The Robot's Twilight Companion

by Tony Daniel

  He drank his coffee. It was tepid with too much milk and these mugs were not self-heating. He set down the cup.

  “I have some memories for Mr. Percepied,” he said. He had put the package on the floor beside his chair. Hecate Minim gazed down at it.

  “There?” she said. “You’re just carrying them around?”

  “That’s all you can do with memories, isn’t it?” He said. “But they’re not in the box. The box is something else.”

  She sat back, regained her composure. Her hair was black, but her eyebrows were light brown. Her skin was Caucasian, tanned—but that was only the grist. C doubted that Hecate Minim got out in the sun very much.

  “He’ll want to know what you’ve got,” she said.

  “Something unique,” C replied. “Something from the twenty-eighth century. A manuscript. The only copy of an unpublished poem. With memory latencies.”

  “What is it?”

  “A page from a poet’s notebook. It’s really quite amazing. The guy must have had a hell of a mind for observation, down to the quantum level. These may be the oldest set of memory imprints that have ever been recovered.”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  “Only a thumbnail.”

  “Who is it?”

  “You should ask mewhat is it,” C said.

  “Well,” said Hecate Minim. “What?”

  “It’s a murder,” C replied. “The memory of killing a woman with a knife.”

  “A knifing. That’s not so unusual. You can buy knifings by the dozen over on Canal Street.”

  “No,” said C. “This is different.”

  “How different? Who is the writer?”

  “Jack Cureoak.”

  Hecate sat back, unconsciously licked her lips. She was very good not to give anything else away. She moved up a notch in C’s admiration. “My,” she said. “Really? Cureoak? The guy who wrote the poems about the outer system?”

  “Desolate Traveleris the most famous book. And the others.”

  “We are definitely interested, but—”

  “There’s something else.”

  “What you’ve got is already pretty good.”

  “There’s no record.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that it’s well established that Cureoak never killed anybody. He was a pacificist. They drafted him into the navy, but he got drummed out during the unrest in the asteroid belt. He could barely bring himself to defendhimself in a fight. But there is a record for a man named Clare Runic. Clare Runic knifed a woman named Mamery St. Cloud to death in 2744.”

  “I don’t see—”

  “Clare Runic was Cureoak’s best friend at the time.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Cureoak did it. Clare Runic took the rap.”

  “That was three hundred years ago. Who cares?”

  “Mr. Percepied will care.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because I know who Mr. Percepied is.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That hardly matters,” C replied. He drained the rest of his coffee, lukewarm or not. “Tell him I have the manuscript and the only copy of the latencies. Tell him that there is only one payment that I’ll take for them.”

  “How much do you want?” asked Hecate Minim. “Percepied Export makes a small profit selling Earth memorabilia, but I promise you that Mr. Percepied himself is not a wealthy man in any sense of the word.”

  “Don’t worry. Even if he were rich, he wouldn’t have enough money. He never could,” C said. “There is only one thing I want from Mr. Percepied. Tell him I want Cassady-13.”

  “You’re talking gibberish.”

  For the first time in weeks, C laughed aloud. “Yes,” he replied. “I am. Exactly.”

  “I have to get back to work,” Hecate Minim said, attempting to appear indignant, but seeming flustered instead. “Where can we contact you?”

  “I have a signifier at the Hotel Egypte on Fifty-Ninth Street.”

  “That’s up in bone country.”

  “Indeed,” said C. “I’m registered under the name of Cornell. Joseph Cornell.”

  “You say your name like it’s not your name at all.”

  C laughed again. “It may very well be my name, my dear,” he said. “And, in any case, it will do.”

  “All right,” said Hecate Minim. “I’ll tell Mr. Percepied. But it may beme that you have to deal with.”

  “It is a matter of complete indifference,” C replied. “All I want is Cassady-13.”

  Hecate Minim gathered her coat and left. After a moment, C reached over and touched the cup brim that she had just drunk from. He closed his eyes and felt the remains of her grist there, frantically seeking its mistress. But she was gone. C put the grist to his lips.

  Hecate in her building. All the citizens of New York had an entire building to themselves these days, if they wanted. Some had complete blocks.

  Somewhere in Chelsea. From her window, Hecate could see the Jersey shore across the Hudson. Jersey gone back to swamp and mosquitoes. Somewhere out there in the mud they had buried the Chrysler Building after it went on its rampage and had to be taken down with a missile.

  Hecate setting down groceries. A rustle in the back of her musty living room.

  Faint light on a wan face. Cigarette smoke rising in moted sunlight.

  “Did you get the eggs?”

  “No, Papa, I forgot to—”

  The vision faded and there was something else in the grist remnant, something familiar, a memory of a memory . . .

  But then the feeling faded, and that was all C could recover from the grist. It was enough. He went to the coffee bar and got a refill. From the back, a child cried out.

  “There, there,” said a man’s simpering voice. “There, there.”

  C used the coffee to wash down the last traces of Hecate Minim.

  Uracil Cern

  C wandered the city in a purely random manner for the next day and a half. He couldn’t sleep. In fact, C had not been able to sleep for centuries. The ability to sleep was something he’d lost as he went through more and more duplications of himself. Eventually, the heightened knife-edge sensitivity of insomnia became his natural state. Now he could hardly remember what it was like to be relaxed to the point of unconsciousness.The real ossification of the city started in the upper thirties of Manhattan, and north of there the city was completely white. The epicenter was at Broadway and 116th, at the old site of Columbia University, but the bone-change had radiated far out into Queens, taken all of the Bronx. And Brooklyn? Brooklyn was a dangerous place. He’d only been there a few times and had no wish to return. Rogue grist still roamed the avenues, and only the grist knew Brooklyn.

  The sun was hot in the bone canyons of midtown. The street-cleaning grist was functioning still in most parts of the city. It took the form of little rain clouds that moved along in ragged lines an inch above the streets. Seen from above, the sweeper clouds looked exactly like the miniature version of a storm front moving over a continent of Earth. When it reached an obstruction, it analyzed to determine whether the obstruction was alive. If the blockage was inorganic or dead—and small—the grist broke it down. If it was big and dead, the grist sweepers cleaned it and left it there. Something had gone corrupt in the algorithm, however, and the sweepers did not recognize about a third of the streets. On these streets, the bone dust, weathered over the years from the buildings, piled up in drifts or mingled brownly with the other residue of the city. Some of these drifts were hardened to a chalk by decades of rain, but mostly the worn bone remained in loose grain form. When a wind picked up, particles swirled in choking clouds from hidden alleys and side streets. On most autumn days, you could not walk the streets of New York north of Forty-Second Street without getting your clothing thoroughly plastered with bone dust.

  At one point on a purely random street that the sweepers had missed, C leaned over and w
ith his finger took a sample of the bone from a drift. Surrounding C (surrounding almost every human being these days) was his own pellicle of grist, a kind of invisible armor of information and calculation embodied in micromachines. It washim as much as the meat and blood of his body were him. Maybe it wasmore him, since he had often had other bodies—growing them and shucking them like ears of corn—but his pellicle retained more or less the same programming. Perhaps that was his secret identity after all these years, hidden in the grist. Maybe all he really was, was a disembodied thought.

  No. I’m a man.

  He turned his pellicle to analyzing the bone sample.

  The bone was as he’d left it three hundred years before, and still holding what it held within its calcium interstices, its hard-sponge caverns.

  What it held—what it was designed to contain—was the Harmony code. And attached and interwoven with the code was a youthful copy of the man who was now the ruler of the inner solar system.

  Let me out!

  C gasped, stopped in the street, and leaned against a lamppost to catch his breath. After all these years, the ghost of Amés was still so potent! The man within the trapped code wanted to be free. No, more than that. He wanted torule . To dominate.

  Everything.

  Let me out and things will go easy on you!

  “Don’t worry,” C said, though the trapped code could not hear him. “You’ve given me no choice in the matter.”

  Let me out. Let me stop the chaos! You need me. Everyone needs me to tell them what to do. Let me out before it’s too late!

  With a shudder, C dropped the bone fragment.

  I tried to stop him, C thought, but I only made things worse.

  He had gotten what he wanted from the analysis, however. The schematics for opening up the bone lock overlaid his vision in glowing purple. He filed them away. But understanding the mechanism of the lock was the easy part. Now he had to get the key: the skeleton key that he had hidden so long ago, after he had turned it in its lock.

  Cairn Cruel

  Columbia University, 2744. Wilson Lab, Dodge Hall. Columbia, once a great university of the land, now for the most part become an academy of spies. Met Intelligence had bought the place years before when it had gone bankrupt during the first exodus from Earth. Now they ran the college as a front. Most of the halls of higher learning had become a twisted shadow of themselves, breeding warrens for codes and ciphers. But Columbia suited Clare Runic. He had been perfectly content to move from studying philosophy there as an undergraduate to his graduate work in cryptology.His best friends from his college days were still living in the neighborhood. Jack Cureoak, of course, never had any intention of going into the intelligence services, but inertia kept him in the same apartment that he and Clare had shared as undergraduates. He wanted to write, but this was before he had discovered his true subject and calling: restless travel about the solar system. He was waiting for the impetus to get on the road.

  And also in the apartment: Mamery St. Cloud, Cureoak’s friend and Clare’s lover. She was working at Columbia on a project with a curious code name: “Harmony.” Her boss and the head of the project team was a man named Amés. Everyone said he had a genius for administration. Things got done when Amés was in charge. Everyone also said that if you disagreed with him or got in his way, he became a real asshole.

  Mamery St. Cloud disagreed with Amés and got in his way.

  She believed that nanotechnology should not be used for military purposes. In the lab, she acquired a complete copy of the code that the team was working on and reverse-engineered a palliative strain. Wilson Lab was extremely secure. The only way to smuggle out the antivirus was to make it part of her own genome.

  She thought she had gotten away with it.

  “I may not be as smart as Jack or as clever as you are, Clare, but I know the difference between right and wrong,” she said to him one night. They had made love not long before, and both of them were smoking cigarettes. She smoked Petra Ultralites back then. He smoked Mandala 75s. “Something is wrong with that code.”

  “Morality can’t be written into an algorithm,” Clare said. “Code is just code.”

  She climbed on top of him and sat there, still smoking. Mamery was so slight and thin, he could hardly feel her upon him.

  “Well, maybe not your code.” She reached behind her back to grab him. Clare felt himself getting hard once again in her hand. It was so easy back then when there wasn’t so much to think about all at once. “Butsome code is bad,” Mamery said.

  He leaned up and licked Mamery’s nipple. “Your code is good,” Clare said. “A ’20, if I’m not mistaken. Excellent vintage.” They ground out their cigarettes in an ashtray and made love again in the smoky night, as young lovers do.

  There were secret detectors in the lab. Spies in the walls. Amés found out that Mamery had taken away a Harmony antivirus.

  Shedid get the antivirus back to the apartment. She scraped off a patch of her skin and put it in a sequencer (people had genetic sequencers back then that sat on tables and were as big as a fist).

  Between the time when the sequencer finished its work and was downloading into the apartment’s computer storage, Paranoia 4.1a, the military grist that Amés had sent out looking for her . . . found her. By the time a copy of the antivirus was streamed into Clare’s virtual space, the Paranoia had control of Mamery’s brain, and Mamery St. Cloud wasn’t really herself ever again.

  Paranoia was a very subtle security grist, used for counter-insurgency warfare. It would take weeks before Clare and Cureoak realized that something was terribly wrong with Mamery.

  It took Clare two days to find the antivirus that she had downloaded into his computer. But he found it and realized almost immediately what it was.

  Only he didn’t quite realize how strong it was. What a good job his lover had done. That she’d used part of her human bone-making DNA to construct the Harmony lock-down code.

  But when Amés released the Harmony code into the municipal grist of New York one morning at dawn, Clare was ready with the antidote. Within hours, Mamery’s bone-change had caught up with Harmony. During that time, most adults had time to flee the infected areas. But there was simply not time for a general evacuation. And one bureaucrat failed to notify another bureaucrat in the school system. Random chance and obstinacy. The schools didn’t get called until it was far too late.

  It was all explained as a big mistake that science would eventually take care of. Even then, the politicians were afraid to mess with the spies of Columbia.

  Nobody got caught, Clare thought, when he was sitting in prison on Ganymede and considering that the crime he was serving time for was perhaps the only one he could never have committed. When he was bending his mind to unraveling the ironies of cause and effect in a quantum universe and time-based ciphers. When he came up with the idea for the box.

  Curran Lice

  Report!The word exploded like a sun inside C’s head. Oh Christ, it was so loud! This time he fell to his knees in the street. He held his head and moaned. It was the quantum communicator that Amés had encoded into his grist before he’d left Mercury. Amés knew instantly when C had accessed the Harmony code. That must have been some sort of trigger. And now he was blasting like a megaphone into C’s language centers.

  It was like Mamery, when Mamery got the dose of Paranoia and went crazy. She was in your face. You couldn’t ignore her, and you couldn’t get away from her. Her code had gone bad.

  And you couldn’t kill her, no matter how much you wanted to because you once had loved her.

  Amés’s blasting voice made C feel as old and ineffectual as he had the day that he’d realized Mamery was going to end up killing him and there was nothing he would or could do about it.

  “I haven’t got the key,” C moaned. “Could you modulate your voice a little, sir? You’re blowing my mind.”

  Get up and walk. You make me sick. This is all your fault. Think about that.

&nb
sp; He got up. He walked. It was necessary to do Amés’s bidding. Necessary for survival.

  God, Amés sounded like Mamery when she was ill. Absolutely certain of herself. Absolutely certain that you must see that her way was the best and only way, even though it was clearly insane to anyone else.

  C did what Amés wanted him to do. He continued down the lonesome streets. He thought about what Amés wanted him to think about, but he would have been doing so anyway. It was unavoidable, here in the bone canyons of midtown under the noonday sun.

  New York, empty skull of a city. All your brains have blown out into space. I started it all. I started it when I changed the children. I had to stop Amés; I had to stop the Harmony code from binding all the Artificial Intelligences, the Large Arrays of Personalities, to Amés’s will. I thought I had to stop Amés no matter what the consequences. But after the bone-change, who would want to stay in such a petrified place as New York? Only the depraved and the hopeless. Dregs and mold and detritus.

  It gives me great pleasure to have sentyouto release the Harmony code. Amés was a bit less forceful in his mind. He was speaking to C from New Hierarchy Central, deep within the great halls of Mercury, but he still sounded as if he were standing right next to him. Too close for comfort.That’s why I will not wipe your sneaking filth of a life from existence, Mr. C, now that I’m the boss of you. It gives me great pleasure to have sent you because the solution is so balanced and so beautiful, using you.

  “Yes sir. I have made contact with the subject, and I am approaching him about the matter we discussed.”

  You can speak freely, Mr. C. Quantum transceiving cannot be intercepted.