Android: Golem (The Identity Trilogy)

by Mel Odom

  I looked at Shelly. “I apologize for my inattentiveness.”

  “No sweat, partner. Let’s go catch the bad guys.”

  “Cool.”

  Shelly sighed and shook her head. “Okay, you’re going to have to stop saying that.”

  I was puzzled. “I thought you wanted me to say that.” I had started responding in that manner only a few days ago at her insistence.

  “I was wrong. Don’t. Just chalk it up as a failed idea.”

  “Why?” My curiosity was my strongest human facet.

  “Because it’s wrong.”

  “I have done something wrong?” I reflected over the forty-two times I had responded in such a manner over the last nine days. I perceived no incorrect response. The response was used in the manner in which Shelly had designated.

  “No, big guy, I did something wrong. I tried to change you. That’s how women are. We try to change the men we like. Usually, it helps, but sometimes—infrequently, mind you—we’re wrong. In this instance, I’m wrong.”

  “Perhaps if I were not who I am, it would work.”

  “If you weren’t who you are, you wouldn’t be my partner.”

  On many levels, that statement was incongruent and made no sense. It was only consistent that if I were not who I was, that I would also not be her partner. I chose not to point that out. Shelly only laughed at me when I pointed out logical things at times. I sensed this would be one of those times.

  “Your response lacks the proper inflection.” Shelly pulled on the black, thigh-length, bulletproof jacket she wore out in the field. According to Shelly, the jacket was in keeping with one of the current fashions and, along with the black suits we wore, allowed us to blend in almost anywhere, except in the poorer regions of the city. No one blended in in those neighborhoods, except the people that lived there.

  “Perhaps you could teach me.”

  “No.”

  “I am teachable as well as intuitive.”

  “I know, but this would be one of those parrot things. You would say it the way I would say it, and that would drive me crazy.”

  The “parrot things” she referred to was the mimic ability in my learning programming. Mimicry was the best way to learn things. Clones and bioroids both began with neural channel overlays, then added to them based on mimicry. We learned by doing, and from responses within our environments. So did humans, after a fashion, but they went beyond the initial learning by adapting whatever they learned into something that was more personal, and sometimes from stimuli that was never provided by an environment. That synthesis went beyond anything I was capable of.

  I nodded, one of those responses I had learned from Shelly that she had not complained about. “I will take your word for that.”

  “You should.”

  “Let’s hop.”

  I took my Synap pistol from my desk drawer. The weapon worked by shooting a bioelectrical charge that disrupted a human’s synapses and caused brief paralysis or unconsciousness. It did not cause death like the weapons in my glitch.

  Human police personnel called the Synap pistols “Gandhi guns” because they were non-lethal. They also declared the weapons ineffectual because they didn’t always bring down perpetrators. The human police officers and detectives I knew preferred to meet deadly force with deadly force of their own.

  I holstered the weapon, pulled on my own bulletproof jacket, and pulled on the knitted black skullcap Shelly gave me our first Christmas as partners. She had given me the hat because she worried that my head got cold. I had told her that only the synthskin of my face registered temperature, and I could control the temperature of all my synthskin, but she had insisted. I wore the cap for her, really, but I also knew it disguised the metal back half of my skull and made me more acceptable to humans on some level. I never wondered if it was so I would look more human for Shelly. I chose to believe that she accepted me as I was. I had never seen any indications otherwise.

  Together we left the bullpen.

  *

  In the elevator cage, I was reminded of the shoot-out I had witnessed in my imagination. I pushed those thoughts from my mind and concentrated on the case. “Do we know who the victim is?”

  “The L’Engle Hotel registry has him listed as Richard Smith.” Shelly stood beside me and worked on her PAD. The hand-held computer glowed as the 3D vid cycled through the files she pulled up.

  I accessed my own internal PAD and pulled up files. “There are a number of Richard Smiths registered in New Angeles.”

  “No joke.”

  I knew I wasn’t joking, and I knew she knew I wasn’t joking. Her response was just one of the incongruent things I’d come to accept about her. Overall, Shelly was a good communicator, but sometimes she lapsed into phrases that I didn’t quite comprehend. However, I had compensated by learning most of the ones that were nonsensical and were not spoken for a response. I added this one to my list.

  She went on. “If you factor in that most Richard Smiths living in New Angeles probably wouldn’t need to spend the night in a hotel, and that this Richard Smith could be from somewhere else in this world, not to mention Mars or the Moon, that’s a lot of Richard Smiths.”

  “No joke.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  I’d thought my intonation was pitch perfect, but that was probably what she’d most objected to about it. “All right.”

  I concentrated on running the files I had access to at the L’Engle Hotel. With NAPD clout pushing through the hotel’s red tape in the event of a homicide, I had all the clearance I needed. I pulled up Richard Smith’s bill. The fees were exorbitant because he was staying in one of the executive suites.

  “He checked into the hotel two days ago.” I saved a copy of the registry information to my office for later review.

  “I see that. Says here that his luggage arrived from up-Stalk through a courier service.”

  “Up-Stalk” referred to the Beanstalk, the space elevator that connected the Earth to the Moon through a series of exchanges: travelers could take an underground mag-lev train—or “tube-lev”—from stations in New Angeles to the Root, then hop a beanpod that would take them all the way up, by way of the Midway, to the Challenger Planetoid. The Challenger Memorial Ferry was then projected out of the base, landing at Starport Kaguya on the Moon. A person could leave Earth and be on the Moon in hours.

  “Does the courier service have any information on him?”

  “Says his name is Richard Smith. He used a prepaid credaccount, same as he used at the hotel. That tweaks my radar, partner.”

  Shelly didn’t have radar. I didn’t have radar, though I would have liked it. I did have a 360-degree view of the world that, when we were out in the field, allowed me to offer her, and other humans, better protection. Furthermore, as a police officer, I was able to internally access seccams in an area and build a 3D image that I could use when necessary.

  “Because you think ‘Richard Smith’ was hiding something?” I had learned to anticipate Shelly’s thought processes. She was very clever, very complicated, and I appreciated that.

  “Or hiding from someone.”

  I turned both of those possibilities over in my mind. I had arrived at the same conclusions. Shelly and I were definitely in sync. I enjoyed my working relationship with her very much.

  “Can you access the hotel’s seccams?”

  My PAD slid through the Net more easily than the PADs even available to the NAPD. Haas-Bioroid didn’t stint on the Net capabilities of their units. That was one of the things that made other corps suspicious of Haas-Bioroid. That ease of Net use allowed decriers to point out the potential for corporate espionage even more loudly.

  I shot through the various nodes and reached the seccams in the L’Engle Hotel. The linkage was difficult to maintain. “Yes.”

  “Link me.”

  I reached over and touched her PAD, creating a link through the electromagnetic field generated by my body. I brought her on-line with the sa
me images I was looking at.

  A human male in his early sixties lay sprawled on an expensive carpet in an elegant suite. The image bothered me, reminding me too much of my earlier glitch.

  Help me. The voice pulsed through my thoughts. I checked my aud receptors and found no log of the entry. There had been no physical corollary to back up the voice. Had I imagined it or remembered it? I wasn’t certain. And even if I remembered it, hadn’t I imagined it first? Trying to figure this out was very much like running a game of Tic-Tac-Toe.

  “Someone used a blade on him.” Shelly was in her musing mode, thinking aloud. In our early days together, I used to respond. That wasn’t what she wanted. “That makes it personal.”

  I zoomed in on the body. Slash marks were cut so deep they’d marked the dead man’s skull. It looked like someone had tried to carve his face off.

  Shelly’s tolerance for the violence one human could do to another never ceased to amaze me. I remained largely unaffected; I had no feelings when it came to the horrible sights afforded in my job. Other detectives were not able to compartmentalize the emotional stresses of their investigations.

  “Can you capture stills of the man’s face? Maybe generate what he looked like before he was killed?”

  I concentrated on the man’s face and used the software packages I had loaded in my internal PAD. I took still images of the dead man’s face, tried to put the pieces back together again as much as I could, and then manipulated the aspect until I maneuvered the face into a full-on shot. I spent a few milliseconds smoothing out what I’d created, then sent it to Shelly’s PAD.

  “Got it. I’ll start the facial recognition software running on this guy.”

  I nodded and watched as the elevator doors opened. The investigation was underway and we hadn’t even left the department. This was one of the advantages I had over human detectives, and Shelly never hesitated to implement what I could do.

  Chapter Three

  We walked out onto the hopper pad and the wind was strong and cold, blowing in from the sea. The humidity was soaring, and the weather reports I’d accessed on the way up in the elevator promised rain.

  Shelly turned up her collar against the wind, but she shivered and I knew it wasn’t helping as much as she’d hoped.

  The synthskin of my face was cold so I adjusted my internal heaters to compensate. Within seconds, I was warm once more. I wished I could do the same for Shelly.

  I followed her to our hopper. The vehicle was a black four-seater, standard issue for plainclothes detectives. The two bucket seats in front were separated from the back by a wire mesh screen that allowed prisoners to be kept at bay. It looked like a blunt-nosed bullet with an elongated transplas windshield. Three fins framed the rear section and provided stability while airborne. The hopper also had skids and wheels in case we had to resort to ground pursuit.

  As we approached, the gull-wing doors opened. Shelly got into the driver’s seat and powered up the hopper. The electromagnetic motors came on-line without a hitch and quickly stored energy for the first hop.

  Although they were, in essence, “flying” cars, hoppers didn’t fly independently. They had a limited fuel range and were run on hydrogen cells which limited their movement to short bursts. The capacitors could only absorb so much of a charge, and they pushed it all back out each hop. So the cars “hopped” from hopper pad to hopper pad, which absorbed solar radiation and converted it to electricity. With each touch, the engines of the hopper powered up again in a second or two, then were ready for the next hop.

  Shelly quickly plotted our route, using the emergency lanes provided for police and rescue units. The windshield lit up with control readouts showing power, wind direction, speed, GPS location, and a dozen other things.

  I was trained to fly hoppers, too, but Shelly preferred the driver’s seat and I didn’t mind. She also liked to manually operate the hopper instead of using the autopilot. She told me once she liked to be “in control.” Around us, other hoppers took off and landed. The pad stayed busy. Units constantly lifted and lighted. Most of them were NAPD marked hoppers bringing in perpetrators or going out on patrol.

  “NAPD Tower, this is Homicide Unit 1968 requesting clearance for lift.”

  A handful of other exchanges came over the comm. Then we were addressed.

  “Homicide Unit 1968, you are cleared for lift.”

  Shelly moved the control stick and the hopper lifted from the building. She swung us around and slung us forward, lifting us above the northbound and southbound traffic lanes stacked beneath us. She switched on the red and blue flashers fore and aft that gave away the fact that we were in an unmarked police vehicle.

  I looked down at the hoppers filling the computer designated lanes. Although the sky was relatively clear, traffic had to be managed. Management came in the form of layered traffic routes. Shorter hops stayed closer to the ground and ran slower. The farther you went on a hop, the higher you could fly and the faster you could go.

  Robot sensors—spherical balls atop key way stations throughout the metro area—monitored the traffic. Offenders who blurred the traffic lanes were issued e-citations. Egregious offenders—speeders, line jumpers, and drunken drivers—got their vehicles e-booted. Their power cells were sapped except for their emergency reserves and they were safely guided to the ground, where they were kept locked in their vehicles until they were picked up by ground patrol.

  “Are the nosies on the case yet?” Shelly concentrated on the traffic, ready to pounce on the first opening.

  “Nosies” were the media. Reporters for NBN and its subsidiaries—the newsrags like The New Angeles Sol, The New Angelino, and NewsDirect, as well as the 3D vids plastered across the Net—hawked violence and sold it by the minute on the Net.

  I opened my media feed and checked the headlines.

  THREE BODIES FOUND IN MASS GRAVE IN GILA HIGHLANDS.

  That meant Reynolds and Mack would be busy tonight. My curiosity was piqued and I wanted to know more, but I kept scanning the headlines.

  ANTI-EARTH MARS TERRORISTS BOMB NEW CLONING CORP IN THORIS CITY.

  That was nothing new. Martian rebellion was often heating up and cooling off, usually dependent on Earth corp involvement.

  MARA BLAKE, CEO OF MIRRORMORPH, INC. KIDNAPPED.

  That wasn’t new, either. Shelly and I had worked kidnapping cases of corp execs that ended up becoming murders.

  HOPPER PILE-UP KILLS SIX.

  CASINO ROBBERY FOILED BY TREGARD SECURITY.

  Giving in to curiosity, only because I knew I had time to spare, I tuned in to the first story. I was intrigued by what Reynolds and Mack would be up against.

  The vid opened up in Gila Highlands, an upscale private community. Security not only protected against land-bound intruders, but also from hoppers: anti-aircraft gunnery emplacements were camouflaged as ornate statuary, but I knew what they were.

  The odds were that the spree killer was someone who lived inside the gated community. Killers usually killed within their own families, neighborhoods, or work groups.

  Based on the cases Shelly and I had worked, and successfully solved, the killer would be someone in the security department or good at computer programming. The killer would have to be someone who could hack the security.

  Unfortunately, having security or programming abilities were skill sets that got people assigned to gated communities. So the list would be short, but there would still be a list.

  Finding a murderer was always done with the same variables, though. Homicide detectives concentrated on finding out what happened, not whodunit the way so many ficvids portrayed.

  I liked my job, and I liked knowing how to do my job.

  I didn’t like the feeling of uncertainty left by the glitch…

  “Drake?”

  I looked at Shelly. “Yes?”

  “You’re thinking a lot.”

  “No. I’m reviewing the mass killing Reynolds and Mack have been assigned to.”

&nbs
p; “Anything good?”

  The catchline on the Net changed.

  “Five bodies have been found in a mass grave in Gila Highlands.”

  Shelly shook her head in disgust. “Sounds a lot more interesting than what we’re working.” Then she looked embarrassed. “I guess that sounds pretty ghoulish, doesn’t it?”

  “Not to me. I like our work, but Reynolds and Mack will have a much more interesting investigation. Serial killers and spree killers are intriguing.”

  “Reynolds and Mack won’t feel that way.”

  “True. That is their loss.”

  Shelly grinned at me. “You know, I couldn’t ask for a better partner.”

  “Actually, you could. Haas-Bioroid has rolled out new models.”

  “I wouldn’t have one. I enjoy working with you. We’re…compatible.”

  I considered that. “Do you mean to say that I am more human in context than other models? Because that isn’t so. Or are you implying that you have the same skill set as a bioroid? Which is also impossible.”

  She took one of her hands from the control stick and patted my hand. She did that sometimes, and I recognized it as a human expression of affection. “I’m saying, Detective Drake, that you’re a fine investigator and an even finer partner.”

  “Thank you.” That seemed to be the only necessary response.

  Lightning blazed across the sky and rain that had been threatening all night finally settled into a steady downpour. The transplas windshield muddied with rain and the city lights softened and blurred.

  Shelly cursed. She didn’t like the rain. I did. The constant noise muted the din of the city.

  *

  Only a few minutes later, Shelly landed the hopper on top of the L’Engle Hotel. The gull-wing doors hissed open and I stepped out into the rain without hesitation. Wet clothing didn’t bother me.