Extinction Reversed (Robot Geneticists Book 1)

by J. S. Morin

  Charlie7 stood and retrieved his suit. “Just figuring out what to keep and what to get rid of. Don’t worry. You’re a keeper.”

  He winked at her, wondering what human eyes saw when a robot shut off the light from one optical sensor. That had been a wink for a thousand years, but it was a mere affectation.

  “Are we down here because of the tornadoes?”

  “There aren’t any tornadoes,” Charlie7 assured her.

  That little furrow returned to Eve’s brow. “Are they a fictional contrivance like the flying monkeys?”

  Fictional contrivance… Charlie7 made a conscious effort not to shake his head at her use of language. He didn’t want to give her mixed messages or discourage her. Sounding like a human would come with time and practice, learned—with no small dose of irony—from robots who’d lost most of their residual humanity over the ages.

  “Tornadoes are a real meteorological phenomenon, but they aren’t currently a problem. Earth’s climate is managed now. We identify the precursor effects and mitigate tornadoes before they form.”

  “Then why are we in the cellar?”

  There were so many ways he could answer that question. He could have gone the historic route and gone off on a tangent about the invasion that had wiped out mankind. He could have expounded on the practicality of subterranean dwellings in terms of thermal stability.

  Instead, Charlie7 tailored his explanation to what Eve already knew. He headed into one of the adjacent chambers, and Eve followed close behind. “You remember the other part of Kansas we visited?”

  “Yes.”

  The question had been nearly rhetorical. Of course Eve remembered. It wasn’t as if she’d suffered brain trauma in the two days since she’d been there last.

  “Well, Alison3 oversaw a facility like that one. But instead of mucking up the traffic flow of all the drones flying in and out, she had a tunnel to go in from beneath.”

  Charlie7 hit a switch, and a row of lights blinked on down a long tunnel that vanished to a pinprick of light at the limits of vision.

  The generators had been up and running long enough for the air circulators to come up to speed. Initially intended to cut down on mold formation, they also made the air breathable for Eve.

  Eve squinted down the length of the tunnel as if she could make out the far end, some three kilometers distant. “If I live in Kansas, should I name myself Dorothy?”

  “Of course you shouldn’t. Where would you get a daft notion like that?”

  “Plato said he named himself Spartacus. Then when his parrot took that name from him, he chose Plato. He said I should pick something other than Eve since lots of girls who end up at the sanctuary start out named Eve. He said it wasn’t original.”

  “Bear in mind that Plato’s an imbecile. His head’s packed full of old movies and Schrodinger-only-knows what else. Look, he might have saved you from Creator, but that doesn’t mean he has all the answers. I started out Charlie7, and at one point I could have chosen any name I wanted without anyone to object. I could have been Joan of Arc, Confucius, or Alexander the Great. But I’d have been the same inside. I’d—”

  “Do you hear something?” Eve asked without preamble. She wandered into the tunnel entrance, hunched forward and still squinting.

  Charlie7 had been keeping his audio threshold set to human levels but reminded himself that even normal adult hearing was inferior to a teenager’s. He turned up the gain and noticed what was preoccupying Eve. “Um, you might want to step back.”

  “Why—?”

  Before she could finish her question, they came into view. A swarm of bats, no doubt startled by the sudden presence of light all along the tunnels of their borrowed home, came rushing en masse toward Charlie7 and Eve.

  Eve shrieked and ran for cover.

  Charlie7 rushed over to shield her with his chassis but couldn’t help laughing aloud.

  In her panic, Eve evaded Charlie7’s attempts to interpose himself between her and the swarm. Tiny rodents flapped past the girl on all sides as she spun and swatted. Every generation came up with silly dances to vex their elders; Charlie7 wondered if this was the seed of the first new teenage dance crazy of the Second Human Era.

  Probably not.

  Eventually, the swarm petered out. The last few bats failed to spur Eve to further contortions as she caught her breath.

  “That… wasn’t… funny,” Eve protested.

  Charlie7 picked the girl up by the waist and swung her around like they were figure skaters, grinning all the while. “Don’t you understand? No. Of course, you don’t. Why would you?” He set Eve down but couldn’t override the smile on his face. “Those bats weren’t installed here by any robot. They didn’t need to be told where to live. The Earth is overcoming its reliance on robotkind.”

  Puzzlement still lurked in the corners of Eve’s eyes, but Charlie7’s laughter was contagious. Soon, Eve joined in, chuckling without even understanding why.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  As Betty-Lou rocketed over the Atlantic Ocean, Plato lay back in the pilot’s seat and waited for his heart to stop racing. Sweat cooled as the air circulator blasted. His mind cleared. He’d done it. James187 was officially out of the human-hunting business.

  It didn’t matter whether the robotic hunter delivered Plato’s message to Evelyn38 or slunk back to the hole he crawled out of. Evelyn38 would know just based on his failure that Plato was still looking to turn that crystalline matrix in her head as blank as an automaton’s face.

  The monotony of the waves beneath lulled Plato into relaxation. There would be time aplenty for vengeance. For now, he had a more urgent desire.

  Eve. Plato had to find her again.

  Unfortunately, that meant finding Charlie7 again. To give the old hunk of junk credit, he had broken into Plato’s lair and not left a trace of how he’d done it. If he wanted to disappear with Eve, Plato didn’t know how long it might take to track him down.

  Maybe Plato didn’t have to find Charlie7. Maybe that ancient bag of circuits would throw Plato a lifeline to keep him from going nuts with worry.

  Putting himself in the mindset of a bored robot, Plato punched in a phony ID and sent Charlie7 a Social message. “Charlie, old bean. Fancy a rematch? I’ve got a new gambit sure to trap your queen.”

  There had been a chessboard set up in Charlie7’s underground bunker. It was a solved game, but that didn’t stop some robots from playing under a gentleman’s agreement not to use computers. Plato hoped that Charlie7 was one of them and not just a pretentious old robot with delusions of sophistication.

  Plato knew the rules of chess, but the game had never appealed to him. Too static. Too unemotional. There was no guile or courage, just cold, robotic logic. Now that his mind had wandered there, he couldn’t help thinking of the comedy of the pieces. In chess, the king was more important, but the queen more powerful. Just the opposite of him and Eve. Plato was the strong one, but Eve meant everything.

  That analogy would have made Charlie7 a knight or bishop. That robot never moved in straight lines.

  NO TIME FOR CHESS. IF YOU WANT TO MEET UP LATER, I’VE GOTTEN A BIT HOMESICK. THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME.

  Plato smirked. “Oh, yeah? Homesick, huh?”

  Charlie7 lived in Paris, but that wasn’t home. Plato knew the biographies of the Twenty-Seven. Charles Truman was from the Baltimore suburbs. What was there now?

  As he ran the archival search, Plato came across a notification that sent a shiver from toes to shoulders. He had a message.

  On a fake ID.

  From just after he and Eve parted ways at Liberty Island.

  “There’s no place like home…” Plato whispered, reading it aloud.

  The archives revealed an atmospheric adjustment station in what once was Baltimore, and a fish hatchery just off shore. The hatchery was small and heavily monitored, which made it an unlikely place for Charlie7 to hide out. The atmospheric station was idle at the moment. If Charlie7 had pick
ed one of the two, that was the more likely.

  “There’s no place like home…” Plato whispered again as his eyes glazed over. He tapped his heels together, and it clicked. “You’re not in Baltimore. You’ve taken Eve back to Kansas.”

  Eve hadn’t told Plato where in Kansas exactly, but he remembered her mentioning it while they were watching The Wizard of Oz. This wasn’t a message from Charlie7. It was from Eve.

  The difference mattered somehow.

  Plato had no idea where Auntie Em’s farmhouse was supposed to have been, but Kansas was only so big, and he had plenty of time to search the planetary archives for holes where Charlie7 and Eve might be hiding.

  Betty-Lou banked and reversed course, heading back toward North America and onward to the Great Plains.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  CHARLIE, OLD BEAN. FANCY A REMATCH? I’VE GOT A NEW GAMBIT SURE TO TRAP YOUR QUEEN.

  James187 leaned against the hull of his skyroamer. There had been no point taking off without a heading, and Plato’s skyroamer disappeared from all manner of detection as soon as it was over the horizon.

  But the bug he’d installed was working fine.

  While he might have underestimated the human’s cunning and guile, the naivety James187 had pegged for a bullseye.

  Plato running inside the refinery had been a blatant trap. It had also left the human’s skyroamer unattended. While sabotage might have eliminated Plato from his list of problems, it would also have cut off his best source of information.

  NO TIME FOR CHESS. IF YOU WANT TO MEET UP LATER, I’VE GOTTEN A BIT HOMESICK. THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME.

  The response was from Charlie7’s ID.

  James187 had qualms about getting on the wrong side of a Toby when Toby22 had been his prime suspect for Plato’s accomplice among the robots. The prospect of tangling with the likes of Charlie7 flashed unfamiliar warning messages deep in James187’s quantum processors.

  All those single-digit designations felt like ghosts to him. Too old. Too smug. Only one of them claimed to have known the Twenty-Seven personally. That was Charlie7.

  James187 hefted the EMP rifle that Plato had left behind in his haste. For hobby-made, it wasn’t a bad design, and it certainly proved quite effective at stopping automatons. When he’d taken the weapon, it was with visions of aiming it at that no-good Toby22’s head and squeezing the trigger. People would grumble about a low-numbered Toby getting data-wiped, but they’d get over it.

  A new communication came in. This time, the ID belonged to Evelyn38.

  JAMES, WHERE IN THE BLUE BLAZES ARE YOU? I JUST LOST A HIP ACTUATOR, AND I STILL HAVEN’T GOT A REPLACEMENT CHASSIS. I’M NOT TAKING ANOTHER TRIP TO KANTO FOR A REFIT. IF YOU DON’T BRING ME MY PREFERRED HOST THEN I’LL FIND SOMEONE ELSE WHO WILL. YOU’RE NOT THE ONLY—

  He cut off the message and deleted it without reading the rest. He could just as easily envision putting Evelyn38 out of her misery with a well-placed shot from the EMP rifle.

  Raising the rifle to his shoulder, he sighted down the barrel and pictured Evelyn38’s condescending half-smile as she shuffled across in front of his aim. But of all the robots he knew, none offered so tantalizing a chance to feel the wind against his skin, to savor the heat of the sun’s light, to taste a medium rare steak, perfectly seasoned and fresh off the grill.

  Humans were coming back to inhabit Earth, and he was in line to be among the first of them. All of that relied on keeping in Evelyn38’s good graces and bringing Eve14 back alive and relatively unharmed.

  “Listen, you’ll get your ape back. Just let me do my job.”

  Giving the weapon one more good look, he pitched it into the back of his skyroamer and climbed inside.

  He had a job to do. It wasn’t a clean, tidy job, but few of his ever were.

  Animals were messy, unpredictable creatures with lives governed by chemicals and instincts. They got crazy notions and panicked when their lives were in danger. Robots, on the other hand, tended to be too predictable. Charlie7 should have let Eve14 devise the message for her friend Plato. Maybe that brain Evelyn38 bragged about crafting would have come up with a subtler hint that only another human would have understood.

  Eve14 and Plato had spent time together. They should have planned ahead for a rendezvous if they were ever separated.

  As his skyroamer lifted from the ground, James187 set a heading that put him on course for Topeka, Kansas—or at least where the maps said it used to be.

  “There’s no place like home?” James187 muttered. “Really, Charlie7? That was the best you could come up with?”

  After all, who hadn’t watched every movie ever made?

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Bats. Species Eptesicus fuscus.

  Now that Eve had looked them up and read about them in the planetary archive, the squeaking vermin weren’t so scary. Maybe being enveloped by a swarm of them would still be unsettling, but those bats were harmless to humans.

  The sunlight coming through Alison3’s west-facing windows had dried up. Eve rubbed her eyes as she idly perused the archives, learning about Kansas, robots, and the unique vocation known as filmmaking.

  Eve didn’t want to sleep just yet. Plato ought to be there any minute, and she wanted to see him to reassure herself that he was all right. This would be the third time he’d risked his life to protect her.

  When she posed the question of why to the archive, it had told her that behavior such as Plato’s was endemic to males of many species due to the reproductive value of females in the population. Eve didn’t feel particularly valuable, but both Charlie and Plato claimed that she was.

  Charlie had been gone for hours. He was close by, somewhere in the underground levels of Alison3’s old house.

  The self-terminated friend of Charlie’s had lots of interesting equipment. Most of it was a complete mystery to Eve, but Charlie had shooed her away; he had important things to do and couldn’t constantly be distracted monitoring Eve’s safety.

  Besides, Eve could learn more from the archive. The Earthwide held the majority of human and robotic knowledge in one place. It could tell her the names of long-dead human leaders, the annual ore production of extraplanetary mines, and thousands of recipes that prominently featured apples. But it couldn’t tell her what was in Alison3’s basement, nor could it tell her how long Charlie would be down there.

  The answer to that last question came shortly thereafter, when Charlie came up to the surface level. He seemed pleased, judging by the upturning of the corners of his mouth. But Eve was learning not to trust the simple visual cues that Creator had passed along and reinforced in virtual reality simulators.

  Just as Plato always seemed to be varying levels of happy, she was beginning to wonder if Charlie could fake happiness altogether. Why did the two of them want Eve to think they were always happy when she was around?

  “Well,” Charlie said, tugging at the sleeves of his tattered suit. “Depending on how far Plato wandered before losing his tail and how fast he was willing to fly, he could be getting here any time now. Let’s head outside and watch for him.”

  “But it’s nighttime.”

  “Yes, a daily nuisance you’ll learn to deal with,” Charlie said. “I’ve got a surprise for you that’ll make it all worthwhile.”

  Thus far, Charlie had been a relatively good judge of Eve’s likes and dislikes; his notable misfires had all been food-related. She was willing to give him another chance to show her a surprise.

  Eve followed the robot out into the fields of tall prairie grasses that surrounded Alison3’s house in all directions. Constellations shone in the night sky, picked out from a trillion stars as the brightest and most prominent. Most were invisible, but Eve knew they lay beyond her unaided vision. The Milky Way spread overhead in a gentle haze of blue and orange hues.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Charlie asked.

  Bare feet guided their own steps as Eve wandered in awe. Dry grass crunched and caught between her toes. Cricke
ts chirped from all directions. Looking straight up, Eve spun slow circles and watched the universe twist above her. Infinity lay in that direction, and only a slight gravitational force prevented her from drifting away toward it.

  Dizziness set in. Eve spread her feet and looked down as she waited for the prairie to stop spinning.

  That was when she noticed the tiny stars that drifted among the grass. They were little more than pinpricks of light floating around in lazy, patternless routes. Heat and radiation should have killed her long before real stars could have gotten so close, and these didn’t even emit heat as far as Eve could tell.

  Too small, as well. Even the smallest of stars ought to have dwarfed the whole of Earth. Determined to investigate, Eve stalked and captured one and cupped it in her hands. It tickled.

  “They’re called fireflies,” Charlie said softly, barely audible over the crickets and the rustle of grass in the breeze. “Alison3 made a hobby of bringing them back. They went extinct even before the invasion.”

  “How do they generate electricity?” Eve asked, peeking inside her firefly prison.

  “They don’t. It’s a form of bioluminescence. They can—” Charlie’s attention turned skyward, and Eve turned to follow his gaze. “Looks like we’ve got company.”

  There were no lights. But on that cloudless night, Eve watched the approach of an indistinct silhouette by the stars it blotted out. It had to be Plato’s skyroamer.

  Her heartbeat quickened, and the barefoot girl opened her hands to let her glowing prisoner fly free. Eve preferred to spend her attention on Plato’s arrival.

  For a moment it, looked as if he might fly right past them. But the skyroamer changed course directly toward them, and it jerked to a stop with a startling suddenness before beginning its descent.

  “Eve, run!” Charlie shouted.

  “But Plato just—”

  “That’s not Plato. No human could survive that deceleration. Now hide!”

  Eve didn’t need to be told twice. She didn’t have the optical sensors that Charlie did so she couldn’t make snap measurements of change in velocity. But his claim that no human could have survived it rang true.