Eve sat up in bed, eyes closed, blocking out the distracting sight of medical monitors and the bustling of doctors and nurses. Tubes running down her throat and into her lungs kept her oxygen supply carefully regulated. A neural block squelched her gag reflex and prevented her diaphragm from fighting the breathing machine.
Her arms might have been limp at her sides with exhaustion, but her fingers twitched, operating the computer whose display was active whether Eve’s eyes were open or not. Though her collapse had been regrettably public and everyone knew where she was, the Human Welfare Committee might otherwise have been unaware that Eve was on medical leave. Committee business came across her interface tentatively at first, but as soon as associates and underlings sniffed the first inkling that business was back to normal, Eve’s inbox flooded with the usual daily tasks.
Elsewhere in the hospital, medical researchers were scrambling to develop experimental transplant techniques that would meet Eve’s approval. Just because she had an external mechanical system operating her respiratory system didn’t mean Ashley390 got to perform her hack-job lung procedure with its projected three-week recovery time.
ETA 10 MINUTES, Charlie7 texted her.
Good. It was about time that creaking old robot got back from his Martian holiday. “Don’t let them stop you from coming in, and don’t bring a chaperon,” Eve texted back. If she’d wanted eavesdroppers and hackers, she could have taken Charlie7’s report over long-range transmission.
No. Some things needed to be done in person, even in the thirty-third century.
Eve conducted as much business as the ten minutes allowed. She signed off on the emancipated class’s housing selections, chose a meeting date for a revision to the Universal Rights of Sentient Organics, and politely declined an invitation to the year-nine performance of Alice in Wonderland at Oxford. At some point in the middle of it all, a nurse came in and fiddled with Eve’s artificial plumbing.
Without opening her eyes to check, she assumed it was either Janet220 or that human girl, Brenda, pawing at her. With the new chassis most of the medical robots preferred, it was hard enough to tell them apart visually. By feel, Eve’s old neurons just couldn’t distinguish anymore.
Charlie7’s arrival came as a welcome relief.
Eve opened her eyes. With the tubes down her throat, she couldn’t exactly talk. But her optical implants could display her words like a teleprompter. “About time.”
“Sorry,” Charlie7 replied with a shrug. “I interviewed 827 eyewitnesses. That takes time.”
Before she said anything sensitive, Eve needed to know that this wasn’t a clever trap. Version 70.2 chassis were rare, but that didn’t mean someone wouldn’t go to extraordinary lengths to deceive her. It had happened before. “Plato’s last words.”
Charlie7 cringed—for her benefit, Eve supposed—before replying. It had only been the two of them there, attending her husband’s final moments. “‘Wait, that didn’t come out right,’” Charlie7 quoted dutifully.
The corners of Eve’s mouth twitched in a smile as Charlie7 grew blurry with tears until her optics corrected for the distortion. “That old goofball. Fine. It’s really you. What did you find out?”
“That I hate soccer,” Charlie7 replied dryly.
“We both knew that already,” Eve flashed across her eyes. “Get to the point.”
Frankly, Eve appreciated that Charlie7 wasn’t treating her as either a porcelain doll with cracks already showing or a test specimen in a lab. Whether he had a “treat Eve normally” program running or was just task-minded enough to ignore her infirmities and discomfort, there was a fine line between coddling her and wasting her time.
“There’s a sizable minority on Mars looking to start trouble as an excuse to break off relations with Earth,” Charlie7 stated bluntly. “They’ve mythologized their alleged plight and cast themselves in the role of a British colony or Soviet puppet state, depending upon who you ask.”
“Educational failure. No similarities. All this over a soccer game?”
Eve wished she were in a mood to express herself more eloquently. Truth be told, unless Charlie7’s report contained some conclusion requiring immediate action, she was considering a nap as soon as he left. The effort of twitching her finger muscles to navigate her computer interface had sapped her energy.
“Oh, that was no soccer game,” Charlie7 assured her. “That was a political protest that scheduled a soccer game as an opening act.”
“Protest?” Eve asked, raising one eyebrow above the glowing words scrawled across her optical implants. “That was savagery. When did my kind revert to barbarism? How did it sneak past my notice?”
Charlie7 snickered. “Oh, maybe 120 years ago, when some offended committee member pummeled an impostor by the name of Zeus to the point where he couldn’t walk for a week.”
Eve knew the incident well. Hers had been the bruised fists on the winning side of that pummeling. “Point taken, but I want to know what’s going on with Mars. You still haven’t given me a good answer.”
“‘All men are created equal,’ was the line I heard most often,” Charlie7 said. “They don’t believe it any more than a mixed robot believes he’s the same as all the others. If everyone’s not identical, someone’s got to be better, right? Well, some half-cocked band of misfits realized that robots and humans can’t be equals, and they’re starting to think they’re better than us.”
Eve shook her head as much as her temporary ventilation ductwork allowed. “You’re as human as I am,” Eve typed. “Equality is evenhanded treatment, not equivalent ability or worth. This is a meritocracy, not some damned idealistic commune.”
“Not exactly campaign speech material.”
Eve scowled. It wasn’t worth the effort to type a response. He knew she only spoke so bluntly when it was the two of them.
“Did you get to the root of the problem?”
“Of course not,” Charlie7 replied indignantly. “If you want to know who assaulted Brent104, it’s on hundreds of vid feeds. Clear-cut case if you want to dredge up Human Era legal codes to figure out a way to punish them. If you want a simple answer as to why, blame Brent104 for over-officiating that soccer match. If you want the real, deep-down truth from the Oracle at Delphi…”
“Yes. The last one.”
Charlie7 smirked. It looked strange on a Version 70.2 chassis, one of the few that made little pretense of humanity. Most of the old chassis tried to look civilized, and the new ones were almost too human. But on that military-grade visage, his facial expressions always amused her.
“Well,” he replied. “It’s because Mars is having some growing pains. They have nearly a tenth of Earth’s human population now, and they’re starting to learn that majority vote means they’ve got no say in anything. They’ve transitioned from a bright new endeavor to a limping, needy step-brother no longer content with hand-me-downs. Some of them are definitely agitating behind the scenes, but none of them admit to anything. If you want me to get to that deepest of truths, I can forward you a list of Human Welfare Committee regulations that I’ll need exemptions from. Also, I guarantee you don’t want those answers badly enough to sign off on what I’d have to do to get them.”
“No. I don’t. What’s your prognosis?”
“Perfectly healthy,” Charlie7 replied cheerily. “Humans being human. It takes getting used to, but once you get a critical mass, unrest was bound to happen. The schools teach them to think for themselves, and that’s what they’re doing. The fact they aren’t doing what you’d like isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.”
“Advice?”
Charlie7 blinked, shutting off his optic glow for a measured four hundred milliseconds. He might fool human eyes into thinking it wasn’t a deliberate reaction but not Eve’s implants. “Advice? From me? They must have you on psychoactive medications. I’m the brawn. You’re the brains of this outfit.”
Eve cast him a withering glare.
“Fine,” Charlie7 said. “I’m the brains. You’re the conscience. If you want a peaceful, compliant Mars, ship the troublemakers off on a mining mission. We can hold them on Earth until the necessary modifications can be made for one to support human habitation. A decade on the edge of the solar system will give them time to cool their thrusters.
“Of course,” the robot continued, shifting tone from grim to pedantic. “That would dredge up a lot of unflattering historical parallels. I’ve long called the Kuiper Belt the Robot Age’s Siberian gulag. It wouldn’t take the Martian dissidents long to latch onto that as propaganda.”
“Dissidents? Propaganda?” Eve echoed, picking the wheat from Charlie7’s ever-loquacious chaff. “Has it gotten that bad without anyone noticing until now?”
“People can say anything they like on the Social. Easy anonymity makes humans and robots alike bold, indiscreet, and inflammatory. That much was true even in the First Human Age. But if you want evidence of a revolution, watch for smoke on the horizon.”
Eve shut her eyes.
Somehow, she hadn’t expected to live to see the day that humanity fractured. She’d been born a curiosity, fostered in a tiny community, appointed head of the governing body that protected a vulnerable but growing minority population. Scattered settlements pockmarked the Earth, with stray, anti-social individualists sprinkled alone in the spaces between. Mars had five colonies ready to burst free across the surface the instant the terraformers gave the all clear. Until now, the disparate communities had all worked together under a common purpose.
Eve wouldn’t hasten its demise.
“Do nothing,” she displayed, opening her eyes to deliver the message to Charlie7. “Tell no one. Assign no blame beyond the obvious perpetrators. We will provide no fuel for this fire. If the complaints are ill treatment by Earth, let us Earthlings stay out of it. Unless Mars asks for our help, we’ll let them handle this themselves.”