Time Bandits (Age of Abundance Book 1)

by Dean C. Moore

  She glanced at the overhead cameras. She should have seen them first thing, if it weren’t for Torin pulling focus. It was why aging superstars seldom chose to be cast alongside pretty boy younger actors if they could avoid it. Get both of them in a two-shot, and the younger one always pulled focus. Whatever case you could make for good acting just went out the window. He’d long since learned to avoid putting her in that situation by standing in her blind spot when she had to interview a witness or potential perp.

  Kendra headed towards the back room in search of the DVRs attached to those cameras, rather looking forward to the show. Though not with the same childhood excitement Torin brought to all things; she was curious to see if anything could penetrate that shell of numbness that she kept wrapped around her like a warm, protective blanket.

  THREE

  “Dad?” The shop smelled of oil and gas and dust and a complex mélange of things it was beyond Kendra to identify. Many of the odors could no doubt be sourced back to the undercarriages of those cars, some of them lifted off the ground. No matter how big his garages got, they never seemed any less cramped. As usual, it was a game of hide-and-seek to find him. He’d robbed her of a childhood, so she supposed this was just his way of giving it to her now. “Dad!” she said with rising impatience.

  “Over here!” he shouted in his gravely, pre-cancerous voice. Assuming that wasn’t full-on cancer he wasn’t telling her about. Be just like him to check out without so much as a word. She was doing no better at pinpointing his whereabouts with just echo-location to assist her. Too many surfaces for the voice to reverberate off of.

  “You want to send up a flare?”

  The familiar thunderous smack of a gun discharging had her reaching for her holster. An orange glow ignited overhead, showering the vicinity in tiny needles of Vegas-night-life light. He’d fired off a flare that lodged in the ceiling overhead. “I was joking!” she said.

  “No you weren’t. Got tired of hearing your griping. You said we never played enough children’s games when you were younger. Now I get good at hide-and-seek and you still bitch.”

  It galled her that they could have the same thoughts about anything, including the analogy depicting this bit of foreplay so common between them. She found him at last. “You’re right. Better my second childhood than yours.”

  “Ha-ha. I’ll be entering mine soon enough and then you’ll resent me all the more. Assuming that’s possible.” He was sitting on a faux red leather upholstered stool with wheels turning a socket wrench in his hand, with the car lifted off the ground just a few feet. The dirty cream overalls seemed to swallow him up a little more each year. It wasn’t just weight he was losing, it was bone mass, height; he was the incredible shrinking man. How many times had she told him, alcohol dissolves the bones?

  “I came to ask you about Pete.”

  “Pete? Well, he doesn’t have much of a social life, but neither do you. I suppose I’ll understand if you make some time for one another.” He was talking to her like a nagging voice in back of his head, eyes still focused on his work, hands still turning his wrench, playing it better than a musician played his sax.

  “Very funny. I need to know if he can be programmed to kill somebody.”

  He sighed, slackened his hold on the wrench and craned his head towards her. “I’m not that much of a pain in the ass, am I?”

  “No, you I’ll kill with my bare hands, when it comes time. This is about another murder I’m contemplating.”

  He set down the socket wrench and wiped his hands of grease in the rag, which was greasier, and just made more of a mess of his hands. His long hair draped over his shoulders. There was just a little blond streaking the grey now. He may have grown older but he never grew up. Still a hippie at heart. Still smoking enough weed to give her adequate cause to bust him. Though he’d argue it was medicinal. He grimaced, ruminating over her insinuations. “You’d have to be awfully smart to reprogram Pete for something like that.”

  “There’s no shortage of smart people, Dad. Add to the ones born that way, the neuro-enhanced, juiced up on any number of mind-expanding drugs, you should know about that… and then there’s Google, which makes any idiot plenty smart enough.”

  “Still. It takes teams of people working together to build his brain. Hard to imagine it would take any less to re-engineer him. But I suppose anything’s possible. Pete! Come over here.”

  She could hear Pete squeaking a path to them from God knows where in the shop. “How is it he can trace a beeline to you and I can’t?”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out what looked like a garage door opener. “My distress beacon. Though I’m not sure I want that guy working on me when I go into cardiac arrest. One chest compression and it’ll be like a truck ran over me.”

  “What’s up, doc?” Pete said, squeaking into sight. Pete looked like a cross between a shop vac and Mr. Clean, the bald muscle guy avatar peddling himself as a home cleaning solution since the 1950s or so. These days, Mr. Clean mostly enacted biowarfare against germs on your behalf with its self-evolving within-limits, more-rabid bacterial strains than anything you had around the house. Pete looked like he was here to unleash not just bacterial warfare but whatever his dad needed in around-the-shop assistance, up to and including tearing the limbs off a guy and stuffing the pieces inside him and hitting puree. Come to think of it, her father said he’d switched to biofuels some time back. Maybe that’s what he meant; everyone he’d offended and taken advantage of over the years who’d found their way back to him for some payback found themselves turned to the greater good instead. Though of course he’d gone on about biofuels being an eco-conscious decision, the same way that growing and selling pot was eco-conscious by cutting down on the need for commuting to make a living and hence on noxious automotive gaseous emissions.

  All in all, it wasn’t much of a surprise why her perps couldn’t fast-talk their way around her; by the age of nine she’d heard it all; better spin doctoring than most politicians commanded and all in the name of epic self-destructiveness. Or enticing her to run some con in concert with him toward the ends of paying off his many gambling debts, betting on most anything being his third favorite addiction. As co-grifter, she’d probably committed more crimes before she could define the word than she could make up for with her arrest record. All preying on other people’s emotions as much as her own. No wonder she’d adopted emotional numbness as a defense mechanism.

  “Your track needs greasing, Pete,” he said.

  “Then I wouldn’t be able to irritate you.”

  She smiled. “I like him already. What else do you do to get under his skin?”

  After a split second delay, Pete confessed, “I leak oil on his carpet.”

  “Inspired. But since when did he start taking you home with him?”

  “Since his body started locking up on him. Compressed vertebrae. I told him I could operate. All he has to do is switch out my modules. But he’s old fashioned.”

  “Yeah, I know. He’d rather just get stoned on weed.”

  “I envy him for that. Me, I don’t get any reprieve, ever. Makes a person homicidal.” Pete crushed a rusty carburetor in his hands as if to relieve the mounting stress that was just going to make murder inevitable moments from now. She winced at the thought of a classic piece of hardware like that, however rusted and inoperable, forfeiting its remaining years just so Pete could have a more defined sense of self.

  Then she reminded herself that they had computer printers these days that could fabricate most anything on demand at a fraction of the cost of the original and likely to last ten times as long. One more reason the bread lines were growing longer, unemployment more rampant, and the only way out to agree to some chip implant or other human upgrade just to stay in the game. Which explained her disdain for technology and its advocates, in general, most of all, these Singularity Watchers celebrating each breakthrough in human upgrades like it was leading them to the Promised Land instead of to perd
ition. Someone owning a piece of her mind with overwrite access, some backdoor coding only the manufacturer had privy to, the one in bed with the government and big money interests whose main concern was to ensure everyone remained subservient to them? No thank you. What surprised her was she was in a minority. People weren’t rioting in the streets. And her rants made her seem like the crazy one.

  All the same, she couldn’t help smiling despite Pete’s dark innuendo. She could read bluster on AIs as well as she could on people. These days her perps could be either one, so just came with the territory. “We think a robo-doc, just like you, killed someone,” she said, looking him straight in the front-facing artificial eyes rimming his head.

  “Impossible. Don’t let the snarky humor fool you. I’m running the dry sarcasm algorithms. It’ll pass the Turing test, providing you just desire a smart ass. But I really can’t be other than I am. Same with the auto-repair module. You’d have to swap it out if you wanted something different, and then it’d just be different programmed behavior.”

  “That could well be the answer, a military module then.”

  “Nope,” Pete said swiveling his head back and forth, which just made her dizzy tracking all those eyes. “Robo-docs are too crude for military applications, too cheaply made, a little too off-the-shelf, even with the ever-expanding battery of extensions. Even the military bots aren’t really used to kill people for fear of escalating things. They’re used more in a peacekeeping capacity, like police.”

  “I don’t know. You seem able to do a lot more than you initially suggested.”

  “The sarcasm module is an overlay above and beyond general utility mode. That includes internet data retrieval. You really haven’t asked me to do anything outside my programming.”

  “What would someone need to do to make you truly sentient?”

  “Design a better robot. You’d need self-evolving hardware and software so I could reprogram and rebuild myself.”

  “But you wouldn’t have to be sentient to kill. Programmed behavior should suffice just fine.”

  “Damn it, Kendra!” her dad shouted, startling her, as he threw down the rag in his hand. “This is the way she is,” he explained to Pete. “It’s not the truth she wants, just a sliver of proof that her worst fears are justified. Always it’s worst case scenarios with you,” he said, turning to face her again.

  “Gee, I wonder where I got that from, Dad? With you the worst case scenario usually turned out to be the correct one.”

  “He already explained to you…”

  “Presumably a robo-doc could be programmed to kill,” Pete interjected. They both turned to him with betrayed expressions on their faces. “I just said a military module wasn’t likely. So long as you knew all the parameters of the situation going in, murder is just another task to perform efficiently within the given constraints. We can improvise within limits having to do with our module’s assigned tasks. You’d have to case the joint first, to put it in the vernacular. Make sure to control the most important variables come D-day.”

  “Like what?” she said.

  “Don’t know, not at an expert level, anyway. Don’t have a module for that. Like I said, we robo-docs are jacks of all trades, masters of none outside our specialty module.”

  “Why can’t you just access what you need off the internet?” Kendra asked.

  “That kind of access is denied. The instant we log on, we’re identified, limiting what we can and can’t do. Any attempts to hack the chip, assuming that’s what you’re going to ask next, leads to instant lobotomy. I won’t just look like an empty oil drum then that thinks he’s a man, I really will be all hollow on the inside.”

  She just wasn’t buying it. Pete just seemed a lot higher functioning to her than he was letting on. Me thinks you doth protest too much, was that the Shakespeare line? “If you don’t believe me, ask your dad. He’s been trying to get me to kill him for years.” Pete rolled off on his tracks to return to this work. The fact that he seemed to read her mind didn’t assuage her fears any. Then again, his ability to read human moods and expressions would be part of the standard service kit, to make him less difficult to live with and more humanlike in his companionship. Maybe what really creeped her out was just how human he could seem without being human, while adhering to strictly programmed behavior. Muddied the divide between humans and robots. Making it hard to go on feeling superior. After all, she was no shortage of programmed behavior beyond her own control as well, as any psychologist would be happy to testify to. And that meant that even before getting a mind chip stuck in her head, she may well be a lot more programmed by Big Brother than she cared to admit.

  After feeling herself tensing up secondary to the thoughts flowing through her mind, she softened some as she returned her eyes to her dad. She got so lost in hating him she sometimes forgot he was starting to have the kinds of problems that would benefit from love and forgiveness more than resentment. Per Pete’s comment about Dad’s frequent requests to off him. But she could handle that truth even less right now, namely his well-deserved human right to accept and receive kindness, so she kept her shields of anger and resentment just where they were.

  “You sure you’re barking up the right tree with this theory of yours?” her father asked.

  “No, I’m not. Torin doesn’t buy it either.”

  “Torin, your psychic ex-husband? What does he know? If he was that psychic he wouldn’t have married you in the first place. Hell, I could have told him you’re more trouble than you’re worth.”

  “Love you too, Dad.” She could hear her high heels clicking on the cement as she turned her back on him, shooting him down with the click-click-click coming like machine gun fire.

  “Wish that were true,” he mumbled behind her.

  She steeled her heart, actually gratified that she’d learned to do that at an early age thanks to him. Otherwise she would be a basket case in her line of work. Not even Torin had figured that much out.

  FOUR

  A FEW HOURS EARLIER…

  “Hi, sweetie! Look at you, you’re a mess!”

  “I’m afraid she got a little carried away with the jelly doughnuts.”

  “Shame on you, encouraging such behavior. She’ll be positively addicted by the time she’s older.”

  “He’s the worst parental figure, the worst,” Notchka said. “I’m going to have to trade him in on a new model.”

  The meddlesome female bent over to apply her handkerchief to Notchka’s face, as Clyde looked around. They’d barely made it out of the gym onto the sidewalk, and now this. At least traffic was light and zooming by. Not any of them would be able to make much of what they saw, assuming they saw anything at all. Now, what to do with this intrusive lady? She’d seen them standing right in front of the gym.

  The woman, satisfied with her cleanup of his daughter’s face, tucked her handkerchief back in her purse without paying much attention to what she’d actually wiped off. Talk about unreliability of eye-witnesses. It was true; people really did see what they expected to see, and no more. But now they’d have DNA evidence to go on, the skin-cells she’d managed to slough off of Notchka’s face, if the cops ever crossed paths with Ms. Inconvenient.

  She was dowdy, fiftyish, and showing more skin in that tight dress than she ought to, even without the chilly weather factored in. It was his guess she made sure to parade up and down this street as often as she could to catch the pumped up johns coming out of the gym, perhaps riding their steroid high enough to hump a telephone post. Easy pickings. Probably the only place she’d be shown any interest at all. If she put half the effort into actually working out, she mightn’t be half bad, broadening her prospects. Maybe she just couldn’t maintain the illusion she was anything other than she was before all those mirrors.

  “I’ll get her right home and clean her up,” Clyde promised. “Thank you for your kindness.” He pressed his hand against Notchka’s back and hurried the two of them away from her. “Don’t look back,�
�� he mumbled to Notchka. “Just tell me, using your psychic abilities, if she’s forgotten about us and is moving on.”

  “Yep, completely.”

  I’m guessing that means Miss Inconvenient isn’t exactly shopping for age appropriate fare, Clyde thought. Probably felt she needed the energy and sexual prowess of a younger man, which, scientifically speaking, wasn’t half bad reasoning. Clyde would be happy to confirm that his penis size and his ability to hold an erection both had declined in recent years. An affirmation he doubted she was looking for. She had enough of her own unsettling insecurities to contend with, too much perhaps to entertain anyone else’s. That was one more check mark in the column for younger men.

  “Good,” he said. “Once she’s a respectable distance away so no one can associate what happens next with us, I need her to combust in flames.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s got your DNA on her handkerchief. They’ll be able to track us with that.”

  “So what if they do? You keep saying I’m smarter than anyone alive.”

  “And now you’re deadlier too. But it doesn’t pay to get too cocky. I’m guessing, moreover, trouble will find us the way it has today without us having to go looking for it.”

  “I want to get caught. I want to test my skills against whoever’s gumshoeing me.”

  “I have much better ways to test your abilities.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  Big dramatic sigh. “Fine. But your manipulation of my young impressionable mind is duly noted and may not be forgiven later.”

  “That’s good, Notchka. It means you’re learning there are always consequences to actions, some not even you will be able to avoid. Maybe now you understand better why I don’t want you to get too full of yourself.”

  “You believe whatever we do comes back to us three times over. That’s magical thinking. And not very scientific.”