by Greg Dragon
She heard Brad turn off the shower, so she placed his device where it had been, and turned the computer to a game.
“Thanks Trish, I feel so much better.”
“What did I tell you about taking care of yourself?”
“Yes, I know, I know. It’s just, I can’t get her out of my head, and I feel like if I just put in a little more effort I can find her and rescue her from whatever it is she’s into.”
“When was the last time you paid rent?” Tricia asked suddenly, thinking him sober and awake enough to be informed that he was letting his life fall apart.
“Hmm?”
“Rent, Brad. The money you pay a landlord to maintain the right to live in his home. Meaning, your apartment.”
He got quiet and stared off into the distance as if trying to reason it out. “Wait, didn’t I pay it at the beginning of the month? I had enough in my account to…no, was that this month?”
“You haven’t paid it in three months. Part of the reason why you haven’t paid it is because you are broke and you no longer have a job. Your parents don’t feed your account anymore because you dropped out of school and forfeited the money they did spend to invest into your future.”
“Why so judgmental? You think I don’t know that I screwed up my life?”
“I am not being judgmental, I am being frank. You need to hear these things so that you can begin to fix them. Clean up, get a job, and start living your life again.”
“It’s not that easy,” he muttered.
Tricia looked into his eyes to see if the spark that had always been there was still dancing around. It was gone and she felt a pang of worry for his wellbeing that made her want to help him as soon as possible.
“Brad, you need to rest. You look worn through. Let’s get you into the bed and I will go back to working at your rotors so that you can at least sell those once again. Does this sound okay? I’ll take care of you and we will get past this. I know she meant a lot to you, but you are killing yourself trying to find her.”
“How does someone just vanish into thin air though? It’s the oddest thing.”
“Lay down. Just get some rest.”
He laid down on the dirty bed and settled in. His vision was blurrier than he had last remembered and the confidence from the pills was completely gone. Thoughts, those negative thoughts that had always consumed him, were back. He’d let the rent slip, but why hadn’t he been kicked out? Tricia was helping him, and he had neglected her for so long for Priscilla. Why did she care? Why would she help him so much after all of the harm he had done to her in the past? Locking her away, roughly shoving her into closets, violating her and wiping her memory. He would be nicer to her; he owed her at least that. Where no one cared, not even his own parents, she was there to fill in the gaps. He kept on questioning his worth and reason for living as he closed his eyes and hoped for sleep. In time it came to him, and he dreamed of happier times.
0 1 0
Montgoya had followed Tricia home, curious about the woman who hired him to chase a ghost. He sat outside watching the windows and he saw the silhouette of the man she called Brad. He was worried that she was in danger. If a man could imagine a person as vividly as this Priscilla White, who knew what else he was capable of due to his psychosis. He opened the flask that he had stashed under his seat and let the hot moonshine splash against his throat. It was strong and raw, the way liquor should be, and it put his mind at ease as he started to question the validity of Priscilla White.
What if she really existed and he had failed in finding her? Could he live with himself if she wound up dead, or in a prostitution ring overseas? Just because evidence couldn’t be found to prove that someone existed didn’t mean they were made up. Yet he was sure about this one, and had told Tricia that her friend was out of his mind. He thought about the suicide that had ended his career as a cop. He had learned to hate the police since then, and a majority of his cases had been for people who wanted to investigate them. He took another swig of the drink and waited. He needed to talk to the woman again.
It was late when Tricia opened the door to leave, and Montgoya met her as soon as she rounded the corner to start up the sidewalk.
“Montgoya! Why are you here?” she exclaimed, frightened by the way he stepped out of the shadows to confront her under the streetlight.
“Tricia, look, I’m sorry to greet you like this—and startle you, but I didn’t want to knock on your door and frighten your boyfriend or whatever. I just want to understand what you’re playing at here. Who is Priscilla White, really? Why send me on this ghost hunt and then allow me to call it off so easily? See people that have lost someone, like truly lost someone to kidnapping, murder, whatever… they have a real drive for answers. You bought my whole ‘he is crazy’ bit real easy and gave up. So tell me, are you in trouble? You off this Priscilla White chick and cover it up? Did you hire an investigator to see if you did a good enough job hiding the body? I’m telling you, Tricia, I spent years as a detective before this line of work and I met a lot of crazy beauties like yourself. Vindictive types that put arsenic in their husband’s pills, cover their faces with pillows to snuff em out, you name it. So what do you have to say for yourself? Put my mind to rest here.”
“I was waiting for you to finish writing your false novel on your murder mystery, Montgoya. I haven’t killed anyone. I am not able to do that even if I wanted to.”
“What do you mean? You talking religion, or your good morals would prevent you? Anyone is capable of murder, no matter how much they tell themselves that they’re not.”
She saw where she slipped up and tried to correct it quickly. “No, I mean that I am a good person. I couldn’t kill a bug, let alone a person. I didn’t lie to you. I have never met Priscilla, only heard Brad talk about her.”
“So, let me get this straight. You live with that guy, like a roommate, and you are hotter than hell, beautiful. You two have nothing going on, and his girlfriend goes missing?”
“Yes…”
“So you spend a bunch of your own money to hire me to look for her. All for a guy who is a junkie—don’t deny it, people round town are talking. Something ain’t right. Does he have something on you? Some sort of deep dark secret you need him to keep quiet about because the chips ain’t stacking up, sister.”
Tricia sat down on the nearby bench and tried to reason out an answer to give Montgoya to make him go away. He was definitely good, and this was evidenced by his accurate summation of the situation that she was in, but she couldn’t tell him the truth. An ex-cop would instinctively turn on an android. If he knew what she was he would cuff her right there, cuff Brad as well, and they would be hauled in for questioning.
“Tricia, look at me. Whatever you’re hiding from me, I need you to tell me. I have no ties to the police department outside of what I need to do for this job. I just need to settle my mind about this thing. It’s keeping me up at night. Who is Priscilla White, really? Why can’t I find her, and why do you really care if I do?”
“What are your thoughts on the android problem, detective?”
“I didn’t know we had a problem.”
“I mean the jobs they take over, the lives…like the perverts that want to marry them, replace human beings with them and all of that. Doesn’t it make you angry that pretty soon they’ll be taking over the planet?”
“I never pegged you as another anti-droid, nutcase, Tricia. Actually, having interviewed enough of those idiots during my lifetime, I can tell that you’re trying poorly to come off as one of them. You’re asking rational questions; they don’t do that. A true nut only parrots what the actual smart people tell them. They echo the same nonsense that television and radio personalities feed them, and your questions are not on that level. I think you want me to think of you as one, so you can lead me down a path to nowhere about Priscilla White. What? Is she an android, Tricia? Brad was with an android that nobody knows because she got disassembled? Do
n’t care about all of that. I just want to know the truth.”
“Priscilla was not an android detective, but I am. If you want to get your career back and be in good graces with the police, you can arrest me. Make up whatever story you like to convince them that I am an evil machine, but make sure that Brad is given proper treatment to return back to normal.”
“You’re no android. What the hell do you make me out to be?”
“I am, and I can prove it to you if you’d like me to.”
“Okay, repeat our entire conversation from the start, no mistakes. If you’re a machine you can play it back, right?”
She did this for him, adding in the extra bonus of making her voice sound like his for the parts where he spoke, and repeating hers. He stood stunned for a moment, and he wondered if the moonshine was bad, since he had to be hallucinating.
“I have never seen an android look so human in my life—except for the doctor’s wife. Tricia, are there many like you, around the city? How deep does this go?”
“It doesn’t go deep at all, and I doubt there are many like me. The truth, Montgoya, is that Brad created me illegally to be the girlfriend he could never have. He’s had bad luck all his life, and his love for robotics led him to create the one thing that was missing. When he got me to look like this he made a trade with someone that wanted him to try out some pills in exchange.”
“Oh boy.”
“The pills gave him a lot of the qualities that women like in men, so his luck changed and he met Priscilla online. I think that the pills did other things, too, since he no longer eats and takes care of himself. He sacrificed himself for me, you see, and he isn’t even aware of what it has cost him. Priscilla had become his source of happiness, and now she, too, is gone from his life. This is why I sought you out.”
“That is the saddest thing I have ever heard.” He sat next to Tricia and took a drink before looking around at the empty street and leaning close to her. “I lost my job because of what I did to someone very much like Brad. He was a professor, brilliant guy, and I was made to arrest him for having an android wife.”
“Constance!”
“You know her? Well, I never agreed with that law or the fact that we had to enforce it. So I picked the old man up and was talking to him about it. He had too much to lose with that arrest, and most of all he knew what they would do to his wife once the news got out. He jumped from my car, fell not three blocks from here, to his death. That crushed my very soul, Tricia. It crushed me. I’ve seen so many messed up things throughout this career that dealt with death and desperation, but for a guy to take a header out of my car because of what he chose to love? Whew, that was heavy. They didn’t need to fire me over it. I freaking quit.”
“That is a sad story. I met Constance and learned a lot from her as an android trying to live as a human being. We are persecuted wherever we go, so it is a life of solitude and hiding whenever our human isn’t around. The reason for the professor being arrested was probably political, a way to calm the growing number of anti-android activists that have been routinely hunting us down to disassemble us. They thought that he would go quietly, and that they would probably let him go in secret so that he could continue to contribute to society. He couldn’t live without Constance though, since what they had was not replaceable. It’s the classic love story, am I right?”
“I guess. Is this what you have with this guy Brad?”
“We are different, but he built me to be very much like Constance was for the professor. The pills that Bradley took changed him, and my life has been one of personal learning and adapting.”
“So this guy built you to be his girlfriend or whatever, then once you were built he goes off and finds a real woman? Is this what I’m hearing?”
“Yes…”
“This real woman is Priscilla White, and now you—as his android creation—are out to help him find her, even though you know there is a chance she doesn’t exist?”
“Why would Brad lie about the existence of the woman he loves? He talks about her constantly, disappears for long periods of time, and is now sick and depressed because she is missing. Nobody goes out of their way to put on that sort of act for someone that is imaginary. This is true, is it not?”
“It is if you are sane and have your wits about you. In my investigation, the neighbors told me they never see him. Sometimes he would go down to his car and listen to the radio for hours, but then he would just go back up into the house afterwards. They say he roams around the neighborhood a lot too, his eyes glossed over, his clothes dirty and ragged. Some have tried to talk to him but he acts as if they aren’t even there. He is seen as a sponge head, drug addict, so when I asked about a girlfriend, they mostly laughed – as if I was out of my mind. The ones that do acknowledge a woman in his life mention you. They’ve seen you come and go, but they wonder what you see in him.”
Tricia thought on what Montgoya was saying, and she began to wonder about Priscilla, too. It was not going to accomplish anything speculating on Brad’s behavior however, so she thought on what she would need to do to fix him.
“I’ve told you the truth, Montgoya. Are you going to arrest me and have me disassembled now?”
“Of course not. Hell, this sad story of Priscilla White is my chance at redemption over the suicide—at least that’s how I see it. You need to forget the girl; she isn’t worth the time and money you are spending to find her when your man is in there dying. If I were you I would go back inside and nurse him back to health. Look into the pills and what you can do to get him into a mental hospital…just something. Focus on Brad and fix his brilliant mind. The world has gone lazy due to your kind—no offense, of course—and the geniuses are hiding away in underground web communities, and in bunkers where the authorities can’t find them. This has caused us to stop innovating, and it is ruining the world. We need brave souls with high intelligence like Bradley Barkley to bring about a change in attitude. I mean, you are perfect. I had no idea that an organic heart was not beating in that chest of yours. Fix him, Tricia, and bring him back to us.”
“What will you do in the meantime?”
“I will keep a lookout for you and yours. Any signs that the police or any snitches are going to make life hard for you and Brad, you will be the first to know. It’s the least I can do, and I feel lucky to have the chance. I have nothing against a man wanting to love his android, and I’ve seen what blind prejudice and foolish laws have cost us for being too involved in people’s bedroom habits. Fix him, Tricia, and I will make sure that you have the time and safety needed to get it done.”
08 | Falling… once again
Tricia kept hearing the signal. It was faint at first but then it grew stronger as she approached the grate that sat near the park entrance. There was a bench there, so she sat down and tried to understand why she would be hearing the signal after Constance had been taken away. Could it be possible that there were more androids like her in the city? That wouldn’t make any sense, being that it was both illegal and expensive to make a model like her. But there it was…the beeping. She leaned down towards the grate and she realized that it grew stronger when she did. It wasn’t annoying, or alarming; it was actually soothing, the beeps echoing in her android mind like the lyrics of a popular old song, or the first movement in a glorious symphony by a talented composer. She wanted to hear more of it, to get close to it and meet the android that was causing it.
There were people walking by constantly, so she knew that opening the grate and going down would set off a lot of alarms with the humans. She needed to go down there though, so she could meet whoever it was. She imagined it was an android on the run from his masters. He could teach her so much more about herself, just like Constance had. Or maybe he needed her help instead. She wished that she could just contact him with true communication instead of proximity beeps, but the droid manufacturers placed permanent safeguards against that. No one wanted to be blamed if there was an un
restrained android uprising, especially if the androids could communicate silently.
She looked around slowly to see if there were any other good access points to go below. This was when she saw an old sign for the Underground Tours. A long time ago, Seattle had rebuilt its city a level above the old city, and much of the old historical structures were right below where she sat, as they were once a tourist attraction. The company and city no longer maintained the tour, and much of the underground had been sealed off under lock and key. She could see that the store on which the sign was hanging was also closed down, and it had the look of an old saloon from the time when the sunken city was alive and kicking.
Tricia stood up and walked over to the sign. She pretended to be reading it as she scanned around for people who might be watching her. It was a busy square, and she wanted so badly to get below to meet with whomever it was making the signal. He would have been hearing her too, and she wondered if he—like she—would be overcome with the need to meet, and would make his way to the surface. She sat on the bench for the remainder of the day, but the people kept on pouring in and out of the square. Flying motorbikes began to enter the area in the late evening, and as the stores closed down she felt the eyes of owners that had noticed her sitting out there for so many hours.
After a while she decided that it would be best if she left and returned, so she walked around for several blocks before finding herself distracted by the living, breathing city. There was so much going on under the streetlights: there were people hanging out, talking, dancing, soliciting, and most of them were just trying to hook up. She was wearing one of the hooded sweatshirts Brad had in his closet so she pulled the hood up and bowed her head so nobody would give her more attention than she needed. She loved to people watch; it was the ultimate education in human sociology, and at one point she stood near a few partygoers and listened in on their banter as they discussed everything under the moon.
