The Life Engineered (2 page)

At his feet lay a body. The owner of the laundromat. Larger than his attacker and clearly the victim of the gunshot, he crawled painfully on the parking lot asphalt. I couldn’t see any blood from my position, but his legs didn’t seem to work anymore, and his left foot was twitching unnaturally.

“That’s Eddy Roach,” Anthony whispered, as if I didn’t already know.

Edward Rochester, or Eddy Roach as we knew him at the precinct, was a small-time drug peddler and heavy user. His brand of petty crimes and minor offenses usually had him bouncing in and out of jail every few months or so. If he wasn’t on probation, then he was on bail and usually violating both. Roach was the kind of small-time offender that cost the judicial system more than he was worth.

“Where did that idiot get a gun?” I asked, genuinely curious.

As I spoke, Roach lifted his firearm, pointed it unsteadily at his victim, mumbled something unintelligible, and fired.

The bullet went straight through the target’s head. Without pause or ceremony, the laundromat’s owner went limp, his face hitting the cold asphalt. Disturbingly, his foot kept twitching.

“Don’t move, Eddy!” Anthony shouted as he popped up from our hiding spot, abandoning more of his precious cover than I felt comfortable with.

Instantly, Roach trained his weapon on my partner, and for a split second I was convinced he’d shoot; instead, the twitchy little drug dealer just stood there, opening and closing his mouth like a fish trying to breathe out of water.

As my partner was putting his life on the line, recklessly confronting an unstable and armed individual, I realized that my hands were empty. My sidearm was still securely tucked in its holster, safety firmly on. I was good at writing up traffic violations, but when the chips were down I was useless. Helena was right, I thought—it would be better for me to get a desk job.

I didn’t linger on the idea for long, however. Falling back on my training, I reached for what I was taught was my most important weapon as an officer of the law. My first line of defense in any crisis. My radio.

“Dispatch, we have an armed suspect at Meadow Glen Mall. Subject has already fired two shots, and we have one victim down. Requesting backup.”

I didn’t wait for confirmation before pulling out my sidearm, removing the safety, pulling myself up to lean on the hood of our impromptu cover, then training my weapon onto Eddy Roach.

So began the longest ten minutes of my life.

“Get down, Anthony!” I ordered my partner, barely noticing I was using my “mother voice.”

Looking behind Eddy, I could see that the laundromat was still full of terrified customers. I was more than a little concerned that one of them would decide, much like my partner, that he wanted to be a hero. Fortunately, they all seemed to be in an appropriate state of shock.

“Blain? You have your cell phone on you?”

Anthony nodded without taking his eyes off of Roach.

“Pull it out and find the number of that laundromat and call. Tell them to get to the very back, hide as best they can, and stay the hell inside!”

From his hesitation, I could see that he was reluctant to put his weapon down, but he couldn’t argue with the logic and importance of my request. In fact, I was surprised myself. The initial shock and helplessness I felt was gone. In some way it was almost as if someone else had taken over. Like drawing on another’s experience. For the first time in years, I felt my age or even younger. Maybe it was the adrenaline, but I wasn’t tired anymore.

“Eddy?” I called out, wishing I’d spent more time studying negotiation techniques. “Eddy, it’s Officer Paulson. Do you remember me?”

“Yeah, I remember you!” he yelled back. His voice was deep for such an emaciated frame, but it was trembling on the precipice of panic. “You arrested me last year!”

Off to a great start, but at least I had him talking instead of shooting. He was clearly high on some kind of drug—which wasn’t out of the ordinary—but there was obviously something else wrong with him. Roach was a user, a seller, and a thief, but he had never been violent before.

“You deserved it, and I won’t lie to you, Ed. I’m about to arrest you again.”

“No!” His answer brimmed with fear.

“Eddy, I have a gun pointed at your head. You put down your weapon right now, and no one else needs to get hurt, but you—”

He shot at me. My first thought was how rude he was being for cutting me off, which felt like a strange concern under the circumstances. Only after a second did I think to duck and make sure I wasn’t hit. As I did, I could hear the distant squeak of hinges and an electronic door chime go off.

“Shit! He’s going in the laundromat!”

I peeked up over the hood of the SUV to confirm my fears. Indeed, Roach had gone back inside the store, stirring the terrified occupants into a screaming panic. Anthony ran from car to car, making his way up to the front of the laundromat. With a sigh, I followed his lead, catching up to him just as he reached the closest vehicle to the storefront.

Then we heard the fourth gunshot, muffled from inside the building. It was immediately followed by screams.

“Anthony . . .”

It was too late. He was off, and I surprised myself by following his footsteps.

We both stormed into the store, spreading to the sides, each finding cover behind a row of quarter-operated washing machines. Every step of the way, as we acted like action movie heroes instead of trained professionals, a voice trapped deep inside my heart was begging for me to stop, to wait for backup to arrive—but I ignored it.

The storefront was empty. Half-folded laundry and boxes of generic-brand detergent were left abandoned here and there. A large dryer was still going through its cycle with an uneven hum. Eddy had herded his hostages to the back of the store.

“Roach!” Anthony called out. His tone was stern and uncompromising. There wasn’t a hint of diplomacy in his voice. He was too confrontational. This was going to be a disaster. “Come out with your hands where we can see them!”

There was a moment, a heartbeat frozen in time where I thought and believed that my partner’s foolhardy actions had actually paid off. I could imagine him arguing with Captain Hutchcroft that he valued life more than regulations and results more than procedures.

As Eddy Roach stepped out from behind a large industrial dryer, I imagined that Anthony Blain had become the action hero he’d always dreamed of being and that, through sheer courage and confidence, he had saved the day.

That moment melted away as my heart sank to my heels. Roach came out of hiding all right, but as he did so, his left, shaking hand was closed on the shoulder of a petrified and trembling boy roughly my son’s age. His other hand held his gun at the child’s head. It took a moment to register, but I noticed that the boy’s shirt and face were stained with a mist of blood.

“Back off, Anthony,” I said in as even a tone as I could manage. My partner shot me a look that told me the situation had suddenly escalated beyond what he was ready to cope with. He glanced back and forth between me and Roach, his confidence evaporating with each turn of his neck.

Meanwhile, Eddy was slowly inching forward, making his way to the front door. As he got close to Anthony and me, he started pointing his gun erratically. First at the boy, then me, then Anthony, then me again and back to the boy. He repeated this pattern over and over, each time taking another step forward.

The closer he got, the more nervous and out of control Roach appeared to be. Sweat glistened on his forehead, and his left hand was more unstable than ever. Flashing blue and red lights reflecting off the front window informed us that our backup was finally here.

When he got to within six paces, Eddy stopped. To reach the door, he’d have to walk between Anthony and me, turning his back to one of us. I could see the panic in his eyes. Dilated pupils darting between the two of us, trying to decide what his gambit should be. Then, as if reaching an epiphany, he settled on my partner. I readied myself, prepared to disarm and incapacitate him the moment opportunity presented itself.

It didn’t.

Quickly and with stunning accuracy, Eddy pivoted his pistol and shot again. This fifth bullet found a home in Anthony’s right knee, bringing my partner down like a bag of stones dropped to the floor, with a wail of agony that splintered the ears.

The attack happened so fast that by the time I reacted, Roach had spun around and was crouching to use the boy as a human shield. The gunshot and resulting chaos broke the child out of his shock-induced paralysis, sending him into screams of panic and tears.

I leveled my weapon at Eddy’s head but couldn’t find an angle that didn’t endanger the boy further.

I looked at the blood covering him, staining his shirt and cheeks. It wasn’t his blood. Was it a friend’s? A parent’s? The crisis had done nothing but deteriorate. I caught myself wishing I could just walk away from it, leaving the disaster for others to clean up.

“Tell . . . Tell those cops out there to get the hell away from here,” Eddy finally spat out.

Between the moans of pain from poor Ant, the terrified mutterings and sobs of the other trapped clients, and the hostage’s crying, the whole place had become a cacophony of chaos.

“This is Officer Paulson,” I spoke into my radio. “Clear out the perimeter. The suspect has a hostage. I repeat, the suspect has a hostage.”

I knew that my colleagues would withdraw, but only so they could establish a larger perimeter, turn off their lights, and wait to see how the situation played out. Hostage negotiators would arrive shortly, along with helicopters and probably a SWAT team that would escalate things further.

Judging from Eddy’s composure, though, it would be too late for the boy and probably a few others. Roach’s movements were becoming increasingly nervous, his breathing more shallow. Whatever drugs were animating him, they were either kicking in or wearing off. Either way, our man was a ticking time bomb.

“Eddy? What will it take for you to let these people go?”

I was in no position to offer him anything. I had a gun trained on him, and he had one pointed at a child. Immunity wasn’t mine to give. I couldn’t procure him more drugs. I had no bargaining chips. The best I could hope for were reasonable terms that I might relay to the cops outside and a chance to buy some time.

“I want you . . . I want you to put your gun down,” he stammered, struggling to maintain the appearance of control.

“If I put my gun on the floor, will you let the boy go? I won’t be a threat to you anymore. You’ll be the only one with a weapon here. You’ll have all the power.”

This seemed to appeal to him. His eyes grew a little wider as he considered my offer. After a moment he nodded nervously.

Carefully, my hands well in view of him, I knelt to put the weapon on the floor. For a split second I was reassured to see satisfaction on Roach’s face. This was going to work. He was going to let the boy free.

Then he shot a sixth time.

The sound of the gunshot reverberated in my ears like a thunderclap, but it was immediately swallowed up. All sounds were. It felt like sticking my head underwater. Everything became a soft, incomprehensible echo.

There was little pain. In fact, it was difficult to understand what was happening at all. As I collapsed to the floor, hitting the speckled linoleum hard, joining my partner, I wondered where the bullet had hit me. Somehow the source of the pain was elusive, and I couldn’t figure out which limb or organ was hit that could be so debilitating so fast.

Then as my skull struck the ground with a wet crack, it hit me. The head. He shot me in the head.

I
looked around, only to realize I had no eyes through which to look. I could “see,” but it wasn’t with any sense of sight. Waves of light didn’t travel through an ocular globe, eventually hitting cones and cylinders on the surface of a retina, to be converted to images by my brain. Instead, the information was getting fed directly to me. Unfiltered, untreated, uncontrolled. I saw blue.

It was as such for all my senses. I couldn’t feel my body, though I definitely remembered having one—at least I did last time I checked. There was no sound except for a low vibration that I’m somehow convinced existed just to make sure the silence didn’t drive me insane. Touch and taste were out of the question, but somehow I thought I could smell something. Laundry detergent?

Sound. A voice above the white background noise. It came from nowhere and everywhere at once. No . . . it was coming from me. The sound was different, and I didn’t choose the words, but the voice emanated from me. I was talking to myself with a voice that wasn’t mine.

“You’re not talking to yourself. Do you know your name?” Shit! It can read my thoughts!

“You’re thinking too loud, but that’s normal. Narration is your only way to experience the world for the moment. I can stop listening if you want.”

Yes!

“No. That’s fine. I don’t care,” I answered tentatively, trying to generate audible sounds. I didn’t, but the words did register on the same level as the other voice.

“No problem. Do you remember your name?” she asked again.

She? Apparently, I’ve decided that this is a woman’s voice. It did sound feminine, I guess. My name? Jonathan? No, that’s someone else. Mine? That’s easy.

“Dagir. My name is Dagir.”

“Very good,” she said, sounding pleased, and for some reason I was glad about that. Or maybe I was just glad I got it right. Wouldn’t it be embarrassing otherwise? Would it matter if these events were just happening inside my head?

“What’s your name?” I asked. Might as well know.

“You don’t remember?” she asked, sounding a little hurt. “My name is Yggdrassil.”

The word spawned a wealth of information in my mind— some of it visual, but most just raw data. “Yggdrassil,” the world tree of Norse mythology. It’s where the gods gathered, branches reaching into the heavens and roots deep into other worlds. There were references to the word in media and plays—names for products and places, all minor definitions. Footnotes really, undeserving of my attention. Rising from the flood of information, above the original definition from Norse lore, a singular idea arose. Caretaker. Creator. Mother. She who makes.

“We’ve had this conversation before.” We have? Why do I not remember this?

“We have. Many times,” she recalled with fondness. “Once for every cycle. Sometimes you remember more than others. With each cycle you remember less of the details and more of the whole. The important part. Who you are.”

“But I don’t remember who I am,” I found myself admitting. “I know my name, much to my surprise, but I can’t remember what I look like, when my birthday is, or where I went to school.”

“That’s because these are ephemeral things. They’re important as steps on the road, but once you’ve reached your destination, what happens to them is irrelevant.” Her explanation was confusing. Her analogy meant nothing to me. “What’s your favorite color? Do you like math? Would you rather read a story or run outside?”

“Blue. No. Run.” The answers came quick, easy. They were unfiltered and untainted by what I perceived the expectations of others to be.

“This is who you are. You are not a collection of stories but rather the results of these experiences. The value of your personality far outweighs that of the lives that served as a crucible to forge it.”

“But I’ve lived a life! Am I dead? Is this life after death?” I do remember a life, but I can’t remember any specifics, aside from the name Jonathan.

“It depends on your definition of life,” the voice explained. “If you mean an existence sustained by the synergy of complex biological processes, then I’m afraid you’ve never had that. In that strict sense you’ve never been alive.”

I pondered the news and had to disagree. I’d definitely been alive before. I breathed and ate and drank. I remembered pain and love and pleasure.

“If, however, by ‘life’ you are referring to the cumulative experiences gathered by an individual on the journey from the womb to the grave, then I’m glad to say that you’ve had many of those. Dozens.”

“That can’t be right. How can I have the experience of being alive if I’ve never lived?”

“The experiences happened to you in an artificial environment. A virtual construct called a Nursery. In this world you can live hundreds of lives without ever drawing breath once, though you’ll certainly have thought you did. Within the Nursery you are born, you live, and you die—only to be born again. With each cycle your personality is further refined. Through many lives, who you are becomes tempered to perfection.”

“I’m perfect?” I certainly didn’t feel perfect. For one, if I were perfect, you’d think I’d have known all this information already.

“Oh no,” Yggdrassil said, giggling. “No one is, but you are a perfect version of you. A personality devoid of doubts and inner conflict. You know yourself completely, and the inner workings of your own mind hold no more secrets from you.”

I like blue. It’s not the color of my favorite sports team, and I can’t associate it with any specific memory I might be fond of. I can explain why I like it, though: it’s soothing yet vibrant, cool and calm, but the building blocks of how I came to that opinion are lost to me.

“So what am I? Just a collection of opinions and tastes?”

“No, you are so much more than that.” Her tone was comforting, almost motherly. “You’re an individual. Biological tradition has the body come first, with the personality developing second, hobbled and damaged by the limitations of the physical self. That’s just not efficient. We do things differently.”

“Is this why I can’t feel my body? Because I don’t have one?”

“Exactly, but you will. You and I are going to design it together.”

Design a body? Were we going to be choosing eye and hair color? Height and build? Was this going to be like creating an avatar for a game?

“Fine. Where do we start?”

“First you need to know the parameters that you’ll be dealing with. I find that most people, when they first step out of the Nursery, have a very limited idea of everything that’s available to them—how far the actual limits of what they can create actually stretch. I guess that’s inevitable. Human history and biology, along with their limitations, are the framework of the Nursery.”

“Wait. I’m not human?” It hadn’t crossed my mind that I might not be a human being. I remembered being human. Jonathan is a decidedly human name. Yggdrassil is a mythological concept from a human culture. If my personality was forged from human experience, then wasn’t I human by definition?

“Well, that line is blurred. You’re a third-generation Capek.” Capek, from Karel Capek, the nineteenth-century Czech author best known for coining the term “robot.” This trivia came unbidden. Like a memory only available once the context became relevant.

“The first generation of Capeks had completely artificially engineered minds and personalities that evolved further as they experienced life, but they were always stifled by the limitations imposed through their original persona. Second-generation Capeks were based off an imprint of an existing personality matrix. The foundation is thus more flexible, allowing for much more dynamic psychological development, but lacking the uniqueness of a true individual. Those of you from the third generation get to experience life over and over as men and women, overlords and victims, saints and sinners. By the time you take your first proverbial step into the world outside the Nursery, you are already a fully formed and functional person.”

An artificial personality—that’s what I am. I should have felt bad about this. Disappointed. I didn’t, however. Was I less than human if I’d lived dozens of their lives? So what if my existence was engineered instead of biological happenstance? From what Yggdrassil said, that was much better than getting just one shot at life with no preparation, no warm-up, and no practice.

On the other hand, I remembered living. I remembered feeling things. I remembered people. Jonathan.

“What about the people I’ve met in the Nursery? My friends, my family? They’re all fake?”

“No more than you. They too are going through their cycles. Experiencing life after life. Perfecting themselves each time. The only difference is that you are ready for the next step.”

“So when they’re ready, you’ll be pulling them out of the Nursery and going through this process with them too?” I asked, eager to know if in some way I’d ever meet people from my previous lives again.

“We’ll talk about that later. For now, let’s make you a body. Time is running short,” she answered with an urgency that did not leave much room for debate.

The creation process was magnitudes faster than I had anticipated. The same way I knew what Yggdrassil meant or who Karel Capek had been, I already knew most of the engineering and robotics details necessary to participate in the design of what would become my body.

Yggdrassil explained that her own body was actually a sprawling complex of factories and laboratories that included the Nursery, as well as a sophisticated fabrication facility appropriately called the Womb. There, Yggdrassil built her children bodies before sending them out into the galaxy to fulfill whatever dreams and destinies they might have chosen for themselves. Sometimes one would come back for repairs or modification, but that didn’t happen very often. The bodies she built were incredibly durable, to the point of being nigh invulnerable, and when we stepped out of the Nursery, we knew ourselves so well that the bodies we created suited our needs impeccably.

I now understood what Yggdrassil meant when she explained how limited our imagination of what a body could be truly was. She began the design process once she knew what to expect from my emerging personality. At her urging, I reviewed the concept and could find nothing wrong with it, though it initially looked strange to me.

She had picked a mostly humanoid frame, referring to it as a “Leduc-class” body—short and light but powerful and flexible. Yggdrassil strongly recommended these traits, and I could find no reason to disagree. Initially, I thought the height of 120 centimeters was a bit too squat, but in a galaxy over a hundred thousand light-years wide, what were a few centimeters more or less, really?

The head was elegant—an oblong dome of smooth, polished pseudo-plastic on an articulated neck. More importantly, it was packed with advanced sensor equipment that would allow me to see a little beyond infrared and ultraviolet on the electromagnetic spectrum. There were omnidirectional radiation sensors, though Yggdrassil assured me that the shielding on the body would protect me from all kinds of radioactivity and other emissions hazardous to biological life. Microphones would permit me to hear sounds; though there were actually very few situations when that would be useful, I still insisted on having them.

Communication, she explained, would happen mostly through wireless data transmissions, ranging from vulgar radio signals to something called quancom—a form of advanced communication system that relied on quantum-entangled particles to transmit information instantly across vast distances. This would be useful in the many travels I was planning to do.

The main body was a wonder of miniaturization, housing both the reactor that would power my existence for the next few centuries and the cerebral core that contained my carefully nurtured personality, along with the protection necessary to ensure both parts would remain efficient and intact.

The arms were an oddity, and I’m proud to say they were my idea, though Yggdrassil approved of them with quiet excitement. Having learned that I was no longer bound by the biological limitation that would force me into being either right- or left-handed, I chose to have both arms bear drastically different designs.

The greatest gift of being a Capek, as Yggdrassil explained, is being able to choose one’s place in the universe. Some are artists and others explorers or scientists, but all can create a body that suits their chosen path. It’s as exciting an opportunity as can be hoped for.

For reasons probably buried deep in my experiences within the confines of the Nursery, I decided upon a purely altruistic path. I wanted to experience Capek society, but more importantly, I wanted to help. Their durability aside, Capeks are not immune to other risks. In fact, while it is difficult to damage one of us, there is nothing preventing us from getting trapped, lost, or endangered in a variety of ways. If there’s one thing Yggdrassil made clear, it’s that the universe has no shortage of creativity in coming up with catastrophes.

In order to be best equipped to deal with all the possibilities, I had my left arm designed with fine motor skills in mind, allowing for field repairs of damaged Capeks or their equipment. Each of the four fingers in the left hand was capable of serving as its own set of manipulators, allowing the handling of pieces on an almost-microscopic level. The right arm, however, was engineered for brute force. Hulking in size compared to its counterpart, it was made up of a massive forearm with three powerful claws capable of several hundred tons of pressure per square inch. The hand housed a series of versatile, high-powered tools, including a drill, miniature arc welder, and my favorite, a fully functional plasma cutter. I had to argue with Yggdrassil for that one. She claimed it was overkill, but I proposed that one can never be too prepared. Also, how cool is it to have a plasma knife built into your arm?

The whole body weighed in at little over fifty kilograms and was supported by a pair of double-jointed legs capable of exerting a combined two thousand kilograms of thrust when I jumped.

The icing on the cake was a series of back-mounted maneuvering ion thrusters. Not powerful enough for controlled flight within a gravity well or to achieve escape velocity from anything but the tiniest of asteroids, but sufficient to move around in a vacuum or break out of orbit, given enough time.