Elizabeth Bear was born in Connecticut, where she’s now returned to live after several years in the Mohave Desert near Las Vegas. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005, and in 2008 took home a Hugo Award for her short story “Tideline,” which also won her the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (shared with David Moles). In 2009, she won another Hugo Award for her novelette “Shoggoths in Bloom.” Her short work has appeared in Asimov’s, Subterranean, SCI FICTION, Interzone, The Third Alternative, Strange Horizons, On Spec, and elsewhere, and has been collected in The Chains That You Refuse and New Amsterdam. She is the author of three highly acclaimed SF novels, Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired, and of the alternate history fantasy “Promethean Age” series, which includes the novels Blood and Iron, Whiskey and Water, Ink and Steel, and Hell and Earth. Her other books include the novels Carnival, Undertow, Chill, Dust, All the Windwracked Stars, By the Mountain Bound, and a chapbook novella Bone and Jewel Creatures. Her most recent books are a new novel, Range of Ghosts, a novel in collaboration with Sarah Monette, The Tempering of Men, and a chapbook novella, ad eternum. Her Web site is www.elizabethbear.com.
On Sunday when Dolly awakened, she had olive skin and black-brown hair that fell in waves to her hips. On Tuesday when Dolly awakened, she was a redhead, and fair. But on Thursday—on Thursday her eyes were blue, her hair was as black as a crow’s wing, and her hands were red with blood.
In her black French maid’s outfit, she was the only thing in the expensively appointed drawing room that was not winter-white or antiqued gold. It was the sort of room you hired somebody else to clean. It was as immaculate as it was white.
Immaculate and white, that is, except for the dead body of billionaire industrialist Clive Steele—and try to say that without sounding like a comic book—which lay at Dolly’s feet, his viscera blossoming from him like macabre petals.
That was how she looked when Rosamund Kirkbride found her, standing in a red stain in a white room like a thorn in a rose.
Dolly had locked in position where her program ran out. As Roz dropped to one knee outside the border of the blood-saturated carpet, Dolly did not move.
The room smelled like meat and bowels. Flies clustered thickly on the windows, but none had yet managed to get inside. No matter how hermetically sealed the house, it was only a matter of time. Like love, the flies found a way.
Grunting with effort, Roz planted both green-gloved hands on winter white wool-and-silk fibers and leaned over, getting her head between the dead guy and the doll. Blood spattered Dolly’s silk stockings and her kitten-heeled boots: both the spray-can dots of impact projection and the soaking arcs of a breached artery.
More than one, given that Steele’s heart lay, trailing connective tissue, beside his left hip. The crusted blood on Dolly’s hands had twisted in ribbons down the underside of her forearms to her elbows and from there dripped into the puddle on the floor.
The android was not wearing undergarments.
“You staring up that girl’s skirt, Detective?”
Roz was a big, plain woman, and out of shape in her forties. It took her a minute to heave herself back to her feet, careful not to touch the victim or the murder weapon yet. She’d tied her straight light brown hair back before entering the scene, the ends tucked up in a net. The severity of the style made her square jaw into a lantern. Her eyes were almost as blue as the doll’s.
“Is it a girl, Peter?” Putting her hands on her knees, she pushed fully upright. She shoved a fist into her back and turned to the door.
Peter King paused just inside, taking in the scene with a few critical sweeps of eyes so dark they didn’t catch any light from the sunlight or the chandelier. His irises seemed to bleed pigment into the whites, warming them with swirls of ivory. In his black suit, his skin tanned almost to match, he might have been a heroically sized construction-paper cutout against the white walls, white carpet, the white-and-gold marble-topped table that looked both antique and French.
His blue paper booties rustled as he crossed the floor. “Suicide, you think?”
“Maybe if it was strangulation.” Roz stepped aside so Peter could get a look at the body.
He whistled, which was pretty much what she had done.
“Somebody hated him a lot. Hey, that’s one of the new Dollies, isn’t it? Man, nice.” He shook his head. “Bet it cost more than my house.”
“Imagine spending half a mil on a sex toy,” Roz said, “only to have it rip your liver out.” She stepped back, arms folded.
“He probably didn’t spend that much on her. His company makes accessory programs for them.”
“Industry courtesy?” Roz asked.
“Tax writeoff. Test model.” Peter was the department expert on Home companions. He circled the room, taking it in from all angles. Soon the scene techs would be here with their cameras and their tweezers and their 3-D scanner, turning the crime scene into a permanent virtual reality. In his capacity of soft forensics, Peter would go over Dolly’s program, and the medical examiner would most likely confirm that Steele’s cause of death was exactly what it looked like: something had punched through his abdominal wall and clawed his innards out.
“Doors were locked?”
Roz pursed her lips. “Nobody heard the screaming.”
“How long you think you’d scream without any lungs?” He sighed. “You know, it never fails. The poor folks, nobody ever heard no screaming. And the rich folks, they’ve got no neighbors to hear ’em scream. Everybody in this modern world lives alone.”
It was a beautiful Birmingham day behind the long silk draperies, the kind of mild and bright that spring mornings in Alabama excelled at. Peter craned his head back and looked up at the chandelier glistening in the dustless light. Its ornate curls had been spotlessly clean before aerosolized blood on Steele’s last breath misted them.
“Steele lived alone,” she said. “Except for the robot. His cook found the body this morning. Last person to see him before that was his P.A., as he left the office last night.”
“Lights on seems to confirm that he was killed after dark.”
“After dinner,” Roz said.
“After the cook went home for the night.” Peter kept prowling the room, peering behind draperies and furniture, looking in corners and crouching to lift up the dust-ruffle on the couch. “Well, I guess there won’t be any question about the stomach contents.”
Roz went through the pockets of the dead man’s suit jacket, which was draped over the arm of a chair. Pocket computer and a folding knife, wallet with an RFID chip. His house was on palmprint, his car on voice rec. He carried no keys. “Assuming the M.E. can find the stomach.”
“Touché. He’s got a cook, but no housekeeper?”
“I guess he trusts the android to clean but not cook?”
“No taste buds.” Peter straightened up, shaking his head. “They can follow a recipe, but—”
“You won’t get high art,” Roz agreed, licking her lips. Outside, a car door slammed. “Scene team?”
“M.E.,” Peter said, leaning over to peer out. “Come on, let’s get back to the house and pull the codes for this model.”
“All right,” Roz said. “But I’m interrogating it. I know better than to leave you alone with a pretty girl.”
Peter rolled his eyes as he followed her towards the door. “I like ’em with a little more spunk than all that.”
* * *
“So the new dolls,” Roz said in Peter’s car, carefully casual. “What’s so special about ’em?”
“Man,” Peter answered, brow furrowing. “Gimme a sec.”
Roz’s car followed as they pulled away from the house on Balmoral Road, maintaining a careful distance from the bumper. Peter drove until they reached the parkway. Once they’d joined a caravan downtown, nose-to-bumper on the car ahead, he folded his hands in his lap and let the lead car’s autopilot take over.
He said, “What isn’t? Real-time online editing—personal
ity and physical, appearance, ethnicity, hair—all kinds of behavior protocols, you name the kink they’ve got a hack for it.”
“So if you knew somebody’s kink,” she said thoughtfully. “Knew it in particular. You could write an app for that—”
“One that would appeal to your guy in specific.” Peter’s hands dropped to his lap, his head bobbing up and down enthusiastically. “With a—pardon the expression—back door.”
“Trojan horse. Don’t jilt a programmer for a sex machine.”
“There’s an app for that,” he said, and she snorted. “Two cases last year, worldwide. Not common, but—”
Roz looked down at her hands. “Some of these guys,” she said. “They program the dolls to scream.”
Peter had sensuous lips. When something upset him, those lips thinned and writhed like salted worms. “I guess maybe it’s a good thing they have a robot to take that out on.”
“Unless the fantasy stops being enough.” Roz’s voice was flat, without judgment. Sunlight fell warm through the windshield. “What do you know about the larval stage of serial rapists, serial killers?”
“You mean, what if pretend pain stops doing it for them? What if the appearance of pain is no longer enough?”
She nodded, worrying a hangnail on her thumb. The nitrile gloves dried out your hands.
“They used to cut up paper porn magazines.” His broad shoulders rose and fell, his suit catching wrinkles against the car seat when they came back down. “They’ll get their fantasies somewhere.”
“I guess so.” She put her thumb in her mouth to stop the bleeding, a thick red bead that welled up where she’d torn the cuticle.
Her own saliva stung.
* * *
Sitting in the cheap office chair Roz had docked along the short edge of her desk, Dolly slowly lifted her chin. She blinked. She smiled.
“Law enforcement override code accepted.” She had a little-girl Marilyn voice. “How may I help you, Detective Kirkbride?”
“We are investigating the murder of Clive Steele,” Roz said, with a glance up to Peter’s round face. He stood behind Dolly with a wireless scanner and an air of concentration. “Your contract-holder of record.”
“I am at your service.”
If Dolly were a real girl, the bare skin of her thighs would have been sticking to the recycled upholstery of that office chair. But her realistically engineered skin was breathable polymer. She didn’t sweat unless you told her to, and she probably didn’t stick to cheap chairs.
“Evidence suggests that you were used as the murder weapon.” Roz steepled her hands on her blotter. “We will need access to your software update records and your memory files.”
“Do you have a warrant?” Her voice was not stiff or robotic at all, but warm, human. Even in disposing of legal niceties, it had a warm, confiding quality.
Silently, Peter transmitted it. Dolly blinked twice while processing the data, a sort of status bar. Something to let you know the thing wasn’t hung up.
“We also have a warrant to examine you for DNA trace evidence,” Roz said.
Dolly smiled, her raven hair breaking perfectly around her narrow shoulders. “You may be assured of my cooperation.”
Peter led her into one of the interrogation rooms, where the operation could be recorded. With the help of an evidence tech, he undressed Dolly, bagged her clothes as evidence, brushed her down onto a sheet of paper, combed her polymer hair and swabbed her polymer skin. He swabbed her orifices and scraped under her nails.
Roz stood by, arms folded, a necessary witness. Dolly accepted it all impassively, moving as directed and otherwise standing like a caryatid. Her engineered body was frankly sexless in its perfection—belly flat, hips and ass like an inverted heart, breasts floating cartoonishly beside a defined rib cage. Apparently, Steele had liked them skinny.
“So much for pulchritudinousness,” Roz muttered to Peter when their backs were to the doll.
He glanced over his shoulder. The doll didn’t have feelings to hurt, but she looked so much like a person it was hard to remember to treat her as something else. “I think you mean voluptuousness,” he said. “It is a little too good to be true, isn’t it?”
“If you would prefer different proportions,” Dolly said, “My chassis is adaptable to a range of forms—”
“Thank you,” Peter said. “That won’t be necessary.”
Otherwise immobile, Dolly smiled. “Are you interested in science, Detective King? There is an article in Nature this week on advances in the polymerase chain reaction used for replicating DNA. It’s possible that within five years, forensic and medical DNA analysis will become significantly cheaper and faster.”
Her face remained stoic, but Dolly’s voice grew animated as she spoke. Even enthusiastic. It was an utterly convincing—and engaging—effect.
Apparently, Clive Steele had programmed his sex robot to discourse on molecular biology with verve and enthusiasm.
“Why don’t I ever find the guys who like smart women?” Roz said.
Peter winked with the side of his face that faced away from the companion. “They’re all dead.”
* * *
A few hours after Peter and the tech had finished processing Dolly for trace evidence and Peter had started downloading her files, Roz left her parser software humming away at Steele’s financials and poked her head in to check on the robot and the cop. The techs must have gotten what they needed from Dolly’s hands, because she had washed them. As she sat beside Peter’s workstation, a cable plugged behind her left ear, she cleaned her lifelike polymer fingernails meticulously with a file, dropping the scrapings into an evidence bag.
“Sure you want to give the prisoner a weapon, Peter?” Roz shut the ancient wooden door behind her.
Dolly looked up, as if to see if she was being addressed, but made no response.
“She don’t need it,” he said. “Besides, whatever she had in her wiped itself completely after it ran. Not much damage to her core personality, but there are some memory gaps. I’m going to compare them to backups, once we get those from the scene team.”
“Memory gaps. Like the crime,” Roz guessed. “And something around the time the Trojan was installed?”
Dolly blinked her long-lashed blue eyes languorously. Peter patted her on the shoulder and said, “Whoever did it is a pretty good cracker. He didn’t just wipe, he patterned her memories and overwrote the gaps. Like using a clone tool to photoshop somebody you don’t like out of a picture.”
“Her days must be pretty repetitive,” Roz said. “How’d you pick that out?”
“Calendar.” Peter puffed up a little, smug. “She don’t do the same housekeeping work every day. There’s a Monday schedule and a Wednesday schedule and—well, I found where the pattern didn’t match. And there’s a funny thing—watch this.”
He waved vaguely at a display panel. It lit up, showing Dolly in her black-and-white uniform, vacuuming. “House camera,” Peter explained. “She’s plugged into Steele’s security system. Like a guard dog with perfect hair. Whoever performed the hack also edited the external webcam feeds that mirror to the companion’s memories.”
“How hard is that?”
“Not any harder than cloning over her files, but you have to know to look for them. So it’s confirmation that our perp knows his or her way around a line of code. What have you got?”
Roz shrugged. “Steele had a lot of money, which means a lot of enemies. And he did not have a lot of human contact. Not for years now. I’ve started calling in known associates for interviews, but unless they surprise me, I think we’re looking at crime of profit, not crime of passion.”
Having finished with the nail file, Dolly wiped it on her prison smock and laid it down on Peter’s blotter, beside the cup of ink and light pens.
Peter swept it into a drawer. “So we’re probably not after the genius programmer lover he dumped for a robot. Pity, I liked the poetic justice in that.”
&nbs
p; Dolly blinked, lips parting, but seemed to decide that Peter’s comment had not been directed at her. Still, she drew in air—could you call it a breath?—and said, “It is my duty to help find my contract holder’s killer.”
Roz lowered her voice. “You’d think they’d pull ’em off the market.”
“Like they pull all cars whenever one crashes? The world ain’t perfect.”
“Or do that robot laws thing everybody used to twitter on about.”
“Whatever a positronic brain is, we don’t have it. Asimov’s fictional robots were self-aware. Dolly’s neurons are binary, as we used to think human neurons were. She doesn’t have the nuanced neurochemistry of even, say, a cat.” Peter popped his collar smooth with his thumbs. “A doll can’t want. It can’t make moral judgments, any more than your car can. Anyway, if we could do that, they wouldn’t be very useful for home defense. Oh, incidentally, the sex protocols in this one are almost painfully vanilla—”
“Really.”
Peter nodded.
Roz rubbed a scuffmark on the tile with her shoe. “So given he didn’t like anything … challenging, why would he have a Dolly when he could have had any woman he wanted?”
“There’s never any drama, no pain, no disappointment. Just comfort, the perfect helpmeet. With infinite variety.”
“And you never have to worry about what she wants. Or likes in bed.”
Peter smiled. “The perfect woman for a narcissist.”
* * *
The interviews proved unproductive, but Roz didn’t leave the station house until after ten. Spring mornings might be warm, but once the sun went down, a cool breeze sprang up, ruffling the hair she’d finally remembered to pull from its ponytail as she walked out the door.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction Page 16