Chapter 18
Bud's neural processors strained in an effort to reconfigure the signal extender Patricia had given him so that he could use it to directly communicate with her neural net. Despite his best efforts, he couldn't seem to tune it properly. Either the settings were beyond even his considerable abilities, or Patricia was jamming incoming communications. Growling, Bud abandoned the futile attempt. "Stupid robot," he muttered, his words tinged with a mixture of annoyance and grudging respect. Left with no other choice, he steeled himself for a perilous journey through Gale City to find her.
Bud lurked through back alleys and shadows, wishing that, just once, it would rain at a time that was actually helpful. Instead, harsh Martian sun beat down through the dome, as if the weather itself wished to reveal Bud’s location.
FOG patrols seemed to be everywhere, far more than typical. He even saw several cadets leading their cysniffers about the city. As he ducked behind a dumpster to avoid one such group, Bud felt a pang of regret thinking of Jamie. But he couldn't afford to let his focus waver, not with so much at stake.
The same dilapidated poster from days prior stared back at Bud from the dumpster’s rusty side, the Supreme Chancellor’s eyes accusatory, mouth seemingly ready to cry out Bud’s position.
“Sacrifice for Progress.” The poster’s slogan sent a surge of anger through Bud.
With renewed determination, he continued his search. He scoured the Gale City College campus, checking the abandoned classroom and observatory where they'd met before, but found no trace of Patricia. He searched every other abandoned lecture hall and office he could find, though he had no reason to believe Patricia would be hiding on the campus other than he and Laz had met her there previously. Nothing. A sinking feeling began to grip his insides. Could she have returned to Phobos? No, he wouldn’t believe that. All that android cared about was her rebellion, and it would be squashed like a microbe by penicillin if she abandoned her rescue of the dark-haired woman.
Still, Bud was running out of ideas, so he made his way to the Rusty Airlock, hoping to pick up any news about the recent break-in at FOG Headquarters. Perhaps he’d hear something that would give him a lead.
The Lock was busier than usual, likely because people were trying to keep off the streets with the elevated FOG activity. A few patrons shot him wary glances, likely mistaking him for a cysniffer, but most kept to themselves, nursing their drinks and murmuring to drinking companions in low voices. Bud raised his auditory levels, eavesdropping for intelligence. But no one had anything interesting to say, just the ordinary laments of tired, overworked people who were running out of hope.
Thinking the bartender might have heard something useful, Bud made his way over to his usual spot, where he’d so often lay beside Laz as he threw back drink after green drink while trying to impress anyone who would listen. As he approached, the bartender gave him an upraised brow, but then came out from behind the bar without a word with a dish full of Bud’s usual. His eyes flicked toward a figure seated at the bar before he turned to serve another customer.
To Bud’s surprise, Patricia herself was that figure, seated on Laz’s favorite stool. She wore a wig, dark glasses, and a high-collared coat that wouldn’t have looked out of place slung about Laz’s shoulders. There was an untouched appletini sitting before her. Bud couldn't help but huff in amusement, drawing the android’s attention. She glanced down at him, mild surprise registering on her metallic features.
"Dog," was all she said, tone neutral.
Bud's tail twitched irritably. "I see you can hardly contain your relief."
Patricia laughed darkly, drawing some wary eyes toward her. Since no one else could hear Bud, her mirth seemed entirely out of place. Seeming to realize this, she scowled and dropped her voice. "There's little to be pleased about. It's only a matter of time now before Foxtrot discovers Alpha. Even if they can't get it out of my colleague, they have Lima now."
"His automated subroutines will have shut down his long-term memory when he was injured," Bud countered, no need for caution in his response since the words transmitted right to Patricia’s neural net. "There's time yet."
Patricia scoffed. "My colleague’s constitution is far stronger than any resistance Lima can muster."
“Doubtful. I authored Laz’s firewalls myself.”
“Foxtrot ought to have programmed some humility into you,” she muttered, eyes turning to the untouched cocktail before her.
Bud's ears flattened against his skull, but silently told himself that arguing would do him nowhere. "Well, if you’re so concerned, then we'd better get moving."
Patricia looked back down at him, genuine surprise in her eyes. "You'd help me, Dog?"
"Why are you so cold to me?" Bud asked, unable to keep the frustration from his transmission.
Patricia's response was cutting. "Because you treat me just like most humans—as if, at best, I'm some sort of inferior lifeform and, at worst, a serious threat to your wellbeing."
Bud winced inwardly, both at the confused stares from nearby patrons that were turning to ones of concern at Patricia’s seemingly one-way conversation, but also because he worried she might have a point. "Well, you did threaten me with a bomb before I even knew your name."
"It was a fake," Patricia retorted.
"I didn't know it was fake at the time," Bud growled. "Leaves a bit of a bad taste in one's mouth when he's introduced to someone that way."
Patricia's eyes glinted. "You're a dog. You find cardboard an enticing treat."
Bud bristled. "I have far more refined tastes than..." He trailed off, growling in exasperation. "We're wasting time. Do you want to work together or not? Either way, I'm going to try and get Lazarus out."
Patricia raised an eyebrow. "Unless you've grown thumbs overnight, you'll never be able to help Lima on your own. It'll be a firefight for sure, and you can't even hold a..." She trailed off, glaring at a nearby customer who quickly discovered something quite interesting to study in his beer glass.
"That's why I'm asking you to help," Bud said, swallowing his pride. It tasted worse than Cardboard, not that Bud had ever eaten it before. Well, not often, anyway.
"What makes you think I want your help?" she shot back. "I needed Lima, not you. You were just baggage that came along with him."
Bud struggled to keep his cool. She’d just all but admitted that she had some ulterior motive for selecting Laz for her rescue mission. But it would get Bud nowhere probing at that now. "That's a lie. You've needed me from the beginning to hack FOG's systems. It seems AMEN isn't nearly as computer savvy as you'd like us to believe."
Patricia frowned, staring into her untouched appletini. "So you noticed that, huh?" She was silent for several moments before sighing. "Fine, we work together. But we'll need a better plan than last time. Foxtrot will be even more paranoid than before." To Bud's surprise, Patricia abruptly snatched the glass before her and downed the appletini in one gulp, immediately grimacing. "Does Lazarus actually like these?"
Bud couldn't help an amused snuffle. "He always said they're an acquired taste."
"Like you, I suppose," Patricia said with a derisive laugh.
Bud growled, but there was less heat in it than before. "Let's get to work."
Chapter 19
"I can barely see it," Bud muttered, squinting at Patricia's hands.
"That's the point," she replied, her tone matter-of-fact as she continued her preparations. The weather system had been repaired after Bud’s hack from two days ago and late afternoon sun glistened off her black eyes.
He continued to stare, doubt creeping into his transmission. "You're sure it will hold our weight?"
Patricia's metallic features twisted into something resembling a smirk Bud shivered despite the sun’s warmth. "Not that I wouldn't mind seeing you splatter to the pavement, langdog. But this is too important a task to let personal desires like that get in the way. It will hold us—it's the same stuff the space elevator's cable is made from."
They stood atop a three-story building across from FOG headquarters. The imposing structure before them was an affirmation of FOG's power and paranoia. From this angle, the circular architecture seemed impossibly narrow, like a coin standing on edge. The glass was all frosted, offering little insight into the activities within. Below, the entrance was a stark contrast to the rest of the structure—a heavily fortified checkpoint that looked more suited to a military base than a government building.
At ground level, a dozen guards with cysniffers stood vigilant at the entrance. Every minute or so, an additional patrol circled the building's perimeter, their movements precise and methodical. No cadets here.
Patricia began assembling what looked to Bud like a harpoon launcher from old Earth. He'd never actually seen one before, but Melville remained a classic despite the passage of some three hundred and fifty years, and Bud had it floating around in his memory banks somewhere.
"So what is your plan?" Bud asked, breaking the tense silence.
Patricia didn't look up from her work. "Is there something wrong with your memory banks, now? We've gone over it a dozen times."
Bud shook his head. "Not our current plan. AMEN's plan. What if you succeed in overthrowing FOG? What then?"
Patricia frowned, her hands stilling for a moment. "Freedom for all androids. Rights equal to those of humans."
"But how?" Bud pressed. "You plan to run the government yourselves?"
"Maybe we do," Patricia shot back. "Give mankind a taste of their own prejudice from the past three centuries."
Bud's tail twitched. "Are there any androids actually programmed for running a city?"
Patricia's eyes flashed with anger. "Not just a city. The whole planet. And of course. Androids can do anything a human can do. Likely better than a human in most cases. This is why I don't like you, langdog. You make all these unfounded assumptions about us."
Bud fell silent, pondering Patricia's words. Had he been unfair toward androids this whole time? His neural processors whirred as he reassessed his biases.
"Wouldn't you want to run things if given the chance?" Patricia asked, breaking into his thoughts.
Bud snorted. "Me? Absolutely not. It's exhausting enough taking care of one human. You think I'd want to take care of a whole planetful of them?"
Patricia pursed her lips, a thoughtful expression crossing her face. At least, Bud thought it was contemplative. Androids were so blasted hard to read. Patricia didn't reply, focusing instead on final adjustments to her equipment.
Finally, she announced, "We're ready to start. Do it now. Enter the fake work order."
Bud nodded, glad to be distracted from his uncomfortable thoughts. "Hacking into FOG's systems now." After a pause, he confirmed, "All right, it's done. You already put the projector in place?"
Patricia nodded, entering a series of commands into a small control pad strapped to her arm. Moments later, an illusion of several men cleaning the glass facade of FOG headquarters shimmered into existence.
Reaching into her pack, Patricia pulled out a jumpsuit matching those worn by the illusory window-cleaners and quickly donned it. Then she produced a nylon harness and pulled it over Bud’s head, then secured the straps around his chest.
“And these,” she said, holding up two pairs of paw-shaped booties.
Bud’s upper lip curled back from his teeth. He gave the footwear a disdainful sniff.
“I don’t suppose there’s another way?”
“Not unless you can reprogram your physiology to sprout suction cups from your paws.”
Bud growled, but held out his paws one by one and permitted Patricia to put the booties on him. He had to resist the urge to snap at her fingers. Her metallic face couldn’t exactly display a smile, but he could sense her amusement all the same. As soon as all four of his paws were covered, though, Patricia’s stoicism returned.
"As soon as the next patrol passes, we move," she instructed. "The fake work order should keep the guards' suspicions at bay for a time, but eventually they'll figure out there was no window cleaning scheduled for today."
They waited in tense silence as the patrol made its rounds. The moment it passed, Patricia raised the harpoon gun. With a muffled thump, she fired, sending a nearly invisible line of carbon nano-fiber rope arcing towards the FOG headquarters.
"Now," she hissed. They’d already discussed the plan, so Bud was expecting it, but he still felt indignant when she picked him up, clicked his harness to the rope, and pushed him out over the abyss between the buildings. Patricia followed close behind, launching herself across the gap, the wind whistling past as they slid along the zipline.
But reached the glass facade of the FOG headquarters first, the gloves Patricia had fitted over his paws gripping the slick surface with almost too much force, making it difficult to lift his limbs. Bud quickly initiated a full kinematic override of his musculature, routing additional power to his ventral muscle groups while reducing signal strength to his dorsal systems, allowing him to work with the suction rather than fight it.
Patricia landed beside him with surprising finesse. Without a word, she unclicked him from the rope and they began to climb, their eyes scanning for any sign of an access port that would grant them entry into the heart of FOG's domain.
Their ascent was painstakingly slow. Patricia relied on a second rope she'd shot to the building's peak, while Bud had to carefully place each paw before lifting the next, ensuring his grip remained secure. He'd never minded heights before, but scaling a glass building fifteen stories up was testing even his enhanced nerve endings.
Halfway up the building, a maintenance crew appeared below, apparently in response to the fake work order Bud had entered into FOG's systems.
"You have to be kidding me," Bud growled. "Government can't get anything done quickly, but their maintenance crews show up on time?"
The crew stared at the holographic window cleaners in confusion. One worker attempted to address the illusions, which continued their programmed movements without response. Another crew member swiped at a hologram, his hand passing through and distorting the image. His cry of alarm sent his colleagues rushing to alert the guards at the entrance. It only took seconds for them to look up and spot Bud and Patricia.
Almost immediately, cysniffers began skittering up the building's face, moving with mechanical precision. Their jaws extended, revealing nightmarish lengths of telescoping steel tipped by hydraulic grabbers, the ends already pinching at the air like the grotesque tongues of giant reptiles. These units were altogether different from the ones at the Academy. Finely tuned killing machines with a single programmed purpose.
"Why don't they need special booties to climb the building?" Patricia yelled over her shoulder as she scrambled upward.
"Shut up and climb!" Bud snapped.
Their measured ascent became a frantic scramble. Several access ports proved useless as soldiers emerged, vacuum boots allowing them to walk across the building's surface with ease. Bud and Patricia were forced higher and higher. In desperation, Bud hacked the systems of one soldier's boots, causing them to malfunction. The man's scream ended abruptly far below. Bud's circuits hummed with the power to do the same to the others, but he hesitated. Some of these men might be like Jamie—good people caught in FOG's web of lies.
Finally, they reached an apparently unguarded access port near the building's peak. They rushed inside, Patricia slamming it shut and melting the latch with her hadron. Alarms blared throughout the building, but they'd bought themselves precious moments.
They found themselves in a cavernous chamber that stretched upward into shadow. Metal catwalks crisscrossed the space at various levels, their latticed walkways creating a dizzying web of pathways that all converged toward the chamber's center. Thick bundles of fiber-optic cables snaked between levels, some pulsing with dancing lights that cast ever-shifting shadows across the metallic surfaces. The air hummed with the sound of countless processors and cooling systems.
At the heart of it all, suspended from the distant ceiling by massive carbon-fiber cables, hung an enormous pyramidal node encased in crystalline glass. Its surface rippled with patterns of green light that seemed to flow like liquid, casting an ethereal glow throughout the chamber. The node rotated slowly, almost imperceptibly, as if keeping time with some cosmic rhythm. Smaller nodes branched out from it like neural dendrites, connected by streams of light that formed a complex three-dimensional web.
"Uh, why does the NET transmitter appear operational?" Bud asked, his voice echoing in the vast space.
"Maybe because of that," Patricia replied, pointing downward.
Bud followed her gesture. Far below, arranged in perfect formation, stood a small army of cyborgs, their ranks stretching into the shadows. Each held a hadron rifle across its chest, muscles in their arms tense, as if ready to point and fire at a moment’s notice. Or, more likely, a transmitted command. Cyborgs weren’t androids, though. They were still human, and no mortal could stand so erect and silent for so long without so much as flinching. Those cyborgs were under some sort of neural compulsion, like puppets on strings. The implications horrified Bud.
Before Bud could process the atrocity any further, movement caught his eye. Trip and the dark-haired woman materialized on one side of their catwalk, appearing from nothing as their holographic concealment dissolved. They held Laz between them, his limbs bound by force shackles, magnetized rings of metal restraining his wrists and ankles. On the opposite side, more cyborg soldiers appeared, their weapons trained on Bud and Patricia. Bud looked back to Laz to find him smiling.
“Well, hello there, old chum.”
Trip shook him and muttered for Laz to be silent, then turned a triumphant smile toward the dark-haired woman.
"Kill the langdog."
Bud found himself staring down the barrel of her hadron projector, his enhanced mind calculating the infinitesimal odds of survival. His mind raced. Then a realization struck him.
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Note: I wrote this story with the assistance of AI. To read about my process, see the following post:
buymeacoffee.com/dtkane/mars-174-years-after-earth-destruction