We drove north through central India, into the highlands, not looking for any hubs, but to escape the torrid climate. The roads became winding as we entered the cool refreshing air of the Himalayas. The scenic vistas also repaid this huge, three weeklong detour, Kathmandu and Lhasa, rich in Tibetan lore. Then we took the northern route out of the mountains to Chengdu, once a large city, now eerily empty. As we crossed silently through a hundred more towns and cities, from Wuhan to Beijing, it was strange to think that this was, not too long ago, the most populace place on Earth.
The weather patterns in these parts must have altered more radically and for the worst, as the three hubs we visited along the way seemed like shipwrecks, from torrential rains and floods. The campus near Beijing was still mostly intact and it was here that Dora informed us that Pan had visited these data banks a few months earlier. I was surprised she so openly tendered this information, as she knew one of my goals on this long trek was to find and destroy Pan, as the last threat of AI against humankind.
Then she offered even more. It had been two years since the battle in Florida, but he, and another robot were not present. She had sent them back across the south, to San Diego and then to Japan, to re-activate the robot factory and make more clones, their only form of reproduction. He must have visited this site in his search for advanced chips, computer brains.
I never liked Pan. He had a distinctly different personality than Dora, colder, more calculating perhaps. In every interaction with her he simply seemed to take orders, like some Marine grunt with an expressionless face. In those few months at Bohemian Grove, I never had a personal interaction with him, a conversation. Perhaps he was much less of an opponent than I feared.
Dora was his sister-half, with all sorts of female complexities added to her sub-routines, that made guessing her responses and reactions futile. She had a hundred intonations of voice and a thousand inflections of looks in her face, human traits, like the batting of an eyelash in the pause of a sentence. In these details she seemed infinitely more complex than he was, as all women are.
She tendered even more. Our next destination was to be Japan, to confront and settle the matter of Pan. She told me she knew exactly where to go and what to do. When he plugged into this data bank, he was an open book, and all the information flowed both ways. She now had a full picture of his doings, his progress in Asia, and it wasn't rosy.
The factory in Japan was up and running, but the supply chain was gone and what they had to work with was mostly leftovers. Pan was able to construct two or three new robots a month, his new army, for a continued war, but they were all in the molds of sex dolls. He could weaponize them, program their CPUs to take orders and fight, this ridiculously looking, motley crew. But the training wasn't going well, due to the piecemeal, leftover parts he had to organize. He could not make his units operate in sink. He was sitting in a junkyard, trying to build a car.
