by A J McKeep
“You’re a good man, soldier. It’s dangerous for you if you care too much, though. You should maybe take better care for yourself, soldier.” He opens his mouth to speak, but she cuts across him. “Don’t. You want to tell me your name. I don’t want you to. I don’t want to have to care about you. And you shouldn’t care about me either, soldier.”
“You aren’t a bot.”
“I’m a bot.”
“This is definitely the most strange and surreal conversation I have ever had.”
“What’s so strange? Anyway, don’t think about it. Let me help you relax. That’s why you came, isn’t it?” with her nails she scratched upward along the insides of his thighs. She looked down as she licked her lips. His voice thickened.
“It’s strange because it’s an anti-Turing test. You trying to convince me that you’re a bot. Especially when I’m sure that you’re not.”
She nodded, not looking up. “I am.”
“If you were, you wouldn’t worry about whether I cared about you. And you wouldn’t have to worry about caring about me. Because whatever else bots do, they don’t worry.”
“Come on. Take off your jacket.”
She gave him a long look. “Garrison.” Her head shook.
“You like trouble, Garrison.” He couldn’t hold back a grin as he nodded. She shook her head again, “No, you like it too much.” Her lips pressed together. “Call me Faith.”
“Really? Faith?” He lifted her chin with a finger, “That’s a lovely name.”
“No, it isn’t It’s a tragedy. You say, ‘Tragedy’?”
“We do. But it’s not.”
“It’s not really your name though, right?”
Her mouth tightened and released. “It’s what my name translates to.”
Her hands rested on his thighs and she was looking down. He was very hard. Hard enough that he was starting to ache.
She stroked his legs, thoughtful. “It’s a translation of my name.”
She jumped onto the bed and kneeled behind him. Her voice was soft in his ear. “You are stressed. You are all wound up too tight like spring. Let me help you to relax.” Her breath was warm, but it was very steady. Piped. Her fingers moved in a way that was somehow too detailed, too precisely co-ordinated, but her touch on his shoulders felt tender and sensitive.
Was it possible for a bot to be too perfect? It felt to him like the precision of the machine was being driven, urged by something more. Maybe it’s just too long, he wondered, since you felt a hand on your flesh that wasn’t your own.
Leaning with her lips by his ear she whispered, “Tell me what you want, soldier. Garrison. I’ll do it for you. Let me make you feel good.”
He turned. There was a light in her smile. Her hands slid down against his body. She began to open his clothes.
He said, “Where are you now, Faith?”
“You’ve paid, alright? I’m contracted to give service. We can spend the time talking trash if you want. It doesn’t hurt me. You’ve got,” She picked up a phone. The lit image was private, so he only saw a black shield and the light on her face “Oh, you’ve kind of got as long as you want. Madame Cara put a comp for drinks and the overtime is unlimited.” As she snapped the phone off, she said, “Thanks, Cara,” under her breath.
“Meaning you won’t get paid?”
She nodded. “Meaning that my credit for the day is set. I can’t earn any more from you, and I’m booked for the whole shift.”
“Men give girls tips.”
“Yeah,” her mouth was tight, and her eyes were narrow, “But tips here just go to the house.”
“If I put one on your phone?”
“It’s a house phone.”
“Don’t you have a phone of your own here?”
“I’m a bot.”
“There must be something I can do for you.”
“Her eyes went to the blank screen. She said, “No. There’s isn’t anything.” She smiled, “I’m a bot. Don’t worry about it.”
“If you were a bot, why would you care how much or how little juice you made on the shift?”
“Look, here we are arguing like an old married couple. We haven’t even had sex.”
“So, exactly like an old married couple.”
She slipped around, slid her hands inside the front of his shirt. “Hard day at the office, dear?”
He stiffened more. The front of her dress was open. He stroked her neck. Tried to lift her chin again. But when he tugged, she kept her head down. She wouldn’t let him turn her face up. He tugged again. Her head shook. Just once.
She slipped her hands lower. Her fingers sneaked into his pants. She leaned forward, rested the top of her head against his chest. As he thought, he felt her shiver. Instinctively, he stroked her, held her to give her comfort. He stroked her hair.
“Where are you?”
She stiffened in his arms. Her face turned up towards his.
A crash and the tumbling clatter of furniture and more came from the next room.
The girl’s bot said, “It’s just the normal noises in here,” but she was looking around rapidly.
Garrison jumped to his feet. In his fatigues and boots he ran out to the hallway. He moved along the far wall, approaching the door to the next room along. Rubble and dust burst out of the wall. Followed by a girl. A blonde punky girl bot in torn and wrecked clothing was propelled through the wall. She landed in a crumple at his feet. A crazed half-mech clambered through the hole in the wall. His grin was wide and vicious. His eyes were red.
Garrison raised a hand. “That’s enough, warrior.”
“Mind your fucking beeswax, trooper. Get out of the way.” The huge half-cyber killer lumbered, stamping toward him. “I’m going to beat that bot till it’s straws and goo.”
The door at the end of the hallway slammed inward and fell to the floor. Two helmeted guards bust through with weighty pulse cannon. “Calming measures.” Their synthetic voices announced, “Move aside and assume a kneeling position.”
The half-mech grinned wider as he swung around to face them. They aimed the first blasts over his head. The ceiling burst and smoked. Garrison backed toward the room where Faith crouched by the bed. The half-mech ran toward the guards. They fired one more blast at his feet. When he didn’t stop, they both fired directly at him.
Gaping holes ripped open his torso. His limbs waved, limp. He collapsed to the ground. The remains of his body was a twitching heap. It shuddered and convulsed, and it steamed, oozing blood and noxious fluids, some organic, some synthetic. The crumpled bot scrambled to get to her feet. Immediately the guards blasted her. Her body twisted and spun in the air, wrecked.
Garrison backed into the room. What was left of the bot dropped and rolled in piles and pools behind him.
The beat of the guards’ feet told him that they were cleaning up. He and Faith were likely to be the next things they cleaned up.
“Stand in the middle of the room,” they shouted as they approached, “and remain still.” Without weapons he had to improvise. He beckoned for Faith to come beside him, then told her to keep down. He waited by the door with one a metal chair raised.
When the first guard reached the door, Garrison whacked the chair leg into his face. Twice. He pulled the guard in and relieved him of the cannon. Garrison shot a blast at the guard’s head for safety, then jumped out of the door to crouch, facing the other guard. Garrison fired twice, quickly. Then he moved aside. Even with a four-inch hole at the top of his sternum, the guard was still moving, so Garrison fired twice more.
The parts of the guard were mostly disconnected by then. Faith shrank into the corner of the room. “They’ll shut me down. I’ll be…” Garrison took her arm, swept her up and headed for the emergency exit. Her voice shook. “It’s no good…”
He carried her through the door.
She said, “Don’t. Garrison, don’t.”
The rear of the compound was empty, but alarms were starting up. He’d need to get her o
ut, fast. He carried her to a gate in the back fence.
“It’s no good.” She shook her head, “Look,” her finger touched his face. “I’m just… This is just a bot. Forget about it. Get out now or they’ll ventilate you for sure.”
“You’re not though, are you.”
“Look, it doesn’t matter,” her voice was tense and urgent. “You can’t take me. I’d be disconnected as soon as we got past the perimeter. I’ll be disconnected anyway.”
She hugged his neck. “Just go. Maybe look for me in Hope’s.” He frowned. “Or at least, go there and think of me. Okay?” She made a smile. Then she froze and went limp. Her eyes were still, and her temperature plunged. She was a lifeless mannequin.
From behind, at the back of the building, an amplified voice yelled. “Do not attempt to remove the bot from the property. Theft of a cyber component can be dealt with summarily.” Two security mechs emerged from the building.
From the field, he knew that ‘summarily’ meant with lethal force. The bot was draped lifeless in his arms. Still it didn’t feel good to let her go. Slowly, gently he laid the bot on the ground.
The mechs marched toward him. He moved left, through the gate. They didn’t change course. They were coming for the bot, not for him.
He ran down the alley, back to the dark street and kept on running. He felt empty. He’d lost something precious and it was something he never had.
Bar Bar
HE WALKED THROUGH THE hard, noisy rain in the dark streets. The brooding broken district seemed deserted. The kind of deserted where trouble could start up. Kicking the dust, walking aimlessly, Garrison realized he was hoping for the distraction that trouble would bring. Poor decision, he thought. And his training came to mind. The drill sergeant on his first week of boot camp said, “Poor decisions are the start of bad outcomes.”
He fished out his phone to call a Cab-U but before he woke it, a neon glimmer up ahead through the dusty fog read, Bar Bar.
In the low colored light he couldn’t tell how many people were in the bar. MechMetal beats rumbled a grind through the speakers. Pink noise masks around every booth fizzed away the sounds of any talk there may have been.
There were certainly customers here. Evidence of stale breath, cultivated male body odors and burnt oil confirmed it. Everything was monochrome. Pink or blue, as the faint neon glow shifted.
Occasional flickers of light from the edges of cloaked phone displays indicated human occupation in a few booths. Three figures hunched together at the end of the bar. They expanded like an opening fist as Garrison came to the bar. They were the only actual people he could see, apart from the pale, reedy barman. A raised finger got the barman’s attention. He stared into the swelling group at the far end. What light there was all came from behind them, so he couldn’t see their faces.
He ordered a stick of rye. The group didn’t move. They were just establishing territory, or so he figured. There didn’t seem any pressing need for him to contest it. Not so far.
He took a pull on the stick. The fiery spice and smoky caramel awoke his mouth and burned his throat. He let it sink and spread into him as he began to process what had happened. If her name really did translate to ‘Faith,’ then she certainly wasn’t a bot. She was a human. A girl somewhere, probably somewhere very far away, working as a remote sex-worker.
In USCom, that was very illegal. Human sex workers were licensed and, supposedly regulated. A brothel employing bot workers, they could do more or less what they liked. Virtus, flesh pets were said to be asked to do very outrageous things. Among grunts, that was accepted their accepted purpose. But a remote worker could be in an unregulated zone. Their employer could be unCert, illegal, anything. The girls could be exploited and subjected to suffering and harm of many kinds.
Garrison thought the last thing he’d want on his R&R would be getting into fights with bots, but he seemed to have been in two so far and he hadn’t exactly minded. This wasn’t even a full day. The bounce from MidEast Fed and the tube journey swallowed most of it.
Working out his aggression on a petbot seemed like a good plan and he hadn’t been able to do that. But the stomper in the tube terminus and the securibots in Friends Electric didn’t seem to have dulled his rage too much. His clamor for sex was more of a problem now. Not only had he started an encounter and had it cut off before it could take off, but now his mental image of Faith was seared into his mind.
She’s probably a poor grandmother. Inuit or Congolese maybe. Or even an off-world culturegirl. Human but ageless with no feelings at all. He took a hit on the rye. Forget her.
Murphy would enjoy the story. If he told Murphy a fraction of what was in his head about the girl, he’d give his buddy an everlasting, all-you-can-eat giggle buffet. There were parts of the story he might not tell Murphy, though. A few points he could be apt to misunderstand. Maybe it would be enough to coax Murphy out. Here or another bar. Maybe he’d let Garrison spring for the juice to power his chair. Or even his limbs.
Garrison’s head shook as he lifted the stick again. Murphy’s pride wouldn’t ever allow that. Perhaps Garrison could play on his pride to coax him out, though.
Got to be worth a try. He pulled out his phone and snapped the screen up with a privacy cloak. His battered and ancient phone had been with him through a lot. It must have been almost a year old. The projected display was scuffed and crackled down one edge and the top corner bled red and his animicons didn’t sing anymore. He was thinking how best to provoke Murphy into coming out, whether to suggest a bar from their old carousing days or try and lure him here. Looking around, he couldn’t see any features to help him sell the place.
Somewhere local to Murphy, then. Somewhere familiar. Bree’s Lounge or the Collinwood Bellini. He pressed Murphy’s contact icon. A static red ‘Call barred’ icon filled the display.
A oneline came in. It was just audio, a voicetag but it was Murphy’s voice.
“Don’t call or contact me again. Get lost, psycho.”
It struck Garrison like an iron bar to the nose.
The fallout from his incident at Friends Electric must have rippled out already. The brutal message, well, that was Murphy. ‘Psycho,’ though? Garrison frowned. No, there was something in the message that he wasn’t getting. Murphy might well say, “Don’t call or contact me again.” But the other part. Something gnawed at him, trying to get out.
The bunched fist of figures spread out and came lumbering along the length of the bar. Three ugly grunts with some very unCert enhancements surrounded him.
In a mechanical voice sounding like rusty clockwork, the biggest one said, “Won’t your little boyfriend take your calls anymore?” Garrison’s head filled with the smells of smoking oil and burned electrical wire. He slipped his phone away thinking, here we go again.
Chop
THE SMALLEST OF THE three was about half mech, mostly plastic. The one in the middle wore a hooded robe. Almost none of him was visible. The barman stood near. He pressed with three fingers on a flat gray tablet. Lights flashed on a wide steel bracelet on the big one, the talkative drinker. He froze and his eyes bulged. His body trembled and vibrated. The barman took his fingers off the tablet. The man relaxed.
The barman’s told him through a crooked smile, “Play nice, Chop, or you don’t play at all.”
Garrison was impressed. He asked the barman, “Does everyone in here have to wear one of those?”
Chop’s hollow, rusty voice made Garrison’s head snap back, “Everyone who’s mandated by the penal code.”
“That’s most everyone in here.” The mechanical voice of the smallest of the three had the flat tone of a voicemail bot.
Chop said, “If we want to fight, we have to find somewhere we can’t be observed.”
Garrison nodded. “And you just happen to have found somewhere.”
Chop laughed. Garrison wondered how long it would take him to shake that sound. Over the MechMetal it was like an evil instant earworm. Chop looked at
his companions. “This one’s on to us.”
Garrison told them, “I don’t have a lot of juice for you to steal, so I don’t think you’d get much of what you’re after.”
The hooded man barely had the croak of a human voice left. A box fitted over his throat looked like a larynx enhancement, but if it was it wasn’t turned on. “You may have other things we could make use of, soldier.”
Garrison looked at the three. The biggest had his two upper arms mechanized and seven fingers. His skull was plated on one side. A cranio-sacral conduit had tubes from the plate to the base of his skull then all the way down to the top of his ass. It spread out across both shoulders, too. Probably meant he could uproot a fair-sized tree if he could ever afford to run it.
“So, is that the game?” Garrison asked him. “Lure an unwary or unlucky mark to somewhere dark and sub-grid for a game of strength or combat. One that he’d been persuaded he would easily win against you, because although you’re a giant of a man, you’re weighed-down with enhancements and physically impaired. Right?”
Chop’s head tilted to one side as Garrison took a tug on his rye and went on, “Then, abracadabra, someone produces fifteen or twenty minutes of juice. Enough to charge up your back, your shoulders and your arms.”
While Garrison talked, the three each took a step back. The bartender stayed near. “Then the mark surrenders just about everything he has.” He looked around the three men. The one in the cowl moved forward. Chop stopped him. “No, Hush. Not now. Not this one.”
Garrison went on, “If the mark doesn’t comply, his ID-Secure components would be removed, jarred and used to extract all of his juice credit and then he’d still lose every item of value he has. Only he’d be salvage and past caring.”
Garrison heard stories of people disappearing in similar circumstances. He smiled at the group. He drained the stick of rye and asked, “Is that about right?”
The small one with the husky voice stepped near, “If you’re USSecur…” The barman raised the tablet and an eyebrow. Hush said, “I’m just telling him.”