by Ed Naha
“He is human,” Johnson replied.
“Half-human,” Morton countered. “And as long as we control his brain, he might as well be a staple gun.”
“Uh-huh,” Johnson muttered.
Robo looked down at the little persons in front of him. “Hey, Robo? When I grow up can I be a cop like you?” one gap-toothed little boy asked.
“The department can always use more brave young boys,” he said evenly. Noticing the disappointed face of a pig-tailed face on his left, he dutifully added, “and girls, too.”
The little girl broke into a grin.
An elderly schoolteacher who resembled an Egyptian mummy wandered into the crowd. “Okay, children. We mustn’t keep Mr. Robo from his work now. He has to go catch villains and you have to go back into class.”
The kids uttered a collective “awwww,” and reluctantly shambled off toward their school. A five-year-old boy, his face littered with freckles, turned and waved one last time. “Bye, Robo,” he called.
In his hand he carried a doll. It was a miniature policeman. A tag hung from the doll’s left arm. “T. J. Lazer.” Robo stared as the little boy trotted off.
“Jimmy?” Robo asked.
A chilly wind whipped through the schoolyard. Soon, the place was empty. Robo heard Morton and Johnson call to him. He continued to stare at where the little boy had stood. “Jimmy?” he repeated.
There was no one to answer him. Where had he gotten that name from? Had he remembered that? No, he didn’t think so. The name was not in any of his data banks.
“Robo?” Morton called again. “Get a move on. It’s cold out here.”
Robo nodded. “I’m on my way.”
He walked slowly back toward the waiting OCP van. Two technicians held the doors open for him. He sat quietly in the back seat. Dr. Roosevelt beamed at him. “You have a lot of fans, Robo.”
Robo nodded. He did not reply. Something was happening inside him. Something he didn’t understand.
[ 14 ]
Robert Morton walked confidently down the corridor in the OmniCon Tower, the spring of success in his step. Single-handedly, he would make OCP the darling of both the business world and the popular press. He nodded at the half-dozen smiling executives who greeted him in the hall.
Funny how fast things could change. A couple of months ago, he was a has-been. Worse, a never-was. Then Jones blew it. Blew it in a major way. A fleeting memory of Kinney’s body sprawled across the Delta City model flashed through his mind.
Screw it. The kid was a nerd. Anyway, he had died for a great cause—my career.
A young, fresh-faced executive named Walker trotted up after Morton. “Hey, hey. Bobby. Vice president. Congratulations. Handball Tuesday night?”
Morton smiled paternally at the young pup. “Love to, Bill . . . but I’ve got a date. Couple of models coming over to my place.”
“Whew? Need company?”
“Why. You know a third model that can drop by?”
Morton paused in front of the executive washroom. Sliding a gold cardkey out of his pants, he slipped it into a slot and walked into the exclusive quarters. Walker followed him.
Inside, Morton grinned to himself as he surveyed the posh decor. Sparkling tiled floors stretched out for nearly a city block. Small, golden signs pointed the ways leading to the Jacuzzi, the shower, the gym, the racketball courts. It was an upwardly mobile executive’s dream come true.
The washroom was empty but for someone using one of the stalls. Walker and Morton stepped up to two urinals. Walker babbled as he unzipped his fly. “You’re making a real name for yourself in Security Concepts with RoboCop, Bobby.”
Morton nodded.
“But,” Walker added, “I’ve got to level with you. I hear Jones is plenty pissed.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,” Morton replied, taking aim at his urinal. “I know. The guy’s got himself a killer reputation, but bottom line, it’s a smokescreen. Let’s face it, he’s lost his teeth. The guy’s a wanker.”
Walker’s eyes bulged. Morton was treading on thin ice. “Are we talking about the same Dick Jones here?”
Morton smirked. This kid had to learn what the new order was in the tower. “Walker, wise up. Jones is old. We’re young. That’s life. Survival of the fittest, right? Corporate Darwinism.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“The guy fucked up.”
Walker didn’t reply. He was staring directly into the mirror in front of him. The stall behind the two men opened. Dick Jones slowly walked up to the sinks and began washing his hands. Walker tensed. With the muscle control of a samurai, he stopped urinating, zipped up and headed for the door.
“Geez,” he muttered. “I gotta meeting I gotta get to. Seeya.”
Morton continued his business at the urinal, nervously. He watched Jones slowly dry his hands with a paper towel, crumple the towel masterfully, meaningfully, and stuff it down a dispenser. Jones turned and walked toward Morton, stopping directly behind him. He literally breathed down the young executive’s neck.
“Congratulations on the promotion, Bob,” Jones said, his hawklike nose practically in Morton’s ear.
“Uh, thanks, Dick,” Morton replied lamely.
Jones stared into the mirror, making eye contact with Morton. Morton was furiously zipping up his fly as Jones intoned, “I remember when I was a young executive at this company. I used to call the Old Man funny names. Ironbutt. Boner. Why, once I even called him an asshole.”
Morton scurried to the sinks and began scrubbing furiously. Jones sauntered over to the sinks as well. “But, and this is an important point, Bob, there was always respect. I always knew where the line was drawn.”
Morton reached for a towel. Jones grabbed him around his wrist. “You just stepped over the line, Bobby boy. You’ve insulted me, and you’ve insulted this company with that bastard creation of yours.”
Morton gaped at Jones. Jones wasn’t shouting, really. He hadn’t raised his voice. It was the tone of his voice that was a shout. No, it was more like an insane squeal. Jones’s eyes seemed to be the size of grapefruits. “I had a guaranteed military sale with ED 209. Renovation program. Spare parts for twenty-five years! No one cared if it worked or not, Bobby. No one.”
Morton tried to finesse his way out of the situation. He also tried pulling his wrist away from Jones. He was successful at neither. “Well,” he said. “The Old Man thought it was pretty important, Dick.”
Jones released Morton’s wrist. The tone of his voice grew calmer. “You know, Bobby, he’s a sweet old man, and he means well. But let’s face it. He’s not going to live forever. And I’m number two around here, Bobby. Now that’s pretty simple math, isn’t it? When one is gone, you move on to two.”
Taking an extreme amount of pleasure in the gesture, Jones spat directly in Morton’s face. “You just fucked with the wrong guy, Bob.” Jones smiled. “You’d better pray to God that your RoboCop doesn’t screw up one iota. If that happens, I’ll pull the plug on you both.” He walked out of the bathroom, whistling.
Morton grabbed a towel and wiped the spit off his face. He trudged out of the bathroom. The confident bounce had evaporated from his step.
[ 15 ]
Robo sat in the holding cell. His eyes were closed. He was dormant. Two technicians sat idly by outside the room, glancing, every so often, at the telemetry units monitoring Robo’s systems.
The technicians were clearly bored. At first, baby-sitting the cyborg was a great job. It got them out of the lab. But sitting day after day, night after night, in a rundown police station wasn’t exactly heaven, either.
“Hey,” one technician said, noticing a glitch in one of the readouts, “what’s this?”
The second technician banged the monitoring units. “Japanese equipment.”
They returned to their conversation. Inside the holding cell, Robo sat. Darkness. Humming. All was still. No thoughts. No power. Crackle. A bright white line of static engulfed his senses. A black figure dar
ted by. Who was that? Did he remember that? No. He had no memories. Wait. Voices. Laughter. Ka-chunk. What was that noise? A shotgun. Did he remember that? Yes. Very good. But from where?
Crackle. A swirl of white light. A glimpse of a room. Square shapes. Boxes. Crates. Men above him. Next to him. Shotguns pointed at his . . . body?
A roar.
The feeling of flesh torn away.
Robo awoke with a start. His jaw ached from gritting his teeth. He shook his head clear as panels of indicator lights on the chair flickered to life wildly. Robo got to his feet as the two technicians watched, half-amused.
“Hey, look,” one laughed. “Bucket boy’s on line.”
The second technician frowned. “He’s not supposed to be on line. Did you activate him?”
The first technician refused to get upset. “Japanese equipment. Probably a power surge. Let’s just go in and . . .”
It was too late. Robo was leaving the holding cell.
“Hey!” the first technician exclaimed. “He can’t do that.”
Now, it was the second technician who stifled panic. “Are you gonna tell him?”
The first man shrugged. “Naaah.”
In the booking room, Dr. Roosevelt was in the midst of hitting on a rookie policewoman when Robo walked in the room. “Sure, I’m a scientist, but I do the gym three times a week.” Roosevelt grinned. “And . . . what the fuck?”
“Are you talking to me?” the policewoman asked angrily.
“No. HIM!”
Robo walked through the booking room and headed for the door leading out of the precinct house. Roosevelt checked his watch, realized that Robo was off his schedule and ran into the back of the station and the holding cell. The two technicians were combing through the readouts.
“How did this happen? What the hell is this?” Roosevelt squealed.
“Uh,” the first technician replied. “We were just wondering that ourselves.”
Robo slammed the front doors of the Old Detroit station open. Outside, Officers Lewis and Starkweather were escorting a handcuffed mugger up the stairs when Robo bounded down them. Lewis watched him head toward a TurboCruiser. She pushed the prisoner at Starkweather. “You book him. I’ll catch up with you later.”
Robo marched to an empty Cruiser and opened the driver’s door, a grim look of determination on his face. Something was going on. Something was churning within him. Something alien. Something very real. He felt the presence of someone behind him. Spinning, he found himself staring at a policewoman.
“Uh, hello,” the woman said. “I haven’t had a chance to introduce myself. I’m Anne Lewis.”
Robo took a step toward the woman. Lewis held her ground, staring nervously at the armored man. Robo blinked. Grids and readouts blurred his vision. He could barely make out her face. For a moment, she was every woman he had ever cared about. He blinked again. The Prime Directives appeared in his brain. Directive One: Serve the public trust. Directive two: Uphold the law. Directive Three: Protect the Innocent. Directive Four: Classified.
“Do you have a name?” Lewis asked.
He blinked again. The directives and the grids were gone. Lewis was still standing before him. “How can I help you, Officer Lewis?” Robo asked, now in control.
Lewis wasn’t sure what to say. “Oh, gee. I . . . That’s not really what I meant. Don’t you have a name?”
Robo stared at her. What was she talking about? Lewis frowned. “Come on, Murphy. It is you underneath there, right?”
Robo stepped back cautiously.
Murphy?
Lewis stared deeply into his blue eyes. “You really don’t remember me, do you?”
Robo slid into the car. “No. Excuse me. I have a job to do. Somewhere there’s a crime happening.” He gunned the TurboCruiser and sped off into the night. A few seconds later, a very frazzled Dr. Roosevelt ran up to the curb where Lewis, confused and unsure, still stood. Tyler ran out of the station, carrying sheafs of paper and stood next to his mentor.
“What did you talk to him about, Officer?”
Before Lewis could answer, a limousine squealed to a halt in front of the station.
“What the hell is going on around here?” Morton demanded.
“She was talking to him,” Roosevelt said, sounding like a schoolboy ratting on a cheating classmate.
“About what?” Morton demanded.
“Stuff,” Lewis shrugged.
“What kind of stuff?” Morton asked, angrily.
“Police stuff,” Lewis sneered.
“He’s a cop, isn’t he?” Sergeant Reed’s voice boomed from behind Morton. “Why shouldn’t he shoot the shit with a fellow officer?”
The young executive spun around and confronted the burly old cop. “I thought I made it clear that this project is off limits to your people!”
“As long as your project is a cop at my station, he or it can talk to anyone or anything he wants!” Reed fumed.
Morton turned to Tyler. “What the hell happened here! Have we got a glitch or what?”
Tyler stared at the reams of paper. “Well, it’s hard to be one hundred percent certain. I mean, this system was never designed to experience Detailed Somatic Response.”
“It looks like Robo had a dream, Mr. Morton,” Roosevelt explained.
“Shit,” Morton hissed. He faced Lewis. “What did you talk to him about?”
“Well.” Lewis shrugged. “I asked him if he had a name. He didn’t know.”
Morton’s eyes widened. He was as near hysteria as he could get. “Oh. Great. Let me make it real clear to you, lady. He doesn’t have a name. He’s got a program. Clear?”
Lewis shrugged. “Sure.”
Roosevelt was still concerned. “I say we pull him in, run a systems check, the works.”
Morton closed his eyes. Before him, his career, his status, about three million dollars of merchandising contracts and his shot at the cover of Time magazine was spinning down a large high-tech toilet. He growled at Roosevelt. “You want to take him off line because he had a little dream? Are you kidding me?”
“Uh,” Roosevelt replied not quite scientifically.
Morton was not finished with his performance. He glowered at the old sergeant. “You’re in deep shit, Reed. This goes on your record. This project doesn’t concern cops. It’s classified. It’s OCP. An official reprimand will be on your desk tomorrow morning. Officer Lewis’s discipline is your prerogative.”
Reed glared at the young executive. “I think she should get a medal for even talking to that bag of bolts. Your Robo has a personality of . . . an OmniCon vice president.”
Morton’s face clouded. “We keep him on the streets,” he ordered Roosevelt. “We maintain the schedule. I can’t afford any downtime right now. Show me the readouts.”
Morton, Tyler, and Roosevelt scurried back into the precinct house like frightened rodents. Lewis shrugged and flashed a half-grin at Reed. “Sorry, sarge. I screwed up.”
“Forget it, kid. Morton is a serious asshole.”
The older man stared at the empty Old Detroit street, in the direction Robo had taken the Cruiser. “Personally, I admire the tin bucket for thinking for himself for a change. I never saw him look like he had someplace he had to go. And he was in a hurry.”
Lewis nodded. “Yeah, but where?”
[ 16 ]
Seventeen-year-old Mickey Radford wanted to be an astronaut; not just one of the guys who flew to and from the moon like some kind of space stewardess. He wanted to be a primo astronaut. He wanted to be a pilot. He had a shot, too. If he could get that Rockwell scholarship to the Norcross Academy, he’d manage to get himself out of Old Detroit and on the road to space in a hurry.
If he blew the Rockwell tests next week, he might as well forget his plans for the future. He’d wind up working in this Shell station all his life. Right now, it wasn’t so bad working the graveyard shift. Most people were too scared to come out this late at night, so he wound up being more of a baby-sitt
er for the station instead of a pumpboy. The job gave him a quiet place to study, too.
Mickey sat in the attendant’s booth, concentrating on his analytic geometry textbook. He didn’t notice the mud-caked gray motorcycle roaring into the station. It was only when the driver tapped on the booth that Mickey looked up.
The feral little cycler wouldn’t have distracted Mickey at all if it wasn’t for the gun barrel of the Mac-10 that the guy shoved into the change slot of the booth.
“Gimme all your money, bookworm, or I’ll blow your brains out,” Emil sneered.
Mickey gaped at the gun barrel. Was this really happening? Jesus. He’d seen reports about self-service robberies on the news and stuff but this station? In the middle of nowhere? On a weeknight? When he had the Rockwell exams next week?
The sneer turned into a snarl. “Come on, zit-head,” Emil said. “Get a move on.”
Mickey quickly emptied the cash drawer into the change slide and pushed the money toward Emil. Emil glanced at the cash. Only a couple of hundred.
“Slow night,” Mickey explained.
Emil trained the gun on the shaking teenager. “Now, fill it up on Number Seven.”
Mickey began punching buttons for the number seven pump as Emil backed toward the bike. The numbers on the automated pump whirled down to zero. A badly rusted robotic arm inserted the gas nozzle into Emil’s bike and began pumping fuel dutifully. Emil kept his eye on the kid in the glass booth.
“I’m a good shot, punk,” Emil bragged. “So don’t do anything stupid. I could give you a third nostril from here.”
Keeping the gun trained on the booth, he grabbed a cigarette out of a pack he kept tucked in his shirt pocket and lit it with his free hand.
Emil didn’t hear the faint whine of an approaching car. He was having too much fun giving the attendant a bad time. He stood under the light provided by the Shell sign, grinning evilly. “Hey, man. What you reading in there?”
Mickey slowly held up his textbook, smiling like an idiot. Emil squinted his eyes, reading the book’s title. “You a college boy or something?” he asked. “I bet you think you’re pretty smart. Yeah, a regular wiseguy. You think you can outsmart a bullet?”