by Audrey Faye
“Captain, can we stay this time?” Estwing asked.
“Yes, I think we can,” Captain Hunt replied.
The bridge quieted. There were many things to do, but their tasks could wait for just a few moments, as every crew member gazed upon their new home.
~END
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Unfinished
An Unstrung Story
Kendra C. Highley
In a world where genetically-engineered humans serve as slave labor to “real humans,” two prototype children, designed to be the most superior models ever created, look to each other to find a way to escape their fate. They may discover that being “artificial” doesn't mean they can't love.
I
Unfinished
Author’s Note: First, I’d like to thank my awesome beta readers: Becca Andre, Kristen Otte, and Ryan Highley. Also, a big shout out to my editors, Shelley Holloway and Cassandra Marshall.
Part 1: Ten Years Ago
Quinn watched the monitor. Its camera was trained on the prep room where the new K700 prototype was under development. She was only the second model in this line, and the first female.
His match.
His heart fluttered with excitement. Miss Maren had told him the little girl was going to be his friend. Created specifically to keep him company and learn with him. After spending most of his time in the company of adults—both human and artificial—he could hardly wait to meet her.
Lexa. That would be her name.
She was still pale, her hair almost as white as her skin, just like the day before and the day before that. He wondered when she would change colors, and what color she would be, but Doc Mendal had said not to pry, so he didn’t ask. He’d learned that if he asked the wrong questions—or too many in a row—that his curiosity would cause trouble. And pain.
The girl stared blankly into space, but he could tell she was afraid by the way her knuckles whitened as she clutched her blanket. Or the way her right eyelid twitched every so often. Being scared was a good sign—it meant she was turning into a person.
He immediately flushed, feeling bad. He didn’t want her to be scared, and it wasn’t nice to be glad about it. He remembered the prep room. He remembered the fear. No, it wasn’t nice to be glad.
Dr. Martine cocked his head. “Quinn, what’s Lexa thinking? Any guesses?”
“She’s…wondering where she is, and why she’s here,” he said after a moment. Even though he was watching her over the feed, he could read her mannerisms easily, which was strange. But if Lexa had been made to be his best friend, maybe that was why he could tell how she felt.
He watched her a moment longer, registering how her chest rose and fell more quickly as the fear turned into panic and grief. “She thinks something’s wrong with her.” Quinn turned to Dr. Martine. “Please, we need to let her out.”
“We can’t. You know that. No cross-contamination until imprinting is complete.” Dr. Martine tapped his stylus against his data pad. “But maybe we could let you in? What do you think? You want to try?”
Quinn’s heart leapt. He tried hard to keep the eagerness out of his voice when he said, “Oh, yes. I think she might talk to me.”
“Well, then, let’s—”
The door at the back of the observation lab swooshed open and a pair of high heels clicked toward them. Quinn rounded his shoulders to sink a little shorter. I’m not a threat. I’m not a threat. I’m invisible.
Cool fingers tipped with long, pointed fingernails, brushed the back of his neck. A welt rose up on the sensitive skin below his hairline where they scratched. He held very still.
Invisible. Not a threat.
“Hello, dear,” Miss Maren said, releasing Quinn to give Dr. Martine a kiss on the cheek. He didn’t look too happy about it, even though Miss Maren was supposedly his girlfriend. “Any progress?”
“Um…” He shot a look at the girl behind the glass. “Well, we were thinking about exposing her to some stimuli to see if she’s ready for advanced configuration. Namely, I thought I’d send Quinn in. She’d be less likely to see him as a threat, given her programming.”
Quinn balled his fists around the hem of his T-shirt. Please. Please don’t say no.
Miss Maren pinned him with her eyes. Calculating. That was the vocabulary word he’d use. It meant shrewd. Which sounded a lot like shrew. Which meant mean, screechy lady.
He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling. It wouldn’t be a real smile anyway, he reasoned. It would be a nervous I’m-not-hiding-anything smile, and a vaguely disinterested look was required if he hoped to get what he wanted.
Because that’s what Miss Maren was good at. She found out what he wanted, then took it away.
After a long, long, long stare, she finally nodded. “A short visit, perhaps. Five minutes.”
Five minutes? That was all? The look on her face, though. She wanted him to argue. If he argued, she could tell him no.
“I can be in and out in four, if that’s better,” he said.
Her eyes widened and she nodded in approval. “Very well.”
Dr. Martine gave him a pat on the back and opened the door to the clean room. “Full measures. No contamination.”
Right, no touching. Doc Mendal had told him her immune system was still developing and his germs could hurt her. Inside the clean room, which was just a little hall between the observation lab and her prep room, he pulled a white jumpsuit out of the cubby. It covered him from his neck to his toes and had a hood attached to the back to cover his head. The suit crackled every time he moved. It was polymer based and felt like a trash bag.
By now, the little girl was hugging herself and rocking back and forth on her white bed. Quinn hurried to don a pair of latex gloves. She would be better if she could just meet him. He knew it. She needed a friend; that would fix everything.
He gave a thumbs up to Dr. Martine, and the airlocks opened with a clank. When her door opened, she started, staring wide-eyed as Quinn stepped inside.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
Good, so she could talk. They’d loaded her brain with all the right prompts, but they hadn’t been sure. “I’m Quinn.”
She nodded slowly. “Who am I?”
He blinked fast to clear the tears smarting in his eyes. The white room did that—it made you feel hopeless, helpless. Just being in here…it was awful. “You’re Lexa.”
“Lexa,” she said, like she was trying out the word in her mouth. “Lexa. Is that a good name?”
“Very good,” he told her. “It means ‘defender of the people.’”
Her forehead scrunched up. “Are there more?”
“More what?”
“People? Are we the only two? Or are there more?”
A smile stretched across Quinn’s face. She was so serious when she asked that it was almost funny. Almost. “Yes. Lots and lots. When you’re finished here, you’ll meet some of them.”
He waited for her to ask how long, but instead, she said, “I like you.”
“I like you, too.” Quinn flushed, and he suddenly didn’t know where to rest his hands. He locked them behind his back to keep them out of the way. “You don’t have to be scared anymore, okay? Soon you’ll move into the dorm with me, and we’ll play all kinds of games.”
“Are you good at games?” she asked.
“Some,” he said, hoping it sounded modest. He didn’t know why, though. Usually he talked smack with the other artificials, knowing he was faster and smarter than many of them, even if his biological age was only nine and a half. But there was something about Lexa… He wanted her to feel like she was equal. She had been created to be his equal, right? He should treat her that way.
“Then I’d like to play,” she said shyly.
“Great!” He took a step closer. “We can play hide a
nd seek, except I’ll hide an object, and you have to try to guess where I hid it. Would you like that?”
“You’d hide it under the third pillow of the couch,” she said.
Quinn froze. “How did you know that?”
“Is that right?” she asked. “Did I guess?”
“Yes.” How did she know that? She didn’t even know they had a couch, let alone that it would be his first choice for hiding something. “You guessed right.”
She flushed—it completely changed the way she looked. It made her look more alive. “I guessed right.”
Quinn reached out a hand, forgetting Dr. Martine’s warning. Lexa’s eyes widened in panic, and she scooted against the headboard of her bed. “Who are you? What do you want?”
He froze. “I—I’m Quinn. Remember? Your friend.”
“Leave me alone! Help!” She raked her fingers through her white hair. “Seven, two, three-three, six, fourteen. Seven, two, three-three, six, fourteen.”
Not sure what else to do, he backed out of the room. As soon as the airlocks hissed shut, the clean room door opened. Dr. Martine looked disappointed.
Miss Maren looked smug. Another vocabulary word. It meant she was right about something, and Dr. Martine was wrong.
And that made her happy.
Later that day, once he was upstairs in the main training room and safely away from Miss Maren and her scientists, Quinn asked, “What did the numbers mean? When Lexa got scared, she said a bunch of numbers in a row. What are they?”
His instructor, Doc Mendal, had been trying to teach Quinn how to block an opponent wielding a knife, but he had no interest in training today. Doc backed away and huffed a breath. “Boy, you ask a lot of questions.”
“Because that’s what they designed me to do,” he said, feeling stubborn. But it was okay to be stubborn with Doc Mendal. He might have to run an extra mile or climb the rock wall without using his feet for disobeying, but that was easy.
Doc mumbled something about “Goddamned free will” then sighed. “Her reset pattern. Whenever she goes into overload, she recites her reset pattern. It’ll happen if she ever reboots or goes into sleep mode, too.”
“Do I have one of those?”
“Yes, but you don’t know what it is. It’s buried in your subconscious. It’ll only come out when you trip the recall.”
Quinn cocked his head to the side, considering. “So humans wouldn’t have those?”
“No.”
“So how do they react to trauma?”
“Badly,” Doc Mendal said. “That’s your advantage.” He glanced at the cameras mounted in the corners of the training room walls. “Enough talk. Assume close combat stance.”
Now it was Quinn’s turn to sigh. He faced away from his instructor, knees slightly bent, waiting for the attack. But when Doc wrapped him up tight in his arms, he whispered, “Remember what I said about how humans handle trauma. There will come a time when you need that advantage.”
Then he tossed Quinn to the mat.
Quinn lay awake long after lights-out. He worried about Lexa all alone in the dark, scared and not knowing where she was. Sometimes he had nightmares about his first few days in the prep room—he woke up in a cold sweat, wishing he had a mother like that girl who had come to visit two of the geneticists. The kid had cut her hand on the sharp edge of an open computer casing and had started to cry. She was almost Quinn’s age, but she cried a lot when the blood welled up on her palm. Her mother had raced over to cuddle her before fixing the cut.
Maybe that’s what Doc Mendal meant about humans reacting badly to trauma. Quinn wouldn’t have cried about a cut hand. Still, he couldn’t help but feel just a little envious of the girl. Of course, after that incident, Miss Maren had banned children from visiting the lab.
Unless they lived here.
He sighed in the dark. The sound was thin and sad. Lately, he’d begun to wonder what his point was—why had he been created? The K600s were very near human in every way, so why did the scientists make him? Why create a K700 that was more than human, only to treat him like he was an object, a thing. Miss Maren, when she wasn’t in a bad mood, would cluck over him and tell him he had a grand purpose. A destiny. But did artificials have those? To him, it sounded like a fancy word for being told what to do with his life.
A loud rap at his door made Quinn jump. He barely had time to sit up before Piers, the security lead at the lab, strode inside, grabbed him by the collar, and hauled him into the corridor.
“Ms. DeGaul said you upset the new asset today, beanpole.” Piers’s hand clamped hard onto his neck. “She said they told you not to contaminate the area, but you tried to touch little Lexie, anyway. You disobeyed.”
Quinn’s knees shook inside his thin pajama pants. Piers’s eyes had that wicked gleam, the one that spelled trouble. “I-I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just thought—”
“Save it for her.”
Oh, no. Piers was taking him to see Miss Maren. That only served to spike his fear to painful levels; his bladder felt too full and his lungs felt too empty. Piers was a slender man, but powerful, all wiry muscle, with a love of hurting small things. They trotted down the hall at an awful pace. Quinn had a hard time keeping up, so Piers gripped his biceps to drag him whenever he slowed. By the time they arrived outside of Miss Maren’s office, downstairs near the labs, his bare toes were stubbed and his fingers had gone numb from Piers’s grasp.
“Now you listen,” the man growled. “You answer her questions honestly or we’ll know. And you know what happens when you lie about lying.”
Quinn shuddered. Yes, he knew. The roundish scar on his back from the heated metal pipe was a permanent reminder that he couldn’t keep secrets. “I’ll tell the truth.”
“You better.” Piers turned and rapped on the door.
Following Miss Maren’s muffled “Come in,” Piers laid his palm on the scanner, and the door slid open. The office was becoming familiar, Quinn thought, with its priceless wood and velvet furniture and the high-tech vid panel behind her desk. And its familiarity was a bad, bad thing.
“Quinn, come here.” Her voice was cool, but he heard the little bit of glee in her tone.
He swallowed hard and went into the office. Piers shut the door behind him, leaving Quinn alone with Miss Maren. He glanced at the cameras in the corner of the room. Not alone, really. Somebody was always watching, which meant if he misbehaved, a dozen security guards—both artificial and human—and Piers could be here in an instant to bash his head in.
He’d seen that happen to one of the service artificials, once. She’d taken a swing at Miss Maren with a vase for calling her a “bolt,” which was an ugly word for artificial human. Before Quinn could skitter out of the way, the K600’s brains were splattered on the carpet. He’d vomited later, but at the time, all he could think was how those brains looked like curds of cheese flying from the servant’s skull.
“Please sit.”
Now he was really scared—she never said please. Miss Maren was smiling, and as he sat in the chair on the other side of her desk, she pushed the candy jar his way. He didn’t know what she wanted, but he knew he couldn’t refuse the candy. He took a small piece of taffy and held it in his fist.
“Dr. Martine tells me that Lexa is coming online remarkably well. Does that match your assessment?”
What did she want? How should he answer? A bead of sweat dripped from the nape of his neck and slid between his shoulder blades. “I, um, she seems proficient in communications?”
There, that was bland enough. Wasn’t it? Oh, please let that be right.
Miss Maren leaned back in her chair. For such a tiny lady, the chair made her look powerful and important. Kind of like a throne. Quinn blinked rapidly to clear that thought out of his head before he dreamed up a crown and scepter and started laughing at the picture his mind made.
“Of course she is—we made her and we’re very good. What I’m asking is if she seems…different s
omehow.”
Different? “She’s a girl,” he blurted out. “That makes her different, right?”
Miss Maren rolled her eyes. “Never mind. But hear me well. You will not touch her again, not until she’s out of processing. Am I clear?”
He nodded.
“I can’t hear you,” she said, her voice going as cold and hard as the stainless steel table in the procedure room. “Am I clear?”
“Yes, ma’am. Perfectly,” he squeaked.
“Very well. Just to be sure, though…” She pushed a button on the underside of her desk. Piers entered a few seconds later. “Take this young man down to the basement and make sure he understands his new orders.”
Quinn’s overfull bladder threatened to release when Piers smiled down at him. “Will do. He won’t forget after we’ve finished.”
The next morning, a com ping roused Quinn from a fitful sleep. He winced and rolled from bed, careful to favor his right side. Piers hadn’t burned him this time, but the bruised ribs would twinge for a few days, despite the rapid healing programmed into his DNA. Shuffling to his data pad took effort, and it was hard to keep his expression neutral as he answered the summons.
Dr. Martine’s frowning face appeared onscreen. “I’d like to see you in my office.”
Quinn tried to hold in a sigh and failed. “Yes, sir. I’ll get dressed.”
Once the link was disconnected, he sank down onto the foot of his bed. He was so tired of being afraid all the time. He was tired of second-guessing every move he made. He couldn’t even hide his thoughts—they’d built in a security feature to betray him. Whenever he lied, his shoulder twitched.
He was so tired of being a pawn, pushed around in a game between more powerful people. And he knew what a pawn was because Dr. Martine had taught him to play chess. It only took two months before Quinn beat him, too.
