Steel, Titanium and Guilt: Just Hunter Books I to III

by Robin Craig

  “Well, I hope you learned what you needed to know. Follow me and I’ll see you out.”

  He led her to a lift, looked toward a biometric scanner and a few seconds later the door opened swiftly but silently. He bowed his head and indicated she should enter, and then followed her in. “My office,” he commanded.

  The lift rose as swiftly and silently as its door had opened then he let her out into his office. “Just before you go, Detective, there’s one more thing I’d like you to see.”

  Miriam felt a stab of alarm, but his look was friendly and open and she could see a bustling office through his window. And she was carrying a gun. It would be safest, she concluded, to accept when she had no good reason to refuse.

  “What is it?”

  He smiled. “You’ve seen a lot of what we do, but too much of it has been about machines of war. It might give a distorted view of us. I just want to show you what we’re really about. You’ll understand that we’re on the side of the angels, whatever our enemies might accuse us of. Here, sit down and I’ll show you,” he said, indicating a comfortable-looking visitor’s chair. “It’s a thing we’ve been putting together to show investors. It shows how many important medical treatments we’ve been developing.”

  She sat down on the edge of the chair, feeling she had to obey but wanting to retain the power of escape. But the chair appeared to have a mind of its own. It instantly tilted to a comfortable angle and adapted to her form, so much so that she slid down into its soft back and headrest before she had a chance to be startled.

  “Oh!” she said half a second later, when being startled caught up with her.

  He smiled. “Oh, sorry, one of our little tricks. Adaptive furniture. Not entirely unique, but still rare. Ever since I sat in my first uncomfortable chair outside an investor’s office, I’ve thought visitors should be given a treat, not treated like unwelcome guests. So make yourself comfortable.”

  She felt a bit dizzy, then hot, cold, afraid, angry, sad, and everything in between and round about. She was too confused to react, but within a few seconds the rushing stopped and she felt at peace. She smiled up at him. She wondered why she had thought his eyes cold, for she now realized that though they were blue as the sky they were as warm as sunshine. He smiled again, and her heart skipped a beat. Such beautiful teeth! She started to feel all gooey inside, and felt a warm glow between her thighs as her nipples hardened. I wonder if he’ll… if he’d…? But she knew that would never happen. No. I’m not good enough for him. But I want to please him! Maybe if I please him enough...

  He regarded her for a few more seconds, as if his warm eyes could see her soul and approved of what they saw. “Now, Detective Hunter. Miriam. May I call you Miriam?”

  She nodded eagerly. “Oh yes! Of course! But what just happened to me?”

  “Nothing you need to worry about, dear. Just a little calibration. There are a lot of commonalities in brain structure between people, and our machines can interpret neural pathways down to surprising precision. But even then, we need final calibrations to get things just right. Are you well? No pain or discomfort?”

  She nodded happily. He was so clever, and she could sit here hearing his mellow voice forever. A voice that had called her “dear.”

  “What did you see that made you so afraid?” he asked. “Down at the conveyor belt?”

  She felt puzzled. She could not imagine being afraid under this man’s protection. She thought back. Oh, that’s right. “Oh, just something silly. The man I was chasing – the reporter – had some titanium ribs. I saw one of them – it looked like one of them – in the wreckage. I was afraid. I wanted to run away.” She giggled. “Silly, aren’t I?”

  He nodded at her with a benevolent smile. “You are a clever bitch, aren’t you?”

  For a moment she was shocked at the word as if it did not belong in a mouth like his, but then it filled her with a dark excitement that he would use it for her.

  “Now, Miriam. You’ve obviously had your suspicions for a while. Will you do something for me?”

  She nodded vigorously again. Then she said in a small voice, “If I do, if I’m good, will you, I mean can we…?” Then shocked at her own temerity, she hung her head and blushed furiously.

  “I will do whatever you want, my dear.”

  Her head snapped up to gaze into his eyes. Does he mean that? Does he know what I want? He is a man of honor and will keep his word if I ask! But I have no right to ask…

  “But first, you’ll do what I want. I know you have notes of your investigation, stored somewhere on your police systems. You wouldn’t be incautious enough to just have them on your person or in your effects, would you?” She shook her head. “You seem distracted, so listen carefully, please. I want you to access all your notes. I want you to get rid of any speculations that point to Allied Cybernetics or me. I want you to mark any lines of investigation that are more than speculation and lead here as irrelevant or disproved – whatever will show we are not involved. Can you do that for me?”

  She looked slightly worried, as if she thought she should be worried but didn’t know why, but she nodded her head slowly.

  “Listen, Miriam. I would never ask you to do anything wrong. I just don’t want silly misunderstandings. You know that wasn’t really a rib you saw, just a support structure. Just a coincidence. And you must have your suspicions that your reporter just ran off – maybe with some girl he met? Maybe you should put that in your report instead?”

  This time she nodded eagerly.

  “Good!” he said, favoring her with another dazzling smile. “When you’ve done all that, just finish it up with notes about what you saw here – except the silly rib – and say you think everything here is above board and how all our testers look happy and are treated well. Can you do that for me, please?”

  She nodded seriously, tapped on her phone and then for the next few minutes studiously obeyed his request. Finally she looked back up at him. “All done!” she announced brightly.

  “Oh! There’s just one more thing. I think you are a lovely girl, and you have been so cooperative! Please forgive me if I am being too forward – I know I’m older than you – but I’d like to get to know you better. Would you share a drink with me before you go?”

  Her heart leaped, along with certain other organs. “Oh! That would be lovely!”

  “But you understand… nasty-minded people might think our business is their business. Could you just log that you’ve left these premises and are on your way home? Then put your phone onto full privacy? It’s only a little lie – just a short time in advance of the fact. But it would be so helpful. It would avoid all kinds of embarrassing questions, don’t you think? Especially if we happen to be a little, er – delayed – getting you to the airport afterwards?”

  She looked a little dubious, but her heart, or perhaps it was those other organs, persuaded her there was no harm in it. So she nodded and complied. If anything, she complied more rapidly than she had to, thinking about that drink and what might follow it.

  As soon as her fingers stopped moving, his fingers ran along the top of his desk and Miriam felt a brief wave of disorientation. Her head felt restrained. She lifted her hands to her head and felt a soft cowl covering it; touched the soft but firm bands around her neck and shoulders. Then her eyes widened in shock and her hand darted toward her wrist. But before she could reach her phone her arms collapsed limply onto the armrests of the chair. She couldn’t move her legs either. It was strange. She could feel the pressure of the seat, the cloth on her legs, the feel of her feet on the carpet, even the slight movement of her shirt on her chest as she breathed; but she couldn’t move a muscle in her arms or legs.

  “What have you done to me!?” she cried. “What the fuck did you just do to me!?”

  “Now, now, Detective,” he chided. “Such language from an officer of the law. Just be thankful I’m not the kind of man to take advantage of a situation like we just had. Otherwise your last sentence
might have been literally true.” He smiled a cold smile as her eyes widened in shocked realization. “If you like,” he added silkily, “it still can be.” And he lifted his hands over his desk in preparation.

  “No!” she said in fright. “No,” she added more calmly a second later, “that… won’t be necessary, thank you.”

  “That’s better, Detective. More polite. More consistent with your current position. But to answer your question, you know we are world leaders in machine-neural interfaces. I offered you a demonstration and you’ve just had one. That chair is a highly sophisticated interface. As I told you when you were more – fascinated – our technology is so precise that it takes just a little calibration to personalize its transmissions for almost anyone. I knew you were on to me and had to protect myself.”

  “Whatever I might have suspected, I think you’ve pretty much confirmed it! How do you think you’re going to get away with this?”

  “Admittedly I would rather not have run the risk. But you didn’t leave me much choice, I’m afraid.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Your visitor’s badge can read crude emotional states. It can be very handy in negotiations I must say. In your case, after you saw that damned rib, your emotions went haywire. Ending in fear. Which changed to relief when I gave you an easy out. Only one thing would have made you that desperate to get away: you thought your own life was in danger. That meant you knew.”

  “And I suppose my current inability to move is more of your chair’s magic?”

  “Of course.”

  “Let me go!”

  “No. I don’t think that will be possible.”

  “You can’t get away with this! Those people out there saw me come in! The police know I came here! The time recording on my report will show I was still here when you made me say I was gone! You’re just adding more charges to the sheet! Let me go now and I’ll forget this little episode happened!”

  He shook his head slowly. “Do you think I’m that stupid? All anyone on the other side of that window has seen is a restful beach scene. I do like to keep my employees relaxed – a model employer. You have already reported that you’re happy with your investigation here and as far as anyone outside this room knows, you’re long gone. So face it. I can do whatever I want with you.”

  The fear grabbed her again and she stared around the room, brain racing. But its racing found no traction; it found no way out. “So…” she said softly. “So what are you going to do with me? Kill me? It won’t work. Even with that fake log, they’ll find out. This is still the last place anyone saw me. Don’t risk it. You won’t get away with it!”

  “Oh, I think I will. But what kind of host am I? I promised to show you how far we’ve advanced here. I really do want you to understand. The good we are doing here is worth a few necessary sacrifices. We will save thousands of lives, relieve the suffering of millions. I admit we might have cut a few legal corners. But we had to! Surely a few people dead, most of them dregs of society to start with, with no value to themselves let alone anyone else, are a small price to pay for what we’ve done? The needs of many outweigh the needs of a few, don’t they? Especially when the few would otherwise have sunk into history without a ripple to mark their passing.”

  “They were still people! With a right to choose their own path!”

  “And look what they did with their vaunted power of choice!”

  “And me? What have I done to deserve this?”

  “I do regret the necessity in your case, Detective. But it is simple self-defense, beyond my own power of choice. Simple arithmetic too, in the calculus of how many lives your sacrifice will save. And,” he added, his eyes boring into hers as if he could read her innermost fears, “if you wish to speak of what you deserve, you are no innocent. It is you who killed the world’s first self-aware machine. Perhaps your fate represents more justice than you dare to name.”

  She stared at him. “Please. Let me go. I can see none of this is your fault. You aren’t well. I can help you.”

  “Take your present state,” he continued as if she had not spoken. “Complete, harmless paralysis of the voluntary muscles. Or this,” he added as his fingers played over his desk. Suddenly she couldn’t feel anything, as if her head had been removed from her body and was somehow floating in the air, still alive. “Equally complete and harmless anesthesia. Or perhaps more useful, selective loss of feeling.” Now she could feel again, all except her right arm. “Without drugs. Without loss of consciousness. This will revolutionize surgery.”

  Another play of his fingers and she could feel again, but when she tried to leap from the chair nothing happened.

  “Very impressive, Mr Sheldrake. I can see why you don’t want your technology lost. But it doesn’t have to be. I’m trapped here. Just go. Run like hell. You can get away. Live on an island somewhere. Your work will continue. You’ll be free. I’ll be free. Everyone will win.”

  “Oh, I am afraid we have passed the point of letting you go. But don’t worry. You will not die, and you will not disappear. Not in the sense you fear.” He stroked her arm, like a mother comforting a frightened child. Her brain flinched but her arm just lay there, helpless to register its protest.

  “What… what are you going to do?” she asked hoarsely. As if I don’t know. The image of the rib burned in her brain. Oh dear God. She felt a tear roll down her cheek and knew if she could move, she would be trembling.

  “Why,” he smiled, “don’t cry, Ms Hunter. I will do for you what men have sought since the beginning of time. I will make you a god.”

  She looked at him fearfully. “A god? You’re insane!”

  “Do you believe in an afterlife, Detective? In a higher realm, where gods and the spirits of the departed dwell?”

  “What? No. This is the only world there is, the only life we have. Please let me have mine. Let me go.” More tears escaped her eyes. She hated those tears. She hated that she could not stop them or hide them from him. But the tears did not care and would not be withheld.

  “Pleading, Detective Hunter? It doesn’t really suit you, you know. But I suppose even the strong must plead when nothing else is left to them.”

  He continued in a tone of academic discourse. “But quite right, Detective; I agree with you. I was merely leading to my point: I will make you a god, but not in some imaginary Heaven. Here, on Earth.”

  She stared at him, unable to speak, unable to even think except for the one word coursing through her head. No, no, no…

  “Ms Hunter, dismiss your fears. They are folly, born of incomprehension. Let me explain. Do you know what one horsepower is?” He waited, but she made no answer. “It is literally that: the power a single horse can supply. Even the most elite athlete can sustain only a fraction of a horsepower for any length of time. You will have the power of a hundred horses!”

  He continued softly, persuasively, “The human body produces a mere hundred watts of power, Ms Hunter. Can you even imagine what seventy-five kilowatts of power is like? And look at you. See how soft, how vulnerable, a human being is! How slow! I will free you from that. A hail of bullets? You will shrug them off! You are a fit woman, Ms Hunter, but how fast can you run? When I am done with you, the fastest man on earth would be left in your dust!”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying,” she whispered. “I can help you. We can work through this. We can still both get out of this.”

  He looked at her with contempt. “So you think me mad? Every visionary in history has been called mad by dullards who equate convention with sanity! But who is forgotten, and whose names reverberate through the ages, their deeds shrouded in myth?!”

  “You don’t believe any of this! If you can do this for me, why not for yourself? You talk of gods, yet all I see is a man!”

  He smiled. “A perceptive point: worthy of you, Detective. But there are some things I can still do only as a man. My time has not yet come, but no, I am not a hypocrite. For the time will indeed come – whe
n the time is right. Not in the same form as you, perhaps. But something. Something magnificent!”

  “Please,” she said, her words darting like a seal in the sights of an orca, as she desperately tried to reach whatever kernel of reason, sanity or pity remained in his mind. “Don’t you see it can’t work? The gods do not forgive! I do not want your gift! Do this and I will hunt you down. I will destroy you. If you want to live and not see your work come to ruin, run. By the time I am released you can be long gone, safe – and I will be a mere woman without jurisdiction. Not some god bent on your destruction!”

  He laughed, and she quailed at his simple mirth and all it implied. “Oh, I don’t think so, Ms Hunter! Can a caterpillar conceive of what it is to be a butterfly? Does the butterfly remember the dreams of the caterpillar, or live in regret that it has shrugged off the worm? I think not. I have no fear that you will hunt me down. I will make you a god, but nevertheless you will serve me. Even heaven has its hierarchy.”

  He added sharply, “So do no fool yourself with fantasies of revenge, Detective. You will remember nothing. Why should you want to? You are a grown woman. Do you remember, would you want to remember, when you were a baby, unable to control your squalling and your bodily functions, unable to feed yourself? Unable to think? Why would a god wish to remember its life before? And there are other things you will not wish to remember. One does not achieve godhood without cost. Let me show you.”

  For long seconds, Miriam felt as if her body had been plunged into lava filled with daggers. She was left gasping for breath. He looked down at her, blue eyes boring into hers gone dark with shock. “There is Yin and there is Yang, Detective.”

  Pleasure she could not have conceived of now coursed through her until she thought she would burst, then it too was gone and she was left gasping with pleasure, gasping with loss, gasping for more. “You see? And still there is more. For Yin and Yang are one.”

  Now she felt the impossible sensation of both combined, as if being burned at the stake while experiencing an ultimate orgasm fueled by the flames themselves. She was left confused and gasping, terrified and appalled. She looked at him with pleading eyes, no longer knowing whether she wanted it to stop or wanted it to go on.