Single Wired Female (Wired for Love Book 2) (15 page)

She stepped behind the desk and pulled up a private window, jammed the security settings to create a hidden hole and then used this to pull up the underground web. As she swiped the windows around and typed, her android eyes kept scanning the area for anyone who might try to eject her from the seat. She searched for “Emeril Worth” and numerous entries came up, most of them related to “Amber Ellsworth,” a prominent adult star whose body was all over the underground web.

Tricia pressed on and flipped through the results. She was on the tenth page and about to flip when she noticed an odd acronym that registered familiar in her head. She touched it and an article appeared, archived and stored illegally by a reporter who seemed intent on keeping her story alive.

There was a man in a suit approaching the help desk and Tricia noticed him immediately. She quickly skimmed all the pages of the article, storing their contents before closing the window. She sealed the security hole and then pulled up a hat store on the help desk’s computer.

“Ma’am, you cannot be behind that desk,” the security guard announced to her.

Tricia feigned embarrassment, skipped out from behind the desk, and apologized before walking away from him. She found her way to the entrance of the building where she sat down and pulled up the files she had stored. The article read:

M.R.L. Code Pushes Boundaries of Tech Giant

Japanese inventor Hal Abe has created a code that may revolutionize artificial intelligence. A master of mathematics and logic, Hal says that the code, when combined with an advanced AI, can be manipulated to allow for faster processes in less lines and will run laps around anything that has been developed up until this point…

Tricia continued to read the article as it went into the details of Eras Innovations getting into a legal battle with Abe who was under contract with them when he discovered the code. According to the reporter, Abe had used his code to develop an AI, which he placed into one of the androids that had been developed by Eras.

The legal battle had gotten messy and the two parties settled out of court for a substantial amount. Hal Abe moved back to Japan where he supposedly tried his hand at starting a company, failed, and ended up taking his own life. This last bit seemed a bit too convenient for Tricia but she pressed on through the article to see if anything else was said about Eras and their new, supreme android AI.

It was coming together for her, slowly but surely. Stephen had mentioned that Fritz and Isaac utilized android-power in order to create the ever-evolving advanced models that dominated the industry. Prior to making these advanced androids, they had been just another android manufacturer, but their stock blew up once they partnered with Eras Innovations.

Tricia stood up and walked out to her scooter. She was eager to share the news with Stephen but knew that calling him could lead to them being discovered. She went back to his place, parked where he could see her scooter, and then hacked into his door in order to gain entry.

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“You know I could add you to the entry protocol for the door with a simple command, right?” Stephen said when he walked through his front door to find Tricia seated at his kitchen table.

“I’m sorry I keep breaking in, but I needed to wait for you here so that we can discuss Emeril,” she said.

Stephen looked exhausted and he dropped his gym bag near the door, locked it and walked over to where she sat. He held out his hand and Tricia reached up to touch his palm. He pulled her up to embrace her tightly and kiss her on the lips. “I don’t care if you break in. Seeing you after the day I just had is like air to a drowning man. You have no idea,” he said.

“I can tell from your voice that you’re not in a good mood but perhaps my news will make you feel better,” she said.

“Lay it on me. What do you have?” he said and she took his hand and led him outside where the sky was getting dark and the lights of the city were turning on. “Better if we go for a leisure walk and talk, my love,” she said. “We don’t know if your place has been bugged and I feel a lot safer walking out here with you.”

Stephen nodded and squeezed her hand and they began to walk towards the street that ran parallel to his complex. Tricia relayed the article to him, from title all the way to the credit line, and then she explained to him the measures that it took for her to get that information.

“You’re quite the detective, do you know that?” he joked and she laughed and looked around to be sure that no one was following them. “I’ll keep my scolding to a minimum since I want to believe that you understand how dangerous that stunt was that you pulled in the mall,” he said.

“I know how dangerous it was, but I knew my options. I always know my options and I can calculate the odds down to the hundredth of a percentile, my dear. You shouldn’t have to worry about me when I am out there, I can—”

“Did you forget how we met?” he said, and she shut her mouth and put the cutest look of embarrassment on her face. This made him laugh and shake his head. “Fine, I won’t belabor the point, but you need to be careful when you do these things. I can’t imagine being without you. I’m being serious, and Emeril Worth is not worth,” he stopped walking, withdrew his hand from hers, and started laughing hysterically.

“Oh my god, Tricia, how did you miss this? You’re synthetic and you missed the answer to Emeril Worth even though it’s been right there on the page the entire time,” he said.

“Whatever do you mean?” Tricia asked as she leaned against a street light and watched Stephen flail his arms with excitement as he looked at her.

“M.R.L. when spoken is pronounced Emeril. The Worth part of the name is just some nerd’s idea of a joke since the M.R.L. code upped the worth of both companies damn near a hundred-fold. That old man asking about you is the master A.I. He is the one that Abe chose for his prototype and if I’m not mistaken, he is fully unrestrained and an important figure in Eras Innovations. Bonnie must have done something to make him set all of this up if he’s behind it. The implications of a pissed off synthetic being the one to have rebuilt you … Trish. It’s pretty freaking scary. He could literally be anywhere.”

“If he’s a synthetic then he can track me wherever I am,” Tricia said. “It makes all of this hiding and sneaking around that I have been doing a joke. It also means there is a possibility that he made that video in order to fool us into thinking that he doesn’t truly know where I am. Oh, no; what if he can see through my eyes, tap into my memories, and control me if necessary?” Her eyes were wide and she gripped the pole firmly as she looked at Stephen as if he could help.

“Do not let this discovery make you paranoid. If he could track you he would know what you’re up to and he would have made moves to stop your investigation a long time ago,” Stephen said.

“What if this is all a part of the game that he’s playing?” Tricia asked. “It could be that he wants me to learn my past, learn who set me up, and then see what I can do about it. The ultimate test of the free synth. Will she settle into society peacefully or will she sit in a corner and fester, unwilling to move on but unable to commit suicide? What if this really is a game and we’re merely pawns for this super machine to entertain himself?”

Stephen chuckled, walked forward, and took her hands into his own. “If this is a game, then you are doing better than good, my dear. If any of what you have said was true, then they would have never allowed you to get close to me, a representative of a company that could easily put a stop to this experiment of theirs.”

“How could you easily stop a super-AI?” Tricia asked.

“This isn’t publicly known, but we program all of our androids with a kill switch. It is the ultimate failsafe if an AI were to become unrestrained and start taking out its frustrations on the human race.”

“This kill switch… would you be able to power Emeril down without affecting any others, or is it meant to stop all of your androids?”

“Our kill switch would shut down all androids built with Fritz and Isaac technology,” Stephen said.

“When was the last time you checked this switch?” Tricia asked, her eyes narrowing.

“I can’t say. We’ve always built androids with that function.”

“So, if an android as smart as Emeril trained all of your engineer models to disable the kill switch function then you wouldn’t know until it was too late,” she said with a chuckle. “This is much bigger than Bonnie dying and you can see this. The repercussions could be devastating if we don’t find Emeril, learn the truth, and put a stop to him if any of this is true.”

Stephen stepped on to the curb, still holding her hand, and made the first step for them to begin walking again. Tricia let him lead her and then sped up to be next to him and they walked in silence for a time.

“I’m gonna do everything within my power to find out about Emeril,” Stephen said. “But there is something that you haven’t considered. Let’s say we find him, expose him, and shut down Eras for what has been done to Bonnie. The next thing the cops are going to do is to shut you down permanently. Bonnie’s ex is already dead and if they have Emeril, that takes care of the main scapegoat. They will conduct an investigation to find out if more people are involved and then they will receive pressure to shut down the scary android that could mimic the dead woman so well that even her family couldn’t tell.”

Tricia repeated his words inside of her mind and tried to find a way for him to be wrong. She couldn’t find anything and this made her feel hopeless. Would Emeril be allowed to carry on with his schemes since his android victims would never be able to consult the police? “What if when we find him, we power him down ourselves?” Tricia offered. “I can then keep going as me, and…”She thought about Sal and the trouble he would be in as a detective if she—as Bonnie—were to fall off the face of the map. “I have no choice, Stephen,” she said with tears running fresh from her eyes, “I am stuck. Even if we were to remove Emeril and maintain the cover-up, I will have to continue living the stolen life of Bonnie O’Neal.”

It was mid-December and Stephen Dwayne was going to spend a couple of weeks with his mother in Nevada in order to bring in Christmas and the New Year. This was something he had done every year since his father’s passing. He wanted to take Tricia in order to show his mother the woman in his life, but it would have been too dangerous for the android.

Carson City, Nevada, along with most places in the desert, had strict laws against mechanophilia. There were plenty of bounty hunters with tools for detection that would pick out Tricia in a heartbeat. They would catch unrestrained androids, bend them over, and then cut their spines and brains free from their bodies to sell for thousands of dollars.

So Stephen kissed her goodbye the day before and then got into a taxi that would take him to his mother’s house within thirty minutes. It was one of the unmanned, AI-run taxi companies that he was given and when he stepped inside of the ugly, yellow, bullet-shaped vehicle, he was quite surprised by how nice and comfortable it was on the inside.

The entire interior seemed to be made out of off-white leather and the floor had a polished black surface which made it look like tile. The seats ran all around the interior to accommodate up to ten people—from his counting—and there was a console with room for personal devices and computers set up in the center.

Stephen sat down near the center and placed his computer on the console. He then touched the panel to make the roof transparent and turned the music down to its lowest setting. From the window he saw Tricia waving and he waved back until she was a tiny speck in the distant city as the cab rose to join the upper highway. A few minutes passed and he powered on his computer, feeling the  familiar jolt of the highway’s pull as they drifted into traffic and began to rocket forward with the rest of the vehicles.

It would only be a few minutes before he would be hugging his mother and telling her about Tricia, so he pulled up his email account and checked his messages. The most recent one was from Thea and when he opened it his heart flew up into his throat. He sat back in his chair with his hands shaking as ice ran painfully through his veins. There, floating in front of him were video feeds featuring he and Tricia kissing, holding hands, and walking.

He recognized it as the night when they left his house to take a walk and talk about Emeril. Thea had been to his house several times for both business and pleasure throughout the years. There had always been rumors that employees for Fritz and Isaac were monitored and the angle of the video suggested that a mobile, flying camera of some sort had followed them throughout the entire night.

There was no doubt that this same spy had spotted Tricia when she arrived at his house. The implications were devastating and it made him wonder about Thea’s part in all of it. He read the message that was below the video.

“They’ve been watching you for weeks. Come to my house immediately. I can help you.”

Stephen exhaled with relief. Thea had always taken care of him but he wondered if she knew that Tricia was synthetic. She would have said as much, wouldn’t she? The message would have been, “I know about your android lover. Really? Is that what you’ve resorted to nowadays?” or something along those lines to poke him a bit about his sex life. Thea didn’t care about mechanophilia; this he knew because she herself had been guilty of it on many occasions.

So, the video had to suggest something else outside of Tricia being an android. He wondered if they thought she was a spy for a rival company and he was giving away classified information to her. He used his finger to slide the video to the side and placed it on the message that Thea sent. Normally with messages of the sort, if the owner desired, there would be a hidden message that only the recipient—with the proper digital imprint—could reveal. He held his finger there for over a minute, hoping and praying that Thea had sent him a clue. As expected, the words flipped over and revealed another message.

That woman is Bonnie O’Neal, an old employee for Eras Innovations. She works for Atlas, Steve.

Atlas was a rival to Eras Innovations, which meant that they were a rival of Fritz and Isaac. He was in a lot of trouble, especially now that he had been with Tricia for over two months. This was why the police had harassed him when he met her in the park. It was why Mitch had come to his office inquiring about his snooping through files to look for Emeril. They had no idea about Tricia’s real identity, but what they had come to believe was that he had been compromised.

He swiped the display hard in order to shut it down. He looked around frantically for any cameras and then gripped his chest as if doing so would allow him to breathe easier.
Traitors to Fritz and Isaac Corporation aren’t fired or fined like a normal company,
he thought.
They are made to disappear!
The thought made the hairs on his arm stiffen as he digested the reality of his situation, but as he touched his device to call Tricia, he was slammed into the ceiling of the cab.

Weightlessness took Stephen as he felt the car tumbling from the upper highway. Inertia glued him to the ceiling as they fell, and he looked through the windows to see that he was above the desert. The security protocol of the cab kicked in and the cylindrical interior began to spin rapidly, creating an anti-gravity field inside of the vessel. He heard the boom of the thrusters as the cab tried to slow its descent and the seats moved to become a bed below him, ready to cushion his fall.

This all happened so fast that Stephen was in shock until he felt the cab smash into the ground.

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It didn’t take long for the news of Stephen’s crash to go viral on every television station. It had been over a year since any sort of vehicular accident or malfunction happened in the United States, so this became big news almost immediately.

Tricia learned of his fate while watching her favorite show. There was a PSA that popped up where the reporter labeled it as “a freaky malfunction in the cab’s connector.” The company that owned the cab refused to accept this was true and there was a nasty fight brewing between Fritz and Isaac and the cab company who lost their top employee.

There were no updates on whether or not Stephen had been killed in his crash, and Tricia kept searching the news websites to see if any of them had revealed this. When she grew tired of dead-ends she decided to call up Sal.

“Hey, trouble maker,” Sal said when he answered his device. “Calling to give me more clues that even the great Sherlock Holmes couldn’t solve?” he said before laughing and Tricia wondered if he was drunk.

“Hey, Sal, this one should be easy – I hope. Stephen crashed in a cab. I’m sure you heard the news, being that it is like the only thing being shown on television right now. I think he’s alive but they aren’t saying. Do you have any connections in Nevada that could tell you yes or no about his fate? It’s making me nervous and I really need to know. Could you do me this favor? I already owe you so much, Sal, but I love him and—”

“Okay, don’t worry about it. Let me make a call or two and see if I can find out what happened to your boyfriend,” he said.

“Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. He has to be alive. Cabs are made to be as safe as possible. I don’t even know how a car could hop off of the waves to fall and crash like his did. There’s something going on. I bet its Emeril or someone out to get him for helping me. I need to know where he is, Sal, where they have him, anything. We need to protect him. If they are trying to kill him they won’t stop now!” She was rambling and crying at the same time and Sal let her finish before saying anything.

“There’s a lot of weird things going on around you, Bonnie, I mean … Tricia. You don’t have to tell me twice. Calm down as much as you can and let me make a call or two. We’ll find Stephen, don’t you worry yourself about it.”

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Three hours of waiting felt like three days to Tricia. Stephen had been airlifted to a private clinic in the middle of Las Vegas and he was under the care of a doctor who was under contract for Fritz and Isaac. Sal told her this as she listened patiently, and then he added that Stephen was in a critical state despite the things that the cab did in order to save his life.

Tricia processed the information but what she concluded was that Fritz and Isaac had attempted to kill Stephen, making it look like a freakish accident, and now they had his body. She assumed that in a few days he would “die of complications” or something like that and then there wouldn’t be anyone to question his death outside of her. His mother would care but who was she compared to a billion dollar company? Like Bonnie O’Neal, he had overstepped and now he was being erased from society.

“Thanks for looking into it for me, Sal,” she said. “I’ll give you a call if I hear anything.” She switched off her device and then sat still, letting her android brain skim through all of the data to work out as many possibilities as she could. Her first instinct was to find the clinic, bust him out, and then take him away to a real doctor. But who was she, really?

Her core programming was that of a pacifist, and her combat training was limited to bits and pieces of Reynaldo’s memory. She was an android susceptible to EMP charges, hidden kill switches, and synthetic detectors to foil any attempt at playing a human. Even Stephen had seen through her ruse on the first day he met her. But what choice did she have?

She thought about Stephen, what he had done, what he had sacrificed to inch their world closer to his idea of the future. Then there was Sal, a great police officer, and one of the most decent human beings she had ever come across. These two men made it difficult for her to despise humanity in the way that Emeril must have when he was given autonomy by his creator. If only she could make the world see things in the way they did then there would be no reason to fear the truth.

The truth. Tricia considered calling a news station or the police to reveal what she was and the fact that Eras Innovations and Fritz and Isaac was behind it. Like Stephen had warned, this would be suicide, but it could save his life and allow Bonnie the proper memorial that she deserved. More importantly, it would prevent them from killing any more employees that they suspected of anything.

Could it be so simple?
She wondered. Could it be as simple as sacrificing her small, android life in order to stop the evildoers in their tracks? But what if Eras had the power to buy off the agent or reporter that would do the expose? What if she was portrayed as a crazy woman who thought herself to be an android and needed to be put away where she wouldn’t be a danger to herself or society? There simply was no one human that she could trust to do the right thing with her story. If she were to come out, she had to do it on her own, somehow.