Weaponized Human (Robot Geneticists Book 3)

by J. S. Morin

  “We think it could also have been Charlie25. After he wiped Evelyn11, he—”

  “Excuse me?” Gemini snapped. “He what?” The look on her face stole away Eve’s anger. There was heartbreak in that voice. Eve had seen the expression on the faces of actresses but had never witnessed it in real life.

  “I’m sorry,” Eve said quietly. “No one told you. I didn’t realize.”

  “No one tells me anything,” Gemini griped. She hastily wiped the corner of her eye.

  Eve allowed Gemini a moment to collect her thoughts. This was a chess game on a larger scale. There was time to pause between moves of the pieces. Zeus wasn’t going anywhere in the next few moments.

  When Gemini had fought back a few tears and steadied her voice, Eve explained the situation. She laid out the discovery of the Plato clones below Charlie25’s section of Kanto, the discovery of the inert chassis of Charlie25 and Evelyn11, and the subsequent reorganization of the Human Committee into the Human Welfare Committee.

  “They made you chairwoman and you lost the position already? Feminism, raised from extinction only to die in childbirth at the dusk of the thirty-first century.” Gemini shook her head.

  “It was Zeus,” Eve insisted. “It’s his plot to discredit us. But in order to stop him, I need to understand who he was as a robot.”

  “Charlie25 killed me, you say?” Gemini asked.

  Eve nodded.

  “Well, think of it from his perspective. He’s got one dead robot on his hands and wants to fake his own death. What better way than to upload to a ready-made vessel in his own private wine cellar of brains? Why would he self-terminate without so much as trying?”

  “Shame?” Eve ventured.

  Gemini threw back her head. “Ha! There’s something you may not have run across in your brief lifetime, a bit of trivia that might aid your unraveling of this mystery. There isn’t a gram of shame, self-doubt, or regret in any of the Charlies. And if everyone believes that Charlie25 was the first of them to self-terminate, they’re fools.”

  “Wait,” Eve said. “I thought self-termination was an epidemic at one point?”

  “That’s why we removed Charlie7 as mixer. He experimented. He guessed. At least Charlie13 made a science of the process. Plenty of Charlie7’s creations self-terminated. It was bad for a while. But in all that time, not a single Charlie—whether they were mixed by ‘7 or ’13—has ever self-terminated. It’s just not in them. Charles Truman was a bit of a cocksure madman in life, and the robots that took his personality inherited all of it.”

  “So…”

  “I’d bet my life that it’s Charlie25 walking around in that crystal-brained corpse.”

  “Thank you,” Eve said and turned for the door.

  “One thing,” Gemini called after her. Eve paused. “If I’m proven right, please tell them I helped.”

  Eve heard the plea in that simple request. Tell them I helped, and ask them to let me out of here. The latter half went unspoken, but Eve heard it clearly.

  “I’ll be sure to mention it,” Eve assured her. She pounded on the door, and Brent184 let her out.

  As soon as Eve had reconnected her technology, she encrypted a file using a protocol Charlie7 had just created for the occasion. She shot the message through the nebulous void of digital space, telling Charlie7 who Zeus really was.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Lunch was ice cream. Of late, lots of meals were becoming ice cream. But since modern science held the promise of engineered food supplements and she had a metabolism like a fusion reactor, Phoebe erred on the side of eating what she pleased. Olivia was merely collateral damage in her dietary assault.

  “So, how was it?” Olivia asked just before shoveling a spoonful of raspberry ice cream into her mouth.

  Phoebe sat at the table with her legs crossed on the seat, the fabric of her skirt spilling over the edge. Hints of her multicolored bikini showed through the white of her blouse; she hadn’t taken time to change, instead throwing clothes on over the swimwear, deciding it was close enough to her undergarments for now.

  “Scary,” Phoebe reported. “He was right there. I mean SO there. My body started producing excesses of multiple neurochemicals all at once. I was hardly in control of my own actions.” Her spoon jittered on its way to her mouth.

  Olivia licked her spoon clean. “Did you ever figure out who Zeus really is?”

  “No,” Phoebe said with a sigh. “But I threw his brain into the sea, which has to count for something.”

  “I haven’t heard anything back from Eve,” Olivia stated. She headed to the mixing bowl to begin the refilling process for the ice cream machine. “You?”

  “Nope,” Phoebe said. “I’m not sure how they expected me to install that snooping device in the time it takes a male to urinate.”

  “Was that officially part of the plan?”

  Phoebe scowled. Olivia was supposed to be listening, not investigating. “No. But it was implied when Charlie7 said to find time away from Zeus with the computer. When did he expect me to get Zeus and the computer away from one another—and me at the same time?”

  “You could have waited until nightfall and slept on the beach,” Olivia suggested.

  “Listen, I didn’t hear you volunteering to go be a spy.”

  Olivia took a huge spoonful of ice cream and spoke with her mouth full. “Sounds like I would have been a better one.”

  Phoebe looked from Olivia to herself and back again. “Please… an extra year does wonders for this body. Why would Zeus have gone with you?”

  “I’d have taken him somewhere more exciting than a beach,” Olivia countered. “Like the Grand Canyon or the Crystal Grottos.”

  Clenching her jaw, Phoebe explained some basic interpersonal facts to her sister. “Breathtaking wonders of nature aren’t romantic. A couple’s attention should be primarily focused on one another.”

  “Not when you’re trying to reprogram a computer he keeps plugged in twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Well, my plan got him to take it off.”

  “And the lack of a follow-up plan got you caught.”

  “I was working on a short timeline. No one could have installed it that fast.”

  “I bet Eve could have.”

  “I’m not Eve!”

  Technically, for a good portion of their life, both of them had been Eve. It was odd even denying the name. But it felt good having someone to argue with. Without robotic nannies around, they could yell and scream at one another to their heart’s content without someone stepping in to mediate, separate, and punish.

  Phoebe pulled the bowl of ice cream toward herself and dug a spoon into it.

  “Lucky for us,” Olivia said. “Wouldn’t want to be her these days.”

  Phoebe let out a deep breath filled with thanks toward whatever deities had watched over her ancestors. “Here’s to Eve. May she never stick us with dealing with the robots’ committees.”

  The two girls raised spoons heaped with ice cream and clinked them together in a toast.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Hunched over an electronics workbench, Zeus peered into his own brain. Well, half of his brain, anyway. The external computer made him whole, robotic, even special. He had the best of both worlds, with only the occasional lapse related to biological needs to hold him back from perfection.

  Physical strength, dexterity, durability, those were the savage virtues of mankind’s first reign over Earth. Creativity, calculation, innovation, these were the marks of greatness of the dawning Second Human Age. What the robotic age lacked in empathy, love, and hedonistic pleasure, they would reclaim.

  Phoebe had acted rashly, like the teenage girl she was. Zeus should have known better than to take her offered charms at face value. Even if she meant half of them, the other half had been an attempt to undercut his base of power within the Human Welfare Committee.

  His external processor’s seawater bath had been mercifully brief. Even without access to a bui
lt-in ballistic calculator—and, frankly, the eyes to make proper use of one—he had watched carefully where the device had splashed into the Mediterranean Sea.

  Flying back to Dublin had been a surreal experience. He’d hardly gone without an active data port since being “rescued” from Kanto. While he still had access to the skyroamer’s onboard computer, using it manually was more adventure than he had been up for. Instead, Zeus had used the time for reflection.

  As he carefully cleaned and repaired the processor, he found his thoughts drifting back to the more pleasant start to his day.

  “Biologically speaking, one of the Madison Maxwell-Chang clones would be ideal,” he mused. He reclined as a diagnostic started. “Eve isn’t an option, of course. Plato would twist my head off and use my skull for a bowling ball. Phoebe… she’s just so wild. Would I want a lifetime of that sort of energy to keep up with?”

  The younger girls grew older day by day—even Eve was still young for his tastes. Patience and population statistics on a micro scale seemed to imply that one of them would eventually prove to be an ideal match.

  A stickier idea was another uploaded robot. But who? There was so much baggage shared among the living robots of Earth. Even those who were merely casual acquaintances might have shared decades together in total over the centuries.

  Zeus snorted as an amusing idea popped into his head. “Maybe Charlie13 could start a dating service. Freshly uploaded mixes, personality to taste.”

  Of course, it wouldn’t be that easy. The trauma of a newly mixed robot was anything but romantic. All of the Twenty-Seven awoke with the last memory of theirs being of lying on Charles Truman’s scanning bed. To suddenly awaken a millennium later in an artificial body took time to adjust to.

  For everyone except a Charlie. Whatever the reason, a new Charlie always took the news in stride with a bemused and adventurous optimism, almost smug at seeing his life’s work validated.

  But Zeus preferred to stick to heterosexual arrangements, and even if he didn’t, he certainly would look farther afield than his own archetype. A Nora would be the obvious choice. Staff records and hints shared among the other Charlies suggested that Charles Truman and Nora Maxwell-Granger had an affair all those years ago. Something biological clearly worked there.

  Ideas and fanciful notions floated through Zeus’s mind. He blamed it on the disconnection from his computer. The crystalline matrix by itself replicated human thought too well.

  What if he and one of the Noras used their own DNA samples? Charles Truman hadn’t been the world’s finest physical specimen; neither had Nora. But the bodies would be familiar, like a visit to an old college stomping ground.

  They could adopt one of the younger Eves together, maybe even one that was still in fetal development at the moment. Madison had been Nora and Holly’s niece, daughter of Holly’s brother and Nora’s older sister. It would be like reassembling a family.

  The computer lit with an alert. Its diagnostic was complete.

  If he hadn’t been all alone, Zeus would have embarrassed himself in his haste to plug himself back in.

  Data flowed.

  Zeus’s consciousness expanded. No longer was he hemmed in by the walls of his own skull. He had access to a transmitter, receiver, and all the spare processing power he could hope for.

  Checking around the world for status reports, he found that Gemini and Plato were both safely locked up; he took quick looks at the feeds within both of their cells to confirm. There were no reports of Eve in public life. One gossip outlet suggested that Charlie7 was at Kanto visiting ‘13.

  “Let him,” Zeus muttered to the data floating in his brain. “Charlie13 doesn’t know anything. Maybe he’s looking for a job.”

  With a chuckle, Zeus dismissed his search parameters. For the moment, none of the HPA or the Human Welfare Committee appeared to be working against him.

  And other than Phoebe, and maybe Eve, there was no reason to expect them to. Sure, Zeus might have different policy ideas for the Human Welfare Committee, but he would make sure everything was on the up and up. He would be the model chairman to guide humanity into the Second Age.

  And under his astute neglect, the human upload project would flourish. He and his colleagues would receive their well-earned humanity back. They would be the ones to benefit from the foothold humanity would gain.

  “As many lifetimes as we wish. All the pleasures of the flesh. All the fruits of our ingenuity. Everything will be ours. Our own technological Eden.”

  Browsing through committee correspondence and standard notifications of newsworthy events, Zeus stumbled across an invitation. There was a meeting being held to select the next chairman of the Upload Committee. As a committee chairman himself, Zeus had received a standard courtesy invitation to attend in a spectator capacity.

  “I shouldn’t…” he muttered to himself. It was vanity to go just to see who’d be selected as his own successor. “Then again, I’m a chairman now, and the Upload Committee is a big deal. Whoever gets the position will become quite important. It would be politically useful to be there in person to voice my support.”

  There was no notification in his interface—there never was, and for good reason—so Zeus checked his ultra-secure message center and discovered one from just over an hour ago.

  REPORT IN

  There was no identification. There never was. But Zeus knew without a doubt who had sent the message. Contained within was a code that was the key for their next encrypted conversation.

  Zeus considered ignoring it. He was on the verge of establishing a new power base. Anything he said or did was public news, however minor. The last thing he needed was Dale2 trying to steer his skyroamer from the passenger’s seat.

  With a snarl, Zeus entered the encryption code and bounced it off a relay station with the power to broadcast as far as Mars. “What?” he snapped.

  “I hear you had a small interpersonal issue,” Dale2 remarked offhandedly.

  It galled him that the blowhard could discover such information from Mars when everyone on Earth seemed oblivious to his leisure activities.

  “Who’s spying for you? James63? Fred164? I don’t need an oversight committee for an afternoon off.”

  “You’re in a delicate position. You might need someone to jump in and lend assistance. For example, dredging the Mediterranean for your better half.”

  “If you existed, I’d report you to the Privacy Committee,” Zeus grumbled.

  Through the connection, Dale2’s laughter echoed. “I’m Arthur19’s best customer. I’m as private as they come. You just keep those lessons in mind, Zeus. You’re a public man again. Nothing good ever came of being incautious as a public man.”

  “I don’t need a lecture,” Zeus said.

  “If you say so.”

  The connection ended. Zeus wished he could reclaim the uplifted feeling of plugging back in after a long abstention. But if he needed something to feel good about, nothing having to do with Dale2 was liable to help.

  Rearranging his clothing to conceal his computer safely beneath his clothes, Zeus headed for his skyroamer. He still had time to get to the Upload Committee meeting.

  Zeus wanted to see who would be the next Charlie25.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  It was hard for a committee hearing to feel like home. But in the upper reaches of Kanto, in a tower that offered a view of Tokyo Bay, there was a conference room that, for Zeus, was as much home as any committee stronghold on Earth.

  The room was packed with dignitaries. While the Upload Committee members packed around the conference table, the outer reaches of the room were filled with committee chairs from across the spectrum of robotkind.

  “Congratulations,” Holly9, head of the Automaton Committee, offered as Zeus passed by, shaking his hand briefly.

  Elizabeth56 drew Zeus aside. “I’m sure you’ll do fine.” It was robots like her that made Zeus feel that his presence wouldn’t stand out beyond his biological body. She w
as head of the Experimental Biology Committee, which had nothing to do with upload. Like Zeus, Elizabeth56 was just there to witness a tiny slice of history.

  Others made their introductions and offered well-wishes. A few made suggestions on policy. Most just went through the motions; Zeus knew because he’d gone through those motions enough times himself to recognize the blank expressions and cardboard words.

  Charlie13. There he was. Seated right beside the vacant chairman’s seat, the Mixing Committee chairman was officially the senior member of the Upload Committee now as well. When the venerable old mixer caught Zeus looking, he offered a brief nod.

  For Charlie13, that was as good as a handshake and a pep talk. Zeus had known that robot all his life. For long centuries, they had split the glutton’s share of Kanto—two pillars of robot society. Charlie13 was the midwife of 80 percent of the robot race. Charlie25 had been hospice nurse, undertaker, and spirit guide to the newly resurrected.

  Zeus forced himself to look away. Those ancient, knowing eyes unnerved him. He was at a disadvantage so long as Charlie13 lived in an artificial body; Zeus’s biology had secrets it could betray. He wished he could share the miracle of humanity with his friend, but of all robots, he expected that Charlie13 would find no appeal in regaining human sensation.

  “Hi, boss,” Charlie7 said smoothly as he slid into the seat beside Zeus at the room’s back row.

  He would have sworn that Judy128 had been there the moment before. But that was Charlie7, always wedging himself into whatever spot he liked.

  “I didn’t expect to find you here,” Zeus observed. “I thought the guest list was committee chairmen.”

  Charlie7’s face grew an enigmatic smile. “Oh, you know me. I pulled a string or two, called in a favor. Standard stuff. I even hinted that maybe I might have a name to throw in for nomination.”

  Zeus’s face went slack. No. Not him. Anyone but him. “You’re not considering a candidacy, are you?”