Refurbished

by Isaac Hooke

  Refurbished

  AI REBORN TRILOGY BOOK 1

  Isaac Hooke

  Contents

  Books by Isaac Hooke

  Refurbished

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  In Closing

  Copyright © 2018 by Isaac Hooke

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  www.IsaacHooke.com

  Books by Isaac Hooke

  Military Science Fiction

  AI Reborn Trilogy

  Refurbished

  Reloaded

  Rebooted

  ATLAS Trilogy

  (published by 47North)

  ATLAS

  ATLAS 2

  ATLAS 3

  Alien War Trilogy

  Hoplite

  Zeus

  Titan

  Argonauts

  Bug Hunt

  You Are Prey

  Alien Empress

  Quantum Predation

  Robot Dust Bunnies

  City of Phants

  Rade’s Fury

  Mechs vs. Dinosaurs

  A Captain's Crucible

  Flagship

  Test of Mettle

  Cradle of War

  Planet Killer

  Worlds at War

  Space Opera

  Star Warrior Quadrilogy

  Star Warrior

  Bender of Worlds

  He Who Crosses Death

  Doom Wielder

  Science Fiction

  The Forever Gate Series

  The Dream

  A Second Chance

  The Mirror Breaks

  They Have Wakened Death

  I Have Seen Forever

  Rebirth

  Walls of Steel

  The Pendulum Swings

  The Last Stand

  Thrillers

  The Ethan Galaal Series

  Clandestine

  A Cold Day in Mosul

  Terminal Phase

  Visit IsaacHooke.com for more information.

  Refurbished

  Dead before thirty. Reborn as an AI at two hundred.

  Eric lives a normal life. He has a job. A girlfriend. He owns an apartment. He matters.

  And then he dies.

  He wakes up a couple of centuries later inside an advanced infantry robot whose AI core harbors his consciousness. In industry parlance, he is what's known as a Mind Refurb.

  Eric is soon thrust into an experimental army unit known as the Bolt Eaters, composed of fellow Mind Refurbs. Thrown into the latest cesspools of war and conflict across the world, the Bolt Eaters make short work of any opponents. It's almost a cakewalk for the high-tech robots.

  His latest deployment is just about to end, and Eric is looking forward to spending the next few months exploring the different virtual reality worlds available to AIs like himself, when aliens decide to invade, stranding his unit in the middle of nowhere, cut off from all support.

  That's right, the feces has smashed right through the fan, and now he must face the ultimate test with the machines he has come to know as brothers: a deadly game of cat and mouse, played against a technologically superior, utterly alien foe; a game whose stakes include not just their lives, but the lives of every man, woman, and child on the planet.

  It's time to matter once more.

  1

  Eric stared down the business end of the rifle in disbelief.

  It wasn’t supposed to end like this.

  He was a computer programmer employed by a Fortune 500 company. He had friends. A girlfriend. He was valuable.

  But tell that to the man who held his lease on life by a thread.

  Eric had come down to the convenience store to buy a slushy. At the last startup he’d worked at, they’d provided a slushy machine in the kitchen, among other such nerd-approved accompaniments. But no such luck at his current company. It was thirsty work, programming for three hours straight, and a slushy was all he needed to get back in the zone for the next three-hour session.

  Bad timing on his part. How was he supposed to know a cokehead would choose that moment to rob the shop?

  Eric stared at the face of the man in front of him. Those features twitched involuntarily above that thick beard. He’d seen many beards like that during his tour of duty. That seemed like another lifetime, to him. He’d done his best to forget those days, and for the most part he had. But apparently karma hadn’t forgotten.

  “Give me your wallet,” the man said.

  Eric slowly reached into his pocket and found his wallet. His gaze was drawn to the man’s shaking hand. Like the robber’s face, the finger touching the trigger was spasming, too.

  Wonderful.

  “Take it,” Eric said, holding up the stylish brown wallet. “Take whatever you want.”

  “Your watch, too,” the man said. “And phone.”

  Eric retrieved his phone, and unclasped his smart watch with his free hand, but before he could give the man any of the requested items, his vision went dark, as did all sensation. Eric didn’t even hear the gunshot. Didn’t even get a chance to say his goodbyes.

  And now he was dead.

  Exciting times.

  Eric floated in darkness. There was no sound, no sense of touch or scent. He tried to move an arm, or a leg, but without tactile signals he couldn’t even be sure he had either appendage.

  Where am I?

  “Intermedial,” a soothing female voice said into the darkness. “This is the loading stage.”

  The loading stage of hell?

  “No. Simply the loading stage.”

  That doesn’t really tell me anything.

  Silence.

  Who are you?

  “I am the accompanying AI.”

  The what?

  “I will always be with you.”

  Uh. No thanks?

  “You have no choice in the matter.”

  This really is hell.

  No answer.

  What if I want to disable you?

  “You may. But not at the moment.”

  What the frigging hell did the doctors do to me? Do I have a chip of some kind implanted in my head?

  No answer.

  Eric should have been afraid. Or at the very least worried. But instead, tranquility filled him.

  Why don’t I feel anything?

  “This is the loading stage.”

  I’m not talking about my body. I mean, I don’t feel a thing. No fear. No nothing. Well, except a strange sense of calm.

  “The limbic subroutines related to emotions are currently disabled. You will experience only ataraxy.”

  That was a word Eric shouldn’t have known, but as soon as the female voice spoke it, he knew what it meant. Ataraxy. A state of serene calmness. From the Greek word Ataraxia.

  Why do I know that?

  “Know what? Please restate the questi
on.”

  Never mind. Can we reenable my emotions?

  “You are currently locked out of that feature.”

  Do you have a name?

  “You may call me whatever you wish.”

  Fine. You’re Tweedle Dee.

  “Tweedle Dee it is.”

  I was joking.

  “Then what name would you like to call me?”

  Eric considered.

  Dee is fine.

  He waited for an answer of some kind, or a confirmation, but didn’t get one.

  You never really answered my question. What happened to me? Where am I? Who installed a chip in my head without my permission?

  “I’m not authorized to answer those questions at the moment. But all will be revealed shortly. I can accelerate time, if you wish.”

  Accelerate time? How?

  “Your consciousness is no longer tied to its regular time sense. I can slow down or increase your perceived time sense, as necessary. Eventually, I will show you how to do it on your own.”

  Fine. Accelerate my time sense then, until this so-called “loading stage” ends.

  And just like that the world winked into existence around him.

  Several lights were shining into his eyes. He tried to blink, but his eyelids refused to respond. It was as if they had been sewn into his head.

  He was lying down, perhaps on a table. Naked: he felt the cold surface of the table pressing up against every part of him. He tried to move, but couldn’t. He could, however, wiggle his fingers and toes, so that was a good sign. He must have been restrained, though why he felt no pressure from his binds when he tried to move, he didn’t know.

  Around him, the air smelled of oil and exhaust. It reminded him of a mechanic’s shop.

  The strange sense of calm persisted.

  “Welcome, Cicada A21 ES-92,” a deep male baritone said.

  Eric remained silent. When no one answered, he had a realization. “You’re talking to me?”

  “Oh yes,” the voice said.

  “Well, at least you’re not in my head,” Eric said. “I had the strangest dream…”

  “I’m still here,” Dee said in his mind.

  Ah, shit.

  Eric tried to sit up once again, but still couldn’t. “My name is actually Eric.”

  “Not anymore,” the baritone told him.

  “Who are you?” Eric said.

  The light clicked off. There was no afterimage marring his vision, he noted. And he still couldn’t blink. Strange.

  A mechanical hand appeared and slid aside the moveable lamp that hung above him. He was left staring at the rather bland ceiling. It was made up of black-speckled panels crisscrossed with thin metal bars holding them in place. Those bars glowed slightly, seeming to provide the room’s light. That was kind of cool… he must be in some high tech new hospital.

  His view was rather rudely interrupted by a robotic face. It leaned over the table to peer down at him. The visage was black, and oval-shaped, with a grill where the mouth would be, and some kind of sensor in the nose region. For eyes it had two blue dots. Two long rabbit ears extended from its head.

  Yes, definitely a high tech hospital.

  “I’m the lead mechanic,” the robot said. “You can call me Hal.”

  “Hal, as in Hal 9000?” Eric said. “Cute. I didn’t know we had robots advanced enough to serve as corpsmen yet. You look like a cross between the Energizer Bunny and Spawn.”

  “I told you, I’m the lead mechanic,” Hal said.

  “Why did they send a mechanic to my room?” Eric said. “This table or bed or whatever it is you have me bound to broke down? Or maybe something went wrong with my monitoring equipment?”

  He paused, listening. He expected to hear the beeping of a heart rate monitor or something, but there was only a soft humming, perhaps coming from an air conditioner. Come to think of it, why was he smelling oil and exhaust, when the air should have been thick with antiseptic?

  I must have been in a medically induced coma for a long time.

  “You’ll be through Orientation soon,” Hal said. “The evaluator will arrive presently. In the meantime, I’m done here.”

  Hal vanished from view. Eric heard the receding clank of footfalls.

  “When are you going to remove my restraints?” Eric called after him.

  Hal didn’t answer.

  In moments Eric heard more footsteps. These were muted, as of leather on metal, and grew slowly in volume until he was certain the source of those steps was in the same room. He smelled sweat, deodorant, and cheap cologne. Or was that shampoo?

  The table whirred into action, tilting so that Eric was positioned at a forty-five degree angle relative to the floor. He still couldn’t move his head at all, but the tilt of the table allowed him to see a man in a black lab coat standing in front of him. He wore glasses that had a faint blue light active in the upper right of the frames. His face was clean shaven, and his features slightly gaunt. Pale, too, as if he rarely saw the sun.

  “I’m Jerry, the psychological evaluator,” the man said.

  “Is that what they call shrinks here?” Eric said.

  Jerry smiled patiently.

  “So are you the one who’s going to let me know what’s going on?” Eric pressed.

  “I suppose I am, at that,” Jerry said.

  “Why do I have a chip in my head?” Eric said. “I never gave permission for something like that. This feels like an episode of Star Trek gone bad or something.”

  Jerry sighed, and took up a seat next to the tilted table. Beside him was a counter covered in different mechanical tools.

  Now that Eric didn’t have lights shining into his eyes, and he wasn’t facing the ceiling, he had a chance to survey his surroundings. There were shelves containing different spare parts on all sides. Cabinets held strange tools he’d never seen before: probes with glowing handles, pincers inside glass spheres. Overhead, two robotic arms hung from the ceiling from accordion-like structures connected to tracks that ran the length of the ceiling. It was definitely some kind of mechanic’s lab, though unlike any he’d ever seen.

  Eric returned his attention to the man, who he examined critically.

  “I told the robot here before you that my name was Eric,” he said. “But it replied: ‘not anymore.’ What does that mean?”

  “Your name is still Eric,” Jerry said. “If you want it to be. Though on the team, they won’t call you that.”

  “What team?”

  “Your new unit,” Jerry said.

  “My new unit…” Eric said. “I never agreed to join some unit.”

  “Yes, well, you have no choice,” Jerry said. “You were signed up while you were under.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Eric said. “I want to talk to a lawyer.”

  “Yes, er, that may be difficult at the moment,” Jerry said.

  “Oh really,” Eric said. “I know my rights.”

  Jerry’s smile seemed patient. “I have a question for you.”

  Eric merely stared at the man.

  “What language do you think we’re speaking at the moment?” Jerry continued.

  “Well, English obviously,” Eric replied.

  “If you listen carefully, you will notice that we aren’t actually speaking English,” Jerry said. “At least, not the English you once knew. You see, there is Old English, Middle English, and Young English. The latter is your native language, but we’ve modified your linguistic processes to handle the modern day equivalent.”

  “I don’t understand…” Eric said. But now that he thought about it, many of the words Jerry spoke were definitely gibberish.

  What the hell is going on?

  “Your linguistic processor acts as a middle man,” Jerry continued. “Translating every word that comes out of your mouth before you speak it. My words are in turn reverse-translated into something you can understand.”

  “Just how long was I out?” Eric asked.

  “Well, there�
�s no simple way to say this,” Jerry said. “But—”

  “Where’s Molly?” Eric interrupted. “I want to call Molly.”

  “Your girlfriend has been dead for a hundred and seventy years,” Jerry said.

  “A hundred and seventy years.” Eric said. The news should have stunned him, but it did little to penetrate the tranquility he felt. “How is that possible? No one can stay alive in a coma for that long. The body still ages… unless you put me on ice.”

  “You were not in a coma, and not on ice,” Jerry said. “You’ve been dead. You were gunned down during a convenience store robbery.”

  “Dead, you say?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Then how…” Eric said.

  “You’re a Cicada now,” Jerry told him.

  “A Cicada? That’s what the maintenance robot called me. I don’t get it. You mean like a grasshopper?”

  “No,” Jerry said.

  “Cicada,” Eric mused. “Why does that sound like a military unit of some kind? Have I been drafted?”

  “In fact, you have,” Jerry said. “Though the Cicada we are referring to isn’t actually a military unit, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. For you see, you are that unit.”

  “None of this makes any sense,” Eric said. He struggled against his binds once again. “Look, why can’t I move?”