“Well at least you got out of the office, that’s better than my day.”
“Yeah maybe, if I didn’t have my own stack of paperwork. Did you see what I brought in?”
“No. What did you get?”
She leaned against his door frame and smiled. “It’s not a kid. I found some type of adult android. Check it out before you leave. I had them put it in your workshop.”
“An adult? What was it doing in the mountains?”
“I don’t know, but it’s in bad shape. It looks as though it’s about thirty years old or so. Most of the living tissue is gone, but I bet you could get it going again. Maybe it’s an old butler android.”
James pushed his chair back and stood up. “It could be something from the Mountain Home Air Force base. Maybe they lost one.”
“I don’t know, I’m sure you’ll figure it out. You can tell me in the morning.”
“You’ve got me interested now. I think I’ll swing by there.”
“See you tomorrow.”
He waved as Tamara disappeared down the hall. He grabbed his coat and kicked his door shut. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly seven in the evening. His wife would have supper ready. He really wanted to see that android. He made a mental note to come back and lock his office, but his mind crumpled the note and threw it away not five steps from the door.
The other offices were already locked for the night. It seemed any more he was always the last one out. It didn’t bother him, this place felt as much as home to him as his real one. Some people thought it a bit creepy at night, but not him. He knew these halls almost intimately. There weren’t any ghosts here, but if there were they probably knew him all too well.
He found Tamara’s present on his workbench. It smelled something terrible. He covered his mouth as he approached. “Well what do we have here?”
It took him a minute to determine that the thing’s gender was male. Sometimes if you knew the gender it gave you a clue as to the android’s function. There were few roles for adult androids. All of its hair had fallen out, and its flesh stretched across its skull like a mummified cadaver.
James flipped it over, looking for the access panel. There were no tell-tale signs, only scar tissue down the spinal column. “How the heck do you open? Somebody wanted to hide their handiwork, didn’t they?”
The android took a single rasping breath as he searched. He ignored it. Sometimes androids never fully died. He’d seen broken children live for almost a decade with their power supplies keeping them alive long after their bodies had failed. Androids were such amazing things, the technology still fascinated him. It didn’t startle him in the least that this one still clung to life.
Time had not been kind to it. A normal android had synthetic muscle and skin tissue that did not deteriorate or rot. A ‘dead’ kid would sit in a landfill for generations. They were resistant to both biodegradation and the photedegradation that effected plastics. After all, you couldn’t have your kid showing signs of sun damage.
He pulled out his android marker and made a swipe across the back of its hand. He shook his head as it turned a dark blue. A light blue meant living tissue, black meant android. So what did this mean? Had somebody built a better flesh?
There had to be some type of access to the android’s power cells without cutting it open, but he couldn’t find it. That left the Dr. Frankenstein method. He grabbed his cell charger and attached the paddle electrodes to the android’s chest, a defibrillator for artificial life. Instead of a brief shock, it delivered continuous electricity. As James suspected, his monitor detected the android’s cells. Once it read that it had a full charge, he disconnected the electrodes and waited.
Its breathing regulated to something more akin to a sleeping state, but otherwise it didn’t budge. Tomorrow he’d have to try a few other things to get it to awaken. He might even have to cut it open. He couldn’t stay much later though or he’d never hear the end of it from his wife. He didn’t see it turn its head to watch him leave.
16
Gus Baskin walked down the hallway of Kidsmith. The building only utilized emergency lighting after dark, giving the place an abandoned eerie feel. Few people stuck around after five and the management no later than seven. Not that long ago the building operated around the clock. Back then Gus hadn’t worked in security. He’d worked in assembly.
The parts would come in from all over the world, wherever Kidsmith could get the best prices. Gus worked on the skeleton, the metal foundation of the children. The difficult stuff, the skin and the circulatory system and a whole host of other complex biological stuff, all of that happened in the labs upstairs. They used to tell them to treat each one as a life, but after a while all you could see was the machine. The skeleton, brain, internal organs, and central nervous system, that was all mechanical. At one time the entire android had been metal and plastic. But the technology had such a high demand, and so much money poured into it that they became more and more realistic, until they were developing synthetic tissue and blood to make robots that passed entirely for human. People wanted as real of a kid as money could buy.
They were amazingly clean to work on too. All of the messy biological stuff was carefully contained. You could open them up and work on all of the tech components without ever getting your hands dirty.
He missed it, but at least Kidsmith kept him employed. Many of his friends were laid off, had to find nine to five jobs somewhere else. He sometimes pined for the good ol’ days when the benefits had been exceptional. They’d even had a retirement plan, though the company had reabsorbed it as the demand plummeted. Nobody retired anyway.
He whistled while he patrolled the hallways, it made the place feel less creepy. Reclamation had brought in a few broken things that he needed to keep an eye on; two abandoned children and an old adult android.
He had to feed the children. It only reaffirmed the wasteful nature of the country, creating robots that needed to eat and shit. Resources that could be used for more import things went to giving people that ‘real child’ experience. In all the time that he’d worked for Kidsmith he’d never had the urge to get one of his own. Maybe it had to do with the fact that he knew what they looked like under their skin. You couldn’t make something feel real if every time you looked at it you detected the metal.
Both kids were boys and were shoved into rooms barely larger than closets, but with thick metal doors. The first stared at him sullenly as he placed the soup on the table. “If you so much as move I’ll put you down, got it?”
If the kid tried to run past him, he was empowered to stop the kid in any way possible. His metal flashlight had only cracked two robot skulls in his entire career, and Kidsmith hadn’t even bothered to investigate if his use of force had been necessary. After years of being so careful with the kids it felt liberating to break one.
Still, he took his job seriously. He would never crack any skulls unless absolutely necessary. But he wouldn’t hesitate if the kid tried anything. They so rarely did.
The boy watched his every move. He didn’t turn his back on the kid as he backed out, relocking the door. He shuddered involuntarily. “Damn kid gives me the creeps,” he muttered. They weren’t supposed to be programmed with such hostile emotions. Somebody had done a number on that one.
Gus took another bowl to the next room. This boy slept on the cot and didn’t budge as he set the bowl down. He didn’t get too close. You could never tell what the children planned. They could fake sleep. The boy’s face seemed permanently touched by sadness that even the peace of sleep couldn’t erase. Some kids responded to their treatment like the first boy, fostering resentment, others responded like this one. Nobody told him the children’s stories, and he didn’t want to know. Robots or not, there were a lot of creepers out there that had their own ideas of what children were good for, and they’d sold to them all. People didn’t need background checks for toys.