by Rob Vlock
He took a few unhurried steps toward me.
I felt the grenade in my pocket pressing into my leg. I cautiously slipped it into my palm.
“You are too weak and slow, Seven,” he continued. “You have been programmed that way, yes? You have not the strength nor speed nor intelligence to hurt me. You are no better than the human vermin you live among. Weak. Vulnerable. Stupid. You are practically human, Seven. Too human.”
I sneered at him. “You know what? Being me is just fine, thank you very much.”
I wound up and threw the grenade.
It flew well over his head.
Dr. Shallix laughed. “You see? You are pathetic, yes?”
“No,” I said coldly.
The grenade sailed into the crane and hit the red lever. With a buzz of electricity, the electromagnet sprang to life.
Right above Dr. Shallix’s head.
His smile disappeared half a second before his body exploded.
There was practically nothing left. Except his head. It dangled upside down from the electromagnet, suspended by the silver cable that ran from his central processor.
“I knew I could throw to save my life,” I muttered.
His head looked at me.
And then it smiled.
“There is something I wish t-t-t-t-to ask you,” what was left of Dr. Shallix struggled to say, his system failing.
I grinned back at him. “Yeah, well, maybe I don’t feel like answering questions from a head on a string.”
“Have you ever w-w-w-w-wondered why you are named S-S-S-Seven?” he asked faintly.
I stopped smiling.
“A little something for y-y-y-you to ponder when you think of me, y-y-y-y-y-yes?”
He choked out two or three garbled laughs, then fell dead silent.
CHAPTER 42.0:
< value= [Ticktock] >
“UNNGH!”
Someone moaned.
It was Alicia. She struggled to her feet next to the crane. Her nose bled freely, and she winced when she rubbed the back of her head. But she still held her knife at the ready.
“Where is he?” she asked, totally ready to jump back into the fight.
“Alicia!” I cried. I took a few steps toward her, then stopped short as I felt the pull of the electromagnet.
She staggered over to me, battered but not beaten. “Where is he?”
I nodded toward what was left of Dr. Shallix.
“Good. He so deserved that,” she said. “What about . . . ?”
“Will!” I cried.
I ran over to the haphazard pile of wreckage. My stomach churned. Somewhere beneath those countless tons of scrap metal, Will lay buried. Dropping to my hands and knees, I searched for my best friend, frantically clawing at the dirt under the roof of an upside-down car. Sharp stones cut open my fingers, but I didn’t care. I had to find Will.
There was no sign of him under the crushed metal frame.
I turned grimly, unsure of where to look next. And there, several feet away, was a denim-clad leg sticking out from under a crumpled pickup truck.
I froze with horror. “Alicia! Help me! Over here!”
She hurried over as I grasped the pickup’s mangled rear bumper and strained to lift the vehicle. My entire body shook, muscles nearly bursting with exertion. I knew there was no way I could lift that much weight. But I didn’t care. Will was under there. And I had to get him out. I had to.
The pickup creaked and groaned. I grunted and groaned. Ever so slowly, the back of the truck rose off the ground. And there, beneath, lay Will, pale and motionless, his face and clothes streaked with rust and grime.
Alicia pulled him free, while I braced against the weight of the rusted metal.
Once they were clear, I let the junked pickup fall, stirring up a fresh cloud of dust.
Will looked terrible.
Alicia closed her hand around his. “Will, can you hear me?”
He moaned almost too quietly to hear.
I leaned in close. “What is it, Will?”
“I’m . . . ,” he gasped. “I’m . . .”
I pressed my forehead against his. “Dude, come on. You have to be okay. Please . . . I need you to be okay.”
“I’m . . .” He coughed. “I’m so freakin’ hungry I could eat one of your mom’s cakes!”
He smiled at me broadly and sat up.
“What?” Alicia and I cried in unison.
How was it possible he’d survived? I’d watched the cars tumble onto him.
Will dusted off his jeans and slung an arm over my shoulder. “I got lucky.” He nodded to where he had been lying—a depression in the ground just deep enough to keep him from getting squashed. “It was nice hearing how much you love me, though.”
I elbowed him in the ribs. “Watch it, dorkwad.”
“So, um, Sven,” Alicia said, her eyes wide with relief and astonishment. “You just lifted a car.”
“How . . . how did you do that?” Will asked in awe, compulsively wiping his grimy hands on his equally grimy jeans.
How did I do that? I gazed at my bloodied hands, then at the pickup truck. Dust was still settling around it. And then, as I looked at the faces of my friends, I knew.
“I was programmed to be human. But I guess being human means not sticking with the program, you know?”
Alicia laughed. “A paradox, huh? I thought you robot types had your heads explode when you thought about paradoxes. ‘Does not compute! Does not compute!’ Kaboom!”
“I don’t get it,” Will said. “How did that help you lift a two-ton pickup truck?”
I shrugged. “Something in my brain just snapped. I mean, I couldn’t just stand there and watch my best friend get buried alive. A Tick might do that. Not a human. I was programmed to be human by a Tick who didn’t understand what being human really means. So I guess whatever part of my programming told me I was supposed to be weak got overridden by the part of my programming that cares about the best friends a person could ever have.”
Alicia and Will were looking at me with these strange, mushy expressions that caused an uncomfortable, clogged-up feeling to well in my throat. And for a few moments, time stood still.
Until Alicia checked her phone.
“Oh, no!” she gasped. “It’s after ten! We have less than two hours!”
“To do what?” I asked, the joy of defeating Shallix evaporating as the hopelessness of our situation crushed me like a runaway freight train. “Sam is gone. We’re out of time. There’s nothing we can do.”
Will’s face fell. “What do you mean?”
“You can’t give up, Sven!” Alicia insisted, her eyes gleaming wetly in the cold fluorescent light. “There has to be something we can do!”
There was.
“You’re right,” I said. “There is something.”
I climbed into the cab of the crane and turned off the magnet. Dr. Shallix’s head fell to the ground with a moist thump. I took a deep breath, trying to shake off the fear that constricted my rib cage.
Then I stepped out and positioned myself under the magnet.
“Alicia,” I said in a hoarse whisper, nodding at the red lever. “Go ahead.”
“No,” she cried. “No. There has to be some other way!”
Will let out a long, mournful moan.
I tried to keep my voice from shaking. “Sam is gone and we’re out of time. We have to do this. I can’t wipe out the human race. I can’t hurt you two. Please.”
Alicia stared at me, her shoulders heaving with heavy sobs. “I . . . I . . . I’m sorry.”
She ran over to me and hugged me tight. Her tears felt hot and wet on my cheek. After a few seconds, she let me go and slumped slowly toward the crane.
Her shoes clanked on the metal steps as she climbed into the cab.
“Dude,” Will croaked. “Dude . . .”
Alicia placed her hand on the red lever.
CHAPTER 43.0:
< value= [I Get Inside My Head] >
MY
HEARTBEAT THUDDED LOUDLY IN my ears as I watched Alicia’s fingers tighten around the red lever.
I closed my eyes and waited for the end.
And then the sound of a rusty door creaking open echoed through the air.
I gazed across the compound to see Junkman Sam staggering out of the painting studio, looking a little singed, but otherwise okay.
“I think a clown broke my fall,” he told us.
Alicia let go of the lever and practically threw herself out of the crane. Two seconds later, she had grabbed Sam’s arm and was dragging him toward the door to the robotics studio. “There’s no more time! You need to help us. Now! Sven, Will, come on!”
We stepped through the door and descended into the gloom. Our footsteps clanged on the stairs. I had to swallow down a lump that was forming in my throat, unsure whether this staircase would lead to my salvation . . . or my doom.
When we reached the bottom, Junkman Sam flipped a light switch and bathed the bunker in cold fluorescence.
The studio bore almost no resemblance to the metal buildings on the surface. It was perfectly neat and orderly, with straight rows of high-tech equipment stretching the length of the structure. The dismembered metal skeletons of robots in various states of completion lay on top of worktables—an unwelcome reminder of what I was on the inside.
The room looked like it hadn’t been visited in a long time. A thin layer of dust blanketed every surface.
From the far end of the long bunker, slow, heavy footsteps echoed off the metal walls. I tensed, unsure of what was about to come into view. A short, squat robot lumbered out from behind a bank of equipment and took stiff, ungainly steps in our direction.
“Welcome back, Master,” it intoned mechanically. “I have been waiting for you for six hundred twelve days, fourteen hours, and fifty-seven minutes.”
Its head swiveled toward us with a whir. “Knock, knock.”
We looked at one another.
“Uh, who’s there?” Will said cautiously.
“Europe.”
“Europe who?”
“No, you’re a poo!” the robot replied in a monotone. Then it broke into canned laughter.
“Sorry,” Junkman Sam said. “That’s Jokebot. An old project of mine.” He stabbed at a button on the robot’s back, and the laughter wound down into silence.
Great. Our lives depended on a guy who spent his time building bad-joke-telling machines. We were doomed.
Sam peered around the place. “I hope I can find something that’ll help us.”
He led us down one aisle of machines and back up another, stopping in front of a desk that supported a big computer terminal. He blew the dust off it. Then he opened a drawer and searched through a tangled ball of cables.
None of this impressed me as a solution to the problem at hand—turning off the bioweapon that lurked inside me. I was about to say so, when Sam’s expression turned thoughtful.
“Sven, I have an idea. Assuming your programming is based on my work, you’re going to be pretty well protected from anyone trying to hack into your system,” he mused. “You’d be a pretty feeble killing machine if I could just send you a few lines of code that say go pick some flowers instead of destroying humanity, right? So what we have to do is sneak a bit of code into something your operating system thinks looks harmless on the outside.”
“You mean like a Trojan horse,” I said. “A virus that’s disguised as something that’s not a virus.”
“Exactly.” He nodded. “All we need to do is use a neural feedback loop that will allow your conscious mind to interact with your defense network.”
“Um . . . that doesn’t sound so bad,” I ventured.
“Oh, it is,” he said with a smile that I thought was totally unnecessary. “If you do it wrong . . . well, let’s just say I hope you haven’t grown too attached to being able to do things like talk and see and move and whatnot.”
“Oh,” I said uncertainly. “Okay, so how do I do it right?”
He shrugged. “Beats me. I’ve never projected my consciousness into an artificial brain before. I can definitely get you inside your head. And once you’re in, I think I can send you some code that might work to shut down your sneeze routine. But the rest is up to you. By the way, do you take a forty-two-pin connector or a fifty-six-pin connector?”
Alicia answered for me. “He’s an Omicron, so fifty-six, I’d guess.”
“Excellent,” Junkman Sam said with a smile. “And where do we plug in?”
I could feel certain muscles below my waist tensing up involuntarily. “Wait! You don’t know?”
He looked at me with a puzzled expression. “How would I?”
“So this is just going to be trial and error or something?” I cried.
“It goes right here.” Alicia tapped the back of my neck. “There should be an interface right about here. At least that’s where they always are in the stories my parents used to tell me.”
Will slapped me on the back. “Dude, relax. I’m sure it’s not going to hurt or anything. Right, Alicia?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Right?” Will asked again.
Silence.
Finally, Junkman Sam spoke. “Actually, I suspect it will hurt quite severely.”
“Can’t you give me something for the pain?” I pleaded.
Alicia shook her head sadly. “Sven, your nervous system isn’t human. Anesthetics won’t work on you.”
“Great.” I took a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s get it over with.”
“Right,” Junkman Sam said nervously. “So, well, I guess, uh, just hold still or something.”
Gee, thanks for the reassurance, Junkman.
When someone starts carving up the back of your neck with no anesthesia, it’s not easy to sit still. Will and Alicia each had to hold one of my arms to keep me in place as Sam made an incision and pulled back the skin. The pain was so intense, I was sure I was going to pass out.
“The incision wants to close itself up to keep us from accessing the port,” Junkman Sam complained as he made another slice with his scalpel. “He’s healing as we go.”
“Try a couple of magnets. Small ones,” Alicia suggested.
Junkman Sam rummaged around in a nearby desk drawer and fished something out. “I have these,” he said, holding up a pair of souvenir refrigerator magnets. Got them when I visited the Grand Canyon last year. Will they work?”
“Hey,” Will said. “My mom got that same magnet when she went to Arizona for a sales conference. It’s on our fridge!”
“Will!” I grunted.
“Sorry.”
Once Junkman Sam had placed the magnets to keep the incision open, he connected the cable and—
ERROR X:
RRRRRRRRRRRRRR
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
CHAPTER 44.0:
< value= [I Find Inner Peace] >
EVERYTHING WENT BLACK. I WAS nowhere. Which is kind of depressing when you realize you’re talking about your own mind.
I squinted through the blackness and could just make out a light far ahead in the distance. I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to be doing, so I began walking toward the light.
As I approached, a scene started taking shape. Details resolved themselves before my eyes. I saw a big walkthrough metal detector, a conveyor belt feeding luggage through an X-ray machine, and a guard wearing an official-looking uniform with a large weapon of some sort holstered at his waist. He glowered at a line of travelers who waited impatiently to get through.
How weird. An airport security checkpoint.
When I got close enough to the guard to make out his features
, my stomach lurched—he looked exactly like me! And, I realized with a shock, so did every one of the people in the line. It was like a whole airport full of me!
I fell in with the others to wait my turn.
A voice—mine—came over a loudspeaker and echoed through the space. “Welcome to Seven Omicron Inter-Hemispheric Brainport. Please report any suspicious activity. Remember: If you see something, say something. Sneeze routine deployment in t-minus twelve minutes.”
My feet suddenly went cold. Twelve minutes? How could I only have twelve minutes? It felt like I had just gotten here! Time, I realized, must work differently in my head.
Whatever I had to do, I only had twelve minutes to do it!
Every few seconds, the security guard barked out, “Have your boarding pass ready for inspection.”
The versions of me lined up to get through the metal detector each handed the guard a boarding pass, then marched through the machine.
Until a disturbance halted the line.
“Next traveler! Boarding pass!” the guard yelled.
“Sorry,” the next traveler said, patting his pockets. “I don’t have my boarding pass.”
The guard drew his weapon, and without ceremony, blasted the traveler into a blue mist. I had to stifle a terrified whimper, but no one else in the line took any notice. It was as if this sort of thing happened all the time.
“You!” the guard growled. “Boarding pass.”
His eyes were trained on me. Oh, no. I may have only been a projection of myself inside my own mind, but my palms started to feel sweaty anyway. What was I going to tell him? I didn’t have a boarding pass. And I had no idea where to get one.
“Um, yes, hold on a second,” I said nervously. “I’m sure I have it around here somewhere.”
The only thing I was actually sure of was that I didn’t have a boarding pass. I made a show of checking my pockets for it anyway. All I found there was a rectangular pink rubber eraser. Which did me no good whatsoever.
I had to buy myself some time.
“Hurry up,” the guard shouted. “You’re holding up the line!”
He placed a hand on his weapon.
“Just a moment,” I gulped. “I definitely have one. . . . I just can’t . . .”
