by J P Waters
The officer who’d received their last roke delivery was working at the reception desk again, although his droid companion was busily whirring away at a terminal next to him.
He took one look at her and said, “You again?” The droid turned its head and focused its eyes on the duffel bag. Not inconspicuous enough, evidently.
“Can I speak to Detectives Scarborough or Haight?”
“No, they’re out. You can wait in the lobby, but they’ve been pretty busy.”
Great, at least she could avoid being dressed down this time around.
“Sorry, but I can’t really wait. This thing is going to wake up soon.”
“What thing?”
She pointed at the duffel bag.
The officer instinctually backed away from her, a light sweat forming on his brow. “Oh shit, you brought another one?”
“Yeah, I sure did, and this one is really a nasty one. You want me to leave it here with you?”
“Uhhh…” The receptionist looked to his partner, but the droid remained silent, instead turning back to its terminal.
“Well, I guess you could take it to Frog.”
“Frog?” Olie asked, “That’s the name of a person?”
“Yeah, basement floor, straight ahead. He’s been working containment. Although we’re already low on space as it is…”
“Okay, I’m off to deliver my bag of fun to a man called Frog. Fun day.” Olie was starting to get antsy. She wanted to get the roke out of her possession. “Where am I going?”
“Elevator’s back and to the right. Just make it quick.”
“Thanks.”
When Olie climbed off the elevator she immediately heard the muffled skittering of rokes a little way in front of her. She slung the duffel bag over her shoulder and pulled out her dart gun. The basement was an inmate detention area, and beyond the first cell’s glass there were rokes piled on top of each other, rolling this way and that and tearing away at a cot in the corner. The cell’s toilet was bolted closed, but a few of the creatures were attempting to pry it open. Beside that cell was another, and another, and another, each containing dozens of the creatures. Olie couldn’t pull her eyes away from the scene. She looked, scanning the cells for Gerry and his trademark white stripe, but no luck.
“Don’t touch the glass, please,” said someone behind her.
Olie turned around to see a short, pudgy young man in large black boots. He was wearing a blue jumpsuit and looked more like a high-schooler than a police officer. His head was shaved clean, and he had work gloves on.
“Sorry, I was just looking at where you kept the rokes.”
“Rokes?”
Olie lifted her duffel bag. “Yeah, I have one that I tranquilized in here.”
“Wait a minute – you’re that crazy lone wolf, aren’t you!”
Evidently Scarborough and Haight weren’t the only ones talking about her. “Uh, no. But I did capture one of the first ones, if that’s what you mean.”
“You call them rokes?”
“Yeah. When they roll they look like spokes on a wheel. What do you call them?”
“Evil little shits.” The man smiled with mischief in his eyes, “Technically, they are Unidentified Animal Species 1279 or UAS 1279, but the way these eat and kill, I like to use my own nickname. Seems they can eat their way through most organic matter, but this glass is a solid barrier they can’t get through it,” the man said before delivering a swift kick to the bulletproof glass of the nearest cell. A handful of rokes were pressed up against the glass trying to get to them, but the impact sent them scurrying to the other side of the room.
“I’m supposed to find someone named ‘Frog’?”
“You found him. I used to be a champion diver, and the nickname stuck. My real name is Francis, but nobody calls me that.”
“My name is Olivia, nobody calls me that either. I’m Olie. Nice to meet you.” The pair shook hands before Frog started eying the duffel.
“So, you’ve got a 1279 – err Roke – for me in there?”
“Yup—” Olie replied, but before she could open and show him, Frog waved his hands furiously for her to stop.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Not here, damn. Let’s get somewhere safe first. Come on.”
As Olie followed Frog down the hall, she saw more and more cells. They started to thin out somewhat as they went deeper in, but the numbers were still astounding. Surely they didn’t need this many rokes to study. Olie had thought most rokes the police encountered were being exterminated.
“There’s so many,” she said in awe.
“They brought most of ‘em in last night.”
“Who brought them in?”
“Droids, mostly. You know what these things can do, don’t you?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“They’re killers, through and through,” Frog said, shaking his head. Frog seemed completely at ease down in the basement among the rokes, despite his obvious contempt for the creatures.
“But why aren’t they saying that on the adnews? So far they’ve just claimed they’re dangerous and made some light speculation.”
“I haven’t exactly had time to watch the telesphere lately. In case you can’t tell, we’re all hands on deck down here.”
“I actually haven’t noticed. You are the only one down here. Everyone up there seems pretty calm about it,” said Olie. “No one’s panicking— it doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“No one’s panicking yet,” said Frog. “They will. Just wait ‘til these things start moving in droves. Okay, let’s get a look at this specimen you have in that bag.”
They walked into the last cell, which contained no rokes. Instead, a makeshift veterinarian’s surgical room had been set up—filled with medicine cabinets, various monitors, and a sterile unit. Frog pulled the door into the cell closed behind them, careful to leave it unlocked.
“Hold on,” Olie said. “I thought we were going somewhere safe. If it wakes up, we’ll be its first targets.”
“I didn’t say safe for us. Do you know how many people would die if one of these things had run of the building? We can’t risk losing any officers. Okay, let’s do this. Up, up.”
Olie lifted the duffel bag up and dropped it onto a steel table, and Frog walked over with a syringe full of what she assumed was a tranquilizer. Poking the needle through the bag, he fished until he made contact, pushing hard enough to puncture the roke’s hide. After the roke had been motionless for thirty seconds, Frog slowly opened the bag, lifting the sleeping roke out and laying it on the table to investigate. Olie noted his thick, rubber gloves.
“I do not fuck around with these things,” he said. “This guy’s in surprisingly good condition, though. How’d you manage it? And how did you have tranqs in the first place?”
“Military training—I was on Mars. The darts were printed by a friend when we first discovered them.”
“Whatever, sounds illegal to me, but I don’t care as long as these little beasties get brought in. I wouldn’t mind seeing the stars, y’know out there.” He pointed up, and then continued to poke and prod at the beast, checking various points for reasons Olie didn’t know and Frog didn’t bother to explain. “Have you spoken with Scarborough or Haight today?” Frog asked.
“No, why?”
“Scarborough’s pissed so many are coming in alive. I’m surprised you went through the effort for this one.”
“Wait, why are you keeping them, then? I assumed she’d given the order to hold some here.”
“Are you kidding? She hates these things. Higher-ups are the ones who want us to bring them in breathing. Scarborough is a good officer, mean as hell, but good. She wouldn’t let a threat like this stand unless there was some serious authority telling her otherwise.”
“What about the ones nesting on the beach? She told me herself they were exterminating them.”
Frog glanced over his shoulder. “Well, they killed some, but they captured as many as they could. The r
est are still out there.”
Olie narrowed her eyes.
“We used to have more here, too,” Frog continued. “But a truck came by to cart them off. Sending them to some other lab, probably. I just check for mutations and make sure they’re nice and sleepy.”
“When you say the rest,” Olie asked, “how many do you mean?”
“Lots, hundreds at least. I don’t know why they let ‘em live, personally. You’ve seen the teeth on these things, haven’t you?”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Something’s up,” Olie said, climbing into Jayson’s car outside the station.
“In what way?” asked Mona.
“Someone wants the rokes alive.” Olie sat down as the wing door closed behind her. “And wants them enough that they overrode the extermination order.”
“Don’t we also want the rokes alive? Jayson is still convinced they might be important to biological studies.”
“True, but that many? Wouldn’t a few do, especially if you bred them in captivity? Why risk public safety by leaving so many unchecked until they can be transported?”
“Collecting numbers that high is odd. And dangerous.”
“Think about it. The guy in there, Frog, said the order came from the top. Who would want this many rokes alive and why?”
“Would you like me to pretend to think?”
“No, just calculate or whatever you do.”
“I still don’t know.”
“Well,” began Olie, “let’s start thinking in terms of uses for them, then.”
“Military?” suggested Mona.
“Possibly,” said Olie, “but that’s only if they can be trained. Unless the idea was to let them run rampant over an enemy territory. A kind of controlled infestation.”
“You trained Gerry, though. There is a precedent.”
“Yeah, I guess so, but Gerry attacked you. He seemed to be docile, but only for me. Every other roke we’ve seen has been aggressive.” Olie conceded. Was that really the reason for their capture? Were rokes the next in a long line of horrifying war machines?
Olie’s band buzzed. It was Jayson attempting to make a videocall. Pushing the call to the car’s dashboard, she picked up. Jayson’s face quickly filled the screen.
“Olie? Is Mona still with you?”
“Yeah. What’s up?”
“There’s been another attack at SeaCrest.”
Olie’s heart jumped into her throat. Who could have been attacked? All employees had been removed from the premises, to the best of Olie’s knowledge.
“Who?” Olie whispered, dreading the response.
“Not who—what.”
“Huh?”
“They got a Seba.”
Olie looked to Mona, expecting horror or concern, but the AI’s features remained as calm and collected as ever.
“By a roke? Are you sure?”
“The adnews is floating it as either the SeaCrest killer or some kind of copycat. One even floated that it might be a disgruntled union worker. I clipped an image from the adnews, though, and it’s unmistakable. The news forums are going nuts, everyone is making the connection but the press. It doesn’t make sense. The wound is in the exact same place that Gerry bit Mona. It must have been going for its biological components. I’m pushing the footage to you now.”
A controversial aspect of the Sebanic design was that they utilized genuine, human organs grown in laboratories. Other AI companies had focused purely on bigger and better supercomputers to serve as brains for increasingly complex droids, but Frederick Parker’s chief innovation was taking a more holistic approach, recreating every part of the human body in an attempt to approximate a genuine human being. And when components stopped serving his designs, he turned to the real deal. Not enough so his creations could legally be considered cybernetic clones—only about 15% of a Seba was organic—but it worked. The process was a closely guarded trade secret, Parker had never publically talked about the science behind it. He thanked evolution for doing the schematic, and he referred to himself as a simple engineer. Regardless of the how or why, though, one thing was for certain: Sebanic really were the most human AI on the market.
Watching the adnews segment, Olie couldn’t deny that the Seba was clearly another roke victim. The wound was nearly identical to the one she’d seen earlier in the day, the only difference being that instead of blood dripping out of the victim, there was a vibrant green pool of transmission fluid.
“What does this mean?” Olie asked, flipping the video back to Jayson.
“If they’re that hungry, it means things are about to get a lot worse.”
Chapter Thirty
Olie walked directly to her couch and collapsed, reclining with her head on one of the pillows. Mona followed behind, sitting on a chair across the coffee table.
“Are you okay?” asked Mona.
Olie nodded. “I’m just tired.”
“Perhaps you should take a brief rest. I heard you tossing and turning last night.”
“You listen to me sleep?”
“Yes.”
“Please stop doing that.”
Mona nodded.
“Besides, I’m not sure I could sleep if I wanted to.”
“We could darken the windows,” said Mona.
“It’s not that. It’s just a lot to deal with,” said Olie.
“What is?”
“All of it. Especially now that people are claiming the union had something to do with the Seba attacks.”
“That seems unlikely.”
“I dunno. What was it, a copycat? What if all this is spiraling out of control?”
“Does your union hate Sebanic that much?”
“They took our jobs, Mona. For a lot of people that was all they had to support themselves.”
“The Sebanic were designed to take the workload off humans so that they would have time to pursue endeavors of their own choosing.”
“But if humans are no longer necessary, they’ll be treated so poorly they won’t be able to pursue anything.”
“Base income climbs as the Sebanic drive the economy with increased productivity.”
“That’s a Frederick Parker line, isn’t it?”
“He programmed this understanding into us. Yes.”
Olie shook her head. “I wonder what you would say about it if you could think for yourself.”
“I’m sorry, but I can think for myself. I still do not understand your point of view.”
“The economy can improve without the base income rising. Frederick Parker’s income could rise without it affecting ours.” Olie crossed her arms and exhaled heavily. “Plus, maybe I want to work. It’s how I’ll get back into space. Deep into space. Past Mars and into the ring of stars around the Milky Way. Explain how exactly I’m going to do that if Sebanic are manning all the ships?”
“Humanity wants to explore. To discover. To search and to find. To reach beyond their grasp.”
“Another Parker line?”
“Correct.”
“Well then, he should understand.”
“The Sebanic were not created to negate purpose. They were built to aid in its pursuit. Do you believe that?”
“I guess I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“Were you fulfilling your purpose when you were working as an AI droid technician with SeaCrest Desalination Systems?”
“I hope not.”
“Then I don’t understand.”
“Don’t understand what?”
“A Seba took over your job so you could pursue another one that might fulfill your need for purpose.”
“So, you’re saying the Sebanic did me a favor?”
“Yes.”
“Jeez, Mona…”
Mona continued. “Now, you are free to apply to jobs on cargo ships leaving from Portland or Seattle or anywhere else in the world you like. I can help you with that.”
“With the applications?”
Mona nodded. “And searching. J
ayson instructed me to help you in any way I can.”
“Okay,” said Olie. It felt ironic to have a Seba take over her job and then help find her a new one, but Olie was becoming more desperate to leave by the day. “But let’s keep it between us.”
“I shouldn’t tell Jayson I’m assisting with your application process?”
“Please don’t.”
Olie stood to go into the kitchen. Reading into the cold unit, she grabbed a couple of steak bars and put them in the hydrator to bulk up. As she waited for the machine’s ding, her eyes fell on Gerry’s empty terrarium. There was something inside she hadn’t noticed before.
“What the… Mona?”
“Yes?”
“Do these look like egg shells to you?”
“Yes. They strongly resemble the ones on the beach.” Mona blinked calmly.
“So Gerry is… a girl?” Olie asked, ignoring the hydrator’s chime as she dug through the sand to see if there were any baby rokes burrowing below the surface. Safety be damned, she hoped beyond hope they were still there.
Mona bent down for a closer look. “Negative,” she said. “Male pregnancy in sea creatures is possible. Male fish of the Syngnathidae family – commonly known as seahorses – are known to perform this function.”
“Fuck, Mona. Okay. This is bad. You mean all rokes can reproduce? That means…” Olie considered the possibility of just how many bloodsucking creatures were being born at this very minute.
“I am currently unable to tell if all of the animals can reproduce or if male rokes carry eggs like seahorses. It is an unknown species and I have no data on the animals. However, it appears that Gerry’s brood has escaped,” Mona gestured around the room.
“Oh my gosh.” Mona had been so distraught by Gerry’s escape, she hadn’t even thought to empty or repair her home. “What are we going to do?”
“Perhaps we should contact Jayson.”
“No, there’s no time,” said Olie to herself. “Ughhhh! Think, Olie, think!”
Olie abruptly stopped pacing when she heard a shrill scream coming from the back of the building.