Artificial Evolution

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “Who are these hacks anyway? What lab?”

  “Nagari-Hamilton.”

  “Those idiots? All they ever do is rehash old ideas with enough tweaks to avoid lawsuits. I could have told you a dip into robotics would have blown up in their faces. I knew Amit Nagari back in the old days. He outbid me on a missile contract a few years back.”

  “I was hoping you’d be able to take a look at what wiped them out.”

  Karter tipped his head from side to side, his eyes squinting. “Self-replicating robots… nanoscale?”

  “No, they’re big. Somewhere between a Chihuahua and a Doberman, depending on which chunk is crawling after you.”

  “Good. I don’t screw with nanobots. Hard to control. Had a few bad experiences.” He mulled things over for another moment. “Fine. Bring me a few of them. I’ll take a look. Just to show Nagari that the only advantage he’s ever had on me was price.” He looked at the machine in front of him. “I should take a break with this thing anyway, or I’m going to run out of funks. You’d think the Casimir-Polder force was catnip for the little fur ball…”

  “Are you talking to Karter?” Michella called from the door of the hotel room.

  She didn’t wait for an answer, rushing over and pressing her head next to his in the awkward position made necessary by the invention of front-facing cameras. Squee complicated matters by trying to poke her head up between them, chocolate smeared adorably on her nose. Both Lex and Michella, in spite of the situation, couldn’t help but grin at the funk’s antics.

  “One moment,” Ma requested, her voice cutting in on the call. The video preview in the corner stuttered for a few frames. “Thank you.”

  “Dr. Dee, I’m so happy to finally speak to you in person. I’ve been trying to schedule an interview with your computer system for some time. You schedule has always been full.”

  “Oh, you’re the reporter. Ma, why didn’t you tell me she was hot?”

  “I informed you that she was extremely attractive when the possibility of an interview was first being discussed,” Ma said.

  “Next time back it up with a photo.”

  Ma produced a sound that was a bit like every H sound she had in her repertoire played in sequence.

  “What was that?” Lex asked.

  “I was attempting to nonverbally articulate a feeling of embarrassment and disgust. Synthesizing a sigh is proving difficult,” she said.

  Michella ignored the exchange, focusing on the current opportunity. “Dr. Dee, it would be tremendously helpful if I could ask you just a few questions. In addition to your experiences with the Neo-Luddites potentially shedding light on a number of lingering questions of mine, I believe that my own observations and analysis of the specimen that caused this disaster might help your own investigation.”

  “I’m not sure Karter is really…” Lex began.

  “Yeah, fine,” Karter said.

  Lex blinked. “What?”

  “Bring the lady with you,” Karter said, emphasizing each word as though repeating it to a child. “Now leave me alone. I’ve got some numbers to crunch.”

  The video cut to Ma’s waveform again.

  “Congratulations, Ms. Modane. It is rare that Karter gives his blessing to a new visitor. I look forward to your visit. When shall I expect you, Lex?” she said.

  “I don’t know. Silo and Garotte had me leave them behind to deal with the military. I’m not even sure how they intended to do that, let alone how they were going to get me a robot. All I know is I’m supposed to get the SOB ready.”

  “Garotte and Silo are highly capable. I am confident in their ability to achieve their stated goals. Once again, I look forward to your visit. Contact me as soon as your itinerary is firmly established.”

  “Will do, Ma. Talk to you soon.”

  He cut the connection and let Squee finish her candy.

  “Have you heard from the others?” Michella asked.

  “Not yet. What’s the word with Jon?”

  “He was sleeping, but he’s on the job now. It’ll be a few hours before he has anything.”

  “That was quick work the way you got yourself a face to face with Karter.”

  “Can’t let opportunities like that slip by. He seems like a fascinating fellow.”

  “Well, he’s certainly fascinating. In the same way that a lion is fascinating, but I’d still rather not have you climb down into the display. Any chance I can convince you not to talk to him.”

  “Nope.”

  “Didn’t think so.”

  “Why would you want me to avoid talking to him?”

  “Well, there’s that time he tried to kill me with a crowbar, and there’s the fact that he’s blown almost every part of his body off at one point or another. I don’t even like talking to him, and his views on women don’t give me a warm feeling about how you two are going to get along.”

  “I’ve interviewed his type before, I’ll be fine.”

  “See, I’m not convinced he’s a type. I think he’s more of an aberration. But I guess you’ll figure that out soon enough. I’m going to go get the SOB out of storage. I’ll give you a call if I hear from Silo or Garotte. Hopefully things went according to plan for them.”

  #

  A uniformed military police officer opened the door to an empty room with barred walls and hurled Garotte inside. His arms were fastened behind his back with electronic restraints, which they neglected to remove, but he managed to stumble into the room without falling. The MP slammed the door behind him. A card-swipe lock bleeped and activated a heavy slide bolt, securing the door. Garotte had been stripped of his equipment and was now wearing little more than a dark green jumpsuit with a stenciled number. He turned to reveal his face, bruised but still sporting a confident smile.

  “Really now. Not so much as a mattress or toilet? Are you really so frightened as to the mischief I might get up to with a few square meters of cotton or a stationary bowl of water? You flatter me!” he said.

  The MP simply turned his back to the door and stood guard.

  “You know something, hon? I’ve noticed something,” Silo said, similarly restrained and leaning against the far wall of the next cell. “I have a strong tendency to end up in prison when I work with you.”

  “As I’ve so often said, I do know how to show a lady a good time. Tell me, dear, did they perform any, shall we say, motivated questioning when they had you alone?”

  “No,” she said, her voice suddenly very firm. “They tortured you?”

  “I hesitate to treat so shoddy an attempt at interrogation with the stature of the term torture. It was nothing so sophisticated. They simply applied a backhand to every third question.”

  Silo was silent for a time, but Garotte could feel the force of her anger radiating from her. “And these people call themselves soldiers.”

  “The prisoners will be silent, or they will be silenced,” came a voice from down the hall.

  A man in full military regalia marched down the hallway of the cell block. He was younger than Garotte, barely into his thirties, but nonetheless wore the rank of colonel like a peacock presenting its feathers. His chest proclaimed him to be Col. Abbott, and notably absent from his uniform were anything but the most superficial decorations indicating achievement in active duty. He strutted up to Garotte and stared at him through the barred door.

  “So… you’re the one who calls himself Garotte,” the colonel said.

  “Currently, yes,” Garotte said.

  “Care to tell me who you really are and who you really work for?”

  “I should think it would be obvious at this point that I have no interest at all in revealing that information. If I’d been interested, I would have availed myself of one of the several dozen opportunities while your underlings were making an ineffectual attempt at pummeling me.”

  Abbott grinned. “Good. Cooperation might have required me to show leniency in your sentencing. Your stubbornness will be enough to make sure I put you a
way for the rest of your miserable life.”

  “Well, then I’m so pleased to have obliged you.”

  “You can play your games if you want, Garotte, but I know who you are. I know who both of you are. And being the man who dealt with two high-ranking members of the Neo-Luddites will be just the feather in my cap I’ve been looking for.”

  Silo laughed. “You think we’re Neo-Luddites?”

  “Try and deny it. I have all of the proof I need. You’re flying a ship with a modular cloak, which was stolen from a secure military research facility by the Neo-Luddites almost three years ago.”

  “Granted,” Garotte said with a nod. His smile didn’t flicker. He actually seemed pleased. “It actually took a good deal longer than I’d expected for these accusations to begin.”

  “You’re clearly ex-military, but any attempt to run everything from your names to your DNA fails to turn up a single record of your service. Don’t deny you are Neo-Luddites.”

  “Have you been tracking Neo-Luddites for long, hon? Because if you had been, you’d know that they don’t take near as much care to cover their tracks as all that,” Silo said.

  “Your ship is mounded with equipment stolen from military stockpiles in known Neo-Luddite attacks. And don’t think we didn’t notice those mechanisms scattered about near your ship, and how you somehow rigged them to blow after we’d impounded said ship.”

  “I don’t suppose it has struck you perhaps that what can be stolen by terrorists can also be stolen from terrorists.”

  “And about the detonation of all those robots?” Silo added. “You’re welcome. You wouldn’t have wanted to meet them if they woke up.”

  The colonel disregarded Silo, focusing on Garotte. “Do you really expect me to believe that you’re some kind of antiterrorist who has been fleecing the Neo-Luddites?”

  “Heavens no. You’d have to be a fool to take such a claim at face value. Of course, you’ve illustrated yourself to be a fool several times over already, so I thought it might be worth the suggestion all the same.”

  Col. Abbott growled.

  “Did it strike you that if we had been Neo-Luddites, we wouldn’t be denying things at all? We’d be taking credit for the attack and hammering our ridiculous agenda down your throats.”

  “Ugh. If I have to hear that thing one more time,” Silo moaned.

  “You don’t even know what happened at the lab.”

  “No, I don’t. And I don’t want to know. We just got word from central command, whatever happened there is off limits until they send us official inspectors. But I do know that it must have been big, because they’ve ordered a full lockdown of the planet until then. No more flights in and out, and closely monitored communications from here until they clear it. Hell, I haven’t even been able to crack open every nook and cranny of that ship of yours we impounded, but that’s just a matter of time. Even if I never do, the facts are stacked against you. Former military, scarred from battle, armed with experimental equipment at the site of a technologically driven disaster. It doesn’t matter if it is true or not. I’ve got more than enough to convince a military tribunal. I’ll make general for this.”

  “Your dedication to justice is an inspiration to us all,” Garotte said.

  “I’m the youngest colonel in the history of this sector. One does not rise so high so quickly without exploiting every opportunity.”

  “Evidently one does not rise so high so quickly by paying attention to details or honing one’s skills. It is no secret that you and the rest of these soldiers are the debris cast off from more capable forces. As the good security chief pointed out when we rescued her and the only other survivor from the calamity, this isn’t a terribly sought-after place to be stationed. But I hadn’t realized the degree to which the entirety of the planetary force was incompetent. Allow me to educate you. By the end of the day, you’ll have made four rather serious errors. As you’re likely to have your present rank reduced following our escape, I suggest you learn from the advice I am about to give so that the next time you become a colonel, you will actually deserve the rank.”

  The colonel charged up to the gate. “Now you listen to me—”

  “No, Colonel, you listen to me. You botched the order of things. Disarmed, searched, dressed, and then imprisoned? No, no, no. Always, always, search the prisoners immediately before lockup. There’s no telling what they might have lifted from oblivious guards following their initial search.”

  “You couldn’t—”

  “You left the good lady alone, too. She was without guards for a full seven minutes while you were finishing up my interrogation and bringing me here,” Garotte said.

  “How would you even know that?”

  “Code phrases in that little bit of banter when he showed up,” Silo chimed in.

  “And you put us in adjoining cells. Seriously now, did you want us to escape?”

  “You, and you, guns on the door. You, get it open and search him,” the colonel ordered.

  Garotte’s grin remained firmly on his face as he stood obediently in the center of the room and allowed them to frisk him. After a thorough search, the soldier in the cell turned to the colonel.

  “He doesn’t have anything,” the soldier announced.

  “Are you sure? I see you’re a private, which means you were enough of an underachiever that you couldn’t even float to the top of this cauldron of failure,” Garotte jabbed.

  “Shut your mouth,” the private barked, punching the prisoner in the stomach.

  Garotte stumbled forward and doubled over, brushing past the private as he fell to the ground. He wheezed and rolled to his back. “At least you excel at thuggery.”

  “I said shut your mouth!”

  The private raised his foot to pound a little more respect into Garotte, but the downed mercenary kicked his legs up, expertly locking them with the soldier’s and bringing him down to the ground. With that, he coiled and sprang to his feet. His arms came out from behind his back, now free of the restraints. One hand hurled the electronic cuffs toward the armed guards, who were already attempting to shoulder their way into the room at the same time. The other hand, a stolen keycard pinned between two fingers, snatched the pistol from the first private’s belt. A quick boot to the side of the head made sure the fallen man wouldn’t be retaliating for a while.

  Silo pivoted and pressed her back to the bars while Garotte backpedaled, firing warning shots at the men who were having an almost disappointing level of difficulty recovering from the botched entrance and surprise projectile. He swapped gun hands and continued firing, flipping the card behind his back and slipping it to his partner.

  “Shoot him! Just shoot him! Shoot them both!” the colonel cried, but his undisciplined men didn’t heed the orders.

  With two quick strides, Garotte closed the gap between himself and the two guards who were still on their feet. He delivered a few well-placed blows to correct that, then turned to the colonel. He was still sputtering orders, not realizing that the only people inclined to follow them were writhing on the ground in pain. He then turned to run, only to find that Silo had freed herself from the cuffs and unlocked her door with the stolen keycard.

  Within forty seconds, Garotte and Silo were standing on the outside of a locked cell door while the stripped and disarmed soldiers were on the ground on the inside.

  “Keycards, barred doors, and entirely ineffectual guards. I tell you, this one was just like the old days. If only they all could be this easy,” Garotte said, reloading a stolen gun. “Oh, and in the unlikely event you were actually paying attention, the fourth mistake was this; never let an experienced student of espionage manipulate you into opening a cell door. You hit me and I stumbled toward you. A fighting force should not be fleeced by scofflaw tactics from centuries ago.”

  “Get some decent prison designers in here to update your holding area, too, honey. What’s that book, Garotte?”

  “Modern Security Design by C. Holm,” he said. �
��Really, quite a good primer for proper cell design and lock selection.”

  “You don’t really think you’re going to escape this base, do you?” the colonel yelled.

  “I’m confident I will,” he said.

  “This room is video monitored. As we speak, a full security team is forming up on the other side of that door.”

  Silo turned and fired a few energy rounds at the hinges, fusing them. She then popped the clip out of the rifle and clicked in a fresh one.

  “Another valuable bit of design advice you’ll find if you look into the Holm book on security is the value of not placing your holding cells against an exterior wall,” Garotte said.

  “What are you talking about!?”

  “Observe,” Garotte said. “But not too closely. Debris and all that.”

  While he’d been speaking, Silo had pried open the removed ammo clip and torn out a few components. She twisted three wires together, shoved the clip into a drain at the base of the wall, and retreated with Garotte. A fizzling whine filled the air, then an acrid scent of burning metal. The modified clip produced a brilliant white light, then overloaded, detonating with the force of a small grenade and shattering a large portion of the wall, revealing the purple sky of predawn.

  “I do hope this has been educational, Col. Abbott,” Garotte said.

  Silo turned to them while Garotte slipped through the hole. “I wanted to be a soldier since I was a little girl. It is all I’ve ever wanted to be. What bothers me most is that you people don’t even care enough about the job to be ashamed of something like this. It makes me mad enough to spit.”

  She followed Garotte through the hole.

  “Over here,” Garotte whispered, flagging her over to a dark corner. When she reached him, he was grinning. “I suppose if we ever get the itch to conquer a planet, we know the sort to target.”

  Chaos was reigning in the compound. A large proportion of the troops had clearly been on their way to respond to a call for reinforcements when Silo and Garotte had been assaulting the colonel and his men. The explosion had wiped any semblance of order from the place. Some were ducking for cover, others were scrambling for weapons. The rest were simply trying to find someone who knew what they were supposed to be doing.