Conduit

Ch. 1

Wires connected, tied, and twisted. Metal to metal, sparks ignited. Against my hands, it felt like fire, but in my eyes, it was the closest I'd ever be to the stars.

As I grinned, I saw my reflection in the interior cavity of my personal android. Another touch from my soldering tool and artificial organs reacted, moving, replicating human life. As the heart beat and hummed, I watched the computer power on. Blue lights against steel made my brown skin glow.

I clicked my teeth and closed the latch. My android moved.

"Are you done, Elijah?" it asked.

It. Her. Victoria.

Leaning back in my seat, I rolled a foot away and looked at her. An angelic piece of pristine technology. Rebuilt, reconstructed, by me. Unlike the rest of the androids in the world, Victoria had a personality I programmed from the ground up. I couldn't let her exterior feel so inanimate compared to it, so I spruced that up, too. While the rest of the robots in the world looked like machines with synthetic flesh, Victoria looked like she could live next door.

She was more than an android. She was real.

"Elijah?" Victoria straightened, adjusting her white shirt before pulling her long black hair away from her face. "Are you done?" She peered at me with her emerald eyes.

"Yeah." I smiled, wiping sweat off my brow. After an hour of tuning her up, disconnecting her from the latest Lyons update, and reconnecting her basic functionality, I was hot. I also wasn't like the rest of the builders in the nation. While I managed to get my hands on advanced tools, my place of work didn't match; I had my grandfather's garage, untouched since 2035. The insulation didn't let me breathe.

Lifting her arms at her sides, Victoria eyed her light brown skin down to her freshly cut nails. "Did you fix what was wrong with me?"

Victoria was an old android, built and delivered with the first batch of Personals, as they were called. But that was seventy years ago. Every ten years was a new android model, and with them came a mass update for older models. Some of them broke down, unable to run the software; Victoria had been like them, too. When I'd found her in this garage at fifteen, I fixed her. And had been ever since.

"Elijah, are you going to answer me?"

I looked down at my dirty shoes so I wouldn't have to see the frustration on her face. Sometimes, I questioned how I made her too human for her own good, and yet, I never complained that I did. It was good. My family home was empty and had been for so long; I couldn't let loneliness and darkness be my only friends.

"You're fine, Vicky," I said to her before leaning forward to rest my arms on my knees. "I made sure the data didn't hit, you're still intact—you're good, okay.

She didn't say anything. Instead, she focused on her feet. I frowned.

"Look at me." I motioned for her to walk to me with one finger. When she stood in front of me, I smiled. "There's nothing to worry about, okay?"

Victoria nodded.

"And you understand that, right?" Reaching for her hand, I raised my brow. It'd taken me years to break her out of Lyons' basic coding; the 100 Series was obsolete by today's standards. But I'd taken one look at her, nestled away in my dad's old work trunk, and knew she was preserved for a reason. He just wasn't around anymore to tell me why; taken too soon by the company that employed him.

"I do." She smiled weakly at me. "I'm programmed to understand."

Cringing into an awkward laugh, I lifted her chin with one finger before reaching back over to my seat for my work jacket. The steel blue bomber was all I had with my family's name on it. "You are programmed to understand, yeah—" I pushed my arms into both sleeves. "—but I've also programmed you to have thoughts, you know that, too, right?"