Attack Doll 2: Junior Prime

by Douglas A. Taylor

Chapter 22

 

  Following the revelations about companion mode, the rest of our interview with Lily just sort of fizzled out. Shelley asked a few more questions about operator mode and Wizzit had some additional things he wanted us to find out about, and then we were done.

  As soon as Wizzit teleported us back to HQ, Shelley made a beeline for her father's office. The two of them remained closeted together for the better part of an hour, discussing who knew what. I mean, obviously something to do with Lily, but what specifically, I didn't know.

  Having nothing better to do, I hunted up Trina, who was not doing anything in particular at the moment either. We went to the gym and worked on her knife-hand technique for a while, and then we sparred until it was almost time for dinner.

  Nicolai and Padma returned from Cambridge sometime around then, surprising us with armloads of takeout from an Indian restaurant in Cambridge that Padma assured us was very good. For once, Prime Commander joined us for dinner, and all eight of us sat around the kitchen table, ate Indian food, and swapped stories until it was time for lights-out.

  We were all summoned into Prime Commander's office bright and early the next morning, almost before I had finished my breakfast. Commander Windham was there waiting for us, dressed and shaved and everything, which was a bit of a surprise since it was, like, two o'clock in the morning Montana time.

  Nicolai and Padma, I noticed as we all took our seats, were now a couple. I had gotten hints of this the previous night, and I noticed it even more now. Not that they were pawing at one another like a pair of hormone-crazed teenagers; it was a lot more subtle than that. They didn't even hold hands, barely made any physical contact. Still, Padma always seemed to be making sure she knew where Nicolai was, always made sure she was sitting or walking beside him if possible, and Nicolai was doing the same thing with her. It was pretty obvious once you noticed it, and it was just as obvious that they thought they were hiding it from the rest of us.

  "Jealous?" a voice whispered in my ear. I turned to look at Trina beside me. She nodded, smiling, at the clandestinely happy couple.

  I grinned. "Nah," I whispered back. "I'm glad they finally got together. Nicolai's a good guy, and Padma and I are just friends anyway."

  "Just friends?" Trina looked surprised, and I knew she was thinking of the time she had walked in on Padma and me during one of our not-so-impulsive kisses. "Do you always 'make out' with your friends?"

  I winked at her. "Just the female ones. You wanna try it sometime?"

  Her smile faltered for a moment, and I felt my heart sink. Trina is such a huge flirt that I was sure she wouldn't take my offer seriously. I hadn't meant it seriously. "I, um," she began. Then she regained her smile. "Sure," she said, returning my wink, "but I will have to check my schedule. Toby and Mike have nearly filled me up, but I'll try to fit you in somewhere."

  I chuckled in reply, wondering whether Trina intended the rather kinky-sounding double entendre she had just uttered or if it was just my dirty mind in action. Behind me, someone cleared their throat, and I turned around to see everyone staring at Trina and me. "If you two lovebirds are quite finished with your little tete-a-tete," Shelley said dryly, "the rest of us would like to discuss what to do about Lily Lee."

  I grinned sheepishly while Trina raised a hand to her mouth to stifle a giggle. "Sure thing, Shelley," I said. "I'm all ears."

  "Fine. Nicolai and Padma, I told you last night some of what we've learned about Lily, but I want Wizzit to show a vid of us questioning her anyway. I want you to get an idea just how . . . well, just how robotic she is. First, though, I want to you to see Mike's and my encounter with JB Swift from yesterday."

  Wizzit brought up the desert conversation the rest of us had watched earlier, and then a scene of Shelley quizzing Lily about personal-grooming commands in operator mode. Pretty boring stuff -- Lily, brush your hair; Lily, wash your face; Lily, floss your teeth. When it was done, Padma, who had once met Li Lin-fa, said, "She speaks English with an American accent. How do you get her to speak -- what was her language, Trevor? It was some form of Chinese, wasn't it? Not Mandarin, but . . . you know, the other one."

  Shelley smiled wryly. "It was Cantonese. That's a good question, Padma. We don't know to get her to speak Cantonese. Apparently, English is the only language the attack doll knows."

  "The attack doll?" Nicolai repeated. "What's that?"

  "That's what JB Swift calls her," Shelley said with a shrug. "You heard him. And it's how she refers to herself, as 'the attack doll' or 'an attack doll unit'."

  "We think," Commander Windham put in, "that the part of her who speaks Cantonese -- the woman who calls herself Li Lin-fa -- is what you might call her base personality."

  "Her real self," Shelley interjected.

  "Exactly." The Commander nodded. "The story she told Trevor of growing up in a fishing village near Shanghai is probably true. This 'attack doll' construct is most likely something JB Swift put in place after Enclave got hold of her, using hypnosis or drugs -- we're not really sure."

  "Wait a minute," Mike said. "I thought that Enclave couldn't do anything like that to someone against their will. It's against their rules or something. All their monsters have to agree to be mutated; they actually have to ask for it. Isn't that right, Wizzit?"

  "Ya damn betcha," Wizzit piped up. "However, the rules concerning that can be somewhat fluid. For one thing, she has not been mutated. One hundred percent pure human female. For another, if she really was sold to Enclave, then it could be assumed she had already given up her right to object. After he had the bill of sale in his hand, JB Swift could to anything he liked to her."

  "She told me she thought she was being sold into prostitution to pay off her family's debts," I said quietly. "I don't know much about it, but I got the impression it's not unheard of, especially in rural areas of China."

  "So, how do we get in contact with this Li Lin-fa personality?" Trina asked. "How do we draw her out?"

  "I don't know," Shelley admitted. "I wish I did."

  "Well, at least we'll have some time to figure it out," Toby put in. "Now that we've got her safely locked up, I mean."

  Shelley shook her head grimly. "We might not have as much time as we think." She looked around at each of us. "Trina, Toby, Trevor -- the three of you were there with me the whole time Lily was explaining operator mode. Does any of you remember her explaining how to tell her to go to sleep?"

  To go to sleep? I thought back. "I assume it would be something like 'Lily, go to sleep'," I said.

  In response, Shelley waved a hand at the video screen. She must arranged something with Wizzit beforehand, because he brought up a still image of Shelley alone with Lily. "I went to see her earlier this morning," she explained, "because I figured someone ought to make her use the bathroom on some sort of regular schedule."

  Wizzit started playing the vid. On the screen, Lily was self-reporting that she had last slept thirty hours, two minutes ago. She was extremely tired, she said, and needed to sleep soon. She was showing no signs of fatigue, I noticed, but neither had she that time with JB Swift, when she reported she had been awake for nearly twenty-two hours.

  "Lily, lie down," the screen-Shelley ordered. Lily complied. "Lily, go to sleep."

  Lily simply lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling.

  "Lily," Shelley said after a few seconds had passed, "tell me about the sleep command."

  "There is no such command," Lily reported in her calm monotone.

  "Lily, tell me about sleep."

  "I have no information about sleep."

  Wizzit turned off the vid at this point. "We went round and round like that for a while," real-life Shelley explained. "Maybe one of you could find something I missed, but as far as I was able to determine, there is simply no way to tell Lily to go to sleep. And it appears she won't fall asleep on her own." r />
  Mike rubbed his chin. "JB Swift warned us she would wither and die if she wasn't with him," he said thoughtfully. "Can a person die from lack of sleep?"

  "Not to my knowledge," Commander Windham said over his steepled fingers. "Although sleep deprivation can lead to various other problems -- loss of memory, decreased immune response, hallucinations, even insanity." He shrugged. "Lily is such a strange creature, though. It could be that her . . . her programming, if that's what we want to call it, could break down. She could become unresponsive, refuse to eat or drink . . ."

  Padma suddenly spoke up. "Trevor," she said, "that time when we were in the cell with her -- with Li Lin-fa, I mean -- she kept falling asleep. Do you remember that? She couldn't seem to stay awake. Do you think that . . .?"

  "Yeah, I do." I said. That exact same idea had been running through my head, in fact. I turned to the others. "Li Lin-fa told me that whenever they brought her back to her cell, she was always so tired she fell asleep right away. I wondered at the time why they would bother to bring her back at all when all she did was sleep. Maybe this is the reason."

  "So the only way to get her to sleep is to turn her back into Li Lin-fa?" Trina asked.

  "That's my guess. As to how we can do that . . ." I spread my hands and shrugged.

  "Did JB Swift do anything to her when you saw him put her into the cell?" Shelley asked. "Did he give her any commands? Or did he use his remote?"

  "He didn't give her any verbal commands, I'm sure of that," I said. Across the room, Padma was nodding thoughtfully in agreement. "He didn't even put her into the cell himself," I went on. "The two of them came into the room, and she let herself in. I don't think I saw him point the remote at her, but I was watching her at the time, so I can't be absolutely sure."

  "I was hiding under her bed," Padma added, "so I couldn't see much of anything."

  I closed my eyes, trying to picture the scene. "I . . . don't think she made the change right away. She didn't become Li Lin-fa until after he had left the room."

  Padma snapped her fingers. "He did say something, though, just before he left. It was . . . 'have a good night' or 'sleep well' or . . . something like that. Some ordinary phrase you might say to someone who was going to bed."

  "You're right," I agreed after a moment's recollection. "I had forgotten about that."

  "Well, we could try saying some of those things to her," Toby suggested. "We could make a list and read it off and see if that works."

  "But what if she responds only to the sound of JB Swift's voice?" Mike asked. "He said she had to be with him."

  Prime Commander nodded. "Good thinking, Mike. Wizzit, could you use the voice alteration in Mike's force shield to make him sound like JB Swift?"

  "Not me," said Mike. "I'm going on vacation in about an hour."

  Commander Windham smiled. "Right. I had forgotten. Toby, then? Or Trevor?"

  "Let me check," Wizzit replied. After a few moments, he said, "Yes, I have enough samples of his speech that I could do it with anyone."

  "If no one objects," Shelley said, "I'd like Trina to be the one who reads the phrases to her. If it really doesn't make a difference whose voice Wizzit starts out with, that is."

  "Why me?" Trina asked.

  "Because you bear the closest resemblance to JB Swift."

  "I do not!" Trina somehow managed to sound indignant and confused at the same time.

  Shelley covered her face with her hands and shook her head vigorously. "Augh! Sorry! That didn't come out right." She took a breath, let it out, and dropped her hands. "I didn't mean that you look like a hedgehog," she said apologetically. "What I meant was that you're the shortest member of the team. If Wizzit turns your force shield red like JB Swift and you crouch down just on the edge of Lily's field of vision when you read the commands, then that's probably our best shot at making her think you're the real deal."

  "Oh," Trina said, mollified. "Well, I can't deny that I'm shorter than everyone else."

  Prime Commander chuckled. "I have to give you points for creative thinking, Shelley. Every little bit helps, I guess. Okay, if Trina's willing, then that's plan number one. If it doesn't work, what else do we try? I'd like to have at least two plans of attack."

  We all stared at each other. "Could we break through her programming in some way?" Nicolai asked. "Try to reach her directly? She is a person, after all. She is not a robot, even if she acts like one."

  "She did wake up as Li Lin-fa that one time I kicked her in the head," Mike said thoughtfully. "Maybe someone could --"

  "No!" everyone else said in unison.

  Mike raised his hands placatingly. "Hey, it was just a suggestion."

  Another long pause, broken this time when Trina said, "What are you thinking, Trevor?"

  "Hm?" I said, startled out of my reverie. I had been staring hard at the floor with my chin in my hand. "Oh. I was thinking about what Nicolai said. I remember I asked Li Lin-fa one time whether she could recall anything from when she was Lily, and she said she had some vague memories of fighting someone."

  "So you're saying their control over her is not perfect? Do you think there might be a chance we could get through to her?" Commander Windham asked.

  "Yes, sir. It's worth a shot, anyway. One of us could try talking directly to her."

  "It would have to be you, Trevor," Shelley stated firmly. "You're the only one of us here who speaks Cantonese."

  "And she trusts him," Padma said with a smile. "You should have seen the way she was hanging on every word he said. It was so cute, like a little puppy dog. If she will listen to anyone, it will be him."

  Prime Commander placed his hands flat on his desk. "So, to sum up, we'll brainstorm a list of 'good night'-style phrases which Trina will read to her using JB Swift's voice to try to put her to sleep. And Trevor will spend some time speaking to her in Cantonese, trying to draw out the Li Lin-fa personality. Anything else?"

  Shelley said, "I will draw up a schedule for people to feed Lily, and another one for bathroom duties. It's not that hard, people," she added sharply in response to the chorus of groans. "Nor is it messy. You just have to say, 'Lily, go use the bathroom,' and then 'Lily, wash your hands.' That's all. Boys and girls both can do it; it's easier than walking a dog."

  "All right, I will take the first bathroom shift," Trina volunteered.

  "And I'll go start on a batch of stir-fry right now," I said.

  Prime Commander looked around the room, then stood up. "Good. I think we've got everything covered."