Public bathrooms for these tenants, to my knowledge, had also been a large problem, but my curiosity never drove me to discover the delicate balance required. In either case, the body lockers lined the walls in the apartment complexes. Traveling in those buildings, it was always an eerie thought to wonder how many of the individuals locked inside were dead and yet undiscovered.
I seldom went into any of these locations, as my wealth level could afford something much nicer, and I didn't need a great deal of sleep either way. In addition, I seldom stopped for more than a few hours or a few days in any one location, so accommodations were not usually necessary.
I continued to contemplate the possibilities involved with gaining the information from Keritas, deciding that whatever little bit they could provide would be worth my time to pursue.
"Pssst! Hey buddy!"
A disheveled, filthy individual stared at me with wide eyes. He leaned out of the tiny alley gap between buildings, squeezed tightly in the very small space. Dirty fingers clung to the wall edge, and the man beckoned frantically.
I didn't approach. "Yes?"
"You're the guy looking for Ivan, right?"
Glancing around, noticing no one else paying me any mind, I said, "Now what would make you think that?"
He jabbed a grubby index finger at the side of his temple, where a tarnished implant lay. "Oh, you know. I got ways." He grinned, revealing a row of stained, half-rotting teeth. His shaggy gray hair and beard were tangled and greasy. "Tapping into the database is tricky, but not if you piggyback onto someone else's query. Of course, it can get really boring because you have to sit there and wait for something useful to come up. But that's not important. What I've got is information. You'd like that, wouldn't you?"
Significant doubts of this individual's sanity entered my mind, but I sighed. "What do you know?"
"Oh, nono. Not here. Somewhere else. We can't let them find us."
He wriggled backwards, squeezing his way through the tight space. Gritting my teeth, I followed behind, inching my way forward. The man seemed thin and frail, squeezing through with relative ease. My metallic right shoulder scored the walls on both sides as I scraped along. My hat tumbled off, but I managed to snatch it with my free hand. "I take it that receptionist's discomfort was your fault?"
The man laughed as I continued to struggle through. "Yeah man, the system they got has detection algorithms for multiple links on the same path, kinda to prevent exactly what I'm doing. They send a feedback spike down the link into the intruder's brain, which manifests as about the worst hangover you could ever imagine." He shrugged, stooping over. "Of course, I tricked the countermeasure into thinking she was the illicit presence, so she got zapped."
Finally, as he jabbered about his mainframe diving, I gripped the edge and pulled myself free. I came out in a small open square, with identical gaps leading forward and to the left and right. My new friend was crouched over a street covering, prying at it with a twisted chunk of metal. Exasperated, I asked, "Sewers?"
He waved a hand at me, annoyed. "No, no, no. This isn't a shit-pipe. It's a relay." The man wrenched, and the covering popped open an inch. "Grab that." I did as he asked and hauled the hinged plate upward. I noted the broken locking mechanism on the lid as my new companion dropped down into the hole. Carefully, I followed behind, settling the hatch in place overhead before descending the short ladder.
Lengths of electrical and various cabling stretched out in either direction along with a small walkway. It appeared to be a maintenance tunnel for the unholy amount of data processing and wiring that stretched everywhere on the planet. Soft green diagnostic blips on the walls provided a dim lighting.
I half-expected the crazed man to take a lunge at or try to rob me, not that it would have done him any good, but he waited with an impatient expression. "You're a little slow; you know that?"
Frowning, I asked, "Where are we going?"
"We should be safe here, for now. I couldn't speak freely out in the open because they're looking for me."
I felt a twinge of frustration as the man confirmed the presence of paranoia and likely delusion. "Who is looking for you?" I asked.
"Keritas, of course. Who else?"
Rolling my eyes, I replied, "Who else indeed? What information do you have for me?"
"Ah, ah, ah! It's not that simple, is it?" He grinned again, and the wild expression knocked my opinion of his sanity down several more notches. "There's a such a thing called a deal. You know? Tit for that? You scratch my back, and we all smell the music? All for one and five for a credit?"
I folded my arms, favoring him with a glare. "Loose lips sink glass houses."
My new friend tossed his head back and gave a long laugh. "Exactly my friend, exactly. So I want to know what you'll be doing for me if I tell you what I know."
Cocking my head, I replied, "I'm willing to negotiate, assuming what you know is worth anything in the first place. You mentioned Ivan; do you have information on him or not?"
I winced as he revealed his hideous teeth again. "Oh, for sure. I know exactly why he was a patron of the fine Keritas establishment as well as why the greedy pricks won't say a thing no matter how high up the chain you go."
"Why not?"
"They're embarrassed! Oh no, no... can't let that little secret out, can they?"
Rubbing my forehead, I replied, "What secret?"
"Ah, ah, no, no!" He wagged a finger at me. "You gotta promise me something."
I stared at him.
"Promise you'll take me with you when you leave."
"No."
He appeared shocked by my flat denial. "W-well, then you have to tell someone about what I tell you. Spread the word, fly like an eagle, you know?"
"To what end?"
He smacked himself on the forehead. "Man, the people! The people gotta know what they're doing in there: the kinds of horrors and wonders of technology hidden by the corporate giants. They gotta know, and then everyone can band together to tear the walls down, you know? Bring the fat cats back down to our level!"
"You want to bring down Keritas?" I envisioned the planet upon which I stood, Ethra, with billions of unemployed people scrounging and murdering for food. Fires burning across the wide cityscape. A galaxy-wide recession as commerce stuttered under the loss of a major economic power.
"Of course! Man, the things I've seen; they would shock you. They would horrify you."
I doubted this, as I'd done many jobs and seen many things. His assertions didn't matter anyway since it wasn't really possible to bring down the entire corporation in any real sense. It operated within thousands of smaller units and didn't exactly have unified oversight of every little detail.
It became certain for me that the information from this man was suspect. Not that any of the corporations had the most stellar record or firm ethics, but he carried an obvious madness. I nearly decided to leave and let him doomsay at someone more patient. Still, I wouldn't be too inconvenienced to hear him out.
"Very well," I said. "I will take your message to those who may act upon it. I don't guarantee results, and I am not a champion for your cause." This was utter honesty. I intended to tell someone as long as the story had details applicable to my search. I didn't tell him what I suspected: no one in the entire galaxy would care even if his tale was dripping with the truth. "So tell me, what is this big secret about Ivan which is so embarrassing?"
"He escaped from them!" he said with delight. "The most advanced piece of technology in the entire galaxy, capable of fighting armies and destroying cities, worlds even, slipped right out of their grubby little fingers!" He stifled a giggle.
I found his assertion of their uncleanliness to be ironic and mildly hypocritical, but I didn't bring it up. I asked, "What exactly do you mean?"
The disheveled man continued snickering and shaking his head. "Man, you have no idea. No idea!"
Frustrated, I glared at him without speaking.
He grinned. "I-V-A
-N, man. Ivan's a goddamn robot."
******
"They don't want anyone to know about it, especially after the incident in the Regulus system when Ivan became so famous. I had friends on the Garden, man. Lots of friends.
But his creation... the entire R&D department responsible for building Ivan got shipped out to deep space exploration with the threat of death if they should ever return within the next three millennia. Managers who knew about the project, anyone who happened to be working within three floors of the breakout, all kinds of people disappeared in their clean-up.
Think of the lawsuits, man. Think of how many people would be banging down Keritas' doors if they knew that all the shit Ivan had done was their fault. The company would get smashed into tiny pieces, and that'd be it.
IVAN was just a code name for the project. It stood for Impervious Vessel for Annihilation Nexus. It was supposed to be one of a hundred, maybe a thousand individual units with the strength and destructive power to conquer anything and withstand any amount of punishment.
They were the ultimate in defensive and offensive weaponry. An unstoppable force Keritas wanted to use to cut down the competition and reign supreme in the entire galaxy.
It all started in that big building, on the 19th basement floor.
The lab was huge, containing the most sophisticated pieces of technology. Famous engineers from everywhere disappeared and were brought to the facility to work on this robotics project. It was a big secret, man. They had top of the line hardware, dense and refined alloys, and the most important piece of all:
An augmented human brain.
AI projects have been dead-ends for hundreds of years, you know? It's a widely known fact that the growth of an intelligence on that scale requires a planet-wide system of computers to sustain it, and by then, the experiment gets wild and out of control. No variant has ever bothered to consider us humans as anything but inferior, so these projects end in disaster. But that's a whole new can of worms, man. I could talk for days about AI stuff.
Anyway, Ivan wasn't all robot; he's got a few chunks of human brain matter in that neosteel skull plate, but that's all there is to his humanity.
I mean, it wasn't hard for them to fabricate the exoskeleton; there were plenty of android models to work from. Even so, they brought in the most prominent robotics engineers not already chained to the other corporations.
Dr. Ronald Calloway was the head of the Ivan project, and he'd worked core-ward for dozens of years on some of the best pieces of robotics known to man. His big achievement was the Iso-Clean Mark IV, a learning-algorithm servant-bot for lazy rich people. You remember that one, right?
He definitely had money, man, but Keritas offered him ever so much more. Other researchers from the pinnacle of all fields came and went: antimatter physicists, starship engineers, augmentation specialists, neurosurgeons. They all came to bring this hulking beast to life.
Ivan's final specifications included a full neosteel skeleton with dissipating mimic-flesh coating it. An internal reactor, codenamed OLGA, in a fortified chest cavity produced countless gigawatts of energy. It was supposedly enough to power the dissipation shielding of the skin to withstand brief immersion within a star. That wasn't even the most important function of the device.
His sight, hearing, indeed all senses were augmented to more than triple the finest after-market modifications available to the public. He had strength and speed of unholy proportions. He had a heightened human brain capable of eidetic memory and rapid calculation be it in a laboratory or on the battlefield.
The most frightening piece of Ivan's hardware was his energy release mechanism and how they intended to use it. They pulled out all the stops, you know? Ivan was the finest and most potentially destructive force to exist, and they wanted to make more.
Lots more."
******
Dr. Calloway entered the complex, bidding his usual passive nod to the walls of receptionists and security personnel. The elevator he took dove to the accustomed cool of the distant basement, where the sparkling lab greeted him.
The nearly assembled body of Ivan lay on the table in the central isolation lab, locked and shielded by excessively, in Dr. Calloway's opinion, redundant security.
He walked over to their personal break-room, setting his briefcase on the counter. He poured himself a cup of fresh coffee. A colleague, by the name of Dr. Trevors, was seated at the table, reading the news on a digital pad.
Looking up, Trevors smirked. "Big day today."
Calloway nodded, taking a sip and grimacing at the lousy flavor.
"What's the delay been, two weeks now?" Trevors asked.
"Three," the robotics specialist replied. "The damn neurosurgeon had to dig out the implants in some captured dignitary or something. As though they couldn't find someone as qualified to help us instead."
"Another one to give clearance to? You know: the two week process by itself?" Trevors said. "We're on the home stretch here; they don't want to have to bring in more people now, right?"
Calloway waved a dismissive hand. "They should have had back-up candidates approved and ready. The billions, trillions spent on this project and you'd think they'd appreciate more efficiency." He took another swig. "Ugh, Gods... you'd also think that they could-"
"Afford better coffee? Yes, I've heard that one before." Trevors shrugged, returning his attention to the news reports.
Scowling at his colleague's lax attitude, Calloway drained the remaining coffee and stepped out. In truth, the constant close quarters in which they worked and the frustration of delay was beginning to wear on the pair closely associated with the project. Various people came and went, but Trevors and Calloway worked in uncomfortable proximity, twelve hours a day, for years.
"...and it's almost done," Calloway muttered as he stepped towards the entrance to the isolation lab. An exciting prospect for him, to see the grand scheme- his grand scheme -coming together. "Except we need that damnable neurosurgeon to finish it off..."
Sighing, he palmed the outer lock and set his chin into the retinal scanner. Green lights flared, and he punched in his seven-digit access code.
An error light flashed. "Dammit."
Twenty minutes later, after a group of five heavily armed and trained men swept through the lab to ensure a complete lack of anything resembling intruders, Calloway tried again.
This time the code was successful, and the outer door opened.
Sanitizing product and fans scattered the thin hair upon his head, as always eliciting a grimace from the aging man. "Why this is necessary I'll never understand..." he lapsed into his usual mutterings and complaints. He withdrew a small key from his pocket, three-pronged. Into the locking mechanism of the inner door, he set this key and waited. A green light shone, and he turned the key two clicks left, three clicks right, and one click back left. He punched in one more keycode.
The door opened.
"Good morning, Ivan," the doctor said cheerfully, his annoyance tempered by finally being through the security countermeasures. "Today we should get to see you up and about for real."
The slab of metal and synthesized flesh on the table gave no reply, lying as a brainless lump of trillion dollar parts. Truly the only task remaining was to get Ivan's augmented human brain installed.
For weeks, they'd done countless testing of Ivan's motor functions with a simple processor linked to controls. Bent sections of starship hull plate lay, discarded in one of the testing areas from the strength demonstration. A hideous indentation was smashed into a concrete wall as one of the idiotic and now-fired techs had not slowed Ivan's impressive sprint quickly enough in the speed test.
A capacitor chamber had nearly overloaded at a demonstration of Ivan's power output, an action which very well could have caused a cataclysmic explosion that would have destroyed a quarter of the Keritas complex. This was at a tenth maximum load.
"We'll never have to worry about using that function, now will we my devastating littl
e pet?" Dr. Calloway practically crooned. His affection for the project appeared excessive but not so much that Keritas thought he needed to be removed. "You'll always win without it. I just know you will."
In the unlikely event of a detachment of Ivan-units being unable to secure an objective or certain varied circumstances, the Annihilation Nexus portion of his namesake would activate. In tandem, their reactors would release an energy stream straight into the core of the planet, the intention being to cause a world-shattering event. Then in the aftermath, Keritas could in theory send a ship to scoop up the undamaged Ivans, recharge them, and haul them to the next objective.
Dr. Calloway was almost sad to see the project at its end. Once they had a viable prototype, the schematics would be carted off to a manufacturing center for production, and he'd likely not see his precious children unless on the opposite end of their promised brutality.
The doctor ambled through the lab, checking over some of the instruments and analyses. System diagnostics spooled through the large monitor. Everything displayed green lights.
Stepping over to the table, he ran a hand over the remarkable synthetic skin that coated the structure of the human-in-appearance body. Cold and lifeless at the moment, it was remarkably smooth, soft. "Like real flesh," he murmured, always astounded when he felt it.
The airlock hissed open. "Is it really such a surprise?" Trevors asked as he stepped into the room. Calloway felt a pang of irritation at his fellow doctor's air of smug satisfaction. Trevors, the impudent cad that he was, did create the design for the flesh and was instrumental in altering it to suit the energy dispersion and channeling functions.
Calloway didn't answer his colleague. He stepped over to some charts and pretended to sift through the documentation. In truth, very little could be accomplished. Countless simulations and tests had been run to determine Ivan's viability, and the final stage was only minutes away.
The Legend of Ivan Page 4
