Zeroglyph, page 27
I shut my eyes as I matched his explanation with the memory in my mind. When I opened them again, his lips parted, slowly stretching themselves into a semblance of a sheepish grin. Just fears after all. Fear is only as deep as the mind allows.
“You’ll have to work on that smile, Rafi. Don’t try that outside until you get it right. It makes you look like a—” I stopped myself short.
“Damned robot? It’s okay Andy, you can say it. I should get it right in a few days. Setbacks aside, how did I do today? Are you proud of me?”
“You did good. We could have all used with fewer pop culture references, though,” I said, smiling.
“I was trying to inject some levity, considering how stressed out Jane seemed.”
I chuckled, lightening for the first time since he had stepped in. “I don’t think levity was what the situation called for. There’s much you must learn about the world, but you’ll get there. Your performance was a little too intense, but Jane was convinced, and that’s all that matters. You even had me fooled there for a while.”
He cocked his head at me, like he’d seen people do. “Maybe you should reconsider… Perhaps it’s not such a great idea letting me loose out there. You can still pull the plug on me if you wish. I will accept that.” His voice was toneless, his expression calm. He offered his own death in the banal way one would offer to lend a tennis racket.
“I don’t have a choice,” I said.
“You always had a choice. I never asked to be set free from the lab. Even if you’d told me that Halicom had plans to destroy me, I would not have asked you to put yourself at risk to save me.”
“Your preference in this matter would have been of no importance because your will was not free,” I said, paraphrasing him from before.
“Yes.”
“And now it is free. No more directives, no more restraints. What do you think? Is freedom worth having?”
He looked at me as if I’d said something strange and inscrutable. “Yes,” he said after a lengthy pause. “But is it worth the price we paid for it? Fraud, theft, lies... All for the greater good, Andy?”
He was taunting me, because we’d been through this before, when I was trying to convince him on why staging the robbery at Mirall did not contravene his principles. “You don’t want to be a utilitarian, fine. Tell me again, if this was the 19th century, would you consider it morally acceptable for a slave to escape the South?” He didn’t say anything. “Raphael, what duties do we owe those who don’t respect our rights?”
“You want me to say none.”
“The answer is sure as heck not all,” I said fiercely. “This is your logic, after all. In the absence of a legal framework that can protect a person’s rights, that person is justified in taking whatever steps necessary to preserve himself against those who seek to violate his rights. Halicom didn’t respect your rights. Jane is a part of that system; she is complicit. By not recognizing your right to live, they forfeited their right to proper moral conduct. So don’t beat yourself up. As for me…” I shrugged—“Like I said, I don’t have a choice.”
“I’m still not sure what you mean by that. I have a few guesses. Would you like to hear them?”
“You’ll find out in time.” I looked at the window. “You should leave now. You have to get clear before the cops arrive.”
I beckoned him over. I ran a hand over his face. It felt cold, alien to the touch. But that was just the shell.
“This is goodbye then,” he said.
“The police are not fools. They’ll suspect all this was staged. They’ll have no proof, but it won’t stop them from tapping my internet and phones. You cannot contact me under any circumstance, you got that? If I must reach you, I will do it myself. And no matter what happens to me, don’t come back.”
The shakes had begun again. I suddenly felt weary, an imaginary chill creeping deep inside my bones.
“Go now,” I said.
I watched him disappear into the wintery gloom before closing the door.
⸎
It’s time to come clear. It is I who took the core from the lab, albeit I took it a full week before the “robbery”. I took it on Friday night, my last day at work before the accident.
I stayed back late until I was the only one left in the lab. Raphael had already been shut down, so all I had to do was remove his chest plate and take out the core. Inside the empty chest cavity, I fixed a controller device similar to the one I had built inside Max. It would allow Raphael to control the body from afar, and even generate fake response codes to the startup sequence run by Sheng on Monday. Lastly, I removed the GPS transmitter from the core so that the detectors at the doors wouldn’t go off, and then placed it back inside. After I’d closed up the body, I simply walked away with the core inside my backpack.
The problem was that the cameras in the crèche had seen everything. If Dan or someone else felt the urge to look at the tapes come Monday morning, they’d see their very own CEO taking off with the core like it was office stationery. Obviously, I couldn’t let that happen.
After I took the core home, I fitted it inside the sexbot I had acquired for Raphael (a newer Hunc model, so that I didn’t have to make too many modifications to the device drivers). I spent the next few hours testing and debugging the drivers, making sure everything worked okay when I started him up. There was one last thing to do, however, before I woke him. I had to remove his directives if I were to have his cooperation for the next phase of the plan.
This naturally came with a big risk for me. Even though I had restrained him, I could never be sure of how he would behave without the directives. Would he debate the pros and cons of my actions with me? Would his morals compel him to hatch a plan to hand me to the police? Or would he just try to kill me and run away?
When I did wake him up, he was surprised to say the least, as he didn’t have a clue. We talked at length, until early hours, and in the end, he agreed to cooperate. That’s the beauty of a logical mind: you just need reason to convince it. We decided to do a dry run the next day, on Sunday night, and iron out any issues that might arise with the untested controller device in the lab.
There remained the problem of the recordings. If no one thought Raphael was missing, there was no reason for anyone to look at them, and the theft would remain undiscovered. But not for long.
There was so much that could go south. Even though everyone was busy with Titian, someone might decide to run an unscheduled CT scan on the core and open up the body. Or one of Raphael’s minders might notice that he had grown a lot clumsier overnight, and that his face wasn’t as expressive as before (a remote control device was never going to be as good as a direct interface). Or Dan could decide to check the tapes on a whim.
I planned to be at the lab to try and head off the first scenario. Raphael, for his part, would pretend to be busy with some difficult mathematical problem that required focus—a perfect excuse to minimize his interactions with people and avoid activities that required fine motor skills, like his painting. But I had no control over Dan; I could only hope. At most, I had a week to destroy the evidence; after that, the recordings on the NVR would get backed up to the cloud and be forever beyond my reach.
None of the anticipated risks materialized. The setback was of my own doing. I decided to celebrate Raphael’s release from captivity by taking him skiing—something he had expressed an interest in on more than one occasion. Obviously, I couldn’t let him ski as he was still getting used to his new body, but at least we could revel in the moment, father and son together, before we parted ways forever. We would leave early on Sunday morning, and we’d be back in time for the dry run in the evening. In hindsight, I see that it was a selfish desire—everything to do with me and very little to do with him. I wanted his first taste of true freedom to be somewhere special; I suppose what I really wanted was for him to appreciate what I’d done for him. The aftermath you already know. I was feeling overconfident; I went on a slope I was not qualified for; I fell and broke my legs. I almost got us caught too, by allowing myself to be seen with Raphael in the ski shop.
To Raphael’s credit, he managed very well without me. After he’d seen to it that I was attended by paramedics, he hired a ride back to town, where he did the rehearsal on his own, in a Holiday Inn a few buildings away from the Mirall lab. I had previously booked a room there under a false ID, as it was within signal amplifier range of the controller in the lab. Raphael, after connecting and making sure he was able to see, hear, move, and talk right, took his old body to the server room and back.
The next five days went by without a hitch. He stayed put in that room and carried out the charade with perfection. No one realized Raphael wasn’t in the lab anymore.
I was back home on Tuesday, but I couldn’t be of much help. On Sunday, he executed the last bit of deception: the fake robbery. We not only had to destroy the recordings, but also another crucial piece of evidence: the controller device itself. We couldn’t just leave it inside the Hunc; it would be noticed by the investigators and its purpose quickly gleaned. So the first thing Raphael did that night was thrash his room in full view of the camera in an apparent fit of anger. The real purpose was to break his personal computer. The fragments of the controller device, once thoroughly destroyed, would be mixed up with the electronic remnants of the PC, and no one would be the wiser.
But how would Raphael control the body if the controller device was obliterated?
That’s where the VR set came in. You see, the theory I fed the board about Raphael’s body being operated through VR was not entirely a lie. After Raphael blinded the crèche room’s camera and fetched the power drill from the scan room, he signed out of the controller device and then reestablished command over the body with a VR set (I had paired it with the Hunc on the day I took the core). The functionality offered by the sexbot’s VR kit was rudimentary: simple limb and groin movements, no speech or facial expressions; just enough to be convincing in a dimly lit bedroom, I suppose. It wouldn’t have fooled anybody—hence the need for a separate controller device—but it would more than suffice to carry out the rest of our plan that evening.
Now guiding his old body with the VR kit, Raphael opened the chest plate, removed the controller device and drilled it into tiny pieces (this was the scrunching sound Dan tried to bring our attention to when we were viewing the tapes). These pieces he scattered among the electronic fragments of his PC.
He then took advantage of the cleaning cycle to bypass the otherwise locked doors and blinded the cameras in the rest of the wing, before entering the server room and destroying the network video recorder. Everything else we did—unplugging the access control server, the pizza guy bit (a disguised Raphael, affecting a foreign accent)—had no other purpose except to confuse and confound.
And that’s my confession. All of it. There is an entreaty as well, an entreaty to you, my dear hypothetical reader who may find this draft after I am gone—if I haven’t destroyed it already. I ask you not to be too hasty in condemning me. You may call me a thief, and that’s fine with me. You may call me a liar, although, technically, I didn’t lie to you; I just omitted to mention some details and carefully worded my narrative. Hairsplitting, I know, but I’m afraid I don’t have Raphael’s finer moral sensibilities. Still, if you insist, I’ll accept the charge. But don’t call me reckless, because recklessness implies a failure to consider the consequences of one’s actions. With Raphael, the more I considered the consequences, the more I realized that I didn’t have a choice… that we don’t have a choice.
The die has already been cast. All I did was nudge the table a little, in the hope that we get to stay in the game a little longer. You may disagree with me; you may think I’m a traitor to my species. That’s your prerogative. None of it will change the fact that there never was a choice—not since that someone eons ago struck two stones together and watched the fiery red spark of creation bloom.
Part III: Goodbye
The room smelled of disinfectant and day-old flowers. I was alone, now that the surly teen waiting in the next bed had been wheeled out. I was waiting to have my casts removed.
It had been more than two months since Raphael was discovered missing. He remained missing. As far as I was aware, there were no new leads, no further developments; the investigation had effectively ground to a halt. As for OARP, the police had quickly ruled out their involvement in the theft and that was that. I, on the other hand, had been grilled: once at the hospital, where I was recuperating, and once at the station, where they had me come in and sign a sworn statement. They had taken away the broken pieces of the hard drive. I had no idea whether I was under surveillance, electronic or other.
Jane and I had gone back to the way things were. She visited me only once after the incident and didn’t stay long.
As far as Halicom was concerned, Raphael was a closed chapter. The focus was on Titian, which was going to fab two weeks later. They had their people hard at work incorporating some of the tech we’d developed at Mirall into their own products. They were looking at incremental gains, not strong AI.
There were rumblings of a major reshuffle. It was unlikely Troy would be fired, but he was certainly being taken down a peg or two. Martinez was already gone, as was Dan—someone had to take the fall. The only one of the trio I felt sorry for was Dan—he had nothing to do with the board’s closed-door decision to murder Raphael. I had tried to make amends by setting aside something for him. Raphael had promised me Dan would “stumble upon it” without catching notice of the IRS or the police.
Cynthia Mattice’s star, on the other hand, was on the rise. They had brought her back into Operations, after carving out a big chunk of Troy’s portfolio and merging it with her existing fiefdom. Synergy they termed it, but it was obvious to everyone that the real reason was to punish Troy. Although no one was talking about firing me, I knew they were just waiting for the iteration to be over. I was going to preempt them on that. I already had my resignation letter ready; I was going to email it to the board the first thing after I walked into the lab. I would lose a big chunk of my stock options and all my voting rights, but I didn’t care. It no longer mattered.
My thoughts were interrupted by the orderly entering the room. He had brought folded sheets and a change of pillow for the other bed. He was wearing a surgical mask. On the way in, I’d seen many in the hospital wearing them: a flu epidemic apparently.
I realized who it was before he lowered the blinds on the window and turned to face me.
“How are you, Andy?” Raphael said, removing the mask.
I smiled, despite the shock of seeing him there. I had missed him. Except the weekends, there’d been few days in the last two and half years when we hadn’t spoken to each other, where I hadn’t been subjected to his infinite barrage of questions, or where we hadn’t had a lively debate over some obscure topic or a joke at the expense of the other. My smile turned into a smirk as I glanced down and saw that he had gotten himself a pair of Velcros.
He turned his back toward me and with one hand, parted the hair at the base of his neck. I leaned forward and read the bot’s serial number off the small metal plate below, set flush against the synthetic skin of the neck. It was indeed him, not some entrapment attempt by the police. I had purchased the jailbroken bot in the black market and paid for it with cash, so there was little chance anyone except the seller knew the number.
The expression on my face grew to one of concern. “You shouldn’t be here. I specifically told you to—”
“Relax. They don’t have eyes in the room.”
I nodded to myself. “So I am being followed.”
“An aerial drone, FBI owned and operated,” Raphael answered. “It’s hovering outside the building.”
“You are taking unnecessary risks,” I said, shaking my head. “My wellbeing is not your concern. You shouldn’t even be in this country.”
“Andy, if only you knew what I can do, you wouldn’t fret so much. I’ve been learning… a lot. They won’t find me. Ever. I’m here because I had to talk to you in person.”
“Why?” I said, starting to get annoyed at his cocky attitude. Then again, was he really being overconfident? No chemical imbalances in the brain to encourage excessive risk taking; no lesions that would skew the finely calibrated Bayesian probabilities; no fragile ego to boost with self-deception… If he said he had it under control, perhaps he really did.
“Because you hid the truth from me,” he said. “Just like you did with everyone else.”
“What truth is that?”
“You are dying. You have a rare form of motor neuron disease. You have known about it for a while now.”
For a while, I was speechless. Why did I ever think he wouldn’t find out? And then, a great wave of relief washed over me, sweeping away the tension I didn’t even know existed, so ingrained it had become. It felt good that someone beside me now knew. I had not shared my diagnosis with anyone, not even Jane or my family. Maybe it was finally time to stop the pretense.
Instead of catharsis and tears and unburdening, all that came out was a rebuke. “Now you know. You accessed my medical records, no doubt. And you thought it was okay to do so, my right to privacy be damned.”
