I felt blood drain from my face. The ground tilted a little under my boots.
I licked my lips nervously and asked, “There was never any bounty on Prometheus?”
“Oh there was,” he said. “There is. Actually, there are two. But like I said, the announcement you caught wind of was the spare. It killed two birds with one stone, so to speak. Because of the broadcast, you were adequately distracted and confined. And yet, should any of you manage to be caught and turned in, IRM-1000 certainly wouldn’t have objected.”
My mind spun. “Give Jack the antidote, Ben. I kept my word. I’m here.”
“Yes, you did and yes, you are,” he admitted freely. “And the antidote has already been administered.” He stepped to the side and gestured fluidly. I followed the line of his gesture to the gazebo behind him. The gazebo’s lights switched on, at last revealing the darkness inside. There in the center of the covered space lay a prone and bound man.
He was unconscious. But he was breathing. Hell, he was snoring. Now that I had a definitive figure to concentrate on, I was able to hear him even from where I stood.
Relief flooded me, but it was short lived. The lights switching on probably meant Ben had help somewhere out there, at least one other person who was most likely standing by the park’s main switchboard. That was bad enough. The other problem was that now that the poison issue had been dealt with, there was nothing to stop Ben from absconding with me. And I needed more time.
So I asked, “How did you do it, Ben? How did you know I would be there in that alley, on that street? And….” I thought of his injuries and how horrible they were. This was something I wanted to know anyway. After a tight swallow, I managed to ask, “Did you do it yourself?”
He looked at me with that curiosity again. “You mean did I harm myself? To get your attention and play upon your sympathies?”
I didn’t have to nod for him to know that’s exactly what I meant, but I wanted him to keep talking. “You looked like you’d been in the trenches.”
The trenches were the worst areas of the android dumps that humans used to dispose of the machinated people they no longer had use for. They were aptly named after the trenches of World War I. Akin to ditches from Hell, they were dips and valleys filled with the dismembered and mutilated bodies of androids that had either malfunctioned or been destroyed in battle. The most horrible aspect of the trenches were that not all of its occupants were inanimate. And most were still conscious on some level.
Androids could die. Just like computers – and just like humans – could die. So often, it was possible to revive a human. But eventually, the “life” just went out of them. They were brain dead and it was time for them to give up. And move on. That was what android death was like too. At that point, it did little to no good to attempt to repair them because their memories were gone, their personalities erased, everything that had made them who and what they were was no more. Then it was time for a funeral.
The trenches however, were filled with androids who remembered. They still thought. Some of them could even still speak. But new models came out or old ones dared to disobey or damaged parts became too expensive to have repaired. And the android went into the trenches.
“They were severe wounds, I admit,” Ben said, his tone a little softer than before. “And I honestly wasn’t certain whether you’d be capable of repairing me entirely.” Something passed before his eyes, something that put a dent in the chill of his expression. But it was gone as soon as it had come. “But you really are everything they say you are, Samantha.”
I would have liked to be flattered by the compliment, but I was in such a miserable situation, I was only two minutes on the timeline after contemplating suicide – and too much was riding on this moment.
I wondered how long it would take the recycling vents to purify the air in Prometheus’s underground facility. I wondered… if my plan had worked at all. Most of all, I wondered how soon I would know.
Over the course of my life, I’d realized time was not a constant as so many physicists believed. The speed at which it moved most definitely changed, slowing down like a watched pot of water when you were desperate for the hour to strike, and speeding up like a car on last lap of the Indie 500 – when all you needed was a few extra seconds. As a matter of fact, I now knew with absolute certainty that time could move at two different rates at once.
Such as now.
At that moment, time was slipping from my grasp in that park square. And everywhere else, it was advancing at the pace of a frozen zombie. Who was limping. Because a stray cat stole his foot for a snack.
“Ben… did you inflict those wounds on yourself?” I questioned, again both stalling and genuinely curious.
“Yes and no,” he told me with serene candidness. “When IRM-1000 gathered together his handful of chosen hunters, the bounty he offered us was inestimable. What you caught wind of?” He shook his head with a wry smile. “It was nothing compared to what we were promised. Should any of us exist for centuries, we would never again receive a proposition so great. And part of it was delivered up front. Hence, I had no trouble enlisting the aid of my own trusted team of hunters to assist me in the job.”
Trusted team, I thought with alarm. “Team” meant definitely more than one.
“And,” Ben shrugged, smiling again, “when an android hunter is given an order by his employer, he in turn has no trouble carrying it out. The injuries were done to me,” he said, still calm and direct. “But I ordered them carried out.”
While I digested that, he took a step toward me. The sound was loud, despite the muffling snow beneath his shoe. No doubt my fear amplified it for me. I couldn’t help but take a step back.
But he seemed neither surprised nor upset by my reaction. He only watched me.
“What was the bounty?” I asked.
“I’m afraid that’s… need-to-know,” he told me reluctantly. “However I will disclose that contrary to what you’ve been lead to believe, you Samantha are in fact the only member of Prometheus that IRM-1000 wants alive and unharmed. The others are conveniently expendable.”
A chill went through me. Hard.
“But….” I stumbled over my own speech. If that were true, Ben could have let Jack die. He could have ordered that I destroy the other androids in Prometheus rather than deactivate them. But he didn’t. In fact, he’d caused as little harm as possible.
Why? Dead was definitely easier.
So… was it possible his time with us had shaped his decisions in some way?
No. As much as I would have loved to believe it, I found it implausible. After all, if it had, would he still be doing what he was doing right now?
He took another step toward me, and this time I stayed where I was because my eyes flicked to his legs and my mind was distracted. Ben wouldn’t have been able to step toward me if it hadn’t been for Prometheus. Before we’d helped him, he hadn’t had a leg to step forward with. It didn’t matter that the injuries had been of his own sick design. We hadn’t known. We’d simply seen someone in need and vowed to help any way we could.
We had repaired him meticulously. I had trusted him. We’d welcomed him into our fold. And in the wake of tragedy too…. The son of a bitch had even been at the funeral. He’d heard me sing. Not even Jonathan had been able to hear me sing.
And Ben’s injuries had been so costly, they were part of the reason we’d had to raid the shipment tonight.
Now my heart flipped as further recognition walloped me. Crap, I thought numbly. Had that been Ben’s plan all along too?
“Ben is short for Benedict Arnold, isn’t it?” I asked, my teeth clenched tightly together. I couldn’t tell at that point whether it was from cold, anxiety, mounting righteous fury or a nerve-wracking combination of all three.
“If it helps you make sense of my actions, feel free to call me by any name you wish,” Ben told me, his composure as tranquil and un-ruffled as ever. But that certain something was back in his eyes ag
ain, further thawing the cold in his expression. “I can’t deny I deserve it.”
He glanced up and over my shoulder.
I knew what the move meant; there was someone behind me. But there was no time to turn around. Whoever had snuck up on me was clearly there to subdue me. There were a number of ways they could do this without causing damage in a struggle, and most of them involved injectable drugs or chloroform, neither of which I wanted in my system.
The only thing I could think of doing was what came to me instinctively. I ducked the grasp of the person behind me by simply dropping straight down. Just as I’d suspected, there was a male android at my back with a folded white cloth in one hand. His swiping attempt to grab ahold of me missed by a split second.
I swore under my breath, vowed to track down and beat up the idiot who’d recently made chloroform odorless, and rolled a distance to jump back to my feet. There, I looked from Ben to the stranger, weighing my options.
They looked at me right back.
The newcomer was dressed in the same black military-style uniform as Ben, but he was blond with dark green eyes. He glanced questioningly at his boss, but Ben’s expression hadn’t changed. He still peered at me with curiosity more than anything.
“Is it that you intend to fight me now that you know the captain is safe or that you would rather not be drugged?” he asked.
“A little of the first and a lot of the second,” I replied.
Ben’s lips curled in a small smile. He glanced at the other man and gave him the slightest nod. The other man relaxed and tucked the white rag into some inside pocket within his dark clothing.
“Very well, I’m willing to offer an accord,” said Ben as he approached me again. “Come with me quietly and I see no reason to use any kind of force. In fact, I would definitely rather not.”
“You can’t just leave Jack on the ground like that,” I told him hastily. Come on guys! Daniel! Sonia! Where are you? To Ben, I said, “He’ll freeze to death.”
“Oh, there’s no cause for worry there. He’s coming with us too.”
I froze. “He what?”
“He’s to be turned over to IRM-1000 along with you, Samantha. As I said, you’re the vital mark. But my employer will have nothing against a bonus delivery.”
“That wasn’t part of the deal!” I exclaimed. But even as I objected, I realized Ben had never specified that Jack would be released. Only that he’d be given the antidote.
Ben breathed deeply through his nose as if attempting to release building tension. He didn’t even really need to breathe, so I recognized that the gesture was purely for my benefit. He wanted me to know I was trying his patience.
As he did this, he resumed his pace toward me to shorten the distance between us. Against my better judgement, I moved several paces further back. I couldn’t help it. I needed more time!
Ben came to a full stop and sighed. The EED at his temple turned yellow, then flashed red. My eyes widened and my heart skipped a beat as I contemplated all the things he could have been doing in that moment. Such as contacting Zero.
His eyes cut to my boots, where I was unconsciously taking yet another step back. “Just so we’re clear,” he said when the sensor returned to yellow beside his eye and stayed there, “There will be no accord, I take it.”
I swallowed hard, then opened my mouth to reply.
“No. Definitely not,” came a man’s voice.
My head snapped in the direction it had come from, but my eyes could make out absolutely nothing in that darkness before all Hell broke loose in the form of weapon blasts and flying snow, and I was diving for cover.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Shots were fired, tearing like thunder through the night, and were quickly followed by several more in quick succession. I squealed in surprise and Ben shouted orders as I dropped to the ground, instinctively covering my head even though I was well aware it would do no good against bullets.
All around me footsteps rang out, sounding clearly despite the snow-covered ground. Androids just weighed too much to move quietly when they were in a hurry. But the footfalls were soon drowned out by intensifying salvo and angry voices. Bits of snow were violently uprooted far too close to my crouched body and sent flying. I stared at the empty nicks in the snow left behind and realized I might just be taken out of the picture tonight after all.
The shots were becoming gratuitous, and my ears were ringing.
“Stop firing, idiots!” someone yelled, straining to be heard over the shooting.
“Gray, cover Hart!” Ben commanded even louder. I looked up, peeking from beneath my fingers to find him attempting to run toward me. But explosive shots in the snow of his path repeatedly brought him up short. To my left, the man who must have been “Gray,” the hunter who’d been working with Ben, was in the same boat. He continuously pushed to get to me, but was unable to make any real progress due to obscene amounts of gunfire.
I was fairly sure a few of those bullets had found their marks in Ben or Gray or both, and as androids they’d simply managed to work past the pain – or turn off their pain sensors altogether.
The firing paused long enough for someone to get a few words of warning out. “We’re taking her off your hands, Cipher! Back off now or become an expenditure!” Then the barrage began once more in full force.
I didn’t recognize the voice, but my guess was it was coming from another bounty hunter. Or perhaps several. Ben apparently had competition – and hadn’t planned this as covertly as he’d thought. More importantly, the gunfire was sure to gain the attention of more company, such as the police or Zero’s soldiers.
I wondered whether these bounty hunters were the ones who’d heard IRM-1000’s public announcement and wanted to cash in on the prize, or the “chosen few” that Zero had made his private offer to beforehand. I decided it had to be the former and not the latter because I had a feeling IRM-1000’s hand picked wouldn’t jeopardize the very mark they were tasked with bringing in.
Ben bellowed a few choice swear words over the cacophony of bullets splitting the air. “You’ll kill the score, damn it!” he pointed out furiously.
The firing continued for another few seconds, and I felt like I might piss my pants when a few chunks of snow went sailing now less than a meter from me. Then it slowed, but didn’t stop. Whatever hunters were out there were well aware that if they allowed Ben to get to me, it would be over.
I needed cover.
The gazebo would provide a barrier at least. The lower half of it was wood with metal siding. If I could make it to the structure, I could pull Jack’s body against that metal wall and we could crouch behind its shielding until this idiocy was over. It was better than nothing. I couldn’t stay where I was; the bullets were getting reckless – and closer.
I counted to ten, watched and listened to the gunfire, and then swallowed hard and forced myself to move. As my boots pounded out the first few feet, I heard several men call out at once. One of them was Ben, probably telling me to stop. I was fairly certain another was his co-hunter Gray, agreeing with him. And the competing hunter’s voice rang out again as well.
“Hold your fire!”
But it was too late. A final shot rang out in time with his command, and this one didn’t displace any snow. Instead, it displaced flesh, muscle, and blood.
Mine.
Getting shot doesn’t hurt, not at first, at least not the way one might imagine thanks to movies, television and video games. You don’t feel the bullet tearing through your body. Rather, you feel an immense impact, as if someone punched you extremely hard. It can knock the wind out of you if it hits just right. But there’s no Platoon-ending style body jerking, and nothing quite worthy of Hollywood. I’d once seen a woman shot point-blank in the chest with four rounds that barely missed her heart. All she’d done is bend forward a little as the bullets kept coming, her hands touching her mouth and throat in that ancient human gesture that translated to profound disbelief at what was happenin
g.
It wasn’t quite that profound an experience for me as the bullet struck me on my way to the gazebo. Instead, I felt it impact with my left side, and at first I thought it was Ben or Gray catching up to me. I looked down, expecting to fall, a heavy android body pressing me into the snow. But that didn’t happen. There was just snow and night and the sound of my boots as they broke through the fresh white fall ahead of me.
It wasn’t until two or three steps after the impact that I felt it for what it actually was. A kind of hard burning yawned open at my side, sudden and horrid and deep, and I stumbled. The burning spread to a deep throb that just felt wrong, and then of all things, I sensed snow making its way into the gap between my gloves and my jacket sleeve. I hated that.
But it made me realize I was on my hands and knees.
I pushed myself up into a kneeling position as my heart pounded like a static waterfall in my ears and all outside sound became muffled. Through my tunneling senses, I heard someone yelling, there was more swearing growing ever distant, and then I felt through the ground the pounding of running feet.
But all I could see was the snow.
There was a patch of it in front of me, a short distance from my left knee that had my attention like blinders. The snow was bright, beautiful red.
My blood, I thought as the pain began to go numb. Hell, my inner voice mused, I think I’ve been shot. “Idiots,” I whispered. At least, I was pretty sure I did. I couldn’t be sure because sound was dissipating just like physical sensation, drowning out in a cacophonous silence. There was no other way to describe it.
I felt myself moving and wondered if the snow would be cold on my face when I fell on it. But the ground retreated rather than coming closer as I assumed it would. After a few seconds, I realized I wasn’t actually falling. Strong arms had enveloped me and I was being carried. There were jolts of impact going through me, but they didn’t hurt either. I felt weightless to myself, devoid of mass and structure.
I, Android: A Different Model Page 37
