Re-Wired (8 page)

“Stop being so sweet. Maybe I’m the lucky girl.”

“Are you practicing for another performance?”

“Oh, I do Carnival every year. I’m going down to Miami next month so I have to prepare my costume and figure out what I want to do before then. The dancing is to get me into the mood for the Calypso festival. You should come. I can dress you up and we have a good time at Carnival.”

“That would be great but it’s too short noticed. I wouldn’t be able to get off work. How long would you be gone for?”

“A couple of weeks. I have family there who want to see me, so it would be a trip to visit, plus dance all night like we do every year.”

The thought of losing her for that long made him anxious, but her smile helped him keep his cool and accept it. He hadn’t taken a pill in three days, but he didn’t feel any less confident than he did when he was taking them daily.
Maybe I could spread them out more, and save myself some money from reordering them all the time
, he thought. He had sent the final journal of the effects to the Japanese a while back, and through his results—along with several others—they had put the pills up for sale on the black market.

“Earth to Brad,” Priscilla teased, with that song-like accent he couldn’t get enough of.

“Sorry, I was just thinking. Been a lot on my mind lately.”

“Well I was saying that I need to go in to work. Will you be here when I get back or do you have some errands to run?”

“I’m gonna check in on my apartment, and build out a few more rotors. Call me when you’re getting off, and we can get dinner or something.”

“Okay sweetheart, I’ll give you a call.” And she kissed him before retreating to her room to change for work.

0 1 0

Brad was walking on air. If someone had stopped him to tell him how scruffy and worn out he looked, he wouldn’t believe it. Priscilla loved him, and that was all that mattered for now. Without his pills he had begun to smoke marijuana to calm his nerves.
To think that pot was once illegal in the United States of America
, he thought as he smiled and took in the high rises and the flying cars that zipped this way and that on their designated airways.

Hell, alcohol had been outlawed at one point, too. Now the vices that were outlawed were even stranger: there were laws against loving and marrying machines—which brought in the need for android restraints. There were laws against littering, which carried some of the harshest penalties. Tricia, in terms of what he meant her to be, was an illegal android. If the authorities knew that she existed, he could get up to a month’s time in jail. He knew the risks and it made him paranoid, but for a young man with a foxy Trinidadian girlfriend in the city of Seattle, life—at least for the moment—was grand.

He strode along the sidewalk towards the café but his mood started to darken quickly. He didn’t know what had come over him, but he wasn’t feeling “good enough” for the world. He wanted to crawl into a corner and hide, to get away from people, bills, and Priscilla’s judging eyes. What was he thinking about? She couldn’t be serious about him; any day now she would tell him it was all a joke, a bet to see if she would willingly date a loser.

He skipped the café and found a bar. There was a basketball game on and a bunch of excited old men that looked like they spent most of their time there. Sitting down near the corner, he asked the bartender to give him a shot of rum, and he nursed it and thought on his miserable life.

By the time he was finished he was seated on the curb in front of the closed bar. The streets were emptying out, and the droid patrol was asking drunks like himself if they needed a ride home. He dragged his tired body home to his apartment and vomited in the toilet. Tricia—who was quite surprised to see him—helped him clean up, and then she gave him several pills to help him get through it.

“I need my pills,” he said to her, and she stared at him as if confused. “Pills, Tricia. The Japanese ones. They’re in that closet over there. Get em for me, will you?”

She walked slowly to the closet and grabbed the bottle to bring it out to him.

“Thanks, Trish, you’re a life saver,” he said to her and swallowed one quickly.

Tricia watched him to see if there would be any recognition of her having switched the pills out for store-bought headache relief. He sat still for a time as if he expected a reaction, then moved to the couch and switched on the television before motioning for Tricia to join him.

“Why did I have to make you so hot?” he said to her in a drunken stupor.

She looked at him with disgust. She’d never dealt with a drunken version of him before.

“I wonder, can androids get drunk, or high? We HAVE to program that into you if you can’t, Trish. You have no idea what you’re missing.”

“Why are you talking to me that way? Is your head feeling healthy?”

“It’s ‘is your head feeling okay.’ ‘Is your head feeling okay?’ You haven’t been practicing your speech much, have you?”

“How can I when you are never here to talk to me?” she replied angrily.

He gave her an odd look and smiled, then lifted one of her hands and kissed it. “I’m sorry I talked to you like that, Priscilla,” he said, and before she could correct him, everything went black.

When Tricia powered on after the blackout, she found herself alone in Brad’s bed. It was the same situation as before. She could only remember the earlier part of the day before, and she was in a bed that she would never voluntarily lay in. Machines did not need beds, and while she could lay in one to emulate human behavior, standing up or sitting down to power down was quite acceptable. She heard a loud groan and a few expletives from the far side of the bed, and found Brad seated on the floor, looking around, confused.

“What the hell are you doing in the bed?” he asked. “Christ, my head is pounding, and I feel like crap.”

“I cannot remember anything. I think that there is something wrong with me. Every other day it seems, I reset, and I wake up in your bed with memory loss. Was this programmed into me?”

“Why would I even want to do that? Look, you’re beautiful – I made you that way, and part of me loves the fact that I woke up next to a beautiful woman this morning, android or no android. But, this is how misunderstandings start, and if Priscilla came in and saw you like that, I’m toast. Wait a second, we didn’t… did we?”

“I don’t understand what you’re asking.”

“Nothing. I’m a bloody fool. Look, I’ll check out your brain as soon as I shower, okay? You shouldn’t be experiencing blackouts, just like I shouldn’t be drinking and feeling like a pile of dirt right now.”

She got up from the bed and dressed herself, then went into the kitchen to make him a pot of tea. The blackouts were concerning, and she wondered if it was a flaw in her design due to Brad’s inexperience, or if he was lying to her for some reason. She only experienced them when he was around, and when she woke up, he was always there. A part of her knew what was going on but she wanted to believe that he was being honest with her.

“I’ll be better about coming home to talk to you,” he said to her, and with her forgetting their argument the night before she took it as a good sign that the loving, caring Bradley that she had started out in the world knowing was on his way back to her.

While Brad was generally happy when he was with Priscilla, he was a completely different animal when it came to her being around other men. Brad hated the way that average people behaved, but in a closed-in setting, he felt like they got worse. Men would push up on women they saw with weaker men, and if they weren’t strong enough to keep them at bay, those weaker guys would end up alone by the end of the night. So when Priscilla showed up with tickets to a college basketball game that she had scored from a coworker, he was not very excited to go.

“Don’t you like sports?” she asked.

He hesitated in giving her an answer. He felt funny telling her no. It was one of those loaded questions that brought into question his manhood, and normality, that he knew she didn’t realize was a bit offensive.

“Of course I like sports, everybody loves sports,” he lied, but she was insistent and eventually he caved.

She dressed in jogging pants and a tank top representing the home team, but he decided to wear the same jeans and t-shirt he was in. She looked at him as if he was hopeless when she saw this, but took it in stride as they headed out together, hand in hand, and happy.
It won’t be so bad
, he told himself as they stood in the slow line that flowed into the building. The outside of the auditorium looked like the classic bowl shaped arena that had carried sports since the age of the Roman gladiators, but inside it was a marvel of modern engineering.

“This is a college auditorium?” he asked Priscilla as they walked around the lit corridor that bordered the raised stage. Floating ads popped up in front of them as they made their way to their seats.

“You’re definitely not a sports fan, are you? But that’s okay, baby, we can work on that,” she said as she pinched his cheek playfully. “This is the auditorium for the Supersonics! If a college team had anything near the level of this thing, I would assume the city would have a fit.”

They sat in their seats and Brad exhaled in relief. The anxiety of walking through the crowd had put him on edge. Priscilla rested her hand on his thigh and he lifted it up to his face and kissed it gently. She looked over at him and smiled, then snuggled into his arms. The announcer shouted out declarations of grandeur for the two teams as they began to file onto the court to begin their warm-ups.

Soon the game started and Brad was actually enjoying it as the teams were quite competitive and the players showed off their tremendous skills. He smiled and clapped when someone sank a three-pointer or slammed the ball over someone else, but Priscilla was on a completely different level of hype. She was on her feet screaming, pumping her fists, and becoming quite emotional when their team was down. The whole display should have been obnoxious, but to Brad and a number of men in attendance, it was quite cute and attractive.

One of the men that saw her bouncing up and down with glee couldn’t take his eyes off her, as if she had a spell on him that he couldn’t break. Brad saw him staring and began to stare back, making sure the man knew that Priscilla was his and he should find someone single to leer at. The man saw Brad staring and smiled at him, recognizing the sort of pathetic jealousy that came with a pretty girl. If Brad could have seen himself he would be disappointed and upset, but he had taken some pills before they headed out, and he assumed that this was him being confident.

Brad tried to bring Priscilla in close to let her admirer see that she was with him. This action brought around an annoyed Priscilla who looked to see why Brad wanted to be close during a time that didn’t warrant it. First she looked at him with a slight question in her smile, then she looked around to see who was seeing them being clingy—which was a point of embarrassment for her—and that was when she saw her admirer laughing at the exchange.

“Are you serious, Bradley?” she asked, shocked by his behavior. The home team was being demolished, so she motioned to him for them to leave. Brad was more than happy to get out of there, but Priscilla was quiet and walked ahead of him rather quickly. As they walked out of the coliseum he grabbed her hand and spun her around so that she had to look at him.

“I’m sorry, I don’t do well with crowds and that guy was looking at you like he—“

“Like he what, Bradley? Like he wanted to sleep with me? Guys are going to look at me, and I don’t want you trying to fight all of them for it. You’re a sweet guy so don’t act like the jerks I used to date, please.”

He liked the way she called him Bradley; it was almost her pet name for him, just like “Priss” was what he had for her. The moniker came from a popular children’s cartoon that Brad had watched and loved as a child—even though he would still tune in whenever it was on. Prissy Missy was the name of the title character, and she was a sassy black detective with super powers. Brad loved the art and the veiled adult humor, so when he heard Priscilla’s name, it was the first thing that had gone through his mind. The jealousy was stupid, but he would be lying if he said that he would ever be okay with another man looking at her.

“It was stupid,” he said as they slowly walked to her car, she in front, him trailing behind.

“What’s stupid?”

“My actions just now. I’m not sorry for staring that guy down for his wandering eyes, but I am sorry for getting you mixed up in it by trying to pull you in to kiss me. You are the most beautiful girl I know, so of course people are going to stare. I’m just not used to it; this is all a new experience for me.”

“I’m still mad at you but I won’t lie, you make me feel like a queen. You’re different, and this is why what you did just now is so not you. Who cares if some creep stares at me? We all have eyes and I didn’t even notice it. Life is too short to be so petty.”

She didn’t understand how Brad felt, but being with her was like being on guard duty all day long against the men of the city that overstepped their boundaries. It was the same with Tricia, and he had grown accustomed to stepping up when necessary. He felt silly for his actions at the basketball game, but if he hadn’t done that the guy would have made it a point to come over and talk to her.

They found a cozy little shop off the beaten path to get some espressos. Priscilla ordered a Danish to go along with her coffee and Brad had a shot of espresso by itself. They sat on the outside and continued their conversation, while sipping away at their drinks.

“All my life, I’ve seen smaller, smarter guys have their girlfriends taken away by big buffoons that liked to talk. It made me realize that I would be fighting an uphill battle with women throughout my lifetime,” he finally said.

“Really, Bradley? You should give us women a little credit. Any woman that gives up a good man for someone like that is a fool in her own right. I think those smart guys are better off without them. I’m not a fool, so no need to go trying to fight people for me.”

He nodded. “How’s work?” he asked, wanting to change the subject.

She let him. “Not bad, actually. Our IT department stinks, and I find myself doing my own troubleshooting daily, but that’s all I can complain about.”

“What sort of troubleshooting? You know that’s my area.”

“Look at you trying to play the hero again. Bradley, you got this.” She motioned at her entire body with a gesture that was almost seductive. “There’s no need to guard, hold-down, or fight anyone over me. I’m your girl, alright? Plus you haven’t noticed the way other women look at me when we’re out. I could easily assume the role of overprotective mate, too.”

“Other girls give you looks?”

“All the time. It’s pretty funny to me the way they flash hate in their eyes.”

“What’s funny is that if it were me alone at these places, those same girls wouldn’t look twice at me or give me the time of day. It’s just how people are. Upset when you’re with someone and they aren’t. It doesn’t matter how that someone looks to them. It’s all so damn silly.”

The table was small, so they were extremely close even though they sat across from one another, and Priscilla leaned in for Brad to kiss her. They stayed like that for a time, letting their kiss erase the embarrassment of the earlier hours during the basketball game, and refocus them on how they felt about one another. People that walked by and saw them locked into this kiss merely smiled, dispelling their earlier thoughts that singles disliked all couples that showed public displays of affection.

They walked the town afterwards, taking in the people and the general atmosphere of the Seattle nightlife. They went into a bar to get a few drinks and the mood lightened when Priscilla got a little tipsy from the beer. They were at a high-top table in the rear of the near-empty bar and she was giggling uncontrollably. Everything was a joke, and the volume control seemed to break in her voice box as she cackled loudly and became a bit obnoxious.

“CAN YOU EVEN FIGHT, BRAD?” she asked, and he looked around to see who had heard her.

“Of course I can fight.”

“When was the last time you got into an actual fight?”

How about we take it back to the car, Priss? I think you’ve had enough.”

“No, I’m okay, babe, just having a laugh. Calm down, relax. You’re too uptight.”

He looked at her to remind himself how lucky he was to be with her but suddenly there was a flash of bright light, and he saw Tricia looking at him, plain as day. Then her face blurred and he was on the floor of the bar, looking around.

“Brad!” Priscilla was yelling. She came around and helped him to his feet as he held his head and looked about, wondering what had come over him. Priscilla smelled good, so he hugged her close, and took her outside where they walk-stumbled until they found a bench to sit on and watch people walk by. The night air felt wonderful. It was chilly but not to the point where it was uncomfortable, and the sky was clear, its darkness broken only by the large white orb of the moon.

He sat and watched the people walk by while Priscilla fell asleep next to him. He wasn’t tipsy or drunk so he wondered why it was that he had blacked out and fallen at the bar. No one had made to help him, except Priscilla, who wasn’t in much better shape than he was. He let her sleep for half an hour before shaking her awake and helping her back to the car. They’d had enough excitement for one night, and while he had wanted to spend more time with her, she was worn out, and couldn’t do much more. She was leaving for Miami the next day, and they had argued. He wanted it to be different, but all he could do was drive her home.

0 1 0

The black car pulled up to the front of the red brick building and detective Homer Montgoya parked it down near a tree and waited. It wasn’t often that a violator of rule 59 presented himself, and he wondered what manner of pervert he would see exiting the house. He pulled up the warrant and shook his head at the charges. The front door of the red brick opened, and Professor James Leroy Anthony stepped out. He was stopped by a beautiful woman who adjusted his sweater vest and kissed him on the cheek.

“Well, if anything, I gotta say the old man has taste,” Montgoya muttered to himself as he exited the vehicle.

He crossed the lawn at a brisk space. He raised his stun gun at the man. “Mister James L. Anthony?”

The man turned around, surprised to see the police officer on his lawn. “Yes, I am James Anthony…”

“You are under arrest for the crime of mechanophilia. Please turn around, get on your knees, and place your hands on your head.”

“I will comply, officer. What crime have I committed—besides the assumed—for me to get this level of embarrassment at my home? I am a proper citizen, and a professor. Who would make these accusations against me?”

“You’re a pervert, professor, and our government doesn’t want perverts in society. Think about it for a minute, will you?” He cuffed the older gentleman and stood him up before dusting off the dirt that was now on the knees of his corduroy pants. “Men like you professor, brilliant men who train the geniuses of the future, should be populating the earth with your seed. If our beloved government allows you all to choose machines over warm, breathing human beings, who would produce more men and women like you? The spice-heads and drunk losers of society?”

“I appreciate your kindness, and gentleness in this detective, and I overreacted as none of my neighbors seem to be up yet. I wouldn’t like the gossip, since none of them know about my beloved Constance. It isn’t…perversion. It’s—it’s a long story.”

Montgoya placed him in the passenger seat, ignoring his safety protocol so that the people who would see them would assume the professor was a friend and not a criminal. “It’s a long drive back to the station, professor, so why don’t you explain it to me. Look, I can’t change our laws, no matter how absolutely stupid they are, but I want to understand. What makes a man love a machine?”

“We all have our reasons, detective. There is no grand organization of robo-lovers where we swear off partners in lieu of androids or anything like that. My personal reason came about when the love of my life died from the cow disease. Marcy was my partner in everything, and a brilliant engineer in her own right. When I lost her so suddenly my life was in shambles, and what came of it was a partner that would not be vulnerable to diseases, poisons, or the cruelty of our humanity.”

“How long ago did you build her?”

“We’ve been together five years now. The government has been hypocritical about machines and what we can and cannot do. The military androids are not given restraints, and have routinely shown the human traits of PTSD, trouble adapting to civilian society, and much, much more. Is it not evident that with intelligence, even a machine can be cared for? Or do we need another long age of prejudice and ignorance before we realize that we are wrong in our limitation?”