Franken Steinberg stood by the bus, recharging as Olympia busied herself with Blastite. Jump-leads connected his neck-bolts with the generator. Kochineel monitored, triple-belled cap nodding over the dials. Juice flowed into the capacitators under Franken's clavicles. He could function for a day on less than five cents' worth of electricity.
Considering Canyon de Chelly, Franken found himself questioning the dictum that nature was random and chaotic. The column was so contrived, so perfect that, like his own mainly mechanical body, it bespoke the existence of a creator.
It might be God's colophon, a declaration of copyright and ownership.
The thought was surplus to the cybermind. He made an effort to burn it from his graymass. When his meatmind consciousness transferred to a more efficient storage vessel, unfruitful byways would be shut off. He longed to achieve true machine state.
He had abraded the GenTech logo from his plaskin face but the symbols persisted inside, a sub-microscopic rash on the robo-bits scattered through his altered body. Retaining memory of his half-life before BioDiv got to work on him, he did not (like more superstitious cyborgs) regard Dr Zarathustra as a God. He had been created equal with meatkind; GenTech BioDiv, for its own reasons, helped him evolve towards perfection.
Towards perfection. That was the path of the 'bots.
He was not personally involved in Olympia's special project, but he observed her preparations with interest and admiration. Olympia was a good machine, if overinclined to special effects. Having run calculations through the chipped portion of her graymass, she had determined the exact charge necessary to fell the pillar. Flitting around the pillar on her points, she chattered instructions to Pinocchiocchio, who hulked along after her like a drone, placing the Blastite as ordered.
Olympia hated inefficiency and freaks of nature. It was not enough that meatfolks become machine, the Earth must be covered over with plastic and durium. Gaia, the sentimental personification of the living planet, must become a cyborg, in symbiosis with its machines. That was how machinekind should greet the millennium.
This current demolition was undertaken aesthetically. The cybermind could create art. It was empirically provable.
Robbie the Robotman and Hymie the Android knelt facing each other over an imaginary chessboard, indicating moves.
Their chess programs were so advanced no game could progress beyond three moves without one or the other conceding that stalemate was inevitable. Andromeda watched, amazonian body entirely covered by black cloth, ironically like a good Moslem girl. She laid her marble-white hand on Robbie's shoulder, trying to follow the game with only her unaugmented meatmind.
Darkness gathered as the sun slipped below the horizon. Franken blinked and his eyes infrareddened. Bored, he accessed the time code. LED numbers gave him a time check, flashing alternates in successive population centres. A master reading told him his eyes had been functional for four years, two months, three weeks, six days, nine hours, ten minutes and forty-eight seconds. He watched seconds tick off towards the expiry of his five-year warranty, whereupon he would be advised to seek an upgrade. It was important that the cybermind remain state of the art.
That meant going back to BioDiv. Eventually the 'bots would have to resubmit to Zarathustra. There were independents – Simon Threadneedle, most obviously – but only GenTech had the R&D capital. Between meat and metal was the barrier of money.
In the bus, Rosie the Maid and Talos the Bronze Giant made crackling love, wires stretched between plugboards, currents passing between them in rhythmic flow. Most 'bots eschewed meat sex. Their pleasure sensors were adapted to capabilities beyond human organs.
Olympia returned, a grin obvious under the black scarves that wrapped her head. Her crystal chest sparkled.
"At dawn, as the sun rises, we shall detonate."
"That is nice, dear."
She did a few steps, balancing perfectly. Kochineel inclined his sad clown's face and watched her, active eyes intent. Penny-sized red highlights were painted on his china cheeks and blue-diamond tears etched under his eyes. He never spoke; his mouth was a cupid's bow around a tiny inlet.
"Then, we should give thought to the Grand Canyon," Olympia continued. "Concrete would be impractical, but fast-expanding synthetics are achieving spectacular results. At the current progress rate, the operation will be feasable within two annos. Our gift to the 21st century shall be to smooth over that nasty crack and restore proper featurelessness to the globe."
"You still have blood on your face, dear. Organic matter from this morning."
Olympia cringed disgust and wiped her forehead with the heel of her hand. Most of her skin was playtex but she had yet to replace her hands or face. Inside, as her superb balance demonstrated, she was all doodads and robo-bits.
Franken was furthest along the road to complete mechanisation. Only his brain and a few unaugmented bones were original to him. When it became possible to download the information that constituted consciousness into silicon, he would willingly abandon physical graymass. He scorned the Donovan Treatment: vulgar brains brooding in bottles had little in common with his improved, augmented, demonstrably superior form.
At the other extreme was Andromeda, whose uncannily mobile prosthetic hand barely qualified her for the Knock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots. When funds were amassed, she would have more alterations. Her human body, now in its brief peak of perfection, would customise superbly.
Andromeda walked over, graceful as a panther. She had taken a Pentathlon Gold for the Pan-Islamic Federation at the St Petersburg Olympics in '92, but – a Greek Christian and a persecuted minority within the PIF – had defected. She had been through steroids and longevity programmes, and concluded cyberneticisation was the way to preserve and enhance herself against time.
Olympia watched Andromeda, her body language easy to read. Contempt, jealousy, fear, dislike. Olympia strangely retained much of her meatmind. Eventually, she believed, such irritants would cease to be a part of the cybermind.
Andromeda had sought out the Knock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, crushing her own meathand to demonstrate commitment. Dr Threadneedle, contracted for the job, was enthusiastic about the possibilities of perfecting the woman. Her hand benefited, like Kochineel's body, from developments in ceramics. It was imitation marble. She would ultimately be a goddess of living stone.
When remodelling was complete, Andromeda would be a better machine than Olympia. There was static between the cyberwomen. Now, Olympia could best Andromeda at any contest of skill or strength; but Andromeda's mentality eventually would prevail. Her graymass was closer to the cybermind than Olympia's part-silicon brain. Trained from infancy to treat meat as if it were durium, she was programmed as a Gold Medal winner.
Andromeda looked up at Canyon de Chelly.
"It is very beautiful," she said. "In this light, almost magical."
"Tchah," Olympia spat. "You have too much meat in you, madame. Sentimental juices squirt from your heart, poisoning your mind …"
Olympia's heart had been her first replacement. A necessity; the meat organ was defective at birth. That had taught her not to trust nature, and put faith in the machine.
"Meat is weak," she told Andromeda. "That damfool pilgrim this afternoon. He was pure meat. Look how he burst when squashed. Like a bug."
Olympia was being unkind.
"I would wager your warranty does not cover the treatment you gave that Josephite," Franken told her. "If Pinocchiocchio drove the bus over your chest, your components would fail as surely as the meat of that poor, strange man."
Franken was perturbed by the way the Josephite had accepted his death. As if he were certain of a future.