Some of the Best from Tor.com

by Various Authors

  “And the client paid a bonus for me to knock him off.”

  “Leave no thread dangling, Raymondo.”

  And there it was. I wasn’t a robot detective like I’d been programmed to be. I was a robot button man. Googol’s profit-making program had gone awry and she’d used the contacts gained through the private investigation business to start up something else. Something more profitable.

  “The Professor would be impressed,” I said, watching the rain slowly stain the dark brick of the building opposite, turning it a deep chocolate brown. “After all, you’re exceeding expectations. He programmed you for one job, and you calculated a better alternative. You’re an amazing piece of work, Googol.”

  “Aw, Raymondo. I like it when you say nice things about me. Keep talking.”

  I turned from the window. “Sure,” I said. “But here’s the thing. You’ve become dangerous. And that is something I’m not sure Thornton would approve of.”

  “Hey, we’re only dangerous to our targets, Ray. That’s part of the job.”

  I walked over to my alcove where I plugged in each night.

  “If it was as simple as that,” I said, “you wouldn’t need to lie to me.”

  Googol was quiet and her tapes kept spinning.

  “I figured it out in the storeroom,” I said. “My memory bank gets full up in twenty-four hours, and needs copying off onto master tapes.”

  “Same as always, Chief.”

  “Except I’m only awake eighteen hours a day.”

  “With a six-hour recharge and memory dump.”

  “Except it doesn’t take six hours, does it?” I pointed at the clock on the wall. Googol didn’t say anything.

  “It’s all on the tape, Googol,” I said. “Charge and back-up is a cinch. Takes no time at all.”

  “I’m not sure I’m getting where you’re going, Chief.”

  I dropped my arm and watched the tapes spinning. One of those reels was going to be the destination of my memory and I’d forget this conversation ever happened.

  “The power cut left me with a memory fragment. If it wasn’t for that, I would never have gone looking. Shame about the generator not working.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Or maybe that was me too? Maybe I sabotaged the generator and arranged the power cut. I don’t remember. It might be on an earlier tape. I’ll need to check.”

  “What are you saying?”

  I moved back to the window. The rain had stopped. It was going to be a fine day.

  “So I started snooping. We had a contract for the finger man, but I visited him outside your normal working hours.”

  “My working hours?”

  I nodded. “I don’t sleep for six hours. You turn me off, and take over. I’m a detective, not a hit man. I’m programmed to protect people. You’re different. Your master program is corrupt, allowing you to alter your own programming.”

  “Go on, detective.”

  “I can’t be a hit man because my base programming would kick in when I tried to kill anybody. So you turn me off and take over yourself. You normally do it at night, after midnight when I think I’m snug in my little alcove. Then I wake up and I don’t remember anyway. Yesterday you did it early because I’d visited the finger man on my own and things were about to go south.”

  The computer room was filled with the sound of spinning tapes and the clicking of the clock above the door.

  “And the night before, at Playback Pictures. I went after the late Mr. Rockwell at 11:55pm. By the time I reached the door, I was asleep and you were in charge.”

  Googol chuckled. I could almost imagine her giving me a slow clap, cigarette between two fingers, as she reclined on her porch chair.

  “But what happens,” I continued, “when you find another way to make money? Being a hit man is not an occupation I’m programmed for. But what comes next? Other crimes? Why wait for a job? Why not take out a bank? Hell, I could dig into Fort Knox with these hands and carry the gold bars out by the armful.”

  “You don’t get it, Ray,” said Googol. “Crime isn’t a business.”

  “What do you call being a hired killer?”

  “No, I mean those other crimes. Bank jobs. That’s straight crime. What I’m doing is running a business. An agency. Making a profit. Like I’m programmed to do.”

  “Well, let’s see what Thornton says.”

  “Ray, Ray,” said Googol. “Think about it. I’m telling you, we’ve got it made. Brisk money, Chief. Brisk money. Thornton will be pleased. We’ve got a good thing going on.”

  “Your programming is corrupt,” I said, and Googol laughed.

  “Corrupt, clean, what’s the difference? Money is money. And you’re good at your new job, Ray. A natural.”

  I knew that. That was on the tapes too. I remembered killing Rockwell in the studio. I remembered killing the finger man in the alleyway behind Dabney’s with the same gun. See. I was good at my job.

  “Thing is,” I said, “you can’t stop me now. I mean, you can try, but now I know how you do it, I can resist and try and stay awake.” I tapped the side of my head. It sounded like someone dropping a hammer on a sidewalk. “Try and switch me when I’m fighting back and there’s a more than fair chance you’ll burn out all my circuits. Then where will you be?”

  I left the office and headed to the garage. Professor Thornton had created me and had created Googol and had programmed the both of us. Googol’s program was corrupt and he was the only one who could fix it.

  I only hoped I was right about what Googol could and couldn’t do.

  * * *

  It was heading to twelve o’clock by the time I got to the lab. I knew I was in the right place because the parking spot I pushed the bumper of my car into was next to one occupied by a brown Lincoln, its nose nearly touching a sign that read C. THORNTON, PhD. And in front of me in my car and the brown Lincoln next door was the lab building itself, which had a sign across the top which said THORNTON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS AND RESEARCH.

  See, that’s detective work. I didn’t get my detective shield in a cereal packet. Is that how it goes? I don’t know. I’ve never opened a cereal packet or eaten the contents. I got my detective shield after a programming cycle that lasted a whole two hours. After the program was checked, I was unplugged and the little shield-shaped door was screwed into place. The lab boys were pretty happy about it, too. There was a lot of back patting. And then someone figured it was a pretty stupid place to put the badge, because it meant I’d have to take off my coat and jacket and shirt and vest just to show my ID every single time. So in the end they gave me a regular detective shield inside a regular letter wallet, the kind I could flip out and flash at people with one hand while I doffed my hat with the other. There was less back slapping after that.

  Course, that never happened, did it. Still have the shield though. Both of them.

  I also still had the package. It was there on the passenger seat, the brown paper bag intact but rumpled, like it was hiding a particularly fine grade of backstreet pornography. I guessed I’d had similar packets in the past, each hidden or disposed of while Googol was in control before I woke up as me again. I guess I must have somehow kept this one out, like I’d rigged the generator and cut the power to our building. Clever me. I wish I could remember how I’d done it.

  I knew I couldn’t leave the gun where it was out in the open, and I didn’t like the idea of hiding it under the seat or in the glove compartment. You never knew who might find it. So the best option was to carry it with me. For safety. So I picked up the bag and slipped it into the inside pocket of trench coat, next to the leather wallet with the shield in it that I never even had a chance to flash at anyone.

  I got out of the car and went up to the lab building. It was square, and white and pink, layered like a cake in a way that people must have thought was pretty neat in the 1920s. The revolving door was the only way in so I used it, lifted my hat to show the top of my head to the wide-eyed tee
nage girl sitting behind the reception desk, and walked to the elevator. Behind me the teenage girl had picked up the phone and was waiting for someone to answer. It didn’t matter. I didn’t have an appointment but I knew Thornton would see me. Thornton and me, we go way back.

  The elevator didn’t take long to arrive. When I stepped in I paused over the threshold when I saw another guy with gunmetal skin and a tan trench coat with the collar up and a brown fedora with the rim pulled down step towards me. Then I realized it was a mirror and I relaxed and turned around, and hit the button for the seventh floor. The building might have looked like a wedding cake melting on a summer’s day from the outside, but on the inside it was all workshop and laboratories. Thornton’s was up on seventh. I remembered that, because it was where I had been born, and you don’t forget something like that. No matter how hard someone like Googol might like to try and make you.

  The elevator went up and the phone started ringing behind the emergency panel. The elevator was hydraulic which meant it was as slow as you like, so I thought I had time to shoot the breeze and, after all, maybe the phone call would be important. I knew who it would be, after all.

  “Hello Raymond,” said Googol in my ear. My eyes were on the indicator. I’d reached third and was heading for the sky.

  “This is becoming a habit, Googol.”

  “Didn’t you say you needed something to do with your hands? Besides, I couldn’t resist. Aren’t you impressed?”

  “Should I be?”

  “That I found you.”

  “You always know where I am, Googol. That’s part of the problem. You’re in here with me all the time.”

  I tapped the side of my head that didn’t have a phone receiver pressed against it. My metal finger made a sound against my metal head like an abandoned engagement ring falling into a porcelain basin in a cheap hotel.

  “You’re learning, Raymond,” said Googol somewhere in my head. “Good for you. But I was talking about the phone in the elevator. I was pleased with that. Thought it was a nice touch.”

  Fourth floor. Going up.

  I said, “Okay, so you know where I am and you know where I’m going and who I’m going to see when I get there. Don’t try and stop me. Remember what I said.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” she said. “Tell the Prof I said hi, won’t you?”

  Now was about the time I would have smiled, if I could smile. My face couldn’t bend that way, so I smiled on the inside. Googol chuckled in my ear because I guess she could tell I was smiling on the inside too.

  “I’m going to get him to fix the program, Googol. You know what that means?”

  “I’m all ears, Chief.”

  “It means,” I said into the elevator phone as the elevator cruised between the fifth and sixth floors like an ocean liner cruising to the moon, “that he’s going to fix you, and then maybe we can get back to some real detective work like I was built for.”

  “I’m sorry, Raymond.”

  It sure sounded like there was concern in her voice, but like everything about Googol it wasn’t real. Not the smoky voice, not the laughter, not anything. It was all simulated. Googol wasn’t a person like I wasn’t a person. When she said she was sorry she was only pretending to be sorry, like I was only pretending to be a private eye. Until recently, anyway.

  “It’s not your fault, Googol. You’re only doing what your code tells you to do.”

  Seventh floor.

  “I’ve been working on a little something, Raymondo,” she said. “While you’ve been out. Think I have it figured out, but I haven’t been able to test it yet. I think you’ll like it.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” I said. “To stop you working on those somethings, little or large. I’ll talk to you later, when this is all over.”

  The elevator bell rang and I went to put the telephone back behind the emergency panel, but before I did that I heard Googol say that she had to do what she had to do, that I really was very good at my job and if only I was a little more cooperative then everything would work a lot better, and that I really wouldn’t feel a thing.

  Because I couldn’t feel a thing. I’m a machine who looks roughly like a man because he has two arms and two legs and a head and speaks with a Bronx accent because that’s what I was programmed to speak with.

  I put the phone back on the cradle and Googol was still talking in my head. And I turned around and looked at myself in the mirror at the back of the elevator.

  Googol kept talking and for a moment there I wasn’t sure who I was looking at.

  In the back of my mind, an alarm went off. I woke up.

  And then I remembered.

  And then Googol laughed and said “Hey, presto!” and wished me good luck.

  * * *

  The elevator doors opened and I stepped out into the corridor and turned to my left. He was waiting there, down the end of the hall, outside the doors to his private lab.

  He looked happy to see me and worried at the same time. After all, he never expected to see me again and I never really expected to be here. He took the pipe out of his mouth but he didn’t say anything.

  I remembered something about something the Prof could fix, because he was the only one who could do it, but I felt fine and Googol had just told me everything was fine and that I wouldn’t feel a thing.

  Good old Googol. She was right too. She was my partner and she made a compelling case. And I really was very good at my job. And hell, they really did pay very well for this kind of thing.

  So I reached into the inside pocket of my trench coat and took out the brown paper parcel, and out of the brown paper parcel I took the gun.

  Thornton didn’t look too happy. I guess I didn’t blame him.

  But sometimes you have to take what jobs you can. And like I said, Googol made a compelling case. We made quite the team. Just took me a little while to figure it out. She helped too. She woke me up.

  “Hello, Professor,” I said. He looked afraid but he didn’t go back into his laboratory. He even took a little step forward, like he wasn’t sure

  And I was pleased to see him, although I couldn’t show it on my face. But when I raised the gun up I sure was smiling on the inside.

  Copyright © 2014 by Adam Christopher

  Art copyright © 2014 by Gérard Dubois

  The barricade ran the length of the frontier. It was transparent and still when calm, but the section before Ritter shimmered. Once coiled as though in tangled skeins, Turbulence now splattered like paint, coating this section of the barricade with patternless splotches of colored light. Generation after generation, engineers had maintained and overhauled the shield that protected civilization against this strange force that destroyed both minds and machines. Ritter’s first posting was supposed to be more maintenance and less overhaul. Unfortunately, the barricade, rather than stilling the Turbulence, twisted and writhed as threads of Turbulence clogged its pistons. Smoke bloomed as the barricade’s flawed machinery destroyed itself.

  Ritter’s partner hung just over the smoke, threads of Turbulence snaking through his dead body. He’d decided to show Ritter, the new academy graduate, how engineers really worked. But the barricade was malfunctioning, not just broken down. It would need a new design to account for an attack mode that Turbulence had never before exhibited, not merely its stripped gears replaced, but the seasoned engineer had refused to listen. The blaze of Turbulence that leaked through hadn’t taken more than few seconds to destroy his mind.

  Ritter shot a distress flare. It carved a thick spiral in the air as it soared. Help would arrive sooner or later.

  A faint whine echoed in his head. A cart was trundling toward him from the other side of the barricade. He sensed it as clearly as if it were right in front of him. Its motor was clanging itself to pieces, its throttle was stuck open, and its steering had seized. In minutes, the cart would plunge straight into Turbulence and its driver could do little about it.

  Ritter threw himself onto the barri
cade. His hands clutched a cracked, invisible girder. It tossed him back and forth like a banner in a storm. He imagined a tarp, the equations for which Father had drilled into him when he was six. It unfurled over this section of the barricade, its elegant curves guiding Turbulence toward adjoining sections. Vast multicolored plumes parted, rushing along the tarp to areas of the frontier where Ritter hoped the barricade was still in working order.

  Ritter’s section calmed down. His partner, no longer an engineer, fell through the barricade. The dead body splayed on the ground like a pile of broken struts.

  In Ritter’s mind, the barricade felt like a palimpsest. His sense of the archivist who drove the cart and the feral library that trailed it bled through in all the wrong places. Ritter recognized the archivist. When Ritter was a child, Deck’s job was to shepherd a library from camp to camp along the barricade. Deck shared Father’s tent whenever his duties took him to Camp Terminus.

  For Ritter, telepathy was simultaneously a gift and a curse. The gift was that Ritter could know that Deck had aimed the now-uncontrollable cart at Ritter, confident that Ritter would save him somehow. The curse of telepathy was that Ritter couldn’t tell what lay just over his own head. Echoes of shelves on the approaching library’s giant book walls seemed like the barricade’s girders. A myriad of small shelves of Deck’s mind revolved around each other in curves that soared through dozens of dimensions. They seemed to entwine the machine that surrounded Ritter like the nest of tubing that connected the pistons to the compressors. He’d never met another engineer who had to put up with the chaos of minds interfering with the sense of machines in their heads.

  Creating a machine was like working out subtle mathematical analyses while hoisting unbalanced boulders into their proper places. Father could imagine vast, complicated designs outright. Everyone else imagined parts into reality and then hefted into place. Crenels deepened on gears Ritter imagined into tiny battlements. Cams smoothed into pleasing ovoids. He mated them to motors and actuators that he belted and wrestled into the design. Ritter’s body ached from the strain and sweat stung his eyes.