History in the Flesh Ch4

[General]

Jack Lang sat ram rod straight in the hot tub and tried to wrap his mind around his newly restored memory. He was breathing heavily as he made sense of the new situation. How could he have forgotten about Morgan for so long? She meant so much to him. Why did he remember all that other crap first and not her. Suddenly he was flooded with guilt as he realized he was living a life of relative luxury and had just fucked two other women while her body was either floating around in space or sitting in a junk pile somewhere.

Erica and Sara came running over to the hot tub to see what was wrong, both still naked from their recent encounter. “Jack are you OK?” asked Erica as she put a comforting hand on his shoulder. She sounded and looked deeply concerned about his condition, while Sara appeared more passive.

“No I am not ok,” Jack mumbled. “I need to now about Morgan. Did you find her with me? She should have been in the escape pod.”

“Jack who is Morgan? We didn’t find anyone in the escape pod but you.” Erica replied, now growing confused.

“Morgan was my co-pilot during my last battle. She was injured, but still should be in the pod,” Jack said with an angry retort.

“You remember the 2nd Battle of MacDougal?” Erica asked?

“Yes I remember everything now. Everything…” the last word faded out as Jack was overcome again by another wave of guilt.

“He has total recall,” Sara said smoothly to Erica. “Tend to him. I will inform Dr. Logan,” and then she walked out of the room.

Erica gently helped Jack out of the hot tub and wrapped an oversized towel around him. She led him to a couch and sat him down. She returned a few moments later, now clad in a robe and carrying a data pad. “According to this report filed by the cargo crew that found your pod, there was only one occupant,” Erica said as she scanned the file.

“Morgan should have been in the back seat. Did it say they found anything else in the pod? A flightsuit, an empty chair?” Jack asked.

Erica skimmed through the report for a few moments. “It does mention they found a heavily damaged droid,” Erica paused for a second as she tapped the pad to bring up another report. “It was removed from the pod and transferred to the university annex lab for study while you were still in cryo-status. Is this droid the ‘Morgan’ you were talking about?”

“Yes that’s her,” Jack replied with a spark of excitement to his voice. At least she wasn’t still drifting in space. He might be able to repair her, or in the worst case give her a decent burial. “I need to see her. Can you take me to this lab?”

Erica scanned the report, “It was sealed in the archive once the students finished studying it. We shouldn’t have trouble finding the storage container, but the annex is closed until tomorrow.” She paused as saw the excitement drain from Jack’s face. “Why do you keep referring to this droid as if it were a person?”

“Because she is a person, or at least was a person. I care about her very much and she should be treated with respect and not filed away as a scientific curiosity,” Jack quipped. “And why do you insist on treating her as an object? Haven’t you ever met an android before? They are a lot more than nuts and bolts you know.”

“Actually I have never met an android,” Erica calmly replied, trying to bring Jack’s anger down. “They haven’t been any androids to speak of since the end of the Third Age. We think most were destroyed during the war. Those that survived didn’t last very long because we lacked the industrial infrastructure to support them. We haven’t been able to build any droids until very recently, and those we can build now are expensive toys and far from human from what I have heard.” She paused for a second to let her words sink in. “I am sorry if I upset you. For a human to care for a droid is an alien concept in my culture. I meant no disrespect.”

“That is ok,” Jack sighed, “I am sorry I got angry at you. I am just very upset with myself that I didn’t remember her sooner.”

“We can’t go to the annex now, but would you like to talk about what you remember?” Erica asked gently, “it might help you to come to terms with it.”

Jack nodded and over dinner and the next several hours told Erica what he remembered from when he joined the military until his last battle. He stuck to the high points but there was still much to tell. Erica diligently recorded everything he said and only stopped to ask an occasional clarifying question. The night grew late, and when he had little voice left to speak, Jack stumbled back to his room and slept a restless night.

Jack and Erica left bring and early the next morning and made their way to the university annex across town. At Jack’s insistence, they arrived as soon as the lab opened and grabbed the first researcher they could, a young woman named Kari.

Kari led Jack and Erica down into the bowels of the building, several stories below the street. Kari used a power lift to pull a moderately sized metal box from a high shelf and deposit it on the floor.

“Here you go,” Kari said as she stood back from the battered metal crate.

Jack looked it over suspiciously. It box was only about a meter long by maybe half a meter wide and deep. It was way too small to fit Morgan. “Are you sure this is the right box?”

Kari pulled a small pad from her pocket and checked an entry, “Yes this is it. Box #19858: android debris recovered from Terran fighter (post examination). Do you want it or should I put it back up?”

Jack ignored the question, and Kari’s use of the phrase ‘android debris.’ He opened the box and gasped at what he saw. The box was full of what appeared to be random body parts. A leg, an arm, a hand, and most disturbingly, Morgan’s face; still locked in a look of surprise and terror. Erica quickly stepped forward and closed the box. “Yes this is the right box, we will take it.” She signed Kari’s pad and shifted the box onto a hover-dolly they had procured.

Kari left, as Jack slumped down on the dolly with one arm slung over the box. Erica waited a few moments then gently lifted him up. “Come on Jack, we should get going. I got us an appointment with one of the researchers that examined her after the crash and we don’t want to be late.”

The pair silently made their way back upstairs to a large, clean lab above ground. They were greeted by a bearded man in a white lab coat. “Ah our little researcher returns with her living time capsule,” the man smirks then looks at the dolly, “and I see you have brought a sometime for me, hrmm?”

Erica quickly moved forward and shook the man’s hand, “Thank you very much for meeting us on such short notice Dr. LeClerk. Have you met Mr. Lang?”

“Yes, yes, I saw your barbarian friend when he was in the hospital earlier. Please my time is very precious, lets just get on with this,” LeClerk said as he ignored Jack and pulled a data pad from his lab coat. Erica, knowing the task might be emotionally difficult for Jack, starting removing various parts from the box and laying them out on the lab table.

“Dr. LeClerk,” Erica spoke as she unloaded, “can you explain what you found when you examined this android?”

“As you can quite plainly see,” LeClerk said as he gestured to the damaged parts now on the table, “the android was heavily damaged when we got it. The torso had four large holes that appeared to have been caused by a medium caliber projectile weapon. I didn’t get to examine the escape pod, but I would expect to find the projectiles lodged somewhere behind the android’s work station. The projectiles severely damaged its primary support frame and completely destroyed its primary power cell. Upon further disassembly, it was found that an energy surge, probably caused by the destruction of the power cell, fused most non-shielded circuits in the rest of the body.” While he spoke, LeClerk casually picked up body parts and point out the damaged components. He finally picked up Morgan’s head.

“Fortunately, the power surge was intercepted before it could reach the primary processing unit,” with a sick pop that turned Jack’s stomach, LeClerk grabbed Morgan’s jaw with one hand and twisted off the top of her head with the other. “We could not determine the mechanism to access the computer core, so we just cut through the skull with a rotary tool.” He then tipped the now open head for Erica and Jack to see, “we then extracted the computer core which appeared intact. We hooked it into our lab computers to attempt to download any data, but due to some unknown block we couldn’t access anything.”

“That is a safety measure,” Jack finally spoke, “She is a mark 19, mil-spec android. They were designed so that if captured by an enemy, data could not be forcefully removed without the proper access codes.”

“Ahh the barbarian speaks,” LeClerk replied, “I am surprised your people thought of such techniques back then. I assumed you were too busy trying to find new ways to wipe out entire species.” he paused to enjoy the look of anger radiating from Jack’s face. “It doesn’t matter anyway. The droid couldn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. In my opinion the whole unit is a total loss. I wanted to recycle it right after the examination, but Dean Lawyson wanted to keep it for spare parts in case we found a more functional unit. Do whatever you want with it, just get it out of my lab.” And with those last words Dr. LeClerk marched out of the room.

Erica watched him leave and then turned her attention to Jack. He was carefully sifting through Morgan’s parts and laying them gently back into the box. “I am sorry about the professor,” Erica said gingerly. “I know this must be very difficult for you.”

“It isn’t your fault,” Jack sighed. He picked up Morgan’s burnt and mangled torso and gently set it into the box. “But what the Hell is his problem anyway? I didn’t expect hugs and smiles, but he was downright nasty.”

“Dr. LeClerk is of a small minority in the university who thought it was a bad idea to revive you. He believes that the human’s of your time were directly responsible for the calamity that befell us, and that to wake you would be to re-introduce dangerous ideas from a time he feels should be best left forgotten,” Erica said.

“He has it all wrong,” Jack replied, “The Clanks started this. We were only defending ourselves. We weren’t the aggressors.”

“I believe you Jack,” Erica replied as she took a seat on a lab stool. “I have studied your era quite thoroughly and agree with your assessment. But the prevailing theory that is politically popular is that humanity brought the end of the Third Age upon themselves. The theory states that an expansionist human empire secretly wanted Classion territory to fill its hunger for raw resources. The public and interstellar community would not tolerate an outright war, so the government secretly raided Classion territory to provoke a large scale response. The theory also states that the use of the bio-weapon against the Classions constituted a war crime.”

“How very easily people forget,” Jack replied while staring at the wall in thought. “Shouldn’t the other major species remember what happened? I mean they were unaffected by the war from what I could remember. Their records should be intact. Hell, the Kilgarians live so damn long I am sure most of them can remember the war first hand.”

“Yea, that is another problem I haven’t brought up yet,” Erica said with a sheepish look. “The territory that belonged to the human and Classion governments before the war has been quarantined by the interstellar community. During the war the other major species were too scared of the Classions to interfere, and after the war they were too appalled at humanity genocidal revenge to help rebuild. We were left as a galactic pariah. Which is the root of the political anger against you and your time.”

“Swell, just what I need,” Jack groaned. He slowly picked up Morgan’s head and pulled her eyelids shut. With a little movement, he shifted her face into a more peaceful pose and put the open head into the box. He picked up her computer core, the last part of her not already in the box, and gave it a good look.

“So what do we do now?” Erica quietly asked.

“I am going to see if I can find her in here.” Jack replied with a small smile.

***

Jack and Erica carried what was left of Morgan back to their apartment building and secured it in the basement which Erica said was used for communal storage. Over the next several days, Jack spent the mornings telling Erica about his time, and in the evenings he would connect his terminal to Morgan’s computer core and try to get through the access codes. Erica and Jack were friendly, but he avoided any further sexual advances from her or Sara. Sara seemed disappointed but Erica was fairly understanding.

One morning as Jack and Erica began their normal discussion, she appeared particularly agitated to him. Her starting pleasantries were peppered with “um’s” and “ahh’s” and she shifted nervously in her seat. “Jack, let’s talk about a different topic today,” she paused and shifted her datapad. “What can you tell me about your fighter?”

Jack was a little surprised by her question since she had normally focused on broad historical trends and personal accounts so far. Hardware didn’t seem very interesting to her, so he figured she wanted to hear about his personal connection to his ship. “She was a Hercules class heavy fighter and the third ship I flew since I got my wings. In the tradition of my past ships, I named her Feisty Bitch III. The name came from a trip I took to Amsterdam a day before I shipped out on my first tour. I visited a brothel with some of my squadron mates named Club Vandersexxx and somehow ended up with a devilish dominatrix named Helga. My Dutch was poor and she didn’t speak English, so it took almost an hour of all kinds of demented kinky shit for her to finally let me go. They guys joked afterwards that she was probably meaner than anything I would ever face in the future, so I figured if my fighter was half as viscous, nobody could stop me. But I guess she wasn’t quite viscous enough.”

Jack wore a strange nostalgic smile that spoke of crazy days past. He thought again that if he got through that night in Amsterdam, maybe he could get through this tough time too. He then noticed that Erica seemed even more agitated. “Um, while that was a very interesting story, it isn’t exactly what I was looking for. Maybe I should be more direct…could you tell me about her technical capabilities?”

Jack’s smile faded a bit while he pondered this change in Erica’s questions. Something made him a bit uncomfortable, but he decided to play along a bit. “Well the Hercules fighters were an older ship during the war, but they were very tough and packed a big punch. They were a great balance between a fighter and a light strike bomber.” He paused to see if this would satisfy her.

“OK, that is good,” Erica delayed, “what about that big punch? What was the power output and cyclic rate of your cannons?”

“Umm,” Jack stalled. He knew these figures by heart, or at least a good approximation. He used them to make mental calculations to balance offensive power requirements against his shields or engines. But he also knew that information was marginally classified. Why did Erica all of a sudden want hard technical figures? He was appreciative of all she did for him so far and wanted to help her out, but his training told him something was wrong and that he should keep his mouth shut. He decided to feign ignorance. “You know I am not exactly sure. Normally Morgan took care of all the math for me.” He hoped bringing up Morgan and putting on a sad face might encourage her to drop the subject.

“Oh OK,” Erica stammered, “do you remember the approximate frequency range used by your primary targeting sensors?”

“You know,” Jack said while he dropped his head and pinched the bridge of his nose. This was really getting strange. Those frequencies were highly classified and would effectively let any potential adversary jam his targeting system. This was too worrisome to play along any longer. He had to end the conversation now. “These numbers are really giving me a bad migraine. I normally let Morgan deal with all the numbers, that way I didn’t have to remember.” Jack saw Erica look away; obviously very uncomfortable. He took the opportunity to quickly give each eye a quick poke with a finger. When Erica looked back, she saw a tear run down Jack’s cheek. “I am sorry I can’t help you.”

“That is ok Jack, I am sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you,” Erica stopped for a bit and logged a few notes. “Let’s stop for today and let you get some rest.” She packed a few things into a small bag and put a gentle hand on Jack’s shoulder. “I need to head down to the University Annex for a while. Try to take it easy and I will see you later tonight.”

After Erica left, Jack cleared the induced tears from his eyes and pondered what the hell was going on. She was always more interested in the large historical picture of Jack’s life, or little personal stories here or there. Now she wanted technical details and classified ones at that. Something was definitely going wrong around here.

That evening, Jack grabbed Morgan’s core and walked down to the basement. He dragged open her box and gently pulled out her head. His fingers traced her cheek and he cursed silently to himself. She was so close. Her body was ruined but her mind; her soul was still in her core, now sitting on a work bench just a few inches away. Yet he couldn’t get in. She always had a knack for solving mysteries and he would love to hear her analysis. He held her head in his hands and wished he could see her open her eyes and smile at him again; her hair blowing in the wind.

‘Wait a second’, Jack thought to himself, ‘why do I remember her hair blowing in the wind? There was no wind to speak of on our ship, and I never really saw her off ship. Plus she always had her hair pulled up in a bun.’ Just then he noticed that the hair attached to her head now was blowing in the breeze. A breeze that he could also feel on his leg. He gently put her head back in the box and sealed it, then began to find the source of the moving air.

Jack stumbled through the basement for a few minutes, licking a finger ever now and then to try to trace the air currents. He soon found the air was moving around a large heavy cabinet that was covered in dust. He peered behind the cabinet and couldn’t see anything, but he could feel the wind was significant in the small crack between the cabinet and the wall. With some effort he pulled the cabinet away from the wall and to his surprise found an old metal door. He opened the door which led into a pitch dark passage. His curiosity piqued, he foraged around the basement and found a small backpack, a few bottles of water, and a flashlight. He slipped Morgan’s core into the pack, lit the light and stepped into the passage.

The walls were constructed of well cast plasticrete and followed in one direction away from the basement. Thinking twice, Jack took a few steps back and pulled the door shut behind him. He followed the passage into the darkness for several hundred meters; the only sound he could make out was the light fall of his feet. The tunnel made a sharp turn to the right and a steep set of stairs led down. At the bottom of the stairs, the passage continued on and he could now hear the faint sound of running water.

Eventually the narrow tunnel opened into a much larger passageway. Jack’s light scanned his new surroundings and made out a gently slope down to a slow moving stream in the center of the passage. He also made out what looked like a small sign near the water. He got closer and saw the sign was almost completely obscured with grime. He brushed it aside with his hand.

[MacDougal 5 Department of Public Works. Sewer junction 529-A594F-15. <- Emergency Exit 2000m. CDS 13A 1200m ->]

A few things caught Jack’s eye. The first was the confirmation that this was a sewer system, which he had suspected. But strangely it lacked that wonderful sewer aroma. In fact upon closer inspection he didn’t see anything in the liquid flow besides clear, clean water. Hesitantly, he dipped a finger into the flow and held it up to his nose. It smelled clean. Although to be honest, he realized he hadn’t been in a sewer before to recognize it here.

The last thing that caught his eye was the CDS, which stood for Civil Defense Shelter. Jack remembered that the colony on MacDougal was built after the bitter ground war with the Klakkon Hive, when tens of thousands of unarmed colonists were slaughtered in urban combat with Klakkon warriors. Afterwards a law dictated that all new colonies be built with fortified shelters in case of future invasions. That way the population could hide safely until the troops could come in and re-take the city.

Jack figured the shelter might provide some information or at least give him a few more tools to work on Morgan’s core. He followed the passage for a bit over a kilometer until he found a large 6 by 6 meter metal door. He brushed some dust off around the door and found a control panel. He was surprised when it immediately jumped to life. He expected that he would have to try to hotwire it after all this time, but he didn’t mind a little good luck here or there. With any more luck, the system would have him as an authorized user since he was in the military when this place was built. He placed his hand on the scanner and looked at the screen.

“Biometric authentication accepted,” the panel spoke in an even feminine voice, “Welcome to CDS 13A.”

The large door slid open with a very surprising lack of noise. Jack quickly slid through the opening, which closed silently behind him. Within a few seconds the lights came on, and he found himself within a long, large hall that must have gone on for nearly a kilometer. The entire room was full of simple bunk beads, stacked floor to ceiling. Every bed was made and empty. “I guess the colonists didn’t make it down here in time before the Clanks hit,” Jack said to himself as he wandered through the hall looking for anything of use.

Jack left the large main hall and explored a few attached rooms. He found an empty and spotlessly clean mess hall, and fully stocked pantry. Here and there he found an empty administrative office, but still no signs that anyone made it down here. He opened the next door marked with a large red cross. When the lights came on, he jumped in surprise. The room was full of bodies in beds and on the floor.

Jack examined the first few he came to and found they were surprisingly well preserved for being down here for over 350 years. Their skin was dark and dried but the body was otherwise intact. He did make out the signs of severe radiation burns on the skin. His only guess was the radiation killed off the bacteria that would normally aid decomposition.

Jack was about to leave this depressing room when he noticed a uniformed woman bent over a desk. Her plus sized frame stood out distinctly from the other thin, dried bodies in the hospital. When he got closer he saw that the woman looked like she was asleep, not dead. He touched her light olive skin and it was soft but cold. He lifted her heavy frame off the desk and sat her in an empty desk chair.

Jack knew by now that she was an android, and judging from her uniform, some sort of nurse. Since he didn’t know her exact model he felt around the usual places to try to find her emergency restart switch. He finally found a small indent behind her left ear. He pulled a pen from her pocket and used it to click the hidden switch.

The nurse suddenly jerked in her seat and her eyes shot open. She twitched twice more then her jaw dropped open. “***beep*** …. ***beep***….System Error 10: Unable to Load Core Module. Shutting down.” the nurse android said in a flat voice. Her eyes then close and her head slumped back to her chest.

“Swell,” Jack grumbled under his breath. Maybe the radiation fried out her CPU core. “Well, let’s see what we can do,” he said to himself as he walked to a set of nearby cabinets. After 20 minutes he returned to the malfunctioning android with a small toolbox and hard printed manual labeled: [MIL-STD-124-15 Mark 15 Field Service Manual.]

Jack thumbed through the manual and pulled a small tool within the box he found. He felt along the android’s hairline until he felt a small bump at the base of her skull. He pushed the tool into the bump and then twisted carefully to the right. With a snap, her scalp popped loose and he grabbed the base of her black ponytail to remove the assembly and sit it on a nearby table.

Jack carefully removed this android’s core and set it on the table next to the scalp. He then gingerly removed Morgan’s core from his pack and examined it. After a few quick checks in the manual, he adjusted two jumper settings in the empty skull and then firmly seated the new core.

Jack crossed his fingers and slowly clicked the hidden power switch. Again the android’s eyes shot open. Its head twitched several times and he also noticed the left foot move, not sure if it was a good sign or not. The android blinked twice then spoke, this time the mouth moving with the words, “Mark 17, Morgan Boeing-98929F3C initializing. New hardware detected…Warning Cranial case open…”

Jack began to get excited as hope finally grew within him. Maybe it was going to work.

“Hardware re-initialization complete. Personality matrix suspended. Awaiting command…” the android said in a deep, smooth and unfamiliar voice.

“Here goes nothing,” Jack mumbled. “Morgan, initialize personality matrix.”

“Standby,” Morgan smoothly replied in her new voice. She stared at the wall without moving for almost a minute before she blinked a few times and gasped. Her hands jumped to her now much larger chest, which visually surprised her. She then looked around frantically until she found Jack. “Jack, what the hell…hell…hell…is going on?” she stammered.

“Morgan, thank God you are alive. I thought I would never see you again,” Jack said as quickly embraced her, still being mindful of her open skull. When he broke the hug, she looked up at him and twitched slightly. “A lot has happened. You took a couple of Clank rounds in the chest during the battle. I thought I lost you. I was shot down shortly thereafter, and the pod kicked me into cryo-statis. We are on MacDougal 5 now, apparently over 350 years after that battle.”

Morgan started at him for a second, “Standby…” she said in a flat voice. Jack grew worried that he had somehow broken her, but she quickly came back. “Jack I am having a little trouble grasping the situation,” she paused again for a second. She then looked down at her new body and back at him. “The memory capacity of this replacement body is only 45% of my minimum requirements. I have to use a lot of virtual memory to keep everything going, so please bear with me.” She froze again for another few seconds. “Could you please replace my scalp? I am getting a constant warning message and it is very distracting.”

“Oh yea, sorry.” Jack quickly snapped the scalp panel back into place and stood back.

Morgan stood up and tested out her basic movement functions by stretching her arms and legs. She then looked around at their surroundings, “where are we?”

“This is an old civil defense shelter I found. Your new body is from an older nurse who’s core was damaged,” Jack replied.

“This body is interesting,” Morgan paused as she looked at her arms. “while not as advanced as my old one, it does have some useful features. The extra space this frame provides allowed the installation of additional sensors to support the nurse role, including high resolution bio sensors,” she paused again for a few seconds. “But these things,” she said as she grabbed her now ample chest, “are going to take some getting used to.”

“I am just glad to be able to talk to you again,” Jack admitted with a warm smile.

“Hold on one second, this is getting to be too much to bear,” Morgan grimaced, then went still for several seconds. When she came back, Jack noticed the spark behind her eyes was gone, “I have disabled many of my more advanced features to try to speed up my processing. This includes much of my human emulation algorithms and emotional modules.” She saw Jack frown, “Don’t worry, I will restore them later once I have worked a few things out. How long did you say we were drifting in space?”

“Three hundred and fifty seven years, from what they said,” Jack replied.

Morgan froze again for a few seconds then snapped back up, “I have calculated that possibility is highly unlikely. I have a micro atomic timing clock built into my core to adjust for micro time dilation during high speed combat. According to this clock, I have only been offline for about 130 days.” She them moved over to one of the corpses nearby and placed her hand on it. Ten seconds later she stood up and reported, “I have performed a detailed scan of this body and it appears to have died between three and five years ago. I calculate there is a 99.78% chance that the story you were told was false.”

“Then something strange is going on,” Jack puzzled. He scratched his head and noticed the time on his watch. “Oh shit, I need to get back before they notice I am gone. Are you good to walk?”

“Yes, my power core is at 39% capacity. I should be able to sustain a normal gait for several days,” Morgan said as she followed Jack out of the shelter. The pair quickly made their way back to Jack’s apartment, following the tracks he left in the dust. On the way he filled her in on everything that had happened since he woke up. “What do you want me to do once we get there? They might suspect I have seen through their ruse.”

“There is a lot of empty storage space in the basement. Nobody else goes down there and you should be able to hide out there.” Jack said as they grew close to the last door. He gestured for Morgan to hold back while he opened the last door. He poked his head in and didn’t see anyone there. He quietly slid out and waved Morgan to follow before shutting the door behind him. He checked his watch, 1:07am, Erica would be looking for him by now. They quickly looked for a good space for her to hide when she put a hand on his shoulder.

“I detect footsteps coming down the stairwell,” Morgan said quietly. Jacked ushered her into a large locker and shut it behind her. He then swiftly made his way over to the crate full of Morgan’s old parts.

“Jack, are you down there?” Erica asked as she descended the stairs into the dimly lit basement.

“Yes I am over here,” Jack replied. He gently brushed the hair from Morgan’s old face and lowered it back into the box. He did his best to act depressed as Erica drew close and gently touched his shoulder.

“I have been looking all over for you,” Erica almost whispered, “I didn’t think about you being here until just now. Are you ok?”

“I think I will be ok,” Jack lied, “it is just finally hitting me that I may never see Morgan again. I am sorry I am throwing off your research schedule. I just need a little more time. I would like to go bury her tomorrow if that is ok?”

“Of course,” Erica smiled, “I will come with you and help if you would like?”

“Yes, I would like that,” Jack thought quickly, “Let’s meet up tomorrow at 10am and take care of it. Then you can interview me for the rest of the day.”

“Sounds like a plan. I will meet you in the living room at 10. Do try to get some sleep tonight,” Erica said as she patted Jack on the shoulder and walked upstairs.

Jack waited until he heard the door close, then counted to one hundred and walked over to get Morgan out of the locker. He opened the door but before he could talk, she covered his mouth, and held it for another several minutes. At the point where he started to grow restless she released him. “Keep your voice down,” she whispered.

“Why?” Jack asked, “she can’t possibly hear us here.”

“I believe she could have until now,” Morgan said calmly, “Are you aware that that woman is an android?”

To be continued…

[Gorgo]

That certainly threw us all for a loop

[DollSpace]

Very nice It made an awesome birthday present! ^_~ Or should I say, anniversary of first activation date? eh..something like that...

Catie

[General]

Well, happy activation date then Catie. I am glad that you guys like it so far. It has been a while since I posted the last chapter and I worried I lost my audience. I apologize for the spelling and grammer mistakes. This last chapter took me a few days to hash out while I was on a business trip and in my excitement to finally post it, I forgot to do a good proofreading.

I figure this story has one, maybe two more chapters left in it. Hopefully I can get them out in the next month or so. I appreciate the encouragement everyone has left so far; it makes finishing it up a lot easier.

I just finished watching the 2nd season of Lost and have become quite annoyed with dangling plot threads, so I will try to tie everything up nicely. I am curious if anyone has any theories about what is going on though.

Thanks again for the encouragement,
General

[Sthurmovik]

I just wanted to let you know that I find your story universe to be very well thought out and quite interesting. I especially like the history of Androids and their relationship to humanity. I also think that Morgan is quite hot It's nice to see fembots who have a distinct personality, are not sex slaves and can also kick your ass if they so choose.

I hope that after this story you keep writing in this story universe.

[BA2]

General,

That was fantastic - brilliant plot development and characters and really well written, I am aching for more.

I particularly loved the scene with the nurse 'bot: Morgan having to reduce functionality to operate effectively in a lower spec body / CPU. I don't know if you intended this but I liked the casual way with which Lang binned the medic bot's personality to insert Morgan's - he clearly identifies with her as a person but does not think twice about regarding the medic as a mere machine. Albeit she is a more basic android I like the implied double standard.

You asked for plot guesses so here goes:

Lang has been captured by clanks and is in a sophisticated interrogation set-up to pump him for techinical information; it is not in fact years later at all. Clearly they have tried and failed to exploit Morgan and now need to trick him into revealing Terran defence secrets (or have they? Has Morgan's security been compromised - has she been reprogrammed to betray him?)

Possibly the apparent sympathy of the ladies looking after Lang might be because they too are androids, designed to exploit Terran prisoners perhaps? Do they idenify with his love for an android when perhaps their society is not so tolerant?

I'm probably way off but I can't wait to find out!!

Keep up the good work,

BA