G. Wright - Broken Things

He pulled back up his sweats and briefly considered washing his hands before he decided it would be too much work. He wanted to see if he could slip back into the same dream while he still could remember it. As he entered the hallway, he glanced into the living room. Angel didn’t usually watch much television, and it wasn’t like her to leave it on.

The answer slept on the couch. Neil had his feet kicked up on the cushions, still wearing his shoes. His left arm dangled off of the couch, remote control on the floor just out of reach where he’d dropped it. Just above his head, a nearly full soda rested on the end table balanced on an open gamer magazine.

He paused, glanced at the bedroom, and huffed. If he allowed Neil to keep his shoes on his furniture, the damn kid would think he could do it all the time. He strode up to the couch and grabbed Neil’s feet. As precariously as Neil rested on the edge, it didn’t take much to shift his balance. Cody nudged his shoes, dumping the kid onto the floor.

Neil woke up, hissing and spitting like a cat dumped into a wading pool. Cody stared at him emotionlessly, letting the kid run through his repertoire of curse words. Failing to raise Cody’s ire he finally calmed down and said, “What was that for?”

“You had your shoes on my couch.”

Neil kicked them off and flopped back onto the couch. They both turned in time to watch the magazine with the boy’s soda resting on its pages slowly slip from the table to dump on the carpet.

“What the hell,” Cody cursed, “You have klutz programming?”

Neil glared back. “It wasn’t my fault. Make Angel clean it up. Angel!”

Cody turned, waiting for her to enter the room. The house remained strangely silent. “She’s probably asleep. Get a towel and clean it up yourself.”

“That’s what Angel is for. AAAAN-GEEEEEEL!”

He flinched at the shrill screaming. If anything set her off, it was Neil bossing her around. He normally would let them fight, but he really wanted to get back to bed. “If she doesn’t clean it up, you got to do it.”

Cody walked back to his bedroom, the promise of continuing his dream beckoning him back to his sheets. He heard Neil scurrying through the house, trying to pass off his mess. He knew Angel would eventually deal with it, she always did.

Just as he settled back into the warmth of his sheets, Neil stuck his head in the doorway. “Is she in here?”

“Get out of my room.”

“Because if she’s not, I don’t think she’s home.”

Cody sat back up, any promise of resuming his neighbor fantasy slipping away from him. Neil continued to stare expectantly, waiting for him to do something. Not for the first time he questioned his decision to let the boy stay. Neil created a risk, if anyone ever bothered to follow the kid, or if he ever brought attention back to him for his unethical acquiring of android parts. Still, the benefits the boy provided outweighed the risks. “Where would Angel go? She’s afraid to leave the house.”

Groaning loudly to let Neil know just how much of an inconvenience this was, Cody climbed back out of bed, sliding his feet into his slippers. He went room by room with the boy on his heels, but there was no sign of her.

Finally he stopped in the kitchen, and noticed next to a stack of dirty dishes and an empty pizza box his notebook lying open on the counter. Had he left it that way? It hung open to his notes on the new kid, Josh.

Now that had been a messed up kid. His arms and legs had scars as though he’d been tied behind a truck and dragged. The damage to his head implied serious physical trauma as though someone had beaten him severely. Cody understood him wanting to go home. Every owner was imprinted in the mind of their child. That was part of the bond. Unfortunately, it only worked one way. Owners didn’t feel the same attachment. Maybe they had with real children, but Cody didn’t know anything about that kind of psychology. No matter how real the children seemed, how real their programmed emotions, people were never able to consider them as anything other than a toy. Though there existed laws to protect real biological children (that didn’t exist), it didn’t apply to androids, and there would never be a law that said you couldn’t break your own toys.

But the damage done to Josh had destroyed his value. Nobody would ever take a kid like that.

Cody didn’t much care for children either, but he loved what he could make them do. He could use them to do things that he couldn’t, thanks to his own program, Cain. It allowed him to give them personality traits that the other Kidsmith programmers had avoided, things that made the kids more fun. There were other programs that did the same thing, android hacks that made unpredictable chaotic children, but they didn’t have his background.

“Did you bring Josh back?”

“What? No. He bailed on me.”

Cody eyed Neil with suspicion. Neil folded his arms across his chest and stared defiantly back. Maybe he’d put a bit too much chaos into Neil. “Why wouldn’t he come back? He wanted that upgrade pretty bad. That seems a bit out of character.”

The boy shrugged. His expression dared Cody to accuse him of anything.

“Whatever. I wonder if Angel went after him?”

“Angel? Why would she care?”

Because I gave her a maternal personality. He didn’t say that out loud. Neil might be an android, but he would still tease him. He didn’t need a flashback to his own childhood caused by a miscreant kid.

That had to be it, a kid had come along that needed help and it had overridden her mild agoraphobia. He’d have to increase its severity. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye on her. He grabbed another tablet and typed in her registration number.

It couldn’t locate her.

“What’s this?” he mumbled. He typed it in again, just in case his fat fingers had made a mistake. The same answer returned: ‘ Can’t Locate Subject’ . Somehow she’d gone off the grid.

Had she erased her identity? The thought sent a chill through his body. What if she told somebody about him? What he liked to do? She was like a walking diary of all his habits and fetishes. She had no reason to keep his secrets.

But if she were going after Josh, she’d have to be tracking him. Yes, Angel did know his secrets. She would be able to track a kid as easily as he could. If she had gone after Josh, he just had to find him first. Then he’d get his Angel back. If he couldn’t trust her after this, then she would spend her nights sleeping in the closet with his other girls.

The map application on James’ tablet led Josh across the foothills. He had to crawl through a barb wire fence once, but otherwise there wasn’t much else to hinder him. James had seemed nice, and had even fixed his arm, but he couldn’t help but feel manipulated, which meant that he wasn’t any different from everyone else he’d encountered.

He had no illusions that James wouldn’t be able to find him. The man had somehow managed to find him once already. However it would be that much harder for him if he avoided the roads.

The foothills were covered in sagebrush, making his travel difficult. He could barely see in the minimal light that the city below him put off, glowing like a distant ocean of candles. Finally he realized that he could use the tablet as a flashlight. It didn’t work great, but it kept him from tripping over the flora immediately in front of him. From somewhere distant came the short yips of a coyote, but he could no longer hear the sounds of the city.

His destination wasn’t too far away. Two miles from the city limit was the Ada County Landfill. Next to that had been built another landfill designed for the disposal of androids. A Kid Cemetery.