by J. S. Morin
With the aid of the protofab and its intuitive interface, Eve designed the handheld weights she needed for her strength regimen. It only took the machine a matter of minutes to create a set. The finished parts were pleasantly warm to the touch, like clothes fresh from the dryer.
Next, Eve fashioned a meter-long bar and found some of Charlie’s welding equipment. The welding was slow going. With no protective eyewear to be found, Eve had to line up the plasma torch, avert her eyes, and make a small bead. But in time she had welded the bar across one of Charlie’s doorways, and it was sturdy enough to bear her weight.
Eve spent the morning doing chin ups, pushups, squats, curls, and every other exercise in Creator’s regimen. Then she moved on to poses and stretches, running through all the forms she knew. With a shock of guilt, she skipped the eight-angle pose, which she had never cared for. But today Creator wasn’t watching.
Today Eve could cheat just a little, couldn’t she?
At the end of her stretching, Eve was still left with the dilemma of her cardiovascular routine. Charlie’s living space wasn’t conducive to long spans of running. Eve considered simply doing fast leg-lifts, then she had an epiphany.
There was a spare steel plate lying in one of the storage rooms. Eve dragged it to a corridor that looked little used and propped it against the wall.
Charlie’s cloth-o-matic worked with a similar interface to the protofab and already had her size. Eve asked it to spit out a clean pair of socks. But instead of putting them on, she dropped them on the inclined plane she had erected and angled the plate until the socks slid down.
It took half an hour of adjustments, simple calculations, polishing with a reciprocating buffer, and finally a few quick tack welds. But in the end, Eve found that wearing just socks on her feet, she would slip down the slope if she didn’t keep running at a steady pace. Ideally, there would have been an adjustable component to the incline, but Eve resolved to work on that at some later date.
It was possible that Charlie could arrange to get her a proper treadmill in the meantime, but until then, Eve would run while she slid down the steel ramp.
“Eve!” a voice called out. It wasn’t Charlie’s.
She stopped running and slid down onto the level floor. Quietly as she could, Eve slipped on her shoes and tied them tight. She was sweating, and her respiration rate was elevated.
The voice was familiar, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a trick. If this were a trap, Eve would be ready to run in earnest as soon as her heart rate returned to resting.
“C’mon out, Eve! It’s me, Plato.”
Eve started to rise, but then it occurred to her that merely stating his identity didn’t mean it was really Plato. Voice recording and playback wasn’t even very complicated. Anyone could manage it. She waited for a better sign, skulking in the shadows and trying to remain as quiet as possible.
A face poked around the corner and broke into a grin. It was Plato, the human who had taken her from Creator’s lab. “Hey, there you are! Let’s get out of here before Charlie7 gets back.”
Plato extended a hand toward Eve, and she accepted it.
After seeing the residents of the Sanctuary for Scientific Sins, it was hard to imagine this vibrant creature as part of the same species.
Plato was half a meter taller than Eve, and the hand he presented closed completely around Eve’s when she took hold of it. His shirt didn’t have sleeves and split open at the front, showing clear muscle definition that none of the broken humans came close to matching. The eyes that sought Eve’s shone with intellect and didn’t shy away as Eve caught herself staring into them. Plato’s smile shone like a beacon.
Today there was even a shadow of hair growing along his cheeks and jawline, confirming Eve’s newfound suspicion that Plato was male.
“I didn’t tell them anything,” Eve said as they raced for the elevator.
“Thanks. This is all my fault. I didn’t think Toby22 would give you away. I figured he had more stones than that.”
Eve paid attention to details this time around. Fleeing from Creator’s lab, her mind had been adrift. Everything had been too new, too strange, too impossible to accurately sort its way from short-term to long-term memory. “Where are we going?”
Plato didn’t slow as he replied. “I’ve got a place. Rather not say where until we’re airborne. Charlie7 is one sneaky bastard. I took down a few perimeter alarms, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he buried backups down here that I didn’t catch.”
Plato punched in a series of commands, and the elevator pushed against Eve’s feet. They were heading up. “They took me to the Sanctuary for Scientific Sins. Charlie almost left me there.”
Plato shook his head, causing his shaggy, shoulder-length hair to flounce. “You don’t belong with them. They call that place the Scrapyard. It’s where they send the factory rejects of our kind.”
There was a question Eve had been yearning to ask, but none of the robots had the answer. She could tell by everything they did and said. “Are there more like us? More working humans?”
Plato pulled Eve against her. He was warm and smelled faintly of an unfamiliar musk. She was damp with sweat and unclean, but he didn’t seem to mind. “I’m sorry. As far as ones that think and act like old humans… you’re the first I’ve found. And even I’m not like you.”
Eve pulled back. “You’re not?”
“I’m like over-tempered metal. I’m stronger and sharper than I was ever meant to be, but I won’t last as long. You… that crazy Creator of yours did some outstanding work. I’ll give her that.” Plato made a fist and gently pushed it against Eve’s jaw. “You’re really something.”
It was a bland, vapid comment, but Plato delivered it with such an oddly reassuring grin that Eve couldn’t help feeling better. Why was it that years of emotive training by Creator left Eve barely able to puzzle out robotic emotions, yet she could read Plato as if he came with an instruction manual?
The elevator opened at the surface, and Eve saw Plato’s skyroamer. It looked like Charlie7’s but was nicer on the inside. The ride away from Creator’s lab had been cozy and warm. Eve had fallen asleep on the way.
As Eve jogged to keep up with Plato’s brisk walk, she looked back. “Should we leave Charlie a message?”
Plato grunted. “The less Charlie7 knows, the better.”
Chapter Twenty-One
As Charlie7 rode the elevator down to his home beneath the Arc de Triomphe, he felt anything but triumphant. A whole day of wasted effort.
Toby22 had been no help at all. Worse, he had seemed intent on diverting Charlie7’s efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery of Eve’s origins. And to top it off, it had taken Charlie7 hours to realize he was being made a fool.
The two robots had hiked to the spot where Toby22 had found Eve, and they had combed the forest for tracks or signs of her rescuer that might lead back to an identity. For a while, Charlie7 had begun to suspect a secret lab hidden underground in that very wood and that Eve had escaped on foot, alone.
Then they’d discovered the distinctive imprints of skyroamer landing gear. After that, Charlie7 knew Toby22 was lying. There was no way someone had flown into his precious preserve without him knowing about it. An additional fifteen minutes had subsequently been wasted as Charlie7 lambasted the mechanical forest ranger. But screaming his vocal emitter out of calibration hadn’t accomplished anything.
Charlie7 needed a little sunshine in his day, even if he could only find it below ground. Seeing Eve would reboot his priorities. It was hard to be angry in the presence of humanity’s glowing future; it was harder still not to be amused by Eve’s attempts to learn all the quirks and foibles of actually being human.
At the bottom of the shaft, the elevator doors slid open. “Eve? I’m back. How was your day? I’d love to hear all about it.”
Idly brushing the dust and dirt of today’s adventure off his suit, Charlie7 wondered what Eve had gotten into. It wasn’t like her to remai
n quiet in the face of a question. Even a question she didn’t understand prompted a request for clarification.
“Eve?”
The house was too quiet.
With a mounting dread, Charlie7 rushed through his refuge. For the first time he could remember, he regretted the wasted space and sprawling, inefficient design.
She wasn’t asleep in the media room.
The workshop he’d converted to a makeshift kitchen was empty, and there was no lingering cooking heat to say she’d been there recently.
The wastewater access closet was vacant.
He checked the computer terminal node, the trophy room, and the several chambers devoted to various hobbies.
Charlie7 found the handheld weights and the spot where the girl had welded an inclined plane to the wall outside the protofab room. It could have been either a weight bench or an improvised slide-friction treadmill—possibly both.
There was no sign of Eve anywhere.
“Please don’t tell me you went exploring,” Charlie7 muttered.
It would have been fitting that the one actual restriction he’d placed on her activities was the one she’d violated the moment he left. A nagging voice told him that he should have disconnected power to the elevator before departing or at least locked out the controls from the master computer. Charlie7 had been in a hurry, and she seemed like a sensible enough girl.
But Eve was human, and with humanity came free will and all that rubbish. Charlie7 could predict behavioral responses for any robot he knew based on their personality mix, at least at a macro level. But for everything else she might have been, Eve was caught at that awkward developmental stage that came after puberty but before full mental stability.
Settling in at his main terminal interface, Charlie7 brought up the access logs for the automated systems. At least from there he could get an idea when she’d left, which would narrow his search radius. After all, there were no vehicles around for her to steal. She had to be on foot.
The records were blank.
Charlie7 had an in-depth, personal knowledge of how all the systems in his home worked. He’d programmed them all himself. So when he saw that records were missing, he knew that he had not merely lost track of where they should be.
Not only was there no record of Eve having accessed the elevator. During a five-hour period leading up to Charlie7’s return, there were no records at all. At the very least, there should have been a graph of power draw. With that thought in mind, he checked the logs for the generator and found them likewise blanked out for the same time period.
In a panic, Charlie7 looked into his personal files, but those were all present and accounted for. The layered security and encryption were all intact. The redundant backups were all in place. The booby traps and alerts he’d piled upon them had not been set off.
In a world with no thieves and the only criminal conduct mainly limited to unauthorized research, Charlie7 had always wondered if he was paranoid. Now he wished he’d kept a perimeter alert system more sophisticated than a doorbell.
There was one thing he was certain of: Eve hadn’t run off on her own. Creator, or someone in league with her, had to have bypassed his security and run off with her.
As he stormed off toward the elevator, for the first time since the invasion’s aftermath, Charlie7 wished he were armed.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Yucatan looked greener than the last time Charlie7 had seen it. Someone’s habitat revitalization efforts were going well. The area had a pleasant, verdant tinge as seen from the air, and it wasn’t yet overgrown. The ancient ruins were easy to spot as the skyroamer flew over its destination.
Charlie7 hadn’t called ahead. The flight had given him time to cool his synaptic pathways and sort his data. He could have tried someone closer or someone who needed a favor from him. But for Eve’s sake, Charlie7 needed answers, and that meant finding someone who had them.
Even if that someone was the crazy primatologist Janet9.
As he swooped in for his final approach, Charlie7 resisted the temptation to set his skyroamer down atop El Castillo. Setting aside the fact that he couldn’t find a suitable landing pad on the stepped pyramid, he needed Janet9’s help. While she cared less about the pre-invasion architecture than the wildlife around it, Chichen Itza was still her home.
Circling the ruined city, Charlie7 set down in the middle of the ball court instead. Stepping out as the engines spun down, he looked around.
Anything older than himself gave Charlie7 a sense of continuity—of there being a greater purpose than himself. Restored cathedrals only echoed the past. Real humans whose calendar had ended forty-three years before their descendants were wiped out entirely had carved this city of stone out of the wilderness.
It hadn’t been a bad guess. But then, humanity had always harbored a penchant for the morbid.
Charlie7 could have gone looking. Even a direct message to Janet9 might have been quicker. But Charlie9 wanted her off guard. He wanted her on the offensive so that his riposte could hit its mark.
The wait wasn’t long.
“Shame on you, Charles,” Janet9 shouted as she came into view. “I have a moratorium request on file with the Flight Control Committee. The least you could do would be to honor it until it’s official.”
As always, Janet9 appeared ridiculous in a fur suit from feet to neck. Only her face was visibly robotic.
It always rankled Charlie7 when a robot referred to him as Charles. Most of the Twenty-Seven had either called Charles Truman ‘Dr. Truman’ or ‘Charlie,’ depending on their relationship. Occasionally a mix with a hint of Janet Wilkes’s forced, finishing-school airs slipped through.
Charlie7 preferred the familiar. But he reminded himself that he wasn’t there for a social call. Eve was missing and likely recaptured by Creator. Whatever interpersonal pain he had to endure was nothing compared to what Eve might be suffering. The scenarios his fertile imagination had concocted ranged from the gruesome to the inhuman. Each second he wasted meant another second Eve was left to Creator’s mercy. But blurting his problem to Janet9 without preamble wasn’t going to get Charlie7 the answers he needed.
“Hey, Jane. You’ve got a monkey on your back.” He pointed to the capuchin peering at him over her shoulder. The little creature was curious but still skittish enough not to trust Charlie7 without Janet9 in between them.
“How marvelous—wit and unwelcome aircraft. You’ve outdone yourself.”
Janet9 was one of the few robots that even approached Charlie7’s age. But while he viewed himself as a middle-aged man in a perpetually young body, Janet9 looked upon herself as a grand dame among robot kind.
“Listen, Jane. I didn’t come to ruin your airspace or pester your monkeys. I’ve recently developed a keen interest in humans. Who do you think might presently have the ability to clone them?”
“You mean aside from Eddie80 and Mary23?” Janet9 asked as the capuchin scrambled across her shoulders.
There was no point in responding. The only two human geneticists who’d been caught in the act were public knowledge. Eddie80 had self-terminated shortly after he was discovered with vats of human embryos in his lab, and Mary23 was on Mars performing geological surveys.
Neither was of any use to Charlie7. The old robot crossed his arms and waited for Janet9 to elaborate.
With a dramatic sigh, the fur-wearing robot obliged. “Well, any number of primate geneticists could manage, of course. Perhaps not Eddie110 or that poor, misguided Nora77. That one should have stuck to chimps and left the theoretical animals to those with imagination.”
“Names, Jane. I need names I can use.”
Janet9 helped her monkey passenger to a perch on the trunk of a nearby tree as she pretended to ignore Charlie7’s question. For his part, Charlie7 fumed silently, keeping quiet by running simulations of himself rushing in to save Eve in the nick of time in a variety of improbable situations. Who could imagine what punishment Eve might be facing fo
r her escape? Charlie7, for one.
“I have two theories about your line of questioning,” Janet9 said after a suitable pause to bring Charlie7 to the peak of agitation. “And I won’t answer until I’m satisfied that neither is correct. Firstly, have you taken up an interest in genetics? Because if you have, I’ll ship you off to the nearest florist. Let some poor Jocelyn or Marvin teach you how to grow phosphorescent orchids or sit with a Toby and watch oak trees sprout. Leave the higher life forms to those with the passion and dedication to see it through and do a proper job of it.”
Charlie7 scratched at the side of his cranium. “No. I don’t plan on cloning anything.”
While he’d taken up any number of hobbies during his retirement, he’d never engaged in one so very much like work as genetic engineering. The wet, squishy side of science was for other robots. He’d stick to hardware and software.
“Second question, then. Have you taken up some amateur form of private investigation? I won’t condone having my colleagues harassed if those busybodies at the Scrapyard can’t get by without knowing where their residents came from.”
Charlie7 held perfectly still. He felt a coolant failure coming on.
How could she be concerned over the inconvenience of her fellow primate geneticists when human cloners operated in secret, growing girls in vats and kidnapping them when they’d just tasted their first apples?
Truth be told, the idea of launching a crusade to expose the responsible dark lab scientists was a good one. No one else had the time for the hassle except perhaps Charlie7. If he did, it would be the noblest thing he’d done all century.
But provoking Janet9 was the last thing he needed to do just then. He couldn’t compel her to give him information. If he pushed her too far, she’d spread the word, and none of her colleagues would give him the time of day either.
And since, technically, this was a form of vigilante investigative work, he only had one option: make up a lie and make it up quick.
