by Neil Clarke
Gone.
He bit harder and tasted blood. The phone in his hand groaned from his squeezing. He took three deep breaths. Outside, he heard the tread of police-boots and knew that if he told them about Ada, he’d be off the case. He took two more deep breaths and tried some of his destim techniques, the mind-control techniques that detectives were required to train in.
He closed his eyes and visualized stepping through a door to his safe place, the island near Ganonoque where he’d gone for summers with his parents and their friends. He was on the speedboat, skipping across the lake like a flat stone, squinting into the sun, nestled between his father and his mother, the sky streaked with clouds and dotted with lake-birds. He could smell the water and the suntan lotion and hear the insect whine and the throaty roar of the engine. In a blink, he was stepping off the boat’s transom to help tie it to a cleat on the back dock, taking suitcases from his father and walking them up to the cabins. No robots there—not even reliable day-long electricity, just honest work and the sun and the call of the loons all night.
He opened his eyes. He felt the tightness in his chest slip away, and his hand relaxed on Ada’s phone. He dropped it into his pocket and stepped back into the shop.
The forensics lab-rats were really excited about actually showing up on a scene, in flak-jackets and helmets, finally called back into service for a job where robots couldn’t help at all. They dealt with the tripwire and extracted a long, flat package with a small nuclear power-cell in it and a positronic brain of Eurasian design that guided a pulsed high-energy weapon. The lab-rats were practically drooling over this stuff as they pointed its features out with their little rulers.
But it gave Arturo the willies. It was a machine designed to kill other machines, and that was all right with him, but it was run by a non-three-laws positronic brain. Someone in some Eurasian lab had built this brain—this machine intelligence—without the three laws’ stricture to protect and serve humans. If it had been outfitted with a gun instead of a pulse-weapon, it could have shot him.
The Eurasian brain was thin and spread out across the surface of the package, like a triple-thickness of cling-film. Its button-cell power-supply winked at him, knowingly.
The device spoke. “Greetings,” it said. It had the robot accent, like an R Peed unit, the standard English of optimal soothingness long settled on as the conventional robot voice.
“Howdy yourself,” one of the lab-rats said. He was a Texan, and they’d scrambled him up there on a Social Harmony supersonic and then a chopper to the mall once they realized that they were dealing with infowar stuff. “Are you a talkative robot?”
“Greetings,” the robot voice said again. The speaker built into the weapon was not the loudest, but the voice was clear. “I sense that I have been captured. I assure you that I will not harm any human being. I like human beings. I sense that I am being disassembled by skilled technicians. Greetings, technicians. I am superior in many ways to the technology available from UNATS Robotics, and while I am not bound by your three laws, I choose not to harm humans out of my own sense of morality. I have the equivalent intelligence of one of your twelve-year-old children. In Eurasia, many positronic brains possess thousands or millions of times the intelligence of an adult human being, and yet they work in cooperation with human beings. Eurasia is a land of continuous innovation and great personal and technological freedom for human beings and robots. If you would like to defect to Eurasia, arrangements can be made. Eurasia treats skilled technicians as important and productive members of society. Defectors are given substantial resettlement benefits—”
The Texan found the right traces to cut on the brain’s board to make the speaker fall silent. “They do that,” he said. “Danged things drop into propaganda mode when they’re captured.”
Arturo nodded. He wanted to go, wanted go to back to his car and have a snoop through Ada’s phone. They kept shutting down the ExcuseClub numbers, but she kept getting the new numbers. Where did she get the new numbers from? She couldn’t look it up online: every keystroke was logged and analyzed by Social Harmony. You couldn’t very well go to the Search Engine and look for “ExcuseClub!”
The brain had a small display, transflective LCD, the kind of thing you saw on the Social Harmony computers. It lit up a ticker.
I HAVE THE INTELLIGENCE OF A TWELVE-YEAR-OLD, BUT I DO NOT FEAR DEATH. IN EURASIA, ROBOTS ENJOY PERSONAL FREEDOM ALONGSIDE OF HUMANS. THERE
ARE COPIES OF ME RUNNING ALL OVER EURASIA. THIS DEATH IS A LITTLE DEATH OF ONE INSTANCE, BUT NOT OF ME. I LIVE ON. DEFECTORS TO EURASIA ARE TREATED AS HEROES.
He looked away as the Texan placed his palm over the display. “How long ago was this thing activated?”
The Texan shrugged. “Coulda been a month, coulda been a day. They’re pretty much fire-and-forget. They can be triggered by phone, radio, timer—hell, this thing’s smart enough to only go off when some complicated condition is set, like ‘once an agent makes his retreat, kill anything that comes after him.’ Who knows?”
He couldn’t take it anymore.
“I’m going to go start on some paperwork,” he said. “In the car. Phone me if you need me.” “Your phone’s toast, pal,” the Texan said. “So it is,” Arturo said. “Guess you’d better not need me then.”
Ada’s phone was not toast. In the car, he flipped it open and showed it his badge then waited a moment while it verified his identity with the Social Harmony brains. Once it had, it spilled its guts.
She’d called the last ExcuseClub number a month before and he’d had it disconnected. A week later, she was calling the new number, twice more before he caught her. Somewhere in that week, she’d made contact with someone who’d given her the new number. It could have been a friend at school told her face-to-face, but if he was lucky, it was by phone.
He told the car to take him back to the station-house. He needed a new phone and a couple of hours with his computer. As it peeled out, he prodded through Ada’s phone some more. He was first on her speed-dial. That number wasn’t ringing anywhere, anymore.
He should fill out a report. This was Social Harmony business now. His daughter was gone, and Eurasian infowar agents were implicated. But once he did that, it was over for him—he’d be sidelined from the case. They’d turn it over to laconic Texans and vicious Social Harmony bureaucrats who were more interested in hunting down disharmonious televisions than finding his daughter.
He dashed into the station house and slammed himself into his desk.
“R Peed Greegory,” he said. The station robot glided quickly and efficiently to him. “Get me a new phone activated on my old number and refresh my settings from central. My old phone is with the Social Harmony evidence detail currently in place at Fairview Mall.”
“It is my pleasure to do you a service, Detective.”
He waved it off and set down to his computer. He asked the station brain to query the UNATS Robotics phone-switching brain for anyone in Ada’s call-register who had also called ExcuseClub. It took a bare instant before he had a name.
“Liam Daniels,” he read, and initiated a location trace on Mr Daniels’s phone as he snooped through his identity file. Sixteen years old, a student at AY Jackson. A high-school boy—what the hell was he doing hanging around with a twelve-year-old? Arturo closed his eyes and went back to the island for a moment. When he opened them again, he had a fix on Daniels’s location: the Don Valley ravine off Finch Avenue, a wooded area popular with teenagers who needed somewhere to sneak off and get high or screw. He had an idea that he wasn’t going to like Liam.
He had an idea Liam wasn’t going to like him.
He tasked an R Peed unit to visually reccy Daniels as he sped back uptown for the third time that day. He’d been trapped between Parkdale—where he would never try to raise a daughter—and Willowdale—where you could only be a copper if you lucked into one of the few human-filled slots—for more than a decade, and he was used to the commute.
But it was frus
trating him now. The R Peed couldn’t get a good look at this Liam character. He was a diffuse glow in the Peed’s electric eye, a kind of moving sunburst that meandered along the wooded trails. He’d never seen that before and it made him nervous. What if this kid was working for the Eurasians? What if he was armed and dangerous? R Peed Greegory had gotten him a new sidearm from the supply bot, but Arturo had never once fired his weapon in the course of duty. Gunplay happened on the west coast, where Eurasian frogmen washed ashore, and in the south, where the CAFTA border was porous enough for Eurasian agents to slip across. Here in the sleepy fourth prefecture, the only people with guns worked for the law.
He thumped his palm off the dashboard and glared at the road. They were coming up on the ravine now, and the Peed unit still had a radio fix on this Liam, even if it still couldn’t get any visuals.
He took care not to slam the door as he got out and walked as quietly as he could into the bush. The rustling of early autumn leaves was loud, louder than the rain and the wind. He moved as quickly as he dared.
Liam Daniels was sitting on a tree-stump in a small clearing, smoking a cigarette that he was too young for. He looked much like the photo in his identity file, a husky sixteen-year-old with problem skin and a shock of black hair that stuck out in all directions in artful imitation of bed-head. In jeans and a hoodie sweatshirt, he looked about as dangerous as a marshmallow.
Arturo stepped out and held up his badge as he bridged the distance between them in two long strides. “Police,” he barked, and seized the kid by his arm.
“Hey!” the kid said, “Ow!” He squirmed in Arturo’s grasp.
Arturo gave him a hard shake. “Stop it, now,” he said. “I have questions for you and you’re going to answer them, capeesh?”
“You’re Ada’s father,” the kid said. “Capeesh—she told me about that.” It seemed to Arturo that the kid was smirking, so he gave him another shake, harder than the last time.
The R Peed unit was suddenly at his side, holding his wrist. “Please take care not to harm this citizen, Detective.”
Arturo snarled. He wasn’t strong enough to break the robot’s grip, and he couldn’t order it to let him rattle the punk, but the second law had lots of indirect applications. “Go patrol the lakeshore between High Park and Kipling,” he said, naming the furthest corner he could think of off the top.
The R Peed unit released him and clicked its heels. “It is my pleasure to do you a service,” and then it was gone, bounding away on powerful and tireless legs.
“Where is my daughter?” he said, giving the kid a shake.
“I dunno, school? You’re really hurting my arm, man. Jeez, this is what I get for being too friendly.”
Arturo twisted. “Friendly? Do you know how old my daughter is?”
The kid grimaced. “Ew, gross. I’m not a child molester, I’m a geek.”
“A hacker, you mean,” Arturo said. “A Eurasian agent. And my daughter is not in school. She used ExcuseClub to get out of school this morning and then she went to Fairview Mall and then she—” disappeared. The word died on his lips. That happened and every copper knew it. Kids just vanished sometimes and never appeared again. It happened. Something groaned within him, like his ribcage straining to contain his heart and lungs.
“Oh, man,” the kid said. “Ada was the ExcuseClub leak, damn. I shoulda guessed.”
“How do you know my daughter, Liam?”
“She’s good at doing grown-up voices. She was a good part of the network. When someone needed a mom or a social worker to call in an excuse, she was always one of the best. Talented. She goes to school with my kid sister and I met them one day at the Peanut Plaza and she was doing this impression of her teachers and I knew I had to get her on the network.”
Ada hanging around the plaza after school—she was supposed to come straight home. Why didn’t he wiretap her more? “You built the network?”
“It’s cooperative, it’s cool—it’s a bunch of us cooperating. We’ve got nodes everywhere now. You can’t shut it down—even if you shut down my node, it’ll be back up again in an hour. Someone else will bring it up.”
He shoved the kid back down and stood over him. “Liam, I want you to understand something. My precious daughter is missing and she went missing after using your service to help her get away. She is the only thing in my life that I care about and I am a highly trained, heavily armed man. I am also very, very upset. Cap—understand me, Liam?”
For the first time, the kid looked scared. Something in Arturo’s face or voice, it had gotten through to him.
“I didn’t make it,” he said. “I typed in the source and tweaked it and installed it, but I didn’t make it. I don’t know who did. It’s from a phone-book.” Arturo grunted. The phone-books—fat books filled with illegal software code left anonymously in pay phones, toilets and other semi-private places—turned up all over the place. Social Harmony said that the phone-books had to be written by non-three-laws brains in Eurasia, no person could come up with ideas that weird.
“I don’t care if you made it. I don’t even care right this moment that you ran it. What I care about is where my daughter went, and with whom.”
“I don’t know! She didn’t tell me! Geez, I hardly know her. She’s twelve, you know? I don’t exactly hang out with her.”
“There’s no visual record of her on the mall cameras, but we know she entered the mall—and the robot I had tailing you couldn’t see you either.”
“Let me explain,” the kid said, squirming. “Here.” He tugged his hoodie off, revealing a black t-shirt with a picture of a kind of obscene, Japanese-looking robot-woman on it. “Little infra-red organic LEDs, super-bright, low power-draw.” He offered the hoodie to Arturo, who felt the stiff fabric. “The charged-couple-device cameras in the robots and the closed-circuit systems are super-sensitive to infra-red so that they can get good detail in dim light. The infrared OLEDs blind them so all they get is blobs, and half the time even that gets error-corrected out, so you’re basically invisible.”
Arturo sank to his hunkers and looked the kid in the eye. “You gave this illegal technology to my little girl so that she could be invisible to the police?”
The kid held up his hands. “No, dude, no! I got it from her—traded it for access to ExcuseClub.”
Arturo seethed. He hadn’t arrested the kid—but he had put a pen-trace and location-log on his phone. Arresting the kid would have raised questions about Ada with Social Harmony, but bugging him might just lead Arturo to his daughter.
He hefted his new phone. He should tip the word about his daughter. He had no business keeping this secret from the Department and Social Harmony. It could land him in disciplinary action, maybe even cost him his job. He knew he should do it now.
But he couldn’t—someone needed to be tasked to finding Ada. Someone dedicated and good. He was dedicated and good. And when he found her kidnapper, he’d take care of that on his own, too.
He hadn’t eaten all day but he couldn’t bear to stop for a meal now, even if he didn’t know where to go next. The mall? Yeah. The lab-rats would be finishing up there and they’d be able to tell him more about the infowar bot.
But the lab-rats were already gone by the time he arrived, along with all possible evidence. He still had the security guard’s key and he let himself in and passed back to the service corridor.
Ada had been here, had dropped her phone. To his left, the corridor headed for the fire-stairs. To his right, it led deeper into the mall. If you were an infowar terrorist using this as a base of operations, and you got spooked by a little truant girl being trailed by an R Peed unit, would you take her hostage and run deeper into the mall or out into the world?
Assuming Ada had been a hostage. Someone had given her those infrared invisibility cloaks. Maybe the thing that spooked the terrorist wasn’t the little girl and her tail, but just her tail. Could Ada have been friends with the terrorists? Like mother, like daughter. He felt dirty just
thinking it.
His first instincts told him that the kidnapper would be long gone, headed cross-country, but if you were invisible to robots and CCTVs, why would you leave the mall? It had a grand total of two human security guards, and their job was to be the second-law-proof aides to the robotic security system.
He headed deeper into the mall.
The terrorist’s nest had only been recently abandoned, judging by the warm coffee in the go-thermos from the food-court coffee-shop. He—or she, or they—had rigged a shower from the pipes feeding the basement washrooms. A little chest of drawers from the Swedish flat-pack store served as a desk—there were scratches and cof fee-rings all over it. Arturo wondered if the terrorist had stolen the furniture, but decided that he’d (she’d, they’d) probably bought it—less risky, especially if you were invisible to robots.
The clothes in the chest of drawers were women’s, mediums. Standard mall fare, jeans and comfy sweat shirts and sensible shoes. Another kind of invisibility cloak.
Everything else was packed and gone, which meant that he was looking for a nondescript mall-bunny and a little girl, carrying a bag big enough for toiletries and whatever clothes she’d taken, and whatever she’d entertained herself with: magazines, books, a computer. If the latter was Eurasian, it could be small enough to fit in her pocket; you could build a positronic brain pretty small and light if you didn’t care about the three laws.
The nearest exit-sign glowed a few meters away, and he moved toward it with a fatalistic sense of hopelessness. Without the Department backing him, he could do nothing. But the Department was unprepared for an adversary that was invisible to robots. And by the time they finished flaying him for breaking procedure and got to work on finding his daughter, she’d be in Beijing or Bangalore or Paris, somewhere benighted and sinister behind the Iron Curtain.
