Chapter 16
It surprised Susan even more when, after the detective left, she found herself missing him. She liked his easygoing manner, sensed competence beneath a quiet exterior, and had even enjoyed the banter, despite usually detesting verbal games. There was nothing sexual in their give-and-take; his initial pronouncement had put an end to that.
After she closed the door, Susan shuffled through the wreckage of the Calvin living room. Bits and pieces of her mother’s familiar picture, the one possession John had treasured most and could never replace, lay scattered around the room. Uncertain where to start, she began piling strips of photograph, the twisted metal of the frame, the shattered pieces of the safety glass. She grabbed for a curled fragment sticking out from under a mound of broken wood, and it kept coming, bigger than she expected. In a moment, she held an entire photograph in her hand, and it was not a piece of her mother.
Susan turned it over, confronted by her own smiling self, sitting on the familiar concrete bench below their terrace beside a tall, handsome man with dark blond curls. Remy. Memories flooded down on her, not only of the man she considered her soul mate, but of the moment when her father had presented her with the picture and had placed it proudly on the wall beside the one of Amanda Calvin. Not Calvin. Amanda Whatever-My-Last-Name-Used-to-Be. Amanda, my mother.
A tear splashed onto the picture. Afraid to ruin it, Susan blotted the droplet away with the bottom edge of her shirt. Quickly but carefully, she rolled up the photo, tucking it into her back pocket. The empty feeling of loneliness became unbearable. She headed for the terrace, tore open the curtain, unlatched the door, and slid it open. She stepped out onto the concrete balcony in time to watch Jake striding across the parking lot toward his Subaru. It was not yet six o’clock, but the overcast and the coolness it brought made it seem later. Susan considered shouting and waving her arms, calling him on the Vox, doing anything to attract his attention and bring him back. As he reached his car, he turned to look at the building.
Susan raised a hand and waved.
Jake’s head rose slowly, scanning up the balconies to stop on Susan’s. It took him a moment to spot her, but he finally must have, because he returned her friendly greeting with one of his own.
Again Susan considered calling him, but decided against it. The apartment was going to feel uncomfortable for a long time, and she had no right to burden others with her pain. The detective had given her a couple of hours of his off time, more than she had a right to demand. For all she knew, he had an adoring husband and a host of kids missing him.
Susan started to turn to go back into her apartment. Rough hands closed around her arms, ripping them behind her. She felt her Vox stripped from her wrist as dark cloth was shoved over her head and another hand clamped tightly to her mouth.
It all occurred so quickly, Susan barely had time to acknowledge that something had happened before she found herself dragged back inside and heard the door slam shut, the shush of the pulled curtains. She found herself unable to scream, barely able to breathe. Her arms were pinned immobile, so she lashed out with her legs. Debris rolled under her step, stealing all balance, sending her reeling. She fell hard, shards of safety glass and hunks of damaged wood jabbing her in what felt like a thousand places. She was shoved against a wall, and a gruff voice filled her ear. “Be still if you want to live.”
Susan froze, sprawled across the wreckage. Panic crushed down upon her. She could feel twine or rope tightening around her wrists, binding them behind her back.
“Sit,” the voice continued. “Make yourself comfortable.”
The incongruity of the statement penetrated Susan’s consciousness like the peal of a code-blue alarm. With it came the slow, calm rationality that accompanied her worst moments in medicine. When a patient’s life lay at stake, she always mustered the necessary clearheaded competence to do the right thing. She knew she needed to maintain that same professional demeanor to save herself now. Susan struggled to place her back against the wall, to blindly kick away the chips and splinters.
“Susan Calvin?” another disembodied male voice came from out of the darkness.
She could scarcely deny it. They had her Vox. Susan attempted to make a noise, anything to draw attention to the cloth over her head and the hand still firmly pressed to her mouth.
“Nod or shake your head,” the first man demanded.
Susan forced out another noise, one intended to convey urgency. She did not want to suffocate.
Apparently, they understood. The voice in her ear returned, and something cold and hard pressed into her ribs. “Don’t scream, don’t do anything stupid, or you’re dead.”
Now Susan nodded.
The hand fell away from the cloth, no longer driving it into her nose and mouth. Then the cover disappeared from her face, leaving her blinking in the subdued and artificial light. A man crouched at her side, one hand behind her neck, the other clutching an oversized handgun, its barrel buried in her side. Another crouched in front of her, a holstered pistol just behind his right hip. Both were of moderate build, well muscled, sinewy, and dressed in black. Both had short, mouse-colored hair; dark, predatory eyes; and unremarkable features. Both were clean-shaven. They virtually defined “nondescript.”
Susan had expected a couple of massive, hairy brutes with hawkish noses and weak chins. The clean set of them, the neatness of their appearances, the normality of their movements, unsettled her. They could easily murder her, leave, and blend into the Manhattan crowd without a hitch. Their descriptions were elusive, common, without defining features. Even staring straight at them, she was not certain she could pick them from a lineup. Assuming I survive this. It did not seem likely. They had allowed her to see them, which did not bode well for her future.
The nearest one spoke again. “If you cooperate, you live. If you do anything stupid, you die. Understand?”
Susan did not, but she nodded anyway. She had a feeling any other answer would be considered stupid. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“Quiet!” the other man said, softly but with emphasis. Susan flinched away from an anticipated slap that never came. “We do not answer your questions. You answer our questions.” His voice had a hint of an accent, Southern American, Susan believed.
Susan’s Vox buzzed, startling her. The man in front of her opened his hand and glanced at it. “Steven Kendall.” He looked at Susan.
Obediently, Susan said nothing.
“Who is he?” the man asked impatiently.
Susan’s mind raced. Could she trick them into answering a call? And, if she did, what would happen? She did not want to put Kendall at risk. Were they testing her? She did not have long to answer. To have a chance of surviving this, she had to play the panicked female willing to follow any command to save her life. “Work colleague.”
“What’s he calling for?”
Susan wanted to say, “How should I know? Ask him,” but knew it would only antagonize. The truth seemed best. If she appeared to cooperate, she might be able to pull off something later. Jake’s description stayed with her: professionals. “He’s covering my patients, and he would have just gotten home. He probably wants to give me an update.”
“Leave it,” the other man said.
The buzzing stopped, and a tone sounded to indicate Kendall had left a message. The man played it back on conference mode.
Susan tried not to cringe, uncertain what he might say. Kendall’s joking might get her into trouble if these men took it seriously.
Kendall’s voice came through the speaker: “Calvin, where are you? Thought you’d be here. Call me.”
Susan carefully let out a breath she had not realized she was holding. She needed to pay more attention to the cues she gave them. She had to become a blank slate, to reveal nothing except what she wanted them to believe. She needed to become SU-2. And she needed to think faster.
“What did he mean, he thought you’d be there?”
Paranoids with guns. Gr
eat. Susan did not want to reveal their relationship; it could put Kendall at unnecessary risk. “I’m on call tonight,” she lied. “I told him I’d try to meet him at his place to get the rundown on the patients for tonight.” She looked around the room. “There’s not a whole lot to keep me here at my apartment.”
“Does he know where you are?”
Susan tried to anticipate the reason for the question. Likely, he worried Kendall might come looking for her. She did not want them to feel they had to move her or hurry. Being home did not give her much of an advantage, especially when the destruction made it so alien to her, but at least one person knew her current whereabouts. On the move, she was virtually unfindable; it became too easy to slaughter her and dump her body in an alley. “That’s what he asked me,” she reminded. “If I don’t show, he’ll figure I went straight to the hospital. He’s not going to come looking for me here, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
The one in front of Susan made a thoughtful noise.
Susan looked from one man to the other, trying to memorize some detail that would allow her to identify them. She had to believe she would survive this encounter…somehow. Still, though the question seemed dangerous, she could not help asking, “Did you kill my father?”
“Quiet!” the man said again.
His companion spoke next. “You’re a scientist, too, aren’t you, Susan?”
“I’m a psychiatrist.”
“But you’ve worked with robots.”
Susan tried to guess what answer would keep her alive longest. These men could have killed her on the terrace, but they did not. That suggested she had something they wanted. As long as they believed she had this thing and she did not give it to them, she remained alive. If they discovered she did not have it, or she turned it over to them, she would die. No reassurances from them would convince her otherwise. “Yes,” she admitted. “I have worked with robots.”
The men looked at one another, and Susan wondered if she had just made a fatal mistake. Perhaps they merely wanted to know if she might continue her father’s work, if they should murder her to keep her from doing so. If they believed she knew nothing about his projects, perhaps they might leave her alone. She added, “But I’m not a robot scientist. I’m a psychiatrist who worked on a robotics experiment.” She hoped that left things open enough for them to draw their own conclusions, to keep them from shooting her.
For the moment, at least, it did. The man across from Susan still seemed focused on the Vox call. “You’re expected at the hospital tonight.”
She wasn’t, but it was the story she had concocted earlier. An adage her father had often quoted came, unbidden, to her mind: He that will lie must have a good remembrance, that he agree in all points with himself. “Yes.”
“And if you don’t show up?”
Susan thought fast. She had originally lied to protect Kendall, but now she saw a way to use it to her advantage. “Hospitals don’t run without residents on call. We’re slave labor, and they hold our futures over our heads if we’re late. If I don’t show up, they’ll certainly come looking for me.”
The gun barrel dug deeper into Susan’s ribs. “Beat it out of her, shoot her, and let’s get out of here.”
That galvanized Susan. “Wait! I’ve answered all your questions. Why do you think you need to beat something out of me? Just ask.” Her arms throbbed, and she strained at the ropes without budging them.
The man in front of Susan rose, towering over her where she sat amid the wreckage of her home. “You know what we want to know.”
“I don’t,” Susan insisted, honestly confused. “Just ask me.”
“We need the formula that uncouples the positronic brain.”
So Lawrence was right. Susan hesitated, seeking the best approach. She could create a fake code, but it would do her little good. True or false, they would no longer need her alive. Why would the SFH want such a thing? Susan imagined that by releasing the robots from the Three Laws, they could create the Frankenstein’s monsters they had warned the world about. Perhaps they intended to demonstrate the danger of robotics by creating that very danger, hiding their hand in the events. It seemed a ridiculous thing to do, especially since it went against all their previous actions. They had, presumably, gunned down Amanda and Calvin to keep the information from ever becoming known or acted upon. Susan had assumed they killed John Calvin for the same reason, in the mistaken belief he had survived their earlier attempt to murder him. Clearly, they had not known he was a robot at the time of the murder. Given their successes, why would the SFH change tactics so abruptly and completely?
Susan knew she had limited time to think. She tried to gain more by stalling. “Uncoupling the positronic brain? What do you mean by ‘uncoupling’?”
The man beside her made an impatient clicking noise with his tongue. The other watched her cautiously, obviously trying to read her. “We mean detaching the brain from the constraints placed upon it.”
Susan blinked, trying to appear clueless. “You want to be able to detach the positronic brain from…its power source? From its…non-brain functions?” She shook her head, as if trying her best to understand. “You want it to be able to think without the constraints of a preprogrammed agenda?”
“She’s stalling,” the closer man said.
The other held up his hand, forestalling any action by his companion. “Maybe.” He looked directly into Susan’s eyes. “Susan, you are playing with us. You know about the Three Laws of Robotics, don’t you?”
“I do,” Susan admitted, then acted as if she had an epiphany. “You want to know…how to uncouple the Three Laws of Robotics from the positronic brain.”
Both men nodded.
Susan deliberately gave them the USR party line, knowing they would not buy it. “Can’t be done. If the Three Laws are deactivated, the positronic brain cannot function. For safety reasons, they’re irrevocably intertwined.”
“Unless you have the code. A code that only your parents knew.” His eyes narrowed. “A code they gave you. Didn’t they?”
Susan shut her mouth firmly.
The men looked at one another. One raised his brows. The other nodded again. They turned their attention back to Susan.
The genie was out of the bottle. Susan knew what she had to do, at least in a general sense. As long as they believed she had the information but refused to give it to them, she lived. The moment she gave them a response, whether true or false, they would likely kill her. “What possible use is that information to the SFH?”
The man in front of her gave her nothing, but the one beside her closed his eyes to slits. If she had to put a label on the expression, Susan would have described it as confusion.
“We’re asking the questions,” the one in front reminded her again, but he said it with less vehemence than previously.
Susan knew she now had some small measure of control in the situation, though she had to use it sparingly, carefully, cleverly. Physically, they still held all the power; they had her life wholly in their hands. Her own hands, at the moment, lay uselessly bound behind her. Mentally, however, she held the aces now. I’m a psychiatrist, for Christ’s sake. If I can’t use that to my advantage, I don’t deserve to live. Susan pursed her lips with exaggerated tightness and looked through the man crouched in front of her.
“Talk!” he barked.
Susan continued to stare penetratingly.
The man dropped to his haunches. The one beside her sighed loudly. “Torture, extract, kill.”
Susan did not move a muscle. She had nothing to lose.
The man in front held up a hand. He used a reasonable tone, shifting closer to his prisoner. “Susan, we are not bad guys. We’re on the same side here. Honest.”
Susan turned him a withering look. “You kidnapped me, then threatened to beat me, torture me, and kill me. You slaughtered my father. With friends like you, who needs enemies?”
“We had nothing to do with John Calvin’s death.�
�� The man’s features softened. “And you can stop playing with us. We know he wasn’t your father.”
For reasons she could not wholly explain, his choice of words upset her nearly as much as the gun barrel in her ribs. “Oh, John Calvin was my father.” Truer words had never left anyone’s mouth. In every sense of the word but one, the mechanical man who went by that name had been her only parent for most of her existence. He had raised her, loved her, made her the priority of his life.
Susan thought back to the Ansons, the parents of the antisocial little girl who had deliberately triggered the bomb that took Remington’s life and, nearly, Susan’s as well. The Ansons had adopted Sharicka with impeccable intentions and lavished her with the purest, rawest love in the universe, despite the inherited conduct disorder that made her a demon in child guise. They took understandable offense when people referred to the sperm and egg donors who created her as her “natural” or “real” parents. The Ansons were not babysitters, not “artificial,” “unreal,” or “fantasy” parents, and John Calvin was not just a chunk of metal programmed to act like a caretaker. He was Susan’s father.
Susan bore Amanda and Calvin no ill will; they had clearly loved her. But John Calvin had dedicated every moment of his life to Susan; had given her a moral compass, nursed her through her illnesses, taught her all the important lessons in life; had weathered her adolescent storms, shared her successes and disappointments; had paid for her necessities and indulgences, her education; had done everything possible to mold her into the person she had become. Gears and wires, flesh and blood—what did it matter? John Calvin was her father, and she bore his last name proudly. “John Calvin,” she repeated more forcefully, “was every bit my father.”
“John Calvin was a robot,” the man beside Susan pointed out.
There was only one way he could know that information. “You murdered my father.” Susan fairly spat the words. “You murdered my father!”
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