Weaponized Human (Robot Geneticists Book 3)

by J. S. Morin

  “Nora, maybe?” Eve mused aloud, careful not to keep the translator running as she worked through her thought process. “No. I can’t risk who they might put in charge of my sisters’ safety.”

  Nora109 was out.

  “Phoebe?” Eve asked, and this time connected to her sister on the Social, albeit on a private channel and an assumed username for each of them.

  “Hey, Eve? What’s up?” her sister asked. She was dusty and wearing a hard-shell protective helmet but transmitted in full video conference.

  “Are you alone?” Eve asked. “This is private.”

  “Hold on a minute,” Phoebe said. The view bounced, and the background behind her shifted until the cloudy blue sky gave way to an indoor space. Footsteps clomped with the sound of work boots. Doors slid open and closed. “OK. I’m in a tram terminal office. There aren’t even data lines connected here yet. What’s the big secret?”

  “Plato’s in trouble.”

  “You need a macro to broadcast that to me, Zeus, and Charlie,” Phoebe said with a sigh.

  “I need to plant a tracker on his skyroamer,” Eve grumbled.

  “Betty-Lou wouldn’t like that,” Phoebe warned.

  “Well, it doesn’t have emotions,” Eve snapped. “Plato flew off and decided to break into Evelyn44’s home, looking for evidence that she’s a cloner.”

  “She is,” Phoebe replied. “I was just listening to a symposium she was giving on botanical garden design. I’m planning on ordering some flowers from her to brighten up the areas around the tram stops.”

  “He thinks she used to clone humans.”

  “Oh,” Phoebe said. “Well, that’s silly. I thought you approved her license request. Why would you approve a cloning license for someone who was an illegal cloner?”

  Eve seethed out a breath. “Apparently, Plato thinks I made a mistake. I told him I was uncomfortable around her because she’s an Evelyn, and the double-number made me think of Evelyn11.”

  “Want to know a secret?” Phoebe asked in a whisper.

  Eve decided to humor her. Phoebe was odd at times but often proved to be insightful. “Sure.”

  “I make up middle and family names for the robots, sort of the way we all made our own names. Evelyn11 is Evelyn Karen King. Evelyn44 is Evelyn Doris Drake.”

  “That works?” Eve asked, incredulous.

  Phoebe nodded with a proud grin dimpling her cheeks. “Yup.”

  “Who’s Charlie7?” Eve had to know, despite the circumstances.

  “Charlie Truman,” Phoebe said with a frown. “But he’s a special case. Anyway, what sort of trouble is Plato in?”

  “He’s at Evelyn44—that is, Doris Drake’s—house. He says he’s sure she’s a cloner but has no proof,” Eve said.

  “I can prove she’s a cloner,” Phoebe interjected.

  “An illegal cloner of humans,” Eve clarified, knowing she wouldn’t get anywhere with Phoebe dancing around her words.

  “Well, surety without evidence is unwarranted and merely conjecture,” Phoebe said. “Maybe you could send that back to him, and he can just leave.”

  “I think he’s trapped.”

  “You have evidence?” Phoebe asked coyly.

  “He requested extraction,” Eve replied. “If he were injured, he would have indicated that as the reason. Absent such a mention, I had to assume that he is in good health but unable to reach an exit.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” Phoebe said glumly. Suddenly the video swung away from her face and aimed out a glass window. There was a panoramic view of Paris. Eve could see her own house in the direction Phoebe pointed the camera. “As you can see, I’m in the middle of a construction project here. What sort of help are you looking for from me?”

  She didn’t sound unwilling, but Eve certainly heard the skepticism in her sister’s voice. “I can’t say,” Eve admitted. “I was hoping you might have some ideas on what I should do.”

  “I trust your judgment,” Phoebe said. “Maybe you should, too. Do what you think is best.”

  “Thanks,” Eve mumbled.

  Phoebe flashed a big smile. “Anytime.”

  The connection closed.

  “What I think is best?” Eve echoed to herself. Alone in her bedroom, she was safe, useless, and frustrated. Her best avenues for aid were dead ends, and her only available adviser had just told her to take matters into her own hands.

  Someone had to go help Plato. If that couldn’t be Charlie7, Zeus, or one of their robotic friends, it fell to Eve to go get him out of trouble.

  Eve would formulate a plan on the way. The flight would give her nearly an hour to think it over. As Eve dashed for her skyroamer, she could only hope that with an hour alone with her thoughts, she wouldn’t talk herself out of this rescue plan.

  After all, Plato had done the same for her.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Zeus sipped his mysterious tea. The day was passing him by.

  “Aren’t you going to respond?” Jocelyn15 asked, nodding toward Zeus’s portable computer, buzzing with alarm overrides and forcing him to notice its presence.

  Zeus held the teacup poised at his lips. “I think not. If I involve myself, I get my fingerprints and DNA all over it. I’ve gotten to know Plato better than I’d like. All I have to do is keep my distance. As long as Olivia remains missing, Plato will thrash like a raging bull to find her. Everything is set up perfectly. There’s nothing more I can do until he self-destructs.”

  “Won’t Eve become suspicious if you ignore her?” Jocelyn15 asked.

  “Of course, not,” Zeus replied. “I’m on vacation.”

  Jocelyn15 chuckled, and Zeus joined in. The text messages piled up from Eve, unread.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Course locked in, Eve spent her time in the pilot’s seat of her skyroamer plotting and scheming.

  Her data goggles lay in her lap, unplugged. Eve needed to think, not connect. All the answers were in her mind. Secrecy was a better ally right now than advice from the Social.

  The nagging voice of reason told Eve that the safest way to ensure Plato’s retrieval was to turn him in. Whatever Evelyn44 might have planned, she couldn’t very well harm Plato if he was in custody on charges of burglary and espionage.

  One quick call to Arthur19, and it would all be over. Plato had violated her orders to stand down. He had continued his investigation. Now there was a break-in at the home of a robot Eve had just commended—perhaps prematurely, perhaps overzealously—in her licensing inspection report. The Privacy Committee would send in a few well-armed robots and fill the area with sedative gas.

  At some level, Plato even deserved it.

  Or Eve could go through committee channels to draw Evelyn44 away from her home. While she’d just attended a symposium, that didn’t mean she needed rest. Fatigue was a human frailty that robots didn’t share. Maybe a celebration of her license going through. Maybe convince some other robot to invite her for a chat.

  Those ideas fell apart upon detailed consideration. There had been no party in commemoration of Cindy14’s inspection. Having one for Evelyn44 would be suspicious and engender hard feelings. As for arranging for someone to babysit Evelyn44 for her, Eve just didn’t have those sorts of social connections without Charlie7 to help.

  Sicily approached. The skyroamer’s information console displayed a real-time view of Eve’s location and a countdown to projected arrival.

  “Why couldn’t you have gotten trapped in Australia, maybe in a dinosaur paddock or something?” Eve chided Plato in absentia. “I need more time to think.”

  She remembered the layout of Evelyn44’s home. Even if she hadn’t, Eve still had the raw data feed from her inspection tour that she could compile into an incomplete blueprint. The good geneticist had shown Eve around most of the property, just to prove she wasn’t hiding anything.

  That left another problem: Where was Plato?

  If Plato had gotten himself trapped in Evelyn44’s home, Eve couldn’t ima
gine where he was remaining hidden. There ought to be a report on the newsfeeds any time now about Plato being discovered hiding behind a flora genome sequencer or tripping over a botanical drone. Eve wasn’t sure whether Plato could swim, but she couldn’t imagine the dolphins keeping quiet about him if he tried to hide out with them.

  The temptation to pull on her goggles and delve into the Earthwide for answers scratched at the edges of Eve’s mind like Jimbo and Russels when they wanted to go outside.

  “No,” she told the goggles. “You’ll just distract me.”

  Heart rate and pupil dilation were interesting to track, possibly providing data that could analyze long-term health trends. But those and a hundred other data streams would suck away cycles from Eve’s biological processing unit. Even arguing with them was a waste of precious seconds better spent solving this puzzle with too many blank pieces.

  “Plato wouldn’t be stupid enough to get caught without a fight,” Eve reasoned. The worst case scenario wasn’t for Plato to show up on the newsfeeds. It was for Plato to fight his way out and stage the scene to look like a self-termination.

  Today, that wasn’t going to work. Evelyn44 was probably having quite a good day, unless something horrific had taken place at her symposium.

  Eve again resisted the urge to slip on the goggles, this time to check the Social for reactions to Evelyn44’s speech.

  If Plato were to kill Evelyn44, even leaving no trace behind, he would still be the prime suspect. The list of robots with violent tendencies was a null pointer. The list of humans with violent tendencies may have included Eve—with some creative editing—but was certainly topped by Plato. Add in his recent scolding by the Privacy Committee and track his last known whereabouts, and it wouldn’t be too difficult putting the pieces of a murder conviction together.

  Plato was singlehandedly forcing a thousand-year-old society to reinvent the justice system.

  But if Plato hadn’t been caught and hadn’t fought his way out—and Eve had to believe he would have checked in, had that been the case—that meant he had found some way to hide. The how didn’t matter, though it would have provided some comfort if Eve knew where to look for him.

  “Wait… I don’t have to find him.”

  Plato wasn’t a child to be scooped up, shushed, and spirited away wrapped in a blanket. He fancied himself a secret agent. Eve didn’t need to provide him a guided tour out of the villa. She just needed to provide a distraction for Plato to rescue himself.

  That chat to draw Evelyn44’s attention was the plan after all. The only change was that Eve would be the visitor.

  With just two minutes left on her inbound flight and no backup plan, Eve decided that she didn’t have anyplace to lure Evelyn44. Taking the controls in hand, Eve disengaged the autopilot and guided the skyroamer back to the same spot she’d parked this morning.

  Fumbling the data goggles onto her face and plugging the fiber cables into the rest of her compute rig, Eve breathed a sigh of relief. Access to the world’s data made her feel like she was on level ground with the robots she dealt with. With the Earthwide, the Social, and all the scattered private networks at her command, Eve wasn’t a tiny creature in a vast uncaring world; she was a self-made cyborg connected to all the information mankind had acquired throughout the millennia.

  As she approached the door and rang the alert chime that was mostly for decoration and ritual, Eve knew that being as robotic as possible made her powerful. But it didn’t make her interesting. She needed Evelyn44’s undivided attention if she was going to give Plato the chance to escape unnoticed.

  The door slid open, and Evelyn44 appeared. “I saw you on radar and thought it must have been a glitch. Clearly not. How nice to see you again, Eve.”

  “Hello,” Eve said with a quiver in her voice. She cleared her throat.

  “What brings you back for a second visit today? Problem with the inspection report?”

  “No,” Eve said, steeling herself. “I’ve changed my mind. You can test your new scanning equipment on me.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Tracking was dull. Not being connected to the Earthwide was disconcerting. The living, vibrant landscape was a change, but there were too many eerie similarities to the immediate post-invasion aftermath for Charlie7’s liking.

  “I did not build a planet from a ball of rock and scraped-together tissue samples just to walk the bloody thing in the dark,” he grumbled as he crested a ridge only to find no sign of Olivia immediately beyond.

  Of course, it wasn’t dark at all. The sun was still high enough in the sky that the mountains’ shadows fell only in the steepest valleys. But it certainly felt like the Dark Ages with the lack of access to technology—aside from himself, of course.

  Charlie7 sighed. “Olivia, if you weren’t kidnapped, I’m going to strangle you.”

  He didn’t mean it. A thousand years of preparation and painstaking labor hadn’t brought humanity back only to be snuffed out for the sin of acting human. Still, it shouldn’t have been too much to hope for that a new generation of teenagers might have more sense than the last one prior to the invasion.

  Charlie7 looked up to check the position of the sun in the sky. He ran through some basic trigonometry and orbital mechanics to estimate it was roughly 1:35 am Universal Standard Time—the middle of the night in Greenwich, England but dinnertime for a hungry human here in western Canada.

  He waited on the ridge, rather than descend into the valley along Olivia’s trail. She wasn’t taking measures to hide her path. The trail wasn’t going anywhere. But along with that bit of laissez-faire woodcraft, Charlie7 had one ancillary hope.

  Charlie7 continued waiting, drawing on centuries of patience to check his hypothesis rather than act rashly along the easiest course. He set a deadline of sunset. At sunset, he’d light his own path and follow Olivia’s trail in the dark.

  But sunset lost the race. Charlie7’s wait was over.

  He saw the thin, wispy plume of a wet-wood fire and smiled.

  Jogging toward the site of the smoke, Charlie7 no longer bothered with a trail. Shallow depressions in the soil and scuffs in the moss might mark Olivia’s path through the Yukon, but there was little doubt as to her present location.

  Even when the wind shifted and the plume of smoke was lost beyond view behind a hilltop, Charlie7 didn’t waver. He had the girl’s position locked into his memory. The mental map he carried of the Earth had a pinpoint marked with Olivia’s name, and it wasn’t moving.

  Over hills and through one surprisingly deep stream, Charlie7 pressed on. How the girl had managed to cross this terrain with a pack nearly as heavy as her was no small feat.

  Dripping and tattered, still scorched from his close call with the bomb on board Olivia’s skyroamer, Charlie7 at last caught sight of his target.

  “There you are!” he shouted to Olivia, who sat cross-legged in front of a crackling fire surrounded by a circle of stones. She held a bit of meat over the flame on a twig.

  “Oh,” Olivia said, perking up. “Hi, Charlie.”

  “Hi?” Charlie7 asked. “That’s all you’ve got? Do you have any idea the trouble you’ve caused?”

  Olivia looked all around. “No. Everything seems fine. I’ve been practicing proper fire safety.” Despite her twisting and turning, the spitted meat barely waved over the fire.

  “Eve and Phoebe are beside themselves. They sent the whole Human Protection Agency out looking for you,” Charlie7 said.

  “To be fair,” Olivia countered. “There are only three of you.”

  “Plato and Zeus riled up so many robots demanding to know where you were that there was a Privacy Committee hearing to address the complaints.”

  “I’m not lost,” Olivia insisted. She reached into a pocket of her heavy winter coat and produced a folded plastic sheet.

  Charlie7 took it from her and discovered a printed map of the region, two-sided, with a more localized area on the reverse side. It was clearly marked out wi
th latitude and longitude, topographical details, and seasonal average temperatures. He could hardly imagine the map containing greater detail without a digital medium.

  “What are you doing out here?” Charlie7 demanded.

  “Camping,” Olivia replied with a shrug. She made it sound like the most natural and obvious thing in the world.

  “Why?” Charlie7 snapped. “Why disappear? Why not just tell someone where you were going? The Human Welfare Committee and HPA are in danger of dissolution—or at least a change in leadership—because of how your disappearance has been handled.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?” Olivia asked, taking a second to twist her meat over to roast the other side. “I didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t want anyone following me. As for whatever happened in committees… I’ve got nothing to do with that.”

  She had a point on the last front, at least.

  “You could have at least told Eve or Phoebe, ‘Hey, I’m disappearing from civilization for a while. Be back in a year or two,’” Charlie7 chided her. Marching over to the campfire, he plopped to the frozen earth across the blaze from Olivia. “They were worried about you.”

  “They shouldn’t have been,” Olivia protested. “I’m emancipated, same as them.”

  “That just means you’re free to do what you want,” Charlie7 explained. “It doesn’t free you from causing harm to other people by your actions. You worried Eve and Phoebe and probably a number of less vocal advocates.”

  “Phoebe got worried?” Olivia echoed, taking note of the fact as if it were the first time Charlie7 had mentioned it. “I must really have gone too far. Eve worries about everything. But Phoebe?” Olivia shook her head in disbelief. “Never would have imagined her getting worked up. Do you have footage?”