The Golden Couple (The Samantha Project Series, # 2) (34 page)

Haden stepped in. “For now, you two are the only ones with these enhanced genes. So your attraction to each other is off the charts. If you were in a room full of people with these enhanced genes, that attraction would be tamped down a little. But still, you would be much more attracted to the people with enhanced genes than you would be to regular people with regular genes.”

“That’s not true. I’m attracted to regular people. I have a boyfriend.” I instantly regretted saying it. Even though Colin was safe, I knew that I should never mention him. I didn’t want them even thinking about him or where he might be.

Haden didn’t seem to notice or care. “You were attracted to your boyfriend because Erik wasn’t there. You didn’t even know Erik existed. But I’m guessing that once you finally met Erik, it was hard to keep your mind on that boyfriend of yours.”

He was right. It was a constant struggle to keep Colin front and center in my mind when Erik was around. Now I knew why. It finally made sense.

“But before you arrived here,” Alison said, “when you temporarily lost your abilities, your attraction to Erik probably wasn’t as strong. In fact, you were probably feeling close to your boyfriend again, right?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “That’s because the software was disabled. When we went in and restored your abilities last week, we fixed the software, too. Updated it to the latest version. And look what happened after that? You two couldn’t keep your hands off each other. Your attraction to each other was probably even stronger than before you arrived here.”

I didn’t try to deny it because what she had described was true. Which meant that the attraction Erik and I shared for each other was simply a product of some computer software. It was all engineered in a lab.
 

I glanced over at Erik, who was still too stunned to speak.
 

“So you’ve engineered us to what? Fall in love?” I asked, trying not to let my growing hatred for GlobalLife show.
 

“Well, love is tricky,” Haden said. “It’s hard to engineer. There are so many factors to consider with the whole love emotion. But physical, or sexual, attraction? That’s much easier. It’s basically a mix of hormones, visual appearance, fantasies, things like that.”

Alison explained. “You don’t have to be in love with someone to be attracted to them. And there are many ways to build attraction. We can do things like alter hormone levels or define what characteristics you find attractive in the opposite sex.”

“How would you do that? I understand the hormone levels being changed, but the other part?”

“The characteristics? We’d just rework the software. At this point, all we’ve had to do to make you and Erik attracted to each other is to let the software identify your unique base codes. Again, it works because you two are the only people who have these enhanced genes. But in the future, when there are more people like you, we hope to engineer attraction based on more specific characteristics. We haven’t defined those yet.”

“Well, your technology doesn’t work because I’m not attracted to Erik that way,” I lied.

Alison smiled. “There’s no need to pretend, Samantha. We’ve seen it for ourselves.”
 

I remembered the cameras in our room and felt my face blushing.
 

“Didn’t you feel yourself drawn to Erik the instant you met?” Alison asked. “Maybe even before you met? You might have even had a premonition or dream about him before you knew he existed.”

It was all true. But I didn’t answer, not wanting to prove their point.

“And Erik,” Haden said, “didn’t you want to . . . you know . . . the second you met this girl?”

Erik didn’t respond, so Alison continued. “What’s interesting is that we’ve noticed your attraction to each other gets stronger the more your minds connect. So the more you talk telepathically, the more attracted you become to each other. And that waltz you did? Well, you two were so connected on that night that you basically couldn’t help what happened later.”

What happened later? I thought. What exactly did she see?
I
still didn’t even know what happened that night.

Haden turned to Alison. “But they do seem connected on a more personal level as well, don’t you think? They seem to have more than just this physical attraction.”

“Yes, you’re right. I noted that earlier.” She jotted something down in her digital notepad. “That’s actually a good thing. I mean, if you’re engineered to be that physically attracted to someone, it’d be nice if you also liked them as a person.” She laughed, but I didn’t see the humor in it.
 

Erik finally spoke. “Alison, you mentioned that Sam and I were made to have a physical attraction to each other. And that you don’t care if we actually like, or love, each other. If you want us to be a couple, why wouldn’t you at least try to engineer that as well?”

Haden answered. “As I said earlier, making someone love someone else is very difficult. We haven’t yet figured out how to do that. But for the purposes of this project, love doesn’t matter. Sex does. And physical attraction drives that.”

Erik moved to the edge of his seat. “Wait a minute. So was that your goal? You engineered us to have sex with each other?”

“Well, of course,” Alison replied. “Are you still not getting it? We need you two to mate.”

“Could you say that once more?” Erik looked even more shocked than before.

“We need you two to mate.” Haden repeated it as if it were no big deal. “We need you two to have a baby. We need to see what happens when two people with these enhanced genes procreate. And we’re hoping we can use the new genes to—”

“What? No!” I jumped up from the sofa. “You can’t make us have a baby. I won’t do it.” I yanked Erik up from his seat. “WE won’t do it.”
 

“She’s right. Forget it. We’re not doing that. You may have made us attracted to each other, but we’re not animals. We don’t mate when put in confinement. We can control ourselves.”

“So that’s why we’re in that room together? Because you want us to have sex?” I wanted to scream at them, but I knew it would interfere with our goal of getting information.
 

“You might as well go ahead and give us separate rooms because that’s not gonna happen,” Erik assured them.
 

Haden looked at Alison and smiled. “Are you sure it hasn’t already?”

I suddenly felt light-headed and sat down. “I don’t feel so good. I need to go back to the room.”

“Oh, she’s white as a ghost,” Alison remarked.
 

Haden motioned to one of the lab workers on the side of the room. “Ridley, could you come check on Samantha for me? Hurry, please.”
 

A young man walked over with a wandlike device in his hand. I had seen a similar device at the lab in Minnesota. He waved it over me.
 

“Everything seems okay,” Ridley said.

“I’m fine. I’m just tired. Do you think we could take the rest of the day off?”

Alison got up. “We’ll postpone our activities for today and resume tomorrow.”

She walked us back to our room, then left. I collapsed on the bed. Erik sat next to me, not saying anything. After a few minutes, he leaned down and put his arm around me.
 

I immediately pushed him away. “Get off me!”

He sat up. “What did I do? Why are you screaming at me?”

“Didn’t you hear any of that? Weren’t you listening? This is what they want! Us! Together! This fancy room, the fireplace, the clothes, the lingerie. It’s all part of their sick plan!”

“Why are you getting mad at
me
? I didn’t do this!”

“Because you’re acting like we’re still—like we were before. And we’re not!”

“So you hate me now, or what?”

“No, I don’t hate you.” I sat up to look at him. “I don’t know how I feel about you anymore. Obviously everything I thought I felt wasn’t real. It was all engineered.”

“Really, Sam? You think that’s all we have here? Fake feelings for each other?”

“Yeah. I do.”
 

“Real nice answer there, Sam. So now you don’t even like me? You don’t care at all about me? Is that it?”

I didn’t answer. I was too confused. Rejecting Erik meant I was rejecting GlobalLife’s master plan for me. And I had to do that. I couldn’t let them continue to engineer my whole life, especially who I was attracted to or who I had children with.
 

Erik went across the room and sat on the chair. He started mind-talking.
“You’re just letting them win, Sam. They want to drive us apart. They don’t want us building an alliance. Like they said, they don’t care if we like each other. They just need us to have sex. And I’m sure they have ways to force us into doing that. They’ll send our hormone levels through the roof. Or drug us so we don’t even know what we’re doing. But if you let them break apart our friendship—or whatever type of relationship we have—then we’ll never escape. It’s exactly what they want!”

I wasn’t ready to talk to him. I needed time to think it over. Maybe Erik was right. Maybe they
were
trying to break us apart. Maybe they suspected we were up to something. Alison and Haden had said that talking telepathically made Erik’s and my attraction to each other stronger. But they knew I didn’t want that. They knew I had a boyfriend. I kept insisting that Erik was only a friend. So why would they tell us that? Probably to get us to stop mind-talking. They didn’t want us saying things they couldn’t hear.
 

So was any of what they told us true? Did the attraction software really exist? Were we really engineered to be together? Or was their whole speech some type of mind game meant to manipulate us into doing what they wanted us to do?
 

Erik wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the afternoon. I stayed in bed, pretending to sleep. I felt horrible for yelling at him. None of this was his fault. And I hated pushing him away. I needed him. We needed each other. Or, as he said, we’d never get out of there.
 

Dinner arrived as usual and Erik went over to the table to eat. I got up and joined him. “Hey, I’m sorry about how I acted earlier. And I’m sorry for what I said to you.”

“It’s okay. I understand,” he said coldly. “I’ll keep my distance from now on. I’ll sleep on the floor tonight. On the opposite side of the room.”

“You don’t have to do that, Erik. Like you said, we’re not animals. We can control ourselves no matter what they did.”

“No. I thought about what you said and maybe you were right. Maybe we just need to stay away from each other.”

“Erik, I was just upset earlier. I didn’t mean to yell at you like that.”

“Well, you meant the other stuff.”

“What other stuff?”

Erik went into mind-talk mode.
“Like the fact that nothing you ever felt for me was real. You just bought into that whole GlobalLife crap without even giving it a thought. It’s like you were relieved that you didn’t really have feelings for me.”

“That’s not true.”
I paused, considering how much to tell him.
“Okay, maybe a part of me was relieved. But that’s only because I’ve felt so guilty since meeting you. I’ve been trying to understand why I have these feelings for you when I already have a great boyfriend. I mean, Colin is back in my life now and since being here with you, I’ve been acting like he doesn’t even exist. So yeah, it’s nice to be able to explain that.”

“And what if they lied? What if we really weren’t engineered like that? How would you explain your feelings then?”

“I don’t know. Before we found this out, I tried not to think about it. And obviously, if Colin wasn’t in the picture, things would have gone further last Saturday night.”

“Well, according to Alison and Haden, things did go further.”

“Let’s not talk about that, Erik. It’s bad enough I don’t remember, but then to think they were watching it all. I can’t even think about it.”

“They probably just said that to see our reaction. I’m sure we didn’t do anything. I would’ve known.”

We finished dinner and went to bed early. I insisted Erik sleep in the bed despite his protests. The room was more frigid than normal. Another way to get us together, I thought. Make us huddle up for warmth.
 

In the middle of the night, Erik woke me up. “Sam, I can’t sleep.”

“Because of me? You can’t move, right?” I was curled up next to him trying to keep warm. “I’ll just go to the other side of the bed.”

He kept hold of me before I could move away. “No. You’re fine. I just can’t stop thinking about what they said.”

“What about it?”

He switched to mind-talk.
“I don’t think it’s possible to engineer a person’s feelings like that. I don’t think it would work.”
 

“Some of it had to be true. How else would you explain our instant attraction to each other?”

“Yeah, so maybe the software in us can recognize that we have enhanced genes, but how much more could it really do? It can’t think for us.”

“What do you mean?”

“Think about when Colin came back. It was like you two were never apart. You didn’t tell him to get lost, then come running back to me. You were able to overcome whatever they put in us and make a decision for yourself.”

“Yeah, that’s true.”

“So why are we just accepting that some software program has so much control? We still have brains. And free will.”

“What are you trying to say, Erik?”

“I’m saying that our genes and the software are just a small part of us. They don’t have to dictate who we are. We can still think for ourselves. We can make decisions. We can change outcomes. We can’t forget that, Sam. We can’t get so hung up on the idea that we can only act the way we’re programmed to act. Or engineered to feel.”

“But sometimes I feel like the genes and the software really are controlling me. Like they’ve controlled me my entire life.”

“Because you’re letting yourself believe that. Or you want to believe it so you don’t have to face the truth about how you feel, or why you made a certain decision. But if you think that way, you’ll never overcome the outcome they’ve picked for you. They’ll always control you.”