Chapter Twenty-Eight

There were two Zeros, not one. One stood in front of Lucas, his left hand wrapped around Luke’s throat. His right pressed a gun barrel so tightly to the underside of Luke’s chin, Luke’s head was forced up at an angle.

The second Zero stood behind Lucas, his chest to Luke’s back. That Zero’s left hand wrapped around Luke’s upper arm. But his right arm was stretched out to the side along with Luke’s right arm. Their hands were android gray, and IRM-1000’s was placed gently against the back of Luke’s, his fingers curled around it ever so slightly.

“Now then,” said the second Zero as his hand began to glow, and Luke’s did too. “Let’s find out what you know, shall we?”

That one was Malcolm. He was the original Zero; I knew in my gut and by the sound of his voice, the choice of his words, and the look in his eyes.

Lucas made a desperate sound, but gun beneath his chin cocked in warning. At Luke’s back, Malcolm closed his glowing blue eyes. Veins of electricity moved from Luke’s hand into his. I watched them sizzle and spark and I knew those bolts of white-hot power contained information. They possessed in their streams everything Lucas knew and Malcolm wanted to know.

In the course of seconds, Malcolm learned all he desired about Lucas, about Prometheus, and about me.

When I awoke a second later, gasping and sitting upright in my bed, I had no idea why I’d experienced such a bizarre dream. But one thing I did have was a more thorough understanding of why IRM-1000 wanted Lucas alive in this bounty hunt of his. What better way to glean everything available on Prometheus and its members than to simply steal it from Luke’s database?

But if he could do it so easily – with a touch, the way Daniel transferred his protections – why hadn’t he done so to begin with?

Maybe he did, Sam.

My eyes grew wide in the darkness at my own internal thoughts. Holy shit. What if he had? What if one of the things he’d done when he’d had Lucas on that horrible, horrible table in that nightmare of a room was steal vital information from his system?

RIF protected the androids of Prometheus… but if Lucas and Daniel could contact scan, then Zero could do it. It would make sense. So far it was like the song said: Everything they’d been able to do, he’d been able to do better. It wouldn’t be a stretch to think that he’d also found a way around RIF’s built-in protections. Nick and I still couldn’t figure out how Zero had come into being. Nick did say he had a theory, but it was farfetched and he didn’t want to voice it until he had more evidence. As if anything was farfetched any longer.

What if that was what my dream was trying to warn me about? Did dreams really even do that? Warn people? A form of time travel would have to be possible.

I’d always wondered….

I was a lucid dreamer, but I was also a scientist, so I preferred to liken dreams to the “emptying out” of your subconscious, rather akin to your brain taking out the trash. But the fact that I was able to lucid dream and sometimes even control those dreams threw a kink in that belief. How could the subconscious get busy emptying anything out if I was going around sprouting wings and kissing boys in my sleeping hours?

Now I no longer seemed to have the control I’d once had. At times, I was not in control at all. My thoughts were in control then. Or worse – Zero was.

Now I wondered if it was possible for something else altogether to be in control. Such as fate.

Scientists were open-minded by their very nature. We were the first to admit that at any given point in time, magic existed. Lightning had been magic until it was explained. Earthquakes. The aurora borealis. Eclipses or red moons. Just because we would one day explain with science what we believed to be magic now did not make that magic any less real.

Or any less magical, really.

Maybe fortune-telling dreams would one day be readily interpreted by the logic of science.

I sighed heavily and closed my eyes where I sat. The room was quiet around me, or at least as quiet as Prometheus could be. Pittsburgh had rivers. It turned out that moisture in the ground around and above the building was great at conducting sound. I was sure when traffic resumed after the winter storms abated we would catch the constant if muted noises of vehicles overhead and trains at the nearby station coming and going. Even now, we could hear the boats in the harbor.

There were also sounds like of electricity moving through the facility, the air through the state-of-the-art ventilation system, and the hum and beep of various electronic devices maintaining watch and keeping us safe. During the day when everyone was up and talking and moving around, these noises went unnoticed. But at night, in the dark, in the otherwise silence… I found them cacophonous, and the dark became stifling.

There was a reason I’d always been a night owl, restless by night, down by dawn.

It was because in the darkness were layers of distraction: the sounds, the heat, the cold, too many covers, not enough covers, pains or discomforts, and worst of all – the thoughts.

The goddamn thoughts! My mind wondered about things incessantly. I couldn’t stop asking myself questions. Why was I an orphan? Why couldn’t I remember anything before the age of ten? Where were my birth parents? Were they even alive?

I’d performed DNA testing on myself when I was old enough to. But oddly, there were no records of my existence before the time I was adopted by the Hart family.

There was so much I didn’t know. And I wondered about it all.

Now, in my adult years I not only wondered, but feared. I panicked about the future. I felt trepidation about the past. I lamented the failings of humanity – war, cruelty, injustice. I was terrified of losing more of the people I loved.

And I was afraid of IRM-1000.

I feared Zero’s power, his reach, and his mind. And then… I also feared the feelings I had toward him. There was an unfortunate but undeniable attraction that unfathomably existed between us despite the atrocities he’d committed against me and mine.

In all honesty, that was most frightening of all.

Clearly my guilty thoughts and mounting fears had even found a way into my dreams. It was cool in my room, but I wiped at my brow and my fingers came away damp. “Damn.”

There was a knock on the door. As usual, I recognized that knock even though I hadn’t heard his shoes on the floor before it. The knock was gentle but firm, and each rap was a specific and equal measure apart.

“Come in Lucas,” I said. I didn’t have to raise my voice; I knew he would hear me.

The door slid to the side like a Star Trek door, another added touch compliments of Lilith and the crew. Luke stood at the threshold, tall and absolutely beautiful as ever. He looked like he’d just run a hand through his thick black hair, messing it up just enough to make it even more sexy than usual. His gray eyes glowed slightly silver, stark and piercing in the dark.

“You okay, Samantha?”

No doubt he’d heard me breathing hard with that android hearing, and maybe I’d even said or done something alarming in my sleep. And right now, he could probably detect my stress levels and discomfort. Had he scanned me?

But all I said was, “I’m fine.”

He didn’t believe me. If he had, his EED wouldn’t have turned yellow in the darkness, and he wouldn’t have stepped into the room, allowing the door to slide shut behind him. “Liar,” he accused softly and without any real vehemence.

When he moved, he still made no sound, and I realized he was barefoot. Funny how even android bare feet were quiet on a hard surface.

“Lock code ten-sixty-six,” he muttered after having entered, using his ability to mimic my voice. The deadbolt system on the door slid into place, and I sat up a little straighter.

“Lucas, what’s going on?”

Luke tilted his head in the darkness. With the door shut, all I could see of him was his tall outline and that half-moon sensor on his temple. “I’m locking the door because we need to talk, and I don’t want us to be disturbed.”

That’s not what I meant,” I told him quickly, but I was pretty sure he already knew as much. “Why the sudden secrecy?”

“Lights,” Lucas said, mimicking my voice again and sending a shiver through me. The lights in the room came on, momentarily blinding me. I hissed in surprise, raising my hand and blinking beneath their full brightness.

Lucas immediately rectified his mistake. “Lights at sixty percent.”

The lights dimmed a little, and I lowered my hand.

“Sorry,” he said with a small smile. “I sometimes forget a human’s body parts can’t do what an android’s can.”

I stared at him a moment, wondering if there was innuendo in what he’d just said. But then I just shook my head, running my hand through my hair. “It’s okay,” I told him. “But hearing you use my voice creeps me out, so please stop.”

His yellow EED flickered to orange and back to yellow. “If you wish. May I join you?”

“Sure.” I curled my legs under me and pulled the blankets close. Lucas looked down at the empty space on the bed and moved toward it.

I had to admit I loved watching him move. Even just a few steps was a treat.

There was something special about Lucas – and Zero – that Nick hadn’t programmed into his other androids, not even Daniel. There was a grace there, tall and capable to the degree that it seemed they were to some extent immune to the laws of physics. Gravity obviously kept them on the ground and prevented them from floating out into space, but that was about it.

Not only did they possess the infinite, impossible strength-in-grace of lifelong dancers, their mental acuity was off the charts. Zero was perhaps a bit more ruthless in demonstrating his guile than Lucas. But it was there for them both. I knew that. It was in Luke’s eyes, and sometimes in the split-second decisions he made.

They really were like brothers, the two sides of the human Id. They even technically had the same last name: Antares. The wolf and the tiger. They were a different breed, rare and special.

Lucas sat down beside me and moved back on the bed, making it sink a little. Androids were heavier than humans, on average. FutureGen had done all it could to make them as comparable as possible, but the average android was still forty percent heavier than a human of the same size. Lucas was six-two and built with broad shoulders, a narrow waist and all the beautiful, literally sculpted anatomy that went with it – not that I’d ever been fortunate enough to see him below the belt. But that didn’t matter to me… I liked everything above the belt just fine. In short, he wasn’t a small man. A human his size would have weighed two hundred pounds easy. So Lucas weighed around two-eighty. And the bed could tell.

Tonight he and Shawn had guard duty. Jack, Nick, Nanuk, Cole, and I had gone to bed while the kids read quietly in their play room under Charlotte and Lex’s vigilant watch, and most of the other Prometheus members stationed themselves around the new facility to maintain guard. Daniel, Sonia, and Matt had left on a short mission. This one was relatively simple, so it didn’t matter too terribly that Nick and I hadn’t yet figured out how to scramble their signals if they were scanned by other androids. They simply needed to transfer a lot of funds from one not-so-nice company to a specific charity before the tax deadline hit, and they needed a secure, non-related console from which to do it.

Nick and I had directed them to eBay Bank’s server cache four and a half miles away. No one would know this was something they were planning to do tonight, and since there were plenty of other secure server locations they could hit, it was a safe bet they would make it in and out without being detected. A plethora of security scrambling devices I’d created for them helped with that.

Tonight Lucas was dressed in a plain light blue T-shirt and a pair of jeans with no shoes. He had nice feet, obviously, since they’d been perfectly created. But if he weren’t an android, I would tell him to get some damn shoes on. I always had empathy pain for people’s bare feet. Seriously, life was just too cold and too hot and too Lego-y to not wear shoes.

He looked amazing though. Like, edible amazing.

“What did you want to talk about?” I asked, feeling fatally distracted now that I was noticing his clothing… and the way it molded so well to his hard body.

“You’ve been hiding something from me these past few days,” he told me in his android-neutral tone but with inquisitive eyes. “It began the night IRM-1000 managed to heal your wounds while you were sleeping.” He paused, glanced at my arm, then back up. “I can tell that whatever it is, it’s upsetting you.” Now he looked away, falling silent for several long seconds as his EED flashed red and returned to yellow. Finally he softly said, “I wish you would confide in me.”

I wish. It was something you didn’t very often hear androids say.

He turned his eyes back to mine, and as they searched my face for some sign of something only he would recognize, I melted a little.

But unfortunately he was right. I was hiding something. I was hiding a few somethings.

In that dream, Zero had told me, “You make me feel.” And then he’d told me that I was the only one in the world who could do so. His confession had a profound effect on me. It could mean so very many things.

I knew first hand that androids could feel emotion. They could even feel pain – as long as their receptors were on. They could be happy and sad and everything in-between. So, why had Zero told me that? Did it mean that normally he couldn’t feel? That for some reason his programming didn’t allow it? Or had it somehow been destroyed? And he couldn’t feel what, exactly? Emotions? Or physical sensations? Or was it perhaps both?

If he was incapable of these sensations, then holy shit. What kind of existence was that? More importantly, if this was the case, then why? I knew Nicholas Byron well enough to know he would never purposefully deny an android something like emotion. So, why was Zero different in that capacity? Why him? And why only him?

Was it only him?

And that was the real question, the one that left me unsettled deep down.

Yes, it did affect me. Since that night, the dreams I’d had featuring Zero only continued. Nearly every time I closed my eyes now, I saw the man in some capacity. This last dream had apparently left me in a cold sweat.

Lucas waited quietly beside me, and I closed my eyes. I just didn’t want to tell him any of this. I didn’t want to tell him that it all made me wonder whether Lucas felt the same way as Zero. Or rather, didn’t feel the same. In other words, I was afraid it meant Luke didn’t really have any feelings either.

I didn’t think it was likely. After all, he seemed to have grown close to Jack and Nanuk. He had friends at Prometheus. And most importantly, he continued to fight for Prometheus. To me, this meant beyond a doubt that he very much knew the difference between right and wrong and wanted to see things rectified.

But then, Zero continued to fight too. For the wrong side maybe, but he did fight. A lack of emotion or “feeling” didn’t seem to deter his single-mindedness or determination.

In any case, this was something I just didn’t want to bring up with Lucas.

And I didn’t want to tell him I’d dreamed about him being tortured for information by his worst enemy.

“It’s nothing, Lucas.”

“It’s absolutely not nothing.”

I looked up at him. His gaze had narrowed, and his tone had a slight edge to it. He was the most agreeable android in the world, but when he was determined…. Yeah, I thought. He’s definitely an alpha.

“Okay, fine,” I said knee-jerking a little at his tone. “You’re right, okay? I’m distracted. I’m….” I took a deep breath and let it out shakily, running my hands over my face. “Zero told me that I made him feel. And… he told me I was the only one in the world who could do so.”

Wow, I thought suddenly. I really just blurted it all out there, didn’t I?

It was several long beats before either sound or movement registered in the room again. I hesitantly dropped my hands from my face. Luke’s EED was pulsing bright, crimson red. His eyes were steady on mine, his body was rigid, and his jaw was set.

“Lucas?” I asked quietly. Say something. That bright red was scaring me.

“I was afraid that was the case,” he said at last. His tone was cold, colder than I’d ever heard in fact. It was unsettling, but even more unsettling were his words.

“You what?”

“Imagine that you only tasted water and smelled filtered, unscented air. Imagine you felt neither hot nor cold, and experienced neither pleasure nor pain. Imagine how strong it would make you.”

Strong? To me, that sounded horrid.

As if he knew what I was thinking, he tilted his head slightly. “You would be strong because you would choose to eat only what was required for ultimate nutrition. You would exercise despite heat or cold. Small discomforts or distastes would not deter you. In other words, you would have a perfectly functioning body.” He smirked slightly, which made my body function in utterly inappropriate ways. “You would never crave chocolate, Samantha.”

Okay, touché.

“Pain would never slow you down, and hence fear of pain wouldn’t either. This would allow you to attempt things you wouldn’t otherwise attempt. And in attempting them, your ability to make strategic decisions would never be compromised by the debilitation of fear. Making you the perfect soldier.” He paused, shaking his head. “In short, in some respects you would become invincible. Especially if you were an android with a potential lifespan of centuries. If not millennia.”

Okay, I get it already, I thought. It sounded boring, in all honesty. But I could definitely see how it would also make someone strong. Especially someone like Zero.

“I see you understand,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said sullenly.

“Good. Now imagine something comes along, something unique and unexpected… and suddenly you can smell the clean scent of a blanket fresh from the dryer. Conceive of yourself pulling it out of that dryer on a very cold winter day, a cold that had never hurt you before but did now. And imagine that for the first time in your life, you can feel the blanket’s soft warmth sinking into you as you wrap it around yourself.”

I imagined it. It was easy. A soft, warm blanket fresh from the dryer on a cold day was one of my favorite things, which was probably why Lucas had chosen the example.

I blushed a little and looked away, but he kept going.

“Fancy enjoying your first long, hot shower.” He paused. “Or your first sip of ice cold Diet Mountain Dew.”

Another two favorites of mine. Cheater. “Luke, you said not feeling anything made you stronger,” I objected.

“It does,” said Lucas easily. “But haven’t you ever noticed it’s the things which make us weak that we love most?” He smirked, and that smirk was downright sexy. “It makes no logical sense. But somehow, these are the things that ultimately turn existence into life – and make life worth living.”

I swallowed hard, thinking of all the things that got me out of bed in the morning. Or at night. Whenever. And when I stopped to think about it, yeah. He had a point. They were all “bad” for me. They were bad for everyone. Caffeine, saturated fats, sugar, movies, video games.

Why was that? Why was it only the things that gave us some sort of weakness that we came to love? Good food? Drink? Things like recreational drugs and shopping sprees and dangerous games? Hell, even love itself made us weak. It changed us, compromised us, and turned us inside out.

“Things like that taste of chocolate that you would face Hades for, Samantha” Lucas said. He smiled slow and wicked. The gray in his eyes gleamed like gunmetal, shot through with charges of lightning. “And sex.” His voice deepened. I stared transfixed as he raised his arm to deftly brush the backs his knuckles along my cheekbone. “Imagine feeling that deep, gripping, forbidden pleasure for the first time ever. And having your first climax….”

I blushed furiously now, but I couldn’t seem to look away. He had me in his sway.

His thunder gaze slipped from my eyes to my mouth. I inhaled sharply but remained immobile when his thumb gently brushed over, then hooked my lower lip. He pressed down slightly, and his pupils darkened, expanding hungrily. “Now imagine that all of this is taken away from you.” His eyes shot back up to mine. “What would you do to get it all back, Samantha? To what lengths would you go?”

For chocolate and sex?

Fuck, I thought as my heart pounded and he looked at me like that, and heat coiled between my legs. Lucas knew damn well what was happening to me. He knew damn well what he was doing. He was doing it on purpose.

The interrogator from android hell.

He leaned over, his hand leaving my face to slip down around my waist. His fingers curled in, grasping my side firmly to slide me toward him along the mattress. It was effortless for him, and before I knew it my body was flush with his.

He was solid against me, every inch of him, and his skin was hot. He waited a moment, just watching me, studying me closely, reading me in that thorough way that took in every tiny detail and logged it for future reference. Finally, he leaned in. His words ghosted over my lips. “For whatever reason Samantha, you are this precious, solitary thing for IRM-1000. You are the only reason he can feel anything.”

No, I thought. It made no sense. But then… I could barely think at all at the moment.

“You may be his kryptonite,” he said with a look that left me undone. “You may render him weaker than he would otherwise be. But he would do literally anything for that weakness all the same.”

Luke’s solid heat, deep voice, and storm-laden eyes were encompassing me. I was fast losing this unspoken battle of wills between us. But I was confused about something just enough to form one last question. As Lucas slowly took us both to the mattress, my rapidly fogging brain managed to breathlessly ask, “How would you know this, Lucas?”

He gently took my bottom lip between his teeth to tease it as his hands slid up under my shirt and wrapped around my chest, his thumbs brushing the undersides of my breasts. His teeth released my lip from captivity as my mind spun away. I knew he was watching, cataloging, when I closed my eyes and shuddered in his arms. Above me, so close, he whispered, “I know because I would do the same, Samantha.”

I felt his hand slide from my waist, up my back, to the nape of my neck. There, he gathered a fistful of my hair and pulled gently. I couldn’t help but arch in response, exposing the column of my neck. A gasp escaped my lips when Luke’s teeth scraped along my throat, not quite hard enough to leave a lasting mark.

“For you,” he half-growled before his grip in my hair tightened and he paused above my pulse point to take more of my skin between his teeth, sucking with more urgency. I quashed a moan, but pressed my body against his, and he released my tortured flesh to finish his sentence.

“I would do anything.”