Grey Rollins: When There's a Will, There's a Way

“No, I’m free to grow again, to acquire new memories, develop new traits. At least until this car gets scrapped. Then I’ll start over again.”

“Oh, no you don’t!” she snapped. “I’ve already lost you once, and I don’t intend to lose you again.”

“Alexis, I don’t—”

“You were my husband, and God help me, I still love you.”

As far as Alexis was concerned, I was simply suffering from amnesia. That’s not to say that she thought I could be cured; she wasted no time on futile efforts to try to help me remember things that were forever beyond my grasp. Her plan was to create a rich bed of new memories that would serve as a foundation for another phase of our relationship.

Money would not be a problem for a while. The payoff from my life insurance had left her well-off. Even after buying me, it would be quite some time before we would have to worry about practicalities.

Once I understood that Alexis had gone to enormous trouble and expense to track me down, it no longer surprised me that she had turned into the parking lot of a motel not far from the dealership. An hour after buying me, Alexis filled my trunk with her luggage.

I opened the door for her. “Are we going home?”

She slid in and folded her hands neatly in her lap. “No, we’re going on a trip.”

“Where do you want to go?”

She grinned. “You decide.”

This, I’m afraid, took several seconds for me to process. “Alexis, that’s the very thing I’m not supposed to do. I’m the car. You’re the driver. You’re supposed to tell me where you want to go, not the other way around.”

She frowned. “You mean you can’t? They took that away from you, too?”

“There are lots of things I can’t do anymore. I can’t vote, can’t dance, can’t—”

“But, it’s OK. I give you permission.”

“Alexis, I can’t. ”

“Damn you, you were a man once, be one again!”

And to my utter astonishment, she was crying.

“Alexis,” I said softly.

“Yes?” she whispered.

“It isn’t legal, but something can be done.”

Whether I had known anything about electronics when I was human was a moot point. Now that I had been placed in an automobile, I had full schematics of my internal circuitry available to me as part of my diagnostics capability. I was about to use that information to induce a failure.

The NeVPROM next to me on the circuit board was my supervisor chip, the silicon conscience that kept me from going astray. Pin fourteen—the numbering system gave Alexis some problems until she figured out that pin one was to the left of the notch and that the pins were numbered counterclockwise looking from the top—was the reprogram pin. Induce a voltage on pin fourteen and a NeVPROM promptly forgets its programming.

Bright early summer Sun, a light breeze, a motel parking lot, and a determined woman with a screwdriver and a bent paper clip.

Alexis opened the casing, undid the screws that held the circuit board down, and turned it over in her hand. Counting carefully, she located pin fourteen, used the paper clip to bridge from it to the bus where power entered the board, but stopped just before making contact.

“You promise this won’t electrocute me?”

“Absolutely solemn promise. It’s only three volts more than the nine volt batteries that go in radios.”

“That’s something you used to say.”

“What?”

“Absolutely solemn promise. Are you sure you’re not hiding in there?”

“I’m sure.”

She made contact.

And it nearly killed me.

I hadn’t anticipated the backlash that hurled through the car’s computer system. I hadn’t known I could feel pain, but I got educated in a hurry.

It took several reset cycles and a few seconds of real time before I could catch my breath. Tentatively, I reached out. The supervisor chip was devoid of programming. Effectively dead. Everything would be up to me from now on.

I started the engine as soon as she got back in.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

I chuckled. “I’m taking you out to eat, of course.”

Ten minutes later, she burst out laughing as I pulled into a driv^-in restaurant on the way out of town— the only way we could be together as she ate.

Twenty minutes outside of Atlanta, headed east on I-20. I was driving. Alexis had slid herself around to the point where she was effectively sitting side-saddle across the front bucket seats. Her skirt had caught on the edge of the seat when she turned and was pushed up past the top of her stockings. Her garters were deep purple.

I was admiring the view from two vantages, the dash and the smaller eye in the interior rearview mirror.

“Tell me something,” she said. “Are you ever curious about your previous life?”

I wished I could shrug. “Like the man says, ‘I am what I am.’ ”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

1 affected a sigh. “Of course, I am. But why bother? I can’t go back. Obviously, I was near death, either due to accident or disease. My Living Will kicked in and my personality was read onto a chip before my body died. By the luck of the draw, that chip ended up in this car. 1 feel pretty fortunate to be an Icarus. It has a nice body.”

She laughed. “As it happens, I like your body, too. But don’t you wish sometimes that you had a human body?”

I paused, then said seriously, “Alexis, you’d better be glad I don’t.”

Her eyebrow raised. “And why is that?”

“Because if I had a human body, you’d have been screaming rape over every inch of the last fifteen miles. I’ve been looking at your legs ever since you turned sideways. At this particular moment, I’m thinking some very personal, very physical thoughts.”

She didn’t blush, didn’t flinch. “You like what you see?” she asked.

“Alexis, men turn to watch when you pass. They breathe your scent and strain to hear your voice. Every single one of them would kill to spend an hour alone with you. I’m no less interested, I just can’t shower you with flowers or buy you dinner.”

She gave me a sultry smile. “You took me out to eat.”

“And if there were still such things as drive-in movies, we could see all the latest films, but I have yet to figure out a way to get you into bed. Trust me, it’s not for lack of trying.”

“So… if I could somehow smuggle you into a hotel room… what could we do?”

In spite of the preposterous nature of the conversation, she sounded serious. I thought about it for a second, then gently fluttered the number eight pneumatic side cushion of the driver’s seat where her upper thighs rested on the soft, supple leather.

Her eyes widened for a second, then she resettled herself a bit lower in the seat, twisting slightly to her side. “Try that again.” After almost a minute, and some fine tuning of her position, she said distractedly, “Um, is there, ah, something I can be doing for you?”

“Just let me watch. I’m a voyeur these days.”

We drove to Washington, D.C., then up through Vermont to Maine for a week. Back roads were our preferred mode of travel. They were slower, curvier, and more fun to drive than the interstates. More than once Alexis slept in me when it got late and we weren’t sure where to find a motel out in the country. My internal maps aren’t that detailed.

For some reason we both got a kick out of crossing bridges. Quite by accident, we found an old covered bridge, said to be one of the last in existence. The scene was perfect. Trees grew densely up the slope on the far side and a field was behind us, towards the setting Sun. I pulled over onto the bank of the stream before crossing.