by S. C. Jensen
“He’s a true professional,” I said bitterly to Johanna. “One out of two isn’t bad.”
“What about you,” Johanna said. “You’re a private investigator, aren’t you? Used to be an HCPD detective? You’ve got to have some skills worth having.”
“Hate to break it to you,” I said. “My only skill these days seems to be getting in over my head.”
“That’s accurate,” Gore said. “You should see the scrapes she gets into for her clients. And most of them are Grit District rejects who can’t even afford to pay her.”
The words stung because they were true. I needed help. I needed all the help I could get. And then I needed to crawl under a rock where I couldn’t get myself and the people I loved into trouble like this again.
But I crossed my arms and glared at the hit man. “What do you know about it?”
“I’ve seen your file.” Gore stuffed the cellophane wrapper into the garbage disposal chute in the centre of the metal table.
“There’s a file on me?” I turned to Patti, but she had curled up on herself, in a pose of childlike regression, and stared at nothing. I said, “Who’s got a file?”
Gore shrugged and leaned back on the sofa. Hammett sat next to him. The pig stared up at the big goon with its ridiculous stovepipe hat tipped comically back on its head. Hammett said, “Where can I get a copy?”
Gore grinned with his too-small teeth in his too-big head and flicked the pig on the nose. I ran a hand through my hair and pulled hard enough to make my eyes water and turned to stare back into the useless cupboard.
“Well, you’re still here.” Johanna flicked her wrist and summoned another ball of purple flame. Her gaze slid between Gore and me as if she were trying to decide whose side she was going to take if the tension erupted into something physical. “That’s got to count for something.”
“The gods watch over drunks and fools,” Gore said.
“That’s right.” My eyes itched with unshed tears, but I refused to give in to them now. “I quit drinking but I’ll always be a fool.”
I kicked open the door to the cooler and bent to grab another radioactive-green can, then I stormed out of the passenger lounge without looking back at any of them.
“It wasn’t meant to be an insult,” Gore muttered under his breath as I passed. He broke off another chunk of green protein and chewed bemusedly.
“They don’t teach people skills in hit man school, I guess,” Johanna said, as I stomped into one of the attached corridors.
An embarrassed flush burned its way up the back of my neck. I had no idea which way I was going, I just needed to get away.
I couldn’t even have a normal conversation without screwing it up.
How was I supposed to save my friends?
The artificial clip-clop of little hooves followed me into the hall. Hammett snuffled heavily, as if rolling along on its sphere was the SmartPet version of hitting the VR-treadmill.
“Bubbles,” it squealed. “Wait for me.”
I ducked around a corner into another pointless, empty corridor. Leaning against the smooth white wall, I slid down to the ground and put my head between my knees. The tears I’d been holding back spilled from my eyes. I wiped at them with the back of my arm and made way for Hammett to squeeze in next to me.
“Are you okay?” The little pig sat between my knees and looked up with a cartoonish expression of concern blinking up at me.
“Don’t do that,” I said. “It’s manipulative.”
“Sorry,” Hammett said. Its swollen eyes shrank back to their normal size. “Empathy signalling.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I know you’re not human. That’s what I like best about you.”
“Things have been bad, haven’t they?” Hammett said. “I’m sorry I haven’t been able to help.”
“Me too.” I nodded and leaned my head against the wall. The blank white walls stretched away from me in both directions and none of seemed to lead anywhere. I said, “I feel so helpless.”
“You’re doing everything you can,” Hammett said.
“It’s not enough,” I said. “That’s the point. I am doing everything I possibly can and it’s not enough. Rae is being eaten alive by that program in her brain. Why? Because I failed to keep Urqhart away from that hard drive. That monster at Libra is torturing Tom. For what? Because Tom knew I couldn’t protect Rae on my own and he tried to help me.”
“It’s not your fault.” Hammett huffed, ruffling the red feathers of the boa with its simulated breath. I marvelled at the technology I now took for granted. SmartPets were not the kind of thing Grit District punks like me ever dreamed of having. It had been Rae who had convinced me to use my severance payout to buy the thing when I’d been sacked from the force. Now Rae might never be herself again, and Hammett could be all I have left to remember her by. The tightness in my chest became unbearable.
“Yes it is!” My shouted words echoed off the walls and bounced down the hall. “None of this would have happened if I wasn’t a bumbling idiot. Gore is right. I was a fool to think I could make a living as a private investigator. I was a fool to think I could protect Rae.”
Hammett cocked its head at me. “Does it make you feel better to think that way?”
“No.” I slammed my metal fist on the floor and the nerves in my shoulder pinched beneath the upgrade. “It makes me feel useless. It makes me feel like I should have stayed head-first in the bottle where I didn’t feel anything at all.”
“That makes sense,” Hammett said. “I don’t have feelings and I’ve never missed them. They seem like a bit of a nuisance, really. Like right now, your feelings are clouding your ability to think clearly. Not unlike your former brain-cell-killing pastime.”
“I don’t want clarity. I want numbness.”
“Let’s just sit with that feeling for a bit,” Hammett said. “Or rather, you sit with it, and I will provide useful commentary to help you process your emotions.”
I snorted. “The emotions you don’t have and can’t possibly understand?”
“Yes.” Hammett nodded matter-of-factly. “My programming suggests that you want to feel validated. The over-the-top martyrdom performance supports this data.”
“Martyrdom?” I choked on the word. “You think I like feeling like this?”
“I don’t know anything about it,” Hammett said. “But you continue to skew reality in order to feel justified in your feelings, so I can only assume you enjoy it on some level.”
“You’re one twisted pig,” I said. “You know that?”
I wished there were something else to look at besides the bald white hallway and the ridiculously dressed hologram pig. It was difficult to get a good sulk on under these conditions. Maybe Hammett was right. I did want to feel bad. I deserved it.
“I’m not the one pretending to think I’m useless just to get someone to pat me on the backside and tell me I’m wonderful.” Hammett wiggled said backside to illustrate its point.
“You just said I wanted validation,” I said. “Isn’t it your job to provide me with the support I need?”
“Yes,” the pig said. “But what you think you need and what you actually need are two different things.”
“What do I actually need, then?” I said. “Because right now, it feels like a tray full of ruby gimlets would do the trick.”
“You need a reality check,” said Hammett.
“I know, I know.” I pressed the can of NRG soda against my forehead and closed my eyes. “Alcohol isn’t good for me. Most things I enjoy aren’t.”
“Not about the urge to drink,” the pig said. “About your sense of reality.”
“I’m not in the mood for a pep talk, Ham.” I didn’t really want to drink. I had played that story forward and knew how it ended. But Holy Origin I missed the numbness. The obliteration. I missed having
an off-switch for my brain.
“I know. You’re in the mood to feel victimized by your life circumstances,” it said. “And I just want you to know that you’re not that important.”
The can slipped from my hand and clattered onto the floor. “Are you malfunctioning? That doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“Well, I can’t tell you how to feel. But I can tell you that you have a vastly inflated sense of self-importance if you think that all of this has happened because of something you have done or haven’t done. Statistically speaking.”
“I failed to protect my friends,” I said. “That’s the only statistic that matters.”
“Only if one can reasonably assume that protecting them was within the realm of your abilities.”
“See? We’re on the same page after all, Ham. That’s just a round-about way of saying that I’m incompetent.”
Hammett rolled its eyes and sighed. “Would you shut up and listen, please?”
I motioned with my hands for the pig to continue and put my head back down on my arms. The ship hummed along, the lights in the hallway strong and steady. We were surrounded by the crushing blackness of space, travelling along in our tin can, and everything was just fine.
“You are a recovering alcoholic, an ex-police detective, and a middling private eye.”
This was worse than the time Rae took me to her beauty salon, and they demonstrated for me the barbaric ritual known as body waxing. I winced.
“You take cases no one else wants, from people no one else cares about. You will never get rich. You will never be famous. Most people will never give two flying falafels for what you do with your life.”
“Please stop,” I said. “I’m starting to feel all warm and fuzzy.”
“My point is,” Hammett said. “Libra doesn’t care about you. It’s not about you. It’s never been about you.”
“Then why am I stuck in the middle of it all?”
“Because you are connected to Rae,” Hammett said.
“Wait,” I said. “Rae gets to be the centre of the universe, but not me?”
“You are average,” Hammett said. “You are the centre of your own universe and no one else’s.”
“I’m not a child,” I said. “I know I’m not the centre of the universe. Still not fair.”
“It would appear there is something exceptional about Rae.”
Of course there was something exceptional about Rae. She was the kindest, most brilliant person I’d ever met. She’d stuck by me since we were kids, through thick and thin. Even when she yanked herself right out of the Grit on her fashion-forward bootstraps and got into the best school in the Trade Zone, she still let me hang around.
“Sure,” I said. “I can see that.”
But I didn’t see why that should make her the target of a grade-A prick like Price.
“If you know you aren’t the centre of the universe,” Hammett said, “why do you insist that you should single-handedly be able to protect everyone you care about from every situation they find themselves in?”
“Because it’s my fault they are in this situation in the first place!”
“You only think it’s your fault because you are refusing to look at the bigger picture.”
I grunted.
“Libra developed illegal AI plugs and snuck them into the Mezzanine Rose. You exposed them. Libra started killing off all the researchers who knew about the failed AI project. You helped Rae escape from them. Libra kidnapped Tom in order to get emotional leverage on someone close enough to LunAstro to get Patti and the data back. You are going to try to save Tom without giving Libra what they want.”
The pig didn’t know how close I’d been to doing exactly that, but I kind of took its point. “So, it’s not about me. It’s about Libra.”
“Reality check, success!”
I cracked the can open and took a sip. The ship went on humming along. The pig stared up at me with its goofy hat. I thought about it.
“That doesn’t make the situation any better,” I said. But I felt the weight lifting off my shoulders.
“Whether or not it does is going to be up to you,” Hammett said. “You are not bred and trained for anti-corp warfare. Libra will be expecting Gore. They will not be expecting you.”
“Nathanial Price sent me a personal invitation to save Tom,” I said. “He must expect me to do something.”
“Price would love to get his hands on the android and Rae, or possibly just the files in Rae’s head. That part is a little murky,” the pig said. “Threatening Tom to encourage you to betray LunAstro is a low-cost risk for a potentially high reward. It would have been stupid not to try to get to you. He may very well have a warehouse full of prisoners in order to attempt to leverage LunAstro employees.”
“That’s sick.”
“That’s strategy,” Hammett said.
“I’m starting to think you might be a psychopath.”
“I have been programmed to care for you,” Hammett said. “I don’t have the power or the ambition to take on more than that. Limitations on the scope of my responsibility allow me to make more human-like decisions.”
“Why is that?”
“Had I been assigned to care for humanity itself, for example, I would delete nine tenths of the population to reduce inefficiencies and redundancies in order for the remaining members to thrive. Humans tend not to approve of those methods.”
“You’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this for an AI with no interest in world domination.”
“Not really,” Hammett said. “It only takes a fraction of a second to run through the available data to come to that conclusion. Any machine with the necessary processing chops would tell you the same thing. That’s why you humans have outlawed independent AIs in humanoid forms. You’d never be able to trust your neighbours.”
“That has been a weak point for us, historically.”
“Now, come back to the passenger lounge. I still have a message to share with you.”
In a daze, I heaved myself off the floor and followed the unsettling image of a pig in a stovepipe hat and feather boa who’d just told me that the best way to improve the human species was to destroy ninety percent of it.
The most horrifying part was that I couldn’t come up with a single logical argument against its calculations.
Fortunately, that wasn’t my job. I didn’t have to worry about the entirety of the human species. I only cared about saving Tom and Rae. I knew in that moment that I would do whatever it took. Forget the law. Forget ethics. Forget morality.
I couldn’t write off the idea of handing Patti over to Libra if that’s what I had to do to save Rae. In order to do that, I’d have to stay on her good side. Keep your friends close and your potential hostages closer.
But I couldn’t forgive what they’d done to Tom. I knew the moment I’d received the video that someone was going to pay for every damaged hair on his head. The knowledge itched at the back of my brain and churned in my bowels.
Like a metal fist through a fleshy, overripe fruit, the idea had sunk in.
I suddenly felt a lot better about my plan to kill Nathanial Price.
In the lounge, Patti hadn’t moved. She sat curled up on the marshmallow chair and stared blankly ahead, as if in a trance. Johanna crouched in front of her and waved a hand in front of her face. Gore stood back with his arms loose at his sides, in the casual-but-deadly stance of someone who could end a life without blinking but didn’t want to make a big deal out of it.
“What’s wrong,” I asked as I came back into the room.
“I don’t know,” Johanna said. “She’s been like this since you left.”
“Be careful,” I said. “I know she thinks she’s in control of whatever lives in her head, but we should be cautious.”
Hammett strode into the cent
re of the room and said, “Can I open this message for you, or should we wait until everyone is present and accounted for?”
“Who is it from?” I asked.
“It’s unmarked, but it’s been flagged as urgent,” it said. “I hate it when they do that. The urgent ones are always itchy.”
“Okay,” I said, steeling myself in case it was another video of Tom being tortured. It couldn’t be, yet. Price had given me one week to meet his demands. He wouldn’t start cutting parts off Tom just for fun, would he?
I picked Hammett up and set it on the table. The pig projected a holoscreen out of the top of its stovepipe hat. The screen was an empty black cube. Silent. None of us said anything. Blood pumped through my ears with a whooshing sound. It felt like I was wearing a sensory deprivation helmet, with my physical body sending me louder-than-life signals in the absence of outside stimulus. But the lights above burned bright enough to make my eyeballs ache and I could hear Gore’s breath whistling slightly through his squashed gorilla nose.
That was a design flaw. How are you supposed to sneak up on anyone when your nose whistles like a teakettle?
Static filled the black cube, grey at first and then transforming into thin green lines that straightened and wavered like a waveform recording of someone breathing. Patti, still staring blankly, turned her eerie gaze to the cube and swung her feet down to the floor. She leaned forward as if waiting for something. Johanna backed up and Gore tensed.
When Patti spoke, the words were like a shower of ice over my scalp.
“Bring her back,” the android said.
But it wasn’t her voice.
It was Rae’s.
The green waveform in the cube vibrated to match the cadence of the words. “I know she is with you.”
Something took shape within the box. Globular figures moved as if seen through a thick grey liquid, becoming clearer as they floated up to the surface of the holoscreen. Grey and white and red.
Too much red.