Android: Rebel (The Identity Trilogy)

by Mel Odom

  “Your traveling acquaintance isn’t going to impress many of the people you meet,” Shelly said.

  “It’s better that way,” I replied, too quietly for anyone around me to hear. “I don’t want to be noticed, and if I were traveling alone, I might draw attention.”

  “Whoever you meet is going to try to get away from the two of you.”

  “We’ve had worse prisoners we’ve brought in.”

  “Agreed, but that’s a short list.” Shelly shifted her attention to the overhead holo display broadcasting media from a Mars network. “Looks like the unrest between Earth and Mars is getting worse.”

  On the screen, vid rolled of a riot in Phobos colony, one of the southernmost colonies where we were headed. Martian police equipped with shields and non-lethal weapons tried to handle a protest against Earth-corps that had gone violent. The vid was pre-packaged, not live, and was intercut between different cameras for the most effect. I judged from the height perspective that there were at least five different vid sources during the riot.

  One of the vid people stood behind a Phobos PD officer who used her stunstick to render a man unconscious who was clearly strangling the life from another man. Jolted into unconsciousness, both men collapsed to the ground where they were trampled on by other protestors and civilians.

  A large man lunged from the crowd at the police officer. She wheeled quickly and brought her weapon around, but the man caught the stunstick in gloved hands and resisted her efforts to club him. The view pulled away from behind the officer as her attacker bore her backward. Then the angle cut to another vid operator who stood at the side and caught the action there.

  Since I couldn’t hear the transmission and I had access to the Net in the building, I keyed up my internal PAD and routed audio to myself.

  “—gathering started out peacefully, but didn’t remain so. Police department spokesmen here in Phobos aren’t saying who started the violence, but there’s no doubt that it turned bloody very quickly.”

  The police officer gave ground as the big man drove her backward and swung a big fist into her helmet, rocking her head back with each blow. Then she set herself and kicked him in the crotch. Her attacker stumbled forward another step, but then froze, obviously trying to remain on his feet.

  Yanking her stunstick from the man’s grasp, the police officer drew the weapon back and swung it. The baton slammed into the man’s face, crushing his nose and knocking out two of his teeth. Blowing bloody spray, his eyes already glazed, he collapsed to the ground.

  The vid suddenly swung skyward, catching a hovering Phobos PD troop hopper thirty meters overhead. Light poured through the plascrete dome and I could tell from the angle that it was mid-afternoon.

  “Protesters were there to announce grievances against the sudden increase in AgInfusion’s fertilizers.”

  A new window opened up on the monitor and revealed a middle-aged black man who spoke with an Ethiopian accent. His face showed fear and sadness. “My family and I were persuaded to relocate here to Mars for the promise of a better future. Our country still struggles to feed its people. My wife and I buried our first two children in our village.” His voice broke.

  Three men rushed another police officer and took him to the ground where they started beating on him. They screamed in open mouthed anger as they delivered their blows. The police officer’s features eroded under the impacts, skin split and bone fractured.

  “Then we came here to Mars, to Phobos colony,” the man continued. “I wanted to be a farmer. I knew the work was hard, and the pay was not much, but it is a necessary thing for the colonies to survive. People need to eat. I want to feed them.” He shook his head. “But with the way the Earth-corps keep raising the price of seed, the way they limit the seed so that you cannot build a seed crop because the plant DNA will not replicate past the first generation, farmers here are fighting a war they cannot win, losing the battle centimeter by centimeter, season by season.”

  A corp secman in a hardsuit entered the battle and fired a pistol into the backs of the men beating the police officer. Watching these events was hard. My first impulse was to go there and do something. Only logic dictated that the events were past, that I could do nothing, so I remained seated.

  The pistol was non-lethal. No wounds showed on the attackers as they faltered in their chosen endeavor and turned to face their attacker. Almost as one, two of them fell, overcome by a drug that had been delivered to their systems.

  The third man pulled a monofilament knife and closed on the corp secman before he could retreat. Outlawed for civilian ownership, designed strictly for military use, the deadly blade penetrated the secman’s hardsuit and opened up his stomach. Blood spilled over both men. I knew instantly that the color had been touched up for the vid. Filters had been slapped onto the blood to make it more colorful and vibrant.

  Some of the parents in the train station covered their children’s eyes or tried to distract them from the monitor. Some of the younger children quickly looked away, their faces troubled and scared.

  I thought about Shelly’s daughters, tried to imagine how they would respond to such events. They would consider them horrific. Shelly and her husband had worked hard to give their two daughters a safe home.

  Then I looked at Shelly sitting quietly beside me and knew that the protection those children had been given hadn’t been enough.

  Shelly looked at me. “What happened to me wasn’t your fault, Drake.”

  I knew that this Shelly was an operation of my persona, and I was aware that I was telling myself I wasn’t to blame. Maybe that was why I didn’t believe it.

  “Everything ties back to the Chimeras,” I told her. “And it all ties back to Simon Blake.”

  “You’re not Simon Blake.”

  “Part of me is.” I knew that was true.

  Shelly stared at me for a moment, and I thought maybe there was no answer to what bothered me the most. “What you have to do is hang onto the parts of you that aren’t Simon. He doesn’t get to claim everything you’ve turned out to be. And you don’t want to lose yourself to him. You’re getting close to doing that.”

  I wasn’t certain if I was trying to reassure myself or if I was probing at my greatest fear. I focused on the monitor, watching as the violence continued. People were dying—had died, I corrected—and there was nothing I could do about it.

  “I didn’t come to Mars just to bury my next child,” the man on the monitor said. “I came here hoping for a future.” Anger flickered in his eyes. “Now the Earth corps want to take that away from me. Take that away from my children.” He shook his head. “I’m not going to allow that to happen.”

  The window showing him closed, then the fatality and wounded lists started to scroll. Sixty-eight colonists had died in the protest. No one knew for certain how many of them were anti-Earth demonstrators and how many were simply bystanders who got caught up in the violence. Seven Phobos Colony Police Department officers were dead. Three corp secmen had died. The list of injured was in the hundreds.

  The monitor switched over to a nosie seated inside a studio. She was blond and pretty, the kind of looks that would have gotten her a career on Earth, on the Moon, or on Mars. “Today’s riot is the worst that has been recorded in the last eighteen years.” She looked sad, but the expression was a canned, artificial one. News didn’t really touch her. She lived above everyone else. I’d seen nosies like her, men and women who managed to stay out of the reality of living in the megapoli. “Next, we talk to Shakir Waqar, our tech guru, who reports that Haas-Bioroid is ready to announce its next-gen models.”

  An image of a bioroid dressed in combat fatigues superimposed on the screen beside the nosie. It had no face but sported wraparound eye shields that I knew weren’t necessary because I had 360-degree vision and there was no way Haas-Bioroid would cut down on that for a new model.

  The image disturbed me on several levels.

  On the monitor, the screen changed again, this t
ime to the sculpted features of a man of indeterminate age and a small, laser perfect, thin mustache. He sat in front of a wall filled with bookshelves, which said a lot about him because people didn’t have space for such extravagances, and only the wealthy could afford to have printed books.

  The crawler under the man’s image announced: Dr. Baigorria Medrano, PHD, Military Strategy, Harvard University.

  “To put it simply, war is business, and as such, it is a highly profitable enterprise. Every major corp has some division dedicated to the development of war materials. Weapons. Combat armor. Stealth technology for vehicles and men. Our whole field of medicine has benefited from military engagement and the injuries and loss of soldiers. The initial strides took place during the Civil War between the North and South United States. That technology has continually developed. The terrorist action in Afghanistan and the Middle Eastern War cemented the advances medicine made in bionic limbs.”

  The vid angle switched over to include a middle-aged man sitting in a chair across the desk from the professor. He wore thick black-framed glasses—which was a cosmetic choice, not necessary for vision with all the options open to anyone with medical insurance—and a goatee. The black suit and long haircut looked like it belonged back in the 1970s, which was an anomaly for someone reporting on emerging technology. His name, Shakir Waqar, crawled under his face.

  “In your latest paper, Dr. Medrano, you make the case that the time has come for a battle-ready bioroid,” the nosie said.

  Something stirred in the back of my mind, and it was uncomfortable not knowing if it was truly the back of my mind or something left over from Simon Blake.

  “I do make that case, and for one simple reason: it’s time to stop sending men and women into the field to fight our battles. The training cost per unit of flesh is too expensive for the return we’re getting.”

  Another crawler started across the bottom of the screen: Who does he think he is? I served in the military. I risked my life every day and watched my buddies die. Is he going to try to tell me those sacrifices don’t matter?—Captain Ffolkes.

  “Someone has hacked the network,” Shelly said.

  I started to access the Net and run a trace on the hack, then remembered I didn’t have NAPD credentials and wouldn’t have been able to use them if I’d had them on Mars anyway.

  “The truth is that soldiers sign on for a term of combat,” Dr. Medrano went on. “They cycle in and they cycle out, and that makes the training part of the military ineffective. If a bioroid were created that could handle war, training could be cut down to a simple neural download. Not only that, but you’d have the same soldier time after time. Standardization would be optimum.”

  The next crawler announced: Then where is the organic soldier? The men and women who can learn from each encounter? Who are truly adaptive in the field?—Captain Ffolkes.

  “But a bioroid that can kill?” Waqar let the question hang in the air for a moment. “Do you know how many people have nightmares about such a thing?”

  “People have nightmares about all kinds of things,” Medrano replied. “That’s the way the human mind is built. And that’s one of the reasons human soldiers tend to be ineffective in the long run. A bioroid soldier will never develop post-traumatic stress disorder. There will be no need for the ongoing psychiatric care many of the soldiers these days need.”

  Another crawler ran at the bottom of the monitor: He’s talking about creating monsters! A human soldier knows compassion and mercy. That’s what creates PTSD. Taking a human life should never be easy for a soldier. If it is, soldiers aren’t being trained right.—Captain Ffolkes.

  I noticed that a few more people in the crowd were starting to take notice of the vidcast. They shared nervous glances. I wondered if the story was airing on Earth, or even on the Moon. Surely it would be.

  “Having mechanized warriors in the field is nothing new,” Medrano continued. “The war in Afghanistan at the beginning of the 21st century proved how successful that could be. Instead of constantly throwing men into areas, drone warfare enabled surgical strikes. The same result could be achieved through a small group of war-capable bioroids.”

  “You’re talking about bioroids used as drones? With a human controlling those units through telepresence?”

  “No, I’m not. Doing something like that is absurd. There’s no reason to halfway do this. In order for this to be successful, human involvement has to be factored out of the equation.”

  I pulled down information on Medrano from the Net. By all accounts, he was a recognized authority on warfare, one who had worked with the Defense Department on the development of military thought that remained top secret. Some of the blogs I accessed accused him of being a warhawk, and he had a history of being involved in the Colony Wars on Mars as a proponent for Earth. Medrano was also a resource for several sec divisions with assets on Mars.

  “Do you know any bioroid corps that are currently working on such a unit?” Waqar asked.

  Medrano smiled. “The list would be shorter if I gave you the names of bioroid corps that aren’t working on such a unit.”

  The story cut to an image of a hulking bioroid on a battlefield, standing atop a pile of bodies in rubble that looked like it was covered by a plascrete bubble.

  “Not exactly subtle is it?” Shelly asked.

  “No,” I replied, and the idea sat uneasily in my thoughts.

  The last crawler crept across the monitor as the vidcast shifted to a commercial by SandozGene, a Martian ag-corp. Even as a perky SandozGene spokesman unleashed his spiel about a new modded corn seed, the crawler asked: Are you going to let them threaten us like this? Are you going to let those patriots in Phobos colony have died in vain?—Captain Ffolkes.

  Chapter Seventeen

  All aboard.” The mechanical voice blasted throughout the train station, rousing several of the waiting passengers from slumber. Enough of them had slept that I had run an oxygen check to make certain that nothing was wrong, but the oxygen and carbon monoxide levels in the building were fine.

  “They’re just stressed and tired,” Shelly said. “There’s nothing you can do to fix that.”

  I accepted that, but I still felt the need to do something for them. After the news had ended, the monitor had broadcasted a few dramas directed at casual viewers. Most of them were created out of the same fabric as those I had been aware of back on Earth and on the Moon.

  Viewing audiences in those places weren’t as large, percentage-wise, as they were on Mars. On Earth and on the Moon, there were clubs and VR decks, places where people, bioroids, and clones could go and mingle. Mars tended to be more centered around work and home, and the entertainment areas were smaller, less developed. The people around me worked and rested, often with too much of one and not enough of the other. Yet, somehow, they endured.

  There were a lot of sensies, though, stories that would appeal to housebound audiences. Mostly they were stories about people who lived under harsh circumstances who managed to contribute to their societies. The stories weren’t subtle about their messages.

  While I’d waited for the train to arrive and while Hayim slept, I’d pulled down information about the proliferation of sensies on Mars and discovered that several psychologists—most of whom were based on Mars—felt that the media channels, primarily owned by Earth corps, were there to indoctrinate the Martian population.

  “These sensies seek to lull the colonies,” Dr. Macdonald Wease, a recent Burroughs University graduate, said in one report. “The dramas show colonists eking out a living and becoming successful at whatever they’re doing simply by virtue of hard work. That’s not the Mars I grew up on. My parents and I had to work hard for what we had, and then it wasn’t much. We had to work hard to just survive. They wanted me to get an education so I wouldn’t have to live the way they did. My father died trying to pay for my tuition.

  “I’m going to be paying off student loans for my education for the next fifteen years. If I�
�d signed with an Earth corp to provide clinical care for Martian patients, those fees would have been paid for me. But I would have also had to espouse the party line. The same line that used up my parents and threw them away. Mars is a conduit for profit for the corps that built there. The colonies provide a market for the corps and an expanded tax base for the governments.”

  When I’d attempted to look up more about Dr. Wease, I’d found a media story that he had committed suicide only a few days after his statement, which had gone viral. He had taken sleeping pills and drowned in a hot tub after hours in his apartment building. He wasn’t prescribed sleeping medication, and most Martians took showers, not baths, because water usage and recycling was expensive.

  The story bothered me enough that I’d wanted more information immediately, certain there was cause for a more in-depth investigation, but none was available. There were no further follow-ups on Wease except for the notice about his cremation.

  “This is Mars,” Shelly told me. “Things are done differently here.”

  I could remember being told that by several people I’d had interactions with, but never by Shelly. I pulled my attention off the Net and locked back into my immediate surroundings.

  All around me, men and women dressed themselves and their children in envirosuits, pulling them up and tabbing them closed to maintain integrity. Suiting up was merely a precaution till the train was locked down. The airlock allowed everyone to board the train directly without losing atmosphere, but the boarding process was always dangerous.

  Hayim slept on till I roused him by shaking one shoulder. I was gentle, and I’d waited till the line for the airlock had started to thin. During the time he’d slept, I’d noticed that he had frequent nightmares. I didn’t know if this was a regular thing or if it had been brought on by the drinking or the near escape from the tech vultures.

  He blinked up at me, momentarily lost.

  “Time to go. The train’s here.”