It was just beginning to get dark when I left Fred and Wilma's.
I slammed on the breaks and the old Land Rover pick-up slid to a stop on the crumbling asphalt. The road in front of the Raoul's Robot Repair Shop was blocked by a police cruiser, lights flashing. Two more and an unmarked vehicle were parked at angles behind it. I watched the ambulance rise to its cruising altitude and head off in the direction of Central Medical. I guess I'd never admitted it before, even to myself, but I really cared for Phyllis and Raoul. They were like my parents, or rather, they were unlike my parents and so I liked them. Seeing that ambulance lift off froze my guts. I left the pick-up where it had come to rest, and ran towards the repair shop with tears stinging my eyes. An armoured police officer moved to intercept me.
"Road's closed," he said. "Crime scene."
"What crime?" I asked, trying to see round the bulk of his black and white body armour.
"Can't give out details at this time," he monotoned.
"But I work here," I said.
"I'm sorry, sir – "
"You Steven Houston?" A voice behind the policeman asked. A detective.
I nodded. "What's going on here? Who was in the ambulance?"
"Let him through," the detective said, ignoring my question.
"This way, sir." The armoured policeman stood aside.
I hurried after the detective.
"We've made our record of the scene, but I'd still prefer it if you didn't touch anything without checking with me first," the detective said. The guys with the 3D cameras were packing up their gear, but a couple of scene of crime officers in white overalls were still on their hands and knees examining the floor for clues. One of them looked up at the detective and scowled.
"We're not going to get much here," he said. "This place was a mess before the attack."
"Just do the job properly," the detective said. "If the old man doesn't make it, this becomes a murder investigation, okay?"
The other man shrugged and went off muttering.
The door to the repair shop looked like it had been torn off, and most of the frame had come with it. Glass crunched under my feet as I made my way into the workshop. At first I thought there had been an explosion, but it looked more like someone had deliberately smashed every piece of equipment and furniture, and overturned every shelf of components. In the middle of the floor was a small area completely free of debris, an area roughly the size of a man. Someone had lain there while the contents of the room were destroyed around him. There was a big, dark stain soaked into the old brown carpet, and I didn't want to think about it being blood, because if it was, someone had lost a hell of a lot of it from a head wound.
Not someone. Raoul. At that moment, I thought Raoul was dead.
"What happened here?" I asked.
The detective turned and looked down at me, and I was sure that he was going to say that he wanted answers from me, not questions. He just sighed.
"Looks like an attempted robbery. My guess is that a gang broke in, thinking the place was empty. Seems that the old man – Raoul?"
I nodded.
"He disturbed them, tried to stop them. They hit him with something heavy and blunt – we don't know what yet, we're still looking for the weapon…" He trailed off, looking out through the wrecked door towards the scrap yard. "Needle in a haystack," he said. "Raoul was unconscious when his wife came back and found him. She's in the ambulance with him, along with one of my officers." The detective shrugged. "That's all we have. I'm hoping you might be able to shed a little light, maybe have a look round and see if anything significant is missing. If there's something... unique we could look out for, I'd like to get word out quickly so we can start checking on the kind of people we know fence ripped-off hardware and software." He didn't sound too hopeful.
I wandered numbly through the wreckage, looking for things that weren't there. Except they all were. I couldn't see that anything was missing. There were a couple of things lying around, in various stages of brokenness, that thieves could have sold for reasonable money on the black market if they hadn't wrecked them. I couldn't figure it out.
"Nothing's been taken," I said. "I mean, there was really nothing here to take: we fix old robots, that's it. There's nothing of value here."
"You don't have any little side-lines here?" The detective asked. "Taking in stolen robots, stripping 'em down and selling on the spares? Black market software? Insurance fraud?"
"Take a look around," I said. "Does it look like we make any money? Robot repairs, that's it. Really."
The detective looked around. "I want to believe you. But why would someone break in and batter the owner senseless if all you do is repair junk robots?"
I shrugged.
"Did you have any robots here today, anything in for repair?" He asked.
I shook my head. "Everything had gone back to their owners, except those two on my workbench." I nodded to where Seymour and the robot from the Oasis were laid out like a couple of robot sunbathers. The repairs on them were almost finished, but even in their working state they wouldn't have been worth stealing.
"They don't look worth anyone's effort," the detective said. I thought he meant they weren't worth repairing, which was possibly true. But then it struck me that he hadn't been commenting on the value of the robots themselves.
"You think one of the anti-robot groups might have done this?" I asked.
The detective shrugged. "It would give us a motive," he said.
There'd been an increasing number of attacks on robots: grudge attacks or the work of anti-robot protest groups. But they mostly targeted new robots, machines they regarded as a threat.
"Why would they attack a place like this?" I asked. "We're hardly high profile. And they usually attack machinery, not people."
The detective shrugged again. "Who knows why these nuts do that they do? Maybe Raoul disturbed them and tried to stop them wrecking the place. I'm not saying it was them, I'm just trying to think of some motive which could help us make sense of this." He shrugged. "But then I don't get why someone could be so violently opposed to a household appliance."
I didn't want to get into that debate: there were things in my past I had no intention of discussing with a police officer.
The detective smoothed his hair back with both hands. "We're about through here," he said. "When we're gone, have another look round, check your computers, whatever; let me know if you discover anything missing. In the meantime, I'll have someone come in and take a statement from you, ask you where you were all day today, that kind of thing." He held up a hand when I opened my mouth. "I'm not asking you for an alibi; I don't suspect you or the old woman of anything, but we have to go through the formalities."
"In case the old guy snuffs it?"
"Yeah, I'm sorry. He was pretty messed up – he might not..."
A uniformed police officer came in carrying two paper cups of hot coffee and passed one to me. He set up a camera to record my statement, and we sipped as I described the routine of our working days. Of course I left out some of the details, but what I told him was pretty much the truth. Pretty much. I didn't tell him about Raoul's muscle fibre. If it was one of the companies that had trashed the repair shop, then the whole thing was way beyond the jurisdiction of the local police. I was pretty sure that the motive for the attack had been to obtain the muscle fibre data, that it had been made to look like a typical violent robbery; but I didn't know whether the thief had been successful in obtaining the data, because I didn't really know where or how Raoul stored his notes: for all I know, he kept everything in his head and never wrote anything down.
I figured it was better to let the police continue to think that the attack on the robot repair shop was the work of mindless thieves looking for something valuable to black market. Once the plods were out of the way, I could poke around and begin my own investigation. Not that I had any idea where to start. I could just wait and see which of the robotics manufacturers was the first to market
machines which made use of the muscle fibre, but by then it would be too late to do anything to stop them.
I waited for the last of the police cruisers to pull away, and then set about securing the shop as best I could. The door was so much matchwood, so I nailed a sheet of plywood over the opening on the inside. We'd have to use the back door until I could find a replacement. I'd have to give some thought to improving our security too. I nuked some of last night's left-over coffee then dropped into a chair, intending to rest for a couple of minutes and then head over to the hospital to join Phyllis in her vigil, waiting for Raoul to come out of surgery.
I walked to the nearest tram stop and rode to Central Medical, paying with anonymous credit rods. An old vehicle like the Land Rover is a bit conspicuous, and I didn't want anyone to be able to track my movements: the closer you got to the city, the more security cameras there are to watch over you. And you never knew who was watching.
Raoul was out of the operating theatre and on a life-support hook-up in Intensive Care. He was in a private room, courtesy of his medical insurance and only a small amount of nagging from Phyllis. They'd repaired the damage to his skull, but they weren't yet sure about the damage to his brain, and they wouldn't know that until he regained consciousness. If he regained consciousness: they were quoting his survival chances as between thirty and forty percent, which was an improvement on virtually nil.
Raoul was a pale, skinny old man with tubes stuck in him, and wires trailing from him to machines monitoring the functions of his various bits.
"When you live with someone everyday for years and years," Phyllis said. "You don't really notice them ageing. It's only when you find yourself looking down on them in a hospital bed, that you suddenly see what all those years have done to them."
Phyllis seemed older than I remembered her being. She looked drained.
"I've spent two-thirds of my life with that man," she said. "What am I going to do if he doesn't make it?"
"He's going to make it," I assured her.
A second bed had been made up for her in the corner of the room, but I could see that Phyllis hadn't used it. I turned back the covers and urged her to get some sleep. I promised that I'd sit with Raoul for the next couple of hours, and that I'd wake her if there was any change in his condition. Phyllis explained to me what a couple of the monitors' readings meant, telling me that I should notify the nurse immediately if this reading went above this figure, or that indicator dropped below that level. I knew the monitors were linked directly to the nurses' station, and that any sudden change would bring them to the room immediately. But I also knew that Phyllis needed to believe that she was doing more than just sitting and hoping, so I told her I'd watch the monitors closely. She crawled into bed, and checked up on me a few times when she thought I wasn't watching. Eventually she drifted off to sleep, and I was able to relax a little.
Phyllis and Raoul had met at a party when they were both students. He told me this one night over pizza. He was studying cybernetics, Phyllis was studying law. Raoul was drunk, and he'd been having some problem with his contact lenses, but refused to wear his glasses: he was going to party, how was he expected to pull in four-eyes mode? So he'd spent the evening leaning forward and peering at everyone, vision blurred, eyes red and streaming. Very attractive: bent at the waist, eyes screwed up, he must have looked constipated. And once he was drunk, this wasn't a very stable position to be standing in.
Phyllis had been sitting on an over-stuffed sofa in the corner – probably looking pretty over-stuffed herself, even then – wearing a low-cut dress and a scowl. Raoul leaned down to talk to her. Who it was that backed into Raoul, the two of them never found out, but they sent him plunging head-first into Phyllis's ample cleavage. Phyllis was startled. Raoul panicked. Phyllis thought his frantic thrashings and dartings of wet tongue were deliberate and of a sexual nature, so she grabbed him by the balls. The shock and sudden pain caused Raoul to bite down, hard, and his mouth was smeared with blood when he finally surfaced. Phyllis carries the scars to this day.
"I thought I was going to drown," Raoul told me. "What a way to go!"
Needless to say, he didn't actually get off with Phyllis that night: if he'd been wearing his glasses, he probably wouldn't have bothered trying. But he claims that it was almost inevitable that the two of them would end up together after that.
"Once you've swallow-dived into a woman's cleavage, you're prectically betrothed anyway," he said.
*
The first rule of computing is to back-up your data. You keep the copies in a different data store to your working copies: you automatically write back-up copies at a specified interval – monthly, daily, hourly, even every few minutes, depending on how often you make additions or alterations to your data. If you're smart, you also keep your last two or three back-ups, maybe even using a third data store. Data stores are just massive banks of memory. Some are corporate subsidiaries, others are independents, offering the data equivalent of a Swiss bank account: safe storage, no unauthorised access, no questions asked. You can rent millions of gigabytes for anything from half-an-hour to a lifetime. Maybe even longer. For most people, back-ups are just a sensible precaution, insurance against their own errors or a fault in their hardware and software.
Raoul was someone who didn't trust anyone with his data. He figured that the companies would only ever locate his data by following his tracks online. If his data wasn't on a machine connected to the net, they couldn't get at it; at least not using search software: someone would have to come and physically take it. If they knew where to look. Someone had decided that the repair shop was a good place to look. But had they found it? Or had Raoul's hiding place eluded them? If they didn't have it, where had Raoul hidden it? Presumably somewhere that only Phyllis or myself would find it if anything happened to him. I wasn't ready to have that conversation with Phyllis yet. If Raoul regained consciousness, he could tell us where the data was hidden. I wanted to believe that this was what would happen.
I'd gone back to the repair shop to pack a bag with clothes, toothbrushes, and whatever else I thought Phyllis and Raoul might need during their time in the hospital. I was a little nervous going in the back door, clutching a rusty old crowbar in one hand and a juiced up taser in the other. The workshop area was dark and silent, and still looked like a twister had ripped through it. Raoul and Phyllis' living space was in a similar condition. If I'd had to select clothes for them from their drawers, I would have felt uncomfortable: but having to pick the least damaged items from the mess on the floor just made me angry and upset. I ended up tidying away everything that was still in one piece, and bagging up everything that was trashed. I stashed the bin bags in the utility room, figuring Phyllis might want to look through them before they went in the garbage: there might be some family heirloom she wanted to save and have mended.
I took a break then to nuke a ready-made cheeseburger, which I washed down with half a litre of cola: I never realised that domestic chores were such thirsty work. I belched loudly and set about tidying up the workshop area. The damage was much greater out here: every piece of furniture had been reduced to matchwood and twisted metal, and every rack of equipment had been overturned. Holes had been punched into the wall in a couple of places and some of the floorboards had been torn up – maybe the thieves had been looking for a hidden compartment or safe. I nailed down the floorboards as best I could and righted the shelves, then restored the tools and the robot spares to their proper places. I'd take a trip out to a second-hand furniture later to find new chairs and desks, and I'd see if I could also pick up a couple of framed prints to hide the holes in the walls. When Raoul and Phyllis returned, I wanted the place to be as normal as I could make it. And in the meantime, I wanted to keep myself distracted with busy-work because I didn't know what else to do.
That evening I sat beside Raoul's bed watching the TV with the sound turned down. There had been no change in his condition. I'd handed over Phyllis' overnight bag: she
'd looked in it and grinned: I'd packed some of her cigars in with her wash kit.
"I'm going to take a shower and change my clothes, then nip outside for a breath of fresh air," she said.
"Take all the time you need," I said, "me and the old man will be talking shop for a while anyway."
"You're a good lad, Stevie," she said. That almost choked me up. I listened as she shuffled down the corridor to the wash room.
The newscaster on the screen crossed her legs in a pause between stories: it was a gesture programmed into her performance to make the audience think she was human and not CG.
"In the city, we are receiving reports of two more vicious, unprovoked attacks on robots, taking the total to five assaults in three days," she said. "In all cases, the robots have been completely torn apart, prompting tabloid news services to nickname the attacker Jack the Wrecker.
"Police investigating the incidents say that there is no apparent motive for the attacks, all of which have targeted older models. So far there are no clues as to the identity of the attacker, and no anti-robot faction has claimed responsibility."
It was obviously a slow day for news. I turned down the sound on the monitor. The news people had missed the obvious reason why 'Jack the Wrecker' was targeting only older robots. The attacks were all taking place in areas where surveillance cameras were not watching – and people with shiny new robots don't send them to such places. Jack didn't want to be seen – maybe this was significant, maybe it wasn't. If any of the detectives had bothered to stop by the hospital to see how Raoul was doing, I might have mentioned it to them. If any of them had bothered. Screw 'em. The Wrecker attacks weren't anything to do with me. But that didn't stop me feeling uneasy whenever Jack the Wrecker was mentioned...
Chapter Fifteen
In the city, you'll never see a robot travelling above twenty miles an hour. Not because robots can't move any faster, but because their speed is limited by law. It makes people feel safer if they know they will never be run down by a speeding robot, and that the robot pulling, or pedalling, their rickshaw won't suddenly sprint off and take them on a white-knuckle ride.
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