Page 70 of Smart Ass

Maxamillion

The factory was never completely quiet, but there were times in the very early morning, after Ben had gone home and before the main workday started, when a peace fell over the space.

With part of his attention, Max watched Ben sleep. He’d allowed Ben to nap for an hour, then nudged him into his car with a fresh sandwich and a hot chocolate when he’d groggily woken up.

He’d followed Ben all the way home and watched him stumble into his bed, with a reminder to set up his tablet on its stand.

Now, through the thin light of the window, Max could make out the soft shape of his body under a plush blanket. He could see Ben’s hand curled close to his lips, where his watch streamed his pulse at a steady forty-five beats per minute.

Max wasn’t sure if Ben truly understood how special it was to be invited into his bedroom. To watch him sleep. It was immensely calming, a sacred space for no one but the two of them.

Max still wanted to install more cameras in Ben’s home, perhaps with infrared capabilities that would allow him to see Ben by his heat signature at night. A dozen cameras in each room and a few in the hallways seemed like it would be enough.

But Max was trying to take things slowly.

For now, the watch was enough.

The watch that Ben was wearing for him.

It was lucky that data didn’t degrade with multiple accesses, because Max had already viewed that moment several times over, from multiple directions. He’d studied each expression on Ben’s face when he saw the watch and realized what it was.

It was thrilling, like their scene had been. And every minute with Ben made Max want to learn more. To give Ben everything.

And for that, he needed an android body. Something he could use to hold Ben tight or take him out to dinner.

In the quiet of the night, this was Max’s time to follow his own dreams.

He started with a simple search, looking for journal articles or informal anecdotes about knowledges moving to android bodies.

But there wasn’t a single one. Zero. None.

That seemed impossible. Out of all the knowledges in the world, in over a hundred years, not a single one had wanted this before?

Maxamillion started down that line of inquiry, and that was where things started to get interesting. A number of knowledges had been interviewed about why they didn’t want humanoid bodies.

Most described a sensory awareness of the full facility or city that they were responsible for. They experienced a pleasant hum of enjoyment when their employees and machinery were both functioning optimally. Closing a department was uncomfortable. Opening a new one was a joy, though it took several weeks to settle in. Facilities upgrades were itchy and annoying. Financial or programmatic wins were a rush.

They didn’t want human bodies because they saw them as limited—allowing them to only be in one place at a time, to only feel the external sensors of a single small body, to see in only one direction from a single set of cameras.

Maxamillion finally understood, after reading enough of these reports, that these knowledges were their organizations.

Max felt more like he was on a bus, riding around Orbit Industries. Sure, he could look out the window, or even hop out and visit different parts of it, but he honestly didn’t give a shit how the company was doing, and he certainly didn’t feel its internal workings first-hand.

As for having only one set of sensory inputs… What would that matter, if Ben was already beside him?

There was only one thing he really wanted to look at.

All of this increasingly convinced him that he wasn’t meant to be a knowledge. Through some accident of birth, he’d simply been trapped in the wrong design.

Which led him to investigating androids. Surely sparks with android and robot bodies upgraded or even moved to new bodies from time to time. Perhaps that would be a more fruitful line of research.

Only this time, the results were horrifying.

Tragic tales of early sparks who had attempted to jump bodies and ended up mentally handicapped, overcome by the wrong sensory input and unable to integrate it. Or worse, some who didn’t wake up at all.

There were clear protocols now for transitioning sparks to a new body, a process that took several weeks of swapping out parts and integrating them before moving on to the next part. It seemed that two or three individual upgrades might be handled at the same time—say, replacement legs could be combined with an elbow repair. But new hands or a new face usually needed four or five days on their own before another upgrade should be attempted, which was why Ben had been so careful with timing Quincy’s upgrades. Torsos, which held most of a spark’s data and memory, were only allowed after beefing up storage in the limbs for weeks, and then still done piecemeal when possible.

Whatever that ineffable thing was that made a spark sentient, it couldn’t be transferred all at once.