“It seemed the thing to do,” Bain said in a phone interview. “It is against my model’s coding to participate in the loss of human life. Perhaps I did not process the action as negative because I had seen the boy fall. Allowing him to stay in the cold waters would have ended his life cycle. Therefore, I had to act contrary to his death.”
Bain is one of the newer prototype androids, a model XHJ152. He was completing a manual task assignment before his judgment coding was tested.
::flip::
“Why’d you do it, Peter?” Kirsten asks, voice soft as her eyes trace a grainy, newspaper photo of the diminutive Westerhaus dwarfed by the size of the yacht he stands aboard, platinum blondes dripping off of him like voluptuous beads of sweat. “You had it all, and more. Why this? Why now?”
Sighing, she closes the scrapbook and places it atop the dozen others she managed to secret away when she began the run for her life.
She sighs again, clicking off the flashlight in her hand, and slumping back against the seat. The night sky is brilliantly clear, the stars a smattering of jewels thrown across a velvet tapestry by a careless hand. She stares through the windshield into that sky, lost in her own thoughts.
The paper is right, of course. About most things in her life, and the androids especially, Kirsten King is a skeptic of the highest order. The religious zealots and jealous corporations had praised her to the highest Heaven during her first public stands against Westerhaus’ creations. Others had looked at her as if she’d grown a second head. Her peers, mostly, laughed behind their hands and coined her with the affectionate title “Chicken Little”. Not because of any perceived cowardice on her part—there was nothing cowardly about Kirsten King—but because of what they felt to be her sudden propensity toward running around shouting “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”
“It fell alright.”
Her voice is unnaturally loud in the absolute silence of the night, and her breath fogs the windshield, rendering her view hazy and indistinct.
Smothering a yawn with her cupped palm, Kirsten stretches out her cramped shoulders and back, rolling her neck from side to side and listening to it crackle with a soft grunt of satisfaction. Behind her, Asimov moans in his doggy dreams and shifts slightly into a more comfortable position.
“Okay, mutt,” she says, turning to look over her shoulder at her slumbering canine companion, “time for you to give up your….”
The sound of shattering glass cuts through the rest of her sentence like a knife. Before she can react, Kirsten feels a hand slip into her hair and pull tightly, slamming her head hard against the window’s support. Her vision lights up with interior stars that swirl in a dizzying pattern before her.
A breath that sounds very much like a scream is forced from her lungs, and her survival instinct kicks in with a vengeance. Her scalp shrieks as she jerks her head away and rolls sideways across the bench seat.
She jerks back as a second arm blasts through the passengers’ side window, splattering her face and clothing with icy shards of safety glass. This time, it’s a definite scream that shoots forth, and Kirsten crab-crawls backward, hands and feet slipping and sliding along the vinyl seat-cover.
Asimov jumps over the seat, snarling, and clamps his huge, dripping teeth into the arm that pokes into the passengers’ side of the truck searching for the door handle.
Pulling her legs out from beneath her dog’s heavy weight, Kirsten reaches for the keys still in the ignition, but before she can grab the switch, her hair is again grabbed and she is hauled bodily across the rest of the seat, slamming against the door hard enough to drive the breath from her lungs and the thoughts from her mind.
The world grays out for a moment, then rushes back with startling clarity.
I’m going to die.
The thought is strangely free of accompanying emotion, and part of her wonders if she’s not dead already, simply existing as some amorphous ghost-thing doomed forever to haunt a truck.
“I don’t believe in ghosts.”
Setting her jaw, she jerks forward again, only to be dragged back when a strong forearm clamps itself against her throat, cutting off her breathing in a savage motion.
Her right arm shoots out, trying desperately to reach the keys, but all she can do is flop her fingers uselessly against the steering wheel. Black roses begin to bloom in her vision, and with all of her strength she tries again.
Nothing.
Her hand rebounds off the steering wheel to land at her side. Her fingers trace along the chilled metal of some object that her oxygen starved brain refuses to identify. Working on blind instinct alone, she grabs the object, hand curling around it naturally. Hefting it, she brings her arm up and across her body and pulls the trigger of the gun in her hand, again and again and again until it only responds with empty, impotent clicks.
In deep shock, and temporarily deafened by her own gun, Kirsten doesn’t realize that the arm around her neck has loosened until her head begins pounding with the rush of life-giving oxygen returning her red blood cells to their normal function.
Her lungs respond automatically, in heaving gasps of fresh, cold air, and even before her second intake of breath, she’s straightened out, dropped the gun, and is reaching for the keys in the ignition. This time, her fingers score a direct hit, and the van starts up with a howling growl.
“Asimov, release!” she shouts as she swings her leg down and jams her foot on the accelerator. Human and canine are driven against the backs of their seats as the van goes from stop to go in what seems to be a nanosecond. The stench of burning rubber accompanies the screech of new Michelins. The van rockets away from the curb, shimmies a bit on a small patch of black ice, then straightens admirably and roars down the street as if being pursued by Lucifer himself.
Her attacker is still hanging on, though now it’s to the doorframe. Shards of safety glass cut cruelly into its unfeeling palms, but it holds on, uncaring. Kirsten knows better than to try and pry the fingers away from the frame. She lacks the strength and leverage it would require, and would further draw her attention away from the road she is blistering down at sixty and still gaining.
A grin devoid of any charm or humor curls her lips as she sees a delivery truck parked against the curb to her left. A quick twist of the wheel, and the van heads in that direction.
“Die, you fucker!!!”
Another jerk of the wheel and the side of the van crashes against the delivery truck and bounces off. It shudders, then sideswipes the truck again, paint and metal screeching their last. The screeching stops as the two vehicles finally separate. The truck remains stationary, rocking on its springs. The van continues forward, now sounding a little worse for wear.
Kirsten chances a look to her left, and crows in delight when the only sign of her inhuman attacker is the two hands it’s left behind, still gripping the window frame hard enough to dent the metal beneath the vinyl and foam padding.
At her side, Asimov yelps, and Kirsten quickly returns her attention to the road just in time to see a moving truck parked crossways along the road, blocking it completely.
“Oh shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii…..”
Yanking the wheel hard, she almost overturns the truck as it attempts to turn at a nearly right angle while still doing somewhere close to fifty miles an hour.
“..iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii….”
Going up on two wheels for a terror-filled moment, it finally drops home on all four and continues on at an angle, the truck in its sights and growing larger by the second.
“…iiiiiiiiiiii…”
All four wheels leave the road this time as the van jumps the curb, missing the rear corner of the moving truck by less than the width of a hair.
“..iiiiiiiiiiiit!”