The Robot's Twilight Companion

by Tony Daniel

  “Mr. Harco, may I have your attention,” the crank said. The voice synth needed major adjustment. It was low filtering, and the thing sounded like a rusted-out saxophone. How could it get that grating nasal trill to come out when it didn’t even have a nose? Ah, the mysteries of science.

  “What is it?” I replied through tight lips. I pointedly looked away from the 50. Who knows? Maybe the thing had enough brains to be insulted. I hoped so.

  “Please accompany me,” said the crank. Then red letters flashed across the periphery of my op-eds.MR. HARCO, YOU ARE REQUESTED TO FOLLOW THE ROBOT TO AIRPORT SECURITY SCREENING. PLEASE COMPLY. The font was crude, but 3-D. I have organic inner lenses in my eyewear—I don’t skimp on any of my peripherals—and the words burned on the cellwork of my op-eds like lash welts.

  I blinked twice and popped up my custom V-trace menu. It had cost me six thousand, a chip of my skull’s parietal plate, and a year of bureaupain to get a license for the junk. It was not my most expensive piece of exotic junk, but it was damned near. My brain is probably as much vat-formed gray matter as it is natural—and that’s not counting the hardware interfaces.

  I had no right to use the V-trace in the present circumstance, of course, but if this asshole who was cowboying me brought me up for review, he’d be asking for suspension along with me. Assuming he was a rent-a-cop to begin with. I had better stop making assumptions, I told myself, and start dealing with this shit.

  I blinked the cursor toROOT AND BURN with my left eye and closed both eyes to activate it. The message disappeared from my op-eds. I have good junk. Not the best. My junk is not really integrated into me, like that of the nodes and the rich. I couldn’t make it work without op-eds. But my junk is quality stuff when combined with my eyewear. Within a second, the status display spread across my field of vision, and iconed the real world into a little block in the lower right-hand corner of the virtual.

  SIGNAL ROOTED. FEED PROTECTED. BURN OPTIONS:

  1.ORIGINATING DEVICE

  2.ORIGINATING CONTROLLER

  3.GENERAL BURN

  I chose number 2, then iconed back to reality. The crank stood absolutely still for a long moment, and I stared at it. Somewhere, someone was receiving a nasty surprise in their eyewear.

  The crank finally moved. It opened a door in its casing and extended a pink tube that looked for all the world like a shriveled penis. The crank sprayed knockout gas like a scared puppy pisses. It seemed to dribble out. The chemicals probably hadn’t been changed in years, and the crank was more electric than biologic, so it didn’t have the guts to nurture complex chemicals indefinitely.

  The gas did sublimate to some degree, however. Although, fortunately, the corridor was mostly clear, one of the gate attendants was walking by. The stuff billowed lazily about, and after she got a whiff of it, she started to run away. Too late. She dropped onto the carpeted floor with a dull thump.

  I, of course, have been filtered since Justcorp modified me at the Academy eight years ago. Justcorp does a first-rate job. It took the crank—or whoever was directing it—a moment to figure this out. It had been squirting me like I was a cockroach that was slow to die.

  I walked over and made sure that the attendant was all right. Looked like she’d taken the fall on her side and was only bruised. No op-eds. As I felt her head to make sure nothing was cracked, my fingers closed around the feedhorn wart at the back of her neck. An optical bundle in a delta configuration. She was a node with fairly expensive hardwiring. Her brain belonged to another. I quickly stopped worrying too much about her well-being. Worrying about a node is like caring about the fate of a particular dead skin cell. And anyway, the Ideal would provide, or not, as it saw fit. I wondered, vaguely, which Ideal she belonged to.

  Some of the others who were waiting on flights began to gather around the two of us. Idiots. What if Iwere a terrorist and in need of a hostage?

  “Mr. Harco,” whined the crank.” We are prepared to activate all systems to persuade you to accompany me. Please accompany me.”

  Big vocabulary these security cranks have.

  I said nothing, but nodded for the thing to lead the way. May as well get the checkout over with and be on my way. I was on personal leave, for Christ’s sake, with specific instructions from management to stay out of trouble.

  One nondescript corridor led to another until we descended an airtube into the bowels of the complex. I felt like I was being swallowed. Security always seemed to pick the most cheerless locations for offices.

  The duty officer’s eyelids were charred, and he looked like a raccoon, although his appearance wasn’t that much different from what it had been before I’d burned his eyewear out, I was sure. Low-order security always wore those smoked plastic op-eds that look like windows into a black void. This guy’s own burned-out op-eds were lying, twisted and pitiful, on the desk before him. Yet even with the black eyes, I recognized the fellow.

  Ed Bernam. Dandy Ed, we used to call him. He was a Guardian rental, and fit that agency’s stereotype to a T. Big, vain, mean—and unable to control snot and fart production. Guardian’s body mods on new employees were quick and cheap. The procedure adversely affected the guts and nasal tract.

  Bernam picked his nose continually, but dressed well, as if he were trying to compensate for the shabbiness of his innards. He wore a blue and white uniform with a fully animated holoshield undulating on his chest. No wonder the airport couldn’t afford state-of-the-art cranks; it was dropping all its money on sparklies for the rentals. Or, knowing Bernam, he paid for his own.

  “Hello, Ed. Frontline monitor still? Isn’t this supposed to be a slot to break rookies’ balls?”

  Bernam scowled and sank back into the protection of his control chair.

  “MeanderHarco, what the hell are you doing in my airport?” he growled. He remembered me, evidently. Or at least remembered the fact that I hated my given name.

  “Personal business,” I replied with a neutral voice. I’d had my fun with him, and now I just wanted to get the hell out of there.

  “We’ll see,” he said. “The junk has flagged you. I’m going to have to pull and comp your file.”

  “I’m not a terrorist, Ed.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Shit. This was going to take time. Public security junk is notoriously slow compared to P.D. or private corporation. It still has to access central databases, for Christ’s sake! And Bernam was going to run a full comparison, there was no doubt of that, even though there was not a reason on Earth why a terrorist would get himself doctored up to look like me. I glanced around for a chair. There was none other than the one Bernam’s fat ass was occupying, of course. That was the way of such offices. I set my suitcase and my briefcase full of peripherals down on the desks in front of him, further mangling his ruined op-eds.

  Dandy Ed Bernam watched me through his raccoon mask. I checked again to make sure itwas him before me, wishing I were plugged into the briefcase. I had downloaded all of my long-term memory into a biostatic memory froth I’d paid a half-year’s salary for. That’s one reason I don’t let the briefcase get too far away from me. I did it so as to have more room in the old noggin for junk interface algorithms . . . and other things. What was left in my brain was memories with cheated links and little redundancy. The guy who installed it—the best in the field—told me it was foolproof, nonetheless. And so far, I hadn’t found any blank spots.

  This was Bernam, all right. He’d been a two-year man when I came on with the Birmingham P.D. Most Guardian rentals stay on patrol, but Bernam had worked his way up to plainclothes. Someone had joked that he did it all so that he could dress the way he wanted to every day.

  Whatever the case, he hadn’t done well in Vice. Management had shuffled him around a couple of times before busting him back down to patrol. Ed couldn’t take it, and broke his lease. Management was not exactly mortified to see him go, especially since Guardian refunded the deposit on him. But it seems the corporation got back at Ed for
losing them money by contracting him out only to places with strict uniform requirements. No more fancy duds for Ed. Yet I could see that he still had his snot problem.

  What I remember most about Ed is from the day before my arraignment. He was cleaning out his locker after breaking his lease. The locker was full of designer jeans. Ed liked to affect that he was big-time management in those days. He took the jeans out and neatly folded them, then stacked them in a vinyl bag—and appeared to be inventorying them as well. Ed acted like he didn’t notice me as I got dressed in my blues, but he stopped with the jeans when I closed my locker door. He looked at me hard, and I stared back.

  “What the hell do you think this is?” he asked me. “The twentieth century?”

  I suppose he meant that I didn’t understand the intricacies of the situation I had gotten myself into, the fact that a rookie did not step on toes—particularly toes as sensitive as Freddy Pupillina’s and the Ideal to which he paid tribute.

  The Birmingham P.D. and the Mafia had had a good-old-boy understanding for over a hundred years, and I’d stepped over the boundaries with my bust of Freddy for an assassination he’d been stupid enough to attend to in person. But that hit had stepped over my boundaries.

  The poor guy he killed had been a bug junkie for years—just one of the burnouts hanging out on Twentieth Street with mental parasites eating their every thought almost before they formed it. When I was on patrol, I took a liking to this guy. He took care of stray dogs. His problem was that he had a big mouth.

  This bugman just happened to look at Freddy wrong one day and say something stupid. The nanobugs had eaten the poor guy’s soul like gas on Styrofoam.Fuck the twenty-first century. Fuck the Family and its new and improved ways to hurt people.

  Though of course I didn’t say a damned thing to Bernam at the time, I gave his question some thought. I’m still giving it thought. Maybe this century isn’t the one I would have chosen had I been given the option. Well, the fucking times had chosenme , and would just have to put up with my existence.

  The airport junk took fifteen minutes to complete its report. Bernam had to listen to it aloud, since his op-eds were crisped.

  “Meander Harco, age thirty, 6'0", eyes brown, hair brown, race mulatto.” At least this voice synthesizer had the pleasant accent of a Southern woman. Made it easier to hear all the personal shit spoken aloud. But not that easy. “Born 12/21/65, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, contract birth, parents Julia Monroe Delacroix, mother, Marvin Harco 473A, father. Licensed cohabitation 3/15/85–12/22/88 with Abigail Wu Brimly, Birmingham, Alabama, no offspring. Education: graduated Banks High School, Birmingham—”

  “Skip to the currents,” Bernam grunted. He dribbled a little spit onto his chin when he spoke. It sat there for a while, glistening in a yellow sort of way. Finally, he took out a paisley handkerchief and delicately wiped it away. Classy guy, Ed.

  “Employed 2087–present by Justcorp Criminology. Leased since January 2089 to Seattle Police Department, homicide. Current departmental rank, Lieutenant. Licensing to follow: Grade 19 depth investigations, including virtual slayings. Section B coda use of harmful force, with an exemption in part 2, subparagraph 4 for biomodifications in hands, elbows, and torso.” Which meant I had built-in brass knuckles—among other neat additions. “Option 4 for use of deadly force.” Bernam smiled. He knew the kind of restrictions they had in Seattle for a license to kill. At Option 4, it was very doubtful that my junk could process the legalities of response in time for me to shoot back if someone was trying to blow me away. “License for (1) Remington angular electrochemical stungun, serial number on request. (2) Glock polymer nine-millimeter automatic pistol, serial number on request. (3) Schrade two-inch boot devices. (4) Bullard Forensics Portalab III. (5) Archco Enhanced Op-Eds—”

  “Fucking illegally modified—” Bernam muttered.

  “With licensed enhancements (1)—”

  “Fuck the enhancements,” said Bernam. The junk was smart enough not to try and interpret Bernam’s orders literally. It skipped to the next section.

  “F.A. license HARCO234319599 for genre constructions, science fiction.”

  “Huh?” said Bernam in his inimitable way.

  “I write science-fiction stories on the side,” I replied. “Got a problem with that?”

  “You’re full of shit.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Commendations, Official Evaluations, Resolved Offenses, and Unlicensed Activities. Warning: listing will take approximately twenty minutes for oral report.”

  “Skip it. Outstandings?”

  “1/3/89, Dereliction of Duty, Birmingham Police Department, on Article 6, judicial expert system appeal. Review due 8/97.”

  “So,” said Bernam. “Going to get sentenced soon?”

  “Going to get cleared soon,” I said. “You bastard.” I said it without heat, and Bernam grinned evilly. I wasn’t sure, but I thought he was wearing a thin coating of lipstick.

  “Give me the comp,” he told the computer.

  The lights went down and the infrared came on. Sensors popped from the wall and shone darkly. Another five minutes passed. Finally, the lights came back on and the junk spoke up. “Behavioral and somatic patterns: 97 percent match. Lacking genetic evaluation—”

  “I refuse a scan under Section B of the Privacy Act,” I said. It felt weird to be the one invoking a Section B. Usually I was having it invoked on me by some bad element who didn’t want to be identified.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Bernam grunted. “Nobody asked you to.”

  “Lacking genetic evaluation, opinion tendered: This is Meander Harco.”

  “Satisfied?” I asked.

  “Shut up.”

  “Ed, it’s time you stop messing with me. I’m out of here in ten seconds unless you got reason to hold me.”

  Ed looked at me as if he were scrutinizing a strange insect. “I knew you were dark-skinned, but I never knew you were a mule, Andy,” he said.

  I stood still, expressionless. No. He wasn’t worth it. “Now you do,” I replied. I felt a great numbness grow in my gut, as if I were far bigger inside than I was outside. This was the way I felt before violence. Control. Hold on. My legal junk was spewing conflict options onto my op-eds. There were no options in my favor in this situation. Just for fun, I sifted the parameters through the Option 4 junk. It gave me the red flag. So. I could not legally kill him. Lucky Ed. This time.

  “I’ve got a message for you, Andy,” Bernam said. “Freddy Pupillina wants to talk to you.”

  For a second, I was nonplussed. Then this little shakedown began to make sense. Bernam was under orders from Freddy. Which meant all my previous legal evaluations were out of context and meaningless. Hmm.

  “You’re mistaking me for somebody who gives a shit,” I replied.

  Bernam got real quiet. He was evidently not used to anybody refusing Freddy in such a cavalier manner. But it was true: hewas mistaking me for somebody who gave a shit.

  Bernam resolved his difficulties by pretending not to hear me. “Tomorrow night, around eight, at the Sportsman,” he said. “You’re free to go now.”

  “Tell Freddy I’m not coming,” I said.

  “Out,” Bernam said. He closed his eyes and touched something on his chair. The chair spun around with its back to me. I stepped up to the desk where I’d laid my luggage and opened the briefcase.

  “Ed, turn around.”

  He did not reply and continued facing away from me. I pulled out the Glock and slid the magazine into the handle. I felt it click into position, but the plastic was noiseless.

  “Ed.”

  Still nothing. My legal junk was screaming, so I powered it down. I popped up a targeting menu, took aim, and fired the Glock into one of the chair’s armrests. As I suspected, there was no security breach sensing in the home office. A perfect way for an airport to cut corners. Why would you need it where you have a permanently armed guard? The crank that had led me here stood immobile in the corner, u
naware that anything untoward was going on.

  Bernam was, at least, a bit more self-aware than the 50. He spun around with his hands over his head. “Jesus Christ,” he whimpered. He tried to shuffle out of his seat, and I saw that Bernam was even worse off than I’d thought. He was attached by a bundle of leads to the chair.

  “Ed, you’re bonded.”

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  There was nothing I could do to him that was worse than what he’d done to himself. It was like being a node with none of the perks—no sense of community, no mental health plan. It made me physically sick to contemplate. An individual giving himself up to an Ideal, but staying himself. Like a dog dragging around a tick the size of an elephant. Only rentals desperate forsomething ever got themselves wired for bonding. I wondered what kind of shit Bernam had gotten into. Graft? Bugs? Booze? He would not meet my gaze.

  “Tell Freddy that if he messes with me, I’ll take him down,” I said. “Tell him that.” I pointed the Glock between Ed’s eyes. This got him looking at me.

  “Oh Christ,” he said. “I can’t without my op-eds, Andy.”

  “That’s okay. You can tell him the old-fashioned way. You still have a link screen, don’t you? Tell him I came to attend my grandfather’s funeral, and then I’m leaving. I no longer take shit off bad elements. Tell him to stay the hell out of my way.”

  “Jesus, Andy—”

  “Will you tell him that?” I said. I touched the muzzle of the Glock to Bernam’s nose. A little runny snot stuck to it.

  “Okay, God,okay , I’ll tell him!” said Bernam. He seemed sincere. I pulled the gun away and wiped the snot on his nicely starched uniform. I had to press hard to make it stick.

  “Nice seeing you again, Ed.” I put the Glock away and gathered my things, then walked out. Out of the airport, out into the sweating southern night. The air, as always, had an ozone tang imparted by the huge biostatic plants downtown. And, as always, the fecal odor of bucolic acid from the plants mixed with the tang, so that the city smelled like a zombie might, decaying and electric.