up old fart like me going to find a real woman that is this elegant, sexy, and smart.” Eve smiled and then hugged him tight. “However, we are not in here for me.” Doctor Hammer said as he tried to struggle for air as Eve was hugging a little too tightly. “I wanted you to have a place to explore your skills and find out what you know and don’t know. I’m hoping by remembering what your skills are, we can get one step closer to the truth; that is if you want it?”
“I do,” replied Thad. “Where do we start?
Doctor Hammer had to kiss Eve to get her to let him go, “Damn it, that girl can hug. I think I will have to tweak the safety protocols before I try anything with her or she might just kill me trying to love me.” That got a good laugh out of Thad as well as Eve. “You will start here,” he pointed to the desk and chair, “Eve will you run the program please.”
“Sure thing lover boy,” she smiled wickedly at him.
“My God I think I have created a monster! I will leave you two alone for now before she gets any ideas to drag me off to a closet somewhere,” Doctor Hammer said.
As soon as Doctor Hammer left the room Eve who had been dressed in shorts and a tee shirt was now sporting a long gray skirt, white blouse, and her hair was pulled up into a bun, complete with a pencil stuck through it. She was also wearing square glasses, which made her the picture-perfect stereotype conservative teacher. “Welcome to Miss’s Eve’s language class. I am Miss Eve and I will be evaluating your ability to understand, speak, read, and write other languages.”
She started out by speaking in Mandarin Chinese, which Thad understood and replied back to her in perfect Mandarin. Next, she tried French, same again, then German, and so on. As time went on it turned out Thad could speak, read, and write almost every known human language and a few alien ones as well. The first part of the program took the whole morning and Thad was hungry, due to only having had a cup of coffee for breakfast. He asked Eve to pause and he left to find some food.
In the kitchen, he found Doctor Hammer busily working away making sandwiches for lunch. “So how is it going in there with Miss Eve?” Doctor Hammer asked as he put a plate in front of Thad.
Thad picked up a sandwich and took a big bite “Well apparently I’m a walking talking Rosetta Stone.
“That is very interesting,” Doctor Hammer said as he took a bite of his own sandwich.
“What do you think it means?” Thad said through a mouth full of sandwich.
“Well, it tells me you had a need to be able to move through and fit into any group. Being able to speak the language goe
s a long way from keeping anyone from noticing you.” Doctor Hammer said then took another bite.
The two sat and ate lunch while discussing the possible reasons for the different languages he could speak. After lunch, Thad went back to the Holo-room to find the scene had changed and it was not Eve, but Rhonda dressed in a martial arts Gi, standing in the middle of a dojo. As soon as he entered the room, she did a quick bow then launched into an attack. Any normal human who was on the other end of the attack would have been looking for their teeth by now. Not Thad. He moved with skill and speed that surprised Rhonda, as he blocked every blow and landed a few of his own. “Very good Thaddeus, but let’s see how you handle this.” Again, she attacked and again his skill was as good if not better than hers was. His lighter bones gave him the edge in speed. Rhonda could have easily matched it, but she was programmed to run at regular human speed. The grueling workout went on for an hour and when it was done she had run through every martial art still practiced.
Thad wiped the sweat from his head, “So why did you get to be the one to run me through my paces?”
Rhonda smiled, towel in her hand, as she wiped the rest of the sweat from his brow, “Mom said that you might like to interact with someone else this afternoon and when I found out about this halo-room, she couldn’t keep me out of here. Besides, I couldn’t miss the chance to get out of that bike and be able to stretch my legs a bit, not to mention the chance to spread them for you.”
Thad blushed at her forwardness, but she looked and felt so real he forgot for a minute that she was an AI programmed to keep him happy. He also forgot her sense of sexually had been programmed by an AI that had learned everything about human sexually from media shows. Therefore, Rhonda didn’t have the normal social blocks to her sexuality. In a word, she had no inhibitions, and she seemed Hell bent on pleasing him in every way. She pulled him close and kissed him deeply. She felt so real, but something about her was missing, smell that was it she had no smell.