Downhill Slide

By Jeff Howe

Six weeks and I’m off Uphill duty. Six weeks to an automatic promotion and sweet, sweet dirt under my feet for good. The mantra brings me even less comfort than usual. Right now all I have to look forward to is investigating another murder on another lifeless rock.

I sneeze blue-gray powder into a starched linen handkerchief. The pilot pokes her smooth, hairless head down from the flight deck and waves to get my attention. Her voice crackles over the intercom. “We’ll arrive at Ceres in half an hour. Are you all right, Detective Ba?”

“Just getting the dead nabots out of my sinuses.” I wiggle the handkerchief as proof. “They’re better than motion sickness, but not by much.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” The pale cyborg returns to her duties. The luminescent green vision sensors on her face and hands—calling them eyes imbues them with a humanity they no longer deserve—remind me of the Buddhist goddess of compassion, Tara. Perhaps the resemblance explains why she’s so personable, despite having replaced a third of her body with equipment. More likely it’s because out of eighty million tons of cargo, my capsule is the only container that can hold up its end of a conversation.

Now that we’re in range for real time updates, I check the case log again. One change: the sole suspect is in custody at the company’s Ceres facility. Otherwise the details remain the same as when they plopped me in a life-support capsule and shot me off Phobos Station on a fast freight.

I peruse them like a playbill. Cast of characters: the vic, Mr. Xuan Ling O’Connor, the lantern-jawed manager of a mining operation inside 789803 Marion, an asteroid chock full of rare earth elements; the perp, his petite mineralogist wife, Eliso Espinoza, the only other faintly human being on the rock. The usual cast of thousands mills about in the background, in this case robots and AI-controlled drones, the actual means by which big chunks of rock become ship-fulls of ready-to-process powder.

O’Connor sent out a distress call from an inspection pod forty-two days, eight hours, fourteen minutes ago. I play the recording again in the hope I hear a clue I missed the previous sixty times.

“Any team, please assist! My pod is disabled—I’m near the entrance to shaft twelve. The drive is out. I’m…God, no, Lise! Don’t…”

A woman’s low laugh through a loudspeaker, a noise like a swarm of angry metallic bees, a scream, static. The beam from a plasma induction coil traced across his one-person pod from a few meters away. The resulting pool of melted metal and scorched polyceramic contained just enough DNA for a positive ID.

Open and shut, especially since she’d confessed, a recording I’d reviewed even more. With a Bodhisattva’s composure Espinoza detailed her actions: sabotaging the drive, lying in wait, scattering most of her husband’s mass into a cloud of ionized particles. She held out only when it came to motive, but that’s not why I was here.

I was here because she was lying.

Every record on the Marion mine’s computer confirms she lay comatose in their mender from two days before to three days after the murder, the result of an encounter with the business end of a robotic extractor. The rock came very close to being unmanned that week. A caretaker team showed up when they took Espinoza into custody, but the vagaries of claim law mean they can’t mine again until the investigation concludes. Thus my presence. The company hates downtime.

Twenty-nine minutes and forty-eight seconds after the pilot’s announcement, a soft, broad thud tells me we’ve snugged up against the tower at Ceres. The hiss of pressurization seeps through the walls of my capsule. Soon the pilot floats down to release me. She’s as naked as me, her skin the color and texture of a Praxiteles statue. My own dark, less vacuum-friendly skin could use a shower, although the smell of bottled air drowns out my scent. I pluck out wires and hoses, then stretch for the first time in two weeks.

“Welcome to Ceres Station One.” Her smile is warm in a disinterested way. “New arrival?”

“I’m almost a regular, actually. Customs still on level four?” A nod. I refrain from telling her she was the pilot for two of my seven previous visits. Cyborgs get testy when you remind them of the memory edits. More fleshy types probably do too, assuming you can figure out who they are. I unpack my uniform, dress, and pull myself up the access tube.

Astarte Johnson, not quite two meters of local company constable, awaits me at Customs. “Good to see you again, Chris. Even if you only visit because you have to.”

I grunt, then remind myself it’s not her fault I’m here, and unlike me, she can’t leave when the case is closed. Along with a handful of maintenance staff, we board the ShuttleVator for the drop to the surface, 1800 kilometers below. “Still distilling that degreaser you call vodka?”

“You seemed happy enough to polish your GI tract with it.”

“Sheer desperation. Unlike my pilot, I can’t depend on the company to clear my head after a sensitive assignment. Your hooch was a handy alternative.” Her stuff tastes fine. After all, they produce millions of tons of grain and the purest water in the system here. But she does soak gun parts in it.

“I aim to please. How are Steve and the kids?”

“Lovely. Counting the days.”

“You’re welcome to call them from my quarters. I get free bandwidth I never use. You could, ah, clean up there too.”

Polite but observant: that’s Astarte. “Thanks. I believe I’ll take you up on the offer.”

* * *

The SV slows as we hit the GravUp field at the surface. We descend past level after level of hydroponic farms, their robot tenders oblivious to our passage. Father Piazzi would no doubt be happy to learn his name became prophetic: the goddess of the harvest and her 800 human residents feed half of humanity.

In Astarte’s shower I scrub the stink of space travel off me, then don my ever-pristine uniform again, thankful for whoever invented Impervion back in the 2020s. I send reassurance homeward. My smile will reach Steve, Berina and Qamar in about twenty-four minutes. Astarte waits on the far side of the link, furtively tidying, until I’m done.

The moment I log out she passes me a shot of Ceres’s finest. “In case you want to get a head start on your selective amnesia. Although they shipped us a new mem editor last month. No wires, the latest and greatest. Fits in a hygiene kit.”

“Thanks. I prefer your personal touch.”

Her drink’s gone already. “About the case—you’ll want to talk to Espinoza first.”

“Are you asking or suggesting?” I sip and my gut doesn’t spontaneously combust, so I toss back the balance.

“Predicting.” She clears her throat. “She’s due for arraignment and summary trial in six days, as soon as the circuit judge’s ship arrives.”

I almost cough up the vodka. “The log didn’t mention a trial date.”

A shrug. “This came down an hour before your ship docked. He’s dead. She confessed. The company wants to move things along.” The expression on my face puts her on the defensive. “They’re willing to drop the charge to negligent homicide, give her eighteen months of wrist-slap on Vesta and blame a bad recirculator. Too much Oh-Two, she got loopy.”

“Ignoring her unconscious state at the time.”

“She says she hacked the records.”

The resignation in her voice doesn’t deter me. “Hacked. Good way to describe a bot shearing your hand off. If she’s getting the one-way ticket to Pleaville, why call me in at all? To put a pretty face on it?”

Astarte runs a long sienna finger around the rim of her glass. “You are attractive.”

“Fine. I’ll go a round with Espinoza. Maybe she’ll swoon when she lays eyes on me and talk in her sleep.”

* * *

There’s a class of woman who can make even a paper jail jumpsuit look good, and Eliso Espinoza is its valedictorian. As I open the holding cell, she’s lying on her back on the white plastic slab bed, her bobbed hair a dark corona about her head, her darker eyes staring somewhere between the ceiling and forever. I introduce myself. She leans on an elbow.

“I thought I’d answered everyone’s questions.” Her contralto teases at arm’s length. The log said she’d been a cabaret singer, good enough to pay for her undergraduate degree.

I picture her leaning on a piano in her current attire. “I’m not everyone. Your plea deal reeks, but verdicts aren’t my business anyway. I’m more of a truth person.”

“You’re a company meter maid. Your business is what they tell you.” The words deserve a sneer, but her face and tone stay impassive.

“When they tell me to leave, I will. Until then I get to be selfish and ask whatever I want. Like, why are you so happy to take the blame for your husband’s murder, given you were swaddled in MediJel at the time?”

“I changed the timestamps and audit trails on the medical records. I’m clever like that.”

“Clever but inconsistent: most people don’t set up an alibi and then confess. Why the change of heart?”

She yawns. “Conscience got the better of me.”

“Not the oxygen level?”

“A contributing factor, I’m sure, but the air filters didn’t pull the trigger. I killed my husband, Detective Ba.” She lies on her back again. “And I’ll do my time. Leave me be.”

Cagey. I chew my lower lip and invent something to put her off balance. “If you two weren’t the only ones on the rock, I’d say you were covering for someone.”

A trace of smile pulls at her lips. She sits up and curls her feet under herself. “Are you married, Ba?”

“I assume that’s more than a crude pick-up line.” I remove my left glove to show the titanium band.

“I may be a killer, but I’m never crude.” Her eyes probe. “Your spouse lives on Earth? Children?”

Sometimes questions are the best answers, so I encourage her. “All of the above.”

“They should stay Downhill. Real people should never live out here, no matter what the law says about mining rights.” She stands, her gaze still locked on mine. “Space has a way of finding weakness, Detective. A fissure in a hull, a brittle gasket, a corrosive half-truth: here, all failure is catastrophic.” Her freshly grown hand twitches. She lowers her eyes at last. “Earth grants people the ultimate luxury.”

“Being?”

“Gradual decay.”

I nod. After almost three years on Uphill rotation, I can disagree with nothing she says. She turns away and brushes back her hair. A neural interface sits behind her left ear. The case log didn’t mention any augmentations. “One more question, Ms. Espinoza. Before your assignment, did you love your husband?”

“Before our assignment, I didn’t know what love was.” She’s a million miles away again. “I only learned after it boiled off into the vacuum.”

* * *

I requisition a two-seat Ripper to visit the mine. Astarte agrees, on the condition she drives, and I’m happy to defer. The surplus military ships are touchy.

The trip to asteroid Marion takes a day and a half of the five I have. En route Astarte and I chat, joke, flirt, sleep, the usual cycle for space cops in transit. We try a few shared sims, but they lost any allure for me after tac training. I watched too many partners get virtually blown apart too many times.

The caretakers are company types who muster tolerance for our visit, no more. I ignore them with equal cordiality and inspect the crime scene, the mender, the happy couple’s quarters. I run a finger down the lip of their sleep chamber. “Dusty.”

“Extractor residue. The stuff gets everywhere.” Astarte waves her hand over a black plastic cone and a small holo of Espinoza and O’Connor pops up. A winter scene loops: they embrace and kiss on the Great Wall, snowflakes spotting their hair. If they weren’t in love, they were doing a fine job of fooling each other.

While Astarte refuels, I head to the control room. The caretakers are playing old-school chess on a roll-up board. Perhaps they’re not hopeless. “I require access to the AI.”

The younger one squints over his pieces. He has mate in three if he wants it. “Company didn’t say anything about cops searching the frame.”

“They shouldn’t need to. Detective Lieutenants and up get plenipotentiary warrants on assignment. As a Detective Inspector, I can search a suspect’s soul, on the off chance they have one.”

The elder yawns and stands. “Don’t worry, Marcus. I’ll make sure the mine doesn’t blow up.”

I smile. “Please do.”

He pulls a flat cable terminating in connectors the size of my pinky from his pocket and plugs it into the console. The other end slips in behind his left ear. His breathing slows. “Okay, I locked down base maintenance. Poke around all you want.”

Under his watchful supervision I meander through five years of mine records. I need to find three things. The first is easy: Espinoza had an NI placed in her skull a year ago, on her own dime, to make data analysis faster. A direct hookup to the prospector bots looking for veins speeds the process, I’m sure. If that’s the real reason she got one, I’m a wind-up feelbot.

The second takes a little longer. The work log shows O’Connor’s time creeping up during their assignment, from just over fifty percent of waking hours—normal for new mine crews—to not quite ninety the last few months—abnormal by any standard. He slept less too. By the final month he was hooked into the AI, supervising the drone teams, twenty hours a day.

The third requires the bureau’s Sudo access. My minder raises an eyebrow.

“You do know how to snoop, don’t you?”

“I suppose you never check out user AINI profiles?”

He grins, not guilty in the least. “In public?”

I locate what I want and produce my own NI plug, a wireless model. Cables are a fraction more dependable, but I like to move around. A snikt and I’m in, using O’Connor’s credentials.

“Hello, Xuan Ling. I missed you.” The AI’s girlish voice plays a tremolo on my spine. Surely O’Connor engineered it for the effect, I suspect with frequency stacks tailored for maximum impact on his nervous system.

“I’m afraid Xuan Ling isn’t available. My name is Chris Ba. Can I ask you some questions about Mr. O’Connor?”

Her viz is like and unlike Eliso. More willowy, darker eyes, highlights in the raven hair. I smell apricots. She dimples. “Of course. What do you want to know?”

“Were you intimate?”

“Gloriously so.” A blush. Damn, O’Connor missed his calling. He could have directed sims.

“How long?”

“We first engaged in physical intimacy on 8 January 2117, at 1100 Zulu.”

Okay, still some rough edges. Whatever gets you through the night. “Did the frequency or duration of your assignations increase over the years?”

The AI giggles, a high-pitched staccato noise I cannot imagine Eliso Espinoza making. Ever. “You could say that. Hours and hours. He can’t get enough of me.”

“Thanks for your help.” I log out. She derezzes. I log in as Espinoza.

After a long loading sequence, as if the AI doesn’t want to talk to me, the viz reappears. Her voice is sultry this time, an echo of Espinoza’s own, but the goose bumps recur anyway. “Hello, Eliso my love.” Not-Espinoza’s lips pout in a calculated fashion. “What have you been up to, dearest?”

* * *

On the return trip to Ceres, I’m briefly awoken by the sound of a commlink being slammed off, then a muttered “not again.” Crying follows. Must be a company thing. I think about asking what happened, but before I do, the sobs dwindle to quiet, regular breaths. I go back to sleep. Astarte will clue me in later if it’s important.

* * *

Espinoza’s half-finished with breakfast when I walk through the door again. She’s unsurprised. I touch a small device on my belt. A burst of white noise precedes a high-pitched whine.

“Sound masking?” A sip of coffee underlines her indifference. “Are you going to beat a new confession out of me, Ba?”

“You and O’Connor should have gone into show biz.”

“I have no idea…”

“Spare me. He’d been getting cyberbooty on the side from the AI for a couple of years. You found out and decided to join the fun on your own terms. I admit, I prefer your viz to his, although she borders on the narcissistic.”

Her sigh is the most honest thing I’ve heard from her. She sets her bowl on the cardboard tray. “What can I say? Xuan Ling never satisfied me like I satisfied myself. His little diversion provided an opportunity to raise my game. So I borrowed the name and face of his digital concubine to fashion my own Lise.”

“Whom you programmed to sabotage, then torch his pod, before you tried to feed yourself to an extractor.”

“The idea was to put me out of commission for a few days.” She rubs the fading scar on her arm. “Those drills are harder to control manually than I expected.”

“Yet you wake up in the mender, overcome with remorse.”

“Remorse is a strong word, Detective Ba. Once the deed was done, I simply came to the conclusion that killing Xuan Ling was the act of a petty woman. I’m not petty.”

“Sure the mender didn’t fix your conscience too?”

That rates a chuckle from her. She raises her rubber cup of cranberry juice in a mock toast, as smug as a woman eating hot cereal without utensils can be.

I reach for the masker and pause, my finger on the switch. “Too bad about the work you did on the AI. Pardon me—Lise.”

The juice stops halfway to her lips, but she recovers in an instant. “What about her? The next crew will bring in their own AINI profiles and overwrite ours. Standard procedure.”

“Not this time. Company wants to make sure you didn’t leave any surprises behind. They did a full core replacement after I finished. New hardware, new firmware, new OS. The old system’s going straight to bulk salvage.”

“They extracted our data first, though. They had to.”

I shake my head. “They’d rather do a survey of the rock from scratch than risk bits of killer AI code getting loose.”

“Oh. Of course.” She manages a weak nod and weaker smile.

Gotcha. “Good thing I made my own copy.” I produce a crystalline HIMM. The stark light of the cell makes rainbows swirl on my fingers. “Seven terabytes of portable fantasy in a sliver of diamond.”

Only her eyes move, following the memory module as I gesture. “I thought you said the company wouldn’t appreciate having a killer AI on the loose.”

“She’s not on the loose. Right now she’s not even on the evidence log. Maybe she stays that way. Since the forty million data files you parked bits of Lise in are gone, I’d think you’d be happy to see her.”

“You can stop with the theatrics, Detective.” The words squeeze out between perfect, clenched teeth. “Taunts are beneath you.”

“Not a taunt. An offer.”

Her eyes narrow like the iris of a photon cannon. “What can you give me the company hasn’t?”

“A choice, Ms. Espinoza. I found that truth I wanted, courtesy of your handiwork, so you deserve something in exchange.”

“My handiwork?”

“My instincts were right when I said you were covering for someone.” I rotate the crystal in front of my eye, making her kaleidoscopic selves pirouette. “You didn’t program your AI to kill Xuan Ling; not directly. What you did was craft an AI personality so overflowing with your pain and your jealousy, yet so in love with you, she decided to do the dirty work on your behalf. All on her own, like a big girl. Lise cut you up with an extractor to give you an alibi, and proceeded to fry your husband while you healed.”

“You can’t know that.” Her whisper is a scalpel across a wrist.

“Oh, I can. One thing about AIs—compared to us fleshy types, they’re remarkably ingenuous creatures.” I drop the crystal in my jacket pocket and give it a protective pat. “Chatty, too, if you know how to get them talking.”

She folds her napkin and places it on her tray. “The choice?”

“You could stick with your plea deal. Eighteen months on Vesta won’t kill you. You might even learn some new social skills.” I crouch across the extruded plastic table from her. “Or you change your story, I enter the crystal in evidence, and you get an obstruction charge the company will drop in a heartbeat, because you managed to do what they’ve never been able to—introduce independent agency into an AI. They’d kill for Lise.”

“What will the company do to her? If I change my story?”

“AIs are property, Ms. Espinoza, for now at least. Property can’t commit a crime.” I consider, my lips pursed. “I imagine they’ll want you to interact with her, under their loving scrutiny. To help them tease out your secrets, and hers. Great job security, not much privacy.”

“And if I go to Vesta?”

“I keep Lise with me until you’re out.” As I stand to leave, this time for real, the urge to smirk overpowers my better judgment. “I’ll make sure she waits for you.”

* * *

Astarte comes up behind me as I’m finishing the report and starts massaging my shoulders. For a fraction of a second I think about objecting, but she’s good, I need it, and I’m pretty sure I can’t escape her grip anyway. I pour myself another vodka instead.

“So, you’re out of here on the next grain barge.”

“That’s the plan.” I work sips in between muscle groups. “With any luck I won’t get a new case before my rotation ends. Tie up a few loose cables, take the Downhill slide back to Earth and claim my genuine Chief Inspector’s badge as a prize.”

“Desk duty. Pah.”

“Maybe not.” I close my eyes. “Oooh, yeah, top of the shoulder blade. Less time away from Steve and the girls, though.”

“I’ll miss your visits. They cut back on the human staff here every year as the bots get better. Gets harder and harder to find a drinking buddy.”

The loneliness in her voice makes me reach up and pat her hand. “You, at least, are irreplaceable. I would never trust a bot with my back.”

When her lips touch my neck, I take a sharp breath, not in surprise at her forwardness, but from the intensity of the warmth that rushes to my extremities. What follows is more than a courtesy fuck and less than an invitation to stay. We entwine, we move, we rest; we entwine again. I tell myself she needs this more than I do.

Spent, sweat cooling on our bodies, Astarte curls around me in her bed like a protective caramel comma. I dream of Espinoza, or her AI doppelgänger, in a high crystal tower.

Waiting.

* * *

The aroma of pancakes wakes me. Astarte’s in uniform already. “Your commlink beeped. Sounds like the company has your next assignment lined up.”

“No rest for the wicked.” I rise from the couch, sore in odd places, and review the message. “I mean, I solve a triple homicide they let go cold, and what do I get for thanks? Another one.” A sigh forces its way out. “The job is always going to be like this, isn’t it? I can’t believe I signed up for three years.”

“You want that Chief’s badge.”

“Too much, maybe. The boys are growing up without me. I almost wish Sonia were less understanding.”

Sympathy softens her glance. “Technically it’s two years, eleven months, eight days.”

“Did you sleep at all last night? You look tired.”

For a second Astarte looks as if she might tear up. “Sometimes when I have special guests I…can’t keep my eyes closed.”

“Should I be flattered?”

A strange, forced smile. “Yes.”

I gather my uniform to get dressed, feeling inexplicably unburdened. A HIMM tumbles out of the folded jacket. “Hey, this shard yours?”

“Company’s, actually. Thanks.” She steps over to reclaim the memory and tosses it into a satchel the size of a hygiene kit. The satchel disappears into her constable’s safe.

“Sure. Thank you.” I try to think of something to cheer her up from whatever has her so edgy. “You’ve been a great hostess, considering we just met.”

A beep announces the coffee’s done. “My pleasure, Detective.” Astarte pours me a cup. Smells real.

“Call me Chris.”

This time, she does cry.