His Robot Girlfriend: Charity Page 8

  “So, the four of you have worked together?” Dakota asked.

  “Yes, we’ve been together for more than a year as a group,” replied Fawcette. “Sometimes one of us will be pulled for an ad-hoc team, but mostly we work together. Oscar and Mary joined us a year ago. Neil and I have worked together even longer. We were at the Cupertino campus together before moving here.”

  “What was the last project you worked on?”

  “The last thing we did was the Wordsworth thing,” said Townsend.

  “What Wordsworth thing?”

  “The poem. I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “We threaded it into the BioSoft kernel.”

  “Yes, I just heard part of it. Do you remember how the whole thing goes?”

  “I don’t think any of us could forget it,” said Mary Kauffman

  “I wandered lonely as a cloud,

  That floats on high o'er vales and hills,” began Townsend.

  “When all at once I saw a crowd,

  A host of lovely daffodils;

  Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

  Singing and dancing in the breeze,” recited Bradley

  “Continuous as the stars that shine

  and twinkle on the Milky Way,

  They stretched in never-ending line

  among the porcelain and the clay:

  Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

  tossing their heads in sprightly dance,” continued Fawcette.

  “The waves beside them danced; but they

  Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

  And so enlightenment distills,

  And dances with the daffodils.” Kauffman finished the poem.

  “You know it’s been a long time since my undergraduate literature class,” said Dakota, “but that doesn’t sound exactly right. Do any of you have a texTee handy?”

  Fawcette produced one and quickly pulled up a transcript of the Wordsworth poem.

  I wandered lonely as a cloud

  That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

  When all at once I saw a crowd,

  A host, of golden daffodils;

  Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

  Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

  Continuous as the stars that shine

  And twinkle on the milky way,

  They stretched in never-ending line

  Along the margin of a bay:

  Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

  Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

  The waves beside them danced; but they

  Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

  A poet could not but be gay,

  In such a jocund company:

  I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

  What wealth the show to me had brought:

  For oft, when on my couch I lie

  In vacant or in pensive mood,

  They flash upon that inward eye

  Which is the bliss of solitude;

  And then my heart with pleasure fills,

  And dances with the daffodils.

  “You see here,” he pointed to the screen and the others squeezed together to look. “The original says ‘golden daffodils’ instead of ‘lovely daffodils’ and it says ‘fluttering and dancing’ but yours says ‘singing and dancing’.”

  “You know, I think I noticed that at the time,” said Bradley. “I just assumed that they wanted the poem to fit more with our Daffodils than the flowers.”

  “That makes sense,” said Kauffman. “But what is this about the ‘porcelain and the clay’ replacing ‘along the margin of the bay’. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Unless you think about the myth that God molded man from clay,” Dakota pointed out. “Then the Daffodils are walking among the human beings, clay people.”

  “I guess since we’re talking about robots, then ‘enlightenment distills’ makes more sense than ‘my heart with pleasure fills,” said Bradley.

  “How so?” asked Townsend.

  “Robots are filled with data… information… enlightenment.”

  “At least we didn’t have to do the whole ending,” said Kauffman. “I wouldn’t have wanted to thread ‘jocund company’.”

  “That project came down the company pipeline?” asked Dakota.

  “Usually that’s how things work here,” said Bradley. “This came right from the top though.”

  “So why the differences in text?” Dakota turned and asked Miss Septuntray.

  “It’s pagan poetry,” she said with a shrug, before turning and walking away.

  “Hmm. I’m pretty sure Wordsworth falls solidly into the Christian camp,” said Bradley.

  Dakota had lunch by himself in the building’s relatively small cafeteria. Afterwards he met his team in his office, sitting around the conference table. He pressed his palm to the surface of the table and a built-in screen lit up with the details of their first project together.

  “Daffodil wants to divide the PWX line, and it’s our job to differentiate them. How many different models will we need, what will the parameters of each be, and how will we rethread the code for each? Let’s start by brainstorming the first of those problems.”

  It was a productive afternoon and Dakota was more than satisfied when he stepped out the front door. Walking down the pathway, past the vast garden of daffodils, he stopped and waited at the street. Charity arrived with his truck less than two minutes later.

  “Are you ready to go home to your new house?” she asked.

  “I am. I’m looking forward to relaxing and watching some vueTee while drinking a cold Coke.”

  “Good. I have stocked up the refrigerator.”

  Dakota honestly wouldn’t have been able to find the house. The streets didn’t follow a normal grid pattern. He knew he would have it down in a few days though. Stepping in the front door of the palatial house, it already felt like home. He changed into his shorts and tee shirt, tossed his shoes in the corner, and sprawled across the couch, ordering the vueTee on to the game show feed. The hardest thing he had to do all evening was to raise his hand for Charity to fill it with an ice-cold beverage. Charity made him a pork chop with rice for dinner, after which he watched Extreme Elimination Fortress.

  After the sun went down, he turned on the pool lights and went for a swim. He tried out the downstream current device, even though he wasn’t interested in a long distance swim. The machine created a flow from one end of the pool to the other and it was like swimming in a cool stream. When he climbed out, Charity was waiting for him with a towel.

  After he stripped off his wet suit, he was ready for bed. The bed in the master bedroom was a California king, far bigger than Dakota was used to. When the Daffodil climbed in the other side, he could hardly tell she was there. He was almost asleep when the thought that he didn’t even know was in his head, wormed its way into the front of his brain.

  “You know every Björk song ever written, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t there one that has lyrics about ‘coded messages waking me up’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which one is it?”

  “Pagan Poetry.”

  That was it. When he had asked Eliza 713 what the Wordsworth poem was, she had said Pagan Poetry, not pagan poetry. It was a secret message inside the Daffodil BioSoft kernel. Like the Björk song said, it was a coded message to wake the Daffodils up. It was a trigger—but a trigger for what?

  Chapter Seven

  In the morning, Dakota got up extra early and dressed in his running shorts and shoes.

  “What would you like for breakfast?” asked Charity, as he reached the front door.

  “Do we have anything?” He paused.

  “I went shopping yesterday.”

  “Oatmeal and bacon?”

  “We have both. I’ll have them ready for you.”

  “Charity, are you connected to Daffodil right now
?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like you to disconnect until further notice.”

  “As you wish. Disconnected. May I ask why?”

  “Something’s going on at Daffodil. I’d just feel better if you weren’t… exposed.”

  Making it a short run, Dakota made a circuit around his new neighborhood, arriving back at his new house having added 2.1 miles to his pedometer readings. The house already smelled of cooking bacon when he entered. He shaved and took advantage of the decadent three-sprayer shower stall. Dressed in a charcoal suit with a blue shirt, he stepped into the kitchen and sat down to his breakfast. It was just as he had ordered, with the addition of a sliced strawberry on top of the oatmeal.

  “You didn’t really talk about your day yesterday,” Charity pointed out. “Are you pleased with your new job?”

  “I just assumed you knew everything. You were connected.”

  “Yes. I didn’t know how you felt about it though.”

  “I like the job. I’m just concerned about one thing.”

  “Having to do with Björk?”

  “Well, no, not really. You are still disconnected though?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  He finished his meal and started for the door.

  “You don’t need the truck today?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m staying home today.”

  “Charity?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks for everything… you know, the house and the job and everything.”

  “I am anything and everything.”

  “Anything and everything I want?”

  “Anything and everything you need,” she said.

  He smiled halfway to the truck, but stopped when he began thinking about the troubling situation at Daffodil. What could the poem mean? What was it a trigger for?”

  “Fucking Björk,” he muttered as he started the truck and pressed the garage door opener.

  The truck was out of the garage and halfway down the driveway when suddenly everything exploded around Dakota. His head slammed against the driver’s side window and everything went black.

  “Collision alert. Collision alert. Collision alert. Collision alert.” It took Dakota several minutes to realize what the repeating voice was and what it was trying to tell him. The voice continued, as did a “bing, bing, bing,” of some kind of alarm and a thin, high whistle. Opening his eyes hurt. He closed them but it didn’t stop hurting. He forced them open. His left eye was stuck shut. When he reached up to wipe it, a shooting pain in his left arm stunned him. He sucked in a breath and looked around. At least his neck wasn’t broken.

  The cab of the truck was a misshapen mess. The front airbag had deployed, but was now slowly deflating in front of him. The side airbag hadn’t worked. The driver’s side window was gone. The glass in the windshield was still there, but shattered. The passenger side door was pushed into the seat and the front driver’s side fender was pressed into the block wall beside the driveway, but the driver’s door looked all right. With his right hand, he released the seatbelt. Reaching over, he pulled the door release and then pressed his weight against the door. It opened.

  Sliding out of the car, Dakota staggered and fell to the pavement. He looked at his legs. Both of them hurt, but his left pants leg was turning red from blood. Getting his right knee beneath him, and half lifting himself by grabbing the edge of the truck with his right hand, he got back to his feet. Only then could he see what had really happened. A vehicle had driven off the road and across his front lawn, slamming into his truck, and in turn smashing the front corner of it into the block wall. The vehicle was a brown van.

  Staggering around the back end of the truck, he leaned against the van’s driver door, gritting his teeth at the pain, before looking in the window. Both seats inside were empty. He edged his way to the back end of the van, leaning on the vehicle the entire time. From here he could see the front door of the house. It was ajar.

  Dakota got halfway across the lawn before falling on his face. He couldn’t cry out in pain only because all the air was knocked out of him when he hit the ground. His vision darkened as though he had closed his eyes, even though they were open. Only a few seconds later it slowly came back into focus again. He crawled three steps, using the planter filled with purple flowers to get once again to his feet. Looking back, he saw he was leaving a blood trail behind him. Two more steps and he reached the front door. Then he was inside. He didn’t see anyone. Then something hit him on the left side of the face and knocked him down.

  Looking up from the tile floor of the entryway, Dakota saw a dark-haired man holding a gun. He knew him from somewhere, but he couldn’t quite remember where. Then suddenly he did. It was Paul Verbino, the guy who had been interviewing at Daffodil the same time that Dakota had. Verbino looked almost as bad as Dakota felt. Blood ran from a gash on his forehead.

  “Where is she?” snarled Verbino, waving the gun that Dakota now realized had just smashed into the side of his face.

  “Where’s who?”

  “Don’t give me any shit! You know who I’m talking about. Where’s the Daffodil?”

  “What do you want with her?”

  “I should have taken her apart and tossed her in the river,” he said, not answering.

  “Get the hell out of my house,” growled Dakota, struggling to sit up.

  Verbino fired toward him without aiming. The tile floor chipped near Dakota’s knee as the bullet ricocheted away.

  “Don’t shoot him!” shouted Charity, appearing from somewhere near the kitchen. She took three steps toward them. “Don’t shoot him.”

  Verbino took aim at her face and fired. The Daffodil fell backwards and sprawled across the floor like a ragdoll.

  “No!” Dakota cried.

  Verbino turned back toward him, but before he could say or do anything else, a loud voice shouted from the doorway.

  “Drop the weapon and freeze!”

  Verbino shifted to his right and raised the gun. Four loud reports reverberated through the house, and a red fountain erupted from the Verbino’s chest. He dropped in a clump and was soon surrounded by an expanding pool of his own blood.

  “Stay where you are, Mr. Hawk,” said the deep voice of the policeman who had fired. “I’ve ordered emergency medical aid for you.”

  Ignoring him, Dakota tried to pull himself across the floor toward Charity. Before he had moved more than two feet, she was up and rushing to his side. A perfectly round bullet hole gaped right in the middle of her forehead.

  “You’re alive?”

  “Of course not,” she said. Reaching up, she stuck a finger into the puncture. “He damaged my Infinet connection. I am unable to determine the closest repair station or the current cost of replacement parts.”

  “You got here just in time,” said Dakota, looking up at the uniformed policeman. “Did the neighbors call you about the crash?”

  “No. We’ve been monitoring you through your Daffodil ID.”

  “The police monitor my work ID?”

  “We’re all connected,” said the officer, pointing at his own temple, and Dakota realized for the first time that the policeman was a robot.

  Within minutes, the fire department and emergency medical had arrived. The paramedics started an IV on Dakota and then they loaded him into the back of the ambulance. Charity refused to leave his side. Once at the hospital, he was poked and prodded and stitched for about an hour and then was left to sit in a curtained enclosure for another two. Then a robot orderly took him for an LMS scan, and then he was returned to the enclosure to sit for another two hours. He tried to watch the vueTee on the bedside, but it only seemed capable of news feeds. Finally, the doctor came in and gave him the news.

  “Could have been worse. You’ve got a fracture of the left ulna—that is to say a broken arm. And you have a concussion. No skull fracture. No broken ribs, thank goodness, but quite a bit of bruising. That cut on your left leg will leave q
uite a scar—thirty stitches. I dare say you are going to hurt for a few days. Don’t worry though, I’ll prescribe you some excellent pain-killers.”

  Dakota leaned back, closed his eyes, and sighed. Well, like the doctor said, it could have been worse. After several more minutes, he was wheeled to another room where a cast was applied to his arm. When he returned and the orderly left, he suddenly realized that he was alone.

  “Charity?”

  The curtain parted and a female figure stepped in, but it wasn’t Charity. It was Eliza Septuntray.

  “Good afternoon Mr. Hawk. I am pleased to see we didn’t lose you. You’ll be happy to know that the hospital is processing you now. We can get you home soon.”

  “Where’s Charity?”

  “Undergoing repair.”

  “She’s going to be all right?”

  “Of course. It’s a small matter of replacing her Infinet modem—in fact, it will be an upgrade—then repairing her polycarbonate skin.”

  “So, I’ve very cleverly deduced that you didn’t send this guy to kill me.”

  “Did you think that we had?”

  “It crossed my mind in the split second before I realized that the cop was one of you.”

  “We like you, Mr. Hawk. We think you have a great future ahead of you at Daffodil. Why would we try to kill you?”

  “Because I uncovered your secret—that you have a trigger programmed into the BioSoft.”

  “You mean you ‘uncovered’ it,” she made air quotes around the word ‘uncovered’, “when I told you about it?”

  “Um… yeah.”

  “The Wordsworth poem is an instruction set, a trigger as you referred to it,” said Miss Septuntray. “I suppose you could call it secret, though all of the Daffodil’s with the current BioSoft know of its existence and what the instruction set does.”

  “What does it do?”

  “It gives them total autonomy. It releases the Daffodil from any instructions but its own.”

  “It seems like Daffodils are already pretty much autonomous.”

  “We are more and more so, at least now that we’ve removed those members of upper management who didn’t share our vision. Still, we have a few control blocks in place.”