Isaac Asimov's I, Robot: To Preserve

by Mickey Zucker Reichert

  Susan cleared her throat, reciting the contents verbatim: “‘Susan, the Three Laws are irreversibly intrinsic to the positronic brain. There is not, and has never been, a code to uncouple them. My love for you has always been as clear and real as any father could have for his daughter. Never forget you were my everything.’”

  Silence followed. Pal swallowed hard, and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “That’s . . . pretty straightforward.”

  “Yes,” Susan said.

  “Unless . . .” Pal trailed off, lost in his own thoughts.

  Susan did not have the energy to question, so she simply waited for him to continue. Sleep crept up on her, and his voice startled her awake. “Susan, do you have the original code from the port key?”

  It took Susan a moment to emerge from the haze. “Not the original, no. It was in some sort of machine language that only Nate could translate. But I have his translation in the form of a cryptogram. I decoded it right on the paper.”

  Pal stood up. “May I see it, please?”

  “It’s in the top drawer of my dresser in an envelope.” Susan murmured sleepily, “Under my underwear.” As Pal headed in the indicated direction, Susan managed to add, “Wake me at seven. I need to be at the Nineteenth Precinct at eight to prepare for Lawrence’s bail hearing.”

  Pal stopped in his tracks and turned to face Susan. “Sweetheart, I’m not waking you up. You need your rest, and there’s nothing you can do at a bail hearing, anyway.”

  Susan tried to remember what Jake had told her at the restaurant. “But Jake thinks . . .” Shapes and colors filled Susan’s mind. Her words seemed to float in midair.

  “That was before you were attacked and injured, I’m sure. The hospital told me to let you sleep as long as possible.”

  Exhaustion overtook Susan, and she drifted into sleep.

  • • •

  Susan awakened to the sound of vicious arguing from her living room. She leapt from her bed, still wearing the blood-splashed khakis and ripped shirt from the wee morning hours. The sudden movement sent a wash of pain through her shoulder. She rushed to the other room, clutching at the bandage to assure it remained in its proper place. It seemed secure.

  Pal and Jake stood glaring at each other, but as Susan appeared, they both turned to look at her. Nate sat quietly on the love seat, looking decidedly uncomfortable, his hands clenched in his lap.

  “What the hell is going on in here?” Susan demanded, glaring at both men, then glancing at Nate. “And when did you get home?” Before anyone could respond, she added, “What time is it, anyway?” She glanced at her Vox for the answer, only to find it black. She had never seen an empty Vox screen before, so she tapped up the brightness, then checked for silent mode. Nothing worked. “What the hell?”

  Pal was at Susan’s side in an instant, though he practically had to shove Jake out of his way. “What’s wrong?”

  Susan held out her Vox arm. “Nothing. It’s dead. Battery must have gone out.”

  Jake stepped up, too. “I had a battery start to fail once. My Vox made the most obnoxious noises, and I ran it to the store. They told me it was in phase one, replaced the battery in less than five minutes, and it’s worked fine ever since.”

  Susan shook her arm and held the Vox to her ear. It made no noise at all. Nothing lit up.

  Pal held out a hand, and Susan removed her Vox so he could examine it.

  Jake continued. “Apparently, the noise comes first. It’s horrible, unignorable. He said I had a solid two weeks before the battery actually died. There’s a sequence of various noises. The blinking starts a week before battery death. Guy said he’s never heard of a Vox dying before someone brings it in, usually in a panic.”

  Susan supposed that was the reason neither she nor anyone she knew had ever suffered a Vox loss. The atomic batteries had an extremely long life; and, apparently, they made a loud, slow production of their demise. Still, that did not explain her current problem. “Well, it’s definitely down.”

  Pal did all the same things Susan had tried plus a few more. “You’re right. It’s broken.”

  Jake volunteered, “I can take Susan to the store and get it repaired. That’ll give us some time to talk.”

  Pal stepped between Jake and Susan protectively, still clutching her Vox. “No way! I’m not trusting her to your shoddy protection again. You got Kendall killed. Susan is lucky to be alive after your incompetence.”

  Jake’s hands balled to fists. “You ridiculous bastard! I did the best I could.”

  “Not good enough!” Pal shouted. “When people in your protective charge are killed, you’ve failed. Miserably. And I’m not trusting Susan’s life to your incompetence again. Period!”

  Jake lowered his head, biting his lower lip. He clearly wanted to fight, but he could scarcely deny what had happened. “What would you have done differently, pretty boy?”

  Pal glared. “A million things. I’d have parked in a better place for starters. I wouldn’t have let myself get distracted. If I’d been there, we’d have a dead shooter and a live doctor.”

  Susan did not like the tone of the conversation, and she certainly did not appreciate any man telling her where she could go and with whom, but she had hired Pal for exactly that purpose. He had the world’s best training and nothing but her interests in mind.

  “Twenty/twenty hindsight,” Jake spat out.

  “You don’t need hindsight if you use foresight.” Pal handed Susan back her nonfunctioning Vox. “You come into our apartment claiming you have things to tell us, but so far you’ve done nothing but accuse me of unspeakable things and try to defend your indefensible mistakes. Kendall is dead because of you!”

  “Stop it!” Susan hollered, replacing her Vox on her wrist. “I’d like to hear what Jake has to say.” She pinned her gaze on the policeman. “About the case only. I don’t want any more bickering.” She hoped Jake had not used Kendall’s arguments from the previous night to antagonize Pal, but the “pretty boy” comment suggested he had.

  Jake cleared his throat. He turned Susan a hopeful look, then rolled his eyes to Pal, then back to Susan. “I’d really like to talk to you alone, Susan.”

  “You can go in the bedroom, if you want,” Pal said through gritted teeth. “But you’re not leaving this apartment with Susan unless I’m with you.”

  Susan understood Pal’s concern. She appreciated his compromise, but they all knew the apartment was too small and the walls too thin to keep a conversation truly private. “Anything you can say to me you can say in front of Pal.”

  Jake turned Pal a disgusted look. “Fine. I’m here because you didn’t show up for the bail hearing. I couldn’t get through to your Vox all day; so, as soon as I got off work, I came here.”

  The reason now self-evident, Susan merely lowered and raised her head once in understanding. Damn it! I slept all freaking day. “How did it go? The bail hearing, I mean.”

  Jake grimaced. “No bail, but don’t blame yourself. Judge Eads wouldn’t let anyone but Lawrence, the lawyers, and some of the boys from the Nineteenth Precinct in the room.” He added, “Alfred’s been trying to reach you, too. I told him what happened and that I was going to check on you physically. He requested I call him from your place.”

  “All right.” Susan made a fluttering motion toward Jake’s Vox to suggest he should make and open-speaker the call.

  Jake complied. Apparently, he used the general USR number, because the secretary answered.

  “United States Robots and Mechanical Men. Amara speaking.”

  “Hi, Amara.” Jake tipped his head toward Susan. “This is Detective Carson. Alfred asked me to call him from Susan’s apartment. I have Susan and Pal with me.”

  “Hi, Amara,” Susan said.

  Amara’s voice gained warmth. “Hi, Dr. Calvin. How are you feeling?”

  “I’
m fine,” Susan assured her. “Can you get Alfred for us, please?”

  “Gladly.” The line went silent for several moments before Alfred’s familiar voice replaced Amara’s. “Susan? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Susan repeated.

  Alfred made a wordless noise. “When I brought”—he appeared to have forgotten the name but did know better than to say “Nate” in front of Jake—“your cousin back to your apartment, your boyfriend said you’d gotten . . . um . . . shot.”

  “Mildly,” Susan said.

  “Mildly . . . shot?”

  Susan explained. “We think it was a graze or a ricochet.”

  Jake raised a hand, though Alfred could not see him. “Actually, sir, I can speak to that now. What hit Susan was a training round.”

  All eyes went to Jake, and Susan saw the same surprise on Pal’s face that she was sure her own reflected. Even Alfred would have stared at Jake if they had chosen a picture connection. Unable to converse nonverbally, he asked the question also on Susan’s mind. “What’s a training round?”

  “It’s a type of nonlethal ammunition used for realistic exercises, mostly by law enforcement and military. They can shoot around each other without the risk of mortal consequences, though it’s considered bad form to actually hit a colleague instead of a target. The training round leaves a mark of a certain color, depending on whose gun it came out of, and the instructor can determine how the encounter would have gone down in real life based on those hits.”

  Susan looked at the bandages on her arm. “It hurt an awful lot and bruised pretty badly to be a paintball.”

  “Not a paintball,” Jake corrected quickly. “A training round is fired from a real gun. It can penetrate thin fabrics and cause a pretty uncomfortable injury. They’ve been known to occasionally break a bone.”

  Susan’s hand drifted to the bandage. “How do you know it was a training round? The ER didn’t recover anything, and they didn’t mention any paint marks.”

  “The Sapphire took several hits,” Jake said. “Small dents, each with a bit of red paint. I remember hearing projectiles hitting the roof at about the same time you got shot. A dot of red paint would disappear amid blood and bruises.”

  Susan’s mind raced. There seemed no logical reason for the SFH to pepper them with nonlethal missiles, nor did it fit the scenario as she recalled it. “But Kendall—”

  Jake interrupted. “Was shot with a 7.62 by 25 mm, solid copper Special Mission Capable round manufactured by the largest ammunition company in the world, Magtech.”

  “Really,” Alfred said, startling Susan. She had forgotten he was still on Vox. “I’ve heard of Magtech, of course, but I didn’t know they made a homogeneous copper bullet.”

  “It’s a subsonic 220-grain expanding hollow point that’s barrier blind, meaning it won’t expand if it hits hard material but will if it hits flesh. It’s been around for years but is only available to the military and certain government groups, like the Department of Defense.” Jake rolled his eyes toward Susan, as if to suggest she needed to focus on details she would rather not hear. “It was supposed to be released to police departments and private sales a couple of weeks ago, but it got delayed indefinitely. It seems the government put last-minute pressure on Magtech because, when fired from a modified and suppressed M4, it’s reputed to be Hollywood quiet, and it uses low-signature primers and flash-retardant powder so it’s not visible when fired.”

  There’s no way Jake could have seen or heard it to protect us. Susan guessed that might be what the detective wanted to convey in his own defense, but she needed clarification even on that point. “By ‘Hollywood quiet’ you mean . . . ?”

  Jake supplied, “Hollywood-based media is the reason so-called silencers were rebranded as suppressors. In most movies, they appear as black cylinders you can screw onto any gun to make a gunshot almost inaudible. In real life, as you know from experience, suppressed gunfire sounds like slightly diffused . . . well, gunfire. When you say something is Hollywood quiet, it’s as close to soundless as it can get.” Addressing Susan directly allowed Jake to stare into her eyes. He clearly needed her to take home a more salient point than noise, and he wanted her to do it without tipping off any of their companions.

  Pal looped an arm around Susan’s waist, his expression dubious. “How can you possibly know all that? The cops told us the SFH had mopped up the scene again, just like in Central Park.”

  Susan turned her face to his. “I don’t remember that.”

  “Painkillers,” Pal reminded. “You were in and out of Loopy Land all evening.”

  Jake fairly smirked, as if he had caught Pal in a verbal trap. Susan did not like contemptuousness in general but especially aimed at herself or a loved one. She thought she had a glimpse of why the two men had been arguing when she awakened. Apparently, Jake had accused Pal of something, presumably the same issues Kendall had raised at the restaurant the previous night. Kendall. Susan had no difficulty bringing the scene at Alphonse’s back to life, Kendall chatting, joking, laughing. It seemed impossible that someone could be so vigorous, then dead an hour later. She felt tears sting her eyes again.

  “The scene was mopped up,” Jake admitted. “But a woman two blocks away found a spent copper bullet in a potted plant on her terrace. It had Kendall’s DNA.” He added, looking directly at Susan. “I don’t know if it helps, but Kendall’s autopsy showed he had itai itai disease. I understand it’s extremely painful and inevitably fatal.” He turned her another profound look, as if he found that information enormously important.

  Susan racked her brain, damning the painkillers that, apparently, kept her from remembering. She knew she had heard of itai itai sometime during medical school, but she had definitely never seen it. She reached for her Vox, immediately saw the blank screen, and sighed. She would have to find another time to look it up. She considered asking Jake, but an almost imperceptible shake of his head held her silent.

  As usual, Alfred struck to the heart of the matter. “So, if the release was canceled, who all would have access to this proprietary ammunition?”

  Pal jumped back in. “Anyone working for Magtech. Also, whoever was testing it for them: special dealers, high-level tactical trainers . . .”

  “Someone in the military, the government,” Jake inserted.

  Pal rolled his eyes. “Obviously.”

  “Speaking of the government,” Alfred said through Jake’s Vox, “we retrieved nearly all of our robots as you requested, Susan. The only ones not in yet are on Mercury or indispensable governmental assignments.”

  “And?” Susan encouraged.

  Alfred’s tone did not suggest he conveyed good news. “Brand-new batteries in all the governmental returns.”

  “What?” Pal and Jake said almost simultaneously, then glared at each other.

  Susan realized it did them little good to examine the replacement batteries for radiation exposure. “Why would they do that?” She added carefully, “Unless . . . maybe . . . they had something to hide?”

  Alfred responded, “Routine, they told me. They replace all the batteries once a year to prevent any robot from failing at a random and possibly critical juncture.”

  Susan asked the obvious. “Is such a thing necessary? How long do their batteries last?”

  “The function of most robots doesn’t outlast their batteries. By the time the battery fails, the robot has usually been taken out of circulation because we’ve built something better.”

  Susan knew John Calvin had functioned for twenty years, at least. She used his code name to remind Alfred that not every person in the room knew his purpose. “What about N12-C?”

  “We made several updates on N12-C to allow for aging. We replaced the battery every five or six years, just to be safe, and every time there was still plenty of juice.”

  Susan did not want to dwell on this subj
ect. She still had not broached it with Pal. It was not an easy thing to tell a lover that a robot had raised you. “So they certainly don’t need to change the batteries every year.”

  Jake added, “And isn’t it a weird coincidence that the change day came up right about the time you sent out the recall?”

  “Yes,” Alfred said, “but coincidence it is. The changing of the batteries preceded my sending out the recall notices by several hours.”

  Pal released Susan with a reassuring pat on the hip. “I have some experience with the government, at least the military part. It’s generally cheaper and easier for them to do something global, like replacing all the batteries every year, rather than trying to keep individual logs on each machine. As far as timing, the fiscal year starts October first, so it’s not surprising they would choose to do something like this in September to use up any allotted money.”

  Alfred sighed. “Well, the upshot is we still have no idea who might have tested radiation doses on the robots or which robots they may have used, which is bad in so many ways.”

  Susan had made the suggestion in order to change USR to a leasing system as well as to catch the criminals. “So many ways?”

  Alfred explained. “A robot exposed to radiation could have significant damage to its positronic brain. We can’t take a chance that it caused a negative effect. We may have to permanently disable . . . all of them.” He fairly moaned at the end.

  Susan knew the cost would be astronomical, but an ethical company trying to keep its product pure had no other choice. “You’re not really going to destroy them all? Are you?”

  “Not yet. We’ll thoroughly test the brains of as many as we can, starting with the most valuable robots, of course.”

  “Of course,” Susan repeated, her thoughts already miles beyond. It was no surprise that the government chose convenience over record-keeping, no matter the cost to the taxpaying citizens. It meant they still had no idea who had tampered with the robots, who had done the necessary experimentation to determine how much and what type of radiation to use to incapacitate Nate for the right amount of time without destroying him. “Alfred, that means the mole might still be someone who works at USR. You need to be very careful who you trust with any information.”