Brother, Frank, Page 2

  The problem is, what I’m doing with Frank right now... well, strictly speaking, it’s not medicine. It’s monstrosity. That’s the only way I can think of to say it. I’m building a monster. The Amish wouldn’t approve, and no one else would either.

  Truth be told, I probably considered this solution even before the first transplant, way back when I first learned that Frank was dying. But I pushed it out of my mind. We already had a more suitable donor subject. An adult. Someone who had volunteered to be used by science. Someone who’d made a choice. Someone who had no family, no ties to the world he might be leaving.

  Yet even as I was performing that first transplant, Frank was on my mind.

  Here, I thought as I looked down at the HADroid, if it could be made to work, is the perfect body transplant for a sparkling, beautiful soul like Frank.

  I’m schizo about this. It only fully makes sense when I’m really drunk at night, but a remnant of why I’m doing this stays with me in the morning. Just a notion, but it has something to do with this: I really want to save Frank to save myself. Because I seem to have the need to save something. I don’t have it all figured out. I don’t know what unseen force compelled me to try and save Frank. Pride. Delusion. A god complex. The need for power over life and death. Maybe all of that.

  Yeah. All of it.

  Frank was dying because of a simple and sad reality: his brain, heart, and vascular system were growing too large for his small body. Or you might say he has died. Or will die? The time tense of all of this is difficult. His body is already buried and in the ground.

  There was no saving Frank—at least not in his old body. Modern medicine had pronounced him incurable, and I concurred, because what Frank really needed was a whole new body. And I’m probably the only doctor in the world who can provide what Frank needs to survive:

  A full-body transplant.

  People have received robot hearts before. Not even remotely the same thing as what I’m doing.

  I’m helping Frank survive. Even that may not be an entirely accurate way to describe what I’m trying to do here. It all made so much more sense last night. After seven scotches and a bottle of cabernet, and me laid out on the floor of my kitchen, the cool travertine helping to keep the room still. Me thinking about the funeral, and lowering Frank’s little body into the ground.

  You see, the Millers believe that their little Frank has already died. I used my government security clearance to harvest Frank’s brain and heart just before his body killed him. I’ve kept his organs alive artificially since then.

  Sometimes cutting-edge science can be a sticky wicket.

  We couldn’t keep his organs alive indefinitely, but we needed some time to make certain the HADroid was ready. We’ve made improvements this time. We’ve fixed what we thought needed fixing. And while all that was going on, I attended Frank’s funeral. I watched his family bury their boy. I stood with them and told them how much I’d miss little Frank.

  Part of me is so invested in the science of the HADroid, and in the immense potential of humanoid robotic defense applications, that I’m willing to accept the price that must be paid. Imagine: an army of advanced robotic soldiers who can think, initiate, create, adapt, and empathize like a human, but without a human’s physical limitations. Or, what if you could enhance a human soldier—provide him with a computer to aid regular brain function, and install machine defenses to make him terribly difficult to kill?

  Sure, movies and TV have taken a crack at it. The Six Million Dollar Man was an early Hollywood take on the idea, and RoboCop—both the original and the suckier remake—looked into the idea as well. But this, what I’m attempting right now, this is the real thing, and it’s never been tried before. And no one will ever know about it. It’s not the kind of thing the government advertises.

  The goal of the HADroid program is to make a robot that, on the surface, is a normal, adult human—but which, in reality, will be almost a living contradiction. It will marry flesh, computers, robotics, and advanced weaponry that far surpass the limitations of any purely human soldier. All with the heart, soul, and mind of a human being; with the ability to reason, to show compassion and mercy, to care. In effect, or maybe I should say in theory, the machine can be overridden by its human control mechanism—the person it really is—before it can do something cartoonishly evil, like maybe deciding that humanity is a virus plaguing the earth and thus should be wiped out. We’ve all read and watched those stories. Science fiction does teach us sometimes.

  What the program is trying to achieve... it’s a noble goal. At least, I think it is.

  Or was.

  Because now I’ve hijacked that program to save a friend. And maybe to save myself, too. I have made the choices of a god.

  And as a result, this dangerous creature, my invention—this living, breathing super-soldier—will have the heart and mind of an eleven-year-old boy.

  An autistic eleven-year-old boy.

  * * *

  We’ve kept the whole thing compartmentalized. Even these heart surgeons don’t know what’s really going on. They’ve signed releases and they’ve been told that what we’re doing is a top-secret government operation, and it is. They have no clue what the HADroid really is.

  Most of my own staff doesn’t know what I’m doing either. I’ve confided in Carlos and a few of his BDD hacker brothers, but that’s it.

  It’s been just over eight hours since I held the boy’s heart in my hands, and my team of surgeons has finished the implantation procedure. Now they’re attaching leads for stimulation—electrodes that will soon deliver a current that should jump-start the heart and get it pumping again. And this is the moment when I see an aide enter the surgical suite with a note.

  A note for me.

  I open the letter with shaking hands because I fear I know what message it contains.

  And there it is. Eight simple lines, bereft of emotion or feeling or any human compassion. It’s a note that will have enormous implications for Frank’s new life. However much of it he has left. And mine, too.

  My eyes dart from the paper to the operating table. I have a few seconds. I can stop it. I can shout to William and Clarence and tell them not to flip the switch. But I hesitate. For some reason, I hesitate. I know exactly where we are in the procedure. Whatever happens next, it will be on my head. Because I can stop it.

  And then...

  I see the heart lurch twice; it throbs into motion. Too late. Frank is alive, and the note from DARPA, that single sheet of bureaucratic memorandum, is going to change everything for everyone involved. Especially me. After all, I had a career and a life that both now seem to me—because of this memo—to be over. I knew I’d end up on the run, but I thought I’d have more time.

  The memo orders me, Dr. Christopher Alexander, to kill Frank. Actually, to never vivify him in the first place. The program itself has been killed. Maybe they found out I’d moved forward with the operation. Or maybe some officer or agent somewhere needed to start shoveling my money into some other off-budget ops or something. Who knows? Governments start and then drop programs all the time. It’s the way of the beast.

  The why doesn’t matter. All that matters is that funding has been pulled for the whole HADroid program. Any evidence that the project ever existed, including Frank, is to be destroyed.

  And I don’t plan on letting that happen.

  God help us.

  CHAPTER 2

  “I tripped a wire at Social Security and they’re searching, but I’d already finished up and buried the new account, so they won’t be able to find what I did.”

  “You sure?” Carlos asks.

  “Yeah, pretty sure. But they’re looking now. I’m out and brushing my tracks.”

  “Dammit, Pat!”

  Patrick rolls his eyes, then looks back at his screen. “This is an art, not a science.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  Smoke rises from the ashtray where I just crushed out a cigarette. There
are no windows in here, and the garish light from the recessed compact fluorescent bulbs emphasizes the wispy trails of cigarette smoke as they swirl upward and disappear into a cloud above our heads.

  The place smells like rum and sweat and an ashtray and spilled coffee.

  Yes, I smoke cigarettes. Not all the time, though. Only whenever I’m depressed or mentally overwhelmed. So, most of the time. I’m not a perfect representative of my profession. In fact, if I’m being honest, I’m probably not even a good representative of my species.

  The BDD geeks don’t mind if I smoke in here since everything else we’re doing is illegal anyway. In fact, I first learned that Carlos Luna was a world-class hacker during a smoke break early in the HADroid project. Not here, though. This is a warehouse office rented with cash and under a fake name. Over at my lab—that’s where I met Carlos. He works for me both there and here.

  Over a cigarette I mentioned that my ex-wife, Cruella, was defaming me daily in her blog. She knows that I can’t really tell people what I do for a living, so she was having fun offering some artificial, alternative theories. She’s that kind of lady.

  Carlos was part of the team that was writing the programs for the HADroid brain interface. He was compartmentalized like everyone else, but once I met him and got to know him, we became friends... and now we’re cohorts in crime.

  Her real name isn’t Cruella, of course. It’s Marilyn. But I call her Cruella. It’s not a hard puzzle to solve. Anyway, on that day Carlos and I were out in the breezeway sucking on cancer sticks, and Carlos gave me a sideways look through a slanted eye, and when I paused as I was bringing my cigarette to my mouth, that’s when he made the offer.

  “How’d you like to see her blog disappear?”

  “Permanently?” I asked.

  “Nah. Maybe for a day, and I can make it hell for her to recover her old files.”

  “You could do that?”

  Carlos shrugged. He shrugs a lot. “It’d be something to do, I guess.”

  “I’d love for that to happen.” That was all I said. I thought about asking Carlos if it would be illegal, but I realized that I didn’t want to know. Besides, at that moment, I didn’t know if he was serious.

  He was.

  I felt bad about it for about five seconds. It’s like I told you: I’m probably not a good person. But getting one over on Cruella was something I savored. I didn’t get a win very often, so it felt good to make her suffer for a change. She never did find her old blog posts, and Carlos made it so that her site was invisible to search engines for almost a year. Don’t ask me how he did it. It took him all of about three minutes.

  * * *

  “A good rooster that crows strong, that means you’re blessed.”

  That’s what Frank told me last night before I put him down to sleep in a cheap room in that rundown motel outside of town. I’m not all that sure what he meant by that, or if it was just some Amish wisdom his daddy shared with him. Something in him sparked the notion, but I can’t imagine what it might have been.

  But it did make me think of context, since in the CAINing process, context is everything.

  I lived in the country some as a boy, but we weren’t farmers. I’m not one-hundred-percent city though, not at all. I remember black smoke rising from the chimney in the mornings before the warmth of the day could settle in, and I remember the smell of apples on the tree, sweet like candy growing right within reach. And going with my great-uncle Jeffrey when he went to rob a beehive of its honey and I stood way off, like half a football field away, and was still afraid those bees were going to get me. I remember all that.

  And wet grass and leather boots and fishing for catfish in the neighbors’ pond.

  So, I’m not all city. Still, I need to realize that Frank has very little context for everything that’s happening to him. And he’s handling it all after waking up in a grown man’s body. How would you handle that?

  When he first woke up, after the operation, he hugged me and said, “I’m big. Is this heaven?”

  No, Frank. This isn’t heaven.

  He did well last night and he wasn’t all that freaked out, considering everything he’s been through. I read to him from the Gideon Bible I found in the bedside drawer. I had no idea what I was reading, but it seemed to keep him calm, and he really did listen to what I was saying. I’ve been running the CAIN program in his computer on and off for twenty-four hours; maybe that’s helping him keep it together.

  At one point last night I asked him if he missed his mom and dad, and all he said was, “I’m to help Father milk the cows in the morning. Four hundred twenty-two steps to the barn and back.”

  This morning I left him in the motel room with the television playing on the cartoon channel. All I can do is hope he doesn’t flip out and kill everyone. I could have powered him down and left the CAIN program running the whole time I’m gone, but he’s yet to show any tendency to change on his own, and since I had him CAINing for over four hours yesterday, I figured he needed a break.

  But what do I know? This is all new to me too.

  If there were a way for me not to leave him alone at all, I’d do it. I’d certainly do it. Because it’s dangerous leaving a weapon like that unattended. But there’s no way I’m going to have him with me when I’m dealing with the BDD team. Hackers get raided and arrested, and with what these particular hackers are doing for me... well, the odds may be somewhere around fifty-fifty that I end up in a jail cell or the morgue by the end of the day.

  * * *

  In the year after Carlos hacked Cruella’s blog for me, he and I became very close friends. That’s when he let me meet the whole geek squad. The BDD. Carlos, Patrick, Paula, and the rest of them. Some of them already worked for me, and I’d never known they were in cahoots with Carlos. They were something like an Anonymous-style cyber-terror squad. Havoc makers. Lords of e-darkness. Their hacker clan was called the BDD, which stood for Brazos de Dios (the Arms of God), but they usually just referred to themselves as the Arms. And they had elements, branches, all over the country. All over the world. Most of them were twentysomethings with government clearance positions, terrorizing the Internet on the side. Exacting retribution for social wrongs, perceived slights, or just for fun. In the same way you might collect stamps or beer cans or something in your spare time, only they destroy evildoers or corrupt companies or sometimes lives.

  There is something deeper there, too. Something scarier. There is often talk that uses the verbiage of war. Of war coming. Dark things hinted at in moments of humor.

  I wonder if the government knows how many hackers like Carlos are working inside the fence, doing government jobs and pulling down government checks, and all the while destabilizing the system from the inside.

  Now the BDD crew works for me. At least on this project they do. And I pay well because I’m rich. Made most of my dough a decade before I began working on projects for DARPA. Medical school was just a sidelight—something to make sure people would let me do my experiments. To make it legal I had to be a doctor, so I became one, but med school never taught me anything I didn’t already know. I’d held and sold patents from the time I was nineteen years old, and at some point the money wasn’t even a way to keep score anymore. It was just there. A seemingly endless amount of it. And once I started taking government projects, DARPA didn’t mind shoveling more and more green into my account every quarter, as long as my projects made progress.

  Well, up until now they haven’t minded.

  From today on, they’ll probably mind. A lot.

  That’s what the geeks are doing for me now. Hiding everything so I can disappear with Frank. I’m done with all of it, and I’m not going to let them kill the boy. Man. Man-boy. Hell, he’s an adult-looking robot, but he’s just a boy by every accounting that matters. So the team is making us go away, Frank and me. Erasing every vestige of the HADroid project. Creating new identities for us, including new driver’s licenses, passports, bank accounts, and credit ca
rds. Several identities, and safe houses to get us fully disappeared. All at a very stiff price. This stuff ain’t easy post-9/11.

  We’ll hide out in some BDD-provided safe houses for a while, and then, once the searching dies down... an island somewhere. I can afford it.

  The Arms boys and girls know their business. Most of them will probably end up in jail one day, or who knows? Maybe they got their government jobs because they’d already been threatened with jail. Hard to tell. But right now, they’re working like a well-oiled machine. Until they realize the gig might be up.

  Because that’s what happens next.

  “The IP we’ve routed this through, the fourth hop, well, they just got served from Homeland.” Paula looks up from her screen, calm as always. “A contact there just private channeled me, and they have papers in hand. He’s dragging his feet but it won’t be long. Someone there might have already spilled. The Social Security trip-up must have really pissed someone off—they’re halfway back through the route.”

  Carlos sighs and looks around the room. “That’s it then. Let’s pack it up, people. They’ll be here soon.”

  “How long?” I ask.

  Carlos shrugs. “Maybe they’re already on the way. Or maybe if they just now served the IP, and Patrick got the warning in time, we could have hours.”

  “So it could be hours or minutes?”

  “Or less.”

  This time I’m the one who shrugs. I pound a new cigarette out of the pack and light it. “This isn’t helpful.”

  Carlos is still staring at his screen. He hits a few keys and I see his eyes light up—and not in a good way. Maybe we don’t have as long as we thought.

  He slams his laptop closed and places it in the middle of a table next to what looks like a huge and very expensive toaster. The black box. “Right here and right now, friends!” he shouts.

  Laptops slam shut throughout the room, and each hacker adds a device or two to the stack. Two men wearing medical gloves are polishing everything quickly with a towel that smells like ammonia, and each electrical device is quickly wiped of prints. They’re even vacuuming the place and spraying the whole carpet with something out of an exterminator’s can. They move quickly; they’ve done this before.