“I can do that,” I replied with a nonchalant shrug as I grabbed my own pad and stylus from the table. “And that’s noted on the size difference; thank you for the heads up.” I turned to a fresh page on the screen and began sketching out ideas that were coalescing in my brain. The fact that they had nothing to do with what we were discussing and everything to do with electronic signature designs was not important. This was for effect. “But he isn’t next on my list, to be honest. I’m curious how Daniel compares first, given his obvious alpha-rebel comportment, so I’ve penned him in for Thursday night. Hand me that nanite retractor?”
I never looked up at him, but Nick had fallen silent and the retractor was slow in coming. Plus, I could practically feel the flames licking at me from where he stood a few feet away. So I chalked it up as victory number one and tried not to gloat.
We fell into a working silence. For me, it was comfortable. For Nick, it was probably pregnant with unspoken questions and revenge plots. But silence was silent and it allowed me to clearly think. A few minutes later, I had sketched out most of my solutions and saw that they had cohesive merit. I smiled to myself. The door to the lab slid open, and Lucas stepped in carrying two delicious-looking shakes. My stomach immediately and loudly reacted.
Luke came toward us and held out the shakes. “Lieutenant Byron ate the eggs,” he told me as if he knew I’d felt bad about leaving them. I took my shake gratefully, thanking Lucas. But Nick was a little more reluctant in accepting his. He did anyway; he was exhausted and needed fuel and he was on the other end of the spectrum from stupid. But his “thank you” was curt in the extreme.
Luke seemed completely unfazed by this behavior. Which probably rubbed it all in even more for Nick.
I smiled to myself at that thought, then waited until I could feel Nick’s eyes on me. While I knew he was watching, I sensuously wrapped my lips around the straw and made a show of “innocently” sucking on it.
When I swallowed and looked up, Nick’s blue eyes had darkened, his jaw was set hard, and the corners of his mouth were ever-so-slightly turned upward in black amusement and covetous challenge. He stiffly turned away, pulling his own straw out of his shake to toss it resolutely in the nearby garbage can. He then began chugging the shake, and I knew it had to be giving him a nasty case of brain freeze. But he was stubborn. And I was betting he welcomed the pain as a distraction.
I tried not to laugh at that too, and this time I almost failed.
I was chalking it up as victory number two.
Chapter Thirty
In the year 1963, Juno Motorcycles came out with what was widely considered the first automatic transmission motorcycle to hit the market. In layman’s terms that’s a motorcycle that doesn’t require you to shift the gears yourself. All you have to do is steer, brake, and gas it.
The Juno was rudimentary though, so in 1977 Honda improved on the idea with the first sports bike to feature a “Hondamatic” automatic transmission. Honda’s fancy term for a torque-converter, just like the one used in automatic cars.
Though most motorcycle riders considered automatic transmissions to be sacrilege – probably because they believed there was something “cool” in having to do all of the work yourself – there was definitely something to be said for a motorcycle that didn’t require a lot of up and down shifting. It was easier in traffic, and it was easier on people with physical disabilities.
So over the years it became increasingly popular, and in 2016, Honda emerged with an entire new line of automatic transmission motorcycles geared toward people who didn’t really care about being “cool” anymore and just wanted to enjoy riding.
Someone might wonder why the hell I was thinking about this right now. What did bikes have to do with the revolution, or Zero, or a damn thing really? As it turns out, not much.
Except for one bike in particular.
And it was that bike that had me focused on the past. Besides, as I thought about its history, the story was narrated in my head by “Chuck” from the classic twenty-first century television program Supernatural, and his voice soothed me.
Over the next ten years or so, automatic transmission motorcycles increasingly replaced manuals, and by the year 2030, Harley Davidson had converted almost all of its lot to automatics. When they made the change it waved the checkered flag for die-hard manual enthusiasts to quit trying to beat the crowd and just join them.
Now in 2100, you’d be hard pressed to find a motorcycle of any kind anywhere, much less an automatic. Automatic versus manual wasn’t even an issue with vehicles any longer. Now it was all about whether you’d gone electric and registered your scan signature, which was required by law. Plus, the vast majority of cars were simply auto-pilot.
No one would want a motorcycle any longer due to those electric highways. It was far too dangerous.
But I had one.
I had a motorcycle. And that’s why this was important.
During World War I, some manufacturing companies stepped up to the plate to aid their countries in war efforts. One such company was the Indian Chief Motorcycle Company. It sold so many of its motorcycles to the United States government for its troops, civilian motorcycle dealers were left without bikes to sell to the public.
Indian never fully recovered from this drop in sales. No good deed goes unpunished, as they say. It didn’t help that Indian pitched in again to help during World War II. Well-meaning gluttons for punishment.
By 1945, Indian Motorcycle Company was dying. In its death throes, it was handed over to a man by the name of Ralph B. Rogers. Rogers loved the beautiful, iconic Indian and wanted to see it make a comeback, so he donated millions of his own hard cash to reviving the failing company. But he wanted it too fast, and the bikes weren’t properly tested before they were manufactured, and they were junk.
Indian continued to decline. Three years later out of desperation, Indian did something vitally important. Well, it was vitally important to me anyway, and to what was taking place in my life right now.
What Indian did was send their schematics to the Vincent motorcycle company overseas in England. At the time, the Vincent Shadow and the Vincent Lightning were the fastest bike engines on the planet. Indian wanted to know whether a lightning-fast Vincent engine would fit in the body of an iconic Indian motorcycle, making the perfect, desirable pair to sell to a public that had all but forgotten the Indian Chief bike.
It turns out the Vincent engine fit perfectly. And beautifully.
Enthusiasts of the idea called this proposed bike the “Vindian” and couldn’t wait to see it made. But for some bizarre reason that no one had ever figured out, neither Vincent nor Indian followed through.
And so in the year 1953, the Indian Chief motorcycle company rolled out its last bike and shut its doors. It was done. Like a death rattle echo, Vincent bikes in England would close their doors just two years later.
Completely unbeknownst to those in charge, back in 1949, four years before Indian would shut down, and one year after the Vindian was proposed and rejected, a retired US Air Force pilot did something that would change history. At least my history.
On the down-low, the pilot contacted someone from the Indian Motorcycle Company and offered him a large sum of money to create a single bike of his own design. That single motorcycle was the Vindian that didn’t happen the year before. But with a few modifications.
The secret motorcycle was built behind closed doors during manufacturing off-hours by hand-picked workers who broke into the factory in Springfield, Massachusetts to produce it. When they finished it, the date was October 31st, 1949 – Halloween morning.
Because of the date and because it was an all-black combination of a modified Indian Chief and a modified Vincent Shadow, the pilot nicknamed his bike “The Wraith.”
The Wraith was my motorcycle.
Why did I, a foster kid from Pittsburgh who was fighting in an android rebellion in 2100 actually own the original and only unofficial “Vindian” model mo
torcycle ever made? That retired airline pilot was Samuel Frank Hart, my foster great-great-tons of greats-grandfather. His son was a helicopter pilot. His daughter was a private pilot instructor – and worked for NASA. The line of pilots and engineers and scientists continued through the generations.
My foster mother also worked for NASA, and had been the fifth female Blue Angels pilot in history and had helped design the 2-0FTS, the first jet plane capable of traveling at twice the speed of sound, simultaneously initializing the use of inertial dampeners. Which she'd also help design. Her name was Beverly Elouise Hart. She’d inherited her penchant for finessing the friendly skies from her great-great-tons of greats-grandfather, it would seem. She had also inherited his motorcycle.
And now that motorcycle was mine.
I’d been taught to ride when I was eleven, a year after I was adopted. When my foster parents died and left it to me years later, I made some modifications to it – but then, for some reason I put the bike away and didn’t ride it any more. I stored it in a garage in Pittsburgh and kept it secret throughout my twenties. I hadn’t even told Nick or Cole about it.
The rebels of Prometheus had no idea it existed.
As it turns out, that was a lucky bit of kismet. Yoda had been watching out for me.
Because it was in my twenties that the electric highway was established. When that happened, every vehicle wanting to make use of public roads was electronically tagged, and its owners registered. What that meant was that the owner’s physical signature was linked to the vehicle, and every time the vehicle hit the road, a scan was performed to make certain the driver was someone legally registered to drive that particular vehicle.
This made car theft next to impossible, and that was the claimed reasoning behind it. But there were those of us who suspected vehicle theft had little to do with it. No one wanted these electric cars anyway. We knew it had a lot more to do with keeping track of citizens than anything else. Once you and your car were traceable, you were on what we pop culture enthusiasts liked to nostalgically refer to as “The Grid.”
I smiled when I realized that Kevin Flynn of Tron probably would have been ironically proud to learn the one vehicle in Pittsburgh and possibly the whole damn world to not be on that grid was a motorcycle.
Normally Prometheus was in the business of helping others, if in a round-about way. But right now, it was Prometheus that needed help. Specifically, we were in need of biocomponents. In a perfect world, android parts that were damaged or worn out could be replaced by simply printing them up using in-home 3D printers. But the problem with any printer of any kind, 3D or otherwise, was that it wasn’t the printing that was the problem, it was the material used in the printing process that was the problem. In the case of androids, that material needed to encase something highly radioactive – Vulcan blood.
HIC material, or “high integrity container” material for Vulcan blood was exceedingly expensive and hard to come by, and virtually all of the corrosion-resistant metal alloys that met HIC requirements for android components were both mined and then manufactured into parts overseas. When Nick had been in charge of FutureGen, he’d set up the supply according to the industry values at the time. Now that Vector Fifteen was in charge, the trade was maintained overseas, but there were rumors of manufacturing facilities going up in undisclosed national locations as emergency back-ups. No doubt, one or more owners of said undisclosed overseas locations were the people Zero was planning to meet with when he’d abducted me.
Whatever the case, at the moment the only way to get missing android limbs or “organs” was by overseas shipment. We’d already been running low on parts and Vulcan blood before I’d brought Ben in to join Prometheus’s ranks. Zero’s men had done away with most of our supplies in their attack. But as luck would have it, a shipment of biocomponents was scheduled to arrive at Lock Wall One Marina’s shipping yard tonight.
It had been one week since IRM-1000’s bounty announcement went out to the androids of the world. The good fortune of the shipment seemed too timely to not be a trap, but we were getting desperate. So we checked and double-checked on the order, when had it been placed, who had placed it, and how the shipment was en route to Pittsburgh before we determined the shipment was legit. We were pretty sure it wasn’t a trap – yet. The problem was, it could fast become one if IRM-1000 knew about it, was aware of how badly we needed it, and received word that we were going for it.
The first two were most likely a given. Zero knew everything. At least, that was what we were assuming, just to be on the safe side. But he wouldn’t just assume we were going to take any particular chance at a mission without some evidence to that end. There were so many other ways we could obtain biocomponents – such as stealing them from already stocked warehouses or raiding the “droid pit,” where androids were dumped when they no longer functioned as expected.
At the moment, Zero was probably having to weigh the probabilities that we would hit up any one of these locations for supplies. His bounty hunters were probably doing the same. Between the two, there was a veritable army of hunters on the lookout for us, but even armies possessed a limited number of soldiers. He and those who would serve him couldn’t be everywhere at once.
Hence, we figured that if we could stay off the radar and “off the grid,” during our mission, our likelihood of running into trouble was low.
We let the ship come in. But on our side, Jack and Cole got to work using their police connections to alter shipment records, cancel transfers, and make the shipment appear to have been terminated so no one would be there to unload it when it arrived. They linked the termination to the manufacturer, and Lucas used his voice mimicry to leave a voice message from the manufacturer to the shipyard stating as much. Luckily, no one would get a chance to listen to it until after we’d completed our mission.
Meanwhile, Nick and I got to work on the designs I’d come up with for the “scramblers” that would keep Prometheus’s members anonymous in public, even under android scans.
Androids were readily identifiable by their unique production serial numbers. Those numbers were like fingerprints, and they were imprinted on an android at a nanite level over and over again. To further complicate matters, once an android’s thorium had run through his or her veins, it was also marked with the same tag.
And as far as Jack, myself, Nick and Cole were concerned, any scan at all would instantly reveal us to be human. Then our DNA markers would give away the rest.
So Prometheus’s scanning disguise needed to either alter the android’s perception of their scan, or alter the effectiveness of their scan. Nick and I both knew that Zero would expect us to make changes to protect ourselves. But he had no way of knowing how or what we would do, and that was our advantage. He couldn’t cover every base. Therefore, if we did several things at once, our chances were good at evading detection.
In the end, we’d created two separate solutions, one for androids and one for humans. But both were called “scramblers.”
For the humans of Prometheus, we’d made a dozen small electronic devices that were attachable to any clothing or carried item. I planned to make them smaller and capable of attaching to human skin later. But for now, this would do and there just wasn’t time for further refinement.
The devices were approximately nickel-sized, the same as co-crests, and they worked by constantly emitting random signals that met with incoming scanning waves and altered them, causing false DNA readings to be sent back to the scanner.
For the androids, I was able to implement the scrambling capability into the nanites already in their silicone skin layer. While I was at it, I added my improvements to the bullet-proofing technology, hoping the results would be a longer-lasting shield. There wasn’t time to test it obviously, since it was a time-base test, but I was relatively confident. Eighty percent at least.
To say that the androids of Prometheus were excited about these improvements would have been a grotesque understatement. But the h
appiest Prometheus member actually seemed to be Jack. He was human and still very much susceptible to bullets. But with the new technology, Lucas wasn’t. From the moment I installed the new modifications into Luke’s android make-up, Jack hadn’t stopped grinning.
It was during the testing phase of the scramblers, with Cole, Jack, Lucas and Nicholas in the room that Nick suddenly stopped what he was doing and began cursing. When I asked what was wrong, he said, “How do you plan to get to the docks?”
The docks were miles away; the one chosen to sneak onto the boat and re-route it would need to drive to the docks in the first place. But any vehicles traveling in public would be marked and traceable, courtesy of The Grid. No one had stopped to think about the fact that we hadn’t altered a vehicle signature to keep it safe, and doing so would be very difficult anyway. There was no time.
If we tried to take any electric car at all to the docks, even our fake signatures inside the vehicle wouldn’t match the VIN. How could they? The scrambler only managed to send out random readings. They weren’t programmed to send out specific signatures, and even if they could be programmed like that, we needed a signature to copy, and it would take a long time to perfect.
If any of us attempted this, it wouldn’t take long at all for Zero to notice the rogue vehicle passengers and figure out what we were doing on the spot.
And that’s when I realized that the garage where I permanently kept The Wraith was less than a block from Prometheus’s front door. It wasn’t electric. Hell, it wasn’t even a car.
I thought about this like I was studying a light in the distance as everyone else stewed. Ideas were slowly unfolding in my mind, blossoming in my head like an intricate, glowing cross-word garden. I braced my hands on the work bench and closed my eyes, lowering my head to concentrate.
Okay. We might have a vehicle. What next...
There was really only one way to effectively steal this vital shipment for Prometheus. Someone had to break into the facility on the docks, make their way onto the ship, and re-direct the boat to pull back into the water and dock somewhere else, somewhere more private. Then we could take our time unloading what we needed.
I, Android: A Different Model Page 33
