Unnatural

by Anthony DiGiovanni

CHAPTER 17

  “Ya hear me, moonies?” Uriah said, ignoring Jane’s astonished reaction. “I get it now. I’m a guilty wretch, and when my time is up you have every right to mess with my brain. But until then I need you to give me this chance to redeem myself. I know what I’m doing. Trust me.”

  There was no reply, which he took as the equivalent of, “Okay, get to it instead of wasting your time.”

  “Jane, d’you know Marshall’s password to his credit account on that virtual bookshelf doohickey?”

  “Sorry, but no.”

  Poor Jane, whose creator couldn’t trust her one iota. There went his idea to loot a book about the process of reverse-vitrification. What alternative was there?

  The Good Angels said, “Mr. Uriah, Governess Zolnerowich wants you to return to Everett Police Department promptly.”

  Stupid. Of course they would catch on. But there was hope. Perhaps the only thing that had stopped him from considering this option wasn’t stupidity, but ego. I want to earn my redemption, dammit, he thought as he motioned for Jane to follow him outside the institute.

  Collecting his thoughts, Uriah concluded that the E Wing meeting could most likely have concerned some discovery of a leak of Mindscape specs to a Russian manufacturer. If Marshall had worked on Project Autopia, it would be easy for him to design these machines so as to prevent exploitation of robotic memories. This also explained Livingston’s knowledge of how to use them on him and Jane, yet the missing piece of the puzzle had always been not that triviality, but the logistics of Livingston’s mastery over robots.

  Had it indeed been Livingston behind the curtain? It wouldn’t take exceptional abilities to program androids to do what they’d done at Goodsprings, but there seemed to be no airtight evidence that the resurrecting man had relocated all the robots from and to the southern Nevada area – which, along with what had transpired in the Amish house, did border on the uncanny. That, too, he couldn’t be sure was Livingston’s doing, and the Ivanov hypothesis was just as credible.

  Then what of the resurrections? he wondered as they returned to the car’s back seats. It was possible that the pulse hadn’t been powerful enough to subdue a Transhuman – after all, he’d never tested it on one – but he’d simply shocked the man into tumbling with his arrival.

  That, plus the likelihood that Livingston had been protected from cryogenic doom by the same proximity that had guarded him, made for a more sane theory than bodily revival. He could’ve easily fooled Uriah into thinking he was dead, to protect himself from a man who had other weapons for all he knew. As for the “empty tomb,” there was no reason to suppose the same mastermind who’d trapped him with Sabrina for days would be incapable of moving a cadaver. No obvious motive, sure, but the means were there. It all seemed to make more sense, even Livingston’s humble abode, which fit nicely in the hands of a genuine philanthropist.

  Just enough sense to sign Uriah’s doom without eliminating that phantom of a possibility that Livingston was still out there, ready to make his life a living hell.

  The commute ended swiftly. He didn’t look Jane in the eyes at all as they approached the entrance, although he noticed still the effect the breeze had on her lifelike pseudo-hair.

  While the door closed automatically behind them, ceiling lights revealed the presence of a familiar man leaning against the hall wall.

  Himself.

  His face brightened at the sight of the visitors. “Hey, it’s Jane and my good man Marshall!” He strode towards Uriah to shake his hand. “Just kidding, of course. I know you used to walk around in this bag of bones.”

  “Well, this is surreal, Mr. Me.” Uriah didn’t return the kindly gesture. “Who are you and why’ve you taken my body?”

  The stranger had no better luck being polite with Jane. He grinned and said, with a not-so-subtle indication of the robot, “Guess.”

  “Marshall, you chickenshit.” He lifted a fist halfway before Jane held him back. “How could you do this to her?”

  “Wow, we are clever!” Marshall evidently thought nothing of the insult he endured, as he took a seat and popped the cap of a Kinetic that had been on the nearby table. “Sit down, and we can discuss this like reasonable adults.”

  “Reasonable adults don’t build robot lovers only to screw them over for almost a week, unless they happen to also be sadists. I have half a mind to kill ya right now, only –”

  “Only you won’t do that because if you do, Jane’ll never be happy again. Will you?” he added to Jane, who was glancing back and forth between Uriah and Marshall, understandably confused by this brain switch. She wouldn’t be happy with you now, anyway, he thought, but he let Jane speak.

  “I don’t know.” She looked at the ground. “I love Marshall, if that’s really who you are, but I don’t want you to do anything to Dennis.”

  “I don’t see why you shouldn’t, so long as I leave his – or my, I guess – body in good shape.” He took a sip of concentrated caffeine. “What lies has this fella put in your head, Janie?”

  “Enough. Marshall, if you don’t mind, Jane and I would like to go report to Governess Zolnerowich in peace. I assume I’d be informed of any weapons you might have by now, so if ya know what’s best for you, I suggest you follow us and we can discuss this with the Lunar survivors.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. Go ahead, try to contact your moon friends. You’ll figure it out soon enough.”

  He got the hint. “So has it been you all this time? Cutting communications from here to Luna, bombing Goodsprings and Sloan, changing Sabrina’s memories, forcing me out of my own body?”

  “You could say that. ‘Course, if I’m lying just to scare you, you’d never know, would you?”

  He probably wasn’t lying, but then that created the mystery of why he would come clean so bluntly. Uriah looked over his shoulder as Marshall said, “Locked. No one’s talking to the government ‘til I’ve had my say. Please, sit.”

  Silently swearing, Uriah took a chair. “What is it you want, Marshall?”

  “I think you know that. You said it yourself, to Zolnerowich – Jane’s cheating on me with you, and I can’t have that.”

  Jane said, sitting, “I haven’t been sleeping with him!”

  “Yes, but Janie dear, you know this is how it starts. You helped him when there’s no way that could have helped me.”

  Uriah raised his hand in indignation. “Yeah, Marshall, why don’t you tell us why Jane needed to save me in the first place? Start with the reason you have for annihilating almost the entire human species.”

  “I never wanted this to happen, Dennis. Not now, anyway.” He rested his hands on his knees. “You were the one who opened Pandora’s Box in your primal rage.”

  “Don’t pin this on me! You expect me to not have trusted the woman I loved, when she was crying – which she’d never done before – and swearing she was telling the truth? Unnaturals gave us the finger every chance they could get, wasting our tax dollars to win some petty Space Race! To which you contributed, I might add.”

  “Hey, hey, let’s set the record straight, here! The first people we were gonna send to the moon were the folks who would’ve died of impending natural disasters. On the moon, they’d be safer than anyone down here.” Marshall waved his hand. “But this is all on the side. I suppose you wanna know why I made the machine in the first place.”

  “Let me guess. You’re a sociopath.”

  “Ha! If only it were that simple. ‘That guy does socially unacceptable things because he’s an asshole, problem solved.’” Socially unacceptable, yeah, that’s the term! “I had no intentions of killing anyone. From what I know about you, you’d probably be more comfortable with that than I would. Nah, I was after something on the opposite end of the moral spectrum.”

  “Ah, ‘the ends justify the means’ kinda guy, are ya?”

  “When the ends are a world in which every human can be happy wi
th the love of a robot so human-like as to be indistinguishable from the ‘real thing,’ yes, I’d agree with that. As if you’re a stranger to, ahem, dangerous ambitions yourself!” he laughed.

  “I never harmed anyone because of my dream of immortality, and I don’t plan to, now that I have the chance to realize it.”

  “That’s what they all say, but the tougher your target is to hit, the more likely it is your arrow’s gonna stab someone in the eye. Fortunately, my target was a pathetically easy one. When you’re as familiar with robotics and life extension as I am, it’s really a paint-by-numbers deal.”

  “Life extension?”

  Another irritating smile. Those’re my facial muscles you’re using, bub. “Heh, I guess it does sound ironic. Do you know, Dennis, there are two million legally dead folks in cryogenic capsules, just waiting to be woken up in some heaven on Earth – or even on the moon, as it were?” That he glanced sideways out a window for the moon infuriated Uriah as he speculated what Marshall had probably done to Sabrina.

  “I considered a slightly more modest statistic of that sort years ago, asking myself, ‘Who says these people need to wait until their hearts stop, or their Libertas run out of energy, to have their brains vitrified?’ The answer is the law, but that was the price I was willing to pay to move the human race forward and save precious lives.”

  Uriah rolled his eyes. “Not a very bright plan, what with a whole civilization on the moon you left unfrozen.”

  “That was where you threw the monkey wrench. My plan would’ve gone smoothly. The nanos would keep my brain functional for as long as is necessary to fix this mess of a world – deactivate and safely dispose of all nuclear weapons, molecularly manipulate the world’s waste into every necessity needed to eliminate poverty, terminate any dangerous Singularities in the making. All worthy causes, but there was another reason, something you wouldn’t really think of when coming up with a list of things to do when ‘putting the world on hold,’ so to speak.”

  Marshall nodded to Jane. “The perfect lover, not just for me anymore, but for every adult human being – indeed, the distinction of adults and children would break down in this new world. You already see it with the birth rate steadily dropping as more people trade their reproductive power for the benefits of a Libertas. Sounds iffy, but the instinct to propagate new generations would go the way of the dodo, too.”

  “I wouldn’t think of that, mainly because I already had Pat.”

  “Whom you lost because she lied to you. That’s the problem with humans. You can’t trust one unless it’s yourself. I thought Jane would be immune to the causes of infidelity, but it seems I was too credulous. After I perfect the Jane AI, it’ll be a matter of making each member of Jane’s massive family a proper complement to their human.”

  A smile flooded his stolen face, eyes glazed over in love with his own idea. “Dennis, imagine what the world could be without all the sorrow, jealousy, anger, pain, and even death that our present courting system is tied to! Had you possessed your own ‘Jane,’ you would never have felt compelled to seek vengeance on Livingston. Unwanted pregnancies would be a thing of the past, and people would devote to more important pursuits the time they would’ve wasted figuring out how to win the game of inter-human romance.”

  “I don’t want to ‘possess’ anyone,” Uriah spat.

  “Right, that’s why you stayed monogamous. Nothing possessive at all about restricting yourself and your partner with this relationship framework in which you own her sexuality and she owns yours.”

  “She doesn’t own me.”

  “Yeah?” Is that really how I look when I’m skeptical? “What did you plan to do when you found out Pat was dead?”

  “Well, if you hadn’t interfered, I would’ve kept some animals from starving.”

  “Just a coping mechanism. What next?”

  “Like I said, I would’ve found a way to live forever.”

  Marshall leaned in for the kill. “And that’s just a way to prolong a life you know as sure as the sun rises will be miserable until you either bring her back, or find another volatile human to tie yourself to. It’s madness, a never-ending cycle of surrender to this primitive dependence on someone you can only end up losing. Or, if you don’t lose her, you and she lose your passion and your trust, which is even worse.”

  “All right, then, if you think your idea will solve this problem, why are you miserable with Jane? Why are you still losing her?”

  “I never said my project was perfect. That’s why I’m buying time with this ‘Dethroning,’ as the kids are callin’ it these days. Beyond rewiring the human brain, which is bound to have negative repercussions, it’s impossible to separate our species from the pain of loss. But what we can do is ensure that the loss never happens, not for hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of years into the future. It’s as Confucius said: cultivate the individual’s well-being, and you produce a flourishing society.”

  He relaxed, looking Uriah in the eyes with the most sincerity he’d displayed since they met. “With a lot of effort, we really can get all the hope of heaven without the fear of God. It won’t be easy, it probably won’t even be as good as we’d like it to be, but dammit, we owe it to ourselves to give it our best shot.”

  “Who’s this ‘we’?” Uriah scoffed. “Don’t try to paint this as something collective, not when you’re putting nanobots inside people without their consent and turning their lives into a paused video game.”

  Marshall looked disappointed. “Ah well. Not like it’d be for the best to have someone as impulsive and delusional as you being among my first supporters. Let’s see if the governess will be a little more receptive.” He stood and led the way to the conference room. “And don’t even think about tryin’ to kill me or escape. Y’know the kind of robots that resisted your EM gun back in the cage? They’re all over this place.”