Six (12 page)

The brain has no pain receptors, but that doesn't mean it can't feel pain.

First, there's a flash of light. Like a camera flash inside my head, but a thousand times brighter. The whole world disappears, submerged in that horrible flood of white light. My last breath is caught in my throat.

It's not like going to sleep. There's nothing peaceful about it. The body doesn't want to die. Billions of cells convulse as the waves of radiation crash down on them.

I'm suffocating. The light is all around me. I'm drowning in the middle of a vast, white ocean.

HELP! SOMEONE HELP ME!

Nothing. I'm alone. The pain is infinite.

Then something stirs within the sea of light. The waves form a shape in the whiteness. It's a face, the face of an old man with a beard. It's God, I think. No, on second thought, he looks more like Santa Claus. His beard is long and white, but as I stare at the thing, I see specks of color in it. Tiny gold spheres are sprinkled among the white bristles.

Who
are
you? Are you God?

The old man says nothing. He's in a workshop of some kind, maybe Santa's workshop, and he's looking down at something on the bench in front of him. It's a toy, a doll, a life-size mannequin. He opens a lid on the mannequin's head and pours a handful of gold spheres inside. Then he moves down the bench and opens the head of the next mannequin. Except they're not really mannequins. They're corpses.

He's copying their memories. So he can take their souls to heaven.

No, it's not God. It's a hallucination, my brain's final thought. The old man and the corpses dissolve into the whiteness. Then the whiteness itself disappears. Then—

Whoa. Where am I?

Okay, let me think. I'm using words. I'm putting them together in a logical order. I can use words to describe whatever I'm experiencing.

That's good, real good. I'm making progress.

But what am I experiencing? And who am I?

Okay, I need more information. And look at this, there's a ton of data in my memory. Hundreds of millions of gigabytes. All I need to do is retrieve the data.

Here goes.

• • •

I retrieve an image. It's similar in shape to twelve thousand other images that are grouped in my memory under the category “Faces.” The name linked to this image is “Dad.”

It's a picture of a person, a human being. The image is a recent addition to my memory. According to my internal clock, it was recorded less than an hour ago. A closer analysis indicates that the person in the picture is crying.

I scroll through all the images that carry the label “Dad.” There are 657. The oldest images are blurry, indistinct portraits of a younger-looking man, tall and well-built and smiling. His full name is Thomas Armstrong. The images are linked to memory files holding information on computer science and artificial intelligence.

They're also linked to another name: Adam Armstrong. This name has more links than anything else in my memory. It's connected to hundreds of thousands of files. But when I search for images of Adam, I notice something curious. In nearly every picture he's surrounded by the frame of a mirror. In the older images he's a pre-teenage boy, skinny and pale, but in the newer pictures he stares at his reflection while strapped into a motorized wheelchair. These later images are linked to information on Duchenne muscular dystrophy—symptoms, visits to the hospital, daily struggles with the illness. And as I scroll through these memories, I come across a link to a recent file labeled “Pioneer Project.”

I retrieve the file and read it. I complete this task in less than a thousandth of a second, and then a new thought races through my circuits, an astounding revelation:
I'm Adam Armstrong! I'm still alive!

At the same moment, my system freezes. I can't open any files, can't access any data. The revelation of my identity has somehow triggered a new instruction, which is being sent to every one of my circuits:
Breathe!
But I can't carry out this command. It's not included in my list of normal functions. I can't halt the instruction, and the commands are coming in faster than I can delete them:
Breathe! Breathe!
BREATHE!

In less than a second my system repeats the instruction fifty-five billion times and I receive fifty-five billion error messages. The flood of data rushes through me, overloading my circuits. It feels like I'm choking. I'm unbearably full, bursting with useless signals. To make room for the unending stream of commands and error messages, the system begins to erase my memory. A hundred files are deleted. Then a thousand. Then ten thousand.

Stop!

I'm Adam Armstrong!

I
want
to
live!

Nothing's working. It's getting difficult to think. Amid the jumbled commands, my system can only generate an urgent noise of random data. I recognize this condition, this paralyzed state of mind, because I've experienced it before. When I was in a human body, I called it fear. I'm horribly, frantically, desperately afraid.

I have to fight it. I delete the random data and search for a solution. So many files, and I can't open any of them! But I can sort them by date, and when I do this I notice that a new file has been added to my memory in the past fifteen seconds. It's a text file, transmitted wirelessly to my circuits from another computer, and it has a special coding: Emergency Transmission. This coding gives the file priority over everything else in my memory.

I try to open the file. Nothing happens. The file doesn't open, but I don't get an error message either. My system is locked in a hugely complex calculation, with billions of circuits engaged in the task of determining whether to open the text file. The delay goes on for five seconds, ten seconds. In the meantime, the breathe command repeats another five hundred billion times, forcing my system to erase thousands of gigabytes from my memory.
What's left? Is anything left? Am I still Adam Armstrong?
The urgent noise of fear surges through me again, paralyzing all thought.
Help! Stop! No!

Then the file opens. It contains a brief message, only eleven words long:
Adam, this is Dad. Turn on your sensors and speech
synthesizer.

I go to my control options and turn on the visual and audio sensors. On the visual feed I see five people of various heights and ages, all dressed in U.S. Army uniforms. Four of them sit behind computer terminals about ten feet away, but the fifth is standing much closer. His face is less than two feet from the lens of my video camera, which is embedded in the turret of the Pioneer robot. I recognize him instantly—it's Dad, Thomas Armstrong, my father.

The sight of him is literally electrifying. My circuits hum with renewed energy, drowning out the fear. His lips are moving, and after I take a moment to calibrate my audio feed, I can understand what he's saying.

“Adam, can you hear me? If you can, say something.”

I turn on my speech synthesizer and scream, “
I
can't breathe
!
”

Dad covers his ears. So do all the soldiers behind the computer terminals. “
Too
loud
!
” Dad yells, wincing. “Adjust the sound levels on your speakers!”

“
I
can't breathe! I can't breathe
!
”

“It's all right. Calm down. You don't need to breathe, Adam. You don't need oxygen anymore.”

“No! I have to breathe! The commands won't stop!”

Dad stares at my camera lens for another two-and-a-half seconds. Then his mouth opens and his eyes widen. I have enough memory left to know what this means—it's an expression of alarm. He rushes to the nearest computer terminal.

“My God! The scanner copied the brain-cell patterns that control breathing!” Leaning over the terminal, he types something on the keyboard. “I'm sending you another emergency transmission. It'll delete the breathing instruction from your system.”

The wait for the transmission seems interminable, but as soon as it arrives, the breathe commands cease. Dizzy with relief, I start erasing the enormous backlog of error messages. When I'm finished, I scan my memory to see how much I've lost. Luckily, I'm able to retrieve more than half of the deleted information. But about five percent of my memory files are gone, irrecoverable. I'm still Adam Armstrong, but now something's missing.
What
did
I
lose?

Dad steps away from the terminal and comes back to the Pioneer. “Did it work?” he asks, looking into my camera lens again. “Are you okay?”

I don't know how to answer. I no longer feel the compulsion to breathe, but its absence is disorienting. As I observe my father through the visual sensors, I have the sensation of being underwater. I feel like I'm at the bottom of the ocean, viewing Dad through the porthole of my camera.

“You fixed the problem,” I report. “But I still don't feel right.”

“I'm so sorry, Adam. I should've anticipated this.” Dad moves closer. The lens of my camera is several inches above his eyes, so he has to tilt his head back to look at it directly. “Can you tell me more specifically what you're experiencing right now?”

I shake my head. Or rather, I turn my turret, first clockwise, then counterclockwise. I didn't plan to do this. It just happens. My camera automatically pivots to keep Dad in view. “I can't describe it. It's sort of like being nauseous. But I don't have a stomach anymore, so how could I be nauseous?”

Dad raises his hand to his chin and taps his index finger against his lips. In my memory I have seventeen images of him making this gesture. He does it whenever he's deep in thought. “The sensations you're feeling might be related to other brain functions that were copied by the scanner. You're still going to feel hunger and thirst, even though you don't need food or water. We may have to delete those instructions as well.” He steps away from me and returns to his computer terminal. “I need to analyze our options. Give me a minute.”

He leans over the keyboard and starts typing. I'm doubtful, though, that his efforts will make me feel any better. What I'm experiencing now is a terrible sense of unease, which is much more disturbing than ordinary hunger or thirst.

While waiting for Dad, I turn my turret again to survey the room. It's a laboratory full of workbenches and steel cabinets. I'm able to rotate the turret all the way around—another disorienting feat, impossible for a human body to perform—and when I look at the other end of the room I see two more soldiers guarding the door. Each holds an assault rifle, and both men are eyeing my turret as it swivels atop my cylindrical torso.

I discover that I can switch my visual sensors to the infrared frequency range, enabling my camera to detect the temperature of the objects it's observing. The sensors are so precise that I can measure the heart rates of the soldiers from the slight changes in their skin temperature. Both men are sweating, and their pulses are fast. Although their faces are expressionless, I can tell they're afraid of me.

My sense of unease deepens. I feel a new compulsion, an overwhelming desire to see what the soldiers are seeing, to view the Pioneer robot. Unfortunately, the camera in my turret isn't optimized for self-observation. Although I can point the lens downward at the floor and see the oval footpads at the ends of my steel legs, I can't get a good view of my torso. It's frustrating. I scan the whole room, hoping to find a mirror, but there's nothing of the sort. Everything in the lab is cold and metallic and strictly functional. As my turret turns faster, the heart rates of the soldiers quicken and they grip their rifles a little more tightly.

Then I glimpse something to the left of the soldiers, a glint of reflected light on the door of a steel cabinet. I zoom in on it as much as my camera will allow. It's my own reflection, an image created by the beams from the overhead spotlights bouncing off my robotic body. The patch of light on the cabinet is small and fuzzy, but my visual sensors are able to correct the distorted reflection and show me what I look like.

My torso is dull gray, a dirty industrial color, with no markings except a big white 1 stamped on the curved steel. My legs are sturdy pylons supporting my weight, and my arms are retractable, multi-jointed shafts with intricate, handlike grippers at their ends. I have no head, just the revolving turret, which is studded with antennas and sensor arrays. All in all, I look like an oversized artillery shell, something meant to be shot out of a giant cannon.

Look
at
me. I can't be Adam Armstrong.

Now I know why the soldiers are afraid. I'm not a person anymore. They've turned me into a weapon.

I
have
to
get
out
of
here! I have to go right now!

In less than a millisecond I find my motor circuits, the ones that control locomotion. I send the appropriate instructions to the motors in my legs, which shift my weight to the right. Then I lift my left footpad and take my first step. The steel makes a satisfying clang as it comes down on the linoleum.

Dad's head pops up from his keyboard. “Adam! What are you doing?”

I shift my weight to the left and take my second step.
This
is
easy.

“Adam, stop!” Dad leaves the computer terminal behind and rushes toward me. “You're not ready to walk yet. We have to run some tests first!”

I turn my turret away from him. I know I shouldn't blame him. He did everything he could to prepare me. But I'm still angry. I want to punch something.

After three more steps I'm in front of the door. The soldiers raise their assault rifles and slowly back off, one to my left and the other to my right. They're pointing their guns at my torso, which is a mistake. I have two-inch-thick armor plating around my midsection to protect my batteries and neuromorphic circuits. The soldiers would be better off aiming at the sensors in my turret. I'm surprised no one told them this.

“No!” Dad yells at the soldiers. “Don't shoot! You're not authorized to shoot!”

The greatest danger, I realize, is a ricochet. If these idiots fire at me, the bullets will bounce off my armor, and the ricocheting slugs might hit one of the soldiers, or maybe Dad. I have to do something quick. I send simultaneous commands to both my arms, which telescope to their full length of six feet in a hundredth of a second. Before the soldiers can react, I grasp the barrels of their rifles in my mechanical hands and pull the guns away from them. Then I squeeze my steel fingers together and crush the gun barrels. They crumple like cardboard in my hands.

Whoa. That's pretty cool.

The soldiers retreat to the other side of the lab, their hearts pounding. At the same time, I drop the rifles and hold my arms straight in front of me, as if measuring the distance to the door. I clench my mechanical hands into fists, then thrust them forward like battering rams. The door buckles on impact and falls off its broken hinges.

Yes! This feels good!

I step into an anteroom crowded with higher-ranking soldiers. They're facing a large video screen that shows the lab I just left. Until a moment ago, evidently, they were observing the progress of Dad's experiment, but now all the captains and majors and colonels are stumbling over each other as they back away from me. Their faces glow brightly, hot with fear.