Less Than Human

by Maxine McArthur

  Masao turned toward her with a groan. “I never let Grandpa bother me. He’d drive me mad.”

  “Today he said something strange. He practically accused Kazu of making some mistake.”

  Masao was silent. She waited with growing impatience. Masao was always slow with his opinions.

  “Grandpa’s probably thinking of Kazu’s failed venture,” he said finally.

  “Kazu? You’re kidding.”

  “No, really.” Masao shifted to face her. “A couple of years after the Quake, we were away that summer because you had a conference in Amsterdam.”

  She did remember. They took the obligatory souvenirs to Masao’s parents after they got back to Japan, but the atmosphere was tense there. She never asked why.

  “Kazu got together with some of his mates and rented part of the old milk factory building. You know, in the next block from ours. They were going to make robot toys you could program yourself, taking advantage of the slump after the Quake. They spent a lot of credit livelining the whole building for their equipment. It was the latest thing, but terribly expensive.”

  Liveline cabling had been invented before the Quake of 2006 but had not come into widespread use until afterward, when the rebuilding of Japan began. Liveline was the most secure of cabling, but even nine years later was still prohibitively expensive.

  Masao stroked her hip reflectively. “Kazu said the factory was a mess. They had to move a lot of big equipment abandoned by the milk company down into the basement. And then some other company …”

  “Mipendo,” interrupted Eleanor. “Brought out their personal robot line. Which ruined the market for small companies in that field.” Tomita had developed a similar, minor line, based on the Mipendo template.

  “That’s right.” Masao rolled onto his back again. “And Kazu went bust, along with the money he’d borrowed from Grandpa. Ever since then, Grandpa hasn’t let him do anything creative. And he never lets Kazu forget it. Not deliberately, of course.”

  Eleanor winced at the casual way she’d dismissed Kazu’s veiled invitation and her careless comment about small companies going bankrupt.

  “You could have told me about this before,” she said.

  “You never asked. Besides, I didn’t think it was fair to Kazu.”

  “I never saw Kazu as angry as he was today. He said Grandpa wasn’t moving with the times.”

  Masao slid his arm under her shoulders and pulled her close to his side. His warmth dissolved some of her tension. “Grandpa is a stubborn old man. He doesn’t want to change the way he’s always done things.”

  “I suppose if I changed my name or produced a batch of grandchildren, he’d be friendlier.”

  Masao stayed cautiously silent. She didn’t want to do the former and couldn’t do the latter, after a miscarriage, before she met him, which left her unable to conceive. They had talked this over years ago.

  After a moment she relaxed into him. “Do you know what Kazu asked me today?”

  “To look at the machine, yes.”

  “Not just that.” She twisted her head back so she could see Masao’s face in the filtered moonlight. “He asked me if I’d ever thought about leaving Tomita.”

  Masao’s face didn’t change.

  “Don’t you think that’s strange? He practically asked me if I’d work with them.”

  “Bet Grandpa doesn’t know.”

  “Do you think Kazu was sounding me out before approaching Grandpa?”

  “Dunno.” Pause. “Yoshiko would be upset. You know about her and the shop, don’t you?

  She’s got a bit of an inferiority complex because she wasn’t much help to Kazu. Most of the wives of small business owners do the books. Yoshiko isn’t any good at that. She messed up a couple of orders, and Grandpa decided she’d better stay out of it.”

  Not only did Yoshiko worry about Eleanor’s influence on Mari, she probably also worried about Eleanor’s taking what was Yoshiko’s rightful place in the family business.

  “You wouldn’t leave Tomita, would you?” His disbelief was palpable.

  Of course she wouldn’t leave the challenges of research in a top company like Tomita for the claustrophobic drudge of a family workshop. They’d have to leave the Betta. Imagine trying to sleep beside that busy road. And she’d never find the infrastructure her research needed outside a large company or a university. Look at poor Akita, who had joined Tomita when Eleanor did. He worked for nearly four years on neurosilicon interfaces for prosthetic hands, then when the Seikai Lifestyle Reconstruction Plan was announced, the company put most of their funds into construction-related projects. Akita never accepted that. He raised a hell of a stink and left them for another company, although he didn’t mention any of this in his recent e-mails.

  “I’m worried about our project,” she said. “Izumi thinks the budget committee isn’t sympathetic.”

  “What’s the worst they can do?”

  “Cancel it”

  Masao murmured something suitably appalled.

  “It’s so shortsighted!” she burst out. “Just because we can’t give them immediate results …”

  Masao turned on his side to face her. “It sounds like they’re being practical, as management has to be. If there’s no demand for humanoid robots, why build them?”

  She resisted the urge to swat him. He was merely playing devil’s advocate. “But we have the technology. They’re not willing to invest enough to develop it properly.”

  “That reminds me of the old human clone debates. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.”

  “It’s not like that at all,” she said crossly.

  Silence for a few minutes. She wondered if he’d gone to sleep.

  “How’s Mari?” he said. “I didn’t get a chance to talk to her.”

  “She got a phone call and had to leave before I had a chance to talk much.”

  “Probably a boyfriend.”

  “I hope so.” Eleanor tried to think what was different about Mari. “It’s like she’s decided to keep her real life away from the family.”

  Masao grunted. “Sounds sensible to me.”

  She snuggled into him again. She had always envied his ability to drop off in moments. Soon she drifted into a dream in which Yoshiko tried to invite the technician Sakaki, of Kawanishi Metalworks, to tea, but he kept saying, “Ask the robot.”

  Here?” Ishihara’s voice rose in disbelief.

  “Yup.” Assistant Inspector Beppu, Ishihara’s usual partner, took his scene-of-crime kit from the back of the car and blipped his key twice at the doors to make sure the locks were active. Beppu, who had been on the driving range when Ishihara called him, was still wearing golf slacks and a regrettable Hawaiian shirt that strained over his paunch. The duty officer from Homicide had gone on ahead with the Forensics team.

  Two marked police cars and the squat white morgue van were parked right up against the main entrance of the twenty-story, four-block Betta. It was one of the newest Bettas—Ishihara could see a pile of construction rubble to the side of one building, surrounded by a line of orange tape that flapped in the hot breeze, and the curved concrete walls shone blindingly white.

  “We should have come by subway,” added Beppu. “Too damn hot outside.” He wiped the beads of sweat that had jumped out all over his face. Beppu needed to lose about twenty kilos. “That retirement village by the seaside looks better every day.”

  Ishihara scratched his head. “I thought they said a cult-related group suicide?”

  “Yeah, either they got it wrong, or it’s a weird one. Come on.” Beppu jerked his head at the entrance.

  Ishihara shook himself mentally. Don’t doubt an incident because it doesn’t fit the pattern. Cult-related group suicides had, as far as he knew, all occurred either at country retreats or in run-down midcity communes, often underground. It didn’t feel right, this one happening at a Betta. As though he’d found a cockroach in his guaranteed fumigated and insect-free, shiny stai
nless-steel bathtub.

  The lobby was cool inside and crowded with tall plants in blue pots. Natural-seeming light from hidden ceiling panels created the impression of a skylight and made the room look larger than it was. He couldn’t tell if the plants were real or not—the flat leaves looked shiny and perfect enough to be artificial. On the other side of the room several men in casual clothes huddled together and stared at the police.

  Three uniformed policeman stood talking to a portly man in a gray suit. The man kept raising a hand nervously to his mouth. His words floated through the fronds.

  “… called an emergency meeting of the Residents’ Association. This is most irregular.”

  You bet it is, thought Ishihara.

  Beppu chuckled. “I’ll take the whiner, you take the stiffs. Right?”

  Ishihara nodded. He preferred the company of the dead. They didn’t talk. And Beppu had a knack of getting information from witnesses.

  One of the uniformed policemen went up with Ishihara in the elevator. The elevator wouldn’t move without some fancy button-pushing on the door panel and flashing of a card at ceiling sensors.

  “He unlocked this elevator for us,” said the constable, with a jerk of his thumb toward the manager. “You go direct to the sixth floor, and nobody will disturb us.”

  “That’s where it happened?” said Ishihara.

  “Yes. The owner of the apartment went away on a work trip and got a shock when he came back. Doc reckons the bodies have been there two, maybe three days.” He grinned at Ishihara’s expression. “The air-conditioning was set to about ten degrees, so it’s not as bad as it could’ve been.”

  Ishihara chided himself mentally for showing any expression and said nothing more until the elevator doors opened. They followed a beige-walled, brown-tiled corridor.

  In the apartment blocks Ishihara had lived in when he first married, the corridors were balconies open to the outside air, cluttered with children’s toys, bicycles, and pot plants. In summer, doors were always propped open to let the breeze through. The air was heavy with cooking smells, and noisy with voices and television jingles.

  Here, nobody spoke in the cool, aseptic tunnel of the corridor, and only one door stood open. A black-and-yellow crime-scene barrier blocked it off.

  Ishihara sighed and pulled gloves and surgical mask out of his pocket. The only good thing about suicides was that he wouldn’t be spending the next however many shifts chasing the culprit.

  The entrance hall was full of solid, sensible, police shoes. The dead people’s shoes would have been packed away as exhibits. The door and lock didn’t seem to have been damaged. They must have broken in to use the apartment, but why didn’t the alarms sound?

  The smell, as the constable had said, wasn’t too bad through the gauze mask, merely a sourness at the back of his throat.

  “Assistant Inspector.” One of the station’s forensic pathologists, Dr. Matobe, beckoned him from the inner room.

  The apartment was set out very much like his own. A short hall led on from the entry, with a study on one side and a tiny bedroom and bathroom on the other. Then the kitchen/dining room on the left, a living room beyond, and the main tatami room to the right of kitchen and living room. A small verandah completed the whole, which must have been about sixty meters square.

  As Ishihara walked through the kitchen he noticed that the dining table was cluttered with cups and unwashed bowls. Just like at his own place. The familiarity made the scene in the room even more grotesque.

  The living area was full of bodies. One lay stretched at his feet, as though fallen on the way to the door. Two curled in fetal crouches in front of the vidscreen and one sprawled half-in, half-out of the tatami mat room beyond. No sign of a weapon, no obvious wounds.

  They were all naked and all silver.

  Ishihara stepped carefully around the body near the door and squatted by the two in front of the screen. One male, one female. Beside them lay two hand computers. Wires were taped to their hands and shaven heads, leading to the handcoms and the computer drive panel on the living room wall. Both had metal tips on their fingers where the wires were attached.

  Can’t be electrocution, thought Ishihara. We’d smell the singeing.

  “Shock?” he said, raising his voice to be heard clearly through the mask.

  “Always a safe guess, Detective.” Slim little Dr. Matobe rubbed his hands together. His Playtex gloves squeaked. “From an initial examination that’s all I can tell.”

  He squeezed easily past Ishihara and squatted beside the female body that faced them. “They’ve had some kind of anaphylactic reaction. You can’t see the cyanosis because of the paint. It’s a spray-on body paint.” He pointed at the bathroom. “The tin’s in there.”

  “You can see their airways have swollen and basically choked them.” He raised the chin of one of the girls slightly to show Ishihara her blackened, protruding tongue. Ishihara put up with the sight, but looked away as soon as he could.

  “Of course,” Matobe hastened to add, “this is off the record. I can give no opinion until we’ve done an autopsy.”

  “Right, sure,” Ishihara confirmed mechanically. He turned to the other bodies. The one near the living room door was male, the other female. He shivered involuntarily. The silver paint flattened the children’s features, made them seem inhuman. Even the pert little breasts and flaccid penises seemed mechanical.

  They’d have to interview the other residents—somebody might have noticed something unusual. They’d have to check the movements of the dead kids before they came here.

  As he ran through the list of things to do in his mind, he could feel a knot of tension in his chest dissolve. Whenever he bent over a body, he was always afraid it would be his son.

  “Assistant Inspector Ishihara.” A cheerful voice called him from the entrance hall, and young Kusatsu from Forensics came in, bringing an atmosphere of healthy bustle and a handcom. Kusatsu was fresh and smart and knew his computers backward; for some reason Ishihara became irritated after five minutes in his company.

  “I’ve ID’d them all.” He grinned triumphantly.

  Ishihara nodded acknowledgment. The Emergency Access Act could be helpful. Kusatsu could quote the case number, then input any information about an individual—in this case, probably photographs—and the National Data Network would find all other information on that individual. It could include everything from birth certificate to credit card status.

  “All four were students, the two girls at Ohara Women’s College, the boys at Osaka Engineering University.”

  Both elite universities, and expensive. Kusatsu offered the handcom, but Ishihara shook his head. “I’ll look at the details later,” he said. “How did they know each other?”

  “Apparently they’re all members of a local geography club. They go for walks around Osaka, find neat places nobody’s noticed before, that kind of thing.”

  “Uh-huh. We’ll talk to some of the other members of this club, I think. Did any of the kids know the owner of this apartment?”

  “Not according to him.” Beppu appeared in the kitchen doorway, filling it almost completely. “I ran the photos past him. He’s never seen any of them.”

  “So how did they know when he was going away?” said Ishihara.

  “The manager?” Kusatsu looked at Beppu.

  Beppu shook his head. “Don’t think so, although we’ll have to do a proper background check.”

  “We’ll have to do that with all of them,” said Ishihara.

  “I’ve got a constable going through the camera logs,” said Beppu.

  “Good.” Ishihara looked at Kusatsu. “What’s in those computers?”

  Kusatsu shook his head. “We’re waiting for the doc to finish. My boys don’t want to turn anything on until they’ve got the whole lot back to our labs. Don’t want to risk wiping anything by mistake.”

  “I can guess what’s in the computers,” said a female voice behind Beppu.

&nb
sp; Beppu stepped hurriedly into the kitchen, and a youngish woman wearing a trouser suit entered from the hall. She held up an ID that flashed more gold than a gangster’s watch. Her heart-shaped face was youthful, but her eyes were hard and calculating. She looked surprisingly like that stock character of police manga, the young and attractive female officer who shows up the older male characters.

  “Inspector Funo, Prefectural Office Religious Affairs.”

  Ishihara knew most of the prefecturals in his area, and female inspectors were too rare to forget. She must be a recent arrival from the National Police Authority in Tokyo.

  “We’ve been watching some of these young people,” said Funo. She shifted her handbag on her shoulder.

  “Not close enough,” muttered Beppu.

  Funo ignored him. “They may have been involved with a particularly difficult group called the Silver Angels.”

  Ishihara thought of the paint can.

  “Which of the kids did you follow, and how did you know they were involved with the group?” said Ishihara.

  “Let’s say one of the boys was indiscreet with his e-mail,” said Funo. “I can’t say more.”

  The kitchen felt uncomfortably warm and crowded. His imagination suggested that the smell from the bodies was getting stronger, and he was conscious of Dr. Matobe shifting from one foot to the other beside him.

  “Let’s go outside,” he said. “The morgue boys are waiting. We’ve all seen enough here, I think.” He’d have liked to look around a bit more, but he could check the videos later.

  The career detective opened her mouth, shut it again, and filed out with the others. Ishihara had no illusions as to who was now in charge of the investigation—any “interest” shown by Prefectural Office meant they took over—but at least he’d kept control of the scene.

  “The Silver Angels,” began Inspector Funo, as they all finished shuffling into their shoes and flattened themselves against the wall to let the morgue stretcher-bearers past, “are a group of well-off, mostly talented young people. The oldest we know is twenty-five, although we think the leader is older.”