Engineered Tyrant

by J. S. Morin

  Rosa cocked her head. “What if frogs don’t want houses?”

  “Birds, beavers, foxes, bears, and snakes have all taken to human-designed housing. I won’t force anything on an innocent frog, but I’m not giving up on them prematurely,” Billy said earnestly. “Frogs didn’t ask to be cloned. This is a huge and terrifying world for them. If I can offer them the comfort and security of a custom habitat to make them feel a little safer, it’s a small price to pay.”

  “Hear, hear,” Nigel said with a nod over his teacup.

  Billy tipped his chair back and leaned toward Rosa. “Have you ever considered clothing for animals?”

  “Please,” Rosa replied with a delicate sniff. “I have my hands full dealing with human fashion. I’d be here in my latest creation if it wasn’t such a warm day.”

  “You simply can’t dangle a morsel like that without details,” Nigel insisted. “Do tell.”

  Rosa tapped on her personal computer and, with a flourish, displayed it to the group. It showed a mannequin in digital wireframe wearing a giant fuzzy dress.

  Surreptitious glances passed among the other three at the table.

  “What?” Rosa demanded when no one made a comment. “It’s a crossover between Victorian formalwear and Viking outerwear. I was thinking we could have a winter ball in a snowstorm. It would be magical.”

  “I might look dashing in a men’s version,” Nigel said sportingly.

  “Possibly,” Billy agreed.

  Rosa interposed herself in Abby’s view. “Well? What about you?”

  “Not if you uploaded my brain and reprogrammed it,” she stated bluntly.

  Rosa’s eyes shot wide in stunned surprise. Nigel and Billy spluttered laughter at her expense. But Abby just didn’t have it in her today to humor her friends’ pointless hobbies. She was having trouble even justifying her own.

  “I’m sorry,” Abby said wearily. She set her coffee cup down and pushed back her chair with a scrape of iron on brick. “I’m just not up for being social today.”

  She fled the cafe. Her only concession to propriety was using the gate instead of hopping the thigh-high wrought iron fence that separated the eatery from the pedestrian portion of the sidewalk.

  Paris passed by in a blur, more skeleton than city still, with Charlie7’s Arc de Triomphe rising like a blight in the center. Abby ran without intent, but her feet carried her home anyway. Tears streamed down her face. The three Cs of dealing with existence had failed her: caffeine, cannabis, and camaraderie.

  Slamming shut the old style wooden door behind her, Abby slumped to the floor in her foyer and wept.

  What was the point?

  She was trapped in a cycle of ennui where she could do anything she liked but nothing that mattered.

  Personal connections suddenly felt phony and contrived.

  Her house was too quiet without Spartacus yakking at her. That grating, witty, irrepressible voice should have been the first thing she heard when the front door had opened. Instead, silence.

  A hard, cold floor spurred Abby to adjourn to the living room couch, where she found enough relief from physical discomfort to cry herself to sleep.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Alex had planned a party for the day following his experiment. With the abject failure of the test rig to perform to his satisfaction, he could easily have justified canceling. Everyone would have understood.

  Waste. Pity. Loss of stature.

  There was no point in letting all that planning rot on the vine simply because the initial purpose had been subverted by the whims of chance. As the guests arrived, Alex greeted each with a handshake and a cryptic promise to reveal the experiment’s results once everyone was there to hear at once.

  He was the only human living in Copenhagen. The population swelled to three if one counted the preserved statues of Hans Christian Anderson and Soren Kierkegaard. One day, Alexander Truman would have statues like theirs, except the world would build them far and wide. For now, humility served him better than envying his neighbors.

  Gerry Marvinson shook his hand, beaming. “Can’t wait to see the rig, Alex.”

  Leslie de Saito kissed him on both cheeks before presenting him a case of home-brewed lager. “Simply wouldn’t be a party if we can’t get good and drunk. And this stuff kicks like an orbital booster.”

  When Dr. Toby arrived, it was with a sheepish smile and an apology. “If I’d have known it was an eating kind of party, I’d have stopped at Agrarian Station Ninety-Seven on my way here.”

  Alex clapped the unmixed robot on the back with a hollow clang. “Don’t worry about it. There’s plenty for everyone.”

  If he ever considered taking on an assistant himself, Dr. Toby would have been his first choice. Never needed to eat or sleep. Wasn’t uppity like the mixes or bereft like the unmixed robots. Plus, he was a sort of family heirloom, being Charles Truman’s assistant so long ago. Though he’d had a decade and a half to learn, Dr. Toby hadn’t embarked on any grand new scientific endeavor. He still thought of himself as second fiddle no matter which orchestra he played for.

  Irene Spence, Wendy Chang, Xander Paulson, and Stephen Ginason rounded out the guest list, all grins and well-wishes as they poured into Alex’s home. And once inside they all obeyed an unspoken accord not to bring a drop of color inside the chic, Second Age modern decor of the mansion.

  The floors gleamed white. The furnishings were black and silver, cold, hard, and functional. Of artwork or decoration, there were only charcoal portraits of great scientists—as much a checklist of competitors as inspiration. Even Alex himself wore not a scrap that existed outside a continuum from black to white. The lone concession to personal style was the motto emblazoned across his chest: I may because I can.

  Clean. Crisp. Controlled. Nothing amiss.

  “Thank you all for coming,” Alex announced loudly enough to cut through the private conversations that had broken out among his friends. “Let me preface what we’re about to see by reminding you all that the greatest advances in history have often come disguised as failure.”

  Gerry guffawed. “You blew it. Didn’t you?” His own black shirt bore the symbol of the atom, with the caption: the heart of the matter. It had become a trend among his social circle to express their inner being or philosophy in pith. Alex only continued following it because he’d been the first. The rest of them would follow as long as he stayed the course, and he’d yet to see what he could not convince them to imitate.

  “He was trying to blow things up, idiot,” Wendy scolded. Her shirt proclaimed: Agreement is intellectual impotence. “He’d be dancing if he’d produced a catastrophic explosion.”

  Alex doubted that. Even in his greatest moment of triumph, he wouldn’t have danced.

  “I assure you, the results were enlightening,” Alex said. “If not what I had aimed for. But enough showmanship for one night—”

  “I’m waiting for any,” Leslie quipped.

  Alex bowed, pretending not to have noticed the interruption. “Let us adjourn to the lab.”

  The elevator was designed for hauling equipment to the lower reaches of the complex, so there was plenty of room for the eight of them to fit inside without crowding. Alex took great pride in calling it an elevator instead of a lift like everyone else. It was a matter of pride in his American heritage, even if it had been his father who’d popularized the alternate term.

  Twelve stories deep, the shaft sank beneath the Danish landscape. He’d used up a year’s worth of drone time-share getting it excavated, borrowing against future use and eventually having to slyly borrow from Charlie7’s illicit workforce to sink his lab deep enough for Alex’s liking.

  Soft music played over speakers built into the elevator car’s ceiling, melodic yet meaningless. An algorithm from a childhood programming project generated soothing noise to drown out the rumble of motors and vibration of the shaft guides. The whole system ran on magnetics, and a few of his guests preferred not to be reminded that it wa
s Alex’s own design and not the standard Safety Committee–approved paradigm.

  The elevator stopped at the lab level and disgorged its occupants. Alex breezed through the staging area for newly delivered equipment and vectored for the dark energy lab. “Right this way.”

  “You’ve spruced the place up,” Wendy observed, scanning the array of unmarked doors that led to Alex’s other single-purpose labs. “Last time I was down here—”

  “It was a mess,” Alex finished. “I’d just received a shipment from Kanto and wasn’t at liberty to discuss its contents.”

  Control the narrative. No distractions. Tease the reveal.

  “But that’s nothing compared to what you’re about to witness.”

  Motion detection recognized Alex and brought up the lights in the dark energy lab. Without a test imminent, there was no reason to wallow in the darkness. Consoles gleamed in anticipation of use. Cables and wires ran circuits through a maze of electrical and data connections. Bulky metal frames housed purpose-built computer equipment and the mysterious workings of the dark energy emitter. And as a monument to failure, a neat stack of cinder blocks stood unscathed in the path of the dark energy beam.

  “Nice place you’ve got here,” Dr. Toby observed. “I get around to a lot of labs, and this is one of the nicer ones.”

  “So which is it?” Gerry asked, ducking and crouching to look around the setup. “Did you clean up and reset for a second demonstration, or is this how it looked post-test?”

  “The latter,” Alex admitted.

  Acceptance. Forthright. Unashamed.

  “But if you’ll all follow me into the blast-proof observation room…”

  Wendy snorted. “It make a lot of noise or something? Doesn’t look too dangerous out here.”

  “Much as I despise the nanny-bot Safety Committee, if they found out I’d let you in the room with an experimental dark energy emitter while I activated it from inside a bunker, that’d be the end of my career.”

  Melodrama. Exaggeration for effect. Lead by example.

  With a spread of her hands and a roll of her eyes, Wendy joined the group already filing for the far exit of the lab. “Fine. You win. I’ll hunker down like a good little robot.”

  Dr. Toby cast her a quick glare but said nothing.

  Alex noticed and suppressed a smile.

  Once the door closed, it was eight of them crammed together in the observation room meant to be spacious for one. Heat radiated from biochemical reactions. A faint odor of sweat wafted. Alex took his seat at the control console. As everyone shuffled to arrange themselves with a view of the emitter, a pair of breasts pressed against his upper back. Without looking, he guessed it was Leslie, whose clumsy advances he’d been dodging for months.

  Hormonal attraction. Sex. Entanglement. Distraction.

  Charles Truman hadn’t sidetracked his life with family or tawdry biological hedonism. His focus on robotics and brain upload had saved humanity. For all Alex knew, his life’s work could turn out to be just as crucial.

  “I’ve only got one pair of goggles,” Alex explained. “I’ve seen it already. So pass them around.” He dangled them from a finger, and Leslie leaned over him to take first dibs.

  Without further warning, Alex killed the lights. Out in the lab, the countdown started. Though he kept it to himself, he still counted down the names of the scientists he hoped to one day surpass. Unlike last time, he had no illusions that his ascension to greatness would be today.

  10… “What’s with the countdown?” Gerry asked. “We aren’t going to see explosions.”

  9…

  8… “Shut up, Gerry,” Irene scolded. “Just watch.”

  7… “Goosebumps,” Leslie said, wrapping her arms around Alex.

  6…

  5…

  4… “This better be good,” Wendy said cynically. Alex could envision her with her arms crossed and that glorious scowl plastered across her face.

  3…

  2… “Here it goes…” Alex said.

  1…

  The snap and hum of the power converters kicked in. Alex squinted to see, but any evidence of the dark energy beam was merely his imagination filling in the details of what he knew was there.

  “Flying…” Leslie said breathlessly. After eleven seconds, she shifted against him, and the goggles passed to the next viewer. Alex was glad of the darkness as he squirmed in his seat, failing in his efforts to resist reflexive reactions to the feel of her against him, even through multiple layers of cloth.

  “The flyingest,” Gerry agreed, finally shrugging off his teasing tone. “You really did it. More of a flashlight than a weapon or a power source, but it’s proof of concept for sure.”

  “Give ‘em here,” Stephen said.

  “I’m next!” Wendy protested.

  “Fascinating,” Dr. Toby said so softly that the words barely registered above the argument over the one pair of goggles.

  “You can see it?” Alex asked. “You can view the beam?”

  “I knew what I was coming here for,” Dr. Toby replied. “I adjusted my optics to compensate. It’s… remarkable.”

  Alex shut down the emitter, and the lights sprang on. The guests cringed at the sudden intrusion of light and the end of the scant entertainment Alex had provided, grumbling amongst themselves.

  “It would be remarkable if that pile of cinder blocks was a pile of dust,” Alex said. “I was able to duplicate the base conditions from the data on file. But those files are intentionally incomplete. I reviewed everything last night, and I can only conclude that some keystone piece of information was left out, whether by ingenious surgical removal or the luck of a leprechaun. I have exactly enough to tantalize without producing anything remotely dangerous or useful.”

  “How long to reverse engineer the keystone?” Wendy asked, quieting the room.

  Right question. Goal-focused. Respect.

  “With my current equipment,” Alex said, “possibly ten years. Maybe a lifetime. I’m playing guessing games with an alien species capable of interstellar travel. Who knows how long it took them to come up with the solution.”

  Gerry sighed dramatically. “Well, so much for our big party. Anyone still up for getting drunk, at least?”

  Alex held up a hand and fought back a smirk.

  Timing. Emotional reverse.

  “Hold on. That’s only with my current equipment. I think if I had access to a working model, it might not take long at all with what I already know.”

  “How you planning on getting ahold of one?” Irene asked dubiously. “If there’s one thing every committee with oversight has, it’s that the dark energy arsenal is closed for anything short of an invasion.”

  Wendy scowled. “You’re not planning on faking an invasion, are you?”

  “Your father kept one,” Dr. Toby stated somberly. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

  Alex aimed a finger at the robot. “Not a bad thought but not as far as I know. Nothing Charlie7 does can ever truly surprise me but no. I have a simpler solution. We find a working weapon. We just sneak in and take it. There’s our model.”

  “There was a lot of first person plural in that statement,” Gerry noted. “Who’s ‘we’?”

  Set up. Took bait. Segue. Predictable.

  “Anyone who wants to be a part of the scientific revolution of the thirty-second century. The 31st was all about the maturation of genetic engineering. We’re all here thanks to that. But unless we’re hoping to take transhumanism in a direction that, frankly, I’d rather not see come to fruition, the next revolution in scientific advancement is up for grabs. If we don’t take history by the horns, some robot is going to reap the accolades.”

  Leslie leaned over to Dr. Toby. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” the robot replied. It was no secret that he was a misfit part, a three-quarter inch wrench in a world of metric bolts. Dr. Toby was a human in a Halloween costume.

  “This whole notion of snagging an alien weap
on sounds chipmunks to me,” Stephen said, taking a step back despite there being no room behind him to retreat. Having the discussion in these cramped quarters was part of the plan.

  Nothing said we’re all in this together like being stuffed into a closet. There was no space to gain the sort of physical separation that committee-meeting chambers relied on to give an air of independence.

  Co-dependence. Pack mentality. Convert camaraderie to conspiracy.

  “You enjoy watching news feeds filled with the same twenty-seven names?” Alex asked. “That’s the future if we sit on our hands, let them force us to play by their rules, take the scraps left over when the robots are done inventing our future for us. Right now, the Earth is at a population level unseen since the last Ice Age. Never has there been a generation in such a position to shift the course of history—not since mankind first grasped the concept of history.”

  “You’re making being chipmunks sound glorious,” Gerry said.

  “History is littered with despots and kings, scientific giants and crackpots,” Wendy said, squeezing through the crowd to stand at Alex’s side. “The difference is winning versus losing. Success and failure. He’s right. No one’s getting ahead if we fly their speed.”

  “What if we get caught?” Irene asked, gnawing her lower lip and staring down at a shirt that read: If not now, then when?

  Unintentional humor. Impatience transmuted to pessimism.

  Alex smirked. “Caught? By whom? The whole system is rigged, and my father rigged it. It’s designed to shield privacy from invasion, and no amount of tinkering by the nannies can keep that from applying to us.”

  He pulled up his sleeve and showed the scar on his wrist. He didn’t need to tell his friends what that meant. They’d all been tagged with a safety tracker as kids—a well-meaning initiative if one were of a generous disposition.

  To Alex’s mind, it was merely a collar to keep him on a chain.

  “You pulled out your tracker?” Irene asked.