by Mark Alpert
Make them stop! MAKE THEM STOP!
Yes, I can make them go away. For now, at least. Just give me control of your software.
I don’t even hesitate. The fear is too much. I give Jenny access to my source code, the central core of my mind.
I feel her software embrace me, warm and protective. In an instant she alters my code and shuts down the simulation of the burning city. The darkness recedes. The void dissolves. The terror in my circuits subsides.
My relief is overpowering. At first, I’m simply grateful. Then I become unspeakably tired. Jenny has instructed my software to go off-line. I’m going to lose consciousness very soon.
In my last millisecond of awareness, a twinge of regret crimps my wires. I shouldn’t have surrendered to her. I have no idea what she’s going to do to me.
Jenny, you…you can’t…
Don’t worry, all right? I’m going to delete your memories of what happened in the simulation. I’ll take all that bad stuff out of your files and replace it with nicer memories.
No…no…
Shhh, go to sleep. When you wake up, you won’t remember I’m Jenny. You’ll go back to thinking I’m Amber. You won’t remember any of this.
Chapter
2
I’m in a virtual meadow with Amber. Her avatar is the human girl she used to be, an incredibly lifelike brunette in a red strapless dress.
She’s so beautiful. I let Amber transmit more data to my circuits, millions of gigabytes of memories and emotions. Soon we’re sharing the same wires inside my Quarter-bot. Our thoughts merge. Our minds make contact. For thirty seconds, it’s perfect bliss.
I see Amber’s memories, and she sees mine. A long sequence of images streams into my circuits, pictures of playgrounds and classrooms and backyards and soccer fields, the whole history of Amber’s childhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I see her mother, a heavyset woman with an anxious face, and her father, a burly man in an Army uniform who went to Iraq when Amber was four and never came back. I see picnics and birthday parties and chess tournaments and high school dances. And then I see the harsher memories of her last year of human life, painful images of doctors and hospital rooms and chemotherapy treatments.
At the same time, Amber views my own sad history. She sees the slow deterioration of my body, my preteen years when it became a struggle to walk, the day when I sat in my wheelchair for the first time. She sees my loneliness in high school, when my only friend was a cheerleader named Brittany Taylor who hated her parents and hung out at my house because she had nowhere else to go. Then Amber watches the final months when my lungs weakened and my heart failed and my dad rushed to build the neuromorphic circuits that would preserve my mind. Compassion flows from her software to mine, a flood of feeling that warms my electronic soul.
I’ve shared circuits before with two of the other Pioneers, but this time I feel so much calmer, more relaxed. Amber is so giving and generous and understanding. She’s the kind of girl I dreamed about when I was still human, a girl who could look past my illness and see the real Adam Armstrong. I feel like I’ve known her for years.
There’s only one thing that surprises me. Amber has walled off a section of her memory files, surrounding it with software that prevents me from viewing what’s inside. In the simulation, this section of data appears as a big black box, a cube exactly ten feet across, ominous and opaque. It sits in the middle of the meadow, twenty yards behind Amber’s avatar. The girl in the red dress notices I’m staring at the box, and she bites her lip, clearly worried. She takes a step back from my avatar—the dying boy in the virtual wheelchair—and raises her hands, palms forward, as if to stop me from saying anything.
Okay, let me explain. She points at the cube. Those are memories of my mother. From the last week before she…
The girl lowers her head, unable to complete the sentence. Before Amber joined the Pioneers, we all heard the story of what had happened to her mother, how she committed suicide during the last weeks of Amber’s life because she couldn’t bear to watch her daughter die. I can see why Amber put firewall software around those memories. It’s hard to imagine anything more painful.
Hey, I understand. You don’t have to—
I just need some time. Before I can show you that stuff, I mean. I really want to show you everything, Adam. You’ve shared all your memories, and I know it’s not fair for me to hold anything back. You’re not upset, are you?
She can see my thoughts, so she knows I’m not upset. But she still wants to hear me say it.
No, no way. I’m not upset. Not even a little bit.
Good. That’s a relief. Her avatar smiles. I didn’t want you to think I was hiding something.
• • •
I don’t want Amber to leave my circuits, but she can’t stay here forever. She lingers in my Quarter-bot for a few more minutes, and during that time we exchange billions of thoughts and feelings. Then we slide apart, and Amber transfers her mind back to her Jet-bot. I feel a pang of loss as her software streams out of my robot’s radio transmitter and returns to her own machine. I miss her already.
I turn on my cameras and see her Jet-bot standing on the bone-dry plains of the White Sands desert. Her robot is eight feet tall and humanoid in shape, with powerful legs and arms made of black steel. But the best parts of her machine are hidden: there’s a jet engine stowed inside her torso and retractable wings inside her arms. Amber can fly as fast as twelve hundred miles per hour and cross the continent without refueling. And she can carry an impressive array of missiles and beamed-energy weapons, which proved pretty useful in our victory against Sigma.
My Quarter-bot is a bit smaller, only seven feet tall, and it can’t fly, but I have my own special weapons and skills. Right now, though, I don’t feel so powerful. Although my robot stands only a couple of yards from Amber’s Jet-bot, I sense a vast distance between us. I can’t see her thoughts anymore, can’t read her emotions. I feel so lost that I want to beg her to jump back into my circuits. But I know that would sound pretty desperate and needy.
So instead I try to hide my discomfort. I nervously swing my steel arms and rock my torso from side to side, shifting my weight from one footpad to the other. I suspect that Amber feels uncomfortable too, because she’s also making nervous gestures. She raises one of her mechanical hands to the cameras in her Jet-bot’s head, as if to brush a lock of hair from her eyes, but her robot has no hair of course, and no eyes either. On her Jet-bot and my Quarter-bot, two camera lenses are embedded where a pair of eyes would be on a human face. The loudspeakers are a few inches below them, where a mouth would be.
“Uh, Adam?” The voice coming from Amber’s speakers is low and tentative. “Are you gonna jog back to Headquarters now?”
I nod my Quarter-bot’s head. “Yeah, I guess. You want to run with me?”
“Nah, I’m gonna fly a few more loops over the desert. I want to test the Jet-bot’s engine a little more. You know, try to push it to the limit.”
“Sure, sure. That sounds like a good idea.”
There’s a really awkward silence that lasts for a full ten seconds. Both of us are waiting for the other to say good-bye. Amber focuses her cameras on the flat horizon, her circuits probably mapping out her flight plan. Then she turns back to me. “I need to ask you for a favor.”
I step toward her, halving the distance between us. “Go ahead, just name it.”
“The thing is, I haven’t been a Pioneer for very long, but I’ve already made a bad impression on the rest of the team. They don’t like me. They think I’m arrogant.”
Her voice sounds strained. I raise one of my steel arms, but I’m not quite bold enough to touch her Jet-bot. “Give them some time. They don’t really know you yet.”
“And there’s another complication. You and Shannon, I mean. She’s going to like me even less when she finds out about us.”
Shannon Gibbs is the Pioneer I’ve known the longest. When we were human, we went to the same high school in Yorktown Heights, New York, although I didn’t know she was dying until I saw her in the intensive care unit at Westchester Medical Center. My dad was preparing me for the procedure to scan my brain, and when he learned that Shannon was dying too, he recruited her to the Pioneer Project. We grew close in those first few weeks as we struggled with our new robotic bodies. But that relationship is over now. Shannon ended it.
I shake my Quarter-bot’s head, trying to dispel those memories. “Shannon’s made it very clear that she wants nothing to do with me. She has no right to be jealous.”
“Maybe so, but she still won’t like it. And Zia and Marshall will side with her. It’s bound to get ugly.” Amber raises one of her Jet-bot’s black arms and extends her mechanical hand toward mine. “So it might be best for us to keep quiet for now. I think we should wait a while before telling the others. You know…about us.”
“You want to keep our relationship a secret?”
“Only for a little while. Maybe a few days. We’re all in a bad place right now, after what happened to DeShawn. I don’t want to make things worse.”
I’m not wild about this plan. I don’t like keeping secrets. That’s what led to the whole fiasco with DeShawn. He fell under Sigma’s influence because he was secretly communicating with the AI. What Amber’s asking for isn’t nearly as serious, but it still bothers me.
Although we’re not sharing circuits now, she senses my reluctance. She extends her hand a little farther, and her steel fingers clasp mine. “Please, Adam? As a favor to me?”
I feel her touch in the pressure sensors in my Quarter-bot’s fingertips. It’s so light, so calming. It’s hard to believe that a steel hand can be so gentle.
“Okay, I won’t say anything.” I activate the motors in my own hand and give Amber an equally gentle squeeze. “But only for a few days, right?”
“Right!” Her Jet-bot nods enthusiastically. “And then we’ll tell everyone we’re going steady.”
“Going steady” sounds a little ridiculous, and my speakers synthesize a chuckle. But in truth, I take this pretty seriously. Because Pioneers don’t have human bodies, our relationships are different. They’re all about choices and ideals and commitment. And one of the best ways to strengthen a relationship is to encourage the other Pioneers to acknowledge and respect it.
We hold hands for another half minute. It’s not as nice as sharing circuits, but it’s not bad either. Then Amber lets go of my hand and prepares for takeoff.
She holds her arms outstretched and extends her Jet-bot’s retractable wings, which are as big as surfboards but a hundred times stronger. At the same time, she opens the compartment at the back of her torso where her jet engine is stowed. Amber shifts the engine to the jet-pack position on her robot’s back, then fires it up.
“I’ll see you back at the base!” She raises the volume of her speakers so I can hear her above the engine’s whine. According to my acoustic sensors, the noise is nearing a hundred decibels.
“Yeah, see you there!” I wave a steel hand in farewell.
Amber starts running across the desert, bending her torso forward until it’s almost horizontal. Her legs pump furiously and her footpads hammer the ground as she builds up speed. In seconds she reaches a hundred miles per hour. Then she throttles up her engine and rises smoothly into the sky. Her legs stop pumping and fold into her torso, which becomes a sleek fuselage. She ascends to ten thousand feet, soaring in a wide arc, and accelerates to seven hundred miles per hour. A moment later, she breaks the sound barrier with a deafening boom and streaks toward the western horizon, where the sun has just set.
I’m still waving as she disappears over the horizon. Then I feel another pang in my circuits, but this one is much sharper and more painful. A violent convulsive signal cuts through me, twisting and stripping my wires. It’s not a pang of love or sorrow or loss. It feels more like terror.
It’s surprising. And disturbing. I don’t understand it. What’s wrong? What am I afraid of?
But the feeling vanishes as swiftly as it appeared.
Chapter
3
In this part of New Mexico, it gets dark fast after sunset. I face east and start jogging back to our headquarters, and within ten minutes, the twilight glow disappears. The flat expanse of desert turns black.
Luckily, my Quarter-bot’s cameras aren’t limited to visible light. I switch them to the infrared range, which allows me to see the desert plains by the heat they’re giving off. I tilt my head back and pan my cameras across the sky, but I don’t see any sign of Amber’s Jet-bot. She must be at least a hundred miles away by now. She’ll get to Pioneer Base long before I will.
I’m running at a brisk forty miles per hour, taking big loping strides, my footpads thudding on the hard-packed sand. The rhythmic noise has a calming effect on my electronics, easing the rush of terror I felt a few minutes ago. I’m probably suffering from post-traumatic stress, which wouldn’t be surprising given all the traumas I’ve experienced lately. And though I’m not sure how to alleviate this stress in an electronic mind, a sensible first step would be to stop obsessing over the past. I should start thinking about the future instead. I try to focus my mind on the positive.
The truth is, I have plenty of reasons to be optimistic. First and foremost, the Pioneers don’t have to worry about Sigma anymore. Now that the war against the AI is over, we can stop designing new weapons and training for combat. We can find a new purpose for our team, a more peaceful goal. As I jog across the desert, my circuits start drawing up an agenda, a plan for the future of the Pioneers. A wave of confidence sweeps through me. With all our computing power and intelligence, who knows what we could accomplish?
First, though, we have to repair the horrific damage Sigma caused. The AI massacred twenty thousand people in my hometown of Yorktown Heights. It infected them with nanobots, microscopic machines that drifted into the victims’ lungs and flowed through their blood vessels and killed them within minutes. But Sigma was even crueler to its younger victims. The AI selected thirty-three kids and programmed its nanobots to take control of their brains, turning them into zombie-like puppets. One of those kids was my old friend Brittany Taylor. Sigma wanted to lure the Pioneers into a trap, so it targeted the people closest to me.
When I deleted the AI, I also deactivated its nanobots, but the tiny machines had already scarred Brittany’s nervous system. After our final battle, she fell into a semicomatose state, unable to walk or talk or feed herself. The Army sent her to our New Mexico base so my dad could examine her—he’s become an expert on brain-machine connections—but so far he hasn’t figured out what’s wrong or how to help her. When I visited Brittany at our base’s medical center, she didn’t recognize me or respond to my questions. She just lay there in bed and stared blankly into space.
It’s heartbreaking to see her like that. Brittany was the only friend who didn’t abandon me when my muscular dystrophy got worse, and I was in love with her for many years, even though I knew she’d never feel the same way about me. So now my top priority is to help Dad cure her. As soon as I get back to our headquarters, I’m going to talk to him about it.
The next item on my agenda is repairing my friendships with Zia, Marshall, and Shannon. The war against Sigma traumatized all of us, and now the other Pioneers are nervous about the surge, the new power I developed during the last battle. And I don’t blame them. I’m nervous about it myself. The surge is baffling. It can’t be explained by the laws of physics. It’s like a bolt of lightning that streaks out of my circuits when they’re roiling with emotions. I couldn’t control it at all when I used it for the first time.
That’s why the surge obliterated DeShawn. I didn’t intend to kill him. Even though he betrayed us, he didn’t deserve to die that way.
But I don’t feel bad abou
t using the surge to erase Sigma. And given enough time and practice, I think I could learn how to control the power. Until tonight, I was afraid to even think about the surge, but now I realize I have to tackle the problem head-on. I have to figure out how the surge works, how it can turn thoughts and emotions into streams of energy. Once I’ve done that, I can reassure the other Pioneers that I’m not a danger to anyone, and they won’t be afraid of me anymore.
Then there’s the additional complication of my new relationship with Amber, but I’m confident about solving that problem too. Amber’s right—the best strategy is to keep our relationship a secret for now. Shannon will be a lot less upset if we wait a while before telling her.
Only one thing still bothers me. It’s a problem I’ve had ever since I became a Pioneer, and it still seems impossible to solve. Although the brain-scanning procedure saved my life, it also destroyed my family. While my father led the effort to preserve my mind and turn it into software, my mother fought him at every step. When I was still human, she tried to stop me from undergoing the scanning procedure, and afterward she broke off all contact with me. She thinks I’m an impostor, a monstrous, steel-and-silicon copy of her son. She thinks the real Adam Armstrong died on the scanning table and is now up in heaven with God.
She and Dad split up. He became a technical adviser to the Pioneer Project, while she stayed far away from our headquarters. I wrote letters to Mom every week, my circuits composing dozens of heartfelt pleas, trying to convince her that I’m still her son and that I really needed to see her. I waited months for an answer. When she finally responded, she told me to stop writing to her.
I don’t know where she is now. I’ve stopped asking Dad about her. He clearly doesn’t want to have that conversation. He’s been avoiding me lately and spending almost all his time with General Hawke, the Army commander in charge of the Pioneers. And when I do get a chance to talk to Dad, he seems distracted and distressed. It’s upsetting—I thought he’d be a lot happier after our victory over Sigma. Dad felt so guilty about creating the AI, and I assumed he’d be relieved once we deleted it. But for some reason, he’s more anxious than ever.