The sound of another text coming in. Barry rushed into the kitchen, talking breathlessly on the phone.
“Um,” Laughton stalled. “I’m onto something.”
“When can you be here?” the commissioner said with a big smile in his voice.
Laughton was eager to get to the Sisters. Knowing that McCardy was looking to make contact with them, he wanted to get there first. “Say at least an hour. Tell them I’m all the way on the other side of the preserve.” He knew they’d be too busy to bother to GPS his phone.
“Two hours?” the commissioner said, trying to buy him extra time. Laughton felt an unusual surge of warmth toward the man. “We’ll see you— What?” the commissioner said to someone who was with him. His voice grew even more pinched. “It’s got to be now,” the commissioner said to Laughton, “twenty minutes.”
Shit, Laughton thought. Shit, shit, shit. “Then I need immediate surveillance on two locations.”
“Send them to me.”
“Okay,” he said.
The commissioner hung up.
Chief Laughton looked at the texts he’d received, both from Betty. The first, “They’re coming!” and the second, “You promised!” And then a third came through right then. “Get back here now.” This was followed with a series of emoji, crying, screaming, fuming. If he didn’t call her, she’d have a heart attack.
“Betty?” Kir said.
He nodded, texting the commissioner Barry’s address and the location Barry had given them for the Sisters’ home base. Then he called Betty. She picked up before it had even rung once. “I knew it. I knew they’d never let us alone. They just wanted to get us all in one place so it was easier to wipe us out.”
“Betty…”
“Don’t tell me I’m overreacting. You know your history.”
“Okay,” he said. The panic in Betty’s voice was frightening. He didn’t know what she would do, and he couldn’t get to her, and now he had this meeting with the very robots freaking her out. If he told her that, she’d think he was going to be killed.
“You need to make this better,” she said.
“I’m trying.”
“No, you need to come here, and make this better.”
“Betty, they’re not taking over the preserve. They’ve got to look into the sims connections to these robot deaths, and that happens to be on the preserve. They’re here as guests.” He heard himself giving the official spiel without even having been briefed, and it made him sick. Is this how it happens? We all just keep fooling ourselves until it’s too late? “Listen, I just got a big break. I need to work on this, and I might be able to get the feds to leave before they send more robots in.”
“Are you just saying that?” Betty said.
“No,” he said, hoping it sounded true. The click of a call waiting came through. He pulled the phone away from his ear to see who it was. His mother.
Bringing the phone back to his ear, he heard Betty reply with a small “Okay.”
“Let me go,” he said.
“Promise me,” Betty said.
“I promise,” he said without either of them detailing exactly what the promise was. He hung up, switching to his mother. “Mom, I can’t talk right now.”
“But you’re okay? The news says there are robots on the preserve. They’re going to shut it down?”
“Mom.”
“What’s happening?”
“Mom!”
“A mother gets to worry about her son.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“How’s Erica?”
“She’s with her mother. Call them. I really need to go.”
“Be safe,” she said. “I love you.”
“Take care.”
“Bye-bye.”
He hung up. The two calls back-to-back left him feeling drained and off balance.
“Ready?” Kir said, thankfully not prying.
Laughton nodded. He went over to the door frame leading into the kitchen. Barry was talking into his phone with his free hand pressed against his forehead, like he needed to hold his head in place. “We’re going,” he said to Barry.
“Good,” Barry said without taking the phone away from his mouth. “ ’Cause I’m done. I’m just done.”
Laughton watched the frazzled young man, and it made him feel helpless. He turned and walked away.
* * *
In the truck they had the radio tuned to the Charleston PD. There was a lot of chatter about the metals moving in, a lot of things said that shouldn’t have been said on an open channel. He’d never tolerate that kind of unnecessary traffic on the radio from his officers, but everyone was in a panic. People were talking about rumors of a blockade in the harbor. Just the idea made Laughton’s throat squeeze tight, and he brought both hands to his forehead, rubbing the top of his head in panic.
Kir turned off the radio. “They won’t have any kind of real blockade in place until tomorrow,” he said.
“You guessing?”
“I’m listening,” he said, indicating that part of his system was taking updates from official channels. “Narcotics and the Coast Guard. Not us.” Laughton’s face must have appeared stricken, because Kir said, “I know. But I swear I’ll protect the preserve.”
“Just like I promised Betty you metal bastards would stay off our land?”
Kir said nothing, and Laughton felt guilty immediately for having grouped his friend, using the slur. “Look,” he said, “we’ll hit the Sisters. Sounds like Sam’s running from Titanium. Who would know better than the enemy?”
“Keep following the distribution line,” Kir said.
“Won’t end your robot deaths.”
“If we kill the supply and pick up some scapegoats, I promise you I will get robot forces off the preserve. I promise.”
“Yeah. Okay. First let’s catch a killer.”
“That’s our job.”
Laughton turned the radio on, but it was more of the same ignorant, fear bullshit from before, so he turned it off. No one was calling anything real in right now.
The robot agents had taken over a conference room as their command center. An officer led the way for Laughton and Kir. The officer—he couldn’t have been more than twenty-three years old—kept glancing at Kir out of the corner of his eye. He must have figured that the robot was part of the team that had invaded headquarters, and it clearly made him nervous, his body too rigid, the muscles at the edges of his upper lip dimpling with the effort of suppressing a frown. Seeing the young man’s fear made Laughton angry: angry that the metals were there, angry that nothing ever got better.
When they opened the door to the conference room, Laughton was overwhelmed by the number of robots present, but before he could even assimilate just how many there were, the commissioner had him by the shoulder, and was pulling him back into the hall, shutting the door behind him. The commissioner took one look at Kir, and then turned his attention to Chief Laughton. They all knew each other from pre-preserve days; the commissioner knew Kir could be trusted. “Tell me you have something that’s going to help in there.”
Laughton thought about the likelihood McCardy had the antivirus, and the chance they would find him. Instead, he said, “Is there anything that could help in there?”
“Besides a lightning storm? No,” and to Kir, “Sorry.”
Kir wasn’t bothered by the suggestion that all his colleagues should be fried.
“We closed up Kawnac-B’s club out west,” Laughton said. “That’s got to count for something.”
“Let’s hope so,” the commissioner said. He suddenly looked very old. “Have you seen the news?”
“I think we’re making the news,” Laughton said.
The commissioner shook his head, pulling out his phone. “It’s not all bad,” he said, handing the phone over.
A video showed the mall in Washington. There was a large gathering of robots, some still humanoid in appearance, but many with nonbiological designs, too tall, or too sm
all, exposed metal and plastic, synthetic hair, even hovering like a quadcopter off the ground. They were holding up signs, “Preserve the Preserve” and “Be Better Than Humans. Keep Our Promises.”
“Is this going out over Preserve news?” Laughton said.
“I don’t know. The important thing is that there’s still tremendous robot support for the preserve,” the commissioner said. “Those bots in there have to tread lightly, so let’s give them something to hold them off.” He opened the door to the conference room, and the three of them went in.
The room was the dingy room to be expected in any good police station. A ten-foot table, scarred on its surface by the graffiti of some bored officer, was too large for the room, making the space feel uncomfortably narrow and long. A mound of discarded printers, monitors, and ancient desktop computers filled one corner. The walls were dominated by several SMART Boards, one projecting a map of Charleston, another filled with dry-erase notes from some past briefing, a variety of names, dates, and locations. The bit of wall visible in the space between the boards was scuffed, gray marks all over the once-white paint.
Grace Pattermann, the sole human in the room, sat at the head of the conference table, a tablet and a phone faceup before her. Both screens flickered with movement, which the secretary ignored. Six robots stood around the table divided into pairs. Colonel Brandis was joined by another seven-foot army robot. The Mark Sysigns they’d run into at Kawnac-B’s club stood beside another four-foot-tall robot, human in appearance aside from his size, who wore a white sailor’s uniform. The final two robots, a man and a woman, wore the traditional black suits of the FBI. All sported robotic nonexpressions on their faces.
Chief Laughton felt Brandis’s eyes on him. Just being in the room with the robot made Laughton nauseous.
“Kir,” Grace Pattermann said.
Kir simply nodded as he positioned himself at the opposite end of the table, neither on the robots’ side nor the humans’.
There was an awkward delay, no one sure who had the authority to start. Of course, there was no way for Laughton to tell if the robots weren’t messaging each other silently. It was generally seen as rude to do so when two robots were in the same location, but Laughton always felt as though they were doing it anyway, having a conversation over his head like parents spelling things out in front of kids who can’t read.
The commissioner tried to take charge. “This is Chief Jesse Laughton,” he said. “He’s chief of police in Liberty, one of our western settlements. He’s heading the Smythe murder investigation.”
“We know,” Brandis said.
“We actually met last night,” Mark Sysigns jumped in, revealing some kind of interdepartmental rivalry.
“Chief Laughton, we’re eager to hear your report,” the short robot said. “We understand your record in the Human Crimes Division of the Baltimore Police Department was astounding, so we expect great progress.”
“ ‘Astounding’ seems a bit strong,” Laughton said, but Kir spoke over him, “Perhaps you’d care to introduce yourselves before you start interrogating a fellow law officer?”
“Perhaps the Department of Health and Human Services officer would like to make the introductions for us,” Brandis said. “It’s your job to be a liaison between the upper and lower orders.”
“Peoples, Colonel,” Kir said.
“I was being generous,” the colonel said.
“Comparing humans to rudimentary AIs is hardly generous.”
“You’re right,” the colonel said, and his tone made it clear that he wouldn’t even consider a human on par with the lowest-order robot.
Laughton’s face burned. He felt like a child who’d been caught doing something wrong, and was now helpless to the consequences.
Kir allowed disgust into his voice as he turned to Laughton and the commissioner. “Jesse,” he said, “this is Colonel Brandis, army, and Lieutenant Cray. At the end of the table is—”
The robot who had said they were eager for the police’s report interrupted, “Captain Sysigns,” he said, “Coast Guard.”
“Agents Asimov and Spectra, FBI,” the woman in the suit said.
There were four branches of the robot government in the room. Laughton felt sick to his stomach at such a display of power. He tried to focus on the robot protest the commissioner had just shown him, because he’d promised Betty that this was not the end of the preserve, but in this room it felt a lot like it was.
“I’ve been assisting Chief Laughton personally since yesterday,” Kir said, trying to draw everyone’s attention, to protect Laughton and the commissioner. “We helped Mark Sysigns clean up a little mess on preserve lands last night.”
“We’re data mining as we speak,” Mark Sysigns said.
“Much easier to do when you have the perps in hand,” Kir said. “Chief Laughton was rather outraged that Homeland Security is so unconcerned with upholding the legal boundaries of the preserve, and frankly I was appalled.”
“It’s not Homeland Security’s job to police the preserve,” Sysigns said. “In fact, we’re expressly forbidden to.”
Colonel Brandis jumped in, recognizing that Homeland Security had allowed themselves to be on the defensive and shifting the briefing back in the intended direction. “If Chief Laughton is such an outstanding policeman, then he can tell us what he’s doing about policing the humans who are murdering each other and attacking robots from the safety of the preserve.”
“There’s no evidence that there have been any attacks from the preserve,” the commissioner said, unable to hold back his anger.
“We actually have very good evidence that Killer Apps originated here,” Brandis said.
“Killer Apps?” Laughton said.
“That’s what they’re calling the virus,” Mark Sysigns said.
“In fact,” Brandis continued, “digital markers left in the victims suggest very strongly that Killer Apps is a Sam and Smythe program, and Kir of the HHS is very aware of that intelligence.” He directed the end of that at Kir.
“And we think it was robots who killed Sam and Smythe,” Kir said. “No doubt after they did the work for robot terrorists.”
“Nobody’s claiming anything about terrorists,” Sysigns said.
Laughton watched the robots argue, relieved that they seemed to have forgotten him.
Grace Pattermann said, “The president has no doubts that this is a human attack launched from the perceived safety of the preserve, exactly the kind of unlawfulness that people feared when the preserve was being debated by the last administration.”
“And I have no doubt that this is a robot-led attack meant to undermine public support for the preserve,” Kir said. “Perhaps not even a private attack.”
The accusation hung over everything for a moment.
Colonel Brandis said, “We’re not here to debate politics. Now, I’m prepared to set up a cordon, and the Coast Guard has already begun to set up a blockade—”
“We’re moving ships into position,” Captain Sysigns said. “We need perhaps twenty-four hours.”
“Like a physical barrier matters to a computer program,” Kir said. “A program that’s already off-preserve! This is just the president’s excuse to turn the preserve into the prison he wants. Are there trucks with rolls of wire fences waiting out on the highway?”
“Kir. Enough,” Grace Pattermann said, silencing the room.
Agent Spectra focused her attention on Chief Laughton and said, “Well, maybe Chief Laughton can give us a reason to not take such drastic measures. Isn’t that the purpose of this meeting?”
Everyone turned to the chief. Laughton had to resist the feeling in the back of his throat that he had to retch. He tried to get a signal from Kir, but he couldn’t read any advice in his partner’s face. “I understand that you’ve lost an alarming number of robots in a short period of time,” he said. “We’re doing our best—”
“No,” Colonel Brandis said. “What are you doing?”
> Kir said, “We’re solving a murder.”
Brandis ignored him, keeping his eyes on Laughton.
“We believe Smythe was murdered because he had the antivirus.”
“Because they’d written the virus,” Colonel Brandis said. “These men were radical orgo terrorists.”
Grace Pattermann said, “There’ve been no terrorist claims—”
“I don’t need a claim to know what terrorism is,” Brandis said.
“We’ll leave that to you,” Laughton said, surprising himself by his impertinence. “All I can say is that we think Smythe had the antivirus, and we’re pretty sure that McCardy has it now.”
“Good,” Agent Asimov said. “Tell us what you’ve got, and we’ll track these orgos down.”
“Not on the preserve you won’t,” Grace Pattermann said. “You’re here as guests of the preserve only.”
“It’s in everyone’s best interest to have as many people working on this as possible,” Agent Spectra said.
“You work on containing on your end. The commissioner and Chief Laughton with Kir as the HHS representative will take care of the preserve. This meeting is a courtesy.”
“We’ll see how long that lasts,” Colonel Brandis said. “The president has already authorized the military and the Coast Guard to close the preserve borders.”
“You can’t—” the commissioner started.
“He has,” Captain Sysigns said.
Kir pointed at the other robots in the room. “You’ll take no action until this has been confirmed by Congress.”
“Kir,” Grace Pattermann said, losing patience with her subordinate. “You head the Criminal Division at the HHS. You’re not a member of the administration.”
“Do you represent the president in this room or the HHS?”
Colonel Brandis said, “I still haven’t heard the human tell us anything important.”
“You don’t think an antivirus is important?” Kir said.
“An alleged antivirus with no apparent proof?”
Chief Laughton felt like he was going to collapse. The commissioner was bright red.
Kir played a recording of an air horn at top volume, and the room fell silent. “Chief Laughton and I are close to finding these people and the antivirus, but we can’t do that with a bunch of robots causing hysteria in the humans, and that means no robots on the preserve, and no robot forces amassing on the borders of the preserve.”
The Preserve Page 16
