The Trouble with Androids

By James Thomae

I look human, but I am an android. I was grown on cyclone-3, and I can do Magic. They said I should be vaporized because I was a danger to the galaxy. I ran away and took my cat, Kato, with me. I met a girl, who could read minds and do magic also. This is the story of what we taught each other, and our fight to survive pirates and people trying to kill me.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462873128

James Thomae

James Thomae is a seventy-seven-year-old man, and this is his fifth novel. He has had numerous poems published in the book At Water’s Edge, the International Library of Poetry. He has spent time on an Indian reservation and makes Native American drums. He went to Southern Illinois University, where he met his beloved wife, Jeanie. Together they traveled most of the western states and now live in Alton, Illinois, with his cats, Kato and Shadow.

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Copyright © 2011 by James Thomae.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011907813

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4628-7311-1

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4628-7310-4

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4628-7312-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Dedication

In memory of my proof reader and wife Jeanie.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 1

I am twenty eight years old, I weigh one hundred sixty pounds, five feet eight inches tall, green eyes, brown hair, and fairly strong. I look human but I am not human at all. I am an android from the planet Cyclone 3. I was grown there twenty eight years ago and that’s when the trouble started. The first part of my life was more or less normal, hours spent learning to read and write learning to handle emotions, learning about space and distant planets, looking at the stars at night, and longing to go there. I was twelve when I first started to have problems with my instructors and fellow androids. Something went wrong in the process and I developed an ability to do magic. Not just making coins disappear, but making matter come and go with just my mind. At first I didn’t know what was happening, things just appeared and disappeared at odd times. At first I didn’t know what to think of it, but the instructors had an idea what was causing it. At first they told me it was something I would outgrow. Then they told me it was something I would learn to control. I didn’t know if I would ever learn to control it, but I didn’t argue with them. I talked about it to my cat Kato, him being the only one who would listen and not make any snide remarks. He was my friend and my buddy, he was with me all the time and when they gave me trouble, he would fight them and scratch and bite them in some of the most offal places. The people on Cyclone 3 decided that I was a danger to the universe and I should be vaporized. I tried to talk them out of it, but they were determined to do it. Needless to say, I didn’t think I should be vaporized, so I ran away, hitched a ride on a tramp trader, and went off world. They chased me for almost three years until I found a body that looked like me enough to satisfy them that I was dead. The body I found was a homeless man about my age and looked a lot like me. He had been in a fight with pirates in a tavern on New Georgia in the Milky Way galaxy, and got blasted. I had a tattoo on my arm that had my serial number and other information on it. I tattooed my serial number on his arm, you would think they would have known he wasn’t an android, but they found the tattoo on his arm, and that was that, case closed. They stopped looking for me and I put color on my hair, and grew a beard. They never gave me a name so it was hard to sign things and if asked, I couldn’t give someone a name. I picked a name out of a book, something not to well known. Derrick Domalon was the name I chose. I changed the spelling and took it for my name. The first time I used it, I was petrified that they would remember seeing it in print. They didn’t remember it though. I used it all over the place to get used to using it, until it became habit.

Androids are grown like a potted plant and not made like a robot. All the DNA material is put in a mold and starter fluid is added, to get things started. After a while a person is made, complete with some knowledge already built in. The rest, I learned the old fashioned way. I have been told that I am handsome, and have a good voice, but I can’t see it myself, and I can’t sing for shit. The only thing I notice is I can buy shirts and pants off the rack with out any changes made.

In my travels, I learned to fly a space ship and do all the things needed to get from one place to another in space. I also learned to play poker and got very good at it. I won a ship in a poker game, and didn’t even cheat to get it. It is a small ship but big enough to serve me. The person that had it did some work on it and hopped it up so it goes like a bat out of hell. It has all the things that ships need to get around in space. It has a second generation brain, named Sorak which is something all ships need to keep track of where you are in space, an atmosphere maker and a food maker. I don’t need anything else. I made enough credits in the poker game to buy fuel, so I can get farther away from Cyclone 3. I am a gambler of sorts. My computer brain allows me to figure the odds of getting a winning hand and so I usually win. I make enough to keep me in fuel and supplies.

My second in command is Kato, my cat. He is fairly large for a cat, gray in color and has yellow eyes. I took him with me when I ran. We both have computer circuits in our heads, but it is living tissue rather then metal. We both eat the same food and drink the same water. He does, however know what I say to him and does what I tell him to do. The problem with him is he likes to fight. I don’t mind him fighting, I just wish he would pick on something more his size. He will fight anything big, small, peg legged, flying or stupid, he doesn’t care. I watch his eyes and when they change color, from yellow to green, look out he is ready to fight.

I am not sure what I can do in the way of magic but as time goes on I learn to do more things. Some day I will find a person that can teach me to do more. It gets lonely in space so I am always on the lookout for someone that I can get along with.

I happened upon a planet of odd people known as the Fay, some time ago. They are small people, about five feet five or six. I landed near the village and went to a tavern to get a drink. I asked the bar tender about the people and he told me they were from the planet Earth in the Milky Way galaxy. On earth they were called fairies, and elves. They moved to the planet Dagonn several generations ago and have lived there since then. He said that they can read minds and do magic and that interest me. I was enjoying my drink when a girl came in and I was taken by her beauty and the way she walked and acted. I am not very good at picking up girls.

She was about five feet four inches tall and had pointed ears and slanted green eyes and blond hair starting at the top of her head and down her back to her waist. She had her hair tied in a cord of some kind at the top of her head. She had on a short tunic and knee high boots of soft leather. She sat down a few seats down from me and ordered a drink.

I asked the bar tender, Do you know her?

He said, Her name was Nayla and she was about twenty five years old.

I said, My name is Derrick Domalon and the beauty of this place just went up a good bit. Can I buy you a drink?

She looked at me and smiled at me and said, Yes, if you want to.

The bar tender gave her another drink and I moved down to set next to her. We shot the shit for well over and hour, some music started playing and I danced with her.

I woke up and my face was pressed into something very soft and smelled good. My mouth tasted like bilge water and probably smelled as bad. I looked down and my flight clothes were folded at the bottom of the bed. I sat up in bed and discovered I was nude. I got up and put on my clothes and went to the galley. I looked into the galley and froze in place. There was a pretty girl cooking what smelled like bacon and eggs and wearing nothing but one of my shirts.

She didn’t turn around and said, Good morning, what’s left of it. Breakfast is almost ready.

I sat down and she turned around and set a plate of bacon and eggs in front of me, and a cup of coffee.

If I remember correctly your name is Nayla. Right?

Yes that’s me. We both got a little plastered and you were so charming, I couldn’t resist your offer to join you on your ship.

I must have been a lot drunker then I thought. I don’t generally pass out.

"Not many people can handle the drinks on Dagonn.’

Please excuse me, but I don’t sleep nude, but I woke up that way. Did we… .

Yes we did and you were great. I wasn’t sure if we could, but when we got down to the nettys’ and the gritty, they matched just fine.

I just noticed that we are under way. Am I taking you home or something?

Oh, you must not remember that. That’s why I’m on board. You made me first mate.

OK, Boy I must have been plastered. My cat is my first mate.

We talked it over and he thinks you need a female first mate, so he resigned.

I read your mind and found out about Cyclone 3, and the people wanting to vaporize you, and I decided to join you and we can solve any problems that come up.

I just sat there with my mouth open and my mind was blank.

She said, Drink your coffee, and eat your breakfast. We will talk about it later.

I took my coffee to the bridge and sat down and drank it. Nayla came to the bridge and sat next to me.

She said, I had some trouble with the people on Dagonn. Every one can do magic but I can do it much better. They thought I would be a threat to their society. They wouldn’t tell me to leave but they weren’t sad to see me go either.

That’s my trouble, I can do magic, and they wanted to vaporize me and I couldn’t let that happen. So Kato and I ran for it.

I gather you don’t know what you can do and what you should not do.

You got it sweet thing. By the way, where are we going?

I don’t know. I just told Sorak to pick a direction and go. He said you never told him to do that before. Have you ever used magic to move the ship?

No, I didn’t know you could do something like that. How fast can you make it go?

I don’t know. I never had a ship I could test it on. First of all, you tell the brain that you are going to do a speed thing.

For the next hour she showed me what to do to get the ship going much faster then it was going. It was a matter of changing the phase of the ship to get rid of matter. Once you get rid of matter, then there is no light speed limitation, or light speed limit. I practiced taking the ship out of phase and putting it back.

Finally she said, I guess you are ready to do it.

I sat down at the controls and told Sorak what we were about to do. I concentrated and did all the mind things she told me to do. I switched over to mind magic and the stars that were points of light suddenly became streaks of light and it went on and on, until I felt her pounding on my shoulder.

Turn it off, turn it off, you can’t leave it on that long. If you leave it on too long it will kill you.

I must have passed out because; I woke up lying in her arms and feeling like I had been hit by a truck. I sat up and asked her what happened.

She said, You held it longer then I ever saw anyone do. I thought you blew your mind and were hurt.

It didn’t feel like it was that long. How long was I out, and did we hit any thing?

No, but I don’t know how far we went. Sorak see if you can find any markers to give us an idea where we are.

Markers are star patterns that tell us where we are in space. It takes three of them to pin point us in a particular part of space.

Sorak said, I can’t find any markers, you will have to find them yourself.

OK, none of the star patterns look familiar, but after a while I found two and then later I found another one.

I got out the old star charts; all ships carry them, and looked them up. I was flabbergasted when I saw where we were. We had gone all the way across the Milky Way Galaxy, all the way across the Andromeda Galaxy, and out the other side of it. I whistled and told Nayla where we were.

"Boy, you are lucky to be alive. Look at the names on those planets. Nobody has been out here for three hundred years. One of the names was Neegala, it was a planet we fought and then we moved on and it was forgotten. It had a stormy history and then it settled down and became more or less a planet where any thing was possible. Pirates and Universal transports used it as a fuel stop. After a while it settled down and was more or less safe to visit.

I sat back in my chair and looked at the charts and the sensors. I noticed a ship a little ways ahead of us and saw that it was blasted apart. I told Sorak to pull along side of it and get a tractor beam on it.

Nayla said, Looks like it had a run in with a pirate and lost. He must have gotten away or they would have stripped it of any thing valuable.

I asked Sorak if there were any life signs on board. He said, No.

I asked Nayla if she wanted to go with me. I was going to drift over and check out the cargo.

Sure, sounds like fun.

We went down to the cargo hold and put on the space suits. I was lucky the guy I won the ship from was a little guy. The suit fit her like a glove. We floated over to the ship and I forced the hatch open and we went inside. The inside was blasted up pretty good and there were bodies all over the place. I counted sixteen in all. The weapons the pirates use are nuclear in their make up, and use. The ship is hit and the inside is flooded with radiation that kills the crew.

I said, It’s hard to tell, but I don’t think it happened very long ago.

I agree with you. Some of the blood is still liquid.

It appears the pirates didn’t know the crew and captain were Aldonitans, a people not susceptible to radiation. They must have lived for some time after the hit to get away. We made our way down to the hold and found it more or less intact. I found the cargo list and showed it to Nayla. This stuff is very valuable, thirty six barrels of Maple sugar, one thousand mink pelts, One thousand sheets of half inch plywood, and eight thousand tubes of glue, plus a bunch of odds and ends mostly building supplies. Well we can claim it as salvage."

I folded the list up and put it in my pocket. There isn’t much left of the ship so we might as well kick all the bodies out into space and into a star.

It took almost an hour to clean up all the bodies and check the ship for more cargo. Nayla found a stash of gold coins in a desk. It was a sizable amount, and she gave them to me.

I said, Keep half, you found them.

No, you keep them and if I need any I will ask.

We went back to my ship and took the blasted ship in tow. We set a course for Neegala. We couldn’t make good time while pulling the other ship. It took almost a day to get to Neegala. We parked the ship at the space station, and took my ship to the next position on the station wheel. A man came aboard and told us to lock the guns while docked. I told the man not to let anyone on that ship while we were down on the surface. He assured me no one would try to get on board, and it was perfectly safe.

We went down to the surface and found a cafe that looked clean. We went in and ordered a meal. The cafe was clean and well made up. It had eight tables and four chairs each with checkered table cloths and an electronic candle on each of them. The meal was good and fast.

We were on our coffee when a man came over to our table and introduced himself as Kitell Garvic, the person in charge of the dealings with the Emperor Hasak. He said he saw the ship we brought in and wanted to know what we were going to do with it. I told him we took it as salvage, and were looking to sell the cargo. It was a pirate survivor and no one was alive when we got there. We kicked them out and into a star, a sort of burial in space.

Kitell said, The ship didn’t look too blasted up, and was good enough to sell. What is the cargo you wish to sell? Do you have papers?

I handed him the cargo manifest papers. He looked at the listing and turned white as a sheet. Is this an accurate listing? Yes, yes it must be.

I asked, Do you know anybody that would be interested in buying the cargo?

Good God man, do you know what that cargo is worth?

I hadn’t thought about it. Do you know any one who would buy it?

The man sat down and looked over the papers again. He wrote several notations in a book he carried with him.

Friend, there is only one person that would have that much money, the Emperor Hasak. How much do you want?

Make me an offer I can’t refuse.

He took out his note book and scribbled something on it and handed it to me. Now it was my turn to turn white as a sheet. The figure he wrote was one hundred million credits. That’s about six hundred million dollars in universal credits, and twenty five million for the ship.

I said, Tell your Emperor he has a deal. Tell him also that I have a ship docked to the station, and I will need some work done on it.

I will have the Imperial ship docks waiting for you when you come down. The money will be put in your account at the Imperial Bank.

I wrote my name on the paper and gave it back to him. Even if the ship docks are very expensive we still have enough money to get the ship fixed up and armed so we can go where we want to go around here.

We decided to go shopping and get some clothes for Nayla and me. We went to the station outfitters and went to the fashion department. I bought five pairs of pants, six shirts, and a pair of boots. Nayla bought some new underclothes, eight new dresses, and a pair of soft knee high boots. She showed me each dress before she bought it, and she looked terrific in all of them.

This was beginning to look like the beginning of a good stop over.

Chapter 2

We brought the ship down to the ship yards and let the people working there start fixing it up. We rented a small office close to the yards. The Emperor actually gave us more for the cargo then his man said he would. I laid out what I wanted to do after the fixing up was done. I thought we might do a little passenger hauling. There is an area of space that people don’t go as a rule. It is too dangerous. The imperial arms works are beefing up our guns to be on a par with the imperial strike ships. The price was a lot but we had it and figured we could use it. I spent a lot of time on the ship, telling the work crew what I wanted done to the ship. They were used to working from blueprints and were not used to spoken word as to what to do. I didn’t know any thing about blueprints.

There was a very pretty girl working at the yards that came over to the office to have a drink with me, every so often. Nayla didn’t like her but she just didn’t leave us alone very much. I thought it was funny. Raya came over one day and had a bottle of something and offered me a drink. She poured a drink for me and asked me to try it and give her my opinion of it. I swallowed a mouth full and thought it was a little bitter. I started to stand up and had to catch myself on the desk. I thought it made me drunk sort of fast. Then the walls of the office started to close in on me and everything got black.

I came to, setting in a chair in what I thought was a cave, but on closer inspection it was a basement of some kind. I saw Nayla tied up over in a corner. I tried to move but found I was tied to a chair. Raya was standing by a fireplace with a piece of iron in her hand. It was very hot on one end. She kept stirring the fire with the iron until it was red hot. She lifted it up and lit a cigarette in her mouth. She looked at me and smiled a demonic smile.

She said, I am going to ask you one question if you lie to me or don’t give me the correct answer, I will fry your girlfriend. Do we understand each other?

I nodded yes.

I have looked all over your ship for the super speed device, but couldn’t find it. So it must be hidden somewhere else. Where is it?

She laid the iron down and walked over to me. The same sway of her hips that I saw so attractive, now were almost demonic. I saw Nayla had a gag in her mouth. They must know that Fay can do magic. But they don’t know that I do magic also, and I was getting mad.

What was in that drink you gave me?

It is none of your business what it was. Where is the device? I am getting tired of asking you.

Raya looked supremely confidant and sure of her self. She was close to my face and I thought of telling her, her breath smelled badly, but I thought better of it.

Just as she was glaring at me her face changed and she let out a scream. She took off for the stairs that led out of the basement, with a red hot iron stuck to her ass. She left a trail of smoke in her wake. It didn’t take much to free my hands, and feet from the ropes and get up. I got Nayla out of her ropes and she stood up as well.

She said, I am glad you took care of her, I was getting mad. I saw that iron take off and I knew you had it under control.

When we walked out of the basement we saw imperial troops putting handcuffs on Raya. A man came over to us and begged our pardon. They had just found out about Raya’s plan and just got her as she ran out of the basement.

The man said, "My Emperor has told me to handle the situation and tell you that she is the company doing the repairs on your ship, and she will not charge you a cent. Ask of her what ever you want, and it will be