Russell's Attic, Books 1 - 3

by SL Huang

  “I don’t really know,” she answered, with a hollow sort of laugh, but her posture relaxed a little now that Pilar was in the room. “You’re right, though—um, you’re right about Arkacite. They were having a serious problem with corporate espionage. They told us secrets had been leaked, but not what, and I don’t know who stole them or who they were sold to.”

  Corporate espionage. I grabbed a clean burner and dialed.

  “It’s Cas Russell,” I said when Harrington picked up. “I need some information. I’ll pay whatever you want for it, but it’s urgent.”

  “What information do you seek?” he asked, after a slight pause. One of Harrington’s chief values was discretion. It was part of the reason I liked him.

  Well, too bad. “Are you familiar with Arkacite Technologies? Professionally, I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “I need to know who would be stealing from them.” Everyone was watching me. Rayal and Pilar were tense enough they should have been vibrating.

  Harrington hesitated.

  “Come on, I looked into the plutonium thing for you,” I argued. “You owe me this.” Of course, I’d ended up making a lot of money off acquiring the atomic batteries, but I didn’t tell him that.

  “If I disclose this to you,” he said slowly, “we are even.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re even. Who is it?”

  “I am not your source for this information, you understand.”

  “I get it. Now who?”

  “Arkacite…has been involved in an escalating industrial espionage battle with Funaki Industries, a Tokyo-based technology company. It began decades ago. The tactics have become vicious.”

  Harrington had a strong stomach, so that was saying something. “Thanks,” I said. Something inside me unclenched. Finally, a lead. “I didn’t hear it from you.”

  I hung up the phone.

  And then it hit me.

  Tokyo.

  Oh God. Ally Eight represented a bloc of Japanese companies. They’d wanted batteries identical to the ones Arkacite had. And immediately after they’d acquired them from me, the robots had hit the airwaves.

  But Checker said—the amount of energy—

  I dug in my pockets for the battery specs like a madwoman; I still had the papers I’d brought for Okuda the day before. I’d read them to assess the value of the amount of plutonium, but I hadn’t really looked at them—

  “Cas,” said Checker. “Cas, what is it?”

  I flattened the rumpled papers in shaking hands. I didn’t know all the engineering shorthand in the diagrams, but I could make some guesses—references to materials—equations—

  The power capacity leapt and spiraled, up one order of magnitude, then two. Then three.

  Holy crap.

  Funaki Industries had stolen all of the robotics technology from Arkacite. The designs, the programming, everything—they must have. Hell, they must’ve already had the androids built, to swing into action this quickly. The only piece they’d been missing was the power sources, the ridiculous revolutionary plutonium power sources, and I’d gotten those for them.

  I had made all this happen.

  “Russell?” Arthur touched my shoulder. “What’d your guy say?”

  “It’s my fault,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” asked Pilar.

  I turned to Rayal. “The robots. They run on a new type of alphavoltaic nuclear battery. Don’t they.”

  “Oh—uh—yes…” Her answer drew out into almost a question as it rode the tension in the room. “It was the hardest—we’d tried everything. The material scientists at Arkacite only made the breakthrough two years ago, and—and the enormity of the technological leap—we had to be sworn not to say a thing; they’re not even being developed for commercial purposes yet because the consumer cost would be too high. Just military contracting and—and internal special projects, like us…”

  “Holy shit,” said Checker. “This is our fault.”

  Chapter 25

  Arthur drove.

  Sloan had been holding his press conferences in a small theatre downtown. At the rate he was “revealing” new ’bots, we figured if we showed up where he’d been we had a better-than-even chance at…well, kidnapping him. When did this situation get so out of control?

  “You ain’t to blame for this,” said Arthur, as we sped down the 101.

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “I am literally the one responsible.” Now I had to get Liliana, Denise Rayal, and Pilar out of it, not to mention Checker and me—if they managed to ID us. And I had no idea how.

  “They was planning this for ages,” said Arthur. “Had to been. They had the whole thing set up—if you ain’t got ’em their power sources, someone else would’ve.”

  “That’s awfully rationalizing of you,” I said. “Nobody had this battery technology except Arkacite. And what happened to telling me I should take more responsibility for what I do?”

  His lip twitched in something like humor. “No point when you’re already beating yourself up. This is when I get all supportive instead.”

  I grunted. I hate it when people are inconsistent.

  Arthur, as usual, had the classical station playing on the radio, today with the ringing vibrato of an opera in some other language. I leaned forward and twiddled the search dial until I got to a news station. The way things had been going, we’d be in a robot war by the time Arthur and I reached downtown.

  “—and this is just what these so-called ‘scientists’ want you to believe. Haven’t I always said it was a conspiracy? I’m telling you, this is domestic terrorism. It’s only a matter of time before…”

  “Meet Reuben McCabe,” said Arthur, his hands clenching on the steering wheel. “Fearmonger extraordinaire.”

  “…and if the scientists at Arkacite are the ones responsible for these imposters, then I say they deserve what’s coming to them! Treason is still punishable by death in this country! At least, last I checked we were still red-blooded men enough to say that, although with the liberal fascist conspiracy—”

  “Hang on,” I said. “How does he know Arkacite was involved? Did the Feds leak it?”

  Arthur frowned and spun the dial to skip stations.

  “—and Morrison Sloan has now announced the source of the robotics technologies, the scientists at the tech behemoth Arkacite. There has been no comment yet from CEO Imogene Grant, and it’s unclear whether Arkacite Technologies had some plan for planting these androids in the population, or whether their technology is being used by a third party. It is now confirmed that a federal investigation is underway, and ARKT shares are expected to plummet at the opening of the market Monday—”

  “Son of a bitch,” said Arthur. “This must’ve been Ally Eight’s plan all along. Rile everyone up on the other side and then leave Arkacite holding the bag. Bankrupt ’em into the toilet.”

  “So that’s all this was? A way to shut down their competitor?” I thought about how much I got paid by Harrington for corporate espionage jobs and winced. I knew how far corporations would go to smash each other into oblivion.

  “Guess so,” said Arthur.

  “—we’re now getting reports of police activity downtown. Our correspondent Javier Alvarez was there for Morrison Sloan’s latest press conference—Javier, can you tell us what’s happening?”

  “It seems like we have some mob activity forming here, Grace. I didn’t see what started it, but the crowds are beginning to riot—”

  “Step on it,” I said to Arthur.

  He revved the engine and shot down the last few streets. We hit a police blockade just around the corner from the address, but Arthur didn’t miss a beat; he took a sharp right and then left to land us one street over, and within moments was pulling over illegally in a loading zone behind the theatre. As soon as I got out of the car the rumble of a mass of angry humanity reached me from around the front. Something was happening—

  “Shit,” I said.

  �
�We better get inside,” said Arthur.

  Glass shattered nearby, and the crowd roared.

  This side of the ground floor was a solid wall and shut up tight. I could get through it, but…

  “Second floor,” I said, already measuring distances to the row of windows above our heads.

  “I got rope in the trunk,” said Arthur.

  “Get it.”

  Reach and leverage. I needed a stepstool.

  A cube truck was parked a little way down, against one of the locked loading doors. I raced to it, jacked my way in, and pried up the dash. Within seconds I’d pulled it away from the back of the building. I revved it and accelerated backward as fast as it would go, flooring it right into the stairs at the back of the loading dock.

  The back wheels smacked up the steps with a tooth-jarring screech. I yanked the e-brake and hopped out. Arthur tossed me the rope. I looped it over my shoulder, ran up the hood of the truck, and leapt over the windshield to use the roof of the cab as a launch point, my boots pounding the metal.

  I hit the slanted top of the cargo box with just enough friction to keep from tumbling off, and ran up the slope ten feet above the steps I’d mounted the truck on. The second-floor windows were just my height, and only a short gap away. Without slowing, I dove at the glass, twisting to hit across my shoulders and avoid any sharp pieces as the pane shattered. It was nice to have the luxury to avoid getting cut this time.

  I rolled out onto a desk in a large office-like room and hit the floor on my feet.

  And stared, feeling sick.

  I thought at first the room had five bodies in it. But no, two of them were metal, the silicone and circuit boards smashed and ripped apart as if they’d been torn to pieces by wild animals, the entrails of wires and metal shards scattered across the floor. The human bodies were thankfully more intact…one of them moved slightly, and I sagged with relief.

  I took an instant to loop the rope around the leg of a heavy metal desk that abutted the outside wall, one that would take Arthur’s weight, and threw the ends out the broken window. Then I skidded over to the nearest person, a woman half-fallen against the wall.

  It was Okuda. Her eyelashes fluttered weakly, and blood matted her hair above her left ear. “Oh, Jesus,” I muttered. She had a decorative scarf around her neck; I picked apart the knot and pulled it off to press the filmy fabric against her head wound. “Okuda. Can you hear me?”

  “Ms.…Ms. Russell,” she said faintly. “What are you doing here…?”

  “Trying to find out what you were planning,” I said. “I’m guessing that’s a moot point now.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” she murmured. Her eyes were glassy. “There wasn’t supposed to be…any violence…”

  “Inflaming the public worked too well, huh?”

  “They took them…” she said.

  “They took who?”

  “The other models—they broke some apart and took the others, and they made us tell them where the rest were—and they took our tablets—they could program them to do anything; we made it too easy—”

  With a tinkle of glass, Arthur’s jacket flopped over the jagged window sill and he climbed over. As soon as he saw what was going on he hurried to the other slumped bodies, checking for pulses, cataloguing injuries.

  “You call 911 yet?” he asked.

  “No,” I answered.

  He pulled out a phone.

  “Are they all right?” Okuda mustered the energy to ask.

  Arthur glanced briefly toward her. “Everyone’s alive. Don’t know how bad the injuries are. This was the mob downstairs?”

  As if in response to Arthur’s question, a roar burst up through the floor. Arthur scrambled over to the door, shut it, and shoved a heavy metal desk over to block it with a screech and a bang.

  “She said the crowd took some of the ’bots,” I said. My eyes shied away from the metal corpses in the middle of the floor. “Did that sound like bloodlust to you just now?”

  “Too much,” he said.

  “Okuda.” I pressed down more firmly with her scarf. It looked like it was staunching the blood, thank God. “You said they made you tell them where the rest were. Where are they?”

  Her eyes fuzzed in and out of focus, uncomprehending.

  “If you have people there, they’re in danger. Where are the other robots?”

  “Our lab…” The words were thready. “Santa Clarita…”

  Santa Clarita was north of the city. It would take some time for the mob’s ringleaders to get there.

  Unless they called their friends.

  “Arthur—” I said.

  “You go. I’ll man the door till the cops break things up.” He fished into a pocket and tossed me his keys, which I caught one-handed. “Police will be on your tail—too serious not to send them.”

  I nodded and shook Okuda’s shoulder slightly. “Okuda. Stay with me. We need the address of your lab.”

  It took her a few tries, but she finally managed to tell us. I tied the scarf around her head as tightly as I could, my hands tacky with her blood. Then I left Arthur talking to the 911 dispatcher and ran out the window, vaulting off the sill with one foot since it was faster to dash down my cube truck stairway than to climb down the rope. I tore down off the hood of the cab and fell into Arthur’s sedan.

  It was Saturday, so I had high hopes traffic wouldn’t be too bad. I left the speed limit in the dust, cut between lanes all the way up the 14, and beat the police response time to the lab.

  It didn’t matter. I was too late.

  I sat on the floor in the middle of the wrecked laboratory, surrounded by overturned equipment and upended computers, not looking at the remains of an android skeleton on the floor, and not touching the two human bodies a few inches away from me. They were young, maybe early twenties, Japanese, and dead.

  Sixty-seven days.

  After a few moments I stood back up. I still had a job to do. People to protect. An artificial girl to save from being a lab specimen, a scientist who was wanted by the federal government and probably now also by a lynch mob…not to mention Checker and Pilar and myself. Plus an angry Mafia still out there waiting for us to make a mistake.

  And I wasn’t even getting paid.

  “This job needs to be over now, please,” I said. The words rang pitiful and desolate. The silence in the dead lab swallowed them up.

  I found a security office in the back and yanked the video drive. I also grabbed any other intact data storage I found—a hard drive and a few flash drives, and a tablet under one of the lab tables. I still hadn’t heard sirens, so, channeling Arthur, I called the police on my burner phone and tossed it on the floor. I had another clean one back at Miri’s.

  The dispatcher’s urgent queries echoed off empty walls as I left.

  Chapter 26

  I got back to Miri’s apartment to find Denise Rayal standing in the middle of the living room surrounded by more reams of printouts saying, “No, that’s wrong, that’s all wrong—”

  “I’m wrong?” squawked Checker.

  “Yes, go back to the beginning!”

  I threw the drives from the Ally Eight lab at Checker. “Find out who’s on these. And give me some sort of news update.” I’d been listening to the radio the whole way back, but it had been confused, a series of disjointed this-just-ins and corrections and retractions. I gathered someone had figured out Sloan’s robotic nature, but how many of the robots had been destroyed, and who’d been involved with the rioting in the first place—or whether the mob had simply formed spontaneously—the news anchors hadn’t been able to tell me.

  “On it,” said Checker. “Are you all right? I talked to Arthur—what happened at the lab?”

  My throat closed as if I wanted to vomit. “It’s on there.” I pointed at the drive from the security office. “News, give me news. And what’s going on here?” Checker had apparently printed out another roomful of paper; he and Denise Rayal were drowning in it, along w
ith all the laptops open and running. Liliana was asleep on the couch, Pilar curled up by her feet with her own pile of paper.

  “I don’t think there is much news,” said Checker. “At least, not that you don’t know already. There’s nothing but speculation right now, though I’ve at least been running IDs on any of the rioters caught on camera downtown. But we’re trying to put together a search program for the ’bots. If you can identify one on sight, a computer should be able to, too. If we can write the algorithm, we can scan for any of the rest of them on the news or on traffic cameras or anywhere else. I’ll need you to help with the math.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I said. I glanced at Liliana’s sleeping form.

  “Yeah, we’re in her head right now,” said Checker. “She’s, uh…unconscious, while we work on this.”

  A creeping feeling of wrongness stole over me.

  “She’s not a child,” said Checker quietly.

  “I didn’t say anything.” We’d rescued her from people experimenting on her. We’d rescued her.

  “We’re not hurting her,” said Checker. “Not that she can be hurt, but—you know what I mean.”

  He hadn’t seen the corpses of the robots downtown, or the twisted scraps of metal my senses had recoiled away from when I’d reached the lab. What did it mean, to hurt someone? I knew what Noah Warren would say, but he’d already sacrificed himself for his daughter…while trusting us to protect her.

  Christ.

  I turned away from Liliana’s sleeping form and tried to gather my scattered thoughts, to consider options. Ally Eight’s plan was beside the point now. Instead, we had a legal mess and a lynch mob to deal with.

  If the anti-robotics mob found Liliana or Denise Rayal, they’d kill them; if the government found them, Liliana would go back to a lab and Rayal would almost certainly go to jail. I could put Rayal on a plane out of the country if I paid enough money for it, which didn’t make me happy, but was doable. Liliana, on the other hand…she was programmed to be five. She couldn’t take care of herself.