Less Than Human

by Maxine McArthur

  “This is …” the woman started to say in Japanese, then stopped and blinked at Ishihara in surprise. “Who are you?”

  “Assistant Inspector Ishihara, West Station Police, Religious Affairs. Who are you?”

  She brought her thoughts back from wherever they were. “My name is McGuire. I work for Tomita. We designed this robot.” She reached for a dilapidated brown handbag on the floor near the robot, rummaged in it for a moment, then proffered a card to him.

  The only accent in her Japanese was that of Osaka. Ishihara noticed she gave him only midlevel politeness. He hadn’t even used ordinary level for her.

  He knew enough foreigners—third- and fourth-generation Koreans, Brazilians and Filipinos on work visas—not to be surprised that she spoke reasonable Japanese. A relief, though, not to have to dust off his high school English. Or Russian—they saw a lot of Russians since the Sakhalin Treaty, but not many of them worked in big companies.

  She had gray eyes, a color he found less alien than blue. To see if it would faze her, he dropped his gaze slowly down to her boots and up again.

  It didn’t. She merely stopped her hand before it could begin to brush strands of hair out of her eyes.

  “Well. Nice to meet you.” She started to turn back to the robot.

  “What are you looking for here?” said Ishihara. “I thought it was an accident, human error.”

  “I’m just making certain.” She didn’t look directly at him this time. “Before we move it.”

  Ishihara looked at the robot properly. A big, ungainly cranelike thing. “This is it?”

  “You were expecting Gundam?” she said.

  He had to stop himself grinning. He’d been thinking of Mighty Atom and Sam Number Five, in fact. “What were you about to say?”

  “When?”

  “When I came in.”

  McGuire hesitated, then pointed to the robot. “This is at the wrong position.”

  “‘Wrong’?”

  “It’s at halt, not emergency stop.” She stepped closer to the robot and ran her hand along the arm and the pointy bit at the end. He noted how her long, grimy fingers gripped the box and the familiar way she moved among the tangle of wires and leads.

  “This part hit Mito,” she went on. “It’s programmed to come to a complete emergency stop as soon as something interrupts its arc of movement. So unless someone has tampered with the controls, it should still be in that position. But it’s at halt.”

  “What’s halt?” Ishihara could guess from the pronunciation of the characters used for the word, but he wanted to be sure.

  “Halt is when the robot pauses in its job. It doesn’t go back to the beginning of the sequence. None of the peripherals”—she pointed at the machines around the robot— “should be affected.”

  “So were they affected this time?”

  She nodded, her long, bony features exaggerating the serious expression. “They were all off-line. Which is what I’d expect in emergency stop.”

  “So someone turned it from stop to halt?”

  “It’s not a matter of turning the switch back,” she retorted. “Once it’s at emergency stop, the robot’s got to be completely restarted. That leaves a record in the programming file. But there’s nothing.”

  “The only entry card used last night belonged to the person on duty,” said Ishihara. The factory’s security system report was clear. Unless the dead man had let someone in, he’d been there alone.

  “Another thing.” McGuire stepped back from the robot again, keeping her eye on it as if the thing might still move unexpectedly. “The safeties must have been tampered with.”

  “Safeties?”

  She pointed to the wire barrier, a post with a cameralike box on the top, some wire netting mats inside the gate, and the warning signs posted all around the enclosure and the line itself. “Measures designed to prevent this happening.”

  “Don’t work very well, do they?”

  “This is the real world, Assistant Inspector.” She stepped right back from the wire and slotted the box into a stand outside the cage. “An industrial robot is a complex computer, but its hardware has to interact with the real world, with the possibility of infinite errors.”

  “Like us humans.” In spite of the heat, Ishihara was interested.

  “Exactly.” She smiled, pleased that he’d understood, and slipped into what Ishihara mentally labeled “lecture mode.”

  “The robot is programmed to do one thing very accurately and continuously, for years and years. It needs to be stable—we don’t want it shifting out of alignment, or your car window, for example, mightn’t be fixed on straight. It has very sensitive sensors, but only for its own job, not for what’s around it. Unlike your Helpbots in the Betta, it gets no feedback from the environment. It’s taught to go from A to B to C through certain coordinates. It doesn’t know or care if there’s air along the coordinates or someone’s head.” She winced at her own words and was silent.

  Ishihara fished his cigarette packet from his shirt pocket and extracted one. “Could Mito have altered the program to keep the robot active while he did something?”

  “I would be able to see a change like that. There isn’t anything. In fact…” She stared at the controller, then at Ishihara, raising her chin as if facing an unpleasant fact. “The controller log shows nothing after 4:30 A.M., and the program files are unreadable. I won’t know why until I’ve had a chance to investigate further.”

  “The security office wasn’t called until 5:20, and the body wasn’t discovered until 5:30.” Ishihara twirled the cigarette between his fingers. “Would Mito have noticed a malfunction and come close to the robot to investigate?”

  “If there’s a m … minor malfunction”—she frowned at the stammer—“a signal to check it is sent to the control booth. The whole line wouldn’t stop, or a signal would have been sent to the security company as well. That didn’t happen until … 5:20, did you say?”

  “Yeah. So this robot only had some problem and halted. Or could it have kept running without leaving a record in the log?”

  “That’s impossible.” There was almost enough authority in her voice to make him cancel that possibility. “All I can suggest is that Mito went to investigate whatever wiped the welder’s log, but he was hit, and the line actually stopped at 5:20.”

  “Maybe the safety precautions developed a problem.”

  “In that case he definitely wouldn’t enter the work envelope.”

  “So you’re saying somebody else altered the safeties?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. Normally I’d say no, not without leaving traces that I’d find.”

  “Have you got any concrete proof it wasn’t an accident?” Ishihara scrunched the empty cigarette packet and dropped it on the floor.

  McGuire glared at him and bent to pick it up. She scrunched the packet harder than he had. “I’ll know m … more when I’ve had a chance to go through the program. You can’t smoke in here,” she added, looking pointedly at the closest NO SMOKING sign.

  “I’ll go outside then.” He stared her straight in the eye—wasn’t that what foreigners expected? “Nice meeting you, McGuire-san.”

  “I can’t say the pleasure is mutual.”

  He got a real kick out of how she changed the usual polite expression.

  He didn’t go outside immediately. As he spoke to McGuire he’d seen a man in overalls enter the factory from a side door and go to the glassed-in booth in the back.

  The technician was sitting in front of a computer and jumped nervously when Ishihara tapped on the glass.

  “Yes?” He opened the door about three centimeters.

  “Assistant Inspector Ishihara, West Station.” Ishihara flashed his ID perfunctorily. “You on duty tonight?”

  “Y … yes.” The man brushed a long fringe out of his eyes. He was young, probably in his mid-twenties, with slanted fox-eyes and a dissatisfied expression.

  Ishihara pushed the door open
farther with his foot. “Nasty business, this.” He jerked his head back in the direction of the accident scene. “Just wanted to ask you a couple of questions about the deceased.”

  “I wasn’t here,” the man said quickly. He had a high, petulant voice.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Sakaki. Tomihiro Sakaki. Look, detective-san, I have lots of work to do because we’re behind schedule …”

  Funny how people think bluster will hide the tremor in their voices. “Was Mito a friend of yours?”

  “No.”

  Pause. Sakaki looked pointedly at his computer.

  “Did he have any personal problems?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Just wondering if he had anything on his mind, that’s all. He might have made a mistake and turned off the safety devices.” Ishihara wasn’t going to mention McGuire’s opinion.

  “That’s probably right.” Sakaki was sweating.

  Mind you, Ishihara was sweating, too. The factory was damn hot. “Could be the power cut off for a second.”

  “Could be.”

  Ishihara considered shaking Sakaki up a bit. One of his coworkers just had his head smashed in, and this bastard wouldn’t even be honest about basics. He was probably worried about some petty misdemeanor—had some Bettaspecific hardware tucked away in his apartment or something.

  No, leave Sakaki for now and come back and question him if necessary. First, see what McGuire finds in the robot’s program. And run a background check on the factory, the company that owned it, personnel, and suppliers. Including Tomita’s gaijin robot expert. And especially close-mouthed Sakaki here.

  “If you remember anything, give me a call.” Ishihara shoved his card into the breast pocket of Sakaki’s overall. “Anything at all.”

  “Yeah.” Sakaki leaned away from the contact and shut the door.

  He could be ex-gang, mused Ishihara. Got the right attitude. Or even still affiliated, maybe doing petty theft or dealing.

  In the loading bay, McGuire stood outside the robot’s cage. She looked very small in the middle of all that machinery. He decided to keep the constable outside until she finished.

  The evening hadn’t even begun to cool off, but it still felt better outside than in the ovenlike factory. Ishihara’s sweat-soaked shirt clung to his back and chest. He lit his cigarette and blew out the first lungful of smoke with a sigh.

  Outside the gate a loudspeaker blared a rhythmic chant. It was the recorded voice of one of Osaka’s last mobile tofu salesman. In a tiny utility truck loaded with tanks, the pale ranks of tofu would be swaying like rectangular corpses in a watery morgue.

  Tofu! Get your fresh to-ofu! The voice called up the ghosts of a more leisurely age, when children played outside until dusk and men returned from work in time to practice golf shots on the sidewalk.

  On top of the building opposite, a huge billboard flashed captioned images of the latest Betta. Beat the heat. A shaded dome full of neat rows of leafy plants. An indoor swimming pool with kids splashing happily and adults seated in lounges by the poolside, reading newspapers or talking on phones. Housework made easy. An immaculate lounge room, housewife smiling as a cleanbot whiffled over the carpet at her feet. This lifestyle can be yours at Kusatsu Betta. The Betta itself, a jumble of immense gleaming white domes and towers, loomed over the shabby remains of an older town.

  Yeah right, thought Ishihara sourly. For those who can afford to mortgage the rest of their lives.

  “Was everything satisfactory inside?” The constable at his post stared straight ahead at the sunflowers. In the fading light they looked like a row of drooping heads.

  “Not bad.” Ishihara didn’t elaborate. “I’ll keep the report tonight. Got to finalize a couple of things.”

  He felt inclined to dismiss McGuire’s discoveries as expert babble, except that she and her company had nothing to gain by finding a problem with the robot. And Sakaki was hiding something. Probably nothing relevant to Mito’s death, but you never knew.

  Eleanor yawned as the monorail carriage rocked soothingly and invisible underground walls whooshed past. Bright white lights, multicolored glare of advertisements. Yodogawa station. She felt grimy and crumpled, in spite of the chilly air-conditioning. Someone got in at the other end of the carriage. The pillars of the station and the reflection of the wall holos got mixed up in the window opposite. Her reflection stared back in familiar surprise—she looked so alien, with her angular gawkiness instead of compact Japanese elegance; undignified obviousness instead of tasteful reticence; bright flame of hair like a signal flare to warn of the heresy of difference.

  She’d had to work later than she intended on Sam’s presentation for the budget committee after getting back from the Minato Ward factory. None of her team would be at work the next day—all of them had gone to their hometowns for Bon. She couldn’t possibly go in tomorrow either—she hadn’t spent an evening with Masao for a month.

  But the problem that kept jerking her mind out of drowsiness was not her own project. The Kawanishi Metalworks welder must have been radically reprogrammed to allow it to move without activating the safeties. The dead man, Mito, couldn’t have done it. He was a C-grade maintenance officer. He could have resolved most lower-level programming and teaching problems, but certainly not perform the surgery involved here. The robot must have been off-line during a reprogramming of that magnitude. Sakaki said he didn’t think it had been off-line for months. She’d have to call again on Monday and look at the maintenance schedule.

  The train whooshed smoothly into Amagasaki station; the doors swished open and shut. She was the only person left in the carriage. Then the muffled roar of the tunnel ceased as the carriage emerged into open air. Rattle-click, rattle-click, as it crossed the bridge. Behind her reflection in the window, lights spread in great swaths across the pale backdrop of the Osaka night sky, each of the Bettas a constellation in itself.

  The robot hit Mito, which meant it should have gone to emergency stop. She didn’t like the way her thoughts were heading, but possibly Mito had surprised someone who was trying to interfere with the robot. That person then wiped the control log after Mito died. If so, it was police business, not the company’s, and she could file her report.

  The trouble was, she’d found a different clue that might indicate Tomita was responsible—an unknown signature in the robot’s recognition file. All commercially manufactured robots, whether mobile home helpers or fixed factory manipulators, had their own identity codes, which were theoretically impossible to copy. They consisted of the maker’s electronic signature, the type of robot, the series, the date of manufacture, and the number of the individual machine. In the Kawanishi robot, the robot’s individual number didn’t match the number on record at Kawanishi and Tomita. Until she checked it with the Industrial Lab at Tomita on Monday, she wouldn’t know if it was deliberate or a mistake in registering the ID code. She didn’t see how it could affect the robot’s behavior with Mito, but it was a discrepancy that must be cleared up.

  The train stopped at Tachibana station. Home. No climbing down stairs and into the sticky night air, into the dark streets echoing with her own footfalls, like in the old days. All she had to do was walk along the brightly lit corridor to her own Betta.

  The corridors were always bright. No dark corners, no ambiguities. This particular corridor was rounded and tunnel-like, with walls sloping outward up to a domed ceiling. Smaller corridors branched off at regular intervals. Along the ceiling, holos advertised products made by the business conglomerates that sponsored the Bettas. Their jingles were muted at that time of night. Along the walls notices to residents shimmered between text and graphic directions for newcomers or those who lost their way easily. Eleanor never lost her way. It was the same sense that woke her when the train reached her station.

  The corridors were safe, one of the great selling points of the Bettas. Security cameras watched all corridors and were programmed to alert human security guar
ds at any sign of trouble. She remembered without regret the days when she had to take a taxi home if she worked late, or had to call Masao from the station to come and meet her because he didn’t like her to walk home alone through ill-lit streets. She didn’t like it, either. The accident so many years ago that left her with her stammer had happened on a dark street. A car hit her bicycle, they said.

  The damn stammer. That long string bean of a man, the detective, Ishihara, noticed although he didn’t say anything. All it meant was that she was overtired, but he wasn’t to know that. It made her sound like such a fool. And she didn’t want to appear a fool before that man, who obviously didn’t believe a woman could do her job. He didn’t look like her image of a detective, which was based on the young, dashing actors of popular vid shows. Ishihara’s stoop, his crumpled short-sleeved shirt and shiny-kneed trousers, and lined, dour face could have been that of many aging engineers she knew, passed over for promotion and relegated to administrative tasks. He’d looked at home in the dingy factory.

  She shrugged off the memory. The Kawanishi incident was closed as far as the police were concerned, and it was unlikely she’d meet Assistant Inspector Ishihara again.

  Cleanbots scuttled out of her way on wheels and jointed legs as their infrared and movement sensors told them she was approaching. Then they returned to their tasks, skimming the corridor for rubbish like the insects they were modeled upon. Anticockroaches, she thought sleepily, admiring their clustering behavior. Tomita produced a smaller, down-market version of Spick and Scram, as the cleanbots were properly known, although she hadn’t been directly involved in its development.

  She turned right where the corridor branched, then stopped. One of those cleanbots seemed out of synch. She peered back around the corner and saw it approaching purposefully, away from the herd. Immediately it sensed her, it swung around and zoomed back to the others. Almost as if it had been…following her?

  She laughed at herself and kept walking. It would be a glitch in the recognition function. The bot probably thought she was one of its herd.