19)
Ro waited anxiously in Tiff's old and wounded vehicle. Shifting her eyes all over the place nervously, she checked again to make sure the key was stuck in the ignition and the car was ready to go. All she needed was Zee. It was torture waiting for him. She kept looking behind her, through the narrow rectangular window in the back of the vehicle, smudged with insect guts and the corners dotted with cutesy decals. If she expected to see Zeta appear from that direction, she was disappointed. And even in her mind were images that West would turn the corner instead.
There was always that split second of complete and utter human fear whenever she knew the agents were hot on the scent. A split second of terror so profound that Ro swore she was no longer human when it happened. She couldn't be, not with such a feeling. The terror itself told her that it was all over, everything was over, and the running would stop.
Ro would rather the world ended first.
How had the agents known they were in Hillsburg?
The answer was obvious once Ro allowed her mind to relax. Perhaps the same person who had set their EHT cabin on fire had been the same person who'd told the NSA to check out Hillsburg, Maryland, for the two fugitives, one a robot and the other a girl.
But the incident on the EHT was just a theory. "A speculation," as Zeta had said. It was not fact that some unknown person out there wanted Zeta and Ro scratched off for good. Even the NSA wanted Zeta in one piece. He'd cost the government a huge fortune to build, and Ro only had guesses as to how much, but upwards of fifty-billion perhaps, which included prototype materials and research. And the government was reluctant to watch their expensive investment destroyed. It was best, then, if the escaped infiltration unit with a conscience was returned in one giant three-hundred pound piece of adamantium. The idea that it was the NSA who'd set fire to the train was completely disregarded. Ro found no way to make it work, not in her mind. She knew it was someone different, someone from outside the NSA hunting them down.
She was sick of being hunted. She felt like one of the Pleiades, who'd been hunted by Orion.
It was funny how she didn't mind the running, the being mostly homeless, the serendipitous movements that took her from one place to the next. All of the instability she didn't mind. Yet she hated to be hunted. It was only because she was being hunted for the wrong reasons. She wasn't a terrorist. She wasn't a criminal. And neither was Zee.
Ro grunted as she thought about the hypocrisy of the charming American government. They'd built Infiltration Unit Zeta to do just that: infiltrate. Sophisticated holographic techniques, voice alteration, unbreakable frame, high computer intelligence and learning capability, all compounded into one machine that would get behind enemy lines, steal their secrets, start wars and, more doubtfully, prevent wars. The infiltration units were engaged in their own form of private terrorism. But when it's your country that does the terror, it's okay. It was ironic, then, that the NSA believed Zeta had been programmed by some other terrorist group and were using him against America. It was still more ironic that none of that was true. Zeta was working for neither the government nor a secondary terrorist organization. Zeta worked for no one. He merely ran from those who pursued him under false pretenses.
The rest of the world still believed in happy ignorance that infiltration units as highly advanced as Zeta did not exist. They were, of course, myths. Like alien landings and ghost sightings. Zeta was nothing more than a big metal leprechaun in the unexpanded, rigid minds of billions. Perhaps it was better this way. The world was full of cruelty toward that which was new. The cruelty only grew when the newness faded into misunderstanding. Ro had seen it happen with androids. Infiltration units like Zeta would be faced with the same difficulty, should the public ever come to learn about them, and stop hovering in their dark little dream world which kept out the light of knowledge.
Ro awoke from the trance of profound thought, and flatly laid her hand on the horn at the wheel. It sounded through the city in a deep echo. Perhaps Zeta was lost, which Ro thought was impossible. He had a built-in sense of direction. She thought he'd at least be able to find the gift shop on Sixth Street.
"You'd think!" Ro said aloud to the empty car.
Then she caught sight of Zee Smith in the mirror on the driver's side. She let the horn have it again. This time Zeta did not waste time, but jogged to the door of the car. He flew in, his dark blue jacket falling about him as he sat down behind the wheel.
"What took you so long?" Ro asked, folding her arms crossly. "Did you stop and save someone from a burning building?"
Zeta ignored Ro's derogatory remark. "I wanted to listen to Tiffany and Agent West's conversation."
"Oh, I bet that was fascinating."
"I wanted to find out if they knew we were in town."
"Did they?"
Zeta looked at her sharply as he steered the car from the curb. "No. They don't know. I'm sure West suspects, but Tiff wouldn't tell him the truth."
"I'm going to send that girl a big basket of fruit when I can. She deserves it. Did they say anything else?"
"Lots of things. But, yet, nothing. It was a very unusual conversation."
This idea roused Ro unfavorably. "Unusual how?"
"Tiffany was not like herself. And West was different, too."
"Maybe there's a poisonous gas floating through the air downtown," Ro said. "Maybe she was just uncomfortable. West could make anyone's skin crawl."
"Uncomfortable isn't the word I would use."
Ro lifted her elbow to rest on the back of the seat, and she set her head into the palm as she looked at Zee. He glanced at her blankly, all innocent and arcane. When he again paid attention to the traffic in front of him, Ro began to gather together the holes in Zeta's story.
"You mean, he was, like, hitting on her or something?"
Zeta didn't understand the question. His quizzical look told her so. She tried to rephrase it using real English words instead.
"I mean, they were flirting with each other?"
"Flirting?" he repeated, and Ro tightened her lips to keep from smiling. It was one of those words she'd never thought Zee would say, and she wasn't sure it suited him. "I am familiar with the custom of flirtatious behavior among adults. But that is not what I would imagine flirting to be like."
"Wonderful," Ro growled. "I hope she hasn't lost all sense, and I hope you've misunderstood. I'm definitely calling her whenever we get to where we're going. And where might that be?"
"Back to Spring City, at least for the night. They won't think to find us there."
Ro pulled her legs up underneath her and yawned. Another moving vehicle, another nap. She titled her head into the seat, still facing Zeta. She watched his hands on the wheel and his foot against the pedal. "Why do you always have to drive? Everywhere we go you drive. Why don't I ever get to drive?"
"You don't have a license," he replied.
"Neither do you, hologram man."
"But I look old enough to drive."
That was true, he did look older, and his inhuman reflexes made him a more capable driver, especially if they ran into NSA trouble on some desert road, some city by-pass, some residential street.
Ro thought of something she'd told Tiffany earlier, about how she had no birth certificate, no papers, no nothing to show she was Ro Rowen. "I don't exist, you know."
Zeta pretended not to hear her. He'd thought often enough that he didn't exist. Every time he said the thought aloud, there was Ro to contradict him. He could think of no contradiction. He lacked Ro's stylish wit.
"So tell me, Zee. Do you have any more theories about our new enemy? Or, better yet, our new superhero?"
"No," he replied. "I haven't had time to think of it. Would you like to think about it now?"
"I'd like to sleep now and think about it later." Ro snuggled into the seat, finding that it smelled distantly of the Morgan house, and faintly of Tiff's perfume, a kind of flowery, gardenia and orange scent. "You can think about it all you want, Zee, while I sleep."
It wasn't a terribly tedious drive to Spring City, just over an hour by freeway. Zeta stuck to the easy freeways. They were safer, out in the open, built amongst corn fields and Maryland's fruit orchards. The picturesque country faded away to suburbia, until the urban buildings took over the landscape, like encroaching metal insects. Just as he reached a familiar portion of Spring City, he shook Ro on her shoulder to awaken her. Zeta had stopped the car in a parking garage and Ro observed the dim surroundings, looked to see how late it'd gotten, and how the sun would set soon. She rubbed her face and swept back her hair. The day had been a long and interesting one. Suddenly she wished she hadn't thought that. Every time she thought a day was over, inevitably something else happened. As she lifted herself out of the car she stretched, her hands lifting high above her head, and Zeta joined her. He poked her in the side while her arms were not there to protect, and she jumped away. She hated to be tickled, but knew how much tickling was a curiosity to the synthoid, who would never understand the purely human torture but wished he could. He asked the question he often did wherever they stopped. "Eat now or hotel first?" And Ro never wavered in her reply; it was always the same: eat first, hotel later.
Spring City was a dangerous town. A person had a one out of one-hundred chance of being murdered in a given week. Run mostly by mobs and gang members, the urban portion of the city grew deadly once the sun touched the horizon. Aware that Zeta knew this, Ro wondered why he'd chosen to stop there. It would've been nothing for him to drive all night. He had some kind of plan, and she was afraid to ask what it was. Zeta always seemed to have some plan.
"You don't like it here, do you?" Zee asked. They walked coolly along the sidewalk in the business portion of town, lined with entrances to offices and the occasional shop.
"No," Ro answered curtly. "And you know why."
"Your dislike is apparent, like hostility."
"Why'd we stop here?"
"To tell you the truth," Zeta started and he slowed his steps for a moment, "I thought it would be--funny."
"I assume you mean weird funny and not comical funny."
"Yes. Where do you want to eat?"
Ro had to think about it. She looked around her, the block of Spring City they were on was too familiar to her, and she resented the lifting of regret inside. "Greek, maybe." Two years ago there had been a decent Greek restaurant only a block from where they stood, just up the street. It was odd the things she could remember when she was faced with them again and they stared back at her. It was like looking into a mirror, one with hazy edges to distort the past so it would become what one wanted to believe it was and not what it really had been.
The restaurant was still there, owned by the same Greek family, and Ro even recalled the looks of many employees. They were shown a table, nearly having their rule of the place, as it was not yet a busy meal time. It was just barely five-thirty, on a Tuesday, and it was unlikely the restaurant would gain more customers than the few already there, even through the more popular late dinner hours. Ro had to look at the menu to remember what Greek food was like and decide what tantalized her. She placed her order, their server giving an obligatory leer at Zee, who never ordered.
Zee was so far away that Ro could hardly get him engaged in any conversation, until she asked him one thing which caught his attention readily.
"Tell me about--nebulae."
"Nebulae?" he repeated, startled. "Why nebulae?"
"They interest me."
He asked a question using information she didn't know he had, in reference to her meeting with Tiff earlier. "So you really are interested in astrophysics?"
She wasn't surprised. He heard all. He saw all. Omnipresent synthoid. "A little. Never mind." Ro waved a hand. A part of her wished he hadn't heard that conversation with Tiff. It wasn't anything she'd said, she didn't care about that. But the idea of it somehow bothered her. "How much of our talk did you listen to? Where were you?"
"I didn't pry," he said. "Only I caught a few words here and there. I was on the other side of the park. A hundred and three feet from the bench where you and Tiff rested. Your conversation was private. It's between you and Tiff. I can erase the memory if you would feel better about it."
She lifted a thin eyebrow, eyelids tightened to scrutiny. "Don't bother. I'm not ashamed of anything I said. Well, it's just that I have so few moments alone."
"Would you rather be alone?"
Ro glowered at him while mourning the possibility. "No."
Zeta knew she was greatly on edge. He'd never seen her so tense. It was the atmosphere of the town she loathed that did it, and it was not his presence. He studied her keenly while she accepted timidly her ordered beverage from the waiter. Even after all the days that had passed since she'd told him her troubles, Zeta was unable to come up with an explanation about Ro's visual manifestations of her parents, and all the things that lately seemed to haunt her. He knew she was unwell, somehow, and that concerned him intensely.
"Being alone is unnatural," Ro said, and chewed on her straw. "I don't think people are meant to be alone."
"That is a theory supported by evolution. Primates, for example, live in---"
Ro lifted her hand to dismiss his topic. He altered the subject, drawing in a perfectly human breath.
"It's time for you to take a break."
"You mean that rest thing you keep mentioning? That would be nice. Now that I've seen Tiff, I've done all that I need to do, all that I can do. Except I wonder about Batty Gwennie." Ro shook her head as she stared into the table top, recalling pictures of Gwennie, and still in shock the old woman was dead so suddenly. "She might've been able to help me. I think that woman had some kind of power. I don't mean, like, mutant power. I mean she knew the right kind of people. That's a great power, when it's not abused. I think she really wanted to help me."
"Yes, she knew you were a Rowen. She said you look like a Rowen. Her death was a loss to us both, then. You for a lead to your family, and me---"
"For a lead to your family."
Any of his missing creators might be considered Zeta's 'family', but that wasn't what he was going to say, though it was near enough to allow it to remain unaltered. Ro had chosen the words wisely.
Ro leaned back into her chair, a profound thoughtfulness upon her face. "Say, Zee," she started and he looked her in the eye casually, "I have an idea. Tell me, you do remember everything, don't you?"
"Whatever I want to, yes."
"And you store it away somewhere, right? Like, in a database?"
"Yes."
"Is there a way to access that database?"
"Yes."
"And a person can download your memories to another computer, and display what you see?"
"Yes," he said, thinking what she was thinking. "That is how I intend to prove my innocence. The only devices available to synchronize my thoughts with a computer's hard drive are located in government buildings. I don't know what buildings or who is in possession of such a tool. There may be only one. But one is all that it would take, if I could get to it. That seems impossible."
"Of course. I hadn't thought of that." Ro had forgotten he was a high-tech secret weapon. Therefore no one but the government would have the ability to access the information a synthoid obtained. "There's got to be another way. Maybe you don't need the doc."
"He's the only one I would trust," Zeta said, almost in tenderness. Ro fancied that, in his own robotic way, Zeta looked upon Dr. Selig as a father figure. If a synthoid, created from the minds of humans, could have a father, Zeta's was master scientist Eli Selig. Zeta set his forehead in his upturned palm, and looked about him in the restaurant mournfully. He said his favorite word that meant much but with great imprecision. "Someday, Ro."