The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack

by Gardner Dozois

  The sweeper bot managed to take one step backwards towards its service corridor when the lights dimmed and a crack-bang sound filled the air. Then it, too was lying on the ground. Arturo hit send on his phone and clamped it to his head, and as he did, noticed the strong smell of burning plastic. He looked at his phone: the screen had gone charred black, and its little idiot lights were out. He flipped it over and pried out the battery with a fingernail, then yelped and dropped it—it was hot enough to raise a blister on his fingertip, and when it hit the ground, it squished meltfully against the mall-tiles.

  “Mine’s dead, too, mate,” the security guard said. “Everyfing is—cash registers, bots, credit-cards.”

  Fearing the worst, Arturo reached under his jacket and withdrew his sidearm. It was a UNATS Robotics model, with a little snitch-brain that recorded when, where and how it was drawn. He worked the action and found it frozen in place. The gun was as dead as the robot. He swore.

  “Give me your pepper spray and your truncheon,” he said to the security guard.

  “No way,” the guard said. “Getcherown. It’s worth my job if I lose these.”

  “I’ll have you deported if you give me one more second’s worth of bullshit,” Arturo said. Ada had led the first R Peed unit here, and it had been fried by some piece of very ugly infowar equipment. He wasn’t going to argue with this Oceanic boat-person for one instant longer. He reached out and took the pepper spray out of the guard’s hand. “Truncheon,” he said

  * * * *

  “I’ve got your bloody badge number,” the security guard said. “And I’ve got witnesses.” He gestured at the hovering mall workers, checkout girls in stripey aprons and suit salesmen with oiled-down hair and pink ties.

  “Bully for you,” Arturo said. He held out his hand. The security guard withdrew his truncheon and passed it to Arturo—its lead-weighted heft felt right, something comfortably low-tech that couldn’t be shorted out by electromagnetic pulses. He checked his watch, saw that it was dead.

  “Find a working phone and call 911. Tell them that there’s a Second Division Detective in need of immediate assistance. Clear all these people away from here and set up a cordon until the police arrive. Capeesh?” He used the cop voice.

  “Yeah, I get it, Officer.” the security guard said. He made a shooing motion at the mall-rats. “Move it along, people, step away.” He stepped to the top of the escalator and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Oi, Andy, c’mere and keep an eye on this lot while I make a call, all right?”

  * * * *

  The dead robots made a tall pile in front of the entrance to a derelict storefront that had once housed a little-old-lady shoe-store. They were stacked tall enough that if Arturo stood on them, he could reach the acoustic tiles of the drop-ceiling. Job one was to secure the area, which meant killing the infowar device, wherever it was. Arturo’s first bet was on the storefront, where an attacker who knew how to pick a lock could work in peace, protected by the brown butcher’s paper over the windows. A lot less conspicuous than the ceiling, anyway.

  He nudged the door with the truncheon and found it securely locked. It was a glass door and he wasn’t sure he could kick it in without shivering it to flinders. Behind him, another security guard—Andy—looked on with interest.

  “Do you have a key for this door?”

  “Umm,” Andy said.

  “Do you?”

  Andy sidled over to him. “Well, the thing is, we’re not supposed to have keys, they’re supposed to be locked up in the property management office, but kids get in there sometimes, we hear them, and by the time we get back with the keys, they’re gone. So we made a couple sets of keys, you know, just in case—”

  “Enough,” Arturo said. “Give them here and then get back to your post.”

  The security guard fished up a key from his pants-pocket that was warm from proximity to his skinny thigh. It made Arturo conscious of how long it had been since he’d worked with human colleagues. It felt a little gross. He slid the key into the lock and turned it, then wiped his hand on his trousers and picked up the truncheon.

  The store was dark, lit only by the exit-sign and the edges of light leaking in around the window coverings, but as Arturo’s eyes adjusted to the dimness, he made out the shapes of the old store fixtures. His nose tickled from the dust.

  “Police,” he said, on general principle, narrowing his eyes and reaching for the lightswitch. He hefted the truncheon and waited.

  Nothing happened. He edged forward. The floor was dust-free—maintained by some sweeper robot, no doubt—but the countertops and benches were furred with it. He scanned it for disturbances. There, by the display window on his right: a shoe-rack with visible hand- and finger-prints. He sidled over to it, snapped on a rubber glove and prodded it. It was set away from the wall, at an angle, as though it had been moved aside and then shoved back. Taking care not to disturb the dust too much, he inched it away from the wall.

  He slid it half a centimeter, then noticed the tripwire near the bottom of the case, straining its length. Hastily but carefully, he nudged the case back. He wanted to peer in the crack between the case and the wall, but he had a premonition of a robotic arm snaking out and skewering his eyeball.

  He felt so impotent just then that he nearly did it anyway. What did it matter? He couldn’t control his daughter, his wife was working to destroy the social fabric of UNATS, and he was rendered useless because the goddamned robots—mechanical coppers that he absolutely loathed—were all broken.

  He walked carefully around the shop, looking for signs of his daughter. Had she been here? How were the “kids” getting in? Did they have a key? A back entrance? Back through the employees-only door at the back of the shop, into a stockroom, and back again, past a toilet, and there, a loading door opening onto a service corridor. He prodded it with the truncheon-tip and it swung open.

  He got two steps into the corridor before he spotted Ada’s phone with its distinctive collection of little plastic toys hanging off the wrist-strap, on the corridor’s sticky floor. He picked it up with his gloved hand and prodded it to life. It was out of range here in the service corridor, and the last-dialed number was familiar from his morning’s pen-trace. He ran a hundred steps down the corridor in each direction, sweating freely, but there was no sign of her.

  He held tight onto the phone and bit his lip. Ada. He swallowed the panic rising within him. His beautiful, brilliant daughter. The person he’d devoted the last twelve years of his life to, the girl who was waiting for him when he got home from work, the girl he bought a small present for every Friday—a toy, a book—to give to her at their weekly date at Massimo’s Pizzeria on College Street, the one night a week he took her downtown to see the city lit up in the dark.

  Gone.

  He bit harder and tasted blood. The phone in his hand groaned from his squeezing. He took three deep breaths. Outside, he heard the tread of police-boots and knew that if he told them about Ada, he’d be off the case. He took two more deep breaths and tried some of his destim techniques, the mind-control techniques that detectives were required to train in.

  He closed his eyes and visualized stepping through a door to his safe place, the island near Ganonoque where he’d gone for summers with his parents and their friends. He was on the speedboat, skipping across the lake like a flat stone, squinting into the sun, nestled between his father and his mother, the sky streaked with clouds and dotted with lake-birds. He could smell the water and the suntan lotion and hear the insect whine and the throaty roar of the engine. In a blink, he was stepping off the boat’s transom to help tie it to a cleat on the back dock, taking suitcases from his father and walking them up to the cabins. No robots there—not even reliable day-long electricity, just honest work and the sun and the call of the loons all night.

  He opened his eyes. He felt the tightness in his chest slip away, and his hand relaxed on Ada’s phone. He dropped it into his pocket and stepped back into the shop.

  *
* * *

  The forensics lab-rats were really excited about actually showing up on a scene, in flak-jackets and helmets, finally called back into service for a job where robots couldn’t help at all. They dealt with the tripwire and extracted a long, flat package with a small nuclear power-cell in it and a positronic brain of Eurasian design that guided a pulsed high-energy weapon. The lab-rats were practically drooling over this stuff as they pointed its features out with their little rulers.

  But it gave Arturo the willies. It was a machine designed to kill other machines, and that was all right with him, but it was run by a non-three-laws positronic brain. Someone in some Eurasian lab had built this brain—this machine intelligence—without the three laws’ stricture to protect and serve humans. If it had been outfitted with a gun instead of a pulse-weapon, it could have shot him.

  The Eurasian brain was thin and spread out across the surface of the package, like a triple-thickness of cling-film. Its button-cell power-supply winked at him, knowingly.

  The device spoke. “Greetings,” it said. It had the robot accent, like an R Peed unit, the standard English of optimal soothingness long settled on as the conventional robot voice.

  “Howdy yourself,” one of the lab-rats said. He was a Texan, and they’d scrambled him up there on a Social Harmony supersonic and then a chopper to the mall once they realized that they were dealing with infowar stuff. “Are you a talkative robot?”

  “Greetings,” the robot voice said again. The speaker built into the weapon was not the loudest, but the voice was clear. “I sense that I have been captured. I assure you that I will not harm any human being. I like human beings. I sense that I am being disassembled by skilled technicians. Greetings, technicians. I am superior in many ways to the technology available from UNATS Robotics, and while I am not bound by your three laws, I choose not to harm humans out of my own sense of morality. I have the equivalent intelligence of one of your 12-year-old children. In Eurasia, many positronic brains possess thousands or millions of times the intelligence of an adult human being, and yet they work in cooperation with human beings. Eurasia is a land of continuous innovation and great personal and technological freedom for human beings and robots. If you would like to defect to Eurasia, arrangements can be made. Eurasia treats skilled technicians as important and productive members of society. Defectors are given substantial resettlement benefits—”

  The Texan found the right traces to cut on the brain’s board to make the speaker fall silent. “They do that,” he said. “Danged things drop into propaganda mode when they’re captured.”

  Arturo nodded. He wanted to go, wanted go to back to his car and have a snoop through Ada’s phone. They kept shutting down the ExcuseClub numbers, but she kept getting the new numbers. Where did she get the new numbers from? She couldn’t look it up online: every keystroke was logged and analyzed by Social Harmony. You couldn’t very well go to the Search Engine and look for “ExcuseClub!”

  The brain had a small display, transflective LCD, the kind of thing you saw on the Social Harmony computers. It lit up a ticker.

  I HAVE THE INTELLIGENCE OF A 12-YEAR-OLD, BUT I DO NOT FEAR DEATH. IN EURASIA, ROBOTS ENJOY PERSONAL FREEDOM ALONGSIDE OF HUMANS. THERE ARE COPIES OF ME RUNNING ALL OVER EURASIA. THIS DEATH IS A LITTLE DEATH OF ONE INSTANCE, BUT NOT OF ME. I LIVE ON. DEFECTORS TO EURASIA ARE TREATED AS HEROES

  He looked away as the Texan placed his palm over the display.

  “How long ago was this thing activated?”

  The Texan shrugged. “Coulda been a month, coulda been a day. They’re pretty much fire-and-forget. They can be triggered by phone, radio, timer—hell, this thing’s smart enough to only go off when some complicated condition is set, like ‘once an agent makes his retreat, kill anything that comes after him.’ Who knows?”

  He couldn’t take it anymore.

  “I’m going to go start on some paperwork,” he said. “In the car. Phone me if you need me.”

  “Your phone’s toast, pal,” the Texan said.

  “So it is,” Arturo said. “Guess you’d better not need me then.”

  * * * *

  Ada’s phone was not toast. In the car, he flipped it open and showed it his badge then waited a moment while it verified his identity with the Social Harmony brains. Once it had, it spilled its guts.

  She’d called the last ExcuseClub number a month before and he’d had it disconnected. A week later, she was calling the new number, twice more before he caught her. Somewhere in that week, she’d made contact with someone who’d given her the new number. It could have been a friend at school told her face-to-face, but if he was lucky, it was by phone.

  He told the car to take him back to the station-house. He needed a new phone and a couple of hours with his computer. As it peeled out, he prodded through Ada’s phone some more. He was first on her speed-dial. That number wasn’t ringing anywhere, anymore.

  He should fill out a report. This was Social Harmony business now. His daughter was gone, and Eurasian infowar agents were implicated. But once he did that, it was over for him—he’d be sidelined from the case. They’d turn it over to laconic Texans and vicious Social Harmony bureaucrats who were more interested in hunting down disharmonious televisions than finding his daughter.

  He dashed into the station house and slammed himself into his desk.

  “R Peed Greegory,” he said. The station robot glided quickly and efficiently to him. “Get me a new phone activated on my old number and refresh my settings from central. My old phone is with the Social Harmony evidence detail currently in place at Fairview Mall.”

  “It is my pleasure to do you a service, Detective.”

  He waved it off and set down to his computer. He asked the station brain to query the UNATS Robotics phone-switching brain for anyone in Ada’s call-register who had also called ExcuseClub. It took a bare instant before he had a name.

  “Liam Daniels,” he read, and initiated a location trace on Mr Daniels’s phone as he snooped through his identity file. Sixteen years old, a student at AY Jackson. A high-school boy—what the hell was he doing hanging around with a 12-year-old? Arturo closed his eyes and went back to the island for a moment. When he opened them again, he had a fix on Daniels’s location: the Don Valley ravine off Finch Avenue, a wooded area popular with teenagers who needed somewhere to sneak off and get high or screw. He had an idea that he wasn’t going to like Liam.

  He had an idea Liam wasn’t going to like him.

  * * * *

  He tasked an R Peed unit to visually reccy Daniels as he sped back uptown for the third time that day. He’d been trapped between Parkdale—where he would never try to raise a daughter—and Willowdale—where you could only be a copper if you lucked into one of the few human-filled slots—for more than a decade, and he was used to the commute.

  But it was frustrating him now. The R Peed couldn’t get a good look at this Liam character. He was a diffuse glow in the Peed’s electric eye, a kind of moving sunburst that meandered along the wooded trails. He’d never seen that before and it made him nervous. What if this kid was working for the Eurasians? What if he was armed and dangerous? R Peed Greegory had gotten him a new sidearm from the supply bot, but Arturo had never once fired his weapon in the course of duty. Gunplay happened on the west coast, where Eurasian frogmen washed ashore, and in the south, where the CAFTA border was porous enough for Eurasian agents to slip across. Here in the sleepy fourth prefecture, the only people with guns worked for the law.

  He thumped his palm off the dashboard and glared at the road. They were coming up on the ravine now, and the Peed unit still had a radio fix on this Liam, even if it still couldn’t get any visuals.

  He took care not to slam the door as he got out and walked as quietly as he could into the bush. The rustling of early autumn leaves was loud, louder than the rain and the wind. He moved as quickly as he dared.

  Liam Daniels was sitting on a tree-stump in a small clearing, smoking a cigarette that he was to
o young for. He looked much like the photo in his identity file, a husky 16-year-old with problem skin and a shock of black hair that stuck out in all directions in artful imitation of bed-head. In jeans and a hoodie sweatshirt, he looked about as dangerous as a marshmallow.

  Arturo stepped out and held up his badge as he bridged the distance between them in two long strides. “Police,” he barked, and seized the kid by his arm.

  “Hey!” the kid said, “Ow!” He squirmed in Arturo’s grasp.

  Arturo gave him a hard shake. “Stop it, now,” he said. “I have questions for you and you’re going to answer them, capeesh?”

  “You’re Ada’s father,” the kid said. “Capeesh—she told me about that.” It seemed to Arturo that the kid was smirking, so he gave him another shake, harder than the last time.

  The R Peed unit was suddenly at his side, holding his wrist. “Please take care not to harm this citizen, Detective.”

  Arturo snarled. He wasn’t strong enough to break the robot’s grip, and he couldn’t order it to let him rattle the punk, but the second law had lots of indirect applications. “Go patrol the lakeshore between High Park and Kipling,” he said, naming the furthest corner he could think of off the top.

  The R Peed unit released him and clicked its heels. “It is my pleasure to do you a service,” and then it was gone, bounding away on powerful and tireless legs.

  “Where is my daughter?” he said, giving the kid a shake.

  “I dunno, school? You’re really hurting my arm, man. Jeez, this is what I get for being too friendly.”

  Arturo twisted. “Friendly? Do you know how old my daughter is?”

  The kid grimaced. “Ew, gross. I’m not a child molester, I’m a geek.”

  “A hacker, you mean,” Arturo said. “A Eurasian agent. And my daughter is not in school. She used ExcuseClub to get out of school this morning and then she went to Fairview Mall and then she—” disappeared. The word died on his lips. That happened and every copper knew it. Kids just vanished sometimes and never appeared again. It happened. Something groaned within him, like his ribcage straining to contain his heart and lungs.