by Mel Odom
Around us, people were getting to their feet and heading to the chocolate buffet that had been laid out for the ceremony.
I stood and offered Mara my hand. She took it and I pulled her to her feet. “You’re going to have a hard time convincing me that a bioroid will be able to replace a police officer. Much less a detective.” I shot Floyd a dismissive glance. The words and attitude were totally Simon’s. At that point, bioroids weren’t being used as med-techs on Mars. He’d had limited exposure to them other than in a servile role.
Floyd stood on the stage with his hands folded behind him, looking like a department store mannequin. No one had told him what to do once the ceremony had concluded. His social software, though adaptive, hadn’t had enough stimulus and experience to create a conditioned response to his surroundings.
“Look at him. Standing there because he doesn’t know what to do.” I snorted. “Some detective he’s going to make.”
Mara took my arm and I moved us along with the crowd, constantly watching for any threat that might manifest itself. I guarded Mara with my life because there had been two attempts on her in the last eight months. One of them had been a simple robbery gone wrong, but I still didn’t know who had sent the last three men. I’d killed all of them.
It was possible that Haas-Bioroid wanted all of her research instead of sharing ownership with her, but it didn’t make sense that the corp would move against her till she’d finished the program coding. So someone else was out there. Plenty of other corps wanted to get their hands on the work she was doing.
“Don’t mistake Floyd’s social inadequacies for any kind of deficiency regarding his police work.” Mara walked confidently alongside me and I felt the heat of her body against mine. “I got the chance to look over his programming. It’s all first-rate. Top of the line.” She frowned. “He just lacks some social experience. Haas-Bioroid botched that. A detective can’t be a manual laborer like an assembly line bot or a human-looking front end loader moving freight in a warehouse. A detective needs to be more human. That’s where the code I’m creating will bridge the gap and reduce the learning curve Floyd will have to experience.”
“Have you considered the fact that Haas-Bioroid intentionally didn’t make that machine more human on purpose?” a challenging voice demanded. “Because they want the machine to remember that it isn’t human?”
Instinctively, noting the threat level in the words, I turned and stepped in front of Mara, putting her behind me. My suit was bullet and laser resistant. I had a slug-thrower hidden on my hip under my jacket and a smaller one mounted on my forearm where a single twitch of my wrist would snap it into my palm.
Alton Fuller didn’t look any different than he had in the vidcast in the hotel room on Mars. His jacket was expensive and he wore it over a black turtleneck. He turned his hand over and the holo of a business card appeared there courtesy of his PAD.
Mara remained behind me, not bothering to accept the proffered business card. “I know who you are, Mr. Fuller.”
Fuller smiled and shrugged. “That’s encouraging, especially in light of the way you’ve been avoiding all my attempts to contact you.”
“I’ve got a busy schedule.”
“Yet you found the time to attend this charade.” The business card disappeared from Fuller’s palm.
“I was encouraged—strongly—to attend by people who are supporting my work. If I’d had my way, I would have passed.”
“I was hoping I could perhaps get a few minutes with you now, if I may. I’d like to discuss my thoughts on your attempts to makeover the bioroid operating parameters.”
“They’re not attempts,” Mara snapped. “They’re also not makeovers. I’m enhancing the neural channeling so that it will go deeper, transfer more knowledge.”
“To create copies of people who have mistakenly allowed their thoughts and emotions to be downloaded into your computers?”
“Not copies. Interpretations. They will not be watered-down versions of the neural donor. A bioroid that comes out of the neural channeling we’re doing at MirrorMorph will think faster and better, and be closer to being a human being than anything we’ve seen so far.”
“You see that as a desirable goal?”
“I do.”
Fuller worked his jaw and I knew that he was getting more and more worked up. “If you imbue bioroids with as much information as you’re talking about, how can you ensure that they will honor the Three Directives?”
“They will.”
“Why?”
“Because, Mr. Fuller, at the end of the day, they’re still bioroids. In any incarnation, they will observe the Three Directives.”
“How do I, as a concerned citizen, know that, Dr. Parker?”
“Because I’m telling you that.”
Fuller folded his arms across his chest. “You’ll permit me my kernel of doubt. You wouldn’t be the first person to attempt to feather her own nest with empty promises.”
We had gathered a small crowd of media people who were listening avidly to the exchange.
“I didn’t come here for a debate, Mr. Fuller,” Mara said. “I’m here to put in an appearance, and then I’m returning to my lab.”
“How far are you going to go with your abominations?” Fuller’s tone grew louder and more accusing. He knew he had the attention of the crowd and he reveled in it.
Although most of the execs there supported the bioroid alternative for common labor, most of them did not like the idea of a bioroid in a position of authority, which was exactly what Fuller counted on during his diatribes. He underscored their fears.
“I’m going to go as far as I possibly can, Mr. Fuller.” Mara squared up on the man and stepped from behind me to confront him directly. “I intend to create neural channeling that will allow bioroids to be as capable as humans so that danger to humans is reduced.”
“You want to replace humanity, Dr. Parker.”
“I want to protect it.”
I leaned in close to Mara, whispering into her ear so that only she could hear me. “This isn’t the place or the time, Mara. Don’t let him play his game. You can’t win this. Let it go.”
For a moment she stood there, listening to Fuller quote facts and figures and trends. I thought she wasn’t going to be able to walk away, but she turned on her heel and headed for the door.
Fuller tried to follow her, clamoring for her attention. I stepped in close to him to mask the short jab I sank into his soft stomach. All of the air wheezed from Fuller and he stumbled to a stop.
Two of his sec crew started to come after me. I flicked my wrist, dropped the large-bore slug-thrower into my palm, and then let them see just a glint of it between my fingers as I followed Mara. They met my eyes and nodded as they circled their employer and made no further effort to interfere with our departure.
Outside on the rooftop as we walked to the hopper pad where our vehicle awaited us, I watched the area and felt uneasy. There was no reason for Fuller to so aggressively approach Mara. I commed the rest of my sec team and put them on alert.
When we were halfway to the hopper, Sanjay shouted, “Sniper!”
I grabbed Mara and wrapped her up, triggering the coat I wore to release the extra sheets of bullet-resistant fabric from my sleeves, creating a protective cone around her. Electricity pulsed through the fabric, stiffening it.
Two high-velocity rounds thudded into the fabric but neither of them penetrated the material. I had swept the large slug-thrower from my hip and had it out as I hustled Mara toward the building. I didn’t want to take the chance another assassin waited with a readied rocket launcher or someone had booby-trapped the hopper.
Shots cracked, penetrating the sounds of the megapolis echoing over the rooftop.
“Sniper’s down,” Sanjay reported.
“Secure the body,” I ordered. “I want to know where he came from.”
“Roger that.”
When we reached the building, several people were in the
foyer, drawn by the building’s sec movements. NAPD officers on duty for the swearing in ceremony halted me as I entered the building and tried to relieve me of my weapons.
I flashed my e-ID from my PAD and backed them off. “My employer was the intended victim. My team has put down the sniper.”
Four NAPD uniforms were stationed around Mara and me, and I felt more at risk there than I did on the rooftop. Cops could be bought. I tried to keep her wrapped, but she fought free and stood there.
In the crowd, Fuller scowled and looked unhappy. I met his gaze and thought seriously of putting a .50-cal slug between his eyes. I doubted the assassin would be tracked back to Fuller, but I knew where he’d come from, and I knew why the Human First spokesperson had braced Mara.
Maybe he realized what I was thinking, or maybe it showed on my face, because he turned and walked away.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Eight days later, the Screaming Mimis—survivors and new blood—crawled 1,327 klicks northwest of Podkayne colony on a search and rescue mission. A ground supply caravan from the terraforming operations at Persephone 29J was overdue for a check-in.
At that time, we had been on patrol, scouting out the terrain looking for units responsible for strikes against pro-Earth corps. Other merc units were with us, and all of us were operating on “grapevine intel culled from anybody who could hoist a drink and had a creative mind.” That was according to the acting major.
I crawled with the soldiers at times, and served on scouting missions as well as a corpsman on minihoppers. No one wanted to fight. I recognized the fear in them, listened to their nightmares when they fitfully slept, and dispensed anti-anxiety patches to help them deal with it.
The constant distress of my companions was having an effect on me as well, which had not been something my programming had been prepared for. I found myself running manual diagnostics checks on my hardware and software even though I knew the automatic ones had turned up nothing. I had self-checked before, but there had always been a reason. This time there was no discernible catalyst that I could find, and I had to prevent myself from cycling endless loops of diagnostics.
“It’s not you, Drake.” Shelly sat beside me in the crawler as we progressed toward our estimated goal the afternoon of the second day. She was stable and steady, unaffected by the constant lunge and twist of the crawler as it undulated over the rough terrain. I, and the rest of the crawler crew, rocked and rolled with the vehicle’s movement. “You’re programmed to be sympathetic to the people who work with you as well as the people of interest. It’s only natural that a little self-doubt creeps in there.”
“I was not made to be self-doubting,” I replied. “I am programmed for gathering data, making interpretive conclusions and an action plan, then performing based on that.”
“All right, then what do you think needs to be done for these people?”
“They need to be protected.”
“Yet they’re marching into confrontations that will leave some of them dead and others wounded.”
I said nothing.
“You were designed to work at the New Angeles Police Department. The parameters of your work involved protecting people and locking up people who had murdered others you were too late to save. The intention there was to continue to save lives, to lock down murderers and spree killers so other people were not harmed.”
“Yes.”
“You weren’t programmed for watching people risk their lives. I would assume that true medical bioroid officers have different software designs created to view acceptable losses.”
“There are no acceptable losses,” I replied.
“You can’t save them all. You’ve already seen that.”
I had, and the result of our last engagement had been…unacceptable.
“How did you feel toward me when we went into potentially dangerous situations?”
Like when we went to investigate the murder of Cartman Dawes? The question was in my mind, but Shelly didn’t acknowledge it. “I knew that risk was inherent in the situation and I accepted it.”
“Why?”
There was only one answer for that. “I was programmed to accept such an eventuality of risk and to know that I could provide assistance to you or any other NAPD detective or uniform.”
“Yet I ended up killed in action.”
“That was unacceptable.”
“Yes, it was, and I am no less dead for it.”
I started to run a diagnostic again, pulling up the files on the night Shelly was shot and killed, prepared again to go over the situation to see if there was something else I could have done.
“Stop, Drake.”
“Perhaps there was something I missed.”
“You missed nothing. You did everything you could have done.”
“The resolution is unacceptable.”
“But not outside the operating parameters of such an engagement.”
It was not. Such an eventuality lay within my programming. I did not want to accept it.
“You have to accept it, Drake. It is what it is. And now you’re facing another situation like you had days ago, when you lost so many of your team.”
“That was not acceptable.”
“Yet the eventuality persists. Perhaps it even accelerates and magnifies.”
The potential of that made me feel increasingly uncomfortable. “This should not be happening.”
“But it is.”
“I was programmed to prevent human death.”
“You can’t prevent a war, Drake.”
“War must be prevented.”
“It’s coming. You know that. If things don’t change, and perhaps even if they do, war is going to break out here in the colonies.”
That was, indeed, one of the permutations prognosticated by my situational analysis software. Given the variables now in play, war was inevitable. “I do not know how much longer I can do this.” I looked at the people around me.
Hayim sat in a loader’s ready position. Most of the others were new to the unit, but I had all of their files and could pull up information on them in less than a second. I had access to full medical as well as limited psych profiles, but they were more than just a collection of bytes and data to me.
“A medical bioroid wouldn’t see them as more than data,” Shelly said. “You’re tapping into that part of your programming that is intuitive. Medical bioroids don’t intuit more than physical or psychological distress.”
I understood that. I had tried to separate what I needed to do as a medical support unit versus a police detective and could not. My system was too integrated with who I was.
“You can do this,” Shelly said.
I didn’t argue with her.
“You have an edge over those medical bioroids,” Shelly went on.
“What?”
“You’ve been here before as Simon Blake. You know this world. You know this kind of work. Reach into yourself and find more of Simon in order to become more effective here.”
“I will try.”
* * *
At 1523, one of the airborne drones picked up a comm signal from the missing unit. Major Venturi, his promotion now part of the record for the Screaming Mimis, opened a secure channel, but I’d hacked into all of the links because I needed to know how situations were progressing. I eavesdropped on his conversation.
“This is Major Venturi of the Screaming Mimis. Who am I talking to?”
“Captain Micah Abelard, sir. Acting CO of the Scarlet Chakrams.”
“Where is Major Eick?”
“Major Eick became a casualty, sir.”
“Understood. What happened?”
“We got hit by Martian terrorists. Ambushed, sir. They came at us hard and fast. We held our own for a little while, but we never stood a chance.”
“How long ago?”
“Three days, sir. They crippled us and left us out here to die. We would have been dead too, except that we took seventy-three percent ca
sualties and were able to salvage enough air to keep us going. But if you don’t reach us in the next five hours, most of us aren’t going to make it.”
“Understood. We’ll be there in ninety-eight minutes, Captain. You people hang in there.”
“Yes, sir. Will do.”
* * *
Seventy-three minutes later, I rode on the back of a two-man minihopper that sped only a few centimeters above the nap of the terrain. Dust coiled around us like a storm constantly waiting to close in on us.
Ahead, the remaining fifty-seven men and women that were left of the Scarlet Chakrams lounged in the sun to allow their hardsuits’ solar batteries to recharge. Most of them would be in bad shape because the hardsuits only carried enough water and protein sub for two days. They would be hungry and dehydrated.
Even though they knew we were coming and were anticipating our arrival, most of them took up skirmish positions along the ridges and boulders that lay strewn across the hillside.
Clarice Isaacs, the soldier I rode with, halted the minihopper four hundred meters out along a ridgeline and we peered down into the bowl-shaped depression. I accessed the Chakrams’ unit frequency, hacked through the sec coding, and started pulling up information on the wounded.
“Captain Abelard, this is Captain Pitts of the Screaming Mimis,” our unit commander broadcasted over a hailing frequency. “We’re an advance scout group. The main unit is twenty minutes behind us.”
“Acknowledged, Captain Pitts. Welcome to come ahead.”
Pitts nudged his minihopper over the ridge and descended into the depression. Clarice fell into line behind him and I started prioritizing the wounded. There were two medical bioroids still with the unit.
* * *
“I fear I am not at one hundred percent capability, McDreamy,” Welby 4AR9KA told me. “Of course, I will be happy to help in any way I might assist.”
The medical bioroid leaned against a boulder and sat in the red powder that shifted restlessly on the bones of Mars that lay below. Shrapnel scars tracked his upper body and he was missing most of his face from the right eye down. His lower body was gone from the waist, ending in a jagged stump that leaked fluids. Most of the capillaries had been tied off to prevent further leakage.