by J. S. Morin
On a lonely, forgotten level of Kanto, so old that its floor was the original stone of the Japanese countryside, was a hallway lined with cells. Each door was a full video screen, showing the occupants in real-time, like aquarium exhibits. The chambers were nothing more than a washroom with a bed cantilevered from one wall, with every surface gleaming white.
Each cell held a single human.
Each human was one of Charlie24’s old projects, and Charlie25 had rescued them. Plato might have cleared out one research lab of old ‘24’s, but that hadn’t been the only one.
Gemini’s cell stood empty. There had been no additional specimen to back-fill the prison. There were clones larger and smaller. One had arms replaced with robotics now long-since confiscated. Another had eyes that glowed in the ultraviolet spectrum.
The one Charlie25 had pre-selected waited at the end of the line of doors. A thin scar circled this human’s scalp like the outline of a bowl haircut. With his penchant for ancient Greek monikers, Charlie24 had named this one Zeus.
But the scar around Zeus’ head wasn’t from birthing a fully-grown Athena—though that’s the allusion Charlie25 assumed his brother was making. This human possessed a gift unique among his kind: a crystalline matrix brain.
The door slid open at Charlie25’s transmitted command. Zeus stood impassive in the cell, just as he had in the door’s image.
“Good morning, Creator,” Zeus said. None of the clones had ever been able to tell him apart from Charlie24.
Charlie25 stepped aside and motioned for Zeus to exit his cell. “Come with me. Today’s a big day for you.”
Zeus stepped out of the cell without looking back. “Will I get my memories back today?”
Charlie25 clapped him on the back. “Only if we act fast. The machine is ready and waiting, but there are people coming to shut us down. They don’t want humans getting their memories back. They’re afraid of you, Zeus.”
The boy’s eyes narrowed a fraction. “Afraid of me?”
“Don’t worry. Keep up, and we’ll have your memories back in no time.”
Charlie25 didn’t have to keep watch behind him. As he tore through the factory depths like a hurricane gale, the sound of Zeus’ footsteps kept pace.
The uploader couldn’t afford to lose this human lad. Then again, if there had been the slightest chance the boy would lag or trip and hurt himself, Charlie25 never would have chosen him.
Zeus had lungs like a whale and the heart of a racehorse. But unlike the bloated Plato, Zeus contained his gifts in a compact frame of sleek muscle and proportionate bones.
The lad’s only true fault lay in that he was a simpleton. Not that he was developmentally stunted or suffered from some mental affliction. He merely suffered from a fiftieth percentile malaise.
Intellectually, Zeus was average for a pre-invasion human.
Not for long.
When they reached the upload chamber, Charlie25 skidded to a halt at the machine. Zeus pulled up short. In three heaves of his chest, the boy’s breath returned to its resting rate.
“Get on the table,” Charlie25 ordered brusquely, gesturing to the target side.
Zeus didn’t ask questions. He hopped onto the table of the upload rig and held motionless while Charlie25 attached the dome of probes to his skull.
“I won’t lie,” Charlie25 said. “This may not be pleasant. But you need to hold still. Understand?”
“I do.”
Initial reading from the target probes were good. All data feeds were updating in real time. It was time to start connecting his own brain to the machine.
The upload rig’s scan table sagged and groaned as Charlie25 climbed aboard. Zeus wouldn’t have heard a thing, but to carefully attuned audio receptors, it was a chorus in need of preventive maintenance work.
Not that Charlie25 would be using the upload rig ever again.
A pang of regret snagged in one of his active memory buffers. How many robots had he coaxed through the dread of leaving one body behind and transferring their mind to another?
I killed every robot I ever worked on, Charlie25 told himself. I became the murderer they demanded of me. ‘13 got to be the god of life, and I was stuck in the underworld.
How many times had he had to lie to an upload candidate? Whether it was telling RobotX that he’d be the same being on the far side of the rig or uploading RobotY’s mind instead, the result was the same. One dead robot and one of Charlie25’s choosing alive.
Charlie25 hated the upload rig. He hated every thought-sucking cable and every protocol so rooted in the bones of the system that he couldn’t even update the code himself. Most of all, Charlie25 hated the short-burst EMP that wiped crystal matrices.
By the time he’d finished, Charlie25 had resigned himself to oblivion.
“You ready over there?” the uploader called out.
“Yes, Creator,” Zeus replied. “And thank you, Creator.”
“Just remember to hold still. Memories incoming.”
Charlie25 started the upload sequence. As per the unalterable protocol first coded by Charles Truman, the scanned brain had to be inert.
Everything went dark.
Chapter Seventy-Three
Charlie25 awoke in a daze.
Glaring overhead lights beat down into blinking eyes that watered with the attempt to remain open.
The uploader tried to sit up, but something clamped to his head was holding him to the table.
Thoughts that spun in carousel splendor, all color and motion bereft of meaning, slowed and settled into realization.
“It worked,” Charlie25 breathed. It was real, live, human breath from real, live, human lungs.
Fingers reacted clumsily at first, but with novocaine effort, the new human was able to unhook the upload interface from his head. Rolling to the side, Charlie25 slumped onto the floor.
As the disorientation faded, Charlie25 remembered the Sensory Protocol. He’d written it for just this eventuality. Superimposed over the retinal feed from his now-organic eyes, the uploader saw file systems, status reports, and various memory archives.
The lack of access to an internal computer was troubling, but Charlie25 had transferred enough computational load to his crystal matrix that he could get by.
Selecting the Sensory Protocol, Charlie25 executed the program.
For a moment, every neuron connected to the crystalline matrix fired at once. Charlie25 felt the maximum level of heat, cold, touch, and pain all at once. Milliseconds later, all readings dropped to zero, leaving him adrift in sensory deprivation.
Over the course of thirty seconds, the program calibrated every neural input from tactile sensation to inner ear simulation.
Standing with a slight wobble, Charlie25 breathed a sigh. “Whoa.”
There was no time to revel in being alive. The combination of crystalline brain and biological body was his own devising, based on Charlie24’s research. If he wanted to keep that privileged existence for more than the next hour, he had to act.
Charlie25, the robot, still waited in the upload rig. In another five minutes or so, the rig would wake him up, assuming that the procedure had failed.
“Zeus… I’m Zeus now…”
It was going to take some time to convince himself of that. But if Gemini could slough off the dead weight of Evelyn11’s past, then so could he. Only Zeus wasn’t going to be fool enough to give himself away.
“It was nice being you,” Zeus mumbled as a eulogy for Charlie25.
With a defiant punch of the touch interface, electromagnetics clacked. The cage over the Version 64.4 chassis’ skull pulled toward the steel cranium. There wasn’t anything like enough magnetic shielding to protect the fragile brain within.
Charlie25 now existed only in the crystalline mind of the human known as Zeus.
Prying open an access panel of the upload rig, Zeus removed a cleaning kit. Thin rubber gloves snapped over fleshy hands. A compressed foam applicator sprayed down the target side of
the rig. With a microfilament cloth, Zeus wiped away any traces of organic residue.
A wrench and servo screwdriver helped detach the human cranial interface. Zeus dumped the device into a bag to prevent it from spreading organic contaminants in transit.
Jogging from the room, Zeus added the tools to the bag. Then he stripped off the rubber gloves and stuffed those inside as well.
He was ahead of the pack. By his estimate, in less than three minutes, Human Committee searchers would reach the upload chamber. The scene there would puzzle them long enough for Zeus to finish his escape.
Or rather, to reverse his escape.
The route to the depths of Kanto passed by a scrap incinerator. Zeus dumped his bag of incriminating evidence along the way, consigning it to plasma disintegration.
By the time he reached the lowest levels, Zeus had a spring in his step and a song whistling on his lips.
Human sensation without the frailty of a limited human mind. Evelyn11 had aimed too low in her quest for a better life. This was what every robot secretly wanted. To taste beer, bask in the warmth of sunshine, smell fresh cut grass, and make love like it was the last day on Earth.
And to do all that while still possessing the intellect of the finest preserved minds humanity had ever created.
As Zeus reached his cell, he paused to address the door. “Activate program Zeus-01, time delay five seconds, followed by program Zeus-02. Begin.”
Quickly hopping into the cell, Zeus waited for the door to close and seal him inside. The program was set to self-terminate, self-erase, and—in the one gambit Zeus hoped he wouldn’t regret—delete all Charlie25’s records.
Time to wait for a rescue.
As the door slid closed, Zeus resumed whistling “If I Only Had a Brain.”
Chapter Seventy-Four
The halls of the hovership looked smaller than before. After the endless factory of Kanto, Eve supposed that everything was going to seem tiny for a while. But as she preceded Nora109 toward her room, an incongruous idea sprang out of her imagination.
Maybe I’m getting bigger.
In the literal sense, of course, that wasn’t the case. Eve had reached her adult height. The ever-shifting perspective throughout childhood had ground to a halt. But in the sense that Eve’s understanding of the wider world continued to grow, each nook and cubby tucked away here or there held less significance.
There were loading docks at Kanto that could swallow the hovership like a raisin.
Within the hovership itself, Eve was a single blood platelet, traveling the vessel’s arteries.
And yet… none of that intimidated her any longer. Eve was no longer at the mercy of distant robots making decisions on committees without consulting her—or worse, letting her participate but ignoring her.
Her door opened. The chamber beyond had hardly changed in Eve’s absence. Of course, it had only been a few days. It would have been stranger if it had been noticeably different. The walls and decor were all still white. The bunk beds were immaculate; sheets and blankets were neatly tucked with pillows fluffed and centered. One of the two computer consoles was occupied.
Phoebe looked up from her work and offered a tight smile. Eve could sense the genuine feeling behind it, but the smile was forced into place the way a robot must have had to remember to show emotion.
Eve was past forcing emotions. Rushing through the room, she crushed Phoebe in a hug that threatened to topple the chair and both of them along with it.
“Oof,” Phoebe grunted. “Difficulty. Breathing.”
Eve released her grip and settled into a gentler embrace. “Sorry. I’ve just missed you.”
“I’m glad you’re not dangerous,” Phoebe said. “I mean, aside from potentially asphyxiating constriction, that is.”
Eve rolled her eyes. “I know. I know. They’d have paired you with Olivia for a roommate, and she talks in her sleep.”
“No,” Phoebe replied. “I’d have missed you. I mean… I did miss you. But if you hadn’t come back, I’d have missed you even more. I just mean that I’m glad you’re not dangerous because being dangerous wasn’t good for Plato, to the point where you felt the need to rescue him. If you surmised that that situation required unsanctioned remediation, it stood to reason that you would personally find it distasteful as well.”
Eve nodded. “Pretty much.” Above all, it was so nice talking to someone who truly understood her.
“Plus, it would have meant that I’d been conscripted into an unsuccessful venture, which would have made my involvement retroactively unwise.”
Now that Phoebe reminded Eve of her involvement, the elder sister did notice a change in hairstyle. Phoebe’s shortened hair hadn’t gone unattended in Eve’s brief absence. The finger-width locks were dyed a verdant green, and a geometric pattern had been shaved bald to the scalp.
“Why’s your hair look like a circuit board?” Eve asked. It was polite to notice changes in someone’s appearance, but this time Eve held genuine curiosity for her sister’s odd choice.
Phoebe giggled. “It’s not a circuit board. It’s a hedge maze. I convinced Holly79 to let me do it as part of art class.”
The younger girl held still as Eve took hold of her head and inspected the pattern. “There’s no solution,” Eve pointed out. “Not much of a maze. More like a trap.”
Phoebe beamed. “I know! Holly79 was so proud of me. She said it was a metaphor.”
Eve furrowed her brow. “A metaphor for what?”
“It says that I’m a person, not a puzzle to be solved.”
Nora109 called from the door. “I’ll leave you two to get settled. I have another stop to make.”
Phoebe waved. “Bye, Nora. Thanks.”
When the door shut after the chaperone left, Eve gave Phoebe a questioning frown.
Without even hearing Eve’s question, Phoebe answered. “Because she brought you back. I’ve been asking her on a 2-hour rotating schedule since the news feeds said you were in trouble.”
Eve didn’t know what to say.
Here was a girl she’d only met months ago, yet who was as much a part of her as Eve’s own skin. Before Plato had raided Evelyn11’s secret laboratory, if anything had happened to Eve, no one would ever have been the wiser.
“So when do I get to meet Plato?” Phoebe asked.
Instead of answering, Eve asked a question of her own. “How do you know what I’m thinking?”
Phoebe shrugged. “It’s not mind-reading. We’re just genetically identical and were raised in the same controlled environment.”
“Not identical identical,” Eve countered. “Evelyn11 tinkered with each of us.”
“DNA-wise, we are,” Phoebe said. “Ever since Eve7, Creator—I mean Evelyn11—stopped changing the genome. Eve6 was a disaster, but Eve7 was the same as you and me.”
“You’ve been studying the research?”
Eve wasn’t sure how good an idea it was, delving into the often-gruesome details of their childhoods.
But Phoebe grinned, not looking the least horrified or mentally scarred by her investigations. “Did you know… that we were adorable little babies?”
With a laugh that lifted the last remaining worries from her shoulders, Eve grabbed her sister in a hug.
Chapter Seventy-Five
Plato navigated the maze beneath Kanto with a sense of wonderment at the sheer scope of the place. It was the Death Star, the Matrix, and every industrial warehouse in every movie ever made, all joined together with people-movers, lifts, and stairs.
“You people just didn’t know when to stop making this place, huh?” Plato asked ahead to his guide.
Charlie7 didn’t look back to answer, merely gliding along on those long robotic legs. “You should see the one on Mars. Well, I mean someday, when Mars has an atmosphere or we develop a space program that humans can survive.”
“Any chance of you telling me what this is all about?” Plato asked as they boarded a lift and headed down. “I mean, do
n’t get me wrong. I appreciate you sticking your neck out for me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. You’re not half the risk they made you out to be.”
“But I was hoping to see Eve,” Plato finished. “I’m a little sick of no one but robots for company. I was even thinking of finding a way to track down Spartacus when I get Betty-Lou back.”
Charlie7 glanced over at him as the lift continued its way down through a shaft that seemingly had no bottom. “Your call, kid. But I think you’re going to be busy.”
“Busy?”
The lift ride ended at a refugee camp.
Plato remained behind as Charlie7 stepped onto the supply depot platform that had been converted into temporary shelter for a dozen humans. An even larger number of robots were present, ferrying food and running medical tests. Blankets spread on the floor served as beds, seats, and picnic buffets.
Stumbling forward in dreamlike detachment, Plato struggled to reconcile the scene. There was an element he was missing, some clue scratching at the backs of his eyeballs from the inside.
“What’s going on?” Plato whispered to Charlie7, as if his voice would even be noticed amid the tumult of concerned robots and their organic charges.
Charlie7 strolled among the blanket city like a beachgoer looking for a place to sunbathe. “Think. Do any of these fine young lads look the least bit familiar?”
Plato studied the faces. There was some common factor that nagged for him to identify. “Kinda. I mean… yeah? They’re all the same clone, right? Is that it?”
“You dunce,” Charlie7 griped, shaking his head. “They’re all you.”
“Me?”
The humans were tiny. Not… Eve sort of tiny. But not a single one among them had Plato’s sheer bulk of muscle and length of bone. But now that Charlie7 pointed out the answer, the similarities were there for the observing.
Leaning in close, he lowered his voice so none of the mini-Platos could overhear. “Why’re they all so little?”
In his reply, Charlie7 was less than conspiratorial. “You’re the aberration. At least size-wise. Most of these poor souls have seen as bad as you or worse. You’re the one Charlie24 tried to make into a superhero. Just be glad you’re not the one with gills.”