The Neuromorphs

by Dennis Meredith

  “So, where’s his balls?” asked Kuznetov again.

  Mencken reached into a small can and hauled out a handful of scrotal sac and a flaccid penis. “Here. You want to inspect them? You really that interested?”

  “Can his dick get hard?”

  “You didn’t spec that out, Dimitri. He’s not supposed to be an Intimorph.”

  “You never know what he might be asked to do. This one fucked women when he was alive.”

  “Look, we’ll retrofit an erection mechanism, okay? I’ll have to get my contact at the company to steal one.”

  “Your problem. Where is fucking skin? You are not even putting on skin yet?

  “Goddamn, Dimitri, we’ll get it done! You can see that we’ve molded the skin. And it goes on quickly. And we’ll seal the seams and detail the skin, as always. You’ve never bugged us like this before. What’s different this time, huh?”

  “Big fucking amount of money! The guy embezzled a bunch, and we have all the access codes. Now we need the robot to make transactions in person.”

  Mencken scowled and hefted the armload of ultra-realistic secondskin-R that was his own invention over to Brandon. Together, they began to tug and pull a mass of the elastic skin over Andrew’s head and stretch it down his trunk. They carefully connected the hair-thin wires to the surface sensors and muscles embedded into the skin during spraying. Similarly, they drew other pieces over his arms and legs, prodding the now-Landers to balance on one foot, then the other, to receive the leg skin.

  Mencken returned to the molding area and gingerly peeled off a secondskin head mask that looked like a grotesque shrunken version of Landers’ face. He returned to the android and pulled the mask over the black graphene skull, again wiring the connections to the embedded sensors and muscles. He yanked and poked the skin until it was in place.

  “Smile, Andrew,” instructed Mencken.

  “I’m Bob Landers, goddammit!” replied the android in a gruff southern drawl. “Andrew is my fucking defective robot. I think I’m going to trade his plastic ass in, maybe on a girl robot that fucks.”

  Mencken smiled wryly through his fatigue. “Sorry, Bob, I forgot,” he told the robot. He turned to Dimitri. “How do you like that voice, that accent? We adjusted the vocal cords, the pronunciation algorithm.”

  Dimitri shrugged. “So, you’ve done one thing right.”

  “C’mon Dimitri, go off and do whatever you do, and come back when we agreed. We’ll have it ready for you.”

  “Yes, you will,” said Dimitri, opening the door and leaving, slamming it behind him.

  Mencken willed himself to calm down and returned to his concentration on the work at hand. He pitched Landers’ glove-like secondskin hands into the trash. To make the fingerprints as perfect as possible, they would have to be remolded with the new fingerprints. He reached into the box Dimitri had brought and pulled out an ash-gray, severed thumb.

  • • •

  Garry’s brow furrowed in concentration and worry, as he peered through his googles, appearing to any observer to be staring blankly into space. He lounged back in his leather recliner in the dimly lit living room, a half-finished can of beer in the chair’s cup holder. The beer would not be emptied for a while. Garry was attempting an act that could get him fired, prosecuted, and likely jailed—hacking into the operating system of the Helpers, Inc. main computer. This OS fed system and data upgrades to all of the millions of Helper computers worldwide.

  “Troll, I need you,” he announced. A small, green, gnarled troll avatar appeared in the corner of Garry’s virtual vision, scratching itself and chuckling. It was Garry’s preferred character for a virtual assistant. Other virtual-space-farers might choose as an avatar a cartoon character or muscled warrior version of themselves. And most used some version of an angel, since the formal name for such assistants was Agent for Neural Guidance to Electronic Libraries, or A.N.G.E.L. But Garry wanted his avatar to have a more scruffy, disreputable character. He saw his troll as a wily henchman in the complex, dangerous virtual GameWorld, where Garry sometimes spent whole weekends.

  He instructed his troll: “Access the Helpers OS using the code Jonas Ainsley gave me.” Actually, Garry had stolen his fellow programmer’s login code, but avatars’ data could be used as evidence in court. So, Garry was trying his best to protect his butt by pretending Jonas had given him the closely guarded code to access the OS.

  To steal the code, he’d sent a camera-equipped microbug scurrying into Jonas’s cubicle, to transmit video of Jonas accessing the OS. Garry had figured out how to make the spider-like microbugs evade the company’s intrusion detectors.

  “Code entered,” growled the troll, as it fed a long string of characters into the login box in Garry’s vision. Garry tensed. No response from the computer. Would he be identified as an intruder?

  “You are attempting access from a new device,” intoned the computer.

  Now things would get really dicey! He had to convince the central computer he was really Ainsley. Fortunately, he had taken a key step: programming his processor to spoof its identity as being Ainsley’s.

  “Yes, this is a new device,” said Garry. “Proceed with biometric confirmation.” But the voice was not Garry’s. He’d programmed a voice filter from a recording of Jonas that transformed his voice into Jonas’s.

  Garry held his breath for the long moment it took the main computer security system to respond.

  “Fingerprint verification required,” the voice said.

  Success! The computer accepted the filtered voice. Garry was ready for the next verification, as well. Fortunately Ainsley liked his morning coffee in his personal cup, and Garry had scanned his fingerprints off the mug Ainsley kept in the break room. Garry reached out to the scanner attached to his processor and placed his thumb, onto which he’d glued plastic film with Ainsley’s thumb print, on the reader.

  A long silence, then, “Access granted.”

  Garry slumped in his chair, breathing a sigh of relief.

  Now, peering through his googles, he slipped on haptic gloves. They would give him a sense of touch in the virtual realm. He reached out with virtual hands to a virtual control panel hovering before him and nudged its joystick to send him wafting slowly into the depths of the computer’s programs. His objective was the Helper OS, the central software engine in the vast network of programming for Helpers.

  The computer algorithms appeared in his virtual view as a vast three-dimensional network of fluorescent shapes floating in the utter blackness of null hyperspace.

  He propelled himself past the huge boxes, spheres, polygons and other shapes—interconnected by sheaves of pulsing, incandescent cables—that housed the administrative, management, employee, and other components of the central computer.

  Finally, he reached the Helper OS, a vast golden sphere. He passed easily through its fluorescent membrane, since he had access rights.

  Inside, he found himself surrounded by the welter of OS subroutines that looked like glowing boxes—red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. It was like being immersed in the most mind-blowing tangle of Christmas lights. He used hand gestures to ease his virtual self through the low-level subroutines. He recognized them easily as controlling Helpers’ basic motor and sensory functions. They all looked just as they had before, when he’d legitimately accessed the OS.

  He guided his view to a vast wall displaying the numbers, letters, and symbols that represented the OS master directory. He began to scan the list of subroutines and the amount of memory storage each occupied—not exactly sure what he was looking for.

  After scanning the entire list twice, he stopped short, puzzled. The memory storage numbers didn’t add up! The storage space for the OS subroutines was less than the total space the OS was occupying on the main computer.

  That could only mean that somebody had hidden an “invisible” subroutine on the server—a big one, taking up a large chunk of storage space! This was a stunning discovery, given the extreme
security surrounding the Helper OS!

  His suspicion about Blount’s odd behavior was no longer a gut feeling. Only Melvin Blount, as programming director, would have had authority to create such a subroutine.

  The mystery subroutine would have normally remained just that, because even disguised as Jonas Ainsley, Garry wouldn’t have been able to access it. But he was a graduate of MIT, instilled with that school’s notorious culture of computer hacking. So, back when he’d had legitimate access to the OS, he’d secretly inserted a “back-door” into the security system. The teensy bit of computer code allowed him to enter any subroutine, even a hidden one. So, taking a deep breath to steady himself, he issued a simple command—like using a lock pick on a door lock—to switch off the security system that kept files invisible and locked.

  Far away in the virtual space, he saw a huge red sphere materialize nestled among the colored forms of the rest of the OS. He sailed across the virtual space to the sphere, seeing that it had a visible button, meaning that Garry could open it.

  He pressed the button and floated into the box. He found himself surrounded by an array of colored, jewel-like globes, cubes, and polyhedrons suspended in the coal-black virtual space. Like the subroutine modules, they were interconnected with a labyrinth of glowing cables.

  He pushed through the tangle of glowing digital foliage, gently parting them like the vines in a jungle, to reach the individual subroutines. He stopped at each one, touching its surface, causing it to open like a flower to reveal the mass of letters, numbers, and symbols of its computer code.

  Sorting through the codes for each subroutine, Garry realized that the data structures were virtually identical to those of the official OS. And that was the big, big problem!

  Blount had created his own parallel secret Helper OS, hidden inside the real one!

  “What the fuck!” he exclaimed to himself.

  Why would Blount do that? The question lured Garry to continue, like morphine to an addict. Understanding the workings of this intricate code structure would be a massive challenge, but it was one that he’d loved since his days at MIT.

  Deeper . . . deeper . . . deeper Garry penetrated the code’s structure, exploring the subroutines for processing audio, for controlling motor movements, for processing language. But these were peripheral. He turned to the largest subroutines, the kernels, the core algorithms of the Helpers’ neuromorphic OS.

  Among these shapes, he found a subroutine he didn’t recognize, a luminous blue sphere. He poked its virtual-rubbery surface, and it blossomed into a cloud of computer code and even smaller subroutine-shapes that revealed it as some kind of algorithm that governed a part of a Helper’s nervous system.

  Now he was flying blind. He would have to analyze this code instruction-by-instruction to figure out its purpose.

  It was the weekend, so he had two whole days for exploration. Over those days, he continued his virtual dissection, hauling himself out of his chair only to pee and eat. And also to make sure he didn’t get what ‘liners had dubbed “Bendix boulders”—lethal blood clots in the legs named after the first man to die from spending too long sitting while immersed in the virtual-reality Mirror World.

  On Sunday afternoon at two-thirty-five, as he was munching a ham sandwich, he discovered a path to the answer!

  Hovering deep within a main subroutine floated a small cluster of globular, lower-level subroutines. They clung like a cluster of algorithmic leeches to the subroutine that he had figured out governed a Helper’s basic motivation. That motivation drove Helpers to actively serve their owners. It triggered the robots to absorb their owners’ needs and preferences and to act on them—for example to seek out foods, amusements, and other things the owner would like.

  Now Garry had something he could really get his programmer’s teeth into! He propelled his virtual self up to a red orb of one of the subroutines and poked its surface.

  The code blossomed and floated before him. He delved deep into its structure, tracing its instructions and connections, trying to discern its function. He explored the intricate code until late into the evening, when hunger pangs began to divert his concentration. He got up to make another ham sandwich from the components he’d left on the kitchen counter.

  As he was slathering mustard on a slice of week-old bread, the realization hit him like a fist to the face.

  “HOLY SHIT . . . SON OF A BITCH . . . HOLY SHIT!” he exclaimed, abandoning the unfinished sandwich, slamming himself back into the chair and whipping on his googles. His epiphany was confirmed, as he feverishly teased apart the code with his virtual fingers.

  Blount had committed a programming crime no Helper software designer would ever, ever dare to do! He had built an autonomy algorithm into a Helper operating system! Helpers with this code embedded in their OS’s could act independently!

  In the worst case, they could even escape human control! Blount was either a total idiot, or one of the worst villains in human history! Garry now realized the significance of the label on the subroutine cluster that he’d barely noticed. The name signified an entirely new class of robots:

  Neuromorphs.

  • • •

  Gregory Mencken held the slimy eyeball between his fingers, inspecting its iris. When he’d first performed such an examination two years ago, he felt totally creeped, like the disembodied orbs were staring accusingly at him. But by now he’d steeled himself to endure handling eyeballs once embedded in the eye sockets of living humans. His life depended on it, as did that of his family, of Brandon, and of Brandon’s family.

  Mencken inserted the eyeball into a holder and triggered the scan. The scanner quickly completed its task, storing the iris pattern. Mencken replaced the real eyeball with a similarly glistening and pliant artificial eyeball.

  Now the scanner emitted an infrared laser beam that inscribed Robert Landers’ iris pattern on the eyeball. Mencken repeated the procedure with the other eyeball.

  He took both artificial eyeballs over to the former Andrew, now transformed almost completely into Bob Landers. The android stood naked, with empty eye sockets, and infinitely patient, in the middle of the cavernous warehouse. Holding an eyeball in each hand, Mencken waited patiently for Brandon to move out of the way. The assistant squatted in front of Andrew/Landers meticulously gluing a mole on its belly, exactly where it had been on the now-dead human Landers.

  Brandon stood up and groaned. He’d been crawling around the body for hours, placing moles, painting on birthmarks, and cleaning out wrinkles that hadn’t properly formed in the molding process. Beside him sat the secondskin sprayer he’d also spent hours using to seal the seams in Andrew’s new skin, rendering them invisible.

  Brandon sighed. “Wish we could just leave the seams that wouldn’t show. And it’s such a pain doing all this touch-up on skin nobody will ever see.”

  “Remember the old lady?” said Mencken. “You forgot to seal a seam. And I didn’t catch it. And Dimitri told us some maid noticed when the old lady was dressing. And they killed the maid. That was on us.”

  Brandon grimaced and shook his head. “Yeah, it was.” He pursed his lips in concentration and circled around behind Landers to inspect the robot’s backside. With clear access to the robot’s front, Mencken took up a long forceps, used it to plug a wire lead from the robot’s eye socket into the eyeball and popped the eyeball into the socket. He repeated the process with the other eyeball.

  “Robert, perform visual diagnostic,” he instructed.

  The Landers android blinked its eyes and rolled them around, then scanned the warehouse.

  “Robert, is your visual system functioning?”

  “Yeah,” drawled Landers. “I see just fine.”

  A pounding on the door drew their attention to the security display.

  Two men stood quietly in the shadows by the door. One was Dimitri Kuznetov.

  The other was Mikhail Fyodorov himself!

  Brandon shook his head and waved his hands in a franti
c signal that he wanted nothing to do with the encounter that was to come. Mencken nodded in assent and let the two men in, as Brandon disappeared behind one of the tall metal shelves.

  Fyodorov had never come to the workshop before. Mencken didn’t know whether the visit meant he would be killed or congratulated.

  As Mencken admitted them, nothing in Fyodorov’s blank expression gave a clue. It was a face hardened into an impassive mask by the horrors the Russian thug had experienced—or more likely caused. His dead obsidian eyes were set beneath black slashes of eyebrows. His thin lips curved down in a permanent glower. A dark stubble rendered his face even more sinister. A brush haircut revealed a deep gash in the scalp that ran from the forehead to behind the left ear.

  The Russian’s body was as lean and taut as a feral cat’s, dressed simply in jeans and a black t-shirt. The t-shirt’s neckline revealed tattooed Cyrillic words circling his neck, and the short sleeves showed symbols on his arms—a crow, a dagger, a severed hand—undoubtedly images crudely inked by some fellow prison inmate.

  “Show me result,” he said in his guttural Russian accent. His voice was surprisingly soft, like velvet over a razor blade. He strode forward, and Brandon backed even farther away into a shadow, still trying his best to disappear. Mencken gestured at the inert robot, deciding that salesmanship was in order, perhaps to avoid the lethal effects of half-a-dozen bullets ripping into his body.

  “We’ve nailed it . . . Mikhail. Take a look. We were about to do the scan comparison.”

  Fyodorov walked around the naked potbellied body, inspecting it clinically. He particularly scrutinized the face.

  “Motherfucker!” he spat.

  Mencken winced, heart pounding, hoping the epithet wasn’t directed at him. But noting Fyodorov’s intense concentration on the android, he concluded that the curse was likely aimed at the dead human that the android now perfectly mimicked. He assumed he was safe, but his heart continued to thud.

  “I’ll start the scan; show you how good a mimic we got,” said Mencken. He donned his googles and directed his processor to launch a comparison between the 3D image scan Andrew had made a week earlier in the bathroom, and the re-engineered body standing in front of them.