by J. S. Morin
The gentle lurch set her empty stomach aquiver. She hadn’t eaten before her escape, and the hours since then had only compounded her hunger.
“You’d best have more than peeled apples and yogurt, Charles,” Gemini threatened wearily, unsure whether she was being monitored. “Meat would be a start. Wouldn’t mind a pint or three to wash it down.”
Eve Fourteen was known to frequent Charlie7’s home. There had to be food. If she had to eat like the Human Committee chairwoman, so be it.
But she didn’t have to like it.
The lift doors opened onto Charlie7’s sitting room. Dark screens and human-compatible chairs beckoned. Gemini could flop down and wait for robotkind’s patriarch to return while keeping abreast of the news feeds.
First, that meal she’d promised herself.
Charlie7’s house was a maze of a chaos theoretician’s design. Gemini took no fewer than five wrong turns before locating the refrigerator. It was filled with yogurt, as anticipated.
However, a freezer adjoining the unit contained a variety of ice cream. Nutrition be damned, Gemini pilfered a carton of chocolate, found a spoon, and headed for the nearest couch.
Settling onto the plush surface reminded her that she had a coil pistol tucked in the back of her waistband.
“Charles!” she called as she drew the weapon and placed it gingerly on a side table. “I don’t know if you’re monitoring security feeds, but I don’t intend any harm. I’m seeking asylum. This may come as a shock to you, but I much prefer my odds here to facing what Dale2 has in store. The gun was merely a means to my hard-won—and likely temporary—liberty.”
She waited, half expecting one of the screens to spring to life with Charlie7’s matte-black face glowering at her. Tearing the plastic covering off the ice cream carton, she continued to watch. Eyes fixed on the screen, Gemini spared a glance down at her snack just long enough to judge where to plunge her spoon.
The chocolate was divine. Eight hundred years had passed without such a caressing of her taste buds. During most of that time, she had possessed none to delight. Since her upload to this human body, she’d been acting as a double agent, running for her life, and imprisoned for crimes committed during her robotic life.
It seemed like eons ago.
The ice cream was like time travel. It brought Gemini back to the days of her childhood, those hazy memories that were more emotion than photo album. It brought back nights with her roommates at Dartmouth, studying over pints of Ben & Jerry’s while listening to Adele. It brought back birthday parties for Clancy and years later for little Leonard.
Worries melted away faster than the ice cream in her mouth.
The carton ended with a half kilogram of cream, sugar, and natural flavorings transferred to Gemini’s stomach. A churning rumble told her it had been too much, too quickly. Setting the empty carton and spoon beside her coil gun, she flopped back on the couch and waited.
Gemini closed her eyes. “I am a rude house guest,” she called out to the room at large, still not sure anyone could even hear her. “But I’m at your mercy. If you want to have me hanged, drawn, and quartered over a pint of chocolate ice cream, I’ll consider it an acceptable final meal.”
The underground abode smelled so different. Though it had been forever since her last visit, and she had no basis for smelling it the previous time, Gemini could scent the newness on the air. So many Cloth-o-Matic and protofabbed objects around that no robot would have ever needed. The upholstery of the couch had that fresh-from-the factory whiff of plastic. Hints of protofab resins colored the scent.
No small amount of chocolate and cream brightened her nose’s palette as well.
What a day…
This morning had begun as every other morning these past years. Monotony. Blandness. More monotony. Then the world tore at the seams, and Gemini slipped through one of the tears. Her adrenaline glands had gone dry as a wrung washcloth. Though still in her plain, dull white prison attire, her lungs were filled with a change of air and her belly swelled with a forbidden delicacy.
But the longer she lay there on Charlie7’s couch, the more she wondered if this play was a mistake.
Couldn’t she have just hidden? Surely by lying low she could have worked out a hiding spot where Charlie25 might have missed her. It’s not as if Dale2 was likely to come looking for her.
Sleep weighed all the heavier on closed eyelids. She ought to have sat up and waited. Maybe somewhere around the flat she could find a coffee maker. A lifetime of abstinence should have rendered this body particularly receptive to the wakeful jolt of caffeine.
Though neither of them remembered the act firsthand, Evelyn11 had killed Charlie7 once. They’d both died the day she tried to upload herself to Eve14. But none of them were the same person they were that day—least of all Eve. Gemini hardly felt like the sort of person who could ever have done the things Evelyn11 had. She was certainly willing to allow for bygones.
Too heavy. Stomach and eyelids alike carried the weight of boulders. Gemini didn’t want to sit up. She couldn’t open her eyes if she tried. As sleep came to overtake her, she offered one bone to the guard dog security system that might—for all she knew—have been watching and listening this entire time.
“By the by, I know where Dale2 is.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
What a curious creature, this Eve.
Charlie7, for all his centuries’ experience with robots, was still unable to predict human behavior. If she had a flaw, it was that she was too certain of what she knew, the difference between right and wrong. It had led her, at times, to ugly and unpleasant conflicts with other committees whose pragmatism clashed with her pristine moral compass.
But Charlie7 had been there when Eve strayed. Her love of Plato and unwillingness to allow him to face justifiable punishment had led her to cover up a murder for him. Charlie7 had cleaned that up, placing blame on Zeus, who was in no position to refute the evidence fabricated against him.
That had been a time when each of them saw the other for the flawed, self-serving being that lay within. And while Charlie7 had always embraced those instincts in Eve, he had feared that she wouldn’t extend that same respect to the actions of Charlie2.
“You’re taking this better than expected.”
Eve, who had been staring ahead as they shot down the tram tunnel, turned and met his eyes. Those enhanced eyes of hers saw more than other humans but less than Charlie7’s. What she saw when she looked at him was anyone’s guess. “Right now, I need you. Later—if either of us has a later—you’ll have worse problems to deal with than me.”
Beneath the idealist: a sister.
“We’ll do whatever we can for Rachel. If Charlie25 is trying to win a popularity contest against me, hurting her isn’t going to advance his cause.”
“I wish I could be so calculating about it,” Eve replied glumly.
“It may be calculating, but it’s also a matter of knowing our enemy. Charlie25 doesn’t—”
An alert came in. Considering their location, the origin wasn’t surprising. No place but home could reach them here.
AUTHORIZED VISITOR.
That was annoying and inconvenient. Who would be dropping by at a time like this? Certainly no one he wanted to see.
VISITOR ID: EVELYN38.
Charlie7’s processors skipped a sector. Evelyn38 had been murdered and impersonated by Evelyn11 decades ago. Though the timeline was fuzzy, it ought to have been the real Evelyn38 who’d last been allowed into Charlie7’s home. Evelyn11 hadn’t been to Paris in centuries.
But who else could it be? Evelyn11 was dead, but it wouldn’t have been the first time she’d returned. That would mean she was still with the conspiracy. Charlie25, returned from his stint as a human impostor as Zeus, had brought back the top scientist in his cabal.
“Charlie25 doesn’t what?” Eve prompted.
“Forget that,” Charlie7 snapped. “I just got an alert that Evelyn38 let herself into my house.
”
Eve was never one to leave disparate pieces of a puzzle scattered without seeing how they fit. “How could you be such an idiot?” she demanded. “You had to assume Evelyn11 would have downloaded her knowledge. And now Gemini knows it, too.”
“Gemini?” Charlie7 asked. “She’s…”
No. It made sense. At least, it made as much sense as his theory.
“Which do you find more likely?” he asked. “That Gemini has escaped from a hover-ship prison and decided to flee halfway around the world and seek sanctuary with me, or that Charlie25’s conspiracy reloaded her into a new body and sent her to kill one or both of us?”
Eve unfocused her gaze. The lenses had an interface all their own, separate from normal vision. She was staring at a computer screen not so different from Charlie7’s own. It had never occurred to him as such, but at some point, Eve had become a cyborg. She had spent so much of her career acting as a bridge between humans and robots that she had become one.
“I can come up with scenarios for both. Conspiracy backup does seem the more likely, though. Can’t you just check a security feed?”
Charlie7 sighed. He wondered whether Eve appreciated the affectation, or if she was past buying feigned robotic idiosyncrasies. “I could, but it might alert anyone sitting around waiting for us. They could explore top to bottom without finding this additional complex. If they looked and found no one, they’d be expecting any assault to come from the surface. So our choice is either foreknowledge of our enemy and giving away our location versus an ambush on whoever might be up there.”
“Ambush,” Eve agreed with a curt nod.
Was there a time when she would have shied from conflict? Charlie7 couldn’t recall one. Bravery, at times, was merely an optimal plan. Eve fled when outmatched but had never shown cowardice when circumstances called for taking the offensive. Raised on puzzle games and drilled mercilessly to solve them at any cost, she had been conditioned to win.
But she’d also spent far too much time with Plato, exposed to his warped notions of heroism and glory.
“Let me take the lead,” Charlie7 cautioned.
Eve snorted. “Don’t trust this gear you gave me?”
Charlie7 slowed the tram. They were getting too close to their destination to leave details unresolved. “You just heard that entire story I recounted. You’ve witnessed me come back from death. Do you think I’m being a martyr, going in first? I still have contingencies lined up. I’ve rededicated myself these past few years to plugging holes and replacing elements whose powers of surprise have been stripped away.”
“You’re just worried I’ll shoot first and skip questions. You’re thinking I’ve let Plato rub off on me.”
“The thought hadn’t crossed my mind,” Charlie7 replied warily. If he believed in psychic powers, he’d swear at times that Eve could peer into his skull. She couldn’t divine his deepest secrets, but she knew the basic twists of his surface thoughts too often for his liking.
“I’m leading the way. If it is a trap, maybe I can catch them by surprise. An EMP meant for you will just take out my visual overlay.”
Charlie7 hated himself. Much as he knew that another Charlie7 would rise in his place, this one could die. It would believe itself to be Charlie7 right down to its nanotransistors, but it wouldn’t be him. “Fine. But for the record, I don’t like this plan.”
Chapter Fifty
Eve crept out of the secret hatch in Charlie7’s sub-basement. The lubrication and acoustic-dampening materials did their job and made her emergence as silent as could be. Boots scraped along the floor with a rasp like a metal file. Her breath howled. Fabric flapped like sails in a hurricane.
Taking one hand from the barrel of the alien-tech rifle, Eve twitched her fingers through menus in her interface.
OPTIONS > INTERFACE > ELEMENTS > REMOVE
She temporarily shut down her heart rate display.
OPTIONS > INTERFACE > ELEMENTS > ADD
Scanning down the list of available interface gauges, she selected an acoustic monitor. Though the sensor data came from sound pressure against her implanted lenses, and thus wasn’t especially precise, a reading within 0.5dB was good enough for now. She activated the app and checked to see if she was really the shrieking war band she heard as she moved.
25dB…
Fair enough. A robot without audio receptors tuned to annoyingly sensitive might not notice her coming until she aimed the rifle their way.
Slipping on the helmet to the armor Charlie7 had given her, the audio reading went to nil.
Eve spun in place to check with the armor’s inventor.
Charlie7 held up a finger to his lips. Eve winced. She hadn’t heard herself move, but that might not have been her at her quietest.
Setting one foot on the stairs up to the next level, she paused.
Was it better to rush up, heedless of the noise but fully armored, creep up in ignorance, wondering whether she was a ghost or a garbage disposal, or simply take off the helmet and track her sound output the whole way.
Science is god. Data is the fuel of science.
Eve reached up to remove the helmet. Better to know than to guess. She could always slip it on again if she heard trouble coming.
Charlie7 caught her by the wrist. She glared back at him, but a stern shake of his head told her that this was one argument she wasn’t winning. The old robot could get stubborn as anyone Eve knew and hadn’t liked this plan in the first place.
Eve was already risking too much.
With a sigh that stayed muffled inside her physics-proof helmet, staring through a transparent material whose composition was an utter mystery, Eve glided up the stairs as fluidly as combat boots could dream of.
She hoped the journey was as quiet as it felt.
Tactical training was something for movies. Thanks to Plato’s turn on alternating, non-child-friendly movie nights, Eve had seen her fair share of special forces tactics in action.
She entered rooms gun barrel first, swept for intruders, then used hand signs to signal Charlie7 when it was safe to follow.
Protofab room, workshops, washroom, comms, consoles, kitchen, and pantry all came up empty as Eve cut a direct path for the lift to the surface. If some cowardly robot wanted to wait in Charlie7’s house and ignore them, she was fine dealing with the intrusion later.
If Charlie7 objected to her route, he gave no indication.
As Eve prepared to enter the sitting room, Charlie7 once again caught her by the arm.
When she looked back, he was smiling wryly.
Eve cocked her head in lieu of verbalizing a question.
Charlie7 put a hand to his ear and motioned for Eve to remove the helmet.
Tucking the alien-tech rifle under her arm, Eve pulled off the purple cloth helmet and listened for whatever Charlie7 had found amusing. The answer was apparent in an instant. Sonorous snoring filled the air.
Dropping the helmet, Eve marched into the sitting room where a carton of ice cream lay empty beside a dripping spoon. A coil pistol next to the dessert remnants hinted that the snorer might possibly be unarmed right this moment.
Leading with the rifle barrel, Eve peered over the back of the couch to find her suspicion confirmed. It was Gemini.
“Get up!” Eve barked, startling even herself with the menace in her voice. Her breath quickened, and the muscles of her jaw clenched.
The snoring cut off in a flustered choke and cough. Gemini saw the rifle and fell off the couch in a panic to escape it. She propped herself on her elbows, raising her hands from the forearms up. “Don’t shoot!”
“Check her for transmitters,” Eve ordered, keeping the rifle trained on Gemini’s chest.
“Point that thing somewhere else,” Charlie7 replied. “She’s human. There isn’t a chance in hell of her overpowering me.” As soon as Eve diverted her aim, the robot swept in and patted Gemini down. Once he pronounced her clean, he lifted Gemini by the shirt collar and deposited her onto the couch.
“Start explaining,” Eve snapped. She kept the rifle at the ready but didn’t point it at the uploaded former robot. “Last I heard, you weren’t due for parole until… never.”
Gemini took a shuddering breath. “That was before Dale2 decided it was time for a jailbreak. I don’t imagine he had anything pleasant in mind for me, otherwise, he wouldn’t have sent a robot disguised as Mary98 to fetch me. He’d have sent someone I knew to be with him.”
“And you got away from your kidnapper,” Eve ventured a guess.
“Oh, I won’t sugarcoat it. That gun on the table was hers, and I used it to put a slug through her crystal. Her skyroamer is parked topside with a hole in the canopy. Flew the whole way here with a shriek like a banshee in my ears.”
Charlie7 shrugged, rifle barrel resting casually on his shoulder, though he kept a finger near the trigger. “So, what? You come here and expect sanctuary? This isn’t a church.”
Gemini scoffed. “Don’t tempt me. If you turn me away without either accepting my help or murdering me yourself, I might well do just that. Notre Dame is a brisk walk from here, and the sunshine felt nice on this skin.”
“Help?” Eve asked, glomming onto the one useful bit of Gemini’s response. “What kind of help? You finally willing to out the conspiracy members?”
Gemini laughed. “Out them? They’re holding a convention in Kanto right this moment. Round them up, and take inventory.”
“So your value to us is…?” Charlie7 let the question hang.
Gemini smiled. “Promise me I’m free to go or choose to remain safe here, and I’ll give up Dale2’s location.”
Eve stared at Gemini in shock. Charlie7 was likewise mute.
“Oh, don’t look so gobsmacked. I could have told you at any time and found myself a smear of bloody gore on the floor of my cell the next day. That despicable old bastard had a gun to my head the whole time of my incarceration. Only his desire to kill me in person saved me. Now that I’ve got the great and glorious Charlie7 to protect me, I have my chance to see that rotter eliminated once and for all.”