by Guy Haley
"You won't hurt Veronique, will you?" said Valdaire's phone.
Progess. Otto yawned. "So you are speaking to me now?" he said, knowing full well it had been observing him for the last day. He had decided against having his own valet force it open. The likes of Richards were pool-evolved, millions of variants hothoused to force favourable traits, the best of each generation blended, a new wave bred from them, and the process repeated until personality and purpose arose. By contrast, evolved near-Is like Chloe were defined as "weak", made from a single, programmed source, and in Chloe's case heavily modded. Valdaire was good at her work and Chloe far exceeded most near-I specs, but years of tinkering might have made it fragile. Crack it badly, he'd lose everything. "I will not harm her. I am trying to find her so I can help her."
"I love her."
Otto nodded. "I am trying to help."
In the meantime Otto's near-I fed him AR directions to Valdaire, tracked off the Grid cheater mirages Richards had unravelled. They were uncertain, jumping about as his lock on broke and then was re-established, his oblique link to the Grid multiplying the effect, but he was on the right track – the signal he'd found off the back of Richards' frequency estimates was leading him steadily south-southeast. The modulated pulse of Valdaire's cheater weakened and strengthened as it switched up and down the levels of the Grid. Visible, but unlocatable. Chloe had to talk. Best take it slow.
Otto curled his lip. They were coming up to a rest stop. Time for a break. He had his near-I check for data-tagging on his Gridsig, or the emanations of machines that might be watching in the Real or online. Negative. There was always a chance of old-fashioned eyes doing old-fashioned watching, but he'd been careful. And he was hungry. "Car, stop here," he ordered.
"Yes, sir," said the car in a smooth voice complementary to the whispered rumble of the tyres on the tarmac. Thousands of AI-sped man-hours had probably gone into working out that touch. Cars and coffee blenders were getting smarter than some of his clients. There was a danger he was getting sloppy in the way that he dealt with them because of it. He had to watch that.
The car pulled up at a collection of wooden buildings: smart miniature charge station, restaurant and gift shop, the exteriors constructed rustically from whole logs; picturesque, and economical – there were tax breaks for using carbon neutral resources.
"What are you doing?" asked Chloe. "Why are we stopping?"
"Breakfast," said Otto.
"As of this moment, you do not require breakfast."
"I am hungry."
"Your nutritional needs dictate that you do not require breakfast," she insisted, businesslike.
He looked down at the passenger seat, where Chloe poked out of a bag. "You'd know? It is my stomach, not yours."
"Veronique provided me with efficient dietary and exercise software. I can calculate your optimum nutrient and calorie intake by estimation of your body weight and activity levels. I am highly accurate."
"I am hungry, be silent," he said. He preferred to eat to gain the energy he needed; he could plug himself in, but that made him feel like an appliance. He needed a damn sight more food than Chloe could guess at.
"It appears your stomach has been modified," said Chloe. "Although I am unfamiliar with your cybernetic physiology, I surmise that your systems provide for efficient nutrient recycling. If you are hungry, and do not wish to recharge by electrocal means, might I suggest you sate your psychological needs to eat and attempt to extract energy from some of the freely available organics by the roadside? You could eat them in the car," she said helpfully. "And it contains roughage."
"I had ham and eggs in mind," growled Otto.
Chloe was quiet, then blurted, "You said you would help Veronique."
Otto glanced at the phone. Chloe was all over the place, unstable. Too many apps and mods for a near-I to handle. Someone like Valdaire should know better. "I will. But if you are not going to tell me where she is, I cannot help her, so I got to eat breakfast instead."
"Get to eat," said the phone, "in this instance."
"Get to eat," he said, under his breath. He knew that. Damn, he was tired. "I am going to eat ham and eggs. And coffee, I need coffee."
"You do not require coffee!" Chloe's voice became shrill.
Otto shrugged. "Maybe I do not need coffee, but I want coffee, so I am going to get coffee. You can sit on the table while I eat my ham and my eggs and drink my coffee and think about telling me where Veronique is. You should hurry, I do not think Veronique has much time."
"But..."
"I am hungry." Otto scooped the phone up. The car anticipated his intention and swung back the door. He got out.
The restaurant was a small affair, a forty-seater or so, one of many Otto had passed catering for tourists, this one standing at the head of a mountain trail heading off into the forested wildernesses of the parks southeast of Flagstaff. A large car park, hidden by the buildings and a fold in the land from the road, stood behind it. A small ranger's office and toilets were at the top, a large wooden board carved with hiking routes next to it. The car park was half full, both of groundcars and, as they were close to the edge of the mountains, the more robust kind of aircar. A couple of tour buses occupied the far end of the lot.
The bus passengers were crammed into the diner, a real mom and pop affair in the 1950s revival mode popular back in the 2090s: high-walled booths, red vinyl seats, wood panelling and faded postcards, cakes in perspex boxes, local memorabilia and antiques hanging from the ceiling. It was hard to tell if any of the bric-à-brac was genuine – artefacts like these were often not; you could buy the fab patterns for them for virtually nothing. Ancient still photographs of grinning fishermen holding up extinct monsters by the gills crammed the walls, groundcars as ugly as primitive idols behind them; pictures out of a faded century, distorted further by the lens of another now fast receding in time. All Otto's life he'd lived through retreads of times from before his own time; the world was stuck in a loop, the advent of the Information Age proving conclusively there was nothing new under the sun. The Grid kills creativity, he thought. People don't get to forget any more.
The diner's kitchen was visible through a hole cut through the wall, where a short-order cook worked with a battered android on a hotplate as big as a billiard table. The air was thick with human breath and cooking smells, the windows steamed up against the cool mountain air outside, where autumn made an early foray. The diner strived for homeyness, and almost succeeded. Otto felt himself unwind a little.
"Hiya honey, you want a window seat?" The waitress was ages older than Otto, her hair tinted and chopped so as to appear three decades younger than her skin. It was bunched like a child's, framing a wrinkled, non-modified face. Her pink gingham uniform made her look like a geriatric doll. The effect was ugly, but Otto had seen worse in the mirror.
Otto's near-I shut off the cheater tracker for a moment and used its scrap of covert bandwidth to run a tactical analysis of the restaurant. Reticules blinked up in Otto's iHUD as it checked off each face, all full human, only a couple of uplinks, no threat from any. No records on the system beyond one or two parking tickets, one minor insurance fraud, a public order infringement and a couple of ancient drug busts. "No," said Otto, "I would like to sit there." He indicated an empty booth wedged by a large cast-iron stove.
"Gee, where are you..."
"I am German. Before you ask, I am also a cyborg, ex-military."
The woman's head wobbled, a tiny motion. Her good cheer disappeared.
Otto immediately regretted his terseness. American culture was predicated on crude but brittle decorum. He wasn't so good at that. "I am sorry," he said. "I look different. I become weary repeating myself. I have come far."
"Well, people would be interested, honey." The waitress's professional bovine smile crept back. "We don't get many other than your regular folk up here, one or two maybe with a little work done, but nothing like you."
Otto tried his best to smile, conjurin
g up a grim, slotmouthed expression that did double duty at funerals. "Your curiosity is understandable."
The waitress nodded, abashed.
Otto attempted a fresh start. "So please, I would like to sit there."
"Are you sure, honey?" she said. "It's awful cramped for a big fella like you. We've got some lovely views out front."
Otto looked at the vista of plunging forest-cloaked slopes. "You have. It is beautiful here, but I would like to sit there, for privacy's sake. I have an important call to make," he lied.
"OK, honey, they say it everywhere you go, but we mean it when we say the customer is always right at Josie's!" She smiled broadly, as wide a smile as a Euro would spare for her lover, but as emotionally involved as a car grill. Otto did not understand Americans – they wore their hearts on their sleeves, but when you peered closer to look, there wasn't that much to see. What first seemed to the cyborg like refreshing openness had long ago revealed itself as a lack of depth. Americans used your name too often. They lived up to their reputation for doing everything big, endlessly detailing their own dreary lives and mediocre achievements in unasked-for confessionals, in person and online.
He paid little attention to the woman's chatter as he forced his bulk behind the table. Thick log walls to his right and back, the stove to the front, he was well protected from small-arms fire. The booth afforded a good view of the restaurant's patrons and doors. The waitress stopped listing the specials, and reached for an animated menu card. He halted her arm midway, preventing the menu reaching the table. "Ham and eggs, a double portion of ham, eight eggs, sunny side up, as you say." He tried another smile, but it felt all wrong. He was not a man for smiling.
"Are you sure you don't want to see the menu? We have some fine specialties here – what about some of our famous pancakes? This tour bus party here, why, they stopped here special, just for them."
That sounded agreeable. "Very well. I will have pancakes with my ham and eggs. And a pot of coffee."
"You got it."
"Please could you provide me with the code and add a charge to my bill for your energy relay? I would like to recharge my phone and my implants."
"Sure! Energy's free here, it's open, just tell it to zone in and drink up!" She bustled off, then returned with a pot of coffee and a mug with "Josie's" emblazoned on it in a fat 1950s script, or at least the 2090s idea of a fat 1950s script. There was something well-meant about the mug, like the place. It was genuine in its artifice, for all its kitsch.
"I am not your phone," muttered Chloe when the woman had gone. "I am Veronique's PA. Not yours."
"Fine." Otto sipped the coffee. Coffee, he thought, Americans are good at coffee.
"You appear emotionally stunted. I will explain. I am not engaging with you. I am exhibiting signs of displeasure."
"If you tell me where Veronique is you can be reunited with her, and you need worry about my emotional state no longer."
"I cannot. How do I know you are telling the truth?"
"You have no face-reading applications?"
"No," she said in a small voice. "Anyway, you are a cyborg. You could probably hide a lie."
That particular kind of biological micro-management was beyond him. His upgrades didn't include the somatic rephrasing, and the tricked-out facial capillaries needed heat-beating, but he was tired of explaining himself. "You will have to trust me," he said.
"I can't," she said, somewhat sorrowfully, then, "You smell," her voice suddenly high and piping.
"Keep your voice down, or I will be approached and detained and you will not see Veronique again."
Chloe did not respond.
"You do want to help Veronique?"
A small sound: "Yes."
"So then, shhhh." He held his finger to his lips.
Otto's meal arrived, and he attacked it with sensuous relish. The gammon alone was enough to feed a family of four. The steak was vat-grown, film-engineered stuff pressed into patties that lacked the texture and flavour of genuine animal meat. But he ate methodically through it just the same.
He was tackling the pancakes when something tweaked at his Grid cover. Within milliseconds his near-I adjutant examined the alert, weighed its relevance, judged it pertinent and passed it on to Otto as a warning icon in his iHUD. Otto's head came up whip-fast and he moved. He hit the floor as a burst of flechettes punched perfect round holes through the plate-glass windows and embedded themselves in iron and wood alike. The hubbub of voices and click of knives on plates abruptly ceased as the restaurant patrons looked at the window.
A large man in his sixties pitched forward into his meal, blood pumping from holes either side of his neck, the flechette that caused them buried in the table. The woman next to him screamed. A second burst of flechettes terminally compromised the glass. The windows fell inwards. The restaurant erupted in a din of shouts and screams.
"Scheisse," said Otto wearily, and kicked his augments into gear. His lips took on a greyish hue as combat drugs entered his bloodstream. Time slowed as his chronaxic sense accelerated, the drugs bringing his other senses into sharp focus. He could feel the individual fragments of glass under his knees, smell the fear in the restaurant. His near-I dutifully fed him combat-relevant data. "I thought this was too easy," he said. He grabbed his pistol out of the holster under his jacket, snatched Chloe down from the table and took cover. Many of the other customers were scrabbling for the door and throwing themselves through the glassless windows. All sense of propriety lost, they became a herd that shoved at itself savagely. Otto heard a fresh series of distant cracks, louder now the glass was gone. A fraction of a second later a handful of people fell dead. The rest scattered, banging into each other as they panicked. In the car park engines started.
"What's going on? Get me out of your pocket, I can't see! I want Veronique!"
"Be quiet," said Otto. He pulled Chloe out and pointed her camera across the valley. "There is a sniper up there." He nodded over to the mountainside opposite. "Thirty-three hundred metres away or so, armed with a railgun. He's probably got a lock on me."
"Why? Why?" wailed Chloe.
"Because I'm trying to help Veronique."
Otto jogged over to the door, keeping the thick log walls between him and the shooter, pistol at the ready. Though it had nowhere near the range to hit the assassin, the weight of the weapon in his hand helped him focus. Outside bodies littered the forecourt. His car lay in pieces, holes punched through one side to the other, sunlight lancing through, tyres shredded, lubricants and water dripping onto the floor. He looked over the mountainside quickly, magnifying likely-looking locations for the sniper based on his near-I's estimation of the flechettes' trajectory. He saw nothing; whoever was shooting at him had decent camo, and if they were any good at their job would be moving in between bursts.
They'd have to have been good at their job to have found him.
He stepped back at an explosion from the car park as the split hydrogen in a fuel cell went up. Debris clanged over the forecourt surface.
On terrain like that on the opposite mountain the shooter would be moving fifty, sixty metres each time, if there were only the one and they were human. If there were more than that, he was as good as dead. Sound was no aid in locating his attacker. The sonic reports of the railgun munitions were faint. Without his enhancements he'd have heard nothing until the darts impacted the restaurant; the booms the flechettes made as they went hypersonic arrived as distant crackles, much of their energy lost in the vastness of the landscape. Nature barely deigned to acknowledge human noise up here, no matter how violent.
"Is, is it safe?" A young woman spoke, three wailing children crouched by her skirts, hands over their ears.
"Stay down!" shouted Otto and waved her back. "Get behind the table. Stay in here, where it's safe, all of you!"
"What's going on?" asked someone.
"Are you a cop?" asked another.
There were fifteen people left in the restaurant. He had to get out of t
here; he was putting them all at risk. He would have to go out the back. Another burst came, and a man hiding behind the charge station fell to the ground, writhing. The shooter was firing at targets as they presented themselves – that meant he had no bead on Otto, no firm lock; that was something. He watched the slopes as darts peppered the room, the mountainside opposite lit up like a rack of votive candles, infrared decoys mimicking the brief heating and cooling of a railgun as each shot was fired, a signature produced only by barrels of high-end long-string magnetic iron ceramics; exotic, expensive, more evidence this guy wasn't going to mess around.
He waited for the burst to stop, then made for the kitchen door at a crouch. His foot nudged a body, old face on a starlet's body. The waitress. He reached down a hand to feel for a pulse, found none, drew back fingertips dripping blood.
"Where are you going?" shouted a man in a red plaid shirt. He was wearing a grease-stained cap with the restaurant logo across the front, non-motile, a genuine cloth badge; possibly the owner.