The Liberty Primary and Secondary School was housed in a former strip mall on the highway out of town. Doors had been cut between each of the storefronts allowing for four sections, each containing a class spanning three ages. Erica was in the 7-8-9s, a class of sixteen students. Most of the children had never been in school before, human schools outside of the major cities nonexistent, and robot schools unnecessary when knowledge could be uploaded en masse.
Erica’s classroom had been a clothing store at some time, and the walls were still covered in long horizontal slats from which hooks could be hung in endless configurations. A SMART Board hung on a side wall, and maps and wildlife photographs and children’s art did its best to make the space feel like a proper classroom and not a failed business.
“I’m so sorry,” Laughton said to Miss Holly as he and Kir came in the door, the young teacher already putting her bag over her shoulder, ready to go home.
“It’s fine,” Miss Holly said, but her tone made it clear she was annoyed.
Erica sat on the floor, engrossed in some kind of game on her tablet.
“Hey there, little one,” Kir said.
At the sound of his voice, Erica looked up. Her face opened wide. “Kir!” She jumped up, ran to him, and threw her arms around the robot. “Kir, Kir, Kir.” She released Kir’s waist and grabbed his hand, and jumped up and down, up and down, jerking his arm.
Laughton could tell his old partner was pleased simply because he said nothing, allowing Erica to do her celebratory dance without comment. Laughton was happy too, happy and proud that his daughter had that kind of bond with a robot. Despite everything that was said around her, sometimes by her parents even, she was untroubled with prejudice, something too few people were, and the very reason the preserve existed. “Okay, Erica,” Laughton said. “That’s enough.” She kept jumping and squealing. “Enough, Erica.” He put his hand on her head and she stopped. She didn’t let go of Kir’s hand. Instead, she started to drag him into the classroom.
“I want to show you my nature project,” she said, and took him over to a small table that was covered with shoebox dioramas.
Miss Holly came over, and said, “Is this your uncle?” to Erica. Getting a better look at Kir, her smile wavered, but she did what she could to hide it. Only Laughton would probably have noticed. It was amazing: when they lived among them, it could be a real challenge to tell the robots from the humans. Laughton guessed that months without seeing any robots made their appearance as “other” more apparent.
“An old friend,” Kir said.
“Right,” Miss Holly said, and whatever more she had planned to say, she kept to herself. “See you tomorrow, Erica.”
“Can I just show him—”
“No,” Laughton said.
Erica flashed an exaggerated grimace, and then started dragging Kir toward the front door.
“Say goodbye, Erica,” Laughton called after her, but she didn’t even look back. Laughton rolled his eyes at Miss Holly, and said, “Goodbye.”
Miss Holly, restrained, said, “Have a good night.”
At home, Erica gave Kir a tour of the house while Laughton took some Tylenol and ibuprofen. When they joined him in the kitchen, Kir said, “You should go to bed.”
“No,” Laughton said, “I’m not going to leave you.”
“You look terrible,” Kir said. “You’ll be a greater help to me rested.”
“You sure?” Laughton said. The idea of bed seemed so wonderful. It wasn’t even beginning to get dark yet, but his head weighed a hundred pounds.
“Go.”
“Kir will watch me,” Erica said.
Laughton stood, but hesitated another moment. “I feel bad. You sure?”
“Go.”
Laughton was grateful for his old partner. He put his hand on Kir’s shoulder on the way out of the kitchen. “Be good for Uncle Kir,” Laughton said to Erica. “Just make sure she eats,” he said.
“I was going to plug her in,” Kir said with a grin.
Upstairs in the darkened room, Laughton took his phone out of his pocket before taking off his pants. He climbed into bed, the pain in his head spinning around to his face as he lay, his head back, like a bubble in a bottle of water. The overhead fan was pleasantly chilling.
He felt guilty for leaving Erica. Betty would not approve. He reached over for his phone. Still no text from her. He texted, “ETA?”
This time, the phone indicated that she was typing back. Eventually the words popped up: “Soon. Everything’s fine. Tell you about it when I get home.”
He dropped the phone down on his nightstand, rubbed his face with both hands, and let out a long breath.
It was dark in the room when Laughton jolted awake. The phone on his nightstand was buzzing, Commissioner Ontero’s name showing on the screen. Laughton closed his eyes, not wanting to pick up, but that only made him feel guilty. He turned, propped himself on one elbow on the bed, and picked up the phone. “Laughton,” he said.
“Your boys’ house just burnt down.”
“What?” Jesse swung his feet around so he was sitting up. “Whose house?”
“Your dead hacker. Or it’s still burning. I don’t know.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My computer boys were staying out there as their decryption programs ran. Thank god they were staying on the first floor.”
Jesse’s thoughts went to the robots who had been staking out the place earlier in the day. “What happened? Who started it?”
“You want to get out there. It’s still going. They just called.”
“Shit. Did they get anything out?”
“Jesse, are you hearing these boys could have been burnt up? What the fuck is going on?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, find out. You and your partner need to come down here for a meeting tomorrow with all of the top brass.”
“Waste of time,” Laughton mumbled.
“Be there.” And Ontero hung up.
Laughton stood up. His head felt heavy, but the discomfort in his face had faded to a small, nagging spot just below his left eye, manageable. He pulled his pants back on, almost tripping. Erica’s door was slightly ajar. He shone his phone in the gap and saw her calm form sprawled out on her back in bed, one arm draped across her forehead. He started down the stairs, hearing voices. When he came into the dining room, he found Betty and Kir sitting across from one another at the dining room table. Betty looked disheveled and exhausted.
“I’m so glad we don’t live in Charleston,” she said when she saw him.
“Sam and Smythe’s house is on fire,” he said to Kir.
“What!”
“Ontero wouldn’t give details, but I’m guessing the anti-hacking program wasn’t bullshit. We should go.”
“Now?” Betty said.
Laughton came up behind her, bent to wrap an arm around her, and kissed the top of her head. “How’s your mom?”
“She’s fine. I set her up in the guest room. It took forever in the emergency room, and then they wanted us to see a dentist about the broken teeth, but he said that he wanted the swelling to go down before he assessed what needed to be done. We can talk later if you need to go.”
Kir stood up, and Betty did as well.
“Okay,” she said. She stretched. “I’ve got to deal with a roomful of terrors in the morning. Time to go to bed.”
“Good night,” Kir said.
“Good night, hon,” Laughton said.
She kissed him on the cheek as she walked out, and the former partners were left in the dining room in the small area lit by the overhead light. It was a bit like being in an interrogation room.
“We better go,” Kir said.
“Commissioner demands our presence in a roomful of our own terrors in the morning, some bigwig metals conference.”
“Got it from Pattermann,” Kir said.
“All right.” Laughton thought about those robots hanging around the hackers’ house. The fire might have been caused by Smythe’s security, or it might have been something else. “One minute,” he said, and headed into the kitchen. He pulled open the basement door beside the refrigerator. Brooms and mops and brushes clattered on their hooks on the back of the door as he went downstairs. The basement was split in half, the front finished with wall-to-wall carpeting and a drywall ceiling with high-hat lights. They had set it up as a den with the same furniture and television that had graced their apartment in Baltimore—no looting the preserve for the chief of police’s family. Laughton went through the hollow-core door into the back half of the basement, which was unfinished, a storage area and workbench lit by bare lightbulbs, the sockets screwed into the joists below the exposed underfloor. There was a safe under the workbench, a green, two-foot cube, with both a keypad and a manual dial. His mind blanked on the combination for a moment, his eyes going up and to the right as he tried to remember.
The combo clicked in his mind, and he spun the dial, right, left, right, and a red LED light began to blink next to the keypad. He punched in the code, and the light turned green, the sound of the lock disengaging, a dull thunk. He pulled the safe open and took out two electromagnetic dampers, black disks maybe two and a half inches across and half an inch thick with a recessed button on the top to arm them. The damper would attach itself to a robot, and override its system, effectively shutting him down for as long as ten minutes with no lasting effect. He pocketed those. Then he pulled out a shoulder holster that contained a Taser on the left and a yellow, fingerprint-locked service revolver, his spare, the other one still in the drawer at the station. He slung his arms through the straps, adjusting the holster so it fit comfortably. He hadn’t needed to carry any weapons in the past nine months, but he had still kept them in working order, cleaning and checking them once a month. He considered the magazines of electric-tipped bullets at the bottom of the safe, but he decided the dampers were enough if they ran into any robots. He closed the safe, and it locked itself.
Upstairs, Laughton saw Kir see the weapons, but his partner didn’t comment. He just followed Laughton to the front door.