Extinction Reversed (Robot Geneticists Book 1)

by J. S. Morin

  Charlie7 was more than familiar with those exceptions. His last encounter with Jennifer81 had been seventy-three years ago, regarding a mediation request for the Climate Control and Rainforest Management Committees. Hopefully, this time would turn out better.

  “Your committees aren’t meeting,” Charlie7 groused. “You haven’t taken up traveling. You must be around here somewhere.”

  No one built a home and zoned the surrounding thousand square kilometers as off limits to construction unless she preferred being alone.

  On a hunch, Charlie7 tromped out into the orchards of the peach and pear trees. They were small specimens just three and a half meters height. The fruits of the pear trees were even ripe, he noticed, taking one in hand. With a twist, he broke one free at the step and slipped it into the coat pocket of his suit.

  “Come all this way to rob from my orchard, Charlie?” Jennifer81 called out.

  Charlie7 bent and peered between the trees where the intertwined branches left a gap. Jennifer81 crouched at the base of a tree with a hand scanner of some sort. A wide-brimmed hat kept the moonlight from glinting off her cranial plate, but the glow of her eyes made her hard to miss.

  The pear in his hand provided evidence of Charlie7’s guilt. “I suppose I am. But that wasn’t my primary reason for coming.”

  Jennifer81 dusted herself off and tucked her gloves into her belt. “Of course it wouldn’t be. What’s it this time? Or have you just given up harassing me at hearings and decided to deliver your shabby backroom offers to my home?”

  Charlie7 looked up into the night sky, wondering whether Creator was tracking him, even now. With acoustic lasers on a satellite orbiting overhead, hostile ears might eavesdrop on his conversation.

  The dark of night always reminded Charlie7 of outer space, as if the blanket of cheer and sunlight provided the illusion of atmosphere only to have it stripped away come sunset. A blue sky made the world seem cozy. But out in the orchard, the heavens lay bare before his optical sensors. The computational mind whirled in futile attempts to calculate infinity.

  “Can we talk inside?”

  Jennifer81 tore the gloves off her hands. “Of course. I wasn’t doing anything important out here. By all means, consume my evening.”

  Choosing to take the comments at face value, Charlie7 followed her into the house.

  One wall held painted images of the countryside at various stages of terraforming. Charlie7 had forgotten how long Jennifer81 had lived in the Mumbai area. The first picture was little more than a barren stretch of beach, littered with the foundations of concrete buildings, beneath a sky of green and brown. She’d supervised the clearing of the land herself. One of the paintings even showed the earth-movers in the foreground. Eventually, the land was cleared, decontaminated, and, after centuries of work by geneticists, reseeded. The latest picture showed the orchard with knee-high saplings.

  Jennifer81 hung her gardening hat on a hook by the door. “So, which hat shall I put on for you this time? I assume you have some pressing business with one of my committees.”

  “Maybe,” Charlie7 said. “But mostly I’m looking for information.”

  Jennifer81 activated a faucet and washed off her gardening tools one by one. “You could have saved yourself the fuel and called.”

  “I didn’t want to transmit this.”

  The flow of water quit abruptly. “Oh dear. Not you, too, Charlie. Don’t tell me you’re another conspiracy theorist who thinks a cabal of geneticists is out there cloning a human army. I get two of those a year already, usually right after the sanctuary gets a new resident.”

  “I don’t know about an army…”

  Charlie7 hadn’t given the broader implications much thought. But he knew about the crackpots and the theorists of all things conspiratorial. A week ago, he’d have been inclined toward Jennifer81’s view that the whole notion was ridiculous.

  Privacy protections were a staple of society due to selection bias in the base population. Twenty of the twenty-seven personalities could be classified as pathologically introverted—Jennifer among them. The rest were only mildly introverted.

  Scientific discoveries were shared in due time, then mostly presented to quiet applause and mild accolades. Historic breakthroughs came with substantially more notoriety and renown. Those were worth working on in utter secrecy until it was too late for anyone to steal the glory.

  Now that he considered it, Charlie7 couldn’t imagine how conspiracies wouldn’t boil beneath the surface of academic society. After all, they did in the days of flesh-and-blood humans.

  “Can we please get to a point? I do have committee business—legitimate business—in twenty-six minutes. I’d appreciate having some time left to prepare.” Jennifer81 tapped a foot as she awaited Charlie7’s reply.

  “I’m looking for a listing of geneticists who’ve come under committee scrutiny.”

  Jennifer81’s stare could have frozen the grease in Charlie7’s joints. “I don’t know what sort of game you think we’re playing here, but until and unless there is actionable evidence against a member, Genetic Ethics Oversight Committee investigations are confidential.”

  “Which is why I came to you directly, instead of the whole committee,” Charlie7 explained. “This could be a matter of life and death—literally.”

  “Oh, Charlie. Quit being melodramatic. We’re not harboring human cloners.”

  “What about one who might be reverse engineering the upload process to work on human hosts?”

  Jennifer81 folded her arms. Her voice lowered an octave. “I’m not sure I like a word of that sentence. And I’m certainly not handing over confidential committee findings to you to pore over and dig up imaginary infractions.”

  “But I—”

  “Quiet, Charlie,” Jennifer warned. “Stop before you say something you’ll regret. You know those conspiracy theories? Well, if I were to form one of my own, it would be that a particular free-spirited robot was bold enough to march up to a committee chairman and ask whether she’s on to him or not. No one accounts for your activities for years at a time. You’re always trading favors with committee members and using prehistoric tales of heroism as a skeleton key to get around every objection.”

  “There’s a human girl in trouble,” Charlie7 said, stalking over to look Jennifer81 in the eye from half a meter away. “Her name is Eve. Yes, I know the name is trite, but that’s not her fault. I was looking after her, and someone broke into my apartments and kidnapped her.”

  “You… had a human… at your home?” Jennifer81 was cross-examining him, but there was no avoiding unpleasant scrutiny no.

  “She was a stray, a runaway from some mad scientist,” Charlie7 said. Its sounded cliché when he put it like that, but how else was he to describe Creator?

  “Why wasn’t this on every news feed? Why am I hearing it firsthand, presumably hours or days later, and you haven’t even sought official help?”

  Charlie7 wished for adrenaline, for testosterone, for any excuse to blame his rising anger. “Because if it were up to committees, we’d wait and perform an autopsy to find out what went wrong instead of saving her. Please. I’m begging you. For Eve’s sake.”

  “Charlie7… I tell you this for your own good. You’d have been forcibly shut down if it weren’t for the debt we all owe you. Your current status as a retiree is nothing short of a godsend to the working community. Your methods were quaint once, but have no place in an orderly society. My advice to you is this: go home. Reflect on how much better this would have turned out if you had turned this human over to proper authorities the minute you found her. But I won’t have you knocking on doors across Earth, bothering every geneticist whose name flashes across my terminal. Let. It. Go.”

  Charlie7 flung open Jennifer81’s door on his way out. She followed him to his skyroamer, more to make sure he left than to say goodbye. Before he slammed the cockpit canopy closed, he couldn’t resist a parting shot.

  “The human is a ‘she,’ n
ot an ‘it.’ And her name is Eve. Remember it.”

  Jamming the throttle open, Charlie7 swung his skyroamer around and kicked up a cloud of dust over Jennifer81, her house, and the near end of her orchard. He regretted the orchard part, but trees were hardy. A little dirt wasn’t going to kill them. The horrors that Eve might be enduring, he was less sure of.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Plato reached into his pocket, and Eve heard the faint click of a button press. A section of a low hill shifted, dragging a collection of bushes and shrubbery with it. A whir of unseen mechanisms accompanied the rise of the door as it swept up to reveal a passageway.

  “Pretty cool, huh?” Plato asked with a grin. “It was a cargo transport before I buried it here as my secret lair.” He ducked inside, and Eve dodged a light rain of dirt from above as she followed.

  What lay beyond was nothing like the hill it appeared to be from Plato’s skyroamer.

  It wasn’t dirty or wet inside, nor was it filled with subterranean creatures or the unpleasant aromas that seemed to pervade the outdoors. There were chairs and a table. Eve recognized cookware similar to what Charlie had used to cook for her. The space was small for Plato’s bulk, but for Eve it felt cozy.

  With another click from within Plato’s pocket, the lifting door began to lower. Eve whirled and wondered whether to bolt before she was trapped inside.

  “Relax. You’re safe in here,” Plato said.

  He fished in his pocket and took out a small device. Holding it up for Eve to see, he set it gently on a small table against the wall.

  ”See? You want out, just press that button and the door opens. But inside here, I’ve got the best tech a guy can steal. We’re shielded from scanning, hidden from satellites, and safe from wolves.”

  “Wolves?” Eve knew them by genus and species but had never considered that she should fear them.

  “Toby22 says there are a few hundred out here. This piece of land used to be called Nottinghamshire, and it was crawling with wolves. Toby22 says everyone wants it back the way it was. And that made me figure it needed itself an outlaw.”

  Eve had followed gamely thus far, but Plato’s wandering narrative had left her without a trail to follow.

  “Nottinghamshire? Outlaw?”

  Plato held up his hands. He wanted to placate her. While his words often made little sense, his emotions came across clear as day. The only one Eve was unsure of was happiness. Plato grinned almost constantly, so she assumed she might be reading a false positive there.

  Happiness was a rare emotion, not an omnipresent one.

  “Listen, I’m sure I’m going to say a lot of stuff that sounds crazy. It’s OK. You got raised weird. Just accept that and ask questions, and I’ll do whatever I can to answer them. OK?”

  Eve nodded.

  “Nottinghamshire is just the name of a place.”

  He ducked around the corner, and Eve followed. Tucked inside a cubby just large enough for the two of them was a terminal like one of the many in Charlie’s home. He brought up a map. A small portion turned red. A white dot appeared in the midst of the red region.

  “This is us, and we’re in Nottinghamshire. Or what used to be Nottinghamshire. Who knows if anyone calls it anything anymore except me.”

  Pointing to the screen, Eve indicated the other names written there. “What are all these places?”

  “Mostly nothing. Oh, and I didn’t forget your second question. An outlaw is someone who doesn’t follow the rules. There are no real laws anymore. The robots don’t believe in them. Near as I can figure, they’re an anarchistic bureaucracy.”

  “That’s a paradox.”

  Plato’s grin widened, and Eve took note. “Yup. They don’t see it that way, though. All rules, no laws. A bunch of chairmen who don’t see themselves as leaders. No real enforcement. It’s nothing like the histories.”

  Eve had read bits and pieces about committees at Charlie’s house. Could the whole world be run by a loose amalgam of committees with no central authority?

  “How long have you lived out here?”

  “Oh, I guess it would be 1,530 days now.”

  Eve blinked at the mention of so large a number. Creator had never referenced such extended periods of time. Usually, it was fewer than ten, and that was when Creator was going to be away and left instructions for Eve’s puzzles and training.

  Plato licked his lips and swallowed. “Hey, you must be hungry. Want some real food?”

  Real food? Charlie had made that promise, but it was evident he didn’t know what he was doing. Plato seemed sure of himself, and as a fellow human, he must know what food was supposed to be like.

  “Yes.”

  Plato squeezed past Eve and hobbled into his lair. She hadn’t noticed him limping earlier.

  For a moment, Plato disappeared into a side room but reappeared before Eve gathered the nerve to venture in after him. He brought a container that wept a cloud of fog. It was cold to the touch as Eve reached out and felt its surface. She snatched her fingers away and blew into her fist to warm them.

  “Careful. I freeze all the meats to keep them from spoiling. Good hunting out in these woods, if you know how to bring down a boar.”

  Eve watched in fascination as Plato handled all the cookware that Charlie had fumbled with. His kitchen had knives and forks, spoons and pans, and to her delight, a captive fire. The aroma of searing pork made Eve’s mouth water and her stomach grumble.

  And unlike Charlie, who had been consumed by the devilish task at hand, Plato wanted to chat as he cooked.

  “So, this Charlie7 guy. How was he?”

  “He was nice to me. He checked my vital signs and made sure I was healthy. He cooked for me, even though I don’t think he did it right.”

  Plato chuckled. “Robots cooking is like snakes juggling.”

  A small intruder suddenly flapped into the room, swooping low overhead in a flutter of wings. Eve dove for cover behind the table as Plato laughed. Laughter wasn’t a sign of panic or fear. He was mocking her.

  Eve peeked over the edge of the table to see a bird perched on Plato’s shoulder. It was mostly red, with splashes of black and white on the face and hues of blue, green, and yellow down its wings.

  When Eve looked straight at it, the parrot squawked. “Hello. My name is Spartacus.”

  “It’s all right, Eve. Spartacus is my friend. I rescued him from a hunter who keeps aberrant animals from procreating in the wild.”

  Never taking her eyes from the talking beast, Eve rose from her hiding spot. Plato kept an offhanded watch on the pan he was tending and smiled at her. Holding out a finger, the bird hopped aboard, and he held it out toward her.

  Plato lowered his voice. “Just keep it nice and slow and hold out a hand to let him smell you.”

  Eve swallowed and did as instructed. She extended a hand like she was forcing it through mud, stopping at what she guessed was close enough for the parrot to get a good sniff of her scent.

  “I didn’t know animals could talk,” Eve whispered.

  The parrot tilted its head. “Spartacus is a smart little bird.”

  Plato chuckled. “I used to call myself Spartacus, and I was going to call the bird Plato. But when I tried to teach him, he copied me exactly, and it got all reversed. Since he’s the only one I talk to every day, I figured it was easier just giving in and swapping.”

  “So should I call you Spartacus, then?” Eve asked.

  Creator hadn’t prepared her for this sort of social interaction. Names were names. They weren’t supposed to be mutable, let alone stealable by birds.

  The parrot squawked and angled its head to interpose its face between Plato and Eve. “My name is Spartacus.”

  Plato shrugged. “What can I say? The bird’s got a way with words.” He lifted the finger Spartacus was using as a perch, and the parrot flew off into unknown parts of the lair. “Normally I hunt down robots who experiment with making humans—like you. But I got wind of someone who’d spliced
dolphin and chimp DNA into parrots and came up with birds as smart as apes.”

  “Apes can talk?”

  “No, but that’s mostly down to the physiology of the tongue and larynx. Apes just can’t make the noises. Ancient humans managed to teach a few hand gestures that were a form of communication, but Spartacus can actually talk. Now, don’t get me wrong. He’s not smart smart, just smart compared to birds. His math skills are horrible; his vocabulary’s limited to a few thousand words; and he can barely play checkers. But hey, a friend’s a friend. Right?”

  A squawk echoed from the other room. “Spartacus is a friend. Plato cheats at checkers.”

  Plato flipped the meat, and a splash of grease dripped over the edge of the pan. An unexpected gout of flame made Eve flinch away.

  “He’s also got excellent hearing, so be careful what you say about him.”

  Fascinating as the parrot was, Eve was more interested in the ancillary implications of Plato’s statements. “How do you know so much about old humans? Have you studied the news archives Charlie7 showed me?”

  “Oh, sure. Plenty of dry, important stuff to know in there, but it’s a gut punch to go through. There’s lots better stuff in the archives if you know what to look for.”

  “Like what?”

  Eve had observed that Plato had a habit of omitting key details in his conversational speech. Creator could have taught him a thing or two about using words to convey accurate, complete information.

  Plato wiggled his eyebrows up and down. “I’ll show you after dinner.”

  The meal was marred by mild carbonization of the protein portion. But once Eve carefully excised the overcooked sections, the pork had an intriguing flavor, far more potent than any of the nutrient mixtures Creator, Charlie, or the sanctuary had made for her.

  It took an inordinate amount of chewing, however, before the pork was fit to swallow. Eve’s jaw muscles ached by the end of the meal. Plato had insisted that this was normal human food, not mush meant for easy digestion and that she would get used to it in time.