by J. S. Morin
Eve plopped herself down on the fur-covered cushion, relishing the quick rush of adrenaline that came with her brief free fall.
Creator had cautioned her against spiking her body’s chemical balance like that, but Creator wasn’t here to object. Her body chemistry would return to baseline readings long before anyone bothered to measure it again.
She felt like a rebel.
Plato had left the controller for the video screen in easy reach, and Eve had no trouble navigating the simple interface. When the system came online, it presented her with the option to watch Wizard of Oz again. It was tempting, but with the entirety of human history behind a shroud of mystery, Eve opted for a new experience.
Whether by coincidence or not, Wizard of Oz was the last in the alphabetical listing of movies Plato had. Above it was a movie called Winnie the Pooh, which told her nothing about its subject matter. Deciding to see if the listing looped, she went past the end and found herself presented with 101 Dalmatians. While she was equally ignorant of what a Dalmatian was, the quantification of them held a scientific appeal to Eve.
She settled in and began the playback.
At first, it appeared to be a simple instructional tale. It was a story of musical endeavor and of animal-keeping. The movie included an antagonistic element personified in a woman who made coats out of puppies.
Eve ran a suspicious hand over the fur cushion and wondered where Plato had gotten it. It didn’t have the markings of the Dalmatian puppies, but it could have come from a gray one…
For a time, Eve became engrossed in the story. But as the little dogs were chased all over and buffeted by events they couldn’t fully comprehend, it dawned on her: I am the puppies.
Eve was a little Dalmatian, being “rescued” by people she had recently met from threats she didn’t exactly understand. Plato wouldn’t tell her why he’d taken her, just that she’d needed saving. Toby22 had passed her along as soon as Plato had left them together. Charlie7 wanted to figure out who Creator was and where she lived, and it wasn’t to bring Eve home. That much was certain.
She found herself gasping at the harrowing close calls as puppies fled their coat-making pursuers.
“Leave them alone,” Eve shouted at the nasty lady in the fur coat, even though it was merely a moving image on a screen.
All Eve could hope was that none of the little Dalmatians got turned into a coat.
Eve didn’t want to be a coat, either.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Charlie7 had tried to play nice. He’d tried to connect the dots like a private investigator. The whole way from Mumbai to England, he had mulled over alternatives and come up empty.
“Where did you get her?” Charlie7 demanded, throwing open the door to his skyroamer and jumping down at Toby22’s feet.
They were in the middle of nowhere, some forsaken pasture destined for an upgrade to the arboreal paradise of England-that-never-was. Charles Truman had traveled England as a young man. It was a land of freeways and cities and cordoned parks that hemmed in what little nature was left. Toby22 was just a fanciful gardener, and Charlie7 didn’t care a whit for the seedlings burnt with ion wash as he’d set down.
Toby22 backed away, hands upraised. What did he see in Charlie7 just then? Righteous anger? Derangement? For the moment either would serve Charlie7’s needs.
“Someone broke into my home, Toby,” Charlie said. “They stole her right from my house… my house. Do you even know what that feels like? I’ve been around the globe in the last eleven hours, looking for her, but I can’t even work out who took her. I figured… if I can’t find the robot responsible for kidnapping her from me, maybe I can get answers from the one who rescued her in the first place. I imagine you know who that is.”
Charlie7 took a fistful of Toby’s coveralls and held him firm.
If it came right down to it, Toby22 could have given Charlie7 a sound thrashing. He’d been wearing that Version 50.1 chassis for decades past the recommended replacement, but that didn’t change the fact that it was an outdoor model. Quite literally, Toby22 was built for manual labor. He was heavier, stronger, and had ruggedized outer plating. That 50.1 chassis was designed to shrug off a fallen tree or survive a rockslide or sinkhole.
But instead of grabbing Charlie by the wrist and shearing it off, Toby22 cringed. “I promised I wouldn’t tell.”
“Eve14’s life is at stake here. If whoever put those studs in her skull gets her back, who knows what she’ll do to her for escaping. Her mind could already have been wiped clean for all we know. If you know anything about where she came from—anything at all—you’re going to tell me right this minute.”
Charlie7 let go Toby22’s clothing and allowed the robot his dignity. His point had struck home.
Toby22 retreated a step. “You won’t believe me.”
“Anything will be better than the nothing I’ve got.” Charlie7 followed as Toby22 continued to fall back.
“Wasn’t a rescue by any robot you’ve met.”
Charlie7 smirked despite his ire. “You think there’s a robot I’ve never met?”
Toby22 looked over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “Wasn’t a robot.” He put a hand up to shield his mouth from the east. “There’s another human out there.”
“Keeping a new rescue off the news feeds is impossible enough. You’re telling me there’s a vigilante out there springing them?”
“And you’re telling me all those human cloners self-terminated?” Toby asked in reply.
Charlie7 lost uncounted computational cycles as that thought recirculated in his algorithms. He’d always viewed those red-handed cloners as Romanesque for falling on their swords upon being caught. Suicide had gone out of fashion as a response to public shaming in pre-invasion times, but Charlie7 couldn’t help admiring the tidiness of skipping investigations and hearings.
Toby22 dropped his shovel and closed the case of seedlings he’d brought along. “Come on. Can’t be telling you this outdoors. Ears can be anywhere.”
Charlie7 followed Toby22 on foot to the nearest of his supply shacks. The little hovel was halfway between a barn and a portable outhouse. Once inside, they used a pair of crates as stools.
“What’s the big hush hush?” Charlie7 demanded. His ire had drained as Toby22 showed signs of cooperation. Tobys always cooperated eventually. “You think someone’s going to hear us in here?”
“Plato doesn’t like anyone talking about him.” Toby22 kept his voice low, even inside.
“Plato? Funny name for a vigilante. You’d think he’d have picked something a bit more… proactive than a philosopher.”
Truth be told, any name that wasn’t one of the Twenty-Seven sounded strange in Charlie7’s ears. Even Eve was taking a while to sink in as a proper name.
“Called himself Spartacus for a while. Claims a bird stole the name, though, so he had to come up with a new one.”
“So, not quite Scrapyard material but still not right in the head?”
Pieces were beginning to fall into place. Also, Charlie7 chided himself for calling the Sanctuary for Scientific Sins by its derogatory name.
Toby22 shrugged. “Never got a straight story from the lad. Earnest sort. Seems to mean well. But oh, the mean streak he’s got for anyone who harms a human. I daresay he’s scrounged up half the residents come to light these past two or three years.”
“And this Plato brought Eve to you? Why not bring her to the Scrapyard like the others?”
“Don’t think he ever went himself,” Toby22 said. “Too risky. He left them somewhere safe and called it in. Anonymous login. Fake public ID. Everything looks like a guilt case, right? Well, he couldn’t bring Eve14 there, could he?”
Charlie7 leaned back until his head thumped against the shack’s wall. “No. He couldn’t. That place isn’t for her. She’d do better with a laboratory of her own than with someone spooning her gruel three times a day and changing her soiled clothes. Why’d Plato leave her with you, though?”
Toby22 shrugged. “Convenience, maybe? Said he’d be back for her. Didn’t have time for much before he was off again. Business, he said. I didn’t ask what. I keep on that one’s good side.”
“By dumping her on me the first chance you got?”
Toby22 held up the index fingers on either hand. It was a gesture that Tobias Greene used when making excuses for cutting corners in the lab.
“I had my reasons. First off, you’re the one with all the experience. I’m just a glorified gardener. What was I going to do to look after a living girl? She’s not an oak sapling. She’d have starved to death by morning.”
Charlie7 leaned across and closed the scant distance between the two robots. He locked eyes with Toby22, who squirmed in his seat but didn’t dare move.
“Now Toby, I’m going to ask you a simple question, and I think you know the answer to it... Where. Do. I. Find. Plato?”
“You can’t tell him I told you. You just can’t.”
“Where Toby? I’m one dead end short of blowing this story across every news feed. You won’t work planetside again this century. I’ll get kicked off every committee I’m on, even if they’re all honorary seats. There’ll be a planet-wide manhunt for Plato. In all the chaos, it’s a 50/50 chance Eve will get rescued or destroyed as incriminating evidence. So unless you give me a lead, that’s the best shot I’ve got.”
“You won’t find Eve14 if Plato thinks you’re a threat to either of them.”
“You’re terrified of this rogue human, aren’t you?” Charlie7 asked.
Humans were certainly capable of causing harm. But the mere idea of Toby22, in a chassis built to haul trees and herd cattle, being afraid of a blood-filled sack of skin was rather unseemly.
Toby22 nodded. “He’s a good kid, but I’ve seen the temper in him. Yeah, I’m afraid of him.”
“Well… I’m not.” Charlie7 flung open the door to the supply shack and stalked off into the woods.
Chapter Thirty
The woods were too quiet for Charlie7’s liking. Not enough birds lived here yet to fill the air with song, and there weren’t enough leaves on the pipsqueak oaks to rustle much in the wind. Dry leaves crinkled beneath Charlie7’s shoes, but that just emphasized the isolation, creating the only real sounds for kilometers around.
The landscape rose and fell in gentle waves, the product of some fractal algorithm and the toil of autonomous bulldozers centuries ago. This area had been hard hit in the invasion, and little of the original character remained. Charlie7 wondered how much of its history Plato knew before choosing it as a hideout.
Toby22’s coordinates weren’t precise, giving Charlie7 a square kilometer or so to search. The coward either didn’t want to lay any better trail of breadcrumbs on the chance they might lead back to him, or Toby22 had never investigated his domain thoroughly enough to find out.
Either way, Charlie7 found himself trampling dry oak leaves and needles fallen from pines the size of Christmas trees. He had imagined that simple thermal imaging would have been enough to locate a concealed dwelling in this sparse forest. All Charlie7 found in the IR spectrum were animals, mostly small game and a few stags and boars. He suspected Toby22 had to feed them all since there didn’t appear to be enough for them to forage.
But one boar hadn’t shown up on Charlie7’s scanner.
The carcass was lukewarm, blending in with the dirt and brush. This boar was plainly dead, with its head lolling at an impossible angle. A ragged hole marred the creature’s chest, still tacky with warm blood. No animal had made that wound unless armed gorillas were loose with spears. Based on some of the more sensational rumors on the Social, a few of the primate geneticists weren’t far off from that.
For Charlie7’s quest, the answer was simple. Plato had been here. He’d killed this boar. And… for some reason left it behind.
Charlie7 was no woodsman. But it was no mystical art to find the footprints in the soft soil.
Two sets of prints chased one another over the forest floor. One set were large boot prints with a long stride. The others had a mechanical precision in their regularity. Neither matched the shoes Eve had gotten from Nora109.
If the larger set of footprints belonged to Plato, then that “boy” of Toby’s was a Goliath.
Not far from the boar, Charlie7 found a tranquilizer dart. Its reservoir of sedative had been emptied. Another lay among the fallen leaves a few dozen meters farther, amid Plato’s now-zigzagging footprints.
Charlie7 came across several more darts with their sedative intact and pocketed them as a precaution. Based on the uninterrupted trail of prints after the first two expended darts, Charlie7 had his doubts how effective they’d be.
Pieces were fitting together in a puzzle of Charlie7’s own. Eve would be proud of him.
A robot was after Plato with sedative doses insufficient to drop the lad. Anyone who thought ahead to bring such specific ammunition must have had a target in mind. Sloppy preparation alone couldn’t explain being so wrong about the dose. But someone who wanted to bring Eve back without a fight… they might have a sedative measured out that would barely slow a brute like Plato.
Charlie7 tried to envision himself as a detective in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes. It seemed fitting for the region, if not the terrain. What could he deduce from the scene?
Some robot had come looking for Eve; that seemed evident by the inadequate tranquilizers. He—or she—had come upon Plato instead.
Plato was armed, judging by the dead boar. Had he fought back?
There was no sign of a struggle, and Charlie7 didn’t fancy backtracking the footprints to see whether any arrows might have been hidden among the dead leaves back in the other direction.
The robotic tracks halted, then veered suddenly in a different direction. Charlie7 paused, then continued to follow Plato’s. Those ended at a telltale pattern of imprints in the soil—landing gear. Plato had reached a skyroamer. His pursuer must have realized that and headed for his own transportation—or given up and gone after Eve. Charlie7 retraced the trail and followed the robot’s again. It ended likewise at a set of landing gear and another path that wandered away from the vehicle in the first place.
Two possibilities presented themselves. Either Plato had run away to save himself, or Plato had lured the robot away from Eve.
Charlie7 had only Toby22’s description of the young man to go by, but nothing of the vigilante human-rescuer indicated cowardice. A coward doesn’t risk death or capture to break into the homes of mad scientists—and the occasional war hero—to free humans, only to turn tail and leave one to her fate.
Charlie7 preferred to think that Eve was nearby, hidden, and, for the time being, safe.
“You think you’re a hero, don’t you, Plato?” Charlie7 mused. “Heroes don’t run away without a plan.”
By Toby22’s word, Plato was no fool. The heroic vigilante knew his way around these budding woodlands. But no amount of woodcraft could hide the footprints of a man the size of a bear. Plato couldn’t help leaving a trail.
Charlie7 backtracked to the dead boar. The footprints leading to the dead boar weren’t nearly so deep and defined as the ones running away from it. But knowing they had to be there made finding them easier. Charlie7 brushed aside leaves with his foot as he went, discovering hints of a print here and there amid apparent signs of an effort to leave little evidence.
After following the trail, Charlie7 revised his estimate of the boy. Plato was no huntsman or commando; his best efforts were amateur. Charlie7 traced his path back to a small hillside.
A smirk twitched its way onto Charlie7’s features. It was an involuntary bit of code that had mapped itself onto a crystalline matrix in imitation of a human brain. At times like this, he was glad not to have deleted it centuries ago.
The boy hero had hidden away a secret lair for himself.
There had to be an entrance to below ground somewhere, but none of the equipment he’d brought was registering anything. That
was the clue. There should have been readings, even if they were boring ones. From aerial observation, and certainly from orbit, the minor blip would have been beneath notice. From a meter away, it was apparent to anyone who already knew it was there.
In fairness, the concealment was brilliant. Modern search methods fell short of discovering the hideout. Only someone willing to walk around in the dirt and look for footprints was liable to find it.
Charlie7 had myriad ideas on how Plato had managed the technological aspect of the concealment. But for now, it only mattered that he found a way inside.
Already willing to write off his best formal suit as a loss, Charlie7 dug in the dirt. Robotic fingers tore away loose earth like a child playing in beach sand. Roots ripped and snapped. With a grating scratch, Charlie7 reached the metallic layer beneath. Continuing sideways, he discovered markings that told him what he was dealing with.
Charlie7 was looking at the rear hydraulic hatch of a zoological transport. He chuckled upon realizing that it was upside down. The ramp to deposit lab-raised creatures into the wild had been flipped to act as a garage door, and there was no way Charlie7’s Version 64.6 chassis was going to overcome the hydraulic pistons that held it closed.
This was the point where a civic-minded robot would have called for assistance.
Any number of machines could be delivered to his location in relatively short order that could force Plato’s front door open. No construction automaton worth its circuitry would be stopped by a simple metal panel. A Toby would likely think to cut a hole through and disable the pumps.
But none of those other robots was Charlie7. A quick transmission of the factory override code ended the lockout, and the door lifted under its own power.
It was bright inside. Charlie7 could have described it as cheerful, quaint, and cozy if he appreciated any of those characterizations. Instead, he found it small, garish, and amateur.