Cronos, who’d taken to walking with a “walking stick,” jabbed the point of his spear into a camouflaged soldier lying on the forest floor. “You ever go spearfishing, Michael. It’s these kinds of experiences that round you out later in life.”
Michael studied the Asian soldier bleeding out his mouth. “I wonder why the nano didn’t just take care of him already.”
“These guys, not all of them mind you, but some of them,” Cronos explained, “get pretty advanced with their martial arts training. He may have been able to keep his mind clear of his intent until the last minute. In a state of deep meditation, he could lie out here for some time, conserving energy as well. The nano, reading his mind with their proximity sensors, would thus be inclined to ignore him as a threat.”
“A human land mine. What will they think of next?” Michael said sarcastically.
He adjusted his eyes so he could see better at night with the nano assist. There was another Chinese military man standing by a tree, also in meditative repose. Michael could tell because his heart was barely beating, and his body temp had fallen considerably. They hadn’t exactly bought the B-string to his sendoff party. He ripped the man’s heart out with one plunging claw-fingered hand to the chest, watched the organ start beating gradually faster in his hands. “Looks like meditative repose doesn’t last past death,” he said, handing the heart to Finelli. “Sic your nervous eating on this. Should help stabilize your blood sugar after all those sweets.”
Finelli grimaced, but slowly retrieved the heart from his grip and gave it a try. After struggling to bite a wedge out of the heart, he said, “It pays to have pointier teeth for this lifestyle.”
“I’ll file yours down later, once I have a free moment,” Michael said, continuing to spearhead the party.
Cronos let his spear fly. It tagged a solider high up in a tree. He fell like a piece of overripe fruit. “Don’t forget to look up.”
“What gave him away?” Michael asked. “I know your night vision and hearing aren’t as good as mine.”
“A little voice in back of my head,” Cronos said.
Michael grunted. “You might have a little of that Zen thing going yourself.”
Cronos waved dismissively. “I do seem to find my groove under pressure a lot better. Must have a high-excitation threshold.”
Michael took his eyes off him and put them back where they belonged, searching for their hidden attackers, cloaked as much by their stealth behavior as the moonless Alaskan night.
A ninja, clad in black, came out of nowhere, sliced at Jane using two swords, one in each hand, and dashed out of the way before Michael could react. She fell into pieces at his feet, staring at him as if she’d let him down the whole time.
Michael felt slingshot out of his body by the force of his emotions. He saw himself looking down on her, unable to move or react, his own will to live buried beneath the avalanche of feelings. He used the heaviness he was feeling in his heart lower him slowly back into his body, like an anchor dropping at the end of a long chain. Forcing himself to keep calm, he bent down and did his best to stick her pieces back together, half blinded by the veil of tears, and prayed for the nano to do their work. She had said she was an immortal. And just as invulnerable to accidents. It wasn’t like her to make idle statements.
He continued to hope for the best as she came to, the sutures sealing themselves. “Sorry I ever doubted you,” she said, “or myself.”
“You didn’t see the ninja, even with your night vision?” Cronos said.
“He’s a robot, has to be,” Michael said. “No body temp to speak of, so I couldn’t track him. Plus those blades sliced through her faster than the nano could react.”
“Leave it to the Chinese,” Cronos said, making a face. “And they assured us they were still ironing out the kinks in their maidbots. Why is it some people are just so determined to bring the future crashing down on our heads? As if the present doesn’t have enough of its own problems.”
Cronos turned around on himself three hundred and sixty degrees, hoping to see their assailant that had gotten away in the dark. “Let’s hope he’s another failed prototype like you, Michael, if you’ll pardon me for saying.”
“Stand still,” Michael said. He visualized what he wanted and waited, as the others did what they were told. This time, when the ninja came at one of them, Finelli to be precise, the death dealer couldn’t maintain his balance and fell on his back.
Cronos was quick to return to his “spear fishing.” “Sometimes a gag plays better the second time around,” he said, driving the spear into head of the cyborg, short-circuiting its wiring.
“How did…?” Cronos asked.
“I instructed the nanites to go on the march. Figured he couldn’t well do his ninja thing if the ground was moving under his feet.”
“Nice,” Cronos said. “He was evidently trying to isolate you from the rest of us, saving you for last, so he could test his stuff. Prototypes with something to prove, it’s becoming a theme, which reminds me.” He flopped down against a tree. “A little light, if you please, Michael.”
Michael took a deep breath, not feeling particularly inclined to humor him. But Cronos’s instincts had proven uncanny so far. Maybe he knew what he was doing risking their position. Michael lit him up with the light from his eyes, simply diffusing the intensity of the lasers and widening the coverage area.
“Come join me in a little siesta, Finelli,” Cronos said, gesturing. “You know I don’t do much without you.”
Finelli flopped down beside him, dropping the heart he’d continued to munch on, wiping his hands clean of blood to get them ready for the laptop keyboard.
“Bring me up some footage on Serena,” Cronos said. “Something to test my theory.”
Cronos watched the video of the scene between Serena and ADHD robot, Gorman, on the train hurtling through the Canadian countryside at ninety miles per hour. “Can you two establish a wireless link with your minds to see what I’m seeing,” he said looking up briefly at Jane and Michael. They did as requested.
“What do you make of that?” Michael asked Cronos.
“I tell you what I make of it. They’ve got a robot that has gone off the reservation in her earnest desire to track you down and kill you. Finelli, am I right?”
“Yeah, she’s definitely tracking us. And with the hack I have on her mind, I can tell you she’s assessing every drop of intel on us we’ve handed her on a platter since we’ve been up here. Apparently she had no problem hacking me right back.”
“You’ll notice they sent one defective robot after another,” Cronos said. “What do you make of that, Michael?”
“Don’t know,” he said, after a while, straining to think and coming up with nothing.
“I suppose that’s because while the nano have souped up your soldiering, they haven’t exactly made you a master strategist. After all, they have to work with what they’ve been handed, and you were never trained to do much but take orders, were you?”
He seethed. “Your point, Cronos?”
“My point is you don’t send one defective robot after another unless your intent is to get rid of both of them. Someone’s cleaning house, getting rid of all their dirty little mistakes.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Now, that is a good question. I might have to stew on that one myself. Though, from the parade of defective robots recently, Ninja Bot Boy, being the latest, and pending whoever else they send after Serena… I’d have to say that’s one too many defective robots. Let’s not forget the DARPA hybrid, half-human, half-machine I had to put down not once, but twice.”
“Again, I’m not following,” Michael said, mad at himself for still not catching on to this strategizing thing even when he was being handed the Cliff notes.
“Who’d have thought there were any of these prototypes around until Jane there went and pulled the rug out from under their feet with her nexgen breakthrough?” Cronos said. “And suddenly all the co
ckroaches are coming into the light. Strange for cockroaches, don’t you think?”
“Maybe this is a good time to ask why you’re really here,” Jane said, glaring at Cronos.
Cronos pointed to her. “Nothing wrong with her strategic thinking.” He sighed. “I was sent to bring you both in.” He held out his hand quickly, gesturing, ‘hold on.’ “You can relax. I have no intention of doing any such thing. But the orders in themselves are interesting, no? They didn’t tell me to kill you and erase all evidence. Wouldn’t you, considering the threat you represent? And I remember the CEO being very pointed about the real issue being one of control, and just needing time to get their nano better perfected. As in, they were already working on a more controllable solution. And if you’re a control freak, why let anything walk around which is so clearly out of control unless…”
“…Unless even we weren’t much of a threat,” Jane said. Her eyes went a bit vacant as she considered the implications. “For that to be the case, they must be ready to launch a robotic age. Once well into that age, we’d be good and surrounded, effectively neutralized. And a more advanced prototype wouldn’t mean much against those kinds of numbers. Especially when you think that every corporation would have their own prototypes and their own development trajectories. There’d be no shortage of options of how to put us down, how to sneak up on us when our guards were down, or how to simply wear us out continually running from the inevitable. Sooner or later we’d have no choice but to turn ourselves in.”
“You could learn a lot from her, Michael, provided there’s enough time,” Cronos said standing and dusting himself off.
“But you don’t just engender a robotic age without some type of ramp up period,” Jane said, still thinking. “Hell, just getting the public to buy into it would be a feat in itself. And there hasn’t been any talk in the media.”
“That we know of,” Cronos said. “But we’ve been out here a while, and clearly things move very fast in Robo-land. That said…” He rubbed the back of his neck, “I’m at a loss to explain how they could pull this off myself.”
“You don’t count movies like I, Robot market prep? Once they get people to accept the fantasy, the reality is that much easier to buy into,” Michael said.
“Better, Michael,” Cronos said. “Glad you’re not a complete dolt when it comes to getting inside the heads of those conspiring against you, and just possibly, against all of humanity.”
A Chinese soldier, hanging upside down from the tree, made his presence felt by attempting to slice a blade across Cronos’s neck. Cronos reacted lightning fast, pulling the guy’s arm away from his throat, and yanking him to the ground, where he stabbed him with the “walking stick.” “God, you are so yesterday’s news,” he said, staring at the soldier. “Do try and keep up with current events. It’s cyber-enhancement, or nothing.”
Cronos bent down to examine the body more closely. “Human.” He felt his skin. “Ice cold. Another Zen master turned soldier for the fatherland, masking his heat signature. Who’d have thought there were so many of these guys running around? I tell you, my entire reality is starting to play like one big lie. I wonder what other surprises lay in store for us.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Dayton Histori stepped up to the podium to the deafening cheers and placards rising and falling in the air proclaiming, “Dayton for President!” He’d chosen to run on the Democratic ticket because what he was about to suggest was just not going to fly with the Republican Party. The notion was anything but conservative.
“My opponent in the Republican Party wants to increase jobs for the growing numbers of unemployed, losing their positions day by day to robotics, software upgrades, IVRs, self-serve websites… As if we can somehow turn back the hands of time. How Republican.” He paused for laughs, of which there were some, but he could feel the sea change. They were all wondering where this was going. “I say we go in the other direction. We admit it’s game over, and it’s time no one had a job. It’s time we all retire to our yachts and let the robots do all the hard work. Time for someone to afford those big boats besides the Republicans, huh?” The applause had faded; the room was more a cathedral of confusion, as Democratic Party members eyed him and one another.
“Did you know that if the top one percent weren’t hoarding all the profit garnered by the relentless advance of technology for themselves, the rest of us could live a comfortable life right now without working at all? Think, freed to spend our time how we want instead of being wage slaves with no other value to them than to stall until their robots are ready to go on line and they’re all too happy to replace us with wage slaves that don’t have to be paid, don’t require health care benefits, will never call off sick or late to work… Really, it’s a wonder we lasted as long as we did. So once again, I say, why fight it, let’s just redistribute that wealth back to who it belongs to, namely the other 99% of society left out in the cold. After all, the profits of all that technology is a legacy to the entire human race, not just to a precious few; it’s the gifts of generations of geniuses and mavericks dating back to when man first invented fire.
“Now I’m not saying we’re all going to be living in the lap of luxury the second that money gets redistributed. But the advent of technological progress will continue unabated at an ever faster rate because, after all, robots can be upgraded with a tweak to software; that takes five minutes. Compare that to growing an entire new generation of humans or getting a room full of people to change their thinking on something they’ve already made up their minds about. So in very short order that quality standard of living for each of us is going to rocket upwards, leaving us with only one pressing concern, what to do with all our free time?
“Well, let me help you fill in some of the blanks. We can earn college degrees on line for free trough PhD level and beyond. We can devote ourselves to a lifetime of learning and in fields that interest us versus what the market forces on us with supply and demand style economics. Some will choose a life of leisure, and will contribute nothing back to the greater good, I grant you that. But most will bore with that after a while and start looking for ways to give back. Maybe that’s planting trees, maybe it’s helping the homeless, or starving of India. There are no shortage of humanitarian projects and ways to help our fellow man. What’s more those people can earn an augmented stipend based on how much they give back, seeing their wealth grow relative to one another by serving the greater good, depending on how creative and energetic they are with giving back to humanity rather than simply resting on their laurels.
“This is not utopia I’m promising. Problems will continue for as long as there are humans. Robots themselves are imperfect beings. With time we may even have the luxury of deciding whether to live out our lives in robot bodies ourselves, bodies that don’t age and breakdown, that don’t get sick, and that are capable of so much more than humans are currently capable, whether that’s thinking faster by quantum measures, or even being bigger hearted and more humane than us so called humans. But that doesn’t mean we’ll stop having problems or goals to which we strive which are still beyond us.
“The point is that we will all be free to cocreate the future together, whatever form that takes, as free men, as equals, and no longer as wage slaves living by the dictates of the one percent.”
The crowd was silent a while longer, long enough to process what he was saying, before erupting in cheers. Maybe they hadn’t comprehended all the small print about the Age of Robots, but they got the point about putting an end to wage slavery just fine, and to a life of leisure free to pursue their own ends, free from worry, as well. Now that the new memes were out there, it would be little or no time at all before they spread across the internet like wildfire.
The powers that be that weren’t prepared to buy into such a future would try to assassinate him; it’s kind of what they did when they couldn’t buy you off. But he was a robot himself, so they were going to find that difficult.
There, he’d
done it. He’d executed well on the orders he’d been given. Now he’d wait and see, as much for the reaction on high as for the reaction from the ninety-nine percent.
***
“We need to find out which one of us is behind this,” Totos said, regarding the big screen television from the Lodge’s main room at Camp Futura, their tongue-in-cheek name for their Camp David of sorts, only for the people who were literally building the future, not for the powers that be that harkened back to another age. “And we need to shut them down and fast.”
“Maybe not,” Gunther said, setting his glass down. “Whoever put one of their robots up to this, and you can bet that joker is one of our prototypes—no human could survive the bullets coming his way—might have done us a favor.”
“What, have you gone soft in the head too?” The old man reached for one of his nitro tablets. At the rate he was going, he wouldn’t survive the announcement, far less the regime change.
“We’ve been tracking Serena. So far the only robots that have gone after her suggest someone is cleaning house, getting rid of any evidence of their early defective prototypes.”
“I was told that was all we had.”
“I’m guessing we were told wrong,” Gunther said. “You know how these guys are; they’re not going to show us all their cards. We may be coconspirators but we’re also competitors.”
The old man took a deep breath. “You can’t just pull the rug out from under the American people like that.”
“No one is suggesting we do. Looks like the campaign to massage their thinking into something more serviceable to us is just beginning. Weeks, months, who cares how long it takes to sell them on the new world order? After all, there’ll just be more of them on the unemployment lines each month, more ripe for recruiting into true believers in the new world order. Now that we understand the game we’re really playing a little better we might even be able to hasten the process along, which will make Dayton Histori sound all the more prophetic.”
Nano Man Page 25
