Okay. I'm posting this because I've had several people trying to get me to. -_- May I note that this is the unedited version. Positively nothing has been changed, language has not been edited, spelling errors have not been fixed, and there are plot holes the size of Antarctica! Woo! With that said, I'd prefer no nitpicking because I know exactly where all the mistakes are. -_-
At any rate, thanks!
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Chapter one: Blueprints
“Leeches, that’s what they are,” Karina Bois was saying as she wiped counters down as though each had done her a personal wrong. “How could they do that? It wasn’t as though they caught her thinking bad thoughts against them. Asses, didn’t have to throw her in fucking jail.”
Her boss, a man in his mid thirties nodded in absent agreement.
“yeah,” he said, turning a page in his magazine. “do me a favor and take this trash outside, yeah?”
Karin threw down her dusting rag and turned around. “Were you even LISTENING to me?
“Yeah, take the trash.”
Karina rolled her eyes and grabbed the box of out of date paper work and magazines and took them out to the back.
Slamming the door behind her, she glanced up at the sky, which was not exactly a mood lifter in the best of circumstances, and did not help now, certainly.
The city of Ebbin, where Karina had lived her entire life, was covered in a haze of smog. It was like they were in a bubble of some sort, and karina had heard some people say that when they went to the outer edges of the city and tried to leave, they couldn’t. They described it as walking into a brick wall.
Karina glared up at the swirling mass of clouds and dust, and hefted the box up higher under her arm. A roll of paper fell to the ground with a heavy thunk. Karina looked down at it and kicked it forward with her foot toward the dumpster. Reaching it, she lifted the box up high above her head, and dumped the contents inside.
Reaching down, she grabbed the thick roll of paper. She glanced at the block lettering labeling it:
MODEL 3823 9O1: BLUEPRINT/INSTALLMENT DISK
Karina stared at it. Blue prints? She hadn’t seen blueprints for a while. Most everything was digital now days.
She lifted up a corner and peeked at the contents. The small inch she saw was covered with complicated little graphs. Her attention caught immediately. She looked around her; the alley way was empty, and most of the shops around them were closed anyway. She tucked it back under her arm, and went back into the store.
The clock by the doorway told her that it was her quitting time. She grabbed her sweatshirt and her backpack and shoving the blueprints in, went to the front.
“chris, I’m going,” she said. Her boss looked up briefly from his magazine, gave a grunt of affirmation, and went back to flipping pages. She considered telling him that she took the blueprints, but since it had been going out into the trash, she didn’t think it would matter, and decided against mentioning it.
Closing the door behind her, she tied her sweatshirt around her waist, and slung her back pack over both shoulders and set off down the street. her apartment wasn’t far from here, and the blueprints in her bag seemed to wiggle back and forth. She picked up her pace and sped down the street, periodically glancing around her shoulders as she did so.
By the time she reached the door to her one story apartment, she was sweating bullets. She yanked her key out of her pocket, thrust it inside the lock, and shot inside, locking the door again behind her.
She breathed a sigh of relief and let her backpack fall to the ground with a thwump. She breathed another sigh of relief and ran her hands through her short blonde hair. She flipped on a light and turned into the part of the living room that was her kitchen, and put a kettle on to boil.
On the wall, she saw that her home telephone was blinking. Blowing her bangs out of her face, and thinking that this could NOT be good, she went over and pressed the message button. Instantly, an angry, LOUD voice filled the room.
“Karina! What the hell?! Psycho bitch, those were my fucking best pants! Not even the dry cleaners can get those marks out. You owe me a new pair of damn pants!”
Karina yawned widely and pressed delete, then went to get the whistling tea kettle.
Five minutes later, she sat at her kitchen table, the blueprints rolled out in front of her. They were even more complicated then she had imagined. Graphs, schematics, the whole shebang. She whistled softly.
“What is this even for…?” she mumbled to herself, leaning in close to examine a diagram of what looked like an arm.
“Whatever.” She sighed, and began to roll it up. As she did so, however, a slip of paper fell out from between two sheets, and fluttered to the table. She picked it up.
To whoever has found this:
You hold in your hands what could possibly be the key to the future. These blueprints contain instructions to build K4V1, a humanoid robot designed to overthrow and liberate us from the computers of The Governement. You have my greatest sympathy and encouragement, and I pray that you build this machine if not to free everyone around you, then only yourself.
A little computer chip was taped to the bottom, barely bigger then the size of karina’s pinky nail.
She stared at it. One part of her wanted to crumple the letter and the blueprints and burn them. The other part, the part that had less sanity, told her not to be a wuss and build the damn thing. She had the equipment in her workshop, didn’t she? She certainly had the talent. She’d helped her father build and rebuild their old car thousands of times, and in grade school she had built a working motorcycle. They couldn’t be much different, could they?
She didn’t give herself any more time to question it. Standing up and scooping the papers into her arms, she crossed to the sink and dumped her tea out. That done, she walked to a door a few feet from the sink, and after freeing up one of her hands, unlocked it with a key from her pocket.
She stepped inside.
Her workshop was admittedly her favorite spot in her apartment. One wall was complete cement, and had rows of equipment hanging on racks. The other had three large windows facing out to the street. Even though there wasn’t any sun to brighten her workshop, they still let in some light. The rest of her workshop was typical. Long tables, metal flooring, half-finished projects scattered everywhere.
She shut the door behind her with her hip, and dumped the blueprints on a nearby table. Turning on an overhead light, she shined it onto the papers. She bit back a grimace. They looked even more complicated then they had in her kitchen.
Complicated, but she could do it. She ground her teeth. Anything to get rid of the damn government.
The first thing she did was to carefully untape the computer chip and slide it into a plastic baggie. She opened a drawer and put it inside. She reached for a set of keys on a nearby hook, and locked the drawer. Just incase the government did come by, it probably wasn’t something they needed to see.
She pulled her hair out of her face and looked again at the blueprints.
It was time to start.
***
Karina worked all that afternoon and well into the night. Since it was a Friday night, she didn’t have to be in work tomorrow, and could there for afford to be a complete wreck and grouch the next day. It was coming along well, though. She had most of the parts that were required, due to years of pack ratting brought on by her father, and what she didn’t have she could easily get.
At this moment, she was busy constructing the frame.
“Ow! Shit!” Karina dropped the screwdriver she was holding, and sucked on her finger. “Son of a bitch!” She had pinched her finger between two sheets of metal that she was screwing together to form an armplate. She shook her finger back and forth and swore again. Already she could see a blood blister forming. She winced and sucked in her breath between her teeth.
“ow.”
She picked up the screwdriver again, and finished winding the screw in, this time being careful to keep her fingers out of the way. After she had finished that, she looked at what she had completed during the last hours. She had two arm forms, biceps and forearms, and a bit of the hands. The chest area was almost completed as well, and after she attached the arms to the shoulders, she could start on the legs.
Karina wiped grease off of her hands with a rag, and stood up. Her leg muscles complained at the sudden movement, and she nearly fell over. She did a few stretches to warm them up, and then switched off her lights and went back into the kitchen.
Her entire apartment was dark. The glowing clock above her stove told her in big bold numbers that it was two thirty in the morning.
Karina yawned and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. She went to the fridge and got a piece of cold pizza, and went into her room.
Her room, like the rest of the building, was dark, and a little chilly. She went to a small table beside her bed and switched on a light. Curled up on her pillow was a small tabby cat, who raised its head sleepily to look at her. She reached over to scratch the cat’s ears.
Taking a bite of pizza, Karina stepped out of her mismatched shoes and kicked them under the bed. She dug her hand gingerly under the pillow the cat was laying on, and pulled out two things: a set of pajamas, and a romance novel.
The cat, annoyed at having her perch disturbed, unwound herself and stretched. Silently, she padded over to the corner and sat down, looking up at Karina with bright amber eyes. Karina pulled on her pajamas and crawled into bed. The cat climbed onto her lap. Karina opened the book and flipped the pages until she reached her spot.
“Just ten minutes,” she told herself as the cat kneaded her stomach. “ten minutes, and then sleep.”
The cat settled down, and tucked her paws under herself. Karina absently scratched her ears as she read. This was currently the only romance novel she owned, and she would be damned if anyone found out about it. Which is why she kept it securely under her pillow. The cat, Birch, seemed to know this, and attacked the head of anyone who came too near the bed, which had served to deter previous boyfriends, and spur others on.
Although her eyes itched with tiredness, Karina couldn’t help her mind wandering away from her book and towards her workshop, where her current project sat. Where had those blueprints come from? That was the biggest of Karina’s curiosities. Behind the curiosity, though, sat worry. What if the government found out what she was doing? She would surely be thrown in jail, just like her friend Samantha had been, on the charge of “treason against The Government.”
Karina honestly didn’t give a damn about what The government thought, but she certainly didn’t want to spend the rest of her life in jail. Who in their right mind would?
She turned back to her novel, and tried to get herself drawn into the sickly sweet storyline, the kind of which she could only tolerate in storybooks. She was a self proclaimed “hater of all things romantic” as her friends loved to tell her. She was disgusted by public displays of affection, and refused to see any movie marked as a romantic. She would never hear the end of it if the novel was discovered.
Karina tried to make it past a few more words, before she gave it up for the night. Marking her place, she slid it back under her pillow, kissed Birch on the head, and turned off the light.
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If you made it this far, you deserve cookies, seriously. ^^
