IGMS Issue 7 Page 6

  "Hmmm," Alvin said to himself, then played out the fiber optic filament he'd used to jack into Valerie's computer and plugged it into the slot above the keypad. Instantly the environment of the house's matrix surrounded him. He located the routings governing the barricade quickly, and attempted to reconfigure them. As soon as he set to work, though, he felt a sudden, severe disassociation. When his awareness returned, he found he'd been expelled and blocked from the system.

  He snatched the filament back, then knelt at the base of the barricade. Wedging his fingers as far under the lip as he could, he braced his carbon composite frame, and hauled upwards. Metal screamed as the locking pins wrenched free of their moorings, and wind and rain assaulted him immediately. He raised the door up just enough to slip underneath, bracing himself against the wind that tore at him. Then he slammed the barricade back into position, and used the spot-welder in his middle fingertip to seal it.

  That will have to do, he said to himself. The he turned to face the storm. The center of the cell still lay off shore almost two miles away. He activated his onboard telemetry, and got a spotty Com SAT feed showing him a view of the coast. He zoomed in and saw that the surge had come almost a mile inland so far. By the time it reached his current location, it would probably be more than a meter. Enough to seriously injure or even drown a human, but Alvin -- as he'd been painfully made aware -- was not human. The wind blew hard, fluctuating between 310 and 330 kph. More than enough to make traversing the city difficult, even for someone of his strength, because a good deal of that strength came from his carbon composite plasteel construction. He'd have to take a low profile, then. He lowered his body, his legs swiveling around at the hip joint until they faced backwards. Then his feet twisted around until they sat backwards in relation to his legs. Not very pretty, he reasoned, but much better suited for his purposes. He took off down the street, crab-fashion, while he tried to get a Com SAT fix on Tony's mobile phone.

  Com SAT data came intermittently, and cloud cover prevented Alvin from getting a decent satellite image of the George W. Bush Bridge. Frustrated, he resigned himself to waiting until he got in the vicinity of the bridge itself, hoping that there he would be able to pick up the signal.

  He threaded his way through the streets as quickly as he dared; the wind had intensified as the eye crept closer to landfall. Twice he had lost his footing and had been pushed a meter or two by the wind, so he tried as best as he could to take advantage of the scant protection offered by the buildings along his path. He rounded the corner of the South Carolina United Bank at 14th Avenue and Dogwood Drive, and stopped cold. A wall of water two and a half meters high rushed down 17th, pushing a '37 Andromeda directly at him. With little time to react, Alvin anchored himself to a street light pole, wrapping his arms and legs around it as tightly as his servos would allow.

  The water hit first, and despite his strength, pulled his legs loose from the pole. The car struck him in the back, a glancing blow, but he felt the carbon composite give, felt the simulated musculature tense and strengthen to absorb the impact, but even though the tensile strength of those elements exceeded that of flesh and bone by a factor of twenty, he still felt and heard the stainless steel rotor joint in his right shoulder crack. He let go with that hand as fiber optic "nerves" misfired, causing it to spasm. He dug deeply into the shell of the pole with his left hand, feeling the synthskin on his fingers tearing away, and the steel skin of the pole gouging beneath his fingertips.

  He held on, his muscles sending alarms to his neural network as they fought to compensate for the strain of keeping his 150-kilo body from being wrenched away. He held on while the bulk of the surge passed him, then a few minutes later, he felt his feet touch the pavement as the force of it dissipated. Once he could stand, he waited another minute or so before he dared to wade through the knee-deep debris-laden water that filled the streets around him. No bodies, though, and he was thankful for that. He was the only one crazy enough to be out in this.

  Would Tony care? Would he realize what Alvin had risked to save him? Alvin didn't stop to try to answer these questions. The G.W. lay just a mile east of his current position, and the wind had kicked up to 350 kph as the eye rushed towards landfall. He could wade, but it would be slow going, fighting both the water and the wind. Better, he thought, to swim.

  Unfortunately, he had too much weight for something so elegant. What he did instead was sink, then gouge his fingers into the pavement and pull himself along. Not quickly, and he left quite a bit more synthskin behind, but he still moved faster than he would wading.

  Ten minutes later, he broke the surface near the southbound off ramp of the G.W. The eye had passed over while he "swam" and the wind had dropped back down to 215 kph. Here, the leftover surge came only to mid-shin, but the current was strong as it ran off into the Dogwood Canal, and back out to sea.

  The damage to the bridge surprised him, at first. Then he saw the scorch marks, and knew the bridge had been struck by lightning, a bolt so massive the grounding of the bridge hadn't been able to compensate. The concrete piling at the end of the southbound lane had literally exploded, the tiny air bubbles inside the structure superheated in an instant, their gaseous nature forced to expand, to go somewhere. And there, balanced precariously on its nose, rear wheels perched on the broken ramp, sat Tony's truck. It rocked almost constantly in the steady, driving wind. As Alvin briefly surveyed the scene, he saw the front end of the truck shift slightly; water runoff was slowly washing the support from under the front grill where it lodged in the mud. Even at maximum zoom and resolution, Alvin couldn't make out any details through the cracked windscreen. But he did see blood.

  Alvin forced his way through the water, fighting the wind until he reached the broken edge of the off ramp. He calculated that twelve point seven meters separated him from the other broken edge. A hard jump even without the wind. Nearly impossible with. He scanned around for other possible approaches. He could travel underneath the bridge, come up on the northbound ramp, and try to cross that way . . . he might be able to cross at the piling using a maintenance catwalk . . .

  He heard a faint cry for help from the truck.

  Deciding he had no more time to waste, Alvin squatted, made some quick calculations relating to angle and wind velocity, and then launched himself across the breach. As he leapt, he felt the wind gust several kph faster. He twisted in midair, angling his body differently and hoped for the best. His waist slammed into the broken edge of the off ramp, and he scrambled quickly for purchase, feeling his damaged shoulder protest. Alarms flashed in his optical display which he ignored. He caught hold of a twisted piece of rebar sticking out of the concrete, hanging there for a moment as the wind tried to rip him away. Then he levered himself up onto the off ramp.

  The truck hung a few meters away. Still keeping a low profile to the wind, Alvin inched over to it, calculating what he would do once he got there. The truck's position wouldn't allow for much more added weight. And he saw no way to further secure the vehicle and keep it from tipping over. He'd have to be very careful, he decided. He reached the end of the truck, where it rested against the broken edge of the ramp, and adjusted his external vocal volume so he could be heard over the wind.

  "Hello? Are you injured?"

  "Help!" Tony, definitely. Alvin could tell by the timbre and inflection, even though the man screamed hoarsely. "Help me!"

  "Tony Gardner, are you or your companion injured?"

  "My leg!" came the reply. "It's broken, I think. And I hit my head!" He paused, for long enough that Alvin made ready to ask again about the other occupant, but then Tony said, "Frank's dead, I think. He's not breathing, and there's blood all over his head."

  Alvin braced himself against a sudden gust of wind and analyzed the situation. He'd have to climb down. He didn't see a way around it. Adding his weight to the outside of the truck though, disturbing its already precarious balance . . . that would cause problems.

  Unless . . .

 
"Tony!" he called out. "Is there a window in the back of the cab?"

  "What? A window? Yeah, there is! Why?"

  "Hold tight," Alvin said, though he knew that no matter how tightly Tony held onto anything, it would not stop the truck from tipping over. "I am coming to get you."

  Alvin moved to the back of the truck, to the door at the rear of the cargo compartment. He broke the lock without effort, and carefully opened the door, taking note of how much the truck's weight shifted when the door opened enough to catch the wind. He levered it down into the fully open position, jumping back as the wind tore it from his grasp to slam it against the side of the truck. The truck lurched half a meter or so, but held. Tony screamed. Alvin ignored him.

  Fortunately, Tony and his partner had completed all their deliveries and the trailer was empty. Of course, the forward wall had no window to match the one in the cab, but that wouldn't be a problem. The walls of the trailer were made of thin aluminum. The eighty-degree angle of the floor was a different story.

  He turned, and lowered himself into the trailer. Holding onto the bed lip with his left hand, he dug his fingertips into the thicker aluminum plating of the bed itself, noting the alarms from his shoulder. He squeezed to make a handgrip, then lowered himself with the right arm and repeated the action with his left. He did this until he stood on the tilted forward wall of the trailer.

  The trailer had begun to fill up with rain as he'd descended, and he knelt in water a few centimeters deep, testing the tensile strength of the aluminum wall with his fingertips. A few millimeters thick at most. He pushed, piercing the thin metal with his fingertips and tearing it back as if peeling an orange.

  He could see the window in the back of the cab, and Tony's frantic expression framed within it, his fingers clawing at the glass. Alvin had to wave him away twice before the man understood, and moved, covering his eyes. Then Alvin punched the glass out. Most of it shattered into the cab, but a few jagged pieces remained. Alvin smacked these away. Tony tried to scramble through the hole, but Alvin stopped him. "Are you sure this man is dead?"

  Tony hesitated, fixing Alvin with a look of contempt. An android, mistrusting him? Then he nodded. "Yeah, pretty sure. I told you he wasn't breathing."

  Alvin nodded. "Well, I would like to make very sure."

  "Whatever, toaster. Why are you here, anyway?"

  Alvin ignored him, reaching through the window frame to place his fingertips on Frank's throat. Body temperature a cool ninety point seven degrees, and Alvin felt no pulse in the carotid. Judging by the bloody impact shatter on the windshield, and Frank's lack of a seatbelt, Alvin assumed his skull had been crushed.

  The wind gusted, much harder this time, and the truck shifted position again.

  "Okay, screw this!" Tony said. "Frank's dead. Get me out of here before I am too. That's a damned order!"

  Alvin looked at him, resisting the urge to simply leave the man there to die.

  "What's the matter with you, toaster? Get me out of here! You know the Laws. You have to save me!"

  Alvin nodded. "I am aware of the Laws, Tony Gardner. But there is something you must know before I remove you from this predicament.

  "I am different. I am self-aware, human -- and I use that term loosely for one such as you -- and I feel. Were it left to me, you would rot at the bottom of this river, and I would gladly take you there myself.

  "I am here because I made a promise to your daughter; because in the infinite compassion of a child, she loves you. She cannot see that you are of the worst, most insidious kinds of evil that exist. Nothing you do serves any purposes but your own, Tony Gardner. And the worst part of this is that you believe you have the right to act this way.

  "It needs to end here, today, Tony Gardner. The logical course of action would be to let you die, or to kill you myself. Everyone whose life has been touched by you would be much better off.

  "But your daughter loves you. As Valerie once did, too."

  Tony stared in shock as Alvin spoke.

  "What I do today," Alvin finished, "I do for them, not for you." Alvin reached inside the cab and grabbed Tony's shirtfront, pulling him towards the window frame. Tony had just enough time to duck his head, screaming all through it about his leg, before Alvin hauled him through the hole.

  Holding the man up, Alvin told him, "Wrap your arms around my neck. Hold tight, and I will climb out." Tony said nothing, just glared at the android while Alvin got a secure handhold. Then he held on as Alvin had said, while the droid started to climb. Alvin was one handhold from the bed lip when the wind gusted again, and the truck lurched violently. By the size and direction of the shift -- cab end sliding to Alvin's left -- Alvin knew that whatever ground had been supporting the nose of the truck had finally given way.

  He reacted instantly, using his mechanical strength to launch them upwards out of the cargo compartment onto the surface of the off ramp. They barely made it, Alvin just catching the edge of the ramp with his hands. He hung there for a moment, then moved to pull their combined weight onto the ramp.

  Concrete crumbled under his left hand, and suddenly he clung with only his right. Tony slipped loose from his neck and slid down his back. Only Alvin's reflexes enabled him to grab Tony's shirt and keep him from tumbling after the truck, which slid into the river.

  Servos whined at the strain, and alarms appeared in his opticals, warning that his damaged shoulder was in danger of failing completely. The stress he'd put it through had widened the cracks in the rotor joint, and only a matter of moments remained before it separated completely.

  He had no choice. He looked down at Tony, dangling at the end of his good arm, face ashen and wide-eyed with terror, and said, "Be worthy of this," and hurled Tony overhand onto the surface of the off ramp. The strain proved too much for the shoulder -- but then, Alvin had known it would. The rotor joint cracked the rest of the way through. His carapace simply wasn't strong enough to support his weight anymore, and in an instant he fell through the air, watching his one arm curiously still gripping the edge of the ramp. Then he struck soft mud and torrential water, sliding headfirst on his back down the incline to the river. He tried to arrest his descent -- despite his noble intentions he had no desire to terminate his functions -- but he slid too fast, and the mud was too slick and soft to provide any purchase for his single grasping hand. In moments, he slid over the bank and into the river.

  Had he been whole, he would have simply sunk to the bottom, then worked his way back to the bank. But with the gap where his shoulder had wrenched out, he could feel the frigid water seeping into his circuitry, flowing through every unobstructed pathway until every empty space within his body had been filled by it. Mechanical parts seized up. Electrical parts shorted out. Alvin's thought processes skipped, skittered. His optical displays faded. In moments, they died out completely, and then a few seconds later, so did Alvin.

  Were this a perfect world, Tony would have been forever altered by his experience. He would have been forever altered by the android's sacrifice, indebted to the "toaster" that had given his life so that one child might not cry herself to sleep for many years to come.

  But this is not a perfect world, and people only change like that on the TriV. In the real world, if people make those kinds of changes, it is because they want to. And Tony Gardner didn't want to. You see, Alvin had been right; Tony thought he had a right to act the way he did, and he could never quite divorce himself of that conclusion. His perspective on the world was the only one he believed in. Call it a safety mechanism, a product of environment or bad rearing, even genetics . . . the end result is that after a brief period of humility -- and by brief I mean a couple weeks -- he was back to his old self again. I think, perhaps, that my father had just been living that way for too long. My mother eventually left him, less than a year after the storm. They fought in court for a bit over the money -- she had to tell him about it eventually; even though they'd never legally married, the state common-law marriage laws provided him a sha
re. Not a huge share, but a share nonetheless. It was enough for him to live comfortably for a while.

  They fought over custody, too, but even then I knew that he only did it to hurt her, and not for any care for my well being.

  He died a few years ago, the same man he was when I was a child. Bitter, resentful and envious of those who had "more," feeling that life had dealt him the short stick from the beginning. I saw him through different eyes then, and though I stilled loved him for who he was, it saddened me to see him die with such blackness in his heart.

  Alvin's body was never recovered. CyberLogik offered her a new Alvin, kind of a token gesture/publicity gimmick. After all, one of their units had given up its existence to save a single human life. They had to figure out how to make a buck off of that. Mom politely declined, saying it wouldn't be the same. She didn't offer any explanation why, and I only found out myself a few weeks ago, just before she died.

  I'd always wondered why she'd never gotten involved with anyone else after my father. She was still young, and beautiful, and had several men pursuing her. She always told me it wasn't something she felt she needed to do. Just before she died though, she told me the truth.

  When they'd been connected to Mom's computer, sharing Alvin's dreams, he'd left something of himself there, an open link. When he'd "died," some of his memories, his consciousness, went there. A miracle, really, with all of the electrical activity in the storm. Or maybe because of it. At any rate, the essence of Alvin survived.

  They could have downloaded that essence into a new Alvin, but CyberLogik refused to give, or even sell her a "blank," with no operating systems at all. And neither Alvin nor my Mom could bear the thought of "killing" an Alvin by doing a wipe. The framework existed, she said, for every Alvin to become as self-aware as our Alvin had been. They didn't want to rob even one Alvin of the chance to experience what they had. And as we saw in the A.I. Independence Act of 2097, they were right. The Android Nation thrives, and they live, laugh, love just like humans do. They've even devised a way to mimic human reproduction. Alvin could have gone there when Mom died, gotten a new Mechanid body, and lived and loved on. I begged him to . . . but he refused.