What Lies Behind: A New Adult Dark Science Fiction Romance (6 page)

“Huh,” Cass said. She opened the car door and got in. Remembering what he’d said the day before, she latched the seatbelt secure and tried not to get sick as the car spiraled up into the air and merged with traffic.

They were going in the opposite direction as the day before. Hover cars whirred by on either side of them and shadows cast down on Cass from hover cars that were up higher than they were. If there was any reasoning to how the flow of traffic worked, Cass couldn’t tell. It all looked like a mess to her. Cars above them and below them and beside them. She watched as a green car merged with a lane above it and then circled the top of a towering building.

“If I could get sick, I think watching these hover cars would do it to me,” Cass told him. “I don’t understand how you can drive in this.”

“If I’m correct, you can drive in this too, you just don’t remember.” Brandon looked over at Cass to catch her frowning. “Don’t you think that’s odd?” he asked.

“That I can fly but don’t remember having flown before?” she asked.

“No, that you’re feeling emotion all of a sudden,” he said. “You were just frowning. Automatons don’t frown. I’m not even sure automatons are
programmed
to frown.”

She wanted to argue that robots didn’t
have
emotions, except she knew that was a lie. She
was
experiencing emotions. She got frustrated, she felt pitiful, and she had been embarrassed. Over the last day she had felt more emotion than she’d thought possible for an automaton.

“Kinda,” she mumbled. “But then aren’t some automatons programmed to be lovers? Wouldn’t they need a range of emotions?”

Brandon shrugged and nodded. “It’s not something that’s been with you all this time,” he commented. “Another little secret of ours.” He smiled over at her, and Cass returned the smile, but it was hollow. She didn’t feel like smiling. She felt like getting sick, and this time not because of the hover cars. This time she felt the uneasiness because he’d pointed out something she’d been trying to forget: how she was different.

“Ready for the surprise?” Brandon asked, easing the hover car out of traffic and to the right between two tall buildings.

“Do I have a choice?” Cass asked him.

“Nope. You’re my hostage today, and you’re going to have fun dammit.”

The car parked toward the end of a large parking lot. Cass could see a bulky building through which people were streaming.

“World Zoo,” she read the large sign hanging above the entrance doors. “You brought me to the zoo?”

“Yea, isn’t that fun?” Brandon asked.

“Sure.” Cass smiled at him.

The entrance was a stone reception room with several people behind windows taking money and allowing people through. Brandon paid for them, and before long they were stepping into an open air courtyard. There were buildings here and there for different features. Trails led off from the main path and to other exhibits, some marked “Outback” which she assumed was for Australian animals. Another “Safari” and so on.

“Where do we start?” Brandon asked her.

“Why don’t we follow this path?” she asked.

“Well, that’s all farm animals like goats and cows and stuff. There’s nothing that interesting about them.”

“Really?” Cass asked. “Did you know that cows have a huge stomach with four different chambers in it? And they have to drink an obscene amount of water a day. Or that they can climb stairs but can’t come back down?”

“Well I doubt we will get to see them climbing stairs or get to see their stomach chambers,” Brandon told her.

“And goats. Their eyes are really rectangular. And in Scotland there are feral goats!”

“Can you even imagine that?” Brandon asked around a laugh. “What would you do if you met a feral goat?”

Cass tried to picture it and started laughing.

“Now
that
would bring something interesting to their exhibit,” Brandon told her. “Do you want to go see the goats?”

“Nah,” she told him. “I doubt we will get to see someone attacked. Better to just go somewhere else. Maybe the reptile house?”

Brandon shivered.

“Alright, you pick,” Cass said tossing her hands in the air.

“No, reptile house is fine,” Brandon said, itching his arm. “I hate snakes.”

“Well, there will likely be a lot more reptiles there than just snakes,” Cass told him as they set off down one fork in the path that indicated the reptiles’ house was ahead. She started running down a list of known reptiles to exist in zoos but stopped when Brandon started snickering.

“What?” she asked him.

“Turn the encyclopedia off today, huh?” he asked her.

Cass frowned at him. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing.” He smiled at her. “Continue.”

“I get the feeling you don’t like my lecture.”

“Whatever gave you that idea?” he asked in mock seriousness, splaying his hand innocently over his chest.

“Be careful or I will throw you into a snake pit,” Cass poked him in the side.

“Bruce will save me,” Brandon told her.

She held the door open for him and followed him inside. They followed a hall toward the central exhibit. Along the walls were various snakes that could be found in their area. When the hall opened up into the main room there were more exotic kinds of snakes. She didn’t bother reading the names, she enjoyed looking at the colors. Reds and greens and oranges.

At the end of the house was a large tank several people were gathered in front of. Cass joined them, but Brandon stayed behind her, his hands tucked into his pockets, a sick look on his face.

The tank was full of cobras, and there was a guy inside cleaning the tank.

“Oh my God!” Cass said.

“What?” Brandon asked, stepping forward, suddenly interested like maybe the guy was being attacked.

“Watch him,” Cass said.

The cleaner bent down, grabbed a cobra by the tail and tossed it to the side of the tank.

“Holy crap!” Brandon exclaimed. “He must have brass balls or something.”

The man continued tossing snakes aside as if they weren’t deadly and hissing at him.

“Alright, I’m ready to go,” Brandon told her and tugged her toward the exit. She smiled at him, but didn’t argue because he was looking pretty green around the gills.

It was her turn to squirm next when Brandon steered her toward the aquarium. He insisted that they take the conveyor belt through a huge tank with a tunnel built through it.

“Ow!” Brandon yipped when Cass squeezed his hand as a shark glided overtop. “Be careful, you’re stronger than me.” He chuckled as he pried her hand loose. “Why are you so uppity around water?”

“Robot, remember?” she asked. “Water doesn’t really mix well with electronics.”

“Well this much water cascading down on anyone wouldn’t be too good for them.” Brandon smirked at her, but took her hand again. He went through names of the fish that they were seeing, all salt water and all of them as amazing as the snakes had been. It was hard for Cass to settle down with that much water around her, but at least she was able to enjoy the fish.

“And you really don’t need me to name them, do you?” Brandon asked her. “You’ve probably got some kind of internet connection, right?”

“Cortical nodule,” Cass nodded. “Please continue. I’ve shut it off so I won’t be able to identify the fish.”

She could have seen any number of the fish through her cortical implant, but that was through videos. This was better. Seeing the fish and the sea life first-hand wasn’t something she was likely to forget.

But I forgot Olivia,
she thought.

Brandon led her out of the tunnel and to another tank where she could see an octopus swimming around. Cass didn’t really pay as much attention to the octopus as she’d normally have because Brandon hadn’t removed his hand from hers yet.

“There is a reason I brought you here,” he told her, sitting her down a few hours later. “But I have to use the bathroom right now. I will show you when I get back, okay?”

Cass nodded and as he walked away she connected to the internet. A stream of information flooded into her mind and all she had to do was think about a name or a topic for a list of results to populate on her visual overlay.

She tried looking for Doctor Gerard, but the list of results didn’t happen to show the specific doctor she was looking for. Cass wasn’t sure what his full name was, or what the name of his shop was.

Olivia…she’d heard her name earlier on the news. Cass let her mind enter the information required for Olivia Hamilton and a ton of search results populated before her eyes. She made sure to store the results for later in case Brandon returned while she was investigating.

There wasn’t much information on her that was helpful to Cass. She was a prominent figure in the android rights fight and had lost her husband a year ago to a fire in their home. When Cass read about the horrible fire, she stopped reading the article all together.

Had she been part of that fire? Was that why Olivia had gotten rid of her? If Cass was right, and her memories were true then she was the old automaton that belonged to Olivia and Jack. She knew where the house was when she was flying with Brandon, and it had been burned out.

Is that why she got rid of me?
Cass wondered.
Was it because she couldn’t bear to think about that fire? Was I a reminder of that?

“What has you so deep in thought?” Brandon asked.

Cass pushed the stream of information from her mind. Her eyes came into focus. Brandon was wiping his hands on his dark, beat-up jeans leaving wet tracks over the pockets.

“Nothing. You had something you wanted to show me?” Cass said.

“Yea, the exhibit should be starting soon,” he told her. Brandon dragged Cass to her feet by her hand, and led her through the throngs of people headed down a sloped hallway. At the base of the hallway they turned left. Skylights created pools of light on the gray slate floor. Cass could almost feel the excitement of all the humans around her.

Now and then she caught the glimpse of a robot with their family. All automatons were programmed with recognition devices. Cass was able to tell through her programming when a person wasn’t a person but instead a machine. She wasn’t precisely sure why this was, if it was intentionally done by humans to make sure that robots knew who the humans were and who they needed to serve, or if it was some kind of electronic signature that all robots could recognize.

Brandon’s hand tightened in hers, drawing her eyes to him. He smiled at her as he led her along.

“What are you thinking about?” Brandon asked her.

For some reason in that moment Cass felt she could trust him. It was only yesterday that she’d been so uncertain about Brandon, wondering if he was a spy of sorts for Natalia. Now she thought if he were a spy, he probably wouldn’t have gone this far out of his way to make Cass feel so welcome.

“Why some things are the way they are. Like how I can tell the automatons here from the humans,” she told him. Cass looked up into his brown eyes, somehow different today, almost golden in a way she found both hypnotic and mildly frightening.

Brandon shrugged. “I hadn’t really thought about that. I guess it makes sense, you’re all connected into the internet and maybe you can read each other that way.”

Cass nodded. “That would make sense. You don’t think it was anything done specifically so we would know who to serve?”

“Not that I know of. My parents used to run an automaton shop and I’ve never heard anything like what you’re talking about,” Brandon told her.

If we are all connected to the internet, could we communicate that way too?
She wondered. She gazed at one short woman that looked like any normal human, long brown hair pulled up. She wore a yellow hoodie, a pair of faded jeans, and was tending to two children. Only Cass knew that she wasn’t human at all. That girl was an automaton. Could she communicate with her?

Singularity
, Cass thought. In the past humans used to think that at one point the machines they created would rise up and destroy the human race. They called that the singularity. What if it was more prophetic than they realized?

The crowd around them was starting to slow, and so was Brandon.

“Here,” Brandon said, pulling Cass out of her contemplations. “This is what I wanted to show you.”

He slid in between groups of people, pulling Cass along with him. It earned him scowls of disapproval from parents and solitary people alike, but no one said anything to them. Cass and Brandon were next to the glass now and on the other side was a cage filled with lions.

The cage was open to the sky, and the sun shown on the lions making them look as if carved from gold. When Cass thought of lions she thought of fierce hunters, not what she was seeing now. Some of the lions were sunning themselves around the only male lion in the cage. Other lions were playing with one another, behavior she would expect to see from any regular house cat.

There was something strange about the male lion. Something that Cass and a few of the other automatons around her seemed to notice.

“He’s not real,” Cass said.

“What do you mean not real?” Brandon asked.

“He’s synthetic,” she told him.

“I know, but that doesn’t make him any less real,” Brandon said.

Cass frowned at him.
He doesn’t understand,
she thought.
He thinks we are real, but we aren’t the same as humans. That lion isn’t the same as all the others.

A tour guide was standing before the glass cage, a microphone clipped to her ear broadcast her speech out to all gathered. She was short and squat with dark hair and bright blue eyes. Cass wasn’t really listening to what she was saying because at that moment she was giving a rundown on what made lions lions, and how they acted when in their pride. It was all things that Cass could know if she took the time to look up lions on her visual overlay. It wasn’t interesting to her.

“So he is an automaton?” Cass asked Brandon.

Brandon shook his head no. He was listening to the guide, and so Cass had no option but to listen as well. She studied the male lion. It was odd how none of the other lions treated him any differently.