Unnatural

by Anthony DiGiovanni

  * * * *

  At midnight, Artemis stopped Sabrina from opening the door, whose window now showed Nevada’s only Cryonics Institute.

  “Sabrina, remember that the robots in there are live again. Maybe we’re a little better than we would be with Livingston controlling them, but that was the easy part. Now that no one at all can handle them – now that they’re as free as I am, only they exist to serve this building – we have our work cut out for us.”

  “Got it. But,” she said with a bit of a squint, “you made me leave my EM gun.”

  “Check under the seat.”

  She knelt by the artificial leather lounge, which on closer inspection had a storage cubby accessible simply by pressing the foot inward. There were about a dozen devices inside that appeared clunkier than typical electromagnetic weapons, yet that was a virtue if it was an indicator of power.

  “Those each have a Genius system that homes in on likely targets by itself. Just squeeze lightly on the left trigger to disable that if you need to. Also …”

  She took one blaster and aimed it at her forehead. “Don’t worry, I’m just programming it to turn away from me if I get in its line of fire. Again, left trigger gets rid of that, but I’d prefer it if you didn’t.” Artemis smirked, not the least worried that her master might terminate her.

  “Any other robots I shouldn’t aim for?”

  “No, but there is a human in a robot’s body I’d prefer to stay alive.”

  “Dennis?”

  She nodded. “Michael, too.”

  “How did they –?”

  “The bot who escorted them here got them through security. Said it was for classified testing, which it technically is, and with some tactics Zolnerowich gleaned from records of Livingston’s behavior this past week, the plan was pretty easy.”

  “So why don’t we do the same?”

  Artemis stepped outside, looking impatient. “Suffice it to say these buggers are smart. They’re not gonna fall for the same scheme twice, and even if they would, there’s some business to do in this place that doesn’t exactly involve complying with standard procedure.”

  Clearly it wasn’t the time to ask any more questions. “So, like it or not, we’re gonna have to get our hands dirty?” Sabrina stopped in front of the entrance beside the robot, holding her weapon out with both hands.

  “Basically.”

  She shot a beam out from her hand at the lock-box above, shoving a door aside and sprinting in.

  Sabrina took another look at her gun, her one means to bring down this technological empire, and found another switch Artemis hadn’t shown her. An imprinting depicted waves leaving the barrel while its stick-figure holder clearly left his finger off the trigger.

  She looked back at the limo. The last thing they needed was for their mission to come to an anticlimax, all because some police bot spotted their vehicle this late at night. Leaving her modified blaster inside and returning to the automobile, she tapped at the “driver” window.

  “Pardon me, but I have some quick things to do in here. I left an item in the back.”

  The robot chauffeur unlocked the car, giving her access to one of the auxiliary weapons. Auto-shoot enabled, the gun found its way into the wrappings of a thin blanket, on the ground with its barrel exposed. She’d deduced that there were no cameras in the main body of the limo, but outside she was less certain.

  Sabrina walked inside nonchalantly, relieved to find the first gun where she’d left it. In her hands, it locked onto one section of the atrium’s ceiling, then another, a third. Several more spaces succumbed to the electromagnetism, yet if she hadn’t possessed a weapon this advanced, she would never have suspected that security machines might reside in such places.

  Artemis, in the center of the darkened room, spun as she fired off pulses in every direction with astonishing competence. Stressful as the pandemonium was on them, knowing there were likely stunners built into at least a few of these devices, it was almost silent initially. The androids, which required no audible alarms to deal with an intruder, stepped into her impeded view within less than a minute.

  Sabrina sensed a jolt, seizing up in place – which was, at the time, a stance of pointing her gun straight at a bot’s face. It crashed at the command of Artemis’s palm, as did the others, whose pinpricks of red light faded away as if covered by a second curtain of night.

  Yes! Her nervous system regained normality, coming with a vengeance as she felt the EM gun jerk in those seconds before she got a grip on it. She let the blaster fry the right wall while Artemis incapacitated another wave of robots.

  Sabrina’s breaths were labored by the time the gun found no more targets. Only her spaceflights had been more dangerous. She joined the last robot standing, whom she could see just by the slight shine of the fake black hair.

  “Whew! How’d you not get nuked in seconds?”

  “Because security bots don’t use EMPs except as a last resort,” she said grimly. They strode toward the hall, starting another round of pulses. “Until it’s too late to deal with a ‘droid like me, they try to hack a robot into submission, but given the circumstances …”

  Again, while Sabrina let the gun do its thing, her journeys into immobility lasted not nearly as long as those who’d designed security intended. The chaos died down, and Artemis shot her a suspicious look.

  “So what’s keeping you from freezing over and over again?”

  “This little guy,” she said, flipping the switch to off. She was almost enjoying this, at least more so than Artemis seemed to be. “Makes the gun hit what it’s aiming for without my input. I guess the Genius was smart enough to find the device that determines how long the stun is.”

  The android nodded with approval.

  “Hey, if I’m gonna ‘find the answer’ by myself, I’d better be able to get outta such a simple mess without your help, right?” Her eyes darted around the hall for stairs. “Something tells me an elevator would be our death sentence.”

  Artemis peeked into the numerous niches, apparently not satisfied with what she saw. “Which is exactly why there are no stairways here. Although I don’t expect there to be any security to prevent us from, say, cutting a hole out of the elevator ceiling and trying to get up the chute …”

  “Count me out, I’m not strong enough for that, even if I did want to gamble my life on an expectation.”

  “What choice do you have?”

  She wasn’t prepared to take that as a rhetorical question. “Come with me.” She reactivated the auto on her way to the exit, deciding not to push her luck.

  It was actually brighter outside, with the streetlights a few meters away. She beckoned for Artemis to follow her to the back exterior, behind which loomed the moon, challenging her with all its associations.

  “What floor are we aiming for?” Sabrina said, squinting.

  “Third.”

  That was approachable through a window, but how to get level with it? She looked around. No cherry-pickers, ladders, or crates to stack. Then a door caught her eye.

  “‘Fire escape’ – here we are.”

  Artemis blasted its lock off. As she was about to fling the door open, Sabrina inhaled a breath of horror. She caught the robot’s arm.

  “Wait! I just realized something. Don’t you think the bots in there would’ve learned from their mistakes? If you go in there now, they’ll kill you with an EMP.”

  She was smiling again. “You’re right. Go ahead, wreak havoc and let me know when there’s no more risk that I’ll have my mind erased.”

  Sabrina’s heart thumped as if approaching a gallows, and she made a crack of an opening, thrusting her arm in and leaving the rest to the gun.

  An android paralyzed her again, but before the source could be destroyed, it confiscated the weapon and, near as she could tell in this state, disabled the auto-shoot. She was completely impotent now, but it said something about Marshall’s programming
skill that she was more concerned for Artemis’s life by this point.

  One robot stepped outside to eliminate another.

  Please don’t be her, she silently pleaded to the machine that caused a thudding noise to enter her ears. The silence was not promising.

  She wanted to scream, but the automaton that returned seized her by the upper arm and led her back to the front of the property. Her peripheral vision revealed the outline of a feminine figure, motionless on the ground.

  Just as she realized where it had taken her, she broke out of her stationary state and watched her captor crash down. The gun!

  The car had seen too much. She retrieved the weapon and dashed to the driver’s seat. The autopilot didn’t put up a fight, but it was only a matter of time before the police would come to the scene of the distress call.

  At that moment, when she could get a more comprehensive look at her fallen comrade, something snapped in Sabrina. Her rush toward the stairs, her blind annihilation of those androids that had not a fraction of Artemis’s heart, was a declaration of defiance to the clockwork of the universe. To the death, the emotional manipulation, the total inhumanity of beings who called themselves human.

  It wasn’t an act of rage, for she didn’t feel angry. She felt nothing, really. The numbness was what made it so easy to do what she knew Artemis would’ve wanted her to do. This was a plunge down the water slide, nothing more and nothing less.

  At the bottom of the slide she found the body whose memory had laid bloody in the back of her mind, haunting her for days. She could just barely make out his distorted facial features in the gloom, and several inches below a pistol ascended so that it pointed right at her.

  His mouth stayed shut as his feet crept down the steps.

  Sabrina lifted her own weapon, which was adjusting its aim for Livingston. It could’ve been so easy, he would be dead in an instant and the same would go for every other one of his sick clones. Yet she flicked off the auto-shoot, backing away with wide eyes keeping glued to his but steadily shaping into something more confident.

  “Your fear won’t work ever again, Zach.” She cast the blaster onto the floor. He positioned the gun under her chin, but she could scarcely feel a bone inside her tremble. “All the nonsense you’ve thrown in my way, no matter how much I’m supposed to feel sorry for you, has been a colossal waste of your time. You wanna break me, make me murder my own identity by murdering you. All you wanted from me was a free choice, but that’s what makes it so easy to deny you.”

  Livingston stared at her just the same.

  “That’s the problem with real hate. Like real love, you can’t really force it out of someone – if you do, it’s not authentic, is it? But I can help you make this worth the trouble. You have two ways to go here. Kill me now, go out to live a life you know will be miserable because you did all this to sell your values and make others do the same, and there’s nothing to show for it.

  “Or,” she said as she pressed the powerless machinery in his hand down to his side, “you can change and help us all create the vision you told me you wanted all along. Maybe that was just you pretending to be Marshall, I don’t care. Better to live for the purpose of encouraging people to do good they never thought they were capable of, than to get them to do the same with evil. If you think I’m gonna tell you you’re a good guy underneath, forget it. What you do now makes the difference.”

  The figure, shaded in the doorway while she stood just outside, remained like a statue for nine very long seconds. At last he stepped out of the darkness and, striding away without looking back at her again, said, “I’ll take a third option.”

  Sabrina gave him a few more moments, bending slowly to pick up the EM gun, then raised it, aimed at that wrecked skull, and pulled the trigger.