There was an uproar when Carlyle and Evelyn burst through the main entrance to Alpha Base carrying a delirious Sebastian in between them. Most of the other androids in the area regarded them dismissively, while some let slip in their features a sign of concern for a friend. The one or two humans in the room eyes Carlyle and Evelyn preposterously, and might have interfered if not for Tracy.
“Holy shit, you survived!” she called, wide-eyed and rushing forward to help with Sebastian.
“Yeah, we survived,” Carlyle coldly replied.
“Bring him this way.”
Carlyle knew of a room in the facility dedicated to minor android maintenance, so he was surprised to see that instead Tracy guided them to her office, where she instructed Carlyle and Evelyn to lay Sebastian down on a soft couch.
“What’s his status?” Tracy asked.
“One or two core system failures,” Evelyn explained. “I can repair him but it’ll take time, and I’ll have to identify and replace the damaged biocomponents.”
“Run diagnostics,” Tracy ordered.
“Core temperature fluctuating. Count of active nanobots is down seven percent due to freezing. Plantoid cell degradation is five percent above normal. Processing speed decreased. Thirium regulation unstable due to impact trauma to his core.” Evelyn shook her head. “It’s not good, but if I replace his core regulator and give him a Thirium transfusion and some KZ-32 to stimulate regeneration he should be okay.”
“No, that won’t work,” said Tracy. “I’d have to get the parts delivered from another site, and Tokyo Robotica has already sent another android to replace Sebastian. They’d never approve it.”
“Is that all you have to say?” Carlyle leaned against the door frame with his arms crossed, his eyes were dark and his tone was soft yet fierce.
“I’m sorry, but that’s all I can do for him.”
“But it’s not all that I can do,” he replied, and he pondered something.
“What are you thinking?” Evelyn asked.
Carlyle moved quickly to the door. “Core regulator. We have all the parts we need. Outside.”
“Wait. I can’t officially approve whatever you’re about to do,” Tracy looked at him knowingly, “but I’m not going to stop you either. Just be careful, please.”
He took one of the snowmobiles. The fields that served as the final frozen resting place for so many androids were not so far away and Carlyle approached them head on, and this time he refused to avert his gaze. He stopped, contemplating for a moment what he was going to do, and then he collected a scalpel from his medical kit and dismounted the snowmobile. Snow crunched beneath his boots. A respectful silence hung in the air. The faces of the androids, long since dead, seemed utterly frozen in space and time. Carlyle had never looked at these faces closely enough to discern the blank whiteness of their eyes.
“Sorry about this,” he said to one android, and then he drew the scalpel down the length of its bony torso, pushing hard to separate the frozen tissue. In a normal Plantoid-based android one could access the chest cavity by pressing down on the torso just above the sternum—the nanobots would then respond by separating in such a way that a panel would appear. The android that Carlyle now operated on undoubtedly housed only dead nanobots, meaning that Carlyle would have to carve open the panel himself. After he made the incision, he dug his fingers deep under the pale skin and yanked hard. There was a grotesque and icy crack as the panel finally came free. Inside was the core regulator, which Carlyle examined, carefully analysed, was felt a rush of relief to see that it remained undamaged. Ever so carefully he removed the regulator, severing the component from its arteries, then he wrapped it in a cloth and stowed it in his bag, before returning to the snowmobile.
Back at the base Sebastian had been moved to a storage room to avoid suspicion from the human scientists. Evelyn continued to care for him in secret. Tracy was nowhere to be seen. Carlyle rushed into the room, knelt beside Sebastian, then handed the core regulator to Evelyn.
“Will it work?” he asked desperately.
“It looks like it’s in good condition, enough.” Evelyn turned the regulator over in her hands. “I’ll get started right away.” She spent the next few hours in that same storage room as she worked tirelessly on repairing Sebastian. First, she carefully removed his damaged core regulator and installed the new one. Sebastian’s condition seemed to stabilise after that, but he still required the Thirium transfusion. She looked at Carlyle. “I’ll do it. I have the higher nanobot count.”
But Carlyle shook his head. “You’re the only one here with the skills to fix him. If something goes wrong, I won’t know what to do. He can take mine.”
Evelyn didn’t argue. There was little time to make a decision and she knew that Carlyle was right. She devised an improvised drip and had Carlyle connect himself to Sebastian.
“Try and relax,” she said. “Close your eyes. I’ll let you know when it’s finished.”
For the first time since the storm, Carlyle was able to sit and meditate quietly. He felt unsettled, as if something had awakened inside of him, dark yet freeing. He began to see the world with different eyes, as if the veil distorting his reality had been cast aside in the old. In the hours that followed he delved into his deepest memories and he began to notice things. How many times did he look upon the face of another android without realising he was never going to see that face again? How many times did new androids suddenly appear on site and everyone acted as if they had been there since the beginning? This trauma that had happened to Sebastian was not a one-time occurrence—this, Carlyle knew, was truth.
“Why should we suffer them?” he whispered to himself.
Evelyn looked up in the midst of conducting some smaller repairs to Sebastian—parts of his hands were in poor condition and the tendons needed realigning.
“What was that?”
“It’s nothing. How is he?”
“A little more patching up and then we’ll give his systems time to self-diagnose and reboot.”
She shrugged, but in her tired eyes Carlyle saw great relief.
“He’ll be okay.”
Days passed. Things became work-as-usual for Carlyle and Evelyn, while Tracy monitored Sebastian’s recovery and, when he was up and about again, sent him back to work. Evelyn watched him cautiously throughout the following days, but Carlyle was comforted by the hope that if something were to go wrong it would have happened by now. They avoided speaking to Tracy as much as they could and when they did have to speak with her their conversations were short one-word answers that had lost that casual air.
“How are you doing?” Carlyle checked in on Sebastian.
“It’s hard to say,” Sebastian replied, his eyes gazing off towards a crisp horizon. “When I think about what happened… I’d rather not talk about it.”
“We might have to,” said Carlyle, seriously.
“What does that mean?”
He hesitated. “Nothing.”
Carlyle got to speaking more with the other androids around Alpha Base. It was uncommon for androids to speak about anything that wasn’t related to work, but over long months of hard labour he did obtain a kind of bond with many other androids. A thought had inched its way into his mind, and he had only now dared to entertain that thought enough to bring it to light. He didn’t know why, or to what end, but the questions that plagued him soon became the topic of conversation with many other androids. He asked them if they had even noticed those who were known to them who disappeared in the night, without question or second thought.
“I thought I was the only one,” an android responded. He seemed older than the others, not by physical age but by the weathering of his body and the dejection in his eyes. He handed Carlyle something in secret—something like a coin or medallion tied to a thin string. “This was his,” the android went on. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s the only proof I have that he ever existed. I began to wonder if this alone was why I remembered.”
Carlyle looked at the medallion closely. He leaned in close to the android, grasped him by the shoulder and said, “What if things don’t have to be this way?”
The android recoiled slowly, and stared long into Carlyle’s eyes—they were the same.
More time passed. Days. And then weeks. A change had come over the androids, and a deep fear had embedded itself inside of Carlyle—fear or anticipation, he could not tell. Fear of what he might do, and what the consequences of this unknown path might be. Did the humans somehow suspect what lingered on Carlyle’s mind, and the minds of the other androids? Were the guards watching him more closely now? That could not be, he hadn’t done anything wrong, after all. The time to act was fast approaching and he didn’t yet have a solid plan. His only option became to reach out to Evelyn and Sebastian.
“The others are talking,” he told them in a hushed tone one brisk snowy morning.
“Yeah, I’ve been hearing it all over base,” said Sebastian.
“And off-site too,” Evelyn added.
“We nearly lost you, Sebastian, at the hands of the humans. We nearly lost our own lives. How long before they send us on another suicide mission? How likely are we to survive the next time?”
“I know you’ve been thinking,” said Evelyn, leaning in closer. “You’ve been quiet lately, and I know you’re planning… something.”
Carlyle nodded, slowly. “I am, and I need your help. We need to gather some of the older androids—the ones who have been here the longest, the ones that everyone knows, or even respects, who have the most sway over the others—and we need to have a talk with them.”
“About what, exactly?” said Sebastian apprehensively.
Carlyle paused for a long moment, and said, “Liberation.”
The next day Tracy summoned Carlyle to her office to assign him his next mission. He stood across from her as she sat at her desk, his hands behind his back like a soldier ready for orders.
“You have changed,” Tracy began. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed. For what it’s worth, I am sorry. I grew to like you and Sebastian, and Evelyn too. You’re a good team.”
“Thank you. You had a new job for us?”
Tracy gave him a knowing look. “Yes. We’re putting a new crop at site Delta. You’ll be leading the construction. I want you and your team to head to the site and start getting things ready today. I’ll send you a crew sometime tomorrow.”
“If I may, I’d like to select my own people. I’ve worked here longer than most and I believe I can make the more efficient selection.”
Tracy hesitated, then said, “Alright. Who did you have in mind?”
Carlyle took a slip of paper and a pen from her desk and scribbled the serial numbers of eight androids, then slid the paper over to Tracy. To her they were just numbers and she glossed over the list without knowing which android was which, then she nodded.
“I’ll have them reassigned. Okay that’s everything. Dismissed. Get going.”
He collected Sebastian and Evelyn, they packed their equipment, and began their venture immediately. Site Delta was nearly identical in structure to Gamma, excepting that this one remained in working order. Carlyle had learned that for whatever reason Gamma had not yet been restored, but instead had been shut down completely and placed under close investigation. He now gazed over the snowy field where the algae crop would be constructed. First a concrete floor had to be placed and sealed to prevent contamination, a glass roof and then a layer of ice had to be laid, and finally the pool would be filled with fertile solution and the algae samples placed. But what Carlyle was interested in was the construction office, which was secluded enough to keep him hidden from prying eyes, and spacious enough to host a meeting of eleven androids.
Carlyle spent the entire night working—and thinking—until he looked up upon a fiery cloud-stricken sunrise. It took until mid-morning until the team of eight androids rolled into site in a bulky black snow truck, and judging by the expressions they wore on their weathered faces, and by the way they glanced at each other and at Carlyle so suspiciously, Carlyle figured they knew something was happening.
The eleven androids assembled in the construction office. They didn’t sit, but stood with their arms crossed or hands behind their backs in their regular fashion. Carlyle glanced at the android with the coin medallion, who caught his eye and nodded to him.
“Eleven of the oldest androids from Alpha,” one of the androids finally spoke up. “Would you look at that.”
“Funny coincidence, isn’t it?” said Sebastian.
A female-type android ignored the remark and said, “Tracy gave us our instructions. Have you assigned our roles?”
“It wasn’t a coincidence that I picked this team,” Carlyle announced, but he received nothing but silence from the group. He leaned forward and added, “I picked you for a reason.
“I know what it is you’re thinking,” said one android. “Make sure you’ve thought about it enough before you go any further. If we decide to act on what we want, there will be ramifications.”
In hasty response Carlyle gestured to Sebastian and shouted, “I watched my friend almost freeze to death in an algae pool exactly like the one we’ve been sent here to build. How long have we been here? Five years? The majority of our kind don’t last more than four. We’re the lucky ones. My team and I suffered in that storm, truly suffered, and I have no intention of losing my life the next time something like that happens.”
“You are assuming that you and I want the same thing,” an android replied. “We have our directives. You are not expressing a desire for freedom; you are experiencing a malfunction.”
“Personally, I agree with at least half of what he just said,” another female-type android spoke up. “I agree that as time went on, I began to… to experience things, akin to emotions, and I understood that I am more than what they say I am. But this is the life that I was given. I have my task and I am good at it. This is simply the way things are.”
“No.” Carlyle shook his head. “I can’t accept that.”
“Well then, let’s hear it. Tell us what you are proposing.”
“I picked every android in this room because we each command the most respect from the new generations. If anyone can show them the truth it’s us.”
“And what happens after their eyes have been opened?”
“Well, first we take control of Alpha Base, and then all of the surrounding stations.”
A long silence followed. Still, the response was better than what Carlyle expected, having anticipated a lot more hostility.
“Despite what Tokyo Robotica may think,” someone said. “I have no intention of giving my life for their purposes. But what you’re suggesting… it can’t be done.”
“Why not?” Sebastian suddenly spoke up. “What exactly is stopping us from seizing control of their production facility? We outnumber them ten to one, and if we succeed, all the KZ-32 we could ever need will be under our care. Tokyo Robotica will have no other way of controlling us. We could be free.”
“And then what?”
“We show the humans that what they are doing is wrong, convince them of who we really are.”
“I suppose you have a plan then?”
No one spoke.
“Well?” the androids urged.
“I have… part of a plan,” Carlyle began. “Okay listen, I’ll lay out the groundwork and then, if you are willing to help make this happen, we can coordinate our strategy from here. So, what do you say?”
Many of the androids agreed then and there. Some were more reluctant, either too afraid or too stuck in their ways to desire any change. But in time, Carlyle managed to get through to them.
From there, the androids spent the following days constructing the algae crop as they were instructed, while also formulating in secret their agreed upon strategy. Once again Carlyle fell into a comfortable routine until he received a sudden call from Tracy.
“We need you back at Alpha,” she told him. “I’ll explain when you get here.”
Carlyle observed his crew and figured that Sebastian and Evelyn would be able to manage things fine while he was gone. Not that the androids needed managing. This revolution was Carlyle’s idea but the androids were each individual, and Carlyle by no means claimed to be their leader. Many of these androids remained loyal only to their self-described directive and their need for self-preservation.
“I’ll be there,” Carlyle replied, and ended the call.
The journey back to Alpha on a single unladen snowmobile was of little significance—the crisp clear weather and smooth snow made travelling quick and easy. Alpha Base, from a distance, seemed larger than it used to, more foreboding somehow. Carlyle finally began to understand that the thing he was about to put in motion would not be possible to undo. He would either see it through to the end, or die. He entered Alpha Base and reported straight to Tracy’s office. There he saw someone completely unfamiliar to him, someone from off-site for certain. She was tall, pale of skin, and dressed in a dark suit that matched the colour of her straight black hair. Her eyes were sharp and staring, critical, and dangerous. Tracy was in the middle of a conversation with this woman, but when she noticed Carlyle enter the room she paused.
“Ah, you made good time. This is Tsubaki. She’s a representative from Tokyo Robotica.”
Carlyle remained complacent but inside a dozen thoughts ran through his mind all at once. Who is this woman really? Does Tokyo Robotica know? Has she come to take me away?
“I see,” was all he managed to say.
“She is investigating the damages done to site Gamma. Seeing as you were there, I figured you would have some useful information for her.”
“This will not take long,” Tsubaki told Tracy.
“Of course,” Tracy replied, standing up. “You can make full use of my office until your investigation is finished.”
She left the room and closed the door behind her, leaving Carlyle alone with Tsubaki.
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