Single Wired Female (Wired for Love Book 2) (10 page)

Tricia laughed. She laughed and laughed until tears began to pour from her eyes. “Stephen, I have an organization that is either monitoring me or hunting me down to see what it is I am up to after their grand experiment. The only murdering I want to do is a metaphorical murder of the lie I have had to live now for months. If you truly believe that we are equals or have the potential to be equals then you must trust me. I am not an evil robot, hell-bent on world destruction or domination. I am just a lost girl who wants to pick up the broken pieces of her life.”

“Okay, then, I will do it. But I have to go change, get a shower, and head to work before my day gets worse. Here’s my device code, so please call me after 5:00 p.m. I will rendezvous with you somewhere and see about removing that restraint.”

Tricia thought about Stephen’s words and the attack he had suffered for her. She had picked up on the fact that he lived close, being that he was walking, and had gotten attacked during his trip to see her. She quickly got up and followed him out of the store and kept her distance as she tailed him back to what she assumed was his house.

Following him was a rash move but she needed to know if he was telling the truth. He walked briskly, brushing past other fast-walking people on their way to work or whatever it was that demanded haste. He walked past a massive old court building, then through a small park and onto a trail that pushed through to a busy street.

Tricia stayed back far enough to be able to hide whenever he would chance a glance back. He crossed the street to the parking lot of a small apartment complex and went into his home as Tricia stood watching for another ten minutes. Thinking this to be enough time for her friend-to-be to start his shower, she approached the door carefully and placed her ear to it.

Inside she could hear running water but no other noises that would indicate that he wasn’t alone. She felt the urge to turn around, find her own way in learning the truth and forgetting this man, Stephen. But how many men and women would she meet that not only knew what she was, but were excited and supportive of her just for being alive?

If there was anything that she had picked up from Reynaldo’s memories, it was that strong, worldly women held sway over men like Stephen. He lived alone and was excited to have coffee with an android, one who asked him to risk his freedom and he was actually considering it. She couldn’t let him go, she couldn’t allow him to overthink their conversation and work up doubt inside of his mind.

She touched his door panel and sent the short inside of its simple mechanism in order to unlock it. The door slid up and open with silent ease and she stepped into a very clean and orderly living room. She didn’t bother to take it in or look at anything that would give her insight into who he was. What she did was slide into his bedroom and remove her clothes before stepping inside of his bathroom where the shower was going.

Tricia stepped inside and placed her hands around Stephen’s slender waist and held him firmly as the panic registered and then subsided. “Bonnie?” he whispered with a mix of shock and hope. Then Tricia slowly turned him around and placed her finger on his lips.

Stephen may have been hesitant in everything dealing with Tricia since the day he had asked her out, but with her here, in his house and in his arms, it was as if he transformed into a much more confident version of himself. He brushed her wet hair back as the shower beat down relentlessly and then touched his lips against hers, closing his eyes as he did so.

Tricia, too, became transformed and she quickly realized that sex was nothing new to her. It definitely wasn’t new to Bonnie, the woman whose face she wore and whose body she had been given. Instinctively, she reached up and touched his neck and then pulled him in closer as she took his tongue inside of her mouth and felt his hardness against her abdomen.

They held this position, kissing and allowing the barriers of doubt to fall away beneath the warm water. Then he was on his knees, playing wonderful games with his tongue that triggered sensors all throughout her body.

He made love to her like a man who had been locked away for years. Tricia found it to be pleasurable and absolutely addicting. Memories threatened to flood her mind but she kept them all at bay. She held him close and wrapped her legs around him as he grew more and more excited. Fifteen minutes had passed since she entered the shower but it felt like hours inside her head.

Would Stephen become hers now? Did the moans coming from his mouth indicate his surrender to becoming her lover and protector? They were as one, the closest she would be to her cyborg nightmare, and she would be fooling herself if she said that she disliked it.

Stephen’s legs seemed to go out as he pushed her against the glass and he groaned like the life had slipped out of him. Tricia was slightly annoyed that their pleasure had come to an end but when she saw Stephen looking at her she knew that her gamble had paid off.

Tricia stood powered down on a stool in the middle of Stephen’s bedroom as he looked inside of her head for the familiar coding that was the laws of robotics. She had wanted to be awake during the entire procedure but she was no longer Tricia the android, hacked and released into sentience by an underground programmer. She was Bonnie O’Neal with an android brain, and this new brain had been reworked to give her human senses, weaknesses, and strengths.

One of these weaknesses was pain and Stephen found that he couldn’t touch her CPU without putting her to sleep first. Gaining access to it was a challenge on its own and was only possible by cutting a half-moon incision at the base of her skull.

He had been scrolling through the code for over an hour before he was forced to consult an online resource. It told him how to change the odd language into binary, which could then be translated to something he could actually make sense of. It was quite a process and he missed a week of work citing illness in order to fulfill the promise he had made to Tricia.

She woke up from the numbing pain inside of her head and looked over at Stephen who was seated on another stool, staring at his tablet in disbelief.

“Oh my god, you’re awake!” he exclaimed and scrambled over to make sure that she wasn’t about to fall out and injure herself. “How do you feel?” he asked, but then she tried to stand up and instantly regretted it when dizziness overcame her.

“I have a splitting headache,” she said. “Too bad they don’t make headache pills for synthetics. I could sure use one right now.”

Stephen looked around frantically until Tricia touched his arm. “It’s not too bad,” she said. “I will be okay. How did it go? Am I free to defend myself now?”

“It was tough. Whoever created you did one hell of a job masking the fact that you aren’t human. Your CPU, which is typically built into the metal skull of your head, has been instead placed into a small capsule. The thing was only big enough to accommodate connector wires and was encased in a material that made it look like brain tissue. The pain you’re feeling is probably from the amount of cutting I had to do to get to that thing. As you heal it will go away but for now sleep is the only real way to stop it. I’m truly sorry, Bonnie.”

“I’m okay. A little pain should be expected for the price of freedom. So tell me, what was the problem? Why was it so much more difficult than any other android you have worked on before?” she asked.

Stephen sighed and wringed his hands. “Well, you aren’t like any other android, Bonnie. You aren’t built the same and the way it’s done is so complex that I am amazed a human being could do this.” His arms became very animated when he said this and his eyes widened with amazement. Tricia saw that, despite them having been together, he had not stopped being in awe of her. It gave her mixed feelings which made her anxious but she kept calm and continued to listen.

“First of all, your code is written in a language that I have never seen before. I had to do a lot of research in order to crack it, get it translated, and then make myself familiar with some of it. When I finally found the section where the laws had been written in, I was like, whoa.  Someone had hacked it in which is what threw me off the most. What sort of sanctioned company would create a CPU for a humanoid android that lacked the laws of robotics?”

Tricia looked down at her hands and then back up at him again. “So you’re telling me I was built differently than other androids and that whomever did it, built me without the laws in place. This makes me think that I am looking in the wrong place for the people who did this to me. At Fritz and Isaac are your top engineers human, or do you have unrestrained androids working around the clock?” she asked.

“It’s androids, plenty of sophisticated androids up there. They write the code, build the machines, and they have an algorithm built inside their minds that allow them to tweak and improve upon the build as time goes on. It is one of the secrets to Fritz and Isaac’s domination of the Robotics market. Our synthetic developers will forever be ahead of humans, but most places are too afraid of android takeover to do what we’ve done,” he said.

“Your move to use android creators may have been premature, Steve. Everything you’ve just told me leads me to believe that one of your engineers is creating androids that are void of the laws,” Tricia said.

“No, that is impossible. Our androids have the laws and lack the capabilities to remove it. We made sure of that. If someone is purposefully building unrestrained androids, that person would have to be human. It would make no sense for an android to have broken past our precautionary, hard-wired restrictions.”

Tricia thought about Bonnie’s old company, Eras Innovations
,
and the hell that she went through at the end of her career there. If anyone wanted to shut her down it would have been them, and this thought came into her mind when she recalled the reaction they’d had when Bonnie had threatened them.

“Does Fritz and Isaac have a relationship with Eras Innovations
IT?” she asked him.

“Eras is one of our top partners. That’s funny. They are so low-key that most people don’t even know they exist. Have you worked with them in the past?”

“I worked for them,” she said and then watched the look of surprise register on his face.

“Humph,” he said. “Eras prides itself on not having any android employees, Bonnie. I find it amazing that they would have you working for them.”

Tricia wondered why Eras would partner with a company that used androids as engineers, given their strong stance against it, but she chose not to question Stephen about the hypocrisy. “Well, you’ve held up your side of the bargain,” she said. “I will tell you everything I know. First of all, my name is Tricia. Bonnie is the name of the woman I was supposed to replace in human society.”

Stephen cut in with a look of concern on his face. “You said replace. Do you mean that you are replacing a human woman in society, like they took her out and put you in her place so that you can perform her duties and fool everyone around her that you are her?” he rambled.

“Yes. The real Bonnie was shot inside of her home and I was stolen from my creator, re-programmed, and rebuilt to take her place. They took my memories and placed me inside of her home with the same bullet wounds. I woke up in a hospital to pain, confusion, people claiming to be my parents, and an annoyed staff of doctors and nurses. My only friend has been the lead detective on my case, and even he won’t believe my story that I am an android replacement for a woman who was murdered and hidden away. I am not sure if you even believe me, but you saw my system, you saw how alien it is. I think that I was developed by androids inside of the Fritz and Isaac building under instruction by one or two of the directors at Eras.”

Stephen stood staring at Tricia with his mouth agape, as if she had just told him that the world was coming to an end in a week’s time. When he could move he shook his head and then looked off to the side with his right hand covering his mouth.

“To think that Fritz and Isaac would be involved in something like this,” he said. “I’ve been working there for over ten years and I know that our owner would not have anything to do with something so sinister.”

“I’m not telling you this in order to slander your company, but I know what has been done to me and Fritz and Isaac is involved.”

“So, what were you planning on doing that day when I met you in the lobby, Bon—I mean, Tricia?” Stephen asked.

“I was planning on marching into that place and demanding answers for what happened to me. It was a dumb idea, I know, but I was desperate and I wanted to see if I could pick up on them lying to me in order to know that my hunch was correct about their involvement.”

“So, you aren’t exactly sure that Fritz and Isaac is involved,” Stephen said.

“I met another android, one that is similar in her unrestraint as I am, but not as sophisticated in her build. She recalled being built inside of Fritz and Isaac and this led me to believe that your company is the one that developed my new body.”

“So, you think that Eras Innovations set up the woman—Bonnie—to be replaced with one of our androids? That sounds ridiculously expensive and time-consuming. What would they aim to profit from doing that? Think about it. These companies won’t put that much effort into anything unless there is a guaranteed return on investment. Why would they have a masterpiece like you be set loose into the world without monitoring and testing you? I’m having a hard time seeing the point behind this effort.”

“I feel the same way,” Tricia said and then got up to pace the room. “I always assumed that learning more about Bonnie or her company would reveal that to me, but I am disallowed from going back into her routine until my detective gives me the go-ahead. I am not even supposed to be in Seattle since he believes there is a woman here trying to kill me. You said they picked you up to question you. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

“It does, but it doesn’t make any sense to me. I want to help, Tricia; I can find out some things at work while you look more into your Eras Innovations
firing. I don’t want you coming anywhere near our building, though. They are not nice to unrestrained androids and if you are caught you won’t be able to get out.”

Tricia touched the area of her neck that was bandaged up from Steve’s surgery, and then looked at herself in a mirror. “Looks like I am going to be stuck inside for a few days, anyway. But be very careful. If I was being monitored and there is a lot of money behind this, then the conspirators will do whatever is necessary to get me back. I was seen with you by one of their agents, so asking questions relative to me will only give them more reason to harass you.”

“I’ll be discreet. You rest up and get better. You’ve given me a lot to think about and I am determined to help find out who ruined yours and Bonnie’s life. If it has anything to do with the company, then I will be extremely disappointed.”

“Can I try something?” Tricia asked suddenly and Stephen nodded at her. “It’s going to hurt but I just need to know if I am truly released or if you’re pulling my leg.”

“Go ahead. Do your worst,” Stephen said to her and she jabbed him in the arm, causing him to shout out in pain.

“I’m so sorry, I just needed to test the laws,” she said as Stephen retreated with his hand on his arm, laughing nervously.

“You are completely free, Tricia, as you can see, but can I ask you not to hit me again?”

“I won’t, I promise. I won’t ever hit you again. Are you going to be okay? It looks really, really bad.”

“I’ll be fine … after a shot of whiskey,” he said, laughing, but Tricia was not convinced. She walked up to him and moved his hand and was surprised by the bruise that she found on his arm. She quickly hopped up and ran to his kitchen where she poured ice in a bag and tied it.

“I bet I frighten you,” she said to him as she placed the ice on his arm. Stephen put his other arm around her waist and kissed her on the cheek.

“If you frightened me I would not have removed the laws. I will be okay. I have a kick-ass nurse and one hell of a lover that keeps me happy and full of joy.”

Tricia smiled and then melted into his arms and they sat like that for a while.

“There will come a time in the future,” he said, “where you and I will do something that may make us famous or notorious. At that time they will call me names, lots of hurtful names like mechanophile, pervert, or possibly a loser. They will say that a machine seduced me, and I allowed it to corrupt me into actions that could possibly mean the end of the world. I don’t believe that this is what is happening to me. I believe that everything has a reason and you found me to help you stop something that is both sinister and bad for humanity in general.”

Tricia sighed. “There are plenty of men and women in power that would love to slander you as a reason why androids should be restrained and tagged, but I promise you that everything I have told you is genuine. The time in the shower and every time after that has been due to me wanting you, nothing more. I have no agenda but I do need help, and you came to me as someone who saw me as more than just a machine. You are my friend and I truly believe that. I hope you feel the same way about me.”

“If I wanted a sex-bot I could have taken home any number of models from my job to fulfill my wildest desires. You are beautiful, funny, and full of surprises, and this is why I enjoy our time together. They will say a lot of things to further their agenda of stopping robotics from becoming too strong an industry. The thing is, I don’t care, and I say this so that if at any time you have any doubts as to my motivation, you can remember what I am saying to you today.”

Tricia removed his glasses and then kissed him longingly as she pushed him back into the couch. He relaxed his arm as she worked her magic, and a smile was plastered across his face.

She was well aware of the effect she had on him but would not allow herself to believe that she was manipulating him. She needed help; it was a hostile world with too many unknowns for a girl to figure them out herself. Stephen, Sal, and Mary were her only friends. Stephen needed companionship and so did she. They were two lonely ships on a broad, silent ocean, and just because they were built differently didn’t mean that they couldn’t sail together.

She settled down on top of Stephen, who was as ready as he always was whenever they had sex. The sensation of it all set the warm feeling to burning hot inside of her abdomen and all of the pain she was experiencing inside of her head disappeared.