The sobs broke through my chest before I even realised they were building. I screamed a throat-rending yell that bounced off the quarry walls and repeated itself until it diminished to nothing. I grabbed a rock and flung it at the distant skyscrapers, my rage finally finding an outlet in their failure.
I felt a little better, but I realised then that I needed to do more than extra paper rounds. I needed to feel I was contributing something useful. Daddy’s experts were still out there somewhere, scattered into more austere professions, but they were no use without the mammoth funds. Saving up enough was going to take years. So be it. I would put those years to good use.
By the time I was sixteen, my shelves were piled with physics textbooks and robotics manuals. Myra’s bedroom walls were covered in posters of bare-chested hunks I’d never heard of because I had my nose in New Scientist while she was reading Seventeen. I had a picture of Hiroshi Ishiguro above my bed.
“You fancy that guy?” Myra asked one day.
I rolled my eyes in frustration. “I don’t fancy him, Myra. I admire him. He was a robotics pioneer who built one of the first interactive humanoid robots.”
She looked around my room with an expression of disdain. “You seriously need to get out more.”
That was the day I realised I’d outgrown her friendship. I sat under the stairs with Daddy that evening, feeling closer to him than I did to any of my peers. I pulled his arm around me and told him what Myra had said. He listened in stoic silence as always. I kissed him on the cheek and vowed he’d always be more important to me than silly nail-varnish-wearing girls.
By the time I was eighteen, the economy was slowly recovering. Food bank queues were ever shorter, councils were repairing roads again, and most importantly of all, I’d earned a scholarship to Cambridge. I was ecstatic. By now Mum and I had scraped together a few thousand, but still nowhere near enough to have Daddy fixed. Without a scholarship, there was no way I could have gone to university.
I made Mum promise to keep Daddy free of cobwebs and dust while I was away.
By the time I was twenty-three, I was embarking on a Master’s degree in computational neuroscience and cognitive robotics. The depression had stunted the development of android technology, so they were still rare and expensive. The lab had one as a subject for study, but its consciousness was entirely artificial.
I was examining its servomotors late one afternoon. One of my fellow students, Raz, was working on something else two benches over. He stopped to watch me.
“Did you know Edinburgh had an uploaded consciousness model?” he asked. “I’d sell my gran to get my hands on one of those.”
“What happened to it?” I tried to sound casual.
“I dunno.” He flicked dark hair out of his eyes. “Somebody said it got tired of being a lab rat and walked out, but I heard that was just a stupid rumour. It’s not like they have human rights!” He seemed to find this funny.
Until then, I’d been considering the idea of bringing Daddy here. There were enough experts at the university to mend him, possibly at reduced cost, but I realised he would become a coveted object for study. I couldn’t do that to him.
I lowered my head, got on with my work, and politely ignored Raz for the rest of the semester. I was the only Cambridge postgrad who had ever seen an android with uploaded human consciousness, and I never mentioned it to anyone. Daddy wasn’t an android to me. He was my dad, and I missed him terribly.
I studied, and learned, and worked a waitressing job in my spare time. I deposited all but my most basic expenses into the savings account I shared with Mum. For Daddy.
I built my first artificially intelligent model for my dissertation. I’d built smaller robots before; I’d been building them since I was fifteen, but this was the first machine I’d built that could learn and think for itself. I modelled its brain on that of a human toddler, with all the same capacity for growth. I wanted to see how long it took to develop the mental skills of a human adult.
I graduated with honours and received a commendation from the university.
The pioneering research into transferring human consciousness had all but ground to a halt when its funding dried up. But now that the recession was fading, there were new companies eager to invest in up-and-coming technology, and several were vying to be the first to patent prosthetic bodies for living consciousness. Less than a year into my doctorate, I was approached by a headhunter.
“We’d love to have you on board, Miss Landry.”
They would fund my doctorate if I agreed to carry out research on their behalf. It was the foot in the door I’d been dreaming of.
The working atmosphere in the lab was a strange one. We were fellows, all sharing the same passions and goals, relating to one another in ways we couldn’t with others in our daily lives. Yet we were also rivals, competing for that first ground-breaking discovery or technological advancement. The harsh competition meant we closely guarded our discoveries, kept our advancements under wraps, and took every advantage ruthlessly. It was the only way to get ahead.
My closest competitor was a guy named Mark. He seemed decent, but I’d never got close enough to really know him. As the two highest academic achievers and the two most likely to hit a breakthrough, we held each other in mutual respect but kept our distance. Another lab partner, Susie, pulled me up on it one day.
“Do you really have to minimise your computer files every time Mark walks past?”
“Don’t you?” I asked.
“No!” Her tone suggested I was being ridiculous. “I’m not about to let him rifle through my notes, but a glance at my screen won’t tell him anything.”
“Don’t be so sure,” I muttered. “You know he only keeps paper notes in case anyone hacks his system, right? He takes the damned things everywhere with him.”
“So because he’s paranoid, you have to be too?”
“I wouldn’t call protecting my research ‘paranoia’. The guy’s practically a genius, Suse. He doesn’t need any help from the likes of us.”
She laughed. “So said the pot to the kettle…”
I rolled my eyes at her. In truth, we all had our own methods of protecting our work. We shared trivia. We kept our trump cards close to our chests.
Mum was visiting her sister in Scotland. I went to see Daddy for the first time in weeks. He gazed through me when I opened the cupboard and crouched down in front of him.
“Come on, Daddy. It’s time.”
His joints creaked as I shifted him forward. I’d often wondered how Mum had managed to get him in here. His frame was reinforced aluminium, but he still weighed about the same as an average-sized man. He was a dead weight as I dragged him out of the cupboard that had been his home for the past fourteen years. I winced an apology when his head bumped the floor. I heard a tear as his trouser leg caught on an exposed nail. I was breathing hard before I’d got him halfway down the hall.