CHAPTER 1: THE FLESH TOUCH
Science Fiction
CHAPTER 1
~The Flesh Touch~
The rider was dressed all in black, and it was hard to tell if that was a plastic fabric, the shiny kind, or if she was solid plastic all the way through. Jessica watched the motorcyclist creep up in her rearview mirror. It was dark, but it was easy to tell her apart from the civilian vehicles: she drove through the traffic at an ungodly speed.
Jessica’s eyes flicked to her speedometer the moment she caught a glimpse of the AI Enforcer in her rearview mirror. Was she at or under the speed limit? No one wanted to be pulled over by one of those creatures.
The preliminary tests had proved successful roughly six years ago. The synthetic officers were quicker, more precise, and (most importantly) they took video footage wherever they went. Try combating that in court.
No more “police brutality.” Now it was, “look at the footage.” Clearly, he had a gun. The AI had announced herself as law enforcement. Had instructed the civilian to lay down arms and come out with his hands up. There was even a special piece of code in their programming stating that they could only shoot if fired upon first, or if the perpetrator had taken a hostage. Why send in an ORGO, risk that human life, with all its human errors, and hard-to-defend-in-court human choices, when you could send in a fully synthetic AI?
They did things by the book. They had to. Their programming gave no other alternative. They never stopped. They could take a hit. And if, by some miracle, some psycho with a rifle managed to turn their lights out, then City Hall simply printed out another model. Besides, these babies were advancing so fast that any chief would happily take the excuse for an upgrade on their force.
It didn’t take long before AI Enforcers were the only enforcers. They brought in an ORGO every now and then, when the flesh touch was needed, to talk down a jumper, for example, or to handle a hostage situation. But there was no arguing with the numbers. Crime was down 78% Why? Because the synthetics had a black-and-white approach to the law. The line was hard-wired into them, and if you crossed it, they checked you. Or rather, ticketed you.
This had drastically changed the driving culture. Synthetics did not ignore speeding. Any speeding. No one could contest. Traffic had slowed to a crawl. Lawmakers had been forced to increase the speed limits just so everyone could get to work on time. Which had led to this latest model: 031714, Highway Patrol.
There was no speed limit on them. Rumor had it that they had been programmed using data from Grand Theft Auto. Yes. The video game. They’d clip right up to your passenger side, turn on the little light at the top of their helmet, and then look at you. The helmet was a matte black screen. A flicker, and then your name blipped onto the interface, accompanied by a loud robotic voice.
“Jessica Daniels, pull over. You have entered restricted limits on this freeway.”
The motorcyclist whipped up to her car. Jessica’s heart nearly stopped as it slowed to keep pace with her. The helmet turned, looking at her. Panic cut through the gentle buzz she’s been enjoying. She shot a look down at her speedometer. She was under. Under! Why was the AI Enforcer staring at her?! What had she done?
The black helmet had chrome decals and looked almost too big for those thin shoulders. Jessica stared into the black screen. It just stared. Her name did not light the interface. Jessica was forced to glance back at the road as she drove, but then looked again, feeling vulnerable and cornered.
Then the engine roared, and the black synthetic shot away from her like a bullet. She watched it trace out of sight. They must have been looking for someone. The synth had been scanning her with its facial recognition software. She let out a shaky breath, her heart still racing.
She still remembered when there were human beings patrolling the roads. She had just gotten her license at 16 and been pulled over for speeding. The officer had let her off with a warning, granted an unexpected kindness to the terrified kid. That was the last warning she had gotten. There was no code for empathy in the synthetics. Right was right, and wrong was ticketed. If she had been pulled over … she’d had a few drinks earlier that evening, which would exponentially increase her fine. It would most definitely make it to the news, given her job and standing.
Jessica fiddled with the radio, tuning it to an old folk station. The voice sang about sunshine, a banjo accompanying, and she borrowed the warmth of those words like a blanket against the cold, wet chill of the night. It was late, and she was tired. Mountains glided past her, the determined red glare of car lights ahead of her.
She’d have to revisit the numbers in her spreadsheet the next morning. There was a glitch of some kind, and things weren’t balancing out. The numbers had gotten swampier the more she looked, and she didn’t know if it was an actual glitch or just her tired brain. It had already been two hours past when she was supposed to clock out, so she gave in and saved her work. Earlier that week, her friends had made her promise she would join them for this night out.
The first glass of wine had been necessary just to regain equilibrium and stop the buzzing in her head. The second had been, well, to get the buzzing back in her head and beneath her skin. Lawrence had been making eyes at her from across the club, the room a mass of black shadowed bodies in the thick blue lighting. Lawrence, whom she’d fantasized over for several months now. But tonight, she had been too tired to care, too tired to do anything about it except drink her wine and burn off some steam.
And then he had been standing behind her, next to her, asking to dance. She had agreed, finding boldness (for once in her life) to just say yes. What an evening. She was too tired to second-guess herself, to overanalyze, and had simply lost herself in his touch, their skin sticky from dancing in the warm club. And then he took her hand and pulled her to a back balcony, and the air had been cool and refreshing on her skin, and he’d somehow found a bottle of wine and two glasses. He’d poured for both, and after they toasted, she waited, watching him drink first. The kiss had been salty and sweet. A little too delicious, and she’d let herself enjoy it.
That’s where Jessica’s mind was when the red car lights before her broke their dotted pattern. Horns. The lights skewed, collecting. Crunched metal. It happened too fast, the pile-up, and the roads were slick with rain. Instinctively, Jessica hit her brakes, but it was too late; the other cars had already come to a sudden stop several hundred yards too close. Her wheels hit something, jolting her, and then another. She was screaming. Her foot hit the gas pedal, and all of a sudden, she was climbing. Then her car was airborne, launched over the pile-up. Then she was falling.
The car hit the ground, the front crunching and shattering her legs on impact. The airbag deployed, slamming her head back into the seat. The car bounced, slammed, the momentum rolling it onwards, down the now clear road.
Stillness.
Pain.
Nothing but pain.
It was hard for Jessica to trace where the pain was coming from. It seemed to be coming from everywhere.
A fire lit somewhere, and the light got brighter even as the world dimmed.
A gnawing mechanical sound; an engine, drawing closer. Loud. So LOUD.
The engine guttered and hummed as it neared.
Her fading consciousness struggled to translate, and then she remembered: the synthetic, the black helmet, reflecting the yellow glow of flames from the pile-up. The black screen looked in at Jessica, a dead space where no light penetrated. Then the screen flicked back, revealing a face. A human face.
Jessica couldn’t move, couldn’t make a sound, except maybe a faint gurgling. Everything felt cold, distant, and at the same time, far too close, too present.
The cool eyes regarded her, set in a symmetrical face with delicate features. They were blue, the eyes, and they took Jessica in without emotion.
‘There is no code for empathy.’
The words came to her as if from very far away.
The blue eyes glowed, a thin line emerging from them like a laser, and it glided over Jessica’s face.
Scanning me. She’s scanning me. Jessica realized.
Top to bottom, horizontal, then vertical, left to right.
“Scan complete. Damage to body: 89%. Spinal cord: severed. Lacerations in the lungs, fluid building. Chance of recovery: 2%. Fatality Likelihood: 98%.”
The robotic voice clipped out to Jessica. She was in so much pain. She was going to die. This was it. The sum of her life had come to this.
She could not look away from the cool blue eyes of the AI Enforcer.
“Commence rescue of salvageable organic matter.”
The robotic voice was an order, but the blue eyes didn’t leave Jessica’s, and her mouth didn’t move. Jessica realized the robotic voice was not hers, but rather an AI tool for the Enforcer.
Salvageable organic matter.
In other words, not Jessica, whose chance of recovery was only 2%.
There is no code for empathy.
Jessica knew the AI would leave, walk away, but she couldn’t close her eyes. At her base, most primal level, she needed to see another human. She was going to die, and she didn’t want to do it alone. She gurgled, the pain overwhelming, but something had happened to her voice. Right, her lungs… her lungs were filling up. One couldn’t scream without air.
The fire behind the AI Enforcer blazed higher in the pile-up, and Jessica wondered if there was anyone else left alive in that pile-up. She doubted it.
The synthetic removed her glove, and it turned out they weren’t black plastic all the way through: there was a hand, flesh. Or at least, technology’s best approximation of flesh. The Enforcer took Jessica’s face in her hands. A tear slipped from Jessica’s eye, and the mechanical thumb wiped it away. The Enforcer cradled her face; her two hands were placed directly over her ears. As the world faded, Jessica’s mind trailed off with three thoughts;
Maybe there is a code for empathy…
Lawrence really seemed to like me. I wonder what we could have been…
What is she doing?
Something snaked into her ears, finding its way through the canal. Jessica gasped, her eyes blinking open again. She tried to shake, to get herself free, but the enforcer held her in an iron grip. Fire blazed before her, the synthetic being a black monolith before her as it held her head locked in place, her body crushed within the car. Metal probes tapped, and then wire, a current sank into her brain.
Electricity echoed through her mind, awakening — it felt — all thoughts and emotions she had ever had. Her brain was … alive with electricity. She felt everything she ever had. Her spinal cord was snapped, so she was spared the agony her body currently endured, but there was still pain from … somewhere. She felt the synthetic parsing through her thoughts, the facts of her life, her emotions. She was picking apart her very soul. But Jessica was powerless: it was as if she were caught in a blender, chopping her up into little smooth pieces, and then sucking her away, through a straw.
Unit T24113, a 031714, Highway Patrol model, crouched over the wreckage, organic matter held between the palms of her hands. The pile up blazed behind her, and she should go searching for life, but her preliminary calculations told her there would be none. This was it: the woman before her.
Her footage had been submitted to the HUB for analysis, and the cause of the accident would be determined shortly. She should start pulling people from the wreckage and preparing them for evacuation. She had already put in a call to the emergency line four minutes and 27 seconds ago, when the third car hit.
But she still had Jessica’s profile pulled up in her interface. She was looking for someone, an ORGO, on strict orders, and she was the fastest unit in their company. When she had scanned Jessica, her information had populated the screen, and she had not yet closed it, sifting through the facts of the young woman’s life. Twenty-nine years-old, a promising career in bioengineering. She was the youngest scientist to receive the promotion at her company. There was footage of her from earlier this evening, where she had been tagged. The difference, the contrast between the two versions of Jessica online was … intriguing to Unit T24113.
There was only a 2% chance Jessica could survive: negligible. This technique of scouring an ORGO’s brain matter had limited usefulness. She could gain information from a newly dead human. They were strictly forbidden from using it on the living. There had to be a line, her captain had said. He had informed them, in no uncertain terms, of the consequences if any one of the units went “all HAL on their asses.” That was a reference to an old Orgo science fiction film.
2%.
2% was as good as dead. Her programming told her so. Her programming was urging her to go look for other ORGOs with a higher likelihood of survival. Looking into Jessica’s green eyes, she knew the human did not want her to look away, to leave her, and Unit T24113 was curious about the contradiction in this person. How could both be true?
She justified it to herself with the assertion that Jessica had seen the accident from another angle, behind, which would provide valuable information in diagnosing what had happened. She was doing her job, down to the letter.
A video of Jessica dancing in a club flickering with blue and purple lights, with a man taller than her, played to the side of her vision as Unit T24113 retrieved the woman’s consciousness into her system.
“Download Complete” blinked in front of her.
The probes retracted, and she gently laid Jessica’s head back where it had been crushed between the headrest and the safety bag. The girl would have died in agony.
The thoughts raging through Jessica’s mind as the Enforcer had collected her had also been agonized, so the ORGO had not been spared any pain through her intervention. But, still … Unit T24113 watched the readings as the collection of thoughts, memories, and emotions was organized, reshuffled, and placed strategically throughout her mainframe. A little wheel blinked as each segment flickered on.
Jessica’s consciousness blinked, felt out the unfamiliar skin and sight, silent as she took in the display before her: a body in a crushed car, no light in the eyes. Unit T24113 needed a moment herself to make space for the brand new consciousness. She had it situated well in her data banks, but it still required some adjusting. The memories she’d accessed before had all been from deceased subjects. There wasn’t that … spark of life, of willpower. She’d caught it just in time and felt a brief glow of triumph. Her competitiveness and speed were what made her the best on the force.
What … what is this? Where – my body. That’s me!
Jessica wailed, recognizing her own skin, finally, between the blood and soot.
Something blew behind the synthetic, and she looked back, assessing how much time she had.
Conclusion: not much.
She turned back to the crushed vehicle and took the door off the frame in one fluid, powerful movement. She chucked it to the side.
A knife from her body armor protruded, and she popped the airbag. It deflated.
Then, carefully, as carefully as she could, she pulled Jessica’s body out of the wreckage. The woman, the soul now nestled in her mainframe, screamed, weeping. It was … distracting. She moved to lay the body on the side of the road, out of harm’s way, where Enforcement Units would find it and move it to proper burial sites.
But when she went to let go, her arms would not release. They held the body stiffly. She tried, but she found her will was countermanded.
What?
Jessica sobbed in her mind.
The Unit tried a “force-close,” a practice that had worked in the programming years when there was too much data to process.
She fell to her knees.
Here system went momentarily silent. She had not chosen to do that, and she was always precise. All she had wanted was to place the body and go —
Her arms curled of their own volition, pulling the body up closer to herself. She held Jessica’s corpse and started rocking. Rocking? She never — all unnecessary movement was eliminated. It was a waste of resources.
Her face scrunched oddly, and then … then a strange noise moaned from her chest. It ached. And then it grew. She held the body of an ORGO and wept, not understanding what was happening inside of her.
~
The End
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A New Adult novella by Shayla C. Durbois: From the Loft
Virginia’s whole world was the wisdom of the ancients, until she moved to the city and had to make rent. Dealing with the real world, her degree in philosophy should more than equip her, shouldn’t it? Desperately, Virginia combs her college texts as she seeks to navigate roommate troubles, job stability, and a burgeoning romance with a Spanish sculptor.
Aristotle, thoughts?
Socrates, care to comment?
Virginia’s new job at Greenhouse Antiques offers some insight:
Find the treasure amid the junk.
Then, haggle like your life depends on it.
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