What Lies Behind: A New Adult Dark Science Fiction Romance (20 page)

The office was equipped with a computer of its own. That was most likely so that the company couldn’t infringe on people’s personal thoughts. There were a lot of safety measures put on computer implants now, but when it had first became the new thing, a lot of hackers had been able to cause some serious trouble inside the minds and bodies of their victims.

Businesses weren’t allowed to put programs into a person’s computer implant now. It would be too easy for leaks to happen.

Brandon grunted and a drawer slipped open behind the desk. It was deep and thin. He reached inside of it and started pulling out all kinds of papers, storage devices, and odd trinkets that Cass didn’t recognize.

“What is all that?” she asked.

Brandon shrugged.

“What do you think she’s hiding on all those storage devices?” Cass asked.

“Who knows? Do you want to look while I search for the devices?”

Cass’s hand shook as she reached for the device. She picked up the clear cylindrical crystal and slipped it into a port at the base of her skull. At least that much was like humans who were often equipped with such computer ports in their heads.

Her visual overlay was populated with all kinds of encrypted messages and correspondences.

“Who is Chelsea Birch?” Cass asked. “I’ve heard her talking to a Mrs. Birch a lot in the mornings while she’s getting ready for work.”

“That would be the CEO of our competitor,” a man said from the doorway.

Cass gasped and her gaze flickered to the doorway. A man stood there in a dark suit. He was bald and his face had the look of power. Even if his brown eyes appeared kind and soft, his mouth was set in a hard line that was nearly as intimidating as Natalia could be.

“Brandon,” the man said. “I come to take my daughter to lunch, and here you are.” He smiled.

Brandon smiled. He stood up straighter, trying to close the hidden compartment with his leg, despite the evidence that he had been searching through Natalia’s personal belongings. He itched his head.

“No need to be coy, I caught you snooping,” the man said and laughed. “I didn’t think you and my daughter were a couple any longer?” he asked.

“We aren’t, sir,” Brandon said.

“Please,” Mr. Tupper said. “Call me James, you always have before.”

James turned to Cass, who had already slipped the storage device out of her port and was trying to set it down on the desk without drawing attention to herself.

“Now what’s that?” James asked, holding his hand out to Cass. “You’re my daughter’s personal assistant, right?”

Circuit breaker, that’s how Natalia referred to her father. She hated him because he was in love with an automaton…but he didn’t refer to Cass as a machine. He called her an
assistant.

This could work out better than taking Natalia to the authorities.

“I was, sir,” Cass said.

“Please, you can call me James as well.”

She nodded and tucked a lock of blond hair behind her ear.

“Now what’s this
were
business?” James asked.

“She disposed of me over a week ago,” Cass told him.

“Very interesting,” James said, tilting his head back. He picked up the storage device and flipped it over in his hand. “Please, if you would come with me to my office, we can discuss this in further detail.”

“That sounds great,” Brandon said.

Cass shot Brandon a look. She didn’t feel like she could trust this man, but Brandon seemed okay with it. She trusted Brandon, so she nodded and followed them.

They stepped out into the hall. Mathilda fell in step behind them.

Mr. Tupper’s office was at the end of its own hallway, away from the noise of the rest of the office and out of the way of prying eyes. The walls here were a rich brown. They weren’t wood, Cass realized, but painted. The carpet was a sky blue. Windows lined the hall on the left to look out on the cloudy day.

“Tabitha, my dear, would you look into what’s on this device for me?” James said, handing the storage device to a plump silver-haired woman behind a desk outside his office.

She nodded and took the device from him. She didn’t smile. Her face looked like she never really smiled to Cass.

She didn’t have time to ponder Tabitha and her lack of smiling because James was leading them into his office. The windows looking out into the office were covered with blinds, but the ones that faced out on the city were free of clutter.

He motioned for them to take a seat and they all arranged themselves around his office, Mathilda further back than Cass and Brandon.

“Would you like something to drink?” James asked Brandon, who shook his head no. James sat a glass of blue shimmering water before him.

“Now, you were just about to tell me,” James said, sitting down in his leather chair. “What your part in all of this is. Why were you snooping in my daughter’s office?”

“That’s actually my fault, sir,” Cass said.

James turned his brown eyes on Cass, and laced his fingers over his stomach. He didn’t say anything, so she continued. She told him everything that had been going on with Natalia. She told him about the abuse, she told him about the repairs she was constantly having to do to herself, and she told him about the damage his daughter had caused, according to Doctor Stephenson.

As she told him of the terror she’d experienced living with his daughter, his face grew darker and darker. At first Cass was worried that he didn’t believe her, and that he would have her and Brandon arrested for trespassing on his daughter’s personal property. Cass finished telling the story and she looked down to her hands, clasped in her lap.

James let out a loud sigh and rested his head back against the chair.

“I was worried something like that was going on. She never let me see you when I came over. And though her mother and I parted on good terms, she’s always been angry that we split up because of my feelings for an
artificial
intelligence.”

He looked at Cass, considering for a moment what to do with what she told him. He leaned forward on his desk. Cass tried to focus on the hover cars drifting by outside, but she couldn’t. His presence was too dominating.

“EMP. Really?” he shook his head. “What am I to do with her? If I turn her in she will be arrested for using illegal weapons, but she’s my daughter. Could I do something like that?”

“Sir, she really resents you,” Brandon chimed in, obviously more relaxed with their current situation than Cass was.

Cass gaped at Brandon. Was he really trying to get Natalia’s father to turn her in?

Mathilda shifted in her seat behind them, drawing attention to herself. “That doesn’t matter, she’s his daughter. Just because she might hate him, doesn’t mean he’s allowed to hate her.”

“Thank you,” James nodded to Mathilda. He stood and looked out the window on the left wall. He leaned against the window frame. “But it also means I have to take responsibility for her. I can’t let her get away with this. Who knows what she’s really up to? Torturing someone in her care? Maybe figuring out how to torture
other
automatons?”

“What are you going to do?” Brandon asked.

James took a breath to say something, but a knock sounded on his office door. He frowned and called for them to come in.

It was Tabitha, and she was wearing a concerned look. James went to her, and as she whispered in his ear, his eyebrows drew down over his nose. Cass hadn’t thought James looked old until that moment, when his face scrunched up with disappointment and maybe anger.

Tabitha left closing the door behind her.

James sighed, lowering himself into his chair. He was silent for some time as he watched the day outside his office.

“There are times when a parent wonders where they went wrong,” James finally spoke. “Was it something we did to Natalia? Was it something she was born with? Do humans have programming at birth like robots? Was she
programmed
to be like this?”

“James?” Brandon leaned forward. His eyes were dark.

“Brandon, you know I’ve always thought of you as a son, even before Natalia got her claws into you, when you were here, working in the mail room. If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t be telling you this now.

“Natalia has crossed many lines, and if it wasn’t for your little lady here, Cass, I might never have known it. She’s been secretly leaking confidential information to Chelsea Birch. That’s what was on that storage device.” James looked to them. “She’s done many things to disappoint me over the years, but I’m a father, what can I do about that other than love her, hope she can change, and correct her if she’s gone too far?”

No one spoke.

“I can’t turn a blind eye to this. She will be punished. You have nothing to worry about,” James said. “And, as my way of thanking you both, let me give you a gift.”

“We don’t need anything,” Cass said. “Really, we just want to be safe from Natalia.”

“And you will have that, I’m sure. There’s more, I can tell the way Brandon feels for you. He looks at you the same way he looked at my daughter before she became who she became.”

“James?” Brandon asked, leaning back. He took a drink of the blue water. His lips shimmered for a moment after his drink, and then faded to their original color.

“My wife was an automaton at one time. Our house assistant, actually,” James said. He faced both of them, lacing his hands together on the desk. “I thought I loved her then, but when she became an android, my love only grew. She became more and more the woman I’d glimpsed under all of her programming.

“You’ve both saved my company. If we hadn’t known about Chelsea Birch, Natalia would probably have destroyed what I worked so hard to build. If you two want whatever is happening between you to work, I think you need exactly what Julia and I have. I think Cass needs to become android.”

Cass stepped out into the open air. The dismal light of the sun shown down on her. She could barely believe what had happened. Without knowing it, Natalia had given Cass exactly what she wanted.

Android,
she thought. It was something she’d wanted for such a short time, but with such a need that Cass could barely think of anything else. Now she had it, or she would have it, thanks to James.

“This is great news!” Mathilda said, clapping her hands.

Before Cass could celebrate, a red light started to pulse in the lower right of her visual overlay. An urgent news broadcast. Without her willing it to, the headline populated.

Olivia Hamilton announced her bid for Congress.

All thoughts of being an android drained from her mind. Olivia was the one who did this to her. She knew that now with certainty. Olivia had ordered Janet to make these changes to Cass. Olivia was the true danger here, not Natalia. Olivia had to be stopped. Equal rights was one thing, but that’s not what Olivia wanted. Olivia worked more with subjugation.

She’d wanted Jack dead because he didn’t see eye to eye with her,
Cass thought. Was Olivia willing to keep that kind of mind frame through the entire campaign?

Something else was happening to her now. Cass wasn’t hearing what was happening around her. Her mind was filling with other thoughts, other needs.

Other programming.

Automaton speed activating…speed boost repaired.

She felt the strength in her limbs. Cass felt the bio fuel pumping to her legs, and before she knew it, she was running, following the urgent red path lit up on her visual overlay. The red path that lead her to Olivia. Led her to her destiny.