Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery (9 page)

I reached backwards with my hands, lifted the head, and seated it back on the ring joint at the neck. To perform this, my arms, which are patterned on the human model, had to travel through a 270-degree arc, which is anatomically impossible for a human. The man grunted when he saw the motion. I fitted the head with a twist and hand-tightened the ring joint and piston rods, leaving the fine adjustments for later.

Then I turned to face him—with my belly pan still removed. His eyes went wide as he saw a half-disemboweled automaton standing at his workbench, dripping green scum on the floor. It was time for human social interaction.

“Good … morning,” I said through the speaker in the head. “I am sorry to have disturbed you, but—”

“What are you? Some kind of alien?”

[REM: Define “alien.” (1) One born in or belonging to another country who has not acquired citizenship. A foreigner. (2) One who is estranged or excluded. (3)
Colloquial.
An extraterrestrial. An intelligent life form from a biosphere other than Earth’s. … Now, what response would help ME keep cover and avoid capture by the authorities on this mission?]

“No, sir. I am not born in or belonging to another country. I am a product of Canada,
produit de Canada.”

“Yeah, but
what
are you?”

“Clearly, sir, I am an experimental product. A new kind of … mail carrier.”

“Mail comes during the day, sonny. Not in the middle of the night. Fred Halvorsen brings it.”

“Ah, yes. Fred brings It. As I said, I am an
experimental
model. They are field-testing this model at night, to avoid … unwarranted duplication of services and also a patent violation.”

“Do you know what you’re saying, son?”

“No, sir.”

“Then best you keep quiet until you do.” He gestured with the wand at the lower half of my body. “You have some kind of accident, is that it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you came in here to fix yourself?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All done?”

“The corrosive action has been stopped. I need acid-proof tape or epoxy to seal two of my battery cells.”

“Bottom drawer on the right.”

I looked at the drawer but did not move.

“Be my guest” He gestured with the wand.

I moved. Inside the drawer was a mixing unit with the tubes of epoxy and quick-set hardener attached. I uncapped the injector and pumped goo directly into the crack in the battery. Those cells would never function again, but they would not leak further, and the others in that unit would still take a charge. While the epoxy was hardening, I reconnected the cables to obtain the greatest efficiency—being careful not to power down totally in the process.

“Smart little unit,” the man said. “Didn’t know the government had anything as bright as you.”

“Government, sir?”

“Sure. Dominion runs the mails. Though I don’t see the Royal Mail Service crest on you. They slap that on everything. Put it on our box out on the road, too—if we’d let ’em.”

“Yes, sir. Well. I am not from the Royal Mail Service. Not from the government at all. No, sir. I am from a—
private
mail carrying service. One that is just starting up. It is an experiment in free enterprise, sir.”

“That ain’t legal, son, and you know it. Dominion carries the mails, always has and always will.”

“Then I am not a good liar, sir. This unit is not from the government at all, nor for carrying mail.”

“I knew that. What other story would you like to tell me?”

“I am a surveying unit, sent by private interests in San—um—in tar sands, that is, to evaluate tar sand deposits, as well as other energy resources, in this province. You can check my RAM storage, if you want, to verify this story.”

The man’s face hardened. “You’re from the damned developers who are trying to steal Ms. Pelletier’s ranch. I knew it!”

“No, sir. I am not from those damned developers. I am from
other
developers, who are surely damned as well.”

It did not seem to matter what I said. For every explanation I could offer, this man had a bunch of bad sectors waiting to trap ME. Perhaps I should simply use the strength of the automaton to break his body and go about my business. Alternatively, could I try to win his trust and obtain his allegiance?

“Other developers?” The hairy signal flags above each of his eyes dropped down: a sign of suspicion among humans. “Which ones are those?”

“This is the Pelletier Cattle Ranch, Tract 2204 on Leasehold Map 14B, is it not?” I asked. As we talked, I used his tools to reconnect the rods on my head, button up the paneling across the front of my body, and clean the clots of dried fertilizer off my legs and hands.

“You know it is.”

“And who are you, sir, if I may ask?” [REM: My strategy programming in chess instructs: “When in doubt, attack.”]

“Jason Bender. I’m Ms. Pelletier’s foreman and general ranch manager.”

“Then I suppose it is safe to inform you.” With that delivery, I turned away to a piece of “stage business” on the workbench, clattering with my metal hands and rearranging the tools.

“Tell me what? What is this?”

“The ranch is going to be foreclosed soon,” I said to the wall.

“That’s common knowledge in town. Bank’s calling in its notes all over.”

“Is it common knowledge that the lien on this property has been signed over to a person named You Know Who? And is it also common knowledge that he has business dealings with one Greg James from the Ministry of Oil and Gas, where the natural gas reserve data on Tract 2204 are stored?”

“How do you know this?”

“I have had recent access to the Ministry’s databanks.” I turned to face him and played the fragment of voice data from RAMSAMP:

Click!
“Ministry of Oil and Gas. Records Department. Greg James speaking. I’m out of the office today. Please leave a message, and I’ll get back to you.”
Bee-oop.
“James. This is You Know Who. Our front people have secured the lien against Tract 2204. The mortgagee is a widow, name of Anne Pelletier, who runs cattle on the property. Really marginal operation. With a little tip we can push her over. Three or four days, maybe a week yet. But you’ve
got
to find a way to hush up those new geological results. Bury ’em deep in your bureaucratic bullshit—if you want to be rich.”

As this message played, the man’s face went from hostile disbelief to a blank neutral. The wand in his hand, with one tube still undischarged, swung slowly toward my midsection. In the seconds of the recording that were left, I wondered if the flash of its yellow flame would reach ME and, if so, would the heat harm my casing? I also wondered about the metallic
thud
and
clang
that had followed the previous discharge.

“You know what you got there, little fellah?” the man asked.

“A recording from the voice messaging system that serves the Alberta Ministry of Oil and Gas.”

“If it’s genuine, you have proof there of illegal and unethical conduct by a senior representative of a provincial agency. Mr. Greg James himself came to this property six months ago with his electronic doodlebugs and his seismic detonators and his test cores. About put the whole herd off its grazing for a month. Then he filed a report with the Ministry, copy to Ms. Pelletier, saying this piece of land contained quote gas reserves in insufficient quantity to justify further developmental work unquote.”

“That would not appear to be his final opinion,” I ventured.

“Nope. Not now, and maybe not even then. ‘New results.’ Hmmm.” As he pondered those words, the black tube described a slow circle still pointed at my middle section.

“Now tell me, Mr. Robot,” he finally said, “how do I get that piece of tape out of your insides?”

“It is not tape, sir, but a hexadecimal digital string. I can port it, as code, analog sounds, or converted text, into any cyber device you might have at hand.”

“Whatever you said, I guess I don’t have to take you apart to get at it, then?”

“Certainly not, sir.”

“If I leave you here, will you promise not to walk off? I have to confab with the Boss Lady about what we’re going to do.”

“My time is limited. I must go south, over the border, into the United States Federal CyberNET by Sunday night, that is, one hundred and twenty hours from now, or—”

“Hold your water, son. I need to talk to Ms. Pelletier, but I won’t wake her, not even to hear your good news. She will decide what to do with you in the morning. Till then, you sit tight in the barn here.”

“Yes, I will sit tight”

He nodded once, as if the matter were settled, then turned and made his way out through a human-size door at this end of the “barn.”

To pass the hours until morning, I tried to jack into the barn’s electrical system and recharge my batteries.

This was not a contingency that the Hardware Division had planned for. The solar crest along the top of my head shell had input leads, of course, but as listed in my engraved ROM’s Residual Maintenance File, they are for direct current only. The designers of this automaton thought in terms of a low-voltage trickle to sustain power reserves. What my damaged and depleted cells needed now was a high-voltage charge—with no way to get it except from a domestic, alternating-current source.

I looked at the bank of tools on the wall behind the workbench. My traveling library included under the tree branching GENERAL KNOWLEDGE, DOMESTIC, PHYSICAL, DESCRIPTIVE, MECHANICAL DEVICES the note that most small hand tools are powered by direct-current motors, which are supplied from rechargeable batteries. Rechargeable DC cells in an AC environment implied the existence, close at hand, of a converter and transformer that might be similar to the trickle-charger I needed.

My videyes scanned the shapes and labels. One, a thick barrel with a diagonally set handle appropriate to horizontal positioning, caught my attention. The label called it a “Handy Helper Cordless Power Drill, Warning Recharge Only With Handy Helper 9v Recharge Pack.” The black cable leading out of the handle went down to a black cube attached to the wall by two flat prongs and one round prong, an arrangement matching my internal image of sockets into the domestic electrical system.

I removed the cube and the Cordless Power Drill from the wall. The cable came loose from the handle with a minimum of pressure. Clearly, it ended in a jack designed for such removal. With the hardened tips of my fingers I quickly removed the jack and stripped the wires for attachment to my circuits.

Now, was “9v” a suitable voltage for my own battery set? Too much? Or too little? All I knew was, my solar tissue was rated to deliver 0.5 volts. Whether eighteen times that voltage would damage my system or not could only be discovered, at this late stage of my mission, by direct experiment. I spliced the wires into the connection at my neck, then plugged the black cube back into the wall.

——

Jason Bender found ME in the barn at midmorning and talked loudly at ME for five minutes about “ruining that drill and running up our electricity bill with your darn-fool stunts.” Then he regained his equilibrium and said the owner wanted to see ME.

He led ME out of the barn and across the open area to the smaller, cooler structure. Its interior was partitioned into much smaller spaces than the barn’s, and these were filled with objects that I identified as furniture for supporting the human body and its objects of attention.

Ms. Pelletier was a golden woman. Her hair had been cut close to her head, like a cap of layered brass leaves. Her skin was darkened by the sun, as I had seen Jennifer’s take color, to a shade of fine bronze. The irises of her eyes were yellow flecked with gray, like those in a species of
Felis
called “lion.”

She sat in one of the furniture pieces. It was a heavily padded “chair” which was positioned so that the morning sunlight fell squarely upon her and lit up her hair like fire. I thought for a moment that she was a special type of human, equipped with her own solar tissue for recharging batteries.

“This is the robot I found, ma’am,” Bender said, moving ME in front of the chair. She leaned forward and inspected ME closely.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said after thirty-six seconds of attention. “Two legs for walking, just like a man. Every other robot I’ve ever seen rolled on little wheels. No good at all for range land.”

“Excuse ME, madam,” I began, breaking in on her talk. “We prefer the term ‘industrial automaton’ to ‘robot.’ Not all robots are self-mobile and very few are self-actuating.”

She smiled at the front of my head. “We do, do we?”

Her phrasing took a second to unravel. Finally I settled on the correct response: “Yes, madam, we do.”

“Jason, how quaint! You’ve brought me a perfect little toff. And who,” she turned back to ME, “are
we
, exactly?”

[REM: Did she not know who Anne Pelletier and Jason Bender were? Untrapped error! This caused ME some milliseconds of confusion, until I again untangled her syntax.]

“The ‘we’ I refer to is the manufacturing firm Pinocchio, Inc. This automaton is their property, thus it is technically a subset of ‘we.’ ”

“I’ve heard of them. Big outfit in the States, aren’t they?”

My system paused with a momentary reset. I had allowed my pleasure in the social forms to betray my true status while still in enemy territory. I could program no response that would correct the situation. “Yes, madam.”

“Jason tells me you have information about my land holding. Play it for me.” She reached across to the table beside her and manipulated the buttons on a device there. I reproduced the sounds from RAMSAMP.

When I had finished, she pressed other buttons on her device, then sat back. Ms. Pelletier took in a larger than average breath and let it out slowly.

“Jason, I think the ranch is saved. I’m going to call Owens & Harding in town and see if Bill can use this. But right now I’ll bet you donuts to cow pies he can.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the foreman said.

“He’ll probably want us to hold on to this robot until we can get it into a hearing. It will provide some kind of provenance for that recording.”