by Mich Moore
pushed and shoved against the lead-lined vest that was their second skin at home. The cooler temperatures had hardened the leather straps and made the garment less compliant. It finally settled into a position where it wasn't digging into his ribs or threatening to slice his head off and he relaxed.
"Pete, go into my bedroom and get me my distance glasses, please."
The DAT dutifully got up, left the room, and came back with Palladino's sunglasses.
"Here you are, Dad."
"Son, these are my sunglasses." Peter had a special hook on his right shoulder that he used to carry small objects around with. Palladino removed the sunglasses from the hook and showed them to the DAT. "See? They have that special UV coating. Look. The letters UV are written right there. And they're darker than my distance glasses. Remember?"
Pete trotted off and returned shortly. This time he was carrying Palladino's distance glasses.
"Here you are, Dad."
"Thanks, Pete." He slipped on his glasses and peered at the TV set. "What'ya watching?"
"Black Beauty."
"Hey, that's a good one. You've only seen it like fifteen times already." He grabbed the TV remote and began flipping through the channel guide. "There's a wrestling match coming on at eight. Jake the Maniac and the Hollywood Flame. Should be a good one!"
Pete tried to crawl onto Palladino's lap. It was proving to be difficult. Pete was as large as a pony and weighed almost as much. Palladino put up with this DAT nonsense for a few seconds and then settled the matter. "Okay, son. Tell you what. Let's get on the couch and stretch out."
Palladino hoisted himself out of his comfy chair and onto the couch. It was a special construction of steel rods and titanium springs designed to comfortably accommodate the combined weight of a mature human male and a two-hundred pound AI. Pete stretched out beside him, cramming Palladino into the couch's back cushions. The remote popped out of the man's hand and landed right in front of Pete, who had it in his control in a flash. "You're a little slickster, you know that?"
Pete looked up at him with an innocent expression. "I do not know that, Dad." He gave Palladino a tiny nudge with his nose before flipping the channel back to Black Beauty.
At eight o'clock Pete relented and allowed Palladino to watch the wrestling match. Five minutes into the action the colonel fell asleep and was soon snoring loudly. The AI picked up the remote and switched to American Dad. Major Helen Avery discretely watched it all happen from the hall. She pushed a limp curl of damp hair from her face. What a life, she thought to herself.
And indeed, it had been some kind of life.
Helen Avery and Eugene Palladino, both officers in the Army's 84th Engineering Battalion, had been two of twelve individuals personally chosen by Colonel Richard Higgins to serve as primary facilitators in the integration of the DAT AI program into the American Army system. Helen, like Eugene, had been trained as a Special Forces combat engineer. All twelve officers were singles in their mid-thirties, in possession of multiple degrees, carried impeccable service records, and were childless (and, the joke went "friendless"). Their jobs were to serve as fathers and mothers to the first stand-alone, assembled intelligence beings ever built on American soil. They were to raise their mechanical offspring as fellow soldiers, giving them real-time lessons on how to fight guerrilla warfare with the enemy, and how to promote friendship and cooperation with the friendlies and the fence sitters. It was a job that went on seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. And it was for life.
The DAT family enclave was situated on the outskirts of a small Illinois town called Granite City. Illinois had maintained a resolute allegiance with the government in Washington. The governor had even asked the state's taxpayers to pass an emergency bill authorizing bonds to pay for revamping nearby Scott Air Force Base so that the region could provide aerial and logistical support for Army and Air Force campaigns directed against the steady encroachment of the Advance South. Some of that money had been secretly diverted to the DAT program and to the creation of the DAT enclave and its support staffs in Granite City.
When not on active duty, the DAT families were to live as fully-functioning military families, and from the outset Colonel Higgins had made it clear that they were to be solidly middle class. The families dwelled in a heavily gated cul-de-sac of two-story homes. There were American-made SUVs with heavily tinted windows for town travel and large backyards to accommodate the Army horses who paid regular visits. Christmas decorations went up during the holidays, fireworks went off on the 4th of July. The long-extinct American middle-class had been resurrected and given new life in Granite City.
On the outer perimeter of the enclave sat several apartment buildings. Redstone had rented these units for the hundred-odd Patriot personnel assigned to the families. The Patriots attached to the DAT Family Program had served with distinction during Operation Crucible and had also worked in some capacity with the Redstone Laboratory when the AI program had first booted up. These men and women had been put through enhanced train-up to junior Ranger capability by off-lined personnel from the Army's Delta unit, which would enable them to literally 'protect and serve' the DFP.
From the very beginning, John Voode had insisted on staff continuity whenever possible in order to keep down errors and friction during times of phase transition. The results so far had borne out the veracity of his rationale. The Patriot community now bunkered in Granite City had risen up lockstep with the DAT staff, aware of every twist and turn in the program, knowing all of its key players and even getting an occasional glimpse at Freddy Fields's playbook. This persistent inclusiveness had allowed these civilian soldiers to willingly provide invaluable flesh and metal support for the families at every turn, and with minimal training or funding from Washington.
Here in Granite City, the Patriots served as the unofficial palace guards for the six AI families, keeping out the curious and the trespassing with the required polite tenacity that was still the indelible seal on all law-abiding bodies under official governance by both America and the new United States.
Helen Avery herself was a Patriot, having joined with her family right after the war had begun, and she approached her current assignment as a DAT mom with the same quiet dedication that had earned her a fast-tracked advancement from the bottom rung of a her college's ROTC to the rank of captain within three years. She completed one tour of peacekeeping duty in Scotland and then one tour in Alaska in rebuilding efforts after the tidal waves hit. After that, she landed a gig in the newly co-ed Army Rangers, working in their counter-intelligence department. Within five months she was bored to tears. When Colonel Higgins approached her about the possibility of working in their AI department with a new product, she had jumped at the opportunity.
That might have been a mistake. That refrain was the one that she kept hearing inside her head when she was alone with her thoughts. After a few months of techno razzle-dazzle, it finally dawned on her that it was going to be her housekeeping skill set rather than her mental prowess that would get her any meaningful recognition from the upper brass. They called it "DAT socialization," which was essentially a crater-sized rabbit hole that the AIs and their handlers would shimmy down every day. This grand charade was designed to trick the robots into thinking that they were ordinary soldiers engaged in an ordinary war. Back in the beginning, one of the first of several misguided DAT creators had decided that the best way to achieve lasting results was to embed the AIs into simulated family units, which would (in a perfect world which no longer existed and never did) give them the constant emotional and educational support required to go from a pile of metal parts to upstanding citizens in five years. Helen likened socialization to a slow morphine drip. Or more accurately, a slow LSD drip. Her part in this deception was to play that of dutiful wife and mother. A latter-day June Cleaver. Not some whiz kid full of fresh (and saner) ideas. Uh-uh. She would be paired with another Higgins recruit, Eugene Palladino. Palladino had a solid reputation amongst the Rangers as a brave, if not occ
asionally heroic, leader in battle. The adjectives "cynical" and "abrasive" were also routinely applied to him, but that did not frighten her; she had experience with that personality type before. Eugene Palladino was eerily similar to her father in temperament. The same blustery nature; some of the same silliness. The plain humility. It both startled and fascinated her. But the real carrot-on-a-stick was far more intimate. Eugene Russell Palladino was, without a doubt, the most skilled lover she had ever known. And so even if her brain was recoiling at the demeaning nature of her job, her genitalia were in complete agreement with the DFP. And so she threw herself into becoming an excellent housemate for Palladino and a sound mother for Peter, caring and providing for both man and machine as if they were actually her own.
My own. Sure, kid. She lived in the possession de verisimilitude. Whenever Marsha Van de Veer would stop by on one of her 'mental health breaks,' she would say out loud what Helen sometimes caught herself thinking: "I don't care what anyone says. Marty and Colleen are my family." Of course, it was well known that Marsha and Marty were perhaps losing sight of the true purpose of the mission. The DATs served at the pleasure of the military, as
