Download My Love (2 page)

“Rolling.”

He turned his attention to the vid scrolling across the front of his visor. A woman with long red hair walked through a hazy patch of green. Plants, he realized as he used his ocular adjusters to sharpen the image. A farm. He focused back on her and sensors he hadn’t known he possessed jolted awake. Inexplicably, he felt a connection to her and in the space between his positronic connectors an alarm pealed with utmost urgency. He frowned at the screen, seeing no immediate danger. The woman entered a primitive looking house and did not reappear. He raised an eyebrow and zoomed in, studying the home’s construction and assessing the sturdiness of the structure. By today’s standards a mud brick and mortar abode was considered…horribly uncivilized. But that hardly constituted an emergency.

“Skip ahead.”

“Okay. Rolling.”

The sun’s position in the sky changed. The woman emerged from the house and left. The ticking time clock in the lower right hand side of the vid stated 11:15 a.m. About an hour before he’d finished lunch. At approximately 11:30 a.m., a black hulled police-surplus hovercraft descended. He switched to infrared. The ship’s weapons were aimed and hot. Still, he twitched in surprise as the craft opened fire and the target exploded. The short, intense torpedo volley decimated the little house in seconds. The woman would have been immediately killed as well, if she had been inside. His gut churned at the thought, something that didn’t normally happen. Emotions, normally vague, appeared out of nowhere.
Concern. An urgent need to protect. Anger over their attempt to hurt her
. They fuzzed his brain, making it hard to concentrate.

“Now, Everett, we’re downloading mission directives and doing some upgrades I think you should hear about. We’re giving you additional weapons package B42 and the Emo enhancement. We’re starting the file transfer now. You’ll feel a little pinch.”

The needle jabbed into his neck with the delicacy of a stone club wielded by a short Neanderthal. He winced at the machine’s clumsiness as the nanos entered his fluid stream to deliver the programming. Some would be immediately activated and run, other software commands would lay dormant for now, processing during his moments of downtime. If he had any. He started to fidget, the need to find the rustic red-headed woman gnawing at his nerve circuitry. “Alex?”

“Yeah, Everett?”

“Why the Emo upgrade?” He’d heard about the upgrade but hadn’t read the available data on it. For all he knew, he’d start crying at embarrassing moments or something equally unfit for his line of work. A risk he’d rather not take while rescuing Simon Gold’s daughter.

“It’s a safety protocol, really. We implant the ability for you to fall in love with the subject if it will help improve her survival rate. In other words….”

“I’ll be willing to die for her?” Everett asked.

“Well, not in those exact terms, but yeah. I mean—”

The room exploded in activity. “Incoming transmission.”

“Spooling to real-time monitor.”

“It’s a hot one.”

“Here it comes, Everett.”

He blinked at the abrupt change in setting before his ocular implants. Bright white department store lights flooded the view-screen. It took him a full eighteenth of a second to pick out his charge. She stood by the kitchenware display fondling a ladle. His cock suddenly hardened with the ardent wish she was fondling him.
Now where had that come from? It’s never happened before
….

“There she is. We’ve found her,” one of the techs said.

Charles’ lower, dreary voice echoed, “So have they.”

He adjusted to widescreen view. There, on the same floor were two dark-clad street issue mechanoids heading her way. His heart beat out a panic mode. The room around him erupted into chaos.

“Go, Everett! Now!”

“Damn it, get those things out of him!”

“Emergency protocol. Emergency protocol,” the computer warbled.

“Disengage.”

He sat up, twisted away from the needle and ran for the heliport. At full speed, the impact of his feet hitting the floorboards shoved the craft sideways. It toppled over the edge of the building and began to roll. He grabbed the controls and linked, feeding the destination into the database and hauling up on the throttle at the same time.

“Come on, come on, come on,” he chanted. “I can run there faster than this.” He fought the urge to simply jump out of the craft and prove himself right. With every nerve in his body screaming on high alert, he felt a desperation to reach his subject he’d never experienced before. And he knew without a shadow of doubt if he arrived too late, he’d cry.

“I don’t know.” Sam bit her bottom lip and held the two spatulas in her hands, weighing the feel of each. “I think I like this one better. It has a longer reach.” She handed her choice to the department store clerk mechanoid and set the other back on the shelf.

“Will that be all, ma’am?”

She rolled her eyes a little at the clerk’s predictable pre-programmed polite blather. If there was one thing she hated about mechanoids it was their droll, utterly humorless predictability. She’d never understood her father’s fascination with what basically amounted to a computer with a human face. When he’d moved into the shop on the basement level of their home to spend more time near his creations, she’d thought him obsessed. Later, when he’d told her he would one day make a mechanoid so human she’d never be able to tell the difference, she’d thought him crazy. Unfortunately, moving out of the house didn’t solve her problem. Her father’s work hummed all around her—from the taxi drivers to the barmaids. It was inescapable. She practically tripped over it everywhere she went, except the farm, her one bastion of sanity in a super-tech world. “Yes, thank you.”

She followed the clerk to the insta-register and held out her arm so it could scan the implanted credits. Even such a simple bit of technology annoyed her. She hated tech. Utterly and completely. Well, except for escalators. She’d always liked riding those. She pulled her arm back as soon as the machine beeped.

“Thank you, Miss Gol—”

A deafening crash drowned out all other sounds. She whipped around to see splintered wallboard flying and two men dressed in dark suits and sunglasses coming through the breach. They both headed directly toward her. She gasped in a breath and froze, every bone in her body turning to ice. The moment she’d dreaded had finally happened—they were coming to take her away for being an unfit citizen.

One of them pulled a gun. “Stay where you are, Miss Gold, and we won’t hurt you.”

The hell
. She dodged right and fled down the next aisle, the clerk zooming after her with her purchase.

“Miss? Miss? Did you want to have this gift-wrapped? Miss?”

Seconds later a thud shook the floor, probably the clerk being run over by the two thugs. She didn’t waste time looking back to find out. Sucking in air while running full tilt, she raced for the only exit she felt safe taking—the escalator.

Down she went, shoving people aside, and jumping over small children. Down, down, down as fast as she could. Screams split the air behind her, but she could not stop. Fear pounded in her veins, making her limbs loose and wiry and her mouth dry.
Got to reach the bottom. Got to get out of here
.

Her foot finally landed on the last step. She pushed off and collided with a massive wall of chest. A strong arm came around her, pressing her tight.

“Darling, there you are. I’ve been looking all over for you.” The voice was calm and smooth.

Before she could catch her breath and ask him to ID himself, they were moving. Well he moved—her feet weren’t even touching the ground. He’d swept her up in his arms as though she weighed less than a feather. Through the crowded floor he ran, holding her so tight she wasn’t jostled. They traveled so rapidly the wind made her eyes tear. She turned her head and looked behind them. The two goons still followed.
My God, they move so fast, they can’t be human
.

“I-they-the-”

“Everett, my name’s Everett.”

She blinked, stunned. He didn’t even sound out of breath. How could that be possible? “Everett, the goons, they’re gaining on us!”

“Then it’s time for us to get out of here, my dear.” He took a hard left and started muttering “B42”, “B42”, whatever that meant.

She whipped her head back around in time to see him hold out an arm, fire some strange weapon, and completely obliterate the elevator next to the bathrooms, leaving a black gaping hole in the wall. But he didn’t stop his forward momentum. He kept going. Right for the smoldering opening.

“Hold on.”

She gripped his shoulders tight, nails digging in. No. No, he couldn’t be serious. “Everett, no!”

But he was. He jumped through the hole and right off the edge of the fortieth floor. Straight into certain oblivion. Death himself must have trembled at the sight.

She closed her eyes and screamed as her stomach pitched into her ears. Down they went, and fast. She tried to calculate the seconds until impact but found her brain too paralyzed by shock to formulate the numbers.
I’m going to die. I’m going to die. And all I wanted was a new spatula
.

Wham!
Everett’s feet landed on a solid surface—an adjacent rooftop several stories below. She heard it crack beneath them but it did not give way. He simply shifted her in his arms and kept running.

Sam blinked and tried to get used to the feeling of her heart beating all over again. Her breaths came in little gulps.
I’m still alive
. Shivering with hysteria, she buried her head in Everett’s shoulder and mewled.

He patted her on the back. “You’re doing great. Don’t worry.”

She nodded but screwed her eyes tight shut. She absolutely did not want to see what was coming next. While he ran, she heard Everett communicating with another party.

“Yes, we are in process. Hovercar no longer in service. Need emergency re-route. Coordinates received. 696683 out.”

He jumped to the next roof, ran and vaulted down again, this time landing on solid ground with a resonating thud. But in half a second he took off running again. He moved faster than a herd of cows spooked by sheet lightning on a hot summer night.

After a few minutes the world quieted around them. She risked a glance over his shoulder. They sped along a dark abandoned commuter tunnel. No hovertrains. No pedestrians. No sign of the goons. They were utterly alone.

Everett careened to the right and entered an unmarked metal door in the long corridor. He went through it quickly and efficiently, then gently set her feet on the floor. She stood there looking at up at him feeling small and ridiculous and felt the first hysterical tear leak out of the corner of her eye.

“Hey.” Everett smoothed a hand down each of her arms, subduing the tremors threatening to shake her to pieces. “It’s okay. We’re safe for the moment.”

She shook her head.
For the moment? And then what?
The tremors got worse. Every jarring step and lurch came home all at once, settling into her bones. She thought their ferocity might rattle her apart. Her stomach plummeted. None of this made any sense. Not the men chasing her. Not the jump. Not the…. Wait. She replayed their escape in her mind. Those things he’d done were impossible. Unless he wasn’t human. The awful truth sank in. There could only be one explanation. She wrapped her arms around herself and took a step back from the far too alluring masculine form who’d clutched her oh-so tightly to his body, making hers tingle. “E-Everett. Wh-hat are you?”

He stuck out a hand looking perfectly normal, every blond hair in place and beaming a smile gorgeous enough to make angels weak at the knees. “Agent 696683 here to serve and protect. You’re my new charge, Miss Gold. Welcome to safe house number eleven-o-two.”

“Oh God.” She covered her head with her hands and sank to the floor. “You’re a mechanoid, aren’t you?”

Everett retracted his arm and took a step back from where Samantha sat on the floor in front of the heating unit hugging her knees, head buried in her arms. He wanted to comfort her badly, but her statement held him back. Yes, he was a mechanoid. Yes, there were mechanoid haters everywhere these days. No, he hadn’t expected Simon Gold’s daughter to be one of them.

Internally he checked the feeds. Good. No one had followed them underground. They were safe here but not for long. They’d need to keep moving. The sooner he got her to Security Core, the better. So how come he wanted to stay with her right here forever if it would make her feel safe?

He took a cautious step closer. “Miss Gold? Are you okay? Did I hurt you?”

She shook her dark sienna locks and sniffled. “No. I’m fine.”

The sound of her distress drew him closer like a bolt to a magnetic nut. He knelt and risked reaching out his hand again. His heart ached to help her. “Are you crying?”

“Don’t touch me!” She scooted back toward the wall giving him a suspicious look. “I want to go home.”

Remembering the vids, he shook his head.
Not going to happen
. “I’m afraid that’s impossible.”

She squinted. Her eyebrows looked so lovely when pinched. “Why?”

“Your home has been obliterated, Miss Gold. It’s been destroyed by the people following us.” He wanted to add that such a structure wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes under a good snowstorm, but refrained. Luckily it never snowed in New California.

“What?” She screeched and clenched her fists as she stood. “What are you talking about?”

She was clearly upset. He stood and spoke slowly so as not to frighten her further. “The men following you had your mud hut torpedoed to rubble about an hour after you left this afternoon. I saw it on the vid briefing during my upgrades.”

“My house is gone?”

He nodded.

“My crops?”

“Those, too.”

“What about my cows?” she wailed.

He cocked his head and re-checked the feed. “Bovine life forms were unaccounted for in the initial data provided.”

“Then how am I going to get milk? How will I survive off the grid? I don’t go to the grocery store.” With hands on her hips she glared at him as though she considered this a life-and-death matter and the whole situation was entirely his fault.