by J. S. Morin
Oh, it was ingenious how Plato had converted the transport into living quarters, with plumbing lines run inconspicuously along the ceiling and extra ventilation ports drawing fresh air from who-only-knew where. There was even a little kitchen area that looked well used, judging by the scorch marks and food stains.
“Hello?” he called out. “Eve, are you in here?”
A familiar, metal-studded head stuck out from an adjoining room. “Charlie? What are you doing here? Where’s Plato?”
She was chewing, which meant that Plato had at least fed her before heading off to hunt boars. And she sounded more worried than afraid, which was a good sign.
“I’m here to take you somewhere safe. Plato fled from some robot who chased him in the woods.”
A bird squawked and flapped over to perch on an electrical conduit. “Death is not the worst that can happen to men.”
Charlie7 cast the bird a perplexed glare.
“I really think I should wait for Plato to come back,” Eve replied and disappeared back into the side room.
Seconds later, a cacophony ensued.
Following after Eve, Charlie7 found a small media room set up with what appeared to be Back to the Future playing at three times normal speed.
Eve reclined on a makeshift mattress covered in a wolf-skin blanket. In her lap, she cradled a basket of apples. She pared them with a knife and snacked as she watched.
Blinking her attention away from the screen at Charlie7’s entrance, Eve paused the movie. “This is good. I think I might be able to solve humanity’s extinction if I can figure out how the flux capacitor works.”
As the worry drained from Charlie7, he offered a weak chuckle. So innocent. How long would it be before her intellect and the vastness of the Earthwide squelched that endearing quality from her?
“It’s all fake. Just fiction. Besides, hobbyists have been trying time travel for centuries, and none of it’s possible.”
Eve had paused the playback just as twin lines of fire ripped down the parking lot of the Twin Pines Mall. Charlie7 had seen this movie a dozen times before. Everyone had.
There wasn’t a movie in the archives that hadn’t been picked clean of entertainment value. The few contemporary attempts to create new works always fell well short of the ancient masters. Sure, there were duds among the archival records. Whoever had deemed The Cannonball Run fit for eternal preservation deserved the extinction he got.
The Twenty-Seven hadn’t had it in them to produce a film worth watching. Maybe Eve or some descendant of hers would finally create entertainment worth the time it took to watch.
“But these are real people,” Eve countered. “I know the artistic representations are just pretend, but those are humans. They sent the dog back in time. They traveled from 1985 to 1955 and reversed a temporal paradox. Now they’re risking another paradox to save the fuzzy-haired one’s life. There are two more movies in this series, and I’m hoping they explain the equipment’s function in greater detail.”
“It’s a prop. The car is an antique, vaporized a thousand years ago, and it never went back in time.”
Eve pointed to the screen and the recently vanished Delorian. “But—”
“It’s a story. Amusement value only. Now come on. There’s someone out there looking for you, and they know you’re in this area.”
“Wouldn’t it have made more sense not to open the door and show them?” Eve asked.
Charlie7 scowled because she had a point. “They were going to figure it out for themselves soon enough. Now gather up a meal for the trip, and let’s get out of here.”
“But Plato will be back.”
“He might. But he’s gone to some trouble to lead whoever is after you away from this place. I’m making sure Plato’s efforts aren’t in vain.”
“But… Plato will be back,” Eve reiterated. “He promised.”
Charlie7 deleted a harsh retort before speaking it aloud. It wasn’t Eve’s fault that she trusted so readily.
“Plato told you that so you wouldn’t worry about him. What he does is dangerous, and one of these days it could get him killed. If you’re not careful, it’ll get you killed right along with him. I imagine things back in Creator’s lab seemed simple and straightforward, but in the real world, you have to assess for yourself what’s true and what isn’t. Safety and danger live side by side. The fire that Plato cooked you… what is that mutton? …that same fire could burn you if you misuse it. The boars he hunts out there have tusks that could tear out your intestines. Consider this: did everything in Creator’s lab seem safe to you?”
A thoughtful frown crossed Eve’s face, and she chewed her bite of apple more slowly. “I think so. Creator wouldn’t let anything damage me.”
That Eve’s response came after a pause and with a hint of reservation gave Charlie7 hope that she might be swayed.
“Well, since risk and safety surround us in nearly equal measure, then also consider that your Creator kept you not in safety but in ignorance.”
“Why would she do that?” Eve asked. “Wouldn’t I better protect myself from danger if I knew about it?”
Charlie7 smiled an orator’s smile. “Exactly my opinion on the matter. But Creator and Plato don’t seem to trust you with the truth. I do. So here’s the short version, based on what I’ve been able to learn so far. Someone made you with a purpose in mind. You haven’t fulfilled it yet. They want you back. And most importantly, you aren’t likely to survive finding out what that purpose is.”
Eve backed slowly into the corner of Plato’s media room, clutching the little knife that cut her apples. “No. I think you must have made an error.”
Never one to back down from a challenge, Charlie7 expounded on everything he’d learned throughout his search for Eve and what he’d inferred of Creator’s motives. It all kept coming back to the studs Eve wore in her head like macabre jewelry. And just as there was no escape from their presence, there was also no escape from the conclusions Charlie7 presented to her.
“You are either the first of a new personality for programming robots, which would make your ignorance of human history inexplicable, or you are to be a body for the first robot to return to the realm of the biological. If the latter is the case, giving you a world to remember and hope for was nothing but a recipe for rebellion, wistfulness, and general disobedience.”
How long would it take for this breathtaking young mind to process what he’d just heaped onto her?
Accepting a painful truth tempers the soul, and once the hurt cools, leaves it stronger. Eve didn’t have a lifetime’s experience to draw on. Charlie7 could only lend his wisdom and hope that Eve trusted him enough to take it.
Creator had been all Eve had known. To come to grips with the premise that her life had been an elaborate hoax, a mere illusion of human experience…
Charlie7 watched Eve’s face as her eyes unfocused and she stopped chewing her slice of apple. Just as over-tempering a blade could shatter it, Charlie7 hoped he hadn’t just destroyed Eve’s world.
The girl swallowed. She met Charlie7 eye to eye. “We should leave.”
Tension eased from strained actuators, and Charlie7’s shoulders slumped. “Good. The sooner we’re airborne, the sooner I can figure out someplace no one will stumble across us.”
“But we have to tell Plato where we’re going.”
Already heading for the inverted cargo ramp exit, Charlie froze. “What? We can’t do that. It’s not hiding if we leave evidence of our hiding place. It’ll only be until we figure out who Creator really is and stop her.”
“Plato will worry. We should trust him with the truth. Safer for everyone.”
There were times when rhetorical deftness circled around like a boomerang toward an unwary thrower. No sooner had he illuminated the girl on the virtues of truth but she was turning his own words back at him.
“Fine. I’ll leave him a note saying you’re safe.” Charlie7 had seen a terminal in the front of the transport some
where—or rather, the back of the hideaway.
“No. We should tell Plato where we’re going so he can meet us there,” Eve said. “He’s in danger too. I’m responsible.”
Plato killed wild boars, led robots on wild goose chases, and lived for years undetected while rescuing every human test subject he could get his hands on. Charlie7 somehow doubted he would even accept the prospect of going into hiding. But this also meant that he needed to decide right now where he was going to take Eve.
Charlie7 stroked his chin, wishing for the millionth time he had a beard. “We’ll need to leave him a note with information that only he’ll understand. Did you two work out a code between the two of you by any chance?”
“No, but he seems smart. He should be able to decrypt one if we don’t make it too hard.”
“Not good enough,” Charlie7 replied. “Anything he can decrypt, someone else could as well. We need to think of something the two of you have in common.”
“Plato watched The Wizard of Oz with me.”
“That won’t work. Too many robots know the story, and the imagery has the subtlety of a marching band.”
However, the idea of movie references gave Charlie7 the seed of a plan.
Returning to Plato’s media room, the would-be savior of humans browsed through the most-watched titles. The list was topped by action movies, westerns, and lowbrow comedies. Looking past the bourgeois taste in film, Charlie7 picked a movie that few robots were likely to have spent much time dissecting.
Most brilliant of all, Charlie7 came up with an encryption key that few robots could crack. “Spartacus, I want you to give Plato a message. Only Plato. You understand?”
The bird fluttered in and perched on Eve’s head, making her giggle. It squawked. “Message to Plato. Only to Plato.”
Charlie7 made up a passphrase. Once Spartacus heard it, he refused to even repeat it back for verification. That suited Charlie7 just fine. Either the bird was an imbecile and hadn’t memorized it at all, or he was cagey enough not to give the message to anyone but Plato, which excluded Charlie7 and Eve as well.
Re-transmitting the override for the zoological transport once more, Charlie7 closed up the hideout as he and Eve fled for the skyroamer.
Chapter Thirty-One
This time across the Atlantic, Charlie7 was better prepared. Eve was bundled against the cold, and they had a day’s worth of food along for the trip. Once they arrived, food would no longer be an issue.
While in the air, Charlie7 and Eve had time to clear the air about her origins.
“Eve, it’s time you told me everything you know about Creator. And first on my list of questions is this: Do you know her real name?”
“Her name is Creator. If she has another one, she never told me.”
Eve watched out the window, staring down at the ocean. Not that there was much to see. Atmospheric conditions were clear, and they were only a few hundred meters up. Charlie7’s skyroamer forced its way through the thickest part of the sky. At higher altitudes, they might draw attention from Traffic Control Committee by flying too near a regulated transit corridor.
“How do you know Creator is a ‘she’?”
“She taught me how to tell the difference and used herself as an example female archetype.”
“Could you pick her out by chassis?”
If Eve could manage that, it could narrow the possibilities considerably. Depending on how exotic Creator’s tastes ran, a model number might narrow the list of suspects down to anything from a few hundred to a dozen or so. The skyroamer didn’t have a video screen to run Eve through a listing of every possible version number, but as soon as he stashed her safely away, they could pore over them in detail.
“How visually distinctive are different chassis?” Eve asked. “If they’re all as different as yours and Toby’s, I should be able to.”
“Different enough, I would think. What else can you think of about her? What was her daily routine?”
“Well, I only saw her now and then. I had a regular routine to follow when I was alone. But every few days, Creator would come by to personally supervise me. The puzzles were usually harder when she was watching. Sometimes she would reveal after the fact that a puzzle was teaching me something special, and she would explain why it was important. Like the puzzle that taught me how to differentiate emotional expressions. Or the one where I learned to identify whether foods were safe to eat.”
Charlie shuddered as he imagined how that test might have gone but didn’t dare press her for details.
“Often times, she would stay to watch my entire fitness regimen and make comments about what I could do better. ‘There’s no such thing as perfection,’ she would say. So I always had to keep doing better than before. Oh, and the measurements. She always took detailed measurements before she left me alone for long periods.”
“What kind of measurements?” This was both what Charlie7 most and least wanted to hear.
Creator’s motives were nefarious; Charlie7 was convinced of that. But what danger she posed to Eve was the real question. Knowing why Creator had made Eve might possibly tell him who she was. Once exposed, Eve would be free to live in the world of robots openly. Not coincidentally, Charlie7 would share no small amount in the credit for her discovery.
“Well, there are the regular measurements,” Eve said. She put a finger to one of the studs in her head. “I connect the leads to the computer, and it takes encephalograph readings while I solve puzzles. Sometimes when I ran or did balance poses but mainly just the puzzles. But when she wanted better readings, I’d lay down on a bed with a screen hanging just above my eyes. Creator would give me something so that my muscles relaxed and the whole world seemed to go away except the screen. I’d see all kinds of things. Most of them I can’t remember. It’s all fuzzy. Creator says it was the chemical that relaxed me that’s to blame, but that I gave very good results that way, so she usually left in a good mood.”
Charlie7 didn’t want to hear any more. He could picture it all being done to her.
For Eve, this was all normal. She’d lost the fear of her captor through everyday horror.
One of the wonders of the crystalline brain was the ability to feel phantom pains. Most robots deleted the synapses responsible but not Charlie7. Now, he was sick in his imagined guts.
He had witnessed bloated, irradiated, and charred bodies scattered across the Earth, but it was all so long ago. It felt like a different world, separate from modern day Earth or the Earth of Eve’s forbearers. It was a place he didn’t want to revisit, but those horrid memories left a dark palette for his imagination to paint with.
“Skip the rest,” Charlie said. “Tell me more about Plato. Tell me about the day he rescued you. What can you remember?”
“Well, that I remember just fine,” Eve said. “It was just three days ago.”
Clearing her throat and straightening in her seat, Eve began her tale.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“When I woke up that morning, Creator was at the lab. She was annoyed but not at me. I could tell because she used shorter sentences and her words were spaced more closely together. I proceeded with my morning routine while she made adjustments to one of the machines in the lab—the newest version of the one that takes detailed encephalographs. Creator told me that something had come up that required her immediate attention.
“Eve,” she said. “This is very important. I’ll be back in approximately fifteen hours. When I return, I want you ready and waiting in the scanning machine.”
I told her that I understood, and she left. I figured that I had at least fourteen hours to go about my daily routine.
Hooking myself up to the scanner wasn’t that time consuming, but in case she was a little early, I wanted to make sure I was ready. Connecting all the leads usually only takes about nine minutes, including the pre-diagnostic to make sure I didn’t have any of them attached to the wrong studs.
There’s a mirror by the scanner that make
s it easier to see what I’m doing.
Inserting the sedative IV is quick, but I have to set the drip on a timer, and choosing the delay is tricky. The longest part is securing myself in place, and until the sedative starts, several of the restraints are a little uncomfortable, especially the cranial clamps. Too early, and I can’t finish before my arms go limp. Too late, and I can’t move while I feel the restraints dig in as they tighten.
Usually, Creator will tell me in advance if the scanning is going to be long enough to worry about excretory, feeding, or breathing tubes, so I didn’t have to leave time for those.
Once Creator had left, and I’d allotted myself fourteen hours for activities, the day sort of… happened.
I don’t know how to describe it other than it was a regular day.
I solved a simple series of matrix eigenvalues to unlock my breakfast. They were so simple that I assumed Creator wanted to make sure I ate that morning, rather than truly challenging me. As it turned out, that was going to be my last meal until the mushy stuff at the Sanctuary for Scientific Sins, so I’m glad Creator went easy on me.
Other than that, the morning wasn’t notable.
I was able to run through my full physical training regimen. After my warm-ups, I did all my strength conditioning: free-weight maneuvers, pull-ups, push-ups, bench press, leg raises… well, you probably get the idea.
After that, I did my coordination and cardiovascular workout. It took five runs through the obstacle course for me to hit my target heart rate of ninety beats per minute, then I went for my ten-kilometer run on the treadmill. I rehydrated briefly and went through all my dynamic stretching katas and my static flexibility poses.
The full routine took four hours and eighteen minutes. If I had a tighter schedule for the day, I could have managed it more carefully to keep it under four hours, but the katas are especially relaxing.
In retrospect, that lackadaisical attitude cost me the time it would have taken for a second meal. Because once I’d showered and changed into clean clothes, there just wasn’t time left to finish the first of a series of three-dimensional interlocking solids I had to reassemble on the screen to have my midday meal.