Weaponized Human (Robot Geneticists Book 3) Read online

  “Fine,” Eve said wearily, not bothering to untangle anything that came after ‘nah.’ “Just let me know if you hear anything. I’m heading back to home base.”

  “Roger wilco,” Plato replied. “Over and out.”

  Eve smiled at the silent speakers. He meant well, and just hearing Plato’s voice reassured her. But Eve couldn’t evade the nagging sensation that something was going terribly wrong, and she couldn’t figure out what.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Charles Truman had considered the outdoors to be a nuisance. It was the purview of park rangers, farmers, and children. By the time he’d been able to program a computer, the exterior portion of the world had been relegated to a wasteland between buildings.

  A millennium later, Charlie7’s opinion had shifted only slightly.

  The outdoors was a wonderful place to store all manner of biological organisms necessary to sustaining a living biosphere without them tracking mud and excreting various substances indoors.

  Canada’s Yukon Territory was someplace he’d never have considered visiting in his human days. As overseer of Earth’s rebuilding, he’d paid it scant attention, letting drone workforces cleanse the vast swaths of land. These days, Toby36 oversaw most of what was once the Yukon and Northwest Territories combined.

  No one else came here, and other than perhaps Siberia, the Sahara Desert, and certain parts of Antarctica, there was no better place for a lone human girl to flee the trappings of robotic society.

  Charlie7 stood on a riverbank and admired the view. Shimmering blue water cut between towering peaks tinged with green as nature slowly reclaimed control of the wild places of Earth.

  “Hey, Eve,” Charlie7 said, tapping directly into his private channel to the chairwoman. “I’m on the ground with a potential blip on Olivia.”

  Odd. There wasn’t a system confirmation of message delivery. Those minor pingbacks were so innocuous that they went without notice until one time they didn’t appear. Charlie7 checked his personal system log and found no error.

  “Eve. Testing. Broadcasting ID-only blast on multiple channels. Disregard.”

  Charlie7 ran through a diagnostic cycle and realized that nothing was getting through. Hiking back to the clearing where he’d parked the skyroamer, he attempted short-range communication with the vessel.

  Pingbacks arrived with nanosecond delays. He nodded to himself. That was working just fine.

  “Well, someone’s being clever. This is the best comm-jamming system I’ve seen. Where did you learn to design frequency-nullification hardware?” he asked the wilderness, knowing that wherever she was, Olivia couldn’t hear him.

  Eve had always seemed like the exceptional one, the one among her sisters with drive and ambition. But the younger versions were all, in theory, just as intelligent, clever, and inventive.

  But this seemed like too much. Even a prodigy couldn’t conjure knowledge from thin air. And whatever was jamming Charlie7’s outbound signals was cutting edge. The Jasons, Hollys, and other Charlies of the world worked on this sort of technology, and as far as Charlie7 knew, none of them were teaching advanced signal processing theory at the human school.

  Charlie7 looked up into the clear blue sky. The moon shone faintly, a ghost beyond the blue. If he needed to get a message out, a simple laser pointed at the moon could manage a basic signal. He had the means to cobble together an emitter that wouldn’t lose all cohesion before penetrating the atmosphere.

  But he had more important concerns. Olivia was out here somewhere, according to every clue Charlie7 could find in her digital footprint. The jamming equipment was only a further indication that he was on the right trail.

  Why else would someone set up an advanced signal-jamming system in the middle of nowhere?

  Charlie7 had ideas on that question as well, but the most obvious was that someone was shielding Olivia from searchers. Whether that someone was Olivia or an upload conspirator remained to be seen. She could have conspired with a robot and merely covered her tracks better with regards to those communications. That seemed unlikely.

  The most likely of all scenarios was that someone had lured Olivia to this location and cut her off from outside communication.

  If that was the case, then Charlie7 had no time to waste. Olivia was out there, somewhere in the Yukon Territory—unless she’d already trekked hundreds of kilometers on foot. Despite every robot on Earth knowing she was missing, no one had reported seeing her. If someone was going to catch up with her and bring her home safely, there was only one robot in position to do so.

  Time for Charlie7 to be the hero once again.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Plato’s skyroamer sped along, jetting up a wake from the north Atlantic as he kept low. The autopilot was engaged, maintaining enough altitude to keep from being struck by waves.

  “That was close… too close.”

  Plato was fully clothed. There was no maintenance work either at home or on his skyroamer.

  He’d lied to Eve.

  Fortunately, he seemed to have gotten away with it. The damping algorithm had scrubbed out the sound of the ion engines and the rush of wind over Betty-Lou’s hull. She’d been suspicious at first, but that was just the way Eve was—a scientist. Eve had been suspicious of apples at first, too.

  But the conversation had gleaned Plato one useful piece of actionable intel. Eve was worried about Evelyn44, and as chairwoman of the Human Welfare Committee, suspicion wasn’t enough for her to act on. The creepy human-cloning robot had kept her public facade in order, pristine to the point where maybe it was a little too tidy.

  Plato didn’t believe in clean or tidy. Anyone with that sort of time on their hands would put it to better use if they weren’t paranoid about someone seeing what they were up to.

  Mucking through the list of every robot Olivia had met was getting him nowhere. And getting caught going nowhere would be a waste of the Human Protection Agency’s best agent.

  This Evelyn44 knew something. That’s the message Eve was trying to send him without being able to admit it over a possibly bugged channel. If the Privacy Committee was listening in, all they would have heard was Eve griping about the ghost of Evelyn11 still haunting her and Plato not saying anything about violating his orders and continuing the investigation.

  He was clean.

  While he could have started checking into Evelyn44 from the terminal on his skyroamer, it wasn’t as secure as Plato would have preferred. Back home, he had much better security on his data lines. Plus, he was on his way there anyway to meet up with Zeus.

  When he arrived at Sherwood Castle twenty minutes later, Zeus was already standing outside, waiting for him.

  “Took you long enough,” Zeus snapped as Plato headed for the door.

  “Sorry. Didn’t you check under the doormat for a key?” Plato asked. He punched in the door code for the converted agricultural hauler he called home, and the door to Sherwood Castle lifted open.

  “Very funny,” Zeus replied. “But Olivia is out there, and every second we waste could be vital.”

  Plato sighed. Zeus was a killjoy, but this time he was right. “Yeah. So let’s agree to split up the names, then get back to work.”

  It took almost half an hour to hash out a plan that let Plato keep the area near Evelyn44’s island fortress in his territory. Evelyn44 wasn’t on the list. She hadn’t dealt with Olivia directly, which was how the conspiracy was keeping this so secret.

  Plato walked out to the skyroamers with Zeus, ready to see his partner off before returning inside to do his preliminary scouting via the Earthwide.

  But with the cockpit canopy open and one foot poised to climb in, Zeus paused. “I just had a thought,” he said, returning both feet to the soft forest soil of Sherwood. “Do you still have any of those EMP grenades?”

  “Of course, I don’t,” Plato said with a wink. “What are you planning?”

  Zeus ran a nervous hand through his hair. “I dunno. I’m just t
hinking… if Olivia is being held captive, I might be up against a robot. Sneaking her out might not be a viable option.”

  “You could wipe yourself, too,” Plato pointed out, aiming a finger at Zeus’s skull.

  “I know,” Zeus replied, looking down at the dirt and fallen leaves. “But if it comes down to my life or saving Olivia…”

  “I gotcha,” Plato replied somberly, nodding along. “Lemme run inside and grab you a couple from the stash I don’t keep around just in case.”

  As he trudged back into Sherwood Castle, Plato found his mood dampened. He was on the trail of Olivia, sure enough, but Zeus was preparing for a suicide mission if that’s what it took.

  It wasn’t long before Plato was back outside with two of the onion-sized electromagnetic bombs. He slapped them into Zeus’s waiting hands. “You know, I give you a lot of crap, but you’re a good guy, Zeus.”

  Zeus finished packing the grenades away in the back of his skyroamer and clapped Plato on the shoulder. “Thanks, buddy. That means a lot to me.”

  Watching Zeus’s skyroamer blast off in a wash of ions, Plato just shook his head. Sometimes, you just didn’t know someone until all the chips were on the table.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Zeus had probably expected him to take off, too, but Plato settled in and closed the door to Sherwood Castle. He almost wished he had installed the hydraulic ramp right side up, so it would raise and lower more like a drawbridge than a garage door. More trouble than it was worth to flip the whole house for it, though.

  The computer terminal was worn where Plato’s thick fingers tapped regularly. It had been old when he’d salvaged it, and it was older now. Robots built things to last, but they also liked newer, faster, better. After all, 150 years was a long time to keep a computer terminal. Still Plato had grown fond of it, even if Toby22 had moved on to better things.

  “OK, Evelyn44… what are you up to?” Plato muttered to himself over the display screen.

  Let the robots think him a dimwit. They could marvel over Eve—with good cause—and her sisters as well. Plato was no idiot. He was the smartest of his brothers, and he knew it. Even Zeus, who was more of a robot than he liked to admit, wasn’t Plato’s intellectual equal.

  Sure, Zeus calculated a little faster and his math always checked out, but he lacked the creative bursts of inspiration that set Plato above the rest.

  “Who do you talk to?” Plato asked himself, typing queries into the Social. He was using an alias, himself, and if Evelyn44 had any sense, all her shady dealings would have been done under aliases as well. But he had to start somewhere, and you could never tell when the easy answer was also going to be the right one.

  Publicly, Evelyn44 spoke at consortiums—lots of them. Most of her Social posts were in the manner of follow-up questions from attendees. She spoke on sustainable biomes, mitochondrial mutation, ocean salinity, species exclusion, and biodiversity zones. Other topics were so arcane that Plato got sidetracked just looking up what in the name of Noah Webster it all meant.

  Less public were her hobbies and social engagements, but it was the same low-security garbage Plato regularly scoured from the shallows of the Social. Evelyn44 was fond of fractal artwork, the music of Chopin and Tchaikovsky, and was a member of a club that created new systems of mathematics for recreation.

  “My God,” Plato muttered, shaking his head. “If I lived that life, I’d want a human body, too.”

  For his part, Plato had been watching the archival copies of football and baseball games from the early televised era. He’d built a script that filtered out the results and let him experience the pastimes of his ancestors as if there were real seasons in progress. One day, he hoped to reintroduce sports to Earth.

  That was a hobby. What these robots did for “fun” was self-flagellation.

  Cracking his knuckles, Plato decided to delve into the harder part of his search. The data was all there, floating in the ephemeral void of qubits, slumbering in the crystal structures of databases, and whizzing through the robotic minds who knew of the conspiracy.

  Plato just needed the right methods to access it all.

  Luckily, Plato had years of experience breaking into robot geneticists’ personal files. He’d even breached the security of an Evelyn before, which gave him a leg up on the archetype’s way of thinking. Every robot might be different, but the ones with the same designation weren’t as unique as they pretended to be.

  Plato hummed the Peter Gunn theme as he tapped commands into his computer. While he was an agent of the HPA, he didn’t feel like a secret agent most of the time. This cloak and dagger hacking always got his blood pumping. The only thing better was going around with an EMP rifle, handing out justice door to door.

  Setting a cracking script to run, Plato busied himself repairing the power supply on his primary weapon against geneticists.

  The EMP rifle needed a name, but to date, nothing appropriate had come to him. Betty-Lou had just sounded right the moment he’d flown her. One of these days, the rifle would have a moment like that. But until it happened, he wasn’t going to force-fit a name to it.

  Charlie13 had done a number on the power electronics. The battery was damaged beyond Plato’s ability to repair it, and several voltage regulators and an over-current breaker needed full replacement. Fortunately, Plato had all the parts he needed on hand. He kept tabs on the script’s progress as he swapped out damaged parts and soldered in new ones.

  “What’s taking you so long?” Plato asked the computer. It didn’t answer but kept busily chugging away, hammering at the systems Evelyn44 had in place to keep him out.

  Plato passed the time checking and rechecking his EMP rifle. The repairs made it better than ever since the battery he’d swapped in had a 25 percent higher charge capacity. He just hadn’t wanted to tinker with the old one because it worked so well the way it was.

  Dinner came and went, and still the script chugged on.

  Plato stripped out of his clothes and exoskeleton for a quick shower. As luck would have it, while he was standing under a stream of hot water, the script finished running. He dripped water as he ambled over to view the results.

  “Hoo boy!” Plato cheered, sitting down at the computer with just a towel wrapped around his waist. “Let’s see what a bad girl you’ve been, Evelyn44.”

  He stared at the screen. Here was root access to Evelyn44’s private systems. But the file structure was empty. Plato updated the system’s display settings, altering them to the more verbose display available.

  Nothing.

  It was blank. Everything was blank. There was no data whatsoever in Evelyn44’s private computer network.

  Deafening alarm bells rang in Plato’s mind.

  “She’d cleaned the system,” Plato snarled. “Or she keeps a dummy as a front.”

  Either way, this was as good as an admission of guilt in his book. Robots with nothing to hide didn’t put a trillion-synapse neural security grid in front of an empty file server.

  Drying himself and reattaching his exoskeleton, Plato planned out his next move. Jackhammering at Evelyn44’s data security had gotten him nowhere but the truth. He didn’t know what she was up to in exact terms, but he had a criminal and a crime. Connecting Evelyn44 to Olivia’s disappearance wasn’t recombinant DNA manipulation.

  It was time to show up at someone’s door to look for answers.

  Then again, this wasn’t supposed to be Plato’s job at the moment. He revised his plan to include the back door instead of showing up demanding answers. Plato was just going to sneak in, find Olivia for himself, and if anyone got in his way…

  Plato pulled on his pants and shirt, laced up his boots, and buckled on his belt. His gear was all packed and good to go out in Betty-Lou. The last thing he scooped up was the EMP rifle.

  If anyone got in his way…

  Zeus might be ready to die to save Olivia, but Plato was prepared to kill.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  In the
back garden of a lush estate nestled between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, Zeus sat sharing tea with Jocelyn15. The robot, of course, did not partake in the beverage, but she nonetheless observed the more social aspects of the ritual.

  The grounds were manicured expertly, and small, non-humanoid drones flitted about, watering, fertilizing, and trimming. The aboveground portion of the house was in Moroccan style, historically inaccurate but still aesthetically suited to the landscape.

  “It’s a shame about the girl,” Jocelyn15 said, pouring Zeus a fresh cup of a blend that had never existed on Earth prior to the invasion. The herbs were a unique hybrid she’d created from wintergreen, ginseng, and two ingredients she refused to disclose.

  Zeus added his own honey and swirled a spoon to mix it in. “I don’t even know why someone would take her at this point. It’s too high profile an activity for my taste.”

  “You think the Martians are involved?” Jocelyn15 asked. The stately robot reclined in her chair and cocked an eyebrow at Zeus.

  He waved away the notion. “Please… if anything, they’d have a lower opinion of this operation than we do. It’s sloppy. The HPA and Privacy Committee are like rams before the spring breeding season. They’ll butt heads until one falls off the mountainside.”

  Jocelyn15 covered a quiet chuckle behind a hand.

  “I’ve noticed an uptick in the frequency that your metaphoric imagery involves sexual activity since you’ve transitioned,” Jocelyn15 said with a snicker. “That’s all.”

  “New subroutines,” Zeus assured her. “I don’t have the neural receptors for serotonin. I’m just mimicking human dialogue, not being swept up in it.”

  “Who’d blame you?” Jocelyn15 asked. “After all, isn’t getting swept back up into the currents of emotion and sensation what this is all about?”

  “I’m a half-measure,” Zeus said evenly. “And the easy half, at that.”