by Alex P. Berg
“So? Send him a Brain missive.”
“I did. He won’t accept them.”
“Probably because he has no interest in speaking to you. How is this difficult to comprehend?”
I felt my anger rising. Paige helped me force it down before I inadvertently sent a foot flying into the alien’s head. “Please. I need to relay a message.”
The Meertor responded with a long, sad wheeze which I gathered was a sigh. Perhaps the novelty of my presence was wearing off. “You could try some sort of written communicative. But don’t ask me to deliver it for you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t have any interest in getting fired or incarcerated. Most of our tenants are very concerned with privacy. Only a select few entities are authorized to make deliveries to them. Food services, mostly.”
“Such as?”
The Meertor made a raspy, gurgling noise and adjusted his respirator.
I think that was the equivalent of him clearing his throat, said Paige.
Wonderful. “Perhaps another donation would help you remember?”
The alien perked. “Thirty-five SEUs?”
I nodded.
The Meertor smiled. “Certainly. I’ll send the list of businesses your way.”
The inbox in the corner of my vision blinked, so I thanked the clerk and turned toward the door. Carl held it open for me as we poured back out into the Cetie heat.
“Carl,” I asked. “Any chance that contract you sent Miss Busk covered incidental expenses?”
“One would think you hadn’t lucked into a bonanza of SEUs,” he said. “But of course it did. I think of everything.”
I smiled. “I’m so glad you do.”
So, said Paige as we approached the car. Should we start our restaurant tour?
“Soon,” I said. “But first, let’s drop by the office. There’s something I forgot to pick up before we left that might come in handy.”
4
The doors to Smotrycz’s blinked open upon our approach, hitting Carl and me with a blast of cool, deep-fried air. Molded orange and yellow plastic filled my field of view, along with dozens of holodisplays, regular displays, and plastic statuettes of Donald, the iconic blue-haired, oddly-happy Smotrycz clown. Somewhere in the back fat sizzled and popped, and the air was thick with the smell of tomatoes, spices, and volatilized oil.
A low-level droid in an orange smock greeted us as we approached the service station. “Welcome to Smotrycz’s Pies and Fries! Can I interest you in a deep dish soy-cheese and ham pizza or a heaping portion of our famous double-battered fries? Or you could try to beat the heat with one of our signature spicy and refreshing Chili Chillers, now available in Habanero and Datil!”
The bot was an older model, human in appearance but lacking a few key upgrades to its facial response systems. I found its awkward, forced smile that lifted too highly at the corners unnerving. “Uh…no thanks. I was actually hoping I could ask you a question.”
“About our menu?” said the droid. “Certainly! I’m well equipped to deal with all your Smotrycz’s food and food-like substitute related questions, including information regarding the joule content of our meals, the origins of our sustainably sourced wheat and bacon, and the mercury levels of our farmed halibut.”
“Halibut?” I said.
“Part of our famous seafood medley pizza, with traditional White™ sauce and your choice of cheese or cheese replacement. Care to order one?”
I was smart enough not to inquire about the rest of the medley. “No, thank you. My question was about delivery.”
“Yes, we do deliver!” spouted the droid. “Our drones will happily service any residential or commercial address within a twenty kilometer radius. For locations outside our range, we’d be happy to redirect your order to one of our hundreds of sister locations across Cetie.”
“I’m not asking for me,” I said. “I’m here for a friend. Lars Busk. I understand you deliver meals to him on a regular basis.”
The droid continued to smile, but the slightest of twitches in its cheek indicated I’d thrown it for a loop. “If you’re in need of assistance with one of your deliveries, you can call our automated help line. If it’s an order originating from our store and you have your order number, I’d be happy to do the same for you here.”
I waved Carl forward. I was going to need his help.
“You misunderstand me,” I told the droid. “Look. I have a friend. Lars Busk. He receives regular deliveries from you—a medium hand-tossed mushroom and pheasant pie with a side of ginger Snappers, if I’m not mistaken—every ninety-six hours. I need to get ahold of him, but he hasn’t been answering my Brain missives. I’m starting to worry.”
The droid glanced at Carl. “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t see how this impacts our team at Smotrycz’s. If, however, you’d like to order a hand-tossed mushroom and pheasant pizza of your own, I’d—”
“Listen to me,” I said. “This man may be in danger. I’ve tried to contact him via Brain, but he won’t respond. The only other option I have is to send him a written message, but due to his living arrangements, I can’t get that to him either. Only a few businesses are authorized to deliver to him, and Smotrycz’s is one of them. If I’m not mistaken, you’ll be sending him his meal soon. All I’m asking is you include a message to him with your delivery.” I removed a slim, PolyPly sleeve from my pocket and flashed the slip within at the droid. “Please. I’m not asking a lot.”
The droid’s brow furrowed—again, in an unnatural, creepy way. He eyed Carl. “Is this true?”
Carl nodded. “I’m afraid so. If there were another method for us to contact him, trust me, we’d pursue it. But the man’s family is anxious, and while we’re not fully aware of why he’s cut off communications with us, there’s serious reason for concern.”
I held out the card slip engraved with my message to Lars. The droid eyed it, then me, then Carl. Eventually, he reached out a hand and took it.
“This is highly unorthodox,” the droid said. “But if you suspect a man may be in danger, which your own droid confirms, then I suppose I’m compelled to aid you in this. I’ll include the card with his Smotty Meal.”
I pressed my hands together. “Thank you. Really. This means a lot.”
The droid eyed me and flashed me another of its awkward grins. “You’re…welcome, sir. Now, would you like to place an order?”
I doubted my response would change anything, but no sense in jeopardizing our success. “You bet. Can I get a large side of cheese fries and one of those chillers? Medium sized, but nothing too spicy. Jalapeño flavor, I guess.”
“For dine in?”
“No. Take out. Thanks.”
The droid provided me with an order number. I paid via Brain and found a seat at a bench in the far corner of the restaurant, behind a couple of stocky Cetieans sharing lunch with a tall Dirax, its mandibles buried deep in a pile of plain, heavily salted fries. Carl sat across from me, shaking his head.
“What is it?” I asked.
Carl glanced at the front of the store, making sure the droid wasn’t yet bringing out our meal. “You know what it is. I don’t like lying—especially to another droid.”
“We didn’t lie,” I said. “Lars isn’t responding to our communications. For all we know, he could be in danger. And legally, we’re not authorized to make physical deliveries to him, so it’s not as if we had any other alternatives.”
“We lied by omission,” said Carl. “And I’d argue we didn’t exhaust our other options. Surely there’s a way to ensure Lars sees one of our missives that doesn’t involve us violating his personal property and privacy rights, and even if there isn’t, we could simply wait. Sooner or later, Lars is going to exit the Brain game he’s playing, at which point he’ll see the messages we’ve left him. He may or may not respond, but he’ll at least see them. But that’s not my biggest problem with what we’ve done.”
Carl leveled me with a glare. “Perhaps we didn’t explicitly lie, but we deliberately manipulated a low-level droid for our benefit. And I was complicit in it! Maybe you don’t feel sleazy, but I do.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but I didn’t have a leg to stand on, mostly because Smotrycz’s hadn’t been the first restaurant we’d visited. First we’d stopped at Smoothie Maharaja, which according to the data the Meertori desk jockey had provided us with was next in line for delivery to Lars’s place. Following that, we tried a run down sandwich shop that followed Smoothie Maharaja on the list, but that too had turned out to be a failure. It wasn’t because the data we’d received was inaccurate. Both restaurants did deliver to Lars and had deliveries scheduled in the near future, but neither were staffed by the kind of bot I needed.
The smoothie joint’s order taker had been too advanced, as fully featured as Carl and with the looks and personality to match. Apparently, the folks at Maharaja valued their customer experience highly. The sandwich shop didn’t. Their service station consisted of an interactive kiosk. It wasn’t until we reached Smotrycz’s that I’d found what I needed. A fully-functional droid, but an older model, a cheaper model—one with all the fundamental droid leanings of human subservience, respect, and trust but without the advanced, non-fast food related computational prowess to determine when a human and android pair were tag-teaming it to their advantage. Because as Carl had hinted, as true as it was that we hadn’t lied to the unit, we hadn’t been fully honest either.
“Look,” I said. “The microbot we concealed in the PolyPly sleeve isn’t going to do any harm to Lars. It’s a surveillance unit, nothing more.”
“But it could,” said Carl. “That’s my point.”
“How?” I asked. “By flying into his eye and poking him with its hundred micron wide lens? Yeah, that’ll give his cornea a fierce scratching.”
“That’s not what I meant,” said Carl. “If we’re able to conceal something so easily, to deceive so easily, others could do it as well. To ill effect.”
“Oh, don’t give me this,” I said. “Have you forgotten we’re trying to reunite a woman with her estranged son? We’re the good guys here!”
“So that’s it, then?” said Carl. “We’ve progressed past a point where we care about our methods? The final result is all that matters, regardless of how we get there?”
I waved for him to pipe down. “We can work on recalibrating your moral compass later. Fries and a chiller, ten o’clock.”
A server droid rolled over to our table, dropping off my order and thanking us for our patronage. I grabbed the bag and scooted my posterior toward the edge of the bench, but the smell of freshly fried potatoes slathered in processed dairy was too strong. I cracked open the bag, stuffed a few fries in my mouth, and moaned in pleasure. Though a large side of Smotty fries probably contained enough hydrogenated fats to necessitate an early trip to a GenBorn facility for blood refreshment, gosh darn it if those artificial oils didn’t burst off the tongue!
“I thought we were leaving,” said Carl.
I shrugged and jammed a few more fries in my mouth. “Eh. I’ll finish my snack first. Besides, we’ve got a good eight hours until the package gets delivered if that Meertor didn’t steer us wrong. We’ll be ready when the time is right.”
At least, I hoped we would. I’d never actually tried anything of the sort before. But, hey—what could go wrong?
5
I stood in front of one of my hallway mirrors, eyeing myself from multiple angles. Having just taken a nap and a shower, I patted my hair to make sure the pomade still held firm. As soon as I pulled my hand back, my locks sprang back into place, fresh as a spring hare. Perfect.
Vanity, said Paige. The character or quality of being vain. Possessing excessive pride in one’s abilities, appearance—
Oh, shut it, I told her. I’m allowed a little self-congratulation every now and then. I happen to think I look darn good for an eighty-five year old former kickboxer.
You’d look exceptional if this were the year twenty-three thirty, said Paige. But considering it’s a millennia later, I’d say you’re a little shy of average.
You’re not going to give me any credit for the straight nose, are you?
I’d be willing to give your reconstructive surgeons credit, perhaps.
I snorted. They’d only restored to me what a few wayward kicks to the face had wrongfully stolen. I turned my head toward the railing. “See anything yet?”
Carl’s voice drifted my way from downstairs. “Nothing. Just the inside of the bag. I think we’re still in transport.”
“And I’m assuming Lars is still online?”
According to the Princess Gaming servenets, he is, said Paige. Still hasn’t responded to any of our Brain missives, before you ask.
I shook my head. About twelve hours had passed since we first began the investigation, and Lars had yet to sign out. Didn’t the guy ever get up to pee?
Don’t ask, said Paige.
I headed down my apartment’s spiral staircase and joined Carl in the sitting room. My partner sat there on a puffy cerulean sofa set, his feet propped up on an ottoman. I plopped down next to him.
“Paige, let me see,” I said.
She obliged. My view of the living room blinked away, replaced by a uniform field of brown so dark it appeared almost black.
“Contrast?” I said.
Sorry, said Paige. I’ll do what I can. We don’t have much light in the bag at the moment.
My vision flared, and I squinted reflexively. The bright flash only lasted a moment as everything quickly settled into a more pleasing spectrum. The resulting image was grainy and indistinct, but at least I could make out the surroundings.
In front of me rose an enormous sheer brown cliff face, several hundred meters tall, its sides bumpy and textured but not enough for me to be able to find purchase. Not that I’d need to. I wasn’t really there, having merely switched the visual feed from my own two eyes with the one from the microbot’s camera. Though logically I knew I hadn’t instantly shrunk down to the width of a human hair, I couldn’t help but feel like a gnat’s younger, shrimpier cousin—especially once I realized the impossibly tall cliff face in front of me was the side of a Smotrycz’s pizza box. Despite the low contrast, I could just make out the right half of an ‘m’ where it encroached upon the left half of an ‘o.’
“How about the other feeds?” I asked. “Scent, sound.”
Paige superimposed those over my body’s own sensory inputs. A powerful smell of freshly baked bread, ginger, and roasted chicken filled my nostrils, and somewhere in the distance I heard a steady thrumming.
That’s the drone’s rotary blades, said Paige. And for the record, that smell is roasted pheasant, not chicken. Please, get it right.
“My apologies to the planet’s poultry farmers,” I said. “Do we know how close we are to delivery?”
I heard Carl’s voice, though somewhat muffled by the sound of the drone’s rotor. “According to the geolocator, we’re within a hundred meters of the building. Should be there in no time at all.”
“Good,” I said. “Now let’s cross our fingers and hope Lars’s elevator doesn’t give out, otherwise this whole food delivery thing will have been a bust.”
That won’t be a problem, Rich, said Paige. Even if the elevator fails, we’ll be fine.
“I know,” I said. “I have to think like a microbot. Not only does our bot have a set of wings that allow for flight, but even if it didn’t, because of its negligible weight, a fall down an elevator shaft wouldn’t do any damage, and that’s before accounting for the effects of air resistance. Trust me, I’m not an idiot. I’d be more concerned about the drone’s ability to get the food up to the delivery slot if that happened.”
And I’m glad to know you have a fundamental understanding of the square-cube law, Rich, said Paige. But the elevator won�
��t be an issue because the building’s units have internal and external delivery slots. You didn’t notice them set into the exterior windows?
I hadn’t, of course. “Well, there’s that, too.”
“Approaching the windows,” said Carl.
I’m sure the microbot contained a gyroscope as well as several directional accelerometers, so it must’ve logged the delivery drone’s deceleration as it approached Lars’s window, but Paige had apparently decided not to simulate those sensations for me—maybe for gastrointestinal purposes. I did, however, hear a tone sound behind the drone’s rotating blades, followed by the dull clap of a slot opening. A raspy tear followed, that of hook and loop fasteners. My vision once again faded to white, and I heard a puff and whine of a linear actuator.
Sorry, said Paige. Looks like we’ve been pulled from the insulated bag. Fixing contrast again.
My vision adjusted once more, this time with the end product becoming slightly less fuzzy. Now, in addition to the enormous wall of cardboard, I could make out a white, cloudy barrier surrounding me and looping over the top of the pizza box mountain. A plastic bag, unless I was mistaken.
“I’d guess we’re inside the apartment,” said Carl, “based on the auditory feed and the geolocation data.”
Accelerometers also confirm we’ve stopped moving, said Paige.
I heard the actuator sound once more, followed by the clap of the slot. The buzzing of the drone blades stopped.
“So we’re in?” I said.
“Should be,” said Carl.
“Excellent. Paige? Give me the microbot controls.”
Uh…you sure about that champ?
“What? You don’t trust me?”
If Paige could’ve gulped, I’m sure she would’ve. Do I really need to answer that?
“Need I remind you I spent several years as a flightwing instructor?”
“I’m not sure that translates particularly well to microdrone manipulation,” said Carl.
“You’re not helping my case,” I said. “Paige? The controls please.”
