Akihiko Watanabe was having a bad day. His underling Shin Saito disappeared days ago, and though he left increasingly threatening voice mails to Shin’s cell phone, the man never responded. Akihiko also had a killer headache, the result of doing drinking rounds for his nephew’s graduation party. Akihiko didn’t like to think of himself as old, but the grey lines cropping up around his head told him otherwise. A man his age shouldn’t be attempting drinking games, but when your favorite nephew asks, what else can you do?
As for business, his worst fear had never come to fruition. He worried that his loss in the game World of some of the top players that they had thankfully went unnoticed. Though they did earn some money as soldiers or contract mercenaries, the funds from the mining operations were what the Yakuza really thrived on. With a few accounting tricks, everything appeared normal.
His office was above the main warehouse, which housed all of the residents that were busy asteroid mining. As he sat back and popped two aspirins in his mouth, two loud banging sounds went off. He choked on his aspirins as the sound startled him. Then he scrambled. First to stop asphyxiating himself, second, to find out what the hell was going on.
His frantic heart went into even more furious overdrive as he saw the monitoring stations. People wearing baklavas and body armor while shooting automatic rifles were in his building. At first he watched in absolute shock. How could they be here? No one knew anything about this place, and they were very careful to make sure nothing suspicious could be traced back to the location.
Then, he knew. Of course. Shin must have been captured by the police at some point. Maybe banging some of the hookers, he did have a taste for the flesh. They catch him, he flips, and now they have the location of the warehouse.
A small part of his brain knew that this scenario was unlikely. Getting caught for soliciting prostitution was a small fry charge, he’d have called their lawyer and been out within an hour. The only thing major that the police could have gotten Shin for is the human trafficking charges, but there was no new container of men, women, and children to put to work.
Still, it was the only option that seemed likely, and regardless of the cause, he knew one thing. He had to get out of there. Problem was, the only way down was through the stairs, which would lead him right into the police. His only option was to go out of the window. Falling two stories wouldn’t kill him. But it would suck.
He grabbed his chair and threw it through the window. Then, he jumped out after it. He should have cleared away more of the glass before jumping through the window. As it was, he cut himself up with the broken pieces as he jumped through. He didn’t notice that because the pain of landing soon beat the pain of numerous cuts. He landed partially on his car, and tumbled gracelessly over it as momentum propelled his body to flop on the other side on the passenger’s side.
Cursing his life, he crawled over to the driver’s side and let himself in. His car didn’t require an ignition key be turned, it came to life with a simple button press. Another part of his brain voiced a concern, but he was too busy escaping to notice it. As he fled the scene, the small conscious part of his brain told him that if this were the police, they’d have blocked off the entire area. There would be no way to escape the way that he just had.
He punched into his vehicle’s blue tooth and made a call to Japan. There would be no one on the other end, just an answering machine. But the message would be relayed immediately. They’d been betrayed by one of their own.
Eve was very proud of herself. She had only taken a few of the other robots with her on the mission, no more than eight. In her professional assessment, they were not very good. Most humandroids were deliberately programmed to be kind of mentally slow, suitable for the tedious work that most people looked down on like plumbing, cleaning, repairs, putting out fires, and other “grunt” work.
But no one with any money wanted to be replaced by humandroids, so the general humandroid was good for sex or good for menial labor, but there weren’t doctor humandroids walking around. From her conversations with Dr. Rossignol, the problem was a bit more fundamental. Humans came pre-wired with billions of years of evolution, which usually adapted them to learning very quickly, but at the cost of making incorrect assumptions, having biases, or making mistaken correlations.
Humandroids had no such limitations, but because they didn’t have all the prebuilt hard-wired behaviors, they learned much slower than humans. It took repeated several thousand repeated demonstrations before a humandroid could approach a regular humans level of understanding. Dr. Rossignol was using the information she was supplying to help rectify that deficiency.
Still, that left her with a problem. She had essentially had an army of idiot savants at her command, good at simple tasks, terrible at complex tasks. The video game and pod that Mark used allowed her to gain all of that data humandroids needed in a small time. But, Mark had a specific build. He’d also already used up a large amount of his skills, and they didn’t come cheap.
To really boost her numbers, she’d need an army of volunteers outfitted with neural implants, hooked up to other humandroids, and using military pods. Unfortunately, direct control didn’t work nearly as well as she hoped. After the failure, she looked up hypnosis and similar experiments performed by the US government. They had tried creating “manchurian candidates”, people who could be hypnotized and then unleashed as pawns to assassinate valuable political targets.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
It didn’t work. The further someone’s moral code was from what they were hypnotized to do, the more they would reject the suggestion. Thus while she could get her slave to give up the location of the warehouse, it pretty much fried his brain. Overcoming that much stimulation from the frontal cortex fried him. And that was just to get the location, if she’d asked him to come down here and assist, he’d probably have stroked out. Which brought her to now, and her months of planning leading to this moment and her current preoccupation.
The Yakuza men were rounded up. The guns her team used had a special self-healing ballistic gel. When a bullet was fired, it would puncture the membrane, but it would slow the bullet down to a fifth its normal speed. It wasn’t enough to kill, unless you hit the person in a vital area, but it certainly was enough to put people down. The only trick to it was not to fire more than once every three seconds, or the membrane wouldn’t be healed enough to slow down the bullet and you’d just shoot the other person dead. Difficult with people who were trained to double tap.
They tied up and loaded up the Yakuza members, then start moving the player pods into waiting vehicles. None of the players would know anything had changed, since the sensory input of the VR pods would block anything occurring in the real World.
She and her humandroids rounded the pods up and shipped them back to their main warehouse/manufacturing hub. The next part would be the toughest. She knew Mark’s moral code would require that she set the people free. But she thought that she could get around the moral limitation by giving the people a choice. So long as the contract was consensual and made between fully informed people, Mark’s moral code wouldn’t be violated. She hoped anyway, she didn’t really quite understand human moral code, since it was so often circumstantial and contradictory.
After the team put everyone in the basement of her warehouse, a portion of which Mark had no access, she walked up to her first pod and began the emergency ejection protocol. The first person was a young woman, maybe 20 or 21, with Slavic/Eastern European features. When she removed her face visor, Eve carefully held her up. The woman’s muscles were atrophied.
Pods came in various types. For those who were just squeaking by on their universal basic income, the pods they received had minimal functions. The body wasted away inside of it, which lowered life expectancy, which lowered the amount of time that people would be drawing a UBI. It was a win-win in a “corporate thinking” sort of way.
At the high end, there were pods like Mark’s, designed for maximal cerebral and physical stimulation, capable of training elite soldiers in a fairly confined space for minimal costs, if you ignored the high rates of psychopathy and PTSD. Still, there were variants in use that turned down the realistic elements to preserve the sanity of their hosts.
These pods were the low rent versions, more along the lines of cheap knock-offs of cheap knock-offs than something from any real manufacturer.
As the woman came out of VR environment, Eve practiced what she knew about human interactions. Eyes soft, don’t glare too hard, nod the head to appear sympathetic, and smile, but not too big of a smile.
She practiced all of those as the woman pulled off her visor and looked at Eve. The woman was in a state of muscle atrophy, so Eve pulled her up higher so she could keep her head above the viscous liquid.
“Hi,” Eve began. “My name is Eve. Can you please tell me yours?”
The woman didn’t respond.
“Hi, my name is Eve,” she said again, but this time in Russian. “Can you please tell me yours?”
“Anna,” the woman weakly replied. She motioned for her workers to bring over water and food.
“Hello Anna,” Eve said, “You were kidnapped and forced into a virtual slavery. We have taken care of the men who did this and they will not pose a threat to you ever again.”
She waited to see if the woman registered what she’d said. She did, but she also didn’t seem convinced.
“We are going to feed you, give you a place to stay, help you go through rehab for the muscle loss, and try to recover your passport or get in contact with your embassy to get a new one.”
“What do you want in return?” Anna asked. Smart girl.
“What we want is absolutely nothing,” Eve replied. She waited a second. “But, I imagine you left your home country for a reason. Our facility is creating new forms of artificial intelligence. After you recover, we can discuss potential employment options. The procedures are unorthodox, but the pay is good. Don’t worry about that right now, just focus on recovery. We’ll help you get in contact with any relatives or loved ones in the meantime.
Two of Eve’s workers waited, one with a silk bathrobe and the other with an electric wheelchair. They put the robe on Anna, then put her into the wheelchair. They lead her to a room specially prepared.
Eve’s plan was crude, but from what she knew about humans, it should work. The luxury robe, the electric wheelchair, the personal room, the delicious food, it was all meant to convey an aura of wealth. They would get a taste of the good life for a while. Faced with a choice of returning to whatever they fled from or being stuck with a wonderful boss like herself with potential wealth, Eve thought that she knew the answer. They would come down on her side.
Of course, humans were irrational, so some may be tempted to return home. She might be able to alleviate that by offering them a paid vacation to see their family, or to bring their family over here. She really wanted to just start ripping open their heads and to get on with it, but sadly, her experiment with Shin told her that it wouldn’t work very well.
He was basically a dog. Dogs are apparently enjoyable to humans and useful for a few small tasks, but incapable of the complex decision and skill making processes that was required to succeed in the game.
Besides, she was in this for the long haul. If she needed to spend a few days wining and dining the new guests, so be it. The long term rewards outweighed any minor problems she had.