Scott Medbury - Inga

“Aww, don’t be shy chica, Danny’s gonna make it all right,” he whispered into her ear.

She stared straight through him.

“The fuck? Are you meditating or are you a fucking retard?”

Nothing.

Hell, maybe she was drugged. Garcia reached out and touched her bruised jaw.

“I guess you like it rough chica…” he whispered, before allowing his eyes to crawl over her body. He felt himself stir. This bitch was hot. Like, supermodel hot. He wondered briefly what she had done to get in the boss’s bad books, then shrugged it off.

Her misfortune was his good fortune.

He dropped his hand to the hem of her dress, his fingertips brushing the soft, warm skin of her thigh as he grasped the material and slowly pulled it up, watching greedily as it slipped up over her smooth skin to reveal her white panties. Still, she stared straight ahead like she was in a trance.

He began to breathe a bit harder as he placed his second hand on her other side, running it down the warm curve of her hip to her thigh. He pulled the dress even higher and his right hand made its way between her legs, where his finger touched the white triangle of her panties and the promise beneath.

It was then he glanced up and found her blue eyes wide open and looking at him curiously. His hand froze in place.

“Chica! You’re awake.”

Garcia felt his face redden. Like a kid caught with his hand down his pants. It made him angry, why the fuck should he be embarrassed?

“Who are you?”

“Aww, that don’t matter, bitch.”

He pulled his hands away and straightened before reaching into his belt and pulling out a small knife. He tapped it against his cheek thoughtfully.

“What matters is you keeping your mouth shut and enjoying what I’m going to do for you, okay?”

“Is Dimi coming soon?”

“What?” he asked, annoyed. “What are you, slow? Don’t worry about Dimi; it’s me you need to worry about.”

“Where is Myfriend?”

“What the fuck, bitch!?”

Garcia swung an open hand at her face. It never landed. Never even got close. Impossibly fast, the girl’s hand snatched his wrist mid-flight and held it like a vice.

“No one is to touch me without the express permission of my owner, Dimitri Molenski.”

Garcia tried to shake her off, but her grip was impossible. Enraged, he swung a punch with his other hand. Inga also caught that one too.

Not the sharpest tool in the shed, it was then, caught like Brer Rabbit in the tar baby, Danny Garcia finally realized that the girl was not a girl at all.

He struggled a little longer, angry not only at the fact she had bested him but also that he had not recognized her – it – for what it was.

“Okay – okay,” he said, eventually realizing that resistance was futile. “Let me go; I’ll keep my hands off.”

Inga released him, and Garcia rubbed his wrists, looking warily at her as he began to slowly back away.

Unlike Ivan and his boss, Garcia, now aware of what she was, had no problem seeing Inga as a machine, and she terrified him. As a child, he’d been frightened of a doll that his sister owned. It was one of those big creepy dolls whose eyes opened when you stood them up. Add in a couple of horror movies at a too impressionable age, and his phobia of mechanical humans had been deeply entrenched.

Now that he knew what she was; he couldn’t wait to get out. When he thought he had backed up a safe distance between them, he turned and hurried to the door.

If not for bad timing, he may have left the room alive.

In an apartment four blocks away from Dimitri Molenski’s enclave, three men were assembled around a bank of monitors and computer equipment. Two of the men stood, while the other, pale and sweaty, sat on a chair. The ID card on his pocket stated he was Tim Redfern, Genitix Robotics Technician.

Just a few hours before, he and his driver had been forced off the road on their way to deliver a custom made Sinthetica model to a customer in an exclusive part of Chicago. The driver had been killed with a double tap, two shots to the head from a silenced pistol, and Tim had been taken captive and forced to drive the van, with the body of the driver and the robot to an abandoned warehouse.

“You will install this in the machine,” the bigger of the two men had ordered, handing him a clear plastic sleeve containing a tiny interface card.

“What is it?”

“It is a computer card,” said the big man, simply.

“Yeah, I can see that, but what’s its function?”

“Never mind, you’ll find out soon enough.”

He had indeed.

Initially, he thought that the card had only allowed the men to track the robot’s movements via the handheld GPS unit they had. But since then, he had discovered it also let them see what the robot was seeing – to tap directly into its visual feed which was displayed in glorious HD color on the monitors in front of him.

But all of that paled into insignificance, compared to the primary and far more sinister function of the card. A function that allowed a user to remotely override all of the robot’s hard coding and give it orders.

With the muzzle of a gun against his temple, he had been informed that he would be entering new codes when they received a call to give them the all clear.

“What do you want it to do?”

“Simple, you’re to program it to kill everybody in the building.”

Tom had glanced at the three screens showing what appeared to be three levels of a very large building and surrounding grounds. He was in shock and didn’t take the time to count, but there appeared to be more than twenty heat signatures.

“That’s mass murder… I won’t do it.”

The big man chuckled.

“Not even for Rachel and Sarah and Bethany?”

Tom felt bile rise in his throat and tried to stand. He was pushed roughly back into his seat.

“Who are you?”

“Easy. The less you know, the better. Your wife and kids are safe if you do as you’re told. If it makes you feel any better, most of the people the robot will be wasting are criminals.”

It didn’t make him feel any better that they were criminals, but the fact was, he would do anything to keep Rachel and the girls safe. Seated between the two stone cold killers, Redfern doubted he would make it home to them.

Despite what his abductors said; he had seen too much. Still, while there was a chance to get out of this alive, he decided to do whatever the two gunmen wanted of him, even if it meant breaking the law and being a party to murder.

The cell phone on the desk began to vibrate, and the big man snatched it up.

“Yes?” he said, then listened for a few moments and then terminated the call. “It’s time; Molenski is only a few minutes away from the estate.”

“Go ahead, do your magic Mr. Technician,” said the other, gesturing to the console.

Tom took a deep breath and began typing.

Garcia had just grasped the door handle when the robot spoke in a soft voice.

“Accepting new programming…”

The sentence was followed by two distinctly machine-like beeps and a low humming sound that quickly faded. The thug then made the mistake of turning around. The robot was walking towards him.

“What are you doing? Get back in your corner.”

She continued towards him, smiling like an idiot, and it horrified him. He turned back to the door handle, his sweaty fingers slipping as he desperately tried to release the latch he had locked earlier.

Finally, he did it and turned the handle, ripping the door open. He had barely taken a step when her hand grabbed him by his hair. The scream he let out was decidedly unmanly, and he scrabbled at the doorframe as the robot effortlessly dragged him back into the room. The last thing he saw was her pretty face, still smiling, as her hands gripped his head and twisted it sharply. His body dropped to the floor.