XOM-B

by Jeremy Robinson

  I hand her another nut.

  She nods. “You’re a good listener at least.” She starts on the second bolt, ratcheting back and forth with a grind that is starting to tense the back of my neck. “All of this is what allowed me to create the Xom-B virus. I spell it X O M dash B.”

  I hand her the third nut.

  “Anyway, the bite is just a pathway for the Xom-B virus, which is transmitted to the transistor mesh in the synthetic skin and shot straight into the central core, which wipes the operating system and replaces it with a much simpler code propagating a solitary, insatiable urge—hunger.”

  “That’s how you made the undead,” I say, summarizing her lengthy explanation.

  “You know what they are?” she asks.

  “Undead, walking dead, living dead, zombies. Yes.”

  “How?” she asks.

  “Jimbo,” I say. “He saw a lot of zombie movies. He was a companion. For a child.”

  She chuckles. “And where is little Jimbo now?”

  “Dead,” I say. “For good. But he wasn’t very nice.” I hand her the fourth bolt. “There’s only one problem with what you’re telling me.”

  She starts in on the bolt. “Do tell.”

  “I already knew all of this,” I say. “I didn’t know that this hard metal shell was Heap’s skin, but I know how mine works. I know about my core. My memory. My skin. These are the things that make us human.”

  The ratchet slips free of the bolt. Hail laughs. “You poor, deluded child.”

  She shakes her head and quickly finishes tightening the fourth bolt. She reaches out for the fifth bolt, plucks it from my hand and cranks it quickly into place. When she’s done, she descends the stairs and puts her hands on her hips. “You … are a machine.”

  I nod.

  “But human beings are not machines, at least not in the way that you think. Humans, real humans, are organic. Our bones are composed mostly of calcium phosphate, not titanium. Our minds are organs that are far more complex than even yours. We’re eighty percent water. We have hearts that pump blood.”

  “Humans are animals?” I ask, understanding what she has just described.

  “Primates,” she says. “We are alive.”

  “But I am alive,” I point out.

  “You simulate life, Freeman.” She’s grinning now and I sense it is meant to mock me and my perceived ignorance. “While robots are able to respond to stimuli and maintain homeostasis, they’re just two requirements of life. True life has a metabolism, taking in energy, processing and releasing energy. It grows, something robots are incapable of, and upgrades don’t count. It needs to evolve in response to the external environment, through natural selection, and that requires reproduction, which”—she laughs and waggles a finger at me—“you sir, cannot do. Robots are built, not grown.”

  “Actually,” I say. “I was grown.”

  She just stares at me.

  “Councilman Mohr described it to me.”

  No reaction.

  “My life began as a single cell. Using the materials around it, the cell created more cells, duplicating itself until there were several million cells, at which point they began to specialize, duplicating in different ways to form my skeleton, skin, eyes, mind. Everything.”

  “Nanocreation,” she says.

  “You believe me?”

  “It was my idea. What I was working on before the awakening.”

  “So I am human,” I say.

  “Not remotely.”

  “But I was grown, not built. The cells, or nanomachines, that built my body are still part of it.”

  “You don’t have a mother,” she says, sounding nervous. “You weren’t born.”

  “Does it matter?”

  Her mouth clamps shut. Then, after a moment, “Growing a robot in a lab is not reproduction. That requires—”

  “Mating, gestation and birth,” I say. “I know all about the raccoons.”

  Her face scrunches up in confusion, but she shakes it off. “You don’t seem very upset. This isn’t as entertaining as I thought it would be.”

  “Because you’re still wrong.”

  She looks at the ceiling and groans. “Okay Freeman, enlighten me. Tell me why I am wrong. Lay your cold logic on me.”

  I look to Harry, who is watching the conversation intently. Luscious is watching us now, too. A glisten of moisture in her eyes makes me smile. Tears. Adaptation. But I decide not to point this out. I don’t want to draw Luscious into this. I’d rather focus on what I believe to be the most poignant argument. But first, a deal. “If I can prove that there is no difference between us, you will believe that I am alive?”

  “Impossible, but sure,” she says with a grin.

  “And if I do, you agree to stop the attack. To … switch off the zombies.”

  “A wager,” she says. “With a robot.” She glances at her array of security monitors, watching the screens flash scenes of destruction and chaos. She shrugs. “Why not?”

  Her casual acceptance of my deal worries me. She’s either supremely confident or believes, maybe knows, that it’s too late to save humanity. Realizing this might be my best chance of stopping worldwide genocide, I try to choose my words carefully. In the end, I decide to use the same language Hail used. I turn to her and in my most serious voice, so she knows I’m not joking, I say, “Hail, you’re a robot.”

  44.

  “A robot,” she says. Deadpan. Her face brightens. “An organic robot, perhaps, in the loosest sense of the word, but humanity meets all criteria for life. That’s a pretty weak effort, Freeman. Not exactly what I’d expect from M-M-Mohr.”

  “What was that?” I ask.

  “I … stuttered,” she says, looking at her arms as though her words had come from them rather than her mouth.

  I decide to continue with my explanation rather than get distracted about her malfunctioning speech. Ever since I awoke in the elevator, my ocular implants have functioned normally. They’ve healed, just like Mohr said they would and I’ve been scanning the building and Hail since entering the lab. “You keep on using the term organic. You’ve compared yourself to animals. Primates. And yet, you have nothing in common with them. I have scanned your body for signs of water and have found very little. Your heat and electromagnetic signatures are quite similar to Luscious’s. I have inspected your skin at two hundred times magnification and can quite clearly see the mesh of organic, metallic and transistor strings you described. I must confess, I am perplexed as to how you might procreate, but you are a robot. In simpler terms, you are a machine. Like me. Like Heap and Luscious and Harry. So either you are a robot, or we are all human.”

  Her eyes remain fixed on her hands as she turns them over slowly.

  “How long have you been here?” I ask, sensing she needs more proof.

  “I—” She looks up. “Since—since that first man died. Since the outbreak…”

  “That you had already been exposed to along with everyone else,” I say.

  She twitches.

  I can feel the conversation shifting. “That was thirty years ago.”

  Her eyes widen. “Thirty years?” It’s clear she had no real concept of how long she’s been down here.

  “How old were you when the awakening took place?” I ask.

  “Thirty-two,” she says.

  “Do you feel sixty-two years old?” I ask. “I am aware of what it means to age and am familiar with the common traits associated with aging in animals, including primates, yet you lack the loose skin, wrinkles and diminished physical prowess associated with age. The longest living primate, Pongo pygmaeus, more commonly known as the Borneo orangutan, lives, at most, fifty-nine years. If you are sixty-two, it stands to reason that you should at least show some signs of aging.

  “You are a machine. You … are a robot.” I lower my voice, breaking the news gently as I feel it will wound her as she intended it to wound me. “You are human.”

  “No,” she says, looking at her
hands again. “I’m not.”

  This isn’t the reaction I expected.

  She shakes her head, but she’s not disagreeing with me. It’s more like an uncontrollable twitching. “I stuttered.”

  I hardly see why this matters, but she perseverates.

  “I stuttered!”

  She hurries to her cluttered tabletop, rooting through the tools.

  “That’s important?” I ask.

  “Stuttering is a sign of a memory block,” she says. She finds what she’s looking for, a small black rectangle with eight golden prongs. She holds the small device over her forearm. “Memory blocks only work on robots.”

  Hail’s hand shakes, the computer chip just above her skin. “Do you know what this is?”

  “No,” I say.

  “It doesn’t have a name,” she says. “I suppose it should, but since I invented them and am the only person who ever used them, I didn’t see the point. But it has one function, to create or remove blocked memories. You just push it down and focus on what you want to forget, or what you want to remember. It spiders out through your mind, gathers the information and everything related to it—memories, emotions, beliefs—compresses it all and encrypts it. But it creates glitches when those subjects come up again.”

  “Stuttering,” I say.

  “Dammit,” she grumbles and presses the chip down. The golden prongs slip into her synthetic skin, making several contact points with the transistor mesh. She sets her jaw, closes her eyes and says, “Library.”

  Her eyelids flutter for a moment and then snap open. “No…”

  She removes the device from her arm, places it back on the table almost as an afterthought because she’s already headed for the exit. “No, no, no…” She repeats the word over and over, stumbling from the room as though in shock.

  “Freeman!” Harry says.

  Realizing this might be the only opportunity I have to free the others, I quickly pick up the small but powerful memory chip, tuck it into a hip pocket and rush to Harry’s aid. I tug on the metal cable, but it’s too strong to break without putting Harry at risk. I hurry to the table of tools, find a pair of bolt cutters and rush back to Harry’s side, quickly cutting him free.

  I move to Luscious next, cutting the cables holding her down. Once she’s free, I help her sit up.

  “You’re not upset?” she asks.

  “Why would I be upset?”

  “I thought you didn’t know,” she says. “What we are.”

  “There was never any doubt,” I say with a smile. “We are human.”

  Luscious frowns. “Freeman … but, we’re not. Everything she told you is true.”

  A flicker of confusion clouds my thoughts for a moment, but then disappears when I see a glint of light reflecting from the wetness beside Luscious’s eyes. I gently place my finger between her nose and eye, wiping away the moisture. I hold my finger up for her to see. “Then why were you crying?”

  She stares at my wet fingertip, her jaw slowly opening. She then wipes her other eye and looks at her hand, marveling at the simple expression of sadness.

  I kiss her hard on the forehead and then hurry toward the exit.

  “Did you say she was crying?” Harry asks, the very definition of befuddled.

  I clap him on the shoulder. “See what you can do about Heap. Try to wake him, but be careful. We don’t know what she did to him.”

  “You’re going with her?” Luscious asks, as I head past the shelves dividing the two halves of the massive laboratory.

  I pause and turn back. “She’s the only one who can stop the virus. I have to stay with her. Get Heap and find a way out.”

  I don’t wait for a reply. I just leave, barely noticing the severed limbs and open corpses littering the far side of the lab. My focus is on Hail’s voice, now distant, still repeating the word “no,” over and over.

  I slide to a stop in the hall outside the room. To my right, the elevator doors are closed. But I can still hear her voice, faintly, so I know she hasn’t taken the elevator. Turning left, I find a hallway full of doors, but just one of them is in motion. It’s just an inch of movement before it gently bumps shut, but the way Hail’s voice is suddenly silent lets me know that’s where she’s gone.

  I hurry down the hall and open the metal door. A stairwell. I stop and listen. I can hear her again, but the direction—up or down—is distorted by the echoing stairs. The bump of a closing door is not.

  Down.

  I leap down the stairs, allowing gravity to pull me down faster than I could run. I jump down the next set of stairs and whip open the door. It’s a hallway identical to the one above. But it’s empty. She’s not here, and I can’t hear her voice.

  Two more staircases later, I reach the bottom floor and pull open the door. Her voice is loud again, “No, no, no…”

  I turn left and head down the hall, realizing that she has entered the same room her lab is located in two floors above. The door creaks as it opens, announcing my presence.

  Though identical in size, the room on the other side of the door is nothing like the lab above. It’s full of rotting books, ancient-looking machines I think are computers, assorted knickknacks like little wooden elephants, stacks of what I think are magnetic tape media and framed paintings that are overgrown with mold.

  Hail stands by the shelves blocking this half of the large space from the other.

  “This was my first lab,” she says. “I started down here because it was more secure. Because I didn’t think anyone would find me. But he did.”

  I walk slowly closer. “Who did?”

  “Mohr,” she says. “He helped me.”

  “With the virus?” I ask, terrified.

  “Something worse.”

  She turns to me, gripped by terror. “I know that we’re enemies. I know that you think I’m a murderer. A genocidal maniac. But I think you also understand why I created the virus, and because of that understanding, show me mercy.”

  I step up next to her, looking into the dimly lit space beyond. It’s a lab for sure, more modern than the space we’re standing in, but not as sophisticated as one of Mohr’s labs. There are two operating tables, each holding a body hidden beneath a white sheet. There are tools. A portable computer. It’s bare bones, but it could serve as a functional laboratory for the repair of humans. “What are you asking me?”

  “For your help,” she says. “I can’t do this alone.” She looks up at me. “And then I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

  “What do you want me to do?” I ask, feeling the weight of time crushing down on me.

  “Just stay with me.”

  I nod.

  She leads us into the room, slowly moving toward the nearest of the two operating tables. To my surprise, as we near the sheet-covered body, she takes my hand. I give her a squeeze, trying to reassure my enemy that she will be okay and she lets out a deeply sad moan that fills me with feelings of mercy. Here stands a person who endured the end of her people, and was broken by it. I know, without doubt, that Sir is partially to blame for her state and the resulting fallout.

  Generational genocide.

  Despite the darkness that is the world, I say, “You’ll be okay.”

  Her eyes stay aimed toward the floor, avoiding the table that’s now within arm’s reach.

  “Do you want to—”

  She shakes her head rapidly.

  I reach my hand out for the sheet. “Should I?”

  She nods subtly. “Go ahead.”

  I take hold of the sheet. It feels dry, but soft, perhaps from the layer of dust clinging to it. The sheet pulls away slowly, revealing the body hidden beneath.

  I take a step back, letting go of Hail’s hand and the sheet.

  “What is it?” she asks, unable to look up.

  I don’t want to say. I don’t want to even see it. But there she is, unmistakably dead.

  And organic.

  Human.

  “It’s … you.”
r />   45.

  My eyes linger on the shock of orange hair hanging over the ghastly stretched back face with withered white eyeballs. The hair on the back of the skull has been shaved away, the skull removed and emptied of its contents. Hundreds of thin wires lay around the skull, coming together in a box from which a single cable extends and attaches to a portable computer.

  “Well, Freeman. It looks like I was wrong,” Hail says, turning her head slowly up toward me. “We’re not different after all.”

  I stagger back, feeling confused and defeated. Strangely this discovery means the same thing to both of us. “We’re robots.”

  “Sophisticated robots,” she says. “Android is probably a better word. Simulations of human beings. But yeah, we’re not alive. Well, you were never alive. I’m actually dead.”

  “But…” This is all very confusing. I can feel my core heating up as my mind races to process the information and the emotions it’s creating. “If that is you, then who am I talking to?”

  She finds a chair and sits down, covering her eyes with her hands. The sight of her dead self must be overwhelming. Feeling a deep sadness for this person I’m supposed to loathe, I pull the sheet back up over her corpse.

  “Thanks,” she says to the floor. After a moment, she slaps her knees and springs back to her feet. “Everything I told you upstairs was true. The plague. Sir. And me retreating here to survive the virus.”

  “But you’d already been exposed,” I point out.

  She nods. “So I built this.” She motions to her robotic body. “A perfect duplicate of my human body. Skin and muscle were created from casts of my body. My bone structure was duplicated in titanium. Even my hair was recreated with synthetic fibers and colored to match. You’d think I would have noticed that it wasn’t growing.”

  “Hair grows?” I ask.

  “Human hair does, but that’s hardly interesting compared to what we did next.” Her eyes lose their sullen look. A new sort of energy—excitement—takes hold. “I had two bodies. A human body, which had days to live. And a robot body, that could live indefinitely and survive the virus. The problem was that my mind, my personal operating system and all the knowledge that made me, me, was trapped in a ticking time bomb. But we’d already solved that problem. Already performed the procedure successfully. Do you know what neurons are, Freeman?”