"Anyone seen Chad yet?" Evan asks as he comes into the lab.
I disconnect my tenth eye and let the wave of nausea recede. The headache lingers but stops getting worse. I might be able to talk if I give myself a few seconds. I got plenty of practice on the trip, but I'd forgotten how painful really pushing myself on the implant can be.
"I haven't seen him yet, but Erik said he did," Louise says before I can get my mouth to make words. "Said he saw him in the hospital wing of the Residence this morning."
Erik. I think I know him. Shorter guy in one of the older classes, or am I thinking of Albert? I really need to get my console database project done, there's too much junk to remember on my own without it.
"What was Erik doing in there?" Evan asks.
"He broke his finger while he was spotting Phil on the bench press," Louise tells him. "Poor guy had his hand in the wrong place when Phil dropped the bar."
It's been a different couple of days for everyone since Chad disappeared into Father's lab. Phil apparently had to find a new workout buddy, and the rest of us have had the unmitigated pleasure of not dealing with Chad.
"Interesting," Jeff says from his seat in the corner. I glance his way with a spare eye. He doesn't seem too disappointed that this disproves his latest theory that Father killed Chad and disappeared his body. "Perhaps Father needs to keep him concealed to prevent us from recognizing the alterations in personality that the procedure has induced."
"Maybe," I say, the throbbing in my head finally down to where I can talk again. "Or maybe he's just recovering from surgery."
Jeff sighs. "I suppose that we don't have sufficient evidence to predict whether there should be any overt effects at this stage."
My eye out in the hallway spots Chad coming this way. He's still got his same old swagger. If the implant update did anything to change his personality, it's sure not showing in his stride. He's got a device in his hand that looks like one of the implant appliances, but much bigger. Is that the replacement for the bot phone after the upgrade? I need to look into pants with bigger pockets. Or maybe I'll just keep it in my satchel and carry that all the time.
"We'll find out soon enough," I say just before the sounds of his footfalls reach the computer lab. Louise and Andrea both get up to go look out the door.
"Well, we knew it couldn't last," Evan sighs before Chad gets close enough to hear.
"Hey, welcome back, Chad," Louise says. Good for her for being polite, I guess. I know she didn't miss Chad any more than the rest of us did.
"Thanks," Chad says as he clears the doorframe. "I know you were probably all worried about me. Well, you don't need to worry anymore. Thanks to Father's brilliance, I'm back and better than ever."
Yeah. No personality changes there. Still the same old arrogant, sycophantic Chad.
"The upgrade is amazing," he continues. "You can't begin to imagine how much better the controls are." He glances at a chair and it slides his way, circling around behind him and swiveling to accommodate him exactly as he sits down. That's new. He's never had that kind of fine control without a lot of careful gesturing. "It was a little overwhelming at first, but I guess you'll all see for yourselves soon enough."
"Yeah, guess we will. Come on, Noah," Evan says. "Let's get lunch."
I let my ninth eye dissolve and get up without even needing to steady myself on the table before I follow him. My balance is good even with eight still running. I give Chad a nod on my way out that he returns without even glaring at me. Maybe he's in a good mood. Or maybe we're really not hating each other anymore.
"So, what do you think?" Evan asks as we get out of earshot. "Robot mind-slave?"
"No, just chief cultist in the sect of the pater familias."
He nods agreement and we make our way to lunch. The food here is so much more bland after our time in Africa. I eat about three bites before I lose interest, but I like hanging out with Evan so I stick around. He's reaching for my uneaten pudding when we hear the commotion from out on the commons. I send out a pair of eyes to see what's going on.
It's Chad, of course.
He's got a few hundred glowing balls juggling through the air, changing colors as they spin and morph from spheres to cubes to flattened oblongs and back again. Whatever the new controls involve, it's not just writing code to get the bots to do what you want. Chad couldn't program anything this complex if his life depended on it. He's got his movie-star grin on his too-handsome face as he shows off to a growing crew of younger siblings. I swear his standard holier-than-thou attitude has transfigured itself into a full-on god complex.
"Anything I need to worry about out there?" Evan asks. He knows me well enough to recognize the vacant look on my face that I get when I'm paying more attention to my robotic eyes than my physical ones.
"Just Chad being Chad," I say. "Only more so. The new controls must be pretty good, though."
He nods and takes another bite of my pudding. Outside, I see Marc practically prostrating himself before the almighty super-Chad. Chad gives him a magnanimous smile and says something I can't hear but must have been nice because Marc beams. Chad being nice to Marc? Maybe he is a robot mind-slave, but if the swarm AI is twisting him this direction maybe it's not all bad. Or maybe Chad finally filled that hole in his soul with a glut of Father's attention and a massive jolt of pure power.
Jeff catches my eye from his table in the corner. He looks worried. I turn on my bot detection overlay and see a couple of his eyes floating outside. He's seeing what I'm seeing. I think he's holding tight to his theory. At least he's eating with his hands and utensils instead of streaming pre-chewed food with his bots. The trip was good for him.
"Come on," I say to Evan. "Let's go see the Chad show. You know he's not going to be happy unless we all watch at least one episode."
"Fine," he grumbles, "but then we go play some foosball."
"Sure, but just a game or two. I've got a lot of homework."
I don't really, since my text capture system and new math solver are saving me a ton of time in both teachers' classes. But I want time to work on my database. Even if Father's upgrade does wonders for your bot control, I doubt it does any of what I'm planning. With any luck, in a week or two I'll be rocking a working memory support system that should make it so I don't have to manually look things up in my log anymore.
Outside, Chad stoops down in the center of a ring of nursery kids gathered around him on the field, whispering something to them. We get to the cafeteria doors just in time to see him spread his arms wide and start slowly rising into the air. Hanging there he looks like a frat boy on a crucifix, minus the cross. I do a quick calculation in my solver to figure out how many bots he'd need to lift himself like that, and it's a bigger cloud than he's ever run before, even on our trip. The new software must have a better version of something like Jeff's cloud size optimizations. Or Jeff is right about Father running AI on the bots. Either one.
I can't deny that the idea of floating is kind of cool. I've never seen Father do tricks like that, but he's always been more about substance than style. I wonder if we'll be able to fly with the new stuff. If Jeff ever gets that going, he'd probably never walk again. Too bad. I think all the exercise on the trip has been good for him. His long, sticklike legs almost have a little muscle on them now.
"You'll see when you get yours," Chad tells Marc with a smug grin. "I don't want to spoil it for you. It's awesome though. Everything is so much easier. And so much more powerful. I feel like I can do anything. I'll try flying for real later today. You guys can come watch me. It's so godlike, I love it."
Well, that answers that. I'll keep an eye or two out here while I code this afternoon, just in case he does something funny like crashing and breaking his neck. For anyone else, I'd be tempted to assume that a rogue AI had gone to his head. But Chad's always been a megalomaniac narcissist, so this is actually about what I'd expect from him.
Marc is hanging on every word, not even talking much. It's like he's included Chad in his personal pantheon now along with Father. I'm watching them closely enough that even with my two fleshy eyes and eight robotic ones, I don't notice Jeff silently gliding up next to me until he's there.
"Definitely AI," he whispers to me. "I'm sure of it. We will need to act as soon as we are able."
"All right," I whisper back.
"It is anything but all right, Noah." I turn and see that his face is full of genuine, intense fear. "It is all wrong, all wrong."
All wrong unless you really want your siblings to help you get revenge for your mother's death, then it's going pretty well.