by J. S. Morin
Resources were shared, if not freely then in the understanding of a loose reciprocity among all robotkind. That meant not hoarding tech or raw materials, but it also meant you didn’t go pissing in someone else’s backyard.
REPORTING TWO VANDALS IN ENGLISH AIRSPACE. LOW-ALTITUDE FLYBYS DISTURBING ANIMALS AND SAPLINGS. PLEASE BE ADVISED.
This was Toby22’s turf. Whether he was watching or not, the coordinates Plato attached to his message we sure to trigger an automated alert.
Plato kept up the chase through muscle memory and repetition. He yawned and kept glancing at the terminal screen, waiting for a response. A jolt of surprise shocked him awake when the cockpit speakers blared to life.
“Dammit!” Toby22 snarled over an open frequency. Plato had never heard him cuss before. “Go take your daredevil flying somewhere else. I’ve got a game reserve to look after. Both of you, knock it off or I’ll get your airspace permits revoked.”
Plato rolled his eyes.
Permits only mattered in a few spots of heavy traffic and the little getaways of a few influential robots. But in addition to his toothless threat, Toby22 had come in one of his agrarian transports. It was a hauler, built to ferry livestock and feed over short distances. There was no way it could outrun either Betty-Lou or his persistent friend. If ever a brick had flown, this was the closest any ship designer had come.
Switching his short-range transmitter from directed broadcast to omnidirectional blast, Plato keyed open his mic. “Hey, I’m a little low on fuel. Mind giving a fellow Toby a lift?”
Without waiting for a response, Plato swung around and intercepted the agrarian transport. The vessel was far larger than Betty-Lou, and the loading ramp was easily five times the size of the little unit that he’d converted into a home. Feathering the controls, he matched speed and course and lined himself up to use Toby22’s vessel as a makeshift carrier.
The other pilot had no real choice. He couldn’t very well attack a Toby out in the open, right in his own backyard. That left aside the fact that one of the little personal crafts could hit Toby22’s transport full speed and not knock it out of the sky. It was either go out in a blaze of glory or turn and depart.
As Toby22’s cargo ramp opened and Plato piloted his way inside, he knew he owed Toby22 an apology. The coward had found his heart.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Earlier that afternoon
With Charlie7 gone, Toby22 shunted his friend out of active memory and went back to work. At least, he tried.
Planting out in the forests felt wrong. Charlie7 was out there, looking for Plato. Even knowing the general area he’d be in, so long as Toby22 was outdoors, it would feel like Charlie7 was scanning his every motion.
There was plenty of work to be done. Toby22’s very presence in the greenhouse proved that.
The seedlings were identical, healthy, and destined for a little spot in Lincolnshire. The shipment from Marvin91 had come in just yesterday, giving him a welcome respite from the chaos unfolding behind the wainscoting. Toby22 got caught in a recursive worry algorithm when chaos intruded.
The population on Earth fluctuated with the coming and goings of the space-faring robots but never dipped below the two-thousand mark anymore. Of all those, perhaps as few as three realized anything was even amiss.
Toby22 wished he wasn’t one of them.
Plato had developed a disturbing habit of tying up loose ends. Toby22 should never have encouraged the boy to get in touch with his cultural roots. Too much violence in those old archival records. The news, the games, the movies, the songs, and everything else mankind had touched was tinted red with blood.
Though Plato never said anything about it, Toby22 read between the lines when anyone noted a robot had gone reclusive. Rumors of disappearances and self-terminations always set Toby22 back a full workday getting bugs out of his logic circuits. Plato couldn’t be the cause of all strife in the bunkers and shadow laboratories of Earth. Some of it had to have been coincidental.
Toby22 watched the timer expire and the automatic irrigation system spring to life. Each seedling got a calculated dose of nutrient-balanced mineral water, custom calibrated to its current mass and chemical balance.
There were times when Toby22 imagined that he was coddling the seedlings. Out in the wild, they’d be at the mercy of the English climate and the predation of herbivores. Their pollination would take place at the mercy of the fickle winds and the labors of the small but growing population of honeybees. But for the time being, they were under his care, and they’d receive exactly what they needed to grow and prosper. If he’d known what Plato required in such exacting detail, he’d have given the boy exactly that.
But Plato was Charlie7’s problem now.
That girl Eve was the root of all this. Toby22 didn’t want any part of getting between that boy and her. Hormones… nasty stuff. X and Y chromosomes wanted nothing more than to mix, and woe to the robot who misplaced a word to suggest otherwise. That was a crossfire Toby22 would keep clear of.
Charlie7 had been brilliant in his day, but retirement had softened the edges of his mind. If Plato had gone back to retrieve Eve from him, then Charlie7 was going to have one hell of a time convincing Plato to give her back. The boy’s mind was stuffed with movies and computer games; he knew that a hero is supposed to protect the girl.
Toby22 snorted. “Biology lost one war, but it’s got enough battles under its belt that you’re welcome to fight this one without me, old friend.”
He whistled a tune while he inventoried another crate from the same shipment. These would be a new set of ferns, each sample genetically identical, but still in need of individualized care. After a few simple tests, Toby22 would be able to customize a nutrient regiment that would have them ready for planting in the wild within the next month.
An alert pinged from his internal computer. Toby22 diverted a sliver of attention to checking in on what had prompted it. A public message on the Social had referenced a geolocation in Toby22’s little corner of England.
REPORTING TWO VANDALS IN ENGLISH AIRSPACE. LOW-ALTITUDE FLYBYS DISTURBING ANIMALS AND SAPLINGS. PLEASE BE ADVISED.
He scowled at the plants arrayed before him. None of this was their fault; they were just in the way of his scowl. “Sorry. It’s nothing you did.”
But vandals? In his forest?
First off, what the hell were vandals doing existing in the first place? There might be little spats over territorial overlaps and best practices when it came to historical preservation. But even the most ill advised of archaeological work fell well short of the definition of vandalism. There hadn’t been an actual vandal since humanity went extinct.
Toby22 suddenly realized exactly what that meant. The ID of the Social post was a blatant fraud, but that was common enough for anyone pitching around words like “vandal.” Reputations were at stake on both ends, so anonymity made sense.
The choice of wording couldn’t be a coincidence. There were humans out in those woods. As a prankster, Plato was too ham-handed to come up with such a subtle ploy, but as a strategist, Toby22 believed it in an instant.
The second “vandal” in the message was most likely Charlie7.
Bad enough getting in the way of Plato and Eve. Toby22 would be damned if he was going to throw himself in front of Charlie7 for Plato’s sake.
Some misshapen piece jutted from Toby22’s jigsaw puzzle, refusing to fit with the rest.
Why would Charlie7 be harassing Plato in English airspace? It would only make sense if the boy were trying to keep Eve away from him. Wouldn’t that have made for three “vandals” in the message?
It stood to reason that if Plato wanted help, playing on Toby22’s sympathies by mentioning the girl—however tangentially—would have been the prudent move.
But why would Charlie7 chase Plato if he didn’t have Eve with him?
Charlie7 didn’t care about Plato, and it seemed as obvious as the moon in a sky of stars that he cared a great deal about E
ve. Hard to blame him. The girl was six kinds of a handful but had an endearing naivety and earnestness that was impossible to ignore. Charlie7 was willing to risk Plato’s ire to go looking for her at his hideout. If Plato were running away and didn’t have her, Charlie7 would just keep on looking.
“Boy… what have you gotten yourself into?”
If Charlie7 wasn’t the one after him, then it meant someone from his past had caught up with him. Tough to keep quiet when you make as much noise as that boy. Sooner or later someone was bound to come after him. Live by the homemade electromagnetic pulse rifle, die by the… well, something similar but probably not identical.
Toby22 tried to go back to his work. But the ferns glared up at him accusingly. Blinking away the notion and rebooting his optic subroutine, he tried again. Examining one of the samples under a microscope, the healthy, vibrant cells stood out like billboards for a new Earth. Reborn. Vital. Ready for the coming of humanity’s second act. Plato was humanity’s second act. He and Eve plus Einstein-only-knew how many others tucked away in secret labs.
Shutting down the microscope, Toby22 called it quits for the day. He tromped off to his media room and settled in to divert his mind until Plato’s plea worked itself out. Toby22 was no hero. Charlie7 had been pretty clear on that subject. Activating the video screen, Toby22 collapsed into his favorite chair and put his feet up. The ever-present error messages from his failing knee and hip flexors ceased for now.
The footrest had been a gift from Plato. It was a piece of stone salvaged from a restoration site in Ireland, part of some old castle, Plato had said. The boy had laser carved slots for Toby22’s feet that fit perfectly to specification, distributing their weight and reducing the strain sensor data to virtually nil. The footrest was even the perfect height.
The old park ranger couldn’t put up his feet and pretend all was right in the world. He had to at least go check. If it were Charlie7 up there with Plato, he’d let the two hash it out between themselves like rational, thinking creatures. If it was some deranged geneticist whose humans Plato had liberated, he was going to have to go through Toby22 first.
Minutes later, Toby22 sent a broadcast message from the cockpit of his biggest hauler.
“Dammit! Go take your daredevil flying somewhere else. I’ve got a game reserve to look after. Both of you, knock it off or I’ll get your airspace permits revoked.”
Whoever was pursuing Plato didn’t broadcast an ID.
As Plato maneuvered around behind the hauler, Toby22 kept squelching unpleasant simulations as his crisis prediction subroutine spit them out. If the lad knew Toby22 had sent Charlie7 to that dilapidated old sheep transport of his, things might get ugly. Hopefully, this rescue would be enough to call it even.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
James187 piloted his skyroamer in a persistent state of disbelief. The chase had been a disaster.
Theoretically, barring outside intervention, there had been a hard limit on the number of consecutive hours the human pilot could have guided his craft. Simple biology dictated that he would need rest, and barring that, food.
James187’s plan to keep close and just wait the poor creature out had dragged on far longer than he had ever imagined. Though he was neither historian nor biologist, James187 seemed to recall that after ten hours, a pilot would be too fatigued to fly properly. That limit fell far short of the twenty-two consecutive hours this boar-hunting human had been playing with him. The two of them had roamed the English countryside, the North Atlantic, and Scandinavia.
Someone must have tinkered with the biology of this specimen for him to have put up such a struggle.
But it was over now. Toby22 had swooped in and taken the human away.
The game warden had to have been in on it. If Evelyn38’s scheme was unraveling, Toby22 was another pawn aligned against her.
James187 paused as an idea flitted through one of his cognitive buffers. Could Toby22 have been the one to breach Evelyn38’s laboratory to kidnap Eve14?
Tobys had all the ambition of automatons. The differences in intellect were marginal at best. But if this one were different, would that not have been the perfect cover story?
As he mused, James187 tinkered in his chest cavity with a toolkit. The human’s arrow had severed the main data line to his internal computer. A wary part of him wanted to say the human aimed his shot with expert precision, but that wouldn’t have explained the errant second arrow. More likely the brute had just gotten lucky.
Back home, James187 would have no trouble replacing the data cable, but in the meantime, he could work around the issue by routing the data through the skyroamer’s systems. He plugged direct tethers into both his internal computer and his crystalline brain. A backlog of error messages nearly overwhelmed James187’s conscious thoughts as the computer reconnected.
The flow of information resumed. James187 watched the soothing flicker as each angry red notification turned green and winked out of existence.
It had felt odd being cut off from that computer.
So many daily tasks became trivial. Calculations beyond his mental faculties fell effortlessly into place within the digital realm. Ballistic calculations that once relied on gut feel and experience could be broken into factors of drag, air pressure, wind speed, and the ambient magnetosphere.
Going without for a few hours had been like camping with his dad—or the original James McCovey’s father. It used to be a chance to disconnect from the automation of then-modern life.
James187 made a point to start shutting down data transfer from time to time. After all, if Evelyn38 could deliver on her promise of a human body, he would be flying blind all the time, not just until he had a few peaceful moments to enact repairs.
JAMES187, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?
The temptation to yank the data cables out of the skyroamer’s computer sizzled in the crystalline synapses of James187’s mind. Evelyn38’s promises were all well and good, but they meant having to actually deal with her.
The respite from the outside world at an end, James187 was once again at the mercy of Evelyn38’s frantic calls.
“I’ve been tracking a lead,” he said aloud, letting the digitized audio transmit back instead of a text reply. “Had a bit of a technical hang-up. Heading back for some quick repairs.”
AND MY APE?
Couldn’t she just say ‘human’? One might have imagined that two-key encryption would have assured Evelyn38 that their conversation was private. But this was an Evelyn. Even her namesake had been a bit kooky about digital cryptography.
“The ape is still on the lam. A mother hen flew the coop, and I think one of our little worker bees might be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
HOW’S THAT NOW, JAMES? I BARELY GOT A WORD OF THAT.
James187’s hand hovered over the transmitter. One quick jab of the cutoff and Evelyn38 would go away. But there was a conflict in James187’s primary ethics software. He’d accepted a job. Duty required him to finish it. While he could override his own self-programed moral compass, giving up would have been a mark of personal failure.
He snarled into the skyroamer’s mic. “Your pet human had a friend. There’s a second human out in the woods of merry old England, most likely in league with her. I chased him, hoping he’d lead me back to Eve14, but a Toby intervened and gave the human shelter.”
A TOBY? WHICH ONE? BLAST YOU, JAMES! I TRUSTED YOU TO HANDLE THIS BUSINESS DISCREETLY.
“Don’t you go starting trouble with the Tobys. You might tip your hand and have to put your cards on the table whether you like it or not. Don’t make matters any worse by antagonizing the largest population on Earth.”
TRACK THAT HUMAN, JAMES. TRACK IT, AND FIND MY EVE14. I’VE NOT MUCH TIME LEFT, AND IF I’M FORCED TO TAKE ANOTHER NEW CHASSIS, YOU’RE GETTING BUMPED TO LAST ON THE LIST FOR A NEW BODY. IS THAT UNDERSTOOD?
“Clear as acrylic.”
Silence was his only reply.
James187 shut down his optic sensors a mo
ment and let the automated controls maintain course. His goal rested dead center in his crosshairs, but the particulars had shifted.
Getting Eve14 back was an essential part of Evelyn38’s plan. She was the promising test subject and Evelyn38’s future host body. But that wasn’t the only human James187 was going to capture. That second human was a physical specimen unmatched in human evolutionary history. Someone had dreamed him up in a superhero comic book and made him flesh. Speed, strength, grace, and apparently incredible stamina as well.
James187 could go for a body like that one. And best of all, it was out there for the taking.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
A golden statue gleamed on the horizon, the tallest structure for a hundred kilometers in any direction. It caught the eastern sun and held it aloft as a beacon. In ages past, it had stood as a symbol of hope for visitors from European shores, promising refuge to the weary and safety to the oppressed.
Charlie7 could only hope that he wasn’t hopelessly naive in thinking it could do the same for Eve.
Eve stared as they approached. “That copper robot is the largest I’ve ever seen,” she remarked in a whisper. Without turning, she addressed Charlie7 directly. “What’s its purpose?”
“Well, it’s not a robot; it’s a statue. And its purpose is to greet travelers. Like us.”
“If it’s a statue, how does it do anything?”
Charlie7 watched her from the edge of his peripheral vision as they drew near. He kept them purposefully low over the Atlantic, so Eve got the full effect of the approach. “That feeling you’re experiencing. The awe. The wonderment. It makes the world seem like a larger place, where anything is possible. That’s how the statue greets its visitors.”
On final approach to Liberty Island, Charlie7 finally decided to call ahead. Paul208 wasn’t the world’s most social robot, so the odds that he was on site were good. With Notre Dame out of the way, he was on to his latest endeavor. Whoever had decided on his personality mix had inadvertently created an architectural dynamo. According to public records, he was a 34/33/33 mix of Paul, Fred, and Eddie—as low a percentage as anyone had ever been of their dominant personality. Hopefully, Paul208 was open-minded about humans.