Sparked (The Metal Bones Series Book 1)

SPARKED

The Metal Bones Series

SHEENA SNOW

SOUL MATE PUBLISHING

New York

SPARKED

Copyright©2015

SHEENA SNOW

Cover Design by Fiona Jayde

This book is a work of fiction.  The names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual events, business establishments, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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Published in the United States of America by

Soul Mate Publishing

P.O. Box 24

Macedon, New York, 14502

ISBN: 978-1-61935-
917-8

www.SoulMatePublishing.com

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

To happiness.

To love.

To joy.

To laughing so hard you cry.

To smiling so much your face hurts.

To the light bubble inside your body that lifts you up.

To seeing the beauty

in the small and seemingly insignificant things.

To kisses and hugs and overgenerous squeezes.

To living each day to its fullest potential

because that’s the only day of that day you’ll ever have.

To being able to love life.

To being able to love yourself.

To happiness.

Chapter 1

I never locked eyes with a robot before.

Never.

Not once.

I guess I thought it would feel different. But it doesn’t. Nothing is different. It feels the same, the same as looking into a human’s eyes.

I wanted to pry my eyes away but now that I’ve started, I can’t stop staring. Even from this distance, I could tell the robot’s eyes were a honey brown.

They are so close to being one of us. But they can’t be. They can never be us. Or at least, that’s what the government says.

The robot’s indifferent gaze shifted from mine and it strode toward my neighbor’s Lincoln Town Car. The robot’s gait caught with every third step and the elbow twisted incongruently when it opened the car door—the only telltale signs it wasn’t human.

This robot had dark-brown hair, tan skin, and was dressed in a chauffeur’s suit.

My neighbor, Mr. Romero, waved at me as he exited the car, and I just stood there, mouth agape and knees locked.

Mr. Romero frowned but I couldn’t wave back. I couldn’t move. I was frozen to that spot on my porch with my keys dangling from my fingers and my purse sliding down my shoulder.

It was just as the news had said. Everything was. From the eyes, to the nose, the lips, to the hair, it all looked so real. I had never studied a robot that wasn’t on TV; I was always too busy avoiding them. But when they weren’t moving, when they weren’t doing anything, when they were just standing there, they looked exactly like people. Exactly.

Together, they disappeared inside the house, Mr. Romero with his stout frame and wiry black hair, and his robot chauffeur.

I now lived next door to a robot.

The keys felt cold in my hand, and I realized for the last several seconds, my focus had been consumed by the now empty driveway.

Leave it to me to do something like that.

I opened the door and leaned against it as it clicked shut behind me. Everything was changing. And everything would be different.

“Mom, I’m home.” I shrug
ged off the door and into the family room.

“Be right there, Vienna.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I called back, hoping Mom would leave me alone.

“How was shopping? Find anything you liked?” Mom appeared and wiped her hands on her paint-covered overalls. Mom was a die-hard artist. She lived, breathed, and probably ate paint.

At a whole head taller than me, Mom still looked great.
Forty-five and thriving
was her motto. Mom and I had wispy blond hair, pale-green eyes, and small noses. Unlike mine, her hair was cut in a bob-like fashion, the front angled longer, reaching past her shoulders, where mine was always in a ponytail.

I shook off my jacket and looked up into Mom’s bright, beaming face.

“I only went shopping,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “No need to look that—”

“You’ll never guess what I
bought
.” Mom practically sang the last word, cutting me off.

Head throbbing, I sucked in a deep breath and dropped my purse on the couch. “I have absolutely no idea.” I wondered how Mom would react if she knew Mr. Romero had bought a robot.

“They’ve had nothing but good reviews.” Mom nodded, following behind me as I headed toward my room. “And you and your father are going to love him.”

I rubbed my temples. “I’m sure we will.” How could we
not
get excited about Mom’s latest painting gadget? “What does this one let you do?”

Paint with two brushes at the same time?

Mom darted in front of me, and spread her arms to block me from going any further.

“What’s going on?” I looked from side to side.

“I named him Robotatouille.” Mom nodded as if that solved everything.

“I’m sorry?” I shook my head. What in the heck was Mom talking about? “You named what Robot . . .” My breath caught in my throat. My stomach flipped. “You . . . you did what?” I repeated.

Mom’s eyes lit up and suddenly, it was like all the energy in my body had been stolen from me, sucked out, leaving me dry and empty.

“N-N-N-o,” I breathed.

Mom wouldn’t
—

“Everyone’s getting one,” Mom said.

My legs shook.

“Did you know Mr. Romero just bought one yesterday?” Mom asked, face glowing while it felt like mine had lost all of its blood. “And you’re going to love him. Look.” Mom winked at me and stepped back to pull a sandy-blond brown-eyed twenty-something-year-old man from behind the kitchen wall.

I couldn’t breathe.

Air was trapped in my body, as I stood there, gaping, into this man-robot-thing’s eyes.

Brown eyes. Sandy-blond hair.

I jerked backward and stumbled into the coffee table.

The robot was right in front of me.

No.

Freaking.

Way.

I blinked and it was still right there, in a white chef’s outfit, standing in our kitchen, with a spatula in its hand.

My heart slammed back into my chest and air surged into my lungs. It was a robot. A robot. In my house. Right there. Eye to eye with me.

“You—You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, leaning my full weight against the table.

This couldn’t be happening.

“Isn’t he great?” Mom said, completely missing my expression. “He’s a French Cuisine Robot-Chef, supposed to be the best model out there. Best part is, he doesn’t only cook French Cuisine, he makes cordon bleu—”

Mom’s voice droned on and on and I stood there, ogling at it. It . . . it was so human. Its hair . . . so real. Beach-blond highlights.

Not robotic in the least. Nothing robotic in the least.

I had never been this close to one before, never ever been in the same vicinity as one before, and most certainly never touched one before. This small gap of a few inches was
way
too close for comfort. Heck. It was
way
too close for anything.

It had started a few weeks ago, once the public caught wind. A rambunctious news crew had stumbled upon an underground base in Virginia, where the government had been creating robots for the last few years in secret. The story went viral within hours, completely debunking the government and leaving a trail of public outrage.

But the government, being as resilient and shrewd as it is, gave the choice back to the people. In doing so, they turned a situation that could have ended in uproar and anarchy into a profit-turning marketing machine. They had unleashed the robots they never had any intention of being discovered, to the public, for purchase.

Politics is clearly the government’s best game.

“He’ll . . . he’ll be here, living with . . . with us?” I couldn’t even say the words.

No. No. No.

“Yes. Right over there.” Mom glanced at a spot she had cleared in the kitchen. “I’d make you something but I’m sure there is plenty prepared already.” Mom sniffed the air. “Doesn’t it smell delicious?”

Delicious? Delicious!
How could she think of food at a time like this?

“Umm. Could you—?” My body wobbled as I grabbed her arm and pulled her in the family room.

“So, what do you think?” Mom’s face glowed.

That at this point, I’d rather have a rat in the house.

“We don’t need it. Just get rid of it. It’s so creepy just standing there. Don’t you think? It—”

“Vienna!” Mom pulled out of my reach. “How can you say that? You haven’t even given it a chance.”

“Well you don’t even know anything about it. What if it has a malfunction? What if it does something it’s not supposed to? What if”—I lowered my voice to a whisper—“it does something to our food?”

“That’s ridiculous, Vienna. Sometimes, you overanalyze things, and this”—Mom pointed a finger in the air—“would be one of those times. I know changing
anything
is difficult for you but you have to evolve with the times.”

My jaw tensed. Mom never listened. “I know, I just don’t feel that it’s responsible to charge headfirst into something, especially when you don’t know that much about it. I’ll cook, please.”

Mom stopped and turned around.

“I feel . . .” I lowered my voice. “. . . just . . . so uncomfortable with it, in the house.”

Could it hear me even now?

Mom looked at me oddly. “Give it a week. If you still don’t like it, I’ll give Robotatouille to Aunt Becky.”

“You promise?”

“Yes, Vienna, just give Robotatouille a chance.”

I sighed.
Give it a chance?
How could I do that when I didn’t trust it? We didn’t know anything about them, or what the government was planning to do with them. I don’t care if the news and everyone else thought they were safe. There was something off about them, I had this bad feeling deep down inside of me. If Mom was going to force me to live with the robot, I was going to find out what it was.

“You’ll see,” Mom said, “it won’t be as bad as you think.”

I rolled my eyes.
I’m sure it’ll be so much worse.

“What are you working on?” I said instead, and gestured toward Mom’s studio, at the far end of the house.

Mom shrugged. “I don’t know yet. I’m playing around with colors and shapes, somehow trying to make them fit together in a stoic-type way.”

“‘Stoic-type way’?” I frowned.

What did that even mean?

“You’ll see.” She brushed me off. “How’s school going so far? Did you have class this morning?”

“Yeah, Greek Art is difficult. The names are long and the temples all look alike.”

“Too bad you couldn’t be an art major.”

My eyes narrowed, drilling into the back of her head. How many more times could we fight about the same thing?

“I can’t draw and you know it.” This is not one of those never-say-never moments. I really can’t draw. Somehow my cats become random circles and my people are lucky if they become sticks.

“Coffee,” Mom said, “and cream. No sugar.”

I came to a halt, tongue-tied at the robot right in front of me. I could see the gold tones in his brown hair and the pale pink of his lips.

Gold tones?

This.

Pale pink?

Was.

Lips?

Miserable.

I grimaced.

It nodded at Mom, and my eyes widened in disbelief. Mom went through all this trouble to buy a robot and then she goes and buys the non-speaking kind. Great. Just great. Because now we’re living with a robot that can’t communicate with us.

Breathe. Breathe.

This day just keeps getting so much better.

“How is Sydney doing?” Mom asked, oblivious to my frozen stature in front of the kitchen. “Have you seen her on campus recently?”

I left a wide berth as I stepped around the robot in the kitchen. “Umm, yeah.” I eyed it suspiciously as it prepared Mom’s coffee. “I had lunch with her yesterday. She’s bummed. Someone accidentally knocked over her architecture project. The wooden structures caved in and she has to start all over.”

Sydney is my Aunt Becky’s daughter, my first cousin on my mom’s side. Where I’m light, Sydney’s dark. She has her dad’s long black hair, big brown eyes, and tiny freckles that sprinkle her nose. We’re nothing alike, and not just in looks.

Like her mom and my mom, Sydney inherited the art gene. I’ve been told the only other person who couldn’t draw a thing was our grandfather, but he had still found a way to compensate for it by being creative in other ways—unlike me.

“You think she’ll finish it in time?”

“It’s Sydney,” I said.

Mom nodded and sipped her coffee. “I’m going to the grocery store. I want to load up the fridge with a bunch of weird food, see how good Robotatouille really is at turning it into a”—Mom put on a French accent—“
French cuisine
. Want to come?”

What, she didn’t have one of her artist friends to go with?

“I’m going to the library with my friends and Sydney in an hour.”

“Yeah, Giselle and Kat couldn’t go either.”

Bingo.

“Try to be home around six. I’m looking forward to dinner,” Mom called as she headed for the door, leaving me alone in the kitchen with it
.

Thanks, Mom.

I gave what I hope wasn’t a freaked-out smile and backpedaled to my room. According to the paintings on the walls, I only had two more to go.

Mom insisted on displaying only her artwork throughout the house. Instead of actual photographs, we had oil family portraits, transforming the house into Mom’s personal art gallery. Too bad I’d never be the piece she’d wanted, the piece that would complete the collection, be the daughter of her dreams.

I shut the door and belly flopped on my bed.

Although Mom had pushed a geometric theme for my room, I wouldn’t let her touch it. I left everything bare, with only a bland white paint to grace the walls.

Caribbean, my Japanese Fighting Fish, darted around in his tank. I pushed myself off the bed. He knew it was feeding time. It was almost impossible to deny that fish anything.

I strolled over to my desk, facing the window where his tank sat. His beautiful scales shifted from turquoise to a deep blue depending on where the sunlight caught them, giving them the appearance of the Caribbean Ocean.

The few flakes I dropped into the tank danced around the surface until Caribbean came up to eat them. It was almost therapeutic watching him swim around his tank. He was the closest thing I was ever going to have as a pet. Mom would never allow animals. Ever.