Conduit - Season 2

Ch. 17

I drove through the old city, leaving the safety limits, and delved well into the skirts and small towns. I rarely did it and as we reached the third dirty and broken "Welcome" sign, I was riddled with guilt. I should've come this far. I didn't. Before Lyons, it hadn't been a thought in my mind. But if I had, would I have acted faster to correct the androids?

With my finger on my upper lip, I stared out the window. I watched the grass brown until there was nothing but dirt. Animals were ghosts; their memories ran through the dead farmland. This was what androids needed to help us, to continue to care for and love this world. To do it because humans couldn't do it themselves. No, it's not that we couldn't, we wouldn't. We let this world get this way and gave it to someone else to fix.

"Do we have to be this far out?" Frank's voice hit my ears. Pulling away from my thoughts, I looked at him in the passenger seat. He leaned against his open window, eyeing the deadlands outside. Watching our world zoom by was depressing. There was no escape as each patch of land was as dead as the last.

"There's an amusement park out here. I thought it would be best to use it as a training ground away from peering eyes," I said as I cleared my throat and leaned back in the driver's seat.

Frank shifted, glancing at me. "Are we riding a rollercoaster?"

I snorted and shook my head.

"Then I don't get why we have to come out this far. There's nothing here." Frank looked back out the window. "This is just a reminder that people are shit and the Earth and androids have the right to be mad at us."

Frank was right. We neglected the planet. For years, while we "advanced," the world became our casualty, and the insects and animals met their doom. Androids were our cure-all. We built them to care for us, love us, and bring Earth back to its prime. We couldn't give our machines the same respect.

"Do you really think I can do this?" Frank looked at me again.

"You can. Ezekiel showed me how easy it is to connect—" My brows shot up. That sounded weird, didn't it?

Frank looked at me as he rubbed his chin. Without the bandages around his elbow and forehead, I saw the scars from the surgery, rapidly healed with nanotechnology. "Ezekiel?" he asked.

Yeah, it was weird. With my tongue in my cheek, I eased my foot off the gas. I let the car continue to roll but didn't force it. The peeks of the amusement park were about three miles, according to my computer. It'd buy me a little time to pull out of this awkwardness.

"I'm not going to ask," he said.

He wouldn't, but I knew he wanted answers. I scratched the top of my head. "The day you were shot, he helped me attack the Doom and Gloom—sorry, the Acceptance. If he hadn't, maybe I would've done something differently, something bad, but," I scratched my cheek, "I learned how androids can connect and share energy, like phones."

Frank's brows shot up, but the curiosity didn't match his face. "So, we're cellphones."

I chuckled nervously. "Not really but if we share energy, the upgrades to your arm could help me and vice versa, Frank. I learned this not in a way I would've wanted, not with the person I should've, but I made my mark that day." Smiling, I held his gaze. "Now, I want to be able to make that mark with you."

His expression softened. His tongue passed along the inside of his bottom lip as he stared ahead at the road. I pressed my foot on the gas. The wind came in through his open window and pushed his hair away from his face. Laughing, he caught a few strands, pressing a few strands against his forehead. When I pulled the car into the park's lot, he looked at me. Then he reached for my hand. "You know, we started this together."