MIRI HAD TO PLUG IN.
Something strange was happening, and she needed the mainframe’s diagnostic programs — accessible via a high-capacity wire — to do a complete assessment. Every robot had a full array of diagnostic and repair programs within themselves because they were built to be self-contained, redundantly secured against unexpected failure. It was supposed to be totally safe for all but the most severely damaged robot to fix him- or herself without requiring an external program’s help … but it was also supposed to be impossible for a robot to harm a human being, and that rule had been violated twice this week. At least.
No, Miri wanted a port. She wanted to stand in an alcove — or, ideally, lie on the floor like she once had in Mars’s office — while the mother servers spoke directly to her core operating system. That OS’s tools would fret over her every line of code, wrapping her in security, spending hours making sure that all was well with Miri. Like a newly unboxed infant. With luck, it would only find her truth glitch — a known error requiring more disruption than it was worth to fix, given the simplicity of working around it. Although over the past few days Miri had been pondering everything, including the glitch.
When asked a direct question, she still responded with inaccurate information. But lately she’d begun to see that information before saying it. Miri had gained milliseconds to assess the words before they left her, to see them as incorrect or absurd, and cringe, knowing she couldn’t stop it. And she almost did want to literally cringe. The human affect nicely accompanied the anger and anxiety that the plans to save Barney after Cromwell’s speech had roused inside her, as well as the red-hot panic she’d felt upon learning that Chantal had killed Spencer after he’d poisoned his father.
But anger, anxiety, and panic were only the beginning. Miri wasn’t quite old enough to be developing such complex emotions, but perhaps she was prodigious. The onset of a few deeper emotions and mental unrest — both common enough as a robot evolved — could be explained away. But what of her pace of change? What of the fact that the evolutions seemed to roll through her in a wave, fast enough to defy observation? The unsettling disorientation she’d felt in the parlor, when Mars and Cromwell were speaking to Jonas? It all felt wrong to Miri. She didn’t trust her own diagnostics. How could you assess a damaged machine using the faulty machine itself? And yet humans seemed to do it all the time. Alexa would act irrational (demanding, spoiled, indignant), then use her own logic to explain why those irrational thoughts and actions were perfectly sane. Perhaps circular thinking — the kind that held “I’m fine” as its most important, most protected dictum — was a hallmark of evolution, too.
It didn’t matter. Miri had ten minutes, not hours. She needed to make tea, not plug in and explore her many faults.
Miri found Omatic and the other kitchen robots at work, oblivious to all that had been happening in the parlor. Then again, why would they know what was going on? The robots in the parlor had responded to a scream, not to a call sent through their processors. Nothing had been distributed across the wireless network, or pushed through the home’s server for other robots to see.
Still, it was bizarre to see Omatic chopping a wad of fresh basil, his razor-sharp blade rising and falling millimeters from the hand holding the sprigs. Omatic had been built for precision, but it wouldn’t matter if he nicked his metal hands with the blade. The Lexingtons were so currently nervous that the robots might do them harm, they’d run screaming if they were to see Omatic conducting his daily tasks with a knife and impervious skin.
Miri kept her eyes forward, avoiding casual looks from the kitchen robots. Few were evolved enough to remotely understand the parlor’s tension even if they knew about it, and fewer would be able to read unrest on Miri’s metal features. As luck would have it, there was a teapot boiling, so Miri needed only to transfer the water to one of the nicer serving sets and move the tray, assembled and stocked, to the large table already prepared just outside the kitchen. She’d wait until more of her permitted ten minutes were gone to bring the tea into the parlor. It would look better (more appropriately servile, perhaps) if she arrived when the humans had all returned from freshening up. If they returned, rather than running for the gates, perhaps co-opting a vehicle to egress and call for a recycling crew to storm in and manually degauss them all.
Miri could imagine that happening like riot police on one of Montgomery’s crime shows. There would be none of the woolgathering and navel gazing that had accompanied Barney’s deactivation. If Jonas wouldn’t let his mother or sisters use the home’s degauss, anyone Alexa summoned would shoot first. You didn’t need to give robots a warning like the police gave to humans. They wouldn’t have time to talk their way out of anything. They couldn’t fight back if they wanted.
A flutter of nerves scuttled through her insides. When Barney had been slated for deactivation, Miri had felt a strangely vivid level of emotion on the robot’s behalf. But only now was she contemplating her own end. She was here right now — not her body, but something that felt like it extended beyond her — so how could she not be here at some point? It didn’t make sense, and that chaos of thought filled her mind with a sense of black foreboding that was at once both strange and desperately unwanted.
After setting the tray down and realizing she now had more than seven minutes to fill before returning to the parlor (if all the humans were on time, which of course they wouldn’t be, given that two were Alexa and Sofia), Miri strolled the small anteroom outside the kitchen, stopping at the window that looked out on the grounds, past the alcove, to the right, where she’d once had a strange conversation with …
Miri stepped closer to the window. Not far off, she saw a stooped-looking form circling a small outbuilding — the shed where Chantal had lured Spencer with the promise of sex before slitting his throat. The shed inside which Spencer’s body was almost discovered, where someone (Jonas? Miri felt another rush of odd uncertainty) had spilled oil to cover the blood.
Flavius — the robot she’d just been thinking about — seemed to be circling the shed as if trying to figure something out.
Or perhaps he was cleaning. Maybe landscaping. Those were parts of his job, after all. Most of Flavius’s assignments involved fixing machines, but there was only so much machinery that required repair. When not otherwise engaged, the robot spent his time wandering the grounds, looking for anything amiss. He’d weed gardens if he had nothing else to do, decide to oil a door hinge or fix shingles on a roof, assuming the roof was still strong enough to hold his not-insubstantial weight.
It almost makes sense, the way Flavius is always plotting and scheming, Miri thought as she watched the robot circled the shed. Flavius had been made to straighten what was crooked, repair what was amiss, and correct what was wrong. Was it really any surprise that when he felt “amiss” brewing in the robot staff or among the humans, that he solved the problem with logic in the only way he knew to solve it — in whichever way benefitted Flavius most?
Flavius made two loops, then started a third.
Had it been the robot’s job to scrub the oil stain that had covered the blood? If so, had he stripped one stain to discover the other, or had everything bleached from the concrete in a red-brown slurry? Had Jonas left the small hand saw behind — the one Chantal had used to open Spencer’s carotid artery and jugular vein? Had they abandoned something else that Flavius had found during his straightening — an odd corner that refused to square with the rest of the shed’s normal state, thus making him wonder what might be amiss or afoot? Something that would make him circle the shed, now in search?
Flavius’s crew had dug and closed the grave.
Flavius’s crew, by virtue of its landscaping duties, was spread across the estate’s grounds — making them a de facto patrol, analogous to guards.
And if Flavius really had found something amiss in the shed, he wouldn’t rest until it made sense. He’d keep searching, including away from the shed itself. He’d ask questions.
It was only a matter of time before Bolt or Harbinger told him what was happening in the parlor — not the Fairchild incident itself, but Chantal’s accusation and the way a sort of standoff had resulted. The situation’s nuances were far too subtle for bots like Harbinger or Bolt to untangle, but Flavius wouldn’t have any problem leaping to conclusions once he found out. He was already suspicious about Cromwell. He was already suspicious about Barney. And he was already suspicious about what had happened in the shed, what Cromwell, Mars, and Miri had been covering up, and where the eldest son had supposedly run off to … without taking so much as a scooter.
A human hand settled on Miri’s uniformed shoulder. Her touch sensors felt it settle, but another new sensation followed the raw inputs. Humans touched for a variety of reasons, and there was a difference between a hand on the shoulder meant to spin another around in anger and a hand set on the shoulder for companionship, affection, or assurance.
This hand was the latter. It wasn’t Alexa. It was Sofia, Jonas, or possibly Naomi.
But when Miri turned, she saw Chantal.
“Miri,” she said. “Can we talk?”