The Robot's Twilight Companion

by Tony Daniel

  “Wouldn’t mean anything.”

  “That is true. Do you want Us to drop the charges against you for dereliction of duty?”

  “You use people and kill them and don’t think anything of it,” I said. “Individuals mean shit to you.”

  “Basically, yes,” said the Family. “We know it’s hard for you to comprehend, Andy, but basically, that’s what they are. Shit. Nothing. Individuals are a means, not an end.”

  “So,” I said. “There’s really nothing more to say.”

  I tipped the barrel over onto Freddy, and skipped back out of the way. The nanos did their work much faster than they had on the wood. Flesh was, obviously, the medium they were tailored to alter.

  Freddy screamed horribly, and in that scream I believed—I hoped—that I heard the cries of a hundred others, hurting in unison.

  When I left the warehouse, all that was left of Freddy was a puddle of primordial goo.

  8

  I went home. Mom was all right. She was in some kind of meditation trance, and the patchouli had stunk up the place real good. But she came out of it when I showed up, and flung her arms around my neck. She called me “Meander,” just like she had when I was a kid. I couldn’t find it in my heart to correct her. Maybe thatwas my deep, true name. I thought. Amazing the crazy delusions you get when you’re relieved over a loved one’s safety.Then she noticed the two holes in my chest, both clotted black with old blood now. She screamed, covered her mouth.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m a cop. We’re used to getting shot.” After that, we didn’t say anything for a long time, which was probably for the best. Then I said, “I have a few things to clear up, Mom, and I’ll be back.”

  “You can’t go,” she said. “Don’t leave again . . . Andy.” She was obviously regaining her senses.

  “Everything’ll be all right. Everything’s okay now,” I said. “Nobody can touch me now.”

  I took the beltway, top level, to downtown, then descended into the grid of the city. Through the decaying Birmingham Green, a leftover jungle, a hundred years old, full of bums, hurtful bugs, bad junk. Urban Renewal. The People Who Know getting it all bassackward as usual. About as effective as adding wine to vinegar.

  Up Twentieth Street, through the nightwork of the Southside. Up Red Mountain, the Vulcan’s red torch looming up dead ahead. To Abby’s place. When no one answered my knock, I kicked in the door. Abby was standing in the living room, gazing out over the city.

  “I was expecting you,” she said. “Even when they’re off traffic control, I still follow every car that moves in my city.”

  “Your city?”

  “Yes!” she said. She flung back her hair defiantly. It shone dully with neon reflections from the window. “My city.”

  “Why did you kill Thaddeus, Abby?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Fuck that shit!”

  “Very well, then.” She took a step toward me. “Politics. His sort of mind becomes a very important, strategic node when integrated into an Ideal. Freddy was going to get him, and with him, Freddy could have overturned the City. We couldn’t allow that.”

  “I’ve heard this before. From the Family.”

  She sniffed, shrugged. “Well, that makes sense. It’s only reasonable.”

  “No,” I said. “Not reasonable. Hobbes logic. Billiard-ball logic. People are solids and stripes. Life does not have to be nasty, brutish, and short without a goddamned king to tell us what to do, to shove us around. There’s more to life than actions and reactions!”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, what are you doing right now, Andy Harco?”

  She drifted across the room toward me. Her brown eyes were intense and deep. She held her hands out toward me. I’d forgotten that she’d had artificial nails installed years ago, to break her nail-biting habit. They shone whitely, moon-colored.

  “Everything you’ve done for the last eight years has been a reaction.” Her voice was low and soothing. For years, I’d dreamed of it, and awakened with a feeling of utter loss when I found that she was not really beside me.

  That feeling washed over me now, stronger than ever before. I raised the Glock. “Justice,” I said, “is not reaction.”

  She stopped, six feet from me, facing me, fearless.

  “You going to take me in, Lieutenant?”

  I no longer had my op-eds, but I was pretty sure what the Option 4 junk would tell me. If I pulled the trigger, I could never be a cop again.

  “This is my town, Lieutenant. My town. Do you think I’ll get punished? Do you think I’ll spend more than a night in jail? Andy, my brain is part of what runs the jail.”

  “I could take you with me. I could drive us to Atlanta.

  “I’ll call every cop in the metro area to stop you,” she replied. “Illegal extradition. You know that.”

  I raised the Glock, took aim at her forehead. “It would be an accident,” I said. “Or you resisted.”

  “The City is recording every second of this conversation.”

  “I just don’t give a shit,” I said. “I think this is what you are failing to comprehend.”

  “Don’t you, Andy? Then blow me away.” She lowered her arms. The child’s sad face, those incredible lips. The silver on her arm. The fanatic zombie glow in her eyes.

  I lowered the Glock. “It was jealousy, wasn’t it?” I said. “Politics didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  Abby let out a long sigh, then said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “He loved Birmingham more than you. And he was a better lover, too.”

  “Don’t be absurd. Jealousy is for, well, nobodies. Forindividuals .”

  “The City chose him, Abby. I know it for a fact.”

  “No,” she said. It was almost a whimper.

  “You did it yourself, didn’t you?”

  She smiled, sadly.”Andy, when are you going to understand, really comprehend?”

  “There is noyou .”

  “The I you used to know is changed and better.”

  “Good-bye, Abby.” I turned to leave. My eyes were misty, though I felt numb inside.

  “Just a minute, Andy,” she said. I felt the cool touch of her hand on my shoulder, my neck. So soft, so small, her hands had been. I could almost cup them within mine. God, I had loved her so completely. Then a prickle, a sting.

  Oh, shit.

  The breaking of glass, a stifled scream. I spun around with the Glock at ready.

  Trina stood over Abby, a broken bottle of bourbon in her hand. Abby had slumped to the floor, one side of her face webbed with glass cuts. I lowered the Glock once again, took a long breath. A blast spider crawled out of Abby’s relaxed palm and began working its way up her arm. Over the silver bracelet and the lily-white skin. Toward her shoulder, toward the porcelain curve of her neck where her spinal cord lay, a pinprick away. There was no put-back routine that could restore a mind after the kiss of a blast spider. Even the mind of a node.

  “God, Andy, she was trying to do something to you!” Trina said, unable to take her eyes off her own handiwork. Her op-eds sat skewed on her nose.

  “You did the right thing, kid,” I said. “The right thing.”

  I reached over and worked the broken bottle from Trina’s hand. She had a damned good grip on the thing.

  “I don’t think I can stay here anymore,” Trina said. “She killed Thaddeus.” Then she started crying, really crying, like she hadn’t before. I pulled her toward me, but I didn’t want to hug her on account of the dried blood from my chest wounds. I stroked her face with the hand that didn’t hold a gun. I righted her op-eds.

  “Come on, kid,” I said. “Let’s blow this town.”

  “Yeah,” she said tentatively, then, “Yeah.”

  The blast spider was past Abby’s elbow now, working its way over her armlet. I could almost hear the little crank’s tiny feet clinking against the metal. It was nearly to her shoulder. . . .

  We stepped
into the sultry night, Trina and I. I opened the passenger side of the Saj and helped her inside. She sat there gazing up at me, trembling slightly. I leaned down and kissed her, lightly, but on the lips. Then I reached into my pocket and took out Thaddeus’s lighter.

  “He would have wanted you to have this,” I said, and folded her brown palm around it.

  As I closed the Saj’s door, I glanced up into the sky overhead.

  The Vulcan was leering down on me, as big and bright as the labor of a hundred thousand ironworkers, a hundred thousand watts of city power, could make him. His red torch mocked me as surely as his idiotic all-knowing god smile.

  I could shoot the fucker out.

  I could. I leaned against the Saj and took aim. But without my op-eds, I would never hit a target that far away.

  I pretended to. I pretended to pull the trigger, and in my mind’s eye, I hit that damn torch. I hit it dead-on. But instead of blowing the death light out, in my mind’s eye, the bullet changed the flame from glaring red to vivid living green.

  Mystery Box

  A Circle Run

  T he man in the long coat walked down the streets of bone. The moon was shining on the sides of bone-white buildings and on the bone-white streets. The shadow the man cast as he walked was dark and lustrous—far more alluring than the man himself. He was nondescript, except for his eyes, which were sea-green and seemed to be illuminated from within. For a moment, the man felt observed and didn’t like it. He looked up at the moon. There were more people up there than there were in New York. More than there were on Earth. The light from the moon was like their twilight subconscious awareness, turned Earthward. Turned to him.But that is only my imagination, C thought. Hardly anyone in space pays much attention to Earth, especially at night.

  Tucked under C’s arm was a package wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. There was no address on the package, but that was all right because he wasn’t delivering it anywhere. This was only the semblance of delivery. He found the corner that he wanted, Church and Canal in old TriBeCa, and walked south down Church. Here the rogue strain of grist had transformed only the stone of the buildings to bone and not the metalwork. Somethinghad gotten into the metal superstructure, though, because the iron ornamentation of the buildings had a blue tint to it, and was very brittle. There were places where the fire escapes had crumbled away in straight lines that mere rust would never have produced. More like broken ice.

  But the air was not cold tonight. It was a mild October night, and he was glad he was wearing a coat with no quilted lining, even if it did flap a bit too much in the breeze. He wondered where he’d left the lining, but he couldn’t remember. Probably somewhere in space, or back on Mercury. The lining was like a lot of things that way.

  C found the address he was looking for,PERCEPIED EXPORT . At the door there was a broken iron grating pushed to the side. The outside windows were covered with sheet-metal roller casings that did not look like they would be rolled up come daylight, or ever. He wondered what he might find in the spaces between the metal coverings and the windows behind them. Something lost from the last millennium, probably. For a moment, C pictured the three-hundred-year-old skeleton of a little girl stuck there, but shook the image from his head.

  It wasn’t preposterous, knowing what he did of New York. For three centuries, New York had made a fetish out of children. Dead children. Live, trapped children. Over the beds of old women you would find the paintings of the Little Bone Boy, crying thick chalky tears from enormous eyes that were, somehow, still a living brown. The steps of most brownstones had their guardian children, taken from the sections of the city that had turned to bone, as perpetual wards against the bone-change coming once again for the young.

  And there were darker, sexual perversities that had arisen. C knew all about them. He’d been there when it all began.

  He opened the door on Church Street and went in. There was a single large room, twenty feet to the ceiling and maybe a hundred feet long and wide. The walls of the room were piled high with wrapped packages much like the one C held under his arm. In the center of the room was a cluster of desks. Three men and two women sat on battered chairs. Four of the five chairs had no backrests, but all of the people were hunched over their desks examining data pools, so the backrests didn’t seem to matter. The men and women moved their fingertips over the desktops, touching the surface here and there, here and there, as if they were using fortune-telling boards or shuffling invisible gambling chips.

  C came and stood quietly near the desks. After a moment, a woman at the biggest desk looked up.

  “I have something for Mr. Percepied,” said C.

  The woman touched a spot on her desk, freezing the invisible swirl of data before her, C supposed. He could have attuned his grist outriders to examine what the woman was looking at, but it would be useless knowledge to him. Why soak up the entropy? Do only what needs doing.

  “This is shipping,” the woman said. “You want receiving.”

  “No,” C replied. “I don’t think so.”

  “Mr. Percepied hardly ever comes into the warehouse,” the woman said. “I run things here.”

  “I was told Mr. Percepied comes in on Tuesdays,” said C, “to buy for his personal collection.”

  “Oh,” said the woman. She seemed startled, but quickly recovered herself. “I see. We’ve been expecting you. I’m Hecate Minim. You must be—”

  “Mr. Cornell.”

  She stood up and stretched. She was tall and had once been very beautiful. Now there was the red tinge of reparation grist to her skin, and her eyes were old—not the creases around her eyes, which were nonexistent, but the eyes themselves. They were the same startling green as his own.

  Except I am even older than my eyes.

  Despite her eyes, and for no reason that he could name, he associated the woman with the color brown. Like a moth. As he thought of his old friend, Jack Cureoak, the wandering moth of the solar system’s night. Thiswas Cureoak’s daughter, after all.

  “Mr. Percepied said you could leave whatever it is with me,” Hecate Minim said.

  C smiled sadly. “I’d rather give whatever it is to him,” he said.

  “That may not be possible,” said Hecate Minim.

  “It may not be,” C replied evenly.

  “Do you have it with you?”

  “Shouldn’t we go somewhere else?” C indicated the four other clerks sitting at their desks.

  “They won’t hear us,” Hecate Minim said. “I’m on nightwatch this evening, and I locked them in virtual as soon as you came in.”

  “You might be surprised what can seep into your dreams,” said C.

  “All right, then. Let me use the bathroom and get my coat,” said the woman. She went to a closet in the back. C touched one of the men hunched over the desk. The man did not flinch or shudder. He moved his hands like insects across the wood grain of the desk surface. The woman returned wearing a coat of faded red wool. They went out into the night. She leaned against the broken iron door grate and got out a cigarette, shook it until it lit, then took two quick puffs. C noticed the brand of the cigarette, as he always did. Mandala 90s. She was breathing in a blend of marijuana and crazed Eastern logics from the kef farms out on the Gai radial, near Venus. But when she breathed out, the smoke smelled like hot sand. There must be new additives, C thought. Something all-consuming to make them smell that way.

  “Is there some place we could get a cup of coffee?” he asked her.

  “Coffee?” she said. “Don’t you mean whiskey?”

  “I would rather drink coffee.” On Earth, the drinking of coffee sometimes had peculiar connotations. But C saw no reason to explain to her that he didn’t drink alcohol. He had watched what alcohol had done to Jack Cureoak. It had been enough to put him off drinking for three centuries.

  “There’s a place on Walker,” she said. “But they have children.”

  “I just like coffee,” said C. “That’s all.” They wa
lked three blocks, saying nothing, and turned down a dark street. In the middle they came to a black door. There were black metal letters on the door that C would not have been able to read had it not been for the moonlight. The letters saidNIGHT KINDERGARTEN .

  The interior was lit with pinprick biolumins that twinkled like stars. Behind the coffee bar was a tank filled with preservative. A row of naked dead children was floating in it. Some were right side up; some were upside down, their hair trailing about them in the gooey liquid like rays of sun. The tank was long but narrow, and it held their bodies up against the glass. They were backlit with a blue-green lamp.

  From the far rear, behind heavy black curtains, came the whimpers of the live children. Or, in truth, they would be adults who had been modified to look like children, thought C, if this place were on the up-and-up. But the grist could remake a body from the DNA up, so it was hard to tell what was really back there. The patrons could well imagine that they were groping an actual child. At twenty greenleaves for each copped feel, the kids did their best to keep up the illusion.

  C remembered two hundred years before, when coffee had first started to be associated with pederasty. Now it was one of the famous forbidden attractions of old New York.

  They ordered two smalls. Hecate Minim took hers dark and sweet. C, of course, took his coffee regular, like everything else. Leaving no trace was the way to stay alive.

  They sat down at a table near the front where the childish whimpering wouldn’t drown them out.

  “Have you considered the possibility that Iam Mr. Percepied?” said Hecate Minim.

  “Of course I have,” C replied. “But there are certain quantum fluctuations that I am sensitive to that tell me otherwise.” Of course there weren’t, or at least none that he was aware of, but Hecate Minim likely wouldn’t know that. In many ways, Earthers were the most provincial people in the solar system.

  “I see,” she said. She sipped her coffee, and a bit of brown lipstick came off on the cup’s brim. The grist in the lipstick quickly sensed that it was no longer connected to its larger algorithm and began the migration back to the penumbra of Hecate Minim’s body. The lipstick smear faded away. C pictured all the lost bits of humanity forever following each human body around, perpetually trying to reconnect, but the body keeps moving ahead. Until it doesn’t. When we die, the rest of us finally catches up, thought C.