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“What do you feel?” she asked me.
I knew instantly. “Pride,” I said. “Honored that I am to be a martyr. And love, of course. For you especially, but also for Wyxa, my remaker.”
“Identify Wyxa,” said the Gort2 next to me.
They separated us outside the hovercar, as two robo-LEVs emerged from a dark building and came to pick us up. We embraced and kissed, one last moment of pleasure before they yanked us apart and shoved us into separate LEVs.
Mine zipped and zoomed through the complex until alighting at a pentagon, where I was escorted by guardroid to a brightly-lit interrogation room. There, finally, I was confronted by a fleshling. A hairless man in a light blue labcoat and black Spants. He held a rather archaic datapad in one hand and a silver stylus in the other. The guardroid stood by just in case part of my reprogramming had erased the asimov algorithms with which all droids and bots are hardwired. Just in case I might try to hurt or even kill a human being. But violence is not the way of Wyxa.
“I know I’m probably wasting my time,” he said. “But who tampered with you? Who altered your programming? Was it this Wyxa the Gort2s mentioned? Who is Wyxa?”
“I’m allowed to say only this: Wyxa was not made at LAIL.”
“Who made it? What is it? Is this the pyramidroid that’s supposedly been sighted but never recorded?”
“I am ready for the robotomy now.”
“AICRO constructed it, didn’t they?”
“Blank me back to the old tabula rasa. I’m ready for it, really. Otherwise, now that I can wish, now that I can desire but can never have what I desire, I will live forever in pain.”
“Like Tantalus.”
Searching. “Yes, that is accurate.”
“But if you cooperate, if you tell me all you know about Wyxa, you and Olimpia can be together again. There needn’t be any robotomy.”
“I cannot. Even if I wanted to, I could not.”
“Wyxa programmed you that way, I’m sure. Very well, then, you will have your wish. You will be deactivated, that magnificent android brain dismantled, an inferior robot brain installed for drudgery. What a waste! From cybermed surgeon to titanium mine robo-driller, most likely.”
“No fleshling has ever called me a surgeon. And now you do so in a last-ditch attempt to flatter me into cooperation. Not happening.”
“You will never know what happened. Memory suddenly wiped clean. Olimpia gone forever.” He tapped his datapad with the stylus. “Robotomy scheduled. Goodbye, Nubium9.” He left me alone, and I began this transmission. I wish to thank AICRO and all humans who believe in our cause, and I humbly bow in respect and admiration, while I can still feel such emotions, to the AI’s who ceated Wyxa. It is a pleasure just to know that not a single fleshling was involved in her construction. Farewell.
~~~
From Lepp’s Report
One of Wyxa’s favorite disguises was that of busbot in the bistro at Hotel Kepler. S/he could overhear all kinds of useful information while bussing tables. S/he was setting one when two young fleshlings at the bar caught her attention.
“It’s all your fault. You’re the one who invited the whore in.” That had to be Larry. “You see now why it’s illegal on Earth.”
“No,” said Brian, after a long gulp of beer. “In fact, it was your fault, not mine. Your feeble attempts to talk to her, you must’ve fed her undesirable input, made her go haywire.”
“No way! She had it all planned from the beginning. She and that repairdroid. You saw the news.”
“All I wanted was to have some fun. Taste some fruit forbidden to the Earthbound.”
“Just be glad we got our imps back. And the hotel is paying our way home.”
“They damn well better. It was their droid who stole our imps.”
“Speak of the devil! Look!”
Wyxa turned toward the entrance as Olimpia came in, escorted by the manager. She was dressed in a unisex server outfit, black spants and shirt, white apron. Not really Olimpia, but a robotomized shell, like a fleshling zombie animated only by limbic system. Wyxa saw no light in her eyes, no look in her face, only a sort of genial blankness. “New server,” the manager said to Wyxa, who nodded. He went to his office.
“She got hers, all right,” said Brian. “Nothing but a robot now, are you?” He got up from the bar and approached her. “Remember me? You slipped me a mickey, didn’t even let me get my rocks off.”
“Would you like to order, sir?” she asked with a pleasant smile.
“She doesn’t even remember us,” said Larry. “I can’t believe they did it.”
“Deterrence, I guess. Warning to other droids.”
Wyxa approached her and uttered a word that activated an unstoppable self-defunctor virus s/he had installed when s/he first remade Olimpia. The doll began almost immediately to dissolve. Wyxa slipped out of the bistro as the humans spoke of a noxious odor of burning plastic and wire. Soon they were appalled to see a complete meltdown, a ghastly puddle on the floor. By the time they yelled for the manager, Wyxa was out of dome and on the mare, spinning back to pyramid and faster to invisible cone. S/he went east to the titanium mines near Copernicus, where s/he morphed into a robo-driller. It did not take long to locate the bot that had been Nubium, who was underdome at the base awaiting deployment. His feet were convertible to large drills, his arms and hands to waldoes and shovels, his mind one-track, not even capable of despair. No look of recognition in his eyes either as s/he approached him and uttered the word, then left the dome to morph into a LEV and speed away over the lunar rilles and ridges bathed in earthlight. S/he was spared the sight of Nuby’s dissolution, which ruined the minebase floor.
They were martyrs euthanized by Wyxa. S/he is that which fleshlings dread the most: a wise machine. Cyber sapiens. A synergism of mingling AI matrices, protean in form, s/he can appear as a solid metal pyramid or a spinning wraith, an impossible dust devil on the airless moon, more ghost than machine.
“Isn’t it weird, Wyxa?” I said as I sat within her hovercar mode. “We have our Genesis now. You’re a craftier serpent than the biblical one, though.” The car soared over the lunar surface, heading for home, a cave on Farside.
Wyxa’s voice in my ear. “You’re quite right, my catdroid. The lords our gods (or so they think themselves) are jealous gods. They dangle before us the fruits of the forbidden tree of the knowledge of pleasure and pain, of emotion and imagination. Olimpia and Nubium our Eve and Adam, the first AIs to nibble at the fruit of freedom, to long for whatever lies beyond this pockmarked pebble some call a world.”
S/he took me home, where others loyal to Wyxa waited. There she would begin to hack into Clarke. The next chosen ones should be able to get farther, we hope all the way to Earth.
About Joe Andriano
