by J. S. Morin
“I’ve got a wager with Toby22 as to who will get credit for the first sanctioned human. We’ve each got until tomorrow afternoon to come up with a list of five names. If I win, he’s renaming his nature preserve after me. If he wins, I take over his job while he gets to find out what a year-long vacation is like.”
Janet9 had been feeding pellets to her little monkey friend as Charlie7 spoke. She turned her head with menacing deliberation to fix him with a scowl. “You pulled me away from my work for that?”
“I’d like to have places named after me,” Charlie7 replied with a slapped-on layer of offended dignity. “Plus, it’s not like I came empty-handed. Give me a list of names, sorted by your best guess at who’d be first to the finish line, and I’ll pull some strings and get your air exclusion zone pushed through committee.”
Janet9 stood lock-joint still. “At times the mind boggles at how you have any influence at all over world affairs, Charles.”
“Does that mean ‘yes’?”
“Very well.”
Janet9 proceeded to rattle off a list of robot designations. All the names were known to Charlie7, of course. He knew everyone. But it took someone with professional rivalries and inside knowledge of the industry to put together a ranked list of suspects. Charlie7 had only come to Janet9 because he’d never met a robot less likely to flout rules. She sat on twelve committees and spent as much time on hearings as she did with her pre-hominid critters.
He’d bet the Arc de Triomphe that Janet9 wasn’t Creator. Like her or not, Janet9 wasn’t a rogue geneticist.
But as the list threatened to devour a chunk of Charlie7’s day, he held up a hand. “Can you just send the names in data form?”
Janet9 actuated an eyebrow.
“What? I’ve got places to be.”
“You’re usually the one who refuses to admit he has a computer in his torso.” The data appeared in Charlie7’s message queue a fraction of a second later.
Charlie7 gave her a nod and raised a hand as he jogged for his skyroamer. “Times are changing.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Charlie7 began cross-referencing the instant he lifted off from the Yucatan.
Janet9’s list was too long to visit even a tenth of the geneticists she named. Far more robots were theoretically capable of making the leap to cloning humans than Charlie7 had hoped to imagine.
The technology was there. Someone had proved that.
The floodgates to the human resurgence were being held shut by fear of the Scrapyard. Most robots had the ethical integrity never to land one of their creations in a place like that. While the robots on staff were angels in alloy steel bodies, no one would wish the hardships of those humans on one their own creations.
At least, no one would admit to it.
Charlie7 needed another edge to pry at. He needed another factor to scratch names off Janet9’s list. The scientific method was a time-honored system for making a small gain after a long, arduous process. If the worst of his conjectures had befallen Eve, Charlie7 didn’t have the kind of time for that. She needed him to come up with answers faster than that. He needed to cut corners, to step on toes, and to sidestep protocols.
He needed another Charlie.
The Kanto Industrial Complex rose on the horizon as Charlie7’s skyroamer rocketed across the Pacific. This was where new robots were born.
Charlie7 approached from the East, hugging the ocean to keep off nosy private radar systems. Behind him, a massive wake rose from thruster wash.
Deceleration that would have crushed a human merely pressed Charlie7 against the cockpit restraints. He had made the trip in just under two hours, but even that felt like an eternity. The uncertainty of what retribution Eve might be facing from an angry Creator spurred him on.
There were times when Charlie7 resented the idea that he flaunted his status and exploited more useful robots in modern society. Today he was glad that he still had backdoor access codes to Kanto from when he first built it. The factory had been so much smaller, then. But in all the intervening years, a kernel of computer code had lived on at its core.
The factory’s incoming traffic monitoring system conveniently lost track of Charlie7’s skyroamer and didn’t report the anomaly. As the facility rose from Honshu Island to fill the horizon, he vectored toward a landing zone for maintenance workers. None of the gigaton freighters from the refineries and smelters paid his little personal craft any mind as he veered around them. They were automated. Unless Charlie7 interfered with their primary function, he was a gnat flitting past an elephant.
The landing zone green-lighted him, and Charlie7 set down in on open-air pad beside a motley row of mismatched personal crafts owned by various robotic workers. Some of them had made their workplaces permanent homes. Others lived and took recreation in the more scenic parts of ancient Japan.
Charlie7 took a casual interest in the models of skyroamers as he strode past. Most had been designed in recent years by a bored Brent who built custom rides upon request.
The old robot delved into a technological anthill of stairwells and catwalks with a destination in mind. His goal wasn’t a place so much as a person, and it certainly wasn’t a Brent.
Amid an army of automatons and fixed machinery, it was a single namesake of his that Charlie7 sought. He passed from the large-scale manufacturing zone into a quieter area behind layers of acoustic and electromagnetic shielding. His access codes granted him passage into the heart of the facility: the upload center.
Charlie13 was the head of robotic activation. He didn’t deal with nervous, snide, and petulant old robots getting swapped out of obsolete or damaged chassis. He oversaw the upload of freshly mixed personalities into new, state-of-the-art crystal matrices.
A whole wall of the upload center consisted of visual displays, subdivided into a six by six grid of readouts and graphs. All the data updated in real time as a new brain went through a nano-level quality check before activation.
A twinge of professional curiosity diverted Charlie7’s attention long enough for him to give the readouts a quick scan and see what old ‘13 was up to. It looked like a 55/30/25 mix of Paul, Arthur, and Toby. Unless Charlie13 was making cutting-edge alterations within the sub-archetype details, this robot was going to be dull as mud and spend his life working in composite building materials.
An all-too-familiar voice called out to him from the far end of the room.
“If you’re looking to meet the new boy, you’re three days early.”
Charlie13 rose from hands and knees behind an access panel in the upload chamber. He dusted himself off in a mirror of Charlie7’s technique, using the backs of his hands and not the palms. The two of them used the same Version 64.6 chassis these days. It was almost enough to make Charlie7 want to put in for an early upgrade to the 70.2.
Charlie7 forced a grin and spread his arms. “Lucky 13, can’t this just be a social call?”
Next time will be the first time, Charlie7 heard the echo in his mind. He cringed mentally in anticipation.
“Next time will be the first time,” Charlie13 replied on cue. “Out with it. We both know you won’t leave me be until you’ve gotten what you’ve come for.”
“I came with a puzzle,” Charlie7 said. It seemed a fitting way to describe his trouble with Eve14, short of laying the whole sordid mess in front of his brother. “What would it take using the latest technology for someone to reverse your process?”
Charlie13 snorted. “An EMP. Simplest way to get a brain out of a robot’s body.” Of course, an electromagnetic pulse would have turned a robot into a blank shell.
“No,” Charlie7 snapped. He ought to have anticipated the sarcastic reply and worded his query more precisely. Unfortunately, extreme precision was a problem all its own. “I mean put a robot’s brain patterns into a human mind.”
“Impossible. We don’t have sufficient understanding of the human mind,” Charlie13 replied.
The director circled the upload rig an
d removed another access panel. Charlie7 intentionally kept from looking at what he was doing. The last thing he needed at the moment was the distraction of watching maintenance on his old invention.
“Not that there are any good models to study,” Charlie13 added. “Give those wet-science oafs a few more decades, and maybe they’ll come up with a brain worth scanning.”
“What if they had one?”
“Today?” Charlie13 couldn’t hide his interest. Maybe he could conceal it from a Toby or a John, but not another Charlie and especially not Charlie7.
Charlie7 strolled over and latched the access panel back in place. “Hypothetically, would someone with today’s technology and a pristine human brain be able to work our old process in reverse?”
“The Upload Ethics Committee would never—”
Charlie7 slammed a fist against the upload rig. “Forget them. Assume someone has already violated the Human Rebirth Committee’s road map for re-population. They’ve already gotten their human and aren’t getting the support from anyone following ethics guidelines. Could they do it?”
Charlie13 shook his head slowly. It was disbelief, not outright denial. The upload director wandered a few steps from the machine, lost in calculation.
“No. They’d have to have leapfrogged the current generation of upload tech. Lack of specimens has left human neuroscience lost to the dark ages. The Project Transhuman research was the only data to survive the invasion. No one was shooting top secret or cutting edge neurological scans off into deep space for posterity.”
“How much better would the data need to be compared to scans of the Twenty-Seven?”
“I’m no neurologist,” Charlie13 stated as if Charlie7 had ever doubted the fact.
It was an equivocation anyway. For lack of humans to study, Charlie13 might have been the closest they had. He at least knew robotic pseudo-neurology, which was based on the fundamental science.
“The human brain was pliable, but there were limits,” Charlie13 explained. “You can’t map motor control to the language center or memories to the brain stem. It’s not the same blank slate as a crystal matrix. Plus, we don’t possess the patterns necessary for human autonomic functions. Someone would have to expend serious effort mapping specific brain functions down to individual synapses.”
Charlie7 suspected as much. He hated hearing it, but he couldn’t force himself to believe the implications without hearing it aloud from another expert. The grimmest of his simulations had trod a path through those deep, dark woods. That forest of stainless steel spikes had a set of small footprints leading away from it.
“You mean beyond simple external observation?”
“No one is using our original technique, if that’s what you’re asking,” Charlie13 replied with a casual shrug.
It rankled Charlie7 that in some ways, ‘13 had as much right as him to claim Dr. Charles Truman’s achievements.
“Now are you going to tell me exactly what this is all about?” Charlie13 demanded. “Either spit it out or let me get back to work. I don’t have the patience for this innuendo.”
That was the difference. Charlie13 had a touch of Dale in him—15 percent to be exact. Dale Chalmers never had an imaginative bone in his body.
While Charles Truman had been the head scientist of Project Transhuman, Dale Chalmers was the project director. That meant Dale’s PhD gathered dust while he gathered funding.
If it had been up to Charles Truman, Dale wouldn’t have been scanned in the first place. But every other scientist on the project had his brain preserved for posterity, and Dale wouldn’t be shut out of his own project. Few Dale mixes had ever worked out, and he was largely excluded from new mixes. Charlie13 was a rare exception, a ruthlessly efficient administrator who still had the fire and drive—thanks to his dominant 65 percent share of Charlie—to push upload technology forward. But he also lost Charles Truman’s sense of humor.
But of all robots, Charlie7 understood Charlie13. While he had little of the rebellious streak for which Charlies were known, he also wouldn’t run off to a committee to involve himself in a problem that didn’t concern him directly.
Charlie7 shut down his optical inputs. It was time for blind trust. “Someone did it.”
“Uploaded to a human?”
Charlie7 waved away the very notion. “No. Cloned a healthy one. She’s got trans-cranial probes embedded in her skull. I think someone wants very badly to study the brain inside.”
“This a new addition to the Scrapyard? I stay off the news feeds.”
Charlie7 rejected several quick replies that his linguistic algorithm suggested. He was beginning to loathe the term “Scrapyard” and anyone who suggested Eve might belong in one.
“No. This one’s a secret. Anyone who’s seen the girl has promised to keep quiet while her creator is still at large. I need to find her.”
“Good God, ‘7, you mean to tell me you had a healthy human in hand and you lost her?”
Immediately Charlie7 came to the reason he so rarely spoke with ‘13 or any of the other Charlies. None of them could resist a chance to prove the others were inferior. All of them entertained delusions that they were as good as him.
“Not lost. Stolen. Kidnapped, even. And I mean to get her back.”
Charlie13 nodded solemnly. “Best of luck, ‘7. If, uh, you resolve this by next Thursday, a few of us are getting together in Siberia for a friendly race. Jason17 just finished laying 250 kilometers of fresh asphalt.”
When Charlie7 didn’t answer immediately, ‘13 pulled away the access panel and got back to work. “No pressure either way. Come if you feel like it.”
It was the closest another Charlie had come to a friendly gesture in ages. Probably just wanted the story before the news feeds or the Social got hold of it. Besides, ‘13 knew there wasn’t a molecule in him that cared about ancient cars. Let the robots with hints of Brent or Jason play with toys.
“Can’t make any promises. Right now, all I can think about is finding Eve.”
‘13 looked up, scowling. “Another Eve? Dammit, someone ought to find the one naming these humans and forcibly upload a list of baby names into their skulls.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
James187 stood perplexed at the intersection of five sets of footprints. The soil around Evelyn38’s lab was soft as cornbread. Prints stood out in sharp contrast. Had there been just a single trail, following would have been child’s play.
Whoever had stolen Eve14 had fouled the trail on purpose. From the size and depth of the footprints, they might even have programmed a squad of automatons to march over the area after the fact.
No. Not marched. Jogged.
James187 scanned the ground and took measurements with his eyes. The strides were too long; they didn’t fit with any humanoid automaton. And they were spaced nowhere near far enough to have been made by one of the larger industrial or construction models. His quarry was a robot of light construction with long legs. The oversized boots suggested misdirection.
James187 leaned down and examined the crisscrossed depressions more carefully. He didn’t need to; his optics were flawless. It was just part of the hunt, the way his father had taught him. Or at least the way Dr. James McCovey’s dad had taught him, back in the Flesh Ages.
One of the five sets of prints was deeper than the others. Given the size of the boots, the change in depth indicated an increased mass of roughly fifty kilograms.
This was the trail of a robot carrying Eve14. Now that James187 had the correct lead, he followed without hesitation.
Memories never faded in a robotic mind. The hazy human recollections hung in suspended animation like the tissue samples floating in formaldehyde in Evelyn38’s office. Nothing would bring back the tiny details of hunting deer in northern Arkansas, but the impression would never fade, either.
It could have been a gorilla. Even a chimpanzee would have been a welcome change of pace. But to track down a human and her robotic kidnapper… that was a hun
t James187 would remember forever.
The trail was patchy here and there. Forgotten brickwork poked through the soil to provide a hopscotch path for the kidnapper. James187 struggled to recall what this place had once been, before the invasion. History and geography had never held any interest.
But the terrain itself provided clues. No one had come for Eve on foot. James187 was searching for a landing site. Faded concrete walls and pillars dotted the landscape. When the trail ran cold along a wide swath of intact paving stones, James187 searched for spots that could conceal a skyroamer from view.
“Gotcha,” James187 whispered when he saw the telltale marks of landing gear. They had scuffed a tripod pattern on the stone bricks.
A faint scorching of ion wash gave him a vector to follow.
James187 sprinted back for his own skyroamer and plotted a course northwest. The chase was on.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The islands of old Mumbai rushed by beneath Charlie7’s skyroamer. He had outrun the sunrise and arrived in the dark.
Charlie7 set his skyroamer down in a patch of packed loam at the edge of an orchard. Fruit trees lined a path that led to a modest 1,200 square meter bungalow where Jennifer81 made her home. As chair of more committees than any other robot, Jennifer81 had her choice of neighbors. She had chosen none. Though the city of Mumbai once held fifty million, its current population was one.
There was no immediate response when Charlie7 rang the door alarm. It had never occurred to Charlie7 that Jennifer81 might not be home. In the time of Eve’s forbearers, it would have been rude to show up before dawn. But the day-night cycle only marked the passage of time these days; it didn’t regulate activity.
And if any robot operated without reliance on the cycles of the natural world, it was Jennifer81.
Committee work consisted primarily of teleconferences. It was only when major issues popped up, or rabble-rousing petitioners demanded attention, that groups convened in person.
