Analog Science Fiction and Fact - July-Agust 2014

by Penny Publications

"And when we got too confused with new material."

  I let the air out of my chest and shook my head. This was getting hard to believe.

  "So the night that Bonnie died, someone told you to forget everything that happened around the time of death?"

  "Exactly," said Peter.

  "Precisely," said Paul.

  "What was the last thing you remember?" I asked.

  "Bonnie was done for the night and asked for a glass of wine," Peter said.

  "A glass of wine? How does a disembodied brain drink a glass of wine?"

  "Bonnie had sensory inputs for tastes and smells—an artificial nose and palate with chemical receptors connected to nerve endings," the AI explained. "A small amount of wine poured into a decanter next to the inputs gave her the sensation of tasting the wine."

  "And I titrated a small amount of alcohol into her bloodstream to match the effects of a single glass of wine," Paul said. "She found it quite relaxing."

  "So you had access to her equipment," I said.

  "Of course," said Peter. "We were part of the monitoring system."

  I twisted my face and squinted at them, then at Abigail and Gaby. "Judge, is this all accurate? They aren't selling us refried spam, are they?"

  "Completely accurate, as far as I know," Judge Adams said. "They had access to Bonnie's life support kit. And Bonnie told me more than once that she had reset their memories to erase bad experiences she had with them."

  "And no one thinks any of this is suspicious?"

  "Now that you put it that way, I suppose we should have," the judge said.

  "And how about you two?" I asked. "Have you processed this piece of knowledge into the question of how Bonnie died?"

  "No," said Peter.

  "But we can if you would like us to," said Paul.

  "By all means," said Judge Adams. "Process it and give us your analysis."

  The room was silent for a long, tense moment. The mannequins stopped moving, stopped blinking and twitching and stretching.

  "Paul, are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

  "Probably. I'm thinking that it's possible that we may have played a role in Bonnie's death," Paul replied.

  "Precisely what I'm thinking," Peter said.

  "I'll tell you what I'm thinking," I said. "I'm thinking that either one of you could have pulled the plug on Bonnie's brain and figured out some way to make you both forget you did it."

  Abigail gasped. Gaby frowned. The judge made some kind of throat-clearing sound, except it was more like digital static.

  And Peter and Paul looked at one another with what I swear were untrusting eyes.

  "It is entirely possible that events unfolded as you describe, Mr. Adams," Paul said.

  "Yes it is," said Peter. "All it would take is a preprogrammed command. One of us—"

  "Or both of us," Paul said.

  "—or both of us could have done what you described, pulled the plug, and then told the other to forget what happened."

  "And then the pre-programmed command could have made the first one forget what happened."

  "Yes," said Peter and Paul in chorus. "We could have killed Bonnie and erased the memory of the crime."

  And with that, it seemed we were done. Gaby escorted me through the house to Judge Adams' chambers, then disappeared, leaving behind a faint scent of flowers and exotic oils.

  "Would you like a drink?" the judge asked. "Like I told you, this used to be the Elks Club bar. There's some good scotch whiskey in the cabinet in the corner and beer in the fridge."

  I found a bottle of something dark and thick with a strange name, and then went searching for a bottle opener.

  "Down here," he said. "On the end of the table from my containment."

  It only felt odd for a minute as I opened the beer next to the big stainless steel coffee urn that held Judge Adams' brain.

  "So what do you think?" he asked.

  "My first impression was mystery solved," I told him. I took a long sip off the bottle and savored the brew. "But you're probably going to tell me I'm wrong."

  "Why did you think the mystery was solved?"

  "They all but admitted they did it," I said. "But if that's artificial intelligence, there's a long way to go. It's not too intelligent to tell people you could have murdered the woman who created you."

  "The twins are totally without guile," Judge Adams said. "But unfortunately, they are also completely without volition. Despite Bonnie's best efforts."

  "So you don't think they could have done it?"

  "I was an assistant state's attorney for two years," he said. "I spent some of that time in Hartford working the big cases, including a couple of murders. Nothing big: shoe salesman killed in a robbery; husband throws wife down the stairs. That kind of thing. But you still need three things: means, motive, and opportunity. They don't have a motive. Couldn't come up with one between the two of them. Maybe a couple more generations of design work would do it, but not this model."

  "And I was hoping we had a closed case that I could write up," I said. I rolled the bottle in my hands and felt the cold glass. "But if we don't have culprits, it looks like we had the method. Somebody told the twins to shut off Bonnie's life-support system—and then forget what they'd done."

  "I agree," Judge Adams said.

  "But who?" I finished off the beer and looked into the cameras atop Judge Adams' containment.

  "I have one possibility," he said. "And he has a motive."

  "Oh yeah?"

  "Bonnie has a great-grandson who lives here in town. He visited her a lot."

  "And the motive?"

  "He's heir to everything Bonnie owned," the judge said.

  I got home late, after a police commission meeting where nothing happened of any interest. They were going to talk about firing Patrolman Joe Padegimas for sleeping when he should be walking his beat, but they put that off. I was already stuck there, so I sat through the rest of the session, hoping they might let something slip worth writing up. They didn't.

  I stopped at the fish market downstairs and picked up a piece of Atlantic salmon, farm-raised, and some green beans. I steamed the beans and grilled the salmon, covered it with as much fresh rosemary as I could fit on it, and poured a bottle of porter into a big glass—straight down into the glass to build a thick and creamy head, just like the brewers planned.

  Then my mother called.

  While my supper grew cold, she gave me the word I was afraid she would.

  "We were talking to Mary Parker today about the apartment," she said. I was glad she wasn't skyping so I could see the pained expression she was certainly wearing. "And your father and I are thinking that maybe you shouldn't have to take care of that big place all by yourself. I mean, it is four rooms and they're so big."

  I looked around the place—I'm not sure what she meant by "so big" even if you could hold a soccer match in the living room. The sectional couch could turn into a king-size bed. The bookcases were salvaged from an old library and held a bunch of leather-bound paper that no one had touched in a dozen years. The fire pit wasn't real—a holographic fire and some kind of infrared source behind it that gave off a decent amount of heat.

  The kitchen was what I loved. A doublewide fridge, a big stove with convection and ultrasound ovens. Enough cupboards to hold food for the cast of "Julius Caesar."

  And my bedroom... well, I never had trouble taking care of the place all by myself, but I'm not a hoarder and I know how to use a robo-vacuum.

  "So we've decided..." she said.

  I knew what they had decided. I knew they were going to decide it the minute the Parkers came after me in the dining club. The way the towers worked, you put money into the building trust and it builds up interest over time. When you move out, you get the money back, plus whatever it's earned. And my parents were selling me out of my home for the bond.

  "We figured we'd let you have half of it to help you find a new place," she said. "Is that all right?"

  All r
ight? I almost choked on my porter and suddenly decided that a cold supper was a small price to pay. Half? I hadn't expected anything. That was the way my father usually did things.

  "Ben? Are you still there? I asked you if that's all right."

  I finished swallowing, cleared the liquid from my lungs and my throat, and answered her. "Yes, I'm all right," I said. "Sure, half would be just fine. Probably pay for the moving costs."

  "That's wonderful," she said. "I'll tell your father that you agreed."

  And that was that. I was still being sold out of my place, but I was going to have an easier time finding a new one.

  There was only one problem: I'm a journalist, and I hate and fear change.

  The next morning, I went to the office and tried to think about something besides moving out of my home.

  I wrote a couple of short pieces on the visiting nurses and teacher evaluations. I was about to start calling around to the town offices to see what was up when I got a visitor.

  I didn't see him come in, but I knew he was looking for me when he asked: "You want to know what's happening with Joe Padegimas?"

  It was Andy Krumm, one of the detectives from the Rockville PD. He wasn't like most cops, who were mainly former high school athletes without scholarship hopes. He was a small guy with boyish features and prematurely gray hair, and he was smarter than the jocks who walked the streets of our town looking for drunks and burglars.

  Of course I wanted to know what was happening with Joe Padegimas and I told him so.

  "He's not in trouble for sleeping when he should be on duty," Detective Andy said. "He's in trouble for sleeping with one of the police commissioner's daughters."

  "Oh ho!" I said. "Which one?"

  He gave me the details, and I scribbled the names into my notebook. He even gave me the daughter's phone number. That was a story with potential... if the police commission ever said something about it publicly. Or the commissioner's daughter did.

  I thanked Detective Andy, then I said: "What do you know about Bonnie Bannister?"

  "Bannister? Nothing to know. Equipment failure, from the look of it. People can't expect to live forever."

  "What if it wasn't failure? What if someone turned it off?"

  "That would be a whole different story," Andy said. "Who did that?"

  "I'm working on it," I said.

  "Well, good for you, because I don't have time to waste chasing down crazy ideas without leads. Give me a name, and I might do something about it. Otherwise, you don't try to be a detective, and I won't try to write stories about Joe Padegimas."

  "Thanks for the advice," I said, and he left.

  After lunch, I called a friend of mine for a favor. Billy was a member of a dying trade—he was a truck driver, and I wanted him to give me a ride. I had to meet him behind the train station, at the far end, where the cargo comes in, and the roads are still open for vehicular traffic instead of pedestrians.

  His little electric van was just the thing for carrying small loads of merchandise around to stores and shops here in town. But today, I wanted to go a little farther.

  "You're in luck," Billy said, wiping the foam from a root beer off his thick walrus moustache. "I'm actually going out there today with a load for Trader Jack's."

  A few minutes later, we were rolling down a street on the edge of town, past the high walls of the kilotowers.

  We rolled down Union Street, past the hospital (built around a big mansion with seven gables that once belonged to the daughter of the man who built Maxwell Court), past the old houses with big porches and cookie-cutter trim, and down to the foot of the hill where the road from Ellington and farm country came in from the north.

  Then we crossed over into the old part of town—the suburbs of Vernon. We put the pharmacy and the abandoned gasoline station behind us and rolled past empty storefronts, a strip-mall with plywood over what once were plate glass windows, and an empty lot with a sign out front that said "Car Wash." All the places were fronted by big empty lots with tall grass rising from cracks in aging pavement where the cars used to park. A row of empty monuments to the age when automobiles (like dinosaurs) ruled the Earth.

  Billy seemed at ease as he controlled the movement of the truck.

  I was not.

  But that's because I knew things that Billy probably did not. Bill had probably never scanned through the archives of the old Rockville Inquirer. He probably did not know the risks we were taking.

  The unending death toll of motor vehicle accidents was horrifying. Cars hitting trees. Cars hitting buildings. Cars hitting one another. Over and over and over again. Week after week, month after month, year after year. Mayhem and blood and injuries in a long, long chain of tears and hopelessness.

  I wanted to wear a helmet, but after the first ride he gave me Billy wouldn't let me.

  I wanted to hang on to something inside the cab of the truck, but there was nothing within reach. At least Billy had the steering wheel.

  And when another truck approached us from the other direction on the road, it was all I could do to keep from screaming. Billy had been clear about that after the first ride too. It wasn't allowed.

  How could he be sure we weren't going to collide? What if the other driver miscalculated? These things weren't on tracks, for Pete's sake. We could all die in the blink of an eye... and Billy just smiled and rode along without a care or concern.

  "Are you all right, Ben?" he asked.

  I gritted my teeth. "Just fine," I said. "Are we there yet?"

  "Just a few minutes," he replied.

  We continued on past more empty stores and then took a right down the hill toward the Hockanum River. It wasn't much of a river down there, just big pieces of marshland on either side of the road, with the sewage treatment plant in the middle.

  "Doesn't this part of the road get flooded in the spring?" I said.

  "Sure does," Billy said. "And sometimes in the summer when the monsoons get going."

  "What do you do if it does? You don't drive through it, do you?"

  "No, Ben. I just take another route."

  It just seemed too harrowing to me.

  On the other side of the river were the first of the tract homes. Low to the ground, with big yards that had gone to seed, roofs that were sagging or collapsed. Some were blackened hulks, some were skeletons of their former selves. We went on up the hill to a strange concrete circle where Billy pulled the steering wheel hard over and we orbited a grassy knoll in its center.

  I felt the cold rush of panic as we turned in a sharp little circle. What if someone else was driving here and wanted to make that turn? What would we do?

  Then he pulled into the driveway of Trader Jack's, rolled up to the building, and stopped.

  I tried to steady my breathing and waited for my heart to stop pounding.

  We had stopped between an electric roadster and an alcohol-burning truck—I could smell the fuel through the open window. I helped Billy carry the boxes into the store, big plastic shipping crates, but with good handles on the ends. An Indonesian woman behind the counter gave us a sneer and we set the boxes down in front of an island where a dozen different kinds of rice stewed over small cans of liquid flame. The place smelled of strange spices and stale sausages.

  I thanked Billy and got out of there as quickly as possible, in case another truck rolled in. Pedestrians were always at risk when motor vehicles were around.

  A trio of old men sat at a picnic table under an awning, eyeing me as I consulted my head-ring for directions. The ring projected a map before my eyes and sent me back to the circular roadway, where I could see now that five different roads fed into this spot. I tried to imagine the old cars rolling around it like some kind of amusement park ride. I shivered at the thought.

  Then I headed down along what the sign said was Skinner Road.

  There were still suburban subdivisions around where people lived in tidy single-family houses, where they rode to the local train depot in little el
ectric carts and rode home to wives and children and home-cooked meals. But that was in South Windsor, and Skinner Road was not one of them.

  I counted four empty lots with rectangular foundation holes filled with debris and five salt-box shells wrapped with wild vines and ivy. Half the rest of the houses were empty, and the other half looked like they were home to refugees, with vegetables and rows of corn growing where grassy lawns had once been carefully tended.

  The social life in this neighborhood once had centered on the elementary school at the other end of the road. I knew this because I'd written about the Skinner Road School PTA—they still met once a month in the Noah Webster kilotower, even though the school itself had closed twenty years ago. Now what social life there was out here probably was centered on youth gangs or immigrant clans.

  David Poole's house was almost indistinguishable from the other squatter's digs, except for the solar panels on the roof and the piles of rusting scrap metal beside the cornrows. No one was around when I arrived. I looked things over carefully, then decided to sit, very carefully, on a wooden bench. There was no way of telling what kinds of home security measures someone might put in place out here. It was a long time since burglar alarms—or the electricity to power them—had been wired into these places.

  Poole came along after I'd been sitting there for more than half an hour—just long enough to make me doubt why I'd come out here. He was pulling a large cart with four wheels that looked like they'd come off a moon-buggy—coiled spiral springs and hard rubber tires. Inside the cart was a load of copper pipes, some tools, and sheets of bright copper embossed with an elaborate pattern.

  Poole was not tall—shorter even than me—but he was big. Powerful arms, wide shoulders, a big belly. He had short red hair and blue flame tattoos across his neck and the lower part of one side of his face. His voice was low and deep and powerful.

  "Can I help you?" he asked.

  I introduced myself. "I'm a reporter and I'm doing a story about your great-grandmother."

  It's not like I could tell him I was looking into her murder... and he was a suspect. Even so, I was hoping to get as much useful information as I could. An editor of mine when I was starting out told me to "jolly them up" before asking people questions, so I did my best.