Unstable Prototypes Read online

  "You want to explain to me what the plan is?"

  "You and I are going to rendezvous with one of Karter's former collaborators. He has experience in matters such as these. From there, pending his insight into the situation, your involvement may be at an end."

  "You sure? All I have to do is escort you to a meeting with this guy?" Lex asked.

  "That is a rough overview, but I've done what I can to allow for maximum flexibility, so expect a degree of fluidity."

  "What kind of fluidity?"

  "We are likely to require more manpower, and if so, he may require your aid in locating and meeting with them."

  "Okay. That sounds doable. I guess I can see why you needed a chaperone. It must be tricky getting people to take you seriously when you're, you know, fuzzy."

  "Exceedingly."

  "Wouldn't it have been easier to build a robot body?"

  "Time was limited, and the circumstances of my departure made the survival of a complex computational mechanism unlikely. In addition, there was the necessity to blend with human society. While the many breeds of dog and their relative ubiquity would permit my current selection of form to go unnoticed, a robot would need to be extremely sophisticated to receive the same treatment. Karter has built a female humanoid robot, but he achieved the desired level of fidelity in only three areas of its anatomy. The face was not one of them."

  "Do I want to know what three parts made the list?"

  "Unlikely."

  "Yeah, you're probably right. Okay, we're here. Cost-Mart," Lex said.

  With a name like Cost-Mart, one could be excused for thinking that a description was unnecessary, and to a degree that is true. As you might imagine, it was the sort of place that sold everything conceivable, and generally in gallons when ounces would suffice. The last time Lex had visited this place, it was to buy a gross of granola bars to stock the SOB for a particularly lengthy delivery. The name may even conjure to mind the sprawling size of the superstore, but that is where the expectations start to fall short. To begin to understand the scope of the shopping center, you must first understand that there was no parking lot, because customers were encouraged to pilot their vehicles directly into the store. It had departments the way malls had stores, spread across floors and stretched across blocks. Items were loaded directly into trunks, baskets, and seats. A quick swipe of your slidepad deducted the cost of the purchase directly from your accounts, meaning that there was no checkout. Shoplifting was virtually nonexistent, primarily because if you walked or drove out of the store without paying, they would automatically debit your slidepad as you exited. There were smaller stores and more traditional places to purchase things, certainly, but if you wanted to be absolutely certain that what you needed would be in stock, Cost-Mart was your best bet.

  "What are we looking for?" Lex asked.

  "Some manner of leash appropriate for a creature of my size. We will also need food and water for a few days for myself, and if the SOB is not currently stocked, food for you as well. In addition, we need: four small items of blue clothing, a commercial or industrial grade thiol oxidation spray, two or more epinephrine injectors with replaceable reservoirs – product code EPP-4942c, a large package of pain management medication, a general anesthetic, assorted first aid supplies, four to six additional hands-free audio devices, four to six additional slidepads or datapads..."

  "Whoa, whoa, whoa! What is this, a scavenger hunt? Listen, I'm not sure I've got enough available credit to cover this stuff. I mean, what's a cheapo slidepad run these days, five thousand credits?"

  "High-end models would be preferred."

  "Yeah, I don't have the cash to be buying those things by the half dozen."

  "Of course. Please stop at the nearest gambling kiosk."

  "Heh. This ought to be good."

  Before long, Lex spotted a video poker machine beside a coffee stand on one of the upper levels. Just as cash had found a replacement in casino chips, ATMs had evolved into Poker Kiosks. All one had to do was take a seat, load some of their credits into the machine directly from their bank account, and cash out to get a pocket full of fixed value, non-traceable funds. Best of all, the machines didn't charge a service or convenience fee. This was largely because virtually all of the people who sought to use them simply as a way to convert money from credits to chips took the time to play a hand or two, inevitably losing a bit in the process. It was actually a fairly ingenious and effective system. Unless, of course, you had a gambling problem, but society had shuffled those unfortunates down to the bottom of the ladder long ago. He settled his bike down and Ma hopped to the seat. The light on her neck flashed, a log-in screen came and went, and a user profile under the name Kyle Oscar Dunbrook appeared. As she worked at the Kiosk, a patron of the coffee shop, sporting a latte larger than his head, stopped and eyed the bizarre sight.

  "She's my good luck charm. I always sit her in the chair for the first hand," Lex explained.

  The stranger shrugged, apparently satisfied with the answer, and moved on. A moment later, Ma was finished bringing up the account information. The balance was... unusual. It seemed to say 5.45E11.

  "Wh- Why is there an E in the available balance field?" Lex asked.

  "Scientific notation. The funds display of this machine is only ten characters," she said, the screens flipping through to the cash out tab.

  "Wait... so Karter has more than ten digits in his bankroll?" he asked, eyes wide.

  "In this account, yes. There are others."

  "... I should have become a mad scientist..."

  The coin tray on the front of the machine quickly filled. There were five 100k chips, twenty 10k chips, and twenty 1k chips. A moment later, four more 1k chips dropped. For the appropriate frame of reference, if his various jobs managed to bring in 100,000 credits combined, it was a pretty good week. He was holding nearly two months salary in his hand.

  "That should be sufficient to cover the expenses. I would suggest you only deposit half into your account. Liquid funds may come in handy."

  "Whatever you say, Boss."

  She logged off, he logged on, and in short order his account swelled to a larger number than he'd seen in months.

  "Right, let's go shopping," he said.

  Chapter 3

  The items on the list were snagged, one by one. First was a harness-style leash, which was securely strapped on so that Lex would stop getting irritated looks from security guards and fellow shoppers. He also had swung by the pet food section, but Ma assured him that Solby always seemed happier and healthier when he was provided with the food Karter favored. Specifically, beans and rice. Thus, frozen burritos and vitamin tablets were chosen as her rations. Next, he managed to get a decent deal on a combo-pack of six current generation slidepads bundled with hands-free buds. At Ma's request, he'd splurged for a few ruggedized cases, complete with lanyard and belt clip, as well. The vague "blue clothing" requirement was fulfilled by a handful of bandanas. The epinephrine gadgets were a little hard to find – they were in the allergy medication area rather than the prescription area, and everybody seemed to prefer the disposable ones rather than refillable – but before long he'd snagged everything that she was after.

  "What's next, Ma?" Lex asked as he piloted his bike out of the store.

  "Our next destination is the starport. We will need to board a first class flight, but first, you will need to send your own ship autonomously to a maintenance station near the flight path," Ma explained.

  "Uh. The SOB can't do long range autonomous flight," he explained, nudging his bike in the general direction of the starport.

  "Karter designed and built your ship, and I was responsible for installing the software. I assure you, it is entirely capable."

  Lex blinked.

  "Well why didn't anybody tell me?!"

  "You had not requested it. You had only requested short range autonomy."

  "Then why did you put it in?"

  "The appropriate sensory apparatus and
computational power were present in the system, there was no reason not to include it."

  "Are there any other features you didn't bother to tell me about?"

  "Several. I can prepare a list for you, if you like, following the completion of our current task."

  "Any reason you can't do it now?"

  "It is possible that you will be displeased by one or more of the functions, and thus will be less inclined to continue to lend your aid."

  "... See, now that's not very encouraging."

  "Only one of them is potentially life threatening."

  "Oh, well, that's not so bad," he snarked, quietly questioning why he was willingly helping these people.

  #

  In a large space station, at an undisclosed location, a woman by the name of Janet Purcell was pacing angrily in the way that only a superior officer can. Her hair was short and red; a brilliant, fright wig shade of red that was clearly the work of chemicals rather than nature. The clothes she wore were strictly military; black canvas fatigues, festooned with patches and medals representing assorted service honors. Notably absent were flags or seals indicating her military loyalty. She looked like she may have been entering the unhappy half of her thirties, but her physique was the training-forged build of a career soldier. A deep scar ran from her scalp just above her left eye, circling across her temple and cheek and ending at the edge of her chin. What looked to be the feathery red beginning an electrical burn was just visible on her throat at the neck of her fatigues. Hanging at her belt was a combat knife laser-etched with the designations MME (MonoMolecular Edge) and HFMO (High Frequency MicroOscilation) along the side of the blade. To a layman, these terms roughly translated to "very very sharp" and "makes a scary high pitched noise while it cuts through things." The scary noise was caused by the fact that the blade vibrated at a frequency just beyond the range of hearing, and this frequency slowed a bit while it was sawing through... well, virtually anything. In a chest holster, a plasma-pistol with a bulging extended power cell was ready and waiting to be drawn. The look in her eye suggested that it wouldn't have to wait long.

  "He is secured?" she hissed.

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "Again?"

  "Yes, ma'am."

  The man answering the questions was the same one that had been the leader of the group that had ended up kidnapping Karter. He was sporting at least three recently bandaged wounds, and one hand was badly disfigured. Rather than the arctic gear of his last outing, he was wearing composite body armor over fatigues similar to Purcell's, and a high-powered plasma rifle was strapped to his back. The goggles, however, still had a place of honor on his head. The body armor, goggles, and bandages were worn by nearly all of the soldiers without a task-specific uniform. In this case, a name tag etched on the armor labeled him Crewman Marx.

  "Explain to me how this happened," she ordered.

  "The prisoner, Doctor Dee, appeared to be cooperating. Our engineers agreed that the most recent design did appear to be larger scale implementation of the small device we had confiscated from him when we first captured him," Marx explained.

  "Cooperating? He depressurized three decks. Even with emergency procedures, we lost five men. That does not sound like cooperation!"

  "We are still investigating how he managed to gain control of the airlocks and override the safety fail-safes."

  "That is the third security breach since he was brought to this facility. That is unacceptable," she cried, hammering the wall beside her with a fist. A moment later her composure returned. "You say the scale has been increased. Is it enough for our purposes?"

  "Engineering is just finishing a mockup now, but they say that several key components necessary for activation aren't included. They are going to run some tests shortly."

  She fumed silently for a moment.

  "Keep me apprized of the results. I am going to speak with him."

  "Yes, Commander."

  Commander Purcell marched out of the room and into the hallway. The cramped, industrial corridor looked as though it had been designed by the same people who had made the first submarines. Pipes and vents visibly lined the walls and ceiling, and a grating covered more along the floor. She made her way down a long curving hall, through a narrow door, and down a few ladders, finally arriving at a much larger and more navigable space. This was good, because there were six guards on duty. The same number in another hall would have made it impassible. Three stood on each side of a barred cell door. Inside was Karter Dee. He wasn't looking particularly threatening at the moment, as it had been discovered that both his whole left arm and his left leg below the knee were mechanical prostheses, and had been forcibly removed after being used rather creatively to wreak havoc. He was now sitting on a chair that was the only piece of furniture in the room. Even the lights had been removed.

  "Dee!" the Commander barked.

  "What?" he snapped, as though she were interrupting something much more interesting.

  "You can't keep doing this forever."

  "I think that I can."

  "You realize that we will kill you if you don't cooperate."

  "Pff, no. If you could figure this out on your own you wouldn't have kidnapped me to start with. This is a lose-lose for you. I'm not going to cooperate, unless I get what I want, so unless you are going to cave to my demands you can either keep threatening and get nothing, or kill me and get nothing. I've got all the power here."

  "We have your latest designs. It is only a matter of time."

  "Lady, that design is incomplete, and you don't have the tools to finish it. You don't even have the tools to MAKE the tools to finish it."

  "You won't stop us from achieving our goals."

  "What makes you think I want to stop you? I couldn't care less about your agenda. You think you're the first group of terrorists I've sold stuff to?"

  "We aren't terrorists. We are revolutionaries."

  "Tomato, tomahto," he said with a waggle of his remaining hand. "The point is, I was ready, willing, and able to fork these things over by the dozen if you were willing to cough up the money. I still am, but the price has gone way up. Inconvenience fee, because for some reason you thought it was wise to kidnap me."

  "We couldn't afford to have you supply them to anyone but us, and we couldn't afford to have you warning anyone."

  "Nondisclosure agreements and exclusivity agreements. Think like a corporation, lady. They've proven much better at enslaving the masses and pushing home their agenda than all of the terrorists in the history the human race put together. But no, you had to do things the hard way. So I had to make a point or two, in the form of four very destructive escape attempts."

  "Three," she corrected.

  "You sure about that?" he said doubtfully.

  Purcell stared at him intensely, her mind racing. Suddenly her eyes widened, she scrambled for her hefty mil-spec communicator and thumbed the transmit button.

  "Engineering!" she hissed.

  "Engineering here," came the reply a few moments later, accompanied by video.

  "Do not activate the latest prototype of the CME activator."

  "It is already in the testing rig. We are getting impressive power output."

  Even over the transmission, a worrying increase in the electronic hum of the equipment could be heard.

  "Shut it down, now!"

  "Shutting down."

  The man in the video window tapped at some controls. The hum had become a shuddering rattle by the time he issued the appropriate command, and whatever had been causing it was causing the lighting in the room to flicker and flare. Gradually the rattle died away.

  "The device is powered down," the technician said.

  "Disassemble it, and move it off the station. Testing on any and all designs provided by Dr. Dee will now be done planet side in Site C. Maximum safety protocols."

  "Yes, Commander."

  She closed the connection and turned her gaze to Karter.

  "Probably I should have kept
my mouth shut about that one," he said. "Oh well, next time."

  "What do you want, exactly?" she fumed.

  "Good question. Start making offers."

  Her eyes narrowed.

  "No," she decided. "We have not reached that point. I'm not willing to make any deals."

  "Heh. The terrorists won't negotiate with me," he mused as the Commander stalked away.

  #

  Back on Golana, Lex and Ma had just arrived in "The Upstairs," the orbital section of Golana Interstellar Starport. It was made up of a series of rotating rings at the end of long tethers that led to complexes on the planet's surface. These tethers allowed elevators to haul crew, passengers, and cargo into space in a cheaper and more efficient way than shuttles, and the rotation allowed the outer rim of each ring to experience at least a semblance of gravity in a cheaper and more efficient way than artificial gravity generators. A side effect of the rotation method, though, was that the full effect was only felt at the circumference, where the paying customers were. The further in you went, the less gravity. Right now Lex was quite near the hub, working his way toward a place called "Blake's Stardock" and learning how difficult it was to gracefully navigate in zero-g while carrying a small creature and a bulky bag.

  "I find it difficult to believe that there is not a better means of travel in microgravity," Ma suggested as she and Lex twisted awkwardly and collided with the wall at the end of a corridor.

  "There is. There's these little zip-lifts. I just never had to use them before. Most of the time this is faster."

  "This does not appear to be one of those times."

  "Don't rub it in," he said, tucking her under an arm and wrangling the bag onto his shoulder.