The Evolutionite Chronicles Book Two: Dagger and Shadow Ninja in: Welcome to Las Vegas

by Timothy P. Callahan

  When he finished he pressed the button on the table again and the ribs slowly started to close. “I know the question you are going to ask, and yes, you have the memories of Nancy Waddel, but you are not her. You are a robot.”

  “Where is she? Why do I know all about her? Did you kill her?”

  “No, no. You see, that’s where I went wrong with the others. I killed them after mapping their minds to the artificial brains. That was years ago, before I discovered the error of my ways. I needed to keep them alive and not just transfer their minds. I needed to link their minds to the robot brain. I could never get it right despite my best efforts. That is, until I made you. It took a while but I finally cracked it. The perfect robot with a human brain!”

  “So... I am Nancy?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes. Nancy’s human body is locked away safe, her mind is linked to this body.”

  “Why tell me this now?”

  “Because you needed to know.” Destructo walked away from the table and back to the work bench. “Our plan will be in full effect soon and I wanted you to see it.”

  “Our plan?”

  “Yes,” Destructo said turning around. “It’s time you regained the memories you asked me to suppress.”

  “What memories?”

  “Of when you discovered the truth about me. Now, hold still while I establish a link between us.”

  His eyes went from red to a blinking blue. Nancy felt something in her mind. It reminded her of the sensation of going from sober, to buzzed, to drunk. She soaked it in. The more she let the connection go, the easier it was for her to remember.

  The memories came back to her in a series of images and snippets of sounds. Walking into Turing’s office and asking for some time off only to find him with his right arm on a table, his left arm using a screwdriver to fix an issue. Him standing from the chair, asking her to close the door. Closing the door reluctantly as she wondered how to escape should it become necessary.

  “Nancy, I might be a robot but I was built with feelings,” he told her. “I do not understand love but I believe if I did what I feel for you would be that. I do not want to kill you.”

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  Then he told her his plan. Told her that there were flaws. Told her the truth, that the robots he had weren’t perfect, and he would need a perfect robot to finish what he wanted. What he had now was fine for this phase, but until he achieved perfection, he could not complete his goal.

  “What do you need for perfection?” Nancy asked.

  “You,” he replied standing from the desk and walking over to her. “I need you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. I need to study you, need to figure out how you work. Once I know that, I can create a robot which will be indistinguishable from a human.”

  “Why me?”

  In a tone Nancy never thought a robot could use he said, with a trembling voice, “Because you are perfect.”

  After that she remembered them driving away from Vegas. Away from the prying eyes of the world in the desert. Turing had bought some land and had his robots construct bunkers there. Land away from the rest of the world. Land no one could find unless he wanted them to. From the road the bunkers would look like any World war 2 buildings the government used. Inside they were state-of-the-art labs.

  Nancy and Turing spent weeks inside them. He studied her in a way that would be scary if he were a human. He figured it all out. How a human moved, how the heart beats, how hair grew, how they sweat. Everything that made Nancy a human, he duplicated in the robot. He didn’t need to sleep, and he could work on a problem a thousand times faster than any human. The progress they made was swift and within a few weeks they had the first Nancy prototype.

  “Nancy, my sources in the police have told me that your roommate has reported you missing,” Turing told her one day. “You must go back.”

  Nancy had a thought, a bad one, but one she couldn’t help thinking. This was going so well, she didn’t want it to stop. “Or, we can just replace her with a robot.”

  Turing made things happen and she wanted to be a part of that. Replacing her roommate with a robot was easy, even though she wasn’t the perfect robot Nancy-replacement had become. It was good enough to fool most.

  The time soon came for the Nancy robot to replace the real Nancy as a test to see if she could indeed fool everyone.

  “You need to wipe my memory of these events,” Nancy said.

  “Why? It would be more efficient if you knew.”

  “If we are to test how perfect I am, we need to fool everyone, including me. Can you do it?”

  “Yes, it is easy to erase memories once they are planted inside the robot’s head.”

  “Good, do that.”

  Once her memory was erased, she was set free, the missing time explained as a vacation with too much partying.

  Walking down the street she saw David and panicked. She called Tanaka, the only person she could trust. Had she remembered she was a robot she never would have called him. “Why did you let me contact them?” she asked opening her eyes.

  Destructo’s bright blue eyes were fading to red. “You did that on your own after you saw David. You did not lie to them. You acted as you would even if you weren’t a robot.”

  “But we found out David wasn’t a threat. They would have gone home if you hadn’t contacted Daniel. Why did you do that?”

  “It was a chance to see the future. I had this theory about all those born with his powers, and how they might actually be seeing a few seconds in the future. Together with the right telepath, we might be able to see if this plan works. Don’t forget, I also come with the power to mimic any Evo around me. Having them all in the same room increased my own danger sense by five and I saw the future.”

  “Unstrap me,” Nancy said.

  He walked over and undid her straps. Once her hands were free, she grabbed the flaps of skin which had been her chest and covered her ribs. The two halves met in the middle. Once they touched, the skin immediately started stitching together. “What did you do with the guy who shot me?”

  “He has been disciplined.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “No. Worse. I did not pay him and I left a very bad review on the site I found him on. He won’t be getting much work in the future.”

  Nancy shook her head as she sat up. “Yeah, that’ll teach him. How long have I been out?”

  “A day.”

  “What do Tanaka and Daniel know?”

  Destructo told her all he knew. Daniel destroyed the Katebot. Tanaka and Daniel destroyed several dealerbots and devastated the strip club, destroying all the robots there. She listened, impressed at how they seemed to find a way to survive. “And you believe that Daniel knows how to detect the robots by now?”

  “It would seem so. He detected the robots in the strip club with ease.”

  “So, might not be a good idea for me to show up now,” she said.

  “I think you going into town is a great idea,” Destructo said. “This is the best chance we have to see if you are indeed the perfect robot copy. If you could go back into town and stand in front of Daniel and fool him, we can fool anyone.”

  “But if he kills me, we start from scratch.”

  “I am a robot and I don’t age. I have the time to start over. The only thing we have to worry about is Nancy’s mind.”

  Robot Nancy reached into her programming, looking for the mind she was supposedly connected to. She felt nothing. No thoughts echoed back when she called out. When she pulled up old memories, they felt as if they were coming from her mind. She wondered if she really was connected to human Nancy. Nothing she felt or thought lead her to believe she was.

  “I want to see her first. I want to see Nancy.”

  “Fine. I will take you to her. Do not wake her. Waking her will break the connection.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “I’ll take four cheeseburgers, four orders of fries, a
n appetizer sampler, and a draft beer,” David lowered his Roxy Diner’s over-sized menu and looked at Daniel and Tanaka. “You guys want anything?”

  The three of them sat inside a diner located in the Stratosphere. It was a fifties-themed restaurant with an over-sized menu that looked like a newspaper. The place was large and crowded. Most of the tables were filled with families who were winding down for the day.

  Tanaka looked over at Daniel, whose face told the story of a man who was about to pay a for a very big bill. Tanaka simply smiled. “Sure, I’ll just have a burger and fries with a soda.”

  The waitress looked at Daniel who slowly lowered his menu. “I’ll have chicken salad and some water please.”

  The waitress wrote it all down then grabbed the menu leaving the three of them at the table to talk.

  “Not sure how I’m going to pay for this,” Daniel said.

  “You should really use your powers to get some money,” David replied. “Don’t rob banks or anything, just join a poker tournament.”

  “I said the same thing!” Tanaka yelled. “We could be rich.”

  “No,” Daniel replied sternly. “I will not use my powers that way.”

  “Right, only for good.” Tanaka said. “Fat lotta good it does us now. We don’t even know where to look for Nancy. Might just have to wait until the robots start attacking and hope we can get some information out of them.”

  “What?” David asked. “You guys didn’t do any research? Nothing to help find her?”

  “Yeah, we fought a few robots but they don’t really talk to us.”

  “Not sure what else we can do,” Daniel asked. “Waiting seems to be the only thing right now.”

  “Our friend is out there in trouble and all you want to do is wait?”

  Tanaka snapped. “Do you have any clever ideas?”

  “Yeah, I do.” David snapped back.

  “All right, jerk, what?”

  “How about you go to the records office and see if anyone has bought any land outside of Vegas recently and then see if they someone hired some contractors to build something like, say, oh, bunkers.”

  Tanaka looked over at Daniel, who had a very odd smile on his face. He looked amused. Tanaka said, “Did you do that?”

  “Yeah, where do you think I’ve been for the past day. It took some time, but I got the information.” David replied.

  Tanaka’s face lit up and his smiled broadly. He slapped David on the back and laughed. “All right, you big old lug. What did you find out?”

  David pulled out a cell phone and looked at it. “I wasn’t able to take anything out so I took pictures. They didn’t seem to mind.”

  “I don’t think anyone was brave enough to tell you no,” Tanaka laughed.

  David smile. “Yeah, I give off that vibe. Anyway, about two years ago a guy named Sam Bulik bought two hundred acres of land from some cattle ranchers who were looking to sell.”

  “Sam Bulik?” Tanaka said. “I know him. Turns out he’s actually Turing.”

  “Betting that’s a fake name,” Daniel said.

  “You think?” Tanaka replied crossing his eyes, mocking Daniel. “What else you got?”

  “Not long after that, he hired a bunch of contractors to take down all the old farm stuff and add new buildings and to dig tunnels and stuff.”

  “Sounds like secret lair stuff to me,” Tanaka said.

  “Yeah, me, too.” Daniel replied. “I take it the job’s done now?”

  “Yeah, the paperwork ends about a year ago.”

  “Right around the time Nancy disappeared for a few weeks,” Tanaka said.

  “And around the time he bought the strip club.”

  “Has to be a cover,” Daniel said.

  “Or a recruiting agency,” Tanaka replied. “Or neither. Maybe he’s a robot who just likes seeing naked girls.”

  “Wouldn’t be surprised,” Daniel said.

  Right then three waiters walked up to the table and started putting the food out. David offered his sampler to the two and they dug into it, hungry and eager to eat more.

  “So,” Tanaka said bringing the conversation back to the subject at hand. “What’s our next move?”

  “We go to the bunkers,” David replied. “We know where they are. You teleport us there or we drive there or whatever and we take this Destructo robot out and rescue Nancy.”

  “Not so fast,” Daniel said. “We can’t just jump on there without any recon.”

  “You’re the best at that,” Tanaka said. “I say we drive close to it, close enough where I can see the place, I teleport you there and you do your thing while we wait.”

  “No,” Daniel replied. “I don’t think you’ll be able to get close enough in a car. Probably has sentries all over the place. No, we need to this a different way.”

  “How?”

  Daniel looked around as if hoping the answer would jump out at him. He spotted a sign for the Stratosphere’s observation deck and pointed. “This is the tallest building in Vegas. It’s got a view of pretty much everything surrounding the city. David, can you point out on a map where the bunkers might be?”

  “Sure. The paperwork has a map of the area and shows where it is.”

  “Good. When we finish, we’ll head up to the observation deck, you point out the bunkers to me, and I’ll use my sight to get a good look at the place. Tanaka, I’ll point to where I want to go and you can teleport me there.”

  “Whoa, dude, not sure about that.” Tanaka replied before taking a bite of his burger.

  “It’ll work. I trust you.”

  “I don’t trust me,” Tanaka replied swallowing. “But hey, I’ll give it a try.”

  The three sat eating silently for a while. Tanaka kept looking over at Daniel, who seemed to be in some sort of trance. He’s seen it before in his brother. He was building up his power, homing in on sounds and sights as a warm up for what he was about ready to do. It seemed like a bad time to talk but Tanaka had something to get off his chest. “Okay, we need to deal with the elephant in the room before the three of us go off into battle.”

  Daniel seemed to snap back into reality. “What are you talking about?”

  “He’s talking about me,” David replied. “What are you guys going to do about me when you don’t need my help anymore.”

  “Hey, don’t make it sound like you’re only here ‘cause we need your help,” Tanaka said pointing at David. “You have stakes in this, too, and it wouldn’t be right if you weren’t here. But you are right. When this is over, we have to try to take you in.”

  “You can try, I won’t let you.”

  “I know, but hear me out. What if, when this is all over, we hire you and you work for us.”

  “Wait a second,” Daniel said. “We didn’t talk about this.”

  “But it’s a good idea,” Tanaka replied. “Look, Daniel and I have a lot of say in Haven. If we vouch for you and tell them that we’ll keep tabs on you and you’ll be working for us, I don’t think you’ll spend much, if any, time in jail.”

  “How do you figure?” David asked.

  “We’ll need to work out the details with our lawyer and with the Protectors, but come on, this is the best deal you’ll get.”

  “I don’t want to spend any time in jail.”

  “I can’t promise that. But I can promise it won’t be much time, and when you get out, you won’t be hurting for work.”

  “I didn’t agree to this,” Daniel said. “But I do think it’s a good idea. I don’t want to fight you again, and you have been very helpful.”

  “You saved my life,” Tanaka said. “This won’t repay that, but I promise I’ll do all that I can to help you get your life back.”

  David finished the last of his fries and started working on the cheeseburger. He looked at the two, studying them. Tanaka got the feeling he was about ready to flee, and if he did, there was nothing he nor Daniel could do to stop him. They would need to call in the Protectors, and it would take time for th
em to get out here. Time in which David could run. Tanaka was sure that between him and Daniel, they could keep track of him, but doing so would take them away from finding Nancy. He hoped David was smart enough to take the deal. It really was the best option he had when this was over.

  “Fine,” David said. “I’ll turn myself in when this is over, and I’ll become your messenger boy. You better not screw me over.”

  A wave of relief flood Tanaka’s heart. Having David on their side made Tanaka more confident than ever. “Good to hear, good to hear. It’ll be nice to have a speedster on the team. We don’t really have any of those, and as long as you can avoid running through buildings to get something delivered, I think you’ll do just fine.”

  “Can’t promise I won’t run through a building if it’s a rush,” David said hiding his mouth behind his burger but Tanaka was sure he saw the wrinkles around his eyes turn up as David smiled.

  Daniel’s head shot up and he looked around. Tanaka hated when he did that, it meant his danger sense, or some other sense, had alerted Daniel to something. Daniel’s gaze was out onto the floor next to the diner. People walked past, talking to each other or rushing off to be somewhere else. Daniel pointed to a man dressed as a card dealer. “He’s a robot.”

  “You sure?” Tanaka asked.

  “I’m sure. I can feel them throughout the casino now. They smell like plastic and I can hear the sound of the gears. This place is full of robots.”

  “Define ‘full of robots.’” Tanaka said.

  “Too many for us to fight. I can’t give a number, but it’s more than three.”

  “Four if you count me twice,” David said as he took the last bite of his burgers.

  “Did you just quote Superman Two?” Tanaka asked.

  “Yeah, great movie.”

  “Focus!” Daniel yelled. “I’m kind of worried here. What if they’re programmed to come after us?”

  “I doubt it,” Tanaka replied. “A fight with us in public, revealing that card dealers are robots would put a kink in Destructo’s plan, don’t you think?”

  “Makes me wonder why we don’t just go the gaming commission and talk to them about it.”

  “Pretty sure our robot buddy has that figured out,” Tanaka said. “Probably took them first.”