Of course, the problem would solve itself in fifteen years after clones were emancipated. They weren’t able to breed, and if Jinteki stopped manufacturing them, the last clone would drop dead fifteen years later.
Humanity Labor raised another issue—Human First. An underground group, often running outside the law, they still tended to have the full support of Humanity Labor and other workers’ advocacy groups, as well as a vast array of ACM organizations. The Anti-Clone Movement didn’t care whether clones got to vote or not. Unlike SAM, most other ACM groups in fact simply wanted clones gone, period, even if that meant—to use Melange Mining’s rather chilling weasel-word euphemism—retiring them.
I typed in the words “Easter egg,” followed by my NAPD pass code again. Additional data appeared.
Jones had been “hired,” if that was the right word, on the authorization of Roger Mayhurst Dow, Jr.
Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.
I’d been so entranced by my Net search that I hadn’t even noticed when the beanpod had begun accelerating. The sensation of weight had returned as the pod silently rode the twisting magnetic fields up the elevator Stalk, deeper into the black.
I shifted the focus of my online investigation to the murder victim.
At higher security levels, there was file data on Dow that couldn’t be found on Netpedia…not to mention the fact that Netpedia bios have been known to be controversial or just out-and-out wrong. I started with Dow’s credaccount. Nothing unusual there. He wasn’t on the verge of bankruptcy, didn’t have unusual debts, didn’t appear to have a drug or sex habit…
Hold on. He had 117 charges against his account over the past two years from one special creditor: Eliza’s Toybox.
So I followed that link, just to make sure I was on the right track. Eliza’s was a large business located in Heinlein, one of the biggest. And she rented out bioroids.
Most notably, bioroids who were sex-service gynoids.
There are other uses for female bioroids, of course. Eliza’s had several lines that catered particularly to rich clients who wanted an attractive domestic servant, complete with old-fashioned maid’s costume and feather duster, though even those were usually programmed to allow the client to seduce her—or to force her. Face it, though. If a client wants a generic robot laborer, he’s usually going to rent a generic male android—assuming the thing looks like a human at all.
Sexbots are big business, and they’ve been so for a long time. Back in the first decade of the 21st century, a German company marketed a sex doll called Andy the Android. She had a pulse, a heartbeat, a realistic temperature, and could simulate breathing, all for between $4,000 and $7,000, depending on the exact mix of features. During the company’s first couple of years of operation, they’d received more than four million orders.
Of course, Andy had been a bit shy in the brains department, and couldn’t carry on a conversation, much less walk or be taken home to meet the folks. That came later.
Bioroids were human simulants—android robots that mimicked human thought, intelligence, and personality through neural channeling technology. The experts were still arguing over whether AI robots could be considered intelligent, creative, or self-aware in the same way as people, but they certainly acted as though they were. And while I’d never used one myself, I understood that high-end robotic sex companions were very good at what they did. Eliza’s Toybox rented out only high-end models, and they charged a lot for the service.
It looked as though Roger Mayhurst Dow, Jr. had been a frequent purchaser of Eliza’s services.
A lawyer and lobbyist for Humanity Labor, using a bioroid for sex. That complicated things. Had Dow been into some twisted, psychological fantasy…maybe dominating a sex gynoid because he hated the things? Or had he just been indulging in guilty pleasures that would have gotten him fired if his bosses had found out?
And that made me think. Fired? Or taken apart with a mining laser?
Somehow I doubted that Humanity Labor was so paranoid about bioroids that they would kill a human employee just for dating one. But I made a mental note to question whoever was further up the chain of command above Dow. I used my security codes to access the Humanity Labor organizational charts. Dow had been an independent lobbyist who’d reported to the company’s legal department, and someone named Thea Coleman. Her record looked clean enough—not even a flight path violation—but her supervisor was Thomas Milroy Vaughn. Before he’d gone to work for Humanity Labor in their public relations department, he’d been a lawyer on retainer for Cheong Li Hua. Cheong was 14K, and that meant, almost beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Vaughn was dirty.
More leads to follow up. More people to interview. But at least now I had something to work with.
I spent most of the rest of the trip time after that exploring the murder scene on my PAD, pulling the tightly rolled screen up from the top edge and unfolding it into a 28 x 40 rigid display. Whoever had shot the crime scene had gone through the whole room, pointing the camera at everything, and all of that data had downloaded to my PAD in the Commissioner’s office that morning. That meant I could use the touchpad to navigate through a 3D scene, studying whatever caught my attention from every angle.
What a mess!
Seventy thousand kilometers above Cayambe, we arrived at the end of the line.
The Challenger Planetoid is a five-kilometer rock serving as the Beanstalk’s upper-end anchor. The Nearside facility started off as a construction shack for workers on the elevator project, including a huge spin-gravity carousel—a pair of side-by-side, three-decked wheels rotating on the planetoid’s surface. That rotation had provided a half-G of artificial gravity for the workers during the Beanstalk’s construction.
The wheels were enormous: two hundred meters across and rotating once every twenty-eight seconds in order to create a steady half-G of spin gravity. They rotated in opposite directions, the torque of one countered perfectly by the torque of the other, because without that little detail, spin would very gradually be transferred to the far larger planetoid, with disastrous consequences for the space elevator.
Today, the big rotating complex includes the original Castle Club, plus an enormous dance floor and cabaret, the Cloudtop. There’s an exclusive restaurant, the Earthview, where you can drink wine from an open glass without worrying about sloshing the contents in low gravity. There’s the Carousel Boardrooms, available for business meetings; that was where Dow was going to make his pitch to the politicians from Earthside. Directly adjacent to the up-end of the Beanstalk, there’s a large hotel and business center, the High Frontier. And just outside the twin wheels proper were the low-gravity attractions: a ballet theater where a good dancer could carry off a sauté that let her brush the ceiling with her hands, ten meters above the stage, and, of course, another Honeymoon Hilton, this one at .04Gs for those couples who had problems performing the docking maneuver in zero-G.
On Farside is a collection of surface domes and underground tunnels constituting the Challenger Mines, as well as the embarkation terminal for the Challenger Memorial Ferry. Both planetoid and base are named for the Space Shuttle Challenger, destroyed seventy-three seconds after takeoff on January 28, 1986, back at the dawn of the space age.
We dropped down the last kilometer of elevator toward the planetoid’s Nearside at .04Gs, propelled solely by the artificial spin-gravity of the Stalk at that altitude. Earth had continued dwindling until it covered just 10.5 degrees of arc. It was well past noon in New Angeles, and I could see the terminator, edged by sunset colors, following the curving edge of night across western Europe and the bulge of Africa.
We didn’t need attendants to help us float into the terminal this time. Here, I weighed a mere 3.2 kilos, enough to keep me on the deck so long as I watched my step. An attendant did hand me a pair of low-G grip-slippers, though. They fit over my regular shoes, and gripped the carpet on the deck with thousands of near-invisible hooks. If I had jumped hard, though, I would have sai
led into the ceiling ten meters above my head…and it would have taken me a long time to fall back to the floor at just four-hundredths of a meter per second squared.
The terminal was filled with passengers, some going up to Heinlein, others coming down—a bustling place. There were the usual shops and souvenir stands, but commercial ventures were not nearly so evident here as they’d been at Midway. The feel of the place was a bit more raw and new-frontierish than the lower stops on the elevator, with expanses of bare metal and lots of foam padding to protect the heads of the careless. No backscatter x-ray checks on the way out. The only security I could see were cameras on some of the walls—and the ever-present Beanstalk yellow jackets.
They actually had full-sim bioroids wandering around the terminal, though—perfect replicas of the seven Challenger astronauts killed in the disaster. I had to ask Christa McAuliffe for directions to the High Frontier Hotel and Meeting Center.
Full-sim, of course, means extra care has been taken to avoid the Uncanny Valley; unless you get very close, it’s hard to tell you’re talking to a simulant. These models don’t have the annoying cables in the backs of their wrists, or the blank silver eyes employed to make a bioroid seem just a little less human. Christa’s eyes were the dark, dark brown of the real person—lifelike and lustrously bright enough to remind me of Lily’s. With these bioroids, Haas-Bioroid had crossed the Uncanny Valley and made it through to the other side.
I wondered why they hadn’t done this with all of their products.
“Right over there, sir,” Christa’s ghost told me. “Across the terminal to the blue door, down the passageway, and up two levels.”
“Thank you.”
“Captain Harrison?”
I turned to face a small, neat man with a goatee. Beards are common enough on Earth, but not so much on the Beanstalk or in Heinlein, though they’re not unknown. There’s a chance that you’ll get hair caught in the pressure rings when you’re trying to don a helmet in a hurry, and it makes for a poor seal if you have to wear an emergency oxygen mask, which can happen if a pressure hull is breached.
“Yes?”
“I’m Tom Fuchida,” he told me, extending his hand. “Manager of the Challenger High Frontier Hotel and Meeting Center.”
“How do you do?” I said, shaking his hand. “And just how the hell did you know I was coming?” I hadn’t shared my itinerary with anyone.
“Commissioner Dawn called me a couple of hours ago, and told me you were on your way up-Stalk. She told me to extend to you every courtesy, and to cooperate completely with your investigation. We tracked you by your e-ID, and I came down to meet your pod.”
“I see. Thank you very much.”
Damn Dawn. She knew I’d rather show up without the locals being prepped to receive me. I didn’t want them screwing with my crime scene. Why the hell had she called ahead? Didn’t she want me to solve this case?
“What would you like to see first?”
“The crime scene, of course,” I told him. “I trust you have it cordoned off. No one in, no one out.”
“We’ve followed standard procedure, Captain. The room has been sealed off from the public.” He produced a deep blue handkerchief and mopped his upper lip. “It was dreadful in there. Dreadful. In any case, the only ones in or out have been elevator security pers—”
“What?” I turned to face him, furious. “You have damned elevator mercs trampling the crime scene?”
“Sir!” he sounded shocked. Perhaps he was. “The Space Elevator Authority employs only the highest caliber of security officer.”
“SEA employs rent-a-cops, Mr. Fuchida, who wouldn’t recognize their own butts if you dropped them into their open and waiting hands!”
“We are handling this case according to standard procedure, Mr. Harrison, as I said.”
Which probably meant SITFUBAR—Situation Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition.
“Just get me there, Mr. Fuchida.”
We took a slidewalk across the terminal and entered the Blue Sector. Through the passageway and up two broad and sloping ramps brought us to a hotel lobby, the High Frontier Hotel.
“So, what do you know about Mr. Dow’s death?” I asked him, using my PAD to record the conversation.
“Just what we told you in our report this morning. A maid went up to Mr. Dow’s room at about 2330 last night. He’d called down and asked for a nightcap. She found him…like that. Like in the vid we sent you.” He looked and sounded like he was going to be sick.
“Is the body still there?”
“No, sir! Of course not!”
I groaned inwardly. “Great. Where is it?”
“In the med center morgue, of course. We didn’t want to risk having it…uh…begin to decay.”
“He wasn’t going to start rotting on you that fast,” I said.
“The environment in a base like this is…delicate, Captain Harrison. Very delicate. It was important to, um, get him on ice quickly.”
What Fuchida was trying to say delicately was an indelicate truth. The air circulating through the base was carefully monitored for temperature, humidity, and particulate levels—especially dust and mold—but the environmental control personnel of a hotel, I knew, tended to be fastidious to the point of obsession. An odor in one room would very swiftly circulate throughout all of the other rooms, and then across the station.
And then something else occurred to me as I recalled the images of the crime scene I’d seen on my PAD that morning in Dawn’s office. The legs on the bed. Part of the torso on the floor.
We were through the hotel lobby, and making our way down a long corridor with numerous doors to the left and right.
“Mr. Dow’s abdomen was cut open, wasn’t it?” I asked.
Again the handkerchief came out, and Fuchida could only nod.
Once, during the War, I’d had to pry open the pressure suit of a man who’d caught a laser burn across the belly. We were in the emergency field surgery unit, and I’d removed my helmet. My God, I will never forget the smell—charred meat and leaking intestines.
Yeah, they’d had good reason to get that body packed up and on ice, or the smell would have been all over the station.
“Here we are, Captain,” Fuchida said, gesturing at an internal pressure-seal door with a yellow and black keep-out disk mounted on it. A couple of armed yellow jackets watched me suspiciously from either side, and I flashed them my badge.
One handed me a bright yellow cleansuit. Fuchida waved it away when one of them offered him a suit as well.
“Not coming in?” I asked, setting the evidence kit on the floor and handing my PAD to a guard. I removed the grip-slippers and stepped into the suit. It fit snuggly over my shoes, and, as soon as it sensed the pulse at my ankle, began to unfold and expand, spreading up and out and around to completely enclose me. An environmental pack smaller than my PAD rested at my waist, and cool air filled the transparent bubble helmet. Sensing my body size, it snugged down to a perfect fit. I retrieved my PAD and club.
“No…no,” he said. “I’ll…wait here.”
Fuchida used a keycard to open the door for me and I stepped inside.
Oh, God…
Chapter Five
Day 1
The room was one of the High Frontier’s finest—luxuriously appointed and quite large by up-Stalk standards. The low, slanted ceiling and one wall were part of the outer hotel dome and were partially made of a curved sheet of transplas rather than titanium steel. That was no digital projected image with the Earth, impossibly blue and white, suspended in the blackness directly overhead, but the real thing. The Beanstalk was a thread-slender dark scratch across Earth’s face, vanishing into her center.
The room was bathed in Earthlight, ethereal and beautiful. That made what the light revealed, somehow, that much more horrific.
There was blood everywhere, including on the transplas ceiling directly above the large, square bed. The bed itself—which rose only half a meter above the fl
oor and was covered by what looked like violet silk sheets—was crumpled, burned, and soggy with blood, and there was a pool of the stuff on the floor alongside it.
Two yellow jackets were in the room, both in cleansuits. “Hold it right there,” one said, his voice slightly muffled by his helmet. “You authorized to be in here, Mac?”
My badge was inaccessible inside my jacket and the yellow cleansuit, but when I tapped it, it broadcast my e-ID. The yellow jackets’ PADs chirped, and brought up my number and ID.
“Uh…yes, sir,” one of them said, reading his screen. “Good to meet you, sir.”
“What the hell are you doing in my crime scene?” I demanded. My PAD gave me their names: Smethers and Daley.
“Collecting evidence, Captain,” the second one, Daley, told me. He held up a small, plastic bag with voice-tag sample tubes inside.
“Trampling through evidence and mucking it up, more like it,” I replied. I could see blood on their cleansuit booties, and bloody footprints tracked all over the room. “How many of these damned footprints are yours?”
“Uh, the blood is kind of everywhere, Captain Harrison,” Smethers said. “It’s hard to avoid, you know?”
“I do know. That’s why you people shouldn’t even be in here, damn it! Now get the hell out!”
Smethers skittered out like a kicked puppy, leaving more bloody tracks on the carpet. Daley glared at me. “You don’t need to take that ristie tone with us, Cap.”
“It’s ‘Captain Harrison,’ and I’ll take any tone I damned well please.” I reached out my gloved hand. “I’ll take that.”
Reluctantly, he handed me the evidence pack.
“Sign for it.”
There was a tag on the evidence bag, with a barcode, a signature box, and a small attached stylus. He used the stylus to sign his name, then handed the package to me.
Android: Free Fall Page 6