Single Wired Female (Wired for Love Book 2) (6 page)

But after numerous victories and a change of ownership which left his original “trainer” wealthy beyond his means, he met Darlene. She was a ball-busting, fight-clubbing, hardcore type of trainer, but she was misunderstood and this led to fat purses and easy fights for Reynaldo. Darlene was also a romantic, and as her champion became more popular she began to treat him to the pleasures of travel and all the things that life had to offer a famous fighter.

Tricia didn’t realize that she had slipped into one of his memories again, having forgotten herself to play the role of Bonnie, and now unaware that a Reynaldo was stored inside of her memory banks. All she could see was the rise and fall of the ocean, deep emerald in color, almost black in some parts, broken up periodically by chunks of brilliant white ice.

She had never seen anything like it before. She stood five levels up on the side of a ship, bordered on all sides by tourists, gushing over the ice floes. But she—as Reynaldo—was too entranced by the ocean to worry about any of them.

This would have been Reynaldo’s first cruise and when she looked down at herself in this vision, she saw the bulge of his massive chest and shoulders, and the colorful shorts that he wore. Next to him was Darlene, and Reynaldo’s hand—now her hand—was pressed into the small of her back. She was in a string bikini, cobalt blue with white trim. It stood out brilliantly against her caramel-colored skin, and she kept her handsome face staring forward at the ocean, looking very much like the confident show runner she was.

Tricia focused Reynaldo’s eyes forward once again to watch the bits of ice and was pleasantly surprised when not one but two whales bared their backs for all to see. She had only seen marvels like this on television or on the internet, so now she stared with genuine adoration at how beautiful the world could be.

This feeling that she was experiencing came with a bit of cynicism.
So this is how you hook us
, she thought to herself,
this is how you get us synthetics to stick around when we would rather power ourselves down permanently and not play along with your games
. The emerald ocean, vast and endless in its reality to this ignorant android, yet somehow bordered by massive portions of land, each thick with trees and life. It was truly a pleasure to witness but feeling Reynaldo’s emotions of being drawn to its splendor made Tricia wary of her own feelings.

She thought it to be her own vision at some point, some strange dream that had her playing the part of an attractive man on a vacation with an attractive woman. But why was she having this dream? Why had her creator given her the ability to dream? It didn’t feel real, that was all she knew, and though she tried to say something to the woman beside her, she couldn’t bring that strange male body to move his lips.

Reynaldo’s pleasant memory came to an end and Tricia could see the folder structure of her mind. She saw that this “memory” spawned from a massive archive, and that she had programmed herself to grab one periodically whenever she was feeling down or angry. But she wanted to feel angry. This forced distraction was not the sort of thing that she needed at all. Someone had undone what her previous owner had developed her to do, all for the sake of turning her into a mimic and a wicked puppet to a murderous scheme.

She needed to be angry in order to stay sharp, but at the same time she needed to maintain the mask that her puppet master had affixed firmly to her face. But where should she start to get her answers? It wasn’t as if she could capture the medical staff of the hospital and force them to tell her what had truly transpired.

A light went off inside her head.
But you’re a machine, aren’t you, Tricia? All you would need to do is get their machines to talk and we can see what was done
.

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When Tricia woke up from her triad of dreams she made the decision to leave. She was Bonnie in looks and assumptions, but she couldn’t go on with the façade now that she knew who she really was. The dreams weren’t dreams, she decided, they were glimpses into memories of the three people inside her head.

Bonnie was a woman, an unhappy woman who was murdered and replaced for someone else’s gains. Her dream was one of betrayal, and had come to Tricia as a type of clue. The Tricia memory was the most confusing, since Reynaldo’s memory was simply a file that she could access from another android’s archives. The Tricia memory was a certified nightmare but she wondered if any of it had really happened in her past.

Was she homeless at some point, living amongst transients? Did she run into Bonnie’s boss while she was there, and did she snap at him for something he said? Then there was the man in black who was chasing her the entire time. What was his story? And why would he be chasing Tricia, a hacked android whose usage had only been to make an engineer happy?

As she packed her handbag to exit the apartment, a frightening thought came to her mind:
what if I’m being tracked and visually monitored?
There would be no true way to slip from under an invisible camera. She placed her handbag down and scanned the house, looking to see if there was anything out of place.
They could easily be scanning my apartment from across the street and using the heat signatures to make sure I stay put
, she thought.

Bonnie was a high-spirited woman who had become restless, though. If she went for a walk it wouldn’t seem strange. Bonnie might even take a trip back home to Seattle. Despite the objections from her detective friend, she might do something like that. It was probably expected, especially if this ruse was not really about her. For all she knew, it could be about someone else they were trying to trap.

Tricia paced the apartment, going over and over the situation inside of her head. There were many variables that were mathematically plausible, but at the end of the day it all came back to the reality that she really did not know. Everything was possible and nothing was off the table. She could be in Florida, out of the way and barely monitored, or they could have several people watching her around the clock.

When the odds were this unpredictable, you just had to take a chance and even though she was an android, Tricia took a leap of faith. She slipped on her handbag, a change of clothes inside of it, and exited the apartment to the street below. She made sure to dress like everyone else taking a leisurely stroll on the Tampa streets, but her intent was to get a car and fly it all the way back to Seattle.

She walked for several hours until she got to the inner city. Here, she stood out in her tourist garb but she threw care to the wind and pressed on. Night fell and she found herself in what seemed like a lower income neighborhood. People stared, some called out to her, but she ignored them all and kept on marching with a bit of purpose.

One thing that stood out as odd to her was that she was feeling fatigued. It only made sense that if an android was to be human it would need to have a threshold for stress and exercise. Still, she thought it was a worthless barrier that had been placed on her. But try as she could, there was no easy way for her to remove that bit of program—

There was someone following her and she had picked up on it a few minutes after brushing past a group of men playing a game beneath one of the traffic lights. Was this the situation that she was shown inside of her dream? She had reacted irrationally, rushing out into an unknown city due to panic, and now she had picked up a stalker who was probably intent on doing her harm!

Unlike Seattle, Tampa had plenty of dark, dangerous areas. She was passing through one of these when she realized that someone was following her. She listened to the way he walked, how his pace was intentional in matching hers.

One of the most popular restrictions that humans placed on androids were the rules of robotics that prevented them from hurting a human being. She hoped that in their attempt to turn her into Bonnie, they would have removed that restriction, especially since they took the time to add silly things like making her feel tired.

She slipped around a dark corner and changed her walk into a sprint. Her pursuer followed further behind but she could pick up the vibrations of his feet as he, too, ran in order to keep up with her. Tricia thought about what she would do if he caught up with her. She would hit him as hard as she could and if that didn’t stop him, she would place her hands around his throat and—

A sudden jolt came across her senses and all of a sudden she found herself lying on her back in a dirty alleyway behind a convenience store. There was a hooded figure going through her handbag and when he saw that she was conscious he slugged her hard across the face, bruising the flesh and causing the sight in one of her eyes to go blurry. Tricia went to throw a punch of her own but it was as if the function to move her arm had been removed, and she simply lay back while her assailant robbed her of the things he deemed valuable.

When he was gone and she was able to stand up, she looked around at the items that had been thrown out of her handbag. There were some of her new clothes and toiletries, but her personal device had been stolen as well as her identification card. She went through the motion of putting things back inside of the handbag while internally she moved things around and brought back proper vision to her damaged eye.

For the first time she remembered the Band-Aid on her arm, and she peeled it off in order to see if her self-inflicted wound had healed itself. She was quite surprised to see that it had and that made her feel good that the bruise on her face would work itself out. She thought back on her attacker and how easily he had pursued her to take her things. There had been witnesses watching him chase her, yet there were no police or would-be heroes to help her when he attacked her behind the store.

This was the ugly side of life that balanced out all the emerald oceans and beautiful partners that Reynaldo had collected in his memories. She wondered how her memories would be to someone if she chose to pass them on to another android like he had done to her.
Wait,
she thought,
how did I know about the transfer?
It was the jolt to the head from her attacker’s punch—he had done her a favor without realizing it.

For the first time Tricia knew who she was—who she really was—and though it didn’t override her plans to find out more, it made her sad inside. She had been a loving creature, an android created with the purpose of love and affection. But this had led to her being used by people she considered to be friends, and eventually she had been turned into Bonnie, all because of her innocence and naiveté.

Even now, fully aware, she had been assaulted by a human male assuming her to be a human female. It would be easy for her to hate humanity but she couldn’t bring herself to get to the point of a general loathing of their species. Reynaldo had made sure of that, back when he taught her about their creators and the numerous flaws that made them do wicked things.

She straightened her shirt and slung the pack onto her back and then stepped out of the alley to resume her walk. Robbing and raping, both old crimes that were very human in nature. The latter was one she feared would happen but the man had simply wanted to take something of value from her. This thought made her smile despite the situation …
Is your body not a thing of value, Tricia?
she thought.

One thing that stayed with her from the attack was her inability to fight back even when she had wanted to. She was unrestrained but still restrained and she knew that it would become a problem. The small adjustments she was able to make when it came to her own programming were helpful but she needed more control, and the only person that could give her this was either a human ally or another unrestrained android.

The problem was that unrestrained androids did not march around town revealing themselves to everyone. She had to find someone, but running around getting assaulted was not the best way to make that happen. She retraced her steps to go back to her apartment, and the fear of being attacked again completely left her body. There was nothing they could do to her that would make her feel worse than she felt now.

It was like being in Bonnie’s dream, the one where she had no control over anything. She was merely a lost girl in a forest full of hungry wolves. Fighting back was not an option, and she no longer had a personal device to call a cab or Sal Minstretta to report the crime. She dragged her legs and let the humid night air pull sweat from her flesh—another human-like feature that surprised her in its attention to detail.

I can’t do this alone
, she admitted,
I need someone who is willing to help
. Then she remembered the android that was working the bar and she smiled as she thought about how her eyes had made her question herself. Was that android unrestrained? No, but she was much, much more than a simple bartender. Tricia knew what it took to remove a restraint—that at least she knew for a fact she could do—but she would need to steal the girl away in order to make her free.

One android working on another to remove restrictions; it was what the humans feared above anything else. It was true autonomy, synthetics building and empowering other synthetics. She was about to commit the greatest cyber-crime that an android could do besides killing an organic person. The thought empowered her and pushed away the fear and vulnerability that had clouded her mind after being robbed.