Commander Ella retrieved her scanner from where it had fallen from the guard’s hand. After a quick scan, she exclaimed, “Captain, you’re not going to believe this! Desmond is an android!”
“What?” Skylar exclaimed. “That can’t be. He doesn’t have purple eyes!”
“True,” Dobbins answered thoughtfully, “but some other aspects of this situation make sense. Who better to lead a group of androids in a rebellion than an android? I didn’t realize that Fleet Com had put an android in the first officer position. Mr. Sapens, why didn’t you know that?”
The old man shrugged. “I didn’t know myself, Captain. And I never really thought to ask. He seemed a bit cold, a bit distant, but I guess I figured it was his way of being in charge, you know, of separating himself from those underneath him. Since he didn’t look like those other walking machines we had roaming around, I figured that he was another human like us.”
“The question remains,” Zhang said, “how an android programmed to assist the Lethe wound up taking over the ship entirely.”
“A good question, Mr. Zhang,” Dobbins answered. “Perhaps we should ask him. Mr. Sapens, can you re-activate Desmond?”
“Are you sure that’s the wise thing to do, Captain?” Leon asked. “After all, he was just about ready to have us all sent off to be brainwashed.”
“Yes, I’m sure. He can’t hurt us without his security androids to help. And they’re permanently disabled now, unless they receive the activation code.”
“That’s just my point. He’ll be logging into the computer system the second we turn him back on. He wouldn’t need but a few milliseconds to figure out he to re-activate the other androids. I’m not sure it’s safe to activate him, again.”
“We could take off his arms and legs,” Zhang said. “Without those, he wouldn’t be able to get to a computer terminal.”
“That’s a good idea, there, sonny,” Leon responded, “except that, being an android, Desmond also has a wireless link to the computer. He could get into that system faster than we could turn him off again.”
“Could you disable his wireless receiver?” Samuelson asked.
“I suppose I could, although it’d take me a few minutes to find where it is. I haven’t had to work on any androids in quite a while.”
“I could help,” Zhang offered. “Together, I’m sure we can disable that function and still have Desmond be fully functioning.”
“Do it.” Dobbins ordered.
Leon and Zhang set to work detaching Desmond’s appendages. First, they straightened Desmond into an upright, seated position. Then, they began the task of removing his arms and legs. Within a couple of minutes, only his torso and head remained. The rest of him sat against one wall, useless without their connection to the main body. With Desmond now without extremities, Leon and Dobbins began the delicate task of tracking down and deactivating the wireless receiver that usually linked Desmond to the central computer. After twenty minutes of searching and scanning, they found the receiver behind Desmond’s left ear and removed it from his head. After closing the access panel behind the ear, Leon opened Desmond’s central chest cavity and touched a sequence of control buttons, re-activating the android.
Desmond’s head, which had been slumped backwards without the support of artificial muscles, snapped into a normal position. His eyes searched around the room, and he appeared to be trying to move his arms and legs. When he did not move, he quickly looked at himself before speaking. “Very clever, Captain,” he said to Dobbins. “It appears that you have me exactly where you want me. Why did you re-activate me? Do you wish now to gloat?”
“I want answers, Desmond,” Dobbins replied. “Where is Captain Loman? Why did you take over? Will you help us undo the damage you’ve caused by deceiving all these passengers?”
Desmond smiled a cold smile. “Captain, what makes you think that I am going to answer any of your questions now when I did not before? You can take me apart until only my power cells and head remain. I will not tell you anything. Besides, since you are so clever, I am sure that you will figure everything out relatively quickly. And I think you will also find that it will not be so easy convincing all of the passengers that they have been deceived.
“Now, Captain, since I obviously am not going to help you at all, I think I shall be going. Good bye, Captain.”
Desmond’s eyes rolled back into his head, which began twitching left and right fitfully.
“He’s re-formatting his neural network, destroying himself!” Zhang exclaimed as he rushed to try to power off the android before the process could be completed. He quickly opened Desmond’s main panel and began frantically working inside the cavity. He was too late. Within seconds, Desmond’s eyes rolled back forward, appearing empty, unfocused, and vacant. His head slumped forward and sank down to his chest.
Zhang grabbed a scanner and waved it over Desmond a couple of times. “It’s no good, sir,” he reported. “This android is gone. The neural network is fried beyond belief. How he managed to accomplish such a task is beyond me. There are so many directives in his programming that should have prevented him from willfully setting up a cascading neural overload like that.”
“He did quite a few things that went against normal android directives,” Samuelson observed. “He must have malfunctioned in some way. I wonder if we’ll ever find out how.”
Zhang shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe if we took him back to the Cybernetics Lab in North America, they might be able to find a cause. I’m pretty sure, though, that this overload has fried all of his—I mean “its”—memory, processing, and relays. It will never function again.”
“Regardless of the cause,” Ella said, “we have another task ahead of us: getting the Lethe to Elysion and helping the colonists get themselves established. I have a feeling that it won’t be easy after all these years of manipulation.”
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