Hercules III - 5. Chapter 5

Hercules III

Chapter 5

The Cat

“I wish he wouldn’t scream so much,” Carlos said as he opened the door to the apartment he shared with Stefan. “He’s giving me a headache.”

“You know the bots enjoy doing it”, Stefan said, shutting the door and locking it. He thought for a moment until all of the privacy and security seals locked in place around the door, knowing that bots usually came in through an outside wall, which quite possibly the bots hadn’t noticed was also protected with an interlocking mesh of intrusion sensors. “They’ll continue making him scream until his brain is formed to their requirements. What I don’t want is being a part of it tomorrow. So, you might as well try to get some sleep; at least one of us should be awake during the final processing.”

“I wonder if the bots would let us have him,” Carlos said. “He could help us around here. Of course, we’ll have to have real food around here to feed him.”

“What!” Stefan exclaimed. “The bots won’t let us keep him. We work in Analytics.”

“What does that have to do with it?” Carlos asked. “It’s not like we’ll take him to our work center; he can stay here while we’re at work. Of course, we’ll have to have the bots add a room so he’ll have someplace to sleep. We’d probably have to put a lock on his door so he won’t escape while we’re working. The bots will worry if they see him wandering around outside without at least an electronic leash.”

“You’ve got it all figured out, except I’m not volunteering to this crazy idea of yours,” Stefan said. “Besides, it’ll take a month to get a room added. Where will he sleep until then?”

“We could move to a two bedroom apartment,” Carlos said. “There are at least two Analytics’ apartments empty right now; it won’t hurt us to ask. After all, we’ve been with the bots for six years. I’m sure they’ll let us keep him.”

“I doubt it,” Stefan said. “Bots don’t think like humans, especially here.”

“No, the bots aren’t the same here,” Carlos privately thought. There was no guarantee this crazy idea might work. There had to be some way to get over the fact Jeblee’s brain, mind and, quite possibly his body too, were being reconfigured, most likely into something resembling a bot. Carlos couldn’t understand why the bots hadn’t just ejected the criminal from the ship; that was the usual sentence for inciting revolt. All he had to do tonight and next morning was to come up with a viable way of getting Jeblee down to their apartment. He went over and sat on his bed for a moment before lying down hoping his subconscious was going to help while he slept.

Sleep failed in the full light of the room; normally, dream time was spent reenergizing their bodies as the chloroplasts absorbed energy from all the grow bulbs set into the ceiling and around the walls. He must have slept for some parts of the night because when he got up to use the toilet Stefan was asleep on his bed. After lying back down sleep still apparently eluded him, but he remembered Stefan getting up to use the toilet around oh one fifty. When he looked at the clock on the wall, it was nearly time to get up and have a shower for their meeting with the supervisory bots at the Institute of Justice. He couldn’t remember if he had dreamt or not because his mind was blank as if someone had come in their bedroom sometime in the night and stole his dreams.

“You look like someone who needs a little more sleep,” Stefan said when Carlos came out of the bathroom. “I guess I’d better get ready, too. Are you still hoping the bots will give you Jeblee?”

“I’ll ask, that’s the least I can do,” Carlos said as he lay down on his bed. “I know it is highly unlikely the bots will give me Jeblee simply because they don’t like humans. I just hope they haven’t altered his physical appearance to something unhuman. I won’t ask if they changed him into a bot, even if he’s something lower than a custodian.”

“What if they’ve changed him into some kind of joke animal for picking fun at humans?” Stefan asked. “It might be nice to have a semiliterate cat around here, but if they do change him that dramatically, he can’t be kept here.”

“Any animal is okay as long as it isn’t a leopard,” Carlos said. “Go on and get your shower so we can get there in time. Our appointment is oh eight seventy-five and you know how the bots prefer starting at the appointed time.”

********

The Institute of Justice was located next to the Hall of Justice in a ramshackle clump of dusty military barracks for what purpose Carlos, or Stefan, had no idea. He looked at the address on the summons and was surprised it matched their location. What he knew of bots didn’t include any facility looking like this. Bots were sticklers for tidiness. Green paint on the front door was faded and peeling almost as bad as the white clapboards around it. Even though this wasn’t on their itinerary, they stopped to watch a bot scraping the old paint. Its head turned toward them and asked if they needed help; while his hands continued to work on the door.

“We have an appointment,” Stefan said.

“You are the two greenies we’re expecting,” the bot said with a hint of disgust. “The entrance is temporarily around the corner, first entry on your left. I will announce your imminent arrival.”

“Thank you,” Carlos said, but the bot had turned his head around facing the door.

“Come on, Carlos. You know very well he isn’t paying any attention to us,” Stefan said. “It’s nearly time for our appointment.”

The door they were seeking opened to an elevator vestibule. The car was waiting patiently for its next passengers. Carlos nudged Stefan to make him go first. One never knew how bots might react to two greenies.

In a slightly metallic voice the elevator said, “You are expected. Your destination was preprogrammed.”

“I figured as much,” Stefan said.

“Please choose your seat,” the elevator said, as two seats came out of the back wall.

After the boys sat down, the door closed and they felt an immediate downward movement. This was followed by a sensation of moving to their left and followed by another downward movement. The doors opened to a room that had a definite clinical appearance with its bright lights and equipment whose purpose neither boy could imagine. There were bots everywhere moving about performing their assigned tasks.

On a stool opposite the elevator door sat the very much reduced and naked body of Jeblee. There were nine metal rods penetrating his skull. Wires of different colors were attached to the end of each rod and terminated in a small metallic box on a table next to him. Carlos sent pulses into Jeblee’s head trying everything he knew about the workings of the brain. Unfortunately, he couldn’t find anything human remaining from the bots attempts to alter Jeblee’s brain to their specifications; or, he surmised, the bots destroyed the criminal’s mental capabilities to give the bots a raw container to mold into whatever they desired; maybe that was to be today’s work.

“Did you find anything?” Stefan asked.

“No, there’s nothing left of his mind,” Carlos said. “I guess we’re supposed to give him artificial memories. We shouldn’t have too much trouble since it is now very similar to open fertile ground on a farm. There is the chance the remaining memories are so disguised we won’t encounter them until we start stitching the neurons back together in some, as yet, unknown pattern. With the two of us working on him we shouldn’t have too much trouble.”

“You’re here! Some of us thought you might not come today,” a bot said loudly from down the hallway. He was hurrying toward them a couple of centimeters off the floor. He stopped near them and looked menacing even though he didn’t have a face. Actually, all bots of the higher orders, like Mark, could create a face out of the silvery liquid metal that covered most of the front of their heads; maybe this bot didn’t have that capability.

“We thought the summons was official,” Stefan said. “We thought it had to do with our being here for over six years. Plus, Carlos thought he might ask whoever is in charge if it might be possible for us to take Jeblee home with us once we restore his mental capabilities.”

“I thought we might ask, you and the other bots, if that was possible,” Carlos said. “We were thinking more along the lines of a semiliterate cat; though I was more interested in a dog. I know they are not qualified for habitat residence, but I thought we could ask.”

“One of our team was able to hear your earlier conversation and duly reported your desires,” the bot said. “Luckily, we are willing to alter the criminal’s physical appearance to an orange tabby—we have the templates for cats and dogs so construction should be fairly easy—as they are less likely to cause instinctual behaviors not welcome on an intra-galactic vessel such as ours. You are granted a cat from the usable physiologic processes of the criminal’s body. One of you will take part in the rearrangement of the body; while the other will assist bots reconfiguring a brain suitable for a cat. You are free to alter its mind to give it the level of intelligence suitable for your needs. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind if your cat is able to check out books from the library, but that would be your decision. Your teams are waiting in the conference rooms.”

With that, the bot turned and headed back down the hall. Stefan looked at Carlos and asked, “What do you want, brain or body?”

“I’d prefer the body, but I think I’d be better working on the brain,” Carlos said. “We can always set up a cross mind circuit if either one of us needs help on something the bots are unable, or unwilling, to do.”

“I’m nervous and a bit scared,” Stefan said. “We’ve never worked this close with bots we don’t know.”

“Yeah, me too, to the first part, at least,” Carlos whispered.

********

A hologram image of a human brain slowly orbited a smaller image of a cat’s brain. By mutual consent they were working on the brain stem first. The bots were better at moving appropriate pieces of human brain to the cat, but Carlos was quickly learning the process of selecting the required sections of the human brain and sizing them to fit in the cat’s cranium.

As he was working on his third dissection, Carlos became aware that one of the bots was staring at him. The bot had completely stopped working on his section of the process. The other bots seemed to ignore why one of their team was no longer participating. Carlos tried to ignore the obvious staring; but it was so blatant he couldn’t stop looking in the bot’s direction every now and then to see if the bot had gone back to work.

Finally unable to work under the bot’s glare, Carlos asked, “Have I done anything wrong?”

One of the other bots chuckled. The first bot said, “You’re the Executioner. Why are you here turning a human into cat? Aren’t there enough bots walking around to reduce this criminal into a cat plus a couple buckets of bloody body parts?”

Carlos wanted to say something, but found he was unable to explain the situation or why he was participating. He looked at all the bots with their faces covered with smooth silvery metal and knew his presence was hindering the day’s task. There was nothing to do except leave the room. Out in the hall he saw Stefan talking to the bot who first met them at Jeblee’s body.

“Did they know your work assignment?” Stefan asked. “One of them said I was a bot executioner. Then she said I killed her brother. How did she know the bot was related to her?”

“Yeah and I felt they might try to kill me,” Carlos said. He looked at the bot for some form of explanation, but there was no response to his silvery stare. “Luckily I left before my tampering effect was able to engage. They’d all be totally disabled down to their smallest circuit board, if they tried anything.”

“You are able to do that?” the bot asked.

“Yes, but Stefan has a stronger and more varied mental process,” Carlos said. “How about the bots try to do the job without us and we’ll simply wait until you come up with a cat. I think it’s best if we leave now.”

“Unfortunately, that is impossible at this time,” the bot said. “You cannot be excused until end of your shift.”

“Then we cannot be responsible for any inorganic or electro/magnetic discharges or some other effect upon any bot that attempts intruding into our brains,” Stefan said.

“We have a room where you can rest until your time comes,” the bot said. “It is a secure room; you will be perfectly and totally safe. Come along, I’ll show you the way.”

The room sort of met the boy’s requirements; though they had to admit the room was really a jail cell with two beds, a metal toilet, and bars, lots of bars. Surprisingly, it was a comfortable room where those who were waiting to be interrogated could relax, or maybe rest between periods of bot torture. Carlos and Stefan knew what the bots were capable of when torturing a human.

“Ow!” Stefan exclaimed while rubbing the side of his head. “I’ve been pinged. Didn’t that bot say we’re in a safe room? They’re using those old interrogator systems bots stopped using three years ago. Ow! They did it, again. Are you getting anything?”

“They seem to be bouncing off your brain or that’s what I think they’re doing,” Carlos said. “All of my defenses were automatically activated. I think you’re going to have to let your systems do what we’ve designed them to do. I can set mine to run parallel to yours. You do have the better processors.”

“We’ll deal with them in packs of five; that seems to be their normal way of dealing with the outside,” Stefan said. “Ready? Good, I’ll set the foci.”

“How deep will we go?” Carlos asked.

“We’ll burn out their central processors first,” Stefan said. “Then overwrite their memory with something useless; I know they’ll try to retaliate, but I’ll sneak in under their com systems. Come on, we’ll give them an idea of what we’re really like. Okay, I’ve got your signal. This is going to be fun.”

At the beginning, Stefan thought he was going to have at least some degree of difficulty, but the bot software, and hardware, wasn’t designed to fend off intrusion from within the existing bot com systems. They were so interconnected via virtual networks an attack on one could disable at least twenty others. Stefan worked feverishly as he dug deeper into the local bots searching for their central core referencing controllers.

Every now and then he’d come across a closed container of human brain cells with very small wires extending from them. The wires terminated in a variety of junction boxes. That gave him the idea of working around the bot that had active human cells until he discovered a collection of bots whose memories weren’t interstratified with other bots. There was no way of bypassing these clumps without destroying them. At each bot with brain cells, he inserted a small virus that duplicated so fast most of the bots went inactive and fell to the floor within a period of a few minutes.

As Stefan worked directly on destroying bots, he came aware of another working on the periphery of his own targets. He sent a loop-back signal to Carlos and wasn’t surprised when the returning signal was so corrupted by viruses it barely reached him. Stefan gave a hand signal for Carlos to go offline. They broke all connections with the bots; but each was careful to cauterize the bots’ junction points to mark where they were to start the process again.

“What’s wrong?” Carlos asked.

“Viruses,” Stefan said. “They’re old like before the habitation of Hercules I, like Terran viruses.”

“What do we do?” Carlos asked.

“I’ll go back in and insert three or four cleansing-locating programs,” Stefan said. “It shouldn’t take too long; but you need to be wary of unwelcome approaches to this jail cell. Personally, I think you should go out at least ten meters in all directions to kill any bots who might try staging an attack on us.”

“Okay, I can do that,” Carlos said. “Do you still need to use parts of my brain for your purposes?”

“Yes, but I’ll drop them as soon as I can,” Stefan said. “I’ll send out the cleaners then work from the dead channels from the locating feedback. The way the bots have linked themselves I’ll be able to destroy multitudes without having to move too deep in their systems; they’ve got some scary hardware and software the closer you get to their central cores. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to go offline again.”

Carlos went back to his stealth attacks upon unsuspecting bots working in areas that might not be subjected to the boys’ activities toward killing bots that were beyond their service life. It wasn’t long before he was able to know Stefan’s actions were in many of the bots he was trying to enter via the I/O ports.

After a couple hours, Stefan gave Carlos the quit signal. There were over five thousand bots that had been totally destroyed or had their internal system neurons so disoriented the bot was useless. They stood and Stefan began to wonder if they were going to be able to leave the Institute of Justice without having to attack more bots.

They needn’t have worried; their exit was being programmed as soon as they left the jail cell. The boys were tired from all of the mental reengineering they had to perform on so many bots. Stefan thought they would certainly be described as dangerous to bot life and necessary actions would be made; quite possibly death or reprogramming into some form of bot existence. At the same time Carlos was still wondering if the cat they asked for at the beginning was still a viable conclusion. He knew Stefan was probably going deeper into the ramifications of their actions over the past few hours. Would they still have their positions with Mark? Had they gone too far in their actions against the bots? There were so many bots in the Institute of Justice, bots whose destruction was so easy. Was their visit to the Institute of Justice part of some obscure plan devised by bots further up in the hierarchy to eliminate extra bots in an attempt to simply reduce the population of bots?

********

Mark was standing in the middle of the parlor when they returned to the apartment. His face was not showing, but today, its smooth silvery surface belied an unseen threat to the boys. “Well, did you two have fun today?”

“No, not that we had expectations the day might turn out differently,” Carlos said, as the back of his left hand briefly touched Stefan’s hand.

“Right now, there are quite a few bots throughout the ship who are deathly afraid you might use your, whatever you call it, on them,” Mark said. “How do you explain today’s activities?”

“The bots we were supposed to be helping said we executed bots,” Stefan said. “Then they put us in what you can call a jail cell.”

“It certainly looked like a jail cell to me,” Carlos interjected. “Then they started actively scanning our brains. Some of the intrusions were painful to Stefan. That’s when we decided to fight back, or at least make enough of a defense they would stop.”

“Obviously, they didn’t stop,” Stefan said. “So, we actively set about eliminating bots from our closest perimeter from where we were being kept outward in an ever-increasing circle. We found that most bots down there were interconnected to the point where killing one seriously disabled upward of twenty bots. You could say they killed themselves; of course, after we initiated the sequence of their destruction. What’s to become of us?”

“No, wait a moment, just until you tell us if you want this recorded; as in why there are bots listening in on our conversation right now?” Carlos asked. “You do have us at a disadvantage, but I want this on level ground, not some slippery slope devised by bot counterintelligence.”

“We have a new ship,” Mark said. “It is much faster than this one, but it has its drawbacks, too. It is meant to be a world explorer. As we see it, when a new world is picked up by the pilots they will initiate a series of exploratory ships to analyze its atmosphere, biology, geophysics, ecologies.”

“And, once one is found; a certain number of candidates, bots and humans, will be sent out on this new ship,” Stefan said. “There will still be a number of probes, to analyze the planet and settle it if there is a sufficient number of bots and humans willing to make a settlement. That’s the gist of it, right? And, you are offering us two seats on this new ship, right?”

“Or, we stay here and continue our work searching and eliminating too old or too troublesome bots,” Carlos said.

“Yes, that’s about it,” Mark said. “We have one problem with you leaving; you two are the only humans capable of doing what you do. So, Central HQ wants to put you on a leave of absence for a couple months; and, then allow you to start searching again. You won’t be killing any bots, at least not for a while.”

“Unless provoked?” Stefan asked.

“Unless provoked,” Mark said.

********

Three days later a long haired black cat showed up at their door; a service bot delivered it in a large wooden box. There was, also, a corrugated paper carton full of cat food and a number of toys. When Carlos opened the door, the bot was hurrying as fast as it could to the nearest exit to catch a transport car back to the Institute of Justice. The cat stared at Carlos and seemed to smile when Carlos set the box down in the middle of the room. The cat jumped out of the box and began to look around the room.

“Our cat is here,” Carlos hollered.

“I know,” Stefan said, walking out of the bathroom. “It has a bot transmitting device implanted somewhere in its body. I wish you’d at least try to use your talents on a regular basis.”

“It’s our cat,” Carlos said. “Why should I assume it has a bot clandestine device?”

“Because less than a week ago we were attacking and disabling bots,” Stefan said. “Are you going to help, or do I have to do this by myself? We have the same brains, but you seem to rely on me.”

“Maybe it’s my raising,” Carlos said. “Maybe I just assume someone or something is not going to be a danger to me. You seem to be one hundred eighty degrees off from my point of view. You suspect everything is not okay. Why are you so suspicious? Why can’t you be more trusting?”

“Because that cat is a product of the Institute of Justice,” Stefan said. “Look at it. No not with your eyes! Use your brain.”

“Wow! That thing is scary,” Carlos said. “Did you see that? It’s almost transmitting everything we say. Oh no, not that. Where’s the reset button for that thing?”

“I’m looking at it right now,” Stefan said. “It’s of bot engineering. What’s the chance we can expect a visit from a senior bot within the next quarter hour? What are you doing?”

“There that should take care of things,” Carlos said, as the cat froze in midstride then fell over onto its side. “You know what? I’m looking forward to the senior bot coming down the hallway right now.”

********

Author’s Note: Sorry for the delay, but things haven’t been going too well. I’m trying very hard in dealing with the bipolar, but sometimes I just have to let it run its course.