The Robot's Twilight Companion

by Tony Daniel

  “Do you think Freddy did it?”

  Another temporal dropout, then she said, “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “The gambling was a way for the Family to get its hooks into Thaddeus. Like I said, they need better nodes. They wanted him to join them.”

  “Why Thaddeus, for God’s sake?”

  “Call it an exercise in eugenics, in mental evolution. No great poet has ever belonged to an Ideal.”

  “Because they would stopbeing a great poet the minute they joined!”

  “That’s your opinion. It would be a wonderful thing for humankind if Thaddeus had joined the right Ideal. You don’t understand. You can’t comprehend.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  It made sense, in a sick sort of way. But why bring me in? Or was I overestimating the Family’s opinion of me? Maybe It thought I would botch things up good, and that’s why It had . . . killed my grandfather. To make sure the detective investigating Thaddeus’s death was an imbecile.

  I was suddenly fed up with the fucking Ideals, fed up with Abby and her precious City. Fuck Birmingham. Fuck all that is general, all-encompassing, bigger-than-you-and-me who knows how. There are times when a guy has to get away from principles.

  “I still love you, Abby,” I said. “I’m willing to give you a chance to get out of your Ideal and come back to me.”

  She looked at me as a child will look at a strange insect, just before it absently crushes it.

  “You’ve got to be joking.”

  “This is your last chance.”

  There was a moment of integration. A flash of pleasure on her face as the Ideal gave her what she’d come to need. Hell, what she’d always wanted. “What do you think I’ve got?” she said, laughing softly. “Everything.”

  “Nothing,” I said. I set my untouched bourbon down on top of the crank’s head and showed myself to the door. Abby breezed beside me to open it. She no longer smelled like rain. I must have brushed against her skin, but I do not remember how it felt at that moment.

  I drove around for a long time in the Saj, off traffic control, off the pump and quiver of Abby’s involuntary nervous system, because that is what the traffic system of Birmingham was. A brain interlaced with nanos that reported back to networking junk, that inhabited a bioelectroquantum froth somewhere in the depths of City Hall. Each municipal function had a human overseer, just as nerves and hormones tell your body when and how to shit. And nerves and hormones, for all their complexity, are less independent entities than shit is.

  I felt very independent this evening.

  Driving, trying not to think, because thinking was what always got me in trouble, because thinking was what Ideals did best, wasn’t it, and all we puny humans had was our feelings, the seat of our pants? What I was feeling was a deep and abiding hatred for them, for the Ideals, and what they’d done to me, to us, to all the people. And I wanted, more than anything, to take out Freddy Pupillina. Take him out and watch as, like one of those old-fashioned strings of Christmas lights, his destruction took out the whole fucking tree.

  I drove through downtown and hitched onto the bottom deck of the beltway, headed northeast. I felt like a corpuscle streaming through a capillary, a cell with no center. The lights were on when I got back to Mom’s, which should have told me something, but, idiot that I am, I walked right into it.

  “Don’t even think about it,” said Big Bertha, Freddy’s goon woman. She was holding the Danachek fléchette pistol to my mother’s face. I froze. Think of something, goddamn it, Andy. But I couldn’t. Mom was still wearing the incandescent mourning dress. It shone black-red for terror.

  The guy whose balls I’d fried got up from a chair and limped over to me. He grinned through his beard and slid the briefcase out of my hand.

  Mom made no sound. She was grinding her teeth together so hard I could hear it across the room. Somebody was going to fucking pay for this.

  “Say good-night to your mama,” said the guy who had my briefcase. He was still grinning, as if he couldn’t get his face to go back to its natural stupid scowl. His teeth were very white in the curly blackness of his beard. I wanted very much to wipe the beard, the grin, then the grinning muscles off of his face—with sandpaper.

  “It’s all right, Mom,” I said. “Everything will be all right.”

  “Oh, Andy. I’m sorry,” she said. “They said they were from the Mourners’ Union. So I let them in.”

  “Shut up,” said Bertha.

  “I should have been more careful, less trust—”

  Bertha slapped her in the temple with the butt of the Danachek. It didn’t knock her out. She sat stunned and hurting.

  “What do you fucking want?” I said, low, almost in a growl.

  “Ha,” said the grin-faced goon. He pulled a stungun out from his jacket and tried to shove it into my balls. He missed and connected with my thigh. He’d turned the juice all the way up, and the last thing I remember was the tightening of every muscle in my body, impossibly tight, unbelievably painful. Then the smell of burning flesh. Then the

  bliss 0, bliss 0, I am not I am we, the dark and empty center spinning black and clumped like spit thick tobacco in a greater darkness, moist, hot, trembling, needing, giving. We are spinning, we are all spins, dancing through tendrils, sheaves, and chords of thready fibrous tendrils holding us, guiding, feeding and being fed, leading always and inexorably to the dark clumped center of all, All. There is a gushing rise within . . . me . . . and a hot wheel of love in my mind, spinning, burning, shedding the blood of desire, longing for

  the Darkness.

  6

  I awoke in a bare room in a warehouse that belonged to Freddy Pupillina. I knew that the Family had not killed Thaddeus. Iknew , innately, because now I had been made. I was a part of the Family. How odd, I thought, that the thing I feared so much before was now my heart’s desire. It seemed that all my life was a pale shadow before this time, this being. I was a node. The very thought sent waves of pleasure flowing through me. I reached out and entered the strong mind of the Family.Respect and loyalty. A just code and the need to keep to it flowed back. I felt lucky to be a part of such a higher purpose, a greater principle. It had chosen me when I was rebellious, a mote of nothing destined for nothingness. I was touched by a grace far greater than I.

  I let the grace take me up, away. I expanded like the huge swelling erection of a god. The Family could use me properly now. I was capable of understanding.

  The Ideal, Excellence, was making Its move in Washington, taking out the old imperfect alliance of Courage 3 and the Dallas-Chicago coaxials. Old Ideals must give way to the newer, the better. The Family, as always, needed to be on the winning side. Survival was at stake. But there was a lack, a need. Stale. Thought had grown stale and unproductive, moribund, with nodes like Freddy in Birmingham, Yoakam in New York. Certainly they were loyal. Good Family people.

  But no geniuses. No, no geniuses. No geniuses in the Family to draw upon, to use. And Thaddeus Grayson, unattached, doing nobody any good. Freddy, the fool, couldn’t even bring in this boy from his own neighborhood. I could feel the Family’s longing for Thaddeus, Its brooding need for bettering Itself, to beat back the others, to control, to grow, to destroy all that was not It. I approved. If only Thaddeus weren’t dead, I would personally assist in his recruitment. I knew that I could do a damn sight better job than Freddy. The Family felt my pride, knew that it was directed properly, and sent me a wave of approval. I almost fainted with the joy of it. Looking down, I saw that I had come in my pants.

  Still a lot to learn about this new way of living. But I would love every minute of the learning.

  What the Andy Harco part of my new wholeness had to do: find the killer. Punish the killer, for the hit was made to keep Thaddeus out of the Family. Let the killer know that the Family always either got what It wanted or got revenge. And then I was to die.

  It didn’t really matter how I got rid of myself. As long as there was no Family involvemen
t.

  Of all these things, I approved.

  And so, in the dirty warehouse room, I sat down to think, with the Family behind me. I examined all the Ideals at work within Birmingham—for it seemed intuitively clear to me that an Ideal had killed Thaddeus. The poem fragment was why, the logical bridge from association to association. How clear it all became now. Now that I had a real Mind.

  God, if only we could have gotten Thaddeus for Us.

  I reexamined the records, all of them, of Thaddeus’s comings and goings for the last month of his life. I laughed when I realized how completely the Family knew everything, all that people in this city did. All that was done anywhere in which the Family was interested. What a fool I was to think I could hide anything, ever, from an Ideal.

  The girl, Trina’s, entrances and exits from his apartment. One time, she’d said. One time a day was more like it! Lying, silly, stupid girl.

  In the midst of this examination, there was a flicker in the corner of the room. I reached to adjust something in my op-eds and realized that they were gone. I wouldn’t be needing them anymore. Still the flicker. I looked up from my reverie.

  Granddaddy was standing there, smoking a cigarette.

  “Hello, son.”

  Granddaddy.

  A shriek deeper and mightier than any cry of pain I’ve ever heard. A blast through my mind that I thought would kill me. A wave of information. No way to assimilate it, let it crash, let it pass.

  And I understood, somehow, in a small part, just what Granddaddy was. And what that meant to the Ideals.

  Granddaddy was spontaneous. Granddaddy had happened while the Ideals weren’t looking. Granddaddy was the integrated organic heart of the city. Hewas Birmingham. More than Abby and her ilk could ever be. The city that hides behind the city, that lurks in the imagination of poets and the delusions of bums.

  The city that wants nothing of people, that takes nothing, that merely inhabits the power grids, the link nets, the sewer pipes. That strengthens the people like invisible integument, holding them together in a way the Ideals never could. I looked at him again. A holoprojection, using some surveillance and defense equipment in the warehouse, probably. But more than a mere image hanging in the air. So much more.

  The Ideals had suspected for years, but there was no evidence, no proof. Only the fact that the plans for incorporating all individuals seemed to drag inexorably, that somehow there was always strife when the goals of all the Minds seemed so clear.

  Something was fouling things up.

  And now They knew what it was. After all these years, he’d shown his face.

  The Family was terrified. What if there were others? The Ideals were not prepared for organized resistance.

  “You let go of that boy,” said Granddaddy.

  The Family withdrew from me.No, oh God, no. Please stay, please, I beg—

  I stumbled to my feet, dazed.

  “Well, son,” said Granddaddy. “I don’t know how long I can hold ’em. Now’s your chance.”

  So he knew that, too. The junk I’d had buried so deep inside me that even I couldn’t remember except in dreams. But now the time had come, and the knowledge rose to my consciousness like Queequeg’s coffin, waterproof, unsinkable. I grabbed hold,remembered . Andy Harco was a rider program, taken from my brain, fitted to deeper junk, a hidden soul. Andy Harco was a virus allowed to inhabit a stronger substratum. Andy Harco had rigged his own mind with a secret weapon against the Ideals.

  “The men of iron ore unfluxed,” I said. “And the women with dark and carbon eyes.”

  It was a line from one of Thaddeus’s poems; it was an activating code. A trigger. I felt theme that I’d implanted in my own brain two years ago coil out of slumber, spread out into my mind. Become my mind. The simple me at the base of all my existence. The killer me. Its sole purpose was to cleanse my brain of all traces of an Ideal. Any Ideal.

  Its only job was to wipe me clean.

  My briefcase. I needed my briefcase. Frantically I looked around.

  “It’s over there in the corner,” Granddaddy said, pointing with the cigarette. He smiled.

  And there it was. The Family had thought that I might need it. Hell, yes, I did! I picked it up and set it on my lap, flipped it open. I laid the Glock and stungun beside me, took the Portalab out as well. What was left was the froth. What was left was the static programming and the data that made up Andy Harco.

  My op-eds were gone, but I no longer needed them to link up with the briefcase. Now I had an Ideal feedhorn on the back of my head. I felt the wart, hated it, knew it would always be there as a reminder. I took an old-fashioned optical cable out of a compartment, clipped one end to the feedhorn, and plugged into the briefcase. I activated the froth. All the tell-tales burned green. I downloaded my short-terms into the briefcase, to complete theme that was already there.

  Then I looked around for Granddaddy, to tell him thanks. To tell him good-bye. He was gone.

  And with that, I wiped my mind out of existence.

  And

  slowly

  returned.

  Angry.

  7

  Because I had been a part of the Family, I now had new information. I knew that the Family didn’t kill Thaddeus. I knew where to find Freddy Pupillina. He was in the warehouse, going over the books with the foreman of the place. It was a nano-warehouse, with barrels of hijacked bugs from all over the new South. I passed a couple of cranks shuffling inventory on the way, but they didn’t notice me.Grin-Face and Big-Boned Bertha were standing outside the door of the office Freddy was in. They were in some sort of discussion, with Grin-Face gesticulating wildly, pulling at his beard, and Bertha shaking her head.

  I hid behind some barrels, took out the Glock. I was afraid they were wearing body armor, so I took time to aim, to control my breathing. Then I shot them both, quickly, in the head.

  The noise alerted Freddy, and he turned out the lights in the office. Smarter than he looks. But I knew—how well I knew—that the Family had told him what to do.

  The door of the office opened, and the foreman came stumbling out.

  “Don’t, please don’t,” he said, looking around wildly for me. “He’s got a gun on me. Please don’t—”

  “Come over here,” I said. I waved an arm, and the foreman stumbled toward me. I took the stungun from the briefcase. When he was close enough, I stood up and zapped him. As he fell, a shot rang out and hit a nearby barrel. I smelled acrid activating nanos as the contents spilled out. These bugs were designed to alter something organic, if not precisely wood.

  The floor began to seethe where the nanos touched it, to deform. Soon a section of the flooring was gone and in its place was a lump of a charred and gross thing writhing on the concrete subfloor. Then the nanos started to transform, more slowly, the concrete. Freddy had lucked into some potent stuff. Military shit, probably, bound for the Mideast.

  Another shot. It popped into the foreman’s back, and blood spurted. Getting sloppy, Freddy.

  “Well,” I said, and stood up. Freddy fired twice more, missed by a mile. I walked toward the office. He was either reloading or taking better aim. I flung open the door. He opened up on me. Two shots in the chest, but I was ready, and they didn’t knock the breath out of me. I quickly fell forward, rolled head over heels.

  And came up with the stungun in Freddy’s chest. When the juice hit him, he slumped down onto me, his body’s own weight keeping him pressed into the gun. I kept the trigger depressed for a long time.

  Freddy was a monstrously fat man. I finally put my years of weight training to good use, dragging him out to the nano barrels. I opened one of the barrels with a hand torch I found in the foreman’s pocket.

  Then I sat down beside Freddy, in the midst of the dead, dangling the Glock absently from one hand. In my other hand, I held Thaddeus’s cigarette lighter. I flicked it on, closed the cover, flicked it on again. I tried not to imagine what I was going to do. Anything else.

 
I began to consider how I would end my Minden Sibley time-traveling detective story. I turned the possibilities over in my mind. None of them really suited me.

  I haven’t told you, hoping, I suppose, that you would have read them, that you would know it already. But in case you didn’t know, the Minden Sibley mysteries usually turn on a humorous point. They are, in fact, satirical comedies of our times. At least that’s the idea. Sometimes I get it right, sometimes I fuck up. But when things get really messy, when the plot has reached convolutions unknown even to brain surgeons and French master chefs, then I call upon the trusty Third Temporal Law to get me out of the bind. Minden, good soul that he is, finds himself invoking it at least once a story. It is a tacit law, never taught to any Timeways detective, but understood by all.

  3. Break any rule, breakevery rule, even the First and Second Temporal Laws. Just don’t get caught.

  Yes, I thought. That’s the only way to wrap it up when logic escapes you and you have a mess that you have to clean up, one way or another. It’s not logical, but it’s rational. It’s only human.

  After a while, Freddy began to come around. I waited some more. He struggled to sit up. I put the Glock to his head.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  He lay still, his pig eyes flashing in his pulpy face. “Andy, please—”

  “Shut up. I want to talk to the Family.”

  He shut up. Then there was the blank moment of integration. “We’re here,” said the Family, through Freddy. “Hello, Andy.”

  “You didn’t kill Thaddeus,” I said.

  “No.”

  “I know who did. This is no longer your problem.”

  “Well,” said the Family. “Good.”

  “I’m upset about being made a node.”

  “We felt it necessary.”

  “Nevertheless, I’m upset.”

  Freddy screwed his face into an expression of bewilderment. It wasn’t much of a reach. “Do you want an . . . apology?”