Android: Free Fall

by William H. Keith

  There were genetic tweaks that made the zygote grow very quickly, reaching adulthood in as little as three years. And there were telomere timers built into the rewritten genome that caused the clone to die—to “retire” in Jinteki’s weasel-speak—in twelve to fifteen years. Both of these were present according to the read-out.

  The DNA analyses could even read the telomeres—the lengths of repetitive DNA sequences at the tips of each chromosome that kept the strand from unraveling—and estimate that the clone who’d pinched his hand in the mining laser had been about twelve years old.

  I checked my electronic notes. Yep. Mark Henry, the clone I’d seen with the big suitcase in the surveillance vids, was twelve years old.

  Hey! Maybe this was going to be a quick and simple case after all.

  I zapped all of the data back to headquarters, along with a personal recommendation that they put out an APB for the clone Mark Henry.

  There was still something bothering me about the picture, though.

  Walk it through.

  Dow eats dinner in the hotel restaurant, and goes back to his room at 1925:13 last night.

  Fifty minutes later, at 2015:56, the Eve bioroid arrives. She goes to Dow’s room, does the bouncy-bouncy with him, is acrobatic enough to plant her fingerprint on the bed frame, and dribbles a couple patches of synthetic lube on the sheets.

  At 2042:27, just under half an hour later, Mark Henry walks in, carrying a mining laser inside a large suitcase. He goes to Dow’s room—probably unpacks the laser and snaps in the battery pack out in the hall, pinching a finger as he does so—then steps into the room. Maybe Dow and Eve are still going at it. Maybe she’s already up and out of bed. But one way or the other, Henry slices and dices Dow until there’s nothing left but blood and spare parts. Either he or Eve—or maybe both of them—go to the bathroom, strip, wash the blood out of their clothing, wash the blood off themselves, then clean up the bath after them.

  At 2122:25, Mark Henry leaves Dow’s room, walks down the ramp and through the lobby, looking like he has indigestion.

  Twelve minutes later, Eve follows him, slinky and sexy in that blood-red sheath.

  And an hour and forty-one minutes after that, Henry phones the High Frontier’s Housekeeping services, identifies himself as Roger Dow in Room 12, and requests clean sheets.

  Sounded good, with just two lingering questions.

  Was forty minutes long enough for those two to murder Dow, then wash themselves and their clothing and clean up the bathroom?

  And where the hell was the suitcase?

  I called up the surveillance images again, studying both Henry and Eve as they left the hotel.

  Neither of them looked wet.

  Now, self-cleaning clothing can fool you on a case. Chances were good that the blood would have slipped right off of the bioroid’s dress—assuming she’d been wearing it when Henry broke in, and even if she’d washed it in the sink it would have been dry in moments. But there would have been blood on her skin and in her hair even if she’d been watching from the farthest corner of the room, and she wouldn’t have wanted someone in the lobby to notice that gory little detail.

  Same for Henry. I wasn’t sure whether miner’s jumpsuits were self-cleaning or not—I needed to check that—but he wouldn’t have been able to keep splattering, low-G blood from landing on his skin.

  In the surveillance images, Eve’s fluffy yellow and artificial hair seemed dry, not plastered to her head as though she’d just had a shower. And that bothered me.

  Okay, maybe Eve had hidden in the bathroom while Henry carved up Dow. No blood on her. Henry drops the laser and goes into the bathroom for a quick wash-up. Eve cleans up after him because bioroids are fast. Even at that, forty minutes didn’t feel like enough time for Henry to shower and for the two to clean up after themselves. Something wasn’t right.

  It made sense and hung together, though, just barely…except for the question of the suitcase.

  At the moment, the most likely explanation was that Henry had left the suitcase empty and open in the hall outside. For whatever reason, he’d left it there when he fled the scene, and someone from Housekeeping had moved it between 2042, when Henry arrived, and 2329, when Maria came by with the sheets. A search of the back stairs, of Housekeeping downstairs, and of the hotel lost-and-found might produce it.

  One conclusion I could make readily enough: Henry and Eve had been working together. She’d been there, either in the main room or safe from splattering in the bathroom while Henry killed Dow. Maybe she’d been sent in first to keep Dow occupied; it must have been a hell of a shock when Henry had come through that door with the laser. Then she’d helped Henry clean up after the fact, and waited for twelve minutes until he left. Or else Henry had brought the laser in and she’d used it to slice up Dow, after having had sex with the guy for an hour. That didn’t feel quite as right as the other, but it was a possibility.

  There was still one other mystery, though. Clearly, Eve had been invited to the room. Dow must have let her in when she arrived. But how had Henry gotten inside with the laser an hour or so later? The bioroid might have left the door cracked open a bit and Dow hadn’t noticed. More likely there was a simpler answer: Henry had pressed the door chime, Eve had called “Come in!” from the bed, probably much to Dow’s consternation, the voice-activated lock had clicked open…and in walked Henry.

  Nice, neat, and tight. Just the way Dawn liked them.

  So why didn’t I believe my own story?

  Motive was a part of it. Having a clone and a bioroid working together to murder a full-human in such a spectacularly gory fashion would play well with the tab-rags. Humanity Labor and Human First would both be salivating over this—one of their own brutally killed by two murderous androids.

  But what would have been their motive?

  Clones are capable of crimes of passion. They’re human, after all, with all of the wiring full-humans have for love and hate and anger and lust and every other emotion in the human spectrum. They can even have sex, though their genome keeps them sterile. Where they’re different is in the conditioning. Jinteki makes sure their brains mature with very deep channels devised to keep them in line. Love your work. Obey orders. Be quiet. Fit in. It takes a lot to break a clone out of that conditioning to the point where he might actually get angry enough to kill someone.

  Bioroids are capable of crimes of passion, too, though in general that’s even less likely. The programming process for bioroids includes conditioning as deep as a clone’s. Act like you love your work. Obey orders. Be quiet. Fit in. A bioroid’s programming, especially the neural channeling that gives them personalities based on a human model, seems to give them human emotions. The experts, though, are still arguing whether an AI can really feel emotions, or if it just mimics them, doing so with such precision that it can even fool itself.

  What it came down to was this: I was willing to believe that a sex bioroid or a miner clone could feel enough rage to kill a human…and the crime scene suggested that the murderer had lost control, slashing Dow with a 100-kilowatt laser a dozen times and chopping him into bloody bits.

  But Humanity Labor was going to argue that Dow had been killed before he was able to convince legislators to pass laws eliminating androids from the work force and that suggested premeditation, not a crime of passionate rage. And there was the planning involved, using Eve to distract Dow and get Henry into the room with a laser, then cleaning up after, and making the call to Housekeeping to throw us off the track about the time of death.

  So which was it? Wild rage because Dow was trying to block androids from the work force? Or cold and calculating premeditation?

  I had to go with premeditation based on the evidence, and I wasn’t certain that clones or bioroids could think that way. Sure, cold and calculating perfectly described bioroids in the public imagination, but things just weren’t that simple. There were too many safeguards built in.

  A couple of centuries ago, back bef
ore humans even walked on the Moon, there was a writer of popular fiction who wrote a lot about robots. Most of his guesses about the future of robotics had turned out to be wrong, of course; after all, he’d been an entertainer, not a writer of scientific treatises on engineering or AI programming.

  But this writer’s robots, with their positronic brains, had run according to something called the Three Laws of Robotics. What these boiled down to were armor-plated rules that made it impossible for a robot to harm a human under any circumstances, or to allow one to come to harm.

  A nice idea, but not practical in the real world. Suppose a robot has a split second to save a human from certain death—and can only do so by killing another human who is about to murder the first? Suppose a robot confronts a new Hitler or Pol Pot or another General Tseng and the only way to prevent mass genocide is to kill the bastard? Never mind weaseling out of the question by saying the robot can try to immobilize or incapacitate the villain; in a hand-to-hand fight nothing is certain, and to save a life—or millions of lives—snapping the guy’s neck or shooting him dead might well be the only sure option.

  Still, Haas-Bioroid had done their best to make sure that their products couldn’t harm humans by way of massive neural conditioning that would shut the thing off if it began planning a human’s death.

  So how had Eve gotten around that programming? Or Mark Henry, for that matter? With him, he would have trouble just getting himself to the point where he could even think about such things. For him, thinking about work was so much more pleasant.

  No, planning the murder of a lobbyist who was about to help create laws against simulants in the work force is something a human would do. A bioroid and a clone might be given certain isolated tasks to complete—to carry a laser inside a suitcase up to a certain room at the High Frontier and assemble it, for example—but plan out the whole thing, then carry it out with such bloody, wild, and apparently emotional abandon?

  It didn’t feel right.

  There were three individuals I wanted to talk to right now.

  Two of them were the suspects—the Eve bioroid and Mark Henry 103. I’d have to check Beanstalk records to see whether they’d gone out, to the Moon, or in, toward Earth…or if they were still here on the Challenger Planetoid. First guess would be that they were on the Moon. The bioroid would have to return to Eliza’s Toybox, unless she’d gone rogue. And Henry would need to report back to work, or risk a retire-on-sight sanction by both Melange and Jinteki.

  But I also needed to talk to someone about Dow. I needed to know more about the guy, about what he’d been doing for Humanity Labor, about his personal and private life if possible. So far, he was little more than a cipher. To do that, I would need to talk to his boss—Thea Coleman—and she was back on Earth, in the offices of Humanity Labor.

  It made the most sense to head on up to Heinlein and see if I could track down Eve or Henry. I had enough of a case here to charge them, at least—not that charging a simulant carried the same legal burden as a human. Still, I would do it by the book. Henry still belonged to Jinteki, and Eve would belong to either Haas-Bioroid or, more likely, to Eliza’s Toybox. This needed to be done right if we were to avoid nasty legal entanglements with the owners.

  Before I did that, though, I needed to complete one more chore here at the top of the Beanstalk.

  I needed to visit the morgue.

  The morgue was a part of the Carousel Emergency Medical Facility. Humans evolved in a one-G gravity field, and there are some aspects of our physiology that just work better in that environment.

  So while some hospital facilities work well in zero- or low-G environments—burn units, for example—most off-Earth hospitals have at least a 0.5 gravity field. Broken bones, especially, require at least that much gravity to heal properly, and the only way to manage that in microgravity is to set up a big, spin-gravity wheel.

  Partly buried in the surface of the Challenger Planetoid, about a kilometer from the low-G Beanstalk terminal and the High Frontier Hotel, that huge double wheel had been built by the U.S. government and the Weyland Consortium, back in the early days of the space elevator’s construction. Eventually the Feds sold out, though.

  The wheel on the Challenger Planetoid had been purchased a decade or so ago by Gianfranco Calderoli, an uber-wealthy entrepreneur and casino developer who’d wanted to turn the place into a huge, low-gravity nightlife club that would rival the entire city of Las Vegas. At something like a half a billion dollars, it turned out to be a steal. He called it the Castle Club, and based the theme on the old fairy tale of the giant’s castle at the top of the beanstalk.

  The Challenger Carousel still maintains some of Calderoli’s thematic elements from the fairy tale. There’s a harp three meters high with a woman’s face that sings Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini. And there’s an animatronic goose as tall as a man. Both of these are courtesy of Eliza’s Toybox, up in Heinlein. That goose, though, almost got the place shut down once. The thing waddles like a real goose, it squawks and honks and hisses like a real goose, and—until a couple of tourists were killed in the ensuing riot—it used to periodically lay a genuine golden egg worth something like twelve thousand dollars. The idea—originally a promotion for the casino—was supposed to bring in a lot of customers who would pay a stiff admittance fee at the door for the one-in-a-gazillion chance of being able to grab a real golden egg.

  It had brought the customers in, all right. And two had been shipped home in body bags, while others ended up in the Carousel Emergency Medical Facility.

  The hospital occupied a relatively small section of the bottom wheel on two levels. The lower levels of both wheels, further from the hub, were at half a gravity; the upper levels, closer to the hub, was at about a third of a G, roughly the same as on the surface of Mars. I got there by riding the access tube deep beneath the surface from the High Frontier out to the basement level beneath the Challenger Carousel’s hub, taking an elevator up to the hub proper at the bottom wheel, and then stepping into one of the horizontal people-movers, letting the spin gravity waft me out and down into an artificial gravity field that grew stronger and stronger the further I dropped out from the hub.

  I was met by Dr. Hugh Weissmuller, the hospital’s pathologist, and his assistant, Carol Dole.

  “Welcome to gravity, Captain Harrison,” Dr. Weissmuller said, extending a hand. “You feeling okay? Dizzy or anything?”

  “Doing fine, Doctor,” I replied. “I haven’t been in low-G for that long.”

  “Fine, fine. Just checking.” He had to ask, of course. People who came all the way up-Stalk had experienced considerable acceleration—a G and a half, at least—in order to get there…but often they spent a considerable time in the low-gravity sections of the facility. Even after a day or two, you could find yourself feeling dizzy and a bit weak in the knees when you went straight from .04G to .3G, especially if you weren’t in real good condition to begin with.

  The simulated gravity felt quite natural. The decks are slightly canted to compensate for the additional, almost trivial .04G drag you feel from the planetoid’s movement about the Earth.

  “Your call earlier said you wanted to see the body they brought in the other night,” Dole said. She was short, slender and athletic, like a gymnast, and her voice had a no-nonsense edge. “I hope you have a strong stomach.”

  “I’ll manage,” I told her. I looked at the doctor. “Have you done a post yet?”

  He made a face. “It’s hardly necessary. There’s not much question about what killed the poor son of a bitch—massive exsanguination, massive trauma, multiple amputation, and, just to round things out, decapitation. I think we can rule out suicide.”

  “I saw photographs,” I told him. “But I would like to know if the victim was drugged or otherwise incapacitated when he was killed.”

  “Ah, yes. Of course. We did draw samples, yes. He had a blood alcohol of 0.07. For someone of his body weight, that’s consistent with three drinks. There was no ind
ication of illegal drugs. We did detect mirtazapine—that’s a tetracyclic antidepressant—at therapeutic maintenance levels. And his blood showed significantly elevated testosterone levels.”

  “Oh? What would cause that?”

  “Any of a number of things. He could just have high testosterone levels naturally. It happens. Or be on testosterone therapy, though there’s nothing in his medical records about that. If he was into power games, power-over role-playing, blowing up at underlings, that sort of thing, that could generate an elevation.” He shrugged. “So could sex.”

  Well, he’d certainly been having sex that night. I hadn’t known that intercourse could elevate testosterone levels, but it certainly seemed the obvious conclusion.

  “So, nothing that could have incapacitated him?”

  “Oh, no. Absolutely not.”

  “Well, let me see it.”

  Carol Dole, it turned out, was the morgue attendant on duty this morning, and she led me back into a cool room with a massive refrigerator in the center of it—a refrigerator with four pullout drawers.

  “Are you ready for this?” she asked with a raised eyebrow as she handed me a pair of surgeon’s gloves.

  “Go ahead,” I told her, and when I’d snapped the gloves into place, she opened the door and pulled out the slab.

  It was bad. I’d seen worse, I suppose, back during the War, but that didn’t make it easier. The pieces had been laid out to roughly simulate an intact human body—the head lying above the stump of the neck, the left arm below the stump of the upper left arm, and so on. Intestines had been put into a plastic bag, along with other, less readily identifiable parts. The foul stink of feces lingered above the body despite the bagged internal organs, and I gagged involuntarily.

  “Told you,” Dole said with a shadow of a smile. I think she was enjoying this.

  “You’re not like the other girls,” I told her. “How long have you been doing this?”

  “Seven years,” she replied. “But…” She gave a dramatic little shudder. “You never get used to it. Not this.”