Justin Kemppainen - The Legend of Ivan

“He escaped from them!” he said with delight. “The most advanced piece of technology in the entire galaxy, capable of fighting armies and destroying cities, worlds even, slipped right out of their grubby little fingers!” He stifled a giggle.

I found his assertion of their uncleanliness to be ironic and mildly hypocritical, but I didn’t bring it up. I asked, “What exactly do you mean?”

The disheveled man continued snickering and shaking his head. “Man, you have no idea. No idea!”

Frustrated, I glared at him without speaking.

He grinned. “I-V-A-N, man. Ivan’s a goddamn robot.”

“They don’t want anyone to know about it, especially after the incident in the Regulus system when Ivan became so famous. I had friends on the Garden, man. Lots of friends.

But his creation… the entire R&D department responsible for building Ivan got shipped out to deep space exploration with the threat of death if they should ever return within the next three millennia. Managers who knew about the project, anyone who happened to be working within three floors of the breakout, all kinds of people disappeared in their clean-up.

Think of the lawsuits, man. Think of how many people would be banging down Keritas’ doors if they knew that all the shit Ivan had done was their fault. The company would get smashed into tiny pieces, and that’d be it.

IVAN was just a code name for the project. It stood for Impervious Vessel for Annihilation Nexus. It was supposed to be one of a hundred, maybe a thousand individual units with the strength and destructive power to conquer anything and withstand any amount of punishment.

They were the ultimate in defensive and offensive weaponry. An unstoppable force Keritas wanted to use to cut down the competition and reign supreme in the entire galaxy.

It all started in that big building, on the 19th basement floor.

The lab was huge, containing the most sophisticated pieces of technology. Famous engineers from everywhere disappeared and were brought to the facility to work on this robotics project. It was a big secret, man. They had top of the line hardware, dense and refined alloys, and the most important piece of all:

An augmented human brain.

AI projects have been dead-ends for hundreds of years, you know? It’s a widely known fact that the growth of an intelligence on that scale requires a planet-wide system of computers to sustain it, and by then, the experiment gets wild and out of control. No variant has ever bothered to consider us humans as anything but inferior, so these projects end in disaster. But that’s a whole new can of worms, man. I could talk for days about AI stuff.

Anyway, Ivan wasn’t all robot; he’s got a few chunks of human brain matter in that neosteel skull plate, but that’s all there is to his humanity.

I mean, it wasn’t hard for them to fabricate the exoskeleton; there were plenty of android models to work from. Even so, they brought in the most prominent robotics engineers not already chained to the other corporations.

Dr. Ronald Calloway was the head of the Ivan project, and he’d worked core-ward for dozens of years on some of the best pieces of robotics known to man. His big achievement was the Iso-Clean Mark IV, a learning-algorithm servant-bot for lazy rich people. You remember that one, right?

He definitely had money, man, but Keritas offered him ever so much more. Other researchers from the pinnacle of all fields came and went: antimatter physicists, starship engineers, augmentation specialists, neurosurgeons. They all came to bring this hulking beast to life.

Ivan’s final specifications included a full neosteel skeleton with dissipating mimic-flesh coating it. An internal reactor, codenamed OLGA, in a fortified chest cavity produced countless gigawatts of energy. It was supposedly enough to power the dissipation shielding of the skin to withstand brief immersion within a star. That wasn’t even the most important function of the device.

His sight, hearing, indeed all senses were augmented to more than triple the finest after-market modifications available to the public. He had strength and speed of unholy proportions. He had a heightened human brain capable of eidetic memory and rapid calculation be it in a laboratory or on the battlefield.

The most frightening piece of Ivan’s hardware was his energy release mechanism and how they intended to use it. They pulled out all the stops, you know? Ivan was the finest and most potentially destructive force to exist, and they wanted to make more.

Lots more.”

Dr. Calloway entered the complex, bidding his usual passive nod to the walls of receptionists and security personnel. The elevator he took dove to the accustomed cool of the distant basement, where the sparkling lab greeted him.

The nearly assembled body of Ivan lay on the table in the central isolation lab, locked and shielded by excessively, in Dr. Calloway’s opinion, redundant security.

He walked over to their personal break-room, setting his briefcase on the counter. He poured himself a cup of fresh coffee. A colleague, by the name of Dr. Trevors, was seated at the table, reading the news on a digital pad.

Looking up, Trevors smirked. “Big day today.”

Calloway nodded, taking a sip and grimacing at the lousy flavor.

“What’s the delay been, two weeks now?” Trevors asked.

“Three,” the robotics specialist replied. “The damn neurosurgeon had to dig out the implants in some captured dignitary or something. As though they couldn’t find someone as qualified to help us instead.”

“Another one to give clearance to? You know: the two week process by itself?” Trevors said. “We’re on the home stretch here; they don’t want to have to bring in more people now , right?”

Calloway waved a dismissive hand. “They should have had back-up candidates approved and ready. The billions, trillions spent on this project and you’d think they’d appreciate more efficiency.” He took another swig. “Ugh, Gods… you’d also think that they could—”

“Afford better coffee? Yes, I’ve heard that one before.” Trevors shrugged, returning his attention to the news reports.

Scowling at his colleague’s lax attitude, Calloway drained the remaining coffee and stepped out. In truth, the constant close quarters in which they worked and the frustration of delay was beginning to wear on the pair closely associated with the project. Various people came and went, but Trevors and Calloway worked in uncomfortable proximity, twelve hours a day, for years.

“…and it’s almost done,” Calloway muttered as he stepped towards the entrance to the isolation lab. An exciting prospect for him, to see the grand scheme- his grand scheme -coming together. “Except we need that damnable neurosurgeon to finish it off…”

Sighing, he palmed the outer lock and set his chin into the retinal scanner. Green lights flared, and he punched in his seven-digit access code.

An error light flashed. “Dammit.”

Twenty minutes later, after a group of five heavily armed and trained men swept through the lab to ensure a complete lack of anything resembling intruders, Calloway tried again.

This time the code was successful, and the outer door opened.

Sanitizing product and fans scattered the thin hair upon his head, as always eliciting a grimace from the aging man. “Why this is necessary I’ll never understand…” he lapsed into his usual mutterings and complaints. He withdrew a small key from his pocket, three-pronged. Into the locking mechanism of the inner door, he set this key and waited. A green light shone, and he turned the key two clicks left, three clicks right, and one click back left. He punched in one more keycode.