Kit

Our house was never quiet. It spoke to me even when the voices of its inhabitants were silent. It communicated audibly in groans and creaks, but its walls told a story, each room boasted an epic. I had explored every inch of our house, down to the minute details of the moldings along the ceilings. I knew the deepest corners of the closets, the highest points of the attic. I had counted everything that could be defined enough to deserve counting. There were five bedrooms, three bathrooms, two sitting areas, a kitchen, an office. But that wasn't specific enough: there were 17,000 roses on the dining room wallpaper and precisely 62 million paint dimples throughout my room alone, punctuated by several graphite drawings of mine on the wall. Each of those details told the story of this house, of her inhabitants, and secrets of course. Plenty of those.

Eleanora knocked on my door. She opened it without me saying anything and didn't pause entering the room to head straight to my desk chair. She sunk into it immediately and started fishing through the drawers.

"Can I help you find something?" I asked, but made no move to stop her rummaging. Instead, I laid perfectly still on my bed, sprawled out and counting the imperfections on the ceiling.

"I'm looking for a key" she said and rose from my desk, unsatisfied.

"What kind of key?" I didn't recall too many keys lying around. We had ones for the house of course, old brass keys that sat on a ring in the kitchen. They opened random old cabinets and safes. Some were keys to doors.

"The one for the car."

That intrigued me. I sat up fluidly and stared at her. She stood in front of my open closet doors, one hand on her hip and the other nervously covering her mouth, like she was pretending to think or be innocent. "Where are we going?"

We didn't leave the house much. And it was even more rare that we would take the car. Usually, the car sat in the ivy-covered garage behind the house. Every so often I would go out, charge her batteries and start her up, just so that she stayed functioning. But she really hasn't been driven on the road in a full year. Not since Victor had his fall.

Eleanora looked at me squarely with a sarcastic look, as if I didn't know.

"The market," I answered, nodding. I continued,"I don't think that's a good idea."

"I knew you wouldn't," she said, rolling her eyes. The motion grated on me but I ignored it.

"Then why did you come in here for the key?"

"Victor said you knew where it was. I was trying to find it without alerting you, but you ask too many questions."

"You answer them too freely," I retorted.

"There's no sense in lying to you. You could hear that car start from a mile away," she said, not because the car was noisy but because we both had impeccable hearing.

"And because you want me to drive you," I groaned. I had tried to teach her to drive multiple times in the past, but it never stuck. She said she didn't have the right software for driving, it just wasn't in her code. I reminded her that it wasn't in mine either but I eventually learned. I think it boiled down to that she didn't like driving, especially because of its relationship to Dead World, which she despised passionately.

"Yes."

"And what do you plan to do at the market? You know Victor isn't able to-"

"Yes, of course I know that," she snapped, cutting me off. "I'm going to give out some extra supplies I found when cleaning out the basement."

Suspicious.

"Get Jake to drive you," I suggested and laid back down on my bed.

She scoffed, offended. Jake, although human, was not her favorite in the house. They didn't get along. Ever. He stayed because he was helpful around the house and Victor loved company. Not to mention that our world was hard for humans to live in and our home was as close to a sanctuary as he could get. But I didn't mind Jake, I found him quite funny and entertaining to be around. Eleanora on the other hand, did not find him humorous nor did she appreciate that Jake loved to argue with her. Yet, Eleanora had been the one to bring Jake here in the first place.

"Please, Kit."

"Wow. You said 'please.'" She smacked my shoulder. I turned to her with mocking shock on my face.

"Just drive me to the market. You can even go in with me and ogle at the old trinkets."

"I don't ogle," I murmured and turned my head away from her to count things on my wall, my eyes focusing on one of the drawings I had done of her. She was in the kitchen watching Jake cook something sketchy when I had been struck by the desire to draw her face. I captured her expression in graphite and paper, but it wasn't the same as what was written on her face now. Contempt in the drawing was mirrored by her arrogance now, content that I was giving in to her.

"We're leaving in ten," she said and stalked out of my room. I rolled over until I was off the bed and padded down the hall to Victor's office. His door was closed so I knocked and waited.

"Come in."

Victor sat at his large oak desk, endless papers spread in front of him. His desk lamp illuminated the weathered folds of his face, the softness of his eyes. He didn't smile when he saw me, instead he nodded in acknowledgement and moved his eyes back to his work.

"I'm assuming Eleanora found what she was looking for."

"Yes," I responded and moved my eyes from him to the bookcases that surrounded his office. Three thousand five hundred and ninety-six books in total. Seven double copies of books. One bible.

I stood in front of the empty fireplace. There was no need for it in the middle of this miserable spring. I'd caught Jake sticking his head in the freezer on several occasions, swiping ice from the bin to put against his flushed throat. Eleanora and I couldn't feel the heat nor did it bother us, but we didn't like the extreme thunderstorms it caused. Between the lightning strikes that threatened our circuits and the sheer amount of water, it had become an unnerving threat. There was supposed to be another incredible thunderstorm tonight, hence the market trip. I could sense the rise of moisture in the air and the electricity that began to buzz around the atmosphere.

"You'll go with her, right?" Victor asked, pausing to look up at me. I looked to him and fought the desire to sigh.

"Of course," I said. "But I must ask, why now? It's been almost a decade since we've been to the market. I thought we said we were going to stop muddling in their business."

Victor chuckled. "Things change, son."

I twitched at the word.

"To be truthful, Eleanora did find more supplies, but she's also on a separate mission."

"A mission?" I asked, a touch of humor in my voice.

"She's been terribly bored locked up in the house all day. We've been talking about ways she could feel more fulfilled, more purposeful."

"So she's taking over for you?" I asked. It wasn't accusatory like I thought it might've been like. Victor had asked me long ago if I wanted to take over for him, but I always told him no. I always told him it wasn't the path I wanted to pursue. It wasn't that I couldn't have done what he did or learned to perform medicine. I just didn't want to. There was also the element of admitting that Victor was slowing down and required someone to take over for him. He was well into his 80's at this point, his hair had been ice-white for two decades now. While he was still spry and healthy for his age, he had recently become confined to his wheelchair. It aged him even more. Since then, I'd become essentially housebound, leaving only on quick jaunts with Eleanora. Mostly, I just spent my time drawing and worrying.

"Not entirely. She'll do better than I could've," Victor said. "Besides, she can actually leave the house."

"No more house calls then," I mused. After things changed and the balance tipped toward the android's control of the world, Victor was overwhelmed by guilt. He had worked for the company that produced the android population, that constructed me and Eleanora. Working in their Biological Manifestation department, he was responsible for analyzing and implementing certain biological influences into our programming and hardware. Victor was the reason we could cry through projected tears on our cheeks and had a sense of self-preservation. To ease the guilt he carried for helping us exist, he would take in humans secretly and treat them for a cacophony of maladies. He set broken bones, soothed burns, cured chicken pox. With his deep knowledge of human biology and anatomy, he tried to make up for things by practicing medicine. We ran an underground health clinic for years from the comfort of our victorian home. But it never felt like enough for him, that much I knew.

My father was a prisoner to our house. Godwin promised to keep him safe so long as he stayed within the confines of our home and black metal gates that divided it from the rest of the neighborhood. Godwin said he provided this gesture out of respect, but really, I think he was thrilled by trapping my father directly in the middle of a world he inadvertently created, a world that festered into one that hated him and anything else like him. We were in a cage disguised as a childhood home.

He shook his head dismissively. "No, we all know I'm not much help. Besides, it's much safer anyway for you and Eleanora."

Originally, it was my responsibility to go to the market and bring back those in the worst condition for Victor to treat. We were forced to slow our help into almost complete inactivity for several reasons. Most of them boiled down to Victor's health, but other reasons belonged to security risks and worries. Eleanora and I were eternally safe in most of our exploits outside the house, but if we were caught helping Victor it would mean reprogramming. Not even Godwin could grant either of us immunity. And if Victor or Jake were caught outside our home, they could be imprisoned just like the rest of the humans. Taken and sold into the same indentured working system every other human in the city was a part of. 

Or worse: get picked up by a Dead World van.

"What will we do now?" I asked.

"Ideally, we'll do what we did before."

"And what about the drones? The new security checkpoints?" The city had changed even more recently. A pervasive darkness creeping in. Godwin's paranoia was showing.

"I know you can handle those," Victor said, dismissing me. There was more to this.

"There's something you're not telling me," I accused, my eyes narrowing on the way his hands shuffled through papers. I moved closer to Victor, resting my fingertips against the edge of his desk. He stopped shuffling and looked up to me.

"There is change on the horizon, son," he whispered. That word again. "Can you feel it?"

I closed my eyes and tasted the room around me. I didn't know what he was asking me to feel, besides the heat of the room and the taste of the dusty books.

"Hank contacted me."

I sighed. Hank was another guilty party, more so than my father. Hank's grandfather was responsible for the creation of the androids, but Hank was the orchestrator of sentience. It was his idea to implement it. It was his actions that made the world the way it was. He wasn't graced with the arrangements like ours, however. No, he was banished somewhere only Godwin knew, cut off from the world but well-aware of the horrors. He had difficulty maintaining contact with us, but we'd get a random message every so many years. Last I heard he was working on a remote control. I rolled my eyes at the absurdity that our sentience or even basic functioning could be controlled with something as basic as a remote.

"Hank?"

Victor nodded in response to my question, but said no further based on my tone. He knew I didn't approve of Hank's involvement. Hadn't he done enough? I wanted to shout.

"And what, in all of his wisdom, does he have to say now?"

"Nothing new, really. Just the same image," Victor explained quietly and I groaned without thinking.

"The shark again?"

"Yes, Kit, it's the shark again on the same day and the same time as every year."

"From Hank," I supplied, distrust in my tone.

"Yes, from Hank."

"We've been over this, it's a glitch, it doesn't mean anything. Besides, Hank has been dark for years, it can't be him."

"But it is, Kit! It is!" Victor insisted. "When we worked together we had a series of codes for various security protocols and means of communicating."

"And was shark one of them?"

"No," Victor said, "But animals were always involved. We used to call lawyers 'flounder.'"

"So what?"

"It means something, Kit. I've been doing some reading about sharks. Did you know they went extinct the year I was born?"

"No," I said earnestly, it wasn't a fact I had accumulated. It didn't surprise me though, most animals on this planet fell victim to a similar outcome.

"And they're seen as a predator, a monster. But their violence is a sacrifice, their bodies built to only consume and destroy. A keystone species of vital importance."

"What are you thinking?"

"What if Hank made a shark?"

"A predator for who?"

"For the androids."

"How would that even be possible?" I questioned.

"I don't know."

"Where would even begin to look?"

"I don't know," Victor repeated.

I shook my head against the thought but regained my composure. I pushed down my anger until it evaporated below my feet.

"I think it will be a human. So, I want you to keep your eye out for someone out of the ordinary. They're important, whoever they are. We must protect them with everything we have." Victor said and moved from his desk. He started to wheel closer to me where I leaned against his desk. He reached his hand up to place it on my hunched shoulder. I moved a few inches to help him place his fingertips on the top of my shoulder.

"How could a singular person have the ability to take down Godwin?"

"Hank is a brilliant scientist."

"And you really trust him?" I whispered.

"I trust you," Victor said.