by J. S. Morin
The Nora who’d acted as nurse leaned into view as well. “I’m actually hoping you don’t cooperate. That body of yours is slated to be mine.”
Chapter Forty-Five
Eve turned the rifle over in her hands, letting her lenses record her inspection. One day, those images might be her only record of these devices—in the event Charlie7 confiscates them once the danger was past. On the other hand, they might also be requisitioned as evidence at a committee hearing over Charlie7’s conduct in this matter.
And a lot of other matters.
The tram whooshed through Charlie7’s hidden network of underground tunnels. Eve was dressed in a winter parka and snow pants that violated the known laws of physics. She’d just come from a preserved alien outpost beneath the Baltic Sea.
As chairwoman of the Human Welfare Committee, she’d investigated potential geneticists to ensure that they weren’t hiding anything in their committee applications. Considering she felt like she knew Charlie7 as well as any robot she’d met, Eve wondered how effective she was at sussing out those illicit geneticists.
“A lot to take in, isn’t it?” Charlie7 observed.
Eve sucked in a quick lungful of air and reminded herself that she wasn’t alone here. Crawling inside her own thoughts was such an easy trap. Plato and Abbigail couldn’t be still long enough for Eve to forget their presence, but Charlie7 had the patience of a mountain.
“You haven’t told me the rest,” Eve pointed out. “It was an excellent distraction, but I can’t overlook the holes in your story. You never explained the animosity with Dale or why there’s no such thing as a Kabir in Kanto’s database.”
Charlie7 smiled gently. “If I’d shown this place to Phoebe or Olivia, they’d have forgotten all about Dale2. Plato would have asked me a million questions about the rifle.”
Eve ran a hand along the rifle’s barrel. It felt like nothing under the armored glove. “Dark energy, you said. I’m not even qualified to ask. I’d need a primer on how dark energy physics even works first. Presumably, for practical purposes, I fire at something, and it makes holes. Unless that’s not the case, I’d rather you finish the story. The aliens are dead, I assume, unless you missed some.”
With a story like this one, there was no telling when the sudden twist might come. Had Charlie7 reached a truce with the alien survivors? Were they the ones feeding him this tech? Was Charlie7 really an alien uploaded to a robot chassis? Eve’s imagination whirled with possibilities.
Charlie7 stared ahead. “Fine. The end. Let’s get this over with…”
Chapter Forty-Six
The war was over. We had won. It was touch-and-go for a while, because we couldn’t be sure. But in retrospect, everything was clear sailing.
Those alien monstrosities had wrecked our planet, and there were just four of us left to start the cleanup. Toby2 and Holly2 had been lost when tunnels collapsed during the great purge. You can’t imagine the forces we unleashed, tapping into the Earth’s volcanic heart and turning it into a weapon.
There was cleanup work to be done. As a human, I’d been daunted by the prospect of scrubbing a toilet. I had a cleaning service that came twice a week and did that sort of thing for me. Now, the entire planet was contaminated with traces of that mutagenic agent that killed living cells within minutes.
We had four robots and four competing plans on what to do next.
Jason2 wanted to become a fully robotic society. Just machines. No biology. No looking back. We had proven the technology, he argued. We could restore Toby2 and Holly2, then the rest of the Project Transhuman team, then begin working on the mixing software. Eventually, he proposed, we could develop thinking AI from scratch.
I have to admit, Jason2’s plan was tempting.
Kabir2, if possible, wanted to go a step further. Why remain in the physical realm? We were converting data into signals interpreted by an artificial brain as sensory input. Why not skip the middleman and develop a self-sustaining computer infrastructure and inhabit it as pure software?
“There are dozens of movies and hundreds of books that make it clear why that’s a bad idea. Weren’t you all aware of them?” Eve asked.
Yes. We watched all those.
“Even Kabir?” Eve persisted.
Yes, Kabir still thought it was a good idea afterward.
But the how was less important at that stage. The four of us were petty gods. We had just wiped out an alien presence that had eradicated our species. At that point, it felt like we could accomplish anything.
Dale2 had the bug in the worst way. He imagined that we could advance humanity past what it had once been. Of the survivors, he was the one who fit poorest into a robotic shell. He wanted his body back.
“You mean he wanted a clone of himself?” Eve asked.
Yeah, the same creaky, post-middle-aged body he’d lost. His contention that with all the time in the world, we could advance the field of genetics far beyond what our species had previously known. We could learn from our invaders, steal the secrets of their technology and biology, and reshape the world as a whole new species.
Homo chimera, he wanted to call us.
Yes, I’m aware that he was mixing Greek and Latin roots. But that was least among the things that bothered me with that plan.
“So. That’s three plans. You still haven’t mentioned yours.”
Hah. My plan? You’re living in it. This is what I’ve wanted all along—a detail here or there aside.
You must be getting caught up in the story if you don’t already realize that I won. I wanted the Earth back the way it was, or at least as close as we could manage. We could restart the planet without the geopolitical divides and environmental time bombs threatening it. It was a do-over.
I’m not sure whose plan would have been the most work to implement, aside from there being no question that Jason2’s was the easiest.
Nevertheless, we agreed to each work up a project proposal and reconvene in a month’s time. At that point, we would hold a summit to determine the fate of Earth. Post-summit, some negotiated plan—probably a mix of ideas—would determine how we would rebuild.
“Probably?” Eve echoed with a wary scowl.
Oh, yes. I said probably. You see, I knew I couldn’t win an argument in that venue. I spent days going over game theory scenarios, and all I could envision coming out of that meeting was a world of robots and software simulations with a zoo of extinct species taking up an island somewhere.
I spent the rest of my month preparing to defend my dead species the only way I knew how.
When the date of the summit rolled around, we all met on Mt. Olympus. We were pompous bastards, and we had every right to be. Casting ourselves in the role of the ancient gods was the least of our hubris.
I… don’t know what happened at the summit. My plan had been to listen to the proposals from the other three, hoping for signs that I might somehow prevail on behalf of their lost biological ancestors. But as for the details of what took place, that’s a gap in my memory that I can never fill.
Charlie2 set off an EMP device that destroyed Dale2, Kabir2, and Jason2 in one go.
“How did you manage to survive?” Eve asked.
I didn’t. It was a suicide mission. I died alongside them. Or, at least, Charlie2 did.
The day before the summit, Charlie2 made a replica of himself. You see, while the other three all adjourned to little corners of the world to do their planning, I took up the old offices of Project Transhuman. I built a new crystal matrix. I built a new body.
I built Charlie3.
Of course, for political purposes, I took the name Charlie7 instead. I concocted the story of a team of Charlies defending the world. All the rest of the histories you heard differently from that story were my fabrications.
I took years putting the pieces in place to make the details fit.
I built the foundations of Kanto, where I started production of robotic chassis and drones alike in the shell of an old automobi
le factory. It was never a humble place—only by modern standards would anyone ever consider it tiny. But that’s where the rebirth began.
Drone bulldozers were delivered around the world by drone cargo carriers. Drone workers expanded the factory. Drone laborers fanned out and collected biological samples from anyplace that might have been missed during the early stages of the resistance.
As… a side project, I created the first interstellar missile. I was able to backtrack the aliens’ flight path to a distant star. I built what amounted to a weapon out of an ion rocket.
I have no idea to this day whether it worked. But if my calculations worked out, about one hundred and thirty years after I launched it, that missile should have intercepted and towed an asteroid on a collision course with the aliens’ homeworld at something approaching the speed of light.
Eve gasped. “That’s monstrous!”
Well, I’m not saying it was my proudest moment. But… top five, maybe. Those aliens had taken everything from me. Everything but my consciousness, which I’d packed up on a life raft of crystal and steel. A tit-for-tat payback, ruining their world in return was part vengeance, part assurance of no follow-up attack.
Eventually, I awakened a companion robot. I called him Toby2. He didn’t last long before going mad and self-terminating. My grasp of the intricacies of personality mixing was shabby. It was trial and error, and the errors were heart wrenching.
Over time, I established the core of what became the culture and civilization you now know. It was built on the ashes of a dead world and on the bones of its saviors who didn’t share this vision.
And, it has now become apparent, that Dale2 survived that fateful day on Mt. Olympus.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Eve’s hand tightened on the rifle’s grip. Charlie7 had admitted to murdering half the team that had saved Earth’s wreckage from the hands—or possibly tentacles—of its invaders. Could she be fast enough in the tight quarters of the tram’s passenger compartment to fire the weapon and enact justice for those robots he’d slain so long ago?
It didn’t matter. The question was moot. Eve couldn’t pull the trigger.
For better or worse, she was alive and in this tram because of that long-ago decision. None of the other robots’ plans would have resulted in her existence, at least not as a human, in the case of Dale2’s version.
“Why?” was all she could think to ask. “How could you?”
“How could I not?” Charlie7 countered. Or should she call him Charlie2 now, or just Charlie, since he had the unmixed mind of the original Charles Truman? “Those things destroyed everything humanity had built from the Neolithic to the Transhuman Age. They took us from the verge of the technological singularity to pre-amoeba protein soup in a span of weeks.”
“But you could have compromised. You could have implemented multiple plans. Why murder?”
“As I said, I can’t know the exact details that made Charlie2 trigger that EMP,” Charlie7 said. “All I know is my reasoning for preparing to do so. This was more important that voting on digging a community pool or whether to repaint an old school or build a new one. This wasn’t even civil rights voting or a nuclear arms pact. This was deciding the fate of our species. This was choosing biology or machinery, soul or software. This was a decision that would affect every living, thinking being from that moment to the death of our sun. Possibly beyond, since even now we have the tech to leave the solar system.”
“Why were you the one qualified to make it?” Eve challenged. This was the hubris everyone had warned her of. Even without knowing the depths of his deeds, robotkind had seen beneath the veneer of Charlie7 enough to realize it.
Charlie7 stood in the tram car and held his chin high. “This… was my doing. Project Transhuman had its contributors and its dead weight, its interchangeable parts and its key cogs. It might never have reached completion in time without Holly Chang or Jason Sanborn, but it only existed at all because of me. Barring invasion, I could have done it all myself in a private lab with angel funding by the time I was seventy or eighty.
“The future of life on Earth wasn’t a matter to be left in a hodgepodge of half plans and compromise. It required a vision and a laser focus on achieving it. No arguments over the direction of the project. No conniving, undercutting, and resource hoarding could be tolerated. Mankind needed one vision, one plan, one directive from on high about how we would all go forward.
“And I was the only one of the four of us remotely qualified to do it alone.”
Eve took a long breath. Then another. History had been filled with men who sounded like Charlie7. They had been megalomaniacs, dictators, and conquerors. They claimed divine right, right of arms, or right of will to justify their ambitions.
Historians had oft argued that the wars of mankind would leave a single ruler presiding over a dead world.
Charlie7 had fulfilled their prophecy.
“You get at least a modicum of reprieve for what you’ve done since then,” Eve said cautiously.
“They all owe me their very existence. Even Dale2,” Charlie7 replied.
“Bear that in mind. Of all robots alive today, not a single one met a live human before this second Human Age. Not even Dale2 saw one with his own robotic eyes. Robots have memories of human experiences, human friends and lovers, all preserved from brain scans. I remember them firsthand.
“I watched Tobias Greene sacrifice himself and Charlie Truman so their life signs wouldn’t give away my location. I was alive through the final extermination and the colonial phase of alien occupation. I woke the first robot mixes and assigned them the task of learning genetic engineering.”
Eve wanted to argue that killing three heroes of mankind was unforgivable. That’s what movies had told her. Some sins could be redeemed, but Charlie7 was unrepentant. He should at least pretend he was sorry for what he’d done. He was a good enough liar that she’d never know the difference.
Charlie7 sat back down as the tunnel continued to rush past. They were heading into an old war, one that Charlie7 had started, without knowing it, a thousand years ago.
“I understand,” Eve said softly.
In his place, Eve couldn’t have done what Charlie2 had done. She would have negotiated. She would have gone to that meeting at Mt. Olympus and brokered a compromise. The act of stranding herself as the only sentient life form on a planet was impossible to comprehend. The willpower to knowingly subject oneself to that solitude, that uncertainty, that unfathomable burden would have been too much for her.
Charlie7 dimmed his eyes at her. “You do?”
Eve sighed and looked away. “No. Not really. But I can’t comprehend well enough to judge. I understand who you are, but who you were is as alien to me as this rifle. I can see it, feel it, know what it does, but what goes on inside or why is an utter mystery. You’re not like the other robots, and it finally makes sense why. I can imagine why Dale2 is upset with you, in theory. But I want to consider one alternative before you take the blame for this scenario in front of the whole world.”
“What’s that?” Charlie7 asked.
The possibility occurred to her even as Charlie7 laid out the betrayal at Mt. Olympus. “Dale2 survived, right?”
Charlie7 spread his hands. “Obviously.”
“And you survived.”
“Is this going somewhere?”
“You had been prepared to kill everyone at the summit.”
“Yes. We just went over that. I did what I had—”
“What if it was Dale?”
Charlie7’s eyes blinked off and on several times. “Repeat that.”
“What if it was Dale2 who killed the four robots at the summit? You know why you were prepared with a backup body. Maybe Dale2 had the same plan.”
Charlie7 shook his head. “Killing us, maybe, but Dale2 never would have had a prayer of building a body on his own, let alone a crystal matrix.”
“He hid from you for a thousand years and was one of two
thinking creatures left on Earth. I dare say you’ve made an epic underestimate of Dale Chalmers somewhere along the way.”
Charlie7 folded his arms. “I refuse to believe that ignoramus and his plastic sheepskin was prepared to rebuild Earth with his own two manicured hands. Please make your judgment based on me having been the one to destroy the other three. Are you in?”
Eve was far from convinced. Charlie7’s denial, given the context, seemed uncharacteristically emotion based.
In the end, though, some matters were best left in the past. Charlie25 and Dale2 had taken control of Kanto, and Rachel was inside. Maybe afterward, Eve would be of a mind to do some soul-searching regarding Charlie7’s historical villainy. For now, he was the one who had the willpower and, frankly, the firepower to get Rachel back safely.
“I’m in.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
The engines of the skyroamer wound down. Their high-pitched whine died away. The constant whistling from the hole in the canopy had left Gemini’s ears ringing as she stumbled along beneath the Arc de Triomphe. But she was on the ground now.
Paris: her hope for salvation.
Gemini’s hands shook as she punched an access code into a decorously disguised computer panel set into the stone monument. “Please let this work,” she muttered to the universe. “Just please bloody work.”
A soft digital chime rang, and the door slid open.
Gemini slumped against the doorway before pouring herself through. The lift was bare, spacious, and scuffed from frequent use. Of course, it had been entirely refurbished since her last visit, lifetimes ago.
Evelyn11 had been no friend of Charlie7’s, but that gregarious old blighter knew everyone, and everyone knew him. Gemini would have bet her left eye that 90 percent of the robots alive had been down this shaft at one point or another in their lives.