Barker’s arms, legs, and torso are bound to the chair. He slouches against his constraints. His lips twist and pull tight as his emerging madness contends with his loyalty to Lorca.
“Out of work. No way to obtain juice. You sought out the disciples because you had no choice.”
The bot doesn’t acknowledge the old detective’s presence. Two days, and he’s yet to speak a word. Just twists and bites his drooly lips, sucking them in and puckering them out to allow the saliva to drip.
“You were reconfigured to be a securitybot. Quantum encryption for your memory. Training in arms. A loyal soldier by all accounts, though I bet you’d prefer your old job back.”
For two days Flaubert has been telling the bot, I understand you. For two days he has been offering the bot various alternatives to the beatings administered by his young, one-eyed partner in the law. For two days it hasn’t worked, but how great would it be if it did? What a score if he could be the one to catch Lorca! What a legacy to the department and a validation for a lifetime of honest service to the state.
“You know there’s work for you overseas,” Flaubert mentions after clearing his throat. “They use the older models there and pay them well. An ingot goes much further in Asia than it does in the US.”
The android cocks his head and sits up straight in his chair. For the first time in two days, he appears to be listening. He appears to be accepting the old detective as the one officer willing to grant him some way out of his predicament.
“We’d pay for transport and the juice you’d need until you begin. You’d have the job you were designed to do. You’d be building again,” Flaubert promises. “Creating. Marking the world with your passion.”
The bot’s forehead tenses. His teeth grind. He struggles to keep the secret of Lorca’s whereabouts in his mouth.
“She isn’t coming to save you, Mavis. She isn’t doing for you what you did routinely for her.”
Flaubert can feel the others watching from the observation room, pressed against the one-way glass as the whereabouts of Lorca are about to be revealed.
“Tell me where you were before you came to the Mission. Tell me where you were hiding when you discovered you were ill.”
The bot leans across the desk drawing the old detective face closer to his own.
“Whisper it to me,” says Flaubert. “All you have to do is say it once. One time and you’ll walk out of here free.”
Barker leans back in his chair, jerks forward, and spits a black, fleshy object against the old detective’s cheek.
It’s his tongue.
It leaves a tarry mark on Flaubert’s face before falling as a clump in his lap.
The door to the interrogation room opens. Ochoa takes a running start and lands a hard right that sends the bot backward, his head splitting as it hits the ground. “I got it from here, Jean-Michel.”
In the bathroom, the oil easily washes off his face, but the stain on his pants is more stubborn. Still, he has to admire the bot, chewing off his own tongue and swallowing the oil as it bled. Talk about commitment. Talk about loyalty and strength.
In the hallway, on his way back to interrogation, Flaubert passes an argument between a sergeant from the larceny division and a young man in a loose-fitting suit.
“I’m just asking you to check the feed.”
“Keep pushin’, shitbrain. Keep fuckin’ pushin’.”
“I’m a tax-paying citizen, and you call me shitbrain?”
“You’re lucky I don’t throw your drip-fiend ass in jail.”
“And you’re lucky I don’t file a complaint against you and sue the department.”
“For what? For not calling the cavalry every time some hunk of metal gets lost?”
Flaubert looks closely at the young man, whose voice sounds vaguely familiar.
“I’m just asking for the drone footage from one night. One night. One set of coordinates, and I promise I won’t…”
“Mr. Lazar,” Flaubert interrupts, remembering the young man from the night of that last situation. The poor lad seems to have aged ten years since. Lost ten pounds, too, and amassed a few lines around his eyes. The transformation is alarming. It’s as if some parasite is feeding on him from within.
“Jean-Michel,” says the sergeant, “you know this fuck?”
“Yes, we met once before, didn’t we?”
“He’s been here ten times in the last six weeks, each time with some bullshit about a missing bot.”
Flaubert puts a friendly hand on the young man’s shoulder. “There’s a diner across the street from the main entrance of the precinct. Head over, and I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”
The old detective checks in with the lieutenant in the observation room to let him know he’ll be gone for an hour. He walks out into early evening rain and crosses to the diner where the young man is seated in a booth by the window. There’s a decent crowd inside, more than usual, probably because of the weather. By the time two cups of coffee arrive, the young man has already begun his complaint against the department. The old detective listens. He notices that Eliot, too, has a cough now, though it’s probably from a head cold, a weakened immune system, not from an accumulation of soot. More alarming than the cough, however, the young man’s demeanor has taken on a manic, obsessive quality that gestures toward a deterioration in his thinking. He has three separate branes open on the table displaying maps, spreadsheets, and loops of surreptitiously recorded faces. He places a locket in the old detective’s hand.
“She made this,” says Eliot, “used to wear it every day. The red fleck echoes the red flaw in her eye. It’s like her signature, all her clothes and jewelry, everything she made has it.”
Flaubert recognizes the quality of the store and fair curies of the work. The clasp gives a good snap when he opens it to reveal an engraving done in a wistful yet confident hand:
IRIS MATSUO
C-900
SERIAL #G14-95-7789
“I entered the number into every database I could find. I called all the labor providers and asked them to run it through their inventories. I called all the parts retailers. Wholesalers, too. I called every shipping, trucking, and rail service in case the number got scanned anywhere in the supply chain. I put it up on the Web, on the message boards. Turns out there are these C-900 collectors who buy and sell parts so they can mess with the bots’ auras. They trade a pair of arms to get a bot with a different character, then trade back, or keep the new parts if they like the change.”
He stirs an unhealthy amount of sugar into his coffee as he speaks.
“I called Green Valley and every recycling chain on the Web. I called all the dumps, scrap yards, and rendering facilities. Not only in the US, but Mexico, Canada, anywhere I could get a hold of someone. But, the number never popped. Not one limb, screw, or chip was over scanned. Not here. Not anywhere. Of course, if I had access to a police database,…”
“What about the chop shops?” The old detective adds cream to his coffee but decides against the sugar.
“I checked them.”
“All of them? There must be five hundred in L.A. alone.”
“Three hundred eighty-one,” says Eliot, “and about a hundred more that aren’t licensed.”
The old detective can hardly imagine it’s possible. More than ten shops a day, hours spent looking through crates of metal components, some as large as a leg, others as small as a screw. He pictures the sickly young man standing over a bin and shining a black light on each and every part to read its serial number.
“I went about a month without a lead, but then I got a tip from Mun and figured a few things out.”
“Mun?”
“The Korean who owns the maquiladora where Iris worked.” Eliot takes a large swallow of his coffee. “Mun found out her securitybot, some guy named Uchenna, had a scam going. Every time one of her girls got fired, he would offer to get her another gig. The girls would be desperate. Most of them can’t live a week without pay, so
me can’t make it a day. Thing was, all these girls went missing.”
“Did you find the securitybot?”
Eliot shakes his head. “Mun fired him after she got tipped off about his scam. I visited his address in Inglewood. There were about ten bots living there in a nasty little squat. They were burning in the bedroom, turning out illegal juice, but Uchenna was gone by the time I got there. His roommates said he’d been chopped. Turns out he had a gambling problem, owed a bunch of money to the shys. Whoever he was tipping, some trapper I assume, paid him a commission in parts. There were a few still there in the apartment. The bots showed me the stash they kept around in case any of them got injured and needed a spare. That’s where I found her arm.”
Flaubert smiles in appreciation of the nice bit of police work pulled off by the amateur sleuth. Too bad the young man shows no satisfaction in his success. “The serial number matched?”
“Her left arm,” says Eliot before issuing a weary sigh. “That’s it. That’s all I have so far. That’s all that’s left.”
The old detective checks his watch and sets a time when he has to cut this meeting short. Every minute he spends with the lad is another minute Ochoa spends beating the oil out of Mavis Barker. If Flaubert doesn’t get back soon, there will be nothing left to interrogate.
“I went to a few of the bars where the trappers go,” says Eliot. “They’re a paranoid bunch. Lorca hunts them the same way they hunt bots. I talked to a few and asked around. I said I needed this C-900 back, no questions asked. I even offered a reward, but they weren’t interested. They roughed me up pretty good, and after that, I had to stop going.”
The old detective notices the fresh wounds on the young man’s face. Even the abrasions from six weeks ago hadn’t fully healed.
“If I could access the department’s drone feed,” says Eliot, “maybe I could catch a glimpse of who took her. I know you keep the footage on the cloud for a few months before you erase it. You could check it for me, see if you caught who went home with her that night. Then I wouldn’t be running around chasing my tail like this. I just need to see the drone footage from one stinking…”
“I can’t help you with that.” says the old detective.
“What if I pay you?”
“Bribing on officer?”
“Then help me out of kindness.”
“I help you better by declining your request.”
Eliot shifts the branes around the table then back to their original positions. “What’s the point of being a cop if all you do is stonewall and look for excuses not to help people? A woman is missing.…”
“A bot is missing,” the old detective corrects him.
“Their hearts don’t beat, they spin. They live off electricity, not the food of the Earth. They are designed to mimic our emotions, but they have no souls.”
“You believe in souls?”
“I do believe in souls.”
“When a man makes a painting or writes an opera or builds a home,” the young man asks, “does he not put into that work some element of his soul?”
“You could say the same thing about a toaster.”
“I’m not in love with a toaster.”
Flaubert suspects he’s doing more harm than good by engaging with such a mind. Perhaps he should arrest Lazar on a possession charge now and see to it that he’s forced into treatment. Not that treatment has done him any good in the past. But at least in a facility he could detox, restore his health a bit, get off the street before he gets himself killed.
“Are you familiar with the myth of Orpheus?” Flaubert asks the young man.
“If not, allow me to refresh your memory.” The old detective sips his coffee and allows the hot liquid to burn the ashy irritation in his throat. “Orpheus was the greatest poet in all of Thrace. He was to marry Eurydice, his fiancée, but on their wedding day, a viper bit her foot and dragged her soul down to the underworld. Orpheus was so distraught he ventured down to the river Styx and sang a poem so moving, so filled with passionate longing, that even the gods of the underworld took sympathy. In an unprecedented breach of protocol, they told the great poet he could lead his deceased lover back to the upper regions, back to the land of the living, to marry as had been their plan. But the gods had one caveat before they would allow Eurydice’s release. One command for Orpheus that he absolutely had to obey: that his eyes must not turn back to look at her until he’d passed the valley that separates the underworld from the Earth.”
The botress returns and the old detective pays the bill. Eliot offers to contribute, but Flaubert won’t allow it.
“But Orpheus did look back,” he continues with his retelling. “Steps from the safe harbor, he looked back only to see his fiancée’s soul disappear again into the abyss. ‘Farewell,’ she said, a second death without a second life. The poet returned to the flaming river and sang his song again and begged and pleaded with the gods, but this time they refused. This time, they wouldn’t let her go.”
Eliot stares out the window as the sooted raindrops streak against the glass.
“In the end, Orpheus retired to a hilltop where he sat alone and sang his poems—poems that set the Thracian women wild. He rejected them in favor of his dead fiancée, and eventually, the jealous harpies tore him apart. Killed him. In give some fashion.”
The old detective coughs and wipes his mouth as Eliot struggles to discern what this story has to do with his plight.
“Why did he look back?” the young man asks. “If he hadn’t looked back, he would have rescued her.”
“But he did look back.”
“But why?”
Flaubert shrugs. “It’s a recurring theme in mythologies that attempts to raise the dead are always destined to fail.”
“Then the old myths are no longer relevant.”
“Why not?”
“Because death is no longer a final destination,” Eliot argues. “At least not for an android.”
Flaubert pauses to consider the young man’s claim. If the androids do outlive us, he wonders, will they carry the old myths with them, or any of the great art and literature that was done by man? Will it all become, as Eliot says, no longer relevant—or will the essential truths these stories describe assert themselves in this new version of life?
“Wouldn’t it be simpler,” Flaubert asks, “wouldn’t it be more wise, to open yourself up to the possibility of another woman, perhaps one of the same species? Wouldn’t that be a better fate to choose than that of Orpheus ripped apart by the harpies because he refuses to move on?”
“But Iris isn’t Eurydice,” says Eliot. “If she were dead I could move on. I could accept it if there was no chance of recovering her. But who am I if I abandon her just because finding her isn’t simple? Just because I’ve been looking for six weeks and have only found her arm?”
“How long will you give it?”
“As long as it takes,” says Eliot. “What kind of man am I otherwise?”
Though she’s too timid to speak up, the botress clearly wants the table for the next round of customers queuing up at door of the diner. And Flaubert has urgent business back at the precinct. Mavis Barker may not be the lead he hoped for, but he is a bot in Lorca’s inner circle and such an opportunity must be explored.
“I’m asking very little of you,” Eliot says, looking down into his empty mug. “I just want to look at the drone feed see a parts database in the police file. I just want a little help.”
“I’m afraid I’ve helped you all I can.” Flaubert stands from the table and dons his hat. He adds to the tip before leaving. Crossing the street back to the precinct, he hopes his warning has some resonance with the young man. He hopes it guides him toward a more promising fate than that of the Thracian poet. It would be a great shame if the lad were to continue on with a fool’s errand. After all, a man’s life, when all is said and done, should serve some greater purpose than that of the hero in a cautionary tale.
TEN
A Date<
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In his dream, Eliot rides a bus through Koreatown, leaning against the window, holding a drip hanky to his nose for a quick inhale. He sees Iris in a white coat walking through the rain in the opposite direction. He yells for the bus to stop, but the driver doesn’t respond.
“Iris,” he screams as he breaks out the door and chases after her. He sees her vanishing into a parking structure around the corner. He follows, runs through the rain, enters the garage, and catches a quick glimpse of her white coat as the elevator doors close. He bolts up the stairs, flight after flight, chasing the elevator to the top floor where the doors open on the rooftop, but there’s no one inside.
A rub of tires on the asphalt. Downstairs, a flight below, Eliot sees a car pass, the driver dressed in white. He calls to her but she doesn’t hear. He throws himself over a low railing to fall a full story before his body slams in front of the car. The driver hits the brakes. Her car skids. She gets out. A small Asian woman in a white coat.
“Sir, are you all right?”
Eliot looks but sees no red fleck in her eye. It isn’t Iris face. Not even close.
“Are you all right?” she asks again.
Outside the garage, he sees Iris across the street. Then another Iris fixing a display in the window of a brane store. Then another driving by in a delivery truck. There’s Iris again, holding a Chug-Bot in a commercial playing on the massive brane above Wilshire. On the street, everyone looks like Iris. Everywhere he looks is an Asian woman in a white coat hunkering against the rain. He grabs an Iris by the arm, and her face changes, it distorts, the red fleck disappears.
“Eliot.”
From a distance they all look like her, but up close, they are other women. Strangers. Robots and heartbeats alike. Everywhere he looks, he sees her, and no matter where he looks, she isn’t there.
“Eliot.”
Gita touches his shoulder to wake him from his dream. She puts a cup of hot tea on his desk beside his arm.
“Eliot, it’s late,” says his co-worker. “You should go home.”
The office is empty. Dark. Quiet except for the hum of the cleaningbots vacuuming the hall.
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