by J. S. Morin
Plato’s hand went to his neck. The skin was still tender from where the sedative collar had rubbed. “Gills?”
Charlie7 pointed. “Pisces.”
Flanked by two robots in white coats, one of the smaller Platos sat passively while submitting to medical care. There were a series of slits at the side of his neck.
“We don’t know if they work or not, but no one’s planning to dunk him in the Pacific to find out.”
“Think he’s freshwater, then?” Plato asked.
Charlie7 covered his mouth as he chuckled. “Stop that. They’re not supposed to be funny. This is a travesty.”
They walked among the blanket medical camp as Charlie7 pointed out and occasionally introduced Plato to his brothers.
Heracles was lean and muscular, but his body was coated in a fine sheen of golden fur. When Plato looked him in the eyes, what he saw were the slit pupils of a feline, not a man.
Triton’s skin was covered in shimmering scales, but otherwise he seemed fairly normal. Plato’s fish-brother was amiable and had a firm handshake. It was clear that the clone was frightened and bewildered, but he was making the best of it.
When Plato met Daedalus, he hesitated before offering to shake his brother’s hand. The robotic arms looked every bit capable of crushing human bone, and the bones in Plato’s hand were newly healed. But his fears were unfounded. Daedalus barely gripped the offered hand at all and wouldn’t look Plato in the eye.
“What’s happened to all these guys?” Plato whispered between visits. “Where’d they come from?”
Charlie7 leaned close to keep his comments between him and Plato. “We found Evelyn11 and Charlie25 both wiped. It looks like Charlie25 murdered her, then self-terminated. These clones were all held captive below the upload center. Charlie25 took over ‘24’s work, it appeared. Or at least, he took custody of your creator’s experiments.”
Plato nodded. It made sense why he’d discovered so few of his own brothers among Charlie24’s other hideouts. “That explains the names.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that,” Charlie7 replied. “Charles Truman had a fondness for Greek mythology.”
Plato knew that much. He’d looked up his own name on the Earthwide soon after escaping Charlie24’s lab. Ajax had been the name of either a Greek hero of middling fame or a powdery cleaning product. That discovery had been what prompted him to choose a new name for himself.
Charlie7 introduced Plato to a handful of other variants. It made Plato grateful that he’d been the one to be huge and strong, even if that meant a few creaky joints and muscle aches. Most of his brothers were far worse off and not adjusting well to their first hours of freedom and safety.
“What’s your deal?” Plato asked the last of his brothers. This one appeared normal enough, not scaly or possessing horns or anything freaky. He sat without robot attendants, eating an apple. From the cores littering the blanket beside him, someone had shown him the proper way to eat one.
The final brother swapped the apple to his left hand and proffered the right for a handshake. The grip was firm, but not so strong as Plato’s. “Name’s Zeus. I’m the one with tact.”
“What, are you the control or something?” Plato asked with a narrowed glare.
Setting down another apple core, Zeus brushed his hair up with his fingers, revealing a thin, pink scar running the circumference of his skull. “Creator uploaded my brain to a crystal, then put the crystal into my head in its place.”
Plato backed up a step. “You’re a cyborg!”
Zeus shrugged. “I’m just glad I’m not going to pieces like those poor bastards. No brain chemicals. I mean, I remember what scared is like, but it’s not the same without the spike of adrenaline. Anyway, nice to meet you.”
Charlie7 pulled Plato aside, and they spoke near the lift. “I know it’s asking a lot. But can you help these brothers of yours? We’re going to be setting them up with someplace to live, proper education, the whole works. But they could use someone to relate to.”
“Me.” Plato didn’t need to be as smart as Eve to puzzle that one out.
“You’ve been through it. You got out. If anyone can help guide them through this, it’s you.”
Plato crossed his arms and took in the sight of the refugee camp. What he saw didn’t provoke pity or disgust; he’d had his daily dose of both already. What simmered deep inside was anger.
“Yeah. I’ll help. But I’m not cut out to be a babysitter. I wanna help stop this from ever happening again. Humans don’t belong in cages.”
Charlie7 snickered. “Well, except maybe one.”
Chapter Seventy-Six
Gemini sat.
There wasn’t anything in the room to do but sit. Well, that wasn’t entirely true.
She could look at things. There were the plain white walls, the plain white carpet, and the plain white furniture. A video screen set into the wall behind a layer of indestructible glass persistently refused Gemini’s verbal commands to activate. Then there was the glass wall, looking out over the Earth and all the places she wasn’t able to go.
That wall was the worst torture of Gemini’s captivity. Better to be locked away in darkness, able to imagine that the outside world had ceased to exist.
The door slid open.
Gemini made a break for it, but the robot who came through made a lightning-quick dip of her shoulder and scooped Gemini up by the waist.
“None of that, now,” Nora109 scolded in that schoolmarm voice of hers.
Despite her struggles, Gemini found herself deposited on the edge of the room’s bed. Nora109 continued onward to the coffee table in front of the couch where she set down a briefcase.
“What’s in that?” Gemini asked warily.
While imprisonment had seemed a given, due to the crimes of her robotic forbearer, it had never seemed like enough. Sooner or later, there would be interrogations, experiments… some form of actual punishment. That case probably contained medical equipment. Maybe it was to be pain-inducing implants.
Irony would have seen Nora109 bring in rods saved from the surgery that removed them from Eve Fourteen’s skull. Gemini wasn’t looking forward to what could follow from there. She’d seen how easily those rods could be made to resonate. She knew the data that could be gleaned. The Human Committee could interrogate her and know whether she was lying, punishing her mercilessly for even the slightest falsehood.
Gemini held her breath as Nora109 opened the case.
“We thought you might be getting bored,” Nora109 explained.
A few caveman-grade wooden tools lay atop an array of plastic-wrapped gray bricks.
Sometimes a scent could trigger memories so old they might otherwise have faded. Visual memory expires in due course of decades. Evelyn Mengele was seventy-two when she had been scanned by Project Transhuman. Her own childhood was the faded inscription on a plaque handled by too many fingers over the years.
But the scent of modeling clay came rushing back to little Lyn, four years old and rolling snakes on the kitchen table while watching Blue’s Clues with her mother.
Gemini picked up one of the bricks. It had the appropriate heft, and her fingers made depressions in the surface. “You can’t be serious.”
Nora109 put on a wide, warm smile, but those robot eyes couldn’t sell it. “You’re human now. Maybe you have a creative side. Let those chemical-soaked emotions flow.” The patronizing robot spread her arms like a circus ringleader.
Gemini held the clay brick out at arm’s length and dropped it to the floor. There was no satisfying crash or shatter, no piece to go flying, nothing ruined. She suspected that was the point of Nora109’s gift. Instead, the clay merely thudded on the carpet. The clear plastic wrapper rustled softly.
Nora109 gestured to an outline on the wall. “Your meals will come through there. If you require medical attention, we are monitoring your vital signs via thermal imaging and external cameras. Anything more invasive would require sign-off, per Human Committee
directive 604.8.112.”
Gemini raised a skeptical brow. “You require a consent waiver? I’m a prisoner.”
“Per directive 604.8.112, you’re human and entitled not to be subjected to unwanted medical procedures. You can thank Eve for that. But… you’re going to be lonely. You might even view certain benign medical examinations as preferable to complete isolation.”
“Aha!” Gemini exclaimed, aiming a gotcha finger at Nora109’s smug face. “It’s solitary confinement you plan to use on me. Starve me for companionship until I’ll spill all my secrets just for the sake of hearing a voice besides my own.”
“No,” Nora109 said with a sigh. “We aren’t mandating isolation for you. Any of the Eves can come visit you whenever they like, for any reason whatsoever. Any robot on Earth or visiting from beyond is welcome to walk right in and have a supervised visit for as long as they wish. Personally, I’ll be glad for my duty here to wrap up so I don’t ever have to come back.”
A cold chill ran through Gemini’s spine as Nora109’s implication sank in.
As Nora109 headed for the door, Gemini clutched her coat sleeve to prevent being left all alone for possibly the rest of her life. “Don’t go! Or send someone. Anyone.”
The former head of the Sanctuary for Scientific Sins paused at the door, still closed and sealing them both in. From a pocket she withdrew an impact syringe. “You can either go sit on the far side of the room while this door is open, or I sedate you, and you wake up dizzy and nauseated and equally not outside this room. The choice is yours.”
Gemini looked up with pleading eyes. Nora109 was five centimeters the shorter of the two, but the human prisoner was on her knees.
When Nora109 raised the impact syringe, needle catching the overhead lights with an evil glint, Gemini retreated. Scrambling away on hands and knees, she at least wanted a final glimpse out the door as Nora109 departed.
Dragging herself onto the couch, Gemini stared into the case of clay. Taking up a dull wooden scalpel, she jabbed a hole in the plastic wrapper of one of the gray bricks.
With eyes filled with self-pitying tears, Gemini began rolling out a clay snake.
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Eve marched through the committee chamber with false bravado. The butterflies in her stomach had been swept up in a cyclone, along with fireflies, mailboxes, and stray fence pickets. But appearances mattered, and Eve had worked hard to cultivate the look of someone self-assured, poised, and in charge.
Platform boots gave Eve the illusion of height without the ungainliness or stray sexualization associated with high heels. A slick black trench coat obscured her build and masked the line of the boots. A turtleneck and slacks, also in black to reduce contrast and distractions, rounded out the ensemble.
Eve’s hair had gone from finger width to hand width in length. It hung flat and straight if left to its own whims. Eve slicked it back against her scalp with cationic polymer gel to prevent it from moving or getting in the way.
If any of the robots waiting for her to start the meeting had any comments about Eve’s change in appearance, they kept them to themselves.
Eve turned with a flourish and gathered the stray fabric of the trench coat beneath her as she sat. It was a maneuver she’d spent hours practicing in front of the mirror.
Hers was the head seat at the table. This was the first meeting of the newly rededicated Human Welfare Committee. Eve Fourteen was the founding chairwoman.
“Let’s begin the meeting,” Eve announced, dispensing with some of the more hidebound conventions of committee culture. “I trust you’ve all had a chance to review today’s agenda.”
Eve brought up a copy of her own. The final bit of her ensemble was a piece of technology she’d been working on to level the playing field with her robotic contemporaries. Though they looked like a pair of darkened lab safety glasses, the twin globes that obscured her eyes were computer displays.
While Eve couldn’t process data with the speed or breadth of any of the other committee members, that didn’t mean she had to stare down at the conference table to keep an eye on her agenda.
Thin fiber wires ran behind her ears and under her turtleneck to a processor at the back of her belt. Eye movements and gestures from a pair of fingerless black gloves provided all the interface she required, and she was getting faster with it by the day.
“Our first order of business is going to be hashing out protections for human rights. Robotic rights include privacy, committee membership, resource sharing, and habitat claims.”
Jennifer81 spoke up. Though Eve would have preferred her not to be a member of the committee at all, the former chair of the defunct Human Committee was appointed nonetheless. “While I agree in principle, to-date, all the humans discovered are either mentally unfit for self-care or are minors.”
“Pre-invasion precedent,” Eve countered instantly. She’d anticipated that line of reasoning—with a little coaching help—and been ready with a counter. “We should no more be bound by those old legal codes than we should by monetary policy or guidelines on network bandwidth allocation.”
There were chuckles around the room. Charlie7’s advice to liken age-of-majority laws to restrictions on network communication—a joke in an age of nigh-unlimited communication breadth—had gone over just as he’d anticipated.
“Those laws,” Eve continued. “Were bell-curve targeted. Safely post-pubescent. Young enough to populate military training programs. What we’ve got now are cherry-picked genomes. My own presence on this committee demonstrates the antiquated nature of age-dependent permissions. And by that measure, age-withheld privileges are outmoded as well.”
“That’s all well and good now,” Ashley390 argued. “But what about the future? We can’t expect every sixteen-year-old to be capable of getting by on her own.”
Eve spread her hands, inadvertently sending her agenda spiraling out of view. “What? Do we not have the resources to objectively assess life skills and maturity of the entire human population? There are still fewer than fifty known, and most have already been thoroughly vetted.”
“But what criteria should we use?” Eddie51 asked. It was a careful, neutral question, neither committing to Eve’s side nor opposing her.
Looking for allies and enemies at every turn was an odd perspective to take, but everyone from Nora109 to Toby22 agreed that it was a fact of committee life.
This was on the agenda, but Eve went through the motions of presenting it anyway. “This committee can be the arbiter. I don’t think that for the time being, it’s too difficult a task that we review individual petitions for every human.”
“How many humans are we talking about?” Jennifer81 asked. “We can’t just turn you all loose in the wild. You need education, supervision… protection.”
“The list for vote today includes: myself, Phoebe, Olivia, Plato, Triton, and Zeus.”
Eve sat back and let the robots process the names. Her heart pounded. A quick switch to metabolic status in her goggles showed a cardiac rate of eighty beats per minute, nearly double her resting rate.
Across the table Toby22 spoke up. His inclusion on the committee was one of Eve’s greatest coups. No one invited Tobies to a committee. “I say we just take a summary vote on all six of them.”
Jennifer81 raised a finger. “I object. Take out Plato’s name, and I’ll vote on the other five. Lumping that one in with the rest I believe unfairly biases the vote in favor of letting an admitted killer loose with full privacy privileges.”
Eve clenched her jaw. “Motion to approve full robotic equivalent rights for Eve, Phoebe, Olivia, Triton, and Zeus?”
The list passed unanimously.
Behind the privacy of her goggles, Eve shut her eyes in relief. Now for the hard part.
“Motion to approve full robotic equivalent rights for Plato?”
There was a chorus of “ayes.” Eve’s goggles displayed a count. It was two more than the minimum to carry the motion.
“O
pposed?”
The remainder chimed in with “nay” votes. No member abstained.
“Motion carries,” Eve announced. While it wasn’t the victory she’d hoped for, with a clear mandate from the committee, it was enough.
Janet9 chimed in out of order. “I’m looking forward to branching into human research. As the foremost expert in legitimate primate research, I think I should like to come out at the fore of human innovation. I’d like to motion that we open sanctioned human cloning to ethical geneticists.”
Eve had known this was coming. In truth, she had expected to feel conflicted over it. But deep down, she knew that the best thing for future clones would be proper regulation and protection. “Fine. But I think that beyond the terms of the research itself, we need to lay groundwork for raising the resulting humans. I think no embryo should be brought to term without a dedicated parent or preferable parent pair willing to act as dedicated guardian and mentor until this committee deems the child fit to function independently.”
“That’s a lot to ask of a researcher,” Janet9 countered.
“You don’t have to raise them all yourself,” Eve argued. “You just need to ensure a home for every life you create. You’re not cloning pigeons and mackerel. Humans can’t just be released into the wild as soon as they can feed themselves. But I have a suspicion that if that malfunctioning old hag Evelyn11 could fall victim to maternal instincts, most of you are going to want to keep the children you create.”
No one ventured to bet against Eve’s prediction.
“Now…”
Eve launched into her agenda for the day.
No eugenic breeding programs.
Yes, more samples should be introduced to the gene pool from the genomic archives.
Yes, all geneticists working on human cloning would be required to undergo inspections by Human Welfare Committee members, including the chairwoman.