The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack

by Gardner Dozois

  The R Peeds could outrun a police car on open ground on highway. He’d barely had time to untwist his clenched hands from the steering wheel when R Peed Robbert was at his window, politely rapping on the smoked glass. He didn’t want to roll down the window. Didn’t want to smell the dry, machine-oil smell of a robot. He phoned it instead.

  “You are now tasked to me, Detective’s override, acknowledge.”

  The metal man bowed, its symmetrical, simplified features pleasant and guileless. It clicked its heels together with an audible snick as those marvelous, spring-loaded, nuclear-powered gams whined through their parody of obedience. “Acknowledged, Detective. It is my pleasure to do—”

  “Shut up. You will discreetly surveil 55 Picola Crescent until such time as Ada Trouble Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, Social Harmony serial number 0MDY2-T3937 leaves the premises. Then you will maintain discreet surveillance. If she deviates more than 10 percent from the optimum route between here and Don Mills Collegiate Institute, you will notify me. Acknowledge.”

  “Acknowledged, Detective. It is my—”

  He hung up and told the UNATS Robotics mechanism running his car to get him down to the station house as fast as it could, angry with himself and with Ada—whose middle name was Trouble, after all—for making him deal with a robot before he’d had his morning meditation and destim session. The name had been his ex-wife’s idea, something she’d insisted on long enough to make sure that it got onto the kid’s birth certificate before defecting to Eurasia with their life’s savings, leaving him with a new baby and the deep suspicion of his co-workers who wondered if he wouldn’t go and join her.

  His ex-wife. He hadn’t thought of her in years. Well, months. Weeks, certainly. She’d been a brilliant computer scientist, the valedictorian of her Positronic Complexity Engineering class at the UNATS Robotics school at the University of Toronto. Dumping her husband and her daughter was bad enough, but the worst of it was that she dumped her country and its way of life. Now she was ensconced in her own research lab in Beijing, making the kinds of runaway Positronics that made the loathsome robots of UNATS look categorically beneficent.

  He itched to wiretap her, to read her email or listen in on her phone conversations. He could have done that when they were still together, but he never had. If he had, he would have found out what she was planning. He could have talked her out of it.

  And then what, Artie? said the nagging voice in his head. Arrest her if she wouldn’t listen to you? March her down to the station house in handcuffs and have her put away for treason? Send her to the reeducation camp with your little daughter still in her belly?

  Shut up, he told the nagging voice, which had a robotic quality to it for all its sneering cruelty, a tenor of syrupy false friendliness. He called up the pen-trace data and texted it to the phreak squad. They had bots that handled this kind of routine work and they texted him back in an instant. He remembered when that kind of query would take a couple of hours, and he liked the fast response, but what about the conversations he’d have with the phone cop who called him back, the camaraderie, the back-and-forth?

  Trace terminates with a virtual service circuit at switch PNG.433-GKRJC. Virtual circuit forwards to a compromised “zombie” system in ninth district, first prefecture. Zombie has been shut down and local law enforcement is en route for pickup and forensics. It is my pleasure to do you a service, detective.

  How could you have a back-and-forth with a message like that?

  He looked up Ninth/First in the metric-analog map converter: Key West, Fl.

  So, there you had it. A switch made in Papua New-Guinea (which persisted in conjuring up old Oceanic war photos of bone-in-nose types from his boyhood, though now that they’d been at war with Eurasia for so long, it was hard to even find someone who didn’t think that the war had always been with Eurasia, that Oceania hadn’t always been UNATS’s ally), forwarding calls to a computer that was so far south, it was practically in the middle of the Caribbean, hardly a stone’s throw from the CAFTA region, which was well-known to harbor Eurasian saboteur and terrorist elements.

  The car shuddered as it wove in and out of the lanes on the Don Valley Parkway, barreling for the Gardiner Express Way, using his copper’s override to make the thick, slow traffic part ahead of him. He wasn’t supposed to do this, but as between a minor infraction and pissing off the man from Social Harmony, he knew which one he’d pick.

  His phone rang again. It was R Peed Robbert, checking in. “Hello, Detective,” it said, its voice crackling from bad reception. “Subject Ada Trouble Icaza de Arana-Goldberg has deviated from her route. She is continuing north on Don Mills past Van Horne and is continuing toward Sheppard.”

  Sheppard meant the Sheppard subway, which meant that she was going farther. “Continue discreet surveillance.” He thought about the overcoat men with their sticky hats. “If she attempts to board the subway, alert the truancy patrol.” He cursed again. Maybe she was just going to the mall. But he couldn’t go up there himself and make sure, and it wasn’t like a robot would be any use in restraining her, she’d just second-law it into letting her go. Useless castrating clanking job-stealing dehumanizing—

  She was almost certainly just going to the mall. She was a smart kid, a good kid—a rotten kid, to be sure, but good-rotten. Chances were she’d be trying on clothes and flirting with boys until lunch and then walking boldly back into class. He ballparked it at an 80 percent probability. If it had been a perp, 80 percent might have been good enough.

  But this was his Ada. Dammit. He had 10 minutes until the Social Harmony meeting started, and he was still 15 minutes away from the stationhouse—and 20 from Ada.

  “Tail her,” he said. “Just tail her. Keep me up to date on your location at 90-second intervals.”

  “It is my pleasure to—”

  He dropped the phone on the passenger seat and went back to fretting about the Social Harmony meeting.

  * * * *

  The man from Social Harmony noticed right away that Arturo was checking his phone at 90-second intervals. He was a bald, thin man with a pronounced Adam’s apple, beak-nose and shiny round head that combined to give him the profile of something predatory and fast. In his natty checked suit and pink tie, the Social Harmony man was the stuff of nightmares, the kind of eagle-eyed supercop who could spot Arturo’s attention flicking for the barest moment every 90 seconds to his phone and then back to the meeting.

  “Detective?” he said.

  Arturo looked up from his screen, keeping his expression neutral, not acknowledging the mean grins from the other four ranking detectives in the meeting. Silently, he turned his phone face-down on the meeting table.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Now, the latest stats show a sharp rise in grey-market electronics importing and other tariff-breaking crimes, mostly occurring in open-air market stalls and from sidewalk blankets. I know that many in law enforcement treat this kind of thing as mere hand-to-hand piracy, not worth troubling with, but I want to assure you, gentlemen and lady, that Social Harmony takes these crimes very seriously indeed.”

  The Social Harmony man lifted his computer onto the desk, steadying it with both hands, then plugged it into the wall socket. Detective Shainblum went to the wall and unlatched the cover for the projector-wire and dragged it over to the Social Harmony computer and plugged it in, snapping shut the hardened collar. The sound of the projector-fan spinning up was like a helicopter.

  “Here,” the Social Harmony man said, bringing up a slide, “here we have what appears to be a standard AV set-top box from Korea. Looks like a UNATS Robotics player, but it’s a third the size and plays twice as many formats. Random Social Harmony audits have determined that as much as forty percent of UNATS residents have this device or one like it in their homes, despite its illegality. It may be that one of you detectives has such a device in your home, and it’s likely that one of your family members does.”

  He advanced the slide. Now they were looking at a massiv
e car-wreck on a stretch of highway somewhere where the pine-trees grew tall. The wreck was so enormous that even for the kind of seasoned veteran of road-fatality porn who was accustomed to adding up the wheels and dividing by four it was impossible to tell exactly how many cars were involved.

  “Components from a Eurasian bootleg set-top box were used to modify the positronic brains of three cars owned by teenagers near Goderich. All modifications were made at the same garage. These modifications allowed these children to operate their vehicles unsafely so that they could participate in drag racing events on major highways during off-hours. This is the result. Twenty-two fatalities, nine major injuries. Three minors—besides the drivers—killed, and one pregnant woman.”

  “We’ve shut down the garage and taken those responsible into custody, but it doesn’t matter. The Eurasians deliberately manufacture their components to interoperate with UNATS Robotics brains, and so long as their equipment circulates within UNATS borders, there will be moderately skilled hackers who take advantage of this fact to introduce dangerous, anti-social modifications into our nation’s infrastructure.”

  “This quarter is the quarter that Social Harmony and law enforcement dry up the supply of Eurasian electronics. We have added new sniffers and border-patrols, new customs agents and new detector vans. Beat officers have been instructed to arrest any street dealer they encounter and district attorneys will be asking for the maximum jail time for them. This is the war on the home-front, detectives, and it’s every bit as serious as the shooting war.”

  “Your part in this war, as highly trained, highly decorated detectives, will be to use snitches, arrest-trails and seized evidence to track down higher-level suppliers, the ones who get the dealers their goods. And then Social Harmony wants you to get their suppliers, and so on, up the chain—to run the corruption to ground and to bring it to a halt. The Social Harmony dossier on Eurasian importers is updated hourly, and has a high-capacity positronic interface that is available to answer your questions and accept your input for synthesis into its analytical model. We are relying on you to feed the dossier, to give it the raw materials and then to use it to win this war.”

  The Social Harmony man paged through more atrocity slides, scenes from the home-front: poisoned buildings with berserk life-support systems, violent kung-fu movies playing in the background in crack-houses, then kids playing sexually explicit, violent arcade games imported from Japan. Arturo’s hand twitched toward his mobile. What was Ada up to now?

  The meeting drew to a close and Arturo risked looking at his mobile under the table. R. Peed Robbert had checked in five more times, shadowing Ada around the mall and then had fallen silent. Arturo cursed. Fucking robots were useless. Social Harmony should be hunting down UNATS Robotics products, too.

  The Social Harmony man cleared his throat meaningfully. Arturo put the phone away. “Detective Icaza de Arana-Goldberg?”

  “Sir,” he said, gathering up his personal computer so that he’d have an excuse to go—no one could be expected to hold one of UNATS Robotics’s heavy luggables for very long.

  The Social Harmony man stepped in close enough that Arturo could smell the eggs and coffee on his breath. “I hope we haven’t kept you from anything important, detective.”

  “No, sir,” Arturo said, shifting the computer in his arms. “My apologies. Just monitoring a tail from an R Peed unit.”

  “I see,” the Social Harmony man said. “Listen, you know these components that the Eurasians are turning out. It’s no coincidence that they interface so well with UNATS Robotics equipment: they’re using defected UNATS Robotics engineers and scientists to design their electronics for maximum interoperability.” The Social Harmony man let that hang in the air. Defected scientists. His ex-wife was the highest-ranking UNATS technician to go over to Eurasia. This was her handiwork, and the Social Harmony man wanted to be sure that Arturo understood that.

  But Arturo had already figured that out during the briefing. His ex-wife was thousands of kilometers away, but he was keenly aware that he was always surrounded by her handiwork. The little illegal robot-pet eggs they’d started seeing last year: she’d made him one of those for their second date, and now they were draining the productive hours of half the children of UNATS, demanding to be “fed” and “hugged.” His had died within 48 hours of her giving it to him.

  He shifted the computer in his arms some more and let his expression grow pained. “I’ll keep that in mind, sir,” he said.

  “You do that,” said the man from Social Harmony.

  * * * *

  He phoned R Peed Robbert the second he reached his desk. The phone rang three times, then disconnected. He redialed. Twice. Then he grabbed his jacket and ran to the car.

  A light autumn rain had started up, ending the Indian summer that Toronto—the Fourth Prefecture in the new metric scheme—had been enjoying. It made the roads slippery and the UNATS Robotics chauffeur skittish about putting the hammer down on the Don Valley Parkway. He idly fantasized about finding a set-top box and plugging it into his car somehow so that he could take over the driving without alerting his superiors.

  Instead, he redialed R Peed Robbert, but the robot wasn’t even ringing any longer. He zoomed in on the area around Sheppard and Don Mills with his phone and put out a general call for robots. More robots.

  “This is R Peed Froderick, Fairview Mall parking lot, third level.”

  Arturo sent the robot R Peed Robbert’s phone number and set it to work translating that into a locator-beacon code and then told it to find Robbert and report in.

  “It is my—”

  He watched R Peed Froderick home in on the locator for Robbert, which was close by, at the other end of the mall, near the Don Valley Parkway exit. He switched to a view from Froderick’s electric eyes, but quickly switched away, nauseated by the sickening leaps and spins of an R Peed moving at top speed, clanging off walls and ceilings.

  His phone rang. It was R Peed Froderick.

  “Hello, Detective. I have found R Peed Robbert. The Peed unit has been badly damaged by some kind of electromagnetic pulse. I will bring him to the nearest station-house for forensic analysis now.”

  “Wait!” Arturo said, trying to understand what he’d been told. The Peed units were so efficient—by the time they’d given you the sitrep, they’d already responded to the situation in perfect police procedure, but the problem was they worked so fast you couldn’t even think about what they were doing, couldn’t formulate any kind of hypothesis. Electromagnetic pulse? The Peed units were hardened against snooping, sniffing, pulsing, sideband and brute-force attacks. You’d have to hit one with a bolt of lightning to kill it.

  “Wait there,” Arturo said. “Do not leave the scene. Await my presence. Do not modify the scene or allow anyone else to do so. Acknowledge.”

  “It is my—”

  But this time, it wasn’t Arturo switching off the phone, it was the robot. Had the robot just hung up on him? He redialed it. No answer.

  He reached under his dash and flipped the first and second alert switches and the car leapt forward. He’d have to fill out some serious paperwork to justify a two-switch override on the Parkway, but two robots was more than a coincidence.

  Besides, a little paperwork was nothing compared to the fireworks ahead when he phoned up Ada to ask her what she was doing out of school.

  He hit her speed-dial and fumed while the phone rang three times. Then it cut into voicemail.

  He tried a pen-trace, but Ada hadn’t made any calls since her ExcuseClub call that morning. He texted the phreak squad to see if they could get a fix on her location from the bug in her phone, but it was either powered down or out of range. He put a watch on it—any location data it transmitted when it got back to civilization would be logged.

  It was possible that she was just in the mall. It was a big place—some of the cavernous stores were so well-shielded with radio-noisy animated displays that they gonked any phones brought inside them.
She could be with her girlfriends, trying on brassieres and having a real bonding moment.

  But there was no naturally occurring phenomenon associated with the mall that nailed R Peeds with bolts of lightning.

  * * * *

  He approached the R Peeds cautiously, using his copper’s override to make the dumb little positronic brain in the emergency exit nearest their last known position open up for him without tipping off the building’s central brain.

  He crept along a service corridor, heading for a door that exited into the mall. He put one hand on the doorknob and the other on his badge, took a deep breath and stepped out.

  A mall security guard nearly jumped out of his skin as he emerged. He reached for his pepper-spray and Arturo swept it out of his hand as he flipped his badge up and showed it to the man. “Police,” said, in the cop-voice, the one that worked on everyone except his daughter and his ex-wife and the bloody robots.

  “Sorry,” the guard said, recovering his pepper spray. He had an Oceanic twang in his voice, something Arturo had been hearing more and more as the crowded islands of the South Pacific boiled over UNATS.

  Before them, in a pile, were many dead robots: both of the R Peed units, a pair of mall-sweepers, a flying cambot, and a squat, octopus-armed maintenance robot, lying in a lifeless tangle. Some of them were charred around their seams, and there was the smell of fried motherboards in the air.

  As they watched, a sweeper bot swept forward and grabbed the maintenance bot by one of its fine manipulators.

  “Oi, stoppit,” the security guard said, and the robot second-lawed to an immediate halt.

  “No, that’s fine, go back to work,” Arturo said, shooting a look at the rent-a-cop. He watched closely as the sweeper bot began to drag the heavy maintenance unit away, thumbing the backup number into his phone with one hand. He wanted more cops on the scene, real ones, and fast.