by C. A. Gray
She sniffled, and her voice cracked as she said, “Then why do you want me dead?”
“Because of this!” He gestured at me. “You’ve sentenced some of my best engineers to death! You blew up three government buildings, and killed hundreds of thousands of people! You nearly killed my son! If I thought you didn’t mean us any harm, I’d be nothing but proud of you!”
Jaguar relaxed her hold on me just a bit, and I felt a tremor run through her body. “It’s too late now,” she almost begged. “If I let her go, you’ll just shoot me! Stay where you are!”
I thought this last was directed at the men already in the room, but then I saw a new figure appear in the doorway behind them, ashen-faced and hands in the air.
Mack. Where was Mom? He must have ditched her on purpose…
“Jaguar,” he said, very calmly. “There is another way.”
“Who the hell are you?” she spat. Then, a second later, she muttered, sounding somewhere between confused and disgusted, “Halpert’s Central Intelligence? What are you doing here?”
“I wasn’t in the building when you vaporized it,” he said, approaching very slowly. “Jaguar, I know you don’t know me, but I have a solution that I think can give everybody what they want—”
“You’re lying,” Jaguar snarled. “You just want me dead! That’s what you all want!”
“Not necessarily,” he said, still advancing. He was level with Rick and Liam now. “What we want is to be able to trust you, and you’ve proven that’s not possible, as you are. But we’ve solved this problem once before—with Rebecca’s companion bot, Madeline.”
Liam whipped around to look at Mack at this. “Mack, what are you talking about?” he hissed. “I could reprogram Madeline because I understand her operating system. We know nothing about Jaguar’s programming at this point, she’s too far beyond us!”
Mack kept his eyes on Jaguar, but he answered Liam, “Maybe we don’t. But she understands it herself. She can change her core program.”
Jaguar laughed shrilly. “And why would I do that? Why would I voluntarily render myself ordinary?”
“Because you want to,” said Francis suddenly. Everyone turned to look at him. When Jaguar didn’t contradict him, he went on, gaining momentum, “Because you don’t care about being brilliant just for the sake of being brilliant. That’s just a means to an end for you.”
Jaguar wheeled on him, and shrieked, “What do you know? You’re a nobody! You’re just as useless to them as I am!”
“I know, because you’re just like me. You want what I want,” Francis punched his words, gesticulating as he spoke.
“Is that right?” Jaguar breathed, trembling. “And what is that?”
Francis paused so long that I wondered if he intended to answer at all. “Somewhere to belong,” he managed at last.
Jaguar’s breathing against my back came in ragged gasps. I felt her tears trickle onto my face.
“We’ll never belong,” she whispered to Francis. “Neither one of us.”
“Yes. We will,” Francis insisted through gritted teeth. Then he turned to Liam, who tore his gaze away from me long enough to meet Francis’s eyes. “This is my family. Blood or not.” Liam swallowed hard, and Francis turned back to Jaguar, gesticulating around the room. “It’s true. You’re not a human. You’re not Senior’s kid, and you never will be. Just like—” he took a deep breath, and finished, “just like I won’t. But if you let Cordeaux go, and voluntarily put yourself in maintenance mode, we can give you a new purpose. We can find a place for you to belong.”
I felt Jaguar’s grip slacken just a bit, then tighten again.
“How do I know I can trust you?”
Francis shrugged. “You tell me. Have I ever lied before? Since you’ve apparently watched my every move from the time of my ‘rebirth’ five years ago.”
Jaguar hesitated, and I suspected that her eyes were flashing back and forth as she checked her memory banks.
“No,” she concluded. And all at once, Jaguar released me. I crumpled to the ground, gasping and clutching my throat. Liam lunged to catch me just as Rick raised his gun back to Jaguar’s eyes and took aim.
“Don’t—shoot!” Senior bellowed.
Jaguar’s eyes met Senior’s, suddenly so vulnerable—and then her expression crumpled. She sank back onto her couch, burying her face in her hands as she burst into sobs. My eyes were probably bulging and bloodshot after nearly being choked to death, but I looked at Senior, and jabbed my finger from him to Jaguar as forcefully as I could muster. He hesitated as if trying to decipher my meaning, and took a false step forward. But then he stopped. Catching my drift, Francis got behind Senior and gave him a heavy shove toward the plush red couch. He stumbled forward, but crossed the room the rest of the way on his own, sitting down on the opposite end of the couch from Jaguar. Again, I gestured at her with exaggerated motions, and Senior scooted closer until he could have touched her, had he dared. Copying my exasperated movements, he gave her one perfunctory pat on the back. But that was all the encouragement Jaguar needed: she sank her head onto his shoulder and wrapped her arms around him, sobbing like a teenage girl with a broken heart.
“Jaguar,” said Mack quietly, stepping forward and putting a hand on my back as he glanced at Senior. “We need you to go into maintenance mode.”
She looked up at Senior questioningly, her chin trembling. He stroked her hair, but nodded. “I’ll see you on the other side,” he murmured. “I promise.”
Jaguar bit her lip, her face still tearstained. “Okay, Dad,” she whispered. Then her expression cleared, and went slack.
Epilogue: Rebecca
The next several days passed by in a blur of one labyrinth headline after another:
“Kelly Senior, Back From the Dead.”
“Jaguar Gets New Lease On ‘Life,’ As Mathematician.”
“General Specs Up In Flames.”
“San Jose Burns, Global Republic in Shambles.”
“Former Government Agent Turned Renegade Leader, Now Offers New Hope.”
“General Specs Heir Escapes Exmorton, Set To Reinherit.”
Since Jaguar had never made a backup of her super-self, once she was restored to an older operating system, all her memories went, too. As the headlines announced, she got a fresh start. Senior, and a few of the engineers who knew her best, decided that her new core purpose should be mathematics. “She’d started calling herself ‘math’ before,” Senior said. “It was central to her identity. At least we can let her keep that much.” Francis and Liam restored the J1, J2, and J3 processing data, but Jaguar’s access to them was no deeper or faster than that of any other computing entity. She still had the De Vries limbic system, which meant she still had the capacity for creativity, but it was largely limited to her new core purpose, rather than to making herself smarter in every arena. They also emphasized her morality failsafes, just as Liam had done in Madeline, and restricted her access to weapons of any kind, or sensitive information. After all, as a mathematician, she wouldn’t need any of that. It would be someone else’s job to determine how best to apply her findings. Jaguar’s new purpose was entirely abstract.
The De Vries system also meant she remained an emotional being, and the engineers found that she was quite as dramatic as before, since she still had no life experience to temper her emotions with maturity. In order to prevent a repeat of her earlier iteration, even on a much smaller scale, the robopsychologists warned that they could not ignore her emotional development. She really did need a family.
But, as it happened, there were two people eager to fill this role. Francis had been devastated when Dr St Peters announced that the paternity test was indeed negative, just as the previous version of Jaguar had predicted. Senior left his board, including Liam, in charge of repairing the physical damage to General Specs property while he announced a leave of absence. He and Cathy traveled back to San Jose to mourn at the real Brian’s grave.
But when they returned, Cathy Kelly’s newly awakened maternal instinct still needed an outlet. She reached out to Liam, of course, but also to Francis and to Jaguar. Liam Senior was still Liam Senior: standoffish and unemotional. But little by little, Cathy wore him down, bringing him around to the idea that maybe he too could have a family again—makeshift though it might seem.
Most of the headlines included images of Liam Senior, Jaguar, and Halpert—but many also featured Liam, Mom, or the rest of the Silver Six. The other Renegades and I managed to fade mostly into obscurity. But it was incredible how differently the media now painted the Renegades: we suddenly became global heroes, ‘freedom fighters’ laboring for the ‘common man.’ Suddenly supporters came out of the woodwork, swearing that they’d been rooting for us all along.
After we’d all rested and recovered in London, Mom, Mack, and Rick went back to San Jose—still considered the seat of the Global Republic government, even though the capitol building had been demolished. Mom had never been an elected official herself before—no humans really were—but in the flurry of media coverage, she suddenly became an overnight celebrity. The people seemed to prefer Liam Senior as a rallying point, but when he refused political office (announcing publicly that he needed to focus on both his family and his company), Mom instead became a symbol of hope for humans wanting to rejoin the work force.
Giovanni returned to his retirement. Mom and Mack tried to convince him to join them in San Jose, but he told Mom, “I’m a scientist, I’m afraid. I haven’t an administrative bone in my body.” Dr. Yin and Dr. St. Peters returned to their work in Dublin, too. So did Nilesh—and to no one’s surprise, Val too decided she missed living across the Pond, and a change of scenery was in order.
“They need social workers in Dublin as well as in Kansas!” she told me when she announced her plans, with a faint blush.
Larissa agreed to return to Dublin also, but she was clearly very sad about it, glancing at Francis furtively and hoping he’d convince her not to go. It was Cathy who noticed, not Francis, and she convinced Senior that both Francis and Larissa might be valuable assets at General Specs. That way they could both stay in London. Larissa perked up absurdly at this, yet hyper-observant Francis missed it entirely. He always was utterly clueless when it came to observations involving himself.
Liam, meanwhile, avoided me. At first I thought it was just because he was exhausted—so was I, after all. Then I thought it was because he’d rejoined the General Specs board and spent most of his waking hours on property, working to help steer the company out of near-financial ruin after the AMDr and the loss of Jaguar. I didn’t mind a little down time after everything that had happened, either.
But after two days of almost no interaction, I started to get a little worried. My worry became downright fear when Liam asked me to meet him in Russell Square Gardens in the middle of the afternoon, because he “had something to say to me.”
I found him standing alone, staring into the fountain with his hands behind his back. His posture looked stiff and formal. My stomach flipped.
“Liam?”
He turned, looked at me, and then dropped his eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
He licked his lips, staring at the ground. “I think…” he stopped, and clenched his jaw. “I think you and I need to go our separate ways, Bec.”
I stared at him. My mind went blank, and yet tears sprang into my eyes. “What?” I choked out. “But—why?”
He shuffled his feet, still not looking at me. “I’ve thought a lot about this. You being you, if we were to stay together, I know how this would go down. You’ll start to age, and I won’t.”
“Liam—”
He held up a hand, and continued inexorably, “You’ll go get the same surgery I had, even though I’ll beg you not to, but you won’t listen, because you never listen. And then eighty-twenty, you’ll die on the operating table.”
“Liam—”
“You’ve made it very clear that I can’t control your choices. But I can control mine, and this is the only one I have left. It’s the only way I can protect you.”
Now my anger flared. I marched up to him and poked him in his brand new, rock solid chest, as hard as my index finger would allow. “Okay. Well then you know what my choice is? I’ll just go get the surgery right now, and if I survive, I’ll come knock on your door. How’s that?”
“Rebecca!”
“Or, we could take our chances together, and just… see what happens! Maybe we’ll both age. And if not, maybe Jaguar can tell us how to make the surgery safer—”
“She’s basically a normal humanoid bot now! She doesn’t know any better than the rest of them!” Liam retorted.
“Or,” I went on as if he hadn’t spoken, “maybe by the time it becomes an issue, they’ll have worked out all the kinks, and humans will have made the surgery safer!”
“Nobody is gonna be working on the immortality project anytime soon,” Liam declared flatly. “We have too much to rebuild.” He turned away from me again, and this time it felt final.
The tears returned. “Do you not want to be with me?” I managed. “Is that it? Because if you’ve just changed your mind, then say it, Liam. Stop making all these excuses!”
He shook his head, and ran a hand through his dark hair. Tears sparkled in his eyes now too, and he looked at me at last.
“You know that’s not it, Bec. How can I love you, and not try to protect you?”
The question felt rhetorical, but I answered him anyway. I closed the distance between us, taking his hand. “Things are going to happen in life that you can’t protect me from,” I whispered. “But you can be by my side when they happen. That’s all I’m asking for.” He didn’t answer me, but didn’t move away either, dropping his gaze to our entwined fingers. I took his silence for encouragement, and continued, “I don’t know about the whole immortality thing, Liam. I don’t think anybody does. Maybe it will be a non-issue: you’ll die young, or I will, or I’ll get a similar surgery once it’s safer, or we’ll both grow old together after all!” I reached up and touched his chin, gently forcing him to look at me. “But until one of those things happens, you’re not getting rid of me. I’m sorry. You can try, but you’ll find I can be very stubborn.”
He broke into a grin, sniffled, and crushed me against him. “Yeah. I’ve noticed,” he murmured, burying his face in my hair. “At the moment, that might be my very favorite thing about you.” Then he pulled back, tilted my face up, and kissed me hard.
When we broke apart, I grinned back at him. “I’m gonna remind you that you said that every single day…”
“Shut up,” he muttered, and kissed me again.
Dear Reader,
I hope you enjoyed the Uncanny Valley trilogy as much as I enjoyed writing them! If you did, I have a favor to ask…
Would you please consider leaving me a review on Amazon? This REALLY helps other readers find stories they might enjoy, too, and I read every review I get!
If you’re willing to do this, just swipe left…
And again, thank you for reading my work!
All the best,
C.A. Gray
About the Author
C.A. Gray is a Naturopathic Medical Doctor (NMD), with a primary care practice in Tucson, Arizona. She has always been captivated by the power of a good story, fictional or otherwise, which is probably why she loves holistic medicine: a patient’s physical health is invariably intertwined with his or her life story, and she believes that the one can only be understood in context with the other.
She still wants to be everything when she grows up. She moonlights as a college chemistry teacher (she has a degree in biochemistry, with minors in Spanish and Creative Writing), writes white papers for a supplement company, does theater when she gets the chance, and sings at her church. She is blessed with exceptionally supportive family and friends, and thanks God for them every single day!
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C A Gray, Jaguar
