by Mel Odom
We’d stopped between floors, but there wasn’t enough room to get to the second floor. I took the woman’s hand and stepped up to the third floor. I knew the men would be coming as quickly as possible.
Without hesitation, I ran down the hall, pulling the woman after me. The wound in my side pounded painfully. It was strange because I knew what the sensation was even though I couldn’t remember ever experiencing it in this magnitude or for this long. The warmth of the blood running down my leg seemed somehow familiar, too.
I pressed on.
The third floor had two elevator areas. I wasn’t quite certain how I knew that, but I knew it was true. My breath tore raggedly through my throat. I didn’t breathe normally, but I needed to now, and the effort felt largely unrewarded.
At the other end of the floor, I pulled the woman into the hallway with the second set of elevators. I felt fortunate that our pursuers hadn’t been lying in wait. I ran to all the elevator cages and hit the recall buttons, then glanced frantically at the glowing readouts. There were six elevators. Four of them were on the way up. The other two were headed down.
I leaned over instinctively and tried to catch my breath. I had seen Shelly do something similar after we’d chased a perp for a ways. I raised my arms over my head as well to open my lungs—lungs I had never had before—for better ventilation.
One of the elevators heading down was stopped on the second floor beneath us. I glanced around and spotted the seccams on the wall. I realized then that our pursuers probably knew where we were. They would have hacked into the sec systems and would be using the seccams as their own.
Feeling the panic building in me again, I forced open the elevator doors to the cage holding steady beneath us. We couldn’t use the stairwells. They were already in those.
“What are you doing?”
“They’ll be watching the seccams. They know where we are.”
Even as I said that, the stairwell door to our left opened and one of our pursuers stepped through into the hallway. The hooded mask identified him immediately.
I raised my pistol and fired two rounds, knowing I had missed with both shots, but they were close enough to send the hunter scrambling for cover. He cursed and blindly returned fire.
By that time, I had the elevator doors open all the way; the shaft looked dark and empty in front of us. I captured the woman’s hand and yanked her inside after me.
The elevator cage was only a meter below us. We managed to keep from striking the carbosteel supports and landed on the cage. It hung in the shaft, having enough give to cushion our jump slightly. At that moment, the cage resumed its drop to the first floor.
The elevator doors on the third floor opened once more, allowing light into the dark shaft. I got to my feet and lifted the pistol I’d managed to hang onto.
Our pursuer shoved his head and shoulders through the door. I squeezed the trigger and put a bullet between his eyes. Like a puppet with its strings cut, the man went limp and fell forward into the shaft.
I grabbed the woman’s upper arm and yanked her to the side to keep her from getting hit by the falling corpse. The cage’s emergency exit, probably already weakened by our jump, gave way under the dead weight. The corpse spilled into the cage with the passengers. At least three women started shrieking beneath us.
The cage stopped on the first floor. I opened the elevator doors to the second floor, crawled up, and we went through at a dead run. The elevators and stairwells were out of the question. That left only the windows.
I ran toward the window at the end of the elevator hallway and lifted my pistol, emptying the magazine in a rush of bullets. The pistol thundered and bucked in my hand as it spat flames and projectiles. I hoped that the glass wasn’t bulletproof transplas.
Before the thought was firmly seated in my mind, the glass shattered and fell away in shards.
I used my pistol barrel to break out the remaining glass, then clambered up on top of the window frame and reached back for the woman. She’d stopped hesitating; she took my hand automatically. The woman looked down at the ground a floor below us. The distance was more than five meters, but it was a garden, not a sidewalk. The earth would be tilled and soft. I didn’t know if any of the bushes were thorny, but they would hopefully help cushion our fall.
Instead of leaping, though, I froze. I stared out at the world around me. Earlier, when crawling on the outside of the hotel, I’d noticed it was dark and that the city had a lot of nearby buildings.
For the first time, I noticed that the stars were wrong for New Angeles. I wasn’t even in the same hemisphere as New Angeles. I looked at the woman. I wanted to ask her where we were. Instead, my words changed. “We’re going to have to jump.”
She shook her head fearfully. “I can’t.”
I wanted to tell her that jumping from this height was easier than holding onto my back while I’d climbed down the building. Instead, I grabbed her by the arm and yanked her off balance.
She fell with a scream and I jumped after her. We fell a lot slower and a lot more gently than I’d expected, but the off-balance impact drove the wind from my lungs. The sensation was new to me, but my body knew how to react. I kept myself under control until my lungs opened up again and sucked in oxygen. My side throbbed with continuous pain like I’d never felt before.
The woman lay prone beside me, also gasping for breath. I took a moment to reload my pistol with one of the magazines I’d taken from my vanquished opponents.
“Are you all right?”
The woman gaped at me and nodded. “I think so.”
“Nothing broken?”
“No.”
I offered her my hand and pulled her to her feet. Above us, a hopper coasted from the rooftop and a spotter light licked at the front of the hotel. I was in motion just as it reached down for us. By the time it touched the crumpled brush we’d left behind, we were already racing for the street.
The hopper traffic on the street was constant. Wherever we were, a lot of other people were there too. A taxi hopper had just let a fare out at the front of the hotel. I ran for it, dragging the woman behind me. The taxi pilot was helping get her passenger’s bags out of the hopper’s storage compartment.
I ran past her toward the hopper’s open hatch. The ignition was still running and the engine was powered up. I shoved the woman with me inside the vehicle and followed her in.
“Hey!” The hopper pilot abandoned her assistance with the bags and came around toward the front of her vehicle. “Get out of my hopper!”
At that moment, the hotel’s main entrance opened up and three men burst through. They raised weapons and took aim at the woman and me.
I put my hand on the woman’s head and shoved her into the seat. “Stay down!”
Bullets ricocheted from the taxi hopper an instant later, some of them ripping through the windows. Almost immediately, hotel sec guards engaged our opponents in a pitched gun battle that filled the area with noise. The canopy of the dome overhead trapped the harsh explosions and made the rolling thunder even worse.
The taxi pilot turned away and ran for cover.
I grabbed the controls and put the hopper into motion, blowing through the hotel’s ground parking area and screaming into the air to fight for space amongst the other hoppers.
As the night sky filled my vision, I realized why the stars looked so strange. I wasn’t on Earth anymore.
Chapter Twenty
I came to fighting the links. That had never happened to me before. I’d never heard of any bioroid having a bad experience, but I knew that Haas-Bioroid would keep that kind of fact concealed. Usually I never lost consciousness or went anywhere outside the room, though.
I accessed my internal PAD and discovered that I had lost the last hour and twenty-three minutes. A full diagnostic on a bioroid normally took less than thirty minutes.
“Detective Drake, can you hear me?”
I recognized Jenny Crain’s voice and rolled my head toward her. She stood to my left.
She looked concerned and a little mystified.
I felt mystified myself. “I can hear you.”
“What were you experiencing just now?”
Knowing that I wasn’t ready to discuss everything that was going on with me at that moment, I lied. “Only the diagnostic.”
She hesitated. “Was there anything different about this diagnostic?”
“Only that it required fifty-five more minutes than my last diagnostic. Was there a problem?” Putting the question back on someone to make them take the defensive was a trick Shelly had taught me.
“There was…something. We’re not sure what it was. You didn’t appear to be awake.”
“I don’t sleep.”
“We’re aware of that.”
“Did you do something to me that took me off-line?”
“No.” She hesitated before she answered, and I knew for certain that she didn’t know what was going on either. But that didn’t mean that her department head was equally in the dark. Somewhere in Haas-Bioroid, someone might have been inside my thoughts. They might have seen the chase on Mars.
I didn’t care for that idea, which was unusual. I was trained to be defensive when it came to self-preservation, not privacy. As a bioroid, I was an open book to anyone, even—to a degree—a perp I had taken into custody.
Had something in my experience pinged my self-preservation programming? I wasn’t sure, but that was the only explanation I could formulate that covered the unsettled sensation that cycled through my thoughts.
I tried to move but discovered the links still held my body. “Can I get up?”
She waited just long enough before answering that I knew she was talking to someone over an internal comm. “Of course.” She pressed the controls on the chair and the links slid out of my body.
The chair sat back up and I started to get out.
“We’d like to detain you just a moment further, please.”
“Why?”
“To get a second evaluation on your diagnostic. Dr. Kent would like to speak with you.”
“Of course.” I knew Dr. Kent. We’d met when I’d transitioned from a patrol officer at the NAPD to a full-fledged detective. He’d wanted to know how I felt about being partnered with a human. After the first year, he’d interviewed me again about the relationship I had with Shelly. “May I ask you a question?”
“I believe you already did.” Jenny Crain smiled at her own joke. “But, yes, you may ask another question.”
“Why did you come here?”
“Because I wanted to see more than just the red dust of Mars.”
“Terraforming is going on there. It’s not all red dust these days.”
Jenny Crain frowned. “Enough of it is still red dust, and there’s too much unrest.” She hesitated. “I lost two brothers to the fighting that’s going on there. My parents wanted me to have a different life.” A note of guilt entered her voice. “I wanted a different life. Now I have one and I enjoy it very much.”
“I apologize. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“It’s all right. At least we know your curiosity subroutines are running at peak efficiency.” Jenny Crain smiled. “Now, let’s see if we can figure out what caused this diagnostics glitch.”
*
For seventeen minutes, I sat without moving in a small room much like Exam Room 9, only this room had two real chairs and neither one had built-in links. The walls held thousands of images in no particular order. They were of people, places, things, colors, and expressions. Nonsensical images shared space with serious images.
At first I had scanned them, trying to ferret out the logic of the organization, then had realized I was wasting my time and returned to working my case files. There was no logic in the arrangements, but there were patterns that were inconsistent and more a process of randomness than any pure design.
I didn’t understand the latest episode I’d gone through. I still didn’t know who the woman was, and in these sequences, she didn’t seem to know she had been talking to me earlier, out of that sequence. Her behavior was very odd and unsettling. If I couldn’t know the answer to something, I at least liked to be able to frame the question correctly.
I had no clue what to ask other than who she was, who the men were that were chasing us, and what I was doing on Mars when I had never been there.
Even more strangely, the unsettled feeling I had about the whole experience seemed to be growing within me exponentially. By my eighteenth minute in the room, I discovered I could no longer sit still.
That had never happened.
I stood and paced, walking along the walls as if I were more closely examining the pictures pasted there. I didn’t have to do that because my vision was more than adequate for the task. But it was a cover for whoever was watching me, and I knew they would be watching. In Haas-Bioroid, they were always watching.
I had noticed occasions when walking had seemed to help Shelly. The effort didn’t make the troubled feeling inside me go away, though.
Twenty-four minutes into my wait, at a point when I was no longer certain I’d be able to stay inside the room, Dr. Kent entered. He was a moderately tall man with a rangy build and about five kilos overweight. He was balding and had grey hair; he was obviously not concerned about looking his age or possessing perfect features. He even wore glasses, though I suspected that was an affectation because there was no reason not to have his eyes adjusted. I thought that he liked himself enough that he wanted to be unique, which was unique to a Haas-Bioroid employee in and of itself.
I liked him for his fearlessness and his decision to be his own person. Given my existence as a bioroid, just a copy of personality indices stripped down to the bone, someone who embraced individuality intrigued me.
“Detective Drake.” Kent offered his hand.
I took the proffered hand and shook. I also took a biometric reading. Kent didn’t appear nervous in any way. “Good afternoon, Dr. Kent.”
“You remember me.”
“Of course. I’m programmed to remember everyone I meet.” My response was immediate, but I realized how false it was when I thought of the black-haired woman. I didn’t remember her since we’d woken in the hotel—on Mars—which I couldn’t remember going to.
“Would you prefer to sit, stand, or pace?” Kent settled himself into the room’s other chair.
“I don’t know. What are we going to do?”
“Just talk.”
“About what?”
“Anything you’d like to talk about.”
I waited long enough to be polite, then made my reply. “There’s nothing I’d like to talk about.”
Kent didn’t take umbrage at my declaration. “Don’t you want to talk about what happened during the diagnostic?”
“It took fifty-five minutes too long.”
Kent snorted. “The procedure might not have finished at all. You were fortunate.”
“How so?”
“If the diagnostic hadn’t completed, you would have been overwritten. Everything you’ve learned over the last seven years would have been wiped. You’d have been exactly as you were when you walked out of Haas-Bioroid the very first time.”
I felt more defensive, and that troubled me further. Having feelings like this was…uncomfortable and inconvenient. “Why?”
“That’s just how the program is set up. Either a diagnostic goes well, or it’s deemed fallible and overwritten.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“It’s not something the corp advertises.” Kent gazed at me speculatively. “How does knowing that now make you feel?”
“I don’t feel—”
“Yes, you do.”
I stared at him and felt suddenly vulnerable. I had never felt vulnerable before, even when dealing with someone with a large caliber weapon in his or her hand.
“Do you feel threatened?”
“Should I feel threatened?”
Kent smiled at me. “Are you going to insist on answering a
question with a question, Detective Drake?”
“Is that a bad thing, Dr. Kent?”
“Questions are usually constructed to ferret out information. What are you trying to ferret out?”
I was suddenly reminded of the pleasure bioroids talking endlessly among themselves. Dr. Kent and I were both slaves to our inquisitive natures. I wasn’t human, so my patience was—theoretically—inexhaustible. Dr. Kent was stubborn. However, I discovered that the troubled feeling lurking inside me was continuing to grow.
Not only that, but Dr. Kent’s patience, and his time, weren’t infinite resources. He would grow tired or irritated, and then he might do something else. I recognized that the same way I recognized fatigue and exasperation in Lieutenant Ormond.
“I feel unsettled and that is curious to me.” I looked at Dr. Kent. “I would like to know why I feel unsettled.”
“Because you’re curious?”
“Yes. It is in my nature to seek answers until I am satisfied I have them.”
“And you’re not satisfied now?”
“No.”
“Very good.” Dr. Kent nodded and steepled his fingers. “Why do you think you feel unsettled?”
“My existence isn’t falling into acceptable parameters.”
“Tell me about that.”
“The diagnostic took fifty-five minutes too long. That is not an acceptable parameter. I wonder if there is more I don’t know about myself.”
“That concerns you.” Dr. Kent’s voice had gone flat, neutral.
“It does.”
“Why?”
That was easy to answer. “Humans depend on me to protect them. I need to be operating at peak efficiency so I can perform that function adequately.”
“Are you at peak efficiency?”
I quickly ran my own internal diagnostics. “According to my systems, I am.”
“But you continue to be unsettled.”
“I am. The diagnostic should not have taken so long.”
“Is that the only concern you have? This aberration of time?”
“Yes.” I never hesitated.
Dr. Kent took out his PAD and gazed at it for a moment. I saw lines of code reflect off his glasses. My vid acuity systems instantly reversed the information and allowed me to see it properly, but I still didn’t understand what I could see. Whatever the code meant to Dr. Kent, it meant nothing to me.
