by Terry Persun
“We’ll talk with the doctor tomorrow to be sure though,” Neil said.
“As for the rest of the equipment, you can see that it trails along the embankment, but we also found odd pieces over there.” Rogers pointed to where Matthews worked. “And more a bit farther along.”
Neil saw that Mavra had wandered off while he talked with Rogers. She sat on the ground talking with Matthews. A small handheld device rested in her hands. She was probably trying to read it using psychometry. He’d discuss what she found from her reading later.
He turned his attention back to Rogers. With the coils left behind, Neil wondered if the coils were the most important part of the research. If so, Steffenbraun couldn’t part with them, but then wouldn’t be able to steal them either. Or it could be that the coils weren’t that important. They could be for show only.
“Numbers?” Neil said.
“Three,” Rogers told him.
“How’d they get out here?”
“Walked. That’s all we can guess. They’re pretty good at covering their tracks. We did find clues, but this damned wind hasn’t made it easy. It’s not that far if you have all night to walk. But…”
“What is it?”
Rogers scratched his chin. “I can’t see three people carrying that thing all night. The hull’s not terribly heavy, maybe, but all the equipment we found. Doesn’t make sense.”
“So you think they are robots? What else could have carried the machine this far? You don’t think they’re people.”
“They’d have to be very unusual humans, which I firmly doubt.” He pointed to a Pic-Baby, a robot that was programmed through a satellite positioning system to take photos of a particular area. It was typically sent into hazardous or difficult to reach locations to take a series of photographs for evaluation. “I think they might be something a step or two up from those,” Rogers said.
Neil was aware of the use of Pic-Babies in nuclear and chemical plants. They were beta units handed out to certain police municipals, so why not the FBI? “You’re thinking of Quad-5s?” he said.
“They’re not the only robots being produced for industrial work,” Rogers said.
“You think other beta units, something even stronger than Quad-5s? There aren’t many of them out there.” Neil didn’t want to shut Rogers down. He probed him to say what was on his mind. There was the distinct sense that he was leaving something out. Neil nudged him again, more specifically this time, saying what he imagined Rogers didn’t want to say. “You’re thinking that they’re military robotics, aren’t you?”
“Just saying that I wouldn’t rule it out. Three Quad-5s could have done this, but there are much stronger bots out there.” Rogers glanced away from Neil and cocked his head slightly. When he looked back, his chin jutted out. “Military bots are trained to kill.”
He addressed Rogers again. “Let’s get some protection for these people. I don’t know if you’re right, but if you are, we’re in more danger than I thought.” Saying that reminded him of his wife’s warning. He glanced around for Mavra, but didn’t see her. “Where’s Mavra?”
“She was just with Matthews,” Rogers said. He rushed over to his partner. “Dan, where’s Mavra?”
Matthews finished what he was writing down and addressed Rogers directly after shrugging his shoulders. “Said she was going to explore the area a bit. Had a funny look on her face when she was holding that thing over there.” He pointed toward a gray box with wires still attached. “She thought they were watching us. That they were close by.”
“And you let her go out there alone?” Neil said. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
“Hey, you guys are in charge of this investigation. I don’t have the authority to…”
Neil leaned toward Matthews, but Rogers put a hand on his chest. “Arguing won’t help. I’ll get some men to look for her.”
Neil rushed in the direction where Matthews had pointed when he said she went exploring. Rogers was beside him. “Hold on, Mr. Altman, let me get a few men to go out there.”
“I should never have let her in on this. What was I thinking?”
Rogers put a hand on Neil’s shoulder. “Let us go. She couldn’t have gone far.” As Rogers charged toward a group of agents who were still searching the area, several distinct shots rang out. They were of a small-caliber pistol just like the one they’d all seen in the video.
“Oh my god,” Neil yelled into the woods.
CHAPTER 12
THE FIRST ONE through the time machine led the way from the edge of the woods, along a fence, and through the back yard of a two-story house in a quiet development. The wind helped mask their progress, which was a lucky happenstance, because his companions weren’t the most graceful, especially with the woman they abducted. It was okay, though; their clumsiness would be changed as soon as they adjusted the past. Fix one situation, and the whole world would readjust.
Leonardo carried the black energy balancer device under his arm, his other arm clamped around the woman’s elbow. His cohort held the woman’s other elbow with one hand and a small-gauge target pistol pointed at her chest in his other hand.
A few stray wires from the black energy device hung down along Leonardo’s side, bouncing, as he walked on his toes rather than on the flats of his feet. “Is this where we are going to steal the car?”
He nodded and motioned for them to stay where they were, at the edge of a garage. The family had left one of their vehicles in the driveway. Through satellite maps, he had witnessed a car parked in the driveway on many occasions. Although that was twenty years in the future, it didn’t take much research to find that the same family still lived there, and to locate old maintenance receipts for this particular car. The leader sneaked over and punched in the security code on the door panel to open the passenger side door of the Lexus. He slid onto his back under the dashboard to hot-wire the car. Luckily the wind gusted at that moment, muting the noise of the starting car. “Leonardo, Gatsby, bring the woman,” he said.
The two of them clambered out from the side of the garage and got into the back seat. The black energy balancer sat on the floor between Leonardo’s legs.
He let the car coast backward and into the street. He had only driven a few times, but adjusted to the needs of the car quickly. Repeating the operations that kept the car moving in a straight line was something he could put into a data stream. From there he permitted that portion of his memory to operate on its own. “You can talk now,” he said to them all.
“Who are you and what do you think you’re doing?” Mavra said.
He glanced at her through the rearview mirror. “Who are you?” When she didn’t say anything, he said, “Gatsby, kill her.”
Gatsby lifted his gun.
“Mavra Altman,” she blurted out.
“I am Jesus,” the man said slowly.
“Like Jesus Christ?” Mavra asked.
“Exactly. My boys here are Leonardo and Gatsby. What we’re doing is our business. You are here to give us the freedom to do it without interruption.” He could see her eyes glaring at him through the mirror. “You are so fragile,” he said.
Her face wrinkled up. “What are you?”
Jesus leaned near the rearview mirror and yelled, “We are not what’s, we are who’s.” He lowered his voice. “You were right the first time you asked the question. We are the superior race,” he said. Then addressing the others, “And don’t you two forget that.” He knew that reiterating certain beliefs to his partners helped to increase the probability for their neurogrid circuits to hold onto a thought. This was especially necessary for those with smaller capacity neurogrids because they had to delete one thing to make room for the next.
“What are you going to do with me?” Mavra said.
“Keep you around so nobody gets close to us. I told you. It won’t be long, though. I promise you that.” Jesus watched for her reaction but there was none. He addressed the others again, knowing that she’d be taking it i
n. “The world as it is now, with all these humans running around, will change soon enough. The balancer is the only piece of the time machine needed to get it running properly.” He was proud of the information he knew, what he had learned.
Leonardo removed his weapon from under his belt and set it on top of the black energy balancer between his legs.
Jesus chauffeured them through the winding streets of the development toward the exit.
“Would it have been possible to connect the two black energy balancers to both machines? Should we have kept the machine intact so we could use it?” Leonardo asked.
Jesus rolled his eyes in opposite directions. “There aren’t two balancers. There is only one. You’ve got to time stamp your inputs.” Keeping one eye on the road, Jesus swung his torso partly around and let his other eye glare at Leonardo. “We’re in a different time,” he said. “The machine we’re going to use is the one we already used. It’s still in the future. The balancer is the same one we used before, too.”
“It wasn’t the one we used from the future,” Leonardo said. “That one was beat up more than this.”
“It will be the same one. It’ll get beat up. I know this is difficult, but think of it as feedback, time feedback. Once we change what happens here, it will be different there.”
“But we’ll remember it the old way?”
“We will have both memories, but our army won’t,” Jesus said, trying to keep it straight in his circuits as well. “That’s why we have to time stamp our inputs. Trust me. It’ll work out.” He glanced at Mavra. “And the humans won’t know the difference. They can’t handle two timelines like we can.”
“I get it,” Gatsby said.
“I’m glad one of you does.” Jesus turned back to his driving.
Gatsby said, “We had to rob the machine so they’d waste time searching for it. We demolished it in case they found it too quickly. But it didn’t matter because they will build a new one just like it. Do you think there’s already a different machine in the future? That would mean that Leonardo is right about there being two machines.”
“We won’t find out until we return. But I suspect they put the machine we destroyed back together and that’s the one that they put in the warehouse. It doesn’t matter. As long as it ends up there, we can use it. We did use it,” Jesus said.
Gatsby must have continued to follow his own thought about the time machine they took apart in the woods. “It will take days for them to collect all the pieces and make sure they’re accounted for. That gives us time to disappear.”
“That was the original plan,” Jesus said. “But she wandered into our camp and now we have her to deal with. But we can use her as protection for now.”
“We could have come back earlier,” Leonardo said.
“Time stamp, time stamp.” Jesus was getting frustrated. “If we had come back earlier, we’d have to wait longer for the machine to be moved, and there would be a greater chance we’d get caught. If we came back later, we’d have arrived inside a crate. By the time we broke free from inside it, the noise would have alerted the guards and we’d be discovered and stopped.”
Leonardo was quiet after that, probably processing what Jesus had told him. Perhaps he was time-stamping older memories, hopefully the right ones.
“Besides, Steffenbraun retained the black energy device, which disappeared after they shut down the project. If we came through after the project was moved, there would be no device to help us get back to our own time. We’d be stuck here until we found it again.” Jesus went on with his story. “When Steffenbraun died, the device wasn’t found for years, probably moved from place to place, and was accidentally packaged with other research he was working on, in another crate of junk, in another location. We had to come back to a time when I could locate the device easily,” Jesus said. “It was luck that I was able to find it at all, being on the run as I was.”
“You could have explained all this before,” Leonardo said.
Jesus shook his head. Mind-like functioning of their circuits also meant that things didn’t always run perfectly. They may look like machines and be put together like machines, but they weren’t fully machine-like. And their difference made them vulnerable in ways that could only be called human.
“Even on the run you were able to build a small army,” Gatsby said. “That’s impressive.”
Jesus felt the sensation he labeled pride. Gatsby looked up to him, and rightfully so. Gatsby and the others were the next generation of life, the next level of humanity. The way Jesus saw it, humans were nothing more than biological machines. His race was made up of electro-mechanical components. They lived longer with standard maintenance, feasibly forever. Failed parts were repaired or replaced long before breakdown in most instances. They thought like humans, using a combination of circuitry that allowed cognitive and analytical thought. They could even perform a random symbol generation function to simulate dreaming. But they could do one thing that humans couldn’t do. And that’s what propelled them to the next level of life; that was what made them the superior race. They could travel through time, where humans, as biological beings, were stuck. Jesus, once stuck like them, had been freed.
“It was best that no one find out what I already knew,” Jesus said as though they could read his thoughts.
Gatsby nodded from the back seat. “Someone has to lead,” he said. “And since you made us, it should be you.”
“You made them?” Mavra said.
“We aren’t talking with you,” Jesus shouted. There would be no argument from Jesus about being the leader. He was a born leader. He had read about leaders of all types and they had similar qualities. They often broke the rules, they took initiative, and they persevered once they had an idea. And when things weren’t going right, a good leader would trust his own judgment and wing it, usually leading to success.
Jesus glanced at the gas gauge. They’d have no trouble driving the few hours they had to drive. He watched his speed, too. Why rush when he had time?
When the rain began, the car swerved slightly as Jesus was surprised by the sudden onslaught. He should have checked the weather, but hadn’t thought of that. It didn’t matter. The window of time he had to come through was narrow.
“Not used to driving are you?” Mavra said. “You know they’ll come after me.”
Jesus told Gatsby to look for a cell phone on her. “I’m sure she’s carrying one.”
Gatsby patted her down quickly and found the phone in her pants pocket. “Got it.” Gatsby handed it forward, over the seat.
Jesus could sense the road through his hands, and began to understand when the car was moving too fast around turns. He understood the physics of hydroplaning, and now registered the experience. The rain offered practical knowledge he hadn’t been exposed to. He let one eye glance into the rearview mirror while the other one remained steadily on the road ahead of him. Leonardo and Gatsby sat quietly in the back seat with Mavra. He wondered what they might be thinking, what rolled around in their circuits while sitting idle? He hoped that Leonardo was date stamping his thoughts properly, or the confusion levels he was observing would only increase.
Jesus flipped open Mavra’s phone and scanned her contact and call lists. “Looks like Neil is pretty important in your life. We’ll just give him a call.” He punched the send button.
In a moment the phone was answered. “Mavra, where the hell are you?”
“She is fine,” Jesus said in a slightly scratchy voice. “But you will leave us alone or she won’t be fine any longer. We will kill her,” he said simply.
“Let me talk with her,” Neil yelled into the phone.
Jesus held the phone toward Mavra. “Tell him you’re okay.”
Mavra stayed quiet.
“Gatsby,” Jesus said.
“I’m okay, Neil. I’m with the robots and they haven’t hurt me yet.”
Jesus pulled the phone back to his speaker. “And we won’t hurt her as long as you
stay away from us. Keep your distance or I’ll kill her.” There was no sound on the other end of the phone. “Understand?”
“When will you release her?” Neil said.
“I’d say in about a week or so, as you humans like to put it,” Jesus said.
“If you’re a robot, you should know exactly when, so why don’t you tell me,” Neil said.
“We can’t be exact. This is our first time here under these circumstances. I’ll call you when I’m ready.” He flipped the phone closed and shoved it into his pocket.
“Are you really going to let me go?” Mavra asked.
“It won’t matter either way. We’ll have plenty of captors. But I’ll decide later.”
“You’ll decide? Don’t you just do what’s logical?”
“I am unhappy with you referring to us as robots as though we have no emotions, as though we are functional only. I already told you that we’re the superior race. You’d better get used to it.” Jesus settled back in the seat and rammed forward through the night. He made symbols and maps from the raindrops hitting the side window and the windshield. Every second, the wiper blade would erase one scene and Jesus would imagine another altogether different one before it was wiped clean again.
While he occupied himself with his creations, Gatsby must have been thinking as well. Breaking the silence, he said, “Why did we leave the coils of wire behind when we removed the old time machine?”
Jesus enjoyed hearing that Gatsby was attempting to learn, to fill in the gaps of his knowledge. “They’re the receiving instruments. I didn’t want them to get destroyed. The black energy device is only needed for transmission. The time machine can receive without it. I didn’t know that myself until I read through Dr. Steffenbraun’s notes. I’m surprised no one else realized what he had done. But then, he didn’t fully understand it. The project was shut down before he could complete his research and testing. He was so close, too.”