“Once more I think you’re joking. And once more you’ll tell me you’re not.” She turned from the illusory brown-haired man, just as he’d started speaking, and turned back to Micah. “It’s as if everything I ever knew is a lie. I’m struggling to process all that I’ve learned in the past few days, and…” She took a deep breath. “It’s very difficult.”
“That’s why the people at this table felt it best to release their discoveries slowly, to allow time for adaptation. They knew those who’d not been privy to that development as it happened would feel a profound shock, like you, but given time would adapt and adjust accordingly. In your case, I couldn’t control the speed at which you’ve learned everything; you had to learn everything almost immediately. You’ve handled it remarkably well.”
“Thanks.” She put her hands on the table to steady herself, only to find that it, like the people, was illusory. She regained her balance and stood up straight. “You asked to see a memory from a particular date. Is there some significance?”
“Yes.” He motioned her over to his side of the table, near a studious-looking woman focused on the current speaker, the dark-haired man they’d stood near as the memory began playback. Even in this holographic display, she exuded a deep sense of self-confidence. “I picked this date because I knew she’d be present.”
Sheila moved closer. “She looks quite familiar.” She snapped her fingers. “She’s the woman in the picture you saved, isn’t she?”
Micah nodded. “She is. Her name was Ashley Farmer, and she is my creator.”
Sheila took a closer look at the woman, leaning in and examining her facial features. She jumped back as Ashley leaned forward and spoke. “That’s amazing, Micah. So… you could say that she’s your mother?”
Micah smiled. “In a manner of speaking. She was quite the brilliant woman, Sheila. She constructed my body using the nanos, the same machines the Phoenix Group have used for such horrible ends in this time. She gave me the ability to change my shape as needed. Modest changes in height, body type, hair and skin and eye color…”
She looked at him. “So you could have been female?”
“I could imitate the appearance of a human woman, just as I could that of a human man. But I would be no more female than I am male now. Appearance only. To answer what I suspect is your next question: yes, I have taken both male and female body forms during my existence.”
Sheila chuckled. “I’m trying picture you in a dress and wearing heels.”
“I wore them well and looked quite stunning. Or so I’m told.”
She laughed. She thought for a moment and her brow furrowed. “If your creator lived before the Golden Ages, and you were alive during this video… Micah, just how old are you?”
He made a show of counting on his fingers. “I am one thousand, four hundred, eighty-one years, seven months, four days, three hours, two minutes and one second old. And counting.”
She whistled. “Very robot-like answer, Micah.”
“Precision is critical in my line of work.”
“No doubt.” She motioned at Ashley and the others gathered around the table. “What are they talking about?”
“They are finalizing battle plans against the bad guys, which will commence a few weeks after this discussion.” He allowed the artificial skin of his face to droop, his eyes to drop, the corners of his mouth to turn down. “Ashley was the first casualty of that battle.”
Sheila clapped a hand to her mouth, then threw her arms around him. “I’m so sorry, Micah. I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t.”
“It’s a very human action to keep her picture with you all this time, Micah.”
In his centuries-long effort to become as human-like as possible, he’d never before heard such a compliment. He nodded his thanks. “I’ve kept that picture safe my entire life, even as the world dissolved in chaos around me on multiple occasions.”
“You’ve been through something like this before?”
“In terms of results? The decimation of the human population? Yes, several times. But I’ve never seen it happen in the manner we’re seeing now.”
“How were you… born?”
He frowned, wondering how she’d arrived at that question. “She built my brain as an experiment in artificial learning. Essentially, my brain had a few core rules coded into its firmware, rules that can’t be overridden. I had to learn everything else through observation, experimentation, and developing patterns of actions and results. It’s very much the way a human child learns. She’ll see someone walk, and then tries to do the same. She’ll fall and fail many times but never give up, until her muscle strength and coordination produce the desired result. The same happens with language. I learned to speak in the language and dialect of the day before I had a body, which she fashioned for me, as I mentioned, from those nanos. A massive robotic brain controlling quadrillions of smaller, less intelligent robots. I learned to coordinate all of it, until I could walk, until I could move my mouth in perfect harmony with the speaker that provided my voice. I watched and learned non-verbal communication and mannerisms, so that after a time, I could pass in public as a human, and not a machine that didn’t blink, or flick an insect aside, or yawn at appropriate times of the day.”
Sheila nodded. “As you might have guessed, I certainly never suspected you weren’t human. You’ve learned well.”
“I’ve gotten quite accomplished at faking my humanity over the centuries.” He smiled. “She gave me free will, for the most part. I can act as I deem best based upon my observation and learning, but there were a few overriding rules that I couldn’t violate. I could act as I thought appropriate unless she specifically ordered me to take a different course of action. She rarely did, but when she used that power over me, it prevented me from quite a few catastrophes of my own.”
Sheila nodded. “That’s good foresight. She knew she couldn’t predict everything that might happen, or expect you to have the necessary experience to handle anything that might happen, and so she built that feature in.”
He nodded. “She also knew that such a feature would still be required if she wasn’t around, either due to geographic challenges or her death.” Sheila winced, a sympathetic reaction that he wished he could experience. “She added another rule, giving that power to her descendants, with the caveat that they had to know of their relation to her and know they could do so. That would prevent me from ignoring orders because I didn’t know, or a descendent of hers giving me orders without realizing the impact.” He nodded. “And, being thorough, she added a third tier of humans with that ability.”
Sheila nodded, understanding dawning. “The people at the table?”
“Not just them, but the entire group we’d call the good guys. There were thousands. I had access to identifying characteristics to ensure I knew all of them. They were not people inclined to give orders, thankfully, so that override ability rarely came into play.”
Understanding dawned on Sheila’s face. “One of the people in that group… one that’s still alive today… they’re the one who told you not to interfere, aren’t they? They told you not to stop them.”
He nodded. Her ability to connect facts dazzled him. “That’s correct. Unfortunately, centuries of utter hell can make anyone lose their minds and turn to evil. It happened in this case. One of her peers changed philosophies and is now part of Phoenix.”
“So… can you find someone else in that original group of Ashley’s to override those orders?”
He sighed. “If only it were that simple. An order can only be overridden by someone in a higher tier of the hierarchy.”
She thought for a moment. “Oh, I understand. You’d need one of Ashley’s descendants.” Her eyes widened. “Are there any still alive?”
“I tracked them through the centuries after Ashley’s death. The various calamities decimating the human population took many of them. With the discovery of the Time Capsule and the herding of humanity in
to the cityplexes, I struggled to track them. Too much distance. It’s one of the reasons I adopted this persona and joined the West’s military. It gave me an opportunity and an excuse to move among plexes in my search for Ashley’s descendants.”
“And…?” She waved her hand, encouraging him to tell her the news. “Are there any left?”
“Oddly enough, Phoenix’s efforts to collect genetic data on the entire human population helped me. I found one, but… she died. Years ago. I thought I was in trouble. But then I learned she’d given birth to a child. I tracked that child as best I could, but it was difficult.”
Sheila stared at him. “Did something happen to him? Did he survive the Ravagers attack? We have to find him, Micah! It’s important!”
Micah tensed his face. “I agree. But the child was a girl, Sheila. And I made extraordinary efforts to ensure that she survived the Ravagers attack.”
“You did? That’s great! But how do you know?”
He said nothing, watching her face as she connected it all together, as her eyes widened and her hand moved to cover the wide open mouth gasping at the revelation.
“And now you know the truth, Sheila. Now you know why I went to such lengths to protect you above all others as everything unfolded. You’re the last living descendant of Ashley Farmer. I need you to undo the orders I’ve been given, because if you don’t, there’s nothing more I can do to stop the Phoenix Group.”
—13—
RODDY LIGHT
THE TWO MEN moved along the primary travel corridor in the space station, beyond where Roddy had gone in his previous sprint along the thoroughfare. He noticed it now, the subtle changes in wall coloring and carpet texture, enough to create obviously unique sections of the station. With people able to walk the miles-long circumference, it would otherwise be easy to become lost and disoriented, unable to find whatever one sought.
He had some concept of where the ship might be, but found himself moving in the wrong direction, prodded along by Delaney’s occasional not-so-gentle nudges. He wanted to finish breaking the bonds and strangle the man with his bare hands. Then he’d repeat the effort with Silver. And then he’d return to the surface on his own and find Deirdre.
He paused, turning his head slightly in Delaney’s direction. “I’ve heard you mention that Deirdre had involvement in launching those robots, came up with the plan. That’s not really true.” A pause. “Is it?” Another strand snapped.
Delaney heard it and chuckled. “When you’re around people with telepathic abilities, Light, you’d do well to learn to control your thoughts. I’ve been enjoying your quiet struggle for freedom. But, alas, I don’t think that’s advisable.” He grabbed Roddy’s arm, spinning his captive against the nearest wall, and used a forearm to pin his back and keep Roddy still. Roddy heard a snapping sound and felt his wrists firmly rebound.
Delaney pulled him away from the wall. “Much better.” He nudged Roddy forward, and Roddy, regretfully, moved. “To answer your question, yes, Deirdre provided the fundamental idea enabling us to accelerate the purge phase. You see, we’d seen the nanobots, the tiny robots upon which we based the Ravagers. But we’d never really thought of them as a selective weapon; that’s not what they’d been coded for in their Time Capsule incarnation. Deirdre, though, saw the potential, recognizing that the tiny bots could destroy as well as create. With some commandeered intellectual prowess, we figured out how to make them tear apart whatever they might encounter, how to make them exclude from that destruction a few specific substances, and, most critically, how to get the machines to use the remains of what they destroyed to reproduce themselves. It was so jaw-droppingly brilliant that we couldn’t fathom how nobody else had thought of it in the preceding years.”
Roddy shook his head. “I can’t believe my wife brainstormed the destruction of the world.” He knew the word wife would infuriate Delaney, but didn’t care.
“She was impatient, like many of us. We’d reached the critical mass of people, but most weapons for mass extermination were… too sloppy. Or they’d require decades, even centuries of waiting here before the grounds were inhabitable again.”
“What a shame for you.”
“We had all manner of catastrophes planned. Civil insurrection driven by anger at wealth inequality—do you think it’s an accident that Mr. Silver was so ostentatious in flaunting his wealth and mocking those with less, Light? Genetically engineered diseases. Incarcerations for invented charges from which the guilty parties never emerged. All subtle. We had to avoid being too blatant in carrying it all out; being outnumbered a million to one, we’d be destroyed if enough people figured out what was happening and rose up to stop us. That’s the beauty of Deirdre’s breakthrough: it didn’t matter if people figured it out.”
The carpet changed to a thicker grade, and Roddy felt his boots crunch the fibers down. He thought of everyone dying on the surface due to Deirdre’s idea. As he walked, he cringed. He’d never known he’d married a woman who’d suggested systemic genocide as a less smelly alternative to war, disease, and civil unrest.
He glanced at Delaney, his face taut with anger as usual. Roddy suspected the man still held a grudge at Silver’s use of Deirdre to ensure Roddy’s survival. Little had he known that at the time he met his future wife, she was already engaged to Delaney and had masterminded the Ravager-based purge of civilization.
He wondered if he’d ever known the real Deirdre.
They walked in silence, moving at a steady clip down the massive internal corridor. Roddy considered the structure, using the time walking toward what might be his execution pondering the marvels of it. The gravitational pull here felt just as it did on earth, and that pull tugged him toward the interior of the loop itself. He felt nothing pulling him toward the planet, the largest natural source around, a pull that would send him toward the transparent ceiling. Nor did it come from centripetal forces; he’d have to be on the inside of the wheel, looking up at the core. Those who’d built this space had learned to create and direct the force at will, which followed as they’d figured out the secrets of powered flight.
It meant that this station could support multiple such room-lined corridors in the wheel section. He’d seen enough living and working space to boggle his mind; the idea that there were other such corridors boggled his mind.
Delaney stopped before an unmarked door and knocked in an obvious coded pattern. The door opened, revealing a stern-faced guard. The man acknowledged Delaney and stepped aside, letting both men inside. Roddy saw Oswald Silver seated at another ornate wooden table, flanked on either side by additional guards. Roddy found that strange; was he afraid of Roddy?
Interesting idea.
Silver leaned his head back, eyes never leaving the new arrivals, and murmured something to one of the guards. The men left and shut the door, leaving Roddy alone with Silver and Delaney.
“Have a seat, Light.” Oswald nodded toward one of the chairs.
“I’ll stand, thanks.”
Delaney pulled the chair back, manhandled Roddy into the seat, and slammed it into the table. Roddy grunted as his ribs hit the side of the table. Nothing broke, but it still hurt. “You’ll do as instructed, Light.”
Roddy offered Delaney a withering gaze before turning to face Oswald Silver. He’d known the man as a media-crazy tycoon and his sole employer for many years, but he no longer recognized that Oswald Silver, not after the events and education over the past day. This man looked to be in his early forties with dark brown hair, replacing the guise of a man a quarter century older with a silver mane atop his head.
Of course, if one could believe Delaney, Silver wasn’t twenty years younger than previously suspected but a thousand years or more older.
Silver fixed him with an amused expression. “We meet again, Light. Our discussion today will revolve around the nature of your present captivity, and the means by which you might earn your freedom.”
“Captivity?” Roddy arched an eyebrow. “No subtle,
if inaccurate, suggestion that I’m here of my own free will with the ability to roam the space station as I please?”
“I’m not a man given to subtlety, Light. You surely know that by now, having been in my employ these many years.”
Roddy said nothing.
Silver snorted. “Let’s be frank. You have something we require. You don’t know how to provide it, so the fact that you’ve little interest in aiding us won’t be held against you.” He paused as his eyes narrowed. “At least, not yet.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “Here’s the dilemma for you, then. We’re no worse off than we were if you were to, say, walk out the wrong door of the space station, never to be heard from again. The only way that it’s worth the risk of keeping you alive is if we can identify and replicate the secret of your uniqueness.”
“Risk?” He thought, and the implications came to mind. They feared Roddy would be noticed, recognized for his unique ability by their enemies, kidnapped and able to provide them with his secret. Silver and Delaney would lose out. Better to leave Roddy for dead than to allow him to help others.
That raised another interesting possibility. If he could find the others who’d understand and be able to make use of his secret, they could be potential allies against Silver and Delaney. Or they might be just as insane as Silver and Delaney. He had risks of his own to consider and ponder.
“Given the risks we’re taking, we’ve decided that you’ll undertake projects on our behalf. You might think about resisting, of course, fool that you are. Let me be perfectly clear: the greater your resistance, the more you’ll suffer. The worse you do at completing our assignments, the more you’ll suffer. Should we determine that your efforts are less than ideal, we will unfortunately proceed along without you. Understand?” The piercing stare once more.
“Just one question, Oswald.” He felt no compulsion to use an address of respect toward a man no longer his employer, a man who saw Roddy as no more than a slave. “What happens if I do succeed in giving you what you want?”
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