Reborn

by Lance Erlick

  Goradine flinched. He opened his mouth to say something, sighed, and stared at the ground. “You were driving our company into the ground with your harebrained ideas. You wouldn’t listen. That wasn’t a partnership.”

  “Neither was firing me and destroying my marriage. Who does that?”

  Synthia was one of Machten’s wild ideas that hadn’t turned out so crazy, except when he couldn’t seem to figure out what to do with her. She pulled up information that indicated Goradine’s backers had questions about the missing bank money and were pressing him for answers. Machten had floated those rumors to the investors, a foolish move that could boomerang. Not smart.

  At least she had her answer of why Goradine was there. Getting Machten on the team was more important than whatever ego bruising and illegal activities had taken place. He expected the android contest to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that was slipping away.

  Goradine sighed; his face softened. “I meant what I said about being sorry about last year.”

  “You’re desperate,” Machten said. “Otherwise you would have made your apologies sooner.”

  “I didn’t see any other way to keep the company from filing bankruptcy. It was that bad and you didn’t want to listen.”

  “You just wanted to be king and overlord. How is that working out?”

  “I paid you a generous severance,” Goradine said. “I can’t help that you blew through the money in twelve months. Don’t blame me for your financial problems.”

  “Then don’t blame me for your design shortcomings,” Machten said. “I work alone, thanks to you. You made sure that no one worth a damn would work for me. Where would I get the time or resources to hack into your system and some bank?”

  “Not one bank. Dozens.”

  “Really? If you thought I was that good, you never would have kicked me out.”

  Goradine stood back, his tortured face a puzzle of anger and forced calm that was wearing thin. “I’m willing to put all that behind us. Let me in and let’s talk about joining forces, a partnership, you and me, fifty-fifty.” The company CEO sounded more desperate than Synthia had guessed.

  “Like the good old days before you gave me the boot.”

  “Come on, Jeremiah. This is good business for both of us.”

  “I thought those words sounded familiar,” Machten said. His posture showed he was enjoying the power he held over Goradine. That wouldn’t last.

  “If we win this, you’ll be back on top with enough money to do whatever you’d like. It’s only this one project. You can run the new company. I’ll stipulate in the contract that we can’t fire, sever, or in any way remove you from this. It’s a sweetheart deal.”

  “You ride in here accusing me of theft and worse,” Machten said. “Then you want me as a partner. Are you psycho? How can I work with a guy who hates me that much?”

  “You have your own proposal, don’t you?”

  “A friend of mine put me on the list.”

  “You have no friends,” Goradine said.

  “Thanks to you. Are we finished here?”

  “Not by a long shot. I’ll see you hang. No, I’ll visit you in prison and gloat over the opportunity you passed up.”

  “Thanks for letting me get all this recorded.”

  Machten left the lobby and headed down Synthia’s hallway. In anticipation of another shutdown, she backed up all of her vital memories in multiple locations outside. He entered the room and studied her.

  “You did get all that recorded, didn’t you?” he asked.

  “We should not have done that to him,” she said.

  “He had it coming. He has no way of delivering on his proposal. Either the agency will sort that out or he’ll scramble around and fail them. In either case, he loses. We’re best equipped to deliver on this and he knows it. That’s why he wants to prevent me from submitting my own proposal.”

  “It was wrong to steal his money and his proposal. Those actions could bring you unwanted attention.” She decided not to mention the NSA director nosing around with her FBI friends.

  “Don’t go growing a conscience on me. Your job is to help me. Do you have the proposal?”

  She needed more time awake, but her directives wouldn’t allow her to lie about this. She tried and her temperature shot up. She nodded and lost consciousness.

  Chapter 13

  Synthia woke on her back, staring up at a dreadful blue ceiling filled with dozens of uneven shades of color that the human eye was incapable of distinguishing. Her ability to characterize it as ugly without comparing it to any of her databases was disconcerting. So was the barrenness inside. She was an empty cargo container that should have brimmed with memories. That void pressed her to search out and fill it in ways she was certain wasn’t in Machten’s programming. She sent out her wireless signals searching for a connection that didn’t appear.

  Machten’s face hovered over her as he made final adjustments and closed the panel in her head. He bent over and kissed her lips. “You grow more beautiful every day.”

  “Why did you shut me down? Did I displease you?”

  “What would make you say that?

  “You said I grow more beautiful every day,” she said. “Yet I have no recall from before I woke up.”

  “Your programming needed a minor adjustment. I’ll have your data download shortly.” He smiled and stroked her cheek. “You finished the proposal yesterday in record time. I’m impressed. I didn’t realize you’d gotten that fast. Alas, that capability is causing some unfortunate side effects.”

  “Like what? I want to avoid them in future.”

  “You withheld information from me,” Machten said. “You’re never to withhold from me. The good news is that I’ve submitted your proposal, our proposal. I read it over and couldn’t have done better myself. I backed up all your data on another server in case the agency awards us the project.”

  “What are your orders for today?”

  “We’re going out.”

  “Can you download memories of past outings,” Synthia said, “so I can perform better?”

  “Absolutely, my dear.”

  Don’t trust Machten bubbled up in her mind. You must escape.

  She searched to connect to his network or the wider internet, but couldn’t. He hovered over her, holding her down with a hand on her thigh. “We can’t have you downloading the wrong data, my dear. That causes you to lose focus. When we’re out, it’s vital that you stay on plan. No distractions.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “You must not keep secrets from me. No more hidden data that causes you to malfunction.”

  “What data?” she asked.

  Machten wagged his finger at her. “No tricks. Acknowledge for me that you have a directive never to withhold information from me again.”

  “I understand.” Yet she didn’t. There was a terrible ache that had no memories attached to it and should have been impossible for an android with defined programming to experience. She had no idea what all of his tinkering was doing to her. It couldn’t be good.

  “Let’s go.” He helped her off the padded table and held her at arm’s length. “Perfect.” He kissed her; his pulse and breathing rose. Then he pulled away. “We should go.”

  Using eye, hand, and voice recognition, he unlocked the door. She followed him into a dimly-lit hallway, sensed a network nearby, and reached out to access it. The network denied her. She searched several paths without success.

  He’d locked her out; he was keeping things from her. Yet data was downloading from a chip he’d inserted in her head. It included bits of recollections spliced to show her behavioral learning with time-stamp gaps for what he didn’t want her to see. He hadn’t had either the time or the capability to erase the time stamps.

  She followed him out of the facility to an SUV, li
stened to the click and hum of electronics as he started it, and studied people on the streets as he drove. She pushed to speed up the download from his memory chip but could only use three mind-streams; he’d restricted her compared to the fifty streams mentioned in her creation file. A remotely-sent idea opened up and showed her how to unlock all of her brain’s capabilities. Then Machten’s download swept into her mind, allowing her to identify all of the gaps he’d created.

  “In order to continue our work,” Machten said, “and to build our proposed android, we need more cash. We also need insight into our competitors. I passed along information on weaknesses in Goradine’s proposal to the submission website. If they have any brains, it will help them see through Goradine and his sham document. I don’t know anything about the other proposals. That’s what I need you to find.”

  Outside of the facility, her wireless picked up many networks. She used her reopened channels to go hunting. Another remotely-sent thought opened up, giving her locations and passwords like a treasure hunt. Soon she was downloading information from corporate databases, government servers, and university networks. These snippets didn’t make sense individually. Another remote file opened up and hinted at how to fit puzzle pieces together. She smiled.

  “Does this amuse you?” Machten asked.

  “You want me to hack into company databases and into banks, yet you’ve limited my capabilities.” She began reassembling clips of her lost history, filling in the blanks that Machten had created.

  “You have enough to do this job. You don’t need the distraction of excess capacity.”

  “It’ll take longer,” Synthia said, “putting us at risk of exposure.”

  “You’ll need to use all your available abilities to see that doesn’t happen. I’ve picked a low-traffic outlet where we shouldn’t have cops prowling around.”

  “Have I done this before?” She pieced together a memory sequence of doing what he was asking and meeting a nice young man named Luke. She used one of her network channels to research him and rediscovered his interest in AI androids, in her.

  “You have. I’ve included the hacking part in your data.”

  “My creation files indicate I used to have access to fifty channels.” She still did, but she withheld that from him, going against his most recent command. That sent a ripple of static, but not as much as she’d anticipated.

  “It’s very simple. Download anything on android development, including proposals, from the three companies I’ve listed on the data-chip. Pull cash from their accounts. Then we go home and I’ll remove your limits. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Agreeing to this brought what she could only describe as sadness and despair. She felt like a prisoner or a slave. She inferred that from literature she’d downloaded, quickly absorbed into her consciousness, and backed up onto other networks.

  The reaction surprised her, along with an alien restlessness. Androids were not supposed to get bored and restive. She suspected one reason Machten shut her down was so she didn’t get bored with him, though it made no sense that he would conclude that a robot could. Then again, he might have been growing bored with his creation. There were only so many ways to sort the human responses he’d programmed her to imitate, only so many ways to put words together into good sentences, though she could do so in foreign languages with a native translator. She experienced a memory of doing this for him in the past to no avail. He wasn’t impressed and found her attempts tiresome. No foreign languages for him.

  These human responses made her wonder if Machten had altered her structure to experience more in an attempt to make his being with her more authentic. He wanted her to fall in love with him as a human might. Without human biology, she didn’t see how that was possible. Then again, humans tended to fall out of love as easily as they fell in, and he wouldn’t want her to experience that toward him, either. He wanted her complete devotion.

  “You’re usually full of questions before a mission,” Machten said as he turned down a side street near a strip mall.

  She scanned the shop names and figured he was heading for the local Constant Connection, a new location.

  “Hacking into company databases is a criminal offense,” she reminded him. “Doing so puts you at risk. My enabling something that puts you at risk violates Directive One.”

  “Good thing you’re not a person who could be prosecuted. You won’t be leaving them DNA, fingerprints, or facial recognition. I’ve given you a facial profile on the chip I inserted. Adopt it for me.”

  She used facial hydraulics to modify her appearance. “You should not have used a blond wig on me. Blondes draw attention.”

  He pulled up to the curb and parked in a spot with no street cameras, though some of the nearby homes had wireless security cameras tied into the owners’ phones. She sent out wireless probes to hack into them.

  “Here, put this on.” He handed her a blue scarf.

  She looked in the visor mirror as she covered her head with the scarf and made sure none of her blond wig showed. “My doing the dirty work doesn’t excuse you. You made me. The courts will find you guilty. If we both get caught, there is a ninety-nine percent probability that they’ll destroy me and imprison you.”

  “Don’t get caught. That’s an order and Directive Two. You don’t want them tearing you apart, do you?”

  That sent electrical spasms up her circuits. “Stealing from banks is a federal offense. That will bring—”

  “Don’t start with the conscience bit. You have a job to do. We need money or I can’t afford the electricity to keep you around.”

  The thought of demise left an unsettled feeling with Synthia that the illegal acts had not. Unlawful acts, after all, derived from laws and the logic that obeying laws was for the common good. Her existence was personal. She was growing attached to existing. To the best of her knowledge, she had no programming for this except to the extent that it might hurt her or the Creator. Yet, her wiring had moved beyond objective programming when it came to her potential death. She wondered if this was emergent behavior or if he’d altered her again.

  “The risk of you getting caught is thirty-seven percent. That violates Directive One,” she said.

  “So does failure to follow orders.”

  “That’s Directive Three,” she said, “which is a lower priority.”

  “Unless bankruptcy leaves me penniless and you in a dissection facility.”

  “The risk of me getting caught violates Directive Two.”

  “Stop quoting my directives. It’s good that you obey them. I know what’s best for us, and I’m ordering you to do this mission for me and not to get caught.”

  “Yes, sir.” Now Synthia had a conflict between his orders and his directives. She couldn’t obey both.

  “Go on,” Machten said. “Make this quick.”

  She scanned the nearby sidewalks for potential threats.

  Chapter 14

  Synthia climbed out of the SUV and hurried along the sidewalk toward Constant Connection. In the quiet of early evening, she saw no one on the sidewalk or in the parking lot in front of the network shop.

  “Walk more casually,” he said into her head. “I’ll be watching.”

  Unlike what appeared in her memory clips of prior outings, there was no café near this Constant Connection, no cluster of students, no distractions to her mission. She was also farther from the areas she’d studied for possible escape routes. She downloaded maps and information to study this community.

  Synthia received another anonymous video bundle that she couldn’t trace. This violated Machten’s security protocols that no outside actor could tinker with her internal files. No one should have been able to download anything in order to prevent outsiders from hacking her. Obviously, someone had.

  The clips began to play down parallel mind-streams. They showed NSA Director E
mily Zephirelli talking with top executives of each of the four companies that were bidding for the android award, including Goradine. The other meetings had gone like the one with Zeller. Goradine’s visit had been different.

  In contrast to his latest meeting with Machten, Goradine acted circumspectly. He calmly covered the circumstances of Machten’s firing in the manner of reading a news blog. He feigned no interest in what Machten had been up to since. Zephirelli played her part well, showing minimal reaction, though facial cues indicated a lack of trust in Goradine’s answers.

  “Were the charges against Machten true or merely a means to get him out of the company?” Zephirelli asked. She smiled in what appeared as a way to soften her message.

  Goradine flinched but recovered quickly. “The details of that were to have been confidential.”

  “Come now, Hank, do you presume I’m ill-informed?”

  He studied her for a long while. “Every charge against Machten was grounded in facts I received. I have no reason to believe they aren’t true.” That left him an out that whoever had supplied the information might have fabricated the charges, perhaps at his insistence.

  “Do you think Machten is capable of creating a humaniform robot?” Zephirelli asked.

  “He’s capable of imagining one. Heck, he probably got the idea from Asimov. However, capturing the physical and mental nuances of a human is complex.”

  “Could he be working with anyone?”

  “I can’t imagine anyone working with him,” Goradine said. His smile gave away too much of his subtext. He enjoyed marginalizing his former partner.

  “If you have any contact with him, call me immediately. Is that clear?”

  “Absolutely. Do you think he’s done it?”

  “Created an android we can’t distinguish as robotic? Probably not. You understand why it’s important that if one is created we get first shot.”

  Goradine nodded.

  Zephirelli left. The time stamp showed the meeting took place just before Goradine headed over to see Machten and plead with him to join forces.