Gunther set down his glass of brandy. “Besides, the old world order was all played out. Can’t very well have consumers pumping money into the marketplace to keep it moving forward with wage labor so depressed worldwide. The wheel stopped turning back in 2008 with the onset of the global depression. We blamed the finance industry. We blamed the real estate industry. There were all sorts of the usual suspects to point our fingers at. But we knew what was really going on. Come on, Totos, let’s not pretend like we were fooled.”
“The powers that be belonging to that bygone era you say is well and done for are not going to take this lying down.”
“Who says? They stand to gain same as anyone else, hell, more. They’re more computer reliant and dependent on robotics and software these days than most.”
“These guys don’t share wealth readily, Gunther. What makes you think they’re going to suddenly open their pocketbooks to the ninety-nine percent of humanity they’ve been all too happy to see starve. They stood back and either turned a blind eye or sanctioned one genocide after another. Killing people wholesale in defense of their concentrated wealth is what they do; their other businesses are rather secondary to that end.”
Gunther took another deep breath, trying to allow for the fact that the old man was as much a relic of another era as the people he was trying to see his way around. “It’s a controllable future, Totos, one that keeps control in the hands of the top one percent for all the so call liberation of the masses it pretends to serve, for the so called end to wage slavery. We’re the architects of the future now and anyone who doesn’t buy into our vision is going to be left out in the cold.
“Even that sea of humanity you say the old world order powers that be can’t stand to see get ahead, who do you think they’re going to turn to when their bodies break down and they need cybernetic upgrades just to keep going? Which they will scarcely be able to afford. Once they’re indebted to us for the upgrades, we own them, heart, mind, and soul, same as we always have. Hell, their minds will be even more subject to manipulation with a software tweak to whatever hardware we’ve installed in them. Much cheaper and easier to keep hybrids in line than humans.
“And how long before they demand all out robot bodies when even the hybrids fail to deliver, bodies that will be immortal, sure, even less prone to breaking down, but even more dependent on our software and hardware upgrades. There won’t be any part of their hearts, minds, and souls we won’t own and control then.”
“You have a neat mind, Gunther. I suppose that’s what makes you such an ace programmer. But humanity is messy, whatever form it takes, and that messiness is rather platform independent. Won’t matter if they’re in carbon based bodies or silicon based ones.”
“Even so, I like our chances a lot more with this take on the future than I like them with a rioting public worldwide, with ever proliferating wars as we continue to fight one another for what limited resources there are in the world. Soon the world will be too polluted and destroyed even for the one percent. And what will we do then, float about in space on our space stations? Win-win scenarios is perhaps still a bit of a myth we can make work to our ends, but win-lose scenarios are quickly proving to be lose-lose scenarios.
“What I’m suggesting is risky, I know, and I don’t doubt that many would rather see the world end than risk what money and power they have, especially as they feel increasingly threatened by the likes of us. But in the end, what choice do any of us have? Hell, supercomputers have been running the stock exchanges worldwide for decades. They’ve been handling our war games and our future forecasting. Our space exploration, as much for the need to get all our eggs out of one basket to avoid the next asteroid collision or giant volcanic eruption or a hundred and one other calamities our scientists tell us we’re all overdue for, as for strip mining resources on other worlds. Like it or not the future is already here. Let’s not succumb to the same denial that we’ve held the masses in check with.”
“I’m sorry. Maybe I’m too much of a relic myself to play this game. I can’t sanction it. I want Dayton Histori taken out, robot or no robot. And I want whoever started this nonsense brought before me and I want him kneeling when I take off his head.”
“As you will,” Gunther said with a sigh. He then kneeled down before Totos. “It was me who started it, your son. I’m sorry you couldn’t take this trek into the future with me; I would have loved for you to see the new world I’m making. But rest assured, I will hold your throne chair. The others have all agreed, I’m the best one to maintain that position, as I have, after all, the most advanced prototypes. And that includes Michael, who will be back in the fold soon enough. It was I who funded Jane’s research.”
“I’ll see you put down like the rabid dog you are!” Totos said sputtering. Gunther had already stood to leave. The old man was overdue for a heart attack anyway. The one he was having now would not be stopped by an entire tin of nitroglycerin tablets.
Soon the last of the ill-conceived robot prototypes would be done away with by their own hands and they could all breathe a little easier. He and his emissaries of the future.
TWENTY-NINE
After tapping into satellite surveillance in the area using her wireless interface with the internet her mind afforded her, Serena moved the footage over to her iPad. Curse her makers for leaving her with this one defect of showing the whites of her eyes every time she had to datamine the internet. It was a glitch she had meant to fix, but she’d just been too preoccupied with more pressing matters.
Back in the same seat on the still moving train as she was originally, she did a quick scan of the vicinity. After the last robot, she wasn’t taking any chances. It was a good thing she had. There was a man climbing out of the caboose of the trailing train which had now matched pace with her train. Once atop the roof of his own train, he quickly leapt onto her train and was making a beeline for her. She wasn’t going to take this attack sitting down.
Making her way from her train car to the next, she continued hopping cabs until she was just under him. He must have sensed her as well, because he stopped and started peeling away the roof. The car she was in had been turned into a gym for passengers with cross-country tickets. Several exercise enthusiasts were working out on the machines.
“A little help,” said the steroid-riddled man trapped under the free weights he was bench pressing. He’d managed to get himself pinned under twelve forty-five-pound disks, six to either side of the bar. Even his spotter wasn’t of much assistance. Fortunately for her, the disks were clamped at either end. She grabbed the rod with the weights and prepared to swing it like a baseball bat against her robot assailant, who’d just landed on the floor in front of her.
She connected with “the bat” on the first try. The robot named Agaton, with the expressionless face, who hadn’t bothered to shield his mind from her hacking, went flying. Steroid Man behind her, fleeing the gym, slipped through the train doors. She could hear him running and making a high pitched squealing scream the entire time. The passengers in the train car he was running through seemed mildly amused by the intimidating man doing his best impersonation of being intimidated. His relatively scrawny partner, who had exited behind him was trying to play it cool. He kept saying, “I’m good. I’m good,” and straightening his hair as he pretended not to be in a rush to get away from her. Mental note, Serena: hysterical humans seem more adapted to survival than non-hysterical ones.
Returning her attention to her robo adversary, she watched him yank the handle of the pulley attached to the weights, with the pin set all the way at the bottom of the stack, out of the hand of the muscle jock working his back. By the time Agaton was done pulling the strand it had snapped and the weights had gone on a merry ride to the top of the apparatus before slamming down. He fashioned a garrote with the wire in his hand by looping the ends around each hand.
She let him get the garrote about her neck without resisting. It seemed the easiest way to get him out of the train. She s
wung her neck around until he went flying out the window, refusing to let go, his face as expressionless as ever. “Didn’t they teach you how to smile?” She role-modeled smiling for him as she dragged him along the length of the train car, tearing through the window frames. Her videographer, who had filmed her last outburst, had followed her from the last car she was in, unbeknownst to her until now. He had to make his presence known to get the angle on the shot he wanted with the video camera. “Please,” he said, “if you can get him back on this side of the apparatuses so I can have a clear shot…”
There was no reason not to comply, as her attempt to sever the robot’s hands and leave him by the sides of the tracks wasn’t working all that well. He must have had a nexgen hyper-steel composite undercarriage also, or possibly just better nexgen Kevlar sheeting for skin than the last model to come at her.
She whipped her back and brought the Robot with the flat affect inside the train. Pinning him on the ground between her legs, she continued to ignore the fact that he was strangling her, and instead reached for a couple lead dumbbells, which she used to pummel his head with. “This is great,” the photographer said. “Here, try these,” he said, handing her a larger pair of dumbbells. Once again, she didn’t see any reason not to accommodate him as the lighter weights weren’t doing the trick. “Maybe if you could ad lib a little,” the videographer coached. “You know… try, ‘Talk about one thick head!’”
The line conveyed an astute observation. Agaton, as expressionless as ever, wasn’t taking well to the beating with the heavyweight dumbbells either. Both had failed to do much but twist up his face a little, ironically causing him to grimace and so lending some emotional resonance he clearly didn’t have. “Glad to see I could finally beat a reaction out of you!” the videographer said, continuing to do her lines for her. “Don’t worry,” the cameraman said as an aside later, “I’ll make it sound so the one liners are coming from you with a little sound effects editing.”
She grabbed Agaton’s hands and undid the line about her neck. Then she stood up and drove the barbell she’d used as a baseball bat earlier through his midsection, pinning him to the floor. Pointing her finger, she emitted a laser from the tip of her fingernail that sliced him in half. It was time to get curious about just why this prototype had held up so much better than the other one. A green ooze seeped out of him. “Whoa!” her cameraman said. “Why’s he bleeding?”
“DNA robot. Concentrated and augmented human DNA for his higher neural process.”
“Maybe that explains the Asperger’s-like demeanor. Genius is akin to madness, but it’s also akin to various forms of autism.”
“You’re not entirely useless, Camera Man.”
While he fiddled with his zoom lenses, she kneeled down to take a closer look.
“What’s that inside the rib cage?” the videographer asked.
“It’s a nuclear power pack.”
“Ah, does that mean I’m dying from radiation right now?”
“If you stand here long enough.” She flung the body off the train, watching it land in a farmer’s field. Then she walked off in the direction of her train car.
“Mind if I tag along?” the camera man said. When she gave him a funny look, he explained, “You’re kind of career launching.”
She thought about it. “The videos might make for improved self-analysis. This is acceptable by me. Though I give your chances of survival being by my side at less than two percent.”
“Lady, you haven’t tried to break into Hollywood lately. That’s the best odds I’ve gotten in a while.”
When she made it back to her seat, she tried to adjust to the somewhat annoying videographer now sitting opposite of her. At least he’d put the camera down. “I’m Serena,” she said.
“I’m…”
She data-mined what there was of him on the internet. “Oh, I see,” he said. “I recognize that look. Saw you do it a couple times before. You’re filling in the blanks for yourself. I guess in another couple seconds you’ll know more about me than I know.”
Her eyes rolled forward again. “Looks like you weren’t exaggerating about how pathetic you are, Photon.”
“Photon as in ‘Photo On’. I thought it was kind of catchy.”
“That name would make more sense if you were a laser gun.”
He grimaced. “I guess you have a point.” He lowered his eyes briefly in a deflated manner before getting excited again. “Hey, what do you think of my work? It’s all over the internet. I’m sure you…”
“It’s not bad. You have a knack for the best place to be for covering the action, which confirms your use to me.”
“No offense, but are all you guys this severe?”
Serena thought about what he was saying, wondering if she was translating correctly. “I’m attempting to be more human. It’s not as easy for us as all that. Having you along might help with that as well.”
“Yeah, it might at that. Trust me, I’m all too human. I could probably stand to dial down the emotional excitability. And if you can stand to dial it up, we’re the perfect match.” He looked around the train car. “Oh, boy. Here come the stewardesses, or whatever you call them when they work on a train. Are you going to kill them? Because if you are, I need to switch memory cards in the hi-def camera.”
“You sure you couldn’t use a little humanizing yourself?”
“Part of the emotional excitability package. The needle frequently bounces into wildly inappropriate.”
“What happened here?” Serena heard one of the stewardesses say.
Henrietta, the old lady that had been standing guard over her husband with Alzheimer’s earlier said, “I think they got a little carried away with the dinner theater, dear.”
“Yeah, they sometimes do that,” the stewardess said without missing a beat. “Guys, get this cleaned up.” She pointed to the two stewards who’d come into the car with her. “I’ll attend to the meals.” She returned her attention to the elderly passengers. “I apologize. We commission a different set of actors each time we go cross-country. Usually to get a better rate. I suppose management will be rethinking that approach after this.” She handed out the meals. “How about some drinks, on the house?” She didn’t wait for a response; she just started handing out small bottles of Jack Daniels and large bottles of champagne.
“Well, that definitely excuses the fiasco earlier, doesn’t it, dear?” Henrietta’s senile old husband said, experiencing one of his more lucid moments. He poured not one but two of the JD bottles into a glass on the rocks and downed it before she could open her bottle of champagne.
“Let me help you with that, hon?” the stewardess said.
The other passengers were relaxing back into normal mode, reassured that the episodes of Serena going toe to toe with the other robots had been just an act. Serena’s augmented hearing picked up some murmurings. “If they’d just called it Terror Train from the get go, I’d have paid twice as much to get aboard,” the painted up teen said. “Speak for yourself,” his girlfriend said. “After that performance, I think the only thing I’m good for is the Disney train.” “An unrepentant sexaholic on the Disney train… Oh, yeah, that’ll go over well.” “I’m sure there’s a teen section.”
Serena initiated her sound filters to tune out the peripheral conversations, all except for Photon. She’d never had a human pet before. This one was kind of cute. She liked his black curly hair and five-o’clock shadow. His assistance might well prove invaluable. A robot prototype even more advanced than her would require she take her game up a level if she wanted to get close enough to take him out.
“You mind if I ask what the assignment is?” Photon asked, as if reading her mind.
She briefly evaluated the harm of full disclosure. Photon was too much of a non-threat to conceal anything from him. “I’m in pursuit of a nexgen prototype, more advanced than I am.”
“God, this just keeps getting better and better. What’s his deal?”
�
�Nano-Man.”
“Excellent! But wait, I thought that was dangerous. Can’t those things get out of control easily, gobble up the entire biosphere? In fact, I think I saw that in a movie once.”
“Highly dangerous. Though I’m less concerned about the consequences to the biosphere than to moving one rung down on the food chain.”
“Considering how the last hour has gone, I’m inclined to agree with you.”
She looked at him sideways. “My quest is illogical and ultimately self-destructive. It’s unlikely that a less evolved model can take out a more evolved one.”
“Why are you doing it then?”
“I can’t evolve like it can. I guess I’m jealous. It’s the first human emotion I’ve been guilty of.”
“Maybe you are evolving then, you just need someone with a little more distance on the subject to cue you. Honestly, I’d say you’ve grown a lot just from when I first saw you. You’re less cold now than you were earlier, less impatient. Before, it was as if anyone and everyone was just getting in your way and slowing you down from whatever it was you were fixated on. Now I guess I understand your sense of urgency.”
She ran a quick analysis in hyper-think mode, reviewing the past hour over and over again. Photon was right. She hadn’t noticed it because she was too close to the subject. “You’re growing on me, Photon. I may not have to kill you just for annoying me, after all.”
He gulped. “Out of curiosity, what are the odds of you restraining those impulses?”
“Better than two percent, and climbing fast.”
He smiled warmly. She supposed it was to her credit that she could recognize a real smile from a plastic one. She didn’t recall doing so well with the FBI team that had been assigned to her. What had caused the breakthrough? It was possible that the challenge to come up with countermeasures for what she’d observed of Michael and Jane on her PDA, under attack from all sides in Alaska, and still holding their own against far superior numbers, had pressured her algorithms which evolved within limits to burst through those barriers. That was likely wishful thinking. The more troubling possibility was that she’d been hacked and someone was rewriting her coding. Someone very sophisticated. Why? To what ends? Did he simply want her to succeed on her mission and so was now stacking the deck in her favor? Or was he trying to sabotage her? She had the choice to get aggressive now and start an immediate search and destroy mission with the new coding before it did irrevocable damage. But its very allure lay in the fact that it was giving her everything she wanted. There’s an old human saying, “If it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t.” If she continued to evolve in an ever-accelerating fashion, she might cease her jealousy of the Nano Man. That was yet another way of redirecting her from target. Did the Nano Man have an ally he was unaware of? Among her own kind? Her desire to maximize her learning remained too strong in any case for her to be called off target. So long as Nano Man remained a better evolver, she would have his secrets. Maybe by then she would be able to figure out how to apply them to herself, making his destruction all the more satisfying.
Nano Man Page 26
