* * * *
It was Jane. She grasped his hand, stunning him on the spot, and pulled him out of the stairway.
“You’re under arrest for the murder of Isaac Livingston.” As she relayed the legal mumbo jumbo, leading him outside, Uriah could only wonder why Jane wasn’t the one being arrested. “Don’t worry, one of these androids will take care of Sabrina,” she said with a nod to a robot like the one he had speared, whose lights glowed distinctly in the night.
“Take care of” her?
“Let me explain. You and I are being monitored by Zolnerowich as I speak. She’s only allowed me to say what’s absolutely necessary to inform you. After I destroyed Strange, I fled to Plestsy and tried to avoid incrimination.” They entered a robotic car, in the back seat of which she confined him while she took the front.
“But the TLTB found me soon. I could’ve fought back, but Zolnerowich personally offered me a deal. The Lunar government considered me a threat, and they were ready to fire a concentrated EM pulse at me and all the robots I’ve hijacked. I knew it would be risky to try to get away again, so I agreed to surrender my built-in weapons and to help her find you, and in exchange she’d let me go free.”
It was betrayal, but he couldn’t have expected more from her. What choice did she have? Marshall was the center of her life, and if she didn’t comply with Zolnerowich’s wishes, there was no chance of her reuniting with her love.
Under Zolnerowich’s microscope, he couldn’t get any info out of Jane about what she meant by “robots I’ve hijacked.” Obviously this made her the culprit for the confinement, as it would mean his suspicions about the significance of the Marshall Libertas were right, but there were many holes. If Jane had been working for Zolnerowich since he and Sabrina had reached the village, why didn’t she just take him into custody immediately? If not, he still saw no reason for Jane to manipulate them.
As they re-entered industrial civilization, headed for EPD, he wondered if it could’ve all just been a ploy to get him inside Marshall’s robo-body. The coincidence was too great, yet its implications sent a chill down his spine. The last thing he wanted was to be Jane’s, well, Jane – a brain in Marshall’s body, as far as she was concerned.
Yet this made no sense. Surely Marshall would’ve designed Jane to maintain fidelity not to an easily duplicated body, but to his unique mind. Perhaps she hadn’t planned Uriah to go to prison, and there was simply something about him she found desirable as an accidental consequence of her programming, hence the saving-his-life spiel in Goodsprings. Then why steal his body?
Uriah would never again take his voice for granted.
Peripherally, he saw EMFI, reminded of the evidence against him that lay inside it. If Jane had played around with nanos the past few days, she’d done it in a manner awfully similar to Livingston’s tactics. Knowing Livingston’s tendency to rise from the dead, it was a doozy to know where the one ended and the other began.
All for Pat, that was the mantra. Zolnerowich would understand. It was all for Pat.
Unnatural Page 42