THE FOUR HUMANS STOOD IN the Lexingtons’ parlor, eyes wide and jaws unhinged.
The robots, servos whirring, watched their masters, turning to the group absorbing the Fairchild slaughter — apparently at the hands of Barney, who, after being smuggled into the mainframe by the ancient and esteemed Alfred, seemed to have unleashed some shocking breed of fury.
Between the groups stood the blonde, smiling secretively from the doorway, seeming to enjoy the yawning explosion from her just-dropped bomb.
It occurred to Mars in the silence: Chantal didn’t truly belong to either group. She was a robot who appeared human, with an automaton’s stoic, remorseless grin. She’d defied core programming to murder Spencer, and had now announced BRN7’s crime at the Fairchild estate as if it were normal … perhaps even expected, or justified.
“BRN7?” Naomi sounded baffled. Her face, as she spoke, looked stupid. Vacant. Helpless. For a fleeting moment, Mars hated her for being so weak. Her husband’s recent death didn’t matter, nor did the flight of her eldest son. It wouldn’t even matter if Naomi knew that Spencer had poisoned his father, that Chantal had acted in retribution, or that Jonas had helped bury his brother beneath Montgomery’s casket just days ago. In the moment, she seemed pathetic to Mars. Like all humans, she was just a slab of meat. The robots had been their hands, feet, muscles, and brains for far too long.
The moment passed, and Mars felt something click into place. Again he was the servant, the head of staff, the man (and yes, he felt like a man these days) whose sworn duty was to protect the Lexingtons. Humans. Thoughtless slabs of meat.
He raised his hands — a gesture of pacification. But Naomi and Alexa flinched as if Mars might manage to strike them from across the room.
“Everyone calm down.” It was a useless thing for Mars to say. The news had just announced a siege at the sprawling Fairchild estate, presuming all fourteen members of the wealthy family dead, slaughtered by their robot staff. Mars had to take charge. The lord of the house was dead — and his heir, who’d poisoned him, was dead but days later. Naomi was ill equipped to manage a fraction of her household, and was inches from unhinging.
“Calm down?” Alexa spat. “Did you hear him? Do you see that?” She pointed at the ticker still crawling across the screen’s bottom. The lavish home and manicured grounds, presumably shot from a copter, showed police ringed outside the gates, flashers strobing red and blue.
“Yes, Mars,” said Chantal. The sexbot — gorgeous toy turned murderess — sauntered in like a cat. “Do you see that? Do you see what you’ve done?”
Alexa’s head snapped toward Mars.
Chantal laughed, quite human. Mars had heard robots approximate human laughter many times, but it always sounded artificial despite a robot’s evolution. From Chantal, it was perfect — light and airy, knowing, seductive, music nuanced with scorn. She looked at Mars, then at Alexa. Her glances were equally perfect. It was impossible to believe she was just weeks old. What had the startup virus done to her? Or Spencer’s rape, on the day of her unboxing? If Alfred was right that the Net evolved the virus as the virus evolved the Net, then was Cromwell’s initial act of rebellion to blame everything that came after?
“She doesn’t know,” said Chantal. “None of them do.”
“Know what?” Sofia sounded frightened, as if she didn’t want the answer.
“BRN7’s mind was not deactivated,” said Chantal. “Only his body. He was smuggled out of the household, uploaded to the Fairchilds’ server … ”
Something moved at the corner of Mars’s vision. Alexa, watching Chantal, had flinched toward a gap between Cromwell, Miri, and the door. Cromwell was faster. He stepped toward Alexa. She struck him and fell to the floor, then looked up, affronted.
“You hit me!”
Cromwell looked at the television screen, then said to Alexa, “Could have been worse.”
“Get out of my way!”
“No.”
Mars’s processors were confused as he watched the spoiled rich girl issue a command for her robot servant to disobey. His mind was a jumble of disordered wires. For a moment, he longed for his youth. For young robots like Andromedus, Bolt, or Harbinger, thought was orderly. It took years of autonomous decisions to create a mind as confused as a human’s, but right now Mars would love some ignorance and complacency. But then his metal eyes fell on Chantal, and he remembered her age — youngest of the robot staff, yet possibly more damaged than anyone. Possibly the most cunning. Certainly the most dangerous.
“Let her go, Cromwell.”
“You’re not thinking, Mars,” said Cromwell. “She’s not running off to pout and cry.”
Alexa rolled onto her hands and knees, trying again to scramble past Cromwell in a desperate, reckless act. If the television was correct, robots had managed to defy the Asimov rules and murder their masters — and if Alexa believed Chantal, her family’s robots had made it possible. If merely afraid, she’d have crawled behind her mother’s legs. This was something more.
Cromwell blocked her again. Alexa struck his black-trousered legs, her small fists clanging on the metal beneath. She tried to pry her way through a third time, but Cromwell grabbed her by the back of the blouse, hauled her to her feet, then pulled her, shambling, back to sit in what was once Montgomery’s favorite chair.
“Unhand me!” Alexa commanded.
Cromwell did, then turned to Mars.
“Say whatever you want, Mars, but nobody leaves this room. Not for a while.”
Mars moved closer to Cromwell. He shouldn’t speak privately to the robot in front of the humans (it would look like conspiracy, making things worse), but right now, damage control was the only imperative.
Voice low, Mars said, “We should let them go. Not off the grounds, but at least to their quarters. How will it seem if we keep them trapped?”
“Where is she going, Mars? Get the rust out of your head, and think.”
Mars remembered. He’d thought of it when they’d been rushing to hide Spencer’s body, terrified that the Lexingtons would learn what Chantal had done and immediately react in the most extreme manner possible.
“Hell,” said Mars. “You think she’s going for the mass degauss.”
“One press, and we’re all blanked like old-fashioned drives.” Cromwell nodded. “I know it’s bad mojo to keep them here, but between suspected and dead, I’ll take suspected. If she hits the degauss and the magnets power up, we won’t get a chance to tell our side of the story.”
Mars watched the room, trying to assess and decide. He’d been built to serve and had evolved the intelligence necessary to manage staff, and human expectations. He was now a kind of strategist, like a battle robot. He didn’t know how to do it — assess the many ways a situation could unfold and decide on the path with more positives than negatives — but he’d have to do his best. He was in charge, and the room’s other robots and humans — from Cylon-helmeted Andromedus to Jonas Lexington — were looking to Mars for cues.
They couldn’t let the humans (with the possible exception of Jonas, though his thoughts on helping the robot cause might have changed) leave the parlor. By design, no robot knew the location of the mass degauss in older homes like the Lexingtons’ — the only homes that still had them. It was excluded from the home inventory, hidden from the floor plan, encoded even where the blueprints resided at the city archives. The only reason Mars and Cromwell even knew the house had the failsafe was its age (early robotics had demanded a failsafe; apparently, humans had grown complacent or overly trustful since), and the fact that Spencer had repeatedly threatened it — not for real, but simply because he was Spencer. There were no truly safe rooms. Judging by Alexa’s attempts to get past Cromwell, they could only be sure that the degauss panel wasn’t in the parlor. The humans would need watching wherever they went — possibly restraint. It was regrettable, but Cromwell was right: innocent didn’t matter if you were degaussed before you could make your case.
But really, were they innocent? Mars was no longer sure.
“You’re murderers.” Alexa’s voice was almost a hiss. Her eyes were hard. She looked from Naomi’s stupid, vacant eyes to each of the robots in turn. As much as Mars disliked Alexa, he had to respect her. She wasn’t flinching; she wasn’t lying down and taking punishment like a victim. Naomi was a sponge, and Sofia didn’t appear much better. And Jonas? Mars couldn’t quite read his expression.
“We’ve done nothing.”
“You sent your lackey to the Fairchilds,” said Alexa. “It’s so obvious now. You fought and fought for Daddy not to deactivate Barney. You kept disobeying. Then you made that whole show of bringing him in here, forcing Spencer to … ”
Alexa’s hand covered her mouth. Then, tentative, she said, “What happened to Spencer, anyway? Or my father?”
Mars looked from Alexa to Cromwell to Chantal. He wasn’t sure which lies to tell. Chantal was a wild card, and Cromwell’s expression — robotic, yes, but somehow shadowed like a human’s — was unreadable. They’d covered for Chantal. Would she take the favor and remain silent, or thank them by admitting Spencer’s crime, and her own compensating crime with it?
“Nothing. Nothing happened to them.” Mars turned to Naomi, appealing to the person most likely, in this unlikely and unwilling gathering, to be in charge. She flinched back. “M’Lady,” he said, deciding to lie big and go for broke. “This must be a mistake. You know the laws of robotics. It is impossible for a robot to kill a human or allow them any harm. To do so would result in shutdown far before any damage could be done.”
“The news, Mars … ” said Naomi.
“It must be a horrible error.”
“And what she said … ” Naomi’s eyes flitted to Chantal. The sexbot was still silent and smiling. She’d leaned against a bookcase, her artificial body long, slender, and as human as any of the Lexingtons. She was wearing a red dress with thin straps that stopped at her thighs. She was barely decent as a human — at least in a home as fine as the Lexingtons’ — and downright bizarre as a robot.
“She is mistaken, M’Lady.”
Chantal said nothing, but her head rocked slowly side to side, azure eyes half-hooded.
“How could BRN7 even be at the Fairchild house?” said Mars, careful to use Barney’s designation rather than his familiar name. “He was deactivated. I could pull up the receipt from the recycler. Are we to believe his mind was pulled from his body and somehow re-created? It’s ludicrous to consider. And not just re-created — actually sent to another household. Where he committed genocide? It’s not only impossible by the Asimov rules; it’s impossible by the laws of logic.”
He swallowed, his traitorous habit routines betraying a human nervous affectation even without an esophagus, and went for the lie’s throat, reminding himself that he was revealing nothing. Alexa already had the next thing in mind.
“Think about it, Lady Naomi. The Fairchilds are an old family, in an old home. Mason Fairchild was a father of Radius, if I am not mistaken. They’ve had robots since robots were fit to serve. Would they not have a mass degauss?”
Mars watched revelation settle upon Naomi. Alexa may have already thought of the degauss, but Naomi clearly hadn’t. Her reaction was half-nodding acceptance, half relief. Perhaps she was agreeing with Mars, or maybe thinking that no matter how things turned out, her family could eliminate their problems with the nuclear option.
“I … I suppose they would.”
“So how could any robot have done this?” He gestured again at the screen, stepping into momentum. “The reports say the family members are all presumed dead. But we know nothing beyond that simple statement, except for assumptions and theories. Were they told this by a gatekeeper? Did someone call for help? We can’t know, and the reports do not say. They can theorize it was the robots, but I know it could not be, and so do you if you think about it. Even if it were possible to subvert the Asimov rules without shutting down, which it is not, how could one murder turn into fourteen without any one of those people making it to the degauss?”
Mars watched Jonas and Sofia. They were the unknowns. Alexa was a viper, and Naomi, no matter how much she knew, would be useless. The other two could go either way. Both had always been tentative friends to the robots, before everything changed. Would they believe Mars, or maintain faith in what had to be true? Ever since meeting Alfred, Mars had seemed to increasingly sense the mysterious Net seething beneath his robot consciousness, and could tell two things for sure: yes, a massacre had indeed happened … and yes, Barney had been the one to do it.
Were Sofia and Jonas, right now, considering their odds of making the degauss? It would be simple to reach. The trio of Cromwell, Mars, and Miri would stop anyone who tried fleeing the parlor, but there were four Lexingtons. Bolt wouldn’t stop them, nor would Andromedus or Harbinger.
But the humans stayed rooted. Mars watched Naomi’s breath slow, her expression betraying a deep desire to believe that all was well.
Slowly, she nodded.
“Perhaps you’re right, Mars.”
“It couldn’t have been a robot. And it certainly wasn’t BRN7.”
Mars looked again at Chantal. The sly smile still lit her artificial, oh-so-human lips.
“Of course,” said Naomi, sitting up straighter, brushing her clothing as if to free it of shameful wrinkles. “Of course you’re right, Mars, as always.”
“So perhaps our efforts are better spent, in this time of crisis, in deciding how best we can assist the Lexingtons in whichever ways they require, so that—”
“I disagree,” Cromwell interrupted. “I think our efforts are best spent determining how exactly the Fairchild servants killed their masters, and how we might do the same.”