And there was that thing… that ghostly form in the dark that he’d had to hastily usher them away from. The seeker. Didn’t he say it was that ethereal, glowing shape — little more than fragile membrane, like a jellyfish, like a plume of smoke — that had ripped the previous team to unrecognizable shreds?
The previous team.
Us?
CHAPTER 2
2070, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs
‘But why, skippa?’
Rashim Anwar shook his head at the childlike question. The thing’s squeaky voice and perpetual goofy, dumb smile — all of that Rashim’s choice, of course. His laboratory assistant unit, one of the half-size models, came up to no more than his waist in height. In the default factory-shipped polygenic skin, the domestic models looked like little plasticine children. No hair, faces deliberately artificial-looking, inexpressive, neutral. But shapes and sizes varied. Rashim’s one was designed for a lab environment, squat and square, nothing like a plasticine child, more like a filing cabinet on legs.
Rashim couldn’t help customizing his unit, his inner geek looking for a way to express itself. The lab assistant unit’s shape and configuration were roughly the same as the cartoon character’s anyway; close enough that hacking the polygenic skin’s configuration code to make the unit look even more like the character was a couple of hours’ work. Little more than changing the programmable plastic skin from the default utilitarian grey to a bright yellow, and getting the face to extrude and replicate the cartoon character’s goofy features.
‘But why, skippa?’ it asked again with a squeaky voice. It looked up at Rashim with big round eyes, above a perky, pickle-shaped nose and two jutting tombstone teeth.