Otto had access to enough Phoenixes to use their built-in robotics factories. He didn’t need to do the laborious work of screwing skeletons together, welding a T-frame, or any of that nonsense. It was still a lot of physical work, but Otto was used to that.
Fifty-five hours later, he had three humanoid shells. Reggie was tired from munching metal, and had curled up to nap. But Otto wasn’t done. Not by a damn sight.
The next step was to call on Jason, who had the money, brains, and boredom to help out. Otto wagered that Jason was getting a little antsy at not being able to jet around the world, doing exciting things, and this project would let him do a little bit of that. And when Otto explained, Jason’s mouth twisted slowly into a grin. “Sounds like fun!”
Within eighteen hours, Jason was cruising the roads of Dubai in a custom supercar literally nobody else in the country owned, or could own. Their destination was Romans Aviation, but there was plenty of time to play around, do some racing, dodge a few foreign spies and their inadequate BMWs. The usual. And after a couple of hours of negotiation, inspection, and legal hullabaloo, Otto Newman was the proud owner of a used Boeing B737-800 jet aircraft.
By comparison, buying the fire engine was almost ridiculously easy. Jason took care of that via a cell phone call on the flight back.
“These aren’t just toys to play with, right?” Jason had asked, mock-sternly.
“Don’t worry, J-Bear! You’re gonna love this. The stuff we can do with rescues alone is gonna be worth it.”
The work spilled out of Site 5 and onto the field next to it.
Now came the hardest part.
Otto sat in the lotus position on the concrete floor of Site 5’s hollow interior. Thin cables connected his torso to a Heart Factory. Reggie the Phoenix chirped curiously from nearby, but was content to sit coiled up and observe. There wasn’t much to observe, honestly. It was all happening in Otto’s head.
Otto remembered everything Leo knew about creating him. The seed of Pneuma didn’t exist in Otto’s mind, but he understood the principle. Be someone else, strongly enough to experience it. The Heart Factory would lock onto that delta, unwind it, build the mathematical matrix in memory, then reverse engineer a connectome for it.
What the technology couldn’t do is let Otto be someone else. He had to do that himself. But to do that, he had to know who he was.
Leo at thirteen years old. Foster child of a junkyard manager and truck driver. Two hard-working, loving people, who didn’t have as much time for their son as they wanted, but always tried anyway.
Otto’s speech pattern wasn’t an affectation. His accent, very different from the boss’s, was based on that of his parents. Leo had unconsciously adopted the speech and mannerisms of important people during his formative years, and when he baked Otto, this one stuck. But it wasn’t just how he spoke. His personality, his comfort zone, everything about him, was colored not only by that angry young inventor that had made him, but by the reliable blue-collar folks that Leo had attached himself to. He had something of the good ol’ boy in his soul.
He couldn’t imagine the souls he envisioned as being anything different. This was a job for a stoic construction worker type, the rugged git-'er-done sort, the Steely Eyed Missile Man. They’d have as much free will as Leo himself had granted Otto, but Otto got to set the trajectory.
One at a time - one at a time. The big guy. The bigger guy. The biggest guy. Hour after hour, Otto visualized, and the Heart Factory recorded.