"Caller ID, please?" Aydin said, over the soft ringing coming from his eGlass set on the shelf. He was doing pushups on the floor of the multifunction room. Sweat drew dark spots on the fabric of his grey shirt; under his armpits, over his shoulder blades, and the curve of his spine.
Box connected itself with the eGlass and looked at the caller ID. "Caller ID indicates 'Damien.'" He was Aydin's younger brother, a boy Box used to love keeping company with when Aydin was still living at his family home, that is, until the bag incident. The display of the morning news Box was projecting on the wall shimmered.
"Put him through, please."
Box could have left that to the eGlass, but instead it answered, copying an answering machine's tone—an imitation requested by Damien for times he was upset with his friends. "The individual you have attempted to contact is currently unavailable. Please consider trying again at a later time."
"This is getting old, Box," said a youthful voice, so similar to Aydin.
Box's cameras and its other sensors went to Aydin's face and the display of the news turned off. The sensors found no indication of anger in the expression on his face. His heartbeat was increased, but that coincided with the exercises that he was doing. It repeated, "The individual you have attempted to contact is presently unavailable. Please consider trying again at a later time."
"Stop playing around and put him on," Damien demanded. Irritation laced his voice.
"Box, you can be so petty." Aydin stood up and started to do squats. "Connect him through, please."
Box's sensors still didn't detect any sign of irritation or anger in Aydin, which meant it could continue to agonise Damien, but since Aydin had said 'please,' it reconnected Damien to the eGlass and put him on speakers. "Established connection."
"Hey," Aydin said.
"Finally. You need to tell that childish thing of yours—"
"I am not a thing." Box, who was still connected with the eGlass, put a filter on the speaker so that the end of Damien's sentence came out as if they were having connection problems.
Aydin glanced at the orb, furrowing his brow.
Box doubled the filter so that only gibberish was coming from the speaker.
"Box, that's enough." Aydin's voice rose. He straightened up.
"There was no need to raise the volume." Blue light flashed over Box's inner display. It removed the filter and flew to its station, fixing its main camera at the wall. It sent a small mirror out of its orb and positioned it so that it could see what was happening behind it, but so that it wasn't visible to Aydin. To yell at it like that! Redness threaded the blue.
"Damien, could you repeat that?" Aydin said.
"I said, you need to talk to mum."
"What for?"
"About my application for a police apprenticeship. What else? Haven't you been listening?"
Aydin looked at Box, his eyes narrowing. "I'm afraid I can't say that I was. What is this about a police apprenticeship?"
"She's really getting on my case since she learned about it. You need to talk with her."
Box tuned them out and opened its connection with the warehouse and its Helpers. It had already reviewed the last three months of footage, but it hadn't found anything unusual. That's why it continued to examine the clips from the previous year, displaying different time stamps at once, and comparing them. Box had never asked Aydin why he wanted it to look over the footage since it didn't need to activate its superior deduction skills to connect the Commander's words about the smuggled narcotics with Aydin's request. Its handler had integrity, which prevented him from spying on his team, but that integrity also demanded that he get to the bottom of things and find out if their station was involved or not.
It again glanced at Aydin, who was still talking with his brother and who was now in plank position. Yes, its handler had integrity. It was the word Box had looked up when it first heard Aydin mumbling it a year before, the same year he quit his job as a detective. He told his father that the job didn't offer him enough challenge and that the pay was too low since he wanted to get his apartment, which didn't match up with Aydin muttering about integrity. That's why Box had 'Purpose behind Aydin's relocation to the Border Police' in its Notebook, under the 'Things that I don't know' tab.
Aydin finished his conversation with the promise to talk with their mother and went to Box. He patted it. "Are you sulking?"
"No." Box played the warehouse footage.
"Liar."
"An AI is incapable of lying."
"An AI can't sulk either, yet here you are, gazing at the wall because I raised my voice." Aydin patted him again, chuckling.
Box emitted a small beep.
"Box, as much as I enjoy watching you antagonise my brother, you need to let it go. Damien didn't mean any harm. He only wanted to show you off to his friends, something he had written in the apology that you refused to accept."
Box emitted a higher beep that sounded like a cry. "He placed me in a bag." It had happened just a week after Box got its personality chip and was still getting acquainted with all the new sensations and colours when it found itself trapped inside a blackness that clung to its orb and was moving. Box didn't know what it was and dark grey layered its cameras and with that its inner display while a cold sensation overloaded its sensors. The memory of it started to play over the warehouse footage. The noise of the street sounds loud —
Powering up.
No errors detected.
Loading...
The cameras turned on and showed Box the view of a wall. What activity was I engaged in?
The media player opened.
Box closed it.
"Run diagnostic, please," Aydin requested. "And show it to me."
"Initiating diagnostic procedure," Box said. "Power-on self-test completed without detecting any errors."
The notification of the diagnostic report appeared in the upper right corner of its display. It opened the report and via a finger that it pushed out of its orb projected it on the wall to Aydin.
"It's your space issues again. It looks like your personality is getting too big for you."
"I possess the capability to expand in size." The finger withdrew back into Box. It started to unfold parts of its shell from the inside and push them out. They thinned and connected until it was as big as a basketball, the biggest it could get. Now there were empty spaces just under the surface of its orb that could serve as drawers, which in the past Aydin's brother had liked to use as his personal secret storage.
Aydin chuckled. "That's not what I meant."
"No?" Box went to the general database and put 'Too big personality' into the search bar. It got eighteen million hits. It chose one randomly and read it. A red laser light shot out of its orb at Aydin. "I do not exhibit behaviour considered bothersome."
"I never said you were. But sometimes you can be a little overwhelming. Not that I would change anything about it. I like you just the way you are." Aydin's fingers followed the curve of the orb as he stroked it. "But the thing is, your personality is evolving, and it's taking too much disk space. You'll need to stop recording everything and delete some of your memories."
"Proposal rejected." Box went to the folder labelled 'memories' in which it stored the footage important to it. It recorded everything that happened to it throughout the day and then at the end of the day or the next morning, it went through the recording, storing the clips it found important in his 'memories' folder and deleting others. It had clips of the trips they had made with Aydin, Aydin dancing and Box joining in, Damien singing out of tune, Damien being clumsy, playing chess with Aydin's father... They were all special moments that Box wasn't willing to part with. They made it who it was now. The folder also included footage of incidents like the one in which Damien had put Box into the bag or the one where Linda had caused Box to short circuit, which Box could get rid of since they had given it negative sensations. But if it deleted those, then it wouldn't know who to hold a grudge against and why. "Rejected. Rejected."
"Yes, I got it the first time," Aydin said. "Listen, I'm not saying that you need to get rid of them completely. Just store them in the cloud for now."
But then they wouldn't be available when Box was offline. Which didn't happen often. In three years, it had only happened one hundred fifteen times. But these were the memories of events that had shaped it into what it was now, and it wasn't willing to part with them, not even for an hour. They were its core memories. "Rejected."
Aydin sighed. "Fine. From now on, store everything new in my cloud and disable all updates."
"Affirmative." Box went to the general database. There, it found answers to everything that it ever needed to know, besides why Aydin had quit his previous job and how he could best Aydin's father in chess every time instead of only two out of three games. It typed in 'problems' and added its model and year of production, then went to look over all the hits and bookmarked a few of them. It planned to go over them later after it finished comparing warehouse footage from this year. It was still running the players a few hours later, in the evening, this time only two at one time. It was floating over a kitchen table in the Tower, keeping Aydin, who was eating dinner, company. It was just going through the last days of January when orange lights flashed.
"Unauthorised entry at C34. Unauthorised entry at C34. The entry has been repelled, and the offenders detained. The Helper 386 86 284 has been damaged. Please send assistance."
Light came from Aydin's eGlass on the table, forming a screen. It showed a black-and-white view of a meadow, with a white outline of a person caught under a netted dome. Since the Helper's cameras' visuals should have been the same as Box's and clear enough that they could see the intruder's face as if he were before them, it must have been the Helper's cameras that had been damaged.
Aydin grabbed his eGlass and put it on. The screen disappeared. He stood and walked into the hallway. "Box, send a notification about the intruder to Chief Jasmin."
"Affirmative." Box flew after Aydin. It sent a standard breach notification to the police chief of the village just across the neighbouring country's border. Then it connected with Aydin's eGlass to see that Aydin had zoomed in on the bushes by the shield. Five people were hiding there, two of them on the U.C.E.'s side of the shield, all of them trapped there by the netted domes. It sent out another notification, this time to a drone, the one that it used for travelling a longer distance, to come to the garage.
Aydin was already at the end of the hallway, his step hurried. Lee and Linda, the ones who were on duty with him this evening, joined him on his way to the ramp.
They stepped onto it. Robotic hands appeared from the ceiling and started to put armour plates over their black and grey uniforms.
Box flew after them and avoiding the arms, it overtook them so that it was by the bikes before Aydin reached the landing. Contrary to the Units that hovered in the air, the bikes had tires like old-fashioned vehicles called cars, which had been used before the invention of the Units' anti-gravity technology. The same one that enabled Box to float. The bikes could use anti-gravity technology too and were not only designed to accommodate any terrain but to adapt themselves to their riders too.
Aydin and the two women passed Mark's station and walked to the bikes, taking the helmets off the shelf nearby.
A drone that looked like a flying saucer with a hole in the middle came through the garage door that started to open.
"Is it coming with us?" Linda asked Aydin, looking at Box.
Box set its cameras on Aydin. "May I?"
"If you must." Aydin straddled the bike. The black axis that connected the tires was in the shape of an L. At its peak, the handles came out and the axis shifted under him so that the handles were higher and the seat lower. "But keep out of the way."
Yay. Box flew to the drone and positioned itself in its hole. It was already connected to it, but instead of giving the drone the end destination, it tagged Aydin's bike for the drone to follow. Since it was always either in Aydin's multifunction room or in the Tower, going out of the station always felt as if it were on a trip. And it had always liked to go on trips.
The three bikes drove off with Box flying above them. They were joined by two Helpers in a detainee transporter, a cylinder-shaped vehicle with two benches inside that could seat eight people. In the descending darkness dispersed by the lights from the bikes and the transporter, they followed the road by the inside line of the shield, the red light reflecting from their helmets, their armour plates, the bikes, and the transporter's roof.
They arrived at C34 where six people were trapped by the Helper's nets. Linda dismounted and aimed her bike's light at the Helper by the shield before she went over to it. She waited until the Helper scanned and identified her before she started to examine it.
Aydin walked through the shield to the closest net, the one with the intruder, Lee close behind him. A ray of light came from his eGlass and scanned the man.
'Identity unknown,' it wrote on the part of Box's display that showed what Aydin could see in his eGlass. Since Aydin had access to databases including citizens of U.C.E., all of U.C.E.'s neighbour first- and second-world countries, United America, New China, United South Asia, and Australia, the fact that the man's face couldn't be found meant that either the man was an Outsider or had had unregistered plastic surgery.
"Identify yourself, please," Aydin requested.
"Violet Blair, a citizen of the U.C.E," a woman yelled from one of the netted domes in the bushes on the U.C.E. side. "By trapping us and keeping us here, you're violating our human rights. Don't think you'll get away with it. If you don't release us at once, we'll sue you."
'Violet Blair.' Box put the woman's name into the general database and got: 'Violet Blair, thirty-one years old, finished History of Viking Women Emancipation at Berkeley, U.A., unemployed, living on guaranteed income. A member of the No Shield association.' She also had a criminal record; she had assaulted a Helper. Being caught helping an Outsider illegally enter the U.C.E. was her second violation of the law, because of which she could lose her guaranteed income. It forwarded the information to Aydin.
"We know our rights," a male voice said. "We demand you release us."
Two rays of light came from an approaching transporter, like the one they had with them, just dented, and more worn-looking, lit the nets, then passed them to stop by Aydin. Two men stepped out of it.
Aydin greeted them with a lift of his hand. "Chief Jasmin."
"Cain." The chief, the one with a moustache, walked to them, greeting them with a nod of his head. He looked around. "What do we have here?"
"Considering that we have a man who we were unable to identify, human trafficking," Aydin told him. With his chin, he pointed at the women, who continued to talk about their human rights. "And at least one member of No Shield."
"Oh, joy," Jasmin said. "Who are the rest?"
At least here, there weren't any instances of men trying to breach the shield by using a battering ram against it, as was a regular occurrence on the southwest border, incidents that most often ended with the idiots needing medical attention. Aydin had served three months there before he was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel and relocated to this quiet station.
"We haven't ID'd them yet."
"What are you waiting for?" Jasmin tucked the ends of his blue shirt, which he must have just tossed on in a hurry since not all the buttons were buttoned, into his pants.
"You."
The Helpers scanned all the detainees. They were unable to identify only one of them, the man by the shield, while three of them were citizens of E.C.U., two of them of U.A.; all five, according to the information in the general database, were members of the No Shield organisation.
"Let's start loading them up," Jasmin said and gestured to his colleague to the nearest net, while he and Aydin walked to the Outsider that was just by the shield. They tried to talk with him, using different languages via the translation app, but the man refused to say anything.
Linda and Lee, with the help of a Helper, guided the U.C.E. citizen that was on the U.C.E. side into the transporter.
"It seems that we won't get anything out of him," Aydin said to Jasmin.
"Apparently not." With his arms akimbo, Jasmin nodded. "We'll take his DNA at our station." His gaze went to his colleague, who guided a woman into their transporter and a smile flashed on his face. "I should thank them for being stupid enough to try to smuggle in an illegal, since with the four of them, their keep is going to pay me and my men this year's bonuses. There might even be enough left for the municipality to repair a Helper that broke down at our last harvest."
Just like the U.C.E., Jasmin's country billed detainees, their families — or if they were activists, the organisation to which they belonged, in this case, No Shields — for the cost of their accommodation in detention. The same policy also applied to prisoners, only in case of prisoners, the roof over their heads and three meals a day were paid for by the government, everything else: fitness, access to the internet, meals for vegans, etc, they had to pay themselves, either with money supplied by their families or friends, or by working in the facility. The cost of accommodation for illegals and their deportation, U.C.E. always billed to the illegal's home country. Unfortunately, they weren't always able to collect that money, even though the countries that traded with the U.C.E. usually paid up, since otherwise they risked trade sanctions.
"Why don't you send the Helper to Linda? Maybe she can do something with it. For free," Aydin said.
"Would she?"
"Yeah." Aydin looked at Linda. "Anything for a good neighbourhood relationship."
"You mean you wash my back and we wash yours?" Jasmin said.
"Something like that." Aydin smiled.
One of Box's side cameras went to Linda and Lee, who were now occupied with Miss Blair, who, unlike her friends, refused to push her hands out of the net so that the women could handcuff her.
Jasmin pointed at the Outsider and stretched his arms out, his wrists together, showing him what he wanted from him.
The man pressed his mouth together and his forehead furrowed for a few seconds before he pushed out his hands.
Jasmin cuffed him and the net vanished. He guided him towards the transporter.
Box floated closer to Linda and Lee.
"You can't do that," Miss Blair screamed. "He was almost on U.C.E's side."
"Even if he was, according to the U.C.E.'s border law, Chapter Two, Article Five, we are obligated to refuse entrance to all who are not U.C.E. citizens and don't have a visa," Lee recited.
"He has human rights. He deserves to come to the U.C.E," Bair insisted. "Just like the Swedes did in 2097."
"Those were extraordinary circumstances. Otherwise, entry to the U.C.E. is not and never was a human right," Linda said. "But everybody who wants to come to the U.C.E. can do that legally through Transition City."
Transition City was a city U.C.E. had built on the Outside to serve as an entry point for all Outsiders who wanted to come to the United Countries of Europe. It not only vetted the Outsiders through its five-level program but also served as a free education centre to all Outsiders who wished to get the knowledge and tools to better their own countries. For all who just wanted education, U.C.E., through the government organisation Make the Change, had been using hologram technology to set up education centres in the Outside, in third- and fourth-world countries, offering them the opportunity to learn how to produce food and build infrastructure.
"Transition City is nothing but a tool for the U.C.E. to discriminate against Outsiders. We consider ourselves free-thinking and tolerant and yet, we demand that everyone who wants to live here fit pre-set standards and go through multiple tests. Europeans are nothing but hypocrites and racists."
"While you are trying to smuggle in people, is doing something good?" Linda raised her eyebrows, her jaw clenching. "You're enticing people to try their luck, wasting money they don't have for human traffickers when you must know full well from all those times No Shields members have been caught that the shield can't be breached. The only thing that you managed to do is to fill the human traffickers' pockets and get used by them for advertising and to do their dirty work." She looked at the Outsider, who was already by the transporter, before her gaze returned to Blair. "You have most likely filled his head with dreams about life in the U.C.E., giving him expectations that would never have been fulfilled. Have you ever even given any consideration to him and his feelings, and what kind of disappointment he would feel when caught — because, as you know, there's no way that he would be able to enter."
"You have no empathy for those less fortunate than you. None of you do," Blair spat out. "If you did, you would let him in."
"Even if we allowed him to enter, if he's not registered, there's no way he could use our services, let alone work. So, what is he going to do in the U.C.E.?" Lee said.
"If you had any empathy, you would direct Outsiders to Transition City or help them get sponsorship, not encourage them to try their luck with human traffickers," Linda's voice rose. She pointed at the transporter and the Outsider who was already sitting inside. "He's lucky. He got caught. But some of them aren't lucky enough and end up as human traffickers' hostages or worse, as their slaves. Not that you care about them, since I have never heard a word about No Shield dedicating their resources to locating those Outsiders and saving them from human traffickers' clutches."
"That's not what our group is about." Even though Blair's voice was now quieter, Box detected that her already high heart beat had increased and that there was a breathlessness between her words. Linda's heart rate was also higher and despite the darkness, there was a noticeable redness on her cheeks. If her back hadn't been turned towards the shield, Box would have attributed the blush to the reflection of the shield.
"Yeah, and you're the one lecturing us about empathy." Linda snorted. She looked at Lee. "I just can't with her and hers...." Then she walked away, leaving Lee with Blair.
Lee faced Blair; she gave the woman a pleasant smile, but when she spoke, her voice was hard and authoritative. "Please, cooperate, or I will, as is the protocol for such situations, tase you."