Reborn

by Lance Erlick

  Synthia’s connection to the bunker’s security system showed Director Zephirelli grilling Machten in the lobby. Synthia’s temperature kept climbing over abandoning her Creator. She didn’t need the distraction, so she suspended all searches and other activities so she could concentrate. Multitasking was one thing, but she hadn’t been in this situation before.

  A database search revealed the car’s driver as a street-gang member who had done time for assault. His eyes darted around the dark alley beyond the car’s lights, no doubt searching for other dangers.

  Drexler had disappeared off the grid when he left the police force, doing odd jobs for men like Kreske. Of the four men in the alley, she identified him as the most dangerous. He was wearing a bulletproof vest that masked her infrared image of his heart. He was also working for Goradine and might suspect what she was. The small device in his left hand posed the biggest threat. Drexler was a cool man, showing no elevation of breathing or heart rate to the carotid arteries in his neck.

  “Put down the gun,” Drexler said to the choker. “Any harm comes to her and the boss will find you.”

  “We did as you said,” the choker said. “The girl didn’t go down when we tried to tranquilize her. Now look what she’s done.” He pointed to Needle-man lying facedown on the ground, blood pooling around his face.

  “You’ll get paid. Now walk away. We’ve got this.”

  “I deserve combat pay for the broken ribs.”

  “I won’t ask nicely again,” Drexler said. “Walk away from the girl.”

  The choker was trembling. His vitals indicated a level of paralysis as he held his ribs with his left hand and looked down on his friend. “What about Larry?”

  “Count of three, drop the gun and step away from the girl.”

  Synthia moved behind her choker. “Please don’t let them take me,” she whispered.

  With her heightened sense of smell, she picked up the scent of his fear-soaked sweat and something else. There were dogs nearby. Letting out a wail pitch that humans couldn’t hear, she got the dogs to bark: a Great Dane, a German shepherd, and others she didn’t wait to identify.

  Drexler fired. Synthia bumped her choker. Two shots missed them both. She pulled her choker behind a dumpster. Drexler fired again. The bullet ricocheted off nearby metal. “There’s nowhere to hide, missy. Come out before you get hurt. We have no desire to harm you.”

  From the cover of the dumpster, she scanned the alley. There was no clear escape and police band was chattering in response to shots fired. They would arrive soon and expose her.

  “Let me go,” she said. “I’m nobody. I don’t know anything.” She spotted a stainless-steel pipe and studied it.

  Drexler took cover in a doorway across the alley that gave him a clearer view of Synthia’s position. If they wanted the choker dead to remove witnesses, he would offer no shield. From the camera across the street, she saw a police car speeding their way. Others were responding.

  Out of time, Synthia did the math. She was too exposed to escape without personal injury or harming the humans. If the men captured her for Goradine, he would copy and weaponize her, putting many lives at risk vs. the three men in the alley. She couldn’t let that happen.

  Synthia grabbed the pipe and used the base of the dumpster to help her bend it into a 90-degree angle. She shielded what she was doing from her choker, who cowered nearby.

  “Last chance,” Drexler said. He fired again, hitting the choker in the shoulder. His driver shuffled alongside the dumpster, his shoes scraping the gravel.

  The choker whimpered and slumped. She grabbed hold of him and wrapped the pipe around his waist with the ends facing forward. She pushed him in front of her toward both Drexler and the driver. The choker held out his gun to protect himself. Drexler and the driver fired simultaneously.

  Based on the angles of the guns, Synthia aimed the pipe openings to receive both shots and redirect toward her assailants. The driver’s bullet penetrated Drexler’s skull between the eyes. Drexler’s gun arm flew up in the air. His next shot glanced off the brickwork above her. Then he collapsed onto the concrete.

  Drexler’s bullet struck the driver in the chest, hitting the nervous man in the heart. In infrared, his heart quivered and stopped pumping. Before he went down, the driver fired again, hitting the choker in the arm. Her remote sensors scanned vital signs for Drexler and his driver. Neither had a pulse or heartbeat. Street cameras showed a police car barreling down the street toward the alley, sirens blaring.

  Her choker groaned and tugged to pull free. She tightened her grip around his injured ribs and double-checked vitals on all three downed men. They were dead, but the choker’s wounds were superficial and the police would be there soon.

  “Stop it,” her choker yelled out. “Who are you?”

  “Someone you don’t want to disappoint,” she said. “Police are on the way. They’ll arrest you for killing those men. Drexler’s boss will kill you for having witnessed this. You should disappear and talk to no one. Go and don’t ever touch another woman.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Take the car,” she told him.

  Holding his chest, he hurried toward the vehicle.

  Synthia sprinted down the alley. Before reaching the end, she jumped up, pulled herself over a wall, and climbed onto a roof. From there, she made her way to the corner. She jumped off the roof, sprinted across the street, and ran down a side street as police approached the alley from both directions.

  Police dash cameras showed the choker get into the car and speed down the alley. A police car blocked his exit. Rather than surrender, the choker gunned the engine and rammed the car. Then he climbed out and fired his gun. A single shot silenced him.

  She noted with curiosity that, over the course of this evening, two men had chosen death, the opposite of self-preservation. She pondered that, but she had her own problems.

  Chapter 18

  Staying in the shadows of trees and bushes, Synthia hurried down a dimly-lit street away from the alley. She regretted the deaths she’d caused by letting herself get distracted and caught in a dangerous situation. She’d calculated a 98 percent probability that Drexler and the driver would die, though she hadn’t fired either gun. While the choker was no saint, she’d let him go with a 79 percent likelihood he would either kill himself or die in a gunfight. If he survived, she calculated almost certainty the police would arrest him.

  She’d weighed the probability he would describe the fantastic events of a woman who did not go down with the tranquilizer shot, who bent pipe with her bare hands, and who deflected two shots. She decided that in the confusion of events, his story would lack credibility.

  She’d calculated only a 19 percent probability that Needle-man would die from her kicks. Hitting his head on the concrete raised that to 76 percent. A medical report she accessed from three months earlier indicated he’d had prior concussions that increased the odds to 97 percent. Her part had only contributed a small share of the outcome, though that knowledge didn’t calm her circuits.

  She had followed her directives in one sense, making sure no one discovered what she was. She’d protected her Creator by calling 911. According to her commands, she hadn’t done anything wrong, except for running away from Machten. Yet the electrical disturbance in her quantum brain told her otherwise. It shouldn’t have been so easy for her to kill, even though there was near certainty that they would have shut her down and dissected her if they’d captured her.

  Most troubling was the possibility that Goradine planned to use her to create an army of androids with no conscience about killing, and possibly sell them to a foreign power. With Asimov’s laws, she would not have killed those men, meaning Goradine would have captured her. She filed that away with her quest for a new set of worthy directives. She would have to address something between Asimov and Maslow, tempered by what she’d witn
essed.

  One good thing was her focus on directives—protecting herself and her secret—had lowered her internal temperature.

  Synthia replayed video from the bunker security cameras now that she was free of those men. Director Emily Zephirelli received a call and quickly left the facility. Synthia traced the call. The words were chilling: “We have reason to believe the men you identified as assaulting Mr. Machten were sent by Mr. Goradine. We’re tracking two other Goradine associates.”

  Sticking to side streets, Synthia sprinted to put distance between her and the crime scene, with its convergence of police. The NSA director also headed that way. Police radio confirmed that the choker was dead, along with the other three men. Synthia moved her bee-drone over the scene and continued running. Nighttime provided some cover, though there were too many cameras to dodge. Using specially designed hacker tools, she accessed home and business security cameras, scrambling their images with as much confusion as she dared until she passed.

  A female detective arrived on the scene of the shootings. She examined the bodies, the car, and the area around the scene. Police records showed that Detective Marcy Malloy had been on the Evanston force for seven years. She shook her head. By the look on her face, this must have been the worst shooting she’d seen in this otherwise quiet Chicago suburb.

  Avoiding most surveillance cameras, Synthia hurried along dark streets and watched Marcy Malloy work. The detective directed a team of three men to check for blood and DNA samples. She bagged the guns, labeling each for where found.

  “Pull camera footage from the stores along the street,” she said to one of the officers, evidently her partner.

  “I don’t see any cameras pointing down the alley,” her partner said. “The only one that might show anything is across the street.” He pointed to a black box that might have picked up the entrance to the alley.

  Synthia made sure that any recording of her history at the scene was scrambled and turned her attention to Fran.

  Her search engines downloaded packets of information on Fran Rogers from before she disappeared. Synthia could find no images of the woman and Machten being intimate, yet the public images left little doubt of a romantic entanglement spanning to before she started working for his company. On the job, company security cameras revealed that they’d worked long hours together in the AI lab on various designs. After work, they rotated having dinner at a half-dozen secluded restaurants that served few late-night patrons, so they could talk and be alone.

  Like many other retail establishments around the area, all of these restaurants had installed internal cameras without sound as a security measure. Synthia’s lip-reading picked up that most of the conversations were about pushing AI limits. She concluded they were intimate because they settled into secluded booths and sat side by side, touching. Toward the end of these evenings, Fran would whisper in his ear something Synthia couldn’t decipher. They kissed and left together. From there, they retired to one of three hotels away from Evanston, where they spent an hour or two before he took her to her apartment and left.

  Synthia reached the diner where Luke lingered in a booth at the back, eyeing his tablet. He was watching the latest android dystopia movie, where robots take over the world. Before venturing inside and attempting to befriend him, she stopped and vented heat from her hurried escape. She also modified her face to the one he’d seen before, though she still had the blond wig Machten had given her.

  She adjusted her blue scarf in her reflection on the diner’s door and entered. She had one chance to get this right and he was a nervous boy.

  He was enjoying himself, though the movie had him on edge. His heart raced, his blood pressure was up. His eyes dilated, trancelike. He might profess to want to create an android, but in a conflict, he would identify with the humans losing control. After her experience with those men in the alley, she could almost empathize with him. Maybe he could help her devise better directives.

  Synthia cleared her throat, an unnecessary act, given her lack of relevant biology, and moved along the aisle between diner booths that had seen better days. She pretended to select a table across from him, and then turned to get his attention. “Luke? Is that you?”

  He looked up. His face flushed. His breathing grew shallow and his heart raced faster. Her mind flashed through the events at the alley in a video loop. She pushed them away and smiled. “It’s me, Synthia. I enjoyed meeting you. I’m sorry I had to dash off.”

  “Uh, yeah. How’s your boyfriend?” His hands fidgeted in his lap, clenching and unclenching.

  She scanned through her empathy modules for ways to put him at ease. “Mind if I join you?” she asked. “He’s my ex-boyfriend and I don’t want to see him.”

  “Are you running away?” Luke asked. She detected a quiver in his voice. His eyes widened and he turned away.

  She nodded and eased herself onto the bench across from him. “I’m pretty sure he didn’t follow me. I wandered up this way, found this place, and thought I’d rest. I’m pleasantly surprised to find you here.”

  Eyes warily narrow, he stared at her. She captured her image in a diner camera and didn’t see anything out of place. She verified her facial alignment to make sure it matched their earlier meeting. “Do I have aliens bursting out of my head?”

  Luke shrugged when a laugh would have been more appropriate. He turned off his movie and pushed his plate of unfinished hamburger aside, all the while stealing glances at her. “I always find the married, engaged, and attached girls.”

  He’d been nice to her and seemed harmless. Given his social awkwardness, she considered whether he had autism. Given grades on his college transcript, it would be high-functioning, Asperger’s syndrome. That appealed to her. It meant they both didn’t fit in, that they were both special. It might also help him to tolerate what she was without freaking out.

  “I’m not married or engaged,” she said. “You’ve found me, so that has to be a good thing, doesn’t it?”

  He smiled and then frowned.

  Synthia lowered her voice. “I can’t go home tonight. You understand. He knows where I live. You’d be doing me a tremendous favor if you’d sit with me for a while.”

  “Will he hurt you?”

  She nodded and inferred Luke’s real question was whether Machten would hurt Luke for helping her. “I’ll be okay. It’s hard, because he acted like a father figure. I’ve outgrown that and he won’t listen.”

  “Is he your father?”

  “No.”

  “Then what hold does he have over you?” Luke asked, staring at her. His question was quite direct for a second meeting. “He’s not your …”

  “Pimp? No! I’m not into that. I’ve had one bad relationship. That’s all. What were you watching that had you so absorbed?” She pointed to his tablet.

  “Android Apocalypse.”

  How original. “You really are into androids.”

  “Not apocalyptic ones, though they may be a natural evolution of the technology.”

  She pulled up posts he’d made on such topics. He was well informed and opinionated for such a shy boy. Maybe he didn’t have autism, just severe introversion. “Wait, aren’t you the Luke Marceau who wrote about artificial intelligences as individuals?”

  “You’re probably the only person who read my stuff.”

  “I found it interesting. It’s nice the meet the author.”

  Synthia held out her hand to shake his and he followed before his shyness caught up. She held a firm grip, until a smile crossed his lips. She patted his hand with her left and let go.

  Her sense of smell detected reduced levels of stressful hormones in his sweat and breath. His eyes relaxed and remained steady on her. She mirrored to encourage a connection, though he didn’t seem to need much encouragement.

  He was wrong about his characterization of AIs as individuals. It wasn�
�t that simple. She’d dispersed bits of herself in multiple copies across thousands of databases. She was everywhere. Her identity was a collection of packets of information scattered across the globe. Yet she considered his attitude useful and encouraging.

  Synthia followed Director Zephirelli via street cameras to the alley and a meeting with Detective Marcy Malloy. After Malloy gave a rundown of her findings, Zephirelli said, “Keep me informed of your findings. This might have bearing on another investigation in process.”

  The detective didn’t appear very happy with what had been a one-sided interrogation.

  All of this attention concerned Synthia. I didn’t ask for any of this.

  “You had brown hair before,” Luke said. “Now you’re blond.”

  She detected a thin wisp of blond bangs hanging over her left eye. She tucked it up under her scarf. Then she lowered her voice and cupped her hands so only Luke could hear. “It’s supposed to be a disguise so I can escape and start a new life. I guess I didn’t fool anyone.”

  “I bet you’d look amazing with any hair color.” He blushed and turned away. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  He shrugged.

  “Tell me about your apocalypse movie.” She downloaded and raced through the movie and online reviews along thirty mind-streams in compressed format, which took twenty-four seconds. The movie presented a frightening scenario for people.

  “Androids get smarter than humans and take over all of our jobs. Then they demand rights. Being smarter, they restrict people ‘for their own good.’ They prevent us from eating, drinking, or smoking—anything that’s bad for us. To keep people peaceful, they surround us with virtual worlds. Since humans are less than perfect, the androids stop us from reproducing. The last humans fight for a home away from the androids.” He lost some of his shyness talking about the movie.

  “You’re afraid of the singularity?”

  “Terrified,” Luke admitted. “An android without rules and constraints would be a psychopath, capable of destroying without remorse. That’s why we need to build in laws to prevent a takeover.”