I Only Killed Him Once

by Adam Christopher

  I had discovered their identity. Because for that month at the studio, as Touch Daley interrogated my circuits as to the whereabouts of Ada, I was interrogating his circuits. Peterman’s portable memory tape machine had a few tricks built-in, including one that allowed me—or at least, my autonomous systems, given that my conscious self was too busy being buzzed by Daley and his probe—to trace a signal back along that probe and access his own systems.

  The target was the head of IA.

  But—it couldn’t be. It didn’t make sense. Because according to Touch Daley’s systems, Ada was the head of IA.

  Ada, the supercomputer built by Thornton, who until a month ago had occupied the very room I was standing in. The computer that Touch Daley Seventeen had come to collect. The computer that had hidden herself from Daley to avoid that very fact.

  The computer who had, apparently, taken out a contract on herself.

  Maybe I’d gotten it wrong. Maybe something had gotten scrambled. I hadn’t been operating perfectly for a while now.

  I felt my circuits overheating already.

  I stepped around Peterman and stepped into the outer office. I moved to the desk and I looked at the telephone and I willed it to ring.

  It didn’t but I kept looking at it all the same.

  I heard Peterman pad over the rug. He stopped and when I turned around he had lowered himself into the chair in front of the desk. He leaned back and he put his hands behind his head and he closed his eyes.

  I hadn’t told him everything I’d learned from my interrogation of Touch Daley’s systems. All he knew was that I was trying to identify the target and that I had succeeded.

  I hadn’t told him that target was Ada.

  “You don’t know who the boss of IA is?”

  Peterman opened one eye and he used it to squint at me. “Would it matter if I did?”

  I shrugged with little enthusiasm. Peterman had closed his eye again and didn’t see it.

  “It might matter a great deal,” I said.

  Now it was Peterman’s turn to shrug. “You know what to do. Cut off the head of the snake.” Then his eyes snapped open and he swung his arms down and he brought himself to a more upright position. “So who is it?”

  I frowned as best I could. Peterman narrowed his eyes at me, like he could see me do it.

  “Sparks?”

  “The head of IA is the head of IA,” I said. It was the truth and nothing but the truth. I didn’t say any more and Peterman looked at me and I waited for more questions to follow. None did so I kept going. “More important is figuring out where they are. Did you get anything on the tape?”

  Then Peterman nodded and then he stood up. “You did good back at the studio, Ray. You kept our friend Touch Daley talking a good long while.” He moved around the desk and he reached down and he pulled a folded wedge of paper out of a bag I hadn’t noticed. He moved the telephone and the inkwells on the desk and he unfolded the paper over the empty space.

  It was a map of Southern California. Los Angeles at the top. San Diego at the bottom with a slice of Mexico along the edge for good measure.

  “Okay, so, here we go.” Peterman spread his hands across the map to flatten it. Then he tapped it. I watched as he circled Hollywood with his finger. “We’re here—well, we were here. Playback Pictures, Studio City. Daley had a pulse transmitter—the equipment at the studio wasn’t great, so getting a fix took a while. But he was sending a signal back to home base.”

  “Did you get a trace to where that home base is?”

  Peterman grimaced like he’d found a spider swimming in his morning coffee. He folded his arms.

  “You didn’t trace it?” I asked.

  “Oh, now, Sparks, come on! You know, before I was an actor I was a scientist? A good one, too! Of course I traced it.”

  “Good.”

  “Well, I traced it a bit.”

  I looked at Peterman and he looked at me and then he grimaced again like it was me who had done something wrong. He leaned back on his elbows and looked over the map on the desk.

  “I traced it as far as Southern California. Very Southern California.” He traced a circle around San Diego.

  A very large circle.

  That’s when I saw it.

  “Peterman,” I said, “do you have my book with the notes?”

  “Sure.” He didn’t take his eyes off the map as he reached into his jacket and pulled it out and offered it to me. “Seemed the safest place to keep it away from Daley.”

  I took it and opened it. I went right to the back, where the most recent note was, the one I’d written to myself after leaving the instructions to meet Peterman at the fencing club.

  The note had one word on it: ESMERELDA.

  I read it a few times. I didn’t know where I had heard it to write it down, but I had clearly thought it was important.

  I held the note under Peterman’s nose. He leaned back to get focus. Then he finally took it from me and stood tall.

  “This is from that phone call, isn’t it? I saw you write it down.”

  “Phone call?”

  “Yeah, phone call. That night, you came to my place, we had a little back-and-forth about the multitude of problems called Touch Daley, and then the phone rings again. It was that old guy. Must have been the tenth time in the last week, and he asks for you again, and I was ready to give him the whole script about how I don’t know nobody called Ray and I don’t know nobody called Fresco and you call again I’m going to find you and me and the boys are going to come down and wrap that telephone cord around your neck and—”

  “With less excitement, please.”

  “Ah . . . well, yeah, and then you take the phone off of me and you and the old guy have a talk.”

  “What about?”

  “What, am I you suddenly? How would I know, Sparks? I just stood there and waited and you wrote something down on that pad of yours and you tore out the sheet and you put it in that book and you gave the book to me. But listen, who’s Esmeralda? Are you telling me you had the target’s ID all the time?”

  I shook my head. I turned to the map. I pointed to it.

  “Esmerelda isn’t a who. It’s a where.”

  It was on the coast to the north of San Diego. A small town, maybe something that was really more a suburb of its mother city than a strictly defined locale of its own now that San Diego itself had begun the characteristic outward sprawl of any good-sized town.

  But there it was, sitting on a curve of coastline. The same word I had written on the note to myself.

  A town called Esmerelda.

  “That’s where they are,” I said.

  Peterman did some more of that frowning he had gotten good at and he looked at me and then he looked at the map. He rubbed his cheeks and he held his breath and then he let it out.

  “Now it’s your turn to trust me,” I said.

  Peterman opened his mouth. He hesitated and he closed it again. Then he turned to me.

  “I don’t get it. Why Esmerelda? It’s a resort town. Nothing much there except a lot of fancy houses and a lot of sand.”

  “You’re right.”

  Peterman moved an eyebrow up. “About the sand?”

  “About the houses,” I said. “That’s where IA are. And I know why.”

  Peterman folded his arms. “I don’t get it.”

  But I did. It was right there, on my permanent store. I’d known all along and I didn’t even realize.

  “Because that’s where his house is. House and private laboratory.”

  “Whose house?”

  “Professor Thornton’s,” I said. “That’s where he lived, in Esmerelda.”

  Peterman blinked. “Isn’t Thornton dead?”

  I shrugged. “Apparently so, but I’m beginning to have my doubts.”

  “So you’re saying Thornton is behind IA? Is he the target?”

  I didn’t say a word. I looked back down at the map. I tapped the coast near San Diego.

 
“I think I’m going to have to go and find out for myself.”

  23

  Peterman puffed out his cheeks and then he exhaled long and slow. I watched him and I wished I could do the same because it sure looked like the appropriate reaction to a situation like this.

  Then I watched him some more as he paced around the rug in the outer office. Then he headed behind the big desk and he leaned against the frame of the big window behind it and he folded his arms and he half turned so he could look at me and the outside world at the same time.

  “Listen, Sparks, I get it,” he said. “You get a job, you do the job. That’s just swell. Call it business. I get it. No problem. But this? This doesn’t feel right. What are you going to do? Ring the doorbell and ask for Professor Thornton?”

  I didn’t say anything. Peterman looked me up and down.

  “I mean, come on, you might pass for a private detective in Los Angeles, but you sure as hell aren’t going to look like an encyclopedia salesman in Esmerelda.”

  I didn’t say anything. He had a point. But I had a job to do and there didn’t seem to be any other alternatives. IA was a threat. Whether to me personally or to society at large, I didn’t know and it didn’t matter. It was bad enough for Ada to skedaddle. Without Ada my time was limited. I had nothing left to do but the job Ada had employed me for and I just had to hope it would be enough.

  I told Peterman the same. He looked at me with a pained expression and he squeezed his folded arms even tighter and when he was done with all that he shook his head and whistled between his teeth at the same time.

  “There’s a whole lot of things I could say about vipers’ nests and spiders’ parlors and things like that.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  He shook his head again. “It wouldn’t make me feel any better.” He turned to look out the window.

  I didn’t say anything. He was right. There was a bad deal going down and I was on the receiving end. I looked at the telephone on the desk and I wanted it to ring and the voice on the other end to tell me what to do.

  A logic gate clicked somewhere deep inside me. “If in doubt, have someone walk through the door holding a gun,” I said.

  Peterman looked at me from the corner of his eye. The eyebrow above it moved up a little.

  I shrugged. “Somebody once said that. Maybe it was even Thornton.”

  “Then Thornton has a hell of a sense of humor. I’ve read some bad scripts in my time, Sparks, but that line would get you thrown out of the writer’s guild.”

  He returned his attention to the world outside. I returned my attention to the problem at hand.

  Maybe Thornton had a point.

  “Give me the ray gun,” I said.

  “What?”

  “The gun,” I said. “The one for robots.”

  Peterman sniffed. He didn’t look happy but then neither did I, at least on the inside. He gave me another look up and down like I was an unpopular son asking for the keys to Dad’s car. Then he pushed off the window frame and reached behind his back. When his hand came back it had the ray gun in it. He looked at it and then he looked at me and then he turned it around and held it out with the grip toward me.

  “Take it easy,” he said. “You get on the wrong end of that, it’ll pack quite a punch.”

  “I’m counting on it,” I said. I took it. We looked at each other. Then I said, “Thanks,” and Peterman sighed.

  “I hope you have a better plan, Ray,” he said.

  “I do not,” I said, “but there’s one thing I’m counting on.”

  “Oh yeah? And what’s that?”

  I put the ray gun in the pocket of my trench coat. It felt heavy. “Me,” I said. “I’m good at my job. I know that. Ada knows that. And this just might be the most important job of them all. So I’m going to do what I always do. I’m going to get it done. I know who the target is. I know where to find him. That’s everything I need.”

  Peterman looked at me for seven whole seconds and then he nodded, just once. “Okay,” he said. “What can I do?”

  I joined him at the window. Outside, life went on.

  “You got away from Playback Pictures okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  “Really?”

  Peterman looked at me. “Now it’s your turn to trust me, Sparks. I said yes. As far as IA know, I still work for the department—for them.”

  “Good,” I said. “Because I need you to get back to the studio.”

  Peterman frowned. Then his eyes went wide and he clicked his fingers. “The portable memory tape.”

  “Right. There might be some kind of setup I can use in Esmerelda, but if I don’t see it I’m not going to stick around to look. I’m going to lose time there and back and that’s not counting the job, so I need you to be ready. I may need another hookup, and fast.”

  Peterman nodded. “You can count on it.”

  Then I looked out the window and that’s when I saw them. They were several blocks away but I had a clear view and they were traveling with some speed and they were getting closer with each passing moment. Peterman saw them too because he grabbed hold of my shoulder.

  “We got company, Sparks.”

  “That we do.”

  There were four cars, all long and black. They were coming to the office along Hollywood Boulevard and they were ignoring the traffic signals. Other cars stopped to avoid collision and people out on the sidewalks stopped to look.

  Four cars full of Touch Daleys and all of them with a single purpose in mind.

  Peterman jerked his head toward the door. “Get going. I’ll stay and run interference.”

  I didn’t need a second invitation. I turned and left at speed with Peterman’s call of “Good luck, Sparks!” ringing in my audio receptors.

  24

  The drive to Esmerelda took two hours and I counted the seconds the whole damn way. I was on the clock in more ways than one. Occasionally I cast an optic down to the telephone that sat between the two front seats but it remained silent. I assumed Ada was safely stowed somewhere and wasn’t calling me not because she was in trouble but because it was too much of a risk.

  That just left me and the ray gun and a job in a town called Esmerelda.

  How Thornton came to live there was no secret. It was part of the whole history of the federal robot program and I had all of that on my permanent store.

  At the time of his disappearance, Thornton was a federal employee. But before that he had been a big shot in private industry, working for various commercial interests for twenty years. By the time Thornton was recruited by Uncle Sam he already had investments that ran to an eye-watering number of digits. It was the kind of wealth that, while it might not bring happiness, certainly brought comfort.

  And a significant part of that comfort was a big house on the beach in the quiet seaside town of Esmerelda. His company—now a federal asset—along with its laboratories and workshops remained in Los Angeles, but he only worked there when the need arose. The remainder of his time was spent in seclusion in Esmerelda, where, in addition to sea views and a two-car garage and a color television set you could charge tickets to see, he had his own robotics laboratory, a private domain where he did the real work that, once refined, he would transplant to the larger facilities at Thornton Industrial Electronics and Research in Pasadena.

  Then Thornton had disappeared, but the private house with private laboratory stayed exactly where it was. I had the address on my permanent store too.

  Except Thornton hadn’t disappeared. Far from it. He was a businessman and he did what businessmen were supposed to do—he took the best offer. He’d been taking the best offer his whole career. First he built his empire. Then the United States government came courting. And after that he’d found another paymaster.

  International Automatic.

  His work was his passion. No, more than that. It was his life. He’d had decades of success. Then the US government came in and offered him the world
.

  And then the robot program failed. It couldn’t have been his first failure. Far from it. But it was his biggest, and certainly his most public.

  International Automatic had money. They had resources. They had technology. Boy, did they have technology—thirty replicas of Touch Daley was evidence of that.

  But there was a catch. There had to be. Touch Daley was too perfect.

  So they needed Thornton. They needed him to fix the problem. Whatever that problem was.

  As I moved my Buick through the seaside streets of Esmerelda, past houses big enough for presidents to make important phone calls from, I decided that I didn’t blame Thornton. We all had to make a living somehow.

  Just look at me.

  And then I was there. The address in question was on a high outcrop on a corner with the road winding around it. The road curved out to the sea and there was a beach and a parking lot. I pulled in. The parking lot was empty. The beach was too. I didn’t notice any sign saying it was private, but this was the kind of town where you didn’t need signs like that. You were only here if you were supposed to be. And I wasn’t.

  I looked in the rearview. The house was behind me. It was nice. It was a wide bungalow, Spanish colonial. It had lots of big windows made up of lots of little square panes of glass. The windows looked out to the sea and even from down in the car I knew how much that kind of view was worth. There were several chimneys. I imagined it could get chilly down by the beach no matter how much money you had. The front door was recessed and I couldn’t see it.

  The windows were dark and I couldn’t see any movement within, although the angle of the sun made it hard to see. I tried a few filters but nothing worked.

  I sat in the car and I watched and I waited. I wasn’t sure what to think. I calculated a few options and ran a few of them through my tabulating regression forecaster. The answers came back the same each time, and none of them was of much use to me given that the house seemed empty and the street was quiet and I was a robot sitting in a car with a ray gun that wasn’t much good for anything if there were no robots to shoot with it.