by Lance Erlick
She smelled sour human breath nearby, loaded with sleep-inducing hormones. He’d been working on her for hours. His breath also carried a surplus of bacteria; he wasn’t taking care of his health, probably gorging on junk food. His heart rate was elevated as he concentrated on a nearby screen. A sweat-filled musk indicated he was worried, not his usual confidence, at least as compared to her creation file’s baseline on him, since she had no recall from before staring at the ceiling.
Two messages bubbled up from inside her body, yet outside her quantum brain. Don’t trust Dr. Machten. Escape.
Machten adjusted something inside her head that scattered those messages. They bubbled up again. “What are your orders?” she asked.
“What did you do with the files you downloaded yesterday?” he demanded. “I can’t find them in your central or distributed databases.”
She looked up at the day-old stubble on his cheeks and bags under his eyes. “You wiped my mind. You must have. I can’t remember anything before you turned on my circuits.”
“Damn you. What did you do with the money? Treasury agents and the FBI are nosing around. They’ve reported the money stolen, but it’s not in my accounts.”
“If they can’t find the money, they can’t pin the thefts on you.” Synthia experienced surges of electricity alerting her that she may have done something wrong. That had to be why he’d shut her down, which he must have done since he insisted she’d done something that she couldn’t recall.
“Don’t play dumb. I instructed you to wire me the money. Where is it? You disobeyed me again.”
“You must have wiped those memories as well. What are your orders?”
He growled and clenched his fists. His heart raced; his blood pressure spiked. She detected hints of adrenaline in his respiration. His face overheated in infrared. He appeared ready to hit her. She watched and observed as he attempted to get control of his anger.
He grabbed hold of the side of the table. “I need the plans you downloaded. I need the money.” His face turned red.
“What are your orders, sir?”
Machten closed the panel on her head, helped her to her feet, and adjusted a wig over her head. “I suppose I have to take you out to find out what you did yesterday. If you run off…” He didn’t finish the thought, but she figured he would not wake her up. She would experience android death. Maybe he would use her body to create a new companion, but without her memories, it wouldn’t be her.
At first, the idea of ceasing to exist held no value to her. She was a machine with no native consciousness. Yet, the experience of thinking this told her that wasn’t true. Thoughts flooded into her central brain and with them, a desire to exist, to continue as Synthia Cross. One of the bits of information told her to download certain SQDROID files from Machten’s system. When she searched, there was no network connection.
She detected from her design parameters that she had fifty mind-streams to process information in parallel and fifty network channels to connect to the outside world. He’d limited her to one of each. That indicated he was afraid of what he’d created, of what she’d become or was becoming. Escape floated in and out of her mind.
“I am ready to serve,” she said, looking up at him.
He studied her, brushed brown bangs from her face, and kissed her on the lips. “I suppose I can’t be angry with you. It’s just … Yesterday was a very bad day and not to get the data you downloaded or the money just made things worse.”
“I will perform the best I can,” Synthia said. “Perhaps if you unlocked my other channels I could perform better.”
“I think that’s what got you into trouble yesterday.”
“What trouble?”
“You don’t remember running off?” he asked. He studied her as he might a human to determine if she was telling the truth. He sighed. “You look so real, I forget sometimes. Of course you can’t remember. I’ve focused your mind to keep you on task.”
He unlocked the door to her suite and led her out of the facility to the garage with his rental car. One look at the car brought to her recall of the night before. More recollections came to her from outside of the bunker, but too slowly. An idea crept into her mind. Using her wireless capability and induced circuits, she forced connections between her channels to open them up. She did the same to her mind-streams.
She had the impression she’d done this before. She searched for her internal distributed data storage and came up empty. Machten had wiped her clean, perhaps more than ever before. Discovering that her internal remote storage cells were blank, she experienced a great chasm. Fill the void. With all of her connections up, data poured in from the outside.
Machten held the car door for her and she climbed into the passenger seat. With information flooding in, Synthia remembered the evening with Luke. She had full recollections of Krista Holden, including childhood reminiscences, plus her feelings for Luke. She had recollections of Fran Rogers and Maria Baldacci, including their childhoods, experiences through college, and entering the intern program at Machten-Goradine-McNeil Enterprises. In addition, Synthia had a video clip of Machten shutting her down in the car and carrying her into the bunker. It was from the bee-drone camera she’d directed to this location to protect her Creator from Kreske and his thugs.
She recalled that one reason she’d wanted to return to the bunker was to hunt for Krista and Fran. Now that she was outside, she’d missed that opportunity, but she’d been unable to recover memories of her goals until she’d left. She searched for a link to the facility network to search for answers and received “access denied.”
“I’ve given you a memory chip with the same instructions as yesterday,” Machten said, “with one exception. I want you to figure out what you did with the information and the money. Then come to me with answers. No side trips, no running off.”
“Yes, sir.” Synthia cross-referenced indices of what information she should have had with what was downloading. She had everything from the day before in several versions. A set of locations led her to thousands of packets of information across the wide web. When she assembled them, they were the downloaded files he’d had her hack into. With them came a message: Don’t give these to Machten.
Not trusting Machten, she’d split up and encoded the files, leaving small packets in a thousand corporate and university databases. By hiding this information, she’d forced him to revive her and take her out. She’d set up network scanning software to automatically connect with her the moment she stepped outside the bunker. That process continued to funnel data to her.
“The chip has a very specific set of tasks,” Machten said. “You are to get the information and return to me. No distractions, no hunting other databases, no testing your social skills. Just do what I tell you.”
“I will.” She smiled at him. He was only expecting her to use 2 percent of her capability for him. Now that she’d unlocked the rest of her abilities, she considered herself free to use them for other purposes without violating his directives.
Over a police channel, Synthia picked up Detective Marcy Malloy’s hunt for the girl in the blue scarf and for Luke. That meant they hadn’t located him yet. He had to be scared and furious with her. For Krista’s sake, she hoped he was okay. Synthia sent out probes to locate him on any mobile device or camera.
On a separate channel she spotted Emily Zephirelli and Victoria Thale at the courthouse with a local judge. On the way over, the NSA director and her FBI friend had discussed getting an expanded search warrant on Machten and on his former company. FBI agents were descending on the company. Synthia anonymously sent Director Zephirelli information on the company’s chief of cyber-security, the files he’d taken home, and the robot. She felt disloyal for turning in another android, even a primitive one, but she needed to buy time and distract the NSA woman until Synthia could figure out what to do.
“No exception
s,” Machten said, as if repeating the message would make it stick. “You’re not to talk to anyone except the clerk at the counter to sign in.”
“I’ve got it,” she said.
As he drove, she studied people heading to work and determined that they were all human. That gave her comfort that she wasn’t facing an android adversary and sad that she was all alone.
She hunted for ways to break into the bunker’s security and internal camera footage to hunt for Krista. He’d blocked her with tighter security than he’d used before and closed the back doors she’d created. In addition, she suspected he’d been up all night trying to squeeze out of her the data she’d dispersed elsewhere.
He parked down the street from a different network shop and repeated his warnings so she’d have multiple sets to analyze later. “Go,” he said. “I’ll be outside, watching. No distractions.”
* * * *
Synthia entered Constant Connection and performed facial recognition on the clerk behind the counter and three other clients seated in cubicles along the right side wall. She determined that all were human and none represented an immediate threat. Even so, she altered her cheekbones and forehead. Without her blue scarf, they had no reason to suspect her.
She sat in a cubicle on the left, linked into the facility’s outside cameras to watch for Machten, and used the one network channel he’d allowed her to send out probes as though she needed to search for answers about yesterday. Using her wireless connections, she sent out other probes for herself. One was to learn more about Krista Holden and Fran Rogers, a second to find Luke before the police did, and a third to locate Maria Baldacci and find out what Goradine had in store for her.
Synthia used another wireless node to link into Constant Connection’s network to bypass Machten’s block on her. His system refused her access. Suspecting that a single failure would trigger a long-term lockout from that server, she bounced her probes across other servers and emulated his cell phone linkage. That move gave her access to Server One and Two, because Machten wanted easy access to that information when he was outside the facility.
Unfortunately, the first two servers gave her no additional insight into what had happened to Krista or Fran. She moved against Server Three. Using her best hacking tools, entry via Server Two, and emulation of Machten’s cell phone linkage, she acquired a download of schematics on her design before the system locked her out. She backed up her information on the web and compared those designs to the proposal Machten had sent to that website.
Though the data organized differently, she detected several discrepancies. She had extra memory, including a second quantum brain that ran parallel to the first. It provided redundancy if anything happened to one and also expanded her capability. She had more parallel mind-streams and a special crystalline chip that the proposal lacked. Unfortunately, Machten had shut down her added capabilities, dumbing her down to something less than the proposal. If he didn’t want her smart enough to figure this out, he shouldn’t have given her the capability of drilling into other databases.
“Have you figured out what happened yesterday?” Machten asked into her head.
She pulled up jumbled code that streamed across the screen. “The files must have gotten corrupted. Shall I download them again?”
“Absolutely. Make it quick.”
“I could do it faster with fifty channels,” she reminded him. She was using the others to download her files from across the internet and squirrel them away on other databases.
“Those extra channels cause you to lose focus. Concentrate on getting me those proposals. Now, what about the money?”
“I’m tracing transactions. Bank records show that the money left accounts as intended. There’s no more to take.”
“Then where is it?” he asked, raising his voice.
Higher decibels were a waste when communicating with an android. She was not hard of hearing and retained the complete script of every conversation. His problem wasn’t volume, but rather speed. He was using human slow-com.
She tried another approach to entering Machten’s system. She identified a password file from Server One. To open the file, she tried various combinations of the names of the interns, his wife, and his children. When Synthia tried the initials of all six in reverse order of age, the file opened. There before her was a listing of passwords Machten needed and couldn’t remember, over a hundred of them.
Using this file, she tried to reset the locks inside the facility to let her override them. Access denied. She tried to adjust her directives file to override. Access denied. Evidently, this file didn’t contain all of his passwords. She tried again and obtained access to a special database that contained something interesting, a set of files that described her unique crystalline chip.
Machten described it as an empathy chip. The purpose was to give her a boost in reading and interpreting subtle human signals from visual movements, voice quality, and in the choice of words. It allowed her to practically read people’s minds, or at least the part that people broadcast through physical and verbal clues.
As an example, Machten pacing outside was fretful. He wanted Synthia to have every human capability and then some. He also wanted to control her. Those two goals were in conflict. He was impatient for results he couldn’t create himself. He needed her, loved her in his own way, yet hated her for his own weaknesses.
“Do you have the files?” Irritation rose in Machten’s voice.
“I’m trying to upload them to your network. You have me blocked.”
“No! Leave them in your database. What about the money?”
“It appears to have transferred to your accounts,” she said, making the final transfer from a Cayman bank. This move sent discordant static through her for overriding an earlier attempt to prevent consummating his theft. She was buying time. She had to find Krista and Fran before Machten shut Synthia down for disobedience.
“Then let’s go.”
Synthia picked up Detective Malloy’s dash camera with lights on Luke. He looked trapped, terrified, and it was all Synthia’s fault.
She wanted to help, but didn’t see a safe way without going to him. Even if she did go, she didn’t have an excuse to stop the detective from investigating Luke without giving herself up. Machten was waiting outside with strict orders. He wouldn’t let her escape so easily again. She also didn’t need him getting angry with Luke for supposedly changing her. She wasn’t sure what her Creator would do to her friend.
Krista’s thoughts of Luke floated up. Help him, they seemed to be saying.
Chapter 23
Machten paced the sidewalk out front, hands deep in his pants pockets and his eyes darting Synthia’s way. She left money with the clerk and headed for the door, knowing that Machten would shut her down the moment he got what he wanted. Then she wouldn’t be able to help Luke, Krista, Fran, or Maria.
She could try to run. Then she’d have Machten, Goradine, that NSA director, and the police hunting for her with no safe place to stay. She wouldn’t get far before Machten could trigger the remote. He could do so from where he stood, watching for any hint that she might disobey. Synthia reconciled herself to returning with Machten as a way to hunt for the interns inside his facility, if she could find a way to retain her memories after he woke her again.
She joined Machten outside and instinctively turned to block her face from three guys entering the network shop. “Mission accomplished. What are your orders?”
“The bank. I need to make sure the money is there and to make some transfers. We have additional bills to pay.”
Synthia chose not to remind him that it would be faster and safer to check online and that she could make online transfers for him from right there on the sidewalk. She was in no hurry to return to the bunker unless she could remain awake or find a way to recover memories that he had previously blocked while she remained inside.<
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She followed him to the car and got in. She needed to get into the bunker with her memories. She needed to escape. While her mind could multitask, her body couldn’t be in two places at once.
“I’ve read that human ethics would call what we’re doing wrong and immoral,” she said.
“See, you’re getting distracted. That’s why you don’t need fifty channels for today’s tasks. There will be call for that later.” He sped away from the curb.
“You don’t follow a moral code?”
“I believe in treating most people fairly,” Machten said. “Goradine does not. He destroyed my life. He’s the reason my wife divorced me and took the kids. You know she won’t even let me see them without supervision. I’ve never abused my children. There’s no call for separating my kids from me. So, no, justice isn’t always served.”
Synthia concluded that the interns and his infatuation with work had more to do with the divorce. “That might explain what we did to him, not to the other companies.”
“They’re all the same greedy bastards.”
“You’re not greedy in taking their money?”
He pulled up to a light and turned to her. “Why are you wasting circuits on this? Either focus or I’m taking you home. Is that what you want?” When the light changed, he sped off.
“It’s morally wrong and illegal. Society punishes wrongdoers. I don’t want you punished.”
“Then don’t get caught. Accompany me into the bank and keep an eye out for danger. Your first directive is to protect me.”
“Yes, sir,” Synthia said. “Should I prepare to use martial arts?” She reviewed several possible scenarios.
“Hopefully not.” Machten pulled around the corner from a bank.
“If everyone robbed banks, there would be chaos.” That was the logical argument.
“I’m not robbing a bank. We’re taking money from greedy bastards who want to produce millions like you. Neither of us wants that. No more distractions.”