I saw the ego in her eyes, the pride in what she had accomplished, and took advantage of it. “A new era? What does that mean?”
The elder Casad smiled. “It means freedom! Freedom to travel beyond the limits of our solar system!”
Sasha got it first, confirming that she hadn’t known the reason behind her mission, and cementing my affection for her. “Beyond our solar system? A star drive?”
Her mother nodded. “Yes. It will be known as the Casad Drive, and it will carry millions, even billions of human beings to distant stars. “Imagine,” she said, momentarily caught up in a glory of her own making, “a new beginning! A breakthrough so important, so liberating, that it will change the course of history. And I made it happen!”
The way Dr. Casad said it called for applause, and judging from her expression, I think she actually heard it thunder across a thousand years of immortality.
But the rest of us were silent. Shasha looked uncomfortable. The guards shuffled their feet. Metal pinged in response to a temperature fluctuation. Finally, after what seemed like minutes, but was actually seconds, the scientist’s eyes rolled into focus and she returned from fantasy land. Her words were precise and to the point. “Take him to Lab 16. Tell Sanchez to wire him up. I’ll be along in fifteen minutes or so.”
Sasha tried to move in my direction, but her mother grabbed an arm. Crewcut nudged me towards the door, and there seemed to be little point in resisting. What with zappers on my wrists and four able-bodied guards, there was no chance of escape.
That being the case, I tried to come up with a suitably nonchalant response and failed. The four-armed android didn’t even bother to look up as they marched me down the hall. I heard the same thumping I’d heard before, saw light leak through plastifiber walls, and was ordered down a side corridor. The air smelled of ozone. An equipment-laden autocart whirred by. I assumed these were among the last sounds, sights, and smells that I would experience. Everything seemed hyper-real, the way it always does when adrenaline pours into the bloodstream and death looms near.
A door marked “Lab 16” appeared in front of me, sensed my presence, and slid open. A worried-looking lab tech hurried forward. She wore a severe pageboy, no jewelry, and an immaculate lab coat. An I.D. badge hung from her breast pocket and identified her as Carla Sanchez. She gave me the same sort of look a butcher gives a side of beef and pointed over her shoulder. “Place him on the table and strap him down.”
The table looked like the kind you find in well-equipped operating rooms. It was backed by a wall full of vid screens and banks of computer equipment. The autosurgeon stood crouched over the table. Its arms whirred as servos were tested and found to be in working order.
I remembered the dreams that weren’t dreams and tried to escape. The zappers clamped down on my wrists and pain lanced through my nervous system. I screamed and kept on screaming as the guards lifted me onto the table, applied the straps, and removed the zappers. The pain disappeared and left me sobbing for breath.
Sanchez appeared between me and the ceiling, waved a scanner in front of my eyes, and squinted at the reading. She smelled of soap, and the fragrance remained even after she had disappeared. I liked the smell, even though I knew it was stupid, and marveled at how the male part of me never quit. I whimpered pitifully and nobody came.
Things got complicated after that. More people entered the room. Needles entered my veins, wires were hooked to various parts of my anatomy, and people talked as though I wasn’t there. Their voices seemed to float on an ocean of drug-induced happiness.
“Is this the one?”
“Yup, that’s him.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah.”
“What happens next?”
“The doc comes, we pump him dry, and break for lunch.”
“Just like that.”
“You got a better idea?”
“No.”
“Then shut the hell up and align this equipment. One glitch, one error, and everyone pays.”
There was more of the same, but I lost interest and drifted away. That’s where I was when I heard someone shout, heard the steady thump, thump, thump of an automatic flechette gun, and felt something heavy land on my chest. It smelled of soap.
Then I heard someone call my name, struggled to respond, and discovered that I couldn’t. I heard more thumping as someone fired back. A man yelled, “Hit the switch! Start the transfer!” and data rose around me like a suffocating tide. Words, images, and numbers filled my throat, mouth, nose, and ears. And then, just when I seemed certain to drown in a flood of information, something powerful started to suck the data away, pulling me along with it. I fought the sensation for a while, determined to save what remained of my personhood, but the effort was pointless. The suction was too powerful for me to resist. I let go and was removed from my body.
19
“Unauthorized use of this equipment can result in permanent brain damage.”
A warning sticker posted on the control panel in Lab 16
Someone flicked a switch, and I came into existence. I opened my eyes. Nothing. I moved an arm. Nothing. I attempted to speak. Nothing. Words arrived from somewhere and echoed slowly through my brain. “Hi-i-i-i-i boss-s-s-s-s! Order-r-r-r-r the-e-e-e-e computer-r-r-r-r to-o-o-o-o provide-d-d-d-d an-n-n-n-n interface-s-s-s-s.”
The voice was gender-neutral and could have belonged to anyone, except for one thing: Joy was the only person in the solar system that called me “boss.” I had formed the words in my mind and was about to speak them through a nonexistent mouth when the computer obeyed. A fuzzy-looking picture appeared. It was shaped like a rectangle. I thought the word “focus,” and the view became crystal clear. I was looking down from the corner of a large room. I saw an autosurgeon, an operating table, and a body. My body, or what had been my body, until the techies sucked it dry. Wires ran into and around it like worms feeding on a corpse.
I screamed. The computer took the thought and turned it into a high-pitched squeal. There were ten or fifteen people in the room. They winced and covered their ears.
A feeling of warmth and happiness flooded around me. A giggle came out of nowhere and rippled through my mind. “Joy?”
Her voice seemed closer now, and the echo had disappeared. “Hi, boss. Sorry about that…it took a moment to find you. This computer has an incredible amount of memory. They stashed you in a file called “‘Project Freedom.’”
I was happy, confused, and worried all at the same time. “I’m in a computer file? Then where are you?”
Joy giggled. “Pan right and you can see my body. I left my operating system out there…but most of my personality program is here with you.”
I thought the words “pan right,” and the picture moved accordingly. A camera! I was looking through one of the many security cameras placed throughout the habitat. Joy appeared. It seemed as if she was too far away. The camera zoomed in. I ordered it to stop and saw that she was naked again. Pieces of duct tape still clung to her arms and legs. Always dramatic, the diminutive android had struck a pose prior to sticking her finger into an interface socket. “There you are…showing off as usual. Thanks for riding to the rescue. But why would a Protech computer obey my commands?”
Joy laughed. The sound had a wonderful bubbly quality that made me want to smile. “Because I told it to… that’s why.”
I was still marveling at the gift Wamba had given me when a voice came from what seemed like a thousand miles away. “Max-x-x-x-x? Can-n-n-n-n you-u-u-u-u hear-r-r-r-r me-e-e-e-e?”
I wished the echo away and wondered if there were other cameras besides the one I was looking through. The thought was still in the process of being born when my vision was routed through three additional lenses in the lab, out into the hall, and into spaces I hadn’t seen before. I ordered the computer to return my vision to the lab. It took conscious effort to ignore my own circumstances and focus on the outside world.