The Gate (4 page)

Devlin had, she reminded
herself.

And this wasn’t Devlin.

But he looked just like him.

And, if she was right, he was Devlin,
not just a physical reproduction but right down to his
personality.

Except he wasn’t really Devlin, she
reminded herself.

Devlin Bear had been killed a year ago
in his lab when there’d been an explosion that had reduced the lab
to rubble.

Lifting a trembling hand, she lightly
skated it downward along his arm. He opened his eyes and stared at
her without recognition and her heart clutched painfully in her
chest. She didn’t know if it was because there was no recognition
or if it was simply because it was impossible to think of him as a
machine once he opened his eyes.

But, of course, that was the point, she
reminded herself.

“Carly?”

Carly swallowed with an effort,
discovering he’d tilted his head and focused on her and the blank
look had shifted to a look of recognition. She smiled with an
effort. “Devlin.”

Something flickered in his eyes and for
a moment she feared it might be a malfunction, especially when he
looked confused. He frowned, looking around her apartment. “I don’t
live here.”

Carly stiffened, resisting the urge to
glance up at the camera. “Of course you do … now. You’re my
companion.”

He fixed her with his gaze again, his
frown deepening. “I don’t remember.”

“Oh damn!” Carly muttered.

“The programming of your companion
cyborg appears faulty. Would you like for me to run a
diagnostic?”

She would like for Trude to mind her
own damned business, she thought angrily! “No, Trude. Thank you. I
imagine it’s just orientation.” She discovered when she returned
her attention to Devlin that he was examining his hands. “Why don’t
I show you around?” she said soothingly, smiling at him
coaxingly.

Relief flooded her when he stepped from
the crate. He paused, turning to examine it and then sent her a
strange look. Carly’s uneasiness intensified. Despite every effort
to dismiss her dismay, the feeling was growing that the companion
she’d been waiting so anxiously for was defective.

She didn’t want to send him back! He
looked just like she’d imagined he would—just like he had in the
videos she’d gotten from archives! He sounded like
Devlin.

And she knew with absolute certainty
that his was the only contributor of sim Daniel that had ever
mattered to her.

A replacement would never be as close
to the real Devlin as this was! She was convinced of it.

It flickered through her mind that
she’d ordered a replacement for the real Devlin, put she shoved
that back to the nether regions of her mind as quickly as it
presented itself.

He was fine! The disorientation was
merely his programming trying to catch up to his new
environment.

She offered her hand. Relieved when he
clasped it, she led him around her apartment, slowly familiarizing
him with everything. She saved the bathroom for last, but it was on
her mind the entire time she was showing him everything else.
Partly that was because she could speak completely freely there
without worrying that Trude would record it. And partly it was
because the moment she thought about the bath it leapt into her
mind that she could make love to him in the shower.

The conflicting desires added to her
anxiety had her so jittery by the time they reached the bathroom
that reluctance had begun to war with desire, the fear that this
was where she was going to discover the colossal mistake she’d
made. She paused briefly at the door and looked up at him. There
was nothing but curiosity in his eyes and it flickered through her
mind that she’d never noticed how very, very human-like cyborgs
were.

Of course, that was the entire point of
spending such outrageous sums of money on one. The droids were more
like dolls, their exteriors of synthetic materials that mimicked
human muscle and tissue—to a degree—but still fell short of
actually feeling like humans. They could be made to look and behave
like someone specific or just ‘attractive’ using the customer’s
preferences in body type, height, and personality, but only the
cyborgs were so carefully constructed with a combination biological
materials and robotics that they could pass for human. Even their
programming was far superior to the droids.

“This is the bathroom,” she told him
with a flickering, nervous smile and an attempt at humor. “It’s
tiny, but I think we can both fit.”

He looked at her curiously. “If it’s
too small for both of us, I can examine it by myself.”

Carly’s smile tightened. Deciding to
ignore the comment, she entered and tugged commandingly at the hand
she was still holding. Fortunately, he didn’t resist.

When the door had closed behind them, a
modicum of relief swept through her. “This is the only room in the
apartment where I have privacy—complete privacy,” she said
significantly.

Something flickered in his eyes. It was
uncanny the way he mimicked human thought!

He lifted his head and scanned the
ceiling and walls. “Your home system has no censors
here?”

“Quiet!” Carly commanded, turning the
dryer on and then moving a little closer to him. “I’m not sure it’s
sensors can’t still probe the room from the hall. You can talk
freely but only in a low tone.”

Devlin frowned. The sense that he would
remember something, possibly something important, flickered through
his mind but remained frustratingly elusive. “If I’m your
companion, why does nothing seem familiar?”

Carly gaped at him in dismay, trying to
decide what she should tell him. She didn’t recall that the sales
rep had said anything about the cyborg being ‘confused’. She had
assumed he would have been programmed to ‘know’ what he needed to
the moment she activated him by touch. Would it mess things up—the
illusion she’d been trying to create of a real relationship—if she
explained it? Or would there be more problems if she
didn’t?

“You’re a companion cyborg,” she said
finally.

He sent her a startled look and then
looked down at himself and then looked at her again. This time she
saw emotions in his eyes that rattled her. His entire face
transformed to a look of dismay and then to one of anger. “I’m
not!” he said flatly. “I’m Devlin ….” He paused, as if searching
for something. “I’m Devlin Bear.”

“Uh oh,” Carly said, visions of making
love to him in the shower vanishing like mist and real alarm taking
the place of the slight uneasiness she’d felt before.

* * * *

Despite the anger that had arisen from
his fear and frustration, and his confusion from the time he’d
awoken, Devlin knew he couldn’t afford to display any of the
emotions roiling inside of him. He was being watched. He was always
being watched.

And he was playing a role … different
from the one he played before, he realized.

The realization that being monitored
was nothing new set off an almost explosive chain reaction within
his brain. Memories rushed back into his mind as he sat quietly
staring, not at the view beyond the window, but his own
reflection.

Like the alternate universes he had
been studying, his life had become a nightmare that seemed linked
to another and another—an endless series of nightmares that changed
but remained a nightmare. It had been unnerving enough to find
himself disembodied, wandering aimlessly with no clear idea of how
he’d gotten there or where he was or even who he was. It had been
as if he was drifting on an endless sea of fog and his mind had
seemed just as untethered. Memories swirled just beyond his reach,
but as hard as he’d struggled to grasp them, they moved away
again.

No longer disembodied, the memories
seemed to have found a harbor to rush back to, but as hard as he’d
struggled to capture them in the endless time he’d floated
unmoored, he was almost sorry that they’d returned.

And he was still confused.

This body looked like his own, but it
wasn’t.

It didn’t feel right. Every movement
he’d made since he had awakened to find himself in a box within a
box had seemed awkward, required a conscious effort to complete
when it had never been that way before.

For a little while after Carly had left
he’d wondered if he was insane, if the thoughts and memories were
true and real or if they were no more than a figment of his
imagination.

She looked familiar. No. She seemed
familiar. He hadn’t recognized her. Somehow, he’d known her name
was Carly, but he hadn’t recognized her and nothing she’d said made
any sense to him. There was something about her, though, that had
seemed familiar. He just wasn’t certain what that something
was.

He dismissed the effort to figure out
the newest puzzle, to grasp more missing memories, fairly
quickly.

When she’d left, he’d settled in a
chair in her living room to stare at the landscape beyond the
window and try to sort his newfound memories. He was looking at the
moon colony and for a while that fact distracted him. Why was he on
the moon colony? How had he gotten there?

He shrugged that question off with
angry disgust. He knew the answer to that. The crate was still
standing in the center of the living room behind him, reflected in
the window glass.

Excitement flared for a moment. His
sister, Brenda, lived in the moon colony! For a few seconds
thoughts triggered by that memory collided wildly in his mind and
then reason reasserted itself.

Brenda had nothing to do with him being
here. He wouldn’t have arrived in a crate if he’d decided to go
visit and he wouldn’t be sitting in a stranger’s living room—a
companion she’d apparently ordered and paid for.

He hadn’t wanted to examine that but
one thought led to another and he realized why he felt more like he
was trapped inside a strange box than within his own body when this
… shell, looked like his body. He realized why it didn’t feel
right.

Because it wasn’t. It didn’t feel
‘natural’ or like his own because it wasn’t.

The only kind of companion that came in
a box was cybernetic companions.

He frowned, too wrapped up in his
thoughts to consider that his watchdog might make a note and begin
to tabulate possibilities to explain that very human emotion. But
then, he’d carefully chosen the chair facing the window to avoid
that possibility as much as he was able. The computer might be able
to analyze his reflection but the glass distorted his image, which
would make analysis difficult.

He was as safe to explore his mind and
emotions as he could be.

Carly might be right about the bathroom
being a safe place, but he couldn’t sit in there for hours
contemplating his situation. That would be suspicious in and of
itself.

Were the memories floating in his mind
now not memories at all? Or not at least not his memories? If he
was a companion as Carly had said, were the memories he thought
were his nothing more than programming?

If that was the case, though, why would
he remember being a scientist? As good as artificial intelligence
was, it required a great deal of ‘learning’ in order to mimic human
behavior and the easiest, and quickest, way to go about that was to
give the computer ‘memories’ to learn by.

Where was the logic in giving him the
memories he had, though? There was nothing there to prepare him for
interacting as a companion! He’d spent most of his life either
studying for his degree or doing his research. He’d been a loner,
had had very little time for any kind of relationship. Wouldn’t it
be more logical to give a companion cyborg more social
memories?

It occurred to him after a while that
there was one way to know for certain whether the memories were
real and truly his.

He could find his sister

Chapter Four

“I think I’m losing my
mind!”

Carly stared at Brenda in dismay, an
avalanche of guilty thoughts colliding in her mind. Brenda was more
agitated than she’d ever seen her, distressed enough that she’d
dragged Carly down to their secret meeting place in the middle of
their shift. “Why would you say that?” she asked
cautiously.

White faced, Brenda clutched Carly’s
arms. “I thought I saw my brother, Devlin.”

Carly had feared as much and she still
felt a shockwave of horror wash over her, felt the blood leave her
own face. She couldn’t seem to collect her thoughts with the guilt
that was riding her and come up with a response that would sound
the least bit reasonable. “You did? When? Where?”

“It wasn’t him! It couldn’t have been
him!” Brenda exclaimed, whirling away and beginning to pace. “It
must just be that I’ve had him on my mind so much lately because
you and I have talked about him so much.”

Carly felt a hard blush rise to her
cheeks. Fortunately, Brenda seemed too distracted to notice. She
cleared her throat, trying to get up the nerve to confess what
she’d done, but all she could think about was that Devlin had put
her in this horrible position! She knew it had to be him! And what
the hell was he doing wandering around when he was supposed to stay
in the apartment!