Mechanical (3 page)

“So, where did you go to school before this?”
Caroline asked politely, carefully brushing a strand of long blond
hair out of her light blue eyes.

“Before?” I repeated, my mind spinning,
searching for the information I needed and finding nothing. “Um ...
just another school,” I lied.

“Oh,” she said and started eating.

“Did you just move here? Or have you been
here a long time?” Hailey asked.

“I’ve ... lived here all my life,” I replied,
wondering why she would want to know. This seemed like such an
irrelevant topic. I was starting to feel uncomfortable.

“Cool. What are you into?” she inquired,
propping her elbows on the table.

“Into?” I repeated.

“Yeah, like your interests,” Jessica said,
looking at me strangely.

I noticed their unease around me and wondered
what I’d been doing wrong. The creators had not prepared me well.
Interests? What
were
my interests? They should have taught
me how to carry on normal conversations with normal people. How was
I supposed to do this? What did normal people like to do? I didn’t
even know what
I
liked to do. I was an android. I didn’t
really like to do anything. I had only come back into consciousness
barely a week ago.

“Drew?” Jessica said.

“Um ... I like reading,” I stammered,
repeating the first thing that came to my mind, feeling slightly
proud of coming up with a somewhat normal hobby other than
inspecting my ceiling for shapes.

“Sweet! What have you read?” Hailey jumped
in.

Sweet? Was she referring to her food? “Um ...
just a lot of stuff, I don’t remember all the names,” I said
quickly, growing very tired of the constant interrogation. Is this
how people made friends? If so, I didn’t want any.

“Huh,” Hailey said, eyeing me oddly, and then
started a discussion with Caroline.

I simply watched as Caroline, Hailey and
Jessica talked. I needed to learn how to carry on a conversation if
I was going to stay here long. I watched their body language,
facial expressions and noticed the topics they engaged in. They
talked mostly about school, teachers, other girls, and boys. After
about ten minutes, when they had finished eating, they started to
stand up.

“You coming, Drew?” Jessica asked then
glanced down at my plate. “You haven’t eaten anything.”

I looked down at my untouched plate of food.
Oh. I was supposed to eat. How could I have forgotten?

“You guys run along, I’ll stay with Drew,”
Jessica said to Caroline and Hailey. “Do you feel okay?” she asked,
sitting next to me.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I just....forgot,” I said,
realizing how ridiculous it sounded and wondering how on earth I
could have overlooked it. “Just with all the craziness of the day,”
I added quickly, hoping it would make sense to her, because it
definitely didn’t make sense to me.

Jessica nodded knowingly. “Yeah, you’re
nervous is all,” she said. Her smile, once again, seemed to make me
feel as if I hadn’t made that big of a mistake. After all, humans
weren’t perfect and since I was trying to behave like a legitimate
one, making a few mistakes couldn’t hurt me.

I started eating pasta. I hadn’t eaten at all
since I had come back. The taste was shocking and, quite frankly,
disgusting. How humans could eat this three times a day was a
wonder to me. I worked hard to keep a straight face and made myself
finish it.

“Jess, do you have money for lunch? I left
mine at home,” a deep voice announced behind me. “I’ll pay you
back.”

I turned around to see a tall, dark-haired
boy standing beside Jessica. I noticed right away the resemblance
between the two. They had the same eyes, same facial structure.
They were definitely related. His gaze shifted away from hers and
met mine. He looked slightly uncomfortable before giving me a shy
grin.

“Yeah fine,” Jessica said to him, handing him
some money. “Oh,” she added, noticing I was watching both of them.
“Michael, this is Drew. She’s new today. Drew, this is my brother,
Michael.”

“Hey, Drew,” Michael said with a smile
similar to Jessica’s, although his demeanor was more reserved and
he had a slight intensity to him.

“Hello,” I replied.

He stood there for a moment in awkward
silence, playing with the quarters Jessica had given him. “Well,
I’d better go. Nice to meet you.” Then he turned and left the
table. I watched him walk away for a few seconds before Jessica
turned her attention back to me.

“You done?” she asked, pointing to my lunch
tray.

I nodded and we both stood up. I put my tray
away and then we left for our lockers since our next class was due
to start in about five minutes.

“So, is he your older brother?” I asked
Jessica then caught myself, surprised, wondering why I had wanted
to know this. Maybe I had been programmed to ask questions. Was I
programmed at all? The creators had told us we had free will,
but...did that mean we were completely free of their
influences?

She laughed. “Everyone thinks that. No, we’re
twins. Technically
I’m
older, but only by a few minutes.”
She smiled like she was very proud of those few minutes of
seniority.

After a while, we moved on to our next
classes. Soon the day was through and I found myself standing
outside the front doors, searching the parking lot for the van that
had dropped me off earlier.

When I saw it pull up, I hurried over and
jumped in the back seat.

“How was your day?” the driver asked,
camouflaged behind his silver sunglasses. Although he was polite,
he sounded like he didn’t care all that much.

“Fine ...” I leaned against the seat,
ignoring his detached tone. It was just another annoying human
habit that caused them to ask things when they didn’t really care.
I wondered why they did it, especially to the androids, since we
weren’t human, didn’t act human and didn’t care to emulate their
polite, irritating ways of behaving normal and civilized. It just
seemed like a waste of energy.

“Now,” he said, leaning over to the passenger
seat to switch on a recording device. “What did you observe?”

I thought for a moment. I had seen many
things today. But what had I observed that was worth mentioning? I
started listing off all the things I had seen and answering his
questions.

“Now, what did you learn?” he asked once I
had finished.

“Well ... people seem very inclined to talk a
lot. They seem to want friendship and think that’s what I want, as
well,” I started to say. I stopped for a moment to think about my
report. It was all true. They did seem to cling to friendship and
emotions, something I didn’t understand. They were the complete
opposite of me and my fellow androids. They were emotional, while
we were impassive, they were erratic while we were constant, and
they were irrational while we were logical.

But, which one is better?
The thought
had unexpectedly flashed through my mind and I blinked, shocked,
wondering where it had come from. I shook my head and pushed the
thought away.

I am better.
I told myself.
I am
perfect.

Chapter Three

I walked into Miss Clark’s English room and
sat down at one of the desks, waiting for class to start.
Promptness was a mechanical trait the androids had, and the lack of
it in the human world bothered me to no end, but I sat back and
reminded myself that they were insignificant. A few students filed
in but Miss Clark hadn’t arrived yet. I started reading the poems
and author biographies that littered the walls around me when I
felt a tap on my shoulder.

“Hey,” a deep, masculine voice said.

I turned around to see Jessica’s brother,
Michael, sitting behind me. He had a pencil in his hand, which he
had tapped me with and was now swirling between his fingers.

“You’re Jess’s friend. Drew, right?” he
asked.

I nodded. “And you’re Michael.”

He smiled, suddenly happy. “You remembered.”
He leaned forward and propped his elbows on the table.

I gave him a puzzled expression, but then
remembered humans didn’t have the same enhanced memory that we did,
and I just smiled back.

I was about to turn back around when he
started talking again. “So where did you used to go to school?”

I frowned.
This
question again. What
was I supposed to say? “Um ... just another school,” I repeated,
wishing humans didn’t talk so much.

“Ah, that boring, huh?” he countered with a
laugh.

I forced a laugh to seem normal but I didn’t
understand, and that frustrated me more than anything. More
students were beginning to enter the classroom and I willed Miss
Clark to hurry.

“So how do you like this school so far? A
little more interesting than the last one, I hope.”

“It’s fine,” I replied. “Nice people.” I
wasn’t sure if this was a valid statement or not, considering these
were really the only people I had ever met outside of the
Institution.

He gazed into my eyes. “Cool.”

“Mr. Walter and Miss Martin,” a female voice
called. “Please stop talking so we can get on with class.”

I turned to see that Miss Clark had come into
the room and was staring at us with mild annoyance. I turned away
from Michael and focused my attention on the teacher for the rest
of the period.

* * * *

“So,” I asked Jessica as Caroline and Hailey
sauntered away from the lunch table, chatting. “Could you explain a
few things to me?”

We were sitting in the cafeteria. Once again,
to my irritation, I had forgotten to eat my food and Jessica had
stayed behind with me. I had decided to take this chance to ask her
about some things I didn’t understand—theology class, in
particular—since it was the one thing here that I lacked in
knowledge, and I didn’t want an audience. Everything else made
sense. History was simple facts, biology was the study of human
life, English was a simple language, but I could not make sense of
theology.

“Sure,” she replied eagerly, propping an
elbow on the table.

“Well ... in theology ... I’m not sure I
understand everything.” I hesitated, not certain whether I was
supposed to ask the humans questions like this.
Of course you
can,
I reasoned.
You can’t get all the information the
creators need without asking questions
. Maybe I could report
this to Glen.

“Oh, okay. Well, what don’t you
understand?”

I ran through the list of questions I had
thought up earlier that day and decided on the one that puzzled me
the most. “Well, first of all, why do we study all those mythical
beliefs?”

Jessica looked at me for a moment, surprise
etched in her features, before slowly smiling then laughing
quietly. “Drew ... they’re not mythical to the people who believe
in them ...”

“That’s another question I had,” I went on.
“Why would people choose to believe in something they can’t even
see? All those things we study, none of them are real people
...”

Jessica sat in silence, studying me, her
brows furrowed, her soft brown eyes searching mine. She opened her
mouth as if to say something then closed it again. Instead, she
shrugged. “I’ve never actually had anyone ask me that before.”

I was silent, wondering how she could never
have thought about it. It seemed so silly to me.

“Well,” Jessica started again, “I guess that
people kind of want something to believe in ... something greater
than themselves.”

I pondered her answer.

“People want something to look up to. Some
religions might be made up, while other ones might be true,”
Jessica elaborated, noticing my confusion. “Many times, people
think of their gods as their creators.”

I watched her for a moment, processing what
she had just said. Creators? I had only heard that word used when
referring to the people who created
us
. Did she mean to tell
me that there was someone else who created all of them? Or at
least, a theory? This seemed overwhelming to me, but at the same
time, it did make some sense. Did that make us all mechanical? No
... the creators had specifically told us that we were different.
But how could you create flesh and bones? I stared at my lunch
tray, trying to sort this out. You
couldn’t
create flesh and
bones ... the creators had specifically told us that, too.

Then again, I remembered countless times in
our history class when the teacher spoke of groups of people long
ago who worshiped certain items or ideals. The creators had also
mentioned this. Maybe these gods were merely figments of their
imagination, deities to blame or to trust. They had to be.

This was all getting very bewildering, an
emotion I had rarely experienced, at least, not since I had come to
this school. I pushed the thought away and replaced it with the
idea that the humans were delusional. They liked to look up to
something and declare it would solve their problems. It didn’t make
sense, but neither did any human behavior in that regard that I’d
seen so far.

Just the same, I didn’t like the state of
unknowing.

“Does that answer your questions?” Jessica
asked.

I paused. “Mostly, yes. Thanks.”

“Good.” She beamed.

I shook my head, admitting to myself that I
had a lot to learn about humans before I would understand them.

Chapter
Four

“What did you observe?” the driver’s monotone
voice asked me once again, like he had done every day since I had
started going to school. I heard the click of the recorder turning
on and then my voice as I answered.

“What did you learn?” was the next question.
I automatically answered, staring at the back of his head.

Soon we were back at the Institution and I
hurried inside, tossing my bag on my bed in the room I shared with
Yvonne.