by J. S. Morin
Inhale…
The floor jolted beneath her buttocks. An earth-shattering boom accompanied it. The door to her cell opened, and Gemini’s eyes flew wide.
What the bloody hell had just happened?
She had been trying to block from her mind the horrific implications of Dale2 landing troops in Kanto. Her cell had force-fed her the broadcast. Even covering her ears, the booming audio had found its way to her brain.
“I won’t go quietly,” Gemini warned, backing against the window overlooking the South China Sea. If she could crack that nigh-unbreakable glass and survive a four-kilometer dive into the ocean, she could have considered it.
The Version 34.2 chassis that swept into the room was female. Beyond that, without an onboard computer one robot looked like the next. Minuscule differences passed unnoticed by frail human vision.
Her visitor cornered Gemini and hauled her toward the door by the arm. “We haven’t got much time. I’m Mary98. I’m working with Charlie7.”
Gemini stumbled along, struggling to keep her balance. “Scant comfort, that. What’s that miserable old relic want with springing me?”
“Dale2 is bound to send someone to clean up one of his messes,” Mary98 said, towing Gemini in the direction of the hangar bay.
“You mean me,” Gemini said.
“Yes.” Without warning, she yanked Gemini into a side corridor and whipped a coil pistol from inside her jacket. The floor was already tilting beneath their feet. This hover-ship wasn’t long for the skies, it seemed.
“Where are the guards?” Gemini asked.
“Shut up!”
Footsteps approached from the next corridor. Gemini couldn’t see around the corner to confirm her suspicion that it was one of the prison workers, but the gait was unhurried.
Mary98 stood, gripping Gemini’s arm with one hand and holding her out of the way. The other held the coil pistol ready in ambush just around the corner of the intersection.
Gemini took the moment she’d been given to peek inside the robot’s open jacket. Tucked into the inside pocket was an impact syringe. There was no earthly use for one of those against a robot unless the tip had been replaced with a high-speed drill and the reservoir filled with a corrosive agent.
The presence of the coil pistol and Mary98’s reaction told Gemini all she needed to know about whether her rescuer was worried about dealing with robots.
Tugging Gemini behind her, Mary98 rounded the corner and fired. Gemini heard the clatter before she came within view of the robot who fell.
It was Cindy117.
There was a neat hole in the robot’s forehead and a ragged one in the back of the cranium. Shattered crystal crunched underfoot as Mary98 dragged her past the corpse.
“This would be faster without the both of us stumbling along like penguins,” Gemini griped, tugging free of Mary98 and following along willingly.
“You’re on board, then?” Mary98 asked. “Fine.” She quickened her pace, and Gemini matched it.
This was no time to let on. If Cindy117 was working for Dale2, Gemini would eat her own socks. Maybe—just maybe—Cindy117 had been replaced by an impostor. But Gemini was more than willing to risk collateral murder if it meant getting her freedom.
Grimacing, Gemini rubbed the spot on her arm where Mary98 had grabbed her.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m fine. Just get me off this bloody death trap before that maniac finds me.”
Gemini kept up her run in Mary98’s wake with a litany of quiet grunts and winces as she continued to massage feeling back into her arm.
“Quit bellyaching,” Mary98 ordered. “I didn’t hurt you.”
“Who’s complaining?” Gemini asked. “Not me.”
But the off-the-cuff comment was telling. Gemini had never heard of a Mary using a term like “bellyaching.” Unless she missed her guess, it was either a Jocelyn or perhaps a Janet in that chassis.
At Mary98’s skyroamer, Gemini circled around and climbed in on the passenger’s side, hugging her supposedly injured arm against her body and using the other to steady the short climb.
Mary98 hopped into the pilot’s seat and tucked her pistol away. The hangar was open, and the refreshing rush of outside wind died away as the canopy closed them in.
Gemini pulled half the safety harness across in front of her, then tried with her off hand to grab the straps on her far side. It was awkward, and she gritted her teeth against the alleged pain. “Little help here.”
With a sigh, Mary98 reached across to the far side of the cockpit, leaning across Gemini to corral the other half of her safety restraints. “Really, you’re being a baby. I’d have felt it if I—”
A coil pistol cut the sentence short. Gemini had drawn the weapon with her supposedly incapacitated arm and fired it up through Mary98’s chin.
Struggling for the canopy controls as the robot collapsed atop her, Gemini waited and heaved the chassis over the side.
She kept the coil gun.
Shimmying over to the pilot’s seat, Gemini retracted the canopy once more and powered up the engines.
As she rocketed out of the prison ship’s hangar, a whistling keened from the canopy where a coil gun slug had punched a thumb-sized hole. The annoyance was a small price to pay.
Gemini had no idea where she was going, who she could trust, or what her next move would be. For now, she set a course north and slumped back to let her heartbeat slow.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Betty-Lou left a trail of ionized water in her wake as she sped along like one of those WWII era submarines, floating up on unsuspecting enemy forces. Plato’s hands were steady on the steering yoke as he navigated the North Pacific waters east of Kanto. It was slower going than hitting the factory from the air, but this wasn’t the time for kamikaze tactics.
The map overlay showed Plato’s location relative to land, but he still had to watch out for underwater obstructions. Somewhere there was probably an undersea survey he could cross-reference with the nav computer, but that would have required more access to the planetary archive than a guy on a secret mission should probably manage.
Even replying to Charlie7 on a scrambled Social ID was probably pushing his luck.
Plato pulled out his pocket computer and brought up a smiling image of Eve. It was the same face everyone made in old pictures—painted on, dutiful. There was never time to pull out an image capture device and grab a still while she was genuinely smiling.
With a swipe of one meaty finger, Plato switched to a picture of Abbigail from a few weeks back. He had to keep getting fresh images since the little sprout was growing centimeters by the day.
Well, maybe not, but it seemed like the kid never looked the same from morning to night of a single day.
Abbigail’s smile was the same as her mom’s except with a missing baby tooth and chipmunk cheeks. Give her ten years and he’d hardly be able to tell them apart.
“Promise you, I’ll get your sister out of there safe,” Plato said.
Eve’s whole family tree was more like a lawn. A dozen versions of her were out there now, walking around with identical genetic codes. Abbigail’s little cluster of cells had been rescued from Evelyn11’s lab. Had those horrid experiments continued, they’d have been sisters to one another. The mother-daughter relationship had blossomed out of a separation of years and official adoption.
But there was no heredity at work.
Whether Rachel was Abbigail’s aunt or her sister didn’t matter. There was a weird bond at work that Plato couldn’t wrap his head around. All he knew was Rachel needed him and both his wife and daughter were counting on him to be the hero he was designed to be.
Betty-Lou approached landfall, and Plato angled for the surface. Kanto was huge, labyrinthine, and guarded by an unknown number of assailants. Plato knew where he was going. Anyone who got in his way was going to regret it. And if some of the touchy-feely privacy robots wanted to slap him around afterward, they were going to hav
e to pry his EMP rifle from his cold, dead hands.
Water cascaded from Betty-Lou’s hull as she emerged from the waves. Plato brought the skyroamer inside through one of the desalinization intakes that supplied water to the factory. He parked on an access overlook and popped the canopy.
“Time to make some robots wish they’d left well enough alone,” Plato grumbled, tearing the wrapper off a protein bar and stuffing it into his mouth whole.
He’d memorized a good chunk of the map he’d need on the trip over. There had been a temptation to spend the flight and submarine portions of the journey getting pumped up for the conflict, but somehow he just couldn’t get into any action movies. After three attempts, Plato had just studied.
Something about family being in danger focused a wandering mind.
The first maintenance hatch he came to, Plato kicked the door in. Very little in Kanto was built with security in mind, and until he needed to, Plato was planning to avoid any areas that warranted special surveillance. It might add hours to his rescue mission, but getting to Rachel without drawing hostile forces was more important than getting to her quick.
The “out” was the trick of any rescue, after all.
So much of the factory was in refurbishment. So much lay idle. Robotkind had too much bleeding time on their hands and too many resources. Efficiency hardly played into their thought process anymore. Whenever they needed new production lines, they built them custom rather than reusing. It hadn’t been until humans started studying the archives and reminding robots of the lessons of the distant past that they’d started cleaning up old portions of the grand factory instead of keeping them in permanent disrepair.
“Not exactly monument quality,” Plato remarked to no one in particular as he made out the shape of a crystal matrix production cell that looked like it hadn’t been used in centuries. Cleaner drones kept the machinery from corroding too badly, but it still looked decrepit. “Weird that they’d get weepy about overhauling the spot their brains got made.”
If Plato had been in their place, he’d have wanted this production line melted down and turned into cupcake tins. The closest analog for him was the lab where Charlie24 had grown him, and Plato had burned that place to the ground.
Wending his way through the factory, Plato was glad of a young child to chase around and the cybernetic joints that alleviated the worst of his arthritis. Jaunts like this used to be hell. Bone grinding against bone. Stiffening up if he kept still too long. There was no winning against a body that was breaking down from fundamental flaws.
He tried to keep that gratitude in mind. Not every robot he encountered would be working for this Dale2 clown. Some might be innocent bystanders, here for meetings or overhauls. He might recognize a worker or two—certainly Jason90 or Charlie13 if he ran into them.
Anyone else was liable to get an EMP blast to the cranium before Plato had a chance to find out.
Pausing to reorient with his computerized map, Plato pulled out another protein bar and stuffed it in his mouth. He nodded along, relieved to see that he was still on course and that his recollections had been accurate thus far.
Dropping the wrapper for some cleaning drone to pick up later, he continued deeper into the factory.
If he ran into any cleaning drones before he was safely on track to the exit with Rachel, it was going to be time to build a new cleaning drone. The EMP rifle’s grip was worn in the shape of Plato’s hand. It was an old friend and a reliable comrade in battle.
Until Rachel was safe, robots weren’t safe from Plato.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Eve had been studying the equipment. The robots had developed preservative techniques that could keep metals from corroding for hundreds of years. But by Charlie7’s word, these should have been older than that and pre-dated those techniques.
“Come on,” Charlie7 called out, pulling Eve from her musings. “This isn’t the end of the line.”
“Where are we going now?”
Eve hated mysteries. Puzzles were a challenge for the mind. Mysteries were the trappings of a puzzle wrapped around a secret. Charlie7 could end this mystery any time he liked, but he had to put on his show first. Tell his story. Make his pitch. Sort the charges from Dale2’s broadcast into neat piles to refute them.
She didn’t doubt for a second that Charlie7 could refute that soliloquy word for word. What she couldn’t be certain of was that any of it would be the truth. Charlie7 had lied to thousands of robots for a thousand years. That made him a million times the liar Eve could ever be.
The tram’s power cell hummed to life, and it lifted from the floor. Charlie7 climbed aboard and waited. “Context. We’re heading for that context I promised you.”
“That was supposed to be a metaphor,” Eve replied with a scowl as she climbed aboard the tram and took a seat opposite Charlie7.
As a door set into the wall groaned open, Charlie7 started the tram and navigated through. It was one of four such doorways out of the factory. Eve knew better than to bother asking where the others went—probably to other nebulous concepts.
“I swear to you,” Charlie7 said. “This is going to be worth the wait.”
“I’m not looking for a tour of Invasion Era historical sites,” Eve retorted. She sat back and crossed her arms, intrigued despite her annoyance. “I want to know why Dale2 thinks he can conquer the world.”
Charlie7 ran a hand over his cranium. “Probably because he came close once before…”
Chapter Thirty-Four
I’ve studied a lot of wars. The Human Era was chock-full of them. This one was unique. It wasn’t carried out in glorious marches, fought with daggers and poison in the shadows, or hinted at and glared across the globe from behind nuclear arsenals.
It started with meetings.
Holly2 was the first Toby2 and I activated. She knew the code for the upload process as well as I did. If anything were to happen to me, she was the most likely to get the upload process going again—though personally I’d have bet my life that Toby could have managed it.
After that, the three of us agreed that Jason was the next most useful from the project. Thus, Jason2 joined the fold.
That was the last time anyone agreed on anything though.
Jason2 wanted to bring in Kabir.
Hold your horses. Let me explain. Kabir Singh was Dale Chalmers’s lapdog. He was a project liaison, explaining the big words to Dale and translating press-release gibberish into actionable goals for the team in the lab.
I’m not going to question Kabir’s technical chops. He earned his way onto the team fair and square and just happened to draw the short straw to get stuck dealing with Dale for a living. His degree was in electrical engineering, which I had no qualms with.
Personally, I would have brought in Brent or James next, because the way I saw it, we were going to be doing a lot of weapons design. It was a war, after all.
But Jason2 and Holly2 pointed out that Kabir was the only one who’d served in the military. He’d done a tour in the Air Force as part of earning his citizenship. None of the rest of us had any formal training of any sort.
My argument that James McCovey had been an avid hunter fell on deaf ears. Deer didn’t fight back, plan, or counterattack. We had to assume these aliens would.
I tried to stalemate the vote, but Toby2 abstained. I guess, without the benefit of hindsight, I couldn’t have blamed him at the time.
But it was all too predictable that once we had Kabir2, the last spot on the roster was going to Dale.
We had all the technical expertise we needed, they argued. I have to confess, flattery might have carried the day at forestalling my objections. With me, Jason2, and Kabir2 working on the hardware side and me and Holly2 developing software, I felt like maybe they were right.
So, we activated a manager, Dale2.
“And after that, you started fighting back? Eve asked.
What’s that? No. We didn’t charge out of our little ramshackle lair and
start blowing up alien colony ships like some stupid Hollywood film. Do you want to tell this story?
“No. Go on,” Eve replied.
Good. Then here’s what we actually did; we began to experiment.
Humanity was done for. The lack of fresh broadcasts made that clear enough. What I’d seen with my own robotic eyes of alien ships boring holes into underground bunkers to gas out the inhabitants was enough to convince me of their thoroughness.
But we were alive, weren’t we? The six of us were merely mechanical life instead of biological.
The aliens, like I said, had a blind spot.
Maybe the bastards could have EMP’ed the whole planet and started from a clean slate. If they could, maybe they should have. Instead, they started playing house as soon as the planet was cleansed.
It took years to pick apart their quirks and idiosyncrasies. They were amphibious creatures but preferred the water. Their sensors could detect life forms but not power sources below the scale of a regional generator.
They shot down flying drones we built and automated. What they thought of the tiny toy crafts, we never learned. But they never put much effort into finding us. We were an anomaly, a bit of static on their radio station. Nothing more.
Eventually, two facts came to light. One was galling in a way; the other was an epiphany.
Firstly, we hadn’t been invaded by a military force. It took time and the most painstakingly careful observation—always by remote—but we inventoried all the alien assets and discovered them to be entirely colonial. There was some guesswork involved, but they had conquered Earth with the equivalent of a couple mining lasers, some asteroid defense cannons, and a planet-sized can of bug spray.
Needless to say, none of us felt too good about our species at that point.
But the second key fact more than made up for it. These invasive creatures had no idea about the planet they had just set down upon. Specifically, they were oblivious to Earth’s seismology.
And so, we tunneled.
