Chapter Two
Three years ago
Adam has been online for several weeks. He’s still learning a lot of things, but the development team has mostly peeled off to work on new projects. I’m not ready to leave him yet, even though he was technically transferred to the Ascent training team a week or so ago.
I’ve stayed on board because he needs someone who understands the technology to make sure that they don’t exceed his stress specifications. He’s being primed for work, a fact I don’t like, but knew was inevitable. I haven’t been told what work he’ll be doing, but it’s likely that they’ll be preparing him for some kind of military or police application.
Since he woke, I’ve had limited contact with him. Ascent is very careful about who gets to be in his presence. They’re guarding him closely to say the least. I’ve been allowed in to run a few basic tests related to cognition, because it was my neural network technology they integrated into his brain.
It’s been fourteen days since I last had contact, and I’m really looking forward to seeing him again. Adam is more to me than a subject. I saw him laid down in the early stages in row after row, flesh printed in three dimensions. I’m not privy as to how the entire process works. The technology is top secret and wholly owned by Ascent Laboratories, and I only understand a part of it. Nobody is allowed to know all of it.
For the first two weeks of his life, he was kept in stasis of sorts, data uploaded day and night through the probes in his temples.
His brain isn’t like ours, and it’s not like a computer. It’s neither and it’s both. He has a lot more storage capacity than the average wet meat processor, but he needs time to build connections between the blocks of information. As time goes by, I expect his cognitive abilities to far exceed that of a normal human.
He was made by men, but he is not a man. He was knitted together, piece by piece, by machines, but he’s not a machine either.
He’s something between the two. The consciousness of man and machine.
For someone in my field of work and study, he’s the Holy Grail. A potential answer to the question of consciousness and personhood. It’s a problem that has been mystifying philosophers for thousands of years, and Adam could be the key.
Developing a meat robot is easy. Developing one with consciousness is something else. It’s my theory that consciousness isn’t inherent in the meat of a man. It’s a matter of reception. I helped develop a chip, a neural lattice that allows the brain to develop in near organic ways. He won’t be separate from the human world. He will potentially be part of it.
Of course, for the rest of the team his consciousness isn’t the focus. As a group we have created an impressive intellect and a physical body so powerful, and so capable of both inflicting and enduring damage that he puts even the most incredible human warriors to shame. He can withstand explosive blasts, take bullets. I know that aside from a precious few spots, he can be stabbed over and over again, taken apart and put back together. We can generate new organs and limbs for him. He can potentially be modular. And with that same technology, we can give people new organs and limbs. There’s the capacity to change the lives of millions of people for the better if we can fine tune the technology even more.
I have everything ready to give him a new round of testing. I can’t wait to see how his language skills have advanced, how he is coming to terms with the fact of his existence. Adam has had no infancy, no childhood. He has been spawned fully adult, and I expect that to have some kind of flow on effect.
The doors in front of me lead to the chamber where they are training him. I’ve only got fifteen minutes to do my assessment, but I’ve come a little early in the hopes of being able to see him for longer.
I swipe my card and they open. The silence of the hall is broken by a rage-filled scream of anger and pain. At first I can’t comprehend what I am seeing. It’s literally unthinkable. The man we made with so much care is writhing in agony.
They have chained Adam to a plinth, and they are torturing him. I can’t say it any other way. They have electric probes and they are zapping him on the tender parts of his body. He is growling and snarling like a tethered animal, foaming at the mouth as they laugh and strike at him again and again.
His powerful body is contorting at the stimulus, unable to resist the electrical impulses. They have deliberately chosen the most disruptive form of pain they could use. His nerve network is new and raw. This is cruelty of a kind that churns my stomach.
I drop everything I’m holding and run to him, cursing them all at the top of my lungs, and myself too, though more internally. I could have prevented this.
When he was still in development, there was an argument over whether or not he should be sensitive to pain of any kind. We didn’t have to give him pain receptors, but we did. Without pain, he wouldn’t know when he was hurt, and without knowing when he was hurt, he wouldn’t be able to adapt to damage. Now that capacity to feel is being used against him in a stupid and thoroughly cruel way.
I push my way through them and throw myself on his body. One of the assholes strikes with the shock rod again and I feel the agony of the strike zip through my body, my muscles contorting in referred pain.
“Stop!” the overseer shouts, angry not at the men who are torturing Adam, but at me for my interference. He grabs me roughly by the arm and hauls me away from Adam. My strength is no match for his, and as much as I try to stay with Adam, I can’t help but be pulled away.
The overseer drags me off the plinth where they have Adam bound on his back like a sacrifice. I am glowered at, not just by him, but by every single soul in the room besides Adam. They’re all so utterly sure of themselves. They believe they have the right to hurt him. He’s not a person in their eyes. He’s just a thing to use and to hurt.
“What do you think you’re doing!” I confront him before they can confront me.
“He disobeys orders. We need his submission.”
“What?” I stare at him. “We made him to be independent.”
“He still has to follow orders.”
They start to torment him again, right in front of me. As if my presence doesn’t matter. As if they have some right to destroy what so many of us worked so hard to create.
“Stop!”
I run forward and push their probes away. They don’t know what to do with that. They don’t see Adam as a person, but they know I’m a human, with rights. They know if they use those electric prods on me, they’ll kill me. So they step back.
He’s singed and burned where the points have met his skin. They’ll heal swiftly, but that’s not the point. We didn’t design his regeneration capabilities so he could be used as a test dummy for torture.
“Leave him alone,” I growl. “Don’t you dare hurt him again.”
“Step aside, Lilly.” The lead tech comes forward to try to defuse the situation.
“No.” I stay where I am. I’m trembling with rage. How dare they do this? He has been alive for no more than a month and they have made his world painful. They are punishing him for being what we made him to be, and I can’t stand it.
He’s being held down with so many bindings and straps he can’t protect himself. He can’t even curl up against the pain. He has to lie there and take it.
What they don’t understand is that they can’t break him. We made him unbreakable. Every bit of pain makes him more resistant, stronger, angrier.
“You can’t do this to him. It won’t work. He’s not made to respond to this.”
“Everything responds to pain. Now move. Your job is over. Let us do ours.”
“I didn’t make him so you could hurt him!”
“What did you think was going to happen to him? You think you made the perfect soldier so he could spend the rest of his life crocheting and reading you articles from women’s websites?”
The asshole snorts at me. He’s military and he’s a fucking asshole. He doesn’t understand the technology that went into making Adam. He doesn’t understand what Adam is at his core. He’s a brutal sadist and he’s going to destroy what I’ve created.
“Leave, Doctor Mallory. Now. Or face the consequences.”
I stare at him with all the fury I have. “The consequences are going to be yours if you don’t stop this. I promise you, you will regret what you have already done, and if you keep doing it, you’ll regret it even more. He’s not an animal to be beaten down. You’ll never break him. Not ever.”
He jerks his head toward his men. “Get her out of here.”
They grab me by the arms. I lose my temper. More than that, I lose my mind. I lash out with all the anger Adam can’t express. I kick. I hit. I bite down on the hands that grip me.
In the end it takes four of them to pull me out of the room. My clothing is yanked and wrenched, my head is locked beneath someone’s arm.
The last thing I see as they haul me out are Adam’s eyes locked on mine. There’s no expression on his face. It’s a mask of cold fury. I can feel his anger, his pain. I can imagine the betrayal he must feel. He came into coherent existence mere weeks ago and now all he knows is pain. This is my fault. I could have made him a dumb machine like the rest of them. I could have saved him from this. That neural network is the only reason this pain matters. It’s the only reason he has any comprehension, any sense of himself as a being that can suffer. This is my fault. And I can’t undo any of it.
* * *
“Doctor Mallory, you’re an exceptionally competent worker, but you must be aware we cannot tolerate the kind of interference you displayed today.”
I’m being fired. After being thrown out of the torture chamber, I’ve been sent to HR like a naughty schoolgirl. The representative’s face is such a stern mask I could almost expect a spanking, except they don’t beat the employees here, only the subjects.
“And you must be aware that what you’re doing is wrong,” I argue back. “Dead wrong. He’s fully self-aware. What’s being done to him is torture.”
“He’s a prototype, Doctor Mallory. I know it’s tempting to anthropomorphize the projects, but…”
“This isn’t anthropomorphizing anything,” I interrupt. “He’s more human than you and I. He just happens to also be more than human. He’s our greatest achievement, and he deserves more than to be tied down and shocked just because he won’t do as he’s told.”
“He’s a project, and he’s malfunctioning.”
“You don’t fix anything by shocking it with electricity. This is complete bullshit and you know it.”
It’s not professional to swear, but I’m past professional. I have bits of one of the guard’s skin stuck between my incisor and the tooth next to it.
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to terminate your contract. As you’re aware, complete secrecy is expected and contractually obliged. If any of the information relating to this project is shared…”
“You’ll kill me. I know. Don’t worry, I won’t say anything. I like being alive.”
He smirks at me and shakes his head. “We’re not murderers, Doctor Mallory.”
“Yes, you are. But don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. Your secrets are safe with me.”
I shouldn’t be surprised that I am being fired, but I am surprised. There aren’t many people in the world with my level of skill, and none with my knowledge. I have to leave all my notes behind, of course, but the real magic is in my brain, and they can’t take that.
I don’t get to say goodbye to anyone, especially not Adam.
They throw me out, in the most polite of ways. Not before making it abundantly clear that if I so much as breathe a word of what is going on in the laboratories, I’ll be sued into oblivion.
I want to save Adam, but I have to let him go. I have to forget what’s going on at Ascent and hope that somehow karma takes those bastards.
They do pay me handsomely though. Enough that I don’t have to work again. It’s blood money. The creature I helped create suffers for every dollar I spend, but I spend the money anyway, because his suffering can’t mean the end of my survival. There’s not much work for people in my field. There’s only one lab with the kind of advanced tech I’m trained in—well, one lab in the United States anyway, and I’m pretty sure Ascent would put a bullet in me if I so much as looked at working for another company.
I’m forced into retirement at the grand old age of twenty-eight years old. And I can’t get Adam out of my head. I don’t date. I don’t look for a new career. I sit at home and I idle my life away.