by J. S. Morin
Abby didn’t know what he meant. Waves of dizziness washed over her as she struggled to keep her eyes focused.
Alex was alive. She’d saved him.
A weak smile was her last gesture before a pervasive cold took hold of her and everything turned black.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Abby awoke in an unfamiliar bed, surrounded by familiar faces. Her eyes gummed open, but her body was leaden, the effort of reaching up to rub them was simply too great. Lolling her head to the side, she smiled up at Mom and Dad. Plato loomed behind and above Eve, their heads arranged like a totem pole, drawing a groggy chuckle from Abby.
“Well, her sense of humor survived,” Dad said with a goofy grin.
From the opposite side of the bed, Nigel crowded in. “That was amazing, what you did out there.”
“Alex?” Abby asked, forcing her voice past a tongue made of terrycloth.
Mom scowled. “A grade two concussion but otherwise unharmed.”
“Knocked fifty IQ points out of him,” Billy said with a grin, crowding in for Abby to see him.
There was a heavy thwack. “Did not,” Rosa said. “Where do you get off making up phony injuries?”
“I was just trying to cheer her up,” Billy protested.
“How bad do I need cheering up?” Abby asked, looking at Mom for a straight answer without sugarcoating or jokes.
“You won,” Mom said. “I’m still going to be running the Human Welfare Committee, presuming you keep your campaign promises.” She offered a wry smile.
Abby closed her eyes and lay back. “Good. Well, all’s right in the world, I guess.”
“Not everything, Pumpkin,” Dad said somberly.
Abby’s eyes snapped open. The beeping of a heart monitor quickened. “What’s wrong with me?” She tried a cursory self-inventory not dissimilar to her ritual upon waking up from a night of drinking. “Why can’t I move?”
A robot in pale teal medical scrubs swept into the room as if on cue. It was Ashley390. “Simple neural blockers. It’s for the pain. You’re not paralyzed.”
Well, there was that. But something still lacked thoroughness in the surgical robot’s explanation. “But what is wrong with me?”
Ashley390, never notorious for bedside manner, pulled back Abby’s blanket. Even with the limited mobility of her neck, Abby could still see the problem at once. Her breath caught in her throat.
Her left arm was gone.
“What happened?” she demanded.
Ashley390 explained in clinical terms. “A scattering of projected steel shrapnel severed your humerus in six places and rendered your bicep and triceps muscles little more than ground meat. You lost roughly 32 percent of your body’s blood, and without immediate medical attention, you would have died.”
“Oh.”
Dad put a fist to Abby’s chin and gave her a nudge. “Take more than that to keep my girl down. Won’t it?”
He was looking for an affirmative answer. Despite her uncertainty, Abby obliged, forcing a smile. “Yeah.” She turned to Ashley390. “But turn off the nerve blocker. I don’t wait to lie here in a stupor.”
Ashley390 cracked a smile. “The stupor you refer to is your own. The nerve blocker isn’t functioning above the neck. You’ve had a rough night. Lie back and rest. We can discuss cybernetic options in the morning.”
“Cybernetics?” Abby echoed. She looked from one parent to the other.
Dad was a mass of arthritic joints supplemented by servo-mechanical actuators to help bear the load of his bulk. Mom had implanted computer screens in her corneas and a spider web of fiber optics paralleling half her nervous system, attached to an on-board computer tucked beside her kidneys.
“Don’t worry,” Dad assured her. “There’s no rush. You can take all the time in the world deciding how you want them to fix you up.”
“Turn off the nerve blocker.” This time it wasn’t a suggestion.
Ashley390 affected a sigh and headed over to the control console for the medical bed.
“You sure that’s a good idea?” Billy asked.
Rosa leaned in. “Maybe you should listen to the doctor.”
Ashley390 paused and looked to Eve.
“What are you looking at me for?” Mom demanded. “Abby’s emancipated. It’s her call.” She scowled at Abby’s friends, as if they needed a reminder as well.
Abby sucked in a breath and grit her teeth in anticipation, but nothing could prepare her for the pain that flooded in as soon as Ashley390 allowed her nervous system back online. She grunted and squeezed her eyes shut, tears streaming from the corners of her eyes.
“Just say the word and I’ll re-enable the block,” Ashley390 said quickly.
Abby thrashed her head in refusal. Panting for breath, she opened her eyes and forced a smile for the concerned onlookers. She was already sweating. “See? I’m fine. Nothing to worry about.”
“Needless to say,” Ashley390 said, “once we get the nerve endings cleaned up and reattached to the cybernetic interface, any residual discomfort can be readily managed.”
Managed. As in, turned on and off, just like the nerve block.
Cybernetics was one field Abby had never wished to study in detail. As her visitors filtered out and her convalescence began in earnest, Ashley390 spent hours fulfilling Human Welfare Committee edicts on informed consent.
Schematics and computer-generated models floated across a screen, showing a mock-up of Abby’s injured arm and a variety of mechanical replacements.
“While we can certainly preserve the existing tissue as is, there will always be minor issues at the interface,” Ashley390 explained, showing how a mechanical fitting could be joined to the stump of her arm, lost halfway between shoulder and elbow. “The strain on your remaining arm would be the main source of discomfort with this approach, though we can go over options for false-positive reduction in neural transmission.”
“Ignoring the pain it would cause?” Abby asked, trying to translate the clinical gibberish into layman’s terms.
“Precisely. However, if we were to excise the remaining limb…” A few taps at the portable screen, and the simplified digital rendition of Abby was missing her arm clear up to the shoulder. “Then we could use a hybrid polymer steel to replace your scapula and clavicle, reattach the living tendons to the hybrid material on one side, and electro-fibrous synthetic tissue to the other. We’d attach neuron-to-fiber interfaces for each nerve ending, and you’d end up with a seamless integration that would become second nature given enough time.”
“Wouldn’t it be heavier?” Abby asked, her one remaining hand straying to the collarbone Ashley390 so casually suggested removing and replacing. “Wouldn’t there be response differences between my left and right arms?”
“Of course,” Ashley390 said. “I’m just telling you that you’ll adapt and stop noticing them after a time. You’ll still feel. I can brush my fingers across a flower’s petals and still feel the soft texture. You’ll have a little taste of how robots experience life.” She smiled reassuringly.
It wasn’t a matter of merely getting used to a clumsy robotic limb. Abby had been a musician as well as a playwright. She could program a computer to play scores she wrote, but they couldn’t feel them out on the strings of a violin or tap at the keys of a piano until a melody struck her fancy.
Ashley390 droned on, delving into servo-motor options and power packages. Some prostheses could be powered by her own bioelectric energy. Others would require occasional recharges, just like a robot. There were performance and aesthetic options galore. Abby began to feel like a customer of Kanto, awaiting upload to a new chassis.
“Just upgrade me to a Version 75.1 and be done with it,” Abby snapped, shoving the portable computer aside.
“Now, Abbigail,” Ashley390 said, clucking her tongue. She picked up the portable and swiped to a new design. “You don’t need to go talking about a full robotic body. Most of you is in perfect working order. You just need—”
“I don’t need anything,” Abby shouted. “Leave me alone!”
Ashley390 stood up and took the portable computer away with her. “The pain is making you irritable,” she said from the doorway. “Just press the button by the bedside to re-enable the nerve block. Consider it if you can’t sleep. Rest is the best thing for you right now. Good night.”
The lights flicked off. The door slid closed behind Ashley390.
Amid the darkness, a pale green circle of light glowed near Abby’s right hand. It cost her the use of a pillow for the night, but she buried the temptation and the chance to accidentally drug herself into a stupor.
Abby fell asleep with her arm trapped in a furnace.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Charlie7 didn’t get invited to many closed-door meetings these days, at least not with any robots of influence or standing in the community. So it felt strange walking into an exclusive meeting of the Special Investigative Committee for Political Crimes as if the prior sixteen years hadn’t happened.
All the faces were familiar to Charlie7 and not just because they were from mainstream chassis lines. Earth had pulled out all the stops to get to the bottom of why a lone robot would try to assassinate a human political candidate. The incident had sent shock waves through both the human and robotic community.
Jason90 was the first one to speak since his arrival. The rest had watched in stoic disapproval as Charlie7 stalked in among their ranks. “What did you come up with?”
Charlie7 smiled amiably as if oblivious to the resentment radiating from a dozen sentient minds tainted with altered programming so long ago. “Let me just start by saying how nice it’s felt to be working on a matter of this import. As it turns out, fatherhood really wasn’t the adventure I was looking for, and—”
“Cryo-freeze that nonsense and report,” Charlie13 ordered. “You’re on auxiliary power here as it is.”
“Right,” Charlie7 said with a huff. “Fine. I reexamined all your findings and added a few observations of my own. I’ve pieced together what made Joshua143 try to shoot Alexander Charles Truman on the night of Monday November 6, 3111.”
“And?” Arthur19 prompted just as Charlie7’s dramatic pause was taking effect. Some robots really had no flair for the dramatic.
“Well, first off, the assassin wasn’t really Joshua143.”
“The crystal fragments matched within a .001 percent variance of his last scan, which was only a month and a half ago,” Charlie13 said.
Jason90 nodded in agreement.
“Oh, it was Joshua143’s brain, or at least one of his old ones,” Charlie7 said. “In fact, your own words confirmed how it was obtained. This wasn’t a brand new crystal. I expect that when we hear back from his mining ship, Joshua143 will be quite surprised to hear that he’s been killed.”
With transmission times by laser taking four days each way, even a vessel that was expecting a transmission would be more than a week in responding to the investigation’s inquiry.
“So… someone duplicated him?” Jason90 asked.
“No,” Charlie7 said with a shake of his head. “More like salvaged him. Quantum residuals don’t show signs of activity since well before the election.”
Arthur19 scowled. “How come you can tell that when our best—?”
“I am your best,” Charlie7 snapped. “That’s why you brought me in, because the rest of you were stumped. The dark energy blasts from those oh-so-brave armed volunteers in the crowd may have scrambled the readings, but I understand how they were scrambled. I filtered out the effects of the alien tech as best I could and pinned down the last quantum gate shifts in that crystalline matrix to right around the time of Joshua143’s upload.”
“Then how was he moving? Talking? Why did he attack Alex?” Jason90 asked. “We didn’t pick up any local transmission in the area.”
“Pre-programmed. He was running like a drone via internal computers. Something triggered him, and—”
“Again,” Jason90 said. “No unaccounted signals.”
“Unaccounted?” Charlie7 asked as if amused. “It was broadcast for the world to see and hear. Alex said ‘humanity doesn’t need the mixes,’ and our friend in pieces lurches into action. Review the video. It’s covered from multiple angles and with time stamps galore. Half the robotic spectators submitted eye-witness recordings as evidence.”
“You’re saying it was waiting for that phrase, or something like it, before it acted?” Charlie13 asked. Charlie7 appreciated that his namesake was at least shrewd enough to stop calling the drone assassin ‘he.’
“That specific wording.”
“You cracked the encryption?” Arthur19 asked eagerly. “Even Holly5 couldn’t scratch that one.”
Charlie7 grinned like a burglar. He could have told them nearly anything. They were constantly in awe of him, even the other Charlie designations. Keenly aware that the planetary computer systems had been riddled with inextricable back doors that were unsealable short of scrapping modern technology and starting from scratch, he could convince them of any trick he’d buried in there for later use.
Instead, Charlie7 admitted the truth. “I left it unsecured and waited for Alex and his friends to try to cover their tracks. I left a trap that rerouted access and cut off the assassin’s computer the instant it sent a signal confirmation back. I dummied up the data exchange so that Alex thought he was successfully reprogramming the drone to remember none of its programming for murder.”
“Wait,” Jason90 said. “You’re telling us that Alex Truman tried to martyr himself publicly just because he was behind in the polling?”
Charlie7 scoffed. “Of course not! The rotten brat had given it clear instructions to miss unprotected flesh, and the suit coat he wore was made from that alien fabric. If he’d been hit, it would have been a thumb in the eye to anyone who told him to leave that domed city alone. And he would have garnered sympathy, foisted suspicion on Abby and her associates, and come out looking heroic. He might still have lost, but it was a well-planned gambit.”
Charlie13 shook his head slowly. “I don’t get it. He’s your son. You could have let him get away with this.”
“I spent thirteen years crafting Alex into the young man he’s become,” Charlie7 said. “All things considered, I’ve spent longer on projects that have turned out worse results. But I’ve spent a millennium turning Earth into the paradise we see each day. It’s not perfect, not by any means, but I’ll be damned if I let that despotic little twerp ruin my planet.”
He looked around the room to the shocked silence he saw all around. “And remember, whatever you think you’ve done to me, out of fear or spite or a misguided sense of justice, this is still my planet. I fought for it. I won. I built it back up from ash and scrap metal. The rest of you are just tending the gardens and feeding the pets for me.”
As Charlie7 strode out of the room without waiting for anyone on the committee to dismiss him, he smirked. Let them chew on that for a while. It wasn’t until the doors slid shut behind him that he allowed his face to fall slack and the guilt to sink in over inflicting Alex on the world. But maybe by turning him in, Charlie7 would regain some of that lost respect among his robotic descendants.
Oh, God, did he miss being involved.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
A shiver ran through Abby as a brisk December breeze cut through the fabric of her sweater. She could have held her acceptance speech on Easter Island, where the climate was not only milder but it was late spring instead of the doorstep of winter. Somehow, holding the speech in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe just felt right.
“Welcome, fellow citizens of Earth,” Abby proclaimed, allowing her voice to carry as far as her lungs could project it. Years of theater had taught her how to be heard from the back of a crowd. Today, of all days, she wanted to be heard directly by human and robot ears alike. “Today is a day of rededication. Three weeks ago, you spoke in the ancient tradition of humanity and selected a leader of your own choo
sing. I am humbled and honored that you have bestowed that honor upon me.
“As I stand here, I think back to the promise I made you all. That I would support my mother. That I would allow Eve Fourteen to remain the voice of humanity in a world dominated for so long by our robotic friends. I intend to keep that promise, but I will not do so through benign neglect as I had once intended. I expect that many of you are standing there thinking that you could do this job, that you could do it better than I will.”
Abby broke into a smile. “And I suspect that everyone thinking that is right. Well, except maybe one person in particular.” There was a chuckle from the crowd that Abby wasn’t so crass as to dwell upon, nor would she mention Alex Truman by name on this day. “But I am an actress with a role to play, and I’ll play it as best I can. Others of you are researchers, inventors, the dreamers of the Second Human Age, and your talents are needed elsewhere.”
It no longer hurt to say it. “Politics isn’t a field for the best and the brightest. It was meant for men and women of vision and character. It is my job to take hold of the crucible of ideas and make sure it all melts down without anyone getting burned. My contribution is vigilance, resolve, accountability—both for me and for Eve Fourteen.
“There is nothing in this position that contravenes committee edicts. My role, as far as the committee structure is concerned, is that of a concerned citizen. But to all of you, I intend to be more than that limited description implies. I will be the voice of the ignored, the conscience of the powerful, and the message bearer of the change we wish to see in this world.”
Abby watched the rapt faces of her supporters. The steady glows of robotic eyes watched her alongside the eager faces and cold-reddened cheeks of her human constituents.
“The easy path would have been letting comforting lies guide us,” Abby said. “We chose better. The easy path was destroying the old to force the new. We chose better. The easy path was ignoring the authority of the hundreds of committees that have kept Earth spinning this past millennium. We chose better.”
