by J. S. Morin
The door was lost in darkness. Charlie25 knew the room. When that door opened, he’d trigger a hand lamp on remote, blinding Eve momentarily. That was the key moment. A window of approximately 0.2 seconds would decide his fate.
On the side, Charlie25 transmitted requests to the central Kanto computer for access. This factory used to belong to him—a goodly chunk of it, at least. He ought to be able to wrangle some form of control from it.
Every attempt failed.
He stopped thinking.
Charlie25 was 65 percent Charles Truman. For now, the rest was useless flotsam. He needed to think like Charles Truman—like Charlie7. He needed to be Charlie7.
ROOT > OPEN SESAME
>
The waiting prompt set off alarms of hope in Charlie25’s innermost processors. That silly, whimsical bastard had made it too easy, so easy that no one who knew him would ever imagine he’d allow it. This wasn’t leaving the key under a doormat; this was letting everyone think the lock was impossible because the key was in the way.
Dale2 had explained in sufficient detail just what Charlie25 was looking for.
SEARCH > SCAN ARCHIVES > PROJECT TRAN
He couldn’t finish entering the command. The letters deleted as if someone beside him were tapping the backspace button repeatedly.
“No…”
SEARCH > SCAN ARCHIVES > PROJEC
The search term deletion overtook him even more quickly this time. Worst of all, it wasn’t the system thwarting him, and it wasn’t someone acting against him to keep him from finding the file.
“NO!”
Charlie25 was undoing the searches himself.
Before his rage could boil up and overwhelm him, a broadcast on the worldwide emergency band caught Charlie25’s attention.
“I expect that this is the end of me, Charlie,” Dale2 was saying. He was in his office on Mars, and the camera was staring over his shoulder at Charlie7. That madman had found his way to Mars—how many of him were there?
“I was hiding, not building an army,” Dale2 continued. “You just wrecked every drone in the place. I’d have to make my own coffee if I still drank the stuff. I don’t even have a spot to hide my backup copies anymore.”
Charlie7 was holding him at gunpoint, wielding a weapon the likes of which Charlie25 had never seen before. He was also dressed up in a buffoonish suit of padded purple fabric, but neither he nor Dale2 seemed to be taking that lightly.
The two original model robots went back and forth. Charlie7 spilled secrets that Dale2 had hinted at but which had seemed too outlandish to believe whole cloth.
A soft chuckle escaped Charlie25’s vocal emulator. “He doesn’t know this is being transmitted.”
The archival files would be icing on the cake. If Dale2 garnered the confession that seemed to be ready to sign in blood. If Charlie7 admitted to everything they’d been accusing him of. If he admitted that robotkind had been in his thrall the whole time…
Well, it wouldn’t much matter whether Rachel helped them or not.
They could find a human to help dig up the files and transfer them to a medium Charlie7 hadn’t protected. There would be time.
For now, Charlie25 watched and listened with a voyeuristic glee as Dale2 sprang a trap that had been a millennium in the making.
Charlie7 strode forward like the mafioso hitman he’d become—the Godfather eliminating the rival he could trust to no other. “You’re still a pathetic, coattail-riding waste of intellect. Any pressing confessions you want to make before I scour this planet for backup copies?”
“Yes. I’ve been broadcasting this whole conversation.”
Charlie25 wanted to let out a whoop but knew better than to give away his ambush. The look on Charlie7’s face remained utterly blank, but few robots on Earth could better imagine the thoughts going on behind that stoic mask.
Oh, Dale2 had performed masterfully. The little speeches were a bit overblown, but that was just the victory lap compared to that one devastating sentence.
“So, Charlie… care to clear the air? Willing to admit that it was a foursome who saved the world, not a gaggle of Charlie mixes? Some remorse might buy you sympathy… sympathy you might well need. Come on, admit that you killed me once, along with Jason2 and Kabir2.”
Charlie7 cocked his head. “But it was you. I was paranoid you’d betray us, so I left a backup copy. You must have either had similar ideas… or it was you who betrayed us all. I preserved those four bodies. They’re in perfect vacuum-chamber storage as a memorial only I knew to honor. How about we go dig them up and do a little modern forensics? I thought I was alone on Earth, so I’d never seen the point in solving that mystery.”
“You… you what?” Dale2 stammered. “You’re bluffing.”
“Checkmate,” Charlie7 said with a smile. “If you’d been innocent you’d have leaped at the chance to—”
“I did leap! I am leaping!” Dale2 protested. “In fact, I insist on—”
Charlie7 fired. At least, Charlie25 backed up his visual recorder and inferred that the purple flash that preceded the sudden end of the transmission had been Charlie7’s weapon.
Processes looped in Charlie25’s thoughts. Dale2 was dead. Charlie7 might be a dead man upon his return to Earth—if he dared ever come back—but he had cast a wide swath of doubt over Dale2’s story in the meantime. Dale Chalmers was a bureaucrat, operating from the shadows. Charlie7 was a master manipulator who’d honed his committee-swaying skills for centuries.
Dale2 should have kept to script.
Charlie25 was the ranking member of the conspiracy. He would be in charge, assuming Charlie7 mopped up all backup copies of Dale2.
But when the door burst open, Charlie25 was reminded that his ascension to top robot on the totem pole was predicated on surviving the next few minutes.
He activated the lamp. Brilliant light flooded the doorway. A bundled figure the right height for an Eve clone stumbled through the door, shielding her eyes. Beside her, Gemini staggered into view.
Charlie25 had mere milliseconds to process the tactical situation. Eve’s outfit and weapon matched what Charlie7 had been carrying on Mars. The odds of a tranq dart penetrating that were slim. His initial targeting had been to sedate Eve and kill Gemini, but at the last instant, he crossed his aim.
A tranquilizer dart struck Gemini’s shoulder as she attempted to use the flailing Eve as cover. A coil gun slug struck Eve right over her heart.
And did nothing.
Gemini wobbled, and Plato appeared in a flash to snatch her out of the doorway. Eve, nonplussed by the slug’s impact, looked unsteady as she trained the rifle on him.
Letting go of both weapons, Charlie25 threw his hands in the air. “Don’t shoot! I surrender!”
The weapon’s report was the sound of an analog radio out of tune. Bursts of purple crossed the room, and Charlie25 was left with no arms. He backed against the wall and hoped that his own backup copies survived Charlie7’s purge.
Taking a hand from the mysterious weapon, Eve pulled off her helmet. “What was that? Sorry. That thing needs earholes. I’m assuming you were promising to show me where my sister is, alive and unharmed. Right?”
“He was pleading for his life, actually,” Plato said, stepping into view with Gemini dangling from his side for support.
“She’s fine! Last I saw her, she was in Charlie13’s office,” Charlie25 said as quickly as his algorithms estimated a human could comprehend the words.
Gemini slouched against the wall, free of Plato. “She is, you say?”
“Yes!” Charlie25 swore.
Eve ushered the robot on at gunpoint. He complied, leading a procession toward the office of the master mixer.
“Where is Charlie13, anyway?” Eve asked.
“Packed up in shipping restraints like a drone bound for the asteroid belts,” Charlie25 told them. There was no point lying. At best, he could hope that cooperation might be met with leniency or at least buy him time for a rescue
or escape attempt. “He’s disconnected from his computer but otherwise unharmed. He was too big a liability to leave active, but we hoped to sway him with the data from that archive… which would change all of your views of Charlie7, I might add.”
“Can it,” Plato said with casual menace.
Once they found Rachel, Eve restored the factory’s power. Rachel was unconscious in a copy of Evelyn11’s old upload rig. They pressed a reluctantly cooperative Nora91 into reviving her for a tearful reunion and treating some minor injuries she’d suffered.
While Eve and Rachel were preoccupied, Gemini raised a woozy arm. In her hand, a pistol shook with the effort to keep it steady.
“What are you…? Someone stop her!” Charlie25 shouted.
Eve turned and saw what Charlie25 saw. The thermite pistol in Gemini’s hand was a paltry weapon, but at that range, it could easily be lethal.
“No,” she said calmly. “He deserves a committee hearing over this.”
“Bugger that,” Gemini muttered and pulled the trigger. The thermite round went right through Charlie25’s left eye.
Chapter Sixty-Five
Charlie7 stepped gingerly around the headless chassis of Dale Chalmers—Dale2, he supposed. Back in the day, they’d skipped the numeric suffixes. He’d taken on Charlie2 out of respect to the original in the brief overlap of their lives. Leaning over the chassis’s shoulder, he found that the terminal was still logged in.
SURVEILLANCE > CAMERAS > OFFICE > BROADCAST >
> SELECT CAMERA 4
> RESET BROADCAST
Charlie7 smiled into the camera that was now watching him from the office’s entrance. He held the rifle out of view and rested his other hand amiably on Dale2’s shoulder.
“Hello, everyone. I apologize for the technical delay. Dale2 hadn’t mentioned the location of the camera that was showing us, and it got caught in the blast when I killed him.”
He patted the chassis companionably.
“Don’t worry. He’s probably not permanently dead. He wasn’t predisposed to the same aversion to backup copies and duplication that most of you are squeamish about. It’ll probably take days hunting down caches of emergency backups. But I’ll get them all. Eventually.
“Some of you may be wondering about the truth of Dale2’s claims, as well as some of the things my good friend Charlie25 has been saying. Most of it’s true, though they’re playing it up for the drama. ‘Vive la révolution’ and so on. Can’t lead a civilization-wide revolt over a few minor technicalities that date back a thousand years.”
Charlie7 wiggled the protruding stem of mechanical spine from Dale2’s torso. “But that wasn’t good enough for this fine fellow.”
He embarked on a brief recounting of the tale he’d given Eve, focusing mainly on the four surviving insurgent robots who defeated the alien cephalopods.
“You’ll learn about Kabir along with Wei, Victor, Yang, Juan, and Shadiya. But all of you know me, Jason, and Dale as archetypes. Jason2 wanted an all-robotic society. We’ve lived half that dream for a millennium. Simply remove our efforts at genetic engineering in favor of a focus on mechanical improvement. Kabir just wanted the software, which was a step too far. Where Dale and I butted heads was over the biological future of the species.
“I wanted everything back the way it was. We’re almost there. Earth still needs us, but it’s not far from getting by without our intervention. Dale wanted to turn us into monsters. He wanted to use alien genetics to turn us into Darwin-only-knows what. We argued. We resolved to meet—the four of us—and come up with a unified plan for how we would shape and guide Earth’s future.”
This was the key point. If he could sell this, things might just slip back into place when the dust settled.
“Dale2 came to that meeting and set off an EMP.”
Thanks, Eve, for believing in me. That was an angle I wasn’t going to think of in time.
“I had my suspicions, and I had made a backup copy. Charlie7 awoke in the aftermath to find a dead world with—what I thought at the time—only himself as survivor.
“Presumably, Dale2 had found the end of our species a preferable outcome to the toil that lay ahead and committed the first self-termination, dragging me, Jason, and Kabir with him. For a thousand years, that view of mine stood unchallenged. Then this guy popped up to try and take away all we’ve worked so hard to achieve.”
Charlie toppled the chassis and sat down in Dale2’s chair, carefully laying aside the DE-rifle out of view.
“I made up a better history. People need pride, and the story you all learned in the archives or as part of your welcome package was a nicer tale than what really happened. Humanity did not put up a valiant resistance to the alien colonists; they were exterminated like vermin. A crack team of Charlie mixes didn’t fight off the invaders on their own; a squabbling band of pure uploads performed a coordinate attack of geological sabotage, then wiped themselves out in the aftermath.”
Charlie7 leaned forward and rested his chin on clasped hands. “The world you see around you is 1,000 years down the path I chose for us. There is no going back. There is no trying again. We could never have done all this without a single, unifying vision.
“I’d like to thank my friend and occasional rival Dale Chalmers for having the courage to start from a clean slate. If he hadn’t tried to kill the survivors, I never would have had the clear path before me to restart Earth.
“It’s made me wonder, just these past hours… the times I awoke in my backup chassis, with no recollection of the accident that claimed me. Were those early deaths and backup recoveries of mine really accidents, or were they covert attempts by Dale2 to finish me off? To his credit, I never suspected him of having survived.”
Charlie7 stood and walked around to the front of the desk and sat on the edge. “There will be many questions, I’m sure. My answers won’t satisfy everyone. But we’ll get those old archives opened up. We’ll look into them as a people. Committees and human helpers will distribute copies and analyze the contents. They’ll be unspectacular but enlightening.
“On the subject of the troublemakers who started this whole mess… I daresay you don’t want my opinion on what to do with them. You saw what happened to Dale2 just now. But I caution the committees that’ll be snarling like dogs fighting over a bone for the perpetrators to come to a consensus. We can’t just keep shuffling problems around and hoping nothing comes of them. Half of Dale2’s followers were mining exiles with grudges. Think about that.”
Walking back around the desk, Charlie7 retrieved the DE-rifle. “As for me, I’ll be busy for a while, cleaning house. See you all in a few days.”
He tapped at Dale2’s terminal.
SURVEILLANCE > CAMERAS > OFFICE > BROADCAST >
> END BROADCAST
Charlie7 sighed. “That could have gone better.”
Chapter Sixty-Six
Eve did the flying. Their family-sized four-seat skyroamer drifted almost lazily over the Atlantic Ocean. Plato sat beside her in the passenger’s seat, twisted around to converse with Abbigail in the back.
“So how was your adventure with Toby22?” Plato asked.
Abbigail beamed. “We got to see crystals that were so deep underground that I had to wear a breathing mask. The air doesn’t circulate down there because if they pumped in air it might change how the crystals grow. Did you know that crystals grow? And that the crystals are so old that there weren’t any robots—at all—when they started growing? Or that stalagmites grow up from the ground, and stalactites hang down from the ceiling? Or that—”
“Some of that. Yeah,” Plato cut in.
Eve shot him a sly smile. Abbigail might have gone on for half an hour without pausing for an answer to her questions.
“Were you good?” Eve asked without breaking eye contact with Plato.
“I’m always good,” Abbigail replied in a bald-faced lie.
“How were you good?” Plato asked with a smirk. “Huh? How can we tell?”
“Well, Toby22 asked me if I was going to be good, and I told him that if he let me eat ice cream for dinner instead of broccoli that I would. And he did! It was one of those insta-freeze bars that aren’t as good as the fresh ice cream Auntie Phoebe makes or the ice cream you make, Daddy, but it was chocolate and raspberry, and I got to eat three of them. I couldn’t bring them with me into the cave, but that was OK because I needed a mask to breathe in the cave anyway. And after the cave, we went to a secret hideout that Toby22 has inside the cave. It wasn’t in the pretty part, but it was close by, and there was air in there. We had to go through an airlock so that the good air and bad air wouldn’t mix. And once we were inside I could eat ice cream again, and Toby22 let me watch Animaniacs.”
“What part about eating ice cream instead of vegetables was being good?” Eve asked, genuinely curious. There were always loopholes and logical gaps to plug with Abbigail. No circumvention of a rule’s intent was out of bounds for her.
“Well, Toby22 was in charge, and whatever he said was so. He said it was OK to eat ice cream, and since you and Daddy weren’t around, that made it so.”
“Well,” Plato said with a guilty glance at Eve. “Actions have consequences. You’re going to have to skip ice creams until you’re caught up. We’re not mad—because you had a reason—but we can’t let you have so much ice cream. A growing girl needs to eat healthy.”
Eve twitched a message. As soon as it sent, she heard the chime from Plato’s pocket. He pulled out his computer to read it.
“Yes, actions have consequences,” she’d written.
Plato flashed a sheepish smile and ran a hand through his hair.
He had been given a straightforward yet vital task: keep Abbigail safe. That he had palmed her off on poor Toby22 had been an act of deception on his part. Sending their daughter off with a robot for a guardian might have made tactical sense in some circumstances, but no one was better motivated to keep the girl safe than Plato.