by J. S. Morin
“Yes, prisoners often are,” Charlie7 said. “You can’t even see the environment you created for her as similar to what Evelyn11 built up around her. Safe? Yes. But a cloying, stifling safety.”
“She is merely a child,” Jennifer81 retorted. “She requires guardianship and guidance.”
Charlie7 spread his arms. “And as soon as she slipped free of her cage, you deem her adult enough to stand trial.”
The grumbles around the room that had served as an undertone to the proceedings went silent. Eve had asked about this odd behavior in robots before and learned that for their kind, sort-range, encrypted transmissions stood in for whispers. The room around Eve was no doubt abuzz with illicit transmissions that she couldn’t overhear.
“This isn’t a trial!” Jennifer81 insisted.
“Isn’t it?” Charlie7 asked, voice dripping with venom-laced honey. When next he spoke, it was in Jennifer81’s own voice. “We’ll get them rated Dangerous Humans, designate a separate holding facility away from all the other humans, and try to raise the others to fall in line with societal standards.”
Jennifer81 knocked her chair over jumping to her feet. “Lies! I never said anything of the sort!”
“I’m sure Mary27 can confirm receipt of that message,” Charlie7 said. “Or I can just play back her reply, too. You know… I remember a time, oh, centuries ago now, when you people didn’t try to end-run around me. You knew better. Did you think I retired because I was used up, senile, or just unable to keep up with you clever new robots and your ‘13-mixed brains?”
Arthur19 crossed his arms from his spot by the wall. “Yes,” he griped.
“Well, sorry to disappoint you, Arthur, but your Privacy Committee’s just had a breach. I did appreciate that you used the encryption key that would be guessed last in a standard Truman-Chang regression attack, but for the time being, I’ll be holding onto root access to those systems. You can have them back when this mess is sorted out.”
This revelation kicked the hornets’ nest. All around the room, shouts of indignation and outrage poured in Charlie7’s direction.
“Order!” Jennifer81 shouted above the clamor. “Order! Charlie7, I suggest that you remove yourself from these proceedings and begin formulating a defense for your own actions.”
“Duly noted,” Charlie7 echoed sardonically. “But the real problem here is all of you. Plato terminated twelve robots. The loss of those minds is on your hands.” The white tuxedo glove over Charlie7’s Version 70.2 hand leveled directly at Jennifer81.
The Human Committee chairwoman drew up tall. “Me? How dare you!”
Charlie7 shrugged like a stage actor, exaggerating for the back of the audience. “How else are we to explain why a lone human was able to root out twelve rogue geneticists experimenting on humans? You spread yourself too thin, taking on too many committee positions. This job doesn’t mean enough for you to put your crystal and power supply into it. Plato poured heart and soul into saving his fellow humans, which is why he got results. If you wanted those mad scientists scolded and packed off to mine the edge of the solar system, you should have done your job better.”
“We still can’t sanction vigilante justice,” Jennifer81 snarled. But her tone was quieter, bitter rather than vitriolic.
“Oh?” Charlie sounded surprised. “Then why did you allow circumstances that demanded it? Vigilantes don’t arise when justice rules the day. Plato’s only guilty of doing your job for you. And if you don’t like how he did it, maybe you should have taken action before it came to this point.”
“That still doesn’t excuse the losses of James187, Marvin108, or John117,” Eddie51 added, possibly making a play to become Jennifer81’s successor.
Committee politics was still new to Eve, but the idea of wolves jockeying for position in a pack came up in nature documentaries. This was the same thing but with words in place of fangs. Jennifer81 was losing a battle with prey she never should have challenged, and her place as alpha was in jeopardy.
Charlie7 hung his head. “I am truly sorry for the losses of Marvin108 and John117. Even James187 had a change of heart that redeemed him.”
“Redeemed?” James63 blurted in outrage. “James187 was a good man, a hard worker, a—”
“Kidnapper,” Charlie7 cut in smoothly, without missing a beat. “Sorry ‘63, but your younger brother wasn’t just retrieving apes for Evelyn11. He was the one who recaptured Eve.”
Jennifer81 directed her gaze to Eve.
Suddenly, robotic eyes around the room all focused on her. Eve gulped. “I didn’t want him to get in trouble. He told Charlie7 and Plato where to find me. I… said that Evelyn11 recaptured me. However, I may have omitted the means of my recapture.”
Jennifer81’s next words harpooned Eve through the pride. “You little liar. How can we—”
“Come off it, Jennifer,” Charlie7 scolded. “She didn’t lie. I reviewed the transcripts—since everything from Eve’s birth to her body image scans seems to be public record now. Eve artfully avoided any untruths in her debriefing. Yes, Evelyn11 did recapture her. No, she didn’t want to talk about the details. If you wanted answers, you would have had to pressure her, and to your credit at least, you knew better on that account.”
Eve clenched her jaw shut. She had lied in the reports. Contradicting Charlie7 in the middle of insisting otherwise just didn’t seem like a wise idea.
“But,” Charlie7 said, raising a finger and waving it in lieu of a flag. “The fault isn’t entirely yours, either. If modern society resurrected humanity before it was ready to accept them for who and what they are, the blame lies with me.”
Eve could contain herself no longer. Charlie7 couldn’t martyr himself, not after actually dying to save Eve. “No. Charlie, don’t. It’s not your fault at all.”
Charlie7 disentangled himself from the hand that gripped the cold metallic flesh of his wrist. “But it is. You see, I made you. All of you. I stood for one long, dark night on this Earth as the only thinking creature on a barren rock orbiting an uncaring sun. Since then, I’ve put in place the most elaborate Rube Goldberg machine in history to restore the Earth to the glorious blue marble it once was, filled with animals, plants, and most of all, people.
“But I constructed it in the most haphazard fashion. My machine was made up of many smaller ones and rife with free will boiling out of every crack and crevice. A thousand years and more, it’s taken. None of you remember back that far.
“But I do.
“I’ve waited for this moment longer than any of you. And, scattershot and disjointed though it might have seemed, this has been my hope all along. This… is my life’s work.”
Charlie stood behind Eve’s chair, leaning over to bracket her face between his hands.
Eve smiled obligingly, suddenly uncomfortable beneath the weight of a thousand years of expectations.
Charlie7’s voice boomed from directly over Eve’s head. “The exact means are a different matter, but that Eve is alive, healthy, and free-willed means everything to me.”
In the brief silence that followed, Jennifer picked up her chair from the floor and sat down. Lacing her fingers together, the chairwoman took on an appearance of control. “That was very eloquent, but it doesn’t change the core matter at hand.”
Charlie waved the notion away as he breezed down the line of chairs. “Please… if you had an ounce of intellect sparking around inside that empty crystal of yours, you’d already understand. Does this look like the face of a multiple murderer to you?” He mimicked the same picture-frame hands he’d used on Eve, but this time highlighted Gemini instead.
Gemini ducked and hunched, but there was nowhere in the conference room to hide short of crawling beneath the table.
“Naivety doesn’t suit you, Charlie7,” Jennifer81 said archly. “Appearances can be deceiving.”
Charlie7 threw back his head and laughed. “This is why none of us can write a play or movie. Our own ironies shame fiction. You talk about me being
naive, about appearances being deceiving. Yet not a single robot in this room knew that Evelyn11 successfully uploaded herself to a human body.”
Gemini squirmed, and for the first time, Eve allowed herself to wonder if those dark suspicions she’d swept to the corners of her mind had been right all along. Her skin crawled at the thought.
There was an uproar throughout the room. Robots talked all at once. Jennifer81 shouted for order as Charlie7 stood clutching the high back of Gemini’s chair.
“Evidence for any such claim can be filed for a later hearing,” Jennifer81 stated. “Sensationalism aside, Evelyn11 has no bearing on the substance of this case.”
“Of course it does,” Charlie7 said, reaching around to take Gemini’s chin in hand and force it toward the chairwoman. “You’re accusing her of murder.”
Chapter Sixty-Five
Gemini pulled free of Charlie7’s grip. The unyielding hand beneath the white cotton gloves pinched like a lobster claw but loosened when she thrashed.
Stumbling out of her chair, Gemini launched the only plausible defense she could think of. “It’s not true!”
Standing before the assembled robots of the Human Committee and various lookie-loos just there for the show, Gemini felt her face warm. Her chest heaved. The faint needles of stabbing pain around the site of her knitting fracture helped tear her mind from the attention.
Blank faces stared. Unblinking dull orange glows of eyes shone spotlight focus Gemini’s way. No one spoke.
“What are you all looking at?” Gemini demanded. “This is a crazy dead robot talking to you. What about the Backup Accords? How about we talk about that a moment? Charlie7 ought to be deleted as a duplicate, not handed a forum for his lies.”
In every direction, blank stares.
No, not every direction. Just the far side of Toby22, not two meters away, Plato glared bloody death her way. Eve’s soft, sweet eyes held a mixture of contempt and disgust but not disbelief.
“How did you know?” Jennifer81 asked, her voice echoing in the silence.
It was a bloody good question. Charlie25 had the best security of any robot alive. Evelyn11 had made sure of that before ever making a deal with him.
“Oh, just a hunch,” Charlie7 admitted, sauntering past and gracing Gemini with a sly smile that the devil himself would have envied. “You get to be this old, you develop a pretty good gut instinct simulator.”
That wretch!
Charlie7 had taken advantage of Gemini’s organic mind, overwhelmed with chemical emotions and unable to disconnect reflexive reactions. It had been a trick, and despite seeing it coming, she’d been able to do nothing to stop it working.
“I have names,” Gemini blurted. “There are more out there. I know more than a few. But in return, I want immunity. I won’t be—”
At that moment, Marvin76 lunged from his seat beside Gemini, flashing a blade she hadn’t noticed him carrying. The glint paused, freeze-frame, capturing the instant of horror in which Gemini realized her life was about to end.
Chapter Sixty-Six
Bright fire blazed across the former robot’s neck and collarbone. Gemini choked as she attempted in vain to staunch the flow of blood with her hands.
While the wound burned like the flames of beckoning hell, the rest of Gemini’s body grew cold. Dizziness swept her up in a cyclone funnel without her feet moving. Her muscles stopped answering her commands.
Gemini tried to call out for help but only a gurgle answered.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Eve watched in horror as Plato leaped from his seat, vaulting over Toby22 to attack Gemini.
“He’s got a knife,” someone shouted.
How could Plato have smuggled in a weapon? They’d removed the sedative collar from his neck, but the robots trusting him much further than that seemed implausible.
That was when Eve saw Marvin76 lunging for Gemini.
Plato caught the robot by the arm just as Marvin76 slashed at Gemini’s throat. While the man made of steel and circuitry might have been the heavier and stronger, Plato’s momentum was still enough to throw the robotic assassin off course and bulldoze him to the floor.
Nora109 was on her feet in an instant, rushing to Gemini’s side. Cloth tore as Eve’s chaperone and former advocate tore a sleeve from her dress to use as a bandage.
Toby22 sprang into action as well, though with less dramatic zeal. The stocky groundskeeper was there when Marvin76 threw Plato off him, grabbing the assassin by the wrist.
Eve glanced from the bleeding Gemini to Plato, rubbing the back of his head where it had struck a chair, then to Toby22 wrestling with Gemini’s attacker. As the groundskeeper’s grip crushed the struggling assassin’s wrist actuators, Charlie7 stepped around the fray.
The cane the eldest robot had brought along seemed at that moment to be nothing more than a fancy steel bar. With a second’s pause to line up his strike, Charlie7 drove the cane through Marvin76’s sternum—or at the least the equivalent location on a robot.
Marvin76 went limp.
“Nice shot,” Toby commented. He released the paralyzed robot to dangle from Charlie7’s cane.
But Marvin76 wasn’t dead. Charlie7 had merely severed the data cables that connected his brain to the bulk of his chassis. The eyes still glowed sickly orange, fighting for escape.
Charlie7 lifted the assassin’s chassis using the cane as a skewer. “So, care to tell us who you’re working for, or do I need to download that brain of yours into an alarm clock?”
Eve wanted to see how Nora109 and the two other robots who’d rushed to help were doing with Gemini. But the spectacle of the robotic assassin was impossible to ignore.
“I work for the future,” Marvin76 croaked. Smoke rose from the seams between his cranial plates.
“Someone put him out,” Jennifer81 ordered. “He’s frying evidence.”
“Too late for that,” Charlie7 replied, watching as the robot spitted on his cane overloaded. “Must have come here with his fuses all hard-wired. This was a suicide mission.”
“Suicide mission?” Toby22 asked. “Marvin76 was always a good chap.”
Charlie7 angled his cane downward and gave a little shake. The chassis slid free and crumpled to the floor. “Probably wasn’t Marvin76.”
“Huh?” Toby asked.
Eve was glad she wasn’t the one to express that semi-word sentiment aloud.
“The upload conspiracy,” Charlie7 explained, looking around the room as if he were going to find agreement or confirmation. “What? Come now. Don’t tell me none of you believe the rumors? There’s a reason rumors like that start up. This…” He paused to kick the chassis of the supposed Marvin76. “Isn’t the first time I bet you’ve seen someone who isn’t who he claims to be.”
Toby22 cleared his throat and aimed a finger Charlie7’s way.
Again, Charlie7 laughed. Eve had missed how he could find the humor in even grim circumstances, but now didn’t seem like the time for joking.
“I admit, I’m the black pot here, kicking a kettle while he’s down,” Charlie7 said with a shrug. “But I’ve got proof of who I am. How many of you could be as convincing?”
“Clear the way,” Nora109 announced. “We’ve got to get Gemini out of here.”
Charlie7 stepped aside to let Nora109 and another robot past, carrying Gemini between them. “Let her bleed out. I tell you, it’s Evelyn11 in that skull, not the poor human who grew up in it.”
Eve trailed behind the medical volunteers, but a hand caught her by the shoulder. “Sorry, Eve,” Jennifer81 spoke softly. “But we still have business here.”
In a numb haze, Eve shuffled back to her seat.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Eve sat still in her chair, flecked with droplets of Gemini’s blood that she hadn’t noticed until the panic of the moment had faded. Now she tried not to move, lest she smear it. The thought of asking for a short recess to clean up sounded reasonable in her head, but Eve just couldn’t do it.
Knowing that it was Evelyn11 in that head was all the more disconcerting. Eve had known the old robot her whole life. Gemini had seemed nothing like her. At least, the similarities seemed so minor and innocuous as to make the comparison feel forced.
Plato leaned across the empty seat between them. “You all right?” he whispered. To the robotic ears all around the room, he may as well have shouted.
Eve nodded without looking him in the eye.
It was a quicker and easier response than trying to sort through her feelings for an honest answer. Physically, Eve was unharmed, and that’s how she chose to interpret the question.
“…charges against them have nothing to do with Eve,” Charlie7 was saying when Eve resumed paying attention. “You’d be doing the world a favor dropping them and letting everyone just move on.”
Jennifer81 made the sound of an exhausted sigh. Eve wondered how many of them remembered being human.
“Very well,” Jennifer81 said. “All in favor of dropping all charges against Eve Fourteen…”
A chorus of “ayes” surrounded Eve. For all the muck swirling in her heart, it was a spot of brightness.
“Opposed?”
Silence.
Eve blinked. None of them?
She turned and looked up to Charlie7, looming behind the conference table chairs. He noticed and winked.
Eve understood. It wasn’t that the council members all believed Eve deserved to have the charges dropped. None of the robots in the room wanted to cross Charlie7.
“And now for the matter of Plato,” Jennifer81 continued.
Before the chairwoman could continue, Charlie7 leaned over the table and blocked her view of Plato. “Come on. Really? He’s the best protector you could ever ask for. You saw him just now… human in trouble, didn’t even hesitate.”