Alien Education Page 14

  “WHAT’S SO FUNNY?” I asked my mother. Because I saw nothing funny about the “we have a mole” statement, from any angle.

  Mom heaved a sigh. “Really?”

  “Really, Mom. I mean, it’s not a happy thought, but who else could have gotten me so well without my knowing it?”

  Mom rolled her eyes. “I doubt you’re going to be impressing your newest recruit—excuse me, business partner—all that much, but here we go. One of your best friends is the daughter of Herbert Gaultier. You and Amy have been friends since ninth grade. You were at her house all the time, including for sleepovers. Who do you think got your specs, easily?”

  The room relaxed again, while I gave myself a gigantic “duh” on this one. “Ah. Gotcha. And that makes sense.”

  “Are you sure it was him?” Christopher asked. “I agree that it makes sense, but at the same time, assumptions about this could be deadly to us later.”

  “Pretty damn,” Mom said. “It’s the obvious choice.”

  “Doesn’t mean it’s the right one,” Chuckie said. “Not that I’m arguing. But Kitty and Christopher do have a point—if it’s possible that it wasn’t Gaultier, then we need to determine who else it could possibly have been, as fast as possible.”

  “And if it was my deranged father, then why isn’t there a Sheila-Bot?” Amy asked. “Or a Brian-Bot?” Serene’s husband, Brian Dwyer, had been my most serious boyfriend in high school. “Brian was over all the time when he and Kitty were dating. Or even a Chuck-Bot? I mean, Chuck and I weren’t close in high school, but he was over at our house more than once.”

  Saying Chuckie and Amy weren’t friends in high school was the understatement of the century, but everyone let this pass. A lot had changed since I’d joined up with the gang from Alpha Four, and Chuckie and Amy now being friends wasn’t the strangest thing that had happened by far.

  Mom heaved the sigh of the long-suffering. “I’ll speak slowly. There’s an Amy-Bot that’s been prepped, we know this.” Everyone nodded. “The Kitty-Bot was rolled out first, though, because the plan was to kill me, and I can promise you that Ronald Yates wanted me dead years before any of you knew what he was really doing in his spare time.”

  “But that doesn’t answer the Sheila-, Brian-, and Chuckie-Bots Question, Mom.”

  “You should never get up as early in the morning as you had to today. It’s clearly affected your thought processes. Sheila has no value as a robot—she’s not influential in any way. Brian is an astronaut, yes, but it wasn’t a goal of his that anyone knew about when you were all in school, and without that, he’s also noninfluential. Charles was not identified by anyone but the thankfully now-dead lunatic Cliff Goodman as a threat until such time as I suggested him to the then-Director of the CIA. They had plenty of time get the specs on Kitty and Amy. Why bother with the others? They weren’t going to be used as weapons.”

  “I can buy it for Sheila and Brian,” Jeff said. “But not Chuck. Someone that brilliant? Who was already on Cliff’s hit list? I don’t believe they’d have passed up their chance to make a robot version of him, too.”

  My brain decided to represent. “Yeah, but even if they’d wanted to, Chuckie grew like a foot between the end of high school and the start of college. Of the five of us we’re talking about, he’s the one that looks the most different from when we were teenagers. Even if they’d taken his measurements, they’d have been all wrong. And women tend to stop growing in their mid-teens. So, yeah, I’m caught up, Mom. And I’m so with you on never, ever doing a morning show again in my life, no offense meant to you, Adam.”

  “None taken. I think.”

  White cleared his throat. “However, Missus Martini, if you recall, we did have a room full of, ah, recreations that we found.” He was referring to the Room of Hot Zombies that White, Chuckie, and I had encountered near the end of Operation Confusion. “And Charles was represented.”

  Chuckie nodded worriedly. “Richard’s right. If they were able to create lifelike replicas of us, why not robots?”

  Mom had managed to kick-start my brain. She was great that way. “Because that was a different project.”

  “Obviously,” Chuckie said patiently. “But how does that negate the robot issue?”

  “First off, all the zombies were made to match everyone as an adult and there were no females. Why go through all that zombie stuff if you already had a Chuckie-Bot lined up? I mean, every dude who mattered at the time was represented, and they were all made up of formerly living parts. They were ready to go and they were not robotic. That took time and effort. I think Gaultier and whoever else abandoned the Bot Initiative. The Kitty-Bot hadn’t worked, so they stopped bothering.”

  Mom nodded. “Or Marling had made such strides with the androids that it made more sense to focus that way.”

  Managed not to say that it could simply have been because Christopher had killed Gaultier during Operation Confusion in order to save Amy and pretty much all of Jeff’s family. And though LaRue DeMorte Gaultier was the real brains behind so many things, she was working on cloning, which was more effective than robots or zombies could ever be.

  Reader was looking at something. “I’m sure that Angela’s right about who created the initial Bot.” He looked up. “Due to what’s going on, I had the robotic schematics we confiscated from the late Eugene Montgomery sent over. The Gaultier logo is on this. It’s hidden, but it’s here. I think there are other logos here, too. It’s like a Hirschfeld piece—the logos are part of this one particular design. I found the Gaultier one because I know what it looks like and figured it would be here.”

  “So, it’s like a Hirschfeld caricature only we’re looking for logos instead of the name Nina?”

  “Pretty much. I have no guess for how many logos are included, but someone out there does, because they did the drawing.”

  “Let’s see if we can find that artist,” Jeff said. “And yes, I know it’ll take effort. Put the freeloaders onto it.”

  “Hacker International will love the challenge, I’m sure. Okay, so this now begs the question I’d asked Chuckie earlier—do we know who created the first Kitty-Bot? Those plans would indicate it was Gaultier.”

  “Potentially,” Reader replied. “Also potentially with a lot of help. Someones’s going to have to decipher this drawing, but Jeff, if Stryker’s team could have done it, they would have already.”

  “How Da Vinci Code of whomever. But Hacker International might have missed it because they’re not focused on art, in that sense.”

  “Maybe.” Reader didn’t sound convinced.

  “It wasn’t Titan,” Kendrick said, before anyone else could add in. “I’ve had our records thoroughly searched.”

  “But it could have been,” Horn said. “We know that Cliff Goodman cleared out anything he wanted to once Marling and Titan were exposed. For all we know, Marling was the originator.”

  “It’s likely, but what about YatesCorp?” I asked. “The Kitty-Bot was with Ronald Yates on her inaugural run, after all.”

  “We’ve had a harder time searching there,” Chuckie said. “They have legit reasons to not allow us in—they haven’t really been implicated in a provable way in anything untoward.”

  “Honestly, that’s kind of shocking.”

  “I know. Believe me, I know. They’re well protected.”

  “Well, while we have Amos Tobin being so helpful and all that, I think it’s time to launch a full YatesCorp investigation.” By helpful I meant under our protective control, albeit unwillingly. As with Amy being Gardiner’s proxy at Gaultier, Christopher was Tobin’s at YatesCorp, since we’d decided that it was in our best interests to enact the Yates Bloodline Clause. “And can’t Christopher ask for some of this?”

  “Only if we bring more people on board under the bloodline clause,” Christopher replied. “No one’s happy I’m there, and everyone’s doing what
they can to not do anything I want.”

  “Why now for the YatesCorp attention?” Amy asked. “I mean as opposed to focusing on that?” she nodded toward the video screen, which had been paused on a panning shot that included Gutermuth onstage along with another view of the rabid audience.

  “Because Christopher’s got robotic doubles out there, and he’s Tobin’s proxy. Maybe Tobin wants that stopped, or maybe someone else does. And because someone started the Bot Initiative and the first Bot we know about was the one created to look like me in order to kill my mother. Yates and your dad were close, since we’re taking the idea that it was indeed your dad who got my specs. Someone made that first Bot. We really need to know who.”

  “While I’d love to say that it was Cliff Goodman, my money’s still on the Tinkerer.” Chuckie got Cliff’s name out without snarling. Since we’d taken out the Mastermind during Operation Immigration, Chuckie had seemed to finally be back to normal. He could refer to Cliff without going into a rage or a migraine. His naturally calm, cool, and collected demeanor was back. And he no longer seemed infinitely sad.

  Not that I thought that him finally getting to destroy Cliff had made the loss of his wife, Naomi Gower-Reynolds, hurt any less. But it now seemed easier for him to bear, and Jeff was no longer worried that Chuckie was going to do something horrifically drastic.

  “He wouldn’t have had to be in hiding at the time,” Richard White said. “And he preferred to be in close proximity to my father.”

  “Meaning YatesCorp or one of its companies makes the most sense. Speaking of sense, have we ever compared the robot schematics we found via Eugene Montgomery against the shredded ones we found at Marion Villanova’s apartment?”

  “Yes,” Chuckie said. “They’re different. Stryker can give you the full details if you want them.”

  “I will, but not at this precise time.” I was getting hungry and therefore wasn’t feeling totally up to comparing diagrams of robotic versions of me and my friends while combing through the tiny differences in detail. Just call me a quitter.

  “Kitty, are we thinking the Kitty-Bot was made by the same people or company or whatever as the Fem-Bots that attacked us at Camp David?” Tim Crawford asked. Tim was doing the job that was still my favorite of any I’d ever had—he was the Head of Airborne for Centaurion Division.

  Tim and I tended to think a lot alike—it was why he was good in my old position. So I didn’t answer off the cuff. And it was a good question, since those Fem-Bots had all looked just like me, too. But they’d been far deadlier than the Original Kitty-Bot. “What do you think, Tim?”

  He grinned. “Always nice to have my opinion valued. I think we need to remember that your theory that Monica Strauss was being her own Mastermind is sound, and we all felt that there were two separate robotics programs going. That we’ve confirmed that the two sets of schematics we have are different seems to confirm that there are at least two potentially competing programs. I think we need to figure out whether or not the Original Kitty-Bot is the same design as those we had to fight off while dodging lab-created superbeings.”

  “We shouldn’t ignore the superbeings, either,” I pointed out.

  “We haven’t been,” Lorraine Billings said. She was one of my two best A-C girlfriends and she was married to Joe. “But events have kept us focused in other directions.” Lorraine was blonde and buxom and, like all the Dazzlers, gorgeous.

  “However, we do have teams assigned to the project,” Claudia Muir added. She was my other A-C bestie and married to Randy. She was a willowy brunette who kept the Dazzler tradition of being totally hot going strong.

  Lorraine and Claudia were also Captains on Alpha Team, and all the Dazzlers were mathematical, scientific, and medical geniuses, at least by human standards. So if the girls said they had a team on the supersoldier stuff, then I could probably stop worrying about that. For the moment.

  “But to Tim’s point,” Lorraine said, “we should also look into whether the Kitty-Bot is the same as either the Montgomery schematics or the Villanova schematics, or if she’s a different design from either of them.”

  “Excellent point. So, then, next question—has anyone at Dulce or within Hacker International chosen to break down and reverse engineer her?”

  There was silence from those who would know if this was happening. Wondered if, stomach growling or no, I needed to get Hacker International onto video conference. Noted that Raj was on his phone and motioning to the A-Cs on A-V Duty and figured he was anticipating my request.

  “Um, guys? Why so silent?”

  “Ah, no,” Chuckie said finally. “No one is willing to do that.”

  CHAPTER 23

  LET THAT SIT ON the air for a moment. “Why not?”

  “John Butler and Cameron Maurer are both adamantly against it,” Chuckie replied. “To the point of near self-destruction against it. I get the impression they feel that she’s sentient.” Claudia and Lorraine nodded emphatic agreement.

  “But she isn’t. Is she?”

  “Can’t say. My initial reaction is no. However, I haven’t had time to do any in-depth examination and, as I said, our two fully sentient and in-control androids are quite against it. We might have a better idea if the currently intact Christopher-Bot lasts long enough for examination.”

  “Wow, you’re Mister Sunshine.”

  “It’s a gift. We do know that the Kitty-Bot is unclear on where or how she was made, and she has no idea who her creator is, either.” He sighed. “I do understand why Butler and Maurer don’t want her harmed or destroyed—there’s something kind of . . . plaintive . . . about her.”

  “Yeah, I remember. She was very focused on her mission, which I see I’m going to need to remind everyone was to blow up the entire Administration, but she was more like a child than a machine.”

  Seemed like it was time for me to have a visit with my robotic twin. I’d make a note to fit that in somewhere. After I ensured the Wasim situation was truly handled, doubly ensured that Gadhavi was happy to be playing on the side of sort of law and order, figured out what was going on with Somerall, Lee, and the Christopher-Bot or Bots, interrogated the True Believer Bodyguards, determined how to stop the crazed End of Days Hatemongers, and got all the kids to school, potentially dragging their feet and screaming all the way. No biggie. I’d get to visiting my Robotwin on Thursday or something.

  “So, currently, the Kitty-Bot is kind of a dead end.”

  Chuckie nodded. “For the moment, at least. Though we’ll investigate ways to determine her schematics safely so we can do the comparisons we’ve been discussing.”

  “May I ask how you know if someone is a Bot or an android without cutting their body open?” Gadhavi asked politely.

  “We use the Organic Validation Sensor,” Serene, who was sitting between Reader and Tim, replied.

  “What is that?” Gadhavi asked.

  “I’ll explain, and I’m going to anticipate your follow-on question—what do we do if we don’t have an OVS available, as in, how do we tell if someone is an android or a Bot?” He nodded. Serene grinned and stood up. Took this as my opportunity to sit for a while.

  Serene was younger than me and the girls, but she was Dazzler all the way. She was also, we’d discovered, White’s very much younger half-sister, because Ronald Yates had really been focused on beating Wilt Chamberlain’s conquest record. And she was scary talented.

  Like Jeff and Christopher, she’d had Surcenthumain given to her. In her and Jeff’s cases, it had been unknowingly and unwillingly. The Surcenthumain had made her crazy, but with it out of her system she was crazy like a fox.

  In addition to being the strongest imageer we had after Christopher, she was an explosives genius, and she was also our top scientist in terms of the Bots and androids. She was the reason Cameron Maurer was still around to care about the Kitty-Bot.

  However, the
thing I found the coolest about Serene was that she was also a stealth troubadour. And because she was smarter than anyone gave her credit for, since she did Blonde Ditz really well, she’d created the stealth A-C CIA made up totally of troubadours.

  Raj was her second-in-command, and Colette and her middle sister, Francine, who was also my FLOTUS Body Double, were also in the corps. Basically, if the person was a troubadour, I assumed they were in Serene’s Special Forces first and chose to be surprised later if that wasn’t the case.

  I was one of the only ones who knew she was doing this, though we’d finally shared the information with Jeff and Chuckie. Christopher knew because I’d had to tell him during Operation Immigration, White and Mom had figured it out all on their own, and one other person was in the know. However, no one else—not even Reader, Tim, or the girls—had been told about this, because Serene felt that secrets were better kept if they weren’t shared.

  “The OVS is made up of a variety of sensors that are tuned to every spectrum of organic life,” Serene started. Realized with horror that she was literally going to give Gadhavi a lecture. Was more horrified to look at him and see him nodding in rapt attention. Did a fast room check. Either everyone was interested or they all knew how to fake it better than I did.

  Serene continued on, explaining the intricacies of how the OVS did its magic. Gadhavi and others asked questions. Questions that indicated they were paying attention. The questions branched out into how we told the difference between Late Model and New Release Androids, the Bot levels, and more.

  However, fascinated as the rest of the room appeared to be, I couldn’t muster up the enthusiasm. My ears shut off. My brain asked if we could play a game on my phone. Told my ears to listen for clues that I might need to speak or stop the class by making a joke. My ears shared that neither seemed likely. My brain begged for sweet release.

  Wanted to fantasize about sex with Jeff, since that was always a good way to keep myself happy and entertained, but he was freaking paying attention to what was going on, too, and I knew he’d pick up the lust spike. Totally took one for the team and tried to focus on the million other things I had to worry about.