Robots: The Recent A.I.

by Elizabeth Bear

  The only clean prints were from Patterson himself. The screw had more detail than he’d thought possible for such a small piece of metal. It was a M3 machine screw, brass, a truss head with a posidriv slot, and had been sheared 5 mm down the shaft. Griggs had no word on the lemon smell, or the blood on the stairs.

  Huang threw the papers down. What was the point of trying to investigate something when half the evidence had gone missing?

  Evidence was missing.

  What if someone hadn’t taken Metta to access her network, but to hide evidence? No, that didn’t make sense. Griggs had said they were going to boot a backup of Metta into a new chassis. On the other hand, that meant the department would have access to all of the information from before her last backup, but not after.

  Metta had asked Huang to wait while she did the backup, which she did every six hours. They spent two hours on the roof before the break-in at the station happened. So everything in that two hour period was unrecorded.

  What was in the blind spot?

  He turned to the computer and asked the A.S. search engine for a list of crimes under investigation when Metta had vanished. The engine returned the search empty-handed. Huang grimaced. Of course, Metta wasn’t available to query. Once he started feeding the A.S. the scattered details he could remember, it began returning information from the call centers about the unresolved investigations.

  He scowled and tried to recall what they’d talked about in the morning staff meeting. The urge to subvocalize to Metta and ask her to jog his memory kept tickling.

  Hours later, Griggs leaned her head into the department. “Hey Huang, the new chassis arrived.”

  Huang pushed back from his desk. He pulled his VR glasses and earbud out of his pocket, putting them on while he followed Griggs into the hall. An excited crowd of officers streamed toward the stairs. He pushed down the steps where Amado had been found, wondering if it had been hard for him to come back this way.

  Just down the hall from the bottom of the stairwell, it looked like half the station had gathered outside the chassis room. Griggs hung near the fringes, hands shoved deep in her pockets. Huang worked his way through the group until he was leaning against the door.

  Amado glanced over his shoulder. “Okay. She’s about to wake up.”

  Metta’s cameras swiveled on their base, ID-ing the people standing in the door.

  The face she wore for Amado, a young, gawkish woman, appeared above the interface with panic in her eyes. “Why am I a backup?”

  Huang wanted to back away from the raw fear in her face.

  “What happened to me? Why am I a backup?”

  “Take it easy, Metta.” Amado raised his hands soothingly.

  “Screw that. Tell me why I’m a backup.” She blinked. “And why don’t I have access to anything but my local connections?” Her voiced thundered over her speakers. “Tell me what the hell happened!”

  “I thought it would be too jarring for you to come back online everywhere at once.”

  She smiled sourly at him. “Well, I’m online now and I feel like an amputee. How is that better?”

  “I’m sorry.” Amado tapped some keys on the manual interface and Metta’s face relaxed.

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m sorry. I haven’t done this before.”

  “No one has except when—” her voice broke off. “Am I dead?”

  “No.” Amado hesitated, clearly trying to decide what to tell her.

  Huang couldn’t stand this subterfuge. “Metta?” he subvocalized, “Can you hear me?”

  Mae West faded into sight on his glasses. She purred in his ear, “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?”

  “Beyond measure.”

  “I’m glad.” Then her face hardened. “Will you tell me what’s happening?”

  In the room in front of Huang, Amado rubbed his hands together. “There was an incident.”

  “Duh.”

  Delarosa leaned over Amado’s chair, ignoring the AI wrangler. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  Her eyes widened. “On which channel, sir? I’m with all of your men on duty, do you want me to tell you my last memory with each of them? Or my last memories through the surveillance cameras? Or shall I simply tell you my memory ends at 8:59:59 on Tuesday, October twenty-fifth. It would be more useful to tell me what happened after that.”

  Huang subvocalized to Metta, “Armed men broke into the station and stole your chassis. They shot Amado.”

  The face in his VR glasses opened her mouth in shock. Over her interface, Metta looked down at Amado. “I should have noticed the bandage. I’m sorry, I was disoriented.”

  In Huang’s ear, she whispered, “Thank you, Scott.”

  “So you brought me online to find the people who stole me and shot you?”

  Amado flinched and looked over his shoulder, no doubt wondering which of the officers watching was talking to Metta. Huang met his eyes with a flat expression, uncomfortably aware of the glasses on his face.

  “Fitzgerald’s dead?” Metta’s voice brought Amado back to the front. Huang realized he was not the only one in the group subvocalizing to her.

  “Who’s telling you these things?” Amado started to twist in his seat again.

  “For heaven’s sake, Amado. There’s an APB out for the people who shot him! I’m doing what I was designed to do, filling in the blanks from evidence on hand. This isn’t like we’re playing hide-and-seek.”

  “I’m sorry, I was worried about you.”

  “Which me, Amado? The one here now, or my Prime?”

  Huang backed away from the door. “Metta, are you okay?”

  Mae West laughed at him. “I’m angry and confused, but completely functional. On the way to the Patterson case, I told you to wait so it could all be on one memory bank, and now I don’t remember any of it. Tell me everything that happened from your point of view after that.” She hesitated and looked squarely at him. “Don’t leave anything out, not even the jokes.”

  Huang began talking as he walked up the stairs; he started with the wainscoting.

  When he finished reciting everything he could remember since she had vanished, the face of Mae West chewed her lower lip thoughtfully. “Scott. . . . Beyond talking to Mrs. Patterson, I didn’t hear you say anything about the case. Did you interview the workers at the Daily Grind, or canvass the neighborhood, or . . . maybe you should catch me up on what you’ve done on the Patterson case?”

  The air went cold and Huang slumped in his seat. He hadn’t done any of that. “I—I was thinking. . . . Well, wondering if maybe one of the cases on Tuesday morning was connected to the break in here and—shit.” He hung his head, realizing that he’d forgotten his own case in his concern for Metta. Was he really that inept without her to remind him of things? “I totally got distracted and screwed up, didn’t I?”

  “Well. . . . ” Metta smiled at him, with the full dazzling brilliance of Mae West. “An ounce of performance is worth pounds of promises.”

  Huang laughed, despite his guilt. Trust Metta to attempt to reassure him. “Y’know, you don’t have to keep the Mae West interface if you don’t want to.”

  Her smile dropped. “I thought you liked it.”

  “I do, but you’ve been through a lot and I don’t want you to stress about it.”

  “Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can’t figure out what from.” She pouted the full lips and then spoke with her own voice out of Mae West’s mouth. “Scott, I just woke up for the first time in my life. It’s . . . it’s hard to explain what it is like to have no awareness of a day. My memory stretches back to the moment I first came online with the exception of this gaping hole. Being Mae West today makes me feel connected to when I was Mae West on Tuesday. If it bothers you, I’ll change, but otherwise I’d rather keep her for awhile.”

  Huang wanted to press his hand to her cheek to soothe her. “Metta, I wish there was something I could do for you.”
/>   “You’re doing a lot already.”

  “I’m not doing anything.”

  “You’re treating me like I’m real, and we both know I’m not.”

  “Don’t say that.” He leaned forward, close to her interface.

  “I don’t mean that . . . I mean I’m a backup. There are two of me in the world—this is more than two programs starting with the same parameters. My siblings are like identical twins; the same material creates different people. I’m an incomplete version of the Metta you know, and we diverge farther from each other with every moment that passes.” She tossed her head. “There’s no need to go on about this. It is what it is. The point is, I appreciate that you have always treated me like a real person.”

  He listened to the words she didn’t say; there were people who treated her like a machine. He thought of Qadir and his Arabian Nights interface. “Metta—”

  “Hush. Let’s talk about the Patterson case.”

  He took a breath to clear his head. “Okay. I guess first up is the coffee shop?”

  Metta lowered her lashes and purred. “If I asked for a cup of coffee someone would search for the double meaning.”

  Huang stepped into the Daily Grind coffee shop and inhaled deeply. He could probably get a caffeine fix just from breathing.

  “A smell?” Metta asked.

  “Lots of really good coffee.”

  “The way you boys go on about coffee makes me wish I had taste and scent.”

  “It’s probably not as handy as your multitasking.”

  She gave him a saucy look. “Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.”

  “Geez, Metta, you’re going to distract me with all this Mae West heat.”

  “I didn’t discover curves; I only uncovered them.”

  “Shush.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Sorry, Scott. Go on, do your thing.”

  Huang walked up to the counter and leaned casually against it, waiting for the teenage girl behind it to notice him. She was standing by an A.S. espresso machine as the mechanized arms made a perfect cappuccino. The automaton’s arms whirred with precise tiny movements.

  Huang subvocalized to Metta, “Why don’t you have an automaton?”

  “Why give up processing power when I have you?”

  “I’m more than just a pair of hands, you know.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “Men are all alike—except the one you’ve met who’s different.”

  “Ow.”

  The girl took the cup from the machine and shouted into the cafe, “Double dragon cappuccino!”

  The automaton espresso machine had poured the foam in the cup to create a coffee dragon. The bouquet was a complex nutty affair with notes of violets, citrus, and dark chocolate. Probably a Colombian blend.

  She handed it off to an Asian retro-steampunk kid and blew a strand of hair out of her face. “Welcome to the Daily Grind! What can I get for you?”

  Huang smiled at her and glanced at her name badge. “Actually, Vicki, I need to ask some questions. Were you working yesterday morning?”“ He pulled his badge out from his pocket and showed it to the girl.

  Vicki rolled her eyes at the sight of the detective’s shield. “Yeah.”

  “Great. Someone made a call from here at 8:13 yesterday morning. We want to talk to whoever it was.”

  “Is he in trouble?”

  Huang made a mental note that she had assigned a gender to the hypothetical person in his question. “We think he’s a witness. Who made the call?”

  “Lowfat double-shot cappuccino.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I know customers by their drinks, not their names.” Vicki flipped the hair back from her eye. “This guy comes in every morning and orders the same thing. He tried a mocha once and didn’t like it, went back to the lowfat double-shot cappuccino.”

  “Can you describe him?” He glanced at Metta who nodded to show that she was ready.

  As Vicki talked, Metta created a composite sketch, occasionally prompting Huang to ask specific questions in order to refine the features. When she was finished, she pinged the image to his PDA. Huang pulled it out and unrolled the screen to full-size. “Is this him?”

  Vicki frowned, looking at the rendering of the slender black man. He was in his mid-thirties, with a round face and short hair, twisted into neat, tiny curls. “Shit, yes. That’s creepy.”

  Huang suppressed a grin, but this skill of Metta’s was one of his favorite tricks. She nodded in his field of vision. “I’ll start cross-referencing him with our files.”

  Aloud, Huang asked, “Was there anything strange about the last time you saw him?”

  “What, you mean like the bandage on his hand?”

  Huang held himself extremely still. “Yes.” He locked his gaze on hers. “Exactly like that.”

  He waited for her to fill in the blanks. Vicki sighed and twisted her hair up onto her head in a bun. “Well, he usually comes in once around six, but yesterday he came in twice. I asked why, he says it was ’cause yesterday’s job was in the neighborhood.”

  “Any idea what he did?”

  “He was in construction. Always wore the same coveralls—” She held up a hand to stop him, clearly guessing the next question. “Gray with an orange patch. I don’t remember what it said.”

  “Huang, what is it?” Metta leaned forward in her screen. “Your eyes dilated.”

  “In a second,” he subvocalized. To the girl he said, “Go on.”

  “Anyway, so the first time he just gets his coffee, like usual. The second time—”

  Metta whispered, “Ask her when.”

  “Do you know what time that was?”

  “Just after 8:00. I was making the usual for Tall Skim Chai Latte and remember being surprised to see Lowfat double-shot cappuccino back in here. He asked if he could use the phone ’cause he’d left his at home. So I say sure and don’t pay much attention ’cause Tall Skim Chai Latte can be a bitch sometimes.”

  “How did he seem?”

  “Distracted? Tense? But smiling like always. . . . ” She squirmed. “He’s not in trouble, is he?”

  “Why do you think he might be in trouble?”

  “He’s a regular and he broke all the patterns.”

  “We think he witnessed the murder upstairs. Please, we need to find him.”

  She nodded. “Okay. So he uses the phone then goes out. I felt bad about having to ignore him so I shouted ‘Bye’ and that’s when I noticed that he’d been hurt.”

  “Did he have the bandage when he came in that morning?”

  She shook her head. “No. I would’ve noticed when I handed him his drink.”

  Huang slid his eyes to where Metta hovered in his glasses frame. “You didn’t see him again?”

  Vicki shrugged. “He didn’t come in this morning.”

  “Was anyone working with him?” From the moment the girl had said the man was in construction he’d had a feeling.

  “Not that I know of. It was always just him.”

  He handed Vicki his business card. “Thank you for your time. If you think of anything, or if you see him again, please call me immediately.”

  The moment his back was to the girl, Metta enlarged her face in his field of vision. “Okay, Scott. Spill it. What do you know that I don’t?”

  “Hang on. I’m enjoying being a step ahead of you.”

  “You’re taking unfair advantage of a medical condition.”

  He sobered as he recalled why she didn’t know what he remembered. “Yesterday there was construction scaffolding on the building behind this one.” He walked around the corner, heading to the back of the Daily Grind building.

  “I told you to tell me everything!”

  “I didn’t think to mention it because it wasn’t on the crime scene.”

  “What else did you leave out?”

  “I don’t know.” He strode down the sidewalk to the end of the block. “I had no way of knowing this was any more re
levant than that my mother made me tea last night.”

  She growled at him, but with the Mae West interface, she sounded disturbingly sexy.

  “I’m sorry,” Huang said. “It was a mistake. I won’t do it again.”

  “If you put your foot in it, be sure it’s your best foot.”

  He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “Just how big a Mae West database did you download?”

  “Big enough.” She still glowered at him.

  “Okay.” Huang held up his hands in surrender. “Look, I saw the scaffolding when we got to the roof. I don’t know if there was anyone on it when we left because we left in a hurry.”

  “Fair enough. Now get moving, I want to see this scaffolding.”

  Huang nodded and jogged to the end of the block. Across the street, the scaffolding was still in place, but no one was working on it.

  Metta looked up and to her left, grimacing. “I wish I could see your POV from yesterday and know if Mr. Lowfat was there.”

  He let his voice drop down. “Whoever was on that roof is still loose.”

  “You think—oh. Bogart, The Enforcer.” She rolled her eyes. “I must be more rattled than I thought if I can’t recognize your impression.”

  “Hey, Metta.” The urge to rub her back, to comfort her almost overwhelmed him. “No one will blame you if you need a day to get back into the groove.”

  Her eyes flashed. “I will blame myself.”

  “But you—you can’t blame yourself for being kidnapped.” His head spun as he remembered the Metta who had been kidnapped was still missing. It was so easy to think she was all right, when she was here. But he was speaking to a clone, who was also Metta, and yet not.

  “Who else is responsible for the safety of the station? I’ve been reading the reports since I was rebooted. How did they get so far before being noticed?”

  “I can’t answer that, Metta. Delarosa will find you.”

  “Ha.” She leaned forward, showing her bosom. “I see you’re a man with ideals. I better be going while you’ve still got them.” She sighed. “Speaking of going, get me closer to the scaffolding to see if there’s any contact information on them. Meanwhile, I’ll check with permits to see if we can find our guy that way.”