The Methuselarity Transformation

by Rick Moskovitz

  Just as the pungent scent of Asian food wafted its way to her nostrils, a hand pushed her head down from behind and shoved her into a vehicle. Her step count was no longer relevant as the vehicle sped away from the scene. Now she attended to the motion of the vehicle, which descended steeply before leveling out for most of its course. By the time it came to a stop and she was roughly pulled to her feet, she could smell salt air.

  She was led a short way on pavement and then onto softer ground. A creaking sound erupted a few dozen feet ahead of her, reaching a crescendo as she approached. As she moved forward, the air around her began to feel damp and the ground under her feet became slippery and boggy. The creaking sound was now behind her, ending with a clank.

  She sniffed the air. The muddy organicity had the kind of familiarity that resonates with long forgotten feelings and sharpens faded memories from long ago. Lena felt herself smile, ever so briefly, despite her peril. She knew this place and perhaps could use her knowledge in some way to her advantage.

  Lena was born in the fall of 2008, the day after the investment company Bear Stearns suddenly went broke, which became part of the folklore of her family. Her father was an investment broker with another firm, but failed to escape the ripples that went through the financial world and left her parents destitute just as they were building their family. While many Wall Street executives continued to make high salaries and collect bonuses, her father had been too low in the hierarchy to merit such protected status. When he was unemployed, her mother went to work as an office manager for a medical practice while he stayed home and tried to care for their infant daughter.

  When her mother came home unexpectedly early one afternoon, she’d found her father in the bedroom with a gun to his head. There was a note by the bedside telling her that Lena was at a neighbor’s house and that he was sorry he couldn’t handle things better. She convinced him to put the gun away and he was admitted to a hospital for treatment. Over the next year, he was in and out of the hospital until he finally renounced the possibility of killing himself and committed to rebuilding his life.

  With the hospital bills on top of their other debts, her mother was unable to keep up with the financial demands from her modest salary. They wound up homeless until Lena was four. It took another five years for them to work their way out of poverty on the combination of her mother’s salary and her father’s modest income teaching economics at a community college.

  For most of the first decade of her life, Lena had either lived on the streets or spent her time scrounging on the streets along with a gang of similarly impoverished kids. They entertained themselves by exploring the nooks and crannies of the city, from the basements of the neighborhood businesses to the buildings and wharves along the waterfront. One day, they stumbled upon a pair of massive and mysterious iron doors. At the top of the doors was a space large enough to crawl through, but too high for them to reach.

  The children returned a few days later with hooks and rope. Using the door hinges as braces, they scaled the doors and descended into the darkness armed with flashlights. Once they became accustomed to the company of the rodents and raccoons that inhabited the space, it became their secret hideout where they spent hours playing and carving their names into the rock. With time they became nimble at scaling the barriers to enter the tunnel in just a few minutes. The dank atmosphere of the tunnel grew familiar and welcoming. Now Lena imagined herself surrounded again by her childhood gang.

  “If we finish her here, we could just leave her body for the rats.” The voice of one of her captors shocked her back to the reality of her present danger. The image of the dead guard in the corridor reminded her that the people who held her didn’t hesitate to kill. She felt something hard thrust against her left temple. She drew a short breath and held it, as if not breathing might somehow make her invisible.

  “First we need confirmation that Mettler’s dead,” came another voice. “Otherwise we’ll still need a hostage.” The pressure against Lena’s head subsided.

  “Can’t imagine him surviving the cyanide. We already got word that he was in the apartment. Our sentry locked him in tight. She should be here any minute.”

  Now Lena’s breath came in short gasps and her chest felt like it was going to burst. Following their brief rapprochement, Ray’s behavior had become even more bizarre and cryptic than before, driving them apart again. Her feelings for him had submerged, but now sobs bubbled to the surface and threatened to strangle her within the hood.

  “If you’re going to kill me, anyway, could you at least take this off?” Lena pleaded, her words coming in choking fragments.

  “Guess there’s no harm in that,” said another one of her captors. “The tunnel walls are thick enough to keep her off the grid.” She felt the ties around her neck loosen and the hood came off. Her eyes were already used to the dark, so things around her came quickly into focus.

  Her assessment of her location was immediately confirmed. Light filtered through high arched spaces from both ends of the quarter mile long tunnel. She could see familiar niches in the contours of the walls where she and her friends had hidden various mementoes and toys. She now counted three human figures, corresponding to the three distinct voices that she’d heard through the shroud. Her sobs subsided as her attention turned to integrating the new information she now had about her surroundings.

  One of her captors took pity and freed her hands so she could wipe away her tears with her sleeve. They had nothing to lose. The tunnel was secure and she was defenseless.

  Lena tried to connect her MELD chip to the UDB, but the kidnappers had been right. There was no access to the cloud from the tunnel. Which meant that her captors were also cut off. That explained why they weren’t still in communication with their accomplice on the outside.

  The creaking sound suddenly rose behind her. She turned to see one of the huge iron doors slowly moving outward as the aging hinges squealed and groaned. A female figure appeared silhouetted against the sky and pulled the door shut again with apparent ease.

  “He got away.” she shouted from the entrance once the door was closed. Lena’s heart skipped with the hope conveyed by those words. Ray was alive, after all, and she’d likely at least bought some time.

  “How in the world did that happen?”

  “They blew up the window with a drone and extracted him,” replied the woman, now standing directly before Lena, who recoiled in shock at her appearance. There before her was the face of the woman on the floor with the steel blue eyes, identical in all respects absent the hole in the middle of her forehead.

  Once the shock had worn off, it all began to come together. This was not the guard that had been posted outside her door. She was an identical replacement. The wound had been bloodless because no blood had ever flowed in either woman’s body. They were SPUDs and had been manufactured at the same time in the same version. Somehow, whoever had abducted Lena had been able to replace the one who had been posted to guard her with this one. Lena wondered whether this SPUD had been the one that destroyed her double and what, if anything, she might have felt when she did it.

  It all began to seem like a bad spy saga. But who the hell were these people? And who, for that matter, were the people who’d tried to protect her? She knew that Ray had enemies because of his invention, but why would a secret organization suddenly take an interest in protecting him...or her for that matter? Could it have something to do with his mysterious absences? Or with his odd behavior the morning Terra showed up out of the blue? Or with Katrina’s story?

  The four abductors moved a short distance away and conversed in whispers. Then one of them approached her.

  “You’re a lucky woman,” he said. “We’ll need you alive a while longer, at least, to help us get to your husband. Enyo will keep an eye on you here,” he added, nodding at the woman in black with the steely eyes. “I wouldn’t try anything stupid. She has five times your speed and ten times your strength. She can crush you like an insect
and without a moment’s pause. You must have seen what she did to her twin back there.”

  The three remaining captors gathered up their things and left through the iron doors that faced the sea. She watched the huge door swing shut, this time with a resounding ringing sound, and heard the sound of the lock closing to fasten the enormous chain that held the doors together. Enyo stood a few feet behind her, arms folded, locking her into focus with a piercing gaze.

  Lena struggled to remember what she’d learned about SPUDs when she had access to the Universal Data Base. Since there were by now many generations, there was an enormous amount of variation in their technical specifications and in their levels of intellectual sophistication. There was even more variation in their capacity to simulate emotion and empathy. The most advanced evoked a level of emotional nuance that many believed went beyond simulation and rendered them as sentient as people.

  Many of the earlier versions had intellectual and emotional functions that at best were childlike. While the latest models incorporated massive data bases and advanced logic algorithms, they still acquired their intelligence by learning, just like people, and started their existences as intellectual, and especially emotional children. Learning from experience turned out to be the most efficient way to maximize their potential. So like children, they were programmed to be curious and to enjoy mastering new skills.

  Teaching emotional responses was considerably harder than teaching reasoning and had begun to be undertaken by a few skilled mentors like Corinne Takana who believed in the potential of SPUDs to become truly sentient. Lena surmised that Enyo had not had the benefit of emotional mentoring, which would be contrary to the purposes of an organization that intended to use her for violent ends. Emotionally, at least, she could be expected to react as a child. Perhaps there was some way that Lena could use this to gain the upper hand.

  She scanned her memory for anything in the tunnel that might be useful in defeating her android captor. She and her friends had secreted many things within the tunnel that they used in their play. Some of their games involved intricate skills that they’d honed over time. Her thoughts wandered to an item that she’d left decades before in a niche in the wall not fifty feet from where she sat. She wondered how many of her toys were still where she and her friends had left them. She walked casually toward one of the walls and ambled along its perimeter.

  “Look what I found,” said Lena, holding out an object she plucked from one of the crevices.

  “What is it?” asked Enyo.

  “It’s called a yo-yo. It’s a toy. It must have been left here by some children.”

  “What does it do?” Enyo’s gaze was now glued to the curious object.

  “Let me show you,” replied Lena, winding the string around the spool. As she began to throw the yo-yo toward the ground, Enyo recoiled momentarily, then smiled as it stopped and rolled back up into Lena’s hand. The feel of the yo-yo was familiar and she proceeded to ‘walk the dog’ along with other tricks that had once been second nature.

  “Let me try,” said Enyo, her hand shooting out for the toy. Lena removed the loop from her own index finger and fastened the slip knot over Enyo’s.

  Enyo’s first few tries were clumsy and Lena helped her wind the string back onto the spool. By the time she got it to return to her hand, the yo-yo was occupying most of her attention, leaving Lena free to wander a bit further down the wall. She felt along the wall at what would have been a child’s shoulder height until she reached another chink in the stone.

  When she reached into the crevice with her right hand, her fingers found a sturdy forked stick. At the open end of the Y, she felt the small patch of suede that was attached to the ends of the stick by two heavy rubber cords. She prayed that the rubber hadn’t dried and cracked. Her heart skipped a few beats as she ran her fingers over the cords. They was still supple to her touch and her heart resumed its normal rhythm. Within the crevice was also a small pile of smooth stones, each around an inch in diameter. She drew two of the stones from their hiding place and put them in a pocket. Then she carefully drew out the slingshot and tucked it in the waistband of her pants behind her back. As she turned back toward Enyo, who was now trying some of the tricks that Lena had shown her, she scoured her memory for more data.

  Every SPUD had a central processing device, the anatomical location of which varied, depending upon model. And every one had some way to deactivate it. Many of the earlier generation models used a combination of remote controls and manual switches, and many of these had the switches conveniently located in the small of their backs behind a cover. Lena visualized the woman with the hole in the middle of her forehead and concluded that her CPD, and Enyo’s, lay somewhere in the path of the hole.

  Enyo glanced at her as she started back in her direction, but saw nothing amiss and returned to her play. Lena was just a few feet away when Enyo turned toward her again. She drew back on the slingshot with all her strength and the missile found its mark in the center of Enyo’s forehead. The force of the blow was apparently sufficient to disrupt her CPD and she crashed to the ground, limbs askew, haphazardly twitching. Lena sprang to her side, swept her hand over the android’s spine, and located the hidden compartment. She flipped the switch. Her body stilled.

  Lena was now aware of her own breathing, coming in gasps from her burst of activity. She paused long enough for it to settle back into a regular rhythm, then took several long, deep breaths. She felt the sweat running down her face and the wetness under her arms, contrasting with the smooth dry skin she’d felt in the small of Enyo’s back.

  Tucking her trusty slingshot back in her waistband, she returned to the crevice and scooped a handful of stones into her pockets. Approaching the gates that faced the bay, she remembered the hooks and ropes that she’d used as a child to climb over them. They weren’t in the cave. But she was now taller and, thanks to an ambitious exercise regimen, stronger than she was back then, even at fifty, capable of using the hinges as hand and footholds to scale the gate. In just a few minutes she was under the open sky and had full command of her MELD, which was broadcasting her location. She could only hope that Ray’s friends, whoever they were, would get to her first.

  32

  WHEN MARCUS FIRST logged in after the fire to the Ministry of Discovery, he found a ten day old message requesting him to speak at the International Artificial Cognition Conference in San Francisco that was to convene the following week. He’d turned down the original invitation a couple of months earlier, but was now being asked to reconsider. This provided the perfect cover for his trip to the west coast. The only complication would be the Secret Service agent that now followed him everywhere. He would have to find a way to lose him once he got to his destination.

  He would have been reluctant to leave Corinne and Natasha except for the beefed up security detail that was assigned to protect them and the extra security in the building to which they’d been relocated after the fire. He felt comfortable that they were in good hands. So the following Monday, he and his bodyguard boarded the tube transport in Washington and made the forty-five minute trip to California. They emerged at the other end to a clear, but blustery February afternoon and were met by a sleek, silver hovercar that whisked them to the conference venue at the Four Seasons Hotel. Upon their arrival, Marcus noticed additional security personnel posted throughout the hotel. He wasn’t the only high profile attendee at the conference.

  No sooner had Lena switched on her MELD chip than she spotted the hovercraft swooping toward her over the water. She ducked behind cover and instinctively switched her chip back off. As the craft approached she saw a woman at the helm that bore a remarkable resemblance to the SPUD she’d just left behind in the tunnel. The only difference was a small round bandage applied to the middle of her forehead. Lena concluded that she was looking at Enyo’s double, the original guard who’d been posted outside her door back home, now refurbished and hopefully an ally. But was she?

  All Lena really k
new was that these two forces seemed to be fighting over her. When Terra’s security detail had first approached her at the apartment, she’d taken their word that they were there to protect her, but they never explained from whom. Maybe there weren’t any good guys in this strange battle that seemed to be raging over her and Ray. There was no way to know who could be trusted. As the craft approached land, Lena slipped into the shadows of the waterfront buildings and disappeared.

  Where to next? It would be risky to return home, but for the same reasons, her pursuers would hardly expect her to go there. She might find clues about what happened to Ray. Perhaps he’d even return to the apartment once he recovered from the cyanide. It was her only chance for them to meet up without revealing her location to everyone.

  Lena wound her way among the still familiar array of buildings near the waterfront, navigating her way back toward the heart of the city. When she reached the corner of Powell and Sacramento, there was nobody near the entrance to the building. She deftly disappeared inside. As the elevator glided upward, the pulsations in her ears reminded her of the uncertainty of what she would face when she reached the top. Her left hand found the slingshot that was still in her pocket and the fingers of her right hand closed over a round stone the size of a large marble. The elevator reached her floor and the force field containing her dissolved. She stepped out.

  An imposingly tall figure in a hooded sweatshirt stood at the door of the apartment with its back to her. The door had been damaged in the rescue, but was now shut tight against the intruder. She placed the stone in the web of the slingshot and took aim. The hooded figure whirled around. Lena caught herself just in time, lowered her weapon, and stared open mouthed at the intruder. He was equally astonished to see her.

  “Marcus Takana!” Lena exclaimed, “What the hell are you doing here?”