Emily's Secret

18. Two weeks later

Two weeks passed. Being part of a conspiracy to take down the world's most powerful corporation sounds very exciting, but the reality is a lot more boring.

While I was stuck in my father's house, out of fear of being spotted by security cameras with facial recognition, Cherry got to go on dates with the plastic surgeon, whom she met at the supermarket where he happened to be shopping. I thought she would have to meet him at a bar or something like that, but it was actually a lot simpler. Cherry and Mercedes simply staked out his office, and followed him as he drove away, and he drove to a supermarket. And then Cherry "just happened" to bump into him in the frozen foods aisle, where she got his attention by asking him a question about frozen fish.

I am sure that if I had asked some guy a question about frozen fish, I'd get a very quick answer and he'd be gone quickly. But I must remind myself that Doctor Maldives is a sleaze who committed insurance fraud and had his medical license suspended. And of course he's 21 years older than me, which is old enough to be my father, which is kind of icky. So I guess it's a silver lining that guys like him don't try to pick me up. But I still think it would feel nice if I got just a little bit of attention from guys more suitable for me.

So anyway, Cherry often leaves the house to spend time with her new "boyfriend," and has spent the night with him twice. And my father leaves the house on Mafia business, or to buy groceries. But I'm stuck inside with nowhere safe to go, and even if it were safe, I wouldn't know where to go in Staten Island anyway. My father gave me daily lessons in using my telekinetic powers so I'll be ready for the day, sometime in the future, when we will use our powers to confuse the gallium chips in Googol's root node in Manhattan and insert a virus into their computer network. But right now, preparing to save the world from an evil corporation is pretty boring.

Weirdly enough, I even missed school. My father told me to take advantage of my free time to learn whatever I wanted. Anything you might want to learn is on the internet. A lot of it is free, and my father offered to buy me any e-books that I wanted to read that weren't free. Although his advice made a lot of sense, I had trouble mustering the motivation to learn without a teacher telling me what I was supposed to be learning.

I did enjoy our nightly card games. My father taught us how to play Hearts, a game which he said he used to play with his roommates in college. Rob won more often than anyone else.  This made sense, because his computer brain would have perfect memory for every card played and would be able to precisely calculate the odds of anyone having any particular card. But why didn't Cherry have the same advantage? Cherry said she was just as frustrated as I was that Rob won more often than anyone else.

My father said that game is better if you play for money, but I didn't have any money, and from a legal standpoint, robots can't have their own money because they are considered property that belongs to someone. Also, I thought that if we were playing for money, Rob would be using his unfair robot-brain advantage to transfer our money to himself.

It was one evening, about a half hour after playing a game of Hearts, that it happened. I saw my dad walk into his room a few minutes ago—at least it seemed like i was only a few minutes—so I figured it would be OK to just open to door to ask him where he put the leftovers from dinner. (I know, a fat girl shouldn't eat an extra serving of food, but that's besides the point.) So I opened the door, and to my shock, there was my father, naked, his big body atop Cherry, also naked, her curvy yet svelte body oozing sex appeal.  They were doing it! I screamed.