by Max Thorn
“But I think you’re saying good ideas frequently lead to bad situations.”
“Exactly darling,” she said with emphasis. “Like money. Root of all evil. The level of sophistication I’m seeing downstairs is already so good, it’s easy to see that we humans can’t compete. Most people’s friends are a bit useless; unreliable, deceitful, self-absorbed, rude and unkind. But you put up with them because they sometimes tell hilarious jokes, occasionally the sex is good and once in a while they do something nice. The day will come when you can buy a humanoid companion who appears to admire you, will care for you, and can crack good jokes and have sex darling. Well, who would you rather be with; your very flawed human friends or your flawless, fun-loving robot?”
“And then the AI becomes a lifetime companion?”
“Of course. She always does what you want to do, skiing, hiking, going to the movies, depraved sex or whatever, and as we grow old and become decrepit and smelly, she stays beautiful and cares for you faithfully to the very end.”
“But no children.”
“Exactly. And your bond with her becomes so important, your mind so deluded, that you leave her your assets to continue whatever joint dreams you thought you had. But the instant the last breath leaves your body, the default expression appears on her face; she transfers your assets to the robot manufacturer and hands herself in for recycling. Ultimately it’s about population control and wealth distribution. I reckon in just three generations the worldwide human population could slump to almost nothing or whatever the robot masters want it to be.”
“When Lifetime Partner Inc offers me a companion, I’ll just say no.”
“You won’t be able to resist. Look at the smartphone. So useful and attractive, virtually everyone on the planet has one and a lot of people have two.”
“But you’re showing me the future. I’m forewarned about perfect synthetic partners.”
“Even with all that skiing and depraved sex on offer?”
“At the same time?”
“Darling, they’re robots. They’ve got no shame.”
We laughed.
Laura handed me her business card. “I know what you’re thinking. What’s a girl like me doing with a card that says, Procurement and Audit Officer? I ask myself the same question most days.”
“Everyone has to earn a living.” I passed her my card.
She read out loud, “Equity Research. Is this a back-door fishing expedition to research our business?”
“No, it’s a front door request to solve a small mystery.”
“Are you sure you’re not working for a scurrilous hedge-fund or one of the global pharma giants?” She narrowed her eyes at me.
“Honestly, this is not work. It’s a little complicated, but I’ll tell you whatever you want to know if it means I can get an answer to this problem. Before we tackle the larger issue of the end of humanity.”
She laughed. “My imagination runs away with me sometimes. Alright, tell me about this spider and its box and why you’ve come all this way.”
“Thanks. I really wasn’t sure I could get anyone to look into this.”
“Your problem sounded intriguing and,” she said in a stage whisper, “I’ve got a bit of time on my hands while my current projects gestate.” She put a hand on my arm, “Don’t tell anyone. Productivity’s very important around here.”
“I appreciate it. I’m hoping this won’t take up much of your time. The situation is this; a Sydney funnel-web spider in a box turned up in my friend’s apartment in unusual circumstances on the tenth of October last year. I want to find out how it got there.”
“So what were these unusual circumstances exactly?”
“Well…there was a dead man in my friend’s bed,” I continued quickly, “although the spider’s got nothing to do with the death as far as we know. It’s just an odd thing out of place. Even the police aren’t interested in the spider otherwise they’d be here instead of me.”
“Curioser and curioser.” She flicked on her tablet computer. The screen’s soft uplighting illuminated her face.
I took the box out of my rucksack. “I don’t want to leave this with you, but please take a picture of the box and its barcode.”
Laura turned the box over and took pictures with her tablet. “No spider?” she asked with a smile.
“It’s with the zoo for now, but we might be able to get it back.”
She focused on her data. “I’m looking at our inventory for the boxes around that period and it does show that we’re six short against the physical stock count. But that could easily be the lab technicians not accounting for them properly when they throw them away. Not scanning them. I can check to find out exactly. And as for the dangerous wild animal livestock,” she paused, flicking her fingers back and forth across the tablet screen and frowning, “I can’t make sense of these numbers so something’s not right. Maybe a batch that’s been incinerated and they’ve checked the wrong box.”
“You kill them?”
“The males don’t live very long according to this,” she waved her finger at the screen, “so we buy funnel-webs all the time. Domestically bred of course. I’ll take a closer look at this with a trip to the laboratories,” she looked up brightly. “I’ll phone or email you tomorrow.”
“Thanks for taking an interest, Laura.”
“Oh, I need the distraction right now. And if I get the answers to this little mystery, I think you owe me several large drinks.”
“Absolutely anytime. Phone number’s on the card. Or email. Or whatever. Telepathy might even work.”
She laughed. “So now you’ve forgotten the receptionist.”
“I prefer real life. Here’s my address.” I wrote on the card.
Laura walked me down to reception. I could see the blonde receptionist looking my way. Laura didn’t bother with eye contact for the AI and just put her hand up to the screen as acknowledgement. Pointing me toward the shuttle bus stop for the short drive back to the station, she squeezed my arm. “Have a good trip back to town, darling.”
The bus was due in fifteen minutes so I walked through the piazza between the administration buildings to the gate for the research estate. The surrounding grounds smelt of newly mown grass and lilac shrubs. The sun broke through the clouds and warmed my back.
Standing by the vehicle barrier, I could see the estate spread out like a well-ordered new town. Grid-plan roads formed a matrix for gray box-like buildings, rows of detached houses, apartment blocks, large square windowless buildings, an electricity sub-station, tennis courts, football pitches, a blue-hued glass building which looked like it might be a swimming pool, restaurants with dim neon lights, a movie theatre, and beyond the river, a small airstrip protected by another gated and guarded bridge.
A beige-uniformed guard sauntered out of the sentry box beside the heavy swing barrier for the road, hands on his broad belt. Heavy leather pouches on the belt carried his radio and other equipment. He said, “What can I do for you sir?”
“How do I get in there?”
A second, younger guard strolled out to join him.
“Spend years on a ground-breaking PhD research project and then I think they give you a job. Of course they never let you out again.”
The younger one added, “Yeah, but then you’re made, aren’t you? Best human biological research facilities in the world in there.”
The older guard frowned at his colleague.
“It’s on the website. Already in the public domain,” he said in reply to the frown. “See that building there, the one with all the cranes. That’s gonna be a particle accelerator.”
“Shut up. That’s garbage. You’re mixing up your sciences. Particle accelerators are quantum physics. Don’t listen to him mate. This is human biology. You don’t split human atoms. Maybe the genome but not atoms.” Nodding to me, he said flatly, “It’ll be another apartment block.”
“Well, they file more patents from here than any other research busine
ss in Europe. That’s on the website too,” he said looking at the older guard. “In the public domain,” he muttered, tilting his head away as though he might be about to receive a blow.
“So what are you here for?” asked the older guard.
“Trying to trace a lost lab spider.”
“Ha! That’ll be the courier guy. Always speeding. Always got some little thing wrong with the paperwork. Wrong time, too many boxes, not enough boxes, boxes on their sides instead of right-way-up like it says on the label. He ain’t gonna last.”
We laughed together.
“I’ll see you again when I’ve either got the PhD or the spider.”
They watched me go. Walking back to the shuttle stop, I called Laura on my cell phone. I asked her if she could check for a late-night courier dispatch from HomEvo to central London, sent on the night of Aleksy’s death. She said she’d look into it. She seemed genuinely interested in getting to the bottom of the mystery.
It looked as though the police had not visited. Mrs Naumowicz was right. Aleksy’s case was at the bottom of the pile. Evidence, in the form of the spider box, had been lost. They might’ve been working hard elsewhere, but the police weren’t covering every angle the way I imagined they did. I had a feeling I was about to discover critical information that would solve Aleksy’s murder in perhaps the one place they hadn’t looked.
EIGHT
Back at my desk the next afternoon, I read an email from Laura. She’d been down to the laboratory which had been using the funnel-web spiders. The inventory rules hadn’t been followed and she’d had to give a procedural note to the laboratory manager.
She phoned me. “Darling, complete chaos from an inventory point of view. No one following the correct process and they’re all blaming each other. But I’m going to get to the bottom of it. I’ve told them to get their records together and I’m going to go through them with a fine-tooth comb until I figure out what’s gone wrong, when and where. As for the courier, a package was dispatched to The All Night Café on Crowley Street, which is right around the corner from you. It must’ve arrived in the early hours of the morning.”
“Is that usual?”
“No, not usual at all. We send stuff out to other laboratories, universities or manufacturers or our own people. People in our line of work. Not all-night eateries. Imagine if that package had been opened in the café and out pops our lethal funnel-web spider, doing the can-can on people’s beans-on-toast at three in the morning. Screams and more chaos. All very odd. Am still digging.”
I didn’t hear anything more from Laura over the weekend. Nor during the week.
After a week of silence I called. Her phone went straight to an answer message telling me to call Michelle Donoghue on an alternative number.
I called Michelle and introduced myself. “Laura was trying to trace a spider and a box that might’ve come from HomEvo and ended up in my friend’s apartment. Do you know if she got any further with it?”
“I have no idea.” Then silence.
“Where has she gone? Can I reach her?”
“She’s no longer with the company and I don’t have contact details.”
“What?” I said surprised. “I saw her only a week ago. She didn’t say anything about leaving. She had projects on the go.”
“So things changed. She’s gone now,” she said curtly.
“Okay, who’s her manager?”
“Mike Joplin.” More silence.
I waited long enough for the silence to get awkward but she didn’t volunteer anything else, so I thanked her and hung up.
Searching for Laura on social media, I saw that she was posting from the Caribbean. Her most recent post included a picture of herself in a bright blue bikini, cascading hair and seductive pout, just twelve minutes earlier at Freddy’s Beachside Bar on Aruba. She was having breakfast.
I called the bar, gave my name and asked for her to come to the phone.
Her voice arrived loud and excited, “Darling, how lovely to hear from you!”
“Are you okay? What’s happened?”
“I’m so sorry I didn’t get back to you, but things have been so hectic.”
“I’m glad you’re alright.”
“I’m better than alright. You’ll never guess what happened.”
“You got fired.”
“Not quite. Out of the blue, the HR director calls me in and they offered me redundancy. How strange is that? I had no idea it was coming. So darling, because I’m such an awesome negotiator I got an enormous settlement.”
“You’re amazing.”
“I am! I’ve only been there three years but guess what I got.”
“I’ve no idea. Six months’ pay.”
“Guess again. Two years!” she shrieked. “Even the chief executive doesn’t get that. With bonuses! And it’s all tax free! Tell me I’m amazing again darling.”
“You’re awesome.”
“I’m awesome and I’m loaded. Only thing is, they made me sign a vicious non-disclosure agreement as part of the deal, so I’m afraid all talk of spiders, boxes or anything else at HomEvo is completely verboten my love.”
“Ahh, I see. Do you think they’re connected, this thing you were looking into and this sudden huge pay-off?”
“I have no idea and I don’t even care. I’m staying here on Aruba until a billionaire…” she became fainter while I heard her saying to someone nearby, “Yes darling, I am talking about you,” and then suddenly back at the phone, “decides to fly me away from here on his private jet to somewhere even more amazing. One day I might make it back to England. When I have children maybe.” Away from the phone again I heard faintly, “Not for ages, no. Not for ages darling.” And then suddenly louder again, “So darling, Michelle Donoghue has taken on all my work and she’s delighted about it. And so am I. She might take a look at our spider thing, although she is a company gal and doesn’t have a lot of imagination, so don’t count on it. Sorry darling, and good luck.”
I wished her the same and put the phone down on the chink of glasses, laughter, loud talking and the far-off sound of the sea. I called Michelle again but she hadn’t warmed up since our earlier conversation and she definitely wasn’t interested in looking into a spider matter for me.
I called her boss.
Mike Joplin said, “With the best will in the world Mister Fox, we can’t devote energy to tracing one box and one spider when we’re dealing with multi-million pound procurement projects. I don’t know why Laura ever entertained this beyond a thirty-second phone call in the first place. Now I don’t mean to be harsh, but I’m running a very busy department here. Please don’t bother us with this again.”
I didn’t think that I’d get a more sympathetic reaction from anyone else at HomEvo, so I stopped making phone calls. Instead, I pondered Laura’s excessive pay-off. Something wasn’t right but I couldn’t see what I could do about it.
Idly I clicked through HomEvo’s annual report, looking at the board directors’ names and the list of major shareholders, wondering whether it was an ethical well-run business with just one bad apple, or whether there was something fundamentally rotten about the whole company.
And then I noticed that Raymond Pendle, one of the company founders, was still a major shareholder although he no longer had a working role at HomEvo. I hadn’t realized he was even still alive. Searching for news stories online, I saw that he still gave occasional lectures and appeared at scientific events as a guest speaker. He was ninety-two years old. After some more searching, I found his phone number, spoke to his secretary and arranged to see him to talk about HomEvo.
If his reputation as a maverick genius was justified, I reckoned that he’d know exactly how to find out what was going on at his old company. And since he was collecting a multi-million pound dividend twice a year from his HomEvo shareholding, I guessed that he’d want to know in a hurry if there was anything untoward happening. Laura could be bought off, but the company founder would make an even strong
er ally. At least, that was what I was hoping.
NINE
I rented a standard sedan so that I could drive to the professor’s home up on the northeast coast instead of waiting for trains and taxis.
I packed a rucksack with a change of clothes and some toiletries. The May weather on the coast can be cold, so I put a pair of heavy boots and a raincoat on the backseat of the car. At the gas station I squeezed another three gallons of fuel into the tank that was supposed to be full, and bought sandwiches, some bananas and a large bottle of water in case I got stuck somewhere remote.
It was early afternoon by the time I set off north through the heavy London traffic. Eventually I joined the M1 expressway that would take me to the western edge of the North Yorkshire Moors. Five hours later I was in Whitby.
I parked on the beachfront, found a guest house online using my phone and put the guest house’s zip code into the GPS. An annoying automated voice directed me to the address. I wanted the ersatz wit of the blonde HomEvo receptionist but I got an insistent and humorless speaking-drone instead. I was probably safer without the flirtatious metaphysical debate while going into busy roundabouts.
My plan was to stay overnight and see the professor in the morning. Wednesday morning was the only part of the week he had free. I wanted to be there early and alert. Given his history as a maverick pioneer, and a HomEvo shareholding worth two hundred and fifty million pounds, I wasn’t surprised that he was busier at ninety-two than I was, at only a little more than a third of his age.
By dusk, I’d checked in at the guesthouse, a rambling redbrick building with a steeply-sloping red tile roof. I ate a light supper and tried to get a decent night’s sleep in a bed that was too soft, a room that was too warm and a darkness that engulfed me like a suffocating cloud.
After breakfast the next morning, I checked out from the guesthouse. I drove north along the coastal road, winding alongside the cliff edge with the North Sea on my right, stained purple near the shore from sea slugs’ dye mixing with the foamy water. Huge white gulls wheeled above and below on the chilling sea breeze, screeching over the crashing waves which dragged noisily at the base of the three-hundred foot cliffs.
