Weaponized Human (Robot Geneticists Book 3)

by J. S. Morin

  “I’m not finished here,” she objected.

  Charlie7 looked down at the mass of sutures and exposed bone. “He’s not in any visible pain. I just want a word alone while he can’t run away.”

  Zeus didn’t like the sound of that.

  Ashley390 agreed with some reluctance, but there was that mysterious power Charlie7 held over other robots. By all that Zeus knew of her, Ashley390 should have refused until his treatment was finished.

  The door slid closed with a whisper and a hiss of sealing pressure.

  Zeus leaned back as far as he could with his leg pinioned to the portable operating theater’s table. Charlie7 loomed over him with a twisted grin.

  “They have cameras. I’m watched around the clock,” Zeus threatened with the only thing he had at his disposal: public opinion.

  “Oh, I turned those off,” Charlie7 replied. “You should have paid closer attention to my lesson on accumulating favors.”

  “What are you going to do to me?” Zeus asked.

  “Nothing. I just wanted you to know that Plato was exonerated. You see, I made it look like you were the one who planted the communications files in Evelyn44’s archives. Plato was merely acting on credible evidence. I’m going to be having a long, private talk with the lad about his future in law enforcement—namely that he has none—but Evelyn44’s death has been planted squarely in your lap.”

  “You’re worse than any of us,” Zeus countered. “Just a thug with a favorable mix for computers.”

  “Mix?” Charlie7 scoffed. “I thought you were smarter than that. Charlie13 figured it out ages ago but kept it to himself. Since no one will ever listen to you or believe you again, let me allow you in on a little secret: I am Charlie2. And Charlie2 was an exact upload of Charlie Truman.”

  “But—” Zeus objected. He couldn’t even imagine why Charlie7 would tell him this unless it was a lie. This was a trick to drive him mad. To think that he’d been railing against the world’s true creator, his own archetype from among the Twenty-Seven. He refused to live his life in this glossy white cage believing that.

  “But since you have the credibility of a used skyroamer salesman, I just thought I’d leave you that little tidbit to chew on.”

  Zeus didn’t know what to say. He glanced down at his half-repaired leg. There were new tissue grafts in place of his medial collateral ligament and anterior cruciate ligament. His tibia was fractured in three places, two of which were even now held together with biosafe epoxy with the third fixed in place awaiting similar treatment. He’d suffered a bruised trachea and testicular dislocation. Eve had taken him apart physically.

  But nothing that girl did to him had undone Zeus’s world as completely as Charlie7 just had.

  “Bye,” Charlie7 said with a wave before heading out the door.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Two years later…

  The grounds of Oxford University were packed with well-wishers. Without it ever having been intended as such, Emancipation Day had become an annual tradition. Soon enough it was likely to be missed, once the last of the Eve clones had graduated to official adulthood and the next generation wasn’t yet ready.

  But one day, it would take place across the globe. One day, there would be an entire subcommittee just for the purpose of testing and evaluation candidates each year.

  That was Eve’s dream.

  Plato stood in the front row, blocking the view of robots behind him, though no one objected. He hooted and shouted as Eve announced the 3092 graduating class: Sally Nineteen.

  Aging thirteen years seemed to have become the standard for Eve’s sisters to convince robotic society that they were ready for the responsibilities of adulthood. Sally wore her hair loose beneath an ancient graduation cap with a gold tassel woven from real gold. Her black gown hung off her, obscuring all but her hand and the face that beamed a smile that could be seen from orbit.

  “Congratulations, Sally Nineteen,” Eve said, her voice booming from nearby speakers that carried her words to the farthest reaches of the crowd. “You have proven yourself to be worthy of the solemn responsibilities of overseeing your own affairs, of deciding for yourself how to live your life, and of being held accountable for the decisions you make. You will now be eligible to live without supervision or surveillance, to love whomever you choose, to pursue any career, and to participate in committee deliberations with the full weight and authority of any citizen of the solar system.”

  Eve handed her sister a plaque upon which an edict to that effect was engraved for posterity.

  Sally shook Eve’s hand and received another round of cheers and applause.

  Plato hoisted little Abigail up onto his shoulders, and the tiny girl clapped for her—well, Eve wasn’t sure whether Sally was more sister to Abigail or aunt. She was the first of the new generation of clones to be born from Evelyn11’s experimental stock. Eve and Plato had formed a parenting pact, agreeing to raise the girl until her own ceremony of emancipation.

  Plato was doing better these days. He no longer whirred and hummed as he moved. Finally giving in to Eve’s nagging, he’d gotten cybernetic joint replacements. Now near-frictionless magnetic bearings allowed pain-free motion in his joints. Every few months he had to get another joint or two added as his arthritic condition worsened. A lifetime of surgeries was the price he paid for having destroyed the only robot interested in genetic therapy for existing humans. Still, it was better than the exoskeleton, and his mood had grown less volatile without the constant background pain plaguing him.

  “Thank you,” Sally said, taking her place at the podium. The microphone was already set for her height since she and Eve were nearly identical. “I just want to thank everyone who believed in me. I intend to make full use of my emancipation to make Earth a better place for everyone, human and robot alike. While Eve has done a wonderful job as head of the Human Welfare Committee, I think it’s about time that humans were made by humans again.”

  Eve flushed. This wasn’t where she had expected Sally’s speech to go at all. But before she could step in to possibly suggest a less personal topic for an emancipation speech, Sally plowed forward.

  “So it is with great pride and optimism that I announce my intention to study in the field of genetic engineering.”

  Another cheer, and tiny Abigail clapped along, caught up in the excitement.

  This was a far more boisterous response than Rachel got last year after announcing her intention to pursue work in robotic uploading. An apprentice mixer to Charlie13 was a nice, safe career with little risk—Charlie13 wouldn’t allow her to fail. But Sally might actually move the world forward if she had the creativity and ingenuity Eve suspected lay within her.

  Speech finished, Sally came over and crushed Eve in a hug, plaque digging into her sister’s back. “Thank you, big sis,” Sally whispered in Eve’s ear. “None of us would be here without you.”

  Tears welled in Eve’s eyes. She’d never understood the paradox of joyous tears, but this had happened last year, too, for Rachel, and the day she and Plato had taken Abigail home from Cindy14’s lab.

  “You make me so proud,” Eve whispered back.

  There was a reception afterward, with wine and cheese for the human guests and festive, decorative glasses for the robots to carry for toasting purposes.

  Near the end of the ceremony, an urgent message popped up into Eve’s field of view. She no longer wore data-goggles, and she’d shut down the interface on her implanted lenses to enjoy a day away from work. But something had decided it was more important than one of the few days off Eve took during the year.

  With a twitch of her fingers, subcutaneous sensors picked up her commands and selected, then opened the message. It was from Brent184.

  ZEUS IS GONE.

  “Excuse me,” Eve said, handing Abigail back to Plato, who swung the squealing child up onto his shoulder in one smooth motion. “I’ve got to take care of something.”

  Making her goodbyes along the wa
y, she motioned for Charlie7 to fall in with her.

  “I saw it, too,” he reported.

  “I’ll fly,” Eve said briskly on her way to the skyroamer pad, packed with guests’ vehicles.

  Charlie7 saluted. “You’re the boss.”

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  The scene at the hovership prison was brutal, the worst thing Eve had ever witnessed firsthand. All of Evelyn11’s worst atrocities had been committed outside her view. Seeing replays of disposal procedures on video had given her nightmares, but the protective panel of optically active glass had always provided an emotional barrier.

  Zeus lay on the floor of his cell. At least, the human body that had belonged to a human named Zeus lay there. Charlie25 was gone. The skull of the corpse had been cut open, and a hollow space remained where a crystalline brain had once interfaced with its biological systems.

  “How did this happen?” Eve demanded.

  “James63 was watching the cells on that shift. Things had been quiet; we weren’t doubling up any more,” Brent184 reported.

  Eve allowed the vague insinuation pass—since Eve had stopped trying to rescue Plato from them, the security situation had improved.

  “What trail did they leave behind?” Eve asked. “No one got in and out of here unseen, undetected.”

  “Stopping the live feeds was your idea, Madame Chairwoman,” Brent184 said stiffly. “Public curiosity was a backup system.”

  “Come on, Brent,” Charlie7 cajoled. “It was a human zoo. You can’t blame her for shutting it down, even if it was fun watching Zeus sit there squirming all day.”

  “Is there anyone missing or unaccounted for?” Eve asked. She put a hand up to cover her nose and mouth. The smell was getting to be too much for her stomach.

  “James63,” Brent184 said, shaking his head. “Can’t believe he was in with them. He’d have had chances before this. My guess is he was a casualty of the jailbreak.”

  “Is that what we’re calling this?” Charlie7 asked, stepping around the gore to have a look from another angle. “Weirdest damn jailbreak I’ve ever heard of.”

  Eve stepped out into the corridor for air that was less foul. How had this happened? The Hovership Committee had assured everyone that the vessel was impregnable. Worst case, there should have been logs, security recordings, something to go on.

  A robotic hand came to rest gently on Eve’s shoulder. “You taking this OK?” Charlie7 asked.

  “No. I’m furious. We can’t keep living under the threat of a secret organization murdering us or vaporizing our consciousness in order to steal our bodies.”

  “Would you rather we have executed Zeus and Gemini?” Charlie7 asked.

  “Murder isn’t the answer,” Eve replied flatly. There was no room for debate on that subject. “What we need is to wring Arthur19’s neck until he lets us put real security measures in place.”

  “Wars have been fought over less,” Charlie7 said softly. “Robotkind has enjoyed freedom for a thousand years. If you try to take that away, many will see you as the enemy.”

  “Tough,” Eve said. “If they want to view me as an enemy, so be it. But I won’t stand idly by while Charlie25 slips into another body and goes right back to work trying to circumvent all the protections we’re putting in place for mankind. My only duty is ensuring the welfare of the human species. It’s right in my job title.”

  A smile twitched the corners of Charlie7’s lips.

  “What’s funny about any of this?” she demanded. “There’s a body in there, and the murderer that lived in it is on the loose. He wasn’t just a human criminal, either. He overwrote the minds of robots who came to him for new bodies.”

  “Says Gemini,” Charlie7, but he put up a hand before Eve could object. “But I was smiling because I was just thinking how you were when I first met you. You were frightened and overcome with wonder at how the world worked. I can scarcely imagine that frightened young girl with the transcranial probes could have turned into a major force in robotic society.”

  “Well, if we don’t find a way to locate and recapture Charlie25, a large segment of robotic society is going to be mighty peeved with me,” Eve said with a scowl. “Privacy is going to end. The technology exists to end conspiracies like the one Charlie25 heads. His underlings won’t run around spitting on the concept of justice while I sit idly by.”

  Chapter Sixty

  Deep in an underground facility on Mars, a robot strolled along a bank of glass cylinders filled with a translucent green liquid. Inside each floated a human in some stage of early development; they were tethered by tubes and wires that ran in and out of orifices. Some were barely fetuses; others were infants. The tanks contained room for them to grow to adult sizes.

  “What am I going to do with you?” Dale2 mused aloud as he toured the tanks. The brain held in his upturned palm said nothing, but he had attached a microphone to the aural receptors. It could hear him.

  “Your oversight of Evelyn11’s work was exemplary, even if she wasn’t able to complete the research herself. But this whole mishap with Zeus was just embarrassing. I’m not sure how to reconcile your wonderful advancements and keeping up the ranks as we hid robots in stolen bodies against the utter disaster that you perpetrated in exposing our organization to investigative scrutiny.”

  Dale2 tossed the crystalline brain and caught it, letting the built-in accelerometers sense the brief dance with dropping to crack against the Martian rock that made up the floor.

  “Alas, poor Charlie25. I knew him—or so I thought—to be a wise and cautious robot. But give him a sniff of human flesh and off he races like a fool. I needed robots like you, Charlie. I needed more of them, not fewer. Replacements aren’t coming out of a protofab or getting delivered in the mail. It takes decades just to screen a candidate, let alone recruit one.”

  He strolled with the disembodied brain over to a waiting chassis. It was castoff from Kanto, refurbished and functional. “I know you can’t see it, but I’ve got a chassis here waiting for you. I’m wondering whether I shouldn’t cut my losses and recycle this brain of yours into something less chancy. Maybe a paperweight. But I’m going to give you one chance to convince me that you’re worth saving.”

  He plugged a data cable into the port at the back of Charlie25’s brain. The other end connected to Dale2’s like a children’s game of telephone, played with empty soup cans and a length of string.

  CHARLIE7 IS CHARLES TRUMAN.

  Dale2 laughed aloud, echoing into the far reaches of the cavern. “You just find that out, or are you guessing? If that’s a guess, oh, my friend what a bold gambit you just played. But if it was a gamble, you just won a second chance. Yes, Charlie7 is the original. I’ve known that since the beginning. I could tell you stories of Charlie7 that no one would believe. I know tales of a monster the likes of which has never walked the Earth. Oh, once upon a time we needed a monster such as him. By God, we needed a monster to reclaim our planet from those… those things.”

  “But if indeed you’ve known for some time just who we’ve all been harboring in our midst, my kudos to you. Unless he’s hidden some other fool away among the mixes, he and I are the only two fully human minds among the Twenty-Seven. Though if you knew Charlie7’s secret, guessing mine isn’t too difficult. But I give to you the gift of respect enough to at least admit it.”

  RESPECT IS NICE. RATHER HAVE THE BODY.

  Dale2 chuckled and unplugged both the data cable and the microphone. With an expert twist and a shove, he jammed the brain into place inside the Version 70.1 chassis.

  “There. We’ve got a Charlie25 again.”

  Author’s Note

  One of the things I wanted to explore in the Robot Geneticists series is the blurring of lines between humans and robots. We saw one perspective on it with Gemini in Brain Recyclers, but Zeus is a different case. He doesn’t need to fool just Eve, he’s looking to fool the world. How can you tell a human who’s had his brain replaced with a crystalline matrix from a
robot who was uploaded into that same matrix.

  Plato brings up one of the key questions when he gives Zeus credit for having a soul despite his consciousness being in a robotic brain. What is it that makes a human? Eve and Plato were both created in a lab. How different is that from the robots who wake up, freshly mixed, in Kanto?

  At the same time, I wanted to explore the struggles of a lone human representing her whole species in the tangled committee politics of robotic society. Eve makes personal sacrifices to keep up with her robotic peers, becoming more ingrained in the technology they use to keep abreast of news and constantly able to access data networks.

  However, my favorite parts to write were Eve and her sisters interacting. Despite a common genetic code and similar upbringing, each of the girls has taken their own path. Yet when they get together, the similarities matter more than the differences. Even though they have little to go on sociologically, they learn how to be a family through trial and error.

  Next up for the series, I’ll be looking into what happens when a certain secretive old robot’s past comes crawling out of the grave to haunt him. Time to find out what Charlie7’s been hiding for 1000 years…

  Books by J. S. Morin

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  Read about the Black Ocean series and discover where to buy at: blackoceanmissions.com

  Twinborn Chronicles: Awakening

  Experience the journey of mundane scribe Kyrus Hinterdale who discovers what it means to be Twinborn—and the dangers of getting caught using magic in a world that thinks it exists only in children’s stories.