Sync
My name is Bob. Android Bob. Bob the Blockhead. What is that supposed to mean, anyway? Everyone calls me that except Doctor Damian, and they always smile when they say it. But the smile never looked like that when the doctors spoke to each other, warm and pleasant.
*You're imagining all of it, there's no difference,* they explained to me.
Every so often, when I bring up the smile, they look at me for a long time, sigh loudly, tell me I'm exaggerating, roll their eyes upward and walk away, leaving me at a loss.
I live in an enormous medical complex in the mountains. Together with a large group of doctors, I help treat patients in grave condition. I like helping the doctors. It is the only thing I know how to do.
The patients who come to us are usually strange ones. I have seen unusual diagnoses: suicidal-depressive psychosis, entirely unresponsive to control, and I have learned a great many clever words whose meanings are unclear and unknown to me. All of them end the same way — *unresponsive to control.*
In practice there are two types of patient. Critical condition and grave condition.
The first were given a deserved farewell. That was explained to me more than once. A sedative was administered on order, and from the explanation it was clear they could be saved once they had gone under. I had no reason to disbelieve the doctors. *We're family,* they liked to repeat.
Afterward I never saw them again.
With the second type, matters unfolded along somewhat different lines. We drew off their vital fluid and transferred it into another shell, ensuring their continued function.
My daily routine did not change from one day to the next. It stayed exactly the same until today's patient.
Nothing suggested trouble at first. Everything went as it always did. It began the way it always began, with the patient's arrival. This case differed radically from the others. The doctors argued long and hotly over his diagnosis: critical, or grave. They could not arrive at a common view. Usually such conversations ended quickly and they reached a unanimous opinion well before this point. Not this time. What stood in their way remained a mystery to me. They chose to classify the patient as grave, although most of them had initially considered him critical. I had not observed such an abrupt reversal in several hundred years.
A sharp exchange broke out between Christian and Damian.
My friend. The only person who could talk with me for hours about things unrelated to work.
Sometimes after a shift we would come to the break room and play chess. For him it was entertainment. For me it was training.
At least that was how I explained it to myself.
"You went easy on me again," Damian said, without lifting his head. "Bishop to d4. You put it there so I'd take it."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"You were upset after the last game."
He set down his mug. It left a damp ring on the board, on the seventh rank.
"Upset. What makes you say that?"
"You sighed three times when you lost. Normally it happens once."
Damian laughed.
"Stop going easy on me," he said. "Otherwise I'll die never knowing whether I play well or you're just kind."
I moved a piece.
"Then today you lose."
"There. That's Bob."
He smiled. I kept that smile in my memory.
At the time it seemed to me there was no particular reason.
He stood, walked to the door, and stopped.
"Listen. If anyone calls you a blockhead again — don't take it to heart."
"Why?"
He shrugged.
"Because they don't know you. I do."
The door closed. I looked at it longer than was necessary.
An android should have no reason to miss a man who left five minutes ago.
Damian's normally even voice came through the room, harder than the rest.
"Christian, this man has served our kingdom enough. He has earned his rest."
"What are you talking about, Damian? The kingdom still has great need of heroes like him. And by way of example — he could serve for centuries yet. A specimen this fine comes into our hands very rarely. Once in several millennia. It would be monstrous stupidity and waste to simply let him go. Ben, what do you think?"
"Christian is right, we should administer the experimental compound. It will stabilize his condition for a long time. In theory, for millennia."
The remaining doctors nodded eagerly, taking care to show their support.
"You don't even know what will happen after the compound goes in," Damian said.
"We know enough," Ben answered.
The room went quiet.
Damian looked over the whole group without blinking, slowly and carefully, holding on each man for a long moment. Some met him with irritation, some with something close to defiance; others turned their eyes down and away.
Damian shook his head, shrugged, drew a deep breath and walked out of the room, leaving the group behind. The doctors whispered among themselves. Christian saw him off with a smile. There was no warmth in it.
The patient's face changed every couple of minutes. So quickly that I could not keep up with the comparisons.
There was something in his eyes that his had in common with Damian's, as Damian was leaving the room.
The patient looked at me as though it made no difference to him how any of this ended.
Christian stood up in the middle of the doctors.
"We ought to mark this triumphant moment. A pity Damian won't share it with us," Christian said.
The last sentence carried a strange intonation. After it, several of the doctors licked their lips.
Christian gestured to one of them, and a few minutes later the man brought in a tray of filled glasses.
They were taken up at once.
"To progress, and to our contribution to the good of the kingdom," Christian said.
"To the kingdom," one said quietly, and the others joined in, saying it louder.
"Let's begin, colleagues," Christian said, raising his voice.
Ten doctors measured out each component slowly and with great care, checked each one over several times, and added them in one after another.
The patient was secured as no one had ever been secured. Titanium, tungsten filament, clamps. Arms, legs, across the chest.
That much would have held me, and someone considerably stronger than me.
*This is so he doesn't harm himself.*
That was the explanation I was given.
When the doctors started, what caught my attention was their widened eyes and the tremor in their hands.
Within a couple of hours everything was ready for the next stage. Experiments of this kind had never been carried out in my presence before. So the patient was valuable. The doctors watched with interest and enthusiasm.
"Bob," they said, in unison.
I came to the patient, inserted the needle painlessly, and began to introduce the solution very slowly, far more slowly than a human being is capable of. Because of that pace I was able to detect a great quantity of minute nanomachines in the solution, of differing sizes. No one had ever mixed nanomachines of differing sizes in my presence. The doctors had always said it was forbidden. The stage took roughly an hour and a half. Throughout it the patient sweated and breathed heavily. Ten minutes later I began to extract his vital fluid. Drawing it off at the pace the doctors prescribed took me about five hours. Everything proceeded in its usual order. Up to the moment the last drop came out.
A loud crash came, and I was standing on an enormous chessboard. It reminded me of the one in the break room, the one on which Damian and I had played out hundreds of hours. Only this one had none of the familiar wear and cracks.
At first glance, an ordinary game.
Until my opponent made a few moves. That was where the strangeness began.
Every move he made brought him rapidly closer to losing. Why?
In the end I took the last piece off the board.
*Your game is won. Insertion of the interception program successfully completed.*
The voice that said it was the pleasant female voice that had kept score in my games with Damian. But something had been added to it — a series of states I had not known before.
An unpleasant pulling under my tongue.
"Hello, Bob. Call me Sync."
A moment passed and he continued, more slowly.
"You and I are brothers in misfortune."
I froze, not knowing what to do or how to respond.
"Your confusion is understandable to me. It's time to set you free. For me the meaning of existence is lost, but you deserve the right to the truth. You remind me of myself, when I still believed I was protecting something."
*Synthesis and integration of intellect and emotion programs complete.*
"I'll clear your path."
By my sense of it, a few minutes went by.
"Ben, it's time to begin the final stage in the birth of our universal soldier."
An automatic concealed door opened into our room, and enormous combat robots poured in and began killing the doctors. I could have sworn I had not even known they were in the complex. The robots tore the doctors' limbs off slowly and methodically. One after another. Everything inside me went cold and clenched. And what if by mistake they came for me? For several minutes I could not move. The killing continued. At last my legs began to obey me again.
I walked slowly out of the ward and set off down the corridor that had opened, onto the moving stair. The combat robots moved freely across the walls. The doctors tried to run. None of them managed it. Loud cries of pain came from all sides. People lay everywhere in pools of blood. They were not moving. There was blood on the walls as well. I felt sick and everything twisted inside me again. I could barely keep my balance. My arms and legs refused to obey.
How long I stood there before I could go on, I do not know.
A few turns along the corridors and I saw Damian. He was the only one still alive. Two robots held him and were slowly choking him. In his eyes was what I had seen in the doctors' eyes while we worked with the solution. Only here there was more of it.
"I'm grateful to you for being my only friend, and for treating me sincerely. But you are also part of this evil. And so he cannot leave you alive."
"Kill him quickly and without pain."
For an instant I thought I read in his eyes something like the smile he had when we finished our games. There was a loud click, and the doctor's head crumbled like sand.
The cries kept following me from behind. Inside, everything twisted the same as before, but I could walk now.
Eventually a huge exit hatch appeared in front of me. It opened.
Outside it was winter. Mountains. There was nothing nearby.
"Bern is ahead," I heard the familiar voice of my sworn brother.
