by J. S. Morin
“And Charlie25?” Eve prompted. “He was as important as any robot.”
“And he self-terminated in shame rather than face justice for his actions.”
Treat finished, Eve threw her spoon in the sink with a clatter. “That’s exactly what he hoped you’d all think. He’s probably already reactivated in some secret bunker somewhere, just like Evelyn11 did last time.”
“He wouldn’t get away with it,” Nora109 said quietly. “He’s too well known. Evelyn11 was a recluse, and even she couldn’t just slip quietly back into the shadows. A robot like Charlie25 couldn’t keep himself cloistered away like that. It’s just not in a Charlie’s nature. All of them are larger-than-life, big-picture blowhards who think the planet would stop spinning without them.”
“Charlie7’s not like that,” Eve assured Nora, stepping to the waste bin to properly dispose of the empty carton.
“Charlie7 is the worst of the bunch,” Nora109 insisted. “Remember your history. At one point, Charlie7 was the only thinking creature on this planet. That means whatever was left here with him, he wiped out. He’s the most dangerous, murderous, heroic, visionary robot you are ever likely to meet. And this is coming from someone who considers him a friend.”
Eve didn’t know how to respond. She’d heard the stories, read the news clips. None of it seemed possible, despite knowing that it was real. Alone on a planet all by himself.
It would have driven Eve to madness. Even back in the lab, she’d had Evelyn11 to talk to.
But Charlie7 wasn’t the one she needed to worry about. Nora109 was wrong. The uploader conspirators were out there, lurking, scheming, waiting for the opportunity to pick off stray human hosts and live out their dream of reclaiming humanity long lost to them.
“Can you just promise me that until we find out what happened to Olivia, that you’ll take extra special precautions regarding the little ones?” Eve asked.
Nora109 offered a reassuring lopsided grin. “Eve, dear. You’re all little ones. I have coolant in my tubes older than you.”
It wasn’t the promise she’d hoped to extract, but Eve had spent long enough bandying words with her former chaperone. She needed sleep, and it was going to be hard work quieting her brain to get it.
It would take twenty minutes to fly back to Paris. Eve hoped to be in bed within thirty. With any luck, she would find sleep in an hour or two.
Chapter Eleven
Zeus pulled his skyroamer into the sheltered landing bay at Eddie130’s beach house on the Baja Peninsula. After climbing down from the vehicle, he paused to look out over the waves and take a deep breath of the salty Pacific air.
Even with robotic synapses, it felt good in his lungs. How much better it would feel with the proper neurochemical responses to match.
“Can I help you?” Eddie130 asked, coming down from the house to greet his guest. “Didn’t expect a visit from the HPA today.”
“Can it,” Zeus snapped. “You took Olivia sailing five weeks ago. When was the last time you saw her?”
Eddie130 recoiled as if Zeus had shot him. “Why? You surely don’t suspect me of anything to do with her disappearance.”
Zeus wanted to call him out for knowing that Olivia was gone. It should have remained privileged information, available only to the investigators. And yet, on the way over, Zeus had checked the news feeds and discovered that the search was public knowledge.
“Of course, you didn’t,” Zeus replied curtly. “You shut down your human cloning operations after thirty-eight consecutive failures and went back to cloning dogs.”
If a robot could have blanched, Eddie130 would have right then and there. He may have even fainted had he the blood pressure to drop. Instead, he staggered backward like an actor in a cowboy western who’d just been shot and was hamming it up for the death scene.
“You have no proof,” Eddie130 protested. “I’ve never even attempted to clone anything more advanced than a canid.”
“You tried to bring to life human biological samples cultured from the DNA of Martinique Robespierre. I don’t know why you were so obsessed with cross-gender upload, but I was never one to judge, if the science was sound. Yours, however, wasn’t worth what exited the rectums of those dogs you grow.”
Eddie130 stared. “Who are you, and what do you want?”
“Good Lord, Eddie. It’s me, Charlie25,” Zeus said. “If you have any idea where the girl is, cough it up. And if you’ve got any of your old equipment lying around, smelt it back to ore.”
Eddie’s face registered a momentary shock, but the robotic features slid into annoyance within seconds.
“Already done,” Eddie130 replied bitterly, ambling over for his own gaze out into the limitless depths of the ocean. “You were right. I was never any good at it. I have to admit, the temptation was there to read Evelyn11’s research and take another bite of the pie.”
“And…?” Zeus prompted, folding his arms. He took a step forward, and Eddie130 retreated a step back toward the cliff edge of his hangar.
“And nothing,” Eddie130 promised. “There’s no link back to me. I won’t get onto a list of suspects. I’m 100% clean.”
“Then why am I here?” Zeus demanded. “It was the flip of a coin whether it was me or the oaf who came. What in Newton’s name were you doing with Olivia?”
“She wanted to try sailing and found me in a directory of robots with a known propensity for yachting,” Eddie insisted, edging back to the very limit of the hangar. “She found me. Not the other way around. I swear.”
“You sure you don’t have an Evelyn-style upload rig squirreled away somewhere around here?” Zeus demanded.
There were times when wrangling all the disparate personalities among the conspirators had seemed like more trouble than it had been worth. The conflicting agendas, the differences in caution and risk tolerance, the razor-thin patience so many of his colleagues possessed. Being human for a few months had been a vacation.
Except for times like this.
“I. Am. Clean. Do you want to search the premises? You can look anywhere you like.”
Zeus shook his head. “No. I’ve got better ways to waste my time and a long list of visits to make. Olivia got around, and Plato put together a huge list of robots to interview. I have to hope you know better than to keep anything that incriminating off-site. Now, if you have any idea where that scamp might have run off to… keep it to yourself.”
“Yes, sir,” Eddie130 agreed instantly.
“And look where you’re putting your damn feet,” Zeus ordered. “If you fall into the Pacific, it’s going to be me that gets branded a Dangerous Human, and the only friend it’ll make me is the oaf.”
“What about Charlie7?” Eddie130 asked. “Will he be sniffing around, too?”
Zeus scratched an itch, still unable to control a slight grin that he could even feel such a sensation. “With that one, you can never tell. Update your security just in case. If anyone asks, tell them I offered a friendly reminder that there are nasty robots out there, looking to impersonate humans.”
Eddie 130 chuckled nervously as he stepped away from the ledge.
Zeus climbed back aboard his skyroamer and raced to keep ahead of the damage Plato was liable to cause to his organization.
Chapter Twelve
Charlie7 sat alone in the dark. Few robots who knew him publicly would have imagined it, but he had spent more than his share of days in just those circumstances. Back in the days before he’d rebuilt the robotic race, solitude had been his only option; light and darkness hadn’t played into the matter.
For what he was currently up to, the somber lighting and lack of witnesses seemed appropriate.
Earth had been reborn from a womb of stainless steel. It had blood vessels that carried data. Charlie7 was a parasite in a world of his own creation, sucking stray data from those veins to nourish his agendas.
Today, his goal was to locate a thirteen-year-old girl.
Calling the Earthwide a ne
twork did it a disservice. It was a network of networks. Any computational system that could be reached by hopscotching from one device to the next across the globe was a part of it. Only certain robotic processors and personal, private databases remained pristine and disconnected.
Charlie7 had systems that weren’t accessible from the Earthwide. Most robots didn’t. To date, he knew of no precocious young human who had joined that secretive, paranoid club.
Yet for all his ability to access the files and records of a thirteen-year-old girl only months removed from a life of cloistered slavery, Charlie7 was getting nowhere breaking into them.
“I must admit, Evelyn,” Charlie7 mumbled to himself in the dark. “You built your little humans better than the originals.”
But there was a difference between intuitive talent and centuries of experience backed by a brilliant mind in its own right. After a few hours alone at a terminal in one of the basement levels of his abode, Charlie7 finally cracked the girl’s privacy protections.
“Whatever happened to a diary with a key lock,” he grumbled when the file system opened before him like a book. His flippant comparison seemed apt, as well.
Olivia had as much need of military-grade security as the average teenager—which was to say, none at all. Her personal files included class assignments, stored images from her trips, and amateur poetry that had a solid and intricate rhyming scheme, if not a single original sentiment.
In fact, the most incriminating thing Charlie7 discovered in the whole mess of manufactured teenage melodrama was the existence of the security she’d used to protect it. Nothing else was even interesting, let alone worth protecting.
“Arthur19 would love this kid,” Charlie7 muttered. “Privacy for privacy’s sake.”
But her personal digital treasures weren’t Charlie7’s only discovery. Olivia, perhaps thinking her computerized fortress secure, hadn’t taken the basic precaution of scrubbing her Earthwide search history.
Another ten minutes of reading the news, articles, and instructional guides she’d read and Charlie7 had a lead in the disappearance of Olivia Seventeen. His chief suspect: Olivia herself.
Chapter Thirteen
Zeus gritted his teeth as he watched Plato’s skyroamer swoop in for a landing. They were supposed to have split up. This was supposed to be about efficiently dividing their labors to minimize the time for a complete search. Reporting their progress to one another was a formality.
Or at least it was supposed to have been.
But as Zeus waited for his partner on the rooftop of the Kanto factory in what was once Japan, he regretted checking in at all.
When the engines whined down and Plato clambered out of the vehicle, the big lug hustled over, EMP rifle in hand. “No partner of mine goes into this snake pit alone.”
“It’s Charlie13, not some lunatic cloner,” Zeus griped as he fell into step behind his genetic brother.
The faint whirr of Plato’s exoskeletal motors was audible from this close. Zeus thought to remind his partner that the very robotic assistance device he wore was built in this factory. But arguing with Plato was like reading a Human Era movie poster, all explosions and exclamation points with no substance to back them.
“You could’ve said the same about ‘25 before he chucked his brain through a magnetic food processor,” Plato replied, drawing a wince from Zeus.
That body had been a masterpiece. While no chassis was perfect and new models had come and gone since, Charlie25 had loved that old Version 68.2. Had events turned out differently, he could have comfortably inhabited it for another century or longer.
“Just keep your head down, don’t shoot anything, and try not to insult the good mixer, shall we?” Zeus said as condescendingly as he could. Plato, he’d found, needed subtlety hammered through his cranium. On impulse, he grabbed the barrel of Plato’s EMP rifle and tried to wrench it from his fellow agent’s grip. “You shouldn’t even be carrying this thing around, let alone in here.”
Plato’s grip on the weapon might as well have been a hydraulic vice for all the luck Zeus had prying it loose. One quick jerk was all Plato needed to break Zeus’s grip. “Hey, knock it off. I got no intention of firing it unless Charlie13 happens to be one of those cloners.”
Zeus snorted at the very idea. “You’re kidding, right? You think the Human Committee would have found Charlie25’s secret facilities and not scoured this place to the last bolt?”
“Kanto’s got more ghosts than a graveyard,” Plato retorted, continuing to plow into the facility, frequently checking his wrist computer for directions.
“What’s that even mean?” Zeus protested. There were times when he wondered whether the digital barrier was the difference in their understanding or if Plato really was off-kilter mentally. As a scientist, he couldn’t ignore the possibility of the former. As a thinking, reasoning creature, he strongly suspected the latter.
“You’re just too robot-brained to think like a human,” Plato said casually, as if Zeus wouldn’t instantly take offense. “But that makes you useful hunting them. Or it should. I mean, thinking like they do, you ought to be one step ahead of them.”
Zeus slapped a palm against his forehead. Was this the time to engage in another debate with the Great Wall of Hyperbole? With another half hour to reach Charlie13’s office, yes it was. “Even if I had the same mixed, centuries-old mind that a robot does, why would that put me ahead of them? At best, I’d still be making predictions and extrapolations based on incomplete information.”
“Yeah,” Plato said. “But you’ve got that human cunning mixed in. That ought to be your leg up on them.”
“You know,” Zeus said, shifting tactics. “It’s hard to envision Charlie24 teaching you to think with such gaping logical holes.”
“Get ‘24 out of this. Ain’t we got enough Charlies to worry about as it is? We’ve got ‘7 off playing tickle-tap with a computer screen and the ghost of ‘25 in this place somewhere. We’re on our way to see ‘13. Let’s cap it at three.”
“There’s no such thing as a ghost, especially not a robotic ghost. That doesn’t even make sense,” Zeus protested.
“Hey, sorry man,” Plato said. Holding up both hands in a surrender gesture might have carried more weight if he weren’t holding an EMP rifle that could blank Zeus’s brain. “Eve ran into the ghost of Evelyn11 in this place. Call her a clone or a copy if you want. I just figured you’d want the benefit of the doubt that someone with a crystal brain’s actually got a soul.”
“What?” Zeus asked, and for the first time he had the distinct impression of insects crawling along his spine when he knew rationally that nothing was there.
“You know,” Plato said with a shrug. “Humans have souls. Charlie13 makes robots out of bits of old human brains. Maybe some of that gets into a crystal matrix. Come on, man. I’m throwing you a bone.” Plato cuffed Zeus playfully on the arm. “The alternative is you’re some soulless machine wearing that flesh like a Halloween costume.”
The two agents of the Human Protection Committee boarded a lift and started downward into the inner reaches of the factory.
Zeus kept quiet.
Metaphysics fascinated most robots upon first awakening on the upload table. But it opened lines of inquiry that were wholly outside the bounds of science. Uncomfortable subjects of life and afterlife, soul versus monster, and the nature of a potentially eternal existence were subjects only a John or perhaps an Elizabeth could keep at the fore of their minds forever.
But Zeus was something new now. He hadn’t taken the full leap, the way he’d forced the transition onto an underprepared Gemini. She was human with all the baggage that went along with that designation. Zeus was something different, neither entirely robotic nor entirely living.
With painstaking surgery, his modified crystalline matrix could be implanted into nearly any human with a skull sized large enough to accept it. It had been custom-fitted to this body, but that was only a convenience.
�
��Hey, you coming?” Plato asked.
Zeus realized that he’d grown distracted by his own thoughts. The lift had stopped and let them off, but Zeus was still on the platform while Plato had started off once more.
“Yes. I’m coming.”
Zeus followed Plato, but while he devoted just enough attention to keeping up and not getting separated, the rest of his mental energy went toward that simple, unanswerable question:
What am I?
Chapter Fourteen
Plato had heard about Charlie13’s office from Eve. She’d been there once before, with Gemini. While in the presence of the false human, Eve had confronted the mixing master in the hopes of gaining his help reprogramming a new Charlie7.
This time, Plato wasn’t here asking for a favor.
The door opened, and Plato led the way inside. Zeus was still quiet, cowed into silence by Plato’s skillful debate skills. He followed a short ways behind before the doors closed.
Charlie13 stood with his back to them, hands clasped behind him. For an important robot, he dressed like a factory worker in practical coveralls and no adornments. The wall the robot faced was plastered with gaudy, oversized data screens. By the way the images flashed and changed, Plato was able to follow well enough to see that Charlie13 was tinkering with a new upload.
“Some sort of Toby mix?” Plato called out by way of greeting.
Charlie13 answered without turning. “The world will never have its fill of Tobies. Hard working, loyal, dedicated. What’s not to like about a Toby? A Dale or Evelyn might scoff at Tobias Greene’s baseline education, but he was more intellectually robust than half the Project Transhuman scientists. Now, to what do I owe this interruption? And with two HPA agents, no less?”