Human Phase Page 4

  As pathetic as his suspect was, Charlie7 felt ill inclined to go easy on him. He’d been friends too long with Brent104 for sympathy with one of his attackers. “Mr. Farris, I presume you know who I am,” he began.

  Those haunted eyes glanced up to take him in. “Yeah,” Landry replied. “You’re Charlie7. Who the hell doesn’t? Least you’re honest enough to look like a robot and not try to pass. You’re one scary sonovabitch, and you look it.”

  “I’m not going to get drawn into an argument over chassis aesthetics,” Charlie7 replied. “Tell me why you stormed the field at—”

  “Pitch,” Landry cut in. “It’s not a field; it’s a pitch. You’ve got a goddamn quantum processor in you; use the thing. Terminology. Read up. I’ll wait the five seconds it’ll take.”

  Charlie7 didn’t need to waste the processor cycles. “I grew up in North America during the Human Era. If you’re going to call the game soccer, it’s played on a field. Now tell me why you were on it when you entered Watney Arena as a spectator.”

  “I got word from the docs,” Landry said, lip curling, brow knit. “It was a dodgy call, a clear ref job.”

  Charlie7 held up a hand. “Can we agree on linguistic boundaries here? You’re not British. Your genome is Russian. Your parents are Martian-born from American and French DNA samples. Even Oxford doesn’t teach the Queen’s English these days. Have you been watching archival soccer matches or something?”

  The fire bled out of Landry as he glanced toward the interrogation room’s door. “Maybe a little.”

  “Bringing back good old twentieth-century sports hooligan culture?”

  “No.”

  “Trying to stir the pot? Maybe get on the news feeds? Sounded like a good idea at the time?”

  “No!”

  “Is life up here on the red planet so dismal that you have to—?”

  “It wasn’t a bloody handball!” Landry shouted, slamming his fists on the table. He winced and fell back into the chair as he tried to rise up in righteous anger on a broken leg. Apparently, his doctor hadn’t installed a neural block on the injured area. He collapsed into his seat, panting, but wouldn’t let the point go. “Hand brushed the ball. One tenth of a degree angular deflection. Header would’ve gone in either way. Didn’t make a bit of difference. Wasn’t intentional. Ref just wanted to look out for his home-planet team.”

  Charlie7 could hardly believe his audio receptors. He had to play that last segment back twice before replying. “Let me get this straight. You think Brent104 fixed the match.”

  “Damn right! Stadium replay showed it. Analysis backed us up after the fact.”

  “And your reaction was to attack a volunteer referee wearing a type 75.1 chassis capable of snapping your bones like twigs…”

  If there was any residual sign of fatigue or dejection, it burned away on Landry’s face. “It wasn’t like that! You know when you just reach that point where you just can’t take one more iota of garbage the universe tries to dump on you?”

  “I’m familiar,” Charlie7 replied dryly.

  Realization dawned in Landry’s eyes. The man offered a forced chuckle and a halfhearted smile. “Yeah. Forgot who I was talking to. Guess you are.” He slouched back and stretched his hands out in a sweeping gesture. “So, what? Happy with the world you created? Step on the little guy. Muscle him around because you’ve got what he needs and you both know it.”

  “Are we still talking about soccer?”

  “I’m a geologist!” Landry snapped, pounding the table again.

  “I’m aware.” It was all in his profile, even if Charlie7 hadn’t attended Landry’s emancipation some twenty-eight years earlier. So many humans had trouble accepting a timescale in which their lives rushed past while Charlie7 watched. Time to remind him. “Your emancipation thesis was on disparities between Martian and Terran mineralogy.”

  Landry studied him quietly.

  “I know who you are. What I’m trying to determine is why you attacked Brent104.”

  “I’ve been waiting my whole life to see Mars like a native. Breathe outdoor air. Stargaze without anything between my eyes and the cosmos. I do my bit. I did the site surveys for the Mars Terraforming Initiative’s Site-2. Tomorrow we were supposed to be breaking ground. Instead, I’m off to Hydrofarm 7 to do grunt work for the biologists. Not their fault. Ned just needed something for us to do with no building materials to start the new Site-2. Brent104? He’s the problem.”

  The logical errors cropping up in Charlie7’s processors were the closest he could come to having a headache. “Brent104 designs parts for transorbitals.”

  “He works at Kanto.”

  “In a completely different department. If anything, putting another transorbital into service would alleviate the ore shortage.”

  “Ore shortage,” Landry scoffed. “There’s only a shortage here. Kanto’s got all they need.”

  Charlie7 let the comment pass. He knew the situation behind the scenes better than anyone. Robots were being outbred, with more factory-born humans than new mixes coming out every year. With the recent upsurge in natural births, there wasn’t even a modicum of control anymore over the imminent population explosion. Some wanted their new reactors before Kanto fell from prominence. Others legitimately wanted to starve the Martians of resources just to slow down their rampant, exponential growth.

  “But what did you hope to accomplish by attacking Brent104? What was your dream outcome if everything had gone perfectly?”

  “We wanted to teach him a lesson.”

  An analytical subroutine flagged that comment as incriminating. “Excellent. Now tell me… who exactly is we.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Kaylee and Alan sat on the couch, shoes discarded, feet tucked up beside them on the cushions, arm in arm. The video screen in their living room was dark.

  “I’m just glad you got out of there,” Kaylee said. “If you’d gotten better seats…”

  “No one was killed,” Alan replied.

  Kaylee pushed back, shooting him a look of incredulity. “Is that our threshold now? Not dying at a soccer game? Where does this end?”

  Alan shook his head and slumped against the arm of the couch. “I don’t know. I mean, is it awful to think we need a prison?”

  “Political prisons?” Kaylee asked with a scrunched nose. “What are we, Marxists?”

  “We’re not talking about imprisoning people for their political views. This is about locking up dangerous and volatile miscreants who attack referees at soccer matches.”

  Kaylee crossed her arms. “You think there’s a difference? I bet you a week’s worth of foot rubs that everyone involved in attacking Brent104 was a Humans First voter.”

  “C’mon, Kay. You of all people should know better than to—”

  “Call a spade a spade?” Kaylee challenged. “You might teach political science to ten-year-olds, but don’t think you can talk circles around me about stereotyping movements.”

  “You think Andy Wilkes’s Unity Keepers aren’t soccer fans?” Alan replied.

  “This isn’t about soccer!” Kaylee shouted.

  Both of them looked to the door in a panic.

  The walls were only mostly soundproof. What if the neighbors overheard?

  Kaylee left Alan on the couch to pace the living room. She hugged her arms close. “This whole planet is a powder keg. You don’t see it dealing with kids all day.”

  Alan kept his voice measured. “I see it. Even the teachers aren’t immune. There are only so many lessons you can teach about political theory and history without addressing the issue of colonial independence. The first settlers on Mars considered themselves adventurous Earthlings. More than half the population was born here, now. Many of them have never even been to Earth. I’m one of two teachers on staff who’s taught at Oxford—out of twelve!”

  A chill ran through Kaylee. “Part of me wants to just go home.”

  “Me too,” Alan admitted quietly.

  “
But how do I look Athena and Stephen in the eye and tell them that things on Mars got hard, so we quit?”

  “I’m sure we can think of something,” Alan quipped.

  Kaylee cast him a baleful look. Normally, the humor he injected into their daily lives was a welcome shine on the dull red planet’s drudgery. But this just wasn’t the time.

  “No more soccer games,” Kaylee said firmly.

  “Oh, come on.”

  “We stick to our jobs. We help Andy’s people put a lid on the revolution brewing here. We avoid big public gatherings with inflamed passions. We make Mars the kind of place where we’d be proud to raise kids. Deal?”

  Alan got up from the couch and took Kaylee in his arms, looking her square in the eye. “You’re crazy, and I love you.”

  “Deal?” Kaylee asked again.

  “Deal.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Eve sat up in bed, eyes closed, blocking out the distracting sight of medical monitors and the bustling of doctors and nurses. Tubes running down her throat and into her lungs kept her oxygen supply carefully regulated. A neural block squelched her gag reflex and prevented her diaphragm from fighting the breathing machine.

  Her arms might have been limp at her sides with exhaustion, but her fingers twitched, operating the computer whose display was active whether Eve’s eyes were open or not. Though her collapse had been regrettably public and everyone knew where she was, the Human Welfare Committee might otherwise have been unaware that Eve was on medical leave. Committee business came across her interface tentatively at first, but as soon as associates and underlings sniffed the first inkling that business was back to normal, Eve’s inbox flooded with the usual daily tasks.

  Elsewhere in the hospital, medical researchers were scrambling to develop experimental transplant techniques that would meet Eve’s approval. Just because she had an external mechanical system operating her respiratory system didn’t mean Ashley390 got to perform her hack-job lung procedure with its projected three-week recovery time.

  ETA 10 MINUTES, Charlie7 texted her.

  Good. It was about time that creaking old robot got back from his Martian holiday. “Don’t let them stop you from coming in, and don’t bring a chaperon,” Eve texted back. If she’d wanted eavesdroppers and hackers, she could have taken Charlie7’s report over long-range transmission.

  No. Some things needed to be done in person, even in the thirty-third century.

  Eve conducted as much business as the ten minutes allowed. She signed off on the emancipated class’s housing selections, chose a meeting date for a revision to the Universal Rights of Sentient Organics, and politely declined an invitation to the year-nine performance of Alice in Wonderland at Oxford. At some point in the middle of it all, a nurse came in and fiddled with Eve’s artificial plumbing.

  Without opening her eyes to check, she assumed it was either Janet220 or that human girl, Brenda, pawing at her. With the new chassis most of the medical robots preferred, it was hard enough to tell them apart visually. By feel, Eve’s old neurons just couldn’t distinguish anymore.

  Charlie7’s arrival came as a welcome relief.

  Eve opened her eyes. With the tubes down her throat, she couldn’t exactly talk. But her optical implants could display her words like a teleprompter. “About time.”

  “Sorry,” Charlie7 replied with a shrug. “I interviewed 827 eyewitnesses. That takes time.”

  Before she said anything sensitive, Eve needed to know that this wasn’t a clever trap. Version 70.2 chassis were rare, but that didn’t mean someone wouldn’t go to extraordinary lengths to deceive her. It had happened before. “Plato’s last words.”

  Charlie7 cringed—for her benefit, Eve supposed—before replying. It had only been the two of them there, attending her husband’s final moments. “‘Wait, that didn’t come out right,’” Charlie7 quoted dutifully.

  The corners of Eve’s mouth twitched in a smile as Charlie7 grew blurry with tears until her optics corrected for the distortion. “That old goofball. Fine. It’s really you. What did you find out?”

  “That I hate soccer,” Charlie7 replied dryly.

  “We both knew that already,” Eve flashed across her eyes. “Get to the point.”

  Frankly, Eve appreciated that Charlie7 wasn’t treating her as either a porcelain doll with cracks already showing or a test specimen in a lab. Whether he had a “treat Eve normally” program running or was just task-minded enough to ignore her infirmities and discomfort, there was a fine line between coddling her and wasting her time.

  “There’s a sizable minority on Mars looking to start trouble as an excuse to break off relations with Earth,” Charlie7 stated bluntly. “They’ve mythologized their alleged plight and cast themselves in the role of a British colony or Soviet puppet state, depending upon who you ask.”

  “Educational failure. No similarities. All this over a soccer game?”

  Eve wished she were in a mood to express herself more eloquently. Truth be told, unless Charlie7’s report contained some conclusion requiring immediate action, she was considering a nap as soon as he left. The effort of twitching her finger muscles to navigate her computer interface had sapped her energy.

  “Oh, that was no soccer game,” Charlie7 assured her. “That was a political protest that scheduled a soccer game as an opening act.”

  “Protest?” Eve asked, raising one eyebrow above the glowing words scrawled across her optical implants. “That was savagery. When did my kind revert to barbarism? How did it sneak past my notice?”

  Charlie7 snickered. “Oh, maybe 120 years ago, when some offended committee member pummeled an impostor by the name of Zeus to the point where he couldn’t walk for a week.”

  Eve knew the incident well. Hers had been the bruised fists on the winning side of that pummeling. “Point taken, but I want to know what’s going on with Mars. You still haven’t given me a good answer.”

  “‘All men are created equal,’ was the line I heard most often,” Charlie7 said. “They don’t believe it any more than a mixed robot believes he’s the same as all the others. If everyone’s not identical, someone’s got to be better, right? Well, some half-cocked band of misfits realized that robots and humans can’t be equals, and they’re starting to think they’re better than us.”

  Eve shook her head as much as her temporary ventilation ductwork allowed. “You’re as human as I am,” Eve typed. “Equality is evenhanded treatment, not equivalent ability or worth. This is a meritocracy, not some damned idealistic commune.”

  “Not exactly campaign speech material.”

  Eve scowled. It wasn’t worth the effort to type a response. He knew she only spoke so bluntly when it was the two of them.

  “Did you get to the root of the problem?”

  “Of course not,” Charlie7 replied indignantly. “If you want to know who assaulted Brent104, it’s on hundreds of vid feeds. Clear-cut case if you want to dredge up Human Era legal codes to figure out a way to punish them. If you want a simple answer as to why, blame Brent104 for over-officiating that soccer match. If you want the real, deep-down truth from the Oracle at Delphi…”

  “Yes. The last one.”

  Charlie7 smirked. It looked strange on a Version 70.2 chassis, one of the few that made little pretense of humanity. Most of the old chassis tried to look civilized, and the new ones were almost too human. But on that military-grade visage, his facial expressions always amused her.

  “Well,” he replied. “It’s because Mars is having some growing pains. They have nearly a tenth of Earth’s human population now, and they’re starting to learn that majority vote means they’ve got no say in anything. They’ve transitioned from a bright new endeavor to a limping, needy step-brother no longer content with hand-me-downs. Some of them are definitely agitating behind the scenes, but none of them admit to anything. If you want me to get to that deepest of truths, I can forward you a list of Human Welfare Committee regulations that I’ll need exemptions from. Also, I
guarantee you don’t want those answers badly enough to sign off on what I’d have to do to get them.”

  “No. I don’t. What’s your prognosis?”

  “Perfectly healthy,” Charlie7 replied cheerily. “Humans being human. It takes getting used to, but once you get a critical mass, unrest was bound to happen. The schools teach them to think for themselves, and that’s what they’re doing. The fact they aren’t doing what you’d like isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.”

  “Advice?”

  Charlie7 blinked, shutting off his optic glow for a measured four hundred milliseconds. He might fool human eyes into thinking it wasn’t a deliberate reaction but not Eve’s implants. “Advice? From me? They must have you on psychoactive medications. I’m the brawn. You’re the brains of this outfit.”

  Eve cast him a withering glare.

  “Fine,” Charlie7 said. “I’m the brains. You’re the conscience. If you want a peaceful, compliant Mars, ship the troublemakers off on a mining mission. We can hold them on Earth until the necessary modifications can be made for one to support human habitation. A decade on the edge of the solar system will give them time to cool their thrusters.

  “Of course,” the robot continued, shifting tone from grim to pedantic. “That would dredge up a lot of unflattering historical parallels. I’ve long called the Kuiper Belt the Robot Age’s Siberian gulag. It wouldn’t take the Martian dissidents long to latch onto that as propaganda.”

  “Dissidents? Propaganda?” Eve echoed, picking the wheat from Charlie7’s ever-loquacious chaff. “Has it gotten that bad without anyone noticing until now?”

  “People can say anything they like on the Social. Easy anonymity makes humans and robots alike bold, indiscreet, and inflammatory. That much was true even in the First Human Age. But if you want evidence of a revolution, watch for smoke on the horizon.”

  Eve shut her eyes.

  Somehow, she hadn’t expected to live to see the day that humanity fractured. She’d been born a curiosity, fostered in a tiny community, appointed head of the governing body that protected a vulnerable but growing minority population. Scattered settlements pockmarked the Earth, with stray, anti-social individualists sprinkled alone in the spaces between. Mars had five colonies ready to burst free across the surface the instant the terraformers gave the all clear. Until now, the disparate communities had all worked together under a common purpose.