How to Date an Android

How to Date an Android Chapter 16 Part A (revised!)

I'm leaving the lights off still.

There's a video feed from Barbara on my machine. She wants to talk, but she had sent it directly to my messaging and not having it dial the house directly. That's interesting. I'm curious what she's going to talk about. She sounds pretty sweet and caring. How do androids do that? Or do they just know we're a sucker for caring love? I'm still struggling with responding too quickly to it.

As usual there's about five other potential customer calls too that want their cars fixed when I'm checking my messages. Two of them sounded kind of rattled and scared. I'd have to give them the bad news. I hated letting my bread and butter go. It was fairly typical to get up to five calls in a normal day for my auto repair business, of which three of them would be trying to yank my chain or screw around with price checking or trying to get free stuff. Four of the five would typically request actual bids, and two or three of those I might close into a solid deal. It's stressful to not make ends meet and I want to tear my hair out. I do have a sizable savings because I've never believed in working paycheck to paycheck. But it doesn't eliminate the stress.

I kept the drapes and windows shut. It would be hard but I was going to board them up too, and keep them so tightly covered that not even a bit of light could get through, I think as I sweep over looking up and down the street through my peep hole in the drapes.

It's inconclusive. I don't see anyone on the street. Also when I look at what cars are there. Most of them I recognize except for a van down the street. It's a white utility mag van with no markings or writing of any kind.

I can't tell if that's unusual or not.

The local news feeds don't show anything about an android shooting or a senior citizen being killed. In fact all the news is purposefully happy, in both the local paper and the local crime section. That's really weird. I had already doubted someone shooting a senior citizen gardening in her yard would make the front page what with so many other things going on but I had expected it to at least be in the local crime section. And if anything would make the news, you'd think that it would be cops or security guards getting shot; that's not a lot of people but it gets noticed. But that's not there either.

But nothing? It's as if none of them even exist!

What does it mean? And no police follow up or attention?

And what was the status of what was going on with the android that was lost to me? Would she still have a future? Would she even know she was stolen from me?

That was the worst part...if she didn't even know.

If she knew there was the hope it could be rectified somehow. It could even be like some kind of Hansel and Gretel story as it were.

Carefully I send Barbara a message to meet up as per her request. But I warn her there was an android shooting last night and this area could be watched and to be careful. And that its probably not safe. She still wants to meet later around 6 PM.

That'll work. That's plenty of time to get this worked out. She would have some kind of news I think. She wouldn't want me to just meet up with her for nothing.

I better plan this out. I need to be ahead of the game and not just reactive. I needed to think about creating control switches of my own; ways where I could be the one that calls the shots. The idea of getting seeds was one of those, but it wasn't enough. And supplies. I had gotten some of those supplies be dry goods also, and grain. Stuff that keeps for awhile.

I don't have a gun. I didn't believe in guns as a way of solving problems, but instead that they created them. But what do you do when society as a whole embraces guns and using them for chaos and anarchy?