by J. S. Morin
“I don’t think so,” Charlie7 replied. “But there wasn’t a manual when they first evolved. So who knows? But let’s just say you’re at an anatomical advantage, being female. Zeus or Plato wouldn’t find your seat very comfortable.”
“Really? Why not—? Oh. Yes. Never mind. Forget I asked.”
With gyroscopic stabilization, microsecond reaction times, and eyesight tuned to pick up even faint outlines in the dark, Charlie7 had little trouble navigating the terrain, even as Olivia twisted to look all around the whole way.
Starlight glinted off a distant river when the clouds parted. Mountainsides caught the moonlight and held for a few breaths before another tendril of clouds obscured them once more. It would have been beautiful if Charlie7 was in a mood to appreciate it. But this was a search-and-recovery mission; it was the vast, trackless back garden of ancient Canada, and the temperatures were well below freezing.
Though she talked often, Olivia never complained. When Charlie7 asked whether she was holding up to the cold, the girl estimated that she had up to an hour remaining before she’d suffer the early effects of hypothermia.
He didn’t ask what she based those calculations on. Charlie7 just sped his pace.
Before Olivia’s predicted hour until freezing was up, Charlie7 found his skyroamer. As he approached, Olivia tapped urgently at his skull.
“Right,” he said, kneeling so she could safely climb to the ground. “Bomb check.”
There was still a signal-jamming field in effect, so whoever was blocking communications wasn’t finished with them yet. Maybe the explosive in Olivia’s skyroamer was the only trap laid. Maybe it wasn’t. Charlie7 wasn’t willing to risk the girl’s safety on the chance that there was another deadly surprise in store for them.
“All clear,” Olivia announced from her position behind a rock.
“That’s my line,” Charlie7 replied. And yet, as he approached the skyroamer, he tried to come up with odds that his words would prove true.
With all the care he could muster, Charlie7 gently eased through the process he’d used when searching Olivia’s craft. All the while, he was poised to dive for cover if he heard the signs of any system activating that he didn’t install himself.
After a few minutes of checking and wary of how long Olivia remained out in the cold, he pronounced the skyroamer clear.
“Let’s get you aboard and put the heat on,” Charlie7 said.
Olivia didn’t need to be told twice. She scrambled out of cover and climbed into the passenger’s seat. As soon as the cockpit was sealed, Charlie7 powered up the engines and turned on the environmental stabilizers, setting the target temperature for 25°C instead of the usual 20°C.
“That’s too hot,” Olivia announced, pulling off her gloves and blowing into her hands.
“I’ll turn it down again once you achieve homeostasis,” Charlie7, wondering if Olivia even noticed the teasing inherent in his use of the overly technical term for warming up.
Still shivering, Olivia nodded her assent to the plan.
The skyroamer lifted off with no sign of sabotage or malfunction. Charlie7 hadn’t been fond of his options if he’d had to keep Olivia warm on the ground down in the Yukon.
As they sped off to the southwest, Olivia scowled at the navigational console. “We’re going the wrong way. Home is East and a few degrees South.”
“The signal jamming must have a limit. I’m taking my best guess as to the shortest way out of it.”
“Up,” Olivia suggested. “Presumably the jamming effect isn’t able to manage a counteracting signal unless it can intercept it. Otherwise, how would it detect the signal to neutralize it as an inverse wave form? There must be a network of detectors and emitters. If they were stationed in orbit, someone would have noticed.”
“Hmph,” Charlie7 grunted. “You’re right.”
Pulling back on the flight stick, Charlie7 took them up toward the edge of the atmosphere.
“You just let me know if you start feeling lightheaded or develop a headache,” Charlie7 instructed. “There’s a reason these are called skyroamers and not spaceroamers.”
“Acknowledged.”
Long before they left the troposphere, and with the cockpit maintaining a comfortable environment for its human passenger, the skyroamer found a signal.
A backlog of text communications flooded in, none of them of use any longer.
“Hey, there we go,” Charlie7 cheered. “Great work, Eve.”
“Olivia.”
“Right. Sorry.”
“It’s OK. I was Eve to Creator for all my life. I’m used to it. I just… I want to be me now. I’m not like Eve Fourteen or even Phoebe.”
“I know,” Charlie7 said quietly. It wasn’t fair to the clones. Cut from the same double helix, they started out life under identical circumstances. Genetic pre-destiny gave them similar appearances, similar potential, even similar predispositions. But different rearing had turned each of them into an individual with separate likes and dislikes, quirks and foibles. The older they got, the more the paths they carved would diverge.
Charlie7 cleared his throat to break the mood. He reached for the skyroamer’s transmitter controls. “Well, let’s use our newfound connectivity and let everyone know you’re safe. Charlie7 to Eve. Mission accomplished… Eve…? Eve Fourteen, this is Charlie7, please respond.”
“She’s not answering,” Olivia pointed out. “Maybe she’s excreting.”
Charlie7 said nothing, but at times he wished Eve were a little more selective about when she would and wouldn’t respond to voice—or video—communications.
He switched channels.
“Charlie7 to Plato. Good news. I’ve got Olivia right here with me, safe and sound.”
Olivia raised a finger that shook along with her shivering. “But cold.”
“Plato? Answer the bloody comm.”
“Excreting,” Olivia suggested.
Oh, for the mind of a thirteen-year-old raised as a lab rat. Charlie7 certainly had other ideas in mind, being able to reach neither of the two of them.
“Charlie7 to Zeus. Come in, Zeus.” After a moment, Charlie7 tried again. “Zeus, reply or I’m going to upload your brain to a teddy bear and give it to Vivian.”
“Whoa,” Zeus replied. His voice came in clear from the cockpit speakers. “I was lining up a putt. No need for existential threats.”
“You’re golfing?” Charlie7 asked, incredulous. “You golf? Since when? And what are you doing golfing instead of searching for Olivia?”
“Benched,” Zeus replied. “Not allowed to investigate. Where have you been? It’s all over the news feeds. Wasn’t sitting easy on my conscience, so I found the least modern activity I could think of and came up with golf.”
“Well, Olivia did you one better,” Charlie7 replied. “She was solo hiking the Yukon.”
“Golf is boring,” Olivia called out, jumping with both feet into the conversation. “What is it about a dimpled sphere that should distract from the interesting outdoor events transpiring all around?”
“Well, I’m with you on the boring part,” Zeus said with a chuckle. “Eve must be relieved you’re all right.”
“We haven’t been able to get a hold of her,” Charlie7 reported. “She didn’t say anything about unplugging or anything, did she?”
“Eve?” Zeus scoffed. “She’s closer to being a robot than I am, and as Plato won’t let me forget, I’ve got one of your brains in my skull.”
“Right… right,” Charlie7 muttered.
“Wait a minute,” Olivia chimed in. “You should know where Eve is. She’s your boss.”
“Well, I don’t. Our ‘boss’ sent me and Plato packing until Olivia is home safe and sound. Which, by the sound of it, means I ought to be wrapping up this round of golf. None too soon, if you ask me. Scots created golf, ended up extinct. Can’t say I feel too bad about that, having played it.”
Charlie7 kept his chuckle to himself. He’d tried golf a coup
le times after James18 built a course a few hundred years back, when grass was a novelty. He’d had the same spiteful wish about the extinct Scottish people, verbatim.
“Well, good enough,” Charlie7 said. “You get ready for work and once I’ve delivered Olivia back to Paris, we can pick up where we left off.”
“Roger that. Zeus out.”
The transmission ended.
“What are we going to Paris for?” Olivia demanded. “Not only do I not want to live in Paris, I don’t have a skyroamer if you leave me there. Kanto would make more sense; I can get Jason90 to build me a new one. But that’s neither here nor there, because Eve is still missing.”
“Well, missing might be a premature conclusion,” Charlie7 cautioned her. “We only just got communications up. Eve could be sleeping or showering or swimming.”
“There’s lots of other things she could be doing,” Olivia shot back, dripping with misaimed innuendo that Charlie7 had no doubt she didn’t comprehend. “But the important thing is we don’t know where she is or how to find her. She could have been kidnapped or injured or stranded with technical difficulties, maybe even in the same transmission suppression zone we just came from or another like it.”
“So, what you’re saying—in a nutshell—is that despite Eve being emancipated and responsible for her own actions and safety, it’s our duty to find and rescue her at all costs?” Charlie7 asked. “Just trying to be clear on the subject.”
“I couldn’t say about the nutshell,” Olivia equivocated. “But the rest: yes. Eve is my sister, and I don’t think she’d run away or hide. She might shower and stuff, but she usually keeps her computer close by, even then.”
“And that means we’re worried about her,” Charlie7 said slowly. “So, the right thing to do is go look for her.”
“Yes,” Olivia said with a huff. “For a robot, your short-term memory is atrocious. Maybe you should come to Kanto and stay for a diagnostic. It’s like you’re not even able to listen to what I’m saying.”
“Oh, I’m listening,” Charlie7 said with a quiet chuckle. Despite his best efforts to lead her back to the root of her own argument, Olivia seemed oblivious to the juxtaposition of her plight versus Eve’s. “But we’re going to Paris. If we want to find Eve, any trail would start there.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Eve had toured Evelyn44’s villa earlier that same day. What she was doing now could only be described as ransacking. With Plato down in the sub-basement tinkering with a database server, Eve was left to explore the rest of the villa—however she saw fit.
At first, Eve had been hesitant. But every invasion of privacy, every minor vandalism to force open a door or force a factory reset of an electronic devise, made the next easier to stomach. The scales of balance between moral guilt and legal culpability titled ever in favor of needing to find evidence to justify what she’d already done.
This was Eve’s first experience dealing with the slippery slope principle in her own affairs. Eve had begun helping Plato’s spurious search with enough shared culpability that she would have likely lost her position as chairwoman and possibly even her freedom. Now, if she and Plato couldn’t find the evidence they sought, incarceration was all but guaranteed.
As Eve browsed the file transaction records of a gene-sequencing machine, she muttered under her breath. “Why does a positive reinforcement loop lead to a negative outcome?”
Evelyn44 hadn’t hidden any of this information from Eve during the tour, nor had she presented it. At any moment, Eve could have requested the sequencer’s historical record of every genome it had analyzed. It would have made no sense to keep incriminating data behind such a faulty security measure as “hope Eve doesn’t ask.”
But Evelyn44 might have had falsified records ready to present. The wily robot that Plato envisioned would have come up with that paranoid level of preparation. But if Evelyn44 had been so meticulous, would they ever dig up the incriminating files?
The same could be said of any of the systems in the villa. Any of them could have contained evidence of wrongdoing, whether human cloning or a host of other, lesser genetics offenses.
Eve secretly hoped that Evelyn44 had tinkered with alien DNA on Earth. Near as she could gather, the only offense the robots considered worse than violating the sanctity of their ancestors’ biology was the reintroduction of alien cells to Earth. In one stroke, Eve would exonerate Plato for Evelyn44’s murder, remove herself from being an accessory after the fact, and deposit the whole problem in the laps of the Alien Bio-Research Committee, which didn’t even meet on Earth.
Time and again, from gene sequencers to drone control nodes, centrifuges to cell growth regulators, Eve found nothing amiss. Evelyn44 was meticulous to an obsessive degree, and not a molecule was out of place.
Eve went so far as to check Evelyn44’s protofab and Cloth-o-Matic for hints that she had ulterior motives. All she learned in the process was that Evelyn44, in her leisure time, enjoyed wearing Victorian dresses and designing tiny plastic statues of Yorkshire Terriers.
With a sinking feeling in her gut, Eve went downstairs to check on Plato’s progress.
Ducking and weaving among the water and coolant lines prevalent in the underground level that ran beneath the outdoor gardens, Eve finally made her way to the “hidden data bunker” that Plato had unearthed.
“You get the news?” Plato asked, grinning up from the floor where he was lying with his face in the guts of the computer.
Eve sighed with relief. “Yes. I hate this radio silence business, though. They’re going to get suspicious when neither of us answers.”
“Operational security,” Plato assured her. “Same as when I called you for help. After that, signals became a liability. I’ve shut down everything that might broadcast out of here, from drones to news feeders and everything in between. I’ve got just one exception, and… there.”
Plato tapped a spot on his computer interface. Half a second later, Eve had a notification on her goggles.
“What’s this?” she asked, frowning through the goggles at both the pop-up and Plato at the same time.
“I logged you in as Evelyn44. If anyone tries to contact her socially, you can brush them off.”
Eve took a step back, mouth agape. “I couldn’t do that. That’s awful. Wait, how did you even get into her personal account? Hacking a robot’s Social ID is supposed to be arduous.”
“You learn a trick here and there,” Plato said with a knowing look. “For one, there’s a code laser etched into every crystalline matrix. It’s a backup key for their personal files, so scientific data isn’t lost if someone suffers a fatal mishap. It’s not subject to electromagnetic damage, so it survived the EMP.”
Eve’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Wait a minute… you didn’t. Did you?” Eve edged slowly around to the back of the refrigerator-sized computer cabinet. “You did! That’s gruesome!”
Lying on the floor with a microscanner clamped to it was Evelyn44’s brain.
“Hey, it got us in. That’s what matters, right?”
“Maybe…” Eve was growing ever more skeptical of this whole endeavor by the minute. But she was getting hungry. And thirsty. And there was a good chance she’d throw up anything she tried to ingest while worrying that she and Plato were going to be locked up for the rest of their lives as murderers.
“So what have you found?” Eve asked, trying to get the investigation back on topic before their scheme unraveled.
Plato shook his head dismissively. “Nothing yet. Don’t worry. I’m not giving up.”
“How much have you searched?” Eve asked, clutching her hands together. The air was cool in the sub-basement, but she was sweating.
“Well, most of this system seems to be devoted to keeping the garden drones organized. It’s some sort of learning algorithm that tracks and records plant health metrics and tries to optimize watering, pruning, and fertilization schedules based on a feedback loop.”
“I didn’t a
sk what it does; I asked what you’ve found,” Eve clarified. “What evidence? What crimes? What victims? Where is Evelyn44’s secret cloning lair? Where’s the disposal facility? What residents of the Sanctuary would look at Evelyn44 and call her Creator?”
“She’s got a washroom,” Plato pointed out. “No robot who’s not planning to have a human body someday soon would bother building one.”
Eve’s stomach churned. She might finally use that washroom herself. “She was trying to be accommodating. Evelyn44 pointed it out to me before the scan. She seemed disappointed that I didn’t need to. Have you got anything else? Anything at all?”
Plato pushed himself up into a seated position, leaving him nearly Eve’s height. He shook his head, trailing droplets of sweat from his hair. “Nothing. I can’t find anything in this stupid thing.” The butt of Plato’s fist slammed against the computer cabinet with a metallic rattle.
“So… you killed an innocent robot,” Eve concluded.
Plato wiped the sweat from his forehead and dried his hand on his pants. “Maybe,” he admitted. With a furtive, sidelong glance Eve’s way, he added, “But maybe not. We’ve back-doored into all her systems here. We can make this look like anything from a self-termination to self-defense on my part.”
“That’s horrible!” Eve exclaimed, backing away and shaking her head. “No. We can’t do any such thing. We’ll contact Charlie7. He’ll advocate for both of us. He can get us off with a reprimand. After all, this was a horrible series of misunderstandings.”
“No, we won’t,” Plato said softly, defeat heavy in his tone. “I’m two chances past a last chance with most robots. This is the second time you’ll have fallen in with a human who killed to defend you, and you went along with it both times. Robots are big on patterns. Right? They’re not going to want you associating with other humans if you’re so prone to getting robots killed. At best, you’ll get some sort of isolation program where you don’t see your sisters or the other clones of me, not to mention the generation that’ll be coming out of vats in the next couple years. Probably, though, you’ll be in a soundproof cell with a vid screen you can’t control and as much clay and paint as you want. Robots love human artwork—even the recycling-grade garbage I made.”