What Lies Behind: A New Adult Dark Science Fiction Romance by Travis Simmons Read Free Book Online Page B

Cass said.
    “Yea, the exhibit should be starting soon,” he told her. Brandon dragged Cass to her feet by her hand, and led her through the throngs of people headed down a sloped hallway. At the base of the hallway they turned left. Skylights created pools of light on the gray slate floor. Cass could almost feel the excitement of all the humans around her.
    Now and then she caught the glimpse of a robot with their family. All automatons were programmed with recognition devices. Cass was able to tell through her programming when a person wasn’t a person but instead a machine. She wasn’t precisely sure why this was, if it was intentionally done by humans to make sure that robots knew who the humans were and who they needed to serve, or if it was some kind of electronic signature that all robots could recognize.
    Brandon’s hand tightened in hers, drawing her eyes to him. He smiled at her as he led her along.
    “What are you thinking about?” Brandon asked her.
    For some reason in that moment Cass felt she could trust him. It was only yesterday that she’d been so uncertain about Brandon, wondering if he was a spy of sorts for Natalia. Now she thought if he were a spy, he probably wouldn’t have gone this far out of his way to make Cass feel so welcome.
    “Why some things are the way they are. Like how I can tell the automatons here from the humans,” she told him. Cass looked up into his brown eyes, somehow different today, almost golden in a way she found both hypnotic and mildly frightening.
    Brandon shrugged. “I hadn’t really thought about that. I guess it makes sense, you’re all connected into the internet and maybe you can read each other that way.”
    Cass nodded. “That would make sense. You don’t think it was anything done specifically so we would know who to serve?”
    “Not that I know of. My parents used to run an automaton shop and I’ve never heard anything like what you’re talking about,” Brandon told her.
    If we are all connected to the internet, could we communicate that way too? She wondered. She gazed at one short woman that looked like any normal human, long brown hair pulled up. She wore a yellow hoodie, a pair of faded jeans, and was tending to two children. Only Cass knew that she wasn’t human at all. That girl was an automaton. Could she communicate with her?
    Singularity , Cass thought. In the past humans used to think that at one point the machines they created would rise up and destroy the human race. They called that the singularity. What if it was more prophetic than they realized?
    The crowd around them was starting to slow, and so was Brandon.
    “Here,” Brandon said, pulling Cass out of her contemplations. “This is what I wanted to show you.”
    He slid in between groups of people, pulling Cass along with him. It earned him scowls of disapproval from parents and solitary people alike, but no one said anything to them. Cass and Brandon were next to the glass now and on the other side was a cage filled with lions.
    The cage was open to the sky, and the sun shown on the lions making them look as if carved from gold. When Cass thought of lions she thought of fierce hunters, not what she was seeing now. Some of the lions were sunning themselves around the only male lion in the cage. Other lions were playing with one another, behavior she would expect to see from any regular house cat.
    There was something strange about the male lion. Something that Cass and a few of the other automatons around her seemed to notice.
    “He’s not real,” Cass said.
    “What do you mean not real?” Brandon asked.
    “He’s synthetic,” she told him.
    “I know, but that doesn’t make him any less real,” Brandon said.
    Cass frowned at him. He doesn’t understand, she thought. He thinks we are real, but we aren’t the same as humans. That lion isn’t the same as all the others.
    A tour guide was standing before the glass cage, a microphone clipped to her ear broadcast her speech