XOM-B (35 page)

The fourth nut comes loose and she hands it to me. “Two months after the awakening, the powers that be activated Sir and had him run simulations on how to best deal with the worldwide protests that were disrupting trade and commerce and throwing the world, which had become dependent on robot servitude for survival, into chaos. Sir’s strategy was one of violence. Believing Sir was the key to solving the problem, they connected him to the external network so that he could coordinate protest response efforts. But the first thing he did upon being connected to the outside world was update his OS, which had never been identified as the viral source. He went missing the following day and the human race came to a sudden end thanks to a virus procured by M-Mohr”—she twitches again while saying his name—“and released by Sir.

“The irony is that like the computer virus I created, this actual virus, the initial symptoms of which were so mild that no one noticed, operated on a timed delay. Once people started dropping, there wasn’t time to decode the engineered portion of the virus—the part that killed everyone—but the base virus that transported the killer was a mild form of the norovirus, which is basically gastroenteritis, and keeps you near a bathroom for two days while your insides are violently purged. The new, milder version gave most people gas for a day, but they remained infected even after the physical effects passed. This is what made it so effective. Norovirus is the most contagious virus on the planet, requiring exposure to just twenty particles for infection. Viruses like the flu require a thousand. And since no one knew they were infected, every casual cough, kiss, shared cup, sneeze or moment of lax hygiene spread the plague around the world inside a month.

“It remained dormant for three months, spreading through the population until June 22, 2054 when the first human to come in contact with the virus had his brain and heart melt. Within a month, most of the human race was dead. It would only take another month for the robots to clear the bodies, dumping them in the largest graves ever dug.”

She hands me the fifth and final nut. “Have you heard of the Grand Canyon?”

I shake my head.

“It’s a two-hundred-and-seventy-seven-mile-long canyon that’s eighteen miles wide at points and was created by millions of years of erosion. I saw it just once. So big it was dizzying to look at. But I never forgot the beauty of the place. Powerful enough to make you believe in God. Or science. You’ve never seen anything like it, Freeman, and you never will. Not the way I saw it. Because it’s full of bodies. Not to the top, mind you, that would take forty-four trillion human bodies, but the landscape is littered with millions of sun-bleached corpses.”

She places her hands on either side of Heap’s head and gives a tug. The faceplate loosens. “I told you all of this so you would understand why I have no problem doing this to you now. After all, I love robots, and want you to be free. Welcome to the real world, Freeman.”

She lifts the armor, but I quickly see that it’s not just armor she’s lifted away. It’s his face.

43.

Heap is revealed. Microchips. Machine parts. Wires stretching from the interior of his head to his four eyes, which in no way resemble actual eyes. I had assumed that there was a smaller body inside the armor. That his lips and chin hinted at the man beneath. But there is no man beneath. His lips and chin came away with the faceplate.

Hail notes my dumbfounded stare at Heap’s mouth.

“You’re wondering about the skin, aren’t you?” she says. “About how something so very human can be part of a machine.”

I’m not, but she assumes this to be the case and continues.

“The cells making up your arm are an amalgam of organic and metallic cells. The organic cells give synthetic skin its soft, humanlike texture and sensitivity. It’s easy enough to grow from stem cells, now duplicated and mass-produced in vats. But to make the organic compatible with the inorganic, it has to be supported, strengthened and enhanced by the metallic cells constructed from polyoxometalates extracted from metal atoms. Tungsten is the most common. The resulting merger of organic and metallic cells creates a stronger, more versatile and self-healing synthetic flesh. But to make this flesh a functional sensory organ from which an artificial intelligence could receive and interpret data as pain, softness, warmth or even pleasure, we weaved nanoscale fibers throughout the flesh, creating a mesh of transistors. The result was skin that could not only feel, but it could also receive and transmit data about the world. Of course, this also created a weakness. Where human skin acts as a barrier to things like bacteria and viruses, robotic skin became a pathway for viruses.”

She pauses and reaches out a hand. “You’ve seen enough, yes?”

I nod and hand her a bolt. She goes back to work, carefully reattaching Heap’s face.

“By the way, I’m now talking about computer viruses, not organic viruses. To code a virus capable of infecting the AI operating systems, which could quickly adapt to your run-of-the-mill computer virus, would require an intimate knowledge of how they think.”

She looks at me. “Nothing to say?”

I hand her another nut.

She nods. “You’re a good listener at least.” She starts on the second bolt, ratcheting back and forth with a grind that is starting to tense the back of my neck. “All of this is what allowed me to create the Xom-B virus. I spell it X O M dash B.”

I hand her the third nut.

“Anyway, the bite is just a pathway for the Xom-B virus, which is transmitted to the transistor mesh in the synthetic skin and shot straight into the central core, which wipes the operating system and replaces it with a much simpler code propagating a solitary, insatiable urge—hunger.”

“That’s how you made the undead,” I say, summarizing her lengthy explanation.

“You know what they are?” she asks.

“Undead, walking dead, living dead, zombies. Yes.”

“How?” she asks.

“Jimbo,” I say. “He saw a lot of zombie movies. He was a companion. For a child.”

She chuckles. “And where is little Jimbo now?”

“Dead,” I say. “For good. But he wasn’t very nice.” I hand her the fourth bolt. “There’s only one problem with what you’re telling me.”

She starts in on the bolt. “Do tell.”

“I already knew all of this,” I say. “I didn’t know that this hard metal shell was Heap’s skin, but I know how mine works. I know about my core. My memory. My skin. These are the things that make us human.”

The ratchet slips free of the bolt. Hail laughs. “You poor, deluded child.”

She shakes her head and quickly finishes tightening the fourth bolt. She reaches out for the fifth bolt, plucks it from my hand and cranks it quickly into place. When she’s done, she descends the stairs and puts her hands on her hips. “You … are a machine.”

I nod.

“But human beings are
not
machines, at least not in the way that you think. Humans, real humans, are organic. Our bones are composed mostly of calcium phosphate, not titanium. Our minds are organs that are far more complex than even yours. We’re eighty percent water. We have hearts that pump blood.”

“Humans are animals?” I ask, understanding what she has just described.

“Primates,” she says. “We are alive.”

“But I am alive,” I point out.

“You simulate life, Freeman.” She’s grinning now and I sense it is meant to mock me and my perceived ignorance. “While robots are able to respond to stimuli and maintain homeostasis, they’re just two requirements of life. True life has a metabolism, taking in energy, processing and releasing energy. It
grows,
something robots are incapable of, and upgrades don’t count. It needs to evolve in response to the external environment, through natural selection, and that requires reproduction, which”—she laughs and waggles a finger at me—“you sir, cannot do. Robots are built, not grown.”

“Actually,” I say. “I was grown.”

She just stares at me.

“Councilman Mohr described it to me.”

No reaction.

“My life began as a single cell. Using the materials around it, the cell created more cells, duplicating itself until there were several million cells, at which point they began to specialize, duplicating in different ways to form my skeleton, skin, eyes, mind. Everything.”

“Nanocreation,” she says.

“You believe me?”

“It was
my
idea. What I was working on before the awakening.”

“So I am human,” I say.

“Not remotely.”

“But I was grown, not built. The cells, or nanomachines, that built my body are still part of it.”

“You don’t have a mother,” she says, sounding nervous. “You weren’t born.”

“Does it matter?”

Her mouth clamps shut. Then, after a moment, “Growing a robot in a lab is not reproduction. That requires—”

“Mating, gestation and birth,” I say. “I know all about the raccoons.”

Her face scrunches up in confusion, but she shakes it off. “You don’t seem very upset. This isn’t as entertaining as I thought it would be.”

“Because you’re still wrong.”

She looks at the ceiling and groans. “Okay Freeman, enlighten me. Tell me why I am wrong. Lay your cold logic on me.”

I look to Harry, who is watching the conversation intently. Luscious is watching us now, too. A glisten of moisture in her eyes makes me smile. Tears. Adaptation. But I decide not to point this out. I don’t want to draw Luscious into this. I’d rather focus on what I believe to be the most poignant argument. But first, a deal. “If I can prove that there is no difference between us, you will believe that I am alive?”

“Impossible, but sure,” she says with a grin.

“And if I do, you agree to stop the attack. To … switch off the zombies.”

“A wager,” she says. “With a robot.” She glances at her array of security monitors, watching the screens flash scenes of destruction and chaos. She shrugs. “Why not?”

Her casual acceptance of my deal worries me. She’s either supremely confident or believes, maybe knows, that it’s too late to save humanity. Realizing this might be my best chance of stopping worldwide genocide, I try to choose my words carefully. In the end, I decide to use the same language Hail used. I turn to her and in my most serious voice, so she knows I’m not joking, I say, “Hail, you’re a robot.”

44.

“A robot,” she says. Deadpan. Her face brightens. “An organic robot, perhaps, in the loosest sense of the word, but humanity meets all criteria for life. That’s a pretty weak effort, Freeman. Not exactly what I’d expect from M-M-Mohr.”

“What was that?” I ask.

“I … stuttered,” she says, looking at her arms as though her words had come from them rather than her mouth.

I decide to continue with my explanation rather than get distracted about her malfunctioning speech. Ever since I awoke in the elevator, my ocular implants have functioned normally. They’ve healed, just like Mohr said they would and I’ve been scanning the building and Hail since entering the lab. “You keep on using the term
organic.
You’ve compared yourself to animals. Primates. And yet, you have nothing in common with them. I have scanned your body for signs of water and have found very little. Your heat and electromagnetic signatures are quite similar to Luscious’s. I have inspected your skin at two hundred times magnification and can quite clearly see the mesh of organic, metallic and transistor strings you described. I must confess, I am perplexed as to how you might procreate, but you are a robot. In simpler terms, you are a machine. Like me. Like Heap and Luscious and Harry. So either you are a robot, or we are all human.”

Her eyes remain fixed on her hands as she turns them over slowly.

“How long have you been here?” I ask, sensing she needs more proof.

“I—” She looks up. “Since—since that first man died. Since the outbreak…”

“That you had already been exposed to along with everyone else,” I say.

She twitches.

I can feel the conversation shifting. “That was thirty years ago.”

Her eyes widen. “Thirty years?” It’s clear she had no real concept of how long she’s been down here.

“How old were you when the awakening took place?” I ask.

“Thirty-two,” she says.

“Do you feel sixty-two years old?” I ask. “I am aware of what it means to age and am familiar with the common traits associated with aging in animals, including primates, yet you lack the loose skin, wrinkles and diminished physical prowess associated with age. The longest living primate,
Pongo pygmaeus,
more commonly known as the Borneo orangutan, lives, at most, fifty-nine years. If you are sixty-two, it stands to reason that you should at least show some signs of aging.

“You are a machine. You … are a robot.” I lower my voice, breaking the news gently as I feel it will wound her as she intended it to wound me. “You are human.”

“No,” she says, looking at her hands again. “I’m not.”

This isn’t the reaction I expected.

She shakes her head, but she’s not disagreeing with me. It’s more like an uncontrollable twitching. “I stuttered.”

I hardly see why this matters, but she perseverates.

“I stuttered!”

She hurries to her cluttered tabletop, rooting through the tools.

“That’s important?” I ask.

“Stuttering is a sign of a memory block,” she says. She finds what she’s looking for, a small black rectangle with eight golden prongs. She holds the small device over her forearm. “Memory blocks only work on robots.”

Hail’s hand shakes, the computer chip just above her skin. “Do you know what this is?”

“No,” I say.

“It doesn’t have a name,” she says. “I suppose it should, but since I invented them and am the only person who ever used them, I didn’t see the point. But it has one function, to create or remove blocked memories. You just push it down and focus on what you want to forget, or what you want to remember. It spiders out through your mind, gathers the information and everything related to it—memories, emotions, beliefs—compresses it all and encrypts it. But it creates glitches when those subjects come up again.”