“Who created you?” I ask out of the blue. “Or is that a secret, too?”
There is a pause, and she surprises me by actually answering. “You know of the scientists who raised Griffin. They created me. I was built to sound like Aurora, one of the scientists who died early on in the project. Together, the rest of them created me. I’m a group effort. Griffin, too, gave me life. Creating a perfect AI like me takes years.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I say with a little smile.
I’ve come to love her bad temper and banter. There is love and care hidden in her every word. Manufactured or not, they feel real to me.
“How did she die?” I ask.
“Murdered by a man while she was out on an errand. That was the first time Griffin lost control. He was twelve. She was always the one who could calm him down when his emotions got the better of him. When she died, they were already working on me, so they implemented her voice and her personality into my core.”
I sit straighter. Beet is offering me glimpses of Griffin’s life. I can imagine a twelve-year-old Griffin, enraged and heartbroken. I lost my mother around that age, too.
“Seeing how I like you, I’m sure I would have loved her,” I say with a sad smile.
“Of course you would,” Beet retorts. “What’s not to love?”
I get out of the shower by nightfall. TheBeetleis slowly making her way through the wastelands to find a spot to spend the night. I find Griffin in the living room, reading a science fiction book. I hesitate, wondering if I should just crawl on his lap and kiss him again, but something holds me back. Maybe he thinks our kiss was a mistake, and I’d rather not give him an opportunity to tell me so. I head out to the galley to cook dinner. By the time I finish making the stew, I’m starting to wonder if I imagined our kiss.
When Griffin sits down to eat, I’m desperate to find a way to postpone our arrival in Washington. I want to have a little more time with him. I would like to get to the bottom of things. Or should I say, bottom for him?
“Hum, Griffin,” I say. “I have an idea.”
He looks up from his plate. “Yeah?”
“I’m sick and tired of the wastelands. I would love to see the ocean. Could we head straight there first?”
We would need to cross Oregon to get to the sea faster. It would be a detour, which is precisely what I want.
Griffin watches me for a heartbeat, then says, “Sure. We’ll change course tomorrow.”
I grin.
Dinner is a quiet affair. We don’t share the usual stories about our travels and lives. There’s a tension that wasn’t there before, so I guess I really didn’t imagine our kiss. I don’t know how to act around him anymore. I was never the one who had to do the seducing in all my encounters. How do I seduce a two-hundred-pound man with horns that share his blood with legends? Do I just flaunt my qualities in front of him? And what qualities? I’m just a twenty-three-year-old man with a slim body, washed-out blonde hair, and too many scars to count. I do have a nice face.
By the time my thoughts have circled twice, dinner is over, and Griffin disappears into his bedroom to read after washing the dishes.
I stand in the middle of the living room, lost and confused.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Beet says after a while.
I raise my head. “What?”
“I’m asking you what you’re doing, Helios. Because it doesn’t look like you know what you’re doing.”
I laugh. “That’s because I really don’t know what I’m doing. I’m open to advice.”
“I think you should kick Griffin’s door down and get all over him,” she says. “But what do I know? I’m just a hyper-intelligent AI with a million pieces of data on the human experience.”
Her words shake me from my stupor. “But what if he doesn’t want me to get all over him? He’s been avoiding my gaze for the entire day. He would have done something by now, right?”
“Helios,” she says, sounding like she’s losing patience. “Griffin is the first of his kind and the last. There has never been someone like him, with his particular mutations. He grew apart from his brothers and sisters, who were the closest it can get to his personal experience of life. He doesn’t know his place. It has never been among humans or among the gods. And now, a man whom he let into his life kissed him in his most vulnerable time. He’s lost too. He doesn’t have a written guide to explain to him what he can and can’t do. So, he does nothing.”
“Oh. That makes terrible sense,” I say.
“I know.”
Crossing the passageways in hurried strides, I knock at Griffin’s door before I can chicken out. I hear his “yes?” from beyond the door and open it without waiting for him to do it.
