Human Phase Page 18

  “And let me know how the reactor works out for you,” Jason90 said. “Part of my deal with Rachel was to keep her chassis cutting edge. This is the first T-E Reactor released into the wild.”

  Eve raised an eyebrow. “Not comforting.”

  “Sure you don’t want that chauffeur? Just in case?” Charlie7 offered.

  Eve fixed the wily old scoundrel with a wry smile. She stepped up to him on her way to the door; he had the path “accidentally” blocked. “Pardon me. I have a rescue to enact.”

  And with that, Eve Fourteen, the first unmixed robot in a hundred years and the first born in the Second Human Era, left Kanto.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Kaylee turned to the ancient robots surrounding her. Amongst them, Charlie7, Charlie13, and Jason90 represented over twenty-five hundred years of wisdom and experience. She felt so small beside them, so naive and insignificant. Grammy Eve had been a wellspring of human spirit trapped in a withering shell of flesh. A moment ago, the combined efforts of these three Promethean gods had unleashed that mind in a body reborn of science.

  “What now?” she dared ask.

  Charlie7 affected a beleaguered sigh. “Well, I already dispatched the medevac skyroamer to Franklin Hospital. Eve took my spaceroamer. Can anyone offer a lift?”

  Jason90 crossed his arms and studied the upload rig that had just produced the newborn Eve. “Anyone up for a quick vacation? I have this nagging suspicion that we’re about to get flooded with requests.”

  “Vintage racers?” Charlie13 suggested. “I have a 1963 model Corvette that’s never been touched by a drone and 1,300 liters of synthetic gasoline that’s not going to burn itself.”

  “Sure,” Charlie7 replied with an indifferent shrug. “Trans-Siberian Raceway?”

  “Make it the Yangtze Basin Speedway and I’m in,” Jason90 replied.

  Kaylee couldn’t believe her ears. “You’re going joyriding?”

  Charlie13 cocked his head. “I put in, on average, 164 hours a week on mix-related business. I take my leisure when I see fit. You develop a sense of timing for this sort of thing over the years.”

  “I haven’t taken a day off in eight months,” Jason90 added.

  Charlie7 declined comment with a shrug. He’d been officially retired since before Kaylee was born—before Eve was born, even.

  “But what about the people on Mars?” Kaylee asked.

  “Solarwide news feeds,” Charlie13 said. “Flag an alert if you’re worried you’ll miss updates.”

  “You’re welcome to come,” Charlie7 added.

  Kaylee blinked, dumbfounded. Now that they spoke of vacations and days off, she realized that she hadn’t taken any time for herself since moving to Mars.

  And yet…

  “Sorry,” she said. “Alan’s still in danger. It wouldn’t feel right.”

  “Well, suit yourself,” Charlie7 said. “I’ll pull a string or two and get you a transport back—not in a gel pod.”

  “Must be nice, having a robotic chassis for a trip like that.”

  Charlie7 snorted. “I have no clue. Last time I had a human body, only a handful of humans had ever set foot on Mars. An old lab-rat like me certainly hadn’t been. Breaking the atmosphere was for square-jawed military sorts.”

  Would she ever be like them? Would Kaylee ever be able to casually make reference to what things were like when “back in the day” was a thousand years gone by?

  “Can you find your way back to the landing zones?” Charlie7 asked as the others gathered to depart. “We won’t be taking the same departure point as you.”

  Kaylee nodded. “I’ll manage. Thank you. All of you.”

  All three robots turned in rough unison. “You’re welcome,” each answered.

  As she meandered her way back to landing zone Southeast Region-5, Kaylee’s portable tracked the progress of the transport coming to retrieve her. By the speeds it was taking through Earth’s atmosphere, she suspected a robotic pilot. No autopilot was authorized to reach such calamitous velocity. Fast as it approached, however, Kaylee’s proximity to the landing zone gave her an insurmountable head start.

  The time passed in a haze. So much had gone on in so few days. It hadn’t been a full week since Alan had half-woken her in the night with a furtive plan to spy on the Chain Breakers. Once up on the rooftop level of Kanto, Kaylee performed a few calisthenics, fully aware that her next few days would be a cramped flight to Mars in a spacero the size of a reclining sofa.

  The spacero arrived without fanfare, setting down a few meters from her and popping the canopy as soon as the landing feet settled.

  Kaylee stretched on tiptoes in her eagerness to learn the identity of her traveling companion.

  “Hi, Kaylee,” Dr. Toby said with a wave. That familiar, smiling face beamed down at her. “Hop in. I’ve got a travel kit with everything you need including your favorite cookies.”

  “Mom’s chocolate chip recipe?” Kaylee asked, struggling to process. “Dad, what are you doing here?” She addressed her in-laws with the casual familiarity bred by a long marriage and acceptance by Alan’s side of the family.

  “Transport Committee is a little touchy right now about trips to Mars. They don’t want lookie-loos interfering with the negotiations. You-know-who called in a few favors.”

  “You owed Charlie7 a favor?”

  “Actually, no. He still owed me. My son… your husband… we made a good charity case for Dr. Truman to pitch to the Transport Committee. Don’t just stand there. We’ll have plenty of time to chat on the way.”

  Four days. A hard, miserable four days of increased gravity from a constant acceleration outbound and constant deceleration upon approach. Six days was far easier on the body at lower accelerations. Two weeks and the trip was considered leisurely.

  “How long?” Kaylee asked as she approached the passenger side of the cockpit.

  “How soon do want to see Alan?” Toby asked in reply.

  “Can you manage three and a half days?”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Eve’s spaceroamer stabbed a hole in the void of space. Merry little warning gauges and readouts that she was aware of without seeing them told her that the human-like chassis was having no trouble with the forces plastering her to the seat. Reaching for the dashboard controls was like pushing through a wall of thick mud, but her electroactive polymer muscles didn’t jitter and shake under the strain the way a human body would have reacted.

  Not that a human body could have survived a force equivalent to three hundred times Earth’s gravity.

  Fear had chained her for so long to that old body. It was used up but too comfortable to discard, like a favorite sweater gone too threadbare to be worn in public. Evelyn11 had done that to her, made her afraid of the robotic mind. Eve had absorbed that lesson without ever being explicitly taught. She’d feared eviction from the mind she’d fought so hard to shelter from that predator’s vile plans to inhabit it.

  The body had died. The Eve she had always known lived on.

  Somewhere couched within that revelation lay the groundwork for undoing Ned Lund’s core philosophy. He wanted to cast robotkind as villains. Certainly, they had their faults. Some had a great many. Most of the worst among them had been culled. For all Eve knew, some had gotten away with even worse crimes and either ceased their predations upon humans or disguised them so well that over a hundred years of the Human Welfare Committee’s vigilance had failed to expose them.

  But robots weren’t all bad any more than all humans were. Frankly, Eve dared say that robots were the less likely troublemakers.

  Fast as the spaceroamer was, she couldn’t outrun the light speed transmissions of the news feeds across the Solarwide. News of her disappearance from the hospital had stirred a furor. Seeping past the frothing noise of panicked admirers of hers, word spread about the change of her vote on the human upload ban.

  “Good gracious,” Eve muttered aloud, still marveling at the ease with which speech came wh
en tired old lungs weren’t required. “They’re suggesting someone kidnapped me to alter my vote…

  “Well, fine. Maybe they did. But I can’t go letting them tear the planet apart looking form me.”

  Eve keyed in a transmission to all the major news feed purveyors on Earth—Mars might get word indirectly, but some minor element of surprise still struck her fancy. “To whom it may concern: My end of life plans have been thrown like dandelion fluff on the wind thanks to this business on Mars. My choices became to die and let two worlds move on without me, groping along like cave fish in a maze, or to allow myself to become a guinea pig for a process I’ve long resisted so I could head off to Mars to put an end to this nonsense myself. Anyone who knows my longstanding position on nonsense can well imagine how I chose.

  “If anyone is of a mind to turn over rocks or break down doors looking for me, kindly find a better use for your time. I shall next be available for public gaping and ogling at the Curiosity colony on Mars.”

  She cut the transmission with a harrumph.

  Charlie7 could fuss over her. He’d earned the right. Eve would be damned if Earth was going to turn into a publicity circus on her behalf, though. She’d return soon enough and set about cleaning up the mess with a mop and bucket. In the meantime, she had a job to do.

  Mars was fast approaching. Time to call ahead.

  “Curiosity colony, this is Eve Fourteen. ETA two hours, nineteen minutes, eleven seconds.”

  After accounting for the transition delay, the response was immediate. “Please repeat. Confirm passenger identity. Last known location of Eve Fourteen is Franklin Hospital on Earth.”

  “Check the Earth news feeds. Just have Vehicle Airlock-7 clear for the time of my arrival.”

  The wait was longer the second time around. “Um, wow. That’s a lot to take in. Yeah. I can have Airlock-7 ready when you get here. So… if you don’t mind me asking… what’s it like?”

  Eve couldn’t put a name to the voice even with her memories all stored and searchable. Presumably, the tongue-tied gentleman on the other end of the transmission was a product of Martian upbringing. “I do mind. Thank you for checking before proceeding to ask anyway. Eve out.”

  She might be a robot now and not some balsa wood skeleton for doctors to scuttle behind like the sweeper at a horse parade, but that didn’t mean her time had become a commodity subject to casual waste. Besides, that was a highly personal question and one she had yet to explore to her own satisfaction. When she felt the time right to ruminate on it with others, it would be in the company of geriatric robots or her own close friends and family, not some stranger’s voice over a speaker.

  Her instinct was to relax, to slouch in her seat and browse the Solarwide on topics that might educate her in preparation for her upcoming trials. But this body couldn’t relax. This mind was a watch spring wound too tight, ready to leap and pounce and zip off in a billion directions at once.

  So instead of relaxing, as Eve shot at cataclysmic speed through the cosmos, she indexed her new computer core.

  Chapter Fifty

  Alan sat beside Abby in the audience of the Arthur Miller Theater, dabbing at her forehead with a damp cloth. The fabric had been torn from the hem of his inconveniently well-made hostage tunic. The water had come from his lunch ration. Whether his ministrations did anything, it was hard to tell. Alan had no first aid training, and there wasn’t any medical scanner around for him to use.

  They’d drugged her. Whether it was the Chain Breakers’ doing or some clever guesswork by the officials on the outside dosing her food, they’d gotten a sedative slipped into her system. He suspected the children doing the deliveries had intervened, reporting the severity of Abby’s pain and soliciting help to ease it.

  “Everything’s going to be all right,” Alan whispered to her, though he knew she couldn’t hear him. The hand mopping his grandmother-in-law’s forehead trembled.

  I can’t deal with Ned Lund, he told himself. But I have to. None of the others show any sign that they’ll do it.

  Alice was picking at a meal that had gone cold an hour ago. Kripesh was catatonic. Hans and Kevin played checkers with scraps of bread crust and stale potato chips for pieces, ignoring the other hostages. Dawn had her eyes closed, lips moving silently—in prayer or meditation, Alan guessed. The rest were either sleeping or pretending to.

  Ned’s boots beat the floor like the drums of an invading army.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded.

  Alan looked up, checking to see whether the leader of the Chain Breakers might possibly be focusing his fury elsewhere. His hopes sank when he met Ned’s glare without meaning to.

  “She’s out cold,” Alan said. “Overwrought? Drugged? I’m no doctor.”

  Ned jabbed a finger at the comatose Abby, stopping just short of a bruising impact with her temple. “This… this isn’t what I need right now. I got confirmation that all those Martians stuck in Earth’s brainwashing camp are coming back. She’s getting results. Damn me six ways if I’m going back to waiting on Earth to send someone who can deal.”

  “She’s old,” Alan replied lamely. “There’s only so much she can take. I’m sure she’ll wake up soon.” Soon was a comfortably flexible term.

  Ned shook her by the shoulder. Whether he was imagining it or not, Alan thought he could hear joints grinding with Abby’s every limp motion.

  Alan thrust Ned’s hand aside. No sooner had he separated the terraformer from Abby but that hand came and slapped him across the face. “Don’t you touch me!”

  “You need a negotiator,” Alan said, blinking to clear his vision and dabbing at the side of his face to check for blood. “Let me talk to Dana.”

  “You?” Ned asked with a snort. “If I wanted some carpet-bagging Martian wannabe acting as a go-between, I’d have used your wife. I need someone with authority, someone who can get those Earthbound committees off their collective asses to deliver what I asked for.”

  Alan couldn’t take it anymore. “Maybe they’ll send Charlie7,” he said through his teeth.

  He cringed, expecting another blow from Ned’s hand.

  Instead, Ned chuckled. “Let ‘em try. I don’t care how fast that black chassis of his is. My thumb’s faster.” He pulled out the bomb collar remote.

  Alan’s hand went instantly to his neck, as if laying a hand on the device might do the least bit to save him if it went off.

  “Maybe…” Ned said. “Maybe it’s time to show them that if they expect to dole out items from my list one by one, they’re going to have to pick up the pace. If Abbigail Fourteen would rather nap than haggle, maybe it’s time I wiped another robot.”

  Alan shook his head. As best he knew, the only one they’d killed had been the robot Ned wanted to frame Alan for murdering. That seemed like a lifetime ago.

  “Don’t,” Alan said. “Please don’t.”

  “Then wake her up,” Ned ordered.

  Alan patted Abby’s cheek. “Abby?” he whispered. “I can’t do this. I need you. We need you. One of the robots is going to die unless you wake up and do something.”

  Ned scratched at the short beard he’d grown during his time away from civilized amenities. “Maybe I’ll make you pick,” he mused. “Guess a number, one to five.”

  Alan swallowed and shook his head. “Abby,” he pleaded. “Please.”

  “Pick one,” Ned insisted. “Or I’ll wipe two of them. All the same to me. Maybe one and a half, since one’s a defective anyway.”

  Alan looked up. The question was clear in his eyes.

  “Everyone knows Toby521’s not right in the head,” Ned said. “Maybe I’ll just put him out of his misery and some other poor crate of spare circuits.”

  There was just no getting around that Alan had a soft spot for Toby archetypes. He’d been raised by the original Toby. Dr. Toby had been every bit the father to Alan despite there being no biological connection between them. All the Toby mixes held a shred of that father figure
in them.

  “You wouldn’t hurt a Toby,” Alan said with tears in his eyes.

  “Superstitious Earthling nonsense,” Ned scolded. “Nobody needs Tobies on Mars. We’re not afraid to work with our hands. And don’t give me the saline leaks over some robot. They’re not real people. They just think they are.”

  A shout from up on stage turned both Ned and Alan’s heads.

  “Boss, we… we’ve got a problem!” It was Wil, and the nervous stammer wasn’t like him at all.

  Ned perked up. “Are they trying to force their way in?” He was already headed for the steps onto the stage. Despite the prospect of violence, Alan felt thankful to be out of the line of Ned’s ire.

  “No,” Wil shouted back. “A new negotiator.”

  “Well,” Ned said, pulling up short in the main aisle. A grin broke out on his face. “That’s more like it. Someone who can move those good-for-nothing committee chairs, you think?”

  “It’s Eve Fourteen,” Wil replied.

  Alan watched the Chain Breaker struggle to process that name. At first, the two words struck him and refused to enter his ears. Then he blinked, perhaps trying to guess what might have been said that sounded like “Eve Fourteen” but wasn’t. Then reality set in, and Ned’s jaw hung open.

  Wil cleared his throat. “She’s actually… already in the theater.”

  Chapter Fifty-One

  There were times when politeness dictated a certain amount of decorum. At other times, Eve judged that showing up at someone’s doorstep unexpectedly in the chassis of a robot that looked like a younger version of yourself was the way to go.

  The Martian colonial officials hadn’t known what to do with her. With a few items from Charlie7’s spaceroamer tucked away in her Kanto-supplied gray jumpsuit, Eve marched past the cordon and told everyone to keep out of her way.