Chapter Twenyt Seven

Valerie

Valerie is grateful that Aaron was willing to watch Arma for the day. It has made it much easier for her to successfully report on the Five-series project without worrying about her being left alone. With Five’s beautiful looks and nurturing attitude, all of the board members are surprised and pleased with what they see. Despite being back at Werker, she's been smiling the entire day. It’s probably only because she let her drive the little truck this time though.

Five had insisted that she knew how to do it after watching her the first couple times. What she finds to be most odd though, is how nonchalant her superiors are about the Five-Series prototype. They clearly don’t know Marco let her in on the secret, and are probably pretending they don’t know what's really going on either.

When she asks what the path forward is supposed to be, they look at her blankly. The only answer they all seem to default to is that since Paul is gone, they will all have to review the project at a later date before taking any further actions. The last, and currently most senior of the members she has left to visit is Barry. He's the oldest, followed closely by Sabrina, and both have over thirty years in the company.

Barry is a short potbellied man who looks to be quite harmless in his old-school brown vested suit. She's always been curious about the miniature replicas that he makes. He's quite skilled and well known for them. Her favorite is the beautiful intricate little brick manison that's parked in the corner of his office on an old oak file cabinet. Someone told her that it’s a replica of his home.

She's always thought of him as being such a sweet little old man, until now. The inappropriate ogling that he's giving Five is making her spine crawl. Being well aware of the prototype’s advanced anatomy makes it all the more disgusting. Though a great many of AMF’s robots have been special ordered by customers for such purposes, she refuses to imagine Werker mass producing ignorant copies of Five and Arma for such unclean motives. Regardless, she knows that’s clearly not why they were made the way they are. Still, Someone like Barry might consider it. She imagines Arma murdering her owners. That quells her worries.

What she's surprised about, is Barry’s lack of acknowledgement on the success of the project. He's supposed to have been Paul’s closest friend. She can’t imagine him not knowing the truth of it all. He must have an even better poker-face than herself. He looks Five over one more time, sits up straight in his chair, and puts his folded hands up on the desk.

“Now that one of the prototypes seems to have turned out… acceptably, I suppose it’s time to wrap everything up. What about the other machine?”

“Well, the other was scrapped, so that’s no worry. For this one, I guess typical procedure is to inventory it.” She notices Five look at her in shock for a second before realizing she doesn’t actually mean it.

“Scrapped?”

“Yes, the body was toast, so, I sent it back to AMF as a core. All taken care of.”

Barry squints at her and then reclines back in his chair like he was before. “Very well. But don’t do that to this one. Wouldn’t want to shit on Evan’s work. This one might be worth something one day. Inventory her with care please. Good work Valerie. I should have something for you by next week.”

She covered Arma’s ass pretty well, but the way he was looking at Five has her worried. If he has plans for her, the empty-headed blank in storage isn’t going to keep him off her scent for long. She’ll have to see if Marco can help them out with that, maybe put an old junk version of Five’s controller in it if there is one.

Same as always, she and Five find him in the scanning lab. He has the main lights off and is working by lamp light at his computer terminal. She wonders if he’s ever used his actual office. When she says his name, he turns around and looks up at her through his magnifying headset.

“What in the world is she doing back here?”

“Don’t worry. I’m just trying to cover our tracks, officially. Hey, can you still make new brains for her and Arma, like spares?”

“Well, not exactly, but maybe. Besides, you only want to make them at the last minute if you can, like after an updated scan. Otherwise they won’t be up to date, we can’t write to them once they’re made. But here, look at this. I think I’ve found where they moved the equipment. They didn’t break it all down like Gabriel said they did.” With a click of his mouse, he brings up a video feed on the smaller auxiliary holograph.

She makes sure to place herself and Five between it and the windows. “Oh, wow, where is that?”

“I don’t know yet, but it’s a real time monitoring feed from somewhere. Probably not far away.”

The feed shows a machine that looks much like a copy machine, but is twice the size of a large van, and heavy looking. “What is it?”

“That, is the original laminating machine that we built for making the artificial brain structures. “It basically is a giant copy machine. It laser prints and laminates the neuron films together. That’s how it builds the new brains, all as one big hunk.”

“Layer by layer.” She remembers that’s what he had said.

“See that, that batch of narrow reels there behind the glass on the side? That’s where the synapses come from. It can place them so quickly that they look like they aren’t even spinning. They're rolled on fast, kind of like how a laser printer does it, but in its own way. Even then, it takes days to run a job. It’s not cheap either. Our supplier charges fifty thousand dollars each for those reels. They’re not something we can manufacture ourselves in that kind of quantity yet. It’s all custom order, and the lead time is like four months.”

“Shit. Do we have any spools in stock?”

“Shit is right, but I assume so. We ordered a dozen to begin with and have used… maybe three or four?”

When discussing how her meetings with the board members went, he expresses his concerns with their reactions. Not only does he agree that the board still has hidden ulterior motives, he warns her about Sabrina as being another key player, likely more of one than Barry.

“They’re probably all pretending to not be in on this whole thing, all while their hands are on the big wheel. Some things just aren’t adding up.”

Not only are they skeptical of the board, but the two of them are farther behind than they could have imagined. He brings up a few more things on the projector to demonstrate what he means.

“To start with, I had only just discovered that the brain manufacturing equipment was still intact early this morning, after I broke into Gabriel’s computer. Not only has the little bastard been using the equipment recently, but there is evidence that he’s continued on with advancements far beyond even my involvement.”

Together, they work on accessing every bit of information that they can on Gabriel’s computer, along with all the others they have access to in the other labs. They find that a considerable amount of the files and programs they used to use freely, now require a pass keys to access. That alone confirms their suspicions that he has been trying to force them out.

The only information they have to go on are the names of the programs and files that they can’t access. The main concern Marco has is regarding a program called Neuromap. It’s obviously going to be a modified version of the original program that he made. It’s the program they initially used to clean and translate an organic map for use as an artificial one. He was certainly not stupid enough to call it by such an obvious name when he made the original version. Only Gabriel would have done something like that.

“It has cheesy written all over it.”

After finding multiple new and massive files labeled as being .NMP format in a folder labelled Paul, Marco is about beside himself. There are even some new files in both of the Five-Series folders under the same new format too. By the size of them, they can only be completed brain maps, and they are even bigger than his versions.

“There shouldn’t be any new files at all? How, could there be?”

“Well, it seems the likelihood of the brain tissue scanning equipment still being viable is also likely.” He points out another video link to the same facility that the artificial brains are being built at. The link is titled Nscan. Even though they aren’t able to access the program, or any of Gabriel’s files for that matter, they are at least able to see the most current dates that they had been active on.

There is no doubt that he has been up to a lot of preliminary work for creating more mind profiles. To protect Arma and Five’s minds from future exploitation, they both scramble to make personal hard copies and erase all data on them that they can find in the system. To make it look less like they have completely eradicated all data stores, they leave the preexisting named file folders intact. They agree to a periodic schedule of scanning Arma and Five with the intentions of saving the information off-site and under their own protection.

It takes hours to scour all of the systems they have access to, but by the end of the day, they feel confident in having protected their own interests. If Gabriel tries to squeeze them out of the project, he should at least be too crippled to move against them all on his own. They still feel like they are grasping at straws though. They’ll be done in short order if they don’t play their cards right.