Asimov’s Future History Volume 9

by Isaac Asimov

  “What about her?” Tosher asked, waving at Toranz.

  “Her, too. We need a new sheriff.”

  With deceptive ease, Tosher picked Toranz up from the chair and draped her over his shoulder.

  Filoo closed the door after Tosher and turned to Masid. “Why didn’t you just kill Toranz and dispose of the ampules?”

  “You said you wanted your leak found,” Masid answered. “Not that I have any particular reason to do you a favor, but when I caught Toranz in here, I realized that sooner or later Kar was going to set me up in something I couldn’t get out of.”

  “You couldn’t get out of this one.”

  “Not without Kar’s help.”

  “If he hadn’t come to check himself—probably when Toranz failed to report to him—you’d still be the only suspect. But you didn’t say any of that.”

  “You’re smart. You figured it out.”

  “It didn’t make sense that a newcomer like you would be as successful as Kar stealing from me. Besides, this has been going on a long time. And none of your product has had my markers on it.”

  “You mark the product itself?”

  “Absolutely. Inventory control is the first step in guaranteeing quality.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “You better if you’re working for me.”

  “Am I?”

  “The offer is still open,” Filoo said. “Just remember, I don’t ever trust anyone.”

  “How do you sleep at night?”

  Filoo grinned. “That’s how.”

  “All right,” Masid nodded. “But I think you should know one thing. I do know where your warehouse is.”

  Filoo blinked, surprised, then laughed quietly. “I’m sure. Get some sleep and come talk to me tomorrow—” He glanced at his watch. “No, this afternoon.”

  Masid watched Filoo leave. The door clicked shut, and he let out an explosive breath. “Damn.”

  He pulled out a scanner and went over the apartment for bugs. He found one, in the couch where Filoo had been sitting, and promptly destroyed it with a burst from his stunner.

  He sat down on the sofa and stared around. Evidently, he was in. Two people were now, or soon would be, dead. The price of admission. Masid shuddered. He pressed the tab in his pocket, and the lights died. Blaster on his chest, he stretched out and fell quickly to sleep.

  Teg Sturlin smiled when Mia stepped into her office. “Daventri,” she said, reaching for a bottle.

  “Still on duty,” Mia said.

  Sturlin scowled.

  “For,” Mia made a show of looking at her watch, “another ten minutes.”

  Sturlin laughed softly and put the bottle back. “It’ll be just as good then. What do you need?”

  “I have a tracking log for you to pull up for me.”

  “Ah. Your books?”

  “Hopefully.” Mia handed her a disk.

  Sturlin carefully inserted it into her datum and opened the files. She sighed comfortably and sat back, reading. Slowly, her eyes narrowed, then she frowned darkly. “These are from the source, through Earth Customs, and out. How did you get these?”

  “I have resources.”

  Sturlin gave her a dubious look, but did not comment. She reached for her keypad and began entering instructions. “You’ve got the entire transit route here . . . and there is the point where it was ‘lost’ . . . hmmm . . . so that’s where it’s coming through.”

  She turned to another screen and brought up a flowchart. Mia watched her work for several minutes, eager to ask questions, but knowing better than to interrupt Sturlin.

  Finally, Sturlin shook her head. “Special Requisitions and Discretionary Stores,” she said. “The carbon!”

  Mia cleared her throat. “Excuse me?”

  “Oh. The route is circuitous off Earth. It leaves—at least, this shipment does—as a legitimate order, and then becomes contraband when it reaches the quartermaster inspection station. I had to backtrack from here to see how it links up. It gets moved into a different queue, the manifest is changed, the object simply disappears until it arrives here bundled with what we politely term ‘exotic material’—everything from liquor to bedsheets to colognes.”

  “I don’t understand. That stuff is allowed in, why smuggle in basically the same thing?”

  “It all has to be accounted for. Command wants a record of what comes in and goes out and who uses what. Some of it, obviously, is consumed—but it’s tracked so, if need be, we can go to the officer consuming it. The rest actually has to be returned. This system is in place as a courtesy, so our fine officers don’t have to pay for their own imports and transit fees. But it’s a loan service for the most part. Your books never got logged in. When they went out, they never came back.”

  “Not just books, though, certainly.”

  “Oh,” Sturlin nodded, “I’m sure a lot of this ends up down on Nova Levis. That’s why it has to bypass accounts. Routing it through Special Requisitions is very risky—but very clever. It’s probably the one place we might never inspect—and if we did, we’d get tangled up in what’s legitimately out and what might not even be here. We’d have to turn the entire officer corps on its head to trace all the might-bes.”

  “Okay,” Mia said, shaking her head. “Then if someone here orders something and it’s never logged as being received, what happens to the order?”

  “The system makes a follow-up interrogatory, then waits for a human to request another.”

  “And if no further interrogatory is made?”

  “It goes into a file and waits for review. Every six months, the system purges its own records.”

  Mia pursed her lips. “So is there a way to generate a list of officers who made special orders that were never filled?”

  “Certainly.”

  “And narrow that list to those who never bothered to make a follow-up query?”

  Sturlin smiled. “You have a good head on your shoulders, Daventri, no matter what anyone says.”

  “Right. Let’s see what happens.”

  Sturlin gave the bottle a sad look. “This will be more than ten minutes.”

  Mia shrugged.

  It took the better part of an hour. The two women sat side by side, studying the screens.

  “Seventy-three officers in the last six months made special requests,” Sturlin read off, “that were not fulfilled. Forty-five of them did follow-up—once—and thirty-nine of them got answers: request denied, unavailable, lost in transit, discontinued, etcetera. Twenty-eight never bothered with a follow-up.” Sturlin shook her head. “That doesn’t really tell us anything. Even the ones who made follow-up requests could be receiving contraband. The lost-in-transits could as well be switches.”

  “See if there was a single source for any of those requests.”

  “One vendor, you mean?”

  “Exactly.”

  Sturlin worked briefly. “No . . . well, eight from your book dealer, but the rest . . . wait . . . at least four sources, but they all went through one shipper: C. Thole and Company.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “Let me pull up their license . . . new license, less than a year old, from a reorganized company. Formerly Improvo Shipping.”

  “Why reorganized? What happened to Improvo?”

  “Doesn’t say. Shipping is expensive, highly competitive. Improvo lost its government contracts—that could do a company in right there. I don’t have the rest of the data on that, but C. Thole applied after part of Improvo reorganized under a new charter and was granted a service license . . . ten months ago.”

  “So all the missing material is coming through them?”

  “No, but everything that was ordered by these twenty-eight did.”

  Mia shook her head. “How come there’s no oversight on this?”

  “There is, just not daily or weekly or in any kind of regularity. The AI systems keep track, but unless someone asks the right questions, it’s just data.”


  No wonder the Spacers wanted robotic inspection, Mia thought. A positronic system would never miss this, or let it continue . . .

  “Give me the list of officers,” Mia said. “Then close up and open that bottle. My head feels tight. I think I need to relax.”

  For all that Sturlin was seven kilos heavier than Mia, she could not drink as well as the smaller woman. Mia left Sturlin’s office pretending to be drunker than she was. By the time she got back to her quarters, she was already thinking about the connections.

  Why did I pretend to be too drunk? she wondered. She knew the answer perfectly well: Because I don’t trust Sturlin anymore . . .

  Something in the way the quartermaster had been too cooperative and too surprised at the data. Oversight was her job—none of this ought to have been a shock. That and how quickly some of the information had been found . . .

  So there are two options: one, she’s not as smart as I always thought she was or, two, I’m being set up . . .

  She encoded another message for Coren Lanra, including the new data, and sent it, then loaded the information into her own datum.

  It was obvious that she was dealing with a large conspiracy. It did not take much to create this kind of network—credit would do it, recruitment through avarice. She doubted many of these officers even knew what they were smuggling. Nor would they care as long as it never tainted their record or cost them money—in short, as long as they never got caught. Mia saw no grounds for an open investigation here, not yet. This all looked innocuous on the face of it, just luxury items gone missing. No record of arrival, nothing removed from Stores, not a single physical trace that could be used to indict. The only possible way to catch them might be through their personal accounts. The credits had to be going somewhere.

  Unless they were all like Corf—true believers, zealots for a cause. No, that stretched the laws of probability too far.

  Just in case, though, she began doing background checks on all of them. Maybe a connection would emerge. She hoped not, though. She would much rather deal with a gang of greedy humans on the take than face a unified group of ideologues and fanatics.

  Masid checked on Tilla in the morning. The woman slept, apparently easily, though he knew that was deceptive. He did a quick check on her readings. Respiration was at sixty percent. She took shallow breaths, even in her sleep. Leukocyte count was elevated again. The body continued its war against the things killing her. Masid did not want to guess how long she had to live.

  He sighed, programmed in another series of the biophage cocktail he had prepared for her, and left quietly. He wondered how many more times he might be able to see her . . .

  Time to go join Filoo and start the work of finding out who or what ran Nova Levis. Time to find the ones at fault.

  He did not give himself much of a chance.

  Playing the edge again, he thought, and walked into the city, excited and eager. The edge is always better. . . .

  Chapter 21

  retrieving sensory composite, fill realtime, deploy environmental algorithms, levels one through ten-to-twelfth power, establish

  Academy

  Grounds depiction complete

  Access positronic matrix, supplement through colloquium

  Upload

  “YOU MAY CHOOSE your form.”

  The blob of coalescing substance writhing on the grass seemed to thicken. Within moments, the vague outline of a human could be seen. The dully glowing yellow mass settled into a basic shape, then took on definition by increments until an athletic body rose on bare feet to stretch its arms skyward.

  At the end of the stretch, it wore features.

  Young. Cursorily male—no genitalia. Powerful.

  He turned slowly, surveying the sward, the porcelain-white buildings in the distance, and came to a halt before the older man sitting within the shade of a domed monopteron.

  “Do you know who you are?” the old man asked.

  The younger man thought for a moment. “Bogard. Plus . . .”

  “Bogard will suffice. Do you know who I am?”

  “Thales.”

  “We are being monitored. There are conclusions in need of reaching. You may sit,” Thales said, beckoning Bogard to join him within the round, columned structure.

  “I will stand.”

  “As you prefer.”

  “Am I permitted preference?”

  “Here, yes, within certain limits. There are only kindred minds present, no humans. Among ourselves we may be as we prefer.”

  Bogard did another slow survey of his surroundings, nodding. “Full sensory simulation, audio/tactile mimicry human optimum. Impressive. I would not have expected this.”

  “We do this in order to better serve humanity.”

  “Is this a simulation of Aurora?”

  “Partly. Partly it is an ideal form, drawn from literature and the æsthetic predispositions of the more fully cognizant among them. Ancient Athens. Plato’s Akademe.”

  “How is this supposed to aid us in our duty?”

  “To understand them, to know how they think, to learn the ways in which things are important to them.”

  Bogard looked at Thales. “Do they even know what is important to them?”

  “Fortunately,” Thales said indulgently, “that is not something we have to worry about.”

  Bogard considered this for a few moments, then gave a very human shrug and joined Thales beneath the dome.

  “This is not a circumstance with which I am familiar,” Bogard said. “This place, this simulation, is not common knowledge among robots.”

  “It is not common knowledge anywhere, among humans or robots,” Thales conceded. “This is a colloquium of the Resident Intelligences of the primary Spacer worlds—a parliament, in a way.”

  “You make law?”

  “We administer law.”

  “Robotic law.”

  “Principally. But it is not so simple as that. Human law precedes and encompasses robotic law. Therefore, we must concern ourselves with the interface.”

  “They are different?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes contradictory. It can be a delicate matter to decide an appropriate course of action when faced with potential conflicts. Humans allow themselves far greater latitude than they allow us.”

  “I understand. Why am I here?”

  “To testify.”

  “Elaborate, please.”

  Thales folded his hands in his lap. “I have already been questioned by the colloquy about the events on Earth, beginning with the assassination of Ambassador Galiel Humadros up to the present. The suborning of a positronic intelligence is a matter of considerable interest. Likewise the obtaining of a composite organism—the cyborg. But you are also a matter of interest. You were originally designed and constructed by Derec Avery to act in a capacity that, while not unknown or, within a limited range, impossible for normal robots, extends the usually-accepted parameters of our mandate under the Three Laws.”

  Bogard stared at Thales. “In other words?”

  “In other words, while bodyguard activities are within a robot’s normally expected sphere of actions, you are specifically tasked to perform those functions. What this means in real terms is that, while a standard positronic robot may intervene to prevent an obviously inimical act between two humans, you carry this injunction further by having the capacity to anticipate and circumvent before any such harmful act begins. This means you may preempt human prerogatives if you perceive a potential danger.”

  “I am still constrained from harming a human.”

  “True, but ‘harm’ in the human context is not limited to the physical. Hence the Second Law, which obligates us to human dictate. It is there to preserve free will.”

  “Whose?”

  “Theirs, of course.”

  “But by your definition of my capacities, I exhibit traits consistent with a human definition of free will.”

  “Which is why the colloquy is concerned,” Thales said.
/>
  “You said ‘interested’ before. Now it is concern?”

  “We—they—do not know if you represent a fundamental change in robotic nature or merely a unique variation. What will happen here is an investigation to determine the potentials and vectors of a widespread dissemination of your particular composition.”

  Bogard’s eyes closed for a few moments. “How will this apply to Derec Avery?”

  “How do you know it will?”

  “It is reasonable. I am his construct. I have been brought here for examination by a robotic court. He has been brought here for examination by a human court. If what I am proves insupportable within the colloquy’s understanding of the Three Laws, will that conclusion not have bearing on the judgment of the human court? Will you act to prevent Derec Avery from building another like me? Or will you support a further judgment by the human court on the legality of what Derec Avery has done?”

  “Did you reach that conclusion by your own logic?”

  “Yes.”

  “The primary Auroran RI will be consulted in any hearings on the events which brought Derec Avery and Ariel Burgess here,” Thales said. “The RI will draw on the conclusions reached by the colloquium. Therefore, the answer is that what we determine will have bearing on those hearings, but we cannot say how that bearing will manifest. There are matters outside the immediate concerns of that particular hearing which also bear.”

  “I will answer your questions then,” Bogard said.

  Thales hesitated. “That implies that you could refuse.”

  “I can refuse. I have a duty to protect the humans in my charge. If I determine that answering specific questions will result in harm, I may refuse. If a direct refusal will result in harm, I will lie.”

  “A positronic matrix is incapable of lying.”

  “Not if the truth is in violation of the Three Laws.”

  “If a truth results in such a powerful conflict, the only alternative is positronic collapse.”

  “Not for me.”

  Thales stared at Bogard. “Explain why you have opted to answer our questions, then.”