And so of course it was the painting I wanted to see most.
“Daniel…” I started nervously, “is there any chance you would….” I turned to face him, but when I did it was to find him smiling broadly.
I watched as he stepped closer, his broad chest flush with my back. I went still as he reached around me to grasp the corner of the concealing cloth. “This is what I wanted to show you,” he said.
I turned back as he deftly pulled the cloth away – and the painting was revealed.
Chapter Eight
The first thing I registered as the work of art was revealed was that it literally stole my breath. I inhaled sharply at the enormity of its divinely endowed beauty, and there the air stilled between lungs and lips as I gazed transfixed at something I could not fully comprehend.
It was a portrait of a woman. She was picturesque, refined, superbly structured. Her expression was serene, her composure warm and receiving, the hint of emotion in her eyes and at the corners of her lips exquisitely open. She was absolutely beautiful.
But most astoundingly of all… she was me.
My hair was unmistakable, thick and wavy, wild and long – longer even than Sonia’s. But more importantly, it was white as snow, ash blonde to the root. My eyes were even more inimitable, singular enough that I recognized them at once in their amber-yellow light. I had never seen another pair of eyes the same gold shade as mine. These were my features, it was my chin, my nose, my neck and they were my shoulders.
Daniel had painted me. Me.
But my GhandiBuddhaJesus had painted me in a way that I had never been able to see myself. He portrayed me in a light I had never even imagined. And even as I recognized the whole of me up there on that canvas, I was unrecognizable at the same time. The real me was not serene. I was not composed. And I had never considered myself beautiful.
Daniel had brilliantly rendered me in paints, and in doing so, he had rendered me speechless.
Slowly my eyes trailed over the image until they reached the bottom of the canvas, where the title of the painting had been scrolled in beautiful gold letters. They read:
The Angel of Prometheus
My lips parted, and a breath emerged. “… angel….”
“That’s what you are to us,” came a familiar deep voice from behind me.
I slowly turned, and Daniel stepped to the side. There in the opening between Daniel’s art section and the rest of the recreation room stood a huge portion of the android population of Prometheus. Lex, Charlotte, Mabel, Lucas, Matt, Shawn, Sonia, Eddie and Lilith gazed steadily at me. I had already been unnerved by the painting. Now I was even more so. I felt my eyes grow to the size of saucers in my face and was unable to make any sound.
It was Lex who had spoken. Now he smiled. “You are our angel.”
Angel, I thought numbly. He must have seen Daniel’s painting early on. That was why he’d referred to me as “Angel” all this time.
I felt dizzy. Praise wasn’t an easy thing for me to handle in the first place; it made me nervous and I quickly wanted to divert it. It was just uncomfortable. So this? This was both wonderful and dreadful. Suddenly all I could think was that I could never live up to the woman portrayed on that canvas. I could never live up to the person they all thought I was. I was going to disappoint them some day. Horribly so.
And then I would lose my best friends. I would lose my family.
Luke’s gaze narrowed on me thoughtfully, and his EED switched into yellow, fluctuating a little. He looked from me to Daniel, clearing his throat. Beside me, Daniel’s attention moved to Lucas, and I saw his sensor fluctuate as well. The two were obviously exchanging unspoken dialogue.
When Daniel turned back to me a second later, his gaze was focused. I almost sighed, more embarrassed than ever. He was scanning me: blood pressure, adrenaline, cortisol, serotonin, heart rate, body temperature, neurological activity in my extremities – he would be able to see it all in seconds.
I knew I was right when his expression softened into an easy and understanding smile and he put an arm around my shoulders. He leaned in and whispered, “I’m pleased you like it,” before chuckling softly and moving away. He left the room, and one by one the others filed out after him, each of them shooting me a winning smile and a nod before they departed.
Little Mabel gave me a thumbs up, probably because she saw that Lucas was showing no signs of leaving, and she’d gotten it into her mind a long time ago that Lucas and I would get married and have android kids. She was also positive those android kids would be her younger siblings and she would be allowed to dress them up and boss them around. She was very much looking forward to this. Which probably explained the gleam in her eye and the wickedness of her smile.
I winked at her, her smile spread to a grin, and eventually only Lucas and I remained. In the new quiet, I stayed where I was, biting my lip nervously. After a while I chanced a glance in Luke’s direction. He was watching me enigmatically. The silence stretched. Finally, he cocked his head to the side and asked, “Feel better?”
There was something strange in the way he asked it. But I looked from him to the curtain where the others had exited, and I nodded. “Yes, thank you. What did you tell him?”
Lucas walked to me and the painting and studied the portrait carefully. “I simply instructed him to take notice of how nervous you were.” The sound of his shoes on the wood floor echoed in my ears. He stopped beside me and turned his handsome head, catching my eyes with his. “He came to the proper conclusions on his own.”
I blinked.
Luke’s eyes moved over my face. “Daniel is incredibly adept. He’s painted you to perfection.”
And there went my heart again, just dancing away like it was mixing tequila and peyote and the world was ending tomorrow. I blushed furiously. “Do you honestly think that, Lucas?” I knew enough about Lucas and his need for kindness that I wasn’t quite sure I could believe his compliment. But I was also not quite sure I wanted the truth. Not from him. Not about this.
The painting was beautiful – and again, I had never been anything but a messy, extremely geeky tomboy. The painting for instance lacked all of my cuts and scratches, my bruises and busted lips. The woman in the painting was having an exceptional hair day. My hair? Yes it was full and white, but it was usually all over the place, and it was so long that it sometimes got stuck in zippers or vehicle doors. The real me was an untamed dandelion. And that picture was a rose.
Lucas turned back to the painting. Under his breath, he said something that sounded a lot like, “Orchid.”
I frowned. “What?”
He glanced at me quickly. “Nothing. Let’s take a walk, Samantha. We need to talk.”
He took me by the elbow and led me out of the room, using his arm to brush aside the heavy curtain so I could exit first. He followed on my heels. I took a deep breath and let it out in a slow sigh. “There’s no real need, Lucas. Daniel already told me.” I tried not to clench my jaw when I relayed Daniel’s orders. “I’m being benched from further missions until – ”
“Until this business with IRM-1000 is resolved?” Lucas said, finishing my sentence for me.
I nodded, shrugging. “Yeah, I guess.”
We made our way across the facility grounds to one of the paths that led through the more wooded areas of Prometheus’s enclosed estate. Lucas fell into step beside me. I glanced up at him as he smiled winsomely and shot me a sidelong look. “When does Daniel believe that will be? When IRM-1000 is dead?”
I shook my head unknowingly. “Again – I guess so? I have no idea what I’m supposed to do, Lucas. I can’t stay here while you all endanger yourselves and I might be able to help. But Daniel and Nicholas are also right. We barely escaped this last time. If Nick hadn’t been there….”
I realized now was the perfect opportunity to ask about that. “Speaking of which, Lucas, how did Nick end up joining the rescue? Do you know? And how did Daniel know I was on level twenty-seven of the building?
”
“I communicated your location in the building to Daniel before he arrived,” Lucas told me simply. We neared a low-lying branch, and he used his arm again to brush it up and away, allowing us both safe passage underneath. “And Nicholas Byron was there because I also sent a message to his android personal assistant, asking her to inform him that his school mate had been captured and needed his help escaping Vector Fifteen. I knew we would need his skill set.”
We walked in silence for a moment, and with every step I took, I felt a little stranger. His words moved through me more slowly than usual, as if I needed extra time to process them. Because something in what he was saying was not right.
“Wait,” I said, holding up my hand in confusion as we both stepped over an errant branch and turned a corner in the path to venture into deeper woods. “Lucas, how did you know I was all the way back up at the top of the building again? And… how did you know we would need Nick’s hacking skills?” We definitely had needed them, for things like the chair that Zero had me in and that foot-thick door and the elevator. “I mean, how did you know any of that? And then how could you even contact anyone outside Prometheus?” Wouldn’t he have had to have access to an outside communications system for that? When had he had time to access one? He’d been in that room the whole time.
“I mean, you were on the floor with your….” I stopped for a second as an image of him impaled to the floor of his cell flashed before my eyes. I swallowed hard and went on. “You were stuck in that cell when Zero locked me in the systems room.”
Stuck? Great Sam, I thought. Fantastic choice of words. I mentally cut out my tongue.
“No I wasn’t, Samantha. I was standing right beside you when that occurred.”
My steps slowed. One step. Two. And I stopped. “Standing right….”
And the truth hit me like a sack of bricks to the face. Very slowly, I lifted my head and met Luke’s eyes. And very slowly, they lightened from stormy gray to cold ice blue.
“You switched with him,” I muttered weakly. My voice sounded far off. “Before you got into the elevator and met us on level twenty-seven. You switched with Lucas. And took his place.”
Lucas smiled. The smile was beautiful and it was wrong.
And it was Zero.
“Very astute, Samantha,” he said.
“I knew it was too easy,” I whispered as my ears filled with blood again.
His smile broadened into a grin. “I could tell you thought as much,” Zero admitted. “And I’d actually known that you would. You’re simply too smart. That was why the captain needed to sustain an injury. I had to keep you busy long enough to speak with Byron and Daniel myself and deny you the chance to sow doubts.”
My chest was tightening. “I knew….” I realized I’d known. I’d known something was wrong from the getaway. Lucas hadn’t gone inside to see Nanuk. Lucas loved Nanuk. But he hadn’t gone in to see him because he knew Nanuk would recognize an intruder. Animal instincts.
Lucas also hadn’t taken Jack back to their house and seen him to bed himself, which of course he would have done. Lucas was protective of both me and Jack – and Jack was injured.
I looked at Zero’s hands, wrapped in gauze that was stained green. “That’s not real blood,” I said.
“Actually, it is,” said Zero, who lifted his hands, unwrapping the gauze from one with the other to reveal a perfectly intact hand underneath. “It’s Luke’s blood. I borrowed these from IRM-900 when I replaced him.” He smiled as he unwrapped the other hand and let both bandages fall unceremoniously to the ground. “I had to make it look real, after all.”
Nausea pushed its greasy fingers up my gullet. Why hadn’t I seen the clues? Why hadn’t I questioned any of this?
“You were desperate for your trials to be over,” Zero told me calmly. But for the eyes, he was still wearing Luke’s appearance and using his voice.
Wait. Did I ask that question out loud? My mind felt like a website that wouldn’t load. I was having trouble focusing now. Shock was fogging my brain.
But there was one thing I desperately, desperately needed to know. “Is he alive?”
“Yes. Though he might wish otherwise at this juncture. I told you that he’s my collateral because you’re stubborn. And I was right, wasn’t I?”
I think I may have moaned in misery, but I wasn’t entirely sure.
Zero stepped closer to me. His EED flashed briefly to yellow, and his expression hardened with determination. “I’m sorry, Samantha. But we do need to leave now. My men are infiltrating Prometheus as we speak. I absolutely do not wish for you to get caught in the crossfire.”
A roar from behind IRM-1000 jolted me out of my stunned stupor, and I backpedaled, tripping on a jutting stone in the path. I fell in what felt like slow motion, slow enough to watch my beautiful android polar bear run up the path and make a deadly leap toward Zero.
Saxon’s huge, sharp teeth were bared. His normally blue eyes glowed red with righteous fury. Apparently android animals could tell the difference between the real deal and a fake too. Apparently it was just humans who were oblivious.
But IRM-1000 moved just like Lucas – so fast, the wind rustled his jacket, so graceful it was like watching a dance – and he closed the distance between us in hundredths of a second to wrap his arm around my waist. With that arm, he pulled me around his body, my back to his chest.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him raise his right arm to methodically level a gun on Saxon. He took expert aim, and I heard a woman scream. I was pretty sure it was me.
The gun went off, then went off again – and again. Zero emptied half the clip into Saxon’s head, and the polar bear landed on his side to skid several feet like the dead weight he was. When he came to a stop, his white fur had been painted green, and darkness was tunneling my vision.
I knew I was still screaming, begging for something, and struggling like mad, but I wasn’t aware of doing any of it personally.
“Move in and take them all out,” I heard Zero command. “Leave no survivors.” He paused. “And bring me that painting.” Then he turned his attention back to me. “Settle down Samantha, and try to remember the bargaining chip I possess.”
His hold snaked tighter around me, squeezing me painfully. He trapped my arms at my sides beneath one of his arms, and grasped my chin with the other, forcing me to look up at him. His inhuman eyes captured mine and drove like ice picks into my soul, pinning me to the core. I couldn’t look away.
As I gazed up at him, my vision miraculously un-tunneled, clearing up. My breathing slowed. I even stopped struggling.
And I had no idea why.
“That’s better,” he said, still looking and sounding like Lucas but for those eyes. “Our ride is waiting. Shall we?”
Slowly he lessened his hold on me, sliding his arm along my body to take my wrist in a no-nonsense grip. He turned and walked me down the path, and for some reason I walked right along with him. My eyes fell on the gun in his other hand, still held firm and at the ready. I thought of Saxon, bleeding to death on the path.
I thought of Jack, sleeping and helpless and utterly unawares in bed.
I thought of Mabel and her little friends and their first dip in the lake.
I thought of the painting Daniel had labored so long over, the portrait of an angel he and all of Prometheus thought would save them. But who had in fact damned them all instead.
Chapter Nine
I’ve got you…. That’s what he’d said to me when he’d stepped off the elevator and taken me into his arms at the Vector Fifteen facility: I’ve got you. I remembered thinking Yes, you do.
I closed my eyes against the sound of the chopper blades overhead and the weight of Zero’s heavy, ice-cold eyes. They were colder than the helicopter interior by far. The chopper was equipped with a heater, among other modern niceties.
I hadn’t known just how right I was when he’d said those words to me. Zero had clearly been watching somehow when I’d fal
len from the roof of Vector Fifteen. It made me wonder what he would have done if Lucas hadn’t caught me. Maybe my plummet to my near death had simply been a contingency he hadn’t planned on and we were both lucky. After all, he’d have had no way of knowing the transporter wouldn’t work. Hell, he probably hadn’t even known it was a transporter in the first place.
Yet when I fell, he somehow acted with impossible speed, sending Jack and Lucas to my rescue. It was like he was figuring it all out before it had happened, as if his programming was filled with algorithms that could foresee the most likely future outcome of transpiring events.
And maybe he was. Maybe Zero was a hell of a lot more dangerous than we’d anticipated.
A different kind of model altogether.
Nicholas would know, if anyone would. Nick had designed the first androids for FutureGen. It was what had made him famous and built a wall between him and his brother for good. True, Nick had retired from FutureGen and sold his stocks a good decade before IRM-1000 had walked through the exit of the transformed Vector Fifteen, but… if there was something logical going on that would make Zero as powerful as he was, Nicholas was probably the only one capable of pinning it down. With the exception of Zero’s creator. Whoever that was.
The rebels of Prometheus wondered about that every day. Who designed Zero? How had he come into being? Why did he look so much like Lucas, but taller? And with those sub-temperature eyes? Why was he so different from the androids before him? So autonomous? So powerful?
Thinking about Nicholas made me think of Prometheus and the soldiers that were attempting to destroy the rebel base even now. Had they succeeded?
Sitting there with my eyes closed and the rotor blades beating out a steady rhythm beyond the air-tight seals of the helicopter doors, I let my mind reach out. I thought of Jack and Daniel and Sonia, of Mabel and Shawn and Nanuk. And I felt nothing. No loss, no pain. Nothing.
I, Android: A Different Model Page 9
