Engineered Tyrant

by J. S. Morin

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Abby’s campaign headquarters was an expansion building in downtown New York. Drone construction crews had been erecting and maintaining high-rise structures in the city for years in anticipation of a population explosion that had yet to materialize. Paul208 and Phoebe had laid out all the blueprints and simply turned the drones loose.

  All Abby was doing was putting one of the buildings to proper use. As she took a transparent-aluminum-windowed lift up the side of the skyscraper, she surveyed the ghost city spread out before her.

  She shook her head in dismay. “Why would anyone build housing for two million when the human population is under three hundred?” Not to mention that many of those were under age. Building spare housing around Oxford at least might have made sense in the short term.

  With a million pressing concerns aboard her mind, Abby nonetheless diverted her train of thought to a course of action that might justify the wanton excess. The obvious was that Phoebe or Paul208—possibly both—enjoyed the aesthetic of a giant metropolis even without the need of one. She hoped that was the case, wasteful as it might have been. But darker motives crept in.

  What if there was a plan in place to mass-produce, mass-educate, and mass-emancipate humans at a rate heretofore unheard of? There were already grumblings on the Social that the quality of emancipated humans varied wildly from the same genetic stock. Though it was an anonymous minority, an unknown number of robots advocated for a more regimented approach to raising young humans than the time-honored family unit.

  Could it have been Alex’s doing?

  “No,” Abby told herself, alone in the lift car. “He wants the opposite.”

  Abby had an appreciation of cloning on many levels. Clean, safe, and painless, it allowed for a new life to begin without imperiling another. It was how her mother and father had been born. It was how Abby had come into the world. And, someday, if she chose to raise children herself, it was how hers would be born.

  The lift ride ended before Abby had sorted out today’s existential dilemmas. She left distracting worries behind her in the car as she exited the lift on the penthouse floor.

  “Hey, Ab-ster,” Billy called out, rising from a table where he’d camped out with a portable computer. “Polling is looking good.”

  Abby rolled her eyes as she headed straight for the coffee maker. “How accurate can you really think a poll is if everyone learns how they work in grade school?”

  Psychology experiments were notoriously unreliable when the subjects knew they were being tested. If there was a difference with a political poll, Abby couldn’t see it.

  “We’re running five points up from yesterday,” Rosa informed her, shoving a computer screen between Abby and her brewing pot of Columbian dark roast. “This is all so exciting.”

  It was nice that her friends had decided to make her campaign to keep the status quo their cause célèbre. But it would be nicer if they let her regulate her caffeine levels to the point where she could match their enthusiasm.

  When her coffee was ready, Abby blew across the surface to cool it as she ambled over to the windows. Overlooking Central Park, this would have been prime real estate in the Human Era. Something to fight over. Someplace that would have commanded respect. But to either side, there were vacant buildings that would have served just as well.

  “We’re getting volunteers,” Nigel called from across the room, not rising from the workstation where he’d buried himself in portable consoles and freshly cloth-o-maticked slogan t-shirts. He held one up. It was white with red and blue lettering that said: Envision the Future. “What do you think?”

  “Why are the top halves of the letters red and the bottoms blue?” she asked, taking a sip of coffee to indicate that was the extent of her opinion on the garment.

  Nigel shrugged. “I tried it with blue on top and red on the bottom, and this looked better.”

  Good enough for her, Abby supposed. The artist in her would have liked something more iconic, more inspiring, but with less than half a cup of coffee in her veins, she just didn’t have the vision to explain how to do any better.

  Plus, she didn’t really care.

  This campaign wasn’t about sweeping elections that would rewrite the fate of mankind, it was about quashing Alex Truman’s efforts to overturn the apple cart and undo decades of work integrating humanity into robotic society.

  Alex wanted Eve’s job and more. Abby just wanted her mom to stay on as chair of the Human Welfare Committee.

  “I told him it’s crass, folksy, and outdated,” Rosa said. “But then again, so is politics. I hope you don’t mind, but I nixed bumper stickers for everyone’s skyroamers.”

  Abby cringed. “Who would do that?”

  Billy snickered. “I know. Right? Think of the aerodynamic drag.”

  “Hey,” Nigel said. “None of you wanted to put in the work studying two-hundred-fifty years worth of parliamentary, congressional, and presidential campaigns. I distilled this nonsense down to its core tenets: visibility, positivity, steadfastness.”

  Abby’s fingers tightened around her coffee cup. She was such a fraud. None of that was her. She worked best alone in the privacy of her apartment. She was cynical to the core. If there was one of the three where the jury was still out, it was on steadfastness. In a trick of circular logic, she wouldn’t know whether she had it or not until it was beyond the point of planning for it.

  “I’ve been thinking about the rally,” Abby lied. It would have been more accurate to say that she’d been avoiding thinking too carefully about it because it made her nauseous. The confirmations on the Social and projections for spontaneous attendees put her potential audience over a hundred. There were currently 172 emancipated humans. She could end up addressing the voting majority of her species.

  Nigel held up three fingers. “Three points. Any more and you’ll lose narrative impact.”

  Rolling her eyes, Abby laid out her platform. “I want to talk about parenting initiatives, education reform, and career assistance. Newton knows I could have used some of the latter.”

  “Don’t use terms like—”

  “Quit it!” Abby snapped. “I’m not addressing nineteenth-century country bumpkins. Everyone knows what former and latter mean. I can’t go out in front of a crowd and be someone I’m not unless I have a script.”

  “Isn’t that the whole point?” Rosa asked. She finished making a cup of coffee for herself and joined Abby at the window. “It’s not like you’re a real politician. It’s just a role.”

  Abby frowned, chastened by the frank assessment of her candidacy. She sipped at her coffee to hide her lack of a ready retort. “Is Alex a real politician?” she asked lamely.

  Rosa set down her coffee and drew Abby into a hug. “Of course not, girl. He’s just a physicist with a hair across his lens about getting access to that alien tech. He’s reading out of the same playbook as Nigel. They both have access to the sum of human history. It’s all down to who can act the part. Lucky for us, we’ve got Earth’s premier actress on our side.”

  Abby forced a smile. Right. Politicians were all phony back in the Human Era. Why wouldn’t an actress be better at it than a lab rat like Alex Truman?

  There was a buzz from the lift.

  “We expecting anyone?” Abby asked.

  Shrugs and shaking heads were their only responses.

  “Come on in,” Abby replied. If anyone was interested in campaign espionage, the last thing they’d be doing was pressing the door alarm to come off the lift.

  In walked a young man in a flat black t-shirt emblazoned with the motto: All of us are stronger than any of us. It was the most remarkable feature about him. The human inside the shirt was gangly with lingering puberty and hunched with an air of uncertainty that clung to him along with the faint odor of needing a shower.

  “What’re you doing here, Xander?” Abby asked, folding her arms. It took an expert coffee drinker to perform the act while not spilling a h
alf-full cup.

  If Abby was less than welcoming, Billy was outright hostile. “Get lost, thug.”

  “He’s not armed,” Nigel pointed out, aiming a finger at the young man’s bare arms.

  “Hi, Abby,” Xander said without looking her in the eye. “Mind if I pitch in?”

  “What’s the matter?” Rosa asked sarcastically. “Alex drum you out of the propaganda army?”

  “No!” Xander replied defensively. “I quit. I thought this whole thing was a poke in the eye to the committees. Alex wanted access to his dark energy tech. He got it. Now he’s trying to oust Eve… trying to dissolve the Human Welfare Committee. I’m afraid what’ll happen if he wins.”

  Abby raised her hands overhead and looked to the ceiling, still carefully preventing her coffee from spilling. “Hallelujah. Finally, the brainwashed cultists start thinking for themselves.”

  “He’s a plant,” Billy said firmly. “We’ve got ten applicants for volunteer positions and nothing for them to do. You wanna help, little man? Vote for Abby on November 7th.”

  “C’mon,” Xander pleaded, hugging his arms to his body. “I’m sticking my neck out here. I’ve been on the inside. I can tell you what Alex is planning.”

  Abby shared a glance with Rosa. In the background, Nigel shrugged.

  What was the worst that could happen? If they suspected he was working for Alex Truman, Abby and her friends could mitigate any potential damage by managing the information he had access to. If he was on the up and up, they might gain access to a treasure trove of data on their opponent.

  Her opponent.

  Abby had to remind herself that at the end of the day, this was a confrontation between her and Alex. No other candidates had put themselves forward. There wouldn’t be rosters listed in the final tally of the votes, just the names at the top. It was a choice between an inspirational figurehead who wanted to keep the committee machinery in place mostly as is and a radical who claimed that if they tore it all down he could fashion a utopia from the scrap.

  “What can you give us?” Billy asked, clearly still unconvinced. “What secret plans has Alex Truman got up his sleeves?”

  Xander scoffed. “You don’t get it, do you? It’s not a trick. None of it is tricks. You’ve got an issue? He’s got an answer. Alex put all his research on hold to learn the circuitry that runs Earth’s operating system—the committees, the cliques, the regulations, everything. He’s better prepared, more driven, and smarter than Abby.

  “And I’m scared to death of the Earth he’s going to build.”

  “All of a sudden…” Billy said.

  Abby studied the defector. He was clearly nervous, but he seemed more agitated than simply being an applicant for a job that might not even exist. “Does Alex know you’re here?” she asked.

  Xander shrugged. “It was his idea I come.”

  Billy knocked his chair over leaping to his feet. The self-righting mechanism wasn’t quick enough to counteract the sudden shift; it rose steadily behind him until it was upright once more. “Aha! He even admits it.”

  Abby shook her head. “What were his exact words?”

  “Exact?” Xander said, furrowing his brow and looking out the window a moment. “I think it was ‘go drag Abby Fourteen’s campaign down with that wishy-washy bullshit of yours.’ Something like that, anyway.”

  “Sorry. We don’t need any more help,” Billy said, shaking his head sternly.

  But that wasn’t his call to make. The buck stopped with Abby. “Hey. Are we in the politics business or not? You’ll start out as a probationary intern for now. Consider yourself hired.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  If there was one tip that Abby and her advisers gleaned from Xander in his first days with the campaign, it was that the wonders of the modern age worked in her favor. Alex might have been a scientist, but his message hearkened back to an Earth ruled by humans. His plan required mankind to reverse their current course before heading down a new path.

  Abby could afford to look forward and, more importantly, look around her.

  While she had never studied genetic engineering formally, Evelyn99 had been a great help in getting her up to speed to the point where she was qualified to guide a tour through the Center for Human Advancement on Madagascar.

  Including her normal coterie of friends, Abby walked backward at the head of a mass of thirty-three tourists. The number wasn’t a coincidence. Abby wanted to keep the achievements of the thirty-three scientists, and the amazing achievements of humanity thanks to their work, at the fore of everyone’s minds.

  “Most of you probably haven’t been back here since the day you were born,” Abby said. Eve had made sure that Abby had seen the factory’s inner workings at a young age, but even she hadn’t been inside one in years. “Since I’ll be speaking at length about programs to encourage robotic parenthood, I wanted everyone to get a firsthand look at what modern cloning looks like. It’s come a long way since clandestine experiments in subterranean labs.”

  Abby hadn’t been born in one, but her first cellular divisions had taken place in one of those labs. Vast and well exercised as her imagination was, she had difficulty reconciling the fact that at one time she had existed as a single cell.

  “This is where tomorrow’s generations are conceived.”

  Abby paused at a catwalk overlooking a production floor. It was small by industrial standards. This segment of the factory was only twenty meters on a side. Accessing the guest console, she brought up a magnified image that showed up close what one of the armatures down below was doing.

  On the screen, a hazy, irregular circle showed. From one side of the image, the tip of a needle entered, bulky and hollow with a beveled tip, details clear under heavy magnification. With machine precision, the needle pierced the circle, which puckered under the pressure before the tip punctured.

  A darker substance entered the circle, spewed forth by the needle.

  “That was, in essence, the conception of a new life,” Abby narrated, gesturing to the screen.

  “Should we have been watching that?” someone in the crowd joked to a chorus of nervous chuckles.

  “Life is beautiful,” Abby responded without missing a beat. She’d been prepared for far cruder commentary at this stage of the tour. “Thanks to the sterile mechanics involved, we get front-row seats to the scientific miracle that made our lives possible.”

  “Same as every other animal,” another of her tourists commented. “From plankton to monkeys.”

  “Homo sapiens are far more complex developmentally,” Abby explained, though the point was well known by anyone who’d paid attention in second-grade science class. “We’ll get to see how the Center for Human Advancement handles that in this next room.”

  She led the way next door, grateful that the robotic staff had vacated ahead of them for purposes of the tour. Every mixed robot understood that Abby was their ally in this campaign for the hearts and minds of humanity. They allowed her free run of the factory and the illusion that it was a place for humans, by humans, that made humans.

  In reality, Abby and her ilk were, at best, mascots.

  Only Abby’s Aunt Sally had taken up genetics from among the Second Era humans. And after a short, undistinguished career, she’d taken to parenting full time. Of the three young humans who’d been incubated the old-fashioned way, two had been Sally’s.

  The main factory floor dwarfed the fertilization lab. Stark white floors and walls gleamed in antiseptic perfection. Tidy aisles led down paths that ran past row upon unending row of incubators. At one point, there had been a number of different models customized for varied stages of embryonic development. In the modern factory, the Auto-Womb 12.4 Hs did all the work.

  “There’s no longer a significant failure rate post fertilization,” Abby said, raising her voice over the hum of thousands of incubators pumping nutrients, filtering waste, and providing warmth to their charges. “Each fertilized cell gets its own incubator. That wil
l be its home until birth. If there isn’t a set of parents waiting, the blastocyst will be frozen via a rapid-freezing process called vitrification. This is the only significant risk left in the pre-natal process. If we can encourage a higher rate of parenting among robots and humans, we can reduce the need for pausing development.”

  The tour proceeded through the early developmental stages to where the embryos began to look like larval humans with primitive features that were clearly identifiable as limbs.

  Someone shrieked, and everyone in the tour turned to stare. “Blood!” It was Xander Paulson, her soon-to-be-ex campaign intern.

  Abby reacted quickly. “It’s normal. The skin hasn’t yet—”

  “Someone help them!” Xander screamed. He clawed at the controls for the incubator, which showed a perfectly healthy 6-week-old embryo.

  “Someone grab him!” Abby ordered. “Before he hurts it.”

  It felt awkward and inhuman to refer to the embryo as “it” but there wouldn’t be a judgment of its gender for another week or so. There were occasions when scientific correctness just didn’t sound right.

  There was sufficient outrage and resolve within the tour group that three of them managed to restrain Xander. If this was a put-on, he was selling it well.

  “This isn’t real!” Xander shouted. “That’s not how humans should look! This is all the robots’ doing. They made up the Human Era. It’s all science fiction to fool us. We aren’t little worms growing in factories! We’re alive!”

  Rosa exchanged a glance with Abby as robotic staffers arrived to help remove Xander from the facility before his flailing attempts to break free caused actual damage. Billy kept his focus on Xander, but Abby could sense the “I told you so” emanating from him.

  Nigel came up behind Abby and whispered in her ear. “Should go without saying, but we have to cancel the event tonight. This backdrop is too hot right now. It would look callous to hold a rally after this.”