Hydrogen Steel

by K. A. Bedford

  “Uh-oh. Change of topic in the middle of light banter. Nothing good ever comes from this.”

  “We have a slight problem. An Inspector named Tomba’s coming round at noon. He said he’d like a word with us.”

  I blinked and looked up at Gideon over my coffee. “Who?”

  “He’s with the local Constabulary. It’s about last night.”

  “And he’s coming here?” I was putting the breakfast aside and trying to get up and find the bathroom.

  “Hope it doesn’t take long to make yourself look beautiful.”

  “Fifty-odd years and counting,” I said.

  “I’ve whipped you up some temporary clothes already.… Hope you don’t mind. Had to guess sizes.”

  “Remember what my dad always said…” I started.

  “You’re built like a brick shithouse,” Gideon finished. “I know. I couldn’t find ‘brick shithouse’ on the settings menu, so I improvised.”

  After breakfast, I got up, showered, freshened up as much as possible, and found the clothes Gideon had made me. Navy blue linen slacks, almost-leather deck shoes, and a horizontally-striped cotton top, navy on white. I felt like we must be going yachting. The top was too loose; the slacks were a little tight; but the shoes would do with some wearing in, which would also take care of the just-fabbed smell. Checking myself in the mirror, I had to admire the horizontal stripes. Gideon, Gideon, Gideon, you bloody idiot.

  Ten minutes later, with certain aspects of the ensemble altered — a new top with no stripes — I felt like an actress playing the part of someone ready to face the world. In truth I’d have liked few things more than to stay in Gideon’s strange-smelling bed, being waited on and bantered with, than to set foot outside the bedroom to talk to the Constabulary, which would mean talking about yesterday, and I was a long way from being ready to talk about all that just yet.

  “The Inspector’s here,” Gideon said, popping his head into the bedroom. “You’ll do.”

  When I came out of the bedroom, I saw Gideon talking to a slightly built man with dark hair and intense, watchful eyes. He had taken a serious interest in Gideon’s Julius Caesar coins, and was asking Gideon lots of rapid-fire questions. Gideon, the poor old bastard, answered as best he could but looked keen for an escape. As for the inspector, it looked like nothing would delight Tomba more than actually touching the coins, but I could see Gideon was trying very politely to refuse. I had rarely seen Gideon, who normally oozed relaxed confidence, look so bothered by anything. At length, Tomba settled for squatting before the display, his narrow fingers spread out on the surface of the protective glass. His long nose was almost touching the glass. His eyes were transfixed.

  “Inspector!” I said, flashing a quick smile that was more for Gideon’s benefit than Tomba’s. He glanced up, at first with a slight air of distraction, but then, on seeing me, he snapped into business mode. He sprang up and bolted across the room to meet me properly. Gideon, behind him, mouthed, “Thank you!” He looked tired.

  “Ms. McGee?” Tomba said, reaching out to shake my hand. His hands, like the rest of him, were warm, small and fine — delicate, you might say. “I’m Marcello Tomba, Serendipity Police Service. I’m terribly sorry for last night. I was attending a hov-crash. How are you bearing up today?” He flashed a headware verification code and an image of his badge across to me as we shook hands. My headware checked with his HQ that it was valid; it was. Not that I needed convincing. With Tomba’s I-haven’t-slept-in-three-days looks, his thrown-together approach to clothing, and his air of stale coffee fumes, and the faint whiff of burned hov fuel, he looked familiar enough for my taste. It was only when you looked past all the worn-out-homicide-cop clichés that you saw he had a smiling, warm face, and that he looked like he actually cared.

  Gideon went to work his magic with the espresso machine while Tomba dragged an expensive overstuffed chair in closer to where I sat.

  “I see you’re a fellow student of the ways of the pelican, Mr. Smith,” Tomba said as Gideon handed him his cup.

  Gideon looked surprised. “Er, yes, Inspector. They’re majestic birds.”

  Tomba leaned towards Gideon, looking intense. “I quite agree,” he said. “Extraordinary creatures. I love watching them riding up high in the thermals over the environment processor plant. So elegant and serene. Such enormous wing-spans!” He held his arms out to illustrate, even to the extent of doing a little mime of the wings tilting a little as the bird swept around in its orbit.

  Gideon could not help but smile. “I have often thought much the same thing.”

  Tomba turned to me, still looking intense, but this time all-business; a copper on the job. “Ms. McGee. About the fire at your house last night. We have the data your HouseMind collected before it failed.”

  “I have, too. Haven’t had a chance to look it over yet,” I said.

  Tomba reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of Active Paper. It was worn and he’d probably been using it for weeks. Gently unfolding it and powering it up, he brought up a gallery of small images, many of which showed an intruder going about his business, tearing my place apart. It was upsetting to see.

  “Do you see anything familiar here?” Tomba said looking at the images. He handed the Paper to me and I did my best to put my feelings away and look at the images for what they were: evidence of a crime in progress. I’d seen lots of HouseMind material over the years. Often the really stupid murderers completely forgot that, at least in reasonably prosperous households, there was often a very powerful and fairly intelligent system watching their every move, leaving us with even more evidence than even the idiots themselves left lying about in their clumsy antics. The clever ones, of course, the ones who fancied themselves as master criminals, tried to spoof such systems, which took a lot of doing, even in the old days.

  I studied the data. Some of it was video, some was enhanced still images. It was thorough, as you’d expect for the money you paid to have HouseMind watching over you. What was most disturbing was seeing how long it took my HouseMind to “wake up” to the fact that there was something very wrong going on right before its eyes. Amazingly, it carefully tracked the offender all through my house as he tore, ripped, destroyed, up-ended, and trashed my home. The system simply watched him without concern. It was as if the system thought the intruder was supposed to be there. Clever, I thought. The intruder, meanwhile, was having no luck. He appeared to be looking for something and wasn’t finding it. It was only when he was apparently fed up and needing to conceal his tracks, that he started a fire in the bedroom and HouseMind snapped into action and got busy, alerting me, the Emergency Services people and the cops.

  HouseMind, once it “noticed” the intruder, started capturing and sampling the intruder’s body form, biomechanical movement patterns, and studying his facial details. It quickly developed a high-resolution full-color portrait of the intruder that would stand up in court. That done it spent a few fruitless moments querying the police network database of offenders known throughout human space, and came up empty. This surprised us. Spoofing HouseMind systems was no small achievement. This was a serious crime, funded by someone with deep pockets.

  HouseMind then queried the police database of Serendipity citizens, at which it was more successful.

  The system even managed to locate stray bits of the intruder’s hair and skin flakes, some of which were caught drifting through the air in the house. From these minute bits of evidence it could isolate a DNA profile that would also stand up in court.

  “That’s not right,” I said, looking at the result, feeling a chill.

  I passed the paper to Gideon, who had been peering over my shoulder.

  Gideon studied all the data and the result, and then looked at me in stunned silence. Inspector Tomba, I noticed, was also looking very hard at me.

  “Ms. McGee. How w
ould you explain this?” Tomba said.

  “I don’t know what to say…” I said. It sounded lame even to me.

  Tomba went on, “We have data confirming your presence at Headquarters last night at the time this incident occurred. And we have reason to believe that your HouseMind’s timing was not altered by the intruder.”

  “That’s right,” I said, trying to suppress the shivers, staring over the inspector’s shoulder into empty space.

  Looking at the data again, it was now obvious that it was not a male intruder. I’d been confused by the bulky frame and the intruder’s ponderous movement. She was built like a brick shithouse.

  “Ms. McGee,” he said, in a concerned voice “we have this DNA sample…” He indicated the display showing the analysis.

  “What’s going on, McGee?” Gideon asked. He looked very troubled.

  I looked at the data. The high-res rendering of the intruder certainly looked like me. The DNA analysis traced back to Cytex Systems’ product database. It clearly said that the intruder was a late-model Claudia unit of unspecified version number. The pictures in the Cytex product database showed the Claudia unit without hair, and with a vacant facial expression that was the classic disposable android’s look.

  The habitat citizen database display showed clearly that I was the intruder.

  Or something that looked exactly like me. It meant only one thing: the intruder was a disposable android, just like me.

  I was blown.

  The cops knew. Gideon knew.

  “Oh God…”

  CHAPTER 7

  I looked at Tomba, and then at Gideon. Both men looked confused.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered, my mouth dry.

  “This can’t be right,” Gideon said to Tomba. “Have you checked her HouseMind? It’s obviously been spoofed!”

  Tomba shrugged. “We are looking into that, yes, Mr. Smith. It’s just that this matter came up. It confused us, to be honest. We checked out our systems, ran diagnostics, studied the data every way we know how.”

  “But you were with me at HQ!” Gideon was saying, trying to rationalize it to himself, even though the explanation was staring him right in the face.

  “What happened to the intruder?” I said to Tomba, my cop mind working over the facts.

  “We lost it. Probably recycled.”

  I winced, imagining the pain. “Smart thing to do.”

  “Why is there a disposable that looks like you?” said Gideon. “That’s what I don’t get. Why you?” He had a point. Most disposables were designed to be at least attractive and there was a lucrative trade in celebrity-copy disposables with licensed likenesses and personalities. Then, of course there were the rarer models which looked like me. That is, like huge old shoes.

  This was heartening, actually. I realized that Gideon hadn’t got it after all. His mind was still running on the old paradigms, including the Zette-Is-A-Girl model. I felt profoundly sad. Looking at the big old git, thinking about his extraordinary age, the things he must have seen in the course of his long life, it occurred to me that he would have seen the field of robotics move from artificial creations of synthetic materials, exotic alloys and quantum electronics through to the present era of biobots with artificial wetware, the first wave of which were barely smarter than fish and not much more useful except as proofs-of-concept. And now, as I knew only too well, it looked like all remaining problems were sorted out.

  “Why would they send in a disposable copy of you to do the job?” said Tomba.

  I had to be careful what I said here. “To make it personal. God knows I’ve got some enemies out there.”

  Tomba thought about that, weighing it up. “So someone from your past is trying to mess with your head?”

  “That’s my thinking on it, yeah,” I said.

  “A DNA-identical disposable copy of Zette could also get through her HouseMind security,” added Gideon.

  It should have been wonderful seeing Gideon supporting my story like this. It wasn’t. I felt awful, watching him prop up my lies.

  I decided it was time to be economical with the truth. I told Tomba about the mysterious call I’d received from Kell Fallow. I left out the details about our shared past as disposables and the bit about Fallow claiming he was framed for the death of his wife, Airlie. Instead, I leaned heavily on Gideon’s theory that Fallow was a ploy some evil bastard from my past was using against me. Tomba looked like he was buying it. Lying to a fellow copper, though, felt nearly as bad as lying to Gideon.

  When I was done sketching in a chronology of last night’s adventures, I asked Tomba, “So what do you know about the guy in the container?”

  Tomba took back his display paper and brought up the official postmortem report from Dr. Song. He said, “Pathology says that the remains they peeled out of that container were from a white male android, disposable type. Our tech boys say it was a small low-yield flurogen bomb, embedded in its tissues, probably a remote-triggered nano-composite device.”

  I winced, thinking about Fallow, hungry and weak, probably near death after subsisting on the container’s feeble life-support system and — if I could believe what he told me on the phone — desperately trying to hang on until he could talk to me. He probably had no idea he was carrying the bomb; the component nanobots could have been circulating through his blood until they received an external trigger signal, which caused them to assemble themselves into either a single explosive device or a series of small bomblets. Whether the trigger signal was sent from somewhere aboard the freighter carrying his container, or from somewhere here on Serendipity, perhaps near the docks, would require further analysis of the debris. How the component nano got into his system, on the other hand, was an even trickier question.

  “So there’s no way to further identify the remains?” I asked Tomba.

  He looked surprised at the question. “How do you mean?”

  I hesitated, realizing I’d nearly slipped up. “Well, where he might have come from, for example,” I said quickly.

  Tomba consulted his paper, scanning available reports. “Dr. Song says she’s examined debris in the container consistent with a small, self-powered nanofabrication device that might have produced limited quantities of oxygen, basic food and some water, so the disposable could have survived in there for perhaps fifteen or sixteen days.”

  Gideon, standing near the kitchen entrance, sipping his espresso, nodded. “Someone went to a lot of trouble over this guy.”

  “If we backtrack sixteen days along the Hermes VI’s track, what do we get?” I said, my mind racing, secretly loving this part of cop work, putting all the clues together.

  “New Norway,” said Gideon.

  Right, I thought. First chance I get, that’s where I’m going. How I’d get there, I still didn’t know. It didn’t matter. I had to find out what had happened. Who knows, Gideon’s theory might be right. It needed sorting out.

  Tomba, on the other hand, was still thinking about the rest of the scenario. “What was the android looking for, do you think?” He showed me the images of the Claudia unit doing her best to destroy my stuff.

  Oh yes, the Claudia unit’s rampage through my house. I’d been so fixated on Kell Fallow I’d forgotten. Looking at Tomba’s images of the Claudia turning over my house, and now seeing it with my cop’s eyes, it looked to me like HouseMind didn’t alert me sooner because it thought it was already looking at me. It might have been baffled, but it wasn’t suspicious. When the Claudia set fire to the place, however, that was a different matter, and that’s when it sent for Emergency Services and contacted me, as if to draw my attention to what “I” was doing to my own home.

  I explained this to Tomba. He nodded and looked through the vids again, pointing at salient details, such as the trouble someone had gone to in order to customize a Claudia to look
exactly like me. The hair, for example. Disposables don’t have hair; it’s not possible. I have an untidy tangle of brown hair going grey. I remember this hair as having always been difficult to manage, meaning in my programmed memories as well as my “real” memories. Even now it was a wretched mess. Whoever sent this Claudia unit got it some hair, and got it to look enough like mine to convince HouseMind.

  How long would it take someone to cook up a Claudia, customize her, and send her into action? State-of-the-art android nanofabrication systems these days could produce a finished unit in about two hours flat. Another hour to bring the unit up to speed, install necessary control software, run medical checks, apply custom external appearance, check movement and haptic functions, cognition, and so forth.

  So, three hours, assuming everything worked right the first time, which, my research suggested, was unusual.

  “There’d have to be a homebrew nanofab operation somewhere on the hab,” said Tomba. Perhaps he was right. Someone could have converted a house or an apartment into a temporary android factory.

  Tomba was working his paper, consulting past cases, checking through Port Authority import records, and looking into the habitat utility services for unusually heavy use of power, water and heat in a single area.

  “Pretty slick to set up a homebrew operation without the neighbors twigging to what was going on,” I said.

  “Either there’s no neighbors, or they’ve been paid not to notice,” said Tomba.

  “Seen that before in Winter City,” I said, explaining about the organized crime guys setting up pharmaceutical bioform labs either in or deep beneath ordinary houses.

  Gideon sat and watched Tomba and me talking our way through the details of the affair. I felt him staring at me, and wished he wouldn’t. No doubt he’d be thinking about everything from his own perspective, and using his own considerable intellect. He would have noticed last night when I prevented him from giving a statement to the cops, and he would have noticed today that I was pushing his “Evil Bastard Out To Get Me” theory rather than my own, less likely “Conscious Disposable On Run From The Law” theory. He sipped his cooling espresso, thinking.