“Go on what?” Hammell said. “It’s your turn! Why did you come out here?” But Asha Ishi’s blank face told him he shouldn’t have bothered. If she knew anything, she wasn’t going to tell him. “If we’re going to be partners,” he said, making one last attempt to get through to her, “we have to trust each other.”
“Do you trust me?”
“No.”
“Good. That’s the first smart thing you’ve said so far.” She glanced towards the back of the ambulance. “They’ll be back any second.”
"So talk to me,” Hammell pleaded. “Tell me something. I know you’ve been working on something, but you haven’t logged anything on polnet. So what have you been doing? Is it related to all this? Do I really have to keep asking?”
Still Asha Ishi didn’t move and didn’t speak.
“Ok,” Hammell said. “Fine. You win. I won’t bother you again.” And he stood up to leave.
“Wait,” Asha Ishi said.
“Why?”
“Oh, stop being such a drama queen and sit down.”
Hammell bit his tongue and complied, warily. Leaning in towards him, she placed the mask back over her mouth, and he had the sense it was more to obscure her lips than for the oxygen. “You want to know what I know?” she said.
“Yes!” Hammell said. “Clearly.”
“I know a lot,” she continued. “Much more than you. But can you be trusted with it? That’s my question.”
“I trusted you with what I know.”
“You don’t know shit,” Asha Ishi said. “You have an iEye, right?”
Hammell nodded. “I can turn it off, if it makes you happy.”
She shook her head. “No, you can’t.” She watched him carefully. “I can show you the rabbit hole, but I don’t think you’ll want to jump down it.”
“Alright,” he said, suddenly wondering whether this was a good idea. Did you forget that she’s mental? “So…”
“It started with Pitaud.”
“Your former partner,” he said, thinking that they were finally getting somewhere. “She was fired a while back.”
"And then she vanished."
"Vanished?” Hammell said, feeling a sudden cold chill. “How do you mean, vanished?"
“Is that a real question?” Asha Ishi asked. “Do you need me to explain what vanishing is?”
Hammell ground his teeth hard enough that he thought he might break them. Asha Ishi had a real talent for annoying him. He counted to ten in his head as he waited for her to continue.
"How many former I.A.s did you keep in contact with?" she asked.
"Lots. Chalanga, Abash, DeMount, Lacey...”
"How many have you actually talked to recently?"
"Define recently…”
“This isn’t a popularity contest,” Asha Ishi said. “The last two months.”
Hammell fell silent. He hadn’t heard from any of them in a while - most significantly longer than that.
"Even Toskan isn’t around, eh?"
"He mentioned something about going to Abaddon," Hammell said. “Maybe he just... went.”
"Did he say goodbye?"
Hammell shook his head. “Not that I recall.”
"None of them did."
"None of them?” Hammell said. “How many are missing?”
“All of them.”
“Bullshit,” Hammell blurted out before could stop himself.
“Well, I can’t get in contact with any,” she said, “and I’ve been trying. No-one answers my calls. After a while, their accounts get cut off and eventually they get re-assigned.”
“So they moved to Abaddon,” he said, trying to be objective. “Or Bellerophon. Or to the eastern megacities.”
“And not a single one kept their omni account open?” Asha Ishi said, sounding skeptical.
“So what do you think happened?"
"Like I said, they vanished."
"The end?” Hammell said. “I thought you were an investigator."
Asha bridled. "I've heard rumours, nothing more. Nothing I’ve been able to confirm. Nothing I’d want to pass on."
"Rumours about what?" Hammell asked, but Asha Ishi only stared at him. “Come on, don’t give me half a story.”
She looked around as if to check nobody was listening and leaned in. "Assassins,” she whispered. “Black tactical androids that come in the night."
Hammell thought about it a moment before responding. The androids in The Happy Trout had eroded his faith in the laws of robotics somewhat, but even accepting android assassins could exist, it still didn’t make sense. “But I.A.s have been going incommunicado since before the Red King was here,” he said eventually, “when he was known to be in Paris.”
“Maybe his people were here laying the groundwork for his arrival.”
“Or maybe you’re just paranoid.”
“Maybe you’re naïve,” Asha spat back.
"Why?” he asked. “Why bother? We're all being fired anyway. Why not go after the working I.A.s, the ones who can still do him damage?”
“Who says he isn’t?” Asha Ishi said. “You said yourself that Providence has been infiltrated, that all police networks and androids are suspect.”
“You’re implying that he has us fired?”
“With I.A.s out of the way,” she said, “the city’s defences and policing is entirely robotic.”
“A coup,” Hammell said, finally twigging. “That’s what you think this is.”
Asha Ishi sat back with a shrug, and he had the sense she wasn’t comfortable even hearing the words spoken aloud.
He nodded towards the back the ambulance. “And that? The bomb?”
“The target wasn’t the ecotower,” she said, “but the machines of the Restoration behind it. We’re walling them in and tearing down their hiding places. We’re pushing, so they pushed back.”
He sat back, thinking over everything she’d said. There was something about the way she spoke about machines that his instincts picked up on. “You hate them, don’t you?” he said, testing the waters. “Androids. Machines.”
Asha Ishi became suddenly still, her eyes spitting venom. Bullseye, he thought.
“You don’t?” she said. “Our great great grandparents fought a war against them, now we’ve invited them back? Within a single generation they’re running everything again.”
“With limited intelligence this time,” Hammell said, paying lip service to the argument that had been made before androids had been legalized again.
“That’s what they thought last time,” Asha Ishi continued. “Don’t be fooled by what they say about inorganic brains being easy to dial down, so androids could never become smart and turn like last time. We can only be sure we’re keeping them dumb while we’re designing them, and we’re not anymore. Machines are designing machines again. How can we forget so quickly?”
“We needed them,” Hammell said with an affected shrug. “We couldn’t have built the megastructures without them. The ecotowers, the spouters, the mirrors, the receptor stations. We couldn’t have changed the climate. We’d never have stopped The Storm.”
“We could have,” Asha Ishi said, but not convincingly.
“Not fast enough.”
“Ok,” Asha Ishi conceded, “so we needed a few extra hands in the factories, but did we need them on the streets? In our homes? Did we really need the megaAIs controlling all the networks?”
“Traffic accidents have been reduced to almost zero since the megaAI took over,” Hammell said, wondering how he came to be on this side of the argument. “And you know the figures for Providence,” he continued, utterly bewildering himself.
“Bah!” Asha Ishi said, apparently unable to find a word to sufficiently convey her disgust. “Bah!” she said again and Hammell felt a small surge of pride that he’d manoeuvred her to this point. “You know,” she went on, “it would only take one android to see a little too much, live a little too much, get a little too smart before its reset date came around. Only one of t
hem would have to get the idea to map its mind onto a megaAI.”
“There are failsafes,” Hammell countered. “The alarms that would go off if an android even went near one… It would require hardware upgrades that would be detected. There must be a thousand things.”
“Androids go near them every day,” Asha Ishi said. “Check yourself. We have a megaAI in the station basement.”
“Walled off.”
“And who do you think built the current version of the megaAI in our basement?” she asked. “Who maintains it? Who built the walls?”
She was probably right. It was more likely that people wouldn’t be allowed near a megaAI now. They could never be trusted with something so important. But surely there must be other failsafes… “Why do you hate them really?” Hammell asked, thinking that there had to be something deeper. “It’s not because of some war that even your grandparents don’t remember. What did they do to you?”
Asha stayed utterly still, sitting with her legs together and her hands beside her on the bed. She tilted her head down slowly as daggers shot from her eyes. She looked like a snake readying to strike. So there is something.
The back door of the ambulance flew suddenly open and a police android marched in. “I.A.s are not permitted to prevent medical androids from providing assistance,” it said, “or to eject them from ambulances.”
Asha Ishi turned her spitting eyes onto the android and for a moment Hammell thought she was going to explode and savage it. It would be a terrible idea; destruction of police property was a fast track to a firing. Somehow though she brought herself back under control and merely stormed out. He watched her go, thinking that, though there was more than a touch of the crazy about her ideas, it didn’t mean she couldn’t be onto something.
Chapter 19
He ordered the policenat to take him out over the Reserves, needing to go somewhere quiet so he could think. Stein had been at pains to point out that a blood stain that big didn’t necessarily mean a large wound, still less a fatal one. Small amounts of liquid could spread surprising distances. Hammell had thanked him, but he knew the lab boss wouldn’t have called personally if the results weren’t significant.
The nat landed at a checkpoint crawling with the heavy machinery normally used to tear down and re-erect buildings for the city’s Restoration. The walls here had already been reinforced, but someone somewhere had decided that double layered concrete, heavy guns and hammerheads still weren’t sufficient and that banks of missiles were needed too. Things were getting beyond serious and moving into silly territory. Unless Asha Ishi is right.
The armoured android guards had pinged him already, but they still scanned him thoroughly through the open window, taking even longer than Hube had done, possibly because of his still-bruised face. Hammell wondered what had happened to that soft ancient robot and his implant checked for him: It had been unceremoniously scrapped. In a funny kind of way, Hammell felt sad about it. As irritating as Hube had been, it was infinitely preferable being checked over by a happy, doddering fool than by these coldly efficient, vaguely menacing, tactical models.
Once cleared, the policenat set off over the lightless towns - he forced it to fly high enough so that it wouldn’t cause a fuss about obstacles. The light pollution of the city gradually faded away and Hammell felt like he was passing over an older, more brutal world.
He’s down there somewhere. The man who murdered Dave Toskan. Whatever Stein said, Hammell was certain of it now. His friend and his friend’s wife had died in their living room beside the sofa. Or, worse than that, one of them had survived a little while longer; there had only been one stain. Were they murdered by an android assassin in black?
The further in he went, the more uneasy he became. The skin on the back of his neck began to prickle and he felt suddenly exposed up here. If Roy Brown looks up, he’ll see me. Feeling like he was being watched from the thousands of empty windows below, he reached for the manual control panel and switched off the nat’s headlights and navigation lights. An alarm sounded, which he used his police ID to override, and the policenat slowed down to what it considered a safe speed to drift across the sky. His eyes adjusted gradually to the darkness and he began to make out the overgrown roads and ruined buildings below. As he stared, he became aware of tiny lights, barely visible, dotted around like fireflies. He forced the policenat down towards one, but it descended too slowly and the light disappeared before he got close. A little further on, he saw another, but it too vanished before he reached it.
Calling up a map on the nat’s panel display, his own location was shown by default, but it took him a moment to locate The Happy Trout. He stared at the two dots. They were in different towns, tens of kilometres apart. How many towns have been reoccupied? How many Red Hands are out here?
He sat back in the seat, thinking. He knew that he should land and track someone down to arrest them for questioning. More than that, he should call it in so that androids could be sent door to door, scouring every house, rounding up every illegal. But something stopped him. I don’t believe they’d do it.
As he looked down, he realised just how perfect the Reserves were for the Red Hands. There were hundreds of towns out here just waiting to be reoccupied, with the prying eyes of Providence almost blind. With the right technology to conceal them, even huge numbers of them could disappear for years.
But the machines were coming. Eventually they would run out of places to hide. The Red King had to have an end game, something in mind for when that happened. Could Asha Ishi be right?
He forced the policenat higher up into the sky, to the height of the middling flight lanes, just below the cloud base. Finding a pocket of still air, he switched his iEye to night mode, cupped his hands to the windows to shield his eyes from the display’s glare and stared out. Gradually the lights became clear; hundred of them - thousands - looking like stars in the night sky from a time before the spouter.
If they come, it won’t be an infiltration. It will be an invasion.
Chapter 20
It was too early for his shift, but there was no point going home now. The sun would be up by the time he got to bed and he wouldn’t be able to sleep, especially with Kitty prowling around and pouncing on his feet every time he moved. Whenever she detected he was awake, she would turn into a cat-shaped alarm clock; one that could only be switched off through feeding. Better to just go straight to the office and nap on the sofa.
Stinking of smoke from the fire and covered in dust and bits of cow, he headed for the showers in the gym on the first floor. When he was done scrubbing himself clean, he had to crouch down and pick stringy lumps of grey meat from where they were clogging up the drain. It really hadn’t been a great couple of days.
His own locker was bare, but he located a spare set of clothing in another which a colleague had unwisely left unlocked. It couldn’t be stealing if he returned them before anyone noticed they were missing, he decided. In any case, the clothes smelled musty, so it was probable they belonged to an I.A. who had already… vanished, his mind broke in.
Pulling on the tight shirt and light grey suit, he found that the owner had been slim and that he was not. The stitching felt robust though. If he didn’t move suddenly or too much, it might survive the day. His trench coat was waterproof, so most of the blood had already washed away in the rain. Checking through the rest of his clothes, he quickly determined that they were beyond saving. He binned his shirt, socks and underwear, but at the last moment reprieved his trousers, just in case Li could work her magic.
His shoes had filled with blood, he discovered as he shoved a bare foot into a cold, congealed blob. They were made from hard leather though, so they came good with a bit of soapy water and elbow grease. The hand dryer also got them somewhere close to dry, though not close enough to prevent his feet from squeaking as he headed up the stairs towards the cupboard and the waiting sofa.
By now though, sleep had deserted him. The shower and all of the scrubbing h
ad woken him up, so he decided to wander the building for a time until he could coax his brain into switching off. The station was on the night shift, manned by a skeleton crew, meaning almost no actual men. Silent androids glided about dark floors, since their big camera-lens eyes didn’t require much light to function. He passed the Commissioner’s office up on the tenth floor and saw that the lights were out and a devious little idea occurred of putting a tack on his chair, or some honey under a drawer handle, but the door was locked tight. It was probably for the best. Yun would know it was him. Everybody else with a propensity for pranking, and the balls to do it to the boss, had already been fired.
Continuing on up the stairs, he came to the records room, ducking his head in just to see whether there was another living, breathing soul in the building. There was, though the civilian contractor who jumped up from his pillow was less thrilled about his discovery than he was. Hammell closed the door again, leaving him to it, thinking that the entire police department was being operated by night without any human intervention. For an entire third of the time, machines were entirely in control of the city’s policing.
Brow firmly furrowed, he nipped into the bathroom to blow black, bloody ash from his nose, and then continued on, heading up to the Dark Room. He knew the results already from polnet, but it was worth questioning them in person. Asha’s warning popped up in his head, that he was stupid for investigating Providence in full view of Providence, but he wrote it off as paranoia.
Level fifteen was where the coders lived and worked. Few people ever went up there, so it was kept permanently dark; hence the name. Only one android was present now across the entire open plan floor. Looking around, Hammell could see only one desk. The rest of the space was filled with rows and rows of black, cabinet-like machines. He supposed it made sense; it was more efficient to do away with android bodies and pack more processing power into the coders’ expanded brains. Only one android was needed, one pair of hands to provide routine maintenance. Here was another sign that androids too were beginning to lose their jobs. Hammell had a sudden and frighteningly clear vision of a future so efficient that it was occupied solely by monolithic brains whirring away silently.
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