Machina Viva (4 page)

Eve was gaining a very rapid education in the ways of people. The restaurant was full of conversations and merriment, and Eve took in as much of it as she could. She was learning how people talked. It wasn’t really that much like what she had expected. The simulations had placed a lot of emphasis on dialogue and language acquisition, as well as a basic primer in tones of voice. Real people, she had found, communicated almost as much with gestures and looks as with words. Sometimes, they even used words to mean the exact opposite of what they really meant, and the idea still got across somehow. She was utterly fascinated by the principles of innuendo, for example. It was like a form of verbal shorthand where any word could be used to represent nearly any other word. Communication was clearly much more sophisticated than she thought.

She walked out onto the sidewalk after her shift was over and headed towards the transit station to catch a ride home. It was just before the dinner rush and most businesses were closing, so there were plenty of extra cars running to handle the load. She made her way to the platform by the park and waited for the next car. A woman with an infant in a stroller was waiting next to her.

The next car wasn’t long in coming. It stopped with its door right in front of Eve. The first passenger off the car was a man pushing a wheeled cart loaded with glassware. Next to him was a large man with a bag over his shoulder. He stepped onto the platform and turned sharply away toward the exit, and his bag crashed into the cart. The top box tipped over and fell toward the stroller, sending a shower of broken glass at the woman’s baby.

Eve jumped between the cart and the stroller and quickly laid herself over the baby’s seat, shielding him from the broken glass. She felt a few tiny pieces stick into her back, assessed the level of damage done to herself, and dismissed it as irrelevant. The safety of the child was the primary concern. It was such a natural train of thought that it didn’t even warrant a conscious decision.

The man with the cart was frantically trying to pick up the broken pieces. The man with the bag was very apologetic and offered to follow the other man to wherever he was going to explain what had happened. The woman was inspecting her child. Fortunately, not a single piece of glass had reached him.

The baby looked up at Eve with a confused look on his face. Eve had never seen a baby up close before. It was a deeply pleasing sensation. She continued to look at him until two maintenance robots appeared at the platform to take care of the mess. When she finally got on the transit car, she was still thinking about the look on the baby’s face.

She wasn’t paying any attention to all the people on the platform who were congratulating her for saving the baby, or to the two maintenance robots who were staring at her, confused as anything by what their subdermal scanners were telling them about her.

As the car slid away towards the next platform, the Security troubleshooter was sitting in the park on the lake shore. It was really nothing more than a public swimming pool, but it did feature a beach at one end with nearly authentic sand, mined from asteroids as raw silicate and processed at the big mineral refinery in Ikosia, another arcology further up in the atmosphere.

The troubleshooter had a far corner of the beach all to itself. It sat cross-legged in the sand, surrounded by a network of furrows and grooves in perfectly straight lines and concentric rings. Occasionally, it would spot a bit of a food wrapper or other debris drifting down, and it would drag a new set of rings in the sand. The piece of what anyone else might call garbage would gently land in the center ring every time.

It had heard the ruckus on the platform, and it paid particular notice to the commotion afterward. Somewhere in the margins of its mind, it had felt deep satisfaction at the execution of yet another successful operation.

The target had chosen an unlikely solution to the encounter. She could have stepped backward out of the way. She could have caught the box, possibly preventing any damage to the contents. But she had chosen to protect the child and place herself in harm’s way. How interesting.

The troubleshooter had also gotten a look at her on her way from the restaurant to the platform, and it had noticed the same thing that had caused the maintenance robots to stop in their tracks. As a robot, it was capable of seeing under the skin of robots and people. This was the easiest way to tell the difference between the two.

It had seen what lay beneath Eve’s skin.

How very interesting indeed.

8

Mrs. Whitley set out a bowl of dried fruit and put on some calming music in preparation for the meeting. She also set a soft cushion at one of the places and pulled out the chair at that end of the table. Raymond was one of five members of a sort of Neighborhood Watch committee that oversaw things at Crownstone. They made sure that everything was well maintained and organized social functions for the other residents. All but one of the committee members were robots, like the majority of Crownstone’s inhabitants.

Lucy and Will were the first to arrive. Will had been a professional stunt double. He was built to take a lot of abuse and be none the worse for wear. The studio he worked for had paid for him to get a mimetic implant that enabled him to vaguely resemble the actor he was doubling, at least at a distance or from behind. He had been in a lot of action productions, and even had a very small fan base.

He was Crownstone’s accountant, in defiance of everyone’s first impressions.

Lucy was a holistic therapist, and to look at her, it was hard to imagine her being anything else. Every proportion was exactly perfect, every curve was in just the right place. She wore clothes that looked like they were trying and failing not to accentuate her appearance, which meant that they were doing their job. She didn’t walk, she flowed. Of course, most robots moved that way, but the technique looked good on her.

Will set his briefcase down at his place at the table, and he and Lucy settled into their seats.

After about ten minutes, Mrs. Whitley opened the door and let Brian in. He worked as a diagnostic technician, which basically meant that people called him when they were having technical problems with things. Occasionally, he would get someone with a real problem, but mostly it was people who couldn’t get some piece of equipment to work because they had left out an innocent little step like “Push the button marked ‘GO.’” He charged a discounted rate when he did work for Crownstone, as a matter of course.

Brian had originally been in a line of work similar to Lucy’s, but on a much more casual and platonic scale. He had lived with several old ladies and a few university students, spending time with them and giving them someone to cuddle without actually having to appear to care about them personally.

Put simply, he was a cat. He was maybe two and a half feet long, and he had vaguely reddish-brown fur. He was only distinguishable from
Felis domesticus
by his physical needs and his skills at debate. It wasn’t easy for a manufactured pet to earn a paycheck, but he had managed by leasing himself out to people who were looking for a cat and ensuring that he would not only not require medication or a litter box, and would thus be cheaper and easier in the long run, but would also provide much better conversation than the average house pet. Of course, most of his clients inevitably called him something inane like Mr. Snuggles (the second old lady) or something totally meaningless like Creeping As The Infinite Domain (what a weird group of students that had been), and he developed the typical feline cynicism almost as a defense mechanism. His technical skill came from frequently being the only one in the house to actually read the directions on anything, coupled with his ability to crawl behind desks and reach those out-of-the-way bits of cable or read a serial number. As he began doing more and more of this sort of thing, he eventually had a special interface installed in his tail that allowed him to hook himself into most computer-driven devices and diagnose problems at a software level.

He hopped up onto the chair and arranged himself on the cushion on the table. “Sorry I’m late, Raymond. Got caught up on a job.”

“Not a problem, Brian,” said Raymond. “Philip still hasn’t arrived. Has anyone heard from him lately?”

“I haven’t seen him since the last meeting,” said Will. “Isn’t he still working on his new project?”

“No, he finished that a couple of weeks ago,” said Lucy. “I saw him here the other day, but then he got a call from someone and had to leave. I haven’t seen him since.”

“When was that?” said Raymond.

“Three days ago, I think.”

“Hmm. Let me give him a call.” There were a few beeps as Raymond entered Philip’s televox number.

“Security.”

The robots around the table gave a start. Will gave Brian a look and mouthed a question at him.
Security?

Brian just shrugged, with the panache of a true connoisseur.

“Yes,” said Raymond, “I’d like to speak to Dr. Philip Abrams, please.”

The voice paused for a moment, and then it remembered some instructions that it had been given. “Ah, yes. Dr. Abrams is not receiving calls at the moment. If you like, I can see to it that he gets your message.”

“No, that won’t be necessary,” said Raymond. “May I ask why he is indisposed?”

“He is currently assisting the Security department.”

“Does his assistance require him to be sequestered?”

“He is assisting the department. Would you mind telling me your business with Dr. Abrams . . . Raymond?”

“I’m sorry? What was that?” Raymond quickly broke the connection.

“Oh, dear,” said Brian. “I’ve never heard of Security taking such an interest in anyone before.”

“Will?” said Lucy. “Philip didn’t happen to tell you anything about this project of his, did he?”

“Well, one thing,” said Will. “He told me that it might change everything.”

“Everything about what?” said Raymond.

“Just everything.”

9

After about a week at her new job, Eve had one final lesson to learn about the service industry: the joys to be had on a day off. She left her apartment at the start of the day, and she had the whole day to do as she liked. She had seen quite a lot in the preceding week, too, and some of it looked to be worth a try.

Her first stop was a clothing store. Her restaurant uniform was clearly only for work, and her only other outfit seemed to proclaim to the world that she was not long off of the production line. She wanted a set of clothing that better reflected her budding personality, and the last week of tending to the needs of families and students had shown her a wondrous variety of styles that she wanted to sample. She also wanted to buy a swimsuit. With the restaurant being so near the park, many patrons were still dressed in their beach clothes, some only adding enough extra clothing to conform to the public health code. They seemed to enjoy swimming, and she felt inclined to give it a try.

The plan had been to go shopping for some new clothes. A simple idea in theory, but it quickly became much more complicated in execution. The sheer number of options available was vast, especially for women, or female humanoids, anyway. There was also a small non-humanoid selection to serve the needs of the few citizens of Tetropolis who fit that description, like the small but vibrant Stitcher community that had sprung up recently.

When humans had first arrived to colonize the ball of atmosphere they had found, they quickly drew the attention of the other species in the vicinity. None of them could understand why anyone would want to travel so far from home merely to establish a new territory, and humankind’s first contact with its new neighbors had been not unlike a man trying to meet a woman from the opposite end of a noisy bar. There was a lot of gesturing and significant looks, and then the humans buckled down and bought the other races a drink, so to speak.

The first race the humans encountered was more or less what they had been expecting. They were built like large insects, with four crab-like legs and two arms with clawed hands. The humans encountered them while surveying the orbiting asteroids for minerals. Once they got past the language barrier, they got along famously. The humans were not surprised to learn that the Stitchers, as they called themselves, were fierce warriors and keen engineers, although their cultural obsession with fabrics had been a bit of a surprise.

The Stitchers had been militaristic and fiercely predatory, with nothing to unite them as a culture except conquest and intertribal warfare. That all changed with their discovery of textiles. Before then, they had known how to create armor plating from basic minerals, but that was all the clothing they knew how to make. Woven fabrics changed everything. One tribe invented the mechanized loom. Another discovered that the fibers they had been using to make rope could be woven to make cloth. A third invented a fine cord that could be used to bind fabrics together. Once the tribes had something they could exchange besides blows, they quickly settled their differences and beat their swords into sewing needles to ease the flow of ideas. Their culture became so shaped around textile manufacturing that they measured the progress of their civilization by the development of new techniques. Where humans marked their history with the Bronze and Iron ages, the Stitchers had the Loom and Felt ages. The current state of their art was nanofelt, a technique of bonding polymer strands together in a lattice to create a single sheet-shaped molecule, as strong or flexible as was needed.

As Eve browsed through the racks of clothing, she could feel the staff giving her odd looks. Robots always acted like this around her. She could never figure out why. People usually treated robots with at least some decency. Now that she thought of it, the humans didn’t give her any trouble. It was always the other robots. They were the best at telling humans and robots apart. And she was certain that she was a robot, given the nightly rechargings and lack of reliance on food.