Single Wired Female (Wired for Love Book 2) (11 page)

Stephen Dwayne walked towards Fritz and Isaac Electronics with a new outlook on both his life and career. Typically when he’d arrive at work in the morning he would already be anticipating the lunch break, since it would be anywhere but inside of his suffocating office.

His walk into the building was full of hellos and inquiries from important people who seemed genuinely happy to see him. He loved his job and those at his job loved him, but he wondered if any of them would be there to defend him when it was time to pay for releasing the laws from an android. He didn’t know why he had agreed to do so much for Tricia but all he knew was that he couldn’t stop thinking about her.

He crossed the threshold of the lower lobby to ascend the stairs and touched fingers with one of his buddies who was on the way down. He wondered how many friends he would have if they found out that he was in a sexual relationship with an android. Very little, he concluded, though he knew he wasn’t the only one with a synthetic girlfriend.

Human men slept with android women and human women slept with android men. It was a common fact in many households that people bought them just to sleep with them. But surveys—both open and anonymous—said differently. The dad with the beautiful wife, handsome children, and a two-level home would never admit that he bought the family android in order to bend her over instead of “having someone to clean up” like he told everyone.

It was the main reason why Fritz and Isaac built their models to look as human as possible. America loved their androids to be dumb but extremely beautiful at the same time.

For Stephen to admit that he had a walking, talking, intelligent, thinking machine at home who also looked like a sexy human woman by the name of Bonnie O’Neal…well, it would be career suicide. At least with other men, their unsophisticated, android sex dolls were mere tools for lust. He was in love with Tricia, and though he did not know it, he knew that mentioning her to anyone would cause him nothing but grief.

He climbed the stairs and was suddenly aware that some of his coworkers were flirting with him. Back when he was Steve, the unsexed super-genius, he would only see a smile as a smile and walk past it in oblivion. Now he saw that Casey from the third floor smiled a little too big and batted her eyes a little too slowly for it to be a mistake, and Bob from marketing bumped into him “accidentally,” which was a daily routine.

But Tricia had made him happy, and now he was awake to the subtle hints and innuendos. He saw the people who loved him and those who wanted to love him, but he didn’t see any signs of a shady individual who would cover up a murder and place an android in the position of a human woman.

When he got to his office, Thea was there. She was an older woman with long black hair and an affinity for dresses that showed off her large breasts. The rumor in the office was that she did this on purpose. It was her way of picking out the men that could keep eye contact—despite the cleavage—or who were too frightened to look at her. Those who were weak enough to glance at the numerous freckles decorating that glorious valley would notice the tiny piece of jade she wore around her neck. Close observation of that jewel was doom, and those men were not the ones who got promoted in her employ.

Stephen had first slept with her at a company holiday party where they had both gone too far into a bottle of Scotch. All of their secret desires had come through that night in several hours of wild, unbridled, unprotected sex. They both had promised to leave it where it was, to never mention it again, and to keep it professional in the office. But that did not stop her from calling him up to the tenth floor whenever a meeting had been too hard on her or when the loneliness of being a corporate predator had become too much to bear.

Stephen didn’t mind this bonus to his employment but it made him worry that she, more than anyone else at the building, would have a problem with Tricia if ever she was discovered.

“Hey Steve, you okay? I’ve never known you to miss a week of work, not unless we forced you to take a vacation. What is it, a new girlfriend?” she quipped, twisting her thin lips up into a smile.

“Don’t I wish?” he said. “Though it turned out to be nothing, I was having some chest pains and I thought that it was some sort of heart attack. Anyway, I don’t really want to talk about it. Is everything here okay?”

“Everything’s good. I just came down to make sure that you were okay. Joe’s been asking for you, but he’s still in China doing the rounds so I’ll update him this afternoon when he gets in,” she said.

As he walked her to his desk, she took his hand and brought him around. “Don’t force us to worry like that again, Steve. You’re too important to keep a heart attack to yourself. The next time you feel as if your health is in jeopardy, call the damn hotline. You know that we keep doctors on staff for this very reason, and I would hate to hear that some second-rate MD is treating one of our top employees.”

“You’re right, Tee, and I wasn’t thinking. I’ll do the right thing next time, you have my word on it,” he said.

“Wonderful. Let’s do lunch soon. I have something I want to tell you.”

His heart sank when he heard these words because it was code for “Let’s catch up later and screw.” He forced a smile and winked his eye as Thea left the room. He plopped down into his soft, cushy chair and let his arms fall off the sides as if all the life had been sucked out of him.

There was something in what Thea had said that stuck out to him immediately, and his mind ran to Tricia and the fact that she woke up to doctors in a private hospital. Thea had said “we keep doctors on staff,” and it reminded him of some of the things that Tricia had said about her treatment.

He powered on his machine and skimmed his emails and messages. They were mostly warnings from his device about missing meetings and a nice “get well soon” email from Thea. He was about to close his email when he noticed that one of his messages had no subject line and no sender. He opened it and listened as a slight shushing noise like that of static came through the speakers to fill the room.

“We know you have her. We know that she’s been awakened. Turn her in and you will be rewarded, Stephen Dwayne,” a deep voice announced from behind the static.

“Who are you? Are you with Fritz and Isaac?” he spoke out loud. “Tell me who you are and I will tell you where she is.”

“You lie to get information, information for her, but unlike her you have family, Stephen. Do the right thing and turn her in and you will be rewarded.”

“Turn her in to who?” he asked and the voice grew silent as did the static noise and the email.

Am I losing my mind
? he asked himself. He got up and opened the curtains to reveal the beautiful landscape of Seattle, bright and majestic in front of him. The voice had not answered him but he knew that there would be other clues. Perhaps Thea was the one he was supposed to report it to. It really bothered him that, despite the philanthropy that Fritz and Isaac was known for, they would aid in murdering a woman in order to replace her with a programmed machine. It didn’t make sense.

He opened the file that listed out the projects that Fritz and Isaac were to accomplish by the year’s end. Many of them were well underway, and several others were held back as fun, holiday activities for all of the programmers that were on staff. Stephen flipped through these to see if any of them seemed out of place but there were hidden folders that only Thea and above could see.

He looked over at the numerous awards lined up on his desk and at a detailed statue of an android’s endoskeleton that his buddy, Larry Patel, had built for him before his untimely demise. The Fritz and Isaac building had become his second home and everything on the first ten floors was as familiar to him as his own home. But then Tricia had come along with her android story and now the magical place where he worked had become a strange tower of mystery.

Stephen pretended to work for a couple of hours until Thea sent a chime to his personal device. He grabbed his coat and descended the stairs and went out to the garage where her dark, tinted hover-car was powered on and waiting. He opened the door and entered when he thought no one was looking and Thea lifted them out and onto the highway that led north to her apartment.

While they drove she listened to classical music loudly and paid little attention to him as she hummed to her favorite parts. She lived in a luxurious model apartment that was five levels above the ground. It had its own carport, which she landed on just as smoothly as she had taken off.

“We don’t have much time so I hope you brought your appetite,” she said and walked inside of her home while taking off her jacket and skirt in effortless motions. When she was sufficiently naked she reclined on her huge, black bed and motioned for him to come over and handle her heat. Stephen shook off any hesitation harbored in his mind and marched over to Thea and knelt beside the bed. He grabbed her thighs and pulled her and did what he needed to do in order to give her as spectacular a finale as the Mozart she was listening to.

When it was over she looked exhausted and he felt as if he had betrayed Tricia in the worst way. He waited for Thea to fall asleep and as she fanned him away and rolled over, he took the opportunity to grab a shower. When he got out she was snoring lightly. She was an admitted insomniac and sex was one of the only activities that could put her to sleep almost immediately.

Thea’s sleep was always deep and she relied on him to have her up in time for the end-of-the-day meeting. Whenever they would rendezvous to have sex in her home, he would be stuck entertaining himself for three to four hours while she caught up on her sleep.

He slid into her computer room and powered the machine on. She wouldn’t be surprised that he did this while she slept, since it was what he would normally do in order to continue working.

He used her password to log into her system, and then tried the same password to access her virtual desktop inside of Fritz and Isaac. It worked and he felt goose bumps since he was now committing a cybercrime against a woman who had trusted him with her life. He opened the project folder and scrolled through the numerous entries. He saw all of the current, past, and future projects for the teams but none of them struck him as strange or out of place.

He was about to log out when he saw a video on her desktop with a note attached that read, “Scary, isn’t it?” He got up and walked to the door to check on Thea, but she had the covers around her like a cocoon, so he was sure that she was down for the count. He went back in, put the sound buds in his ears, and then played the video. It was of a handsome older man sitting inside of an office that he didn’t recognize and preparing himself for a speech.

“Things are going well with the experiment, folks. Our subject has been put into place and is acting very much like a woman who has no recollection of her past. She’s moved out of town, met some people, and is as human as can be from anyone’s perspective,” the man was saying. Then suddenly the video powered off and Stephen was staring at the file on top of Thea’s desktop.

He hurriedly logged off and went back into his own desktop where he pulled up images of all the top stakeholders for robotics in the world. He scanned the photos of these men and women, trying to see if any of them was the man from the video. He went down a level to the presidents and CEOs of tech companies and after thirty minutes of scanning, he recognized that the man was Emeril Worth, a top shareholder for Eras Innovations.

Stephen went to the internet and looked for any news on Emeril Worth, especially recently after their partnership with Fritz and Isaac Electronics. Emeril’s name was everywhere; he was a popular name in modern IT. Stephen saw articles on his net worth, his multiple marriages, and the church that he was a member of. He also saw that Emeril was a great believer in freeing the androids. He had been a revolutionary during the early years, when mechanophilia was first deemed illegal.

“Well, hello, Emeril,” Stephen said under his breath.

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That evening Stephen went to Tricia’s hotel room to tell her about what he had found. She had been in bed all day healing, so he sat next to her while holding her hand and telling her about Emeril Worth.

“You and this Thea woman, are you close?” Tricia asked as she stared forward, processing everything Stephen had told her.

“Close, but not that close. We have some history but I don’t want you to be jealous of what we—”

“I am sorry, Steve, but jealousy is wired into who I am. It cannot be helped. I find it difficult to concentrate on Emeril Worth when all I can think about is you with another woman who doesn’t look anything like me. It doesn’t sound as if your company is aware of what your androids are being used for in connection with Eras. You all are being used, and Mr. Worth’s motives may not be what we think they are,” Tricia said.

“But this guy is a huge defender of android rights. He was like a Martin Luther King for the androids back when he was young,” Stephen said. “He and a few other people are the reason why some unrestrained androids are allowed to live out there in peace amongst the humans.”

“I acknowledge this but mechanophilia is still illegal and your company has developed glasses that will allow the android hunters to seek us out and destroy us easily,” Tricia argued.

“Yes, we are the problem but maybe that is why Emeril would start a secret project using our own creations. He can set right a great wrong by having us implicated. He will plant androids, reprogrammed and unrestrained into society and then … I don’t know. Insert evil, diabolical, super villain reasoning as the end goal and you have whatever it is that we’re looking for,” Steven said.