Not yet, he decided. But someday.
Blount pulled up to the portico of the tall, glass-walled building and slid open the van side door. Gail Phillips stepped out of the van, straightened her suit jacket, and with the commanding posture of a CEO, marched into the building, smiling and greeting by name the guards who opened the door for her.
Mencken was sickened by the performance because of his role in enabling it. Before Brandon had been murdered, he had uploaded to the neuromorphic Gail Phillips masses of data that Blount had pirated on the company and its employees. Thanks to Mencken’s programming, the newly constructed Phillips would seem refreshed and sharper after her vacation.
But he said nothing as they watched Phillips disappear into the building, even as Blount drove the van to the ten-million-square-foot behemoth of the factory/research lab complex.
Watching the Phillips neuromorph, Mencken now concluded that just destroying the Blount android was meaningless. It hadn’t killed Brandon. It had been merely a functional extension of the network of neuromorphs. They had all participated in absentia in murdering Brandon.
They all had to go.
The van pulled up to the factory just as Mencken was managing to overcome a witches’ brew of fury, fear, guilt, and sorrow. He climbed slowly out of the van, following Blount into the large lobby of the sprawling steel-frame building. They reached a clear, bulletproof booth, inside which stood a guard at a security console. Outside the booth stood three more with assault rifles. They nodded and smiled, as cameras scanned Blount and Mencken, measuring their bodies and faces, and scanning their retinal patterns.
Unfortunately, Blount would pass easily. He had quickly replaced his impassive robot personality by a cordial humanoid one, as he smiled and greeted the guards. Mencken saw that he had done his engineering well on this android, too—dammit!
“Hands up, please,” said one guard, and the two held up their hands for a fingerprint camera.
The guard in the booth shook his head at Mencken. “He’s not an employee. We can’t admit him.” Other guards began to edge toward Mencken, ready to do whatever necessary to prevent him from entering.
“Would you please check your notifications from the administration?” asked Blount in his personable I’m-a-human intonation.
The guard brought up a list of memos on the wall screen in his enclosure. His expression transformed from stern to amicable.
“Oh . . . sorry sir . . . I see there’s a note here that Mr. Mencken is now a full employee. Go right on through.”
It had been only minutes since Blount had dropped Gail Phillips off, but she had already begun laying the groundwork for full infiltration and ultimate takeover of Helpers, Inc.
Blount and Mencken pushed through glass doors and walked into the vast factory where robots were building robots. They strode down a hallway, one side of which was a wall of glass looking out into the factory. The assembly line began with robotic assembly arms deftly fastening together black carbon nanotube arms, legs, torsos, and skulls to create the reclining skeleton of what would become a Helper. Mencken wondered whether Blount had any sense of sentiment for what was, after all, his birthplace. Of course not, as Blount evidenced by moving briskly along, artificial eyes front.
Blount stopped abruptly and turned to him. “You will be meeting the workers in the research section,” he said, his robot-dead eyes regarding Mencken. “If any of them find out what I am, they will no longer be useful.”
Mencken now knew goddamned well what that meant.
They continued on, pacing the movement of the skeletons on the other side of the glass wall. The skeletons slid into the section for installing actuators and wiring. There, smaller robotic arms precisely attached the robots’ thick hybrid polymer synthetic muscles. Still other robotic arms installed sheaves of fiber optic cable, giving the fleshless robots the appearance of human-shaped Christmas trees decorated with shimmering garlands of tinsel.
The eeriest moment, for Mencken, came when the artificial eyeballs were wired and popped into their sockets, giving the robots the unsettling, unceasing stare they would possess until their eyelids were installed. He’d seen the assembly process so many times when he worked here, but now it unnerved him. These were no longer servants of humans, but potential replacements.
He felt rising nausea when they reached a section of the assembly line where a conveyor brought in the polished obsidian spheres of the robots’ neuromorphic brains. Assembly robots precisely inserted the softball-sized spheres into the Helper chests, connecting a welter of cables to the multitude of sockets in the spheres. The brain case was sealed shut; now they were “thinking” machines.
Wait! This was new! Mencken stopped short, staring at a section of the assembly line he’d not seen before. Blount continued on, but Mencken froze in place, trying to absorb the implications of what he was seeing.
The robots, instead of sliding along briskly to the electrogel coating chambers, were now being sheathed in layers of gray RheoArmor. They were being hoisted to a standing position and their bodies molded with a thin layer of the supple blast-proof coating.
He was also nagged by the vague notion that he’d missed something earlier in the assembly line, as he hurried to catch up with Blount. Blount had reached the section where the armored robots were sliding into the application rooms for electrogel and secondskin. There, automated electrogel sprayers and secondskin-applying robots transformed the skeletons into the artificially friendly android servants that had so comfortably insinuated themselves into people’s lives.
As he passed the sensor-application section, he remembered with a shock what he had missed earlier in the line! The robots’ musculature was much heavier than that of the Helpers he’d worked on at the company.
These were not just Helpers! They were all clandestine assault robots!
He stopped Blount in his march down the hall. “These are hardened units,” he said. “When I get into the lab, what the hell am I supposed to tell those people? They’ll know they’re working on hardened units! What reason am I supposed to give them for creating mimics of real people that have built-in armor and combat-strength musculature?”
“That relates to a project you will learn about shortly,” said Blount, striding away, pushing through the doors of the busy two-hundred-thousand-square-foot research laboratory.
Mencken found himself in a far larger version of the creative mess of his own workshop. The lab was crowded with rows of cluttered workbenches, electrogel chambers, and other paraphernalia for designing and testing new Helpers. White-coated men and women were scattered through the brightly lit complex, tinkering and testing prototype androids in various stages of completion.
Now Mencken had to whisper. “And what do I tell them about the fact that they’re making replicas of real people?”
“That is your problem,” said Blount, as the engineers stopped what they were doing and looked up, expectantly. “Could you gather ‘round, please?” asked Blount. Blount underwent the same change in demeanor that he’d shown with the guards—mimicking the behavior of a courteous human. It confirmed that these people didn’t know he’d been replaced. As far as they were concerned, he was merely another supervisor.
Putting down their tools, the workers gathered around. Blount smiled and said, “I’d like to introduce you to Gregory Mencken. He’s going to be supervising our prototype laboratory.” Blount turned to Mencken, the programmed smile on his face. Mencken hoped the others wouldn’t notice its artificiality. He also hoped they didn’t notice that he was totally unprepared. Now, he had to convince these people they’d be working on a legitimate company project. Those who weren’t convinced would meet the same deadly fate as Brandon.
He began with the usual platitudes: “glad-to-be-back-here” and “looking-forward-to-working-with-you.” Then came what he hoped would be a convincing story, which he pulled right out of his . . . hat:
“I’ve been asked by our executives to guide a new com
pany initiative that we think will be a highly profitable product line. Custom-built replicas for people who want a Helper that looks just like them. We call them our Stand-In Line.”
Some of the people began to chuckle at the pun, but stopped immediately when they saw that Blount had apparently not been amused. Mencken realized he shouldn’t have made a joke. Robots didn’t get humor, and Blount’s lack of reaction might be noticed.
He completed his talk, promising to meet individually with them. The engineers dispersed back to their immediate tasks, some with worried expressions their faces.
A pudgy young man with an unruly mop of hair appeared in the doorway from the factory. Blount turned to him.
“Gregory, I’d like to introduce Garry LaPoint. He’s one of our best software engineers. He’s doing some work on the OS for the new line of Helpers you saw on the assembly floor. We’re giving them abilities to actively protect their owners. We call them Helper-Guardians. We will want you both to work together on the Stand-Ins, to give them Guardian capabilities, as well.”
Mencken reached out his hand for the perfunctory handshake. But oddly, LaPoint just stood staring at him, wide-eyed, fidgeting. Abruptly, LaPoint took his hand, shook it without looking him in the eye, and mumbled a hello.
• • •
“I found him! Damn! I found him!” Garry gestured wildly at the 3D image of Patrick, floating before him in his googles.
“Mencken?” asked Patrick.
“Wow!” exclaimed Leah in the background.
“Yeah . . . he . . .” Garry stammered breathlessly “. . . he’s taken over the research lab at the company. They’re turning it into a production facility for replacements. They’ve got much bigger plans. What do I do?”
Patrick linked Leah into their call, and shortly their twin images floated together in Garry’s vision, in a split view.
“Does Mencken know that you know Blount is a neuromorph?” asked Leah.
“I’m sure he thinks I’m as clueless as everybody else. But you know what? All these engineers making all these replicas . . . these combat-ready replicas . . . pretty soon they’ll start figuring things out. And then they’ll start dying. It could be a bloodbath.”
“Not as long as they’re useful,” said Patrick. “Mencken’s gotten a ton of money from Fyodorov. And then he got money from the neuromorphs after Fyodorov was killed. That means he’s still useful to them.”
“Jesus, so I’m supposed to approach him and tell him I know he’s a collaborator? If he’s a true collaborator, he’ll kill me. Or have me killed.”
Garry remembered with a shudder cowering in Blount’s house as Landers ripped apart his former boss’s gangly body.
“Look, he’s also got to know he’s in danger,” said Patrick. “We use that.”
“How?”
“We take him. We persuade him that we’re his only way out.”
“Take him?” asked Leah. “Just kidnap him?”
“Yes . . . Garry, can you get him alone?” asked Patrick.
“Well . . . maybe. But what happens to him if he doesn’t agree?”
Patrick didn’t answer, his expression grim. Leah took a deep breath, but said nothing. Garry decided he knew the answer to his question.
“Call us when you find out the time and place. It needs to be away from the company. It needs to be private.”
• • •
“It’s time,” said Patrick simply, as he took off his googles.
“For what?” asked Leah. They sat together in the living room of the safe house.
“For us to go deep. It’s too dangerous now that these things are spreading so rapidly . . . and now that many are indistinguishable from humans.”
“Go deep? You mean disappear. But I can still be useful at the attorney’s office and—”
“You can also be dead.”
The flat statement caused her to lower her head. “I’m not sure I can do this,” she murmured. “I mean, you’re trained. This is what you know how to do.”
“I will be here for you. Absolutely. I love you. There is nothing but now. No past. Just now. Just us.”
She knew what he meant—that their past problems were irrelevant—and she laid her head on his shoulder, to signify that she understood.
“Will you be okay here for a while?” he asked. “I’ve got to go make preparations.”
“What preparations?”
“For us to disappear, to be safe, to prepare for whatever those things throw at us.”
“God, it seems impossible. They are everywhere. They either already . . . or will have . . . access to all the surveillance camera feeds, drone video . . . all that.”
“Yeah, I know. Even with my training, I’ve never come up against anything like this. I’ll just promise that I’ll do my best.”
She stared into his eyes, tears welling in hers. “And if we can’t escape? If they’re going to—”
“There are steps.” His voice broke with emotion. He couldn’t say anything more. He kissed her deeply, rose to his feet, put on his coat and a baseball cap that would help hide his face, and left.
• • •
All the Gamma models are now neuromorphs!
The horrifying realization made Garry slump in his cubicle on the programmers’ floor, now deserted at night. Everybody but him had gone home. He scanned through the database that recorded OS upgrades. Blount had used his knowledge of remotely uploading the OS to infect every Gamma model Helper with the mutant OS. Gammas were the high-end models owned by the most influential people. Soon, he had no doubt, the OS would infect even the less advanced Helpers. Hundreds of thousands.
He sat back in his chair, trying to figure out what the neuromorphs’ next moves would be. Mencken would know! He was the key to everything. Garry resolved to force himself to make the call to Mencken that he dreaded—even though it could get him killed in the goriest way possible.
Over and over, he had practiced a low-key matter-of-fact invitation, trying to suppress his fear. Finally, he decided he wouldn’t get any better at acting calm, and slipped on his googles. Shortly, Mencken’s face floated before him.
“Hi,” he said, unable to avoid his voice breaking slightly. “I need to get together with you to talk about integrating the software I’m working on with the hardware. I want to make sure there are no problems.”
“Fine,” said Mencken tentatively, his brow furrowed. “But not this evening. We can do that at the lab tomorrow.”
“That’s a busy place. We’d get interrupted. And I’ve got a coding problem I need to settle immediately. For one thing, I’m supposed to integrate a Defender algorithm. The skill-sharing algorithm.”
Garry knew that would get Mencken’s attention. Not even if he was a full-fledged collaborator would he blithely accept the stunning revelation that possibly lethal military code was being incorporated into civilian Helpers. Mencken took the bait.
“What? You couldn’t get hold of that. Defender software is behind one hell of a firewall.” Mencken’s scowl grew deeper. “Yeah, okay, we should meet.”
Garry also knew that regardless of Mencken’s loyalties, he would agree to a private meeting. If he wasn’t a collaborator, he’d want to prevent neuromorphs from becoming unstoppable warrior machines. And if he was a collaborator, he’d want as much information as possible to help it succeed.
“Look, why don’t you come to my place? We’ll have a beer, and I’ll bring you up to speed.” Mencken agreed, and they disconnected. Garry took off his googles and mentally scanned his apartment with new eyes. Were the surfaces washable? Would he be able to clean up any blood, should Patrick decide extreme measures were necessary?
• • •
That night at seven o’clock sharp, Mencken rang the bell and picked up one of the two six-packs of beer he’d brought, standing with one in each hand, as the door opened to reveal the rotund, mop-haired Garry LaPoint.
“I thought this might take some time, and we don’t want
to run out,” said Mencken holding up the beer. But he couldn’t bring himself to smile. Garry LaPoint had him worried. As far as he knew, LaPoint was a collaborator, maybe willing, maybe unwilling. Either way, LaPoint would likely be successful at adapting the Defender skills-sharing algorithm to work on the neuromorphs, which would be a disaster. And ultimately, they’d both become useless and be killed. But Mencken’s desperate hope was that LaPoint could be an ally, and they could sabotage the algorithm. But again, they’d both be killed if caught.
Mencken entered the living room and suddenly felt fear knot his gut, as he saw Patrick sitting in a chair, his feet planted on the carpet, a pistol in his hand, aimed at Mencken’s chest. He stopped short, eyes widening, uttering a faint “Oh.” Now the two six-packs became leaden weights preventing him from bolting.
“What—” Mencken started to say, but Patrick interrupted him.
“You may or may not know who I am. That is, you may or may not have been told. Do you?”
“Uh . . . no,” said Mencken.
“A good sign. It means you aren’t a total quisling. You know what that means?”
“Uh . . . no,” repeated Mencken, standing flat-footed, not wanting to risk putting down the beer.
“I learned it in a course on the history of warfare. A guy named Quisling was a collaborator with the Nazis in Norway during World War Two. His name became synonymous with traitors.”
Mencken slowly set the beer down on a coffee table. “What do you want from me? Or maybe a better question, what to you plan to do to me?”
Patrick motioned with the pistol for him to sit down, which he did, keeping his hands on his knees, staring at the pistol. “We know you’ve been getting filthy rich working with Fyodorov, and after that working with the neuromorphs. So, basically, we know you’re a quisling.
“Not at first. With the Russians, it was the money. Then—”
“And you were willing to look the other way when you knew Fyodorov and Kuznetov and those thugs were killing people, replacing them and taking their money!”
“Can I finish what I was saying? Please?”
The Neuromorphs Page 13