Brain Recyclers (Robot Geneticists Book 2) Read online

  In a panic, Eve rolled the craft left. The sudden motion threw Gemini out of reach of the console. Eve then leveled off before gravity toppled the larger girl onto her. “Stop that.”

  “I wasn’t going to do it. Where are we heading, anyway?”

  “Someplace safe.” That was all Eve was ready to divulge.

  Hours passed. The two girls spoke little. An empty canteen took up a new career as a latrine.

  “Siberia is no place for humans like us to hide,” Gemini commented as they blew through vast desolate stretches of Russian northland. “We don’t even have warm clothes.”

  Eve angled the skyroamer down at a shallow angle.

  “I said this is no place for us.” Gemini’s voice trembled.

  “I know,” Eve replied.

  “Then why aren’t you pulling up?”

  “Because…” Eve let the conjunction hang a moment, fixing Gemini with a mischievous grin. “We’re not landing.”

  With Gemini distracted meeting her eye, Eve jerked the yoke forward and the skyroamer plunged into the Kara Sea.

  Gemini screamed.

  “Serves you right,” Eve scolded. “How do you think those poor robots felt—well, the second one, anyway—right before you shot him? At least you survived.”

  “These craft aren’t meant for underwater use!”

  “Charlie7 showed me that they work fine underwater. We’ll head up to refresh the air supply every thirty minutes. Other than that, we stay below the surface. No one’s going to find us down here.”

  “No one is daft enough to look,” Gemini snapped. But below the reflexive anger, Eve saw the fear. Wide pupils, heaving breast, they were classic textbook signs even an inexperienced observer could pick up on.

  Eve reached out a placating hand and squeezed Gemini on the knee. “It’s OK. I’ve figured out a real hiding place for us. A secret place that no robot alive knows about.”

  “Oh? Where?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Gemini felt a sense of betrayal as the garage door lifted, revealing a living space hollowed out from the back of a cattle transport. It wasn’t so much the implication that Plato had managed to hide for years under the noses of possibly dozens of oversight committees responsible for everything from land use to air traffic in the region.

  What grew the red in Gemini’s vision was that the rotten mutant who’d stolen Eve14 in the first place had hidden her in Evelyn Mengele’s back garden.

  Sherwood Forest was just twenty-odd miles from the Mengeles’ familial home. Mother and Father had taken Evelyn there on picnic day trips. Her brothers, too. What were their names?

  A tickle at the back of Gemini’s mind was the snapped thread of a memory, tugged loose and ragged with nothing connected. Two brothers. That much Gemini was sure of. But there weren’t any names to put with faces.

  Or faces, for that matter.

  Gemini realized that Evelyn’s younger brothers had been reduced to mere statistical fact. Nothing else of their existence remained.

  “You coming in?” Eve asked, already standing inside Plato’s hideout. Their stolen skyroamer, just a few meters away, was hidden under a digital camouflage net.

  Once Gemini stepped inside, the two women would be alone. To the outside world, they would have stepped off the map.

  “Well, are you or not?” Eve asked, pausing to stifle a yawn with the back of her hand. Gemini fought back chain reaction yawn of her own.

  What a day it had been. Gemini was exhausted from both her own activities and the traumas of her host before the upload.

  Gemini’s gaze traced the opening of the hideout as she took a tentative step inside. She jumped as the hydraulics kicked on at Eve’s button press. Then the steel beast swallowed them both whole.

  The interior was impressive, in a Swiss Family Robinson sort of way. Unable to live openly in a world that wasn’t yet prepared for humans, Plato had nonetheless constructed something resembling a home.

  Metallic walls were cold under Gemini’s fingers, a sensation she was still struggling to reconcile with the fact that until days ago, she’d been made of steel. Had she been just as cold?

  Eve disappeared into an adjoining room as Gemini looked around. Residue from old meals crusted the edges of a stove burner. Scattered silverware bore the texture of objects from a Protofab.

  An unfamiliar scent wrinkled the nose of this new body. “What’s that smell?”

  From deeper in the transport, a sonorous hum groaned to life.

  “Just got the air circulator back online,” Eve reported. “Most of the food’s rotted.” She shut the door behind her as she stepped into the main chamber.

  “You know your way around…” Gemini commented, trying to sound casual.

  “I stayed a night here with Plato while I was on the run,” Eve replied.

  “You?” Gemini said, letting the word hang for a moment as she processed. “Here?”

  Gemini’s imagination rioted with a maelstrom of images, all unwelcome. The very idea of that hulking monstrosity placing his hands on her little Eve14 made Gemini’s fists ball up.

  “Uh, huh,” Eve confirmed, ducking into the chamber on the far side from the one where Plato’s food continued to decay. Something heavy and metallic slid and clanged into place beyond view.

  Gemini was speechless for a moment. She’d never imagined any of her little clones finding love, either before upload or after. That just… that wasn’t what the world was about for them or for Evelyn11, either.

  She had to be certain. “What did you and he… do?”

  Eve poked her head from the next room. “Let me show you.”

  Gemini didn’t move.

  A pragmatic, logical portion of her brain told Gemini that Eve was inviting her into a smaller, even more restricted space; sticking her with the sedative syringe would be child’s play. The part of her mind that remembered raising Eve from gestational tank specimen through puberty refused to budge.

  A third nasty, lascivious district of her organic mind needed details. That was what finally spurred leaden feet to motion.

  Eve lounged in a piece of rudimentary furniture halfway between a futon and a beanbag chair. When Gemini clomped into the room, her young hostess patted the vacant half of the cushion.

  “Take your boots off, first,” Eve advised.

  The sweat-dampened socks made her feet chilly, but Gemini did as Eve requested. Warm fur greeted her, heated from underneath by an unknown source. The cushion encouraged a slouching posture that made odds and ends in the tactical vest dig into her chest.

  Thinking sensibly, Gemini could have whipped out the impact syringe at any moment. Eve had her guard completely down. The poor thing was exhausted, and who could blame her?

  Eve’s breathing pattern changed. Evelyn11 would never have put up with a snorer, but aside from that giveaway clue, it couldn’t have been any clearer that the runaway had fallen asleep.

  Could Eve be happy back in the lab? Not the original, of course, but a new one in the same vein.

  No.

  Freedom, once tasted, could never be forgotten. Evelyn11 had known that. She had planned around that. Everything in Eve’s education had been pruned to avoid it. Yet at the same time, Gemini would need time to study the girl before swapping host bodies. Eve would need to live long enough for a thorough re-mapping of her neurological pathways.

  Then again, Eve had already escaped one prison, albeit one whose captors had been lax beyond incompetence. She’d try to escape again and could pose no end of trouble.

  It was possible, with Charlie25’s equipment, that Gemini might pinpoint the girl’s recent memories. Images of Eve with the upper half of her skull removed flashed before Gemini’s eyes. The high-pitched whine of the surgical saw set her teeth on edge.

  Blinking away the notion of lobotomizing an imaginary Eve, Gemini looked down at the real thing. An angelic peace rested easily on Eve’s features. Gemini wiped sweat from her
brow and shrugged out of her vest.

  Somewhere in the little hideaway there was probably a temperature-control console. Fresh sweat cooled quickly, raising gooseflesh on Gemini’s exposed arms. Tapping the heat up a few degrees would remedy that.

  She glanced over at Eve.

  Rather than get up, Gemini shifted until she nestled against Eve’s side. The slumbering runaway murmured a few unintelligible syllables and adjusted her position.

  A warm arm slipped across Gemini’s middle. A spiky-haired head nuzzled against her shoulder. The old scientist in the fresh young body held perfectly still, afraid to wake Eve.

  Afraid? Of Eve?

  What an odd juxtaposition. At the outset of her mission, Gemini had been hunting Eve down to bring her back to the lab. Now she was wary of disturbing the girl’s sleep?

  Let her have the night, Gemini decided. The skyroamer wasn’t far, but in her current condition, Eve’s limp form might be too much to hoist aboard. In the morning, she’d lure Eve back to the skyroamer, sedate her, and fly her back to Kanto.

  Gemini fought to keep her eyes open.

  Walking and talking had come so naturally that Gemini had hardly paused to think about the success of the cerebral transpositions involved. The same neural pathways she’d used as Evelyn11 just worked. Controlling bodily functions seemed to have held over from the original host.

  What of sleep?

  Aside from a few controlled shutdowns for uploads to new chassis or attempts at occupying an Eve host, Evelyn11 hadn’t lost consciousness in her entire robotic life. Gemini wasn’t sure she was ready for that loss of control.

  Her eyelids grew heavier.

  Eve’s breath tickled the skin above the neck of Gemini’s tank top. What was she dreaming? So little life lived outside the lab. What experiences did she cobble together? What narratives could she tell herself? Was dreaming a time of puzzles and obstacle courses? Of being restrained, tested, and punished until she complied? Or was there enough of life in the wider world to fill Eve’s nights?

  Gemini wasn’t sure she wanted to relive her life in dreams.

  Fighting back a yawn, Gemini tightened her arms around Eve and was comforted by the precious girl’s presence. It was just the two of them. No Charlie25 could stand over her helpless form and mock or study her. Gemini wouldn’t awaken strapped to an upload rig, prepped for another experiment.

  She could stay awake.

  Once she got Eve back to Kanto, Gemini would do some investigating. Surely, by now some enterprising chemist had found a cure for sleep. Or at worst, Gemini would find drugs to allow her undisturbed, dreamless rest.

  Flashes of the things Evelyn11 had done haunted Gemini. Memories of washing the flesh from skulls and sliding steel spikes through freshly drilled holes in living heads made her queasy. It was the brain chemicals, she told herself. Her own human brain was filling in the missing emotional impact of those unforgettable moments in Evelyn11’s past.

  Oh, dear God, the things she’d done.

  Pulling the comatose Eve closer, Gemini kissed her atop the head. Even in her sleep, the corners of Eve’s mouth turned up in a faint smile. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

  Not long after, Gemini succumbed.

  She dreamed of Eve.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Plato wiped at his eye with the back of his good hand. The one still encased in its polymer shell was too spattered in paint to put near his eyes.

  Even with the fractures and restrictive cast, his right hand was still the more dexterous for painting. The brush was a toothpick between his oversized fingers.

  With each brush stroke, Plato held his breath. Lines jittered as he struggled to control the tip, leaving over-caffeinated streaks of black.

  Plato wasn’t ready to deal with a multicolor palette just yet.

  On the canvas, a misshapen portrait took on horrific shape. Instead of Eve, as Plato intended, it resembled an extra from a rubber-mask-era science horror movie. Eyes gawked, mismatched in shape and more surprised than humanly possible. The short hair ended up as the field of stainless steel rods that Eve had thankfully been rid of—but not Eve14.3 on the canvas. The portrait’s toothy smile promised cannibalism.

  With a sigh, Plato jammed the paintbrush into a jar of water on the table.

  Closing his eyes, he let the room re-enter his consciousness. Audio from a news feed flooded in, no longer relegated to pass-through status in Plato’s ears.

  “…Day 2 of the Search for Eve Fourteen and still no solid evidence of her location. Human Committee Spokeswoman Mary27 assures us that despite the termination of Marvin108 and John117, all efforts are being made to retrieve Eve Fourteen alive and unharmed…”

  Plucking the canvas from his easel, Plato crossed his quarters and deposited the malformed artwork by the door. “Come and get rid of this thing,” he called out, addressing the ceiling. It didn’t matter whether he whispered or shouted, spoke to the microphones directly or muttered into the washroom sink while the water ran.

  They’d hear him.

  Ignoring the grotesque Eve14.3, Plato retrieved a fresh canvas from a corner of his cell and began anew. Even if Eve14.4 turned out just as horribly, thanks to Plato’s complete lack of talent, this time he promised himself to at least center her face on the canvas.

  The door slid open.

  Plato froze. With the collar on his neck, he didn’t dare trust his instincts and bolt for the corridor beyond. Even touching it had proved provocation enough for it to inject him full of horse tranquilizers.

  “Not bad, kid,” a familiar voice came from the unfamiliar chassis standing in his doorway. The robot picked up his canvas and held it up appraisingly. “Give it ten, maybe fifteen years and you might make one that looks like her.”

  The visitor’s chassis was a style Plato had never seen except in stolen specs. “Is that the Version 70.2?”

  “Yeah, kid. Good eye. Your little stunt actually did me a favor. Upload Committee said if I was going to keep guarding you, they’d approve me for the 70.2. Waiting list for these babies is over ten years, and nobody has been getting approved.”

  The robot flexed a bicep, or at least mimicked the human mannerism of doing so. Plato was impressed. Not that the preening display wowed him, but he knew what that chassis was capable of. It was the power of an industrial automaton in a package sized for daily robotic use. The downside was an abysmal battery life. This guy would be in recharge practically half his life.

  “Sorry about the head, Fred,” Plato said, forcing a smile. “Now get out of here and burn that thing.”

  There was no one else it could be. The voice was off just a fraction. Plato attributed that to new voice modulation in the Version 70.2.

  “Burn it?” Fred55 scoffed. “They formed a Human Art Committee when the clones started taking art class. The stuff they make gets bid on and traded like committee favors. Why, just last week someone traded a custom-built electro-sport asphalt racer for a clay duckie that Olivia made all by herself.”

  “Wait… you’re going to sell it?” Plato couldn’t believe his ears. He knew all about money from pre-invasion movies and games. He just never imagined that he’d be printing it.

  “Don’t flatter yourself, kid,” Fred55 said with a snicker. “It’s the novelty, not the quality they’re after.”

  With a sardonic salute, Fred55 stepped through the door with Eve14.3 and was gone.

  Plato stared at the blank canvas. On a field of pure white, he saw Eve so clearly. His imagination painted in every detail of her face, from the gleam of her smile to the glint of mischief in her eyes. Though it never came through in paint, he always depicted her looking up at him.

  Eve was so tiny, so fragile. But as the news feed droned on in the background, rehashing the same details over and over with the most minuscule of updates, he knew one thing.

  Eve was free.

  Plato sighed and pushed Fred55 from his mind. Let them do what they wanted with the paintings. Eve14.
4 was waiting in that pot of black paint. Plato would brush her into existence with him, if not on this attempt, then on the next, or the one after that, or the one after that…

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  As pillows went, Gemini wasn’t the worst Eve had slept on. Fast asleep, the constant look of worry and uncertainty vanished from that Plato-like face.

  Much as Eve saw the similarities, Gemini wasn’t Plato. She bore none of the secondary sexual characteristics of a male and all those of a female—at least from casual observation. But like Plato, she snored.

  Eve tiptoed from the media room in search of breakfast.

  Hunger boiled in Eve’s stomach, loud enough that she worried the noise might wake Gemini. One sniff of the pantry had Eve slamming the door lest she ruin her appetite for the day.

  “Wh—what?” a groggy Gemini muttered from the other room.

  “Sorry,” Eve whisper-shouted back. “Go back to sleep. I’m just getting breakfast.”

  “I’m—” there was a gummy sound as Gemini worked her mouth. “I wasn’t sleeping.”

  “Oh.”

  The pedantic side of Eve wanted to protest that Gemini most certainly had been sleeping. But if there was one habit that Phoebe had helped Eve break, it was pointless pedantry that invariably led to arguments. If Gemini wanted to deny having slept, what did it matter? Eve knew the truth, and she suspected Gemini did as well.

  “Did you find food?” Gemini asked, still groggy as she dragged herself into the kitchen.

  Eve smacked her lips. “Mmhmmm. Delicious apples.”

  “So… no.”

  Eve huffed a sigh as she took one of Plato’s paring knifes and peeled an apple. “The refrigeration unit stalled. Even the non-perishables were spoiled. I don’t think we have anything on hand to clean it with.”

  “Just assign an automaton to…” Gemini trailed off. She took an apple and tried to pretend she hadn’t said anything at all.

  “We don’t have automatons. I was thinking ammonia.”