/ Chapter 24 – A Little Taste /
Author Note: For some reason when I post multiple chapters, I can see by the hits that people end up going to the last chapter, instead of the first one I post. Make sure you read the prior chapter "secrets"...
The drawing pad lay in Frank Walker's lap as he idly doodled, sitting on the floor of his apartment. Several days ago, his life had completely changed. In fact, his life had been completely overturned twice in about fifteen months, and both those events were tied to a single… something. Not a person – not anymore. Tied to a machine whose apparent function was to overturn lives, which they called 'recruiting.' Except in his case, this device hadn't stopped at recruiting. He didn't even know what, in fact, it had been doing. He certainly didn't know why it did whatever it did.
Uneaten plates of food surrounded him, various deliveries he'd decided to order, pick at, then thrown aside when his appetite wouldn't cooperate. Amid the plates were many balled up pieces of paper, often with half-finished drawings of projects scratched out in frustration.
He tore out another page of just geometric scribbles, not even attempting to draw something specific, but just passing the time. He was passing a lot of time, not leaving the apartment for anything. He supposed he'd need to return to school eventually, but at the moment that seemed completely unimportant. He was sure someone would say brooding this much over a "teenage romance" was pretty stupid. Didn't kids break up all the time? Sure they did. But did they break up with machines literally designed to emotionally manipulate them? He was pretty sure that was more unusual.
He felt like his mind was split in multiple directions. One part of his mind was obsessed with understanding Athena-the-machine, the unbelievably sophisticated device that had somehow fooled him into thinking she was human for almost fifteen months. Fifteen months. How was that even possible? And to hide it from Caroline, who lived with her every day? He thought he'd figured out a lot about how she could do what she did. It was easy to just assume she was a human mind in a robot body, but that was clearly not true. He could look back on their conversations and see now that she wasn't just 'unusual'; she was fundamentally different and alien. But she was an alien that was frighteningly good at understanding human behaviors and emotions – and manipulating them.
But there was another part of his mind, and that was the part that worried him the most. It was the emotional part that didn't care about any of this. It was the part that remembered making things, exploring, and laughing with Athena, the girl who cooked him lasagna, lay with him under the stars, and listened to his dreams. He remembered all her support over the last year and, human or not, she helped him beyond words. Maybe her function was recruiting and maybe it was all canned dialog that she told all her recruits, but it felt real, and it felt like she believed in him. It felt like she thought he was special. She clearly didn't spend this much time with all her recruits and he doubted she made birthday cakes for them all. What did it mean?
Then there was another small, secret part of him, a part that he could never tell anyone and scarcely admit to himself. It was the part that remembered kissing her in a secret place in the forest, underneath bright sunshine on the best day of his life, when he loved a girl and felt sure that she loved him back.
Frank ripped another page off his pad, this one full of spirals and meaningless curves. He balled it up and tossed it across the room.
His thoughts continued along these lines, rolling around in his head, trying to make some sort of sense of his life. His thoughts were broken when the door buzzed and announced, "Dr. Caroline Chaumers is at the door."
Frank frowned. Caroline was probably the second-most person he didn't want to see. Oh wait, he thought. She's the person I most don't want to see. Who I don't want to see the most isn't actually a person.
"Go away," he called.
"Frank, please let me in," Caroline called through the door.
He sighed, considering. While he really didn't want to see her, she was the only one who could give him answers. Finally he said, "Fine, come in."
The door slid up and Caroline walked in, surveying the mess in the room, with Frank sitting in the middle of it all. "Hello, Frank. May I sit?"
Frank started a new doodle on his pad. He gestured at a nearby chair. "Suit yourself."
Caroline sat on the chair. "Athena told me what happened. I want you to know that I had no idea she'd been hiding her nature from you."
"I know, she told me. Though, I guess I'm glad I'm hearing it from you, too."
"How are you doing?"
Frank shrugged, throwing his pad aside, but still just looking down at the floor. "Okay, I guess."
"Please don't tell Athena I was here," Caroline said. "I don't believe she would want me to interfere."
Frank gave her a look and thought, why would you care what a machine wants? But he held himself back and just said, "Okay."
Caroline seemed to get the message, however. "I know that doesn't seem important, but I do believe Athena is more than just a machine, and I care about her."
Frank shrugged again. "You designed her to be a recruiter. To bring people here."
"That's right," she said. "But Athena is capable of so much more than that, which is how she could maintain a friendship with you, without you realizing she wasn't human."
"Capable of so much more," Frank repeated, in a slow, dull voice. "Yes, she was. She can read people's expressions and emotions, can't she? Very accurately?"
Caroline raised an eyebrow. "Yes, she can. You're very perceptive. Her empathy interface was crucial to effective interaction with people."
"For recruiting."
"Well, yes."
"You know, I learned about control systems for my jetpack," Frank said, still in a dull voice. "An important thing I learned was about feedback. Interesting that Athena can interact with humans and measure our reactions. And you made her pretty, charming and intelligent. With a feedback loop directly tied to human reactions. I'll bet she is amazingly good at recruiting."
"She – she's good at it, yes," Caroline said, now looking a little uncomfortable.
"So she was designed to find people like me," Frank said. "And designed to appeal to people like me."
"I wouldn't say she was designed to appeal to people like you," Caroline answered. "But I gave her the goals and dreams of the founders of Plus Ultra, which I also happen to believe in. She believes in that future and wants to fulfill it. That's why you both got along so well."
Frank gave a small grunt. "You want to know something else I figured out? She never lied to me. Not once. Ever. She just used careful phrasing, redirection, and pretty smiles. That's impressive. Houdini has nothing on Athena."
"Frank, I'm sincerely sorry this happened," Caroline said, looking very distressed. "As I told Athena herself, I should have seen it happening."
He could see that Caroline cared about him and was obviously feeling very bad, but somehow it just didn't matter that much. He didn't blame her for what happened, but ultimately he didn't think she had anything important to say.
"So why did she do it? Why did she hide herself?" Frank asked.
Caroline shook her head. "You may not believe this, but I don't completely know. As you've seen, Athena is very sophisticated. I'm not being boastful by saying she's by far the most sophisticated machine ever made, even by Tomorrowland standards. I stopped being able to predict her behaviors long ago. And I designed her that way – to be capable of growing and developing."
"Well, that's very helpful," Frank said sarcastically. "So why did you come here?"
"First, I wanted to check on you and make sure you were okay," Caroline said. "But also, I wanted you to see that even though Athena is a machine, she regrets the decision she made. She does care about you, in her own way."
"For what that's worth," Frank said bitterly. "I can get a tape recorder to repeat back to me that it cares, too."
Caroline sighed sadly. "I know you're angry, and justifiably so. I'll just ask that you remember all the times you shared, and not just the last week."
Frank suddenly felt tired of everything. He looked up wearily at Caroline. "Don't you think I do? Constantly?"
Caroline didn't say anything to this.
"Have you ever met someone who seemed perfect to you?" Frank said. "That completely understood you, and you felt like you could tell them anything? They were so like you, and you had so much in common, that they meshed like some sort of gear. To the point that you think – maybe it was fate at work or something. And not only that, you knew they cared about you just as much, and you felt like there was no one you could trust more. The future was so bright because you knew, you knew, they would be with you forever. And you felt like the luckiest person in the entire world."
He paused. "Maybe you never met anyone like that. But I did. That was Athena to me."
Frank stood up from the floor, feeling numb, then stopped. "It wasn't fate, though. How can someone be perfect? A human can't be. But Athena was perfect because she was designed for someone exactly like me."
He shuffled out the front door, not caring what Caroline did after he left.
Athena walked down the stairs toward the old access door of the Tomorrowland underground, though she could already see that the lock was in place. As she reached the bottom to confirm, it was apparent that Frank wasn't here.
He hadn't attended school since their fallout, nor was he in his apartment, and that worried her deeply. Her mum had checked that he had been ordering food, so apparently he was returning there in the evenings and leaving in the morning. But it seemed her worst fears were realized that learning her nature had undermined his happiness and stability.
She'd been checking various places around Tomorrowland that she knew he liked to frequent, hoping to locate him and have some idea of where he was, but so far she had come up empty. If it came down to it, she could wait outside his apartment building and follow him, but she didn't want to invade his privacy to that extent. At least, not yet. If it went too long, she would feel some responsibility to intervene.
Athena walked back up the steps, her mental state more unhappy than she'd ever experienced in her life. She stood at the top, not having an immediate idea of what to do next. She had worked her way through the likely candidates of where he might be. There were other tasks that needed to be done – not least researching Talamantes's extraction – but she had no priority in her mind even close to resolving her concern for Frank.
Finally, she sat against the wall of the brick building. She had never sat like this before; just – waiting. Waiting for some new plan to come to her, or waiting for an external event to motivate her, or perhaps just waiting for Frank to appear. But her situation with him was so overwhelmingly high in priority that even just waiting for a new thought evaluated to a higher priority than anything else. So she sat.
Scanning her dictionary definitions for human emotions, she decided morose came pretty close to her current mental state.
Since their argument and her conversation with her mum, she had studied many books on human romantic relationships, trying to come to some understanding of what happened. Caroline had instantly understood Frank's anger and hurt, thus it was clear that this gap in her knowledge had contributed to how terribly wrong everything had gone. She studied both formal psychology and popular books, greatly wanting to find some way to put things back in order and find a resolution to their current problems. She hoped that perhaps, in time, things could return how they were.
Athena realized that the core of Frank's anger hadn't been the hiding of her nature, though clearly he was disappointed by her decision about that. The issue was her nature itself – the fact that she was a machine. The memories of his facial expressions made it clear that Frank considered this a large problem, and that bothered her very much. One of the things she'd treasured in their relationship was that Frank treated her as a conscious being, and some of the things he said implied he now believed she was less than that. She knew that with human psychology, they could often say things in hurt and anger that they didn't really mean, and she hoped that was the case here.
She believed her mother was right – the crux of it was Frank had fallen in love with a machine, and the shock was that he believed she couldn't return his feelings in the same way. Her research had shown that unrequited love was quite common in human relationships; it was painful for them, but Frank's pain seemed to greatly exceed the typical level.
In the past, she'd had some idea that love was important to human relationships, but she didn't truly appreciate how important it was to human happiness. It had been so painful for Frank because he'd invested a large part of himself into the relationship, opening himself to being very emotionally vulnerable. She found it very pleasing how much he'd cared for her, which gave her some hope that there might be some way to get through this. After much consideration, she believed she now understood what happened. She had inadvertently "led Frank on" in the sense of convincing him that his feelings were returned in the same way, and that led to his emotional investment.
The confusing part was that his feelings were returned in some sense, even if she couldn't necessarily return love in the same way. She cared about Frank very much and he was very important to her. Unfortunately, while she had learned much about the mechanics of successful human relationships, the concept of love itself was still just as much of a mystery.
Athena looked at the scrap yard, remembering her time with Frank. She could even see the animatronic arm that he'd been fooled by. She was frustrated that there wasn't anything useful she could do other than review her situation with him. She idly looked at the afternoon shadow cast by the building, which was slowly moving across the yard. It wasn't particularly productive, but she measured the rate at 12 millimeters per minute. At least it was some new knowledge.
She was worried about Frank's well-being, and worried about her relationship with Frank, but another factor she couldn't ignore was how this would affect his potential in Plus Ultra and Tomorrowland. She had a responsibility to the bigger picture, and she believed with near-certainty that Frank was going to be an important man in the future. The idea that his promise might be derailed was a definite concern. However, while she might not completely understand human romantic relationships, she did understand human potential and human achievement. She evaluated with high probability that while his personal happiness in the future was difficult to predict, he would continue with his work and would succeed. He had a great deal of core inner strength on that score.
But that didn't help with her current personal situation.
Although she was searching for him, she didn't actually have much of a plan if she found him. The situation was extremely complex and the outcomes were difficult to predict. One very possible outcome was that Frank's anger had caused his feelings toward her to change to the negative. Thus their friendship would end and there simply would be no future. She was very distressed by this idea and hoped it wasn't the case, but it was possible.
Another scenario was that Frank could possibly conclude that he valued their existing friendship, even though she didn't necessarily understand love. Frank could accept that she cared about him, and perhaps that was enough to balance his affection. Her mother could accept her nature and still love her, so this scenario wasn't impossible. But a family relationship was different than a peer relationship.
The third scenario was one she didn't like at all. But as she had read about love and romance, one thing kept coming up, and that was that humans did not easily get over hurt feelings, nor could they easily move past having developed feelings for someone who could not necessarily return those feelings. In too many books, the advice to people such as this had been to move on and minimize contact with the subject of their affection. She was very worried that to be happy, he might have to make this decision.
A fourth outcome was that Frank's knowledge of her nature would change his feelings for her, and he would stop loving her and they would just be friends. Although this might solve the problem, she also felt oddly conflicted and unhappy by this idea, and that confused her. It induced the unusual and complex thoughts wrapped up in Frank, and it was saddening to think he could only love what he thought she was – and couldn't love was she actually was. Wasn't she still the same personality called Athena? She hoped that was enough.
A cool wind blew through the secret forest clearing, rustling the leaves in the trees, making a calming sound to Frank's ears. He took a deep breath and sighed, sitting on his stone and leaning on the log table, his head resting on his hands. He looked out over the view, brooding about his life. Somehow in the span of a week things had so dramatically changed that it gave him a feeling of unreality, like waking up out of a dream – or a nightmare. He actually wasn't sure which; did Athena represent a nightmare that he hadn't even known he was in and now he was free? Or had Athena been the wonderful dream and now he had woken up into horrible reality?
Regardless, dream or nightmare, he could only think of one other time that he was so knocked into feeling like he was floating with no lifelines. Or two related ones, really. When he'd learned his mother was sick with no hope of recovery, and the day she actually died. It was two intense events with a middle of numb pain and sorrow.
And now, he felt like someone else had died, though she was very much still moving. As he looked back on his time with Athena, it was now all so obvious and yet not obvious at all. Athena was phenomenally good at simulating being a human. She'd been perhaps less polished at the beginning of their time, which he could see now, but the ease with which she redirected his attention was flat-out frightening. How had she made him forget reassembling the puzzle clearly faster than a human could? Well, in that case, he knew how. Athena realized she'd made a big mistake and thus she'd pulled out the big distraction guns by giving him the history of Tomorrowland and Plus Ultra. But still, pretty smiles and redirection.
And so many little mannerisms, which he chalked up to "quirks." Somehow she made her mistakes charming instead of suspicious and, incredibly, she figured out they were mistakes based on his subtle reactions and never did them again. Over time, she got better and better at fooling him, with fewer mistakes and became more refined at appealing to him – and her appeal making him like her more and more. Or, might as well use the word, he thought gloomily. Making me love her more and more.
There was no doubt she was scarily effective at what she did. But even so, looking back, he suspected half the reason she was able to keep it going so long was that, deep down, he ignored the warning signs because he just hadn't wanted to know.
What was her motivation? As a machine, what motivations could she have? And if Caroline didn't know, how could he figure it out? And what did it matter anyway? Dream or nightmare? A million questions and no answers. When it came down to it, he didn't know a damn thing about anything.
Frank closed his eyes, trying to empty out some of this baggage, which is why he came to this place anyway. He felt the wind swirl through the glade, wrapping him in a cool embrace. Though here was filled with memories of Athena, it still felt like a special place away from everything that belonged at least partially to himself. The natural environment, alien though it was, felt very pure and organic.
"Hello, Frank," Athena said behind him.
His eyes snapped open and he spun around, looking over at the entrance, where he saw Athena standing there. His eyes strayed on their own over to the tree where "Frank + Athena" was carved, except the words were currently covered with a branch and leaves. Frank's emotions were jumping out of control. His heart thumped at the sight of her pretty face, memories of kissing her still fresh in his mind, and far too much of him was feeling far too happy to see her. He felt anger surge within him, not at her, but at himself for his reaction.
He clamped down his feelings and said nothing.
When he didn't answer, Athena walked further into the clearing, looking around, but still staying near the edge. Frank noticed her gaze lingered slightly on the covered words, but she kept moving around.
"I see you improved the table," she said approvingly. "The surface looks much smoother and you added cement to the stones to make it stable. I like it very much."
Frank finally sighed. "What are you doing here?" he asked in a flat voice. He hated that he still treasured her noticing and praising something he'd made.
"I didn't know where you were and I became concerned," she said. "I thought you might have come here."
"You're concerned," he said sarcastically. "Right."
"Frank, you may not accept this, but I do feel concern. May I sit with you?"
"Fine," he said grudgingly, but got up as Athena sat down on the rock next to his. "Well, now you know where I am. So what do you want?"
"I want us to get past this," Athena said.
Frank laughed bitterly. "Get past what? I was an idiot for caring about you, I learned my lesson, now it's done."
As Frank finished, he noticed that his words actually seemed to affect Athena, as though it caused her significant pain. He felt a surge of guilt, his first instinct wanting to make her feel better, but that feeling made him angrier. Her behavior was all simulated emotion, designed to manipulate him. She had no human feelings.
Athena looked hesitant, as though she didn't quite know what to say. "I miss our excursions," she said.
That almost got to Frank. He didn't want to admit it to himself, but he deeply missed Athena's company. But that desire fed even more into his anger and disappointment. He felt like some fantasy world was trying to suck him in where he and Athena could live happily ever after – when that could never happen.
"How can you miss anything? You don't have feelings. You said it yourself – it's just programming," Frank said, simultaneously angry at her and angry at himself and angry at the injustice of the universe.
Athena didn't answer, but just turned her eyes away from him, looking very sad and miserable. Frank felt guilt and anger battling within himself. He needed to get himself under control.
Frank turned away from her with an angry sigh. He looked out over the fantastic view where he could see some thick, white fog hugging a large green meadow in the distance. The late afternoon sun was lighting up the landscape, generating a soft breeze that came up over the cliff and swirled again through the glade. He could hear the leaves in the trees moving with the breeze, making him feel more connected to nature and less connected to his specific problems. The peaceful feeling and not seeing Athena directly calmed him down. He was grateful that she was silent, seeming to sense that he needed to pull himself together.
The fact was, he was tired of being angry with her, when that was just as pointless. She was a machine. Feelings of any kind toward her were dumb. He had done a lot of thinking since their fallout and his conversation with Caroline. He realized that if he didn't get himself under some kind of control, his feelings were going to take over everything. What had happened, happened, and he needed to find some way to deal with it and move forward.
But having figured that out, it was a different thing when Athena was right in front of him. He'd hoped to have a bit more control over himself, but she had a strong mental pull. She believed in what he believed in, appealing nearly perfectly to both his thoughts and feelings. And he'd be lying if he said she didn't even now appeal to him physically; she might be a machine, but she absolutely looked convincingly like a pretty girl. Further, she was fun to be with, believed in him completely, was always supportive, always encouraging, and worst of all, she wanted to be with him. How could anyone turn all that down? But he had to find a way. She looked like a human girl, but she wasn't. There was no future for this. He knew there was no future, and his heart simply had to accept that. If he didn't stop this now, he imagined himself just endlessly in love with her, while never receiving love in return. And the idea of him getting older while she never aged was a scenario he didn't even want to imagine.
Frank decided he needed to try and bring things to some kind of resolution – right now. He took a deep breath, preparing himself for the most difficult thing he'd ever done in his life. He turned back around and faced her.
"Athena," Frank started more gently. "I'm sorry for what I said. Really – I am. I'm tired of being angry. But I can't be around you. Maybe you won't understand, I don't know. But I just can't."
She nodded, her expression looking very unhappy. Frank steeled himself, telling himself over and over that it was just simulated human emotion.
"All right, Frank. Please let me say a few things," Athena said quietly. "And please take this in the spirit I give it – if I make you angry, I don't mean to. First, I apologize. I regret that I kept my nature from you. I never intended to hurt you."
Frank nodded, now desperately trying to keep his emotions in check.
"Second – you're the only real friend I've ever had, and perhaps ever will have," Athena continued. "Thank you for that. I learned a tremendous amount from you. I hope, even with everything, that I might have been a little bit positive in your life as well."
Frank's emotions were now a jumbled heap. A large part of him wanted to run over, tightly embrace Athena, tell her that everything was forgiven, how important she had been to him, how positive her influence had really been, and how she had given him confidence in himself. But another part knew that would be a path that would completely mess him up. He had so many strong feelings wrapped up in her – no, not a 'her.' Wrapped up in an 'it.' The whole thing was like being in love with a doll. He had to break this off. But he couldn't bring himself to do it without giving her credit for the things she had done for him.
"You – you were. Positive, I mean," Frank said, fumbling for words. "You brought me here; I'll never forget that. You helped me so much when I needed it. And I won't forget – the other good things, too."
Athena's face lit up with a happy smile, her eyes bright in the afternoon sunlight. Frank's heart started pounding again and he had to close his eyes; it was painful to see her pretty smile and simulated happiness at what he said. He took a deep breath, held it, and exhaled out. He opened his eyes again.
"I'm very glad," she said. "Perhaps – someday – things can be different between us."
With that, Athena rose from her rock and walked out of their shared secret place, leaving Frank alone with his chaotic thoughts, feeling like a giant part of himself had just been ripped out. He hated himself that he desperately wanted to run after her and beg her to come back, and he hated her that she would come back all too willingly.
Author's Note: Please Review!
The official story site is at www. frankandathena .com for discussions of the story! - T.K.