by Corey Ostman
He held Grace’s hand as they started toward the steep path that led to the prairie above. Each of her steps was tentative, shaky. Her body swayed like she walked on sand instead of solid stone. He hoped it was because of the physical injuries, not neural damage.
Once they made it to the top, Avonaco steered Grace past the ledge where the fight happened. He knew they had to get back to the house, but he wanted one more look. He altered his vision to search for manmade angles, and estimated the warmth of the grafty compared to the cool of the rock.
When he found it, he wished he hadn’t.
He found the grafty smashed, half covered in gravel. He bent over, grasping the wrecked thing in his hands. Cold tears welled in his eyes and streaked his cheeks. His body shook, and his artificial heart wanted to break from his chest. He had hoped to find it somehow sitting pristine and intact, resting at the rim of the canyon. But the twisted, split disc was almost certainly beyond repair.
He shoved the grafty in his pocket.
“Avo?”
“Y-You’re not going to be able to walk all the way back to the house,” he said, voice ragged. “You’ll need to ride on my back.”
He hunched over, cupping his hands by his sides for stirrups.
“Climb on!” he said.
Chapter 25
Raj sat on the porch. Across the prairie, the setting sun touched the tips of the grasses as they waved and shimmered. An hour before, Dan Donner had ridden south to find his daughter. Somewhere out there was Grace, with Jaya in command of her mind and body. Raj waited for them to return, rehearsing what he’d say. How could he justify what had been done to her mind?
“Sweetie, you know you’re itching to work on Tim Trouncer.” Anna’s voice soothed beside him.
Tim. Grace had sacrificed so much to bring him here—altered her face, suppressed her own mind. What if he couldn’t bring Tim back? He turned toward the house, watching the kerosene lamp flicker in the window.
“I don’t know. I should probably stay here and watch.”
Anna touched his shoulder and offered a hand. “C’mon.”
He took one last look across the prairie and followed Anna into the house. They crossed the living room and opened the cellar door. Anna descended first as he closed the door behind them. He turned on his ptenda light. Reaching the bottom door, Anna tapped her ptenda and a latch on the other side clicked.
“The one place where ptendas work in Cloister 11,” she mused, not for the first time. It was still odd for her, his Martian-born lady, to live in a place technology was not needed to sustain.
“Where’s the duffel?” Raj asked, coming down the stairs.
“Just inside,” she said, leaning beside the door to pick it up.
They walked into the lab, cellar lights flickering on. Anna hoisted the duffel onto the long lab bench in the center of the room.
“Can you secure Marty and Grace’s ptenda?” he asked, pointing to a cabinet on the wall opposite the stairs.
“Sure,” she said, reaching into the bag.
After Anna removed Grace’s gear, Raj pulled out Tim’s torso, turning it so that it rested upright on the bench. It was hard to imagine the dull mimic fabric as luxuriant fur. When Tim was alive, he could make his coat look like any canine, but he could also pulse large splotches of color or intricate symbols across his body. It was one of Tim’s favorite upgrades from human to AI.
Raj pulled out the head next. He brought it close to his face, turning it so the vacant eyes stared into his own. The right lid drooped. Raj closed the eyes and placed the head on the bench just in front of the torso. The four legs followed.
“That’s everything,” he said, staring at Tim’s lifeless body.
“What would you like me to do?” Anna said.
“You can attach the two front legs and the cranium. I need the back legs off while I open the rear port.”
He dug into his pants pocket and pulled out a surgical wrench. His favorite tool. He’d had it since he was a teenager, used it to experiment on his own mechflesh—he’d even taken it to Mars. It was this wrench that he’d used to bolt together Tim in the first place.
Raj handed the wrench to Anna. “Here. The legs will snap into their sockets, but you’ll need to tighten the restraining collars.”
“Got it.” Anna took the wrench and began working on the legs. He smiled. It reminded him of when they’d first met on Mars. Repairing a robot. He was glad he didn’t have to do this alone.
Raj reached under Tim’s torso, his fingers following the seam of the mimic fabric until he found a shallow depression. He pressed until it clicked, then hinged the hatch outward and stuck his hand inside. The blue gel bladder, Tim’s extraordinary liquid mind, was cool to the touch. Instead of resisting his probing, it folded around his fingers. The volume was lower than he remembered. Tim had used small amounts in his escapades, to no personal harm, but had lost a great deal on Ceres after the aposti attack. Was it too much?
Raj grabbed his mag goggles and strapped them on, tapping the temple controls to 10x magnification. He had mechflesh eyes, but still preferred the goggles over his implanted lids. Using familiar tools made working on the body of his friend less distressing. He dipped his head to get a good view under Tim’s torso.
The blue gel was supposed to look like spaghetti, neural paths shimmering under 10x. Instead, the gel looked featureless. He tapped to 100x: the strands were there, but they floated apart, broken and curled.
Raj rotated the goggle’s lenses to the right. Then lowered his head, with its gray grafty, toward the blue gel bladder. With a boost to its power, he hoped his grafty would provide an external neural pulse capable of making the strands react.
He initiated the power sequence. Vivid memories flooded his mind. The smell of cardamom and his mother’s warm smile. The rough feel of hay under his hands. How his sides had hurt from laughing after Tim cracked his first joke. The sound of steak sizzling in his Bod Town apartment, Grace chuckling at the kitchen table. The first kiss with Anna, leaning against a horse stall. Her soft licorice hair.
He directed the flow of his memories down to the blue gel. But the shattered strands made corkscrews and stayed apart. They weren’t linking properly. There was no direction to their interaction.
“There’s so much damage,” he whispered.
“Hmm. Is that why the tongue isn’t blue?” Anna asked.
Raj lifted the goggles and raised his head. She’d connected the two front limbs and the cranium, and her fingers brushed against the clear tongue that lolled from the open PodPooch mouth.
“He’s low on gel,” Raj said, setting the goggles on the bench. Anna’s eyes searched his, their communication silent. What to do next? But he wasn’t sure if there was anything that could be done. The loss of gel and the twisted neural paths made his stomach lurch. Perhaps he was just prolonging the inevitable. Perhaps Tim really was gone. And Grace’s sacrifices were for nothing.
He let the silence draw out, his eyes unfocusing. Far away, thunder rumbled across the prairie.
“Plug him in, Raj,” she said quietly. “Ask the questions. It can’t hurt.”
She meant the iterative questions and responses that he’d used to reduce the error between Tim Trouncer’s blue gel and Eugene Bransen’s brain. Assuming Tim’s gel was cohesive enough to provide any answers at all. And even if it did, Tim had learned so much in the intervening years. Could he even determine an acceptable error band?
“Yeah. I guess,” he whispered, locking the right rear leg into its socket and then repeating the process for the left.
“Here,” Anna said, rising from the bench. “I’ll get the memory for you.”
She returned with the familiar green case. It was battered and scratched, the handle nearly torn off, and it still sported a tattered sticker that advertised Skull Dizzy, one of Bod Town’s notorious brain clinics.
He unsnapped the rusted latches and pried open the case. Inside were banks of crystal storage, the la
ser for read/write, and the tiny feedback computer to interface with the PodPooch chassis. Raj straightened out the interface cable, stiff after so many years of being coiled. He plugged it into the socket by the PodPooch ventral hatch and switched on the feedback computer. He listened to the hum of the machine, concentrating on the monotonous sound and not the futility of their situation.
“The neural matrix isn’t aligning,” Anna said. She’d put on the goggles and was leaning over a gel bladder. “But it’s wiggling.” She leaned in closer to the chassis. “Are you sure there’s enough current to provide structural cohesion and computational energy?”
Raj blinked. He’d told Grace to leave Tim Trouncer’s nuclear pack connected, but maybe she’d left it dialed down, trying to get the pack past security checkpoints.
Raj moved up next to Anna and reached out, pressing the gel bladder aside. The nuclear pack was fitted in below. Its indicator pulsed slowly: a low setting.
“Ok, it’s low,” said Raj, trying not to let his excitement have his head. “Keep an eye on the gel. I’m going to turn up the power.”
“Will do.”
He felt for the pack’s dial, then turned it clockwise until the bladder against his forearm began to stiffen.
“The gel’s expanding,” Anna said.
“And the tongue?”
“Still gray.”
Raj pulled his hand from the chassis and watched, leaning against Anna. A few seconds later, the PodPooch twitched, and blue gel spurted from the leg joints.
“Shit!” said Raj.
He dove into the chassis, lowering the level of the nuclear pack. Anna adjusted the table so that the metarm covering its surface curled up along the edges, keeping the precious gel from pouring onto the floor. Soon the gel stopped flowing from the joints.
Another failure.
“I should have checked the gaskets,” said Raj.
“It’s ok,” said Anna. “We contained the spill.”
“Yes, but it shouldn’t have spilled at all. The joints are supposed to be self-healing.”
She took out a second set of goggles and held them out to him. “I’ll work on putting the gel back. You concentrate on the seals.”
Raj sighed and put on the goggles. Under magnification, the limb seals were cracked and powdery.
“I’ll have to replace each seal,” he said, reaching under the bench and counting the drawers with his fingers until he reached the second from the bottom. He retrieved four plastic-wrapped gaskets and slapped them onto the bench.
“Don’t forget the head,” Anna said.
Raj removed a fifth replacement from the drawer. When he did, something about the movement down and up, or the fact that he was getting a replacement for Tim’s head, settled into his chest and he suddenly felt like he couldn’t breathe.
“Anna,” he said. “I don’t think I can do this. Tim is—”
“We still have tests to run before we can determine that.”
“How am I going to tell Grace?”
“One step at a time,” Anna said. She squeezed his arm, and he closed his eyes, willing himself out of his panic.
They went to work. Anna used a surgical vacuum to gather the gel and put it back inside the bladder. Raj wiggled each gasket into place. He had just finished tightening the cranium when the crystal memory began to beep. He blinked the menu in his goggles to the interrogative display.
“What is it?” said Anna, looking up from her side of the chassis.
“According to this, the blue gel has reached an acceptable error level.”
“What does that mean?”
“His brain aligns with Eugene Bransen, Jr. The original parameters of the experiment.”
“How close?”
“The same error amount as before.”
“Raj. That means—”
“I know.” He swallowed. “L-Let’s turn him on.”
His hand shook as he removed the interface cable. He glanced at Anna, wanting her assurance to proceed. She nodded. He lowered the PodPooch rear hatch, clicking it into place.
The legs bent themselves, then flexed, repeating the motion three times. The head raised until the snout was level.
Then the mouth opened.
“Hello! I am an Unlimited Unlimited PodPooch! I will be a good companion to you. Let’s start by placing me on a level surface.”
The voice was chipper and mechanical, the basic startup demo for the chassis. Raj reached up, slowly releasing the strap that held the torso until the paws grazed the top of the bench. The legs flexed again as the chassis stabilized. He removed the strap.
The PodPooch began singing an advertising jingle, stamping its feet in rhythm.
“The PodPooch is your friend. Your very very special friend. I can run real quick and my voice is slick. Your very very special friend!”
The song ended with two rapid barks.
Raj shuddered.
“At least Tim’s standing,” Anna offered.
But this wasn’t Tim. This was what any PodPooch would do, with or without a blue gel payload.
“We’re only getting autonomic functions,” he said. He pushed the PodPooch, trying to unbalance it, but its positional feedback seemed to be working.
This is just a stupid toy, no better than when I bought it secondhand on Percy Street.
They jumped at the sound of boots on the floor above, stomping through the house and down the stairway.
“Raj! Anna!” Dan’s voice. He pounded on the cellar door. “I’ve got Grace!”
Chapter 26
“You said Grace? Or is it Jaya?” said Anna.
Avonaco looked at them, hollow-eyed. “It is Grace.”
“I can walk!” Grace protested, squirming in Dan’s arms.
“She’s not a very good patient,” Dan said, smiling at his daughter.
“Bring her here!” Raj motioned to the empty lab bench next to Tim’s. Dan laid Grace on the bench. Anna rolled up a jacket and put it beneath her head. Grace shielded her eyes from the bright ceiling lights and moaned. Avonaco came alongside Raj.
“She fell—” the boy began.
“Avo rescued me,” Grace coughed. “Carried me nearly halfway home and then dad rescued us. I was ok when Avo got me out of the canyon, but I’m feeling worse now, I…” Her voice trailed off and her body went limp.
No! Raj brought his fingers to her throat. There was a pulse, but his breath hitched when he saw the wound at her temple. The grafty was gone.
“I think the ride on my back may have been too rough for her, but it was the only way I could think to get her home as quickly as possible,” said Avonaco. “She has a concussion, some broken ribs and lots of contusions and scrapes.”
“Is she gonna be ok?” Dan asked.
Raj wanted to reassure Dan, but he wouldn’t know the extent of the grafty damage until after he’d given her a proper scan. He looked at Anna, and she nodded.
“Come with me, Dan,” she said quietly. “Let’s give him some room to work.”
“But Grace—”
“Will be right here,” she said firmly. “Avonaco, you come up the moment you have more information, understand?”
The boy said something—Raj was too busy to pay attention, setting up his medical equipment. Soon the door to the lab was closed and Avonaco was back beside him.
“What happened to Jaya’s grafty?” Raj asked.
Avonaco frowned, dug into his pocket and showed him a shattered grafty.
“I’m sorry, Avonaco.”
The boy shrugged and looked at the concrete floor.
“You said she fell?”
“Pushed. One of the cowboys. On a big yellow horse.”
“Yellow horse?” Raj said. “Ephron’s the one with a yellow horse here.”
“I did not hear his name.”
Raj shook his head. “Let’s stabilize Grace. Make sure to tell Dan when you go back up.”
“What is Grace’s neural activity?”
“Oscillat
ory, in a fairly steady pattern.”
“That is at least satisfactory.”
Raj nodded. “Normally, I could stabilize her neural activity with a replacement grafty, but I can’t remove my own and there isn’t another here…”
He lost focus momentarily, something that happened when his own grafty was correlating data faster than his human mind. When he first got his implant, it had unnerved him, but now he allowed himself to daydream when he felt the data shift because he found it let the grafty and his brain reach consensus more rapidly than if he tried to consciously control it.
Gel. He glanced at the PodPooch chassis. “Gel? Oh,” Raj said. “Tim’s blue gel.”
“What about the gel?” said Avonaco.
“It could stabilize her brain functions.” He and Tim had compared experiences years before. Each had referred to the experience of grafty joining with mind as intuition but right now the gel might help Grace’s brain return to normal neural activity, soothe the gaps left by the missing grafty.
Avonaco’s gaze went to the PodPooch. “Has Tim been restored?”
“Basic PodPooch activity,” said Raj tightly. “Nothing unique to Tim.”
“Is the gel functioning?”
“At the basic level, enough for Grace,” said Raj. “It can form connections.”
“How much of the gel is Tim? Will you be introducing yet another mind?”
Raj looked down at the blank body of his friend. What mind? his grief asked. “The gel doesn’t really work that way.”
Avonaco’s jaw tightened. “Well I would not know.”
“And we both know why,” Raj snapped.
“You were stupid to come to cloister,” Avonaco said. “Now you are trapped here. But that is how you think: you gather your tech to yourself, never mind that what you created could help other people. If that gel has applications for Grace, who else could it have helped? If you had shared even the basics of the gel’s mechanisms, the AI community could have helped you.” He flung his hand toward the PodPooch. “With Tim.”
“If I had stayed in Bod Town, I’d have been in a corporate prison in a matter of weeks,” said Raj.
