by J. S. Morin
“That’s nice,” Charlie25 replied absently.
Evelyn11 slammed her palms on the desk. “You’re not listening to me!”
“No. I’m not.”
The geneticist made an awful noise, like a steam engine with a leaky boiler. “I will. Not. Be. IGNORED.”
Instead of stomping around to Charlie25’s side of the desk, as he had expected, Evelyn11 climbed onto the desk, crossing it on all fours and grabbing the uploader by the collar.
Dull orange glows in the pits of Evelyn11’s eyes flared bright and narrowed. Her face was mere centimeters from Charlie25’s.
“Neither of us is flesh and blood,” Charlie25 said softly. “But this is still unseemly.”
The pinpoints of Evelyn11’s eyes relaxed into widened circles. With a quick glance to either side, as if anyone could have been watching, she released her hold on Charlie25.
By the time Evelyn11 glanced at the monitors from Charlie25’s side of the desk, he’d switched the display to a feed of automaton locations. It acknowledged that he was monitoring the chase without allowing the crazed geneticist to watch the fun.
“I believe you were going,” Charlie25 prodded.
Evelyn11 wagged a finger at him as she departed. “You’ll alert me the instant Eve is recaptured. The very instant.”
“Of course, I will.”
Chapter Forty-Two
In a distant sector of Kanto, another robot watched the chase with a less intimate display of the proceedings.
Charlie13 stood before his wall of display screens. They were the only source of light in the room, the images reflecting off the glossy shine of his impeccable polymer steel skin.
One section of displays showed various wire-frame views of the Kanto factory. A vertical line of monitors all combined to show a running list of automaton designations and locations.
UNIT 5848103 LOST.
UNIT 5848104 LOST.
The reports and the last known locations of units 5848103 and 5848104 filtered into the wire-frame maps. Two blue dots appeared where the automatons had been terminated.
A trail was developing. A line of blue dots traced a path through the center of an anomaly that was too great to be coincidence. Drone workers were deviating from their duties throughout the region around that line, converging on an anticipated path.
Eve and her friend were being pursued.
Charlie13 hated excitement. Disruption caused delays. Aberrations never correlated to quality.
And yet, here was a chase in his own factory, taking drones off the production lines and getting them terminated. That the drones had fallen victim to the same EMP rifle that had been aimed at Charlie13, there was no doubt. Good to know the design worked, at least. He would have hated himself for feeling uneasy beneath the aim of a malfunctioning weapon.
When he’d had enough of watching the proceedings passively, Charlie13 sent baseline reset codes in a flood, one to each of the affected drones.
Nothing happened.
The drones should have reverted to their everyday programming, ignoring any recent additions.
Charlie13 tried again, this time sending a factory reset code that should have left the drones little better than expensive marionettes. It would take hours to get them all back online and working again.
A hint of anger was squelched in utero by an aggressive subroutine in Charlie13’s matrix. The blip of a signal was enough for the mixer to acknowledge his frustration without falling victim to whimsical bouts of pique.
“Who could be causing this much trouble?”
As soon as he spoke the words aloud, Charlie13 realized the answer. Only another Charlie could be locking him out of his own systems.
Charlie25 probably didn’t even realize that Charlie13 could directly access the drones in that section of the factory. That was upload territory. Charlie13 only monitored it because of the overlap in parts usage for several of the newer models.
By all rights, Charlie13 could have screamed his head off to any number of committees. The Kanto Production Oversight Committee, the Offworld Mining Committee, and both the Upload and Mixing Committees would have sent delegates immediately. The hovership operated by the Human Committee would have diverted course to Kanto at the first hint of Eve Fourteen’s location.
To hell with them all.
Kanto belonged to Charlie13. He’d be damned if he allowed matters to boil over the lip of his pot.
Automatons weren’t the only networked systems in Kanto. If Charlie13 couldn’t gain control of the workforce, he’d commandeer any other system he could lay bytes on.
Chapter Forty-Three
Eve careened around a corner, using her hands to brace her impact against the wall. Gemini slammed shoulder first into the same spot seconds later.
Any semblance of an organized detour had evaporated quicker than spit on a griddle—Plato’s method of choice for testing whether it was hot enough for cooking.
Much as Eve wanted to sprint ahead and put as much distance as she could between her and the pursuing drones, she couldn’t. Gemini was slower footed. She couldn’t bring herself to abandon her friend.
At the next stairwell, Eve grabbed the railings and used the gloves to protect her hands as she slid down.
“Catch,” Gemini shouted down.
Eve whirled just in time to cushion the impact of the EMP rifle against her chest.
Gemini followed Eve’s lead, but without gloves, she winced all the way down the railings. Eve cringed in sympathy at the squeegee sound of Gemini’s skin on steel.
At the bottom of the stairs, Gemini grabbed the weapon and slung it over a shoulder. “Don’t let’s stand here gawking like cuttlefish. Move!”
“Right.”
Gemini shouldered past, taking the lead as she panted to recover her breath. Eve barely had to jog to keep up.
They traversed areas of fenced-in catwalks before coming into a quality control area with proper walled corridors. The factory echoed with encroaching drones, and putting solid walls between them and the noise helped calm Eve’s pounding heartbeat.
But while the corridor walls kept the ambient noise of pursuit from crushing inward upon the two fugitives, the steel footsteps of one pair of drones continued.
“Behind us,” Eve shouted, ducking.
Gemini swung her rifle around as a pair of drones entered from a side passage. The magnetic blast should have done nothing to Eve biologically, but she still felt the need to offer Gemini a clear shot.
The rifle hummed.
One drone collapsed.
A faint click from the trigger came without any further result.
Gemini tried again to fire, but nothing happened.
Eve sprang to her feet. Grabbing Gemini by the arm, she towed the larger girl along until the realization set in that they needed to run.
“But the power indicator…” Gemini moaned.
“What should you believe,” Eve shouted over the clamor as they pounded booted feet down the halls. “A blinky light that says you can fire, or the trigger that says you can’t?”
The corridor dead-ended in a door. Passing the drained rifle to Eve, Gemini quickly punched in an access code.
Nothing happened.
“Blast me,” Gemini muttered. She wiped her hands on her pants and tried again.
Still, nothing happened.
The door stood firm. There wasn’t even an error code to tell them the access panel had taken Gemini’s inputs and rejected them.
“Hurry,” Eve snapped. “Forget this one.”
With a lone drone closing in on them and no weapon to fight it, backtracking was chancy. A dozen meters back, the corridor had branched off.
This time Eve led the way, toting the EMP rifle. Even though it wasn’t working now, there was always the chance they might find a spare nanosecond or two to sit still and fix it.
At the sight of the drone rounding the corner at the far end of the passage, Eve put her head down and sprinted. Behind her,
Gemini huffed like a bellows.
Despite the drone starting out closer to the side passage, Eve made it there first. She paused at the intersection and ushered Gemini ahead.
This corridor also ended in a door.
Gemini stumbled ahead. She came to a halt with one hand propped on her knee for support as the other tapped at the console that would open their escape route.
Eve held the rifle in position to fire but knew that it couldn’t.
The automaton continued its approach at a steady walking pace. With only a few meters of corridor between it and the intersection, it might as well have been traveling at the speed of sound.
“No… no… NO!” Gemini pounded a fist on the door console. “Bloody tin man’s got us bang to rights!”
A cheerful ding rang out from the other branch of the corridor.
Eve tore her gaze from the encroaching drone and saw a green light on the door panel down back the way they’d first tried.
“Hurry up! This way!”
“We already—”
“Now!” Eve ordered.
There wasn’t time.
Gemini lumbered past, sucking air. Eve pressed the rifle into her hands just before the automaton closed in.
The drone stopped. Tentative robotic fingers reached for Eve’s arm. A dull, unthinking reflection shone in the machine’s camera eyes.
Eve hopped a step back, just out of the thing’s reach. As it lurched forward to close in, Eve dropped to the floor and swept a kick at the drone’s lead foot.
Boot impacted steel. The drone outweighed her five times over. But forty kilos can topple two hundred with proper leverage. And with its unsupported foot off the ground, Eve spoiled the drone’s balance.
Two hundred kilos of steel and mechanical actuators flailed for purchase without any handhold to grab for support.
Eve rolled away as the drone crashed to the ground beside her, mechanical hands whirring as the fingers grabbed for her flesh.
At the end of the corridor, Gemini stood at the now-open doorway. “You’re a nutter. Don’t do that ever again.”
Eve offered a weary grin as she jogged past. “You’re welcome.”
Chapter Forty-Four
The door snapped shut behind them quick as a mousetrap.
Gemini jumped, considering how close it had come to taking her arm off.
When she attempted to lock the door, the console showed it already secured.
“Did you do that?” Eve and Gemini said in unison.
Eve shook her head. “Wasn’t me.”
Gemini took a few long breaths to calm down and recover her center. “Nor I.”
“Someone is sending drone workers after us,” Eve stated as if she were an attorney presenting evidence. “Now it appears someone’s unlocking doors and shutting them behind us. Safe to say it’s not the same someone.”
Eve wasn’t even winded. For the first time, Gemini didn’t feel the claws of envy when she noticed. She smiled so faintly it barely made its way to her lips.
Good craftsmanship. That’s what Eve was. But what was Gemini?
While Eve was puzzling over who was moving the pieces on the chessboard that was Kanto, Gemini knew quite well.
Gemini swore beneath her breath. When Eve turned and raised an eyebrow, she rubbed at her injured shoulder to give the impression that it was the source of her frustration. But Gemini could put two names in the line of fire of her cursing.
Charlie13 and Charlie25 were having a scuffle. Eve and Gemini were merely caught in the crossfire like the hapless Greeks of ancient myth. With Zeus dead in the person of Charlie7, had Charlie13 and Charlie25 taken on the roles of Poseidon and Hades?
Gemini didn’t relish the idea of being pawns in the gods’ chess match. Not for nothing, she knew both Charlies and the elder Charlie7 in whose shadow all the others languished. Not a bloody god among them; just a gaggle of self-aggrandizing showmen.
“We should keep moving,” Eve said, stooping down to look the huffing Gemini in the eye.
Forcing herself to her feet, Gemini snapped a nod. “Right. On with us, then.”
Charlie25 must have discovered that she’d gone to Charlie13. Gemini was now a liability. But why the counterplay? Was Charlie13 intent on discrediting ‘25? What was in it for him?
At the next intersection, Eve paused instead of choosing a direction; Gemini blundered into her from behind. Gemini didn’t bother apologizing, and Eve seemed barely to notice, so intent on whatever calculations went on inside that marvelous brain of hers.
Two branches left and right ended in console-controlled doors. Straight ahead, the corridor continued to a T intersection in the distance.
A ding sounded, and Eve’s head jerked to the right. Gemini was willing to accept the audible cue as Eve took off after it. Of course, it could just as easily have been the lure of a trap, but Gemini was already down the path of following the lead of her young genius. She tried to envision Eve as a navigational aid, constructed by Evelyn11 and set into the dashboard of a skyroamer. It was the sort of dry irony that Evelyn11 had appreciated, juxtaposing humanity in place of machinery in the most mundane of functions; Gemini no longer found it funny.
Down the right-hand corridor, the console by the door blinked green. Eve broke into a grin. “It’s Plato. It’s got to be. He’s broken free on his own, and he’s hacked into the Kanto systems.”
Could it be? The gargantuan human had shown surprising ingenuity of his own. After all, he’s stolen Eve14 from beneath Evelyn11’s nose. But this would have been no covert operation against an unsuspecting scientist. Plato was being watched around the clock by robots who knew his prior deeds.
“Perhaps,” Gemini cautioned. “But let’s not allow optimism to make us sloppy.”
Gemini followed as Eve headed for the promise of an unlocked door.
Who could blame Eve for unwarranted optimism? What did the girl know of the background politics that plagued the committee-shackled entirety of planet Earth? Of course Eve’s thoughts would circle back to the only friend she thinks she has, rather than the puppeteers and shadowy power brokers behind the scenes.
The beckoning door led them out into a cavernous open section of the factory. Overhead, gantries dangled chains to haul heavy equipment from one side of a vast drop to the other. Grated catwalks ran to either side from the door, but none crossed.
Across the far side of the empty expanse, a door console blinked green.
“Bloody me,” Gemini grumbled. “We ought to have brought the skyroamer.”
“We’d never have—oh, sorry,” Eve said with a sheepish grin. “You were joking.” Eve edged up to the safety railing and peered over the edge. “Long way down.”
“We should double back,” Gemini said. “Come up on a higher floor. Look, those chains are close enough to grab hold if we were up there.”
Gemini pointed out a landing the next level up from their current perch. In the process, she edged too close to the railing herself and caught a good look straight down.
Her stomach lurched.
“You all right?” Eve asked as Gemini horked up the last of her stomach’s contents. The slurry of oatmeal bar and digestive fluid dripped through the grated steel to whatever lay just below.
“Peachy,” Gemini croaked. “Just vertigo. Perfectly natural reaction to seeing the yawning mouth of hell staring up at you.”
“We can’t go back,” Eve stated.
Gemini rose on shaky legs. “Nonsense. We just—” She caught sight of the door console and its impertinent little red X. “No, I suppose we can’t.”
“It’s not that far. We can climb up.”
Gemini gave Eve an appraising look. Forty-five kilos. She could manage that.
Squatting and gripping Eve around the thighs, Gemini lifted. The slender, compact acrobat of a girl held rigid as a fireplace poker. As soon as she could reach, Eve grabbed the edge of the catwalk and pulled herself up the rest of the way.
Seconds later, Eve�
��s face appeared over the edge. “See? Easy.” She reached down a hand.
Gemini snorted and instead of taking the offered help, handed Eve the rifle. “Stand back.”
While Eve might have been the more nimble and sprightly, Gemini had advantages of her own. First and foremost, she was head and shoulders taller, with arms as long as Eve’s legs.
With a powerful leap, Gemini caught hold of the support beams that formed a lattice beneath the catwalk. Kicking her legs, she swung back and forth, back and forth, building momentum.
Then on one pass, Gemini released her grip and latched on higher up. From there, she managed to hook a foot and scramble onto the floor beside Eve.
“That was amazing,” Eve gushed, helping Gemini to her feet.
Gemini smiled as she steadied herself. She felt her cheeks flush like a schoolgirl’s at Eve’s admiration.
“You didn’t even look down!”
That was when Gemini froze. Gripping the safety rail in both hands as if to wring its neck, she dared to peek over the edge.
In her scramble, Gemini had traversed a meter to the right. When she’d climbed onto the catwalk, below her had been an unbroken expanse a hundred meters or more to the ground.
For once, Gemini didn’t miss having eyes that could estimate such distances to the millimeter.
“You go first,” Gemini offered. She needed to let the adrenaline in her system run its course. The shaking in her hands made the idea of holding onto a chain for dear life sound suicidal.
Eve handed back the EMP rifle, little better than a club at the moment. “Sure.”
As Gemini retreated to the locked door on this level and the gantry controls beside it, Eve walked to the end of the catwalk without a care in the world.
Gemini wondered where her fear of heights had been born. Was it a remnant of this body’s memories or some latent phobia of Evelyn Mengele’s? It could have belonged to Jocelyn Santos or Elizabeth Robertson, the other components of Evelyn11.
Watching Eve wedge a foot into the hook at the edge of the chain and wrap both hands tight around the links, Gemini knew she’d have to face that demon soon enough.