The Robot's Twilight Companion

by Tony Daniel

  I rose.

  “Okay, I’m going,” I said, then, “Is this where you’ve been living?”

  “Do you think I would have let the place get into this shape if I lived here?”

  “Guess not. Trina, are you really all right?”

  “Yes. Everything’s copacetic.” That was Thaddeus’s word. He’d picked it up from junk hustlers a few years back. He seemed to like the way it rolled off the tongue.

  “Do you really think you should be alone?”

  “I don’t live by myself,” she said. “Thaddeus found me this basement room with this woman who’s big shit at city hall or something. She’s an old friend of his.”

  Oh, hell. And here we go again. Floodgates opening. What will and must be about to rain down upon me like heavy sludge.

  “Abby?”

  “Yeah, that’s her name. You know her?”

  “I used to be married to her.”

  “But she’s a node.”

  “I know.”

  After that, Trina didn’t say anything. She found another wrinkle to work on.

  I took a blank sheet of paper from the desk and wrote down my mother’s telephone number and link code on it. I also wrote down the path of the virtual feed to my op-eds—not a code I give out regularly. “If you need anything,” I said.

  As I left, I instructed the spiderlock to close everything up after Trina was out, then went down through the Blocker and out into the sidewalk heat of sunset.

  The Southside was beginning to come alive. College kids and young professionals in smartly pressed jeans strolled the streets, along with cream-faced hookers and bums hawking spit and tirades. The bars, jangle joints, and friendship salons were already lit up, and cars tooled in and out of the flicker of neon. The pavement smelled like money wet with urine. The sky was welted with red lines of clouds, like the nose of a drunkard.

  Thaddeus had loved this town. It had haunted his dreams. On a hot August day like today, the place felt alive, like a living entity—something that far transcended the City Ideal that Abby belonged to. More basic. Maybe not more overtly powerful, but stronger deep down. That was the Birmingham I loved. And missed. Sometimes in Seattle, I woke up sweating like a southern pig in summer, in the midst of winter in the Northwest, dreaming of a southern sky red and hot with the exhalations of two million souls, the breath-prayers of the people.

  Standing above the Southside was Vulcan. The torch was red, of course. I was close enough to see the eerie smile on his iron face. “I don’t know what he’s laughing at,” Thaddeus had said once. “At the way things are or at the way he made them. I’m not sure the old god believes in himself anymore.” He’d smiled bitterly.

  “But I believe in him,” Thaddeus had said. “I’m his fucking prophet of doom.”

  Abby. I had to see Abby once again. Maybe what the old god was laughing at was Andy Harco.

  4

  I spent most of the next day calling up the police reports on my op-eds, avoiding the inevitable. Nothing of much use. Whoever had done the blast job had cleaned up after himself very well. Freddy had lied. It was not a slow torment for Thaddeus, but a superquick explosion. Performed, most likely, by a blast spider—an insect-sized crank that sank its fiber-optic fangs into the neck of its victim and reamed out everything that made the victim a person. Personality, memories, somatic functions. Everything.It was the kind of hit professionals make, both to kill their victim and to destroy the recoverable short-terms that could identify the assassin.

  The body was clean, as well. No marks of bondage. A small piercing hole, just below the base of the skull, where the spider dug in. Probably all Thaddeus had felt was a tingle as the thing crawled into position, then a quick jab of pain in his neck, then nothing.

  After a morning of this, I drove down to P.D. to look through Thaddeus’s personal effects. I could have gotten them in virtual, but it would have taken time to get them translated. And if you’re not a node, virtual is just not high-resolution enough—in audio, tactile, or visual—to give you the fine detail you needed for careful examination of evidence. Add to that the fact that the junk geniuses still hadn’t figured out a way to wire it for smell. Something about the reptile brain being too deep or something.

  And anyway, I needed the exercise that getting out and driving would provide. The place hadn’t changed much. Cranks roamed the halls, carrying hard-copy files. A few dragged perpetrators along. The perps always followed the cranks in a reluctant shuffle, stunned at the apparent temerity of their robot guards. Most cranks had in their deep programming an aversion to coercing human beings into anything. But not at P.D.

  I saw a few Justcorp personnel, but a whole lot more Guardian and Humana. Administration had changed hands. A GarciaSecure rental brought me the items I requested from evidence and acquisitions. Back in my day, Justcorp had practically owned the place. But that was the way business worked nowadays—diversification. The big temp agencies were becoming dinosaurs, as all the companies scaled down and worked into the niches.

  The Ideals were on the rise. Seattle was one of the few places where management in the P.D. didn’t consist of nodes belonging to His Excellence, Matishui, or to another of the business Ideals. Birmingham happened to contract out to a German concern, Meyerstadt. My temporary boss was a node in Meyerstadt, I supposed, but since all my clearances were logged on the computer, I didn’t have to deal with him. Or it.

  Thaddeus hadn’t been carrying much. No billfold. A bag full of vouchers and a link cash card. Anybody else carrying just a bag full of cash would have been suspicious. I, however, knew that this was the way Thaddeus kept up with his money. A pack of Jawolski full-filtered nano-zymed cigarettes for that cool, clean, noncancerous smoke. These didn’t have the self-igniting tips. Thaddeus used the cigarette lighter given to him by the Betablocker. It was among the effects as well. I palmed it, flicked it open and closed, remembering the simple pleasure it had given Thaddeus. He’d had it translated into virtual so he could always have it with him.

  The clothes were nondescript Southern. Light cotton pants, Pons walking sandals, three years out of style, a faded madras shirt. On the collar was a single drop of blood. His op-eds were cracked and taped back together. Cheap and South American.

  I signed out the lighter on personal recognizance, then returned everything else to the E & A woman. I pocketed the lighter, then drove the Saj over to East Lake and went for a long, long run—nearly ten miles. Then resistance work at the nearby booth. A donut at Krispy Kreme. I was stalling.

  Even knowing this, I drove back to Mom’s and started in on my new Minden Sibley story. I blinked down my virtual selection menu and called up “writing office.” This took my voluntaries off-line, and formed the holo of my nondescript working space within the organic matrix of my op-ed lenses. Some people think that virtual writing is as easy as thinking—you just form the sentences in your head, and they are transformed into words on a page. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Only nodes can think to machines, and we all know that node writing is a joke. The way it works with me is that I have to simulate typing with my hands—or come up with some analogous activity. In fact, I used an IBM Selectric from the Dark Ages. No qualitative improvement from Dickens’s pen and ink, but thingsare more convenient and faster.

  Working on the story wasn’t entirely an escape from my professional duties, since the murder I was writing about was extremely similar to the one I was working on in real life. But instead of a dead body with no brain, I had a brain with no dead body. The nanos in East Lake—where the body in the story had been dumped—had eaten the flesh, but hadn’t gotten inside the skull yet. The recoverable short-terms indicated that the victim was a man, but gave no hint as to his identity—images of his op-ed display flicking from one feed to another, comedies and documentaries, for the most part. Then a bright light from around the edges of the eyewear. Then nothing.

  There was a vague hint of Ideal involvement, but in my story, the offending no
de didn’t look a thing like Abby. Instead, he appeared remarkably similar to Freddy Pupillina.

  And then I glanced up from my battered old typewriter and Granddaddy was standing beside me, reading over my shoulder.

  “Not bad,” he said. “But that time-travel stuff bothers me. Why don’t you write about regular people in regular places?”

  For a moment, it was like old times. This, my office, was frequently where Granddaddy and I met, after I left Birmingham. Maturicell gave him four virtual hours a day, and he said he didn’t like to waste it in a City that didn’t exist—the big virtual City, that is, where most people conducted their virtual business. I, on the other hand, didn’t care to visit the Birmingham virtual reification, for obvious reasons. So the office was the compromise, and it was just as well because all we ever did was sit around and talk. Rather, he told stories and I listened. One thing he never did, though, was read what I wrote. Reading was laborious for him. The crazy moment of hope and relief passed, and I frowned at the ghost. “What are you doing here? I thought Mom had you deactivated.”

  He raised an eyebrow, smiled. “She did. Yesterday.” And how could a ghost get into virtual?

  She did.

  Ghosts aren’t smart enough to lie, either. “Yesterday?”

  “That’s right, son.”

  I pushed my chair back from the desk. It scraped, very convincingly, on the linoleum. I imagined the impulse traveling down the temple piece of my op-eds, making connection with the audio leads just above my inner ear. As usual, the only thing missing in virtual was smell. Would Granddaddy stink of the grave’s rot, if there were smells here? No. He’d been cremated. Ashes. He’d smell gray and gone.

  “What are you? Did Freddy send you to mess with me?”

  “Not Freddy. I hate that bastard,” Granddaddy said. “Nobody sent me. In fact, so far nobody knows that I exist.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m not your grandfather, son. Well, I am and I’m not. He and I were friends for a lot of years, though he didn’t really know it.”

  “What are you?”

  “I’m a glitch in the system, son,” he said. “That’s about all I know.”

  “Then in the funeral-home parking lot—”

  “That was me. Not that ghost. After your grandfather died, I decided that becoming as much like him as I could would be a suitable memorial.”

  Granddaddy—or whatever he was—pulled up a chair that hadn’t been there before. It was his favorite recliner, gone for years, since he’d been in the Maturicell Sensorium. He took a cigarette from his pocket, and I reached for Thaddeus’s lighter. It wasn’t there in virtual, but Granddaddy smoked self-igniters, anyway. He rubbed the end against the chair’s fabric, and it sparked to a slow burn. He took a long drag. His fingers were yellowed where he held the cigarette, just as I remembered.

  “What I am don’t matter much right now, I don’t think. I want to tell you something I found out.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Freddy killed me.”

  “The thought had occurred to me.”

  “It was to get you back down here. In person.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I . . . it’s inside me. Knowing.” Granddaddy leaned back in the chair, took another long drag. “Elizabeth Holder, entry clerk 17A98T4—ah hell, there’s a lot of numbers attached to her—gave the order to turn me off. Somebody named Nelson Heally told her it was all right. And he got a message from somebody else who got a message from Freddy, and the message had money attached in a . . . a rider loop. . . . Am I making any sense, son?”

  Sure he was. This was the sort of thing I’d paid big money to be able to do with my op-eds. “You’re accessing computer records. Instantly.”

  “Maybe so. It’s just things that I know. Like I know your grandmother’s favorite color. I was there, with him, all along. Can’t say how, exactly. In the wiring, in the plumbing, maybe.” He finished the cigarette, flicked it to the floor. There was no smell of lingering ambient smoke. The room was as antiseptic as usual.

  “Freddy must have wanted to get me back pretty bad,” I said, mainly to break the silence.

  “No, son. He don’t give a shit about you.”

  “Then—”

  “The Family needs you for something. That’s the part I don’t know. I don’t know why I should, either, ’cause what the fuck would I know about the goddamned Mafia, come to think of it?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Hmmph.” Granddaddy stood up. “I have to go.”

  “Why?”

  “Starting to feel sick. Like I’m coming off a three-day drunk or something. Not used to getting this much attention paid to me, I guess.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well, son . . .”

  “Am I going to see you again?”

  “Couldn’t tell you.”

  “See you. Granddaddy.”

  “Bye.” And he was gone, like a changed channel.

  5

  That night, I went to see Abby.Trina answered the door when I knocked. She led me into the living room and went to get Abby. Notmy living room. Abby and I could never have afforded a place like this. One wall of the room was a window. The house was up on Red Mountain, on the part of Twentieth Street that goes over the mountain and into Homewood. It hung off the side of the mountain, seemed to hang over all of downtown, and the window was a light show. At night, the biostatic plants burned like the souls of saints, the streets flickered in arachnid configurations. Everything was dark or bright, with no in-between. Trina didn’t come back. I turned from the window, looked over at the door Trina had left through, and Abby was standing there.

  She didn’t move, didn’t step into the room. The only light was the light of the city through the window. Black dress, bare arms, white skin. Long raven hair. Brown eyes, lips that always pouted, no matter what her mood. Moon silver armband just above the elbow. Silver bracelet at the wrist. And, after all these years, she still wore the expression of a bewildered child.

  “Thaddeus is dead.” My words sounded alien, or far away—as if I’d said them a long time ago.

  “I know.” Her voice, Southern, alto, too large for her body, but feminine and detached.

  “How have you been?”

  “Very well.” She finally moved into the room. She drifted like a cloud. The room was very still, and I could smell her approach, as you can that of a storm.

  “I hear you run the city now.”

  “No, I’m just traffic.”

  “Did you get what you wanted?”

  “Yes.”

  I turned back to the window, put a hand in my pocket, took it out. What should I do with my hands?

  “Is thatyou , Abby, in there?”

  She didn’t answer at first, but moved closer. I suddenly felt like crying, but did not.

  “What did you ever know about me, anyway, Andy?”

  “I loved you.”

  “Yes. We were two people in love.” She touched my arm, drew back, touched it again. “Did you ever think that there were more important things in the world than two people, in love or not?”

  I turned to face her, then. It was over. It had been over for years. Still, she was everything I’d ever wanted. Butshe wasn’t here. My small sacrifice for the betterment of mankind.

  “No,” I answered. “I never for one minute considered that possibility.” I tried to smile ironically, but it hurt to do so. The touch of her hand on my arm burned like cool fire.

  “Well, what is it you want?” As she spoke, a crank came into the room with a bourbon and water, something I used to drink a lot. I took it from the tray on the crank’s head. Abby stopped touching me, took a glass of water.

  “I think Thaddeus was considering joining an Ideal before he died,” I said. “I was wondering if the city had been recruiting him.”

  “Thaddeus? You must be joking. He hated Ideals almost as much as you do.”

  �
�All right. Did you have any conversations with him just before his death?”

  Abby stood still for a moment, her expression frozen. It was a look I’d seen before when the node is in complete integration with its Ideal. I looked around the room, but saw no obvious transmission points. A tasteful node residence, a bohemian poetry student to share the place with, antiques, wonderful views. Human, no hardware. But then, Abby’s place would be.

  “I haven’t spoken with Thaddeus for three weeks,” she said.

  “Well, that would be just before his death.”

  “What do you mean?” Abby asked, but it was too fast, unconvincing. Nodes don’t lie very well to real people.

  “He died a few weeks ago, but his body was only recently discovered.”

  “I see.” I’ll bet she did.

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Trina. He was worried that I didn’t want her to stay here anymore, and he couldn’t afford to help her out if she needed to get a new place.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him that Trina could stay here as long as she wanted, and that he should stop betting so heavily on the holos.”

  “And that was all?”

  Abby sipped her water. Somehow the motion didn’t look real. More like a mannequin lifting a glass to its mouth, then lowering it, with no fluids exchanged.

  “He was into his bookie for a lot of money,” she said. “And his bookie was Freddy Pupillina’s agent. You know that. That is why he was killed, I think. That might also explain the blast job.”

  “That kind of job is too expensive for a small-time gambling enforcer,” I said.

  “Well, then. You’re the expert.” She said it with the contempt that all nodes have for us simple-minded individuals.

  “Abby, how did you know that Thaddeus had been dead for three weeks?”

  Almost, she was flustered. Again there was a moment of Ideal integration. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

  “Come on.”

  “All right. Freddy may talk like he runs the city, but he is just one voice. City has ways of checking up on the Family and keeping it in check. We know what’s going on with Freddy. Frankly, we’re smarter because we’re made up of smarter nodes.”