by J. S. Morin
As he headed off into the Ancient Canadian wilds of the boreal tundra, he wondered how long it would take to catch up with Olivia.
“This is why you shouldn’t give kids skyroamers,” he shouted in the direction of Kanto, where Jason90 had built her a ride of her own. “Emancipate them all you want. Just don’t give them transportation.”
Problem solved. Minor children in school. Emancipated children relegated to a wide area within walking distance of a home base.
His robotic chassis didn’t feel fatigue. Charlie7 didn’t get hungry, thirsty, or sleepy. The whipping winds even lightened the load on his coolant system.
But those two years of scouting had taught Charlie7 one thing that had remained unchanged for ten centuries: he hated hiking.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Plato had to give Evelyn44 credit. Her little island hideaway had style. Cross-checking against historical databases, he learned it was some sort of Italian villa. It had been built of pale yellow brick with a whiter stone used for quoins. The roof was hipped and made from clay tile. It had arch-covered courtyards and wrought iron fencing around terraces that overlooked the Mediterranean. Thin, square towers gave it a hint of castle in its aspect.
Of modern amenities, all that betrayed the villa from the outside was a skyroamer landing pad, and that was vacant.
Plato was lucky that Evelyn44 kept her public engagements on the Social. He knew she was speaking at a symposium in Stockholm at that very minute. His window was another three hours. Plenty of time to catch a cloner.
However, Plato still didn’t feel right setting down on the landing pad. It felt like a trap. Some cage or force field was liable to spring up and lock him inside. It was the sort of thing he’d do, if he had an eternity to cook up crazy defenses for his island fortress home.
Instead, Plato found a rocky cove a kilometer and a half up the coast and slipped toward the villa from the rear. Left under an electronic camouflage screen, no one was going to find Betty-Lou unless they tripped over her.
All the villa’s motion sensors and cameras were in diagnostic mode, taking old inputs on a loop. It was a horrible oversight on the part of the system designers, leaving in the manufacturing test commands after delivery and installation—or it could have been insurance for the designers themselves. After all, who liked building a system even they couldn’t get into?
Not Plato. Not the robot who came up with this rig.
That still left Plato with the question of how best to enter. The front door was right out. Plato could have had the golden access code to every digital system on Earth and still wouldn’t walk into a place through the front door. His every secret agent instinct screamed that it was a rookie mistake.
With hours on his hands and hopefully a quick search ahead, Plato waited and watched.
The extensive gardens were tended by a fleet of little drones. Most weren’t even humanoid, which made them a little less offensive to human sensibilities. Mindless human forms grated on Plato’s nerves like a dog whistle.
But while the hovering drones that pruned the hedges flew in and out of the villa by way of tiny trapdoors, the humanoid workers gained ingress and egress via an actual door.
“Gotcha!” Plato cheered softly from behind a topiary depicting a bull.
Knowing that most drones were only programmed to be task focused, he fell into step behind one of the humanoid gardening drones and followed it to the door. The robot carried a terracotta pot with a wilted flower too far gone for Plato to identify.
Perfect. It would head inside to do whatever gardeners did to fix broken plants, and Plato would sneak in behind it.
A short flight of stone steps led down to the door, as the drone entrance was below ground level. The stairway was just wide enough for the drones, and Plato had to turn his shoulders to follow the automaton down them. At the bottom, a glazed, multi-panel wooden door slid into the wall at the drone’s approach.
Plato hurried.
The door had opened with only centimeters to spare before the drone arrived. He didn’t imagine it would close with any more margin.
There was a crash and clatter as the door started to close and Plato tackled the gardener to get through before he was shut outside.
“Sorry, buddy,” Plato apologized as he scrambled to his feet.
Unslinging the EMP rifle from his shoulder, he checked the systems for damage. Finding the weapon in working order, he aimed it at the drone and waited for any sign that it was going to hassle him.
But the gardening drone seemed concerned only with the flowerpot it had fallen atop of. It retrieved a nearby dustpan and began sweeping up the mess.
Plato shook his head. What a pathetic existence. He was tempted to fire and put the poor mindless thing out of its misery.
However, there was a job to do, one more important than sending a pile of circuitry off to robo-heaven.
Plato headed off at once, in search of damning evidence to justify Eve’s concerns over Evelyn44.
The lower levels of Evelyn44’s villa were a genetics candy land. She didn’t even hide the stuff out of sight. Sequencers, cellular splicers, DNA encoders, all the stuff a geneticist would keep around. Unfortunately, as Plato walked up and down the rows of equipment, dodging drones that pushed buttons and carried samples, he discovered something that annoyed him.
Evelyn44 was cloning plants.
“Perfect cover,” he muttered. She had the equipment with legitimate purposes, at least as far as anyone in the Human Welfare Committee knew.
Human cloning wasn’t a new field for Evelyn44. She was just slowly easing her way into the good graces of Eve and her committee while licensing was still in its infancy.
It was a brilliant plan, really. Eve would give permission to clone humans in a controlled, ethical environment—something Plato questioned was even possible—then, not long after, Evelyn44 would have a miraculous breakthrough and “discover” all the old research she did on live test subjects.
That made Plato sick to his stomach.
Evelyn44 wasn’t going to get away with it. Playing a game of Corners and Cowards with the drones, he managed to avoid interrupting their work as he lifted seed incubators, tapped into computer logs, and pried open access panels in search of incriminating evidence.
“Aha!” he exclaimed upon discovery of a door outline obscured behind a set of steel shelving. Quickly he looked all around, hoping none of the drones had reacted to his outburst. None had.
Breathing a sigh of relief—both at the fact none of the drones had perked up at his shout and that he’d finally found something spurious to investigate—Plato set about getting to the door.
The shelving was poor quality, considering the easy availability of protofabs that could make similar or better parts. Thin sheet metal had been cleverly bent into V channels and welded together such that the resulting structure—if not the individual pieces—was sturdy. Each shelf was lined with a haphazard scattering of jars and sacks. They were labeled, but after checking a couple to see if any were hazardous to humans, Plato gave up reading them.
Setting his EMP rifle against the wall, Plato grabbed hold of one of the lowest shelves and lifted until the weight wasn’t bearing on the floor. Slowly, with a shriek of sheet metal, he dragged it around, swinging it like a door.
It wasn’t that the shelves were heavy—muscle power wasn’t a problem for Plato. It was the risk of toppling something and leaving signs of his being there. Once he had his evidence, he could call in the cavalry and kick over anything he liked. Until then, stealth was his friend. After all, until he had the evidence in hand, he was the guilty-looking one.
When the shelf was sufficiently out of the way, Plato looked for signs of a door catch. The bricks all lined up, leaving a clear seam indicating the outline of the door, but there was no matching door control panel outlined by the bricks.
Plato poked and prodded, traced patterns in the mortar and rapped with the butt of his EMP rifle listening
for a hollow spot. He’d spent a good fifteen minutes pestering the door before growing frustrated and trying to kick it down.
The door swung open easily. For all his experimentation, he hadn’t tried simply giving the door a good shove.
Before the shock of how easily it opened finished registering, the door began swinging shut. Plato lunged for it, jamming a shoulder against it before it could slam shut. For all he knew, it was good fortune alone that had kept it from being latched the first time.
What he found, though, was that the door operated on a simple gas-spring return mechanism. Stepping through and examining it, he could find no evidence of locks, either mechanical or electrical, and no way for the door to latch shut.
“Well, I’ll be.”
When he thought about it, the lack of advanced systems made sense. Eve would never have bothered looking on the far side of a shelf for a secret door. She might have scanned for stray electromagnetic fields where Evelyn44 hadn’t reported active equipment. This was the robot equivalent of hiding something in plain sight.
Plato grunted. “Yeah, we’ll, you’re not dealing with a robot, lady. You just got outsmarted by good ‘ole human brainpower.”
Setting his EMP rifle inside the secret chamber, Plato pulled the shelf back into place from the far side and allowed the door to close.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Plato flicked on the light attached to the scope of the EMP rifle. It was the only illumination he had. The air was thick and heavy, possibly sealed in since before the atmosphere had been fully restored. Plato blinked to clear his head from a wave of dizziness and forced himself onward.
Heroes didn’t falter. They didn’t complain about non-ideal oxygen ratios or stop to go find a respirator. Heroes got results.
While everything outside the villa had been old world charm, and everything in the basement level was modern scientific, the sub-basement hearkened back to the days of Jules Verne, filled with mysterious pipes and primitive gadgetry that could have come from a foundry in Victorian England.
The sub-basement hissed and gurgled, rumbled and grated. Somewhere, there was a fan blowing, obviously not getting its job done well enough, according to Plato’s lungs. The pipes ran in tangled knots. Plato felt some of them experimentally and discovered that they ran either hot or cold; nothing was room temperature.
Bundles of fiber cable caught the light of the EMP rifle’s lamp. “Hmm. What have we here? Something’s rotten in the state of Sicily, methinks.”
Following the fiber bundle, Plato wended his way through the botanical garden’s underbelly of irrigation and fertilization—the latter explaining the acidic smell down in the sub-basement. Eventually he came upon the destination of the data-carrying cables.
Evelyn44 had herself a secret database. It was sheltered in an environmentally controlled alcove; its blinking lights were almost enough for Plato to work by once he closed himself inside. Propping the rifle against his leg, he angled the lamp to illuminate an access panel.
“Well, crazy robot lady,” Plato muttered. “What sort of physical security have you got on this thing?” It was a trick question since Plato already had a pocketknife out.
The access panel clattered to the concrete floor.
“Jackpot!”
He was in. Fishing some uplink cable from a pouch in his pant leg, Plato hurried to connect his wrist computer to the database.
“Huh? Oh… that’s not good.”
Plato’s factory override had itself been overridden. The outside cameras and motion detectors were functioning again. Someone had rebooted the system.
Quickly, Plato checked the edge of the opening where he’d removed the access panel. Near as he could tell, there was no sensor to detect the panel’s removal. He breathed a sigh of relief, but it was a relief short-lived.
Someone was upstairs. That same someone had direct access to the villa’s computer system and had rebooted it. Anyone who knew to reboot the system had to have done so because they knew it had been tampered with. Knowing it had been tampered with, any robot with half a brain would perform a physical search of the villa.
“Aw, crap.”
There was no sneaking out now. If Plato was to exit back the way he came, he’d trip alarms and get himself caught on video surveillance. The Privacy Committee didn’t give a half-eaten sandwich about surveillance of one’s own turf.
There was a chance that outgoing transmissions might be monitored, but Plato had to take that chance. He composed a short message, text only, and hoped it would slip out through the villa’s blanket of security without getting flagged.
EVE. I’M AT SICILY VILLA. E44 IS GUILTY. CAN’T PROVE IT YET. NEED EXTRACTION.
Sometimes, a secret agent had to be a little more secret, a little less agent.
The blinking lights of Evelyn44’s private database taunted him. But Plato knew that with Evelyn44 on heightened alert, it was as good as setting off a flare telling her where he was.
As much as Plato hated getting overshadowed by Charlie7 and his million years of experience rebuilding the world from toothpicks and spit, Plato wouldn’t mind the old braggart busting in and offering a quick rescue right then.
Crawling to the backside of the database server for cover, Plato hunkered down to wait for backup.
Chapter Thirty
Eve paced. She’d seen it done in movies. It didn’t help.
Plato’s message was dire. He wasn’t responding to any of her attempts to follow up and request details.
Eve’s home was too large for pacing. Her bedroom alone was eight paces across. Pacing half measures across the room seemed like cheating, but going the full distance bore a strong similarity to marching band drills.
She should let him deal with his own problem. Plato wasn’t supposed to have been doing anything remotely dangerous, provocative, or investigative. Eve had ordered him to take a vacation.
Plato was in trouble. There would be plenty of time to be furious with him once he was home safe.
“Plato,” she spoke aloud, letting her computer translate to text. “Come in. Plato, can you clarify the circumstances of your dilemma? If you are unable to reply…”
She trailed off, realizing that the premise of her suggestion was flawed. If Plato were unable to respond, any lack of response could be considered verification. If he wasn’t receiving her messages at all, there was no way to tell the difference.
Eve couldn’t go back to Sicily. She’d just left earlier in the day. Evelyn44 would be suspicious.
She needed someone with experience.
“Charlie? Charlie7?” Eve spoke for the translator’s benefit. “We have a developing situation. What is the status of the Olivia search? I may have a follow-up task for you.”
How had that sounded? She played the message back to herself.
Desperate.
Fortunately, it looked better in pure text, stripped of context, nuance, and the panicked tremor Eve’s voice had taken on.
“Charlie7, if you are receiving this message, report in immediately. This is urgent. Priority B.”
Much as she wanted to, assigning it to Priority A suggested either that Plato’s safety was more important than returning Olivia home safely or that they were equally important, and thus conveying no information. Plato was in trouble, but he was still armed and cunning.
Not that he still wasn’t calling for help.
“Priority B is still important,” Eve added for clarification. “Just… well, if you’re not reading me, then none of this matters, I suppose. Please, though, if you are getting these messages, even a quick status update would be helpful in planning activities relating to the developing Priority B situation.”
Eve waited.
Using the interface from her data-display goggles, she marked out a smaller area of her bedroom with an overlay to use as a boundary for her pacing.
The smaller area didn’t make Eve’s pacing any more effective.
“What is the pacing suppose
d to do, anyway?” she asked herself. “If it doesn’t alleviate worry, what’s the point?”
“Zeus,” Eve said into the translator program, switching broadcast channels and encryption protocols. “Eve to Zeus. Please respond.”
Nothing.
Charlie7 had at least warned that he might be operating in a compromised situation. Zeus was off duty, officially pulled from the search for Olivia until such time as she could convince the Privacy Committee of the necessity of involving him and Plato—not that Plato had obeyed her orders on that count.
Had Zeus shut off his connection to the Social?
Technically, Eve was communicating through an unregulated frequency band, but all the HPA members used the Social as an interface for it. Had Zeus just wanted to get away from coverage of the search he could no longer participate in and ended up blocking out Eve’s requests for help?
“Zeus, this is Eve Fourteen. I am contacting you regarding official Human Protection Agency business. Priority B.”
Eve winced. Uniform priority standard seemed like a good idea, but for Zeus, helping Plato should be top priority. But calling it a Priority B when there was no Priority A task should have made it clear enough that this would be his primary mission.
“Zeus?”
Stalking over to the bed, Eve punched a pillow. Repeatedly. When she was out of breath from venting her frustrations, she felt a mild reduction in stress. Her goggle interface told her that her heart rate and blood pressure had spiked, but that was a small price to pay for a hint of relief.
It had worked better than pacing.
“Toby, this is—no. I can’t.” Eve deleted the half-written message.
Involving Toby22 was a bad idea. He might have been friendly with Plato, even to the point of serving as advocate for him when most other robots wanted nothing to do with the “Dangerous Human.” But this wasn’t a committee hearing; this was a covert operation. Not only was Toby as subtle as sunrise, he was risk averse. At best, he might offer a suggestion of who else to contact instead of involving him.