Because of his “strange” working hours Nate didn’t get to bed until around midnight most nights, but he usually went right to sleep. However, on this particular night he was wide awake. He couldn’t stop thinking about Sandy. Not just the fact that she was a good-looking woman. There was something amiss about her. What was it? Since he dealt with what people said and how they said it in his job he was sensitive to words and how they were expressed. Sandy had a nice enough voice, but she didn’t show a great deal of feeling, and Nate couldn’t remember whether she had even smiled. Another thing: She didn’t use contractions. What had she been carrying? Was it an excuse to get him to help her?

     She sounded somewhat mechanical, like a machine. He hadn’t touched her, so he didn’t know how her skin felt, but the fact that she had opened her front door using the palm of her hand gave him a clue. Another clue was that she didn’t own a phone. Everybody had a phone. He had a flash. She was a robot. A product of artificial intelligence made to look like a pretty woman. For what reason? The obvious answer was espionage. Spying. Nate realized that her handlers must be spying on him. Why? Was it related to him being in the news business? Who did they work for? 

      He reviewed the way they had met. It was true that he had made the first move by turning Pots loose, knowing that his dog would go to her, but her handlers, whoever they were, must have some information about him, including the fact that he had a friendly dog. The question was, why were they interested in him? Finally, the light dawned. Because when he was collecting facts for news stories, he knew some of what the movers and shakers were doing and saying before these things were made public.

      Governments had always tried to feed people their version of what was true . They would like to censor what well known people said before their views were made public, if they, the government officials, disagreed with their opinions. Government functionaries sometimes requested social media executives to censor what people said on social media websites. In addition, they were attempting to censor news that reached the public through other channels. They needed people like Nate to carry out their devious plans.

      How Covid had been handled and was still being handled was a good example. The U.S. government had their version of the truth about Covid, including its origin and what should be done to combat it, and they attempted to silence anybody with a different view. Freedom of speech wasn’t free anymore. Ira Glasser, former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union had said it best: “The only important question about a speech restriction is not who is being restricted but who gets to decide who is being restricted.” Governments wanted to be the decision makers and allow only their version of “freedom” of speech.

      Nate decided he had to stay away from Sandy, in spite of his desire not to. He couldn’t allow her to seduce him, even though he wondered what she looked like under her clothes. Strange, since he now knew she was a robot. He couldn’t meet her tomorrow, which was already today. He had to avoid her, altogether.

                   ***

When her brain cleared, Sandy was thankful that it had cleared at the right time, but she knew she had to hurry. The periods when the commands stopped coming into her brain from her chip averaged about fifteen minutes in length. The first time they stopped, it took her a few seconds to realize that she was back in control of her mind. She thought the chip had malfunctioned and that she was free, but she was quickly disabused of that idea. Since then, she had attempted to time the gaps when she could think for herself. At least, her handlers had let her keep her watch. The gaps happened three times a day at certain hours, as long as she wasn’t speaking to another person.

She was convinced that her handlers didn’t know what she was doing during the gaps, which were apparently maintenance periods when they were updating the chip. She was carrying a shopping bag that contained a dress she had purchased at a store she had just exited. She had shopped for the dress while under their control, and they didn’t attempt to stop her. She had some leeway in carrying out the plan they had for her and Nate that used her intelligence and knowledge of men in addition to artificial intelligence. Fortunately, they had left enough cash at the house to pay for the dress.

She had to act fast, since they had taken away her cellphone. She walked the short distance to an appliance store and went inside. She had chosen the clothing store because it was near the appliance store, and the timing so it would correspond with a chip maintenance period. She went directly to the smart phone counter and asked the sales representative if she could try out one of their phones for sale. He nodded and went back to his customer. She picked up the demo phone and quickly established a connection between it and her chip. She had been quite certain she knew the address of the chip because it was tattooed to the palm of her hand that held the chip. Careless.

She had learned how to do this sort of thing in a class at the community college where she had been studying artificial intelligence and robots. Now, if the coding technique she had learned at the college would only work. She had written an app during the last several of her clear periods. Another question plagued her. Would the chip accept the app from her while it was being updated by her handlers?

 She carefully entered the code on the keyboard of the phone, and included a request for it to execute after a time delay, so that it wouldn’t take effect until early tomorrow morning. She pressed enter and held her breath. She received an acknowledgment and started breathing again. Then she signed off from the phone, nodded to the salesman, and headed toward the store exit. Before she reached the outside world she knew from her brain activity that her chip was coming back online. It would let her handlers know where she was. She ran the last few steps, slipped through the space where the door was being opened by an incoming male customer, smiled at him so he wouldn’t be pissed off, and lost her stream of thought.