If they find him, he thought, taking another sip from the flask.
The lab boss and his forensics team arrived in a small carrier shortly after. “This is your second instance of breaking and entering today,” Stein said as he emerged and his minions scattered about him.
“It is.”
“Smoking is illegal,” Stein said.
“It is,” Hammell said. He’d finished smoking, but he supposed the smell lingered.
“So you heard screams, is that right?”
“Correct.”
“And now you want us to check out a possible dried blood stain. That was quick, wasn’t it?”
“This is Dave Toskan’s house,” Hammell said as he hopped down from the wall.
Stein had nothing to say to that so Hammell set off down the street. After an hour or so of searching in the pouring rain, he came to the conclusion that he hadn’t found his car after all.
The nat smelled of damp and mould; disgusting, but a distinct step up from the last one. He directed it through the streets almost aimlessly. It was steadfastly refusing to fly unless he gave it an address which was sufficiently distant to justify the energy expenditure and Hammell couldn’t be bothered to think of one. He considered finding a bar, but Eva’s performance had forever ruined the Hoola for him and going back to The Happy Trout probably wasn’t a great idea either. It was deserted now anyway, at least according to Providence. He wondered whether he should just go home and wait out the weekend. It was probably not a good idea to start drinking properly this late, even without work in the morning.
The nat was getting restless, asking him repeatedly for confirmation of his final destination. He had to make a decision soon or he would be ejected.
Digging around in his pocket for another of Arthur’s rapidly disappearing cigarettes, he placed one in his mouth and a huge no-smoking sign appeared on the windscreen. “I’m not smoking,” Hammell said, but it was pointless arguing with a vehicle. Fingering the matchbook in his pocket, he considered whether to have the nat drop him here, anywhere, so he could smoke. Maybe there was a bar nearby. He could take a chance. If only it wasn’t raining so hard.
He felt something else beside the matchbook and pulled it out, finding the calling card from the woman in The Happy Trout. Written in the corner was the name of an agency: Passions Escorts. The pixellated logo and grammatically incorrect name probably meant it was a small outfit, but the woman in the bar had implied they had a legitimate presence in the city, and his implant confirmed it.
The nat asked again for the final destination, mentioning that it could not be used as a place to shelter as it displayed the address of a waystation where the homeless were taken before being shipped XS. Cheeky fucker, Hammell thought, before giving the nat an address and assuring it that it was his final destination.
The nat instantly took to the air and Hammell smiled to himself. It linked into a chain and he found himself facing a couple of kids, a boy and a girl, maybe around four or five years old. They waved to him through the glass and he waved back before their parents pulled them away and darkened their windows. Another nat latched on beside him, containing a young woman who was exercising. He guessed she was probably on her way home from work and was making the most of the journey. She was clearly not shy - all the lights were on inside as she was doing squats. Dragging his eyes away, he made the call.
The face that popped up on the panel screen was that of an attractive middle-aged woman. "Hello, Passions," came the seductive voice. “What can I do for you?”
"I, err…” Hammell stumbled. “I… need someone."
"Doesn’t everyone?" the woman replied. “What kind of someone?”
He cleared his throat. "Female.”
“You can be a little more specific than that, my love.”
Hammell licked his lips and shifted in his seat. “Dark hair. Pale skin. Thin. Red… Red lipstick. Sequins, maybe… Like a nightclub singer."
“I know just the girl,” the woman said and a 3D video popped up of a slender young woman dancing around wearing nothing but red lacy underwear. “This is Sam. I call her Sweet Scented Samantha. She performs sometimes in cabaret. Would she do?”
Hammell nodded. His voice came out thick. “Yes. She’s fine.”
The woman looked down as she made a note. “Would you like to book a home visit, or will you be visiting us here?”
“I’m coming there,” Hammell said. “Is she available now?”
“In about… forty-five minutes.”
“Ok.”
“And,” the woman said delicately, “how will you be paying?”
Interesting question, Hammell thought. There was only one way in the city. “Coefficient.”
“No problem. What’s your omni?”
Hammell gave his account details - and the woman's face changed suddenly. “How did you get this number?" she asked.
“Wait,” he said. “You don’t need to-”
“Our operation is legal,” she said quickly. “You can check our licence. It’s all in order.”
“It’s ok,” he tried. “I’m not with the police… Well, I am, but-”
The woman had already hung up.
"Fantastic," Hammell said to himself as he screwed up the card and stuffed it back into his pocket. "I can't even get laid in a brothel."
Chapter 16
By the time the sky began to lighten, his brain felt like it was burning, he was so tired. He knew he should pop a pill to make him pass out - his usual method of getting through the weekends - but he didn’t want to leave his new newsreader until he’d got her just right. The image was good but the voice was off. He hadn’t obtained a large enough sample for a full replication. He’d spent the last two hours tweaking the options, but he just couldn’t get it right. There was a knowingness, an intelligence behind the words that the software just couldn’t replicate.
He gave up for a while to watch for the sunrise – no luck again today – and then walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge. He stared into it for a full minute before heading back to the sofa empty handed. The cat hadn’t bothered moving from her chair, as if she’d known he wasn’t serious. As he slumped back down, he glanced over at the plastic boxes stacked in a vacant corner: Toskan’s things, which he’d had delivered here for safekeeping. Even with Providence, it wasn’t safe to leave valuable possessions in a disused house. Eventually someone would figure out that the owners weren’t coming back, and nobody got caught if no-one was there to report the crime.
His eyes landed on a big black box. He genuinely hadn’t told the removal androids to leave Toskan’s sexulator out. They’d even offered to set it up for him, the presumptuous so-and-sos.
Turning back to his skywall, he listened to the model of Eva as she told him what was going on in the world and beyond. In a way, she was probably better than the real thing, he decided. Ok, she was incorporeal, but she was utterly subservient, could be switched off at a moment’s notice, and she wasn’t part of a criminal gang known for murdering police officers. He glanced down at the black box again. She didn’t even have to be incorporeal now. Thanks to Toskan, his projections could now have substance. They could touch things. He could touch them.
The removal androids had tried to explain how the sexulator worked as they’d installed it. It used magnetic fields, or something of that nature, to suspend fake matter wherever a human might come into contact with it. It could replicate the feel of all kinds of materials, from water to wind to human flesh and could actually be used for a lot more than sex, they’d advised, though humans predominantly wanted it for that, for reasons which perplexed them. There were cheaper versions on the market which were just suits, and even cheaper ones still which were just groinal attachments and goggles, but Toskan had gone all in. It had been quite an effort for the androids to extricate it from his former partner’s apartment and get it over here to protect it. Toskan will really owe me for this, he thought to himself, before turning back to Eva 2.0, a
s he’d decided to name her. Above her head to the right, a tiny red letter ‘S’ was hovering which hadn’t been there before.
“Fuck it,” he said as he reached out and jabbed a finger towards it and his newsreader slowly faded away as the room darkened - the machine had its tendrils in all of his apartment’s systems. A floating solid block appeared before him in the dim light, asking him to create a profile or sign in, the words seemingly stitched into solid leather blocks suspended in the air in front of him. He reached out to tap the ‘Sign-in’ block, suspecting it would be faster to crack Toskan’s password than to make a new profile. Knowing what to expect, he was still surprised when his finger made contact with the block, which felt just like it looked - padded leather and heavy.
Dave really bought a high quality machine here, he thought as he tried all the usual passwords, surprised to find that none of them worked. “Of all the things you need to protect,” he said aloud, “this is the one with the uncrackable password?” Not his house alarm or bank details or police sign-in codes – no, his sex machine. It made Hammell wonder what dirty little fantasies he had that were so bad he had to secure them away.
Scrolling back to find the option to create a new profile, he spotted that Meera had one too. "And he always claimed you were so prim and proper,” Hammell said as he smiled to himself, before realising that he’d thought about his friend in the past tense. He quickly shooed the thought away - wondering whether his best friend had been murdered was a surefire mood killer.
Unlike Toskan’s profile, Meera’s had no password, so he slapped the box to sign in and a well-dressed businesslike woman appeared in front of him. Like Eva 2.0, she was an A.I. with a basic level of intelligence. A wide open field gradually appeared behind her and Hammell realised that the system was also making use of his iEye as well as his skywall to improve its projections. From his perspective, his living room had vanished. He could even feel a cool breeze on his face. It took him a moment to make the mental adjustment.
"Welcome," the woman said. "You seem anxious. Try to relax - there’s no reason to be nervous. You can exit whenever you wish by saying your chosen safe word or clapping your hands twice.”
“I’m not nervous,” Hammell lied.
“Then, if you are ready, please choose an option from the list in front of you."
The woman and the field faded away to blackness and a set of wooden blocks popped up. He patted the first box upwards to scroll through various role playing fantasies until he happened upon one called 'Naughty Schoolgirl Threeway'. Without too much soul searching - it surely couldn’t be wrong if they weren’t real schoolgirls - he selected it and the blocks dissolved into darkness again. After a few seconds the light gradually increased and he found himself sitting in an old style classroom. He smiled at the illusion. It was perfect, right down to the cheap plastic chairs and dusty blackboard. The sofa he was sitting on didn’t even look out of place. The software had accounted for the layout of his living room in the design. It was very impressive stuff.
The door of the classroom opened and Hammell stood up, his anticipation building, but excitement turned to confusion as two men dressed in old style black robes came striding in.
"Mr Thompson here tells me you’ve been naughty," the elder of the two said as he raised a wooden paddle.
“What?” Hammell asked, before it dawned on him: Meera’s profile. He was the schoolgirl.
He tried to recall how to exit the program and his implant reminded him: Say the safe word, which he didn’t know, or clap twice. He clapped once, but before his hands connected again, the younger of the two men caught his arm and started trying to bend him over the teacher’s desk. “She’s been a very bad girl,” the younger man said.
“She hasn’t! She hasn’t!” Hammell exclaimed, fighting and failing to get his hand free. The soligram was frighteningly strong.
“Don’t worry,” the older man said, “we’ll soon beat that out of her,” and he brought the paddle down. Hard.
Hammell yelped and found additional strength in his outrage, tearing his hand free and clapping twice. The classroom faded instantly to black and his living room gradually appeared again. He found himself lying over the coffee table, trousers loose, as the cat stared at him from the chair. With an embarrassed cough, he quickly scrambled to his feet.
“That was less fun than I was expecting,” he said he rubbed at his sore backside, wondering how this must have looked from Kitty’s perspective. Unimpressed, she yawned and went back to sleep, and Hammell decided he should probably follow her lead. Instructing the sexulator to close down, he trudged off to pop enough pills to sleep through to Sunday.
Chapter 17
Even though he’d napped most of the day, he was in a rare deep sleep when the bomb went off. The sudden noise made him fall out of bed as pictures tumbled from his bedroom wall and his floor-to-ceiling windows wobbled ominously. Eyes wide as dinner plates, he fought his way out of the bedsheets and sprinted into the living room to scan the cityscape. The sky was hazy, the buildings were bright with lights, but still the fireball stood out.
An alert popped up in his implant and he opened it. There was no ambiguity in the description. Providence stated that a terrorist attack was underway at the eastern vertical farm. His iEye zoomed in as the explosion faded to grey smoke, and he could see within it the burning remains of the megastructure near the Reserves. The Red King is making a move.
Running off to find some clothes, he grabbed half a cup of coffee before the machine had finished brewing it, then jogged down all thirty four flights of stairs to find a policenat outside waiting for him. Within five minutes of opening his eyes, he was careening across the skyline, siren blaring, red and blue lights filling the sky as they reflected off the cloud layer above. All around he could see the lights from other emergency vehicles glowing in the dense air as they converged on the growing pillar of black smoke.
The tower was burning furiously when he arrived, the smoke combining with the fog to reduce visibility to near zero. The dense pall grew brighter and more ominously red and for the first time Hammell began to question a nat’s ability to navigate. How could it know exactly where the fire was? What about its heat tolerances? Did it even have temperature sensors? If its intakes clogged up with smoke, would it drop like a stone? His implant did its best to answer all of his questions, but he was still nervous as the policenat slowed and the scene gradually emerged below him.
Rubbers had been first to arrive, as they should have been. Thousands of boxbots were cached in dozens of storage facilities around the city ready for just such an event, rare though giant explosions were. Dumbed down, blocky versions of standard police androids, the boxbots’ job was to rescue anyone trapped, provide basic first aid, and then secure the area. A group of them had already linked arms across the southern entrance, forming a temporary wall to keep out the general public until the main emergency services arrived. The ecotower was closed off anyway to the east and north where it bordered the Reservation Line, and it was blocked on the western side by a smaller building, which more rubbers were busy evacuating; the people emerging onto the street in their nightclothes to join the gathering crowd.
The first fire engines appeared suddenly, swooping in overhead to hover around the enormous building as they began blasting it with heavy foam. They were here before the ambulances and police carriers, but not before the journalists. Hammell could see the vultures already gathering around the rubber ring, jostling for position, as his policenat was waved in by an android coordinating ground traffic. A few stray rubbers came over to help, shooing the slower people out of the way to allow the nat to land without flattening anyone.
The moment it touched down, Hammell was out - and the heat hit him like a slap in the face. A battle began between his pores and the fire, as the former tried to soak his shirt and the latter tried to dry it. If I stay here too long I’ll be desiccated. Shoving his way through the crowd, he headed for the rubber ring, where he fou
nd the Android In Charge - a more advanced, less brick-like model.
“Is anyone still inside?” Hammell asked.
“I.A. Hammell?” the A.I.C. asked. “Your face scan does not match your beacon resp-”
“I had cosmetic surgery,” Hammell said as he touched his bruised face. “The homemade variety.” He held out his hand for an additional check and allowed his retina to be scanned.
“We do not know how many people were in the building,” the android said when it was satisfied about his identity. “The probability of anyone escaping now is very low.”
The android was probably right, he thought as he stared up at the burning structure. Why would Roy Brown want to blow up a vertical farm? he thought, but even his implant didn’t attempt an answer. Stepping past the A.I.C., he headed for the megastructure and came up against the android wall. “Move,” he said as he mopped at his glistening brow with a shirtsleeve.
“I am sorry, I.A. Hammell,” the A.I.C. said, “but the area beyond the temporary wall has been declared unsafe for people. Hoverbots are searching for survivors. There is nothing for you to do."
There never is. “That’s my decision,” he said. “Even as A.I.C., I outrank you.” And he wondered if it was true. Laws changed so rapidly now that it was impossible to keep up.
“Forgive me, but you are incorrect in this case," the android said. "The First Law of Robotics states that I am not permitted to allow a human to come to harm, either through action or inac-”
“Except," Hammell jumped in, finger raised, "you and I both know that humans can always come to harm through your action or inaction. You have no way of knowing for sure what will protect us and what will make things worse. All laws require interpretation. So tell the boxbots to move." Feeling assured in his argument – he had after all recently been on the losing side of this particular one – he reached out and tried to prise open the rubbers’ chunky arms.
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