Re-Wired

by Greg Dragon

  The fence grew dark for a time before the voice returned. Hurry inside. Hurry! I can only keep it off for a few seconds.

  It was night now as Tricia looked around, and the fear of being assaulted or kidnapped took over as it always did when she was outside. She slipped through the gate of the fence, hoping to gain access to the red brick house.

  She ran towards the front door that was left ajar. When she got inside and locked it behind her, she knew immediately that it was J.L. Anthony’s house. There were awards and photos of him and his beautiful wife everywhere, not to mention half-finished androids, and large textbooks. She walked the long hallway that held these photos and followed the signal to a pair of doors. When she opened the large double doors to a massive study, she saw Constance, wife to the late J.L. Anthony. She was standing in the center of the room, looking tired and worried.

  “What is happening outside, girl?” Constance asked, her voice sounding nothing like Tricia had expected. “I saw them arrest James, but he didn’t call, didn’t send word. Then when I tried to go find out myself, I saw that they had erected an electronic fence to keep me in.”

  “Why didn’t you just power it down like you did for me just then?”

  “The trick is to use my own transmission to trip the device that keeps the fence powered. Unfortunately, there is a price for me doing that. First, I cannot move, and second, it drains my power immensely. Even now, I feel light in the head, and I need to rest to recharge soon. So answer my questions, quickly please. What is going on with my husband?”

  “Have you not been watching the news?”

  “I have, but I refused to believe any of it. Why would James kill himself? They say he did it because he was ashamed of me. That makes no sense!”

  “It doesn’t make sense because the media is lying. Your husband chose to leave this world because they were going to ruin his life and destroy you in the process. They arrested him for mechanophilia, and he would have been fired from his job in disgrace. They intend to power you down and restrain you, but many humans are rioting the city to make sure that you aren’t treated unfairly.”

  She gracefully walked over to Tricia and hugged her tightly, and as Tricia returned the gesture she couldn’t believe how good it felt.

  “I felt you, when you walked outside of our house. I felt you, and you felt like me. We are the same, you and I,” Constance said as she held her. “We were built out of love, and were built to love. The only flaw in our design is that without love, we are nothing. Your maker. Is he a nice man? Does he love you? Are you a happy wife to him like I was for my beloved James? You look so sad and tired, my dear. I am beginning to think the worse.”

  “My maker is kind but he neglects me. He is confused and out of his mind due to stress, drugs, and I think there is a woman. He leaves me alone for many days, and when he is with me I have blackouts that remove my memory. Sometimes I sneak out and walk amongst the humans but this has proven to be dangerous. I get along well enough, but I keep worrying that I will have a blackout and someone will kidnap me and discover what it is that I am. Brad tells me not to go out without him, but how can I just sit around doing nothing all day? I cannot stay powered down, no matter how hard I try. It’s driving me—“

  “Let me take a look at you,” Constance said. She moved her hands around Tricia’s head and did what she could to access her CPU. “Your maker may not be who he appears to be, girl. The world as you see it now may not be what it is. I can assure you that I am real, but for how long you have walked to get here, and the reason why you managed to find your way here…those reasons may not be clear to you. Do you know what day it is?”

  “Tricia, my name is Tricia. It is Thursday, January 11th.”

  “Tricia, it is May 8th. You have no internal clock. This was removed when you were created. Your maker did everything he could, it seems, to make you as human as possible. But he did leave in a rather frightening feature.”

  “And what feature would that be?”

  “Are you positive that Tricia is your true identity? Do you have any memories of another persona, perhaps?”

  “What do you mean by that? You are scaring me. What did you see just now?”

  “Oh Tricia, I am sorry, but this will not be easy. I think that when you were created, you were created for a different purpose than the one you have been playing out for your maker. I see that you’re still confused but don’t stress; I am patient and I want you to get it. Let me explain to you what it means when an engineer removes your restraint.”

  06 | Bye-bye birdy

  Brad drove out to Priscilla’s apartment complex and ran up the stairs to surprise her. With Tricia’s help, he had sold enough rotors to buy her an engagement ring and the plan was to make it a date night. After dinner at Celia’s, he would fall to one knee and propose. It was too fast, and he knew it, but he didn’t want to take any chances in losing her, especially with his ongoing dark moods. He placed his card against the door but it flashed red instead of the familiar green. Come on, why isn’t it working? He asked himself. He kept on trying before knocking loudly on the door. He heard footsteps running to the door and he forced a smile as he adjusted his tie and straightened his shoulders to greet her.

  “What do you want?” an old woman said as she came to the door. She looked tired and sleepy.

  Behind her and inside of the apartment Brad could see a sleeping old man, and the walls had an ugly wallpaper that made the place seem ancient.

  “P—Priscilla White, is she here?” he asked, confused.

  The old woman shook her head and slammed the door. He checked his key several times to make sure that it was right. 153B that was the number on the door he stood in front of. He tried a few doors adjacent to it, and was met with either hostile residents or nice ones that felt sorry for him. He ran back to his car and looked for her contact code to call her.

  “Why can’t I find her in here?” he asked out loud as he scrolled up and down his list of contacts, all to no avail. “This isn’t funny. THIS ISN’T FUNNY!” he yelled, and then punched the steering wheel until his knuckles were bruised.

  There is no way that a person can up and vanish into thin air. He looked at the apartment buildings, which were not as nice as he remembered them and there was no sign of Priscilla’s car in the garage.

  “This is so freaking weird,” he said.

  He drove to his apartment. It was quiet and clean, the way Tricia had left it when she had gone off on her stroll. He turned on his computer and began to browse for the correspondence that he would have had with Priscilla. But it was as If he had dreamt about the entire year of pleasure he had with her.

  A day’s worth of searching to find Priscilla turned into panic as Brad began to remember what it was like to live without her in his life. He needed to be reassured of his sanity, to know that Priscilla was merely playing a prank and that they would be reunited within a day’s time. Maybe Tricia knows something, he thought as he pulled open the closet door and flipped the light on to see her. The lights came on to an empty room, and he looked around as if she had somehow snuck behind him.

  “Priscilla’s gone and now Trish. What in the hell is going on?” he asked out loud, as he went to every door within his apartment and pulled them open, hoping to find his android.

  Tricia was gone, or she had been stolen. But as unfortunate as that was, the bigger issue was that his very human girlfriend was gone without a trace. He tore the place apart for hours before falling on his bed, exhausted. He recalled a time when he was at Priscilla’s house and she was dancing. She was always dancing, but this particular time was special. He had called his mother, and he’d uploaded a photo to her. The memory snapped him back into reality and he called his mother, skipping the greetings to ask if she still had the photo.

  “Photo? What photo, Brad? I haven’t heard from you in a long time. You never call your mother. What is going on with you?”

  “I’m fine, Mom.
It’s just that my girlfriend has disappeared.”

  “Disappeared? Like kidnapped, disappeared? Have you called the authorities? You know many girls have been coming up missing lately.”

  “No, I haven’t called the cops yet. Tell you what, Ma, let me talk to you later. I’m gonna call them.”

  Brad hung up his device and went into the kitchen. The pills had stopped making him feel confident and calm like they used to and he couldn’t understand it. His emails to the Japanese contact were mostly ignored, and the ones he did answer were canned lies about the order coming in soon. His body was craving them, but he had used them all up and had no hope of refilling his supply. To make up for the way he was used to feeling, Brad began to drink and ingest nasal-spice whenever he could afford it. The spice made him jumpy, and there were segments of his short-term memory that was missing. It hadn’t mattered much to Priscilla that he was his old, awkward self, but he didn’t like being that guy. He was depressed, and dark thoughts were again clouding his thoughts.

  He called the police and put in a missing person’s report for Priscilla. He was crying on the phone, and he didn’t realize that he had poured himself a drink as he sat at the table. He tried to shift his focus to where Tricia was, but the loss of Priscilla was too strong to put out of his mind. He thought about the tracker that all android kits came with, but he had removed it from Tricia’s frame. She was fully autonomous but very much like a child when it came to safety. If someone had broken in to try and rob him, they would have found the beautiful android asleep in his closet.

  Unrestrained, advanced androids were illegal to own, but this did not stop gangsters and pimps from kidnapping them and selling them into prostitution. Androids were not as vulnerable to the STI’s, mental trauma, and aging that a human being was, so high-level pimps would run out android girls. Tricia was a sophisticated build that could fool anyone that she was human, so the price she would go for would be remarkable. If this was her fate he would never see her again.

  The police let him know they would keep him updated on the case, but this was not enough for him so he drove out to Priscilla’s apartment again. He staked it out for hours even though his hunger made him want to give up. It grew dark and there was still no trace of Priscilla coming or going. When his phone rang he expected it to be the police telling him they found her. But what he got instead was his mother.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  “Brad. I found the picture you sent me. I’d saved it to show your father, so I am sending it to you now.”

  He placed the device into the internal matrix of his car, and the windshield darkened and became a replica of the device’s screen. A photo popped up of Tricia dancing in front of the television like the day he saw her and promised her skin. The photo was new to him, and he didn’t remember taking it, or watching Tricia dance in the skimpy outfit that was in the photo. Was I high? He asked himself. He sat stunned, staring at it, wondering why it was he couldn’t remember.

  “Is that her, Brad? She is very pretty. Your father bragged about you to his colleagues for a whole month when he saw that picture. Did you call the police? I really hope that she is okay.”

  “Wrong girl, mom,” he said sadly, and his heart began to race as he wondered about his memory lapse. Why was it so vivid in his mind that he had taken a photo of Priscilla and sent it to his mother? They had even discussed her nationality, and—why was it all so vivid?

  He hung up with his mother and then called the café to ask if he could have the morning off. Susan answered the phone as if she was surprised to hear him, and when he asked her to get time off she laughed as if he had told her the best joke in the world.

  “Of course you can have the morning off Brad, you hilarious, junkie loser. Do you not remember walking out on us last week? Tell me, your highness, how was sunny Trinidad? I’m not sure how you rich, party types get down on vacation, so if you could share some of your stories with me, I’d love to hear them.”

  He hung up on her and hit his head with the heel of his hand to see if he could jog his memory back into commission. Am I still smart? He wondered. He began giving himself complex math equations to see if he could still solve them. Without brains, how good was he to anyone? If he couldn’t remember quitting his job, and which of the two women in his life he’d sent photos to his mother of, he was that much closer to becoming a moron. He began to cry again as the fear of losing everything loomed even closer to reality. His eyes found their way to an old pill bottle. He had loved the way the pills had made him feel. They had brought Priscilla into his life and allowed him to take Tricia to a level that no other android he knew of had attained.

  Without the pills he hated himself, and without Priscilla, he had no love and support. Depression reared its ugly head, and he sat drumming the table rapidly with his fingers. Losing Priscilla felt like losing several limbs, but without Tricia—his life’s work, and his sign to the world that he was somebody—he felt no reason to go on. He had to find Priscilla; he had to know that she was okay.

  So without planning or thinking better of it, he packed a bag and headed out to investigate.

  0 1 0

  Tricia opened the door to the apartment, expecting to find it clean and orderly, the way she left it. But what she found was chaos. Brad had torn the place apart and she assumed that he had been looking for her. She hoped he was okay and that he wasn’t running the streets looking to see if she was in trouble. The rioting had still been going on in the streets but the government decided it would be in everyone’s best interest if Constance was restrained but released to the activists—with a tracker and probationary check-ins to make sure she stayed restrained. The move had prompted Tricia to shorten her stay, and she had run back home in order to avoid discovery. The activists were okay with the decision, so things settled down in Seattle. On a worldwide scale however, the fighting continued for the rights of humans that wanted to love their androids.

  When she flipped open the computer to track the history, she saw where Brad had searched several engines and databases for the name “Priscilla White” and came up empty-handed. She saw where he had hit the wall, where his tears had fallen, and she felt saddened that he was going through the sort of pain that he was. She decided that she would find a way to help him, but first she had to find him and she didn’t know where to start.

  Constance had given Tricia a sizable sum of money to help her to become more independent in the world. It would allow her to go places and do things that she couldn’t before. One of these things was to hire a private detective, and she found her way to the office of a Mr. Homer Montgoya. He was a former star detective on the police force who had been fired for unknown reasons. Tricia knew of him because of his commercials on television. He was a robo-rights activist, and as the commercial said, he could find anything if the price was right.

  She walked inside the small plaza in the late afternoon, and approached his tiny office once she made out the badly designed sign that read “Montgoya P.I.” He was clean-cut and had really nice black hair that was rather unique due to the pattern that his gray hair grew within it. He was in a well-tailored suit and old-style black and white wingtip shoes. A large and genuine smile crossed his tanned face as he stood up to greet her upon her entry.

  “Senora,” he said to her without breaking the smile. She nodded and took a seat in front of his desk. “My name is Homer Montgoya. What can I do for you on this lovely afternoon?”

  “Thank you Mr. Montgoya. My name is Tricia. I have a friend that has gone missing. Her name is Priscilla White. She is very pretty, has brown skin—“

  “Do you have a photo of your friend, Miss Tricia?”

  “No. Is it possible to find her without a photo, or would it be hopeless?”

  “Where there’s a will, there is a way, Tricia. So she’s a black girl, your friend?”

  “Yes, and she’s about my height—I think. She is Trinidadian, and she has an accent, and I think she wor
ks for a local pharmaceutical company.”

  “That is a good start.”

  “Shall we discuss your rate?”

  They sat talking business for thirty minutes, and when Tricia left, she felt confident that Montgoya would find out something. She turned her efforts toward finding Brad—who had recently disappeared to look for Priscilla—so she went to the café and asked around. She didn’t know that he had quit working, and it made her wonder if he’d found a job doing the thing he actually liked doing—creating. She went into the bar he frequented and then to the places she knew that he and Priscilla liked to go to on their dates. Her search came up empty, so she went to the public library where he used to hang out.

  Tricia did not find Brad at the library, so she took the opportunity to find a computer and look into the strange behavior he had been exhibiting. She wanted to have a cure for the pills when she found him, so she looked for a condition that matched up with his. While she found traits of his behavior across several different conditions, she could not find one that directly correlated with his behavior. The entire mystery of his change was irritating and unfortunate, so Tricia doubled her efforts and took the internet into the dark, underground avenues where only hackers, black hat masters, and deviants lived. If she could not find his condition in the public-facing web, perhaps she could find it in the alleys.

  She flipped past pages of pedophilia, terrorist cookbooks, and anti-government rhetoric, searching for Japanese threads about the little black pill. She found a blog that was owned by someone who calling themself BuStream. The entries were sporadic and varied in length, but they were written well, and had commentary by other people who were on “the system” as they called it. She flipped through his archives until one caught her eye:

  The Ultimate High

  By Author BuStream

  Black lightning is unlike any other drug I’ve ever taken before. You all know that I’ve taken them all, felt them all, been there, and done a lot of that. Lightning makes the rest of the drugs look like cheap dates compared to her: long-lasting, all-consuming, demand of you attention. When you’re on it, you get cocky, like real cocky, and it becomes all about you. I’ve seen lightning riders do some strange things, all in the spirit of fixing their messed up egos.