“Come on what?” I asked, but I had a fair idea. The man nodded toward the windshield, toward the rain and colored lights. Then he lifted the gun up and tapped it against my cheek twice. Don’t ask me why he did it, but after he did he smiled like he was pleased with himself and the dull metal-on-metal tapping sound his action made, then he nodded forward again.
“Just drive,” he said.
I started the engine and pulled out into the street and drove like the nice man with the gun said.
* * *
The man with the gun had relaxed a little by the time we’d driven all over town and back again. We weren’t lost. He knew where we were going, or at least he said he did. I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I figured either he was trying to shake a tail that I knew wasn’t there, or he was trying to make sure I couldn’t find my way back later to wherever we were going now. That wasn’t going to work, mostly because I’m a machine and I can remember lots of stuff that the guy with the gun probably couldn’t. And also because when we got to where we were going, I knew exactly where it was.
Playback Pictures, Hollywood, California. Any dumb schmuck with a positronic brain or a copy of the Los Angeles telephone directory could have found it, because it wasn’t hard to find. I lamented the waste of gas driving all over town for the last two hours, but the man with the gun didn’t look like he wanted to be interrupted, so I didn’t bring it up. We cruised past the main gates and down a side street, then through a smaller trade entrance that I’m pretty sure what supposed to have been locked up. It was getting late and the place was deserted. We pulled up in the middle of the parking lot and my mystery passenger sat there with the gun pointed at me and his nose pointed out the window on the passenger side. He was looking for something. Or someone.
On the way over, he’d relaxed. It was a long drive, after all. He managed to keep the gun on me most of the time, held below the dash to keep it out of sight.
In fact, he was more than relaxed. He was as chatty as a talk show host. I didn’t speak, but the less I said, the more he did, like he was compensating. Maybe that was how it worked. Maybe I should have been programmed to be a newspaper reporter, the way this guy was going on while I did nothing but keep the car on the road. He talked about restaurants we drove past. He liked to eat and he liked to drink, I got that. I thought that might be nice. Eating and drinking. People seemed to go on about it a lot. This guy in particular.
After a half hour of drive-by restaurant reviews he started whistling, and after a half hour of drive-by whistling he finally turned to me and looked me up and down. The gun was still in his hand.
“Don’t see many of you around, y’know?” he said.
I checked the rearview. We were on Santa Monica Boulevard doing a steady rate of knots. There were plenty of other cars on the road but none had been following us. I know, because I photographed all the license plates I could see as we drove and was comparing them against each other even as I spoke to the guy with the gun.
“Private detectives?” I asked.
“Naw,” he said. Then he waved his other hand like he trying to hurry someone up. Maybe that someone was him. “Robits. Y’know. Like you, Chief.”
For a moment I wondered why Ada never called me Chief. Then I wondered how Ada knew this guy with the gun and why she never bothered to tell me anything.
“Oh,” I said. “Robots. Right.” I said the word right, because it seemed important that I should. The guy with the gun didn’t notice. He was still rolling his other hand.
“Yeah. See,” he said, and then he stopped, and then he kept going. “See, used to be there was a robit what worked the traffic down on Melrose. Y’know, that big junction where it all goes to shit.” Now the gun was pointing somewhere else and he mimed “all goes to shit” with both hands like a master sculptor working in clay. Then he shook his head and pointed the gun back at me. But I could see his heart wasn’t in it. For the most part, I had settled into my new job as chauffeur.
“They had them on busses too. Y’know, tickets and stuff. Even was one down on the corner at the newsstand. I swear it. Kid next door used to buy comics from him every freaking Wednesday. Huh.” The man shook his head and said “Every freaking Wednesday” again to himself and then he turned to me. “So what happened to them all, Chief? Something must’ve happened. Left here.”
I took the corner smooth as silk. That’s one thing I liked about the car. The suspension was custom. Smooth as silk. Had to be, considering the driver weighed nearly as much as the vehicle.
“Didn’t work out,” I said. The man nodded. He seemed interested so I kept talking. “The public program included lots of different phases—traffic, public transportation, sanitation. All government to start with, then came private investment and some cooperative projects. Office work. Stores and warehouses.”
“And newsstands.”
“And newsstands.” I wasn’t sure that was right but he was the one with the gun so I wasn’t going to argue. I also wasn’t going to point out that the gun wouldn’t be much use against me, even point-blank. He seemed like a nice class of crook and I didn’t want to disappoint him.
“Didn’t work out, huh?” he asked.
“Nope,” I said. “People didn’t like robots. Not really. Preferred talking to other people instead of machines. And robots have limitations, too.”
The man with the gun nodded vigorously. “Turn right here,” he said, and then he said “So you’re one of the lucky ones, huh?”
I turned right and thought about his question and whether I considered myself lucky. I hadn’t thought about it like that. I just . . . was, and that was that. Nothing more to it. The last robot rolled out of the lab. The first of a new class of machines with the sum total of one completed unit. Was that lucky? I thought maybe I should ask Ada about it some time. She was the one with the connections. She understood people better than I did so maybe she was the one who got the luck while I was the one who got stuck behind the wheel of the car, driving around a guy with a gun.
The guy with the gun reached inside his jacket and pulled out a hip flask. It was silver and I got a good look, but there was nothing on it. No monogram. No initials. No name, address, phone number, social security number. Unlike me. I had some of those at least punched onto my chest plate. Next to the detective shield.
“Hey, you wanna? Oh no, I guess not.” The man pulled the offered flask back toward him and took a slug, then returned it to his pocket. “Hey, mind if I . . . ? Oh no, I guess not.” The man pulled out a pack of cigarettes and laid them on his lap and then he squirmed in his seat as his free hand delved into the front pocket of his pants. The hand emerged eventually, clutching a book of matches, along with a small mound of pocket lint.
I don’t drink and I don’t smoke. Doesn’t mean I can’t taste and smell. I didn’t like the idea of the car filled with smoke, but like I said he was the one with the gun. Even if the gun was useless, I figured that gave him certain privileges.
I took a photo of the matchbook. Figured it was the thing to do, even if I never saw it again. I wasn’t doing anything else but driving at the time so it wasn’t much bother. I also took a recording of the man’s voice. Because that seemed appropriate as well. He had no clue I’d done either, but then I didn’t expect him to.
Being a robot had certain advantages.
“Where you from, anyway?” he asked.
“I’m a local boy,” I said and the man laughed and shook his head.
“You ain’t fooling nobody, Chief! That accent. You’re from out East. Oh yeah. I knows it. East.”
“If you’re asking why I sound like I’m from the Bronx, then—”
The man sighed like he was appreciating a fine painting or a particularly good return on a bet at a horse race.
“I knew it,” he said, and puffed on his cigarette. “The Bronx,” he said, and he said it like he really meant it. Like he had never been there.
The accent was programmed and I had never been ther
e either, but like I said, he had the gun and he seemed to be having a swell night, so I didn’t want to disappoint him.
An hour later and he’d smoked another four cigarettes. The spent matchsticks sat in the ashtray in the console between our seats, a chrome bowl just in front of the telephone. If he’d seen the telephone, he hadn’t made a comment. He’d been impressed by the idea that I sounded like I was from the Bronx, and he didn’t seem to mind too much that he was sharing a ride with a machine. Maybe he thought all robots had phones in their cars, like that was a thing. Maybe he thought I’d come all the way from New York just to drive him around downtown LA.
We sat in the dead parking lot until the rain stopped. By this time his gun was resting on his leg. Maybe he’d been told to hold it on me, like it was part of the deal. Like it was also part of the deal that all robots had telephones in their cars and spoke like they came from one of the five boroughs.
The lot was filled with puddles as big as fishponds and as black as the gun on my passenger’s knee. The buildings nearby were large and low, their few windows dark. They were film studios, the backlot of Playback Pictures. A few sodium lamps were dotted around the access roads, but they did little to illuminate the situation.
There were a couple of other cars parked nearby. A truck, too. But it was late. The cars and the truck were in it for the long haul and there was no sign of anyone around.
Then he leaned forward.
“That’s him,” he said, and he pointed with the hand that was holding a new cigarette.
There was a guy in a coat and a hat walking toward a door in the side of the one building. He was walking fast, head down. He wasn’t keeping to the shadows, not on purpose, but it was dark and there was nobody around anyway, so it wasn’t like he really had to try very hard. But we could see him from the car. He walked like he was getting rained on and didn’t like it, except the rain had stopped. Which meant he had another reason for walking fast.
“Okay, okay, okay,” said the man sitting in my car holding the gun. He said it quickly. The appearance of the other man in the shadows hadn’t quite rattled him, but the man with the gun gained focus like a drunk at a peep show. He slipped the gun inside his coat while his other hand reached into the pocket opposite. All the while his nose was pointed to the man in the shadows. That guy—whoever he was, whatever he was doing here—was fiddling with a door in the side of the warehouse. His hat was still low and he was still hunched over so I couldn’t see anything else, no matter how far I zoomed in. All that told me was that the windshield of my car was dirty. Then the guy was gone and me and my passenger were alone in the parking lot again. The sky was clearing overhead, which meant nothing except the promise that the rain would stay away a little longer. Suited me.
The man in my car pulled the hand out of his coat and now he was holding a brown packet. It crinkled in his hand, and then he creaked on the leather as he slid around. Soon enough his free hand was pulling on the door handle and a second later he had one foot planted outside.
He waved the brown paper packet in the air and lay it down in the buttock-shaped indent on the leather. Then he pointed at the building.
“That was him,” he said, then he nodded but it looked like he was nodding more to himself. Then the door of the car clicked shut and he was off across the lot, his own hat down, his own collar up, his own demeanor that of someone who didn’t want to be seen.
If I left him there, he’d have a long walk back to where I had picked him up. I could have offered him a lift if he wanted to wait, but he clearly didn’t so I didn’t bother to open my door or window or call out or anything. I’d had enough of driving around town. Maybe he had another ride waiting somewhere to take him home.
It was quiet until I picked up the brown packet, which crinkled and crackled like a steak on a grill. I opened it.
Inside was five thousand dollars in neat bundles wrapped with paper bands, and a handgun.
I figured the guy had mistaken me for the wrong man, but then again it would be a hard mistake to make, because as far as I knew I was the only guy left with a face made out of steel.
So I wrapped the packet up and put it inside my coat. Didn’t seem safe to leave it on the seat like it was. Someone might find it. Get the wrong idea.
I opened the driver’s door and got out, and closed the door as quiet as I could, my metal fingers making more noise on the handle than the lock engaging. And then I walked toward the warehouse to find out who the other man was. Only I didn’t pull down my hat or turn the collar of my coat up, because I didn’t care who saw me. I didn’t know why I was here. And what you don’t know can’t hurt you, right?
* * *
The clock ticked over to oh-six-hundred hours. The alarm rang and I opened my eyes. Weird thing. Felt I was watching the clock, like I’d been awake for hours, standing in the dark. Listening to the whirr of the reel-to-reel magnetic tapes on the computers surrounding me. Listening to the quiet buzz of cars in the street below. Listening to the clack of the clock on the wall, with its metal digits flip-flapping through the night. Watching the darkness.
Which was baloney, pure and simple. My clock reset every day at oh-six-hundred hours and I was born again. I knew how it worked. It was necessary, too, because those whirring tapes on the computer banks around me weren’t just to impress clients. Those whirring tapes, they were me. My mind, my memories. Everything I’d seen, heard, done; everywhere I’d gone. Everything I’d thought and computed, calculated, figured. On those spinning reels I was copied, backed up—the last version of me, anyway. The last day’s work. At midnight I plugged myself into Ada and shut down my circuits to recharge the batteries. Then she began copying my internal memory bank onto an empty spool, a process which took four hours. Another two hours to erase my internal tape, then a restart and I was back in business.
It had to be that way because the magnetic tape reels on the mainframe cabinets were big, the size of hubcaps from the kind of Buick I couldn’t afford, and they wouldn’t fit in my chest. Which meant I had to use a smaller memory tape in there, a work of genius getting everything so small. But it came with a cost. Limited capacity. Twenty-four hours was it. That was how it worked.
I shrugged off the feeling I had that it didn’t work like that, that I’d been awake for hours. Standing in the dark. Didn’t make sense. And, besides which, I had no memory beyond knowing who I was, what I was, and where I was. This was the reset, the master program. That tape was on one of the mainframes and started spinning about an hour before my alarm call. Reloading me. Every twenty-four hours I was born again.
“Morning, sunshine,” said Ada. In the office her voice was loud, coming at me from all sides thanks to the speakers hidden in the walls. She wasn’t just my assistant. She was the computer—hell, she was the room. I was literally standing inside her.
“Ada,” I said by way of greeting. I stepped out of the alcove and disconnected the cable from the middle of my chest, my umbilical to the mainframe. The port was hidden behind the detective shield, which swung back on a spring. My coat and hat were on the table in front of me. The mainframe—Ada’s mind, and mine—occupied two walls of the computer room. The third, facing my restart alcove, was a window looking out to the street. In the fourth wall was a door that led to the office. The computer room was all science, but the office was done out like any you’d recognize, except instead of diplomas on the wall I hung my quality control certificates and programming documents, all framed, all signed by Professor Thornton. Ada’s idea. Just in case any client got the jitters about hiring a machine instead of a regular guy. There was also a desk and a telephone, two padded leather armchairs for clients and a reinforced office chair behind the desk for myself to sit in. Clients seemed to want their private detectives to sit behind big desks, like they were ship captains behind the wheel. The desk in the outer office sure was big enough to sail away on.
There were two other doors out there. The front door, leading to the hallway, and one
that led to the storage room. Every twenty-four hours my memory was copied onto a reel of magnetic computer tape weighing a hundred pounds. The storage room was bigger than the computer room and the office put together. Me and my memory needed a lot of space.
“Everything okay, Ada?” I asked as I picked up my coat and my hat. I shrugged them on and pulled the brim of my hat down. One of the advantages of being a robot detective was that I didn’t need coffee or a cigarette in the morning. Not even a shower. I was up and ready to get to work. All I needed now was for Ada to tell me what to do. She remembered everything because she was the big computer. She didn’t need backups and restarts.
“Good as gold, Ray. Good as gold.” Ada laughed. She was in a good mood. Whatever job it was I’d done yesterday must have gone off without a hitch. I didn’t remember what it was, but then I didn’t need to. Ada had it all safely stowed away.
I stood and waited for a new job for about an hour. It wasn’t like there was anything else I needed to do. Ada’s tapes spun back and forth, back and forth, and I looked out of the window. The building opposite was identical to ours, all brown brick. Dark, rough. Then the morning sun fell across it at an acute angle and cast long jagged shadows, like sunrise on the moon.
And then I remembered sitting in the car in the dark, watching shadows shift around the back of a low building, something like a warehouse. Then the memory was gone.
If I could have frowned, I would have, so I simulated the expression inside my circuits like Professor Thornton had programmed, and I ran the images back again. The car. The dark. Shadows moving around a warehouse. Quiet. There was a man sitting next to me in the car.
That was it. It was a memory fragment. That happened, sometimes. The little tape unit inside my chest was compact and portable, which meant it could only hold a day of data, but the miniaturization created other limitations. After the information on it was copied to the mainframe, my little bank was erased like you’d erase any magnetic tape, but like any magnetic tape the wipe sometimes wasn’t perfect. Sometimes there was data left, stuck to the surface of my mind like burned grease stuck to a frying pan. It didn’t matter. It would get written over soon enough.
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