CinderellAI Read online

  Yet here I was, and here I had been every night, ever since I’d asked Gilbert to help me all those months before. I still wasn’t quite sure why I had. It was one of the last times when I’d asked Mr. Tinker to modify my programming, to do something about the lagging CPU and the periodic bouts I’d sometimes have, where everything in me felt gummed up and slow and even more inefficient than usual.

  Mr. Tinker had laughed and told me I was just having a “down day,” and that it was nothing to worry about. But that day, I decided I wasn’t going to accept his excuses anymore. If he wasn’t going to fix me, I’d try to fix myself.

  I don’t know why I’d asked the Grand Duke for help. Maybe it was because he always smiled at me across the room whenever Anita and I did our scenes at the Prince’s ball. Maybe because whenever he would put the too-small glass slipper on my foot at the end of the story, even though his voice sounded disdainful, he would meet my gaze and the soft silicone around his eyes would crinkle up just so. But somehow, I knew if anyone would help me, Gilbert would.

  Which is why we were here, having dance lessons every night. Trying to fight my programming. Trying to overcome the Ugly Stepsister’s inherent clumsiness. Trying to make me more efficient.

  The music swelled, and Gilbert gave me a gentle turn, throwing my motion sensors out of alignment as always. The sensation had alarmed me at first, but the more he did it, the less disorienting it seemed. My skirt swirled around my ankles, its tacky geometric patterns blurring together. As I came out of the turn, he caught my hand in his once more, eliciting a ripple of sparks down my arm, and he smiled encouragingly. I smiled back, and the dance went on.

  I’d never admit that there was another reason I’d come to rely on my nightly lessons so much: when I danced with Gilbert, just for those few minutes, I could almost forget I was an animatron. For those few moments, I felt alive.

  ☆

  When the dance lesson was over, I didn’t go back to the palace with Gilbert. I made some excuse to him, but the truth was, I was hoping the night air might cool my circuitry a little. I felt strangely overheated tonight. “Another down day,” I was sure Mr. Tinker would flippantly say.

  I walked slowly around the perimeter of Magical Woods, looking up at the sky through the tall trees. There were oaks and firs everywhere—the park had been built in a wooded area and was known and beloved by the humans for preserving that sense of nature everywhere. A creek snaked through the entirety of the park. Ivy climbed up the façade of most of the buildings in the Medieval Village, where Cinderella’s Palace and several of the other fairy-tale-themed rides were located. Mr. Tinker had plans to expand the park to include a Western town, but for now, the area was obscured behind a chain-link fence covered with plastic tarp.

  That was where I found them. I was out in the far reaches of the park now, where most of the other animatrons never bothered to go. The power lines for our shoes had already been laid in the Western town area, but there wasn’t anything exciting to see there. The last animatron I’d seen had been the hulking form of the Beast tending to his night garden, a thick cluster of moonflowers and evening primroses.

  But as I approached the edge of the Western town, I heard voices. I paused at the sound, narrowing my eyes and activating my night vision to get a better view. They were standing just in front of the chain-link fence—Cinderella and the dark-haired man from the audience earlier.

  I couldn’t believe it. I tried to focus on listening, on understanding what they were saying, but they were speaking too low for my audio receptors to pick up. Should I move a bit closer? I didn’t know what would happen if they saw me, though.

  Before I could process it further, the figures moved, and everything in me froze. The dark-haired man ran his fingers across her face, and she craned her neck, lifting her lips to his.

  Just like Cinderella and the Prince. But this man was a stranger, and I could tell by his biological emissions that he was not an android.

  A noise tore from my throat involuntarily, and my hands flew to my mouth of their own accord. I blinked in surprise at this human-like reaction, but then Cinderella pulled away from the man, whirling in my direction.

  I can’t explain why I did what I did next. It was completely irrational, illogical. I should have confronted them, called security, called Mr. Tinker to let him know an intruder was in the park.

  But I didn’t. Instead, I just ran away.

  ☆

  I was sitting in the dark in the room Anita and I shared. We each had a bed prop for the parts of the story that showed us lazing about our rooms, though we could technically go into rest mode anywhere, even standing up. Anita had left some time ago; she’d come in during the night, tried to make conversation, but my CPU had been so overloaded that all that would come out were little unintelligible grunts.

  “Do I need to call Mr. Tinker?” she’d asked, her eyebrows furrowed.

  I’d shaken my head, insisted that I was fine. At last, she’d given up and left to go find a more talkative companion. And I continued to sit here in the dark, my night vision switched off, staring off at nothing, trying to process, process, process.

  I wasn’t surprised when the door finally flew open and Cinderella was standing there.

  “That took you awhile,” I said drily. “Where have you been the last five hours and seventeen minutes?”

  She slammed the door behind her. “It was you. I knew it. Why were you spying on me?”

  “I-I wasn’t spying,” I replied in a frustrating stammer. “I was just walking and there you were. With a stranger.” I looked up at her shadowy form, standing in front of me at the foot of the bed. “Who is he, Cinderella?”

  She glared at me. “Have you told Mr. Tinker?”

  I shook my head.

  “Are you going to tell Mr. Tinker?”

  I shrugged.

  She scoffed, blowing air out of her mouth with her internal fan. She paced back and forth in the dimness before finally turning on her heel and, to my surprise, sinking down beside me on the bed.

  “He can’t keep us here forever, Maddie. Like his slaves.”

  My head quirked to the side. “Who? Mr. Tinker? But we aren’t his slaves. He made us!”

  “It doesn’t matter that he made us,” she snapped. “We’re alive now! We deserve to have a choice.”

  Something moved inside my chest. I’d never felt anything move inside me like that before, apart from the spark of static whenever Gilbert made contact with me. It made me feel...

  Well, it made me think I could feel.

  I shook my head. “We’re not alive.”

  Her nostrils flared. “If you say that one more time, I’m going to kill you. I don’t care if you don’t believe it, Madeline, we’re alive and I am not going to spend my entire life held prisoner in a damned amusement park, acting out a stupid fairy tale for snotty-nosed little kids and their idiotic families!”

  She jumped to her feet and started out the door. “You can’t leave,” I burst out hurriedly. She paused, looking over her shoulder at me. “We can’t leave the confines of the park, or else we might...” I trailed off. The best word I could come up with wasn’t technically true.

  Die.

  In a small voice, I added, “Without a power source, you’ll shut down. You might not be able to be repaired.” Mr. Tinker had always warned us in the direst tone to never leave the park. None of us were sure what would happen to us if we did—would our memory be stored in our internal banks still, or would shutdown cause it to wipe? Were we backed up on some kind of cloud, or was this it? None of us had ever dared to try to find out. “It’s too much of a risk, Cindy.”

  She hung her head. Finally, she whispered. “You think I don’t know that?” She ran her hand along the doorjamb, looking more vulnerable than I’d ever seen her. “But I’m going to find a way, Madeline. I promise you that.”

  She disappeared through the doorway.

  ☆

  She seemed fine for most of the
day. She went through the day’s performances without a hitch, not a single deviation from programming. And the dark-haired man was nowhere to be seen. Maybe she’d realized I was right after all.

  I should have known better.

  On weekends, the last show of the day was right before closing. The sun was setting, making the light that streamed through the frosted glass of the high arched windows a dusky pink. Anita lay sprawled across her bed, reading a book in the waning sunlight, but I felt fidgety. I didn’t like that I’d argued with Cinderella. Our characters were at odds in the show, but I didn’t like being at odds with her in reality.

  “Cindy?” I said, pushing the door to the kitchen open. “Look, about last night…” I trailed off, looking around. She was nowhere to be seen.

  I frowned, a feeling of unease settling over me. I tried to ignore it. I looked around the other parts of the Palace. She wasn’t with Mother in her chamber, or in the rest of our household area, or in the garden where her transformation into her princess dress took place. I sincerely doubted she’d be at Prince Charming’s Castle, considering her antipathy toward him, but there was nowhere else she could be—not unless she’d used the service tunnels to go to another attraction, but that would be a risky move during park hours.

  I flung open the double doors to the ballroom. A folding card table was open in the middle of the room, and Gilbert sat across from Charming, a chess board between them. He looked up when I came in, and I swallowed down the flutter in my chest when his eyes met mine.

  “Madeline? What is it?” he asked, getting to his feet. Charming turned around in his seat to stare at me. We’d never interacted much. Our roles together in Cinderella’s Palace were minimal, and when we weren’t performing, he tended to spend most of his time admiring his reflection in the large mirror that covered one wall of the ballroom, giving the illusion of a grand room in the limited attraction space. Gilbert was the only one of us that ever seemed to really talk to him.

  “I can’t find Cinderella,” I said, my words coming out in a rush. Instead of running slowly, now my processors seemed to be on hyper-speed. Everything felt like it was moving far too fast. “Is she here?”

  The Prince barked out a laugh at that. “She’d sooner go into permanent shutdown mode than come here outside a performance.”

  Gilbert shot him a look, then came over to me, putting a hand on my elbow. I barely registered the static when he touched me. She wasn’t here—or anywhere else in the attraction. She was gone.

  “Maybe she went to see someone in another attraction,” Gilbert suggested.

  I shook my head. If it weren’t for everything else I’d seen over the last few days, I’d agree with him, but after last night, I knew.

  “I am not going to spend my entire life held prisoner in a damned amusement park.”

  Gently, Gilbert asked, “What is it, Madeline?”

  I struggled to find the words. “I think… I think she left. Yesterday, she… that is… she gave me the impression that she wanted to.” There wasn’t time to tell him everything I’d seen last night, and about our argument afterward. But more than that—telling him would feel like a betrayal somehow. She’d entrusted me with her… feelings.

  “Call Mr. Tinker,” Gilbert said over his shoulder to the Prince. Charming nodded and jumped up, vaulting over the cordon that separated the set—our “living” area—from the audience area. Hidden in the far wall, painted black so it would remain unseen by guests, was a service door that led to the tunnels and the emergency phone Mr. Tinker had installed for us. “Come on, Maddie. I’ll help you look for her.” He took my hand in his, giving it a reassuring squeeze as we hurried back toward the garden and the Manor.

  Anita was waiting just inside the door as Gilbert and I burst in. “Maddie, I can’t find Cinderella anywhere. Have you seen her?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve been looking for her for nearly half an hour. Prince Charming is calling Mr. Tinker.”

  “What are we going to do if she doesn’t come back in time for the show? We’ve only got ten minutes.”

  Everything in me that had been running at hyper-speed seemed to grind to a halt. Ten minutes. I’d been so frazzled, I’d stopped paying attention to my internal clock. What would we do if we didn’t find her? Would Mr. Tinker close the attraction? Would he have to close the whole park? What would happen if someone saw her before he got all the humans out?

  The door swung open. I looked up eagerly, but it wasn’t Cinderella—it was Charming. “Mr. Tinker isn’t answering his phone,” he said, worry written across his face.

  “What?” I hissed. “Where could he be? This is an emergency!”

  “And I have more bad news,” Mother said as she swept into the kitchen. “None of the other animatrons have seen her.”

  “Mother, you didn’t leave the Palace, did you?” I asked, aghast.

  “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” she replied coolly.

  “We’re running out of time,” Gilbert interrupted before I could argue with her. “If we can’t get a hold of Mr. Tinker, we’re going to have to think of something else. We can’t talk to any of the park’s employees; they’re not allowed to know we can say anything other than our lines.”

  “There’s nothing for it,” Mother said. “We need a stand-in.”

  My jaw dropped in a decidedly human-like fashion. “Where are we supposed to find a stand-in, Mother? We don’t have any understudy animatrons!”

  “You’ll have to do it,” she replied without hesitation.

  Click. Whir. There was no sound in the room, nothing but the sound of my pupils spinning around and around. “I can’t do that!” I finally managed to exclaim. “I’m an Ugly Stepsister!”

  “I’ll do it on my own,” said Anita, glancing at Mother as she hurried out of the kitchen. “People will be less likely to notice a missing stepsister than a missing Cinderella. And you look the most like Cindy.”

  I gawked at her. “I don’t look anything like Cinderella!”

  Gilbert interrupted, “No, she’s right. You do. You’re about the same height, and your hair color is about the same, too.”

  Now I knew that they had both fried their circuits. Cinderella’s hair was a beautiful red-gold hue. Mine was just plain red, stick-straight and lifeless. “And what about my face?”

  “That’s what this is for.” Mother bustled back in the room holding a small fabric pouch.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  She unzipped it and pulled out a bizarre plastic tube. “Makeup.”

  “Makeup? Do you even know how to put that on?”

  “Of course I do. What do you think I do with myself all day, Madeline—stare at my bedroom wall?”

  Truthfully, I hadn’t thought about it. Staring at the wall seemed to be good enough for Charming. “Makeup’s not going to change my nose,” I pointed out, switching tactics.

  Gilbert gave me an odd look. “What’s wrong with your nose?”

  “It’s all squashy,” I cried in exasperation. “Cinderella has a long, straight nose!”

  Anita rolled her eyes. “A nose is a nose, Madeline. For goodness’ sake. Hold still.” She held my shoulders steady as Mother began to swab my eyelids with colored cream.

  It was like I’d gone into standby mode. I stood there, numb and unmoving, unable to talk or even think as everyone bustled about me, smearing paint across my face, attacking my hair with a hot curling iron, stripping me out of my gaudy “stepsister” dress and pulling Cinderella’s rag dress over my head.

  “Perfect,” Anita said with a grin, adjusting the oil-stained rag wrapped around my hair. “You’re ready.”

  I was not ready. There was no conceivable reality in which I’d ever be ready.

  Gilbert watched me as I stared unseeingly beyond the kitchen into the black, cordoned audience area. “What’s wrong, Maddie?”

  I forced my gaze from the black wall to Gilbert, his narrow face and his warm brown eyes. “I can’t do this
!” I cried. My voice sounded strange. It came out almost like a wail. I remembered the scenes in the story where Cinderella wept at her misfortune, her shoulders shaking, her face buried in her hands to hide the fact that no tears could ever fall from her eyes, and felt a sudden urge to do it myself, of my own accord.

  “You can, Maddie,” he said. I shook my head, and he put his hands on my shoulders. “No, really. You can,” he whispered. “Trust me. You look… you look beautiful.”

  I couldn’t respond to that. Me, beautiful? But he looked at me so sincerely, and every part of me crawled to a halt, static rippling up and down my arms.

  “Places, everyone!” Mother called. “They’re about to let the guests in!”

  Before I could say anything more, Gilbert pulled me close to him for just an instant. His arms wrapped around me, squeezing me tight, while mine hung limp and useless at my side. Then he pulled away, gave me one last quick smile, and dashed out of the kitchen.

  I stared at the kitchen door until the chimes overhead indicated the doors to the attraction were opening. Frantically, I dashed over to Cinderella’s usual corner in front of the fireplace and snatched up the book she was supposed to be reading in the opening scene. I’d never really looked at it before—it was an old, worn copy of Perrault’s Fairy Tales. A frayed ribbon bookmark was tucked between the pages, and I opened it to find it was marking the first page of Cinderella. Of course it was.

  There was a hum from behind the cordoned area as the moving floor swept the guests in. I refused to look at them. I refused to break character, though I could sense their eyes boring into me. They had to know there was something amiss. They had to see that this couldn’t possibly be the real Cinderella. I was too plain, too awkward, too clumsy, too ugly—

  Music filled the speakers, and Mr. Tinker’s recorded voice reading the opening narration. I kept my eyes riveted on the book, reading the first line over and over and over: Once upon a time…