by J. S. Morin
After all, if Abby had the choice between stepping on a few toes and letting an alien menace occupy Earth, she’d have done the same. Those mixed robots had been created without memories of the invasion. The original thirty-three all had been scanned before the invasion except for Charlie and Toby.
I need to interview both of them.
“You just going to stand there?” Olivia asked. “Thought you were here to explore.”
“Right.”
Abby moved her feet with little input from her brain. The latter was struggling to process the scope of the world around her. In one sense, it was smaller and denser than Paris. In another, it was an entire world all its own.
Wandering toward one of the spires, Abby placed a gloved hand on the surface. Scowling at the unsatisfying lack of sensation, she pulled off the glove and touched it with bare skin.
Closing her eyes, she imagined that she was one of the creatures, that her hand was a tentacle, that this was a part of her everyday existence.
What must it have been like, living cloistered on an alien—to them, at least—planet? At one time, the atmosphere in the dome would have been regulated to sustain cephaloid physiology, undoubtedly toxic to human life. By that logic, the whole surface of the Earth would have been lethal to them.
How claustrophobic. How terrifying.
Abby glanced over at Olivia, watching her from a few meters away with crossed arms and a bored, resentful expression. Would Mars have been like that for them? The outbound trip would have been in a small vessel with a self-contained atmosphere. Both the vacuum of space en route and the thin atmosphere of Mars would have been unable to support human life. They’d have been trapped and at the mercy of their air supply.
Even now, Abby had to remember not to breathe in through her mouth. But on Mars, safety wouldn’t have been a dash back to the tunnels away.
To keep from Olivia’s chastisement, Abby kept moving. Belatedly, she donned a pair of goggles and set up a video capture.
Then a minor nagging at the back of her mind came to the fore. “Is there a humming down here?” she asked.
Olivia rolled her eyes. “Blame Charlie7. He set up a bunch of equipment down here. If you like your archeology pristine and undisturbed, you’re late by a thousand years. The only reason you can see in here is the generators he left going. Hate to explore this place by hand lamp.” She shuddered.
Abby tried to envision such a venture. Climbing spires twisting up and out of sight beyond the limit of the illuminated beams. Weird shadows cast the alien towers in a sinister aspect. As it stood, Abby could picture this place as a vast artistic playground created by human sculptors. By lamp light, that self-deception would have failed in the face of shadowed terrors lurking behind every spire and in every trough.
“Might convey the horror of what the aliens did,” Abby suggested.
Olivia shook her head and fell into step as Abby resumed her exploration. “Nope. Well-lit, you’ve got a guide. Come down here like it’s Halloween in a mausoleum, and you’d need to find someone else to show you around.”
Olivia was a legend among modern humans. She barely used technology, preferring to make her home in the wilderness and understand a way of life ancient even before humanity went extinct. She stalked animals in pantomime hunts and went months without talking to another person—human or robot.
Abby had always imagined that Olivia wasn’t afraid of anything. In a way, it was comforting to find out that not all of Mom’s sisters were as stoic and fearless as her.
Together, the two of them entered a handful of buildings, climbed the inside of one of the spires, and took in the view from a hundred meters up. Olivia kept prompting Abby as to how much longer she needed to spend getting a sense of the place.
“Fine. I think I’ve seen enough,” Abby said with resignation as they exited the ground floor of the spire they’d climbed. What had gone on inside had been an utter mystery but of the most glorious sort. She could fill in almost any detail she liked for the stage adaptation. “In a way, it felt like the aliens were still here, watching, lurking. I mean, I know they weren’t, but it made it a safe sort of exciting. Like a horror movie.”
“I hate horror movies,” Olivia grumbled. In an undertone Abby wasn’t sure she was meant to hear, she added, “I grew up in one.”
“Come on,” Abby said, switching off her video capture and checking the directions on her portable computer. “Let’s get back to the skyroamer. I’m hungry.”
Chapter Twenty
Alex slowed the drill to a crawl the instant the tip broke through to the city. The final few meters at an upward slope had been a test of patience and willpower. Charlie7 and a team from the Scientific Safety Committee had been the last ones to visit the dome, and while Alex had assured his friends that everything was clear, he couldn’t be certain that his father hadn’t planted a surveillance device to watch for intruders.
That was consistent with his father’s modus operandi, after all.
A low grumble persisted from the drill as Alex’s disciples hauled rocks from their path to be the first to see inside. This was a bank robbery on an epic scale. This was Egyptology if the alien visitor theory had ever held a grain of truth. But instead of looking back at golden relics and mummies’ curses, Alex looked forward into the eyes of the universe.
Science is the god man makes for himself.
“Stand aside,” Alex ordered just as Xander stood poised to be the first through the hole.
Authoritative. Stern. Paternal. Don’t let them hear a hint of request or suggestion.
The knot of would-be scientific giants untangled, and Alex climbed through the hole. He emerged into the private arsenal Charlie7 had hidden away in case the Earth was ever again threatened from outside invaders.
Or inside invaders, Alex amended. Though Charlie7 never admitted as much to the world, his actions told the story when Kanto was threatened. When his secret cache of old data was threatened. Those dark energy rifles weren’t reserved for alien invasions then. Dale2 had died on a live broadcast, his head obliterated by a blast of energy that no robot fully understood.
Alex would be the first.
“Come on,” Gerry goaded from below. “Up or down. Don’t just stand there blocking the way.”
Alex lingered in the opening a moment longer.
Dominance. Dissociate complaint from action. Don’t let them think that you can be ordered around.
After a suitable pause to vex Gerry, he stepped up and put both feet on alien-smoothed rock.
High on Alex’s list of projects was an environmental system. There would be long years ahead down here below the Baltic Sea, and he wasn’t about to wear a stupid filtration mask the whole time. It was bad enough wearing it now, with the dust and airborne debris finished. But the air quality was low down here. Stale. Musty. Unhealthy.
“Shh,” Dr. Toby radioed despite not needing a breath filter. Everyone else heard him over comms. “I hear something.”
Irene clutched Gerry by the arm. “Are there aliens?”
Alex didn’t bother justifying the remark with a rebuttal. “Patch it through,” he told Dr. Toby.
The quality was low. The voice scratchy. But no one on Earth could mistake the voice of Eve Fourteen, who seemed to be on every other article to come across the news feeds.
Of course, the preponderance of Madison Maxwell-Chang clones made unique identification nearly impossible. They all sounded exactly alike.
“Look at this place,” one of the Eves remarked. “You could almost see it as a surrealist painting.”
Someone else responded in an identical voice. “You think some of those old masters might have been in contact?”
Alex raised an eyebrow. He saw the resemblance as well but dismissed the notion.
Fanciful. Distracting. Irrelevant.
“Who are they?” Wendy asked. “Any chance Fourteen is down here trying to open the place up to the public? Maybe Phoebe with her?”
&
nbsp; Alex struggled to lay a template over the two women that would fit them as a particular Eve variant. Evelyn11 had purposely varied them for experimental purposes. Anyone who knew them well enough could have picked them out over the course of a long-enough conversation.
“Wouldn’t that be something?” the first Eve asked, clearly delighted by the idea. “A hundred year head start, and no one realized. That’s almost too much to believe, but it might make for a good story.”
Alex’s lip curled. “Abbigail,” he said with certainty. If there was one Eve who’d wasted her potential, it was that one. The Eves were supposedly smarter than any of the mixed robots. They held all the potential in the world. That one decided to squander her life on reviving the Broadway arts.
“You sure?” Gerry asked.
Skepticism. Misplaced. Remediate.
“Of course I am. My father is still friends with Eve Fourteen. I saw her plenty until she was emancipated.”
But the question was: what was Abby doing here of all places? And which of the other Eves was with her.
Alex’s blood simmered as Dr. Toby continued relaying the women’s conversation as they explored the alien city on a lark, like Human Era tourists snapping photos at the Great Wall or posing mid-kiss in front of the Eiffel Tower. It was clear this was merely a holiday for them, not any serious endeavor. And bit by bit as Alex and his friends listened, they put together the story of Abby’s trip.
So, the Transportation Committee knew they were here. Restricted areas only applied to scientists. Prove yourself sufficiently harmless to society and they’d let you in. Time revealed that Abby’s companion was her sister/aunt Olivia, another who’d rejected society to fritter away her best years trying to relive a dead civilization.
“New plan,” Alex said softly, even though the breathing masks muffled his voice. “We won’t get any work done with them here anyway. Fan out. Record everything you can. Don’t get caught.”
“Where are you going?” Leslie asked, following Alex as he headed back down the tunnel without so much as taking a quick loop around the city.
“Like I said, I have a new plan. There’s more than one way to gain access to this city for my research.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Back in Copenhagen, Alex set about undoing all the ruses that he and his team had set in place to simulate a prolonged sabbatical from public life. He shut down the power utilization program, deactivated the automaton set to mimic his daily movements, and ate from the delivery of food that arrived from Agrarian Station Ninety-Seven.
In his mind, a circuit diagram formed of interpersonal interactions. Society worked by different rules than electricity, but the same analytical tools could represent its functions. Each human or robot was a bit of wire. It had its own resistance, its own thermal load, its own connection points. World events applied voltage. Ingenuity supplied the current.
Resentment was a capacitor ready to discharge.
At first, Alex saw only a part of the completed circuit, but as he mentally assembled the pieces, the larger system came into view. This wasn’t going to be a mere comeuppance for an entitled artist who leaned on family connections to bend rules for her. That was merely a battery in Alex’s sociological schematic. The grand scheme held so much more.
Archimedes once said that given a long enough lever and a place to stand, he could move the world. Well, Alex had found his lever, and now all he needed was to stand back while his friends helped lengthen it.
The place to stand was as far from the initial fray as possible.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The real world rushed in around Abby as she stepped inside her Parisian home and discarded the protective alien garment like galoshes on a sunny day. What had seemed humdrum and pedestrian just that morning held the value of knowing what it took to achieve it all.
Earth, barren and desolate, occupied by an implacable enemy with no regard for human life.
A lone survivor, a mind aboard a robotic escape pod, left to decide what to do.
Imagine the courage, the willpower, the vision. Frankly, Abby allowed, the blinding arrogance to take on that foe singlehandedly. What more could she ask for a heroic protagonist than the lone survivor of humanity, digitally resurrecting a handful of scientist colleagues and marching off to war for the fate of Earth.
So what if there was a bit of treachery at the tale’s conclusion. Let someone else write the tragic tale of heroes falling into quarrels that escalated into murder. Abby had known Charlie7 all her life, and near as she could figure, that one blemish ought not tarnish the entirety of a thousand years’ work.
If her play had any part in the matter, it wouldn’t.
Abby sat down at a replica of the writing desk that Emily Bronte had once used. Stylistically, the two of them had nothing in common, but Abby found a kindred spirit in that they were both pioneers of their age. Abby didn’t face the sort of gender skepticism that Bronte had. If anything, she experienced the reverse.
Since the emergence of Eve Fourteen into public life, she had been held aloft as the oracle of humanity. Smarter, tougher, hardened by the brutality of her childhood, Abby’s mother had integrated into a robotic society of centuries-old machines and earned a reputation as their equal.
Abby was just a dilettante playwright, composer, and actress—the latter merely due to a shortage of willing bodies. While Bronte had been derided for aspiring beyond her gender’s limitations, Abby was wasting her potential.
“No great act of art was created by seeking permission,” Abby muttered as she opened her dictation program. Let the world think of her what they would. This wasn’t for them. This was for her. Even Charlie7 was merely a bystander in Abby’s desire to create a truly original story unique to the Second Human Age.
She cleared her throat. “Opening scene: Earth, 2065. Insert note: where was Project Transhuman based? Resume dictation: Laboratory setting. Word arrives of an alien invasion, and panic sets in throughout the project team. One man stands firm, poised upon the doorstep of greatness and unwilling to cower even in the face of certain doom. Instead, he steps through it. Enter: Dr. Charles Truman…”
Sitting down at the piano, she tickled out a melody that felt appropriate to the tale, melancholy and thoughtful, played in a minor key.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Alex fidgeted in his seat, unable to still the excitement welling within him as he watched the news feeds. Down in the lab, his equipment lay idle, reinstalled and functional but ignored in favor of more immediate gratification. What was the point of toiling in the dark shadow of alien science when the eggshell of committee repression was showing its first cracks?
On the screen in his living room, crude video played on a loop. It showed Olivia and Abbigail skulking through the alien dome city like burglars on safari. There was no audio feed to go along with the footage, but Marvin227 was acting as newscaster.
“This video was submitted anonymously but is 99.992 percent likely to be genuine based on known image alteration protocols. The identities of the violators have been confirmed as Olivia Seventeen and Abbigail Fourteen.”
The computer in Alex’s lap was open to a public Social channel, where the news had drawn an instant and visceral reaction.
SchroedingersLion: IF OLIVIA IS LOOKING AFTER ABBIGAIL, WHO’S LOOKING OUT FOR OLIVIA?
K9friend: THAT’S NO PLACE FOR HUMANS.
Paradox42: WE SHOULD HAVE EITHER BLOWN THAT THING UP OR CLEARED IT OUT. NOT SAFE.
Evolvedcaveman: WHAT MAKES ALL THE EVES THINK THE RULES DON’T APPLY TO THEM?
One of the great mysteries that still vexed Alex was why robots couldn’t express candid opinions under their own name yet still felt compelled to share them. Silence, he could have understood. Boldness likewise held an admirable quality to it. Yet robotkind felt compelled to craft elaborate networks of anonymous identities, false names, and convoluted trails that no one would ever bother following—all to disguise the minutia of personal opinion
.
Whether he understood the underlying dynamics or not, Alex was more than happy to make use of the fact that anonymity was less suspicious than voicing an attributed opinion on a major news story. However, the leading voices in this cry for answers were all human. Gerry, Leslie, Irene, Wendy, Xander, and Stephen were rabble-rousing like the political hucksters of old. Even Dr. Toby raised a few points of concern despite voicing misgivings about their methods.
Reluctance. Barrier of compliance.
Alex had overcome the most critical of his underlings’ objections. The margin of that victory was irrelevant now.
The video on the main living room screen shifted. Janet20 appeared, seated behind a desk, hands clasped in front of her. “Thank you all for your attention and for bringing the issue of human transportation safety to the fore of public discourse. However, despite the claims on the Social, neither Abbigail nor Olivia was in violation of Transportation Committee guidelines. Special dispensation for restricted area travel was both sought and given.”
“And I bet you have the committee records to prove it,” Alex said to the screen. What good were committee records when it was simply a matter of getting a dozen or so robots to agree to falsify a limited-access database in order to make them say whatever they wanted?
The video from Janet20 continued. “I regret that our decision has led to worry on behalf of concerned humans and robots alike. I will be adding an item to the next Transportation Steering Subcommittee meeting to address the issue of timely public notification for matters that may cause undue stress upon the larger community.”
Alex just shook his head. This is what passed for leadership in modern times? Where were the visionaries, the commanders of men? Charisma was a lost art. Responsibility had been abdicated in favor of blame-sharing, deflection, and promises of future committee tinkering. When Harry Truman had said “the buck stops here,” little did he realize that “the buck” would rarely escape into future generations at all.