Calypso-15

2 - The First Night

"The lab is under the university," the man said, a responding to my shocked face.I did know that drive-capsules were capable of going down. No one ever thought to accuse the city infrastructure of being government propaganda, so carefully created to hide the truth. Although, the time of accusation is long gone. There is only the Government truth.

"I see," I proceeded to take off my gloves and shove them in the pocket. The pockets in Mama's coat were so deep they were magical. It would take a proper minute to fish them out again. I was committing to being here.

"You've never worked with the Government before," he rested his hand in his palm. His eyes were a pale gray, shining in the soft light.

"No," I answered, and realized promptly that it was not a question.

"You still don't. You'll work for me, but I am a contracted to the Government. I trust your discretion. I create weaponry."

His thoughts zinged around his brain as he looked at me, utterly absorbed in me, but at the same time, he was somewhere far away. In his work, most likely.

"Like Runkle?"

A laugh like a bark blasted through me. He sure did not laugh often. The man sat back, a wide smile coming through ear to ear, Cheshire Cat.

"Runkle, my dear," an impersonal endearment, I felt fancier just listening to him talk, "is a fraud. The Government needs frauds like him to make sure the true work can be done in secret."

"He's lying?" I thought back to all of the ways he shot down the ideas of his colleagues. Was he hiding something?

"No, he believes in his own genius. The Government only needs to fund him, and he will take up all of the public mind. Meanwhile, people like me are allowed to proceed without scrutiny."

Like me, tinged with the jealousy of someone who had everything but the one thing they wanted. Maybe fame. Maybe recognition. Everything is a calculated risk.

"What kind of weapons?" I was eager to leave the topic of Runkle forever.

"Have you heard of the Calypso project?"

I shook my head, but this was a lie. Everyone knew that word, a prayer to the God of Death. Calypso, the blade which pierced through all. My father talked at length about who he thought Calypso was, a highly skilled assassin trained by the Government to take out high-profile political figures. Calypso, the reason no opposition existed anymore. The perfect soldier, a myth. Even my father reasoned that Calypso was a team of people, it was impossible for one agent to kill so many, so precisely. Calypso take you, a wish for an immediate death.

"Calypso is a project to create android assassins. The brief for my work is simple: to create the next generation of these droids. My work primarily lay in reasoning. Previous generations were able to follow a set of fairly complicated instructions, but they could never reason in the moment. That would be outsourced to an human. Now, I want to give Calypso the ability to reason in the moment, making it fully autonomous. No waste of the precious resource that is human time."

I thought back to some conversations with Papa. He was interested in this kind of thing. I humored him.

"Haven't robots been able to reason for a while?" The drive-capsule door opened to a charming corridor jam-packed with all sorts of plants. As we stepped out, I could not help but to touch one. These things were such luxuries these days. The leaf was soft, cool and malleable between my finger pads. The urge to break it and feel the liquid inside overwhelmed me. I thought to my little cactus back at home, sitting under a light.

"That would be be correct. Robots are at their core computers which make yes or no decisions, so we have only spent our time hiding these yes or no decisions under more and more complex parameters. It's like what Runkle was saying, they're mimicking. I can make it real."

Again, the dilemma. What are real decisions? Snake chasing its own tail, biting until it tastes blood.

"How?"

We stopped before one of the door which lined the hallway.

"More complex parameters," he sighed. "An emotional circuitry."

God don't want you playing him, Papa would say. Sometimes, when he drank a little more, I could see the explosions in his eyes. He would go quiet but his mind would fill the space with war.

"You're giving an assassin feelings," I said.

"It's counterintuitive, but it's more efficient that way." He swiped a hand at a scanner, and the door popped open. We left a forest for a metal desert.

The lab was barren but not empty. A long table sat a few feet from a door, its sides hitting each wall. A sleek black computer sat before a chair, lines of text falling through it. A large metal cylinder sat in the center, like one of those medical scanners Mama used to go in. Those same harsh university lights adorned the ceiling, making everything feel so medical.

"You are to sit here and watch the computer. That is the chamber in which the droid will be assembled. Every time the droid accesses the emotional circuitry, there will be a ding, and the computer will spit out the question the droid had, and the outcome based on its emotion." The man walked over to a cabinet on the side, and pulled out a notebook. "Record whatever you find interesting here. Although I don't expect the droid to use it for a couple of weeks."

"Where is it?"

Now, the Cheshire smile came again. He hopped over the long table, and asked me to press the space bar on the laptop.

The machine came to life with the groan of an eldritch horror. I wondered if there was a real soul inside. I wondered if it needed to be freed. After the initial startup, it began to hum quietly. A viewing window materialized on the side. A robot floated inside, suspended by many wires. It was quite large. The skin was a series of raised slick panels, exposing the circuitry inside. I was taken aback by its clearly feminine shape, soft undulating lines all led up to a face. A human face. Where the metallic neck ended, a human began. A human wearing a robot costume. Its eyes were closed, but it was clearly modeled after a very attractive woman. Or maybe just attractive to me. I fell in love with things so easily. There was a masculine tinge its face, a rectangular jaw. The lips were full, nose long but perfectly proportioned. Short burgundy hair was slicked down to the nape of the neck. I was most taken aback by the eyebrows, which were jet black and slightly furrowed, like it was in throes of a dream. This uncanniness was was not helped by the two human hands which protruded from the wrists.

"If a droid looks like a droid in clothes then I have failed. I hope you understand how important that no one knows about this. The government will not hesitate to kill you if any information about this work comes to the public."

The man took my wrist, waving a hand over where there were three raised lines of skin. Payment.

"What's your name," I asked softly.

"Wilde."

So began the first night.