Hydrogen Steel

by K. A. Bedford

  Where I used to work, in the grimy, cheap parts of Winter City, nobody could afford this kind of heroic medical intervention, even if they had managed to put aside enough spare money to pay for health insurance. For these people death was not optional, and was indeed something from which the victim did not generally recover. It was the same for the great majority of under-resourced and under-developed colonies and settlements across human space. On those worlds, interstellar politics and economics, plus the wrenching turmoil left over from macro-scale events like the arrival of the Silent, meant that death from water and insect-borne disease was only too familiar. Living in a place like Serendipity, with access to such magical services, it was hard to escape a deep, rumbling sense of guilt, particularly when you looked at your newsfeeds each day and you saw distant worlds where dusty, wretched people were dying from illnesses that you thought had long been eradicated. Or, worse, where people were fighting to the death over limited clean water supplies.

  For all the lavish money spent on medical services here at Serendipity, the morgue was little more than a series of small, clean-smelling rooms, including one for postmortem examinations, and a few others containing pathological analysis hardware.

  I couldn’t help but think about the very different morgue in the basement of Winter City’s Our Lady of Suffering Hospital, a much bigger, noisier, bustling sort of place. If you added up all the hours I’d spent there, even to the point of sometimes having to sit and eat my dinner while the pathologists went about their business only a few meters away, I think you’d find that I’d spent whole years of my life there. And I never got used to the smells.

  The worst part of the place was the big refrigerated mass storage room out the back, with the racks upon racks of wrapped bodies awaiting processing, and more arriving by the hour. Even in the cold room, there remained a very disturbing smell of meat going bad as well as a strong reek of harsh antiseptic. Winter City, as I’ve said, was the kind of place where people appeared to like killing each other.

  Here on Serendipity however, it was a different story. We’d been standing around in the scrupulously clean-smelling lobby for ten minutes and still hadn’t attracted anyone’s attention. I located a map of the morgue complex and led Gideon to the Senior Examiner’s office. The office was a mess. The desk was strewn with sheets of Active Paper displaying administrative records, pathology journals featuring grotesque illustrations, staff scheduling calendars, and other stuff too buried to see properly. The dedicated beverage and snack fab unit in the corner looked old and mistreated.

  A male disposable receptionist drone, the owner-logo on his temple bearing the seal of the SerendipityMed Corporation, sat motionless at the desk in surgical blues, staring into space, until he suddenly registered our presence. He abruptly stirred into activity and said, his eyes showing no trace of anything much: “Dr. Song is busy. She is doing an examination in Room Three. She will get to your request tomorrow. Please leave a message.” His eyes changed suddenly, and became animated, and he stared at Gideon and me in turn, smiling and looking unpleasantly like a puppy who knows someone’s got a biscuit.

  Gideon walked up to this disposable and stuck his hand out, inviting the disposable to shake it. As they shook hands, Gideon said, “I’m Dr. Gideon Smith and this is my colleague, Dr. McGee. Dr. Song knows us. We’re just going to stop by and say hello, okay?”

  The disposable sat still for a moment, staring. He was so still it was creepy. Suddenly he said, brightly, “That should be fine, Dr. Smith. Hope to see you and Dr. McGee again!”

  As we left in search of Room Three, I said, “Another secret of the mystic East, Smith?”

  “Lots to learn in the mystic East, McGee. Lots to learn.” He grinned.

  As expected, we found Dr. Song in Room Three, examining charred fragments of bone and flesh. The whole room stank of charred meat, smoke and harsh chemicals, which I quickly recognized as burned fluorogen dioxide residue. Fluorogen, as I knew too well from my experience with a certain type of arson-related homicide cases, was a common but powerful explosive. It was relatively easy — though illegal — to customize a standard household fab into a bench-top fluorogen factory. Major criminals and terrorists swore by it.

  Dr. Song, a young woman who looked old and worn out before her time, was muttering her case-notes under her breath for her headware to record. She looked up from the exam table as we entered. “Who the hell are you?”

  I didn’t think Gideon could sort this out with the ancient secrets of the mystic East. “Dr. Song. My name is Zette McGee, I’m a retired homicide cop. I just need to know if you have identified the remains yet,” I said, coming forward to look.

  I had to see the remains for myself, such as they were. There was a foot and part of a leg. Torn, charred shreds of guts and torso were laid out in the center of the table. The head was mostly intact, but had been broken and mutilated in the blast. Most of both arms and hands were present. Not all the fingers were there.

  The smell was bad.

  Dr. Song was coming around the table now. “I don’t care who you are,” she said. “Get the hell out of here this minute. I’m calling security!”

  Within a matter of minutes two big black-clad disposable Security guards showed up, their bald heads gleaming in the bright overhead lights. I’d seen Security goons like these guys before — they were a very popular model with a wide range of personnel-control applications. They also smelled like organic chemicals; I assumed they’d been cooked up in the last twelve hours. “Little problem, doc?” one of them asked.

  “These civilians are trespassing,” the doctor said, looking angry but also shaken and pale.

  “We’re investigating the death of a man named Kell Fallow,” I said tersely.

  “Where’s your warrant?” the second Security guard asked.

  “The paperwork’s been held up. Some stuff-up with Division. You know how it is.” I hoped this bluff would buy us a moment.

  Gideon stepped forward to shake the hand of one of the Security guys. “You boys are doing a marvelous job, I just thought you should know that. I mean, look how fast you responded to Dr. Song’s call. That was impressive, that was. And, by the way, Inspector McGee here is on a special consultative secondment from the Winter City Police Service to the Serendipity Police Service. I’m her assistant, Detective Sergeant Smith. I’m sure you’ll find everything checks out.” He let go of the guard’s hand and looked up at the unit’s face.

  Dr. Song was livid but I knew Gideon was working his mystic East magic again.

  The guards looked at her. “It all checks out, doc. Their papers have just been held up. Happens all the time.”

  “If you were really with the police, why didn’t you come in showing your badge?” she asked, arms folded, not buying anything.

  I tried to mollify her. I knew a few things about having too much to do and no time to do it in. “I appreciate that you’re busy, Doctor. But we just need five minutes of your time and then we’re gone. That’s all we need, just five minutes.”

  Dr. Song sighed in resignation, sensing that I wasn’t about to leave anytime soon, then wearily dismissed the guards, rubbing the muscles in the back of her neck. “What do you need to know?” she said grudgingly.

  “Thank you, Doctor. You have no idea how—”

  “The clock’s ticking, Inspector.”

  “Have you ID’d the victim?” I said.

  “Only to the extent that we know he was a disposable-type android.”

  “How can you tell?” said Gideon. He was looking at the charred remains, which seemed all too human, and all too fragile.

  Dr. Song looked annoyed. “When we can’t tell whether the remains are human or android, we run mitochondrial DNA studies.”

  “What did you get from this one?” I asked, nodding. The procedure sounded similar to that used in Winter City.


  “The nanofacturers database shows he was a Genotech Michael, version 3.0.,” she said.

  I wasn’t sure if this was a surprise or not. “A version 3.0? Just a regular production model?”

  “I would appreciate it, Inspector, if you would not interrupt.”

  “Sorry,” I said, rolling my eyes. “What about the bomb?”

  “He was carrying the bomb.”

  I started thinking about suicide bombers. Why would Fallow do that? More to the point, why did he register as just a regular production model? Was he really “awake” and on the run, like he’d told me; or was he a programmed pawn, like Gideon thought? It ate at me. My mind shifted back to the matter at hand. “So he was carrying the bomb in a case or—”

  She interrupted me this time. “No. Inside his body. Abdominal cavity. We’ve found most of the debris.”

  I stopped cold and stared at the blasted fragments of the body. “Inside?”

  “It might have been embedded during nanofacture, connected to his spinal cord, and up to his headware,” the doctor said.

  Gideon ably filled in the gap left by my stunned silence. “Anything about the cargo container?”

  “You’ll have to talk to your buddies in the Service. Which won’t be a problem, eh?”

  “Why would there be a bomb inside him?” I said, my voice barely audible.

  “God only knows,” said Song. “He never had a chance.”

  Recovering myself, I asked for a copy of the victim’s DNA scan. The doctor gave me more grief about how we’d better make sure our paperwork checked out by morning, but gave me a copy of the DNA analysis anyway. Anything to get us out of her hair.

  “Anyway,” she said. “It’s only a disposable. What’s the big deal?” She discreetly yawned behind her hand.

  “Just procedure,” I said, feeling cold all over at what the doctor said. “Ruling stuff out.”

  She went back to work without giving us so much as a second glance.

  We went out into the hallway.

  “Are you okay, McGee?” Gideon said. “You’ve gone rather pale.”

  “I’m fine,” I lied, and was very nearly sick all over him. “Oh God…”

  It was going to be a very long day.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Who the hell plants a bomb in a bloody disposable?” I said.

  “We’ll talk to the local cops,” said Gideon. “Perhaps see about getting you some kind of accreditation. We can’t go about scamming everybody for information.”

  I nodded, hardly hearing a word he said. All I could think about was the idea that Kell Fallow might very well have been a Genotech Michael unit, and that when he was made somebody had planted a bomb in him.

  Why was that? Why would these companies make advanced units but not make it public? I was living evidence that disposable androids could be made who were — as far as anybody could tell — indistinguishable from ordinary people. Why hide something like that?

  Then there was the other, even more troubling, question: Was there a bomb deep in my guts?

  The thought haunted me. We were sitting in a hov-taxi that smelled like bad food, flying over the night-draped gleam of Serendipity City, headed for Police Headquarters. I wondered if I could get away with poking at my own ample belly without Gideon noticing something odd. It felt like every cell in my machine-made body wanted to know if there was anything odd or suspicious deep in my guts. Thinking back, it occurred to me that surely by this point in my life I would have noticed something stuck in there. I could remember having numerous medical examinations over the years, I could even recall embarrassing visits to the gynaecologists; lots of doctors had palpated and scrutinized my abdomen without apparently noticing something odd and asking me, “Ms. McGee, is there any reason you’re aware of why you might have a bomb in your stomach?” In all cases, I’d come out with all the physicians thinking I was a perfectly normal female human.

  As well as these personal, physical exams, there had been various machine-scans, many of them measuring phenomena in my body at the quantum level, so you’d think either a whole bomb or the components of a bomb would show up under such unblinking and detailed scrutiny.

  From my current perspective, though — in which I had no idea when I’d moved from life in the Cytex Systems factory to life in the world — it occurred to me that since so much of my past was a lie, I could have a bomb in my guts and I might never even know. And who’s to say a bomb like that had to be a solid object? I had discovered the self-destruct switch in my headware, but who was to say there weren’t other types of explosives embedded in my disposable body? Nano-molecular devices could be circulating through my bloodstream, programmed to detonate on a timer, or with the push of a button.

  What if our victim had never known about his bomb? Surely he wouldn’t go to all that trouble to smuggle himself across human space in difficult conditions just so he could blow himself up on arrival. Right?

  And what was the point of exploding then, as the loader guys were opening the container? Why not sometime before? During the flight, perhaps? Though, when I thought about that, it occurred to me that the bomb going off during the flight might have damaged other containers and conceivably even the ship itself. It didn’t feel very convincing.

  One thing my career in homicide had taught me was that there was no upper limit on perversity, deviousness, or the amount of sheer time and energy an obsessive person or persons might be willing to spend in order to achieve a goal, no matter how irrational. The mind, once bent to its task, could be a frightening thing. I had to wonder, in light of all this, if I was caught up in such an obsessive construct — and wonder, too, how I might go about finding out if this was true.

  Meanwhile, I was starting to feel like the only way I would find out if there was a bomb inside me was if I got a knife and cut myself open to feel around in there for myself!

  “McGee?” said Gideon. “You’ve been a bit quiet. You sure you’re okay?”

  Startled, I jumped a bit in my seat. “Oh. Right. Sorry Smith. Just thinking about the case.”

  Glancing out the window, I saw the flattened blue dome of the Police HQ, and the big hov-port and autolander arrays on the roof.

  Gideon nodded. “Me, too. It occurs to me that what happened to our victim, the poor wretch, is something that you don’t normally see outside the realm of terrorism.”

  I swore, thinking about that. He was right. “Could be. What are you thinking?”

  “Well,” he said, looking expansive and professorial — like a pompous git, in other words, “disposable androids and matter replication nano are a terrorist cell’s best friends. Disposables have been used for a bewildering variety of nasty assignments, with and without their own awareness of what they were doing. It could be that our victim, whether or not he was Kell Fallow — and the idea that Mr. Fallow was a disposable with the willpower to travel in difficult circumstances in order to see you is still something very thought-provoking indeed — was being used as a means of smuggling a bomb into the habitat. It might well have detonated accidentally. Perhaps it was intended that Fallow should place himself somewhere around the habitat where a small bomb might do considerable damage — communication arrays, for example, or the environment processor stations.”

  I thought about that. It was certainly possible. More worrying was that Gideon was still thinking about the issue of how Kell Fallow could be a disposable and be sufficiently self-possessed to execute a plan to smuggle himself across human space to this habitat. Gideon was going to ruminate on that until he figured it out. Damn.

  “I’ll tell you one thing that’s bothered me,” I said. “I’m wondering if there are other people or forces involved.” I suggested this partly because I thought there was merit to the idea, but also because it would deflect Gideon from thinking too much about brainy, s
elf-directed disposables.

  For someone who’d spent a lifetime searching for the truth in murky circumstances, the subterfuge was beginning to get to me.

  “It’s possible. Someone with the bomb’s trigger, perhaps,” said Gideon.

  “Though you would still have to wonder why this trigger-guy set off the bomb on the dock like that.”

  “It would also be helpful to know how long ago our victim was built,” said Gideon, as we watched the lights of the hov-port autolander array as they appeared to come up to meet us.

  “The DNA analysis might have something on that.” I wondered if a similar analysis on me would give a truthful estimate of my age. It made me wonder again just when I’d been released from the simulator and into the real world. It was maddening having to second-guess every thought and memory like this.

  We landed hard. Gideon paid for the ride, but didn’t give the bot-driver a tip. When the driver protested, as we climbed out, Gideon told the bot off and suggested it upgrade its piloting software. It said something rude I didn’t catch, and took off sooner than was strictly legal, while we were still in range of the hov’s burning hot thruster-wash. The stink of burned fuel was hard to take.