Extinction Reversed (Robot Geneticists Book 1)

by J. S. Morin

  Charlie7 knew there weren’t fifty humans at the sanctuary. There was barely half that number. And even Nora109’s fifty only accounted for the ones who had been found and brought to her.

  How many others had died and been incinerated without anyone ever knowing they existed?

  How many humans were alive in laboratories? What was being done to them?

  Now wasn’t the time to bring up any of those questions with Nora109. But if Charlie7’s thoughts traveled those dark circuits in the back of his crystalline mind, Nora109’s could just as easily.

  “I’m not sure how much help Eve will be,” Charlie lamented. “I think she’s homesick, awful as that sounds. The girl talks about her creator like a god. That’s all she knew for her whole life, and she’s already picked up on the fact that we’re not happy with her creator. The few times I’ve asked about her former home, she evades. That’s not a behavior of someone who’s acting on rote and obedience. She’s purposefully stonewalling.”

  “We’ll bring her around,” Nora109 said with confidence. “Once she sees that we’re her friends, I imagine she’ll recognize the sad little life someone built around her like a cage.”

  At that moment, Eve14 burst from the residential hall of the Scrapyard. “Don’t leave me here!” she screamed.

  The first healthy human girl in a thousand years ran full tilt through the manicured grass in her bare feet. Sunlight glinted off the studs across her scalp, poking through her short fuzz of hair. Eve14 skidded to a halt in front of Nora109 and Charlie7.

  Eve14 broke into a diatribe without even pausing to catch her breath. “I don’t want to stay here. I don’t belong here. I’m not like all these broken humans. I’m like you. And Toby. And Creator. I can think and talk and feed myself and use a computer and all the other things I need to take care of myself, and I don’t need a room with a bed and a window and someone bringing me all my food and changing my clothes for me.”

  The girl clutched at the sleeve of Charlie7’s suit and wouldn’t let go.

  Nora109 put a hand to Eve’s cheek. “Calm down, dear. It’s all right. Everyone here is different. It’s not as bad as you make it out.”

  Eve14 performed a verbal database dump. She went resident by resident, detailing the disabilities and dependencies of each. All the names and appearances lined up perfectly with the patient roster, and she correctly diagnosed some of their underlying physical challenges.

  For someone with a half-day’s exposure to other humans, Eve14’s knowledge of anatomy and biochemistry rivaled Charlie7’s.

  Once she had finished her summary of the sanctuary residents, Eve14 then proceeded in the manner of a student debater to contrast her own physical and mental health, point by point. Nora109 and Charlie7 just let her go on, uninterrupted. Charlie7 was more interested in when she found time to breathe between sentences that stretched on for kilometers and traveled at near supersonic speeds.

  While the run hadn’t winded her, Eve’s essay on why she didn’t belong on Easter Island left her panting. She looked up to Charlie7 for approval, for judgment, and possibly for salvation.

  Charlie7 turned to the sanctuary administrator. “I’m going to need some clothes that fit her. Shoes. Personal grooming items. Whatever food you can spare that will travel. Oh, and one of your medical emergency kits—one with a diagnostic scanner.”

  Nora109 nodded along with his list. Charlie7 could practically see her filing the record away in her internal computer, possibly even transmitting it to one of her subordinates as Charlie7 dictated.

  “You sure you’re ready to be a parent?” Nora109 asked as Charlie7 finished.

  The old robot looped that question through a few processor cycles before giving up with a shrug. “Who ever is? Besides, it’s not like I’m adopting an infant. She just needs someone to show her around the planet.”

  Anywhere else on Earth, Charlie7’s list would have taken hours or days to assemble, and asking for such a rare commodity as a medical kit specific for humans would have been laughable. But Nora109 had all of it and more. If she needed a replacement for the medical equipment, all she had to do was ask; no one ever questioned Nora109’s requisitions.

  The longest wait was for the cloth-o-matic to take Eve’s measurements and create her a wardrobe of functional, durable garments. Everything was in default white. Eve14 could discover her own sense of fashion at a later date.

  For now, Charlie7 just wanted to get Eve14 away from the Scrapyard. She’d made her point plain that she didn’t belong.

  Nora109 offered to give her a bath before she changed into her new clothes, but Eve14 insisted she knew how to cleanse herself. The robotic staff allowed her privacy and access to a tub and soap. She emerged a few minutes later, scrubbed clean and clad in angelic white.

  The hope of humanity’s future.

  Eve14 didn’t look back as the skyroamer rose from the landing pad, and Charlie piloted them away.

  Chapter Twelve

  On the other side of the world, a wolf padded through the underbrush of a young forest. To call it a wolf was stretching the definition, James187 thought as he leveled his tranquilizer pistol at the creature. The animal was lupine in shape but the size of Bengal tiger. According to the detailed report on the mutant’s condition, it was still growing.

  There was no rush. James187 was downwind, not that his robotic chassis emitted much in the way of scent for the beast to detect. The wolf was unaware of him and taking its sweet time to decide where along a shallow brook it would stop to drink.

  GET HERE. NOW.

  The urgent summons over a private Social channel distracted James187 and spoiled his aim. The wolf passed behind a tree as James187 holstered his tranq pistol. What was Evelyn38 so worked up about?

  Though he wanted to snarl his frustration aloud, James187 knew an outburst would only startle his prey and make the hunt even more troublesome.

  His reply couldn’t carry the annoyance James187 wanted to project: CAN’T RIGHT NOW. EXTRACTING INVASIVE WOLF SPECIES LOOSE IN URALS.

  The wolf was traipsing along the edge of the brook when James187 resumed his pursuit. He might have charged forth, outrun the beast, and wrestled it to the ground to deliver the sedative dose. But half the fun was in the hunt. At the end of the day, a job wasn’t worth doing without a bit of craftsmanship and joy. A clean takedown was the goal.

  Evelyn38’s next message put James187 off his aim once more: I GUARANTEE THIS IS MORE IMPORTANT. YOU HAVE NEVER HAD A HUNT THIS CRUCIAL.

  The temptation not to answer at all rose near the top of his decision algorithm. Evelyn38 was a dour and spite-filled old toaster of a robot. Between the grating joints of her obsolete chassis and her pedigree as the smartest of the Twenty-Seven, James187 could barely stand being in a room with Evelyn38. But she wasn’t prone to… crying wolf.

  Even James187 shook his head when the idiom passed through his linguistic buffer. If the esteemed primate geneticist had a hunt for him, he had to find out the details. Repeated efforts to elicit specifics were met with a wall of obstinacy that nearly convinced James187 to tell Evelyn38 where to shove her missing monkeys.

  But curiosity bested him, even if the wolf couldn’t. Ten minutes later, James187 had the sedated wolf in the back of his skyroamer. He headed off to find out in person just what sort of chimp Evelyn38 had let loose into the wild.

  Chapter Thirteen

  They flew over the Pacific once again. As he piloted the skyroamer, Charlie7 couldn’t help noticing Eve14 repeatedly glancing at the controls.

  Among all his other concerns in taking Eve14 back with him from the Scrapyard was the dread suspicion that if he didn’t, she’d steal one of the sanctuary’s vehicles and find a way off the island on her own. The girl had seen him operate the skyroamer and had the memory of a quantum computer. It was no stretch to imagine that she could fill in the gaps in what she hadn’t witnessed directly and fly the skyroamer herself; he’d have been more surprised if she couldn’t.

&n
bsp; “Where are we going?” Eve14 asked. She pointed to the readout of the craft’s heading. “This is not a return course back to the Arc de Triomphe. We’re currently misaligned by thirteen degrees.”

  “Did you like the food at the sanctuary?” Charlie7 asked.

  Eve14 squinted at him with suspicion. “No,” she replied carefully.

  There was a refreshing bluntness exposed by her lack of social grace. Typical daily interaction had so many layers of paint concealing real feeling and opinion, each sprayed over the cracked and peeling remains of the one beneath. He’d gotten to Eve14 before anyone had taught her how to save face behind a whitewash of lies. Through sheer accident, the robotic society had self-selected for passive aggression and introversion.

  “Well, what Nora109 gave us was more of the same. Oh, there are a few different sorts, but it’ll all be bland. Don’t get me wrong; it’s all perfectly healthy and filling. I could feed you for a week on this stuff before I had to find new supplies. But if you’re going to discover what being a real human is like, you’re going to want to try real food.”

  Eve14 shrugged. “What’s the difference? Food is food.”

  “Cuisine.”

  “I don’t know that word.”

  A slow grin spread on Charlie7’s face. He could already picture the vicarious enjoyment of Eve14’s first real taste of human cuisine. “It’s a form of art, using taste and smell as its primary mediums. It is among humanity’s simplest and most accessible sources of joy. Anyone can survive eating nutrients. But cuisine provides sustenance for both the body and spirit.”

  Eve14 shook her head. “Ideal nutrient content is fixed. Deviation would produce a less desirable result.”

  “Nonsense,” Charlie7 replied. This girl might imagine she could debate him, but she was still a novice in rhetoric. Charlie7 had centuries of committee hearings under his belt. “You are only optimizing for a subset of factors. By ignoring mental benefits related to food consumption, you’re allowing sub-optimal chemical balance in the brain unless you engage in additional, potentially time-consuming activities to offset the imbalance.” Let her sort that one out.

  “Are you implying that my encephalographic readings could be optimized by food?”

  Charlie7’s brain hit a loop. It circled back to an earlier observation. Of course. “Are those studs in your head used to read brainwaves?”

  “Yes. And I shouldn’t use chemicals to artificially alter my encephalographic readouts. Intentionally releasing endorphins definitely counts.”

  “Well, I don’t plan on taking any scans of your brain activity, so I think it’s about time you learned how to enjoy good food. It’s been a thousand years since I cooked, and I wasn’t good at it then, but I think what neither of us knows won’t hurt you.”

  Eve looked out the window, even though there was nothing but ocean as far as the horizon. “You still haven’t explained why we’re off course.”

  Charlie7 didn’t need to get into a lecture on pre-invasion agriculture to explain why they were headed for North America rather than crossing the Andes Mountains on the shortest route back to Paris. All Eve14 needed right now was their goal.

  “We’re going shopping.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  If the Easter Island sanctuary had a polar opposite, this was it—the Kansas Agrarian Plains, Charlie had named the place.

  All along the approach, Eve had watched land stretch out as far as planetary curvature allowed her to see. What appeared from the air to be tall grasses, Charlie explained were actually wheat, a staple grain that ancient humans had produced in abundance. It was a key component in many of the nutrient slurries she’d consumed, never knowing their origins.

  It had taken Eve and Charlie some time to come to a mutual understanding on the subject of food. His descriptions seemed bizarre, unnecessarily complicated, and implausible in his claims of what they could do to the human psyche.

  Eve’s listing of her daily nutrient intake had eventually led Charlie to conclude that Eve had been living off of primate nutrient supplements her whole life. If the residents of the Sanctuary for Scientific Sins had been eating the lowest form of human food, Eve hadn’t even been consuming nutrients meant for her own kind.

  Was Eve just an animal?

  A wash of Kansas air flooded the cockpit as Charlie7 opened the skyroamer’s canopy. Unfamiliar scents assailed Eve, so thick she could almost chew them.

  “Is this safe to breathe?” Eve asked, cupping a hand over her nose and mouth.

  “Perfectly,” Charlie assured her. He waggled a scanner in front of Eve, reading zeroes for a variety of airborne toxins. “What you’re smelling is honest, hardworking manure. Humans have lived with that fragrant backdrop since the dawn of civilization—at least the edges of civilization. Most city folks didn’t care for it.”

  Eve’s new shoes crunched on matted stalks of the local wheat as she dropped to the ground. It appeared from their surroundings as if Charlie had flattened a swath of the very crop he had described to Eve as they approached.

  “Come on,” Charlie said. “This place is all automated. No one around for kilometers. We can take whatever we want.”

  Eve fell behind as Charlie headed them toward a steel structure that rose above the tops of the wheat. A short ways through the field, it was all she could see besides Charlie and the plants that closed around her from all directions. Looking back, even the skyroamer was no longer visible through the stalks.

  Suddenly a vehicle hummed past overhead, flying low and only traveling roughly eleven meters per second by Eve’s rough estimate. It was larger and bulkier than Charlie’s skyroamer, like a storage crate with ion engines bolted to the sides. As it receded from view, obscured by the stalks of wheat before her, Eve thought she saw the back of the transport filled with red fruits.

  Eve crunched through the wheat field in Charlie’s wake, treading where the robot’s feet had crushed a path. It wasn’t long before Charlie led the way into a clearing free of plant life.

  The sight beyond stole Eve’s breath away. She gaped slack-jawed at the marvel of robotic industry before her. Robots swarmed around a hive of steel and concrete that stretched for kilometers. Some robots filed in and out at ground level, carrying loads. Others in hovering vehicles poured through openings in the upper floors. An enormous craft, similar to Charlie’s in design but at least five hundred times the mass, sat parked at the far end of the clearing as robots both loaded and unloaded it at once.

  “What is this place?” Eve asked when her mind had soaked in the scene. She hid behind Charlie to watch the robots in action, lest one of them spot her.

  Charlie swept a hand out to encompass the whole operation. “Mankind may be new again, but we’ve been feeding livestock for centuries now. This is a processing station for hundreds of kinds of crops including ones that eventually end up at Easter Island. I’m going to scrounge up some groceries. Probably best if you stay out of the factory, just to be on the safe side. Feel free to have a look around. Just don’t wander off into the fields. I’ll be back in about half an hour.”

  Eve watched until Charlie disappeared into the factory. It was easy to pick him out from the crowd in his black-and-white suit since all the workers seemed content to run around unclothed.

  Creator had shown Eve what a robot looked like without clothes as part of her education in mechanical systems. She knew they didn’t have to wear clothes. But Creator and all her colleagues wore them habitually. So did Charlie, Toby, Nora, and Ashley. The residents of the sanctuary wore clothes, even though many of them couldn’t dress themselves. But the workers here in Kansas seemed to prefer nudity.

  Eve noticed that her new shoes were dusted with brown, as were the hems of her pant legs. She looked to the worker robots and their bare feet, then back to her own.

  “Adaptive response to the unclean work environment,” Eve muttered to herself.

  Knowing that continued wear would only result in additional soiling of her sh
oes, she untied the laces and pulled them off. For a moment, Eve considered removing her clothing as well, but Creator had drilled it into her that she should remain clad except under clearly defined circumstances. As a compromise, Eve rolled her pants up to her knees.

  Tying the laces of her shoes together, she let them dangle from one hand as she explored the facility. The robotic workers paid her no mind as she slipped among their traffic patterns, and she, in turn, was careful not to impede their work.

  The side of the main structure was painted with ten-meter-tall lettering identifying it as Kansas Agrarian Zone 017 - Distribution & Processing Center 23. Though she knew it involved several unwarranted assumptions, Eve allowed herself to imagine that each Kansas Agrarian Zone had at least as many distribution and processing centers. That meant there were at least 391 such facilities, probably many more. The likelihood that Charlie had brought her to the very highest numbered facility was slim.

  Charlie had said it. They were preparing for humanity’s return.

  Though she wasn’t the first human, Charlie insisted that she was the first ‘real’ human to be born since 10.3 billion of her predecessors had died in a span of 131 days.

  This facility and the others like it were robotkind’s gift to humanity. Earth was a world prepared for humans, with foods the robots didn’t need to eat and clean air they didn’t need to breathe.

  Upon first hearing Charlie say that he was just taking what he wanted, it sounded like stealing. But as Eve approached the hub of the agrarian complex, her mind interlocked two pieces of a puzzle so simple she’d overlooked it until just then.

  Robots building entire industries for an extinct species…

  Eve, the first of her kind by Charlie’s own words…

  The enormity of Eve’s epiphany caused her to stumble as blood rushed to her head. Whether the robotic masters of the world knew her by name or not, this whole world had been rebuilt for Eve.