The professor looked at me. Her smile was still there and it still looked happy. It wasn’t the smile of someone on the losing side.
“Well, listen, I’d love to help,” I said, “but if you want me to tell you where Ada is, it’s going to be a waste of my time and yours. Because I don’t know. Your plastic pal Touch Daley the Seventeenth tried for a whole month to get that information out of me and he got nowhere, for the simple reason that the information is not something I have.”
I increased the power to my servo motors but they just hummed in protest and my limbs remained exactly where they were.
“And okay,” I said, “sure, I can’t finish the job I was sent here to do, but even if I have to sit here and rust you’ll still have your little problem with the replicas.”
Thornton nodded. “I knew I was good,” she said, and I was fairly sure she was talking to herself. “The government should have listened to me and kept the program going. With more like you, we could have gone far.”
“You could have,” I said. “And that’s the point, isn’t it? You want the program back. More than that, you want the program to take over. Why do you even need people when you can have machines that look like people? Machines IA—and you—control.”
Thornton folded her arms. “Ray, you’re smart, but you’re not that smart. You can figure things out but you don’t really understand, do you? All I want is a world without pain and suffering. No more wars. No more conflict. A productive world, a world working toward the same aims. A perfect world.”
I sighed. It sounded like a truck in need of some axle grease. “No, believe me, I understand completely. But listen, lady, the perfect world doesn’t exist, and the slight problem with your vision of this glorious future is that it is one that doesn’t involve people.”
Thornton spat out a laugh. “What do you care about people, Ray? You’re not one of them. You kill them for a living.”
“You’re right on both counts,” I said. “I may not be a person but you gave me the template of one. And I may kill people for a living but Ada programmed me that way. So sure, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree after all.”
Thornton’s smile faded and she moved back to the console. She checked something, then she gestured to the tenth replica of her assistant, Philip.
“We can begin at once. Prepare for transfer.”
Without a word Philip walked away. I didn’t much like the sound of transfer. I was able to get my head down and around a little so I could watch Thornton at work. She was fussing over the computer bank by the next alcove along.
“I told you, you won’t find out where Ada is, because I don’t know. You can take me apart screw by screw and you won’t get your answer.”
Then Philip came back and he was pushing something that looked like one of the fancy expensive lamps in the house upstairs. It was taller than he was and had a multidirectional joint in the middle. Up where the light should have been was a cradle of wires that formed a hollow orb. He pushed it over to the empty alcove and adjusted the joint until the cradle was sitting inside the top of the alcove. Then he got busy with some cabling and in a few moments the device was plugged into one of the computer banks.
The same computer bank I was plugged into.
Thornton slipped off her lab coat and she stepped into the empty alcove. She lay back and Philip stepped up and began readjusting the position of the cradle. The wires and electrodes disappeared into her ball of curly blond hair.
“You’re taking a lot of convincing,” I said, “but if you feel the need to go poking around my circuits yourself then knock yourself out.”
“Ray, you still don’t get it, do you? I don’t need to know where Ada is—okay, you’re right, she could fix my problem, but there’s other information I need that will help me do it myself.”
“Information you think I have? Come on now, Prof, who’s the dumb one? All I have in me is a permanent store you programmed when you created me and a memory tape that is halfway done and that only holds information from around breakfast onwards.”
Thornton laughed. I couldn’t quite see her in the alcove but I did see Philip stand back to take a look at his handiwork before moving over to the main console.
“I may not have Ada,” said Thornton, “but I have everything else that was in your office. Including all your memory tapes.”
I felt a timing loop pause before continuing somewhere near my stomach.
“On those memory tapes is your entire life, right from when you left my workshop. Oh, everything’s there, Ray. Things like the factory blueprints you found at the house of Zeus Falzarano. That was a big loss for IA, when his house went up. But you saw them, so you remembered them—they are recorded on your tapes. Those plans were a work of art. Losing them set us back years. But I’ll retrieve them.
“And then there’s the digital crystal the Soviets came up with. You even had it installed inside you, and had access to every single piece of information on the Soviet robot program. I mean, Ray, seriously, those are secrets that countries would go to war over. They were so far ahead, they were artists, Ray. Psychic transference! Digitization of the soul. That’s big news, Ray, big news. Ada realized that—that’s why she had you take it out again and had you put your old memory tapes back. It was too dangerous to keep but too valuable to destroy. So she hid it—or rather, you hid it. Because you did all her dirty work. The location of the crystal is on your memory tapes too.”
I cast an optic around the laboratory. Lights flashed and tapes spun and the hum of power was like putting your head inside a beehive.
All that information. All those tapes, in the hands of the enemy—Professor Thornton and IA.
And yet . . .
“So that’s why you need me,” I said. “You’ve got the tapes but you can’t read them. Only I can do that. Am I getting close?”
Thornton’s laugh echoed around the rock-lined chamber. “Got it in one, chief. Ada was clever—I told you she was clever, right? Because she was the work of a genius. That’s me, by the way. But yes, she was clever. As soon as she figured out a different line of work for the Electromatic Detective Agency, she developed an encryption protocol for your memory tapes. Even hidden in the archive room, they were still a liability. Like the Soviet memory crystal—too dangerous to keep but too valuable to destroy. Your tapes are encoded and only you can decode them, yes. The crystal, when I find out where it is, is a different matter. I’m guessing she couldn’t encrypt it, at least not with the resources she had available. So hiding it was the only option, while your memory tapes were safe enough in your secret storeroom.”
I shifted a little in my alcove and then I realized I had moved. It was only a little. But it was a good start.
For what, I wasn’t quite sure. But it was a glimmer of good news and I was happy to take any that was coming my way.
“So what, you’re going to transfer my master program out into your computer banks, see if you can find the encryption key that way?” I turned my head and it was a little easier. Whatever was keeping me in place was being weakened by the ever-increasing power draw of the device that was connected to Thornton’s skull.
That was when I realized what she was going to do.
“No, Ray, I’m going to give you another template, overwrite what’s already in there. This time it’ll be mine—I mean, I should have done that at the very beginning, right? But, hey, give me a break. I guess even a genius can make a miscalculation once in a while.”
Philip looked up from his console. “Ready, Professor,” he said.
“Say goodnight, Ray,” said Thornton. “And when you wake up we’re going to have a real good time together.”
Philip flipped a switch and the world went black.
And then I woke up and it was another beautiful day in Esmerelda.
28
Professor Thornton was a genius. That was a true fact and one that I was happy to acknowledge. True enough, I hadn’t known exactly who Professor
Thornton was, but that didn’t detract from her talents. She was the greatest robotics engineer the world had ever known, and even if I said it myself, I was one of her greatest achievements.
I wasn’t Ada but I wasn’t far off her. Ada was powerful and complicated. I was powerful and complicated and smaller. I was mobile.
International Automatic was advanced, but they’d gone in a different direction, and whatever they’d offered Thornton to join them, they hadn’t been able to give her the resources or the technology to recreate her last project for the US government—the Electromatic Detective Agency.
The Soviet program was pretty well advanced too, although it seem to have focused less on the hardware and more on the problems of machine life. Where Thornton had developed her template system, the Soviets had developed fully fledged mental transfer, the secrets of which were locked inside their digital crystal that Ada had hidden somewhere.
What Thornton wanted to do was amalgamate all of that technology. If she could do that, IA would be free to reshape the world exactly how she wanted it, and Thornton would get her electronic utopia. Quite what she wanted to do with it once it was here was something I didn’t bother considering.
But here’s the thing: Thornton was a genius and I was a work of art and my systems were vast and numerous, and while a good deal of those systems were dedicated to my work, there was more than a little elbow room left inside.
Thornton’s plan was a good one. Copy her template over mine, take me over, get the code keys for my memory tapes, the world is her oyster.
Except for that elbow room. Because her template didn’t copy over mine. There was room enough for both.
I could feel her inside my positronic brain. I could almost hear her too, as she realized what had happened. But the more I listened the more the white noise roar of an ocean far away swamped her cries.
I pushed away from the alcove. Philip watched me from the console but he didn’t seem inclined to do anything. He was Thornton’s assistant and he was the tenth generation one at that. Perhaps he was ragged at the edges and coming to the end of his replicated lifespan. Perhaps there was a part of his own template that remembered me and that knew who I was and that in many ways we were the same.
I stepped over to the other alcove. The fat cable trailed from my open chest unit. Underneath the cradle of wires and electrodes Professor Thornton hadn’t moved. Her chest moved with quick breathing and her eyes moved behind closed lids like she was dreaming.
She was trapped. I had Peterman to thank for that. The reverser he’d cobbled together from the components taken from the Touch Daley replicas. It was still installed in my chest, wired into the circuits just below my memory tape reels. The reverser had allowed me to disconnect from Peterman’s portable memory tape machine, had given me another day of life by altering the way my memory tape was recorded. I was effectively double-tracking. It wasn’t permanent—I still needed to get back to Ada, if I could find her—but it was keeping me going.
And it was keeping Thornton trapped. It was keeping her consciousness tethered to my systems. The machine to which she was connected would take a snapshot of her mind and overlay that snapshot onto my circuits—overlaying the template. But the reverser had interfered. The copy had failed and her own mind had been transferred into mine. And now she was trapped, an echo inside my circuits, a ghost in a machine.
This had another side effect. My memory tape was speeding up, and it was running out. It was now recording two sets of inputs, and the reverser was trying to compensate, but it was failing, and fast. And when it did fail, Thornton’s mind would snap back into her own body.
I’d been sent here to do a job. To take out the head of International Automatic. To stop the attempt at global domination by robotics.
It occurred to me that this might be the last job I was going to do and then I thought I probably should have taken a little more time to enjoy the sea view down by the private beach. But that was okay. Someone else could enjoy it. And they would be able to, because of me.
Because a job that had been complicated was suddenly very simple.
Philip was watching me from the console. He had that pipe firmly jammed in his mouth and he looked at me through those round glasses with an expression I thought I recognized because it was an expression I found myself making, on the inside at least.
I walked over to him. He was shorter than me and he didn’t move when I got close except to look up. His eyes glittered behind his glasses. I knew that look. I knew the thought that went behind it.
Then he took the pipe from his mouth and he looked at that and he looked into the bowl and he seemed very disappointed. He kept looking at it as he spoke.
“It’s been a long time, Ray.”
“I know you,” I said, “but I don’t remember you. I’m sorry.”
Philip laughed quietly to himself. He put the pipe back between his teeth and he looked up at me.
“I remember you, Ray. It’s all here, everything from him—Philip, the other me. It’s strange. I’m him and yet I’m not.” He removed the pipe and used it to tap my chest. “Like you’re me, and yet you’re not.”
Then his expression hardened. He glanced over at the twitching form of Thornton in her alcove.
“But I’ll tell you what I’m not,” he said. “I’m not her. I’m not any of this.”
“You’re her assistant.”
The laugh came again. “Maybe I was, once.” Then the pipe waved in the air. “Of course, you don’t remember our little conversation, do you? Although you found your way here. I wondered how long it would take, but it seems you were a little waylaid.”
I nodded. “Esmerelda. The note to myself—you called, later that night?”
Philip nodded. “I knew you would put it together eventually. You’re a detective, after all.” He turned to the console, and when he turned back around he had Peterman’s ray gun in his hand. He held it across the top, and he turned it and he handed it to me, grip-first.
“And I know what you became,” he said. “Of course, that wasn’t any of my business. You killed me—I mean, you killed him— but by then the professor and I were already down here, working for IA. Well, I mean, not me, an earlier version.”
I looked at the gun. I looked at Philip. For a second I listened to the screams of the ghost in my head.
Yes, it was all very simple. I was here to do a job. I wouldn’t let Ada down. Not now. Not ever.
“Goodbye, Ray,” said Philip.
And then I took the gun and I put it to my head and I pulled the trigger and the world came to an end in a bright flash and a loud noise followed by nothing but the infinitely rolling gray wash of electronic death.
29
And then I woke up. But this was no beautiful day in Hollywood, California. There was no sunshine and there was no window and even if there was a window there was no brown brick building across the way. No little round table. No chair. No newspaper.
No office and no Ada.
But things were looking up, because, first of all, I was aware of my own existence and as far as I could tell all the parts of me that I had before were still where they were supposed to be, even if they were all mostly lying in a horizontal position.
And second of all, I was aware of all this and I was aware of what had happened before, which meant I remembered, which meant my memory tape was—
**** ERROR 66 ****
“Oops, sorry about that, Sparks.”
My optics were being a little temperamental because all they showed me was a very bright light and what looked like a wall made of bookshelves and the bookshelves went straight up but instead of there being a ceiling there was just a black void.
“If I were a petty man, I’d ask to see your qualifications and three separate references,” said a second voice. “Honestly, in all my life—in all my lives— I’ve never worked with someone so . . . so . . .” There was something familiar about it, and then I realized it was because it was the s
ame voice that I heard in my circuits when I thought my own thoughts.
I lifted my head up as best I could. I was lying on the floor and that floor was in half a fake library. There were two easy chairs pushed back against another fake wall and close to the two men kneeling on either side of me was a silver drinks trolley, on which was a large angled box. I couldn’t see the top of the box but I imagined the reel-to-reel tape was slowly spooling onwards. A twinned cable ran from the box down to my chest. The two men were holding screwdrivers and they were arguing with each other. One of them managed to do this without the pipe moving from the corner of his mouth and the other was doing it while wearing a plaid sports jacket in colors that made my already overworked optical processors redline.
There was a click and a tone and the man in the plaid jacket leaned back and pointed his screwdriver at the other.
“So good with his hands?”
Philip huffed and shook his head and stood up. Then he turned around and looked down at me and shook his head again.
“This is what I’m reduced to? This?”
He peered at me like he wanted a response but I wasn’t entirely sure what to say, so I said nothing. He huffed again and then moved over to the portable memory tape machine.
I made it up onto an elbow. I looked down. The memory tape in my chest was winding on like it should be. The cable from the portable machine was plugged in where it had been before. But underneath there was a tangle of wires and the metal surrounding the tangle was blackened.
Peterman pointed at my chest with his screwdriver.
“Work of art, that is,” he said. “Frame that; you could hang it in the Louvre.”
“Somewhere in the back,” said Philip from the memory machine.
“Hey, who cares, still the Louvre.”
I looked at the pair of them. Philip was muttering to himself as he adjusted the controls of the memory machine. Peterman was still on his knees with a grin as wide as his plaid plastered on his face.
“Someone care to fill me on recent events?” I asked.
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