bedroom door. She recalled the loud crash of his gun as he fired several times and then she remembered her inability to move. As the life threatened to leave her physical body, all she could focus on was the woman. She was pale with dark hair and eyes; that was what she remembered seeing. The woman stood at the doorway like a horrific doll watching him perform his deadly work.
There was no recollection of her being familiar, no a-ha moment of realization. She hadn’t known that it was Ronald because she didn’t pay attention to him. When the bullets began to fly and her body danced beneath their impact, it was the demon she focused on, the unmoving demon who stood watching, stoically.
The memory uncloaked itself inside of Bonnie’s mind and she sat staring off into nowhere with her mouth agape. Who could that woman have been? And who would be willing to accompany the murderer in order to watch her die on the bed? Without context and memories of relationships with people, this new revelation was worthless, but it was something and it gave her hope that even more would come back to her as time went by.
03 | Once Upon a Dream
The night after her phone call with Sal, Bonnie fell into a deep sleep. It was one of those sleeps that comes after a long day of mental exhaustion and fatigue. After lying down and losing consciousness, she found herself falling. Falling back through the bed and down through the misty clouds of a dream world similar to the real one.
When she saw the Space Needle she knew that it was Seattle she was falling towards. It was an older version, like something out of a past century. The cars were driving neatly along roads that ran between the buildings and the air was clear of everything with the exception of a rising, Boeing aircraft. She fell through the rooftop of an apartment building and landed softly on a bed where a dark-haired woman was sleeping.
The place seemed familiar and she was lucid enough to get up and walk around to see. She recognized the woman to be an android and next to her lay a pale, naked, and emaciated young man. There were computers, wires, and medical equipment all around the room and when she looked closer, she could see that they were hooked up to him.
The android stirred and then woke up. She looked like one of the old depictions of a female robot from the 1930’s. While her face was pretty and very humanlike, her body was all silver with visible bolts where her joints should be. Bonnie thought she looked absurd, especially since her breasts were carved from metal instead of being made of silicone. That was standard for any android female, wasn’t it? Everybody knew that. So, why was this one a machine with a human head?
When the woman stood up, Bonnie was even more shocked that she had a navel, buttocks, and a vagina. Why would she need that? she asked herself, but stopped when she realized that the android had been having sex with the man. The metallic woman saw the way Bonnie was looking at her master and stepped inside her field of vision, as if to protect him from her judgment.
“What is it that you need, lady?” she asked Bonnie through what appeared to be a false and frightening grin.
Bonnie tried to talk and was surprised that she could. “I’m curious about your ability to have sex,” she said to the machine and then touched the woman’s abdomen to examine the feeling of the metal. “You’re a machine, but your metal is soft and … oh my god, you’re warm! Are you one of those sex-bots? I’m dreaming about a sex-bot. Oh my,” she gasped and suddenly felt embarrassed.
“I am not a sex-bot. I was built to love and my purpose in life is to keep him happy,” the android replied, still smiling.
Bonnie chuckled and examined the body that was on the bed. “You mean this skeleton hooked up to the machines? I think that he lost the ability to feel pleasure a very long time ago, my dear. Whatever are you doing to him, besides the obvious?”
“Brad