by J. S. Morin
The plan was beginning to coalesce in Evelyn11’s mind. Charlie25 played a convoluted game. Parts of it must have been concealed from her. But the fact remained that either she went along with this willingly, or she became a liability.
At that point, Charlie25 would upload to the human and very well might delete them both. She’d be nothing more than a data point. Evelyn11 intended to wind up as much more than that.
“Fine,” Evelyn11 snapped. “But you’ll run my post-upload test. Nothing you’ve cooked up yourself will suffice.”
Charlie25 froze statue-still for a moment, then reached into a pocket and pulled out a zip saw. The blade emitted a cringe-inducing whir.
Evelyn circled to the far side of the upload rig and swung the video display arm around to hover over the target’s face.
Meanwhile, Charlie25 worked with the zip saw, cutting holes just above the foam-bundled form’s eyes. The breathing through the tube turned frantic.
“You’re spiking the adrenaline levels, Charles,” Evelyn11 scolded. “For God’s sake, sedate the thing.”
Charlie25 proceeded, ignoring the geneticist’s concern. “I’d rather compensate for a natural chemical reaction than a chemically induced state. I can handle it from here. Get in position.”
“I have done this before, Charles.”
“Well, this time it’s getting done right. You never should have gone past the wet-work without a collaborator.”
Evelyn11 looked down one last time before heading for her side of the rig. The test subject’s eyes were wide enough that whites showed around all sides. They jerked wildly as if the motion could shake them free of their sockets.
The old geneticist covered the eye cutouts with her hand. “Relax. This will all be over soon.”
Letting her shoulders rise and fall in pantomime of a sigh, Evelyn climbed into the scan side of the upload rig. Odds were, she’d just wake up, and the human would be a brain-dead pile of flesh, pre-wrapped for disposal.
The last thing Evelyn11 heard before Charlie25 powered her down was the uploader’s voice saying, “Cross your fingers…”
Chapter Fourteen
Charlie25 waited.
Patience was a precious commodity, and centuries of preparation and guidance were finally about to pay off.
The scan of Evelyn11 was nearly complete. Oh, how tempting it had been to reuse the backup file instead. The months of nagging, grousing, and demands for any chassis but the one Charlie25 had given her were certainly memories he was willing to live without.
But Evelyn11 needed to remember what she owed him.
A monitor showed the progress of the upload rig copying every bit of data from Evelyn11. Charlie25 tapped the inert chassis on the nose.
“Have to admit, that is one unpleasant chassis to look at. Jason6 ought to be ashamed of himself.”
The percentage indicator maxed out. Data replication was complete.
Charlie25 rubbed his hands together. “Now for the good part.”
There was crackle and sizzle as the upload process began. An oversight in the design of the cranial adapter, no doubt. He had neither the time nor inclination to perform delicate surgery on the test subject to implant transcranial probes.
The test subject’s scalp had broken into a sweat. Charlie25 patted the area between probes with a sponge, wishing the idiot test subject would calm down. Overwriting the autonomous functions couldn’t happen soon enough for his liking.
Upload took a similar length of time compared to data replication. Evelyn11’s earlier attempts had all slowed the process down. Why would that be any safer for a human brain? It was being rewritten. That was trauma no matter how you sorted it. Best to get it over with quickly, like yanking out a leaky coolant line.
The test subject’s breathing quickened and became irregular. It held its breath now and then, as if that might stop the electric currents and induced magnetic fields from rewriting its brain’s contents.
Wandering over to look the test subject in the eye, he saw uncomprehending fear. “What are you seeing, anyway? All those involuntary neural cross-fires, the changes to memory mid-thought. It must be downright psychedelic. Must ask Evelyn once this is over, if she has any recollection.”
The process ended minutes later. This was the point when Evelyn11’s test protocol was set to begin. Instead, Charlie25 slowly swung the display screen away from the human’s face.
The upload robot loomed over the helpless creature trapped in solid foam. He looked it in the eyes. Those frantic orbs blinked as if to clear a thought, then narrowed dangerously.
Grunts sounded from inside the foam. With a breathing tube down its throat, the human couldn’t begin to try speaking.
“Don’t worry, Gemini… that’s this form’s name, by the way. Either you’re Evelyn in there, or you’ve just had a very bad dream. Either way, I don’t think you want to be around for the disposal.”
At Charlie25’s encrypted command, the two automatons entered and unfastened the foam package from the table. The trapped human inside continued grunting inarticulate threats.
Pulling a pen-sized atomizer from his pocket, Charlie25 walked up and sprayed the contents into the breathing tube. Gemini’s eyes unfocused in an instant. The grunting stopped, and the hiss of breathing through the tube became regular.
Charlie25 waited.
When the automatons had left earshot, he reactivated Evelyn11.
“What’s happened?” she demanded, reaching up and disconnecting herself from the EMP aimed at her skull.
Evelyn11, still in her scrap-bin chassis, scrambled down from the upload rig. Her immediate reaction was to search the far side of the rig for the specimen.
“As you predicted,” Charlie25 replied with a shrug. “Still, it was worth a try.”
“Well,” Evelyn11 huffed. She smoothed out the wrinkles from being on the table. “Not to say I told you so… Where’s the body?”
“I felt that with your penchant for trophy collection, it was best if I was the one who arranged for disposal.” Charlie25 had visited the site. He had seen the shelf lined with skull after skull of failed experiments.
“Those weren’t trophies. They were keepsakes.”
“To-may-to, to-mah-to, po-tay-to… serial killer trophy case.”
Evelyn11 straightened her back. “Really, Charles! Could you be any less couth? And wipe that silly smirk from your face. What’s gotten into you?”
Charlie25 waited to compose his features. It wasn’t as if Evelyn11 would guess at the reason. “Was I smirking? I suppose it’s just an amusing experience being wrong.”
Chapter Fifteen
Hiking was nothing like treadmill running. First off, you had to look where you were going. From one step to the next, a rock or divot might pop up to trip an unwary foot. Then there were the animals. Wild creatures didn’t loiter around treadmills, as a rule, but they loved outdoor spaces and chose to live there.
What galled Eve as she navigated the Chinese countryside was the sheer size of it all. In the lab, ten kilometers was just passing time. Jogging the same two and a half meters of rubberized fabric mesh on a loop went nowhere. Out in the wind and sunshine, the scale of the map sank in.
“Why did they have to make Earth so big?” she wondered aloud.
Navigating by the position of the sun ought to have been easier. It was mid-morning. The sun was roughly thirty degrees south of due east in the sky. Even without a compass, Eve could estimate its position within a few degrees.
A neophyte outdoorswoman, Eve had failed to account for cloud cover.
Twenty minutes into her trek, a bank of gray had blocked Eve’s view of the sun.
“Someone needs to make a list,” Eve grumbled. “The outdoors is severely under-documented.”
Catching a glimpse of the hovership in the distance, Eve ducked down behind the trunk of a tree that was only twice her height. The massive robot headquarters broke through the clouds gracefully, reminding her of the whales on a
nature video she and her sisters had watched, except upside down.
Any optical scan that could pick up Eve at this distance would also be able to see her partially obscured behind a twig of a tree. With a breath to steady raw nerves, Eve prepared to move.
One thought kept her eyes fixed on the hovership. “I hope I didn’t get you in trouble, Phoebe.”
Eve hunched over as she fled deeper into the broken countryside. Soft soil kept footprints as a record. The land between hills was too low to provide cover; the tops of the hills exposed Eve if anyone was watching.
Pangs of hunger reminded Eve that she hadn’t packed any food. History would mock the first of the new humans if Eve starved to death escaping the only people with a ready supply of food. But supplies had been a necessary casualty of the escape plan.
Eve scanned the skies. “Where are you?”
It was only supposition that James187 would come at all. Eve could easily have misjudged him. There had been no way to take a computer along, and the signal it sent might have been traceable.
Robots might have overlooked building thermal scanning satellites, but they certainly had plenty of signal receivers.
Eve wondered how easy it would be for her would-be rescuers to find her optically. The fluorescent wardrobe was certainly not helping matters.
At the next shallow stream, Eve hopscotched the rocks to the far side, then proceeded to scrub her borrowed pink and yellow ensemble with mud. The whole time, she cringed.
Putting on warm, clean clothes, fresh from the cloth-o-matic felt wonderful; it was a fabric hug. This was just the opposite. The mud had all the tactile squishiness of finger paint, and the now slovenly fabric was wet and clung to her skin.
It will dry, she told herself. The rich, loamy brown would mask the candy pink that was probably bright enough to see from orbit. It was worth getting mud caked under her fingernails where no amount of washing in the stream could cleanse it all.
None of the inconveniences mattered, so long as—
“Thought I was after a panda, not a piglet.”
Eve swiveled around. A robot clad in gray and brown camouflage stood atop the raised bank of the stream, toting a rifle.
At the sight of the weapon, Eve developed a sudden-onset case of second thoughts. Perhaps contacting James187 had been a mistake.
Had the hunter regretted helping Charlie7 and Plato find her?
In her deviousness, Eve might have outsmarted herself. She had counted on James187’s discretion because he didn’t want his involvement with Evelyn11 made public.
Wouldn’t killing Eve and disposing of her remains ensure the secret died with her?
Eve crept back, not taking her eyes from James187’s rifle.
“What are you—? Oh, this thing,” James187 realized with a shake of his head. The robot slung the weapon over his shoulder by the strap.
Eve took a wary step upstream. “Why didn’t I hear you coming?”
“I left my skyroamer back at the coordinates you sent me. I’ve been on foot ever since, sweeping the area. The news feeds are barking at squirrels over your disappearance.”
“Not… literally?” Eve asked. So often a robot would say something random that couldn’t be taken at face value. It would have been comforting to know James187 wasn’t prone to that bug.
The hunter held out a black-gloved hand. “Come on. We can’t lounge here like cats on a sill. Are you coming or not?”
On tiptoes, Eve could see the distant hovership drifting in their direction. As chases went, this was a slow affair, more dread than adrenaline. But James187 was right. The longer she waited, the less likely Eve was to have the freedom to decide.
James187 carried the risk of death and the hope of freedom. The hovership filled with Human Committee busybodies promised confinement and safety.
Eve had looked death in the eye. She’d known slavery most of her life without ever having a word for it. The hovership was just Creator’s lab with more company and fewer invasive medical procedures.
Flicking the water from her fingers, Eve gave James187 a curt nod. “Right. Time I let you in on the plan.”
Chapter Sixteen
The skyroamer with Eve and James187 aboard clung to the terrain as if by magnetic force. Whenever they rose with a hill or mountain, James187 would kill off any altitude gains as soon as they crossed over a valley.
Eve’s brain knew that their low-altitude evasive maneuvering was prudent. Her stomach suggested that vomiting would solve their dilemma. The discrepancy highlighted one of the many reasons Eve didn’t let her stomach guide her actions.
Still, Eve felt her gorge rise each time they took a sudden downward trajectory.
“You all right over there?” James187 asked, glancing at her.
Nice of Mr. No-Inner-Ear to notice her discomfort.
“Peachy,” Eve replied through a clenched jaw.
“You’ve gotten snide since the last time we flew together.”
“And your piloting skills have atrophied,” Eve countered.
James187 laughed aloud. “You’re a spitfire when you’re not wetting your pants, aren’t you?”
“My pants are wetter now than last time I flew with you,” Eve shot back. Learning not to reflexively defer to robots was one of the key takeaways Eve had gained outside her official curriculum on the hovership.
They hit a flat stretch, and James187 leveled out the skyroamer’s trajectory. Eve breathed a sigh and relaxed clenched muscles throughout her body.
James187 flicked on the autopilot. “So tell me, why the Tom Sawyer act?”
Eve’s mind froze for a fraction of a second. She knew this one. Down twisting mental pathways, past shelves lined with scientists and philosophers, Eve navigated to the Hall of Popular Entertainment. It was a new wing of Eve’s mental construct, only having been organized following her introduction to the outside world.
Tom Sawyer was in there twice; once as a song, and another as an irksome rural con artist who went on unsupervised adventures as a minor.
“They don’t listen.”
James187 jerked back on the throttle. “Kid, teenagers have been saying that since before the Roman Empire. If you can’t do better than that, I’m turning around and delivering you back to—”
“Charlie7,” Eve said. “His final request was a new Charlie mix. He wanted to be remixed and started over. I looked it up; it should be Charlie42. The new robot should have gotten everything of Charlie’s.”
“Lotta trouble for a dead robot’s last request,” James187 grumbled.
Eve pressed on. “But Charlie7 was Charlie7. He wasn’t just a robot. He was my friend. And I think by the end, he was Plato’s friend, too. He’ll help get Plato out of whatever dark hole they’re keeping him in.”
James187 pulled his hands away from the steering yoke. “Whoa, hold your horses. I can imagine them keeping hush hush about Charlie7’s dying request. That’s bonkers. We can’t reuse mixes, or there’d end up being duplicate people. You can’t just make a new robot same as an old, defunct one.”
“But—”
“As for Plato,” James187 plowed on over Eve’s objection. “Maybe he had chivalrous intentions. Maybe he was just an angry experiment who got sidetracked from his greasy path of vengeance because he realized how jigsaw puzzles fit together.”
Eve squeezed her eyes shut. Nora109 didn’t talk like this. Eve’s chaperone limited her non-literal speech to one reference per exchange, usually accompanied by an explanation if it was the first time Eve heard it.
Jigsaws were hardly puzzles. They were more a test of visual acuity and color matching. Brute force was still a viable algorithm for solving one. Peeling back the most literal of James187’s possible meanings, Eve ran through the listing of likely subjects of euphemism.
In that light, the implication struck her instantly.
“Ew!” Eve exclaimed. “Plato was not distracted because I was enticing him with the prospect of procreating.”
; “What do I know?” James187 asked with a shrug. “I’ve been non-biological for three hundred years. But I’ve still got cloudy memories of having a wife, girlfriends, high school crushes—not all at once, mind you.” He chuckled at his own joke.
Eve squeezed her legs together and crossed her forearms over her lap. “You really think so?”
“Like I said… who knows? But one thing’s twenty-four karat gold: he’s hung up on you for some reason.”
“We’re friends,” Eve insisted. “Not that many humans. You know? I think it’s probably a nice idea for us to look out for each other.”
James187 eased the throttle forward again. “Well, I’ll do you this much. I’ll get you somewhere safe. Maybe find you a supply of food. After that, you’re on your own.”
Eve weighed her next words. Nora109 always insisted that words carried more power the more carefully they were arranged toward a common goal.
“This is why Charlie7 was a hero, and you hunt animals for a living.”
They flew in silence for what felt like a day, though the sun never moved in the sky behind them. Eve didn’t follow up her statement. Let the guilt gnaw at the camouflage-clad robot’s processors.
Once before, James187 had a change of heart. Was it a bug that he’d corrected? Or was he still just as vulnerable?
“Fine,” James187 agreed. His voice was a kitten’s mew, barely audible. “I’ll look after you.”
The skyroamer shot onward as Eve settled in and found them a movie to watch.
Chapter Seventeen
Evelyn11 awoke immobilized.
She was facedown. Purple-tinged water swirled down a drain half a meter from her face. The sound of a shower was muffled as if heard from the far side of a wall.
What had happened?
Last thing Evelyn11 remembered was Charlie25’s flippant humor before shutting her down. No, there had been something after. For a horrible few seconds, she had awakened in the human body. The agony had been unbearable.