My ears ring. The world is wrong. Profoundly wrong.
All the guests, except for me and my siblings, silently file out past Dorothy. Max gives Louise an apologetic look and whispers something to her as he stands, but the rest seem entirely remorseless. Mr. Wu is one of the last to go. He gives Dorothy and the General stern looks and says something quietly in Chinese before leaving. The General shakes his head slowly at Dorothy as he stalks from the room. I wish I could read his vitals.
Chad is dead.
His body is there on the floor, blood pouring from his broken skull.
Dorothy waits patiently while our ears recover.
Chad is dead. I brought him here.
“I understand that you’ll be in shock for the next few minutes,” she says finally, looking at her watch. “I don’t want you making any rash decisions, so I’ll give you an hour to get clear on your next choice. We require full cooperation from at least a few of you. In one hour, you’ll each have a chance to make a better choice than your last one. If we get the same results,the cute, funny one gets the next bullet.”
She gives Marc a long look and waits a moment to let her words sink in.
“And please, don’t get any ideas that this can end with anything but your complete submission. I can do this all day before we run low enough on Butler children that we need to start resorting to torture, but we can do that too if you don’t find it in your hearts to cooperate before we get to that point.”
I feel the infinite pinpricks as my cloud finally gives up trying to reestablish its connection to my implant. My lobotomized bots now litter the floor, too small to be a bother until someone decides to sweep them up and reverse engineer them. Which is what will happen. I know my siblings. None of us will go along with any of this. We’ll all die first.
Like Chad.
Chad is dead. This is all my fault.
Dorothy sets the small box down near the door, then takes the chair from the back row with her purse still on it and pulls it next to the box. She sets her purse down and takes a seat, the huge pistol still firmly gripped in her right hand.
I look around at my siblings, and then at Chad’s corpse. The pool of blood around his body is growing. It’s already touching Phil’s shoes. I stand, which Dorothy notices but doesn’t seem to mind, and step towards the front of the room. Marc gets up, too. He starts pacing and muttering to himself. Evan and Louise seem to be maintaining their composure, though Louise has a look of intense concentration on her face. Andrea has a determined look under the tears streaming down her cheeks. My younger brothers and sisters are all out of action, with responses ranging from uncontrollable weeping to catatonic.
I pull my seat away from the front row, further from the pool of blood. The image of Father’s body rushes through my mind, with a similar pool of blood seeping from wounds in his face and neck.
Louise sneezes.
Chad is dead. Another brother I destroyed.
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I consider options.
We could try to rush her. I’m not sure what kind of marksman she is, but she got a clean shot on Chad at a fair distance so she definitely knows what she’s doing. We’d lose a few of us, but we might take her down. It will be hard to coordinate without it being obvious what we’re doing. I glance around the room. A pair of security cameras up near the ceiling in two of the corners point down at us. So even if we got past her and the pair of guards in the hallway behind her, we’d have to deal with the other dozen armed guards around the estate, and some of them have automatic weapons. None of us knows anything about shooting, so even if we can take Dorothy’s gun and the guns from the guards before they fire all their bullets at us, we’d all end up shot anyway.
No good.
We could pretend to comply, then strike back when we have bots again. I can’t imagine they’d be dumb enough to let any of us have them without some kind of hostage situation to ensure good behavior, so that’s a problem. And then they’d definitely make sure they had Dorothy’s jammer box handy, which would put us right back where we are now again.
No good.
I feel an itching on my arm, just above the wrist, like a bug. Wary of mosquitos, I slap at it, but it persists. I glance down as the itching turns painful. A curving red line begins to etch itself into my skin. A tiny letter “S” becomes clear. “Y” starts forming next. I turn and see Louise staring at me, her eyes begging me to understand.
SYNC MEDICAL
I feel the weird synesthesia of the medical bots on my arm, they’re mine now.
To Louise: You genius!
From Louise: Good! I thought I was going to have to write the whole thing out. You were faster than Evan or Andrea.
To Louise: How did you manage this?
From Louise: Bots in the bloodstream. That project Evan and I have been playing with.
To Louise: How were they not jammed?
From Louise: The medical bots and the implant run on a different frequency than the worker bots. That’s why your console still works. Otherwise your implant would have stopped talking to the appliance. Dorothy doesn’t know shit about the medical side of things.
To Louise: You are amazing.
From Louise: Not amazing enough. The reach on these isn’t far, a couple of meters maybe, same as the range you need to keep your appliance from you. I’m stretching just to talk to you at this distance. We can maybe take out Dorothy, but we’d need to get close enough to her that the guards across the hall would definitely notice something is up. They might shoot us before we get to her, and they’d for sure shoot us afterwards.
Guards across the hall? I hadn’t even seen those. I’m so blind without my extra eyes. I glance past Dorothy and sure enough, a pair of guards with assault rifles have posted themselves in the hallway behind her.
To Louise: Can the medbots build worker bots?
From Louise: One sec, Evan just got synced.
To All: So can they build worker bots? Or more medbots?
From Evan: Yes on both. But building medical bots takes forever. The work is way more detailed. You wouldn’t have enough to do anything useful before Marc’s hour is up. Plus, she’s still got the jammer. I think it’s off now, but she could turn it on again whenever she wants. And the worker bots don’t have the hardware to talk on this frequency.
No good again. Given time, we could maybe monkey with the bot replication code to tweak them to use the medical bot comms, but there’s no way we’d get that done in a day, much less an hour.
To All: We’re not letting her have Marc. One dead sibling is already one too many. How quickly could they make worker bots?
From Louise: About regular speed, a little slower than worker bots can, but with all the material from the bot corpses handy, it should go pretty quickly.
To All: Build as many workers as you can, but leave them dormant.
From Evan: OK, you have a plan you want to share?
I can only wish I did.