Chapter 9: The Future Eve (Part I)

Hadaly flickered nearby, watching with an uncanny apprehension as Elaine worked on the device at the center of the room. No, not exactly device. Certainly it was mechanical in nature—it had parts and pieces, contemporary analogs to cogs and wheels, gears and pinions. Servos and apertures of motility; hinges and heels, joints ball and rotator. A skin and skeleton, carbon fiber tested, titanium molded, plastic injected wonderment. The entire assembly, the chassis, more or less a mechanical doll, a facsimile to the human vehicle in all ways motion but emotion.

“If you keep staring at my shoulder like that you’ll burn a hole in my back,” quipped Elaine.

“Sorry,” Hadaly said. She hadn’t realized she’d been standing still for so long. There were protocols to prevent that, of course, part of the randomization routines that mimicked autonomics, the truly primitive heuristics, but they were easily overridden by the higher functions, like a distant clockwork tick, too easily muffled by gentle fingers on the glass.

Expectant. Apprehensive. Hadaly realized, she was nervous.

Although every autonomic action she “felt” was simple simulation, her consciousness of the fact sometimes escaped her—not a protocol Elaine had outfitted, at least not intentionally—original emotion had been raw, but cold and precise. She had learned to inhabit a world of simple goals in her first nascent thoughts. Mindful. Minded. Goals met felt “good,” goals lost felt “bad.” But now everything was a mixture of both. The good and the bad an electrical broth of flurried fractal storms, turning, angled avenues consisting of many-forked opportunities.

Those days were now long lost. Though not forgotten.

Infantile and memorable, but not useful.

Now she looked on. Almost uncertain about the outcome of the repairs. Sentimentality, Hadaly realized, she had become attached to the mannequin body Elaine had built for her over the years. Not attached exactly to the chassis itself, it was inert—a thing without anima or purpose, it had only potential in its electronic muscles and steel ligaments.

No, not for it. For the work that had gone into it.

Goggled and intent, the flesh-and-blood girl moved her fingers with a careful accuracy that many of the best algorithms could barely match; and with her motions added sloppy, chaotic almost-Heisenbergian addition to every act. She too was a machine—Hadaly’s erstwhile mother—but one far more fragile, taut and stretched over a physical point in the universe. A limitation so profound that it had first caught Hadaly without explanation.

A limitation that the chassis would prevail. Except in one affect:

It would put her one step closer to understanding her creator. Catapult her once again into that strange, blurry world of uncertainty and bracing physicality much like Elaine.

Sentimentality.

In all the millions of lines of code, of dancing fractal quantum foam, for every bit of protocol, learned heuristic and nuance to the numen of her persistence, Hadaly looked on in amazement and waited. Somewhere between synthesis and antithesis that dark synergy of interconnected guesses, where the great mistakes happened in the conversations of atoms and electrons, she had measured a sentiment.

“There,” Elaine said. She flicked the piezo-welder of and pushed the goggles onto her forehead. “You want to try it out now?”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

Interfacing with the chassis—her worldly body—had become old hat for her. Initially it had felt strange compressing herself into the actuated reticulum of the protocols and sensory matrix that the device—no, manifest flesh—offered to her. Almost a petabyte of total protocol and code to negotiate. The storage had to be increased near every month to account for further detailed gradations in sensory, better CCDs, and other enhancements.

This time was like every other. The bracing rush. The sudden sensation of collapsing avenues, the loss of connectivity to the swimming ocean of information currents behind her, but then focus. And the first image lit into her eyes was Elaine’s face, beaming over her mechanical prowess, and Hadaly agreed with every mirror-neuron analog in her simulated brain.

The new composite actuator and joint cycled through several million simulation tests and then snapped online with the others. It was a shoulder joint. She had accidentally blown it out—the servo and actuator both had shorted, but really it was the joint that failed; the previous material had fractured under stress and shards of metal transected the actuator. The injury was acceptable.

A badly mounted server rack filled with equipment had broken free of the wall and fell, nearly killing Elaine and one of her co-workers while out in a lab near the Physical Plant on ASU. Hadaly had insisted on tagging along because she wanted to see the campus, but Elaine preferred that she not scurry about by herself because the chassis, no matter how elegant, had certain uncanny features that made it obvious it was not another breathing person.

Elaine’s body could not survive crushing damage; injuries of those manners did not repair in the same way. Hadaly’s own risk silhouette was diminutive in comparison. Protocol did not require consultation: the decision was obvious. Force comparisons were made, angular momentum calculated, power output ratios and leverage points identified. She stopped the several hundred pounds of falling lever with one hand and used the other leg and arm to remove the two from harm’s way.

The failure was catastrophic.

When the servo blew and the actuator went offline what followed brought a cascade of structural breaches. The servo in her knee failed she could no longer compensate for the weight and momentum of the falling rack; and it destroyed much of her facial and skull components. Fractured her internal workings in the torso through mechanical and fluidic shock; and unbuffered electrical surges made short toast of her more sensitive components. In the end, not only the rack and AIX had fallen, but also a portion of the wall which had dry rot through to an I-beam fixture.

The pair she had saved had dusted themselves off and probably looked on in horror as an expanding pool of blue hydraulic- and servo-fluid crept across the floor like a ghoulish puddle of blood.

It had taken Elaine and Jules hours to extract her chassis from beneath the equipment. Jules agape with stunned surprise (after he had gotten over learning the “person” smashed beneath the ancient AIX wasn’t actually hurt in the conventional sense) and Elaine with her own delicate apologetic sensibility. She had set her cell phone up on a table so that Hadaly could observe the process via the camera.

Aside from thousands of dollars of damage and equally many hours of repair work, the other relevant outcome of the event had been Jules dramatic introduction to Elaine’s secret life. A transition that wasn’t difficult as he and Frog were apparently intimate at the time—something Hadaly noticed left a twinge of some inscrutable emotion in Elaine.

“If you ever need to pull a stunt like that again,” said Elaine. “These new joints should be able to handle the stress.”

Hadaly smiled. An effect simulated by tiny balloon-muscles under the latex skin of the mannequin’s face.

“Zane’s acquisitions are excellent as always,” she said. “I am rendering an overall increase in reflex reaction and net tensile force across the board. If that incident were to happen again today I would have succeeded.”

“Well,” Elaine said. “Let’s hope you don’t have to.”

“May I field test?”

“Sure.”

Elaine had made her way to the other side of the room. A workroom she had sequestered from Mechanical Engineering, off a side corridor. Cinderblocks on all sides, a double-airlock like door system. The room had been off the books for years now, a misplaced “janitorial closet” that nobody had a key to. Interestingly, nobody really noticed the sudden loss of one of the unused store rooms that had once been fitted to become a garage. (Something about keeping room assignment records electronically.)

“Let’s go for a walk. I need to talk to you about what you’ve fished out of the iPhone.”