Android: Free Fall

by William H. Keith

  “Wondering what?”

  “Bioroids and clones both undergo a kind of programming—patterning taken from human neural readings.”

  “Sure,” Lily said. “Brain-taping.”

  “Old-fashioned term,” I told her. “And misleading. They don’t record a human personality and somehow transfer it to the simulant. But neural channeling can mimic a remarkably human personality.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Do clones and bioroids have a moral compass?”

  “You mean…do they understand right and wrong, good and evil, that sort of thing?”

  “Exactly.”

  “They seem to…”

  “Right. For a bioroid, that could be part of the programming. For a clone…I don’t know. Are they conditioned to be moral? I mean, other than being taught to always obey orders and enjoy work?”

  “I’d guess that was up to Jinteki.”

  “I know a clone who works for the Force,” I mused. “She’s smart and really…intuitive. She’s got this uncanny knack for picking up impressions from her surroundings.”

  “Caprice Nisei.”

  “Yes! How did you—”

  “It’s hard to work the crime beat and not know Caprice,” Lily said.

  “She seems to have a finely developed sense of right and wrong,” I said. “She’s absolutely devoted to Jinteki’s cloning project. But I think she’s more devoted to her sisters.”

  “Sisters?”

  “Several dozen Nisei clones, exactly like her, but still in the vats. Not, uh, not born yet. She’s somehow linked in with them, though.”

  “How does that show her understanding of right and wrong?”

  “She’s afraid that if she fails, her sisters will be recycled in favor of a Mark III model. She’s determined not to let that happen.”

  “Is that morals? Or fear?”

  “Maybe morals are fear. Or fear-based. People do the right thing because they’re afraid of being found out. Of being caught. Or they’re afraid God is going to torture them in Hell for all eternity.”

  “Jesus, Rick. You can be cynical. Maybe people choose to do something because it’s the right thing to do.”

  “Maybe. I don’t see much of that in this line of work, though.”

  “Yeah? Why do you act the way you do?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t see a moral issue there, hon. I do my job because I like a positive credaccount balance.”

  “Your balance would look a hell of a lot better if you took bribes. Sometimes I think three-quarters of the Force is on the tri-maf payroll.”

  She didn’t say it, but I knew she was thinking of Louis Blaine. And how did Commissioner Dawn afford that fancy DFM in her parking spot on the NAPD roof?

  “Point is…could Eve be reprogrammed to kill Dow, or help someone else kill him? Could Mark Henry be conditioned to do it? Or do they have enough of an innate moral sense to…I don’t know, resist it somehow?”

  “My guess would be that a bioroid can be programmed to do anything the programmer wants it to do. Clones…I don’t know about them.”

  “It wouldn’t be that easy with bioroids, either,” I said. “Haas-Bioroid’s PR department is always proclaiming how safe their products are. ‘Programmed for safety and obedience.’”

  “It’s an interesting question, I’ll admit,” Lily said.

  “Anyway, if I can find Mark Henry and Eve, I’ll see what they have to say about human morals. I have a feeling they may see things a bit differently than we do.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Thanks.” I reached into a jacket pocket, extracting an e-card. It looked much like a traditional business card, and it had my name and contact information printed on one side. It also had an electronic data strip down one edge. “If you find Vargas, give him this.”

  “Sure.” She moved it toward the back of her left hand.

  I snapped out my own hand and grabbed her wrist. “Don’t.”

  “But…I don’t think I have your current information.”

  “I’ll give it to you. But you don’t want it from that.”

  E-cards were like old-fashioned business cards, but could be swiped along a PAD or over a hand implant to transfer electronic data. This one, though, was one of a batch of special cards I’d had printed. Swipe that card, and you not only got my contact information downloaded to your file, but a very compact little virus that had nothing on its algorithmic little mind but the need to ping me if I called for it. If Vargas swiped it into his files, I’d be able to use my police access codes to track him on my PAD from just about any distance, using standard Net pick-ups and nodes.

  She twitched the card a few times in front of my nose. “There’s a tracking virus in here, isn’t there? You want me to do your dirty work.”

  “If you find Vargas, why should I have to find him again? It’s harmless.”

  “And what kind of moral compass do you have?”

  “A practical one.”

  The card vanished into a thigh pouch. “You ready to go? I’ll walk you to the terminal.”

  “Sure.”

  The door chimed. An image flashed on the wall, identifying Fuchida, the manager of the High Frontier.

  “Open,” I said, and the door slid aside.

  “Mr. Fuchida,” I said. “We were just about to check out.”

  “I am terribly sorry to bother you, Captain Harrison…but after the events of the other night…after poor Mr. Dow’s murder…”

  The man was in shock. I thought he was going to fall over right there in the doorway.

  “What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Would you…would you come with me, please? Quickly…”

  The High Frontier had several emergency exits throughout its structure, including one midway down each of the long, straight hallways radiating out from the lobby. They were airlocks, with massive walls and heavily dogged hatchways, and with lockers next to the inner hatch containing lightweight pressure suits that would keep you alive for at least a short time on the surface of the asteroid.

  Fuchida took us up one level to the same corridor that included Room Twelve. Perhaps fifty meters down the passageway was an airlock. Two men were suiting up—Beanstalk security judging from their yellow garb. I recognized one of them as Smethers, from the other night.

  “One of our maintenance people went into the lock,” Fuchida explained, “to check the instrumentation, and he saw…he saw…”

  “What?”

  “Why don’t you have a look, sir?”

  Fuchida pressed the door actuator, and the inner hatch slid open. The airlock beyond was small, perhaps thirty cubic meters, lined with pipes and valves and equipment lockers. The outer door was closed, of course—the fail safes meant that you couldn’t activate the outer door when the inner door was open—with a small, square window in it.

  A face stared at us from the other side of the transplas window.

  Lily gave a small gasp, quickly stifled. Fuchida moaned; murders at his hotel were becoming something of a routine, and I had the feeling that right now he would be happy to give up managing in favor of something quieter. Like riot control.

  I stepped into the airlock for a closer look. The face stared back, eyes peeled open wide and rimmed with blood-ice. There was frozen blood on the nose and mouth, too, and in the matted beard. The mouth was open, an obscene rictus, baring teeth and bloody tongue.

  For just a moment, I thought that it was Coleman’s pet bodyguard, Hodgkins. The guy was bearded, muscular, and was wearing a dark shirt. The hair was darker, though, and the face seemed thinner, more angular, with more pronounced cheekbones, though when a face is contorted like that it can be hard to recognize anyone.

  I stepped back inside the hallway. “Let’s get him inside,” I said.

  It took a good fifteen minutes. Smethers told me later the poor bastard had been clinging to a couple of handles mounted on the outside of the outer lock door and that they’d
had to break the corpse’s fingers to get him off.

  As they laid him on a blanket on the hallway floor, I pinged the guy’s e-ID.

  Robert Vargas. Humanity Labor.

  “Was he…murdered?” Fuchida asked.

  “I don’t think he stepped outside voluntarily,” I said. I went through the corpse’s clothing. He was wearing a black shirt with a Humanity Labor logo, like Hodgkins, and he had on a shoulder holster, but it was empty. His pockets were empty as well. I took a closer look at his right arm. It didn’t look right.

  Broken. Not just broken, but crushed, just above the elbow. I tried to imagine what could have caused an injury like that. All I could picture was someone with very strong hands gripping him by the upper arm and squeezing, hard. No human grip could be that strong.

  A bioroid might do it.

  Maybe a G-mod human could as well, if he’d been enhanced for strength.

  He would have had to drag Vargas into the lock, close the inner door, then open the outer before throwing him out. Humans can survive vacuum for a short time. The trick is to blow all the air you can out of your lungs—be as empty as you can make yourself—so that you don’t explosively decompress.

  Could the murderer have done all that, and held his breath until the airlock repressurized and the inner door could open? Maybe. It seemed more likely, though, that the murderer hadn’t needed to breathe in the first place.

  Someone with respirocytes in their bloodstream could manage it.

  Or he might have been wearing a pressure suit. I tried to imagine him standing there in the airlock, repressurizing it, opening the inner door so Vargas couldn’t hit the emergency entry panel and open the outer door.

  I thought of the murderer standing in front of the outer door, the inner door open behind him, watching as Vargas screamed silently in the vacuum outside, clinging to the handles.

  If he didn’t have respirocytes in his blood, Vargas would have been dead in about thirty seconds.

  If he did have respirocytes, it would have taken longer for him to freeze, and for his lungs to begin bleeding out into vacuum.

  How long had the murderer stood there?

  Through it all, Lily had been filming. She’d pulled out the small, silver monocam she always carried and popped it over her left eye, the tiny, high-def camera filming everything she looked at. I could hear her, too, speaking in a low, quick subvocalization as she described what she was seeing, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  I did pick out the name “Robert Vargas,” though, as well as the words “Humanity Labor” and “murdered.”

  “I…I’ve informed the medical center,” Fuchida said. “They’ll have someone over to pick up the body soon.”

  “Good.” I decided I’d go with them. I wanted to talk with Dr. Weissmuller.

  “Can I report this to you?” Fuchida asked. “Or do I need to call someone else?”

  I pulled out my PAD. “You can make your report to me, sir,” I said. “You can start by telling me who found the body, and when.”

  Later, I said goodbye to Lily in the Beanstalk Terminal. “You’re still going down-Stalk?”

  She nodded. “I need to file my story, and I want to do it in person. They may put me on the air. What about you?”

  “I’m going to see what Dr. Weissmuller has to say about the body. Then I’m going up to Heinlein. I think I’ll stop and pay a call to our friend Coleman when I do.”

  “Rick…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Be careful. I don’t like the way this is turning out.”

  “You, too.” I had no reason to think that anyone was out to get me…but if they were, they might be interested in Lily, as well. She’d been seen at the morgue, and she’d been seen with me both here at the High Frontier, and at the Humanity Labor dome on Farside. My “assistant.”

  Damn it, there was a reason I didn’t like working with partners. It reduced the legwork and gave you someone to watch your back…but it also gave you someone else to worry about.

  Lily Lockwell looked very small and vulnerable as she walked away from me into the boarding tube that would take her to a down-Stalk beanpod.

  I took the subsurface slidewalk to the Carousel, then twisted into the horizontal elevator that took me to the third-G hospital level.

  “Mr. Harrison,” Dr. Weissmuller said. “I was half-expecting you to show up.”

  “We seem to be collecting oddly traumatized bodies, Doctor. Have you seen the one they just brought in?”

  “Seen it, yes. Performed the autopsy, no. I’ll be doing that later this afternoon.”

  “This is part of the Dow case, Doctor. I need you to be thorough.”

  He bristled. “I always am, Captain Harrison.”

  “Good. I want to know about drugs in this guy’s bloodstream, and I want to know if he has any special enhancements—respirocytes, G-mod characteristics, anything like that. And I want to know what you think broke his arm.”

  “I noticed that when the body arrived,” Dr. Weissmuller said, nodding. “His humerus appears to be compressed, even smashed. I would expect the assailant possessed a great deal of strength. A G-mod, perhaps.”

  “Or a bioroid?” I asked.

  He blinked, as though that had not occurred to him. “Certainly. If you could get past the programming.”

  “Just how good is a bioroid’s programming, Doctor? Could you get one to murder someone?”

  “I’m not the one to ask,” Dr. Weissmuller replied. “Someone at Haas-Bioroid would be better-suited. They build the things, after all.”

  “Would you call me with the results of the autopsy later?” I handed him an e-card. A non-infected one.

  “Of course.”

  Two hours later, I’d checked out of the High Frontier, taken the tube-lev through the planetoid to Farside, and made my way down through the inverted dome next to the Challenger Ferry dock. The next ferry launch was leaving in three hours, but the time passed by quickly with all I had to think about.

  At 70,000 kilometers above Earth’s surface, the Challenger Planetoid moved too fast to stay in orbit. Like a string tied to a rock used to whirl the rock in a circle, the only thing keeping it in place was the Beanstalk itself. The Challenger Memorial Ferry was one of a number of spacecraft, both passenger and cargo, released from the ferry terminal within a precisely calculated window, and hurled outward by the Beanstalk’s centrifugal force.

  At the Ferry Terminal, I passed once more through a backscatter checkpoint, and was allowed to board the ship. My seat was 11C, but when no one else in the half-filled cabin claimed the seats next to me, I moved over to the window seat. There was nothing to see at first but the steel interior of the drop bay, but eventually one of those holographic flight attendants winked on, all smiles and professionalism, and warned us to stay strapped in for a period of zero-G.

  A voice counted down the seconds, and then those steel walls outside shot upward, and we emerged into dazzling sunlight.

  Zero-G. We were in free fall, hurtling outward at several meters per second.

  If the time of drop was calculated precisely enough, we might have fallen outward in a long, curving path that would have allowed us to be captured eventually by the Moon’s gravity, but this was an express run. There was another countdown, and then a hand pressed me back hard against the yielding foam of my seat, and we began picking up speed.

  The asteroid, black as coal and looking like a lumpy potato with a tiny constellation of lights at its center, dwindled, and soon the Earth emerged from behind its dusty face. Eventually, the Challenger Planetoid fell away into a speck, then was lost to sight, while the Earth remained half-full. The sun was setting on the Earthbound portions of New Angeles; the cities of Europe were clearly visible as dustings of light on the darkened half.

  Then the maneuvering burn ended and we fell, weightless once more, into the dark.

  Chapter Ten

  Day 5

  The Challenger Memorial Ferry’s arrival
point on the Moon is Starport Kaguya, located just south of the lunar equator within a crater called Hypatia-C.

  Starport seems a little ambitious, I know. We have colonies on the Moon and Mars, yeah, and we’ve started mining asteroids, but we’re a long, long way from traveling to the worlds around other stars.

  The Heinlein Lunar Colony, though, is nothing if not optimistic about the future of humankind in space. From the Loonie perspective, we’ve finally dragged ourselves out of Earth’s gravity well and planted ourselves on more than one world. We’re in the process of getting industry off Earth and into space, out where we have near-free energy and abundant natural resources. Helium-3 mining on the Moon is providing Earth with the fuel for clean fusion energy; orbital manufactories are turning lunar regolith into titanium and anhydrous glass using free solar power, and shipping the products down on skip-gliders for an ocean recovery off Bahía de Caráquez. Lunar industry—most especially the recovery and transport of helium-3—has made New Angeles by far the wealthiest, most prosperous city on Earth, with twenty times the gross domestic product of the rest of the United States combined.

  Because not only is the Beanstalk a part of New Angeles, so is Heinlein.

  The Quito Accord arranged for what amounted to the outright purchase of Ecuador by the United States. We actually took less than a quarter of the country’s total land area…but the rest of the country was on the way to being assimilated economically within a few decades of the Beanstalk’s opening, no matter what the mapmakers say. The Quito Accord also established that the New Angeles Police Department was responsible for keeping the peace all the way up the Beanstalk to the Heinlein colony, as well.

  From one hundred kilometers up, Starport Kaguya didn’t look thriving or bustling. From a hundred kilometers out, in fact, it was invisibly small. But the ferry’s engines cut in for the final burn to the surface, and the crater grew until we could see the base: two silvery domes in the crater floor, a big one connected to a little one, with white and red beacons pulsing brightly once per second. The smaller dome opened, panels unfolding like the petals of a flower, and we balanced down into the interior on invisible jets of hot plasma. A boarding tube extended from one wall, pressure-sealing to the ferry’s passenger hatch, and the holographic attendant bid us all welcome to the Moon.