A Memory of Mankind: (This Alien Earth Book 2)

by Paul Antony Jones

  Blue Alpha remained silent for a few moments, then said, “I will administer the test. We shall proceed from there. We must go to my laboratory.” And with that, she floated back up the spiral staircase.

  Blue Alpha’s laboratory was a separate gray warehouse building just beyond the towers. Her main chassis was already waiting for us in front of two aircraft-hanger-sized doors. Silas still hung limply from one of its tentacles like Faye Ray captured by King Kong. The doors slid open as we approached, and we followed Blue Alpha inside.

  “Vat in heaven’s name?” Freuchen exclaimed.

  Within the warehouse were row upon row of heavy-duty shelving. Pieces of machinery had been neatly stacked and ordered on the shelves. Some were as large as cars, others as small as a cellphone, but I had absolutely no clue as to what any of them were.

  We followed Blue Alpha down a center aisle big enough to accommodate her chassis… just. There could only have been a few feet of leeway on either side of her. The racks reached all the way to the ceiling, several hundred feet overhead.

  Chou said, “You have quite a collection.”

  “I waste nothing,” Blue Alpha replied.

  Albert let out a gasp of surprise. “Look! There are more robots like Silas.” He pointed to a rack of shelves just off the main corridor.

  I broke away from the party and walked over to the rack. The kid was right. Each shelf was piled high with the unmistakable bodies of Silas’ brethren. All dismantled. Heads, limbs, torsos, odd tube-like protuberances, multi-faceted silver octagons, eye-bars—all neatly stacked and ordered in row upon row, shelf upon shelf, and box upon box. I felt a sudden wave of nausea. It was horrendous. It wasn’t so long ago that I wouldn’t have considered that I could have felt such disgust at this… this butchery.

  “The remains of the SILAS units that attacked the facility,” Chou said quietly. I hadn’t even heard her approach.

  “I… I know they’re just machines. They’re not human, but I’ve spent so much time with Silas now, seen how kind he is. This seems nothing short of barbaric.”

  When Chou did not answer, I turned to look at her and was met with a furrowed brow. “I forget,” she said, “that in the when you come from, these intelligences would be seen as nothing more than machines.” She ran her hand over a dusty torso, leaving a trail of brighter gold behind. “But in my time, that kind of attitude would be met with disgust much as I believe you might feel if you met someone who considered slaves as sub-humans or as property.”

  “Oh, my God!” I spluttered. “Your husband. He’s an AI. I’m so sorry, Chou, I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  She nodded and smiled understandingly at me. “I take no offense. In this world, where so many cultures and beliefs are colliding head-on, we must all allow for a period of societal and personal assimilation. It will take time, but I believe we will have all the time that we need.”

  “Please, keep up with us,” Blue Alpha said, then continued on her way.

  A little while later, we reached an area that reminded me of a mechanic’s shop. Tools that looked vaguely familiar to me and others sat on benches. I saw compressors, and what I guessed was some kind of welding machine mixed in with high-tech equipment and banks of monitors and displays that I had no idea about. In the center of it all was a raised metal table that reminded me of something you’d find in an operating room but about four times larger. It had outlets and connectors set into its side.

  “Please, wait over there,” Blue Alpha said, gesticulating with a tentacle toward a set of plastic chairs stacked up against a wall. Her chassis extended the tentacle that held Silas and placed him unceremoniously on the table, then proceeded to rearrange his limbs until his legs were straight and his arms lay at his side. She glided over to a rack of tools, pulled out several, including one that looked like a thin version of a crowbar, then moved to Silas’s side. With a speed that left me speechless, she applied the crowbar to what must have been an invisible seam running around Silas’ chest, levered it up, so the front half separated from the back, and pried it off with a metallic ping. Another of her tentacles took it from her while the four others began to probe around inside Silas’ chest cavity.

  It was like watching an octopus perform open-heart surgery.

  Blue Alpha floated up until she was directly above Silas’ open chest. She extended a thin tubular metal instrument attached by wires to a gray box on the floor into his chest cavity. There was an electrical buzz, then we all jumped as Silas’ eye-bar popped from its recess. His eyes glowed an intense red. Several lines of numbers suddenly appeared in the air a few inches in front of his eyes. They scrolled up at a blistering speed for over a minute then, just as suddenly as they’d appeared, they vanished.

  “Primary quantum diagnostic check: Successful,” Silas said, his voice sounding, well, robotic. “No anomalies found.”

  “Good. Very good,” Blue Alpha mumbled to herself. She quickly replaced the top half of Silas’ chest then repositioned herself above the bump that passed for his head. One of her tentacles plucked his eye-bar out of the air and placed it on the table while two more proceeded to lever his head open by inserting the same thin crow-bar-like tool into the eye-bar socket. From where we sat, we had a perfect view of what I took to be Silas’ brain. I guess I had expected some kind of science-fiction-esque array of flashing lights and whirring cogs. Instead, all I saw was a lump of silver metal with three distinct raised bands running from the back of his head to the front that reminded me of a cyclists’ helmet.

  Blue Alpha picked up a long black cord with a pin-like connector at one end and inserted the connector into a receiver at the base of Silas’ brain. She connected the other to one of the banks of equipment behind her, pressed a few buttons on the control panel, and watched as a tsunami of data washed over the screen. A second screen displayed what looked like a duplicate of the data on the first.

  “Do you know what she’s doing?” Albert said. He sounded worried.

  “I have no idea,” I admitted, looking at Chou.

  “I believe,” Chou said, “that she is comparing Silas’ core code to a copy she has which she knows has not been corrupted.”

  Albert stared blankly at Chou.

  “She is checking that the Architect has not altered Silas’ personality so that he might cause him to want to harm any of us,” Chou elaborated.

  Albert pouted. “Silas wouldn’t hurt us. Not ever.”

  I put my arm around his shoulder and squeezed. “Well, we all know that, of course, but we just need Blue Alpha to make sure that—”

  The data on the screens suddenly stopped and a repetitive, alarm-like, beeping sounded. A large block of code on the left screen was highlighted in a flashing green box. On the right screen, the one Silas was plugged directly into, a row of red X’s flashed. The numbers and characters above the row of red Xs looked the same as those on the left screen, but everything after it didn’t even come close.

  I looked at Chou and she at me.

  “That can’t be good,” Freuchen said, stepping between us.

  Blue Alpha stopped probing Silas’ brain, her attention drawn to the screens.

  “What’s happening?” I asked her, stepping up to the table.

  Her lens closest to me turned red and focussed on my face. “There is a discrepancy between the original backup code I have for the SILAS units and your friend.”

  “What do you mean ‘discrepancy?’” I asked. I sensed my companions move closer to me.

  “This SILAS unit is missing a large portion of code.”

  “Well, he suffered some kind of memory loss when he was hit by a pile of rocks. Maybe that’s what did it?”

  “No,” said Blue Alpha. “This code is not related to his memory systems. We are talking about his core personality and drives.” She floated closer to the two screens. “The difference is quite marked. There is a significant amount missing.” She turned back to Silas and removed the wiring from his head. Moving in closer, she
picked up a new tool that looked like a large pen and began prodding Silas’ brain. Where it touched, small puffs of smoke rose momentarily into the air.

  “Wait,” I said. “I don’t care that there’s a difference between your damn code and Silas’. There is no way he would do anything to hurt us. No way.” I was becoming desperate, desperate enough that I was wondering what the odds were that the three of us could overpower Blue Alpha and force her to reactivate our robotic friend.

  “That is apparent,” Blue Alpha said. She replaced the pen-like tool in its slot on a nearby shelf and began to replace the outer cover of Silas’ head.

  “I don’t care,” I said, fear working its way into my voice despite my best attempt to stop it, “we’re not going to…” I paused. “Wait a second, what?”

  With his head back in place, Blue Alpha placed Silas’ eye-bar back in its slot. “I said that it is apparent that this SILAS unit would not attempt to hurt you,” Blue Alpha said. She gesticulated toward the two screens. “I extracted the code on the left from the brains of the SILAS units that attacked this facility. The corrupted SILAS units. The code which Silas is missing is the malicious code that was placed in the other units by the Architect. Your friend is not corrupted.” There was a flash of light from Blue Alpha’s main chassis, and a few moments later, Silas whirred into life, sat upright, swung his legs over the edge of the table, and dropped to his feet.

  Albert sprinted to Silas’ side, threw his arms around the robot’s legs, and hugged him hard enough that the metal man wobbled just a little.

  “I missed you, Silas,” Albert said, his chin tilted up to the robot’s eye-bar.

  Silas reached out a hand and gently stroked the boy’s hair. “And I have missed you, too, Albert. Although I must admit, I am unaware of what has transpired since our arrival here.” He looked around. “Wherever here is.”

  I was about to answer him when a thought struck me like a lightning bolt. “Hey! Wait a second. You’ve been deactivated all this time, and I left your slate in my backpack… but you recognize us all?”

  Silas’s eye-bar moved to take in all of us. “Meredith. Chou. Peter. Albert. Yes, I recognize you all.”

  I turned to Blue Alpha. “You fixed something. His memory. You fixed it.” I felt a smile broadening across my face.

  “Yes. It was a simple repair—just a few synaptic nodes that needed to be reconnected. His power core is another matter, however. I will have to pull one from containment, but it will be a simple transference that should take less than half an hour.”

  “You mean, Silas vill have his memory back, and von’t have to shut down every night?” Freuchen said.

  “That is correct.”

  I resisted the urge to reach out and hug Blue Alpha. Instead, I placed a hand against her metal casing and said, “Thank you. Thank you, so much.”

  “You are welcome,” Blue Alpha replied. “Now, perhaps it would be a good idea for you to explain to your friend that we have need of him.”

  Twenty-One

  “I think it would be better if you and Albert waited in the stairwell. The chance of further collapse is high,” Silas said.

  “Yeah, not going to happen,” I said.

  We were back at the tunnel Blue Alpha said she and her compatriots had sabotaged to ensure the safety of whoever or whatever lay beyond the mound of rubble. Blue Alpha had fabricated ten large metal supports in her workshop, and eight of them lay neatly stacked against the left side of the corridor. Freuchen was working with Chou to put two of them into place to support the ceiling at the face of the rubble. Freuchen had already come up with a plan for how to attack the problem of getting the rubble out of the corridor: we mere humans would stack the smaller pieces of debris along the corridor while Silas would carry the larger items up to the next floor, where they wouldn’t be a danger to us.

  Freuchen stood back, placed his hands on his hips, and regarded the wall of concrete, rock, and dirt, illuminated by two large portable lights Blue Alpha had brought with her. “The more pressing problem is how ve are going to get the biggest pieces out of here,” he said, tapping one of the larger boulders with his boot. “If ve pull out the vong one, the whole thing could come down on us.” He mimicked the ceiling collapsing.

  “Perhaps we should only remove the ones we have to and leave those that we do not need, so they act as support?” Chou offered.

  Freuchen stroked his beard. “An untidy solution and potentially dangerous, but under the circumstances, it might vurk,” he said. “Let’s get to it then.”

  Albert wanted to help too, so Blue Alpha scrounged up a small wicker basket, and we filled it with smaller pieces of concrete and broken red bricks which Albert dutifully followed behind Silas each time he took the stairs. It kept the kid occupied and out of the corridor, which had quickly filled with a thin cloud of cloying gray dust.

  Every ten feet of progress, Freuchen and Chou placed two of the metal supports. I trusted Freuchen knew what he was doing, but I still found myself flinching every time the ceiling creaked or groaned as we moved deeper into the rockfall.

  Not long after they had placed the fourth set of supports, Freuchen called out, “I… yes, ve’re through to the other side.” Twenty more minutes of work, and we had a hole big enough for Freuchen and Silas to fit through if they twisted their bodies just so. We grabbed our flashlights and followed one after the other.

  Beyond the barrier, we found ourselves in the same redbrick lined corridor as we had just come through, but at the end of it was a heavy, dust-encrusted, oak door.

  “This way,” said Blue Alpha, and pushed the door open for us.

  We stepped into a chamber hewn straight out of the rough quartzite of the mountain. The room was roundish, about twenty feet across, its walls roughly excavated, with not a smooth surface in sight. A rivulet of water dripped slowly down the wall to form a small pool near where we stood, a trail of green algae marking its random trajectory. The place had obviously been hollowed out in a hurry, with none of the usual attention to detail I associated with the Architect’s work.

  Ahead of us, a wall of reinforced steel stretched from ceiling to floor and wall to wall, blocking us from going any further. In its center was a large door with a lever handle. There was a numerical keypad next to it, glowing brightly.

  Blue Alpha floated to the keypad, tapped in a code while reciting the numbers aloud. “Nine. One. Five. One. Nine. Five. Three. Remember it.” She reached out, pulled the lever up, and swung the door open.

  We stepped through into a semi-circular, metal-walled vault.

  Across from us, near the ceiling, a large computer screen followed the wall’s curved contour, displaying data and several histograms that updated in realtime. Below the screen, five identical metal doors had been built into the wall. Each one was uniform in size—eight feet by four and made of solid steel. Each was secured to the metal wall by three large, sturdy hinges and equally intimidating bolts. At each door’s center was a large metal wheel. Above that, a square of glass was located at approximately head-height. Over the lintel of each door, a small light glowed brightly. Two of the lights were red, but the lights above the last three doors to our right glowed green. Between us and the doors, set back a little way from the center of the room, was a console with a screen and keyboard fixed to it. A single office chair sat by it.

  “What is this place?” Chou asked, her voice echoing.

  “A repository of sorts,” Blue Alpha said. “When the attack came, we brought the custodians here for their safety.”

  “How many custodians are there?” Albert asked.

  “There are three who were responsible for building this facility.”

  “Three?” I said, turning to face Blue Alpha. “We weren’t really expecting three.” It was a ridiculous thing to say, I suppose. I mean, we’d been told to find Candidate 1. That didn’t mean there wouldn’t be others, too. I walked past Blue Alpha to the nearest door with a green light and peered through the windo
w.

  I let out a gasp of surprise and took a step back.

  “Vat is vong?” Freuchen said, immediately at my side.

  I had no idea what I’d expected would be beyond the door—a cell or maybe some kind of cryogenic deepfreeze, maybe. But not this… not this.

  On the other side of the steel door was a park. Cherry Blossom trees lined a path that encircled a pond, a layer of pink petals covering the ground like snow. Beyond the park, visible through the branches of the trees, the towers of a city I thought might be Tokyo rose skyward. Beyond the city, stark against the blue sky, a snow-capped mountain held sway over everything. Sitting on a park bench next to the pond, caught in the act of tossing a sprinkling of seed from a brown paper bag clutched in one hand, was a woman in her mid-thirties. The seed peppered the air in an arc in front of her, while ducks splashed across the pond’s surface toward it.

  All were frozen in time, as though I was looking at some incredible three-dimensional photograph.

  “Is it some kind of hologram?” I asked, unable to drag my eyes away.

  “No, it is all very real,” Blue Alpha said.

  I felt Freuchen’s breath on my cheek and turned to see him standing beside me. “Impossible,” he said half-heartedly.

  “No, not impossible,” Chou said, and I turned to see her standing behind the two of us, Albert held in her arms so he could see through the window too. “We have already experienced something very similar, remember?”

  “The Titanic,” Albert said.

  “That’s right, Albert,” said Chou. She turned back to look at Blue Alpha. “The technology you are using here is the same technology the Architect used to bring us here, the same technology that caused the unstable multi-dimensional chaos we witnessed onboard the ship. But this is controlled. The Architect has managed to establish a permanent connection between this world and these other dimensions. Am I correct?”