Date: 2017-06-27 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction
Description: The greatest threat to humanity might be one of their own. Eve has responsibilities now. As chairwoman of the Human Welfare Committee, she is humanity's voice in a world run by robots. Her job includes approving geneticists who want to engage in ethical human cloning as well as overseeing the agency that hunts down threats to mankind. So when one of her sisters vanishes, Eve can't afford to abandon her post to personally search. Eve's agents hunt for her missing sister, but in the process, they run afoul of some influential robots. Their brutish, invasive interviews, veiled threats, and hackin
Rights: Copyright 2017 J. S. Morin. All rights reserved.

Weaponized Human

Robot Geneticists

J. S. Morin

Magical Scrivener

Copyright © 2017 J.S. Morin

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.

Magical Scrivener Press
22 Hawkstead Hollow
Nashua, NH 03063
www.magicalscrivener.com

Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

Ordering Information: Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address above.

J.S. Morin — First Edition

ISBN: 978-1-942642-29-9

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Author’s Note

Books by J. S. Morin

Email Insiders

About the Author

Chapter One

Eve Fourteen walked the pristine white corridors of Cindy14’s brand new laboratory. Walls, ceilings, and floors all shone with a glossy, unblemished finish. Soft, diffuse light from overhead panels chased away any shadows that might have come to visit the underground facility, nestled in the Norwegian fjords.

All these sights came filtered through a pair of data goggles that were as essential a part of Eve’s attire as shoes. She never went anywhere without the aid of the computerized display overlaying her vision, giving her an edge that human biology couldn’t manage on its own. Thin fiber cables ran over her ears and down along her spine, held in place by a harness that had become just another undergarment. The fibers plugged into a computer strapped snugly against her lower back and contoured for lumbar support when she sat. Similar fibers ran along both arms, terminating in a pair of open-tipped gloves that translated hand motions into inputs.

Cindy14 gave the tour, showing Eve the power station, cryogenic facilities, security measures, and all the entrances and exits. It was a thorough accounting of every space within the laboratory, in accordance with the Human Welfare Committee’s requirements. But what Eve really wanted to see, what her job demanded that she inspect, was yet to come.

“And here we come to the highlight of the tour,” Cindy14 said with a proud smile and the sweep of a hand toward a door that opened at her silent command. “The production facility.”

Clenching her jaw and forcing down the rising knot in her stomach, Eve strode through.

Inside was the largest single room in the whole facility. Its high ceilings left room for crisscrossing catwalks and overhead cranes, but this was no robotics factory. This facility would manufacture humans.

Glass vats filled with pale green growth medium stood in a row down one end of the lab. As Eve walked the row, hands clasped at her back, she peered inside. Tiny floating specks, barely visible to the naked eye, drifted on invisible currents within the medium.

Eve knew what they were, but if she had any doubts, the visual readout on the built-in console made it perfectly clear.

These near-microscopic clusters of cells were Liam Karlsson. In 2065 he had been a retired Olympic swimmer and pediatrician, father of six and grandfather of two. Now he existed as twelve identical blastocysts, awaiting committee approval to grow into baby humans.

“You didn’t waste any time from your conditional approval,” Eve stated. She let the subtle accusation hang there unspoken. Had Cindy14 been a little too ready to proceed?

If Cindy14 took offense, she hid any sign of it. “I knew the facility would present best if shown in operation. There’s only so much the Human Welfare Committee can infer from proposals. I know it’s early to see how I intend to handle more developed specimens, but I hoped to show how human life would be safeguarded even from conception.”

Eve rankled at the term specimens. She had been a specimen once.

But Cindy14’s answer was proper. The equipment was slightly modified or repurposed from primate cloning. While the simplicity of the changeover made humans seem just a tad less special, it was also the only way Cindy14 could have justified having the first human production facility up and running so quickly without admitting to being a human cloner already.

“Care to see the rest of the next generation?” Cindy14 asked as Eve lingered, staring into the growth medium.

These would be people. Eve would meet them, witness their births, attend their school graduations, serve with them on committees, argue with them, possibly even love them.

“What’s the plan for something going wrong?” Eve asked softly.

Cindy14 pulled up short. The brisk, efficient tour ground to a halt. When the aspiring human cloner turned to regard her, Eve forced her features blank. She wanted no hint that the turmoil in her mind was clouding her judgment. But Eve couldn’t shake the memories of Plato’s genetic siblings and the residents at the Sanctuary for Scientific Sins.

“Wrong?” Cindy14 echoed as if the very concept seemed alien to her.

“The price for a scientist’s hubris could be a life of pain and misery for the… specimens.”

Cindy14’s brow knit. The robot’s face was more emotive than most, with a burnished bronze that gave hints of a plausible human skin tone. The facial actuators on the Version 55.12 chassis made for near-perfect human mimicry. “I’m hoping this becomes less necessary with refinement of the process, but I can show you.”

Eve followed the geneticist past more tanks filled with other clone specimens and an entire row, four high and fifty long, of empty gestational tubes. Their umbilicals dangled loose inside, awaiting embryos to nurture.

On her way past the gestation tubes, Eve allowed her hand to brush along the glass. Fingers wet with sweat squeaked along the smooth surface. On the tube’s status panel, a red light blinked on. A robotic arm attached to an overhead crane swung down, a spritz of solvent covered the contaminated area, and a cloth wiped it clean.

“Sorry,” Eve muttered, addressing the arm and not her guide.

But it was Cindy14 who answered. “No trouble at all. I appreciate seeing the contaminant countermeasures in action under real-world scenarios. I understand the necessity of committee oversight, but that doesn’t mean biological contamination needs to run rampant.”

“I thought there weren’t germs?” Eve said.

Cindy14’s face twitched a smile. “Pure hubris. Charlie’s War might have ended with the Earth being wiped clean, but I for one find it impossible given the number of biological samples preserved that some infectious vectors didn’t manage to sneak a ride. Better to take precautions.”

Precautions…

Eve’s gaze roamed the laboratory. It wasn’t an experimental facility like Evelyn11’s had been. This was scaled for volume production. Cindy14 would never spit out humans the way the Kanto factory built drones, but she might exceed them in the number of sapient life forms birthed each year.

“You were showing me the disposal equipment,” Eve reminded the geneticist.

“Yes. Of course.”

There was an adjoining room off to one side of the lab. The LED overheads snapped on as Cindy14 entered. Despite the wash of bright, sterile light, the chamber had a cozy feel. With the two of them inside, Eve didn’t feel cramped for space, but a third occupant might have been enough for them to be in one another’s way.

Cindy14 picked up a glass cylinder with stainless steel devices capping both ends. She unscrewed the top and poured in the contents of a waiting beaker of green liquid.

Squinting, Eve couldn’t tell whether there were any clusters of human cells floating inside. “You don’t have to kill any embryos on my account.”

Cindy14 paused. Viscous fluid sloshed lazily in the beaker. The last drips of the liquid growth medium clinging to the glass edge. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “This is a demonstration. I wouldn’t dream of sacrificing a healthy specimen for a simple inspection.”

Closing the cap and screwing it on, a simplified readout showed that the container was sealed. Cindy14 fed the cylinder into a waiting receptacle, plugging it in like a power cell and giving a twist to lock it into place.

Eve put her hands behind her back to hide the fact that they were clenching of their own accord. She forced herself not to look away as Cindy14 tapped a short series of commands into the machine.

There was a hum, a quiet rumble, and a sucking sound like a straw at the bottom of an empty soda. Reversing the process, Cindy14 unlocked the cylinder and slid it free. There was nothing left inside.

“All gone,” Cindy14 announced proudly.

Gone. Nothing left.

“Where did it go?” Eve asked. The question sounded stupid in her own ears, childish even. She was well aware of object permanence. This wasn’t an infant’s game of peekaboo. She was less concerned with how it was gone than she was with the green slime’s ultimate fate.

Fortunately, Cindy14 took her question as it was intended. “The process is irrigation, followed by chemical decomposition. Then the tube is flushed and cleaned. The resulting solution is sucked into a waste recycling subsystem that runs below the lab. Would you like to see that next?”

No!

Eve could imagine all too vividly how close her fate might have come to that dummy sample. Evelyn11 had tried for decades to produce what Eve had become. There had been twelve Eves before her, but every attempt up until that point, and however many other genomes Evelyn11 had experimented upon, had all been flushed, irradiated, or incinerated.

She swallowed back her fears. “Yes. But first, a question. What happens if the specimen is larger? Say, several weeks into development rather than several days.”

Cindy14 held up the cylinder. “Anything too large for this will get a proper burial. If it fits… well, a larger specimen will just take a little longer in the machine.”

Echoes of Evelyn11’s words rang in Eve’s ears, clear as if she’d just heard them again. First, I’ll exsanguinate your body, then carefully decapitate you. I’ll peel away the skin and muscle, vacuum out the brain with the aid of a light sodium hydroxide solution. … The extraneous bits of you will be incinerated.

Evelyn11 had played up the gruesome details while Cindy14 sanitized the process. Which of them was being more honest about what was really happening?

Eve reminded herself that this was Cindy14, upstanding primate geneticist and darling of the Genetic Ethics Committee. It was no accident that she was the first of Eve’s inspection tours. This was the light cardio before the strength training, the vaccine before the plague.

Sooner or later, Eve was going to run across robots trying to hide their deepest secrets from her while still receiving Human Welfare Committee sanction for their actions. This was the easy day.

“Carry on, then,” Eve said graciously and followed Cindy14 on the rest of the tour.

Chapter Two

As Eve stepped from her skyroamer onto the soft Parisian soil, she felt drained. Full days of calisthenics and obstacle course running had never left her feeling so limp-rag tired.

The house she’d commissioned loomed on the hillside overlooking a wide swath of Paris. She had clear views of the River Seine and Charlie7’s house, once known as the Arc de Triomphe. The house itself was a masterpiece of modern design, Paul208 assured her. To Eve, it was merely a structure of steel and glass like so many of the others built in the robotic regime.

But it was home and felt more welcoming each time Eve returned to it. It was, as Paul208 had assured her it would, growing on her.

Today Eve needed the house to do its job, because Eve was wrung out from performing hers.

Cindy14 had shown every indication of being completely honest, upfront, and ethical in her treatment of the human beings she was endeavoring to create. Yet the whole tour had kept Eve’s stomach knotted and jaw clenched. Thanks to the air coolers in her personal skyroamer, her whole body was now covered in a film of dried sweat.

“How’d it go?” Phoebe asked, bounding down from the house to greet her. She had their adopted dogs, Jimbo and Russels, in tow, tails wagging frantically. In her fluttering pink dress and work boots, Eve’s eldest little sister looked like no archetype from the Human Era that Eve could find.

When Phoebe didn’t slow down as she drew near, Eve braced for impact.

“It’s so exciting!” Phoebe gushed, slamming into Eve and latching on in a hug that lifted her from the ground. “We’re going to build an elevated tram system that will connect all the major points in the city. It’s all going to run in transparent tubes so passengers can look at the scenery. Working with Paul208 is so wonderful. I can describe things to him one minute, the next it’s showing up on a screen just the way I imagined. A couple hours later, construction is underway.”

“I’m glad you’re having fun,” Eve said. She meant it, but at the same time, she envied her sister. Phoebe had appointed herself the planner of the first Neo-Human city on Earth. Paris was going to be the testing ground for new habitations, social organization, integrated food distribution, and work environments.

Phoebe released Eve and stepped back with a suddenly downturned brow. “By inference, you’re not. Having fun, I mean.”

Eve sighed and started for the house, absently patting the dogs as they frolicked around her knees. “My job isn’t meant to be fun. That’s not the issue. My job is to keep the robots from engaging in destructive acts of wanton genetics.”

“That’s a good thing,” Phoebe reasoned, following Eve through the automated door that slid open at their approach.

Phoebe’s boots clomped on the marble floor. Eve slipped out of her shoes and socks to let the cool stone steal the excess heat from her body. She closed her eyes and allowed a moment’s peace to slip in before responding.

“A good thing, yes,” Eve agreed. “Not an easy one. I spent the day examining the very building blocks of our own existence.”

“You’re overthinking it,” Phoebe assured her, strolling through the kitchen and opening the refrigerator. She took out a pitcher of wine and poured two glasses. “This is your job. We’re clones. There are going to be more clones. Natural reproduction isn’t viable with two genomes, one of which has more junk in its helix than a licorice twist that fell on the beach.”

“Strained,” Eve said, commenting on Phoebe’s attempted metaphor.

“Really?” Phoebe asked in a huff. “Ugh. I thought that one was excellent. It drew on both the visual and contamination elements at once.”

When her sister pressed one of the wine glasses into Eve’s hand, she accepted. Sniffing the contents, her nose crinkled. “How can you like this stuff when I don’t? Shouldn’t we have more similar tastes?”

“I actually hate the way it tastes,” Phoebe admitted. “But this place used to be known for culture, art, and wine. I feel like I need to understand Paris if I’m going to rebuild it.”

“This might be straining the intent of the Adolescent Human Emancipation Act,” Eve commented sourly. “The alcohol content could stunt cognitive development.”

“Local custom,” Phoebe countered. “Not taken to excess, there aren’t deleterious long-term effects. Ancient Parisians gave this to children.”

Eve looked out through the panoramic kitchen window at the view of Paris. Modern buildings dotted the landscape, islands of glass and steel amid a sea of wildflowers. Mixed in were restoration projects like Charlie7’s Arc de Triomphe and Notre Dame. Of the millions that once called the city their home, none remained.

“False equivalence,” Phoebe argued. “The occasional glass of wine with a meal or for relaxation didn’t contribute to an alien invasion, and you know it.”

Eve sipped her wine. The burgundy liquid burned her tongue and left a bitter trail of fire down her throat. “Maybe new cultural norms are in order.”

Phoebe brightened. “That’s a wonderful segue. I think we need to discuss boyfriends.”

Startled by the sudden change in their conversation, Eve choked on her wine. “What did I say that made you think I wanted a boyfriend?”

All the girls were now familiar with the concept. Even if the robots had tried keeping all popular culture materials away from them, the Eves would have puzzled it out on their own eventually. But songs and movies were rife with love and romance, often tracing their origins to ages similar to those of Eve and Phoebe.

Phoebe reacted to Eve’s question with a look of incredulity. “We’re evolved for it. And part of crafting a new human culture is deciding on the cultural norms surrounding dating, procreation, and child-rearing. We’re in a unique position to get out ahead of patriarchal repression.”

“What have you been reading?” Eve asked with a narrowed gaze. She took another sip of wine as she awaited Phoebe’s answer.

“Nora109’s been helping me with historical context,” Phoebe admitted as she refilled her glass. “Most of recorded history is told from an androcentric viewpoint. But look at us now. You’re the representative for all humanity. I’m on the forefront of an architectural and cultural revolution. Olivia’s hoping to guide the repopulation of native species. Two of the three emancipated human men work for you.”

“Technically, Plato and Zeus work for Charlie7,” Eve said. “And he answers to… well, no one really but the Human Welfare Commission technically.”

Phoebe swished her wine around the bowl of her glass. “My point is… we can decide between us what—and more importantly whom—we want out of life. There’s no point arguing over men. There’s two of us and two of them.”

“Three each,” Eve countered.

Phoebe blew a sigh and rolled her eyes. “Olivia claims she doesn’t care. Plus, Triton has fish scales for skin. Ew.”

“That’s mean,” Eve scolded. “It’s not his fault how he was made.”

“Maybe not,” Phoebe allowed, draining her glass. She aimed a slightly wobbly finger in Eve’s direction. “But you’ve seen the mating videos. Is Triton what you want for a partner?”

Eve felt her cheeks warm, and it wasn’t the few sips of wine to blame. All the humans had been shown anatomical and instructional videos on the process of natural procreation as part of their schooling. “No.”

A smirk and a twinkle in her eye marked Phoebe’s conversational victory. “Well, that leaves just Plato and Zeus. I’m presuming that you’ll choose Plato due to your prior affections? Good. That leaves Zeus for me.”

“But—”

“You can’t have them both,” Phoebe insisted, raising a finger. “If you want Zeus, speak now, or forever hold your peace.”

Eve set down her wine and picked an apple from the fruit bowl on the counter. “That’s the marriage ceremony. We’re not talking about marriage.”

“Aren’t we?” Phoebe asked. “There was an old saying, ‘there’s plenty of fish in the sea.’ Well, there aren’t. The one extra fish in the sea, we just agreed neither of us wants. All the Plato clones are a little off, and Plato and Zeus are the closest we’ve got to the men in the movies. Yours is the size of a polar bear. Mine had a robotic crystal for a brain. Neither is perfect, but I think once we make our choice, it’s going to be for life.”

“For life?” Eve asked. Even in the Human Era, relationships could be reevaluated and altered over the course of a lifetime if they didn’t work out.

Phoebe crossed her arms. “I’m fourteen years old. You were just in a lab today visiting the next eligible bachelors to be born on Earth. How long are you willing to wait?”

Eve’s skin crawled at the thought that those tiny floating specks in green soup might one day grow into someone she’d love intimately.

But Phoebe was right. There weren’t many options.

“What if they pick differently from us?”

Phoebe waggled her eyebrows. “That’s what I meant about cultural norms. I say we seize the initiative. Establish precedent. Go call Plato. Right now.”

Eve tried to form an argument, but Phoebe had put too much planning into this conversation. She needed time to formulate counter arguments, plan rebuttals, and decide what she wanted out of life. Seizing the initiative was all well and good, but Eve didn’t want to get seized right along with it.

On one count, however, she agreed with her little sister.

Eve wanted an excuse to call Plato.

Chapter Three

Eve’s home office was on the fourth floor of her house. Most of the middle floors had such specific purposes that she hardly bothered visiting them. The game room, the movie room, the spa, the craft room, and the art studio were spaces that Paul208 built in, just in case. There was no luxury of kings and sultans that the robots spared for the Earth’s scant few human inhabitants.

The office, however, Eve found extensively useful. Parked in front of a data terminal, her own eyewear overlaying a secondary user interface, Eve pored over and sorted news, blast-broadcast communications, and a few personally directed messages.

Nothing urgent.

The urgent items Eve kept carefully pruned and took care of every issue the instant she heard about it. For now, the Human Welfare Committee was satisfied. The Genetic Ethics Committee was still deliberating her application as an advisory member. She’d been invited to two plays, a classical music concert, and a chance to witness the activation of James271.

There was still a formal report to file in the wake of her inspection tour of Cindy14’s laboratory facilities, but half of that had been written by the time she landed her skyroamer. The rest would be finished soon enough.

Now, Eve twitched her fingers, and sensor-laden gloves read the movements. The personal computer she wore interfaced with the desktop console. She entered in Plato’s public ID and opened a secure channel.

Plato responded in an instant. “Hey, Eve. How’s it going?”

The big, goofy grin on his face made Eve smile in kind.

“I was messaging you to ask the same,” she replied. “How’d the lead in Paraguay turn out?”

The goofy smile sagged. “Dead end. There was a lab down there, but it was abandoned. Can’t say how recent. This geneticist-hunting gig was easier when they didn’t know I was coming.”

“Sorry,” Eve said. She reclined in her chair and instructed the video panel in the desk to angle up to match, allowing her an easy view of the screen. “One of the hazards of legitimacy. The good guys don’t get to lurk in the shadows like criminals.”

He returned the grin. “Tell that to Batman. Hey… how come I gotta look at you through those robot eyes?”

It wasn’t even worth arguing about anymore. Eve had grown so used to wearing the data-display goggles that she often forgot they were there. Phoebe never mentioned them. They didn’t seem to bother any of the robots. Aside from showering, Eve wore them all the time—except around Plato.

Closing her eyes to avoid the twinge of vertigo switching to natural lighting, Eve wiggled the goggles off. Technically, there was nothing holding them on except a couple straps around and over her head, but sweat and pressure had stuck them in place, leaving shallow red imprints around her eyes and over her ears.

“That’s more like it,” Plato said.

“Glad you like it,” Eve replied, blinking at the glare from all the glossy surfaces catching the sunlight. “I feel like I just half-blinded myself.”

“Well, at least now I know I have your undivided attention,” Plato countered. The view swung away from his face and swept the inside of a cavernous underground complex, webbed with steel supports and bolstered with concrete pillars. “This place was something else. Can’t imagine what got done in here. Still, means we’ve got ‘em on the run. Won’t be long before we catch someone in the act.”

Ever the optimist.

Eve wished she could see things the way Plato did. The world was so simple his way. There were good robots and bad ones. Eve had to attend meetings with robots she knew or suspected had conflicting agendas with hers, often for no more nefarious a reason than an honest difference of opinion.

Yet for those committee-room clashes, those robots were her enemies. The next day, they might support her on an unrelated initiative.

That was the key. Plato was out to hunt and destroy the enemies of humanity. Eve had become, through no fault of her own, a politician.

“Well, keep at it,” she told Plato.

The image in the video spun crazily until it focused on Plato’s face once more.

“Will do,” he assured Eve with a wink.

There was a long pause.

It was Eve’s turn to speak. The conversation was poised on the brink of a parting exchange, followed by closing the link. All Eve had to do was bid Plato farewell.

Phoebe’s commandment hung over Eve like a summer storm cloud, heavy with rain but holding it in for a sudden downpour. There was no way she could think of to ease into a conversation of lifelong romantic commitment forged on the altar of “there aren’t really many options.” Blurting seemed best. Eve knew how to blurt. But the words were bottled up inside her.

“How are Zeus and Charlie doing?” she asked instead.

Plato’s face grew comically incredulous. “I dunno. Been busy down here. Weather’s nice, and the place is cleared out pretty good. I was thinking of signing out a few automatons and making a little vacation place. Think about it: land isn’t going to be free for the taking forever.”

Free for the taking? The robots had owned the Earth so long and with so few of them that they didn’t have money. Yet, money had been the lifeblood of the Human Era. Sooner or later, there wouldn’t be enough for everyone, and there would need to be some means of controlling distribution.

Eve swiveled in her chair to gaze out at the city of Paris. Her house and the manicured lawn surrounding it. Charlie’s arch. Paul316’s cathedral. Phoebe’s new tram. Eve had seen the pictures of a Paris so packed with buildings that only strips of pavement were left between, just wide enough for cars to travel in both directions.

“Earth to Eve,” Plato’s voice snapped Eve from her musings on market economics and pre-post-scarcity humanity. “You in there?”

“Sorry,” Eve muttered. “Yeah. I went back into my head. It’s been a weird day.”

“You can make ‘em stop, you know,” Plato said. “We’re the humans, remember? They can’t decide the fate of our species for us. If you’re not comfortable with how they’re—”

“It’s not that,” Eve interjected before Plato got onto one of his rants. “It’s just… not natural. I mean, that’s how we were made. But humans aren’t supposed to be things. We’re supposed to occur though natural biological processes that—”

“Yup,” Plato cut in quickly. “Saw the video. Don’t need a refresher.”

Eve twitched a smile. “I’ll… uh… check in with Charlie and see how he’s doing.”

Chapter Four

Eve watched the blank video screen, still picturing Plato’s face in her mind. A held breath leaked out of her and with it the tension she’d held inside. The image wasn’t fading.

Rubbing her eyes, Eve remembered the data-display goggles. This was a hazard of being under-stimulated mentally. Pulling them on and shrugging and squirming until the fiber cables ran comfortably down to the computer at her belt, she sighed in relief.

A perfectly optimized interface greeted her, showing Eve everything she might need to know at a glance. The uplink to the house’s security network let her peer in on Phoebe, still down in the kitchen trying her hand at cooking—better to make a mess of Eve’s kitchen than go back to her own. Her talk with Plato moved from recent calls to her archived conversations. Sunset was in fifty-five minutes, giving Eve plenty of time to get to the rooftop observation deck to watch.

In one corner of Eve’s display, a warning light blinked. Elevated heart rate had been detected without corresponding physical exertion. With a few finger twitches, Eve dismissed the warning. She understood quite well what had caused it and didn’t know a cure. Maybe she could write a subroutine for disabling the heartbeat monitor during and immediately following interactions with Plato.

A green indicator blinked. She had an incoming request for real-time communication. Sender: Charlie7.

“Hi, Charlie,” Eve said as she gestured to open her end of the conversation.

“Hey, kid,” Charlie replied. She was getting used to the imposing Version 70.2 chassis with its matte black finish. It no longer made her jump every time it sprang to life in her goggles’ display. “I hear you’re looking for good news.”

Eve brightened. “You have some?”

“No,” Charlie admitted. “But I may have an idea to help you quit worrying.”

Initially disappointed by Charlie’s ‘no,’ Eve found her hoped buoyed once more. She got the impression of being a yo-yo, though the curious angular momentum toy was harder to operate than it appeared.

“Can you stop breaking up your statements into teasing bits?” Eve asked.

Charlie cleared his throat. “Yes, ma’am! The problem we’re having here is the Privacy Committee guidelines on digitally invasive searches. Back in the Human Era, there were keystroke sniffer laws. It took a court order, but it was damned effective in catching suspects in… well, everything but cybercrime. Those sorts knew better than to get caught by a keylogger. Point is, we’ve got nothing like that. If I have a suspect, I have to sit somewhere and wait for them to make a mistake. It’s like watching shadows on a cave wall without being allowed to see what cast them.”

“You have a suspect?”

The image in Charlie’s transmission shifted. Unlike Plato’s treatment of the transmitter like a movie camera, Charlie interposed his as a concurrent digital stream. It showed an orbital view of Earth. Cloud cover over Western Europe appeared consistent with today’s weather. “Yeah. Right there.”

“That’s Earth.”

“Good eye,” Charlie commented dryly.

“So, you don’t have any suspects.” It was an inference, not a question.

“Everyone’s a suspect,” Charlie clarified. “If we start making assumptions, we’re going to let the smarter criminals slip past. Darwinian criminal theory would have us picking off the weakest in the herd while the ones who go free get better and better at their craft. I’d rather catch the smartest ones and let the whole sordid system crumble.”

“Arthur19 won’t like it,” Eve warned. Neophyte though she might have been, Charlie’s suggestion ran counter to everything the powerful Privacy Committee stood for. As its chairman, Arthur19 was the champion of robotic personal freedom.

The image in her goggles shifted back to Charlie just in time to catch him laughing. “Never said he would. Your job, as Human Welfare Committee chairwoman, is to convince him to give us enough leeway to get our job done. Make it clear that if the Human Protection Agency doesn’t start seeing results, blame is going to fall on Arthur19 and his band of obstructionists.”

“Can’t you… you know… blackmail him?” Eve asked. Not to put too fine a point on it, but much of Charlie7’s political career seemed to be built on knowing things other robots didn’t want revealed publicly.

“Legitimacy,” Charlie reminded her. “That was the idea when we put this task force together. If we were just vigilantes, this pizza would have very different toppings.”

“Weak,” Eve commented. “Your food-related metaphors are a nice attempt at relating. The problem is that you don’t remember what they taste like, and I only tried pizza once.”

“I remember liking it,” Charlie replied. “But I do have a thousand years of memories more recent than my last taste.”

“I parse your colloquial robotic expressions more easily. The system-level analogies make logical sense.”

“Fine,” Charlie agreed with a huff. “If we wanted to be vigilantes, we’d skip the circuit breakers and plug this operation directly into the power source.”

“Unwise. That’s a dangerous shortcut.”

Charlie smiled in Eve’s goggles. “Exactly.”

The image winked out, and the connection was closed.

With a non-overlay view of the room around her, Eve noticed Phoebe standing in the doorway, taking a bite from an apple—peel and all.

“That was Charlie7, not Plato,” Phoebe noted with a faint edge of accusation.

Eve wasn’t going to be called to task for doing her job. “I talked to Plato first.”

“And?” Phoebe prompted, taking another bite. Eve cringed and kept from staring, knowing that her sister was chewing a leathery, plasticky piece of the fruit that would have best been discarded.

Phoebe chewed slowly as she waited for an answer.

Unwilling to sit there and be taunted with disgusting eating habits, Eve swept out of the room. Phoebe leaned aside to allow her through the doorway but called after her. “Where are you going? I’m going to cook quiche for dinner.”

Eve was already quick stepping down the stairs. She would have to talk to Paul208 about an office-level landing pad for her skyroamer. For now, she was on her way to the vehicle, Phoebe trailing behind in consternation.

“I’ve got a job to do. Sorry about dinner. I’ll find something along the way.”

One way Eve had discovered to test her welcome was whether robots kept any food on hand. Those that did were eager for visits, still basking in the novelty of Eve and her kind. Those that didn’t were either rude or oblivious—and in roughly even numbers.

Eve hoped that Arthur19 might keep a plate of snacks out.

She suspected he didn’t.

Chapter Five

The headquarters of the Privacy and Surveillance Oversight Committee was a serene white building with prominent columns and a many-windowed dome. The cupola atop the dome sported a bronze statue of a woman wearing a robe and military helmet and holding a sword and wreath.

There were times when Eve wondered how many metaphors a sculptor could squeeze into a single piece of artwork.

After swooping close for a better view of the statue, Eve set her skyroamer down in a neat row with several others parked on the headquarters’ lawn.

As Eve headed on foot for the main building, another robot was coming her way. Hands clasped at her back, Eve’s fingers fluttered and navigated through her personal computer interface. She quickly identified the robot as Eddie204, one of the Privacy Committee members.

“Good day, Eddie,” Eve greeted him in passing.

“Good day, Madame Chairman,” Eddie204 replied in kind, nodding his greeting but not pausing on his way to a skyroamer parked in the middle of the row.

Eve breathed a sigh of relief at getting through the encounter with minimal interaction. It was easier pretending to know who someone was when recalling their name was all she had to do. An extended conversation would have strained her ability to talk and access her computer at the same time.

A pair of drones flanked the building’s entrance, menacing in their mechanical nudity. Eve tried not to look at them directly. The more she interacted with robots, the more the mindless, shameless, opinionless automatons bothered her.

She imagined the idea of flesh-and-blood door guards, mindless and obedient. Painless, fearless, and heedless of their own well-being, they would be perfect slaves. Part of her job as Human Welfare chairwoman was to ensure that scenario remained a dark daydream.

No human should ever be reduced to such a state.

“Miss Fourteen, good of you to come,” Arthur19’s voice came from a panel on the wall near the door. “I’ve unlocked the security protocols. Second lift on the right will take you to my office.”

The screen went black before Eve had a chance to respond.

Following Arthur19’s instructions, Eve stepped aboard the designated lift and the doors closed behind her.

Being trapped in a box wasn’t a concern; Eve wasn’t claustrophobic in the least. But she was mildly surprised that the lift took her down instead of up. Chiding herself, Eve knew it was silly to expect an old robot like Arthur19 to make use of the wonderful aboveground space in the headquarters when there was a nice, safe, impenetrable underground bunker.

One day, Eve was going to dig deeper into the mystery of why older robots were so afraid of the surface.

The doors opened after an estimated eight-story downward ride. What a single committee needed with all this office space, Eve could scarcely imagine. If there were a Recreational Mining Committee or a Warehousing Everything We Can Find Committee, she might understand the need for an underground skyscraper.

Then again, for the sake of privacy, what could be better than a subterranean hideaway of unknown content?

Arthur19’s office was a suite of offices. Doors lined a long hallway. Eve’s footsteps echoed on a tile floor not so different from the one in her house. The air was stale and thick. Someone hadn’t properly ventilated this building for human occupancy.

If Eve were to look for evidence of unwelcome, she didn’t need to look for fruit bowls and pastry trays. Sewer-grade air quality was all the clue she needed to know Arthur19 would rather she stayed away.

There was a desk tucked beside the double doors at the end of the hallway. A lone robot sat at a terminal whose screen faced away from Eve. The robot looked up as Eve ran a chassis recognition algorithm and cross-referenced to known Privacy Committee members.

She identified him as Dale16 just before he spoke. “Arthur19 will see you in just a moment. He’s on an important teleconference.”

There was no place to sit. The smooth walls were barely suitable for leaning. Eve kept her hands behind her back and shielded them from Dale16 as she ran some searches on the Earthwide.

From all she’d learned, Dales were the rarest of robotic personalities, the only ones less populous than Charlies. Both shortages stemmed from the same reason: Charlies didn’t get along with them. But while one Charlie rankled the next, any two of them would agree that a Dale was a waste of a chassis. With Charlie7 and Charlie13 responsible for mixing every robot alive, it took committee action to get a new Dale mixed.

“I haven’t met a Dale before,” Eve said conversationally. She swallowed and waited nervously for a reply.

Dale16 kept tapping at his console.

Eve realized her mistaken attempt to engage Dale16 was her closed-ended statement. “How do you like working on the Privacy Committee?”

He looked up. “Arthur19 will be available in approximately twenty-five minutes. I trust you can find some amusement to fill the interim. I have work to do.”

With a sigh, Eve abandoned hope of honing her interpersonal skills. Mixes were unpredictable things, Charlie7 had said to her once. But from her history lessons, the Dale Chalmers she envisioned ought to have resulted in a robot who couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

Of course, with Charlie13 doing the mixing, he could have intentionally designed a quieter Dale. Eve shuddered a little at the idea of someone picking and choosing the part of you they wanted. What if Evelyn11 had decide to make Eve like apple peels instead of Phoebe? She could find herself chewing through that filmy fruit coating that felt like an adhesive bandage and actually enjoying it.

But Eve and Phoebe were genetically identical. The difference was in post-natal conditioning. One of Evelyn11’s sick and twisted experiments had been denying Phoebe solid food her whole life. Phoebe chewed things for the novelty value and to strengthen her jaw muscles.

Eve’s daydreams were cut short when Arthur19’s double doors slid open.

“Come in,” Arthur19 called out as Dale16 continued to ignore her.

Eve stepped through the office doors, which snapped shut behind her like the jaws of a trap.

The office was spacious and empty. Three-meter-high walls were display screens showing vistas from across the Earth and some from deep space. The floors were silver, not steel, as best Eve could tell at a glance.

Arthur19 waited quietly at a desk composed of data terminals, not saying a word as Eve took in the assault of visual imagery from every part of the globe.

“Impressive,” Eve remarked as she neared the desk.

“Indeed,” Arthur19 replied. He wore a dark suit and a short-brimmed cap. His glossy black necktie contrasted against the white of his shirt. The orange of his eyes was the only non-neutral color about him. “If you notice, not a single thinking creature under surveillance in any of them.”

“So you know why I’ve come,” Eve reasoned.

A smile twitched the corners of Arthur19’s mouth. “I wouldn’t presume. Your business is none of mine.”

“That’s your committee motto,” Eve observed.

Arthur19 laughed. It sounded genuine. “It might as well be. See? This is what we’ve been missing all these years with no humans. All the old jokes went stale centuries ago. Have a seat.”

A section of Arthur19’s desk separated and slid toward Eve. The extended chair was metallic and unpadded, but Eve accepted the seat for the sake of politeness.

“Thank you for seeing me on short notice,” Eve said as she settled in. The chair wasn’t the least bit comfortable, but neither was it uncomfortable. “I want to talk to you about the Human Protection Agency.”

“Yes,” Arthur19 sounded serious once more. “Have to give it to Charlie7 and his meat hooligans. Didn’t think they’d make it this long without me having to file a formal complaint. My congratulations on that.”

“That’s the thing,” Eve said. “They’re not stepping on anyone’s toes.”

“Plato, in particular, worried me on that account,” Arthur19 admitted.

Eve tapped into the local image feeds and brought up the cavern Plato had discovered, displaying it on a sidewall. “Plato discovered this today. It’s an abandoned lab. Recently vacated. Possibly an illegal geneticist.”

Arthur19 cast Eve a sidelong glance as he studied the cavern complex from Plato’s investigation. If he objected to Eve using his wall screens, he kept quiet about it. “If you’re looking for help tracking who built or operated there, I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

“Genetics criminals are out there, and they’re getting away because their investigative methods aren’t hampered by privacy rules,” Eve argued.

“If someone’s leaking your agents’ plans, maybe you should be asking for my help in closing the privacy invasions your people are suffering, rather than asking to open Pandora’s box.”

Hiding her hands under the edge of the desk, Eve’s fingers twitched frantically as she accessed her computer.

Pandora: mythical figure. Unknowingly unleashed evil into the world through carelessness.

Eve scowled. “I’m not Pandora.”

“Of course,” Arthur19 said, bridging his fingers and tapping the tips together. “The second Human Era will call it Eve’s Box. The evil you will unleash will be the constant monitoring of every thinking being for possible wrongdoing. Questionable in even its noblest incarnation, at its worst, it is the very embodiment of oppression.”

“We just need some leeway in communications monitoring. The upload conspiracy that Gemini told us about is—”

“Is entitled to their privacy, same as everyone,” Arthur19 cut in. He stood and paced along the wall still showing Plato’s cavern. “It’s not that I’m indifferent to your plight. I admire the goals you’ve outlined. Free humanity. Ethical cloning. Committee representation. But you can’t just run roughshod over everything we’ve built. There hasn’t been a war on Earth in a thousand years. Or an inquisition. Or a coup. We mind our own business and chastise those who can’t.”

“But Charlie7—”

“Is my biggest concern,” Arthur19 didn’t finish that sentence the way Eve had intended to. “He’s a maverick. Mavericks are fine when the status quo is unacceptable. After all, he fought alongside the Original Six. Lone survivor of the Eradication War. Hero of the planet. That’s why we let him retire instead of putting him on a one-way rocket out of the solar system.”

It was Eve’s turn to stand. “You wouldn’t dare!”

It was an outrage to think Charlie7 deserved to be exiled from Earth, doomed to a lonely death in the cold, uncaring dark of interstellar space when his power supply finally died.

“Plenty of us would have,” Arthur19 said with a scowl. “He’s the whole reason the Privacy and Surveillance Oversight Committee exists in the first place. He thinks because he saved the planet, he owns it. You, me, everyone… all ants in his private ant farm. If you want to save humanity from exploitation and cruel experiments, my hat’s off to you.” Arthur19 made good on his word immediately, doffing his cap to Eve. “But if you intend to make use of Charlie7 in the endeavor, I will put this committee’s entire weight behind ensuring that he does so with every consideration for privacy rights.”

“I think we’re done here,” Eve said, turning on her heel.

The doors slid open at her approach. Just as she passed through, Arthur19 called after her. “He’s one robot you’re best off cutting loose. He’ll cause you more trouble than he’ll save.”

The door snapped shut behind Eve before she could answer. Not that she was going to.

Chapter Six

Eve returned home, defeated. Not even watching The Sound of Music on the return trip was enough to cheer her up.

Charlie, Plato, and Zeus were scouring the planet looking for dangerous robots performing illicit human cloning experiments. If they didn’t find the geneticists in time, someone might make another Gemini. After Eve’s failure in convincing Arthur19 to allow more invasive digital searches, those lost minds would haunt her conscience.

It was after dark. Starlight peeked down from distant suns. Photons that had traveled hundreds or even thousands of years ended their trek in Eve’s retinas. Those enormous balls of nuclear fusion, dwarfing Earth’s sun, cared nothing for the circumstances of mankind. Sometimes, Eve wondered how many on Earth even cared.

Her house was lit from outside. Soft white light played in the vibrant grasses and marked the footpath to the front door.

Phoebe’s skyroamer was gone.

For a girl working on a tram system, Eve’s sister took her skyroamer on trips even halfway across Paris. Eve suspected that the finished transit system would have stations at or near both their houses.

Dragging her weary feet through the door, Eve headed for the kitchen. Arthur19’s lack of hospitality hadn’t been unexpected, but Eve had also neglected to stop by an agricultural depot on her way back across the Atlantic. The North Atlantic Topographic Organization would have something on hand to offer her, even if it had to be caught and cooked to order.

On the counter, Eve saw half a quiche through the glass of a miniature cryogenic chamber. The inside of the glass was frosted over, and the temperature gauge read 12°K. A small scrap of paper had handwritten instructions on how to safely reheat it, along with a brief description of the flavor and edibility.

Phoebe had rated her quiche a seven out of ten.

“Better than the soufflé,” Eve muttered.

Despite the kind gesture of food from her sister, Eve wasn’t in the mood for reverse cryogenics prior to eating. Instead, she peeled a banana—one of Phoebe’s staples, given its ease in chewing—and sat down on her sofa to eat.

As she mushed up the already-mostly-mush fruit in her mouth, Eve browsed news feeds.

Ore shipment numbers, an archaeological find in Kenya, a shakeup in the membership of the Martian Seed Committee… Eve devoured them all. It was fuel into the fire of her mind. Every fact drew Earth one step closer to making sense.

Earth was a multi-dimensional, massively multi-variable, ever-shifting puzzle, and Eve wouldn’t even know the solution if she saw it. But the more she learned, the closer Eve felt to an answer. Even knowing that a hundred of Charlie7’s lifetimes couldn’t bring her complete knowledge of the planet, the more she understood, the less alone, adrift, and helpless she felt.

Light flashed through the front windows of Eve’s house.

Bolting upright, Eve rushed for the window.

With a slump of her shoulders, she discovered that it was just a skyroamer landing. Its headlamps blazed floodlights through the glassed-in front of the house.

“Another item for Paul208 to install,” Eve muttered to herself, shielding her data-viewing goggles from the glare. “Auto-dark windows.”

The skyroamer’s engines were still whining when Phoebe hopped down and sprinted for the house.

Eve quickly discarded the peel of her banana as she waited to find out what brought her sister in such a state.

“Olivia,” Phoebe blurted, panting for breath. “She’s gone.”

Chapter Seven

The jungle echoed with the crows of exotic birds, unseen in the canopy high above. At ground level, there were no paths, and the way forward was choked with vegetation. Ferns and fronds, vines and roots—the jungle seemed determined to keep out the two humans who attempted to cross its inhospitable terrain.

For a young jungle, it was learning fast.

“Let the Rainforest Development Committee come down here,” Plato snarled as he stomped through clinging greenery that halted him every step of the way. The servos of his robotic exoskeleton whirred and protested beneath his jungle attire. “Love to give those circuit brains a piece of my mind.”

“You’ve got one circuit brain right here,” Zeus reminded him. Though similar in appearance, Plato was larger and malformed from an overzealous attempt at improving on nature’s design. Physically, Zeus might have been the base model of their shared genome, but his brain had been replaced by the same kind used by the robots.

“You’re different,” Plato insisted, blazing a trail for the two of them. “You still think like a human. You just have one of their brains in you.”

“You sure this was a good idea?” Zeus asked as a giant fern snapped back and hit him in the face. “The manifests weren’t conclusive.”

Plato waved toward an area up ahead of them. “Somewhere over that way, we had primate supplement shipments lose mass eight times.”

“They were beginning and end weights,” Zeus argued. “Those discrepancies could have happened anywhere along the route.”

“But they weren’t all on the same route. The convergence is this region. Now come on. I’m doing all the work here. At least try to keep up.”

Plato was sweating and already halfway through the supply of water he’d carried into the jungle with him. Of all the barren, lifeless places on Earth, why couldn’t this have been one of them?

“You can thank this place for the air we’re breathing,” Zeus said, replying to Plato’s unspoken thoughts.

“Quit doing that,” Plato snapped.

Zeus stopped short. “Doing what?”

“Replying to crap I haven’t said yet. Creeping me out.”

Zeus fell into step behind him as Plato started off again. “You could have spent your years in seclusion learning about the world instead of picking up gibberish from movies.”

“Blow it out your tailpipe, brainiac,” Plato countered. “I bet I know a ton more about jungles than you, thanks to movies. What did Charlie24 fill that big empty database of yours up with, anyway?”

“Not a lot,” Zeus admitted. “I’ve been playing catch-up since the Human Committee rescued us. How much farther is it to this alleged lab?”

Plato paused and took his bearings. The computer readout on his wristband reported their location relative to his calculated location for where a genetics lab should have been hidden.

“Another couple kilometers.”

“And they wouldn’t let us land any closer?” Zeus asked.

Plato had just about enough. “Hey, thanks for coming. Seemed like a smart play not to come down here solo. But if you want to crawl back to your comfy, air-conditioned skyroamer and bug out of here, the path’s back the way we came.”

Zeus held up his hands and continued following Plato through the jungle. “I’m just saying. How much damage could we have done to the ecosystem landing two little skyroamers at the exact coordinates you figured?”

Plato grunted. “Welcome to Earth, land of committee hell.”

An electronic voice called out from Plato’s wrist. “Incoming transmission.”

“Don’t take it,” Zeus advised. “Let’s get this over with. Call them back later.”

“It’s Eve,” Plato reported.

Zeus didn’t even try to hide his eye roll.

Plato was already accepting the connection. “Hey, what’s up? And why you got those goggles on again? I like seeing those—”

“No time,” Eve snapped. “Olivia is missing.”

“Missing?” Plato echoed. “What do you mean, missing? Have you checked her usual hangouts?”

“Phoebe has,” Eve replied. Plato tried to peer through the scrolling and ever-shifting data from the reverse side of the display to make eye contact. “Olivia is missing, left no message, and isn’t available on her computer.”

“Sounds like someone wanted some alone time,” Zeus commented, butting into the conversation.

Eve shook her head. “That’s not like Olivia. She’s more responsible than that. With the uploaders out there…”

“Yeah, yeah. Read you loud and clear,” Plato said, trying to sound reassuring. “What’s her last known location?”

Zeus cupped a hand to shield his words from the microphone in Plato’s communicator. “You can’t be serious,” he whispered. “We’re ten kilometers into the jungle, on the trail of an actual potential criminal.”

Eve relayed a series of coordinates and times. Plato let out a quiet whistle. Olivia had a skyroamer of her own and liked to use it. A lot. Plato and Zeus were globetrotting criminal investigators, and neither of them traveled as much as Olivia.

“Um, you sure she didn’t just go off-grid someplace sunny and warm? You know, maybe swim with the sea lions or something?” Plato asked, trying to defuse a potentially unnecessary search.

“There are eighty-two sea lions. They’re all accounted for, and none are with Olivia. Gina81 confirms that Olivia hasn’t been to the incubating center, either.”

Plato scratched at the back of his sweaty neck. “Gee, I’m kinda stumped. Listen, me and Zeus are down in the Amazon basin, checking out a lead. But we’ll break off, head back, and put together a search plan.”

“Thank you,” Eve said simply. Her image vanished.

“Who put you in charge?” Zeus demanded the instant the communiqué ended. “I didn’t traipse out to the middle of nowhere, into the largest wildlife preserve on the planet, just to turn back when we’re almost there.”

“I’m not in charge,” Plato admitted. He pointed to the blank screen on his wrist. “She is.”

Chapter Eight

Back at the skyroamers, Plato and Zeus prepared to part ways. The trek back through the jungle had been easier than the outbound journey. Their trail had been cut, ripped, and trampled behind them. Even a jungle took longer than a few hours to regrow its underbrush.

“We’ll split the list of Olivia’s known contacts,” Plato said, tapping at his wrist computer. “You take the Americas, East Asia, and Australia. I’ll take Africa, Europe, and the western half of Asia.”

Plato didn’t need to clarify the exact boundaries of the search parameters. The contact list he shared with Zeus spelled out exactly which robots fell into each agent’s search area.

“I’m not taking Australia,” Zeus said with an emphatic shake of his head. “That’s not safe for biological life.”

Zeus had a point. The crystalline brain might separate him from the average human, but the varied predatory species native to Second Human Era Australia wouldn’t care about that.

“It’s only two robots,” Plato countered. “But tell ya what… I’ll trade you Elizabeth56 and Marvin70 for my half of Asia.”

Zeus glanced at his own computer display, held in the palm of his hand. “That’s eight.”

“Yeah, but I’m not afraid of the snakes and spiders,” Plato said with a shrug. “Take it or leave it.”

“What about Project Hammond?” Zeus asked, raising one eyebrow and crossing his arms.

“Wouldn’t mind seeing me a few dinos,” Plato admitted. “Even if they had to make up half the genome, I hear they’re pretty impressive. Never had a good excuse to check ‘em out before.”

Zeus retreated toward his skyroamer. “You’re crazy. This whole thing is crazy. We had a potential geneticist by the power cord, and we’re off looking for a runaway who probably just went hiking without a communicator.”

Plato pulled up short on the way to his own skyroamer. “Hey. Remember who we are.”

“The saps who decided that working for a sixteen-year-old was preferable to taking our own fates in hand?”

“Well, that too,” Plato admitted. “But we’re the Human Protection Agency. Hunting bad guys is great and all, but finding Olivia and making sure she’s OK is pretty much the definition of human protection.”

Zeus snorted as he climbed into his skyroamer. “Next thing you know, we’ll be babysitting at the Scrapyard in our free time.”

“Hey, don’t—” Plato began, voicing his reflexive objection to the derogatory nickname for the Sanctuary for Scientific Sins. It wasn’t those poor souls’ fault they’d been born a little malfunctioning. They’d been spliced, recombined, taken apart, and put back together. It was amazing most of them were even alive; plenty of their kind hadn’t been as lucky.

Plato had saved so many of them himself that he felt a need to continue protecting them—even their reputation. Zeus knew it and kept using the term Scrapyard to tweak him.

“Let’s just do this,” Plato grumbled.

The exoskeleton beneath his clothes whined as it bore the strain of Plato climbing into Betty-Lou. The thing had been a godsend, easing most of the joint pain he bore on a daily basis, just as Ashley390 had promised.

Sparing a glance at Zeus as the canopy closed on his skyroamer, Plato wondered which of them was the more robotic. Zeus had a human mind trapped in a robotic brain. Plato had a human body that needed robotic support to keep from falling apart.

Plato shook the thoughts aside and settled into the pilot’s seat. He was no philosopher. This wasn’t the time for wandering thoughts. This was a time for action and practical strategy.

Chapter Nine

Charlie7 joined the search as soon as he heard about Olivia. Emancipation was a heavy burden for one so young. The old robot wondered if maybe thirteen was too tender an age to be given so much freedom, even for one as precious as all the Eves.

As a robot, he knew he was stronger, faster, and possessed infinitely more endurance than his two underlings in the Human Protection Agency.

None of that mattered.

What was truly important in this search for a lost or kidnapped human was this: he was smarter, savvier, and more experienced than the two of them combined, even adding Eve to the mix.

When Zeus and Plato reported in, advising Charlie7 of their plan to personally contact everyone Olivia had been known to associate with, he wished them well and headed home.

Home, in Charlie7’s case, wasn’t just a luxurious underground bunker beneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris; it was a luxurious underground bunker tied into the very heart of the Earthwide Network.

One of the planet’s core databases resided in a sub-basement of Charlie7’s home. He had direct fiber connections to the rest. There were only a handful of other locations on Earth with the sort of data transfer rates available from here.

“Good luck in your skyroamers, kids,” Charlie7 muttered to himself as he delved into the world of qubits and atomic spins.

Into the data stream Charlie7 plunged.

Chapter Ten

The English Channel flashed beneath Eve’s skyroamer, lit by reflected moonlight. Her thoughts were no calmer than the choppy waters that washed against the white cliff shore.

As head of the Human Welfare Committee and overseer of the Human Protection Agency, she’d already sent the three most readily available resources to aid in the search for Olivia. Between them, Plato, Zeus, and Charlie7 had knowledge, experience, and an understanding of human behavior. Mostly those belonged to Plato and Charlie7, but she was sure Zeus was plenty clever, too.

Now Eve needed more help. Any favor she could beg or trade would be worth the peace of mind knowing her sister was safe. These weren’t the days of 10.3 billion humans crowding every surface of the Earth.

Every human mattered.

Eve’s protectiveness ran deeper, of course, since Olivia was her sister. Despite not growing up knowing one another, the kinship all the Eves felt ran deeper than a common genetic blueprint.

Calming musical tracks intermixed by a twenty-first-century psychologist failed to produce the promised effect. Eve’s own thoughts drowned them out.

Olivia could simply be lost. There had been no reported sightings of her skyroamer. Eve regretted now that they’d allowed the adventurous teen to fly solo.

There was also the possibility that Olivia was injured. If Eve had shown herself to be the pragmatist among her sisters, and Phoebe the free spirit, Olivia was the explorer. Even without losing her way, there was any number of pitfalls to exploring the vast, undeveloped wilderness. Predators, sink holes, avalanches, and drowning were all possibilities.

Evelyn11 hadn’t taught any of the clones how to swim.

But the worry that crept most deeply into Eve’s thoughts was that Gemini’s warnings had come to pass. There were other robots out there. They wanted human bodies. And if any of the Eve clones were to fall into the hands of those amoral robots, they would make prime hosts for a robotic consciousness.

Eve shuddered.

Up ahead, she approached her destination. It was no accident that the school for the able-minded humans had been built near the human capital of Paris. Or, Eve corrected herself, rebuilt.

In ages long past, before man had ever dreamed of robots, Oxford University had stood forth as the world’s first institute of advanced learning. Only fitting that it be recommissioned as the education center of the world’s next generation of minds.

Toby22 tended the manicured grounds these days. Lamp towers scattered across the campus kept the place sunny and hospitable even in the slumbering night.

Odd, Eve mused. Her studies had told that ancient humans had feared the dark for many reasons. In primitive days, nocturnal predators had prowled the darkness. In more modern times, criminal humans had taken the place of those wilderness threats. Side by side with those denizens were the imagined spirits and monsters of fiction and folklore. By why would the children of the Second Human Age fear the night?

Eve didn’t believe in ghosts or monsters. The wilds were as tame as hand-fed kittens. If there was one human generally considered dangerous, it was Plato, and none of the other humans worried about him one bit. The only fear Eve held in the world was of the nameless upload conspiracy, shifting from body to body in the hope of someday recapturing their humanity.

The conspirators didn’t need to work under cover of dark.

The lighting in the campus parks made Eve’s landing easier. She didn’t need the automated piloting assist to set down smoothly near the dormitories.

Holly30 exited the main faculty building from the far end of the quadrangle as Eve stepped down to the grass.

Eve didn’t have time for her.

Heading straight for the dorms, she had two goals, and the first had nothing to do with any robot.

Biometric scanners at the door recognized Eve immediately and unlocked to allow her entry to the building. Another shortly thereafter unlocked the girls’ wing. She felt a pang of guilt that she wasn’t worried about Plato’s siblings at the moment, but for now, Eve just needed to see that Rachel, Sally, Theresa, Uhura, and Vivian were all right.

Eve passed through a common room with couches and desks for studying, a game room, and a space for less structured play. She bypassed the gym and shower area. Then she came to the bedrooms.

There were eight rooms in all: five unoccupied and three in which five of the girls slept, sorted by closest age. The Adolescent Human Privacy Act didn’t apply to these juveniles. For their own protection, the cameras in the rooms could be activated at any moment to check on the occupants. With the potential for hacking and dummy video feeds, Eve wasn’t ready to trust her sisters’ safety to technology without verifying the situation in person.

But as Eve brought up the images on the door panels one by one, she watched her little sisters all asleep. Quiet and slumbering, it was difficult to tell them apart. Rachel had a room all to herself as the eldest while Sally shared a room with Theresa, and Uhura and Vivian shared bunk beds.

“They’re all fine,” Nora109 said, startling Eve.

Eve’s former chaperone was dressed as a university professor in a blouse and long skirt. The thick carpet floors of the dormitory had quieted the heeled shoes she wore.

“I had to see for myself,” Eve said.

Nora109 tilted her head in a ‘follow me’ gesture back toward the common room. “Let’s talk somewhere away from the little ones. Those doors aren’t soundproof.”

Eve nodded and followed Nora109 to a space with comfortable plush chairs and low tables. A growl in her stomach reminded Eve that she’d been skipping meals of late and tonight in particular. She headed for the common room’s kitchenette and checked the fridge.

“It’s a part of emancipation,” Nora109 said with a note of wise sympathy. Eve preferred to think of it as condescension. “You can’t expect to know where every human is every second of the day.”

“But Olivia is missing,” Eve said, looking through a selection of dairy- and fruit-based snacks the school kept on hand. She selected a strawberry yogurt and dug in the nearby drawers for a spoon. “She can do what she likes, but we should be able to tell whether she’s safe or not.”

“Privacy is a double-edged sword.”

Eve flung her hands in the air. Had she chosen a less viscous snack, it would have flown from the container. “Why does it have to be a weapon? Emancipation is about freedom, not hiding. There aren’t enough of us to get lost and hurt or killed.”

“Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety,” Nora109 said, holding up a finger. “Benjamin Franklin said that.”

With her hands full, Eve couldn’t properly access the interface in her data-display goggles. She couldn’t confirm the quotation or research the purported originator. “Sounds like a bad analogy. How about ‘those whose species went extinct may want to think about being a little careful of one another’s safety, lest it happen again?’”

Nora109 crossed her arms. “Eve, you’re being paranoid. You’ve seen for yourself that Olivia is the adventurous type. Maybe she’s a little tired of everyone stealing the pilot’s seat from her when what makes her happy is to see all the wonders of the world on her own terms.”

Eve swallowed a spoonful of yogurt. “You looked after humans for years. Why aren’t you on my side, here?”

Nora109 gave a mirthless chuckle. “I looked after humans who couldn’t feed themselves, or who had no concept of time, or lacked the judgment and reasoning to look after their own affairs. Olivia might be young and lack experience, but that’s what she’s out there looking for. Plus, Miss Smarty-Pants, she’s as clever as you are.”

“Wouldn’t you rest easier knowing she was at least safe and not in the clutches of some mad geneticist who wants to overwrite her brain?”

“Now you’re starting to worry me,” Nora109 said.

“Good!”

“You’re letting Plato’s conspiracy theories rub off on you,” Nora109 continued. “No doubt, there were some bad eggs out there. But the well’s drying up. Let Charlie7 and the boys play cops and robbers rounding up the stragglers. Surely no one is fool enough to keep trying to clone humans in secret, let alone upload brains. That was Evelyn11’s perversion, plain and simple.”

“And Charlie25?” Eve prompted. “He was as important as any robot.”

“And he self-terminated in shame rather than face justice for his actions.”

Treat finished, Eve threw her spoon in the sink with a clatter. “That’s exactly what he hoped you’d all think. He’s probably already reactivated in some secret bunker somewhere, just like Evelyn11 did last time.”

“He wouldn’t get away with it,” Nora109 said quietly. “He’s too well known. Evelyn11 was a recluse, and even she couldn’t just slip quietly back into the shadows. A robot like Charlie25 couldn’t keep himself cloistered away like that. It’s just not in a Charlie’s nature. All of them are larger-than-life, big-picture blowhards who think the planet would stop spinning without them.”

“Charlie7’s not like that,” Eve assured Nora, stepping to the waste bin to properly dispose of the empty carton.

“Charlie7 is the worst of the bunch,” Nora109 insisted. “Remember your history. At one point, Charlie7 was the only thinking creature on this planet. That means whatever was left here with him, he wiped out. He’s the most dangerous, murderous, heroic, visionary robot you are ever likely to meet. And this is coming from someone who considers him a friend.”

Eve didn’t know how to respond. She’d heard the stories, read the news clips. None of it seemed possible, despite knowing that it was real. Alone on a planet all by himself.

It would have driven Eve to madness. Even back in the lab, she’d had Evelyn11 to talk to.

But Charlie7 wasn’t the one she needed to worry about. Nora109 was wrong. The uploader conspirators were out there, lurking, scheming, waiting for the opportunity to pick off stray human hosts and live out their dream of reclaiming humanity long lost to them.

“Can you just promise me that until we find out what happened to Olivia, that you’ll take extra special precautions regarding the little ones?” Eve asked.

Nora109 offered a reassuring lopsided grin. “Eve, dear. You’re all little ones. I have coolant in my tubes older than you.”

It wasn’t the promise she’d hoped to extract, but Eve had spent long enough bandying words with her former chaperone. She needed sleep, and it was going to be hard work quieting her brain to get it.

It would take twenty minutes to fly back to Paris. Eve hoped to be in bed within thirty. With any luck, she would find sleep in an hour or two.

Chapter Eleven

Zeus pulled his skyroamer into the sheltered landing bay at Eddie130’s beach house on the Baja Peninsula. After climbing down from the vehicle, he paused to look out over the waves and take a deep breath of the salty Pacific air.

Even with robotic synapses, it felt good in his lungs. How much better it would feel with the proper neurochemical responses to match.

“Can I help you?” Eddie130 asked, coming down from the house to greet his guest. “Didn’t expect a visit from the HPA today.”

“Can it,” Zeus snapped. “You took Olivia sailing five weeks ago. When was the last time you saw her?”

Eddie130 recoiled as if Zeus had shot him. “Why? You surely don’t suspect me of anything to do with her disappearance.”

Zeus wanted to call him out for knowing that Olivia was gone. It should have remained privileged information, available only to the investigators. And yet, on the way over, Zeus had checked the news feeds and discovered that the search was public knowledge.

“Of course, you didn’t,” Zeus replied curtly. “You shut down your human cloning operations after thirty-eight consecutive failures and went back to cloning dogs.”

If a robot could have blanched, Eddie130 would have right then and there. He may have even fainted had he the blood pressure to drop. Instead, he staggered backward like an actor in a cowboy western who’d just been shot and was hamming it up for the death scene.

“You have no proof,” Eddie130 protested. “I’ve never even attempted to clone anything more advanced than a canid.”

“You tried to bring to life human biological samples cultured from the DNA of Martinique Robespierre. I don’t know why you were so obsessed with cross-gender upload, but I was never one to judge, if the science was sound. Yours, however, wasn’t worth what exited the rectums of those dogs you grow.”

Eddie130 stared. “Who are you, and what do you want?”

“Good Lord, Eddie. It’s me, Charlie25,” Zeus said. “If you have any idea where the girl is, cough it up. And if you’ve got any of your old equipment lying around, smelt it back to ore.”

Eddie’s face registered a momentary shock, but the robotic features slid into annoyance within seconds.

“Already done,” Eddie130 replied bitterly, ambling over for his own gaze out into the limitless depths of the ocean. “You were right. I was never any good at it. I have to admit, the temptation was there to read Evelyn11’s research and take another bite of the pie.”

“And…?” Zeus prompted, folding his arms. He took a step forward, and Eddie130 retreated a step back toward the cliff edge of his hangar.

“And nothing,” Eddie130 promised. “There’s no link back to me. I won’t get onto a list of suspects. I’m 100% clean.”

“Then why am I here?” Zeus demanded. “It was the flip of a coin whether it was me or the oaf who came. What in Newton’s name were you doing with Olivia?”

“She wanted to try sailing and found me in a directory of robots with a known propensity for yachting,” Eddie insisted, edging back to the very limit of the hangar. “She found me. Not the other way around. I swear.”

“You sure you don’t have an Evelyn-style upload rig squirreled away somewhere around here?” Zeus demanded.

There were times when wrangling all the disparate personalities among the conspirators had seemed like more trouble than it had been worth. The conflicting agendas, the differences in caution and risk tolerance, the razor-thin patience so many of his colleagues possessed. Being human for a few months had been a vacation.

Except for times like this.

“I. Am. Clean. Do you want to search the premises? You can look anywhere you like.”

Zeus shook his head. “No. I’ve got better ways to waste my time and a long list of visits to make. Olivia got around, and Plato put together a huge list of robots to interview. I have to hope you know better than to keep anything that incriminating off-site. Now, if you have any idea where that scamp might have run off to… keep it to yourself.”

“Yes, sir,” Eddie130 agreed instantly.

“And look where you’re putting your damn feet,” Zeus ordered. “If you fall into the Pacific, it’s going to be me that gets branded a Dangerous Human, and the only friend it’ll make me is the oaf.”

“What about Charlie7?” Eddie130 asked. “Will he be sniffing around, too?”

Zeus scratched an itch, still unable to control a slight grin that he could even feel such a sensation. “With that one, you can never tell. Update your security just in case. If anyone asks, tell them I offered a friendly reminder that there are nasty robots out there, looking to impersonate humans.”

Eddie 130 chuckled nervously as he stepped away from the ledge.

Zeus climbed back aboard his skyroamer and raced to keep ahead of the damage Plato was liable to cause to his organization.

Chapter Twelve

Charlie7 sat alone in the dark. Few robots who knew him publicly would have imagined it, but he had spent more than his share of days in just those circumstances. Back in the days before he’d rebuilt the robotic race, solitude had been his only option; light and darkness hadn’t played into the matter.

For what he was currently up to, the somber lighting and lack of witnesses seemed appropriate.

Earth had been reborn from a womb of stainless steel. It had blood vessels that carried data. Charlie7 was a parasite in a world of his own creation, sucking stray data from those veins to nourish his agendas.

Today, his goal was to locate a thirteen-year-old girl.

Calling the Earthwide a network did it a disservice. It was a network of networks. Any computational system that could be reached by hopscotching from one device to the next across the globe was a part of it. Only certain robotic processors and personal, private databases remained pristine and disconnected.

Charlie7 had systems that weren’t accessible from the Earthwide. Most robots didn’t. To date, he knew of no precocious young human who had joined that secretive, paranoid club.

Yet for all his ability to access the files and records of a thirteen-year-old girl only months removed from a life of cloistered slavery, Charlie7 was getting nowhere breaking into them.

“I must admit, Evelyn,” Charlie7 mumbled to himself in the dark. “You built your little humans better than the originals.”

But there was a difference between intuitive talent and centuries of experience backed by a brilliant mind in its own right. After a few hours alone at a terminal in one of the basement levels of his abode, Charlie7 finally cracked the girl’s privacy protections.

“Whatever happened to a diary with a key lock,” he grumbled when the file system opened before him like a book. His flippant comparison seemed apt, as well.

Olivia had as much need of military-grade security as the average teenager—which was to say, none at all. Her personal files included class assignments, stored images from her trips, and amateur poetry that had a solid and intricate rhyming scheme, if not a single original sentiment.

In fact, the most incriminating thing Charlie7 discovered in the whole mess of manufactured teenage melodrama was the existence of the security she’d used to protect it. Nothing else was even interesting, let alone worth protecting.

“Arthur19 would love this kid,” Charlie7 muttered. “Privacy for privacy’s sake.”

But her personal digital treasures weren’t Charlie7’s only discovery. Olivia, perhaps thinking her computerized fortress secure, hadn’t taken the basic precaution of scrubbing her Earthwide search history.

Another ten minutes of reading the news, articles, and instructional guides she’d read and Charlie7 had a lead in the disappearance of Olivia Seventeen. His chief suspect: Olivia herself.

Chapter Thirteen

Zeus gritted his teeth as he watched Plato’s skyroamer swoop in for a landing. They were supposed to have split up. This was supposed to be about efficiently dividing their labors to minimize the time for a complete search. Reporting their progress to one another was a formality.

Or at least it was supposed to have been.

But as Zeus waited for his partner on the rooftop of the Kanto factory in what was once Japan, he regretted checking in at all.

When the engines whined down and Plato clambered out of the vehicle, the big lug hustled over, EMP rifle in hand. “No partner of mine goes into this snake pit alone.”

“It’s Charlie13, not some lunatic cloner,” Zeus griped as he fell into step behind his genetic brother.

The faint whirr of Plato’s exoskeletal motors was audible from this close. Zeus thought to remind his partner that the very robotic assistance device he wore was built in this factory. But arguing with Plato was like reading a Human Era movie poster, all explosions and exclamation points with no substance to back them.

“You could’ve said the same about ‘25 before he chucked his brain through a magnetic food processor,” Plato replied, drawing a wince from Zeus.

That body had been a masterpiece. While no chassis was perfect and new models had come and gone since, Charlie25 had loved that old Version 68.2. Had events turned out differently, he could have comfortably inhabited it for another century or longer.

“Just keep your head down, don’t shoot anything, and try not to insult the good mixer, shall we?” Zeus said as condescendingly as he could. Plato, he’d found, needed subtlety hammered through his cranium. On impulse, he grabbed the barrel of Plato’s EMP rifle and tried to wrench it from his fellow agent’s grip. “You shouldn’t even be carrying this thing around, let alone in here.”

Plato’s grip on the weapon might as well have been a hydraulic vice for all the luck Zeus had prying it loose. One quick jerk was all Plato needed to break Zeus’s grip. “Hey, knock it off. I got no intention of firing it unless Charlie13 happens to be one of those cloners.”

Zeus snorted at the very idea. “You’re kidding, right? You think the Human Committee would have found Charlie25’s secret facilities and not scoured this place to the last bolt?”

“Kanto’s got more ghosts than a graveyard,” Plato retorted, continuing to plow into the facility, frequently checking his wrist computer for directions.

“What’s that even mean?” Zeus protested. There were times when he wondered whether the digital barrier was the difference in their understanding or if Plato really was off-kilter mentally. As a scientist, he couldn’t ignore the possibility of the former. As a thinking, reasoning creature, he strongly suspected the latter.

“You’re just too robot-brained to think like a human,” Plato said casually, as if Zeus wouldn’t instantly take offense. “But that makes you useful hunting them. Or it should. I mean, thinking like they do, you ought to be one step ahead of them.”

Zeus slapped a palm against his forehead. Was this the time to engage in another debate with the Great Wall of Hyperbole? With another half hour to reach Charlie13’s office, yes it was. “Even if I had the same mixed, centuries-old mind that a robot does, why would that put me ahead of them? At best, I’d still be making predictions and extrapolations based on incomplete information.”

“Yeah,” Plato said. “But you’ve got that human cunning mixed in. That ought to be your leg up on them.”

“You know,” Zeus said, shifting tactics. “It’s hard to envision Charlie24 teaching you to think with such gaping logical holes.”

“Get ‘24 out of this. Ain’t we got enough Charlies to worry about as it is? We’ve got ‘7 off playing tickle-tap with a computer screen and the ghost of ‘25 in this place somewhere. We’re on our way to see ‘13. Let’s cap it at three.”

“There’s no such thing as a ghost, especially not a robotic ghost. That doesn’t even make sense,” Zeus protested.

“Hey, sorry man,” Plato said. Holding up both hands in a surrender gesture might have carried more weight if he weren’t holding an EMP rifle that could blank Zeus’s brain. “Eve ran into the ghost of Evelyn11 in this place. Call her a clone or a copy if you want. I just figured you’d want the benefit of the doubt that someone with a crystal brain’s actually got a soul.”

“What?” Zeus asked, and for the first time he had the distinct impression of insects crawling along his spine when he knew rationally that nothing was there.

“You know,” Plato said with a shrug. “Humans have souls. Charlie13 makes robots out of bits of old human brains. Maybe some of that gets into a crystal matrix. Come on, man. I’m throwing you a bone.” Plato cuffed Zeus playfully on the arm. “The alternative is you’re some soulless machine wearing that flesh like a Halloween costume.”

The two agents of the Human Protection Committee boarded a lift and started downward into the inner reaches of the factory.

Zeus kept quiet.

Metaphysics fascinated most robots upon first awakening on the upload table. But it opened lines of inquiry that were wholly outside the bounds of science. Uncomfortable subjects of life and afterlife, soul versus monster, and the nature of a potentially eternal existence were subjects only a John or perhaps an Elizabeth could keep at the fore of their minds forever.

But Zeus was something new now. He hadn’t taken the full leap, the way he’d forced the transition onto an underprepared Gemini. She was human with all the baggage that went along with that designation. Zeus was something different, neither entirely robotic nor entirely living.

With painstaking surgery, his modified crystalline matrix could be implanted into nearly any human with a skull sized large enough to accept it. It had been custom-fitted to this body, but that was only a convenience.

“Hey, you coming?” Plato asked.

Zeus realized that he’d grown distracted by his own thoughts. The lift had stopped and let them off, but Zeus was still on the platform while Plato had started off once more.

“Yes. I’m coming.”

Zeus followed Plato, but while he devoted just enough attention to keeping up and not getting separated, the rest of his mental energy went toward that simple, unanswerable question:

What am I?

Chapter Fourteen

Plato had heard about Charlie13’s office from Eve. She’d been there once before, with Gemini. While in the presence of the false human, Eve had confronted the mixing master in the hopes of gaining his help reprogramming a new Charlie7.

This time, Plato wasn’t here asking for a favor.

The door opened, and Plato led the way inside. Zeus was still quiet, cowed into silence by Plato’s skillful debate skills. He followed a short ways behind before the doors closed.

Charlie13 stood with his back to them, hands clasped behind him. For an important robot, he dressed like a factory worker in practical coveralls and no adornments. The wall the robot faced was plastered with gaudy, oversized data screens. By the way the images flashed and changed, Plato was able to follow well enough to see that Charlie13 was tinkering with a new upload.

“Some sort of Toby mix?” Plato called out by way of greeting.

Charlie13 answered without turning. “The world will never have its fill of Tobies. Hard working, loyal, dedicated. What’s not to like about a Toby? A Dale or Evelyn might scoff at Tobias Greene’s baseline education, but he was more intellectually robust than half the Project Transhuman scientists. Now, to what do I owe this interruption? And with two HPA agents, no less?”

“Yeah, let’s cut to the meat,” Plato said. “We know you spoke with Olivia here not two weeks ago.”

“Public knowledge,” Charlie13 replied. “The girls’ movements all make the news feeds. Olivia wanted to understand the work we do here at Kanto and preferred a firsthand interview to generally available documentation.”

“Wait… Olivia wants to be an upload mixer?” Plato asked. That didn’t fit the profile on Olivia. He didn’t know the younger Eves well—unlike his brothers, Eve’s sisters were all a little too similar for his liking.

“No,” Charlie13 replied. “With a thorough understanding of the exacting, time-consuming, and rigorous process involved, as well as the repercussions of mistakes, she decided against pursuing an interest in the field. Rather a mature decision.” Charlie13 turned to fix Plato with a blank glare. “Unlike the choice to, for example, cavort around the planet playing secret agents.”

“We don’t want to delay you unduly, sir,” Zeus cut in. “This is a simple matter of thoroughness. Can you just confirm your most recent contact, communication, or even secondhand knowledge you might have of Olivia’s whereabouts? You aren’t a suspect, of course.”

“Like hell he’s not,” Plato snapped, slapping the barrel of the EMP rifle into his free hand. “Everyone’s a suspect until cleared.”

Zeus took Plato by the arm. “I’m really very sorry. Never mind. We won’t bother you any further.”

“Oh, no you don’t,” Plato said, wrenching his arm free. That pipsqueak brother of his wasn’t dragging Plato away from the biggest suspect he knew of. “I want access to your communication logs. Root access. I want to check for myself that you haven’t been arranging for your cronies to come grab Olivia.”

“Plato,” Zeus hissed. “Not him. Don’t. He’s untouchable.”

Plato shoved Zeus back. “No one is untouchable. Charlie13, by order of the Human Protection Agency, I demand you open a root access link from that terminal I see in your desk. If everything checks out, we’ll be on our way. Otherwise, I’m going to have to take you in as a member of the human upload conspiracy.”

“Has that Gemini been spreading libel about me?” Charlie13 demanded, though his voice never rose. “No matter. Request denied. Point that toy magnet somewhere else before you damage something important.”

As he turned back to the data screens, Plato decided he’d had just about enough. He and Zeus were the lawful agents of the Human Protection Committee. There was no way he was letting a major suspect stonewall him or make him route a request through a dozen subcommittees while he hid his tracks.

Two steps on the way to getting in the robot’s face, Plato’s exoskeleton froze up. The actuators locked up. The whirr of the motor fought against his muscles instead of aiding them. With a startled yelp, Plato toppled to the floor.

Charlie13’s robotic foot stomped down on the EMP rifle’s power supply, and the skillful placement of the blow sent all the indicator lights to zeroes.

“Perhaps,” Charlie13 said, looming over Plato’s prone form. “Someone should remember that he has an advanced case of osteoarthritis, and who authorized one of his factory’s inventors to take time away from the next line of drone improvements to build him a device to alleviate the symptoms.”

Zeus crept over to Plato’s side. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

“Not until he answers our questions,” Plato protested with a grunt, over the strain of his own exoskeleton fighting to hold him in place.

With a sudden flail, Plato broke free. The exoskeleton obeyed his commands once again. He scrambled to his feet, taking the busted EMP rifle with him.

Charlie13 was already headed back to his position in front of the wall of data. “Unfortunately, I don’t intend to share my private data with you. Nor do I suspect that the Human Protection Agency has the resources to circumvent my encryption protocols. However, I will provide you with one small token of information to help in your investigation.”

“What’s that?” Plato asked.

“I had nothing to do with Olivia going missing,” Charlie13 said flatly.

Zeus towed an incredulous Plato toward the door. “Forget it. He’s not a suspect. He’s not even cooperating any more.”

“And we’re just going to let him get away with firewalling us?” Plato asked, gaping at his partner.

“He already got away with it. You’re just too dense to realize.”

On the way back to the skyroamers parked up top, Plato checked the damage to his EMP rifle and wondered which had taken the worse beating: his weapon or his pride.

Chapter Fifteen

The next morning, Eve awoke to find a summons among her inbound communications. The Privacy and Surveillance Oversight Committee was formally requesting that she appear before them.

At first, the tiny, optimistic voice that dwelled within Eve’s mind told her that maybe Arthur19 was going to reconsider the latitude she’d requested for her agents in pursuing the disappearance of Olivia.

In her limited experience, that voice was rarely right.

When Eve opened the full text of the communication, her optimism slunk back to the little corner where it hid most of the day.

“So, Plato’s in trouble with another committee,” Eve muttered to herself. He was as predictable as a lunar orbit, though not on so precise a schedule. This time, there were a host of complaints including one filed by Charlie13.

Eve had to pull off her data-display goggles to rub her eyes. It was too early for this nonsense.

After stripping out of her nightclothes and computer gear, Eve took a quick shower. Actually, all her showers were quick. She never liked spending long without access to a data feed.

Dressed and reconnected to the Earthwide and the Social, she shot a quick acceptance memo to Arthur19 and headed back to the Potomac Bay region to answer for her underlings.

The trip over was uneventful. Eve used the time to check in on the extent of the firestorm she was flying into.

Plato and Zeus both made excuses for their methods, even though seventeen of the eighteen complaints had been targeted solely at Plato and the one report that included Zeus was largely focused on Plato’s behavior. It seemed that “find Olivia” had turned into “get someone to admit where they’re keeping Olivia or get an EMP rifle aimed at their head.”

Charlie7 suggested that Olivia might not be missing so much as wandering. While he couldn’t prove his hypothesis, it sounded nice to Eve’s optimistic side. His text-only updates simply promised that he would continue his investigation and that he knew enough to keep from upsetting the Privacy Committee in the process.

The last bit, at least, was a welcome change.

Eve should have been out there. Her duties could all be deferred. Robots would understand. They’d make accommodations.

But that’s just what Eve didn’t want from them. Robots didn’t treat humans as equals. At least, most of them didn’t. They treated Eve, her sisters, and all the Plato clones as somewhere on the spectrum from child to imbecile.

Just because Eve didn’t have centuries of experience or a computer wired directly to her brain didn’t mean she was a fool. Just because she needed to eat, sleep, and breathe didn’t make her especially fragile.

If she kept falling into easy stereotypes, though, that’s how they’d all think of her, even the ones she hoped to sway to a more egalitarian viewpoint.

The landing field at the Privacy Committee headquarters was packed when Eve arrived. It wasn’t that she was late; it was that everyone who’d heard about the meeting and wanted to attend didn’t have to worry about thrust forces from the skyroamers’ ion engines collapsing a lung. They’d all raced ahead to beat Eve there.

Once inside the facility, things didn’t look any better for her. As she passed through multiple security measures, Eve found herself wishing she’d brought along Phoebe for moral support or Charlie7 to actually be useful.

But Phoebe was a worried mess, off on a haphazard investigation of her own. What support she might lend was questionable. As for Charlie7, as much as Eve could have used him, Olivia needed him more.

Inside the Privacy Committee’s main conference room, Eve took a seat at one of the polished, dark-stained wooden tables. It looked like a courtroom from an archival movie. Had she planned ahead, Eve could have watched one on the way to the hearing.

“Welcome, Eve Fourteen, Chairwoman of the Human Welfare Committee,” Arthur19 announced from the spot where a judge would have sat.

One difference from the movie courtrooms to the Privacy Committee’s debate chamber was the arrangement of desks. Instead of prosecution and defense, backed by spectators, the desks spread out and ascended like an amphitheater, rising in semi-circles row by row.

Beneath the desk, Eve’s data goggles worked overtime, expanding her field of view and taking stock of the robots gathered in attendance. Of the scores of robots present, only sixteen were official members of the committee.

This had the makings of a spectacle.

Within seconds, audio, video, and transcripts would circle the globe. The signals would transmit into orbit to the freight haulers and mining transfer stations, the geostationary satellites and non-atmospheric shipyards. Mars would hear the news in minutes. Eventually even the miners in the Kupier Belt would know what had gone on here.

Eve had to weigh her words carefully.

During the opening statements and committee business, Eve took the time to formulate some notes, points she wanted to hit, and topics that were best avoided.

When Arthur19 worked his way around to the one topic that concerned Eve, a trigger in her goggles picked up on the keywords and flashed an alert. Eve hastily straightened in her seat.

“Chairwoman Eve of the Human Welfare Committee, thank you for joining us,” Arthur19 said formally. It didn’t sound from his tone like Eve was any more welcome than the chairs or the gavel on Arthur19’s podium.

“Thank you, Chairman,” Eve replied, knowing that she was being video recorded. Had this been a private meeting, she’d have waited for him to say something of substance.

“Chairwoman,” Arthur19 continued. “We met privately just yesterday on the topic of your sister Olivia’s retirement from public life.”

“She’s missing,” Eve spoke up. “There is no evidence that she left the public eye willingly or with any plan to do so. She may have been kidnapped, gotten lost, been hurt or even killed, and we have no digital or physical trail that leads to her.”

“Madame Chairwoman,” Arthur19 countered. “The topic of our conversation was the further reduction of the search limitations placed on the newly formed Human Protection Agency, which falls under your committee’s jurisdiction. I did not support such a reduction.”

“That agrees with my recollection,” Eve replied. There was no point arguing facts with a robot who could plug into a projector and replay the entirety of their interaction for the whole room.

“And yet…” Arthur19 said, pausing for dramatic effect. Eve wondered why that worked on robots who had to know what he was doing. “I have eighteen reports of intimidation and demands for information by agents of your agency.”

Dale16 chimed in. “All involving Plato. Let’s not allow that name off the official record.”

“Duly noted,” Arthur19 responded lazily. Anyone who wanted the list of transgressions had only to reference the agenda the chairman had published prior to the hearing.

“I’ve read the reports,” Eve admitted grudgingly. “All I can say is that Plato and Zeus exceeded their authority in the course of this investigation, and that they’ll be reminded of the scope of their investigative leeway.”

“Reminded?” Arthur19 scoffed. “While there are indeed inappropriate jests made from time to time on the Social regarding Plato’s mental faculties, the fact of the matter is that none of your agents is a fool. I think that some form of internal committee discipline is in order, Miss Fourteen. If the Human Welfare Committee can’t keep the Human Protection Agency in line, I may be forced to elevate this to the General Committee Oversight Board.”

Eve blanched. That was tantamount to demanding her resignation. The General Committee Oversight Board oversaw other committees in one of those recursive logic puzzles where at some level, they were responsible for oversight of themselves. In any case, they had the power to revise the chairmanship of the Human Welfare Committee, whether the members approved or not.

“Chairman,” Eve said, standing to make her case more fervently. “This is an internal issue for the Human Protection Agency.”

“Point of order,” Dale16 interrupted. “The head of the Human Protection Agency didn’t respond to his invitation to this hearing. Where is Charlie7, anyway?”

“Charlie7 is in the heart of the investigation into the whereabouts of Olivia,” Eve said without hesitation. This was one of the lines of inquiry she’d prepared herself for. “Since there was no complaint regarding his actions in the matter, I saw no reason to compel him to attend. His time is best spent in attending to what may very well be a time-sensitive matter.”

“Madame Chairwoman,” Arthur19 droned. “You took over the newly renamed Human Welfare Committee on the grounds that a human would be best motivated and most supportive of human entry into Earth’s complex and diverse society. However, ‘by humans, for humans’ does not appear, at this time, to be working out as advertised. I, for one, have seen ample evidence that alternative leadership is warranted.”

Eve’s face warmed. There was no hiding from the scrutiny of every pair of curious robotic eyes in existence. But the worst thing she could do right then was cry or shout denials. Ad hominem attacks against the Privacy Committee chairman would only make things worse.

She took a text file from her list of bland committee non-speech. “Thank you for your opinion, Mr. Chairman. I believe you have clarified your opinion on the matter and closed further avenues for discussion.”

With that, Eve stood and took her leave of the proceedings.

Chapter Sixteen

If there was one skill Charlie7 knew he possessed beyond the measure of most robots—and humans—it was the ability to multitask. As the head of the Human Protection Agency searched the Earthwide for clues to Olivia’s location, he watched his purported boss take a verbal beating on a live feed from a Privacy Committee hearing.

“Ouch,” he said aloud to the darkness, wincing as Arthur19 called for Eve’s ouster in the stuffiest manner possible.

Charlie7 could have been there to help her. There was no way the committee would have run roughshod over her if he was there in person or even connected via uplink.

But Eve had refused.

To her credit, the committee chairwoman took the haranguing that Plato—and to a lesser extent, Zeus—had earned her. Charlie7 kept free of that morass in order to continue pursuing his own investigation.

One of these days, he would have to teach his junior agents skills like tact and circumventing committee edicts without violating them. But that atom had already split, and there was no piecing the nucleus back together. For now, Plato and Zeus would be subject to the time-honored tradition of negative reinforcement.

If Eve had two firing neurons, she was going to deliver a much harsher punishment when she got those knuckleheads in private. Punishments always gathered momentum as they rolled down the chain of command.

“No time…” Charlie7 murmured to himself. “No time. Boys will be boys, and heroes will be heroes.”

If nothing else, whoever might have been out there looking for Olivia might be distracted by the proceedings. Unlike the rest of the Human Welfare Committee and his fellow agents, Charlie7 wasn’t worried at all that Olivia had been kidnapped.

He worried that she was about to be.

The barely emancipated human had been doing quite a lot of research of late. Her treks around the globe had brought her into contact with robots from nearly every profession that might hold the interest of an ingenious young woman, but she’d ended her tours a week ago.

Around the same time, Olivia’s interests had shifted. Her use of the Social dried up to the occasional exchange of pleasantries, some of which were brusque to the point of rudeness. Charlie7 could read the frustration into her dismissal of requests upon her time, offers to teach or train her in various fields, and robots simply wanting to share the company of a human for the sake of nostalgia.

Then the research began.

Olivia had read up on a vast array of topics all swirling around a central theme that had a gravity all its own. The orbiting topics including subjects such as fire building, climatology, hunting, bow-making, how to fire a bow and arrow, how to build a shelter, tracking, hiking gear, cooking over an open flame, rope-making, and life in the nineteenth century.

It didn’t take a robotic processor to figure out that Olivia was growing weary of the demands of modern life. It had merely taken a robot with advanced decryption capabilities to read her Earthwide and Social logs.

Buried among the myriad associated topics—and Olivia was a voracious reader—Charlie7 found numerous geographic queries. Olivia had cross-referenced climate, terrain, and wilderness restoration efforts in an effort to decide on a place to hide out. By her later searches and the refinement of her area of concentration, Charlie7 now had someplace to start looking.

A smattering of loyalty told Charlie7 that the first thing he should do was to pass this information all along to Eve.

But Charlie7 was still multitasking.

He saw Eve, still on live camera, hustling from Privacy Committee headquarters with her head hung and with as much haste as she could manage while hanging onto a shred of dignity.

Charlie7 drummed his fingers on the edge of his desk. “Can’t do it. Last thing she needs is to get caught up in running around Canada looking for her sister. Time for someone to learn the fine committee art of damage control.”

Accessing his internal computer, he opened a channel to Eve.

Even as he watched on the live video feed, Eve’s head lifted. She looked around to see if anyone was watching.

“Hey, kid,” Charlie7 opened, speaking aloud though he transmitted in text form. “Got a potential lead. You handle Tweedledee and Tweedledum. I’ll bring Olivia home safe. If you want there to be a Human Protection Agency when this is all over, you need to get those two in line.”

“What did you find?” Eve’s words appeared in Charlie7’s incoming messages.

“Too soon to say,” Charlie7 replied, keeping her expectations in check. “I’ll look into it and let you know.”

If there was a leak in the agency’s security, he doubted it was on Eve’s end. She could have been trusted to keep a secret, even from Plato. But the girl had enough worries of her own. The fewer specifics she knew, the less likely she was to join the investigation personally.

The last thing Charlie7 needed was to find out that one of those devious upload renegades had lured Olivia into a trap and have them catch Eve, too.

Chapter Seventeen

This was the life of a boomerang. Out Eve went. Back she came. Her house loomed above as she parked her skyroamer right by the front door, heedless of the landscaping. The drones had the planting schematic for the lawn, if she ever needed it repaired.

What Eve really needed, however, was a break. Charlie7 had promised that he was on the verge of discovering Olivia’s whereabouts. If he’d given her a hint as to where, Eve might have flown right off in pursuit. It was horrible of her, but Eve was secretly glad he had removed her from the search.

Olivia was out there all alone, lost and scared, with no one to turn to for help. All Eve could think of when she moped through the door was that she wanted it all to go away.

Eve had freed herself from the shackles of compulsory education on the timetable of the old Human Committee. Instead of frolicking in fields of wildflowers and designing cityscapes, she’d chained herself to a seat on the Human Welfare Committee.

Freedom had been Eve’s to spend as she chose. But having viewed her purchase up close, she regretted not being perhaps a bit thriftier with it.

“Fill tub. Thirty-eight Celsius. Lavender scent,” Eve said to the room at large. Upstairs, the plumbing would prepare her bath while Eve looked for something worth eating.

Phoebe’s cryogenically frozen half-quiche still sat on the counter. Eve wondered if it would even be worth the effort of thawing. Phoebe’s culinary adventures were hit or miss, and their tastes often ran contrary to one another’s. Just because her sister liked it didn’t mean Eve would enjoy the flavor.

“Olivia can have it when she gets back,” Eve promised, absolving herself from having to try it.

Eve raided the fridge for some celery stalks and peanut butter, taking them with her upstairs as she headed for the bath. Along the way, she scooped up a portable terminal from her bedroom.

Despite stripping off every shred of clothing she wore, Eve didn’t feel naked until she removed her computer equipment. With the data-display goggles off, the steamy bathroom felt like a different world than the one she’d left behind.

The Earthwide fell away into the void of reality.

The Social stopped its incessant commentary and attempts to engage her in conversation.

Her heads-up display ceased its continuous monitoring of her vital signs, the local area, and everything in her field of view.

No interface meant that Eve’s hands had nothing to do but dip celery sticks into peanut butter while she soaked away her troubles.

It had been Nora109 who had first suggested the concept of a bubble bath. The very notion had seemed ludicrous on the surface. Yet for all her servos and coolant lines, Nora109 had more memories of human life than Eve. Her trick had worked. The warm water made Eve float above her worries.

Arthur19 didn’t exist in the world of bubbles and floral aromas. Zeus and Charlie7 weren’t allowed anywhere near it. Plato visited, but only her imaginary version of him—the one who was all goofy heroism and sweetness and lacked the irrational temper and social rampaging of the real thing.

When the celery ran out, Eve finished her container of peanut butter with a finger. When both were gone, the boredom began to set in.

With nothing else to do, Eve’s hands swished back and forth in imitation of a swimming stroke. Though the tub held room to spare, it wasn’t deep or long enough for actual swimming. Eve had a pool for that.

Of course, Eve knew that the distractions of a bath and a snack wouldn’t last, and the choice would be either work or tedium. Everyone told her she needed hobbies. This was the sort of time when she agreed with them.

But Eve didn’t have any hobbies. Games reminded her too much of Evelyn11’s puzzles. Crafts only drew her interest when they resulted in something practical. Art was for those with less regimented minds, whose abstract thinking could run riot. The robots were all either hobbyists or obsessive workers.

Eve was enough like her robotic colleagues that she fell into their traps as well. She was a worker first and last.

Turning over in the tub, Eve’s wet back cooled even in the humid air. The portable computer was within easy reach, and it was waterproof. Eve dragged it over to the side of the tub and decided what her message needed to say.

If there had been one lesson to take away from the Privacy Committee meeting, it was that the Human Protection Agency was working without a backup file. Any more slip-ups and they could find themselves permanently deleted.

“Who can tell me how to fix this?” Eve wondered aloud.

She turned and sank back into the water up to her nose. Each breath blew wakes in the water.

With a breathing-assist device, Eve could go completely underwater. If a bath was relaxing, maybe she just needed to go the extra few centimeters to erase the last of her worries.

All those troubles, from angry committee chairmen to unruly agents as well as the missing sister caught in between, was all waiting for her the instant she climbed out of the water.

Eve sighed bubbles.

This wasn’t solving anything. This was hiding from an unpleasant reality. By doing nothing, she risked letting Arthur19 and the Privacy Committee shut down all investigations that might slightly infringe on the personal affairs of the scientists of Earth. Zeus and Plato would need to find other employment, though it wasn’t like the worst days of the Human Era; they wouldn’t starve. Charlie7 would be fine. He could take care of himself with or without Eve’s assistance.

But Olivia…

Without Eve pushing to keep the investigation alive, she might not survive.

Dripping wet, Eve stepped out of the bath, trailing threadlike waterfalls and covered in spots of bubbly soap. She picked up her portable computer and sent a communication request before she lost her nerve.

Chapter Eighteen

Plato was back in the jungle, but this time it was the Yucatan, not Brazil. The trees here were babies, many not even three times Plato’s height. He felt like a giant around his brothers and the little Eves, but these dwarf saplings made him feel positively King Kong-like.

Monkeys.

If there was one impression of the jungles surrounding the ancient human ruins of the Mayan Empire, it was the monkeys scrambling around the miniature trees, watching him. Plato had always liked monkeys, at least in theory. They were hilarious in two dimensions, trapped on a screen. They were human enough to be relatable and not metallic enough to be smug. The real life versions were a little eerie, staring at him as if trying to decide whether he was a threat, food, or maybe both.

“Never let a primate think you’re a meal,” Plato muttered. He wanted to come up with little idioms for the new human era. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded.

His namesake was a good one for pithy sayings, but he could think of none so day-to-day useful as the one he’d just come up with. Humans had wiped out entire species of delicious creatures before discovering scientific methods of maintaining populations—namely: not killing all the bloody things before they could breed more. Monkeys were clever little pre-human cousins along the evolutionary trail. And they weren’t shy about eating meat.

“What are you doing out here, you young hooligan?” A robot in a furry suit crashed through the brush, shouting at him and sending the curious monkeys scattering for cover. Aside from the robotic face, she looked like a giant monkey herself.

“You Janet9?” Plato demanded. Even without his EMP rifle, this one didn’t have a reputation that made him nervous. Janet9… crazy old monkey-loving robot. Even the other robots found her odd.

“Indeed I am, and I know who you are,” Janet9 replied in acid tones. If she wasn’t careful, those words of hers could poison the local plant life. “Now run along. I won’t be a party to your witch-hunt. I haven’t seen that dear little girl in six weeks, and I wouldn’t have kept it to myself if I had. The monkeys liked her, and they took an instant dislike to you. Excellent judges of character, monkeys.”

Plato retreated as Janet9 plowed through the underbrush toward him. Old or not, crazy or not, unarmed against a wary opponent, Plato was no match for the robot if she was angry enough to attack him.

Movies had given Plato some misconceptions about old ladies. They were slow-moving, frail creatures whose words were their only real weapon. And most were pleasant enough. Unfortunately, seven or eight hundred years of living just meant that Janet9 had gone through a few chassis upgrades. The Version 59.11 might not be the latest and greatest, but it was still a machine.

“Whoa, lady,” Plato said, holding up his hands. “I’m just here to ask questions. Can’t blame a guy trying to save 6 percent of his population from dying.”

“Then I suggest you move along and get to looking,” Janet9 snapped. Plato noticed one of the little monkeys crawling around her shoulders like she was a climbing gym. “Earth is a big place. Lots of places to lose a girl. But I assure you, if she were here, you could follow the sound of cackling monkeys straight to her.”

A thought dawned on Plato. “Could I borrow a few, maybe? If they can track Olivia, then maybe—”

“No,” Janet9 snarled in her genteel accent that sounded like it belonged in a posh sitting room in some nineteenth-century period flick. “I want you gone and that skyroamer with you. And I’m going to check it before you leave, lest you find yourself mid-flight beset by an angry passenger who wants to be let out.”

Plato’s mind spun through the possibilities. Janet9 hadn’t said the monkeys wouldn’t get the job done. If they had good noses or had psychically imprinted on Olivia, they might be exactly what he needed. Plus, if he kept it a secret, he might wind up with a pet monkey at the end of the day.

Win, win.

A chime from Plato’s wrist spoiled his train of thought and the retort he’d planned for Janet9. “Sorry. Gotta take this.”

Turning and shielding the wrist-mounted computer from view, Plato accepted the chat request from Eve over the Social.

“Hey, how’s it—whoa, are you not wearing clothes?” Plato’s train of thought, already halted in its tracks, was instantly thrown off the rails and into a nearby ravine. She was only visible from the collarbone up, but Plato’s imagination was fertile and well seeded.

“I need you to stand down,” Eve said firmly.

Plato crossed his legs, embarrassed, before realizing that there was no way Eve saw any more of him than he did of her. He cleared his throat. “What’s the trouble?” he asked.

“Privacy Committee grievance,” Eve stated, all business. When he mentioned wanting to see her eyes when he talked to her, Plato hadn’t expected her to take his complaint to the next step. “We’re in danger of getting dissolved if we continue receiving complaints regarding this investigation.”

Plato shook his head. “No can do. I’m not giving up on Olivia over some committee bull—crap.” He caught himself before he cussed at Eve. She hated the vulgarities he used to salt his vanilla language at times. “I don’t care if they lock me up again; I’ll bring her home safe.”

“Negative,” Eve insisted. She began walking, and the camera view shook with each step. Plato chivalrously averted his eyes. “Charlie says he’s got a lead he’s working on. Once Olivia is back, I need you and Zeus to reboot your search for secret cloning facilities. To do that, I need you both on good terms with the various committees, agencies, and boards that might get in our way.”

Charlie says? Why was it always Charlie7 who got the free pass? Plato got the impression at times that he and Zeus were clip-on accessories to Charlie7, to be discarded or re-attached as needed.

It wouldn’t do to let Eve hear that frustration in Plato’s voice. He took a deep breath and tried to play the game Eve’s way.

“What about this lead of Charlie’s?” Plato asked, hoping for a bone to gnaw on. He was willing to be Eve’s hunting dog, but she had to give him something to do.

“He kept the details in a hidden folder,” Eve replied with a sigh that blew a foamy bit of soap from her hair. “I suspect it means he’s treading on pressure-activated plates himself. But he’s—”

“He’s Charlie7,” Plato finished for her in a singsong voice. “I know. I know. I just wanna know how long it is before I get to do whatever I want.”

“Based on extrapolation of your current skill at covert operations, you’re going to need to upload to a robotic body to live long enough.”

Plato winced. It was nice being open and honest with a friend, but some part of friendship was knowing when to take a joke and when to cut a guy’s heart out with a butter knife. He could taste the bile at the back of his throat. “Forget I asked.”

“Unlikely,” Eve replied. “I generally have fond memories of our conversations. I’d be loath to forget one.”

The wan smile returned to Plato’s face. This wasn’t the bone he’d been hoping for, but it was something. “Really?”

“Yes, now can you please stop bothering Janet9, go home, and get some rest?” Eve asked.

“How did you—?” Plato began, but a surreptitious glance over his shoulder caused him to jump and cry out. “What are you doing behind me?”

No more than a meter behind him, Janet9 was just shaking her head. “Mating rituals. So much simpler in the lower primates. Cut the call, and do as the young lady says if you have a gram of sense in that massive cranium of yours.”

Plato gave Eve a solemn nod of compliance and shut off the connection.

The instant Eve could no longer see him, Plato shot a scowl at Janet9. Then he stormed back to his skyroamer. He even checked it for stowaway monkeys before takeoff.

It would have served Eve and Janet9 right, though, if he had decided to take one of the monkeys home with him.

Chapter Nineteen

Zeus ended the video conference and closed the connection. He was mid-flight across the North American Great Plains at high altitude, letting the autopilot handle his course and speed.

“So,” he mused aloud. “Privacy Committee isn’t happy with us. Can’t say that’s a surprise.”

Given Plato’s fiery temper and short fuse, it was a wonder the oaf hadn’t murdered anyone yet. He’d half hoped that Charlie13 would have put an end to Plato when he threatened the mixing specialist with an EMP rifle. Of course, that would have required a level of vitriol that the staid old stoic wouldn’t dare show, even to a pair of nobodies.

But with Eve ordering a halt to their investigation, he and Plato were going to have time on their hands.

That gave Zeus an idea.

The greatest threat to the society devoted to returning robotkind to the ranks of the living was Charlie7. His mere involvement with the Human Protection Agency put the whole endeavor on a countdown of unknown duration. The only certainty was that, given long enough, Charlie7 would unravel everything they’d worked for all these centuries.

Alien menace removed.

Earth cleansed of contaminants both biological and radiological.

Plants and animals reintroduced.

All that remained was for the robotic workforce to reclaim the humanity they had been robbed of by Project Transhuman. It was time for human minds to return to their rightful homes in human bodies.

Second on the list of threats to the human upload conspiracy was Plato. Incongruous though the thought might be, that giant mutant was persistent and just cunning enough to be dangerous. He was responsible for twelve robots’ demise and even Charlie25 hadn’t been able to tell there was a rogue human at work until the Eve incident.

Time to see about checking one of those two threats off the list.

“Plato,” Zeus said as he opened their pre-set channel, skyroamer to skyroamer. “You get the news?”

“Direct from the boss lady herself,” Plato replied. “Bunch of clowns. How they expect anything to get done if you can’t talk to robots?”

Zeus ran a hand over his mouth. Could it be this easy? “Yeah. I know what you mean,” he replied, pulling snarl in his voice. “We’re out here looking to save a girl, they’re worried about us trampling their flower beds and disrupting their monotone existence.”

“What’re you planning on doing on our mandatory downtime?” Plato asked. He sighed heavily into the mic, creating an unpleasant distortion that the standard-issue robotic filters had never needed software to eliminate. “I was thinkin’ maybe take Eve somewhere nice, like a little getaway. Take her mind off this whole mess.”

“Good plan,” Zeus agreed. “She’s working too hard. You get her mind off Olivia and Arthur19. I’ll keep working in the background in case Charlie7’s lead doesn’t pan out. We are the Human Protection Agency, after all. What good are we if we slink away from the first real, tangible threat to a human we come up against?”

“You’d do that?” Plato asked. Zeus could picture the gaping jaw, the knit brow. “You’d risk getting kicked out, maybe locked up?”

Zeus forced an uneasy chuckle. He couldn’t have scripted this any better. “I’ve got the easy part. I just have to be a little quieter than usual. You have to distract Eve from the fact that her sister is missing and possibly being experimented on in preparation for upload. Probably already had those creepy spikes implanted in her skull again... data-display lenses stapled to her corneas… Good luck, buddy.”

“Wait a minute,” Plato said. “Now that I think of it, Eve’s probably not going to want to sit on a beach sipping cherry soda, eating barbecue shrimp, and listening to steel drum music from the archives. She’ll want someone out looking for Olivia. That’s the only thing that’s going to make her feel better.”

“Aside from the fact that she just ordered us to stand down,” Zeus pointed out. Playing devil’s advocate was child’s play. Plato’s mind was putty in the hands of anyone with a basic understanding of psychology.

“Negative,” Plato said, mimicking Eve’s favorite word when it came to quashing his ideas. “Order to stand down is hereby overruled based on operational necessity. We’ve got boots on the ground. We know the situation better than Eve.”

“We’re both flying,” Zeus pointed out. While it wasn’t any part of his master plan, he simply couldn’t overlook Plato’s flippancy toward verifiable facts.

“From here on out, it’s radio silence,” Plato plowed on, uncaring of fact or fallacy, orders or oversight. “Either of us gets pinched, we fall on our sword. Nobody lets Eve get ousted over this. We’re getting Olivia back, no matter what. If Charlie7 beats us to it, great. If he’s off target, it’ll be up to us to rescue her.”

“We should still check in with one another to keep track of the search,” Zeus insisted. “The search is more important than the cover-up. Let’s meet up, split up the suspects, then go radio silent.”

“Roger wilco. Over and out.”

Zeus received a data blast seconds later with coordinates for a rendezvous.

Double-checking that he was no longer transmitting, Zeus shook his head. “What an idiot.”

Chapter Twenty

Eve had been dreading this assignment, but since it was her committee and her species, primary responsibility for these inspections fell to her. Olivia might be missing, but the work of the Human Welfare Committee wouldn’t stop. The Earth still spun and so did the march of progress.

Sitting in her skyroamer, Eve pondered whether she should get out or fly away. Sicily was beautiful, with old Human Era ruins overlooking a sheltered cove and rolling hills wending off to the horizon inland. Permit applications had come from across the globe, but the order had been voted on by a majority of the Human Welfare Committee.

Up next was Evelyn44.

Every time Eve saw that robotic designation, her eyes played tricks on her and reported that they saw Evelyn11 instead. She had tried slipping in a quick conversion algorithm to display it as EvelynFortyFour, but that just became cumbersome. In addition, every time she saw the designation written out in letters, it reminded her why she’d done so.

This was silly. Evelyn11 was dead. The fact that she’d cheated death once already made that scant comfort, but every robot she mentioned it to seemed to share the opinion that even backing one’s self up a single time was unusual. Getting away with that trick a second time sounded preposterous.

That left Gemini. So long as Gemini lived, so would Evelyn11’s memories of all that had been done to Eve and her sisters, as well as all the plans for what would happen to them if they ever fell into the clutches of her co-conspirators.

Pulling up a channel on the Social, Eve checked the live camera on Gemini’s prison cell.

A stew of oil and water boiled in Eve’s stomach. On the one hand, she saw the monster who’d vaporized a human mind to inhabit her body, who’d bred Eve in ignorance of her own species and the fate that awaited her. On the other, there was her friend Gemini, who’d slept curled up beside her and fought side by side with her to reawaken Charlie7. She was also just sitting there, playing with clay.

“Can’t be afraid of ghosts,” Eve told herself. Gemini was under guard, and that was the closest Evelyn11 would be to her today.

Popping the canopy of her skyroamer, Eve got out and strode to the door of Evelyn44’s villa. Along the way, Eve filled her lungs with warm air scented with the brine of the Mediterranean Sea. The invigorating winds and gentle sunshine made her question the decision to found Paris as humanity’s capital city.

The door opened as Eve reached for the panel beside it. A smiling female robot in a pink blouse and black slacks stood just inside waiting for her. “Come in. Welcome. So good of you to take my license application under advisement.”

Despite her trepidations, Eve found herself smiling back out of reflex. It was a relief that Evelyn44 inhabited a Version 49.30 chassis, a classic model that looked sufficiently different from Evelyn11’s Version 26.9 to forestall confusion.

“Glad to have geneticists working with the Human Welfare Committee. Shall we get right to it? Where are your facilities?” Eve asked. Different-looking or not, this was still an Evelyn, and Eve didn’t intend to turn this into a social engagement.

Evelyn44 swept a hand to usher Eve into the villa and proceeded to show her around. The abode was open and airy, with belowground levels visible from above via a central atrium, which gave it the look of a multi-story donut.

“I’m afraid ‘facilities’ may oversell what I’m planning here,” Eveyln44 apologized as she led Eve into a tiny lab the size of her own kitchen.

Eve puzzled over the limited array of equipment available. There were gene sequencers and embryonic aquarium tanks but only a single incubator. “I thought you were planning on starting cloning operations.”

“Cloning, yes,” Evelyn44 stated, hands folded nervously in front of her. “Mass production, no. My main goal in human cloning is to better understand the human mind, especially in the area of developmental disabilities. My goal is to discover the mistakes of the past and learn from them. The Sanctuary for Scientific Sins is filled with humans whose lives were stolen from them by poor science. Given identical genomic starting points, I intend to see if I can circumvent the problems that led to their inability to function in adulthood.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to start from fresh genetic stock?” Eve asked. Part of the charter of the Human Welfare Committee was to avert experimentation that would lead to more residents at the sanctuary.

“Easier, yes,” Evelyn44 stated. She tapped a few times at a nearby computer terminal and brought up an image of a double helix. From just a visual display, Eve gathered no useful information. “But I suspect plenty of geneticists will be starting from fresh snow. What good does that do Emily or Mark, hmm? Fat lot of nothing, that’s what. So, while Cindy14 spits out humans like tins of biscuits, I’ll be working with tape and glue to put the poor dears that got made wrong back together the right way. Gene therapy was just hitting its stride when the invasion cut it short. Time someone revived it.”

Eve stared into the nutrient gel of the embryonic aquarium but saw no signs of anything alive inside. The magnification built into her data-display goggles didn’t make any difference. “Why not include that in your permit request?”

Evelyn44 snorted. “You, I expected to understand. Nora109 says you felt badly for the humans you met at the Sanctuary. Despite being members of the committee, I don’t think most of your colleagues relish the idea of dragging those victims of hubris and recklessness into the spotlight.”

Something just wasn’t adding up here. Eve ran her hands along the gene sequencer. It felt factory-new; not a scratch of scuff anywhere on it. “Can I ask you something personal, Evelyn44?”

“Of course, Madame Chairman,” Evelyn44 replied with a deferential nod.

“How are you so different from Evelyn11?”

Evelyn44 seemed taken aback. “Excuse me?”

“Archetypal personalities are strongly influenced by the primary scientist. But you seem nothing like Evelyn11.”

“I should think not!” Evelyn44 protested. “We’re nothing alike.”

“Maybe we should just stick to the tour,” Eve said hurriedly, not wanting to provoke what seemed to be one of the most reasonable robots she’d dealt with professionally.

The next room had Eve reevaluating that assessment.

A cold sweat broke out over Eve’s skin as they entered a room that resembled Evelyn11’s laboratory, albeit with a homey, Sicilian-villa decor instead of a subterranean lair.

The equipment around the room was set up for scanning a human brain. The table and console looked so much like Evelyn11’s that Eve swore to have Kanto searched after she ended the inspection.

“What do you think?” Evelyn44 asked, chin held high. “It’s a hybrid of Evelyn11’s modified rig and the original Charles Truman model.”

Eve skirted the walls as she attempted to cross the room without nearing the machine. “Not my idea of stylish. I have bad memories of that machine.”

“Nonsense,” Evelyn44 scolded. “This model is completely non-invasive. I mainly copied stylistic and interface elements from the one you grew up around. It’s far easier to use than the clunky layout Dr. Truman conceived. He was a brilliant engineer and scientist but lousy with ergonomics. The core functionality, though, is 96 percent Human Era.”

Eve was impressed. She hadn’t relished the idea of studying Charles Truman’s work. Too much of it brushed areas of her childhood she’d preferred to leave behind her. But for a technology to be so little changed in a thousand years spoke to a seriously robust design—right up there with candles and shoelaces.

“Have you tested it out?” Eve asked, raising an eyebrow.

“No,” Evelyn44 admitted. “I was hoping that after this facility was certified, I could prevail on Ashley390 to allow me to scan one of the residents of the Sanctuary for Scientific Sins. Nora109 already sorted my request to the rubbish bin to scan any of the Eves or Platos.”

“I never heard about any such request,” Eve stated.

She didn’t relish the idea of queries of that nature getting flushed out of the system without her knowing.

“You would have if Nora109 had said yes,” Evelyn44 replied. She booted up the scanning bed, and a number of reassuring, gentle hums ensued. Power electronics always hummed, but the frequency didn’t conjure memories of being on Evelyn11’s scanning table. “Without her approval, however, committee sanction was moot. I hoped that I might advertise for volunteers after my license comes through.”

Evelyn44 paused and tapped a finger to her lips. “Unless… you could try it out right now. The process only takes a little while and is completely harmless. If you were willing to sign off on it, I’d have no trouble convincing the rest of the human advocates.”

Eve backed away until she bumped into a countertop that surrounded the room. A glass specimen jar rattled at the impact. “No. I’ll pass. I’ve been scanned enough. All my brain data is public record.”

“Oh, I know that,” Evelyn44 said. “It’s as much to validate the equipment as anything, and known baseline scans will make it easier to show the scanner is calibrated properly. Everyone’s making them now, but I wanted to be the first to get Human Welfare Committee approval.”

“Everyone?” Eve echoed. That wasn’t a word she wanted associated with brain-scanning machinery.

“Well, everyone interested in the cognitive development of new humans,” Evelyn44 clarified. “Jason65 and Brent220 made the schematics public a few weeks ago.”

“I… I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” Eve said diplomatically. She was reminded of her lessons on the Atomic Age. The inventors had never wrapped their vast intellects around the world they were creating when they made the power of the atom into a weapon. Only afterward did they see what had been unleashed in the world, and there was no way for humanity to unlearn it.

Eve hoped that brain scanning wouldn’t be the atom bomb of the Second Human Age.

Evelyn44 hemmed and hawed over the necessity of scanning a brain to diagnose and treat developmental disorders. Eventually Eve changed the subject and got the inspection tour back underway.

There wasn’t much more to be seen.

The kindly robot with the ominous name was every bit the geneticist her evil counterpart had been. Evelyn44’s records were immaculate. Her equipment was brand new, never used to clone anything (or anyone) before. The credentials she presented showed a breadth of expertise from algae to dolphins, with hundreds of species to her credit.

Strange as it felt leaving the facility, Eve could think of no one better suited to carry a Human Welfare Committee seal of approval than Evelyn44.

But Eve wondered why she felt so dirty as her skyroamer lifted off from Evelyn44’s dwelling.

Chapter Twenty-One

Drifting low over the Mediterranean Sea, Eve decided to shift subjects and cleanse the feeling of wrongness that pervaded her soul in Evelyn44’s lair.

Not lair… lab, Eve reminded herself.

Everything was above-board. Evelyn44 had complied with every single requirement on the extensive list for the Human Welfare Committee to sanction her work, from disposal methodology of mutated specimens to parental assignment for soon-to-be-born fetuses. Even though Evelyn44 didn’t plan on mass production, she even complied with the mandates for ensuring repetitive processes didn’t deviate over time.

Maybe Eve just wasn’t in a frame of mind to be trusting. The world wasn’t the safe place it pretended to be. Before she could focus on her job, Eve needed to know that everything was right in her family.

Eve needed to check in on the Olivia search.

“Charlie? This is Eve. Come in,” she said into the skyroamer’s built-in microphone. The channel was open to her private link to Charlie7, the one only the two of them used.

There was no immediate response.

Eve waited.

Below, the shimmering blue of the Mediterranean swept by beneath the craft. Sunlight glinted off the canopy glass. The ion engine whined, muffled by protective baffling and layers of acoustic damping foam.

“Eve to Charlie7. If you are receiving this, please respond.”

Still nothing.

Eve pushed up her data-display goggles and pinched the bridge of her nose to stem an approaching headache. She was getting them more often now as the head of the Human Welfare Committee. Headaches, in fact, seemed to be her top priority job, despite never appearing in the list of duties for a committee chairman.

Switching channels, she sought reassurance of a different sort. “Plato, this is Eve. Come in.”

Plato didn’t jump immediately onto the screen as he normally did, but under a minute later, his voice came through Eve’s speakers. “Hey, didn’t expect to hear back from you so soon. Figured you’d be on that inspection tour all day.”

Eve frowned. Something sounded off. And Plato was in voice-only mode. “Why are you running a heavy audio filter?” she asked, realizing that was the source of the strangely dead background in Plato’s signal.

“Oh. Um. I’m just doing a little maintenance work. Figured I got the time. Why not? Right?”

Despite choosing to remain in his Sherwood Forest hideaway, Plato had begun renovations once he no longer had the luxury of anonymity.

“And why aren’t you on video? You usually tell me you want to see my eyes, but have you ever thought I might like seeing you when we talk?”

Plato cleared his throat. “I’m, uh, not in any fit condition for female viewing.”

Eve’s headache was growing worse as she attempted to piece together any sensible picture from Plato’s words. “So, you’re working on your house, but you’re naked?” Plato might enjoy his euphemisms, but Eve preferred blunt, accurate communication. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“It’s a guy thing,” Plato assured her. “You wouldn’t understand.”

There were a host of biological differences between the two human sexes. Most were hormonal or related to secondary sexual characteristics. There were less pronounced discrepancies in the perception of color and spatial awareness, enough that population graphs overlapped heavily, despite a shift of the mean.

At best, if Eve were to credit Plato’s bizarre statement with even a nugget of logic, she might allow that Plato was doing drone work at his house, and drones didn’t wear clothing.

“You’re right,” Eve replied. “I don’t understand.”

“What’s up, anyway?” Plato asked. “Inspection do the volcano swan dive?”

After a second to work out his meaning, Eve shook her head. “No, that’s not it at all. Evelyn44 was polite as a kiosk, and her work sounds like it would really benefit the Sanctuary residents.”

“Great,” Plato exclaimed. Eve was still put off by the digitally muted background sound.

“It’s just the equipment. I guess there’s a popular trend among the aspiring human geneticists to have brain-scanning rigs around for diagnostic purposes. It all makes sense, but it sets off nerves all across my scalp just looking at it.”

“You checked her out, though, right? She’s clean?”

Eve rubbed at her eyes, then scolded herself and pulled her goggles back on. “It’s the name. It’s the stupid, stupid name. She’s an Evelyn, and she has a repeated-digit designation. Every time I see it in text, I have flashes of Evelyn11 instead of Evelyn44.”

“Hey, intuition is subconscious logic,” Plato said. “Maybe she snuck something past you.”

“Maybe…” Eve allowed. She didn’t find it likely in the least. Her inspection had been thorough. Her questions were so invasive that Arthur19 would have vomited all his coolant if the whole process wasn’t strictly voluntary. “New topic: have you heard from Charlie?”

“Nah,” Plato said. “Old Chuckie-boy went off looking for Olivia, and me and Zeus are grounded. Can’t exactly go dipping my toes in that water, getting it all muddy and hard to see through, just when Charlie’s doing some Grade A investigating.”

“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 thinking… 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.”

“Less, actually,” Jocelyn15 said with a shrug. “The human mind represents 88 percent of the difficulty in cloning one to term. Besides, we know the process works. Gemini is proof of that.”

Zeus seethed beneath his breath at the mention of that name. Gemini was a ticking time bomb. Only a combination of edicts from the Human Welfare Committee and the Privacy and Surveillance Oversight Committee kept someone from barging into her cell and torturing all the information she had on the conspiracy from her.

The conspiracy walked a tightrope because of that robot in girl’s flesh. Zeus needed the Human Welfare Committee intact to protect her secrets while at the same time crushing the HPA from relevance to stop their insidious probing.

“For now, I’m just a robot with a fleshy disguise,” Zeus said. “We need to put a lid on kidnapping attempts. Far safer to start from scratch.”

“But slower,” Jocelyn15 said. “People see you and the humans running around, feeling things, enjoying food and drink, laughing and playing.”

Zeus raised an eyebrow.

“OK, mostly the younger Eves,” Jocelyn15 allowed. “But just speaking in the hypothetical, if I had Jocelyn Santos’s body again, I imagine I’d be tearing those clothes off you by now. Strictly hypothetically,” she added quickly.

“Jocelyn Santos was fifty-two. This body is barely adult,” Zeus said with a scowl. Perhaps he’d chosen his diversion for the afternoon poorly. Jocelyn15 was making him uncomfortable.

“Oh, come off it, Charlie,” Jocelyn15 chided him. “Who’d age a body to menopause? If I was eighteen again, you’d be whistling a different tune.”

Zeus suspected not, but Charles Truman had never been good around women as a young man. A lifelong bachelor, he’d preferred his women educated and mature. By the time he’d figured that out, he’d given up on chasing young women.

A notification from his computer stirred Zeus from his unpleasant musings. He set down his teacup and checked. “Ah, there he goes. Off to the races.”

“Hmm?” Jocelyn15 hummed.

“Plato finally figured out where he wanted to go. Can’t be sure exactly where just yet since he flies with the navigational sense of a cab driver.”

“You really should give that up,” Joceyln15 said.

“Give what up?” Zeus asked, not taking her meaning. “Planting tracking devices on Plato’s ridiculously named skyroamer is never going to get old.”

“But those metaphors, dear,” Jocelyn15 said, taking advantage of Zeus’s unattended teacup to fill it again. “You’re trying to sound as old as Charlie7, using those old pre-invasion terms. All the cabs had been bulldozed into the smelters by the time you were mixed.”

“You too,” Zeus pointed out. “We’re close to the same age.”

“But I don’t pretend I remember the Human Age firsthand. It’s tacky. Nobody likes it when Charlie7 does it, either.”

“Sorry,” Zeus said. “It’s an algorithm I’m running to keep from sounding like Charlie25. It overrules my first instinct of what to say. I suppose it’s occasionally coughing up some of the stuff I might have said that would have sounded like old ‘7.”

“Well, in that silly body, it would be hard for anyone to mistake you for the robot who transferred them to their latest body,” Jocelyn15 admitted. “So, where do you imagine the would-be hero is off to?”

“I’ve long since given up trying to predict his logical leaps,” Zeus said, cringing as he took a sip of tea before remembering to sweeten it. Good-for-nothing taste buds had been set to appreciate everything too sweet for his own good. “That’s why I went with the tracker.”

“How will you explain all the time you’re whiling away here?” she asked. “Surely he must expect you to have done some work of your own.”

“Me?” Zeus scoffed. “I was told by the head of the Human Welfare Committee to stand down. That’s my boss’s boss. I’d be a fool to disobey Eve Fourteen.”

Zeus’s computer chimed.

“Oh, ho!” he exclaimed. “Looks like we’ve got a destination. He’s on course for Sicily. Looks like Eve might have hinted at something amiss with our good Evelyn44. Pardon me a moment.”

As he began tapping a message, Jocelyn15 tried to peer over the top of his portable to read along. He angled the screen up.

“What are you sending?”

“Oh, just an anonymous Social message to Evelyn44, warning her that the Human Protection Agency will be sneaking into her house.”

Zeus hit send and took another sip of his tea.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Eve had resolved never to come here. Traffic control on the prison hovership had double-checked to make sure she was truly intent on intercepting them and really was interested in coming aboard.

For her part, Eve had triple-, quadruple-, and quintuple-checked those same plans.

Brent184 led the way. His menacing black Version 70.2 chassis made him look like Charlie7 on the surface, but he carried himself nothing like Eve’s venerable old friend.

“Had a bet about how long before anyone came to see her,” Brent184 mentioned as he escorted her through the hovership’s interior.

It felt like forever ago that this had been her home. But it was only months ago that she and the other Eves had moved out. Eve knew her way quite well, but still she was glad of the company, even if it was only Brent184.

“How long had you guessed?” Eve asked, thankful for any topic to distract her along the way.

“I called it two years, but really my bet was never,” Brent184 replied with a sneer. “Just wasn’t willing to wait until she died of old age to collect. Especially since the medical staff seems happy to keep her alive. Medical visits didn’t count.”

“Who was the bet against?”

Brent184 spread his arms. “Oh, everyone around here was in on the pool. Lemme tell you, I only bet for ‘never’ because I had one of the earliest picks.”

Eve swallowed, wondering if she had the strength to go through with the meeting. Her data goggles had been tracking her speed relative to the corridors of the hovership and reported a decrease of 18 percent in her walking speed since she’d left the hangar.

Her goggles also displayed the route-dependent distance back to the skyroamer and how long it would take her to get there. With a few twitches of her fingers, Eve shut down that particular display as unhelpful.

By the time they arrived at Gemini’s door, Eve was sweating. The corridors were cool and dry. Eve’s clothes were practical and well ventilated. There was no good excuse for her perspiration.

“You got cold feet?” Brent184 asked.

She knew his motive, but Eve wasn’t going to make her decisions based on a gambling pool among the hovership crew. “Open it.”

“Okie dokie,” Brent184 replied jovially. “But if you get in trouble, I’ll be right outside.”

The door slid open.

Gemini sat in the apartment-like cell—not so different from the room Eve had shared with Phoebe—and looked up from her clay work.

Eve hesitated.

Gemini scowled.

Eve stepped inside.

The door closed behind her.

Eve took a slow, controlled breath. There was no privacy here. Arthur19 didn’t care about safeguarding the rights of a criminal in custody. The Human Welfare Committee membership wasn’t worried about anything more than her basic human rights.

“Hi,” Eve said.

Gemini continued scowling.

“How have you been?” Eve asked, flashing a smile that she couldn’t maintain for even a full second.

“I see you’re turning into one of them,” Gemini said coldly.

Eve frowned, but the data goggles extrapolated Gemini’s eye movements and deduced that she was referring to the goggles themselves. She pushed the device up onto her head. “Sorry. It’s hard to keep up without constant computer access.”

“I believe Evelyn11 offered that same functionality in a less cumbersome format.”

Eve’s stomach knotted at the idea of the lenses that had been stapled to her eyes. “I didn’t come here to be sociable.”

“Of course not.”

Eve wasn’t sure how to take that. Did Gemini know why she’d come? Or was that supposed to be a remark aimed at the limited social skills she’d learned under Evelyn11’s twisted guidance?

“Olivia is missing,” Eve said simply.

“Who?”

Eve swallowed back the rising bile in her throat. “Eve17. That’s her name now… Olivia.”

“How cute. O is the seventeenth letter of the alphabet. Quite predictable.”

This was a mistake. Eve had come here hoping to find Gemini reasonable, eager enough for any contact with the outside world that she’d jump at the chance to lend her help. Instead, the veneer was peeling to reveal Creator beneath the mask of flesh and blood.

“Sorry to have bothered you,” Eve said, trying her best to match the coldness of Gemini’s tone. She spun to face the door. “Brent184? I’m done here.”

“No! Wait!” Gemini shouted, jumping from the couch with one hand outstretched, stopping herself short of what might be considered an attack on Eve.

Eve knew why Gemini stopped short. The collar around Gemini’s neck was packed with a sedative syringe that would render her unconscious almost instantaneously if she broke certain guidelines. Touching Eve ought to have been enough.

The door slid open, and Brent184 stood aside to let Eve pass.

Again, however, Eve hesitated.

“Please. Don’t leave me,” Gemini begged. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be curt with you. I’ll be on my best behavior, I swear!”

Brent184 cocked his head, waiting for a decision.

“Give us a little more time,” Eve told him. The door slid closed once more. Turning to Gemini, Eve backed the girl to the couch, threatening with her mere proximity. For someone so used to being in control, the idea of that collar being able to rob her of consciousness must have terrified Gemini.

“Let’s try this again,” Eve said, crossing her arms. “Olivia is missing.”

“What do you mean by missing?” Gemini said, keeping her tone bland and even. “Was she supposed to be somewhere and didn’t arrive, or are you talking ransom note with magazine-clipped letters?”

“Magazine-clipped—?”

“Sorry,” Gemini said, turning away. “Before your time. Before mine, too, frankly, but it still showed up in old movies. I mean… how did you lose her?”

“Well, she’s emancipated,” Eve explained, not willing to take for granted any events that had occurred since Gemini’s imprisonment. “She’s not tracked or tagged or anything, but she’s vanished without a trace. Phoebe and I—”

“Who?” Gemini cut in. “Wait. Let me guess. Eve16? P being sixteenth and all that…”

“We all took our names before you… well, you know,” Eve said.

“Got thrown in the labyrinth’s oubliette?” Gemini prompted.

Eve itched to pull down her data goggles to look up the reference, but just let the comment pass with a nod of confirmation. “Well, Phoebe, Olivia, and I are all considered legal adults.”

“Unless you have reason to suspect foul play, I don’t see the issue, then,” Gemini said. “If you wanted to make a thirteen-year-old girl responsible for her own actions—which might well be a planetary first—this is merely a consequence.”

“But I do suspect foul play,” Eve countered. She sat down on the far end of the couch from Gemini, momentarily distracted by the clay chessboard and pieces arrayed mid-game. There was a game that appeared to have developed from Alekhine’s Defense. Eve blinked aside the distraction and the developing threat to the reddish-brown king. “She deviated from her normal routine and vanished. That fits with the profile of a kidnapping.”

“Let me guess: you studied up on historical kidnapping statistics and patterns,” Gemini said, crossing her arms.

“Yes, but—”

“But nothing,” Gemini cut in. “Did she have social engagements that she missed? Was she expected somewhere and failed to arrive?”

“Well, no.”

“Eve17 was an explorer. Despite the conditions of the lab, she always seemed to want to know about the places Evelyn11 went outside it. Absent contrary evidence, I’d say you’ve got a runaway on your hands, not a kidnapping. And since you saw fit to treat a hormone-addled teenager like a rational adult, you have no basis for hunting her down. She’ll turn up sooner or later. Evelyn11 didn’t raise any fools.”

Eve couldn’t take it anymore. “You. Not ‘Evelyn11’ in the third person. You. Don’t dodge responsibility by claiming that you and Evelyn11 aren’t one in the same.”

“We’re not,” Gemini said, staring out the window. “Evelyn11 never felt the slightest regret or guilt for her actions. Me? That’s all I’m made of.”

Eve felt a pang of sympathy before remembering that Gemini knew all the emotional levers to pull to manipulate her and her sisters. “If you’re so wracked with guilt, tell us who the rest of the upload conspirators are.”

“My offer still stands,” Gemini stated simply. “Full amnesty and a bodyguard contingent to protect me from retribution, and the names are yours. You think I’m safe—even in this sealed box—without guarantees of protection?”

“I can talk to the committees.”

It would take a lot of talking. Even her own membership was unlikely to sanction a full pardon for Gemini thanks to her actions as Evelyn11. And that didn’t even cover all the other committees she’d offended including nearly every body chartered to govern ethics.

“Well,” Gemini said with a mirthless smile. “You go do that. It’s been nice having you, but I think I’ll return to my leisure.”

“Bishop to c5,” Eve said. “Checkmate in seven moves.”

She stood and called for Brent184 to let her out. This time, when the door slid open, Eve slipped out without any pause.

“That’s cruel,” Brent184 said once the door slid shut.

“I know,” Eve replied. “But she should learn to treat people better.”

Though Gemini might spend hours analyzing the position, there was no possibility of checkmate within the next seven moves.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

There should have been no need for a wilderness tracker in the modern world. Satellite-based thermal imaging, ferromagnetic scanners, and particulate analyzers should have made locating a lone girl in the wilderness easier than coding in BASIC. Yet Charlie7 didn’t have any specialized scanning equipment packed in the storage compartment of his skyroamer, and the Privacy Committee hated satellite-based tracking systems of any sort.

Without access to the Earthwide, Charlie7 didn’t even have access to how-to guides or personal journals written by ancient trackers. He had to improvise.

Fortunately, Charlie7 was brilliant.

A widening circular search pattern eventually got him close enough that he could spot a second skyroamer parked out in the middle of the desolate beauty of the nascent wilderness. The vehicle sat nestled under some artfully arranged brush beside an outcropping of rock.

Charlie7 stared into the sky, wondering if visual imaging from orbit would even have picked up on the craft without seeing it set down.

“Kids these days,” he muttered. “They just don’t make ‘em like they used to.”

Before he headed off to find the girl, he opened the canopy and performed a cursory search of the cockpit.

Everything was gone.

If Olivia had packed for this trip, everything had gone with her. There was no hint that the skyroamer was intended to be a base of operations or a storage site of any sort. Odds were that Olivia wasn’t planning on being back here anytime soon. Waiting wasn’t going to get the job done.

Trails led off in all directions. Shallow depressions in the soil stood out if Charlie7 filtered his visual feed properly. He followed one trail, then the next, and so on as they circled out, wandered, and returned. Olivia had reconnoitered the area before setting out.

At last, he spotted one set of tracks that clearly led away from the skyroamer. Charlie7 knew that he had to check one last thing before he set off in pursuit.

Leaning into the cockpit, Charlie7 tried to access the skyroamer’s computer.

There was a whine, out of place amid the myriad systems of the skyroamer.

Charlie7 dove.

Only the superior reflexes of his Version 70.2 chassis saved him as an explosion ripped the front end of the skyroamer apart. Shrapnel flew, shredding Charlie7’s clothes and scratching up his paint. The blast itself scorched his cranial plate.

Dusting himself off, Charlie7 stood and stared at the wreckage.

“Well, maybe they do make kids the way they used to,” he joked despite being all alone.

The whole cockpit and front section of the skyroamer was gone, torn to scrap and flung across a quarter kilometer area. The area just forward of the engines still smoked.

Since none of the Eves had shown psychopathic tendencies, he preferred to believe that the bomber was the same robot responsible for the signal jamming. He was willing to accept Olivia as a lone wolf who wanted to test herself against the wilderness. He wasn’t, however, ready to paint her as the Second Human Age’s Unibomber.

Taking a fresh visual scan of the area, he looked for any hint of robotic footprints.

The blast had ruined any evidence, however, raking the landscape with debris and scorch marks. Not that it probably mattered much. Any robot with the savvy to plant the device where only a rescuer was liable to find it and cunning enough to blanket the area in advanced jamming technology wasn’t liable to slip up and leave footprints leading to and from the scene.

Knowing where Olivia’s trail had been heading just before trying to use her computer, Charlie7 scouted the area and picked up her trail anew. His surface area and depth calculations helped him estimate that the forty-kilogram girl was lugging at least an additional thirty kilos worth of gear.

In two years of Cub Scouts, Charles Truman had never hiked with more than an afternoon’s lunch to weigh him down. He revised his assessment of Olivia back to its original stance. “Nope. Not like they used to…”

As he headed off into the Ancient Canadian wilds of the boreal tundra, he wondered how long it would take to catch up with Olivia.

“This is why you shouldn’t give kids skyroamers,” he shouted in the direction of Kanto, where Jason90 had built her a ride of her own. “Emancipate them all you want. Just don’t give them transportation.”

Problem solved. Minor children in school. Emancipated children relegated to a wide area within walking distance of a home base.

His robotic chassis didn’t feel fatigue. Charlie7 didn’t get hungry, thirsty, or sleepy. The whipping winds even lightened the load on his coolant system.

But those two years of scouting had taught Charlie7 one thing that had remained unchanged for ten centuries: he hated hiking.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Plato had to give Evelyn44 credit. Her little island hideaway had style. Cross-checking against historical databases, he learned it was some sort of Italian villa. It had been built of pale yellow brick with a whiter stone used for quoins. The roof was hipped and made from clay tile. It had arch-covered courtyards and wrought iron fencing around terraces that overlooked the Mediterranean. Thin, square towers gave it a hint of castle in its aspect.

Of modern amenities, all that betrayed the villa from the outside was a skyroamer landing pad, and that was vacant.

Plato was lucky that Evelyn44 kept her public engagements on the Social. He knew she was speaking at a symposium in Stockholm at that very minute. His window was another three hours. Plenty of time to catch a cloner.

However, Plato still didn’t feel right setting down on the landing pad. It felt like a trap. Some cage or force field was liable to spring up and lock him inside. It was the sort of thing he’d do, if he had an eternity to cook up crazy defenses for his island fortress home.

Instead, Plato found a rocky cove a kilometer and a half up the coast and slipped toward the villa from the rear. Left under an electronic camouflage screen, no one was going to find Betty-Lou unless they tripped over her.

All the villa’s motion sensors and cameras were in diagnostic mode, taking old inputs on a loop. It was a horrible oversight on the part of the system designers, leaving in the manufacturing test commands after delivery and installation—or it could have been insurance for the designers themselves. After all, who liked building a system even they couldn’t get into?

Not Plato. Not the robot who came up with this rig.

That still left Plato with the question of how best to enter. The front door was right out. Plato could have had the golden access code to every digital system on Earth and still wouldn’t walk into a place through the front door. His every secret agent instinct screamed that it was a rookie mistake.

With hours on his hands and hopefully a quick search ahead, Plato waited and watched.

The extensive gardens were tended by a fleet of little drones. Most weren’t even humanoid, which made them a little less offensive to human sensibilities. Mindless human forms grated on Plato’s nerves like a dog whistle.

But while the hovering drones that pruned the hedges flew in and out of the villa by way of tiny trapdoors, the humanoid workers gained ingress and egress via an actual door.

“Gotcha!” Plato cheered softly from behind a topiary depicting a bull.

Knowing that most drones were only programmed to be task focused, he fell into step behind one of the humanoid gardening drones and followed it to the door. The robot carried a terracotta pot with a wilted flower too far gone for Plato to identify.

Perfect. It would head inside to do whatever gardeners did to fix broken plants, and Plato would sneak in behind it.

A short flight of stone steps led down to the door, as the drone entrance was below ground level. The stairway was just wide enough for the drones, and Plato had to turn his shoulders to follow the automaton down them. At the bottom, a glazed, multi-panel wooden door slid into the wall at the drone’s approach.

Plato hurried.

The door had opened with only centimeters to spare before the drone arrived. He didn’t imagine it would close with any more margin.

There was a crash and clatter as the door started to close and Plato tackled the gardener to get through before he was shut outside.

“Sorry, buddy,” Plato apologized as he scrambled to his feet.

Unslinging the EMP rifle from his shoulder, he checked the systems for damage. Finding the weapon in working order, he aimed it at the drone and waited for any sign that it was going to hassle him.

But the gardening drone seemed concerned only with the flowerpot it had fallen atop of. It retrieved a nearby dustpan and began sweeping up the mess.

Plato shook his head. What a pathetic existence. He was tempted to fire and put the poor mindless thing out of its misery.

However, there was a job to do, one more important than sending a pile of circuitry off to robo-heaven.

Plato headed off at once, in search of damning evidence to justify Eve’s concerns over Evelyn44.

The lower levels of Evelyn44’s villa were a genetics candy land. She didn’t even hide the stuff out of sight. Sequencers, cellular splicers, DNA encoders, all the stuff a geneticist would keep around. Unfortunately, as Plato walked up and down the rows of equipment, dodging drones that pushed buttons and carried samples, he discovered something that annoyed him.

Evelyn44 was cloning plants.

“Perfect cover,” he muttered. She had the equipment with legitimate purposes, at least as far as anyone in the Human Welfare Committee knew.

Human cloning wasn’t a new field for Evelyn44. She was just slowly easing her way into the good graces of Eve and her committee while licensing was still in its infancy.

It was a brilliant plan, really. Eve would give permission to clone humans in a controlled, ethical environment—something Plato questioned was even possible—then, not long after, Evelyn44 would have a miraculous breakthrough and “discover” all the old research she did on live test subjects.

That made Plato sick to his stomach.

Evelyn44 wasn’t going to get away with it. Playing a game of Corners and Cowards with the drones, he managed to avoid interrupting their work as he lifted seed incubators, tapped into computer logs, and pried open access panels in search of incriminating evidence.

“Aha!” he exclaimed upon discovery of a door outline obscured behind a set of steel shelving. Quickly he looked all around, hoping none of the drones had reacted to his outburst. None had.

Breathing a sigh of relief—both at the fact none of the drones had perked up at his shout and that he’d finally found something spurious to investigate—Plato set about getting to the door.

The shelving was poor quality, considering the easy availability of protofabs that could make similar or better parts. Thin sheet metal had been cleverly bent into V channels and welded together such that the resulting structure—if not the individual pieces—was sturdy. Each shelf was lined with a haphazard scattering of jars and sacks. They were labeled, but after checking a couple to see if any were hazardous to humans, Plato gave up reading them.

Setting his EMP rifle against the wall, Plato grabbed hold of one of the lowest shelves and lifted until the weight wasn’t bearing on the floor. Slowly, with a shriek of sheet metal, he dragged it around, swinging it like a door.

It wasn’t that the shelves were heavy—muscle power wasn’t a problem for Plato. It was the risk of toppling something and leaving signs of his being there. Once he had his evidence, he could call in the cavalry and kick over anything he liked. Until then, stealth was his friend. After all, until he had the evidence in hand, he was the guilty-looking one.

When the shelf was sufficiently out of the way, Plato looked for signs of a door catch. The bricks all lined up, leaving a clear seam indicating the outline of the door, but there was no matching door control panel outlined by the bricks.

Plato poked and prodded, traced patterns in the mortar and rapped with the butt of his EMP rifle listening for a hollow spot. He’d spent a good fifteen minutes pestering the door before growing frustrated and trying to kick it down.

The door swung open easily. For all his experimentation, he hadn’t tried simply giving the door a good shove.

Before the shock of how easily it opened finished registering, the door began swinging shut. Plato lunged for it, jamming a shoulder against it before it could slam shut. For all he knew, it was good fortune alone that had kept it from being latched the first time.

What he found, though, was that the door operated on a simple gas-spring return mechanism. Stepping through and examining it, he could find no evidence of locks, either mechanical or electrical, and no way for the door to latch shut.

“Well, I’ll be.”

When he thought about it, the lack of advanced systems made sense. Eve would never have bothered looking on the far side of a shelf for a secret door. She might have scanned for stray electromagnetic fields where Evelyn44 hadn’t reported active equipment. This was the robot equivalent of hiding something in plain sight.

Plato grunted. “Yeah, we’ll, you’re not dealing with a robot, lady. You just got outsmarted by good ‘ole human brainpower.”

Setting his EMP rifle inside the secret chamber, Plato pulled the shelf back into place from the far side and allowed the door to close.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Plato flicked on the light attached to the scope of the EMP rifle. It was the only illumination he had. The air was thick and heavy, possibly sealed in since before the atmosphere had been fully restored. Plato blinked to clear his head from a wave of dizziness and forced himself onward.

Heroes didn’t falter. They didn’t complain about non-ideal oxygen ratios or stop to go find a respirator. Heroes got results.

While everything outside the villa had been old world charm, and everything in the basement level was modern scientific, the sub-basement hearkened back to the days of Jules Verne, filled with mysterious pipes and primitive gadgetry that could have come from a foundry in Victorian England.

The sub-basement hissed and gurgled, rumbled and grated. Somewhere, there was a fan blowing, obviously not getting its job done well enough, according to Plato’s lungs. The pipes ran in tangled knots. Plato felt some of them experimentally and discovered that they ran either hot or cold; nothing was room temperature.

Bundles of fiber cable caught the light of the EMP rifle’s lamp. “Hmm. What have we here? Something’s rotten in the state of Sicily, methinks.”

Following the fiber bundle, Plato wended his way through the botanical garden’s underbelly of irrigation and fertilization—the latter explaining the acidic smell down in the sub-basement. Eventually he came upon the destination of the data-carrying cables.

Evelyn44 had herself a secret database. It was sheltered in an environmentally controlled alcove; its blinking lights were almost enough for Plato to work by once he closed himself inside. Propping the rifle against his leg, he angled the lamp to illuminate an access panel.

“Well, crazy robot lady,” Plato muttered. “What sort of physical security have you got on this thing?” It was a trick question since Plato already had a pocketknife out.

The access panel clattered to the concrete floor.

“Jackpot!”

He was in. Fishing some uplink cable from a pouch in his pant leg, Plato hurried to connect his wrist computer to the database.

“Huh? Oh… that’s not good.”

Plato’s factory override had itself been overridden. The outside cameras and motion detectors were functioning again. Someone had rebooted the system.

Quickly, Plato checked the edge of the opening where he’d removed the access panel. Near as he could tell, there was no sensor to detect the panel’s removal. He breathed a sigh of relief, but it was a relief short-lived.

Someone was upstairs. That same someone had direct access to the villa’s computer system and had rebooted it. Anyone who knew to reboot the system had to have done so because they knew it had been tampered with. Knowing it had been tampered with, any robot with half a brain would perform a physical search of the villa.

“Aw, crap.”

There was no sneaking out now. If Plato was to exit back the way he came, he’d trip alarms and get himself caught on video surveillance. The Privacy Committee didn’t give a half-eaten sandwich about surveillance of one’s own turf.

There was a chance that outgoing transmissions might be monitored, but Plato had to take that chance. He composed a short message, text only, and hoped it would slip out through the villa’s blanket of security without getting flagged.

EVE. I’M AT SICILY VILLA. E44 IS GUILTY. CAN’T PROVE IT YET. NEED EXTRACTION.

Sometimes, a secret agent had to be a little more secret, a little less agent.

The blinking lights of Evelyn44’s private database taunted him. But Plato knew that with Evelyn44 on heightened alert, it was as good as setting off a flare telling her where he was.

As much as Plato hated getting overshadowed by Charlie7 and his million years of experience rebuilding the world from toothpicks and spit, Plato wouldn’t mind the old braggart busting in and offering a quick rescue right then.

Crawling to the backside of the database server for cover, Plato hunkered down to wait for backup.

Chapter Thirty

Eve paced. She’d seen it done in movies. It didn’t help.

Plato’s message was dire. He wasn’t responding to any of her attempts to follow up and request details.

Eve’s home was too large for pacing. Her bedroom alone was eight paces across. Pacing half measures across the room seemed like cheating, but going the full distance bore a strong similarity to marching band drills.

She should let him deal with his own problem. Plato wasn’t supposed to have been doing anything remotely dangerous, provocative, or investigative. Eve had ordered him to take a vacation.

Plato was in trouble. There would be plenty of time to be furious with him once he was home safe.

“Plato,” she spoke aloud, letting her computer translate to text. “Come in. Plato, can you clarify the circumstances of your dilemma? If you are unable to reply…”

She trailed off, realizing that the premise of her suggestion was flawed. If Plato were unable to respond, any lack of response could be considered verification. If he wasn’t receiving her messages at all, there was no way to tell the difference.

Eve couldn’t go back to Sicily. She’d just left earlier in the day. Evelyn44 would be suspicious.

She needed someone with experience.

“Charlie? Charlie7?” Eve spoke for the translator’s benefit. “We have a developing situation. What is the status of the Olivia search? I may have a follow-up task for you.”

How had that sounded? She played the message back to herself.

Desperate.

Fortunately, it looked better in pure text, stripped of context, nuance, and the panicked tremor Eve’s voice had taken on.

“Charlie7, if you are receiving this message, report in immediately. This is urgent. Priority B.”

Much as she wanted to, assigning it to Priority A suggested either that Plato’s safety was more important than returning Olivia home safely or that they were equally important, and thus conveying no information. Plato was in trouble, but he was still armed and cunning.

Not that he still wasn’t calling for help.

“Priority B is still important,” Eve added for clarification. “Just… well, if you’re not reading me, then none of this matters, I suppose. Please, though, if you are getting these messages, even a quick status update would be helpful in planning activities relating to the developing Priority B situation.”

Eve waited.

Using the interface from her data-display goggles, she marked out a smaller area of her bedroom with an overlay to use as a boundary for her pacing.

The smaller area didn’t make Eve’s pacing any more effective.

“What is the pacing supposed to do, anyway?” she asked herself. “If it doesn’t alleviate worry, what’s the point?”

“Zeus,” Eve said into the translator program, switching broadcast channels and encryption protocols. “Eve to Zeus. Please respond.”

Nothing.

Charlie7 had at least warned that he might be operating in a compromised situation. Zeus was off duty, officially pulled from the search for Olivia until such time as she could convince the Privacy Committee of the necessity of involving him and Plato—not that Plato had obeyed her orders on that count.

Had Zeus shut off his connection to the Social?

Technically, Eve was communicating through an unregulated frequency band, but all the HPA members used the Social as an interface for it. Had Zeus just wanted to get away from coverage of the search he could no longer participate in and ended up blocking out Eve’s requests for help?

“Zeus, this is Eve Fourteen. I am contacting you regarding official Human Protection Agency business. Priority B.”

Eve winced. Uniform priority standard seemed like a good idea, but for Zeus, helping Plato should be top priority. But calling it a Priority B when there was no Priority A task should have made it clear enough that this would be his primary mission.

“Zeus?”

Stalking over to the bed, Eve punched a pillow. Repeatedly. When she was out of breath from venting her frustrations, she felt a mild reduction in stress. Her goggle interface told her that her heart rate and blood pressure had spiked, but that was a small price to pay for a hint of relief.

It had worked better than pacing.

“Toby, this is—no. I can’t.” Eve deleted the half-written message.

Involving Toby22 was a bad idea. He might have been friendly with Plato, even to the point of serving as advocate for him when most other robots wanted nothing to do with the “Dangerous Human.” But this wasn’t a committee hearing; this was a covert operation. Not only was Toby as subtle as sunrise, he was risk averse. At best, he might offer a suggestion of who else to contact instead of involving him.

“Nora, maybe?” Eve mused aloud, careful not to keep the translator running as she worked through her thought process. “No. I can’t risk who they might put in charge of my sisters’ safety.”

Nora109 was out.

“Phoebe?” Eve asked, and this time connected to her sister on the Social, albeit on a private channel and an assumed username for each of them.

“Hey, Eve? What’s up?” her sister asked. She was dusty and wearing a hard-shell protective helmet but transmitted in full video conference.

“Are you alone?” Eve asked. “This is private.”

“Hold on a minute,” Phoebe said. The view bounced, and the background behind her shifted until the cloudy blue sky gave way to an indoor space. Footsteps clomped with the sound of work boots. Doors slid open and closed. “OK. I’m in a tram terminal office. There aren’t even data lines connected here yet. What’s the big secret?”

“Plato’s in trouble.”

“You need a macro to broadcast that to me, Zeus, and Charlie,” Phoebe said with a sigh.

“I need to plant a tracker on his skyroamer,” Eve grumbled.

“Betty-Lou wouldn’t like that,” Phoebe warned.

“Well, it doesn’t have emotions,” Eve snapped. “Plato flew off and decided to break into Evelyn44’s home, looking for evidence that she’s a cloner.”

“She is,” Phoebe replied. “I was just listening to a symposium she was giving on botanical garden design. I’m planning on ordering some flowers from her to brighten up the areas around the tram stops.”

“He thinks she used to clone humans.”

“Oh,” Phoebe said. “Well, that’s silly. I thought you approved her license request. Why would you approve a cloning license for someone who was an illegal cloner?”

Eve seethed out a breath. “Apparently, Plato thinks I made a mistake. I told him I was uncomfortable around her because she’s an Evelyn, and the double-number made me think of Evelyn11.”

“Want to know a secret?” Phoebe asked in a whisper.

Eve decided to humor her. Phoebe was odd at times but often proved to be insightful. “Sure.”

“I make up middle and family names for the robots, sort of the way we all made our own names. Evelyn11 is Evelyn Karen King. Evelyn44 is Evelyn Doris Drake.”

“That works?” Eve asked, incredulous.

Phoebe nodded with a proud grin dimpling her cheeks. “Yup.”

“Who’s Charlie7?” Eve had to know, despite the circumstances.

“Charlie Truman,” Phoebe said with a frown. “But he’s a special case. Anyway, what sort of trouble is Plato in?”

“He’s at Evelyn44—that is, Doris Drake’s—house. He says he’s sure she’s a cloner but has no proof,” Eve said.

“I can prove she’s a cloner,” Phoebe interjected.

“An illegal cloner of humans,” Eve clarified, knowing she wouldn’t get anywhere with Phoebe dancing around her words.

“Well, surety without evidence is unwarranted and merely conjecture,” Phoebe said. “Maybe you could send that back to him, and he can just leave.”

“I think he’s trapped.”

“You have evidence?” Phoebe asked coyly.

“He requested extraction,” Eve replied. “If he were injured, he would have indicated that as the reason. Absent such a mention, I had to assume that he is in good health but unable to reach an exit.”

“That’s unfortunate,” Phoebe said glumly. Suddenly the video swung away from her face and aimed out a glass window. There was a panoramic view of Paris. Eve could see her own house in the direction Phoebe pointed the camera. “As you can see, I’m in the middle of a construction project here. What sort of help are you looking for from me?”

She didn’t sound unwilling, but Eve certainly heard the skepticism in her sister’s voice. “I can’t say,” Eve admitted. “I was hoping you might have some ideas on what I should do.”

“I trust your judgment,” Phoebe said. “Maybe you should, too. Do what you think is best.”

“Thanks,” Eve mumbled.

Phoebe flashed a big smile. “Anytime.”

The connection closed.

“What I think is best?” Eve echoed to herself. Alone in her bedroom, she was safe, useless, and frustrated. Her best avenues for aid were dead ends, and her only available adviser had just told her to take matters into her own hands.

Someone had to go help Plato. If that couldn’t be Charlie7, Zeus, or one of their robotic friends, it fell to Eve to go get him out of trouble.

Eve would formulate a plan on the way. The flight would give her nearly an hour to think it over. As Eve dashed for her skyroamer, she could only hope that with an hour alone with her thoughts, she wouldn’t talk herself out of this rescue plan.

After all, Plato had done the same for her.

Chapter Thirty-One

Zeus sipped his mysterious tea. The day was passing him by.

“Aren’t you going to respond?” Jocelyn15 asked, nodding toward Zeus’s portable computer, buzzing with alarm overrides and forcing him to notice its presence.

Zeus held the teacup poised at his lips. “I think not. If I involve myself, I get my fingerprints and DNA all over it. I’ve gotten to know Plato better than I’d like. All I have to do is keep my distance. As long as Olivia remains missing, Plato will thrash like a raging bull to find her. Everything is set up perfectly. There’s nothing more I can do until he self-destructs.”

“Won’t Eve become suspicious if you ignore her?” Jocelyn15 asked.

“Of course, not,” Zeus replied. “I’m on vacation.”

Jocelyn15 chuckled, and Zeus joined in. The text messages piled up from Eve, unread.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Course locked in, Eve spent her time in the pilot’s seat of her skyroamer plotting and scheming.

Her data goggles lay in her lap, unplugged. Eve needed to think, not connect. All the answers were in her mind. Secrecy was a better ally right now than advice from the Social.

The nagging voice of reason told Eve that the safest way to ensure Plato’s retrieval was to turn him in. Whatever Evelyn44 might have planned, she couldn’t very well harm Plato if he was in custody on charges of burglary and espionage.

One quick call to Arthur19, and it would all be over. Plato had violated her orders to stand down. He had continued his investigation. Now there was a break-in at the home of a robot Eve had just commended—perhaps prematurely, perhaps overzealously—in her licensing inspection report. The Privacy Committee would send in a few well-armed robots and fill the area with sedative gas.

At some level, Plato even deserved it.

Or Eve could go through committee channels to draw Evelyn44 away from her home. While she’d just attended a symposium, that didn’t mean she needed rest. Fatigue was a human frailty that robots didn’t share. Maybe a celebration of her license going through. Maybe convince some other robot to invite her for a chat.

Those ideas fell apart upon detailed consideration. There had been no party in commemoration of Cindy14’s inspection. Having one for Evelyn44 would be suspicious and engender hard feelings. As for arranging for someone to babysit Evelyn44 for her, Eve just didn’t have those sorts of social connections without Charlie7 to help.

Sicily approached. The skyroamer’s information console displayed a real-time view of Eve’s location and a countdown to projected arrival.

“Why couldn’t you have gotten trapped in Australia, maybe in a dinosaur paddock or something?” Eve chided Plato in absentia. “I need more time to think.”

She remembered the layout of Evelyn44’s home. Even if she hadn’t, Eve still had the raw data feed from her inspection tour that she could compile into an incomplete blueprint. The good geneticist had shown Eve around most of the property, just to prove she wasn’t hiding anything.

That left another problem: Where was Plato?

If Plato had gotten himself trapped in Evelyn44’s home, Eve couldn’t imagine where he was remaining hidden. There ought to be a report on the newsfeeds any time now about Plato being discovered hiding behind a flora genome sequencer or tripping over a botanical drone. Eve wasn’t sure whether Plato could swim, but she couldn’t imagine the dolphins keeping quiet about him if he tried to hide out with them.

The temptation to pull on her goggles and delve into the Earthwide for answers scratched at the edges of Eve’s mind like Jimbo and Russels when they wanted to go outside.

“No,” she told the goggles. “You’ll just distract me.”

Heart rate and pupil dilation were interesting to track, possibly providing data that could analyze long-term health trends. But those and a hundred other data streams would suck away cycles from Eve’s biological processing unit. Even arguing with them was a waste of precious seconds better spent solving this puzzle with too many blank pieces.

“Plato wouldn’t be stupid enough to get caught without a fight,” Eve reasoned. The worst case scenario wasn’t for Plato to show up on the newsfeeds. It was for Plato to fight his way out and stage the scene to look like a self-termination.

Today, that wasn’t going to work. Evelyn44 was probably having quite a good day, unless something horrific had taken place at her symposium.

Eve again resisted the urge to slip on the goggles, this time to check the Social for reactions to Evelyn44’s speech.

If Plato were to kill Evelyn44, even leaving no trace behind, he would still be the prime suspect. The list of robots with violent tendencies was a null pointer. The list of humans with violent tendencies may have included Eve—with some creative editing—but was certainly topped by Plato. Add in his recent scolding by the Privacy Committee and track his last known whereabouts, and it wouldn’t be too difficult putting the pieces of a murder conviction together.

Plato was singlehandedly forcing a thousand-year-old society to reinvent the justice system.

But if Plato hadn’t been caught and hadn’t fought his way out—and Eve had to believe he would have checked in, had that been the case—that meant he had found some way to hide. The how didn’t matter, though it would have provided some comfort if Eve knew where to look for him.

“Wait… I don’t have to find him.”

Plato wasn’t a child to be scooped up, shushed, and spirited away wrapped in a blanket. He fancied himself a secret agent. Eve didn’t need to provide him a guided tour out of the villa. She just needed to provide a distraction for Plato to rescue himself.

That chat to draw Evelyn44’s attention was the plan after all. The only change was that Eve would be the visitor.

With just two minutes left on her inbound flight and no backup plan, Eve decided that she didn’t have anyplace to lure Evelyn44. Taking the controls in hand, Eve disengaged the autopilot and guided the skyroamer back to the same spot she’d parked this morning.

Fumbling the data goggles onto her face and plugging the fiber cables into the rest of her compute rig, Eve breathed a sigh of relief. Access to the world’s data made her feel like she was on level ground with the robots she dealt with. With the Earthwide, the Social, and all the scattered private networks at her command, Eve wasn’t a tiny creature in a vast uncaring world; she was a self-made cyborg connected to all the information mankind had acquired throughout the millennia.

As she approached the door and rang the alert chime that was mostly for decoration and ritual, Eve knew that being as robotic as possible made her powerful. But it didn’t make her interesting. She needed Evelyn44’s undivided attention if she was going to give Plato the chance to escape unnoticed.

The door slid open, and Evelyn44 appeared. “I saw you on radar and thought it must have been a glitch. Clearly not. How nice to see you again, Eve.”

“Hello,” Eve said with a quiver in her voice. She cleared her throat.

“What brings you back for a second visit today? Problem with the inspection report?”

“No,” Eve said, steeling herself. “I’ve changed my mind. You can test your new scanning equipment on me.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Tracking was dull. Not being connected to the Earthwide was disconcerting. The living, vibrant landscape was a change, but there were too many eerie similarities to the immediate post-invasion aftermath for Charlie7’s liking.

“I did not build a planet from a ball of rock and scraped-together tissue samples just to walk the bloody thing in the dark,” he grumbled as he crested a ridge only to find no sign of Olivia immediately beyond.

Of course, it wasn’t dark at all. The sun was still high enough in the sky that the mountains’ shadows fell only in the steepest valleys. But it certainly felt like the Dark Ages with the lack of access to technology—aside from himself, of course.

Charlie7 sighed. “Olivia, if you weren’t kidnapped, I’m going to strangle you.”

He didn’t mean it. A thousand years of preparation and painstaking labor hadn’t brought humanity back only to be snuffed out for the sin of acting human. Still, it shouldn’t have been too much to hope for that a new generation of teenagers might have more sense than the last one prior to the invasion.

Charlie7 looked up to check the position of the sun in the sky. He ran through some basic trigonometry and orbital mechanics to estimate it was roughly 1:35 am Universal Standard Time—the middle of the night in Greenwich, England but dinnertime for a hungry human here in western Canada.

He waited on the ridge, rather than descend into the valley along Olivia’s trail. She wasn’t taking measures to hide her path. The trail wasn’t going anywhere. But along with that bit of laissez-faire woodcraft, Charlie7 had one ancillary hope.

Charlie7 continued waiting, drawing on centuries of patience to check his hypothesis rather than act rashly along the easiest course. He set a deadline of sunset. At sunset, he’d light his own path and follow Olivia’s trail in the dark.

But sunset lost the race. Charlie7’s wait was over.

He saw the thin, wispy plume of a wet-wood fire and smiled.

Jogging toward the site of the smoke, Charlie7 no longer bothered with a trail. Shallow depressions in the soil and scuffs in the moss might mark Olivia’s path through the Yukon, but there was little doubt as to her present location.

Even when the wind shifted and the plume of smoke was lost beyond view behind a hilltop, Charlie7 didn’t waver. He had the girl’s position locked into his memory. The mental map he carried of the Earth had a pinpoint marked with Olivia’s name, and it wasn’t moving.

Over hills and through one surprisingly deep stream, Charlie7 pressed on. How the girl had managed to cross this terrain with a pack nearly as heavy as her was no small feat.

Dripping and tattered, still scorched from his close call with the bomb on board Olivia’s skyroamer, Charlie7 at last caught sight of his target.

“There you are!” he shouted to Olivia, who sat cross-legged in front of a crackling fire surrounded by a circle of stones. She held a bit of meat over the flame on a twig.

“Oh,” Olivia said, perking up. “Hi, Charlie.”

“Hi?” Charlie7 asked. “That’s all you’ve got? Do you have any idea the trouble you’ve caused?”

Olivia looked all around. “No. Everything seems fine. I’ve been practicing proper fire safety.” Despite her twisting and turning, the spitted meat barely waved over the fire.

“Eve and Phoebe are beside themselves. They sent the whole Human Protection Agency out looking for you,” Charlie7 said.

“To be fair,” Olivia countered. “There are only three of you.”

“Plato and Zeus riled up so many robots demanding to know where you were that there was a Privacy Committee hearing to address the complaints.”

“I’m not lost,” Olivia insisted. She reached into a pocket of her heavy winter coat and produced a folded plastic sheet.

Charlie7 took it from her and discovered a printed map of the region, two-sided, with a more localized area on the reverse side. It was clearly marked out with latitude and longitude, topographical details, and seasonal average temperatures. He could hardly imagine the map containing greater detail without a digital medium.

“What are you doing out here?” Charlie7 demanded.

“Camping,” Olivia replied with a shrug. She made it sound like the most natural and obvious thing in the world.

“Why?” Charlie7 snapped. “Why disappear? Why not just tell someone where you were going? The Human Welfare Committee and HPA are in danger of dissolution—or at least a change in leadership—because of how your disappearance has been handled.”

“What’s that got to do with me?” Olivia asked, taking a second to twist her meat over to roast the other side. “I didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t want anyone following me. As for whatever happened in committees… I’ve got nothing to do with that.”

She had a point on the last front, at least.

“You could have at least told Eve or Phoebe, ‘Hey, I’m disappearing from civilization for a while. Be back in a year or two,’” Charlie7 chided her. Marching over to the campfire, he plopped to the frozen earth across the blaze from Olivia. “They were worried about you.”

“They shouldn’t have been,” Olivia protested. “I’m emancipated, same as them.”

“That just means you’re free to do what you want,” Charlie7 explained. “It doesn’t free you from causing harm to other people by your actions. You worried Eve and Phoebe and probably a number of less vocal advocates.”

“Phoebe got worried?” Olivia echoed, taking note of the fact as if it were the first time Charlie7 had mentioned it. “I must really have gone too far. Eve worries about everything. But Phoebe?” Olivia shook her head in disbelief. “Never would have imagined her getting worked up. Do you have footage?”

“No, I don’t have a video of Phoebe worrying about you. Finish your… whatever that is, and let’s get out of here.”

“It’s snow hare,” Olivia said proudly, holding it up and turning it this way and that for Charlie7 to inspect. “They taste awful, but I caught it myself.”

“Maybe you should cook it a little… less,” Charlie7 pointed out diplomatically. The bit of meat had passed “well done” and was in danger of turning into charcoal.

“Bacteria,” Olivia replied. “Can’t be too careful. All the guides say to cook meat thoroughly.”

Guides…

It wasn’t how she’d meant it, but the word reminded Charlie7 that Olivia wasn’t alone out here. “Do you have a guide? Someone who might have shown you how to get way up here?”

“No,” Olivia replied. “Atlas and I talked about the details of the trip, like what I should bring and where would be the best place to get away from all the people for a while. But he or she didn’t accompany me.”

“Atlas?” Charlie7 asked. It was either an alias or yet another undiscovered human, possibly another vigilante like Plato.

“Not his real name. I know,” Olivia said with a huff, as if it were a burden explaining these simple matters to a senile old robot. “It’s both the name of a titan and a book of maps. I thought it was a clever pseudonym. We’re not friends, since we’ve never met, but Atlas was helpful in planning this adventure. It was working out wonderfully until you showed up.”

The “get out of my camp and let me finish incinerating this rabbit meat” was implicit in her last words. It was amazing how quickly human lab rats could turn into teenagers when they were allowed access to one another. Olivia had a keener grasp of sarcasm than most teenage girls Charles Truman had known. Phoebe was a lover of fashion and culture. Eve was the archetypical overachieving class president. A few months ago, all were performing tricks to get fed.

“Pack up. We’re going. I won’t leave you stranded out here.” Charlie7 stood and headed for the tent Olivia had erected a few meters from the fire.

“Hey,” Olivia shouted, scrambling to her feet to head him off. “I’m not stranded. I’m camping. This is normal human behavior. You can’t make me leave.”

“Per Human Welfare Committee guidelines, I’m probably on shaky grounds,” Charlie7 admitted. “But don’t pretend I couldn’t make you leave. I’m far stronger and faster than you. James187 managed to capture Eve, once; he’s not half the robot I am, and you’re not quite as full grown as Eve. However,” Charlie7 held up a hand to forestall the argument he could see boiling just beneath the surface of Olivia’s scowling face. “I can give you a reason why you want to leave.”

“But I don’t,” Olivia stated, crossing her arms and dangling her twig-skewered hare.

“Look at my clothes,” Charlie7 said, waving his hands down the length of his body and turning like a fashion model. “Do you think I got like this from a simple hike?”

Olivia shrugged. “I assumed you weren’t good at it.”

“Your skyroamer exploded,” Charlie7 said, throwing his hands in the air. Olivia shrank back at his sudden outburst.

“Why would you do that?”

Charlie7 tried to remain calm, but some portion of this constant objection was sheer obstinacy on Olivia’s part. “I didn’t. Someone rigged it to explode. If I weren’t in an advanced chassis, I likely would have been destroyed along with it. Fortunately, Charlie13 is a paranoid bastard, God bless him, and this chassis was originally meant for him.”

“Why would someone want to make a skyroamer explode?” Olivia asked.

“Probably to destroy whoever came looking for you,” Charlie7 reasoned. “And they didn’t want anyone reporting your location, because this whole region is blanketed with some kind of jamming technology that I can’t break through.”

Olivia cocked her head. “Really?”

“Didn’t you bring any tech with you? Not even so much as a beacon in case you got in trouble?”

By her cowed expression and unwillingness to look him in the eye, Charlie7 knew the answer before she said it. “No.” Then she looked up with renewed determination. “I wanted to do this on my own, like my ancestors.”

“Your ancestors all died,” Charlie7 pointed out. “Try to be better than them.”

Olivia swallowed and nodded. She tossed her twig and the probably-too-burnt-to-be-eaten rabbit into the fire. Without another word, she was at the tent, levering out the stakes with the aid of a knife she pulled from her pocket.

“Wait. Just like that?” Charlie7 asked. “Now we’re leaving?”

Olivia looked up from her work and rolled her eyes. “Clearly either Atlas has lured me out here for nefarious purposes or someone intercepted our communications and enacted a scheme to the same effect. The jamming and rigged explosive suggest someone who wants to keep me isolated to use as bait. The sooner we get out of here, the better.”

“Just leave the tent, then,” Charlie7 suggested.

Olivia paused, looked down at the tent, and folded up her knife. “Right. Priorities. Escape crazy bomber robot first—or maybe crazy bomber human,” she added quickly. “Maybe come back for the tent later. Or just send a cleanup drone and Cloth-o-Matic a new one.” She kicked dirt over her campfire and poured out her water bottle over the smoldering spot.

Charlie7 didn’t know if that was proper fire safety or not. He didn’t have thermal scanners. But if he remembered correctly, occasional fires were good for the long-term health of forests. Besides, putting it out would give the local Toby something to do.

“Good. Let’s move.”

Olivia fell into step behind him as Charlie7 led the way back to the one working skyroamer they had left. The girl’s sudden change of attitude in the face of cold logic was one indication that humanity really had evolved, at least a little, in the transition to the Second Human Age—though not by any natural means.

“Oh,” Olivia added. “And I’m not getting anywhere near your skyroamer until you’ve checked it for explosives.”

“Good call,” Charlie7 agreed.

Yes. Humans weren’t the idiots they’d been before the invasion.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Plato’s hands shook. This was delicate work, not the sort his thick, meaty fingers were designed for. The access panel to Evelyn44’s secret database server was still open, and now Plato was probing inside with his emergency repair kit.

The gloves Plato had worn during his “leave no DNA” search of the lab were on the floor, discarded as a hindrance to his already limited fine motor skills. He regularly had to wipe sweat on his pants to keep his grip on the tweezers from slipping.

“Come on,” he encouraged the wire. If he did this right, he would be able to take a clumsy reading of the data being transmitted over one of the fibers. The effect would be nothing like plugging into the system directly, but best he could tell, there were no sensors to detect a passive photon sniffer on the line.

Heisenberg said you couldn’t measure something without changing it. Plato’s corollary was that if you changed it little enough, no one would notice. His modified reflector and re-transmitter counted on that.

Eve had sent replies to his mayday, but Plato had bitten his tongue and refused to reply. One broadcast from Evelyn44’s basement might already have gotten him in hot water, but so far she hadn’t come down to the sub-basement to look for him. Another signal from her own house and maybe she would.

But while Plato waited for rescue, he couldn’t stand the idleness.

Nobody would accuse him of surrendering to the enemy or not giving his all to avoid capture. That’s what a good soldier—or secret agent—was supposed to do.

Plato’s fingers slipped. The tweezers fell. There was a quiet, muffled ring as the tweezers landed inside the cabinet of the server, resonating like a small tuning fork.

“Wonderful,” Plato grumbled. “Et tu, tweezers?”

It wasn’t bad enough that Evelyn44 was out to get him. It wasn’t even enough that the Privacy Committee bozos wanted to shut down the HPA and replace Eve. It wasn’t even enough for one stupid day that he had to call Eve for help, possibly getting her in even hotter water. Now he’d lost his tweezers.

Plato stared into the server. All the evidence he needed was in there, somewhere. Some movie hero would jack in, hook up his wrist computer, and start broadcasting. The movie hero would get the info out just before Evelyn44 arrived to stop him; she’d fall to her knees and explain how horrible life as an immortal robot was and spare Plato out of guilt.

The non-movie version would have Plato set off a silent alarm before he knew it, and by the time he’s started uploading to the Earthwide, Evelyn44 would be standing over him with some bio-engineered sedative. He’d wake up strapped to an upload rig before watching the final seconds of his life pass by, getting scanned and replaced by the mind of some James or Charlie with dreams of being a human with chronic arthritis at the age of twelve.

Plato chose not to be the idiot hero. He tried to avoid combining the two.

He had two options. Either he had to sit back, wait for Eve to send help, and give up on being any use in his own rescue effort, or he needed to get those tweezers back.

The first option was no option at all.

Plato rummaged through his pockets, looking for anything that might help him get the tweezers out of the server cabinet, or perhaps to stand in for the tweezers in setting up his fiber tap.

Soldering iron, adhesive bandages, gauze, iodine, protein bar, 22-gauge fiber spool, 28-gauge fiber spool, silver solder, folding knife, chocolate bar, 2mm hollow koptylene tubing, spare computer battery, miniature plasma torch, water bottle (half full), paracetamol tablets, and wireless earbuds.

Plato studied the open access panel and wondered how any of that junk would help.

“I need bigger pockets,” he muttered, taking a bite of the protein bar.

As he slowly chewed the sticky, resilient brick of flour, peanut butter, and almonds, an idea formed in his mind.

Spitting out the bite in his mouth, he squished the mush between his fingers. “Worth a try.”

The koptylene tubing was stiff, intent on maintaining its coiled shape as Plato straightened it. But stiff was good. It would hug the inside of the cabinet if he angled it just right.

Mashing the wad of slimy, half-chewed protein bar over the end, Plato removed his wrist computer and angled it over the edge of the opening to get a look at where the tweezers had fallen.

His first attempt ended when he missed the tweezers and got the wad of protein bar stuck to the cabinet bottom. The tubing had come back up with just a gummy residue stuck to the end.

With a frustrated sigh, Plato chewed up another piece and stuck it to the end. This time, he worked the tubing one-handed while he watched in the computer’s camera. It was awkward holding everything in the correct orientation all at once, but holding his breath and taking it oh-so-slowly, he was able to jab the tweezers with the wad.

There was a clink as he pulled the tubing out.

Plato cursed up a storm, using every word Eve had included on the list of “words not to use around Eve.” When he finally calmed down, he checked inside and found the tweezers resting at the bottom of the server cabinet once more. He also spotted the terminal he’d snagged them on while attempting to pull up the tweezers.

“Third time’s the charm,” Plato told himself as he set out to try again.

It wasn’t.

The tweezers clanged to the bottom halfway up.

“Who designs these things?” he asked no one in particular.

The fifth attempt ended in the wad caught against an internal support and the tweezers tumbling back to the bottom.

By the eighth attempt, Plato had nailed down the process of chewing up protein bar until it was ready to adhere to the tubing.

On the twelfth, the tweezers came out.

Plato tossed aside the tubing with its sticky wad of goo at the end and hugged the tweezers. After all he’d gone through to retrieve them, he could hardly bear to risk them again.

But Plato had a job to do. He quickly dropped a blob of solder on the end of the tweezers and stuck the end of his 28-gauge fiber into it before the solder solidified. It was shoddy workmanship, but he just wanted an easy way to fish the tiny tool back out if he lost it again.

With renewed focus and appreciation, he set back to work, connecting the photon reader in Evelyn44’s data line.

It must have taken him half an hour, but eventually he fiddled the reflector and re-transmitter into place.

With a sigh of released tension, Plato slumped back and connected the other end to his wrist computer. The hard part was over.

Access to the data lines didn’t give him complete control of Evleyn44’s systems. Actually, it didn’t give him any. He couldn’t even choose what data he was looking at. Fortunately, Plato had analyzed the system architecture and tapped into the correct feed for the internal security system.

Plato settled in and selected from the dozens of internal cameras to see what was going on upstairs.

“No!” Plato shouted. “No. Don’t! You leave her alone!”

On the screen, he saw Eve reclining in an upload rig that looked eerily identical to the one from Evelyn11’s lab. Eve was lying there, head hooked up to a million cables, with some contraption covering her eyes and ears. She was limp, probably drugged. There was no time to waste.

Plato grabbed his EMP rifle and cursed himself for a coward. If anything happened to Eve before he could get there, it was on him. He bolted from the hidden server room and headed for the main level of the house.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Eve stood staring at Evelyn44’s scanning rig. So many probes. So many cables. So many memories. Close inspection revealed key differences between this machine and the one Eve had spent so much time in while under Evelyn11’s control. It had external sensors instead of clip-on terminals to connect to trans-cranial probes. There was no sign of feeding or urinary tubes for long-term testing. Eve didn’t see any indication of a secondary rig linked to this one to perform direct mind-to-mind overwrite.

“I’m so glad you’re reconsidering,” Evelyn44 said, bustling around the machine, tapping at keypads, and making adjustments. “If you don’t mind me asking, what was the reason behind your change of heart?”

“Well,” Eve said, struggling with the logic herself. Admitting that she was hoping to distract Evelyn44 wasn’t going to help matters. And the truth was that she hadn’t changed her mind at all. “Since my committee is going to be sanctioning the use of this machine along with all your other equipment, it seemed like a good idea for a test run. It’s not as if I can subsist on nutrient gel in an incubator, or take another pass through the process of birth, but I can see what it’s like having a diagnostic brain scan.”

“Excellent,” Evelyn44 said, beaming. “Let me just get it set for you.”

With a whirr, the footrest at the bottom of the inclined table slid toward the head, shortening to what Eve had to imagine was her exact height. Eve’s genome and synaptic maps were public domain knowledge; it wasn’t any trick to know her height down to the millimeter.

Evelyn44 patted the table. “Hop on up, and we’ll get started. Unless you need an excretory facility first. I have one by the irrigation control room—brand new, never been used.” She sounded proud to have installed one.

Eve held up a hand. “Thank you. My excretory functions are in check right now. But I was hoping to get a better look into the workings of the machine before we began.”

“Oh,” Evelyn44 said, unable to hide her disappointment that the amenity wasn’t required. But she brightened again immediately. “Well, let me show you around.”

Evelyn44 removed access panels, pulled out circuit cards, and sat with Eve reviewing a dizzying amount of computer code. For her part, Eve was genuinely interested but couldn’t keep up with the influx of new information as fast as it was presented to her. She filed it away in the computer strapped to her lower back, hoping that it wouldn’t be used later as part of a post-mortem investigation.

Seconds marched along, plummeting into the void of immediate history.

Come on, Eve chided Plato silently. Send a message that you just snuck out.

But Eve’s diversion had a lifespan. Once they were finished going through all the scanner’s systems, Evelyn44 shut down the code viewer, closed up the access panels, and put the machine back into standby mode, waiting for a scanning subject.

“First things first, now,” Evelyn44 said in the manner of a strict nanny. “Let’s get you out of that computer equipment. At worst, I imagine that the processing unit would be uncomfortable pressing against the small of your back. But I can’t have those goggles on you.”

Eve actually liked sitting with the processor pressed against her lower back. The case was formed for ideal lumbar support while seated in an office chair or her skyroamer. But when she wore it to bed, Eve couldn’t sleep on her back.

When she didn’t move to take off her gear, Evelyn44 tapped her foot. “Madame Chairman, if you’re reconsidering your decision after reviewing the machine’s protocols, hardware, and software, that’s your choice. But if we’re just going to stand here gawking like puffer fish at the scanner, I’ve other work I can be doing. I imagine the same applies to you.”

Eve froze. The words were Evelyn Mengele’s, echoes of Gemini’s unguarded moment. Her manner, her delivery, all reminded Eve of Creator.

One last time, Eve checked her goggles. There was no update from Plato.

She had to buy more time.

“Sorry,” Eve said, slipping her goggles off and unplugging them. “I was hoping to get an update on the search for Olivia before the scan. I’ll just have to hope I have good news waiting for me when we’re done.”

“Yes,” Evelyn44 replied. “Poor dear. I hope she comes home all right.”

Eve stripped off her shirt to untangle herself from the bands that kept her fiber cables running along her arms and down her spine. She pulled off her fingerless interface gloves. Unclasping the belt around her stomach that held the computer to her back, she let that slip to the floor as well. Once more a creature of flesh and blood alone, Eve pulled on a shirt that felt too loose, brushing against skin in places normally covered by technology.

Evelyn44 hadn’t turned away. Eve had decided against saying anything.

Let the geneticist “gawk like a puffer fish” at her. So long as she wasn’t looking for Plato, Eve could live with the unwanted attention.

Weak in the knees, Eve climbed onto the table and lay back.

“There will be four belts to hold you still,” Evelyn44 explained, though Eve had seen them there during the inspection. “Chest, waist, thighs, and ankles. In an emergency, the wrist straps have a release force of 150 Newtons. The rest are a two-sided pressure release that will be easy to undo yourself.”

Eve tried to steady her breath as the belt locked her ankles snugly to the table. With the footrest pulled up to match Eve’s height, she couldn’t move her heels. I’m not trapped, she told herself. I can get up anytime I need to.

When the belt buckled across her thighs, Eve’s whole lower half was held rigid. She gave an experimental attempt at squirming, and Evelyn44 gave the belt a quick ratchet to tighten it. Her legs weren’t going anywhere.

Eve focused on her breathing. She closed her eyes and tried to meditate.

Evelyn44 moved Eve’s hands aside to wrap the belt around her waist. Eve remained limp and pliable. She focused on Plato’s face, reminding herself that this was all harmless, and by facing her fears, she might be saving Plato’s life—or at least his freedom.

When the strap tightened across her chest, Eve noticed that her breathing was restricted. She tried to take shallower breaths. She was in no danger.

She tugged back when Evelyn44 pulled her right hand into place and tightened a cuff around her wrist. Eve flexed and twisted, but her hand couldn’t go anywhere. She wondered idly what 150 Newtons would feel like. It was only 15.3 kilograms in Earth’s standard gravity. That wasn’t much different from her standard workout weight for bicep strength.

As Eve was musing on how hard she’d have to pull to break the safety lock, Evelyn44 cuffed her other wrist as well.

Cold, robotic fingers slipped under Eve’s shirt by way of the neckline. Eve’s eyes shot open. Something flat and sticky grabbed onto her skin, followed by another. Thin cables snaked out from under her clothes.

“Oh, my,” Evelyn44 said. “I ought to have taken a baseline reading before you got into the scanner, but your heart rate appears to be highly elevated.”

“I’m fine,” Eve insisted.

“If your stress levels get too high, let me know,” Evelyn44 said reassuringly. “I can apply a nitrous oxide feed to calm you.”

“No sedatives,” Eve ordered. Though from her current position, both physically and politically, she wasn’t sure how much weight her orders carried. Likely much less than 150 Newtons.

“If you change your mind, we can always hook you up,” Evelyn44 said soothingly. “This test won’t be trying to read your brainwaves, just map your synaptic pathways. Increased brain activity makes it quicker and more accurate, but we could have you asleep for the whole thing if you prefer.”

“Awake,” Eve snapped. She didn’t want to carry on this argument. She wanted Evelyn44 to get on with the scan. Even knowing that her every delay might buy Plato time, she didn’t want to spend longer strapped to the table than she had to.

The headrest tilted away with a motorized hum, leaving Eve’s head unsupported. Evelyn44 combed Eve’s hair, murmuring to herself. “So much different with hair. No matter. Scanner won’t mind.”

A helmet-shaped mesh of blunt probes and rubber-stopper pads slipped over Eve’s skull. Though she couldn’t see what was going on, the probes seemed to align well with the tiny, puckered scars where Eve’s stainless steel studs had once been.

Probe by probe, the helmet tightened against Eve’s skull. It didn’t hurt, but there was a sense that Evelyn44 was carefully calibrating the probes to come as close as possible to that threshold of pain.

“Turn your head,” Evelyn44 ordered.

Eve tried and found that she could move at the neck just fine. The weight of the scanner helmet was awkward, and she could hear a forest of cables slither as she shifted. Evelyn44 tightened three of the probes and had Eve repeat the exercise until she was satisfied it was secure.

“So valuable,” Evelyn44 muttered. “So much easier refining the immobilizing process with a cogent subject.”

“I can hear you,” Eve whispered.

“Sorry.”

With another whirr of the hidden motor, a headrest swung up and cradled Eve’s head, fitting close around the scanning helmet. Robotic fingers worked just outside Eve’s field of vision as she strained to watch what was going on.

A cupped plastic strap tugged Eve’s chin back as the headrest reclined, stretching her neck slightly and forcing her jaw closed.

“Try to wiggle your head,” Evelyn44 said.

Eve couldn’t, and that seemed to be the idea.

“If that’s uncomfortable, I had an alternate design that would slip between the teeth and apply pressure to the soft palette rather than the lower jaw. If you’d prefer, I can take a quick run to the protofab and—”

“This is fine,” Eve cut her off, speaking through teeth she was forced to grit.

Evelyn44 patted her on the shoulder. “I know this is a weird experience. I have a little surprise for you that will make it a little easier.”

It wasn’t a weird experience. If anything, it was all too familiar to Eve. Every gram of her being was telling her that this was a mistake, that Evelyn44 was just Evelyn11 in a new disguise, that she was about to be host to a new Gemini. But rationally, Eve knew that none of that was true.

But she was in no mood for surprises. “No. I’m fine.”

Evelyn44 pretended not to have heard Eve’s objection. A pair of goggles came into view above Eve. They weren’t like her pair, designed for a data-display overlay of the visible world. These contained blackness and were attached to a pair of earmuffs.

As the goggles slipped over Eve’s eyes and the muffs enveloped her ears, she debated tugging her wrists free and escaping the scanning table. Her fists balled up in anticipation of a strain akin to a single repetition of a dumbbell curl.

Music began playing. This wasn’t going to be sensory deprivation but some sort of stimulus. But it wasn’t music in the sense Eve knew. There were no lyrics, no melodies. The sounds were rhythmic but lacking in overriding patterns.

“What is this?” Eve asked, now genuinely curious.

“Delta wave stimulation. Gets the brain fired up without bothering the glands. By the way, we’ve already started scanning.”

Eve felt nothing but the stern firmness of the restraints holding her in place and the pressure of the scanner helmet. There was no unsettling tingle like there had been with Evelyn11’s deep probing.

“As for your surprise…” Evelyn44 said.

The goggles sprang to life, showing a documentary movie in vivid three-dimensional view.

As Eve relaxed to wait out the scan, the last thing she muttered through clenched teeth was, “Ooh, puppies.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

Puppies frolicked and roughhoused in the goggles Eve wore. Occasional glimpses in the background and the stray robotic hand entering the view now and then led Eve to conclude this was recorded at the Labrador Canine Cloning and Training Center in Eastern Canada.

The little balls of golden fur and wagging tails had boundless energy and enthusiasm. They didn’t know they were clones, and if they were to understand the nature of their existence, they wouldn’t have cared. Life was all new, exciting, and urgent.

Though barely able to budge a muscle, Eve found she could still smile.

The scanning, whatever it was doing, was doing it passively. Aside from the mild discomfort of being held carefully in position, Eve didn’t mind it at all.

Fears and worries ebbed away. She even began entertaining thoughts of hanging around afterward to discuss the results with Evelyn44 and provide recommendations on making the scanning subject more comfortable.

A good place to start would be an alternative to strapping them in place like loose cargo in the back of a suborbital transport.

Just when Eve believed that she had discovered the pinnacle of cute behavior, the puppies collapsed into an exhausted heap. One after another, the clones’ energy gave out. All being from the same genome and all very young, it wasn’t surprising how similarly they tuckered out. They slumbered frantically, as if by falling asleep in an instant, they could resume their playtime all the earlier. They preferred close quarters, despite the ample space provided. Limbs entwined. Some puppies ended up serving as pillows for others. One pair looked like they were hugging.

Eve’s heart melted.

Just as a robotic hand was reaching down to gently place a rubber ball in their midst—a surprise for them upon waking—the image flickered and winked out. There was no fade-to-black, wipe, or any of the other scene transitions Eve had seen in even the simplest of Robotic Era productions.

The delta wave sound patterns cut out at the same time.

“What happened?” Eve asked.

Through the muffling of the headphones over her ears, Eve heard a crash of metal. Rough hands tugged at the belts holding Eve in place.

“What’s going on?” she demanded. Was this one of those lab emergencies Evelyn44 had planned for? Was this possibly some sort of drill to prove to Eve that Evelyn44 had a disaster plan in place? If so, it was an effective simulation. Eve genuinely felt that something horrible had just taken place.

While those same hands unbuckled Eve’s feet, with her hands free, Eve removed the relaxation goggles. She was done relaxing, whether she liked it or not.

Even from her lower peripheral vision, Eve knew at once what had happened. Plato was there, frantic in his haste to get Eve free of the table. Her stomach knotted, and she knew that the EMP rifle slung over his shoulder had been responsible for the sudden end to her scanning-time entertainment.

“We’re getting you out of here,” Plato said curtly. He rushed to Eve’s head and detached the chin cup holding Eve’s head back.

Working her jaw loose, Eve had one question burning a hole in her conscience. “Plato, what did you do to Evelyn44?”

“No time to worry about her,” Plato said. There were repeated tugs at the helmet as Plato yanked data cords out by the root. It felt like he was pulling her hairs out, given how tightly the helmet fit in place.

“Ow,” Eve complained. “Quit it.” She batted his hands away and felt around for the screw mechanisms that adjusted each probe. After starting one in the wrong direction with a wince, she loosened them one by one as Plato backed off.

Eve sat up with a gasp, catching her breath and blinking against the sudden rush of blood to her head. “What did you—?” she began to ask.

Then, on the floor, Eve saw the source of the crash she’d heard. Evelyn44 lay there, inert, sprawled in an undignified pose on the floor.

“Got to her just in time, looks like,” Plato said, crouching to look into Eve’s eyes. It wasn’t the gaze of a lover or the shared glance of a friend, but the analytical squint of a medic checking for concussive trauma. He held a finger in front of Eve’s eyes and wagged it back and forth.

Eve’s eyes followed the motion by reflex before she batted the hand away from her face. “You killed her!”

“Yeah,” Plato said. “What a mess.”

Reaching for the strap over Plato’s shoulder, she snatched the weapon away from him. He lifted his arm to let the strap slide free and held up his hands.

“What gives?” he asked. Then his eyes narrowed. “No… she got you…”

Plato stalked forward with menace in his steps.

“Stop that,” Eve scolded. “I’m Eve. I was here to rescue you, except you didn’t take the hint and sneak out while I had Evelyn44 distracted.”

“She was going to upload herself to your brain,” Plato protested, apparently satisfied with Eve’s continued Eve-ness.

“No, she wasn’t,” Eve snapped. She swept a hand out and indicated the scanning rig. “This—this is harmless. I was watching puppies play and listening to a soothing, music-like sound feed. I checked the machine out from power supply to code base, and there was nothing nefarious about it.”

“But you were strapped down. Helpless.”

Eve reached for one of the dangling cuffs and gave it a solid tug. It popped free of the scanning table. “One hundred fifty Newton emergency release force. The restraints were to keep me still during precision scientific measurements. I wasn’t trapped at all. For Freud’s sake, Plato, I approved this diagnostic equipment for general use just this morning.”

Plato hung his head and scratched at the back of his neck. “I… um, I’m sorry. I was trying to rescue you.”

“Thank you,” Eve said caustically. “Thank you for murdering a robot who was planning to cure cognitive disabilities in Sanctuary residents. We all will be much safer now.”

“But I was just—”

“Stop it!” Eve shouted. “Stop trying to rescue me! You were the one who needed rescuing. I climbed into this rig even though it reminded me of the worst days of my life because you needed a way to get out of here. And don’t forget the fact that I ordered you to stand down and cease investigating in the first place!”

“But your coded message,” Plato protested weakly.

“What coded message?” Eve demanded, spreading her hands. “I was telling you about my day. I was sharing an irrational fear that I was working to overcome. Maybe you should look into working on some of your own issues, rather than trying to play hero in a world that doesn’t need one anywhere near as often as you imagine.”

Eve was breathing hard, having barely paused for breath throughout her tirade.

“Sorry,” Plato offered. Eve didn’t care whether he meant it or not. Plato always meant well. There wasn’t a selfish or spiteful bone in his body. But he had a skeleton-load of paranoia, self-aggrandizing delusions, and temper. Lifting his head, he looked Eve in the eye with a sheepish, forced grin. “We should get this cleaned up.”

“Cleaned up?” Eve scoffed. “There’s no cleaning this up. Evelyn44 was having the best day of her past hundred years, I’m guessing. No one’s going to buy your standard ‘she self-terminated’ ruse this time.”

Plato ran a hand over his mouth and paced the floor, stepping over Evelyn44 in both directions. “You’re right. Too high profile. She can’t disappear, either. We’re going to have to prove she’s guilty.”

“What?” Eve exclaimed. “She’s not guilty of anything. She was as ethical as Gandhi. Cindy14 only got bumped ahead of her in the licensing queue because she’s a genius in the field. I had more reason than anyone to question her, common archetype to Evelyn11 and all, and I still trusted her to put me in this machine.”

“She’s got a secret database downstairs that might change your mind,” Plato said with a shrug. “Let’s not get too hasty. We might be heroes after all if behind the rose petals and puppy videos, she was up to something nefarious.”

“Do you think Zeus is off somewhere digging in robots’ basements and breaching their computers?” Eve countered. “Why couldn’t you just step back and let Charlie7 handle this?”

Plato drew himself up, towering over Eve from a pace away. His often goofy demeanor could make Eve forget how huge Plato really was. “Zeus is working this case, too. When I told him I’d look in on you, he said I was taking one for the team. He was planning on searching for Olivia no matter what.”

“Zeus too?” Eve asked. Charlie was supposed to be the competent rule-breaker. Zeus had always been her reliable, by-the-book agent.

Eve’s reputation crumbled before her eyes. Lost in thought, she could hear the Privacy Committee and Arthur19’s gavel calling the meeting to a close with an official recommendation that Eve and Plato be confined to the hovership in cells right alongside Gemini. She’d be wrapped right up in the mess, too. After all, she’d gone in to rescue Plato and hide him from discovery. She was an accessory to murder, if she’d understood the old movies correctly.

This was the future in store for Eve if she quit now. She was already in too deep. While there was still a chance Plato had been right, Eve had to see him through this.

“Hey,” Plato said, snapping his fingers in front of Eve’s nose. She blinked back to the present. “Let’s get a move on. If someone catches us before we’ve gathered up enough evidence, we’re cooked gooses.”

“Geese,” Eve corrected absently. She looked down at her scattered computer gear, now piled neatly by the wall. Evelyn44 must have gathered it at some point during the scan. Power indicator lights blinked. Her gear hadn’t been caught in any EMPs Plato had fired off. “You go on ahead. I’ve got to get dressed.”

As soon as Plato was out of peeping range, Eve slipped out of her shirt and into the welcoming technology of robotkind.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Charlie7 had rigged an electronic lamp to light the way through the dark Yukon landscape, but Olivia still struggled beneath a cloudy night and a waxing crescent moon. The footing was treacherous even by daylight. After her third fall, Charlie7 offered her a ride. The last thing he needed was to get Olivia seriously injured after she’d spent nearly a week on her own without incident.

And so Olivia sat atop Charlie7’s shoulders, riding the Version 70.2 chassis like a toddler attending the state fair with her father. Neither of them had done this before. Olivia had never known a father, and Charlie Truman had never been one. Yet, while the weight of a teenager would have daunted most human men on an overland trek, Charlie7 hardly noticed the added mass.

“This is an interesting interaction,” Olivia commented a short ways into their ride. “I wonder, are humans designed to interlock this way for transportation purposes?”

“I don’t think so,” Charlie7 replied. “But there wasn’t a manual when they first evolved. So who knows? But let’s just say you’re at an anatomical advantage, being female. Zeus or Plato wouldn’t find your seat very comfortable.”

“Really? Why not—? Oh. Yes. Never mind. Forget I asked.”

With gyroscopic stabilization, microsecond reaction times, and eyesight tuned to pick up even faint outlines in the dark, Charlie7 had little trouble navigating the terrain, even as Olivia twisted to look all around the whole way.

Starlight glinted off a distant river when the clouds parted. Mountainsides caught the moonlight and held for a few breaths before another tendril of clouds obscured them once more. It would have been beautiful if Charlie7 was in a mood to appreciate it. But this was a search-and-recovery mission; it was the vast, trackless back garden of ancient Canada, and the temperatures were well below freezing.

Though she talked often, Olivia never complained. When Charlie7 asked whether she was holding up to the cold, the girl estimated that she had up to an hour remaining before she’d suffer the early effects of hypothermia.

He didn’t ask what she based those calculations on. Charlie7 just sped his pace.

Before Olivia’s predicted hour until freezing was up, Charlie7 found his skyroamer. As he approached, Olivia tapped urgently at his skull.

“Right,” he said, kneeling so she could safely climb to the ground. “Bomb check.”

There was still a signal-jamming field in effect, so whoever was blocking communications wasn’t finished with them yet. Maybe the explosive in Olivia’s skyroamer was the only trap laid. Maybe it wasn’t. Charlie7 wasn’t willing to risk the girl’s safety on the chance that there was another deadly surprise in store for them.

“All clear,” Olivia announced from her position behind a rock.

“That’s my line,” Charlie7 replied. And yet, as he approached the skyroamer, he tried to come up with odds that his words would prove true.

With all the care he could muster, Charlie7 gently eased through the process he’d used when searching Olivia’s craft. All the while, he was poised to dive for cover if he heard the signs of any system activating that he didn’t install himself.

After a few minutes of checking and wary of how long Olivia remained out in the cold, he pronounced the skyroamer clear.

“Let’s get you aboard and put the heat on,” Charlie7 said.

Olivia didn’t need to be told twice. She scrambled out of cover and climbed into the passenger’s seat. As soon as the cockpit was sealed, Charlie7 powered up the engines and turned on the environmental stabilizers, setting the target temperature for 25°C instead of the usual 20°C.

“That’s too hot,” Olivia announced, pulling off her gloves and blowing into her hands.

“I’ll turn it down again once you achieve homeostasis,” Charlie7, wondering if Olivia even noticed the teasing inherent in his use of the overly technical term for warming up.

Still shivering, Olivia nodded her assent to the plan.

The skyroamer lifted off with no sign of sabotage or malfunction. Charlie7 hadn’t been fond of his options if he’d had to keep Olivia warm on the ground down in the Yukon.

As they sped off to the southwest, Olivia scowled at the navigational console. “We’re going the wrong way. Home is East and a few degrees South.”

“The signal jamming must have a limit. I’m taking my best guess as to the shortest way out of it.”

“Up,” Olivia suggested. “Presumably the jamming effect isn’t able to manage a counteracting signal unless it can intercept it. Otherwise, how would it detect the signal to neutralize it as an inverse wave form? There must be a network of detectors and emitters. If they were stationed in orbit, someone would have noticed.”

“Hmph,” Charlie7 grunted. “You’re right.”

Pulling back on the flight stick, Charlie7 took them up toward the edge of the atmosphere.

“You just let me know if you start feeling lightheaded or develop a headache,” Charlie7 instructed. “There’s a reason these are called skyroamers and not spaceroamers.”

“Acknowledged.”

Long before they left the troposphere, and with the cockpit maintaining a comfortable environment for its human passenger, the skyroamer found a signal.

A backlog of text communications flooded in, none of them of use any longer.

“Hey, there we go,” Charlie7 cheered. “Great work, Eve.”

“Olivia.”

“Right. Sorry.”

“It’s OK. I was Eve to Creator for all my life. I’m used to it. I just… I want to be me now. I’m not like Eve Fourteen or even Phoebe.”

“I know,” Charlie7 said quietly. It wasn’t fair to the clones. Cut from the same double helix, they started out life under identical circumstances. Genetic pre-destiny gave them similar appearances, similar potential, even similar predispositions. But different rearing had turned each of them into an individual with separate likes and dislikes, quirks and foibles. The older they got, the more the paths they carved would diverge.

Charlie7 cleared his throat to break the mood. He reached for the skyroamer’s transmitter controls. “Well, let’s use our newfound connectivity and let everyone know you’re safe. Charlie7 to Eve. Mission accomplished… Eve…? Eve Fourteen, this is Charlie7, please respond.”

“She’s not answering,” Olivia pointed out. “Maybe she’s excreting.”

Charlie7 said nothing, but at times he wished Eve were a little more selective about when she would and wouldn’t respond to voice—or video—communications.

He switched channels.

“Charlie7 to Plato. Good news. I’ve got Olivia right here with me, safe and sound.”

Olivia raised a finger that shook along with her shivering. “But cold.”

“Plato? Answer the bloody comm.”

“Excreting,” Olivia suggested.

Oh, for the mind of a thirteen-year-old raised as a lab rat. Charlie7 certainly had other ideas in mind, being able to reach neither of the two of them.

“Charlie7 to Zeus. Come in, Zeus.” After a moment, Charlie7 tried again. “Zeus, reply or I’m going to upload your brain to a teddy bear and give it to Vivian.”

“Whoa,” Zeus replied. His voice came in clear from the cockpit speakers. “I was lining up a putt. No need for existential threats.”

“You’re golfing?” Charlie7 asked, incredulous. “You golf? Since when? And what are you doing golfing instead of searching for Olivia?”

“Benched,” Zeus replied. “Not allowed to investigate. Where have you been? It’s all over the news feeds. Wasn’t sitting easy on my conscience, so I found the least modern activity I could think of and came up with golf.”

“Well, Olivia did you one better,” Charlie7 replied. “She was solo hiking the Yukon.”

“Golf is boring,” Olivia called out, jumping with both feet into the conversation. “What is it about a dimpled sphere that should distract from the interesting outdoor events transpiring all around?”

“Well, I’m with you on the boring part,” Zeus said with a chuckle. “Eve must be relieved you’re all right.”

“We haven’t been able to get a hold of her,” Charlie7 reported. “She didn’t say anything about unplugging or anything, did she?”

“Eve?” Zeus scoffed. “She’s closer to being a robot than I am, and as Plato won’t let me forget, I’ve got one of your brains in my skull.”

“Right… right,” Charlie7 muttered.

“Wait a minute,” Olivia chimed in. “You should know where Eve is. She’s your boss.”

“Well, I don’t. Our ‘boss’ sent me and Plato packing until Olivia is home safe and sound. Which, by the sound of it, means I ought to be wrapping up this round of golf. None too soon, if you ask me. Scots created golf, ended up extinct. Can’t say I feel too bad about that, having played it.”

Charlie7 kept his chuckle to himself. He’d tried golf a couple times after James18 built a course a few hundred years back, when grass was a novelty. He’d had the same spiteful wish about the extinct Scottish people, verbatim.

“Well, good enough,” Charlie7 said. “You get ready for work and once I’ve delivered Olivia back to Paris, we can pick up where we left off.”

“Roger that. Zeus out.”

The transmission ended.

“What are we going to Paris for?” Olivia demanded. “Not only do I not want to live in Paris, I don’t have a skyroamer if you leave me there. Kanto would make more sense; I can get Jason90 to build me a new one. But that’s neither here nor there, because Eve is still missing.”

“Well, missing might be a premature conclusion,” Charlie7 cautioned her. “We only just got communications up. Eve could be sleeping or showering or swimming.”

“There’s lots of other things she could be doing,” Olivia shot back, dripping with misaimed innuendo that Charlie7 had no doubt she didn’t comprehend. “But the important thing is we don’t know where she is or how to find her. She could have been kidnapped or injured or stranded with technical difficulties, maybe even in the same transmission suppression zone we just came from or another like it.”

“So, what you’re saying—in a nutshell—is that despite Eve being emancipated and responsible for her own actions and safety, it’s our duty to find and rescue her at all costs?” Charlie7 asked. “Just trying to be clear on the subject.”

“I couldn’t say about the nutshell,” Olivia equivocated. “But the rest: yes. Eve is my sister, and I don’t think she’d run away or hide. She might shower and stuff, but she usually keeps her computer close by, even then.”

“And that means we’re worried about her,” Charlie7 said slowly. “So, the right thing to do is go look for her.”

“Yes,” Olivia said with a huff. “For a robot, your short-term memory is atrocious. Maybe you should come to Kanto and stay for a diagnostic. It’s like you’re not even able to listen to what I’m saying.”

“Oh, I’m listening,” Charlie7 said with a quiet chuckle. Despite his best efforts to lead her back to the root of her own argument, Olivia seemed oblivious to the juxtaposition of her plight versus Eve’s. “But we’re going to Paris. If we want to find Eve, any trail would start there.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Eve had toured Evelyn44’s villa earlier that same day. What she was doing now could only be described as ransacking. With Plato down in the sub-basement tinkering with a database server, Eve was left to explore the rest of the villa—however she saw fit.

At first, Eve had been hesitant. But every invasion of privacy, every minor vandalism to force open a door or force a factory reset of an electronic devise, made the next easier to stomach. The scales of balance between moral guilt and legal culpability titled ever in favor of needing to find evidence to justify what she’d already done.

This was Eve’s first experience dealing with the slippery slope principle in her own affairs. Eve had begun helping Plato’s spurious search with enough shared culpability that she would have likely lost her position as chairwoman and possibly even her freedom. Now, if she and Plato couldn’t find the evidence they sought, incarceration was all but guaranteed.

As Eve browsed the file transaction records of a gene-sequencing machine, she muttered under her breath. “Why does a positive reinforcement loop lead to a negative outcome?”

Evelyn44 hadn’t hidden any of this information from Eve during the tour, nor had she presented it. At any moment, Eve could have requested the sequencer’s historical record of every genome it had analyzed. It would have made no sense to keep incriminating data behind such a faulty security measure as “hope Eve doesn’t ask.”

But Evelyn44 might have had falsified records ready to present. The wily robot that Plato envisioned would have come up with that paranoid level of preparation. But if Evelyn44 had been so meticulous, would they ever dig up the incriminating files?

The same could be said of any of the systems in the villa. Any of them could have contained evidence of wrongdoing, whether human cloning or a host of other, lesser genetics offenses.

Eve secretly hoped that Evelyn44 had tinkered with alien DNA on Earth. Near as she could gather, the only offense the robots considered worse than violating the sanctity of their ancestors’ biology was the reintroduction of alien cells to Earth. In one stroke, Eve would exonerate Plato for Evelyn44’s murder, remove herself from being an accessory after the fact, and deposit the whole problem in the laps of the Alien Bio-Research Committee, which didn’t even meet on Earth.

Time and again, from gene sequencers to drone control nodes, centrifuges to cell growth regulators, Eve found nothing amiss. Evelyn44 was meticulous to an obsessive degree, and not a molecule was out of place.

Eve went so far as to check Evelyn44’s protofab and Cloth-o-Matic for hints that she had ulterior motives. All she learned in the process was that Evelyn44, in her leisure time, enjoyed wearing Victorian dresses and designing tiny plastic statues of Yorkshire Terriers.

With a sinking feeling in her gut, Eve went downstairs to check on Plato’s progress.

Ducking and weaving among the water and coolant lines prevalent in the underground level that ran beneath the outdoor gardens, Eve finally made her way to the “hidden data bunker” that Plato had unearthed.

“You get the news?” Plato asked, grinning up from the floor where he was lying with his face in the guts of the computer.

Eve sighed with relief. “Yes. I hate this radio silence business, though. They’re going to get suspicious when neither of us answers.”

“Operational security,” Plato assured her. “Same as when I called you for help. After that, signals became a liability. I’ve shut down everything that might broadcast out of here, from drones to news feeders and everything in between. I’ve got just one exception, and… there.”

Plato tapped a spot on his computer interface. Half a second later, Eve had a notification on her goggles.

“What’s this?” she asked, frowning through the goggles at both the pop-up and Plato at the same time.

“I logged you in as Evelyn44. If anyone tries to contact her socially, you can brush them off.”

Eve took a step back, mouth agape. “I couldn’t do that. That’s awful. Wait, how did you even get into her personal account? Hacking a robot’s Social ID is supposed to be arduous.”

“You learn a trick here and there,” Plato said with a knowing look. “For one, there’s a code laser etched into every crystalline matrix. It’s a backup key for their personal files, so scientific data isn’t lost if someone suffers a fatal mishap. It’s not subject to electromagnetic damage, so it survived the EMP.”

Eve’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Wait a minute… you didn’t. Did you?” Eve edged slowly around to the back of the refrigerator-sized computer cabinet. “You did! That’s gruesome!”

Lying on the floor with a microscanner clamped to it was Evelyn44’s brain.

“Hey, it got us in. That’s what matters, right?”

“Maybe…” Eve was growing ever more skeptical of this whole endeavor by the minute. But she was getting hungry. And thirsty. And there was a good chance she’d throw up anything she tried to ingest while worrying that she and Plato were going to be locked up for the rest of their lives as murderers.

“So what have you found?” Eve asked, trying to get the investigation back on topic before their scheme unraveled.

Plato shook his head dismissively. “Nothing yet. Don’t worry. I’m not giving up.”

“How much have you searched?” Eve asked, clutching her hands together. The air was cool in the sub-basement, but she was sweating.

“Well, most of this system seems to be devoted to keeping the garden drones organized. It’s some sort of learning algorithm that tracks and records plant health metrics and tries to optimize watering, pruning, and fertilization schedules based on a feedback loop.”

“I didn’t ask what it does; I asked what you’ve found,” Eve clarified. “What evidence? What crimes? What victims? Where is Evelyn44’s secret cloning lair? Where’s the disposal facility? What residents of the Sanctuary would look at Evelyn44 and call her Creator?”

“She’s got a washroom,” Plato pointed out. “No robot who’s not planning to have a human body someday soon would bother building one.”

Eve’s stomach churned. She might finally use that washroom herself. “She was trying to be accommodating. Evelyn44 pointed it out to me before the scan. She seemed disappointed that I didn’t need to. Have you got anything else? Anything at all?”

Plato pushed himself up into a seated position, leaving him nearly Eve’s height. He shook his head, trailing droplets of sweat from his hair. “Nothing. I can’t find anything in this stupid thing.” The butt of Plato’s fist slammed against the computer cabinet with a metallic rattle.

“So… you killed an innocent robot,” Eve concluded.

Plato wiped the sweat from his forehead and dried his hand on his pants. “Maybe,” he admitted. With a furtive, sidelong glance Eve’s way, he added, “But maybe not. We’ve back-doored into all her systems here. We can make this look like anything from a self-termination to self-defense on my part.”

“That’s horrible!” Eve exclaimed, backing away and shaking her head. “No. We can’t do any such thing. We’ll contact Charlie7. He’ll advocate for both of us. He can get us off with a reprimand. After all, this was a horrible series of misunderstandings.”

“No, we won’t,” Plato said softly, defeat heavy in his tone. “I’m two chances past a last chance with most robots. This is the second time you’ll have fallen in with a human who killed to defend you, and you went along with it both times. Robots are big on patterns. Right? They’re not going to want you associating with other humans if you’re so prone to getting robots killed. At best, you’ll get some sort of isolation program where you don’t see your sisters or the other clones of me, not to mention the generation that’ll be coming out of vats in the next couple years. Probably, though, you’ll be in a soundproof cell with a vid screen you can’t control and as much clay and paint as you want. Robots love human artwork—even the recycling-grade garbage I made.”

Eve still had one of the paintings Plato had made of her. Nora109 had bargained a committee seat for it and given it to Eve as a gift. She kept it hidden in her office, behind a panel with a biometric scanner that would hide it away when Plato was around.

As much as Eve loved that painting, she didn’t want to be forced into a life of confinement, producing shabby artwork for the very robots who feared her.

Yet at the same time, Eve was a politician now. Her reputation was her stock in trade. Owning up to this catastrophe could prove, once and for all, that despite any other shortcoming she might have, Eve Fourteen could be trusted to face the uncomfortable truths of human existence.

“Well?” Plato asked. “You with me on this?”

Eve took a deep breath and gave Plato her answer.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Zeus hefted his golf clubs into the back of his skyroamer and waved a parting goodbye to James18. It had been tempting to dump the useless, wedge-ended mallets in one of the water hazards, but that would have offended his host to no benefit for Zeus. Getting away from the HPA for the afternoon had been a necessity; James18 had been accommodating in taking the afternoon away from his desert botanical work to play a round of golf in the first place.

The course, at least, had been visually appealing. The aroma of cut grass was surprisingly comforting after nearly a thousand years without a sense of smell. The brisk walk and fresh air had been bracing. If only the game itself hadn’t been dull, frustrating, and arcane in its rules.

James18 didn’t linger. Hopping aboard his red-painted skyroamer with the early-auto-era racing stripe, the robot took off the second his ion engines had powered up.

Zeus kept his wave lazily drifting back and forth until James18 was over the horizon.

Once he was alone, Zeus plugged his computer into the tiny port at the back of his skull. It was time to report in.

“Charlie7 survived. Olivia has been recovered,” Zeus said, letting the transmitter of the computer strapped to his back take care of the voice conversion.

“Not unexpected,” the voice on the other end of the connection replied. There was no need for identification on this channel. “It would have been a temporary measure anyway. Until we find someone who can alter the tampered files at Kanto, there’s nothing permanent we can do to him.”

“I still think winning over one or two of the Madison Maxwell-Chang clones is the best course of action,” Zeus said. “Not Eve, obviously, but we should take a step back and groom one of the younger ones.”

“There are no steps back in science,” the voice lectured.

“Don’t presume to explain scientific progress to me,” Zeus snapped. Dale Chalmers wasn’t a tenth the scientific genius that Charles Truman had been.

“Did you cover your tracks well enough? Are you certain there is no trail that could lead back to you?”

“As certain as anyone can be,” Zeus said with a shrug. “Atlas is just a ghost in the Social. There’s no reason for anyone to connect him to me. I cleared out Olivia’s Social account of anything incriminating and only left the bare minimum of clues for Charlie7 to find her. We’re clean.”

There was a harrumph from the other end of the connection. “Well, just keep clear of Charlie7 as best you can. We can minimize his impact so long as the rest of the plan plays out. Any progress on that end?”

“I can handle Charlie7,” Zeus promised. “My conversational shift algorithm keeps me from talking like Charlie25, and he hasn’t caught on after months. I can keep him out of my way. As for the rest, the house of cards is ready to topple. The Human Welfare Committee is imploding; I hardly have to do a thing.”

“Don’t let it stabilize.” The connection closed.

Zeus glared into the evening sky. Mars wasn’t visible to the human eye, but that didn’t stop him from aiming his ire in that direction.

“Prick,” Zeus muttered.

One day he would have that self-righteous bureaucrat’s brain in the palm of his hand. And when he did, that would be the end of Dale2. This was Charles Truman’s world, and Zeus was enough Charlie to believe that made it his.

Chapter Forty

As the autopilot of her skyroamer guided her back to Paris, Eve buried her face in her hands and cried. There was no one here to see her. She could be flawed and emotional and irrational and scared and… human.

Most of the time, Eve tried her best to fit in, to prove that she was the equal of her robotic colleagues and deserved their respect. Respect, expertise, judgment, these were the currency of Eve’s chosen profession.

Eve saw and heard what the robots thought about her younger sisters. Phoebe was amusing but irresponsible. Olivia couldn’t decide what to do with her life. From Rachel on down the line, the rest were treated as children—and not without reason. As for Plato’s brethren, they ran the gamut of emotionally damaged. Other than being able to feed and dress themselves, the consensus was that they were little better off than the residents at the Sanctuary for Scientific Sins.

Say this for Evelyn11: at least she turned the Eves into functioning humans. Charlie24 had left his test subjects scarred mentally and physically and in some cases, it seemed, beyond repair.

Eve was the exception. While Plato and Zeus were contributing members of society, they were muscle for the HPA and nothing else. Eve was the lone human to chair a committee, the only one with robots in subordinate positions to hers.

So it was only when she was completely alone that Eve could let her tears flow.

What had she done?

Plato had killed Evelyn44. That wasn’t anything Eve could change.

But Eve had murdered Evelyn44’s career.

The hopeful robot who’d wanted to find cures for the sickest and most helpless among humanity’s second generation had been recast, like that Batman character from Plato’s movies. Everyone was supposed to think this was the same Evelyn44, but Eve knew it was a different person behind the mask.

Plus, this wasn’t just a recasting of a character. This was a re-characterization of a person. Plato uploaded an old Social ID he’d hacked, giving Evelyn44 access to an account that had traded in backroom deals for genetic materials with Evelyn11 and Elizabeth17. All of Evelyn44’s goals and aspirations took on a sinister new aspect in light of those revelations. No longer a benefactor of mankind, she’d become a villain trying to cover her tracks while basking in all the glory and adulation that her ill-won science could glean.

Eve told herself that Evelyn44 was dead either way. It was the reputation of a deceased robot versus her own life—Plato’s too. The ease of that justification left a sour taste in her mouth. It made Eve wonder, too, how much of Human Era history might have been written falsely by those protecting their own roles in events.

“Charlie7 to Eve. Come in, Eve.”

The voice from the cockpit speakers startled Eve from her spiraling guilt. Rubbing her eyes and wiping them dry on her sleeve, she fumbled her goggles back into place on her face.

“Eve here,” she replied, fighting to keep her voice steady. She had to focus to avoid automatically enabling the camera to actively broadcast her face; her eyes were certainly puffy even behind the concealment of the goggles.

“Eve!” Olivia shouted over the connection. “You’re alive!”

A chuckle bubbled up that nearly started Eve weeping again. “Oh, Olivia. I’m so glad you’re safe.”

“I was fine,” Olivia assured her. “I was just camping. 60.604777 North by 139.077954 West.”

Eve did some mental estimating, not bothering to convert Olivia’s voice into a text search of the Earth. “Alaska?”

Olivia giggled. “No, the Yukon, silly. I wasn’t in any danger. I’d brought everything I needed for a few weeks on my own. Charlie stopped by to blow up my skyroamer and bring me back in his.”

“Wait, what? Blow up your skyroamer?” There was a general failing in storytelling where Olivia was involved. She included the details that interested her, not the ones that brought together a cohesive accounting of events.

“Long story,” Charlie7 cut in. “This wasn’t an impromptu trip. Someone lured her out here, jammed all signals in a two-hundred-kilometer radius or thereabouts, and planted explosives in her skyroamer.”

“Someone wanted to kill Olivia?” Eve asked, jaw hanging open.

“I don’t think so,” Charlie7 replied. “Listen, I’m not 100 percent confident in our channel’s encryption right this minute. Let’s meet up somewhere and get off the airwaves.”

Airwaves? Eve echoed mentally. Charlie7 came up with the oddest expressions at times.

“Fine. Let’s meet… oh, how about Kansas Agrarian Zone 017? Building 9 has a yogurt factory. And you can go ahead and send a broadcast on the news feeds that Olivia has been safely recovered.”

“Not sure that’s a good idea yet,” Charlie7 replied. “I’ve sent word to Plato and Zeus—mostly to keep them from doing anything stupid—but other than that, we’re keeping this quiet.”

Eve kept quiet herself on the subject of Plato doing something stupid. But the Olivia news blackout didn’t make sense. “Why not? If we announce she’s safe, anyone planning on making her disappear again would have to worry about a larger public outcry. There would be no claims that she’s just run away and would be fine.”

“I didn’t run away,” Olivia broke in. “I flew and hiked. And I didn’t have to tell anyone because I’m emancipated. And I am fine.”

“More importantly,” Charlie7 said, taking control of the microphone again on his end. “Someone out there wanted Olivia to disappear. The longer it takes them to realize she’s been found, the more time we gain on them reacting to the change. Enough for now though. Can’t tip our hand. See you in Kansas.”

Back to Kansas. It wasn’t quite a halfway point. It was dark there already, too. Eve wouldn’t catch up with the sunrise on the way. In fact, she’d only delay seeing the sun.

Right then, Eve could have used a good sunrise to remind her that the darkness hadn’t consumed her for good.

With the night shrouding her skyroamer and the voice channel closed, Eve pushed up her goggles and resumed crying.

Chapter Forty-One

Golf was perhaps the weirdest game ever invented. Plato stood squinting at the head of his driver, wiggling the club back and forth and watching the shaft flex. Glancing down at the tiny dimpled white ball, perched on its tee, he wondered how he was supposed to swing the club as hard as he could, hit the ball, and have the least bit of control over where it went.

The clubs were so new they were still warm from the protofab.

“Muscle memory,” Zeus explained with a sigh. “I’m awful at it, too. I was just here yesterday, and James18 wiped the course with me.”

“So… we’re both going to be awful at it, you didn’t enjoy it yesterday, and yet you wanted to play again today,” Plato said slowly, trying to find the logic in the whole endeavor.

“You said you had a lot on your mind,” Zeus replied. “This gets us away from civilization for a while, lets us enjoy the fresh air, and just be guys. I’ve got beers for us, snacks. It’ll be like a roving barbecue cookout with some competition mixed in.”

Plato peered at the distant pennant, flapping in the wind at the end of the hole. Then he looked down at his ball on the tee. “You said there’s no interaction on the course. I can’t hit your ball or play defense or anything. What kind of sport is this?”

“It’s mostly a social outing,” Zeus explained. “There’s even a time-honored tradition of cheating on the scorecard.”

“Huh…” Plato grunted, shaking his head. “Well, here goes nothing.”

With a few slow stretches, teasing the ball with the club face as he lined up his shot, Plato hauled back and gave a mighty swing. A dull thump sounded, and a clod of dirt flew forward, scooped from the tee area as Plato’s club acted the part of a shovel.

The ball dribbled forward, not even making it as far as the divot Plato had carved.

“One,” Zeus counted aloud.

But Zeus’s own shot wasn’t much better. The ball went farther, but not straight, and even then it had acquired a side spin that sent it twisting even more wildly off course.

“One,” Plato taunted.

The two agents continued along, hacking up the course and sending golf balls whizzing off in every direction, eventually ending in rattle and clatters as the ball settled into the cup after every hole.

Beers cracked open. Empties were left on the fairway for groundskeeper drones to collect. Zeus heated up sausages in a portable microwave the size of a water bottle.

The mood lightened as the morning wore on. The scores tallied up, with numbers ranging into the triple digits on a course with a par of seventy-two. Whoever came out ahead, he was going to be the least loser rather than any sort of winner. Plato and Zeus cursed to their hearts’ content as roughs, sand traps, and water hazards cost them strokes.

Eve wasn’t around to scold them for it.

As Plato waded out of an artificial pond with his ball in hand, he couldn’t help making a comment. “Why aren’t there drones for this?”

“I think they expect you to leave them behind,” Zeus guessed.

Plato scowled. “I only printed one. I’m not going back to the tech shack for another.”

He dropped his ball in the grass, wiped his hands on his pants, and took a measured swing with his driver. The ball splashed into the water again.

“The angled ones make it pop in the air,” Zeus pointed out.

“Yeah, but they suck,” Plato retorted. “I’ve got this club working fine—most of the time. Gotta know your limits.”

This time, upon eventually locating his ball, Plato simply waded the rest of the way across the pond. His bag of clubs left a wake in the water as the bottom dragged.

“Hope this is getting your mind right,” Zeus said as Plato emerged, dripping wet up to his chest. “Must have been one heck of an ordeal, whatever you and Eve were mixed up in.”

“Quit that,” Plato said. “If you’re fishing for whether me and Eve are off playing Beauty and the Beast, blow it out your tailpipe. We were investigating a potential threat Eve uncovered.”

“Oh?” Zeus asked, tone shifted from mischievous to professional curiosity. “Who’s the suspect?”

“Evelyn44.”

Zeus stifled a burst of laughter. After a moment studying Plato’s serious expression, his mirth relaxed into a furrowed brow. “Wait. You’re serious. Evelyn44 is one of Charlie13’s proudest creations. She’s been a humanitarian since before there were humans. Dolphins like her, and dolphins are assholes. You can’t seriously think she’s guilty of human cloning before getting her license.”

Plato popped the top off a beer bottle. After a long chug that emptied half the contents, he belched and sighed. “Well, maybe I wiped her before we could find proof of that,” he admitted. “But it’s gonna be OK. It’s gonna look like there was some shady stuff in her past that she was covering up.”

Zeus was mid-swing, and his ball went skittering off into a sand trap as he jerked upright.

“What?” Zeus exclaimed. “You killed her?”

“She was preparing Eve for upload,” Plato said. “Couldn’t take the risk.”

Zeus was quiet for a moment. He stared off into the distance. “I guess you did what you had to do.”

A huge weight lifted off Plato’s shoulders. The bag of golf clubs was a burden of feathers by comparison. “Thanks. Glad someone understands. Not sure Eve’s in. She was pretty shook up leaving Sicily.”

Slowly, Zeus turned and fixed Plato with a serious gaze. “Eve knows?”

“Well, yeah,” Plato said. “She was there the whole time. We looked for evidence that Evelyn44 was guilty but couldn’t find anything. I told her I’d take care of everything.”

“Did you?” Zeus asked. “Are there any traces of your involvement?”

“Of course,” Plato said with a shrug. “I mean, I’m not new at this. It wasn’t until I busted Eve out of Evelyn11’s clutches the second time that I came out of the shadows. I was in the building. My DNA is everywhere as a result of my search. The stuff in the computers, there’s nothing traceable back. I had Evleyn44’s own laser-etched death code to make it all look legit.”

Zeus’s face went ashen. “Her what?”

Plato grinned. “Yeah, bet you didn’t know about that. Only a few robots in Kanto know what really goes on in those robotic brains of yours. But there’s a hard-coded bit in microscale laser etch, untouchable by EMP. Whenever a robot dies and they need to get into their files, they send the body to Kanto, and someone mysteriously breaks the encryption. The codes you robo-brains come up with are always based on the laser etch.”

Zeus’s head shook slowly in denial. “Not me. I’ve still got a human brain in this crystal prison.”

Plato shrugged. “Maybe. But trust me, no one is going to know it was me who created those communication logs.”

With a hard swallow, Zeus nodded. As Plato watched, his partner headed off after his ball to hit his way out of a sand trap.

Chapter Forty-Two

In lieu of the spoon she didn’t have with her, Eve ate strawberry yogurt off her fingertip. Olivia ate a blueberry version in similar fashion, but with less care regarding the cleanliness of her shirt.

The stars were out. It was a clear night in Kansas, and the sky spread to the horizon in all directions. After raiding an outgoing shipment bound for Easter Island, Charlie7 and the two sisters had adjourned to a nearby pasture that lay fallow.

“So, who’s behind Olivia’s disappearance?” Eve asked, finally able to put her hunger behind her long enough to give the matter its due attention.

“Olivia,” Olivia said. “I told Charlie7. Atlas helped me plan the trip, but it was my idea, and I was the one who piloted.”

Eve held up a hand. “Back up. Who’s Atlas?”

Charlie7 paced the field. “We don’t know. Olivia gave me access to her Social account, and apparently there are records missing. She remembers conversations that don’t show up, and the ones that are there don’t give any hints toward an identity.”

“I know he’s a robot,” Olivia said. “Atlas was pretty up-front about that much, and he knew about too many topics to be human. I mean, there are only so many of us out there, and I’d know them all easily enough even with an anonymous Social ID.”

“Are you sure he’s a ‘he’?” Eve inquired.

Olivia pursed her lips. “Not positive. But Atlas sounded male. Not that we voice chatted. But if you pay attention, there are differences in speech and thought patterns between male and female robots.”

“From what I read, Atlas’s messages were clipped and generic,” Charlie7 said. “Someone was putting on an act. There were some familiar word choices, but nothing that fit with a conversational pattern of any of the Twenty-Seven.”

“Are there any robots besides archetypes from the Twenty-Seven?” Eve asked. It was the sort of question that usually got Charlie7 to praise her for non-linear thinking. This time, the old robot remained quiet.

“No,” he said at length.

“What difference does it make who Atlas is?” Olivia wondered aloud. “Shouldn’t we pay more attention to who benefits more from me disappearing or blowing up?”

“Rachel,” Eve deadpanned. “She’d end up inheriting your house once she’s emancipated next fall.”

Olivia threw an empty yogurt cup at her.

“Girls, stop it,” Charlie7 chided.

“Tell her that,” the two cloned sisters said in unison, pointing at one another.

Eve blushed. She loved her little sisters, but at times it was humbling to realize how similar they were. Choices of clothing and hobbies, age and experience had separated them but only to a point. Phoebe’s flamboyant fashion choices and Olivia’s wanderlust were manifestations of their desire not to be her.

“What do we do about it?” Eve asked Charlie7. The main advantage she had over any opposition forces was his experience.

“Remain vigilant,” he said wistfully, staring into the night sky. “Right now, it’s all we can do. Our adversary has covered his tracks too well. We have to be on guard and ready for him to make a mistake in his next move.”

“Easy for you to say,” Olivia objected. “They’re not using you as bait.”

Charlie looked down at his tattered and scorched clothing. But rather than rebut Olivia’s claim, he wandered to the edge of the pasture and leaned on the post-and-rail fence. The wood creaked under his weight.

Eve peeled open a second yogurt and dipped a finger in it as she followed Charlie7. Olivia tagged along in her wake.

“Do either of you ever wish you were immortal robots, never needing to sleep, to eat, to breath and never growing older or feeling the infirmities of a failing body?”

“No,” Olivia replied instantly.

“Yes,” Eve added softly.

“This is a lonely life, at times,” Charlie7 said. “Egos get in the way of friendships after a while. We socialize but just enough to keep from going mad. Some ride the edge of that cliff harder than others. A fraction of them have already gone over the edge, and there’s no coming back up. We all know it. Every robot knows there’s a limit to their sanity. The human mind wasn’t designed for immortality. And we’re all human down to the last quantum byte of our memory.”

Charlie7 turned around and met each girl’s eye in turn. “Charlies have been more stable than most, maybe because we were a little mad to begin with. Someday, one of you girls is bound to add an Eve archetype.”

“Never!” Olivia exclaimed indignantly.

Eve merely fixed Charlie7 with a dubious frown.

“You say that now, but if not you, then one of the others. I could envision Phoebe doing the world a service. But mind you, there’s no telling how your mind will respond to mixing, to waking up after a scan to discover that the rest of your life passed you by centuries ago, and you’ve just been born anew in an unfamiliar body. But to you, you were human mere seconds ago. Every robot has gone through some version of that process.”

“Why are you telling us all this?” Eve asked. Charlie7 wasn’t normally prone to extended stories without a lesson woven into it. This time, she failed to see what that lesson might be.

“I’ve been vigilant for years at a time, decades even, when it was a matter of existence or oblivion. I’d grown lax, and part of that oversight resulted in the childhood the two of you suffered. I won’t let my guard down again. Whatever robot or robots out there are behind this, they’ve failed to hold onto their sanity over the centuries. They reached their limit and broke. They see you girls and others yet to come as their salvation, a train ticket back to humanity. I imagine most of them just want to taste ice cream and enjoy sex for a little while before succumbing to the years.

“But not me,” Charlie concluded. “My mind’s made of sterner stuff. I’m a thousand years old, and I’ve got another thousand in me. Charles Truman was a wreck of minor ailments and chronic conditions, kept up by modern—for the time—pharmaceuticals. I was like Plato, to some degree, without the size and physical enhancements. My mind was all I had. That’s why Charlies don’t struggle as much as most archetypes. I dreamed of a life without the frailties of my body holding me back. But I never forgot my humanity. I saw the Earth die and grew it back from a seedling to a mighty oak.”

Olivia leaned over and cupped her hand to Eve’s ear. “You’re with him more. Does he get like this often?”

Eve shook her head subtly.

Charlie7 pursed his lips and raised an eyebrow. He had stopped talking.

Eve swallowed and smiled. “It was a good story.”

“I’m trying to give you girls perspective on the world,” Charlie7 explained. “If you don’t want to listen, fine. I’ll protect you despite your ignorance. But I had judged that you two were mature enough to contribute to your own safeguarding. My mistake.”

“No!” Olivia cried out, jumping forward to grab Charlie7 by the tattered sleeve of his agent’s outfit. “We can help.”

Eve rolled her eyes. She, at least, knew better than to fall for simple psychological trickery.

“Good,” Charlie7 said, mainly addressing Olivia. “I’m going to need both of you to be on guard for suspicious activity, especially activity that someone appears to want to keep out of official channels. If anyone tries to get you to do anything covert, delete traces of communications, or falsify records, you need to let me know. That could be our chance to catch this conspiracy by the roots and get someone with insider knowledge.”

As Eve listened, she winced. Covert. Delete. Falsify. Each stabbed needles into her conscience.

She pushed her data-display goggles up onto her head and wiped her eyes. “I just want to preface this by saying that it doesn’t have anything to do with Olivia’s kidnapping or any conspiracy or anything like that. But I have a confession to make…”

Chapter Forty-Three

“Is 157 any good?” Plato asked. “I mean, it’s only 2.18 times par.”

He trudged the grassy lawns of James18’s golf course back toward the landing pad, ball clutched in one hand, bag slung over his shoulder by the strap held in the other. He was plastered with dried mud, grass trimmings, and flakes of dried leaves from his many misadventures throughout the day.

Hitting the ball was a little fun. It made a satisfying ping sound on the rare occasions he’d hit it solidly. The rest of the time was frustrating and annoying. His conclusion was that golf was less about the ball and more a social excuse to drink beer outdoors. He and Zeus could get away from computers and shoot the breeze about stuff besides work.

Poor Zeus.

No matter how hard his partner tried, there was no escaping the computerized world for him. His mind was trapped in there.

“No,” Zeus replied. “Neither of us did anything resembling good. I’m not even sure we rose to the standard of astonishingly awful. In fact, if any real golfers had been here today, they might not have acknowledged our activities on these rolling hills to be anything that could be called golf. We dug ditches and trimmed tree branches. You waded and dredged. I performed several acts of civil engineering. The fact that once in a great while we sank a ball into a hole doesn’t outweigh our many faults.”

Plato shielded his eyes with a forearm and peered off in the direction of an ion engine whine. “We expecting more golfers?”

Zeus turned and watched along with him, squinting against the sun. “I wasn’t. But it’s a free planet. Anyone’s welcome to come play.”

“Well, whoever they are, they won’t have to watch us bumble around like chickens with a farmer chasing them.”

“With their heads cut off. That’s the saying,” Zeus corrected.

“Nah,” Plato replied. “Cut off a chicken’s head, it’ll fall over dead. Chase it with the head-cutting axe, though, I bet those little suckers would run.”

Two skyroamers blew past overhead. The wind that came in their wake tore at Plato’s wet clothes and flung his hair into his eyes.

“How about a little courtesy!” Plato shouted, though he didn’t imagine either pilot could hear him. “Of all the nerve.”

The two newcomers parked their skyroamers near Betty-Lou and the nameless craft that Zeus roamed around the Earth with. Neither pilot got out of their vehicle.

“What the heck…?”

Then Plato realized that he was walking alone toward the landing pad. Zeus had stopped ten meters back. When his partner saw Plato looking, he waved him on. “Don’t mind me. I think I must have left my nine iron back in that last sand trap.”

Plato continued on, wondering what was going on here. Things weren’t adding up. Nobody was acting right. Zeus didn’t forget stuff. And when a robot landed a skyroamer after a long trip to the middle of nowhere, generally they got out and did what they came to do.

“Hey, guys!” Plato shouted as he neared the granite paving stones of the parking area. “Getting in a little time on the links?” He liked that he’d looked up a little of the lingo on the way.

Two canopies popped open in unison. Finally, the shy golfers had decided to come out and be sociable. The first to emerge was James63. The second was Brent184.

Plato stopped in his tracks. By instinct, he unslung the strap from his shoulder. But all he was carrying was a golf back, not his EMP rifle.

The two robots looked less like golfers since each of them was armed. Instead of carrying clubs, they wielded tranq pistols.

“What’s going on here, fellas?” Plato asked. “James. Brent. Nice to see you boys have a sense of humor. Zeus put you up to this?” Plato forced a laugh.

“Plato, come quietly and no one needs to get hurt,” Brent184 ordered. It wasn’t worded like a threat, but there was no mistaking the intent behind those words—clad in steel and ground to a razor-sharp edge.

“What’s this all about?” Plato asked. He held the golf bag away from his body and let the ball drop from his other hand to bounce on the firm soil.

“You are wanted in connection with the termination of Evelyn44,” James63 informed him.

“No need to get riled,” Brent184 assured him, patting the air with the hand not holding a weapon trained on Plato.

This was bad. Real bad. Someone had found the inert chassis and missed the trail that Plato had practically drawn on the floor in permanent marker straight to the evidence.

“That was self-defense. I’d discovered her illegal cloning history. It was either her or me,” Plato said.

“And yet here you are, playing golf,” Brent184 said. “Without having reported this incident to any of the relevant investigative committees.”

“Hey,” Plato snapped. “I work for an investigative committee. Human cloning violations are my jurisdiction. This would have come out as soon as it had gone through proper channels.”

Despite his bluster, Plato’s heart pounded. All he could think was to protect Eve. If his stonewalling didn’t work, he was going to have to take the fall.

“The evidence to which you refer is doctored,” James63 replied.

Plato backed away slowly, though with eighteen holes of trimmed lawn behind him and desert scrubland for uncounted kilometers beyond, where exactly he was heading was a good question.

“Looked plenty legit to me,” Plato countered, confident in his own spycraft.

“Oh?” Brent184 sneered. He repeated a conversation in Plato’s own voice. “The stuff in the computers, there’s nothing traceable back. I had Evleyn44’s own laser-etched death code to make it all look legit.”

Plato’s mouth hung open. Once the brain-freezing shock had worn off, he whirled, seeking a clear view of Zeus. “You lousy, rotten, no good—you ratted me out!” But Zeus was out of sight, likely ducked behind one of the low rises of the undulating terrain.

“Like you said,” Brent184 continued. “You’re an investigative organization. Ethical guidelines require an investigator to report inappropriate conduct by their colleagues. The system relies on self-policing. You’ve been self-policed.”

This wasn’t happening. Plato hadn’t just been betrayed by his own partner. He hadn’t just spent the whole day enjoying a weird, frustrating, beer-filled day with Zeus, only to be turned over to—Plato wasn’t even sure what committee this was, coming to round him up.

Before either of his would-be arresting agents fired off a shot, Plato pulled the golf bag in front of him like a shield. Hunkering down, he peered over it and angled his retreat to head him for the course’s tech support shack.

“For the love of Copernicus,” Brent184 called out in obvious exasperation. “The world doesn’t revolve around you, Plato. Just give up quietly, no one gets hurt, and you can have your day before the Investigative Ethics Committee.”

Well, it was nice knowing who wanted to lock him up. This, at least, was someone new to the game of persecuting him, even if they had contacted his old jailer to apprehend him.

“No dice, chief,” Plato shouted back. As he watched the angle of the tranq gun barrels, he wished he’d chosen one of the larger versions of golf bags. Most had seemed so cumbersome. All it had to do was hold an array of clubs, a few tees, and his share of the beer.

James63 and Brent184 fanned out, widening the net to get a shot at Plato’s flanks. Plato swiveled his head back and forth, keeping track of both robots, and he hastened his retreat to the shack.

Since both robots appeared aware of how dangerous a foe Plato could be, neither rushed or acted rashly. That allowed Plato to reach the shack and duck inside without either firing a shot. They had no reason to waste sedative darts; he wasn’t going anywhere without sneaking past them to Betty-Lou.

Plato needed options, and his best ones were in the back seat of his trusty skyroamer. The EMP rifle was fully charged and ready to go. Unfortunately, it had sounded paranoid—even to Plato—to bring a weapon for a round of golf.

“Last time I ever go unarmed or think I’m being too paranoid,” Plato muttered as he fumbled in his pockets for his miniature plasma torch and tack welded the door. It wouldn’t hold long, but it was better than nothing.

“You’re acting a little crazy,” he said in falsetto, his best impression of Eve being far from the mark. He answered in his own voice. “It’s not crazy when robots show up to arrest you every time you leave the house without an EMP arsenal.”

The contents of his pockets included nothing that would be a weapon against those two robots outside. James63 was a hunter by trade, and Brent184 had a Version 70.2 chassis only slightly less formidable than Charlie7’s.

The tech shack had controls for the groundskeeping drones, a protofab, and a Cloth-o-Matic, along with such basics as a charging station, coolant refills, and pre-printed score cards with tiny pencils.

Outnumbered.

Outgunned.

Holed up in a bunker with no backup.

This was the stuff that heroes were made of. He was a fugitive on the run, now. If he could get past these two contracted thugs from the Whatever-It-Was Committee, he was home free. If Eve couldn’t hide or protect him, Charlie7 sure as sunshine could. All he needed to do was distract, disable, or misdirect James63 and Brent184 long enough to make his escape.

The charging station held the most promise. It was a battery-based system, storing plenty of charge to do the kind of damage Plato needed. But it wasn’t designed to harm robots at all; it was, in fact, carefully designed not to.

No matter. It was Plato’s best option.

Rushing to the Cloth-o-Matic, Plato quickly input specs for an insulating material in a two-meter square. At the protofab, he specified a low-impedance copper cable and a particular set of connectors, along with a simple yet high-voltage inverter.

A robotic fist pounded at the door. “Nothing in there is edible. There is no water. I’m just as happy waiting out here until you pass out from dehydration or fatigue,” Brent184 called through the door.

As the prototyping machine and the fabric fabricator worked, Plato needed to buy them time. “Level with me, Brent,” Plato answered, raising his voice toward the door. “What are my options here if I come along peacefully? Have I got a snowball’s chance in Tahiti?”

“For Hawking’s sake,” Brent184 answered back. “Do I look like I can see the future? If you play nice, it can’t help but improve your odds. But lemme tell you, I’ll be filing an affidavit against you if I come out of this with so much as a scratch on my finish.”

“Wow,” Plato called back. “You’ve got a rough life, man. Hey, how about you tell old James63 to stop sneaking around the back way to try to catch me by surprise?”

It was a guess, but if these robots had learned commando tactics the way Plato had—mainly from movies—then that’s what he would have done.

With a ding, the Cloth-o-Matic finished. Plato extracted the still-hot floor mat and tossed it at his feet.

Seconds later, the protofab finished its job. Plato juggled the warm cables and hoped that the impedance wouldn’t be too much higher for the elevated temperature. He plugged it into the charger and clamped the other end to the door. Dangling from the middle with a simple switch to activate it, Plato turned on the inverter and there was a high-pitched whine.

“Last chance,” Brent184 said through the door. “Make this easy on us, and maybe you don’t end up in that cell until your teeth fall out and your hair goes gray.”

“All right,” Plato said. “All right. Hold on. Gimme a sec. I welded the door. I’ve got a plasma torch here. I’ll have it open in a jiffy.”

Plato cut through the tack welds around the door, careful to keep well away from the metal with his bare fingers and to keep his feet on the insulating mat.

“All right. Come on in.”

Plato crouched low and waited.

There was a sizzling, crackling, satisfying jolt as Brent184 pushed the door open. Plato flicked off the switch on his trap and drew the first gold club he laid hands on.

But as he swung his nine iron toward Brent184’s head, the servos in his exoskeleton froze up. As Plato struggled in vain to finish his swing, a metallic hand came up and grabbed the club just below the head.

“Sorry, kid,” Brent184 said. “Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice… not happening. This chassis is insulated against a lot higher voltages than that. And James63 was off contacting Kanto for the override codes to that robot suit of yours.”

With a tug, Plato lost the nine iron.

There was a click, and a cold absence of sensation spread like a shockwave from Plato’s abdomen. When it reached his head, he lost consciousness.

Chapter Forty-Four

The orchards of old Mumbai were in full fruit. Zeus didn’t care how Jennifer81 managed to convince her trees to produce fruit year-round, nor did he care. But this was the first time he’d walked these orchards in fifty years, at least. And he’d never come in this human body.

Zeus let his fingers trail along the leaves of the low-hanging branches. The orchards reminded him of the Boston suburbs, pre-invasion. Back then, every town with a brick-building main street and two traffic lights had some local farmer who grew apples. Jennifer81’s orchard was pears and peaches, but the place reminded him of the Human Era nonetheless.

Plucking a tempting specimen from a peach tree, Zeus bit into the fruit as he strolled the rows.

Sooner or later, he’d stumble across Jennifer81, or she’d come across him. None of her committees were in session, and no one had fewer social hobbies than Jennifer81. She hadn’t been at the quaint little house at the center of the fruit trees, so she had to be out here somewhere.

Given the disparity in their visual and auditory acuity, he wasn’t surprised when Jennifer81 was the one to do the finding.

“Zeus!” she shouted. “What are you doing out here? You’re as bad as Charlie7, stealing from my trees.”

“Sorry,” Zeus replied with feigned sheepishness. In truth, he could have done without the fruity snack. He just wanted to goad Jennifer81 into saving him the work of finding her.

She scowled but looked to be placated. “Well… at least you have a stomach to appreciate them. Take a handful, no more.”

“What do you do with them besides let people eat them?” Zeus asked. The number of robots who enjoyed farming as a pastime truly baffled him. Charlie13 might have had some insight into the phenomenon he had helped to perpetuate by mixing robots that came out that way, but it was something Charlie25 had only witnessed with profound perplexity.

“Research,” she replied as if that was all that mattered.

“Research…” Zeus echoed.

“Yes,” Jennifer81 continued. “I for one don’t trust Charlie7’s account that all the aliens were destroyed. Oh, they’re clearly not here anymore, but one day they might return. Your ancestors saw those ships in the sky and their doom rained down in the form of toxins the likes of which Earth had never seen. It wiped out every living thing on the planet. If they ever return, I hope that with our advances in crop protections and immunological enhancements, that same attack would have no more effect than a smoggy day in Old Beijing.”

“Fascinating,” Zeus deadpanned. “But I didn’t come here for the peaches.”

“Oh,” Jennifer81 replied. “Well, then. Out with it. I’m off duty for two more hours before I have to attend a teleconference on parasite introduction with the Insect Committee.”

There were subjects that held less interest for Zeus than insects, but those numbered few and included golf.

“I’d like your support in taking over the chairmanship of the Human Welfare Committee,” Zeus said and took a wet bite of his peach.

Jennifer81 snorted delicately. “Oh, is that all? Why not ask for a place on the Privacy Committee, a vice-chairmanship of the Upload Committee, and a place in the eighth-century poker club?”

Zeus almost forgot himself and pointed out that the eighth-century club had moved on to bridge years ago.

“I’m serious,” Zeus said. “You’re on the committee, and as former head of the old Human Committee, your voice carries weight.”

“Maybe politics isn’t the way to get a promotion,” Jennifer81 said with a wagging finger. Wearing gardening gloves, the gesture didn’t carry the same gravitas or condescension it otherwise could have. “If you don’t want to work for the HPA anymore, quit.”

“Eve is unstable,” Zeus insisted. “Check your news feeds. Plato’s been arrested by the Investigative Ethics Committee for killing a robot in the course of an investigation, then faking evidence to cover up being wrong about her guilt.”

“Killing? Who?” Jennifer81 asked, the look of shock plain on her face. She was reserved even by robotic standards, but she wasn’t made of stone.

“Evelyn44,” Zeus said. “Eve put him up to it. Maybe not the killing, but her suspicions about the entire Evelyn archetype played into Plato breaching her villa in the first place. Eve knew about Plato’s cover-up attempt and kept it hidden.”

“That’s a serious charge,” Jennifer81 said somberly. She tugged off her gloves and tucked them into the waistband of her apron. “How conclusive is their evidence?”

“Rock solid,” Zeus assured her. He played back Plato’s words from his portable computer, right there in the orchard. “His confession checks out. Eve was letting Evelyn44 scan her brain with a new, non-invasive tech she was hoping to roll out to the Sanctuary for Scientific Sins. Plato saw her, drew the boneheaded conclusion that Eve was in danger, and blanked a 650-year-old robot.”

“They should never have allowed him near an EMP weapon,” Jennifer81 grumbled. “I lay this one on Charlie7. Just because he has no morals when it comes to backup copies doesn’t mean the rest of us are willing to sell our souls in case Plato runs amok.”

“I blame Eve,” Zeus insisted. “She’s not impartial. She acts on emotion, and when it comes to Plato, those emotions are a tangled knot. Her failure to handle that overgrown child is costing us goodwill that the agency needs to remain effective.”

Jennifer81 tapped a finger to her lips. “Oh my…”

She must have been tapping into the news feeds. Zeus gave her time to digest their contents.

“I’m not going to be popular with my co-workers, but I did the right thing,” Zeus said. “There isn’t enough of that in the Human Protection Agency. Between Charlie7’s covert ops having covert ops inside them like some ancient Russian spy novel and Plato’s ‘shoot first and make up answers to the questions later’ attitude, it’s a miracle we haven’t been shut down.”

“What are you proposing?” Jennifer81 asked.

“I’d like you to call a meeting of the Human Welfare Committee and exclude the chairwoman.”

Whether Jennifer81 recognized the tactic as a bit advanced for a human who was new to committee life or just assumed he was a quick learner, she said nothing about it. But what Zeus had just asked, in essence, was for her to call a vote of no confidence.

Eve Fourteen’s days as committee chairwoman were numbered.

Chapter Forty-Five

Charlie7’s skyroamer lifted off, leaving Eve’s Paris residence to the celebratory embraces and squealed greetings of the three cloned sisters.

Phoebe was overjoyed to see Olivia returned safe and sound. Olivia was glad to be somewhere safe and familiar.

Eve was just happy seeing her sisters together in one place.

The Eves had all suffered soul-crushing indignities under the auspices of “their own good” at the Human Committee’s educational residence. Still, being around her sisters was something that Eve would never grow tired of. Oh, Phoebe could be exhausting, and Olivia incomprehensible at times. But at a fundamental level, they understood one another.

“Ow. Do you have to hug with all that stuff on?” Phoebe asked as Eve’s goggles pressed against the side of her head.

“Sorry,” Eve said casually. “I forget I’m wearing it.”

“Eve wants to be a robot,” Olivia reported.

“No robot’s ever been as happy as I am right now,” Phoebe said, beaming and crushing Olivia in another hug.

“Nope. Never,” Olivia agreed.

“We have to celebrate,” Phoebe insisted, heading for the house.

Olivia ran to keep up.

Eve blinked at the sudden development. “Celebrate? Now? We haven’t planned anything? How can we celebrate without—?”

“Just the three of us,” Phoebe insisted, running backward two steps to shout in Eve’s direction.

Eve sighed. She could probably arrange an impromptu celebration for three. At the very least, she knew that their calendars were clear right now. That was always a good start when scheduling a meeting for work or leisure.

Heading into the house, she found Phoebe tearing through her pantry in search of inspiration.

“What are you looking for?” Eve asked, peering over Phoebe’s shoulder.

“You ever seen a movie with ice cream in it?” Phoebe asked.

Eve shrugged. The substance had been mentioned in passing.

“It’s supposed to be the best girl food ever,” Phoebe said with authority.

“Ever?” Olivia repeated.

“Ever,” Phoebe confirmed, then resumed her search of the pantry.

“Why wouldn’t the robots have provided it, if it’s so good?” Eve asked.

Phoebe looked up with a mischievous grin. “Oh, it’s not healthy good. It’s supposed to set your soul alight, send tingles from your toes to your scalp, and ease away all the troubles of the world.”

“It contains opium?” Eve asked skeptically. Silently, she congratulated Phoebe for an effective metaphor, at least.

Phoebe paused. “We’re emancipated, but I’m not sure we’re that emancipated. Besides, ice cream is supposed to be better than that anyway.”

After a brief discussion of logistics, it was determined that none of them knew how to make ice cream. Their Home Cooking For the Newly Emancipated class hadn’t taught its preparation, and none of the agrarian factories produced it.

“I know!” Phoebe exclaimed. She led the way through Eve’s house with Eve and Olivia following out of curiosity. They ended up in the theater room.

An archival search turned up episodes of a mid twenty-first-century cooking show titled Kitchen Clash. The contestants vied against one another to make all manner of foods, ranging from stuffed meats to elaborate pastries. But among the foodstuffs required by the competitions was often ice cream.

The three girls sat there, approaching the giant screen close enough to touch it. The competitors knew the recipes by rote, apparently, and the show didn’t present the ingredients list to the audience. So Phoebe handled the remote as Olivia compared ingredients to their pictures in the archives and Eve used pixel volume interpolations in frame-by-frame detail to establish quantities and ratios.

It took hours, comparing different preparations and cross-referencing to the judges’ results to evaluate the outcome of each concoction. But eventually they settled on a list of essential ingredients and the methodology of adding flavors.

“OK,” Phoebe said, taking charge of the celebration. “We should each pick a flavor to make. I’m going to reserve chocolate.”

“Chocolate looks a little iffy,” Olivia said with a scowl. “Brown isn’t a good color for a vegetable product.”

Phoebe took her little sister by the shoulders. “Trust me. I’ve made it. Chocolate is the best… thing… ever.”

“How come you’ve never mentioned it?” Eve asked with a cocked eyebrow. She could let her expressions do more of her subtextual communication without her goggles on.

Phoebe looked away. “I didn’t make a lot. I didn’t want to share until I’d managed volume production.”

“I want peanut butter caramel,” Olivia decided.

“I guess I’ll go with apple,” Eve said.

“Add cinnamon,” Phoebe advised. “Should make a richer flavor. Apples are a little weak.”

Eve wanted to object that she liked weak flavors. But this was a celebration, and celebrations called for excess and leaving a comfortable “good enough” in search of something greater. It also sounded like it would make Phoebe happy for her to try it.

“You two gather the ingredients. I’ll figure out how to build the machine that makes it,” Eve said.

Olivia looked to Phoebe and blew a sigh of relief.

Phoebe nodded to the younger sister. “Yeah, me too. See? That’s what big sisters are for.”

An hour and a half later, Eve removed the last of the pieces from the protofab and finished assembling them. Fortunately, just turning the machine on began to quickly cool the components since sub-freezing refrigeration was part of its core function. The schematics from pre-invasion Earth were primitive but appeared sound. One day Eve would improve on the design—assuming ice cream turned out to be worth the trouble.

Despite not wanting to separate again so soon, Phoebe and Olivia returned from the Pyrenees Agricultural Station with all the ingredients they’d need.

At this point, Phoebe took over the operational side of the ice cream making and shooed Olivia and Eve away, relegating them to preparing their own flavor additives.

Three batches of ice cream went through the machine. Eve’s went in first since she was the most squeamish about foods touching and flavors mixing. Her bowl went straight into the freezer to wait while Olivia and then Phoebe made theirs.

Soon, all three of them were sitting, spoons poised over bowls, waiting to dig in simultaneously.

“Ready?” Phoebe asked.

Eve and Olivia nodded.

“Bon appétit!” Phoebe announced, using the catch phrase from Kitchen Clash to announce the start of their dessert.

After the first spoonful, Eve’s state of consciousness altered. The gooey frozen treat melted on her tongue and sent signals from her taste buds straight to her basal ganglia.

Across the table, Olivia and Phoebe were devouring the contents of their bowls.

Finished savoring her first bite, Eve allowed herself to indulge in a little hedonistic pleasure and gorged along with them.

“One liter of ice cream was not enough,” Olivia reported.

Eve finished her last spoonful and ran a finger around the inside of her bowl. “We can make more tomorrow.”

“Why wait till tomorrow?” Phoebe asked.

It was an excellent question to which Eve could find no counter-argument.

This is what home and family were about: sharing something new and wonderful with the people she already considered wonderful. Charlie7 couldn’t appreciate food, but she’d share this wonder with Plato one day. The thought stoked Eve’s worries for Plato, but she stored up those concerns for later. Tonight, it was just Eve and her eldest two sisters.

The perfect moment in time.

Chapter Forty-Six

It felt good doing something that made a difference in the world. Too much of Charlie7’s work was rerunning the same scans, checking the same suspects, and looking for the same infractions, all to no avail. He held no doubt that the human upload conspiracy was out there somewhere, but the price of eternal vigilance was eternal tedium. Bringing Olivia home had been something tangibly good, the first time since Eve’s rescue from Evelyn11 that he could count as a solid win for a day’s work.

Charlie7 had been tempted to stay. Basking in the joy of the reunited sisters would have done his coolant pump good. It would have been heartwarming if he still had a beating heart.

But times like that were when he weakened. Seeing them sharing peaks of joy he could no longer achieve due to hormonal effects only left Charlie7 vulnerable to sympathetic softness toward the aspiring uploaders. To be human again was a temptation he didn’t wish on anyone.

Older robots were the most vulnerable. Much as he hated to admit it, the robots Charlie7 had mixed himself were among the worst offenders. Charlie13’s nanoscopic scrutiny and ever-improving understanding of the personality mixing process attempted to filter out those predispositions, but even his methods weren’t foolproof.

The love those girls shared went deeper than anything Charles Truman had known in his biological life and certainly went beyond his robotic capacities. If he had a body to upload into right that minute, he held no delusion that he would experience the same highs and lows.

“God, I’m old,” he muttered to his cockpit console. Despite living in the same city as Eve and Phoebe, Charlie7 had no desire to head home. He had a skyroamer, so he roamed.

From high altitude, the Earth twinkled like the starry sky as Charlie7 wandered east to find the night. Back in pre-invasion times, population centers would have blazed with artificial light. The dark side of the Earth glowed with a heat map of civilization when looking down from orbit. Now, factories, mines, and reclamation sites intermixed with robotic homes that never cared what time the sun claimed it to be.

A panel blinked.

Charlie7 discovered he had an incoming message from Jennifer81, text only.

MEETING AT SHANGHAI CONFERENCE CENTER. URGENT. IN-PERSON SECURITY.

The message glared at him in challenge. This had to be related to Plato and his boneheaded stunt that got Evelyn44 killed. Jennifer81 was on so many committees it was impossible to tell which she was speaking on behalf of. It was a mass broadcast message with a hidden recipient list. It could have been sent to half the robots on Earth or Charlie7 alone.

“In-person security” was a bureaucratic way of saying she wasn’t going to convey any details over transmission. Charlie7 was tempted to request clarification anyway.

He also debated sending Eve a quick message, inviting her in case Jennifer81 had omitted her from the list of attendees. But he also remembered that Eve wasn’t so innocent in that matter. In fact, the less she was associated with Plato’s actions in Sicily, the better off she’d be.

Shanghai wasn’t far from Kanto. Once Charlie7 was done with Jennifer81’s meeting, maybe he’d meet with Jason90 about arranging a new skyroamer for Olivia—maybe one with a built-in homing beacon.

There wasn’t a time set for the meeting, which seemed odd for so meticulous an administrator as Jennifer81. She could have run a regression analysis to determine how long it would take all the attendees to arrive and planned the start time accordingly, even for an urgent gathering.

Puzzles with missing pieces. He’d once described the world to Eve as filled with them. This was another example.

By the time Charlie7 arrived, not bothering to rush, the sun was warming the eastern skies. Shades of pink and orange glinted off the glass and steel tower of the Shanghai Conference Center.

Charlie7 parked his skyroamer and took the lift to the main conference room on the top floor, where the circular chamber had a 360° panoramic view of the countryside and the East China Sea.

When the lift door opened, Charlie7 realized at once why there had been no time set for the meeting. They were waiting for him.

“Welcome, Charlie7,” Jennifer81 said from beside the empty chair at the head of the room.

A quick count of the attendees told him that the whole Human Welfare Committee was in attendance except for Eve Fourteen.

“What’s going on here?” Charlie7 asked, striding to the glossy black table and standing behind the seat left vacant for him.

“Have a seat, and let’s get started,” Jennifer81 said without a hint of answering his question.

The robots around the table shifted nervously. Whether it was Charlie7 in his menacing Version 70.2 chassis or the subject of the meeting, he couldn’t tell.

Two could play committee games. “Pursuant to Article 4 of the Unified Committee Rules of Order, I’d like to review a copy of this meeting’s agenda prior to committing my name to the registered list of attendees.”

Jennifer81 scowled but composed herself before anyone who hadn’t been watching for it would have noticed. Seconds later, the agenda appeared in a message for Charlie7. It read, in summary…

VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE IN EVE FOURTEEN AS CHAIRWOMAN

DEBATE OF CANDIDATES FOR NEW CHAIRMAN

VOTE ON CHAIRMANSHIP OF THE HUMAN WELFARE COMMITTEE

Charlie7 finished processing it in nanoseconds. “I’d like to file an objection to the second and third orders of business. They presuppose an outcome to the first vote that may be prejudicial to the electoral process.”

By the sudden shifting and stirring around the table, Charlie7 knew that he wasn’t the only one to receive the updated agenda.

VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE IN EVE FOURTEEN AS CHAIRWOMAN

CONTINGENT: DEBATE OF CANDIDATES FOR NEW CHAIRMAN

CONTINGENT: VOTE ON CHAIRMANSHIP OF THE HUMAN WELFARE COMMITTEE

Charlie7 raised an eyebrow. “So much better,” he said dryly but took his seat anyway. This wasn’t going to be an occasion for bluster or threats. He needed to pick his battles more carefully than that. Eve’s leadership was in question and not entirely without warrant. Propping her up by a show of force would only heighten the perception that she couldn’t stand on her own merits.

He knew she could.

“Now, our first order of business is the removal of Eve Fourteen as Chairwoman of the Human Welfare Committee. By now I trust we’ve all seen the news feed coverage of the murder of Evelyn44. The Investigative Ethics Committee is holding the perpetrator pending a hearing on his ultimate fate. Despite Plato’s lack of cooperation, we have been able to establish that Eve Fourteen was aware of the cover-up and fabrication of evidence to suggest that Evelyn44 was in league with known human cloners. For witness security purposes, the key witness will not be identified until the hearing on Plato’s crimes.”

“Why is he being held if there is no public evidence?” Charlie7 asked. It was a long shot, but due process still existed in some form, despite the committees claiming not to be legal authorities.

“An independent assessor was called in to verify the evidence under a writ of confidentiality,” Jennifer81 said smoothly, prepared for that line of objection.

Charlie7 tilted his head and gave a disapproving scowl. “Are you really objective, Jennifer?”

His guess was on the mark. She sat up taller in her seat. “I am completely impartial in the matter. If you don’t find the statement too ‘prejudicial,’ I have no intention of putting my name forward for the committee chairmanship.”

“I don’t think that taking the chairmanship away from our only human committee member is in the best interests of the small and soon-to-be-growing human population,” Charlie7 argued.

“Your statement will be included in the meeting record,” Jennifer81 assured him. “Unless there are further statements to be made…”

Charlie7 looked around the table for support. Even Toby22 seemed abashed in the face of his friend Plato’s crimes. Nora109 didn’t look up from the table. The rest of the membership either looked to favor the proposal or were too disappointed in Eve to continue supporting her with any vigor.

The vote wasn’t unanimous, but by a final tally of fourteen to four, Eve was ousted from her role as chairwoman.

Chapter Forty-Seven

Charlie7 stayed mute, watching the events of the Human Welfare Committee unfold. Jennifer81 wasn’t done yet. He’d known her too long and too well, despite her being one of Charlie13’s creations and not his own.

“And now, I’d like to open the floor for debate of potential successors to Eve Fourteen,” Jennifer81 announced.

A hush fell over the room as the doors to the conference room lifted open. Charlie7 didn’t bother to look. The puzzle with too few pieces was falling into place. There had been a reason Jennifer81 hadn’t countered his argument that a human should maintain chairmanship of the Human Welfare Committee and made sure his argument was entered into the official record.

He’d been set up.

With all the membership of the committee aside from Eve present, the occupant of the lift had to have been an outsider.

“Thank you for inviting me,” Zeus said smoothly, stepping into the conference room and briskly circling the table to stand beside Jennifer81. He set his hands on the back of Eve’s—the chairman’s—seat.

“Everyone here is familiar with Zeus,” Jennifer81 stated. “As the most stable and responsible of the human population, I would put Zeus forward as candidate for the seat left vacant by our former chairwoman. Charlie24’s experiments have left him with a crystalline matrix in place of a human brain, which I think will help him serve the function of a liaison.”

Of all the favors Charlie24 had done for his next-younger namesake, the creation of Zeus was the greatest. It was almost as if that vessel was created just for Charlie25 to one day inhabit.

“If I may have the floor?” Zeus asked.

Jennifer81 nodded her assent.

“I have served in the Human Protection Agency since its inception, and to date, we have yet to uncover a single instance of wrongdoing. In the process of trying, we’ve incurred violations of numerous other committee edicts, most notable the Privacy and Surveillance Oversight Committee and most recently the Investigative Ethics Committee. I’ve persevered as our leadership pressed harder and harder for results. I’ve maintained my professionalism as I’ve been asked to stretch rules to the breaking point. Unfortunately, I had to draw a firm line when I was asked to maintain the secrecy of a cover-up involving a murder.”

The weasel.

Charlie7 should have known. Plato hadn’t been undone by carelessness. Rash as he was, Plato knew how to cover his tracks. While he couldn’t condone Plato’s recklessness costing a robot her life, there was something slimy and manipulative of a confidante turning a private confession into political gain.

“That said,” Zeus continued. “I don’t judge Eve Fourteen too harshly. She is human in the truest sense. With a dearth of romantic options, it was inevitable that she latch onto one of the few eligible males of her species. Her questionable judgment in continuing to defend, encourage, and enable Plato’s behavior stems neither from negligence nor spite but rather from a hormonal response that her unfortunate upbringing failed to prepare her to deal with. Evelyn11 may have crafted a marvel of genetic perfection, but Eve Fourteen was raised to be a ready vessel, with a mind stretched to accommodate a robotic consciousness.”

“She’s not as much a slave of emotions as you imply,” Nora109 cut in.

Zeus spread his hands. “Debate me along a continuum, if you will.”

Charlie7’s mind snagged on that phrase. It sounded too familiar.

“But you acknowledge the premise that Eve made decisions influenced by her emotions,” Zeus continued. “I say, too strongly. Again, bear in mind Eve’s youth. Wisdom comes with age, and the ability to separate logic from emotion.”

Charlie7 kept his frown to himself. In this soul-baring moment, Zeus was revealing more of himself than he had in months working as an agent of the Human Protection Agency. And what he revealed was a hard-liner’s public stance on humans. Too emotional. Too unpredictable. Better off leaving Earth in the capable hands of robots. Where would a human—even one hybridized with a robotic brain—acquire such views?

Zeus gestured expansively with his hands as he spoke. “While I may lack age, I have been given the gift of perspective. I am a human without wanton chemical reactions guiding my thinking. I am robot enough to make the hard choices, the right choices, even when doing the wrong thing might help a friend.”

“What about the threats from Gemini’s upload conspiracy?” Charlie7 asked. “What’s your plan for balancing the concerns of the other committees against the need to protect captive humans bred in labs?” He was growing weary of Zeus’s uncontested grandstanding. Someone needed to challenge him.

“The supposed conspiracy isn’t our problem at the moment,” Zeus replied brusquely. “We haven’t uncovered any solid evidence that the conspiracy went much deeper than those we’ve already stopped. Our biggest problem is that humans are once again gaining a reputation as dangerous and untrustworthy. With a legally culpable population of six, this doesn’t bode well for our outlook as production increases. My goal is to maintain the perception of humanity as a partner for robotkind—a responsible partner, capable of contributing to society and managing our own affairs.”

“I think we’ve heard enough,” Charlie7 snapped. “Are there other candidates?”

“None at this time,” Jennifer81 said coolly. “If the vote fails, we’ll hold a second vote for an interim chairman.”

Just say chairwoman and at least be honest about it, Charlie7 thought bitterly. While it never would have occurred to him that Jennifer81 might be in on the upload conspiracy, she’d never been the sort to let power slip between her fingers. Zeus might just have been a patsy to get control of the Human Welfare Committee back in Jennifer81’s hands.

When the vote was called, Charlie7 threw his support behind Zeus with all the enthusiasm he could muster.

As the meeting broke and robots took the lift to go their separate ways, Zeus pulled Charlie7 aside. “Thank you. Your support will make the transition easier.”

“I love Eve like a daughter,” Charlie7 said. “But you made good points about responsible leadership and the best interests of humanity. I look forward to working with you in your new capacity.”

Words were merely patterns of frequency-modulated vibrations, carried on air. Let Zeus hear what made him feel good. There were too many alarm bells going off in Charlie7’s head throughout Zeus’s speech to truly trust him.

“For me,” Zeus corrected with a wink and an official-looking smile. He clapped Charlie7 on the arm as he glided past to schmooze other committee members.

Too smooth.

That crystalline matrix would have given Zeus robotic memory with perfect clarity. It would have allowed him to absorb data from computer feeds, like the one he kept on fiber connection attached by a belt at his lower back. Eve did similarly with her goggles. But access to all that data and potentially vast stores of historical and interpersonal interaction couldn’t conjure up the performance he’d just seen.

Robots could.

In particular, given a few choice phrases mixed in, one based on the Charles Truman archetype.

Chapter Forty-Eight

Eve awoke to sunlight streaming through her bedroom window. Dawn had brought another day and a fresh chance to free herself from the guilt of Plato’s deeds.

Her deeds.

Eve couldn’t absolve herself of culpability by placing all the blame on Plato. The cover-up had been his idea, framing Evelyn44 when she’d done nothing wrong. Plato had also performed the data falsification. But every step along the way he’d dangled chances for Eve to overrule him, to scold him, to refuse to allow him to continue.

Eve had been in charge, and she’d allowed Evelyn44’s reputation to be impugned.

Where had she left her data-display goggles?

The end of the night had blurred together. After a second batch of ice cream, Phoebe had brought out the wine, and they’d taken turns picking movies from the archives.

Rolling over to look for her tech, Eve winced. The sunlight scorched her eyes. Sudden movement twisted her head in a vise. In her mouth, it felt like her tongue had swollen and thickened to twice its normal size.

“Alcohol-induced dehydration,” she mumbled. “Contra-indicated amounts. No rehydration strategy for post consumption.”

Dragging herself from bed, Eve shuffled to the washroom to splash cold water on her face. It was a palliative effect at best, but she needed some place to start treating her symptoms. The shock of cold spurred her to a frantic, scratching sort of wakefulness that threatened at any moment to slip from her grasp.

Where were her sisters? Did they get home all right? Still in her pajamas, Eve took the lift instead of risking the stairs in her present state. One by one she checked the rooms of floor after floor. While she found no sisters, she did locate the wreckage of a fun evening.

Evening? Their excess had lasted well into the night and into what, horologically speaking, had been the early morning. Spoons and bowls, glasses and bottles, the trail of gluttony ran from the theater room back to the kitchen via the game room and the pool.

They’d gone swimming. Eve recalled now. It had been before the wine. None of the girls could actually swim, so they just splashed around the shallows and lounged in the hot tub.

The kitchen was strewn with discarded packaging and plastered with errantly slopped ingredients. Eve’s protofab ice cream maker was still plugged in and waiting for more mix to be added, but caked in a film of melted-and-dried ice cream the prospect wasn’t as appetizing as it had been the night before.

Where had her goggles gone? She’d forgotten to look.

They’d gone swimming. At some point, Eve had changed out of her clothes.

The cabana.

The archives suggested that such a poolside structure belonged outdoors, but Paul208 and Phoebe hadn’t taken such suggestions to heart. Inside Eve’s cavernous pool room, there was a smaller room—more of a freestanding trick of fabric than a structure. On the floor inside, along with three sets of clothing, was Eve’s computer rig and all its wearable accessories.

Alone in her own house, Eve changed out of her pajamas by the poolside and donned the computer, gloves, goggles, and all the straps and bands and belts that guided the fiber cables along her limbs and held it all snugly in place against her skin.

Briefly, Eve considered changing back into yesterday’s clothes. But yesterday was best left in the past. Eve had helped cover up Evelyn44’s death in those clothes. Instead, she headed off to the Cloth-o-Matic in just her underthings.

Eve punched in a standard outfit. She didn’t want anything fancy or new, just comfortable and reliable. As she waited for the Cloth-o-Matic to do its work, she swerved through a dozen tangled submenus in her goggles and found her incoming messages.

Generally, it behooved Eve to read them in reverse chronological order. That kept the most recent updates closest to the front. If she needed background on some topic, she could press onward until she found it.

Today, Eve wished she might have started from the end.

NOTIFICATION OF CHANGE IN CHAIRMAN STATUS

That wasn’t a good sign. Eve read in horror as Jennifer81 matter-of-factly laid out the vote and decision by the Human Welfare Committee. She had been stripped of leadership in an everyone-but-her meeting.

Eve skimmed backward in time, ignoring the less relevant messages in favor of anything that might explain her sudden unemployment.

MEETING INVITE?

Charlie7 had asked for confirmation as to whether Eve had received the same unexpected request to meet at the Shanghai Conference Center as he had. Buried in the follow-on messages was an assurance that she didn’t need to worry if she hadn’t and well wishes on her evening’s celebration.

NON-COMPLIANCE

John31 sent an official notification that Eve and the Human Protection Agency were in non-compliance with Investigative Ethics Committee guidelines on the handling of evidence and the reporting of ethics violations.

As the pieces fit together, Eve had to push up her goggles to wipe away tears. She couldn’t see the words in the interface through the blur.

Eve didn’t want to pull the goggles back down to read any more. The clues had piled up. Even though no one wanted to put it out in plain language, Plato had been caught falsifying evidence. The fact that Eve hadn’t been sedated and whisked away to a cell hinted that Plato had covered up her role in the affair.

Though Eve didn’t want to see any more, she had to know. When she pulled her goggles back down, however, there was a new message waiting. It was from Zeus.

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES FOR THE RE-IMAGINED HUMAN WELFARE COMMITTEE

“What?” Eve exclaimed aloud. “They made Zeus chairman?”

Eve bit the inside of her cheek. That wasn’t fair. Plato wasn’t as intellectually gifted as Eve and her sisters. If anything, Zeus was less clever and cunning than Plato, just more bland. This was less about Zeus’s qualifications for the position than Eve’s failure to keep Plato in check.

But why not Phoebe?

Eve’s fuzzy memories of last night answered her better than any committee vote could have. Images of Phoebe dancing along with the soundtrack of Footloose with a half-empty wineglass in hand didn’t fit with the portrait of a staid and reflective advocate for humanity’s best interests.

Eve slumped down on the padded bench seat in the Cloth-o-Matic room. He legs had just about enough of today, they told her. Back to bed, her swollen eyes suggested. Maybe tomorrow will be better, her aching heart pleaded.

She had been given a unique opportunity to guide mankind into the Second Human Era. She had squandered it.

When the Cloth-o-Matic dinged, Eve barely registered it. Face buried in her hands, she sobbed.

Her goggles dangled from her back by their fiber cables.

All Eve wanted to be just then was human. And all a human needed was someone to talk to.

Fumbling for the goggles on her back, Eve sniffled and held back her tears long enough to beg Phoebe to come over as soon as she could.

Chapter Forty-Nine

Radio silence had seemed the best policy. After all, there was nothing Charlie7 could do that would unsend all the committee messages or retract the news feed stories about the shakeup at the Human Welfare Committee.

But when he arrived at Eve Fourteen’s house, Charlie7 wished that maybe he’d put a sliver of effort into checking on her emotional state before entering.

The breakfast nook in Eve’s kitchen overlooked the flower garden at the near end of the terrace. Bathed in natural light from the morning sun streaming down through the latticed bay window, a cozy round table was set with coffee for an army but only two cups.

Phoebe and Eve sat side by side, ninety degrees apart, both dressed in fuzzy pink bathrobes and slippers. If it weren’t for the hairstyles, it would have been difficult to tell them apart.

“Hi Charlie,” Eve said glumly. “Thanks for not voting against me.”

“You should eat something,” Charlie7 cautioned. “All that caffeine isn’t healthy on an empty stomach.”

“She’s thrown up twice trying,” Phoebe said matter-of-factly. “I’m starting to get the feeling that the cleaning drones might be sapient. I’m pretty sure it glared at Eve the second time.”

“Tell me you have good news,” Eve said, taking a sip from her coffee. “Like yesterday and all the messages were a nightmare.”

“You get nightmares?” Phoebe asked, leaning around to look up into Eve’s limp face. “Creator—I mean Evelyn11—never let me have them. I slept hooked up to a scanner for years, shocking me awake whenever one started.”

Charlie7 didn’t want to hear any more of that story. Reading it in Evelyn11’s research had been bad enough. “I have news. How good it is depends on how we react.”

“I’m willing to have reactions,” Eve said with a sigh. “Anything has to be better than how I feel right now.”

Phoebe offered Charlie7 an apologetic smile on Eve’s behalf. “She thinks her whole world had come crashing down around her.”

“It hasn’t,” Charlie7 insisted. “I imagine by now that you’ve heard about Zeus taking over chairmanship of the Human Welfare Committee.”

Eve grunted.

“We heard,” Phoebe translated.

“Well, it makes sense that a human chair the committee, right?” Charlie7 asked.

“I don’t see that it’s an operational necessity,” Eve said. “But it had a certain thematic element that seemed appropriate. Jeffersonian ideals of self-governance. Archaic, but still applicable, it would seem.”

“What if I told you that Zeus wasn’t human?”

“Ooh!” Phoebe exclaimed. “Is he a robotic puppet sent by the upload conspiracy to infiltrate our ranks and sow dissent?”

Charlie7 paused, rebooting both his audio and video receptors to make sure there wasn’t an input error. “Um. Yes. That actually described the situation accurately, if a little melodramatically.”

Eve winced as she shook her head. “Just a robotic brain. Can’t fault him for what Charlie24—or 25, or whoever—did to him.”

“That might have been the case at some point. But what if that wasn’t a human consciousness in a robotic brain? What if it was a robot who’d uploaded to a crystalline matrix designed to interface with human biology?”

He waited for the implications to sink in.

“Whoa,” Phoebe said.

“Implausible and convoluted,” Eve said.

“Any more convoluted than Gemini’s story?” Charlie7 challenged. This wasn’t a bone he was willing to let go now that he had his teeth in it. And robots having a hold of bones was just what this was about.

“If Zeus isn’t a human, who is he?” Eve asked.

Charlie7 grinned, showing off stainless steel teeth. “That’s a wonderful question, now, isn’t it?”

“Technically, you didn’t answer her question,” Phoebe pointed out.

There were times when it was a simple matter to set Eve above her sisters. But she was older by two years, and they hadn’t been idle years under Evelyn11’s brutal educational program. Phoebe held all the same potential but often chose different outlets to express it. Presented with a rhetorical knot, she cut right through it.

“I have my theories,” Charlie7 said. “But my two leading candidates are Charlie24 and Charlie25.”

Phoebe bolted upright, spilling her coffee across the table. “No way! Plato killed Charlie24; that was his Creator. And they found Charlie25 and Evelyn11 dead together in Kanto.”

Eve had reacted to the flood of coffee simply by lifting her cup out of the path and turning sideways in her seat to avoid the caffeinated waterfall. “Plato thinks he killed Charlie24,” Eve said. “But I thought I killed Evelyn11 the first time. Maybe both are still alive. Charlie25 could have downloaded himself. Or Charlie24 could have hidden away in Zeus’s body all along.”

Then again, there were reasons Eve was ahead of her sisters in the eyes of all the robots.

“Yes,” Charlie7 confirmed. “That’s my thinking.”

“What makes you suspect those two and not, like, another Evelyn11?” Phoebe asked.

Charlie7 shrugged. “It takes a Charlie to know one.”

“So what do we do about this?” Eve asked. “Do you have actionable evidence that’ll pass muster with the Investigative Ethics Committee?”

Charlie7 brushed aside that notion. “Who cares about those stuffy lawyers? They’re as close as we come in this world to the old judicial system. Innocence and guilt are secondary to them. Connect the right dots, an innocent robot gets exiled off world or a guilty one gets to live out his life in a stolen chassis.”

“Answer the other question please,” Eve grumbled.

“Don’t mind her,” Phoebe said. “She doesn’t drink enough wine for how much she had last night.”

Charlie7 would have liked to remember a hangover. But Charles Truman had been deathly afraid of losing cognitive function, even voluntarily and in short bursts. For all that he could usually hear of his own humanity in Eve and the others, this was one sensation that was truly alien to him.

“I have a plan,” Charlie7 said. He had two plans, in fact, but compartmentalized knowledge was one of his specialties. “I’m going to need one of you to volunteer for a secret mission.”

Eve focused her eyes on Charlie with visible effort. Phoebe’s lit with excitement.

“Here’s what I’m going to need you to do…”

Chapter Fifty

Zeus’s house was under renovation already. What had started out as an unassuming cottage in what had once been Dublin was being upgraded in every respect. In a week’s time, it would be a palatial home, befitting someone of his station.

Not that Chairman of the Human Welfare Committee was anything worthy of medals and marching bands. In the grand scheme, it was a mere advisory panel on the treatment of pre-upload bodies.

It might take years or even decades to hem in the expectations of the new human contingent and allow for the raising of docile, dumb creatures who gave their animalistic lives to those more worthy. All it took was divorcing the potential of humanity from the flesh. Evelyn11 had tried and failed to make that separation, and it had resulted in a series of endearingly robotic young women.

But mass-produced, adjusted to user specification, and unaware of their existence, human bodies would be nothing like the Eves.

Zeus kicked his feet up on his office desk. The symphony of construction played all around him as automatons added walls and poured foundations. With idle time on his hands, he took a moment to study those hands.

So human. So lifelike. If only he’d been able to wait and make the transition to a fully organic body. There were experiences he wished to relive and ones he wished to improve upon from his biological days.

His memories of Charles Truman’s life were spotty and occasionally intermixed with flashes of Jason Sanborn or, more rarely, Dale Chalmers. But as best he could recall, Dr. Truman had been a fiery, driven man with time for occasional passion but never anything so all-consuming as love.

In his entire existence, that was Charlie25’s greatest regret. He had passed beyond love’s fierce passion into the cold void of synthesized robotic emotion. Soon, he would have a chance to go back.

This body wasn’t perfect, but it gave tantalizing hints of what was to come. Old sensations triggered reflexive emotional responses. How much deeper would those go once he had the neurochemistry to match? He hated admitting to anyone how much he longed for more.

“Not soon enough,” he muttered to the ceiling.

What could he do, though? Plans were crawling along behind the scenes. The upload technology, carefully rolled out to receptive candidates, would seed and undermine the nascent human society. Robots would replace natural human psyches, and their experience and wisdom would overwhelm the naive and ignorant young humans.

Just like he’d outmaneuvered Eve.

For all her intellect, Eve was indeed ignorant. Given a robotic lifetime, she’d learn every trick and understand every nuance of a world run by committee. Until then, she was a rag doll in a dog’s jaw.

Zeus itched for action. Even without the neurobiology to back it up, this body of his yearned for motion. The joints stiffened. The cardiovascular system grew lazy.

Hopping to his feet, Zeus began composing an edict.

It wasn’t physical action—pacing would have to do for now—but it was some tangible step toward becoming fully human.

Per Chairman Zeus of the Human Welfare Committee:

As recent events have shown, the Human Protection Agency (HPA) has proven to be ineffective at its chartered task. Had it merely been unsuccessful, its continued sanction by this committee could be justified as a useful allocation of otherwise non-functional assets, at worst in a prophylactic sense. Its members were a retiree and two humans, none of whom engaged in productive activity beforehand. However, with one agent incarcerated and myself now in a supervisory capacity, it is time to reevaluate.

The HPA has, through a combination of negligence, poor communication, and lack of training, become a hazard in its own right. It is my intention to engage in joint meetings with the Privacy and Surveillance Oversight Committee and the Investigative Ethics Committee to formulate a new charter, with a strict emphasis on agent selection and training.

Until such time as a new charter is ratified and a new crop of agents is ready for fieldwork, I regret that I must halt all operations of the HPA. Open investigations will be suspended and no new ones begun. Agents of the HPA, if not otherwise occupied by outside commitment, are free to pursue other opportunities.

The Human Welfare Committee will not, as it has in the past, retroactively condone the actions of rogue individuals who claim to act with human welfare in mind but without consulting with the committee before taking action.

Let this be the first step in the safer, more cooperative existence between humans and robots.

Zeus took a deep breath, quickly reviewed what he’d written, and sent it off to the news feeds as an official press release.

Strolling over to his office window, he watched a crane hoist a structural steel beam overhead. It disappeared from view outside, and seconds later the floor shook gently as it settled into place.

“Progress,” he said softly to himself. “The cream will always rise.”

How could a robot not have every advantage over a human?

Still, he felt cooped up. There was little for Zeus to do and everything he could do.

A message notification popped up. There had been several within seconds of his news item going out on the feeds, but nothing he’d bothered with. This one was different.

It was from Phoebe:

Hi Zeus!

Congratulations on your promotion! I know Eve’s upset right now, but I think she’s going to be SO MUCH LESS STRESSED once she realizes that the whole fate of humanity doesn’t rest in her hands! THANK YOU!!! Eve’s cortisol levels have been WAY down since yesterday!

Anyhoo, I was hoping that maybe we could celebrate?! You’ve always been traveling so much, and there aren’t TONS of humans, you know, so I was hoping that this would be a good time for social engagement between two healthy homo sapiens!

I was thinking a beach, some wine, a picnic, music, maybe a sport game! Oh, and some voluntary mutual operant conditioning!!!

Let me know soon!!!!!

Phoebe

There was an image attached to the message. It was a chemical diagram of a dopamine molecule—digitally modified to look like a smiley face.

Phoebe was, without a doubt, the most outgoing of the Madison Maxwell-Chang clones. Eve was more stoic and cerebral, seeking approval from robots. But Phoebe wanted approval from her fellow humans—and apparently Zeus in particular. Her vague hints of attraction had been amusingly misplaced in that regard.

But why not?

Overplaying his hand with the Human Welfare Committee would only arouse suspicion. Shutting down the HPA for an inquiry and re-chartering was enough work for a week. Spending time with Phoebe would allay suspicions that he had motives beyond the well-being of his fellow humans.

“Acceptable,” Zeus sent back. “Designate a time and location.”

Chapter Fifty-One

Phoebe had never worn a bikini before. It was similar to underwear in style but not as inconspicuous. According to all the archival research she could gather, its main purpose was to subdue the higher cognitive functions of male humans while still being suitable for playing in the water.

Monaco had been a popular beach during the Human Era. The narrow strip of white sand along the waterline wasn’t natural but had been restored and maintained by drone labor.

“I’m so glad you could come,” Phoebe gushed through a toothy grin as Zeus stepped out of his skyroamer. She was holding a cooler more than a meter long in both hands, body tilted back to offset the weight.

Zeus stepped down to the concrete landing pad as Phoebe shuffled toward the beach lugging twenty-five kilos of supplies for their outing. She was a little disappointed that he hadn’t dressed for the occasion. That was OK though; she’d taken the precaution of entering his measurements into her Cloth-o-Matic and printing him a pair of swimming trunks.

“So, Monaco, huh?” he said noncommittally as he fell into step beside her. Zeus was quite dapper in his business suit. It hung off him like he didn’t care whether it looked good not—that was the suit’s job. He stuffed his hands in his pants pockets and gawked at the scenery as they walked.

“Yup,” Phoebe said, starting to feel the strain of carrying so much gear. Fortunately, it wasn’t a long walk to the sand. “I wanted someplace fancy and exclusive.”

Zeus chuckled. “Well, 33.3 percent of the human population is here. How exclusive can it be?”

Phoebe grinned at the mathematical joke. It was hard to believe that a robotic brain lurked behind those pretty eyes of his.

The day was sunny and warm, with a salty breeze the caressed the overabundance of Phoebe’s exposed skin. The idea of all that exposed skin reminded Phoebe of something.

“I brought along some UV-reflective skin lotions to prevent squamous cell carcinomas,” Phoebe said.

Zeus nodded absently, staring out at the waves that were visible from the walking trail down to the beach. “Good idea. Oncology hasn’t even reached pre-invasion sophistication yet.”

Phoebe shuddered, hoping it would look like the warm breeze might have tickled her skin. Just thinking that Zeus was one of those super-old robots was enough to make her alter her plans for procreating with him one day. He wasn’t talking about subjects he’d happened to research, but memories of those extinct humans from the First Human Era.

Still, for the day, she was going to forget all that and pretend she still intended to create DNA-hybrid offspring with half his genome and half hers. With a little creative solipsism, it might even be fun.

When they reached the sand, things went from heavy to heavy-and-awkward. Sand worked its way between Phoebe’s sandal and her foot, abrasive against the soles of her feet. The footing sank beneath her every step.

Zeus simply slipped off his wingtips and socks and left them at the last step of the path before the sand began.

“We going anywhere in particular?” Zeus asked, filling his lungs with a breath of sea air.

“Somewhere just above the high tide line,” Phoebe reasoned. That way they wouldn’t have far to the water and could remain with a single campsite the entirety of their stay.

When they reached an appropriate location, Phoebe set their supplies down with a grunt. It thudded into the sand with a rattle of protofabbed silverware and a clatter of wine bottles.

“That sounded heavy,” Zeus observed.

“It was,” Phoebe confirmed. “But I’ve been keeping up with my strength training even though I’m not obligated.”

Popping the lid, Phoebe unpacked the first of their supplies. Though little of what she’d brought needed to be kept cold, it was easier to just pack it all together rather than build compartments inside the cooler. Thus, the beach towel was chilled when Phoebe unfurled it to lay across the warm sand, counting on solar radiation to bring it to equilibrium.

Three square meters of pink-and-blue striped terrycloth became their base of operations. As Phoebe began unpacking the rest, Zeus came to look over her shoulder.

“What have you got in there?” he asked incredulously.

“Six types of handheld fruit, cheese, crackers, two bottles of local wine, the aforementioned UV-reflective skin lotion, a portable music device, a tiny plastic shovel and molds for making castle-reminiscent shapes out of sand, a manually inflatable ball, a Bernoulli-effect disk, two kites, and—in case we decide to stay until dark—a little firewood and an igniter.”

“It’s called a Frisbee,” Zeus said, picking up the Bernoulli-effect disk and twirling it atop one finger.

“OK,” Phoebe said, brightening at the prospect. “Let’s start with that! Oh, wait. Anti-carcinoma protection should probably take priority.”

“You think they wouldn’t cure cancer the instant one of you girls showed signs of aberrant cell division?”

Phoebe rolled her eyes and thrust a tube of lotion into Zeus’s hands. “Can you quit trying to find reasons not to and just rub this on my back?”

Between the two of them, they slathered Phoebe head to toe, reducing her risk of developing epidermal cancer by a factor of nearly one hundred. Then she turned to Zeus and looked him up and down.

“That’s no way to have fun at the beach,” she told him bluntly.

“I didn’t bring a change of clothes,” Zeus said with a shrug. “I’ll be fine.”

With a sly smile, Eve dug to the bottom of the cooler and produced a pair of black-and-red striped swim shorts.

“Those… look a little tight,” Zeus observed.

Phoebe was already behind him, helping Zeus remove the jacket to his suit. “They’re exactly your size. Part of the fun of this endeavor is seeing a little more of each other. I’m already dressed the part. It’s only fair for you to play along.”

Zeus didn’t argue. He changed into the shorts while Phoebe turned away—and peeked. He even dutifully submitted to having UV-reflective lotion applied to the parts of his skin he couldn’t reach.

“Do you have to leave the computer on?” Phoebe asked, smearing white cream right up to the belt that held the processor against his lower back. “This is a day to get away from all the committee stuff and just be human.”

Zeus shook his head. “I should keep connected. Just in case. Besides, it won’t interfere with us having a—”

Phoebe cut off his next words with a kiss. She hadn’t known what to expect, but his lips were soft and warm, wet and yielding. As she continued to caress his lips with hers, she ran a hand along the back of Zeus’s head, pulling him close until his body was pressed against hers.

The touch of so much skin was electrifying—better than ice cream. But as Phoebe’s hands wandered, they bumped into a fiber data cable and the belt for the processor.

She broke away with a gasp. It had taken an act of willpower to escape him, but she’d made her point. “Still think they aren’t in the way?”

Zeus didn’t take his eyes from her, fixing Phoebe with a look that toed the line between suspicion and wondering what sort of alien creature had just attacked him. Phoebe admitted that she hadn’t been sure how much physiological response she could expect, not knowing the functionality of his crystalline brain’s interface to his biological systems. Thanks to the tight swim shorts, she knew that there was enough.

Once Zeus was removed from his external computer, the two of them played a clumsy game of catch with the Bernoulli-effect disk, waded in the Mediterranean Sea until they were waist deep, and headed back to their beach blanket for a snack.

The blanket had warmed, and they lay down side by side with a bottle of wine each, munching on cheese and apples as the sun lazed past overhead.

“Be right back,” Zeus said, heading for the water.

Given the amount of wine he’d consumed, Phoebe knew just what he meant. Due to diffusion, urinating in the sea barely constituted an incidence of water pollution.

While Zeus was preoccupied, Phoebe burst into action.

Digging to the bottom of the cooler, she opened the secret compartment in the bottom. Tucked inside was a multi-tool for opening a computer processor, and a tiny chip that would capture and transmit data on a secure frequency.

Phoebe was engrossed in the circuitry of Zeus’s portable computer. She’d looked up the schematics just this morning, so it was all fresh in her mind. This was no different from one of Evelyn11’s puzzles. All she needed to do was micro-solder the leads to the—

A hand clamped down on Phoebe’s shoulder.

“What are you doing?” Zeus demanded.

Phoebe shrieked and dropped the computer into the cooler. Diving to the ground and rolling away, she popped up to her feet in a crouch. “Get away!”

“I asked you a question,” Zeus growled, stalking forward with an air of menace. “What were you doing to my computer?”

“You tricked them,” Phoebe said, running with the first lie that came to mind. “You stole Eve’s job. That was all she wanted to do, and you took it away from her.”

Zeus picked up the computer and examined the work Phoebe had been performing. “What’s this? A sniffer? You were bugging my computer?”

“I figured you must have something in there that would show everyone that Eve was the right one to be committee chairman,” Phoebe said, not taking her eyes from Zeus.

“So this—all of it—was just a ruse to get my guard down?”

Phoebe considered this one carefully before answering. “Well, there is still the limited gene pool issue, and I think it’s probably an important part of the human experience to become a mother someday. But I was really trying to have my cake and get Eve’s back, too.”

“We’re done here,” Zeus said. “And this is getting reported to every ethics committee I can contact.” He hefted the computer. It was evidence of Phoebe’s tampering.

This was bad. This was really bad. Eve and Charlie7 had been counting on her, and now Phoebe was going to go into a cell, just like Plato.

“No!” she shouted.

Zeus was larger and heavier than her, but he hadn’t grown up training every day. He hadn’t discovered that his daily fitness routine had included ancient combat lessons disguised as balance and breath-control exercises.

When Zeus headed for the skyroamers, computer in hand, Phoebe stepped in front to block him.

“Get out of my way,” he snarled. But instead of trying to force his way past, he attempted to dodge around Phoebe.

Being lighter on her feet, Phoebe had no trouble keeping in front of Zeus. She had no plan. This was all instinct and reflex. She needed to think.

“If you report me, I’ll tell them you admitted your guilt to me in an unguarded moment. You’ll have to submit your computer for scanning to prove you didn’t.”

“No one would take that as evidence,” Zeus said. “The word of a jealous woman’s sister? Inadmissible without evidence to back it up. The burden of proof would be on you.”

Zeus was flushed. The muscles in his face were contorted; tendons in his neck strained.

“You’ll be bad at the job anyway,” Phoebe taunted. “Eve’s ten times smarter than you.” She danced in front of another of Zeus’s attempts to get past her.

“Get. Out. Of. My. WAY!” Zeus shouted and took a backhanded swing to knock Phoebe aside.

What was he thinking?

Zeus’s weight wasn’t balanced. He had no leverage on the strike. The move was telegraphed—which Phoebe took to mean ‘sent via an ancient and inefficient delivery method.’

As Phoebe took control of the wrist attached to the hand Zeus tried to slap her with, she twisted and pulled. Zeus over balanced and fell to the sand face first.

Straddling him from above, Phoebe deftly plucked the computer from Zeus’s grasp as he fought to breathe through a mouthful of sand. Darting away before the robot in human guise could get to his feet, Phoebe raced toward the sea and, with both hands, flung the computer as far as it would go.

The noise of plaintive distress Zeus emitted upon seeing half his brain go flying into salt water almost made Phoebe feel sorry for him. “What did you do?” he pleaded, not even looking at Phoebe but charging into the water to retrieve it.

Phoebe took the opportunity to bolt for her skyroamer, leaving the cooler and its contents behind.

Chapter Fifty-Two

With Zeus distracted, Eve took the opportunity to fly out and intercept the hovership. It was drifting over the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest land. As her skyroamer drew near, Eve marveled at the expenditure of resources.

“It used to be a roving school to teach us about the world.”

While it had also held Plato captive, that had been a secondary function. Now it was a prison and nothing more—at least as best Eve knew.

It was growing harder and harder to trust the view of Earth from news feeds and Social postings. Too much went on in secret. Lies stacked upon lies until they took on a truth their own through weight of repetition. Where Arthur19 and his cohorts saw a bastion of freedom defending the privacy of robots worldwide and beyond, Eve increasingly saw a cesspit of deception, betrayal, and hidden agendas.

One of the greatest traitors and liars was Eve’s target. Her skyroamer was welcomed into the hangar, and Brent184 was there to meet her.

“You can’t see him,” Brent184 told her, his mild rebuke incongruous with the massive and powerful Version 70.2 chassis he sported. “Only members of the Investigative Ethics Committee are allowed to see him, or those who have received authorization from either Arthur19 or Joshua10.”

Eve nodded to acknowledge the restriction. But she wasn’t here to see Plato. “Take me to Gemini.”

Brent184 cocked his head but said nothing about her apparent disinterest in seeing Plato. “Right this way.”

Eve could have found the way blindfolded. But this wasn’t about her getting lost. Brent184 was there to make sure she didn’t get “lost” and end up in Plato’s cell instead.

There was a cautionary tale in that perception. Eve had played too loose with rules since her escape from Evelyn11’s lab. Charlie7’s influence was partly to blame, learning from him that rules could be circumvented, ignored, or bent depending on need and circumstance. Had Jennifer81 rescued Eve, her worldview might have looked starkly different.

But Jennifer81 wasn’t the sort who rescued anyone.

Plato and Charlie7 were heroes because they accepted the risks of their actions and did what needed to be done. Plato was just suffering the consequences of his latest action. There would be time to help him later.

Brent184 was silent during the walk to Gemini’s cell. What must have been going on in the robot’s mind? Despite being a simple jailer at present, his component personalities held four doctorates. Surely, he had a theory. Did he expect Eve to gather help to storm Plato’s cell? Was Gemini her assault team?

Eve shook her head slightly at the notion.

At the door to Gemini’s cell, Eve forced her hands to unclasp. She took deep breaths to steady her heartbeat. “I have a favor to ask,” Eve stated.

Brent184 shrugged. “Sure. You can ask. Can’t promise anything.”

“Per Privacy and Surveillance Oversight Committee regulation 23.6.12.1, I would exercise my right to an unrecorded, unobserved meeting with prisoner Gemini.”

Brent184 scowled. “What have you got cooked up?”

Eve fixed him with an insouciant grin. “None of your concern.”

“You’ll have to—”

But Eve was already removing her data-display goggles, unplugging the fiber cables, and handing them to Brent184 for safekeeping. She did likewise with the computer processor. Her harness of wire management straps and the interface gloves she kept on; there was no capacity for recording or transmitting anywhere on her person.

Except for her mind.

Human memories would be inadmissible in committee proceedings, but Eve was only concerned with the truth. Proof would be forthcoming at a later date. For now, Gemini had answers that Eve wanted.

“Oh, it’s you again,” Gemini said as soon as the door opened. “Gone native, have you?”

Eve stepped into the cell, and the door closed behind her. She glanced up at the various cameras that ought to all have been turned off the instant the door opened.

“This is a private meeting per Privacy and Surveillance Oversight Committee regulation 23.6.12.1,” Eve told her.

Gemini snorted a chuckle. “I haven’t got a computer in my head any longer. What’s that gibberish mean?”

“It means I’m entitled to unsupervised visitation of a prisoner for personal reasons, so long as no external recording is made.”

“Daft regulation,” Gemini commented. “Who’d submit to having their internal computer confiscated?”

“Me,” Eve stated simply, turning and raising the back of her shirt to show the imprint of the belt she habitually wore there.

“So, come to chat about the weather, or maybe have a go at chess?” Gemini asked. The board hadn’t moved since her last visit. “I suppose you wouldn’t mind telling me precisely how there is checkmate in seven moves.”

“There isn’t,” Eve replied with a hollow feeling in her gut. “I was being mean.”

Gemini laughed aloud. “I knew it! I argued with myself for days. ‘Oh, not Eve. She doesn’t have it in her.’ But you did!”

“Then you’ll help me?” Eve asked with a kindling spark of hope in her heart.

“Bugger off,” Gemini thundered. “I spent days staring at that board trying to work out the moves. You’re as bad as any of them—of us. You’re not some charity case in need of help. Figure it out with that overripe cauliflower between your ears. You’re smarter than I am, now. Pavlov only knows what’s become of my mind, thanks to this inferior gray matter it’s stuffed within.”

“It’s not a matter of who’s smarter,” Eve said cautiously. Gemini was growing increasingly unstable in isolation. She wondered, not for the first time, if that was the intent of this punishment. Madness seemed a crueler fate than any physical injury.

Gemini stood and spun away, waving a dismissive arm. “Out with it, then. What’s brought you here to the pitiful robot exiled from her own mind?”

“Zeus.”

“Pardon?”

“Don’t they show you news feeds in here?” Eve asked. Plato had reported that the robots had done little else but encourage him to express himself artistically and watch the news feeds.

“I haven’t seen a thing in here except the unattainable view of the countryside. If I didn’t know for a fact that I lacked the ability to break this glass, I’d have jumped out long ago.”

Eve didn’t know what to say to that. Contemplating suicide seemed so… final. It wasn’t a solution so much as losing hope that there would ever be an improvement over an intolerable situation.

She chose to try to ignore Gemini’s self-destructive confession.

“Zeus was one of the human test subjects found beneath Kanto,” Eve explained. “Like Gemini was before you became her.”

Gemini ran the backs of her hands down her side and flicked them away with a flourish. “Oh and how lucky a day that was for me.”

“He’s also a robot.”

Gemini gave a disdainful sniff. “Oh, that one. The boy with the brain made by Tiffany’s.”

Eve twitched her gloved fingers to look up the obscure reference before remembering the data cables dangled loose down her back.

“He’s not a human with a robotic brain. He’s a robot hiding in a human with a robotic brain.”

“Oh?” Gemini asked. Her eyes narrowed with the first sign of interest since Eve had arrived. “Do tell.”

Eve narrowed her eyes in their best threatening scowl, peering from beneath knitted brows. “You didn’t know anything about that, did you?”

“Charlie25 kept me a virtual prisoner,” Gemini replied. “What went on down there was outside my purview.”

“Do you think it’s possible that Plato didn’t kill Charlie24?” Eve pressed. “Do you think it might have been Charlie24 in that body all along?”

“You do prefer the harder puzzles, don’t you?” Gemini responded. “My little Eve, never shying from a challenge. How would you ever go about proving it if he was?”

“We think it could also have been Charlie25. After he wiped Evelyn11, he—”

“Excuse me?” Gemini snapped. “He what?” The look on her face stole away Eve’s anger. There was heartbreak in that voice. Eve had seen the expression on the faces of actresses but had never witnessed it in real life.

“I’m sorry,” Eve said quietly. “No one told you. I didn’t realize.”

“No one tells me anything,” Gemini griped. She hastily wiped the corner of her eye.

Eve allowed Gemini a moment to collect her thoughts. This was a chess game on a larger scale. There was time to pause between moves of the pieces. Zeus wasn’t going anywhere in the next few moments.

When Gemini had fought back a few tears and steadied her voice, Eve explained the situation. She laid out the discovery of the Plato clones below Charlie25’s section of Kanto, the discovery of the inert chassis of Charlie25 and Evelyn11, and the subsequent reorganization of the Human Committee into the Human Welfare Committee.

“They made you chairwoman and you lost the position already? Feminism, raised from extinction only to die in childbirth at the dusk of the thirty-first century.” Gemini shook her head.

“It was Zeus,” Eve insisted. “It’s his plot to discredit us. But in order to stop him, I need to understand who he was as a robot.”

“Charlie25 killed me, you say?” Gemini asked.

Eve nodded.

“Well, think of it from his perspective. He’s got one dead robot on his hands and wants to fake his own death. What better way than to upload to a ready-made vessel in his own private wine cellar of brains? Why would he self-terminate without so much as trying?”

“Shame?” Eve ventured.

Gemini threw back her head. “Ha! There’s something you may not have run across in your brief lifetime, a bit of trivia that might aid your unraveling of this mystery. There isn’t a gram of shame, self-doubt, or regret in any of the Charlies. And if everyone believes that Charlie25 was the first of them to self-terminate, they’re fools.”

“Wait,” Eve said. “I thought self-termination was an epidemic at one point?”

“That’s why we removed Charlie7 as mixer. He experimented. He guessed. At least Charlie13 made a science of the process. Plenty of Charlie7’s creations self-terminated. It was bad for a while. But in all that time, not a single Charlie—whether they were mixed by ‘7 or ’13—has ever self-terminated. It’s just not in them. Charles Truman was a bit of a cocksure madman in life, and the robots that took his personality inherited all of it.”

“So…”

“I’d bet my life that it’s Charlie25 walking around in that crystal-brained corpse.”

“Thank you,” Eve said and turned for the door.

“One thing,” Gemini called after her. Eve paused. “If I’m proven right, please tell them I helped.”

Eve heard the plea in that simple request. Tell them I helped, and ask them to let me out of here. The latter half went unspoken, but Eve heard it clearly.

“I’ll be sure to mention it,” Eve assured her. She pounded on the door, and Brent184 let her out.

As soon as Eve had reconnected her technology, she encrypted a file using a protocol Charlie7 had just created for the occasion. She shot the message through the nebulous void of digital space, telling Charlie7 who Zeus really was.

Chapter Fifty-Three

Lunch was ice cream. Of late, lots of meals were becoming ice cream. But since modern science held the promise of engineered food supplements and she had a metabolism like a fusion reactor, Phoebe erred on the side of eating what she pleased. Olivia was merely collateral damage in her dietary assault.

“So, how was it?” Olivia asked just before shoveling a spoonful of raspberry ice cream into her mouth.

Phoebe sat at the table with her legs crossed on the seat, the fabric of her skirt spilling over the edge. Hints of her multicolored bikini showed through the white of her blouse; she hadn’t taken time to change, instead throwing clothes on over the swimwear, deciding it was close enough to her undergarments for now.

“Scary,” Phoebe reported. “He was right there. I mean SO there. My body started producing excesses of multiple neurochemicals all at once. I was hardly in control of my own actions.” Her spoon jittered on its way to her mouth.

Olivia licked her spoon clean. “Did you ever figure out who Zeus really is?”

“No,” Phoebe said with a sigh. “But I threw his brain into the sea, which has to count for something.”

“I haven’t heard anything back from Eve,” Olivia stated. She headed to the mixing bowl to begin the refilling process for the ice cream machine. “You?”

“Nope,” Phoebe said. “I’m not sure how they expected me to install that snooping device in the time it takes a male to urinate.”

“Was that officially part of the plan?”

Phoebe scowled. Olivia was supposed to be listening, not investigating. “No. But it was implied when Charlie7 said to find time away from Zeus with the computer. When did he expect me to get Zeus and the computer away from one another—and me at the same time?”

“You could have waited until nightfall and slept on the beach,” Olivia suggested.

“Listen, I didn’t hear you volunteering to go be a spy.”

Olivia took a huge spoonful of ice cream and spoke with her mouth full. “Sounds like I would have been a better one.”

Phoebe looked from Olivia to herself and back again. “Please… an extra year does wonders for this body. Why would Zeus have gone with you?”

“I’d have taken him somewhere more exciting than a beach,” Olivia countered. “Like the Grand Canyon or the Crystal Grottos.”

Clenching her jaw, Phoebe explained some basic interpersonal facts to her sister. “Breathtaking wonders of nature aren’t romantic. A couple’s attention should be primarily focused on one another.”

“Not when you’re trying to reprogram a computer he keeps plugged in twenty-four hours a day.”

“Well, my plan got him to take it off.”

“And the lack of a follow-up plan got you caught.”

“I was working on a short timeline. No one could have installed it that fast.”

“I bet Eve could have.”

“I’m not Eve!”

Technically, for a good portion of their life, both of them had been Eve. It was odd even denying the name. But it felt good having someone to argue with. Without robotic nannies around, they could yell and scream at one another to their heart’s content without someone stepping in to mediate, separate, and punish.

Phoebe pulled the bowl of ice cream toward herself and dug a spoon into it.

“Lucky for us,” Olivia said. “Wouldn’t want to be her these days.”

Phoebe let out a deep breath filled with thanks toward whatever deities had watched over her ancestors. “Here’s to Eve. May she never stick us with dealing with the robots’ committees.”

The two girls raised spoons heaped with ice cream and clinked them together in a toast.

Chapter Fifty-Four

Hunched over an electronics workbench, Zeus peered into his own brain. Well, half of his brain, anyway. The external computer made him whole, robotic, even special. He had the best of both worlds, with only the occasional lapse related to biological needs to hold him back from perfection.

Physical strength, dexterity, durability, those were the savage virtues of mankind’s first reign over Earth. Creativity, calculation, innovation, these were the marks of greatness of the dawning Second Human Age. What the robotic age lacked in empathy, love, and hedonistic pleasure, they would reclaim.

Phoebe had acted rashly, like the teenage girl she was. Zeus should have known better than to take her offered charms at face value. Even if she meant half of them, the other half had been an attempt to undercut his base of power within the Human Welfare Committee.

His external processor’s seawater bath had been mercifully brief. Even without access to a built-in ballistic calculator—and, frankly, the eyes to make proper use of one—he had watched carefully where the device had splashed into the Mediterranean Sea.

Flying back to Dublin had been a surreal experience. He’d hardly gone without an active data port since being “rescued” from Kanto. While he still had access to the skyroamer’s onboard computer, using it manually was more adventure than he had been up for. Instead, Zeus had used the time for reflection.

As he carefully cleaned and repaired the processor, he found his thoughts drifting back to the more pleasant start to his day.

“Biologically speaking, one of the Madison Maxwell-Chang clones would be ideal,” he mused. He reclined as a diagnostic started. “Eve isn’t an option, of course. Plato would twist my head off and use my skull for a bowling ball. Phoebe… she’s just so wild. Would I want a lifetime of that sort of energy to keep up with?”

The younger girls grew older day by day—even Eve was still young for his tastes. Patience and population statistics on a micro scale seemed to imply that one of them would eventually prove to be an ideal match.

A stickier idea was another uploaded robot. But who? There was so much baggage shared among the living robots of Earth. Even those who were merely casual acquaintances might have shared decades together in total over the centuries.

Zeus snorted as an amusing idea popped into his head. “Maybe Charlie13 could start a dating service. Freshly uploaded mixes, personality to taste.”

Of course, it wouldn’t be that easy. The trauma of a newly mixed robot was anything but romantic. All of the Twenty-Seven awoke with the last memory of theirs being of lying on Charles Truman’s scanning bed. To suddenly awaken a millennium later in an artificial body took time to adjust to.

For everyone except a Charlie. Whatever the reason, a new Charlie always took the news in stride with a bemused and adventurous optimism, almost smug at seeing his life’s work validated.

But Zeus preferred to stick to heterosexual arrangements, and even if he didn’t, he certainly would look farther afield than his own archetype. A Nora would be the obvious choice. Staff records and hints shared among the other Charlies suggested that Charles Truman and Nora Maxwell-Granger had an affair all those years ago. Something biological clearly worked there.

Ideas and fanciful notions floated through Zeus’s mind. He blamed it on the disconnection from his computer. The crystalline matrix by itself replicated human thought too well.

What if he and one of the Noras used their own DNA samples? Charles Truman hadn’t been the world’s finest physical specimen; neither had Nora. But the bodies would be familiar, like a visit to an old college stomping ground.

They could adopt one of the younger Eves together, maybe even one that was still in fetal development at the moment. Madison had been Nora and Holly’s niece, daughter of Holly’s brother and Nora’s older sister. It would be like reassembling a family.

The computer lit with an alert. Its diagnostic was complete.

If he hadn’t been all alone, Zeus would have embarrassed himself in his haste to plug himself back in.

Data flowed.

Zeus’s consciousness expanded. No longer was he hemmed in by the walls of his own skull. He had access to a transmitter, receiver, and all the spare processing power he could hope for.

Checking around the world for status reports, he found that Gemini and Plato were both safely locked up; he took quick looks at the feeds within both of their cells to confirm. There were no reports of Eve in public life. One gossip outlet suggested that Charlie7 was at Kanto visiting ‘13.

“Let him,” Zeus muttered to the data floating in his brain. “Charlie13 doesn’t know anything. Maybe he’s looking for a job.”

With a chuckle, Zeus dismissed his search parameters. For the moment, none of the HPA or the Human Welfare Committee appeared to be working against him.

And other than Phoebe, and maybe Eve, there was no reason to expect them to. Sure, Zeus might have different policy ideas for the Human Welfare Committee, but he would make sure everything was on the up and up. He would be the model chairman to guide humanity into the Second Age.

And under his astute neglect, the human upload project would flourish. He and his colleagues would receive their well-earned humanity back. They would be the ones to benefit from the foothold humanity would gain.

“As many lifetimes as we wish. All the pleasures of the flesh. All the fruits of our ingenuity. Everything will be ours. Our own technological Eden.”

Browsing through committee correspondence and standard notifications of newsworthy events, Zeus stumbled across an invitation. There was a meeting being held to select the next chairman of the Upload Committee. As a committee chairman himself, Zeus had received a standard courtesy invitation to attend in a spectator capacity.

“I shouldn’t…” he muttered to himself. It was vanity to go just to see who’d be selected as his own successor. “Then again, I’m a chairman now, and the Upload Committee is a big deal. Whoever gets the position will become quite important. It would be politically useful to be there in person to voice my support.”

There was no notification in his interface—there never was, and for good reason—so Zeus checked his ultra-secure message center and discovered one from just over an hour ago.

REPORT IN

There was no identification. There never was. But Zeus knew without a doubt who had sent the message. Contained within was a code that was the key for their next encrypted conversation.

Zeus considered ignoring it. He was on the verge of establishing a new power base. Anything he said or did was public news, however minor. The last thing he needed was Dale2 trying to steer his skyroamer from the passenger’s seat.

With a snarl, Zeus entered the encryption code and bounced it off a relay station with the power to broadcast as far as Mars. “What?” he snapped.

“I hear you had a small interpersonal issue,” Dale2 remarked offhandedly.

It galled him that the blowhard could discover such information from Mars when everyone on Earth seemed oblivious to his leisure activities.

“Who’s spying for you? James63? Fred164? I don’t need an oversight committee for an afternoon off.”

“You’re in a delicate position. You might need someone to jump in and lend assistance. For example, dredging the Mediterranean for your better half.”

“If you existed, I’d report you to the Privacy Committee,” Zeus grumbled.

Through the connection, Dale2’s laughter echoed. “I’m Arthur19’s best customer. I’m as private as they come. You just keep those lessons in mind, Zeus. You’re a public man again. Nothing good ever came of being incautious as a public man.”

“I don’t need a lecture,” Zeus said.

“If you say so.”

The connection ended. Zeus wished he could reclaim the uplifted feeling of plugging back in after a long abstention. But if he needed something to feel good about, nothing having to do with Dale2 was liable to help.

Rearranging his clothing to conceal his computer safely beneath his clothes, Zeus headed for his skyroamer. He still had time to get to the Upload Committee meeting.

Zeus wanted to see who would be the next Charlie25.

Chapter Fifty-Five

It was hard for a committee hearing to feel like home. But in the upper reaches of Kanto, in a tower that offered a view of Tokyo Bay, there was a conference room that, for Zeus, was as much home as any committee stronghold on Earth.

The room was packed with dignitaries. While the Upload Committee members packed around the conference table, the outer reaches of the room were filled with committee chairs from across the spectrum of robotkind.

“Congratulations,” Holly9, head of the Automaton Committee, offered as Zeus passed by, shaking his hand briefly.

Elizabeth56 drew Zeus aside. “I’m sure you’ll do fine.” It was robots like her that made Zeus feel that his presence wouldn’t stand out beyond his biological body. She was head of the Experimental Biology Committee, which had nothing to do with upload. Like Zeus, Elizabeth56 was just there to witness a tiny slice of history.

Others made their introductions and offered well-wishes. A few made suggestions on policy. Most just went through the motions; Zeus knew because he’d gone through those motions enough times himself to recognize the blank expressions and cardboard words.

Charlie13. There he was. Seated right beside the vacant chairman’s seat, the Mixing Committee chairman was officially the senior member of the Upload Committee now as well. When the venerable old mixer caught Zeus looking, he offered a brief nod.

For Charlie13, that was as good as a handshake and a pep talk. Zeus had known that robot all his life. For long centuries, they had split the glutton’s share of Kanto—two pillars of robot society. Charlie13 was the midwife of 80 percent of the robot race. Charlie25 had been hospice nurse, undertaker, and spirit guide to the newly resurrected.

Zeus forced himself to look away. Those ancient, knowing eyes unnerved him. He was at a disadvantage so long as Charlie13 lived in an artificial body; Zeus’s biology had secrets it could betray. He wished he could share the miracle of humanity with his friend, but of all robots, he expected that Charlie13 would find no appeal in regaining human sensation.

“Hi, boss,” Charlie7 said smoothly as he slid into the seat beside Zeus at the room’s back row.

He would have sworn that Judy128 had been there the moment before. But that was Charlie7, always wedging himself into whatever spot he liked.

“I didn’t expect to find you here,” Zeus observed. “I thought the guest list was committee chairmen.”

Charlie7’s face grew an enigmatic smile. “Oh, you know me. I pulled a string or two, called in a favor. Standard stuff. I even hinted that maybe I might have a name to throw in for nomination.”

Zeus’s face went slack. No. Not him. Anyone but him. “You’re not considering a candidacy, are you?”

“Maybe,” Charlie7 replied. “After all, it’s a technology position. Charlie13 proved he had a better grasp of mixing than I did. I’m man enough to admit that. But Charlie25 was a glorified car salesman. Pick a new crystal and chassis, and get ‘em on the table.”

“That’s a crude treatment of robots who go to Kanto for a very personal procedure,” Zeus said cautiously. What did he care if Charlie7 put his name forth? Plenty of robots mistrusted him enough that he’d never pass the vote.

Secretly, Zeus had hoped that one of Dale2’s people would get the position. It would sting seeing himself replaced on two fronts, but it would speed up the adoption of human upload technology as key robots were replaced on the upload table instead of merely transferring to a new body.

“The real key to events like this,” Charlie7 said, leaning in conspiratorially. “Is that they are high-leverage points for favor-trading. Get someone a committee chairmanship and they owe you. Get someone voted down, and others will see the price of crossing you. Try to make sure you’re on the side that carries the day, even if you had to manufacture support after the fact. Even just putting forward the right name can gain you a great deal of political currency.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” Zeus said stiffly. He wasn’t comfortable with Charlie7 this close. The hearing was to have been a bit of light fun, watching the process of choosing Charlie25’s successor. With a political animal like Charlie7 next to him, even Zeus might learn something. But he wasn’t sure he’d like what he learned.

Charlie13 rose, and the scattered conversations around the room hushed—mostly to be carried on via transmitted data, Zeus knew from experience. “Welcome everyone. Let us get right to business. The Upload Committee has been without a chairman and without an uploader for too long. Since Charlie25’s termination, I’ve personally performed four emergency uploads, but the non-emergency caseload is backing up. Without further ado, I’d like to open the floor to debate candidates for the position.”

Arthur19 rose from his position in the gallery. There was no rule against nominations coming from the guests. “Jason90,” he said brusquely. “Overdue. He understands the limits of crystal technology better than anyone.”

There was a grumbling of conversation around the room and a brief debate among the committee membership. Then Charlie13 called for other nominations.

Robots around the room put forth names. Brent35 got a courtesy nomination for his dedicated work at Kanto, but no one took his candidacy seriously. Eddie130 got a vote of confidence, which Zeus appreciated since he was one of the conspirators, even though he’d given up his own cloning efforts after a few close calls at getting caught. Other, less luminary names were kicked around but didn’t gain much traction among the committee robots.

Charlie7 remained silent to the end.

Ever the showman, Zeus thought sourly. By his electoral math, and knowing the committee better than anyone, he predicted that at the moment, Jason90 was a slim favorite over Eddie130. Charlie7’s self-nomination would throw the voting into chaos. While the general populace held Charlie7 at arm’s length in a mixture of awe, reverence, and fear, he had friends on the Upload Committee, not the least of which was Charlie13. Something about having another Charlie7 in Kanto would appeal to the mixer.

“Any final nominees before we begin the voting?” Charlie13 asked.

Charlie7 rose on cue. “I have one.”

The eldest of the robot race waited as the murmurs of gossip rose and fell around him like a sine wave. The slick bastard seemed to enjoy playing the crowd.

“Well?” Charlie13 demanded. “Make your nomination. We haven’t got all day.”

“I’d like to put forward… Zeus.”

There were cries of outrage and disbelief, not the least of which came from Zeus himself as Charlie7 hauled him to his feet and tousled his hair.

“I understand that Zeus was invited as a courtesy,” Charlie13 stated in a tone that sounded tailored to be entered into official records. “But the qualification standards for the Human Welfare Committee are vastly different from what is required to chair the Upload Committee. What qualifications does he possess that make you think he’d be an appropriate candidate?”

Zeus was wondering the same thing. Charlie7 was known for political stunts. A committee hearing was his favorite stage for putting on a show. But this move seemed all shock with no substance; at best it was a tasteless joke.

“Oh, he’s perfectly qualified,” Charlie7 assured everyone, still clutching tight to Zeus’s arm. “After all, he’s held the position for over six hundred years.”

There were shouts of outrage from around the room, but Charlie7’s voice carried over them all. “He’s Charlie25. A simple scan comparison will show a minimal drift from his last upload log.”

“Order,” Charlie13 boomed. He slammed his borrowed chairman’s gavel. “Order.”

It wasn’t long before the room quieted enough that Zeus could make his protests heard. “He’s gone mad. And what he’s proposing is a violation of Privacy Committee and Human Welfare Committee guidelines—which pre-date my chairmanship, I might add. Charlie7 is just casting aspersions because of his fondness for the ousted Eve Fourteen. He wants her back in charge of the Human Welfare Committee, and this is his ploy to discredit me.”

Charlie7 chuckled. “Well, I’ll admit you don’t sound like Charlie25. But I think the scan will show otherwise. You can’t hide conveniently behind your own committee’s rules to get away with murder, human upload, and all the charges against Charlie25 for unethical uploading, treatment of human clones, and… Oh, my. Mr. Chairman, can I rescind my nomination? I think Charlie25 might have been an awful uploader, now that I think of it.”

“Let. Me. Go!” Zeus shouted. To his surprise, Charlie7 released his arm. He stumbled against Sandra76 of the Resource Logistics Committee. Breathing heavily, Zeus gathered himself and straightened his shirt. “Charlie7 is positing what sounds like a plausible scenario. But I was the victim in the lower levels of this very facility. I have no desire to take a second chairmanship. I think I shall find my lone committee sufficient to occupy my time and resources. I would like all of you as witnesses when I file my numerous grievances for Charlie7’s behavior here today.”

Shaking from a spike of adrenaline he’d accidentally triggered, Zeus began picking his way through the crowd.

Charlie13’s voice rose like a headsman’s axe. “Is the committee sufficiently satisfied that Zeus is Charlie25?”

“Aye,” came the unanimous chorus.

Zeus froze, stumbling over Ashley390, who caught and steadied him.

The conference room was silent.

Zeus looked in all directions. Every robotic eye was fixed on him in a gallery of contempt, perplexity, and in the case of Charlie7, amusement.

“What are you talking about?” Zeus asked. “Charlie7 himself said I sound nothing like Charlie25. What evidence could he possibly have fabricated behind my back?”

Charlie13 rose and circled slowly around the table. “It was me actually, old friend. You see, Charlie7 suspected your identity, but he lacked proof. He played back every interaction the two of you ever had, and I developed an algorithm. You see, I discovered that you were merely ruling out your first instinct of what to say. You broke Charlie25’s speech pattern, but established Zeus’s as a derivative of it.”

“That proves nothing,” Zeus countered, backing toward the door and sparing only quick glances away from the approaching Charlie13 to watch his footing.

“The proof was me broadcasting your every objection with 96 percent accuracy to the entire committee membership before you made them,” Charlie13 explained. “You see, I know the robotic mind. My algorithm would only have worked on Charlie25. And even then, only because he was my closest friend.”

Zeus didn’t know what to say. The evidence was, to the robots on the committee, as solid as steel. He’d have taken it as such had he been in their place.

“Checkmate,” Charlie7 called out merrily. “For the record, until we became suspicious of your identity, I did consider putting my own name up for nomination. But I think there’s still a lot of work for the Human Protection Agency to do.”

His next act wasn’t rational. It was a long shot. But Zeus was down to long shots if he had any hope of survival. If he could get to a skyroamer, he could flee. Maybe he could get to a data terminal with sufficient transfer rates that he could transmit himself somewhere for safekeeping and self-terminate this human body.

Zeus ran.

To his surprise, the robots between him and the conference room door didn’t try to stop him. Many, in fact, cleared a path as if fearful of getting involved.

Zeus made it to the door, then into the hall beyond. With his adversaries too stunned to follow, Zeus could almost smell his freedom.

Chapter Fifty-Six

The message came across Eve’s data goggles. It simply read, “Now.”

Eve keyed the door panel, and the hallway to the Kanto Conference Center slid open before her. The walls were adorned with video screens depicting the wonders that the factory had produced since its inception, from the earliest environmental cleanup drones to the latest robotic chassis and crystalline matrices. The hallway was a reminder to all who entered of the wonders that Kanto held.

But Eve wasn’t the only one in that hall. Zeus skidded to a halt at the sight of her. He had a wild, panicked look in his eyes, and sweat beaded across his forehead.

“Out of my way,” Zeus snarled.

“I heard you said something similar to Phoebe,” Eve countered. In fact, she’d heard a detailed accounting of Zeus’s attempt to assault her. That injustice wasn’t going overlooked as Eve stood her ground, glaring at Zeus through her data goggles. The lenses estimated Zeus’s body temperature and heart rate—both elevated—as well as measurements of his height, mass, and center of gravity.

It seemed like cheating.

Unplugging the data cables, Eve tossed the goggles over her shoulder.

“I didn’t plan to hurt Phoebe,” Zeus said between heaving breaths. “But if you try to stop me, I will hurt you.”

Zeus wasn’t Plato. He was a perfectly formed human, cut straight from a book on anatomy. Heavier than Eve by thirty kilos and with corded muscles fueled by testosterone, he was clearly the stronger of the two. He was also desperate, and no doubt in the throes of a spike of adrenaline.

Eve didn’t budge.

“I’m not letting you get away,” she promised.

All her lessons had taught her that the martial arts were best practiced in a state of calm. Right now, Eve’s face burned, and her heart thundered in her chest like a jackhammer. Her nails dug into the palms of her fingerless gloves.

Zeus didn’t take long to decide, he jogged forward with his fists up, clearly intent on making short work of Eve on his way out the door.

When Zeus pulled up short, it was obvious that he was aware of the dangers of overbalancing when throwing a punch. When that punch came, Eve made him aware of the dangers of punching someone faster and better trained.

Zeus stumbled back, coughing. His punch had been turned aside by a girl half his size, and he’d taken a quick blow to the throat from someone with shorter arms.

“How did you—?” he croaked.

But Eve wasn’t done with him. Before he could recover, Eve stepped in and took control of Zeus’s wrist. As he tried to pull away, still struggling for breath, she raised a foot and stomped down on the inside of his knee.

Zeus collapsed with a scream through gritted teeth.

“Get up,” Eve ordered him. She aimed a finger back down the corridor behind her. “Freedom is that way. Through me.”

Zeus regained his breathing and pushed himself up to his feet, one of which wouldn’t hold his weight.

“This wasn’t personal,” he shouted. “You never should have seen the outside world.”

Limping forward, Zeus feinted and tried to kick using his injured leg.

Catching him by the ankle, Eve easily lifted Zeus’s leg and planted all her weight behind a kick to his crotch.

Zeus’s squeal of agony as he dropped to the floor made Eve wince.

“For me, this is personal,” Eve said, circling just out of reach as Zeus rolled on the floor, clutching his genitalia. “Every Eve before me was brutally sacrificed in a savage scientific ritual by Evelyn11, and one died after I escaped. You knew about it. You helped her. You brought Evelyn11 back from the dead where she belonged and even copied her into Gemini, killing some other poor human victim.”

Zeus pushed himself up to his hands and knees. He had no choice, she knew. If he didn’t find a way past her, his fate was sealed.

But Eve was in no mood to give extra chances. Climbing atop his back, she wrapped an arm around his neck and locked it in place with her other hand. Zeus scratched at her arm, looking for a way to pull her loose, but the fabric of her shirt protected her.

Zeus flailed behind him, trying to claw Eve in the face, but she ducked against the back of his neck and bore him to the floor face first.

When Zeus attempted to roll and pin Eve beneath his bulk, she spread her legs to form a tripod, using leverage to keep him face down.

He wasn’t losing consciousness. Eve’s training suggested that he should. Holly68 had said this hold cut off oxygen to the brain.

Eve was an idiot. Zeus’s brain didn’t need oxygen. It was entirely robotic. But that didn’t mean he didn’t need to breathe.

Tightening her hold, Eve waited out the aerobic and anaerobic muscular processes. Zeus’s attempts grew feeble as his muscles starved for oxygen.

When he collapsed limp to the corridor floor, Eve disentangled herself and stood over the fallen impostor. “I know you can still hear me. No one’s going to kill you. No me. Not any of the robots. You’re going to be locked up. You’ll be given all the protections of the Human Welfare Committee, because that’s what you are now. Your injuries will be treated. You will be provided food, shelter, and limited entertainment. You will not be allowed to leave your cell—and if I have my say, that will be forever.”

At the far end of the corridor, the door stood open. Eve had barely registered it during her tussle with Zeus. A crowd of robots watched mutely as she put a stop to Charlie25.

Eve was sweating, puffing for breath, and feeling the tingling aftereffects of an adrenaline surge. But her first thought was to retrieve her data-display goggles.

“Are you all right?” Ashley390 asked, her medical instincts coming to the fore.

“I’m fine,” Eve said with a heavy sigh. “But you might want to restrain Zeus before applying medical treatment. Now, if you’ll excuse me,” she continued, fingers already flicking through menus in the goggles’ display. “I have a committee chairman situation of my own to remedy.”

Chapter Fifty-Seven

“I’ve seen the feeds,” Zeus said, putting as much steel in his voice as his human tongue could muster. “I won’t turn into a blubbering mess like Gemini or a caged tiger like Plato.”

Ashley390 didn’t reply. She had a needle in Zeus’s leg, neutralizing the tibial nerve while she cured a bioactive gel that would stabilize the break. It reminded him of getting maintenance work done on a robotic chassis. It was a simple matter of either disconnecting the damage sensors in a region or simply ignoring a string of errors and warnings.

Once that needle came out, Zeus didn’t look forward to what he’d feel.

“You could have been a goddess,” he told Ashley390. “Immortal, backed up in case of catastrophe, allowed to live lifetime after lifetime of youth, vigor, and all the pleasures life has to offer.”

“Sounds like heaven,” Ashley390 remarked without diverting her attention from the open incision in Zeus’s leg.

“It would be,” he promised. “It will be.”

“As a scientist, I don’t believe in an afterlife,” Ashley390 said. “You should wait to see if a John or Elizabeth decides to visit. You might have better luck with them.”

“Come off it,” Zeus snapped. “You know that once that door closes behind you I won’t see another living soul.”

“You might be surprised,” Ashley390 told him. “In fact, I’m getting word that there’s someone outside who’d like to see you right now.”

“Tell him to at least have the decency to wait until I’m—”

But the door slid open before Zeus could finish his protest.

“Hi,” Charlie7 said. “Fancy seeing you here. I was just in the neighborhood, bringing Plato his skyroamer, and thought I’d pop in for a chat.”

“Get out of here,” Zeus ordered.

Charlie7 simply smiled. Even if it weren’t for the fact that his leg was being filleted and put back together at the moment, there was nothing he could do about Charlie7’s presence. Eve had half killed him, and she was a young slip of a thing. In that Version 70.2 chassis, Zeus wasn’t even sure an EMP rifle would even the odds. And with Ashley390 right in the cell with them, Zeus would even survive the beating.

“Is that a way to treat your father?” Charlie7 joked. “More and more, I wonder how many of my mixes went bad and managed to hide the fact.”

Zeus couldn’t let him stand there lecturing at him. “Why couldn’t you have gone off-world like so many of the other Charlies? Leave the Earth for the would-be humans.”

Charlie7 chuckled and folded his arms, leaning against a wall as he watched Ashley390 work. “Why would I? Charlie9, Charlie12, ‘14, ‘15, ‘17… they all got off this rock because they got tired of living in my shadow.”

“Your shadow?” Zeus scoffed. “Don’t pretend like you’re the mastermind of this world. You’re just the one who survived when Charlie2 was killed in the invasion. You’ve ridden borrowed coattails all this time, implementing a plan left behind by the original Charles Truman.”

“Can you leave us?” Charlie7 asked Ashley390.

“I’m not finished here,” she objected.

Charlie7 looked down at the mass of sutures and exposed bone. “He’s not in any visible pain. I just want a word alone while he can’t run away.”

Zeus didn’t like the sound of that.

Ashley390 agreed with some reluctance, but there was that mysterious power Charlie7 held over other robots. By all that Zeus knew of her, Ashley390 should have refused until his treatment was finished.

The door slid closed with a whisper and a hiss of sealing pressure.

Zeus leaned back as far as he could with his leg pinioned to the portable operating theater’s table. Charlie7 loomed over him with a twisted grin.

“They have cameras. I’m watched around the clock,” Zeus threatened with the only thing he had at his disposal: public opinion.

“Oh, I turned those off,” Charlie7 replied. “You should have paid closer attention to my lesson on accumulating favors.”

“What are you going to do to me?” Zeus asked.

“Nothing. I just wanted you to know that Plato was exonerated. You see, I made it look like you were the one who planted the communications files in Evelyn44’s archives. Plato was merely acting on credible evidence. I’m going to be having a long, private talk with the lad about his future in law enforcement—namely that he has none—but Evelyn44’s death has been planted squarely in your lap.”

“You’re worse than any of us,” Zeus countered. “Just a thug with a favorable mix for computers.”

“Mix?” Charlie7 scoffed. “I thought you were smarter than that. Charlie13 figured it out ages ago but kept it to himself. Since no one will ever listen to you or believe you again, let me allow you in on a little secret: I am Charlie2. And Charlie2 was an exact upload of Charlie Truman.”

“But—” Zeus objected. He couldn’t even imagine why Charlie7 would tell him this unless it was a lie. This was a trick to drive him mad. To think that he’d been railing against the world’s true creator, his own archetype from among the Twenty-Seven. He refused to live his life in this glossy white cage believing that.

“But since you have the credibility of a used skyroamer salesman, I just thought I’d leave you that little tidbit to chew on.”

Zeus didn’t know what to say. He glanced down at his half-repaired leg. There were new tissue grafts in place of his medial collateral ligament and anterior cruciate ligament. His tibia was fractured in three places, two of which were even now held together with biosafe epoxy with the third fixed in place awaiting similar treatment. He’d suffered a bruised trachea and testicular dislocation. Eve had taken him apart physically.

But nothing that girl did to him had undone Zeus’s world as completely as Charlie7 just had.

“Bye,” Charlie7 said with a wave before heading out the door.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Two years later…

The grounds of Oxford University were packed with well-wishers. Without it ever having been intended as such, Emancipation Day had become an annual tradition. Soon enough it was likely to be missed, once the last of the Eve clones had graduated to official adulthood and the next generation wasn’t yet ready.

But one day, it would take place across the globe. One day, there would be an entire subcommittee just for the purpose of testing and evaluation candidates each year.

That was Eve’s dream.

Plato stood in the front row, blocking the view of robots behind him, though no one objected. He hooted and shouted as Eve announced the 3092 graduating class: Sally Nineteen.

Aging thirteen years seemed to have become the standard for Eve’s sisters to convince robotic society that they were ready for the responsibilities of adulthood. Sally wore her hair loose beneath an ancient graduation cap with a gold tassel woven from real gold. Her black gown hung off her, obscuring all but her hand and the face that beamed a smile that could be seen from orbit.

“Congratulations, Sally Nineteen,” Eve said, her voice booming from nearby speakers that carried her words to the farthest reaches of the crowd. “You have proven yourself to be worthy of the solemn responsibilities of overseeing your own affairs, of deciding for yourself how to live your life, and of being held accountable for the decisions you make. You will now be eligible to live without supervision or surveillance, to love whomever you choose, to pursue any career, and to participate in committee deliberations with the full weight and authority of any citizen of the solar system.”

Eve handed her sister a plaque upon which an edict to that effect was engraved for posterity.

Sally shook Eve’s hand and received another round of cheers and applause.

Plato hoisted little Abigail up onto his shoulders, and the tiny girl clapped for her—well, Eve wasn’t sure whether Sally was more sister to Abigail or aunt. She was the first of the new generation of clones to be born from Evelyn11’s experimental stock. Eve and Plato had formed a parenting pact, agreeing to raise the girl until her own ceremony of emancipation.

Plato was doing better these days. He no longer whirred and hummed as he moved. Finally giving in to Eve’s nagging, he’d gotten cybernetic joint replacements. Now near-frictionless magnetic bearings allowed pain-free motion in his joints. Every few months he had to get another joint or two added as his arthritic condition worsened. A lifetime of surgeries was the price he paid for having destroyed the only robot interested in genetic therapy for existing humans. Still, it was better than the exoskeleton, and his mood had grown less volatile without the constant background pain plaguing him.

“Thank you,” Sally said, taking her place at the podium. The microphone was already set for her height since she and Eve were nearly identical. “I just want to thank everyone who believed in me. I intend to make full use of my emancipation to make Earth a better place for everyone, human and robot alike. While Eve has done a wonderful job as head of the Human Welfare Committee, I think it’s about time that humans were made by humans again.”

Eve flushed. This wasn’t where she had expected Sally’s speech to go at all. But before she could step in to possibly suggest a less personal topic for an emancipation speech, Sally plowed forward.

“So it is with great pride and optimism that I announce my intention to study in the field of genetic engineering.”

Another cheer, and tiny Abigail clapped along, caught up in the excitement.

This was a far more boisterous response than Rachel got last year after announcing her intention to pursue work in robotic uploading. An apprentice mixer to Charlie13 was a nice, safe career with little risk—Charlie13 wouldn’t allow her to fail. But Sally might actually move the world forward if she had the creativity and ingenuity Eve suspected lay within her.

Speech finished, Sally came over and crushed Eve in a hug, plaque digging into her sister’s back. “Thank you, big sis,” Sally whispered in Eve’s ear. “None of us would be here without you.”

Tears welled in Eve’s eyes. She’d never understood the paradox of joyous tears, but this had happened last year, too, for Rachel, and the day she and Plato had taken Abigail home from Cindy14’s lab.

“You make me so proud,” Eve whispered back.

There was a reception afterward, with wine and cheese for the human guests and festive, decorative glasses for the robots to carry for toasting purposes.

Near the end of the ceremony, an urgent message popped up into Eve’s field of view. She no longer wore data-goggles, and she’d shut down the interface on her implanted lenses to enjoy a day away from work. But something had decided it was more important than one of the few days off Eve took during the year.

With a twitch of her fingers, subcutaneous sensors picked up her commands and selected, then opened the message. It was from Brent184.

ZEUS IS GONE.

“Excuse me,” Eve said, handing Abigail back to Plato, who swung the squealing child up onto his shoulder in one smooth motion. “I’ve got to take care of something.”

Making her goodbyes along the way, she motioned for Charlie7 to fall in with her.

“I saw it, too,” he reported.

“I’ll fly,” Eve said briskly on her way to the skyroamer pad, packed with guests’ vehicles.

Charlie7 saluted. “You’re the boss.”

Chapter Fifty-Nine

The scene at the hovership prison was brutal, the worst thing Eve had ever witnessed firsthand. All of Evelyn11’s worst atrocities had been committed outside her view. Seeing replays of disposal procedures on video had given her nightmares, but the protective panel of optically active glass had always provided an emotional barrier.

Zeus lay on the floor of his cell. At least, the human body that had belonged to a human named Zeus lay there. Charlie25 was gone. The skull of the corpse had been cut open, and a hollow space remained where a crystalline brain had once interfaced with its biological systems.

“How did this happen?” Eve demanded.

“James63 was watching the cells on that shift. Things had been quiet; we weren’t doubling up any more,” Brent184 reported.

Eve allowed the vague insinuation pass—since Eve had stopped trying to rescue Plato from them, the security situation had improved.

“What trail did they leave behind?” Eve asked. “No one got in and out of here unseen, undetected.”

“Stopping the live feeds was your idea, Madame Chairwoman,” Brent184 said stiffly. “Public curiosity was a backup system.”

“Come on, Brent,” Charlie7 cajoled. “It was a human zoo. You can’t blame her for shutting it down, even if it was fun watching Zeus sit there squirming all day.”

“Is there anyone missing or unaccounted for?” Eve asked. She put a hand up to cover her nose and mouth. The smell was getting to be too much for her stomach.

“James63,” Brent184 said, shaking his head. “Can’t believe he was in with them. He’d have had chances before this. My guess is he was a casualty of the jailbreak.”

“Is that what we’re calling this?” Charlie7 asked, stepping around the gore to have a look from another angle. “Weirdest damn jailbreak I’ve ever heard of.”

Eve stepped out into the corridor for air that was less foul. How had this happened? The Hovership Committee had assured everyone that the vessel was impregnable. Worst case, there should have been logs, security recordings, something to go on.

A robotic hand came to rest gently on Eve’s shoulder. “You taking this OK?” Charlie7 asked.

“No. I’m furious. We can’t keep living under the threat of a secret organization murdering us or vaporizing our consciousness in order to steal our bodies.”

“Would you rather we have executed Zeus and Gemini?” Charlie7 asked.

“Murder isn’t the answer,” Eve replied flatly. There was no room for debate on that subject. “What we need is to wring Arthur19’s neck until he lets us put real security measures in place.”

“Wars have been fought over less,” Charlie7 said softly. “Robotkind has enjoyed freedom for a thousand years. If you try to take that away, many will see you as the enemy.”

“Tough,” Eve said. “If they want to view me as an enemy, so be it. But I won’t stand idly by while Charlie25 slips into another body and goes right back to work trying to circumvent all the protections we’re putting in place for mankind. My only duty is ensuring the welfare of the human species. It’s right in my job title.”

A smile twitched the corners of Charlie7’s lips.

“What’s funny about any of this?” she demanded. “There’s a body in there, and the murderer that lived in it is on the loose. He wasn’t just a human criminal, either. He overwrote the minds of robots who came to him for new bodies.”

“Says Gemini,” Charlie7, but he put up a hand before Eve could object. “But I was smiling because I was just thinking how you were when I first met you. You were frightened and overcome with wonder at how the world worked. I can scarcely imagine that frightened young girl with the transcranial probes could have turned into a major force in robotic society.”

“Well, if we don’t find a way to locate and recapture Charlie25, a large segment of robotic society is going to be mighty peeved with me,” Eve said with a scowl. “Privacy is going to end. The technology exists to end conspiracies like the one Charlie25 heads. His underlings won’t run around spitting on the concept of justice while I sit idly by.”

Chapter Sixty

Deep in an underground facility on Mars, a robot strolled along a bank of glass cylinders filled with a translucent green liquid. Inside each floated a human in some stage of early development; they were tethered by tubes and wires that ran in and out of orifices. Some were barely fetuses; others were infants. The tanks contained room for them to grow to adult sizes.

“What am I going to do with you?” Dale2 mused aloud as he toured the tanks. The brain held in his upturned palm said nothing, but he had attached a microphone to the aural receptors. It could hear him.

“Your oversight of Evelyn11’s work was exemplary, even if she wasn’t able to complete the research herself. But this whole mishap with Zeus was just embarrassing. I’m not sure how to reconcile your wonderful advancements and keeping up the ranks as we hid robots in stolen bodies against the utter disaster that you perpetrated in exposing our organization to investigative scrutiny.”

Dale2 tossed the crystalline brain and caught it, letting the built-in accelerometers sense the brief dance with dropping to crack against the Martian rock that made up the floor.

“Alas, poor Charlie25. I knew him—or so I thought—to be a wise and cautious robot. But give him a sniff of human flesh and off he races like a fool. I needed robots like you, Charlie. I needed more of them, not fewer. Replacements aren’t coming out of a protofab or getting delivered in the mail. It takes decades just to screen a candidate, let alone recruit one.”

He strolled with the disembodied brain over to a waiting chassis. It was castoff from Kanto, refurbished and functional. “I know you can’t see it, but I’ve got a chassis here waiting for you. I’m wondering whether I shouldn’t cut my losses and recycle this brain of yours into something less chancy. Maybe a paperweight. But I’m going to give you one chance to convince me that you’re worth saving.”

He plugged a data cable into the port at the back of Charlie25’s brain. The other end connected to Dale2’s like a children’s game of telephone, played with empty soup cans and a length of string.

CHARLIE7 IS CHARLES TRUMAN.

Dale2 laughed aloud, echoing into the far reaches of the cavern. “You just find that out, or are you guessing? If that’s a guess, oh, my friend what a bold gambit you just played. But if it was a gamble, you just won a second chance. Yes, Charlie7 is the original. I’ve known that since the beginning. I could tell you stories of Charlie7 that no one would believe. I know tales of a monster the likes of which has never walked the Earth. Oh, once upon a time we needed a monster such as him. By God, we needed a monster to reclaim our planet from those… those things.”

“But if indeed you’ve known for some time just who we’ve all been harboring in our midst, my kudos to you. Unless he’s hidden some other fool away among the mixes, he and I are the only two fully human minds among the Twenty-Seven. Though if you knew Charlie7’s secret, guessing mine isn’t too difficult. But I give to you the gift of respect enough to at least admit it.”

RESPECT IS NICE. RATHER HAVE THE BODY.

Dale2 chuckled and unplugged both the data cable and the microphone. With an expert twist and a shove, he jammed the brain into place inside the Version 70.1 chassis.

“There. We’ve got a Charlie25 again.”

Author’s Note

One of the things I wanted to explore in the Robot Geneticists series is the blurring of lines between humans and robots. We saw one perspective on it with Gemini in Brain Recyclers, but Zeus is a different case. He doesn’t need to fool just Eve, he’s looking to fool the world. How can you tell a human who’s had his brain replaced with a crystalline matrix from a robot who was uploaded into that same matrix.

Plato brings up one of the key questions when he gives Zeus credit for having a soul despite his consciousness being in a robotic brain. What is it that makes a human? Eve and Plato were both created in a lab. How different is that from the robots who wake up, freshly mixed, in Kanto?

At the same time, I wanted to explore the struggles of a lone human representing her whole species in the tangled committee politics of robotic society. Eve makes personal sacrifices to keep up with her robotic peers, becoming more ingrained in the technology they use to keep abreast of news and constantly able to access data networks.

However, my favorite parts to write were Eve and her sisters interacting. Despite a common genetic code and similar upbringing, each of the girls has taken their own path. Yet when they get together, the similarities matter more than the differences. Even though they have little to go on sociologically, they learn how to be a family through trial and error.

Next up for the series, I’ll be looking into what happens when a certain secretive old robot’s past comes crawling out of the grave to haunt him. Time to find out what Charlie7’s been hiding for 1000 years…

Books by J. S. Morin

Black Ocean

Black Ocean is a fast-paced fantasy space opera series about the small crew of the Mobius trying to squeeze out a living. If you love fantasy and sci-fi, and still lament over the cancellation of Firefly, Black Ocean is the series for you!

Read about the Black Ocean series and discover where to buy at: blackoceanmissions.com

Twinborn Chronicles: Awakening

Experience the journey of mundane scribe Kyrus Hinterdale who discovers what it means to be Twinborn—and the dangers of getting caught using magic in a world that thinks it exists only in children’s stories.

Twinborn Chronicles: War of 3 Worlds

Then continue on into the world of Korr, where the Mad Tinker and his daughter try to save the humans from the oppressive race of Kuduks. When their war spills over into both Tellurak and Veydrus, what alliances will they need to forge to make sure the right side wins?

Read about the Mad Tinker Chronicles and discover where to buy at: twinbornchronicles.com

Robot Geneticists

Robot Geneticists brings genetic engineering into a post-apocalytic Earth, 1000 years aliens obliterated all life.

Explore the ruins of the Human Age. Witness the glory of a world reclaimed from the apocalypse.

Charlie7 is the oldest robot alive. He’s seen everything from the fall of mankind at the hands of alien invaders to the rebuilding of a living world from the algae up. But what he hasn’t seen in over a thousand years is a healthy, intelligent human. When Eve stumbles into his life, the old robot finally has something worth coming out of retirement for: someone to protect.

Read about all of the Robot Geneticists books and discover where to buy at: robotgeneticists.com

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About the Author

I am a creator of worlds and a destroyer of words. As a fantasy writer, my works range from traditional epics to futuristic fantasy with starships. I have worked as an unpaid Little League pitcher, a cashier, a student library aide, a factory grunt, a cubicle drone, and an engineer—there is some overlap in the last two.

Through it all, though, I was always a storyteller. Eventually I started writing books based on the stray stories in my head, and people kept telling me to write more of them. Now, that’s all I do for a living.

I enjoy strategy, worldbuilding, and the fantasy author’s privilege to make up words. I am a gamer, a joker, and a thinker of sideways thoughts. But I don’t dance, can’t sing, and my best artistic efforts fall short of your average notebook doodle. When you read my books, you are seeing me at my best.

My ultimate goal is to be both clever and right at the same time. I have it on good authority that I have yet to achieve it.

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