This is gonna be awkward.
I followed mom towards the bookstore while running through possible ways this could work out in my mind as we walked, the busy sidewalk prompting me to automatically fall into the local robot persona. While I haven’t been here that long, it had been something I had been working on for a good part of any given day after all. She glanced back at me with a frown but didn’t say anything.
We were starting with the bookstore since it was close to the taxi depot, and of all the places I had been this was the one I had frequented the most. Thinking back, I had probably been in it more nights than not, and I felt it really was the one I owed the most. I knew for a fact it wasn’t a chain unlike any of the others, and while they never seemed too badly off there had been plenty of evidence it wasn’t a heavily staffed business with spare labor.
The fact I didn’t have any money to pay the owner back rankled me a bit, but mom said it wasn’t a problem. I can only assume she was rich given her position in the company but other than her lack of concern with paying for stuff I hadn’t really seen any evidence of it. Her trike was probably the most valuable thing she had, and it was cheap as vehicles go. Even with it being the fanciest version of the type I had seen, I was pretty sure it was cheaper than even a base model sedan. Not to mention when I had been leaving the apartment she was living in I had the chance to note how worn almost everything in it and the building was, the rust on the railings of the stairs up from the recessed doorway having been hidden by the descending sun the night before.
Maybe it was one of those routine things, she was used to what she had and didn’t see a need to change?
My ruminations were interrupted by the ding of the bookstore’s door opening, startled out of my thoughts and with nerves representing themselves with a somewhat discordant clatter in my head, I hesitated just a moment before following. I hadn’t broken my cover, so without moving my head more than would be expected I took in the place in the daylight and the full illumination of the ceiling lights, rather than just the dim glow I was used to. It appeared far busier than I would have associated with bookstores back home, this was a small place all things considered so something like ten people of varying ages and dress made it feel packed. I hadn’t looked in it while it was operating before out of some irrational fear of being recognized, but I did know print media was still big here without much in the way of portable displays, so I guess that makes sense.
I recognized the owner from having watched her leave a few times from the roof, she was on the older side, the silver appearing in her hair stark against her dark skin. She glanced up at mom and me as we entered, her eyes staying on me for a moment but without recognition in them. I knew it was unusual for someone to be accompanied by an assistant robot, so I imagine it more looked like Mom was flaunting her wealth than anything else.
“Hello, can I help you with something?” She asked when we stopped at her desk rather than continuing into the store. “Sam, you’re up.” Mom said putting a hand on my head almost making me jump, this was roughly what we planned so I wasn’t that surprised. The owner’s expression went weird, and I assumed Mom went straight into the ‘are you nuts’ category, as she still hadn’t even noticed I wasn’t holding myself quite so… robot-like.
“Hi, I er, kind of stole a bunch of your books,” I said sheepishly causing the owner to whip her head away from mom to look towards me. “Um, these and a bunch others I put back already.” I continued while placing the books I had in the tote bag under my arm up on the desk. “I grabbed a lot over the last month, sorry. Mom said she would pay you back for it if that’s okay.” I finished while shrinking back from the stare the owner gave me.
Fuck I don’t think I actually ever stole anything from a store in my life before I came to this dimension, unless you count pirating because you’re a weirdo, and now I’m admitting to basically having been knocking her shop over for an extended period of time. She continued staring at me and I started fidgeting as I made myself as small as possible, which admittedly is pretty fricken small.
“Sorry.” I said again into the uncomfortable silence, after a moment the owner sat back and gave me a calculating look.
“That was you then?” then her eyes flicked to mom for a second. “Assuming this isn’t a joke.”
“It’s not.” I said guiltily drawing her attention again and prompting her lips to purse into a frown.
She sighed and started drumming the fingers of one hand on the countertop. “Well, I guess that explains our mysterious courteous thief.” I guess mom’s expression changed, as the owner switched to addressing her. “Your… child? Daughter? Would clean up.”
“I would leave the place a mess and come back in the morning to a few books missing and everything neat and tidy, all the trash bins emptied, any books disorganized by customers returned…” The frown deepened. “Truth be told it was quite helpful while I was recovering from a back injury recently, I thought I was going to have to get Andy to do all the cleaning.” She turned a look on me I didn’t know how to interpret.
“How many books was it, Sam?” Mom asked as I returned the gaze uncertainly.
“Um three or four a night, I don’t know exactly how many times I went though. Maybe fifteen to eighteen times?” My math unit clattered away for a moment as I threw some guesses into it, then I rounded my answers before vocalizing them. “Sixty to seventy I would say.”
Mom nodded, then looked at the owner. “Could you ring me up for… hmm, say two thousand?” I blinked up at her, that seemed like an obscene amount of money. “Plus, any damages she caused.”
“Are they really that much?” I asked while flipping one of the books over to look for a sticker or price label, but there was only an MSRP of 43.99 on this history book and I had no idea what the owner actually charged.
“I couldn’t possibly accept that much, and she returned everything in good condition.” The owner said, and I looked up at her.
“I can afford it,” Mom said. “She had been repeatedly breaking and entering, even if you feel uncomfortable, I would prefer you accept it.”
There was still a slight hesitation but then she nodded and started typing into her point-of-sale machine.
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“Really, you were cleaning up the places you burgled?” Mom asked chuckling as we were on the way back to the trike. ‘That’s not exactly very subtle.” I didn’t respond as we were still surrounded by people, leading to an awkward pause and then a sigh from her. “You don’t have to pretend.” She said putting a hand on my shoulder, and I jumped a bit.
“Are you sure?” I asked when I didn’t see anyone looking directly at me, still maintaining my view forward.
“Yes.” She confirmed prompting me to glance up at her, uncertain. While I was clearly with someone this time and the owner of the bookstore hadn’t really had a negative reaction to me at least appearing to be intelligent, that was still a far sight from acting like a person in public. While I was less concerned about someone nabbing me to take me apart, there was still the itch of otherness that being something out of line with everyone else around me brought.
“I really doubt anyone will remember you for more than a moment, and worst case we can just use our excuse of you being a project of General Synthetics and no one will bat an eye around here.” She explained with a dismissive wave. “We have a ton of prototypes out and about here, it’s part advertisement and part real-world testing in practical contexts. I don’t know how much you are aware of the rest of the world but there is typically a far lower count of synthetics than here.”
“Huh, I guess I know of them being around elsewhere, but I haven’t even really gone into the berbs here, let alone gone anywhere else.” I responded loosening up a bit if still wound up. I started glancing around in a way I wasn’t used to having the chance to as I answered her original question. “I guess I got used to being in that store and how it usually was. Then with it being out of order a few too many times, it started to bug me… so I cleaned it up.” I admitted. “I get urges to do stuff like that, and I sort of indulge them.”
“Hmm, well your sister was loaded with the complete software package which does include the stuff for being a maid, maybe it got integrated into your mind to some degree.” She suggested.
“Probably,” I confirmed. “It feels like having a different set of rewards to a normal person I guess, like righting the disorder is satisfying. Mostly I don’t really notice it, but then I realize I was considering how best to clean up after my girlfriend or that I was getting way more out of sewing than seems quite believable.”
“Fascinating.” Mom breathed. “Do you suppose it actively replaced organic drives or that your mind expected something similar and just latched onto the closest equivalent? Or maybe…”
I realized as I buckled up my seatbelt behind mom in the trike that I hadn’t even thought about what any of the people around us thought of me through our conversation, I would say it was calculated if it were Kat doing it back home. Mom here seems like too much of a nerd for me to believe that though.
I also realized that thinking of or talking about people back home didn’t nearly have the same visceral pain associated with it then when compared to even a week ago. Maybe it was because I thought I had a plan of action to work towards even if I hadn’t started it yet, maybe it was because I wasn’t quite as lonely. Either way, it was nice to think of family and friends with a belief that I might have the resources to make my way back to see them one way or another. It’s not impossible they might still be trying to find me from the other direction after all, but it can’t hurt to work on it from this end.
These were all questions for another time, as we still had a trunk of stolen goods to pay for.
The rest of the day was honestly less awkward than the bookstore, the other stores were a variety of mostly just confused responses to learning what happened. I think the idea was too bizarre for them to really get angry. It helped that it was just employees of chains so not really something that directly impacted their livelihoods, the bookstore was the only independent place I had visited with any regularity. The guy in the synthetics store mostly just got excited honestly, he didn’t give a crap that I had stolen stuff. We spent like thirty minutes in there while he asked me all sorts of random questions, some of which I very much was not answering but were mostly just the sorts of things I had already been used to back home.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
We ended up leaving after mom got a call on her bulky cellphone about some urgent meeting getting scheduled on short notice, I got a vague impression it was something related to her having skipped out on doing anything unrelated to me for a bit.
It was with more than a little reluctance that I managed to convince mom to drop me off near Natalie’s place on the way back to the General Synthetics campus, I knew her normal work schedule would have today off and that I could find my way back worst case. In the end, she tossed her cellphone and the notepad that had her wallet’s code on it into the tote bag we had been hauling the books around in and gave it to me with the strict order to contact her or any of her coworkers if anything happened. I had almost gotten out of the trike before she realized that she hadn’t taught me to use her phone, which prompted an eyeroll from me as the thing was remarkably simple, all it had beyond the keypad and a small display was some buttons to scroll through its address book.
“Holy shit you’re alive!” Natalie said after she opened her door. “You weren’t in your spot any time I checked in the last week.”
“Yeah, uh mom picked me up…”
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It’s weird as hell to feel someone watch you think.
It was already strange enough when people commented on the sound of my thoughts and how they noticed patterns but having this thing in my brain just dials it up a notch. The software package that mom was using to look at stuff going on was just as intrusive as it was when she first woke me up, but between knowing I could kick it out whenever and this being with my permission I could deal with it.
Physical access for my brain was a little different this time, when I was disassembled she could just hook it into what was basically my spinal cord. I wasn’t in pieces this time though, so that option literally wasn’t on the table. Instead, it turned out I had a data port intended for just this sort of thing - diagnoses, software updates, and monitoring. Using it is more than a little freaky though, as it involves a few latches being undone with a magnetic tool and then the entire back of my skull opening. While she offered to show me with a mirror or something, merely being able to hear the sound of my thoughts being different from my brain not being entirely enclosed was gross enough to dissuade me from seeing.
From what I could tell from her conversations with the various engineers and her muttering, it didn’t seem like mom had made much progress on figuring out how my mind works. It didn’t seem to be due to a lack of information, more just whatever intermeshing of software and human mind was bewilderingly complex. It didn’t help that it seems to be a mixture of pre-compiled libraries and runtime stuff similar to what you might see in a python app, so one part would be incomprehensible that they would try to get meaning from with a hex dump butting up against something that would be disturbingly human-readable. Apparently, some of the code had comments, just normal English descriptions of what some sections would do, except it wasn’t anything written by a software developer at General Synthetics.
So where did they come from? Did I subconsciously write them or is it some weird side effect of whatever process adapted my mind to work in this body? No one knew as the time stamps and contents of most files were constantly in flux and it wasn’t like I had changelogs or anything. While this whole thing sounds like a nightmare to try to comprehend to me, it seemed to only excite some of mom’s team more.
I was starting to be able to tune out excited and confused chatter around me, particularly given doing my own stuff as they worked didn’t seem to interfere with whatever they were doing. At the moment I was taking a break from researching Org A’s incursions by reading a novel that an engineer (Tyler I think? There were a lot of them) had given me. It kind of reminded me of the Imperial Radch series mixed with a hearty dose of Bolo, in some ways it was very weird to be reading about an AI in a human body as a formerly human mind in a synthetic body.
As for my main project in trying to find a way back from here, it was only progressing in fits and starts. It was hard to do any research on the extremely sparse internet here, while it was getting reasonably popular there just wasn’t the usage to result in it being as developed as back home yet. They refer to it as the ‘mass network’ or just ‘massnet’, which doesn’t really roll off the tongue in my opinion. It probably is comparable to whatever the early 200s or late 90s internet would have been like - lots of simple websites without reliable ways of finding them. I never experienced those times myself so I couldn’t really compare directly, but I have spent enough afternoons watching weird YouTube videos to at least recognize the style. Beyond what I could find online, I was reliant on whatever physical newspapers I could get my hands on.
I did have a decent amount of information at this point, but for how much was being stolen and it being from corporations rather than normal people I would have thought the thefts would have gotten more press. From what I could tell their lack of publication was mostly because it was assumed that the missing security guards were responsible for the thefts rather than something more substantial. I expect another reason was that the scope of the thefts wasn’t that great, the last one was probably comparable to a shipping container of stuff from a warehouse that was measured in square kilometers of space. Even if they were taking pretty valuable stuff, from the sounds of things it just wasn’t that big a hit so far as the companies were concerned.
The previous raids were even less substantial which is why mom mostly hadn’t heard of them, Mitsubishi didn’t even bother with a major statement for the first one, just giving one to a local paper. In general, it seems like the blame and the work to prevent future incidents was being pushed onto private security firms from what I could tell. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of recognition of there being a sequence of similar thefts, the most I saw was an article in a magazine suggesting it was just a couple of copycat crimes after previous ones were successful. Their logic was a bit questionable to me as it seems a bit silly for security guards to make off with comparably little in the way of stuff and throw away sometimes decade-long careers to do so.
I was curious as to how the organization seemed to be ramping up their attacks, maybe they were trying to figure out who had what? I didn’t see anything that would say if they had people scouting things out for them one way or another from the articles. Clearly, they were doing at least some research into this dimension as in the sample set of four cases that I could find they are consistently targeting warehouses that would have robots or parts for them.
The only thing that Org A had done that was still hanging around in the news at all was their kidnapping in Texas, although obviously, no one here had made the link they were related. The stuff on that was depressing enough in just the articles where families were throwing tons of money into private investigations or running campaigns to raise money to fund the dependents of the victims. The fact I had a pretty good guess of what had happened to the victims and that at least four of them were probably dead from the warehouse raids was extra depressing.
In theory, I could have gone public with what I knew or fed the information to people who could, but it’s not like I had anything solid I could use as evidence. It was basically just stuff in my head and a set of worn clothes that didn’t really have anything that couldn’t be replicated here that let me say I wasn’t from this dimension and that I knew what was up. If I were a flesh and blood human that would at best get me funny looks, let alone as a robot where someone would assume that I was just something programmed to spout nonsense for whatever reason.
I had spitballed a few different ideas for what my next steps could be with Mom and a few of the engineers that knew my background, but it wasn’t exactly going to be easy to convince anyone with authority to help me line up some kind of ambush for Org A even if we knew where they would strike next. While ‘synthetics warehouse with valuable tech’ narrowed things down a lot, that still left dozens to hundreds of potential targets in North America alone. They mostly seemed to be hitting the east coast, but even that only cut out so many options. They seemed to be going for stuff every couple of weeks give or take, so we might be able to build a pattern at some point.
I had just flipped the page of my book when an excited Tyler slammed the door to the lab open. “Hey, you gotta check the news out! it’s a portal like you described Sam!”
One hurried disconnect later and we made our way to the break room where there was a small crowd watching the TV hanging in a corner of the room. “-front of city hall, we aren’t entirely- Oh there’s a change.” The reporter was in the midst of saying.
The footage of a portal just floating maybe thirty centimeters above the tarmac in the crossing road at the front of city hall was still playing, the other side of the portal was obscured by a heavy metal door set into a similarly chunky frame that left no part of the hole unobscured. It appeared to have just started grinding into motion as we arrived, a slight gap at the bottom beginning to form, presumably that was what had prompted the reporters’ statement.
After a minute or two of it moving without the dark space beyond being properly visible the door halted, the reporter had mostly just been repeating descriptions of what was going on while it had moved. There were a few moments of silence as everyone waited for the door to resume moving or for anything to happen, suddenly a robot like I knew shot out from under the gap. It was basically just a big remote-control car with a thick cable trailing back through the portal, it dropped the short distance to the ground and bounced a bit.
As a whole, the thing looked like a crude replication of a mars rover, four big rubber tires on the sides of a dull aluminum frame with only the crudest suspension, whatever made up its internals were obscured by plastic panels presumably to keep it waterproof. There seemed to be a heavy plastic panel slightly elevated off the top of the body, it also had a lump of cameras on the end of a short limb poking out the front of the frame. There were another few moments of stillness while the reporter continued repeating what was happening then the back panel started to slowly open, evidently having been hinged on the back.
It revealed an inset black panel that then lit up, between the small TV and the distance of the camera I could just about make out large white-on-black text filling the screen.
PEACEFUL
INTENTIONS
It stayed on the screen for maybe five or six seconds, then flipped over to French for a similar time then started rotating through Spanish, Mandarin, and many other languages.
“Oh neat.” I commented.
“Is it familiar Sam?” Mom asked.
“Eh not really, it’s pretty clearly got an LCD display of some type on it but that’s hardly a guarantee of being from my dimension.” My tapping foot betrayed my forced calm.
A picture in picture view was added to the broadcast panning across the area, the tank I was somewhat used to seeing outside city hall was clearly pointing its cannon if not at the portal, then close. The trio of military synthetics lurking nearby similarly were in a ready state their turreted machine guns roughly aligned on the messenger bot, I’m glad they hadn’t started shooting or something like that at least.
The display looped through the same text for a while and several the other engineers waiting in the breakroom wandered off to lines like ‘Let me know if something happens’. I took the opportunity to close the back of my head and let Clover latch it up from the inside.
“Hey mom, if you don’t mind, I want to hang around.” I said while looking for an empty chair.
“I don’t blame you.” She said with a snort, before pulling over a chair herself. “I’ll watch for a while too.”
The main camera had zoomed in to entirely be consumed with the display cycling through the ‘peaceful intentions’ message, after five or ten minutes it changed to a different one.
DIPLOMATS
72 HOURS
It once again continued repeating through languages.
This state was held for a a couple of minutes, after which the cable suddenly unlatched before rapidly getting dragged back through the portal which turned black before fading away. There must have been a battery in the messenger robot as the screen continued to display text, cycling through its messages without interruption.
“Looks like Thursday will be an interesting day.” I commented wryly.