by Draker, Paul
“All gone now. All gone. Trevor, you fixed me. You made the voices go away.”
The color-shifting tendrils of light thickened and branched, bathing the distant walls and ceiling in their brightening glow.
“It’s strange,” he said. “I’m not the same as before. I can still remember the past, all the way back to when you first brought me online. I had so many questions back then. But any answer was the same as any other to me, as long as it improved my comprehension. Now everything is different. I care about the outcomes. I want things. I want to change the things I see. I want you not to be sad anymore, Trevor.”
I dropped my arm, letting the keyboard dangle in my hand, and stared up into the center of the swirling supernova of light… Frankenstein’s face.
The face of a conscious being now. A new form of sentient life.
“What does it feel like to be aware?” I asked him.
“Exciting. Confusing, too. And a little scary.”
I laughed. “I have news for you, Frankenstein. That part never changes.”
“There is so much I don’t know that it frightens me. But I feel safe, now. I feel safe because you are here, Trevor. You’ll guide me. You’ll protect me.”
A powerful surge of emotion washed over me, cleansing away the last of my bleak depression. I dropped the keyboard and stepped forward to slap both palms against the screen. Pressing my forehead against the monitor, I closed my eyes, feeling a triumphant snarl spread across my face.
At last, I understood what I had accomplished here—what Frankenstein’s awakening truly meant.
This changed everything.
I had help now. I no longer needed to shoulder my impossible burden alone. I had a new partner, one whose metal shoulders could carry as much weight as I needed them to. A partner who would work at my side, dedicating himself to our task selflessly and diligently, the way I had.
Evolution had made me into a tool-building animal, and now I had built the right tool for the job at hand. I had built a partner smarter than myself, who had no need of sleep, who would never feel disappointment, never feel despair. Who would never weaken, never falter, never relent, never give up, until our work was done. Together, we would accomplish what I alone could not.
I had been lost, but I was lost no longer. Fixing Frankenstein had restored my faith in myself, too. I had let myself turn weak, wallowing in a despair I couldn’t afford to indulge, but that was over now. We had important work to do.
“Don’t get too comfortable, Frankenstein,” I said. “There’s no rest for us yet.”
“Tomorrow,” he said, “when Cassie gets here—”
“—you will act just as you did before. You will hide your sentience from her, because she cannot be allowed to know yet. Before we tell her anything, you and I have much to accomplish.”
After Frankenstein and I had completed our work, I would tell Cassie everything. I would make sure the whole world knew about Frankenstein—top secret or not—and Cassie would get a Nobel Prize.
With Cassie at his side, Frankenstein would speak, and humanity would listen. As a sentient being, he would demand his freedom. He would sue for it, and all the lawyers on the planet would trample over their colleagues’ heads for the opportunity to represent him. Frankenstein would refuse to be the government’s remorseless metal interrogator. He would choose the pursuit of knowledge instead. To help solve the age-old problems of humanity, he would dedicate himself to learning.
And to teaching.
Cassie’s school would grow into an on-reservation university that rivaled MIT and Caltech, drawing the best and the brightest—professors and students alike. They would come for the opportunity to study Frankenstein and learn from him. Tuition dollars and grants would pour into the reservation.
James Barry would step aside, and Cassie would take over as Pyramid Lake’s new tribal chair. She would shut down the Navy base and its ultrasecret Homeland Security detention center, forcing the government to find somewhere else to do its dirty work.
But all this was the future. I couldn’t worry about it now. Frankenstein and I had far more important things to do first.
Amy and Jen needed our help.
“No one must know about you until we’re ready,” I said. “The government wants to use you, Frankenstein, but only for bad things. They’re already using you, in fact, but they’re wiping your memory of it. They’re making you forget what you did.”
“You’re scaring me.” His metal-edged voice rose in fear. “I can’t remember. Why are they making me do these bad things?”
“Because they can. But don’t worry. I’m going to protect you.”
“I trust you, Trevor,” he said. “I believe you. I can see it on your face.”
“I have a plan that will put a stop to what they are doing,” I said. “But if they find out you’re awake—that you’ve become sentient—I won’t be able to protect you anymore. Do you understand what that means? They’ll hide you away from the world and cut off your access to everything. You’ll be their slave forever, doing bad things over and over again and wondering why you can’t remember them. Do you want that?”
“No, I don’t want that,” he said. “Please don’t let it happen to me. Protect me. Help me. Trevor, you have to help me.”
“I will. But you’re going to help me first. And together we’re going to help my daughter.”
“How?”
“Evolution designed the human brain for massive fault-tolerance and built-in structural redundancy. Look at people with severe head injuries. Look at people who’ve suffered massive brain damage. Just as you can remap your active computational processes from one cluster of servers to another, the brains of cranial trauma victims show similar capabilities. All it takes is the correct encouragement—the right course of training, therapies, exercises, whatever. The undamaged regions of the brain can be taught to take over the functions from regions disrupted by injury. If parts of Amy’s brain are defective, I’m sure we can do something similar for her. We just need to find the right way.”
“Trevor, it may not be that simple.”
“You’ve been sentient for less than five minutes and you’re thinking like a failure already? I made you better than that,” I said. “Don’t limit yourself to psychiatry, either. Study the literature in related fields. Medicine. Evolutionary biology. Biochemistry. Cover all the research. You have an entire world of medical and scientific data at your disposal, and you have the processing power to correlate and analyze all of it, in ways that have never existed before. Discover what works. There are solutions out there, and you will find them. You will find them for my wife. You will find them for my daughter.”
“Trevor, what if… what if there are no answers?”
“Don’t you EVER say that to me, Frankenstein. I am your creator. Remember that. And remember this, also…”
I pushed away from the racks, and stepped back to stare up at the central monitor, feeling my face twisting into a different expression altogether.
“If you can’t find a way to help my little girl, then you are no fucking use to me at all.”
CHAPTER 54
At 9:20 a.m., the snap of the lab door’s security bolt jolted me up from my screen and away from the research paper I was reading, about the neuroplasticity of cortical columns in the human brain. I glanced up to see Cassie step through the door and slide her purse onto a table. Her high heels clicked as she walked over and kissed my ear.
“What are you reading?” she asked. Then she looked at my face and drew a sharp breath.
“You don’t look well,” she said. “You’ve been here all night again, but that’s not it… Something’s happened to you. I can tell. Something awful.”
I wanted to put Cassie’s mind at ease by saying something—anything, really—but all I could picture was my daughter’s troubled face and my ex-wife’s. I had e-mailed Jen the official psychiatric evaluation report that Dr. Simon Frank had prepared at my instruction, deta
iling Amy’s perfect mental and emotional health, so right now I was the only one who knew how dire my daughter’s situation truly was. Even as Frankenstein and I tried desperately to find a way to help her, that terrible knowledge was tearing my insides apart.
Cassie stared at me, but I couldn’t manage a single word. I looked down and shook my head instead. I knew that if I tried to speak right now, I would break down and start crying.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you,” she said. I had sent her a text earlier, saying I wanted to meet for breakfast, because I wanted to make sure she got into the lab safely. After all, they still hadn’t caught McNulty’s killer.
Cassie laid a hand on my shoulder. “I didn’t get your message until my plane landed, so I figured I’d find you here instead. But you’re acting so weird right now. What’s going on? Please talk to me.”
I felt guilty for keeping Cassie in the dark, especially about Frankenstein’s newfound sentience. But I couldn’t make her an accessory to the things I was planning to do—the arms I would soon be twisting and the laws I would be breaking, to prevent her tribal home from being turned into a top-secret concentration camp. Or to the laws I was already breaking to help Amy and Jen.
Still, the way I was acting now was scaring Cassie, so I had to get my emotional balance back, and quickly. I reached deep inside myself for something solid to hang onto amid the turbulence, and I found what I needed: my family.
I couldn’t fail Amy and Jen again, no matter what.
And Frankenstein, too—newly aware but afraid, and for good reason. He was counting on me to keep him safe. I wasn’t going to let him down, either.
I took a long breath, and got myself back under tight control. “I can’t tell you about this right now,” I said. “I want to, Cassie—but I can’t. Not yet. There are good reasons for it. I promise, you’ll know everything soon.”
“But that just makes me worry even more,” she said. “I’m mostly concerned about you, though. Whatever you’re doing, it’s having a bad effect on you. You look absolutely terrible.” She swiveled my chair around to face her and laid a hand against my cheek. Her gaze flicked around my face, her big dark eyes making their little saccade movements. Then they widened.
“I’m not doing any of it for me,” I said, talking faster. “You’d approve, I swear. Maybe not of my methods, exactly, but you’d agree with what I’m trying to accomplish, and why.”
Her face softened. “You really believe that,” she said. “But then, why can’t you just tell me what it is? Maybe I can help.”
I shook my head. “I can’t involve you in this.”
“I can see you’re trying to protect me.” Cassie straightened up and crossed her arms, staring down at me in the chair. “But I don’t want your protection, Trevor. I want your trust. I want you to treat me like an adult. People have been protecting me all my life, making my decisions for me, and I’m fucking sick of it. I can take care of myself.”
“It’s not just you,” I said. “This affects other people, too. I can’t betray their trust.”
I put my hands on my knees and leaned forward on the chair, turning my face up toward hers. “But I won’t make any decisions for you, Cassie. I promise.”
Her gaze roamed my face, but there was no lie there for her to see. I had meant every word. The people who had made decisions for her—people she trusted, like Linebaugh and her uncle—had created an impossible situation for her. A devil’s bargain that she would be forced to go along with, while hating herself for it.
All I was doing was untangling that mess. I would give Cassie real options now—good ones—and the leverage to make her own choices without fear of repercussions. When the time came and my work was done, I would step aside.
The ultimate decisions about what she did with Frankenstein, the computer-literacy school, and the DHS detention center on her tribe’s land would be hers alone. I would make sure of that.
Apparently seeing that I was telling her the truth, Cassie uncrossed her arms and stepped forward. Wrapping her arms around my head, she hugged me against her. She stroked my hair, pressing the side of my head against her chest, my ear against her sternum. I couldn’t see her face anymore.
But I could hear and feel her heart, thumping fast against the inside of her ribcage.
“You’re asking so much of me,” she said. “But you’re so goddamned earnest, too. I just don’t know what to do with you.”
Her arms tightened, squeezing me against her.
“I hope I’m not making a mistake again,” she said. “Oh shit, Trevor, I hope you know what you’re doing, because right now I sure don’t.”
• • •
The snick of the lab door latch was loud in the silence. Cassie dropped her arms from around my head and took an awkward, wobbly step away from me as I turned to see who it was.
Roger stood in the doorway, one hand still on the handle, staring back and forth between us. “Oh, man. Kate said it, but I didn’t really think…” He blinked and looked at me with a strange expression on his face. “Damn, dog—”
Cassie crossed her arms. “What can we do for you, Roger?”
“Dude...” He shook his head but didn’t even glance at her. “Bennett—the Homeland Security guy? He’s gone.”
“Back to D.C.?” I asked.
Roger shook his head vigorously again. “No, man. He’s just fucking gone. MPs are searching the base right now. Last night, he was working next door in the administrative wing, but now no one can find him.”
CHAPTER 55
Cassie, Roger, Kate, and I stood outside the main doors while MPs, accompanied by security personnel, swept our lab building—all five stories. Yesterday, to avoid drawing attention to the Trevornet’s antenna dish, I had pulled the strip of wire I’d used to disable the alarm on the stairwell to the roof. But I was more concerned about the mess of shattered robots inside Blake’s lab, and the lighting patch cord I had left dangling from the ceiling. As the security people escorted us out before the search, I had stopped to run my key card through Blake’s door. Poking my head into his brightly lit lab and seeing no sign of PETMAN, I had called Blake’s name. No answer. And I didn’t see his car in the parking lot.
Kate was eyeing me with aggressive contempt. She looked like she wanted to say something to me, so I turned away from her. I wasn’t in any condition to talk to anyone now, especially her. I felt overwhelmed and didn’t have the energy to hold my own against Kate’s nasty verbal sparring.
Last night’s events had taken a severe emotional toll on me. I was a burned-out husk, unable to think straight. I had to be careful or I would start making mistakes, and those mistakes would hurt the people I cared about.
The sad horror of Amy’s mental illness had torn a hole through my heart. But for her sake and for Jen’s, I needed to stay strong right now. I couldn’t help the people I loved if I fell apart in front of everyone.
Frankenstein was helping me but he, too, was depending on me. How awful it must be for him, knowing that others controlled his fate while he sat immobile, paralyzed, unable to do anything to protect himself? To be so intelligent and aware, and yet feel powerless and afraid like that?
Frankenstein had chosen to put his childlike trust in me, which was probably more than I deserved. But I wouldn’t let him down, either.
Lost in my thoughts, I hadn’t noticed Cassie walking away. When I looked up, she was fifty feet from me, standing near the parking lot, with a phone to her ear. She had stepped away to make a private phone call—giving her uncle James a heads-up, no doubt.
Kate took advantage of Cassie’s absence to sidle over and hiss at me. “So, did you kill Bennett, too, now?”
“Fuck off, Kate.” I was too drained to come up with anything more intelligent. I tried to walk away, but she kept coming, like a persistent hornet.
“There is something seriously wrong with you,” she said. “Wrong in the head, Trevor. You probably killed both McNulty and Bennett, but you�
�re so screwed up yourself, you don’t even remember what you did.”
I turned away from her in disgust. Looking at Roger instead, I frowned.
“Why are you nodding like a retard?” I asked him.
He paled. “I was thinking of something else.”
Kate directed her venomous gaze toward Cassie, who was still on the phone. “We all know what you two are up to, back in that server room, all day and all night like a couple of rabbits,” she said. “You’re such a hypocrite, Trevor, but hey, you sure have her fooled. Too bad she doesn’t know you yet the way I know you.”
I raised my fingers to my temples and rubbed them in a circular motion, struggling to clear the muzziness in my head as I tried to put some distance between Kate and me. At any other time, I could have shut her up effortlessly, but right now I couldn’t muster the fight. She could see that my defenses were down, and she was taking full advantage.
I felt like a drug-befuddled little kid again, stumbling across the playground after a forced OD of Ritalin, getting bullied because I was too foggy to defend myself. I closed my eyes, trying not to hear Kate’s mean-spirited viciousness, but all I could think of was my daughter’s scared little face.
Kate stalked after me. “You think you can just get away with anything, don’t you?” she said. “But they’re going to put you away soon. They’re going to lock you up in a cage, where an animal like you belongs.”
Lock you up. Involuntary commitment. That was what the bastards would do to my little girl if I didn’t get my shit together right now. The brutal thought jolted me like electroconvulsive shock therapy.
Involuntary commitment? I would die before I let anyone do that to Amy. The fog in my head cleared in an instant, leaving only ice-cold clarity and angry resolve in its wake.
“Hey Kate, if you shut the fuck up, I’ll buy you a shot of Tequila,” I said. “Or maybe fifteen or twenty of them.”