by Mark Alpert
I don’t want to see that look on her face. Not now, not ever. I won’t let her see me until she’s a Pioneer too.
“I’m sorry.” I try to think of something funny to soften the blow, but for once my circuits won’t cooperate. “I can’t let you in. Because I’m naked, that’s the problem. None of my old clothes fit anymore.”
No response. I hear nothing at all from the other side of the door. The silence lasts for fourteen seconds. Then Shannon lets out a sigh. “All right, have it your way. I’m going to the lab to wish Jenny good luck.” I hear her take a step away from the door, then another. But I don’t hear a third step. She seems to have stopped in her tracks. Another ten seconds pass.
Finally, I hear her voice again, but now it’s softer. “Adam, can I ask you a question? About the procedure?”
I stride closer to the door. After taking three clanging steps, I halt within reach of the doorknob. “Sure, go ahead. Ask me anything.”
“Marshall told me something else. He said there was some kind of problem right after they transferred you into your Pioneer.”
“Yeah, Dad had to delete the breathing commands. They were copied from the part of my brain that controlled my heart and lungs.” I adjust the timbre of my robotic voice to make it sound as reassuring as possible. “But that won’t be a problem from now on. When Dad does the procedure again, he’ll make sure to delete those commands right away.”
“But Marshall said the problem caused some damage to your memory.”
How the heck does Marshall know so much? Did he talk to one of the soldiers who work with Dad? “My system deleted about five percent of the total data in my memory. But we still haven’t figured out what I lost.”
“You haven’t noticed anything missing?”
“Dad says the information I lost might’ve come from my subconscious memory. Those memories influence the way you think and act, but you usually can’t recall them in any detail.”
“But do you remember what happened just before your procedure? What we said to each other? About the limbic system and emotions?”
There’s another long silence. Now I’m standing close enough to the door that my acoustic sensors can pick up the sound of Shannon breathing on the other side. It’s irregular and raspy, almost as labored as my own breathing was in the last days before my procedure. But as I listen to the sound, I can’t help but think how beautiful it is.
“Come on, Shannon. Of course I remember. And I still have all those feelings.”
She lets out a long breath, a loud whoosh of relief. Then, in an embarrassed rush, she says, “Okay, good, I’ll see you later, Adam,” and with a clatter of footsteps she heads down the corridor toward the laboratory.
• • •
Afterward, I resume pacing. At the same time, though, I resolve to do something I’ve avoided so far. It’s not one of General Hawke’s assignments. It’s something Dad suggested a couple of days ago and hasn’t brought up since. He said I ought to write my mother a letter.
Mom refused to come to Colorado, but she isn’t in Yorktown Heights either. Hawke said she wouldn’t be safe there. Although Sigma doesn’t know where Pioneer Base is, it knows I was chosen for the project and it could easily look up my old address. Hawke was worried that the AI might try to find me by wheedling or forcing the information out of my mother. He didn’t specify how Sigma might do this—would it try to kidnap her? Maybe by hiring a team of mercenaries?—but it seemed prudent to take precautions. So the Army moved Mom to an undisclosed location. The hiding place is so secret that Hawke won’t even reveal it to Dad. We can’t call or email her, but the general said his men could deliver written notes.
I create a new file in my memory for the letter. In some ways, writing is so much easier now—my circuits can compose hundreds of pages on any subject in less than a second. But this particular message is a challenge because I’m writing to a person who believes I’m dead. Mom thinks I’m just a copy, an electronic replica. She believes her son is in heaven now and I’m an artificial intelligence designed to think and act like Adam Armstrong. And who knows? Maybe she’s right. But I don’t want her to feel that way. I want her to come to Pioneer Base and be my mother. Somehow I have to convince her that I’m her son.
I start the note with “Dear Mom.” That’s easy enough. But after those words, I’m stuck. I can’t even think of the first sentence. I decide to devote more processing power to the problem, and soon a huge number of my circuits are engaged in the task of composing the letter. Within twenty seconds I’ve written more than two thousand messages. Some of them are long, tearful pleas, and others are short, angry tirades. But as I review them all, I can’t find even one that’s any good. It’s an unsolvable problem. No matter what I write, Mom will think it’s an imitation of what her son would’ve written. I can’t convince her I’m real.
In frustration, I give up on writing. Then it occurs to me that I could draw a picture for her instead. I scroll through my memory, searching for an image that would be especially meaningful to her. I retrieve dozens of memories from long ago, pictures of Mom in our swimming pool and at the ice-skating rink. I collect more recent memories too, some of them not so pleasant: an image of Mom crying as she drives me to the doctor’s office, a picture of her yelling at Dad in our living room.
I even retrieve my very last memory of her, when she came into my bedroom in Yorktown Heights and held my Pinpressions toy against her face like a mask. I could select any of these images, download it to a printer, and send the picture to Mom. It would prove that I’m alive, that Adam Armstrong still exists. If I can remember these scenes, then I must be Adam! But it would also prove that I’m not human anymore, because no human could reproduce those memories so faithfully.
I give up on drawing too. Instead, I try to imagine what Mom’s doing right now in whatever hiding place the Army has found for her. In all likelihood, she’s mourning me. I picture her wearing a black dress and standing in an anonymous motel room, staring out the window at an empty parking lot. A soldier comes into the room and hands her an envelope with the name “Adam Armstrong” written on it. She tears the letter to pieces without even opening it. Then she goes back to staring out the window.
I become so immersed in this imagined scene that I stop pacing. I also stop monitoring the data coming from my visual and acoustic sensors. I focus all my attention on the dreamlike stream of invented images. After a while I picture a different scene, the lawn behind our house in Yorktown Heights. I’m eight years old and playing touch football with Ryan Boyd and two other boys. One of them is a short, red-haired kid whose name I can’t remember. The other boy is tall and blond. I can’t remember his name either, and when I stare at his face, I can’t make out his features. His eyes and nose and mouth are all blurred together. But the sight isn’t frightening. I’ve played football with this kid plenty of times, so his blurred face doesn’t bother me.
By the time I emerge from the dream, my internal clock shows that forty-five minutes have elapsed. I realize I’ve just taken a nap. In computer terms, I guess you could call it “sleep mode.” Although I never lost consciousness entirely, most of my circuits stopped calculating. This is exciting news and also a great relief. I’ve been wondering if I’d ever fall asleep again.
Then I hear Shannon scream. It’s so strange and unexpected that for a moment I think I’ve slipped back into a dream. But according to my acoustic sensors, the screaming is real. It grows louder as Shannon races down the corridor toward my room.
“Adam! Adam!”
I rush to the door, unlock it, and stride into the corridor. I’m worried about Shannon’s safety, and that overrides all my concerns about her seeing me. She runs toward me as fast as she can, hobbling and swaying. “Adam, you have to come! You have to help us!”
Her lopsided face is pale, frantic. Something is very wrong.
“What is it?” I ask,
but I think I know the answer. My system has already drawn up a list of likely threats, and the most probable one is Sigma. “Are we under attack?”
Shannon stares at the camera lens in my turret. “No, it’s Jenny! We’re losing her!”
• • •
As I stride into the laboratory I notice it’s more crowded than it was during my own procedure. In addition to Dad and his four assistants, General Hawke and half a dozen soldiers are in the lab, and so is Jenny Harris’s father, who’s wearing a fancy pinstripe suit. A Pioneer marked with a big white 2 on its torso stands in the center of the room, its legs restrained by thick steel clamps that fix the robot to the floor.
The soldiers have obviously learned their lesson from my procedure and are determined not to let this Pioneer run away. But now they face a bigger problem: the robot is in distress. Its arms are flexing and telescoping in and out, extending and retracting for no apparent reason, and its turret is madly spinning around. A blast of static comes out of the Pioneer’s speakers, followed by a prolonged shriek.
Dad hunches over one of the computer terminals. He’s staring so hard at the screen that he doesn’t see me come into the room. His face is flushed and sweaty, and when I look at him in infrared, I notice that his pulse is racing. He types something on the keyboard, then looks up at the Pioneer. “Jenny, please respond! Can you hear me?”
The turret stops turning, but the robotic arms keep waving about. Another shriek comes out of the speakers, then a high-pitched voice. It’s garbled and distorted, but it’s definitely Jenny’s voice. “Stop…stop…please…oh God!”
Shannon, who followed me into the lab, covers her mouth with her hand and starts to cry. At the same time, Mr. Harris rushes forward and points a finger at Dad. “What’s going on? What’s happening to her?”
Dad’s typing again. He responds to Jenny’s father without looking up from the keyboard. “Please stay calm. I’m working on the problem.”
“She’s in pain!” Mr. Harris points at the Pioneer. “Why is she in pain?”
Dad shakes his head as he stares at his computer screen. “She opened the links to her memories, but she can’t reassemble them. I’m trying to find out why.”
“But it worked before!” Now Jenny’s father points at me. “Look, the other robot’s right here!”
Nearly everyone in the lab turns to look at me. General Hawke narrows his eyes and frowns. Dad gives me only a quick glance, but in that fraction of a second I recognize his expression. I’ve seen it on his face before, most recently when Sigma attacked us in his office at Unicorp. It’s a look of desperation. Dad’s more frightened than he’s letting on.
“Please, Mr. Harris, I need to concentrate. I’m trying to help your daughter.”
Hawke steps forward and rests a hand on the shoulder of Mr. Harris’s expensive suit. “Come on, Sumner. Let’s—”
“No!” He lunges toward Jenny’s Pioneer. “Jenny? Are you in there? Talk to me, sweetheart!”
The robot lets out a third shriek, louder than the ones before. “Please…I don’t…I can’t… Let me out!”
General Hawke grabs Mr. Harris around the waist and pulls him away from the Pioneer’s flailing arms. At the same time, I turn on my wireless data link and connect to the laboratory’s computers. This enables me to see the same information Dad is viewing at his terminal about the dire status of Jenny’s Pioneer. Her neuromorphic circuits have already been configured to match the memory patterns of Jenny’s brain, but the system is generating new thoughts too slowly. The output isn’t enough to maintain her consciousness, so she can’t control her arms or speak more than a few words.
Something is interfering with Jenny’s calculations, and after a hundredth of a second I recognize the problem. Tremendous surges of random data are clogging her electronics. I experienced the same thing in the first moments after I became a Pioneer. Jenny is terrified.
I take a step toward Dad, who’s typing furiously on his keyboard. He’s sending instructions to the Pioneer, trying to staunch the flow of random data in Jenny’s circuits, but he can’t do it fast enough. The connection between Dad’s terminal and the Pioneer is like a bottleneck, preventing him from taking full control of the robot. Jenny has to fix the problem herself, but she’s not even trying. The fear has overwhelmed her. Because her circuits lack conscious control, they’re starting to randomly realign, erasing her memories. She’s literally disappearing.
I can’t let this happen. I have to help her.
I turn my turret away from Dad and stride toward the steel cabinet behind him. The cabinet is locked, but I rip the door open and grasp the item I need: a high-speed fiber-optic cable. It’s designed to plug into the Pioneers and transfer gargantuan amounts of data between them, a hundred times faster than the wireless data link. I knew it would be in the cabinet because this information was in one of Hawke’s databases. It’s a good thing I finally downloaded those files.
Dad looks up from his terminal and gapes at me. “Adam, what are you doing?”
“Stop sending instructions to Jenny,” I say, turning back to him. Then I insert one end of the fiber-optic cable into my data port, which is in the top half of my torso. “I’m going to transfer myself to her circuits.”
His eyes widen. “What?”
“I read the files about the Pioneer’s electronics. The circuits have plenty of extra capacity. There should be room for both of us in her machine.”
Dad shakes his head. “The circuits weren’t designed for that. You won’t be able to keep your mind separate from Jenny’s.”
“I don’t want to keep it separate. I need to show her how to control her system. I’m going to walk her through it.”
He shakes his head again, more vigorously this time. “It’s too risky. You can merge your files with Jenny’s, but how will you retrieve them afterward? If you can’t make a clean break from her, we’ll lose both of you.”
Dad steps away from his terminal and comes toward me from the left. Meanwhile, General Hawke stops grappling with Mr. Harris and hands the guy over to his soldiers. Breathing hard, Hawke approaches me from the right. “Listen to your father, Adam. We can’t risk it. And besides, you’ve never transferred yourself before. You haven’t practiced it even once.”
Hawke’s moving fast, but not fast enough. “Better late than never,” I say. Then I hurtle toward Jenny’s Pioneer.
The biggest challenge is avoiding those flailing arms. I calculate the safest path, and when I’m close enough to Jenny’s torso, I extend my right arm to block any blows from that direction. With my left arm, I insert the other end of the fiber-optic cable into her data port. But as I do this, Jenny’s right arm bashes into my turret.
My frame shudders at the impact, and my acoustic sensor records a deafening clang. At the same time, my visual sensor goes dead. Jenny broke my camera.
I panic for a moment—I can’t see a thing! I’m blind! But an instant later I come up with another plan. I swiftly analyze the last images from my camera, observing the trajectories of Jenny’s arms, then extend my own arms to the predicted positions of hers. As our limbs collide, I open my hands and grasp Jenny’s arms at the wrist joints. Then I close my hands tight and lock them into place. Jenny keeps thrashing, but now her arms are immobilized. She can’t accidentally break the data cable.
My acoustic sensor picks up a jumble of voices. General Hawke shouts, “Break the link!” and Dad yells, “No, it’s too late!” I decide not to wait to see who wins the argument. With a silent prayer, I initiate the transfer.
It’s like being sucked down a drain. I feel like I’m falling, like someone just pulled the ground from under my footpads. I swirl downward into darkness, crushed on all sides, my mind compressed into a thin, furious stream. It’s horrible, nauseating, even worse than I expected.
The only good thing is that it doesn’t last long. In less than two se
conds I’m back on my footpads, but they’re really Jenny’s footpads, not mine. I’m inside her Pioneer, and it feels like I’ve landed in the middle of a hurricane. Her circuits are roiling with waves of random data. They’re pummeling me from every direction.
It takes all my strength just to hold myself together. I can think only the simplest of thoughts: I’m here, I’m here, I’m Adam Armstrong, I’m here! I repeat this thought thousands of times, millions of times, holding it like a shield against the surges of data. It seems like a hopeless battle at first, but after several billion repetitions I start to make progress. My mind advances into the roiling circuits, deleting the random data and pushing toward where the noise is coming from. In a tenth of a second I reach the source, which is Jenny’s horrified mind.
My mind touches hers, and at the moment of contact a whole panorama of memories comes into view. I see thousands of images from Jenny’s childhood, pictures of her parents and her older brother and her family’s mansion in Virginia. But Jenny can’t see anything. She’s too paralyzed with fear to organize her memory files. She senses my presence, though, and her reaction just makes things worse. Her mind generates a fresh wave of terror, and her anguished cries go right through me: Stop…please…oh God…stop!
Jenny! I struggle with all my might to reach her. Jenny, it’s me! Adam Armstrong! I’m here to help you!
No…stop…let me out…LET ME OUT!
She can’t see or hear me. Her fear is too strong, and it’s eating away at her. The waves of noise are flooding her circuits and battering her memories. In less than a minute she’ll have nothing left.
