Android: Free Fall

by William H. Keith

  The Heinlein colony on the Moon tries to be as self-sufficient as possible, of course. They mine ice water at the poles and in subregolithic veins, and that provides the colony not only with water, but also with hydrogen for hydrazine as a monopropellant rocket fuel, and oxygen for breathing. Titanium and silica are common in the regolith, and those can be fused into fairly strong building materials, including anhydrous glass. What’s not common on the Moon, though, are nitrogen and carbon.

  And that’s where the Challenger Planetoid enters the picture. They’d needed a fair-sized asteroid to anchor the space elevator, of course. They’d pulled one out of the Outer Belt and nudged it into place, accelerating it with a precisely timed loop past the Moon so that it could be captured and tethered to become the top of the Beanstalk.

  The asteroid they chose was a carbonaceous chondrite, the most common kind of space rock there is. Carbonaceous chondrites are rich in hydrocarbons, and that means not only hydrogen and oxygen, but nitrogen and carbon as well—CHON, the basic elements of life.

  A tube-lev took us from the Beanstalk terminal straight through the planetoid’s heart, emerging at the ferry embarkation platform on the other side. This was where travelers headed for the Moon caught the Challenger Memorial Ferry for the last leg of the trip. Our destination, though, was a blue-gray dome with an entrance just off the terminal. The dome itself belonged to Humanity Labor, but guidelights on the walls walked us through a twisting maze of offices and compartments, bringing us at last to the Challenger Planetoid offices of Humanity Labor.

  Their offices on Earthside are enormous—a titanic arcology in the Manabi District. Up here on the far side of the Challenger Planetoid, the venue was far more modest. Animated wall panels showed humans at work in space: scenes of miners, orbital constructors, surveyors, engineers, medical technicians, transport operators, and hundreds of others. I found it interesting that there were no windows. I suppose that made sense. On Farside, the buildings are all upside down. That out-is-down spin gravity generated by the rotation of the entire space elevator around the Earth once each day meant that the ceilings were toward the planetoid, the floors away, and if you could look outside you would see that immense, coal-black space rock apparently hanging above your head.

  That could be disconcerting for visitors.

  We found Coleman’s temporary office not far from the Humanity Labor reception desk.

  “Ms. Coleman?”

  “I’m Thea Coleman,” she said. She was a thin woman with a pinched face and stringy, red-blond hair. Her taste in clothing ran to brightly and discordantly colored patchworks, complete with flashing LEDs and animations.

  A thug in black watched us narrowly from a couch on the other side of the room—a thug with a wicked-looking flechette pistol in a shoulder holster.

  “Captain Rick Harrison,” I told her. “NAPD. I called you a while ago? And this is my, um, assistant, Lilith.”

  Lily had insisted on coming along, claiming that she’d been the one to turn up the contact, which was true. I just hoped these two didn’t recognize her as a big-time media personality. A cop could get a bad rep hanging around with nosies.

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Thank you for seeing us. So…I gather you’re Humanity Labor’s Operations Manager?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Normally you’re Earthside? At the Humanity Labor complex?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you doing up here?”

  “I’m…I was helping to coordinate a meeting with a senatorial committee,” she told me. “Look, I just want you people to find the ones who did this,” she added, emotions surfacing in a rush. “Roger…Roger was a good man.”

  “I’m sure he was,” I told her. “Actually, I was hoping you could tell us something about him. Did you know him well?”

  “We…were lovers.” She reached for a tissue from the desk dispenser. “I still can’t…can’t believe he’s gone.”

  “When did you find out he was dead?”

  “Just this morning.” She wiped at her eyes with the tissue, then noisily blew her nose. “I called him that day to coordinate something concerning the Congressional meeting the next night…and was told his PAD was out of service. And…and then Bob Vargas called me with the news…”

  “Who’s Bob Vargas?”

  “He’s…he was Roger’s bodyguard.”

  “Bodyguard?” I hadn’t heard that Dow had one.

  “Oh, yes. Things have been getting so ugly with the clones and bioroids…the Humanity Labor Board of Directors passed a regulation two weeks ago that said all senior personnel had to have one.” She made this last comment with a slight hand gesture toward the thug on the couch.

  “Yeah,” he said simply. The guy must have massed well over a hundred kilos.

  “I see.” I smiled at him. “And you are?”

  “He is my bodyguard, Mr. Harrison,” Coleman told me.

  “So where was this Vargas character when Dow was getting himself carved up by a mining laser?” I was being deliberately brutal, now. I was looking for emotional reactions.

  “He was with me, checking things out in the Carousel Boardrooms, where the meeting was gonna be.” He had a bass voice that rumbled as he spoke.

  “I see. Pretty big responsibility, that.”

  “Yeah. You said it.”

  “You were with him?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Hodgkins. Frank Hodgkins.”

  “And who do you work for? When you’re not pulling bodyguard duty for Ms. Coleman, here, I mean?”

  “Humanity Labor. I’m what they call your Mr. Fix It guy.”

  “Something’s broken, you fix it, is that it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mr. Hodgkins has been transferred to the security department,” Coleman said firmly.

  “I see. And who was in charge of security for the meeting?”

  “Mr. Vaughn handled those arrangements,” Coleman told me. “He’s Humanity Labor’s Director of Public Relations.”

  I looked at her. “A PR director in charge of security?”

  “Mr. Vaughn had experience. Mr. Martín asked him to handle it.”

  “And who’s Martín?”

  “Mister Martín is the Chairman of the Board for Humanity Labor. But he is temporarily in charge of security.”

  I frowned. “Have the senior officers at Humanity Labor been getting many threats?”

  “Not…directly. But there’ve been a lot of rumors. Things are getting very ugly out there, Mr. Harrison. The clones can’t be trusted. I don’t think bioroids can be trusted, either. They’re machines, after all.”

  “How did Mr. Dow feel about clones?”

  “Like all of us here, Mr. Harrison, he didn’t care for them. He hated them, in fact.”

  “I see. How about bioroids?”

  “Them, too. Frankenstein’s monsters. They never should have been created in the first place! Stealing jobs from real humans…”

  I considered telling her that I knew Dow had been in bed with a bioroid shortly before the murder, but decided to play things cozy instead, I didn’t want them to know everything I knew. They were lying—Mr. Fix It was, at least. And I wanted to know why.

  “So…I presume the senators are no longer coming up-Stalk.”

  “No,” Coleman said. “Our head office called them the morning of the scheduled meeting and canceled it. The damned clones have won…at least for now.”

  “Why do you say they’ve won?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? They knew Roger was going to present a very attractive package to the Congressional committee. The new law would have ended bioroid and clone manufacture, and phased out their use in the workforce over the next five years. Our experiment with these machines has been a failure, Mr. Harrison, a dead failure. Unemployment among full-humans in New Angeles is at over nine percent—higher in some other cities—and it’s all because Jin
teki and Haas wanted to play God.

  “Well, the clones found out about the proposed legislation, and they decided to stop it. Either that, or Melange Mining decided that losing their clones would cut into their profit margin too much. If they did, they probably programmed a clone to do it for them.

  “Either way, Roger is dead and so is the new legislation.” Her mouth compressed for a moment into a thin, bitter line. “But they haven’t won the war. A battle, yes, but they haven’t won the war!”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Excuse me,” Lily put in, “but I wonder if you could tell me something. Why did you decide to hold this meeting up here? Wouldn’t it have been safer on Earthside, maybe at Humanity Labor? Or even back in Washington?”

  “That decision was made by Mr. Martín,” Coleman told her. “He wanted the senators to see the Challenger Mines.”

  “Oh?” I said. “Why was that?”

  “Because the Challenger Mines are fully human-staffed. No android machines. No clones. We thought it important to show them what the future could be. Without simulants.”

  “I see. Well…I think that’s all the questions I have for you right now. Ah. One more thing, before I forget. Would you and Mr. Hodgkins here be willing to give me some samples?”

  “Samples?” Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Samples of what?”

  “Blood for DNA profiling. Hand- and fingerprints. I’d also like to get in touch with Mr. Vargas—”

  “I am not giving you any samples, Mr. Harrison.” She rose from behind her desk, furious. “None of us are! That is what is wrong with civilization today! People treated like machines…treated worse than machines! That is what Humanity Labor is pledged to fight! We have rights!”

  I seemed to have just kicked over a hornet’s nest. “You don’t have to be tested,” I said, keeping my voice reasonable and disinterested. “Of course not. The Fifth Amendment guarantees your right to refuse self-incrimination.”

  “I know what my rights are, Detective! And I’ve done nothing! Nothing! You can’t show probable cause, here! You don’t have a warrant! And I don’t need to submit to your needles!”

  “Ms. Coleman—”

  “We have fundamental rights to privacy!”

  “Yes. I simply—”

  “I am not a machine!”

  “Ms. Coleman—”

  “And I am not some damned, slimy clone!”

  Eventually, we escaped to safety.

  Chapter Nine

  Day 4

  “How do you know they were lying?” Lily asked.

  We were lying together in bed after a long and thoroughly delightful catch-up on old times. After our visit with Ms. Coleman, we’d returned to the asteroid’s near side and my room at the High Frontier Hotel. I’d made some more calls and inquiries, gotten more lab results back from Earth, and tried to track down Bob Vargas, but without success. Lily had a room of her own over at the Carousel, but I’d invited her to stay with me for the night and she’d accepted.

  “They claimed their rent-a-thugs had been handling security for the visit by those senators,” I told her, “and that Humanity Labor’s security department was running the show, at the direction of their CEO. The Secret Service handles security arrangements for visiting senators.”

  “Damn. I should have seen that.”

  “More than that, parts of Coleman’s…call it her attitude…just don’t add up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I pulled up her personal file. Her job title at Humanity Labor is Operations Manager, but she has enough programming know-how listed on her résumé to give ‘Noise’ Reilly a run for his money.” I knew she was aware of old ‘Noise,’ the hacker enfant terrible of New Angeles. He’d featured prominently in some stories she’d done about the Stuckey IT scandal a few years back.

  “So? Operations Managers need to be e-savvy.”

  “Sure. But when was the last time you heard someone who could make computer networks sit up and beg for a living go ballistic about privacy rights and not being a machine?”

  She frowned. “It’s not unthinkable. Someone might know enough about computer networks to get really paranoid about electronic eavesdropping. And anyone working for Humanity Labor is going to feel strongly about android labor.”

  “True. But…it doesn’t feel right, y’know? Something’s off about that woman and her response.” I grinned. “‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much.’”

  It was morning, now—the planetoid facility ran on New Angeles time—and the floor-to-ceiling wall display was showing the Earth at just past half phase, with the sunrise terminator curving across the eastern Pacific just offshore from South America. Room Ninety-Three didn’t have the transplas window looking straight up at the real Earth as Dow’s did, but the digital scene was every bit as big and as beautiful. Most of the western United States was still in darkness, the Pacific coastline picked out by the softly glowing radiance of the Sansan megapolis.

  The night before, when we’d been holding each other close after our first sweaty round of getting re-acquainted, the concentration of the lights of New Angeles, centered exactly within the ghostly disk of the world, had been breathtaking. You could see the lights of the other cities in the Western hemisphere, of course—especially the glowing sprawls of Boswash and Sansan—but the glow from New Angeles had looked as large and nearly as bright as the full Moon from Earth.

  A city that never slept.

  “You can’t charge her with aggravated programming skills,” Lily pointed out. “As for the security arrangements…wouldn’t Humanity Labor want to check things out for themselves before the Secret Service got there?”

  “Oh, certainly. I’m sure any corporate security department involved in that sort of meet would,” I told her. “But Coleman said Humanity Labor was in charge of the security. Not true. And too many other things didn’t add up. Humanity Labor uses the services of Globalsec—that’s one of the largest private security firms in the world. You’d think if they were concerned about security, they’d bring up a few platoons of Globalsec troops. Why use labor goons?”

  “It’s cheaper?”

  “It also keeps any dirty secrets inside the family, as it were. Globalsec operations are subject to legal and governmental review. Besides, the whole set-up sounded fishy. Security being handled out of the PR department? That’s just nuts.”

  “I was wondering about that, too.” She dragged the backs of her fingernails up the center of my chest. “I guess it pays to be paranoid.”

  “Sometimes.” I kissed her deeply. “Right now, I’m paranoid that you’re going to get out of bed and I’ll never see you again…except maybe on the evening news.”

  She kissed back, her hand wandering. “Well, I don’t have a deadline right now,” she said in my ear a moment later. “The bed is comfortable. I don’t think we have to get out of it just yet, do you? I can think of a few more experiments we need to conduct first.”

  Last night, I’d joked with her about carrying out some important experiments with her in that bed. Turns out you can get pretty damned creative in micro-G.

  Yeah, old Roger High-Testosterone Dow must have had an incredible time with his rented sex toy the other night…

  A long time later, with the dawn terminator now well clear of the Sansan coast, we were up and dressed and planning the day.

  “I’m not going to be tagging after you today,” Lily said. “I’ve got my own stuff to do.”

  “Suits me. But…stay in touch, okay? Quid pro quo.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “So what is it you’re going to be up to?”

  “I’d like to find Bob Vargas,” she said.

  “Ha! So would I.”

  “And I need to get some vid of the hotel, here, to file with my story.”

  That part made me a little uncomfortable. “You remember…we agreed that you aren’t going to talk about the different angles on this case. No theorizing. Not until we know more.”


  “I know, I know. I’ll be a good girl. But you know my editor’s going to be hounding me for some in-depths on this one. The victim is too high-profile to bury in the obits.”

  “Of course. But right now, we have too many different leads, too many ways this thing could break. Let’s give them time to develop a bit.”

  The murder could have been exactly what it seemed on the surface—a couple of androids killing Dow to keep him from talking to that Senate committee. But right now it seemed a lot more likely that there was someone behind it—someone like a member of Melange Mining’s management, or even some sort of conspiracy among all of the mining companies. I still didn’t think Mark Henry could have killed Roger Dow all by his lonesome, and probably not even with Eve’s help.

  Then there was our Ms. Coleman and her personal thug, Hodgkins. The fact that Dow and Coleman had been lovers immediately threw a whole lot of other possibilities into the mix—possibilities involving human emotions like jealousy and rage and possessiveness. Until I knew why those two had been lying yesterday, I wasn’t about to let them off the hook.

  I didn’t want Lily writing up any of those theories and publishing them, not yet. I didn’t want the murderers to know they were on my radar. Even if I wasn’t yet certain which blip I was targeting.

  “So where are you headed, Rick? Up or down?”

  “Up. I need to find Henry and Eve and bring them in if I can. I want to talk to them about what they were doing here the other night. Henry, at least, was involved in the murder. I’d bet a year’s salary that he had the mining laser hidden inside that suitcase when he walked in, and I know he didn’t have it when he left. Eve’s wrapped up in it, too. She was with the victim, and she left the hotel after Henry did.”

  “But you don’t think they actually killed him?”

  “I don’t know, Lil. I really don’t. From what I know of bioroids and clones, though, I just don’t think they have the…the programming for it.”

  “Maybe someone reprogrammed them.”

  “A possibility. I keep wondering, though.”