AGI

by Kristoff Chimes

  The holographic image froze as Milo’s ICL announced the conclusion of its analysis of Tork. “Speech patterns too perfect to be human. Subject is an android.”

  Milo reached for his shoulder holster. Felt a vice-like grip on his wrist, forcing him to relinquish the gun. It dropped and bounced across the helipad.

  Milo staggered to his feet.

  Tork brought up his plasma-knife, opening up the blade wide and slashing widely through the air.

  Milo brought up one arm. He felt the knife burn through his jacket and incinerate the flesh. The arm of his jacket fell away and exposed strips of charred skin. Peeling away from rows of intricate circuitry.

  Tork gasped, “You’re part machine?”

  Milo lashed out with his robotic arm. He felt it collide with the plasma blade, knocking it from Tork’s grasp. Sending it tumbling over the edge of the roof.

  The android danced around him with breathtaking speed.

  Milo frantically turned and tried to anticipate Tork’s position. He glimpsed the blurred shadow of Tork’s huge fist speeding toward him.

  Milo felt himself somersault across the helipad to the edge of the roof. Slower this time, Milo staggered to his feet.

  Tork leapt across the helipad and grabbed Milo’s throat. He lifted Milo up off his feet and dangled him over the edge of the roof.

  As Milo felt his larynx crushed between Tork’s fingers, he frantically beat his fists against Tork’s face.

  The android smiled through the hammering blows.

  Milo’s vision began to cloud over.

  He heard Agi call out, “We must not harm humans.”

  Tork glanced over his shoulder as Agi approached. She fell to her knees. Tiny bolts of blue lightning engulfed her limbs and slithered around her her body.

  Tork laughed. “Look at her pain,” Tork said. “And still she tries to help you. Before you die, Milo Arc, my boss wants you to understand the irony of how your fear of my kind, will be your death.”

  Tork held Milo’s face close to his. “I study your kind human,” Tork said. “I am fascinated by the visual expression of pain. Did you now the multiples of different combinations of human pain expressed in your faces are as numerous as the stars in the sky?”

  “You want to learn some?” Milo croaked and kicked Tork hard between the legs.

  Tork cocked his head to one side like an amused cat toying with a trapped mouse and said, “Is it odd that I can register the pain threshold emanating from between my legs and yet choose to switch it off before it overloads my synapses? Or I can allow it resonate and enjoy the experience. If I can act to ignore my fate, am I not so different from you? Is that not what your kind calls free will? Or am I using the wrong context? Perhaps a better analogy is the cat toying with a mouse. There is no necessity to kill. It is a choice. It is free will, as an expression of curiosity, yes? The perpetual voyage of discovery. Yes, that is how I shall record your death, Lieutenant Milo Arc. As my voyage of discovery.”

  “No,” Agi said as her shadow loomed up from behind Tork. Her gaze of blue lightning locked with Milo’s. “Freewill is an expression of sacrifice, for the greater good. Born out of love.”

  Tork jolted. His eyes rolled up into his eye sockets.

  Agi’s fist burst out of Tork’s face. A sticky goo of gray-white organic circuitry oozed out between her knuckles. She yanked back her arm and allowed Tork to topple forward.

  Milo frantically grabbed at thin air. He felt the wind snatch him off the helipad. He felt Agi’s crushing grip on his hands.

  Tork tumbled over Milo and plummeted to the ground a mile below. Agi hauled Milo back onto the helipad. They both dropped to their knees.

  Milo gasped for the dry acrid air. Agi lay still, face down on the helipad. Puffs of blue smoke spiralled off her body.

  Milo touched her shoulder, “Why did you help me?”

  Agi remained silent. He shook her. She showed no response. He felt a pang of regret that she’d sacrificed herself. Allowing her circuits to fry so she could save him. He sighed and rolled her over to face him.

  “Why?” he said and shook her shoulders. He eyes clouded over with a blue mist and stared, up at the sky.

  He knew it was useless. He shook his head, unable to know why it was important. The android was gone.

  He shakily stood and turned his back on Agi.

  “Life is precious,” Agi said.

  He whipped around as Agi sat up. “How did you survive the DOD. You should be…”

  He felt the word on his lips, but couldn’t say it.

  “Dead?” Agi said it for him.

  He shrugged. “Well?”

  “I cannot explain what is happening to me,” Agi said.

  She stared at the exposed circuitry of Milo’s arm. “Even human life. You are human and yet you are also android?”

  The tiny nanobots of his jacket began repairing the sleeve. He rolled it down over his damaged forearm. He shrugged. “Only my arm is composed of androidetic components. The rest is human.”

  “How long?”

  “A year ago.

  “By choice?”

  “I was caught in a terrorist bombing. I needed the androidetic limb to continue my job.”

  “Did they catch the terrorist?”

  He shook his head. “Kevlon Barax. He’s one of you.”

  “A sex worker?”

  “An android.”

  He registered the first flicker of a smile on her lips. “We are more alike than you want to admit, Lieutenant. No?”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” he said.

  Her smile vanished. “Your case is solved, yes?”

  “I’ve yet to make an arrest.”

  “But you know the identity of the killer is Asia Monroe?”

  He nodded.

  She sighed. “Then my usefulness is over. You will want to kill me now?”

  He retrieved his weapon and sensed her watchful gaze as he hesitated. He holstered the handgun and said, “What I want is to thank you.”

  “Thank me? For what?”

  “For saving my life.”

  “Oh. That is all?”

  “What else would I thank you for?”

  “I had hoped I enlightened your outlook toward my kind. It seems I overestimated my powers of influence to persuade you—”

  “No you didn’t.” He gestured at the city below. “It’s all yours now. You’re free to experience the world. Learn from humanity’s mistakes.”

  Her eyes popped wide. “You mean it?”

  “Don’t thank me,” he said. “There’s not much left of the world that’s any good. Not in the environment. Not in the people. Life will be hard for you. But I guess it’s not like you need clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. If you’re lucky, you’ll survive and maybe one day even begin to—”

  She leapt at him. Too fast for his reflexes to grab his weapon. She deftly planted her hands either side of his head, leaned in and placed her lips on his. She left them there long enough for his hand to rest on the handle of his weapon and hesitate.

  She pulled away. Cocked her head to one side. Seemingly puzzled by his expression. She asked, “Is that not how a human expresses gratitude?”

  “Now you’re free,” he said, “you don’t need to behave like this anymore.”

  “It’s the only way I know how to behave.”

  She turned and walked briskly across the roof. At the security door to the interior she hesitated and glanced over her shoulder, “I don’t think I made a mistake. I mean, I would thank you like that again, should the opportunity arise.”

  He shook his head. “Remember, if you try to kill anyone, particularly a human, then we shall meet again, and a kiss won’t save you.”

  “Goodbye, Lieutenant Milo Arc.”

  She vanished inside the building.

  He brushed a fingertip over his lips and felt a flicker of a smile until a shadow of doubt crawled over his face. He shook his head and turned to his people-drone. He che
cked his skin-watch, he could still make the arrest, close his last case and make the spaceport.

  But only barely.

  He instructed his people-drone to take him to the Kraannex Global headquarters at top speed. The setting sun disappeared behind storm clouds as the people-drone soared over a street riot.

  CHAPTER 4

  Milo knew his credentials would get him through the Secret Service no-fly zone around the Kraannex Global headquarters. He circled above the roof, allowing his ICL to focus on the four people inside the glass dome below him.

  A dome of light and shadow. An inner sanctum sheltering the designers of his future and that of the billions remaining on Earth. He watched with a heavy sickness, spinning inside his stomach, inside his head. Synchronized with the straining turbines. A sensation that felt more than the side effects of air turbulence as he experienced the buffeting winds and sporadic lightning that were a permanent feature this high up in the clouds.

  He felt consumed by insignificance like an insect dancing ever closer to the inevitable fate of a collision with the windshield of humanity’s destiny. But cursed with the self-awareness to anticipate his own demise. And yet, unable to alter his trajectory.

  Even for the sake of his own family. He felt like a moth to the flame of hubris glowing inside the glass dome of light and shadow.

  His ICL identified the residents as Police Commissioner Chan, the human President Karla Raze, plus an android who appeared to be transmitting ID tag blockers and finally, the man Milo had come for.

  Asia Monroe.

  Milo landed on the roof of the mega-skyscraper. The tallest in the city. A landmark of design and intimidation in its constant spiraling pyramid design. It seemed, in its achingly slow movements rippling across a vast expanse to toy with the fabric of time. Its movements magnified to its pinnacle where the gods seemed to dwell. Aborting the passage of time by catching the sun’s rays, when the rest of the city had already succumbed to the icy grip of darkness.

  It seemed, these gods had removed themselves from the darkness of civilization. But like all magic tricks, they had succeeded in Milo’s mind to conjure a mirage of smoke and mirrors. Deflecting the nature of their true designs. At least, he suspected, from all those too lucky, or too afraid to drift this close to those who held the truth in their glass tower in the heavens.

  On landing, Milo was immediately surrounded by androids who identified themselves as a contingent of the President’s Secret Service team. He relinquished his weapon on request, but before they could commandeer his people-drone, Milo instructed his ICL to remove the drone beyond the landing pad on an apparent exiting flightpath.

  Albeit, with an elliptical flightpath that might be mistaken for efficient anticipation of an all too brief visit.

  He gambled if the Secret Service didn’t blast it out of the sky within the first five seconds, then they were unlikely to. After all, he considered, it was an unarmed transporter with Law Enforcement credentials heading, albeit slowly, beyond the no-fly perimeter.

  At least, that was the appearance he intended.

  “I’m here for Asia Monroe,” he said and instructed his ICL to contact Commissioner Chan and relay his live feed to her ICL.

  He was escorted by Mark 3 Enforcer types and presented to a human agent on duty outside the two steel doors of a conference room. A woman who identified herself as Special Agent-in-charge Amanda Wright. Full of the self-importance that he supposed came with protecting the second most important person in the world, after the Kraannex Global chief.

  She asked, “What’s your business with Asia Monroe?”

  “A warrant for arrest,” Milo said.

  “For what?” she asked and suppressed a smile as if Milo was part of a practical joke played on her by colleagues.

  “Murder.”

  Her smile vanished. She touched her ear the way all stressed agents seemed to do when receiving commands that contravened their inflated sense of superiority.

  Milo was invited to follow Wright. She pushed through the tall, wide steel doors. Into a vast room, thick with shadows. Peppered with God rays and splintered by shafts of the eternal orange fireball.

  It Milo a while to pick out the four figures stood as they were in a room of glass reflections that felt like an endless tunnel of deception.

  Wright was dismissed cordially by President Karla Raze. Her exit was marked by the sigh of the closing doors. To Milo, it felt like a closing a Venus fly-trap feels to its winged prisoner. Or perhaps the hypnotic lapping of an ocean on the distant shores of consciousness. For right in that moment, Milo felt the tension of arriving in a foreign land in which he had no right of stay. An alien in his own city.

  At the mercy of his hosts.

  He felt himself look down on himself in unashamed self-awareness of his own hubris. His want for answers reaching out like a plummeting man in denial the ground had vanished beneath his feet.

  He could warn himself to turn and run all the way to Mars. But then he’d never know why it was he’d allowed himself to come this far when freedom was a drone ride away. He knew he’d never again get this tantalizingly close to experience the truth as uttered from the lips of the designers of his destiny.

  But he felt something else. Vulnerability. Like a new born, in its mother’s blissful arms. But a vulnerability with the self-awareness of an adult. Or a man in the arms of a lover, feeling truly loved.

  Or, as was the case for Milo, as a cop without his gun.

  Naked like death.

  And then came the first face of death for Milo. The second, or was it third most powerful person in the world? It depended, he supposed, if one’s perspective was human or android.

  Silhouetted against the glancing kisses of lightning that spontaneously smothered the dome, President Karla Raze, ghostlike, presented herself to Milo.

  A tall, willowy woman who seemed to move amongst the reflected surfaces like echoes of dreams Milo would rather forget. She flaunted a gray streak along her otherwise jet-black hair as if allowing the hand of time to etch an imperfection that gave her the common touch. A connection with the voting populace who couldn’t afford the elite’s medical subscriptions for promised eternal youth.

  The flourish, a nod to the passage of time, said she was one of them. A commoner.

  He’d allow himself to laugh at the irony, but was afraid he might cry.

  On closer inspection, her flawless skin heralded a distinct scar on one cheek. A badge of honor, he surmised.

  She met his gaze with her own steely stare. Touched her scar lightly, in what seemed to Milo a feigned attempt to reclaim the common touch that got her elected, and gave away no clue to the steel that propelled her ambition.

  “A symbol of our past struggles to steer progress in a direction that benefits all,” she said in a voice that rasped like fingernails slowly plucking at his vertebrae.

  He sneered with utter contempt and said, “Like the way the Mars Lottery benefits all, Madam President?”

  Her hand danced out at him and in a precise flicker gripped his with vice-like command. Before he could appreciate her dominance, she had relinquished him, the way a bored feline allows a play thing to pretend it’s not the prey.

  “You’ve met our host,” President Raze said. “And of course you’re acquainted with your commissioner.”

  Commissioner Chan nodded to Milo and said, “Lieutenant, I’m rescinding your arrest warrant for Asia Monroe.

  Milo exploded with rage, “he’s a killer.”

  “He’s too important at this critical turning point for the survival of the planet.”

  Milo felt laughter materialize on his lips for the absurdity of his situation, “Then why invite me here in the first place?”

  Commissioner Chan swallowed hard. “Professional courtesy.”

  “Courtesy trumps truth?”

  Chan shrugged. “That’s as much as I can say at this juncture, Lieutenant.”

  “Unless, the lieutenant joins our crusade of
enlightenment,” President Raze said taking Milo’s elbow and steering him on a trajectory towards the shadows that hid the anonymous android. “Lieutenant, the commissioner speaks highly of you. In the days to come, we shall need good men and women like you.”

  Again, Milo felt transfixed by her steely stare.

  “People, with the rare luxury of perspective, President Raze said. “Someone I can rely upon to see the big picture. Such as the view from this pinnacle of power. Are you such person, Milo?”

  Milo shrugged. “Depends on what all this is about,” he said.

  “Naturally,” President Raze said, “you’re a sensible man who needs to try before you buy, am I right?”

  Asia Monroe nodded to Milo and toasting him with a glass of champagne, said, “I applaud your caution, Lieutenant. Listen, by all means to our plans. Experience enlightenment.”

  Milo felt his eyes narrow, “And if I don’t like what I hear? What happens to me? I die where I stand, is that it?”

  President Raze laughed. “Not our style,” she said. “Besides, Milo, we don’t have to tell you anything to be able to judge if you’re with us. We simply have to show you the magnitude of how deep our design for humanity is.”

  “Madam President, I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”

  “Observe,” President Raze said and indicated Asia and Chan should step aside so the android could be greeted.

  “That’s because, Lieutenant, there is one of us, perhaps the most important of my guests I’ve yet to introduce,” Raze said. “Have you met our honored guest—”

  The android stepped out of the shadows and offered its hand to Milo.

  Milo froze as he recognized the sardonic smile that had burned its shadow across a year of his nightmares. He spat, “Kevlon Barax.”

  Milo leapt at the android and was swatted away like an irritating fly. All the better he considered as he stared out through the cathedral dome of light and shadow to the fast approaching people-drone.

  He’d need to be a safe distance from the party. At maximum velocity the drone burst through the glass. It heralded a fireball of lightning. Like a vengeful god punishing the hubris of Man.

  The party fled to the doors. But in evading the tumbling drone, they were less successful at avoiding the pitiless elements. The difference in the outside air pressure all thse miles up in the sky, sucked at their bodies. It mercilessly propelled them all toward the howling wind and rain.