Division Zero

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Yeah, there’s something here…”

  “The survivors look like hell.” Dorian returned from the other side of the lobby. “My guess is you’re right. This thing couldn’t have been strong enough on its own to inflict those kinds of injuries.”

  Kirsten pulled out her NetMini and thumb-typed some notes. One of the male tech-twos examining the doll looked up.

  “Don’t you have an M3? It’s faster to think than type.”

  Kirsten shook her head. “No. I don’t do the whole cyberware thing.”

  Dorian held a finger up. “It interferes with psionic ability.”

  “Wow, really, no ‘ware at all?” He sounded shocked. “How can you survive these days without it?”

  “I get by.”

  “That’s hot,” added an obvious rookie. “Pure girls are the best. No metal, nothing messing up their perfection.”

  The tech-two sighed, looking embarrassed at the rookie’s comment.

  She braced for the inevitable pick up line, but he just shrugged and went back to work. Kirsten appraised him with an unprepared blink, surprised at her disappointment in the lack of a direct come on.

  “He’s probably gay.” Dorian folded his arms.

  She snapped at him in a whisper. “Dorian! That’s rude.”

  The rookie, about the same height as Kirsten or perhaps an inch taller, looked up again and smiled. She lapsed into a staring daze and found a silly smile on her own face. For once, she thought that she would accept if he asked her out, but he just seemed happy to have met her.

  She turned, lamenting how the ones she would consider dating found her intimidating. Scrolling through the files on Eze’s datapad, she rechecked the notes. This would make the fourth time a doll flipped out under mysterious circumstances. Division 2 command made the decision to punt after they came up with nothing three times. This one looked like a repeat of the others, but escalating.

  “Tech Xiao?”

  “Yes, Agent?” Li looked up from where she knelt.

  “Regarding the other dolls that went nuts, was there anything they had in common?”

  Xiao pondered. “Well, the first one was a umm…” She fidgeted and broke eye contact.

  Kirsten blushed. “I can guess, one of those dolls.”

  “Yeah.” Li seemed thankful Kirsten spared her having to say it. “It killed the man it was with and then went through the wall to attack two live girls, but they got away. The second unit worked as a baggage handler at the starport. It tried to detonate a tank of Cryomil being pumped into a Mars shuttle, but only caused minor injuries to about fifty people before they put it down. The one right before this worked as a receptionist at an office building. That one tore its clothes off and walked into a board meeting where it stabbed a VP in the chest with a light pen and started dancing on the conference table.”

  “I thought this was the first fatality? The love doll is missing from the report.” Kirsten tapped her fingers on the datapad. “So there’s no pattern? This all sounds very random.”

  “Well, all four dolls were manufactured by Intera. They were different models though, different ages. The sex doll, a Lily 2, was made more than ten years ago. The receptionist was two weeks old, Maya 6 I think, and the others were all within one to three years from the date of manufacture.” The tech looked through her notes. “They had different firmware revisions, different AI levels but only the receptionist was self-aware.”

  “Oof.” Dorian coughed. “Ten years in service, bet she had a lot of spunk.”

  Kirsten glared, unsure if her disgust arose from the implication or from the pun.

  Shaking her head, she looked back to Tech Xiao. “What happened to the receptionist?”

  “She’s still being held at the lab for observation.”

  Dorian glanced over. “Don’t you mean ‘it’?”

  Kirsten frowned. The law considered self-aware AI’s to have gender. “I’ll need to interview her.”

  “No problem, ma’am. I’ll set it up for you.” Li turned and spoke to thin air, making a vid call on an implanted comm unit.

  Kirsten shot the tech a jealous look. That woman could talk to herself and no one thought her nuts or on drugs. Then again, they stood in a room full of people used to cyberware, and she did not look at an empty seat on a bus while talking to it.

  A long trip around the hotel provided no new additional information. No other witnesses saw anything other than the doll going nuts. No living person could have seen what she suspected; she hoped some other ghost here had caught a glimpse. Alas, after an hour, this turned out to be the one hotel in the city with no resident haunts.

  A tentative male voice came from behind. “Pardon me, Agent?”

  Kirsten spun to find one of the Division 2 crime scene techs trying to act like she did not scare him pale. Her reaction to his trepidation served only to make him more fearful. Relaxing the glare, she looked off to the side.

  “What.”

  He could not make up his mind between a serious face or a disarming smile, and flashed a chimera of both. “There’s something you need to see.”

  potbellied man in a cheap black suit stood by a dark synthetic mahogany desk trimmed with fake gold. Bald on top, with a horseshoe of white hair around his head, he pestered the technical crew to get out of his hotel. Threads of spit flew from his lower lip each time he shook his head to add emphasis to what he said. At Kirsten’s approach, his eyes shifted, though he continued his verbal assault on the technical team.

  The techs both glowered at the terminals as they tried to tune him out. Kirsten hopped up onto the counter and sat cross-legged like a teen hanging out at a friend’s house, leaning over the screens.

  “So… what have you got?”

  The agitated man turned on her. “Are you in charge of these people? Do you realize how long this is taking? I have a business to run here. Customers are coming in, seeing the place full of police, and walking right back out! Do you have any idea how bad this is for business? Can’t you people hurry this along? Must you sit on the counter? Please get down, you’ll scratch it.”

  Kirsten blinked at him. “This? This isn’t even real wood.” She knocked on it. “Synthetic polymer doesn’t scratch that easy.”

  “I don’t care, that’s not the point. Now take your perfect little ass off the counter.” A tiny globule of saliva took flight with ‘perfect’, landing on her nose.

  His voice had the cadence of an upset preteen and she half expected him to stomp his foot for emphasis. The techs’ annoyance changed to dread as they watched him antagonize someone from Division 0.

  After wiping her nose, she glared. “Look, the less you stand here and bitch at us the faster we’ll be out of your hair.” Whoops. Bad choice of phrase.

  He gasped, covering his mouth with shock. “You have got to be the rudest person I have ever had the misfortune to―”

  “Oh, shut up.” A faint glow danced through her eyes, emphasis on the command.

  His voice stopped dead in its tracks as her psionic suggestion took hold. He gazed dumbfounded, unable to speak. A tendril of drool slid out of the corner of his mouth, snapped off, and landed on his lapel.

  “It’s just an expression, you sanctimonious prick. Now go over there, sit down, and stay out of our way or I’ll have them haul you in for impeding an investigation.”

  “Wow, I wish I could do that.” The tech laughed, then paled, and then saluted. “Tech First Class David Edwards, ma’am.”

  She slumped. “I shouldn’t have, but he was getting in our way. So what do you have?”

  TFC Edwards swiveled a holographic display pane toward her bearing a recording of the lobby, paused on an image full of people.

  “Obviously, it’s surveillance video of the incident. We didn’t notice much at first but caught something the third time through. Pay attention to over here.”

  David pointed at a spot and resumed playback. People streamed in and out of frame going about their usual routine. Th
e murderous doll entered from a service door and jittered into the center of the lobby where it froze. The soon-to-be-dead housekeeper walked into view pushing a cart. After noticing the android just standing there, she went over to check on it.

  Right at that instant, near David’s finger, a thin man in his early twenties poked out from behind one of the marble columns. Staring right at the doll, he made a series of strange expressions. A sweep of long dark hair obscured his face, but she could make out the straining.

  David’s coworker laughed. “I thought he was just shitting in the fern at first.”

  The female tech behind them scolded him in whispers about being professional around an officer.

  Kirsten ignored the exchange and studied the man, noting how the doll’s erratic marionette performance started in time with the strange faces. The sight of it punching through the housekeeper’s chest made Kirsten avert her eyes. From there it wobbled into a crowd of fleeing people and thrashed around, knocking them down like bowling pins. Soon no one remained in arm’s reach of it, and it slumped forward and appeared to power off. Less than a minute later, it resumed its routine as if nothing strange had happened, and got to work cleaning up the bloody mess it had made. The strange man fled with the rest of the panicking crowd. The doll continued mopping until Division 5 showed up and shot it.

  That was thoroughly needless, why did they have to destroy it?

  “Don’t s’pose you got this on thermal?” Kirsten rubbed the bridge of her nose, wondering why Div 5 always made a mess of things.

  David made a helpless face. “At a hotel? What do you think this is, the Diplomatic Towers?”

  Dorian’s voice came from her left. He had one arm folded over his chest and held his chin between the thumb and forefinger of his other hand. “Curious. The doll rampaged almost at the exact instant he began staring at it.”

  Kirsten replayed the recording and studied the man’s face. “It’s almost impossible to tell if he’s doing anything or just having a seizure. Though it is a little curious how well timed it is.”

  David leaned back, nodding. “That’s what we thought.”

  After planting her hands on the counter, she vaulted onto her feet. “Can you get a decent face shot?”

  “Only if he pays for it,” quipped his supposed friend.

  This triggered another wave of whispered yells from their female coworker.

  David smirked and shook his head. “Yeah, I’ll send it to you in a few minutes.”

  “Thank you.” Kirsten headed for the exit.

  “Perhaps a better choice of words there?” Dorian fell into step at her side.

  “You know sometimes I operate under the delusion that I’m working with professionals.”

  A big grin stole across his face. “Well at least you recognize it as a delusion. That is the first step to recovery.”

  “Hah.” She paused at the side of the patrol craft to open the door.

  Kirsten settled into the padded grey seat, closing her eyes and enjoying a moment of comfort. The dull hum of the various systems in the car had a soporific effect, threatening to drag her away from consciousness. She spent a few minutes observing people entering and leaving the hotel until a simultaneous beep from her NetMini and the car’s communication terminal startled her.

  David sent over the enhanced image of the man’s face. Nice and clean, it made a good still to use with the recognition software. Now wide awake, she leaned forward and worked at the terminal. Her fingers flashed with blue every time they broke through the veil of light to ‘press’ a holographic button. After setting filters for male, age sixteen through thirty-five, Caucasian, and dark hair, she ran it. The system churned through dozens of faces and she took the opportunity to order a cup of coffee from the hotel.

  The car filled with the fragrance. Nursing the divine nectar sip by sip, she watched the faces cycle. Fifty or sixty per second for quite some time until a hit came up. Six weeks ago, a man by the name of Adrian Lewis obtained identity credentials and a NetMini account. The official head shot taken by the Identity Bureau made a perfect match. Another screen popped up, filling with text containing hundreds of tags from the city-cams. With enough time, one could track a person’s entire routine.

  “Kind of scary, isn’t it?” Dorian poked the screen.

  “What’s that?”

  He pointed at the red and green text drifting by from the surveillance log. “Every time one of the city-cams recognizes a face, it logs it. We can tell how he walks to work every day.”

  “I guess; it’s damn handy to catch criminals with though. As long as they keep it out of our homes, I don’t see the problem.”

  “Many would disagree, but there’s not much to do about it now. Before the war, nothing like this would have ever passed a vote.”

  “I hate politics. I just want to keep my head down, do my job, and try to do right by everyone… ghosts included.”

  Dorian chuckled. “You know the quote about all that’s necessary for evil to win?”

  She shot him a pained look. “It’s not like I’m sitting around doing nothing, but I’m flattered you think I’m good.”

  “One of the few that are left, I’m afraid. Hey, look at that.” He interrupted himself, pointing at another screen. “There’s an ICR on him.”

  The terrified face of a boy, no older than five, stared out from the screen; she knew the expression all too well―she wore a similar one every time her mother came for her. The Initial Contact Report identified Adrian Lewis as a psionic fifteen years ago. He had not been interviewed to catalogue his talents due to his disappearance soon after Division 0 found him.

  Kirsten fussed at her hair. “The name is a match. He’s so little I can’t tell if it’s the same person.”

  Dorian rubbed his chin. “The timing is about right; he looks like he’s maybe nineteen or twenty.”

  “Let’s go ask him.”

  A citycam trace required a lot of time and data sifting to perform pattern analysis. A NetMini track, however, could provide real time information about a person’s whereabouts. It took her less than a minute. A yellow dot appeared at his location, drifting along on a dark blue map of the city. Cyan lines traced the paths of the streets and hollow green hexagons appeared around points of interest, thin lines trailed off to details about the location.

  “Got him.” She pulled the patrol craft into the air and darted off in that direction.

  “I wonder what it was like.” Dorian reclined.

  She lifted an eyebrow at him. “What?”

  Lacing his fingers behind his head, he examined the inside of his eyelids. “When police actually had to work to find their suspects.”

  Kirsten blinked. “How did they ever find anyone without all this?”

  “Pounding ground.”

  “That would take forever. Don’t you think it’s better we have this? We can stop people before they kill again, not follow a trail of bodies.”

  “I suppose you could look at it that way.” His head swiveled toward her. “But it only works if the people pushing the buttons are worthy of trust. It can be abused so easily.”

  “I would never…”

  “I know you wouldn’t. That’s not the point. Div 9 can’t control every cop with ulterior motives. Despite what you think, not everyone behind a badge is a saint.” Dorian heaved a sigh. “I suppose it’s about sixty years too late to worry about it. The senate made their decision.”

  “What are you worried about? The government protects us from the ACC.”

  “Convenient isn’t it? The Allied Corporate Council presenting this great ever-present threat.”

  Kirsten scowled. “In case you haven’t noticed, there is a shooting war going on up on Mars. I’ve talked to some of the soldiers that died up there. If you remember, the people who stayed here in the UCF chose loyalty to their government over wage slavery.”

  “Sheep that put on their own collars.” He laughed. “The corporations still do whatever they
want, just not in the open.”

  She stared. Now he was baiting her. She wondered if he really believed the conspiratorial stuff he spewed half the time or if he just dangled the lure until she nibbled. This had to be his way of paying her back for constant grousing about metaphysical things. Giving up, she turned her attention to the map and the dots.

  As the two points converged, Kirsten slowed and brought the vehicle to street level. Debris scattered out of the way as the craft settled onto its ground wheels. The hover engines surged as they compensated for the deceleration of landing, sending an army of sparks creeping over the plastisteel surface. She nudged the car forward at a walking pace, rolling through a cloud of mist that flickered azure from the discharge. Their target had to be among the endless stream of people flowing along the sidewalk. Kirsten scanned the crowd, distracted first by a tall spiked pink mohawk and then by a woman with a luminous neon green dress.

  Dorian pointed. “There.”

  Adrian Lewis emerged from an alley, unassuming in a shiny, white, shin-length coat. He wore no shirt under it and loose grey pants obscured the contour of his legs. Black hair circled his face and hung down to the center of his back, he had violet eye shadow and false lashes on. His head bobbed to unheard music as he walked up to a street side trashcan and looked around as if about to do something he wanted no one to witness.

  Kirsten trained the car’s sensors on him, bringing up a magnified view. Adrian fished through the can before holding a credstick up to look at while brushing some unidentifiable yellow goop from it. About the width of a pen, a display at the thickest showed six glowing zeroes.

  “What could he want with an empty credstick?” Dorian lifted an eyebrow.

  Kirsten did not take her eyes off Adrian as she answered. “I dunno, maybe some of those payroll places buy back the empties?”

  Satisfied he escaped observation; Adrian held the three-inch metal rod with both hands near his forehead. A faint tug in her mind told her he used psionic ability, but not the exact nature of what.

  The readout flashed, showing all eights for a moment before the numbers cycled like a slot machine. When it stopped randomizing, the display read 362,144.