by Greg Dragon
Brad sank three more striped balls into the holes, and upon lining up a fourth for a bit of English to make the fifth, he miscued. He cursed and sat down. Uriel got up and placed some chalk on his cue stick. He observed the lay of the table and like Brad, proceeded to sinking balls one after the other.
“It’s your game to lose now. As for Mika, she’s the one who talked to me. She asked me out, she’s been controlling the whole thing, and the only thing I’m trying to do is not mess it up by saying anything stupid,” Brad said.
“Well, ask her if she has a roommate or something when you get a chance, man. I’ve been striking out left and right.”
Uriel sank the 8-ball to win the game after an impressive run and Brad hopped up immediately. He racked the balls for a rematch and thought about how he would take his time and show Uriel how much of a superior pool player he was. His device chimed, and Mika’s grinning face popped up on it. Showing Uriel her photo and receiving the thumbs up, Brad walked outside for some privacy so that he could talk to her.
“Hey, what’s up?” he said into his phone, trying his best to sound cool.
Mika caught him in this attempt, and then suppressed a smile as she answered. “We’re hanging out today, remember? I don’t see your car.”
“Yeah, we’re supposed to hang out, but where are you?”
“I’m outside of your apartment. I know I said I’d call but I figured I’d come pick you up and we can, like, go to the museum or something.”
“I’m at school. I can be there in fifteen minutes. So, museum you say? Which museum do you have in mind?”
“The modern robotics one. I thought that it would make sense, considering our class and all.”
“Yeah, erm, of course. Good thinking.”
When he got off the phone he opened the door to signal to Uriel that he was gone and then he took off sprinting towards his car. When he got to his apartment, Mika was walking around, checking the building out. He couldn’t take his eyes off of her jeans; they revealed every curve on her lower body. She greeted him and then motioned for him to get into her car. They visited the museum – Brad knew it well from the numerous times that he had gone – and then they had lunch and she took him back home.
“Thanks for hanging out with me today,” she said.
He stood looking at her for another second before summoning the will to shift out of his frozen state. She was so beautiful and he found it hard to look away from her in that instance. It had only been a second but it felt like ten, and he knew that she would have read into his infatuation from him doing that. He was embarrassed, but it wasn’t the time to dwell on it and beat himself up.
“No, Mika, thank you,” he said, and she leaned forward and pecked him on the cheek before backing out of his driveway and taking off.
He stood on the stairs for a long time after that, wondering what had happened, and how he had managed to spend the day with one of the hottest girls he had ever shared a class with. He went inside and skipped his original plans to work on the android. It was a great night, so to celebrate he treated himself to a pizza and watched movies until he passed out on the couch.
0 1 0
The following week he sat next to Mika during class and tried to see if there were any signals for him to do something in order to advance their relationship. Should he touch her hand while she was reading? Should he send her a text that he missed her? No, that would be too forward and creepy, he thought. He struggled internally for the entire class, and when it was over he decided that he should just talk to her.
“Mika, can you hold on a sec?”
“Sure, Brad, what’s up?”
“How’s the droid coming?”
She almost smiled at his terrible attempt at small talk, but entertained it out of pity, even though he gave away his nervousness by wringing his hands uncontrollably. “It’s still a bit hard to put together, I could probably use your help one of these days.”
“H-how about tonight? Since it’s like due soon and everything. I can help you—“
“Oh, yeah, weren’t we supposed to hook up for that or something?”
He was confused at her aloof attitude but chalked it up to her being tired and distracted. “Just, a suggestion. We don’t have t—“
“No, it’s cool, let’s hook up and go out.” Did she really just say that? “I’ll come pick you up tonight and we can get some Italian, okay?”
“Awesome!” he exclaimed before catching himself.
But Mika was already gone, and if he’d been thinking clearly he would have noticed that she wasn’t too happy about it. In his mind she was interested, and helping her with the android would be the first step towards a beautiful romance. He floated out of the class and through the campus, determined to get through the remainder of his classes to get ready for Mika. When it was evening time and he got home, he showered, put on his best clothes, and then dialed her code in anticipation of a memorable night.
“Hello, Mika?”
“Who is this?”
“Brad Barkley, from class. I was just seeing if we’re still on for the night and putti—“
“Oh, never mind. Brad, my boyfriend showed up in town, so I may need to take a rain check for our study time, okay?”
Brad couldn’t believe what he was hearing. What the hell is she talking about with the study time business? We were going out to eat. He was beside himself with disappointment as Mika’s confusing phone call came to an end.
“Well, you know what? Screw you, Mika,” he said out loud after hanging up the phone and hopping onto his computer to work on his android’s restraint matrix.
It was a bad time to work on something as delicate as setting the boundaries on what an intelligent computer could and couldn’t do; but Brad was distracted so he worked in anger, thinking that it was focus.
After an hour had passed he heard the chime of his doorbell. He inhaled to calm himself and then marched over to the door. He slid it open, expecting to see Uriel or one of his other friends but a large man stood in front of him instead. His face reflected an annoyed aloofness which turned into a mocking smirk at the sight of Brad.
“What’s up?” Brad asked, wondering if he’d been making a lot of noise as he worked or if the giant at his door was at the wrong address.
“You have a class with Mika Scheider?” he asked, but in a way that suggested that he already knew the answer.
Before Brad could say “yes,” the man looked past him at the new android—who was looking around and trying to assess its situation.
“That’s a cool robot,” he said and then motioned for Brad to follow him out to his car.
“Wait, who are you? Where is Mika?” Brad asked.
“Relax bro, she told me to come get you. I’m parked out front, you coming or what?”
Brad switched the android off and complied, but the disappointment at having a stranger come to retrieve him instead of Mika was all he could focus on.
“Are you Mika’s boyfriend?” Brad asked as they got into the car.
The man slicked back his white hair and lit a cigarette. “Something like that,” he said, brushing the question aside in a cool manner that only complemented his good looks and devil-may-care swagger.
Brad already disliked him, as he represented everything that the world wanted him to be, even though he had none of the ingredients needed to be that guy. He sank into his seat and watched the buildings fly by, letting his resentment of Mika simmer until it came to a boil. Why hadn’t he seen this coming? Girls like Mika always had a boyfriend or two. Why did he think that she would be available, and that she would be looking for something more than a patsy to do her homework? It was high school all over again, and he closed his eyes to force back the tears that threatened to come if he thought too hard on his broken history with women.
“So, you two, making robots?” The overly tanned, white-haired, Mika-lover asked. He was trying to make small talk, but Br
ad merely nodded and paid him little attention. “You’re a strange one aren’t you? I guess that’s why she chose you to tutor her. The smartest dudes are always the weirdest...no disrespect though, bro.”
He pointed his finger at Brad’s face, expecting him to return the gesture and touch fingers. This was something that the muscle heads did with one another all the time; it was their show of brotherly love and peace, but Brad had no “bros” to touch fingers with, so he returned it in an awkward way, feeling stupid the entire time for doing it.
They pulled up to a flat and the first thing Brad wondered was how they could afford an actual house in the city. He entered with the giant, whose name turned out to be Gastion, and was led to a table in a nicely maintained office, where he was told to wait. Before long, Mika appeared in the doorway and hugged him, but she was not as bubbly and endearing as she was inside the classroom.
“Thanks for coming, Brad. Ready to get some Italian and talk about androids?”
“It’s no problem, Mika. I’m not feeling so hungry anymore though. If it’s okay with you, I’ll show you how to get your droid functional, and you can be ahead on your design.”
Mika was good at reading body language; it was something she’d always prided herself in knowing about people. She saw that Brad’s demeanor had completely changed from the way he’d been earlier, and she knew it was because she had a boyfriend. She also knew that sending him to retrieve Brad was a bad idea, but Gastion had insisted when he heard him on the phone. She felt sorry for him and upset at herself for leading him on. He was a sweet, harmless guy, and when she had used him to get away from her sorority over the weekend, she hadn’t realized that he would want more out of it.
“Awesome. Thanks, Brad. Are you sure about dinner, though? I was hoping to repay you with food for helping me—”
“The man said no, babe. Stop pestering him already,” Gastion offered up from the other room before Brad could lie and say that it was quite okay.
Mika shook her head and rolled her eyes to show the annoyance she felt with her man, and then the two students got to work, putting together her android. Brad’s idea of this being a magical evening between two future lovers was shattered, and he sped through his instructions and did most of the work himself. He wished the time would move faster so that he could be home and away from Mika and her man.
Brad was driven home at 11:15 p.m. by Gastion, and without looking back at the car, he ran inside of his apartment and dove face-first into his bed. He let the coolness of the pillow calm his angry mood. How could he have been so stupid? The Mika’s of the world had always dated the Gastion’s—sometimes marrying them and giving away their best years. In the future, when he was a famous android engineer in his forties, he would be “allowed” to have a woman like her: experienced (they always dated more than a few Gastions), mature, and not as pretty as she had been in her younger years. This doomed path of love was one that had been around since the beginning of time, but why should he have to accept it? Shouldn’t the smartest men get the lion’s share of what life had to offer?
The pillows were not enough to calm him down as he thought about his humiliation. He gathered that Mika cheated on Gastion regularly, and since he was out of town and she attended school, she was probably bored and thought it fun to seduce a nerd like him. Through him she would pass the class easily, and he was harmless so she wouldn’t have to do much—perhaps some heavy petting and a few empty promises. When Gastion had popped up on her it destroyed her plans, and when he’d kept on calling, the jealous boyfriend decided to go and pick up her “study partner” to see what he was dealing with. Good thing I wasn’t a good-looking player or something, Brad thought. Gastion had been happy to find a loser, which corroborated Mika’s lie.
It was the last straw, so he got up and went to the large sketchpad that sat on an easel next to the powered down android. Maybe my contribution to society will be to create a woman for men like me, he thought, and proceeded to sketch out a beautiful, tanned, woman. When a few hours had passed and he had finished the drawing, he stepped back, exhausted, and took a look at his work. She was lovely, and he thought about how nice it would be to have her fully functional and walking. Her A.I. would be quantum adaptive and able to evolve, and his need for fitting in with the world diminished. He brought out a third-dimensional pad and began to model the layout of the girl’s face in detail. I shouldn’t freehand this, he thought and took out his personal device to cruise the internet.
An hour later, Brad had pulled together features from all of the celebrity women he liked. He used them to aid in his modeling, and by the time he was finished, he had a third-dimensional model of a handsome beauty, whose features were so strong and perfect, that she seemed unlike any other woman he had ever seen before.
“I think that I will name you Tricia,” he said out loud as he spun the holographic head around to scan for flaws.
Satisfied, he dragged himself off to bed.
0 1 0
“Hey Brad!” Mika exclaimed as he stepped off of the elevator towards their class.
She had been waiting for him and noticed that he looked as if he hadn’t slept the night before. Mika’s mind tried to find a reason, but the only one she had come up with was that he had stayed up studying.
“It wasn’t cool of me to keep you all night like I did,” she said, and before she could finish her statement, a man from their class walked by and smiled in a congratulatory way at Brad. Mika saw him do this and rolled her eyes as she continued. “You have your own work too, and I can tell that you stayed up to work because of me. I’m so sorry.”
“You’re good, Mika. Let’s go before we’re late.” He didn’t want to talk to her. His intentions had been to come up the elevator, sit near the front, and avoid her but she’d ambushed him, and it was all he could do to get away from her. Why does she insist on being in my face when she has that gorilla at home to keep her warm at night? He thought. He sat near the front of the large classroom and Mika took a seat next to him. She seemed intent on torturing him, but he ignored her and let his thoughts drift to his soon-to-be creation, and what he would be adding to her in the morning.
“So, who here has already assembled their android?” Dr. Anthony asked, and several hands went up in the class in response. He turned his gaze towards Brad, who was half-asleep and into the world of robot maidens, and nerds who got the last laugh. Mika touched his hand and he woke up with a start. There were a few chuckles from his classmates as he tried in vain to sort out what the question was that had been asked of him.
“Could you repeat the question, sir?” he asked, disappointed that Dr. Anthony had caught him sleeping in what would be the most important class for his future.
“Late night, Mr. Barkley? This is unlike you, but whatever it is, I hope you get it sorted out and come to my class fully rested and ready to participate in the future.”
“Yes, sir, I definitely will. I stayed up working on Tric—my android, and—”
“So, you finished putting the model together, then?”
“Yes, I am finished.”
“Very good.”
The members of the class had always felt like Brad was a bit of an oddball, but they knew that he was more advanced than anyone else there. He had practically leapt for joy when he found out that they were making their own models, and they expected him to go off into a fit of bragging when the professor asked about finishing. But here he was, sleepy, like the average, partying coed. Brad could feel their stares, and the torture of his heavy eyes, combined with the professor’s chagrin, made him feel sick to his stomach. They pulled out their tablets to follow along as J.L. Anthony lectured, but before long Brad was dozing, so he excused himself and went into the men’s bathroom. Why didn’t I just go to sleep like a normal person? He asked himself as he splashed cold water on his face and popped a Fi’e Supplement. The pill worked its magic quickly and he was soon wide-awake to the world. He hated having to r
ely on drugs to function, but he needed to hear what his professor was saying, and being half asleep didn’t help.
When he got out of class he saw Mika waiting to stop him, so he took the back way out and decided to take the rest of the day off. He went to the C. Arthur McDonald Library of Knowledge to study, and began to look up synthetic skin, and how to acquire the most realistic type. He found out that the best stuff came from Japan, but the cost was the equivalent of a semester in school even before shipping. Tricia would need to have the best, and he thought of ways he could get the money but all of it bordered on doing something illegal, or selling important—and necessary—assets like his car.
He put the skin research aside, and began a new search on Artificial Intelligence. He had dabbled in programming A.I. since the age of thirteen, so the methods he found were easy to understand. He engrossed himself in tracing the best practices of the day, and what the Japanese were doing to stay ahead of everyone else. He wished that he could travel to Japan and work in one of their factories just to see.
The Fi’e pill was potent, so he stayed inside of the library until closing time. It got late, and the students that were employed in the library were eager to go. One girl snapped at him when she found him in the rear of the building, flipping through articles. He’d stayed even after they announced they were closing up, and while he was too wired and focused to hear the announcement, the employees of the McDonald Library, seemed to think he was trying to make trouble.
“Excuse me, we ARE CLOSED!” the girl shouted at him.
“Oh, how unique, a whiny worker who hates her job,” he said back to her, the drugs too potent to allow for second-guessing or checking ones speech.
The girl didn’t give him a fight like he wanted, but instead escorted him out, and he stood in the large, empty courtyard of their school, analyzing his next move. If I’m going to get that skin, I’m going to have to get a job. It was the only thing that made sense, but in reality the sort of job that would hire a fulltime student in the neighborhood he lived in would pay him so little that it would take an entire lifetime to afford Tricia’s skin. What about crowd funding? He thought. Maybe someone older and richer would see the need for an android like Tricia and give him the money he needed to make her a reality. No, they would merely steal my idea, he thought,
