Human Code

15 || F I F T E E N

"Honesty is also a foreign concept. Because, the truth, when hidden for so long, can bring about pain. And who wants that?

*

I didn't fall. Tumble. Crash. I'd been standing in the same spot just a foot from the stairs. The memory that played in my head passed over my eyes like a movie. And once it ended, I blinked and returned to reality. I pressed my hand to my chest.

Battery at sixty-five percent.

Looking ahead, down the halls, fresh memories played. Different, recent, and yet so foreign, as though they'd been repressed. Glancing at the metal rooms, I knew what was beyond their black doors. Somehow, I knew there were charging pods and nothing else; no windows, no bars. Looking towards the opposite rooms, I felt as though I'd been inside them, charging, sleeping. I stepped forward and recalled dreams filled with electrical lights and green flares.

And hands.

So many hands.

I took in a breath, forcing myself to look ahead. "Wendy," I whispered quietly to the air. She was there, and she needed me. There wasn't time to worry about memories I couldn't pinpoint.

As I walked forward, I told myself they couldn't possibly be mine. It could've been my sensors picking up on frequencies that didn't belong to me; dormant nightmares from the droids above. Or, they might have been from the bots below, the ones who wandered these dark halls. Shaking my head free of the distant screaming, I felt sorry for them, but not enough to care.

I only cared about the girl they took from me.

"Scan vicinity," I said quietly to myself, forcing my systems to run a manual check of the floor one more time. Six Androids flickered over my left, beyond the rooms and halls I couldn't outright see without a digital layout. The other fourteen were scattered ahead of me, to the right, and farther off than I thought. But as I looked forward once more, down the long hall, I knew Wendy's pinging signal was dead ahead, center room.

I titled my head and locked on to her once more. "I'm coming, Lost Girl."

My sensors shut off, my vision cleared, and my feet took me forward. As light as my body could move, I ran without making much noise, little sound. Without the need to breathe, no one should hear me. And if broken bots couldn't sync like I thought, they wouldn't see me coming.

I can save her.

I moved faster. Harder. My hands slid across shut doors as I zig-zagged passed the columns that met the short ceiling. Bumping my shoulders against the steel didn't stop me.

I'm getting you out of here, Wendy.

Swipe left. Dodge right. The hall felt endless. Doors after doors, flickering, dead-lights. I zeroed in on her signal, watching it flash within my computer's main eye. The other light moved in—the droid. Closer. Closer. Too close.

Get the fuck away from her!

My knee popped as I pushed myself harder. An uncomfortable buzz shot up my leg. But I wouldn't stop. She was right there. I knew it. I could feel it. And once I passed that final pillar, right as the hall ended, I saw her; my baby sister.

I should've smiled, felt relief. I wanted to run to her, grab her, and get her out of this place. But I couldn't.

Wendy sat in the center of an open room. The opposite halls connected to it, like lines in a bee's complicated hive. I came to a halt, hands trying to grab the walls, and I locked onto her red, tear-filled eyes. The way she looked at me, the way her brows pulled together and her pale cheeks turned red, killed me.