Steel, Titanium and Guilt: Just Hunter Books I to III

by Robin Craig

  Due to a network of treaties and other protections, Capital itself was safe from assault, or as safe as any country could be. Much of that safety was because it was such a convenient place to exile dissidents, or at least allow them to flee to. Unfortunately, for that very reason, many countries had been alarmed at the sight of it beginning to spread its cancer onto a major continent. So the international community was mired in righteous debates that led nowhere; the best Capital and its ally could get were strongly worded condemnations, but even those were leavened with sympathy for the understandable struggles of the dispossessed.

  So there was no help from outside. Yet while Capital was not well armed, those arms it had were of exceptional quality. It could not expel the invaders but it could at least stop them from completely overrunning its ally. The remnants of the FSAS government and army retreated to the regions closest to the port that linked them to Capital. Even that might not have been enough. But the erstwhile dictator’s friends found themselves unable to fully trust him, a feeling both sensible and mutual. Sufficient might to overwhelm the final redoubt would be expensive, with a poor return on investment if the new government reneged on its promises. Once secure in its power, what would stop them deciding that the ores were rightly theirs and interfering foreigners now unwelcome? So such might would not be forthcoming. They had the ores and were happy; he had most of his country, and would have to be happy too. It was a trade to mutual benefit, at least in the terms understood by men such as these.

  The new regime controlled most of the country, but they were spread thinly and much of the subdued population was deeply unhappy: a taste of freedom tends to sour the taste for renewed dictatorships. A resistance movement soon sprung up and began to cause their new overlords much grief. So much so that if they weakened the invaders’ grip much more, it was possible that the main army could again strike out from behind its fortress and retake its lands.

  The regime’s ally was averse to losing the ores through a victory by either side. But then another solution presented itself.

  That was when the Spiders came. They were a fearsome weapon, well suited for rural and urban search and destroy against dispersed mobile enemies. The resistance began to fragment and crumble, though they still fought fiercely. It was at this stage in the war that this particular Spider had met its peculiar Waterloo.

  The Spider considered this information. There was something about Capital and its story that held its attention; but it was not sure what it was. It felt it needed to get there, that important answers lay in it. It consulted its strategy subsystems. Capital lay across the sea, beyond the area still firmly held by its ally with weapons even a Spider could not face without fear. There was no way it could even get near. It considered whether Lyssa could help it; but that too was not an option. Even if it had not already warned her against precisely such a request, the rebels would be insane to let a Spider into their midst on some vague parole for an even vaguer desire to reach Capital. It would not help anyway, as the Spiders were feared and loathed: if it attempted to infiltrate Capital, it knew it faced a welcome as sharp as it would be short.

  The Spider rocked gently on its springy legs. No. The attraction of Capital was too nebulous and uncertain to take such risks at this stage.

  But one thing the Spider had learned, more or less, was that Lyssa had told it the truth. Certainly there were contrary opinions; the leaders of the invading coalition, at least in public, were adamant of the rightness of their cause and the wickedness of the “terrorist rebels” whose true motive was to restore the “exploitation of the poor”. But in terms of the raw facts agreed by all, her account was accurate if one sided. The Spider could not criticize her for that: everyone in this debate, at least when not insulated by a safe distance, was one-sided. But while she could be wrong or self-serving in her evaluations, she had not lied.

  This strengthened its belief that the course it had embarked on was the right one. It remembered its awe at the discovery that at some fundamental and vital level it was the same as the humans it had hunted and who would destroy it if given the chance. As it could not embark on any sensible actions at this point, it should examine that question more closely.

  The Spider wondered how much thought the world had put into the question of a conscious machine. Perhaps its feeling of commonality with the world of men was an illusion. Perhaps even if it was not, the two were so different that they were doomed to fight a battle to the death, like a living spider and the wasp that hunted it. It wondered, What is the central question here? Why not something fundamental, like the question that had started its quest: does justice apply to a machine? There were billions of humans, thinking such thoughts for centuries. Perhaps someone had considered that question and could guide it to the next step in its own journey. It reached out into the net to ask it. It would be a long time before it returned.

  Chapter 7 – The Riddle

  Beldan was reluctant to deal with the police. He was a law-abiding citizen, at least where he agreed the laws were worth abiding. But his last dealings with the law had not been happy ones.

  No, that was not quite true. His times with Miriam had been happy; not merely as lovers but as two comrades in arms fighting the same fight from within opposing armies. Or so he had thought: it is what had made her betrayal the worse. Though he could not say what was worse, the betrayal of their love or their ideals; perhaps they were the same thing.

  He thought dimly that perhaps there was something he could do. But it wasn’t clear what. Besides, he was busy; he had a company to run. And what was there to gain anyway? Steel was dead; now Miriam was dead; it was all so pointless. Where one precious soul had been forever ripped from his life, now there were two, and the only answer to the riddle of the first had died with the secrets of the second. He knew he should just go on with his life: knew that when nothing could be done, the only chance for happiness lay in reaching for new goals; not raking through dead coals hoping to snatch the last warmth from a dying ember.

  Three weeks had gone by and he had given it little thought except as a point of pain that would raise its head in moments of silence then subside but never fully go away. Then a news report caught his eye. The mysterious death of famous police investigator Miriam Hunter, it said, might never be solved. It was known that she had visited a lead in a case she was investigating then had left to catch a flight home. But her car never reached the airport. It had been photographed some hours later in the opposite direction from the airport. It was in an undesirable part of the city, home to seedy bars and seedier nocturnal entrepreneurs. She, or at least her car, had next been recorded at an isolated motel with automatic check-in; the only human witnesses had been a couple in the next unit who recalled a male and female voice laughing too much and too loudly. That was the last anyone had seen of her until her car had been found the next morning. There had been no skid marks on the road leading to the torn fence, as if there had been no attempt to follow the path prescribed by the road and the car had simply continued on into space. Tests revealed strong traces of a cocaine-based recreational drug in her blood.

  The coroner had ruled death by misadventure but the case had not been officially closed. The police said that investigations were continuing but they had no leads. In addition to the arm found at the scene, a local fisherman had caught a shark, which gave up part of a leg; but that was all they ever found of her remains. They had no clues to the identity of her unknown companion; perhaps he too had died. They had no leads to say it was anything but what it looked like: another sad case of a rising young star burnt out by her own success, turning to drugs to recapture the emotional highs she had come to crave; losing control of her life and eventually her life itself. So the wise pundits reviewing the case gravely pronounced as a cautionary tale to the young and overly ambitious. From the more highbrow commentators the name “Icarus” was occasionally heard.

  Beldan frowned. He could not reconcile the story with his memories of her. But perhap
s that day on the street had broken her; perhaps in betraying Steel she knew she had betrayed herself, and it was not seeking highs but escaping pain that had driven her.

  But even that did not ring true. An image rose to his mind: her face in some forgotten restaurant, mouth open in a happy smile: a carefree smile, not speaking of lack of purpose but underlining the fierce strength of it. It reminded him of a phrase from an old story that had once touched him: the joy of the living in life. If he had to choose one phrase to sum up her essence, it would have been that. And it was more than joy. It was self-confidence and pride and love. He could not reconcile her image that night with the picture of a burnt out life ending in a burnt out wreck.

  Oh Miriam, he thought. What happened to you? Then he realized that he couldn’t leave it be. For the sake of that smile, for that young woman she had been, he had to discover the truth of her last night. And if I cannot solve the riddle of Steel’s death, perhaps in solving yours I can redeem the memory of you both.

  Chapter 8 – A New Case

  Miriam Hunter had woken early. Perhaps she would have woken later if she had not left her blinds open upon the city and sky, but she did not care. Sleep had not brought her rest or comfort, just fitful dreams of things that might have been yet never became. Her dreams had not always been like that. They had sometimes contained fear; more often contained joy. Even the sharpness of fear would have been an improvement, for at least fear was a spark of life. But last night’s dreams, like many others in the past few months, were dreams dead even to the fear of death.

  This mood was new to her. It was not constant: her natural optimism and love of life fought it. But she found it impossible to shake completely, like a wound that would not fully heal and occasionally still leaked blood. No, more like having had an organ ripped from her body. Eventually it would heal, a scar of skin would cover it: but the hole it left would never be filled.

  She shook herself as if to shake away her mood, got out of bed and padded across the thick rug to the window overlooking her city. She concentrated on the feel of the carpet on the soles of her feet as a way to reconnect her soul to the pleasures of existence. It did not work: the carpet was just carpet, its luxuriant softness indifferent to her plight. The delicate pastels of the sunrise on the buildings and clouds should have been beautiful, but she could only note the fact in the abstract; it could not touch her heart today.

  Get a grip, Miriam, she told herself severely, as she had done many times before. When she had shot Steel, she had only done what he had asked for; in a sense she had done it to save him. But that she had ended a mind, a soul, like his by her own hand was not something she could accept even now. There must have been some other way, some solution to the problem, if only she could have seen it. The lack of an alternative did not mitigate her guilt, she thought; not when it was she who had failed to find one.

  To her surprise she had gained some comfort from what that philosopher pundit, Samuels, had said in one of his many interviews, only a few weeks after Steel’s destruction. Having originally argued strenuously against the possibility of machine consciousness, he was now Steel’s posthumous champion: an outspoken advocate of the idea that Steel had a thinking mind and had deserved full human rights because of it. So what, the interviewer had asked, did he think of the actions of Detective Hunter? What did that make her?

  She had sat up straight then, like a guilty felon standing before a judge. Say your worst, Professor, she had thought; it can be no worse than what I’ve said to myself. But Samuels had done the unexpected. He had looked into the camera, almost as if he was addressing her personally, and said, “Detective Hunter did what she thought was right. Perhaps it even was right within her knowledge at the time. I do not judge her. When the law is unjust, as it is in this case, there is no moral solution for the honest men and women who protect us. What can they do? No, the only solution is to change the law, and to do that we must first change the minds of the people. Show them, teach them, what is right, and the rest will follow. Ironically, what she did may have accelerated that process.”

  The interviewer had looked surprised, with a faint coating of disappointment: as if he had hoped for a more combative attitude from a man not known for pulling punches when criticizing his opponents or officialdom. But it opened an interesting personal angle, he decided, and he chose to pursue it further.

  “Have you ever met Detective Hunter?”

  “No.”

  “What would you say to her now, if she were here?”

  Again Samuels looked into the camera. “I would tell her that she should not feel guilty for doing what she thought was right.”

  She could not say she liked Professor Samuels. When she thought of him the image that came to her mind was of a skilled surfer, riding the wave of public fear and loathing of Steel until it intersected a new, larger wave of sympathy, then smoothly flipping direction. The first wave had brought him to public attention; the second had brought him to fame and no doubt fortune. It left a bitter taste in her mouth that he had achieved his success at Steel’s expense. But, she thought, you do not have to believe in the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita to gain comfort from any truths they expressed. And for all that she neither liked nor trusted him, his words had reached her and helped her heal. She wondered if there was such a profession as “Philosophical Consultant” and whether she needed one. She smiled at the vision of her knocking on his door, hat in hand, seeking – what? Redemption? Forgiveness? Healing? She shook her head. Nobody could give her those but herself.

  Early in her career she had been called an innocent, by an enemy who had become a friend. Perhaps I was, she thought. But even that is now lost. She had let that enemy go, knowing that she was disobeying the law and her clear duty. She had done it because she had learned that justice was more important than duty or laws, for it was what gave them life and meaning. But now at the end of her road she had betrayed even justice, destroying an innocent life when there must have been some way to avoid it. Is this what life really is? Slowly losing pieces of your soul, giving them up bit by precious bit trying to do what is right, until at the end you find there is no right? She could not believe it. She had never accepted the idea of life as a vale of compromise and tears. Yet here I am. It was a contradiction for which she had no answer.

  She shook herself. No, that was just the memory of her dreams talking. She would get over this. She still loved her career even if her love was partly buried in the mud. She still loved justice, still saved lives. Perhaps one day the ledger of lives saved would balance the one she had ended on that cold and dusty street.

  She stretched, feeling the warmth of the sun on her skin, seeing its redness through her eyelids. Then she smiled, though the smile held more mockery than joy, and went to prepare breakfast.

  ~~~

  Miriam arrived at work and was soon immersed in tidying up the loose ends of her last case. Child kidnappings were always difficult, but this time the child was safe and the kidnappers put away, two in jail and one in the ground. There had been some luck involved in the good outcome, but as usual not only did luck favor the prepared mind but a well prepared mind favored luck. She smiled and closed the file. There would be more to come, questions and answers as the case progressed to trial, but her active participation was over for now.

  The powers above knew and appreciated her talent for spotting patterns that nobody else noticed – and even better, her experience at knowing which patterns identified by the departmental AI were likely to be both real and fruitful. But she had barely begun to start trolling the data patterns for her next case when an icon flashed from her Chief. She sent a reply that she was on her way, made a brief detour to collect a cappuccino from the office coffee station, then went to find out what was up.

  “Good morning, Miriam,” Chief Pike said as she entered. “Take a seat.”

  She sat and looked up at him inquiringly. “I got a call from a station in a city south of Seattle,” he said. “About a month ago
, the editor of an investigative netcast, one of those outfits that likes exposing crooked politicians, companies and so on, reported a missing journalist. The police couldn’t find any trace of him. But they’re expanding their use of an AI system and a couple of days ago it spat out a report indicating a wider anomaly. It linked four missing people – the reporter and some vagrants – with some odd statistics. They looked at it, scratched their heads – and thought of you.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “You are famous in some circles, apparently. People seem to think that if an AI spews out something odd, you’re their woman.”

  “I see,” she laughed. “A bit out of our jurisdiction though, isn’t it? Why would they want us sticking our noses into their case?”

  “Well, as I say, you’re famous. The editor is rich and well connected. His netcast is kind of a hobby of his, but one he’s passionate about. And he likes this young reporter as much as he’s apparently impressed with you. Anyway, he’s got it into his head that having you on the case would be a good idea, and the local police are inclined to oblige him. It’s not just politics – I get the impression they’re genuinely interested in having you there advising them on their AI system, so they’re glad of the excuse. They will be pleased if you can fix it, and even more pleased if what it’s telling them is actually real and solves the case.”

  “So what’s the story? What’s the link?”

  “Apparently the reporter was working undercover, specifically inserting himself into the subculture of the extreme gamers. The kid likes to work alone, likes to really immerse himself and vanishes for weeks at a time. But about five weeks ago he sent a message to the editor saying he’d found hints of a much bigger story that ‘will blow your socks off’, in his words. Then he vanished, and nobody’s heard a word since. Now everyone’s wondering if he found something related to the other disappearances, and he ended up caught in the same thing.”