Chapter 1 – Will’s Legacy #7
“I work for the military,” said Jack before Marci could answer. “I’ll look after the three of them, ma’am, so don’t worry.” He twinkled at the scrawny woman as he if wanted to invite her on a date; it usually worked on human women of any age and seemed to work in this case, too.
“I’m sure you will,” she rasped, looking at him through narrowed eyes. “My worries tend to be justified anyway, particularly when it comes to men. This young woman deserves a decent guy who will show her there are still some men you can count on. I don’t want to hear any complaints.”
“You won’t, ma’am,” Jack assured her again, “she’s in the best of hands with me.”
The older woman finally relented and let the boys, who’d been waiting impatiently, race out of the door.
Jack could tell from Marci’s raised pulse rate how unpleasant the confrontation had been for her.
Before her neighbour could close the door, however, Jack asked her if he could quickly use her bathroom. Marci looked at him in astonishment, but Louise agreed.
“Wait for me by the lift,” he said to Marci. “I won’t be long.”
The old woman had barely closed the door behind him when he pulled her to him and put his large hands on her temples before she could protest. She sank unconscious to the floor and Jack deposited her on the narrow sofa.
He’d used a specific nerve manipulation to put her into a short sleep and wipe her memories of the last three hours.
“We’ll have to take the stairs,” said Marci, shrugging, as he met her and the boys in the gloomy corridor. She resigned herself to running down the ten flights of stairs. “The lift doesn’t work.”
“I repaired it when I arrived here with you.” Jack shrugged his broad shoulders as if this helpful act were most the normal thing in the world and called for the lift using the voice control.
“Repaired?” Marci looked at him disbelievingly. “How did you manage that? I’ve been running up and down ten flights of stairs every day because nobody would take responsibility for fixing it.”
A humming noise signalled the arrival of the lift and the doors opened automatically. Jack gently pushed Marci and the boys inside.
“Simple,” he explained when the doors had closed behind them. “I removed a magnetic plate covering the lift’s control circuits, then sent a pulse down the wires. It started working again.”
“Cool,” said Logan. It made him feel almost a bit proud when the boy looked at him with such admiration.
Marci’s expression was more doubtful and to make matters worse, she seemed to immediately remember that he wasn’t human. She glanced at the boys, her expression tense. “It’s better if they don’t find out,” she said cryptically, leaving him feeling stung.
Despite his terrible fate, he’d envied Will his family. It was through him that he’d learned what it meant to be human. Jack had been there when Will first looked death in the face in a fifty-degree desert wind.
Jack had patched him up and while doing so, inadvertently initiated contact with Will’s human memory.
That was when he’d laid eyes on Marci for the first time and it had nearly floored him, seeing the intimate moments of human happiness that Will had unknowingly shared with him.
The experience had acted like a huge jolt to Jack’s basic emotional processor, which subsequently became independent and expanded inexorably.
Since then, he had known what true pain was, and had the first inklings of a particularly powerful feeling that only humans experienced: love.
Since that moment, he wanted nothing more than to be human and, as that was impossible, the next best thing would be for Marci to consider him an equal partner.
He had to admit, it was a fantasy, at least where Marci was concerned.
When they reached the ground floor, the lift doors opened and the cold wind coming off the street brought Jack back to the present. The rain was pouring down and Marci looked at him questioningly.
“It’s OK,” he reassured her, “I’ve ordered a taxi.”
“A taxi?” She looked sceptical, and he couldn’t blame her.
She hadn’t exactly had the best of experiences with him so far.
And the distrust was still in her eyes a few moments later when a van with blacked-out windows drew up alongside them and the doors automatically opened.
Jack encouraged Marci to climb inside with her boys even though the driver wasn’t visible in their darkened cabin.
“Are you sure this is OK?” Marci asked fearfully, stepping hesitantly onto the sill of the van. “I mean, how do you know you can trust this company?”
“The driver has the same serial number as me and we share the same fate,” he explained, trying to make his voice sound trustworthy. “Please get in with the boys, it’s quite complicated manipulating all the surveillance cameras in this part of town and we can’t do it for hours.”
“Everything OK, man?” Silver, who had taken over the controls of the self-driving van, was in silent contact with Jack, imperceptible to others.
Marci, sitting down with the boys and strapping them all in, didn’t notice anything.
However, he didn’t want her to feel ignored, particularly as she didn’t seem to know about his ability to communicate silently, so he decided to keep his report to Silver about the events in the MacIntyre Villa brief as his robot friend steered the blacked-out van skilfully through the steep skyscraper ravines of Chicago.
“I got the chip from Rochelle MacIntyre’s safe,” he said simply, confirming that the mission had been a success.
Without that processor, it wouldn’t have been possible to paralyse CRU and establish a fictional company in the same industry.
He wasn’t going to reveal to Marci that another unit in their rebel organisation had since blown up CRU’s labs.
He didn’t know, either, what their boss was planning for her.
“What did you do to Rochelle MacIntyre?” asked Silver.
“I put her into a temporary sleep and wiped her memory, just like I did with Marci’s neighbour,” replied Jack silently. “Why do you ask?”
“Rochelle MacIntyre was found dead in her room an hour ago. Someone had broken her neck. The city’s swarming with police searching for her killer. I’m assuming it wasn’t you.”
“Shit!” That’s all Jack needed right now. If Marci found out, she’d think he’d killed Rochelle. “Were any more details released?”
“No, it’s not official yet,” said Silver casually.
“I’ve tapped the relevant communication systems. There’s also uproar among the government police agents because of the explosion at CRU.
All the labs were completely destroyed. I’m curious who has MacIntyre’s ex-wife on their conscience.
If it wasn’t you, who else could have done it? ”
“Maybe it was MacIntyre’s own people,” suggested Jack with a sigh. Marci may not have been aware of his communication with Silver, but she noticed his sigh and looked at him questioningly.
Silver grunted his agreement. “If you ask me, it all worked well. Now we just need to get the hell out of this chaos.” He’d bypassed the central control system for the twelve-lane highway through the city to avoid being spotted by the security services.
This made him pretty much invisible to the other vehicles’ automatic navigation systems, so he had to manually swerve to avoid a collision.
Silver was an R8 series robot like Jack and had some additional abilities such as the lightning-fast calculation of incoming missiles, which he now put to good use.
However, what he and Jack hadn’t considered was that humans didn’t possess natural or chemical stabilisers that protected their nervous system from rapid lurching movements, so it wasn’t long before Willie Junior was violently sick next to Jack’s feet.
“Do you have to?” complained Marci, looking extremely pale, and she didn’t mean Willie’s misfortune, but rather Silver’s haphazard driving style. She rummaged hastily in one of her large bags for a towel to wipe up the mess.
“Leave that, I’ll do it.” Jack activated a hidden tool below the heel of his right hand that neutralised the acidic-smelling fluid immediately and vaporised it without leaving a trace.
Logan stared at Jack goggle-eyed. “He….he’s not human,” he declared almost triumphantly, giving his mother an indignant look. “He’s a robot!”
“Yes, Logan, now calm down,” scolded Marci, clutching Willie Junior tightly as they went round the next corner.
“Wow!” cried Logan and jumped up to go and sit down next to Jack, causing Marci to frown. “You need to buckle up, Logan, otherwise you’ll fly into the window,” she warned him.
Jack helped the little boy to buckle himself in.
“Show me what else you can do,” the boy asked, looking up at him expectantly. “Can you shoot with your fingers?”
“If I have a laser pistol in my hand, then yes,” replied Jack with an amused grin.
“Logan, stop that!” Marci ordered sharply. “Jack isn’t a toy.”
“Isn’t he?” asked Logan impatiently, looking Jack up and down. “What is he then?”