Extinction Reversed (Robot Geneticists Book 1)

by J. S. Morin

  Nora109 pulled Toby22 aside as if he were someone important. “We found Eves numbered through twenty-two in the lab plus dozens of embryonic and fetal…” Toby22 waited for her to call them specimens as if they were animals. “Versions.”

  Toby22 hung his head. “Poor things. How are the younger ones taking it?”

  “Overwhelmed. Frightened. Curious. They’re like a regression study of Eve14; all of them are younger than her by varying degrees. The three oldest have transcranial implants like Eve14’s.”

  A pair of Ashleys herded a line of children toward a large-animal transport that one of the wildlife rangers had flown to the gathering.

  Toby22 watched the children march single file in descending order of height. It reminded him of early photographs of prairie farm families with children spaced just a year or two apart for an entire generation. None of them fought or jostled; they all just gaped in wonder at everything they could set their eyes upon.

  “You run into Charlie13 down there?” Toby22 asked. Not that it was any of his business, but as gossip went, he seemed to be at the hub of an event so big that people couldn’t help but include him.

  “Into him? How about him running over me and everyone else down there?” Nora109 said. “You try telling the head of robotic uploads that he needs to get out of the way of a few human children. He’s half mad over finding an unauthorized upload rig. And he’s entirely bonkers that it’s got features his hasn’t.”

  “Think he’s going to respect Charlie7’s wishes?”

  Nora109 scoffed. “Like this world needs another Charlie. But I think Thirteen will play along. Popular sentiment will ensure that. He won’t like making it the same mix as a previous personality, but Charlie7 was practically constructed out of exceptions.”

  “That he was,” Toby22 said.

  If only Nora109 knew what Toby22 knew. A handful of the Tobys had been mixed with memories Charles Truman had never meant for them to remember. All the Charlies knew that Dr. Charles Truman had created a 100 percent duplicate of his own mind; they all remembered doing it. Some of the Tobys remembered helping him. But none of the Charlies could be sure which of their brethren was that unmixed, pure human mind.

  Except for Charlie7.

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  Eve stood on a freshly constructed platform at the crater’s edge of Mount Kilauea. Four robots whose designations she hadn’t caught assembled it in mere minutes. But none of them approached her, just as none of the rest in the crowd seemed eager to touch her.

  The only one by Eve’s side as a legion of glowing eyes looked on was Plato. She had seen the other Eves and spoken with them briefly if only to assure them that Ashley390 wouldn’t hurt them. There would be time for Eve to get to know her twin sisters later.

  This was a time to say goodbye.

  The pieces that had once been Charlie7 now filled a bin that sat between her and Plato. Both of them wore safety harnesses attached to cables to keep them from falling into the molten sea of rock below.

  No such precaution had been needed for Charlie7. He was beyond saving, and the final requests he had transmitted to Plato’s computer included instructions that his remains be melted down. There was to be, as Charlie7’s instructions put it, “No Lenin’s tomb for me.”

  Eve made a point to look up what that meant.

  Plato nudged her with an elbow. “You should say something. Everyone’s waiting.”

  With a sniffle, Eve nodded. “Charlie7, thank you for giving up your life so I could have mine. I promise not to waste it. I wish someone could fix you, but everyone says it can’t be done. Since you asked to be melted, we’ll honor your wishes.”

  She and Plato each grabbed hold of one corner of the bin, and they tipped it. At first, Eve marveled at how little Charlie7’s pieces weighed and wondered if some of him were missing. Then she noticed by flexure of the bin that Plato was bearing nearly all the weight himself. But while he could bear this physical burden for her, the emotional weight of Charlie7’s loss pressed down, unrelenting, on Eve’s shoulders.

  Bit by bit the first few metallic scraps rained down into the volcano, disappearing with red splashes. Then all at once the rest slid free and clattered over the edge. In seconds, Charlie7 was gone. The last piece, a fragment of cranium, snagged on the lip of the bin. A lightless eye stared blankly at Eve. With a shake of the bin, Plato dislodged that final piece, and it too vanished into the lava.

  The two of them stared down into the lava, neither looking at the other.

  “You should pick a new name,” Plato said. “Evelyn38 called you Eve14, but there’s no one to tell you who you have to be anymore. Maybe you could be Dorothy…”

  Eve wrinkled her nose. “Dorothy wanted to go home, even though it was an awful place. I want to stay in Oz. Creator gave me a name, and it’s mine now. And my name is Eve. Eve the Fourteenth, maybe. I just choose to be me.”

  Without taking her eyes from the spot where Charlie7 had vanished, Eve reached out and took Plato by the hand.

  Chapter Eighty-Three

  Toby22 watched the brief ceremony at the crater’s edge. As Eve’s tiny hand disappeared within Plato’s massive one, he leaned over to Nora109. “Do we need to maybe… I don’t know, curate their choices of movies for a while? What if they don’t figure things out on their own?”

  Nora109 chuckled softly. “Humanity ‘figured things out,’ as you put it, long before popular entertainment. From what I’ve seen, though, it may not be an issue. Eve and Plato are barely the same species. They’ve both been tinkered with—Eve prior to development, and Plato a little before and a lot after. She’s as human as they come; her genome has been scrubbed and polished. There isn’t so much as a recessive marker that I’d flag. Eve’s immune to most diseases we’ve identified including alien bio-warfare agents. Plato is… less well-built.”

  With a glance up at the hulking brute at the lip of the volcano, Toby22 raised an eyebrow actuator at Nora109. “Could’ve fooled me.”

  “That male specimen has induced pituitary gigantism, myostatin-related muscular hypertrophy, congenital adrenal hyperplasia, the ACDN5 suite of fast-twitch enhancements that was banned pre-invasion. He’s also got bits and piece from no fewer than six non-primate species, things I can’t even identify a use for in some cases. There have been numerous attempts to mitigate the side effects, but he’s not taking any drugs that I’m aware of. You can tell just by the way he walks that he suffers chronic joint pain. Let’s not even mention the fact that Plato’s only twelve years old. I don’t care if uploading to a human mind becomes safer than taking on a new chassis; you couldn’t pay me to get into a body like that.”

  On the volcano’s edge, Plato and Eve were turning to come back down. The mismatched pair was angel and demon, hand in hand. He wasn’t a beast heralding a new generation of super humans; Plato was a vengeful spirit, doing everything he could before his body failed utterly. Eve was the beginning of the new generation of humans, her innocence fresh out of the original packaging and only slightly tarnished.

  Toby22 shook his head. The shy look they shared, the tentative smiles… they were a lovestruck pair without the first hint of what that meant. “Only twelve…” Toby muttered, shaking his head.

  “Genetic compatibility is probably close to nil,” Nora109 said. Toby22 caught a note of wistfulness that he wished he could remedy. “Maybe once Eve’s matured, they can enjoy one another’s company but not to any productive end.”

  “So… heartbreak, an early death, and not even a legacy to pass on?” Toby asked, hanging his head.

  Nora109 lifted Toby22’s chin. “Not if modern science has anything to say about it.”

  Toby22 heard the note of hope. A thousand years had passed between humanity’s last breath and its rebirth. Science had done it all. Robots had saved humanity, but that was too big-picture for a Toby.

  Robotkind needed to start saving humans. Every human they could.

  Chapter Eighty-Four

 
; Numbers counted backward in the dark.

  An antenna listened for a signal that was long overdue.

  A patient robot lurked in the gloom, the glow of his eyes the only light in the underground storage facility. The countdown continued without the need for a gaudy digital display.

  No one was supposed to be down here to witness the countdown. Today was an exception because today those numbers were going to hit zero. When they did, Charlie25 would be there to witness.

  Three minutes remained.

  This wasn’t Charlie25’s normal routine. The world had ceased being normal of late. Humans had been discovered, which was a setback because those humans still had wet, slimy, illogical brains sloshing around inside their skulls. At the very least, those minds ought to have been renovated before being released into the wild.

  One minute remained. Charlie25 waited.

  The countdown ended. The antenna had failed to receive a particular signal. Lights on the upload rig flashed to life. Storage cores powered up, a cycle began, and data poured into the crystalline matrix of the inert robotic chassis hooked to the rig.

  Five minutes to transfer.

  Then four… three… two… one…

  Eyes flared to life, and the robot in the rig sat up at once, snatching away cables as if they were cobwebs.

  “Where am I? How old is this backup? How much is missing?” The robot swung its legs over the side of the table and took its first unsteady steps.

  “Calm down, Evelyn. You’re at our backup facility under Kanto. Everything’s fine. You uploaded this brain scan just days ago.”

  “Everything is not fine, Charles,” Evelyn11 snapped. “Look at this wretched chassis you’ve set me up with. I was better off in Evelyn38. Now tell me what happened. Last I remember, I was preparing an upload to Eve15. Did it fail that badly?”

  “You survived. Eve15 didn’t. That was nine days ago. Since then, you apparently attempted to upload to Eve14. You not only failed, but your test subject passed the post-upload test, causing the Evelyn38 chassis to be wiped.”

  Evelyn11 clenched her fists until the servos whined to a stall. “That little rodent! How did she ever—?”

  “Charlie7 appears to have had a hand in helping her pass. You arranged for him to be killed.”

  Shaking loose her fists, Evelyn11 began to pace. “Well, bully on me for that, at least. Now tell me, how long until you can arrange a more permanent solution?”

  “I don’t have any good candidates lined up,” Charlie25 said. “But soon enough, a perfect robot will come looking for a new chassis, and I’ll upload you instead of them.”

  Evelyn11 grabbed the smug upload director by the collar of his grease-stained shirt. “Let me clarify. I don’t want a new chassis. I want Eve14.”

  Author’s Note

  I think after just finishing reading Extinction Reversed, you’d be shocked to discover how it began. A story that’s a mix of I, Robot and Jurassic Park was once slated to be a comedy along the lines of Three Men and a Baby.

  No, seriously.

  I had the opening scene of Extinction Reversed in my head for a long time. The idea of robots attending a church service struck me as cognitively dissonant in a wonderful way. But in my original concept, the robots were part of a fully-robotic society where there had never been attempt to repopulate Earth. The robots worshiped mankind as their creators, and a subversive cult was working in secret to clone humans as living gods. Cult of Man, as I’d intended to call it, was originally going to feature the creators of a human baby who had no idea how to handle it.

  When I tried to stretch that concept into something more than a series of “ha ha, look at those robots struggle trying to feed a baby,” I ended up fast-forwarding to when the child had grown up. I needed intrigue, danger, and conflict. I wanted a thinking, feeling character aware of what was going on.

  I’d created Eve.

  But as I explored the idea of an illegally-cloned human on the run, I realized that there was no way a human could go anywhere. A world with no breathable air, no supply of food… there was no way this clone could leave the lab where they were born.

  I scrapped that idea, at least partially. I still wanted my human clone, but the world she inhabited couldn’t be so bleak and sterile. The robots, lacking humanity, would also have been unable to convey humanity to her. In short, I wasn’t going to have any emotion in the story.

  That was when I came up with the mixes. Human minds in robotic bodies gave me a world where robotic nostalgia, ambition, and hubris combined to create a civilization that yearned to recreate an Earth that had been lost. By putting human memories into robotic bodies, I had the seeds of the society that developed out of a pie-in-the-sky scientific project that worked beyond the wildest dreams of anyone (except one visionary).

  After that, things started falling into place. I’m a world-builder at heart, and once I saw the world take shape, I knew where I wanted to go with it. An odd mix of utopia/dystopia in a “government” made up of committees led to gaps in oversight. The pride and accolades of first publishing major breakthroughs is about as close as this society came to fame and fortune. That desire to be at the cutting edge of science hid a darker motive in cloning humans—taking those organic bodies to reclaim lost humanity.

  I love exploring the consequences of a premise. This is a world I loved creating and I’m looking ahead to expanding on the narrow view we got during Eve’s transition from lab rat to the first of a new generation of humans.

  Books by J. S. Morin

  Black Ocean

  Black Ocean is a fast-paced fantasy space opera series about the small crew of the Mobius trying to squeeze out a living. If you love fantasy and sci-fi, and still lament over the cancellation of Firefly, Black Ocean is the series for you!

  Read about the Black Ocean series and discover where to buy at: blackoceanmissions.com

  Twinborn Chronicles: Awakening

  Experience the journey of mundane scribe Kyrus Hinterdale who discovers what it means to be Twinborn—and the dangers of getting caught using magic in a world that thinks it exists only in children’s stories.

  Twinborn Chronicles: War of 3 Worlds

  Then continue on into the world of Korr, where the Mad Tinker and his daughter try to save the humans from the oppressive race of Kuduks. When their war spills over into both Tellurak and Veydrus, what alliances will they need to forge to make sure the right side wins?

  Read about the Mad Tinker Chronicles and discover where to buy at: twinbornchronicles.com

  Robot Geneticists

  Robot Geneticists brings genetic engineering into a post-apocalytic Earth, 1000 years aliens obliterated all life.

  Explore the ruins of the Human Age. Witness the glory of a world reclaimed from the apocalypse.

  Charlie7 is the oldest robot alive. He’s seen everything from the fall of mankind at the hands of alien invaders to the rebuilding of a living world from the algae up. But what he hasn’t seen in over a thousand years is a healthy, intelligent human. When Eve stumbles into his life, the old robot finally has something worth coming out of retirement for: someone to protect.

  Read about all of the Robot Geneticists books and discover where to buy at: robotgeneticists.com

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  About the Author

  I am a creator of worlds a
nd a destroyer of words. As a fantasy writer, my works range from traditional epics to futuristic fantasy with starships. I have worked as an unpaid Little League pitcher, a cashier, a student library aide, a factory grunt, a cubicle drone, and an engineer—there is some overlap in the last two.

  Through it all, though, I was always a storyteller. Eventually I started writing books based on the stray stories in my head, and people kept telling me to write more of them. Now, that’s all I do for a living.

  I enjoy strategy, worldbuilding, and the fantasy author’s privilege to make up words. I am a gamer, a joker, and a thinker of sideways thoughts. But I don’t dance, can’t sing, and my best artistic efforts fall short of your average notebook doodle. When you read my books, you are seeing me at my best.

  My ultimate goal is to be both clever and right at the same time. I have it on good authority that I have yet to achieve it.

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