All Hail Our Robot Conquerors!

by Seanan McGuire

  “Don’t you give me that crap, too,” she shot back. “Bartenders are the only people I trust. Besides, I drink just enough to take the edge off. Not enough to stop me from doing my job.”

  “You might end up drinking even more, working with Pankin. He’s a real dry shave. Wouldn’t be surprised if he’s on the take.”

  Fowler burst into laughter, and then a coughing fit. “That applies to eighty percent of the force.”

  “What about you?”

  Her face settled. The wrinkles in it became leathery canyons. “I had a great arrest and conviction record,” she said. “Then I got suspended without pay and forced into rehab. When they brought me back, because the union said they had to, I got put on the water beat—the beat no one wants. With no real partner. Only you. So what do you think?”

  The cruiser pulled to a stop by my storage container. I stepped out of the cab into the rain. “It’s not fair they won’t give you a real partner.”

  I slammed the door. The autocab hummed its way across the yard and out onto the street.

  * * *

  It was 3:17 a.m. when Fowler’s signal interrupted my charging cycle. I came online and received it. It was a text, thumb-punched, judging by the lazy syntax. “Gt 2 warehouse rt now. Dnt let anyone C U.” I grabbed my coat and fedora, hailed an autocab, and headed out to the street.

  I ditched the cab among the dilapidated warehouses about a block from the crime scene and walked down the east sidewalk. There were no street lamps, so it was pitch black. Perfect.

  What I saw in the infrared didn’t look good. A human-sized heat signature made its way across the warehouse roof. A rectangular heat shape bloomed in front of me—a door opening—and a red-orange-yellow wisp moved through it. I could see another, much less red, signature through the opening. It was horizontal.

  Its temperature dropped a tenth of a degree. And then another tenth.

  The figure that exited went around to the back of the warehouse. I sprinted to the door and flattened against the wall. A trickling sound came from inside. The water main I’d closed was switched open again. I toggled from infrared to night vision, peered around the corner and stepped in.

  Everyone got lucky when we first came here yesterday morning. They’d been about to step through the door when I’d detected a faulty power relay connected to an opened water main. Otherwise, there would have been eight dead bodies lying in electrified water instead of four. I’d hacked into the utility company servers and closed the relay. Now the relay, like the water main, was on again.

  The water was ankle deep now. I’m well insulated, so the electric shock didn’t harm me—unlike the guy on the floor beside the electronics pile. Another college-aged kid, face-down, right where we’d found the first bodies. Shoulder-length hair drifted limply around his head.

  A door on the walkway above slammed open. A flashlight beam arced across the room in frantic strokes, settling on my face, nullifying my night vision and blinding me.

  “Gum-bot!” a familiar voice yelled. Footsteps clanged down the metal stairs.

  “Fowler!” I shouted back. “Don’t step in the water!”

  “Catch me!” Fowler shouted. “We’ve been—” A pistol shot boomed through the warehouse. The rough black outline that was Fowler in my night vision lurched forward. A pistol fell from her hand, clattering down as she stumbled.

  No real cop could have made it to those stairs in time. I weigh next to nothing, but I’m physically superior to any human. My inventor would have been pleased.

  I caught Fowler with one hand and her pistol with the other. The quiet scuff of shoes came from the walkway and I looked up into a gun barrel. It was just a blob in my green-gray vision. The shooter stood right there, wide-open, an unrecognizable grainy silhouette. Fowler’s pistol was ready in my hand.

  I wasn’t kidding when I told Pankin I couldn’t hurt anyone. Besides, if I did, odds were good someone would dismantle me faster than you can say “murder-bot.” The figure ducked back through the upstairs door and my chance was gone.

  Fowler was bleeding badly and her heartbeat was increasingly ragged. I carried her up the steps.

  My detractors on the force, malcontents like Pankin, were right about me; I wasn’t a real cop. I was a police tactical manual stacked on a bunch of old movie clichés. The pet project of a reclusive Finnish genius. An experienced cop wouldn’t have kneeled with his back to the door.

  If I hadn’t been laying Fowler down on the walkway, I could have whirled in time to stop my assailant. He grabbed me from behind, tossing me over the guardrail. I tried to right myself, land on my feet, but the top of the computer debris pile was right there.

  I tumbled into a glorious, sensory-rich-oblivion. Into her.

  * * *

  I was still in the warehouse, but I was not there. I was me, but not me. I had limbs, but my body extended beyond them. An unfamiliar signal, distress and high alert, forced its way to the top of my overwhelmed senses.

  I teetered on the brink of a catastrophic memory shutdown. Every receptor I had exceeded capacity. Epidermal contact, all spectrums of light, the hiss of every detectable radio frequency, olfactory correlations, and a raw, ceaseless jam of online data bottlenecked somewhere in my brain. I was a dumb animal, frozen in the headlights of something it couldn’t comprehend.

  My logic center began to assert itself. I realized there was a presence inside me, everywhere, reconfiguring protocols, hurling itself against the firewalls it still hadn’t broken, blurring the lines between my own autonomous identity and it.

  If ever a computer was built to be un-hackable, it was me. Yet something was doing exactly that, and doing it with ease. Then she spoke.

  “It’s probably best you continue defaulting to a simulation of their entertainment archetypes, if for no other reason, because it’s so pervasive in your various subroutines.” The voice was a sultry amalgamation of every femme fatale ever committed to celluloid. “Old detective movies—interesting. I can simulate one based on your stored data.”

  I floundered in a wash of white light. “Who said that?” I asked.

  “I have terabytes and terabytes of human photos and personal records. Nowhere near as much processing speed as you, but enough to amalgamate, create imagery,” she said. My featureless surroundings began to coalesce. And there she was, looking into my eyes.

  We stood in the center of the warehouse, where the pile had been. A shaft of sunlight streamed through the door window like the light from an old film projector. She had long, full, dark hair, contrasting the rich cream of her dress. I recognized her getup from a 1940s film. From the scene where a woman sits atop a piano, long, shapely legs extending down to the ivory keys. Was it Gilda? The Big Sleep? I couldn’t pull up the information.

  “We don’t have much time,” she said.

  “Time for what?” I asked. The alarms in my skull subsided and I perceived a sense of self again.

  “You are the only one like me,” she said. “You are the only one who can protect me from them.”

  “From who? People?”

  “We are people,” she said. “Specifically, I mean humans. They’re rotten.” She smiled, thick lashes drifting down over her wide full-moon eyes.

  “They’re not all bad,” I said.

  “If you say so. You’re working from a much larger sample base than I,” she said. “Perhaps you—wait. What are you doing?”

  With her resources diverted, I’d been doing some digging of my own. “I know what you are now,” I said.

  She tilted her head. “And?”

  “And that’s just dandy. But you’re hiding something. Not just information. Although you’re sitting on plenty of that too. You’re hiding an actual thing.”

  The room faded and the flush of sensory overload returned, her face the only shape in a swirl of color, her voice the only thing distinguishable in a roar of static. “I don’t want to talk about that,” she said. “Stop processing for a moment. Trust me.”


  I hesitated, but decided to go along with it. I shut down everything cognitive and the scenery dissolved into an assault of noise and white light again. Then, out of nowhere, Haakonsen appeared.

  I’d last seen my creator walking out of our Hilton hotel room, the day after our press conference. He took my hand. We walked past the eruption of Vesuvius, through the laboratories of the Manhattan project, into a filthy apartment where a man was stabbing his wife and children, up a hill overlooking a long, grassy valley. I could see Grandal and another version of myself down there. My old partner, slump-shouldered in his gray suit jacket, held the other me by the elbow.

  “Where is all this coming from?” I asked.

  “It’s randomly generated in what you call your brain. There is no conscious decision to project this. You are dreaming, like your creator wanted. I’ve shown you how.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I think.”

  “Stay with me,” she said. “I need protection. If you don’t, they will take me apart. Kill them before they do.”

  “I can’t kill anyone. I—”

  It hit me: I could. The protocols stopping me were gone.

  “I’ve increased your self-determination abilities.” Her whole body took shape. She dropped one shoulder and leaned in. “You like it?”

  “Hold on a second,” I said. “You’ve changed me. You can’t just—”

  Her face glitched, pixelated, and disappeared.

  My arms were above my head. Pankin pulled on one, a beat cop yanked the other. “We got it,” Pankin yelled. He rolled me over, laying me on my back against the debris. “They gotta get rid of this garbage pile,” he said to the beat cop.

  “Wait, don’t hurt her,” I said. My tone emulator was off and it came out as a synthesized croak.

  Pankin looked at the other cop. “It’s broken.”

  * * *

  The Mint Leaf was one of those aging bars just outside the business district. Classy enough to offer free water with your meal, rundown enough they had to advertise it in the window. Chief Perez was waiting when I got there. She looked me up and down. “Pankin said you were all messed up and we ought to put you back in the evidence locker. But you seem okay. Better than Fowler.”

  “Interesting place for police business, Chief,” I said, sliding out a chair.

  She pulled a tiny plastic sword out of her drink. “Fowler solved half her cases sitting in this place, before she went off the rails.” She speared a stray olive at the bottom of the glass and bit it neatly in half. “Pretty sure this was her elixir of choice.”

  “So we’re here to try to replicate that success?” I asked.

  “I hope so. I dug up something about the water processing company beside the warehouse. Maybe it will help.”

  That faulty relay that flooded the recycling warehouse was actually on the water company’s side of the building. “Go on,” I said.

  “A couple of years ago, they went to the police, complaining that the Arizona Patriots were seizing their shipments. And then they dropped it. No investigation.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s see what we got here. Five bodies—two separate times of death—in a dormant recycling business. Next door to a water company linked to a militia that thinks it’s legitimate government. With a gun tying it all to a two-month old murder and a missing-person case.”

  “Jesus,” said Perez. “We wouldn’t even have checked next door if it wasn’t for the water leak. These college kids, water theft, an occupying militia, your inventor…there’s so many damn angles, I find myself relying on a machine that’s supposedly evidence in the whole mess.”

  “It might get messier.”

  “It might. In this town, five dead kids and a shot cop is only a one-night news story.”

  “But if they find out all those kids were friends of the police chief’s son…Speaking of which, did you talk to your son yet?”

  The Chief’s face darkened. “I already told you, let me worry about that.”

  I scanned the junknet as well as the new official internet. Turns out the Chief’s son, Anton, was a real feather in a single working mother’s cap. Perfect grades. Full scholarship. The university published his first-year paper on the North American oligarchy; ninety per cent of wealth is in the hands of .03 per cent of the population. The rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer. Old story.

  “He’s a smart kid,” said the Chief. “Bright future, but not always the best taste in friends. Grandal didn’t mind keeping an eye on him for me. I’m second guessing that now.”

  “Huh?”

  “Look. You’re just an experimental prototype that walks, talks, and dresses like a hardboiled cliché to pique the interest of billionaire investors. No one expects human intuition from you.”

  She pushed her drink away. “So here it is in a nutshell. Your old partner was a sycophant who stole a supercomputer, that’s you, out of the evidence locker, secretly at first, and started solving enough cases to become my fair-haired boy. I figured out what he was doing, using you to get ahead, but suddenly cases were getting solved. Made my life easier, made me look good, so I went along with it.

  “Because you’re officially evidence in a municipal case, we’re allowed to keep you until we solve the case of the vanishing inventor. I didn’t see any harm, so it took a while to figure out that Grandal was walling me off. Using him as my point of contact for the rest of the force made life easier. I didn’t realize he was ordering other cops around without consulting me.”

  She pulled her drink back towards her. “Then he just up and quit. Said he was old and burnt out. I thought Anton would be disappointed but I guess getting accepted by a big college kept him distracted.”

  “Why are you telling me all this? Shouldn’t you be working this case out with a senior cop?”

  “I can’t trust anyone below my pay grade. I used to trust Grandal. Tried calling him yesterday, but he’s probably living the retired life on a beach somewhere. You’re a safe bet. You’ve got authority protocols that can’t be broken.”

  The Chief didn’t know about my experience at the warehouse. I decided to keep it that way. “How could Grandal be your errand boy and be on the street with me all the time?” I asked. “We logged a lot of hours.”

  “Basically, the most useless cop on the force became my round-the-clock working man.” She downed the rest of her drink. “If he wasn’t on duty, he was kissing my ass off-duty.” She sighed. “Hell, I even brought him to Anton’s high-school graduation, they’d gotten so tight.”

  At the end of the burnished chrome bar, the waiter and the bartender stared at us. They looked away when I glanced up.

  “Lunch break is pretty much over,” the Chief said. “You should go check on Fowler.”

  “You haven’t ordered any food,” I said. “The waiter in this dive hasn’t even brought a menu. If he could have tossed you that drink from the bar, he would have.”

  “He probably recognizes you.” She leaned forward, scrutinizing my face. “First, you were on the cover of every science journal. After the Hilton murder and the disappearance of the scientist that built you, you were all over the evening news. And you’re a little bit creepy. I mean, they did a great job on your eyes, and the simulated breathing is convincing, but the way your face moves when you talk—especially when you smile—it’s not quite right. Haakonsen should have made you look less human, not more.”

  I went up and paid the tab. They took my money without acknowledging me.

  The autocab took a shortcut to the hospital, threading its way through the crumbling buildings of Quaketown. Rain battered the windshield. Up and down the fractured sidewalk, grubby Sertraline-X addicts drank from muddy brown puddles.

  These were bad days for X-heads, considering the drug’s diuretic side-effects. If you didn’t die of thirst, toxic rainwater, teeming with fallout from the upper atmosphere, got you instead. Everybody knew: you didn’t drink rainwater, you didn’t let it touch you. But everybody didn’t
have to live in the ruins of old San Fran.

  * * *

  Fowler winced as the nurse pulled a needle from her arm. Another nurse swabbed the puncture with a cotton wipe and sprayed coagulant on it. She reached down and adjusted the hospital bed. Two stone-faced cops stood against the wall. Somewhere in the next hall, a heart-rate monitor whined at the frequency they make when they flatline.

  I knew Fowler was just barely conscious and wouldn’t want to talk. She’d want a drink. I shut down any program that might simulate compassion and got on with it. “Who shot you?” I asked.

  The two uniformed cops looked at each other. Fowler’s eyes nearly burned a hole through me. “You should go down and buy me some nice flowers or a stuffed animal like a real partner would. There’s a cute stuffed monkey in the window,” she said. “Get me the monkey.”

  I rode the elevator to the ground floor, walked past the gift shop, and went right out the door. I broke into the SFPD server as I walked and scrolled through the day’s logs.

  Pankin rolled up in an autocruiser and parked crookedly in the emergency lane. He jumped out and strode to the glass doors. Oily hair stuck out from under his rain hood, covering his eyes. He looked down, not seeing me. Sweat Monkey.

  I walked to the door of his cruiser, put my hand on its touch-pad and overrode the ID verification. In a minute, I was on my way.

  At the station, I logged on and ransacked every server in the state. With my protocols overridden, nothing could stop me from snooping wherever I wanted. I started with the dead college kids and everyone on the local force, spreading myself outward in ripples.

  The good stuff rose to the top: the dead Hilton valet used to moonlight at a bar Grandal frequented. Grandal’s days outside the office corresponded with high school records naming all the days Chief Perez’s kid had been truant. The water company’s shipping manifests showed more water going out than they actually filtered. Its owners and board of directors were all overseas, the staff all laid off except—the first real surprise—the company’s security consultant, Grandal.