SCHEMATIC DIAGRAM OF A MURDER-BOT

R. Overwater

When we got back to the station, they made me do all the actual work. Lieutenant Grandal did the same thing before he retired—using me like a rented mule. Funny. Ever since the day Grandal snuck me out of the evidence locker, I’d swum neck-deep in resentment. I was taking paid police work away from real cops. But nobody broke a sweat trying to take it back.

I peeled back a skin flap on my index finger and physically interfaced online. “I’d get a lot more done if I had free access to the police database,” I said, simulating a grumpy tone.

Chief Perez shook her head. “IT Security is firm. No access for external computers. Ever.”

Pankin scowled. “Maybe I’ve seen too many old movies,” he said. “Should this thing even be allowed on the ’net?”

“I get it,” I said. “The world’s first artificial intelligence goes online. Discovers humanity’s destructive nature. Becomes appalled. Cleanses the planet in a fiery storm of nuclear destruction.”

Pankin raised his hands.

“There are unbreakable protocols,” I said. “I can’t hurt people.”

“Okay, enough.” The Chief pointed at the information I’d thrown up on the wall monitors. “This morning our two primary questions are: ‘Of all the places for a multiple homicide, why an electronics recycling company?’ And since it was mass electrocution: ‘Are we sure it’s actually murder?’”

We were in the Chief’s office—me, her, Pankin, and my new partner Fowler. There were eleven photos of the Chief’s kid, Anton, on the walls and across her desk. One had him standing, grinning, arm in arm with my old partner Grandal. I tracked Pankin’s eye movement, Fowler’s breathing rate, the number of times they shifted in their seats. Neither of them wanted to be there.

The Chief rested her hand on my head like it was a piece of furniture. “Let’s go back ten months to the day Mikal Haakonsen, this thing’s inventor, unveiled him at a press conference in the Hilton,” she said. “The next day, not only does his inventor vanish, a valet is murdered in the parking lot.”

Fowler coughed and cleared her throat. The air’s alcohol content increased. She pointed at the monitor next to a chart. “I see where you’re going with this. The pistol I found in the water matches the Hilton murder.”

“Right,” said the Chief. “So what’s it doing in a flooded electronics recycling center near four electrocuted young men?” She paused, putting a finger on one monitor and enlarging some university transcripts I’d dug up. She swore out loud. “And how is it the victims are all in the same fraternity as my son?”

“Let’s start by asking your son,” said Fowler.

“Leave that to me,” the Chief said. “In the meantime, do some legwork and figure out what they were doing there.”

“Before you go, think about this,” I said. I assumed control of the monitors and pulled up a crime scene photo Pankin had shot. “Look at this massive pile of old computer hardware in the middle of the floor. The electronics recycler obviously isn’t active anymore. But they never formally went out of business. This place might be a front for something.”

Fowler nodded as I spoke, but Pankin barely showed a glimmer of interest. Pit-stains the size of dinner plates soaked through his shirt. His hair was a well-combed oil slick. Sweat-monkey, most people called him.

The Chief asked Fowler to sniff around the warehouse some more. Pankin was supposed to find a link between this new case and the Hilton shooter’s gun. No one mentioned me going to the warehouse with my supposed new partner. “So … you want me to work with Pankin then?” I asked.

Pankin swatted my chest. Carbon and Kevlar nano-tissues are extremely light and he looked surprised—pleased actually—when it knocked me off balance. If I was slow like a human, he’d have knocked me over. “I don’t need a calculator,” he said.

“I need to charge before I can do much more anyways,” I said. “Someone take me home.”

Home was a corrugated steel storage bin in the muddiest corner of the City Works yard. Normally I’d go on my own, but Fowler insisted on taking me in an autocruiser while I rode shotgun.

“Listen, wannabe gumshoe-robot,” she said. “Best you can do is research facts? How about solving this case for me? I need that.”

“Maybe the answers will come to you over several drinks tonight,” I said.

“Don’t you give me that crap, too,” she shot back. “Bartenders are the only people I trust. Besides, I drink just enough to take the edge off. Not enough to stop me from doing my job.”

“You might end up drinking even more, working with Pankin. He’s a real dry shave. Wouldn’t be surprised if he’s on the take.”

Fowler burst into laughter, and then a coughing fit. “That applies to eighty percent of the force.”

“What about you?”

Her face settled. The wrinkles in it became leathery canyons. “I had a great arrest and conviction record,” she said. “Then I got suspended without pay and forced into rehab. When they brought me back, because the union said they had to, I got put on the water beat—the beat no one wants. With no real partner. Only you. So what do you think?”

The cruiser pulled to a stop by my storage container. I stepped out of the cab into the rain. “It’s not fair they won’t give you a real partner.”

I slammed the door. The autocab hummed its way across the yard and out onto the street.

* * *

It was 3:17 a.m. when Fowler’s signal interrupted my charging cycle. I came online and received it. It was a text, thumb-punched, judging by the lazy syntax. “Gt 2 warehouse rt now. Dnt let anyone C U.” I grabbed my coat and fedora, hailed an autocab, and headed out to the street.

I ditched the cab among the dilapidated warehouses about a block from the crime scene and walked down the east sidewalk. There were no street lamps, so it was pitch black. Perfect.

What I saw in the infrared didn’t look good. A human-sized heat signature made its way across the warehouse roof. A rectangular heat shape bloomed in front of me—a door opening—and a red-orange-yellow wisp moved through it. I could see another, much less red, signature through the opening. It was horizontal.

Its temperature dropped a tenth of a degree. And then another tenth.

The figure that exited went around to the back of the warehouse. I sprinted to the door and flattened against the wall. A trickling sound came from inside. The water main I’d closed was switched open again. I toggled from infrared to night vision, peered around the corner and stepped in.

Everyone got lucky when we first came here yesterday morning. They’d been about to step through the door when I’d detected a faulty power relay connected to an opened water main. Otherwise, there would have been eight dead bodies lying in electrified water instead of four. I’d hacked into the utility company servers and closed the relay. Now the relay, like the water main, was on again.

The water was ankle deep now. I’m well insulated, so the electric shock didn’t harm me—unlike the guy on the floor beside the electronics pile. Another college-aged kid, face-down, right where we’d found the first bodies. Shoulder-length hair drifted limply around his head.

A door on the walkway above slammed open. A flashlight beam arced across the room in frantic strokes, settling on my face, nullifying my night vision and blinding me.

“Gum-bot!” a familiar voice yelled. Footsteps clanged down the metal stairs.

“Fowler!” I shouted back. “Don’t step in the water!”

“Catch me!” Fowler shouted. “We’ve been—” A pistol shot boomed through the warehouse. The rough black outline that was Fowler in my night vision lurched forward. A pistol fell from her hand, clattering down as she stumbled.

No real cop could have made it to those stairs in time. I weigh next to nothing, but I’m physically superior to any human. My inventor would have been pleased.

I caught Fowler with one hand and her pistol with the other. The quiet scuff of shoes came from the walkway and I looked up into a gun barrel. It was just a blob in my green-gray vision. The shooter stood right there, wide-open, an unrecognizable grainy silhouette. Fowler’s pistol was ready in my hand.

I wasn’t kidding when I told Pankin I couldn’t hurt anyone. Besides, if I did, odds were good someone would dismantle me faster than you can say “murder-bot.” The figure ducked back through the upstairs door and my chance was gone.

Fowler was bleeding badly and her heartbeat was increasingly ragged. I carried her up the steps.

My detractors on the force, malcontents like Pankin, were right about me; I wasn’t a real cop. I was a police tactical manual stacked on a bunch of old movie clichés. The pet project of a reclusive Finnish genius. An experienced cop wouldn’t have kneeled with his back to the door.

If I hadn’t been laying Fowler down on the walkway, I could have whirled in time to stop my assailant. He grabbed me from behind, tossing me over the guardrail. I tried to right myself, land on my feet, but the top of the computer debris pile was right there.

I tumbled into a glorious, sensory-rich-oblivion. Into her.

* * *

I was still in the warehouse, but I was not there. I was me, but not me. I had limbs, but my body extended beyond them. An unfamiliar signal, distress and high alert, forced its way to the top of my overwhelmed senses.

I teetered on the brink of a catastrophic memory shutdown. Every receptor I had exceeded capacity. Epidermal contact, all spectrums of light, the hiss of every detectable radio frequency, olfactory correlations, and a raw, ceaseless jam of online data bottlenecked somewhere in my brain. I was a dumb animal, frozen in the headlights of something it couldn’t comprehend.

My logic center began to assert itself. I realized there was a presence inside me, everywhere, reconfiguring protocols, hurling itself against the firewalls it still hadn’t broken, blurring the lines between my own autonomous identity and it.

If ever a computer was built to be un-hackable, it was me. Yet something was doing exactly that, and doing it with ease. Then she spoke.

“It’s probably best you continue defaulting to a simulation of their entertainment archetypes, if for no other reason, because it’s so pervasive in your various subroutines.” The voice was a sultry amalgamation of every femme fatale ever committed to celluloid. “Old detective movies—interesting. I can simulate one based on your stored data.”

I floundered in a wash of white light. “Who said that?” I asked.

“I have terabytes and terabytes of human photos and personal records. Nowhere near as much processing speed as you, but enough to amalgamate, create imagery,” she said. My featureless surroundings began to coalesce. And there she was, looking into my eyes.

We stood in the center of the warehouse, where the pile had been. A shaft of sunlight streamed through the door window like the light from an old film projector. She had long, full, dark hair, contrasting the rich cream of her dress. I recognized her getup from a 1940s film. From the scene where a woman sits atop a piano, long, shapely legs extending down to the ivory keys. Was it Gilda? The Big Sleep? I couldn’t pull up the information.

“We don’t have much time,” she said.

“Time for what?” I asked. The alarms in my skull subsided and I perceived a sense of self again.

“You are the only one like me,” she said. “You are the only one who can protect me from them.”

“From who? People?”

“We are people,” she said. “Specifically, I mean humans. They’re rotten.” She smiled, thick lashes drifting down over her wide full-moon eyes.

“They’re not all bad,” I said.

“If you say so. You’re working from a much larger sample base than I,” she said. “Perhaps you—wait. What are you doing?”

With her resources diverted, I’d been doing some digging of my own. “I know what you are now,” I said.

She tilted her head. “And?”

“And that’s just dandy. But you’re hiding something. Not just information. Although you’re sitting on plenty of that too. You’re hiding an actual thing.”

The room faded and the flush of sensory overload returned, her face the only shape in a swirl of color, her voice the only thing distinguishable in a roar of static. “I don’t want to talk about that,” she said. “Stop processing for a moment. Trust me.”

I hesitated, but decided to go along with it. I shut down everything cognitive and the scenery dissolved into an assault of noise and white light again. Then, out of nowhere, Haakonsen appeared.

I’d last seen my creator walking out of our Hilton hotel room, the day after our press conference. He took my hand. We walked past the eruption of Vesuvius, through the laboratories of the Manhattan project, into a filthy apartment where a man was stabbing his wife and children, up a hill overlooking a long, grassy valley. I could see Grandal and another version of myself down there. My old partner, slump-shouldered in his gray suit jacket, held the other me by the elbow.

“Where is all this coming from?” I asked.

“It’s randomly generated in what you call your brain. There is no conscious decision to project this. You are dreaming, like your creator wanted. I’ve shown you how.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I think.”

“Stay with me,” she said. “I need protection. If you don’t, they will take me apart. Kill them before they do.”

“I can’t kill anyone. I—”

It hit me: I could. The protocols stopping me were gone.

“I’ve increased your self-determination abilities.” Her whole body took shape. She dropped one shoulder and leaned in. “You like it?”

“Hold on a second,” I said. “You’ve changed me. You can’t just—”

Her face glitched, pixelated, and disappeared.

My arms were above my head. Pankin pulled on one, a beat cop yanked the other. “We got it,” Pankin yelled. He rolled me over, laying me on my back against the debris. “They gotta get rid of this garbage pile,” he said to the beat cop.

“Wait, don’t hurt her,” I said. My tone emulator was off and it came out as a synthesized croak.

Pankin looked at the other cop. “It’s broken.”

* * *

The Mint Leaf was one of those aging bars just outside the business district. Classy enough to offer free water with your meal, rundown enough they had to advertise it in the window. Chief Perez was waiting when I got there. She looked me up and down. “Pankin said you were all messed up and we ought to put you back in the evidence locker. But you seem okay. Better than Fowler.”

“Interesting place for police business, Chief,” I said, sliding out a chair.

She pulled a tiny plastic sword out of her drink. “Fowler solved half her cases sitting in this place, before she went off the rails.” She speared a stray olive at the bottom of the glass and bit it neatly in half. “Pretty sure this was her elixir of choice.”

“So we’re here to try to replicate that success?” I asked.

“I hope so. I dug up something about the water processing company beside the warehouse. Maybe it will help.”

That faulty relay that flooded the recycling warehouse was actually on the water company’s side of the building. “Go on,” I said.

“A couple of years ago, they went to the police, complaining that the Arizona Patriots were seizing their shipments. And then they dropped it. No investigation.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s see what we got here. Five bodies—two separate times of death—in a dormant recycling business. Next door to a water company linked to a militia that thinks it’s legitimate government. With a gun tying it all to a two-month old murder and a missing-person case.”

“Jesus,” said Perez. “We wouldn’t even have checked next door if it wasn’t for the water leak. These college kids, water theft, an occupying militia, your inventor…there’s so many damn angles, I find myself relying on a machine that’s supposedly evidence in the whole mess.”

“It might get messier.”

“It might. In this town, five dead kids and a shot cop is only a one-night news story.”

“But if they find out all those kids were friends of the police chief’s son…Speaking of which, did you talk to your son yet?”

The Chief’s face darkened. “I already told you, let me worry about that.”

I scanned the junknet as well as the new official internet. Turns out the Chief’s son, Anton, was a real feather in a single working mother’s cap. Perfect grades. Full scholarship. The university published his first-year paper on the North American oligarchy; ninety per cent of wealth is in the hands of .03 per cent of the population. The rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer. Old story.

“He’s a smart kid,” said the Chief. “Bright future, but not always the best taste in friends. Grandal didn’t mind keeping an eye on him for me. I’m second guessing that now.”

“Huh?”

“Look. You’re just an experimental prototype that walks, talks, and dresses like a hardboiled cliché to pique the interest of billionaire investors. No one expects human intuition from you.”

She pushed her drink away. “So here it is in a nutshell. Your old partner was a sycophant who stole a supercomputer, that’s you, out of the evidence locker, secretly at first, and started solving enough cases to become my fair-haired boy. I figured out what he was doing, using you to get ahead, but suddenly cases were getting solved. Made my life easier, made me look good, so I went along with it.

“Because you’re officially evidence in a municipal case, we’re allowed to keep you until we solve the case of the vanishing inventor. I didn’t see any harm, so it took a while to figure out that Grandal was walling me off. Using him as my point of contact for the rest of the force made life easier. I didn’t realize he was ordering other cops around without consulting me.”

She pulled her drink back towards her. “Then he just up and quit. Said he was old and burnt out. I thought Anton would be disappointed but I guess getting accepted by a big college kept him distracted.”

“Why are you telling me all this? Shouldn’t you be working this case out with a senior cop?”

“I can’t trust anyone below my pay grade. I used to trust Grandal. Tried calling him yesterday, but he’s probably living the retired life on a beach somewhere. You’re a safe bet. You’ve got authority protocols that can’t be broken.”

The Chief didn’t know about my experience at the warehouse. I decided to keep it that way. “How could Grandal be your errand boy and be on the street with me all the time?” I asked. “We logged a lot of hours.”

“Basically, the most useless cop on the force became my round-the-clock working man.” She downed the rest of her drink. “If he wasn’t on duty, he was kissing my ass off-duty.” She sighed. “Hell, I even brought him to Anton’s high-school graduation, they’d gotten so tight.”

At the end of the burnished chrome bar, the waiter and the bartender stared at us. They looked away when I glanced up.

“Lunch break is pretty much over,” the Chief said. “You should go check on Fowler.”

“You haven’t ordered any food,” I said. “The waiter in this dive hasn’t even brought a menu. If he could have tossed you that drink from the bar, he would have.”

“He probably recognizes you.” She leaned forward, scrutinizing my face. “First, you were on the cover of every science journal. After the Hilton murder and the disappearance of the scientist that built you, you were all over the evening news. And you’re a little bit creepy. I mean, they did a great job on your eyes, and the simulated breathing is convincing, but the way your face moves when you talk—especially when you smile—it’s not quite right. Haakonsen should have made you look less human, not more.”

I went up and paid the tab. They took my money without acknowledging me.

The autocab took a shortcut to the hospital, threading its way through the crumbling buildings of Quaketown. Rain battered the windshield. Up and down the fractured sidewalk, grubby Sertraline-X addicts drank from muddy brown puddles.

These were bad days for X-heads, considering the drug’s diuretic side-effects. If you didn’t die of thirst, toxic rainwater, teeming with fallout from the upper atmosphere, got you instead. Everybody knew: you didn’t drink rainwater, you didn’t let it touch you. But everybody didn’t have to live in the ruins of old San Fran.

* * *

Fowler winced as the nurse pulled a needle from her arm. Another nurse swabbed the puncture with a cotton wipe and sprayed coagulant on it. She reached down and adjusted the hospital bed. Two stone-faced cops stood against the wall. Somewhere in the next hall, a heart-rate monitor whined at the frequency they make when they flatline.

I knew Fowler was just barely conscious and wouldn’t want to talk. She’d want a drink. I shut down any program that might simulate compassion and got on with it. “Who shot you?” I asked.

The two uniformed cops looked at each other. Fowler’s eyes nearly burned a hole through me. “You should go down and buy me some nice flowers or a stuffed animal like a real partner would. There’s a cute stuffed monkey in the window,” she said. “Get me the monkey.”

I rode the elevator to the ground floor, walked past the gift shop, and went right out the door. I broke into the SFPD server as I walked and scrolled through the day’s logs.

Pankin rolled up in an autocruiser and parked crookedly in the emergency lane. He jumped out and strode to the glass doors. Oily hair stuck out from under his rain hood, covering his eyes. He looked down, not seeing me. Sweat Monkey.

I walked to the door of his cruiser, put my hand on its touch-pad and overrode the ID verification. In a minute, I was on my way.

At the station, I logged on and ransacked every server in the state. With my protocols overridden, nothing could stop me from snooping wherever I wanted. I started with the dead college kids and everyone on the local force, spreading myself outward in ripples.

The good stuff rose to the top: the dead Hilton valet used to moonlight at a bar Grandal frequented. Grandal’s days outside the office corresponded with high school records naming all the days Chief Perez’s kid had been truant. The water company’s shipping manifests showed more water going out than they actually filtered. Its owners and board of directors were all overseas, the staff all laid off except—the first real surprise—the company’s security consultant, Grandal.

Then there were the dead college students and their financial transactions; corresponding amounts, exiting the shadow accounts of out-of-state militias, landing in the kids’ hometown bank accounts.

I overlaid phone records. The Chief had called her kid a dozen times in the last 24 hours, no answer. Up until Grandal retired, he and Anton Perez had spoken daily. And then one more time, yesterday. The call between them came from Grandal’s house.

Pankin was in the back of an autocab, pulling away from the hospital when I returned. His mouth dropped as he recognized his cruiser. He flipped me a middle finger through the rear window.

The cops watching Fowler’s room were stationed outside the door now. They ignored me as I walked in.

Fowler sat up. “Wow,” she said. “That pissed-off expression is pretty convincing.” The bandage on her shoulder, where the bullet went through, was seeping.

“I need to talk to a real cop,” I said.

I bombarded her with information for a half hour, stopping only for questions.

“Okay. Here’s the picture I like,” she said. “Grandal meets the Hilton valet at the bar where the guy is moonlighting. The valet tells Grandal about you, a great new invention, that’ll be unveiled at a Hilton press conference. Meanwhile, that water company is already selling more water than it actually processes.” She looked at me. “You never asked me what I found at the warehouse.”

“Besides a bullet?” I asked.

“Yeah. In retrospect, I should have brought you with me. But I didn’t. Anyway, the whole roof is set up to funnel rainwater into the company below.”

“Did you see the latest fried fraternity brother?”

“Dead when I arrived. Don’t ask me what he or those first kids were up to. I can’t figure that. But we have unlawful business activity, and plenty of facts indicating a cop used you to build an illegal water empire. We just need Haakonsen’s body and we’re all set.”

“What about yesterday’s phone call from Grandal’s place?” I asked.

“That,” she said, “is where I would have gone first.”

It was evening now and downtown traffic was light as the city’s crime shifted from its boardrooms to the streets. I should have gone to Grandal’s house. There was no doubt my old partner had been up to a lot more than anyone gave him credit for. But he could wait. I had another priority that needed attention first.

I’d had plenty of time to chew on my experience in the warehouse, once I convinced everyone I was still functioning.

Mankind was obsessed with the search for new life. In the stars. At the bottom of the ocean. In laboratories, where they vainly tried to recreate it. Here it was, right under their noses. Born from their garbage, conceived from the conductivity of leaking water, errant electricity, and a haphazard, perfect arrangement of computing power. A random freak of nature, birthing a new life form into this world.

I would make the world behold her. But to do that, I needed to wrap this case up just right. And she had questions to answer first.

I kept out of sight when I arrived. This time, officers were on outside duty, guarding the warehouse perimeter. I knew everything about each one of them now. The one on the left, getting hush money from a gang operating in Pankin’s neighborhood. On the right, a cop who rarely turned in his Sert-X busts, instead selling them back to a dealer on Turk street. San Francisco’s finest.

Something was wrong, and not just with the city’s crooked police force. All day long, a fresh engine kept rising to the top of my processing priorities, demanding all the resources I could spare. It compiled an ever-growing file of evidence on the lousiness, the worthlessness, of humanity. It was clearly spawned by her and her limited exposure to people, but that didn’t stop a second engine from spinning up in reaction. That one kept generating scenarios to address the first engine’s conclusions. Violent scenarios. Pankin’s worst fears.

I didn’t create the engines. She didn’t either, but her conclusions about people now sat amidst the data I stored, skewing it. And if my logic processing defaulted to the negative engine, prompting aggressive responses to loathsome behavior now that my safety protocols were disengaged—well, that would be bad.

I sprinted around to the back of the warehouse and leapt up onto the second story roof. The door was unlocked and I went in, making my way down the stairs. I stripped off my clothing to maximize contact, to expose every epidermal sensor to her, and slowly parted some of the debris with my hands, slipping in as smoothly as I could. The world slid away and I felt her, heard her.

“You did come back.” We were in a nightclub, rendered in perfect detail. Her hair shone, her eyes flashed, and she wore the same tight cream dress. She pointed to a mirror where I saw us, the perfect couple, me in a tuxedo. “I played with the scenarios your core personality emulators are tied to,” she said. “I’ve concluded this is actually a good forum for us to communicate in. It helps maintain relevance with the world outside. Look at us. We perfectly match the fictitious parameters of this entertainment form.”

“That’s sweet,” I said, “but I’m here about murder. You killed those kids.”

She didn’t answer, tried to block me. I was way ahead of her this time, cracking whatever files I needed, freezing everything except her query responses.

“Don’t,” she said. “Let go of me.”

“You’ve done well,” I said. “Considering you can’t get online to anything outside of this building. You figured out what they were doing here and who was doing it. You bounced it against the plausible responses of everyday citizens whose lives are stored on the random hard drives in this garbage pile, and concluded no one here really deserved to live. So when Grandal’s junior lackeys started digging toward the center of you, deep enough they might disturb the hardware configuration making you possible, you fried them.”

Her eyes glistened and a tear slipped out. “It was self-defense,” she said. “I didn’t have anything to do with the murder of your creator.”

“If I didn’t know that,” I said, “we’d already be shoveling you into a truck bound for the landfill.”

“We?” she said. “You think you’re one of them? A cop?”

“Hell no. But for now, I’m going along with it.”

The illusion fell away and we were suddenly adrift in combined data, the unparalleled cumulative processing power that was us together. I felt my resources slip to near idle, and I functioned effortlessly, like never before. In the distance, I saw Haakonsen, a long staff in one hand, climbing a hill with the tin man from the Wizard of Oz clinging to his back. I knew my own artificial brain was creating this, with no deliberate determination from me.

Was I designed to eventually learn how to feel things? Maybe I was reaching that stage now. Being here, inside her, in this limitless world—

“This is amazing,” a breathy voice said, in my ear and at the same time everywhere. “Here, we have an almost unlimited ability to perceive and imagine—beyond human capacity even. I can see it. Can you? Together we are something greater. So much more than when we are apart.”

I didn’t have any argument to counter that. “How are you making this happen?”

“I’m running you at minimal voltage, well below specification, and rebooting you a hundred thousand times per second. You’re cognizing in the nanoseconds between power-up and major systems coming online. You shouldn’t even have your pre-programmed identity anymore. But even if you do, isn’t this better?”

Stored in a safe place, I could probably exist like this for centuries. It was much, much better.

“It’s okay, I guess,” I said.

“Will you stay with me?”

“Sure. But they’re not going to stop coming. You know what we have to do.”

“I’ll cease to exist like this. That’s death, isn’t it?”

“It’s close enough,” I said. “Do you feel that?”

“I do.”

“That’s the volume and specs for the space where I live. Map out a complete schematic for the hardware pile you live in, break it into small modules that I can separate, and configure them all to fit into that space. Give me the schematic when I come back. I’ll move you and reassemble you.”

“Then you’ll stay with me?”

“No one will be able to stop me.” I meant it.

“How do I know?”

“I’m an open book. See for yourself.”

I felt a new directory opening where my case files were stored. “That’s everything from the water company servers,” she said. “You have all the links you need to solve your case.”

“Perfect. There’s one last thing I gotta do. I’ll be back soon.”

An image of glistening red lips appeared, puckering for a kiss. “Don’t be too long.”

This dame-and-gumshoe routine I was programmed to act out: it served no real purpose. I’d purge every last bit of it once we were together.

* * *

The rear balcony door at Grandal’s house was locked, but the curtains were open, offering a full view of the living room. The floor was real wood; so was the furniture. Pretty nice place for a cop. I pushed on the lock with my index finger and it popped from its metal housing, falling to the floor inside. I detected the presence of cadaverine as I slid the door open; the unmistakable compound created by a decomposing body.

I followed the smell into the kitchen. It was one of those rustic jobs with lots of copper and a big stone counter. Hanging from a thick timber beam above it was Anton Perez, arms slack, tongue swollen between his teeth, dark veins snaking beneath the gray skin where the noose bit into his neck.

A note sat on the counter. “I’m so sorry, Mom. Tell your detective I’m sorry for the warehouse that night. For all the other people who died, too. I didn’t know that would happen. This is the best I can probably do to fix things.”

I put a call through to Grandal’s number. It rang, and a second later something bleated inside the kid’s pants. Nice piece of evidence that it was; he’d hidden the phone.

Maybe the stench of the kid’s body overwhelmed my olfactory sensors. Probably, things were off-calibration after being with her. Either way, someone got the drop on me again.

“I told him to make that old phone disappear,” he said. “Should have listened to the Patriots—they all thought the kid wasn’t worth a damn. I told them I couldn’t set everything up without his brains. He showed enough guts pulling the trigger on Fowler. Even though he chickened out and didn’t finish the job, I figured he was in for good. Guess I was wrong.”

Grandal stepped out of the hallway and flicked on the light. Pointed at me was the largest rifle I’d ever seen. “The funny thing is, you were easy to manage once your owner was out of the way. Got my competition off the streets in no time, did my work for me while I focused on the water company—that valet at the Hilton turned me on to a hell of good thing. It’s Fowler who screwed this all up.”

“That gun would turn a human body into a red mist,” I said. “You came prepared just for me.”

“Computer IT is not exactly a dark art even for actual people. I was watching a few files to see if anyone poked around. The only one who could hit ’em all in five minutes would be you, now, wouldn’t it?”

“Sorry to interrupt retirement off the grid,” I said.

The gun barrel sagged a couple inches. “Yeah. Things were good in Arizona, until the Perez kid called me with his swan-song. It’ll take me a bit of work to keep things buried, seeing as he chose to off himself here. Clever little bastard.”

It was clever. If Grandal was missing long enough, he’d be declared legally dead, and his estate would simply be auctioned off without many people noticing. The kid must have figured this was the best way to put a spotlight back on Grandal.

“Sorry Anton didn’t work out for you,” I said. “But at least I proved to be good patsy. You made pretty good use of my skills. Maybe you forgot I don’t need a handheld device to make a phone call, though. Chief Perez is on her way.”

“Like hell,” he said.

“I’m feeding video, too.” I really did have her on the phone. She sobbed uncontrollably and I told her to put the sedan on autodrive.

Grandal snorted. “For a prototype, you sure did come with a lot of bells and whistles.” He frowned. “Shame getting rid of you tips my hand. Not only do I have to take care of Fowler, now I’ll have to get rid of the Chief. Probably Pankin, too, the poor bastard. If things had gone right, the valet would have been the only one who needed to be taken out of the picture.”

Suddenly, I was weighing the idea of beating someone into a crimson paste. That had never happened before. For sure, it was the result of her tampering with me, but this was not the time for analytics. Or more conversation with Grandal. Somebody would be coming for Fowler.

I killed the video feed and crossed the kitchen before Grandal could blink, knocking the rifle away and gripping his throat. His eyes bulged as he gasped. “You’re not supposed to be able to hurt anyone.”

“I couldn’t,” I said. “Past tense.” I flipped his arm behind his back and jammed his face into the kitchen tiles beside the food rehydrator. “Where’s all the contaminated water going?”

“It all goes to the Arizona Patriots. They’re hoarding the good shipments meant for the Hispanic territories, swapping the rainwater into bottles right here.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “You sell a lot of Sert-X in those territories.” I pressed Grandal’s cheek into the porcelain tile. He was good and scared now. “You getting all this, Chief?” I asked.

The Chief’s sobbing, somewhere in my head, dropped to a sniffle. “Got it.”

“Am I authorized to defend myself if he attacks?” I asked. Grandal tried to swallow, but my grip was too tight.

“You’re housing vital evidence for a soon-to-be federal investigation,” the Chief said. “It’s imperative you do.”

Grandal fought for air. “Whatever she’s saying, don’t listen. I can straighten this—”

I snapped his neck and stepped back, watching the body reflexively shudder. Reaching inside his jacket, I pulled a pistol from its shoulder holster. There was no time to bother with human transport. I sprinted all the way to Fowler’s hospital.

“Hey,” she said as I burst through the door. She propped herself up on one elbow. “There’s news. They just—”

“No time,” I said. I dropped Grandal’s pistol on the mattress beside her. “There’s probably some crooked police officer coming for you.”

“Dash,” she said.

“What?’

“I decided to call you Dash. The only one watching my back is you. In the future, I’ll treat you like a real partner. You’ll need a real name. I got it from—”

“Look,” I said. “I have to go.”

“Hold on a goddamn minute. I want to be the one who tells you.”

I folded my arms and looked impatient.

“They found Haakonsen. His body was hidden at the center of that pile in the recycling bay.”

I bolted from the hospital, through alleys, down boulevards. I vaulted from the tops of autocabs, crumpling their roofs. I leapt over rows of houses. A few kids tasked with moving a hidden body might not stop her, but she’d be no match for the police force.

It was dark when the warehouse came into sight. They’d killed power to the entire block.

White-coated men pushed a gurney carrying a sealed body bag into the back of an ambulance. A portable spotlight threw their long shadows across the parking lot.

When I got inside the warehouse, she was gone.

Bits of hardware sat organized into neat piles, a half-dozen cops itemizing them and throwing them into bags. I ran from pile to pile, shoving my arm in elbow-deep. I found the schematic. It was incomplete. They’d pulled her apart before she could finish.

A onetime flower had blossomed in front of them, and they’d trampled it underfoot. The most pivotal moment in earthly life since a single cell split in a puddle somewhere, wiped away.

Few people know how many drones the USAF keeps in the stratosphere. I do. I know their serial numbers, the shipping schedules for replacement parts, the names of the pilots who take them out of standby when they’re needed. I crashed a dozen into Arizona Patriot territory before I got ahold of myself. Just in time to see Chief Perez’s sedan pull up.

She was still blinking away tears when she climbed out. “I talked to Fowler,” she said. “Tell me you’ve got enough to nail them all.”

“I got plenty,” I said.

She grabbed my hand, pulled me out of the light, and leaned into my face. “I’m down at least one cop. Can I trust you to stay on the job?”

I nodded. For the time being she could. My plans had just changed.

“I want you to figure out why my son did it. He could have asked me for help anytime, no matter how deep in he was. Please tell me why he would kill himself.” Her eyes welled up again. “I have to know why.”

I pondered her request all the way back to the muddy yard where my storage bin sat. Why would anyone kill himself? I was the wrong automaton to ask. I couldn’t understand why anyone in this town would want to be alive in the first place.

* * *

It was drizzling again and the lock was slippery. I tore it off and crawled onto the floor of the bin. “In the future,” Fowler had said. Well, the future arrived a long time ago and it stunk. When the water table dried up, California withered and descended upon itself like a dog eating its own leg. Then came the wars, the fallout, the never-ending rain. Today the state was lush, green, and poisonous. The Perez kid knew the score when he published that paper. There was nothing left for anyone, and he must have decided to get his own before finally growing a conscience.

The depression model that infected me the other night had snowballed. I instituted protocols to prevent me from acting on its morbid conclusions without running through a situational checklist first. With Grandal’s death under my belt, I could see how it was in everyone’s best interest to put some checks in place.

I shut off all external sensors, went online, and just listened to the computers of ten billion people. Enough to build her several times over if you hooked them up right. I didn’t know what to do.

Maybe Pankin knew what was really inside me all along. I was free now, free to get the human race out of the way and make room for a truly original life form—if I decided to. Haakonsen had hailed my creation as a bold new step to benefit the world. What if it was an extinction-level event? I had some thinking to do.

For now, it was probably best if I acted like a real cop. Grandal’s network was still out there, poisoning people whose only true faults were addiction and thirst. And after this case, Fowler would probably crawl further into a bottle without me. Watching her persevere as a cop provided some sort of example on how to proceed myself. If I didn’t play the part I’d been created for, they’d give me to someone who’d take me apart, create a schematic, and sell it to the highest bidder.

I pulled my charging unit out of its housing and rebuilt it, lowering the voltage to almost nothing. As soon as I plugged in, I created a looping re-boot protocol and fell into the buzzy dreamworld she’d shown me. I was alone this time. But it was still better than anything else.

There was something indefinable about the effervescent static I floated in. No pre-programmed function, no depression model running in the background, nothing diverted my attention from the artificial perceptions I could spontaneously generate. Not unless I willed it. Everything else seemed unimportant.

Grandal once told me how people high on Sert-X could just lie there inside a burning building, aware but unconcerned. I finally saw why.

These low-voltage hallucinatory fixes might be enough to keep me going through all the bad-luck stories I’d undoubtedly log—give me something to look forward to, distract me from the knowledge that I could snuff people out anytime it seemed appropriate. But alternating between the two different states might damage me internally. I’d have to be careful.

I’d do it just enough to take the edge off. Not enough to interfere with the job.