Semi-Human

by Erik E Hanberg

  I also guessed there were cameras in the tunnel, and for that I found a very Ainsley Irons–looking wig styled in her famous long bob, a sharp suit, and some platform heels to give me another four inches to match her height. I wouldn’t fool anyone in person, but I was pretty sure I would pass to anyone watching the security cameras, especially if my plan to bypass the retinal scanners worked.

  Once I’d gotten past her security systems, I had to get the Analytical Engine out of the tunnel. It was going to be heavy—heavier than I could move on my own—but after a bunch of too-clever-by-half plans (seriously, at one point I was researching magnetic levitation options) I realized I could just bring a cart with me. Not very exciting, but effective.

  And fourth, I had to sell it. For that: my dad’s boss, Orrin Walker, the likely buyer I’d identified from the start.

  Easy, right? Keir called it “the start of a decent plan.” And it was.

  But in the end, I had to scrap almost everything. Because there were DNA scanners that would cause the walls of the tunnel to collapse in on me, mold to my body, and freeze me in place, ha ha ha, because that’s something normal people think up and then tell their all-powerful AI to make for them.

  Keir triggers the retinal scanner that opens the door from the house to the tunnel. We don’t need to hack this one, because he’s authorized. The frosted glass door to the tunnel pops open a few inches as the strong magnet unlocks it. Keir grabs it and looks at me like he’s having the time of his life. We nod to each other. It’s time. We enter the tunnel.

  As I step in, I catch what I didn’t notice the last time—the walls in the middle of the tunnel are just finishing with their repositioning, just as Keir had described would happen when Ainsley unlocks the door. What was once sealed is now an open passage through the tunnel to the office.

  But I can’t take time to be nervous about it. I’m leaning on Keir’s shoulder and he’s got his arm around my waist. I’m leaning on him because the suitcase-sized case I’m holding is weighing me down. It may as well be a magician’s box of tricks, thanks to the incredible toys Gene designed and printed with Keir’s personal 3D printer. They are all stuffed inside the suitcase. The downside being that it weighs almost as much as I do because of them. And whatever I do, I can’t let it drop until I reach the center of the tunnel.

  Now that we’re over the threshold, this case is the only resource we will have. Gene might be working for us now, but he can’t swoop in and save us in the tunnel. In here, we’re on the turf of the T-Six AI—a computer nearly as intelligent as Gene but who is still working for Ainsley Irons.

  “I don’t need to see T-Six,” I say with a laugh, as if Keir had just invited me to come see the company’s headquarters.

  “I want to give you the grand tour,” he answers. “It’s like they say. Someday this will all be mine.” He swoops his arm grandly, yet ironically. To whomever is watching the cameras, I hope we look like we’re just having a good time.

  I laugh and he squeezes more tightly. A little too hard—he’s nervous, I can tell. For good reason. From this moment on, there’s no way for Keir to talk our way out of this. We’re committed.

  Keir points out different computers. The same ones Ainsley pointed out to me the day before. But we’re going much faster this time because we’re trying to get to the center of the tunnel where the side door to the room containing the Analytical Engine is.

  We’re finally within feet of the door and no one has tried to stop us yet.

  “Your mom’s not going to burst in on us, is she?” I ask, trying for coy and suggestive.

  He shakes his head. “She just left for China. Someone has to inspect the manufacturing plants where they make the AIs—and there’s practically no one else left at the company to do it.”

  (This is true, actually. Ainsley left on her private jet several hours ago. We spent the night before and all of today working out the plan, having Gene design and build the special suitcase, and waiting for her to be far enough over the Pacific that she wouldn’t have the fuel to turn back if she was alerted to the heist.)

  “Mmm,” I whisper, stopping in the dead center of the tunnel. “So we have the place to ourselves.”

  I can see the frosted glass door over Keir’s shoulder.

  I pull him closer and we kiss. It’s all part of the plan, but still—it’s a nice part of the plan. I try to enjoy it.

  “Excuse me, Keir,” a voice says politely. The T-Six AI, of course. “I’m detecting some abnormalities with your friend. Her tone of voice and elevated heart rate are more consistent with anxiety or fear than with desire or arousal—despite being in an embrace with you. Can you explain?”

  “What does a computer know about love?” Keir answers philosophically.

  “Facial recognition shows she’s a former intern at T-Six. And based on the way her muscles are working, I estimate she is carrying a load of more than a hundred pounds.”

  “It’s just her suitcase,” Keir says. We’re still in an embrace. “I’m taking her to the airport after the tour.”

  “The abnormalities are too great. I’m making contact with the T-Six jet. Please hold for your mother.”

  Keir’s face noticeably pales. We had assumed we would have to deal with the AI directly. It didn’t occur to us that it would patch Ainsley in to talk to us.

  “Keir?” We hear her voice at the same volume as the T-Six AI. The speakers are hidden and there’s no sense of where it’s coming from. Like the voice of God, she repeats his name again. “What are you doing there?”

  Keir looks terror-stricken. “I—um.” He’s sweating now, too, despite the cool air in the tunnel.

  “She doesn’t change anything,” I whisper to him.

  He meets my eye and I can see him wavering. The fear of his mother is fighting with the hope of being free. I nod slightly and give his waist a squeeze. “We’ve got this.”

  He closes his eyes and when they open, he’s determined. “You said that if I wanted to create the future, I need to taking active steps to make it a reality. Well, that’s what I’m doing. I just need a little seed money to get started,” he says.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing in the museum and I don’t care,” Ainsley says. “Activate countermeasures.” That last bit is clearly not directed at us. Because suddenly the tunnel walls start their slow-motion collapse around us. “I’ll sort this out with you when I get back,” she says.

  I can see the red walls and ceiling closing in. I can feel the floor rising up around my feet, ready to ensnare me like a mosquito in amber.

  “Don’t fight it—it will only make it worse,” Ainsley adds.

  “Ready?” I whisper.

  He nods. We’re still embracing. The next part of the plan is as easy as kissing him. And so I do. I kiss him again. Then I drop the suitcase.

  The floor might be in motion but the shock of the drop is still enough to trigger the springs inside the suitcase. It pops open and from the inside comes an instantaneous explosion of foam. The foam—part of Gene’s incredible design—surrounds us in a flash. It’s coating the walls and the floor. It’s coating us, and all the computers in the hall. The foam bomb is strong enough that it reaches to either end of the tunnel, until it covers the glass doors.

  What was air is now foam. But more importantly—it’s not wall.

  Because once the foam is unleashed and fills the space, it instantly hardens into a network of frozen bubbles.

  I try to separate from the kiss and I find it difficult, like there’s a hand on the back of my head holding me in place. It’s not Keir, though, it’s the foam itself. I push my head back a little harder and I heard some light crunching. The frozen foamy substance has the consistency of a Styrofoam cup or packing material in your average drone-delivered box. It’s strong, but not too strong. And it doesn’t need to be. The collapsing walls don’t need to be physically held at bay. They just form themselves around an object. Gene’s key insight was that if we could give th
em an object as large as the tunnel itself, it would stop shrinking. And then he used his engineering skills to make it happen.

  Keir and I are both moving our heads and clawing out a space in the crackling foam. He’s laughing like a five-year-old in a ball pit and I realize am too. The substance is light and airy enough that I don’t feel claustrophobic, even though we’re in a very confined space not much bigger than our own bodies.

  “Can you reach the suitcase?” he asks.

  “I’ll dig down to it,” I tell him. “You get us to the Analytical Engine.”

  “On it,” he says, pulling out a baton from the inside of his jacket. It’s a matte black cylinder, about fifteen inches long and an inch in diameter. I have one in the suitcase as well.

  As I dig for the suitcase, Keir turns around and points the cylinder in the direction of the side door that leads to the Analytical Engine. He holds the back end of it and pulls the front half toward him, squeezing the liquid contents out the front nozzle. It is the same basic design as the heavy-duty squirt guns I played with as a kid. Except this one—also designed and printed by Gene—shoots fire.

  A thin streak of flame bursts out of the canister and melts the foams wherever it’s pointed. I can’t help but stop and watch as the bubbles melt away and reveal a passage. Keir stops after a few seconds and inspects his work. He’s bored a tunnel through the foam. It’s about twelve inches in diameter and the sides of it gleam where the foam melted and solidified again. At the end of the tunnel I can see the frosted glass door that separates us from our goal.

  “Bigger,” I tell him, but he doesn’t need my coaching—he’s already pulling on the canister again and widening his circle of fire. The tunnel keeps expanding and I go back to digging through the hardened foam to the suitcase at my feet.

  I find it lying open, flat on its back with all the foam contents ejected. I start chiseling away at the edges so I can pick it up again. Because while the foam may be gone, Gene has packed plenty more toys into this suitcase.

  When it’s free and clear, I open a pouch attached to the inner lining of the suitcase and pull out two eyeballs.

  They aren’t squishy, thank God, but they are, nevertheless, exact replicas of eyeballs. I can feel a murmuring of nausea in my stomach as I hold them in my hands. My old boss is staring up at me. Well, we’ve already heard her voice. Why not have her staring at us too?

  “You do it,” Keir says. “Those are freaking me out.”

  I nod. I slip one eyeball back into the velvet pouch and the other I orient until the retina is facing away from me. The fact that Gene has Ainsley’s eyeballs on file for the house retina scan was convenient, no doubt. But I’m still proud that I figured out this seemingly intractable problem on my own. Using scans of magazine covers and other ultra-high-resolution images of Ainsley Irons on the Internet, I was actually able to assemble a computer mockup of these eyeballs on my own. Gene rated it as a near exact match and one that would certainly have fooled the retinal scanner—if I had just found the 3D printer with enough chops to create it. It’s so freeing now, not to have those same constraints. Maybe I would have figured out a way to get the eye printed. I’m resourceful. But having all the wealth in the world is a useful shortcut—just as I’ve always imagined it would be. And I’m only a few minutes away from getting it, I think to myself.

  But I push that thought away. The Analytical Engine might be my lottery ticket, but I haven’t won yet.

  I slip into the expanded tunnel that Keir created through the foam. It’s just big enough to crawl into. I’m on my hands and knees, awkwardly bumbling forward because my right hand has the eyeball and I’m trying not to put my weight on it. I have the second eyeball in my pocket in case something happens to this one, but I take it easy anyway.

  I finally reach the door and see that the retinal scanner on the right is still behind the foam. I’m reluctant to use my personal flamethrower to melt the foam around it, on the off chance that I fry the thing. So instead I use my hands and bat away the foam until the scanner is clear. I hold up Ainsley’s eye and wait. Only a second passes, but the light turns red.

  “Access denied,” the T-Six AI says, though it’s muffled by the foam that separates me from the speakers in the wall.

  I hold the eye up for another scan, and it doesn’t take. My hand is shaking from rising panic in my chest. I take a deep breath and hold the eye steady.

  “Access denied,” the voice repeats.

  “It’s not working!” I call.

  “Try the other one,” Keir says.

  I maneuver on my side and am able to pull the other eyeball out of my pocket. I hold it up against the scanner. It’s quiet for a second. And then—

  “Access denied,” the voice repeats.

  “It should be working,” I say, more to myself than to Keir. “The eye is a perfect replica.”

  Then the AI says—almost kindly, I swear—“Listen, Pen. Can I call you ‘Pen’? Pen, I know I’m not supposed to help you out and I know you’re probably thinking you’re pretty smart for stopping the walls from crushing you. And that must be a really good copy of Ainsley Irons’s eye you’re holding, because the retinal scanner wants to unlock the door for you. It really does. But considering that I just spoke to her while she was on a plane over the Pacific Ocean, and that she’s just triggered countermeasures to stop a burglary, it’s not hard for me to figure out that I shouldn’t open this door. So…your move.”

  I’m frozen in place. I can’t think of a single way to fool this scanner, not with the T-Six AI behind the wheel.

  “Keir?” I call. I do my best to look back at him. Keir is staring at me, and I realize that all he can see is my butt in the tunnel. But he’s definitely not looking me over. His eyes are wide and his mouth is slack. He looks like he’s in a state of shock.

  “Keir,” I say, biting off the word, and it snaps him out of it. “What should we do?”

  “We go home,” he says immediately.

  “What?” I exclaim. “You’re quitting?”

  “We haven’t actually taken anything yet,” he says. “If we turn around right now, it will be ok.”

  “Like hell I’m turning around.”

  “Pen, they have us cold. We need to talk our way of this. I can calm Mom down. We’ll be ok,” he tells me. He’s practically crying.

  “Maybe you will be. But there’s no way your mom is going to let me off the hook for this. We finish the job. Together. That’s the only way out now.”

  “She’ll find us. We can’t hide from her.”

  “We can hide. But only if we have the money. Think how much fun we’ll have together. We can do what we want.”

  “You don’t care about what I want,” he snaps. “You just worked with me because of Gene and my money.”

  I seriously want to punch him. “I like you, Keir, but fine. If you feel that way, we’ll go our separate ways after we sell it. But we have to finish stealing it.”

  He shakes his head like a frightened kid.

  “Keir,” I plead. “Think of what she’s done to your life. You can’t quit now. You’ll never make it out from under her thumb if we don’t finish this.”

  “You keep saying that!” he shouts. “But how do you think you’re going to finish it? The Analytical Engine is on the other side of that door! Your plan failed.”

  I don’t dignify his retort that it’s suddenly my plan.

  “Give me your blowtorch,” I tell him.

  “Why do—”

  But I cut him off. “Just give me your goddamn blowtorch,” I demand. “Slide it over here.” He must be used to Ainsley telling him what to do, because he slides it over the glossy foam at the bottom of the tunnel.

  I grab his and my blowtorches and hold them together, the nozzles next to each other. Keir has really ticked me off. Getting cold feet when we’re halfway through. Putting all the blame on me. I’m sick of it. I’m not thinking about anything other than brute force. As a programmer, I always prefer to
write elegant code. But instead of elegant code, sometimes you can just brute-force your way through a problem. The same is true in the real world.

  Double-fisting my blowtorches I point them at the same spot on the frosted glass, anchor their bases against my body, and then pull back with everything I have. Liquid fire shoots out of both nozzles, trained on the same few inches of glass. I’m suddenly roasting, because the heat has nowhere to go but into the glass or back into my face. But I don’t let it stop me.

  I keep going, slowly scooting forward, the flame moving even closer to the glass. When the blowtorch in my right hand sputters, I drive it forward and it easily plunges through the melted glass door. I push the left torch forward and move them both around in the melted goop of the glass. Both torches have gone out but the glass is still hot. The second it cools, I won’t be able to keep doing this, so I continue and try to ignore the sweat beading on my face and dripping into my eyes.

  Finally one of the blowtorches gets caught in the glass. The cooling is done. I inspect my work and find I’ve punched a hole in the middle of the door about the size of the tunnel—or maybe just a little smaller. But there is a hole. And through it I can see the Analytical Engine on its pedestal in the middle of the room.

  “That’s how we finish it,” I say.

  Fifteen

  Keir is smiling at me. Like we’re done and finished and out of here already. Like he didn’t just try to bail and throw me to the wolves. I want to scream in anger but it won’t get me the Analytical Engine any faster. I take a deep breath. “Now the suitcase,” I tell him.

  When he ducks down to get it, I wiggle further and slide through the glass hole. The edges aren’t sharp but they are still hot to the touch. I slip across as fast as I can and fall into the room.