Moon City

by Benjamin Kane Ethridge

  “Powers?” she said with an uncomfortable swallow.

  I reached forward and pinched the side of the folder and pulled it free from under her plate. She made no move to stop me. Terror replaced the tears in her eyes. “I’m going to sit on the throne the creator once sat upon. Soon. If you’re enjoying your new life, I’d make a point of never bothering me again. You aren’t my mother. I’m not your son. You are a reformed addict and whore. And I am God reborn.”

  She turned away from me with a gasp. The tenor of my voice had alarmed her so that she didn’t realize her lukewarm coffee had begun to boil, her waffles to steam, and sugar cheese to melt into silken puddles.

  “Glad we had this talk,” I said softly and pushed up from the table.

  With the folder clutched in my hand, I left her there, trembling. That was a perfect last image of her to take with me in eternal life.

  Chapter 15

  Dean had rephrased the question several times. “Where do I find these crocoshark things? And just exactly what the hell are they?”

  Donaldo took another quick sip of some bright-green-and yellow-layered Constalife cocktail he’d gotten at a walk-up bar along Stonebone Drive. It was a busy place, reminding Dean of a New Orleans Bourbon Street populated with a majority of aliens over humans. The big guy was a bit shaken after the Firecracker Lady had outed his robots. He’d muttered several times that she must be onto me about my Limbus affiliation as well.

  “Are you calmer now?” Dean asked. He checked his phone again. Sandra had texted him something very sweet about missing him. He wanted to read it more thoroughly. He wanted to know she was doing okay and what the company had her working on. If he couldn’t get the Golden Transport, maybe he could meet her somewhere half way, if she could get an assignment—he shook the thought away. It would still mean she’d be risking years away from her family. He’d royally screwed up, taking this assignment. Why had he just said yes? Why did he let them roll over him? The Firecracker Lady had pegged him right. He let everybody take advantage of his good nature. He could be a wise ass at times, but when it came down to it, Dean could never really stick up for himself.

  “Let me finish my drink and then we can talk,” Donaldo told him.

  “Sure,” he replied. What? What did you just say? Idiot? “No,” he said firmly. “I’ve already waited here, watching you sip that damn thing. We talk now.”

  “Okay, tough guy.” Donaldo turned around from his drink, leaning on the crowded bar. “You’re going to take a road just east of here called Riddleworth. Follow it away from the main cavern entrance. It’s the farthest place in the main cavern system you can go, and the darkest, so bring light with you. There are swamps there. Man made. They hauled the water there from the Midnight Sea, originally to make shadowfish farms. They tried to create an entire ecosystem there but the crocosharks, buzztoads, and wolf bats were the only things that thrived.”

  “Sounds beautiful.”

  “Crocosharks carry pouches of venom under their jaws, whereby it can be withdrawn from holes in their teeth or by squeezing an utter on the pouch.”

  Dean snorted. “It has cow parts too?”

  “I’ve never seen one of these things. I’m just going by what I heard. The venom serves two purposes, being actual milk for their young and a fatal venom to their prey. To humans in small doses, it’s more like a narcotic. You get bit really good, though, and you’ll overdose in less than ten minutes.”

  “Are there a lot of these creatures out there?” asked Dean.

  “Nobody can really say. It’s tough to get them to come out of the water because they gorge themselves on the buzztoads, which reproduce like rabbits on Viagra. There’s no need to come to the surface most of the time.”

  “That’s not going to make it easy.”

  “Use the rotten method.”

  “Explain.”

  “Go to the swamp after first dinner, when they’re more active. Before you go, find some really bad-smelling, rotting food… It doesn’t have to be much… and set it out on the shore. The crocosharks can smell better under water than a bloodhound on a breezy day. They love rotting food more than they love buzztoads. You’ll see a bunch of warning signs around the swamps not to picnic in the area just for that reason.”

  “You’re sure that’ll work?”

  Donaldo shrugged and took a swig from his cup that ended his cocktail. “Like I said, I’m sharing stories. Shit, I don’t even know how you’re going to slow one of them down long enough to squeeze out the venom. If you kill one even, I heard the venom degrades after a few minutes, starts instantly losing potency because the milk floods with other secretions to prepare for decomposition.”

  “I gotta milk the venom while they’re alive?”

  Another shrug. “Firecracker Lady doesn’t mean to ever see you again.” Donaldo clapped him on the shoulder. “Sucks to be you, Fulsome.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I do have some good news.” Donaldo read something on his cell phone and nodded. “Yep, they’re both back, and waiting.”

  “Who?”

  “Your support. Tasha said you needed help with the Moon City Killer. I’ve got two individuals who I think you’ll greatly appreciate—well, if you survive the crocoshark.”

  “Well, what are we waiting for? These people can help me in the swamp.”

  Donaldo shook his head. “No, they won’t.”

  “Well, what the hell kind of support are they?”

  “The best kind for killing, but they won’t engage anyone unless it’s the Moon City Killer or somebody getting in their way. That’s how they were programmed, and by law, they have to be programmed that way.”

  “More robots?”

  “They’re SL-SHRs. Not just any type of robot, Dean.”

  Dean’s chest went cold. “Where the hell did you get two Slasherbots? Limbus could buy this entire squad of mercenaries for just one.”

  “I helped develop them for the Fanglion. These two belong to me, and since Limbus got me the job with the Fanglion government, I allow them to be used in campaigns from time to time. For a price of course, and the fact Limbus has kept me out of a large Grettish criminal law suit I won’t go into.”

  Dean threw up his hands. “You really can’t get them to help me in the swamp? Really?”

  Donaldo smirked. “Do you really want to start introducing variable targets to an artificial intelligence that operates like a contracted serial killer? If these safeguards weren’t in place, you’d have my two robots out there doing far more damage than the Moon City Killer. He’s after the Deitii. They would be after everybody.”

  “Well, maybe I don’t need the Firecracker Lady’s deal then. If the SL-SHRs can hunt the killer down, stalk, and terminate him, why should I even risk this trip?”

  “You have to point them to something, Dean. They need a face. A smell. A name. They need more than you have right now. If you get those surveillance feeds, they’ll be able to start their campaign for you. Trust me. They will come in handy.”

  Dean sighed and shook his head. “I just want a damn break already.”

  “Look, you’ve got time before first dinner. Come to my workshop. It’s a few miles from here. I need to get you imprinted on SL-SHRs safety protocol system, anyway. In case you somehow get the clever idea of getting in their way of taking down the Moon City Killer, we wouldn’t want you ending up in a pile of body parts.”

  “That would suck,” Dean admitted.

  “Great,” Donaldo said with a smile and began up the crowded sidewalk. “I’ll show you the way to my pride and joy. You’re going to get a kick out of these two. You really will.”

  “I’m sure.”

  Dean followed him. His cell phone burned a hole in his pocket the entire walk. He really wanted to reach out to Sandra, but he needed to keep his eyes on Donaldo in the mass of aliens and human Moon City inhabitants.

  * * *

  Dean had seen an SL-SHR robot one other time in a pirate outpos
t on Mars. He’d only seen it from a distance, but recalled being surprised. He was expecting the Terminator, but the one he’d seen looked more like the robot from that 80s movie Short Circuit. When he’d joked as much to a younger logistics guy, he just stared at him with vacant eyes. “You know? Johnny-five?”

  The vacancy grew. Dean had almost suggested one of the robots from the Black Hole as an alternative, but the guy clearly wouldn’t get that reference either.

  Donaldo’s robots were far more intimidating looking, however, and for strikingly different reasons. They both were more representative of the original model of design that the Fanglions had been trying to replicate. They loved human horror movies. They loved them maybe more than the Zetú loved Lady Gaga. They even adopted Halloween as a national holiday, but it was more in celebration of the John Carpenter film than the pagan fall festival it originated from.

  It was obvious Donaldo also had a thing for those types of movies because in his workshop there were posters of Carpenter’s The Thing, King’s Carrie, and Barker’s Hellraiser.

  It was no wonder that the tallest, most powerful of the two robots had been named Jazon Meyers. “Jason with a Z,” Donaldo had told him rather fondly, as though programming the most complex AI system for a robot in the universe was less impressive than unnecessary phonetic spellings.

  Jazon stood around six feet eight inches tall by Dean’s estimation. The face was a round silver plate with holes in it and a grand two-foot-high red Mohawk sprouting from the top. The neck was a series of rods, not unlike the Terminator, much to Dean’s satisfaction. The body was where the nods to movies ended, however. The chest was a triangular shield with reinforced blacktek armor bands running down to the hip area where some powerful, almost human-looking legs extended and sunk into a pair of hellish, black iron boots. The metallic muscle fibers of the legs, a substance called widowsilk, also composed the arms, all the way down to the elbows where they turned into machetes.

  Dean knew a lot about widowsilk and galaxy glass. That’s actually why he’d been on that Mars outpost, overseeing a shipment of both of the expensive, highly dangerous materials that had been stolen back from Grettish pirate groups. He’d seen the strength that could be employed by muscle groups formed of the widowsilk substance: entire block walls taken down by a punch delivered from an infant-sized robot. The fact that Jason with a Z had arms the size of a professional wrestler and machetes for hands made Dean feel like he was standing near a great white shark who hadn’t noticed him yet.

  Donaldo patted Jazon Meyers’ pointed shoulder gently and went to a keypad on his messy work counter. “One hundred and ninety-seven kills over only a year of run time. Not too shabby, right?”

  “Not at all,” answered Dean and looked at the holes in the steel mask, wondering if the thing was watching him or not. “Tell me again how these things are controlled?”

  “Functional directives,” said Donaldo, typing. He checked his watch and silently cursed. “Shit, I need to get back to the mayor soon.”

  “You wear many hats,” Dean said. “Who don’t you work for?”

  “I only work for one dude, and that’s myself.”

  “What did you mean by functional directives?”

  “God, really, I gotta explain?”

  “You said I had time,” Dean told him. “And I’d rather keep myself busy then stare at these things…”

  The second robot was shorter than Jazon, but far more unsettling. Dean didn’t even want to really take it in yet, since the larger robot stood only feet away from him.

  “They are incapable of malfunctioning on their masters. The idea had been to ramp up the fear of all the marks, since traditional assassin robots could eventually be hacked and their AIs broken down and exploited. SL-SHRs have constant development of artificial psychoses that are all snowflake-unique. In other words, they cannot be hacked because their minds cannot be broken down. It would be like trying to translate a surrealist painting into plain English. They cannot be understood because their minds devolve and evolve rapidly with both staggering genius and staggering psychopathy. The one thing that remains firm in their programming, that is safeguarded in such a way that can never be undone, is their main directive to kill a single target at all costs.”

  “How can you tame something with a crazy mind?” Dean asked,

  “Incentive. Pure, deep, beautiful incentive. Ask a drug addict to go out and do something painful to get a Santa-sized sack of their drug of choice and they will. The SL-SHRs are no different. They have pleasure receptors that activate during a murder, and the receptors fire even higher when the act is done in an unconventional manner. We give them the freedom to kill the target exactly as they please and it releases a torrent of reward center impulses throughout their bodies.”

  “Why do robots need an incentive?”

  “These ones do,” Donaldo put simply. “If you strip them of their psychoses, they become like any other artificial intelligence, which is easy to break down, but if you leave their minds to fester, the only thing that you can do to convince them to leave on a mission is the orgasm they get from an unconventional kill.”

  “Sick.”

  “They are effective.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that.” Dean stared at Jazon and swallowed. “Does it talk?”

  “No,” Donaldo replied. “And Mr. Loveman only whispers.”

  Dean’s eyes moved to the other robot for the first time. He really wanted to leave now. There was something very hollow and unnerving in the mechanical thing. If Jazon Meyers felt like a wild animal a breath away from rampage, the other robot, this Mr. Loveman, felt off… like a demon in casual clothes, like the end of a nightmare that brings you awake, like a scream in the flesh.

  And he did appear to be flesh. He wasn’t metallic like Jazon. The flesh was a bright, translucent white though that was obviously a cover material for more widowsilk appendages beneath.

  Dean found himself looking away before meeting eyes with the robot. “Aren’t you afraid they’ll go and kill you in your sleep?”

  “Me?” asked Donaldo. “Never. The one directive they really can’t misinterpret is to kill their master. They are programmed to be selfish, and if I die without instructions about their new master, they are ordered to employ suicide.”

  “And for people they help?”

  “That’s what I’m working on,” said Donaldo with a few more taps of the keypad. “We have to imprint you into each of their systems. That way, they can’t misinterpret you ever getting in the way of their mission. We’ve run into problems in the past with that. The SL-SHRs love to find loopholes in their programming so they can justify a new murder.”

  “Fantastic.”

  “They’re cool. You’re going to enjoy working with them.”

  “Why is that one called Mr. Loveman? I get the other name, but why that?”

  “He named himself.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Beats me,” said Donaldo. “I wanted to call him Chucky Kruger. I’ve never had an AI refuse to take one of my names. Even those with more freedom tend to give their name a low priority. Not Loveman. Within the first few hours after his awareness came online, he told me he only wanted a last name and it would be Loveman.”

  Dean examined the robot closer, still avoiding the eyes. A purple polo shirt. Baggy khaki pants with a hempen belt. Black flip-flops. Dean’s eyes paused at the feet. They were astonishingly real. Mr. Loveman was humanoid in form, but the skin of his arms and face were obviously synthetic material, just not the feet.

  “Oh, you noticed, huh?” Donaldo stopped punching at the keys for a moment. “He’s a pushy son of a bitch. He pretty much extorted me for that upgrade. I’m just glad he only wanted it done on his feet. I guess the synth feet didn’t look quite right in flip flops, the crazy bastard.”

  “Is that… real human skin?”

  “Shit, I wish. Getting some borg-meat grown is cheap these days. That flesh’s DNA-optimized homo sapien sup
eriorous. He liked the sheen of their skin better than us Earth monkeys.”

  The Uber Human species was one Dean had never come across. They were nearly immortal, could heal from most injuries at impossibly fast rates, and averaged nine feet tall in height. “So how’d the robot get you to ante up for that upgrade?”

  Dean finally lifted his eyes to Mr. Loveman’s. They were two glossy, ink-black stars. His mouth was a single, straight line cut across the expanse of shimmering pale skin.

  “He threatened to kill Jazon Meyers if I didn’t upgrade him. He got around the main single-target directive by deducing that Jazon is not a citizen of any planetary region. I’ve since had to change the directive across all platforms to include damage and destruction of private property, so this won’t happen again. All other star systems took the free update for their SL-SHRs. Loveman anticipated I’d do this, so he encrypted his property directives, and therefore remains the only type of these AIs in the universe that can kill other robots by choice. There’s nothing I can do about that.”

  “How many kills do you have?” Dean hazarded to ask the robot.

  A low, rattling whisper escaped the thin, straight mouth. “Seventy-eight over two years and seven months.”

  “So not as prolific as Jazon here.”

  “No,” answered the robot.

  Donaldo was furiously typing and moving code objects around on his display. “Loveman’s a quality-over-quantity type, aren’t you, Mr. Loveman?”

  “Yes.”

  “I get the feeling he’s not being completely forthcoming with that number, but yeah, he’s killed some A-list aliens and humans alike, all types of interstellar celebrities, well-known drug kingpins, presidents of star systems, and the entire thirty seats in the Fanglion parliament. Jazon has some big-name kills as well, but his numbers are high because of private citizens he’s interpreted as standing in his way.”