by J. S. Morin
Remembering back to when she and Plato had first taken Abbigail home, Eve was inclined to disagree. Toby521 needed to learn how to recharge his power cells every month or two. He didn’t need someone to manage all his fluid and nutrient feeds—both in and out—around the clock. He moved under his own power, understood language, and was unlikely to come to harm under all but the most extreme circumstances.
With a sigh, Eve headed for the skyroamer pads. Charlie7 fell into step beside her. After all, they were parked in the same place. “It’s always nice attending an activation, but I’m looking forward to getting home.”
“You should take some time off. I know you set your own hours, but that doesn’t mean you have to set all of them,” Charlie7 pointed out. “I’ve been telling you, it’s only going to get bigger as time goes on.”
The Human Welfare Committee was Eve’s responsibility. But the daily tasks piled up to account for all her time. Nora109 ran the school, which was running out of teenagers and beginning to fill with pre-adolescents. Ashley390 took care of the Sanctuary for Scientific Sins and its residents. But all the cloning efforts, regulatory adjustments to committee guidelines meant for robots, factory production of human products, emancipation planning, real estate designations, and any other aspect of robot society that brushed against the budding race of humanity was hers to oversee.
“I’ll think about it,” Eve promised. It was one of those easy promises to keep—the kind she would have done anyway.
Charlie7 stopped short and faced Eve when she pulled up alongside him. “Do more than just think,” Charlie7 warned, his voice taking on that stern, authoritarian tone that said “for your own good.”
Eve gave a terse nod, more an acknowledgment than an agreement. In the grand scheme of things, technically Charlie7 worked for her. As head of the Human Protection Agency, he was her enforcement department. But for all practical purposes, Charlie7 didn’t answer to anyone.
When they emerged onto the landing zone where Eve, Charlie7, and many of the other robots had parked their skyroamers, it was raining. Actually, it was pouring. Eve had known to expect it, but that didn’t make the prospect any more welcome. She’d showered once already today. A second dousing with her clothes on would be worse than useless.
Some of the robots made token efforts to shield faces or the openings of shirt collars from the rainfall. Residual behavior, Eve knew. Most ignored the weather, heading to skyroamers and treading the same footsteps they had trod upon their last sunny-day visit to the vast factory. Puddles formed in some of those footprints, forcing Eve to wonder whether those repeated steps in the same spots really did add up over decades or centuries.
Charlie7 was one of the robots who didn’t show the slightest hesitation. Human as he sounded when speaking—more so than many other robots, Eve had realized over time as she knew more humans—he was fully adapted to robotic life. Every foible of humanity in his crystalline matrix, he’d overcome. Sure, he still laughed and winked and shrugged, but that was nonverbal communication. He didn’t flinch, didn’t gasp, didn’t cringe or cower or run his hands through hair he no longer grew.
Eve could only hope to be so controlled.
Clenching her jaw against the cold, pelting rain, Eve strode across the open landing zone. Her implanted lenses reported that the distance was 75.3 meters to her skyroamer and dropped with each stride. A twitch of her fingers brought up the menu for the skyroamer’s operating system. With a series of subtle gestures, she selected Canopy > Open.
Timing it with near perfection, Eve climbed inside just as the canopy gave her the clearance to squeeze in. She shut it again before much rain could chase her inside. With the control console before her, Eve didn’t have to use her implanted interface to turn on the ventilation system full blast, power up the ion engines, or open a Social channel to Paris.
Eve just preferred it that way.
As she waited for someone to accept the connection on the far end, Eve ran her hands over her scalp, squeezing the water from her carefully maintained 8-centimeter hair and wiping it on her pants.
The skyroamer was just lifting off on autopilot when the video feed popped up in her field of view, projected directly onto her retinas.
“Hi Mommy!” a delighted Abbigail squealed, waving a hand at the camera. She was seeing Eve’s image from the internal cockpit feed. “You coming home yet?”
“I’m on my way, pumpkin,” Eve promised, still wondering how Plato had ever gotten the term of endearment to stick. “Watch for me to land at 11:42 exactly.”
Abbigail’s glance shot off screen. Her little face crinkled in a frown. “That’s too long. Be home faster, Mommy.”
Without warning, Abbigail rose up out of the camera’s view. Giant hands wrapped around her midsection. Seconds later, Plato settled into the seat in front of the terminal, and Abbigail settled onto his knee, totally nonplussed by her brief time airborne.
“Hey, Eve,” Plato said with the goofy grin he always had on around Abbigail. “Me and Abby were just playing city. I got to be the monster who destroyed it.”
“Daddy stepped on Mr. Charlie’s house,” Abbigail said, acting aghast with wide eyes and a smirk on her face.
Plato bounced their daughter on his knee. “How’d the activation go?”
“The new Toby seems a little eccentric, but other than that, I think it went fine. Will you be making lunch, or will we be eating food today?”
“Mommy, what do you mean, eccentric?” Abbigail asked.
Eve wondered briefly at the child’s question. She had a program installed that cross-referenced her interactions with Abbigail against child psychology texts from the Human Era. By all rights, she should have had to explain the meaning of the word “eccentric” to a five-year-old, but that wasn’t what Abbigail was asking.
“He’s a little more excitable than most new robots,” Eve explained. “He had more interesting questions than usual, like asking how many humans there were, and what he had been doing the night before.”
Abbigail giggled. “He’s new. He didn’t do anything last night.”
At her age, Eve had thought robots had always existed. The idea of one being built would have seemed impossible.
“I’ll be back in time for lunch. If neither of you wants to tell me what that’s going to be, fine. But if it’s peanut butter salad again…”
Plato held up a hand for a solemn oath. “I will veto anything weird.”
“Awwww,” Abbigail whined.
“Too weird,” Plato corrected quickly, which seemed to placate the girl.
“After lunch, we can practice forms,” Eve said. “OK?”
Abbigail held one hand stiff and flat, then pressed her other fist against it and gave a jerky bow.
Once, Phoebe had looked at old videos of the Eve clones and claimed that they had been adorable as children. Genetically identical to her mother and aunts, Abbigail was daily proof of how right Phoebe had been.
“All right,” Eve told the girl. “You just keep Daddy out of trouble until I get home.”
When the video feed ended, Eve was left wishing that she had been joking with the girl.
Chapter Three
Wherever Rachel went that morning, Toby521 was a pace behind her. She had never owned a puppy, but from idiomatic references in the planetary archives, she now understood the phrase “followed her around like a puppy.”
According to Charlie13, the average newly awakened robot required ninety-three minutes of personal attention before deciding to venture off to learn about the world on their own. The standard deviation on that figure was eighteen minutes, and the record was held by John31 at just over three hours.
“So, when you were rescued, you’d never eaten ice cream before?” Toby521 asked.
Toby521 had been following Rachel around Kanto for over five hours. At first, she’d tried working while carrying on a conversation. But eventually, she just had to give in, request the remainder of the day off from work, and devote
all her attention to her new pet robot.
“None of us had,” Rachel said, sitting cross-legged on the couch of her Kanto apartment with a bowl of raspberry ice cream balanced in her lap. “Evelyn11 had a lot in mind for us, and nutritionally dubious treats weren’t anywhere in her plans.”
“Is there any way I can try some?” Toby521 asked, eyeing the ice cream maker on the counter.
Rachel swallowed a spoonful.
This wasn’t right. Toby521 was totally ignoring his So_I’m_A_Robot_Now file. Maybe he was malfunctioning. If Rachel was wrong, it would be rude of her to suggest it, but she had to know.
“Probably not,” Rachel replied. “But let me go find Charlie13 and ask him.”
Toby521 nodded enthusiastically. “Excellent idea. Even 65 percent of a Dr. Truman ought to be pretty clever. I’ll just watch some news, if you don’t mind.”
Rachel didn’t. She showed him the basics for using the remote—information readily available in his welcome package—and headed out.
This wasn’t her fault. Charlie13 had done all the mixing himself. All Rachel had done was to make suggestions, observe, and hit the button at the end. She wasn’t qualified to mix personalities yet, and both she and Charlie13 knew it.
So why did she feel responsible for Toby521 being so odd?
“Ready to resume work?” Charlie13 asked when she entered his office. Her chair beside his, overlooking the master uploader’s console, sat empty and waiting.
Rachel sighed. “Unfortunately, no. I told Toby521 I would find out if there was any way for him to eat ice cream. So—for formality’s sake—can he?”
“Of course not.”
“I know, but I said I’d ask anyway,” Rachel said. “But really, I came to find out what’s wrong with him? He’s so… needy.”
Charlie13’s console went dark. He turned to fix his full attention on Rachel. “He is neither a toddler nor a hamster. If you tell him to look up the answers to simple queries himself, he won’t be offended. He’s a Toby. To varying degrees, they are all obsessively curious over mundane details. That’s part of what makes them so amenable to handling monotonous duties.”
“But I’ve never had a robot be so… clingy.”
In her admittedly limited experience, new robots were almost always more interested in seeing the world for themselves than having it explained to them.
“Toby521 is an outlier, to be sure,” Charlie13 said. “But he’s shown no indications that he poses a danger to you or anyone else, that he will object to performing the landscaping and civil engineering support roles he was mixed for, or that he has any desires to return to a human body. While I’m perfectly willing to allow you to indulge his need for companionship for as long as he wishes—data is data, after all—you are also perfectly within your rights to tell him to go find someone else to bother. He has a brand new skyroamer and a temporary apartment to call his own; he doesn’t need you for anything.”
Rachel pursed her lips.
Charlie13 was right, of course. She couldn’t recall a time when he hadn’t been. Certain flamboyant robots spoke to hear the sound of their voices. They made statements that sounded nice but weren’t always factually accurate. But unlike those loose-tongued robots, Charlie13 spoke in facts.
With a muttered apology for bothering her supervisor, Rachel headed back to her apartment.
As soon as she entered, Toby521 paused the news feed he was watching. A frozen flat image of Parisian construction remained on the screen with a caption that read, “Paul208 and Phoebe Sixteen Reveal New Plan for Civic Center.”
“So?” Toby521 asked with an expectant smile.
“Robots can’t eat ice cream,” Rachel reported.
Toby521 gritted his teeth and jerked his head aside. “Bugger.” But as quickly as the annoyance came on, it slipped away to be replaced by that same wondrous curiosity he’d shown all day. “Hey, I was noticing something as I read through that So_I’m_A_Robot_Now pamphlet of yours. It says they mix robots from twenty-seven personalities dating back to Project Transhuman.”
“Yeah,” Rachel confirmed. It was basic stuff. Maybe Toby521 wasn’t curious. Maybe he had an improperly mixed learning algorithm. Theoretically, it was possible to grab pieces of three brains and be missing an essential element like that. Seemed farfetched, though. Charlie13 had warned Rachel of it for fear she would make that kind of inexcusable mistake. The old mixing expert knew better.
“That number doesn’t sound right. Are you sure twenty-seven is correct?”
Rachel tried to mask her exasperated sigh with a tight smile. “Let’s check at the source, shall we?”
Toby521 followed Rachel to a terminal in her home office and watched over her shoulder as she logged into Kanto’s systems. With a biometric lockout, she didn’t have to worry about Toby521 gaining unauthorized access.
PERSONALITY MIX > LIST OF AVAILABLE PERSONALITIES > ALL
The mixing simulator was completely at Rachel’s disposal. Before Charlie13 ever let her upload to a live robot, she was going to have to simulate dozens—possibly hundreds—of viable mixes that met Charlie13’s approval. She’d played with the system at length, creating artists and musicians from bits of Nora’s childhood pottery classes and the two years Arthur had spent in his high school marching band. She simulated a robot with no interests whatsoever out of Jennifer’s obsessive organization, Holly’s love of algorithms, and Dale’s analytical approach to management. She’d tried two-personality mixes and mixtures that included as many as five personalities.
There was no one who knew this system better than Rachel except the two robots who’d held the job of mixer: Charlie7 and Charlie13.
There they were, all twenty-seven names of the scientific personalities Rachel had been working with her entire time at Kanto. She’d met robots from every one of those archetypes, knew their quirks and predispositions to the core.
Rachel held out a hand to the list on screen and looked up at Toby521.
The robot was so new that he squinted when he looked intently at the list. As if it would help him see better. He scowled. His head shook ever so slightly.
“No… that’s not right at all…”
Rachel cleared her throat and gestured a little harder.
“Mind humoring me?” Toby521 asked.
What else had Rachel been doing all day? To humor him any more completely would require a comedy routine. “Sure.”
“Get out of the mix protocol… root directory… now archival scans…”
Rachel put in the commands as he requested them, sparing him a quick glance as she wondered why a Toby knew so much about how Kanto’s computers worked. Toby was a gardener archetype. They directed bulldozers. They planted trees. Tobies fed deer and flew bears off to new habitats.
Tobies didn’t mix robots.
But this Toby seemed to know more than he ought to about Charlie13’s line of work. “Go ahead. Run your search from here.”
“These are just the raw scans from the Human Era,” Rachel protested. “The mixing copies have been sanitized to remove corrupted data. Charlie13 showed me himself. It’s the same list, just with dangerously aberrant anomalies included. Using these, you could get—”
“Please,” Toby521 said. “Can you just run it? I need to see.”
Rachel ran the search. Given the limited scope, the results came back before her finger lifted from the touch pad. But what the database returned wasn’t possible.
She blinked.
The list didn’t change.
Rachel rubbed her eyes.
“See?” Toby521 said with a quiet sigh of relief. “That’s more like it.”
The list showed thirty-three scans.
Chapter Four
Dale2 drummed his fingers on his desk. The screen in front of him showed a network of mining vessels arrayed at the edge of the solar system. Some of them carried loyalist robots aboard, ones willing to fudge ore collection numbers for him. Others didn’t. Dale2’s task was, as usua
l, acquiring what he needed without anyone knowing he was getting it.
Alison75, one of Dale2’s underlings, had recently taken on a mining assignment. She was captaining the Appalachia for the next five years. While he didn’t question her loyalty, he wanted a longer track record of ore collection before she started skimming for Martian production supply. There was always later. So long as no one discovered the conspirators’ presence on Mars, there would always be later.
An alert popped up on Dale2’s console, utterly unrelated to mining, minerals, or industrial production.
He double-checked. Despite all the fail-safes in place, it wouldn’t do to get worked up over a false positive.
Tapping through menus, Dale2 ran diagnostics, bounced back a system request that looked like a simple database inquiry about logistical needs, and repeated the process for good measure.
“I’ll be damned. It’s about time,” Dale2 muttered to himself.
He opened a comm to another mining ship, one that made the quick, easy runs in the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars.
“What?” Charlie25 snapped the instant the call connected. The former uploader was back in a robotic chassis under the assumed identity of Marvin113. He hadn’t been happy over either the assignment or the change in name.
“Cut the aggrieved robot act,” Dale2 chided him. “I’ve got a job for you—something better suited to your talents.”
Dale2 counted processor cycles as he waited for Charlie25’s reaction. Accounting for transmission delay, his reply was virtually instantaneous. “Oh?” The prospect of some better assignment seemed to snap the robot from his dour mood.
“A kindly young human has finally managed to get around the lockout,” Dale2 continued with a smug grin he didn’t pretend to hide.
“That nonsense again? I worked on that factory for centuries. I’ve had half the equipment in there torn down to its component parts and gone over every line of code. There’s nothing hidden there.”
“You’re programmed that way.”