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  Chapter 20 Part B

  “I was worried they’d catch me. I think they spotted me near the main road but then I thought I lost them but they kept somehow being on every street I was on two hours ago.” She’s biting her lip in frustration.

  “Who?”

  “A bunch of thugs. They were grabbing girls off the street and less than an hour ago got a few that looked no older than thirteen. I almost got taken,” she said. She looks totally desperate and with a wild look on her face like she’d just come out of a war zone.

  “Holy shit!” I excimed, eyes widening.

  “Well…thanks for letting me in,” she said. She calms down pretty quickly though after we take a few minutes to make sure she wasn’t followed. She won’t stop checking the window though. She still hasn’t faced me and had gone straight to the window peephole area I’d made as soon as she’d gotten into the house.

  Is it just me or…she’s wearing what look like clothes you’d wear to a gym. A bck sleeveless tank top with a swoop cut neck design that cuts low over some running shorts. It doesn’t help that the shorts are…very short and skin tight with her rear pointing right at me while she’s leaning forward. She has a small backpack with gold trim that looks like something she stole from an elementary school kid and some big skull candy headphones that go into some kind of old design music pyer setup that looks vintage from like fifty years ago. She has like 5 wristwatches on one wrist also. And to top it off there’s aviator’s sungsses resting on her hair on the top.

  She has a wiry build that draws the eye but still looks soft in the right pces at the same time.

  “OK, I think it’s clear,” she said finally.

  “Did they see you come in here?” I asked firmly.

  “I don’t think so,” she said while straining to peek through the very small peephole in the heavy drapes I had up over the window.

  “Check again to be sure,” I suggested.

  Sure enough a few minutes ter, it’s the same two guys that were the driver and shotgun seat from a few days ago with pantyhose covering their heads and bandannas over all of their face except the eyes, and above.

  But where are the other two that were with them before? They aren’t just after assets but now after girls?

  I didn’t like that they were upgrading what their targets were. And coming back to this street now…

  Dangerous.

  This whole area is messed up it seems.

  They don’t pull in my driveway or the neighbors next to me, but they are cruising the neighborhood in a slow watch pattern while going like 5 MPH as they scout for any kind of human activity. They aren’t even trying to be hiding their guns anymore, and I said something like that as such to the girl who is letting me look while she’s standing there with her hands on her hips.

  “They didn’t see us, but you’ll have to lie low for awhile. There’s no telling if they’ll come back or how long they will cruise this neighborhood looking for people. If they see you leave her then they’ll check her for other people hiding here too,” I said.

  “Crap. I have a full load of jobs to do too after this. This is going to complicate things quite a bit,” she frowned. Her posture shifted into disappointment with her arms folded and her nose scrunched up.

  “It goes without saying that it will be the death of us if you open the drapes or turn on any lights. Don’t open any windows or doors. Stay really quiet. No noise, no lights, no TV. We’ll die if they come here,” I said.

  “Good to know,” she nodded.

  “You want to tell me who the hell you are?” I asked.

  “Oh sorry about that. My name is Val. My official name is Val-7B-1A. Barbara sent me. You can just call me Val for short. Also don’t use my numeric coding around other humans…yeah I like to blend in so I trust you won’t out me to the other humans,” she said offering her hand for me to shake. She gives me a tight lipped smile that is meant to be a bit distant but still be polite.

  We shook hands. But she held it a bit longer looking me in the eye. “To be clear, I’m not yours. Nor intending to become such. I’m here as temporary help to support Barbara.”

  “Fine. No problem. And you say Barbara sent you?” I raised an eyebrow.

  “Right. On sec,” she looked back in the peep hole again to check. I think she’s pretty nervous and I didn’t even think androids could get nervous.

  When I shake her hand, she tests my grip but isn’t cruel or inflicting pain. Then she’s looking me over up and down, “Hmm, that’s good. You are recovering your strength adequately. Barbara said your grip was lighter st time she came here. She asked me to test that as an indicator,” she said.

  “And how was it?”

  “You are getting stronger. Mathematically I think you’ll fully recover. You probably just use the chair because of exhaustion. Am I right?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Do you talk to her often? How many other people are with her? Does she have a lot of friends?” I raised an eyebrow.

  “Not as many as we need. You can’t have too many trustworthy friends in this kind of shit storm,” she said with a paranoid look on her face.

  I’m still deciding how much I can trust the girl in front of me. She’s eyeing me too, trying to see if I’m a danger or a help. Wow, it’s amazing how well androids mimic humans, I think, while seeing it. Surprisingly I think I’m figuring her out.

  “It’s all good. Listen. I’m here because she sent me. But I’m not here to stay. We need to get this finalized. Part of the reason she wasn’t able to wrap up some of the loose ends with you the st time is because her team at work is being watched more closely than before. We think they may suspect things and suspect any transactions going through that look odd,” she said.

  “Well even if they do. I doubt they would gauge the full scope of our pns. They wouldn’t suspect an android breaking off the main company would they?” I asked.

  She shook her head, “I don’t know. I’m worried we might have a mole somewhere but I could be wrong. Nothing is certain right now.” She folded her arms while she’s pacing the room.

  “Well…it’s already complicated even before that happened. It’s only a matter of days before all hell breaks loose,” I said.

  “True, but let’s get started all right? I need to commandeer your coffee table,” she demanded politely with a sinister looking grin.

  “No problem. But even if you do pull this off, we need weapons badly. Those guys are going to hit every house on this street I think. If they keep coming back and every house is a profitable take…” I cocked my head to one said.

  Val nodded. “I’m going to be working that out with Val too. But we have to go step by step. The good news is we’ll have your android adoption done today, or possibly tomorrow. Then you’ll have a companion for life.”

  “But why didn’t she do it st time?” I said impatiently.

  “There was a lot to cover. Timing is everything. Sometimes quicker is not better. She also didn’t know which day this week they were doing the inventory’s mainframe computer maintenance. That was another big detail,” she said after opening up her datapad.

  “You had a setback then,” I crified.

  “Yes….” she didn’t want to admit it, but did so.

  It’s clear that Val also was an android because her eyes were…glowing as she was typing away on a wrist ptop. Not to mention having numbers in her name code… and being hotter than a normal young woman would be. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to tell.

  “Let’s slow down for a second. First off, because of the government funding grant I already qualify for an android so why does this have to be all hush hush?” I grumbled.

  “Barbara is a top of the line high css android that is the top of our evolution. They’d notice for many reasons and not just because she’s a Liga,” Val said.

  “Why did the maintenance need to happen? Was it pnned maintenance or a break down of some kind?” I asked.

  “Hold on wait please,” she said stopping me.

  She paused in her myriad of keystrokes after a full minute. She’s not the social type it seems, and is obviously some kind of programmer. She probably thinks socializing is a waste of efficiency I conclude after she ignores a couple of other small talk questions, I asked after that.

  I was about to leave the room and come back ter when her voice stops me halfway to the door to the mini-kitchen.

  “The mainframe is hack proof. Period. We could only do this the day they were doing maintenance. It’s programmed to only accept administrator inventory manual overrides only during certain maintenance cycle dates that only higher ups know about and are guarded with secrecy. So this is the st part of overwriting her coding to accept you. Even then they have to keep it hush, which days those are and it took us like two weeks and a couple of sacrificed androids to get this information,” she said. Still her eyes never leave the datapad.

  She looks kind of cute, but whoever designed her went for more loli pedo features and the blonde twin side ponytails instead of an adult sophisticated look like Barbara had. She didn’t really have much in the chest department either, but she was still pretty.

  “But if they suspect Barbara’s team already, it would help if you had an alibi and a diversion while we’re on this end to keep them from bming her,” I said.

  Suddenly loli girl stopped entirely and looked at me intensely.

  “You…are right…interesting.” she said.

  Then she punched something into another disposable datapad phone that looked just like mine and sent a huge string of numbers and letters in a sequence. I’d not seen androids text each other before. I suspect the numbers were in a type of cipher sequence however. But there were way to many to even study the code.

  “You are texting her by code?” I asked to confirm.

  “Yeah, she has the cipher. Only the Blue Team has it,” she said.

  Blue Team?

  This must be what Barbara was hinting at when she mentioned more than one android faction. So Barbara was the Blue team? What was the Blue team? Did they have some kind of hidden agenda?

  Or maybe they just called it that for my benefit. Its probably more complicated than blue team and...whatever the other team is.

  I wasn’t sure this was a good thing now. What if both sides were bad too? In the old days you might think good versus evil, but now days things could get pretty twisted early on. And if you got involved in something that wasn’t good, then pretty soon you’d be trying to escape the suffering bad choices entrapped you into.

  But then I realized I was overthinking things. The things I talked about with Barbara were kind of special. No vilin could talk that way.

  I can see Val reading left to right quickly as she scrolls through tons of code really quickly.

  “OK. Barbara is en route to another appointment. We’ll time the hack to let’s say…to activate fifteen minutes after she arrives,” she confirmed to me while sitting on the floor rather than the table.

  “So didn’t you guys think of this beforehand?” I wondered.

  Val looks offended, “We tried to. But we were also shorthanded. We lost one of our team to sabotage recently and she was trying to dey the other team finding out about it. Plus we thought if Barbara was in the garage anyway then that technically would be alibi enough. But your idea made me realize that if the garage is compromised or loses power then it won’t be sufficient as an alibi, but if she’s with a potential customer then that will stretch for more than one type of condition occurring while we’re covering our time slot.”

  “Good. Make it happen. But be careful. Pn for some parts to have unforeseen circumstances and be ready to adapt, please,” I smiled.

  “Will do,” she sounded almost like she would salute me if she had the chance.

  “Thanks,” I added.

  She still didn’t respond.

  She kept working on the code some more. But then suddenly there’s a change of pace after a few more minutes of violent typing.

  “Crap. Not good,” I heard her mutter.

  She’s deyed for a few more minutes of type fighting or whatever it is. I’d never seen anyone type on a keyboard as violently as she does.

  “What’s going on now?” I softly asked.

  “They had more than one watchdog on security to guard against this type of activity,” she said.

  “But you already took care of that didn’t you?” I sucked in my breath.

  Shit. I didn’t want to go to jail or have any trouble.

  “We did. Your having me be ready for unforeseen things helped. We setup a really good scheme for this too. But every once in awhile the maintenance security group…that’s a different group than the regur security group by the way…every once in awhile they’ll send an extra person or two. We couldn’t have predicted that and it’s never happened at our facility before. It’s because a lot of w enforcement groups are on high alert right now too,” she added.

  Then like before she hit some more code just like before into her phone.

  She sighed and is clearly unhappy, “this isn’t cool. We will probably have to sacrifice another pawn for this. Barbara better come through for me on this,” she muttered.

  “She made an agreement with you?” I asked.

  “Yeah of course she did. Didn’t she tell you?” Suddenly Val looked scared and shocked.

  Uh oh. That means…did she promise her something I should have known about? And did I just put my foot in my mouth.

  “Rex. It’ll be fine,” I said.

  “But she didn’t tell you?!” she seemed like almost hysterical. She even dropped her keyboard and is acting like she might run off.

  Crap. I have to stop her. But I can’t do it with physical strength anyway. Even if I was in perfect condition, it’s possible a lot of androids would still overpower me.

  Turns out I have to calm Val down from an emotional breakdown over the next ten minutes. Val says Barbara promised her that she could come with us too, in fleeing the Mellifera garage she then tells me talking so fast that I had to listen to her story twice. And since I didn’t know that part…fudge buckets.

  Wow, I can’t believe she didn’t tell me something so critical. That’s why Val is hysterical.

  OK, what’s going on… wait…

  Barbara hasn’t ever lied to me. She’s not deceptive. Everything suggests a careful builder…

  So I trust her.

  “Why didn’t she tell you our deal yet?” And now Val is crying openly. I didn’t think androids could cry. Is she also an advanced model? I was trying to calm her down and so I gave her a hug, which started to calm her down.

  “It’s going to be OK,” I said reassuring her. She’s still trying to calm down after I hugged her tightly.

  We finally get back to work, after I tell her it will be OK again more than once while she’s sniffing. Of course she did some kind of calcution based on having observed my body responses first to confirm I wasn’t lying…at least that’s what I think.

  Androids… wow. I can see right now that they can be tricky. They are walking lie detectors.

  “So why didn’t you just hack Barbara directly? Why are you hacking Mellifera’s purchasing agreements and inventory management system instead of her CPU? Won’t it be easier to do that than just hack Barbara directly?” I asked.

  Val paused. She still looks a bit teary eyed with red circles simir to a raccoon but red instead of bck. Wow this kid can really emute reactions well.

  “Well we tried that already and it didn’t go well. Even after I’d spent days working on the perfect hacking key and gone through millions of lines of code literally.” She avoids looking at me in the eye.

  “That’s too bad,” I frowned.

  She shrugged, “its cool. We still got something out of it. We tested it by giving the hacking notes to the Red team in the form of a leak. They lost two people trying it out, so it was good to have two less agents to fight. So it was a win in the end.” There was a certain callousness about her view of what happened to the red team that suggested they weren’t just rivals…

  Red team and Blue team…

  Sounds like Red team is… not good.

  She kept working. “If anyone can do this it’ll be me...”