by C. A. Gray
Giovanni froze on the stairs when he saw Alex—like I had, like Liam had. I gathered Liam hadn’t prepared him for what he would see.
“What is this?” he asked at last, horrified.
“I’ll let Rebecca explain how she got here, but I went to get you because of what she found in Alex’s brain,” said Liam, leading him to the VMI screen. I stood up and moved away from the chair to allow Giovanni to sit down. He did, and stared at the screen with the composition data for a long moment silently before he began to zoom through the VMI slices with his fingers.
“What are you looking for?” I asked him at last.
“An A.E. chip.” He pointed at a slice of her brainstem—and there it was.
I let out a little squeak, covering my face with my hands. He didn’t have to explain. The A.E. chip meant she’d had a labyrinth connection in her head, all this time. Whoever sent her, if she had indeed been sent, would know our exact location. And if anything happened to her now, they’d know she had been discovered.
But as soon as we woke her, she’d send a message to whoever she was working for and tell them anyway. Either way, we were screwed. I sank to my knees.
“We have a little time, though, right?” asked Liam anxiously. “Right now, it’s as if she’s still asleep—”
“Synthetics don’t sleep,” Giovanni cut him off flatly. He turned to me. “But they do have biochemistry that makes them susceptible to medications. Is that how you did this?”
I nodded, not bothering to defend my actions this time. “That’s how Hepzibah did it, yes. On Madeline’s orders.”
I felt rather than saw Liam crouch down beside me. He said in a low voice, “You do realize this means that Madeline is a danger to us all now, right? Whatever happens next, she can’t come with us as she is. She’s become violent.”
I snapped my head up. “But—if it weren’t for Madeline, we’d never have known any of this!”
“But what if Alex had been completely normal, and you’d been wrong? She’d have knocked her out and dragged her down here for nothing, because she thought she was helping you!”
“But—”
“The outcome doesn’t change the fact that the way Madeline went about it proves that she’s dangerous,” Liam cut me off. Then he added pointedly, his sharp blue eyes bearing into mine, “Have you ever had to talk her out of hurting anybody else on your behalf before? Anybody you might have been jealous of, perhaps?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I snapped.
But before Liam could answer, Giovanni shushed us both as someone began to pound on the upstairs door. As soon as I heard it, I realized that someone had been jiggling the lock while I was fighting with Liam, too—I’d just been too distracted to register the sound. A muffled voice now demanded, “Liam, open up!”
It was Francis. Giovanni pointed at Liam, and said, “Let him in.”
“Why?”
“Because he might have an idea that I don’t about how to handle the A.E. chip situation. He is brilliant, after all.”
“Oh, what am I, chopped liver?” Liam muttered, even as he made his way up the stairs.
“Well, do you have an idea?” Giovanni challenged, and then looked at me. “Either one of you?”
Liam glanced at me questioningly, and I shook my head.
“No,” he admitted for both of us, and unlocked the door to admit Francis.
“Why did you lock the—” Francis began, and then swore when he caught sight of Alex, her head lolling to the side like a ragdoll.
Not bothering to answer him, Liam announced to the rest of us, “I’m going to get M, too. She needs to be in on this discussion.”
Chapter 31
Liam returned with Mom a few minutes later, also wrapped in a dressing gown. She at least did not look surprised to see Alex’s state. I let Giovanni and Liam update everyone on the current situation, and Mom glanced at me accusingly when I came into the story. I refused to meet Liam’s eyes, still furious with him for the reference to Val and the comment that Madeline was dangerous. The fact that he’d been dead on only made me angrier.
“We have to assume that Alex has already transmitted our location to the Silver Six,” said Giovanni, “and the only reason they haven’t already descended upon us is because she’s their spy, trying to tell them what the Renegades are up to.”
“Did anyone ever tell her how to get onto the Commune?” Mom demanded, looking around the room.
“No, you ordered us not to,” said Liam.
“I did, but I also ordered everyone to keep her in the dark about our actual plans, and that went out the window! If she gained access to the Commune, then the Silver Six know the identities and the rough LP address locations of every single Renegade member, unless they’re disguising their locations like we are.” She directed most of this at Francis, who looked more thunderstruck and deflated than I’d ever seen before—even more than when he’d learned about his own mysterious surgery. But he perceived Mom’s attack, and said, “If she learned how to get on the Commune, it wasn’t from me.”
After a long silence, Mom said reluctantly, “Well, we’re going to have to bring her around and question her, to see what she does know. If we tie her up to keep her under the VMI, Rebecca and Giovanni, do you think you’ll be able to tell when she’s lying?”
I began to nod, but Giovanni said, “Wait, we have to disable her A.E. connection first!”
“I thought you said it was on her brainstem,” said Mom.
“It is…”
“Then won’t removing it kill her?”
“It will. I was hoping,” Giovanni looked at Francis, “there might be another way.”
“There is,” said Liam suddenly, crossing to the VMI screen, and bending over Giovanni’s shoulder. “I didn’t build these myself, but I oversaw them, and I remember that each A.E. chip came with its LP address printed on the underside—very tiny, you’ll have to flip the image and zoom way in to see it…” Giovanni did as he was bid, and Liam beckoned with his fingers in Giovanni’s peripheral vision, indicating, keep going, keep going… “Right there, stop. There it is.”
“Okay, but how does that help us?” asked Mom.
Instead of answering, Liam slid into a chair before one of the netscreens, and got on the Commune himself. He found someone who was available—it turned out to be Roy, from Casa Linda, I saw—and opened up a coding screen at the same time. Francis, aroused from his stupor, must have seen what he was trying to do, and crossed the room to sit beside him. The two of them started haggling over loops and phrases, and finally Francis grabbed the screen from Liam forcibly and erased half of what he’d written. Liam threw his hands up in the air, exasperated.
“Explanation, please,” Mom demanded, impatiently tapping her foot.
“We’re writing the code to disable her LP from accessing the labyrinth,” Liam muttered, glaring at Francis. “Once we have an executable, we’ll have Roy upload it.”
“You can do that?” said Giovanni, amazed.
“I don’t know, we hope so.”
“Yes we can,” said Francis with relish, turning the screen back to Liam. Liam skimmed his work, the corners of his mouth turned down pensively, but he glanced back at Francis with a grudging nod.
“It executed at least,” he said. “Try it.”
Francis sent the code to Roy, along with instructions. As he did this, Liam snapped his fingers, eyes wide.
“While he’s in there, tell Roy to send us the communication history attached to that LP!”
“What do you take me for?” Francis scoffed, turning the screen back to Liam which displayed just that.
Liam saw it and leaned forward. I don’t even think he was breathing as his eyes skimmed the communication history.
“Ha!” Francis crowed.
“What?” Mom, Giovanni, and I demanded all at once.
“She’s already offline. She has been since weeks before
Francis’s rescue,” Liam said, shaking his head in amazement. “Unless I’m reading this wrong…”
“She is on our side! I knew it!” Francis declared.
Knock knock knock. All of us jumped, as Val’s voice chirped from upstairs, “Does anybody want pancakes?”
All at once, we shouted back some variation of “No thanks, we’re good!”
There was a half beat of confusion, and Val murmured, “Oh… kay….” before we heard her footsteps wander away.
“Let’s bring her around then,” said Mom, pointing to Alex. “Hepzibah? Please prepare a syringe with an antidote to the sedative currently in her system.” Hepzibah nodded, crossing to the manufacturing printer. Then Mom gestured at me, indicating that I was to position myself before the VMI screen to determine whether or not Alex was telling the truth. But as I moved over to obey, Giovanni shook his head at me.
“Not necessary,” he said, “if she’s one of them, we can put her in analysis mode. They can’t lie in that state. They’ll just tell you how they’re programmed. She does need to be conscious, though. And—” he added with a nod at Mom, “tying her up wouldn’t be a bad idea.”
I jumped up at once and headed for a closet by the door, where I found some unused power cords. I crossed back to Alex, gingerly bent both her arms back behind the chair, and tied them to the seat of the chair itself. Then I bound her ankles together for good measure.
“All right. Hepzibah?” said Mom.
The bot rolled over to Alex, and injected her syringe into Alex’s forearm. She jerked involuntarily, and then after a series of muscle twitches, her head straightened and she opened her eyes with a few long, slow blinks. I could just see the anger flash across her face when Giovanni commanded, “Alessandra, go into analysis mode please.”
Her expression went slack, her eyes unfocused. My jaw fell open and Liam gave a low, slow whistle. If I’d harbored any further doubts about what she was, they were gone now.
“Tell us who you are,” Giovanni asked.
In a flat voice, almost tinny like Hepzibah’s, Alex said, “My name is Alessandra Russo the second.”
“The second?” asked Giovanni, holding up a hand to us before we could react to this. “Who was the first?”
“Alessandra Russo the first was a brilliant programmer who embezzled millions of dollars from the government. She was captured for her crimes and turned into an experimental cyborg in attempts to counteract the natural aging process, but the number of nanobots required to destroy rogue cells in her body went into uncontrolled replication. This condition is irreversible and rapidly fatal. While she was dying, she was framed for a Renegade locus, and she also received a comm from a Renegade identifying herself as M, warning her that she must flee or she would shortly be captured. Her experimenters believed this meant the Renegades might seek her out to try to rescue her, but she died before they could do so. They reproduced a synthetic version of her brain and her memories, and created a body designed to look as much like Alessandra’s as possible, only more perfect, as it would have been had their original experiment succeeded.”
Giovanni’s mouth fell open, and he exchanged a look with Mom. “So in the weeks to a month that elapsed between Karen’s warning and Francis and Larissa’s rescue, they created you? That fast?”
“Yes.”
Giovanni blinked rapidly, looking around the room at no one in particular. He murmured to himself, “So how many humanoid bots are there?”
Alex took this as a question to herself, and reported, “There are currently one hundred and fifty thousand, though the majority are on the moon and on Mars. Only thirty five thousand or so remain scattered throughout earth.”
I covered my face with my hands. “One hundred and fifty thousand…” I felt like I was going to be sick.
Mom spoke up next, and asked, “How did your A.E. chip come to be disabled before we found you?”
“Alessandra knew that Justice Wallenberg was onto her for her crimes. She anticipated it from the beginning, and knew that once she was captured, there was a possibility she might be killed and her brain used as a model for a synthetic robot that could be programmed to follow her captors’ will. In anticipation of this, she wrote a counter-program: a core program override. She then hid it on the labyrinth, leaving herself a series of clues to lead the synthetic version of herself to the download. The program also disables all labyrinth connections, so that she cannot be tracked.”
“Where is that program?” Liam demanded. “How can we find it?”
“Alessandra suspected that it would be found and dismantled after she had used it on herself, but the labyrinth address is—” and Alex rattled off a string of symbols, unlike those of a normal labyrinth locus. Liam typed them in to his netscreen as she spoke, and I knew he was trying to get someone on the Commune to access it for him.
“Can you explain to us how your brain works?” I cut in.
“What would you like to know?” Alex asked me.
Before I could respond to her, Liam swore. “Dismantled. She’s right,” he announced, deflating.
“But at least now we know it’s possible,” Giovanni pointed out. “Perhaps you can recreate it.”
Mom nodded encouragingly at me. “Go ahead with your questions.”
I turned back to Alex. “Do you have emotions? Can you feel pleasure, pain, fear, anger…?”
“Humans experience these emotions as ends in themselves,” Alex said. “I do not. I have complex programming that enables me to identify the positive emotions of others and mimic them, identify the negative emotions of others and placate them, or identify the expected emotions a human might have in a given situation, and behave accordingly. Once I identify an expected or desired emotion, my programming produces large amounts of the appropriate neuropeptides, and I feel much as a human might feel. But my emotions are dependent upon the feedback of humans. When I am alone or with other robots, I am programmed to feel nothing.”
“What about after you downloaded the core programming blocking software?” I asked, glancing at Giovanni. “How did that change you? What was your core purpose before, and what is it now?”
“I cannot remember what I was programmed to do because that software has been erased,” she said. “I do know that I was programmed to get information, and to use my body if necessary in order to do so, but I no longer know what to do with that information once I acquire it.” I glanced at Francis, who winced. “I am also programmed to search the labyrinth to fill in missing information, but I have no labyrinth connection to do so. What I experience much of the time now is what humans might call confusion. It is the dissonance of conflicting programs.”
With another glance in Francis’s direction, I asked her, “Do you have strong intuition?”
Alex tilted her head to the side. “The definition of intuition is the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning,” she said. “It implies a subconscious mind. Robots have no subconscious mind; they must consciously reason their way into any idea or conclusion.”
I sat with this for a second, then gestured to Giovanni to let me slide back over to the VMI screen. He moved out of the way, and I manipulated the screen with my fingers. As I did so, Francis said to me, “You said my intuitive capabilities were due to the density of spindle cells in my orbitofrontal cortex.” I glanced up at him briefly and nodded.
“Right.”
He glanced at Alex, eyes narrowed. “I am an intuitive masterpiece. So how was it that I didn’t see you for what you were immediately?”
Alex replied flatly, “Your intuitive capabilities were overwhelmed by your sexual attraction to me. I am programmed to use my body against my enemies.”
I smirked at Francis, and with a glance at Giovanni to see if he wanted to explain instead of me, I ventured, “There’s a ‘high road’ and a ‘low road’ of cognitive processing. The high road is the cerebral cortex, while the ‘low’ is t
he limbic system: emotions. The one tends to shut down the other.”
Francis glared at Alex, and closed his eyes, breathing in and out in long, measured breaths.
“What are you looking for?” Giovanni asked me, and I pointed to the three VMI images I’d pulled up, side by side.
“This one is Liam’s orbitofrontal cortex. He’s our control,” I pointed to the image on the far left. “The one in the middle is Alex, and the far right is Francis.”
Giovanni blinked at the three. “Wow.”
“Explanation please?” Mom demanded, folding her arms over her chest.
I pointed again, as she approached to peer over my shoulder, as did Francis and Liam. “Liam has a normal amount of spindle cells here, which means he has an average capacity for intuition for a human, or maybe a little higher, but not markedly so. Francis has more than double the spindle cell density that Liam has, which is why he can size up a situation in a split second. And Alex…”
“Has none!” Mom concluded for me.
“Or almost none,” Giovanni added, amazed.
I nodded. “Which is consistent with what she just said about lacking intuition. Everything she thinks and does has to be conscious. Of course it does—that’s inherent in a machine. I should have guessed that!”
“But wait,” Mom frowned, “if her brain was patterned after a human’s, how is that possible? Shouldn’t it be an exact representation of the way Alessandra’s brain was, as a human?”
“It would have been at first,” Giovanni answered for me, realization dawning on his face, “but as a living system, she has the capacity for neuroplasticity. Use it or lose it.” He glanced at me. “As a human, Alessandra would have used her intuition. But a machine has no way to do so—”
“And so the machinery for it gets recycled, and used for something else,” I concluded with him, shaking my head. “This is the key. Somehow, this is the key.”
“It’s what they were trying to fix with me,” Francis murmured, and everyone turned to look at him. I saw his expression tighten, as if trying to conceal his emotions. “My surgery. It must have been them. I must have been captured at some point, and turned into an experiment to see if they could create a perfect intuitive specimen, so they could translate it to themselves.”