Robot Geneticists (Book 4): Rebel Robots

by J. S. Morin

  If Eve had known Plato wasn’t going to look after Abbigail himself, she’d have headed straight to pick her daughter up personally.

  Plato cleared his throat and kept the conversation going with Abbigail as cover. “So, after seeing the grottoes, you thinking of being a geologist?”

  Eve considered it a fair question. Every adventure came with a change of career plans. It was endemic of an open mind and rampant curiosity. Next week it might be physicist or veterinarian. Last week, it had been chef.

  “No. I want to be a robot.”

  Eve felt an icicle stab her through the heart. No one had told Abbigail of the fate that awaited her in Evelyn11’s lab, preserved as a floating cluster of newly divided cells. She hadn’t been far enough along to have even been assigned a numeric designation, but eventually Evelyn11 would have attempted to upload over Abbigail’s brain.

  Everyone who spent time with the girl was under strict rules not to volunteer that information. Once she was old enough to ask the question, Eve would be the one to explain the circumstances of their creation.

  Someone was in trouble, and Eve had a prime suspect.

  Plato forced a nervous chuckle. “A robot, huh? Why’s that?”

  “Well, Toby22 could go anywhere he wants. He doesn’t need to breathe or eat or tinkle. Recharging is easier. A robot can explore caves or go into space. Robots can’t swim, but they can walk underwater without having to drown. That’s way better than swimming lessons.”

  “But what about all the things robots can’t do?” Eve cautioned. “They can’t taste ice cream.”

  Abbigail huffed. “Well, I’ll just have to invent a better robot—one that can eat ice cream. Besides, you and Daddy are already robots a little bit.”

  If Eve hadn’t set the skyroamer to autopilot, they might have crashed. Her mind went fuzzy. She heard her daughter’s words in isolation, cut off from the rest of the world as if they shared a sound studio in utter darkness.

  “Daddy has robots in his hips and knees to keep from hurting. Mommy, you have robots in your eyes and fingers. When I’m emancipated, I want super jumping legs with ion engines so I can fly like a superhero and the best computer so I can play games in my eyes like Mommy, with no one else seeing. I can be in boring meetings and watch Animaniacs and Mr. Rogers and Alice in Wonderland without anyone knowing. And I’ll build a castle on the moon and live there when it’s winter and too cold to go outside without a coat, and I’ll come back in the summer.”

  Eve quickly twitched out a message to Plato. “I’m blaming you for this.”

  Plato checked the message, then shot Eve a scowl. He tapped beside his eye. The message was clear: “It’s you she wants to copy.”

  “This isn’t funny.”

  Plato was trying not to laugh. He tapped a message into his computer. “It’ll blow over, like everything does. Either that, or Abby’s gonna be a wizard, president, inventor, plumber, dinosaur, committee chairwoman, chef, robot.”

  “It better.”

  Eve had supported every fanciful notion that entered Abbigail’s head. She was five, with a good seven or eight years before anyone started grumbling about emancipation testing. The world was, almost literally, hers for the taking. Humans held so few jobs, and robots seemed almost patronizing in their willingness to let humans try out their professions. After all, what did the robots have to lose? It wasn’t as if humanity was going to squeeze out robotkind. There would always be jobs to do, if not on Earth than beyond it.

  “Mommy, what did you want to be when you were little?” Abbigail asked.

  Eve could barely recall being so young. Her early recollections blended into a uniform sameness of physical education and mental conditioning. She couldn’t even imagine tormenting Abbigail the way Evelyn11 had done during Eve’s childhood. Eve hadn’t been encouraged to dream or think of the future at all.

  She hadn’t wanted to be anything. Eve hadn’t known that there were things to be.

  The only alternative to allowing Abbigail a peek into her mother’s desolate youth was lying.

  Perhaps sensing Eve’s hesitation, Plato chimed in. “I wanted to be a soldier. When I was twelve, I started going around fighting bad guys and rescuing people.”

  “Wow!” Abbigail said. “For real?”

  Her mother momentarily forgotten, Abbigail pressed Plato for details.

  The girl would grow up to be whatever she dreamed, Eve swore. One day, she’d temper those dreams with the reality of the world around her, mutable though that reality was. But until those dreams were sturdy and strong, Eve couldn’t risk shattering them.

  Plato regaled Abbigail with sanitized tales of heroism and bravery, culminating in the story of how he had first rescued Eve.

  Abbigail giggled. “Mommy doesn’t need rescuing. I bet she was the one who rescued you.”

  “You’re probably right, squirt. You’re probably right.”

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Balmy winds blew in from the South Pacific, carrying a whiff of salt and the imagined scents of distant continents. Thin wisps of cloud smeared the otherwise flawless blue sky. A patient sun warmed Easter Island to perfection with the skill of a master chef.

  Gemini was sweating but not because of the weather. She grunted from the effort of navigating Emily’s wheelchair over the rough, rocky paths. It would have been a trivial matter to install miniature ion drives that could all but cancel out Emily’s weight. Even easier would have been simply installing an electric motor and a basic spring-piston suspension.

  Ashley390 had claimed that most of the residents at the Sanctuary for Scientific sins—including Emily—preferred minimal exposure to loud, obtrusive technology.

  Gemini suspected it was simply spite on the part of the sanctuary’s director.

  “Look, birdth!” Emily exclaimed, rising in her seat and pointing.

  A flock of gulls were fishing along the shoreline. They were the same gulls Emily had pointed out each day for the past three weeks.

  “I see them,” Gemini replied with a weary sigh. If she failed to acknowledge the birds, Emily would point them out again. And again.

  After a short while watching the gulls feast and squirming in her seat, Gemini pushed the wheelchair beyond view of the shore.

  “Tell a story?” Emily asked. “Mee-Fee-Us.”

  “Prometheus,” Gemini corrected, accepting the slurring but not the missing syllable. It wasn’t Emily’s fault Cindy55 couldn’t properly monitor for trisomy-21 during development. The whole island was a cautionary tale of misapplied genetic screening and shoddy quality control. “And yes, I can tell the story of Prometheus again.”

  Gemini recounted the tale. Prometheus was the wise old robot who taught robotkind how to make humans like her and Emily. The other robots had all been told that no one should make humans. But when Prometheus showed them how, suddenly everyone wanted humans of their own. But because he had been told not to share the secret to making humans, Prometheus was punished. He was forced to live in a human body and serve other humans while everyone else got to make new humans without being punished.

  Emily had never liked Gemini’s original version of the story, so she’d added a happy ending where Prometheus went home and got to be a robot again and everyone was nice to him.

  Even Gemini liked the new version better.

  The circuit of the island’s walking trails was just over three kilometers. At the end of the loop, Gemini gratefully returned Emily to her quarters at the sanctuary. She helped the girl out of the wheelchair and passed along her crutches. Emily could walk with their assistance, but the island trails were too long a stretch.

  As the door shut with Emily inside, Gemini collapsed back against the wall and let out a long sigh.

  Ashley390 rounded the corner at the end of the hall. “Have a nice walk?”

  Gemini pushed herself away from the wall and folded up the wheelchair for storage. “Nice enough. Weather here is a bit one-note, but there are worse notes to
play.”

  “I’d imagine any weather is a welcome change from 20°C air pumped in from a compressor.”

  Gemini snorted. “Twenty degrees? Try sixteen. I think they wanted the chill to take up permanent residence in my bones.”

  Ashley390 followed as Gemini headed out into the courtyard to rest her feet at one of the picnic tables. “I wonder at times what it would be like feeling temperature as a direct emotion rather than a simple quantitative value. I envy you, you know.”

  With a look back at the residential building, Gemini shook her head. “I envy her. She falls into that neat little crack between where sentience begins and existential dilemmas end.”

  “You don’t give Emily enough credit,” Ashley390 replied softly. “There’s a lot more going on in that head of hers than she can communicate.”

  “Whose fault is that?” Gemini snapped, surprised at the sudden vitriol that boiled out of her. “She’s trapped in a malformed body that someone bolloxed up before she was born. Cognitive development might never catch up, but every single other condition she suffers is correctable.”

  “We discussed this when I agreed to take you on. You’re not here to study, fix, or improve anyone. You’re not a licensed human geneticist; these people aren’t test subjects.”

  Gemini swung around on her seat and leaned her back against the table. Legs spread, elbows resting on the tablecloth, she craned her neck and stared into the expanse of blue sky above. “I am like Tantalus, caught between the body I hoped for and the ones I might have saved.”

  A sly smile preceded Ashley390’s reply. “I thought you were Prometheus.”

  Gemini shot upright in her seat. “You’re spying on me!”

  “Of course, we are,” Ashley390 replied. “Thus far, you’ve been on your best behavior. But I’ve also witnessed your thinly veiled self-pity.”

  “I could fix my own deficiencies far more easily than the poor prisoners of this oubliette.” Stem cells, a cloning replicator, and an auto-surgical drone would be all Gemini would need. “I’d prove out the techniques on myself before offering them to the guests here.”

  “None of them is qualified to make informed medical choices,” Ashley390 said, shaking her head. “This island was founded on ‘because we could.’ It is redeemed by ‘because we care.’ There is a chance you could succeed. You might restore mobility, relieve congenital conditions, even improve cognitive ability. No one’s even arguing it’s not possible. The Human Welfare Committee has had the final word—not here. These people have suffered enough. Nobody’s allowed to gamble their health and happiness on the chance of a little more.”

  “But it’s not a gamble,” Gemini protested. “It’s science! I can help these people. I can—”

  “Take it up with Eve.”

  Gemini swallowed.

  It was so easy to fall into companionable even footing when dealing with Eve during a crisis. The mission to help Rachel had been an unequal pairing, to be sure, but there had been two of them, alone together, taking on entrenched foes. There was only so much room for hierarchy. Out in the wider world, Eve had the weight of a whole committee behind her, one that grew in power each year. Bargains and compromises that might pass muster under duress could be quashed beneath the faintest doubt—or Eve’s whim—now that the threat had passed.

  Measured breaths passed before either of them spoke again. “I don’t sleep well, knowing I could do more for them than help them bathe and take constitutionals,” Gemini said.

  Ashley390 smiled. “But that’s all you can do for them. You’re not a licensed human geneticist. You are a convicted cloning regulations violator, and every… single… person on this island has higher legal standing than you. You work for them. And you work for me. Your alternative to menial orderly work isn’t a glorious return to revolutionizing genetic engineering; it’s prison. And your next prison won’t have the security flaws of the last one. Charlie7 volunteered to design it if we need another. Do you understand me?”

  Gemini nodded mutely.

  This time, Ashley390’s smile was clearly forced. “Good. Because so far you’re doing fine. If you can stop pitying yourself long enough to actually care about the residents, I might even let you help with medical treatment. I doubt that body you’re in will live long enough for me to trust you with a genetics lab.”

  Gemini sat at the picnic table as Ashley390 returned to her normal duties. She barely mouthed the words, wondering whether she was still being watched. “But with a proper lab, I could make this body live forever.”

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Earth was a speck in the night sky. Charlie7 knew it was out there, but his optics couldn’t pick up the backlit ball of rock. The caldera atop Olympus Mons was the highest points on Mars, making Everest back on Earth look like a doorstop.

  Mars had been Dale Chalmers’s hideout for longer than most robots had been alive. The intricacies of his underground lairs and clandestine organization might take centuries to unravel. But for now, Charlie7 had done all he could on the red planet to stomp out the brightest of the embers.

  “If you’re out there, somewhere, Dale2…”

  It was a promise Charlie7 couldn’t even finish to himself. With so much time to prepare, it seemed impossible that Dale Chalmers was gone for good. A lonely solar probe. A mining ship. Another robot. There were so many places for Dale to hide that ruling them all out was an impossible task.

  Dale2 had been right. Charlie7 would be looking over his shoulder forever.

  Back on Earth, affairs were settling back into business as usual. Rachel had opened the archived scans from Project Transhuman. Committees had released preliminary findings. Robots were starting to assimilate the idea that there were personality combinations heretofore undreamed of.

  And aside from a few close friends, no one would be happy to see Charlie7 return.

  Betrayal was a sliding scale without defined parameters. A cheating spouse was worse than a cheating boyfriend. A spy for a foreign government was lower than a seller of corporate secrets. Where did a robot fall who had programmed an entire populace to suit his needs?

  He could take a lesson from Dale2. Charlie7 could have disappeared, only to emerge wearing another robot’s ID.

  Something told him that he couldn’t live as anyone but Charlie7.

  Setting aside the fact that he had earned a unique place in history, for better or worse, there was an excellent chance of someone sniffing him out. Motivated, clever beyond imagining, and with a creative skew that robotkind often lacked, the humans of the blossoming Earth would find a way to reign in robots like Charlie7. He would be discovered, humiliated, and ultimately entrusted to the judgment of the beings he had so desperately needed to recreate.

  It would have been poetry itself for mankind to execute Charlie7 for his long-distant crimes. The story of Frankenstein, retold at a glacial pace. But in this version, the monster was not so monstrous, and the crime was against the villagers, not the creature.

  Turning to look out to the opposite horizon, Charlie7 considered deep space. A little side project or two and he might be the first robot ever to explore another solar system.

  Or he could join up with a mining team. He hadn’t done that in a long while.

  Or maybe he could establish an outpost on one of Jupiter’s moons. It would certainly be quiet.

  Ultimately, Charlie7 knew he would miss humanity. He’d missed it for so long that he’d forgotten what real flesh-and-blood people were like. Earth was about to explode with a population of lab-grown infants. Time would fly, and before long, they would be populating the planet the old-fashioned way.

  A new Renaissance in culture was on the horizon. Without basic needs to fulfill, these next generations of humans would pour heart and soul into music, art, and entertainment. For the first time in forever, new media wouldn’t be rehashed garbage.

  If there was one glaring error Charlie7 had made in his selections for Project Transhuman scans, it was that nobody had
any particular talent in the arts. Six more hard science types added to the mixing pool wasn’t going to change any of that.

  Charlie7 strolled over to his parked spaceroamer and climbed inside.

  If there was one overriding factor that drove him back to Earth, it was Eve. Depending on advancements in medical science along the way, she might have anywhere from sixty to a hundred years left to live. Possibly, some quantum leap might extend biological human life longer than that, but that was a foolish gamble to take.

  Charlie7 wanted to see that life. The elder stateswoman of the Second Human Era would be history from birth to death. Humans a thousand years from now would speak about her in hushed and reverent tones. In ten thousand years, her name would still be known.

  “Can’t miss that.”

  The spaceroamer’s engine was silent above the Martian atmosphere’s upper reaches. So mighty was Olympus Mons that it stood apart from the rest of the planet. Its peak became an island in a sea of carbon dioxide. Charlie7 lifted off and set a course for Earth.

  As the acceleration pressed him against the seat, Charlie7 tried to imagine what a return to Earth held in store for him.

  Committee hearings—certainly.

  Questions—by the transorbital load.

  Accusations—aplenty and ranging from the justified to the paranoid.

  A warm welcome—possibly and from fewer than he would probably like.

  Danger?

  Charlie7 smirked, one of the few motions he was capable of under the extreme forces holding his chassis to the pilot’s chair. If someone decided they’d had enough of Charlie7 and wanted to delete him… well, there was an upload rig buried deep in one of Dale2’s old vaults that had been repurposed to awaken a backup Charlie7 if it didn’t hear from him in the next month.

  Backup. Duplication. Recovery.

  It was the way of a people who knew they were software with consciousness. Charlie7 had let robotkind have their delusions of entrapped humanity, but he knew exactly what he was.