Chimera

by Will Shetterly

  "Come on, guys! If she doesn't calm down—"

  The big borgie said, "Hey, we're sorry."

  The little one said, "We didn't mean nothing."

  "You're just dumb fucks, right?"

  The little one said, "Yeah. We're just dumb fucks, that's all. We're just—"

  The cat snarled, loud enough to make me want to run for it.

  The borgette said, "Oh, shit!" The little one hit the overhead stop bar. All three scrambled for the exit, fighting to be first out as the bus pulled up to the next corner.

  The borgies stumbled onto the sidewalk, then looked back at us. I said, "Wave goodbye to the nice kids, Zoe."

  We both grinned and waved at the borgies on the sidewalk. They stared back with expressions of painful enlightenment as the bus pulled away.

  The cat and I leaned back in our seats. I asked, "Better?"

  She nodded. "Better."

  We caught a pert in Burbank. I told it to take the Mulholland Drive rail along the spine of the Santa Monicas, then shoot down Beverly Glen, which only added a few minutes to the trip. The San Fernado Valley on our right was smoggy—the original inhabitants called it the Place of Smokes for good reason—and Los Angeles on our left was foggy, but it was still nice to ride the hill crest and see what was there to be seen.

  Actually, I hoped it was nice for the cat. I napped. Perts aren't designed for that. You can't expect a lot of comfort in a pod designed to be cleaned with high-pressure hoses, and, like the seats in fastfooderies, the seats in perts are designed to be comfortable while you sit up and uncomfortable if you stretch out. It's all about customer turnover.

  We nearly paid for taking the scenic route. Amos Tauber was shutting his door as we walked up the hall to his office at USCLA. Though there was more gray in his hair and goatee than in his online picture, he carried himself like a man half his age—not stiffly erect, like a military man, but supplely, like a lifelong student of yoga or tai chi. Most famous people seem smaller in real life. Amos Tauber's carriage made him larger.

  The cat said, "Professor Tauber?"

  I held up my P.I. license. "Chase Maxwell. This is Zoe Domingo. We'd like to talk to you about Janna Gold."

  He blinked at us, then nodded. "I was just going to lunch. Would you care to join me at the cafeteria?"

  The cat said, "We'd be delighted."

  "I see you've never eaten there." As we headed down the hall, Tauber asked, "What's this about?"

  The cat said, "Your life may be in danger."

  An elevator arrived, and we stepped inside. Tauber said, "Then you do know the cafeteria."

  As we ascended, I said, "You heard that Dr. Gold was killed?"

  "It was on the morning news. It's a great loss."

  "What story did they give?"

  Tauber frowned. "There's more than one?"

  "Usually."

  "A tragic accident. The police are investigating. What are the other stories?"

  "The one we're pursuing is someone killed her. We don't know who."

  "You believe I can help."

  The cat said, "We hope so. Was she coming to see you?"

  Tauber nodded. "I expected to hear from her last night."

  I said, "Do you know what she wanted to talk about?"

  "I"m afraid not. She said she'd rather discuss it in person."

  "Was that unusual?"

  "I didn't know her well enough to say. It thought it a bit odd, but many interesting people are a bit odd."

  The cafeteria on the top floor of the Mahr Building was half full of students and faculty, mostly human, but including a few chimeras. During the last round of student protests, someone had argued that a public university under an administration aggressively pushing privatization shouldn't turn away students who met the academic standards and could pay their own tuition. But the increase in werewolfings had brought the school's policy under scrutiny again, and the number of human applicants had declined. The betting money believed this was the last year for chimeras at USCLA.

  I carried a tray with lentil soup, a whole wheat bagel, and a glass of apple-cranberry juice to one cashier while Tauber carried his—spaghetti and herbal tea—to another. The cat took longer than us, though not from indecision. I overheard her at the steam table giving a pigwoman her order: "Turkey. Chicken. Some tuna. Come on, you can get more than that on a plate!"

  Tauber and I took a table at the back of the cafeteria, away from other diners. I said, "Do you have any idea who might want to kill Dr. Gold?"

  "Not at all. Is there any reason why I should?"

  "Perhaps not. But people have threatened to kill you."

  "Of course. I'm the public face of a string of unpopular positions." That was an understatement. For twenty years, he had been hated by humans when he championed chimera rights, and in the last five, he had won nearly as many enemies among chimeras who felt abandoned when he began promoting AI rights.

  "Would the same people go after Dr. Gold?"

  "I doubt it. She lived in the world of ideas. The people who hate me don't have much truck with those."

  The cat joined us as I said, "Do you have any notion why she wanted to see you?"

  "No. She said she wanted my opinion on something that was probably nothing, but it'd be an excuse to visit."

  The cat said, "She didn't act as if it was nothing."

  I added, "Have you considered hiring a bodyguard?"

  Tauber laughed. "Are you here for a job?"

  "No. But you should think about it. I can recommend some good agencies."

  "I won't ask someone to stop a bullet for me, Mr. Maxwell. If anyone wants to kill me, let him look me in the eye and shoot."

  "What's to keep someone from doing just that?"

  Tauber shook his head and smiled. "People are afraid of equal rights for machine intelligences. Frightened people stop thinking. If I give in to fear, I'd have to join 'em. And I rather enjoy thinking."

  "Nice speech. Why waste it on me?"

  "Because I believe it. Caution didn't free my people. It hasn't freed Ms. Domingo's. It won't free MIs."

  His use of "MI" threw me for a second. AI activists argue that "AI" is misleading—if sapient programs are truly intelligent, their intelligence can't be "artificial." I decided to stick to the discussion at hand. "Martin Luther King didn't die in bed. Your bot's afraid you won't, either."

  Tauber jerked his head back in surprise. "My what?"

  The cat said, "Your housebot. It's worried—"

  "Ms. Domingo, even Robert E. Lee freed his slaves. How could I keep one?"

  Alarm bells sounded in my mind. I said, "A bot calling itself Jefferson 473 answered your phone this morning."

  Tauber frowned. "You must've gotten the wrong number."

  "No. Someone intercepted—"

  Behind us, Kristal Agatha Blake said, "Hello, Max, Zoe."

  We turned. The woman with whom I had shared my flesh and my inhibitions, if not my soul—and perhaps even that, on short-term lease—slid her See-Alls down her nose to show her eyes. In my mind's eye now, they're steel blue, but that may've only been the reflected sunlight from the window. She grinned pleasantly. "Amos Tauber. Pleased to meet you."

  I said, "Kris! What brings you here?"

  She said, "Loose ends," drew her eleven-millimeter Vetterli Dual-Chamber Recoilless, and shot Tauber. His chest exploded. Whether his mouth fell open from surprise, shock, or the relaxation of voluntary muscles, I will always wonder. I like to think he died instantly. He collapsed in his chair, slumping forward to strike the table and his plate with his forehead. The plate flipped like a tiddly wink, strewing spaghetti on top of gore.

  For what seemed an impossibly long, silent moment, Tauber lay in that pool of blood and spaghetti sauce. I looked at Blake and expected to see—I'm not sure what. Maybe her looking as appalled as I felt, as if she had meant to shoot him with a sleep dart as some sort of joke and the joke had gone horribly wrong. Or smiling as Tauber sat up and the host of In Your
Face! came out to announce that this had been staged to entertain a billion bored HV viewers. What I saw was no expression at all, and the Vetterli moving, ready to fire again.

  The nearest diners turned toward us, looking for the source of the explosion, not yet thinking of the deadly possibilities. Funny how you don't, even when its the most logical explanation. Then someone saw Tauber and screamed. The cat sat rooted to her chair, still waiting to hear she was on HV, but losing hope fast. I tensed my wrist. I felt as if I was watching myself as the SIG slammed out of the Infinite Pocket into my hand. I wanted the HV crews to reveal themselves, too.

  All around us, diners scattered for cover. Blake turned the Vetterli toward the cat. Before she could bring it to bear, I fired at the shoulder of her gun arm. The bullet tore clothing and skin, baring bright metal.

  Blake smiled at me, exactly as she had smiled the night before. She may have said my name. Perhaps I only remembered how she had said it. I shot twice at her heart.

  She twitched and flailed under the bullets' impact, but didn't retreat. Her wounds oozed blood, just as her cut cheek had the night before. Her gun arm spasmed, and the Vetterli flew from her hand into the cat's lap. The cat stared at it, then at Tauber, lying on the white tablecloth in a red sea.

  I began to stand. Maybe I was going to tackle Blake. Before I could try anything, she flipped the table on top of me, knocking me back, spattering me with food and gore. As I stood, Blake smiled contentedly and reached for the cat.

  The cat snarled, raised the Vetterli in both hands, and fired a single shot into Blake's chest. Everything that had happened in the last few seconds may have been a mystery to everyone else in the cafeteria—our table was at the rear, away from the others, and Blake had kept her back to them when she had faced us with the Vetterli low at her side like a gunslinger in an ancient cowboy movie—but that moment, when Zoe Domingo shot Kristal Agatha Blake of the LAPD Technology Crimes Division, was clearly seen by everyone in the room.

  The explosion sent Blake reeling back into a window that broke under her impact. Safety glass rained onto anyone below, but Blake caught the steel frame. Her chest was a mess of broken bone-white ribs and shredded flesh. For a moment, I wondered if I was wrong about what she was, even though I knew that whatever else might be within her was hidden by glistening blood.

  She stood in the window frame, clutching her stomach with one arm as though she were badly wounded. With the free arm, she pointed at the cat. Her voice came out in a quiet wheeze, but the cafeteria was very quiet at that moment. She said, "Werewolf," then fell back through the shattered window to plummet into the alley below.

  The cat and I turned away from the window. Maybe fifteen seconds had passed from the time Blake drew her Vetterli. We looked at each other with the terrible knowledge that bad things had happened, and worse would follow.

  I jerked my head toward the door. Humans, chimeras, and bots huddled at the far end of the room, staring at us. The cat, looking at the Vetterli in her hand, whispered, "Uh-oh."

  A man pointed at her and called, "Stop her!" An alarm went off, shredding the air in a general call for panic. A huge man in a white chef's jacket ran in from the kitchen with a baseball bat. People in the crowd, critters as well as humans, grabbed up trays and kitchen knives to use as weapons. A heavily tattooed dogwoman jumped forward and pulled me away from the cat. "She'll kill anyone now!"

  The cat dropped the Vetterli as I shouted, "It's not what it looks like! Listen to me!"

  Someone threw a tray at the cat. She ducked and backed away. The man with the bat ran forward, screaming, "Get her!" The boldest members of the crowd followed.

  I wrenched free of the dogwoman and grabbed the cat's arm. "Come on!" I waved the SIG so everyone could see it. "Stand back!"

  We ran for the elevator. I prayed no would-be hero would pull a gun, and someone must've decided to give me that much. As we leaped into the elevator, the kitchen man thrust his bat between the closing doors. I poked the SIG in his face and said, "Maybe humans werewolf, too."

  He sprang back, yanking the bat free. The elevator doors closed.

  I punched "ground," and we descended. The cat said, "I did exactly what she—it—wanted."

  Something twisted in my guts. I knew I would have to think about Kristal Blake sometime, but for now, all I had to do was keep the cat alive. And maybe, myself, too. I said, "If it makes you feel better, so did I."

  "Tauber's dead. If we hadn't come here—"

  I didn't let her finish that thought. "No. Blake had time to pick her target."

  "So why didn't she kill us?"

  I wanted to think about where to go and what to do, not what had happened or why, but those were the easier questions to answer. "They want the earring. Or they want to frame us for Tauber's death. Or both."

  "What now?"

  "We go someplace safe."

  "Where?"

  "I'm working on that part."

  The elevator doors opened. The cat said, "Oh-oh."

  In the lobby, six copbots waited for us. Outside, a police van sat on the street, and another copbot kept anyone from entering the building. I lifted my arms high and shouted, "It's all right! She hasn't—"

  The cat slammed me aside. I landed on one side of the doors, the cat on the other, as a flurry of sleep darts pinged off the elevator's back wall. The cat slapped a button for an upper floor. The doors stayed open. "They cut the power!"

  I shouted, "We surrender!" and peeked out to see their response. All six copbots were advancing on the elevator. More darts whistled by my face to say surrender wasn't an option.

  I ducked back, popped the SIG from the Pocket, and fired, hitting a copbot's optics. The bullet struck something vital as it ricocheted within the bot's body—the copbot fell, spewing sparks from its eye socket. The other copbots scattered for cover. Their reprogrammer had left their sense of self-preservation intact.

  The cat said, "Give me the earring!"

  I passed my SIG to my left hand, fired blindly into the lobby to discourage sudden assaults, and flexed my right wrist as I extended that arm in the cat's direction. The earring flew from the Pocket.

  She caught it and grinned coldly. "It's magic time."

  A copbot had gotten far enough to one side to shoot into the elevator. Four darts hit the cat. She stared at them, then slumped down the elevator wall. "Shit."

  "Zoe!" I shot at the bot that had hit her, but missed its optics. Still, it moved back under cover.

  The cat sat splay-legged on the floor. "It's okay. I'm...on it."

  I shot two more copbots, scaring one and catching another's optics. "Bastard sons of blenders—"

  The cat, fighting to stay conscious, turned the halves of the black opal, then slid its gold plates into the jewel. All the copbots froze like kids in a game of Statue. The cat smiled. "Abracadabra. Pretty cool, huh?" Her eyes closed before I could agree.

  I leaped to her side and yanked sleep darts out of her. The fine print on one made the cold thing in my guts grow colder. More than two doses in a mammal of average human size could be fatal. The cat barely came up to my shoulder. I shook her. "Zoe? Do you hear me?" Her arms were thin and muscular in my grip. Her smell reminded me of a former girlfriend's pet—a cat that I missed more than the girlfriend.

  Zoe blinked her golden eyes open and focused the slitted pupils on me. "Sleep now?"

  "Not if you want to wake up. They overdosed you."

  I dropped the earring into the Pocket, put Zoe's arm over my shoulder, and hauled her toward the police van. The last copbot stood at attention just outside the door, where it had barred anyone from entering. Four students waited there. As I came out with gore on my suit and the cat in my arms, their expressions changed from curiosity to concern. One said, "What's going on?"

  I strapped Zoe into the van's passenger seat. "Lunch break. We're making a movie."

  "Oh. Big deal." Three students wandered away.

  Zoe said, "I like lunch."

  The
last student glanced at her. I said, "Actors." The student grinned and followed the others.

  I sat in the driver's seat. The van said, "Destination, please." I leaned under the dashboard, opened my pocket knife, and went to work. The van repeated, "Destination, please."

  Zoe lifted her head. "Max? It wants to know where we're going."

  The van said, "Destina—"

  I came up from under the dash with a small black box that dangled cut wires. Zoe had slumped in her seat. I said, "Stay awake!"

  "Sleep is nice."

  "Sleep is bad. See this?" I showed her the box. "It's a locator with an override to take us to the nearest cop shop."

  "That's not where we're going."

  "Right. Stay awake."

  I got out and crawled under the van. The second locator was harder to reach—it was welded above the power train in the middle of the car. Thieves stupid enough to steal a police vehicle would bring their favorite high tech cutters. In a way, I had.

  I put my hand close to the locator and opened the Infinite Pocket. It was dark under the van, and I couldn't see much of what was above the power train, but I knew the shape of the Infinite Pocket as well as I knew the shape of my hand.

  The Pocket was intended for objects about the size of the SIG, meaning its field of warped space projected four inches from my inner wrist in an oval six inches long at its greatest point. Whether it had any true depth is a question for mathematicians and philosophers. Effectively, its edge was finer than the blade of a monomolecular knife.

  Its drawback as a tool or a weapon was that it's hard to maneuver something almost invisible set at a right angle to your wrist and triggered to shut down near living flesh. Most of the time, there's something better to hand. No pun intended.

  I doubt it took thirty seconds to scoot under the van, cut the second locator box free with the edge of the Pocket, and scoot back out, but the entire time, I was wondering how long the copbots would stay down and whether their reprogrammers had a backup plan in place.

  Leaving both locators on the street, I took the wheel, tapped the manual control, and drove away at the speed limit. Under the Libertarians, the limit's only a suggestion, but people would be less likely to remember a police van that seemed to be heading for a donut shop instead of an emergency.