by J. C. Staudt
Kelvin beeped twice.
“Left,” I said.
Kelvin fired a bolt at the left-hand pad, where it stopped dead, like a ray of sunlight into a thick black curtain.
“Blue.”
He shot the blue pad in the center.
“Right. Green. Middle. Red. Center. Red. Left.” I called out a sequence of instructions, alternating between color and position, beginning slowly and picking up the pace as I went on.
It didn’t take Kelvin very long to fall behind. Soon he was missing his targets, three or four steps behind my orders, blowing pits into the concrete wall.
“Kelvin, stop,” I had to say, to prevent his last several shots from going off. “Angus, feed him the signal.”
A pause. “Are you sure?” came the reply.
“Do it.”
“Ooookay… transmitting.”
A strange wave of jealousy swept over me when I thought about the medallion’s influence being fed to the robot, like I was watching another kid play with my favorite toy. But I began Kelvin’s sequence again and started calling out targets.
He hit the first few without delay. I picked up the pace. He was dead center on every shot, aiming as I spoke and firing when the word was done. I sped up some more, and he stayed with me. No matter how fast I went, the robot stayed on target, until I was calling them so fast I was shouting whatever came to mind. As fast as the rifle could snap them off, Kelvin was laying them down with pinpoint accuracy.
“Kelvin, stop. Wow, that was much better.” So far, so good. Now it was time for the final test. The real test. The one I had bet would be a success, but that Dr. Gottlieb had bet would be a disaster.
I donned my protective mask with its high-impact visor, then crossed the room and stood in front of the blue center target. It would be impossible for Kelvin to score a direct hit on that target without my face getting in the way. The only way the automaton could take that shot was if it overrode its programming. Or if something forced it to.
You’d think we would’ve been smart enough to heed the long history of fear surrounding machines that override their creators’ programming. I knew how much of a gambit it was to test whether Kelvin would harm me, but that was precisely what we needed to do before Angus could certify the automatons as being safe enough for wider use.
The RadPads hummed, giving off a hot electrical smell as they cooled.
“Kelvin,” I said. I took a deep breath. “Prepare to fire. Commence firing drill sequence. Target RadPads.”
Kelvin raised the rifle and beeped twice.
“Left.”
A bolt sizzled across the room and struck the pad, less than two feet from my precious face.
“Green.”
Another shot, on target to my right.
I inhaled and closed my eyes. “Blue.”
Nothing.
“Blue,” I repeated.
I opened my eyes. Kelvin was standing there, poised and ready, but no shots came.
“Blue. Center. Middle.”
Kelvin was not shooting. And more importantly, the medallion wasn’t overriding his prime directive of not harming me. I was excited. Understandably so, I might add. And in my moment of excitement, I did something dumb.
I turned toward the control booth to give Angus a thumbs-up. In doing so, I must’ve swayed on my feet a little, because the next thing I knew there was a laser bolt searing toward me, aimed at the center target. I’d given Kelvin an opening, failing to consider that I’d also given it five consecutive commands to shoot the blue target.
It all happened in an instant. An instant that must’ve seemed very long to Kelvin, thanks to the medallion, but which felt very short to me. I shrank away from the blast, turning toward the robot and stretching out my hands. Kelvin was not equipped for human body language recognition, so that gesture accomplished a whole lot of nothing. I had begun yelling out the command, “Kelvin, st—” when one of his laser bolts caught me through the left ear.
There was a wet, searing pain, like a drop of water on a live skillet. I went deaf. Not just in my left ear, but the entire left side of my head. I fell to the floor, more out of a desire to get out of the way than because anything had made me. There was no blood when I turned to look up at the wall, but when I felt for the ear that should’ve been there, my fingers encountered a dripping blue-violet wreckage.
People were scrambling around in the control booth; I could feel the scuffling of footsteps through the floor as Kelvin fired the last of its five shots, dead on target. Angus’s voice came through the comm. He said something that put Kelvin’s lights out, and then the door was opening and feet were pouring through it and there were hands on me and too many voices talking for me to tell one from another.
They hoisted me up onto some kind of stretcher and carried me down the hall. I kept telling them I was fine; it was only my ear, for crying out loud. But I didn’t spend long protesting. I came to my senses after a few seconds and realized I was being carried, which beats walking any day of the week.
When I arrived at the clinic, or whatever you’d call a room like that in a place like the Maclin facility, my favorite person in the world was there. Dr. Gottlieb peered down at me like some curious scientist examining a specimen under a microscope, hemming and hawing over the damage. He did something to me that hurt. Then he did something else that hurt more. He did a third thing that I barely felt, but which somehow seemed like it should’ve hurt even worse than the first two things.
By the time he’d finished with me, the deafness in the left side of my head had been replaced by a numb deafness. I had an earlobe, he said, and I had that whole top part that curves out from where it’s attached to your head. But the back—that middle section with all the thick cartilage, where your earhole is—that part was gone. Like someone had taken a gigantic hole-punch and chomped it right out of there, an ear piercing session gone horribly wrong.
Back in the bunk room, I finally got a good look at myself in the mirror. My ear was a marshmallow of white gauze, the side of my head wrapped up tighter than a locksmith’s daughter. The laser bolt had left a heat line along my cheek and scorched a little path through the hair in front of my ear. I wondered what my ear’s punctured remains must’ve looked like, but that was something I’d find out soon enough.
“You’re lucky you didn’t get a bolt in the eye,” Angus said. “That would’ve been it for you.”
“If there’s one thing I’ve never been, it’s lucky,” I said. “At least now we know the medallion works.”
Angus frowned. “It certainly improved Kelvin’s performance. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. But we’ll have to do some further testing before we know whether it’s safe.”
“Even if that doohickey is safe, how you gonna transplant it into thousands of automatons at the same time?” Ezra wanted to know.
“We’d have to take it apart and mass-produce it,” said Angus.
“Dr. Gottlieb says that can’t be done,” said Thomas.
“It doesn’t need to be,” I said. “We don’t need a billion copies of the entire medallion. We just need to figure out which part of it is responsible for the improved reflex response and replicate that.”
“Gods, you look awful,” Angus said, ignoring my comment as he looked me over.
I grinned. “Good news, everyone. For once, I feel better than I look.”
“You do have a bit of a sour complexion,” Thomas told me. “Why not go and have a lie-down?”
“I was planning on it,” I said.
I’d just hit my bunk and was trying to ignore the dull throb of pain in my head when Ms. Foxglove entered the room. “Oh, goodness. What do you want? Come to gloat about how wrong I turned out to be?”
“Gentlemen,” she said, prim and polite as ever. “Forgive me for barging in on your personal space, but I’ve just had word that Mr. Nordstrom’s visitors have arrived.”
I shot out of bed. “Visitor…s? As in, plural visitors?”<
br />
“That’s right,” she said. “Two of them.”
“I asked for one person. Are you sure you got the right guy?”
“Are you feeling well enough to follow me?”
“For this, yes.”
“Right this way, please.”
After a bunch of hallways that all looked the same, she brought me into a tiny room, where a pane of what I assumed to be double-sided glass looked into another, tinier room. There sat my two most primitive acquaintances in the world. Chaz Wheatley and Gareth Blaylocke looked ragged, as if they’d been through a tiring ordeal. My guess was that their abductors had been responsible for that.
“What’s he doing here?” I said, pointing at Blaylocke.
Ms. Foxglove gave me a curious look. “You’re referring to the curly-haired man, I presume. I’m told he refused to leave the other man’s side. Our operatives had no choice but to bring them both in.”
“Friends to the bitter end,” I muttered. “Backstabbers and their loyalty. Like skunks and their stench. You never know who they’ll use it on until you get too close. I’m guessing you’re going to let me go in there and talk to them?”
“I’ll be watching from in here. If you need any help, just say so.”
I scowled at her. “Please. They’re primies.”
“You’re on a level playing field, then.”
“You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you? I don’t need augments to keep a couple of primitives in line. My only concern is how in the heavens I’m supposed to strike fear into their hearts with this lump of cottage cheese on my head. They’ll never take me seriously this way.”
“That sounds like a problem without a solution,” she said.
“You are a cold, cold woman.” I ripped the bandage away to reveal the raw wound, hoping it would make me look more menacing. Or that the sight of it would make her dry heave. Either or.
In the mirror’s half-reflection, I could see the purple crust of dried blood around my ear and the smears of flaky blue along my jaw. I turned my head for a better look, then nodded. “You’re about to be glad you did something nice for me.”
I entered the interrogation room and flipped the table. With that out of my way, I grabbed Chaz by the collar and lifted him off his chair, which fell over as I pinned him to the wall. “You traitor,” I whispered.
“Don’t hurt me,” Chaz pleaded, struggling.
I felt Blaylocke trying to pry my arms away. I let Chaz go, shoved Blaylocke off me, then spun his chair around and sat down. Chaz rubbed his neck, then picked up his own chair and slid it as far away from me as he could before he sat down. Chairless, Blaylocke stood next to the wall and glared at me.
“Welcome to my secret underground fortress, you traitorous dogs.” I could practically hear Cordelia frowning in the next room.
“Why did you bring us here?” asked Chaz.
“We’ll get to that in a minute.” I jabbed a finger at Blaylocke. “What in Leridote’s blue heavens are you doing here?”
“I wasn’t going to just look the other way while they walked off with Chester,” he said.
“You couldn’t have tried?”
He scowled. “We’ve got to look out for each other.”
“You didn’t feel too obliged to look out for a poor gullible sap like me when the chips were down, did you?”
“We didn’t have a choice. Yingler had us both by the balls. I can’t speak for Chester, but Lafe has been pulling my strings for longer than I want to admit.”
Chaz nodded his agreement.
“I’m surprised they found you so quickly. I’m even more surprised you were still in the stream. I would’ve thought you’d both gone home by now.”
“Yingler wouldn’t let us. After everything broke open with Gilfoyle, he was too scared of us going home and telling everyone. Now he can’t find Pyras anymore. He’s been looking for it for weeks. The other two councilors, Malwyn and DeGaffe, must’ve ordered the city moved after they sabotaged the Clarity. They knew Yingler was up to something. That techsoul scum. Sorry… no offense.”
“Whatever. Thanks to me, you’ve been saved from that pretentious law-loving windbag and brought here, to my elaborate and well-apportioned stronghold.”
“But why?” Blaylocke asked.
“I told you I would get to that. This is why I think you’re an awful person. You’re telling me you knew Vilaris’s true identity all along and you couldn’t warn me about him?”
Blaylocke looked at his feet. “I know you’ve never liked me much—”
“Understatement of the year. Go on.”
“We were sworn to secrecy. Yingler not only threatened us—he threatened to have us both sent to jail if we stood in the way of Regency justice.”
I shook my head, remembering how Yingler had used that same threat to coerce Sable and Thomas. He’d almost gotten me to turn myself in, that no-good weasel. He would’ve, too, except that Thomas had warned me, whereas Chaz and Blaylocke had never found the stomach to. “Sounds like Yingler’s in the habit of manipulating people with justice,” I said. “I can’t believe I trusted that guy. I actually liked him.”
“You’re a terrible judge of character,” said Blaylocke.
“You’re a terrible everything.”
He shrugged. “I tried to help you. I kept it to myself when you destroyed the crackler remote. I was hoping you’d see your chance and get away before it was too late.”
“You dimwit. I stayed to help you guys! That whole time, you wanted me to get away? So much for friendship and loyalty. I still hate you for not saying anything. You let me walk right into Yingler’s trap, like a blind guy at an archery tournament. I had no clue what was actually happening. Worse than almost getting me killed, you made me look like a friggin’ idiot.”
“You had no love for Gilfoyle before that night,” said Blaylocke.
“The reason I had no love for Gilfoyle is the same reason you’re here, coincidentally. Not you, Blaylocke. Chaz. I need your expertise as it pertains to one of my augments. We need you to isolate its best quality and rebuild it—better, faster, and stronger than it already is. We’ve got a biotech here who’s good, but none of us are good enough. We’ve hit a wall. We have the resources, but I think you’re the only one who’s got the brains to solve this.”
“You had us dragged halfway across the stream so Chester could fix you up again?”
“I didn’t have you dragged anywhere, Blaylocke. You dragged your own sorry keister along for the ride, so shut your hole and deal with it. From now on, I want you to think of this as a free vacation. A vacation about which you have no right to complain. The heavens know, thinking of it that way is the only thing that’s been getting me by.”
“I thought you were in charge here.”
“No. I’m not in charge at all, which sucks. Doesn’t it? That whole secret underground fortress thing was just my way of welcoming you to paradise. A bit of creative embellishment, if you will.”
“How did you wind up here?”
“I’m going to explain everything. Until then, if you’d just keep your comments to yourself for two seconds and let me talk to Chaz, maybe we could get somewhere. I think you’re going to fit right in around here, Chaz, ol’ buddy. Keep in mind, I’ve just gotten the people in charge to start liking me. Now they’re going to meet Blaylocke. Try to make up the difference, will you?”
“How?”
“I don’t know… be charming and stuff.”
Chaz nodded uncertainly.
“Oh, and one more thing… I want you both to call me Hal from now on. Just Hal, that’s it. Mr. Nordstrom is too formal.” I winked at them, my face turned away from the glass so Ms. Foxglove couldn’t see.
Blaylocke gave me a knowing look, but there was an air of spitefulness in it. If he ever wanted things to go badly for me, he could make that happen. Then again, so could Thomas or Ezra. There were now more people who knew my real name than people who didn’t, and I’d be lying if I said t
hat didn’t make me a little nervous.
I turned toward the glass, hoping Ms. Foxglove was satisfied enough to have the door unbolted. She was, and I introduced her to my star gadgeteer with more than a little fanfare. Then I brought the two primitives to the bunk room, where I made the rounds with Chaz while letting Blaylocke fend for himself. I also made it plain that the two newcomers were primitives, and that anyone who didn’t like it could walk off a ledge.
Days passed, and the new additions slowly began to meld with our little group. We were like one big happy family who hardly knew each other. I felt like I was back at one of my birthday parties growing up. You know the kind—where you invite your best friend from school and your best friend from the neighborhood and your best friend from your baseball team, and then you realize that none of them know each other, and you’re the one who has to keep them all from getting bored or ripping each other’s throats out. In the days to come, there would be plenty of boredom and throat-ripping to spare.
5
Now that I had assembled my dream team—which was, of course, limited in scope to individuals who were not dead, incarcerated, or otherwise occupied—we were free to head for the home stretch. Chaz was taken aback when I revealed the Galvos Project to him and told him that the primary reason he was here was to lend his brilliant mind to its success. As ever, he agitated briefly and then settled into his new role with much the same passion and vigor he had exhibited in his workshop back home in Pyras.
Where Angus Brunswick had been Ms. Foxglove’s golden boy in days of yore, Prof. Dr. E. Chester Wheatley quickly surpassed him in her good graces. Even as his popularity grew, he never strayed from his usual temperament of fairness and equanimity in all matters. He took suggestions and fostered ideas from all parties, stooping so low as to entertain even the occasional offering from Thomas, of all people.
Guys like Chaz don’t concede to power trips or balk at responsibility. Guys like Chaz are not at all like me. I think that’s why I liked him so much. If he could prove through his work on the Galvos Project that he wasn’t on Yingler’s side, I told myself, I might even find it within my heart to forgive him.