by J. S. Morin
“I don’t believe you.”
Rachel blinked in disbelief as Toby521 stepped between her and the robot with the gun.
“You don’t have to do this,” Rachel whispered from behind the wall of robotic chassis that had just interposed himself. “I’ll go with them. It’s our best chance.”
“No.”
“But he’ll—”
“It’s just a tranq gun, and my chassis is bigger than—”
Toby521’s boast was cut off when in one smooth motion, the tranq-toting robot pulled out a coil pistol and fired.
Rachel heard the crack. She felt the spray of shattered crystal as the slug tore a hole through the back of Toby521’s head.
“Toby!” Rachel screamed.
Despite her shock, her instinct for self-preservation took over and urged her to stand aside as the 150-kilogram robot toppled over. But as soon as the chassis hit the floor, Rachel dropped down beside Toby521.
“Toby, Toby, no… Toby, don’t be dead.”
The neat hole in the front of his cranium and the lightless eyes staring up at her answered her plea. The answer was no.
“Enough of this nonsense,” the robot behind her grumbled.
As tears clouded her eyes, Rachel heard the clack of a tranq gun firing. She felt the stinging bite in the small of her back. But an icy cold washed over her. Rachel’s head swam as she fell across the body of her newfound friend.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Plato wore a headband with a flip-down screen that covered one eye. A fiber cable snaked down from the band to plug into his portable computer. He had enough servo motors and bearings in his joints that the prospect of adding computational infrastructure to his body was a step too far.
To be honest, he found it a little weird looking Eve in the eye since she’d had those display lenses implanted. When Plato looked at her, he saw his wife, the woman he loved more than his own life. When she looked back at him, she could be doing anything from reviewing committee reports to measuring the length of his stubble.
But for now, Plato was happy to have his hands free and the facility map on display at the same time. Kanto had a certain logical flow to its design, but he’d landed Betty-Lou a good long way from his destination, and relying on memorization for that long a trip was cocky even for him.
“What’re you punks up to?” Plato muttered to himself.
In truth, he was bored. The long walk wore on him. He made sure he had the next section of the factory fresh in his mind and picked up the news feeds.
What he saw raised the bile in his stomach.
“…and I can actually smell this place,” an unfamiliar human was speaking into the camera, a nervous smile semi-permanently installed on his smug, uploaded face. The caption described him as “Arthur39, Reborn Human.” He chuckled. It sounded forced. “Funny, but I never stopped to wonder what Kanto smelled like. Been here a million times—well, 3,446 times since I can still access my digital memory—but not once did that ever occur to me. For those of you out there wondering, it smells like steel lubricant and carbon.”
Plato gritted his teeth. They were interviewing those slimy, Zeus-like slugs. Those hermit crabs in human shells. Testimonials? What, was this Dale2 bozo trying to run a popularity contest?
Charlie25 appeared on screen seated beside the human-looking Arthur39. They were in Charlie13’s office, which didn’t bode well for Charlie13. Charlie25 was sitting at the big guy’s desk while the wall of video screen behind them showed a documentary of the clone-growth process.
Plato snarled. “Charlie24 did that to me.”
He and Rachel were about the same age, just shy of twenty. But Plato already had receding hair and pinpricks of gray in his beard that made him look closer to forty.
Accelerated aging was fine for the guy in a hurry for a soldier but a raw deal on the kid in a soldier’s body who hit puberty at age five and missed out on having a childhood. It was fine for a soldier who’d just get thrown into battle again and again until he was all used up.
“What about the rest of it? What else has been notable in your first day in a human body?” Charlie25 asked.
Arthur39 wiped a hand over his mouth. “I… I’m not sure if this is the sort of thing I should be talking about, but I… I hardly remembered the sensation. Got this clenching in my nether regions.” He paused with a bemused grin and a shake of his head. “I just took a piss for the first time.”
Charlie25 laughed, and Arthur39 laughed along with him.
“Oh, yeah,” Plato said mockingly. “Real funny. Pissing. Woo. Great television there. What’s next? We gonna watch him eat a hamburger and have his eyes roll back in his head?”
“What was the moment you decided you wanted to go back?”
“To being human, you mean?” Arthur39 asked.
Charlie25 nodded.
Plato rolled his eyes.
Arthur39 slouched in his chair. “I think it was Arthur7’s self-termination. I saw it on the news feed, and the words just sat in my processors like a bad sector. I idolized Arthur7. The guy had it all. He was on eight committees. He was chairman of the Interplanetary Mining Committee. I mean, the guy owned a fleet of spaceships. All of us Arthurs dreamed of going into space. If a guy like that, with my dominant personality, can self-terminate… just what are we doing with our lives? What’s missing?
“That’s when I started putting out feelers for other robots who felt like I did.”
Plato was silent. His running commentary on the proceedings didn’t sound as funny as they did a minute ago.
Plato found a lift shaft and jammed the safety gate open. Leaning across the shaft, he grabbed hold of a rung on the ladder and stepped across. He was still twelve levels down from his destination. Front-loading the climbing would give him plenty of time to catch his breath before the blasting started.
“Any regrets?” Charlie25 asked, extending an open hand toward the self-conscious human he was interviewing. “Anything at all you wish you’d done differently?”
“I wish more of us had the courage to stand up to the Human Welfare Committee,” Arthur39 stated with clenched fists. “I had those nagging doubts all those years. Would I succumb like Arthur7? Would I end my own existence? That mental anguish was pointless. We had the solution unlocked. We were just too afraid to stand up and demand what robotkind had worked centuries to earn: a ticket home. Life… real human life. We should have done this years ago.”
Any sympathy Arthur39 might have garnered with his sob story boiled away. Plato paused to catch his breath, panting after hauling his body weight up three stories while the sniveling body-snatcher yapped. “You even sneeze in Eve’s direction, I’ll carve the robot out of your carcass with a paring knife.”
Plato was a lousy cook, but he was a whiz at peeling potatoes.
Charlie25 looked up. “Thank you for joining us, Arthur39. Everyone, I have a wonderful announcement. Rachel Eighteen has been located and is being safely escorted to the mixing center here. I have received word that she is being briefed on the millennium-long con perpetrated by Charlie7 and is going to be helping us untangle the knot of stolen data that Charlie7 has hidden away all these years. It’s only a matter of time now before we can share that evidence with the world.”
Break time was over. Plato resumed his climb. “Like hell she is. Rachel’s not helping you tie your shoes, Poindexter. Never mind unlocking secret data vaults.”
A thought flashed briefly across Plato’s mind. Charlie7 had supplied him with an emergency access code to Kanto, one that no one should have been able to usurp. If Rachel really had accessed some deep, dark secret of Charlie7’s, could Plato find it too?
He shook his head. “Ain’t got time for that. Rachel needs saving.”
Chapter Forty
Gemini’s skyroamer shot over the Pacific waters, casting up a spray. If someone was watching from orbit—and cared one whit about her fate—they could spot her easily, wake or no wake. But to anyone relying on airbor
ne surveillance, the horizon was her friend.
She had taken her leave of that dreadful prison hover-ship none too soon. Short of a salvage operation, Gemini would be presumed dead in the wreckage.
A smirk tugged the corner of her mouth. Her belly twitched. Within seconds of the realization, she burst out laughing, not in amusement but triumph.
“I’m free. I’m… free. I’m FREE!”
Waggling the control stick, Gemini carved a slalom across the ocean’s undulating surface. Let the dolphins think her a madwoman. There was no one else liable to take notice of her. She spun her stolen skyroamer in a corkscrew, relishing the mild vertigo her inner ear inflicted upon her.
Gemini was human. She was free. She could go anywhere and do anything now.
Well, that last bit was self-deception, she knew. Heady bloviating from an overactive sense of achievement. Thinking like that was liable to wind up in getting caught and returned to some newly built prison custom made just for her.
“No. Not again.”
She wanted to say never, but the more Gemini considered her options, the more she realized that there were worse fates ahead, down twisting roads and through the unmarked doors that lay before her.
Dale2 was out there. He hadn’t made his whereabouts known, but his mere existence was a paradigm shift for robotkind. Gemini was the counterargument to his grand plans, the irritating “what if” the old robot didn’t want robots asking of him.
If Gemini ended up in Dale2’s hands, there was no outcome she could foresee that would end well for her. She couldn’t crawl back with mumbled apologies and a promise to do better. Gemini wasn’t the young, naive woman she appeared. Both Charlie25 and Dale2 knew that all too well.
She watched the news feeds as she pondered. Those clones bearing witness like religious converts were her design. Someone had combined her genetic expertise with Charlie24’s accelerated aging process and come out with a viable specimen—several of them, it seemed.
Robots laughing and describing their indulgences in human sensations was the gist of every interview. How did they like tasting a fresh apple? What was it like to see without having data in your field of view? Describe the feel of synthetic cotton against your skin.
“How about pain?” Gemini asked the screen. “How about the metallic taste of animal fear in the back of your throat, wondering if you’re going to die without ever speaking to another thinking creature again?”
The whistling of the wind across the hole in the canopy wasn’t helping matters. Gemini hadn’t stolen a repair kit during her escape. She hadn’t so much as a square of tape to slap across the hole as a stopgap. Turning up the volume on the news feed to drown it out only got her blood boiling all the more violently.
“Hey, maybe I shouldn’t be saying this,” Joshua172 said. He looked like an actor wearing his character’s name on his shirt. Joshua Kramer had been a bald, squinty-eyed hunchback with liver spots. The beast on screen looked like he should have been selling tight-fitting underwear or body spray. “But Sandra29 and I were just talking a few minutes ago, and we’re going to try having sex once things settle down. I tell you, that’s something I’ve been missing these past three hundred years.”
“Oh yes,” Gemini taunted the screen. “By all means, act like you’d shagged in the four decades prior to your brain scan, you pretentious old sock-botherer.”
Sex was a sore point for Gemini since her upload. Evelyn Mengele had been ancient before her scan. Memories of husbands and lovers had been careworn by then, and even her buzzing little friends in the back of her underwear drawer had been rubbish binned ages ago. But she remembered.
It was this body. Something wrong in the genome had resulted in a loss of interest in the act of rolling someone in the hay. Neither man, woman, nor bedroom appliance held any interest for her.
Dale2’s promise of candy and wildflowers had turned to ashes and a prison ship for Gemini.
On the news feeds, robots in fleshy puppets continued to espouse the belief that they had finally won. They were finally free of a prison of lies, and the suppression of cloning and upload technology was at an end.
Time and again, they worked in a common refrain.
“…if not for Charlie7…”
“…I wish I had seen through Charlie7’s lies sooner…”
“…I can’t believe Charlie7 could do this to us…”
Gemini swung the skyroamer around, raising a slice of ocean like a crescent moon. They were all correct. This was Charlie7’s doing. And if Dale2 was afraid of what Charlie7 might do, that’s where Gemini needed to head.
She didn’t know where the devious old robot was, but she knew where to start looking. If she couldn’t find Charlie7, Gemini would let Charlie7 find her.
Maybe it would result in her being sent right back to prison once Dale2 and his hatchet man Charlie25 were deleted. But as her mind played over the possibilities of what the two of them might do to her, Gemini knew that prison was among the best options remaining to her.
Gemini set a course for Paris.
Chapter Forty-One
Rachel awoke to a familiar ceiling overhead. Her own apartment in Kanto. She was… groggy.
She squeezed her eyes shut. A gossamer blur pervaded her thoughts even as she felt her heart racing.
Rubbing her eyes, Rachel tried again.
When she looked up, her breath caught in her throat. “Hello,” she managed, trying hard to quell the rising nausea threatening to erupt into physical illness.
Charlie25 loomed over her. Beside him, an unfamiliar robot lurked with an empty syringe.
“Good morning,” Charlie25 greeted her with an amiable grin. “Sorry for the adrenaline alarm clock, but pressing matters demanded your wakefulness.”
Lying on her back put Rachel at an even greater disadvantage than she already faced with two hostile robots between her and the room’s only door—not counting the washroom, which was a dead end. She pushed up onto her elbows and put her back to the wall. “You had me tranqed and dragged here. You had me—oh, no!” The events from just prior to the dart’s payload seeping into her veins pieced themselves back together. “You killed Toby521.”
Charlie25 hung his head. “Always a shame losing a Toby. Useful. Every last one of them. Your fault, really, placing him in that situation in the first place.”
“How dare you!” Foisting the blame onto her was rhetorical trickery. Rachel wasn’t going to put up with it. “You invaded Kanto. You sent your minions after me. This is… wait, where is Charlie13?”
Charlie25 and his robotic companion turned to one another and shared a chuckle. “Oh, he’s fine,” Charlie25 assured her. “Might even come around to our way of thinking.”
“I don’t believe you,” Rachel challenged. “I want proof.”
“Please. Charlie13 is no socialite, but he’s probably the most popular robot on Earth.”
Rachel raised an eyebrow.
Charlie25 rolled his eyes, which for a robot involved the whole head lolling back. “Fine. Consider Charlie7 Mr. Popularity for the time being if you must. That will change soon enough. But consider this: Charlie13 mixed most of the robots alive today. Whether they’d race classic cars with him in the salt flats or look forward to having a beer with him once we’re all human again, most think of him as something of a father figure. I can’t just blast robots to smithereens without considering the implications.”
Rachel swallowed as the former Mixing Committee chairman leaned close. “He’s a lot more of a problem to dispose of than you,” Charlie25 warned.
She pushed back against the wall, wishing she could keep going right on through. “You wouldn’t dare. Eve would make you pay.”
Why Eve? Rachel cursed herself. What good did dragging Eve’s name into this do? She wasn’t a super hero. Eve was just the eldest of a batch of girls who were all emancipated now. They were all equally qualified to look after themselves.
“I’m not here to threaten you,” Charlie2
5 said, straightening and giving Rachel room to breathe. “In fact, once you understand the implications of the discovery you’ve made, I’m entirely certain you’ll see the error of your ways. If you’d be so kind as to open that cache of old files you discovered, I can show you how—”
“Hah!” Rachel scoffed. “That’s it, isn’t it? You can’t get in, can you?”
Charlie25 was silent for a moment, those glowing orange eyes burning holes in Rachel’s. Or trying. Rachel had looked into enough robots’ eyes that they held no thrall over her. At length, he turned to his companion. “Leave us.”
Rachel didn’t know whether to be relieved or terrified that she would be completely alone with the robot responsible for bringing Evelyn11 back to life, for creating Gemini, for infiltrating the Human Protection Agency in the guise of Zeus… for dating Phoebe that one time.
“So what is it you really want?” Rachel dared to ask.
Charlie25 spread his hands. “It’s just as I said. I want you to open that archival file and share it with the world.”
Rachel’s eyes narrowed. “That doesn’t explain why you sent your friend away, the one with the needles.”
“She seemed to be making you nervous,” Charlie25 pointed out. “Besides, this is just between you and me. If you have reasons for not wanting to help, I’ll hear you out. I can be perfectly reasonable.”
Rachel nodded along. If he wanted to be reasonable, she’d test him. Sliding to the end of her bed, she stood and circled to the apartment’s refrigerator. Barely taking her eyes off Charlie25 to survey the contents, she found a sealed package of grapes. “What’s so important about those files that you’re willing to bring an army into Kanto?” Rachel asked warily. She tore the package open and popped a grape into her mouth.
