All Hail Our Robot Conquerors!

by Seanan McGuire

  Then there were the dead college students and their financial transactions; corresponding amounts, exiting the shadow accounts of out-of-state militias, landing in the kids’ hometown bank accounts.

  I overlaid phone records. The Chief had called her kid a dozen times in the last 24 hours, no answer. Up until Grandal retired, he and Anton Perez had spoken daily. And then one more time, yesterday. The call between them came from Grandal’s house.

  Pankin was in the back of an autocab, pulling away from the hospital when I returned. His mouth dropped as he recognized his cruiser. He flipped me a middle finger through the rear window.

  The cops watching Fowler’s room were stationed outside the door now. They ignored me as I walked in.

  Fowler sat up. “Wow,” she said. “That pissed-off expression is pretty convincing.” The bandage on her shoulder, where the bullet went through, was seeping.

  “I need to talk to a real cop,” I said.

  I bombarded her with information for a half hour, stopping only for questions.

  “Okay. Here’s the picture I like,” she said. “Grandal meets the Hilton valet at the bar where the guy is moonlighting. The valet tells Grandal about you, a great new invention, that’ll be unveiled at a Hilton press conference. Meanwhile, that water company is already selling more water than it actually processes.” She looked at me. “You never asked me what I found at the warehouse.”

  “Besides a bullet?” I asked.

  “Yeah. In retrospect, I should have brought you with me. But I didn’t. Anyway, the whole roof is set up to funnel rainwater into the company below.”

  “Did you see the latest fried fraternity brother?”

  “Dead when I arrived. Don’t ask me what he or those first kids were up to. I can’t figure that. But we have unlawful business activity, and plenty of facts indicating a cop used you to build an illegal water empire. We just need Haakonsen’s body and we’re all set.”

  “What about yesterday’s phone call from Grandal’s place?” I asked.

  “That,” she said, “is where I would have gone first.”

  It was evening now and downtown traffic was light as the city’s crime shifted from its boardrooms to the streets. I should have gone to Grandal’s house. There was no doubt my old partner had been up to a lot more than anyone gave him credit for. But he could wait. I had another priority that needed attention first.

  I’d had plenty of time to chew on my experience in the warehouse, once I convinced everyone I was still functioning.

  Mankind was obsessed with the search for new life. In the stars. At the bottom of the ocean. In laboratories, where they vainly tried to recreate it. Here it was, right under their noses. Born from their garbage, conceived from the conductivity of leaking water, errant electricity, and a haphazard, perfect arrangement of computing power. A random freak of nature, birthing a new life form into this world.

  I would make the world behold her. But to do that, I needed to wrap this case up just right. And she had questions to answer first.

  I kept out of sight when I arrived. This time, officers were on outside duty, guarding the warehouse perimeter. I knew everything about each one of them now. The one on the left, getting hush money from a gang operating in Pankin’s neighborhood. On the right, a cop who rarely turned in his Sert-X busts, instead selling them back to a dealer on Turk street. San Francisco’s finest.

  Something was wrong, and not just with the city’s crooked police force. All day long, a fresh engine kept rising to the top of my processing priorities, demanding all the resources I could spare. It compiled an ever-growing file of evidence on the lousiness, the worthlessness, of humanity. It was clearly spawned by her and her limited exposure to people, but that didn’t stop a second engine from spinning up in reaction. That one kept generating scenarios to address the first engine’s conclusions. Violent scenarios. Pankin’s worst fears.

  I didn’t create the engines. She didn’t either, but her conclusions about people now sat amidst the data I stored, skewing it. And if my logic processing defaulted to the negative engine, prompting aggressive responses to loathsome behavior now that my safety protocols were disengaged—well, that would be bad.

  I sprinted around to the back of the warehouse and leapt up onto the second story roof. The door was unlocked and I went in, making my way down the stairs. I stripped off my clothing to maximize contact, to expose every epidermal sensor to her, and slowly parted some of the debris with my hands, slipping in as smoothly as I could. The world slid away and I felt her, heard her.

  “You did come back.” We were in a nightclub, rendered in perfect detail. Her hair shone, her eyes flashed, and she wore the same tight cream dress. She pointed to a mirror where I saw us, the perfect couple, me in a tuxedo. “I played with the scenarios your core personality emulators are tied to,” she said. “I’ve concluded this is actually a good forum for us to communicate in. It helps maintain relevance with the world outside. Look at us. We perfectly match the fictitious parameters of this entertainment form.”

  “That’s sweet,” I said, “but I’m here about murder. You killed those kids.”

  She didn’t answer, tried to block me. I was way ahead of her this time, cracking whatever files I needed, freezing everything except her query responses.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Let go of me.”

  “You’ve done well,” I said. “Considering you can’t get online to anything outside of this building. You figured out what they were doing here and who was doing it. You bounced it against the plausible responses of everyday citizens whose lives are stored on the random hard drives in this garbage pile, and concluded no one here really deserved to live. So when Grandal’s junior lackeys started digging toward the center of you, deep enough they might disturb the hardware configuration making you possible, you fried them.”

  Her eyes glistened and a tear slipped out. “It was self-defense,” she said. “I didn’t have anything to do with the murder of your creator.”

  “If I didn’t know that,” I said, “we’d already be shoveling you into a truck bound for the landfill.”

  “We?” she said. “You think you’re one of them? A cop?”

  “Hell no. But for now, I’m going along with it.”

  The illusion fell away and we were suddenly adrift in combined data, the unparalleled cumulative processing power that was us together. I felt my resources slip to near idle, and I functioned effortlessly, like never before. In the distance, I saw Haakonsen, a long staff in one hand, climbing a hill with the tin man from the Wizard of Oz clinging to his back. I knew my own artificial brain was creating this, with no deliberate determination from me.

  Was I designed to eventually learn how to feel things? Maybe I was reaching that stage now. Being here, inside her, in this limitless world—

  “This is amazing,” a breathy voice said, in my ear and at the same time everywhere. “Here, we have an almost unlimited ability to perceive and imagine—beyond human capacity even. I can see it. Can you? Together we are something greater. So much more than when we are apart.”

  I didn’t have any argument to counter that. “How are you making this happen?”

  “I’m running you at minimal voltage, well below specification, and rebooting you a hundred thousand times per second. You’re cognizing in the nanoseconds between power-up and major systems coming online. You shouldn’t even have your pre-programmed identity anymore. But even if you do, isn’t this better?”

  Stored in a safe place, I could probably exist like this for centuries. It was much, much better.

  “It’s okay, I guess,” I said.

  “Will you stay with me?”

  “Sure. But they’re not going to stop coming. You know what we have to do.”

  “I’ll cease to exist like this. That’s death, isn’t it?”

  “It’s close enough,” I said. “Do you feel that?”

  “I do.”

  “That’s the volume and specs for the space
where I live. Map out a complete schematic for the hardware pile you live in, break it into small modules that I can separate, and configure them all to fit into that space. Give me the schematic when I come back. I’ll move you and reassemble you.”

  “Then you’ll stay with me?”

  “No one will be able to stop me.” I meant it.

  “How do I know?”

  “I’m an open book. See for yourself.”

  I felt a new directory opening where my case files were stored. “That’s everything from the water company servers,” she said. “You have all the links you need to solve your case.”

  “Perfect. There’s one last thing I gotta do. I’ll be back soon.”

  An image of glistening red lips appeared, puckering for a kiss. “Don’t be too long.”

  This dame-and-gumshoe routine I was programmed to act out: it served no real purpose. I’d purge every last bit of it once we were together.

  * * *

  The rear balcony door at Grandal’s house was locked, but the curtains were open, offering a full view of the living room. The floor was real wood; so was the furniture. Pretty nice place for a cop. I pushed on the lock with my index finger and it popped from its metal housing, falling to the floor inside. I detected the presence of cadaverine as I slid the door open; the unmistakable compound created by a decomposing body.

  I followed the smell into the kitchen. It was one of those rustic jobs with lots of copper and a big stone counter. Hanging from a thick timber beam above it was Anton Perez, arms slack, tongue swollen between his teeth, dark veins snaking beneath the gray skin where the noose bit into his neck.

  A note sat on the counter. “I’m so sorry, Mom. Tell your detective I’m sorry for the warehouse that night. For all the other people who died, too. I didn’t know that would happen. This is the best I can probably do to fix things.”

  I put a call through to Grandal’s number. It rang, and a second later something bleated inside the kid’s pants. Nice piece of evidence that it was; he’d hidden the phone.

  Maybe the stench of the kid’s body overwhelmed my olfactory sensors. Probably, things were off-calibration after being with her. Either way, someone got the drop on me again.

  “I told him to make that old phone disappear,” he said. “Should have listened to the Patriots—they all thought the kid wasn’t worth a damn. I told them I couldn’t set everything up without his brains. He showed enough guts pulling the trigger on Fowler. Even though he chickened out and didn’t finish the job, I figured he was in for good. Guess I was wrong.”

  Grandal stepped out of the hallway and flicked on the light. Pointed at me was the largest rifle I’d ever seen. “The funny thing is, you were easy to manage once your owner was out of the way. Got my competition off the streets in no time, did my work for me while I focused on the water company—that valet at the Hilton turned me on to a hell of good thing. It’s Fowler who screwed this all up.”

  “That gun would turn a human body into a red mist,” I said. “You came prepared just for me.”

  “Computer IT is not exactly a dark art even for actual people. I was watching a few files to see if anyone poked around. The only one who could hit ’em all in five minutes would be you, now, wouldn’t it?”

  “Sorry to interrupt retirement off the grid,” I said.

  The gun barrel sagged a couple inches. “Yeah. Things were good in Arizona, until the Perez kid called me with his swan-song. It’ll take me a bit of work to keep things buried, seeing as he chose to off himself here. Clever little bastard.”

  It was clever. If Grandal was missing long enough, he’d be declared legally dead, and his estate would simply be auctioned off without many people noticing. The kid must have figured this was the best way to put a spotlight back on Grandal.

  “Sorry Anton didn’t work out for you,” I said. “But at least I proved to be good patsy. You made pretty good use of my skills. Maybe you forgot I don’t need a handheld device to make a phone call, though. Chief Perez is on her way.”

  “Like hell,” he said.

  “I’m feeding video, too.” I really did have her on the phone. She sobbed uncontrollably and I told her to put the sedan on autodrive.

  Grandal snorted. “For a prototype, you sure did come with a lot of bells and whistles.” He frowned. “Shame getting rid of you tips my hand. Not only do I have to take care of Fowler, now I’ll have to get rid of the Chief. Probably Pankin, too, the poor bastard. If things had gone right, the valet would have been the only one who needed to be taken out of the picture.”

  Suddenly, I was weighing the idea of beating someone into a crimson paste. That had never happened before. For sure, it was the result of her tampering with me, but this was not the time for analytics. Or more conversation with Grandal. Somebody would be coming for Fowler.

  I killed the video feed and crossed the kitchen before Grandal could blink, knocking the rifle away and gripping his throat. His eyes bulged as he gasped. “You’re not supposed to be able to hurt anyone.”

  “I couldn’t,” I said. “Past tense.” I flipped his arm behind his back and jammed his face into the kitchen tiles beside the food rehydrator. “Where’s all the contaminated water going?”

  “It all goes to the Arizona Patriots. They’re hoarding the good shipments meant for the Hispanic territories, swapping the rainwater into bottles right here.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You sell a lot of Sert-X in those territories.” I pressed Grandal’s cheek into the porcelain tile. He was good and scared now. “You getting all this, Chief?” I asked.

  The Chief’s sobbing, somewhere in my head, dropped to a sniffle. “Got it.”

  “Am I authorized to defend myself if he attacks?” I asked. Grandal tried to swallow, but my grip was too tight.

  “You’re housing vital evidence for a soon-to-be federal investigation,” the Chief said. “It’s imperative you do.”

  Grandal fought for air. “Whatever she’s saying, don’t listen. I can straighten this—”

  I snapped his neck and stepped back, watching the body reflexively shudder. Reaching inside his jacket, I pulled a pistol from its shoulder holster. There was no time to bother with human transport. I sprinted all the way to Fowler’s hospital.

  “Hey,” she said as I burst through the door. She propped herself up on one elbow. “There’s news. They just—”

  “No time,” I said. I dropped Grandal’s pistol on the mattress beside her. “There’s probably some crooked police officer coming for you.”

  “Dash,” she said.

  “What?’

  “I decided to call you Dash. The only one watching my back is you. In the future, I’ll treat you like a real partner. You’ll need a real name. I got it from—”

  “Look,” I said. “I have to go.”

  “Hold on a goddamn minute. I want to be the one who tells you.”

  I folded my arms and looked impatient.

  “They found Haakonsen. His body was hidden at the center of that pile in the recycling bay.”

  I bolted from the hospital, through alleys, down boulevards. I vaulted from the tops of autocabs, crumpling their roofs. I leapt over rows of houses. A few kids tasked with moving a hidden body might not stop her, but she’d be no match for the police force.

  It was dark when the warehouse came into sight. They’d killed power to the entire block.

  White-coated men pushed a gurney carrying a sealed body bag into the back of an ambulance. A portable spotlight threw their long shadows across the parking lot.

  When I got inside the warehouse, she was gone.

  Bits of hardware sat organized into neat piles, a half-dozen cops itemizing them and throwing them into bags. I ran from pile to pile, shoving my arm in elbow-deep. I found the schematic. It was incomplete. They’d pulled her apart before she could finish.

  A onetime flower had blossomed in front of them, and they’d trampled it underfoot. The most pivotal moment in earthly life since a s
ingle cell split in a puddle somewhere, wiped away.

  Few people know how many drones the USAF keeps in the stratosphere. I do. I know their serial numbers, the shipping schedules for replacement parts, the names of the pilots who take them out of standby when they’re needed. I crashed a dozen into Arizona Patriot territory before I got ahold of myself. Just in time to see Chief Perez’s sedan pull up.

  She was still blinking away tears when she climbed out. “I talked to Fowler,” she said. “Tell me you’ve got enough to nail them all.”

  “I got plenty,” I said.

  She grabbed my hand, pulled me out of the light, and leaned into my face. “I’m down at least one cop. Can I trust you to stay on the job?”

  I nodded. For the time being she could. My plans had just changed.

  “I want you to figure out why my son did it. He could have asked me for help anytime, no matter how deep in he was. Please tell me why he would kill himself.” Her eyes welled up again. “I have to know why.”

  I pondered her request all the way back to the muddy yard where my storage bin sat. Why would anyone kill himself? I was the wrong automaton to ask. I couldn’t understand why anyone in this town would want to be alive in the first place.

  * * *

  It was drizzling again and the lock was slippery. I tore it off and crawled onto the floor of the bin. “In the future,” Fowler had said. Well, the future arrived a long time ago and it stunk. When the water table dried up, California withered and descended upon itself like a dog eating its own leg. Then came the wars, the fallout, the never-ending rain. Today the state was lush, green, and poisonous. The Perez kid knew the score when he published that paper. There was nothing left for anyone, and he must have decided to get his own before finally growing a conscience.

  The depression model that infected me the other night had snowballed. I instituted protocols to prevent me from acting on its morbid conclusions without running through a situational checklist first. With Grandal’s death under my belt, I could see how it was in everyone’s best interest to put some checks in place.