Read Online Robogenesis by Daniel H. Wilson - Free Book Online Page A

his skinny shoulder blades against the racks and watches me. I have learned that the light he uses cannot harm me, but I still try not to look into his eyes. The fractal patterns in his pupils glitter and pull; they threaten to swallow my sanity.
    “Cutting out some more cores, eh?” he asks. “It won’t help. I’m not here to harm you. Either of you.”
    I ignore him, keep tapping the panel doors. Counting.
    “I forget, Vasily Zaytsev. Do you give Maxim orders, or does the machine give them to you?”
    “Here?” I ask the room.
    Maxim gives an affirmative click. On my knees, I put my hands against the blade door and push. The panel starts to come out, then jams. I sigh. This could take a long time.
    “Ah, I thought so,” says Archos.
    “When we finish,” I say, straining to remove the panel without success, “he won’t have access to the projector anymore. Correct?”
    “That’s right,” says Maxim.
    I feel the glow of the boy on the back of my neck. He is leaning over, talking low to me. I’m not sure if his image can really see or if he watches through cameras and other sensors like Maxim. But he makes eye contact when I turn to face him.
    “Tired of me already?” he asks, pupils crawling with patterns. “That’s okay. I know when I’m not wanted. But y’know, you could see your friendMaxim if you like. Work with him man-to-man. It might make this go faster.”
    I frown, not understanding.
    The boy cocks his head, eyes smiling. “You didn’t know? He has a face. It’s a part of his core identity. He can’t shake it, no matter what, and I’ll bet he’s tried. Should I show him, Max?”
    No sound comes from the speakers.
    “Transferring control …,” says the boy, his voice slowing and fading by the second word. His light folds in on itself. Lines float, meshing together to create a vague bluish form. Hard beams carve out a figure in the cloudy haze, cutting in details.
    An apparition floats in the stacks, solidifies.
    And Maxim stands before me. Made of light. Slump-shouldered and looking slightly embarrassed.
    “Is that you?” I ask the room. “Truly?”
    Maxim’s voice comes over the speakers soft and smooth. He sounds surprised, but that might be my imagination. I don’t know if the machine is capable of pretending to have emotions.
    “Yes,” says Maxim. “This is me. Near enough.”
    The image of a man is about five and a half feet tall, a squashed fighter’s nose on a broad, round moon face. A chin like a mountainside and a slight underbite. His head is shaved and a receding hairline creeps up over slit eyes that pool like glacier water. His chest is broad and his stout shoulders lie back proudly, so that his arms hang in a perpetual invitation to fistfight.
    He is a hard man, and little. His life, wherever it took him, has forged him into a dirty lump of uncut diamond. I would never have wanted to trade punches with him.
    “You were ugly,” I say.
    The illusion speaks, mouth moving as Maxim’s voice comes out over the speakers. There is a tenth-of-a-second delay on the voice for the first few words. Then it synchronizes perfectly and I hear Maxim’s voice coming from the man-image.
    “This is an image of the man who gave his mind to form my trainingcorpus. He was poor and desperate. His family destitute. One of thousands who responded to the advertisement for a test subject. Physically, he was an incredible find. Very robust. The government apparatchik paid out a full military pension to his wife and son. I made sure of it later. A special machine captured this man’s brain function, every neuron scanned and destroyed in the process.”
    “So, you are him?”
    Maxim looks at his hands and chuckles. I blink, surprised. I never knew it could do that. Never knew he could laugh.
    “I have asked myself that question trillions of times,” he says. “This man’s life formed the bulk of my training corpus. He gave me a basis for understanding humanity. An inside