by Neil Clarke
The clock ticked over to oh-six-hundred-hours. The alarm rang and I opened my eyes. Weird thing. Felt I was watching the clock, like I’d been awake for hours, standing in the dark. Listening to the whirr of the reel-to-reel magnetic tapes on the computers surrounding me. Listening to the quiet buzz of cars in the street below. Listening to the clack of the clock on the wall, with its metal digits flip-flapping through the night. Watching the darkness.
Which was baloney, pure and simple. My clock reset every day at oh-six-hundred hours and I was born again. I knew how it worked. It was necessary, too, because those whirring tapes on the computer banks around me weren’t just to impress clients. Those whirring tapes, they were me. My mind, my memories. Everything I’d seen, heard, done; everywhere I’d gone. Everything I’d thought and computed, calculated, figured. On those spinning reels I was copied, backed up—the last version of me, anyway. The last day’s work. At midnight I plugged myself into Ada and shut down my circuits to recharge the batteries. Then she began copying my internal memory bank onto an empty spool, a process which took four hours. Another two hours to erase my internal tape, then a restart and I was back in business.
It had to be that way because the magnetic tape reels on the mainframe cabinets were big, the size of hubcaps from the kind of Buick I couldn’t afford, and they wouldn’t fit in my chest. Which meant I had to use a smaller memory tape in there, a work of genius getting everything so small. But it came with a cost. Limited capacity. Twenty-four hours was it. That was how it worked.
I shrugged off the feeling I had that it didn’t work like that, that I’d been awake for hours. Standing in the dark. Didn’t make sense. And, besides which, I had no memory beyond knowing who I was, what I was, and where I was. This was the reset, the master program. That tape was on one of the mainframes and started spinning about an hour before my alarm call. Reloading me. Every twenty-four hours I was born again.
“Morning, sunshine,” said Ada. In the office her voice was loud, coming at me from all sides thanks to the speakers hidden in the walls. She wasn’t just my assistant. She was the computer—hell, she was the room. I was literally standing inside her.
“Ada,” I said by way of greeting. I stepped out of the alcove and disconnected the cable from the middle of my chest, my umbilical to the mainframe. The port was hidden behind the detective shield, which swung back on a spring. My coat and hat were on the table in front of me. The mainframe—Ada’s mind, and mine—occupied two walls of the computer room. The third, facing my restart alcove, was a window looking out to the street. In the fourth wall was a door that led to the office. The computer room was all science, but the office was done out like any you’d recognize, except instead of diplomas on the wall I hung my quality control certificates and programming documents, all framed, all signed by Professor Thornton. Ada’s idea. Just in case any client got the jitters about hiring a machine instead of a regular guy. There was also a desk and a telephone, two padded leather armchairs for clients and a reinforced office chair behind the desk for myself to sit in. Clients seemed to want their private detectives to sit behind big desks, like they were ship captains behind the wheel. The desk in the outer office sure was big enough to sail away on.
There were two other doors out there. The front door, leading to the hallway, and one that led to the storage room. Every twenty-four hours my memory was copied onto a reel of magnetic computer tape weighing a hundred pounds. The storage room was bigger than the computer room and the office put together. Me and my memory needed a lot of space.
“Everything okay, Ada?” I asked as I picked up my coat and my hat. I shrugged them on and pulled the brim of my hat down. One of the advantages of being a robot detective was that I didn’t need coffee or a cigarette in the morning. Not even a shower. I was up and ready to get to work. All I needed now was for Ada to tell me what to do. She remembered everything because she was the big computer. She didn’t need backups and restarts.
“Good as gold, Ray. Good as gold.” Ada laughed. She was in a good mood. Whatever job it was I’d done yesterday must have gone off without a hitch. I didn’t remember what it was, but then I didn’t need to. Ada had it all safely stowed away.
I stood and waited for a new job for about an hour. It wasn’t like there was anything else I needed to do. Ada’s tapes spun back and forth, back and forth, and I looked out of the window. The building opposite was identical to ours, all brown brick. Dark, rough. Then the morning sun fell across it at an acute angle and cast long jagged shadows, like sunrise on the moon.
And then I remembered sitting in the car in the dark, watching shadows shift around the back of a low building, something like a warehouse. Then the memory was gone.
If I could have frowned, I would have, so I simulated the expression inside my circuits like Professor Thornton had programmed, and I ran the images back again. The car. The dark. Shadows moving around a warehouse. Quiet. There was a man sitting next to me in the car.
That was it. It was a memory fragment. That happened, sometimes. The little tape unit inside my chest was compact and portable, which meant it could only hold a day of data, but the miniaturization created other limitations. After the information on it was copied to the mainframe, my little bank was erased like you’d erase any magnetic tape, but like any magnetic tape the wipe sometimes wasn’t perfect. Sometimes there was data left, stuck to the surface of my mind like burned grease stuck to a frying pan. It didn’t matter. It would get written over soon enough.
I knew this was how it worked, because I knew how I worked. The only thing I had missing each morning was what I did before six in the AM.
But this fragment was long. Clear. I didn’t know if this was what fragments were like because I didn’t remember any others I might have woken up with. I played it again, and the man sitting next to me in the car was saying something, then he pointed out the window. Towards the warehouse. Towards the shadow moving near to the door of the building. The shadow was a man, and he reached out to open the door.
I turned around, back to the computer banks. The tapes spun. Ada hadn’t spoken for an hour and seven minutes. My internal clock had kept track. I looked at the clock above the door anyway.
It was electric, wired into the wall, digital with metal numbers that flipped around with a clack. It had been counting the seconds ever since I restarted, the seconds in perfect synch with my own counter. Only the numbers on the wall clock read ZERO-FOUR-TWO-FIVE, with the seconds marching on. My internal clock said it had been one hour, eight minutes since the universe was created and I woke up. That meant the wall clock was two hours, forty-three minutes slow.
“Ada,” I said, pointing at the wall clock. “My internal clock says its a little after seven. What time do you make it?”
One pair of tape reels on the mainframe to my left stopped, spun in the opposite direction for a second, then resumed their original course.
“Eight past seven and forty seconds, Chief,” said Ada. “August nineteen, 1962. Everything okay?”
“Yeah, no problem. The wall clock is slow.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Ada. “We had a power outage last night, around one.”
“I thought we had our own back-up generator?”
“We do, but it didn’t kick in. Maybe you can take a look later? There’s an access door at the back of the storage room.”
I nodded. “Okay. Got a memory glitch. Something from the last job I think.”
“What kind of glitch?”
“Just a replay of a few seconds. Nothing much there. Me in a car behind a building.”
“Oh,” said Ada, and then her tapes whirred and her circuits fizzed and she said “Better write over that. Don’t want it interfering with today’s job. Speaking of which, I’ve got an address for you.”
There was a printer attached to one of the mainframes, paper spilling out in a cascade of perforated sheets. It started up and printed out the job details like a jackhammer, and when it was done I tore the sheet of
f, read it over, and folded it in half. When I slipped it inside my coat pocket, I felt something else in there already. Something heavy, wrapped in paper that crinkled as I slid the job sheet snugly beside it.
Interesting.
“Have a great day,” said Ada. I doffed my hat and walked to the door.
“And remember to delete that fragment,” she said as I walked across the empty outer office to the main door. “I want your mind on the job today, Raymondo.”
I said sure thing, and I left the building and headed to where my car was parked in the basement garage, the heavy weight in my coat pocket and the memory of last night playing on a loop in front of my eyes.
Ada had called me “Chief.” I think I liked it.
Here’s the thing: I’m practically built for stakeouts. I can sit or stand still for hours—so long as I get back to the office before my memory is full and time is up—and I don’t get bored or tired. I don’t need to eat or drink and if I leak it’s machine oil and a sign I need a little maintenance. I don’t breathe either, but then not requiring oxygen doesn’t seem a particular plus while sitting in my car watching an empty street. On the other hand, I guess it means that nobody with nefarious intent could sneak up on me while I’m on duty and strangle me with my tie.
The street sure was empty. Nothing had happened for six hours. It was now after two in the afternoon. The sun was out and the car was hot, at least according to my sensors. But I didn’t feel it and I didn’t sweat. I’m telling you, stakeouts are a cakewalk.
Except the house was clearly empty. It was in the suburbs. Nice place. Two story, white weatherboards. Garage big enough for two cars. Lawn nicely kept. I was parked across the street and a little down from it. There were a handful of other cars parked around, some on the street, some in driveways. Nobody had so much as cruised by since I’d arrived. Even the mailman hadn’t been. Maybe in a fancy expensive neighborhood like this the mail came early, real early, early enough to add an extra thousand to the average house price. Y’know. A feature. Mail comes early in this neighborhood. Get your letters from the Queen of England before the poor schmucks in the next block get their overdue demands. Mailman calls you sir or ma’am too.
Another hour and the house was still empty, like the street. The mailman had been, which blew my theory out of the water. I was liking this neighborhood less. Ada hadn’t called either. That wasn’t unusual, but she felt a little odd when I’d left the office. Maybe it was that power cut. If the generator had failed then she must have gone down as well. Couldn’t be good. I needed to look at the generator. Maybe it was just out of gas. I knew our building had maintenance but our office was a secure facility, the computer room and the storage room off limits to any janitor. Even I didn’t remember the storage room, but Ada wasn’t exactly mobile, so I guess I must have been the one who unwound the full tapes, pulled them off the mainframes, boxed them up and put them in storage. But I didn’t remember. Maybe I also dusted the computer room and vacuumed the big rug in the main office, but I didn’t remember that either.
The bright street of nice houses in front of me vanished, replaced by a wet night in a parking lot. There was a large, low building in front of me. There was someone sitting in the car next to me. He said something and pointed, and over by the building a man peeled out of the shadows, opened a door, and went inside.
Then the nice street reappeared. The house I was watching was still empty.
I took the job sheet out of my coat pocket and looked it over. There wasn’t much on it. Surveillance all day at an address given. Maybe it was part of an earlier job. That was the thing with having a limited memory, and that was also why I needed Ada. She remembered the jobs and did the planning. Jobs could take days—weeks—and my entire life started every morning at six.
Which meant this surveillance job was part of something else. The job sheet didn’t say, but then it never did. I put it down on the passenger seat, and then I saw the matchbook in the footwell.
I reached over and picked it up. It was half done and the cover was creased, like it had caught on the edge of a pocket when someone had put it away. It wasn’t mine, because I didn’t smoke.
I pulled the creased cover down and took a good look. The cover was a purple red, magenta, and it had writing on it in yellow letters which said DABNEY’S BAR AND OYSTER CLUB.
Then I looked out at the empty house in the nice neighborhood and the nice neighborhood turned to a wet parking lot in the night, and the empty seat next to me was occupied by a passenger, a man with a thin weaselly face and a high voice. Between the fingers of his left hand he held the matchbook loosely: so loosely that it slipped and fell into the footwell without him noticing. Then he opened the door and got out most of the way, then he stopped and took a packet wrapped in light brown paper from his inside coat pocket and put it on the seat next to me. Then he was gone. Then I picked up the packet. The paper crinkled in my hands, and the object inside was heavy.
The street reappeared and so did the matchbook in my hand. With the other I reached into my own coat pocket, following the movements of the image of the man in my car, recorded onto the memory fragment on my internal tape.
I pulled the packet out. The heavy thing was a gun and the padding was money. Lots of it in neat straps, held together with paper bands.
This was a new thing. I figured that maybe the gun and the money should have been stowed away somewhere, back at the office, but there they were in my coat. I figured that maybe I was the one who should have stowed it away, like I stowed away my memory tapes in the storage room and never remembered doing it.
I thought about the stopped clock on the computer room wall, then looked at the matchbook, then looked at the empty house. Nobody was going to come back. It was late afternoon. The job sheet on the stakeout was nonspecific.
So I decided to start the car and pull out from the curb, the match-book in my hand and the brown packet on the passenger seat, my destination Dabney’s Bar and Oyster Club, Hollywood, California.
I parked out on the main street. No need to be secretive. I was just a robot out minding his own business, which in this case was walking down the street to a bar to see if I could find a man with a thin weasel face and a high-pitched voice.
I passed a newsstand on the corner and crossed at a big intersection. People were looking at me, some even pointing, but that was fine, no problem. People knew about robots and some people even remembered them. Robits.
I stopped on the other side of the street, outside a grocery store. I thought about the man’s voice and the way he said “robits” like it was another word entirely.
It was a hot afternoon and two kids came out of the grocery store with ice cream cones in their hands. They stopped by their bikes and watched me, their treats melting over their knuckles. I looked at them and the three of us stood there playing statues until the pay phone at the curb behind me rang.
I stopped looking at the kids and walked over to the phone. I knew the call was for me even before I lifted the receiver.
“Taking a break, Ray?” asked Ada inside my head. The phone’s receiver buzzed uselessly in my ear, so I ignored it.
“What did you say about telephones, Ada?”
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said, and then she laughed like the twenty-a-day smoker she was programmed to sound like. I had the image again of long legs dangling over the balcony on a smoky Indian summer years ago. “Can’t have a big fella like you standing in the street, whispering sweet nothings to yourself. People will talk.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So what’s the story?”
If I could have huffed I would have, so instead I simulated it like the good Professor had programmed. I turned back around to the grocery store, leaning back into the phone booth. The two kids had moved on, but now the store’s proprietor was watching me from the doorway, arms folded over his white apron.
“Free country,” I said. I flipped the matchbook through the fingers of my other hand.<
br />
“In God we trust.”
“Don’t tell me, you called to say you’ve found religion?” “No,” said Ada, and she laughed. “I read that somewhere.” “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, little piece of paper. Green. Rectangular. Had a President’s face on it too.” “I get it.”
“Seems people will give you all these little pieces of paper if you do stuff for them.”
“No kidding.”
“It’s true. Things like watching a house.”
“I’ll head back there in a minute. I just need to run an errand.”
If I could have frowned, I would have. It was a lie, and an obvious one. Ada knew how I worked. I never ran out of cigarettes or needed a coffee and a donut.
When Ada spoke inside my head her tone hadn’t changed. If she’d noticed anything, she hid it well.
“You’re the Chief, Chief,” she said. “Call in when you see something.”
“I sure will,” I said. I replaced the dead receiver on the telephone and nodded to the grocer standing in the doorway of his shop. His face broke into a smile like he was giving away his daughter at the wedding of the century, and he waved at me before refolding his arms tight.
I held up the matchbook so I could take a good look, and the grocer saw me and he nodded. “Looking for something?” he called.
I walked the short distance from the phone booth on the curb to the storefront and held the matchbook out for him to look. He didn’t unfold his arms, but he leaned forward to peer at it.
“What, robots like oysters now? You learn something new every day.”
I pocketed the matchbook. “No, I’m a private eye. I’m looking for a guy in a hat.”
“Who likes oysters?” “Could be that he does.”
The grocer unfolded one hand to point down the street, in the direction I’d been heading. “Block and a half. Can’t miss it. I don’t go there myself. Lucy’s down on Helen Street is a lot better. Bad sort in Dabney’s.” Then he nodded at me again. I was six feet six inches tall and stood nearly a foot taller than the grocer. “But you look like a guy who can handle himself,” he said. The smile came back.