Unnatural
Page 11
CHAPTER 4
The Mag-Lev railroad connecting Sloan to Jean was Uriah’s only chance, and his relief upon finding it manned by functional androids knew only the bounds of the availability of tickets. Not only were the nonhuman conductors of the train oblivious to the irrelevance of charging the second-to-last man on Earth for a ride, they also expected payment for robotic passengers. Taking Pat’s body on board was out of the question.
“Tickets, sir?”
Deciding it was probably not very smart to repeat the mistake he’d made at the Bio-Bazaar, he checked the price list. The cash he’d snagged on his way, anticipating this problem, was sufficient for six tickets. That unresponsive Homunculus back in the store debris had, indeed, malfunctioned, so less cost.
They boarded the unnervingly spacious vehicle within thirty seconds. If nothing else, automation made society run about ten times faster. Trains’ speed hadn’t grown at that rate, but this one was fast enough that Uriah could expect to get to Everett before Jane.
Uriah wanted to get some sleep now that he had the opportunity, but his mind was a mess of thoughts more deleterious to this goal than Meg White on the drums. Just how conscious was Jane? Did she perceive the world through robotic “eyes” and “ears” as vividly as most humans do, or even more so? Did she have an internal monologue of thoughts? What did it feel like to her in those hours between initiating sleep mode and ending it? Could she “die” in the sense that humans die? What was it like for a robot to first become conscious, without having to take years to develop a brain capable of comprehending those moments as a human needs to?
He still hadn’t figured out what it was about him that repelled the cold grasp of the Housekeeping. Was it really so rare? He thought about the EMFI. The name referred quite literally to the project of establishing a metropolis of human colonists on the moon. The first moon colony had expanded to a population of nearly seven hundred in thirty years. Hardly a societal hub by Earthling standards, but considering the major hurdle of producing a sustainable food source on a giant rock, Project Luna had been considered a success surpassing that of the first man’s step on said rock.
The nationalistic morale of the United States that had been boosted by that latter event was bitterly deflated by the growth of Russian Luna, however. The Moon Frontier Institutes across America were simply the country’s attempt to get its own slice of the new Space Race pie.
So were the Russian moon residents still alive? There was little reason to think an Earth epidemic would reach the planet’s satellite any more easily than other diseases. If he remembered correctly, no Organics traveled to Luna, but then that only raised the question of how any disease could strike the Unnaturals of Earth dead.
No, this wasn’t a disease. Diseases take time to kill their afflicted, and they show symptoms. The Housekeeping had occurred like the simultaneous detonation of over six billion explosives from some master fuse. Or the Rapture. If the nuts were right all along, Uriah’s chances of being taken up to heaven to be seated at Jesus’s right hand were as slim as George Carlin’s. Then again, there was a bevy of other sinners not left behind with him.
There was an even more unsettling parallel to Christian miracle tales in his predicament. How in God’s name had Isaac Livingston risen from the dead? Uriah had shot him with an EM gun powerful enough to fell any Unnatural within as close a range as he was in. He’d heard the thud. If Livingston hadn’t died last night, the thug would have killed his victim’s lover much sooner.
Granted, the line between alive and dead had been growing ever more blurry in the past several decades – an advertisement of Manfred Medical School inside the train, listing as one of its incentives a program in artificial organ system research, was evidence of that. Yet even if Livingston could possess some trait of resistance to electromagnetic severing of ties to Libertas life support, that explained neither the identity of the trait nor the lag in his response to attempted murder.
Murder from Livingston’s perspective, anyway. Uriah was not a murderer. It was justice. The psycho had to go before he could terrorize anyone else.
He was not a murderer.
Everything outside the train was pitch black by then, and the inside was silent but for the soothing hum and whistle of its ninety-miles-per-hour travel. The Clark Mag-Lev androids were many rooms away on the capacious shuttle.
He drifted into the gentle caress of rest without deriving any answers from his silent inquiry. All synthesis of concepts underwent that most mysterious of degenerations into irrational anarchy that precedes nightly unconsciousness, so much so that Uriah failed to notice the train slowing down sooner than it should have.