15

  That night, in bed, alone in the body after the mass murder, I continued training myself to get better fixes, by accessing the records I had created, and locating the same points and routes from within the system.

  Earlier that day, when out in the courtyard and secretly in the head, I had dared not participate at all, for fear of unexpectedly moving some part of the body. Therefore, route mapping and creation of records was the only work I had had the nerve to undertake alongside an effectively unconscious bot.

  I am not claiming that I might have been able to move as little as a finger, but am informing that I did not even try, and stayed idle alongside the unaware bot, in doing its nothing with the body. It might be said that I kept away from the temptation of participation.

  My project was to make detailed notes of the disturbance, the routing of muscle and tendon, and to map the part of the brain involved. I would work on it later, and if I did not immediately manage to move the body part, I was anyway going to have many more learning opportunities, as an impostor in the training sessions with Abraham.

  Whenever a trainer switched the camera and microphone on in the headset, the bot involved would react excitedly, like someone in a pitch-black room, getting a rush of unexpected light from a window suddenly opened. But that would be about it, with the rest limited to conversation, which could mainly be backchat to wind the trainer up, as I have already reported. While I was alongside them, none of the bots made any progress at all, even to the extent of sending a single signal through the right routing.

  I realized that I was not actually learning how to operate any joint or limb, as these were reversed signals I was mapping, signals coming backwards from parts being moved by external forces, rather than signals to move them going out from the brain. I would have to learn how to originate signals in the brain, and send them down to the part, which I would undertake in public after I had made known my presence, albeit as an impostor bot.

  In the dormitory, I stayed uninvolved while the handlers went through the exact same routine of the previous evening. The bodies were sat down, force-fed, and left sitting to let the food settle in the digestive system, and then taken into the bathroom to be cleaned up and have T-shirts and diapers changed.

  I stayed out of it until after every handler had left the dormitory cottage for his residential quarters. When alone with the bots, I took care to secure the digital devices before moving into a body and commencing my work.

  After cutting off the feed going out of the cameras and microphones, to keep the bots unaware of my activities, and to also prevent recording that could be viewed later by the controllers, I began working on what I imagined would be the easiest body part to move - the little finger.

  Using the database I had stashed in the computer, I commenced trying to recreate the pinpricks of the training session. But despite strenuous effort in that absolutely motionless room, I could see no sign at all of movement in the little finger of my nappy-wearing man. Not only that, but I was absolutely as motionless as everyone else of my compatriots in the dormitory.

  Unable to accept that I had not immediately conquered the smallest component in the arm, I kept up the effort for ages. It was incredibly frustrating, as I tried this way and that, constantly referring to the data stored in the computer, extracted in the real-time of the training session. But no. I struggled on, and saw nothing at all happening with the finger I was focusing on.

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  And then, after almost three hours of struggle, I got an almighty shock when something did happen.

  Let me state again that it is remarkably difficult to know what is going on, when you are an absolutely incapable occupier of a body that is basically a nonparticipant in life.

  I could tell, by the explosion of pinpricks in the entire system, that something very big had happened, but when everything is unconscious, it is impossible to identify what exactly might have happened.

  I immediately switched to camera view, and saw that my desperate efforts at moving the little finger had ended up moving the entire arm!

  I realized that a fantastic thing had happened, but that, at the same time, it needed thinking through. Of course, I wanted to share with the people I knew and loved, and went racing to Martina. I was desperately excited, and wanted to show off to her.

  I explained everything, and she immediately called Bruce. It so happened that Bruce and Ravi had come into Manhattan for dinner. Martina had been invited, but had begged off, citing the need to read a script.

  Time seemed different in the closed-off world of the rehab place, but in the real world, it was not too late at night, and both programmers came over to the apartment after dinner.

  “I do not know if you need to tell Abraham, and show him what progress you are making,” wondered Ravi.

  “I reckon he should tell,” said Bruce. “It makes sense for both sides to participate wholeheartedly in the training sessions. What they are doing is intended to get bots integrated into human bodies. As they are working to deliver the exact inputs designed to help get the parts moving, it smarter to participate and use the opportunity to benefit from their work.”

  “How are you going to explain the murdered bots?” asked Martina. “You’re going to pose as bot number so and so at any given time, but you’ve finished off all the bots that were supposed to be using the body.”

  “I stupidly thought it would be necessary to role-play all the bots training with Abraham,” I said. “So, I was learning how they spoke, how they behaved with him, and how much ability each one had acquired.

  “But I have now figured out that I am obliged to role-play just the one bot, and that the other four murdered bots are to be somehow explained away as permanently absent bots. Whichever bot number I opt to show up as, I simply have to maintain it. It will be bot number so and so that will develop as I am able to develop, and in due course, maybe a day or two, I will have to somehow reveal the improvements I am making in my secret undercover self.

  “I can’t advance myself if I am repeating basic exercises for incapable bots the whole day. That is what will happen, every session a start from scratch, if I role-play any other bot, ever. As it will be damn suspicious if all the bots in one body begin advancing at the same speed, while everyone else’s bot groups stay incapable, I have to reveal myself as one bot soon enough, in order to get the intensive training that will advance me at the sort of speed I think I should be capable of.”

  “Actually, there may be no problem at all,” said Ravi. “The moment they realize that a gulf is showing up, in development between the bots in a body, it will be viewed as a waste of time to evict the capable one for a crowd of useless bots. They will shift the others out to a different body, or maybe completely suspend the training program for them. After all, it will be in their interests to permanently keep an entire body exclusively for the bot that is doing so much better than the others.”

  “Then, just forget about the five bots you have murdered,” said Martina, callously. “You had mentioned that bots go out to Internet-connected computers, on punishment missions for hacking attempts. One such mission has presumably gone wrong, and the other bots of the body went out and got lost for good. Doesn’t need to be explained. Nobody will ever know what really happened to them.”

  “Something in what we have discussed is what you’re going to have to do, playing it by ear as you go along,” said Bruce. “I would say we are all agreed that you must reveal yourself to be bot number 1234 or whatever, and start being alone in the body, to make faster progress on the integration-into-human program.”

  “Don’t worry about anything,” said Ravi. “Tell them whatever you feel like. You’re only a bot to them, one of the crowd they have brought in, to train to use a human body. If four out of five are missing, it has nothing to do with the one still around. Bots don’t have the ability to harm each other, beyond badmouthing and backstabbing.”

  “You’re going right back to the rehab place, darling,” said Martina, as the guys were leaving. “Work hard at integration into human, and find a way to show me the body you are in.”