by J. S. Morin
“Olivia,” Olivia said. “I told Charlie7. Atlas helped me plan the trip, but it was my idea, and I was the one who piloted.”
Eve held up a hand. “Back up. Who’s Atlas?”
Charlie7 paced the field. “We don’t know. Olivia gave me access to her Social account, and apparently there are records missing. She remembers conversations that don’t show up, and the ones that are there don’t give any hints toward an identity.”
“I know he’s a robot,” Olivia said. “Atlas was pretty up-front about that much, and he knew about too many topics to be human. I mean, there are only so many of us out there, and I’d know them all easily enough even with an anonymous Social ID.”
“Are you sure he’s a ‘he’?” Eve inquired.
Olivia pursed her lips. “Not positive. But Atlas sounded male. Not that we voice chatted. But if you pay attention, there are differences in speech and thought patterns between male and female robots.”
“From what I read, Atlas’s messages were clipped and generic,” Charlie7 said. “Someone was putting on an act. There were some familiar word choices, but nothing that fit with a conversational pattern of any of the Twenty-Seven.”
“Are there any robots besides archetypes from the Twenty-Seven?” Eve asked. It was the sort of question that usually got Charlie7 to praise her for non-linear thinking. This time, the old robot remained quiet.
“No,” he said at length.
“What difference does it make who Atlas is?” Olivia wondered aloud. “Shouldn’t we pay more attention to who benefits more from me disappearing or blowing up?”
“Rachel,” Eve deadpanned. “She’d end up inheriting your house once she’s emancipated next fall.”
Olivia threw an empty yogurt cup at her.
“Girls, stop it,” Charlie7 chided.
“Tell her that,” the two cloned sisters said in unison, pointing at one another.
Eve blushed. She loved her little sisters, but at times it was humbling to realize how similar they were. Choices of clothing and hobbies, age and experience had separated them but only to a point. Phoebe’s flamboyant fashion choices and Olivia’s wanderlust were manifestations of their desire not to be her.
“What do we do about it?” Eve asked Charlie7. The main advantage she had over any opposition forces was his experience.
“Remain vigilant,” he said wistfully, staring into the night sky. “Right now, it’s all we can do. Our adversary has covered his tracks too well. We have to be on guard and ready for him to make a mistake in his next move.”
“Easy for you to say,” Olivia objected. “They’re not using you as bait.”
Charlie looked down at his tattered and scorched clothing. But rather than rebut Olivia’s claim, he wandered to the edge of the pasture and leaned on the post-and-rail fence. The wood creaked under his weight.
Eve peeled open a second yogurt and dipped a finger in it as she followed Charlie7. Olivia tagged along in her wake.
“Do either of you ever wish you were immortal robots, never needing to sleep, to eat, to breath and never growing older or feeling the infirmities of a failing body?”
“No,” Olivia replied instantly.
“Yes,” Eve added softly.
“This is a lonely life, at times,” Charlie7 said. “Egos get in the way of friendships after a while. We socialize but just enough to keep from going mad. Some ride the edge of that cliff harder than others. A fraction of them have already gone over the edge, and there’s no coming back up. We all know it. Every robot knows there’s a limit to their sanity. The human mind wasn’t designed for immortality. And we’re all human down to the last quantum byte of our memory.”
Charlie7 turned around and met each girl’s eye in turn. “Charlies have been more stable than most, maybe because we were a little mad to begin with. Someday, one of you girls is bound to add an Eve archetype.”
“Never!” Olivia exclaimed indignantly.
Eve merely fixed Charlie7 with a dubious frown.
“You say that now, but if not you, then one of the others. I could envision Phoebe doing the world a service. But mind you, there’s no telling how your mind will respond to mixing, to waking up after a scan to discover that the rest of your life passed you by centuries ago, and you’ve just been born anew in an unfamiliar body. But to you, you were human mere seconds ago. Every robot has gone through some version of that process.”
“Why are you telling us all this?” Eve asked. Charlie7 wasn’t normally prone to extended stories without a lesson woven into it. This time, she failed to see what that lesson might be.
“I’ve been vigilant for years at a time, decades even, when it was a matter of existence or oblivion. I’d grown lax, and part of that oversight resulted in the childhood the two of you suffered. I won’t let my guard down again. Whatever robot or robots out there are behind this, they’ve failed to hold onto their sanity over the centuries. They reached their limit and broke. They see you girls and others yet to come as their salvation, a train ticket back to humanity. I imagine most of them just want to taste ice cream and enjoy sex for a little while before succumbing to the years.
“But not me,” Charlie concluded. “My mind’s made of sterner stuff. I’m a thousand years old, and I’ve got another thousand in me. Charles Truman was a wreck of minor ailments and chronic conditions, kept up by modern—for the time—pharmaceuticals. I was like Plato, to some degree, without the size and physical enhancements. My mind was all I had. That’s why Charlies don’t struggle as much as most archetypes. I dreamed of a life without the frailties of my body holding me back. But I never forgot my humanity. I saw the Earth die and grew it back from a seedling to a mighty oak.”
Olivia leaned over and cupped her hand to Eve’s ear. “You’re with him more. Does he get like this often?”
Eve shook her head subtly.
Charlie7 pursed his lips and raised an eyebrow. He had stopped talking.
Eve swallowed and smiled. “It was a good story.”
“I’m trying to give you girls perspective on the world,” Charlie7 explained. “If you don’t want to listen, fine. I’ll protect you despite your ignorance. But I had judged that you two were mature enough to contribute to your own safeguarding. My mistake.”
“No!” Olivia cried out, jumping forward to grab Charlie7 by the tattered sleeve of his agent’s outfit. “We can help.”
Eve rolled her eyes. She, at least, knew better than to fall for simple psychological trickery.
“Good,” Charlie7 said, mainly addressing Olivia. “I’m going to need both of you to be on guard for suspicious activity, especially activity that someone appears to want to keep out of official channels. If anyone tries to get you to do anything covert, delete traces of communications, or falsify records, you need to let me know. That could be our chance to catch this conspiracy by the roots and get someone with insider knowledge.”
As Eve listened, she winced. Covert. Delete. Falsify. Each stabbed needles into her conscience.
She pushed her data-display goggles up onto her head and wiped her eyes. “I just want to preface this by saying that it doesn’t have anything to do with Olivia’s kidnapping or any conspiracy or anything like that. But I have a confession to make…”
Chapter Forty-Three
“Is 157 any good?” Plato asked. “I mean, it’s only 2.18 times par.”
He trudged the grassy lawns of James18’s golf course back toward the landing pad, ball clutched in one hand, bag slung over his shoulder by the strap held in the other. He was plastered with dried mud, grass trimmings, and flakes of dried leaves from his many misadventures throughout the day.
Hitting the ball was a little fun. It made a satisfying ping sound on the rare occasions he’d hit it solidly. The rest of the time was frustrating and annoying. His conclusion was that golf was less about the ball and more a social excuse to drink beer outdoors. He and Zeus could get away from computers and shoot the breeze about stuff besides work.
No matter how hard his partner tried, there was no escaping the computerized world for him. His mind was trapped in there.
“No,” Zeus replied. “Neither of us did anything resembling good. I’m not even sure we rose to the standard of astonishingly awful. In fact, if any real golfers had been here today, they might not have acknowledged our activities on these rolling hills to be anything that could be called golf. We dug ditches and trimmed tree branches. You waded and dredged. I performed several acts of civil engineering. The fact that once in a great while we sank a ball into a hole doesn’t outweigh our many faults.”
Plato shielded his eyes with a forearm and peered off in the direction of an ion engine whine. “We expecting more golfers?”
Zeus turned and watched along with him, squinting against the sun. “I wasn’t. But it’s a free planet. Anyone’s welcome to come play.”
“Well, whoever they are, they won’t have to watch us bumble around like chickens with a farmer chasing them.”
“With their heads cut off. That’s the saying,” Zeus corrected.
“Nah,” Plato replied. “Cut off a chicken’s head, it’ll fall over dead. Chase it with the head-cutting axe, though, I bet those little suckers would run.”
Two skyroamers blew past overhead. The wind that came in their wake tore at Plato’s wet clothes and flung his hair into his eyes.
“How about a little courtesy!” Plato shouted, though he didn’t imagine either pilot could hear him. “Of all the nerve.”
The two newcomers parked their skyroamers near Betty-Lou and the nameless craft that Zeus roamed around the Earth with. Neither pilot got out of their vehicle.
“What the heck…?”
Then Plato realized that he was walking alone toward the landing pad. Zeus had stopped ten meters back. When his partner saw Plato looking, he waved him on. “Don’t mind me. I think I must have left my nine iron back in that last sand trap.”
Plato continued on, wondering what was going on here. Things weren’t adding up. Nobody was acting right. Zeus didn’t forget stuff. And when a robot landed a skyroamer after a long trip to the middle of nowhere, generally they got out and did what they came to do.
“Hey, guys!” Plato shouted as he neared the granite paving stones of the parking area. “Getting in a little time on the links?” He liked that he’d looked up a little of the lingo on the way.
Two canopies popped open in unison. Finally, the shy golfers had decided to come out and be sociable. The first to emerge was James63. The second was Brent184.
Plato stopped in his tracks. By instinct, he unslung the strap from his shoulder. But all he was carrying was a golf back, not his EMP rifle.
The two robots looked less like golfers since each of them was armed. Instead of carrying clubs, they wielded tranq pistols.
“What’s going on here, fellas?” Plato asked. “James. Brent. Nice to see you boys have a sense of humor. Zeus put you up to this?” Plato forced a laugh.
“Plato, come quietly and no one needs to get hurt,” Brent184 ordered. It wasn’t worded like a threat, but there was no mistaking the intent behind those words—clad in steel and ground to a razor-sharp edge.
“What’s this all about?” Plato asked. He held the golf bag away from his body and let the ball drop from his other hand to bounce on the firm soil.
“You are wanted in connection with the termination of Evelyn44,” James63 informed him.
“No need to get riled,” Brent184 assured him, patting the air with the hand not holding a weapon trained on Plato.
This was bad. Real bad. Someone had found the inert chassis and missed the trail that Plato had practically drawn on the floor in permanent marker straight to the evidence.
“That was self-defense. I’d discovered her illegal cloning history. It was either her or me,” Plato said.
“And yet here you are, playing golf,” Brent184 said. “Without having reported this incident to any of the relevant investigative committees.”
“Hey,” Plato snapped. “I work for an investigative committee. Human cloning violations are my jurisdiction. This would have come out as soon as it had gone through proper channels.”
Despite his bluster, Plato’s heart pounded. All he could think was to protect Eve. If his stonewalling didn’t work, he was going to have to take the fall.
“The evidence to which you refer is doctored,” James63 replied.
Plato backed away slowly, though with eighteen holes of trimmed lawn behind him and desert scrubland for uncounted kilometers beyond, where exactly he was heading was a good question.
“Looked plenty legit to me,” Plato countered, confident in his own spycraft.
“Oh?” Brent184 sneered. He repeated a conversation in Plato’s own voice. “The stuff in the computers, there’s nothing traceable back. I had Evleyn44’s own laser-etched death code to make it all look legit.”
Plato’s mouth hung open. Once the brain-freezing shock had worn off, he whirled, seeking a clear view of Zeus. “You lousy, rotten, no good—you ratted me out!” But Zeus was out of sight, likely ducked behind one of the low rises of the undulating terrain.
“Like you said,” Brent184 continued. “You’re an investigative organization. Ethical guidelines require an investigator to report inappropriate conduct by their colleagues. The system relies on self-policing. You’ve been self-policed.”
This wasn’t happening. Plato hadn’t just been betrayed by his own partner. He hadn’t just spent the whole day enjoying a weird, frustrating, beer-filled day with Zeus, only to be turned over to—Plato wasn’t even sure what committee this was, coming to round him up.
Before either of his would-be arresting agents fired off a shot, Plato pulled the golf bag in front of him like a shield. Hunkering down, he peered over it and angled his retreat to head him for the course’s tech support shack.
“For the love of Copernicus,” Brent184 called out in obvious exasperation. “The world doesn’t revolve around you, Plato. Just give up quietly, no one gets hurt, and you can have your day before the Investigative Ethics Committee.”
Well, it was nice knowing who wanted to lock him up. This, at least, was someone new to the game of persecuting him, even if they had contacted his old jailer to apprehend him.
“No dice, chief,” Plato shouted back. As he watched the angle of the tranq gun barrels, he wished he’d chosen one of the larger versions of golf bags. Most had seemed so cumbersome. All it had to do was hold an array of clubs, a few tees, and his share of the beer.
James63 and Brent184 fanned out, widening the net to get a shot at Plato’s flanks. Plato swiveled his head back and forth, keeping track of both robots, and he hastened his retreat to the shack.
Since both robots appeared aware of how dangerous a foe Plato could be, neither rushed or acted rashly. That allowed Plato to reach the shack and duck inside without either firing a shot. They had no reason to waste sedative darts; he wasn’t going anywhere without sneaking past them to Betty-Lou.
Plato needed options, and his best ones were in the back seat of his trusty skyroamer. The EMP rifle was fully charged and ready to go. Unfortunately, it had sounded paranoid—even to Plato—to bring a weapon for a round of golf.
“Last time I ever go unarmed or think I’m being too paranoid,” Plato muttered as he fumbled in his pockets for his miniature plasma torch and tack welded the door. It wouldn’t hold long, but it was better than nothing.
“You’re acting a little crazy,” he said in falsetto, his best impression of Eve being far from the mark. He answered in his own voice. “It’s not crazy when robots show up to arrest you every time you leave the house without an EMP arsenal.”
The contents of his pockets included nothing that would be a weapon against those two robots outside. James63 was a hunter by trade, and Brent184 had a Version 70.2 chassis only slightly less formidable than Charlie7’s.
The tech shack had controls for the groundskeeping dron
es, a protofab, and a Cloth-o-Matic, along with such basics as a charging station, coolant refills, and pre-printed score cards with tiny pencils.
Outnumbered.
Outgunned.
Holed up in a bunker with no backup.
This was the stuff that heroes were made of. He was a fugitive on the run, now. If he could get past these two contracted thugs from the Whatever-It-Was Committee, he was home free. If Eve couldn’t hide or protect him, Charlie7 sure as sunshine could. All he needed to do was distract, disable, or misdirect James63 and Brent184 long enough to make his escape.
The charging station held the most promise. It was a battery-based system, storing plenty of charge to do the kind of damage Plato needed. But it wasn’t designed to harm robots at all; it was, in fact, carefully designed not to.
No matter. It was Plato’s best option.
Rushing to the Cloth-o-Matic, Plato quickly input specs for an insulating material in a two-meter square. At the protofab, he specified a low-impedance copper cable and a particular set of connectors, along with a simple yet high-voltage inverter.
A robotic fist pounded at the door. “Nothing in there is edible. There is no water. I’m just as happy waiting out here until you pass out from dehydration or fatigue,” Brent184 called through the door.
As the prototyping machine and the fabric fabricator worked, Plato needed to buy them time. “Level with me, Brent,” Plato answered, raising his voice toward the door. “What are my options here if I come along peacefully? Have I got a snowball’s chance in Tahiti?”
“For Hawking’s sake,” Brent184 answered back. “Do I look like I can see the future? If you play nice, it can’t help but improve your odds. But lemme tell you, I’ll be filing an affidavit against you if I come out of this with so much as a scratch on my finish.”
“Wow,” Plato called back. “You’ve got a rough life, man. Hey, how about you tell old James63 to stop sneaking around the back way to try to catch me by surprise?”
It was a guess, but if these robots had learned commando tactics the way Plato had—mainly from movies—then that’s what he would have done.