Almost Human

Chapter 11

The pristine light of early morning glared off the large screen that the national news was playing on.  It was an emergency broadcast that had been playing for hours and was undoubtedly going to be playing for many, many hours to come. 

Andrew tipped himself backwards in his chair, balancing on two legs, using his legs on the table as leverage.  Jack was pouring a carefully measured amount of cream into his coffee.  Veda had a large spread of parts in front of her as she finished off a slightly altered model of her BAS that she started mostly from scratch last night.  She had too much on her mind to sleep, so she turned to her hands to take the thoughts away.

The three, plus a partially finished android, were in Ed’s kitchen, now feeling eerily deserted despite the grouping. 

The newscaster on the television was going on about the magnitude of the attack that happened last night.  She went on and on about how this would shape the world of technology, even the world at large, for generations to come.  It had come to the public’s knowledge that the Big Three were so completely obliterated by whatever was uploaded to their central processors that it was impossible to fix it.  Judging by the sudden and extreme drop of their stock prices, everyone was doubting that they would ever build up the momentum to fix it, ever.  Everyone in the room was satisfied with that.

There were interviews of small business robotic engineers.  They were all hiding their ecstasy poorly.  It really wasn’t a secret that any engineer who wanted to make it on his own was oppressed by the Big Three.  This was finally the opening they had been waiting for.  It was a miracle. 

The newscasters were all trying to remain neutral.  They had the people cheering for whoever organized the attack and singing their praises.  They had the government representatives denouncing them and calling the attack the largest act of domestic terror in decades.  But even these representatives were starting to lose their vehemence in their denunciations.  They too knew that the Big Three’s power was fading fast. 

Veda put the last piece of her android in and let it go off and discover the world around it.  It stared amazed at every object that appeared in its path.  Veda watched it with mild detachment. 

The small transmitter Veda always had with her, a safe means of communication with others, lit up and displayed an encoded message.  Andrew immediately knew what it was.  It was another message from Sam.  He had been sending new ones every fifteen minutes since dawn.  He was anxious for Veda to come home and show him that she was safe.  She had yet to tell him about Ed’s death. 

All of the androids that had escaped from the police attack had made it back safely to Veda’s lab in one of the early hours of the morning before the sun rose.  Sam had already set about sending the damaged ones to be repaired.  The rest were being looked over thoroughly by the PALMs and were being tuned to perfect condition after the strenuous task of destroying a fleet of robots last night. 

All of them had promised to keep Ed’s death secret from Sam until Veda told him.  They were all consumed by being unable to save one of Veda’s closest friends.  As a result, there was an eerie silence over the group as they were checked on by their fellow androids.  Sam walked among them, worried about each’s safety and wellbeing.  He knew that they were keeping something from him.  He knew that Veda was hiding something too.  She had been suspiciously lacking in detail whenever he asked her a question about how everything had gone.  Something was clearly weighing heavily on her mind. 

Sam continued to pass time with useless activities, doing any menial task he could think of.  He ran out of everything to do and still, Veda wouldn’t say when she was coming back.  He took a few of the dogs out and played with them.  Even though it usually brought him immense joy to do so, today, it was barely making him smile.  The dogs crowded around him and whined in their metallic voices.  They knew something was bothering him.  Sam ran his hand aimlessly over their sleek body panels.  He sat down on the rug in the living room and the dogs all curled up around him.  He laid back on them, feeling slightly comforted by their body heat.  He had not slept long last night, and the few hours he got were fitful.  He felt his eyelids becoming heavier by the second until he could no longer keep his eyes open.  He cuddled up with the dogs and fell to sleep.  That was the best way to pass the hours before he could see Veda again and confront what was unspoken between them.  If he slept, he could dream about happy things until Veda got back to make everything happen again.

A team of the world’s top technological genii stood around the central processor at General Robotics.  They were all sharing a respectful and shocked revelation.

“What is it?” one of the CEOs watching over them barked out.  He was at wit’s end.  This was the end for him.  All he could do was gather up his savings, run for the tropics, and retire early. 

“There’s nothing that we can do here to prove who did this,” one of the braver people spoke up.

“What do you mean?”

“This program is way above anything we’ve ever come across.  It’s the highest technology there is, without a doubt.  Real innovation.”

“Well, just tell me what it did.”

“More or less, it exported all of the data on your processor to an outside group and proceeded to erase everything permanently.  It even learned how your supposedly invulnerable-to-viruses system worked and destroyed it with a self-adapting virus.”

The CEOs gritted their teeth and stared into space angrily.  Everything had gone to waste.  Their entire margin for profit was gone.  They knew that their engineers wouldn’t work completely off the network, nor would they want to now.  Johnson died – he had been the one who organized this whole thing.  That sent a bad message to the other engineers, inside the company and across the country.  This was bad. 

The story was the same at Chrystaline.  One of the employees was angrily reiterating his story of seeing some android he’d never seen before destroying one of the sentries.  It was an android unlike anything he had known existed.  It scared him to see its form, echoing that of a human, moving so fluidly, wreaking havoc so elegantly.  He was a recently recruited robotics engineer who had spent his whole life looking for an inspiration, looking for the spark that could create an android that was alive.

He was also insisting that he had tried to alert everyone but the security system was down.  The group of security technicians and the young engineer were fighting for almost an hour over whether or not the system was actually down.  The security technicians all swore that when they ran their hourly tests, checking over the entire building’s security field for any holes or malfunctions, nothing had popped up.  Even the veteran of the team swore that nothing went wrong all night until the central processor was destroyed. 

There was still the irrefutable evidence of a destroyed sentry in the main hall and three more in another hallway leading up to the central processor.  There was only a husk left of the android that the young man said he saw.  Its body had been decomposed from the inside out.  All of its operating systems were destroyed beyond reconfiguration.  From the remainders of its exterior, the young engineer could see that one of its legs was badly injured.  The plastic sheath over its thigh had been torn away by one of the sentries and the metal muscle underneath was so badly gouged that the engineer doubted that it could walk.  That didn’t explain why it had decomposed like it had, though.  The young engineer felt some kind of remnant emotion in the core of his chest when he looked at the scene in the hallway of the destroyed machines.  There was a sadness there.

Fjord’s people were frantically trying to gather enough evidence to launch a lawsuit against whoever had broken in.  Their problem was that there was nothing.

“It was obviously premeditated,” one of the engineers put to the task of investigating said.

“No need to tell me,” another remarked angrily.  “I don’t see why we’re bothering.”

“There’s no more money to be made here,” a third man spoke up.  He had given up running external system checks and was stretching languidly.  “Not even a paycheck for all this.  Good thing I’ve been too busy here to start a family.  I’d be in a tough spot.”

“You could always go off on your own,” the first man commented.

“Or I could just tinker and do odd jobs forever,” he responded dreamily.  “There’s nothing like doing nothing.”  He laughed.  The other men laughed too.

“Besides,” the second man chimed in, “we all know who did this, besides Ed, that is.”

The three men exchanged quick glances.

“We don’t need to tell them that,” the third man said, sage-like.  “They already know.”