Robot Geneticists (Book 4): Rebel Robots Page 13

With nothing but a protein bar and a lingering queasiness from the drugs in her system, the little morsel felt wonderful settling into her stomach.

  “The truth.”

  Rachel snorted and briefly choked on her second grape. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am!” Charlie25 protested. “The truth shall set you free.”

  Rachel shook her head as she swallowed the next grape. “Nope. Not buying. That’s a quote from the Bible, and it doesn’t mean what you represented it to mean.”

  Charlie25 scowled. “I thought John316 had despaired of converting any of the Eves.”

  With a shrug, Rachel popped another grape, then answered as she chewed it. “It’s only 930,000 words and contains a ton of idiomatic references and linguistic roots. You robots keep complaining how smart we Eves are but forgetting to apply it to basic interactions.”

  “My apologies,” Charlie25 allowed with a slight bow.

  Rachel sighed and rolled her eyes. “But see? That’s just one instance. The more glaring one is the invasion of Kanto, my kidnapping, and the feigned politeness. Sure, now that I’m in custody you can act civil. You require my complicity. This is classic kidnapper behavior. Had you played it smarter, you would have kept Toby521 alive as leverage.”

  “Had I known how important he was to you, I might have done just that.”

  For the first time since Rachel had awakened, she heard the unvarnished truth.

  She wagged a finger at the robot as she continued. “You might have used Charlie13 as a hostage. But I know you can’t hurt him without undermining the heroic image you’re trying to project. You don’t have any of my sisters, or you’d have said so by now.”

  All bravado aside, Rachel’s innards were trying to decide whether to seize up or turn to jelly. She knew the alternative if Charlie25 had no leverage by other means.

  “I see we’re at an impasse,” Charlie25 stated.

  To Rachel’s surprise, he spun and headed for the door. As it slammed behind the robot, she dropped the bag of grapes and lunged for her computer terminal.

  DENIED.

  She tried an emergency alternate login.

  DENIED.

  Without worrying about the propriety of it, she tried entering Charlie13’s login ID, just to see how far this lockout went. But halfway through the input, her console went unresponsive.

  Rachel tapped and tapped. She jabbed the screen so hard her fingers hurt. Rushing to the door console, she found it likewise inert.

  She wanted to scream through the door at her captors. Instead, Rachel took a long, slow breath and tried to find her center. Meditation wasn’t a hobby of hers, but Holly68 had taught all the girls as part of their exercises.

  This was no place for rash action. Rachel was going to face trial and tribulations. No plan of Charlie25’s could wait on her indefinitely. Sooner or later, he would ratchet up his coercion as he tested the depths of her resolve.

  The wall screen flicked on. The 2D image was an overhead view of an underground laboratory. Creator—Evelyn11—stalked around an upload rig with a human subject strapped to one side. Which Eve it was, Rachel couldn’t say.

  “Screen off,” she ordered. Nothing happened.

  “Why are you doing this?” the girl strapped to the rig asked.

  “I felt it only proper that you understand your purpose,” Evelyn11 replied. “I’ve given you a good life. Food, clothing, shelter, companionship. You’ve been healthy and hale. That’s more than most get in a life. Now, with my crystal failing me, it’s time to pay back the debt you owe.”

  “Screen OFF!” Rachel shouted.

  She looked away, but the image was already planted in her mind.

  She covered her ears, but someone must have been monitoring her. The volume increased until she could feel Creator’s words reverberating through her whole body.

  “Let me go! Please! I’ll do anything! I’ll do whatever you ask. All I’ve got is my mind,” the doomed girl pleaded.

  Rachel knew who that was. The unfamiliar lab. This had to have been Eve15, the one killed while the girl everyone now called Eve was on the run.

  “Oh, shush,” Creator chided. Her gentle tone conflicted with a high-pitched whine and Eve15’s scream in response. The transcranial probes in her skull were resonating, sending mind-numbing agony straight to the neurons. “Quit acting so ungrateful or I’ll leave this going until the upload.”

  “I’m… sorry,” Eve15 gasped out, and the resonant pulse ceased.

  Rachel was sobbing. She hadn’t learned until later, but those same probes torturing Eve15 had been surgically implanted into her own head mere hours later. And one of the first things Creator had done had been to test out that obedience feature.

  How could she have been such a fool? Rachel had yearned to have those studs poking out of her head. Creator had shown her images of what she’d look like, head shaved, smooth skin dotted with a grid of little silvery protrusions. She’d heard time and again how pretty they’d make her look, how special she would be, until she believed it with her whole being.

  It had only been a matter of days before Ashley390 had performed the surgery to remove those studs from Rachel’s head. But the scab over that memory was torn off bloody by the video—and audio—being inflicted on her.

  As she listened unwillingly, Rachel heard Eve15’s death and subsequent dismemberment. Creator narrated, humming little tunes between observations for posterity.

  All Rachel had to do was yell at the door that she was willing to help. Charlie25 would have nothing more to gain by subjecting her to that archival “research” from Evelyn11’s lab.

  If she did, Charlie25 would win. Rachel couldn’t even be sure what exactly that would mean.

  Could Charlie25 have been correct that once Rachel knew, she would agree with him?

  No!

  That was the trickery. That was the manipulation. All Rachel had to do was demonstrate that no matter what he did, she wouldn’t comply. At that point, only sadism would drive him to continue.

  Rachel listened to the disposal process. Her mind, traitor that it was, couldn’t stop imagining every gruesome detail.

  She needed something to hold onto, some means of holding off the onslaught. If her hands couldn’t wall away the sound before it entered her ears, Rachel needed to erect that wall between ears and mind. None of the litany of meditative mantras seemed fit for the task. They emptied the mind to allow revelation.

  Rachel needed the opposite.

  She wracked her brain even as it continued to conjure images of Creator’s inhuman disposal process. What could fill her mind? What could focus her intent, give her strength, and act as a bulwark against the intrusion of Charlie25’s torments?

  Religious texts, movie quotes, and literary passages floated in her thoughts alongside acid rinses and bone saws. Everything she came up with sounded trite, passive, or brief.

  Then she stumbled onto one that worked best as a loop. She repeated it again and again. She’d heard it during a movie night at Eve and Plato’s but had gone back and read the original Frank Herbert text.

  “Fear is the mind killer…”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Eve had become an explorer.

  The undersea dome was ancient yet futuristic, alien despite being a half hour’s ride in a skyroamer from home. Its wonders were a curious mixture of fluid, otherworldly technology and the pragmatic ruggedness of robotkind’s machinery. The site could have taken Eve a week to search on foot or a lifetime to fully decipher.

  Olivia should have been the one to see it first. She had always been the adventurer. Eve just wanted to get what Charlie7 had come here for and head back to save Rachel, Charlie13, and the rest of the robots who worked at Kanto.

  Despite pressing business and the safety of her sister at stake, Eve’s curiosity got the better of her. Whether she liked it or not, she was stuck with Charlie7 controlling the only transportation that could get her topside this month. There was no signal strong en
ough to escape the alien dome. Freed from activity and information, Eve let her feet and mind share a wander.

  Charlie7 had proclaimed the site safe. Air quality aside, everything Eve saw tended to agree with that assessment. Certainly there were sharp edges and power conduits, but those were only a danger to the incautious. Pure safety was the province of swaddled infants.

  Eve’s implants scanned everything she saw. She disabled the buffer that eliminated junk video from her internal storage. The crystal data processor and storage units nestled against her kidneys would capture and preserve every moment of this venture for later dissection.

  Spires.

  Antennae.

  Something that resembled a dry water fountain.

  A spiral ramp.

  Several more similar ramps.

  Honeycomb housing pods.

  A modern airlock.

  Eve paused. Was this another way to the surface? Would there be a hidden, emergency submarine just on the far side of that pressure hatch? Clearly this was one of Charlie7’s additions to the dome. He wouldn’t allow himself to be trapped down here if someone found the tunnel complex and tried to corner him.

  “Last resort,” Eve muttered to herself. If Charlie7 didn’t have some damn good answers at the end of this story of his, Eve had a backup plan to get away.

  She hated even thinking of Charlie7 in those terms. He’d saved her from Evelyn11—or at least helped greatly in Eve saving herself. Charlie7 had been the one to find Olivia, to untangle innumerable committee charges against Plato over the years…

  Charlie7 was Eve’s best friend.

  She loved Plato, but the overgrown boy stood in awe of her much of the time. He was enamored of the past while Eve had to mind the present and the future.

  Charlie7 was the one who understood Eve. At times, he seemed to know her better than her own sisters did.

  Backing away from the airlock, Eve shook her head. “No. I’m not even going to think like that.”

  Stumbling as she turned, Eve plunged headlong into the twisting streets of a city meant for creatures native to a distant world. At least, she assumed they were streets. The system of shallow troughs running everywhere might have been anything from a vehicular transport system to an open sewer to a communal hydroponic garden long since gone dry.

  Intersections of the troughs formed bowls slightly deeper than the inlets. Eve had no trouble traversing them so long as she paid attention to her footing. Her fingers twitched, belatedly adding notations to the video as she recorded. These same observations may stand in a different light once she had time to reflect. Best to jot down her initial impressions for comparison.

  Near the center of the dome, directly beneath the zenith, stood a geothermal power plant that had the robotic fingerprints of Charlie7’s engineering sensibilities.

  It made sense.

  Presuming Charlie7’s story to be true, the robot rebels had tapped into the Earth’s mantle and vented magma directly into this very dome. It stood to reason that the same shaft could be repurposed for power generation with a bit more care and control.

  Eve snorted. She might not have been the lover of history like some of the other humans, but she knew the origins of fission power as a weapon. History’s cyclical nature never ceased to amaze her.

  DONE HERE. MEET AT THE TRAM.

  Eve blinked, though blinking did nothing to shield her eyes from the images projected from her own corneas. What had happened to having no signal?

  She slapped a hand to her forehead and entered a text response.

  ON MY WAY.

  Of course. She and Charlie7 had their own transmitters and receivers. They couldn’t get a signal to the outside world, but in the confines of the dome, they would have walkie-talkie access to one another on a makeshift private channel.

  Eve passed idle drones and drones performing mundane maintenance tasks. There was Kanto-grade factory equipment tucked inside twirling spires of alien architecture. She found stores of long-term preservative-laden foods from the agrarian complexes. There were piles of raw material and processing stations smelting ore and churning out basic parts.

  “What in the blazes have you done down here?” Eve demanded when Charlie7 came into view. He was already packing up the tram. She edged forward to see what supplies they were taking on.

  Charlie7 threw a bundle of fabric at Eve. “Put those on,” he ordered.

  Eve sorted the mess into a suit of lightweight padding shaped like a shirt and pants. There was headgear as well, shaped like a helmet but floppy as a winter hat. The material was smooth to the touch, with hairline ridges raised in a tessellated hexagonal pattern. Buckles, straps, and clasps all made a degree of intuitive sense once Eve oriented everything properly.

  “Does it come in any color besides purple?” she asked, not bothering to argue as she tugged the pants over her clothes.

  “I’ll put it up to the Aesthetics Committee next time I’m sharing my contraband alien-tech inventions with them,” Charlie7 replied dryly. He hefted a pair of strange rifles into the passenger compartment of the tram.

  Eve froze. “Alien what?”

  Her gaze drifted down to the fabric clutched in her hands.

  “Those creatures that slaughtered your—our—ancestors knew a lot about energy that the world at large still hasn’t discovered. I… uh… kept it to myself because I didn’t know who else to trust with the secret.”

  Eve stood upright, leaving the pant legs of the alien clothing bunched around her knees. “Stack dump. Full error log. What is this stuff?”

  To her shock, Charlie7 pulled out a coil pistol. Before Eve could process what was going on to object, he fired.

  The magnetics clacked in the pistol’s trigger mechanism. There was a fuzzy whoosh of air that culminated in an instantaneous puff like someone punching a pillow.

  Eve blinked. “What just happened?”

  Charlie7 fired several more shots in rapid succession, all aimed at Eve’s alien-clad shins. She didn’t feel a thing.

  “Amazing stuff. Eats kinetic energy over a certain threshold. Devil of a time replicating it and getting that threshold tuned. Go ahead. Put it on. Things go the way they’re looking right now, you’re going to have a target on your back.”

  “Alien tech is contraband on Earth. Only orbital science stations are allowed to—”

  “Spare me the lecture,” Charlie7 cut in. “I’m every exception to every rule. I designed the system. I rigged the system. I operate outside the system. I already know where your next question was heading. Yes, it’s safe. Hell, it’s not even a contest. First of all, it’s completely non-living. There is neither DNA nor that kooky alien analog anywhere in that fabric. But more importantly, there’s a good chance people might want to shoot you, and that stuff will stop a cannonball. Kinda wish we had time to play around with it… damnedest thing to watch.”

  Eve had buckled on the pants, discovering that all the catches and clasps tucked under protective flaps. She started in on the shirt. “How is that even possible? Conservation of energy shouldn’t allow it?”

  “Energy is converted,” Charlie7 assured her. “But exactly how would take too long to explain. For now, just accept that it does and study up on the xenoscience later.”

  “Here’s a question you should be able to answer off the top of your head: why does all this fit me like a mold?”

  “I made one set for myself early on. I made a suit for you years ago, just in case.”

  Eve was just about to open her mouth to ask in case of what, but the answer was obvious—this exact scenario.

  Instead, as Eve pulled on the gloves of the purple hex-grid armor, she nodded toward the arsenal Charlie7 had loaded into the tram. “What’s the story with those?”

  Charlie7 offered Eve a hand up into the tram and powered on the engines. They looped around and headed back down the tunnel they’d come by. “Oh, these?” he asked innocently. “Dark energy rifles. They’ll tear through that armor like it was m
ade of paper. And pretty much anything else, for that matter.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Einstein had developed the theory of special relativity where time dilated as an observer approached the speed of light. Plato had a theory that it constricted around him personally. By Human Era medical standards, he ought to have just been entering his physical prime. Nineteen years old without any of that era’s major vices, he ought to have been an athletic paragon.

  Instead, an aging and creaky body demanded rest. Plato slumped against one of the factory’s lift cranes and prayed that nobody decided to get cute and restart manufacturing on model KX skyroamer stabilizer fins. If they did, Plato was liable to get scraped off his perch and out into the void of factory that stretched farther down than he could see.

  Everything ached. It was easier coming up with a list of body parts that didn’t.

  Hair.

  Fingernails.

  That little spot under the nose where your fingertip goes to shush someone.

  There were probably a few others, but Plato’s brain was among the parts throbbing, chafing, aching, and swelling. Popping open his canteen, he sought hydration as an elixir to cure the most superficial of what ailed him.

  Heat radiated from his body. Plato could feel the updraft from superheated air leaking out his open collar. He pulled the fabric of his shirt away from his body between thumb and forefinger and worked the garment like a bellows.

  “I should not be too old for this crap,” he muttered.

  But those nineteen years on his calendar were pulling double duty. At times, it felt more like triple. Not that he ever had a blueprint to go by. Medical journals were dense as fresh concrete, but Plato had slogged through enough of them to know there had never been a case like his. He was unique, a special mutant snowflake whose frozen contents weren’t all quiet water molecules.

  Eve was so perfect. He loved her, but there were times when she just couldn’t grasp what it was like for him. She was so perfect, from her unblemished skin down to her ultra-efficient mitochondria. If she got hurt, one of the docs could fix her up like nothing ever happened. The concept that no matter what got fixed when Plato broke, it all fit back together inexactly, and the misfit pieces ground together like bare bones… totally lost on her.