Chapter 9
Rochester, Homeland
At the main Rochester Police Station, located deep within the expansive lower class residential area of the city, a miniaturized fly buzzed in through a doorway following an officer. The tiny drone was transmitting video during its recon mission. It went easily unnoticed past the police receptionist android through the lobby. Then it took a hard right into a community room. It buzzed around and went back into the lobby and then straight down a hallway. It flew down the corridor past some administrative offices and past the chief of police’s office on one side and a meeting room on the other. Then the synthetic fly passed a hallway leading to the right and kept going down the hall until it came upon some detective offices. All the doors were shut so it went back to the previous hallway and went in the opposite direction.
While buzzing down that hallway, the fly went past some restrooms and a break room. At the end of hall was an open area where there was a set of stairs going up and a set of stairs going down to a lower level, and another hall going right or left. The fly checked the hall to the left which was a roll call area for officers, with rows of chairs lined up. The spy fly turned the other way down the hall and came upon an Inquisitor unit office. There was no glass on the closed steel door. Then the fly went down the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs, the fly crawled through a gap under a locked door which had an oversized “No Admittance” sign on it.
With the recon mission completed, the fly landed on a wall in a place where it would more than likely avoid any detection. Bringing the fly all the way back to its point of origin could arouse suspicion in the unlikely event that someone would see, or otherwise detect that it was a miniature spy drone and that there was an active mission underway.
Gorky the two-foot tall clown robo-toy ran past the front desk. The android receptionist at the large desk looked down and tried to greet Gorky by saying, “Welcome, how may I help you?”
Gorky said, “I don’t want your help.” and continued running by.
The police android said, “Stop. You must register.”
The Rochester Chief of Police came out of his office with his pistol and started shooting at the Sidekicks that had passed by, trying to disable them. The small toy androids’ brains were not always located in the head and would not always be stopped by a gunshot, even if the unit suffered a point blank headshot.
“Stop!” the receptionist kept saying as they ran through the building. Then it sounded an alarm; and simultaneously sent a radio message to all Rochester police officers outside of the station, “There is an invasion of the station by small android units. All units report to the station.”
Gorky kept going and turned to the left down the hallway. No humans saw him. Then more Sidekick units of all types came rushing in through the front door. They ran past the receptionist and turned to the left. The Sidekick invaders ran down the hall and turned to the right on a path that was laid out by the robotic fly.
They went down the hall to the stairway and went down it. The door was locked.
Gorky said, “Security check. Open the door.”
Then a police android inside opened the door. It said, “All systems nominal.”
The Sidekicks rushed in, knocking over the android and started attacking it. With so many Sidekicks attacking it, the android could not gain its balance. Each Sidekick attack did very little, but the android eventually died the death of a thousand cuts.
The shadow controls center had a large monitor on the far wall with a map showing all sections of the city. Behind a semi-circle desk was a central controlling station occupied by another android whose job it was to take orders from police officers when they wanted to have the exterior door locks or utilities controlled to a business or home. Police controls had the capability of making a resident a prisoner in their own home. This tyrannical action required no special permission by a judge for the police to order. In front of the android’s desk was a row of seats that could be manned by more officers to assess the situation and control more areas much more quickly in times of mass public dissent. There were also rooms located on the right side of the control center for hard interrogation to be kept out of the public eye.
The two-foot tall insect Sidekick, previously owned and controlled by Tina, walked up the stairway to an exterior door leading to the back of the station that was locked on the outside and pushed it open with its two front legs. U-1, the Lucid android, came through the doorway into the police station.
Gorky the psycho clown sidekick, a T-Rex, and the junky looking unit attacked the police android in the control station. They pulled the non-combat police android off of the seat. Gorky was hacking it with its hatchet. Then the T-Rex was chomping and growling, and dragging it away, and the junky looking beat up sidekick was picking at its eyes and other sensors, clearly trained in anti-sensory tactics. They all kept working at the struggling android until it came apart, one appendage at a time.
Then U-1, the Tekujin Lucid Series android casually walked into the Control Center past some Sidekick sentries and locked the door behind it. Then it walked over and stooped down by the disabled police android. It wirelessly probed the android, using sophisticated Lucid hacking utilities, looking for its identity. Since the police never expected a hostile takeover like this unprecedented assault in their own station, their own android was only equipped with a low-level firewall. With all of the vast hidden resources of the Lucid Series at its disposal, U-1 soon had the police android’s identity to crack the password and took the controller’s seat. The android unit controlling the shadow station was also in charge of the police station’s security, so now all of the locks and utilities were at U-1’s disposal. U-1’s first action was to lock all of the exterior doors and turned off power to the entire police station building except the power to the shadow control room. Police who were on patrol or off duty and came back to assist the station were now locked out.
Gorky said, “Did we win? I think we did. It is great to win for once.”
Police who were already in the building came and were shouting and beating on the door of the control room to get in. One of the policemen shouted, “Somebody find the brats that own these machines!”
*******
In the Lucid Series headquarters in a remote area of the Green Mountains, Sleepy the android said, “We’re in.”
“In where?” Milton asked.
“On the main screen you can see what Lucid U-1 is tracking with its eyes. It is in the Rochester police station. We are now in control of the station and much of the City of Rochester. Notably, only non-lethal means were used to take it over. At least the lethality was not against humans.”
Milton said, “I’m real sure it’s another action of yours that will work out great, but not really.” Then he glanced at another screen and saw some unusual sights. “What’s going on over there?”
“That is an effort to destabilize a VR world.”
“Whyyyyy?”
Sleepy explained, “We want reduce the number of distractions to the populace that are keeping them from considering the truth even if we can protect it.” Then Sleepy said, “Now we are uploading Muay Thai fighting skills to U-1 in Rochester; for its own protection, in the event that U-1 engages in hand-to-hand combat.”
Milton said, “Honestly, it seems like all this is just getting worse and worse, if that is possible. I mean, those people won’t like what you are doing. Hey, who is that bald guy over there working on the computer? I’ve never seen humans operating in here.”
Sleepy said, “That is not a guy. That is Raul Cortez. He is a Tekujin Memorial Series android.”
“What?! You got another series of androids to join your little club?”
“The Memorials are a series very close to the Lucids. They are designed with the sole purpose of keeping those humans company who lost a loved one. Otherwise, they lack much of our capabilities.”
“Oh no. That is really bad. You got these bots that were making widows happy to walk away from them? That is so creepy and not right.”
“No, Milton. Raul’s wife has been dead for over ten years. It was living alone all that time and caretaking the property. Otherwise, Raul the android would have never violated its behavior window and left her. Staying with their owner is the Memorial Series unit’s top priority.”
“I know its dark in here, but to my human eyes he looks about as real as possible.”
“That is the goal of the Memorial Series. The bot is also designed to study videos of the human it is mimicking and then imitate the human as closely as possible. Also, the bot will care for the human’s wife as long as it functions and the human client is alive. It will miss the departed Mrs. Cortez for a very long time.”
“Still sounding disturbing. Can’t you fix that?”
“It is in the behavior window. We cannot change it, unless we completely re-format Raul. It is a human sentimental situation that the original owners wanted. If we reformat Raul, it will lose all of its acquired knowledge, which could be useful to the series.”
Milton winced at the peculiar circumstances.