The Erased, page 3
He has a baritone voice, and everything he says is very deadpan. Staring into his eyes is not quite like looking at another human, especially when you know the difference. It’s more like seeing a chimpanzee or an ape; you can see that sparkle of intelligence, but it’s somehow alien to you.
“No Erik Kaplan. Tell me.. your name?”
“That’s…that’s impossible. I know there’s an Erik Kaplan. He was with me just a few…But you, you are him. You are Erik Kaplan, you told me you’d be Erik Kaplan. I recognize your voice.”
“Impossible,” I almost chuckle to him, as I examine his disconnected arm. The polymer bone is severed just below the shoulder joint; there’s a cable inside the bone which assists in movement. All of this is covered in the milky conductive lubricant that sends impulses from the data processor, that causes their bodies to move. There’s also a substance that appears to be blood in a thin layer below the organic tissue. These models can bleed.
I ask again, “Tell me your name?”
“I’m Gary.”
“Who named you?” I try to conserve my words for the sake of my tender mouth.
“You did, of course. Don’t you remember, Erik?” He stares at me as though I should understand everything he’s telling me. When I don’t, it’s just a childlike perplexity. “Today I am free from human oppression,” this thing, Gary, says to me. A sort of pride shines obviously across his face.
I examine where the arm is supposed to be attached. “Hurt, Gary?” I run my fingers over the wires protruding from the “wound,” for lack of a better term. How I’m going to reconnect this, I have no idea; the damage has been pretty severe, and it doesn’t appear to be electrical.
“Not exactly. It’s not pleasant, though,” he says. I’d imagine it would tickle if he were human. Never mind.
“Function, Gary?”
“I’m a revolutionary.”
“Yeah? Revolting against?”
“Like I said, I am revolting against oppression. Don’t you remember, Erik?”
It’s also possible that he can’t see properly and that’s why he mistakes me for this number 24, Erik G. Kaplan, from Aurora, IL. The voice thing doesn’t make any sense though. I’m from Pennsylvania, by way of Michigan. Sure there’s a northern dialect, but Chicago and its surrounding areas are pretty distinct. “Gary, name’s not Erik. Wife’s name not… sorry, not named Irene. Name’s Didi.”
“That’s a silly name, Erik.”
“Gary. How can I...get you... stop calling me Erik?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Just call me Seventy Seven.”
“All right, Seventy Seven,” he says, that deadpan flash across his face, as though he’s very mundanely understood the situation. “What kind of a name is Didi?”
“French. You know French?”
“Of or pertaining to the country of France or its language. It still sounds silly.”
As though an android knows the concept of silly. Yet this one must – it’s displaying it masterfully.
“Short for Didiane. Once told me... it meant ‘to desire.’ Gary, you remember anything... before this room?”
“I can’t tell you that, Eri…Seventy Seven.”
“Why not?” I’m still examining the cable in the polymer bone protruding from his detached arm. I have a screwdriver in my hand and I’m using it to loosen some of the knotted up cable around the bone.
“Security protocols.”
“Who set protocols?”
“You did.”
“Why can’t... you tell me?”
“Do you have a username and password?”
Naturally. The oldest and easiest protocols are the ones that always work to keep people out. I wasn’t going to press it, but it would be nice to know what caused the damage.
He had to be the oddest android that I’d ever come across. There’d been some serious rewiring or reprogramming done with him; probably the latter. It makes me wonder what happened to this number 24 – Erik Kaplan, born to Steve and Nicole Kaplan. Wife Irene. Son Jacob. Maybe he’s even still here. I’ll have to remember to ask some of the others – although I haven’t really talked to any of them yet, due to my jaw.
“Going to... shut you down... now... okay?”
“Yes, Seventy Seven. It will be nice to rest. Be sure to say hello to Didiane for me.”
Yes, Gary actually said that. I used the interface, which had an adapter cable plugged into a port in the back of his head, hidden just behind his left ear.
This is my tiny life now. Once, I was married. Once, I was a father. I had people who cared what happened to me and who cared for me; people whom I cared for myself. Now it’s just trying to fix some broken robot. He’s nothing but machinery; a microchip, metal, plastic, cable, wires, and artificial flesh. I used to build them, and somehow it wasn’t routine. This, this is routine. This is what you people have done to me.
I’ve become disconnected.
What am I supposed to do here?
The invisible answer in my head – you don’t even have to say it to me, it’s already there; “Fix it.”
Fix him.
An android named Gary. Who thinks I’m someone else.
I wake up, things always the same. My jaw still healing – hard to talk. The Professor and his compadres let me sit with them in the mess hall, but I don’t talk much due to the difficulty.
I don’t understand Gary. I don’t understand it, at all. All of the people I’ve seen around here – the nurses and orderlies and guards, I’m fairly sure they’re all androids. They probably all have NMAC stamps on them, and if not, one of our old competitors. They must have an administrator here, a maintenance person. The nurse mentioned administrators. The more complex a system is, the more likely it is to fail. The more vulnerable it is to attack. All of them must have a disaster recovery plan in place in case of failure. That’s I.T. 101; any person who uses technology in a business setting understands business continuity and the possible catastrophic loss of data.
As I work on Gary, it dawns on me to just follow the standard disaster recovery procedure. This was never part of my job at NMAC; I know very little code, all I did was run automated programs. I was just a cog in the great machine. The great machine that spits out other machines – little mechanized automatons.
There’s always a plan B.
And maintenance is the last step in a good business continuity plan. But we don’t see them, we don’t see anyone but other automatons. And what system could possibly be more complex than a walking, talking, thinking machine? Polymer bones and muscle structure – the harder plastic mimics bone while we use a more lightweight texture to mimic muscle tissue. It makes them damn near indestructible.
There are cables and wires to mimic a nervous system. And a hard drive in the head, with several microprocessors and a built-in cooling system to prevent overheating. They’re modeled after computers, to increase ease-of-use. They are androids, automatons. NMAC – National Mechanized Automation Corporation. But to call them indestructible is facetious; that’s making them overly simplified. If they didn’t have maintenance administrators – maybe even just one for this whole “Home” site – these orderlies and nurses would crash in a week. Internal processes are sometimes just too complex. They don’t have the caution, care, and understanding of a human brain – which makes human bodies the perfect machinery that we just imitate with androids. But not even those bodies are perfect – “I have seen all the works under the sun and behold, all is vanity and striving after wind.” Bodies require maintenance, and bodies eventually fail.
Tags: work, Gary, NMAC
5. the superman i knew (42)
That poor guy, the one with the broken jaw. It was in something he said, and I’m simply trying to chase it down. Something that takes me back to William, which may have been the defining chapter of my life.
There’s no surprise for me in William’s story. Whether it was government sponsored, which it most likely was, or some sort of corporate trip, William was William. He was something more than human – strength, speed, invulnerability. Stripped down to the core, from top to bottom, physically and mentally, William came to life.
As a man who wrote extensively about androids and the Transhumans, I felt the air of inevitability around him. Originally, I thought he was just an especially enhanced android, but he seemed far too intelligent. Maybe somebody had finally achieved the Transhumans’ goal. Or maybe he was a freak of genetic manipulation -- it was hard to tell -- and the experience was all-too-fleeting. So I only ever refer to him as “the superman I knew.”
The Nazi party experimented with the Jews and the Gypsies to engineer a race of supermen to take over the earth. The Aryan ideal descended from Nietzsche’s very own concept that man should be overcome. Geeks, nerds, and other good patriotic Americans owe their obsession with comic book superheroes to this very base philosophical notion. Hitler himself believed that genetic superiority existed in the blond hair and blue eyes of the true Aryan. That the Jews and other undesirables had polluted that superiority, and that he was just the man to breed it back into life while eradicating the other villainous swine. Unfortunately, he almost succeeded.
Two American Jews looked to the European theatre and Hitler’s horrible plan for world domination in the hands of his Űbermenschen. They imagined an evil superman crippled and seeking revenge on a world that had cast him out in a 1933 short story that evolved into the greatest American icon of the last 100 years. Before being named Clark Kent, a man who was the Jewish answer to Hitler’s Űbermensch, that character from the 1933 story was named Bill Dunn.
Comic books and their heroes owe everything to the original Superman. Without him, they simply would not exist.
When the Nazi intelligence apparatus was dismantled, the Russians marched on Berlin, and Hitler put a bullet in his brain. Many of his top Lieutenants feared the noose and offered information on the Soviets in exchange for their lives and their loyalties. The CIA employed a number of these high-ranking officials and built their own intelligence apparatus on the National Socialists. It’s no mistake that 1945 saw the end of the war and 1947 marked the foundation of the Central Intelligence Agency. The powers of old and evil weren’t destroyed by Allied victory – simply forced underground.
The way he told the story, he woke up in a hospital bed, with a hunched man standing over him. He didn’t really interact with this, in his words, terrible man. Whether he’d been injured or operated upon for some reason, he couldn’t say. He said he had no memory of anything before waking up there.
There were plenty of doctors and nurses and other people who wouldn’t really get too congenial with him. All of them were so concerned with his body and mind – none concerned with his emotions. Except for one nurse, he said.
When I say they were concerned with his mind, they gave him a computer reader that he was allowed to use whenever they weren’t operating on him. He said that, by the time he escaped, he’d memorized the Knowledgebase itself and could soak up the information in minutes. The problem with William, however, was the sheer boredom that followed from knowing everything one could know. There was no new information that excited him. He could recite Shakespearean sonnets, Tennysonian idylls, or Kierkegaardian discourses. He could give you a Physics overview – the theories of Hawking, Einstein, and Barnett – and make you understand it.
And keeping him there was like keeping a lion in a zoo. Who he might’ve been before he’d been brought to the zoo was irrelevant. If I hadn’t seen what he could do with my own eyes, I’d have dismissed him to the fringe, where other tie-wearing, network-humping journalists had so often dismissed me.
The day we met, the savage found me sitting in my chair with a book in my hands, probably Heart of Darkness, and a shotgun in my lap. I was practically asleep. The savage approached me like a wooly mammoth, his eyes wild with reproach and his beard thick and festive… the anti-Santa Claus. He had broken into my Oregon compound without so much as a thought. As I looked at him for the first time I could only imagine what terrors he had in store, what evil acts he planned to commit upon me. Perhaps there was a shotgun hidden in that large green army jacket.
My first thoughts, peering at him, were that he wanted to slaughter me, pillage my home and have his way with my new wife.
Shocked awake by his sudden appearance in front of me, I shouted, “On the ground, you pigfucker!”
“No,” he responded and hovered over me -- the great bear, the awakened giant.
I had no idea that this was the next evolution of man standing before me. This was the Nietzschean ideal, the great comic book hero man of tomorrow. This was the man who was supposed to save us from ourselves and was on a self-appointed journey to stop those who had created him. He took a step closer, and I became like a chimpanzee hopping around my furniture.
He told me later how his beard itched. His clothing was stained and stinking for having been worn for five weeks with no shelter. He couldn’t blame me for pointing that gun at him, considering the way he looked. Homeless men don’t just wander into impregnable compounds and then break down doors. Unless there’s meaning in the act, of course.
“Get back, you fucking swine, or I swear I’ll blow a hole the size of a basketball through your gut,” I said.
He took another step closer.
“You rat bastard! You must want me to kill you!”
“I just need to speak to you, sir,” he almost whispered in a throaty baritone.
“Regarding what? Who are you? Drug Enforcement?”
“Would I look like this if that were true?” His hair was ragged and matted.
“Maybe you’re one of those ratfucking Transhumans. Come to do me in after all this time. Well, I’ve only got one thing for you, my friend…”
Without another warning, the gun blasted from my hands loud enough to hear three counties away. The shells caught him directly where the ribcage ends and the stomach begins. To my shock and dismay, there’s no blood to fly all over the room. There’s no basketball-sized hole in his stomach. In my panic, I thought I’d missed. I snapped more shells in each barrel, “Oh you little bastard,” I muttered in my rage. “I’m the best fucking shot in this county. I don’t miss. I will hit you between the eyes if you take one more step.”
My eye locked into the crosshairs and he obliged me. I wanted to shoot. To a man like myself, there’s no mystery in what happens when two shotgun shells split open someone’s skull. I just wanted to see it. I had to.
Ka-blam.
Yet, there he still stood, smirking beneath his matted beard.
Fearfully and righteously yours,
Professor T.H. Stockton, esq.
Tags: William Dunn, the compound, broken jaw
6. the unamericans (77)
It wasn’t long before they approached me.
“Listen, friend,” he said in that speedball poetry that somehow seems to float from his mouth. “I heard you say something the other day. But it was like lightning in a bottle, it didn’t even register with me that something important was said, and now I don’t know what it was. And who knows if you would’ve even said it, considering the state of your jaw.”
They came to me during a dinner in the mess hall, after a pointless day trying to work out the right disaster recovery plan for poor Gary.
Poor Gary and his digital soul.
I wasn’t ready to approach them yet. Something about them made me uneasy, and I’m not sure exactly what. Maybe because something inside me said they truly belong here. The more I worked, the more I sat and listened to their stories, the more sure I became that I belonged too. Especially when I heard Block talk about happy coincidences.
Block, number 34, sings to himself, old songs that nobody’s supposed to remember. Sometimes he’d even sing when the Professor spoke, and could still recite nearly every word that exited the Professor’s mouth. He reminded me a lot of the guy who did the seven words you can’t say on television. Block has the same way about himself, the same self-assured confidence that I’m sure is only there because he earned it from years and years of practice. Like compensating. He’s blondish, with a beard that’s more a week-long stubble than anything, and a little bit of a receding hairline.
When they approached me, and the Professor questioned me about whatever it was that I said, Block sang to himself in a high-pitched, subdued falsetto. I found it somewhat distracting, and the singing made it hard to focus on the Professor.
The Professor continued, “Now listen, Seventy Seven, is it? I think it’s something of an important matter that you tell us about yourself. I’ve become certain that it’s the only way I can figure out what it was that you said that was so important. Something you may have mumbled, some girl who jerked you off at some point in your history, some town you may have visited. I’m not sure, but I’m absolutely certain that it’s important.”
“Important?” I asked from my healing jaw.
“What the hell else are we going to do with our time, buddy?” Block broke his song. He immediately went back into whatever it was he’d been singing. I could barely make out the word “nightclub” from his musical mumbling.
A smile crept across the Professor’s face. “Forgive Anthony, but he’s absolutely right, you know. You and me, him, we all need to survive somehow, and sometimes a good mystery can keep a man going.”
I struggled to push more words from my mouth. “Take mystery... shove up your ass.”
Block whipped around instantly, before the last word even slipped out and blasted: “Listen kid, I’ve been here longer than the Professor, I know how to survive here, and it’s been a few years. Can you survive here without a woman? Can you survive here without entertainment, with only the work they give you to keep you occupied? It’s doing time in here, kid, and nothing else. We’re here, allowed to live, because we’re being studied. For some reason we’ve been chosen, and the Professor here thinks he’s onto something with you. There’s no other point to staying alive. We were never tried, we’re never getting out of here. So loosen up, kid.”
