Time stopped for a few seconds, then resumed with the muttering of the lab team. For years, I’d hacked into UGO’s servers, databases, emails. Most of their innovations in the past years was due to a hacker calling himself Ban, leaving solutions to problems UGO was having, giving them new ideas and helping to further the company. It frustrated me immensely to know that a simple chip that could read and pick up on biological issues was just thrown to the wayside when it could’ve helped the doctors save Theresa. What was I to do now?
“Jared…” mom trailed off, her amber eyes peering at me, “you’re Ban?” she asked, as if the reality just struck her. I’d thought she would place more worry on the fact that Theresa died, but she quickly made me remember why we never had a close relationship to begin with.
“Yeah, I’m Ba–does it matter?” I sighed, “Did her family have the funeral already?”
She nodded at me. At that point, I really stopped and wondered if there was a reason that I was alive. I needed to take my mind off of this tragedy, if only for a couple hours.
“Take me home,” I muttered.
“Home? You can’t leave ye–”
“I can. My vitals are fine. I’ve been stable for days. And yes, I’ve already accessed my records so I know the truth. Please, just, get me home.” Perhaps it was the pleading in my voice that struck a maternal nerve, but I had my way.
We arrived home quickly, escaping the flow of traffic by going away from the city. She didn’t fail in sternly questioning the source of Ban’s emails and highlighting the illegalities of what I’ve been doing. After seeing my setup in the basement, she got visibly angry and fumed about the wrongs I’ve done, but when she calmed, the thoughts of losing my advice filtered through the cracks of her wall of emotion.
“Okay, Jared, listen,” she placed her hands upon my thin, small shoulders, “you’re only thirteen, what you’re doing is highly illegal and although I begged everyone at the medical facility to stay quiet about it, this information could still go to the board of directors. If they don’t like what you’ve been doing, we could be in some big trouble. However,” her hands squeezed a little tighter as she looked down, breaking eye contact, “it’s true that this ‘Ban’ has allowed UGO to make bounds and leaps in the right direction.”
I tilted my head, curious as to where she was going with this. For someone who hardly ever spent time with me to speak, this much was astounding in itself.
“Come to UGO on your days off from school and help us perfect the TS. We can always say you just like observing robots,” she smiled. Perhaps, at such a young age, I knew too much. Behind that smile I knew perfectly well that all she cared about was Ban, not so much Jared Ugo. Yet, as if my feeble and childlike mind couldn’t control its nature of dependency, I took her offer.
My choice had me a little baffled, and presented an argument I’d try to avoid, that is, I’m helping UGO, not as a means of coping and taking my mind off my restless conscience so I could forget my past sin, but as a means of earning my mother’s attention and love. That argument smothered my mind and blotted out its creativity for the day.
Once again, I leapt through the wee hours of the morning, finishing a program to augment the user’s control of the TS by phone. I shutdown my computer and opened the basement’s door. “Theresa?” I called aloud, wondering where she was. How stupid of me.
Oh… Right… It stung. A bitter taste of reality that wouldn’t just linger in your mouth, but would get stronger as time passed. I stared along at the high-top chairs lining the kitchen counter we’d sit on every morning, my eyes watering without pause. “Dammit! Theresa!” I slumped to my knees, heartache seeding its way into my day. It was so empty and quiet without her, yet, my head was filled so much noise that I couldn’t hear or feel the presence behind me.
“Ban?” the voice called. I quickly wiped those unbecoming tears and turned around, noticing Anna from the UGO medical facility. Why is she here? My thoughts trampled over each other. The look she gave me was one of pity, but one of awkwardness as well. Her interpersonal skills didn’t look to be something she was proud of. Her two-mindedness was ripping itself apart, debating whether or not to try comforting me. I took notice and stood up, “I’m alri–”
Before I could finish, she rushed into me, holding me so tightly I actually had trouble breathing. I tapped her shoulder desperately, like a fighter held in submission so that I might clear my air paths again. When she finally let go, her jagged movements pulling her back, she apologised. I rubbed along my neck and dismissed her apologies with a whisk of my wrist. I wanted to know why she was here and exactly when during the day she popped up, but somehow, a torpor viciously ripped out that very primal part of me. I was tired.
She glared intensely at me, right in the eye, a strange action for one with such a timid nature. “Are you really, Ban?” she asked. I was at odds with myself, about whether to answer that question or not. Whether to go through with supporting UGO, whether to even continue existing. My arms, autonomously, prepared a cup for myself. “Y-yeah,” I finally answered, after an unnerving moment of silence, “coffee?” I asked her.
She shook her head, “That’s alright. I’ve already had a cup,” politely declining.
I looked up at her, squirming about in my mind again. “You’re here to babysit me, then?” I asked, my face’s emotional coordinates directing deadpan.
“No!” she answered briskly, “Yes, uh, I’m not sure?” her hands shot up in a surrendering position. She was so lively that I found it a little painful. One minute I’m spiralling down the chasm of anguish and the next I’m fighting the urge to laugh at her antics. Short, let-down, shoulder-cut bright blonde hair with not a follicle acting on its own. A simple white shirt and grey skirt, coupled with her lab coat oozed the aura of maturity, diligence and control. Yet, her character and body language were so jarringly opposite that assumption; I found it difficult to keep my snigger in and ultimately failed. If my smile was what she was going after, it worked, at least a little.
“I guess, you’re bad with kids,” I commented, sipping on the bitter brew.
“No,” she said dejectedly, “I’m just bad with people,” she emphasised, making me spit a little of the liquid over the counter from my inability to contain my laughter. Usually, the more someone speaks, the better you know them, but Anna produced a mystifying uncertainty the more she spoke. Perhaps it might’ve been my mistrusting eyes misguiding my judgment, but she’d come across like quite the cold and calculative type that wouldn’t think twice of sacrificing you for her own goals. Though, those one-off moments of doubt were but a sliver of a second amongst the many minutes we talked.
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As my black coffee began turning brown, and I saw the white ceramic below, I brought myself back to the burning question. “Anna, right? I don’t think you’re here to just cheer me up. Is there something I could help you with?”
She scratched her neck nervously, looking downwards, “Well,” she sighed, “yeah. The team, really likes your work. I mean, really, likes your work. Your mom, well she’s pretty straight-laced, and well, you know…”
“I don’t. Just tell me what you want,” I shrugged a little.
“We want you to complete the TS with us. I know, it’s pretty hard because you lost someone important, and miss Ugo will probably roast me if she found out I asked you to help, but, we all want to do this. You’ve got the ideas, we’ve got the tools, what do you say?”
The invasive sunlight spread its mild warmth on us, casting me in a silhouette. “I already said yes. Mom basically asked the same thing already,” I said dismissively and I guess she picked up on it. It was getting increasingly harder to maintain this conversation but it was a good pick-me-up.
She gleamed brightly and thanked me, leaving shortly after. The summer vacation would start soon and I wouldn’t be able to attend school until I was totally recovered, according to the doctors at UGO Medical.
The attendants of the house woke up after a while and did their daily rounds, but I would simply live in the basement during the following days. Sometimes I forgot I had a room of my own. The road to recovery was sure, and the only thing that bothered me was that accident, or rather, murder. Theresa was murdered, and I had yet to tell anyone a thing. Adding paranoia to my already mountainous hodgepodge of issues didn’t prove helpful.
A murderer. Where do I even begin? Who do I tell? What do I do? These questions racked my brain constantly. The car that crashed was fortified with security features from UGO, hacking into its systems and achieving a manual override was something inconceivable to me, but not impossible. After all, I did it before, but that was because I already knew the thinking, practises and general layout of UGO’s security systems.
In the coming days, I let my mind become a slave of computer engineering, changing out parts, tweaking and enhancing the lifeless TS into a more vibrant, natural and seamless android. Within the course of a few days, it was animated perfectly. After honing its movement, my next focus was commands. I wired its CPU to the chip on my head, providing it several methods of communication in case one connection was broken. After a couple hours of re-writing the code, I unexpectedly came across a working one. I loaded the program and turned the TS on.
“TS, make me a cup of coffee, black,” I issued my first real order. It stood up, using an arm to help lift itself off the chair it laid on, quite humanlike movements. Knowing the layout of the UGO building, it walked to the staff kitchen and scanned the cupboard in seconds, locating the instant coffee. The whir of its gears was near silent as it grabbed a mug, making sure to grip the slippery ceramic with its silicone fingertips, turned it over and suddenly paused and warned, the following from its electronic voice, “I do not know how to complete this process.”
This was where the most revolutionary feature of the android came in, and the very reason we called it Trainable Servant, TS for short. “Watch me,” I said, a simple command for its ‘Watch & Learn’ feature to kick in, which recorded the movements of any bipedal creature and replicated it with slight variations to compensate for a difference in things like hand size, cup size, grip strength, and speed, to name a few. I then brewed a cup and set it to the side, then gave the command to make the coffee again, and the TS did so perfectly.
After achieving that, I decided to take a break and simply brainstorm some ideas for other projects. Maybe it was the achievements I made to the TS that exhausted me, but I actually felt sleepy for the first time in a long time and pounced on the opportunity, descending to the lounge at the bottom floor and securing myself a dark corner to curl myself into. I awoke around mid-day and walked out from behind the little space I hid myself. There were some workers in the lounge but no one from the team I worked with. Their questioning stares were understandable, but my mind didn’t really process my environment yet.
I ambled back upstairs to the labs and noticed mom staring intently at the TS. I forgot, to put it away. They didn’t exactly know I was working on him, in fact, they didn’t know I was in the building at all. My quiet gait behind them made sure my footsteps didn’t distract them from staring. There were eleven of them, including mom.
“B-Ban?” I heard Anna’s voice call. I looked up, moving my unkempt hair from my eyes.
“Yeah?” I answered.
“What exactly are you doing here, young man?” Mom looked like she wanted to scold me to the ends of the earth. Without a word, I simply pointed to the unfinished hybrid of metal and wires I left on the seat. Judging from how unchanged the place was, it looked like they only just got to that lab in particular. She put two and two together, realising I didn’t just arrive, but was here for a while.
“When did you get here? And what exactly did you do?” she interrogated. I was starting to get a little worried now, because she certainly looked like she’d throw a fit in front of everyone.
I could lie, but, I sighed mentally, nah. “I got here last night. Buses are always running. I finished the movements for TS and I’m currently setting up how it takes commands. The watch and learn feature works quite well, it has enough finesse in simple micro-movements to brew coffee after seeing someone do it. But I tested this in a brightly lit place and my speed when it recorded me to learn was slower than average. It still needs to be tested in the dark and with a brisk person. Physical variations to suit a particular situation seems to work fine. There’s only one real issue we’ve got to deal with now. Experience. We need a dedicated server for uploads and downloads of experience, this way, the minute a customer gets hold of a TS, it would be able to apply a broad range of functions at the drop of a hat.”
I rambled on, way longer than I intended, and only realised how much I spoke after Anna rubbed my head, with a smile plastered over her face. That simple gesture pulled me back into reality for a moment. Was I that desperate for like-minded people to surround me? Had I been neglecting myself this badly? Was I so starved for attention? Was Theresa not enough all these years? Enjoying myself here felt like spitting on her grave. I took a step back, as if only coming to pay heed to their focused stares, boring through me so effervescently with eyes of stupor, wonder, and specks of admiration. All these years, I assumed contentment with just Theresa, I thought it for the best that I survive without the emotional support, to exterminate the notion altogether that mother would ever come remotely close to those traditional mothers I’d seen in television shows or even in real life. Unbeknownst to me, there was a glimmer of hope still stubbornly enduring, prolonging its life against my wishes. But forgetting my mother wasn’t really a wish, it was a compromise, it was something I had to settle for.
How childish I was, to think for a second mother would have a similar look of awe upon her face like her team did. What am I doing here? I wondered, what do I want from this? My mind slipped deeper into itself, but something grabbed it, forced it to focus its attention and violently ripped it from its cavity of introspection.
“Good job.” Just two words. So simple. Yet, my reactions inside was an alien feeling of complex how’s and what-ifs. The ever-tightening chest I suffered through felt like it unravelled, it felt huge, for the first time in my life there was room to breathe. A compliment that any other individual would just brush off, or not even take notice of, seemed to delete years of accumulated data, causing a system failure.
Mom walked off to a computer, and a few of the coats tried asking me questions, but my mind was blank. Completely wiped. I needed a minute to recuperate.