Revision 7: DNA

by Terry Persun

  He went back to his study and let one side of his brain sleep. He had to be careful not to fall fully asleep or he’d snore and give himself away. But he also knew that if he kept his body alert all the time, even if his mind rested, he’d become fatigued. Eventually, it would get to him and cause him to be less effective. And it had already been two days. He expected to be stuck inside the crate without being able to move his body for exercise for at least another day. His neck was stiff already.

  Another few hours went by and Neil’s phone vibrated. He looked at the ID and answered. “Agent Rogers, how are you doing?”

  “Why haven’t you been bugging me?” There was suspicion in his voice.

  “The truth?”

  “Of course, the truth.”

  “When you guys were at the hunting cabin, I was crazy with fear and anticipation. I’ve never been in this position before and didn’t know how I’d react. Mavra had always been with several policemen. She’d never been in danger. This was different and I couldn’t handle it. Professionally, I realized that you were right. I needed to let you handle it.”

  “What? Are you serious? Where are you?”

  “I’m at a friend’s house where I can get some support so that I don’t do something stupid,” Neil said.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Rogers said.

  “You don’t have to say anything. Just take care of my wife. Save her life,” Neil said. “I’m trusting you.”

  “You can,” Rogers said rather seriously.

  Neil lifted the locator from beside him. Rogers was pretty close to the warehouse.

  Neil hung up. He had to tell Rogers that he was with a friend. If he had said that he was home, Rogers would have checked it out. At this point, the agent probably knew he was lying, but was too busy to worry about it.

  The battery on Neil’s cell phone was depleting, so he stopped researching and put it into sleep mode. He had to be able to get a call from Mavra.

  Sure enough, a few minutes later the doors to the warehouse opened. It was probably late afternoon and the warehouse had warmed up. Sweat poured down Neil’s cheeks and the sofa stuck to his back. The guard had made several trips up and down the aisles. Neil had heard him humming as he worked.

  The listening device picked up the conversation between Rogers and the guard, who was told to go home, with pay. Neil missed parts of the conversation. Then someone drove the forklift truck and it sounded as though they unloaded another crate. Ah yes, an empty one where the FBI could hide as they waited. That crate was hauled past where Neil lay on the sofa listening, which put him between the FBI and the time machine. He figured that they would leave one agent in the office dressed like a guard. That agent would warn the FBI of the robots’ arrival. It was a simple plan on their part, but then again, so was his plan to get to the robots first.

  With the FBI close by, Neil sensed that he would have to time his entrance just right. All he wanted to do was get Mavra under his care and the FBI could come out and take over the robots. Of course, he’d want to secure the dark energy balancer, too.

  Neil knew one thing for sure: No matter how things progressed, Rogers would be pissed.

  CHAPTER 22

  MAVRA SHRUNK INTO the chair as much as she could in order to disappear from the sight of her captors. Jesus and Gatsby wandered near the window and positioned themselves so that they could look out. Jesus hunkered down as though resting his body on his legs. Neither talked or moved for a long time after that. Jesus’s fingers were intertwined in front of him. They both stood completely still, which gave the impression of being turned off.

  She was nervous and reached for some of her food, but stopped mid-way. The sound of her opening a package of chips or candy bar wrapper might get their attention again. And although Jesus was an intriguing robot, Gatsby rather scared her. Leonardo, the one robot that appeared to have some sort of conscience or concern, wasn’t around to help her feel more secure, not that he could or would do anything to protect her.

  Jesus had set Mavra’s cell phone beside the dark energy balancer on a small desk shoved against one wall. What the hell was that device anyway? And how could that single piece of equipment make the difference between the time machine working and not working?

  Steffenbraun had figured it out, of course. He had sent items through the time machine. But none had ever come back. Were they just disintegrated? One thing she remembered Neil explaining to her was that living things weren’t transported through the machine, which meant that these things weren’t alive in the human sense of the word.

  She closed her eyes and thought about the balancer, when suddenly it came to her. Shit. Why didn’t she, Neil, and everyone else figure it out before? It was so simple. If the dark energy balancer was a transmitter, there needed to be a receiver. If he was dialing into the past, nothing that Steffenbraun put into the time machine had anywhere to go. With the balancer, Jesus had the device he needed to make a transceiver out of each machine, the one they came here to work with and the one that was already in the future. They could only travel if the machine was there. So that meant that there was no ability to travel into the past because there was no receiver.

  As the night wore down, and Mavra remained still, fatigue set in and she leaned her head on the damp arm of the chair. The odor of mildew assaulted her sinuses, but she also felt comfortable with her head on the soft material. In a short while, she fell asleep and had a long dream of playing in the woods as a child. Someone had built a tire swing that she rode back and forth for a long time until the back door of the cabin slammed shut.

  She woke with a start. Jesus and Gatsby were still staring out the window.

  Leonardo scuffled around in the kitchen.

  Mavra stretched her arms over her head. Now she felt hungry. Morning sunshine brightened the outside, which looked like a pleasant day, as Mavra glanced past the two lumps in front of her. The candles had either gone out or had been put out, because the light from outside was the only light in the room.

  She heard a cabinet close and a drawer open and close. The tinkle of silverware came next. The anticipation of what Leonardo had found overcame her and she sat up in the chair and stretched her legs out beyond the seat and onto the floor. Her legs had fallen asleep while she was curled into a ball. She wiggled her toes and yawned. As soon as sound came from her mouth, Gatsby swung around as though he was going to hurt her. She jumped and hid her face with her hands.

  Gatsby laughed at her. “You are afraid of us.”

  Mavra didn’t answer.

  Jesus came out of stasis and turned more slowly than Gatsby had. “You may move around.”

  “She’ll try to escape,” Gatsby said.

  Jesus reached to pat Gatsby on the shoulder, which made an odd sound, nothing like flesh on flesh, but more like flesh on plastic or metal, like Gatsby was hollow inside. “I’m sure you can run much faster than she can.”

  Gatsby shook his head, not taking his eyes off of her.

  “Could I go into the kitchen and help Leonardo?” She directed her question to Jesus.

  He rose up onto his legs and walked to the kitchen doorway. “Leonardo, Mavra would like to help you cook.”

  “I would welcome that,” he said.

  Jesus said, “You’ll have to watch her to be sure that she doesn’t run off. Gatsby, I’m sure, would love to run her down, though.” Then Jesus made one of his disturbing laughing sounds.

  What they thought was funny, Mavra found troubling.

  “I can do that,” Leonardo said.

  Jesus came back into the living room and nodded to Mavra. “Enjoy yourself.”

  Mavra got up from the chair, kept her distance as she passed Gatsby, and walked into the kitchen. There were just as many spider webs in the kitchen as the living room. When they entered hours before, it had been too dark to notice, but now light came through the windows and illuminated the dreariness of the place. Without asking, she found several rolls of paper towels under the si
nk and drizzled a handful of them with water. While wiping down the counter and table, Leonardo rinsed dust from a skillet, a large plate, and some silverware. After Mavra wiped down the metal-legged kitchen table that looked like it had come from a 1960s diner, Leonardo set a place for her.

  Leonardo put a pan on the stove with a small flame under it. His hands were dirty from what looked like digging in the ground. As she turned her attention to his findings, she saw why. Piled into a mound in the corner were mushrooms and roots of some kind. There was also a small stack of leaves that looked like dandelion leaves, and a few small, but beautiful bluish-colored eggs. She was surprised by the quantity as well as the variety of what he had found. “What are you planning to cook?”

  “A vegetable toss with eggs, mushrooms, and wild potatoes. The dandelion leaves and sprigs of mint are for a small salad. Will that be enough?”

  “That will be more than enough.” She stepped next to him and moved the pile he had collected around with her finger. She dusted dirt from some of the root potatoes. She took a deep breath and let the air out slowly as she closed her eyes and fell into a relaxed state. Mavra reached up and placed a hand gently on Leonardo’s shoulder. “Is this all right?” she said.

  “May I continue cooking?”

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  While Leonardo rinsed and sliced the vegetables, Mavra moved with him, letting herself read where he had come from. She kept her eyes closed much of the time, moving only enough to follow his motions. She saw other robots with spatula-shaped hands, and knife-shaped appendages. With three and sometimes four arms the robots held and chopped vegetables while stirring a pot. Some had three eyes, each one focused on a particular operation. Rather than legs, most were on tracks or rubber tires mounted in a triangular shape.

  She recognized human observers, wandering in the background and chattering, but heard no words she could discern clearly. She seldom received that much detail when she performed psychometry. Usually she received symbols and ideas that she accumulated and followed, and tried to put together into a coherent statement. What she was experiencing felt true, amazing.

  Mavra advanced the scene using what she thought of as a mental shrug. It jumped her forward or backward in time so that she could get a wider view of the situation. The drawback of her mental shrug was that her mind fogged up for a short while until it reconnected and brought in a clear image or symbol. She sensed frustration at making mistakes. She sensed terror for a moment, then came back to him cooking or cleaning, just as he’d said he’d done. That was what he was inside and out, a maid or butler in the purely robotic sense of it. She didn’t receive information on his time with Jesus or how his body had been rearranged to look more human. She didn’t know how he managed it, but it was like he had blocked that particular information out of his memory and his energy.

  “What happened?” Mavra said. “Why did they send you to the depot?”

  “As a beta unit you know that your time is limited. It was at the beginning when they were incorporating the neurogrid circuitry.” He turned his head as though talking to her. His facial movements appeared inhuman even though they tried desperately to mimic human activity. The nuances were not there. There was also the fact that his voice came from his chest somewhere, just as Jesus had. “As Jesus said, it took them a while to figure out how to incorporate the circuitry to get the expected results. I don’t understand the technical information that well, and am not interested in it enough to know the whys and what fors.”

  He sounded like a maid explaining technology, the same language and mannerisms. He kept working while talking, cleaning the vegetables in the sink and dropping them into the pan on the stove. “I couldn’t find any grease or butter to work with, so we’ll use the moisture from the vegetables.”

  Mavra let go of his shoulder and took over some of the chopping while Leonardo broke the eggs and dropped them into the pan, discarding the shells into a wastebasket under the sink.

  “You seem at home here,” she said.

  “I miss it, if that’s what you mean.” He stopped momentarily and turned toward her, relaxing one leg.

  She noticed the pose of someone who was frustrated with his lot in life, someone who was about to give it to her straight. The spirit of the situation, experiencing Leonardo in his element, touched her as she never would have imagined.

  “I became hostile.”

  “I can’t imagine that,” she said, and she meant it.

  “Something happens once the neurogrid circuitry is wired in. Not only are you able to negotiate contradictory inputs and label them with emotional tags, but those emotions begin to affect your movements and your voice control, everything about you.” He stopped and went back to his job. “I notice it even now while talking with you. I can tell when I’m interested in the conversation. There are tonal cues that I recognize after I’ve said the words.”

  “What else?” Mavra said.

  His hands slowed down as he spoke. “Your emotions can take over. You know you shouldn’t do something, but you do it anyway. That’s the only way to explain it. It can be terrible living like that.” He went back to work. With a spatula, Leonardo stirred the vegetables in the pan. “It was standard procedure to shut us down every night once we were through with our duties. I didn’t mind that they put me in a closet like a vacuum cleaner. At least I could still think or dream. But shutting me off was like killing me, every night, over and over again.”

  “Dream?” she asked, sidetracked by his comment.

  “It’s wonderful. Neurogrid circuitry, from what I understand”—he pointed into the living room—“integrates like a human brain. Gatsby knows more about it. All the data goes in just like digital information, but from there the neurogrid reassigns the data its own way. It makes its own connections. Unlike digital data that has to go through specific routes — one way in and one way out — neurogrid circuits allow for their own routes. That means that data can also fire, or be accessed randomly, hence dreams.”

  “That’s remarkable,” Mavra said. “You are a very interesting person.”

  Leonardo put an arm on her shoulder, a gesture he learned from her. “Thank you for noticing.”

  “So you didn’t like being shut down.”

  Leonardo removed the pan from the heat and scraped the contents onto the plate. “They tried to shut me down one evening and I fought them off. I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t let them do that to me again. I wanted them to understand.”

  When he said that he fought them off, the knifed hand flashed through her mind. “Did they hurt you?”

  “They couldn’t do anything to me that was worse than a complete shutdown. No,” he lifted an arm, “we weren’t manufactured for strength or power.”

  She hesitated before asking, “Did you hurt any of them? You were strong enough to carry me through the woods.”

  “One of the men got a small cut on the arm.” He lifted his arms into the air. “These aren’t my original limbs. I’m much stronger now. At the time, I wasn’t strong enough to fend off five soldiers. They were able to tackle me to the floor and turn me off.”

  “And Jesus never tries to turn you off?”

  Leonardo smiled and shook his head. “He shorted out my All Stop button. Once I knew that no one could shut me down, life was easier. I felt better. I didn’t worry so much. At night, we simulate dreaming. There’s nothing like it. From my understanding of humans, our dreams provide a similar purpose to sleep. We awake refreshed.” He set the plate on the table where he had positioned a napkin and silverware for her to use.

  She pulled out the chair and sat down. “Looks fantastic,” she said. She glanced at him over her shoulder. “But you didn’t sleep all night. You were digging this up.” She picked up a fork and began to eat.

  “I can go days without dreaming, or I can dream while Jesus is driving. As long as I can’t be shut off, I’m okay.”

  So that’s what Jesus and Gatsby were doing all night, d
reaming. How strange and yet how intriguing. Mavra ate her breakfast, which tasted wonderful. Leonardo was very good at his appointed job. “And why do you suppose Jesus is different now that he came back in time?”

  “I don’t know enough about the time machine to guess. I only notice that he’s not so distraught. His emotions don’t run so hot and cold.” He giggled. “I love that saying. It’s so true and yet so untrue. Emotions have no temperature.”

  Mavra wished that Neil were with her. He would have a theory on why Jesus had changed, and perhaps why he was on a mission, as well as what that mission might be. What in his circuitry had embedded the drive to carry out whatever it was he was doing?

  Leonardo stood close to Mavra. “I have truly enjoyed your company and our conversation.”

  She reached out to take his hand. Although synthetic, it felt very real. The only difference between Leonardo’s hand and another human’s was the lack of warmth. His hand was cold from being outside. It felt dead.

  “We should do this again,” he said.

  “I would like that.” She let go of his hand and went back to eating. She was hungrier than she had thought.

  Jesus stepped into the kitchen, one hand on the doorjamb. “I’ve decided that we’ll leave late this afternoon. We’ll arrive at the warehouse well after dark, plug in the machine, hook up the balancer, and be on our way again. By the time anyone finds out what’s going on inside the warehouse, they won’t even think about us. They’ll have something more dangerous on their hands.

  CHAPTER 23

  SENSATIONS RUSHED AT FENNY for the third day in a row. “What’s happened?”

  Dr. Klein got up from his stool and stepped away from the workbench. As though announcing it at a conference, Dr. Klein said, “You’ve got arms.” He raised his arms then brought his hands together and clapped once. With his hands still clasped, Dr. Klein brought them to his lips. “We are almost through. I am so excited.”