by Guy Haley
"The patie… a-HEM! Corpses are in examination 3B, if you'd like to follow me?" Flats hooted.
"I don't like to, but I suspect I have little choice if I want to find out what you have discovered," said Richards with a bravery he wasn't feeling. They set off down a corridor, plush with self-cleaning carpet, the main way within the facility, and numerous rushing men, women and sheathed machine intelligences hurried back and forth. They spared no glances for the two AIs.
"Very droll. Your pointless jibes forever remind of the superiority of the Class Fours over Fives. I thank you for it." A bone saw screeched.
"Don't mention it. You said 'they'."
"I am sorry?" More of Lincolnshire Flats' ocular appendages swung round to look at Richards. He emitted an accompanying "boing".
They walked past Theatre Two, the largest in the place, a warehouse-sized room with gaping clam-doored airlocks leading to a landing field outside. Here they flew in broken base units and pulled them apart. That's where I am going to end up eventually, thought Richards. He shuddered. "'They're' as in 'They are' as in 'They' as in 'more than one'?" he said to Flats, more confrontational than he intended to be; scraps to hide his unease behind. This is fear I cannot deactivate, it is fear from my core. Do the others suffer it, I wonder? He'd never dared ask, it was too big a weakness, potentially catastrophic, to expose to the other AIs.
"Why, of course. The cydroid your partner deactivated, and the Qifang doppelganger."
"You didn't mean that," said Richards. "That was what your words said, but it wasn't what your voice said. You are too theatrical for your own good."
"Ah, yes, well," grumbled Lincolnshire Flats. "Pooh pooh, there's no hiding anything from you, is there? I must watch my levels of syncopation. I over-pronounce my words when I am hiding something. Yong yong," went Flats.
"You should."
"Bah. It is no paint off my casing's inter-ocular space. HA HA! You have only spoilt things for yourself, Richards, but we'll get to that, I'll save what I know. I shall leave you tantalised, which is nowhere near so delicious as flabbergasted. A pity."
They passed into the atrium of a smaller examination theatre, a round, domed room coated entirely in joinless spun glass. The atrium was within this, effectively a large airlock lit with strong, sterilising UV, a red light over the door to the theatre proper, glass frosted to above head height so those in the airlock could not see into the theatre. They were both subjected to a wind laced with cleaning grains. They stood for five minutes, lifting limbs, Richards' tilting his shoes, turning about, as the microscopic machines swarmed over the AI's respective sheaths, gathering contaminants of every kind. The red light over the door turned amber when they were done, and the grains spiralled down a hole in the floor like a swirl of water in the bath. When they had gone, the light turned green. The AIs' gridsigs were updated with the relevant clearances, and the doors opened.
"Follow me!" trilled Lincolnshire Flats. His unblinking eyes shifted to the tables in the middle of the theatre as he trundled out. There were four tables in all. The one on the right was empty. On the leftmost lay the twisted mess of the cydroid Otto had fought, next to that the fish-nibbled Qifang copy. Next to that lay another cydroid. It had been crudely dismembered, its flesh casing decayed, but it was unmistakeable as another doppelganger for the old professor.
"Qifang two!" shouted Lincolnshire Flats with a species of wholly inappropriate bombastic cheer. He extended a long, thin arm and pointed at the cydroid. "Dragged out of the South Bank marshes this morning, not far from Richmond Venice."
Another door opened, and a man dressed in surgical gear walked in from the scrub room next door. "Ah!" he said cheerily. "Richards! Glad to see you, how're you faring?" He was old in that indeterminate way wealthy men with generous healthplans tended to be. The jewelled snail of an expensive mentaug uplink curled round his ear, a biofilter mask sat atop his surgical cap.
"I am very well, Dr Smith, thank you."
"Of course you are, of course you are." He smiled and pressed his gloved hands together, the faintest of crow's feet feathering his eyes. "A Five is never ill, never tires, never stops. Marvellous, marvellous machines." He leaned forward and peered academically at Richards. Richards got the uncomfortable feeling Smith would just love to poke about in his warm, dead innards.
Richards looked at the broken androids on the autopsy tables, ran his hands absentmindedly along the edges. "And how are you?"
"Well, very well, a lot better than these sorry souls you see here," Smith chuckled. Lincolnshire Flats boomed with laughter and performed a twirl.
"Yeah, right. What have you found out for me then?"
"Ah, right to business as always," said the doctor. "They are entirely new, though I don't think I need to tell you that." He tapped his phone stylus against the acid-scarred carbon bones of the heiress. "As you can see, as you have seen, perhaps I should correctly say, these are sophisticated pieces of engineering. I'll use the term cydroid, though they're very near to grade II cyborgs in the proportion of their organic components against pure mechanicals and assorted electronica, shall we say."
"That is an incorrect definition!" shouted Flats, and continued at less offensive volume: "The legal definition of a cyborg is an organism that started life as a fully sapient human, naturally or artificially conceived and gestated, that at a point past conception is altered by the introduction of artificially derived, non-organic components designed to medically replace or enhance natural bodily function," droned the Four. "These are therefore, no cyborgs. Woot!"
"Quite so Lincolnshire Flats, quite so," said Smith, tapping the stylus against his upper lip, unconcerned he'd been poking it into the gory mess in front of him only seconds before. "These never were, for the want of a better term, 'human'." He smiled at Richards. "These are machines through and through. See here." He lifted a flap of rotted skin on Qifang 2 with the stylus. "This is very sophisticated, a full clone in some regards; a genuine copy."
"A full clone, as opposed to a genetically patterned clone, is legally defined as an artifically conceived and gestated organism, or part of an organism, created as an exact copy of a pre-existing organic organism's cellular structure."
"Indeed. Except they are not clones. They're vat grown, for the main, but in parts and then assembled; we can see the joining work, very fine it is, throughout these 'cydroids'… I hate the word! I really wish they would properly classify such," said Smith, shaking his head. "We knew the technology would hit us eventually, we've had plenty of time! What exactly am I going to put on the report?"
"Cydroid! I have already petitioned the medical council for a correct definition," said Flats.
"Whatever term you choose to employ, the machines have all the characteristics of their respective original's exterior properties, dermal, subdermal, lymphatic system… everything." He encompassed the rotting machines with a wave of his stylus and a worried frown. "This has not been spun off a gene-loom, I suspect. The basis of clones from the looms is simply the genetic coding of the subject, but these are actual duplicates, right down to the cellular level. Birth marks, cancers and all. There's more than simple invitrogenesis going on here."
"Someone had cancer? Who had cancer?" asked Richards.
"What? Oh, Qifang, poor chap. Lungs, absolutely shot, way past fixing. His healthtech should have picked that up. I'd sue."
"He's dead now," said Richards. "He's probably past caring."
"Hmmm, what? Yes, I suppose so." Smith scratched his elbow.
"The organics extend far into the system," bellowed Lincolnshire Flats. "Lungs, heart and liver" – his whirring appendages tapped a series of jars at the head of the bed, one after the other. Inside each reposed an organ made pallid by exsanguination and preserving fluids – "as well as all other major internal organs, the alimentary canal, stomach, reproductive organs and so forth. These, however, are not vital to the functioning of the machine."
"Indeed," said Smith. "In fact, the Qifangs are a
lmost entirely human, barring the skeleton. The heiress construct differs from him in her underlying chassis and in its cognitive hardwares. Both would fool most tests. And this is where things get interesting." Smith waved his stylus again. The theatre's sunpipes became opaque, dimming the room. A holo came to life, an image of the reconstructed heiress that expanded to double normal size and rotated. "Unlike Qifang's copies, the heiress's skeleton is a combat android chassis, carbon spun, faraday protected, independently motivated, strong too, similar to those produced and employed by the South African Union, and thus easily purchasable on the black market." He indicated the items one after the other with his stylus on the body of the heiress's cydroid. Above, the holo showed magnified views of the same. "It is capable of operating independently of the organics should they be destroyed; indeed, it is best to view those as merely a disguise." Layers of the cyborg graphic obligingly peeled back and it recentred itself to show the areas as Smith said their names. "Cavities of catalytic acids are scattered throughout. A two-liquid mix. On their own, inert, together…" He pressed his palms together then moved them apart, fingers spread. "Well then, I suppose we can bid farewell to our machine, as you yourself have witnessed."
"A suicide pill for our kind," said Flats.
"Standard black-ops modification," said Richards. "I've seen it before."
"They're deep in the bones, quite a clever modification actually, stops them getting mixed accidentally" – Smith spun his hands round one another – "due to trauma. Trauma caused by fighting your colleague, for example, I would say."
"It is apparent to both my colleague and I that the heiress's primary purpose is violence," added Flats.
"Yes, yes, indeed so. The skeleton itself carries a simple brain, that's the way the Africans run them. But not here. Someone has put extreme effort into making these things look human. We suspect ambush to be its primary modus operandi; surprise, shall we say."
"What about the Qifangs?"
"They're different," said Smith. "A simple woven carbon skeleton, too slow to vat grow like the rest of them, I suppose. Like I said, these chaps were grown and made in parts, then assembled."
"If this is a standard combat endoskeleton, how come it's not picked up on the scanners?" asked Richards.
"Aha! I am so very very glad you asked that!" boomed Flats. He trundled over to a cupboard in the wall. Part of his torso spun round. One of his eyes blinked off, which Richards took for a cocky wink. There was a whirr as his manipulators extended and depressed the door. It sank in slightly, clicked, then opened with a hiss. Flats grabbed an oddly shaped wet machine organ, messy as a liver, from the cupboard and flung it onto the table. "This here, sonny, is a camouflage unit. Woot!" went Flats. "Broadband spectral masking covers the skeleton with a modulated field, a back-up auxiliary mind monitors for any breaks, infiltrates the examination software if needs be and makes it see what it wants it to see. Double blindness!"
"Impressive eh? The military would kill to get their hands on that! But that's not all these new friend of ours have revealed," added Smith.
"No! No! There is more!" shouted Flats.
"You said the brain was non-standard?"
"Very much so, my dear fellow. It is in the brain of the things, the organic, human emulating brain, that we're really peeking into the future. It's still a little crude but it's really quite something," Smith pointed out the various elements of the machine brain on the hologram, which obligingly rotated, zoomed and highlighted parts of itself as the doctor spoke "Yet it mimics human synaptic function far more… adequately I suppose the word would be in this case, than any technology we have yet seen."
"And we see 'em all in here!"
Richards ignored Flats. "Are they capable of full human emulation then, independent of an external governing influence?" he asked, slightly incredulously.
Smith looked disappointed. "Oh, these are sophisticated machines, Richards, no doubt, but even so, whoever built them has not yet found a way of reproducing the full function of the human brain in as compact a form as that which evolution provided us with." Dr Smith tapped his forehead with a finger and smiled. "We meat people are still one step ahead. There are plenty of interesting innovations on the mechano-neurological level, but the mind it sustains is not as complex as that generated by a genuine human brain."
"How do you mean?"
"I suppose you could say the Qifang you found contained the edited highlights of the man's memory. It's as if, well, if you'll pardon the expression, as if he's not all there." He gave a physician's chuckle. "I'm sorry that we could not do a comparison between the two, but the second had lost much of its data content. If you'd…?"
"Dump the files into me when I leave," said Richards. "I'll take a look when I get back to my office."
"Very well. Even with the autonomy these marvellous engines possess, they would appear disconnected and aloof from a human observer. We've done a simulation…"
"A-HEM!"
"My apologies, my colleague Lincolnshire Flats here has done a simulation of how they might think, and aside from the directly programmed competencies present in the heiress, it looks like they were created to believe they are human. That would make them, at least her, the ideal assassin. Replace a living target with one of these, it acts like the original, more or less, until some keyword, broadcast or other signal activates it and BAM!" Smith shouted loudly, slamming his hands together. Richards jumped. "The faux-personality is overturned, the core programme takes over… Dead target, infiltrated business, compromised facilities, you name it. They would be inappropriate for truly complex missions, but deadly in the right instances. Imagine, a covert, human-mimicking assassin, the first of its kind, perhaps."
"We are privileged in our work," said Flats.
"How can you be sure they thought they were alive?" said Richards. Throughout Smith's briefing he'd been walking round the inert android, peering into them, lifting bits up. The room smelled of acid, seared flesh and rot under the disinfectant.
The two coroners looked at one another.
"What?" said Richards.
Smith paused, waved his hand around, looking for words. He couldn't find the ones he wanted, "interrogate" sounded too strong. He settled on the prosaic explanation. "Well," he said. "We asked them."
A short holo of the first Qifang machine active, bundles of cable strung from its head. It was screaming over the questions it was being asked; a terrible noise that did not stop.
"I've seen enough," said Richards after half a minute.
"Yes, yes," said Smith grimly. The holo froze. "Quite immoral, don't you think? The heiress and Qifang Two, I'll spare you the holos, were too badly damaged to reboot right away. There was no underlying programming in either Qifang copy like there was in the heiress, though much of the brain of the second is missing, so it's hard to be sure, but he seems to be a poor copy of Qifang, she a poor copy of an heiress with a murderous purpose."
"Where the hell are they from?" muttered Richards. "And why was the heiress trying to kill the other cydroid? Are there any other differences?"
"No. They are of identical manufacture in all other respects," said Flats.
Richards looked at the machines. Their existence opened a lot of doors into a lot of nasty, dark little rooms. "Do you know where they were made?"
"Negative," said Flats. "We have provided you with information. Utilising it is your role in this. We are coroners, you are the investigator!"
"Perhaps this will help," said Smith. The hologram spun again, focusing in on the top of the heiress's damaged femur. "At the atomic level, there is a company logo. Twelve atoms by twelve atoms. We'd have no clue if it weren't for this. Why the criminal mind has a need to reveal itself in such ways is a mystery we'll never uncover in here, but there it is. Do you recognise it?"
The logo was grainy, blocky like a very early computer graphic, single carbon atoms for single pixels. Richards raised his plastic eyebrows. "Yes, I do." And he wasn't surprised. "Tony C
hoi."
"Who?"
"Arms dealer out of Hong Kong. He and I go a ways back. Thanks. That gives me somewhere to start."
"There is one last thing," said Smith. "Qifang Two was deliberately dismembered. There are tool cuts here, here and here. And there's this." He highlighted similar wounds on both corpses, pulling holo images until they overlaid each other. One hole was more ragged than the other, but both were in the same place. "See this? Identical puncture wounds to the base of the skull, and concomitant internal damage. In Qifang Two, the one from the boat, this has knocked out a precise part of his artificial cortex; the other's head was emptied afterwards, but I would say that they were after the same part. And that was this." A ragged holo came up, and began to play. "It's only a part of a message we found in the one from the boat. It was terribly degraded, I am afraid to say. The retrieved footage should be here… Now."