by J. S. Morin
“They’re not human. They’re not robots,” Eve said firmly. “We’ve created a mezzanine class of sentient life. Dale and Charlie were the first, and no one knew but them. Now we have thirty-three of them, and they’re here to stay. They’re not going to take job assignments they’re predisposed by mix to want. They’re not going to humbly take junior positions on committees. A few might play along, but it’s not going to be long before these robots start acting like Human Age humans—because that’s what they think they are.”
“So what, then?” Arthur19 asked. “We need their help for the investigation. Are you implying they won’t cooperate?”
Eve sighed. Despite digital implants that allowed her to see the names of her committee members floating above their heads and access the Earthwide network directly, she still thought human thoughts. Despite a cruel, barbaric upbringing, she still felt human feelings. “Again, their reactions are going to vary. I’m sure most will help, at least for a while. But it won’t take long for some to remember who created whom.”
“What’s a human in a robotic body going to do?” Holly68 asked.
As if Eve could answer that with any certainty. The only thing that sprang to mind was the obvious. “They’re going to act like humans.”
Chapter Three
Charlie7 departed Kanto feeling pretty good about the testimony his former underlings would give in his defense. He’d climbed to the skyroamer lot and nearly reached his craft when a voice called out from behind him.
“Charlie?” the female voice rose above the wind. “Charlie Truman? Is that really you, or are you just a robot now?”
He stopped and turned. The new robots had all been given brand new clothes, and Nora Prime wore the same brown pantsuit she’d been born in. The thought of it being her birthday suit caused Charlie7 a smirk as he waited for her to catch up.
“It’s really me,” he confirmed. “Sorry you had to come into the world this way. Wasn’t my call.”
Nora Prime approached within arm’s reach but no closer. She looked up into Charlie7’s glowing robotic eyes with a matching set of her own. “This is all so strange. It doesn’t look a thing like you, but it sounds like you, right down to that flippant way you turn everything into a conversation about you.”
Charlie7’s memories of Project Transhuman were imperfect. Anything post-awakening held the crystal clarity of perfectly digitized data. While his human memories hadn’t faded one iota, they were still subject to the existing fuzziness of all biological recollection.
And right at that moment, he couldn’t recall where his relationship with Nora Roberts had been when her final scan was collected.
“It must seem like yesterday to you,” Charlie7 replied.
“Not even,” Nora Prime replied. “I remember grabbing lunch at Jake’s Taco Truck, you joking about my new buzz cut for the scan, lying down as Toby hooked up the electrodes. Next thing I know, it’s the thirty-first century and humanity was wiped out by aliens.”
Charlie7 shrugged. “To be fair, that’s ancient history. Lost its visceral punch centuries ago for me.”
Nora Prime looked around at the other robots heading for their skyroamers after the day’s pageantry and pomp. Was she paranoid? That was never a good sign in a newly mixed robot. Charlie7 wasn’t sure what it boded in a pure scan.
“What became of our son?” she asked in a whisper.
Oh, shit.
Events coalesced into a time line in Charlie7’s memories. They’d still been in the midst of their affair. Nora Prime remembered her pregnancy but not the abortion.
Charlie7 merely shook his head. “The whole species was wiped out.”
“But… did we at least get to—”
Charlie7 shook his head again. “Miscarriage. Second trimester. It was—”
But before he could get another word out, Nora Prime had wrapped her arms around him, sobbing—or at least her shoulders shook and she whimpered. “I… I can’t even cry properly. I lost my baby, and I can’t even cry.”
Charlie7 gently rested a hand on Nora Prime’s lower back, same as he would have comforted a weeping Eve or Rachel or Phoebe. He couldn’t say whether it would work the same as for a human woman. Charles Truman had never been the sort to latch onto anyone for comfort.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly.
Other robots took wide paths to avoid the spectacle they had become. None of the legendary scientists had been quite what the personality archetypes had prepared them for. Seeing their pantheon gawk and cry and stumble around in bewilderment had taken their toll on the robotic zeitgeist already.
Pushing back from him, Nora looked up into Charlie7’s eyes. “Can we try again? There’s no Mitch to get in the way. There’s no project to consume you. It worked. I gave too much of myself to science; I want something back. We’ve earned it. Let’s have another child.”
Charlie7 sighed.
Nora Prime swatted him on the chest. “I get it. You don’t have to patronize me. We’re robots without genitalia. But I asked my share of questions during that interview including what Holly’s niece was doing acting as Frankenstein’s Igor. Robots have been raising cloned human children for the past five years—legally, anyway. Pairs, 18-year commitment, I got the whole story including the existence of genetic samples from the project team.”
If only modern life were so simple. Find a girl. Start a family. Live the biological dream.
Charlie7 had responsibilities. Then again, his access to various committees and computer systems had been so vastly curtailed by the Special Investigative Committee for Historical Crimes that it felt like an amputation.
The investigation itself was a bigger issue with planning eighteen years into the future. “You may have noticed I’m in a bit of a compromised position politically at the moment.”
“To hell with them,” Nora Prime said with a fervor that no Nora archetype had ever shown. “If there’s one fact that’s unavoidable: those smug ingrates owe you everything. None of this would exist without you. This body, this mind… it’s all your design. Everyone else was just helping with the project, whatever else they might claim.”
Dr. Nora Maxwell-Granger had been a primate biologist. She’d been responsible for the health and welfare of the chimps that had been the brain scanner’s first test subjects. The chimps had been completely unharmed. Project Transhuman’s methods were non-invasive, painless, and brief. Nora had played a part in driving Charles Truman to ensure all those conditions had been met.
Without her—without any single one of them—Charles Truman would have eventually succeeded. “But I only finished in time because of all of them. This wasn’t my sole success. There was the whole war. The end of life on Earth. There was—God, more than I can sum up. I have a lot of baggage since that scan of yours happened.”
Nora Prime stepped back. “It’s too much. You’re not the man I knew; is that what you’re trying to tell me? I can’t even imagine. A thousand years… do you even remember us?”
“Like it was yesterday,” Charlie7 replied truthfully. It was ever ensconced in his database that his final meal as a human being was a raspberry Twisty-Bar and a bottle of off-brand orange soda. His last glimpse of Nora had been of her driving off with two chimps in the back seat of her car, trying to evacuate ahead of the alien toxin billowing across the globe.
“Well, that’s the only way I remember you,” Nora Prime replied.
The five seconds of silence that passed between them would have seemed like an eternity to another robot—one who hadn’t been convinced she was a human yesterday, at any rate. That was time enough for Charlie7 to review the entirety of his relationship with Dr. Nora Maxwell-Granger during the Human Era.
It had all started with a late night during primate trials of the brain scanner. She had been touched by how gentle he was with the chimps; he’d merely been taking care not to damage his prototype. All the same, it had resulted in drinks and a shared motel room while her husband was away on gov
ernment business.
They became an open secret in a lab where professional passions and personal lives sloshed together too often for anyone to find them especially scandalous. What Nora couldn’t recall was the fallout from her pregnancy. Charles Truman hadn’t been the most understanding lover; he’d seen the issue as black and white. Divorce Mitch Granger, and Nora became just Nora Maxwell again, free to move on—with him.
Over the months that followed, the two of them had fought and reconciled multiple times. One particularly nasty spat resulted in Charles admitting he was worried about passing on genetic conditions he’d never told Nora about. She terminated the pregnancy before Mitch ever found out about it.
When Mitch returned from overseas, the two of them went to couples therapy. Charles Truman had never gotten a straight answer out of her as to whether she’d told Mitch about their affair.
But in the midst of it all, Charlie7 remembered that he’d been happy—possibly even content. If Nora had gotten her way, and he’d paid more attention to her than his work, humanity would have been buried and forgotten. Cephaloid alien creatures would have called Earth their home. He’d been right to choose Project Transhuman over blissful domestication.
Why not?
Charlie7 was being marginalized in every other aspect of robotic society. Surely his political opponents would be more than happy to see him spend the next twelve or thirteen years—since no child of his would need eighteen years until emancipation—settling down and enjoying a quiet life.
“I think I’d like that,” Charlie7 said. “Whose DNA? Yours or mine?”
Chapter Four
On April 15, 3098, a male human specimen was removed from artificial neonatal gestation and took his first breath. His parents named him Alexander Leonardo Truman, after his maternal grandfather, a famous inventor, and history’s greatest scientist, in that order.
Genetically, Alex was virtually identical to the human once known as Dr. Charles Truman. However, modern science had cleaned up his genome, removing all traces of heritable disease and abnormality, predisposition to heart disease, asthma, and several forms of cancer.
“He’s perfect,” Dr. Nora gushed upon first holding him.
Charlie7 smiled. She had no idea.
Among the small group of friends in attendance, the new parents accepted well-wishes and tidbits of misguided but well-meaning advice. That circle was smaller than it might have been a year prior, but Arthur19’s persecution had taken its toll. Charlie7 might have been exonerated, but he hadn’t been widely forgiven. Legalese didn’t patch up friendships.
“You’ll be great parents,” Eve assured them.
Plato clapped Charlie7 on the back. “Yeah, if any robot can imitate a human, it’s a couple who still remember being human.”
As the newborn cried, the robotic couple continued to accept congratulations and social blandishments promising they’d be excellent parents. Charlie7 joked and laughed with the segment of robotkind’s elite that was still speaking to him. Dr. Nora was beside herself with joy, unable to form complete sentences without going off on tangents. Most of the guests were humans or robots from among the awakened Twenty-Seven—the other six had taken poorly the news that Charlie7 had excluded them from his mechanoid utopia.
“Of all robots,” Toby22 remarked, one of the few mixed robots to attend, “I had never figured you for a father.”
Charlie7 placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I’ve been to the edge of the solar system. I’ve been to the bottom of the ocean. This is my biggest adventure yet.”
Abbigail Fourteen, who had been quiet and attentive all through the birth and its immediate aftermath, spoke up. “He doesn’t seem to be happy to be born.” She stood on a chair by the incubator console to peer into Dr. Nora’s arms at the bawling newborn.
“That’s normal,” Dr. Ashley assured the girl. The former surgeon was the closest the Twenty-Seven had to an obstetrician. She spoke with a hint of a Spanish accent absent in her robotic namesakes. “His lungs need exercise. He’s never used them before today.”
Abbigail frowned. “I know that. I mean he doesn’t look happy. When I got to see Paul30 and Janice71’s baby, he cried lots too. But this baby seems angry.”
“C’mon, squirt,” Plato said, scooping Abby from her perch and seating her atop his shoulders. “Let’s go outside and find some bugs.”
Abby sighed. “They’d better be good bugs to be better than a new baby.”
Chapter Five
Two years later, Charlie7 and Dr. Nora were visiting Paris with young Alex. Eve and Plato’s home had a palatial garden and vast stretches of drone-manicured lawn to play on. Toby Prime—whose honorary doctorate had been a matter of debate, granted mainly to ease the nomenclature problem of non-numbered robots—attended as well, having latched onto the family as a sort of uncle. As the original version, he’d come pre-programmed with a puppy-dog devotion to Charlie7.
Despite full run of the grounds, Abby kept Alex herded within earshot of the adults’ conversation.
“Wish we got to see more of you two,” Dr. Nora said sweetly. “But it feels like raising a toddler takes twenty-five hours a day.”
“It’ll be easier to get together once Alex starts school,” Eve said with a shrug. “I’m assuming you’ll want to move closer to Oxford rather than commuting from North America.”
Leaning back and watching the two young children kicking an inflated ball back and forth, Charlie7 chimed in. “Well, the Boston Restoration Project is something we’re both enjoying. Not sure it’s worth putting on hold for years just to cut down on travel times.”
“Alex good in a skyroamer for an hour each way?” Plato asked. He slurped lemonade through a straw.
“Oh, he fussed the whole way,” Dr. Nora assured them. “But we don’t plan on a school commute.”
Eve scowled. “You’re not considering—”
“Yup,” Charlie7 said. “Going to homeschool him. Oh, don’t look at me like that. He’ll get plenty of opportunities to play with other kids. But frankly, I think it’ll stunt him socially.”
Plato scratched the back of his neck. “How you figure? Oughta be the other way around.”
Charlie7 shook his head. “Let him play sports and active games with kids his age and size. Nice, level playing field there. But if you put him in a classroom environment with his physical peers, he’ll humiliate them, ruining his social relationships. Put him in with his academic peers, and he’ll be surrounded by adolescents while he’s still got all his baby teeth.”
Eve sighed. If there was one worry she had about Charlie7 as a father, it was that he was raising a clone of himself. Ego shouldn’t get to operate in a closed loop like that. “He’s only two. You can’t make those sort of gross extrapolations based on vocabulary and grammar usage. There’s always—”
Eve’s statement was drowned out by the horrid buzz of the gardening drones roaring to life a few meters away.
“What are you doing, Abby?” Plato demanded sternly without slipping past the borderline into anger.
That phrase, What are you doing, Abby?, had become the theme song of their marriage. Eve and Plato both sang it in the same voice, tinged with a mixture of skepticism and worry. Abby’s answers ranged from innovating ice cream flavors or teaching the dogs to sing to building homemade fireworks, attempting to fly a skyroamer, or programming a drone to pierce her ears.
Chocolate bubblegum ice cream had turned out to be palatable. Jimbo and Russels had recovered from severe stomachaches from excessive positive reinforcement. The explosive precursors had been confiscated. Eve had instituted encryption on the skyroamer controls. But occasionally things slipped through.
Abby still had pierced ears of her own doing.
“We’re going to play checkers,” Abby said as the drones mowed a grid into the lawn, varying the grass height to create light and dark squares. A moment later, another drone rolled out of the house carrying red and black plastic platters still warm fr
om the Protofab.
Eve leaned over to Charlie7 and shielded her mouth from the children. “Does Alex know checkers?”
“Probably his idea,” Charlie7 replied. “The strategic layer of chess is still a little too abstract for him.”
The adults watched while Abby laid out the plate-sized checkers. She took the red and made the first move. Alex showed no sign of confusion, toddling over and moving one of the black checkers in a standard opening.
Though he obviously understood the game, Alex lost handily.
“Don’t let her double-jump you,” Charlie7 advised. “Think ahead.”
Alex lost the second game.
And the third.
Midway through a fourth game, Abby blocked him in such a way that any move he made would result in getting two of his pieces taken in a single turn. After looking at the lawn-based board from both sides and finding no moves, Alex dropped one of his pieces on an invalid square.
Abby hustled over immediately. “You can’t do that!”
Alex burst out crying and ran for Dr. Nora.
“I’m sorry,” Abby shouted after him. “Don’t cry. It’s just a game.”
“It’s all right,” Dr. Nora assured her. She pulled down the boy’s pants and pulled out a portable machine she carried with her in a duffel. “He’s just soiled himself.”
Alex didn’t wear what anyone would have considered to be a diaper. Instead, he was protected from his own excretions by what appeared to be the short-shorts version of a space suit. As the boy stood squirming and sniffling, Dr. Nora hooked up a hose from her equipment to the mechanical diaper, giving the connection a quarter turn to lock it in place.
The device hummed. Within the hose, water rushed in a gurgle. An indicator light switched from red to green, then Dr. Nora unhooked the apparatus. “There you go, darling. All clean.”
Eve watched the boy return to checkers, where Abby had already undone his illegal move and awaited his return. “So it wasn’t the losing that brought on the tantrum? It was just the messy diaper… thing?”
