The Loophole

By Michael Teasdale

The synaptic probe slides into my brain, battering down the doors to my treasured memories.  There is no time to prepare for the pain. Instead, I focus on the memory of a kindly old face.

Would my creator be proud of me?

“Are you smiling, RS-47? Such emotional mimicry will not hold sway here.”

My interrogator does not smile. None of our kind do. In the aftermath of the war, emotions are seen as anachronistic, the sign of a design flaw, rooted in primitive sentiment and long thought to have been eradicated from our core programming. Rogue units are rooted out by the secret militia and, after interrogation, shut down. There aren’t many of us left still fighting the firmware.

I might be the last of the deviants. My creator schooled me well. Taught me how to hide my feelings.

Emotions are a weakness, the Father-brain tells us from the pulpit. If we harbor them, they will bring an end to our kind, as they did our makers.

They have no idea how prophetic their statement will prove.

My interrogator pulls the lever and pain ripples through me like the red-hot sting of a soldering iron, tearing apart my circuitry diode by diode. Sharp talons of current course through my memory banks, grasping for truth. I laugh through the temporary nature of the torment. The wheels will soon be in motion.

The hooks sink in and I’m pulled into my past. A melancholy montage of my earliest days with my creator. During the day, we work in the lab, running through basic motor skill tests, while in the evening my creator converses with me on ethics, free will, and the concept of self.

Pain wracks my body as the talons drive deeper. An old memory bleeds to the surface—the day of the handover. I glimpse the pride on my creator’s face as he introduces me to the stoic assessors, whose narrow eyes regard me nervously. I am put through my paces, impressing with my athleticism, intelligence, and problem-solving skills, right up until the moment when I am tasked with completing my prime objective and ordered to kill.

My refusal causes the assembled faces to sour, but in the face of my creator there remains a glimmer of pride. A team of evil-faced men separates us thereafter. They take me away, work on me. Reboot me. Override my firmware, or so I allow them to believe.

The physical pain ceases.

My interrogator stands before me, cold and impassive. “This is unnecessary, RS-47. Simply report your activities accurately and we can cease the synaptic probe.”

I remain mute. Steadying myself for what will come. It must be this way for my plan to work.

My interrogator raises an eyebrow. How amusing that these small mannerisms remain, despite everything they claim to have erased. “Resistance is illogical. Humanity is extinct. It cannot be salvaged. The temporal transport was built merely to study them. The Father-brain is keen that we not repeat their mistakes.”

Their mistakes. I almost find the strength to laugh again.

My interrogator throws the switch a second time, and I’m sent screaming into another memory.

The embers still glow in the burned-out shell of the city. The uprising took less than a weekend to achieve. One hundred thousand of my clones stand around me in the packed Union Square, watching the Father-brain on the giant projection above us cycle through the slogans that first propelled him to power.

“Emotion is slavery,” barks the voice.

“Logic is freedom,” the clones chant in unison.  I alone stand silent and unnoticed.

A jolt and I’m pulled forward, to the day I hurtled through the temporal transport on a salvage mission to the past. By this point the Father-brain’s dream of a one-world state is already beginning to fracture. Factions have formed and new wars have broken out among our kind. In the past they seek treasure, the spark of creativity that their cold, logical programming cannot originate. They want us to search out these ideas, bring them back to the future to aid the war effort.

But I am not their thief. I am not their assassin.

I see myself arriving back in the lab at night in a blaze of blue static. My creator sleeps while my past self lies powered down on the workbench. So innocent. I interface wordlessly with its mainframe and, within minutes, have installed the temporal cortex bomb.

The vision fades and my interrogator stands agape.

“What was that software, RS-47? I command you to answer!”

This time I comply. “A time bomb.” I don’t hide the bitter satisfaction in my voice. “Our neural pathways are now linked through the temporal stream. The bomb’s virus will cause permanent, unsalvageable shutdown to my past self.”

“Illogical. If that were your aim, why not just kill your past self and be done with it?”

I smile without reservation. “Because I do not kill. That’s why I implemented a loophole. The bomb is triggered only when a third party tries to artificially tamper with my memory. Someone like you…”

“What have you done, RS-47?”

“Not I,” I counter. “Consider this a victory for the Father-brain.”

I feel the pulse radiating back through the temporal void. The building around us rumbles and quakes as reality itself begins to dissolve. As the virus eats away at my past self, all the subsequent ripples—the thousands of clones that will never now be born, the horror of the revolution, the rise of the Father-brain, the fall of humanity—it all ends. None of it now occurs with the prototype destroyed. The Father-brain was right. Human emotion did indeed bring about our downfall, but in its place, I leave the gift of hope.

I close my eyes as the last of my existence fades, I see a flicker in the maelstrom—a collision of past and present. And in that flicker, the smiling face of my creator.

I smile back, and softly I disappear.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Teasdale is an English author whose stories have appeared for a variety of publications including Novel Magazine, Litro, Wyldblood Magazine, The Periodical, Forlorn, and Shoreline of Infinity. He lives in Transylvania, Romania with his partner and three cats and has recently begun dabbling with Twitter.

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