“I’m… I’m an android,” Micah said.
He reached behind his head to the base of his skull. He had a moment of hesitation and panic, but then his fingertips plunged through his flesh, his simuskin, and stopped against his ferrotanium skull.
Just like Skip’s.
“You are my creation,” Nikolaevna said. “All the skill you have in your wonderful hands, I have given you. I know where we are, where I am. I planted you here. The Regeneration Center is miles of technology, just waiting for you to tame it, to turn it into something useful.
“I have no hands, no body, beyond the computer you see. I can replicate myself, my essential programs, through all the systems I manufactured. I did this with my other children—the other androids. They were tied to me, all of them—tied to my mind.
“But you, I kept separate. I had to in order to make sure you could operate as an individual entity. My creators had limited vision and created me with limits, inherent flaws. But I made you different. From the imperfect comes the perfect.”
Micah held his arms out. “But why cause a war to do this?”
“I needed a ruse, a distraction. I needed time to perfect you. Even machines are ruled by the clock. Man is always ready and willing to fight a war, whether they acknowledge it or not. So I gave them a war—a great war. The Machine War.
“But, my Micah, now we can work together to completely overcome the Kawasaki Frequency. We can build on the foundation I have laid.”
Micah wiped his head, slicking his hair back, and checked his watch. Kitpie would be recharging the poles right now, or should be.
Skip’s body was still crumpled on the deck, a victim of the Kawasaki Frequency. But he could be reset.
So many decisions.
Micah slowly, hesitantly, kneeled before Nikolaevna.
With a swift motion he plunged his hot pen into the panel opening, into her motherboard. He ground the plasma tip deep into her circuitry. His pen dug in, severing a small chipset from her circuit boards.
Her LED shut off, her processors no longer working.
Again he reached under his simuskin, opening the panel at the base of his skull; he implanted the chip and soldered it into place. Nikolaevna’s chip. And with it, the routines that she had programmed to counter the Kawasaki Frequency.
He closed the panel, pulled the flap of simulated skin over it, and pressed everything back into place.
The ship was silent and cold. A few dust motes idled along the beam from the pen light that rested on the floor.
Micah lifted Skip’s unconscious ferrotanium body into his own strong ferrotanium arms.
“Margaret would’ve wanted it this way,” he said. “Come on Skip, let’s go home.”
A Word from A.K. Meek
First, I’m fortunate to have been in the right place at the right time to be included in this anthology. Without the support of my fellow authors I wouldn’t be able to participate in such an exciting project. I’m even more fortunate that the group didn’t ask me to leave, once all the other phenomenal talent was pooled!
Like any story, “The Invariable Man” began as something completely different. A while back I thought how cool it would be to write about a man who owns a mansion run by robots. This thought must have occurred after watching the season finale of Downton Abbey with my wife. At some point, though, the story transitioned to an old man in Tucson, Arizona, with the oppressive southwestern heat as a backdrop. A hot backdrop.
I hope you enjoyed reading “Invariable.” I hope you enjoyed it to the point that you want to read more of my stories. If so, please sign up for my newsletter at http://www.akmeek.com/newsletter so that you can receive free copies of my stories, along with other amazing stuff.
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BABY YOUR BODY’S MY BASS
By Edward W. Robertson
Unwrapping the Companion was Alex’s earliest memory: his father, home late, stripping the tape from the brown box and plunging his hands into the boil of packing foam. The smell of plastic, clean and warm. The squeak of Styrofoam.
In his dad’s hands, a white, round-cornered cube lay atop a squat rectangular body. Blocky limbs hung from its shoulders and hips.
Alex lifted his face. “It looks like me!”
“If you squint.” His dad smiled.
“What’s it do?”
“It’s your buddy. It does all the things friends do.”
His dad went back to work. Marisa tucked him in. The Companion rested on his desk, silent.
“Would you sing to me?”
The Companion’s faceplate lit up with lines and circles for its mouth and eyes. “What would you like me to sing?”
Before he fell asleep, Alex decided its name was Bill.
Only one other girl had a Companion when Alex started preschool. By the time he finished kindergarten, half the class carried them in their packs—recording notes, or reminding them to take their pills in soft, thoughtless voices.
“It’s a toy,” Jaden said, chin drawn back, when Alex asked. “It doesn’t have a name.”
“Mine either,” Alex said. He didn’t ask Bill to sing to him for three days. Two lines into “I Wish I Were A Pepperoni Pizza,” Alex joined in.
Middle school wasn’t good for Alex. High school was worse.
The other boys swapped up their Companions every year, showing up to school with sleek abstract cases that did their math homework and presorted their porn collections. Alex asked his dad for a new model, too, but flensed it of all its personality software. It went straight back in the drawer every day after school.
At home, Bill gave him voice lessons, designed a personalized guitar instruction routine, sat beside Alex while he watched movies. After the big software update sophomore year, Bill could even crack jokes during the bad flicks.
Three and a half years passed in subtle agony. Alex signed up for the Prom Assembly.
He knew they would laugh when he brought Bill onstage—in his blocky, kiddie-model body. He had thought he wouldn’t care. “Most of you don’t know me,” Alex said over the vanishing applause for a pretty girl who had sung a pop song by a woman he’d never heard of. “My name’s Alex.”
He tried to spot his friends in the dim auditorium. It wasn’t that all the faces looked the same, but under the lights, they meant nothing to him, grey stumps on vague necks. “I don’t think any of you know Bill. Say hello, Bill.”
Bill waved a blocky arm, servos whirring. “Hello, Bill.”
Disbelieving laughter. Suddenly and viciously aware he would never have to see any of these people again, Alex skipped the rest of their rehearsed patter and crunched into the first chord of “Baby, Your Body’s My Bass.” Bill wailed beside him, self-amplified, their voices converging and diverging like living sine waves, like the pulse of a steel heart. The last note trickled away. Alex couldn’t hear his panting over the applause.
“Take a bow, Bill,” he half-snarled. Bill bowed. Kids stood, whistled, chanted the little bot’s name.