“Not me, you transvestite bigot. The big screen.” He pointed with the remote. “Here, I’ll rerun the footage for you.”
She watched as a wild-eyed man stormed the liquor store and mini-mart in one, ripping the glass door open as if it were a safe room and the hounds of hell were on his tail. He combed the aisles for what he was looking for. “Please note the axe in his hand,” Davenport said, “about the one thing you can’t get in a mini-mart these days.”
Psycho Babbler—he was talking to himself as he combed the liquor store aisles—grabbed a couple items off the rack and proceeded to the checkout counter in the same hypomanic, sweating manner, in which he’d entered the store, his eyes darting to the mirrors in the corners. He repeatedly wiped his sniffles with the back of his hand. If she had to go out on another limb, she’d say, chronic drug user, probably experiencing some paranoid hallucination secondary to one really bad trip. “He doesn’t look suspicious,” she said, her sarcasm getting the better of her.
“He’s not checking the mirrors for the reasons you think,” Davenport said. “You’re going to love this. You just have to let the drama unfold in its own time. Put a lid on that impatience, girl.”
Psycho Babbler threw his wares and his money on the counter, loose bills and change. “Nothing like a decaying metropolis inviting all sorts of criminals to live off-grid,” Kendra said, “as if this was 1935 instead of 2035.”
New York City had gone post-apocalyptic in the last few weeks. Ironically, an Age of Abundance meant citizens could vote in whatever take on a city they desired, and pretty much the City AI would make the city over to suit. There was no shortage of nanobots and microbots of every specification to serve her, but if the necessary ones weren’t on hand, she could fashion new ones easily enough. All that was required was the will to depress the Start key on a 3D printer. Even if the bulk of her sentience was committed to solving other, more pressing problems, there were enough chip-enhanced humans to help with the heavy-lifting of remaking the world in a fortnight or two. Who knew how long the post-apocalyptic fad would last? But for right now, it was a real pain in the ass. Kendra wasn’t a fan of modernity, but it beat the hell out of this. Smart roads and bridges that just self-aged and cracked “beyond all repair” thanks to their latest instructions. Same with smart buildings. Even the smart-water, just nano infested enough to keep it germ free, was under new instructions to dish out dysentery, and much more. That part might work in her favor. Let’s see how long the post-apocalyptic fad lasts with people puking their guts out left and right.
“If you’re looking for any giveaway clues that we’re not actually in 1935,” Davenport said, “rest assured, that’s coming.”
The clerk turned from stocking the shelves behind the counter to take in his customer. His head went back, his mouth went wide and he released a relentless scream.
“What the…?” Kendra said.
“It’s one of those outdated humanoid robots, the ones that kind of look like that old stop-frame animation cartoon with the painted wood figures, Thunderbirds. It’s designed to do that to call for help from the robocops in the vicinity, back from when they had enough of those to make this adaptation a little more effective.”
“So, what, it scanned his brain, figured he was up to something?”
“I doubt it was anything that sophisticated. Probably just has a file with pics of suspicious types in its memory banks that include all the signs of a tweaker.”
Psycho Babbler, realizing time was of the essence, stretched his arm across the counter and proceeded to whack it off with the axe, a venture that wasn’t going particularly well as he wasn’t in the best position to apply the most pressure to the axe. The screaming pain kicking in didn’t exactly lend strength to the endeavor. Kendra shook her head. “There are just not enough cops in the world to protect people from stupidity, even if we had a decent budget to work with.”
The arm finally off, Psycho Babbler tore open one of the packets with his one good hand and his teeth. Dusted the stump at the shoulder to stop the hemorrhaging and the pain. He then ripped open the other packet and attached the artificial arm. The arm’s onboard AI, backwards as it was, was still up to the task of the minor surgery. “All this, to make himself stronger in one arm?” Kendra asked.
“Yeah, not that those older cyberattachments are all that strong or all that capable. But that’s not even the best part.”
They watched together as Psycho Babbler poured into the street, following him with the city grid cameras.
Once on the sidewalk, he did a quick survey to find the rest of his gang, noticed they had the Peace Bot cornered on top of a three story building. The ones without guns were throwing what they could at him, but no one had the arm strength to make much of an impact. The bullets they were firing were bouncing helplessly off the Peace Bot’s armoring, adding to the crowd’s frustration. “If you’ll just calm down,” the Peace Bot said, gesturing with both arms, “I’m sure I can address all your grievances in turn.” He didn’t get to serve up any more words before additional bullets pelted him. “If you’d like to build a civic garden to grow food, I can help you with the planning and the actual work.”
Psycho Babbler, reunited with the throng, uprooted a parking meter, and threw it like a javelin at the Peace Bot with his newly attached cyber-arm. The post bounced harmlessly off the Peace Bot’s chest. Even if it hadn’t, Kendra couldn’t imagine that he had too many vital parts there to protect.
One of the gang members took in Psycho Babbler’s retrofit. “Nice try, asshole. Only to get the full use out of that arm, you’d need back and shoulder muscles replaced too, and most of your leg muscles to make a throw like that which requires your entire body.” The kid giving him the lecture was maybe fourteen years old, and not a day older. “Come on, let’s get up the fire escape and you can take one of those parking meters and use it as a bat instead. You’ll have the same inherent drawbacks to deal with, but might be more effective from up close.”
Psycho Babbler smiled and nodded, grabbing up another parking meter and racing for the fire escape. Lecturer shook his head. “Not much on brains, but you can’t fault his conviction.” He whistled to the rest of the gang to follow. Everyone did. He must have been their leader despite looking a good five years younger than the youngest of the rest of them. Brains beat brawn even in their world, from the looks of it.
Kendra craned her neck to Davenport. “You’re supposed to be working the city grid to intervene on crimes, not just watch and laugh, Davenport. Putting that algorithm-writing prowess of yours to help us fill the gap between too few officers and too many criminals.”
“What do you think I’m doing? I’m getting ready to hack the Peace Bot to give those kids a real run for their money.”
“You can’t make it violent. That’s in violation of the protocols.”
“Nah, nah, nothing like that. Just want to help the kids vent their frustration a little better. Sometimes dealing with crime means being more of a social worker than a cop. Especially in Broken City.”
She shook her head at him.
“Don’t shake your head at me. We arrest them, throw them in jail, then what? Have to feed them. They’d kill for three hots and a cot. That we can’t afford to give either. This way, a little psychic healing from Dr. Love…”
“In the red dress and high heels. Don’t you have to be a little saner yourself to play social worker?”
“God, that’s so bigoted. The city’s falling apart because the infrastructure is too denigrated to keep anything going, and you still manage to make it look positively modern when compared to your outlook.”
She suppressed a smile and walked past the rest of the monitors. If she didn’t know better she’d swear she was at a betting club. Detectives were remote piloting Peace Bots on each of the screens, tangling with any number of mobs and putting down any number of riots in progress. Each of the big screens and hacking teams of two or more had their fan bases, detectives curr
ently off duty, waiting to go on duty, or cops eager to learn the ropes, as these days, advancing from cop to detective, pretty much meant being better than the next guy at city policing by way of video game interfaces. They could scarcely afford to get out there in the real world and do these kinds of interventions from up close, not when they didn’t have a single man to spare.
Kendra despaired because for every riot put down, every gang diffused, the city looked a little more like bombed out Beirut, and a little less like the Manhattan she grew up to love.
As she got closer to her desk, a decent enough distance away from the peanut gallery to give her some quiet in which to think, she noticed one of the locals was handcuffed to the chair by her desk. Once she got closer still, she realized he was anything but a local. Too well dressed. She took her seat and before her butt hit the wood of the swivel desk chair his mouth was flapping.
“It’s all one big fabricated lie. Everything they said I did. The hi-def digital video evidence, fabricated, of course. Easy enough to do, considering the police don’t have anything in their arsenal advanced enough to see the disk’s been tampered with.”
“Slow down, Mr…?”
“Hathaway. Earl Grey Hathaway.”
“The multi-millionaire who made his fortune in fortune cookies? By substituting those cute feel-good sayings with…”
“Yes, with riddles that you had to solve to find where the real treasure was hidden about the city. Was on schedule to be a billionaire until the powers that be decided to offer me up.”
She nodded. “Let me guess, you’re their latest scapegoat. Why?”
“Wouldn’t sell out. The takeover company just had more money and power to throw around than I did, and their strategy team was ten steps ahead of me at every turn.”
She nodded sympathetically. She wasn’t exactly buying it, but it was the best theory she had so far for why someone this uptown with all the money in the world to afford all the best lawyers, AI and otherwise, would end up in front of her. She only ever landed a big fish when the top one percent handed him to her on a platter. And while the ninety-nine percent played out escapist fantasies in their post-apocalyptic New York, the one percent carried on in the background doing what they did best, making money and grabbing power. They could turn a profit in a post-apocalyptic age as surely as they could in any other time. “There’s got to be more to the story than that, Hathaway.”
“Why? Everyone hates the one percent. They believe we’re guilty of everything that’s wrong in the world.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Fair enough, but I’m no big plotter and schemer, just a struggling business man trying to get by in his broken city and this even more broken economy.”
“Probably explains why you got out-plotted and out-schemed. I still want to hear the rest of the story.”
He averted his eyes and lowered his head. “I have a thing for little boys. Never touch, mind you, just watch.”
“Now that they can definitely sell to the media. And what, to play my part, I have to simply suck you dry for funds by throwing AI attorneys for the prosecution at you, better than any you can afford?”
“Not better than I can afford, but you can bet, mine will be hacked by their even better AIs, so I’ll lose to your mediocre prosecuting AIs. And then the case will go to civil court where it’ll drag on and I’ll be sucked dry for the rest of my money. Not that I’ll care by that point. I’m guessing I won’t last long in prison, not with the types that get locked up there. And once I’m dead, which you can bet they’ll be assisting me with, my money will go into escrow. The city AI redistributes it automatically to cover the gaps in funding for the public sphere, what with corporations being far too good at getting away with having to pay a penny.”
“I see you’re no stranger to how the system works. You mean to tell me you didn’t see this day coming? You didn’t take some precautions?”
“I was networked with any number of other companies, each of whom got a piece of the pie. I thought for sure, working together, no one would dare to come after the conglomerate, unless it was to buy us out, let us handle the day to day headache for which all the infrastructure and logistics was already in place, saving them the ramp up time.”
Kendra nodded. “That means your well-publicized arrest is intended to be just another smoke screen. The magicians are trying to divert the public eye from where the real crime is happening. And that crime, Mr. Hathaway, you can count on me to look into. I don’t like people trying to pull the wool over my eyes.”
“Suppose that’s the only sense of justice I’m going to get at this point.”
She nodded for one of the junior detectives to take him off her hands, continue with the question and answer session in the small likelihood that he had anything more useful to say that might point her to the real crime going on that no one wanted her or anyone else to ever know about. Though she could probably guess. The usual suspects fell into the human upgrade tech sector, the latest chip enhancements available only to the one percent being tested out that weren’t going to be available to the public for a good long while. The theory being that if it were all that readily available before every possible misuse could be accounted for, the world would be an even crazier place than it was now, with runaway technology adding to the madness.
In truth, the powers that be wanted to make sure the chips couldn’t be used to weaken their power base. The very same reason they kept such upgrades away from the police, judges, senators and congressmen, scientists not in their employ and under their twenty-four-seven supervision. Nothing like intelligence that couldn’t be bottled up for bringing down the entire house of cards.
That said, she couldn’t entirely fault their line of reasoning either. Each bio-dome experiment that had been undertaken so far, a city under glass in essence, Shangri Las in a bottle, where the Singularity scenario was allowed to play out had crashed and burned after a brief period of super abundance and unbridled wealth for everyone, for failure of the interlinked AI intelligences and humans with chip upgrades to stop the runaway effects. With a city full of that much intelligence and explosive creativity, the theory was that everyone ought to be able to keep everyone else in check. Any die-offs would quickly be countered. Say if some bioterrorist invented a nanococktail that spread by air and infected people with the idea of digesting them and turning them to soap. The most vulnerable would succumb, but before the next in line of weakened immune systems caved, some equally brilliant person, jacked up on a mind chip or linked to the grid and various group minds within the city for all the mind-power assistance he needed, would invent a countermeasure. Under this theory, virtually any amount of madness could be contained, just so long as there were more good guys than bad guys, or barring that, that genius was even more productive in people with big hearts and big minds, just not big minds. She found the perennially shockproofed society idea appealing, only, so far, the theory hadn’t held. Maybe the theory was solid. And the problem still lay in the execution, one that was thwarted and derailed by the one percent. Or maybe the complex interdependent systems upon which everyone depended weren’t complex or interdependent enough. A self-sustaining artificial Gaia might well take every bit as long to build as it had taken Mother Nature. And who knew how many Domed-City experiments?
In any case, she and Torin were becoming the go-to people for what went wrong when the entire system collapsed. They were the first to be called in to investigate. And they did the most interfacing over time with the other agencies determined to get the experiment in social engineering to not crash and burn next time.
Leastways, when she wasn’t putting out fires in Broken City, that was what she did. Sort of like living in the desert as one of God’s chosen for the rare days she got to walk The Promised Land, providing she and Torin had done enough penance and soul purifying out in the desert.
And getting everyone to the Promised Land was no trifling matter. An Age of Abundance was all well and good for m
eeting everyone’s basic needs. But the longer it went on, the more people with too much free time on their hands were setting about reinventing the world. An Age of Abundance merely created the context for the Singularity. Making Singularity actually work remained an ongoing experiment. The stakes no less than sustaining life on Earth beyond the next decade or so.
“Hey, you over there,” she heard Torin’s voice calling. “Earth to Kendra.”
She smiled, coming out of her own head. “Sorry. You know how it is…?”
“When you get your bit in the mouth for going after the top one percenters oppressing the hell out of the rest of us and doing it with such style that we mostly thank them for it? Don’t look now but I think the thanking them phase is finally over. We’re into the phase where we’re just too beaten and despondent and broken to do anything about it, and well, too broke in general to fund a meaningful revolution they can’t put down inside of five minutes.”
“I appreciate the pick me up, Torin, just the excuse I needed for coming out of my head.”
He smiled at her. “We have a date with our daughter to go shopping for a new dress in Broken City.”
“Downtown, amidst all the riots and the looting, and the murder and mayhem?”
“I think until she’s feeling less traumatized by Clyde Barker, she’s likely to go where things are darkest. It’s where she feels most at home. You wanted to open Pandora’s Box. Now don’t be surprised at what pours out. Besides, she’s shopping for something vintage. And she’s not going to find the retro look anywhere else but in a used clothing store.”
Kendra took a deep breath and sighed it out. “And when’s this total interruption of my day happening?”
“Soon. She said she’ll beam us out slowly so we have time to grab something, a good book in my case, a hissy fit in yours. Nice way to bond with our daughter, by the way. Shame I didn’t think of it.”
Time Bandits Page 31
