Smasher

by Scott Bly

  First Assistant Evelyn Rasmussin had an expansive workspace larger than Jane’s apartment. Evelyn smiled. “Jane! It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “The pleasure is all mine, Evelyn.” Jane kept her handshake firm. It was 4:55 a.m. Thank heaven she was on time.

  “Mr. Foxx is looking forward to seeing you.”

  * * *

  Gramercy Foxx stood. The energy he used for his otherworldly influence hung in the room. Sweet music soothed his guests.

  “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting long,” he said with a disarming smile.

  “Not at all, Mr. Foxx.” Jane smiled tightly, remaining reserved.

  Foxx took the seat next to her at the conference table.

  He wants me to feel at ease with him — is it genuine?

  “Jane, you’re sharp, so no doubt you’ve analyzed this from every angle.”

  “My integrity is everything to me,” Jane replied. “I will not write or report anything I don’t believe is true.”

  “That’s why I picked you! I want you to be thoroughly honest! Tell the world what you see and think. You will have more than enough information.” He slid a sheet of paper to her. It listed twelve of the most powerful corporate executives in the world — along with their personal contact information.

  “These trusted friends are my chief advisers and will cooperate with you in every way. Unfortunately, Terrence Wrightwood has had an unexpected … illness.”

  Jane’s eyes widened at the list, although she tried to hide it.

  Excellent, Foxx thought. But he wouldn’t risk using The Future’s full mind control on her. A light touch would be sufficient. He needed the public to believe every word she said.

  For the next eleven days, Foxx would keep her preoccupied with the shiny wrappings of The Future, and that would distract her from the truth. He had found the perfect spokeswoman. The world would trust her completely.

  “Why did you come get me now?” Charlie asked one morning. “You can travel through time, so you could have come for me any time in my life. Why did you come now, when I’m twelve? I’ll be much more skilled when I’m sixteen.”

  “That wasn’t an option.”

  “Why not?” Then it dawned on him. “Does something happen to me?”

  “Look, I can’t interfere with the past.”

  “But you already did! You came and took me away!”

  “Yeah, but it’s not like that, Charlie. The future is relative, OK? The Interrogator and the people who follow him are … dangerous.” She let it hang there.

  “What, he’s going to kill me?”

  “I won’t say anything more. Foxx is probably going to kill both of us here anyway, so what does it matter? Lighten up. We have enough to worry about.

  “So there’s one more thing I want to tell you,” she went on. “And I can’t explain it. For a year, I’ve been receiving … information … messages. Usually when I’m … in maintenance mode.”

  “Where do the messages come from? Who sends them?”

  “I don’t know. I wake up, and I know things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you. One morning I could see you, or someone like you, where you live, when you live. It seemed like … instructions. To go fetch you, I think.”

  “To help you stop Foxx?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Let me get to that. It doesn’t make any sense. I’m a robot. I was built. Programmed.”

  “You told me that.”

  “But I didn’t tell you who programmed me.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I was programmed by Gramercy Foxx.”

  “Gramercy Foxx … built you?”

  “I don’t know. But he programmed me.”

  * * *

  “My memories begin in a laboratory in the TerraThinc Building. I remember everything I see, hear, touch, taste, smell — everything. But the information that appears after maintenance mode … it doesn’t make sense; the messages don’t even seem like they belong to me. Memories, dreams, programming. I don’t know.”

  “I wonder what it all means.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if they were accidentally programmed into me. Maybe Foxx was thinking about something and didn’t realize what he put in.”

  “Well, you’ve been doing the right thing.”

  Geneva looked up, surprised. “Thank you, Charlie. You make me feel better. And I’ve never heard of a robot that has feelings. I’m different that way, too. Foxx must have gotten my consciousness circuits right, huh?”

  “You seem like a real person to me.”

  “That was the point. He wanted to see how close to a real person he could get and have me still be a robot.

  “He gave me special abilities — some he doesn’t even understand himself. One of those abilities was time travel. He told me to figure it out with the particle accelerators and magnetic fields and my processing speed. The power levels were right. I just had to practice synchronizing with the energy fields.”

  “The Hum!” Charlie exclaimed. “You do connect with it!”

  “I don’t know about that. But eventually I could smash atoms. I could create a portal and control it. Getting in and out is the easy part. I had to be able to calculate probabilities. Every one of those lights is another timeline probability vector.”

  “Geneva, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Do you know why Foxx wanted you to time travel?”

  “Sorry. I think he wanted me to take him places. But I escaped. I didn’t trust him anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “He would talk to himself in the lab at night after he put me into maintenance mode. He didn’t know I could still hear him. One night he was talking about what he would do when he finally went back in time. ‘I’ll get even with you, old man,’ is what he said. He wants to kill somebody!”

  “But how would he know somebody from the past?”

  “Sometimes I think he came from the past. He’s obsessed with it.”

  “If he came from the past, why can’t he go back again?”

  “I don’t know,” Geneva said with a smirk. “At least, I didn’t know then. But I think you’ve made me realize something. Getting a portal to open the first time is the hard part. After you’ve done it, then the path is laid, so to speak — there’s a weakness in timespace so the portal can reopen, and you can return.

  “Charlie, you said the Hum is powerful where you’re from, but not here. Maybe he didn’t have enough juice to get back! I’m nuclear — I’ve got the juice! Maybe he made me to solve his problem. I can smash through time, and he can’t!”

  “You really hate him, don’t you?”

  “Look what he’s doing! He’s trying to enslave humanity because he’s jealous.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Of his sister. He talked about her during maintenance. She was way more skilled than he was. But he’s really unhinged.”

  “You think he wants to go back in time to kill his sister?”

  “I don’t know. Seems like a lot of effort for a murder. Anyway, he’s stuck here, and I’m not gonna help him.”

  “So he’s making the best of it,” Charlie said bitterly. “He’s entertaining himself by seeing if he can hypnotize the entire world.”

  “Maybe if he does that, his sister will be impressed, and his parents will like him better. Boo hoo.”

  “Geneva!”

  “I have a lot of reasons to want to put Gramercy Foxx out of business.”

  “I broke into Foxx’s lab,” Geneva said. “I was on a mission. I wanted to see more.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Animals in cages. Experiments.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I ran. As fast as I could. Some robot or animal yelled after me, ‘You have to stop him!’ I never went back.”

  “Did Foxx find out?”

  “I confronted him. He started dragging me to that room to give me a firmware upgrade! That’s the most basic part of any mach
ine’s identity, Charlie. He wanted to erase my identity! For a robot, it’s like murder!”

  “Did he do it?”

  “No. The closer we came to that door, the harder I fought. Then I managed to pull a portal open right in front of me. Smash! Foxx was shocked! I pretty much fell into it, headfirst.”

  “So you got away,” Charlie said. “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, but what is the connection between the animal experiments and the computer virus? There has to be a link. Right?”

  “Absolutely. And his connection to the Hum is part of this, too. But I don’t know how it fits together.”

  “I think the TerraThinc Building holds the keys to everything. I want to see that lab.”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “We are running out of time, Geneva! We have a little more than a week, and a big piece of the puzzle is missing. All of these elements connect somehow into a bigger picture. But until we see it, we can’t stop him. We don’t understand what we’re trying to stop.”

  “It’s very, very dangerous.”

  “Everything we’re doing is dangerous.”

  “But this is different. When I ran away, he was already designing something new to increase his power. Maybe another robot, like me, but more sophisticated. Deadly. And it’s probably in his lab.”

  “We’re in this together. I will be there,” he said firmly.

  Her response was not robotic at all. She gave him a hug.

  “Friends,” he said.

  More than seventy thousand people passed through the TerraThinc Building on any given day.

  “Nothing’s easier than blending in with a crowd,” Geneva said. “We’ll slip in right under their noses.” Charlie found himself jostled along a current of workers rotating shifts through the lobby.

  Since the night she’d escaped from Foxx in his lab, Geneva had not been able to use her Smasher portal to get back into the building. Foxx had blocked her. But his traps didn’t stop her spying.

  She wore a baseball cap with her hair sticking out the back in a ponytail. Today she was an ordinary teenager. “When it clears out, they’ll shift focus back to the main entrances. Then we’ll go to the lab.”

  On the 50th floor, they slipped into a dark janitor’s closet.

  “Now we wait.”

  * * *

  For Charlie, every minute felt like an eternity. Finally Geneva whispered, “It’s time.” She handed Charlie a janitor’s uniform. “Put this on. It’s big, but you can roll up the sleeves.”

  She hauled an industrial robot out of the closet and pulled it along behind them. “From the camera’s view we’re just fixing the bots,” she explained. They headed back to the elevators.

  She waved her left hand across a black bar, and the elevator light blinked to green. The car accelerated straight up.

  “I wirelessly hacked the security network. A spare janitor code will get us to most floors, but the security for the restricted floors will be tricky.

  “TerraThinc uses three tiers of security: First, something you have — usually an access card; second, something you know — like a password; and third, something you are — a part of your body that gets analyzed. Biometrics.

  “Most of the moderate-restriction areas use fingerprint scanners. Let’s hope that hasn’t changed.”

  “What if it has?”

  “You don’t want to know. So far my chip has worked.” She grinned. “Foxx changed the codes on me, but I set up a privileged chip in my hand a long time ago. Precautionary measures. I should be able to pull the new pass codes.”

  She’s nervous, Charlie thought. So she’s talking.

  The elevator chimed. Geneva checked for snoopers, and they stepped into the connecting bank of elevators. She waved her hand and punched 185.

  When the elevator doors slid open again, Charlie felt woozy.

  “You OK?” Geneva asked.

  “This place has bad energy. I can feel it all the way to my toes.”

  “Let’s just get it over with.”

  “Right.”

  “Foxx’s office is on 200. His living quarters are on 199. His computer lab is on 198, and the animal lab is on 197. The security up there is ridiculous. All three forms of ID — a card plus a code plus a fingerprint. Nobody but Foxx can get into the animal lab. That’s the toughest one.”

  “When you say you can figure out his codes, what does that mean?”

  “I can match his passwords. And I have his fingerprints. He didn’t think to hide them. Any time I touch a person’s hands, I can mimic his fingerprints.”

  “Do you have my fingerprints?”

  “Of course.”

  “How could Foxx forget something as important as that?”

  “I’m a robot. I was supposed to follow my programming, remember? There’s one big problem. The system keeps track of each card — people can’t be in two places at once. So if Foxx’s card is on the 10th floor, and then he appears on one of the restricted floors, an alarm sounds.”

  They loaded back into the elevator, cleaner in tow. She hit the button for the 190th floor and entered the janitor’s code. Up they went. No movement from security. The hallways on 190 got mopped every day.

  The maintenance elevator doors slid open, and they trudged out. This was the most vulnerable time. If security looked closely, they had a major issue.

  They shuffled to the next bank of elevators. Geneva turned away from the camera. She reprogrammed her chip with Foxx’s codes. Now, if Foxx hadn’t changed his camera kill number, and if security wasn’t watching …

  “I’m counting on your Hum connection today,” Geneva whispered.

  The main elevator doors slid open, and she waved her hand again. Green light.

  She punched 197.

  Blinking green light.

  Seven-digit pass code.

  Double blinking green.

  Her thumbprint changed to match Foxx’s.

  Solid green.

  They were on their way.

  Geneva’s greatest fear was Foxx. He kept inhuman hours and rarely slept. Most of the time he worked on the restricted floors. In a nanosecond, any of this could turn sour.

  Charlie kept his head down and his mouth shut. The elevator doors slid open on 197, and out they stepped. So far so good.

  Geneva led Charlie down the hallway to the door. That door.

  He tried not to stare, but she started shaking.

  “Let’s go back,” he hissed.

  “No! You were right — we have to do this. We absolutely do.”

  Click! The door unlocked. Charlie took Geneva’s hand. She squeezed it tight.

  They stepped into the dark room. An overwhelming stench of death and caged animals rolled out. Geneva was shivering, but she kept going. She flipped on the light switch.

  Animals chirped and squawked, flapping wings against metal bars. Cages lined the walls from floor to ceiling, each dimly lit. Boxes of robot parts were heaped along the walls — arms, legs, springs, tubes, and electric gadgets. Light illuminated the empty operating table in the center of the room.

  She knows Foxx programmed her, but she doesn’t know if Foxx built her. Of course he did. Look at all these robot parts, these pieces. Yet how could a monster like Foxx create something as good as Geneva? And what did these robots and animals have to do with The Future? How did it all tie together? He felt the room for the Hum but could feel only despair.

  “Why is it so filthy?” Charlie asked. “He has all the money in the world. These animals haven’t been fed, and half of them don’t have water.”

  “Because he doesn’t care if they live or die. They’ve served their purpose.”

  “I wonder where his new experiment is,” Charlie said. “The one to increase his power? I keep looking over my shoulder, expecting it to come after us with an ax.”

  “I don’t know. Stay alert. Let’s gather information and get out of here. This place is making me sick.”

  He was horrified by the macabre me
nagerie. Dozens of the animals were hybrid — part robot, part living thing.

  “Geneva,” Charlie called softly, “I think Foxx has embalmed some of these.”

  “If they rot, he probably can’t learn from them,” she snapped.

  At the end of the row, very small creatures such as insects and worms were attached to computerized parts.

  “Look,” Charlie said. “These are simple animals — less complicated than a mouse or a dog.” Down the row, snakes, lizards, and turtles wore electronic chips. “I wonder if Foxx started his experiments with simpler animals and expanded them … all the way to humans?”

  “Hey!” Geneva called from the back of the lab. “There’s a door here. Let’s see where it goes!”

  Three floors above the lab, the intercom on Gramercy Foxx’s desk buzzed. He let the light blink four times before he answered.

  “Sir, McCallum here. They’re on the move. They used the old camera kill codes like you said. The robot is monitoring the dummy access codes. I have teams in place. Do you want us to move in?”

  “Where are they going?” Foxx asked.

  “They’re headed toward Restricted Access Two.”

  “If they’re going into Restricted Two, Gargan will handle them.”

  “Sir, with all due respect,” McCallum said carefully, “if they run into Gargan, we won’t be able to identify the bodies. I believe it’s a young boy we’re talking about here. Geneva’s the problem, sir.”

  “Did I ask your opinion?” Foxx’s face tightened.

  “No, sir.”

  “Have I ever allowed you to question my authority or judgment?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then consider this your only warning. You seem to forget that as far as you are concerned, Gargan doesn’t exist. But Gargan has his orders. I suggest you follow yours.” Foxx abruptly flicked off the intercom.

  Geneva, Geneva, what are you up to, my little runaway? Had the memory wipes failed completely? She had escaped, so obviously the control software had failed. But she must have had partial recall before she disappeared. If that was the case, had more memories returned?

  No matter. She would be dealt with. The code had been updated. And she had been a means to an end after all.