by J. S. Morin
“I trust Charlie7.”
…at least to the extent I can trust any robot, Eve added silently.
“He’s worse than Dale2,” Gemini warned. “More charismatic. More devious. Better able to wreak his own vengeance without the aid of minions and conspiracies.”
As Eve waited for a reply, she whirled on Gemini. “Dale2 kidnapped Rachel.”
“No,” Gemini replied calmly. “Charlie25 is responsible for that. Abbigail too.”
“Abbigail is fine,” Eve said coldly. She stared down at the console, watching for a reply. Charlie7 had gotten her message. With his computer brain, he could have sent an answer practically before her fingertip lifted from the console. He was deciding how to answer.
“But we saw—”
“Recorded footage. Yes,” Eve said, not looking up. “But it was recorded at Vivian’s Emancipation Day. I recognized the configuration of blocks she was stacking.”
“Children often—”
“Not Abbigail. Never the same structure twice. Besides, I record everything now,” Eve tapped a finger just beside her eye. “I compared my view of her in the play area to the recording. It wasn’t my feed they used, but some other spectator took the footage the same day. It’s the same. I’m betting Abbigail’s life on it. They don’t have her.”
There had been no need to add that if Charlie25 was doctoring old footage, he had no new video to offer. With his propaganda interviews cluttering the news feeds, he was in a comfortable position to upload anything he had on Abbigail. Gemini was clever enough to work out that detail on her own.
“Frightfully useful, recording whatever you see,” Gemini observed. “I rather miss being able to—”
“You’d planned to carry on just like I am,” Eve pointed out.
Gemini shut up in an instant.
“Oh, you don’t remember. That’s right. That copy of Evelyn11 got blanked.” Eve hadn’t forgotten. Her singsong sarcasm twisted a knife in Gemini’s conscience—if her human body had come equipped with one. “You held my eyes open and stapled lenses to my corneas. Completely took over my vision, projecting from behind my eyelids directly onto my retinas. Whatever you wanted me to see, I saw. Nothing more. Nothing less. ‘Frightfully useful’ now that I’m in control, but I had them removed the instant I was free of you.”
“You wanted them back…”
Eve growled. “You tortured me with them! Yes, I wanted them back. I’m scratching tooth and nail to keep up with robots permanently plugged into supercomputers, seeing ten times what I see and having the Social, the news feeds, and the planetary archives accessible with a nanosecond’s thought. It still took me years to get up the courage to ask Ashley390 to install new ones. At least these replace my biological lenses instead of sitting on top, begging to trap particulate.”
Gemini shrugged. “I didn’t have a friendly surgeon available.” She offered a weak smile, trying to make it a joke.
The console blinked.
It contained directions and access codes, as well as detailed instructions on a secondary backup plan. Eve was about to ruin Charlie7’s primary one.
“What’s that?” Gemini asked, peering over her shoulder.
“Charlie25 wants a dead Charlie7,” Eve said. “Hope you kept those muscles in shape because we’re going to bring him one.”
Chapter Fifty-Four
Charlie7 hated making mistakes. Sending Eve off to Kanto with one of his backup chassis felt like a mistake. It was a pristine, if heavily modified, Version 70.2 chassis. At initial glance, it would look like him. Upon even cursory examination, the lack of wear would raise instant suspicion. Microcrystallography would prove conclusively that the brain had never been subjected to an EMP.
But that was Eve’s challenge to overcome. Right now, Charlie7 had enough to worry about with his own problems.
The pre-flight sequence on a new spaceroamer was usually pretty straightforward. The vehicular assembly lines at Kanto made mistakes at the nano scale. That was hit or miss with advanced crystal matrices but overkill for even vacuum sealing.
Without a human passenger along, Charlie7 didn’t even care whether his homemade starship was airtight.
It was the rest of it that bothered him. His personal factory didn’t make transorbital mining ships or transport shuttles. After a fad a few centuries back—and the subsequent deaths of two explorers that ended it—recreational space travel had dried up almost completely.
“Flight team, we have confirmation of ion propulsion. Navigation controls are a go. All power systems check… and double-check. Attitude control sketchy as usual, but the ship is fine.”
Despite being alone, Charlie7 tried to keep things light. He’d had decades of practice. Solitude was only an enemy if you considered yourself a boring companion.
Taking a mental deep breath, Charlie7 concluded that everything was as checked as it was going to get without a test flight.
“Houston, we are go for launch. Good luck, and may Oppenheimer have mercy on Dale2’s soul.”
With the press of a button, the airlock began to flood. Even through the sealed cockpit of his spaceroamer, Charlie7 heard the gush of high-pressure ocean water rushing in. Baffles and pressure regulators cut down the explosive force of the jets, but the undersea spaceport was filling rapidly. Water rose all around.
Charles Truman had been afraid of everything. Cloistered, bookish, and chronically ill, he’d thrived on fear to drive him. The refuge of robotic immortality had been the finish-line ribbon at the end of the human race.
Charlie7 remembered most of it. Charlie2 had come from a scan during the invasion. He’d seen the clouds of poison gas rolling across the countryside with human eyes. The taste of that palpable, worldwide fear would remain ever etched in his crystal matrix. He had watched his fleshy doppelganger’s mania as the end drew near.
Action.
That had always been the salve to those open wounds sliced into Charles Truman’s flesh by his fears.
Keep working.
Fight back.
Solve.
Win.
Now, Charlie7 had few enough fears that he could count them on a single hand. He feared that the newly reborn human race would be dragged under and subsumed in the crush of a dominant robotic society. He feared for his vulnerable new friends personally. He feared the return of the alien menace, absent so long yet never conclusively eradicated from the stars.
But most of all, Charlie7 feared Dale Chalmers’s view of a future where human minds inhabited bizarre chimaeras fused together from alien and human DNA.
The chamber flooded fully. The pressure of the ocean floor bore down on the spaceroamer, squeezing it but unable to crush. A thousand years ago, that alone would have made the vessel a technological marvel. Now, in the Robotic Age, it was merely good, solid engineering work.
The roof of the structure opened. Its ridged dome bulldozed aside the rocky disguise that had kept it hidden since Charlie7 constructed it. No light filtered down this far. The only illumination came from within the open dome itself.
“Here goes nothing.”
Charlie7 opened the throttle. The spaceroamer angled upward, nose pointing out the dome, then shot forward.
He was doing it. Charlie7 was finally going to discover the mastermind behind the upload conspiracy and put an end to him once and for all.
The ocean above grew brighter.
What would come next? With Dale2 gone, there would be inquiries. Every committee with the thinnest pretense of jurisdiction would want to investigate. They would demand answers, and hiding behind platitudes and Privacy Committee clauses wouldn’t be able to save his secrets. Not anymore.
The spaceroamer breached the surface.
A column of water sprayed into the night sky above the Baltic Sea. Glancing over his shoulder, Charlie7 watched the droplets catch the moonlight and admired the beauty of the scene. But he also saw, to his imagination at least, the hidden spaceport beneath the sea, open, exposed, and awa
iting those investigations.
The atmosphere thinned and died away around him.
Regardless of what came next, Charlie7 was exposed. He was out in the open now. The subject of the original scans at Kanto wouldn’t die away now that robots had heard of their existence. What Rachel might be able to withhold from Charlie25 under duress, the whole of humanity wouldn’t rally to protect under the weight of robotkind’s demands for answers.
The truth was about to come out.
Charlie7 plotted his course for Mars and switched on the experimental drive. Orbital mechanics be damned; with enough speed, the fastest way between planets was still a straight line. Even the rugged Version 70.2 chassis he inhabited was crushed into place by the strain of the spaceroamer’s acceleration.
In the back storage compartment, the alien-tech dark energy rifle clattered to the back wall of the cockpit. It was the only tool Charlie7 expected to need to end a millennium-old argument once he reached Mars.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Eve and Gemini flew together in tense silence, crossing from night into the oncoming dawn and onward into noontime. The few times that Gemini looked as if she might strike up a conversation, Eve stifled it with a glower.
Glowering was far more effective with a weapon across your lap, aimed at your untrustworthy traveling companion.
“He looks odd back there,” Gemini blurted at last. They were over central China with not much ground left to cover. “Like he could wake up at any moment and—”
“We’re not friends,” Eve snapped. “You’re along just in case I need backup. I don’t want to chat or joke or pass the time discussing deep emotional issues.”
Gemini rolled her eyes. “Well, that makes two of us, at least on the final count.”
“So, just sit there, stay out of trouble, and once we land I’ll let you have your coil gun back.”
Could she go through with that promise? Arming Gemini was the whole point in bringing her along. This wasn’t an armed raid from the outset, but if the plan hit any snags along the way to the exchange, Eve could use the extra firepower.
Still, part of her questioned whether an alternate deal was on the table. She might not have Charlie7’s actual chassis with her, but Gemini had warranted a raid on the hover-ship prison to bring her in alive. Whether Dale2 cared about her or not, Charlie25 was the one she needed to bargain with. He’d made Gemini. She held value in his weighed algorithms.
“I know they’re just words, but I am sorry,” Gemini said softly. “You might not like hearing it, but—”
“But I don’t care,” Eve cut in. “You made us. I’m here now. What came between I’d just as soon forget, and you being here makes that harder than usual. Apologies ring hollow. You haven’t even begun to make amends for what you did.”
“How could I?” Gemini asked, voice rising. “I’ve been locked in a closet these past six years, watching my hair grow. I’ve barely gotten anything from the news feeds. I didn’t even know you’d taken one of your sisters to raise as a daughter until my trip to Paris yesterday.”
“She is my daughter,” Eve argued. “She’s just adopted. Abbigail doesn’t have a biological mommy and daddy like the people in the movies. She just had you, and we’re not telling her about you until she’d old enough to deal with it.”
“Genetically virgin birth makes for strange families. I… I’m glad you’re looking after her. I’d always intended motherhood for you.”
Eve shot her a glare that might have contained more firepower than the alien-tech rifle. “Yes. You planned to wear this body and impregnate yourself.”
With a shrug, Gemini brushed off the comment. “No point denying it when we both know the truth. I miss it, frankly. I enjoyed raising my Clancy. I tried not to get attached to you girls.”
“Because you planned to murder us,” Eve concluded. “Sensible. Don’t name the calves if all you wanted was veal.”
“How dare you!” Gemini shouted.
Eve’s hand tightened on the rifle’s grip. Her finger, resting on the trigger guard, itched to slide past the ring of alien steel and squeeze. “How dare you!” she screamed back. The skyroamer veered as her hand jerked accidentally on the flight yoke. “We were guinea pigs and lab mice to you. You killed over a dozen of me. All identical. All me. Or at least all the same to you.”
“Not true! I loved them all. I love you all. It broke my heart each time an upload failed.”
Eve seethed through gritted teeth. “Yet you kept doing it.”
“I did. It was monstrous of me. I was blinded by my ambitions and unwilling to allow my creations to slip into the world with universal fanfare. I wanted to be that first human, that leader of a new species. I wanted to be you.”
“It’s an old species,” Eve argued. “You didn’t create, you just refurbished.”
Gemini snorted. “Come now. You must have studied my research.”
“Not my favorite topic.”
“Well, one of you went into genetics, I seem to recall. Eve19, wasn’t it?”
“Sally. Her name is Sally Nineteen.”
Gemini waved a dismissive hand, seemingly grown oblivious to the threat of Eve’s gun trained on her. “My points is, Sally would know better than to call you human. Or at least, not Homo sapiens. I was considering the term Homo optimus. You might be able to crossbreed with Homo sapiens, but you’re as far above them as they are above Homo neanderthalensis.”
Eve knit her brow but didn’t know quite what to say about that.
“Surely you’ve watched enough archival video by now that you’ve noticed the differences. No wisdom teeth. No appendix. NO coccyx. You don’t hoard fat in bloated cells and don’t grow hair over every square millimeter of your body. You were born into a world with no shortage of food, no need for a coat of ineffective fur. Your genome is scrubbed free of as much flotsam as I could identify, and I wove in little treats you no doubt enjoy without realizing.”
“Such as?” Eve challenged, frowning to show her patience was limited to Gemini conveying useful information. Kanto was approaching rapidly, and her time could be better spent in preparation.
“Your eyesight. Your metabolism. Your fast-twitch musculature. Your perfect symmetry. Your straight, strong, bright teeth. I had no intention of moving into… this.” She indicated her own body.
“You’re a minor variant of my husband,” Eve reminded her.
“And lucky on that variation,” Gemini replied. “Has it ever… EVER occurred to you that my talents are being wasted in prison? You claim I haven’t made amends, but what chance has there been of that? Your job entails certifying new human geneticists, but has there yet been one who wasn’t a fumbling drunkard before being gifted my work to copy? Don’t answer that. We both know it’s true. Charlie24 was my main rival, and look at the shoddy work he put out. Tinkering on live subjects. Glaring flaws allowed through to birth.”
“I don’t want to hear any more.”
It was one thing having her own genetic underpinnings laid out. Eve had long since dealt with the fawning of every geneticist she’d ever met—with the one glaring exception beside her in the passenger’s seat. However, hearing Plato’s tragic cellular origins sat poorly with her.
It wasn’t so much the fact that they were genetically incompatible for having children of their own. It was that Plato didn’t want any part of trying. He preferred the comforting certainty that their intercourse couldn’t result in offspring that would suffer all the physical ills he had endured.
“Just consider it,” Gemini said softly. “When this is over, come up with whatever plan of supervision you require, and let me help. I can’t repay my debt to humanity without even earning my keep.”
Eve checked the gauges on the skyroamer’s console. “We’re eight minutes out. Time to focus. But… I’ll consider it.”
“Thank you.” Gemini looked Eve up and down. “And while we’re on speaking terms for the moment, I’ve been dying to ask: what’s the idea behind that
ludicrous purple jumper you’re wearing? It’s like a colorblind mum dressed you up in a snowsuit.”
“It’s armor. Dissipates… everything, I guess. Not sure how it works. Charlie7 made it.”
Gemini rolled her eyes. “Of course. That one goes around wearing suits and tuxedos because even a thousand years hasn’t driven them out of style. Force him to work with color and he’ll end up looking like a circus clown. You do realize that thanks to that puffy purple costume of yours and the fact I can no longer simply clear looping algorithms, I’ve had the song to Barney the dinosaur stuck in my head all flight.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Really? You have a five-year-old. Surely it must have come up in archival programming when you undoubtedly looked.”
“Must not have ranked high on our search criteria. Abbigail is very demanding.”
“No doubt.”
“We… um, ready to raid Kanto, or do I need to loop around to buy time for more matronly advice?”
Gemini straightened and looked forward. “By all means.”
Eve prepped for final approach and signaled to Charlie25 that they had brought the chassis of Charlie7 with them. She even mentioned Gemini so Charlie25’s goons wouldn’t shoot on sight. “We’re still not friends, you know.”
Chapter Fifty-Six
The ion engines wound down just as Eve’s heart rate was shooting up. This was it. She was walking into a trap. There wasn’t even a question about it. Even if Charlie25 didn’t intend it as a double cross, it would turn into one when Eve’s ruse was revealed.
“Coil gun,” Gemini muttered. She was already sweating.
Eve dug out the weapon from the side of the pilot’s chair. Her hand clutched it a moment before slapping it into Gemini’s with a smack.
The canopy opened.
Two robots waited for them, neither visibly armed. Eve stood in the cockpit and aimed the rifle in their general direction, some twenty meters distant. “Keep back. We’ll upload him ourselves.”