A.S.T.R.O.
6. Escape
Dr. Pavilion picked through the pile of parts lying on the table. Dr. O'Shay had a forlorn look on his face, while Yuko tried to maintain an expressionless appearance on hers.
"I hope you're satisfied." O'Shay told his supervisor. I feel rather unclean at the moment."
"It seems to be all here." Pavilion said after a very quick examination of the pile of parts. "General Hayes will be here in an hour to check on our progress with the all up model. I hope you have something to show him."
"Mostly just blueprints and CAD drawings." O'Shay replied, "Though we should have the first assemblies ready for his inspection by then, though they are not very much to look at."
"That should do." Pavilion answered. "Look O'Shay, I know you were close with Tenma and that he had asked you to be his son's Godfather. The ASTRO prototype did resemble his son so I do get it. But that robot was NOT your godson, it was a very expensive pile of parts and assemblies, many of which are top secret. There wasn't any other way."
"Of course." O'Shay nodded. He couldn't help noticing the small amount of tears in Pavilion's eyes.
"I'll bring the General by your laboratory in about an hour." Dr. Pavilion said as he exited the room.
"So far so good." Yuko said. "Good thing Pavilion didn't examine that pile of parts more carefully."
"Amen to that." O'Shay replied. "Those were mostly the burned out and obsolete versions of the first assemblies that we installed in ASTRO. I kept them as examples for later troubleshooting. Cleaned up they did look brand new but I never expected Pavilion to be fooled by them."
"If they passed his inspection, the odds are good that the General won't notice either." Yuko added.
"I'm more worried about having something to show the General when he arrives," O'Shay told his assistant. "He's more interested in schedules and results than the technology inside."
"Not to worry there." Yuko smiled. "I've prepared a computer slide show for him that will knock his socks off. We've had the full up skeleton ready to go for a few weeks now and we are the only two people that have seen it. That alone should impress the general enough to get him off our backs. I also have several of ASTRO's spares installed in the framework. We'll actually look like we are already ahead of schedule by a few days."
"I don't know what I'd do without you, Yuko." O'Shay smiled.
"After General Hayes is finished inspecting our laboratory, he'll probably be kept busy by Pavilion in the factory floor." Yuko explained. "Our Fearless Leader wants to butter him up by showing him just how we can produce the final product. Pavilion really wants that extended manufacturing contract."
"Good. No one will be looking for us for the rest of the day." O'Shay said. "That's when I'll take my early leave."
Dr. O'Shay made sure that he was alone in his office and that his tie in to the mainframe computer was secure. He nervously typed into the secure SSH session.
"You OK son?"
"Yes Hakase. I hope we get away with this."
He closed down the connection and opened the cad program. The startup configuration file loaded Yuko's latest elements. Behind his back, O'Shay could hear the elevator in the hallway coming up to his floor. He glanced at his watch and realized that the General was due any moment. "Yuko, It's show time," he yelled.
General Hayes listened attentively to Yuko's narration accompanied by the slide show on the wall mounted large screen monitor. His face showed no emotion, no hint of his satisfaction or displeasure, if any. "Very good." He finally announced at the end of the presentation. "I'm glad that you people are on track here. How about the reuse of the parts from the first prototype?"
"Well as you saw in some of the photos I took of the first skeleton assembly, some of them are already in place." Yuko quickly explained. "The rest are back in storage."
"I'd like to see the inventory storage area." The General said. "I want to make sure that you have everything in order for accelerating the project."
Dr. Pavilion opened the door to the conference room and motioned for the General to follow him. Dr. O'Shay and Yuko followed behind them as they entered the prototype area and walked through the storage area. The General stopped at a few locations to examine some items on the storage shelves, but he didn't look past the labels. He seemed more interested in the fact that no shelf space was empty, or low in stock of any items, rather than the condition of any of the parts. O'Shay breathed a sigh of relief as they headed towards the factory floor.
"If you don't need me anymore, I'd like to get back to the laboratory." O'Shay told Pavilion.
"I think I can accommodate the General for the rest of his stay." Pavilion replied.
General Hayes extended his hand to O'Shay. "Thank you for your time, Doctor." He said. "Goodbye, till our next inspection."
O'Shay and Yuko turned around and headed back to the laboratory.
"Is he ..." O'Shay started to ask.
"He's locked in the trunk of your car, in low power standby." Yuko said. "Good luck."
Dr. O'Shay's car was parked in the sub-basement level of the garage. He slowly navigated the winding passageway toward the surface, finally coming to the exit gate. He inserted his pass card into the gate machine and waited for the computer to recognize his clearance. After several agonizing seconds the gate arm went up and he drove out of the garage towards the main road.
Once again he arrived at a checkpoint, this time maned by man in an MP uniform. Although the guard had seen him come and go many times before, he still requested the doctor's ID badge and swiped it into the computer reader to obtain clearance. O'Shay nervously drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, something he usually never did. He realized this and quickly sat on his hands. He looked up at the guard who had his eyes on the computer console all the time. Finally, the MP handed O'Shay back his ID card and pressed the button to open the gate. "Have a good day, Dr. O'Shay," he said.
The doctor gave the guard a wave of his hand and put the automobile into motion. He drove through the gate and turned onto the two lane state highway, heading towards the NJTP. Once he was about a mile from the complex he reached into his pocket and withdrew a small fob. He pressed two buttons on the device sending a short range radio signal that was picked up by ASTRO's telemetry system. The robot woke up. ASTRO pulled on the release cable to open the passageway from the trunk into the vehicles rear seat. He pushed the passenger side seat back cushion down and crawled out of the trunk into the back seat.
"Hello O'Shay-Hakase" Astro said.
"Hello son." O'Shay replied. "So far it looks like we are in the clear. I hope we can give the Richardson's a nice surprise in a few hours."
Dr. Pavilion watched from the window of the factory floor as Dr. O'Shay's car left the compound. "You stupid old fool," he thought to himself, "I hope you get away with this."
Pavilion hadn't been fooled by O'Shay's and Yuko's subterfuge. He kept quiet when they showed him the pile of parts, and he carefully steered the General around the facility so that he'd only see what they wanted him to see. So far, it was working. Pavilion had been monitoring when O'Shay and Yuko had brought the Richardson's into the facility to visit. He'd seen their prototype interact with the family as a son and he realized that like it or not, Tenma had caused an accidental miracle. Secretly he agreed with O'Shay, but he wasn't in a position to stick his own neck out, and had hoped that the old fool would gladly put his on the chopping block, which O'Shay had done. Now Pavilion was doing his best to give O'Shay and Astro the room they needed to pull the plot off.
General Hayes wandered about the factory floor inspecting the various stations. One of his concerns had been that this facility could turn out the required number of super soldier robots under the A.S.T.R.O. program guidelines. So far he was satisfied that Pavilions people could do the design work, and produce enough beta units for the first and second waves of testing. Beyond that, they'd need to expand the place, but there was room room on the grounds for expansion.
The only fly in the ointment had been that damn child prototype. He had agreed to a small scale mock up, but not built in the image of some insane scientists dead kid. If that any news of that thing got out there would be problems, it had to be destroyed. The General wasn't completely satisfied with the assurances of Pavilion and O'Shay that the prototype didn't still exist, but he did recognize some of the parts that had come from the other contractors for that first unit now installed in the first pass of the full up model.
Hayes waited for Pavilion to be distracted with his normal routine and then took that opportunity to sneak off. He found a computer terminal and entered his military back door pass code. He searched for recent activity, looking for core dumps and downloads. Quickly, he saw the traces that told him the prototype's memory cores had been downloaded into secure storage. Hayes was almost completely relieved and was about to log off when he noticed two lines at the bottom of the printout. He called up the secret back door logger that the CIA had installed for him into the otherwise secure system to look for the session log on those two SSH sessions. The first was just the monitor demon session used to access A.S.T.R.O.s AI brain dump. The second was a short conversation timestamped only hours ago.
"Yes Hakase. I hope we get away with this."
Dr. Pavilion and Yuko found themselves facing a very red faced General Hayes.
"What the God Damned hell is going on here!" the General roared. "You knew Dr. O'Shay didn't destroy that prototype as I ordered, and you're helping him secret it out of here?"
Yuko opened her mouth to say something, but Pavilion clamped his right hand over it to silence her.
"General, that prototype isn't what we designed. When Dr. Tenma ran off with it, he first made some modifications that resulted in a very unusual accident. He changed the robot's AI into something that we've been trying to achieve for years, something that everyone claimed was impossible. That "S" in ASTRO referred to our hopes that the soldier bots would be self adaptive to conditions outside of their programming, but we never really hoped that we could create a sentiment being. In his grieving madness, Tenma actually achieved this. He modified that robot to become his missing child, and it seems that he succeeded beyond his and our wildest dreams. I can show you footage of its interaction with a family."
Yuko bit the hand over her mouth and yanked it away.
"You were recording that visit?" She yelled.
"Yes!" Pavilion roared back. "I know you and O'Shay think of me as a heartless pencil pusher, but I'm a scientist too! I simply know who is buttering my bread and I don't make waves."
The General's face was still beet red. "I don't give a damn what you eggheads think, that prototype represents a lot of sensitive hardware that can't be allowed to fall into unfriendly hands, even if it does look and act like someone's dead kid!"
Hayes pulled a secure phone from his pocket and punched in a few numbers. Seconds later a half dozen MP's stormed into the room.
"I'm putting you two under house arrest." Hayes steamed. " I'm ordering the marines into the act, and I'm going to have that idiot scientist and our prototype located. This ends now!"
Dr. O'Shay's car pulled onto the NJTP heading north. He was in the western half of the divided toll road, in the non-commercial lanes. Traffic was light, and he was being careful not to exceed the speed limit. Suddenly a dark shadow passed overhead, and the car was blow across two lanes of traffic. O'Shay fought for control as the Apache helicopter gunship took up a position behind his vehicle.
"Pull over doctor, I've got you in my sights." The voice of the helicopter's pilot roared from two bullhorn speakers mounted on the aircraft's lower skids.
"I'm sorry, Tobio." O'Shay said as he let up on the accelerator and started to pull the car over to the side of the road, "I don't know what to do."
"NO!" Astro yelled. His brown eyes glowed fire red, and his brown hair turned a dark black as his cowlicks thickened into sharp spikes. He looked behind at the gunship that was only a few hundred feet behind them. Astro bent down to point his buttocks at the rear window. The barrels of two machine guns popped out of his posterior and he aimed at the aircraft using the heads up display that now filled his field of view. He carefully targeted the flying machine's two turbine engines and fired. Several dozen shells flew through the rear wind screen of the car at 1000 rounds per minute, bits of broken glass filled the inside of the vehicle. The gunship lost engine power and its pilot fought the controls to auto giro the machine to a safe landing on the side of the road.
O'Shay was startled at the sound of the gunfire, he first thought that his car had been hit by rounds from the helicopter. When he saw the smoking gunship land hard on the road besides him, he realized that the gunfire had been going in the opposite direction!
"What did you do!" he yelled.
"I don't know!" Astro yelled back, "It was a reflex action, I had to defend myself!"
O'Shay pushed the accelerator to the floor. That helicopter wasn't going to be the only thing the military would throw at them. He wanted to get into the city as fast as possible. Maybe they wouldn't try shooting at him in the middle of a crowed city.
General Hayes didn't take the news very well. He'd hoped to make a clean recovery, but this changed everything. "That prototype of your's is fully activated." Hayes yelled to Pavilion and Yuko as he activated his phone.
"There is no way we can stop it, that robot has us out gunned, even if it doesn't know it yet. As long as it's with O'Shay we have a chance though. I think we may need the help of local law enforcement."