by Ed Naha
“Use mine. I think the air-conditioner guy borrowed yours yesterday.”
“Goddamn it! Those things don’t grow on trees, you know. Hey, Arnie. Give me a DDQ, 4 amps over.”
“Watch his head. Okay, tilt back. Careful. Right there.”
“Don’t worry about the S-series. It’s a temporary patch.”
Words. Singsongish noises. Blending. Forming a melody. Silly. Hummm. Flash. A mechanical hand appeared before him. The fingers flexed back and forth, open and shut. Silly. He wanted to laugh. A mechanical hand. Like a toy. A toy? Did he remember that? No, he didn’t think so.
Darkness. Then lines. Grids. Target sites. Numbers. More numbers. Maps of city streets. Legal codes. Hummm. He was quite enjoying all this. What a show. What a grand, glorious show. How was this hallucination accomplished? He wasn’t seeing this. Yet, he was registering it all. Ingesting it. Wonderful things. He sighed, almost missing the singsongish forms in black and white suits who flung their words meaninglessly around him.
Crash! What? A high-pitched voice. “Come on. Let’s turn him on.”
A female voice. Female. A woman. Different than a man, yet the same. Did he remember that? He didn’t know. Everything was new. Everything was odd. He should have panicked. But what was panic? Something he might have known once yet, now, the word sounded empty. Meaningless. Empty. Hollow. That was it. He was hollow.
Something jolted. A white form floated above him. Long hair. Ugly blue streaks around its eyes. Lips painted bright red. Breath smelling of . . . numbers and words flashed over her form . . . 90 PERCENT ALCOHOLIC SUBSTANCE, IMPORTED FROM RUSSIA. VODKA. A woman. Inebriated. Blood alcoholic content above legal percentage. Should she be driving? How did he know that? Did he remember that?
More staggering white forms beyond her. A male face. Directly in front of his. “Hey! He’s looking at us!”
White forms all around him. Glasses filled with liquid, raised in a toast. Blowing into hollow, reedy, metal tubes. Noisemakers. Did he remember that? The woman leaned forward, her lips parted. Her lips on his . . . flesh? Startling feeling. A woman and a child vanishing in the background of his mind. No faces. No names. Never a part of his existence. Sensory jolts exploded all around him. Alcoholic breath. Cheap perfume. Electrical currents. A voice. Laughing over him.
“Happy New Year, RoboCop!”
So that was it.
He was a cop.
A good cop.
Did he remember that? Good. Very, very good.
Click.
Darkness.
PART
The danger of the past was that men became slaves.
The danger of the future is that man may become robots.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
[ 8 ]
By now, he had come to know Morton’s voice. Despite its nervousness, the voice had a certain sense of authority to it, a definite sense of intelligence. There was something base about it as well, a lack of feeling. It was a totally objective conclusion he had come to by weighing inflection, rate of speech, and fluctuations in pitch as well as breathing. Actually, it was no great insight on his part. It was part of his function, under the heading Voice Stress Analyzer.
He also knew when he was being activated and when he was being shut down. He had come to expect the “clicks” on a fairly regular basis. The clicking sound signaled the moment his internal systems took charge of his form. Or gave up control to the white-coated figures. When he was off duty, he was surrounded by blackness and the constant hum of his heart. He was activated now. Standing outside two large golden doors. Dr. Roosevelt, a bland, one-dimensional man he had come to know from the lab, was standing next to him, whistling softly. He gazed down at Roosevelt. The man had a bald spot on the very top of the head which he tried to cover by plastering his hair down and combing it in a swirl over the pink swath of skin. Did this intelligent scientist actually believe that no one would notice that?
He dismissed the thought.
“Such are the stuff that dreams are made of.” Roosevelt smiled happily.
Dreams. Noun. A series of images or thoughts in the mind of a person asleep; an idle fancy; a vision; an aspiration. He considered this. He did not have dreams. He was not programmed for that.
He tilted his head and concentrated, increasing the amp power of his audio system intake. He could hear Morton on the other side of the door.
Morton’s voice betrayed great pride. “We get the best of both worlds. The fastest reflexes modern technology has to offer, onboard computer-assisted memory, and a lifetime of on-the-street law enforcement ‘programming.’ Gentlemen, I would like to present . . . RoboCop.”
The doors opened. He stepped inside and scanned the room. Data printouts slid by his eyes, both above and below the main focus of his attention. The room was twenty by forty. The table in its center fifteen feet by five feet. There were twenty men sitting around it. Executives of OmniConsumer Corp. There were thirty additional men seated along the wall.
He took four steps onto the carpeting. The pile was two and a half inches thick. Morton stood at the far end of the table next to a smiling white-haired man and two army generals. Johnson, Morton’s fellow worker, was staring beyond RoboCop. RoboCop turned and faced a scowling man positioned at the opposite end of the table.
Richard Jones. Operations Manager of Security Concepts. Age: 51.
RoboCop stood at attention before the assembled. One by one, the men in the room stood. They began to slap their hands together, great, childlike grins across their faces. Slap. Slap. Slap. Applause. He knew they were honoring him. He had no idea why.
Dr. Roosevelt nodded and RoboCop turned to leave the room. He passed by a full-length mirror on the way out and saw himself for the first time in his existence. He didn’t break stride but he memorized the vision, etching it into his memory.
He was tall. Padded. Broad-shouldered. He was wearing a large, segmented suit of armor . . . an exaggerated police uniform. His hands seemed titanic, almost too large to fit on the arms that held them. He rushed through his memory banks to try to find an analogy for the uniform. He managed to compare it to a hybrid of the suits worn by medieval knights and football players.
He had a helmet on, stretching from his skull to down below his chin. His eyes peered out from a large slit in the upper part of armored appliance. It was tinted light blue. There was an open section between the nose and the jawline where a stern mouth was revealed. A mouth. Surrounded by pink. Cheekbones were exposed. High and regal. He considered this for a minute. Human flesh. Flesh. A heartbeat. Blood coursing through veins. Did he remember that? No. It was probably just a piece of information he had gleaned from the biology tapes.
He dismissed his findings as unimportant.
[ 9 ]
A group of six children were hurling cats back and forth when the motorcade pulled up in front of the Old Detroit station. The setting sun bathed the three white station wagons and the white semi in an eerie orange glow. The six pre-teeners gaped at the cleanliness of the cars. They were impressed. So much so that they let the cats go free.
A small army of blue jumpsuited technicians scrambled out of the station wagons and ran for the semi.
“What’s this, an invasion?” One ten-year-old smirked.
“They don’t look like Martians,” another kid said.
“Nah. They look like plumbers or something.”
The kids walked over to the semi, where the technicians were carefully pulling a covering off some object in the back. The kids’ eyes widened when they saw what was inside. They ran away from the motorcade, yammering in fractured syllables.
A black limo rumbled up to the curbside. Morton and Johnson emerged.
Inside the precinct house, Sergeant Reed sat, bored, in his elevated desk. It was a pretty dull night. It was only starting, though. He expected the worst to happen after ten o’clock. It always did. The kids were in bed and the adults were free to screw up. Meanwhile, he had to log this creep i
n.
He gazed down at the lowlife next to the bored officer below him. The prisoner was dressed like an old-fashioned Latin lover, replete with pencil-thin mustache and shellacked hair. He also had an attitude problem. Reed had an earnest desire to correct that, but there were laws against manslaughter that even cops had to obey.
“I’m what you call a repeat offender, man,” the prisoner rapped. “I repeat, I will offend again. You see, I get my orders from a higher source.”
Reed stared down at him from his Brobdingnagian desk. “Shaddap, asshole. I’m the highest authority here.”
Reed’s jaw dropped with a crack when he saw the door to the precinct house opened. Morton and Johnson stood in the doorway, followed by a half dozen technicians carrying large boxes. Dr. Roosevelt, looking more tired than usual, motioned them forward.
Reed was not amused. The guys acted like they owned the place. “You folks think you have squatter’s rights here or something?” he asked. He noticed the OmniCon seal on the boxes. Morton ignored Reed.
“There’s a holding cell on this floor that’s set up for observation,” he said to Roosevelt.
The scientist produced a floor plan on his ever-present clipboard. “Looks perfect.”
Reed slowly climbed down from his desk and approached the corporate invasion force. Four technicians, carrying a large piece of electrical equipment which resembled a throne, squeezed through the front door.
“Excuse me, Mr. . . .” Reed began.
“Morton.”
“Mr. Morton. You look like a very civilized man.”
“Thank you.”
“May I ask you a very civilized question?”
“Certainly.”
“What the fuck is going on here, anyway!!!?” Reed’s red face now resembled a sea of lava.
Morton ignored him. He turned to Johnson. “Who is this guy?”
Johnson checked a file. “Sergeant John Reed.”
Morton faced the irate sergeant. “OmniCon. Security Concepts. Piss off.”
Morton and Roosevelt walked toward the holding cell in back, Morton still chatting. Johnson executed a “what can I tell you?” shrug in Reed’s direction. Reed watched a half dozen more technicians haul in a ton of equipment. “Looks like a fucking safari,” he muttered.
He stormed back to his desk and lifted his phone, dialing while sputtering. “This is bullshit. I take my orders from cops, not guys in shiny suits and . . .”
His eyes nearly popped out of his head. The entire precinct house lapsed into silence. Everyone in the room, prisoners, cops, lawyers, snitches, and bail bondsmen gawked at the door. Two men in blue jumpsuits held the doors open wide.
Robo stepped into the Old Detroit station.
A tall, scar-faced prisoner pissed in his pants. “What is this shit, man?”
The cop next to him shook his head. “I’ll be damned if I know.”
Reed stopped dialing the phone. The thing in the doorway looked like a mechanical mountain, shaped vaguely like a man. Reed tried to figure out if it was a man in a high-tech suit or a high-tech concept in a man’s britches. He didn’t know why, but he figured this meant trouble for the precinct. And if it meant trouble for the precinct, it meant trouble for the entire force.
Robo took three titanic steps into the room. He scanned the area carefully, noting the ratio of prisoners to police. He then walked through the room.
Lewis stepped out of the bathroom and stared at the hulking figure marching by. “Why is that power mower wearing a policeman’s uniform?” she asked Starkweather, paralyzed at a desk.
“I don’t know,” Starkweather replied. “But mine never looked that good on me.”
“I don’t think yours was welded on.”
Starkweather slowly got to his feet. “You want to check it out?”
“In a minute,” Lewis said. “I need coffee.”
Starkweather watched the blond policeman walk away. She was a cool one. The rest of the cops in the room watched Robo march toward the holding cell with a mixture of awe and admiration. The thing was wearing a policeman’s uniform, of sorts. The padding was bigger and stronger and shinier and looked a lot more formidable but, essentially, it was the same design as that of an ordinary working cop.
The cops in the precinct room crowded a small observation window that looked in on the holding cell.
Robo was led into the large chair by his two technicians. Other technicians hooked up banks of equipment to the throne. Roosevelt watched the printouts chug from the laser printer. Robo leaned back into the chair, setting off several lights in the portion of the throne above his head. Roosevelt motioned for his assistant, a bearded fellow named Tyler, to move forward.
Tyler stood directly in front of Robo. “Whenever you are at rest, you will sit in this chair. Okay?”
Robo nodded. “Yes, I understand.”
The crowd of cops looked at each other in amazement. The voice was human.
Roosevelt produced a small card, a compuMap, and held it in front of Morton. “We can check his location at all times with one of these. Here he is right here.”
Morton gazed at the small card. A dot glowed in the center of the grid representing Old Detroit. “Uh, how does he eat?” Morton asked.
Roosevelt glanced at the towering automated cop. “His digestive tract is extremely simple.”
He pointed to a small machine which resembled a cigarette dispenser. “This processor manufactures a rudimentary paste that sustains his organic systems.”
Morton walked up to the machine curiously. He extended a finger toward a button on the unit. He looked back at Roosevelt, a questioning expression on his face. Roosevelt nodded. Morton pushed the button. A brown paste oozed into a paper cup. Morton extended his left forefinger and scooped up a wad of the stuff. He placed a bit of it on the tip of his tongue. He furrowed his brow. “It tastes like . . . baby food.”
“Well.” Roosevelt grinned. “In a manner of speaking, he is a child.”
“Some baby,” Johnson smirked from behind Morton.
At that point, Reed blustered into the room. “Okay. Okay. I got the word. I have to play host to this . . . tin can. But I don’t have to like it.”
Morton and Johnson exchanged looks. The sergeant would have to be pacified. “Sergeant Reed,” Morton said. “I promise you, Robo will outperform any cop on the force. He’ll wind up saving lives. You’ll see.”
“I doubt that,” Reed replied.
“Would you like to see a demonstration of what he can do?”
Reed glared at Morton.
Morton shrugged. “Really. I’d like to show you.”
Reed and Morton left the holding cell. Johnson turned to Robo. “Come on, junior. Time to score some points with the nice sergeant for daddy.”
Dr. Roosevelt frowned. “He’s not a toy, Mr. Johnson.”
“No shit,” Johnson said, walking out of the holding cell. Robo followed.
Robo marched down several corridors. Although this place was a new environment he felt safe here. Secure. Securely. Tie it down securely. He glanced at the walls. They were green and ugly. The paint was chipping. Yet, despite its aesthetic defects, it seemed like a good place to be.
Thunder roared ahead of him. Four doors to the right. Morton and Reed stepped inside. Johnson led Roosevelt, Tyler, and Robo into the firing range.
Four cops stood at the firing line, their ears covered by bafflers. Robo consulted his personnel file. Officers Lewis, Starkweather, Ramirez, and Manson. He watched them fire their pistols at moving, human-shaped paper targets, gliding beneath digital screens computing their score. They were good. Not perfect, but very good. He calculated that Lewis, the best of them, would end up scoring an 87. Very effective shooting.
Morton handed Robo a gun. “Go ahead.”
Robo walked up to the firing line.
Lewis continued to fire, the sound of thunder all around her. Gradually, she noticed that one round of gunshots was louder and more distinctive than the
others. A steady, sure pacing. Wham. Wham. Wham. Wham. No hesitation.
After a few seconds, she found that she was the only cop present still firing . . . except for the steady, even drone of the new entry.
She walked over to the corner where Starkweather, Ramirez, and Manson were standing along with a dozen or so other cops.
Starkweather motioned to Lewis. “Get a load of Super Cop.”
Lewis stared at the titanic android. “Get a load of his gun,” was all she said.
Robo, surrounded by scientists and technicians wearing sound bafflers, grasped a huge Auto-9; a sidearm with enough kick to blast through a tree at twenty yards. Morton, smiling, with his fingers in his ears, nodded at Reed. Reed was impressed in spite of himself. Robo held on to the gun with two hands and fired off round after even round. He finished a clip and, within seconds, loaded another and resumed firing with military precision.
Ramirez whistled through his teeth. “I like this guy’s style.”
“He’s not a guy. He’s a machine,” Manson pointed out.
“I wonder what he’s here for,” Lewis wondered aloud.
“Maybe they’re going to replace us,” Manson blurted.
Starkweather clenched his teeth. “No fucking way any machine is going to replace me.”
“You’re a lot cuter than he is,” Lewis said, elbowing him. “Don’t sweat it.”
Robo fired round after round after round. The bullets sliced into the chest of the moving silhouette. Each clip produced a perfect circle of small round holes in the “heart” of the target. The cops watched in amazement as Robo loaded clip after clip, firing determinedly. Finally, after eight clips, the target simply collapsed, torn ragged by the steady stream of hot lead.
Lewis stared at the digital readout above the target. Perfect score. 100.
She glanced at the towering RoboCop. Robo watched the target collapse, read his score and, then, spun the A-9 on his finger, twirling it easily into his holster. Lewis gaped at the Olympian mechanical figure. She’d seen that move before. Only once. She tried gazing at the face beneath the mask.