Extinction Reversed (Robot Geneticists Book 1)

by J. S. Morin

  Chapter Fifteen

  Eve’s exploration brought her around the north side of the agrarian structure. There she found a prairie surrounded by a short fence. Enclosed within was a herd of blocky quadrupeds grazing on brown grass.

  Eve knew cows from pictures and descriptions: four-legged herbivores with edible flesh and gentle dispositions. They had seemed to Eve a rather pointless species. If they served any purpose at all, it was to keep the grasses short and provide nitrates for soil enrichment. Both those functions were easily replaceable by mechanical means.

  But seeing them outside the sterile boundaries of a digital display sparked Eve’s curiosity. She had to see one up close.

  A truck approached, driven down the dusty road by one of the robotic workers. The back was filled with sheaves of dried grass tied in bundles. Whoever was driving it ought to know all about the pasture.

  Eve waved her arms overhead as she stepped into the truck’s path.

  The vehicle stopped. Eve was blocking its way. A pair of ruts in the dirt highlighted the route that its wheels were keen to continue following.

  “Excuse me,” Eve called out. “Is it all right if I go inside the fence to examine a cow up close?”

  The robot didn’t answer. It backed the truck up and navigated it out of the ruts, angling it to avoid Eve on its next attempt to pass. But Eve scrambled over to block it once again. Time and again, fifty kilograms of human girl halted the progress of a piece of machinery that outweighed her a hundred times over.

  It wasn’t even about her question anymore. Eve was intrigued by both the persistence of the robot operating the truck and his continued insistence on ignoring her.

  Finally, the truck shut down, and the driver climbed out.

  “Thank you,” Eve said, grinning at her minor victory. “Now, can you tell me whether it’s safe to go in with the cows to examine them up close?

  Rather than answer, the robot reached out and took Eve by the sides, lifting her easily and holding her at arm’s length. The robot’s grip wasn’t so tight as to be painful, though the hard, metallic fingers that cradled under her arms couldn’t be described as comfortable. Eve twisted and squirmed, trying in vain to free herself as the robot adjusted his grip to maintain his hold.

  “Put me down!” Eve ordered. She would never have dared speak to Creator in such a tone, but Creator was rational and generally explained her actions.

  This mute robot was touching her without permission and relocating her with unknown intentions. Eve kicked him. She wished she’d kept her shoes on since all she managed was to send a sharp pain shooting through her foot. Not to be thwarted so easily, she swung her shoes at the robot’s head by the laces.

  For all her efforts, the robot ignored Eve’s attacks. He carried her around to the back of the truck and deposited her alongside the hay it was transporting.

  Before Eve could make sense of her situation, the truck resumed its journey. Eve scrambled barefoot through mounds of unprocessed grain to get a view of where they were going.

  The silent robot piloted them to a gate in the primitive post-and-rail fence. A remote sensor triggered, and the gate swung out of the truck’s way. The truck paused until the path was fully open, then entered the pasture.

  Was this his way of answering Eve’s earlier question?

  Non-language communications were spotty at best. Creator had trained Eve to read the complex system of facial actuations that robots used to convey subtext to dialogue, but it was one of her weakest areas of study. But picking Eve up, placing her into a vehicle, and driving her into the pasture was a peculiar way of answering a simple question.

  The cows responded to their presence at once. While not terribly energetic creatures, as soon as the truck approached, the cows headed for a five-meter-high cylindrical structure in the pasture. The silent robot guided the truck toward the feeding silo, carefully navigating around any cows that got in their way in much the same manner that he tried to go around Eve.

  When the truck stopped, an armature extended from the cylinder and the driver robot came back to take custody of the open, tubular end. Eve hopped to ground level, unsure of the driver’s intent as he guided the armature into the back of the truck.

  A high-pitched whine commenced, and the tube sucked up grain wherever the robot guided it. Seconds later, the cattle feed filtered through the cylinder and spat out into a trough that ran all around it, exiting from a dozen ports.

  The cows’ lethargy was replaced by a sudden eagerness to crowd around that trough.

  Eve found her retreat cut off. A river of bovine flesh carried her along in its current. Glimpses of the truck teased her with promises of safety. However, there was no path through the herd of huge, lumbering bodies. Every way Eve turned, there was another animal bearing down on her.

  One of the cows knocked Eve to the ground, oblivious to her presence. As she struggled to rise, the leg of another struck her across the face and sent her sprawling. In a panic, Eve curled into a ball and hoped cows could avoid stepping on her.

  Chapter Sixteen

  A robotic hand grabbed Eve by the arm. “There you are!” Charlie scolded her. “What were you thinking? I told you to look around, not wander into a stampede.”

  “I just…” Eve began the sentence without a clear goal in mind and now found that her thoughts had jumbled.

  “It’s all right,” Charlie said, the anger fading from his voice.

  The robot in the penguin-colored suit bent down and lifted Eve. His was not the uncouth manner of the silent robot. Charlie supported her in the crook of his arm in a seated position, and she steadied herself with a hand on his shoulder.

  “Just… don’t take risks like that,” Charlie said. “Someday I might end up writing your biography. I don’t want it to be a two-page pamphlet that ends ‘…and then she wandered into a pasture at feeding time and was trampled to death by cows.’ OK?”

  The incongruity of Charlie’s statement struck Eve as funny, and she laughed aloud. “Then don’t write it that way.”

  “Well, I’m not going to lie in a biography, so you’re going to have to promise not to get yourself killed in some embarrassing manner. I’d much rather write about this day ending with Eve having the first delicious meal of her life.”

  Charlie’s intentions seemed benign. And while his answers often spawned more questions, he at least responded to her queries. “Why didn’t the robot operating that truck answer me when I asked if the pasture was safe?”

  “He’s not really a robot as you understand them. That was just an automaton.”

  “You mean he’s broken like the humans at the sanctuary?” It would make sense that robots that didn’t work correctly would be given simpler tasks. And since robots were superior to humans in every way, even the defective ones ought to be somewhat useful.

  “Not at all. These are machines without a brain. Just computers in them. They run programs, and those programs include certain jobs like planting crops, driving trucks, feeding cows. At other facilities, automatons maintain factories and construct buildings. Jobs that require creativity and decision-making are done by thinking robots like Nora109 or me.”

  “But Toby22 just watches animals. Why does he have a mind?”

  Charlie snickered. The expression was half a smile and half a laugh. Creator didn’t use it personally, but she had taught it to Eve anyway.

  “Well, Toby22 and all the other Tobys clean up around that borderline between what you need brains for and what you don’t. He was a hardworking kid as a human, before the invasion. Charlie Truman’s lab assistant. He’s probably the only one of us with a gram of humility, and the personalities based on him get stuck doing what the rest of us won’t.

  “A Toby will fix damaged desalinization pumps, oversee animal births, retrieve carcasses from the wild… or monitor forestry and habitat recovery of a small corner of central England. It’s hard to dislike a Toby. They’re not troublemakers like Charlies… or Eves.” He reach
ed over with his free hand and touched Eve on the nose.

  She couldn’t discern whether Charlie meant to infer that since it was hard to dislike Toby and Eve was unlike Toby that she was thus unlikable, or whether by describing a commonality that the two of them shared, he was attempting to increase her affection for him. Creator had explained both conversational tactics but had not prepared Eve for someone who decided to use both techniques at once.

  Instead, she argued the factual basis for his statement. “I am not.”

  Charlie carried her off in the direction of the skyroamer they had taken to get here. He looked up and met her eye. “Oh, little human. You have no idea how wrong you are.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  By the time Charlie7 got Eve14 back to Paris, the girl was hungry again.

  While Charlie7 programmed the protofab with a set of basic cookware, Eve14 munched on a granola bar from the Scrapyard. He really needed to stop thinking of the sanctuary by that name.

  For that matter, he was beginning to question whether it was fair to Eve to continue appending a number to her name. The girl wasn’t a robot. That much became clear as a diamond as soon as Charlie7 finished cooking the first meal made from real ingredients.

  First Eve tried a plate of hard-boiled eggs. After a few experimental chews, she opened her mouth and gagged as the contents spilled forth. She used her fingers to wipe the remainder from her tongue.

  “Tasteless rubberized polymer. Are you sure this is edible?”

  After that, Charlie served her pancakes.

  Eve had chewed slowly, pursing her lips as if she expected her pancakes to escape at any moment.

  “Spongy. Difficult to chew.”

  In fairness, Charlie probably hadn’t mixed the batter well, and he wished that he’d had syrup to go along with them.

  Charlie had sliced an apple to remove any chance that Eve would attempt to eat the core or stem. Yet his caution was unwarranted. Eve nibbled away at the meat of the fruit, discarding the slivers of peel between pinched fingers as if they were a plastic wrapping. Despite her distaste for the peel, she gobbled the apple slices with abandon. Grunts of pleasure escaped as she swallowed each bite.

  Once she was finished, Eve sucked her fingers clean of the juice. Ducking her head, Eve looked up at Charlie7 with guilty eyes. “I expect elevated blood glucose levels.”

  It was time to put Nora109’s human-approved medical scanner to good use. Eve’s paranoia about her physical condition meshed perfectly with Charlie’s curiosity about the girl’s origins.

  The medical kit was a mystery box. Charlie7 had never performed a medical exam even in the days when humans were around. Charles Truman had assistants for that, so Charlie7 had no human memories to call forth. Fortunately for Charlie7, Eve was familiar enough with the process to coach him through it.

  Charlie7 had no doubt that he could have maintained his professionalism around a naked young woman. Nonetheless, some vestigial human embarrassment made him glad that Eve had stopped short of removing the undergarments that the sanctuary had provided.

  First among Charlie7’s observations was a port in Eve’s left arm, right near the elbow. It allowed direct access to her bloodstream. Taking a blood sample was as simple as opening a faucet. Injecting drugs into her system would have been just as easy.

  “Your blood sugar is fine,” Charlie7 muttered to reassure Eve as he proceeded.

  Charlie7’s second observation was that Eve was nearly hairless. Her scalp, eyebrows, and eyelashes were all intact, but there wasn’t a follicle anywhere else on her as far as he was willing to check. Whoever made her must have gone to some trouble in the genetic code to arrange that trait since there was no evidence that it was a surgical alteration.

  Eve held perfectly still except for her steady breathing. She kept her arms slightly away from her body, feet shoulder width apart, and chin level. Every feature was perfectly symmetrical.

  The girl didn’t seem to mind Charlie7’s close inspection, so he zoomed in and looked at her eyes. They appeared all natural. There was no evidence of surgical adjustment to correct the optical deformities that were naturally present in 65 percent of the population prior to extinction.

  Eve waited while Charlie7 looked up an old eyesight test in the Earthwide archive and set up a screen at the prescribed distance. The display lit with a series of gibberish letters at various sizes, stacked in a pyramid from largest to smallest.

  “What’s the lowest line of letters you can read?” Charlie asked.

  “The bottom one,” Eve replied. Then she proved it by reciting them aloud. “P-E-Z-O-L-C-F-T-D. What’s it supposed to mean?”

  “In and of itself: nothing. But being able to read it means your visual acuity is about four times that of an average pre-extinction human.”

  Then Eve elaborated. “Unless you meant the very bottom where it says, ‘Not to be used for medical diagnosis, copyright 2025 Bradford Optical.’”

  Charlie let that comment slide and proceeded to check her blood pressure, heart rate, and pupil response. He had her stretch and twist, flex and bend, watching for any joint or connective tissue injuries.

  Eve had the range of motion of a gymnast. The scanner in the medical kit reported her height at 155cm and weight at 51kg. As a scientist, Charlie7 would have preferred it called “mass,” but he was willing to indulge in the age-old medical conceit that mass and weight were synonymous.

  Charlie7 had always considered himself manly, if not overtly so, back when he’d had a human body. He never would have imagined him envying a woman’s physiology. But Eve was crafted flawlessly. She was no more or less than fully human, but at the tapering end of every bell curve her creator could have imagined.

  It was time to examine the only glaring flaw, one that had been added since her birth.

  Eve tensed as Charlie touched the scanner to one of the studs in her cranium. “Sorry. Did that hurt?”

  “No,” Eve said. “But I always expect it to. I know there are no nerves in the brain, but it always seems like I should feel something in there. Is that odd?”

  “I don’t think so.” It would have been odd not to expect to feel in the one part of the body responsible for all perception.

  The scanner didn’t read anything unusual. If there was circuitry inside the stud buried within the girl’s brain, the scanner couldn’t detect it.

  Since Eve was a good sport about it all, Charlie took her cooperation while he had it and tried each of the forty-eight studs in turn. There was nothing any of the others told him that the first one hadn’t.

  “Eve, you can relax now. Go ahead and get dressed.”

  Even though he had spent the better part of two hours examining her mostly undressed, Charlie7 allowed Eve her privacy as she put her clothes back on.

  “I’m finished,” Eve reported. “Why did you look away?”

  While she had no idea about privacy, Eve at least was keen enough to pick up on the correlation to Charlie7 averting his gaze.

  “It’s just… respectful. Anyway, I was hoping you could answer a few questions for me.”

  Eve nodded. “I’m ready.” She took a deep breath and settled into a pose halfway between military ease and a grade-schooler preparing to recite in front of a classroom.

  “This isn’t a test. I’m not giving you puzzles to solve. I want to know more about your creator.”

  “Oh.” Eve didn’t slouch or relax her posture at all.

  “Oh, fine. I’ll make it a puzzle for you or at least a mystery. You have no hair over most of your body. This isn’t a typical human feature. And yet, you have a full head of hair on your scalp, trimmed recently to below the height of the studs on your head. The puzzle. Tell me why someone who could choose where you grew hair would allow it to grow in a place that was going to require regular maintenance to access the studs he put there?”

  Eve stood silent, but she pulled her brow tight. Charlie7 was in no hurry, so he allowed her to stew over the problem. “Am I a
llowed to include outside information in the problem?”

  Charlie7 waved a hand. “By all means.”

  Outside information was exactly what he was missing in his own deductions. It didn’t add up, and whoever had so lovingly crafted Eve into an idealized human had obviously been no one’s fool.

  All Charlie’s presumptions fell into two categories: aesthetics and deception. Either someone fancied the look of a full head of hair on Eve and wanted to leave her the option to grow it out, or the growth of the hair itself was meant to camouflage the presence of those damning studs. No geneticist could claim to be entirely benign in her research after doing that to the girl. There was no conceivable therapeutic benefit, even if the girl had shown the faintest hint of a need for any treatment, not to mention the gruesome and unnecessary surgery that had to have taken place.

  At length, Eve came back with an answer. “Creator has an idea of what I should look like. She also has data to collect from my encephalographs. Once she no longer needs data, my hair will grow longer, and I will look the way she intends.”

  If Eve said nothing else of value, her use of the feminine pronoun for her creator at least eliminated half the robot population. But he couldn’t help wondering about her conclusion. “Why would you say that?”

  “At the sanctuary, there was a girl named Emily. She had her hair a certain way and always wanted it put back that way. My hair always grows toward a certain length, but Creator trims it. She could stop it from lengthening, but she doesn’t. Thus, she must want my hair long but can’t allow it to grow to that length until she’s done taking readings from my brain.”

  Charlie7 was impressed by Eve’s stretches of logic to cover gaps in her knowledge. So many of the robotic scientists would have rejected the premise of his whole line of questioning. How could they know what another robot was thinking? They wouldn’t deign to violate another robot’s privacy by invading their thoughts, even in the theoretical sense. Guesswork was no better than filthy gossip. Charlie7 wouldn’t mind a little gossip about this creator, whoever she was.