by Ed Naha
Emil laughed. A high-pitched wheeze.
A pair of heavily armored boots approached him.
Emil took a long drag on his cigarette. Crunch. Someone was behind him. He pivoted his torso, gun still in hand, and came face to face with RoboCop. Robo’s gun was already drawn and trained on Emil’s heart.
Robo stared impassively at the wiry thug. “Drop it,” he commanded.
Emil’s jaw flapped up and down. It was the mechanical man from the boob tube. His cigarette glided to the ground. His eyes darted wildly back and forth. There had to be a way out of this. Robo stared hard at the man. There was something about the face. About the eyes. About the way he held his gun. He dismissed the thoughts.
“Dead or alive. Either way, you’re coming with me.”
Emil’s face lost its color. He had heard these words before. He remembered when and where. He squinted his eyes, trying to see beneath the RoboCop’s armor.
He shook his head from side to side, as if recovering from a left hook. “You? You?”
Emil panicked, letting loose a spray of bullets. The bullets ricocheted wildly off Robo’s armor. Emil squeezed the trigger of his Mac-10 a second time, sending a torrent of hot lead in Robo’s direction. The thug dove behind the line of gas pumps for cover, as the rebounding bullets headed his way. Three of the gas pumps were shredded by the slugs. A feed hose burst open with a twang, sending a spray of gas onto the ground.
Mickey, in the attendant’s booth, took his book and his notes and ran out the door, as far away from the pumps as he could get.
“Mister,” he yelled to Robo. “You’d better split!”
Gas sprayed wildly from the ruptured pumps. Emil backed away from Robo and toward his bike, firing wildly. Half of his rounds smashed into the remaining pumps, sending fountains of gas gushing into the air.
“Shit,” he concluded, watching a small river of gas lap up and over his foot.
Robo watched both the gas and the felon. He activated his Targeting Command.
He watched Emil, behind the smashed pumps, leap onto his bike and jam it into gear. The engine roared to life. Emil gave it the gun. The bike moved some five feet when it hit a small tributary of swirling gasoline and swerved wildly. Emil screamed as the bike angled toward its side, skidding madly. He felt his pants absorb a spray of gasoline as the bike slid furiously toward the lit cigarette he had dropped moments before.
The cigarette lay, still smoldering, eighteen inches in front of Robo’s foot.
The bike continued to slide toward it.
A river of gasoline rushed in the same direction.
With a Herculean effort, Emil jammed his foot on the ground and, his ankle screaming with pain, got the bike into an upright position. Miraculously, the bike hit a patch of dry asphalt and leaped forward. Emil held on for dear life, maneuvering the bike out of the path of the flooding fuel.
Robo, noticing the cigarette, placed a firm foot on the burning butt, smashing it just before a torrent of gas rushed up and over his shoe. Robo stood there silently. A second passed. He realized he had gotten to the cigarette 1.3 seconds too late.
The air around him exploded into flame.
The puddles of fuel ignited with a deafening roar, sending roaring fireballs a hundred feet in the air.
“So long, Officer,” Emil cackled. His laughter eroded into rasping gasps of fear as he noticed a fireball skidding across the wet pavement, heading right for his bike. He gunned the engine, keeping the bike ten feet away from the horizontal wall of flame trailing him.
In the center of the inferno, a blackened armored figure turned and watched Emil speed away. Robo stared through the inferno, once again activating his Targeting Command. Slowly, carefully, Robo marched out of the flames. Surrounded by thick, black smoke, he peered out of the fog and locked his vectors on the fleeing punk.
Raising a still flaming arm, Robo fired his Auto-9.
Emil felt a sharp pain at the base of his elbow. He glanced down at his arm as an exit wound the size of a grapefruit appeared. He lost control of the bike immediately and flipped onto the hard, dry macadam.
Emil felt the wound alert all his pain centers. The night sky suddenly seemed like daylight, illuminated by the conflagration at the station. A large, shadowy figure loomed above him. The being before him looked like a creature from Hades itself. He watched as two smoldering steel hands made their way down toward his neck. They grabbed his lapels and yanked him up. He felt his bladder give way. He was nearly in tears. Things were not going his way tonight.
He rose past a pair of fire-blackened legs. A charred torso. He found himself gazing into the inhuman eyes of RoboCop.
Robo activated a Record Command. He didn’t know why, but this man was important to him. He wanted this down in his memory banks for retrieval. Emil was getting giddy. He was flying. Like a bird. Robo angled the man’s head before his recording eyes. Full face. Left profile. Right profile. All stored on videotape.
Emil giggled into the Titan’s face. “You’re dead, man. You’re a nightmare.”
The ground beneath Robo shook as the underground storage tanks to the station exploded with a roar. Emil stared at the undead devil before him. Behind the monster cop, a titanic fireball erupted high into space. It looked to Emil as if it would reach the stars. Emil watched as the fireball blasted past the Shell sign. The sign exploded in a violent shower of sparks. One of the letters careened off into the night.
The charred monster cop loomed before Emil. Behind him, a neon sign sputtered spasmodically. HELL.
Emil grinned at the apparition.
“Who are you?” Robo demanded.
Emil shrugged and laughed. Robo realized that the diminutive thug was of no further use to him. He dropped the little man onto the ground and marched, still smoldering, to the TurboCruiser. He didn’t bother to radio his report in. He figured, by now, half the neighborhood knew there was something definitely wrong at the local gas station.
He switched on the ignition of the TurboCruiser. He had found a clue to a puzzle he did not comprehend. Yet, something within him was driving him to push onward to discover . . . what? He didn’t know. He just had a feeling about all this.
He tilted his head oddly.
He had a feeling?
[ 17 ]
Robo burst into the booking area of the Old Detroit station looking like a vision from hell. His armor was charred. His body still smoldered and reeked of gasoline. He marched past the startled cops, past the frightened prisoners and past the more-than-siightly curious Sergeant Reed.
He paused before Reed. “Records?” he asked.
Reed smiled sweetly. “CompuLab. Second corridor to your left.”
Robo marched off. “Thank you, sergeant.”
“While you’re near the locker room, you might want to try taking a shower, too. If it wouldn’t corrode you, I mean.”
Robo double-timed it down the hallway leading to the CompuLab. He spotted the glass doors and marched through them. A half dozen information loaders, bespectacled men in white short-sleeved shirts, stopped working when the charred officer strode by.
Robo approached the head clerk’s desk ominously. Cecil, the man in charge of the CompuRecords, gazed up into the blackened giant’s face. “Can I h-h-help you, sir?”
Robo glared at the little man. “No.”
He raised his hand and saw the CompuLab terminal sitting five feet behind the trembling clerk. He made a move to walk toward the machine. Cecil was on his feet, in spite of his terror. “What exactly is it you w-w-want?”
Robo brushed the squawking man aside with a flick of the wrist and continued his advance. “This is a restricted area!” Cecil bawled. “Sir? Please, sir?”
Cecil stopped abruptly when Robo raised a titanic steel fist. He turned and faced the terminal, fist raised. Tchikk A metallic strip appeared, protruding from his knuckles. Cecil slowly backed away as Robo lowered his fist, inserting the metallic strip into the access port of the terminal. He stared
at the viewing screen before him.
The terminal fed hundreds of mug shots onto the screen. He passed them by. This was not what he wanted. Concentrating, he summoned his Playback Command. The video mug shots he had taken of the squirming Emil played back. He froze the full frontal shot, summoning up computer-enhanced vectors to re-create the face. Once the computer image was in place, Robo allowed the video of the man to fade.
Combining both the computer image in his brain and the vision of the terminal screen before him, he placed the image of Emil over the flood of mug shots streaming by. Suddenly, the parade halted. A mug shot of Emil appeared. Robo superimposed the computer graphic of this evening’s thug over the old photo of Emil. A match. Robo summoned up the man’s rap sheet. EMIL DELOREAN. ATTEMPTED MURDER. ROBBERY. ARSON. ASSAULT WITH A DEADLY WEAPON. RAPE. DESTRUCTION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY. GRAND THEFT AUTO. KNOWN ASSOCIATES.
Robo quickly was fed the rap sheets on Joe Nelson. Dougie Harris. Chan Oland. Leon Klingensmith. Clarence Boddicker.
Robo scanned the lengthy rap sheet belonging to Boddicker. Printed out, it would have taken at least three pages, single space. The latest addition . . .
SUSPECT, MURDER: DPD OFFICER A. J. MURPHY. FILE ACCESS CODE XJ05183.
Robo summoned up his Playback Command. The face of Officer Anne Lewis appeared in his brain. She was staring up at him, frowning. “Come on, Murphy. It is you under there, isn’t it?”
Robo let the image fade. He turned toward the terminal, entering the file marked XJ05183.
A photo of a cop appeared on the screen. Young. Mid-30s. High cheekbones. Deep, steely blue eyes. Strong, thin mouth. Good-looking in a rugged way.
Very little information accompanied the photo.
MURPHY, ALEX JAMES: KILLED IN ACTION, 3128 PRIMROSE LANE, DPD ID #8788 [DECEASED] CLASSIFIED.
Robo concentrated on the screen. The face. The words. Very little information.
[DECEASED]
The word seemed to burn into his brain.
He disconnected from the terminal and marched out of the room. He passed Tyler and Roosevelt in the hall. “Uh, Robo?” Roosevelt said. “Sergeant Reed told me I could find you down here. It’s not time for your shift yet, Robo.”
Robo marched back out into the booking area and toward the front door. Roosevelt and Tyler trailed after him. “Uh, Robo? You really should shut down now for a while.”
Robo walked out of the precinct house. Sergeant Reed sat in his elevated chair, watching the two scientists agonize over their project gone wild. He chuckled to himself. Whaddaya know, that bag of bolts had some balls after all. One thing these high-tech assholes had to learn and learn fast. A cop is a cop is a cop, no matter what he’s made of.
And cops don’t take any shit from anybody.
At the curb, Robo fired up the TurboCruiser and screeched off into the streets of Old Detroit.
Something had taken hold of him. Something he was powerless to stop. A vision kept on swirling in his brain.
[DECEASED]
PART
Man—a being in search of meaning.
—Plato (427?-347 B.C.)
[ 18 ]
The morning sunlight reflected off the hood of the speeding TurboCruiser, sending a small rainbow of colors shimmering along the windshield. At the wheel, Robo stared vacantly at the twisting, turning streets of the city. He was out of Old Detroit now, heading for the suburbs.
He was experiencing something deep within him. A sense of loss but also of gain. He wanted something. He needed something. He just couldn’t deduce exactly what it was. It was almost as if he were being guided by a higher force, a program he had not yet become aware of.
He slowed the car down as he approached the street sign reading PRIMROSE LANE. He guided the Cruiser down the block-long row of prefabricated houses. Each house was identical but for the color and the condition.
He pulled the car up in front of a weathered, beige home. 3128 Primrose. He slowly got out of the car and faced the abode. The front lawn was small and overgrown. He could sense that, at one time, it had been well kept. A FOR SALE sign was hammered into the ground haphazardly. He walked past the picket fence. The white paint was chipping off the gate.
A damp spring breeze rustled through a lone tree on the lawn. The sky darkened. The sun disappeared. It smelled like rain. Thunder rumbled far off in the distance.
Robo walked up to the front door and turned the knob. It was open. He pushed the door inward, tentatively. It felt familiar somehow.
He peered in through the darkness. The house was small but sensibly designed. Walls were covered with built-in, smart appliances. It was an ideal electronic cottage. It beat the hell out of sleeping in a holding cell.
Robo mused over that last thought. What was that? Humor? He grimaced. Humor had never occurred to him before. He must try it more often.
He took three powerful steps inside. The house lit up. Muzak filled the air. Startled, Robo turned and noticed that, near the front door, a ComUnit was positioned in the wall. A monitor. A phone. A command keypad. The monitor flickered to life and the face of a sweating, middle-aged man with a bad toupee and a frozen smile appeared on the screen. The InterSpace Network logo superimposed itself over the smiling salesman’s face. Robo watched the salesman adjust his badly made bow tie.
“Welcome, shopper,” said the prerecorded spiel. “Let’s take a stroll through your new home . . .”
Robo frowned and walked away. It didn’t help. The voice of the salesman boomed everywhere. Robo entered the empty living room. A monitor screen in that room belched to life. “This is a one-family house built by ZM Industries. Situated near schools and shopping centers, this progressive community has a growth factor of . . .”
The voice receded into the background as Robo stared at the empty room. Something was wrong with his vision. He extended a hand and leaned against the wall as ghostly images shimmered before him. The room was now filled with furniture. A barely discernible little boy sat, cross-legged, in front of a blaring television screen. The boy. He had seen that boy before. Robo gazed at the apparition. On the ghostly TV screen, a badly made up policeman blasted a villain into bits. He then twirled his guns around and slipped them easily into his holster.
The phantom boy turned and faced Robo. “Neat, huh, Dad?”
Robo felt a rush of . . . he couldn’t identify the feeling. He wanted to laugh, but he didn’t know how. Tears were alien to him as well. The ghostly little boy waited for a response. With none forthcoming, he turned and faced the TV again. Quietly, the phantom room faded away. Robo was left standing against the wall of a very empty cubicle.
Confused, Robo entered the abandoned kitchen. “Honey?” he heard a female voice say. He turned and watched a phantom kitchen appear. The kitchen ComUnit began belching. “And, say, it doesn’t matter who cooks in your family because this kitchen by Food Concepts makes everything a snap.”
Robo stifled the urge to put his fist through the blathering monitoring screen. He stared at the kitchen table. A mirage of place settings and steaming food materialized. He stared at the microwave oven. A very pretty woman stood there, a cup of coffee in hand. “Need an extra boost before you roll, copper?” She smiled.
Robo fought back a cry of anguish. What was he feeling? Something was being hidden from him. The cry that churned deep within his chest was anything but a part of his program. It was something dark. Something primordial. Something real.
He staggered to a counter, reeling under the impact of this latest hallucination. He spotted a coffee cup on the counter. Was it solid or was it a product of his malfunctioning brain? He tentatively extended a charred steel hand. He wrapped two fingers around the cup and lifted it. There was writing on it. Old. Faded. World Class Husband.
Grief-stricken, he replaced the cup on the counter with a little too much force. The handle broke off in his hand.
Robo walked down the hallway leading to the bedroom. A hallway monitor screen flickered. The omnipresent shill smil
ed at Robo, talking fast. “Short on cash? With MasterBudget financing, your earning power is your equity. We manage your income so that you can manage your life.”
“Fuck off,” Robo snarled, marching into the bedroom.
Shafts of stormy gray light streamed into the windows. Robo imagined that, on sunny days, this room must have been beautiful. Four full-length mirrors must have made it seem bigger than it actually was.
The salesman was now in the corner, blathering full-tilt. “Ah, the Master Bedroom. Functional space with a touch of elegance.”
Robo watched a queen-size bed appear. Bureaus. Flowers on an end table. The woman from the kitchen strolled in through the room, clad in a robe. “Jimmy needs new clothes for school,” she said, her voice echoing in Robo’s mind. “The Websters want us to come to their party.”
She faced Robo and smiled. God, what a beautiful smile she had. And those eyes. “Hey,” she said. “You look sexy in that shirt.”
She dropped her robe and headed into the bathroom. Robo followed. He watched the ghostly woman step into a steaming shower. The woman began to sing softly to herself. A little melody, nothing special, slightly offkey. To Robo, however, it sounded as sweet as a symphony.
Robo turned and caught a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror. What was he anyway? He saw the eyes peeking out from beneath his face visor. They were human. They were real. He raised a blackened steel hand. But this? What was this? Cold, unfeeling metal.
What kind of aberration was he? Flesh and blood and steel? It didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem natural. It didn’t seem . . . good.
A monitor next to the bathroom mirror zapped on. “Hey, have you thought it all over? Why not make me an offer? I’m ready to make a deal.”
“Deal with this,” Robo growled. He sent a steel fist slamming into the monitor. A shower of sparks erupted from the guts of the ComUnit. The Muzak which had followed him throughout the house sputtered to a stop. The lights in the house dimmed and then went out.