To Obey

by Mickey Zucker Reichert

“I’m in,” Kendall said wholeheartedly.

  Jake took longer. “For the moment, I’m with you,” he promised. “But if it comes down to choosing between our lives and the information, I reserve the right to change my mind.”

  Susan said the only thing she could. “That’s all I can ask for.”

  Chapter 21

  Nate met Susan, Kendall, and Jake at the door, waving the bone- and emotion-weary travelers into the now-familiar stuffy foyer of United States Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. No one sat behind the single, semicircular desk that filled the foyer, mostly obscured by a computer console, enormous by current standards.

  Once everyone had stepped inside, Nate pulled the door shut, obsessively checking to make sure it fully closed and latched before turning far enough for Susan to hurl herself into his arms. “It’s so good to see you.”

  Nate clasped Susan firmly and with evident affection. Though more powerfully built than John Calvin, he stood the same 6′8″. Susan melted into his arms, closing her eyes, breathing in the detergent fragrance of his shirt. For a moment, she managed to lose track of time, imagining herself nestled in the strong, loving embrace of the father she would never see again.

  Lawrence stepped out of his office, dressed in casual attire, uncharacteristically disheveled. “Nate, escort them in here, please.”

  Unceremoniously torn from her fantasy, Susan released Nate and allowed him to perform his duty, and he gestured for the three of them to enter. As Jake walked through the door, Lawrence seized his hand and pumped vigorously. “Good to see you again, Jake. Thanks for keeping our Susan safe, for everything you’ve done to help her and us. We’ll never be able to repay you.”

  “Just a civil servant doing my job,” Jake said wearily, waving off Lawrence’s gratitude and dropping to a crouch in the farthest corner of the room, which put his back to both walls. “Don’t even try. I’d have to charge you with bribery.”

  Kendall entered more hesitantly, and Jake waved him over. “While those three talk shop, I’ll fill you in on the details.” He added, “And let me top off your mag.”

  “English,” Kendall reminded, trotting to Jake’s side.

  Jake tried again. “I need you to hand me back the pistol I gave you so I can replace the cartridge you used and bring the gun back up to a full eleven shots, including the one in the chamber.”

  Kendall moaned. “Didn’t I do enough damage with one? You want to give me the chance to make eleven fatal mistakes?”

  “Just give me the damned gun, Kendall.”

  Susan made the necessary introductions. “Dr. Lawrence Robertson, CEO and founder of U.S. Robots and creator of the positronic brain, you know Detective Jake Carson. The guy beside him is Dr. Kendall Stevens, a fellow psychiatry resident.” She added, “He’s the one who safely took down Cary English.” She knew the information would create an instant bond of trust; Cary English had been one of the nanorobot patients hijacked by the SFH.

  Kendall looked up and executed a stiff salute in Lawrence’s direction.

  Susan continued, “Kendall, you and Nate have met.” She considered how best to acquaint the robot and detective, then decided not to play games. “Jake, Nate’s a positronic robot.”

  Jake pulled the magazine from his gun, popped out a cartridge, and stuffed it into the magazine of Kendall’s smaller pistol. He slammed the backup’s magazine, now full, back in place. “Yeah, I know,” he said distractedly.

  “You do?” That put Susan off her guard. “How did you know?”

  Jake handed the handgun back to Kendall, who took it reluctantly and held it tentatively, as if afraid it might bite him. “Not by looking at him, that’s for sure.” Jake switched his partially used magazine with a fresh one from his belt, slammed the new one home, pressed the slide back, grunted his approval, then holstered his own gun. “I do my homework, Susan. Unlike John Calvin’s, N8-C’s existence is not a well-guarded secret.”

  Lawrence took his usual seat behind the mahogany desk covered with a mixture of several palm-prosses, a couple of digital frames, a combo printer, a bunch of bound hard copies, and masses of loose paper, most of which contained circuitry maps. This time Susan also noted a few port keys mixed in with a larger number of loose computational chips. There were two other chairs, matching foldables, in the room. Susan and Nate each took one, scooting it up to the far side of Lawrence’s desk.

  Lawrence called out, “Jake, Kendall, I can pull in some more chairs, if you’d like.”

  In a tight crouch, Jake made a dismissive gesture. “We’re good.” He turned his attention back to Kendall, who sat cross-legged beside him.

  Susan got right to the point. “Dad left this for me in a concealed location.” She pulled the port key from her pocket and laid it gently on the desk. It was not fragile. People used to carry them amid their loose change, and Susan had seen students hurl them across the room to one another. Nevertheless, she felt safer babying it.

  Lawrence knew exactly what it was. “Smart port key, no doubt. Have you tried to connect it yet?”

  “No.”

  Lawrence studied her face a moment. “Do you…want to?”

  Susan realized she did not. It seemed safer just to destroy the port key now, to ensure no one ever gained access to the code, but she knew they might need it to barter for their lives. She could choose to sacrifice her own; she had no right to take the others with her. Her reply did not reveal her inner turmoil. “We have to, Lawrence.” Worried she might lose her nerve, she jammed it into the port of her Vox. Immediately, a green light appeared on the plugged-in side.

  Susan removed her Vox and handed it to Lawrence. “Now plug it into one of those myriad palm-prosses you’re collecting.”

  Chuckling, Lawrence took the Vox. “Yeah, I do have a bit of a collection, don’t I?” Picking one apparently at random, he jabbed the opposite end of the port key into it. Immediately, a red light flashed on opposite the green one. Lawrence pulled the Vox and port key away from the palm-pross. “Ah, an SPPK. Doesn’t surprise me.”

  Susan glanced over at Kendall and Jake. They seemed enmeshed in discussion. “What’s an SPPK?”

  Nate responded first. “Selective programmable port key. You can still use it as a standard port key, but it won’t give up its contents unless you link the original systems together.”

  Lawrence clarified, “The exact two systems connected at the time the data was created.”

  Susan nodded. Jake had already explained it in the car. “Which are?”

  Lawrence dropped Susan’s Vox and his palm-pross to the desktop, then leaned back in his chair. “The green light indicates you’ve solved half the problem. Your Vox. The question becomes: When did John Calvin have access to your Vox, and to what did he have it connected at the time he programmed this port key?”

  Susan thought back; shook her head. “He’s my father. He bought me my first Vox, and every subsequent one, for that matter. Anytime it requires fixing or replacing, he handles it. If he wanted to, he could have slipped it off my arm while I slept and taken it anywhere. Even if I noticed, I wouldn’t worry about my father’s presence in my room, even at night.”

  “Which suggests,” Nate offered thoughtfully, “he programmed it at home. His Vox to yours. Most likely in the hours before he was killed but after we received word the SFH linked Calvin Campbell to John Calvin, that the man they believed they had successfully assassinated was still alive.”

  Susan gave that considerable thought. Clearly, the time between the SFH figuring out the connection, the leak to USR, and the murder was small. Otherwise, it made no sense that a man who had functioned under the radar for two decades suddenly caught the attention of two groups of killers at the exact same time. Susan realized Cadmium had probably followed the same leak as USR; perhaps they were even the ones who warned Lawrence, hoping to keep John Calvin alive long enough to question him.

  That did suggest only a tiny window of opportunity for leaving messages for loved ones. Susan’s he
art sank. “If that’s so, then all is lost. The feds tore our place apart. They took everything capable of holding data, and demolished anything remaining.” She shivered, recalling her third venture into the apartment. “Twice.”

  Lawrence pounced on the word. “Twice?”

  “Twice,” Susan confirmed. “They searched it once, then returned a couple of days later to repeat the job even more thoroughly. They even chopped into the walls. Other than the refrigerator, there’s not an object, appliance, or scrap of furniture not reduced to siftable rubble.”

  Nate and Lawrence exchanged looks.

  “Which means they didn’t find what they were looking for,” Lawrence said.

  Susan discarded the point. “Obviously. Because what they were looking for was the code. And my father told them I had the code, so when they didn’t find it, they came for me.”

  Nate’s brows slid downward, and he spoke in the slow cadence of concentration. “You know…just because the SFH hadn’t penetrated his cover doesn’t mean John didn’t prepare for the eventuality.”

  Susan supposed her expression closely resembled Nate’s for several moments as she puzzled through his point. “Are you saying Dad might have created the port key in anticipation?” She picked up her Vox with the port key still attached, the light still glowing green. “That he might have fashioned it years ago, perhaps updating it as we changed personal technology?”

  “Why not?”

  Why not, indeed? “But his Vox and his palm-pross are gone.” She turned to Lawrence with a hopeful look. “Unless they were still on his body when he went to the morgue. He was already taken away by the time the police allowed me on the scene.”

  Lawrence shook his head. “No Vox or palm-pross, at least by the time I got to the body. I can’t believe Cadmium wouldn’t have taken them. They’re the most likely places to find any kind of data.”

  “Oooh.” Susan had spent too much of the past few days worried about her life and her job to think about the effects on U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. “Do you think they got any significant information? Anything that might compromise the positronic brain? The company?”

  Lawrence drew himself up, looking affronted. “Of course not. I trusted John Calvin as fully as the man he replaced. He would never have stored classified information on a private system. His work palm-pross is safely locked in his…” The realization of what he was saying struck Susan and Lawrence simultaneously. Both leapt to their feet. “…desk drawer.”

  Lawrence headed back into the foyer, Susan at his heels. She remembered from the time she and Remington had visited USR that the foyer had five doors, one of which led to Lawrence’s office and another to a laboratory. Lawrence stopped in front of the door closest to his office. He ran his thumb across the scanner. “This is a shared office.” He pushed open the door to reveal four desks, one in each corner of the room. Every one contained an assortment of bric-a-brac similar to Lawrence’s desk, though none had even a single palm-pross. Cubicle partitions divided the left rear one from the others, probably Alfred’s, but the rest of the room was wide open.

  Lawrence walked to one of the nearer desks, ran a thumb over a drawer lock, and grabbed the handle. “They’re keyed to individual owners, but they’re also all set to my prints. That way, if someone can’t make it to work, their data isn’t completely inaccessible.” As he pulled open the drawer, he deliberately shut his eyes. Susan suspected that he worried he might find it empty.

  She, on the other hand, could not look away. Though the drawer slid open easily, it seemed like ten minutes ticked past before Susan found herself staring at an ordinary palm-pross. She grabbed it before Lawrence could move, placed it lightly on the table, and jammed the port key into place.

  The confirmatory green light came on instantly. Oh, thank God! Both screens flickered, then an identical wash of indecipherable numbers, mostly zeroes, interspersed with a handful of letters and symbols filled them.

  Lawrence sucked in a noisy breath, then let it out in a loud and filthy curse. Susan just stared at the screen, waiting for something comprehensible to materialize. She removed the port key from both portals, then cautiously replaced it, this time starting with the palm-pross. The same wild wash of characters appeared.

  Drawn by Lawrence’s exclamation, Nate peered over Susan’s shoulder. “Can you make sense of that?” she asked Lawrence. “Is it some kind of thing you can insert into circuitry?”

  “The technical term is machine language. Used to be the next step up from hardware, before microcode, then picocode, processing became the norm. Before my time.” Lawrence pounded his palm. “If I remember from my early programming classes, it’s hex based.”

  Most of what Lawrence just said went over Susan’s head. She referred him to their earlier conversation with Jake, when Lawrence had stated, “Ask ninety percent of people how a Vox works, and you’d get an evasive answer. The honest ones would admit they think it’s magic.” “You’ve triggered my ‘technology is magic’ quotient,” she admitted. “Just tell me what we can do with this.”

  “That’s just it.” Lawrence clamped his hand to his head. “It would take an octogenarian programmer to begin to decipher this.”

  “Or a machine,” Nate pointed out. “I’ve read that in its day, machine language was almost impossible for humans to comprehend, but computers used it exclusively. They couldn’t function without it. The programmers used what they called assembly or high-level languages, such as Fortran and Pascal, and compilers translated it for—”

  Lawrence’s mouth fell open, then snapped shut. He whirled on Nate. “You can read this, can’t you?”

  Nate smiled. “Think of me as a fancy computer with thoughts and emotions.”

  “Never,” Susan said, then changed her tune. “So, what does it say?”

  Nate’s grin wilted. “It doesn’t work like that. It’s not like a foreign language I can translate one-to-one into words. It’s…” He shook his head in clear frustration. “If I could explain it, you wouldn’t need my help. Get me a hard copy, a pen, and ten minutes to myself. I should be able to convert it into something useful to you.”

  Susan immediately hit the print screen shortcut.

  Lawrence scooped up the palm-pross, still attached to Susan’s Vox. “That’ll print in my office.” He headed back the way they had come, Susan and Nate trailing. They returned to find Jake and Kendall huddled in quiet conversation, the enormous printer spitting out several pages of number scrawl.

  Nate grabbed the pages, dropped into Lawrence’s chair as if he owned it, and set to work. “This is the exact same machine code John and I used to use to communicate privately.”

  Lawrence took the empty folding chair without missing a beat.

  Nate’s words seized Susan’s attention, though. “What?”

  “It started out as a game, a puzzle that required some extensive research into the history of computing. At the time, I didn’t know John had a positronic brain, too. I thought he was testing me or helping me pass the time when I got consigned to menial jobs at the hospital.” Nate tapped the back of the pen against his teeth. “It was our secret, like a boys’ club, for want of a better description.”

  Secret. Susan processed that word. Clearly, John Calvin had intended, even required, Nate and her to figure out the riddle of the port key together. At the least, it required her Vox and Nate’s experience. Even as he had lamented the time she dedicated to Nate, John Calvin had had the good sense to take advantage of it. If she added the need for his locked-up palm-pross to the mix, Susan realized he might have deliberately included Lawrence, too.

  Lawrence seemed to be thinking along similar lines. “Good way to prevent anyone from hijacking the information.” He paused, then added, “Unless, of course, they had an elderly engineer who used to program in Fortran.”

  “That would only obviate Nate,” Susan pointed out. “They’d still need my Vox and your thumbprint.”

  Nate paused his writing again. �
�Fortran, Three-tran, Two-tran—wouldn’t matter. Machine language isn’t a singular entity; it varies between individual CPUs. It took John and me a long time to develop this particular form of machine language.” He made another notation. “Lacking my specific history, even a positronic robot would have trouble with this.”

  Lawrence examined his creation, and Susan wondered if Nate had grown in ways even he did not foresee. “How long have the two of you been working on this specialized machine code?”

  “At least a decade.” Nate slurred his words a bit, clearly dedicating most of his thought processes to the paper task.

  That corroborated the probability John had done at least some preparation long before the SFH discovered his connection to Calvin.

  “Got it!” Nate announced suddenly. He looked over his handiwork and frowned. “At least, I thought I had it. The machine language made more sense to me than this.”

  “Let me see.” Susan reached out a hand, and Nate passed along the last page. He had consolidated the end result on the back:

  JQJRY, FMX FMSXX VRKJ RSX ASSXBXSJAGVL AYFSAYJAI FZ FMX WZJAFSZYAI GSRAY. FMXSX AJ YZF RYT MRJ YXBXS GXXY R IZTX FZ QYIZQWVX FMXD. DL VZBX NZS LZQ MRJ RVKRLJ GXXY RJ IVXRS RYT WQSX RJ RYL NRFMXS IZQVT MRBX NJS MAJ TRQCMFXS. YXBXS NZSCXF LZQ KXSX DL XBXSLFMAYC.

  Susan studied it a moment in consternation, then started to laugh.

  Lawrence also examined the paper. “What’s so funny, Susan? It still doesn’t make a lick of sense.”

  “Yes it does,” Susan said, reaching for Nate’s pen. “Or it will in about fifteen minutes.” She explained, “It’s a code within a code, but this one’s a simple substitution.” Susan remembered winter nights in front of the fire, working the daily Vox-news cryptogram. “It wouldn’t trip up the feds, of course; that’s what the machine language was for.”

  Lawrence took the paper in order to study the letters more closely. “If someone did manage to work out the machine code, or got Nate to do it for them, they might see this and think they must have made a mistake.”