(ID)entity (Phoenix Horizon Book 2)

by PJ Manney

  “Greg calls them the ultimate prosthetic,” said Will.

  “I want the most advanced, highest level of autonomy, AI, and tech upgrades, with wireless communication and interactivity. It needs to move and talk and think on its own, and we need to talk to it every way we can think of, all the time. Probably male, but otherwise . . . ” Talia shrugged.

  Greg and Will shared a knowing look. “Even our most expensive models don’t have that level of autonomy,” Greg said. “You’ll need more programing and robotics than most customers are willing to pay for. Some folks modify the hell out of these. I don’t care what they do with them in the aftermarket. Once modders invalidate the warranty, it’s not my business.”

  “Then I need your best modders. Only the ones we can trust,” she said.

  “We know who you are. And we all know Thomas Paine,” said Will softly. “Some of us do what we do because of him.”

  Talia arched an eyebrow at Will. “You make sexbots because of Thomas Paine?”

  Will smiled. “No, we redefine what it means to be human.”

  Talia sighed. “Okay. We’ll take the best of everything, including modders.”

  “Then we have to find a currency to accept,” Greg said. “Right now, it’s Chinese renminbi or direct transfer to and from a Swiss bank. And we insist on proof-of-transfer before it’s out the door.”

  “Swiss bank is fine,” said Talia.

  “Look on those five racks at the back. Gotta go make sure the Swiss thing still works,” Greg said, then speed-walked away.

  The racks were forty-foot wardrobe rods made of strong steel and mounted on large wheels with tires. Each rod had a computer pack with GPS and a motorized system to drive it around the warehouse or out to the shipping dock. The robots hung from a torso harness, with a strap around the neck and a hook that attached to the rod. Most were naked, to be dressed by the new owners. They were covered in a clear protective plastic wrap. The variety was staggering, although Asian-looking robots dominated this particular shipment. And cartoon characters. And young girls and boys.

  Talia must have made a physical sign of disgust, because Will said, “It’s better they use robots than real children, right?”

  Talia and her camera nodded. “Why do they buy from you and not China?”

  “We’re the best,” said Will. “Chinese competitors try to copy us, but they always cheap out. They can’t help it. Competition never lasts long ’cause we innovate the shit out of ’em. They’re always playing catch-up.”

  Talia mumbled into a throat mic, “What do you want?”

  Seeing all the body possibilities made Tom feel an odd need for familiarity. He said into her earpiece, “Could you stand one that looks like me?”

  She laughed. “Which you?”

  “It was always your call,” Tom said.

  She wandered through the racks for a few more minutes. Will followed her. Finally, she stopped cold and gasped.

  “This one,” said Talia.

  The sexbot was a white male, over six feet tall, broad shouldered, and moderately muscular with bright-blue eyes, a square jaw, a cleft chin, and brown hair with chestnut highlights. And an enormous penis.

  Will laughed. “In Asia, they call that one Mr. Handsome. Or James Bond. Popular with rich Chinese women.”

  Talia looked skeptical. “Which Bond do they think it looks like?”

  “All of them,” said Greg.

  To Tom, it looked like Peter Bernhardt, porn star. “You really want to stick it to them.”

  “You have no idea,” Talia said.

  “Buy two,” Tom said. “You can call them Thing 1 and Thing 2.”

  “Because one of you was never enough?” asked Talia.

  “Because one is staying here,” said Tom. “And one is going to China.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Zumwalt sailed into the Port of Los Angeles, all pointy stealth geometry, long and sleek like a needle. LA was still the busiest container port in the Western Hemisphere, but a twenty-first-century destroyer was an unusual sight. California and Washington State had cobbled together a West Coast navy from their existing bases, but none of them had a similar vessel. When the USS Zumwalt had been commissioned, the navy ordered thirty-one more Zumwalt-class ships. Then Congress lowered the budget to three ships. After that, no more were made.

  Instead of docking at the port, which was mobbed with cruise ships filled with immigrants from former American states and abroad, the ship pulled up to Island White, one of the THUMS/Astronaut Islands in San Pedro Bay named after four NASA astronauts who had lost their lives in the line of duty. A manmade isle surrounding an old oil-pumping operation, decorated in the 1960s, it looked like a Disneyesque vacation resort full of high-rises, waterfalls, and palm trees so as to blend in with the Southern California coast’s reputation as the playground of America, while not disturbing the ocean views with ugly derricks and platforms. The oil had run dry years ago, so it was abandoned. No one would bother them there.

  Talia arrived with the two unactivated sexbots and the young robomodders Greg and Will had recommended: Dev Parashar, Miguel Aznar, and Sasha Orlov. The Companibots boys had some of the best minds in robotics working both on and off the books. The money in the global sexbot trade was that good. Fiscal uncertainty and a general uneasiness about the future might slow down committed relationships, marriage, and childbirth, but it didn’t stop folks’ desire for a satisfying orgasm. Sex tech always led innovation.

  After thorough background checks by Ruth and Miss Gray Hat, Dev, Miguel, and Sasha set up shop in the Zumwalt’s empty personnel and engineering rooms. They were only a little younger than Greg and Will and, based on Ruth’s research, came from the top robotics programs in North America. They brought with them crates filled with upgrades: new eyes with hi-res sensors and regular, infrared, and ultraviolet filters; extra-sensitive skin and audio receptors; faster motor processors; and the lightest, smallest, most conductive carbon nanowiring produced anywhere. But the most important addition was the new “brain,” designed to be dependent on the signal sent from Major Tom’s server farm and yet had to be able to act autonomously and with minimal information if the signal was cut.

  The two Mr. Handsome/James Bond robots lay on tables in the middle of the room. Dev—tall, thin, with an austere face and eyes that were always squinting—worked on installing the new eyes, a sized plug-and-play model he’d invented to fit any Companibot’s product. Miguel—petite with a ready smile, quick movements, and quicker wit—added thick silicone cushioning to the joints, originally specced to be useless for anything beyond a roll in the hay. Sasha—athletic, nervously fiddling with fingers and jiggling legs—toiled through her mixed reality contacts on the communications platform. She had the communications array up, but there was a gap between the dependent and independent thought processes.

  “What happens in the time between getting cut from the servers and regaining autonomous control?” Sasha asked Ruth and her coworkers as she shook out her limbs. “And how do we make sure we can get server control back as quickly as possible?”

  “I b-begged Miss Gray Hat for help. Says she will. Danken Gott!”

  “Miss Gray Hat?” asked Sasha. She and her coworkers had worried looks.

  “L-l-long story . . . ,” muttered Ruth. She sent another message to Miss Gray Hat, requesting her opinion.

  Tom was a little jealous watching the young people tinker with his golems. He spoke up from a monitor. “Why did you all decide to work on robots?”

  Dev looked up from a robot’s empty eye socket. “Isaac Asimov said that one day humans and robots would become so much like one another, a combined culture and species would result. I want to be a part of that.”

  Miguel chortled at Dev’s high-mindedness. “I like the money!”

  The room broke out in laughter.

  “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” Sasha said. “We will be them someday—and them us. The more I can figure out how to d
o it right, the better we’ll all be.”

  “Miss Gray Hat has communication for Sasha,” Ruth said. “‘We can maintain limited computing capability, but much better connected to cloud. Find AI and resynchronization operation. Can lead to inconsistencies, but simultaneous updates can create merge conflicts. Spend some time resolving merge conflicts.’”

  Sasha nodded and cracked her knuckles. “Huh. Good idea.”

  The tinkering took several days. The biggest problem was how to replicate Major Tom’s mind in these new substrates. How much would be based on his original download and program, and how much would be independent and autonomous in each robot? What was important to keep, and what could they lose for both storage and efficiency’s sake?

  Miss Gray Hat lobbied for resolving merge conflicts at each stage. “Major Tom might represent the brains of the operation, but each robot will have experiences and input it needs to comprehend and share immediately. This means their identical programs split and generate their own data. He needs a truth maintenance algorithm to access and sync to every copy of him, so he will always know what each of the robots knows and vice versa. In essence, we’re updating their experiences, their model of the world, and their personalities at every step. They’ll be working from the same shared information, so every problem is a synchronization problem.”

  Ruth’s lips alternated between pursing fish-kisses and blubbering. “Nein. Another problem. He might remember. Too much. It’s meshugenah. Crazy. He’s the worst part of human. And machine. Humans need to forget. Sometimes.”

  Sasha asked, “So you want to throw out data?”

  Ruth’s lips stopped twitching. “Only what might cause too much pain . . . ”

  “No,” said Tom, through a console. “We won’t know what that is until too late. I need to know and synthesize. I can’t forget anything. And I’m not really human. It’s simulated pain. We can fix that.”

  Separate copies in cyberspace would automatically update new information to the original Major Tom. If they were cut off, they could hold their own, at least for a while. It would have to do for now.

  Miss Gray Hat called the team. Ruth put her on speaker. “As far as I can tell from the Memory Palace and the data Major Tom sent me regarding his change in energy and personality, he has been under a tempered data attack, with a clock speed slowdown and an input scrambler. It’s a computer version of enforced depression, like a human given chemical depressives in their drinking water, making it harder to process information and diminishing the desire to engage with reality. I’m guessing he’s had it for about a year. Maybe more.”

  Ruth twitched and stared at the robots on the worktables but said nothing.

  “Miss Gray Hat,” Tom said, “would my depression have affected Ruth?”

  “Human psychology is not my line of work,” the hacker’s synth voice replied.

  Sasha bounced her legs, cleared her throat, and shot glances at Dev and Miguel.

  “Something to say?” asked Tom.

  “We read about you guys a couple of years ago, when it all went down,” said Sasha. “It’s why we’re here. And I noticed how close you two are, both in the story you sent and in reality. It’s like when one spouse is depressed or addicted and the other gets dragged down in a spiral of depression or addiction. Even though you’re the first AHI and human relationship, I have to believe it’s possible.”

  Miguel and Dev nodded to Sasha. The room was quiet for a moment.

  “Sorry I dragged you down with me, Ruthie,” said Tom.

  “M-m-me, too,” said Ruth.

  “Do we all assume Carter and his group did this?” asked Tom.

  The four human heads in the lab nodded. Miss Gray Hat posted a thumbs-up.

  “Time to get that fucker,” said Tom.

  While the technical team sat hunched over mixed reality and haptic computer interfaces, or like Ruth clicked on an old-fashioned mouse and keyboard, Talia sat quietly in a corner of the room, saying nothing. Simply watching. Tom could see the conflict on her face and her withdrawn body language. She had feared him ever since he installed the more complex brain-computer interfaces as Thomas Paine, but she was still here, doing everything in her power to save him.

  Steve refused to participate at all. “Your weird fetish for the mechanical makes me sick,” he had told them. Now he hid in his and Talia’s bunk room, catching up on medical journals.

  The team activated one robot at a time. They called the first robot Tom 1. To Major Tom in his server, it felt like an awakening. There had been nothing physically tangible about his world until the moment of activation. Tom 1 didn’t understand the conflicting sensations suffusing his processors and couldn’t resist trying to resolve the confusion. Major Tom told his body to get up, but all it did was spastically shake so hard that the table jumped and shimmied.

  “Haltn!” scolded Ruth. “Khop nisht di lokshn far di fish!”

  Grabbing the noodles before the fish was like putting the cart before the horse. “Sorry, Ruthie . . . ” Major Tom mentally relaxed and cut off his robot’s inputs to stop the data flow.

  Time still moved frustratingly slowly to him. Interacting realistically with his body and the world around it would require a colossal balancing act of time and space.

  “Start again,” ordered Ruth. “And pay attention!”

  He turned on the data flow again.

  “P-p-point your left foot,” said Ruth.

  He tried, but he couldn’t connect the position of the foot with the command in his programing. There was no replicated autonomic brain region that kept the body functioning smoothly without a program or conscious thought behind it. He had to think of each action individually.

  “I can’t,” he said. “Any way to guide me?”

  Ruth grabbed the foot and slowly pointed it for him. “Feel that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now flex it . . . P-point . . . Flex . . . Now left knee . . . ” She grabbed his calf and thigh to bend the joint. “B-bend . . . Straighten . . . ”

  “Ruthie, you’re touching me,” Tom’s avatar said on the monitor.

  Ruth froze. Her eyebrows jumped. She dropped the leg and stared at his screen.

  “Ruth, how can you touch me?” Tom asked.

  Ruth’s right shoulder leapt repeatedly to graze her right ear. “I don’t know.” She thought about it. “You’re a machine. Not human.”

  “Really? Of all people, I would have thought you—”

  “D-d-don’t want to think about it!” She lurched up, rummaged around the room, found the pile of clothing they had bought for the robot, and pulled a pair of boxer shorts over his leg and up around his waist.

  Tom laughed from the monitor. “Why the hell do I need underwear? And shouldn’t we activate that? It might end up being my best feature.”

  “On your t-t-time. Not mine,” said Ruth.

  Over and over, he’d repeat actions to program and link his physical motor processor to his virtual ones, hoping that sooner than later it would feel natural, unconscious.

  “I’m going to regret this,” said Ruth. “Open your mouth. Let’s get a voice.”

  Major Tom rerouted his vocal feed from the monitor to the audio speaker in the throat of the robot. After some shockingly loud and dissonant sounds, Ruth ran speech-therapy drills so that his lips and jaws would match the sounds.

  “Ready for a sentence?” asked Ruth.

  “Yes,” said Tom 1.

  “Repeat after me: I apologize. To Ruth. For being an ass.”

  Sasha and Dev tried to keep straight faces, but Miguel burst out laughing.

  “‘I apologize to Ruth for being an ass.’ Does that make you feel better?” Tom 1 tried to smile, but facial expressions hadn’t been loaded yet. Instead, his cheeks juddered like Ruth’s.

  “Nein,” said Ruth. She adjusted the isolated muscular motors. “Okay, Genius Boy . . . ”

  She hadn’t called him Genius Boy since he had been alive. The apology must have worked
.

  “Time for your eyes,” said Ruth. “Dev?”

  Dev powered up the video connection through his new eye circuitry. Because these worked like cameras, Tom 1 was both extremely near- and farsighted. He could zoom in and out, pan and tilt in a full 180-degree half-spherical plane, and have clarity on any focal plane, even with his fisheye function. He could flip from regular to infrared to ultraviolet filters, allowing heat sensing and night vision. Ruth could see on the monitor what he was seeing through the sensors.

  “Bubula,” Ruth said to Dev, “nice eyes.”

  “Enjoy it, Dev,” said Tom 1. “I haven’t heard her give a compliment in years.”

  “I am finally working,” said Ruth, “with smart people. For the first time. In years.”

  Sasha, Dev, and Miguel beamed.

  Putting it all together would be quite the balancing act. After several hours of running all the body systems through their connective paces, Ruth finally said, “Now, Genius Boy. Get up.”

  The robot slowly rolled on his side, threw his legs off the table, and stood up to his full height. All eyes were on Tom 1. The techs took notes. Ruth appraised him with a critical eye.

  He thought about the move carefully: contract the right mechanical quadricep to lift the right knee, shift the weight forward on the left leg, create the imbalance to relax the right quad, lower the right knee, contact the ground with the right foot, roll forward on the ball of the right foot, propel the next step. And process the visual stimuli, skin stimuli, and vocalizations, all into a seamless whole.