Spaced

by Greg Curtis

  As frustrating as it was, what worried her was that whoever had had the order changed had to have some sort of connection to the bureau, either a contact or a direct hack into the ALEB mainframe. She suspected the latter.

  Whoever their enemy was he clearly had a direct line into the investigation, a hacker so good that he not only knew they were changing tacks, but also what they were finding and what their next steps would be. The timing wasn’t a coincidence. The bomber had known not only that she was having the bot examined, but when and why. Annalisse also realised that the one person who couldn’t have changed that order was the doctor. He was spaced. So he'd been framed and someone was still trying to keep that frame in place. That didn’t sit well with her.

  Technicians were now tracking the order to scrap the bot, but she doubted they’d find anything. Whoever had given the command had surely thought to cover his electronic fingerprints, knowing what would happen if he got caught.

  At least that had been enough to convince her bosses they had a problem. A corrupt cop maybe – though she didn't want to consider that – or a hack. After that, what had been a routine investigation, had been upgraded to a full enquiry. Now there were officers and technicians everywhere. The ALEB could not be compromised. And they absolutely could not be implicated in either murder or terrorism. And it was still all her fault.

  That was why she’d come here to the remains of the hydroponics reserve. It was here that everything had started, and it was here she hoped she’d find their best evidence – assuming there was any to be found.

  The security office was all that remained of the reserve. It had only survived because it was some distance away from the plant. There was nothing left of the reserve except a crater; as the thermo-kinetic device had transformed everything to dust and molten bedrock.

  The office, sitting to one side of the campus and across the parking ground, had been spared the worst of the explosion, its solid structure protecting it somewhat. But the heat and blast pressure had still levelled it, killing the officer who’d been stationed there.

  As weapons went the device was an unusual one. Thermo-kinetic bombs were space-based weapons for the most part. The Navy used them in their torpedoes and miners sometimes employed them to quickly get at deep mineral deposits. Annalisse could well imagine that a geologist would use them as part of his exploration tools. If you wanted to level a building as large as a city block, it was probably the weapon of choice. However, the use of all such devices was highly regulated, and not even a scientist could simply build themselves one.

  The Nightingale had carried twenty-eight of the devices, and every single one of them had been accounted for. Doctor Simons had originally had forty – twelve of them had been used on his previous mission, and all the blasts had been monitored and recorded. The rest had been confirmed as being in their cradles. That was the very first thing the Navy had checked when the ship licensed to carry the devices arrived in port. And it had been a physical inspection – not just a check of records. Removing one of them would also have set off a million sirens. So if he had committed this crime, and that was starting to look like a big ‘if’, where had he got the spare one from?

  Even if she had no idea of where it had been obtained, she did have a fair idea why it had been used. If you wanted to hide criminal evidence it was the perfect means to use. It left very little behind, certainly nothing for forensic scientists to work with. It meant that the scene examiners were literally analysing dust. She didn't expect them to find anything useful.

  Unfortunately, standing in the ruins of the security office surrounded by technicians, she didn't expect to find much more.

  Doctor Simons had been identified as the perpetrator simply by being recorded entering the reserve with the device twenty minutes before the explosion. He’d been expected and facial recognition had confirmed it was him. Unfortunately he also had an alibi. At the same time that he'd apparently been wheeling the device in to the reserve he'd also been on the holo to a client, and facial recognition had confirmed that as well. He had also been locked up in decontamination and quarantine along with his ship while making the call. So how could he have escaped that, made the call from the ship and planted the bomb, all at the same time?

  The man had apparently been in two places at once.

  Her new theory was that there were two of them. She just didn't know how. Even identical twins had enough differences to enable them to be separated, but everything they had so far from the reserve still said the doctor had done it – while locked up on his ship and speaking with a client. So she had come here to try and find some evidence that one of the Doctor Simons was a fraud. It wasn't going well though, which wasn't surprising.

  Nothing in the investigation thus far had gone according to plan. And somehow her bosses seemed to think that all the unpleasant answers she kept giving them were her fault. The evidence proved otherwise. It was the facts of what had happened that were unpleasant, frightening even.

  The worst of them was that everything Doctor Simons had said about the attack in his office had been proven correct. Blast residue analysis had unexpectedly shown that the shot which had killed the receptionist, not to mention the ones in the walls and door and the other officer, had all come from the policebot. There had been no one else in the room. Bot weapons all had a distinctive signature.

  Captain Dalbraith had very nearly had a meltdown when that snippet of forensic joy had made it to his desk. He'd turned red and started shouting and waving his arms around as never before and for a while she'd wondered if he was in danger of some sort of cerebral event. On the other hand all the screaming and waving probably kept him fit.

  However all the shouting and childish tantrums in the universe couldn’t alter the fact that the officer and his bot had arrived on the premises to make the arrest and the machine had turned on his partner and the receptionist.

  That information was being kept confidential, desperately so. As far as Aquaria was concerned the doctor had still done the deed and had then fled. Annalisse didn't agree with the decision but she’d understood it. People needed to have confidence in the police. They wouldn’t believe that a bot had gone rogue, especially not a policebot.

  More than that the police had to have confidence in the machines – they were their partners, their back up, and their mobile field lab all in one. They were there to protect them, and to provide basic analysis. Officers had to rely on them. For officers to be constantly looking over their shoulders wondering when their partner was going to go haywire was a disaster. And the worst of it was that she was already doing the same thing with her own bot. Every so often she caught herself glancing at Thirteen, uncertainly. She'd never done that before.

  Thirteen would be a dangerous enemy. It was large, powerful and horribly fast if needed. policebots were only one step short of warbots in terms of firepower – something that wasn't widely reported. That would only frighten the public. Even the Navy insisted on calling theirs military bots. It sounded less scary.

  Doctor Simons had been lucky to survive the attack, gravity coming to his rescue. He had fallen onto an awning three floors down, then bouncing onto a floater before being deposited on the pavement another storey down. The bot had simply torn straight through the awning, hitting the concrete with an almighty impact. That had broken its leg and damaged its aim. Three or four hundred kilos of metal falling at speed did not stop for much, and concrete did not yield. She might not be so lucky, being uncomfortably aware that Thirteen's laser was a far heavier and more powerful weapon than hers, plus the bot was armoured. It would kill her long before she could even damage it.

  “The recovered records, Detective,” said an officer handing her a holochip, interrupting her worries.

  “Thanks.” She dropped the chip into the bot's interface and had it play the information. It was mostly the surveillance data from the reserve just before the device had gone off. As expected it mostly showed nothing usefu
l. People went about their business and tended to the hydroponics fields, while more worked in the labs and offices. And the only one out of place was the doctor delivering the device.

  That still troubled her. It was him – she could make out even more of the details now than before in the restored recordings – but why would he personally deliver the device? That was dangerous given what it was. It was also unnecessary. He could have simply had a courier deliver it and detonated it remotely. Also, the excuse he'd given for delivering the supplies was thin. He'd said that he’d been on New Berlin in the Europa system at the right time and had picked them up while he was there. Now though they knew he hadn’t been there at all.

  That was no surprise considering. But it would have been easy for someone to have checked at the time. New Berlin might be half a universe away, and there might be no direct communications between the two worlds, but ships travelled between them all the time, and each one always carried updated mesh files. The reserve would have had access to them, and they’d be no more than an hour or two old. All they had needed to do was check. So why hadn't they? And why hadn't the doctor expected them to?

  Still, she couldn't deny the evidence as she watched Doctor Simons physically unload the crate from the back of the floater and then wheel it across the landing area. She'd seen most of this before from a different angle, but the technicians were busy recovering more and more data all the time and it couldn't hurt to watch it again, especially when it was making her think.

  There were other questions too: like why had he wheeled it? That was primitive technology. Why hadn't he simply used a lifter like everyone else? As far as she knew thermo-kinetic devices were stable around anti-gravity fields. And why had he opened the door with his hands? It should have opened by itself. He was expected after all.

  If this particular Doctor Simons had been expected.

  The thought grabbed her unexpectedly. The door should have expected him – the delivery was on the schedule, and his name and details were known. It should have recognised him and opened, but it hadn't. The logical reason why it hadn’t was that he wasn't the doctor – the door was a witness.

  “Thirteen, interrogate the records about that door. Find out why it didn't open for the doctor.”

  She knew that, even with the extra recovered data, getting that information was going to be a gamble. So much had been destroyed even in the security office's computers. So she wasn't completely surprised when it told her that the data wasn't there. The door was no longer there either.

  But as they said there was more than one way for a DD to fall apart.

  “Thirteen, focus and enlarge the images of the door as the doctor approaches it and slow it down to quarter speed.” Even if they didn't have the records from the door itself, they had recordings of it, and security doors had light codes – little diodes in the tops of the door frames which changed colour as the doors operated. They were there so that if a door failed technicians could look at the lights and instantly see where the fault lay. She could see immediately that something had gone wrong.

  The miniature light had been red as normal until the doctor had stepped into its detector’s range. Then it had changed to orange while it scanned him, comparing the image to its list of people allowed access. That was when procedures had gone wrong. It should have changed to green as the door recognised him and opened. But the light had turned red again. The only reason that would happen was that the door hadn't recognised the doctor. And since the reserve, like all reserves, was restricted access, it wouldn’t let him in.

  The doctor had then put his hand on the handle and all the lights had gone out, which could only mean the door had failed. No lights, no power. He’d somehow deactivated its security access and cut its power, which had allowed the doctor to manually open it.

  “Thirteen, go through the reserve's records for that door's specs. Its details and specifically what it scans for.”

  The bot obediently started flashing up holos filled with schematics and specifications for her to view. They were much as she'd expected. It was a security door so it performed some basic checks. But since this was only a reserve and not a military high-security area it didn't go through everything that would be expected. It hadn’t done DNA analysis for example, nor retinal scans – just facial recognition, biological parameters and fingerprints. Its reaction had meant that something about the doctor hadn't matched up with what it had expected.

  Facial recognition wasn't the problem – everything said it was the doctor. Neither was it fingerprints. The moment he’d touched the handle the door had died. It hadn't checked them because it hadn't had the chance. That left only the biological parameters. Something about the doctor’s basic biology hadn’t fitted with what it had expected. That, she realised, could mean only one thing.

  “Thirteen, access every record you can find and look for some sign that the Doctor Simons which entered the reserve wasn't a biological being at all, but an android.”

  It was no simple analysis she was asking for, and so she wasn't surprised when her bot did absolutely nothing but stand whirring for a while. It was undeniable that androids were becoming highly sophisticated. They could be made to match facial recognition records as well as given vocal synthesisers which could perfectly mimic voice recordings. EM emissions could be masked and interference locks shielded. They could even replicate certain chemical parameters to make artificial skin match real skin. Despite that no one had yet managed to make an android move exactly as a human being did. There was something in the way muscles and bones, coordination and balance systems worked together that couldn't be mechanically duplicated. They were close, but not perfect. And an android duplicate would explain how the doctor could be in two places at once.

  It would also explain why he'd used a wheeled trolley and not a lifter. Lifters would detect biological indicators like body temperature and heartbeats, to work automatically the moment someone put their hands on the handle. Not for bots and androids, though. Bots had to give verbal instructions and use the manual controls. But if the android doctor had done that, someone might have noticed, so a basic trolley was a safer option.

  “Eighty-seven point two percent likelihood that the subject is artificial,” Thirteen eventually announced, the results of its rough and ready analysis drawing a round of surprised stares from the others. Nobody had expected that.

  Annalisse had been prepared for it though. It was all starting to form a picture, a modus operandi. A policebot reprogrammed to kill. Orders in the police databases changed. And now an android planting the device. Their criminal was some sort of cyber-expert, or more likely cyber-experts because she very much doubted that this was the work of a single individual.

  The Captain was going to short-circuit like a bad floater when he found out. The doctor had now been confirmed as someone completely innocent who’d been driven into spacing himself, on top of a policebot killing innocent civilians. There were going to be enquiries without end when this hit the mesh. There would be talk about budget cuts and more budget cuts. It didn't make sense, but budget cuts were always the politicians' answer. Only the Navy was ever exempt from cost-cutting. There would be the usual rounds of people blaming one another. And at the end of the day it would be her front and centre in the firing line. Whether that was fair or not didn't matter – it was all about politics.

  “Alright people!” she addressed the flock of officers and technicians surrounding her.

  “Now that we know the details of the crime we're dealing with, we need to identify the criminals. And that begins with identifying the android. Let's try and find out as much we can about it – make, model, and age.

  “We also need answers to some basic questions. Who had the resources to build an android replica of Doctor Simons? Where did they get the biometric data? Who has the resources to access ALEB databases and reprogram policebots? Who benefits from bombing a reserve? And who can either build or obtain a thermo-kinetic
device?

  “Also, now that we have a new suspect, let’s look at this from another angle. If the doctor didn’t do it, why look for a connection between him and the reserve? There isn't one. We need to go back to the start. Look for backgrounds on the staff, anyone who could have a connection to organised crime. Because they're the ones who use android doubles. Gambling debts? Shady pasts? Drug use? Recheck the reserve's financials and look for irregularities.

  “As the spacers would say, let’s nail down the translation points before we start jumping. Those are the questions we need to focus on.

  “And for shard's sake, nothing – and I do mean absolutely nothing – goes over the mesh!” There was little hope of that – the channels were clamouring for interviews and offering large financial incentives. Citizen reporters were everywhere, hacking away furiously. And then there were always those politicians out to score some positive mesh time any way they could. Someone would leak the information.

  “Shouldn't we try to find the android?” one of the officers piped up from the back of the room with what seemed like a natural question. She already knew the answer.

  “We know where the sharding android is! It's somewhere in that crater!” she waved in the general direction of what had been the reserve. “It's dust.”

  The detective knew she was right. The technicians had been hunting for evidence of the doctor leaving the reserve before the bomb had gone off, but they hadn't found it. They'd assumed it was because the records were so badly damaged that the information had been lost. They’d known the doctor had made it back to his office. But now that she knew the attack had been carried out by an android, she also knew the reason they didn't have those records was because the fake doctor hadn't left. Whoever had built and programmed the damned thing would also have been desperate to hide any evidence. And what better way to do that then have it blow up with everything else?