“This place is magnificent.” Beside him and dressed in a frictionsuit that had the thinnest pink piping along the seams to break up the unrelenting black of the wet-look latex-like material, Reina looked up to the towering ceiling overhead comprised of high-impact domes of glass and gleaming chrome scaffolding. “CCR is one of my favorite places to visit. Have you ever been to the Delbert Conrad Museum?”
“No.” The bright white light around them should have made her look out of place, with her dark attire and midnight hair. Instead she looked as comfortable as she had in The Dugout, as though she knew she could hold her own in any environment on the planet. After seeing her in action, he figured this was dead-on accurate. “I keep getting surprised by you. Just when I think I’ve got you pegged as a closet Neo-Luddite, you turn around and tell me you have mad love for the birthplace of bod-mods.”
“I’m not against technology in general. I’m against turning my organic chassis into one of those.” She gestured to a perpetually smiling, pink-eyed jani-droid mopping the already spotless white marble floor. “But just try and take my digicell or tablet away from me and see how far you get before I make you beg for mercy.”
“Sounds like fun.” The saucy swish of her hips made his palms itch to squeeze her ass, and it took more than a little effort to corral the urge. Funny, how a few short hours alone with her had made him so addicted he resented not being able to reach out and touch her whenever he wanted. “You can show me your technique once we’re done here.”
“Once we’re done here, we hit the streets hunting down our wonder child. I don’t want to spend Christmas day spinning my wheels over this case. I want to put it to bed today.”
“What’s the rush?” Edison moved close enough to brush her arm with his. As long as he could be in physical contact with her, he was almost sure he could stay sane. “I thought you haven’t celebrated Christmas since your parents died.”
“That’s true, but...I don’t know. This year feels different.” Her black eyes slid his way, and he felt their impact all the way to his spine. “Are you doing anything special tomorrow?”
“Since I’m determined to spend it with you, I’m thinking that’s special enough.”
The slow bloom of her smile made his chest clench. “Good answer.”
“You’ll like this even better. It looks like we won’t have to wait to see the professor.” He nodded at a pair of men stepping off a chrome and Plexiglas escalator, one an elegant figure in a suit that even from this distance looked like genuine silk, the other short and comfortably roly-poly in mismatched houndstooth tweed. “There he is now.”
Reina’s eyes narrowed as the two men parted, her attention on the elegantly tailored man as he headed for a couple of two muscle-bound behemoths whose presence all but screamed the word bodyguard. “Maximillian McKye, the corporate face of body modifications. You didn’t contact him to play expert as well, did you?”
“Nope.” Edison tracked him as well. “The man we’re here to see is the guy who stepped into Delbert Conrad’s shoes when he passed away last year. If anyone can make sense of what the hell was in that blizzard yesterday, it’s Professor Atsuko.”
“Ah, Detective Wicke.” The roly-poly tweed wearer greeted them with a bright smile as they approached. “It does my heart good to see the first law enforcement officer in all of Illinois to receive modifications coming home to roost, so to speak. How are you?”
“Great, Professor. Though like I said in my earlier email to you, the bod-mods don’t love subzero weather. As soon as your think-tank people can get a handle on an upgrade that doesn’t turn me into the Tin Man once it gets a bit chilly out, I’d appreciate it.”
Atsuko’s baby-round face was an expressive canvas, pulling into a fretful frown that spoke volumes of distress as he led the way back up the escalator. “The technology will have its unforeseen bugs to work out, and this is one of them, apparently. I’ve fielded hundreds of similar complaints about that very thing just since this cold snap began.”
“Luckily my partner came along and dragged me to safety, so all’s well that ends well, I guess.” Edison nodded at Reina. “Gene Atsuko, Professor of Bioengineering and Biorobotics, may I present Detective Reina Vedette, my partner. Professor, Reina was the one who recorded that unusual anomaly I sent to you. Have you had a chance to review the video?”
Atsuko lit up as he shepherded them past a receptionist area and into a whitewashed office where even the desk and visitor’s chairs were in matching white. “Ah, that footage was pure gold! I can’t wait to go over it with the two of you, it’s so intriguing. But I’m just as intrigued to get to know you, Detective Vedette,” he added, turning to look at her with the open curiosity of a child. “In preparation for our meeting I wanted to familiarize myself with all the players involved, but for some reason you’re not on CCR’s files. Did you receive your bod-mods elsewhere?”
“I’m not online, Professor.” Reina’s smile was coolly distant, the kind of smile she used to give Edison right before she went about pretending he was office furniture. “I’m the only pure human left in my precinct, if not in all of Chicagoland. That would explain why you weren’t able to find me in your files.”
“How extraordinary. An organic with a badge. A detective’s badge, no less.” Professor Atsuko regarded her as though she were some sort of mutated lab experiment. “You must find it difficult in the age of cyberization to perform your duties. Do bod-mods go against your religious beliefs, or is there a physical or genetic irregularity that precludes—”
“I’m sorry, Professor Atsuko, but we’re pressed for time.” With that same gracious smile and posh, well-mannered voice that seemed to ask forgiveness while still doing whatever the hell she wanted, Reina settled in one of the visitor’s seats across the desk from their host. “If we could get to your invaluable analysis of that anomaly, we would greatly appreciate it.”
“Oh, of course, of course. I was quite excited when Detective Wicke sent that footage my way, despite the fact that visibility is somewhat less than ideal thanks to the brutal white-out conditions. Tell me, Detective Vedette,” he added, leaning forward like an eager schoolboy, “what was it that made you hunt down that person in the snow to begin with? The odds that they had anything to do with your investigation were slim to none, so why did you bother?”
Reina lifted a dark brow as though surprised he had to ask. “Tracking down every single possible clue that crosses my path is how a detective solves cases, Professor. It’s how this job is done.”
“Yes, but this was so...so random. That smudge you saw through the snow could have been nothing at all.”
“True. Or it could have been everything, which come to find out, it was.”
“Yes. But from a statistical standpoint...”
“I suppose that’s one of the benefits of not having multi-level processors attached to my wetware, Professor. I don’t have anything calculating the odds against what my gut tells me to check out.” Then she smiled. “Perhaps when you and your talented people here at CCR are capable of writing computer code that’s compatible with the wild whims of human instinct, I’ll sign up for modification.”
Professor Atsuko hooted and clapped his hands. “Something for me to shoot for! And for what it’s worth you sound remarkably like my old boss, Dr. Conrad. He had a pure love of all things technological, but he was devoutly against the blurring of the lines between human and machine. I think you and he would have gotten along famously, Detective Vedette.”
“It’s that blurring between human and machine we’re concerned with now,” Edison said, sitting in the chair beside Reina. “What do you make of whatever it was Reina saw yesterday?”
“A virtual impossibility, which is what makes this so much fun.” Atsuko rubbed his hands together in geek-out glee even as he turned to a large touchscreen monitor on his desk. With a couple o
f taps, the familiar video from Reina’s visor appeared, and he swiveled the monitor to face them. “Forty-seven seconds into the chase is when we get the first glimpse of what it is Detective Vedette is going after. See?” With a sharp tap on the screen and zooming in on the dark figure, the outline became crystal clear. “A small humanoid figure. Male, I think, if the shoulders are anything to go by. No more than four feet high, yet moving at quite a clip despite being in snow that’s almost up to his waist.”
“His movements were strange.” Reina leaned forward in her chair, as if that would somehow make her see better through the recorded blizzard. “Though it could have been the deep snow we were running through, I remember thinking there was something about his movement that wasn’t right.”
“Correct,” Professor Atsuko nodded, as if they were in class instead of his office. “If you watch in real time, you can see the swing of his arms is all wrong. They’re fully extended at his sides, as opposed to being held in a roughly ninety-degree angle, the way we humans run in order to conserve energy.”
“So...” A frown began to pucker between Reina’s brows. “Are you saying this is verifiable proof that this is an android?”
“It can’t be,” Edison answered before Professor Atsuko could answer. “The anti-crime failsafe written into an android’s programming would have shut the thing down after breaking into the distribution center.”
“What’s more,” Atsuko added, “in this country it’s illegal to purchase an android that looks like a child. Androids are basically built to be used as tools to be exploited by their makers. Therefore no one would advocate the mass production of a droid that looks like a child.”
“It’s also illegal to modify a child, as bod-mods are deadly to a growing human,” Reina returned, her frown threatening to turn into an impatient scowl. “But setting even that aside, we have irrefutable proof that the person I chased through the snow wasn’t a kid with bod-mods. He was out in subzero weather with no problem whatsoever, whereas my cyberized partner couldn’t tolerate those drastic temperatures for any more than a few seconds. That alone convinces me we’re not dealing with illegal modifications here.”
“You’re both right.”
Edison stifled a curse. “Professor, how can we both be right?”
“You’re not dealing with illegal modifications. What you are dealing with is an illegal android. The best I’ve seen.”
That stunned them into silence before Edison managed to pull it together. “So did someone buy this thing off of some international website, or something?”
Professor Atsuko shrugged. “You can do that, I suppose, though it’s usually cost-prohibitive to do so. Androids that don’t meet this country’s standards are confiscated and scrapped with no refunds and a hefty fine to boot. No, I’m thinking more along the lines that this droid is the result of a modern-day Geppetto toiling away in his basement, creating this perfect little boy.”
Edison snorted. “A perfect little boy that the modern-day Geppetto created to steal. I guess you avoid the failsafe measures when you build your own bad guy.”
“Oh, they’re still there, embedded in the system-updates that all droids, even homemade ones, must receive to avoid a systems crash. If this ‘bot is still operational days after breaking the law, it obviously hasn’t performed a scheduled update. But it will, and that’ll be the end of it.” Professor Atsuko looked at the screen and sighed. “It’s a shame, really. This android is just about the most perfect replica of a child I’ve ever seen. When it looked back at you, Detective Vedette, I’d swear I could see fear in its eyes. Which, of course, is impossible.”
“Impossible seems to be what this case is all about.” Reina was wearing that faraway look that told Edison she had an idea. “Professor, how do androids generally go about receiving these maintenance updates?”
“All they have to do is go online and hit one of the two AI maintenance servers. One is run from the CCR campus, as this is the birthplace of androids. The other is located in Hong Kong and strictly regulated by the government there.”
“Let’s assume our modern-day Geppetto decided to stay local, and maybe even in the area of South Chicago. Would you be able to find an anomalous login of a homemade droid?”
“Hmm.” Swiveling the monitor back to face him, Atsuko began to type. Almost before he’d begun he pulled back, clearly surprised. “Found it.”
Edison’s brows went up. “That was fast.”
“Gut instinct really is quite a force of nature if you’ve got knowledge to back it up.” With a quick grin Reina’s way, Atsuko turned the monitor back around. “As it’s been several days since the initial crime was committed, I suspected this droid is on a weekly-update schedule. And since all crimes have been located in the Mercy Hospital area south of Stevenson Tollway, I looked for any anomalies checking in from that hub. When droids login for updates, they all have PINs—personal ident numbers—to identify them. But according to our database, there’s been one droid checking in from that area with no PIN.”
Edison stared at the screen. “Can we pinpoint the droid’s location? If we can find the droid, we’ll find our perp.”
The professor shook his head. “I won’t know its location until it logs in.”
“And when is it scheduled to do that?”
“You’re in luck,” Professor Atsuko announced after a couple keystrokes. “According to its login history, this unknown droid is scheduled to update at midnight tonight.”
“Christmas.” Reina sighed, and Edison could hear her frustration. “We’ll be ready.”
Chapter Eight
I’d swear I could see fear in its eyes.
Hiking up the steep stairs that led out of The Dugout, Reina tried to hold onto the happiness of seeing her friends open their Christmas presents, but Atsuko’s words kept dragging her down. In some form or another, androids had been a part of daily life for decades, performing their functions like the mechanical tools they were. Delbert Conrad was the one who put a human face on these machines and almost immediately regretted it. But by then the genie was out of the bottle and the world had fallen in love with machines that smiled and talked and could even perform sex if formatted with the proper programming and attachments. Reina had never given the use of androids a second thought, but the idea of a machine displaying something akin to an emotion was...unsettling.
It had to have been a trick of the eye, she decided, pointing her slick bike in the direction of Edison’s place, while the slate gray sky overhead darkened with the encroachment of evening. Or some sort of glitch in the android’s system. No matter how sophisticated the machine was, there was no program in the universe capable of mimicking human emotion.
The droid wasn’t the problem anyway, she reminded herself, pulling up to Edison’s townhome and unhitching her carry-all satchel to sling over her shoulder. The person behind the machine was the source of the problem. Not that giving toys to underprivileged children and bringing Christmas magic to not just their lives, but her own life, was a problem. For the first time in a decade the cheerful light of the Christmas spirit glowed deep inside, when she’d assumed it had long ago given up the proverbial ghost. And whether their perp was nothing more than an over-zealous lover of Christmas, or a garden-variety whack-job with uber robotic skills, or even one of Santa’s elves, she owed him or her a debt of gratitude. After a decade of lying buried in childhood memories, Christmas was alive for her once again.
“There you are.” Before she could hit the visitor’s buzzer, the front door swung open. With an ear-to-ear grin, Edison pulled her inside before she could say a word of greeting. “You’re going to love this.”
She had to skip to keep up with his long strides as he dragged her down the short entry hall to the open-plan living space, the satchel hitting her in the back with every off-beat hop. “What? What is it?”
“Holy crap, it’s a Christmas tree.” And it wasn’t just any Christmas tree. Every silver Mylar needle on the four-foot tall monstrosity shimmered like a Las Vegas showgirl’s pasties, with the tips pulsing in a multi-colored, fiber optic lightshow. Synthesized music that she belatedly recognized as “Gimme, Santa, Gimme” played from its base while it slowly rotated. “Wow. That’s...wow.”
“Check this.” Clearly thrilled with his magnificent Christmas decoration, Edison fiddled with a remote. In seconds, the music tempo had changed along with the pulsing of the lights. Reina sent up silent thanks she wasn’t epileptic. “The lights keep time with the music. Isn’t it great?”
“Great?” Of all the words she could use to describe Edison’s tree, great was not among them. Then she looked at him, only to find his face alive with a boyish enthusiasm and a happiness she recognized as that same warm-and-fuzzy magical effect Christmas was having on her. There was such joy there, a wonder and a delight rarely glimpsed in the hard-bitten life of a Chicago cop, and she looked back to the tree with new eyes. Blindingly shimmery, as subtle as a brick to the face and pulsing to a raucous beat, it was nothing but a Maglev bullet train wreck for the senses. But it was also a source of happiness for Edison. He’d probably never had a Christmas tree in his life, and in his eyes it was a thing of beauty. Because of that, she couldn’t help but love it as well.
A Galactic Holiday Page 9
