“And had Mr. Dow been a client of yours before?”
“Yes. He requested me by name and number.”
“Many of our clients do,” Manchester put in. “There is a very highly placed prelate within the Starlight Crusade church who uses Eve’s services exclusively.”
“Doesn’t that violate a vow or something?”
“Only with a person, Captain Harrison. Eve is not a person.”
“Hm. Eve, did he…hurt you?”
“I do not feel pain, Captain Harrison.”
“Not at all?”
“Not in a way that humans would describe it.”
“Show him your back, dear.”
Obediently, Eve turned around. She was wearing a kind of gray-blue business suit, with a high collar and long sleeves, but leaving her cleavage on display. She opened the neck piece and let the dress fall, in slow motion, to the floor.
“My God,” was all I could say.
Bioroids don’t bleed. No blood. They do have a kind of circulatory system for the hydraulic fluid that works their muscular actuators, but that’s deep enough inside that superficial cuts can’t reach it. Her back and buttocks didn’t look bloody or bruised, but they were torn open in a dozen places, the plastic hanging in strips.
“Turn around, dear,” Manchester told her.
She did so. The high collar on her dress had been obscuring the marks on her throat, and the long sleeves had covered the peeling chafes on her wrists. On her torso, just below where the ribcage would end on a human, at the solar plexus, there was a nasty burn—the soft plastic partially melted and blackened. It looked as though she’d been stabbed twice there, too. The punctures, small and close together, weren’t deep, but they made me wince. Maybe Eve didn’t feel pain, but I felt an answering empathic twinge nonetheless.
“May I touch you?”
“Of course. Would you like me to touch you?”
“Uh…no. Thank you. Just stand still for a moment.” I probed gently at the burn mark. It was quite deep. What had Dow used? Something hotter than a cigarette.
I pulled out my PAD and photographed the damage to Eve’s body, front and back.
“We didn’t have a replacement back for the Eve model in stock,” Manchester told us. “We have a new one ordered from Haas-Bioroid, and it should be here in another day or two. When it arrives, we’ll snap off all the ruined parts, snap on the replacements, and you’ll be good as new, won’t you, dear?”
“Yes, Ms. Manchester.”
I examined her wrists more closely. There were marks on the synthetic skin of both wrists, just below the cables connecting her lower forearms to the back of her hands, like the marks left by cuffs or binders. “He tied you to the bed? And whipped you?”
“Yes, Captain Harrison.”
“Did you free yourself, or did he untie you?”
“He freed me,” she told me. “Just before someone came to the door.”
“Who was that?” I asked. Then I added, “You can put your clothes back on. It’s distracting, having you standing there like that.”
“I heard Mark Henry at the door,” she said, stooping over and pulling up her dress.
“Heard him?”
“My hearing is considerably more acute than humans,” she said, the tone as blank as her eyes, and completely matter-of-fact.
“Did he come in?”
“I do not remember.”
“What do you remember?”
“I remember that room service came to the door,” she said.
“I see. What happened then?”
“I do not remember.”
“Was it the clone instead of room service?”
“I do not remember.”
“Did the clone kill Mr. Dow?”
“I do not remember him doing so.”
“Did the clone have a mining laser?”
“I do not remember.”
“Do you remember a mining laser?”
“No.”
“What do you remember?”
“I remember…boarding the Challenger Memorial Ferry.”
“That was about forty minutes later. What do you remember between the time room service came to the door, and when you got aboard the ferry?”
“I remember…screaming. Screaming. Screaming. Screaming…”
“Oh, dear,” Manchester said. Standing swiftly, she reached up and did something to the back of Eve’s head, just below the hairline. I saw a plastic cover swing open, and Manchester pressed something hard enough to force Eve’s head forward and down. “A reset switch,” Manchester told me.
“I remember very little,” Eve said in cool and matter-of-fact tones as her head popped back up. “My analogue memory includes images of returning down the corridor outside the room. I had been programmed to return home. I was doing so.”
“What about the clone?”
“He was no longer present. I believe he had already left, but I do not have clear memories of that period of time.”
“Did you see anyone else in the room besides Roger Dow?”
“I do not remember anyone else.”
“Do you remember seeing Roger Dow dead?”
“I remember…screaming. Screaming. Screaming…”
Manchester again opened the panel at the back of her neck and pressed something. “I really think that it’s not a good idea to keep questioning the poor thing,” she said, snapping the panel shut. “This sort of emotional looping can be extremely stressful for a bioroid.”
“Eve,” I said, ignoring her. “Did you kill Roger Dow?”
“I do not remember doing so.”
“Did Mark Henry 103 kill Roger Dow?”
“I do not remember him doing so.”
Dead end.
Her eyes were bothering me. Her speech was, if not monotone, then precise and somewhat flat. When a sexbot turns up the sultry, she can set the room on fire with the heat. Expressive doesn’t begin to cover it.
“Tell me, Ms. Manchester,” I said, pointing. “Why do bioroids have the silver eyes?”
“I think it’s silly, myself,” she said. “But it’s supposed to help avoid the Uncanny Valley effect.”
I knew what she was referring to, of course. The Uncanny Valley was first described during the 1970s, and had been based, in part, on a paper published in 1906 by Ernst Jentsch called “On the Psychology of the Uncanny.” So it had been around for a long time.
The modern Uncanny Valley was a simple enough concept. Make androids more and more lifelike, appear more and more human, and you’ll elicit a more and more positive response in humans interacting with the things. Eventually, though, you reach a certain, hard-to-define point where the thing is so lifelike it seems…wrong. Creepy. Both familiar and strange at the same time, and that sets up an emotional dissonance that makes you feel repulsed instead of attracted.
Now, if you can continue making an android even more lifelike, to the point where it is almost literally indistinguishable from a living human, the curve of acceptance swings back up out of the valley again, and humans will be able to relate to the machine just as if it were a person. I thought of the McAuliffe bioroid back at the Challenger Planetoid. But pushing the verisimilitude that extra little bit is expensive, and there were lots of people who thought making perfectly lifelike machines might be dangerous.
Hollywood again. How many movies have there been through the years where human robots were engaged in plots to take over the world, perhaps by replacing world leaders with perfect robotic look-alikes?
“Haas-Bioroid was trying to gain more acceptance for their products,” Manchester explained. “They deliberately added some features to back their products away from the Uncanny Valley.”
I nodded. Bioroids don’t need things like these electrical cables exposed on their wrists. Both the power connections and the muscle actuators are the thickness of human hairs, or finer, easily hidden inside the framework. And those silver eyes? Geez…we’ve had lifelike glass eyes indistinguishabl
e from the real thing for centuries. If you ask me, the silver eyes on a typical bioroid are creepier than anything in the Uncanny Valley. With Floyd, I could ignore them. Most of the time he wears dark glasses or goggles anyway, and you can’t see them. But silver eyes in a love-bundle like Eve were a serious turnoff. At least for me.
“I don’t think it worked,” Manchester said. “The eyes are the part of the human face you notice first, and if they’re not right, you don’t accept the face as truly human. That was the idea, of course…but bioroid eyes look strange, and that drives away customers.”
“I don’t see how you get any,” I said. “When I was a kid, I had nightmares of a big dog or wolf…you know? And what was scary about it was the eyes. All white, no iris or pupil.”
“A lot of folks feel the same way,” Manchester said, nodding. “So…we’ve developed a work-around. Show him, dear.”
Eve closed her eyes. When they opened again, they looked…beautiful. Irises of a deep blue, pupils deep and lustrous.
Eve blinked again, and the eyes were once more blank silver.
“Neat trick.”
“We do what we have to in order to survive, Captain,” Manchester said. “As it happens, there’s a law on the books that says that bioroids must have eyes that distinguish them from humans. That ‘neat trick,’ as you call it, lets Eve look—shall we say—’appealing’ when she’s working. When she’s off duty, the eyes are as you see them.”
“That certainly follows the letter of the law,” I mused. “Her eyes are different from human eyes, no matter how you look at them.”
“Precisely. You might be interested to know, Captain, that the law was introduced in the U.S. Senate a few years ago by one Roger Mayhurst Dow, Jr.”
“The murdered man?”
“The same, during his time in the Senate. As I told you, he hated bioroids…and I think he was afraid of them.”
“And a law like that would help keep them from being accepted as…people.”
“Exactly.”
“Eve?”
“Yes?”
“When you were…working with Dow. Did you have eyes that looked human? Or were they like they are now?”
“He ordered me to keep my eyes at Presentation One.”
“That’s the silver look,” Manchester added. “Light passes through them, just like in silvered sunglasses. Isn’t that right, Eve dear?”
“Yes, Ms. Manchester.”
“Your vision is normal with the other eyes, the human ones?”
“Yes, Captain Harrison. My vision with Presentation Two is limited to optical wavelengths and the shorter IR wavelengths, and I cannot see in ultraviolet.”
“Is that a handicap?” I glanced at Floyd, who was silently watching.
“In the normal course of activities,” he said, “it is not.”
“No, I imagine it’s not.” I was wondering if bioroids would be more accepted by the general public if their eyes weren’t creepy-scary, like that. “May I see your human eyes again, please?”
She blinked. Blue eyes stared at me.
The effect was not perfect. There was just a touch of fashion-mannequin effect, a feeling that those eyes were staring through and past your head, not focused on you. The Uncanny Valley, again.
But I found myself thinking of her as a person when her eyes didn’t reflect my face.
“Eve?”
“Yes?”
“Can you get angry at someone?”
“I do not understand the question, Captain Harrison.”
“Dow beat you. Abused you. And he wanted to get rid of all bioroids. Did that make you angry?”
“I do not feel anger, as humans seem to use the word.”
“You don’t remember if you killed Dow.”
“Captain Harrison, I really must protest this…this inquisition!…”
I ignored her. “Answer my question, Eve.”
“No, Captain Harrison.”
“Could you have killed him?”
“If you mean was I physically capable of doing so, yes. I am considerably stronger than typical humans. And humans are rather fragile in certain key respects.”
“But could you have killed him if you’d had a reason to do so?”
“I do not understand the question, Captain Harrison.”
“Did anyone order you to kill him?”
“I do not have such an order in my command list or in my timeline.”
“Your timeline was erased.” I was still staring into her eyes. They were gorgeous.
“Yes, Captain Harrison.”
“Who erased it?”
“I do not remember.”
“Could you have erased it yourself?”
“That is not possible.”
“That’s true, Captain Harrison,” Floyd said. He always addressed me formally when we were in the presence of others. “Bioroids are not designed to be self-programming, and that includes intentional purges.”
I sighed. We were so close here.
But we seemed to have reached a solid, blank wall.
As blank as Eve’s eyes in Presentation One.
“I’m afraid Eve will have to come along with us, Ms. Manchester,” I said.
“Oh, no! Surely not!”
“Yes, ma’am. There’s an APB out for her arrest.” I didn’t add that I’d ordered the APB…or that technically you can only arrest a human; you could commandeer a machine, but it worked out to much the same thing. “It’s partly for her own protection. I also want the android techs at the station to run some tests on her for me.”
“I will file a formal protest with your superiors!…”
“Go ahead. Eve is evidence in a murder case, Ms. Manchester. She may also be a witness, if we can figure out how to unlock her memory.”
“I…I understand. I just don’t want to see her hurt, is all.”
“We won’t hurt her,” I said. “When those spare parts come in, you can bring them around to the Fra Mauro Station and install them. But we’ll want to hold on to the damaged parts after you replace them.”
“Of course, Captain. Evidence…”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“But, how long will it be before she can come back to work?”
Eliza Manchester was a strange one. She talked about her bioroids being family, but she was concerned about them missing work.
She was such a nice little old English lady…pimp.
Chapter Twelve
Day 6
Floyd had volunteered to take Eve 5VA3TC to the NAPD satellite station at Fra Mauro. I had given him some explicit instructions to pass on to the officers there. She was to be treated well, and no one else was to be allowed to see her except Eliza Manchester, and then only with supervision. No lawyers—but that wouldn’t be an issue since bioroids didn’t have civil rights and we didn’t need to charge her…yet. I wanted them to give her a complete chemical scan—especially her hands, where bits of packing gel or blood might remain for weeks despite careful cleaning. If she’d handled the laser, the silicone compound would still be on her skin
I’d ordered a complete protein work-up, too. Some of Dow’s DNA would still be in her, even days later, and it would be possible to pull in a molecular match with the traces of lubricant I’d picked up in Room Twelve.
Finally, I wanted Dr. Jason Cherchi to examine her. He was our chief roboticist in Heinlein—in fact, he worked for Haas-Bioroid in their research department, but he consulted for the NAPD on the side. I wanted to hear his opinion about the various injuries and damaged spots on Eve’s body.
The more I thought about it, the more suspicious I was of those two puncture marks in the burned patch on Eve’s lower chest.
“You sure you don’t mind doing this?” I’d asked Floyd at the entrance of the tube-train that would take them to the police station.
“Not in the least,” Floyd had replied. “As it happens, I need to return to Haas-Bioroid periodically for adjustment and examination. I will do so after depo
siting Eve 5VA3TC at the satellite station.”
He had one hand clasped around Eve’s upper right arm, holding her…and I remembered the injury to Robert Vargas’s arm. Had she tossed Vargas out the airlock at the High Frontier?
“Okay. One more thing to pass on to the techs there.”
“Yes?”
“When they do the chemical scan on her hands…have them look for tissue, blood, or amino traces that would match with the DNA of this man.” I used my PAD to transmit the file on Vargas.
“Data received. Very well. And where will you go next?”
“Melange Mining,” I told him. “I need to talk with Mark Henry if I can, and bring him in as well. After that, probably Alpha Prospecting. The laser used in Dow’s murder came from there.”
“I will have the station transmit the lab results to you as soon as they have them.”
“Thanks, Floyd. Catch you later.”
He cocked his head to one side like a curious puppy. “I am not running from you, Rick. I am merely—”
“Never mind, never mind,” I said, holding up my hands. Floyd sometimes had trouble with human slang. “I’ll see you later.”
The tube-lev whisked me back beneath the face of the Moon, 650 kilometers from Fra Mauro to Sinus Medii. The artificial day of the Heinlein Colony was coming to a close by then, so I checked into a cheap hotel, the Barbicane, at the Columbiad Arcology.
The Arcology is the tallest structure on the Moon. Arcologies on Earth, of course, are built high to maximize living space in the tight quarters of megopoli, but there’s still plenty of open space on the Moon, and no real need to build kilometer-high structures enclosing what amounts to a small city. But the view from the restaurant on the top of the tower is spectacular, bathed in Earthlight, and overlooking much of the central 2M corporate complex.
The next day, I went to visit Melange Mining.
The big 2M is a vast and tangled collection of domes and Quonsets, towers and separator stacks, gantries and surface conveyers. They even had their own high-G launch track, a surface west-to-east mag-lev monorail three hundred kilometers long, from the crater Bruce to the crater Godin. The track accelerated helium-3 canisters into space, where they looped around the Moon and drifted in for a precision-timed rendezvous with the top of the Beanstalk—the first leg of their journey down-Stalk to Earth.
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