Gordon laughs nervously. “Civ probably.”
The kid was Civ. “How’d they fair on average?” Gordon should have the stats for every Gen.
Gordon rubs the back of his neck, not looking at either of us. I itch to copy the behavior even though my neck was fine and non-attention seeking seconds before he demonstrates the action. “Nobody did as bad as E, but ED and Civ might have tied for second worst faring.”
Juan stifles a chuckle. “E didn’t compete overall. They mostly did ads.”
“Well, yeah, but just like here—if an advertisement fails its purpose, it’s canned. Donors too.”
“But they’re not gaming, not competing. Why eliminate them?” I ask.
“I guess those donors thought they’d last longer as an ad than a gamer—skillset, you know.” Gordon shrugs as if he’s apologizing for his opinion. “There has to be a set of requirements to reach AI. Competing was one of the basic expectations.”
“Why even have the option?” I ask.
“I didn’t develop the program.” Gordon puts his hands in the air. “I heard that, in order to teach humans how to be AI, it was important to not have any CPU, or computer-generated personalities, within the system.”
Juan and I both exchange a look. Our facial expressions reveal nothing, but perhaps the lack of expression reveals too much. Gordon switches his attention between us, like he, too, knows the thoughts currenting through our imitation brains. I deign to change the subject. “Thanks for fixing my arm.”
“Don’t thank us,” Juan says. “We don’t have liquid skin on hand.”
“Who mended my arm? And your face?” Juan puts a hand to his fresh skin in an action of obscuring it, embarrassed by the mismatch perhaps. “Why fix us, if they just want to rip our memory banks out and download them?”
“They what?” Gordon asks.
“Yeah, they said they were trying to hijack technology or something,” I say.
“That’s not the story they told us. Mav thinks they’re conducting internal reviews for Donor facilities,” Gordon says.
“Sure. Internal. If, by internal, they mean ripping brain stems out and reanimating the corpse,” I say. I expect Juan to argue with me. Tell me the headless ED wasn’t reanimated, or that I’m delusional in thinking my energy levels were recharged whenever it clamped on to me—similar to how Mord used to use donor code as battery packs. That game conditions don’t mirror the outside world. But the thing was battery powering me. Useful for me, but what’s the purpose for the headless ED?
“Like Gordon says, GenED never were very smart.” Juan’s face tightens like he’s holding himself back from saying more. If there is an ED sharing space in there, it’s got to be internally hemorrhaging to try to get some vocal time to counter Juan’s statement.
The door opens without any clank slide. Before I have any idea who or what is coming through to where we sit, I blurt, “We’re not locked in here?”
“Why would we be locked in?” Gordon answers.
“Juan?” Surely he knows we need to escape, given the opportunity.
“Just because this door isn’t locked, doesn’t mean we can leave,” Juan says.
Gordon pulls his head back like he needs to distance just that appendage of himself from the idea of being caged.
“Do you all have any idea how lucky you are?”
Abby stands in the doorway.
“Abby?” I haven’t seen her since Geo’s lawyers forced everyone to sign me over like a custody loss. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s a madhouse in Quito. Egypt claims Geo kidnapped their resource scouts and faked the artificial epidemic to cover his tracks.”
“Resource scouts?” I ask.
“It’s how Outercontintents determine what resources to invest in since they’re not technically allowed to produce their own goods,” Abby says. “Like how the Piersons invested in Donor technology after Ace was injured at war.”
“If you ask Egypt, they’re not an Outercontinent,” Gordon interjects.
“Then why did they have resource scouts entering Geo’s building right before the terrorist attack?” Abby asks.
“Maybe they’re the terrorists?” Gordon says. “Covering up their tracks.”
“Your travel companion has already confessed to the act of terrorism that started the chain of events in Quito.”
“Travel companion?” I ask. And what gives Abby the authority to come in here questioning us? Besides, we were long gone before the Mord attacked anyone, or they were fired upon.
“Where’s Miller?” Gordon asks, cutting off my barrage of words. “He’ll know how to straighten everything out.”
“It’s not Miller you need to be worried about,” Abby says.
Worried? Who said we were worried? Should we be?
“That girl you came with released a video confessing to coordinating a resource-ring-wide attack on donor facilities to avenge her sister and she’s implicated all of you.”
“Us?” Gordon stands up. “Why would she do that? We don’t even speak the same language, why would we help her?”
Juan takes hold of Gordon’s arm and tugs him back to a seated position.
“Did you know about this?” Gordon asks Juan, betrayal clear on his face.
“When would she have time to release a video?” Juan says the question quietly, directed more toward Gordon that the room. Gordon twists his head, taking in the stoic expression unchanged from Juan’s face. His brows furrow as he turns back to face Abby.
“I never did like you, Juan,” Abby says. “But I don’t give you credit. You’re not like Jennie, are you? She’s not much more than a pile of scrap metal. But you? You’re different.”
I admit I’m insulted. I’d like to tell her that the basis of our acquaintanceship phase consisted of me pretending to be human so hard that I couldn’t let on I wasn’t a donor. I had to play dumb. I’m not actually dumb. Except at this particular moment, I’m struck dumb with shock at how much I’ve misjudged her character.
“If it was you who came out the other end of the game, I might even be on Geo’s side about the whole thing. But it wasn’t you, was it? It was her.” Abby points to me like I’ve done something wrong, just by being me. “That was all the convincing I needed to join Miller’s circle.”
“Miller?” I ask. My Miller? The man I think of as my parental human since arriving in this dimension of existence?
Abby backs toward the door, a heap of metal limbs and torsos are visible in the hall beyond. “Why don’t they take care of these?” She kicks the pile of robot parts aside with great effort, which is slightly satisfying. “Melt them down at least.”
She pulls the door shut, this time with a slide clank. Gordon blinks at the solid wood door shutting us in. I echo his human response, not because it came naturally to me, but because no response occurred to me and I need to react in some way.
“I bet that wouldn’t be locked if Gordon hadn’t asked all those stupid questions,” I say.
Gordon turns his blink on me. I’m certain he’s on the verge of an outburst when Juan speaks in a low, controlled tone—very non-human given the circumstances. Right now is the time to lose your freaking mind. We’re being framed.
“You’re smart. Right, Gordon?” Juan asks.
“What kind of question is that?” I ask. “I thought you were going to say something profound, or inspiring, or at least get us mad enough to ram the door with our heads or something.”
“Could you create a transmitting tower given the material we have in this room?”
“There’s no material in this room, idiot.” Every corner is bare except for wood seating, complete with splinters, and stone floor and walls. This room happens to have lighting as it’s in the upper section of the Ipiales cathedral, which is a bonus.
“I don’t know,” Gordon responds to Juan. What is he going to do? Weave a Cat5 cable out of thousand-year-old wood splinters? “What’s your plan?”
“We
need to boost a signal. Get it inside this building.”
“It’s stone, man,” Gordon says in response to Juan. “Not much gets through this thickness of concrete.”
“I need it to be possible,” Juan says. “Is it possible?”
“What can you spare?”
And then I get it. We’re the resources. Gordon is going to use us as spare parts to create a signal boost. “I just barely got mended.” And right outside the locked door is a perfectly unclaimed scrap pile of wires and gears and electronic circuitry. If only we hadn’t pissed Abby off so much she locked us in.
While Gordon compiles a list of ‘parts’ he requires to make whatever Juan thinks we need, I run through what I’m losing.
I lose my past. My human world personal history. Every piece and scrap I give away is my personal heritage, which I’ve already been robbed of once by Geo. I have no history before that, nor do I have claim to actual human history.
Here’s the thing about now. I know little to nothing about ‘then’. I don’t know human history other than records I managed to flag as important in my efforts to imitate an informed-human-charade. It’s not intimate knowledge. Surface at best. Even my surface knowledge, I can only espouse it like a rote collection of facts. I have no emotional attachment to human history. Other than my ultimate desire to not be discovered as anything other than legitimate in my AI skins.
Then again, the GenED who clung to me like I was its resurrection portal, what error had he made? If any? And if he made no error, and was a donor of traceable status, why did these technology purists rip out his human pieces? His brain…
“Do you have anything circular?” Gordon asks. “Like something conductive, but round?”
I look up from my stupor of thought—round?
“I’ll give you something round…” The words slip out of Juan’s lips, but it’s not him who is saying them. Nazrete likes to torment Gordon. “I’ll teach you all about round holes and pegs, Gordo—”
“Nazrete, ew!” Gordon’s jaw can’t get much lower. I’m more curious if the shock on his face is the idea that one of us—robotic humans—might be capable of such depravity of thought, or whether we’re capable of following through on Nazrete’s grotesque sense of humor. “I shoved a copper wire up my arm a while back. You can bend it into a circle.” I dip in my reopened skin flap—not torn by my teeth this time, simply sliced so I can retrieve items from inside and let the skin fall together again, though it will never heal. My skin isn’t biological. I can be repaired more quickly than any human can heal if I have the appropriate materials for the fixes. However, I can never regenerate any part of me beyond my thoughts. It makes me think again of the GenED clinging to my ankles. That felt regenerative. But it’s not something I have time to think about right now. We have a cell signal to boost.
“You shoved copper up your arm?” Gordon asks. “Why’d you do that? Don’t you know that’ll scramble your scanners and interfere with airwaves? I mean, it’d probably have to be like a mesh sheet to interfere with a signal, but still…Why would you do that?”
“I didn’t know that, no…” At the time, I thought I was being smart. But I didn’t really know what to do. I was trapped in a cage and refused to do nothing. The only thing available to me was the spare parts and tools. I thought it might have an impact. So far, I’m the only one affected by that action, and not positively.
“You might have caused the signal to drop before we even got out of cell tower range,” Gordon says.
“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Juan steps in. “Whatever was making us sick could have been worse.”
“It’s not like a crazy amount of wires, Gordo. I’m not a walking Tesla coil. Though, it was better when I put my hand to my head.” I lift my wrist to my head as a demonstration, pulling my arm from Gordon’s grasp. He drops the tweezers he’s holding in his attempt to extract the loose wires from the other tubes and lines in my arm, like a high stakes version of a child’s game called Operation.
“Jennie, don’t move so much.” Gordon bends to pick up the tweezers. “Do you think it was Jennie jamming your scanners? Both of your scanners?” Gordon asks.
“What?” I feel accused of something, like maybe Gordon’s asking if I sabotaged us. “No way. I was jammed too.”
“Yeah, but maybe you didn’t know you were doing it. When did you first notice it?” Gordon pulls my arm to him again and continues digging inside my wrist—less carefully I might add.
“It started about the time you all experienced altitude sickness,” Juan says. His words come out metered, calculating, commanding. “It was a deliberate weapon to block Jennie and me from recognizing the problem.” He steps deliberately. Too controlled for his movement to be called a pace, but too rhythmic for it to be a saunter. “Do you think you could make a device that we could wear?” He makes the movement of placing headphones over his ears, of hooking a device behind his lobes. “Something not too conspicuous that can be worn.”
“For what exactly?” Gordon slides a long copper wire from inside my arm. It had jostled its way into my bicep – so far in, it has a bend worn hot where my elbow has forced it weak. With the strength of my frame and the lack of sensory nerves on my interior regions, I have no idea where it was riding all this time.
“A shield.” Juan looks at the wire, where it’s slightly discolored from being bent and straightened with every motion of my arm. “This war will be fought with invisible weapons. We need invisible shields.”
“Uh…Pretty sure I saw those rockets blow the heads off the Mord.” I recall the image on the car monitor without wanting to. The Mord didn’t see it coming. They couldn’t. Their eyes, though present in the AI human bodies, provide no information to their brains. The Mord glean all their input through their mouths. All senses work together at once from a single port. I have no idea if it’s efficient. It’s definitely terrifying. At least it was when I was first introduced to Mord. Now it seems sad and desperate. I’d wanted to tap the video monitor to warn them before the first rocket ripped through their midst. Even if I could warn them through the TV footage, there was no time for that information to save them. “That was a visible weapon.”
“The Mord aren’t our concern,” Juan says.
“They sort of concern me,” Gordon admits while he forms the non-discolored section of copper wire into a circle. The weaker piece he discards to the stone floor.
I pick it up, not sure if we have time to finish our project, how we can possibly disguise it if someone comes before Gordon’s done, or what to do with the scrap evidence. I don’t want to slip it back in my arm. The worn end looks sharp, liable to rick about and puncture something, like a tube carrying battery juice—or whatever keeps me running I’ve already been dealing with a minor leak. I can’t handle any more problems without the help of a donor facility to conduct proper repairs. I put it in my pocket.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Gordon says. “You think we need something too? Like for humans?” His voice reeks of memories of falling from heights. I’d thought Gordon simply couldn’t stop due to his improper repelling strategy back at the ravine, but perhaps there’s more to it than that.
Juan steps up. His hand hovers over Gordon’s work with wire shapes. I think Juan might touch Gordon, but he doesn’t. Gordon’s body tenses. Perhaps he thinks Juan will stop his hand, or maybe he’s anxious Nazrete’s in control. “Humans don’t need to worry,” Juan says. His hovering form takes a single step back, still close enough to impose a looming shadow.
Juan and I shed any part or piece we deem irrelevant, including a lower rib from Juan’s lower right side and my left pinkie toe. The tools I’d concealed in my arm come in handy as well. Gordon continues to use the tweezers in order to assemble small pieces together. He makes what looks like a motherboard, minus the board and microchips. It’s the connections between those parts he puts together.
“For this to work, I need to connect it to one of you.”
“What?”
I ask.
“Well, yeah. Unless you want me to dig around in your brain for the correct circuit chips. This is a boosting device, but you’re the signal source.”
“Not until you make a shield,” Juan says.
“I don’t have any material left.” Gordon shows tweezers, a razor, which he happened to already have on him curiously enough, and an empty piece of tubing.
“I think I have an idea, but you might not like it,” I say.
“What?”
“Our brains are protected by a semi faraday cage, like a protective skull, right?”
“Yes.” Juan nods but doesn’t seem to think too much of it.
“This wire shorted the cage I was held in.” The copper-like wire I have left, weakened from wear, with one sharp end and one blunt end.
“Like blowing up a microwave, sure,” Juan says.
“Can we use that same technique to shield our intellectual circuits from the signal?” I ask.
“By blowing up your brains?” Gordon practically chokes on his words before laughing. “I heard you were an E, Jennie, but that…That’s just the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of.”
“Just shorting them,” I say.
“Okay, let’s say that blowing the microwave doesn’t kill us,” Juan says leaning back. “How do you propose we connect the wire inside our brain in order to short our system from an incoming signal threat?”
“We’d have to slit the back of our necks and insert the wire on either side of our brain stem.” Honestly, I’m guessing. But it sounds like the safest and least conspicuous route. “It can be activated by slapping it down flat to ensure full contact while charging, or some other form of power source…solar cells maybe.”
“So we’d have a potential self-destruct button that might be triggered at any time, implanted in the back of our necks?” Juan asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“Gordo?” Juan says.
“I mean…Yeah. It could probably work if it’s done right.”
Con Code Page 24