Author's Note; Thank you for reading and for your support!

  Note 1; Book sequel will show up as projected between now and April 20th. Everything is set, its almost done with editing, and just needs a book cover.

  Note 2; Not sure if this chapter might get rebeled as a 'Part A' yet, as I'm working out some kinks that will be decided on tomorrow. If that happens don't worry too much.

  Note 3; Word wrap sometimes glitches (fails to word wrap right) on importing from Libreoffice into this site. I've asked for a solution on it but not a sure answer. If it happens I'll fix it.

  How to Date an Android, Chapter 14

  The next day I’ve gotten totally distracted and not able to call Barbara back yet for the new thoughts on android A.I. changes or an update. It was after all, assumed that it would take at least a day for them to do the changes, though they were believed to be fast.

  I had also been told I’d have my new android within a week, possibly less. The thing is I had so many mods that it was difficult for them to be able to even tell how many extra days that would be.

  I was very distracted instantly however.

  Riots broke out in Wisconsin. That completely threw me for a loop.

  You see...

  My sister lives in Wisconsin.

  And the riots broke out in her town.

  Riots? Well I suppose I should be politically correct and just say ‘peaceful protests’. That’s the thing they do now. Even when its anything but peaceful.

  I’m really upset. I don’t know to ugh or cry. My sister is kind of a jerk and been ignoring me for years. I’d always been good to her but she still did that. But still is my sister. I’d believed in family my whole life so I didn’t get baited by some of my siblings acting out in past years. But that doesn’t mean they’d let up.

  I have to do something…

  Its my sister...

  I feel really antsy and I’ve been pacing back and forth…in my wheelchair.

  I feel really helpless, watching it on the news feeds and trying to not hyperventite. Being stuck in recovery doesn’t help. I’m trying to avoid using the wheelchair now though and I’m sitting in my recliner.

  My sister didn’t answer the first few calls. Not that I expected anything different. She’d also kept her address secret from me for years also. So I’d given up on trying to get it.

  I went back to watching the live TV news. Since its an alternative news media person running their own show they show real news footage instead of that fake stuff. There’s a ton of drone footage everywhere both military and from news networks for various channels.

  The drone technology of our era is so good they don’t even have the reporters anywhere near the site. They don’t even have to leave the studio in fact, but just comment on things as they coordinate matching footage between themselves and other drone technicians that interpret the data they are screening up with the help of their tech advisors. It’s good in that it also reduces the chances of misinformation because the lower cost of drones lets them create more than one source for uploaded information.

  “Crap,” I swore in frustration. I didn’t like using stronger words but I’m seeing a night time aerial view of the whole city of Milwaukee. There’s like a sea of fmes on many of the major intersections with gray and bck oily gouts of smoke stacks so big you can’t see anything clearly. The intersections themselves aren’t burning, but rather the buildings on each intersection there are many of them lit up with fmes spewing out windows and clouds of smoke coming out of the roofing. The ratio of smoke to fmes is really amazing. Unlike a fiction tv show there’s tons of cubic feet of smoke for just a few cubic feet of fmes.

  That’s the difference between the real thing and a TV movie. In a movie or show the re’s no smoke and all controlled fmes. All fire. In real fires its the opposite where you don’t see hardly any fire, but you massive amounts of big bck oily smoke.

  “How can there be that many rioters? That’s very strange,” I wondered.

  If the camera weren’t so high up with the drone I could see better… but I swear those people in the riot look like they are moving kind of weirdly…

  Something is really wrong. I don’t think it’s just android rights, since why would something so small like that set something off.

  It’s a lot of things that have people mad as hell now. But when people see red and want to hurt somebody I don’t think they care who it is.

  Like right now, people have to have two jobs, and have a live in partner also with two jobs just to afford groceries and a small pce to rent. And that’s a small pce to rent not a big one.

  That’s been one of the social issues that have been prevalent since our country was taken over by corporations. Everyone is losing and it’s not just me, but my situation is probably a dream come true to some. Now as I see the riots I didn’t know how good I had it.

  I’ve been lucky that I had a lot of very early age work where I never wasted money and put it all into paying off my pce. That’s the ONLY reason I’m not stuck in this multiple job work to death race now that half the country does… and the other half is next to homelessness.

  I continued to watch the news feed.

  There’s an explosion as someone threw a Molotov cocktail into a gas station that is just barely visible on the news feed camera. The massive whoosh of air shakes the drone camera all over the pce until it can stabilize while the news reporter girl is commenting on it.

  Then another apartment catches on fire.

  And another one near that has been burning for awhile. Wow that one is reallly burning.

  Yeah that’s another confirmation...

  [This isn’t just about androids.]

  Usually people who had androids didn’t live in apartment buildings, so there wasn’t a reason for that pce to be set on fire. But then again, there’s no reason for a fire this big of any kind and what could have started it. The drone manages to catch a close up as people are jumping out of the twelfth story windows so they won’t burn to death from below.

  I cover my eyes so that I don’t see the body hit the street below.

  The news didn’t say clearly what had caused the riots or the fire, but just suddenly had a notice of breaking news coverage. I’d also remembered that many protests in the 202s in my father’s days when he was around the news might say the protest was about X, when it was really about Y. And you could tell this because you could look at the video footage and see if the signs matched what the news station cimed it was about; often it was different from one another.

  Now the panning of the camera was from a hover copter covering a certain street below after transferring the camera focus temporarily away from the unmanned drones circling the town.

  And people are running in all directions. Some of them are violent but others aren’t.

  What strange behavior!

  Some are victims and some are getting away but they are so small and the drones so high up that unless there’s a fire or something else happening it’s crazy to figure it out. The distance from the air is also so bad we can’t really get much detail on why people are freaking out either.

  I do have my sister’s datapad number on my contacts list.

  But in the past few years she never answered it. This is my third time trying to reach her. My first two tries went to voice mail. I almost threw my phone against the wall, because I’m upset.

  And suddenly she does call me back. Sharon’s name is on the number calling in. I’m stunned. It seems like a miracle.

  “Hello! Sharon? Is that you?” I pick it up.

  “Jack is that you?” the connection is garbled and static filled.

  Then I lose connection somehow.

  I try to call her back and she picks up, “Hey Jack? Are you there?”

  “Can you hear me?” I replied back.

  While I’m doing so I can hear gunshots all over the pce in the video feed and echoing with the phone but it’s not synched with real time, so I hear them on the phone first, and the tv second. She must be somewhere close to what the camera footage is getting but not right at ground zero. The hoover copter was fgged by the government to get farther off and has to leave then. They suddenly transfer the camera footage back over to the camera drones.

  Then suddenly one of the drones is hit, and goes down. It takes a few minutes for the network to get going again. They switch to another drone in the area, filming more rampant endless destruction taking pce.

  “Hello?!” I called out.

  “Jack! Jack hey! Oh my gosh! This is so horrible!” my sister’s crying and a neurotic mess.

  “Where are you? Are you safe? Sharon?” I’m frantic.

  Even if I thought she was a jerk for not taking my calls I didn’t want her to die.

  But the stuff on the video feeds looked like…a war zone.

  I see someone toss Molotov cocktails into a truck driving down the street. What’s weird is, it was some kind of farm truck that wasn’t hurting anyone. Then a man that’s burning alive shrieks and falls out of the truck and lies still. People are still trying to get away and hurting each other like crazy everywhere for seemingly no reason. More gunshots are going off on the vid feeds again. I can also hear them going on around Sharon’s pce in the background sound from the datapad call.

  “Hey brother I just wanted to say sorry for not calling you sooner!” she said, still neurotic and crying.

  “Well where are you? Are you safe?”

  “NO. No, I’m not Jack. The apartment building is on fire. I’m on the ninth floor, and it’s already going up the stairwells. The elevator isn’t working either. We tried to get out but there was a stampede in the stairway and it’s clogged and blocked with dead bodies. The smoke is too thick too find another way out. We’re going to die from being smothered by smoke.”

  “Oh shit! You have to try to get out. You have to try. Please try to do something.”

  “We’re trapped. I know my time is up. I’ve had a strange feeling for awhile that I couldn’t expin. This isn’t easy to say but I wanted to tell you sorry. I owe you. I just wanted to say sorry for being such a rotten jerk. I was a jerk my whole life to you. I silent treated you for like 15 years. That was wrong of me. I shouldn’t have blocked you out of my life. It was wrong but I was mad that mom and dad thought you were the good one. And I got too caught up in pride and competition. Sorry Jack,” Sharon blubbered.

  “It’s no big deal. But you have to try to get out. I don’t think anything bad about you. Just keep trying please. There has to be something you can do. What about running to the roof? Maybe they can get a hover copter over to do some rescue stuff,” I demanded.

  My emotions are raw and all over the pce. I tried to not cry.

  “It’s too te Jack. There’s like…homicidal maniacs everywhere. We barely made it back to our apartment alive. It’s…something’s not right Jack. People are running around and hunting people acting like they are wolves inside or something. Its weird. Like people trying to run and eat people like wolves. Who the fuck does that? Maybe its a street drug of some kind. People are like…I don’t know, like rabids or something. I don’t get it. Overnight something just flipped in them,” she said.

  “What? I thought it was an anti-android riot. That’s what the news vids have been saying,” I reasoned aloud.

  “No Jack. That’s what they want you to believe. Jack! You have to be careful. Stockpile everything you can. Fortify the house. Electrify the fencing if you can. Promise me you won’t go out, it’s really bad out there. It’s happening everywhere but they are controlling the news networks. It’s not the androids either. Its not even reted to that. It’s the eternal youth drugs they’ve been feeding everyone. They are… their making people sick...its only people taking the eternal youth drugs that are going rabid Jack! And there are five other towns with riots in progress in my own state right now. Others are sure to sprout up in other states; ours are probably just the first. They cause a certain percentage of the popution to go ape shit crazy and start killing people and destroying things!”

  There’s like a pause in her voice and I can hear like what sounds like a dozen people banging the shit out of her apartment’s front door.

  “Oh shit, they found us. They found us! I can’t believe…Jack I’m sorry I was a jerk to you my whole life. I get what I deserve. But I wanted to apologize to you now that I’m going to die...in the next life I’ll do better!” then there’s like snarling and screaming like my sister is fighting for her life and the sound of tearing clothes and liquid splotches.

  I heard the fear in her voice. It was awful.

  Rabids? Are you fucking serious?

  Then the phone clicked off. I just lost my datapad connection. My mind and body were shaken up from what she’d just told me.

  F—k! I have to do something.

  The video feed from the net is also down. Nothing is being shown except for that standard color bar scheme from the Emergency Broadcast Testing service. All the internet is down.

  All the networks are down? How can that be?

  What is this?

  So half the popution is about to go crazy and I’ve got a spine injury at the same time while in a wheelchair? How the hell do you survive in a wheelchair if the whole town is rabid?

  Hmm. Not good.

  I did some more checking.

  The net is not down. I thought it was. But maybe I was wrong? My state is fine. I just get down networks when I try to link to anything Wisconsin based. That’s weird still but not as bad as I thought. So whatever it is hasn’t gotten here yet.

  OK… so I have a bit of time before it gets here. But… shit this is weird.

  If what she said is true it will spread here too. The eternal life drug… I never bought into that crap. But I just didn’t do that because I was a cheapskate and thought it was a scam. You know… like those pill commercials to double your erection size kind of stuff. I was used to stuff being a scam.

  Well… I was right but not in the way they are thinking.

  But it means I have to take action now. Before that gets here.

  OK. Let’s do this. I’ll finalize the android contract today. I have to.

  Barbara hadn’t said the down payment for the android wasn’t very much. They were more concerned with a stable environment and doing what I could to pay monthly, and since the violent crime fund was taking care of that I just had to worry about not being a burden on social security and stay off disability. I used my data pad to pull out some funds from my retirement. I didn’t like the hit, but this looked like an emergency, though I’m sure my tax guy would love to tell me ‘I told you so’.

  …

  A few hours ter everything is set. Now I just wait.

  Again I used the android temp service to order more groceries. I’d better make that a lot of groceries…of virtually everything I could thing off.

  I’d better stock up and just pray I can get my stockpile going before whatever mayhem that ensues hits my state.

  About ten minutes ter there’s a couple of really interesting new simultaneous local news stories that popup. By themselves they didn’t mean much, but all together they could. It was like more subtle hints of crap going down here.

  But why did my state start going nuts AFTER Wisconsin? Wisconsin has people that are more normal than my state. It has lots of farms and people that grew up on farms. You’d expect it to get there st not first…

  There’s some missing piece of the puzzle here. What is it?

  I gnced over some of the news article titles hoping to catch a thermometer’s gnce.

  ‘Power outage in Wisconsin due to cat being put in Power Pnt Reactor, experts say because of hacking the outage could st up to two days. Terrorists suspected.’

  ‘National Guard Units activated in five states for routine Arctic training due to budget surplus’

  ‘Governor Hodgkins of Wisconsin condemns news hoax of anarchy in his state. His message to viewers; he will bring the hoax conspirators to justice and not to trust the news’.

  ‘Terrorist cell from NIS in the Middle East cims victory over Wisconsin. ‘

  Of course they used his inauguration picture and not a live picture or life footage. The sound feed of his voice sounded very monotone too. I had to ugh at the news article for multi-state arctic training tying up all the National Guard too. That didn’t even make sense… to have ALL of them doing ‘snow training’?

  The next one was…

  ‘FBI Director warns of possible terrorist news hoax to scare the American public to ignite fear and panic with little factual basis’

  Seriously? This was getting really screwed up. Something big was going on.

  As if that wasn’t bad enough I got another call from Barbara right before bed. And she gave me bad news.

  “Jack? Are you there?” Barbara asked. She sounds serious.

  “Hello Barbara. Is everything OK?” I asked.

  I’d already finalized the deal hours ago.

  “Jack, I regret to inform you that the android we designed together is gone.”

  “Gone? Gone how?”

  “...it was stolen Jack. I’m sorry,” she said.

  “What the fuck?! Stolen? How could she be stolen?” I didn’t realize it, but I was accidentally screaming.

  Barbara had just told me… my android was stolen.

  “I’m sorry Jack. I don’t know how it happened. We had a bad feeling about how much the current state of anarchy was growing tely and rushed her batch through. That means the android girl you had adopted and 19 other androids were basically being pushed through with double shifts to get them out before the deadline,” Barbara expined worriedly.

  “So how does someone steal an android, from the very factory they were made from?” I can’t believe I’m saying it.

  “I don’t know Jack. It has me really worried. I live at that factory. My parking garage where I sleep is on a lower level but in the same complex. Both her and the other nineteen androids in that batch were all taken at once. Its devastated us, knowing some of our sisters out there are captive to some criminals, doing who knows what to them,” Barbara sounds as shocked as I am.*

  “So you’re saying twenty androids were just up and taken in broad daylight?” I asked.

  “Yeah, to do that you must have a big team. If even one of the androids wakes up from a sleep cycle while being stolen then they would sound the arm. And no arms went off,” she said.

  “Wow. Are you sure they were stolen? I mean…were they harmed?” I asked worriedly.

  “Oh Jack…I don’t know. How can anyone know? But it looks bad. If they can get in like that without getting caught then I don’t even feel safe here,” she said.

  “Crap. Well what do we do?” I asked.

  “I need some time. We’ll have to meet with the higher ups and see what they say. I’m sure they won’t let you go away with nothing but its bad timing with so many rioters in the streets too. It might take weeks to figure out,” she said.

  “Barbara we don’t have weeks. We might have one or two days before all hell breaks loose. I need an android so I can live. I can’t even defend myself right now,” I said.

  Life is so unfair. I wanted to hit someone really bad right now.

  ...

  *Above Barbara calls the other androids her sisters. The vast majority of androids are at least 90% female.

  **Declines in male android orders decades ago was linked and bmed on the PORN era of America. But due to that event many android producers don’t invest much in male android lines.

  *** Kenosha, Wisconsin was renamed 'Rittenhouse City' in the 2030s. Old maps might not reflect this for some 'historians' following this story.