by Reality 36
“Satisfied?” said Quaid.
“No,” said Richards. “No, I’m not. Do you have any idea of where the cranial suspension fluid in Qifang’s cabin could have come from?”
“What are you talking about?”
Richards showed him the holo accompanying analysis. Quaid at least had the grace to look surprised.
“You and the police have scanned this yacht from stem to stern three times already. There are no androids or other robotics here other than the ones I have shown you,” he said, a little more co-operatively.
“Hmmm,” said Richards. “Hey, you, officer…” Richards called to the sole uniform on the boat. He’d been doing an admirable job of hiding in the shadows the whole time, listening.
“Santander, sir.”
“Get onto your office will you? Have them check out Qifang’s whereabouts the two weeks before he got on this boat.”
“A Gridsig search sir?”
“That kind of thing. Oh, and perhaps see if our Californian colleagues will send someone round to check up on his house, would you?” Richards could do this himself, naturally, but he wanted the officer out of the way for a while.
“Of course, sir.”
“Thanks.”
Richards waited for the cop to leave before he spoke to the two men filling the corridor behind him. “If there really are no other androids on board, and the ones that are there are in good condition,” said Richards, “that leaves one possibility. Neither Zhang Qifang was what they appeared to be.”
“An emulant?” said Quaid. “That would have shown up on my security.”
“Your guess is as good as mine. Auto-units don’t fool anyone for long; you’re right. Self-governing androids are not hard to spot. But all this blood…” He turned to look at them. “Zhang Qifang was murdered by somebody on board this boat. However, when the deed was done, they were surprised to find that he was not human, but a doppelganger.”
“Way to go,” said Quaid with leaden sarcasm. “What a theory.”
“It’s what I do,” said Richards. “I suspect some kind of advanced cydroid, an autonomous, organic emulant.”
“They can’t do that yet, can they?” said Quaid, eyebrows raised.
“No,” said Otto. “No, they can’t.”
“And the advent of some new technology would also explain the sighting of Qifang in the subcity at a time when you were halfway across the Atlantic with him. Gentlemen, not only has Qifang been murdered twice,” said Richards. “I suspect the real Qifang has been nowhere near the European Union.”
“Bullshit!” said Quaid. But Richards was already far away, the unseeing eyes of his sheath pointed toward the inner spaces of the Grid..
In theory, it took a lot of paperless paperwork to request what Richards wanted of a foreign sovereign power, especially the Americans. As the passage of history had worn away the influence of the USA, later the USNA, the amount of bureaucracy it employed had increased to fill the gap between the country’s actual influence and its collective memory of how influential it had once been. Form-filling was not something that had been helped by the AI revolution. Unsleeping eyes allowed for many more forms, and now batteries of zealous machine minds presided over an empire of tick boxes.
Relations between the EU and the USNA had been somewhat cool since the Latin American debacle, and both powers, settling into senescence, were wary of each other’s intentions with the globe’s new stars. They were locked together by the past, neither giving the other much.
That was how it worked on the human level.
Richards filled in all the forms in double-quick time, but faster still was his request to Hughie to contact the Three Uncle Sams, the triumvirate of Fives who ran the States in all but name, to inspect Qifang’s LA home. In four or five days’ time, serious-faced men in serious-looking uniforms would be fulminating about this breach of protocol. They’d reach for their rubber stamps all the same.
At 10pm Pacific Time two beat cops called round the professor’s flat. His Gridsig sang out strong, saying he hadn’t been out in two weeks. There was nothing unusual in that; it was only a week until term started again, and he’d have prep to do. The flies and the stench, however, were somewhat out of the ordinary.
The cops kicked the door in and entered, pistols drawn. They found Qifang’s bloated corpse slumped over mouldering dinner plates, an antique cleaning bot banging mindlessly into one blackened foot.
He’d been dead for a fortnight.
Morning saw the corpse of Qifang’s doppelganger dredged from the Medway. From his vantage point on the deck of the Aurora Viva, eyes up to maximum magnification, Richards could make out swags of something non-human dangling from the stovedin head as the cydroid swung up from the water in the ungentle embrace of a crane.
Later, Otto and Richards sat in the yacht’s dayroom with Quaid. Once more they asked him the same questions. Once more, Quaid bridled.
“Of course we ran the full test suite,” Quaid said. “A man in my position cannot be too careful, everyone wants a piece of me. Do you know how many people on the States’ rich list had family members kidnapped last year? I have no desire to spend my time in a cell courtesy of a Mexican abduction gang, nor good money on new fingers once they’re done lopping them off. It all checked out, don’t you see what I am saying to you? All of it!” He threw his phone across the table. It spun on the polished wood, coming to a halt against one of Otto’s massive fists. “Scans, bloodwork, vessel pattern, gait, retinals, molecular DNA. We matched his movements with the last 48 hours on the State Authority’s spy-eyes, the whole damn nine yards. The yacht is shielded, we’ve one tight band Gridpipe for the Twos to use if they need to, anything else gets scrambled. Everyone gets checked. Hell, even I get checked. How the hell was I supposed to know he was an android?”
“He wasn’t an android,” said Otto.
“Did you do a cranioscopy?” said Richards.
“Who the hell does cranioscopies on their dinner guests? Are you fucking joking? You want me to drill holes in the heads of my friends?”
“That’s why you didn’t know,” said Richards drily. “After this, I suggest you start.”
They sent Quaid away, and the uniformed PC. Hughie had many eyes and ears on this boat, but Santander was too attentive by half.
“This is worrying, Otto,” he said. “I had Hughie’s fanclub run a search on Qifang’s Gridsig. Any attempt to track it gave one of the two locations here in London. Nothing out of the ordinary there to the casual observer; they’d only see one. But they ran traces on both at the same time, and that cracked it. His genuine sig says he’s not left his house for two weeks. There was the tiniest flutter in it before that, then it goes all crazy.”
“No one noticed?”
“He’s dead, Otto. For real; killed himself as he ate a fish supper of fugu without bothering with the careful part. His Gridware was intact – he was fully wired, should’ve automatically tagged his death. It is all totally dubious Gridwise. None of the usual protocols followed, he’d seriously monkeyed his chips. He covered up his own death.”
“He was one of the world’s greatest minds.”
“Human minds, Otto,” corrected Richards. He chewed a softgel lip as he ran over a real-time update of the crimefile, ported into his base unit courtesy of the Three Uncle Sams. “The LAPD found his body in his house yesterday. Apparently they were reluctant to go in on my say-so, but did because of the smell, would you believe.”
Otto spread his fingers, watching the bobbles of the polymer under the skin flex. “Someone has found a way of creating an android sophisticated enough to house a human mind, and human enough to foil the standard tests.”
“Yeah. It’s doubtful Qifang could have come up with that on his own. According to k32’s technology sine, cydroids like this – that’s what he called them – are supposed to be fifty years away. It’s one thing to get components to bond with tissue, another to construct an entire machine from vat-grown human
body parts.”
“What did we watch being pulled out of the sea? Some kind of decoy?”
“Maybe. Whoever tried to kill him didn’t know the man was a fake, that’s for sure. Three days after Qifang died, there were three separate logs of him departing the States. This should have tripped some major alarms, but it didn’t, and because the logs ghosted each other, and were chased up by a data-gobbler, no one had done a full check until I requested it. There’s some sophisticated ware behind all this,” Richards said.
“Where’s the third?”
“Beats me. They all hopped zeps within hours of each other, then the ghosting starts. It’s only because the crew reported Qifang missing on Tuesday that Hughie uncovered this at all. If Qifang’s behind this, he’s certainly living up to his rep still” – Richards’ eyes clicked as he blinked dust off their lenses – “but we can’t discount the possibility it’s nothing to do with him at all. Seeing as we have two here, I’d be willing to bet the third one is also on his way to the Londons. There’s something here that he… they… damn… whoever, wants…”
“That still leaves us with no murderer.”
“Yes.”
“This fake Qifang, this cydroid… Do they think it was vulnerable to EMP?”
Richards went quiet for a second, his eyes fixed as he communicated with the mainframe at the coroner where Qifang’s double was being expertly dissected.
“Yes.”
“In that case,” said Otto. “I have an idea. Get Quaid to bring his guests in here. I am going back to the car. I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Wait!”
Otto paused by the door.
“Care to take a bet?” said Richards.
“Sure: heiress.”
“Interesting choice. Indonesian cook. Two bottles of good stuff says so, all right?”
“Agreed,” said Otto.
Richards grinned and wagged a finger. “You’re wrong, you know?”
Otto was right.
The cyborg grappled with the snarling Andorro-Belgian heiress, EMP rifle broken on the floor. Richards and Quaid hid behind the table, the cook staff and steward ducked down at its far end.
“There are goddamned robots coming out of my goddamned woodwork! Goddamn!” shouted Quaid.
“I wouldn’t worry,” said Richards. “Otto was built to fight machine units. He is highly trained, and there’s not much they can download that he hasn’t learned from experience.” Richards winced as the cydroid put Otto’s head through the dayroom wall and then flung him bodily to the floor. Richards grappled Quaid behind the table as the cydroid scrambled to its feet, Otto grabbed its ankle and flipped it to the ground, cracking the sofa’s frame. The leather tore and stuffing flew into the air. The cydroid responded by ramming its stiletto heel right into Otto’s bad shoulder, leaving the shoe embedded there. Otto howled in pain, and swiped at the thing as it scrabbled back out of reach.
Otto had had a theory that there had been two plants on board. That strips of bloody flesh hung from the heiress’s body, revealing spun carbon bones underneath, kind of proved his point. An EMP pulse on low setting on each of the guests; Jolanda had gone down, then come up again, then attacked.
“But, but, I’ve been fucking her!” said Quaid. Otto had gained the upper hand, sat on top of the slender fake, and was hammering it repeatedly in the face with his enormous fists. Its head snapped back and forward with each impact. The face was a pulped ruin. Otto’s hands bled freely too, the machine’s black skull too hard to crack. “How long do you think…”
“Oh, about since Qifang signed aboard,” said Richards matterof-factly. Otto was doing OK. The imposter bucked underneath Otto, and cyborg and cydroid both went rolling. “Someone’s been watching him carefully, found out about this trip, then picked someone else to replace to get at him, someone who’d meet you, chat you up and get a place on your boat through sex. I’m sorry, but the original Jolanda is almost certainly dead. In some ways your security was just too good. It was the only way to get to him. Someone really wants him dead.”
Quaid was far from grief-stricken. “I screwed her! Goddamn!” He shook his head in disbelief. “All she was interested in was sex… I don’t believe it.”
“You evidently did believe it. Tell me, did you never think she was a little bit odd, a little bit unusual, perhaps?”
“Well, yes, but look at her, look at what she was, I wasn’t into her for the conversation.”
“Charming.”
“She’s Belgian,” protested the eugene. “I thought they were all like that.”
“I think I see now how she fooled you, you really… Everyone, heads down!” shouted Richards. He half stood and waved frantically down the table at the terrified boat staff.
The heavy gun drones Hughie had left stationed outside Qifang’s quarters had decided to get involved, clumping into position in the corridor outside the dayroom. Richards shouted out at them to stop, tried to ping them over the Grid, but to no effect. Servos thrummed and armour plates clicked as their weaponry deployed, folding out and down from their broad shoulders. Richards threw his sheath on top of Quaid as the drones opened up. Otto’s eyes widened and he threw himself down, the cydroid vaulting to its feet, arm raising for a killing blow. Twinned heavy machine guns on each let rip with a deafening clatter, filling the room with the stink of propellant. The bullets ripped into the cydroid. It shook with the impacts, tottering forward on its remaining high-heeled shoe, and let out a polyphonic keening.
Shards of wood and gobbets of cloned flesh rained down on Richards and Quaid. The cydroid’s flesh was torn away, its face reduced to a chipped black carbon skull. It backflipped onto all fours away from Otto. Limbs bending in ways no human’s could, it scuttled up the corridor. Richards cracked the drones’ near-I and shut them off before they did any more damage. Rotating barrels whined and smoked as they gradually stilled. Otto jumped up, followed the escaping cydroid, bellowing in German, a chair leg in one hand, his pistol in the other, shooting as he chased it.
“You’re wrecking my fucking boat!” shouted Quaid.
“Hey!” said Richards right into Quaid’s face. “We’re wrecking your boat? What about your girlfriend?” He pressed himself up off the prone eugene, stood and attempted to wipe his coat down, smearing blood across it. Richards tutted; ruined. “Typical,” he said. “Bloody typical.” He looked around. “Right, OK. I think they’re gone. The rest of you get below. I think our fake Jolanda is going to try and get away now, so they’ll be up on the deck.”
“Are you sure?” asked the steward.
“No, but if I were an illegal, experimental replicant hiding the truth of an international conspiracy I would try and put myself out of the way of those investigating it, wouldn’t you? I don’t think hiding under a bed will be very successful. But, if you’ve any better idea of what the deadly robot assassin is up to, please feel free to act upon it.”
Richards looked hard at the little Indonesian. His eyes were swollen with some ‘flu variant, his nose ran; genuinely ill. Otto is going to be insufferable, thought Richards.
Quaid and Richards proceeded cautiously. The corridor was full of shredded insulation, carbon fibres and wood chip, the lighter components of which drifted in the air like industrial snow. The dayroom wall and that of the bar on the other side of the way were wrecked. The gun drones stood motionless, guns ticking as they cooled. A breeze came in through the bar’s shattered picture windows, spinning the airborne detritus in tiny vortices. Richards gave one of the drones an experimental poke as he and Quaid ducked under their outstretched arms. They were inert. It annoyed Richards that Hughie hadn’t trusted him enough to order the things to obey him without him having to dismantle their brains. He unholstered his gun.
By the time Richards and Quaid had made it onto the foredeck of the Aurora Viva, the fight was over. Otto stood over the corpse of the motionless cydroid, ready to shoot it again. It hung there halfway through the steel wire deck guard, bloodied
head still adorned with scraps of matted hair, punctured by bullet holes.
“Well done, Otto!” said Richards.
Otto, breathing hard, looked up at him. He was about to say something when from within the wrecked machine at his feet came a sound like cracking glass. It twitched. Otto stepped back, gun trained on the ruined skull, retreating further as wisps of caustic gas rose from the droid. The remains of its face began to collapse into itself, its limbs to sag, melting away the few remaining vestiges of the heiress. It became a messy skeleton, then something no longer even vaguely human. Otto covered his mouth against the fumes. The deck fizzed.