by J. S. Morin
5… 4… 3… 2… 1…
Nothing happened. “I don’t feel anything.”
“Well, I have some good news,” Charlie7 said. “I talked Plato through the process of stopping the upload to your brain.”
Eve let out a breath she hadn’t noticed she’d been holding. Tears welled in her eyes, which now just saw her vital readings and a blurry haze of lights. “What now? Will Plato come get us both out?”
“First things first. I have a spot of bad news before the storm clouds pass. We can’t shut down the upload checker.”
“What’s that mean?” It sounded ominous, but strapped down to a brain-erasing machine, just about everything did.
“Well, when the process runs normally, the original robot goes inert, the system scans the crystalline matrix, and a copy is uploaded to the new robot. If the upload is a success, a small EMP wipes the original, so we don’t end up with duplicate people.”
“And if it’s not?” Eve felt compelled to ask.
“Then the system erases the faulty data from the new unit, and the original is reactivated so the process can be attempted again at a later date.”
The heart rate numbers spiked again. “I’m the faulty data?”
“We’re working on that,” Charlie7 assured her.
Eve waited. If Charlie7 was talking to Plato electronically, she didn’t want to distract him.
“Dammit!” Charlie7 shouted. His voiced came back a forced sort of calm. “Eve. I need you to do something very important.”
“Yes?”
“In a moment, I’m going to need you to convince this machine that you are Evelyn11.”
Chapter Seventy-Eight
“You’re going to see a series of tests… or puzzles,” Charlie7 said.
Puzzles?
Eve’s life had built up to this moment.
As far back as she could remember, life had revolved around physical fitness training and puzzles. Every success Creator had cheered, every failure that had denied Eve a meal, every mind-twisting challenge that had forced her capabilities above and beyond their previous limits—all of it had been so that Creator would have room enough to fit inside Eve’s brain.
It was time for Eve to find out the limits of her brainpower.
“I can do this,” Eve replied. She heard the tremor in her own voice. Hopefully, Charlie7 would help her whether she was sure of success or not.
The early puzzles in the sequence were everyday challenges that unlocked Eve’s meals. She sped through them without a hitch. It was easier solving them than it had been to resist Creator’s diagnostics.
Eventually, Eve came to new challenges, and she had to slow down to think.
First among this new breed of puzzle was a three-dimensional jigsaw with different-colored pieces. The pieces moved to follow the motion of her eyes as she focused on them.
Idly, Eve wondered if Creator knew the solutions in advance or if the robot merely trusted that inhabiting Eve’s mind she’d have the computing power to solve them herself.
But what if Creator wasn’t as brilliant as she believed?
“Charlie, what would have happened to the other Eves if Creator didn’t know how to solve these puzzles?” Eve hated asking it. She couldn’t help wondering if the fault hadn’t been with her predecessors but with Creator herself.
“Try not to think about that,” Charlie7 replied calmly as if she might panic and run away. If Eve could have budged from the table, running would have been her first choice. “Just concentrate on the test.”
In the corner of her vision, a tiny red circle vanished as if swept away by the hands of a clock turning the wrong direction. There was no time to waste or Eve would be the next skull on Creator’s shelf.
The jigsaw interlocked. Its final piece plugged snugly into place, and the puzzle vanished. Eve released the breath she’d been holding.
Next up was a grid of numbers with no instructions as to what Eve was meant to do with them. “I’d concentrate better if I wasn’t wondering about that question.”
“The electrical charge to reset the crystal matrix would cook the subject’s brain, and Evelyn would wake up without knowing exactly what went wrong. She’d have no memories of the testing.”
The number puzzle was pointlessly simple. The number 253 wasn’t prime; the rest were. Devoting attention to the 253 for a few seconds cleared that puzzle as well.
Eve’s confidence swelled. These new puzzles were no match for her. Eve14 was smarter than Creator. She would succeed where all those other poor Eves had been doomed.
That confidence was short-lived.
After the grid of primes, a truly bizarre puzzle appeared. There were four emblems, arranged two by two. Lettering identified them, but what they meant was still an utter mystery. Each had a shape similar to a shield and various ornamental flourishes. There were letters buried in the designs, some resembling words, but nothing she could decipher.
“Charlie! I need help!” Eve screamed. The circular red timer was sweeping away, and she didn’t even know where to begin solving this puzzle.
“What do you see?”
Knowing how little time she had, Eve rattled off descriptions of each. She made certain not to let her eyes linger too long on any single emblem, lest she accidentally get credited with an incorrect answer while Charlie considered her information.
“They’re school logos. Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth. Evelyn Mengele got her doctorate at Dartmouth.”
Since “DARTMOUTH” was prominently displayed in the relevant logo, it was easy to identify. Eve held her view on it for a moment, and the puzzle cleared.
Eve’s gasp of relief hadn’t even emptied her lungs when the next challenge appeared to vex her.
This puzzle was another two by two grid, but this time showed four human faces. “They’re faces! The next puzzle is faces!”
“Calm down,” Charlie7 ordered. “Describe them. Shape. Color. Gender. Hair. Eyes.”
Eve did her best, but she’d only recently seen other humans.
The differentiations were so subtle. Eve imagined that old humans had a whole codified system of breaking facial appearance down into categories. Someone like Plato could probably have said, “That upper left one is a 12A-85-H11,” and Charlie would have known exactly what the face looked like.
Eve had to muddle through.
“Say that last one again,” Charlie said when she finished.
“He had a nose like an elliptical paraboloid, a two-millimeter gap between his front teeth, and an indentation at the center of his chin that the other three lack.”
Please let him hurry, Eve begged silently.
“Do his eyebrows connect in the middle?” Charlie asked.
Eve squinted, but the lenses didn’t project any more clearly. “Hard to tell. There may be a millimeter of bare skin between them.”
“Clancy Mengele,” Charlie shouted. “That’s her oldest son. He was a mathematics professor at Harvard. Won a Nobel Prize. Evelyn wouldn’t shut up about him.”
Eve focused on the image of Creator’s son. In the few brief seconds she stared at his image, she wondered if the two of them were somehow related. Was Eve this man’s sister, in a way?
Creator’s son and the other three faces faded, and there was nothing to replace them.
The lenses in Eve’s eyes turned transparent, and even the vital sign reading vanished. A cold liquid squirted in through the intravenous line in her arm—a stimulant far stronger than the one that had reversed her sedation.
Eve’s eyes shot wide, her nostrils flared, and her lungs sucked in a greedy breath.
The restraints holding Eve to the table loosened and released—all but one strap across her legs that kept her from falling off the table. A tug that stretched her neck taut ended in a chorus of pings as the leads clipped to her skull terminals popped free.
Eve blinked and sat up. When she reached to rub her eyes, the intravenous line got in the way, so she yanked it out of he
r arm. As she was manually unbuckling the strap across her thighs, a voice boomed overhead.
“GOOD MORNING, EVE MENGELE. WELCOME TO YOUR NEW LIFE AS A HUMAN.”
From the far side of the machine, there was a clack and hum. The lights in the lab momentarily dimmed until the hum stopped.
“Was that—?”
“Yes,” Charlie said. “Evelyn11, who’d taken over Evelyn38’s body, was just wiped blank.”
Eve didn’t know what to feel.
Creator had been her caretaker her entire life. She had made Eve out of nothing, and now Creator herself was nothing. The notion had a sort of symmetry to it, but it still didn’t feel right. There was, of course, the flood of relief that threatened to scrape the insides of her adrenal glands raw.
Charlie—Charlie7—had done everything he’d promised.
Eve was alive, and the whole world lay before her.
Chapter Seventy-Nine
While it was nice that Eve was going to survive, there was still a pressing matter of a captive robot about to be the rope in a tug of war.
Charlie7 made a throat-clearing noise. Eve’s attention snapped toward him. “Now, if you don’t mind a bit of reciprocity, please tell these mindless monsters to let me go.”
For the first time, Eve seemed to pull her wits together to take in the entirety of the scene around her. Considering the sort of day she’d had, Charlie7 was willing to be charitable about an adjustment period. But he also didn’t know how long Evelyn had programmed these automatons to wait for instruction.
Eve stood tall and drew a deep breath. “You two automatons, let Charlie7 go.” She over-enunciated, but he didn’t mind a little extra caution.
The automatons showed no sign of having heard or accepted Eve’s order. “That didn’t work.”
Eve nodded and cleared her throat. “Let. Charlie7. Go.”
There was a pause, and the only sound was the background hum of Evelyn’s lab equipment.
“There must be a password or a code or something,” Charlie7 said.
Contingencies and backup plans jostled in Charlie7’s mind. He didn’t have the leverage to tear his own arms off. He lacked the strength to wrench himself free. The two automatons that held him fast were disconnected from all networks so any attempts at a remote hack would be fruitless.
In unison, the two automatons squeezed. Alerts flashed across Charlie7’s consciousness as the outer casings on his arms crumpled, emitting a plaintive metallic creak.
“No!” Eve shouted. “Why are they doing this? Stop!”
“Evelyn warned me,” Charlie7 said. “If she didn’t wake up from the transfer, these things were programmed to destroy me.”
Eve grabbed one of the automatons by the arm, but her strength was insignificant. “You knew this would happen? Why would you tell me the answers? You cheated the test for me? I didn’t want to wake up just so you could die!”
All Charlie7 could do in the face of her questions was to repeat. “I’m sorry… I’m sorry.”
Eve gave up trying and sobbed as the automatons forced Charlie7 to the ground. He’d have kicked, twisted, anything on the remote chance of breaking free, but Eve was too close by. He couldn’t take a one-in-a-million chance of success if it risked hurting her in the process.
“You promised you’d keep me safe. I’m holding you to that!”
A heavy hand tore open Charlie7’s rear thoracic access plate. Another reached in and grabbed a handful of data lines. Most of Charlie7’s neural inputs went dark, as well as the connection to his internal computer. All motor control below his neck was offline.
“I did. You’re safe. These things aren’t going to hurt you. Plato will fly you out of here. I trust you to get out of this. It’s just another puzzle.” A last-minute thought occurred to him, sparking an inkling of hope. “Willing to try tearing my head off? I’d appreciate it.”
In an instant, Eve had her hands locked under Charlie7’s chin and the base of his skull. Behind him, automaton feet rose and fell, crunching his internal computer beyond repair, along with most of his torso.
Eve grunted and gritted her teeth. She used one of the automatons and braced a foot against it for leverage. For the first time since he’d met them both, Charlie7 wished it was Plato with him instead of Eve. But the sentiment was short lived.
“Get back!” Charlie7 shouted.
Eve leaped away just in time before one of the robotic feet slammed down on Charlie7’s skull. Warnings and error codes he’d never seen in a thousand years of robotic life flashed across his vision.
“Eve, this is it for me.” A foot slammed down.
“No,” Eve said, sobbing. “It’s not. They’ll stop. They have to stop. Why don’t they stop?”
“Get word to Toby22.” Another impact resulted in a starling array of new error codes.
Eve shook her head. “I can’t. I don’t know what I’ll do if you’re gone.”
“You can. Have them make a new Charlie. Promise me.” Charlie7 didn’t even register the next blow except for the sudden shaking of his optical sensor and the loss of vision in his right eye.
Eve nodded frantically as she got down on hands and knees to look Charlie7 in the eye. “I promise.”
“Give all my things to him, house and everything. The new Charlie will look after—”
The error codes all ended with a resounding crunch. The last thing Charlie7 saw was Eve’s tear-streaked face.
Chapter Eighty
The door slid open, and Plato bounded through, pistol drawn. He was sweating and out of breath, with one eyebrow missing. In his off hand, Plato carried a blowtorch. As soon as he entered the room, a pair of automatons flanking the door lurched toward him.
“Plato! No!” Eve shouted. She crouched on the floor over a pile of scrap metal.
Knowing he couldn’t evade the two robots, Plato charged the one on his left.
Before the drone could close its grip on him, Plato pressed the thermite pistol to its chassis and fired.
If he was an idiot, Plato might have aimed for the cranium, but automatons didn’t have imitation human brains in theirs, just a few sensor nodes. Instead, his shot went into the torso at exactly the spot where a thermite round would slag its central processor. The machine was dead weight as Plato’s inertia bore it to the ground.
Landing heavily atop the first attacker, Plato rolled free and fired a second precise round into the processor of the second. It slowed to a halt, kept upright by auto-gyros that didn’t depend on the processor.
Eve turned away from him and sobbed. Plato thought better of stuffing the thermite pistol back into his pants just after firing it and set it on the stone floor as he knelt beside Eve. “You OK? Where’s…”
Removed from the heat of the moment, it became apparent where Charlie7 had gone. He was right there, scattered all over the floor. His last, cryptic transmission of a detailed set of arrangements for his personal affairs made a whole lot more sense now.
“He died instead of me,” Eve said, gasping for breath between sobs. “I didn’t want him to die. It’s all my fault.”
Plato put an arm around Eve’s shoulders. She felt so small and fragile. He worried he’d break her even letting the full weight of his arm rest on her. “None of this is your fault. You were the victim. Creator, Evelyn38 or whatever number… who cares what you call her? She’s the one to blame for all this.”
“But she made me…”
“Hey!” Plato snapped. “Making someone doesn’t mean you own them. My creator’s name was Charlie24 and hardly a day goes by where I don’t wish I could upload him to a new chassis and end his miserable life all over again. A lotta robots are pretty awful people. But there are some real good ones out there, too. I didn’t believe all the crap people said about Charlie7 being a hero; he was a Charlie after all, just like the guy who turned me into the monster I am. But Charlie7 was as good as his word. He was a hero.”
Eve turned to look up at Plato. Her eyes were reddened an
d glistening. Her irises looked wrong as well, but he couldn’t put a finger on why. None of that mattered right now. Plato wiped away the tears with the back of his finger.
“You’re not a monster,” Eve said as she composed herself. “You helped Charlie7 save me.”
“Yeah. I helped. But I know what I am. You haven’t seen as many movies and news clips from the Earthwide as I have. I know what humans look like, how they act. I’m not one of them. Your creator might have done a lot of awful things, but she got at least one completely right.” Plato reached out and touched a finger to Eve’s nose.
As he stood, Eve accepted Plato’s offered hand.
“But,” Eve said, waving a hand over the pile of metallic scrap and scattered shards of brain-quality crystal. “What about Charlie7?”
“We can say goodbye to Charlie later. Right now, we have people to call.”
Chapter Eighty-One
Mount Kilauea became an instant pilgrimage site.
Once word had spread of a secret lab and live, healthy humans on Earth for the first time in a thousand years, robots across the globe dropped what they were doing and rushed to the island of Hawaii.
Flying craft of every description lined the shores of the big island, and the pilots made their way on foot to the gathering at the volcano.
Toby22 had been among the first to arrive, despite a longer journey than many. He hadn’t waited for rumors to spread across the Social. He hadn’t checked and cross-checked, fearful of a hoax or a prank. Eve and Plato had contacted him directly. Toby22 had been the first to hear of Charlie7’s death and had come immediately.
The volcano had become an impromptu memorial site, a triage center, and a crime scene all in one.
Toby22 hadn’t known what to expect as more and more robots arrived but not this. Robots had died before. Horrible accidents and self-termination ran neck-and-neck as the leading causes. Murder was a rare thing indeed—or at least, so he imagined.