Extinction Reversed (Robot Geneticists Book 1)

by J. S. Morin

  He hadn’t been giving Eve enough thought in all this. There was an option he had overlooked. What if neither Eve nor James187 were coming out of that doorway?

  He had given Eve the nickel tour of the building and shown her the tram. It sounded ludicrous to imagine that the girl wouldn’t figure out how to operate it without being shown.

  Would the girl risk putting so large a distance between them if it meant staying clear of James187 as well? Charlie7 had envisioned a rescue with her coming back out, them taking off, and leaving James187 with a disabled skyroamer.

  In fact, as Charlie7 pondered how best to quickly sabotage James187’s skyroamer, he realized that Eve probably had taken the tram.

  It made sense. Why risk getting caught if you can get an insurmountable head start?

  Either James187 would have to follow her down the tram tunnel, or he’d have to double back and take his skyroamer to the agrarian complex. Since neither of them had come back, it seemed safe to assume the former.

  “Sorry for the damage, James…”

  Charlie7 worked his way through the skyroamer’s computer systems, thinking to set the engines to overheat. Then he remembered the live animal transports James187 had been engaged to carry out.

  This craft had environmental controls. It might not have the slick interface and custom programming of Charlie7’s machine, but it was far better suited to making an escape with Eve aboard. No more risking hypothermia for the poor girl until he could get his refitted.

  The engines of James187’s skyroamer did heat up but only in preparation for takeoff. Charlie7 had no qualms about leaving his own ride behind. If James187 could unlock the computer to get it started, he was more than welcome to it.

  In the meantime, Charlie had a human girl to collect at the agrarian center fifty-three kilometers to the northwest.

  Chapter Sixty

  The tram slowed at a rate Eve had selected from the advanced menus. The default setting seemed to assume she had a robot chassis and would have clamped herself to the car prior to arrival. Had Eve not thought ahead, she’d have been launched from the vehicle upon arrival. Instead, she drifted to a gradual halt with a mild jerk at the end.

  Staring back down the tunnel, she couldn’t see any sign of the robot after her.

  The tram line terminated in a small depot. A section of track on a turntable stood ready to turn it around or send it off onto one of two additional tracks. Eve didn’t know where either of them went, and at the moment, finding out wasn’t a priority.

  Eve stepped onto the platform, and her wobbly legs met solid, unyielding concrete. The solidity was welcome; the tramcar had bobbed and wiggled beneath her the whole way.

  An unlabeled door led out of the depot. Plain steel, with no control console, handle, or knob. A droning of machinery thrummed from beyond. As Eve approached it to investigate, it opened unbidden.

  It was a curious new experience for doors to open for her at all, let alone invite her through so boldly. But the droning increased to an industrial cacophony. Eve winced and pressed her hands over her ears against the onslaught.

  Sparing a glance over her shoulder, she looked down the tram tunnel for any sign of the robotic hunter. So far, there was no sign of him.

  There were two ways to go, of course.

  The Plato route would have been to turn the tram around and barrel back down toward Alison3’s house. That would have been bold, aggressive, brave in a foolish manner, and completely unexpected.

  Or would it?

  Certainly, the robot in that tunnel would hear the tram long before it arrived. Pressing himself against the tunnel wall, Eve’s purser could time a shot as Eve sped past. With computer-aided ballistic calculations and nanosecond timing, the robot was sure to hit her as the open side of the tram presented an unobstructed shot.

  There was also the little matter of the trailer she’d left behind along the way. She’d slam right into it. Plato’s method promised either death or capture. Her imaginary Plato was an idiot.

  “Sorry,” she muttered aloud as if Plato might hear.

  With no other viable option, Eve stepped through the door, and the food factory engulfed her.

  The facility existed on a scale that Eve struggled to digest. Her eyes took it in but held tight to the spectacle. Eve’s brain refused to chew it into swallowable bites.

  Slow-moving ships hovered through the upper reaches, a hundred meters above, dumping red sand into a hopper. At that distance, they could have been apples, peppers, strawberries, or any number of other red foods the Earthwide had taught her.

  Smell didn’t carry that far, and the amalgamated scents of every food made in Kansas couldn’t cut through the overbearing odor of ammonia. It reminded Eve of cleaning days at the lab when Creator brought the automatons to scrub everything down.

  Automatons probably did the same in this place. Enough of the mute, slow-moving robots plodded throughout the building to populate one of those old-Earth cities from the archive. Eve couldn’t imagine why they were all needed.

  The factory had a maze of crisscrossed catwalks and mezzanine levels intermixed with machinery that chopped, sorted, irradiated, boiled, peeled, shucked, ground, mashed, mixed, sliced, and gobbled up everything the drone ships dumped.

  How far was Eve below ground? She needed to navigate her way to the surface.

  Was there a terminal somewhere that she could run a search? The walls were bare, and the consoles on the production equipment seemed stark, barely giving the essential details of the machines’ function to the robot who stared at them.

  Taking a chance, Eve put a hand on the shoulder of a drone. “Excuse me. Can you tell me the way outside?”

  The robotic factory worker didn’t respond. It seemed unaware that she had even touched it. At least the truck-driving robot had been forced to react to her presence.

  Eve picked her way through the ballet of robots going this way and that, attempting to put equations to the motions and coming up with too many variables to solve. She realized that what governed them was more than a single algorithm, but rather a series of computer programs that ran everything in the factory. There was no way she could reverse engineer that all just through observation.

  On her travels, Eve peered into hoppers and over the edges of walled conveyor belts to see what they were all doing.

  She watched as belts carried grains and fruits, nuts and vegetables all throughout the factory. Edible parts and seeds were sorted out from waste. Portions were poured, squirted, or stuffed into bottles and bags. Numbers were laser-scorched into each container, but they meant nothing to Eve.

  “These must be for the geneticists,” Eve mused. It felt OK speaking aloud since she wasn’t alone. There were robots all around her.

  In a separate section of the factory, Eve found different sorts of machines combining ingredients. Lines of automatons plucked packages from one conveyor belt, mixed, stirred, and kneaded the contents, and placed them on another. Other drones took those payloads and checked them before feeding them through conveyor ovens.

  These robots were cooking and baking.

  Eve could hardly imagine it, but this was the same process that Charlie7 and Plato had shown her for preparing foods, just on a grander scale. She didn’t recognize much of anything they made. Cuisine was a word that was as new as the clothes she wore.

  Walking down the rows, squeezing behind the robotic cooks, Eve reached through and put a finger in a bowl of batter. It tasted sweet and sent a tingle through to her toes. Rather than steal more of the batter, she sampled from several different conveyors before one soured her on the adventure.

  Porridge. This was where the meals at the Sanctuary for Scientific Sins originated.

  Eve spat it out and wiped her fingers on her pants. Stealing another sample of the substance labeled “strawberry jam,” she worked it around her mouth to get rid of the porridge taste and sucked her fingers clean.

  She could have spent the day exploring, learnin
g all about how Kansas turned simple foods into complex ones and what became of all the results. The factory sprawled for kilometers, and she still hadn’t even reached ground level. Overhead, aerial drones continued to deliver more raw ingredients. More conveyors moved the unprocessed farm fare. More automatons cooked and cleaned and operated the stationary machines.

  A door slid open.

  In the hum and crash of all the culinary chaos, it caught Eve’s ear. There had only been one door since she’d arrived in the factory—the one she came in by. Ducking behind a boiling vat that smelled of apple, Eve peeked down toward the entrance.

  The tram station door was partly obscured by catwalks and a machine that ground wheat into flour. Still, Eve saw a robot enter. It wasn’t yet another of the countless automatons but the hunter she’d left behind in the tunnels. His forest camouflage looked out of place amid the steel and concrete. The gashes in the fabric gave him a wild look.

  Eve’s breath quickened. Her mind filled with pieces of thoughts that didn’t fit neatly together.

  What had she expected? Eve had hoped the hunter had given up, but that wasn’t really what she believed would happen.

  Escape. Surface. Outdoors. Her priorities had been washed away in a buffet of new sensory experiences.

  It didn’t even smell so badly of ammonia three levels up. The sugary sweet concoctions made Eve’s teeth ache just breathing in the scent of them. Why would Eve flee paradise because of what might happen?

  Now there was no more might. Eve’s would-be captor had returned, and she had given herself less cushion than she would have liked.

  A continent would have been a nice, safe buffer.

  “Come out, Eve14!” the robot shouted. “This is no place for you. Nobody wants you to get hurt.”

  The general noise and echoic properties of the walls would keep shouting back from giving away her exact position. Eve couldn’t resist. “You’re wrong. I know why she wants me back,” she shouted. “Just run away before Plato gets here.”

  The robot laughed. “Your friend Plato isn’t coming. He’s hours away, and you haven’t got hours. If you’d like to meet up with him tomorrow or the day after, I’m sure that can be arranged. But you’ll have to come with me.”

  A clever ploy slipped in between Eve’s panic and anger. “You don’t even know who you’re working for, I bet. When I found out, she made me swear never to tell anyone she worked with. That means she doesn’t trust you.”

  “Oh, you think Evelyn38 doesn’t trust me? I could have her before a committee in the snap of my fingers. But that would implicate me as well. You see, that’s how the world works. We share our secrets, and they bind us together.”

  Was the voice moving? Of course, it was. The robot in the forest camouflage would be searching for her the whole time.

  Eve scrambled on hands and knees around the legs of a line of automatons as they filed past in the opposite direction and headed for the nearest stairway up. “Now I know yours, and Creator’s too.”

  “What? You didn’t know her name before now?” The robot laughed again. “She’s Evelyn38; I’m James187. It won’t do you any good. This time tomorrow your brain will be filled with Evelyn38’s mind—or it’ll be mush like all the others. But I’ve got a good feeling this time. And if it works, I’m next in line. How do you think that Plato’s body would look on me?”

  The idea of Creator’s thoughts in her head instead of her own made Eve want to claw her brain out with her fingernails. She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head as if she could shake the image from her thoughts.

  The idea of Plato being this cruel robot who taunted her was almost too much to bear.

  “Well, maybe you can’t appreciate it, but I think Evelyn38 will once she’s got your body. It’s curiously difficult to evaluate without the hormonal reinforcement, but I think with Plato’s body, I might enjoy your company. I don’t suppose Evelyn ever bothered teaching you about reproduction. Did she?”

  Reproducing humans seemed like a skill Creator had already mastered. There had been Eves before her and were probably Eves younger than her as well. “I don’t want to produce humans. Let Cre—let Evelyn38 worry about that, at least until Plato stops her.”

  A dart rang against the leg of one of the automatons next to Eve. He’d spotted her!

  Eve ran.

  Another dart whizzed past as she twisted and ducked, knowing that predictable movements made an easily solvable equation for James187.

  Most of Eve’s plan now was luck-based.

  Unacceptable.

  Forcing low-percentage guesswork onto her adversary improved her odds but left her fate to random chance. Without solid cover to shield her, she needed another way to stop James187 from firing at her.

  Eve hopped onto the railing.

  Creator’s obstacle course had been designed to test her strength, flexibility, and most of all her balance.

  Keeping her center of mass low and her arms slightly to her sides, Eve hurried along the 3-centimeter-wide railing. To her left side was a catwalk with automaton pedestrians roaming about. To her right, a twenty-meter drop.

  Eve had never known a fear of heights, but she’s also never looked down with the promise of death looming so near. If James187 shot her full of sedatives, Eve would fall.

  What she’d land on depended on precisely when she fell. Options ranged from hoppers filled with boiling vegetables to lines of robots working with knives. None of them promised a good chance of survival.

  And Creator wanted—no, needed—Eve alive.

  “Get down from there!” James187 ordered. But no darts came flying her way.

  Eve pivoted and stood up tall, finally daring to face her hunter. “I don’t care who you are, James187, but I know that by this time tomorrow, you’re going to regret having partnered with Evelyn38.”

  Chapter Sixty-One

  The chase was on.

  Eve had found a way to ensure that James187 couldn’t risk firing more darts. That left a footrace. She imagined that, as a robot, James187 could run much faster than her. Chasing down the tram before she’d learned how to accelerate it proved that much. But Eve had tricks of her own.

  James187 bulled past automatons that wobbled and returned to their tasks as soon as he was gone. He was chasing her directly, not getting fancy and trying to head her off. And it appeared that unless Eve came up with a new plan, he was going to catch up with her.

  In Oz, the Tin Man had been a kindly fellow even without a heart. This James187 could have used a heart of his own because Eve could imagine no compassion in him.

  And while the flying monkeys of Oz had been cruel minions of the evil witch, perhaps this too was switched around in Kansas. Overhead, the farm drones drifted in and out. They weren’t so hopelessly far above anymore. If Eve could reach one as it exited the agrarian factory, maybe she could hitch a ride.

  “You’re going to get yourself killed,” James187 shouted as Eve sped her pace, jogging along the railings with her arms outstretched for balance. Without looking back, she could hear how close he was getting.

  “Wouldn’t that be a shame?” Eve countered. “Since Creator is planning on killing me one way or another as soon as you bring me back.” She reached a corner where the railing followed the catwalk in a hard left turn. Rather than turning along with it, Eve judged the distance and jumped across.

  “No!” James187 screamed.

  But Eve caught hold of a railing across the way and a level down. She regretted giving up the vertical progress she’d made, but it was too far a jump to stay on the same elevation. Her knees acted as shock absorbers as her feet hit the side of the catwalk.

  Without pausing, Eve ducked under the railing and ran. There were no automatons on this section of the catwalk, so she had space to put distance between her and James187.

  A crash of metal shook the grated floor, and Eve wobbled in her run. Instinct took over, and she hopped up to the railing once more before James187 could get a shot
off while she was over a safe surface. But running on a narrow beam slowed her, and James187 was already faster than her.

  She needed a new plan.

  Glancing down, Eve found her answer. A conveyor belt angled upward, lifting apples by half-moon buckets molded into its surface.

  Judging the jump to land her in the middle of the conveyor, Eve leaped.

  The apples made for poor footing, and Eve stumbled backward as soon as she landed. Her short, controlled fall became a helpless tumble down the slope of the conveyor. Apples smashed under her elbow and slammed against the back of her head. Hard rubber half-buckets dug into her back and legs. She came to rest in an apple-filled trough with buckets repeatedly trying to hook her left leg and drag it up along with their fruity payloads.

  “Eve! Are you all right?” James187 shouted down to her.

  She was dizzy and sore. Squirming among the fruits, she discovered all her limbs were intact.

  “Eve is dead,” she called out. “Go tell Evelyn38. Bye.”

  Her body was a rag doll, discarded on the tracks of an apple railroad. With her head over the edge, lolling back, she watched the drones drift overhead in resignation.

  So high above. Eve had fallen so far.

  Reaching blindly beside her, Eve picked an apple at random and took a bite, ignoring the weird texture of the peel in her mouth.

  She had failed.

  There was no way she’d ever get to one of the drones before James187 caught up with her. Why make it hard on both of them? Pain was all she’d found. The poor little glands that produced adrenaline in her body had wrung themselves dry. Numb inevitability crept in to replace her fears.

  Eve crunched her apple as she waited for James187 to come down and claim her.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  “I admire your grit,” James187 said.

  His voice wasn’t so far off now, perhaps a level or two up and almost directly overhead.

  There was no rush. Eve hadn’t moved.