The Android Chronicles Book One: The Android Defense (9 page)

Miranda watched him in some
curiosity.

“You’ve never seen an
android exercising before?” Luke said.

“Sorry for staring, sir,”
Miranda said. “If you’d like, I can order some exercise equipment
to be placed in the room. There’s also a 24 hour gym on the ground
floor of the building, but I’ve never seen any androids using
it.”

“I’ll think about the
exercise equipment,” Luke said. He got to his feet and walked to
the kitchen sink. He splashed his face with cold water and then
stripped off his shirt, leaving him standing in only his
sweatpants.

Miranda quickly busied
herself turning down the sheets on Luke’s bed.

The television screen on the
wall suddenly turned on.

“Luke,” Damian
said.

Luke paused in the middle of
pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“Did I interrupt you in the
middle of your workout?” Damian said, with a smirk.

“At the end of it,” Luke
said.

“Well, conference meeting in
my office in half an hour,” Damian said. “See you there. With your
shirt on, preferably.”

His image faded from the
screen.

Miranda emerged from where
she had ducked behind the bed.

“Mr. Foster makes me
tremendously nervous,” she said. “I don’t know why.”

She picked up a fresh pale
blue shirt from the pile of laundry and handed it to
Luke.

“Would you like to wear this
shirt, sir? Perhaps with your dark blue jacket and
pants?”

“Thanks for the fashion
suggestion,” Luke said. He took the shirt and walked into his
dressing-room. He came out a few moments later in the outfit
Miranda had envisioned.

Miranda clapped her
hands.

“Oh, you look marvelous,
sir.”

“Are compliments part of
your programming?” Luke said.

“They are,” Miranda said.
“But you really do look marvelous.”

Chapter 21.

Mandelie, Jake, and Trista
sat in a corner booth in an old-fashioned diner on a run-down
street in Los Angeles. Mandelie and Trista both had plates of
waffles they were hardly touching. Jake was plowing through a
lumberman’s breakfast of eggs, bacon, ham, and French
toast.

“Man, I miss my buddy Luke,”
he said, through a mouthful of eggs and bacon. “But since you say
he’s doing all right, Mands, I feel better.”

“He’s alright … for the
moment,” Mandelie said. “We’re the ones who are in a ditch. I’m
going to the police station after this. I’m going to try to get
some answers out of those cops.”

“That’ll be like trying to
get water from a rock,” Trista said. “But you’re welcome to
try.”

When Luke walked into
Damian’s office, he saw Carlie and Lina sitting on the couches in
the seating area, along with the three other android designers
Melinda, Joe, and Ledia. Tony del Travio and another assistant
named Derrin were standing near the wall, looking a little bit
uneasy to be in Damian’s imposing office.

Tony glared at Luke, who
ignored him and sat down in one of the chairs in front of Damian’s
desk.

Damian got up from his
high-backed chair. He looked suave and cool in a navy jacket, white
button down shirt, and black trousers.

“Alright, we’re all here?”
he said. “I’m not going to bother turning on the television, but
I’m sure you’ve all heard Adventis’s name splashed across all the
news channels today. Granted, it’s not for a very good reason, but
any kind of publicity is good publicity, right? So why not take
advantage of this moment and make it into dollar signs? I’ve
decided that we’re going to move the launch of our android lines up
to next week.”

“Next week!” Lina
said.

“Yes,” Damian said. “Let’s
strike while the iron’s hot. For every person screaming in the
streets about how we’re greedy, job-stealing bastards, there’s
another tech-obsessed geek who’s clamoring to get his hands on our
androids. We’re right in the middle of a clash between the old
generation and the new generation, the modern and the outdated.
There won’t be a better time to launch the androids.”

Carlie looked a little bit
satisfied by Lina’s look of alarm.

“That’s a lot of work we’ll
have to do by next week,” Joe said. “We still haven’t got the Super
Soldiers up to par, and there’s a bunch of other tweaks we’re still
hammering out for the other lines.”

“Get it done,” Damian said.
“We can hold off on the Super Soldiers, but I definitely want the
other lines ready to launch first. Carlie’s already booked the
Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard for the launch ceremony. Sci
Fi’s going to broadcast it, and we’ve already got promises for
appearances by Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Aerosmith, and
Ashton Kutcher.”

“Well, then,” Lina
said.

“The ceremony’s going to be
huge, loud, and it’s going to blow these protestors out of the
water. I want the androids in top-tier, mint condition, ready to go
out to consumers the day after the ceremony. I want one model from
each line present at the ceremony, for display.”

The tone of his voice
invited no arguments.

“Alright, then, you got it,
Damian,” Ledia said. “We’ll start banging it out, around the
clock.”

“That’s what I want to
hear,” Damian said. “I’m holding each one of you personally
accountable for what I see at the ceremony. Meeting’s over. Get
back to work.”

All of the attendants except
for Carlie and Luke got up and left the room. Carlie glanced at
Luke and then looked down at her iPad.

“You won’t be able to be at
the ceremony, Luke,” Damian said, with an apology in his voice.
“There will be tons of cops there. They’ll spot you in an instant.
I’ll lend you the use of my office for that day. You can watch
everything from my television screen.”

“Of course,” Luke
said.

“You did a good job with the
upgrades for the androids,” Damian said. “If it pays off, you’ll
get rewarded, Luke. Trust me. Oh, I nearly forgot. I’ve got an
extra ticket for the Lakers game tonight. Want to go with me and
Carlie? They’re private box seats.”

“Oh, come,” Carlie said
immediately.

“I don’t know a lot about
human sports,” Luke said. “At these kinds of events, there’s a lot
of yelling and screaming involved. Right?”

“Yeah, but you don’t need to
yell and scream,” Damian said. “Unless you feel like it. Game
starts at seven, and we’ll leave the office at six in my
limo.”

Carlie looked
jubilant.

Chapter 22.

Malibu P.D. was strangely
deserted when Mandelie arrived at it. Evidently there had been a
gruesome murder in the Los Angeles area and most of the cops had
left the station in force to investigate it.

She walked a little
nervously up to the front reception desk, where a bored-looking
dispatcher stared up at her.

“Um, can I help
you?”

“I’m looking for Detective
Stroud,” Mandelie said, remembering the police officer’s name. “Or
Detective Grimes.”

“Stroud’s out on a call,”
the dispatcher said. “Grimes is here, I think. What’s your name so
I can tell him?”

“I’m Mandelie Miles,”
Mandelie said. “He’s one of the cops investigating my dad’s
disappearance case.”

“Wait here.” The dispatcher
picked up her phone and dialed a number.

“Hey, Grimes. There’s a
Mandelie Miles here to see you. Mandelie Miles. Yeah, yeah, Jason
Miles. That must be it. She’s waiting here. Come down and talk to
her yourself.”

The dispatcher hung up and
returned to her tasks. Mandelie waited until she saw a lean,
ascetic cop walking towards her. He seemed surprised by her
presence.

“How can I help you, Miss
Miles?”

“It’s been a month since my
dad’s disappearance,” Mandelie said. “Has there been any progress
with the search?”

Grimes glanced at the
dispatcher.

“Let’s go to my desk and
have this conversation,” he said. “Follow me.”

Mandelie followed Grimes
through an area of open police desks, where some cops were sitting,
absorbed in their work. Grimes stopped at his own desk, which was a
cluttered mess of papers and notebooks. He dragged a chair forward
for her.

“Sit down,” he said, as he
sat as well.

Mandelie sat. Grimes leaned
back in his chair.

“Um, well, we haven’t had
any breaks in the case,” he said. “There’s a lot of … I guess you
could say weirdness surrounding your dad’s disappearance. We had
those blood samples from the lab investigated. But only some of it
matches your dad’s DNA. We don’t know where the other blood came
from.”

Mandelie’s heart
rose.

“If only a little was his,
then maybe he’s still alive.”

“I don’t know,” Grimes said.
“I can’t say.”

“I looked through the lab,”
Mandelie said. “There’s a lot of things missing.”

“Yeah, they’re in the
evidence room,” Grimes said. “Waiting to be analyzed.”

Mandelie’s eye was caught by
a familiar-looking notebook sitting on Grimes’ desk. It was her
father’s notebook in which he kept notes on the progress of his
experiments.

She rested her arm on the
desk and pretended to knock a pile of papers off of it.

“Oh, sorry!” she said. As
Grimes leaned down to pick up the papers, Mandelie swept the
notebook off the desk and into her bag.

“Well, I’m sorry to have
bothered you,” Mandelie said. “Can you please let me know if you
make any other discoveries in the search?”

“Sure,” Grimes said, in a
non-committal voice. “Have a nice day, Miss Miles.”

He did not accompany her
back to the front of the station. Mandelie walked quickly out of
the front doors, hoping Grimes would not notice the missing
notebook and chase after her. He did not.

“Isn’t this fantastic?”
Carlie whispered in Luke’s ear as she sat beside him in the private
box seat overlooking the huge gleaming sports arena in the Staples
Center. She wore a jersey belted into a dress and her usual
stiletto heels.

Luke resisted the urge to
shrug. He had a sudden memory of a hockey game he had played with
Jake in the parking lot. He had found that a lot more interesting
than this current activity.

“It is,” he said instead.
Carlie took a sip from her drink and danced in her seat to the
music blasting from the arena speakers.

Damian had excused himself
to take a call in the hallway outside the room.

“Want another drink?” Luke
said to Carlie.

“Oh, sure,” Carlie said. She
beamed.

Luke got up and went to the
bar at the back of the room. He made sure Carlie was not looking in
his direction and then he closed his eyes and accessed his
communication console.

There were no messages
waiting for him from Mandelie. She had not responded to any of his
messages since the night they had kissed.

Luke returned to his seat
beside Carlie. He felt heavy, weighted down, as though his internal
mechanisms had turned to lead.

“You okay?” Carlie
said.

“Fine,” Luke
said.

“You said you wanted the
Super Soldiers to be terrifying, and I promised you they would be,”
Damian said in the half-darkness to the person on the other end of
the phone. “And I always come through on what I say.”

He listened for a
moment.

“Oh, they’re ready. You
ought to see the leader of the Super Soldiers. He’s this pile of
muscles with a huge anger management problem. We call him Captain
Mercenare. How do you like that, eh?”

He listened
again.

“I’m with you on that. It’s
time to show the world that power doesn’t belong in the hands of
humans anymore. It belongs in the hands of the humans who control
the androids.”

Damian laughed.

Chapter 23.

The gray day over Hollywood
Boulevard was cold and drizzling, but that did not stop huge crowds
from surging all around it, screaming their excitement or else
their protests as twelve Adventis androids stood on top of a long
raised stage in front of the Roosevelt Hotel.

Hordes of police officers
stood around the stage, keeping the crowds at bay. Damian, Carlie,
and Lina stood on top of the stage as well.

Damian was being interviewed
by the host from the Sci Fi Channel. He wore a flashy gray suit and
dark blue tie. His handsome face seemed to be even more striking
with the numerous cameras turned onto him.

“This is the day all of us
get to see the future,” Damian was saying. “The day everyone will
be talking about for years to come.”

Carlie scanned the faces in
the crowds. They were all watching the androids in wild
fascination, especially Brigite, who winked and danced seductively
on her side of the stage. The other androids were moving around as
well, waving to the crowds.