by Reality 36
“The boat’s owner,” said Richards. Quaid, made huge by the dicopter’s fish-eye cameras, gestured wildly, arguing with a uniformed cop. The cop was all placating hand motions, while Quaid was angry, but the sound was muted, at least for Otto. Richards had several parts of himself examining every statement and hand wave as they spoke.
“Eugene?”
“You can tell?” Richards said wryly.
“Nobody but a eugene would name their children Thornton, or make them tan orange.” said Otto.
“He’s a second generation, his parents were among the first. Ignore the Fanta glow and the gene bling. His IQ’s off the chart, as you’d expect. This is an important guy.”
“Angry too,” said Otto.
“Yeah, they go for all that alpha male aggression bullshit to make their kids more competitive. It worked for Quaid. He made his first fortune in the North American rewilding, hasn’t stopped since. He’s still got a large stake in the Buffalo Commons.”
“The big money there was done thirty years ago,” said Otto.
“He was in on it nearly from the start. He’s sixty-eight. He’s worth trillions now.”
Otto made a disapproving noise. Quaid looked about thirty. “Right.”
“Right as much as you like Otto, that guy’s one of the preeminent restorative ecologists on the planet. This is the guy,” he pointed, “behind the North American neo-mammoth, the whole hairy elephant ecology, from grasses up. That’s serious brainpower.”
“Fine. So if I go to Wyoming for my holidays and I get dragged out of my bed in the middle of the night by a lion, I know who to sue. His motive for the murder?”
“None yet.”
They watched as the cop left. Thornton went to rage in the face of a short South Asian man.
“Maybe he just lost his temper,” said Otto.
“He’s unhappy right now,” agreed Richards. “This boat is a pleasure enterprise for him. The fee he charges his passengers is nominal, at least as far as he’s concerned – his psych profile suggests he does not like giving anything away for free, you can blame his parents again for that. He gets his guests on for their entertainment value.”
“So what does he care? If he is innocent, he can wait all this out.”
“He’s got a big meeting with the People’s Dynasty government next Tuesday,” explained Richards. “He’s in on their Yellow River rebirth project, it’s worth billions to him, but Hughie’s not going to let him go anywhere until this is done, and by the book, though he’d do that to piss the Chinese off more than anything, knowing Hughie, which I do.”
The screen tilted vertiginously as the dicopter buzzed away from Quaid, then back towards him and over his head, on past the Asian man who was backing slowly into a corner as he tried to appease his boss. “Our other suspects then: Rambriksh Mistry, ship’s steward and our man Quaid’s confidant.” The walls of the yacht’s narrow corridors blurred as the dicopter flew jerkily on, out up the corridor to the deck, where a leggy beauty with vacant eyes stood smoking a cigarette. “Next: Jolanda Garcia, Andorran/Belgian heiress and the only other passenger. And then the crew.” Five Twos in faceless, bandy-legged sheaths ornately tooled from brass loomed out of the night one after the other, attending to tasks nautical. “Finally we have three cook staff, all human.” The dicopter zipped into an open hatch, up plushly carpeted corridors, then down a ventilation pipe and out into the ship’s galley, where a fat-faced white man waved at it irritably with a teatowel. “Zbigniew Lodziak, Armand Fleur and Tora Hakim,” said Richards as it passed them one at a time.
Otto leant forward and cupped his glass. “This is very interesting.”
“There was a murder here, Otto, pay attention.”
“I was not being sarcastic, it is interesting. It is like something from your Agatha Christie.”
“She’s not ‘mine’, Otto. Learn English.”
Otto shrugged and took a drink.
The dicopter banked, flew out the kitchen and up plain steel stairs, then made its way back into the guest accommodation, between two heavy gun drones that filled the passage and through the red EuPol flatribbon guarding Qifang’s cabin. Blood covered everything, great sprays across the tastefully decorated walls in brown arcs. Text up the side of the holo showed a match to Qifang, but Richards wasn’t concerned with that.
The fake insect buzzed circuits round the cabin. Richards’ face was intent. “Aha, there it is!” Richards looked over his shoulder at Otto, dour-faced at the other end of the conference table, nursing his whisky like it might escape. “I thought I’d lost it for a moment there. Now this is interesting.” The dicopter alighted on the ceiling, the 270-degree view its eyes gave inverted. Feet brushed over its face as the sophisticated machine brought samples up to its analysis unit from the surface it stood on. A string of chemical formulae ran up the side of the holo. “There,” he said triumphantly. “Traces of burning silicon lubricant and carbon plastics.”
“Meaning?”
Richards rolled his eyes. “There’s been an android in here, and someone damaged it severely. I thought you were built to fight machines?”
“I’m made to kill them, not perform forensic investigations on them. So you suspect one of the crew has been suborned?”
“I’ve discounted that. Even if we can factor in an assassin programme clever enough to turn one of Quaid’s carriages to its own end and not to get caught, this here is cranial suspension fluid, and underneath the hopeless attempts to clean it up there’s a lot of it. Quaid’s manifest says his crew are all working just fine. You crack an android that hard, it becomes very obvious it’s been damaged.”
“How so?”
“Well, like when it starts walking into the wall repeatedly and talking to the furniture.” He waved a finger. “This stuff keeps ‘droid brains from cooking themselves. You get a leak that big it’ll pitch forward and smoke will pour out of its ears after about five minutes.”
Otto leaned back and sipped his whisky. “I suppose that would also discount an emulant among the guests?”
“Maybe, this coolant does not come from any of the people that we’re looking at here.”
“And Qifang’s body?”
“No idea. They’re searching the seabed now. Whoever killed him pitched him overboard, the blood trails show that.” Supplementary video popped up a bubble next to Richards’ dicopter feed displaying a smear of blood, vermilion in the boat’s harsh lighting, on the deck that terminated at the port side of the bow. “Thing is, how’s a 127-year-old going to crack an android hard enough to make it leak fluid like that? There’s another problem.”
The interior of the boat moved off to one side. Holographic footage of a man moving erratically down a busy street replaced it.
“That must be Morden,” said Otto.
“Yep. And this is Qifang.” The video froze, zoomed in.
“I recognise him. Everyone knows his face.”
“Yeah, but when this was shot, he was also aboard the Aurora Viva.”
“That’s impossible.”
“I’m as sure as sure can be,” said Richards. “Gridsigs, witnesses, tickets, video footage. The lot,” said Richards.
“He’s being followed,” said Otto, uncurling a finger from his glass and pointing at the holo.
“He is.” The outlines of four men highlighted themselves on the picture. “All black, not a legit form of ID among them, damper masks on their faces to fox the IR. They all go down this alleyway here, and then they don’t come out.”
“The footage could have been doctored.”
“The footage is the only thing about this scenario that’s not dodgy,” said Richards. “I’ve checked it pixel by pixel. I’ve had the alleyway checked out – it had been molecularly washed. There were still a few nanites twitching when EuPol got there. Now, either Qifang has unlocked the secret of large-mass teleportation, or he was in two places at once.”
“The Qifang on the boat, perhaps then he was an android.”
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“Maybe. Insufficient data, as they used to say,” said Richards. “Maybe he was, maybe the one in the alleyway is. It strikes me as the most likely eventuality, but there’s no evidence of that, no sign of any outside control coming in via beam in either place. A human grade simulation needs as much bandwidth for a sensing presence as a Class Five and up, and that’s hard to hide. The worrying thing is that both pan out as human, in every way: vessel patterning, scent, DNA, the works.”
“They have sensors in Morden to pick that stuff up now?”
“Hughie’s hell-bent on gentrifying the place.”
“Clones then?”
“With a ninety-nine percent mental failure rate? Maybe, but only if someone convinced the clones to play ball, and gave them acting lessons,” said Richards. “What’s really funny is that his system log has his Gridsig in both places at once, without tripping any alarms. There’s something really peculiar going on here.”
“So we start with the boat, because the murderer is still on board,” said Otto.
“Bingo, Otto, we’ll make a detective out of you yet. That’s what we’re going to find out.”
“You don’t know.”
Richards span his hat around on the glass table top, his softgel face quirked into a smile. Above the collar of his coat exposed plastic vertebrae glinted with the colours cast out by the holo. “Aside from the blood and coolant, there are no chemical traces at all, no signs of other AI on board, no signs of outside influences. No one and nothing has been on or off the boat, but the body. Quaid’s got security that can detect a prawn swimming under his keel. The murder weapon is missing, probably overboard. It’s a bit of an enigma.”
“So you don’t know.”
“I didn’t say that. I have an idea, but I’m not sure yet.”
“The crime scene will be ruined,” said Otto.
“Actually, it’s fresh. Hughie kept things to a minimum. There’s the couple of gun drones and the uniform you saw to keep an eye on things, that’s all. They checked the boat for infiltration, but the murder room is a clean scene. We’ve got free rein. The yacht’s in quarantine. This whole area is under lockdown, for the time being, at any rate.”
“What about the VIA?” said Otto.
“Hughie’s done a good job keeping this on the QT. If the VIA know, they’re not letting on,” said Richards.
“And the other Qifang?” asked Otto.
“EuPol are looking for him now, dead or alive. Hughie says dead.”
“This is going to be dangerous.”
“Yep, that’s why you’re coming. Get your coat, Otto.” Richards strode abruptly for the door. “Middle of the night, Otto, middle of the night!” shouted out Richards. “No better time than that to quiz a suspect, get them off guard.”
“Elementary, my dear Otto,” muttered the German. He refused to be hurried. He drank his whisky deliberately, savouring the smoky flavour of it, and set the glass down with a click before following Richards out into the arcade where his sheath impatiently waited.
The eugene had an accent native to a non-existent land lying somewhere east of Boston and slightly westwards of Atlantis, all hooting nasal glides and flattened rhotics. A massive affectation that had infected an entire subgroup of wealthy Americans, it was so artificial Otto found himself hating the man as soon as he opened his mouth, but then he didn’t like Americans much anyway.
“I said I don’t know,” Quaid said, “five times! Are all you Brits morons or what?”
Richards smiled an unnerving robotic smile. “Technically, Mr Quaid, neither of us are British. I am a free roaming AI, Otto is German.”
“Whatever,” said Quaid. Up close he was even more grotesque than on the holo-feed, a great slab of orange, gengineered meat. He sprawled on the curved sofa of his dayroom, arms flung out on its back, legs open. Quaid had had everything money could buy and more, he was not a man to feel uncomfortable in any circumstance. “Qifang was lousy company,” he drawled. “He got confused real easy, looked dazed a lot, and I swear he kept forgetting where he was. He went on saying he was ill, wouldn’t eat much, kept himself to himself in his cabin for most of the voyage.”
“You do not seem sympathetic,” said Otto. He stood near the door, filling half the dayroom. There wasn’t an antenatally tweaked gene in Otto’s body, but he was bigger than the eugene. He had to bend his neck to keep his head from bumping on the ceiling.
“He was a disappointment to me, frankly. I was interested in grilling him for his expertise on self-sustaining digital ecologies.”
“Why?” said Otto.
“Why don’t you sit down? I’ll get you a drink brought up,” said Quaid.
“I prefer to stand,” said Otto.
“Huh. Friendly attack dog you got here, Mr Richards.”
“Just Richards, Mr Quaid. Please answer my partner’s question.”
“And why should I do that?” Quaid said. “You aren’t even real cops. I am a USNA citizen. I’m not beholden to you.”
“We are fully licensed. We’re the people they call when the cops don’t have any ideas,” said Otto. “We have an AllPass and a warrant from the EuPol Five to ask what we like. You are in EU waters, so I say again: why?”
“Because I am a real ecologist, you ape,” snapped Quaid, “and I like to be able to simulate what I plan to do before I do it. Qifang’s pre-eminent in his field. If I could secure a means of reproducing what he sees in the old RealWorld ecologies and harness it as a testing ground, it’d mean a lot to ecosystem reclamation. Hell, forget that, forget Earth, forget Mars, Venus even, you get me a simulator that powerful, I’ll tell you how to terraform the goddamned Moon with ice chips and algae. I’m expanding into planetary engineering, it’s the next big thing, that’s why I invited him on board.”
“Thank you Mr Quaid,” said Richards, his eyes blinking out of time with each other.
Sometimes his sheath’s expressions look off, thought Otto, it goes pantomime.
“Was he ill?” continued Richards.
“Yeah, I think so. Hakim, the cook’s assistant, came down with the same thing, some kind of flu. That Chinese bastard better not try and sue me for picking it up off Hakim, I’d not want to fire him for letting himself get sick. Everyone gets sick sometime. He’s not been himself at all, though he’s kept working like a real solid trooper. He is a credit to my boat, so many people are so goddamned lazy these days. He kept on going, no matter how spaced-out he was looking. Better than Qifang, at any rate.”
“How many android carriages or sheaths do you have on board?” asked Richards.
Quaid smiled, a sneer hid behind his perfect teeth. “Why, you looking for an upgrade?”
“The sooner you answer our questions, Mr Quaid, the sooner we’ll be gone,” said Richards patiently.
Quaid hammered a tattoo with his palms on the back of the couch. “Jesus! Just the five for the crew and one spare. I sometimes let guests use it, remote access for meetings, it can’t be much fun, they have minimal sensor capability. They’re here to sail the boat, not much else.”
“No more androids on board?”
“Listen, these things are barely worthy of the name. I chose them because they look kind of nautical, don’t rust and have enough hands to let a Two manage my sails. I have nothing as fancy on the Aurora as what a catalogue would call an android.”
“OK. Now we go take a look at them,” said Otto.
With as much ill grace as he could muster, Quaid had his crew line up on the fore deck, then he took Otto and Richards down to the crew room on the utility deck where, in a locker, was stashed an inert sixth. Without a driving mind the gaudy body looked like a broken carnival decoration. Richards and Otto went over them all carefully. They were undamaged.
“The cops did all this already,” grumbled Quaid.
“Yes, and we do it again,” said Otto. Neither his near-I adjutant nor Richards showed up anything untoward. There were no residues that should not be there, human or otherwi
se.
Richards quizzed the five Twos inhabiting the active sheaths. Like the Ones, Two series lacked advanced intelligence, both classes only scraping into the UN’s higher AI classification thanks to a certain dogged self-awareness. Nothing they said suggested they had seen anything, nor did their memories, which Richards accessed directly once he’d done being polite, their logs showing their occupation of the sheaths for the entire voyage, their encryption unbroken. As far as Richards could tell, nothing had been riding them that should not have been. The base units for the Twos were on board, occupying half the lowest deck fore of the engine room. He insisted Quaid open their vault up. They exhibited no sign of interference either.