by J. S. Morin
After helping Plato cleanse the tools and eating surfaces, he showed her into a room similar to the one where Charlie had let her sleep. One wall was consumed by a display panel while the floor of the opposite half was covered in a lumpy, fur-covered cushion.
Plato flopped down and dug out a remote that he used to turn on the display. Patting the cushion beside him, he invited Eve to join him.
Eve reached down and felt the surface. It was soft to the touch, and the cushioning gave way easily under a bit of pressure from her hand. She leaned close to smell it, but the lingering aroma of cooked pork and the mild, pervasive scent of Plato’s body kept her from noticing anything remarkable.
There wasn’t a lot of room on the cushion, so Plato had to lift an arm to make room for her beside him. Once she settled in and squirmed the cushion into a comfortable shape beneath her, Plato wrapped his upraised arm around her shoulders, which happened to also give her a place to rest her head.
The studs toward the back of Eve’s cranium must have dug into Plato’s bicep. If they bothered him, Plato never said a word of complaint.
At first, Eve clasped her hands in her lap and sat trembling, unsure what was expected of her. Warmth welled inside her, more than sharing Plato’s body heat could account for. Before long, Eve was sweating.
Was it a side effect of the unfamiliar food?
Eve twisted and nuzzled close against Plato’s chest. The spreading heat inside her only worsened, but Plato’s arm pulled her in close, and she felt safe. After a harrowing day—several harrowing days—Eve allowed herself to relax.
Plato would have warned Eve if anything she’d eaten were dangerous. He seemed to know everything about humans, and Eve knew only what Creator had taught her—which more and more was showing signs of being dreadfully insufficient.
All the while, Plato tapped and clicked away with the remote in his other hand. A gibberish list of names and phrases scrolled by on the wall screen. At length, he settled on one of the listings.
“What’s a Wizard of Oz?” Eve asked. A wizard was a colloquial term for a guided tutorial, but Oz meant nothing to her.
Smirking, Plato tapped a button and the word “play” briefly flashed on the screen. Instantly, Eve was engrossed.
“It’s a movie. Everything gets explained. Just watch and enjoy.”
It began with music Eve had never heard. Even as the notes played, her spirits lifted, and her hands twitched with the fingering to play it back on a keyboard puzzle. Those were among her favorites, converting a visual code into a melody. But this wasn’t a puzzle for her, and soon an ID screen appeared with a title and accreditation for production.
Eve tried to watch passively, as Plato suggested. She just couldn’t dam the flood of questions that burst from within. “Why is the color desaturated?” Plato explained that it was an artistic choice.
“Oh! Kansas! I was there yesterday!”
“Wouldn’t the house lose structural integrity in a tornado?”
Then the world changed to color, and Eve found herself speechless in wonder.
Everything was so vibrant and alive. The analytical portion of Eve’s mind exhausted itself. Eve accepted the absurdities of the narrative and just enjoyed the visual feast.
There were witches both good and wicked, tiny people, and slippers adorned with chromium-laced aluminum oxide gemstones. None of it made a whit of sense, but its alternative reality held a strange allure.
Plato made her laugh by affecting a falsetto voice and singing along with the munchkin people. He rocked back and forth in time with the music. Cradled beneath Plato’s arm, Eve was taken along for the ride. The girl Dorothy met a man dressed as a scarecrow, then a primitive robot who chopped trees.
“He’s like Toby22!” Eve exclaimed, drawing a chuckle from Plato.
The man who claimed to be a lion was obviously wearing a costume.
As the images continued to play across the screen, Eve found her eyelids growing heavy. For the first time since Plato carried her from Creator’s lab, she could let down her guard. Plato wouldn’t hurt her, nor would he let anyone else harm her.
The last thing Eve saw before slumber took her was a screen that said “The End.” But unlike Dorothy, this girl had only just started down her yellow brick road.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The forest underbrush crunched beneath James187’s feet as he descended from his skyroamer. Where did Toby22 get off planting a forest in an entirely rigid pattern anyway? Any automaton could have been set to do that. The idea of sprinkling Tobys across the smaller landmasses was to give them a personal touch. If James187 had been the sort of robot to complain to committees, this would have been just the needle to prod him to action.
James187’s mood had soured even before he landed. False trails and misdirection had delayed him at every turn. Whoever had stolen Evelyn38’s test specimen had been prepared for a systematic investigation and pursuit—but not well enough.
The search had led to old Sherwood Forest. If it wasn’t a coincidence, then the robot vigilante who’d kidnapped Eve14 had a sense of grim humor and an overblown opinion of himself.
A whole section of forest sputtered with dummy E-M signatures. If he hadn’t already accounted for the whereabouts of the local gamekeeper at the time of the theft, James187 would have suspected Toby22 of being the kidnapper.
Toby22 couldn’t have been ignorant of the errant signals spewing from every crevice in this pubescent forest. That meant that whoever used this place as a base of operations likely did so with Toby22’s blessing or at least a blind eye. Either way, James187’s priority was the girl, not the perpetrator.
The sooner James187 could locate and retrieve Eve14, the sooner Evelyn38 could take over. This sort of mess was outside his programming. Neither the human personality mix nor the robot he’d become had ever dealt well with intrigue. A job started with a target and ended with a delivery.
A porcine squeal echoed in the still air. Northwest. Wolves were nocturnal, and it was an hour after sunrise. Whatever had hurt that boar was worth investigating. James187 set off at once, on foot. The noise of his skyroamer would alert his quarry too soon.
James187 checked his weapon as he made his way through the grid of trees. The dart gun had an effective range of 200 meters, and Evelyn38 had assured him that the dose in each of the twelve darts he had along was enough to render Eve14 unconscious in five seconds.
Evelyn38’s summary of Eve14’s capabilities seemed inconsistent with her hunting boars. The girl certainly had the athletic skills, but Evelyn38 had never trained her with weapons. There was, however, every chance that the girl had rigged up a trap.
Another strong possibility was that whoever had taken Eve14 wanted raw protein for her diet. If the kidnapper were another James or had a substantial James percentage, he’d remember hunting in the Ozarks as a boy. Any James could kill a boar.
When James187 crested a low rise, he performed a quick visual diagnostic. Evelyn38 had been quite clear on the subject of Eve14’s gender. James187 recalled images of young humans, accompanied by height and weight statistics. The data was there in crystalline perfection in his mind.
The creature hunched over a fallen boar was nothing like what he expected. The human must have been over two meters tall and 150 kilos. This was no cloned human, but the statue of an Olympian god made flesh—then infused intravenously with anabolic steroids. A crack rang out as he snapped the wounded boar’s neck with his bare hands. Then, without a hint of effort, the human slung the boar over one shoulder and stood.
This male human might have been rescued by the same robot who had broken in and stolen Eve14. There could be a little colony of them, hidden under the misguided protection of Toby22.
Though this wilderness encounter painted him as a savage brute, there was always the chance that this human was Eve14’s kidnapper.
Either way, it seemed likely that this human knew where Eve14 was. That boar was sure to appear on her plate if Ja
mes187 did nothing. As the human strode off in the opposite direction, James took note of the compound bow slung over the opposite shoulder from the boar. There was no sign of any advanced weapons on his person. He was armed for a hunt, not to fight off a robot.
As soon as James187 moved, his foot rustled a patch of dry leaves. The human’s head snapped around. Eyes that lacked the telltale robotic glow locked onto James187’s position.
For a moment, James187 was lost in wonderment. He hadn’t seen a live human in all his days. The wretches at the Scrapyard showed up in his news feeds, but those creatures looked nothing like this magnificent hunter.
The boar fell to the ground. A smear of the animal’s blood stained the bare, muscular arm beneath. The human swung his bow around and drew an arrow from a quiver hanging low at his back.
Before James187 could take cover, an arrow was in flight. Even with servo-controlled reflexes, he couldn’t outrun the sharpened steel tip. The arrow lodged in James187’s torso, piercing one of the data lines to his computer brain.
James187 felt a moment of disorientation as part of his consciousness was severed. He still had reason and emotion, but he was unable to perform complex calculations without concerted effort, and his access to public networks was cut off.
A second arrow deflected off his upraised arm. The human, not interested in a prolonged fight, bolted for the deeper woods.
James187 remembered the dart gun. Even without computer-controlled targeting assistance and wind compensation, he could hardly miss the shot. This huntsman was too large a target for his own good.
A warning message popped up in James187’s field of view. Ancillary systems went offline. Even in manual ballistic mode, his brain refused to compute a target vector.
HUMAN IN DANGER. OVERRIDE ENGAGED.
It was an old snippet of computer code, a relic of Project Transhuman that had survived until the modern age. James187 paused just long enough to delete the warning from his mind. Unshackled from risking harm to a human, James187 took aim.
The gun puffed, and a dart flew. A second later, the human reached around to pluck the needle from his back. Given the beast’s size, James187 didn’t wait but fired twice more. One missed as the human had the sense not to run in a straight line. The other stung him in the leg.
The human grunted an obscenity and lumbered onward.
While he was tempted to wait out the sedative, James187 thought better of it. He took off after the human at a run. The last thing he needed was to find out that the darts had failed to deliver their payload.
As he bounded through the forest, for the first time he could remember, James187 regretted upgrading to the Version 68.9 chassis. Lightweight, efficient, and boasting an energy capacity that could see him go months without worrying about replenishing his fuel cell, the 68.9 was everything most robots looked for in a chassis. But it wasn’t fast, or strong, or built to take punishment. He had little doubt that his actuators were stronger than the human’s muscles, impressive as they were, but in a footrace, he found himself disadvantaged. This human had a longer stride and a quick-twitch response that seemed at odds with his size. James187 would only catch up once the human began to tire.
But the human showed no sign of tiring as the chase wore on. The only factor keeping James187 from losing sight of him entirely was that the human wasn’t traveling a straight path. Though his route was roundabout, the human was doubling back.
Was the huntsman that concerned about his boar? Could Eve14 have been in such dire need of food?
James187 kept up his pace but weighed the idea of cutting this human off and heading for the site of the boar kill.
That was when he saw it. The human pulled back a tarp. A holographic projection wavered and dissipated. What had appeared as a small hillock covered in brambles turned out to be a two-seat skyroamer. As James187 watched in fascination, the human slung himself inside and fired up the engines.
There was no time to waste. James187 bolted for his own craft. There was no way he was going to let this human escape.
Even putting aside the chance to interrogate him and find out where Eve14 was hiding, James187 couldn’t let the arrow hole in his chest go unpunished. That simply wasn’t the way society worked anymore. Robots didn’t go around killing robots when they didn’t get their way, and he wasn’t about to let a new era of humanity begin with a murderer for a progenitor.
The human’s craft blew by just overhead, cockpit facing down. The human must have realized the frame rate that robotic eyes captured motion because no human ever would have had the acuity to pick up on the rude gesture he flashed James187 on the way by.
Had humans always been such savages, or was this one merely a victim of a poor upbringing? Someone had bollixed up the social skills of this kidnapping huntsman.
“You think you’re funny?” James187 shouted as the human’s engine wash covered him in a storm of dry leaves. He yanked free the arrow in his chest and threw it on the ground. “You won’t be laughing when I catch up with you.”
Jogging to his own skyroamer, James187 knew he could afford to take his time. He wouldn’t rush into a mistake or let his temper blind him.
Whether savage brute or fallen god, James187 didn’t care. While the human might be able to shrug off Eve14-sized doses of sedative, his organs wouldn’t survive the G-forces that James187’s synthetic body could handle. He could fly harder than that human could ever dream. With a punch of the throttle that scorched the ground at his landing site, James187 took to the air on an intercept course.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Eve awoke alone.
Her dreams had delved into fanciful realms of flying monkeys and talking parrots. The line between dreams and the video realm of Oz had blurred.
Blinking and rubbing her eyes, Eve pieced together the events of the previous night, sorting the real from the fanciful. The screen at the far end of the little room was dark. The spot on the fur-lined cushion where she’d slept was still warm.
Plato was… gone.
There was a deep impression in the cushion to show that Plato hadn’t been a figment of the video’s imaginary world. His smell still lingered about her. Squirming on the quicksand surface of the cushion, Eve struggled to the floor and looked around.
“Plato?” she called out.
The parrot squawked. “Plato isn’t here.”
That was unexpected. The bird had remained quiet throughout last night’s meal and hadn’t interrupted the video except to mimic the wicked witch once or twice. She’d never considered him a source of information, but Plato had said that the bird was smart.
“Spartacus, where is Plato?”
“Plato isn’t here. Plato’s going to bring back victuals.”
“What are victuals?” Eve asked, hoping that they were edible. She found her stomach gnawing at her insides and wondered how long she’d slept.
“Victuals are victuals. Victuals are victuals.” Spartacus squawked. “Plato isn’t here.”
Then again, Plato had also cautioned her that the parrot’s intellect was limited.
Eve found Plato’s terminal, the one he said was safe to use and looked up the word herself. Apparently, it had been an archaic term even before humanity had died out. But at least it meant she was going to eat as soon as Plato returned.
In the meantime, Eve pieced together the basics of a stretching routine.
Plato’s lair didn’t have room for sprawling. If she was careful, Eve could at least perform 85 percent of her poses. Physical activity washed away hunger in a torrent of sweat and endorphins. But the effect was only temporary. By the end of her routine, Eve was worried at how long Plato had been gone.
In the absence of anyone else to ask, she consulted the parrot. “Did Plato say how soon he’d be back?”
Spartacus squawked. “The beginning is the most important part of work.”
“That doesn’t answer my question at all. Did Plato say when he would return?”
T
he parrot shuffled back and forth on a wooden dowel stuck into the wall. “Courage is knowing what not to fear.”
“I’m not afraid of—” but Eve caught herself in the lie and couldn’t finish.
She was afraid.
Two days ago—or was it three—she had been safe in Creator’s lab. The world had made sense. But first Plato, then Toby22, then Charlie7, and now Plato again had taken custody of her in turns too short for Eve to feel settled with any of them. That was what she feared: the instability. Her routines were a shambles. Her health was passing by unrecorded. She was dirty, sore, hungry, and bewildered.
Well, the hunger Eve resolved to remedy.
Plato had stores of food. She didn’t trust herself yet to cook anything, but she recognized the apples in a basket as the same fruits Charlie had pilfered on her behalf in Kansas—which didn’t look at all like the version where Dorothy lived.
Eve rummaged through a drawer filled with hand tools and discovered a knife mixed in among the wrenches and screwdrivers. The blade sliced through the soft flesh of the fruit like a scalpel, and she took painstaking care not to cut herself as well.
Once she’d sliced the meat from the core, she proceeded to pare away the peel. Of all the foods Charlie had given her, the skin of the apple felt weirdest in her mouth. It was slimy and slick and tried to turn on end and stick between her teeth. The pale, juicy interior of the fruit was all she wanted from it.
She sucked the juices from her fingers when she’d finished eating her third apple. That was enough to sate her until Plato returned.
In the meantime, though, what should she do?
Plato had a protofab, but when she tried to replicate the exercise equipment she’d made at Charlie’s house, the machine reported that it was out of material. A search of the lair didn’t turn up any of the raw materials listed in the error code, so that ruled out small-scale manufacturing from her day’s amusements.
Spartacus landed atop the machine as Eve gave up and shut the access door. “Gotta remember. Hey Spartacus, remind me: steal more metals.”