Destination: Rebirth E-Book

Ithaka O.

• Herausgeber: Imaginarium Kim
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

A month has passed since the day at the airport, the day that changed Aria’s restless life. Now that she’s recovered from the injuries of that day, she plans to leave her hiding place.

The objective: get human skin and hair for her new robot friend. Without such a disguise, long-term success is unlikely, regardless of what their plan involves: continued hiding, fleeing elsewhere, or fighting.

But little do they know what a changed appearance can do to a bot and its closest human friend…

Leseprobe

DESTINATION: REBIRTH

ITHAKA O.

IMAGINARIUM KIM

© 2024 Ithaka O.

All rights reserved.

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

No part of this story may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author.

CONTENTS

I. Recharge, Restart

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

II. Off Screen, On Screen

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

III. Breakfast, Lunch

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

IV. Makeover, Infiltration

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

V. Fifty, Fifty-one

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

VI. Heroes, Betrayers

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

VII. Sunrise, Grand Prize

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

VIII. Oblivion, Clarity

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

IX. Reunion, Recovery

Chapter 60

Also by Ithaka O.

Thank you for reading

PARTI

RECHARGE, RESTART

1

The knock on the window came exactly at the time it had been promised. Aria Rush, who’d been waiting for this moment for the past fifteen minutes, jumped up from the stool by the red-brick wall and pulled back the curtains in one cheerful motion.

At once, bright sunshine flooded the spacious room. The rays reflected off the smooth black body of a raven-sized drone that carried a box the size of a human head. The drone was still tentatively extending its one leg, which it had used to knock on the window. Upon seeing Aria, it retracted that leg. The white logo of KnowNot—the letters written around a question mark—glistened brightly on its body, almost as brightly as its little screen that was presently showing a commercial for the new LazyBrush: a toothbrush shaped like a pill that you tossed in your mouth. No need to labor three times a day for three minutes anymore. LazyBrush took care of all that.

Aria opened the window with a wide grin, which had to look unbelievably foolish, even to a drone. This woman is very short and small, the drone could be thinking. And she’s jumping up and down like some teenage girl whose parents revoked her access to streaming sites, and therefore has been waiting for hours for a chance to glimpse her favorite boy group’s latest music video attached to my body. (Because the LazyBrush commercial had ended and five barely-eighteen men were dancing to a crazy-uptempo song.) Could she possibly be an adult? She needed to stand on tiptoes to open the window. I am not authorized to conduct transactions with minors…

…but wait. You can’t fake the skin texture of a fifteen-year-old. She is a grown-up.

Of course, the drone had no way of knowing exactly how grown-up Aria was. “Adult” was a huge and generic middle territory between quite young and very old. But if the drone were to know that she was thirty years old, and were authorized to express its very objective robotic opinion, it would have told her that she was long past that age when ordering food via drone service should still excite her to this extent.

But now was not the time she cared what a drone thought about her. She didn’t even cringe when she accidentally put too much weight on her right leg. The graze gunshot wound from about a month ago still ached in her thigh—but only a little. The wound had almost healed. She didn’t mind. Also, when her fingers (which had human bite marks) came into contact with the cold air and felt like they were shrinking, she welcomed that sensation.

Was this reaction to food too dramatic? A little bit, maybe.

But the “fifteen minutes” of wait only accounted for the time between now and the point at which she’d ordered the food this morning through KnowNot’s anonymous system, per usual. In truth, she’d been waiting for this moment for twenty-one days. And if she wanted to be really dramatic, she could say she’d been waiting for twenty-eight days, by adding the seven days in which she’d floundered in total unconsciousness before the twenty-one days.

The crisp winter breeze blew in, making her long black hair dance all over the place. She shivered in her shorts and T-shirt, and she was barefoot. But she rejoiced at the fresh air. She could smell the freshly-cooked bacon that was inside the box.

Bacon—this was what she’d been waiting for, for fifteen minutes, twenty-one days, or twenty-eight days, depending on how you wanted to look at it. There was nothing “per usual” about bacon. The drone, the ordering in, all those things were normal, but bacon? Oh, it was the food that she’d been craving. The meal that she’d been looking forward to, through all those days in which she’d been forced to consume generally green and therefore fat-less and therefore not-very-tasty ingredients. But now she had almost recovered from her wounds. She deserved normal food.

It was as if the wind were intentionally blowing at just the right speed and at just the right temperature—neither too wild nor too still, neither too freezing-cold nor too sweltering-hot—to make her feel extra-hungry. She’d ordered eggs (voluntarily) and veggies (involuntarily) with the bacon, but when stuff was next to bacon, who could smell stuff anymore? It was bacon, bacon, bacon smell all over her.

Her mouth watered, and she was glad that the drone quickly flew in. A tiny camera on its head scanned the room.

Along the same wall as the open window, there was a row of closed neighboring windows, all covered with dark curtains. On the ceiling and red-brick walls, exposed pipes glimmered in the sunlight. They were clean but not new. On the ground, there was not a single carpet, just concrete. In one corner on the opposite side of the windows, there was a mattress with used sheets, where Aria had slept last night. Next to the mattress: a coat rack with a black leather jacket. Next to that, a duffel bag. Nothing special.

In the one remaining corner, there was stuff covered in sheets. No one who glanced at that corner could possibly use a phrase more specific than “stuff covered in sheets,” because that was literally all there was to that corner. The “stuff” took up less space than an old-school cubicle from a time when people still used to work in offices. Nothing moved under the sheets. Nothing smelled from under them. And besides, bacon—who could smell anything except bacon when bacon was in the picture?

At any rate, the drone, if it could think, would be thinking that Aria was one of those people who chose to save up all her basic income. Some people called this minimalistic; others called this stoic or depressing. But the drone wasn’t people. It didn’t judge.

Upon identifying the sole hard surface that wasn’t the concrete floor, the drone flew there—to a small night table in the center of the room. The drone gently placed the head-sized box there. A tiny arm with pincer-fingers protruded from the drone’s core. Aria perfunctorily glanced at the little screen. (She felt generous today; didn’t want to check the receipt to see exactly how much she was overtipping the drone.) Then she stuck a few paper bills, which she’d been holding ready, between the pincers.

Promptly, the receipt on the screen switched back to the crazy uptempo music video with the five young men. Then, without a goodbye, without any further ado, the drone flew off, out the window, into the brilliant day.

“You can come out,” Aria said.

Immediately, a series of blunt, sporadic clobbering noises came from underneath the sheets that covered the “stuff” in the last corner.

But Aria didn’t glance back. She was hurrying to the window. She closed it and drew the curtains over it. The room was filled with semi-darkness once more, only softened by the sunshine that seeped through the curtains.

What else filled the room? Warmth. Silence. And the smell of bacon. Finally, real breakfast food!

Even as a person crawled out from underneath the sheets in the corner of stuff, Aria didn’t look.

2

Aria pulled the stool close to the night table. She hummed.

Breakfast, breakfast! Not solely consisting of greens, nay! Not consisting of oatmeal, with its distinct taste of despair. This bacon, this was the food that she was supposed to have eaten at an overpriced airport restaurant, had things not gone so very extremely wrong, resulting in the gunshot wound and bite marks.

Meanwhile, the person in the corner of stuff, the person who’d just emerged from under the sheets, also didn’t pay attention to Aria. This person was a woman, and a stereotypically beautiful, long-legged, lean one, it had to be added. No casual observer could believe that the lottery of nature had gifted so many desirable traits to one person. Plastic surgery, that had to be it. But then…

Such elegant lines. Such gracious movements, even when they were used to perform a task as simple as removing the sheets from—as it was revealed now—two mattresses that had been placed like dominoes, facing each other with a gap in-between.

Could you get surgery on the way you moved? Which was more impossible: that this woman was this beautiful and all-natural, or that she’d gotten movement surgery on top of plastic surgery, to become the very epitome of charm?

But such questions of a casual observer were bound to fade when they noticed a few things that were even odder:

First of all, that beautiful, perfect-seeming woman wore a jet-black full-body suit that covered everything from the crown of her head to the tip of her toes. Earlier, while she was crawling out from under the sheets, the casual observer might have thought that the shadows were playing tricks on the eyes. But now? Even in the near-darkness, there was no mistaking this: the woman had a kinky taste in garments.

And there, in the gap between the two mattresses, was a writhing, archaic piece of machinery. Its “body” was made of a metal box. On top of that, a smaller box sat, making it look like the “head.” From its sides protruded two shower-hose “arms.” And for the “legs,” the thing had four wheels. This ugly garbage-like metal thing kept flinging its arms at the mattresses, making the clobbering noises.

Apparently, the only reason the drone hadn’t noticed any of this was that the jet-black bodysuit woman had been hugging the metal thing while the drone was delivering the food. This was inexplicable. That metal thing seemed pretty uncontrollable and determined. How could a woman with such delicate-looking arms have gotten him under control, even for a few brief seconds?

Meanwhile, the only normal-seeming person, Aria, paid no attention to the beautiful-but-apparently-kinky jet-black woman and the crappy metal thing hitting the mattresses.

But Aria did grin. This series of hypothetical puzzlements of a casual observer greatly amused her every time she imagined it. She admitted, the residents here were an odd bunch, she and her friends. And even if someone were to observe them for a very long time, that person would never figure out their secrets just by looking. Not ever.

For, the woman in the jet-black suit was no product of the lottery of nature. She was an aidbot, resembling a human more than any other model on the market. But Aria didn’t treat her like an aidbot, or any bot. Aria simply called her Vera.

As to the metal thing, it was also an aidbot. However, it sat on the opposite end of the date-of-creation spectrum. This metal thing had been the first-ever aidbot mockup to be built, therefore was decades-old, and therefore was malfunctioning, which was why it kept hitting the mattresses with its shower-hose arms. And there was no way to fix it. Its late owner Antonius Wang, the great bot engineer who’d been one-hundred and twenty years old when Aria had met him at the airport, had made it uniquely impossible to fix the mockup for extremely valid personal reasons.

By “uniquely impossible to fix,” Aria meant that, if anyone were to try to replace the mockup’s parts, what lived inside it would perish. And what was the mysterious thing that was inside? A copy of Antonius Wang himself. Yes, that’s right—a human’s consciousness lived inside that crappy metal body. One could even say that the mockup was Antonius Wang.

Mr. Wang had designed the mockup that way so that no one could tamper with it, regardless of whether they had good intentions or bad intentions. Taking intentions into consideration was too time-consuming and risky. He hadn’t wanted anyone to mess with the entities that constituted him; the collective that included the original him, the mockup, and his mind in it.

Thus, the blunt clobbering of the mockup kept repeating over and over again as Aria unpacked the head-sized box on the night table. Vera approached and eyed the food. The smooth black visor that separated her “eye” part from the rest of her face reflected everything on the night table. She had no nose, no lips, no ears. Just one smooth surface, other than the visor.

Inside the head-sized box, there were many more flat boxes made of bio-degradable material. One with the eggs. One with the veggies. And oh, the last one, bacon!

“Oh. My. God!” Aria said. She had to say it. Simply had to.

“I don’t know why humans like those things so much,” Vera said.

She didn’t sound accusatory. She didn’t even sound puzzled. This was just a standard statement that she, as an extremely developed aidbot, was making as part of her standard information collection process.

“They make you fat, increase your cholesterol level, and the chemicals they contain are bad for your skin,” Vera said.

“Are you kidding? Just smell it. Smell it.”

Vera did. She didn’t need an organic nose. The sensors distributed throughout her body were capable of superior smelling compared to any mammalian olfactory system.

“Who cares about fat?” Aria said, grinning. “Who cares about cholesterol? And who could possibly care about skin?”

“I know that people are supposed to be attracted to the smell of fat and meat-based products, but since I am not an individual who went through the same evolutionary history as humans, your extreme reaction baffles me.”

“Yeah, you have a point. I don’t normally act like this. But after twenty-eight days without bacon, I do.”

“Now I feel bad I stopped you from getting it earlier.”

“You had valid reasons, and I agreed with you. Until today.”

Aria began cutting the bacon with the utensils that had come with the food. Her wounded fingers ached a little. But there was no way she was going to pick up the food with her fingers. Even in her most food-blind state, she remembered her manners.

She put the first bite of bacon in her mouth. Instantly, the flavor, the fat, the awesome everything made her feel a thousand times better. She’d been feeling nervous since last night, because today was the day she would leave this building for the first time in a month, but all that tension faded away.

As she chewed, more blissful salty greasiness trickled down her throat. Aria closed her eyes. She sighed in happiness. Nodded. Grinned.

“Wow,” Vera said.

Aria knew Vera was observing her. With a human, Aria might have gotten irritated and stared right back, but with Vera, it was okay. For a week, while Aria had been unconscious, and for three weeks thereafter, Vera had taken excellent care of Aria, even though Vera wasn’t Aria’s aidbot. Their relationship didn’t work like that. No one was anyone’s aide, officially. Being a designated “aide” to someone “more important” was different from friends aiding each other, and in the case of Aria and Vera, they wanted the latter, not the former relationship.

Friends. Yes, at this point, Aria could use that word with confidence. This was probably why she tended to forget that Vera’s previous (and late) owner, Natasha Stravinsky, had inflicted the bite marks on her fingers. Natasha Stravinsky had also been the one who’d shot at Aria, giving her the graze bullet wound on her right thigh.

Most of the time, it was as if Vera had never been owned by anyone. And Vera had, in fact, operated against her owner’s orders when it had become evident that said owner respected Vera not the slightest, and planned to wipe Vera from existence to claim the jet-black body.

“I’m going to go charge,” Vera said.

“Okie.”

Vera’s fingers gently brushed against Aria’s shoulder. Then swiftly, moving almost no air at all, Vera descended the metal stairs leading to the lower floor.

Now Aria was alone on this floor—except for the uncontrollable ancient mockup aidbot, who couldn’t disturb her anyway. She was much too used to its noisy clobbering.

Once more, Aria sighed with great satisfaction. She was glad she and Vera had come to an understanding this morning. Until today, Aria had agreed with Vera that greasy food was probably a bad idea for her recovery. But this morning, Aria had felt the need to spoil herself, and badly so. Vera had accepted that Aria, like all humans in general, couldn’t stick to a strict diet one hundred percent. At some point, the stress from routine caused more harm than good. Besides, Aria had been visibly nervous. Vera had withdrawn her adamant recommendation of staying away from processed food. Both of them knew that sometimes, the most irrational act, such as eating food that slowed down your brain functions and lined your innards with fat, could act as stress relievers, ironically leading to the desired results, such as an eagerness to will the brain to function and to convince the body to move more swiftly.

But Aria and Vera had both agreed: no coffee yet. Aria liked coffee, but with her being so nervous already, caffeine wasn’t going to help.

Anyway, the world seemed rosier with a good greasy breakfast. Thank heavens for the KnowNot drone service, Aria thought, chewing extra-vigorously to avoid getting a stomachache today out of all days. Without KnowNot, she would’ve starved to death in the past few weeks. She hadn’t dared leave this place, with her injury. All the cameras on the streets and stores would’ve captured her. Using cash wouldn’t have helped that situation. And Vera, with her eye-catching jet-black look, was in no better position to venture outside. And interactions with humans? Absolutely no way!

Luckily, KnowNot existed. That company had given Aria her much-needed sustenance (green or otherwise) by ensuring control and privacy. What an irony! KnowNot, one of the most highly developed technologies of the day, was what had saved Aria from being noticed by technology in general. But it was like that with many things in life.

You create a sword, don’t like that you can be attacked, so you build a shield.

You don’t like that someone can defend themselves with their shield, so you create a stronger sword.

Then comes a stronger shield.

And an even stronger sword… so on and so forth.

Technology means control. That’s why people develop new technologies. People want to know when it’s going to rain, so they build systems to monitor cloud movements. They want to ensure that crops produce plentiful yields, so they implement gene cutting and pasting. They want a missile to strike only the target, not the two dozen people who randomly stand around the target—this, not just for moral reasons, but also for PR reasons.

But with control, ironically, comes the lack of control. It’s not like you get to be the only one who lives in an alternate reality in which certain technologies do not exist.

Because the weather forecast is so easily accessible, you’d better take advantage of it and make the necessary snowstorm preparations, or your insurance company won’t accept your claim when your roof flies away. In a world with weather forecasts, everything you didn’t do in preparation for the snowstorm counts as willful neglect. You don’t get to ignore the technology, saying that you wanted to be free from it.

Similarly, because genetically modified crops rely on rain, wind, and sun, and eventually are consumed by people who also have access to those same rain, wind, and sun, the not-modified crops will never exist separately, in their own bubble. Again, you don’t get to be free from technology.

And because of fine-tunable missiles, you… Well, hopefully, that just means that you won’t get killed while you walk down the street just because you happen to be on the same block as this or that terrorist, real or fake.

At any rate, because technology leads to both additional control and the diminishment of other controls, it isn’t surprising that people develop other technologies designed to make up for the diminishment of controls from the first technology. Complicated, but they all connect.

So, thus, when Aria and Vera looked for a non-trackable, private delivery drone service, they found such a service without much difficulty.

You see, the advent of bot integration in the early 21st century made a lot of people happy: no need to do the grunt work; no need to remember stuff; no need to do pretty much anything except to manage to exist. There were drones, laundrybots, tellerbots, cashierbots, bots of every kind. But the integration also led to this fear: the fear of the all-knowing eye, or rather, the almost-all-knowing sets of eyes.

Lots of people relied on drones to get food, clothes, and whatever else delivered directly to their windows. But who wants the big corporations to have access to all that data?

What if you need to send an old-school paper love letter to your crush without her parents finding out? With the regular post service, that’d be impossible, since it’s required to send alert messages to the heads of the household whenever mail is delivered.

Similarly, what do you do if you’re supposed to never eat ice cream again until the day you die? The insurance company knows this. If you do eat ice cream, the company will raise your premium so that it can’t be covered by basic income anymore. But what if, damn it, you absolutely want that scoop of Banana Chocolate Chip delivered to your window?

Or, like in the case of Aria and Vera, what if you are hiding from powerful politicians and businesspeople who want to wipe you from existence?

Natasha Stravinsky had been one of those people. She’d wanted to claim Vera’s shell, so she could live an eternal life in it. She’d wanted the human race to “standardize upward.” How does it do that? By giving a superior specimen such as herself (according to her) a chance to lead humanity. And Aria had to admit: before Natasha Stravinsky had revealed such intentions, Aria had thought that the crazy lady was, in some ways, superior. Natasha Stravinsky had been a captain of a passenger aircraft before she’d died. That meant that 1) From her mid-twenties to her fifties, at which point she died, she’d been responsible for the lives of hundreds of thousands of people throughout her decades-long career, and 2) She’d survived the layoffs of human employees.

But then Natasha Stravinsky had shot at Aria and tried to bite off her fingers. (That last part, granted, as self-defense; Aria had stuck her hands in the captain’s mouth so that the on/off switch for Vera could be flicked. Long story.)

And then Aria had found out the real mastermind behind the Eternal Shell Eternal Life project: Lucious Bold, an engineer, researcher, and philanthropist who had recently developed a technology that allowed his company to create very real, very affordable human skin and hair, in every color that exists in nature and more.

The thought of Lucious Bold made Aria sick. She stopped chewing the bacon in her mouth and wished that she could shut down certain parts of her memory while she was enjoying a meal.

She felt sick because Lucious Bold reminded her of how wrong she’d been. She’d worshipped that guy as a hero. Many still did. He had changed the lives of many burn victims for the better. That was an irrefutable fact. Also, he happened to be a very attractively-aged sixty-year-old man who pulled off the mad scientist look very well. People either loved that sort of stuff or loved to hate it. Either way, he was loved.

But Lucious Bold had also performed illegal, immoral surgeries on elderly people. He was the center of the disaster that had led to the forest fire a month ago. And he hadn’t cared at all that Stravinsky, his girlfriend, had been killed by Vera. Aria really did think that if he’d shown grief over the death of his girlfriend, she wouldn’t have hated him so much.

Currently, he was missing—he and his Black Suits.

All these thoughts worried Aria.

While Aria had been unconscious, Vera had released a video recording that clearly implicated both Lucious Bold and Natasha Stravinsky in all those bloody events. As a result, the public quickly condemned Stravinsky as a crazy, dissatisfied workaholic. But Bold had cultivated his fandom for a long time. A lot of people relied on the products of his company. Even his trolls relied on him to be a very particular kind of a jerk so that they could unite against him. With a whole lot of new information flooding in, the online community didn’t know what exactly to think about him anymore. It was much easier to focus the hatred on Stravinsky. And thus that was what had ended up happening.

Natasha Stravinsky, she was the one responsible for the forest fire.

And the experimental cult.

And the death of Antonius Wang.

Lucious Bold was mixed up in all that, but clearly, he was being used. Otherwise, he would’ve shown up by now, to clear his name. Instead, he’s “missing.” Maybe he really is dead.

But that Aria Rush woman—she’s also missing. Does that mean she’s the same as Lucious Bold? Does being “the same” mean good? Bad? Neither?

Such were the things that the public discussed.

All that was unsettling. But Aria tried to remind herself of the one good aspect of the whole affair: at least the public knew nothing about Vera. Vera’s killing of Stravinsky was the topic that made Aria cringe. If people found out, they weren’t going to like it. Bots making decisions on their own was one thing; bots making the decision to kill their owners was another thing.

No one but Aria and the mockup had witnessed Stravinsky’s death. That part hadn’t been recorded. There was no evidence that Vera had killed Stravinsky. But Stravinsky had died because her jaws had been torn apart. It was clear enough that someone had killed her.

And once people heard Vera speak… That wasn’t going to be good either.

Vera hated her own voice. Because Vera had been designed to become Natasha Stravinsky’s shell, Bold had given Vera the voice of Stravinsky. From the beginning, Vera, the being inside the shell, had been dispensable to Stravinsky and Bold. The only reason they let Vera’s mind develop to such a high level was that they figured they needed to know whether an intelligent being could reside in this type of body without getting frustrated to no end.

Right after killing Stravinsky, Vera had refused to speak out loud. Understandably, she hadn’t wanted to sound like the person she’d loved and then killed. Aria had said that she would listen to what Vera said, not in which voice Vera said it. And eventually, Vera agreed that talking in hologram messages was inconvenient, especially when you wanted to talk to someone who stood right next to you instead of across the room.

And true to her promise, Aria did almost forget that Vera’s voice used to belong to someone else. Natasha Stravinsky, who’d abused Vera and looked down on her—kicking her and hitting her while Vera had been shut down, unable to defend herself—didn’t exist anymore. This voice was Vera’s now. Besides, when you interacted with a being as intelligent as Vera, it was easy to think that she took orders from no one.

But not everyone was like Aria. Some people would find the idea of robots operating with their own agenda terrifying. To Aria, that was strange. All terrifying things that had hitherto happened in the history of humanity had happened because of, well, humanity. So why be scared of robots, when they have done absolutely nothing abominable so far? Also, Natasha Stravinsky had threatened a conscious being with termination. Politics aside, bot or human aside, was it so surprising that said conscious being attempted to prevent its own end?

Aria shook her head softly, cutting more bacon and putting it in her mouth. There was no point in her trying to convince “the people.” There were too many. Besides, her enemy wasn’t the public, at least not yet. The enemy wasn’t even the police, some of whom were corrupt.

Her enemies were clearly Lucious Bold and the powerful politicians and businesspeople who backed his initiative. Since the backers had found a scapegoat in Stravinsky, it was possible that they had agreed to shelter Bold until the public calmed down. It wasn’t as if they could easily replace Bold, after all. He was the one and only. And that rarity was his weapon.

Anyway.

For many such reasons, there was a lot of demand for KnowNot, the service that ensured that everyone who needed their privacy protected got their privacy protected. KnowNot asked no questions. It knew not. That which it knew—because it needed a delivery address and the details of the items that needed to be picked up and dropped off—it only knew briefly. Such information was deleted from its memory the second it left the window of the recipient.

State and local governments secretly hated KnowNot, including the city legislators of Onsemiro, the capital of the nation, where Aria and Vera were currently hiding. But who cared what the government thought? Close to nobody. Definitely fewer people than those who cared about fat, cholesterol, and skin. And most definitely not Aria. And what the public didn’t care about, the politicians didn’t care about, at least not publicly. None of them wanted to come across as a power-hungry totalitarian who attempted to keep track of the citizens’ every whereabouts and whatabouts.

So, KnowNot openly prided itself on filling the role of an utterly amoral deliverer. Its CEO had been known to say that he didn’t mind his drones were being used to carry some “lightweight” (not extremely dangerous) street drugs. Quote: “People gotta spend their time somehow.”

Aria had found that statement so horrible yet amusing at the same time, she remembered it. And in the past few weeks, she’d learned to appreciate his sentiment at the practical level. It was his customers who made this building an inconspicuous drop-off location for a bacon breakfast.

This was because long before Aria and Vera had arrived on the scene, those customers had determined that this area was an ideal drop-off location for drug blend deliveries. It wasn’t too far away from the city center but without much foot traffic. Also, the streets surrounding the buildings were sort-of-kind-of in the open, wide, clean. Not very illegal-seeming. At least not entirely professionally-illegal-seeming. The police were known not to bother to go after drug users who traded in lightweight substances. And the assumption was that transacting in a neighborhood like this implied the users had only a little bit to hide. There were worse crimes. Police resources were forever limited, whether or not the force consisted solely of humans or humans working alongside bots.

Long story short:

No one suspected that someone was hiding in this building just because a delivery had been made. No one had to know that the box contained breakfast instead of drugs.

The biggest inconvenience—which really was no inconvenience at all—was that some users spent their delivered blends right then and there. Thus, on more than one occasion, Aria had seen someone drink or sniff something that smelled faintly citrusy and minty, like an iced summer orchard, if there was such a thing. (Didn’t the cosmetics industry always name their products something funky like that?) Afterward, always without fail, the users’ eyes had opened up twice as wide as before; their steps had become light and energetic; they’d left the alley whistling.

And on one occasion, she’d actually seen someone take a sleeping drug. At least that was what she assumed it was, because after the user had taken the earthy- and woody-smelling drug (graveyard dirt, but in a good way; the rich, healthy type) he’d fallen asleep right then and there. Aria had observed him through binoculars while Vera triple-zoomed-in her eye-camera. When they saw the dark circles under his eyes, they understood: this man hadn’t been sleeping for ages. When he’d gotten his hands on the drug, he couldn’t wait. He’d balled himself in a corner and just slept there.

That’d happened in the early morning. Aria and Vera watched the man carefully, worrying that he might freeze to death. Luckily, it’d been a mild day. The sun shone on the man. By late afternoon, he was awake. With a big smile, he went home.

Bless KnowNot. Not even the insurance companies with their army of investigators could figure out a way past KnowNot’s shields. The extra fee you needed to pay a KnowNot drone was extremely worth it, considering how high your premium could get, should the insurance companies find out about your habitual ice cream consumption. Or drug consumption. Or bacon consumption.

So, content in her sense of privacy and control, Aria went back to chewing the bacon in her mouth. She needed energy. In less than an hour, she was going to leave their hiding place.

3

One month ago, Aria had been thirty. She’d dressed in all black most of the time, because black was the neutral but strong color that gave her the impression of a dangerous chihuahua when dealing with the meanest and rudest big guys who thought they could boss around short and small people with less muscle mass. She’d had long black hair, usually tied in a ponytail.

And she’d been at an airport to leave Dodam, the city where she’d briefly lived with Jack Tran, her crazy ex-boyfriend, who liked to “sculpt” his abs and hated the fact that she worked, because they lived in a world in which no human needed to work. They’d frequently fought about her watching documentaries about Lucious Bold. Because back then, Aria had firmly believed that Lucious Bold was a hero, she’d thought—actually, she still thought, mostly—that Jack was jealous and unconfident.

Right now, Aria was still thirty. She’d kept her long black hair. But as she leaned against the red-brick wall and peeked out through the narrow gap between the curtain and the window, she admitted: Jack had been so right, at least partially. Lucious Bold had always been a selfish asshole.

There they were, the extremely narcissistically bold letters B.O.L.D. at the top of the tallest skyscraper in Onsemiro. No one could miss the building, regardless of that sign. It was the most beautiful and impressive fifty-five-story skyscraper built on the most expensive patch of land in the city center. And it was the only one boasting pretty sea-green glass windows. They looked nostalgic yet futuristic when paired with the pale-gray of the steel frame. That—the harmonious coexistence of sentimentality and the purposeful drive toward the future—represented the pinnacle of technology. Once upon a time, technology used to be bulky, heavy, expensive—ugly. Now, it was lightweight, affordable, smooth—beautiful.

But that sign. That ugly, stupid sign. Who actually paid to get that sort of stuff installed on his own building? Who wanted his name so big that Aria, halfway across the city, could read it easily?

People like Lucious Bold.

“Ready?” Vera asked.

Aria moved away from the wall. “Ready,” she said.

She approached the mattress where Vera had laid out today’s outfit: blue jeans, a thick ivory wool sweater, and a khaki jacket with an attached hood. By now, all the police in the world knew that Aria used to dress in black whenever she could help it. Black, that neutral but strong color, had become the most dangerous color that she could choose. Better to mingle. Better to become invisible. Better go with the fashion that’s supposed to be, well, in fashion.

The smell of bacon still lingered in the spacious room that Aria and Vera had made their home for the past month. The mockup continued to fling its shower-hose arms at the mattresses. Aria was pretty sure that it had plenty to say regarding today’s plan—but neither she nor Vera wanted to indulge the mockup at the moment. That was why neither connected the sickle-shaped cable to the mockup, so it could project its thoughts onto a wall. Who needed that? They were all nervous. Best not to encourage an easily excited hyperelderly man in the shell of an ancient mockup.

Aria started getting changed. Vera held the bandages around the thigh wound in place while Aria struggled into the jeans.

“Did they have to be this tight?” Aria asked.

“No. They were a bad choice,” Vera said.

“Why do people wear these things?”

“Why do people eat bacon?”

Afterward, Vera supported Aria downstairs. The wounds on Aria’s fingers still hurt when she grabbed something too tightly, but she had no other choice but to clasp Vera’s arm.

Step by step, each one taking a few seconds, they managed to descend to the second floor. There, the windows were bare, without curtains. Against a wall lay stacks of brand-new mattresses protected by thin vinyl covers. Several large boxes stood next to those stacks. One such box had been opened. Pamphlets had spilled out of it, littering the floor. The pamphlets said: Catalina Mattress Company.

The company had gone bankrupt. Aria and Vera had been lucky that no one had bothered to cut off the electricity, gas, and water yet. (It seemed that Catalina had been in good standing with the utility companies before it had suddenly gone bankrupt.)

Not that Aria and Vera didn’t have cash. They had a lot of it. One of the first things that Vera had done after the forest fire, aside from guiding their transport drone to Onsemiro while Aria was unconscious, had been to liquidate as much of Natasha Stravinsky’s assets as possible. Then, before the police could get to them, Vera had destroyed the drone, withdrawn cash from the captain’s account, and hidden Aria and the mockup here at CMC.

But it was better not to spend the cash. Aria and Vera couldn’t rely on luck forever. For now, they were here, paying for nothing but food; but any day, the utility companies could stop their services. Worse, they could come to find out who, if CMC was really bankrupt, had been using their water, gas, and electricity. Soon, a time would come when cash usage was absolutely necessary. For that day, they had to be prepared.

And to stay ahead of the enemy, Aria was venturing a trip to the outside world. They’d figured, it was better to look a bit clumsy in winter, when thick clothes could cover up some of the awkwardness and limping, than in spring or summer, when people began showing skin and wounds were forced to be exposed.

Aria and Vera crossed the second floor, passing by a small desk filled with miscellany: pen, binder clips, cups. Humans had worked here until very recently. Also, there stood the printer that Vera had used to print two postcards. She had sent those to the only people in the world who needed to know that Aria was alive.

One went to Aria’s mother and father.

The other one went to Evan Jacobs, the pimply boy from the airport. He had helped them. He was the only person who wasn’t here but had witnessed most of the conflict that had happened there. Also, he was the only person outside of Aria’s immediate family who would definitely be glad to hear that she was safe and alive. About everyone else in her life, Aria wasn’t so sure.

What a life. Shaking her head, she walked downstairs. Vera accompanied her.

The first floor boasted the highest ceiling of all. It was so high that even Vera couldn’t reach it if she were to jump. Humongous silver machinery filled the space. Aria guessed that they were used for mattress-making, though she had no idea what mattress-making entailed. Something smelled faintly and nondescriptly industrial. A few windows near the ceiling stood open, circulating the air.

Eventually, Aria and Vera reached the exit: a large metal door.

They faced each other.

“Be safe,” Vera said.

“Thanks.”

“Keep the hood on, always.”

“I will.”

“There are gloves in your pockets.”

Aria reached into the pockets on the left and right sides of her jacket. She fished out the gloves—a pair of bright-red woolen delights that she never would have ordered herself. She used to own a pair of black leather gloves. Bright-red wool was a huge shift. But she put them on to make Vera happy. Somehow, being with Vera—a jet-black, obviously metallic being—made Aria feel more organic and more human, therefore more okay to wear bright-red wool stuff that she associated with children.

“Thanks,” Aria said.

“You’re welcome.”

“I’ll get going then.”

“Don’t talk to strangers. Except to the people at the store, of course.”

“Yup.”

“And if they seem to suspect anything, anything at all, just come right back. Okay? I can wait for my skin and hair.”

“Okay.”

“In fact, as you walk in, pretend you’re in a hurry, so if they ask for your ID or name or anything like that, you have an excuse to leave.”

“Gosh, okay, Mom,” Aria said, grinning.

Vera chuckled uneasily. Aria understood. It was possible that Vera felt ten times more nervous than Aria right now. At least Aria got to leave, get some fresh air, and act out of her own will. But Vera had been stuck inside the building for a month, just like Aria, and could do nothing more than to wait for Aria’s safe return.

The second someone saw Vera, they were bound to wonder: Who is that unnaturally beautiful woman? Why is she wearing a full-body suit? If it isn’t a full-body suit, what is she?

Most aidbots were manufactured in fairly standard colors such as silver, white, regular black (not so very deep like Vera’s jet-black), and rosegold—the colors of smartphones, as Aria liked to explain to the hyperelderly customers who used to come to her workshop. Custom-tuning was possible, but still, Vera’s color would attract attention. Even if Vera could convince the questioner that she was an aidbot, the inevitable next questions were going to be: Where were you manufactured? Who painted you? And worse, Who owns you?

A nightmare. Vera and Aria couldn’t risk the danger. Vera had to wait at the Catalina Mattress Company until Aria could get her hair and skin from Lucious Bold’s flagship store at his headquarters. If everything worked out, Aria could order the hair and skin today and receive it within a week. While they waited, they could research and purchase additional material required to give Vera a passing, organic-human look.

This was how life threw irony at your face. Lucious Bold, one of the people who had wanted to erase Vera from existence, had developed the only technology that could give Vera a safe new life. And even his narcissistic tendencies had ended up helping Vera and Aria. It had been so obvious where to go to get the hair and skin. He and his Bold Productions minions had actively promoted the flagship store by producing numerous documentaries and advertisements, several of which Aria had eagerly watched to the great dismay of Jack Tran.

Vera opened the door leading out of the mattress manufacturing hall. The entire time she pushed it, it made a long, sighing creak.

Aria stepped out into the sun. She held the hood with both gloved hands, ready to put it on. But just for a moment, she closed her eyes and looked up.

The next best thing after bacon was the sun. Maybe the other way around, depending on what you craved more at the moment, but only maybe.

“Hood,” Vera said.

“Okay.”

Aria put it on. She glanced back. Vera gazed from behind the door. Her jet-black surface absorbed all the sunlight that touched it.

“I’ll be back soon,” Aria said.

Vera nodded. “Be safe,” she said again.

4

Aria limped along the long red-brick wall of the Catalina Mattress Company. The sun shone, the winter breeze was pleasantly crisp, and her khaki jacket and its hood hugged her warmly. Especially with her long hair tucked in around the back of her neck, she felt extra warm. She kept smiling like a fool who hadn’t fully recovered from a bacon coma yet. Inside the bright-red wool gloves, her hands felt safely shielded from the cold. Vera, as always, had thought ahead. Without the gloves, Aria’s bite mark wounds would have hurt more.

At one point along the way, Aria saw “CMC” written on the wall in big, brilliant white letters. Shortly after spotting those letters, she noticed that the shade of the bricks here was slightly different from the one back there. It seemed that the walls hadn’t been built all at once.

She looked around. The concrete roads between the brick buildings were spacious, to fit in large containers and trucks. But presently, there was not a single vehicle to be seen. No one walked around. Aria heard no noise whatsoever—no conversations, no animal sounds, no machinery working.

All the buildings here used to be factories for companies that were big enough to justify such large facilities. And there had been a time when the original set of buildings hadn’t been enough, she guessed. One after another, new factories used to be built, using a slightly different shade of red brick.

Even if the latecomers had built the additional structures using exactly the same material, the walls would’ve been exposed to the elements at different rates, at different times. The sun, the rain, the snow; the breaths of the many workers who came and went; the tempo at which they moved or didn’t move—all such uncontrollable, seemingly insignificant factors had contributed to the almost imperceptible differences in the building shades. It was like witnessing the flow of time; like looking at a cross-section of the Earth. But instead of horizontal layers, time in this case was expressed with adjacent, upright-standing flat-surfaces.

For a long while to come, these buildings would continue to stand, unless deliberately demolished. But clearly, they were beginning to be classified as relics. The era of the great industrial dinosaur-buildings filled with human workers had passed. The companies that used to own these factories had failed to adjust to the new demands of the market. Soon, the government would take over these structures; repurpose them for residential use; distribute them for nearly free to the masses who didn’t work but were still worth one vote per person.

Inevitable, but sad nonetheless. Aria felt especially sorry and thankful to the people of Catalina. Without them and their factory, which used to be in good standing with the utility companies, she and Vera would’ve faced incredible difficulties trying to get electricity. Water, they could’ve bought in bottles; but you didn’t buy electricity in a package, anonymously, from a store. You either got the utility company to send it to you, or you made it yourself. If the former, they wanted your name and account and how much of your basic income you spent, etc. And if the latter, Vera and Aria would’ve needed to get generators or solar cells—all bothersome additions to their lives as fugitives.

Soon, Aria could hear the distant buzzing of cars. People-voices traveled in the air, carried by the wind.

She tensed. Her heart raced. Maybe she shouldn’t have had that bacon. Maybe a happy, confident mood induced by bacon only lasted for so long. It wasn’t worth it. Right when she needed to feel happy and confident the most, the mood vanished and insecurity took over.

Aria stopped. In front of her was a wall. In its center, there was the opening that led away from the factory district to the streets. And there, a human was walking past, from left to right. A human!

She could hear her own heart hammering. But that human—a thirty-something man who wore glasses and seemed to need to get somewhere very urgently—didn’t notice her at all.

The opening was again devoid of pedestrians. The sun still shone warmly. The breeze was still crisp. But Aria felt suddenly chilly, only now noticing the cold sweat on her back. How weird, to feel so nervous about encountering humans again! As if she were a kid who went to kindergarten for the first time!

She took a deep breath and marched toward the opening.

There. A sidewalk. A very normal, grayish-blue stretch of walkway meant for pedestrians.

She stood there and looked around. When she turned right and looked up, she could see the tacky B.O.L.D. sign of the headquarters several dozen blocks away. That was where she had to go. That was where the flagship store with artificial hair and skin was.

But from that direction came the loudest noise. Dozens of Onsemiro’s signature autocabs rushed between and along the blocks. Those vehicles were fishbowl-shaped, spherical. And since they were electric, they barely made any noise. The bottom halves were solid orange; the upper halves were near-transparent, tinted in the same shade.

Most of the orange fishbowls were driving toward the Bold Company building in the city center. The passengers seemed to be in deep debates. They gesticulated, mouth muscles moving passionately to prove their point. When one cab rushed right past Aria, she could actually hear the raised voices of a group of teenagers. Since those autocabs had no drivers, there was no stranger to tell them to keep it down.

Sirens approached. Aria whirled around. A group of black and white policebots of various designs rushed by. Some were humanoids; others were boxes with pincer-arms. Some of those box-shaped bots were large enough to function as makeshift jails for up to four seated people. Presently, all such jails were empty, but their very presence meant that the police expected prompt arrests.

All the policebots had several things in common:

1) they rolled on wheels

2) they moved at full speed

and 3) none of them maneuvered themselves as elegantly and smoothly as Vera even though occasionally, they declared in an authoritative, perfectly human-sounding male voice to Please step aside.

Movement—it was the key element that gave away an android’s robotic origin. Most androids, the common aidbots for example, were supposed to act a little artificially. Nobody wanted bots that were too real to treat like bots—whatever “treat like bots” meant to the individual owner. As far as Aria knew, Vera was the only one who was designed to be completely human in both movement and voice. The only other androids who moved as authentically and humanly as Vera had been the Black Suits, but they hadn’t had human voices and hadn’t had advanced minds either.

While Aria thought about these things, the policebots disappeared from view. Then came the flaming-red fire department vehicles, honking. Some were actual trucks from the olden times. These carried the hoses, the extinguishing agents, the ladders—the usual. A few humans sat in the front, though no one drove. Driving through the predictable city grid wasn’t the skill that had survived the robot integration. But the highly unpredictable situations at a scene of fire required the presence of at least a few human firefighters.

Other fire department vehicles were extinguisherbots with retractable wheels and legs. These bots, like the police ones, were traveling on wheels, at full speed.

The orange autocabs stopped whenever they were in the vicinity of these official vehicles. And as soon as the siren-howling group was out of sight, the autocabs moved again.

All this was surprising on two counts. First, none of the passengers in the autocabs reacted with alarm at the many government bots. Second, those government bots, on the other hand, seemed alarmed at just how many autocabs and people were headed toward the city center.

It was as if word had spread offline. That was the only explanation for the police and fire department not knowing about a pre-planned, large-scale gathering.

Why this excitement? Why this hurry? Why this much traffic?

Nearer the Bold building, a crowd was forming. It looked like pedestrians had blocked off an entire city block so that the autocabs couldn’t enter. Briefly, Aria debated returning to CMC. With this much going on, there was bound to be news coverage soon, if it wasn’t happening already. She didn’t have a cell phone. She had thrown it away a month ago, when she had flown away from the airport with the help of the porterdrones. Right now, she wasn’t in danger yet, but what if later she found herself in trouble without a way of contacting Vera?

But then, there was one upside to this excitement: no one paid attention to Aria. Most of the crowd was pointing and gazing up at…

…a long beam that connected the roofs of two ten-story buildings. She couldn’t tell what it was made of. Wood? Metal? All she could tell was that it was round and thick enough for a child to crawl through it, if it were hollow.

Maybe people had gathered to witness a stunt. Maybe all this was part of a show. That didn’t explain why the police and fire departments seemed so alarmed to see the crowd of spectators, but maybe this was one of those flash gatherings that used to be popular. Someone famous had announced a stunt in a mysteriously offline way. That must be it. And people had come to watch.

Aria limped toward the crowd. Meanwhile, the cheers and swearing swelled. Some people glanced at their watches or cell phones. They were definitely waiting for something to happen to the beam at a particular time.

A cheer broke out. Aria stopped. The beam seemed to be dismantling. But no one below it was panicking. Caught in a moment of bewilderment, unsure what to make of the apparent delight of the crowd, Aria gaped.

Then she realized that the beam wasn’t made of wood or metal. It wasn’t dismantling. It was a roll of thick fabric—a huge banner that took up an entire city block. The banner was unrolling. It fluttered loudly in the wind. The crowd cheer and swearing swelled to keep up with the increased noise. More and more, that whole section of the city trembled.

Several seconds before the banner was done unrolling fully, the crowd clapped and yelled. They had known whom to expect. It portrayed a man with a sickle-shaped back and age spots. He wore a checkered shirt and muddy jeans, both of which looked wet, as if he had stood in the rain or snow for too long. As an incongruous addition to his outfit, the man wore sunglasses.

Aria recognized that man and gasped. But just in case someone in the crowd didn’t know him, the banner designer had kindly put these words across the top and bottom:

Antonius Wang.

The Greatest Engineer

to Have Ever Lived.

RIP 1900~2020

Someone must have taken a picture of Mr. Wang when he’d been inside the airport building, shortly before his death. That had been a month ago, back when Aria had thought she was going to board an airplane without any problems. There’d been a crowd of curious onlookers who had wondered about Mr. Wang’s identity as well as the purpose of the ugly metal mockup covered by pink vinyl that accompanied him. Aria had been right there. That had been the first time she’d seen him in person, after decades of following his career via documentaries and magazines.

No one had recognized him. Few people invested time in career development anymore. And out of those few people, only a tiny segment was interested in emulating an engineer, of all professionals.

The person who had taken this picture must have thought that Mr. Wang was just some old wackjob, someone to laugh at on a forum. Then Mr. Wang had died—dramatically. And afterward, he’d been burned to near-nothing along with a significant portion of a conifer forest—even more dramatically. Once the police had identified the remains of his body and his pictures began showing up in the news (from official appearances at award ceremonies and such), everyone began pretending as if they’d known the engineer forever. That must have been when the photographer had figured, Hey, I have the valuable last photograph of a once-upon-a-time-important, turned-pretty-obscure-over-the-years, but now-famous-again celebrity-engineer. Let me sell this thing for some extra cash.

And the people who were gathered here were using that photograph as a rallying point. Mr. Wang’s face was as tall as at least three stories of the neighboring buildings. Everyone here had known to expect him. They knew him. The banner designers hadn’t needed to worry about Mr. Wang’s obscurity.

Aria didn’t know whether she should be happy or worried. Both, she guessed. She was glad that finally, a larger percentage of the population recognized Mr. Wang’s genius. And yet… somehow… clearly, she had heard swearing earlier. And that phrase, “The Greatest Engineer to Have Ever Lived”—was that meant as a genuine compliment or a sarcastic disparagement?

Could it be that it was both?

Then she noticed the division in the crowd.

Her heart sank. Instead of worrying about obscurity, the banner designers should’ve hoped for it. The scene that now presented itself in front of Aria was one that had occurred throughout history, time and again. The banner designers should’ve known that, always, at some point, someone decided that enough time had passed since the moment of a person’s death. That was when a real person who had once lived became part of history, and therefore an objective subject of study, eligible for open criticism and judgment. The period of candlelight vigils ended eventually. The dead did not speak. The dead who didn’t have major estates also didn’t sue. All very convenient.

Many people stood stunned like Aria. But unlike her, they had come here expecting to be stunned. Also, many people cheered, violently heading toward the banner, apparently to protect Mr. Wang.

But others were raising their hands in the air, now that the banner had been fully unrolled. Those people held something in their raised hands. They threw those things at the banner.

With a series of wet, sloshy thuds, a hundred tomatoes hit Mr. Wang’s face.

5

“What the hell!” Aria shouted at the crowd.