by PJ Manney
“Turn it off,” Tom said to Ruth. Amanda disappeared from their screens.
Veronika saw his expression and froze. “What’s wrong?”
“That’s Carter,” said Tom.
The Zumwalt continued north in the open ocean, avoiding the territorial waters of the SSA. They were monitored by the occasional submarine, and Tom was sure that high-atmosphere surveillance UAV and satellite cameras followed them, but otherwise it appeared that they were left alone.
On a loading dock, Tom pulled a black T-shirt over Tom 1’s head and helped him into the sleeves. Tom 1 looked back at him with the blankness that off-the-shelf sexbots exhibited until engaged. To protect the server farm, Tom 1 was disconnected from Major Tom. The robot no longer shared a single mental entity, so Tom could not know what Tom 1 was thinking. Or vice versa. To allow Tom 1 to act autonomously, the team deleted as much information as they could and packed him with as much computing power as possible. There wasn’t a lot of “Major Tomness” left.
Tom wondered if the robot could still be considered sentient, or whether it was another Foxy Funkadelia, a deceptive Turing Test. And yet he had the oddest sensation they were connected by blood, as if he were sending his brother off to war.
“You know what to do?” asked Tom.
“I ask for Conrad,” said Tom 1, engaged and animated. “I look for Amanda. I look for anyone else I might recognize from the memories you left me. I get you information. Then employ my initiative for mayhem. Is that correct?”
“That’s right,” Tom said. “Now go get ’em.” It was a suicide mission. But Tom still felt connected, as if he had just handed the robot the weapon to kill them both. He was nauseous. Perhaps he had adapted to his distributed, multisubstrate personality too well? He had taken for granted that the robots would always be there for him, monitoring the world, expendable on his behalf, a part of him. With Tom 2 destroyed and Tom 1 cut off, there was now only his human body and the server farm. He was losing himself, one by one. Recognizing his own fear of abandonment, Tom pushed the feeling back.
“Bye, Tom 1,” said Tom.
The robot’s eyes tracked to stare into Tom’s. He smiled the same, sad smile as Tom.
“Bye, Tom,” said Tom 1.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The large wooden crate arrived at the delivery bay of the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, DC, only a few blocks from the White House. Tom 1 lay cushioned within. When it sounded like the area was clear, he turned on the lighted drill in his hand and opened the box from the inside.
Cameras tracked Tom 1 as he walked toward the White House.
The location was not familiar to Tom 1. Tom remembered the allée of trees leading to the White House through Lafayette Park, where Carter had convinced Peter to meet with Josiah Brant and join the Phoenix Club. But those and other memories had been wiped from Tom 1. Memories are complex, webs created of innumerable strings. Cut one and others are affected. Tom 1 ran mathematical calculations and language tests, but despite his best attempts at concentration, he was no better than a human with cognitive deficits. He could speak coherently and process others’ sentences and ideas. He could do basic logic and make conceptual connections. He had desires and some memories. But he wasn’t going to solve complex problems or have eureka moments. Having once known the whole World Wide Web, he was now confined to a small room, adequate for his present purposes, but not what he was used to. Tom wondered how he felt.
Tom 1 approached the sentry post at the gate on Pennsylvania Avenue with his hands up. Armed security detained him, and the Zumwalt lost visual contact as he shuffled into the White House with six armed SSA marshals escorting him.
Unseen by the marshals was a tiny fly, barely larger than a mosquito, which flew unobtrusively from Tom 1’s hair and landed on the collar of an agent behind him. It was a MAV, a micro-air vehicle, which used both wings and six legs for transportation and carried a tiny camera that could record and transmit.
Once inside the White House, the MAV activated its camera and began transmitting. Tom 1 was led to an examination room in the basement. Major Tom directed the MAV away from any sensors, toward a hallway wall nearby, where it landed, waiting.
Six hours later, a web-search alarm rang on all shipboard consoles. Tom, Veronika, Ruth, and Talia gathered to watch a live all-media broadcast from the White House. Tom 1 had not resurfaced.
A press conference for favored media was in full swing in the briefing room. The press secretary made contradictory statements: “The robot surrendered itself.” “We found and captured the robot.” “A robotic weapon of mass destruction.” “The robot has no ability to hurt the president.” A gray-bearded engineer took the podium and explained the odd appearance of a robot identical to the one discovered killing refugees at Port Everglades and that Thomas Paine had then detonated as a bomb. Behind and next to the press secretary stood a mixed group: computer and robotics engineers in casual clothing to one side, bureaucrats and security in bland, ill-fitting navy suits, blue shirts, and striped ties on the other. In case it all went sideways, the administration could spread blame among these representatives, and thus blame no one. It was a DC specialty.
“We’ve examined the robot thoroughly,” said Graybeard. “It’s a bizarre, jerry-rigged contraption, but harmless. Completely harmless.”
No media outlet wanted to pay for reporters to do location work if they didn’t have to, especially now that the White House was in a different country than either New York or Los Angeles, so reporters literally phoned it in, their faces projected on large GOs atop remote-controlled robots. The White House could turn them off at will if they asked questions the press secretary didn’t like.
A robot flashed its red light, indicating that its reporter had a question. The name of the news organization was displayed at the top of its GO screen. Graybeard pointed to the robot. “Yes, Atlanta Journal?”
“Is it true it’s a sexbot?” the reporter asked. The attendees laughed, including other reporters.
“Yes, it is,” said Graybeard good-naturedly. “But we can’t be sure its sexual equipment has ever been used for its intended purpose. Unless that’s been weaponized. Watch out, ladies!” He laughed loudly, giving permission to the rest to laugh along. One young engineer looked uncomfortable. Tom sensed the discomfort wasn’t about sex jokes. Graybeard shot a glance at him and continued, “This thing can’t do squat.”
When Tom had been Peter Bernhardt, he had witnessed this dynamic often: a youngster discovered something that the project lead hadn’t found, or wouldn’t acknowledge, and the hierarchy shot the young one down. Consensus was only safe in the room, not in the field. Consensus always led to mistakes. Sometimes fatal ones.
It was sadly human error to ignore a lone voice of warning. And the young engineer was right. Tom 1 was, in fact, a nasty little Rube Goldberg machine of destruction.
The press secretary explained that capturing this robot was the first step in President Conrad’s prime objective: to find and try Thomas Paine and his compatriots as enemies of the state. The sentence would be death. Cash awards would be given to anyone with correct information leading to their capture. The threat to the nation would be eliminated.
Tom 1 was led into the Oval Office. The reactivated MAV had settled back into his wig, then alighted on the curved wall to transmit the scene to Tom and the team back on the Zumwalt. Behind the Resolute desk—built from the timbers of the British arctic-exploration ship HMS Resolute and given by Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes—sat the president of the Southern States.
Terrence Conrad lounged back in his desk chair. His flawless postsurgical face—almost as robotic as Tom 1’s—creepily skirted the uncanny valley. He wore a grimace. Eight Secret Service agents, two at each exit, stood at attention, with laser and mini-electromagnetic-pulse-disruption weapons.
Tom 1 stood still in front of the desk.
As he watched through the MAV’s camera, Tom felt an unnerving sense of déjà vu.
The office was exactly as he had seen in visual reenactments and the news. Few realized that the windows had been replaced with antisurveillance tech, including sound scrambling and opacity technology. Surrounded by the dark-brown sheen of the glass, the room felt like it was cast in perpetual night. Tom referenced the visual archives of the world’s most famous oval room, laying images from different times on top of one another. The colors and decor had changed with each administration. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration had rebuilt the room to help the crippled president access the White House’s private residence more easily, but its essence had remained throughout the decades. Conrad’s decorators had implemented a bilious pastiche of red, white, and blue. A flag stood in front of each blackened window: the Stars and Stripes to the left, the presidential flag in the center, the Confederate flag to the right.
Back on the bridge, Veronika gasped. “You don’t think he’ll blow himself up now?”
“N-n-n-no,” said Ruth, who turned to Tom. “He knows better, right?”
“We’ll see,” said Tom.
Talia watched without saying a word, her arms crossed, her lips pursed, her face taut. Tom thought, Please, Tom 1, don’t kill the president. Not yet. He has something to say. And we need to hear it.
They watched breathlessly as Conrad rocked back in his chair, breathing through his sensuous lips in a display of obvious dissatisfaction. “You’re the infamous Thomas Paine? A sexbot?”
“I come in all kinds of packages,” said Tom 1.
The president gently scratched his coiffed head. “Didn’t think your type was good for much other than a little—” He vocalized a sound like squeaky springs and pumped his fist horizontally in the air.
“Are you prejudiced against robots,” asked Tom 1, “or can we discuss terms?”
“Terms?” said the president with a smirk. “I got you here. We’ll dismantle you, figure out how you work, and find the enemies behind you.”
“You already dismantled me,” said Tom 1.
Conrad’s eyes narrowed. “We determined you weren’t a threat. Now we’ll take you apart like some kid’s Christmas present.”
How Tom hated that bromide: dismantle-and-understand, as though his complexity could be reduced to some chips, wires, and gyros. Even as an engineer, he had known he was more than the sum of his parts. Dismantle-and-understand sounded stupid when the far smarter Josiah Brant had said it in the club bunker before he died, and it sounded imbecilic out of this wannabe strongman’s mouth.
“You’ve got nothing,” continued Conrad. “I’m dictating terms. This was all part of my plan to capture you.”
“Ask him why, damn it,” Tom muttered to himself on the bridge. “This bastard loves to hear himself talk.”
Tom 1 said, “What was your plan?”
Conrad straightened his spine, widened his large blue eyes, and took a deep breath. “We had a surplus of unhappy people. They are dangerous for a new government and have to be dealt with. The first people who leave in a crisis are the biggest troublemakers. They hate it here. They can’t become part of the fabric of life. They leave, or die trying. The next wave is doubtful. They might be convinced to stay and behave. Or not. Any wave after that is waiting to see what happened to the first two. They see success, they’ll keep fleeing, like a leaky drain. But we made sure you killed them. Now they’ll stay where it’s safer. With us.” He pointed a finger at Tom 1. “We’ll take care of them, because you will always fail.”
Score a point for Conrad. Tom had led the victims into Conrad’s trap. The president was the devil they knew, Thomas Paine now the devil they didn’t. In times of perceived trouble, people elected strongmen, autocrats, and bullies. Subconsciously, they wanted to be led, even into an abyss.
“Automation is expensive,” continued Conrad, “and only necessary when the cost of labor goes up. We’re not raising labor costs. Don’t need to. Never needed to, as long as we kept a strong hand on the workers. And eventually? We’ll clone the ones that work best. Strongest. Efficient. Obedient. Everybody’s happy.”
Tom 1 winked. “I bet ‘Dixie’ is your favorite song.”
On the bridge, Tom laughed out loud. He hadn’t thought the robot could make jokes anymore. He hoped that meant that Tom 1 was capable of making nuanced decisions as well.
“Playing the smartass won’t save you,” sneered Conrad.
“I’m not smart. I’ve got few brains left,” said Tom 1.
“We wouldn’t have accomplished our goals without you. You think we need to be as smart as you all to stop you. Not true. Too smart gets you nothing in this life. Too smart gets you stuck at some college with a bunch of other too-smart idiots who don’t understand how the world works.”
“And how’s that?” asked Tom 1.
“Well, for starters, every place is different. Those San Fran and New York values . . . lifestyles”—he made air quotes—“they don’t mean much here.”
“Values? Like freedom?” asked Tom 1.
Conrad laughed. “Freedom? The only folks deserving of the word have to earn it. Or inherit it. Prove you’re good stock, a productive citizen, decent, clean, hardworking, and then you’ve earned the right to freedom. Some in our country aren’t much more than talking animals. They don’t need”—air quotes again—“freedom. They wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
“Earn . . . or inherit it?” repeated Tom 1. He looked confused.
“Well, sure. How the world’s always worked. You think people change, just because we got new toys?” Conrad gestured at Tom 1. “Bottom line: We had a labor issue and chose to use the manufacturing assets we had, instead of uptooling with fancy technologies that need replacing every two years and that we’d have to buy from other nations, or worse. We’re stopping the outflow. We’ll build a wall around the entire South. Including New Orleans and Florida. We’re doing what’s best for everybody. You’ll see.” He smiled broadly, his white teeth gleaming.
“A wall . . . ?”
“Not a real wall. A military wall. Air, land, and sea. No one in or out without our say-so. Lock us up tight as a bug in a rug. Safe and predictable. Our citizens love it. Everybody’s happy.”
Tom 1’s head cocked to one side. “How did the Phoenix Club pick you?”
His ego pricked, the president stood up, his wrinkle-free face reddening under his makeup. Leaning his hands on the desk, he said, “I’m the president of the Southern States of America. And you’re not, so watch your mouth, dipstick. I got here because I’m the best. The best.” He pounded the table for emphasis. The cheek under his right eye twitched.
More likely, the club had reckoned that Conrad was both the most photogenic and the most expendable, should it all go to hell. His ascension had the stink of Josiah Brant all over it: make a figurehead and let him fall if it fails, just as he had tried to do with Thomas Paine. But Josiah’s mind had been locked up in the Memory Palace since his death, and destroyed after Carter’s escape. Could Carter have learned Josiah’s lessons so well? Or was Josiah copied along with him?
“So it was the Phoenix Club,” said Tom 1.
“The Phoenix Club built this nation! We wouldn’t have accomplished all the good we did without it! And you act like no one likes me. There are millions who love me—millions!—who would do anything I ask. You? I can live without your love. You’re done. You’re not even human.”
“One last question, sir,” said Tom 1, “and then you can dictate terms.”
“Damn right I’m dictating terms, you creepy puppet,” muttered Conrad.
“Why are the seasteads gone?” asked Tom 1.
“Really? That’s all you got? Simple. You’re either an ally. Or an enemy. The near-shore economic zones? Fine. They can stay. They know they’re just a small military exercise away from annihilation. But the deep-sea freaks? You can’t negotiate with those fools. They’re anarchists! They don’t follow anybody. They’re a threat to the global order. They have too much power over things they can’t handle. Mon
ey, identity—that’s important stuff! So we said goodbye! Everyone agreed, and chipped in with weapons, vessels, anything we needed to protect our nations.”
“Everyone?”
“The club, Russia, China . . . ” He stood taller. “All the important players. We’re protecting the planet.”
“China and Russia? Aren’t they North America’s adversaries?”
“They know what they’re about and will do anything in their power to accomplish it. We have a lot to learn from them.”
“So it wasn’t about Dr. Who?” asked Tom 1.
“Dr. Who? Who’s he?” Conrad seemed genuinely puzzled. The club leaders still siloed information as “need to know.” Dr. Who was above this man’s pay grade.
“Doesn’t matter,” continued Conrad. “We got what we wanted. Safety and global compliance. Sold the data to the highest bidders for a good profit. The American way. Now everybody knows who’s boss.” He assumed a wider stance.
“But the seasteads were a small threat in the scheme of things,” said Tom 1.
“Kill it in the cradle,” said Conrad. “Anarchists undermine our way of life.”
“What if they could have helped you?” asked Tom 1.
“A bunch of water-loving, flag-burning anarchists? No way.”
Tom 1 let a moment of silence hang. “And your terms?”
