I Only Killed Him Once

by Adam Christopher

  It looked so much like a film set that I decided that’s what it was, albeit one that hadn’t seen an active production for some time. There was an atmosphere of disuse about the place and the air felt heavy and dusty with just a hint of damp. High above the only lights that were on gave out a comfortable yellowish-white and when I turned my audio receptors up I could hear them fizz a little.

  “Well, listen, bub,” said Peterman, “you know what happened last time. And the time before that. So you’ll forgive me if I don’t carry a little insurance around with me.” He waggled the gun in front of himself. It looked heavy.

  The man in the black suit winced, then lifted his chin and directed his attention at me.

  “I’m sorry, Ray,” he said. “You’ll have to forgive Mr. Peterman. He’s been under a lot of pressure recently, shall we say.” He paused and tilted his head. “How are you feeling?”

  It was a strange question to put to a mechanical man, but there was something about the man in the black suit that was familiar and he had an air about him that suggested he knew exactly who—and what—he was talking to.

  I opened my mouth grille and then I thought of the number seventeen for some reason and I closed the grille again. It made a clicking sound. The two looked at me and then each other.

  “How is he doing?” asked the man in the black suit of his friend with the gun.

  “Maybe a short circuit or two,” said Peterman. With the gun aimed at my chest he came close enough to touch and whatever nervousness there had been before was now absent. He looked me up and down, and then he looked down at the tape recorder on the trolley. He gave the dials a tap with a fingernail. “But he’s otherwise in good shape,” he said. “His memory reset is complete and the new tape is running.”

  I watched the two of them. I felt my circuits get hot. I wanted to loosen my collar. I wanted to take off my hat and wipe down my forehead with a handkerchief. All of this was unnecessary as I didn’t sweat and I could withstand a temperature hot enough to melt a school bus without too much difficulty, but that didn’t stop me from lifting my hat up and checking the head band and then putting it back where I had found it. Peterman watched me from by the trolley.

  “I can understand you may have some questions, Ray,” said the man in the black suit. He hadn’t moved from the stage but now he gestured to one of the easy chairs in the fake library. I didn’t need to sit down but I thought matters might be expedited a little if I took his invitation so I moved to the stage and I stepped up onto it and I trailed out the cables from the trolley and I sat down. The man in the black suit smiled and nodded and he moved one of the other easy chairs around so it was facing mine directly. He stood behind it with his hands on the top and his elbows locked.

  “Now,” he said, “we can begin.”

  “You got that right,” I said. “And you can begin with telling me who you guys are and what this place is.”

  The man in the black suit laughed. “Ah, Raymond Electromatic, wonder that you are, a modern miracle with one small but essential problem. You can’t remember a thing, thanks to that little tape in your chest. Thornton’s final insoluble dilemma.”

  I pursed my lips. Or at least I felt like I did.

  “But that does not present us with a problem, Ray,” he continued, “because what I want is right here.” He stood tall and walked to the edge of the stage. He pointed to the tape recorder. “Thanks to Mr. Peterman’s expertise, we were able to save you before you had a catastrophic systems failure. We salvaged your tape as well, although in the process some of the data recorded during your last day was scrambled. But, as I said, this does not present us with any particular problem. All you have to do is unscramble it for me.”

  The man in the black suit waved a finger at Peterman. Peterman nodded and moved to the tape deck on the trolley.

  I looked up at the man in the black suit. “Listen, pal, I don’t know who you are or what you think you’re doing, but I’ve had about as much as I can take. So you’re going to tell me who you are and what’s going on and maybe we can even have that conversation in a polite and civilized manner. But you seem to know me and if that’s true then you know what I can do, so how about we work together to avoid any unpleasantness, okay?”

  I went to stand up and there was a crack like a tree being struck by lightning and I found I couldn’t move a single servo. My optics went green around the edges and white horizontal lines flickered across everything I saw. I got my optics over to where Peterman was standing by the trolley. He had both hands on the controls and was slowly twisting knobs in the clockwise direction and the dials above the tape reels were clicking as the needles within bounced against their upper limits.

  I tried to speak but my vocalizer wasn’t playing ball. I tried to make some adjustments to my systems but I got nothing except error codes five ways to Sunday.

  The man in the black suit stepped around his easy chair and sat in it. Then he scooted himself forward so he was balanced on the very edge. He adjusted its position on the floor and drew himself closer to me.

  Then he raised his right hand. He made it into a fist and then he uncurled his index finger and pointed it at my chest.

  “My name is Special Agent Touch Daley,” he said. “I work for the Department of Robot Labor.”

  Then his index finger broke at the middle joint and swung down on a hinge and I found myself looking down a metal barrel. A second later a silver probe telescoped out of the barrel and extended six inches before stopping.

  “And,” said Touch Daley, “we are going to start this conversation with a very simple question.”

  I wondered how I was going to answer his very simple question when I couldn’t speak but then the silver probe extended again and entered one of the exposed data ports on my chest unit and the world exploded into amber shapes and my internal diagnostics told me what I already knew.

  My system was compromised. My positronic brain was under somebody else’s control. My permanent store was unlocked.

  Touch Daley’s voice boomed inside my head as his foggy silhouette loomed in front of my optics, nothing but a shadow cast against a world of white noise.

  “Where,” asked the shadow, “is Ada?”

  18

  And then I woke up and it was another beautiful day in Hollywood, California. Just like it always was, each and every morning when I woke in my alcove and the world was born anew.

  But not this morning. Something was different.

  Very different.

  I wasn’t standing in my alcove. I was standing in a small room made of concrete blocks painted a dull forest green. The floor was cement and slightly damp. There were no windows but the room was lit by a single unshaded bulb hanging from a cable hanging from the ceiling. Beside me was a silver wheeled trolley on which a portable tape machine purred. As I watched the reels slowly turn I saw the needles in the dials above those reels jump almost in time to my thoughts.

  These things were perhaps the least of my problems. My primary concern was the man leaning in the doorway. He was wearing a jacket in desperate need of being burned and buried and he was holding a gun that didn’t shoot bullets and that gun was pointing right at me.

  “Good morning, Sparks,” he said. A smile appeared and then was gone. Whoever he was he looked tired and I told him the same. That reignited the smile and it was joined by something that might be called a guffaw, if only there had been an atom of humor in it.

  “If I look tired I can only imagine how you must feel,” he said.

  I thought that was a strange thing to say and I told him that as well but that just made him shake his head and I thought I should maybe have asked Peterman for coffee and the morning paper instead.

  Peterman.

  I said his name and he looked up and the smile came back and now it had a certain warmth to it. He nodded and I saw his grip on his funny-looking gun relax.

  “Hey, Sparks, things are looking up! You’re starting to remember. Listen—”
/>
  Peterman paused. He pulled at his bottom lip with his free hand and then when he was done with his face he used the same hand to pull at the lapel of his jacket. I wondered whether I should give him a hand to pull it off completely and then maybe we could see what his ray gun would do to it.

  Not a lot, I thought. It was the kind of gun designed to shoot robots with.

  “Listen,” said Peterman, starting himself up again, “I’m sorry what he’s doing to you, but you’re holding up, and that’s good. There’s not long to go now and I think we’ll have all we need, okay?”

  I said nothing. Peterman nodded and he rolled his neck.

  “Okay,” he said. Then he twitched the gun. “Better not keep him waiting.”

  He twitched the gun a second time and I walked out of the room and into a maze of corridors.

  I led the way. I didn’t know where I was going but, somehow, I remembered.

  * * *

  I led Peterman into a large room with a low stage on which was constructed a passable replica of a library from an Edwardian country house. Standing on the library’s red and purple paisley carpet next to a pair of large easy chairs was a tall man in a black suit with black hair.

  “Welcome back, Ray,” he said. He walked behind one of the easy chairs and patted the top of it with both hands. “How about we get ourselves comfortable and have a chat?”

  I looked at Peterman. He was looking dead ahead but he caught my glance and he lifted his chin up and his eyes went back to the front but I think I got the message.

  I didn’t know anything about him other than his surname and terrible taste in casual jackets, but I was starting to like him.

  For a moment I remembered a conversation out in the hills behind Hollywood, standing in the heat, standing under an oak. I remembered the sound of the birds and the smell of the dirt and the smell of his aftershave.

  And for a moment I remembered lying on a hard metal surface, lying in a box on wheels that moved, and I remembered the sound of the engine and the screech of the tires and the smell of dust and gasoline.

  “Ray?”

  I adjusted my optics and the fakery in front of me swam back into focus. I looked down at the tape machine on the trolley. It was connected to my chest unit by a thin double cable. My chest panel was open and my shirt was unbuttoned. The reels on the tape machine turned but the reels inside my chest were still.

  I looked up at the man in the black suit.

  “I don’t know who you are,” I said, “but I’m guessing I have you to thank for this. If I came to the end of my memory tape . . . well, let’s just say I’m not sure I would want to know what that was like.”

  The needles on the dials on the tape machine twitched in time with my words.

  “Yes, it was close for a moment there, Ray,” said the man in the black suit. “We managed to save your systems from a truly catastrophic failure. You should count yourself lucky.”

  There was something about his tone I didn’t like.

  I kept my mouth grille shut.

  He gestured to the easy chair. “Please?”

  I cleared my throat. It sounded like a forklift truck dragging a dumpster and it echoed in the big room. The man in the black suit was watching me carefully but I was doing the same to him.

  “Believe me, I’m grateful for the help,” I said. I moved toward the stage. I left the trolley where it was and I let the cables trail behind me. “But I’m going to need to know why I needed the help in the first place. And maybe once we get that cleared up we can work on the little problem of who you are and who you work for and how you know me and where I am and what you intend to do to fix the situation, whatever the situation is, because at the moment I don’t rightly know.”

  Down on the main floor, Peterman had his head held high and the gun held tight. I had a feeling he was putting that on but I wasn’t sure if it was for me or his charming friend.

  “All will become clear, Ray,” said the man in the black suit. “In fact, that’s exactly what I’m here to do. I’m here to help you remember. You see, your memory tape was damaged when we rescued you. There’s important information about our case on it. The data has been scrambled, but it’s all still there. We just need your help to extract it.”

  I looked at Peterman and he nodded so I sat in the easy chair. He seemed to know what was going on even if I didn’t.

  I sat with my hands on my knees and the cables trailing to the portable tape deck. Peterman moved to the trolley and stashed his gun on the side. Then he wheeled the whole thing around so his back was to me and the device was hidden from the stage.

  “Now then, Mr. Electromatic,” said his friend in the black suit. He walked around the other easy chair and lowered himself in it and crossed one knee over the other. Then he seemed to get a better idea and he uncrossed his legs and scooted forward so he was balanced on the edge of the chair and then he dragged the whole thing forward until he was directly facing me, close enough to touch.

  “We’ll make this quick and easy and maybe we’ll find that answer rattling around in your circuits somewhere,” he said.

  I might have come up with a question or two about that particular statement, but my logic gates got a little distracted by a sudden influx of data, a stream of numbers and code that were wrapped around themselves inside of a signal that overwhelmed my systems to such a degree that nearly every nonessential function packed its bags and turned off the lights and set sail for an early weekend.

  That included my motors and their servos, and that certainly included my vocalizer. I couldn’t even work the little flap behind my mouth grille.

  And as the man in the black suit leaned forward my optical register overloaded and started scaling the world around me down to nothing but constituent colors and shapes and then even the colors faded away until I was left with shadows and static.

  One of the shadows was the man in the black suit. I knew that much even though it took nearly all of my available megacycles to make him out. He seemed closer and it felt like he was touching my chest panel and then it felt like his hand was passing right through me.

  “I’ll ask you again, Ray,” said the shadow.

  I was about ready to say goodnight when my audio receptors captured his question and then all kinds of things lit up inside me.

  “Where,” he asked, “is Ada?”

  19

  And then I woke up and it was another beautiful day in Hollywood, California. Just like it always was, each and every morning when I woke in my alcove and the world was born anew.

  But not this morning. Something was different.

  Very different.

  I remembered.

  I remembered everything.

  Fresco Peterman was at the door of the storage room and he had the gun but he knew something was different too because when I awakened from my digitized slumber he pushed himself off the doorway and the gun hung loosely from his hand.

  “Ray? Hey, Sparks, you in there? Wake up, big fella.”

  I turned the lights in my optics up a notch and that made Peterman take a step back before he breathed a sigh of relief.

  “And good morning to you too,” he said.

  I didn’t speak. I was busy cogitating. Correlating. I did some hard math to clear my circuits and then ran the data again but I’d been right the first time.

  I grabbed the trolley with my portable tape recorder on it with one hand and gave it a little push. Peterman’s eyes fell to the tape recorder and then they were back on me.

  “I’ve got it,” I said.

  Peterman nodded. “And?”

  “I know who the target is.”

  Peterman grinned. He clicked the fingers of the hand that wasn’t holding the gun and then he tapped me on the shoulder, but he did it carefully like he thought he might get an electric shock. He took a step back toward the door.

  “Then let’s bust this joint,” he said.

  He disappeared into the corridor.

  I f
ollowed.

  I knew what was happening.

  I remembered.

  None of this made me happy in the slightest.

  * * *

  Special Agent Touch Daley was waiting for us on the library set. He stood on the stage with his hands neatly folded in front of his belt buckle and a smile on his face and a downward tilt to his face that told me an awful lot about his state of mind.

  He was confident. Not happy, because in a job like his you didn’t have the luxury of being happy. But you could take a certain satisfaction from performing your assigned task with a level of success. That was why he was here, after all. He was the best man for the job.

  Scratch that, he was the only man for the job and he wasn’t a man at all. He was a machine, like me but not like me at all. He was number seventeen. The significance of that I didn’t yet understand and it was part of something bigger that I sure didn’t remember. I suspected Fresco Peterman knew and I suspected he would tell me in good time. For the moment, I just had to follow the notion that while I didn’t know exactly what had gone on before I had a fair idea of what was going to happen next.

  “Mr. Electromatic,” said Touch Daley. “It’s good to see you again. I’m very pleased you could be here for this little conversation.”

  His politeness was interesting, in an academic kind of way. Maybe it was how he kept control. Cool, calm, collected—you know, the usual. He was a man—a robot— in charge of the situation and he knew it and he could steer the whole shebang any way he pleased.

  Except I was about to disabuse him of that idea, and fast.

  “Always a pleasure, Agent Daley,” I said. I moved to the stage while Fresco Peterman kept his gun level at my chassis and kept his step close to mine. When I got up next to Daley I pulled my little trolley up against the riser the fake library sat on and Peterman turned his attention to it like he always did.