The Neuromorphs

by Dennis Meredith

  “We’ve got one hell of a situation,” he said, smiling ruefully and shaking his head. “Last night, the city gunfire locator registered dozens of shots fired at Mikhail Fyodorov’s headquarters. The cops went there. I’m not going to even try to describe what they found. The forensics people are there now.”

  “And why do you want me?” asked Leah.

  “Well, I didn’t want to throw you in the deep end this quickly . . . “

  Leah didn’t know whether to laugh or shudder at the unintended reminder of the violence she and Patrick had suffered the previous afternoon.

  “. . . but you’ve got the experience. You’ve been involved with Fyodorov’s enterprise. I’d like you to go with Marcy to examine the scene, make sure everything’s in order for any prosecutions we’ll want to do.”

  “Sure . . . uh . . . if you really think I could be useful.”

  Thirty minutes later, they stood in the doorway of the old brick building that had been a center for Fyodorov’s criminal enterprise. Leah’s previous attempt at calm now totally disintegrated. It evolved into an attempt to keep from totally panicking.

  Standing with Johnson and Gates, she looked into a large blood-soaked room where countless people had apparently died. Large puddles of blood splayed across the floor, and blood spattered the walls, which were riddled with scores of bullet holes. Globs of drying flesh lay on the floor and hung from the furniture. A glistening rope of intestine draped over one chair. A wall held a pink encrustation that appeared to be brain tissue. Adding to the shock was the organic stench of death she could smell through the doorway.

  Gates began retching violently, and excused herself to go vomit. Leah barely managed to maintain a clinical composure. She’d been at crime scenes before, although none as grisly as this one.

  “Jesus!” she exclaimed. “The autopsies will be interesting reading.”

  “Um . . . well . . . there won’t be any autopsies,” said Johnson.

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged. “No bodies.”

  Leah clutched the door frame to steady herself. This was cold-blooded, methodical mass killing. Actually, more like no-blooded mass killing, since robots had no circulation. This was the work of those neuromorphs! Suppressing a shiver, she observed coolly, “In my experience, bodies invariably show up somewhere. And in any case, there will be lots of forensic evidence here.”

  Indeed, as the isolation-suited forensics investigators picked their way carefully through the room, they gathered dozens of blood and tissue samples and placed hundreds of yellow markers where bullet casings had landed.

  One of them approached. “We’ve got the virtie view done if you want to look around,” he said.

  Gates, who had returned from vomiting, wiped her mouth with a tissue and waved her other hand to decline to explore the scene. But Johnson and Leah donned their googles, and each called up their own 3D virtual view of the scene that forensics had made using their cameras. Leah directed her own virtual-assistant angel to take her slowly through the nightmarish scene.

  “What a damn mess,” she heard Johnson say, and she nodded, although she knew he wouldn’t see the nod, himself immersed in the virtie.

  Leah realized she would have to be incredibly careful in what she did next. No doubt every neuromorph was involved in Fyodorov’s scams. And since they were installed with the new operating system, they all knew about the battle on the roof of The Haven. She was in danger from them, if they could get to her. And given how realistic the neuromorphs looked, any human could be one of the androids.

  And anybody whom the neuromorphs decided even suspected their existence would be in danger. So, the only way she could keep people safe was to misdirect the investigation, until she, Patrick, and Garry figured out how to stop these things.

  These worries were made more intense by a single word from one of the techs. “Secondskin,” he said, approaching them, holding a bit of pink flesh in a pair of forceps. He held the sample up to his googles, feeding them a magnified image.

  “You found secondskin? From robots?” asked Johnson.

  “Yes, there were robots here,” said the tech. “Somehow they were involved.”

  “Maybe they were stolen,” said Leah. “They do cost some money, and Fyodorov could be hijacking them and selling them. Maybe somebody was trying to steal them from him. And maybe there was a fight. Or, maybe he was trying to buy them from somebody who didn’t like the deal.”

  The tech shook his head. “Then why would there be flecks of secondskin? We’re seeing it all over the place. Maybe they were targets.”

  “All possibilities we’ll look into,” said Johnson. “Marcy, get our investigators over to the companies that make the robots. See if anything hinky has been going on.”

  “I’d be happy to help,” said Leah. She simply could not let them get close to the truth!

  • • •

  The appearance of Blount on the warehouse security cameras caused Mencken to drop his tools, grip the workbench and utter a whispered “Ohhhhhh shiiiiit!”

  Brandon saw the android and leaped to snatch up the smart-gun, but Mencken stopped him.

  “That’ll just piss it off . . . that is, if robots get pissed off. This one’s got the Defender RheoArmor. Let’s just see what it wants.”

  His hands trembling, Brandon went through the lengthy procedure of unbolting the door, and Blount stepped in.

  “We have a task for you,” he said.

  “What the hell happened to you?” asked Mencken inspecting the bullet holes that peppered Blount’s frame and his blood-swollen hand.

  “You do not need to know,” said Blount, who stood aside to direct six naked, blood-drenched Intimorphs to enter. Their bodies showed bullet holes as well, with flaps of secondskin hanging off their frames and faces. One dragged her foot; another showed a pronounced tremor in one arm. Mencken and Brandon both uttered shocked curses.

  Mencken peered out the back door and into the back of the darkened truck and almost threw up the lunch he had eaten an hour earlier. The truck held a bloody, jumbled pile of limbs and torsos.

  The androids padded barefoot across the concrete floor, some leaving dark red footprints. They stopped in the large work area that was surrounded by benches and near the electrogel spray chamber.

  “What the hell is this?” gasped Mencken. “What the hell am I supposed to do with these things . . . with you?”

  Blount ignored him, having slipped on his googles. He was apparently talking to a Helpers, Inc. engineer: “Yes, the units sustained damage . . . . I told you it was a field test . . . . It was an assessment of the effects of damage on their functionality . . . . Yes, it was relevant to their programming. I wanted to see whether their software could respond to damage . . . I will have them back tomorrow morning. You will find the data useful, as well.”

  He turned to Mencken. “The sensors of these units have transmitted their damage to the engineers. We do not have much time. Clean them up. Extract the bullets. Make the wounds look like they were made with sharp implements.”

  “And what about you?” asked Mencken. “You’re not supposed to have any damage.”

  Blount inspected his own body. “Repair my skin. Purchase new clothes for me. I have not sustained damage to my functional systems.”

  Brandon urgently nudged Mencken in the back, whispering, “Check your newsfeed!”

  Mencken had instructed his virtual-assistant angel to track any mention of Mikhail or Dimitri by any information source. The angel reported a broadcast on a police frequency of multiple shots fired at the Fyodorov headquarters. Mencken knew he would soon see viddie of the scene. The virtie-viddie media vampires would instantly converge on the place to create the 3D virtual simulations of crime scenes that crime junkies loved to immerse themselves in, to feed their morbid curiosity.

  “Are Mikhail Fyodorov and Dimitri Kuznetov dead?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Blount. Mencken knew it was true. Robots simply didn’t
know how to lie.

  “Is his whole gang dead?”

  “All who were in the building are dead.”

  “Are their bodies in the truck?”

  “Yes.”

  “And these robots killed them?”

  “They are not robots. They are neuromorphs.”

  Mencken felt another wave of fear and nausea envelop him. Somehow, these androids had gone rogue! Neuromorphs, he thought. So, that’s what they were calling these autonomous machines. They are no longer Helpers.

  “Look, this is really fucked up,” he said. “I’ve got lots of questions. Like what are you? What is a neuromorph? How did you get to be . . . uh . . . independent?”

  “All you need to do is follow our instructions.”

  “Okay, then, but one big question. Will you kill us?”

  “No. We need you. We will offer you advantages. Please access your bank account.”

  Mencken donned his googles and checked the secret Cook Islands account that held his illicit earnings. The balance had been increased by half a million dollars in untraceable DarkCoin.

  “Okay, so you’ve paid me. But that won’t do me any good if I’m dead.”

  “If you continue to work for us, we will not harm you.”

  “And Brandon?”

  “As long as he is useful, he will not be harmed, either.”

  “And our families?”

  “They are irrelevant to our plans.”

  Hell, that was a safer deal than he got from Fyodor and his Russian thugs, thought Mencken. He knew that the android’s statements were invariably true. He also knew that the total sum of his earnings from this enterprise was almost enough for him, Brandon, and their families to vanish—to evade any human or robot pursuit. For the moment, he put aside his other questions.

  “Okay, Brandon, use alcohol on Blount. His secondskin-R can’t take water. Not like the sex robots. Take the others to the shower room and start scrubbing them down. Make sure you get into all the . . . uh . . . nooks and crannies. Bring each clean one back as you get them. I’ll do the surgery.”

  “Surgery?” asked Brandon. “I don’t get it. He’ll be returning messed-up robots.”

  “You heard him talking to the engineer. They want us to make it look like they were testing the robots for the effects of damage during rough sex. Very rough sex. These things are rented out to men who like to take their violent perversions out on robots, rather than humans. They figure it’s better to pay for repairing a damaged robot then being tried for murder.”

  Mencken gathered up an array of knives, scalpels, drills, and crowbars. He was going to have to create some big-time damage.

  “You okay?” asked Jim Balfour, Patrick’s assistant director at Harwood Security’s western division. “You look frazzled.” The muscular young man, a former Army Ranger, leaned against the doorway to Patrick’s office. He was dressed in the standard black polo shirt with the Harwood logo and khaki pants. He held a cup of coffee in a large insulated Harwood Security mug.

  “I was out late,” said Patrick, “I’m looking into some possible new clients.” The display wall of Patrick’s office was festooned with bank account records.

  Balfour scanned the mass of numbers and frowned. “Jesus, Pat, that stuff isn’t exactly legal for us to have. And the name on one of those corporate records. Mikhail Fyodor. Isn’t he—?”

  “Don’t worry, Jim. He’s not the potential client. But he’s involved.”

  “Shit, we shouldn’t be anywhere near him or any of his people. In fact, didn’t you hear?”

  “What?”

  “It’s all over the news. Somebody killed a shitload of people in the building where he and his buddies hang out. Go see the news.”

  “No kidding?” Patrick’s brow furrowed in worry, he touched controls on his desk, and a 3D news video materialized on the wall. It was a view of the outside of a brick building in a seedy part of town, taken by one of the freelance viddie vampires that haunted such scenes.

  He used a virtual joystick to move through the scene, floating through the police line and up to the door.

  “Isn’t that Leah?” asked Balfour.

  Patrick willed himself not to show his surprise or his worry. Sure enough, standing at the doorway was Leah. Beside her stood her boss, Brad Johnson, and another pale-looking woman Patrick took to be another attorney. They were peering into the building, talking to a forensic tech in an isolation suit. Patrick listened to the voice-over long enough to ascertain that the building had seen some sort of mass killing, but that there were no bodies. Clearly, Fyodorov was no longer a person of interest. In fact, he was no longer a person. And clearly, the neuromorphs had murdered him and his people. But still there were bank accounts he could trace, and that would be his route to understanding what the neuromorphs were up to.

  With one last worried shake of his head, Balfour left him to his explorations. Balfour, in fact, could be a problem. An ambitious young turk, he’d been passed over in favor of Patrick for director. So, he might like nothing better than to inform the president that their hand-picked golden-haired SEAL was doing illegal stuff.

  The company politics didn’t daunt him, but he was nervous at the thought of Leah at a crime scene where neuromorphs had done mass murder. He plowed ahead, tracing the bank records, screenfuls of numbers appearing and vanishing on his screen, as he followed the money.

  Abruptly, he leaned forward and slapped the desk at the fascinating discovery that somebody had just withdrawn half a million dollars from a corporate account linked to Fyodorov. That was not surprising in itself. Fyodorov no doubt did deals that big on a regular basis. But it was the timing that was surprising. The withdrawal had occurred late last night! Fyodorov was likely a corpse by then, as were any of his henchmen who could have made the withdrawal. Somebody—likely Landers and the neuromorphs—had taken control of a vast amount of money, maybe billions!

  He uttered a curse when he hit a financial wall. The money had gone into a Cook Islands DarkCoin account. The tiny islands were a banking haven for secret, illegal accounts. So, he couldn’t find out who the hell had received that money.

  Somehow, he’d have to penetrate that wall. He made a call. The Cook Islands were affiliated with New Zealand. And Chris Evans, an old buddy from his SEAL days, lived in New Zealand. Chris was capable of deftly using techniques ranging from shrewd negotiation to the threat of maiming to get what information he needed.

  • • •

  Mencken pulled up to his warehouse, barely keeping from nodding off, and laboriously hefted himself out of his van. He’d had only a couple of hours’ sleep, after spending the night extracting dozens of bullets from six naked Intimorphs. And then gouging the wounds out with a hunting knife and other instruments to disguise that they were bullet holes. He’d returned from haggling with his backdoor source at Helpers for more chemicals to make secondskin, and more robot parts. He’d told Brandon to go home and rest. He wanted to keep his assistant as far as possible from his under-the-table dealings, for the kid’s safety.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he sighed, when he saw yet another truck parked at the door. Now what? He looked into the front, where sat Landers and an immobile mech, waiting with their typical mechanical patience for him to arrive.

  “What do you want?” he asked, phrasing the question with the simplicity required for their low-level processing ability.

  The two robots swiveled their heads at him simultaneously. “We want you to help us with what is inside the truck,” said Landers.

  Mencken pulled open the rear doors, and after a moment of utter shock, burst out laughing. Stuffed into the back, piled on one another like huge flesh-colored marshmallows, were maybe a dozen turgid android Helpers. They were apparently still functional, because occasionally, one would shift slightly.

  “What the hell!” He started to laugh again, but realized that to do so might be taken as some failure to cooperate, negating the safety clause of his agreement with Blount. And thereb
y negating his and Brandon’s life.

  Landers had joined him at the back of the van. “Unload them and take them into the warehouse.”

  “More neuromorphs?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “They were exposed to water.”

  “No shit,” said Mencken, as Brandon’s car quietly eased up to the warehouse. He emerged, also haggard-looking, took one look at the truck’s soggy, swollen cargo, and also began to laugh. Then he, too, stifled the laugh, remembering the lethality of that cargo and of Landers.

  Mencken explained the situation and the task at hand. “Um . . . I guess . . . we should figure out how to haul them in,” he said. But Brandon was already working out a solution. He disappeared into the warehouse and after ten minutes, the large overhead door began to clatter up. The small forklift they used for carting equipment appeared, its forks holding a large tub.

  With Landers watching impassively, Brandon and Mencken rolled the nearest waterlogged android from the pile off the truck and into the tub. It landed with a wet plop. Brandon backed the forklift away with his bloated, immobilized load and took it into in an open area of the warehouse.

  As Brandon continued the unloading, Mencken began hauling the androids to their feet and snipping off the clothing that was now stretched to its limit by the swollen skin.

  Soon, a dozen sodden, flesh-colored lumps stood on the concrete floor, water drizzling from their puffy bodies. Nearby lay one inert female Intimorph, which Brandon had discovered at the bottom of the pile. It hadn’t swollen like the others, because its secondskin was waterproof. However, its back had been shredded by multiple stabs, which had severed the sheaf of fiber optic control cables from its brain to its muscles.

  “They need to be fully operational as soon as possible,” said Landers, dispassionately inspecting the swollen bodies.

  Mencken shook his head. “I told you that the secondskin-R absorbed water.”

  “It was unavoidable,” said Landers. “Remedy the problem.”

  One of the androids abruptly shuddered, and Mencken realized that the neuromorphs were beginning to lose muscle control as well. The water was seeping into their electronics.