Inga
Chapter 21

Tom Redfern tried to sleep, but it was difficult to sleep when you couldn’t breathe. He tried to roll over, but the heavy weight on top of him was too much to push away. Rachel?

Slowly – reluctantly – he began to wake.

The memory of what had happened rushed over him. He opened his eyes and looked straight into the staring eyes of the man who had been trying to strangle him, the slack, gray face slightly distorted by the bullet that had so recently traveled through the skull behind it.

For the second time that day he fought his way from under a corpse.

He climbed to his feet, his throat raw from the attempted strangulation, and checked himself – no other injuries.

“I’m alive,” he rasped, then cackled like an old crone.

Suddenly the rush of relief turned to one of triumph as he looked down upon the bodies of the killers. They were next to each other, with almost identical head wounds. They looked like the victims of a professional hit.

“Yeah! You like that bitches!?” he yelled down at them and did a little jig before doubling over in a coughing fit.

When he had recovered, he heard the faint sound of sirens. Fuck! Even though he had technically done nothing wrong and was, in fact, a victim, Redfern panicked. His recent trauma and the moral and legal responsibilities that had been drummed into him as a robotics technician overrode logic.

He had to replace that robot and stop it. With the damage it had apparently sustained, there was no use trying to override its programming remotely. He would just waste valuable time. The only way to do that was to remove the card and shut her down.

The sirens were growing louder. Redfern bent over and pocketed the gun he had shot both men with and then ran to the display, snatching up the GPS unit. The red blip was stationary. The visual feed on the screens was dark, which meant the robot was still functional but in sleep mode. Good.

He quickly grabbed the mini laptop computer they had been using to control the robot and ripped it away from the cables connecting it to the display. He rushed to the kitchen. He went straight to the microwave oven and placed the laptop in it, setting the timer for twenty minutes on high. It began sparking immediately; he ignored it and headed back for the front door.

Redfern, stressed by the proximity of the sirens, swore and skidded to a stop at the front door. Transport! He needed a vehicle, and the Genitix van would be too conspicuous. He dashed back to the desk and grabbed the keys to the dead men’s SUV and fled the apartment.

Just five minutes later, after nearly causing an accident, Tom Redfern pulled over and forced himself to calm down. Unless he did something stupid on the road, he wasn’t likely to be stopped by the cops. Given the current state of the vehicle’s owners, he didn’t think the vehicle he was driving would be reported stolen anytime soon, if at all, and he had clearly escaped the scene without being detected.

“Breathe,” he said aloud as he gripped the steering wheel. “Just replace the robot. Remove the card. Deactivate it… then go to the cops and explain everything.”

He hoped that shutting down the rogue robot would help mitigate the killing of the two men, but more pressing in his mind was preventing further loss of life. He had seen what the robot could do in glorious living color, and it wasn’t pretty. It would have to be destroyed; there was no doubt.

While removing the card and a complete reprogramming would be enough to completely mitigate the chance of future problems, human law would require punishment and in this particular case, multiple murders of humans would require nothing less than ‘execution.’

Redfern picked up the GPS tracker. If the robot had been in sleep mode, it wasn’t anymore. The blip signified the robot was now on the move, somewhere on the East side. He propped the tracker on his dash and eased back into the traffic.