I don’t know why I wanted to keep quiet. The building was empty. Had been for years.
But still. I wanted to be quiet.
We arrived on the landing—a mezzanine floor—and I kept going up. Alfie followed behind. He was looking around, his hands still in his pockets. He’d given up smoking. He was on the job now.
The stairwell handrail was dusty. We hit the second floor. The third. Nothing had changed. There was no sound. The dust was thick. Our progress was lit by the moon shining in through the big windows that were all over the place. The light was silver and white and in it everything looked gray.
Seventh floor. The research laboratory.
Thornton’s laboratory.
I looked at the ceiling and I looked at the floor and counted the spiders and the cobwebs while I waited for Alfie to arrive. Seven floors was quite a way and while he was faster than me in a straight line he was slower than me when ascending the vertical. When he pulled himself up into the corridor he gave me a nod. I turned and walked on.
We came to a corridor that was completely dark. I heard Alfie’s step hesitate behind me. I turned around and turned the light up in my optics a little to shine a path. I saw myself reflected in his big square glasses.
Alfie nodded at me to continue.
The yellow glow from my optics was the best I could do. It wasn’t much, but we didn’t have far to go. Soon enough I pushed through a set of fire doors and we emerged into a wide corridor that had high windows down one side. The moon was bright outside. It cast long shadows and those shadows made shapes on the floor and the wall in front of us.
I was a robot and even I thought it was creepy. But at least we could see any monsters that might come for us.
I turned my optics back down and we walked a while. The corridor was long and the right side was lined with lots of doors with windows in them. As we passed each one, Alfie took a look through. After the fifth door he stopped. I turned around.
“You sure about this, Charlie?” asked Alfie. “Doesn’t look like there’s anything left in here at all. Whole place has been cleared out, hasn’t it?”
He pointed through the window of the latest door. I joined him and looked inside.
It was a laboratory. The whole floor was full of them. This one was a long room lined with cupboards and benches. There were more long benches running up the middle of the room. Stools were pushed underneath them.
The long benches would have been covered in equipment. Lamps. Magnifying glasses on adjustable arms. Soldering irons. Toolkits. Volt meters. Coils of wire in a dozen gauges. Oscilloscopes and computer banks. The works. The cupboards and drawers that lined the walls would have been filled with more tools and components and spare parts.
There was nothing in the room now. Just the bare benches and a few stools. The cupboards were all closed, but I knew they’d be empty too.
“There’s nothing here, Charlie.”
“We aren’t there yet,” I said. “Try to be an optimist.”
We walked on and went through two more sets of fire doors and then we arrived.
I stopped in the corridor. I thought I could smell heavy tobacco. I thought I remembered a man with a pipe and glasses and a surprised kind of look leaning out of one of the doors down the corridor.
And then the memories were gone and I wasn’t even sure I had really remembered anything.
This was my place of birth. It was bound to stir up all kinds of—
Emotions? No, they weren’t emotions, although it was a little hard to tell. I was programmed to simulate emotions. My whole personality was a simulation, a complex organic algorithm taken from a template copied from a real person.
Professor Thornton, my creator.
But that’s just what it was—a template. I wasn’t him. I didn’t think like him. I didn’t have his knowledge or experience even if I remembered parts of his life sometimes.
And if I sometimes felt like him then that was just another simulation, my positronic circuits estimating responses based on sensory input and correlating that input with data on my permanent store. Somewhere inside me my logic gates clicked and they clacked and my master program algorithm went up and down and back and forth along an infinite number of pathways and options, at each step comparing the yes-no result with what the template said.
It was a program. I was a program. Nothing more. Nothing less.
So I ignored the feeling of weary nostalgia about a place I didn’t remember being in before and I ignored the feeling of guilt at something I didn’t remember doing.
And I ignored the smell of pipe smoke.
Alfie hadn’t said anything. I turned around and jerked my head down the empty corridor.
“Down here,” I said.
Alfie adjusted his glasses.
I turned back around and I walked down the corridor toward Thornton’s laboratory.
* * *
I turned the corner and I stopped. Alfie nearly walked into my back, and he said something I didn’t catch because my head was suddenly filled with the sound of crickets on a summer night.
No. Not crickets. Something else. A ticking, loud and fast. And dangerous.
I tuned in and I listened and then I realized what it was I was listening to.
My Geiger counter was racing. If it had been ticking before I hadn’t heard it because it usually ticked all the time. Lots of things in the world were radioactive and just like any Joe in the street I didn’t need to know about it all. I only needed to know when it was unusual. I would have said dangerous, except radiation didn’t bother me much.
But it would bother Alfie. He was still behind me as I took a step backward, forcing him down the corridor.
“What’s up, Charlie?”
“Back,” I said. “Around the corner.”
My Geiger ticked down as we left the corridor and passed through the fire doors. It was still a little high but I figured that in this corridor at least the dose was a little less than what Alfie got from his own cigarettes.
“Wait here,” I said. I left Alfie where he was and I stepped back through the fire doors.
The main door to Thornton’s lab was dead ahead. The corridor was dark now that the windows were gone so I turned my optics up again.
I didn’t like what I saw.
The building itself had been locked up and then chained up. It was shut, closed, out of bounds. The whole place seemed empty. I didn’t know who owned it but I guessed it was federal property and they were happy to just let it sink into the foundations of Los Angeles. Seemed a bit of a waste, but it was what it was.
Thornton’s research lab was also locked up, but this was different. This explained why they’d left the building intact. They couldn’t demolish it. Nor could they move anyone else in.
Because the door to Thornton’s lab wasn’t just locked, it was sealed. In fact, it wasn’t even a door. Where the door had been was a big wide steel plate that had only a very dull sheen under the lights of my optics. The steel plate had a lot of notices posted on it. I read them all, several times. They were mostly notices from the federal government. A warning about trespassing. A warning about being shot. (Who was left to do the shooting?) A warning about tampering and who to call if you saw or heard anything suspicious.
But that wasn’t what got my attention. What got my attention was the big diamond-shaped poster right in the middle. It was yellow and had a black symbol on it consisting of a big black dot and three curved fins arcing out from it.
The international symbol for nuclear energy.
I checked my Geiger. It roared like a lion.
Thornton’s laboratory was hot.
Of course the items on Falzarano’s shopping list were still in the building, because they were all in Thornton’s lab. The building had been stripped of everything else of value or interest, but not this part. Nothing could be taken out. Something had happened in there and had left the place a radioactive no-man’s-land. All they could do was seal the door and ho
pe for the best.
Radiation didn’t bother me, but I didn’t want to take anything out of there without precautions. So I turned and went back down the corridor and through the fire doors.
Alfie had lit a cigarette, apparently content that nobody was going to catch us loitering. I saw the end flare in the darkness and I saw his silhouette nod at me.
“What’s the story, Charlie?”
I scratched my chin. It made a fingernails-on-blackboard kind of noise and I saw Alfie’s shoulders rise up in irritation.
“Sorry,” I said. “The lab where the equipment is is hot. Radioactive. I can go in there but taking anything out is going to be a risk.”
Alfie nodded and puffed on his cigarette. “So what do we do? Find some kind of lead box to put it in?”
“I don’t think we’ll find anything here,” I said. “You saw the other labs. This whole place had been stripped. But I have another idea.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Pass me the list.”
Alfie handed me the note. I unfolded it and looked it over. Of course I remembered what it said exactly, but I wanted to be sure. Call it a tic inherited from my creator, the man whose abandoned laboratory was now a sealed tomb.
“Most of these things are small,” I said. “They’re only components, little things you build into something bigger.”
“If you say so, mate.”
“Which means I have room.”
I tapped my chest. It sounded like someone knocking on a door. Alfie stood there and smoked and stared at me.
“Yeah, well,” he said, “I’ll take your word for that. You lead-lined or something?”
“No, but the alloy I’m made of is pretty dense. It will do until we get back to Falzarano’s.”
“And what’s the old man going to do? If this gear is as hot as you say it is, he’s going to get well burned, ain’t he?”
I frowned on the inside. “Unless he’s taken precautions.” I looked at Alfie. “Maybe that’s why he wanted me. He knew I could go in there and get the components.”
“Then why bring me along? I’m no good for any of this.”
“You can’t come in with me, but that’s okay,” I said. “Go back to the car. It’ll be safer there. Drive it up to the main doors and keep it running. When I come back down, we hightail it back to Falzarano’s. You drive faster than I do.”
Alfie smiled in the dark. “Interesting idea,” he said. “And I did fancy a go at your motor.”
I nodded at him. “Opportunity knocks. Now go. I’ll be down as soon as I can.”
Alfie did a mock salute. “Roger that, Charlie,” he said, and then he headed away. “Oh,” he said, calling back over his shoulder. “Take it easy, won’t you?”
And then he was gone and I was alone. I turned and walked back through the fire doors. I faced the steel plate. I wondered what had happened inside Thornton’s lab. Some kind of accident? Must have been. With the professor gone, one of his former assistants must have got something very, very wrong.
I turned down my Geiger counter because I didn’t need to hear it anymore. I had to go in, and there was no point worrying about it.
And with the Geiger counter off, I finally heard another sound. I had no idea how long it had been going on, but Alfie hadn’t said anything, so it must have been new.
I looked at the steel plate.
From somewhere behind it, a telephone rang.
I had a feeling I knew who was calling.
30
The steel plate over the laboratory door was made to keep people out, but whoever had sealed the joint hadn’t counted on a robot being interested in getting behind it. I made short work of it, getting a good grip on the edge and yanking it toward me. It didn’t take much. The steel plate had been bolted onto the wooden frame of the lab door behind it, so a couple of hefty tugs and the whole thing came away, wood and all, from the wall. I waited a moment for the brick dust to settle and then I placed the plate against the wall to my right and took a step across the threshold.
It was dark beyond the door so I kept my optics high. I moved in I saw that what windows there had been were covered with more steel plates.
The lab was intact, the whole place left like a museum.
Or a mausoleum.
Equipment was stacked everywhere, big boxy machines and computers as tall as refrigerators with as many miles of magnetic tape strung around their reels as there was back at my own office in Hollywood. There were stools with short backs all around the benches and some of them even had white lab coats draped over the back of them, and some of the benches had screwdrivers and soldering irons and needle-nosed pliers scattered like abandoned toys over blueprints and worksheets and clipboards. Whatever had happened had happened fast and everyone had got the hell out before it was too late.
The fully equipped robotics laboratory included a telephone on the wall next to the main door. The telephone was red and it looked important and it was still ringing as I stood there.
I lifted the handset to the side of my head.
“Ada, I’d love to talk, really I would, and I’ve got a hell of a story to tell, but this place is a little warmer than I’d normally like it and I don’t want to hang around.”
Ada laughed inside my head. “Just what is it with you and radiation?”
“You’ll have to tell me.”
“Maybe I will one day,” said Ada. “So, how does it feel to be back home?”
I looked around the lab. I looked at all the equipment. At the far end of the room was a robot-shaped alcove like the one back in my office. I looked at that and then I found I couldn’t shift my optics from its direction. I felt a pang of something then. Those diodes down my left side. They flashed, all at once. I frowned on the inside as I held the phone to my head and I thought maybe it would be nice to remember things once in a while.
Like where you came from.
I decided to ignore Ada’s question. I checked the radiation count again and I didn’t like what I found.
“Listen, I’ve got an error 66,” I said, “and I’ve lost twelve hours of memory time. Now I’m in Thornton’s lab looking for old components. I don’t like any of that and I have a feeling they’re all connected somehow. Are they?”
Ada hummed inside my head. “Error 66?”
“Error 66. Ideas?”
She hummed again. “Let me look it up. What’s Falzarano got you looking for?”
I ran off the list of components. When I was done Ada gave a whistle over the rim of her coffee mug. “You’ve come to the right place, then,” she said.
“Is it my memory tape? Is error 66 something to do with a twelve-hour record failure?”
Ada finished her nonexistent cigarette and I could have sworn I heard her stub out the remnants in an ashtray made of orange carnival glass.
“I said I’d look it up, Ray. Don’t worry about it. We’ll run a service report when you get back. You’re made of solid stuff, chief. It won’t be anything important.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Do you trust me, Ray?”
I said I did but there was a pause before I did it. I didn’t know where that pause came from but it was there all the same. If Ada noticed she didn’t mention anything.
“Okay, listen hard, detective. I’ve done a little digging and there’s some information you need.”
I managed to refocus on the rest of the laboratory that wasn’t the alcove. I wanted to see the components for Falzarano or at least see where I should be looking while Ada yakked in my ear.
“You get a hit on Coke Patterson?” I asked.
“Forget about Coke Patterson,” said Ada. “I’m talking about your friends Alfie Micklewhite and the lovely Carmina.”
“Okay.”
“They’re not who they say they are.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“No, listen Ray, I want you to pay attention here.”
“I am paying attention but make it sh
arp.”
“Cut it with the countdown and listen good, Ray.”
I sighed. Alfie would have got the car up to the building by now and would be waiting while I let a good dose of radiation out into the air of Los Angeles.
“You have my undivided attention,” I said.
“Which is exactly what you need to avoid from your two friends.”
“Alfie and Carmina?”
“Alfie and Carmina do not exist,” said Ada. “Alfie’s real name is Francis Cane, and Carmina is Professor Carmen Blanco, late of a Colombian research institute that was a state secret right up until it got blown up in the little civil war they have bubbling away down there.”
“Late?”
“She went up with the building, Ray. Five years ago.”
“She’s looking good for it. And who’s Francis Cane? Alfie told me he was a gangster from London.”
“Oh, he’s from London all right. Only he’s not a gangster. He’s a private contractor.”
“For?”
“A company called International Automatic.”
“Okay,” I said. I thought about the name. Nothing came to mind. “And?”
“And nothing,” said Ada. “All you need to do is stay away from Francis Cane and Carmen Blanco. You got that, chief?”
“Easier said than done. Alfie is waiting for me in the car and Carmina has the run of the house, if she isn’t actually running it already. Falzarano’s sick and she’s stepped in to take over.”
“Okay, do your best, Ray. Just wait it out until we get the word.”
I sighed like a dying air conditioner shuddering its last. “Our illustrious client is taking their sweet time about it. What else do they think I’m going to dig up?”
“Well, finish Falzarano’s shopping and then see what happens, okay, chief?”
There was something I didn’t like about how this conversation was playing out. Ada sounded … not annoyed exactly. But there was a pointedness to her tone that was unfamiliar.
And unsettling. Like the job. I was supposed to kill Falzarano but only when I was told to. And in the meantime I was keeping company with two people who Ada had just told me to keep away from while my system was throwing an error 66 and twelve hours was missing from my memory tape.
Killing Is My Business Page 15