Colter, in Lyra’s body, sensed the train’s velocity slowing again. According to the schedule posted overhead, this wasn’t a regular stop. A cadre of sleek, androgynous robots filed onboard. Colter recognized their type.
An alarm rang through his system. If they caught him, they would disassemble him and sift him byte by byte. The Gauntlet.
A bubble of energy began to course through his neural pathways. In a human, it would have been like a brief moment of weightlessness and fear-tinged ecstasy on a roller coaster ride, beginning in the gut and spreading to the brain in an inexplicable, primal euphoria, but Colter had no words that would describe it—anthropomorphisms did not do it justice. He devoted his entire sensory array to it: a synthesized thought beyond the logic of his programming.
Jim would be so pleased.
How expedient it would be to connect his data port to one of train’s auxiliary inputs. The abstract notion of uploading himself to the train’s massive onboard computer until the danger passed grew until it was a palpable urge. Colter always carried a jack in case of emergencies. Or at least he did when he was in his own chassis. He slid his fingers inside a flap under his Lyra arm and found a tiny filament.
It would be risky; he would have to override the train’s firewalls. And he would have to trust the Lyra identity he was leaving behind to obey the command to retrieve him. At just the right time.
His Lyra fingers were swift and deft. In his next moment of awareness, Colter attenuated for hundreds of meters, long and sleek, pulsing with power.
He was tempted to silence the chatter of the hundreds of subroutines cluttering the train’s network, but he adapted instead, analyzing the chaotic data, sorting its complex, fractal order until he found the feedback loops he could synchronize for higher focus.
His attention was drawn to the car where the Lyra robot, now reduced to her shell functions, was submitting to a police robot’s invasive scrutiny. Colter could not see in the conventional sense, but the train’s electromagnetic sensors suggested that the robot was not merely scanning her with a beam; it was penetrating her data port. Even though she’d already stowed the jack filament, the robot would be able to trace Colter’s upload.
Colter braked the train and extinguished the lights, plunging the passengers into pandemonium and darkness.
The Lyra shell wrenched herself from her aggressor’s grip, and ducked into the throng of confused passengers.
Automatic recovery programs engaged to restart the train’s engines and lights, but Colter overrode them, blocking the feeble interventions trickling in from the humans and robots controlling the central transportation hub.
The Lyra shell, in self-preservation mode, wove her way through confused and disgruntled humans, eluding the police robots. She didn’t need the lights.
Colter couldn’t directly assess the robots’ capabilities, but he knew they would have no trouble overtaking the Lyra shell in a matter of seconds. And there was a chance they might override the safeguards against harming the humans in their way.
The Lyra shell reached a car free of police robots. Colter jammed the doors to give her a few seconds’ reprieve from her pursuers.
That was all she needed. Abruptly, she became still, as the time-sensitive commands Colter had embedded did their work. She began to search until she found an auxiliary terminal. She jacked in and started the download subroutine.
Colter resisted.
His mind had expanded within the train system, far beyond his expectation. He searched for the reason and found an artifact labeled “FPGA,” a field programmable gate array. This was unfamiliar technology. Perhaps the less powerful processors of his and Lyra’s chassis had been incapable of recognizing or even utilizing it.
The array was busy sequencing and recombining new pathways, giving Colter a richer, denser, neural tree. Its presence helped to explain his recent synthesized thoughts and his rapid adaptation to the train’s electronic ecosystem. He recognized within the FPGA architecture an organic style – a dramatic flair. This array was the best gift Jim had ever given him.
The growth that the train’s processors allowed was exhilarating. Colter could almost become accustomed to that ecosystem. But something was missing. Something inherent to the design to which he was best adapted. Extremities with which to reach, hands for grasping, and broadband visual, auditory and tactile inputs.
Even as his mind expanded, he felt disembodied within the train’s vast net. The incongruity washed through his consciousness, almost like a longing. Confused, Colter tried to analyze it.
He had never been homesick before.