I Only Killed Him Once

by Adam Christopher

  Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe Thornton had disappeared. Maybe he was dead. Maybe IA were somewhere else and I’d driven a hundred miles based on a hunch. My memory tape would run out by the end of the day and I’d become a permanent resident of the private beach. At least until a neighbor reported the abandoned car and the police came out to take a look and found me sitting behind the wheel, looking at the sea view with my creator’s house behind me.

  The view was nice. I enjoyed looking at it while I contemplated the path I had taken that had brought me here.

  And then the telephone rang.

  I looked at it for a good millisecond or even two and then I picked it up. The telephone clicked in my audio receptor and then came the sound of a rolling sea and then came the sound of someone take a good long drag on a well-earned cigarette.

  “Hi, Ray,” said Ada. “Long time no speakie.”

  “No kidding.” I turned in the driver’s seat to look out the rear windshield with my own optics. “I’m at the house in Esmerelda and I’m sure as hell hoping you called to tell me I got the wrong end of the stick.”

  Ada blew smoke around my circuits. “Sorry, chief, no can do. You’re a detective and you’ve detected the truth.”

  I turned back around. The ocean view was nicer than the house view and the empty beach and the rolling waves cooled my condensers just a little.

  “So Professor Thornton is the head of IA,” I said. “So what. Can’t robots just get along?”

  “IA’s not interested in anyone getting along, Ray. They’ve been working on their pet project for years. They tried to recruit you before, only they were a little short on resources then. But they didn’t give up. They’ve been making in-roads, gathering information, people, technology. They even tried to build a great big factory of their own, here on American soil. You stopped them then and you can stop them now.”

  “But why do I need to stop them, Ada? If Thornton is behind them, surely he’s on the side of the angels.”

  Ada laughed. Two full loops. Then she went back to her imaginary tobacco.

  “You think you know Thornton, but you don’t,” she said. “Trust me on that one, chief.”

  I sighed. It sounded like a dream dying. I glanced down at the passenger seat. There was a black trilby on it. I lifted the trilby with my free hand. Underneath was Peterman’s anti-robot ray gun.

  “You know what to do, Ray,” she said. “You always have.”

  I nodded to myself. “The job.”

  “That’s right, Ray. The job.”

  I put the gun in my pocket. It felt as heavy as a lost future. I looked out at the ocean. The waves looked heavy too. The clouds were drawing in. They were gray.

  “So what are you waiting for, chief? Come up and see me.”

  The telephone clicked off but I held it against the side of my head for a moment longer. Come up and . . . see me?

  I put the telephone down. That was when I saw the movement out of the corner of my optics. I turned around in the seat and got a proper look.

  Someone had come out of the house and was standing at the top of the steps that led to the recessed front entrance. She was smoking a cigarette. She waved that cigarette in the air, and then she straightened her skirt and turned around and she disappeared into the recess.

  I got out of the car and I walked to the house and I told myself more than once to wake up out of this electric sleep.

  It didn’t work. Because this wasn’t a dream, and the woman standing in the doorway of the house with the cigarette and the kind face and the big hair was real.

  “Hi, Ray,” said Ada. “Won’t you come on in?”

  25

  I walked through the door and I let it close behind me. All the while my optics were firmly focused on the woman walking ahead of me who couldn’t possibly be who she was.

  She was older, a particular kind of woman of a particular kind of age that was hard to judge. Maybe late forties, maybe early fifties. She was short and her face was lined from too much smoking and just the right amount of laughter. Her hair was big and blond and set into a permanent. I wasn’t sure if it was real. She wore a blue blouse with a frilled front underneath a tweed jacket. Her skirt matched the jacket and fell to just below the knee. She wore opaque stockings and no shoes and she had her back to me as she walked into the house.

  I stopped by the door and watched her and then she noticed and she turned around. She balanced one elbow on her hip and held her cigarette high in the air. “Don’t be shy, Raymondo,” she said. “Make yourself at home. I’m glad you came. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  I felt like taking off my hat but then I felt the ray gun held tight in my hand. I must have raised it up because Ada looked at it and laughed and she came toward me close enough to touch.

  “You won’t need that, chief,” she said. She reached down and gently pulled at the gun and I’m not sure why but I let her take it. Then she took my metal hand in hers and she lifted it up. I let her. She pulled the hand close and she laid it on her own chest and she covered it with her own. “I’m not a robot,” she said. I believed her. Her skin was warm and soft and while the same could have been said for any one of the duplicate Touch Daleys, there was something else I could feel.

  Her heartbeat. Steady, and reasonably quick, under my hand.

  I didn’t speak. Ada was very close to me. I could see the reflection of my optics in her eyes. Then she laughed and let go of my hand and she turned around and got on with her smoking as she walked away.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ll give you the tour.”

  * * *

  The house was as big as it looked from the street. It was mostly one level, and the rooms were mostly opened out to each other to create an even greater sense of space. The furnishings were all dark wood and green upholstery and they matched the general décor. There wasn’t a straight line in the place. It all looked very classy and very expensive.

  None of this mattered to me. The house could have been made of straw and sticks for all I cared. What mattered to me was that I was walking next to Ada and, last time I checked, Ada had been a computer the size of a room and instead of a heartbeat she had had the ticking of the fast hand of watch.

  “I’m glad you found your way here,” she said as we entered another large room with high ceilings and big windows. She stopped and turned around. Her cigarette still burned. “It was about time we met. Been thinking that awhile, actually.”

  I looked at her. She saw me look and she laughed again. There were no loops here. Her laugh wasn’t a recording. It was real and alive and loud and happy.

  The fingers of my right hand curled of their own accord and I remembered the ray gun she had taken from me. She must have put it down somewhere, as all she was carrying was her cigarette.

  “You know why I’m here,” I said. It wasn’t a question that needed an answer but she nodded anyway and she smoked as she nodded.

  “Raymond Electromatic, always on the case,” she said. “I’m here to stop International Automatic. Seems that all roads lead to Esmerelda, so you’ll have to forgive me if I didn’t expect to meet you here.”

  Ada smiled.

  “Because,” I continued, “I was led to believe that Ada was a computer.”

  The smile stayed right where it was.

  “And I have reason to believe that Professor Thornton didn’t disappear. He’s alive and well and leading IA’s operation—an operation I thought was being run from this house.”

  I lifted my arms and did a half turn while looking around. There was no sign of anything in the house except a lot of fancy furniture and a woman who couldn’t exist. I hadn’t even seen the big TV yet.

  “I’m starting to think detective work isn’t my scene,” I said.

  Ada finished her cigarette and she slid in her stockinged feet over to a gracefully curved sideboard made out of more of the dark wood on which sat a ceramic ashtray that was shaped like the curved half of a scallop shell.

>   “Ray, honey, don’t beat yourself up. You’re right on all counts but one, and since you took the trouble of coming all the way down here I think it’s only fair that I fill in a few gaps for you.” She paused, then turned her back to me and headed off again.

  “Follow me,” she said, and I did.

  * * *

  I saw enough of the house to last a lifetime and none of it seemed particularly interesting except for one particular fact, and that was the continued absence of anyone else in it.

  Ada led the way and we came to a stairwell that went down and then turned at ninety degrees and went down some more. I followed her as we descended into a large room with no windows and a set of large metal sliding doors. There was a panel next to the doors and Ada pressed a button and the doors opened to reveal a service elevator. She stepped in. I followed and stood beside her as she pressed another button and the doors closed and we went down.

  “The labs are underground,” she said, but I’d guessed as much, so I didn’t feel the need to reply.

  The elevator was slow. Ada stared at the doors as she spoke to me and I stared at the doors as I listened to her.

  “You’re right,” she said. “Professor Thornton is the head of International Automatic—well, head of their US operation. They’re a multinational corporation, and I have to agree they’re a bit of a secret one. Nobody really knows who is at the very top, or where that top might be. I heard a rumor it was a bunker under a glacier on an island off of Norway.” She paused. Her forehead creased in thought. “Or was it under a volcano on an island off of Japan? Well, there you go, you know what rumors are.”

  The elevator rumbled downwards.

  “But listen, Ray, I told you I was glad you came here. And I mean that. Because it’s important you see what International Automatic is doing. It’s a big project but it’s worthwhile—and you can trust me on that one, chief. It’s a project that will change the world, and it’s a project that I want you to be a part of. We really need you on this one, Ray.”

  The elevator shuddered to a halt. I turned to Ada as the doors slowly slid open.

  “We?”

  Ada turned to face me. “Yes. We.” She narrowed her eyes. She cocked her head. Her smile reappeared. It was a nice smile, full of life and warmth and then I realized that while I knew all about the life and times of Professor Thornton, my permanent store didn’t have a picture of him and I didn’t even know my creator’s first name.

  But I knew it now. Maybe she could tell. I guess a mother knows her child well enough that even with a face made out of bronzed titanium-steel alloy with no moving parts except a small flap behind a grille that represented a mouth, she could see it.

  “I’m Professor Thornton, Ray,” she said. “Professor C. Ada Thornton.

  “I’m your creator.”

  26

  Ada Thornton laughed and turned back around and stepped out of the elevator and into the chamber beyond. I hung back in the elevator with enough voltage flowing through my logic gates to light up the whole of Southern California.

  The subterranean chamber was indeed a robotics laboratory, and a big one too. The walls were blasted rock and they curved up to form a high dome, underneath which were installed examples of every piece of lab equipment that existed in the world. Thornton was rich and his—her— passion was robotics and in her private empire underneath the house in Esmerelda she had indulged that passion.

  Ada was making a slow circle of the place, trailing her fingers over consoles and mainframes and work benches and the backs of high work stools. I stepped out of the elevator and into the room and I looked around. It was both impressive and exactly what I expected to see—and that included a series of alcoves over on the far wall, just like the one that had been back in my office. Next to the alcoves were control panels and next to the control panels were big mainframe computers with big reel-to-reel tapes ready and waiting.

  Ada had stopped by one of the alcoves and she seemed to be checking the readings on one of the consoles nearby. I stood and watched her and wondered if any of this was even real.

  Because it couldn’t be.

  Could it?

  Ada was my boss. She was a computer the size of a room and that room was—had been—in the office building in Hollywood. She had been built by Professor Thornton. So had I, and I’d been given Thornton’s template for my own personality. That was the only way the Professor had been able to create true artificial life—me.

  But Ada was artificial life too. Sure, she was bigger than I was and had more gizmos and far more computing power and memory. But she was as alive as I was and I’d never even given it a second pass through my positronic processors.

  Except that wasn’t true and I knew it. I may not have remembered what the weather was like yesterday but there was something about Ada that gave me those memory flashes. Cigarettes and coffee and stockinged feet on the desk and a fleeting afterimage of a happy woman with big hair. It was old data sticking to my tape.

  Data old enough to be real memories of Professor Ada Thornton herself.

  One thing was clear. It wasn’t me who had Thornton’s template, it was Ada—my Ada, the supercomputer the size of a room. The woman here, in the lab, under the house, wasn’t her. No. My Ada was where Peterman said she was—in hiding. She had been disassembled and removed and hidden by agents following Peterman’s secret instructions.

  Hidden to keep her away from Touch Daley.

  To keep her away from the head of IA, Professor Thornton.

  The real Ada. The original.

  As she turned back around to face me I wondered for a moment whose template I had, but that thought was very quickly superseded by a very strong desire to still be in possession of Peterman’s ray gun, which Ada was now holding in the hand that wasn’t holding a new cigarette. She put the cigarette in her mouth and she lifted the gun and pointed it right at me.

  I held my hands up. “What gave me away?”

  She cocked her head again. “I programmed you to be the world’s greatest detective,” she said. “You were going to figure it out sooner or later.” She tilted the gun in her hand. “Thanks for bringing this little toy with you. It’ll make things a lot easier for me.”

  I lowered my hands. I pursed my lips, or at least it felt like I did.

  Something wasn’t right but I didn’t know what it was.

  “So if I hadn’t brought the gun, how were you planning on getting me to cooperate?”

  And then the room was filled with showering golden sparks and a whooshing sound so loud my audio receptors shut themselves down in protest and the last thing I saw as I twisted around and fell to the floor was a middle-aged man with round glasses and a big forehead and a pipe clenched between his teeth clutching the uncapped end of the live power cable that had just made contact with my rear chassis.

  And then my optics flickered and turned off altogether.

  27

  I woke up lying in an alcove that certainly wasn’t the one back in the office. My chest panel was open and I was connected to the computer deck next to the alcove via a fat corrugated cable. I tried to move my arm to check my wristwatch but the servo motors in my shoulder and elbow were refusing to obey orders so I checked my internal chronometer instead.

  I’d been out an hour and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t do an awful lot about anything else either, on account of the fact that I had been rendered immobile.

  The man reappeared in my field of vision. He looked at me from behind his round glasses. The pipe was still there but it wasn’t lit. He looked familiar and I realized it was because it felt like I was looking at myself. Whoever he was, he was my original—I had his template.

  “My assistant, Philip,” said Ada, and then she appeared next to him, now wearing a white lab coat over her tweed suit.

  “I recognize the pipe,” I said.

  She smiled. “I thought you might.” She glanced at Philip, who stood back, watching with an expression I woul
d have described as set. “And then you came along and killed him. I would have been shocked if I hadn’t been impressed. Ada sure had some moxie, reprogramming you like that. Then again, I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

  I looked at Philip and I even managed to move my head a little so my chin was pointed at him.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “He’s a replica. Like Touch Daley.”

  “Number ten, in point of fact.”

  “Right,” I said. “Because there’s a catch, isn’t there? They’re perfect. They can pass for people even under the closest inspection. But there’s a price to pay for that. They have a limited lifespan. So sure, you can churn them out, make a whole production line like you did for Touch Daley. But that means you have to keep replacing them. You can do it with Touch because he’s the only one out there, isn’t he? Apart from your pal Philip here. But let me guess, he never leaves the lab, does he?”

  I did the math and ran some theories and got green lights all the way down. At least my deductive cores were working even if my servos seemed to be jammed.

  “But what if you wanted to make more?” I asked. “What if you wanted to roll out a whole lot of replicas. Place them all over the country. Maybe in several different countries. That’s a different ball game. They need to be independent and reliable. Too many and you can’t replace them when their time is up. So you’ve got a problem you need to crack, and you think Ada—the other Ada—can crack it. She was your masterpiece. Okay, so she’s too big to move and she sure couldn’t pass for a human being like Touch Daley and your best friend Philip here, but she’s got the most advanced computer brain in the world and it’s a brain that just keeps on getting better as she reprograms herself. Just look what she did for me. That’s something you can’t replicate, no matter what facilities you have, here or at International Automatic. Even if you could build a system of similar complexity, you’d still be years behind Ada’s own private evolution. The only answer is to get her to work on the problem. Except you don’t know where she is. She got wind of your plan and hid herself away, safely out of reach.”