Weaponized Human (Robot Geneticists Book 3) Read online

  Plato waved toward an area up ahead of them. “Somewhere over that way, we had primate supplement shipments lose mass eight times.”

  “They were beginning and end weights,” Zeus argued. “Those discrepancies could have happened anywhere along the route.”

  “But they weren’t all on the same route. The convergence is this region. Now come on. I’m doing all the work here. At least try to keep up.”

  Plato was sweating and already halfway through the supply of water he’d carried into the jungle with him. Of all the barren, lifeless places on Earth, why couldn’t this have been one of them?

  “You can thank this place for the air we’re breathing,” Zeus said, replying to Plato’s unspoken thoughts.

  “Quit doing that,” Plato snapped.

  Zeus stopped short. “Doing what?”

  “Replying to crap I haven’t said yet. Creeping me out.”

  Zeus fell into step behind him as Plato started off again. “You could have spent your years in seclusion learning about the world instead of picking up gibberish from movies.”

  “Blow it out your tailpipe, brainiac,” Plato countered. “I bet I know a ton more about jungles than you, thanks to movies. What did Charlie24 fill that big empty database of yours up with, anyway?”

  “Not a lot,” Zeus admitted. “I’ve been playing catch-up since the Human Committee rescued us. How much farther is it to this alleged lab?”

  Plato paused and took his bearings. The computer readout on his wristband reported their location relative to his calculated location for where a genetics lab should have been hidden.

  “Another couple kilometers.”

  “And they wouldn’t let us land any closer?” Zeus asked.

  Plato had just about enough. “Hey, thanks for coming. Seemed like a smart play not to come down here solo. But if you want to crawl back to your comfy, air-conditioned skyroamer and bug out of here, the path’s back the way we came.”

  Zeus held up his hands and continued following Plato through the jungle. “I’m just saying. How much damage could we have done to the ecosystem landing two little skyroamers at the exact coordinates you figured?”

  Plato grunted. “Welcome to Earth, land of committee hell.”

  An electronic voice called out from Plato’s wrist. “Incoming transmission.”

  “Don’t take it,” Zeus advised. “Let’s get this over with. Call them back later.”

  “It’s Eve,” Plato reported.

  Zeus didn’t even try to hide his eye roll.

  Plato was already accepting the connection. “Hey, what’s up? And why you got those goggles on again? I like seeing those—”

  “No time,” Eve snapped. “Olivia is missing.”

  “Missing?” Plato echoed. “What do you mean, missing? Have you checked her usual hangouts?”

  “Phoebe has,” Eve replied. Plato tried to peer through the scrolling and ever-shifting data from the reverse side of the display to make eye contact. “Olivia is missing, left no message, and isn’t available on her computer.”

  “Sounds like someone wanted some alone time,” Zeus commented, butting into the conversation.

  Eve shook her head. “That’s not like Olivia. She’s more responsible than that. With the uploaders out there…”

  “Yeah, yeah. Read you loud and clear,” Plato said, trying to sound reassuring. “What’s her last known location?”

  Zeus cupped a hand to shield his words from the microphone in Plato’s communicator. “You can’t be serious,” he whispered. “We’re ten kilometers into the jungle, on the trail of an actual potential criminal.”

  Eve relayed a series of coordinates and times. Plato let out a quiet whistle. Olivia had a skyroamer of her own and liked to use it. A lot. Plato and Zeus were globetrotting criminal investigators, and neither of them traveled as much as Olivia.

  “Um, you sure she didn’t just go off-grid someplace sunny and warm? You know, maybe swim with the sea lions or something?” Plato asked, trying to defuse a potentially unnecessary search.

  “There are eighty-two sea lions. They’re all accounted for, and none are with Olivia. Gina81 confirms that Olivia hasn’t been to the incubating center, either.”

  Plato scratched at the back of his sweaty neck. “Gee, I’m kinda stumped. Listen, me and Zeus are down in the Amazon basin, checking out a lead. But we’ll break off, head back, and put together a search plan.”

  “Thank you,” Eve said simply. Her image vanished.

  “Who put you in charge?” Zeus demanded the instant the communiqué ended. “I didn’t traipse out to the middle of nowhere, into the largest wildlife preserve on the planet, just to turn back when we’re almost there.”

  “I’m not in charge,” Plato admitted. He pointed to the blank screen on his wrist. “She is.”

  Chapter Eight

  Back at the skyroamers, Plato and Zeus prepared to part ways. The trek back through the jungle had been easier than the outbound journey. Their trail had been cut, ripped, and trampled behind them. Even a jungle took longer than a few hours to regrow its underbrush.

  “We’ll split the list of Olivia’s known contacts,” Plato said, tapping at his wrist computer. “You take the Americas, East Asia, and Australia. I’ll take Africa, Europe, and the western half of Asia.”

  Plato didn’t need to clarify the exact boundaries of the search parameters. The contact list he shared with Zeus spelled out exactly which robots fell into each agent’s search area.

  “I’m not taking Australia,” Zeus said with an emphatic shake of his head. “That’s not safe for biological life.”

  Zeus had a point. The crystalline brain might separate him from the average human, but the varied predatory species native to Second Human Era Australia wouldn’t care about that.

  “It’s only two robots,” Plato countered. “But tell ya what… I’ll trade you Elizabeth56 and Marvin70 for my half of Asia.”

  Zeus glanced at his own computer display, held in the palm of his hand. “That’s eight.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not afraid of the snakes and spiders,” Plato said with a shrug. “Take it or leave it.”

  “What about Project Hammond?” Zeus asked, raising one eyebrow and crossing his arms.

  “Wouldn’t mind seeing me a few dinos,” Plato admitted. “Even if they had to make up half the genome, I hear they’re pretty impressive. Never had a good excuse to check ‘em out before.”

  Zeus retreated toward his skyroamer. “You’re crazy. This whole thing is crazy. We had a potential geneticist by the power cord, and we’re off looking for a runaway who probably just went hiking without a communicator.”

  Plato pulled up short on the way to his own skyroamer. “Hey. Remember who we are.”

  “The saps who decided that working for a sixteen-year-old was preferable to taking our own fates in hand?”

  “Well, that too,” Plato admitted. “But we’re the Human Protection Agency. Hunting bad guys is great and all, but finding Olivia and making sure she’s OK is pretty much the definition of human protection.”

  Zeus snorted as he climbed into his skyroamer. “Next thing you know, we’ll be babysitting at the Scrapyard in our free time.”

  “Hey, don’t—” Plato began, voicing his reflexive objection to the derogatory nickname for the Sanctuary for Scientific Sins. It wasn’t those poor souls’ fault they’d been born a little malfunctioning. They’d been spliced, recombined, taken apart, and put back together. It was amazing most of them were even alive; plenty of their kind hadn’t been as lucky.

  Plato had saved so many of them himself that he felt a need to continue protecting them—even their reputation. Zeus knew it and kept using the term Scrapyard to tweak him.

  “Let’s just do this,” Plato grumbled.

  The exoskeleton beneath his clothes whined as it bore the strain of Plato climbing into Betty-Lou. The thing had been a godsend, easing most of the joint pain he bore on a daily basis, just as Ashley390 had promi
sed.

  Sparing a glance at Zeus as the canopy closed on his skyroamer, Plato wondered which of them was the more robotic. Zeus had a human mind trapped in a robotic brain. Plato had a human body that needed robotic support to keep from falling apart.

  Plato shook the thoughts aside and settled into the pilot’s seat. He was no philosopher. This wasn’t the time for wandering thoughts. This was a time for action and practical strategy.

  Chapter Nine

  Charlie7 joined the search as soon as he heard about Olivia. Emancipation was a heavy burden for one so young. The old robot wondered if maybe thirteen was too tender an age to be given so much freedom, even for one as precious as all the Eves.

  As a robot, he knew he was stronger, faster, and possessed infinitely more endurance than his two underlings in the Human Protection Agency.

  None of that mattered.

  What was truly important in this search for a lost or kidnapped human was this: he was smarter, savvier, and more experienced than the two of them combined, even adding Eve to the mix.

  When Zeus and Plato reported in, advising Charlie7 of their plan to personally contact everyone Olivia had been known to associate with, he wished them well and headed home.

  Home, in Charlie7’s case, wasn’t just a luxurious underground bunker beneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris; it was a luxurious underground bunker tied into the very heart of the Earthwide Network.

  One of the planet’s core databases resided in a sub-basement of Charlie7’s home. He had direct fiber connections to the rest. There were only a handful of other locations on Earth with the sort of data transfer rates available from here.

  “Good luck in your skyroamers, kids,” Charlie7 muttered to himself as he delved into the world of qubits and atomic spins.

  Into the data stream Charlie7 plunged.

  Chapter Ten

  The English Channel flashed beneath Eve’s skyroamer, lit by reflected moonlight. Her thoughts were no calmer than the choppy waters that washed against the white cliff shore.

  As head of the Human Welfare Committee and overseer of the Human Protection Agency, she’d already sent the three most readily available resources to aid in the search for Olivia. Between them, Plato, Zeus, and Charlie7 had knowledge, experience, and an understanding of human behavior. Mostly those belonged to Plato and Charlie7, but she was sure Zeus was plenty clever, too.

  Now Eve needed more help. Any favor she could beg or trade would be worth the peace of mind knowing her sister was safe. These weren’t the days of 10.3 billion humans crowding every surface of the Earth.

  Every human mattered.

  Eve’s protectiveness ran deeper, of course, since Olivia was her sister. Despite not growing up knowing one another, the kinship all the Eves felt ran deeper than a common genetic blueprint.

  Calming musical tracks intermixed by a twenty-first-century psychologist failed to produce the promised effect. Eve’s own thoughts drowned them out.

  Olivia could simply be lost. There had been no reported sightings of her skyroamer. Eve regretted now that they’d allowed the adventurous teen to fly solo.

  There was also the possibility that Olivia was injured. If Eve had shown herself to be the pragmatist among her sisters, and Phoebe the free spirit, Olivia was the explorer. Even without losing her way, there was any number of pitfalls to exploring the vast, undeveloped wilderness. Predators, sink holes, avalanches, and drowning were all possibilities.

  Evelyn11 hadn’t taught any of the clones how to swim.

  But the worry that crept most deeply into Eve’s thoughts was that Gemini’s warnings had come to pass. There were other robots out there. They wanted human bodies. And if any of the Eve clones were to fall into the hands of those amoral robots, they would make prime hosts for a robotic consciousness.

  Eve shuddered.

  Up ahead, she approached her destination. It was no accident that the school for the able-minded humans had been built near the human capital of Paris. Or, Eve corrected herself, rebuilt.

  In ages long past, before man had ever dreamed of robots, Oxford University had stood forth as the world’s first institute of advanced learning. Only fitting that it be recommissioned as the education center of the world’s next generation of minds.

  Toby22 tended the manicured grounds these days. Lamp towers scattered across the campus kept the place sunny and hospitable even in the slumbering night.

  Odd, Eve mused. Her studies had told that ancient humans had feared the dark for many reasons. In primitive days, nocturnal predators had prowled the darkness. In more modern times, criminal humans had taken the place of those wilderness threats. Side by side with those denizens were the imagined spirits and monsters of fiction and folklore. By why would the children of the Second Human Age fear the night?

  Eve didn’t believe in ghosts or monsters. The wilds were as tame as hand-fed kittens. If there was one human generally considered dangerous, it was Plato, and none of the other humans worried about him one bit. The only fear Eve held in the world was of the nameless upload conspiracy, shifting from body to body in the hope of someday recapturing their humanity.

  The conspirators didn’t need to work under cover of dark.

  The lighting in the campus parks made Eve’s landing easier. She didn’t need the automated piloting assist to set down smoothly near the dormitories.

  Holly30 exited the main faculty building from the far end of the quadrangle as Eve stepped down to the grass.

  Eve didn’t have time for her.

  Heading straight for the dorms, she had two goals, and the first had nothing to do with any robot.

  Biometric scanners at the door recognized Eve immediately and unlocked to allow her entry to the building. Another shortly thereafter unlocked the girls’ wing. She felt a pang of guilt that she wasn’t worried about Plato’s siblings at the moment, but for now, Eve just needed to see that Rachel, Sally, Theresa, Uhura, and Vivian were all right.

  Eve passed through a common room with couches and desks for studying, a game room, and a space for less structured play. She bypassed the gym and shower area. Then she came to the bedrooms.

  There were eight rooms in all: five unoccupied and three in which five of the girls slept, sorted by closest age. The Adolescent Human Privacy Act didn’t apply to these juveniles. For their own protection, the cameras in the rooms could be activated at any moment to check on the occupants. With the potential for hacking and dummy video feeds, Eve wasn’t ready to trust her sisters’ safety to technology without verifying the situation in person.

  But as Eve brought up the images on the door panels one by one, she watched her little sisters all asleep. Quiet and slumbering, it was difficult to tell them apart. Rachel had a room all to herself as the eldest while Sally shared a room with Theresa, and Uhura and Vivian shared bunk beds.

  “They’re all fine,” Nora109 said, startling Eve.

  Eve’s former chaperone was dressed as a university professor in a blouse and long skirt. The thick carpet floors of the dormitory had quieted the heeled shoes she wore.

  “I had to see for myself,” Eve said.

  Nora109 tilted her head in a ‘follow me’ gesture back toward the common room. “Let’s talk somewhere away from the little ones. Those doors aren’t soundproof.”

  Eve nodded and followed Nora109 to a space with comfortable plush chairs and low tables. A growl in her stomach reminded Eve that she’d been skipping meals of late and tonight in particular. She headed for the common room’s kitchenette and checked the fridge.

  “It’s a part of emancipation,” Nora109 said with a note of wise sympathy. Eve preferred to think of it as condescension. “You can’t expect to know where every human is every second of the day.”

  “But Olivia is missing,” Eve said, looking through a selection of dairy- and fruit-based snacks the school kept on hand. She selected a strawberry yogurt and dug in the nearby drawers for a spoon. “She can do what she likes, but we should be able to tell whether
she’s safe or not.”

  “Privacy is a double-edged sword.”

  Eve flung her hands in the air. Had she chosen a less viscous snack, it would have flown from the container. “Why does it have to be a weapon? Emancipation is about freedom, not hiding. There aren’t enough of us to get lost and hurt or killed.”

  “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety,” Nora109 said, holding up a finger. “Benjamin Franklin said that.”

  With her hands full, Eve couldn’t properly access the interface in her data-display goggles. She couldn’t confirm the quotation or research the purported originator. “Sounds like a bad analogy. How about ‘those whose species went extinct may want to think about being a little careful of one another’s safety, lest it happen again?’”

  Nora109 crossed her arms. “Eve, you’re being paranoid. You’ve seen for yourself that Olivia is the adventurous type. Maybe she’s a little tired of everyone stealing the pilot’s seat from her when what makes her happy is to see all the wonders of the world on her own terms.”

  Eve swallowed a spoonful of yogurt. “You looked after humans for years. Why aren’t you on my side, here?”

  Nora109 gave a mirthless chuckle. “I looked after humans who couldn’t feed themselves, or who had no concept of time, or lacked the judgment and reasoning to look after their own affairs. Olivia might be young and lack experience, but that’s what she’s out there looking for. Plus, Miss Smarty-Pants, she’s as clever as you are.”

  “Wouldn’t you rest easier knowing she was at least safe and not in the clutches of some mad geneticist who wants to overwrite her brain?”

  “Now you’re starting to worry me,” Nora109 said.

  “Good!”

  “You’re letting Plato’s conspiracy theories rub off on you,” Nora109 continued. “No doubt, there were some bad eggs out there. But the well’s drying up. Let Charlie7 and the boys play cops and robbers rounding up the stragglers. Surely no one is fool enough to keep trying to clone humans in secret, let alone upload brains. That was Evelyn11’s perversion, plain and simple.”