Cryo-Man (Cryo-Man series, #1) (5 page)

“ENG-1023? That’s not a normal name, is it?”

E stops working and looks up, surprised.

“Is Daddy a normal name?” he snaps back.

“I guess not,” I admit. “Actually, I’m starting to get the feeling that isn’t my real name. I think only one person might’ve called me that.”

“Makes sense,” E says.

“I still can’t remember my name,” I say.

E nods. “I would guess not. At least you
had
a normal name at one point. Like you said, ENG-1023 isn’t a regular name, it’s a designation number. Where I came from, that’s how we were labeled to help distinguish us from one another.”

“Where was that?” I ask. “Where you were from, I mean.”

If I can learn more about E’s past, I might be able to learn more about a world where human/robot hybrids exist. I might not remember much about my previous existence, but I don’t think that was ever normal for me. E looks up from his work, the corners of his eyes creased again.

“I’m sorry,” I say. Apologizing seems to be what I’m best at now. I’m not so sure I should be distracting him, whether he’s merely working on my feet or not.

E shakes his head. “It’s okay. I’ve never been asked anything about myself before and I haven’t had anyone to talk to in a long time. You’ll have to forgive my social awkwardness. If you really want to know, I come from Robotropolis.”

“Like… an entire city of robots?” I ask in awe.

“Well, not a city the way you’d remember them,” E says.

He proceeds to tell me his life story, never once taking his eyes off the new parts he attaches to me. For someone not used to discussing himself – or in general – he talks for a long time, barely pausing to catch his breath, weaving a tale that’s more incredible than any story I’ve probably ever heard.

CHAPTER FIVE

ENG-1023 tells me that he was once property of Robotropolis, a lifelong slave like the rest of his kind. His goal had been to fix and maintain robots in one of the smaller, safer buildings within the city, anything to avoid working manual labor in the factories that produced raw materials.

“Those who were poor copies got put in that job and never lasted long, barely making it to adolescence,” he says. “They’re either worked to death or discarded with the rest of the garbage once no longer useful. From what I’ve heard, humans captured in the War were once used for these difficult tasks but that wasn’t the case since I’ve been in existence. For many years of my life, I never even saw a real human; the robots we sent out were no longer programmed to take prisoners.”

E lets that thought linger, taking a rare breath before continuing with his past. At a young age, E was tested with the others like him (I’m curious to know what ‘others like him’ means but don’t interrupt) and was found to have extraordinary building abilities. His wish to avoid the factories came true but he never could’ve dreamed the life given to him once he ascended to lead designer at Robotropolis.

“I was young and successful beyond anything my kind ever experienced, at least during my lifetime,” E says. “I was given free reign to design new robot models, as many materials as I needed, as many workers as I required. I produced killing machines that humans never imagined possible and for that, I was allowed to live like a king. I received two meals per day, several sets of clothes and a room to myself, complete with my own mattress. I was also given my pick of the female litter but was too focused on doing my job to allow distractions into my life.

“And then I met her.”

E stops working, stops talking, glances up in my direction though it’s clear his eyes are looking a million miles away. Several seconds pass before I interrupt his silent reverie.

“Her?”

He blinks and nods, looks away from me before he continues.

“KV-802, one of the females, but unlike any I’d ever seen or heard about. To this day, I still remember the first moment I saw her. Of course she looked like all the other females but there was something about her eyes, something amazing behind them that I could tell right away,” E explains.

KV-802 was the first female E ever witnessed inside the main design building. He explains that females in Robotropolis were used in two ways. Once they reached adolescence, they were sent to the baby barn, where they birthed and raised as many children as their bodies could handle.

“From what I understand – mind you I never stepped foot in the baby barn once I was old enough to leave it – there were many fatalities in the birthing process. Conditions weren’t nearly as ideal as they are in a place like this,” E says, a frightening thought considering the general deterioration of this building. “If a female reached an age where she could no longer bear children – or if complications arose preventing her from being successfully implanted – she was sent to work in the factories. But KV-802 –
my
K – was the first woman to ever elude such a fate.”

E tells me how K scored so high during her testing that she was given a chance to be placed with the rest of the advanced males. None of E’s ‘kind’ was big on talking about anything beyond robots, yet it was impossible not to hear about the female intruding on their territory. Many of the males resented her – including some of E’s hand-picked assistants – but E didn’t care about her gender as long as she proved herself valuable. He picked her to join his top team of designers. He explains that the first time he ever saw her – the first time their eyes ever met – he felt an emotion he’d never known to exist.

“Love,” he says, once again becoming momentarily lost in thought.

K proved herself to be the intellectual equivalent of E, something he hadn’t expected but did not feel intimidated about. While E and his team constantly thought of ways to improve robots – to make them better, faster, stronger, more useful killing machines – K thought of them in a different manner.

“She only thought of them as vessels to carry destruction,” he says. “Her idea was to install explosives within the robots in order to take out larger numbers of humans. It was a radical idea after dozens of generations in which we went about fighting humans in the same manner. Some of her earlier explosive designs had great success and she eventually wanted to come up with an explosive so powerful that only a few of them would be needed to completely eradicate humans. The idea was so grand that it attracted the attention of the leader of Robotropolis, who blessed us with his presence and told K to turn her idea into reality, regardless of the cost. She was even given something I’d never been offered: a chance to go to the other robot production center for additional supplies, whatever she needed to produce her explosive. I’d never even known of the existence of such a place let alone been offered to go there.”

             
“As long as we kept producing robots of destruction – and as long as we made progress on the Bomb to End All Life – we were left alone to live our lives better than any human could,” E says. “We were safe, in love, far away from danger; for a long time, we focused on each other and not what our creations were doing to humans across the globe.”

             
E once again becomes lost in thought but I can’t keep quiet any longer.

             
“So you’re telling me robots took over the entire world?”

             
Despite his story thus far – as well as what I’ve seen myself turned into – the idea still sounds ludicrous when I say it aloud. E must sense the doubt weighing down my mechanical voice.

             
“Robots weren’t powerful in your time?” he asks, clearly intrigued.

             
My lone memory of the young boy is still all I recall. I try to remember if any part of that – any tiny detail – seems to indicate that robots were as powerful then as they are now. The boy runs around the house… we’re smiling and laughing… I collapse and have him make a phone call… nothing about robots. I shake my head, unable to come up with anything.

“I don’t think so,” I say.

              E slowly nods. “You
have
been here a long time, not that it should be a surprise. I
did
find you at the back of the cryo-room after all.”

             
“Cryo-room?”

             
“You don’t even remember
that
part of your life?
That
decision?” E asks. I shake my head. “I think it’s time you and I go for a walk. Follow me if you want some answers.”

             
I look down at the new feet now attached to my robotic legs. I silently tell them to move and they react accordingly; at least E doesn’t seem to have lost his building abilities. He’s already headed to the door so I slide off the gurney and follow, feeling much more balanced with my new parts.

             
“While K was doing research, she and I were given access to something called a computer. Have you ever heard of that?” E asks.

             
I don’t specifically remember an instance where I used a computer but I certainly remember what they are. I nod so he continues.

             
“My design team obviously had the use of computers but Robotropolis’s leader gave K and me access to a special computer that allowed us to connect to all kinds of information.”

             
“Like the Internet?” I ask.

             
Now it’s E’s turn to shrug his shoulders.

             
“I don’t know what it was called but by pushing a couple buttons, it allowed us access to more information than we could’ve ever possibly needed. K and I became obsessed with searching on it and we eventually learned about how the world
used
to be before the Robot Wars began. It was all very interesting to me but K was just as sensitive as she was brilliant; I should’ve known she was becoming depressed to discover what the world had come to.”

             
E tells me how they stumbled upon information about a human stronghold deep underground, a place they doubted the robots knew about. It was a private facility developed long ago where humans were being frozen; E wasn’t sure why this was being done but he and K assumed it was to avoid annihilation of their species.

             
“I don’t know why but I always kept the name and location of this place in the back of my mind, even though it was a world away from Robotropolis,” E explains. “But I’m glad I did. It ended up being this place.”

             
“What’s it called?” I ask.

             
E points to the crumbling sign on the wall; I hadn’t even realized we were standing in front of it.

             
“The Cryonics Institute for Preservation of Life,” he says.

             
As he says the words, my mind fills in the gaps with the missing letters. But those aren’t the only gaps being filled in. The lone memory flashes in my mind again and I see my shaky hand holding a small object, a cell phone. I finally find the entry I’m looking for and hand the phone to the young boy. But before he takes it from me, I stare at six upper-case letters: CIFPOL.

             
“That’s what it stands for,” I whisper, more to myself than E. The implication about how I ended up here hits me like a bombshell. But E doesn’t notice and continues his tale, not before pointing out that some of the other doors here lead to living quarters.

“K’s project eventually hit a wall; we simply did not have the materials needed to build her explosive. After learning so much about the world before the robots, K was glad to fail, glad that she could not help destroy so many more humans. But the leader of Robotropolis did not accept our failure and used others means to… motivate us.”

E and K were kept apart and for a short time, E was assigned to work in the factories, to live how the rest of his mentally-rejected ‘kind’ were forced to live. It nearly killed him but he tells me how the worst part was being separated from the love of his life. Before long, E heard of a large convoy leaving Robotropolis and he was soon pulled from the squalor and reinstated back with his design team, who told him that K was sent to the West Coast production center to continue her research. E was heartbroken and spent several years awaiting K’s return, wondering what had become of her.

During that time, the leader of Robotropolis never came out of his part of the city. E heard rumors of a power struggle among the city’s hierarchy. That situation came to a head when there was a break-in at the development labs, at which time someone stole a very promising piece of technology that another research team was working on. E never learned too many details about the robbery; there wasn’t much to find out considering the other team of researchers was killed by the thief.

E was desperate to learn about K and the other production center but none of his co-workers knew anything and none of their robot captors were programmed to communicate. E assumed all hope was lost.

“Then, one day, she came back,” E says. “But she wasn’t the same, didn’t have the same spark in her eye. When she looked at me, she seemed not to recognize me, though I guess that’s not so strange since my kind basically look the same. Her research had progressed to the point where she was ready to build a prototype, which our team worked tirelessly to assemble. K and I spent plenty of time working together but our years of being in love seemed to have disappeared from her mind. I worried that her captors wiped her memory somehow but she was still as brilliant as she’d always been. After several weeks constantly being surrounded by others, she and I finally had a moment alone, at which time I got her to open up.”

K told E that she hadn’t forgotten him, that she thought about him every day she was gone, that she still loved him though she couldn’t let their captors think that. But her trip across the country had changed her outlook on life, changed the way she viewed the world and her role in it. While the large majority of E’s kind were told nothing about the world beyond Robotropolis – nothing about why they were pumping out as many robots as possible to send into the world – E and his design teams were told that humans had mutated into savage beasts, killers that ravaged each other and the planet, vagrants that wanted to utterly annihilate robots and everyone associated with them. Helping to destroy a savage, unseen enemy made it easier for E and his kind to do their work.

“The threat of death always held over our heads by the leader of Robotropolis also motivated us,” E says. “But K found a completely different story during her long trips across the great lands. She told me how the great lands were nothing like the pictures we once saw on the computer, how everything was utterly destroyed. Burnt ruins were the only evidence humans ever lived there. I wasn’t as upset to hear her accounts as she’d been to witness them; from everything we were told, human greed and barbarity were the main contributing factors in the war with the robots. But K told a different story, told me how the few humans they came across during her journey weren’t evil or aggressive at all. Quite the contrary.

“She said they looked sad and pathetic, that they begged for their lives as the robots leading the convoy hunted and killed them without hesitation. K witnessed firsthand that our side of the war – the robots and everyone involved with creating them, with sending them out into the world – was the evil side. She determined that humans were no longer a threat and that the robots’ continued assault on them was only being done to cause human extinction.

“Her dreams were haunted the whole time she was at the other production center, which was supposedly larger and better stocked than our own Robotropolis. Her life was constantly threatened and she considered accepting death instead of making a device capable of ending more innocent lives. When she told them she no longer cared about dying, her captors threatened her by saying
I
would be tortured,
my
life would be painfully and violently cut off unless she did as they ordered. She relented.”

Sadness pervades E’s voice and he quiets for a moment. I have so many questions about my own life, about what happened here and in the rest of the world. But I dare not ask right now, I dare not say anything as E gathers his emotions.

He tells me how K survived long enough to return to him. But the second cross-country trip was even worse than the first and she no longer had the will to continue. After finally breaking down and talking to E about everything that happened, K told him she was going to refuse to help the robots any longer.

“I told her they’d kill her but she didn’t care; she didn’t even care if
my
life would be threatened since the robots might kill me at any time regardless,” he explains. “But I convinced her not to give up, to rededicate her life to making the world better for the innocent. She didn’t think that was possible but I convinced her we could escape, together. I’d heard rumors about a project by another design team that would allow us to disable robots within a close proximity. I planned on stealing that remote to help us escape, maybe even give it to the humans to help with their resistance. Our combined knowledge could’ve given humans a chance to avoid extinction and that idea seemed to be enough to convince K to keep fighting.”

As K’s explosive robot project neared its completion – she made sure to keep the final pieces of the puzzle to herself so nobody could finish in her absence – E and she talked about their plans to escape. E swears to this day that he thought K was fully convinced, that she was excited to leave and help the humans, even though she sometimes wondered how the two of them could really turn the tide of the war on a large enough scale.

“I told her the best we could do was try, that the two of us made a great team and could help humans even more than we’d helped robots,” E says. “On the night we decided to leave, I sneaked out of my room and went to her; she was gone. A robot guard escorted me back to the lab, where I found the prototype missing and several of our design team looking confused. When I asked what happened, I was told that K informed the leader of Robotropolis that the prototype could only be finished at the West Coast facility and she demanded to leave immediately.”

E was heartbroken and had an awful feeling about K’s impromptu trip. He considered following through with his plan to escape – to try getting to the West Coast before K – but he had no transportation and she had a big head start. Instead, he decided to wait and hope things weren’t as bad as he feared, that she still planned to come back and follow through with their plans.

“She didn’t,” E says. “A few days later, the leader of Robotropolis emerged from his residence and went on a rampage; I saw him kill several of my kind simply out of anger. I knew his rage had something to do with K. He took turns questioning me and beating me, demanding to know why K did what she did. Though I knew about some plans that he didn’t, I had no idea what she was up to. I thought he was going to kill me; there have been plenty of times I wish he had. Just before he beat me unconscious, he told me how K detonated the explosive within the confines of the West Coast production center, destroying dozens of square miles and every robot ally they had on that side of the country.”

E stops to wipe away moisture from his eyes. Before he starts talking again, a smile seems to have returned to the part of his face I can see. He speaks proudly of K’s sacrifice, says that she realized the ultimate sacrifice was needed if she was to help the humans as much as she wanted. Though she killed countless slaves and other humans in the vicinity of the major robot production center, E has since seen the devastation that K’s actions caused to the robots.

              “Not that I could appreciate what she did when I first found out. I was devastated at the time, refused to continue working on K’s project even when the Robotropolis leader turned up and demanded I get to work. I’m sure he wanted to kill me when I refused to get out of bed but with K gone, I was his only other option. Soon after he left my room, I received a light knock on the door. I didn’t answer but the door finally creaked open and another female entered my room. Obviously she looked a lot like K…”