The Lab (Agent Six of Hearts) Read online

  Six raised an eyebrow. So, he thought, she knows about the Deck. “They have a moral opposition to your work?” he asked.

  “Apparently so. They seem to believe that bots are dangerous, because they will replace human beings in the workforce.”

  “Will they?”

  “Eventually, yes.” Shuji shrugged. “If we’re going to get right down to the speculative side of things, I foresee two possible outcomes for the reasonably distant future. One is that bots will do all the jobs requiring any manual labor at all, and humans will only be necessary for thinking tasks. This sounds unpleasant until you give it due consideration. Yes, it means that humans will be effectively removed from the workplace. However, the only reason humans need to be in the workplace is to earn money for themselves. If everything is done by bots, all goods and services will be free, because bots have no need of money, and therefore won’t be paid. Soon, money will stop changing hands completely. Not long after that it will be only a vestigial concept and, not too much later, it will be gone completely. The human race will finally be at rest, and everyone will just do as they please at their leisure for their entire lives, while the bots do all of the work.”

  “Forgive my cynicism,” Six said, “but that doesn’t sound like the most likely outcome of bots replacing humans in all jobs.”

  Shuji chuckled. “Your cynicism is forgiven, Mr. Macintyre, because you are right, of course. Far more likely is that unemployment and poverty will suddenly sweep the City, the already fragile economy will collapse, millions will starve to death, the rest will die of disease or old age, and the bots will keep doing things alone until their batteries run out many centuries from now. But these problems will not be in our lifetime, I suspect.”

  “Incredible,” Two said. “What a shameless, evil witch. Try not to lose your cool, Six.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Six to lose his cool. He was admiring the ChaoSilent fittings on the guard’s boots—a mechanism that would silence a soldier’s every footfall by simultaneously emitting a phase opposite to the sound.

  Rumor had it that ChaoSonic was working on an upgrade to their technology that could cancel out any noise at all triggered by the activities of soldiers—even vehicle movement and gunfire. Ironic, Six thought, given that ChaoSonic owned most of the organizations in the City anyway, and there was no reason for them to even have a defense force, let alone make the one they had more powerful.

  The boots didn’t matter as far as he was concerned, anyway. When Six of Hearts didn’t want to be heard, he wasn’t.

  “It is no concern of mine,” Shuji was saying. “If the end of the world was going to be prevented, something should have been done long before either of us were born. You and I are witnessing the final death throes of the human race, Mr. Macintyre. It can’t be long now before cultural habit and routine break down completely throughout the populace, and complete amorality follows the lawlessness in which we have lived our lives.”

  She’s smarter than most, Six thought, as they approached the titanium roller-door at the end of the corridor. But what was a woman with such clear insight doing in a Wanderer?

  “Bots will neither cause the end of the world, nor prevent it. They may indirectly throw a few more scraps of garbage onto the heap under which we are already buried, and perhaps accelerate the process of our downfall. But I need to eat. And, particularly if there is no future, I feel obliged to enjoy the present.”

  She slipped her finger into the gel in the scanning terminal next to the roller-door. The terminal pinged.

  “Access granted,” it announced. “Welcome, Dr. Shuji.”

  Doctor, Six thought. As if there were such a thing as a university anymore to give qualifications like that. She really did think highly of herself.

  The door rumbled aside, and Six’s eyes widened at the sight before them.

  THE PERFECT KILLING MACHINE

  “What the…” the earpiece stammered. “They’ve already gone into production. Serious production.”

  Six agreed. He had seen botlines before, but nothing of this magnitude.

  Steam thundered up from hundreds of engines and furnaces. A massive conveyor belt chugged its sluggish way around the cavern. Electricity crackled constantly between the enormous pockmarked, wirelike roof and the chrome spires attached to every station. The air was filled with the clanking of gears and the hiss of hydraulics from thousands of mechanical limbs doing their various tasks of welding, soldering, assembling, and molding.

  And at the end of the conveyor belt, bots were being put into cases. Their polished, symmetrical bodies and expressionless plastic faces glinted in the light of the furnace fires and the electrical storm above.

  Six was completely shocked. He had never expected the bots to be in construction already. Their contact among the hostages had told the Deck that as far as he knew, no manual laborers had been recruited to begin production, so apart from a few prototype bots, the entire project was in the theoretical phase. In fact, when Six had been briefed, he’d been informed that no botlines were currently at a stage where they could begin mass construction, except for one in a different branch of ChaoSonic called Gear.

  And these are combat bots, Six thought. These are armored and aerodynamic—and armed, he added mentally, when he saw the Swan KM909 rifles molded into the bots’ wrists. Gear doesn’t make soldier bots, he thought. They make androids for manual labor tasks, like heavy lifting and routine assembly—

  Then it hit him. He scanned the floor of the cavern quickly, searching for a worker who was facing him. He saw one, and the bald eyeless head confirmed his suspicions. “Bots building bots,” he whispered.

  Shuji grinned. “That’s right. We bought a few hundred from Gear, assigned them their tasks, and soon the pace of production was triple what Gear themselves can do. It surprised me that they didn’t think of it first, actually. Perhaps they got sentimental and refused to dump their employees.” She chuckled. “Or, more likely, they’re up to something we don’t know about. Of course, the beauty of this system is that it’s totally leakproof. Bots don’t sell secrets to competing branches; nor do they feel a moral obligation to tip off the vigilantes about our activities.”

  She was right, Six knew. Usually the Jokers, the two mysterious spies who ran the Deck, could tap into at least one source from any company and learn incriminating secrets, but no one knew that there were operational soldier droids in this facility already. Shuji could have bought the droids herself, had them shipped over to her facility by any of a thousand courier organizations, and given the bots their duty instructions with no one having any idea what she was up to.

  “Keep stalling her, Six,” Two said. “The source isn’t ready to roll just yet.”

  “So, the soldier bots,” Six said to Shuji. “Do they function as well as in the promo designs you gave me?”

  The woman in the Wanderer grinned wickedly. “I thought you’d never ask,” she said.

  Shuji led Six into a testing lab, while Neeq watched impassively. The laboratory was superbly clean and tidy. There was a chrome table in one corner with nothing on it, and a tintedglass window high on one wall. All the staff and testing apparatus were, Six suspected, behind that glass, watching from above. The light in the room was provided by fat neon tubes built into the walls and similar ones hanging from the ceiling, which were so bright that Six had to squint against them until his sensitive eyes adjusted.

  “A demonstration bot will be here in just a few moments,” Shuji said. “In the meantime, let me explain how the testing process works.”

  Six guessed that she was probably wearing a wire, and that their conversations were being monitored. This way, she could appear perfectly prepared for everything, because her staff knew exactly what Mr. Macintyre was being told. When she had informed Six that a demonstration bot was on its way, a company operative had probably hastened to arrange one.

  “In the early stages, of course,” Shuji said, “all testing and training were theoret
ical. My technicians simply programmed the Central Processing Units with some basic vocabulary, strategy, knowledge of physics, weapons information, and priority code. The real fun started when we brought in some trained soldiers to fight the prototype bots with a variety of weapons. Then we analyzed the results and reprogrammed the bots accordingly.”

  “How did you stop the soldiers from leaking details of your activities to the general public?” Six asked, already knowing the answer.

  “They believed that we were testing body armor, not droids,” Shuji said smoothly. “We told them that the bot used was a Gear product, reprogrammed and dressed like a soldier, because we couldn’t risk harming human beings in our tests. Trust me, Mr. Macintyre, no one but you, me, and my staff knows the truth about what we do here.”

  The data the Jokers had obtained said that all the soldiers had been kidnapped from security organizations and vigilante groups like Six’s own. They had been imprisoned and forced into a fight to the death with prototype bots. Those who had refused had been starved and tortured. After days in excruciating pain, without food or hope of rescue, most soldiers had chosen to fight the bots. Those who didn’t had been executed by Neeq and the rest of his team. But even those who had fought and won had not been freed; instead, they had been forced to compete against more and more advanced models until the soldier bots had reached perfection and the last soldier had been killed.

  The technicians and engineers had been kidnapped as well. The Deck suspected that as Shuji’s theoretical development of the project was nearly complete, all the programmers were scheduled for execution. She was not a woman to leave witnesses.

  But Shuji has already begun production of the soldier bots, Six thought. Perhaps we are already too late.

  His thoughts were interrupted as the titanium laboratory door rumbled open. Another commando dressed like Neeq stepped into the room, carrying a steel coffinlike case.

  The soldier placed the case on its end in the center of the floor. He nodded to Earle Shuji.

  “The demonstration droid, Dr. Shuji,” he said, his voice crackly and gravelly through his gas mask.

  “Thank you, Mr. Crenshaw,” Shuji replied. “You may return to your duties.”

  The soldier turned and nodded to Neeq, who was standing by the door. Neeq nodded back, and Crenshaw left, rolling the door closed behind him. Six heard an ominous clank as the soldier locked and bolted the door from outside—presumably out of habit. This was probably the very room that all those men and women had died in.

  Shuji rolled over to the case and unlocked it.

  “Scott Macintyre,” she said, “it is my pleasure to present to you…”

  She opened the lid.

  “…the perfect killing machine.”

  Inside the case was a soldier bot.

  Six looked it up and down. It was more or less humanoid in shape, but with some bulges in the wrong places—for example, the bulge on its right wrist from the built-in Swan, and the bulge on its left wrist where a flashlight was attached. The hands were narrow, with long, thin fingers. The head was featureless except for two silvery eyes. Instead of a mouth, the bot had an amplifier on the front of its left shoulder, with a directional microphone next to it for receiving audio.

  “Runs off a plutonium battery with a half-life of a hundred seventy years—the bot is operational for all that time,” explained Shuji. “It can lift weights of up to nearly one ton, run at speeds exceeding sixty kilometers an hour, and hit a onecentimeter bull’s-eye from a range of nearly one hundred thirty meters, provided that its Swan is well maintained—which it always will be, because the bot does all the maintenance itself. As for vision, hearing, reflexes…don’t even ask. The thing literally has eyes in the back of its head—and the top, for that matter. Its senses are more effective than those of any man alive.”

  Six raised an eyebrow.

  “While it obviously isn’t suitable for a traditional IQ test,” Shuji continued, “let me tell you that this baby is smart. All that genuine AI requires is the ability to learn, so it can change its own programming within certain parameters.”

  “Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics?” Six ventured.

  She grinned. “What good is a soldier bot if it can’t kill people? Its advanced CPU will detect, analyze, and plan the eradication of any threat in a matter of moments. It has been programmed with all the latest in combat strategy. It can do anything from directing a battalion of soldiers to victory to winning a game of chess. And all its systems are completely impervious to EMP.”

  “How did you manage that?” Six asked.

  Shuji winked at him. “Trade secret,” she said. “Incidentally, the bot is not as fragile as it looks, either—that plastic coating you see is only a few millimeters deep. Underneath it there’s a steel exoskeleton that is much tougher than Kevlar. You could park a three-ton truck with its front wheels on the torso and you’d barely leave a dent—so it’s bulletproof, just for starters. It has an internal-temperature conditioning system inside that automatically adjusts the heat of all systems to match the air—thermal vision won’t pick up the bot at all. Also, this means it’s nearly indestructible as far as heat and flame go. A direct and sustained blast from a Phoenix flamethrower would wipe off the plastic skin, but leave the exoskeleton and all systems intact. Also, when you combine temperature efficiency like that with this kind of pressure resistance, you’ve pretty much got a machine that can’t be destroyed in an explosion. It wouldn’t survive a nuclear blast, but grenades, rockets, and even plastic explosives will still generally leave it standing.”

  Six was beginning to get worried. If everything Shuji said was true, then these bots probably weren’t just a step towards the end of humanity—they may well be the end itself.

  The Deck agents were clearly thinking along the same lines.

  “Are we hearing all this correctly?” Two said in his ear. “This is much worse than we expected.”

  “Allow me to demonstrate some of its combat skills,” Shuji said, smiling. “Mr. Neeq, if you please.”

  “Agent Six of Hearts,” the earpiece crackled, “your mission priorities have now changed. A layout of the building is no longer required as there will be no time to formulate a strategy before we move in. Understood, Six? Just get the hostages and get out of the crossfire.”

  This is getting extreme, Six thought. There were probably Deck teams moving in to cover every entrance right now.

  “The source will be ready soon, Six. We’ll keep you posted. As for now, keep stalling her. Buy us some time.”

  “Because this is only a demonstration bot,” Shuji was saying, “its Swan is not loaded with bullets. Instead, it will fire semi-solid capsules of UV-receptive paint. This is one of my favorite demonstrations—the hostage demo. Just watch.”

  Neeq grabbed Shuji roughly with his left forearm around her neck and crouched behind her, his right hand pointing his Falcon at her head. Immediately the bot opened fire, and capsules smacked against Neeq’s armor.

  “Stop!” Shuji called.

  The bot stopped firing. Neeq stood up. Six couldn’t see any evidence that the fight had taken place.

  “Mr. Neeq,” Shuji ordered, “turn on the black light.”

  Neeq crossed the room to a switch beside the door and pulled the lever down. All the lights went out.

  Six’s eyes adjusted quickly. The room was bathed in a dim glow of royal blue, emitting from the black light overhead. He was in darkness, as were Shuji and the bot. But Neeq was glowing. He had splatters of luminous paint on his helmet, goggles, and boots. The paint covered much of his body armor as well.

  The bot had shot him dozens of times, without hitting Shuji at all.

  “Mr. Neeq,” Shuji commanded, “resume your previous stance.”

  Neeq crouched down with his left forearm forward and his gun arm up, exactly as he had been when he was hiding behind Shuji. Six squinted, not quite sure what he was looking at. Then he saw it and his eyes widened.

&n
bsp; The fluorescent paint on the soldier’s armor was an exact silhouette of Shuji!

  “You’ll notice that not a single drop landed on me,” the woman in the wheelchair said out of the darkness. “Nor did any hit the wall behind me. As I said before, the bots are deadly accurate with their weapons. This one left a two-centimeter safety margin around me in case I moved, and another margin of the same width around Mr. Neeq, to avoid hitting anything behind him. According to its programming, it would have kept firing until it could no longer detect Mr. Neeq’s heartbeat if I hadn’t told it to stop. Mr. Neeq, the lights, please.”

  Neeq pushed the lever back up, and the neon bulbs exploded back into life. Six squinted against the glare. “It follows your orders?” he asked.

  “Yes. Yours, too, if I tell it to.” She grinned. “Bot, you now have shared ownership. This is your new owner. Follow his orders.” She smiled at Six. “Happy birthday.”

  Six waited, but the bot didn’t respond.

  “It doesn’t really respond unless it considers it a necessity,” Shuji said. “Try an order.”

  “Bot, stand on one foot,” Six said.

  The bot lifted one leg into the air and stood stock-still.

  “There you go,” Shuji said, beaming. “Bot, resume previous stance.”

  The bot put its foot back on the ground.

  “It still follows my orders, too, because I said shared ownership. But once you buy them, they will be entirely yours.”

  A puddle of fluorescent paint had formed around Neeq’s boots. “It’s not terribly, er…subtle in its approach, is it?” Six commented.

  “It can be,” Shuji said. “This is another of the bot’s little tricks—an old one, but a good one. Bot,” she said, “camouflage.”

  The bot vanished.

  Six tensed. He had seen a quick flicker of movement before the bot had disappeared in front of his eyes.

  “Projection,” he guessed. “The bot puts a thin covering on its front, receives a DV feed from behind, and projects the footage onto the inside for invisibility.” He had seen the bot swiftly don a cape of some kind.