I Am Automaton 2: Kafka Rising

by Edward P. Cardillo

  Carl stood up, walked over to the door, and placed his hands through the opening as instructed. He wasn’t going to put up a fuss. They were, after all, on the same team.

  One of the guards grabbed his hands while the other shackled his wrists.

  “Captain Birdsall, please step away from the door, turn around, and face the back of the cell.”

  Carl did as instructed. He heard the digi-lock disengage, and then a manual lock (a failsafe in case of a power outage). The two guards entered the room. Carl heard the scraping of metal on the floor. A guard grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him into a chair.

  “Come on, guys. I’m not Hannibal Lecter.”

  However, they ignored him and fastened him to the chair with restraints. He guessed they weren’t fans of pre-Millennial movies. Once secured, they dragged the chair out of the cell and proceeded to take him down the hallway.

  As they made their way down a long corridor, he looked up at the light bulbs in their wired cages hanging from the ceiling. When they reached a heavy blue door, they stopped. One guard disengaged the digi-lock and then the subsequent three other manual locks. Apparently, there was something very important in this room. Carl felt honored that he was going to get to see it.

  The guard who disengaged the locks swung the large door open, and the other dragged Carl into the room backwards. Once they placed him roughly in the center of the room, they turned and left. Carl guessed that they were in the corridor just outside the room, standing guard.

  “Hello, Carl.”

  He knew that voice. It was like velvet on his brain.

  “Why, Fiona, I had no idea that you were going to be doing the poking and prodding tonight. If I did, I would’ve dressed up a bit for the occasion.”

  Fiona stepped around the chair to face him, a wry smile on her face. “You know, you’re no longer the timid Carl I met at Frisky’s one fateful night. Back then, you would’ve nearly wet yourself in a situation like this.”

  “Who’s to say I haven’t now. I only have a small commode in my room. I really have to write a strong-worded letter to the management about the treatment of their guests.”

  “You’re looking good,” she said.

  He smiled. “But things are looking up as we speak.”

  Fiona was a little flustered. “I mean your condition. For a man with a pretty advanced brain tumor, you are looking well.” She looked down at her mini-com. “And it appears that you’ve performed above par on all of the tests.” She scrunched up her face in deep deliberation.

  “You seem vexed by the results.”

  “I am, Carl. It’s almost as if the tumor was helping you, making you stronger. I want to give you some problem solving tasks with a motor component.”

  “I love it when you talk dirty like that.”

  She gave him a come on look.

  “Well, I’m not going to perform very well strapped to a chair. Just saying. It might influence your results.”

  “Don’t worry.” She leaned over and undid the wrist restraints binding him to the chair. Then she produced a key and removed his wrist shackles, freeing his hands. “There.”

  “And what about the rest of me?”

  “I just need your hands tonight,” she smirked at him playfully.

  “Oh, and I thought this was getting interesting.”

  Fiona wheeled a table over his lap and adjusted its height. Then she took out little blocks with various colors on different sides, some with two colors represented diagonally on one side.

  “Gosh, Fiona, I haven’t played with blocks since I was three.”

  “Well, I’m going to need you to play with them now. A pattern is going to flash on the screen. I want you to replicate the pattern with the blocks as fast as you can. The table will record when you are finished and flash the next pattern.”

  “My big brother always told me that women play games, but this is ridiculous.”

  “The patterns will get increasingly difficult. Are you up to the challenge?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “I have more interesting games once we’re through with this one.”

  “Okay. Sounds good.” He positioned his hands over the table. “Just say when.”

  “As soon as you see a pattern flash, begin.” She pressed a button on the underside of the table.

  The first pattern flashed and Carl went to work. It was the first, and therefore the easiest, and he finished it in seconds. The next one flashed, and he finished that one in seconds.

  While Carl manipulated his way through the patterns, Fiona was making observations with a stylus on her mini-com. She said nothing as he worked his way through the patterns.

  As the patterns became increasingly more complex, Carl did not seem to take much more time completing them. In fact, he was smiling as he worked, seeming to barely strain himself.

  After he completed the fiftieth pattern, the screen flashed a TESTING COMPLETE message. Data was immediately fed to Fiona’s mini-com, and she was pressing buttons on the screen with her stylus.

  Carl sat back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “So, how’d I do, Doc?”

  Fiona was looking intently at her screen. “You did incredibly, Carl. You scored in the 99.9th percentile on all patterns.”

  “What, no hundredth percentile?”

  “The computer program is the 100th percentile, and you almost matched it in completing the patterns.”

  Carl looked a little startled now. “It didn’t seem like I was moving that fast. Fiona, how is that possible?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s the tumor. So I’m going to become a superhero before I die.”

  “That’s just the thing, Carl. We’ve reviewed the brain scans and the growth of the tumor. The growth has stabilized, and the tumor no longer seems to be endangering your life.”

  “Wh-how is that possible? Does it still need to be removed?”

  “That’s the other thing. Its tendrils have fused with different parts of your brain. To remove it would be impossible and, frankly, dangerous.”

  “So let me get this straight, now it’s dangerous to remove this tumor?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “But this is crazy. I am supposed to leave it in there now?”

  Fiona suddenly looked awkward.

  “Oh,” Carl said, the truth of the matter dawning on him. “This evaluation has nothing to do with my health.”

  “Carl, the brass wanted to know if you are too dangerous to be kept alive.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “Your abilities are expanding beyond the communication with the drones. You are becoming faster, stronger…”

  “Smarter,” he interjected.

  Fiona nodded gravely, “Yes…there’s another test I want to run.”

  “Wait a minute,” Carl said with annoyance, “you are telling me that the army is considering putting me down like a sick dog because they feel threatened by me and you want to run another test.”

  “Carl, I’m doing my best to advocate for you, but you need to cooperate with these tests.”

  “You’re trying to help me? That’s what you’ve been telling me from day one in your therapy sessions, but that was when you were a therapist. Now you’re in intelligence. Jesus, no wonder why you didn’t flinch when I told you how we were going to deal with Major Lewis.”

  “Carl, I can’t help it if there’s more to me than you thought. Quite frankly, it was presumptuous of you to think I was a…”

  “Nice girl,” he interjected.

  “Carl, I was never a ‘nice girl.’ In fact, if I wasn’t looking for your brother that night at Frisky’s, I probably wouldn’t have given you the time of day.”

  “But you are a nice girl. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have given me the time of day. You saw a nerdy guy and figured you’d give him a boost.”

  “Carl, I never meant to give you the wrong idea—”

  “Oh, I think I got the right idea w
hen you kissed me.”

  “Actually, I seem to remember that you kissed me.”

  “Hey, it takes two to tango, honey.”

  “You were leaving for Afghanistan. What was I supposed to do? Push you away and send you off so distraught that you’d get killed by the first guy to take a shot at you? And don’t call me honey.”

  “Oh, someone really needs to get over herself. I don’t think this room is big enough for you, me, and your ego. You were never like this in the program.”

  Fiona shook her head in exasperation and calmed herself. He was a test subject and she should not let him get under her skin. She needed to remain clinically dispassionate.

  “Can I just run this other test? And then I promise I’ll be out of your way.”

  Carl put up his hands in surrender. “Go ahead.”

  “Thank you.”

  She wheeled the table with the blocks away and wheeled another machine over. It looked like something an ophthalmologist would use. It had a chin rest for one’s head and an apparatus for looking into one’s eye.

  “Change of subject,” he ventured. She nodded as she set it up, so he continued. “So are you still a part of the Infantry Drone Program?”

  “No, not any more. All records of my involvement have been expunged.”

  “Really. No records.”

  “None whatsoever. It’s like I never existed in that capacity.”

  “So does this mean we can date now?”

  She shot him a venomous look.

  “Hey, just asking.”

  “Put your chin on this rest.”

  Carl shrugged his shoulders and did as he was asked, placing his chin on the rest. Fiona wrapped a strap around the top of his head, securing it in place. As she began to refasten his wrists to the chair, Carl began to get a little nervous.

  “Say, Fiona, what is this neat little device anyway?”

  She stepped behind him and began to press buttons on a larger device that was hooked up to the apparatus that his head was currently tethered to.

  “I need to know what you know, what you’ve seen, what you’ve experienced. It may give me insight into how you actually communicate with the drones.”

  “That would be a neat trick.”

  “Actually, all I have to do is tap into your retinas and then follow the neural pathway to your brain from bottom level nodes up neural columns and into tertiary areas of your brain, interpreting the electrical impulse data using cortical learning algorithms.”

  Carl was quiet for a moment. “Okay, call me crazy, but that’s all a little above the realm of psychology, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not above the realm of human factor engineering, Carl.”

  Carl was fascinated and horrified all at once. “I didn’t even know technology like this existed.”

  “Well, let’s just say it’s borrowed technology.”

  “And you are telling me all of this because I am probably never leaving this facility, am I?”

  She didn’t answer him. When he became tense, she finally offered a response. “Such little faith, Carl. This information can help me protect you.”

  “So, what exactly are you doing now?”

  “Setting thresholds for spatial pooling. This helps me filter out all of the electrical noise from the more active nodes and columns.”

  “I have no idea what you just said, but I am very turned on right now.”

  “Okay, and we are ready. Carl, I want you to relax. That sensor right above your eye is going to read your retina and then feed the data into this other machine over here. It won’t hurt at all.”

  Carl suddenly remembered his time in the MRI when they first wanted to get a picture of his brain. That machine banged a lot. He wondered what this one would sound like. He was glad he was out in the open.

  She pressed a button and a bright light flooded his vision. The light was so bright that it gave him a headache. He heard the machine clicking and whirring behind him, processing and interpreting all of his sensory data.

  The bright light triggered the memory of the flash of the explosion at the mall. One moment he saw his mother standing there beyond the glass door waiting for him, and then with a flash of light she was gone, snuffed out in a hot second, erased from the earth. He remembered waking up, upside down in his father’s car, broken glass in his hair. Everything sounded like he was underwater. Then the sound began to rush back…

  After a brief but indeterminate amount of time, the light turned off. Consequently, his headache began to subside. “Well, you were right. That wasn’t so bad.”

  No response.

  “Fiona…”

  Something was wrong.

  “FIONA…”

  She began to unfasten the strap around his head. He sat back and squinted until his vision began to clear. “So, did you find what you were looking…for?”

  She looked like she’d just seen a ghost. She was pale and very startled.

  “What? What did you see?”

  She wouldn’t answer him. She was lost in some kind of private deliberation, as if she had no idea what she just saw.

  “Well, Carl, let’s just say that I think the brass will want to keep you around. That’s all I can say for now, okay?”

  He was getting the willies at her sudden change in demeanor. She was spooked, really spooked. “Okay.”

  “Carl…why did you broadcast out of the cave?”

  He wondered why she was asking this now. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Surely you knew you weren’t authorized to make that broadcast. Didn’t you think about the consequences?”

  He thought about this for a moment. Now that she mentioned it, he didn’t actually remember thinking it through. “It just felt like the right thing to do. Why do you ask?”

  “I ask because you should’ve been smarter than that. It just doesn’t add up.”

  “So, what now?”

  “No more testing for today,” she said with a haunted look.

  The two guards re-entered the room and dragged Carl back out into the corridor fully strapped to his chair. Fiona turned the equipment off and locked it with a security code. She then left and locked the room.

  She walked the other way down the corridor towards her new office. She disengaged the digi-lock with retinal and fingerprint scanning, and then rounded her desk. As she sat, the digi-locks re-engaged.

  This office wasn’t equipped with the therapeutic ambiance program, of which she was the author. It was a Spartan military office, bare bones and functional with no touch of comfort.

  She sat at her desk stunned by what she just witnessed. As the machine read his retina using the same technology as her therapeutic ambiance program and interpreted the images, the images flashed up on a screen.

  At first, they were normal. The barracks, base, and then Xcaret, Mexico. She saw everything that happened. Then the images got strange whenever he appeared to be communicating with the drones.

  Something began to flicker on the screen in between frames. She barely noticed it at first. She only felt an inexplicable feeling of being ill at ease. Then it began to increase in frequency. When she isolated the interstitial frames from the rest of the images, what she saw on the screen was horrifying.

  She picked up the phone.

  “Colonel Betancourt, Captain London reporting.”

  “How did the assessment go, Captain?”

  “The apparatus picked up on something, sir.”

  “Why wasn’t this picked up by the therapeutic ambiance program? It’s the same technology. We installed it to monitor the participants in the program for something like this.”

  “Sir, I don’t know why the therapeutic ambiance program didn’t detect it. All I can think of was that it was just a screening program. The assessment I conducted today was more thorough.”

  “Did you find the mechanism behind his ability to communicate with the infantry drones?”

  “Sir, I think I found the original author of
this technology.”

  “Original author? What do you mean?”

  “I have some concerns, sir. Perhaps our finding this technology wasn’t an accident.”

  “Of course it was, Captain. You aren’t suggesting that it was planted here purposely. There was a crash and wreckage.”

  “All I’m saying, sir, is that we have been using this technology to watch our men, but what if its author has also been using it to watch our men.”

  “Say no more. I want a copy of the data and video streaming on my desk ASAP. Am I clear, Captain?”

  “Yes, sir. And what about Captain Birdsall?”

  “Do you believe he is dangerous?”

  She took a moment to word her opinion carefully.

  “Not of his own accord, sir. He is psychologically stable. His physical and cognitive acumen has improved beyond normal limits, but there is no instability at the moment.”

  Betancourt was silent for a moment on the other end.

  “Let’s reinstate him into the program and see what he can do in training exercises, but I want him on a tight leash. Have an amygdala inhibitor installed into his brain, just like the ones in the drones. This way we have an off switch should we need one. We have the House Oversight Committee and the UN Security Council meetings coming up shortly, and if the Infantry Drone Program is shut down, we won’t have a chance to learn more about this connection you discovered.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll put through the paperwork. He will be demoted. His captain status was a field promotion based on the erroneous presumption that his brother was dead. Besides, I don’t want him to have that much power. He’s stable now, but we’re not sure for how much longer. We’ll promote his older brother to captain.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Betancourt terminated the phone call. Fiona sat at her desk and began to think about the ID Program, specifically about the undead drones. She remembered The Art of War. Sun Tzu mentioned something about rather than destroying your enemy’s soldiers, make them your own soldiers.

  The undead drones did both. They either ate you or turned you into one of them. Either way, the enemy would lose a war of attrition by design. What if this was the design of its original author? The Tutsi-Hutu Virus was found in the vicinity of the crash site.