To Dream

by Lowy, Louis K;

  Niyati studied the angel-white graduation gown cascading down his slim torso. In the picture, Jay’s right arm was slung around Niyati, who was grinning proudly. “I want to make a difference, Mom,” he had said to her just before her husband, Pallab, snapped the photo outside on the auditorium lawn after the ceremony. That was eight years ago—when Jay was seventeen, she was thirty-seven, Pallab was still her husband, and they were still a family.

  “Jay,” she whispered. In her memory a horn blared and she remembered it all, again.

  A red pick-up with a firefighter’s sticker on its windshield smashed into her passenger side mirror. In her ears she heard Pallab scream, “Maadher chod!” Jay’s graduation cap ripped from his hand and jabbed her below the eye. Her calf ached from stomping on the brakes. The tendons in her fingers burnt from clutching the steering wheel with all her strength. The crackle of glass and fiberglass and the crunch of metal drowned out everything.

  Then nothing.

  No Jay, and eight months later a divorce decree and no Pallab. All she had left was a heart-shaped locket with Jay’s ashes and a desire to work forever. She wanted a cigarette. Niyati glanced at J-1. A marketing exec at Ameri-Inc. had long ago dubbed him “the Humachine” and attached the crass tagline: “Beyond machine, practically human!” She was glad she had stuck to her guns to have it made in the exact image of Jay. Corporate had fought like hell for it to be androgynous. “To appeal to as many consumers as possible,” they had argued.

  But she had won.

  They had known she was the leading expert in, among other things, quark circuits, and genefluodigy, which was the science of bio-core fluid and its relation to DNA. More importantly, they understood that without her the project would never succeed.

  She noticed a separation in the seam of his shirt. Niyati opened her bottom drawer and removed a small sewing kit. She mended the tear, brushed back a tuft of hair that had fallen over his left brow, glanced to make sure his collar was straight and his zipper was up, and returned to her desk.

  Niyati looked again at the photo. She wondered what her life would have been like had she pursued her hobby of dressmaking instead of science. Her eyes welled up and she turned Jay’s picture face down. Niyati slipped the sewing kit back in the bottom drawer and removed her personal touchslate. She pressed in her password. As the slate screen lit up she rose from the desk, approached J-1 and thought, God help me for what I’m about to do.

  Chapter Five

  Date: 2250

  Planet Truatta

  GTS Warehouse

  As quickly as J-1’s convulsions had started, they stopped. His internal clock estimated that they had gone on for four minutes. He stood and tested his limbs. Everything worked properly. He looked around the warehouse. Other than the disabled lifter, Coco, and the broken GTS trunk, everything looked normal. Outside, the noise had quieted to muffled thumps. The tail end of the carbo-oxide storm, he concluded. He started to file the incident in the database, but stopped.

  Something was different inside him. Something minute and intangible, like the residual heat from a burnt match head or the touch of a spider web. Whatever it was, he needed more information to analyze it. J-1 sat at his desk and crooked his neck from side to side. Sample the GTS again, his processors internalized, for data analysis. He eyed the splintered container. It was his to do with as he pleased. That knowledge produced a crackling sensation in his circuitry that he had never had before. His polyflesh tingled. Sample it again.

  J-1 leaned down, swept two fingers along the trunk’s crack. He scooped up blue smudges and rubbed them in his eyes. He braced himself for the convulsions, but they didn’t come. In their place, he saw a vision of a traveling carnival. There was a boy, around ten or eleven, standing in front of a double Ferris wheel watching the red, green and yellow lights of the twin spheres swirl against the night sky. A woman with the same mocha-colored skin as his had her arm around the boy’s shoulder. A man with similar skin joined the woman and the boy and handed them cotton candy. The image grew murky. He lost focus. A burning sensation filled his eyes and the under-surface of his polyflesh. Before he could utter, “Overload,” J-1’s power shut down and it went black.

  Chapter Six

  Date: 2030

  West Redlands, Florida

  Ameri-Inc. Research and Development

  Robotics Division

  Niyati felt below J-1’s left wrist until she touched a nearly indiscernible lump. She lifted a small, hidden skin flap and beneath it was a Transportation Serial Device port. She connected the TSD cable from her touchslate to the port on J-1’s arm. Niyati opened a password-encoded redizac file on the touchslate titled “Jay genetic code.” An image like a tornado appeared on the screen.

  Above and below the spiraling image were rapidly changing numbers and letters too quick to follow with the human eye. Niyati tapped her middle finger on the swirl. A button icon labeled “Replicate?” appeared beneath the spot where she had touched. She looked at the overturned picture and said, “Jay, my son, mujhe tumse dil se pyar hai—I love you with all my heart,” and pressed the button on her screen.

  The twister-like image on Niyati’s touchslate grew and sucked up the revolving letters and numbers and transferred them into J-1. His eyes shot open. The image on the touchslate swirled for several minutes, and shrank and dissolved as if sliding down a drain. J-1 exhaled and his eyes again shut. A “bing-bong” noise sounded on Niyati’s computer followed by a message that read “Replication completed. Congrats!”

  Niyati removed the TSD cable and placed it in her smock. She pressed J-1’s skin flap back into place until it couldn’t be seen and double-tapped the “genome” icon on her touchslate.

  An image of a little girl sitting at the top of a sliding board appeared on the screen. “Are you sure you want to delete Jay genetic code? Once you do, this file can’t be retrieved,” the girl said. Below her were the buttons “Delete?” and “Cancel.”

  Niyati pressed “Delete?” The girl slid down the board. When she reached the bottom and her feet hit the ground the “bing-bong” noise re-sounded and the little girl said, “Jay genetic code deleted. Congrats!”

  Niyati went back to her desk, sat and replaced her touchslate and cable back in the drawer. She imagined Mary Shelley sitting at the same desk with a quill pen writing Frankenstein.

  ~~~

  Pete Hemley parked the SUV in the nearly deserted parking lot.

  The Ameri-Inc. building was secluded. It was built on the edge of the Everglades and was set about five hundred feet back from Huizenga Highway. The entrance was gated and the perimeter was lined with well-designed shrubbery. Miguel Acevedo had recognized oak trees, hibiscus and azaleas. The others, he had no clue. He opened the SUV door and heard a bird or maybe a gator caterwauling in the distance. Acevedo and Hemley stepped out.

  Acevedo took a quick breath in through his nose. He kind of liked the rotten-egg smell of swamp water. It reminded him of the canal behind his childhood home in Hialeah. He swatted a mosquito from the back of his hand. It didn’t take a genius, he thought, to know by the low-lying orange sun, that the workday had ended. In fact, the only cars in the barren lot were an older vehicle and a late model Reagan Hydro. The Reagan’s an expensive car, he thought. It was probably the doc’s.

  The building wasn’t much—cracker-box shaped, sand-brown, CBS construction with iron-barred windows. To the side was a large overhead door where the loading dock was. There was an eighteen-wheeler parked by it, but no activity was going on.

  “You miss Miami, Miguel?” Hemley asked Acevedo.

  “A little. You miss North Dakota?”

  “Like a clogged artery.”

  They walked toward the building’s entrance, a double plate-glass door. When they entered, Acevedo smiled. He smelled café Cubano.

  ~~~

  Kaye picked up her office phone and pressed Niyati’s extension. “Misters Acevedo and Hemley are here…Certainly, Doctor. I’ll send them right in.�
�� She hung up.

  Acevedo gulped the last of his café Cubano and handed the thimble-sized tumbler to Kaye. She said, “Are you sure you wouldn’t like some, Mr. Hemley?”

  “That stuff’ll stunt your growth,” Hemley replied.

  She smiled and escorted them to Niyati’s door. As the two men entered, Niyati stood and straightened her skirt and smock. She walked toward them and extended her hand.

  Acevedo studied the slender woman with the thin fingers. He recognized the even, balanced face and the overworked, pretty brown eyes. There was more. An elegance—a feline grace—that their video sessions hadn’t picked up. He grasped her hand. “Doctor Bopari, so nice to meet you in person.”

  “Mr. Acevedo,” Niyati said.

  “Miguel.” Acevedo thought her eyes lingered a second on him before she turned to Hemley.

  “Mr. Hemley,” Niyati said.

  Hemley smiled at her then his gaze went to J-1.

  Following Hemley’s eyes, Niyati said, “Would you like to meet him?”

  “You bet.”

  She escorted them to the corner where J-1 was still slouched on the stool.

  “May I touch him?” Acevedo asked.

  “Of course,” Niyati replied.

  He reached his hand out to J-1’s face. He was in awe of the robot’s resemblance to her: the rich brown skin, silky hair and slender torso. As if blind and trying to form a visual, Acevedo rubbed his fingers along J-1’s face. “It’s unbelievable.” He motioned for Hemley to feel it.

  Hemley touched J-1’s mouth and nose. He looked at Acevedo. “He’s even warm.”

  “How’d you do that?” Acevedo asked.

  “It’s a combination of the nano-regs and the bio-core fluid. There are over a million regs imbedded in the polyflesh, each one linked to a regulated thermostat that receives data from two central bio circuits. The accumulated data is squared proportionately with the existing E.M.P.T. to the existing enviro—”

  “Whoa, Doc,” Acevedo said. “I’m not much of a science guy.”

  Niyati smiled. “Let’s just say his skin reacts to stimuli the same way as ours.”

  “Is there a button or something to power him up?” Hemley asked.

  “Ameri-Inc. specified that J-1 have a factory code installed to wake him.”

  “Ah, right,” Hemley said. “A safeguard against black marketers and pirates.”

  “So how do we shut him down?” Acevedo asked.

  “We don’t,” Niyati said. “Once J-1’s activated it’s permanent. However, when he goes into commercial production there will be an audible password that the purchaser will be able to program to bring him in and out of standby mode.”

  “What about hackers?” Hemley added.

  She shrugged. “Based on TRPEN protocols, J-1’s pemi-porlight encryption formulas will refract and re—” Niyati cut herself off, flashed a smile at Acevedo, and said to Hemley, “J-1 is programmed to not only detect hackers, but to go into attack mode and send back viruses far deadlier than what it receives.”

  “Doctor,” Acevedo said. “You’re amazing.” They locked eyes for a moment.

  Niyati blushed and turned away. “There were hundreds of teams who worked on this project. They deserve much of the credit.”

  “But you were at the helm,” Acevedo countered.

  “None of the teams were in touch with each other, correct, Doctor Bopari?” Hemley said more as a statement than a question.

  “I understand perfectly the desire for Ameri-Inc. to be the sole proprietors of this technology,” she said. “It was all according to their wishes.”

  Acevedo noticed with curiosity that Niyati’s lip twitched at the end of the last sentence.

  “Can you switch on the factory code, Doc?” Hemley asked. “So we can see him in action.”

  “It’s already activated. One only needs to say the password to bring him out of standby mode. Would you like to do it, Mr. Hemley?”

  “That should go to Miguel. He’s got seniority.”

  Niyati raised her eyebrows at Acevedo: How about it?

  “It would be an honor.”

  Niyati stepped close and he smelled her perfume. It was a jasmine scent mingled with tobacco. A tingle ran through him. He had a vision of the two of them sharing a cigarette on Smathers Beach in Key West.

  “Say to him,” she whispered, “I want to make a difference, Mom.”

  Acevedo said to J-1 in a firm, loud voice. “I want to make a difference, Mom.”

  J-1’s eyelids opened. Acevedo was surprised not only by the same rich, mahogany hue in the robot’s eyes as Dr. Bopari’s, but also by the gleam of life in them.

  J-1 stretched his arms over his head, yawned, and stood. He looked at the two men and said, “Mr. Acevedo and Mr. Hemley, I presume.”

  Hemley and Acevedo looked at each other and then at Niyati.

  “Talk to him,” she said. “He doesn’t bite.”

  “What’s your name?” Hemley asked.

  “J-1.”

  “May I suggest asking something a bit more challenging?” Niyati said.

  “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Acevedo asked.

  J-1 crooked his neck from side to side. Niyati’s eyelids widened. J-1’s head moved the same way her son, Jay’s, used to when he was contemplating. She glanced over and saw Acevedo looking at her. She quickly turned away.

  “Darwin's theory of evolution declares that species change over a period of time through mutation and selection,” J-1 said. “Since DNA can be modified only before birth, a mutation must have taken place at conception or within an egg such that an animal resembling a chicken, but not a chicken, laid the first chicken egg. Hence, both the egg and the chicken evolved concurrently from birds that were not chickens and did not lay chicken eggs, but by degrees became more and more like chickens over time.” He smiled. “I conclude, Mr. Acevedo, that it is a catch-22, a case of causality in which the consequence of a phenomenon is also its basis of origin.”

  “Who’s gonna win the Stanley Cup?” Hemley asked.

  Niyati saw Acevedo reach into the inside pocket of his sport coat. She caught a glimpse of his shoulder holster and stiffened.

  “I’m not a prognosticator, Mr. Hemley,” J-1 said. “But if the Tokyo Moons can keep Kumiko Suganami tied to her contract, I would—”

  Acevedo whipped out a notepad from the pocket. “Catch.” He tossed it at J-1.

  Without missing a beat J-1 snatched it. “—consider placing a few yen on them.”

  “He’s amazing,” Acevedo said.

  “You’re only scratching the surface, gentlemen.” Niyati’s eyes fell to the slight bulge of the holster below Acevedo’s armpit. She frowned.

  Catching her disapproval, Acevedo said, “We’re in a tough business, Doc. J-1 is a global game changer. Ameri-Inc. can’t afford to take any chances.”

  Hemley eyed him curiously, not sure why Acevedo was telling Dr. Bopari that.

  “You needn’t worry.” Niyati walked to the large 3D monitor screen hanging on the wall. “As I said, none of the teams knew what the others were working on.” She grabbed the screen’s bottom and swung it outward from its hinged top. Behind the screen was a wall safe. She pressed the combination buttons, opened the door and removed a metal, palm-size, lock box. She handed it to Acevedo. “Take care of that. As per Ameri-Inc.’s orders, what it contains are the only two in existence.” He studied the box a minute and then looked at Hemley. They both knew what was inside it, a master and duplicate data drive with information for replicating the Humachine.

  Acevedo slipped the container in his pocket. “So, do we, uh, pack him up or what?”

  Niyati laughed. “I’d suggest telling him to follow you to your car and to take a seat in it. As he gets more acclimated, he’ll take action on his own. If you stop for lunch, he’ll be like any other normal riding companion and accompany you to a table, unless you specify otherwise.”

  “Does he…” Acevedo cleared his throat. “
Have normal functions of the human body?”

  “J-1 is anatomically correct. He can taste and smell, but he has no need to eat or drink. He doesn’t urinate or defecate. No mucus. No tears. No sperm production. Probably no erections.”

  “Probably?” Hemley asked.

  “He’s capable of them, and maybe of the other functions, too, but he has no emotional or physical desires to do any of that.” Niyati glanced at J-1 and thought of her son, Jay. Sadness flashed through her. “He’s a mechanical device.”

  “How about physical pain?” Hemley asked.

  “Although it would be harder to inflict because his structure is stronger than a human’s, he’s capable of it. Due to his lack of emotion, however, it wouldn’t affect him like it does us. He would probably experience it as more of an analytical phenomenon.”

  Acevedo stuck his hand out. “He’s an amazing piece of work, Doctor Bopari. You’re going to win the Nobel Prize for it. You should be proud.”

  Niyati smiled wanly. The sadness in her expression caused a great longing in Acevedo to brush his hand along her cheek.

  “So, Miguel says, ‘I want to make a difference, Mom,’ if we need to put him on standby?” Hemley said.

  “Try it,” she said to Acevedo. He repeated the words. There was a barely audible whirling noise from inside J-1’s torso. His eyes dulled and shut.

  “The oral command is only temporary, long enough for you to get him to Ameri-Inc.’s Seattle headquarters,” Niyati said. “After that, the bigwigs can change the password to whatever they desire.” Niyati hesitated, not sure if she was overstepping her bounds, but added, “I’m rather puzzled that with such an expensive investment Ameri-Inc. would choose to transport J-1 in such austere surroundings and with so little security.”