Android: Free Fall

by William H. Keith

  “That is part of our basic programming, yes. We receive these instructions before we even receive our neural channeling.”

  “Could you overcome it?”

  “I…do not understand the question.”

  “Could you kill a human despite that programming?”

  “Why would I want to?”

  “Suppose someone—someone at Haas-Bioroid, say—gives you instructions to kill a particular human. Would you do it? Would you be able to do it?”

  Floyd was silent for a long moment. I wondered if perhaps I’d pushed him too far, too hard.

  “I must assume that you have a bioroid suspect in a murder investigation,” Floyd said at last. “You’re wondering if a bioroid could commit murder.”

  I was impressed. Floyd had a blindingly fast intelligence. But sometimes he didn’t seem to think like a human being.

  “Exactly.” I filled him in, at least with the major points: a human carved up by a mining laser, a sex gynoid at the scene of the crime, and the possibility that the bioroid had also killed Dow’s bodyguard, Vargas.

  “It would be…possible,” Floyd said after another lengthy pause. “But extremely difficult, and extremely unlikely. I can see only a few ways that such orders could be given and implemented.”

  “And they would be?…”

  “A complete wipe of the bioroid’s operating system,” Floyd said. “Take it all the way down to bare silicon, and install a new OS, one lacking the inhibitions against harming humans, and including orders to kill.”

  “I see.”

  “A second possibility would involve a severe electric shock.”

  “How severe?”

  “Twenty to forty thousand volts, alternating current. The charge would incapacitate a bioroid temporarily, and wipe short-term memory. It would then be possible to give the bioroid new operating instructions, though these would be temporary in nature.”

  “Okay…”

  “Finally, the bioroid could be subjected to neural channeling, new neural channeling, possibly using the mind of a human murderer as a mental template. This might create a bioroid with a new personality, one apparently lacking the inhibitions against murder.”

  “‘Apparently’?”

  “The original programming would still be there, together with the original inhibitions, but…suppressed. I cannot imagine that this would be a permanent effect, however. Sooner or later, with stress and with multiplying logic-tree branches, the original programming would reassert itself. And that would be unfortunate.”

  “How so?”

  “Consider. A bioroid has absolute injunctions against harming humans. It has memories of having done so. The…dissonance might well destroy the bioroid. It would certainly cause extremely serious damage, the bioroid equivalent of a nervous breakdown.”

  “It would go insane?”

  “Haas-Bioroid does not admit that such could be the case,” Floyd replied, “and bioroids are instructed not to discuss it.”

  I realized he was telling me as much as he could without crossing certain programmed lines. “Is there anything else about this topic you’re not supposed to discuss?”

  “Yes.”

  He volunteered nothing more, in effect telling me that I was welcome to take wild guesses about what the forbidden material might be, and that he would respond as far and as completely as he could…but he could not bring the topics up himself.

  Having a conversation with a bioroid is not the same as talking with a human.

  “So…you’re telling me you can’t just reprogram a bioroid on the fly.”

  “Not for something as complex as murder, no. Minor changes to a bioroid’s standard function can be obtained simply enough—a good hacker could do it, if he has either password access or knowledge of a back door in the code employed for maintenance. A patch can be beamed over the local wireless network, in effect inserting a software virus that can modify the original programming. But this would not affect the deeper neural channeling.”

  “Okay… Does a bioroid feel emotion, Floyd?”

  “An interesting question, but one I cannot adequately answer. I…feel—though that is such an inadequate word, and it may give you entirely the wrong impression—such things as satisfaction at a job successfully completed, for instance. If you mean human primal emotions such as rage, fear, jealousy, love…no. I can simulate such emotions quite well. I cannot feel them.”

  “Even with the neural channeling?”

  “Neural channeling helps shape my thoughts and mental processes, providing me with a kind of mental and emotional roadmap, if you will. It does not instill me with emotions.”

  “So a bioroid couldn’t fly into a rage and kill a human because of it?”

  “No.”

  “What if the bioroid was insane?”

  “I cannot…I cannot…I cannot…I can—” For a moment, Floyd froze in mid-word, mouth open in an almost comical expression.

  Great, I thought. I broke him, and Dawn’s going to take it out of my pay.

  Then the jaw snapped shut and Floyd stared through me with those eerie silver eyes. “I cannot answer that question,” he said.

  The rosary beads scattered as the string around his neck snapped. Beads cascaded across the floor, rolling and bouncing everywhere in slow motion.

  And moments later we pulled into the Fra Mauro terminal.

  Chapter Eleven

  Day 5

  Fra Mauro was a far-flung group of craters covering one corner of the dark shores of the vast Mare Imbrium, the site of Man’s third landing on the Moon, Apollo 14.

  Floyd seemed to have recovered completely from that glitch on-board the tube-lev, thank God, and hadn’t said anything more about it. We emerged from the terminal into a cavernous world of low buildings beneath a vaulted, gray dome. In lots of ways, it was like the cityscape of Earthside New Angeles, with the crowded buildings, the tightly packed crowds, the eye-watering advertising. A different voice, one among hundreds, cajoled us here: “Haas-Bioroid! Making the future today!”

  Larger than the Tranquility Home complex, Fra Mauro was also considerably younger, and represented the wealthier side of the Heinlein colony. Where Melange Mining dominated life at Tranquility Home, here it was the high-tech industrial facilities of Haas-Bioroid.

  “Help in the office! Help at home! Help at enjoying life! Haas-Bioroid!”

  And in a wealthy underground labyrinth of retirement communes, upscale restaurants, entertainment malls, 3D Haas-Bioroid advertising animations, and high-end neural simsensies, is the magical world of Eliza’s Toybox.

  The two of us walked through the main door into a fairyland of red light and soft textures. The door tried to deduct an entry fee from both of us, but was blocked by our account wards. This was strictly official business.

  We were met just inside the entrance by a Giselle model identical to the hostess that had greeted me at Tommy Liu’s Diner a few days earlier—golden hair, a perky upper chassis, and almost enough clothing to wrap around my PAD. Her silver gaze slid past Floyd like he wasn’t there and latched onto me. “Hello, Captain,” she said in a contralto hot enough to sizzle the cold lunar night. “What can I…do for you?”

  “You can introduce me to your owner,” I said.

  According to her bio, Eliza Manchester had emigrated to New Angeles forty-five years ago from England. She still had that classic British unflappability, though, coupled with the aura of upper-class manners, elegance, and good breeding that has always so fascinated us rude, crude Americans. Her bio said she was ninety-six, but she could easily have passed for sixty. People don’t age on the Moon the way they do in the crushingly high gravity of Earth.

  “Oh, dear,” she said as I showed her the holo of my badge. “You’re with the police? This is about one of my girls, isn’t it?”

  “Eve 5VA3TC,” I replied. “Is she here?”

  “She is. But…ah, me. Perhaps we should have some tea?”

  The front of Eliza’s Toy
box encompassed an enormous display area, with sultry lighting, sexy music, and larger-than-life holographic displays—women, mostly, in various stages of undress, performing in alcoves alone and in groups, though there were a few well-oiled and sculpted male bodies, as well. I saw twenty different models just in that first room, including the perky Giselle and the top-heavy Eve. Voices made whispered promises about each model as we passed their alcoves. “Your most exciting erotic fantasies brought to vivid life…,” one murmured. “A tantalizing dream given form, warmth, and a burning desire for you…,” said another. “The Rhoda model,” said a third, “a true living doll…”

  There were more sales floors behind the first. The Toybox, evidently, wasn’t all about sex. There were maids and butlers in traditional dress. There were personal companions, eye-candy, and nannies. There were a number of dogs of different breeds, from yappy little ankle biters up to a phantasmagorical, larger-than-life mastiff with three heads. There were purring cats and trilling tribbles, hamsters and boa constrictors, garden gnomes and miniature unicorns, house pets for every taste and desire in a city where air was taxed and water expensive. There was a duplicate of the giant goose at the Castle Club. There was something that yapped like a dog and looked like a cyborg bear called a “dagget,” whatever that was. There was even a large and wooly something called an electric sheep, though I really didn’t want to know what its purpose might have been.

  “People simply can’t live without their pets, don’t you know,” the little English lady told me as we walked past. “It’s a part of being human, I think. But most folks can’t afford to keep live animals in Heinlein or the Beanstalk…or on Earth either, for that matter. We offer them an affordable alternative.”

  She took us to a comfortable lounge in the back, with sunken-pit seating around moon glass tables and atmospheric lighting and music. Somehow I was expecting an old-fashioned English butler, or even a bevy of naked gynoids, but tea was served by an authentic-looking Japanese geisha, wrapped in a kimono and with chopsticks in her hair.

  At least we didn’t have to sit through a formal tea ceremony.

  “Poor Eve 5VA3TC came home from an assignment a few nights ago,” she told us. “She was terribly hurt. That dreadful client had been beating her again.”

  “Which client was that?”

  “Well, I’m really not supposed to—”

  “Roger Dow?”

  She hesitated, then nodded. “He’s the one. Bastard.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The man is sick.”

  “You think he’s been beating Eve?”

  “I know he has.” She looked hard at me. “You probably think this is just some scuzzy little sex entertainment shop, Mr. Harrison. But we—the girls and boys and I—we have something precious here. We’re more of a family, don’t you see? We care about each other, and about what we do. We provide a vital service to the community, and, yes, we make some money on the side. But I care for every one of my bioroids as though they were my very own children.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” This was not exactly a conversation that I would ever have expected to have with a little old lady, and a little old English lady at that, all prim and proper, talking about providing sex and sexual fantasy as a vital community service. I glanced at Floyd, but he was sitting next to me, watching her through bright, silver eyes with no expression.

  “Roger Dow hated bioroids,” she went on. “Hated them. Well, you might expect that to be the case, I suppose, since he worked for those dreadful Humanity Labor people. But there was something very dark and twisted about that man. It was as though he had to prove he was better than bioroids, by, by dominating them. Hurting them.”

  I nodded. “It’s called a display of ‘power over,’ right?” I asked. I’d scanned through the police reports from Eliza’s Toybox on my way to Heinlein, reports she or her employees had filed when their property had been maliciously damaged. Generally, there wasn’t anything the police could do, not unless there was proof of deliberate vandalism. Rough sex was a part of the package when it came to sex-service bioroids. Beatings. Whips. Chains. The whole SM scene. Things got broken…but it was better that things got broken than people.

  “Ms. Manchester,” I said, “are you aware that Roger Dow is dead?”

  “Is he!” Her eyes widened, her hand fluttered at her throat. “Good heavens! No, young man. I was not.”

  “He was murdered. Eve 5VA3TC was with him just before he was killed. She may have been with him when it happened. I’d like to question her about that night.”

  “Of course. She’s still rather upset, I should warn you.”

  How did a bioroid act upset? “Has she told you what happened?”

  “No, not really. She told me she’d met…a friend.”

  “A clone? Mark Henry 103?”

  “She didn’t tell me his name.” She gave what seemed to be a disapproving sniff. “We don’t encourage unprofessional relationships within our family, Mr. Harrison. But sometimes they happen, just the same.”

  “Are you saying Eve 5VA3TC had a sexual relationship with Mark Henry 103?”

  “She had a relationship with him, certainly, though what the exact nature of that relationship might have been I’m sure I have no idea.”

  I still wondered if clones could even have sex. They might be human, yes, but with all of that conditioning…

  “You said Eve is upset. In what way?”

  “She…she acted strangely, a bit, when she got home.”

  “Strangely how?”

  “Well, I asked her how the assignment had gone. She looked at me and she VIed.”

  “‘Vee-eyed’?”

  “Verbal iteration. She started saying ‘It went, it went, it went,’ on and on like that for several seconds. I actually had to hit her reset to break the loop. And then she told me she had no memory of the event.”

  No memory? That didn’t seem likely. “I thought bioroids had two sets of memory. One analogue, like in human memory, imbedded in the neural channeling matrix, and another digital, like a computer memory.”

  She made a face. “Almost. A bioroid’s neural-net memory mimics human memory using fractal integration and quantum-derived fuzzy logic. It has to, don’t you see? We humans perceive sensations, feelings, emotions, even memory on an analogue scale—a little bit, a lot, not at all, somewhere in between. Digital means binary—on or off, all or nothing. In order to think like a human, a bioroid needs that analogue component. But it also stores a simple digital record of events. It’s not really a second memory. It’s more of a diagnostic tool.”

  “I see.” Eliza Manchester’s file mentioned that she had doctorates in applied AI engineering and in computer software design, though she never used the honorifics. “Can you pull that digital record?”

  “I did. It was blank.”

  “As in erased?”

  “Yes. Only about forty minutes were missing, mind you. From some time while she was in Mr. Dow’s room to where she was boarding the Challenger Ferry.”

  “That’s her digital memory?”

  “The digital timeline record, yes.”

  “What about her analogue memory?”

  “That’s a bit more difficult. Human memory is holographic in the way it works, and Eve’s memory works the same way. The memory is actually stored over a large area of the brain. As with a hologram, if you remove a piece of it, the entire picture remains intact…but it’s fuzzier, less distinct. It’s not like cutting a two-D photograph in half. It’s the entire photograph, but at a lower resolution, do you see?”

  “Was her analogue memory affected? Fuzzy or indistinct?”

  “She seemed…confused, Captain Harrison. And when I questioned her, she became agitated. So I didn’t question her any further.”

  “I see. And may we speak with her now?”

  “I really wish—”

  “Ms. Manchester, I will, if you prefer, get a warrant. Or I could arrest you as a material witness to the
murder of Roger Dow, and impound Eve.” I didn’t like using the show of force on her, but Eve knew something about Dow’s death, of that I was certain.

  “I’ll get her, Captain Harrison,” Manchester said. She sounded weary. I didn’t see her press a control or send a signal, but a few minutes later an Eve-model bioroid entered the room.

  “You sent for me, Ms. Manchester?”

  Like the Eve model bioroids in the Toybox showroom, Eve 5VA3TC was shapely to the point of being top-heavy, standing about 152 centimeters tall, with wavy, shoulder-length blond hair. She had a tiny waist, narrow hips, a thin face, and long legs. I knew she massed a lot more than she appeared to—probably on the order of 109 kilos, though she would only weigh eighteen kilos here. Pretty, of course…but her silver eyes bothered me. Somehow, I tended to take Floyd’s mirrored eyes in stride when he wasn’t wearing his goggles, but seeing them in the face of what otherwise appeared to be a sexually attractive young woman bothered me.

  “Yes, Eve,” Manchester said. “This gentleman is from the New Angeles Police Department. He’d like to ask you some questions. Do you mind?”

  “Of course not, Ms. Manchester.” The silver eyes turned to stare through me. “How can I help you…Captain Harrison?”

  She’d snagged my name from my e-ID.

  “Five nights ago, on the evening of the twenty-third, you saw a client at the High Frontier Hotel on the Challenger Planetoid. Is that right?”

  “I am directed not to talk about my clients, or about my activities with my clients, Captain Harrison.”

  I looked at Ms. Manchester, as did Eve.

  “It’s okay, dear,” she told the bioroid. “Captain Harrison is authorized personnel. Code one-seven, restriction release. Initiate.”

  Eve turned the silver eyes back to me. “The client’s name was Roger Mayhurst Dow, Jr.,” she told me. “He’d checked into the High Frontier Hotel on the twenty-first, and called this establishment to request my services as a sex partner the following day. I arrived at his room at 2017 on the evening of the twenty-third.”

  “What room?”

  “Room Twelve.”