Episode 7
“What if I volunteered? I mean, I have to be worth at least a couple fighters. Maybe more.”
“What?” Amanda said.
“What’s he talking about?” Paul asked.
“Roy, can I talk to you outside?”
Without a word, I stood and walked out of the trailer. Amanda was right behind me. Despite the sounds of the carnival, we moved away from the trailer before she confronted me.
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
And that, right there, told me everything I needed to know. She didn’t try to talk me out of volunteering to join Dockard. She asked if I was sure I wanted to.
“Wasn’t this the plan all along?” I said. “To use me as a bargaining chip? You can’t tell me that if I hadn’t volunteered, you wouldn’t have offered me up like a sacrificial lamb.”
She stammered for a minute, searching for a plausible answer, before throwing up her hands. “Fine. You got me. Yes, the plan was to use you as a bargaining chip,” she said. “But I wouldn’t have done anything without your okay.”
“And if I had said no?”
“Then I would have figured out another way,” she said. “I wouldn’t have just given you to Dockard.”
“Well, thank God for that!” I stormed back towards the trailer.
“Wait,” she called, chasing after me. “Does this mean you’ll go with him?”
I stopped dead in my tracks and turned around to face her. “Is that all you care about? Getting this deal done and fuck everything else.”
I didn’t wait for an answer. I pulled open the trailer door.
The truth was I wasn’t really upset with her. I probably would have done the same thing were our roles reversed. I was more mad at myself for not seeing it sooner.
“Everything alright?” Paul asked as we sat at the table.
I flashed him a big smile. “Everything’s fine.”
Amanda only nodded.
Paul eyed us both. “So what were you talking about? Being worth at least a couple of fighters?”
I was about to explain, but she beat me to it.
“Have either of you heard about what’s happening in New Mexico?” she asked him and Sam.
This seemed to catch Paul off guard. “Just rumors. Something about DHS building a weapon against us?”
“Sam?”
He was still stuffing his face with pizza. “Same,” he mumbled.
“Well, they’re not just building a weapon,” she said. “They’re building a robot army.”
“What?”
Sam almost choked on his pizza.
Amanda nodded. “And the whole army is covered in living tissue. One of them could be sitting right next to you and you’d never even know it.”
It sounded fantastical even to me, and I was living it. But Paul and Sam appeared to accept what she said at face value.
“And how do you know this?”
“We have—“ She caught herself, pursed her lips, and took a deep breath. “We had someone on the inside. She died helping Roy escape.”
“Wait a minute. Are you telling me that Roy is a robot?”
For once, I didn’t mind them talking about me like I wasn’t there. Let Amanda deal with explaining everything. She knew more about the hows and whys of the army than I did.
Amanda smiled. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”
Paul sat back, stunned. “That’s why you said Roy was your insurance against my mind control.”
She nodded.
“Damn. This changes everything.”
“So how many fighters am I worth to you?” I asked.
Paul looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time, which I guess, in a way, he was. “At least a dozen.”
“So do we have a deal?” Amanda asked.
Paul actually laughed at the question. “Oh yeah. We have a deal.” He extended his hand to her and they shook on it.
“Hold on a second,” I said. “Before you two start singing Kumbaya, I have a few demands of my own.”
Amanda’s mouth fell open and she looked at me like I was about to blow up the deal.
Paul merely raised an eyebrow.
“I know the government claims I’m property. I just want to guarantee my own autonomy and safety,” I said. “So no experiments on me. No cutting me open or poking around inside my head. And no matter what, my tissue—skin, internal organs, whatever—stays right where it is.”
“Is that all?” he asked.
“For now. I’m sure I’ll think of something else later.”
Paul nodded. “I can agree to that.”
We shook hands.
“And for the record, I had no idea the government considered you property,” he added.
There were more details of the deal to work out. Paul still needed fighters. And Amanda still wanted to protect the remaining communes. But for the most part, the deal was done.
I walked Amanda back to the car. We had to fight through the growing crowd as we made our way down the midway. Once we had exited the carnival and were on the street she pulled out her phone. “I want to give you my phone number, Grace’s too.”
“Okay.”
Only then did she realize I didn’t have a phone. “Shit.”
“Just give them to me. I’ll remember.”
“Are you sure?”
I smiled. “I’m a robot. Remember? I can recite every word of every website I visited and every video I watched on the way here. I’ll remember.”
She read the numbers to me.
I nodded. “Got ‘em.”
We walked the rest of the way in silence.
When we reached the car she asked if I’d do her a favor.
“What kind of favor?”
“You remember the surveillance photos Derek showed us?”
“Sure.”
“One of the people we saw was Marilyn Clark.”
“I remember,” I said. “You said something about how her father wasn’t going to be happy.”
She nodded. “Her father runs something similar to an underground railroad for us. To get people—altered and their families—to our communes. He searches them out and offers them sanctuary.”
“Okay.”
“One of the reasons he does this is because he’s looking for Marilyn. They’ve kind of become estranged over the years,” she said. “Would you pass a message to her?”
“Sure.”
She pulled a folded up piece of paper from her pocket. “Just give her this.”
I took the paper and put it in my own pocket. I didn’t need to know what it said. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. Let me or Grace know if Dockard’s planning anything major,” she said. “He’s still a bit of a wild card, and his people follow him like a cult leader. Just give us a heads up if anything big’s going to go down.”
I smiled. “So you want me to spy on him?”
“Yes.”
I took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay.”
“Thank you.”
“Will I see you again?” I asked as she got into the car.
This time she smiled. “Yeah. I think so.”
She pulled the door closed, started the car, and with a wave good-bye, pulled away.
On the walk back to Paul’s trailer it hit me what everyone in this new version of reality had sacrificed for me. Leslie had given her life to get me to Amanda. And Amanda said she would endure the pain of time travel to go back to L.E.T. and save my life. Well, the original Roy’s life, but by extension, my life. Was I that important? And who else would be forced to make sacrifices on my behalf?
When I finally got back to the trailer, Sam was sitting outside on a lawn chair drinking a beer.
“You’re back?” Sam said.
“Why do you seem so surprised?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, sure, you volunteered, but if I were in your shoes, I’d be halfway to Mexico by now.”
“And why is that?”
“Well,” he said, “this isn’t your fight. Why stick around to fight a war you have no vested interest in?”
“Not my fight? No vested interest? The nanobots that I helped create killed half a million people and altered thousands more,” I said. “I’m the whole reason you’re preparing for war.”
He took a sip of beer. “When did they wake you up?”
It was a rhetorical question. He was going to tell me the same thing Amanda had. That the original Roy was to blame, not me.
“You know what I mean,” I said pulling the trailer door open.
Inside the trailer Paul was cleaning up the small kitchen, clearing the table and putting the leftover pizza into the fridge. “Did Amanda get off okay?”
“Yeah.” I sat at the table.
“She asked you to spy on me, didn’t she?”
I didn’t hesitate. “Yep.”
He merely nodded and sat across from me. “So tell me about this army.”
I told him what little I knew. Around a thousand soldiers, all robots, all looked just like me.
“Makes sense,” he said. “Easier for them to identify, while not scaring the shit out of the public. What about the officers?”
I shook my head. “Regular military. Not robots.”
Again he nodded, digesting the information. “The robots, did they all have your personality?”
“I think so. Leslie said—”
“Who’s she?”
“She woke me up. She’s the one who died trying to get me to Amanda.”
“What happened?”
I told him about the Black Hawk.
“That explains why you’re filthy. So what did she say?”
“Well, she said that the original Roy Michaelson’s consciousness was the only one left on L.E.T.’s computers when the government confiscated them.”
“L.E.T.?”
“Life Extension Technologies. Where I had the Mind Upload surgery.”
He nodded. “She say anything else?”
“When I first saw the army she said that most of them didn’t remember who Roy Michaelson was. She also said a few years ago some of them tried to gain their freedom. I guess that’s when the Supreme Court declared them—us,” I corrected myself, “property.”
“What happened to the robots who rebelled?”
“She said they were decommissioned.”
“Anything else?”
“No. That’s everything.”
He was quiet, thinking.
“Sam!” he called out after a while.
Sam stuck his head into the trailer.
“Stay here. Learn everything you can about running a carnival.”
“Where you going?” Sam asked.
“Me and Roy are going to Celestine.”