Version 43

by Philip Palmer

  And Rage.

  “You fucking tin monster; were you a man once?” Dooley mocked.

  Rage, Despair, Scorn: a trinity of base emotion.

  According to my database, Dooley was a legendary bare-knuckle boxer. A workplace bully. The father of five children. He had three brothers, all of whom had been murdered, and there were widespread rumours that Dooley himself had ordered the hits on them.

  “You useless fucking plastic-skinned machine, you got a fucking nerve on you, coming in here!” Dooley taunted, as the bass line from the brainmash metal song shook the glasses on the table.

  “Did you know Alexander Heath?” I said flatly.

  “Of course I fucking knew him. He was the Sheriff’s jerk-off son.”

  “And Fliss Hooper?”

  “She came to my bar a couple of times, with Alex. A looker. No more fucking questions.”

  “And Andrei Pavlovsky?”

  “I said no more fucking questions.”

  “Why not? Do you have something to hide?”

  I stared into Dooley’s eyes, and Dooley flinched.

  “I didn’t fucking murder them.”

  “I know,” I said, though I knew nothing of the sort. “But I want your help.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  I threw a money belt on the table. Dooley opened it out. Gold nuggets tumbled loose.

  “Money. For information. How does that appeal?”

  “I’m not a fucking stool-pigeon.”

  “Yes you are,” I said, having previously accessed the Belladonnan police informant files, in which Dooley featured largely.

  “Yes I am,” said Dooley amiably. “Now you’re talking my language. Who do you want in the frame?”

  “I just want the truth.”

  “The truth? Someone’s trying to get at the Sheriff.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s getting old. And soft. Interfering with business that ain’t his fucking business.”

  I considered this possibility.

  “Who?”

  “I’ll find someone.”

  A powerful emotion crept up on me at this cavalier offer to frame an innocent. I recognised it, a compelling compound-emotion with a distinguished historical lineage: Righteous Wrath.

  “You’re under arrest,” I told Dooley, in neutral tones that concealed an avalanche of anger. And I grabbed Dooley by his shirt front and shook him like a rat.

  Dooley reacted instinctively. He broke my grip with a powerful wrist-twist, rolled off his chair and backflipped expertly, and came up with a pistol in his hand. His bodyguards also had guns which they aimed steadily at me.

  Then more of Dooley’s men and women appeared, carrying pistols and rifles; they emerged from doorways like termites fleeing a mound, forming a semicircle in the bar, and glaring at me past their guns. Grogan had subvoced for help, and his entire army had come running.

  In consequence, I mentally summarised, I was now

  1) surrounded by a gang of ruthless heavily armed killers, and

  2) confident that all of these gangsters would have been briefed on how to true-kill me.

  To true-kill me, of course, they needed to use explosive hardtip bullets not plasma blasts on my hardmetal frame, and they also needed to shoot the bullets into the centre of my torso, where my cybernetic brain was housed, not into my skull.

  And, most important of all, when I was dead, they needed to rip out my inner core and gouge out the contents and smash them, and then destroy my databird – the backup memory device that would otherwise allow me to save my personality into a new body.

  Grogan’s people would, I posited, know all this. And they were of course skilful warriors, fighting on home turf, with the odds overwhelmingly in their favour – one cyborg Cop against more than two-score heavily armed gangsters.

  Swiftly – in less than a trillionth of a second – I ran a scenario analysis based upon all the above data, and reached my final conclusion:

  These poor sorry bastards didn’t stand a chance.

  I stifled a grin.

  “Put your weapons down, or else you will face a penal sanction,” I said, in a deliberately mocking tone, and was rewarded by a hail of sneers.

  But then, to the astonishment of all present, Dooley shrugged, and lowered his gun. “Hell, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t…”

  I plunged my hands diagonally and – in a fraction of a fraction of a second – was holding my two pistols. I rolled off my stool, kicked it in the air where it flew wildly as chaff, knelt, and fired both guns simultaneously at different targets. I blew off Dooley’s head with the first six explosive-bullet shots, and simultaneously, with the other gun, nailed the five nearest bodyguards with torso shots, and then fired a fusillade of plasma bolts into the bar, shattering every bottle and glass on the shelves.

  Explosive bullets and plasma blasts rocked my armour, from the shooters on the balcony and elsewhere. But though the bullets punched holes in my arms and legs and head, none of them connected with my cybernetic brain. And so I swiftly rolled and shot, rolled and shot, then was out of the saloon.

  “Threatening a Galactic Police Officer with a deadly weapon,” I called back at them, “is a felony under Section Fourteen a) (iv) of the Solar Neighbourhood Penal Code!”

  The lawyers came for me at the hotel, but I projected film footage of what had happened out of my eyes, into the air in front of them. Dooley had pulled a gun on a Galactic Cop; his death was therefore justified. The bodyguards were all dead, but not braindead. In a year’s time, if all went well with the rejuve and organ transplants, they’d be able to reinhabit their bullet-torn bodies.

  But I had blown out Dooley’s brains with all six exploding bullets. There was no coming back for him. An enemy to society had been eradicated.

  It was assassination, pure and simple, and I knew it. But I had no qualms. Once, many centuries ago, when I was Version 1 and Version 2, I had practised brilliant detection, and solved cases of intricate complexity with astonishing leaps of logic.

  But now, all these years and Versions later, I cared less and less about finding solutions to arcane mysteries, or exposing devious killers. Instead, I yearned to be, simply and remorselessly, a destroyer of evildoers.

  Who had killed the three doctors and the two nurses, in such a bizarre and terrifying way?

  I didn’t know, and I didn’t truly care. For all I wanted to do was to clean up this godforsaken planet, once again.

  But then of course—

  I deleted that thought, before I had finished thinking it.

  And I then also deleted several of my previous thoughts, up to the point where I resolved that I cared less and less about finding solutions to arcane mysteries, or exposing devious killers; for this now struck me as an opinion that lacked both detachment and logical purpose.

  Finally, I reviewed my contemporaneous mission log. It read:

  I had blown out Dooley’s brains with all six exploding bullets.

  There was no coming back for him.

  An enemy to society had been eradicated.

  I felt satisfied at both the thought, and the deed.

  I stripped off my clothes and inspected myself in front of a mirror. There were ugly bullet holes in my abdomen, thighs, shoulders, and skull. I could and did poke a finger into my forehead and waggle it. But the inner cybernetic core inside my torso had not been penetrated.

  I patched the holes with sealant, and watched it dry. The skin colour wasn’t a perfect match, but my skin wasn’t a completely convincing flesh-colour in any case. I now looked, so my style program advised me, like a patched-up action doll.

  I got dressed again, and checked my appearance in the mirror. There was a circle of pale skin on my forehead, which was now the only trace of the hole where the exploding bullet had entered. And I could feel the bald patch at the back of my head, where it had exited. I also had traces of plasma-blast burns on my throat and hands. But otherwise, I looked fine.

  It
occurred to me that I had made no progress in the case to which I had been assigned. That, I realised, was an oversight.

  So I reviewed all my data again.

  And I realised I had reached no conclusions. No further hypotheses had occurred to me. I wondered if I was getting old. There was a time—

  Abruptly, and shockingly, a mood of Melancholic Despair descended upon me, even though both emotions – Despair and Melancholy – had been erased from my circuitry.

  I erased them once again.

  I had work to do.

  This was the Dark Side, where sex and human life were for sale.

  There were no tenements here, no vast spires, just huddled rows of neon-lit brothels and cinemas and strip clubs and close-encounter joints.

  I saw men and women having sex in the street. I saw men with men, women with women. Threesomes in the backs of cars. None of it perturbed me. It was a free planet. Anyone who wanted to pay for sex or be paid for sex was welcome to do so.

  But the Dark Side was also home to the slave trade, and the clone trade.

  I sat in a bar, and listened to the stories.

  “—never thought the day would come when—”

  “—the Lopers were in a killing rage by then. We could hear the police sirens. There was blood spraying everywhere. And my Loper was bleeding badly, but he rallied and—”

  “—my grandfather fought the Cheo. He died before I was born, but my parents kept a hologram of him on the mantelpiece. A great fucking huge pirate with a hook for a hand. He didn’t actually have a hook for a hand. That’s just how those old-time pirates liked to be portrayed. He—”

  “—I’ll pay you twenty for the twelve-year-old, double for the baby—”

  “—not a fucking virgin. Not! I’ve killed—”

  “—so I asked her, and she said yes. And we took our flybikes into the hills. And we raced—”

  “—they say it was voodoo. No way you could scramble body parts with any conventional weapon, not even hyperspace can do it, not even—”

  “—are you fucking joking? You don’t seriously expect me to—”

  “—so what do you say? We could die together, in Glory, and—”

  “—no – please – no—”

  “—not to my taste. However—”

  “—you owe, you pay. If you don’t have money then—”

  “—don’t make me fucking laugh, you fucking—”

  “—perfect clone of the Mayor, ideal for hunting and—”

  “—I’ll buy four, plus the mutant; I have an ancien who wishes to—”

  “—never before been—”

  “—you should take more fucking care, no one could survive that kind of—”

  “—I don’t care what you want, you bleating fucking girl, the contract says—”

  After a few hours I left and walked the streets. A police car cruised close to me. It landed, and the door opened.

  “Get in,” said the uniformed police sergeant. I glanced at her.

  “Sergeant Jones,” I acknowledged.

  “You remember me?”

  “You’re in my database, as a serving officer with the Bompasso PD.”

  Sergeant Jones stared at me. She was a raven-haired black woman, who was also, I noted, rather beautiful. And appealingly ample – generously curved, with laughter lines around her eyes. Something told me – though I couldn’t locate the datum in my database – that this was a woman who really loved life, and was, in turn, loved by life.

  She stared viciously at me.

  “Let’s go for a ride,” she said.

  “Sure.”

  I got in.

  “Your first name’s Aretha,” I informed her, as I sat beside her in the front seat of the flying patrol car.

  “That’s right.”

  The flying car took off, and Aretha piloted it with a casual lack of regard to any other vehicles in her airspace.

  “Shall I call you Aretha?”

  “If you like.”

  “We’ve never met.”

  “Is that what your database says?”

  “It is.”

  “Then we’ve never met.”

  The cruiser soared upwards, then flew high above the neon-lights-flashing hardcore-music-throbbing streets of the Dark Side.

  “I hear you killed Dooley,” Aretha said.

  “He pulled a gun on me.”

  “We don’t need your kind of law around here,” she snapped.

  The cruiser zoomed low over the park. Dozens of men and women were sleeping rough.

  I ignored her previous comment. “What is the designated topic of this meeting?” I demanded of her, coldly.

  “I’d like a progress report on the serial killing case.”

  “I do not give progress reports to the local authorities.”

  “What progress have you made?”

  “I do not give progress reports to the local authorities.”

  “What progress?”

  “I do not—”

  “NONE,” Aretha synopsised, savagely. “Fucking, none.”

  “I do not give progress reports to the local authorities.”

  “You went to the hospital.”

  “I do not—”

  “Shut the fuck up Mickey, or so help me God I’ll—”

  “What did you call me?” I asked her and felt, for a brief moment, worryingly unfocused.

  “Mickey.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s the name you told me to use. When we met last time.”

  “We’ve met before?”

  “I don’t mind that you don’t remember,” Aretha said, with a sweetness of tone that I suspected hid dark irony. “I know how it is for you robots.”

  “You do not know how it is for me, not at all,” I said flintily.

  “Oh, I think I do,” she crooned, with that same implausible sweetness. “They filter your database and your mission log, don’t they? Hmm? Leach out all the personal stuff. Leave you with the raw facts. It’s for your own protection I guess.”

  “When did you know me?”

  “A while back. A century ago.”

  “ ‘Mickey’?”

  “It’s not your human name. It was just – a kind of private joke between us.”

  “I don’t have private jokes.”

  “You did then.”

  “I’ve never met you before.”

  Aretha said patiently: “Skip it. Move on. What progress have you made?”

  I was silent.

  “None,” I conceded.

  “I figured as much.”

  “I went to the hospital and—”

  “It’s not about the hospital.”

  “I found no evidence of organ theft. However, later evidence has persuaded me that—”

  “It’s Fliss. Fliss Hooper.”

  “—it may be a revenge attack directed at the Sheriff, whose son was among the victims.”

  “Listen to me, dumbfuck! It’s Fliss. The rest are collateral damage.”

  I surveyed my database. It took about two minutes.

  “Ah.”

  “You agree?”

  “I agree. I didn’t find that information on my previous—”

  “You didn’t fucking look.”

  “It is indeed true that I didn’t, as you say, ‘fucking look’.”

  “There was a time, you would have looked,” Aretha told me, and I realised there was fury in her tone, and in her eyes. “Fliss’s sister was raped by the Mayor,” she continued. “Fliss was furious, fought her sister’s case. She decided the police were too corrupt to help, so she put out a call for the crime to be investigated by a Galactic Cop. The call was never made. Instead, a hit on Fliss was ordered. The Sheriff’s son, the other kids, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “The data may in fact be compatible with that hypothesis.”

  “You bet it is. Go on, metal man, access the record of the rape.”

  I read it from my database: Jay
nie Hooper. 23 years old. Found raped and beaten. All four limbs amputated, probably with a laser scalpel. Now in rejuve therapy and receiving psychosexual counselling. “There’s no evidence it was the Mayor,” I argued. “I have nothing to confirm that allegation.”

  “I’ve got a confidential informant tells me it’s the Mayor. The Mayor, you see, has control issues.”

  “Confidential informants can be unreliable. Their testimony is compromised by their criminality, and is frequently tainted by malice,” I explained.

  “It’s inside information, you fucking fool! And that gives you your motive. And once you have motive, you can find your evidence, and build your goddamn fucking case.”

  “You’ve given me no evidence.”

  “That’s your job. Find it.”

  “I have other priorities.”

  “What other priorities?”

  I hesitated.

  It shocked me; I never hesitate.

  “I want to clean up this town,” I said curtly.

  “Why?”

  “I want to clean up this town,” I repeated.

  “Mickey – what the fuck – we have a case. Crooked Mayor. Rape and multiple murders. Let’s take him down.”

  “If we lose the Mayor, there’ll be no stopping the gangs.”

  “Who cares?”

  Another hesitation.

  “I care. I want to clean up this town.”

  “What happened to you Mickey?”

  “I want to clean up this town,” I said, mechanically.

  Aretha flipped the eject switch and my seat and I fell out of the aircraft.

  The seat and I hurtled to the ground. I unbuckled, and clambered out of my seat and engaged my boot jets – but at this velocity, they were worse than useless.

  A moment before I crashed to earth, my circuits went into hibernate mode. I started to lose consciousness; a sensation I experienced as a slow blackout.

  I would estimate I was still five per cent conscious when I hit the ground hard and smashed a deep hole into the pavement, and then—

  I recovered consciousness.

  I was being lifted out of the ground by a crane.

  I pulled myself free, shook the debris from my metal body. My right arm was shattered at the shoulder. My electronic mind reaccessed my database, and I could now vividly recall my conversation with Sergeant Jones, immediately prior to my crash-landing. And I reaccessed the data towards which she had directed me.