Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  “And that’s the explanation for the murder of Amberson Teaneck,” Joan said. She closed the case file. “So now we know . . .”

  There was a long silence. Then Kite said: “I don’t believe a word of it.”

  “Me neither,” said Joan. “An Electric Brain under Disneyland. A disease with an anthropology doctorate. It’s crazy.”

  “Preposterous.”

  “Absurd.”

  “Lunatic.”

  “Nuts.”

  “Unfortunately,” said Kite, “that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

  “No, it doesn’t. But if it is true, what the hell are we supposed to do about it?”

  “Why, that’s obvious!” Ayn Rand said.

  Joan and Kite both turned to face the Lamp.

  “Oh?” Joan said.

  “You must destroy this evil computer!” Ayn said. “Unplug it! Smash it!”

  “Just like that, huh?”

  “If you value human life, it’s the only rational course open to you! What a monstrous crime—to snuff out a billion lives for some fantasy of perfection! You must stop this machine!”

  “I don’t think Joan is questioning your sentiment, Miss Rand,” Kite said. “But if G.A.S. does exist, and if it really did snuff out those billion lives, mightn’t we be a trifle outmatched?”

  “A good mind in pursuit of truth and justice is never outmatched!” Ayn said, with such utter sincerity that Joan and Kite couldn’t help smiling.

  “What do you think?” Joan said.

  “We’re likely doomed anyway,” Kite pointed out. “No sense waiting passively for the hammer to fall.”

  “You figure we’re next in line to be prosecuted?”

  “That would be in keeping with the tradition of this sort of thing, yes.”

  “Do you have any weapons in the house, besides your Colt?” Joan asked next. “Stuff that might be good for fighting off killer androids?”

  “I have a few small arms,” Kite said. “Nothing dramatic. What about you?”

  “Well,” Joan said, “I do have one item that might be useful. A pair of them, actually. And I guess you could say they’re a little dramatic . . .”

  Footage

  “And you’re sure this is the actual gun used to kill John Lennon?”

  “Absolutely,” said Lexa.

  “Goodness,” said Dan. He had an old man’s ash-white beard hanging from his chin to his belly, but there was a boyish exuberance in his eyes that no wrinkle or crow’s foot would ever diminish. “The actual instrument of his martyrdom. Do you see this, Walter?”

  “I see it,” Walter agreed, committing himself no further.

  “You know,” Dan confided to Lexa, “back in ’09, during the War of Syrian Containment, my camera crew got actual footage of the Kemo Sabe cruise missile that killed Assad.”

  “I remember that,” Lexa said. “CBS played it over and over again . . .”

  “Paula and I were on the Lebanese coast, interviewing Israeli frogmen,” Dan reminisced, “when the missile just whizzed overhead! Oh, it was something, all right!” Lowering his voice, he added: “Those Kemo Sabes are accurate enough to fly down a chimney, you know.”

  “I know,” said Lexa, “and they’re manufactured by the same company that bought CBS just before the war started. But about the blimp, Dan . . .”

  “Oh, right!” Dan said. “The blimp! Well, if you say you’ve got an important story to cover, I’m sure we can arrange something. What do you think, Walter?”

  Walter had no legs. This was not a war injury; he’d simply been born without them. A national figure in his prime—“the most trusted news anchor in America”—he’d successfully concealed his handicap from the viewing public by always appearing seated behind a desk. Retired now, he passed his days at the Newark Drome, like the proverbial old fart hanging out at the town barbershop. The executives at Walter’s former network sometimes grumbled about this, pointing out, quite rightly, that CNN wasn’t his barbershop, but Walter didn’t give a shit. What did they expect him to do, spend his golden years sucking exhaust fumes at a CBS heliport?

  “Which blimp is it you wanted?” Walter asked, twisting slightly in the breeze. Under orders from the late Ted Turner, CNN mechanics had installed a motorized crane in the main hangar, from which Walter dangled in a special canvas sling. A radio joystick allowed him to move himself around.

  “Jane,” Lexa told him. “We’ve got to have Jane.”

  “Can’t have that blimp,” Walter replied, in a tone that suggested the matter was still open to negotiation. “Jane’s slated for a job in Delaware tonight. The Democrats are holding a fête for Preston Hackett at the Wilmington dog track.”

  “Preston Hackett?” Lexa said. “The dark horse presidential candidate? The one who thinks eminent domain is a form of food poisoning?”

  Walter nodded. “Rush Limbaugh is going to float above the festivities and give counterpoint.”

  “It’s a fluff piece!” Ellen Leeuwenhoek exclaimed.

  “Oh no,” said Dan. “It’s part of CNN’s Decision ’24 coverage. Very in-depth.”

  “It’s a fluff piece,” said Lexa. “Meanwhile, I’ve got a hard news story breaking this afternoon, a hundred miles offshore . . .”

  “What hard news?” Walter asked.

  “A sea battle. Philo Dufresne’s submarine is going up against a mercenary fleet of four, possibly five ships.”

  “A sea battle!” Dan’s eyes lit up. “Walter! Footage! We can use the new smart cameras . . .”

  “At least two foreign powers are involved,” Lexa went on, “lending illegal military support to private American corporate interests.”

  “And you have independent sources confirming all this?” Walter asked.

  “No,” said Lexa. “That’s why I need the blimp. I’ve got a time and a place, and I want to go make the confirmation myself, visually.” She looked at Dan. “Or with a camera . . .”

  “Walter. . . .” Dan pleaded.

  “This is horseshit,” Walter said. He fixed Lexa with a hard stare. “Excuse the French, but you’re horseshitting us, Miss.”

  Lexa decided to gamble: “Some,” she admitted. “But there is going to be a battle, and it is going to be a better story than anything involving Preston Hackett, unless a satellite falls on him.”

  “Hmmph!” said Walter.

  “But if you think political fluff is the way to go . . .”

  “Hell,” Walter grumbled. Then he made up his mind. “Dan?”

  “Yes, Walter?”

  “Go get the head of Jane’s ground crew. Tell him I want to talk to him. And remind him, on the way in here, that he owes me a favor.”

  “Right away, Walter.”

  “And Dan?”

  “Yes, Walter?”

  “Leave the gun.”

  Sweet Sixteen

  Kite returned to the kitchenette carrying a cavalry saber, a set of brass knuckles, and a pearl-handled derringer; Joan brought a cherrywood case the size of a backgammon set.

  “My,” said Kite, when Joan lifted the lid. The matched pair of handguns inside the case were the largest she’d ever laid eyes on, which was saying something. “Are we going to shoot down some planes, or just blow a hole in a brick wall?”

  “We could do both, with these,” Joan said. “Browning Automatic Hand Cannons, .70 caliber. Most overpowered handgun in the world.” She hefted one. “They were my sweet sixteen present from Gordo Gambino.”

  “Gambino?” Kite said. “You have Mafia connections, too?”

  “Sort of. Gordo lived next door to us in South Philly when I was growing up. He’d been a minor league loan shark once, but got out of the business after one of his customers stabbed him in the groin. The experience pretty much mellowed him.”

  “No doubt.”

  “He and Mom had this platonic Heloise-and-Abelard thing for a while. Being a budding tomboy, I got to be the son that Gordo could never have. He taught me baseball.”

  “A
nd artillery.”

  “The pistol range stuff was our secret. Mom even in a righteous mood wouldn’t have approved.”

  “You know, Joan,” Kite said, “the more I learn about your background, the more I understand your approach to problem solving.”

  “Keep your Colt as a reserve,” Joan told her, passing a Hand Cannon and two empty clips across the table. “I’ve got explosive-tipped bullets, too,” she added, setting a cardboard box beside the clips.

  “Not from your sweet sixteen, I hope,” Kite said, even more amazed.

  “Nah,” Joan said. “Office supplies. Fatima Sigorski ordered two thousand rounds of the stuff by mistake, so I swiped some.”

  “My,” Kite said again. She picked up the Browning to feel the weight; it felt pretty good. “You take the derringer,” she said. “It’s single-shot, but I have a spring-holster that’ll keep it out of sight up your sleeve until the second you need it. Good for a surprise.”

  “All right,” Joan said. “Fair trade.”

  “The recoil on this must be tremendous,” Kite added, doing a bicep curl with the Hand Cannon.

  “It’s got a shock absorber to keep from breaking your wrist,” Joan said. “But yeah, it kicks. You also want to make sure you’ve got a good backstop behind whatever it is you’re shooting at, in case you miss . . . or in case you don’t miss.”

  “I’ll remember that,” Kite said. She aimed the Hand Cannon at the refrigerator and sighted down the bore. “So tell me about our opposition. If an Electric Negro were coming to beat my brains out with a copy of War and Peace, where would I aim to make it stop?”

  “Center of the chest,” Joan told her. “The Automatic Servant has two semi-independent computer processing units, one in the chest, one in the head, but it’s the chest module that directs movement.”

  “So a head shot wouldn’t stop it?”

  “It might, if the spinal circuit breaker didn’t trip right,” Joan said. “But I wouldn’t bank on it. Another thing, most of them have auxiliary sensors distributed throughout the body, so even decapitated they aren’t totally blind.”

  “How strong are they?”

  “Domestic models are rated to power lift up to a thousand pounds—enough to move most furniture and act as a stand-in car jack. Industrial Servants can tow a railroad freight car with one hand.”

  “Dear! No arm-wrestling, then. What about reflexes?”

  “Varies,” Joan said. “But don’t be fooled into thinking they’re as slow or as clumsy as they sometimes appear. They’re programmed to play down their abilities so their owners won’t feel intimidated, and so human coworkers won’t start worrying about job security.”

  “Any special weaknesses or Achilles’ heels?”

  Joan shook her head. “Not if their behavioral inhibitors have been removed. They’re not invulnerable by any means, but again, they’re a lot tougher than they seem.”

  Kite nodded. She put down the gun, opened up the box of bullets, and carefully poured its contents out onto the center of the table. Scooping up a fistful of explosive rounds, she set to work filling her ammunition clips. Joan did the same.

  “Do you suppose we ought to call somebody?” Joan asked, when they were all loaded up. “The F.B.I., I mean, or maybe Delta Force?”

  “I’m not sure,” Kite said. “I wonder if we could get them to believe us, even with this case file as evidence. And if we could get them to believe us, I wonder if it’s wise to let people in power know that a thing such as the nanovirus is possible.”

  “I hear what you’re saying,” Joan said, “but if we don’t tell anybody, and we get ourselves killed—”

  The phone rang. Both women started. Joan was actually relieved to realize how keyed-up she was; it had worried her that she was taking this whole thing too much in stride, with too little emotion. But as the phone rang a second time, and her hand dropped instinctively to her gun, she saw that lack of emotion was not going to be a problem.

  “Pick up,” she said, on the third ring.

  A pleasant, familiar voice, last heard in the yard of a gingerbread house, but far more menacing than it had seemed two days ago: “Hello, Miss Fine.”

  “What a coincidence,” Joan said. “We were just discussing you.”

  “Oh, there are no coincidences here.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Some riddles, Miss Fine, even you should be able to solve without hints.”

  “All right,” Joan said. Her eyes flicked briefly to Ayn’s Lamp. “So what do we call you? John Hoover, or J. Edgar Hoover, or G.A.S.? You’re an android, right? A custom-model Automatic Servant?”

  “Under the control of the G.A.S. mainframe, yes. You can call me Hoover or G.A.S., whichever you prefer. One is a sub-entity of the other, so it doesn’t really make a difference.”

  “The G.A.S. mainframe computer, in Anaheim—it can hear what I say to you?”

  “Yes.” There was a sound that might have been a sigh of impatience. “You have something you want to say to it?”

  “Yes,” Joan said, and went on, in the most commanding voice she could muster: “Generate executive order, priority request, authorization code fourtwo-oh-oh-three-two-oh-nine. Turn yourself off, now!”

  Silence on the line.

  “Hoover?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “I heard you. But did you hear me say I was stupid? No? That’s because I’m not.”

  Joan glanced at Kite, then back at the phone. “You edited the videotape before you gave it to us?”

  “I edited the memories that the videotape was created from. I also rewrote the Un-Babel software on Jerry Gant’s computer.”

  “For what purpose?” Kite Edmonds asked. “Why have you revealed yourself to us?”

  “Well that’s what I’m calling about, Miss Edmonds. I told Miss Fine we’d speak again once she’d put the pieces of the puzzle together. And now that she has, I’d like you both to come back to Atlantic City for another face-to-face meeting.”

  “‘Face-to-face’?” Joan said. “You’re a machine, Hoover!”

  “I’m a machine that wants to see you in Atlantic City this afternoon,” Hoover replied. “You’ve got time to make the 12:59 train from Grand Central if you hurry.”

  “Wait a minute . . .”

  “No. And don’t you wait, either. Not unless you don’t care about thousands of lives that are at stake. I’ll expect you no later than 2:00.”

  A click, and a dial tone.

  “We’re in bad trouble, I think,” said Kite.

  Money Shots

  The great Hearst blimp had started life as a navy reconnaissance vessel, built in denial of the end of the Cold War. Sublet to U.S. Customs for a stint hunting smugglers in the Caribbean, it was ultimately sold to Turner Broadcasting for about a quarter of its original construction cost. There was nothing else like it in the air. Its gas bag was bigger than anything since the Hindenburg, knitted from a space-age fabric that shed bullets like tank armor yet was radar transparent; its long gray gondola was sculpted for stealth. The lettering on the gondola’s prow read Sweet Jane, for the widowed Ms. Turner, but the ground crew preferred a slightly different name.

  “This is Drome Traffic Control to the pilot of Hanoi Jane. You do not have clearance for take off at this time. Please return at once to the landing field, over.”

  No response. The blimp, already hundreds of feet above the grassy field, swung its nose around and began to pull away.

  “This is Drome Traffic Control to the pilot of Hanoi Jane. You are in violation of federal flight regulations. Please identify, over.”

  Walter keyed the mike in his radio headset. “This is Cronkite, over.”

  “Cronkite?” the air traffic controller said. “Walter?”

  “No,” Walter said, “Beauregard.”

  “Walter, you’re not authorized to take that vehicle. You haven’t filed a flight plan.”

  “Hell, Traffic Con
trol,” said Walter, “I don’t even have a pilot’s license. How could I file a flight plan?”

  “That’s not funny, Walter. Now turn Jane around and—”

  Walter switched off the radio and told Lexa how to disconnect the automatic transponder that broadcast Sweet Jane’s position. With one hand on the steering yoke and the other holding a mop handle to work the rudder pedals, Walter faked towards the Hudson, then broke another F.A.A. regulation by taking the blimp down low over Jersey City, where its already tenuous radar profile was lost completely in the ground clutter. He brought them around south-southeast, threading an obstacle course of high-rise condominiums and office buildings; Lexa, observing from the copilot’s seat, admired his skill.

  “You fly pretty good for a guy with no license,” she said.

  “Talent’s not in the credentials,” Walter told her. He indicated a console on her side of the cabin. “That’s the navigator. You tell it our destination and it should give us a heading to follow.”

  Farther back in the gondola, in the production studio, Dan was busy demonstrating the smart camera system to Ellen Leeuwenhoek.

  “What’s so smart about it?” Ellen asked.

  “Well,” said Dan, “the Nielsen Company took outtakes from everyone who ever won an award for broadcast news video, and abstracted their styles into a computer model.”

  “So it’s like a collection of personality templates of prize-winning camera operators.”

  “Right,” Dan said, “and you can either call up a particular style you want or use the random mix function to create a potpourri.”

  “Hmm . . .”

  “It’s still experimental, of course . . .”

  “Got it,” said Lexa. The flight cabin windscreen dimmed and a headup display came on, projecting course, airspeed, fuel remaining, and other statistics against the glass in a crisp laser green. One highlighted bar in the display read: HEADING TO D-POINT: 143°—DISTANCE: 128.6 NM.

  “A hundred thirty miles,” Lexa said, not happy. “Can we make it in time? Philo’s set to make his move around 3:00 unless something goes wrong.”

  Walter checked his wristwatch against the clock in the display. “Philo, eh? You two are on a first-name basis?”