Re-Wired (7 page)

“It’s about time,” Priscilla said after they’d been kissing for a minute. She snuggled into his arms and they resumed watching the movie.

Brad wished that he was braver, as he would have had gotten further into things with the willing Priscilla. He felt the evidence of his body being ready, but his brain still held on to the fear of rejection. “About time?” he asked.

“Yes, I was wondering when you were going to kiss me. We’ve been going out for weeks and you never even tried, so I was beginning to think there was something about me that was making you wait.”

Brad turned red with embarrassment. What did she want him to do? Push up on her and act like some sort of aggressive sex fiend? No, he wanted her to know that he respected her so, like a gentleman he had waited for her approval. She felt good against his body, and as the movie went on he grew more and more confident. By the time the credits were rolling, they were kissing again, and this time his hands made their way to places he’d only dreamed about touching her.

“You should go home now before I do something I’ll regret,” she said.

“You should do it, anyway.”

“I’m sure you’d like that, wouldn’t you? But, it’s late, so you should go home.”

He leaned in and kissed her some more, but she was strong and walked him to the door and locked him out. It had been a wonderful night, and this was evidenced by the big smile he had on his face as he walked out to his car. The taste of Priscilla’s lips was still fresh on his mind, and it was hard to think about anything else. His vision seemed cloudy and hazy, but he had been drinking, so he squeezed his eyes tight and opened them, trying in vain to sober up as he found his car and headed home.

Inside the apartment, Tricia was missing and he looked in all of the closets before turning on the lights to find her asleep on the couch. The haziness of his vision passed and he kissed her gently on the forehead before going into the bedroom. What was he going to do with her? Should he introduce her to Priscilla now, so she would be aware of his life’s work, or should he wait until they were further into their relationship?
It was a relationship, right?
He asked himself as he laid on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

When he awoke, Tricia had ironed his clothes for work and had them arranged on the counter. He looked around for her but she was nowhere to be found. He had a momentary panic attack as he thought that she had run away. It was only when he found her powered down in the closet that he relaxed and could breathe again. The fact that she would voluntarily hide herself and power down in the closet made him sad and sick with himself. He lifted her into his arms and brought her to the couch, where he laid her down and cried.
I have been the biggest jerk to you Tricia
, he thought, and then he wiped his face and headed off to work.

0 1 0

Tricia pulled her hat down low as she walked along the busy sidewalk, doing her best to avoid eye contact with anyone. She found the drugstore she was looking for and went inside and sat in the waiting area. She was alone, and the pharmacist she had been talking to on the phone finished up her shift and came out to meet her.

“Tricia?”

“Yes, hello, Jolene. I hope this isn’t too much trouble?”

“No, not at all. I am very interested in this pill you were talking about. Did you bring the sample?”

“Yes, it is right here. One tiny pill that made my mas—I mean, my brother gain confidence. I think it is doing more than that though, and if you can let me know, I can either warn him or get rid of them.”

“Wonderful. I’ll take it home and analyze it, and then I’ll call you and let you know what I found.”

“You’re very kind. How much do I owe you?” Tricia asked, even though she knew that she didn’t have any money, and would have to find a way to get some from Brad secretly.

“Probably nothing, but let me see how much work it will be first. If it turns out to be some
Zenine
or
Drencyn
, I won’t charge you anything.”

Tricia had gone against Brad’s wishes and left the house. But with his wavering moods and the increased time that he kept her powered down, she no longer felt it was in her best interest to listen to him. There were lapses in her memory too, and whenever she would wake up inside of his room, it was as if she’d been re-wired to forget how she had gotten there. Living with Brad was one blackout session after another, and when she was coherent and with him, they were arguing, and he was threatening to lock her away.

The Brad she knew from the past would never treat her so cruelly, and she wondered if it was due to his mysterious new girlfriend that he was acting the way he was. She walked back to the apartment slowly, letting the sound of the city and the contact with the people embed into her memory banks for the times in the future when she would be locked away. Jolene would look into Brad’s pills for her, and though he was almost out of them, he’d said he would order more, and the Japanese would be more than happy to keep him supplied. More pills meant more neglect and abuse by the new Brad, but if she could fix him then life would return to happier times. Brad had been lonely, and the pills had helped him to become more attractive. Though he had built her to be his friend, the pills now made him see her as nothing but a nuisance.

“Hey beautiful,” a middle-aged, balding man said to her as she walked past a small mall entrance.

“Are you talking to me?” she asked.

He came over to her, adjusting his tie. “Anyone ever tell you that you look like…erm, what’s the actress? Judy Pops, the one that was in
Lady Hellgate
? I think you look better than her though—“

“Thank you, but I have to leav—“

He grabbed her hand to keep her from leaving, and smiled as he squared up with her while taking her other hand. “Don’t run off so quick, Judy. I just want to talk to you. Do you have a man?”

“Yes, yes I have a man.”

“And he lets you walk out here by yourself like this? What kind of man is that? I would never let you go it alone.”

“Could you please let go of my hands? I have to go.”

“Alright, alright. Can I have your contact code? We should hook up later. You don’t act like you’re from around here. I can take you to a nice restaurant. I’m telling you, the one I have in mind…they have the best rib-eye.”

“No, thank you,” Tricia said, and she walked away from him quickly, crossing her arms over her chest to stop her breasts from bouncing, and keeping her head low to avoid any other would-be suitors.
I must not come out alone again
, she said to herself, and when she got near her apartment complex, she ran inside and locked the door.

Stepping into the apartment after her traumatic encounter, Tricia began to notice things she had looked past when she was still confined there. The place was a dump, and Brad hadn’t bothered to straighten up the way he used to when he was a student. The classic neat freak now had sketch papers everywhere, and the kitchen held discarded dishes from days past. There were half-finished beers and what appeared to be two bowls of old fried rice. There was a noticeable stench of rotted food coming from the kitchen, and a roach scurried across the wall. So Tricia proceeded to clean it all up and put the place in order. She would not allow Brad to make her into a servant-droid like many of his friends had, but she knew that a clean house would help his psyche, so she got right to it.

“So, when was the last time you were in a relationship?” Priscilla asked as she walked hand in hand with Brad around the artificial lake.

“Oh, well—er, a year? She and I really weren’t, well she stopped taking my calls about a year ago. Is this a relationship?”

“Well after last night, it had better be. I don’t let just anyone spend the night, and I trust you, so… I want you to say it.”

“Will you be my girlfriend?”

“Yes!”

A trip that had started out as one of their standard dates had quickly become one of the best days in Brad’s life. He and Priscilla had kept on doing movie nights at her house after the day Tricia had cleaned up, but she wouldn’t sleep with him, at least not until last night. Tricia had gotten better about his frequent absence, and he left her to take care of the house when he was away—especially since he practically lived with Priscilla, whose home was amazing. He found it strange that after visiting his home and commenting on how “cozy” it was, Priscilla seemed unwilling to hang out there or ask him questions about it. So he spent most of his time at her place, eating her food, watching her television, and being with her.

The routine would go as follows: he would go to work in the morning, stop by the gear shop to sell a few rotors, and then drive to Priscilla’s house in the evening to hang out and sleep at night. He had been doing this for two months now, and Priscilla didn’t seem to mind. Rotors were what he called the tiny, flying robots he made from excess mechanical parts. He had gotten better with artificial intelligence, and began to hustle the little toys for extra money to supplement his small barista’s income. Career-wise he viewed himself as a failure, and he struggled internally with whether to reveal the genius of Tricia to the world or to keep her as his personal secret.

Tricia’s revealing would get him arrested, at least for a time due to her illegal parts. But she would revolutionize modern robotics, and he would be on every talk show across America. After the talk shows, he’d be approached by a private company and they would throw millions of dollars at him to replicate the process. Tricia would cease to be special, and would more than likely be disassembled and reverse-engineered. This latter fact made him not want to do it. She was a person, a person he had built, and he didn’t want her murdered and dissected for money. But being with Priscilla brought the pressure of wanting to do more. There would be outside competition from men that had a lot more than he had, and could do a lot more for her than he could.
There is nothing special about me. I’m just a broke, coffee pusher
, he thought. So it was out of fear that he’d begun selling rotors.

It had crossed his mind to make another Tricia, but this time keep the A.I. restrained, and remove the ability to freely think from it. The idea could work, if not for the skin he couldn’t afford, and the things he had done during groggy nights— things that he didn’t write down or store into memory. The truth was, Tricia was a brilliant mistake. The day he’d walked in and saw her dancing was the day he realized this. Androids didn’t do that; they didn’t crave learning like human beings did, and they didn’t get upset when their masters spent more time with their girlfriends than them. Sometime during the hacking of her A.I. and the installation of foreign parts into her frame, he had found true intelligence. He could pretend that he had the means to do it all over again, but he would need a new Mika to break his heart, several drugs to keep him awake for days, and the luck he’d had when she came to life.

“Let’s go to
Celia’s
tonight to celebrate!” Priscilla said as she rested her head on his shoulder.

He could hear the happiness in her voice, and it was because he had committed to her. The fact that he couldn’t afford Celia’s Steakhouse didn’t matter to him. He had to find a way to afford it. How sobering would it be for him to remind her how poor he was when she had just become his girl? The situation depressed him, but it wasn’t enough to interfere with the pride he felt in having a girl—a very special girl—as his girlfriend.

As if she was reading his mind, Priscilla whispered into his ear, “It’s my treat. I just feel like a steak right now.”

She would be paying for dinner and it made him feel emasculated. Would he be one of the many guys across the nation dependent on their women? Both parties should be pulling their weight. Or, as his father had drilled into him from the time when he was a boy, “
A man provides”
. Yet here he was, a man, and the only thing he was providing for Priscilla was conversation. He felt small, and the urge to impress her and prove his worth pushed him to start talking.

“I—I have something I need to tell you, Priss.”

“What’s up, baby?” she called him baby, and the sound of it made him even more comfortable in talking to her.

“I have an android. Not the kind you can buy and assemble, or rent from the cleaning companies, but true artificial intelligence. She’s very convincing as a human, and way ahead of anything that we have right now.”

Priscilla stepped in front of him on the sidewalk and her mouth dropped open in an expression of awe and happiness. “So you’re a droid engineer?” she asked excitedly, and he couldn’t understand why it made her so happy.

“I never got my degree, but yes, I can build androids. Tricia, the droid I’m telling you about, was my first try at it, and she is brilliant. I can take you to meet her, if you’d like.”

“No, it’s okay. Androids scare me a bit, to be honest. To hear that you’ve built one to be so real, well, she would give me nightmares. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for technological advancement, but what happens when she gets too upset, or malfunctions due to coming in contact with a network virus or something? She could kill you. I think that it’s so hot that you’re like a mad scientist genius or something, but knowing is good enough for me. Let’s go get some steaks. I’m freaking starving.”

While Brad considered the paranoid, technophobia to be a massive letdown on the part of Priscilla, he felt more comfortable with her paying for his meal after she perked up about his passion. She was content in knowing that he had great potential as an inventor, and now he would just have to actually work at it instead of sticking to his poor life of mixing coffee and watching television. Her fear of androids also meant that there would be no future for her and Tricia in the same vicinity. For now he would have to keep Tricia at his apartment and continue to stay with Priscilla. In time she would come around, especially after seeing how wonderful Tricia was—at least that’s what he hoped. But for now life was good, and he had a real girlfriend.

0 1 0

“Tricia, how long has your brother been taking these drugs?” asked Jolene, the pharmacist. She had a worried tone in her voice and it let Tricia know that she had bad news.

Brad had been gone for a few days, and while it was okay that he’d gotten serious with Priscilla, it was unlike him to stay out so long without checking in. He had taken the pills with him, so the plan to switch them out or destroy them all had been delayed.

“He’s been taking them for over a year now. When they run out he orders more.”

“I’m sorry for what I’m about to tell you, but there may only be a short time to help him, if he’s willing to listen to you. The pills have a chemical in it that is known to affect the brain. It makes you feel confident and free in your thought, but it causes damage in the long-term. People have died, developed personality disorders, and much, much worse. You need to stop him from taking those pills, and check him into a hospital where a doctor can assess his condition. This is really bad Tricia, and I would advise you to destroy the pills…they would be illegal here, and we don’t want people reselling them to make money.”

“Thank you so much,” Tricia said. “I’ll find a way to do what you say. How much do I owe you? It sounds like you did a lot of research to get me this information.”

“It’s no charge, hon. Just look after your brother. Give me a call if anything comes up with him. This whole thing has piqued my interest, and if there is anything else I can do to help, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

Tricia thanked her once again and hung up the phone. She began to search the house for the pills, and when she found them she destroyed them. She thought about how easily he could order more, so she hacked into his personal computer and logged into his email to find the correspondence. His dealer’s name was Abe, and his email seemed to be routed through several layers of security. She created a new account on a free email server, and made the credentials similar to Abe’s and coded in an automatic response algorithm. Whenever someone would email his account, it would respond with one of a thousand unique messages that indicated that the pills would be on their way. She then changed the alias “Abe” in his email history to be the one that she had just created, eliminating the real Abe completely. Lastly she sent an email to the supplier, telling him that she was Brad’s sister and that he had died from a fatal accident.

It took several hours for Tricia to shut down or reroute all of the ways Brad could use to get more pills. She knew he’d be persistent, but the things that she had done would be impossible to detect.

Despite Tricia’s attempts to sabotage Brad’s drugs, the last thing he had on his mind were the pills. He was with a girl that liked him, he had come up with a plan to mass produce his rotors, and even though he spent as much time as he could with Priscilla, he knew that in time he would go to see Tricia and clear the air between them. He sat at Priscilla’s table, watching her as she practiced her dance routines in the living room. She was everything he dreamed of, and he couldn’t believe he was right there with her, free to love her, touch her, and see her practice the thing that she loved. How could he tell her she was his first love? Priscilla had been his first where the heart was concerned, and he couldn’t get her out of his head, no matter how hard he tried.

He thought about high school, and how he had wanted to end his life. Mom was the one who’d talked him down from the virtual ledge, and she was the one that had always cared.
Mom…when was the last time I called my mom
, he thought, stunned at how absent-minded he had been, and he looked at his personal device where he had blocked her contact during a fit of rage.
That was several months ago.
Why did I forget to unblock her?
He hopped up and went out on Priscilla’s balcony, and clicked the icon to call his mother.

“BRADLEY?” A surprised voice screamed into the phone, and he heard her whisper to his father that he had called. His father had cut him off from money and communication with him—as if this would magically make him re-enroll in school and resume the path of a physician.

“Mom, I’m so sorry I haven’t called you guys. I’ve been depressed, you know. This whole decision with school and whatnot…but I got better, and I’m working to be an entrepreneur now. So—“

“We were worried sick! Your brother said he went to go find you, but you’d moved and didn’t tell anyone where you were going.”

“Tell him to stay away from me. I have nothing to say to that ass—“

“Bradley, he’s your brother!”

“And dad is my father, and they’re both money-hungry douchebags with an elitist complex. I called for you mom, because I love you, and I want you to know that I’m okay.”

“Oh, my son, that is really good to hear. We miss you so much. When can you visit?”

“Soon, Mom. But listen, I have a girlfriend! Can you believe that? And, and she’s pretty too… I’ll show you.” And he got up and snapped a picture of Priscilla kicking her leg up in front of the television as she emulated the dance moves on a video.

“She IS pretty Brad. I am so happy for you. What’s her name?”

“Oh, sorry, yeah, her name’s Priscilla! Priscilla White, and she’s a dancer and a pharmacist.”

“I can’t wait to tell your father. A pharmacist, you say? He would love that.”

“He’d probably love the fact that she’s black too, right Mom?”

“Don’t start. He’s getting better about that.”

“He’s a piece of work. But anyway, I’ll call you again, soon. I promise. I miss you.”

“I love you, son.”

He hung up the phone and sat in silence as he thought about his parents. His mother was an artist that had fallen in love with a stiff doctor who came from a long line of doctors. He was also a conservative bore, with ancient beliefs in racial and class lines that dated back to the third Great War, and he tried to instill them into his children. His brother, Patrick, was the golden boy that had failed. He went to school and did everything that his father wanted him to do, but couldn’t take the pressure, so he changed majors and graduated to make menial wages. He was a bully, and everything Brad remembered about him from when they were growing up was Patrick doing everything he could to make his life hell.

He walked inside where Priscilla was taking a break from her dancing and snuck up behind her before she could react. He wrapped his arms around her waist and rested his chin on her neck, and she smiled from ear to ear as he swayed with her as if music was playing and they were dancing.

“Who were you on the phone with?” she asked. She turned to face him and put her arms around his neck.

“That was my mother. I hadn’t spoken to her in ages, so I was checking in. Plus, I had to tell her about you, and how I was the luckiest man in the world.”