Virtual Immortality

by Matthew S. Cox

  Katya whispered. “Okay.”

  The girl hugged her. Katya patted her on the back, trying to distance herself from the sudden inexplicable want to keep her.

  horrendous slurping sound rose out of the shaft as the last of the water vanished into the drains. Kenny looked back from the edge at everyone. The strange noise drew Katya out of the truck to see what was going on.

  “Kat, you okay watching those two?” Kenny motioned at the girls.

  “Yeah. I don’t think she’s faking, but she doesn’t trust us completely yet. She’s measuring us as much as we are her.”

  “You don’t trust us either.” Joey laughed. “But at least she’s cute.”

  Katya glared, muttering in Russian on her way back to the truck.

  “There we go. Back to normal.” Joey grinned.

  “Joey, we might need you down there for the electronics.”

  Before Kenny could follow it up with justification, Joey vanished over the side.

  No one wanted to risk the elevator, so they opted for the maintenance ladder, which was really nothing more than a series of independent rungs embedded in the shaft wall. Slick with waterborne moss and algae, they offered a tenuous climb down into the dark.

  “Remind me to file a grievance with the office of operational safety.” Eldon grumbled. “There’s no retaining cage.”

  Kenny laughed. “I’m sure they’ll send an inspector out right away.”

  At the bottom, an inch or so of water remained and the air was heavy with the scent of industrial machines and lubricant. Kenny and Joey covered their mouths with their forearms, trying to use the coarse material of their armored coats as a filter. Eldon smiled through his sealed faceplate at them. Masaru waited, also enjoying filtered air.

  A single door offered entry to the underground complex. Thick and armored, it looked as if it could take a few hits from heavy weapons fire.

  Eldon kicked the door with a dull clank. “That’s gonna be a bitch.”

  Joey moved over and checked the combination retinal scan and handprint reader, cursing at the lack of visible screws or ways to open it from this side. He studied it for a minute or two before shaking his head.

  “This is mounted from the inside… high security. I’m not going to be able to open it up.”

  “What about this?” Eldon tapped his knife.

  “I don’t see any other option.” Joey took a step back. “Masaru’s sword would probably go right through that, but he wouldn’t dare use it as a tool.”

  “You are learning.”

  Eldon squeezed the handle of the knife, activating it at the same time he unlocked it from its sheath. The hypersonic oscillation filled the pit with a sound beyond hearing that manifested as a sense of dread. Eldon poked at the security panel with the tip of the blade. The metal was quite tough, even the vibro blade hesitated on it. He leaned his rifle against the wall, grabbed the knife with both hands, and jammed the tip into the housing.

  Eldon strained, the blade moved a quarter of an inch. “Damn. Indirium.”

  The dense asteroid metal seized the knife, reducing the hypersonic vibration to audible screeches. Each time it snagged, the cutting power fell away to nothing and he wrenched it back and forth to free it before starting over again. The interplay between the edge and the material sounded like someone strangling a massive robotic rooster.

  Joey huddled against the wall as far away from the door as the pit allowed, hands clamped over his ears. Eldon and Masaru had some protection from the sound by virtue of their helmets, but Eldon experienced the joy of the vibration riding up his arms. After almost twenty minutes, Eldon had cut all the way around. He slid the weapon back into its cryo-sheath, generating a small puff of fog and a loud hiss as it locked in place.

  All four stood for a moment, savoring the silence.

  Joey coaxed the security terminal out, tilting it forward to get at the electronics. Without data to spoof the biometrics, he shorted the board to bypass the security. The crudeness of it made him frown at its simplicity. Once he made the right contact, the door slid open with a hiss.

  “You must be getting better at this; I don’t see any smoke this time.” Kenny gave Joey a playful nudge.

  Joey grumbled. “Any idiot with a metal contact could do this. The hard part was getting at it.”

  “No shit,” said Eldon, holding his helmet. “I’m going to be hearing that in my dreams.”

  He hefted his rifle and kicked the door. It slammed into the wall, echoing into the tunnel. Seconds later, stark white lights came on in sequence, illuminating the hallway ten meters at a time. Boots clattered across the metal floor in a disharmonic beat as they passed two empty guard stations. The vibration of distant machinery came through the walls, making everyone look at the vents. At the end of the corridor, a door jerked back and forth, unable to decide if it wanted to be open or closed.

  Eldon leaned into it and shoved, forcing it open and causing a burst of sparks to spray from a control panel. Joey whistled as they entered a cavernous room. Light drifted in from the left; to the right, thin streaks of silver outlined the presence of chairs in the dark.

  Beyond a clear barrier, twelve fluid-filled cylinders stood in the glow of lavender backup lamps. Each held the figure of an unconscious child floating in an unknown liquid; all identical girls around the same age as the one they had found. Eyes closed, short white hair drifted in a faint current, and none of them appeared to be breathing.

  Kenny ran over to the wall and searched for a way to open the door. “You’ve gotta be shitting me.” He pounded on a code panel, urgency in his voice. “We have to get them out of there.”

  Masaru sauntered up alongside, using his helmet visor to zoom in on a console near one of the tanks. “Don’t get worked up. They’re not real.”

  “Not real? What, like WellTech dolls?” Kenny leaned on the door with both hands, catching his breath. “I thought you said WellTech dolls weren’t anatomically correct?”

  “No. These look like synthetics, AI-based, all electronic. According to the screens, they are blank. They have not been loaded with any program code yet. The bodies are just in storage.”

  “Are they dead?” Kenny stared at the cherubic faces.

  Masaru shook his head. “No, they never lived. They’re synthetics. Think dolls, but made out of softer materials. Plastisteel bones and silica based simulated organs; they even have a circulatory system based on nanobot fluid. They are much harder to detect than dolls, but also far more expensive.”

  Eldon walked up to the glass, staring at them. “Also illegal as hell to make after Oberon’s uprising in 2143.”

  Kenny looked at him. “Once more in English?”

  Masaru cleared his throat. “Synthetics were the first attempt to create artificial life forms for use as laborers, especially for colonization projects and hazardous environment work. The original series were crude and flimsy by today’s standards, but they also self-evolved into the first true sentient AI’s. Nowadays, they are made of material that closely simulates human tissue but is not alive in the true sense of the word.” He gestured at Eldon. “And as our friend has pointed out, Oberon’s violent uprising caused the Sentience Act of 2150 which recognized self-aware AI’s as ‘alive’ in a legal sense. The law prohibits the simple ‘manufacture’ of them now. They consider it the equivalent of making people.”

  “Wait, so why are there newer ones made out of better stuff now?” Kenny leaned on the clear wall.

  “The ACC has no such qualms, and the UCF cannot control every single colony world as well as they would like. Also, extant synthetics needed ‘medical’ attention and replacement parts.”

  “So they’ll eventually all wear out and die?” Kenny scratched his head.

  Masaru nodded. “The original series, yes. The newest generation of them have developed a form of reproduction.”

  “Whoa, I’m sorry I asked.” Kenny laughed.

  “I’m not entirely sure how it works―Ido
would be a better person to ask, but involves the two AI’s generating a third that is a composite of their own.”

  “Spawning a child process?” Joey punned, unable to resist.

  Masaru glared.

  “That is just so… effing… creepy.” Kenny cringed at the false children. “They look so real and so helpless.”

  “A lot of the Nova 10’s don’t realize they’re artificial,” added Masaru. “Their nanobots can break down food into its raw component molecules and reconstruct them to maintain their systems. Even if you grabbed one, you could not tell what they were. Un-plated Myofiber feels just like living muscle to the untrained hand. The good news is that even the best ones, unlike dolls, can only get as strong and fast as a person. They just don’t get tired, don’t need to breathe…”

  Kenny exhaled. “Well thanks for making me not want to ever sleep again. So, are they alive?” He gestured at the tanks.

  Masaru nodded. “Think of them as computers that haven’t had an operating system loaded on them yet.”

  Joey stood in a cloud of light emanating from a terminal on the right side of the room. The amethyst glow illuminated a small group of executive workstations.

  He looked back over his shoulder. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much. I’ve met a few on Mars. All they wanted was to fit in with everyone else. This one chick, Simone I think her name was, cried for two weeks when she found out she was a synth. Besides, it will be thousands of years before their population becomes an issue.”

  Eldon looked away. “They feel pain?”

  Masaru tilted his head. “From a philosophical standpoint, who knows? They act as if they do, although it would be simple to remove that from an AI. StarPoint was foolish not to use these for the armor project. If they used simple AI’s that were not self-aware it would have been legal.”

  Kenny edged closer to the glass, unable to look away. “So what do we do with them?”

  Masaru waved. “Just leave them. They have no AI, so they are just going to sit there until someone programs them. It is not legal to sell them, I doubt that StarPoint will risk coming back for them, and I know you. You’re not going to want to destroy them.”

  “I know some people on Mars that would take them.” Joey pointed up. “Other synthetics, it would be like they were adopting them.”

  “Transporting them is more effort than we’re equipped for.” Masaru shook his head. “If you take them out of the preservative fluid, they’d need to be activated within a few days.”

  “They look so helpless.” Kenny turned away.

  Joey yelled from across the room. “Hey Kenny?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you turn into a sap before or after you had a kid?”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Already got my tickets. First class.”

  “Mostly after,” said Kenny. “Don’t tell me you could destroy them?”

  Joey laughed. “Meh, probably not, but I did find some information. Looks like Welker shared the military’s distrust for AIs. The original plan was to use these synths until he got into a nasty argument with someone by the name of Earl Wharton. Wharton was on the same mind track as Masaru, wanting to go with synthetics because they did not feel pain. It’s also much easier to stop a synthetic from growing up.” Joey paged through emails. “Welker felt that AIs couldn’t be trusted, and they would rebel the first chance they got.”

  “Yeah,” said Kenny. “I think a lot of us have that nightmare.”

  “He ordered them to vat grow gene-manipulated embryos and raise them with…” Joey made air quotes. “A full emotional support structure.”

  Eldon rolled his eyes. “So much for that.”

  Joey flipped through more screens. “I think this Dr. Gina Baxter is the woman the kid mentioned. The way this bitch writes, it sounds like she’s just experimenting on animals. She did not consider the pain of the de-aging process to be a showstopper. Wharton tried to re-pitch the synth thing to Welker because he worried about psychological instability. Looks like a Dr. Andrew Francis agreed with Wharton. Lewis wanted to decommission the kids and Wharton wanted to green light the synthetic project. Baxter wanted Francis terminated, and I don’t mean with a pink slip.”

  Eldon cracked his knuckles. “I’d like to have a chat with her.”

  Masaru drifted over. “The girl already said they killed her.”

  “Yep.” Joey opened a holographic panel.

  Six ‘men’ in green suits advanced on a woman in a lab coat. Joey paused it.

  “Got the video of the killing right here, courtesy of our old friend the ceiling cam.”

  Kenny shivered. “We don’t need to see that.”

  Joey shut it and dug into other files. “The rest of this stuff backs up what psycho brat said. Chose females for sympathy, trained to act innocent, take advantage of the best opportunity for escape.”

  “Think she’s faking it?” Eldon looked at the door. “You got kids, can’t you read her?”

  “Not sure.” Kenny brushed his knuckle across his mouth. “If she is lying, she’s doing a damn fine job of it. Kids are far from an exact science. Plus you gotta live with them for a while to learn their ways.”

  “I’m grabbing all this info for Ido, there’s some specs on that part here. Unfortunately, it looks like much of the design files for the armor or anything we could make any money off of is long gone.” Joey scratched the back of his head. “There’s nothing about Mayberry at all. Why the fuck was I sent out here?”

  Eldon walked over. “Guess this whole underground area was for the synthetics?”

  Joey nodded. “Yeah. I hate to say it, but that would have been a better plan.”

  Kenny took a step toward the exit. “And no real kids would be involved.”

  “You know.” Masaru glanced at him. “Some people wouldn’t see much of a difference if the AIs were self-aware. According to the law, synthetics are people too.”

  “It’s not the same.” Kenny tried to explain. “They’re artificial… They don’t have real emotions, just simulated ones. They don’t have souls…”

  “Oh here we go again with the Badlands voodoo shit.” Joey laughed.

  “Did you ever stop to think about what will happen to you when you finally do something too stupid for even you to luck your way out of? What if there is something beyond this world, what then?”

  Joey shrugged at Kenny.

  Masaru chuckled. “Are you so convinced that just because a body is made of plastic and metal that it can’t have a soul?”

  Kenny stared for a moment. “I don’t have enough beer in me to think about that right now.”

  Joey gave Masaru a flat smirk. “Are you so sure that every living body has one?”

  Eldon sighed. “Man, why you gotta rag on Katya so much? Is it just that you can’t have her so you gotta put her down all the time?”

  Joey laughed. “I don’t want her.”

  Kenny patted him on the shoulder. “That’s the usual first response when you can’t have something.”

  “I’m surrounded by metaphysical pussies.” Joey flailed. “Can’t a guy pick on an ice queen in peace? I mean look at her, she’s a bitch all the time for no reason.”

  Eldon chuckled. “Well you do have a point about that.”

  Masaru smirked. “She has her reasons, just not ones she is willing to share.”

  “I ain’t holdin’ my breath for that day,” said Kenny.

  Joey laughed. “Doesn’t matter if you ain’t trying to tap it.”

  “Girl that fine wouldn’t even look at me twice.” Eldon started walking out.

  Kenny patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t sell yourself short.”

  “Yeah, but don’t bite a poison apple.” Joey gave up on the terminal. “There’s jack shit in here.”

  Eldon walked past the inert bodies. “Sick fuckers. Can you tell if this was officially sanctioned?”

  Joey frowned. “Not from here. I can try once we’re back in range of the ne
t.” He paced for a moment before kicking the terminal. “Fuck! What the hell am I missing? I had a god damned railgun fired at my head to stop me from finding something out here.”

  Kenny followed Eldon. “Guess we go back upstairs and knock on doors.”

  eaving the synthetics in their eternal repose, the men returned to the shaft. Joey shorted the console to seal the outer door before stomping the panel back into place. Eldon paused at the base of the ladder, noticing three drops of white liquid on one of the rungs. Before he could question them aloud, the sound of Amber in hysterics made them all look up.

  “Shit, the brat’s turned on us.” Masaru pulled his sword.

  Eldon hauled himself up the ladder, diving over the top with his rifle at the ready. His armor changed into a mottle of orange and brown as he landed in a pile of leaves, making it seem as though the ground swallowed him. A sweep of the area found no hostiles, just Katya and Amber rolling around on the ground by the truck. Amber flailed and screamed as Katya tried to hold her down. The white haired girl hung out of the open passenger door window with her arms folded, watching the women wrestle.

  “What’s happening?” Kenny yelled up from below.

  Eldon stood up and his armor returned to its green color. “Rich bitch is having a meltdown.”

  Masaru put his sword away and started up the ladder.

  Seeing Eldon, Katya yelled. “Little help?”

  Eldon let his rifle sag onto the sling, forgetting it was broken. The gun plopped into the mulch, and he stopped after a single step with a sigh. He stooped to grab it and trotted over to the struggle in the leaves. Masaru cleared the top of the pit with Kenny and Joey right behind him. By the time Eldon got there, Katya had flipped Amber face down and sat on top of her. The young woman clawed at the leaves, screaming incoherently. As Eldon grabbed hold, Katya rolled away and gasped for breath.

  Eldon held her down with little effort. “Amber! What the hell is wrong with you?”