Rocket City Blues

almost to the stairway. Give him a little hope … She raised the pistol with both hands, taking careful aim, in no hurry. She let him get to the door, his grip on the handle before she squeezed the trigger.

«◊»
He rolls off of her, covered head to toe in a slick sheen of amorously-induced sweat. She collapses to her belly, blanketed in his sweat as well as her own synthetic perspiration, programmed into her processor core to simulate that of a woman’s in the throes of passion.
He pants heavily, trying hard to catch his breath. He is getting too old to try to hang with these Andrea models on a nightly basis, he tells himself. But then again, if things go the way he thinks they will, he may not be getting much older. Maybe going out from a heart attack atop this blue-haired angel would be a blessing in disguise. It sure beats being vaporized by a surface-to-space missile or executed as a traitor by a Space Guard firing squad.
She rolls over, facing away, squirming herself back into his embrace. Most of her kind will spoon or snuggle afterward if the man wishes, but usually, they’re just following his lead. But more and more, she seems to crave this kind of intimate contact. Strange for an android to initiate this behavior, but so is talk of killing yourself to avoid capture. There is something highly unusual going on with her. If only he could get her to someone. Someone he could trust not to damage her. Whether a glitch or an anomaly, he didn’t know. It didn’t matter. More and more, she was showing signs of genuine human reasoning and feeling. What a tremendous breakthrough in technology it would be to discover what had happened to make her different from the hundreds of thousands of other androids that had walked off the assembly lines.
He’d tried to convince her to leave with the last load of refugees spirited out overland before the Guard had completed the encirclement. But she’d refused. Her place was at her post. She was an officer in the Colonial Militia, sworn to defend her home. He wouldn’t force her to either, but it made him sick to his stomach.
Sadly, a miracle in sentient technology would most likely be destroyed in an idealistic, but futile rebellion.
He rolls over and takes her in his arms, pulling her into him. She nestles perfectly into him, like the last piece completing a puzzle. He breathes in the sweet, artificial sweat in her hair, mixed with the shampoo scent and the perfume on her neck, by now so familiar, so comforting, like that quilt from your mother’s house you used to love to crawl under on those freezing nights. He pulls her hair away from her neck and kisses the bare skin just behind her ear.
“Tiger?” she asks.
“Yes, Starr?”
“Why do you hate us so much?”
The question catches him by surprise, and he raises his head, a look of puzzlement on his face.
“What are you talking about? Does it look like I hate you?”
“You hate Arties in general, do you not?” she clarifies. “I’ve seen you toast The Only Good Robot with the miners at the bar.”
The Only Good Robot is the head of a miner robot mounted above the bar in the Crater Lounge, like some big game trophy. It met its demise during the Robot Riots a few years back when the mine owners had tried to introduce automated labor into the lunar mines in a blatant violation of the Space Trades Act. Most never made it off the dock. A mob of angry miners, supported by other workers, were waiting for them. They were ripped from their shipping containers and smashed to pieces and then paraded through downtown. The Only Good Robot was lucky enough to find a permanent place of honor in the blue-collar bar. The rest were jettisoned into space.
“Ahhhh! You’ve been paying too much attention to the happenings down at the bar.” He furrows his brow. “That bothered you to see me do that?”
“Yes, I don’t understand why. It shouldn’t matter to me as long as there’s not a direct threat to my safety. But it … it …”
“It what?”
“It’s hard to explain. It’s like something pulled at my processor as if trying to dislodge it.” She takes his hand and places it atop her breast, where a human’s heart would be. “Right here.”
“And when this happened?” he queries. “What else did you feel?”
“I don’t know. I guess I could best describe it as a gray … like the sun going behind the clouds.”
“It’s called sadness, my dear Starr.”
“I’ve seen humans display it, but I could never understand the emotion.”
“You were never meant to.” He slides back and rolls her over on her back so he can see her face. “I need to get you out of here, Starr.”
“Why? I’m just an android?” She gives him a smile and a wink.
“Oh, so now you’re learning sarcasm?”
“Well … isn’t that what I am? Just Artie Intel taking a job away from a human gal?”
“Wow, biting sarcasm too.” He leans down and kisses her on the forehead and then wipes the hair away from her face.
He rises from the bed and walks to the apartment window. Down below, the lights of the city burn, a myriad of colors reflecting off magnicrete and hybristeel buildings. At street level, twenty-five stories below, citizens of the colony still go about their busy lives. Working, going to school, raising families. As if an army isn’t assembling at their gates.
He lights a cigarette and ponders. “When I was younger, my granddad would always talk about the ‘good ol’ days,’ as he called them. Only they didn’t sound all that damned good. He talked about how all those Bible-thumping politicians back then … kept people around where I grew up scared of losing their guns … promising they were gonna put prayer back in schools and all that shit. And the whole time