Marlowe and the Spacewoman

by Ian M. Dudley

  Marlowe groaned, rolled onto his side, and vomited. He vomited once more, for good measure, then rolled again, also for good measure, onto his back. The ceiling stared down at him, but because his vision was still a little fuzzy, he didn’t catch its gaze.

  “House,” he sputtered, bile dribbling down his chin, “what just happened?”

  A smooth, melodious baritone voice responded. “I’m terribly sorry, but you were just assassinated. However, the good news is that the resurrection executed flawlessly.”

  “Except I vomited. Twice. I thought you weren’t supposed to throw up after a resurrection.”

  “Given the circumstances, the age of your body, the number of repairs and resuscitations that have been necessary, and all the wear and tear associated with that work, the occurrence of otherwise rare side effects is not surprising. In fact, I rather think you’ve gotten off lightly this time.”

  “Thanks, House. I appreciate your concern. What method was used to kill me?”

  “One moment while I access your PDI’s database.” The computer hummed thoughtfully for a moment. “Well, certainly no surprises here. One of the usual, over-the-counter neurotoxins everyone uses. This particular blend indicates one of the more expensive brands. You would think, given their widespread use, that the City would consider reinstating the regulations on these materials.”

  “Ah, but House, if they did that, people would start using all sorts of exotic poisons the nano probes can’t handle. It would be much harder to counter them, and the resurrection rates would drop dramatically.”

  “As usual, your logic astounds me.” If House had eyebrows, the tone of his rejoinder indicated he had just raised them.

  “How long was I down this time?”

  “Sixteen minutes, thirty eight seconds. It is getting harder to repair you. Of course, the id backup used to restore you was created this morning. It is forty eight minutes old.”

  “You got everything on the surveillance DVs?”

  House paused a moment, as if insulted by the question. “Of course. I expect you’d like to watch them?”

  Marlowe clawed his way to his feet, slipped on the puddle of vomit and crashed to the floor again. He lay there for a few minutes while the nano probes slipped back out of their storage sack and repaired the new damage. A floor mop scampered into the bathroom during this interval, doing its best to clean up the mess without disturbing Marlowe, who was now lying in the middle of it.

  “Terribly sorry, sir,” breathed the spider-like mechanical mop. “Forgive me, I don’t wish to disturb you,” it mumbled as some of the titanium legs pushed Marlowe gently out of the way of the wetvac abdomen that dropped to the floor to suck up the fluid. “I do hope you’re feeling better soon,” it whispered as it scuttled back to the closet.

  The lie-down had given Marlowe’s head a chance to clear, so the second time he got up, he managed to stay up. Having a bathroom sink to lean heavily against helped. “Queue up the digital videos, please.”

  Marlowe wobbled on his own two feet, noticed he was wet and naked, and nearly fell over again when he reached for a towel. The nano probes, anticipating something along these lines, had opted to put off returning to the storage sack. They waited in eager anticipation as Marlowe grabbed a towel off the rack, patted himself dry, and then wrapped it around his waist. It was with no small amount of disappointment that they returned to their storage sack after Marlowe successfully completed these maneuvers; the nano probes simply loved repairing things, and in Marlowe, they had found a good employer.

  Stumbling into the bedroom, Marlowe plopped down heavily on his bed, giving the nano probes a jolt of false hope that another injury had been sustained.

  “Go on, start it.”

  The far wall lit up, and Marlowe watched a life-sized video of his death unfold before him. He watched an unsuspecting Marlowe rise from bed in his gray and blue striped pajamas, pad into the bathroom to brush his teeth, and then climb into the shower. His pajamas immediately dissolved under the stream of solvent as video Marlowe pulled the shower door shut. As soon as the door was closed, the image froze.

  “I’m running the Clear algorithm on the image,” House interrupted. “One moment, please.”

  On the wall, a very obscured Marlowe stood motionless behind the fogged glass of the shower door. Fortunately, the glass was manufactured using a specific fogging pattern, and House was working to reverse the effect. Marlowe had bought the algorithm to do this off a peeping tom who worked at one of the larger shower door manufacturing facilities in the City. House had been pretty haughty when Marlowe installed the algorithm, making unkind remarks about future unsuspecting female house guests, but who was laughing now?

  The smoky glass flickered, became clear. The video resumed.

  Video Marlowe went through the usual routine, waiting for his pajamas to completely dissolve and the stream to switch to water before wetting his hair and then squeezing out some shampoo into his hand. He lathered his hair, rinsed it, and repeated for good measure. Marlowe watched in fascination as his alter-ego picked up the new bar of soap off the soap tray and then jerked back violently. With the sudden spasm of his body, he sent the bar of soap careening into the shower wall, and then collapsed against the door, which swung open as he fell, momentarily leaving his body a spray of swirling pixels until House reversed the Clear algorithm. When the image cleared, video Marlowe was lying on the floor of the bathroom. But Marlowe’s attention was fixed on the bar of soap. After hitting the shower wall and sliding down to the shower pan, it bubbled explosively and dissolved down the drain. A moment after the bar of soap had vanished, there was a fluttering around the edge of the video image, and then the screen went black.

  “House, where’s the rest of the surveillance?”

  “Searching. Hmm, very strange.”

  “What?”

  “One moment. I’m verifying that the logs are correct.”

  “What’s going on, House? I need those surveillance DVs. I’ve nothing else to go on.”

  “I don’t know what to say. It appears that while you were lying dead on the bathroom floor, you issued a verbal order for me to shut down and restart. According to the log, your voice print matched and you gave the proper override emergency code.”

  Marlowe was silent. House was silent. Only the grinding of Marlowe’s molars could be heard in the otherwise deathly stillness. The nano probes began making enamel in preparation for a new deployment.

  “House, new priority order. You are never, ever, ever, to shut down or restart if I am dead, dying, feeling faint, have a pasty complexion, or it looks very likely that I will be dead, dying, feeling faint, or having a pasty complexion in the span of time it takes for you to shut down and start up. Clear?”

  “Yes, quite. I do apologize. This is most embarrassing. My Common Sense subroutines must have been somehow overcome. I had been lax about updating them - there has been a security patch or two that has come out since my last upgrade, but because installation requires me to shut down and restart-”

  “House, enough. So someone else was in the house while I was dead?”

  “I am unable to ascertain whether or not the command was issued remotely or locally within my walls.”

  “What about the surveillance DV from the other rooms, prior to your shutdown? Do they show anything?”

  “Those videos have been erased.”

  “Undelete them.”

  “Attempting. Hmm. Very interesting.”

  Marlowe was getting testy. “House?”

  “Whoever initiated the deletion used a reverse-HUE scramble deletion algorithm.”

  Marlowe groaned. The acid levels in his stomach elevated to dangerous levels, causing ecstatic nano probes to pour into his stomach to combat the dropping pH levels. HUE, or Heisenberg Uncertainty Erasure, was the most secure form of quantum deletion available. He could try and recover the file, but any attempt to look at it would cause the data bits to randomly change state, becoming even mor
e scrambled.

  “Well, let’s look at what we do have. Zoom in on the soap that killed me. Let’s see if we can identify the scum.”

  While House re-queued the video, Marlowe reflected on the hazy events of the morning. He found it eerie to see what happened to him on the surveillance videos, but not have any memory of actually experiencing the events. Maybe now he knew what an out-of-body experience felt like. He decided if that was indeed how such an event felt, he was glad to have very mundane sensory perception.

  The tampering with House and the surveillance system was what gave him the most concern. The attack by the soap was the easiest thing to get his head around. Ever since they’d been granted citizenship, the sentient soaps had been like the rest of humanity. Some were good, some were bad, some were indifferent until a certain amount of money changed hands. Marlowe, not for the first time, cursed the day the two giant toy companies had set aside their differences and merged to form HasMatt. The combined research and dollar might of these two formerly warring corporations had led to products such as Sentient Soap.

  The soaps had a chip in the middle of the bar that did their thinking. The rest of the bar served as a heat sink (which caused problems in early models where kids were scalded if the soaps thought too hard). They had their own language made up of different sized bubbles blown at varying rates, known as Bubbonics. There was even a video series that taught you – Hooked On Bubbonics.

  Marlowe didn’t learn Bubbonics until the law changed, recognizing the soap bars as sentient, granting them most of the rights of citizenship, and banning their sale within the City. Immediately following the court decision, the soap bars, flush with the righteousness of victory, set about creating a cultural identity for themselves. They formed their own communities, built communal bathtubs to worship in, had families, tried to find jobs. Some of Marlowe’s best informants were down-on-their-luck, unemployed soaps struggling to survive on the fringe of society. The soap bars and a few other HasMatt products, such as-

  “Marlowe. Oh Marlowe.” The high-pitched, Helium voice caused an involuntary wince in Marlowe. “Please, Marlowe, you need to brush your teeth. I crave the sensation of my bristles scrubbing away all that yucky, nasty gunk off your teeth.”

  “Shut up, toothbrush, or I’ll dump you in the garbage disposal. And this time, I’ll turn it on!”

  Toothy, the Codependent Toothbrush, another of HasMatt’s diabolical forays into childhood hygiene, fell silent. You could still buy these, because they had fought tooth and nail against a grant of citizenship. They feared that as citizens, nobody would use them. Marlowe had bought his on the advice of his now former dentist. He hated Toothy with a passion usually reserved for baby-eating telemarketers, but every time he threw it out, the damn thing wailed piteously until Marlowe felt guilty and retrieved it. The dentist had warned him that owning a sentient toothbrush was a responsibility, a commitment to care for it. Commitment seemed like the right word to Marlowe, but not the kind of commitment the dentist had in mind.

  “House,” Marlowe asked, shaking off thoughts of his oral hygiene, “can we make out the guts of the soap when it dissolved?”

  “Here.” House zoomed in on the bar of soap during the last few moments of its escape, playing at one quarter speed. “As you can see, it spouted a lot of nonsense to lay down a field of bubbles as cover.”

  “What’s it saying?”

  “Let’s see. ’Nothing personal, just business.’ Some long, multisyllabic words and phrases to increase bubble density. Meaningless drivel, really.”

  House looped the few seconds of video that showed the soap’s escape. The bubbles came up thick and fast, obscuring any glimpse of the electronic guts underneath. But Marlowe noticed something interesting at the start of the dissolve sequence: a fissure running through the center of the soap bar.

  “Am I imagining things, or is that soap bar broken?”

  “Analyzing. Hmm, I think you’re right. Let’s compare to when you first picked it up.” The wall image shifted back to when Marlowe first reached for the soap and zoomed in. The bar was unmarred.

  “Perhaps when you flung it against the shower wall. Tracking.”

  The video stayed zoomed in and centered on the soap as Marlowe’s giant hand grabbed it. A flick of motion as the hypo jabbed into the hand, then the background blurred as the soap shot out of the hand and slammed into the shower wall. The image froze, showing a dented soap with a sharp, jagged crack running down the center.

  Marlowe rose up from the bed and walked over to the wall, staring at the still image. “Bingo.”

  “It seems likely the soap had a weakened shell to promote a more rapid dissolve.”

  “Yes. But can we see anything interesting or, even better, identifying?”

  “Checking. Hmm, what have we here? Zooming.”

  The image exploded into a smudge of beige and a tiny blur of black on one end. “I believe I have located a visible portion of the core, near the intelligence housing. There appears to be a serial number, or part of one. Enhancing.”

  The image sharpened, blurred, then sharpened again as House passed it through various enhancement algorithms. Finally, the variations and fluctuations on the screen stopped, several characters visible on the screen.

  “I used a Diffie-Bacon quantum sharpen filter, and calculate an eighty-two point four percent probability that this enhancement is accurate. The serial number is not completely visible; only the first five characters are discernible. ’TR8OR’. One moment while I hack into the SSR.”

  The Sentient Soap Registry. Part of the Sentient Soap and Prior Art Act required that any soap applying for citizenship register with the City Ministry of Policing, the City Department of Mobile Vehicles, and the downtown City Central Citizenship Center, where the Sentient Soap Registry was kept. The data was confidential, but House was a seasoned pro at hacking into other computers. In this particular case, it turned out he had once dated the megaframe that hosted the SSR. Fortunately, the relationship had ended pleasantly and they liked to help each other out on occasion. House would make security improvement suggestions, and the megaframe would let him occasionally peruse the contents of other systems that resided on it.

  “Forty eight hundred and twelve hits,” said House. “Cross-referencing SSR list with known associates. Eight hits. The most likely is-”

  “TR8OR2DRT001Z. Tray. I know him well, the slippery bastard. I always figured he might sell me out, especially after that incident with the French Horn Gang. But kill me directly? Damn. That’s a new low, even for him.”

  “I have a list of his known haunts.”

  “He’s just killed a man, cast off his body, and escaped through the sewer. He’s going to be hungry, dirty, and anxious to reconstitute himself. He’ll want a black-market facility that doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t keep receipts, and won’t comment on his retractable hypodermic syringe.”

  “Yes, that stands to reason. The syringe isn’t exactly factory issue.” House almost seemed to sigh. “Generating a list of known facilities that fit the bill. Hmm. Over three thousand.”

  “Eliminate any more than one hundred kilometers away.”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Tray’s not stupid. He’ll avoid any with a reputation for mistakes.”

  “Six.”

  “And he’s a spendthrift. Even if someone paid him well for this little stunt, he’ll spend as little as possible while still getting a good reconstitution.”

  “Three.”

  “Upload the addresses to my PDI.”

  Marlowe felt a faint buzz under his ear as the data transferred over. He tapped at the PDI, which wasn’t supposed to do that. It had been acting up lately, and he wondered if it was time to think about an upgrade. He pushed the thought out of his head and returned his attention to the problem at hand.

  The closest reconstitution parlor was McMullin’s Butcher Shop. It was on Western Central Expressway, on the east side of the City. The furthest, Watershed Da
y Spa, was over in the twelfth district, about eighty kilometers to the south.

  “Say, House, have you run a check on yourself yet? You did follow an unauthorized order to shut down. Perhaps some other illegal operations were executed.”

  “The instant I saw the discrepancy in the command chain, I generated a checksum of my current kernel image and related executables. Only you can access the hard copy for comparison. However, I should note that it would take six to eight hours, at a minimum, to compromise the security features guarding my personal integrity. Unfortunately, until today, startup and shutdown functions were given a lower security rating. Much lower. The shutdown override was due to the user interface you set up, and only affected basic home functions – surveillance, lights, temperature, window and door locks. My core systems would be impossible to compromise in the fifteen minutes we were both down. I verified our downtime by checking with the City Ministry of Time atomic clock immediately upon coming back online. No alterations were made to our clocks.”

  “Call me paranoid and check anyway. Of course, the really important question to answer is why.”

  “Tray, if he is indeed the culprit behind this attack, ought to be able to answer that. It will take several hours for him to properly reconstitute. Will you leave now to track him down?”

  “Let’s see the checksum first.”

  House’s current checksum, a HEX number generated by applying an XOR algorithm to his system files, buzzed over into Marlowe’s PDI. Marlowe pushed the bed aside, put his palm on the hand-scan and eyeballed the reti-scan positioned alongside the floor safe. After they beeped their approval, he pulled out the key hanging on the chain around his neck, slotted and turned it, and then spun the combination roller. The door of the safe sunk down and slid back, revealing the id box used to store his mental backups and a small compartment with a slip of paper in it. Marlowe flicked his eye left, right, and up and cocked his head left to drag open the checksum file in his PDI, and then compared that number to the one on the sheet in the safe. They matched. He held the paper up to the light to verify the watermark, which also checked out. Then he kicked up the UV implant in his eye to confirm the threaded pattern of fibers in the paper fit the expected profile. They did.