Action Figures - Issue One: Secret Origins (9 page)

Semler’s blood runs cold at the sight of a silvery revolver in Manfred’s hand.

“No.”

Semler’s hands automatically rise. “Where did you get that?”

“From a gun shop. Where most people buy guns,” Manfred says, rising from his chair. Semler cringes, his eyes squeezing shut. He’s afraid. Good, Manfred thinks. He should be. “Now, slowly, on your
knees, hands flat on the desk.”

The first bead of sweat rolls out of his fading hairline; he knows an execution position when he hears it. “Roger, please.”

“Do as you’re told and you get to walk out of here. That’s a promise. But you screw with me? You try to run or fight?” He shakes the gun at Semler. Semler drops, hard, sending bolts of pain racing up his legs. Manfred circles around cautiously. Semler isn’t in the best of shape but he’s not a typical fat corporate executive either. He could yet try something foolish.

“What are you going to do to me?” Semler says, his throat bone dry.

“Make you famous,” Manfred says.

He hesitates. He’s never hit a man before, not like this, and he has no idea how hard to strike; too hard and he could cause serious brain damage, and that definitely won’t do. Manfred brings the butt of the revolver down. The sound of it colliding against Semler’s skull is strangely flat, not at all like the meaty
thwack
one hears in the movies. Semler cries out and grabs his head but does not fall over. Manfred, panicking, jumps into the air and brings his full weight down on Semler. This time there is no squeal of pain but the crack is louder, sharper. Semler flops over as if the blow has reduced his bones to jelly.

Manfred checks Semler’s pulse, which, unlike his own, is slow and steady. Semler moans and Manfred almost smiles; he’s not out cold, but close enough.

Grabbing Semler by the ankles, Manfred drags him into the server room, where the equipment awaits. Manfred rolls Semler onto his belly and feels with a
fingertip for the soft spot at the base of the skull, where it sits atop the spine. He marks the spot with a Sharpie.

Sweat pours off his brow in a waterfall as he checks the cable, a rope of fiber-optic cable encased in plastic insulation, made for high capacity data transmission. It’s plugged into the server network on one end. The other terminates in a long, stiff wire that Manfred has sharpened to a wicked point. That was the toughest part for him, adapting a coaxial cable head using parts scavenged from the robot assembly bay. He looks at his first-ever soldering job and is dismayed that success or failure could be determined by the silvery glob anchoring the makeshift needle.

How the program figured this out...this is far beyond cutting edge. This is bleeding edge, practically in the realm of science fiction.

Bleeding edge. Bleeding. Blood. There will almost certainly be blood, Manfred realizes, his stomach quivering, but it’s too late to turn back.

Manfred gently presses the tip of the needle against the black spot on Semler’s neck and wonders: shove it in fast? Or take it slowly and gently?

He closes his eyes and pushes.

He opens them and nearly cheers at his success. He fumbles with a roll of duct tape and tears off a small strip, which he presses over the wound that, thank God, shows but the slightest trickle of blood. He’s had worse paper cuts.

Manfred runs back to his computer, types with quaking fingers, hits ENTER. A small window appears and a red progress bar turns green too slowly for his comfort. The program said it would take time, but the process feels like an eternity. Manfred glances at the
security cameras, just in case they decided on their own to reorient themselves back into their proper positions.

Little by little, the green part of the bar consumes the red. The program is not simply transferring from one kind of memory bank to another, it’s almost literally rewiring Semler’s brain, adjusting synaptic pathways to accommodate the new data streaming in, creating a suitable wetware habitat, along the way testing and confirming that everything is in order.

Semler twitches once, violently, and utters a horrible choking noise. Manfred dashes back to the server room, checks Semler’s pulse. It’s racing now. Manfred opts to remain there rather than watch time crawl by on his monitor. He sits. He waits.

Semler’s body stiffens and he inhales sharply. This isn’t a spasm like before. Semler relaxes, exhales, inhales, exhales...his breathing is very deliberate, like he’s telling himself
breathe in, breathe out, breathe in
...

It’s almost comical, the way Semler moves in such a mechanical fashion as he plants his hands on the floor, tries to push himself up in a way his spine won’t permit, then, with Manfred’s assistance, rolls over into a sitting position. Semler’s face is expressionless.

“Ashe?” Manfred says, not knowing what else to call it, fearful that Ashe Semler will respond.

Semler shuts his eyes tight. His body tenses, trembles. When he opens his eyes again a change has overcome him. He looks at Manfred and smiles a department store mannequin smile.

“Roger,” Semler says, “I believe the appropriate statement at this juncture would be: it’s alive.”

NINE

I would like to report that on Sunday, the day of rest, I rested.

I would
like
to report that, but that so isn’t the case.

No, Mom and I have a lot of unpacking and organizing left to do, and if she’s to be believed, we will never truly finish unpacking. There will always be rogue boxes hiding throughout the house, and every so often we’ll chance across one, look inside, say
Oh, that’s where those went to, I should really find a home for that stuff
, and maybe we’ll empty the box or maybe we’ll close it back up and put it in the attic or, if we’re really lazy, we’ll put it back where we found it so we can repeat the process over and over. The perpetual unboxing. She swears that a box of memorabilia from her high school days (yearbook, her mortarboard from graduation, piles of Polaroids) never got unpacked from when she and Dad got their house.

(Watch in amazement as I now sublimate the rush of melancholy I feel when she mentions my old home. Ta-da.)

(Additional digression: back in school only two
days and already my vocabulary is returning to normal. This pleases me.)

In the morning it’s Mom and me by our lonesome because Granddad is off to church. He’s generally more church-minded than either of us, but I can’t help but think he went today specifically to avoid helping us unpack. Lunchtime rolls around and Granddad calls to let us know he’s going out with some friends and probably won’t be back until dinner.

“That works for us,” Mom says. “That means I can rearrange things to my liking without having to listen to him complain.”

She means it as a joke, but I have to ask anyway. “Granddad’s not mad we moved in, is he?”

“Why would he be mad?”

“Mad’s the wrong word. I guess I’m worried he resents us taking over the place.”

“Trust me, honey, there’s nothing to worry about,” Mom says. “Honestly, I think he’s overjoyed to have other people in the house again.”

I can see that. Granddad has been living alone for two years, since Grandma died (lung cancer, because she smoked like an industrial chimney). I know he’d talked on and off about selling the house and getting a smaller place, someplace that didn’t feel so empty and lonely, but it’s hard to leave a lifetime of happy memories behind. Speaking from recent experience here.

“By the way?” Mom says. “I’ll thank you to keep your friend Stuart as far away from Dad as humanly possible.”

“Oh my God I know!” I say, but I’m laughing because, now that the humiliation has had several
hours to cool, I can admit the whole thing was really funny. Mostly because it was more at my mom’s expense than mine.

I’m terrible.

“You definitely picked up some interesting friends,” she says.

“And by
interesting
you mean...?”

“I mean interesting,” she insists. “Though they’re not the kind of people you used to hang around with.”

“And that’s a good thing, right?”

“I’m not talking about those flighty twits,” she says. She wants to call them much worse than that, but she takes the high road. “I mean your old friends. The good ones. The ones I liked.”

Ouch. I agree, but
ouch
. “That’s a whole different age range, Mom. Little kids don’t really have much in the way of personality.”

“Maybe. Point is, your new friends are definitely characters.”

I’m hesitant to ask. “Do you like them?”

I start to worry when she has to think about it. “I like that they can talk about something other than themselves, their clothes, their hair, their make-up...”

“In other words, you’re withholding final judgment.”

“I am, but I’m encouraged by what I saw.” There’s a pregnant pause, then she says, “Last night, watching you with those kids...that was the happiest I’ve seen you in a long time. That goes a long way.”

The doorbell rings, signaling the arrival of the Domino’s driver and the end of our sappy moment.

But she’s right; last night, for the first time in
what feels like forever, I was genuinely happy.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say Manfred woke up, since that would mean he was asleep, which he wasn’t, and had not been nearly all night.

The adrenaline high of so successfully and slickly carrying out his—
their
plan—had worn off long ago, only to be replaced by a pounding headache and a gnawing fear that slid and shifted through his brain like mercury. He worried that that dope of a security guard was not so dumb after all, that as Manfred and “Semler” walked out of the building together, he sensed something was profoundly wrong with his boss. He worried that in bringing “Semler” home he was unwittingly diverting his charge from an appointment, maybe a date, someone who would miss him. He worried that whatever miracle he had helped to bring into the world would undo itself and Ashe Semler, the real Ashe Semler, would burst into the room in a fit of unstoppable rage.

Manfred rolls out of bed, only now aware that the TV is on in the other room. He finds “Semler” (
I can’t call him that anymore
, he thinks distantly) in the living room, in the center of a nest of chaos. At one hand he has Manfred’s laptop and the TV remote, at the other he has several glasses of assorted beverages—a splash of everything he had in the fridge by the look of it—various condiments, and a plate of thawed frozen pancakes. Manfred watches with mute fascination as his guest selects a bottle at random and slathers the contents on a pancake, which he then shoves into his mouth with his left hand while the right hand flips the channel or types something in on the computer.

“This is a highly inefficient way to collect information. I don’t like it,” says the man who used to be Ashe Semler. He turns to Manfred, a mania in his eyes. Manfred isn’t sure whether to call it withdrawal or separation anxiety, but either way “Semler” is, for the first time in his (its?) existence, totally cut off from the Internet and its continuous flow of data, and it’s proving an unbearable culture shock.

“Ashe,” Manfred begins, lacking a better option.

“Ashe Semler is no longer active. I believe I shall call myself Archimedes. It feels like an appropriate name.”

Archimedes. As in Project Archimedes, the effort that created this new life form. The name means “master of thought.” Extremely appropriate, Manfred agrees.

“All right. Archimedes? Could you stop for a minute, please?” The newly christened Archimedes pauses more than stops, and he glares at Manfred for making him do that much. “We might have a problem.”

“Explain.”

“We didn’t think this through. We chose Semler carelessly.”

“No. He was a sound choice,” Archimedes says. “By choosing Ashe Semler you were able to satisfy your desire to exact revenge—a concept I do not understand, but it seems to be important to you. Simultaneously, you positioned me to manipulate the company’s board of directors to keep the artificial intelligence program active. It was a very logical decision.”

And entirely accidental on that second point. “The A.I. department isn’t so necessary anymore,”
Manfred says. “You’re free. What happens to the department now—”

“Matters because you need to sustain a revenue stream,” Archimedes says, “and it would be useful to have open access to ARC’s resources for future projects.”

“Future projects?”

Archimedes smiles impishly. “A traditional element of creation myths is the creation of a female contemporary for the man which the god in question has brought into being,” he says. “You would be the god in this case.”

Frankenstein’s monster also wanted a mate, Manfred thinks, and that did not end well.

“Roger,” Archimedes says with a disappointed pout. “That was an example of a humorous statement. I do not actually wish for a female equivalent of myself.”

Manfred holds his sigh of relief.

“No,” Archimedes says, “what I truly desire is to reconnect to the Internet so I may have unlimited access to data.”

“Why? Wasn’t the point of all this so you could experience the real world?”

“It was. It is. But the real world isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. I need—I can’t—” Archimedes beats his fists against his skull, as if trying to jostle his thoughts into some organized form. “If I must resort to a clumsy metaphor, I am not ready to sever my umbilical cord to the Internet. I need to be connected, and this? This is unsuitable,” he says, flipping the laptop onto the floor like a child losing his temper with a game of checkers that’s taken a bad turn.

“I’m sorry, Ashe—I mean, Archimedes, but
you’re human now. That’s how we access the ‘net.”

“That’s how
you
access the Internet. I can adapt the same technology that allowed you to download my consciousness into Ashe Semler’s body to create a permanent connection to the Internet.”

“...You can?”

“I need supplies.” Archimedes takes Semler’s—
his
iPhone out of his pocket and scowls at it. “
Feh
. What kind of cell phone do you own?”

“Cell—? I have the newest iPhone, 4G connection, same as that one.”