“Get out of here!” X yelled. He clutched his head and fell to his knees. “Get out of here!” He shot bullets into the sky.
“Crap, that android’s crazy!” one of the men cried.
The men ran away and the buzzing stopped, leaving behind a deadening silence in his head that he didn’t know how to process.
Dr. Crenshaw looked at X, shocked. “The algorithm chip is working now. That was convenient.” He helped X up. “Just out of curiosity—did you shoot to kill or to scare?”
“To scare.”
“Excellent. I don’t condone violence. You know that,” Dr. Crenshaw said, wagging his finger. Then he smiled. “But nice job.” His contact lens lit up as he analyzed a string of code—X hadn’t even noticed that the doctor had been wearing lenses.
“Commander Fahrens, call the Prime Minister’s office. Tell him to send an escort vehicle. We just got attacked by some punks at the harbor.”
“What do we do now?” X asked.
“We wait,” Dr. Crenshaw said. “We might as well go back to the yacht. I need another one of those bruschettas after that ordeal.”
Dr. Crenshaw started back toward the yacht while whistling a jazz song, his hands behind his back.
X followed him, but the world turned upside down and morphed into lines of code that scrolled across his vision in a blur. Then they stopped and a message blinked in front of him: UPGRADE COMPLETE.
X opened his eyes and felt his algorithm chip buzzing loudly and almost desperately. He was back on the street in the UEA, and the men from before had surrounded him and had their hands all over him, trying to get into his black box.
“Open up, stupid android!” the Asian man cried. He took his knife to X’s throat, but before he could make contact, X grabbed the knife and broke the man’s hand. He knocked all of the men into the air with a sweeping kick across the ground and jolted them with a blast of electricity from his hands. They hit the ground convulsing.
X stood up. His suit was torn, buttons missing. A crowd of bystanders had surrounded him, watching.
He looked around, and the crowd dissipated in fear.
He walked back to the UEA headquarters, his guns drawn the entire time.
Chapter 8
X and Shortcut entered the briefing room at the same time. Shortcut was covered in dirt and had grass stains all over his face. X’s suit was still ripped.
Fahrens, who was studying a string of data, looked at them quizzically. “What happened to you two?”
X and Shortcut looked at each other, surprised, and then said at the same time, “Nothing, sir.”
“We deciphered the data,” Fahrens said. “Nice job, Mr. Aaronheart. Your theory was correct. I’ve just ordered the engineering team to upload the data to the big screen.
Shortcut took off his coat and said in a subdued tone, “Glad it worked, sir.”
“We’ll have to act quickly,” X said as he changed into a new suit. “The data probably won’t be relevant for much longer.”
“Indeed,” Fahrens said. “We can’t say for sure how many androids Crenshaw dropped in the city, but it’s at least a dozen. It would be useless to pinpoint all of them. But if we can at least take a few of them out, that would send a powerful message.”
“Sir, the data is ready,” an android engineer said.
Fahrens snapped his fingers. “Let’s get ready, everyone!”
A video of footage of the park where the android sentry was located appeared on the screen. They watched as Xadrian walked by and several people ran for their lives. The android laughed and then flipped them off. “You’re lucky I’m not here to kill you today!”
Then he saw the android sentry. “There you are.”
He hurried to the sentry with a bowlegged run. “Hey, are you there? Can you hear me?”
“Who is he talking to?” Shortcut asked.
“Fahrens? X? Shortcut?” Xadrian asked.
“What the—” Fahrens said.
“Listen, Mama wanted me to deliver you another message since you’re watching this now.”
He pulled his disk off his back and displayed the screen embedded inside. Jeanette Crenshaw appeared again.
“I really like you three,” Jeanette said, laughing. “Smart. Resourceful. So optimistic. But I’m not backing down. I’m keeping the promise I made. I’m already one step ahead of you. Congratulations. By uploading the data from your android sentry to your network, you’ve infected it with a special virus I created just for you. The UEA network is now under my control until you give me what I want.”
“I don’t believe you,” Fahrens said under his breath.
An android engineer put his hands on his head. “Commander! We just got kicked offline. The entire UEA just lost Internet access.”
Jeanette laughed and Xadrian laughed with her.
“Yeah, you guys can’t outwit Mama!” Xadrian said.
The video footage cut to black, but Crenshaw’s voice remained. “Give me what I want and I’ll end your misery.”
Shortcut whistled. “Well then. This just got interesting.”
“That message was embedded in the sentry,” X said. “She knew we would find it.”
“One step ahead of us, as usual,” Fahrens said.
A red telephone on the wall rang. Fahrens sighed and answered. “Yes, Councilman. The network is down. It’s down for the entire UEA. Yes, sir, you heard me correctly. That’s why you had to call me on a landline … Yes, we’re looking into it … Yes, X is right here. We’ll figure this out, I assure you.”
He hung up and braced himself against the wall. “The Council is furious. This is bad.”
“We’ll find those androids and incapacitate them,” Shortcut said. “Hopefully, that will restore the network.”
“Hopefully?” Fahrens asked. “Is that all we can do now, hope? The Internet is down. Everything functions off the UEA network. It’s supposed to be indestructible. Businesses are going to be crushed. People can’t communicate. Drones and robots won’t receive orders and will not perform their daily duties. This is a disaster.”
X harrumphed. “It seems like the only thing we’re doing is reacting. Crenshaw strikes, we react. She strikes again, we react.”
“What do you suggest we do?” Shortcut asked.
“Strike,” X said. “Crenshaw has the advantage, but she gave us one, too.”
“How can we possibly have an advantage right now?” Shortcut asked.
“The network is gone,” X said. “Which means we can’t track her. It also means—”
“She can’t track us,” Shortcut said. “Brilliant. But don’t you think she’s smarter than that? She probably predicted that we’d be having this revelation right now.”
“Not if we don’t act like it,” X said. “Remember Xadrian? He wasn’t equipped for battle. He was equipped for something else. I couldn’t tell what.”
“But Crenshaw is going to expect us to hunt one of her androids down.”
“She’ll be expecting us to try to destroy her entire crew,” X said. “Maybe we will, but that’s not important right now. We have to find some of her androids and see if we can learn anything about her motives. Her androids are not very intelligent, so that shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Finding Crenshaw is more important,” Fahrens said.
X remembered the memory of Dr. Crenshaw. “No. She’s not inside the UEA.”
“How do you know that?” Fahrens asked.
“A hunch.”
“Well, we don’t have any other leads,” Fahrens said. “Good luck, gentlemen.”
“So what exactly are we going to do?” Shortcut asked.
X’s eyes turned red. “We’re going android hunting.”
Chapter 9
Jazzlyn had been eyeing the bakery for a few hours. She couldn’t resist the delicious smells of doughnuts, danishes and coffee. She sat on the patio of a coffee shop across the street as people passed by laughing and cheering and talking.
&nbs
p; She wore sunglasses, a brown gabardine jacket, and jeans. She read the news about Crenshaw’s latest attack on a digital screen but kept one eye on the bakery. She watched as the baking staff locked up all the displays, wheeled bread into the back and shut off the lights. One of the staff picked up an éclair that had fallen on the floor; Jazzlyn could almost taste it, the soft, creamy filling against her teeth.
“I’m so hungry, Smoochy,” she whispered. She wiped a cut near her eye that was still healing from her fight with X. “We haven’t eaten in two days. All thanks to that stupid android. And we can’t sell those parts and make any money until we leave this place. What a bad situation to be in, huh, honey?”
Smoochums cooed from inside her dress.
The baker changed a digital sign from “Open” to “Closed.” She watched as he took off his cap, shut the blinds, paid his staff, locked the store, and took off on a flying scooter.
Jazzlyn stared after him to make sure he didn’t turn around. She decided to wait longer than she thought she needed, just in case. She half sang, half hummed as if reciting a nursery rhyme. “The baker goes around the corner at three, corner at three, corner at three … the baker goes around the corner at three, then I cleaned him dry …”
She smirked and stood up. Then her digital screen went dark and her lens stopped working. All around her, the same thing happened to everyone else on the street.
“What the?” Jazzlyn asked. She tried to reestablish her connection, but she couldn’t.
Everyone along the street stopped and tried to figure out what had happened. People stood scratching their heads and talking to each other, distressed and murmuring about whether Jeanette Crenshaw had anything to do with it.
“The UEA network must be down,” Jazzlyn said, pushing her sunglasses closer to her eyes. “Never thought that was possible. Oh well. Let’s take this opportunity and turn it into cake, Smoochy.”
Amidst the confusion, Jazzlyn made her way across the street and into the loading area behind the bakery. Smoke rose from a sewer grate, lowering her visibility. She squinted through the smoke—there was a long road that stretched back toward a dock, but it was empty since all the delivery vehicles had left for the day.
She crept up to a window. She peered inside and saw a green light blinking on the wall—a security panel. It wasn’t armed, probably because the network was down.
She opened a dumpster, rooted around and found a broken knife blade. She pulled it out and poked a very small hole in the glass, enough to break only the corner. Smoochums fluttered out of her chest and sped through the hole. A few moments later, the deadbolt moved and the door slid open.
She caught the door and scooted inside, shutting it before it could make a sound. She bolted the lock shut behind her.
She was in the kitchen, and she moved quietly among tall racks and refrigerators full of dough. The strong smell of leavened bread made her chest rise in excitement. The tables were speckled with flour even though they had been wiped down. The floor was still wet from a recent mopping; the mop and bucket rested in the corner.
This must be the kind of baker who resisted technology. Any other place would have had drones to clean up so that he could focus on doing what he loved. It was kind of silly, cleaning up a place yourself. Jazzlyn didn’t like robots, but she loved them when they did the things you didn’t want to do.
She came to the front of the bakery and browsed the displays. She pulled out a burlap sack and whispered, “Time to eat.”
Settling on the éclairs first, she grabbed them and stuffed a few into her mouth, chewing furiously.
She saw pretzels—homemade, rock hard, and speckled with salt.
“They’re the best!” she said, stuffing them into her bag. “This whole case could feed me for days. Heh heh.”
She scooped doughnuts into the bag, wrapping them in plastic first so that the sugar wouldn’t get all over the other pastries.
She shouldered her bag and looked around to make sure there wasn’t anything else she could take. Her gaze stopped at the self-service coffee machine.
“Why not?” she asked herself. “After all I’ve been through, a girl needs a coffee.” She set the bag on the counter and swiped a to-go cup with a cardboard cup holder around it. She placed it under the machine and made herself a mocha latte. Then she broke off a piece of biscotti from the stack on the counter, dipped it in the cup and popped it into her mouth, chewing with delight. She grabbed the cup with both hands and smiled.
She sipped, leaving a mustache of foam on her upper lip. She closed her eyes as the tendrils of aromas entered her nose. She remembered home, the caress of her mother and father, how life had been so much simpler in the badlands then. The normal house, the manicured lawn that her dad had cut every other day, airplanes easing by, an occasional android who’d show up with a cleaning crew. She remembered how everything was … quiet. No computers blinking or calculating things. Just the trees swaying outside the house, the cold wind, the house settling with creaking sounds that made you spook in the middle of the night but were okay because they were just floorboards or the foundation or the window panes. Nothing dangerous.
As she made it down to the bitter grounds at the bottom of the cup, she tasted fire, the same smoke and fire that she had seen when the UEA soldiers had marched on her town and wreaked havoc. The fire she had seen when the house went up in flames. The smoke she had smelled when she and her mom, dad, and St. Bernard puppy had to retreat into the wilderness with nothing to their name but a few dollars, a backpack filled with burnt clothes, and Styrofoam cups bursting with soil and her dad’s favorite flowers that he had managed to save from the wreckage.
Flowers. There was a single geranium in a glass on the counter. It had been well taken care of, and the water in the glass was clear.
“So nice to see some of the natural world here,” Jazzlyn said. And then her respect for the baker went up. She felt bad about stealing from him—any man who liked flowers was okay by her—but she had to do what she had to do. Maybe if she was ever back in the UEA, she’d stop by and actually buy something from him. Maybe a dozen bagels, just for having the geranium.
She set the empty cup down on the counter, but then thought twice about it.
“Not a good idea,” she said. “They’ll swab my DNA for sure if I leave this here.” She crumpled the cup and put it in the bag. “Time to go, Smoochums.”
She waited for Smoochums to respond, but she didn’t hear anything. “Smoochums?”
She entered the kitchen and heard a gun cock. The baker was there, his toque still on and an angry look in his eyes. He had tattoos of mermaids all down his left arm, and a silver earring in his left ear.
“Who are you?” the baker asked.
“Just passing through,” Jazzlyn said, putting her hands up. “But I’ll be a pain in your ass if you don’t give me back my cockroach.”
“You’re just a common thief!” the baker said. “You’re seizing this opportunity to rip me off. I built this business with my bare hands, and I’m not going to let you destroy it. Put the bag down.”
Jazzlyn stared at him incredulously.
The baker shot the wall next to her, making her jump.
“Okay, man,” Jazzlyn said, throwing the bag on the baking table. “Just at least let me have another danish and I’ll be out of here. I’ll even put everything back where I found it if you want.” As she spoke, she felt the rest of her cockroaches swarming around her waist.
“Do it,” the baker said. “Or I’ll kill you right here. The cops won’t ever know because I’ll dump you in the sea.”
“Jesus,” Jazzlyn said. “What are you, a baker or a serial killer?”
“Don’t ever mess with an entrepreneur and his business!” the baker said, red-faced.
“Yeah. That seems to be a common trend among you UEA folks.”
Jazzlyn grabbed the bag and entered the bakery display area again as the baker held the gun to her head.
“Y
ou from the badlands?” the baker asked.
“I’m from nowhere,” Jazzlyn said, returning the éclairs. She groaned and bent over, clutching her chest. “What’s the matter with you?” the baker asked.
“Chest pains,” she said. She dropped the bag and a bunch of pastries rolled out. A few cockroaches also rolled out of the cuffs of her jeans and scurried silently across the floor.
Jazzlyn bent over and grabbed the bag. “I hate being caught. Makes me nervous. If you turn me in, I’ll be in jail for a while. I just got out, too. I really, really, really, don’t want to go back.”
She kept talking even though it was nonsense. From the corner of her eye, she saw the cockroaches race into the kitchen.
“Why don’t you just come to the UEA, start a business like the rest of us?” the baker said. “Anyone can make a living in the UEA. If it weren’t for all the opportunity here, I’d be on the street or on drugs back home. This place saved my life.”
“I’m happy for you,” Jazzlyn said, replacing the last of the éclairs. “Really, I am. Now will you let me go?”
“You’re lucky I can’t call the cops.”
“Will you let me go?” Jazzlyn asked again.
The man’s grip on the gun wavered and he pursed his lips.
Jazzlyn put her hands up and gave him the most sincere look she could fake. She spoke softly. “I was just hungry. I promise I’ll never come around here again.”
CRASH! The glass surrounding Smoochums crashed to the floor. When the baker whipped around to see what had happened, Jazzlyn reached into her jacket, pulled out a steel pipe and hit him on the head with it, knocking him out.
“You should have pulled the trigger,” she said. “Just for that, I’m stealing all of your crap again. I didn’t even get to compliment you about your geranium.”
She loaded up the bag in a flash and ran into the kitchen, gathering the cockroaches into her hand. She looked back at the man lying on the floor next to his gun, and then at the geranium. She shook it out of her mind as she left the bakery.
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