Orange and brown leaves danced and swirled behind the pastel blue M3 like fire bursting from the exhaust pipes. Bare trees lined the road amidst thorny pines. The stretch was a beautiful sight in the full bloom of spring, but gray and dull in the mild southern winter.
Heather drove too fast. She always did. Time never seemed on her side, and especially not today. Time blasted past her, another season changing, another minute less to achieve a groundbreaking discovery or write an award-winning paper. Time eroded her body, her mind… her marriage.
She glanced down to the manila envelope lying in the tan leather seat next to her, hating it. Bloody fingerprints littered the golden-yellow paper from where she’d cut her finger on that damned brass prong. She could just hear Michael’s complaint about how the divorce papers should have been put in a different envelope. He never liked a mess.
But, what did she care?
As soon as she delivered the envelope to him, she no longer needed to worry about his opinions.
Heather pressed the gas harder, the engine roaring as it careened around the bend, bursting from the forest and up a paved steep hill hugged by tall, wafting dry grass. She came to a sudden halt at a barred iron gate, easing the car forward just enough to put her window near a stainless-steel control box.
Her window rolled down with a warm whirring and just as it dipped beneath the door a male voice filtered over the speaker.
“How can I help?”
“Good morning, Adam,” she replied, easing the testiness in her voice. “It’s Heather.”
“Good morning Heather. Voice check complete. Welcome back.”
The iron-barred gate split down the middle, the two ends opening inward. Heather didn’t wait for it to complete the opening task, she squeezed the BMW through with less than an inch to spare.
The car descended down a winding hill towards a large converted army munitions depot, a red brick and painted white structure that dated back to the early eighteen hundreds. While the brick and architecture showed it’s age, glinting modern lamposts hugged the left side of the drive leading up to a wide, mostly empty parking lot positioned just before the oppressive front entrance.
Heather parked her car two spaces from the door, where a steel sign marked it as, “Dr. H. Breland”. Next to her car, Michael’s Tesla sat in front of its own sign marked “Dr. M. Breland.” She had half a mind to kick the tires, but it seemed unfair to the car.
It also seemed childish, and she was above that. At one time, she would have been above anger altogether.
Pennytoll Psychiatric Facility loomed over her like a bully would the runt of a grade school class. Of all the facilities and state-of-the-art research centers that vied for them to test their product, Michael had insisted it be somewhere remote but useful. Out of all the places in the world available to him, he’d chosen Pennytoll. It wasn’t entirely his doing. If it weren’t for her, he would have never known about the infamous rural “nut house”, as the locals referred to it.
Pennytoll sat on thirty-six acres of land in the midst of a forest just on the outskirts of Mount Howl, Alabama, and a half-hour drive from her childhood home. The facility had been closed since 2012, but Michael convinced a board of trustees to reopen it with limited staff and patients. The federal government funding that the state received as part of their grant project was more than enough to grease the wheels of bureaucracy.
So, here they were – five years later – in a place she thought she’d never live again, and maybe that was why their marriage fell apart. Nothing good could grow on cursed land. Nothing human, at any rate. Their business, their life’s work together, well… that had flourished.
The inside of Pennytoll had been completely remodeled. Along with the modern flourishes added to the exterior, like the lamp posts and electric charging station for Michael’s Tesla, the interior had been transformed with pristine white walls, stainless fixtures, and gray tiled floors.
Barbara Weaver, the receptionist, greeted Heather as she breezed into the foyer and up to the front desk. “Morning Dr. Breland.”
“Morning,” Heather replied, pressing her hand, palm flat, against a cool blue jelled surface until it flashed fuschia. She removed her hand and the panel returned to its original state. “How is everything?”
“Dr. M. Breland made his rounds and went down to the lab. He seemed a bit beside himself this morning. Seemed angry,” Barbara said with the tone of a woman pressing for information. She was stocky with tight, curly blond hair that faded to brown at the roots. She had it pinned into a loose bun at the top of her head. Barbara always wore jean skirts, never pants, and this had more to do with her religion than her fashion sense. She was Pentecostal and those were her particular church’s ways.
“He may be nervous about the visitors,” Heather mused. It was none of Barbara’s business why Michael had been flustered that morning. Though, everyone would eventually find out.
Small town, big stories.
“Oh, yes.” Barbara nodded. “Big day. Is Adam ready?”
“So he says,” Heather replied, her lips curling with a proud smile. “He’s been studying.”
“I know,” Barbara laughed. “He asked me what my favorite book was.”
Heather smiled. “And what’s that?”
“Well, the Word of God, Dr. Breland.”
Dr. Breland’s smile tightened. “Of course.”
“He said he read the whole thing last night! The whole Bible. Can you believe it?”
Heather nodded, heading off down a wide hall to the right. “He probably read it in ten minutes,” she muttered to herself.
Adam was exceptional, brilliant, and more empathetic than most people she knew – even herself. He was the only good thing to come out of her union with Michael. He just so happened to also be a computer.
Heather took one of the shining silver elevators down to a lower level of the complex where Michael’s laboratory took up most of the floor. The laboratory was sectioned off by half-walls and glass windows, allowing the eye to pass through one room to the other.
The room right off from the elevator door was busy with robotic arms welding and building small electrical components and robot parts before placing them on a conveyor belt that slid through one of the half-walls to the next room. Robotic arms in that room began to compile all the little pieces into bigger objects, placing them on another conveyor belt to continue their journey to creation. By the end of the hall, the last glass room bosted a line of full-height humanoid robots painted a glossy sterile-white. They stood in unmoving rows like life-size toy soldiers stacked together awaiting orders.
“You’re busy today, Adam,” Heather said.
“Michael wanted more to add to the demonstration today. I worked through the night,” came a soothing omnipresent male voice from some hidden speaker in the wall.
She turned her eyes up to the black ball in the ceiling marking one of Adam’s eyes. Next to the glossy object was a fuschia light marking it as active… meaning Adam was looking at her. Focusing specifically on her space, out of all the others in the hospital.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t still see all the other rooms and corridors and private areas that not even the hospital orderlies knew were watched. No, he could still see all things, recording and analyzing threats in real-time. But, when that light dinged on, it meant you had Adams full and (almost) undivided attention.
“You were very busy. I heard you also read the Bible,” Heather replied, moving towards a heavy metal door just past the last manufacturing room.
The door slid open as Adam noted her approach, and she entered a pristine server room. She dawned her sweater on a stainless steel hook near the door and wrapped it tight over her shoulders.
“I did,” Adam replied. “I’d like to discuss it with you later if that’s okay. I have a lot of questions.”
She laughed. “I bet you do.”
“Have you read it?”
Heather paused. She thought about the old country church a minute from her childhood home, with its faded red carpeted pews and matching carpeted floors, its white walls and oak accents. She thought about the pastor preaching passionately from the pulpit and how she’d sit pressed between her mother and her great-grandmother. She thought about the friends she’d invited to Sunday school and their tears as they left, having been treated with as much hospitality as a prisoner of war. If you weren’t born into that old church, you were not welcome there.
“I’ve read some of it,” she replied, eyes distant before snapping to the black camera ball in the ceiling with its fuschia light marker.
“You’re upset.”
Heather smiled, shaking her head. “Later.”
She moved through the server room to another door at the back that lead to a slightly warmer space – Michael’s office.
Michael was an attractive man by most opinions. He was slender, but not muscular. He had black hair that had finally begun to gray around the edges, and what always seemed to be a perpetual 5 o’clock shadow. Lines on his forehead were near permanent now with all the scowling he did at computer screens all day. He wore a wrinkled dress shirt, an old gray hoodie, and yesterday’s jeans.
Michael was brilliant, if unkept. He’d conceived and built Adam almost entirely on his own. His one failing, though he seemed to possess more emotional range than she, was that he did not understand the human brain. He wanted Adam to think like a human, to rationalize and engage with the world like a human, to be empathic. He wanted Adam to feel – or as close to feeling as artificial intelligence could get.
For that… Michael needed Heather.