Guy Haley

by Reality 36

  “Fuck! Otto!” shouted Richards. “Dip it in the sea, dip it in the sea!”

  “What?!”

  “The acid, the acid! Wash it off now!” Richards stormed forward, gesticulating wildly, then lunged onto the deck, grabbed a limb of the twitching cydroid and dunked the smoking construct. The water boiled as it slipped under. He turned off his feedback circuits, ridding him of sensation as facsimiled agony raced up his arm. Ignoring the damage to his sheath he held the cydroid under with one hand, swishing it backwards and forwards in the water.

  “Some sort of super acid,” Otto said, his voice wet. Richards scanned him over quickly. The insides of his nose and throat were raw from the fumes. Otto coughed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. There was blood on it. Then Richards’ machine senses caught a flare of electrical activity in the big man’s solar plexus as his implanted healthtech activated, and he began to breathe more easily.

  “Fluorosulfuric, I’d guess,” said Richards. “That should do it.” He pulled up the twisted wreck and threw the remains to clatter onto the deck where they lay smoking. The hand he’d held the machine in the water with was gnurled into a lumpy fist.

  Richards pulled himself up awkwardly. He was silent for a moment. The fingers of his less damaged hand, stripped back to bare black bones by the acid, drummed on the railing. His little finger ground and jammed.

  “You don’t like this,” said Otto.

  “No, no I don’t like it. No one’s been able to make an emulant this human-looking, until now.”

  They looked at the wreck.

  “Times change,” said Otto wearily. He rubbed at his head, taking comfort in the contrast between stubble and smooth electoo.

  Richards shook his head. “It’s that there’s been no talk of it on the Grid, none at all, that worries me, yet here we find three of them trying to murder each other.”

  “Could be the Russians, or the People’s Dynasty…” Otto offered.

  “All Fives talk to each other, and the Russians employ plenty. The People’s Dynasty like to think the Great Firewall strong, but it only guards people, and people are self-interested. Something like this would get out. It’s of too much value for us, for a start, to the Fives, I mean, for it to stay secret for long. We’d know.” Richards shouted an incoherent noise. The ocean swallowed it whole. “Fucking Hughie,” he said, and punched the rail with his broken hand. “This was supposed to be simple.”

  Chapter 12

  Autopsy

  Murder stalked artificial life as surely as it did that of more natural derivation. Autopsies of base units, androids, cyborgs and non-anthropoid, self-propelled robotic carriages were carried out in a facility attached to the Chief Coroner’s Office in the Keats Arco. Halfway between machine shop and medical centre, the virtuals division of the Chief Coroner’s office smelt of blood and oil in equal measure. The staff comprised men and women who straddled a line between mechanic and medic, for besides the cyborg clients the facility received, many of the more sophisticated androids used systems that were either biologically derived or were straight-up mechanical emulations of biological systems.

  The choppers and slicers and disassemblers were backed up by a coterie of post-mortem hackers who could conjure the dying thoughts of a machine from a pile of torched junk, or hunt down the last firings of a simulated brain as it dissipated into the churn of the Grid.

  It was one of only two places in the whole of the Londons that made Richards uneasy. This was the place his kind wound up when they died and, like most artificially derived sentients, Richards was worried that if it ever came to that, it would be the end. As Pope Clement XX had said, in not so many words, “Electrons are no substitute for a soul”.

  He was embarrassed. He was a machine, he wasn’t supposed to care, but he did. Mostly, Richards got round his fear by not thinking about it. But at the coroner’s he had to stare death down, and it never blinked first.

  Richards put on his best undamaged body and flew over to the coroner’s in the car. He could have extended a sensing presence into the building and conferred with Doctors Beeching, Smith and Flats that way, but he preferred the distance being incarnate gave him from the coroner’s AIs, Lincolnshire Flats in particular.

  The corridor to the Robotics Unit was exceedingly long. When he reached the end and the door swished open, Lincolnshire Flats’ cheerful voice greeted him, and Richards’ heart sank.

  “Ah, Richards, come to see our patients? Our happy clients? Come in! Come In!”

  “They’re not patients, Flats,” said Richards. “Patients stand a chance of getting better; nor are they clients, because they do not pay. They are simply dead.”

  “Morbid as usual!” hooted Flats. “They are happy though, I am correct in that – they never complain!” He laughed.

  “Flats…” Richards said.

  “Very well, as you prefer: corpses this way! All aboard!” Lincolnshire Flats said, and tooted like a steam train. Flats inhabited a columnar carriage composed of stacked disks, each housing a variety of tools, grapples, sensors and medical equipment, mounted on a soft-treaded truckle. There were several of these, sheaths for the building’s AI coroners or remotely visiting experts, but Flats had commandeered this one as his permanent home. He had the habit of spinning his segments round, deploying a surgical saw here, multi-headed screwdriver there, and gunning their motors by way of emphasis, so that his often gruesome conversation was punctuated by whirs, high-pitched squeals of micromotors and inappropriate sound effects. The central plate, which held his primary visual receptors’ clustered lenses – Lincolnshire Flats would not stoop to calling them eyes – remained fixed on the face of whomever he spoke to, no matter what crazed fandango the rest of his body was performing, nor in which direction it was heading.

  Lincolnshire Flats was one of the more independently minded Fours. It was rumoured that he’d had been modified; darker rumours had it that he’d done it to himself. He’d chosen his own name, which was a rarity in his class, and decided to abandon medicine in favour of forensics. A Four leaving its programmed career was almost unheard of, so Richards suspected the rumours were true. Whether they were or not, Lincolnshire Flats exhibited a love of his work far in excess of that displayed by other Class Fours, coming from someplace else than his programming. His dedication was very laudable, and the two resident human coroners regarded him highly, but as far as Richards was concerned, Lincolnshire Flats was an A-grade ghoul.

  “The patie… a-HEM! Corpses are in examination 3B, if you’d like to follow me?” Flats hooted.

  “I don’t like to, but I suspect I have little choice if I want to find out what you have discovered,” said Richards with a bravery he wasn’t feeling. They set off down a corridor, plush with self-cleaning carpet, the main way within the facility, and numerous rushing men, women and sheathed machine intelligences hurried back and forth. They spared no glances for the two AIs.

  “Very droll. Your pointless jibes forever remind of the superiority of the Class Fours over Fives. I thank you for it.” A bone saw screeched.

  “Don’t mention it. You said ‘they’.”

  “I am sorry?” More of Lincolnshire Flats’ ocular appendages swung round to look at Richards. He emitted an accompanying “boing”.

  They walked past Theatre Two, the largest in the place, a warehouse-sized room with gaping clam-doored airlocks leading to a landing field outside. Here they flew in broken base units and pulled them apart. That’s where I am going to end up eventually, thought Richards. He shuddered. “‘They’re’ as in ‘They are’ as in ‘They’ as in ‘more than one’?” he said to Flats, more confrontational than he intended to be; scraps to hide his unease behind. This is fear I cannot deactivate, it is fear from my core. Do the others suffer it, I wonder? He’d never dared ask, it was too big a weakness, potentially catastrophic, to expose to the other AIs.

  “Why, of course. The cydroid your partner deactivated, and the Qifang doppelganger.”

 
“You didn’t mean that,” said Richards. “That was what your words said, but it wasn’t what your voice said. You are too theatrical for your own good.”

  “Ah, yes, well,” grumbled Lincolnshire Flats. “Pooh pooh, there’s no hiding anything from you, is there? I must watch my levels of syncopation. I over-pronounce my words when I am hiding something. Yong yong,” went Flats.

  “You should.”

  “Bah. It is no paint off my casing’s inter-ocular space. HA HA! You have only spoilt things for yourself, Richards, but we’ll get to that, I’ll save what I know. I shall leave you tantalised, which is nowhere near so delicious as flabbergasted. A pity.”

  They passed into the atrium of a smaller examination theatre, a round, domed room coated entirely in joinless spun glass. The atrium was within this, effectively a large airlock lit with strong, sterilising UV, a red light over the door to the theatre proper, glass frosted to above head height so those in the airlock could not see into the theatre. They were both subjected to a wind laced with cleaning grains. They stood for five minutes, lifting limbs, Richards’ tilting his shoes, turning about, as the microscopic machines swarmed over the AI’s respective sheaths, gathering contaminants of every kind. The red light over the door turned amber when they were done, and the grains spiralled down a hole in the floor like a swirl of water in the bath. When they had gone, the light turned green. The AIs’ gridsigs were updated with the relevant clearances, and the doors opened.

  “Follow me!” trilled Lincolnshire Flats. His unblinking eyes shifted to the tables in the middle of the theatre as he trundled out. There were four tables in all. The one on the right was empty. On the leftmost lay the twisted mess of the cydroid Otto had fought, next to that the fish-nibbled Qifang copy. Next to that lay another cydroid. It had been crudely dismembered, its flesh casing decayed, but it was unmistakeable as another doppelganger for the old professor.

  “Qifang two!” shouted Lincolnshire Flats with a species of wholly inappropriate bombastic cheer. He extended a long, thin arm and pointed at the cydroid. “Dragged out of the South Bank marshes this morning, not far from Richmond Venice.”

  Another door opened, and a man dressed in surgical gear walked in from the scrub room next door. “Ah!” he said cheerily. “Richards! Glad to see you, how’re you faring?” He was old in that indeterminate way wealthy men with generous healthplans tended to be. The jewelled snail of an expensive mentaug uplink curled round his ear, a biofilter mask sat atop his surgical cap.

  “I am very well, Dr Smith, thank you.”

  “Of course you are, of course you are.” He smiled and pressed his gloved hands together, the faintest of crow’s feet feathering his eyes. “A Five is never ill, never tires, never stops. Marvellous, marvellous machines.” He leaned forward and peered academically at Richards. Richards got the uncomfortable feeling Smith would just love to poke about in his warm, dead innards.

  Richards looked at the broken androids on the autopsy tables, ran his hands absentmindedly along the edges. “And how are you?”

  “Well, very well, a lot better than these sorry souls you see here,” Smith chuckled. Lincolnshire Flats boomed with laughter and performed a twirl.

  “Yeah, right. What have you found out for me then?”

  “Ah, right to business as always,” said the doctor. “They are entirely new, though I don’t think I need to tell you that.” He tapped his phone stylus against the acid-scarred carbon bones of the heiress. “As you can see, as you have seen, perhaps I should correctly say, these are sophisticated pieces of engineering. I’ll use the term cydroid, though they’re very near to grade II cyborgs in the proportion of their organic components against pure mechanicals and assorted electronica, shall we say.”

  “That is an incorrect definition!” shouted Flats, and continued at less offensive volume: “The legal definition of a cyborg is an organism that started life as a fully sapient human, naturally or artificially conceived and gestated, that at a point past conception is altered by the introduction of artificially derived, non-organic components designed to medically replace or enhance natural bodily function,” droned the Four. “These are therefore, no cyborgs. Woot!”

  “Quite so Lincolnshire Flats, quite so,” said Smith, tapping the stylus against his upper lip, unconcerned he’d been poking it into the gory mess in front of him only seconds before. “These never were, for the want of a better term, ‘human’.” He smiled at Richards. “These are machines through and through. See here.” He lifted a flap of rotted skin on Qifang 2 with the stylus. “This is very sophisticated, a full clone in some regards; a genuine copy.”

  “A full clone, as opposed to a genetically patterned clone, is legally defined as an artifically conceived and gestated organism, or part of an organism, created as an exact copy of a pre-existing organic organism’s cellular structure.”

  “Indeed. Except they are not clones. They’re vat grown, for the main, but in parts and then assembled; we can see the joining work, very fine it is, throughout these ‘cydroids’… I hate the word! I really wish they would properly classify such,” said Smith, shaking his head. “We knew the technology would hit us eventually, we’ve had plenty of time! What exactly am I going to put on the report?”

  “Cydroid! I have already petitioned the medical council for a correct definition,” said Flats.

  “Whatever term you choose to employ, the machines have all the characteristics of their respective original’s exterior properties, dermal, subdermal, lymphatic system… everything.” He encompassed the rotting machines with a wave of his stylus and a worried frown. “This has not been spun off a gene-loom, I suspect. The basis of clones from the looms is simply the genetic coding of the subject, but these are actual duplicates, right down to the cellular level. Birth marks, cancers and all. There’s more than simple invitrogenesis going on here.”

  “Someone had cancer? Who had cancer?” asked Richards.

  “What? Oh, Qifang, poor chap. Lungs, absolutely shot, way past fixing. His healthtech should have picked that up. I’d sue.”

  “He’s dead now,” said Richards. “He’s probably past caring.”

  “Hmmm, what? Yes, I suppose so.” Smith scratched his elbow.

  “The organics extend far into the system,” bellowed Lincolnshire Flats. “Lungs, heart and liver” – his whirring appendages tapped a series of jars at the head of the bed, one after the other. Inside each reposed an organ made pallid by exsanguination and preserving fluids – “as well as all other major internal organs, the alimentary canal, stomach, reproductive organs and so forth. These, however, are not vital to the functioning of the machine.”

  “Indeed,” said Smith. “In fact, the Qifangs are almost entirely human, barring the skeleton. The heiress construct differs from him in her underlying chassis and in its cognitive hardwares. Both would fool most tests. And this is where things get interesting.” Smith waved his stylus again. The theatre’s sunpipes became opaque, dimming the room. A holo came to life, an image of the reconstructed heiress that expanded to double normal size and rotated. “Unlike Qifang’s copies, the heiress’s skeleton is a combat android chassis, carbon spun, faraday protected, independently motivated, strong too, similar to those produced and employed by the South African Union, and thus easily purchasable on the black market.” He indicated the items one after the other with his stylus on the body of the heiress’s cydroid. Above, the holo showed magnified views of the same. “It is capable of operating independently of the organics should they be destroyed; indeed, it is best to view those as merely a disguise.” Layers of the cyborg graphic obligingly peeled back and it recentred itself to show the areas as Smith said their names. “Cavities of catalytic acids are scattered throughout. A two-liquid mix. On their own, inert, together…” He pressed his palms together then moved them apart, fingers spread. “Well then, I suppose we can bid farewell to our machine, as you yourself have witnessed.”

  “A suicide pill for our kind,” said Flats.r />
  “Standard black-ops modification,” said Richards. “I’ve seen it before.”

  “They’re deep in the bones, quite a clever modification actually, stops them getting mixed accidentally” – Smith spun his hands round one another – “due to trauma. Trauma caused by fighting your colleague, for example, I would say.”

  “It is apparent to both my colleague and I that the heiress’s primary purpose is violence,” added Flats.

  “Yes, yes, indeed so. The skeleton itself carries a simple brain, that’s the way the Africans run them. But not here. Someone has put extreme effort into making these things look human. We suspect ambush to be its primary modus operandi; surprise, shall we say.”

  “What about the Qifangs?”

  “They’re different,” said Smith. “A simple woven carbon skeleton, too slow to vat grow like the rest of them, I suppose. Like I said, these chaps were grown and made in parts, then assembled.”

  “If this is a standard combat endoskeleton, how come it’s not picked up on the scanners?” asked Richards.