by PJ Manney
That bump hadn’t been an accident. Tom 1 looked around and actively analyzed his surroundings. This wasn’t the San Francisco he remembered: rich, young, arrogant, and bursting with ideas and attitude. It was the middle of the day in September, but kids wandered around. People congregated on stoops or out in the streets with nothing to do and nowhere to go. There were more homeless.
Veronika? Busy? he messaged.
Yeah, she said.
I can’t believe what I missed. His gaze scanned the surroundings to show her.
Dude. You’re hilarious. Looks like Cow Hollow?
Yeah. His eyes focused on a driverless delivery truck picking up an empty pallet from a lone shopkeeper and unloading a new pallet with shrink-wrapped food containers inside. The grocery manager didn’t even direct the forklift. It drove itself. Inside, there were only a few customers and no staff. The entire business looked automated. He refocused on the dry cleaner next door. And the pharmacy. And the fast-food joint. Each run by a single human. Automation took care of the rest.
He had been too busy playing in cyberspace for the last two years. Did I have anything to do with this?
Was happening anyway, but you sped things up by getting rid of leaders. When companies only care about efficiency and profits, humans aren’t needed. And don’t forget our blockchains. Lawyers, financial services, bureaucrats—Poof! Humans go bye-bye. Thank God folks are guaranteed a basic income in California.
Otherwise, said Tom 1, it’d be another revolution.
No one told people rebooting their world would be so hard, said Veronika. But there are a lot of artists and writers now. Silver linings? Anyway, dude, we’re busy. Call if you need help. Ciao.
An old Asian lady held her Pomeranian on a leash while she waved her GO over a reader at an outdoor produce market. The little brown dog lunged for Tom 1’s ankles.
“Hey, puppy,” said a young woman nearby. “Don’t like sexbots?”
Others nearby laughed. A young man came forward and shoved Tom 1 in the arm. “You lost me jobs. I had a good gig going!”
The gathering crowd howled with derisive laughter.
Tom 1 took off at a jog, ignoring the alert from his leg joints. As he turned the corner onto Union Street, a mother walking her two children screamed, “Robot attack!” She grabbed her kids close. A group of men loitering at the corner started toward him, but Tom 1 ran on.
He had never noticed how many people hated robots. He shouldn’t have been surprised. They were the symbols of the radical automation that had taken their jobs, changed ways of life, and created a new underclass, the biggest in history.
“Ruth!” he voice messaged. “I’ve got a target on my back out here!”
“Need a new p-p-plan, Genius Boy,” she replied.
An outside message arrived from a burn address.
“Ruth, please deal with it. I can’t respond to a video, operate my body, and avoid attacks,” he said.
“Should I share?” Ruth asked.
“Yeah, with Veronika, too. I’m trying to stay in one piece.”
The message contained a video link with a 3.87-minute movie file. And one sentence: Did you think she’d give me up for you?
That stopped him. He scooted into an alley off Union and hunkered down behind a Dumpster so he could focus on the video. A motionless homeless man lay next to him, covered in bubblewrap. He looked to be asleep.
In the vid, a beautiful young woman staggered out of a rave. It was nighttime, and the footage was not clear. She was a tall, curvaceous blonde with cheekbones that could cut a man into bite-sized morsels. Her natural stride and bounce suggested that every last inch was what nature had given her. She was tipsy and tottered in her stilettos as she entered her companion’s robocar. As she slid over, her date got in next to her. They snuggled and murmured to each other. Then he stabbed her with a tiny automatic needle. She slumped unconscious in her seat.
The camera cut to an operating room. Quick edits showed her being wheeled into the room and having her head shaved. Cut to a marker-drawn circle on her skull. Cut to her draped for brain surgery. Cut to robotically guided lasers pointed at key sections of the cortex. It could only be a high-tech lobotomy. Neurorigs, resembling Prometheus Industries’ Hippo 3.0 and Cortex 3.0, were placed in her brain and overlaid with a new neural microlace in the space between the top of the cortex and the brain’s membrane, creating a neural interface that covered the entire brain. A tinny voice faintly directed the medical team, its aristocratic tone devastatingly familiar.
Cut again to the woman in a hospital bed. Maybe a week had passed. A little hair had grown back around the sutures. The woman finished an innocuous conversation with a nurse about what she wanted for lunch, then turned to the camera and said, “Hello, my dears, I’m back!” Then she winked.
She sounded like the woman in the cab, but Tom 1 knew it wasn’t her. Not anymore.
Ruth and Veronika watched the message at the same time. There was stunned silence.
Then Veronika screamed, “I know her!”
“From where?” asked Tom.
“Downtown Santa Barbara!” said Veronika. “Met me in a chat room. Friended her at a coffeehouse yesterday and she came on fast.”
“Calm down,” said Tom.
“Der gehenem iz nit azoi shlecht vi dos kumen tsi im,” said Ruth.
“Hell is not so bad as the way to it,” repeated Tom.
“Oh my God,” said Veronika.
Major Tom scoured the nets for an image of the woman in the video. He found her: Samantha Nugent, a.k.a. Sammi, a biotech sales rep living in San Jose. He called her GO but got only her answering message. Checked her financial records. Her apartment lease was prepaid for a year. Her bills were on auto-pay. When he called her employer, he was told she had quit by e-mail after disappearing two months ago.
“Veronika,” Tom said, “let us know as soon as you see or hear from her again.”
“Dude, she’s coming here.”
“Where?” asked Tom.
“My house. Ten minutes!”
While Major Tom set up a satellite feed over Veronika’s house, he reran the video for himself. Watching this woman become another victim to his own technology made him consider Amanda’s question anew. Why did he get to choose?
“Before Carter left the Memory Palace,” said Tom, “he planned this, sent a copy of himself without me knowing, found a victim, lobotomized her, and used her body so she’d be completely functional and ready when he left for good. I understand how he did it, in theory. But I didn’t think anyone would do it yet.”
“Well, that thing is turning up here,” said Veronika.
“Carter knows you know me,” said Tom. “What do you want to do? I’ll help you run, hide, take your family, anything.”
“Let’s get the mofo,” said Veronika.
“Du bist meshuga,” said Ruth.
“That means you’re crazy,” said Tom. “She’s not wrong.”
“Dude,” said Veronika. “This is my turf. Let’s figure out what Carter’s after. If he wanted me dead, that bitch coulda killed me on the street yesterday. Now nine minutes!”
Thoughts raced. About Carter. About Sammi Nugent. About downloading into robots or humans. About the nature of identity. About the ethics of being human. About the next stage of economics, politics, and society at large.
And ultimately, about why the hell it always involved him.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Tom 1 left the alley off Union and headed up the hill. A young couple in their twenties strode straight for him. Both looked like they hadn’t seen a shower in a few weeks. As they passed, the man shoved him with his shoulder, hard. The woman kicked behind his kneecaps so the gyros could not correct the imbalance. He crashed onto the pavement, which sent “pain” signals to his AI brain. He looked down. The skin had torn on the palms of both hands, exposing the inner workings.
Tom 1 was in trouble. This body wasn’t designed for hand-to-hand combat. He quic
kly sent his sensory information to Ruth with an SOS.
The couple dragged him back into the alley, away from the street cameras. They had done this before.
“Help!” he yelled at the sleeping man behind the dumpster.
The man didn’t respond. The woman kicked him with her boot. The man didn’t move at all.
Her partner sat on Tom 1’s chest, and she sat on his knees, making it impossible for him to gain any leverage.
“You run away from your owner?” asked the male.
“No,” said Tom 1.
“Ooh, you fancy talker!” squealed the female. She ran her fingers along Tom 1’s skin. “Nice hair, too!”
The man studied the robot carefully, opening up clothing, locating the skin seals, looking into his eyes. “Top of the line, plus aftermarket upgrades. This is big!”
A street camera must have sent an alert. A law enforcement drone flew toward them.
“Help!” said Tom 1.
“Don’t worry!” said the man to the LED as he shut Tom 1’s jaw with his hand. “Sexbot went bonkers. Rebooting it.”
The female wagged her finger at Tom 1. “You have to learn to stop turning tricks on the street, or else your privates’ll need reprogramming!”
The drone hovered for a few more seconds, taking footage, then flew away. Cops weren’t too interested in human-on-robot violence, real or imagined. With the drone out of sight, the female unzipped Tom 1’s fly and pulled down his pants. “Wowee! Never saw one ’a these out in the wild,” she whispered. “You musta cost your sugar momma something!”
“Or daddy . . . ,” the male sneered. “Maybe Roberto can move this for us? Not a drone, but big money. He’s gotta have a buyer.”
“Ruth!” Tom 1 hadn’t realized he would vocalize the call. He stopped his vocal transmissions and continued the message. “They’re drone thieves!”
“You gotta alarm?” The woman turned to the man. “Told ya it was a sugar momma.”
“He learns too fast. Turn him off,” said the male. “We need to replace his GPS.”
“How much she pay to get you back, puppet?” the female teased.
“You m-m-messed with the wrong sugar m-m-momma!” Ruth yelled through Tom 1’s mouth speaker.
“Turn him off!” said the male. “Owner has tracking!”
He got off Tom 1’s chest and rolled him over. The woman snaked her hand under a flesh flap near the junction of the neck, spine, and shoulder blades, looking for the off switch. It was enough to allow Tom 1 to free his arms, and he smacked her with all his strength, enough to send her flying six feet away. Her head cracked on the concrete. She looked unconscious, but not dead. He rolled the other way as the male leapt back on top of him. Tom 1 quickly aimed two fingers right into the man’s eye sockets. Only one made its target.
The man screamed and grabbed at his bloody left eye. He ran full force at Tom 1, screaming, knocking him back like a battering ram. He hit the ground with a crunch, and the male began to bash his head on the pavement over and over.
First, audio stopped. Then his vision failed with a single fizzle to black. Touch was the last to go. He could feel the beating his mechanical body was taking, but before his touch sensors shut down, he sensed that he was no longer being used as a punching bag. The man must have abandoned his girlfriend and run away to save his eye, leaving Tom 1 in the alley, perhaps to pick up later.
“Ruth, get the robot out of there!” said Major Tom, safe in his server.
“Called robotics team,” said Ruth. “With the location. Don’t get them hurt! You had to be a big man. Such a schmuck!”
“Thanks for the encouragement, Ruthie. But I need a real body. Like Carter’s.”
There was a long pause before she spoke. “We shipped Tom 2 to Wenzhou.”
“I hope it can work there. But I need a real meat body here.”
“Bist meshugeh?”
“No. Still not crazy. We’re not going to kill anyone. We need to find someone who’s the right kind of almost dead.”
“Zol Got mir helfen.”
“God won’t help any of us.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
With no body to operate on the ground in San Francisco, Major Tom looked over the figurative shoulders of his team through whatever cameras he could.
“Oh my fucking God,” Veronika muttered into her mic. Her hands sculpted the air around her, moving, manipulating, and analyzing file after file of data from her bedroom in Santa Barbara. “All the cryptos. They’re just, like, gone.”
Ruth shot back from the Zumwalt’s bridge, “How gone?”
“Worthless. Some aggressive new stakes in, like, New Zealand and Australian dollars. Put some bets there. Also huge real-estate investment Down Under. And global gold . . . hell, you’d think they just invented the stuff.”
Ruth’s lips burbled. “Gold . . . If it’s from the ground. It must be more real. Fools.”
“Hell yeah,” agreed Veronika. “All currency is fake. Doesn’t matter if it’s material or digital. Dudes can’t eat gold.”
“Is our money safe?” asked Tom.
“We lost some,” said Veronika, “but what’s left is safe as it can be. For now. Hell, I missed my calling. Shoulda taken my nana’s advice and, like, gone into financial markets. Coulda been an oligarch myself!”
“It’s not what it’s cracked up to be,” said Tom. He looked at their new portfolio and agreed with Veronika. For all the world’s volatility at the moment, the places Veronika chose were safer: China for its power, Switzerland for its neutrality and banking system, and Australasia for its stable governments and people who ignored the craziness in the Northern Hemisphere if they could. Ruth had been right: they couldn’t save the world if they were poor. Too much negative press was lining up against Thomas Paine to create any kind of grassroots support. They would need brute wealth and persuasive leverage on the right people. Most people didn’t like the idea that only those with money could play the game. It ruined a “feel-good story” and offended their sense of personal agency, their romantic notions of “the people” saving the world.
In all of human history, quick and powerful change by and for the people had only worked a handful of times, usually with torment, ugliness, death, and a vast communal effort led by a critical mass of highly motivated people, including the wealthy. With Tom’s story changed and his name reviled, he couldn’t muster that kind of support anymore. People were buying the lies. Nobody would march with him.
Now there was less money than ever, and not only in his accounts. The world had lost trillions of dollars in a few days. Arguably, that value had never really existed but was instead inflated by gamblers using currencies as casino chips. But tell that to the poor people now starving and homeless, their money lost in oligarchic manipulation. Why did this have to happen over and over and over again? Would humanity never learn?
Major Tom received a live link through a TOR router from Veronika’s MR glasses, interspersing frames of video with frames of snow with dots. The human eye is slow. Anyone watching would just see her room. But for Major Tom, it contained subliminal messages and links. Veronika had to have created this ahead of time. She was proving to be a remarkable hacker.
On the satellite link, Tom saw a woman approaching Veronika’s house. “She’s walking up your driveway. Ready?”
A written message in Veronika’s frames read, Thought monsters were outta my league. Let’s do this.
This worried him, too. “What’d she call herself?” asked Tom.
Winter d’Eon. Cool name.
His search for the new name came up empty, but the last name, d’Eon, was that of a famous transgender aristocratic spy in eighteenth-century France. Carter didn’t care enough to have created a backstory, but he sure loved to reference French and American history.
Veronika’s house was a remodeled two-story tract home along Foothill Boulevard on the outskirts of Santa Barbara. She revealed all the HOME video feeds and ancillary cameras so Major To
m could watch in real time. There were twenty-two cameras inside and out, a more sophisticated rig than a fangirl hacker like Veronika should have had. On one feed, Veronika orchestrated her online life in her bedroom, trying to save crypto-investments. The doorbell rang. On another camera, Veronika’s mother, tall, slender, and delicate like her daughter, opened the door. Winter d’Eon, formerly Sammi Nugent of San Jose, stood in the doorframe, dressed like a student. A blue chambray button-down over a rock ’n’ roll T-shirt. Jeans. Flip-flops. Her hair was cut pixie short to cover the surgery scar and convey youth with a slight androgyny. She carried a backpack and a brown paper bag.
Her smile was sparkling, white, and lovely. “Hi, I’m Winter. Is Veronika home?”
“Uh . . . one moment. Honey? Your friend Winter’s here!”
“Tell her to come up!” yelled Veronika from her room.
“Upstairs, second door on the left. Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you, too, Mrs. Gascon. Have a great day.”
Winter’s smile was warm and comforting. Veronika’s mom beamed back. She was accomplished parent bait. She climbed the stairs with a relaxed saunter, in complete control. That worried Tom even more.
The door to Veronika’s room opened. Winter strolled in, flopped down on Veronika’s bed, and kicked off her flip-flops. Veronika flipped her MR glasses to record.
“How’s the farmers’ market?” asked Veronika.
“Always yummy. Got some organic grapes and raspberries for us.” Winter took in the entire room. “Oh my God, you’re a serious Major Tom fan! Me, too!” Then she lounged suggestively on the pillows and offered the brown paper bag to Veronika.
“Really?” Veronika moved to the bed and sat next to Winter.
Winter noticed the Thomas Paine tissue sample on the shelf. “Wow! Now that’s something I don’t have. Is it real?”
“It’s real.”
“Shit.” Winter crawled off the bed, moved to the shelf, picked up the crystal display, looked at it from all sides, and put it back. “That’s impressive. And pricey, I bet. Can’t afford that on a grad-slave stipend.” She grinned and flopped back onto the bed. “How’d you get it?”