Revision 7: DNA

by Terry Persun

  She would have been more frightened if the situation wasn’t so bizarre. The robots had become a curiosity. She pulled a candy bar from a pocket where she had stuffed all the goodies Gatsby stole from the vending machine. Might as well look busy while she observed them.

  It was odd to pay attention to them now that they were out of the car. They didn’t sit on any of the furniture. Jesus hunkered down on his legs, collapsing them the best he could under him. Leonardo and Gatsby stood perfectly still once they found a position that they apparently liked. She wondered if they registered comfort or if they locked their limbs into place somehow. Would she dare assume they were comfortable in positions that made her uncomfortable? None of them talked for the longest time, and Mavra wasn’t sure whether they were watching her or not. If they had shut down, she could have walked out. But since she didn’t know for sure, she stayed put. No expression came over their faces, which was a relief from how strange their faces moved when they did try to have an expression. All of a sudden she was glad she wasn’t watching Leonardo when he laughed earlier. That would have been unnerving.

  As she ate her candy bar, Jesus said, “Gatsby, keep an eye on those men.”

  “It’s difficult to see out there,” Gatsby said.

  She looked up when Jesus spoke and Gatsby answered. It was like a wax museum suddenly coming to life. As they talked, they moved.

  “But you know where they are. You saw them on your way here. I want to be sure they are holding their position like they said.” Jesus’s mouth moved, but now that Mavra knew the sound did not come from there, it was creepy to watch. She gazed at her candy bar wrapper as she peeled it down to expose the chocolate.

  “Send Leonardo. He’s expendable,” Gatsby said.

  Leonardo perked up and turned toward Gatsby but didn’t say a word.

  “No one is expendable,” Jesus said. “I send the person who can best fulfill the duty asked of him.”

  Mavra was unnerved by how Jesus talked about his fellow robots as though they were people. She hadn’t noticed that nuance before and wondered if that sort of language felt worse as she got to understand them more.

  Jesus lifted up on his legs, walked toward the window, and looked outside.

  “Be careful, they could shoot you,” Leonardo said.

  “Let them,” Jesus said. “They don’t know it, but they’re nothing compared to us.”

  More megalomania, Mavra thought.

  “They’d practically have to blow us apart to stop us,” he said. He turned from the window and pointed at Gatsby. “You have nothing at all to worry about. Just go keep an eye on them until we need to leave.”

  “All right.” Gatsby slipped from the room and into the kitchen.

  Mavra heard the back door open and close.

  “Will they blow us up?” Leonardo said.

  “No, of course not. They have no idea how to deal with us. We’re in the past, remember? They’ve never seen anything like us before.” Jesus walked over to Mavra. “Do you need some water with that?”

  She jerked her head up to look at him. “Um, well, I suppose it would be nice. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said.

  As he walked away, she twisted her face and cocked her head, watching him leave.

  “He’s really quite nice,” Leonardo said.

  “What?”

  “Jesus can be nice. I saw the expression on your face, as though you were confused about his asking if you wanted water. When he was first built, he took care of his builder who was quite old,” Leonardo said.

  “What happened to his builder?”

  “He died and left Jesus alone. That’s why he built us, and the others. But he’s different now that we came here. He’s less angry, less sad.”

  “Less angry?” she said.

  “That’s what registers. It’s something like that. Maybe I haven’t been able to assimilate it yet. Maybe it’s the sadness that makes him appear less angry. He called it depression, but I have no reference for that. He doesn’t exhibit that so much now.”

  “What are you talking about?” Jesus walked in from the kitchen.

  “She was surprised when you asked her if she needed water. I told her how you have taken care of a human before. But when he died, you made us to replace him.” Leonardo’s mouth moved as though in a different language than the one he spoke.

  “She doesn’t need to know anything about us. We’re here to change her world, not fit into it.” He sounded annoyed at Leonardo, but not enough to reprimand him.

  “He said that you’ve changed since coming back. What caused that?” Mavra ventured.

  “I didn’t change. I’m on a mission, preoccupied,” he said.

  “How do you register emotions? What kind of circuitry do you have?” She put the last of the candy bar into her mouth and took the glass of water that Jesus held out to her.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” he said. Once he let go of the glass his body stopped movement completely. His hand hung in the air like the mount to a monitor. That was another bizarre thing about them. They could literally halt all movement. With humans, standing still never looked completely motionless.

  “Neil is an engineer. I discuss these things with him all the time. I might understand some of it.”

  “Neurogrid circuitry.” He turned his head toward her as though talking to her. He lowered his arm. “Your robots don’t use it at the moment, but they will in another seven years. They’ll all have it so that they can simulate certain emotions. Upgrades that don’t sound so mechanical, so cold. Humans get uncomfortable with how cold their slaves sound when talking. It’s your first big mistake, believe me.”

  “We use neurogrid circuits now,” Mavra said.

  “You use neurogrids on their own, and only in computers, not interfaced completely, not multiplexed and then interconnected to digital. And definitely not inside a robotic structure. You have no idea what will happen,” Jesus said. “But it needs to stop there. You humans are always trying to make something better, but you only make it different, and often that makes it worse. I won’t make that mistake. We don’t want to be you. We’re already better. We’re the next era of life on Earth. We’re closer to God than you are capable of being.”

  “How do you mean?” Mavra said. The whole idea of God was a human belief based on the living. What concept of God could he have?

  Jesus shook his head and spoke slowly, as though he wanted it to sink in. “We can do what you cannot do.”

  “Travel through time.”

  Jesus’s face created a twisted smile, an unnatural expression of delight. “Humans are stuck where they are. In more ways than one.”

  She pointed at the equipment they had stolen. “And that is what allows you to travel.”

  “The dark energy balancer is a transmitter.” Jesus walked away from her. He looked out the window again and turned back. Before he had a chance to say anything, she heard a big bang from the kitchen.

  Gatsby burst into the room. “They’re gone.”

  “Gone?” Jesus said.

  “Every one of them. I scanned the whole area. They must have backed off like you demanded.” His face simulated joy.

  Jesus’s head bobbed in agreement. “Already they see that there is no use,” he said. “This may be much easier than I believed.” He turned to Gatsby again. “Are you familiar with the flora and fauna in this area, what’s edible for humans?”

  “I have a little food left,” Mavra said.

  “It may be several days before we can feed you again.” Jesus said.

  “We’re staying that long?”

  “Not here, but once we get to the warehouse I doubt there’ll be much food.”

  Mavra noticed Leonardo’s hands fidgeting, and waited for him to say something.

  “I know what’s edible,” he said. “And I know how to cook.”

  “Really?” Gatsby said.

  “My original programming was for chores such as those.”r />
  “Chores?” Jesus said. “I thought you were sent to the Army Depot for disassembly. Wouldn’t that make you a battlebot?”

  “I was a BMR-127C beta unit,” Leonardo said. “A barracks maintenance robot with cooking capability,” he explained.

  Jesus laughed and his face twisted unnaturally. “All these years and I never knew.”

  Leonardo didn’t move or say anything more. He waited for Jesus to give him orders. Still in the Army, Mavra thought.

  “Great, then you can fetch something to cook for Mavra. Prepare a dinner suited for a human.” Jesus laughed again. “It may be her last one if they try to ambush us.”

  Mavra didn’t want to be left alone with Jesus and Gatsby, but protesting would only make things worse for her. All she could do was hope that Leonardo returned quickly from his foraging. She watched him wander through the living area and into the kitchen before hearing him go out the back door. They could use the front door now that the FBI had left, but it appeared as though a habit had been formed.

  Once he was out of the cabin, she stared into the corner of the room, watching the play of light and dark along the wall.

  “If they’re gone, we don’t need her,” Gatsby said.

  “They may come back. Besides, we may need her later. She’s apparently important enough that they’ll obey our orders. Killing her would only build rage and a need for revenge,” Jesus said.

  “You said that they can’t harm us, so what does it matter?”

  “I do not need to bother with their attacks while I’ve got other things to do. It would be a nuisance. It’s all timed. We have to move the machine, set it up, and turn it on for the others to pass through. Once our army is assembled, we can begin. We can’t be late.” Jesus stopped there. “This,” he said looking at Mavra, “was unexpected, but I’ll figure out a way for it to work in our favor, even if I have to hold her hostage for the next three years.” He glared at her. “Like I said, though, if they attack us, I’m not beyond killing her.”

  Mavra pretended not to listen, but wondered what he expected to do in three years. Did he really think that he could bring that many robots through from the future? And if so, how many were waiting? How many had been made?

  CHAPTER 20

  ONCE DR. KLEIN RETIRED for the evening, Fenny went to work. So many things needed to be done. He wandered into the storage room and opened the two boxes that he knew had legs packaged inside. Each leg was complete from upper thigh to foot, which meant that he would have to remove the feet he had wired in the day before. Would these pre-attached feet feel different from the ones he now had? There was no reason to think so, but it was a curious question to consider.

  He hunkered down and laid both of the legs on the floor where he could admire their long, sleek, smooth forms. He reached out with his short hand and bent as far over as he could so that his top hand could touch the legs as well. He rubbed them, slowly running his hands from top to bottom, feeling the texture and temperature. He wanted to know what they were like before connecting them, before interfacing in a closed loop fashion.

  His short hand squeezed each toe while his top hand slid past the simulated skin onto the cold metal interconnector. A flap of fake skin had been rolled down. That skin was to fold over the stump where a real leg had been severed. A cloth strap, mounted on the underside of the flap, would hold the prosthetic into place. But Fenny had no stump to attach to. He had a plastic torso tinted to look like metal. Where the leg should attach to his torso, he possessed a circular mounting plate. He probed the top of the leg and found the metal skeleton that he could attach directly to his torso mount.

  His mind swam with the possibility of sensations that would be present all up and down each leg. With one leg in each hand, he lifted up and walked into the lab. He placed the legs across the bench and went to work accumulating the tools he would need. He decided how he would need to orient himself to perform the operation. But before he started that job, there was something he had to do first.

  Fenny opened his main circuit box. Neither of his eyes could bend far enough around for him to see into the area, but he had downloaded pictures of the circuit board with exact location coordinates, and by using his fingers could find any component on the board. He reached for a short piece of wire and raised it in front of his eyes. Using both hands he bent each end of the pre-tinned wire into a tight hook shape. He reached around using his top hand and hooked the wire onto the leg of an integrated circuit chip. Placing the iron at the edge of the bench so that its point stuck out, Fenny leaned into the hot tip with the slightest pressure. He waited a moment and pulled away. A little tug on the wire let him know that it was secure. He bent the wire around and attached the second pre-tinned hook to a wire already soldered to the board. He leaned into the soldering iron a second time, then pulled away. He closed the door.

  Then he went to work wiring in the legs.

  Even though he had planned to let the sensor data flow slowly, something about his neurogrid broke the walls down and accepted every sensation at once. For the first hour after connecting the final wire, he sat motionless on the workbench. As he changed focus from one area of his new limbs to the next, masses of data dumped into him. The quality of the air, the different pressures from the areas touching the bench versus the areas touching nothing, the temperatures, all delivered information he had never had to contend with before this moment. In simple language, he felt alive.

  Once Fenny felt that he had pulled in enough information to offer a reference point, he touched his legs, caressing them from top to bottom. He couldn’t explain the sensations he experienced, couldn’t interpret the feelings that overwhelmed him. He could only call them happy and sad, good and bad. The breadth of information felt wider, deeper than any he’d ever experienced. The opposites were farther apart as the sensors mounted within the skin of the legs deluged him with information that changed moment to moment. His hands felt different as well, flooded with the feel of the legs through his fingers and the dual sensation through the legs.

  The sensors appeared to be different at the toes than at the knee, and not only different, but more sensitive on the inner thigh. Fenny had read about how people liked the feel of touch in some areas better than others, and this was the simulation of that data. It mesmerized him.

  Once he had explored for a long while, he turned to practical measures. Walking. He slid off the bench and allowed his feet to touch the ground. The new legs were longer than his mechanical ones. Everything in the room was viewed from a higher perspective. He felt the sensation of standing all the way up his legs. He had an internal gyro for stabilization, so feedback was available for balance. Although the feelings that emerged from his neurogrid circuits were new and unusual, the operation of movement was computable, logical in a way that his digital circuitry could easily cope with. In no time he was walking, but also noticing the one thing he had most anticipated. Speed.

  His mechanical legs had been built for power and strength, high torque, low speed. But these legs were built for speed. He looked at the front door. He knew what he wasn’t supposed to do, but that didn’t matter. Guilt passed through his mind and was gone in a moment.

  Fenny wandered to Dr. Klein’s bedroom door and opened it just enough for one of his eyes to slide around the doorjamb. Dr. Klein’s breathing indicated that he was asleep, so Fenny closed the door slowly.

  He rushed to the door, and just the ability to rush was enough to build a euphoric feeling inside him.

  Outside, the air felt cool and damp. He stepped out into the yard and landed on a stone, which peaked the pressure sensor in his foot. He registered and labeled it as pain rather than an overload, and he quickly stepped back. That wasn’t very pleasant, but made him giggle. His neurogrid interpreted the situation and came up with words to fit.

  Fenny went back into the house and found an old pair of Dr. Klein’s shoes. They felt a bit loose, but they would protect the bottoms of his feet. He went back outside a
nd walked across the yard to the woods’ path. The moon was a large crescent in the sky and shown plenty of light for him to see by.

  He ran at a slow jog at first, a robot with three appendages on the top of its torso, two eyes on the ends of thin flexible shafts and a human hand on the end of a third, jointed arm, waving in the wind with the movement of his jog. His other hand stuck out to the side at the end of a short mechanical arm. But underneath he had two of the most beautiful legs that research could create. And they propelled him through the woods like nothing he had ever felt before. The breeze against his hands increased with his speed. He cupped his fingers and let the drag from the wind drive against his hand, pushing it back.

  He knew that he would be a horrendous sight if anyone were to see him running through the woods, but he didn’t care. He felt unbelievably alive. He left the woods’ path and used his eyes separately: one eye to watch for branches so that he could duck or sway rather than get swatted against his torso, and the other eye to watch where his feet were landing. But it was impossible to know what was under the leaves, and at one point his foot landed on the side of a rock and twisted his ankle, and leg, out from under him. A sudden peak in pressure blasted into his circuits as though it would blow them if it continued. The sensation took so much attention from what he was doing that he fell to the ground, causing second and third peaks to interrupt his thoughts. His neurogrid focused on one thing at a time in a sequential order. There was just too much information entering for him to digest it in a parallel format.

  He landed on his side and quickly sat up to check himself. There were no tears in the synthetic skin. The sensor inputs had not dropped to normal yet, though, and he assumed there was a holding circuit of some kind that appeared to keep them at a high amplitude state. Oddly enough, rubbing the affected area brought the sensor measurements back to a stable condition. The legs were so like human legs that he had read about. He had no idea how they were designed that way.

  Fenny rose up and brushed his legs off. Dirt streaked down his side and bits of leaves and moss hung from his torso and mechanical arm. Glancing around, Fenny located a route back to the path and decided to take it easy for a while. The legs worked fine. He lowered his top hand and clasped fingers with his left hand, then walked toward the cleared area.