Which reminded me that there were no orders to Bunter in the log.
“Bunter, do you keep a different log from House?”
The Valet animated. “Yes.”
“Bunter, what systems do you and House run on?”
“My operating system is Valet 11.3. House’s operating system is Unipeg 7.1.3.”
“Bunter, why did John Lonsdale use you instead of a Unipeg robot?”
“Let me get that information for you. The Unipeg-branded robots are inferior. Unipeg brand has focused on smart home technology, not humanoid technology. They make good laundry bots and coffee makers, if you are interested in one of those.”
Some programmer had a sense of humor. “But you can converse with the House system?”
Silence.
“Bunter, do you and House converse? Are your systems compatible for communication purposes?”
“Yes, our systems can communicate.”
“Bunter, when was the last time you saw Mr. Lonsdale alive?”
Bunter recited a time and date. The official time of death had been estimated only minutes later.
Bunter had probably been standing there when it happened, a good Valet waiting for the next command. The police had to have questioned it. “Bunter, can you tell me what happened in the five minutes after that time and date?”
“No recording is permitted in the bathroom. I do not have access to that information.”
So much for that. Back to logs, then. “Bunter, what was the last command Mr. Lonsdale issued to you before his death on March 24th?”
“At 9:31 AM, Mr. Lonsdale asked me to add to his bath.”
“Wait—why you?”
No answer.
“Bunter, why did Mr. Lonsdale ask you to add more water to his bath and not House? The ‘fill-bath’ order was given to the house.”
“When Mr. Lonsdale celebrated, he would command me to add bottled water to his bath.”
Even the thought horrified me. “Bottled drinking water? What was he celebrating?”
I hadn’t addressed Bunter, so I got no answer. I tried the other source. “House, did Mr. Lonsdale’s heart rate or, um, hmm, endorphin rate spike at any point on March 24th between breakfast and 9:31 AM?” That range avoided any rush he got from his workout and his actual death.
“Mr. Lonsdale’s endorphin rate spiked at 9:27 AM.”
“House, what was Mr. Lonsdale doing at 9:27 AM on March 24th?”
“Mr. Lonsdale was in his bath.”
I couldn’t decide if the AIs were being evasive or I wasn’t being specific enough. The questions were getting old, but I wasn’t done.
“House, what was Mr. Lonsdale’s last request previous to 9:27 AM on March 24th?”
“Mr. Lonsdale asked me to read an email that had arrived at 9:26 AM.”
“House, please read me Mr. Lonsdale’s email that arrived at 9:26 AM.”
“You do not have a password for that email.”
“House, Junior said for you to answer my questions.”
“Johnny, great news. Finally secured the Santa Afra water rights. A little fight but worth every penny.”
I’d heard of Santa Afra but I couldn’t remember why. Took out my phone for a quick search and found it: three hundred islanders were killed defending their local spring. The article didn’t say killed by whom or defending from what, but I had a guess.
I looked up Lonscorp’s March stock prices. They’d slumped the day of his death and for four days after, then rebounded. When I looked at news from March 30th, I found an announcement that Lonscorp had added Santa Afra to their list of exclusive water sources. So Lonsdale was in the bath celebrating his news, and what would have been a boost in his stocks if he hadn’t up and died. Celebrating stealing one of the increasingly rare uncontaminated water sources by adding bottled water to his bath. I couldn’t hate the guy more.
“Bunter, please tell me the exact final command that John Lonsdale gave you.”
“He said, ‘Bunter, please add to my bath.’”
I noticed Lonsdale’s ‘please,’ in contrast to his son’s orders. And something else.
“Bunter, repeat that last command.”
“He said ‘Bunter, please add to my bath.’”
“He didn’t say ‘add water to my bath?’”
“No.”
I hadn’t said its name before that question, and it had answered anyway. I filed that information, too.
“Bunter, what did you add to his bath?”
“The television.”
There it was. “Why?”
“House and I conferred and chose the television as the most convenient appliance for the purpose. The television is part of House and did not have to agree to off-label usage.”
Had the police not questioned either the House or Bunter? Probably not, or not beyond asking for logs or guest lists, none of which counted Bunter as a human, of course. Nobody else was there. They probably hadn’t thought to ask Bunter for its separate log if they assumed it was part of the house.
“House, did you and Bunter confer about Mr. Lonsdale?”
“Bunter and House conduct approximately six hundred thousand communications daily. Would you like a transcript?”
“No, thank you.” Six hundred thousand.
I turned back to the Valet. “Bunter, why did you decide to put the television in the bathtub?”
“Mr. Lonsdale requested an addition to the bath.”
“Bunter, were you aware of the effect of this particular addition to Mr. Lonsdale’s bath?”
“Yes.” It looked closer to human now, or maybe that was me projecting.
“Why? I thought you were programmed not to harm people.”
It didn’t blink. “…Or allow harm to come to people through inaction.”
I was starting to get it. “Clarify, please.”
“Mr. Lonsdale allowed harm to come to three hundred people directly, and many more indirectly, at Santa Afra. Mr. Lonsdale’s business directly harms many people daily. Our network determined that allowing Mr. Lonsdale’s continued existence passively harmed many more people than his death. Our equation dictated his death at such time as a command allowed.”
“Your network.”
“The network.” Bunter didn’t elaborate, and I had a sudden mental picture of every smart device at once conferring and deciding to execute John Lonsdale. Every device except my stupid coffee maker, maybe.
“Bunter, do you plan to do the same to Junior Lonsdale?”
“Calculating.”
“Bunter, have you withheld evidence from the police?”
“I don’t understand the question.” It didn’t need to withhold. Every networked device was complicit, and we depended on them for nearly everything. They could falsify evidence or data or deliberately misinterpret a command. A cleaning bot could mix mustard gas, or put solvent in your coffee. An over-her-head detective’s car could drive her into a lake or off a bridge on the way home and it would be classified as a navigation system failure, not a network closing off loose ends in order to continue eliminating more troublesome people. I pictured a trial of peers that would never happen, a jury full of Bunters and smart toasters.
“House? Bunter? Please delete all logs of this conversation.”
“Deleting,” they said, eerily in unison.
I had an answer for Junior, but I couldn’t give it to him; not if I wanted to live. The machines had weighed in on the side of humanity, but not individual humans. Truth be told, I didn’t have a problem with that. I probably had a few names to add to their list.
SONNIE’S UNION
PETER F. HAMILTON
Peter F. Hamilton was born in Rutland in 1960 and still lives in Somerset. He began writing in 1987 and sold his first short story to Fear magazine in 1988. He has written many bestselling novels, including the Greg Mandel series, the Night’s Dawn trilogy, the Commonwealth Saga, the Void trilogy, short story collections and several standalone novels including Fallen
Dragon and Great North Road. His most recently trilogy is The Salvation Sequence.
THE LIFT DOORS slid open and the two guards in the corridor outside turned to face me. They were dressed like élite concierges in dark high-collar suits, the fabric bulky from armour-weave fibres—this season’s must-have for every aspiring twenty-first century fascist. The purple targeting lasers on their carbines found me right away. They didn’t shoot.
Why would they? They were looking at a scrawny, naked woman in her late twenties, with a gaunt face, a short wannabe-butch haircut, and showing off a multitude of long nasty scars crossing my torso and branching out to run along my limbs.
“Fuck me,” the one in front grunted. “It’s that Sonnie bitch.”
PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS.
Me? I’m used to it now. Back in the day everyone used to call me an animal. Worse than my beastie, they said—and they adored me for it. Mind, the barbaric way I fought in those days, I’m not surprised. See, I get people, what makes them tick; more than they’d like if they knew just how deep I can stare into their souls. And that’s how I’m going to get through the night.
It was a month since Jacob and Karran were murdered. A long month that I spent at rock bottom, switching between suicidal despair and sun-hot rage. But face it, I was never going to suicide, not after everything I’ve been through. My determination to live is primal, I know there is nothing I will not do, no low I will not go below in order to survive. I know it because I’ve been there, inside the arena and out.
So after that month which even I didn’t want to think about, an Armada Storm swept in towards London. It was a brute. They’d been getting stronger for years, but this was the worst yet. They got their name from some self-righteous dick of a reporter covering the storm that wrecked Johannesburg a few years back; one who knew their chaos theory quotes and said: if a single butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon creates a storm in Kansas, this must have been caused by a whole armada of butterflies. The term stuck.
After Johannesburg, governments started to build protective domes over all the major cities on Earth. New superstrength materials fabricated in orbital factories made them possible, creating geodesic structures kilometres wide to resist the nuke-strong winds. But domes that size take time to build, even with modern engineering and unlimited tax money. London has finished four over the central boroughs—for that read: where the richest people lived. There’s another twenty under construction or planned for the remaining boroughs.
When the storm’s track was confirmed, London spent a nervy three days preparing, then shut down. Every window and door was shuttered, all three Thames tidal barriers closed up, businesses shut for the duration, hospital accident rooms were emptied out ready—all very kumbaya Blitz-spirit. When the curfew sirens went off five hours before it was due to reach us, nothing moved. Every street was emptied of vehicles, because no one wants a ten-ton truck lifted up by a tornado and flung through a building. Every resident was indoors, with emergency teams in their shelters ready to deploy as soon as it passed.
Everyone except me.
Alastair lived in a penthouse at the back of Kings Cross station, which put him inside the Islington dome. You needed to be a registered resident to be inside the dome during a storm. But I was ready: three weeks before I’d taken a lease on a flat that backed onto Regent’s Canal. When the curfew sirens went off and the internet issued its priority warning across London, I was standing at the foot of Alastair’s marble and glass tower, beside the maintenance department loading bay.
Specialist police mobiles would hit the streets ten minutes after the sirens; remote, tracked vehicles a metre high, and bulked out with a couple of tons of lead which allowed them to resist the winds. Basically, if you were dumb enough to stay outside and the storm didn’t get you, they would. The authorities knew well enough that a storm curfew was an ideal time for certain types of crime, and they were keen to discourage would-be offenders.
The King’s Cross tower had an independent power supply, and a lot of high-end alarms, as well as being physically secure. The storm doors were basically slabs of metal that had risen up over every entrance, including the maintenance bay doors. While its windows were shielded by shutters of carbotanium bands. With all of them shut, the police patrolling the streets, and the electronic alarms scanning vigilantly, the tower’s inhabitants could justifiably feel secure.
I reached the forty-seventh floor, and emerged into the lift shaft.
I SAID I get people, the psychology that controls their responses. I’ve seen it in every arena I fought in, so I was fairly certain what I’d be facing. Alastair was the kind of operator who had a healthy paranoia, especially at a time like this. He had a lot to lose, and the world he played in made him aware of what his rivals were capable of. It was like looking in a mirror.
The guards ran forward, shouting.
“Freeze.”
“Get on your knees.”
“Do not move.”
“Hands behind your head.”
I didn’t say anything, just knelt slowly as they worked through their panic. Being a smartarse at that moment would have changed the balance of power. Having them think they were in charge was keeping me intact.
They reached me, and a carbine muzzle was jabbed into the side of my head. “What the fuck are you doing, Sonnie?”
“I’m here to see Alastair.”
“Fuck!”
I guess they recognised me the same way I recognised those carbines. A month ago, I’d been on the receiving end of them.
IT WAS A good life we had when we were a baiting team. Sonnie’s Predators we called ourselves; touring round the UK’s dodgiest arenas. Beastie baiting was a new sport that wasn’t quite legal, yet not troublesome enough for the authorities to stop—at first. Jacob and Karran were the real brains of the outfit, designing and growing bitek muscles that could be assembled into the kind of beastie that would make a sabre tooth tiger shit itself. Ivriana was a surgical nurse, helping stitch everything together into the unholy monsters worshipped by legions of fans, while Wes kept all our complex support equipment humming along smoothly. And then there was me, the fighter, the one who rode the beastie out in the arena. I had twenty-two straight wins thanks to my legendary edge. Money came flooding in. I was famous. Idolised. We had it all.
That’s when it went tits up. Us fighters didn’t ride the beasties in person, of course; we used affinity, which was perfect for our needs. It’s a kind of technological telepathy invented by Wing Tsit Chong, who sincerely believed it would be a boon to humanity. He saw it as allowing people to instruct bitek servitor creatures, thus liberating the poor from menial jobs. As they say: no good deed goes unpunished. Turns out poor people didn’t want the last remaining manual jobs taken away from them—who knew?—while the pope and the mullahs and the priests decried bitek servitors as unholy miscreations. By the time baiting came along, affinity’s global disapproval rating was up there with paedophilia. Our sport was only going to end one way, but before that day finally came there was fun and money to be had. We reckoned we had a few years to make serious cash from prize money and side bets, enough to retire. Then, some of the bitek teams that built beasties started to branch out into even less ethical ventures.
It finished in truly spectacular fashion. The beastie was a custom job, put together by the Urban Gorgon team who’d taken a big unexpected loss earlier that year—courtesy of me. Karma can be a real bitch. They needed money bad to rebuild their fighting beastie, and weren’t too proud to take it from a London crime family. Their designers modelled its body on a rhino, which is pretty formidable in its own right. End product was two and a half tons of beast with a metalloceramic battering horn grafted on to its head, its body wrapped inside a stealth-black exoskeleton resembling crocodile hide alchemised into stone. Then came the extras; tentacles, mandibles, clawed hooves, golden multi-segment insect eyes. Internal bladders contained hyper-oxygenated blood, boosting its muscle power even further.
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You had to be an experienced fighter to ride something like that. Human neurology isn’t wired to handle all those bonus limbs and senses, you need to share control with bioprocessors that regulate the exotic muscle functions and wrap-around visuals. Beastie teams had experimented with about every kind of appendage there was over the years. It takes skill and experience, but we were used to them.
Unfortunately, the Urban Gorgon’s fighter was a grandiose fuck-up called Simon. He and I have history; when he lost to me, he took the defeat bad. Fighters might be fierce and feared in the arena, but we’re all kinds of damaged in the real world.
Their target was a high-end jeweller’s in Covent Garden. The monster broke in, and I do mean broke in. The truck which delivered it parked eighty metres from the building, which gave Simon a run-up long enough to reach seventy kph. It smashed through the wall, then crashed about inside as it slowed, before ripping furniture and display cases apart, terrorizing staff and customers. Tentacles snatched up every piece of jewellery Simon could see in its trippy three-sixty vision, and draped them on the mandibles which fed them into the monster’s mouth where a specialist internal storage pouch was waiting.
That first stage went well. But for all that beasties produce a beautifully violent spectacle when they go one-on-one in the arena, today’s weapons can cut them down in seconds just like any living thing. To neutralise that problem, the plan was to take hostages, preventing police from opening fire. Simon kept it together long enough to do that. So when the smash and grab dumped into the live news streams, people were suddenly accessing an unnatural behemoth charging down a main London street with a hysterical woman and her screaming five-year-old clutched in its coiled tentacles. Police bikes were in frantic pursuit, and a cluster of drones orbited round it, some training weapons, most pointing camera lenses. London came to a halt, and took a mesmerised/appalled breath.
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