Dreaming in Static

Chapter 5

Ali

Alistair raced home, panic surging through his veins. He felt numb, and his mind was in a state of shock, so he resorted to his most basic instincts. He ran.

His feet thundered against the pavement, heading towards the Bubble, which held his apartment. It was quite literally a giant bubble floating in the sky, containing over a hundred residences in "the perfect bubble ecosystem." When Ali reached the Pad, he punched in his apartment number and scanned his fingerprint, and his apartment detached from the others to float down in a bubble and grant him access.

He stormed into his home and immediately called out: "Siri, look up today's android shutdown! Four windows!"

The glass wall split into four different screens, with search results displayed across each one, and he blinked at the news report, activating the vision tracker; the first screen started to play his selection. Ali did this for the other three windows, accessing a different website on each one, and in ten minutes, he had all the information he needed. Which made him calmer. To him, ignorance in the middle of a crisis was far worse than finding the horrible truth.

Until a Breaking News icon popped up on the first screen. Ali blinked at it, thereby selecting it, and expanded it to fill the entire screen when he saw that it was about the Infinity shuttle, which had launched just a few days before. The crew of androids must've all deactivated, too. But the anchor was talking about finding the shuttle, abandoned in the middle of a field, with only eleven androids of the original twelve.

Ali could hardly breathe. This meant that one of the androids was alive. He ran a hand through his hair, shaking in excitement; he hadn't felt a thrill like this since the first experiment on his teleportation device. Ali took a trembling breath and let it out.

The fact that they could only find eleven of the androids...that meant there was one who was on the run. And the screen immediately showed her profile: Andromeda Nova, 5'8", female in appearance, specialty in astronautics. There was a photo as well, featuring the android in question; she had wavy red hair and shock-blue eyes. Ali fondly remembered helping to design her, and how friendly she'd been.

Capturing her would be no easy task. She was smart beyond belief; granted, she was an android, but she was also an astronaut, and Ali had put his heart and soul into her coding. He grinned and said, "Siri, shut down the screen, and fire up my teleport. Destination: Caltech, aerospace building."

Andromeda

She knew they'd be looking for her. Andromeda sighed, running her fingers through her auburn hair. This was still the best course of action; waiting any longer to run would've meant more law enforcement looking for her, and before long they'd bring the ISA into matters. However flawlessly genius she was, she didn't stand a chance against a whole administration of geniuses, especially when she had to lug this bundle of wire along with her. She glanced at Polaris, who was busy trying to catch one of the turtles in Caltech's turtle pond.

Andromeda was using the interface in her mind to check off possible candidates in the student database to help hide her and Polaris. They were pretty much all geniuses, of course, but incessantly good geniuses. It was like none of them had ever done anything wrong in their lives, and she wasn't too sure if they'd be willing to help an android on the run, or just turn her in at first sight.

And then she found him, way down in the R's of the database: Alistair James Ramirez.
The corners of her mouth pulled up in a smile she couldn't hold in. Andromeda remembered him; he'd written some of her most advanced code, and she'd looked forward to meeting him for upgrades and training every day, back before Infinity had launched. Kind and funny, with just enough rebel deep inside him to maybe help her out.