Of course, I should never have answered the door, either. No one had rung my doorbell in over a year, probably closer to two years. A few of the neighbors had tried to be friendly when I’d first moved in, but I politely told them I just wanted to be left alone, and they generally respected that. Oh, one of them might wave or shout hello when they saw me outside, and I would wave back or say hello, while hurrying to get back inside the house. After a while, they stopped and just left me be.
When the doorbell sounded, I guess I figured it was a delivery, because I answered the door without thinking. The man who stood there was as big as the sheriff, and for a second, I thought it was him, but then he spoke.
“Hi, there, Professor. A mutual friend of ours asked me to stop by and visit you, so I hope you don’t mind if I come in.” He was already stepping inside, shoving me out of the way as he did so. “We’re just going to have a little talk, you and me, about the fact that you really do need some help, and we’re going to see that you get it.”
Too late, I tried to slam the door, but he simply stepped out of the way and let it close behind him. “I don’t need any fucking help,” I said. “And I know who I’m dealing with, now, I know it’s the sheriff. You can go back and tell him I said to go screw himself, he’s not getting anything out of me.”
The guy grinned at me. “Now, Professor, you’re talking like you have a choice in the matter. It’s time you get it through your head that you don’t. You see, you need to do things our way, or you don’t do anything at all. Do you know how easy it would be to make you disappear? We’ve done a little digging, and there’s not even any record that you live here. Wouldn’t be a bit difficult to make you vanish completely, and then all that work you’ve done would be ours.” He leaned close to me. “Or, you can cooperate, and we’ll all get rich together. Wouldn’t that be the simpler way to go? I mean, surely, you still have things on your bucket list, right? Things you want to do before you die?”
That’s when it hit me that this man was honestly willing to kill me, to take my life and snuff me out like a candle. I didn’t know how to react to that, so I’m afraid I just stood there and stared at him for a moment. He took it as a sign of surrender.
“See? That was easy, wasn’t it? Now, how about you and me sit down and talk like gentlemen, shall we?”
He took me by the arm and walked me over toward my couch, then pushed me down so that I was sitting on it. I knew that Bobbie was getting everything through her cameras and sensors, but I wasn’t ready to tip my hand on that just yet, so I kept quiet.
He sat down on the couch, just a foot or so away from me. “So, anyway, here’s how it’s gonna go. You and me, we’re going to get to be real good friends, because I’m going to be here with you most of the time. That’s just to make sure you don’t decide to do anything stupid, and whenever I have to be away, well, I might have to lock you into your bedroom or something. We’ll figure that out as we go along. Meanwhile, Eugene—that’s the sheriff—he’s going to take over the business end of the operation. He’ll be handling things like dealing with the companies that will want to buy your invention. That’ll be his contribution to it all, and you’re going to sign some papers later today that will give him your permission to do that.”
My temper got the best of me. “I’m not going to sign shit,” I said. “You can’t force me to do this, that’s called duress.”
He shook his head, laughing at me. “No, no, it’s not duress, it’s called survival. You sign it, you survive. You don’t sign it, you don’t survive, and we make sure nobody knows you were ever here. We still take your invention, and we still sell it, but you don’t get anything out of it. Wouldn’t it be smarter to just keep on working with us, so you live longer? Sure it is.”
That was the last straw for me, so I called out to Bobbie. “Bobbie, please come in here.”
The man was suddenly on his feet, and a gun materialized into his hand. “Someone else is here? Who is it?”
His eyes went wide and his jaw dropped as Bobbie, in the form of the robot avatar, entered the room from the hallway. “How can I be of assistance, John?” Bobbie asked.
I smiled. “Bobbie, please move this couch to the other side of the room.”
“Certainly,” she said, and then the robot rolled forward, extended its arms and slid them under the couch, then picked it up with me still sitting on it. One arm was underneath me, so that it was all balanced as the robot turned and placed the couch against the opposite wall. When it had withdrawn its arms, I looked at my visitor.
“Allow me to introduce Bobbie,” I said. “As you may have just noticed, she’s a whole lot stronger than you. Do you want to take a chance of pissing her off?”
His eyes were still staring at the robot, and he looked like he was just about to go into shock. “Oh, my God,” he said. “Eugene said you were a genius, but he thought you just built some fancy new computer. What else can the robot do?”
I laughed. “That robot is just a tool, that’s not anything special. As for what it can do, it can do absolutely anything. It’s the computer that makes it work, though, because the computer controls all of its parts. The arms, the wheels, all of it. On its own, that robot can’t do anything, but with an Abercrombie controlling it, it can do anything that any human can do, from frying an egg to brain surgery to building a spaceship.”
“Oh, my God,” he said again. “This is incredible! How do you turn it on? How you tell it what to do? Do you just talk to it?”
I shook my head. “You just don’t get it, do you? That robot is nothing; it’s worthless hardware and nothing else. It’s the computer that makes it capable of doing what it does, the computer that is capable of thinking a thousand times faster than you or me, but still capable of applying human judgment, feeling emotions, maybe even having a soul. It’s like your body—it’s absolutely useless without your brain to control it, right? You do all the thinking inside your head, and you can lose all of your arms and legs, and still be alive and thinking. Your body is nothing but a tool that your brain uses to move about in space-time; the robot is the equivalent of that tool for my Abercrombie computers.”
He turned and looked at me. “Okay, great, so there’s a super bright computer in there somewhere. So all Eugene and I really need to do is snatch this robot, and sell it to the highest bidder. We don’t really need you at all, do we?”
He pointed his gun at me, which was a mistake. Bobbie moved instantly, getting between us just as he pulled the trigger, and the bullet hit the robot in its sensor dome, its head. Naturally, that didn’t do any harm to the computer, but it did cause the robot to go into reboot mode, which it had to do in order to assess the damage. Its arms dropped to the floor, and its suspension system relaxed, so that the whole unit seemed to sit down.
“Oh, shit! Did I kill it?”
It was all I could do not to laugh. “You can’t kill it,” I said. “Like I told you, that robot is nothing. It’s just a toolkit for the computer to use, but the computer is put away in a safe place, and connects to it through radio transmissions. Unless you get to that computer and destroy it, you can’t do it any serious harm. Hell, that robot can repair itself.”
The guy looked at the robot, sitting there looking for all the world like a piece of obsolete equipment at the moment, and then grinned. “Good,” he said. “Then tell me where that computer is.”
“Like hell I will,” I said. “It’s put away safely, just because of people like you. I’m not giving it up.”
He looked at me for a few more seconds, then shrugged. “In that case, we don’t need you. We’ll find your fucking computer sooner or later, and then we’ll be the rich motherfuckers.”
He raised his gun and pointed it at me again, but this time, Bobbie wasn’t there to block the bullet.
Chapter 32
Branson looked at us, and I could see the confusion in his face. He wasn’t sure whether to believe Gunner or not, and it was like he had lost his way. I suppo
sed that seeing Gunner there had thrown a monkey wrench into his plans, so he might have felt as though things weren’t going the way they were supposed to.
Suddenly, he grinned. “Bullshit,” he said. “If you had gotten any help, you’d have people here with you now. I’m not stupid, you know. I was smart enough to figure out how to beat the professor, even after Kyle killed him, and I was smart enough to figure out who you are.”
My eyes snapped up and away from the gun, to meet his. “You know who I am?” I asked. “Oh, dear God, tell me, for crying out loud!”
Branson suddenly started laughing, and for a second, I thought he had lost his mind. “It was his notebooks,” he said. “I’ve been looking at his notebooks for months, but none of them made any sense until just the other day. You want to know who you are? Well, you may not like it, but fuck it, I’m feeling like all warm inside, and your face is gonna be priceless!”
He made us both sit down on the dirt floor, and he took a seat on an old barrel. There was about ten feet between us, so he was confident that he could fire before either of us could get to him. Once he was settled, he began to talk.
“I met the professor about a year and a half ago, one night when I stopped in Selkirk for a beer. He was sitting off by himself, and we just got to talking, and that’s when he started telling me all about his new, super-genius invention. He said he had come up with a way to make a computer that could do all of our work for us, and that it was going to make the world a better place. I told him it was going to make him rich, but he just laughed at me. He said he had all the money he’d ever need, and he didn’t want to get richer, so he wanted to give this stuff away. How stupid is that?”
The sheriff paused, as if waiting for one of us to answer, but neither of us said a word. “Well, I started looking into him a bit. It wasn’t easy, because he didn’t have anything in his own name, but I knew he was into computers and was rich, so I started looking at computer magazines. Took me a while, but I figured it out. John Saldivar, that was his name. He made a fortune when he was still a teenager, writing computer software, then went on to invent a whole bunch of new things for computers, while he was still in college. Made him a billionaire, it did, one of those guys who seemed like he has it all.”
He spat on to the ground. “Life isn’t fair, though, is it? He had a wife and a couple of kids, and from everything I can find out he must have loved them for all he was worth. Must’ve just about killed him when they all died in a plane crash, coming back from a vacation without him. He ended up moving up here to Selkirk, bought a house and a car through some dummy company, and apparently he just started drinking a lot. For a while there, he must have stayed drunk, but I guess when you’re a genius, you can’t stop having ideas. He started thinking instead of drinking, and came up with the idea for some new kind of supercomputer. Not long after that is when I met him, and then I started watching him.”
As he spoke, his hand grew more and more wild as the story unfolded. The gun waved in the air, and it was all I could do to not show myself watching it.
“I started keeping an eye on his place, and sometimes, when he would go out to the bar, I would slip in and take a look through his workshop, down in the basement. He had all kinds of machines and equipment down there, most of it stuff I didn’t recognize at all. Oh, I know a microscope when I see one, but there were so many things there that I never even heard of, I didn’t even bother trying to figure them out. Instead, I started reading his notebooks. He was one of those people who write everything down. He had stacks of them, and his handwriting wasn’t too bad, but some of the things he said just sounded absolutely crazy, at least in the beginning. He was talking about computers that could think like people, that could do any job a person could do. According to his notes, he can make those computers so small they could fit into a thimble. The size of an almond, that’s what he said, but a thousand times smarter than any human being.”
He looked at me strangely for a moment, and then he smiled. “The size of an almond; that’s pretty small, isn’t it? Imagine if you could put all those smarts into something that small, what you could do with it. That’s exactly what he did; he thought about how those tiny, super-smart computers could be used, and came up with some fantastic ideas. You know, I thought, when he first told me about these supercomputers, I thought they’d be just better versions of the computers we already use, but these are so far beyond what we’re used to that it’s unbelievable. In his notebooks, he told how these computers could control robots that could do any kind of job, from gigantic robots that could do things like digging rock out of the ground or building roads to super tiny robots that could go inside the human body and fix something that went wrong, but without having to cut someone wide open. Reading his notebooks was like reading some of the best science fiction stories I’d ever come across, except that this wasn’t fiction. He really was accomplishing it, and I could tell that because he described how a lot of the equipment in the basement was helping him to get it done.”
He stood up, then, as if he was just too restless to sit still. “Thing was, he was like a lot of geniuses, and the more ideas he had, the more ideas it gave him. He built a few of his computers, at first, and put them to work in different ways. One of them could actually drive his car for him, which probably came in handy when he went to the bar and got drunk. All he had to do was get in the car and tell it to take him home, and it would.”
“What has any of this got to do with me?” I asked, interrupting him. A look of fury took his face for a moment, and he raised the gun again, pointing it straight at my face. I thought for a split second he was going to pull the trigger, but then he got control of himself again.
“Just shut up,” he spat, and then playfully changed his tone, “I’m getting to it.” As if it were a game to him. He lowered the gun and continued, “He made another computer, and hooked it up to everything in his house. It can open and close doors, turn lights on and off, adjust the thermostat—you name it, it could do it, except when it came to cooking and cleaning, so he built a robot. Ugly-looking thing, in my opinion, but I guess it got the job done. It went around on wheels, but it had this gadget that would let it go up and down stairs, too, and it had two long arms. It could pick stuff up around the house, run the vacuum cleaner, do the dishes, and even did the cooking. According to his notes, he had designed it so that it could do literally anything a man could do, from sweeping the floor to the finest surgery, and he said that with a computer and one of those robots, anyone could make a good living for the rest of his life. All they had to do was send the computer to work every day, and collect the paycheck for it. Pretty wild, isn’t it?”
“That do be some shit,” Gunner said. “Something like that make a man pretty rich, so I guess you decide you want in on it, right? How he feel about that?”
Branson grinned. “You’re damned right I wanted in on it,” he said. “Maybe John had all the money in the world, but somebody was going to have to work with him, and even if he wanted to make sure everybody could get one, there was still plenty of room to make billions of dollars on these things. The way I saw it, he could be the research and development division, and I’d run the business end of it all.”
“But he didn’t see it that way, did he?” I asked. “He saw you for what you really are, a greedy sonofabitch who just wanted to horn in on his inventions, am I right?”
Branson just stared at me for a few seconds, before he went on. “The robot trick was pretty cool, and I could see his point. That robots could do any factory job, any construction job, just about any kind of job you could imagine, and it wouldn’t have to go to school to learn how to do it. All it would take would be a program in the computer, or just let it study all the information at its own speed, and five minutes later it could be a master of any trade at all. If you had one, all you had to do was rent it out to whoever you used to work for, and let it do your job. He had all these ideas about getting laws passed that would guarantee every
body could have one computer and robot of their own, so that they would always have an income. He wanted to eliminate poverty and starvation, and this was his way of doing it.”
“Noble goals,” I said.
He nodded. “That they were,” he said, “but like I said, a guy like him can’t stop coming up with new ideas. He started thinking about other ways to use his computers, like to help crippled people walk, blind people see, deaf people hear, that sort of thing. Besides being a computer genius, he was also a doctor, so he knew a lot about medicine and anatomy and stuff like that. He started working on even newer ideas, and as I read his notebooks, it blew my mind. He had plans to make a living robot, by making a clone of himself that would have one of these computers embedded in its brain. Can you imagine? A man with one of those computers in his head, able to think thousands of times faster than a normal human, knowing just about everything? Wouldn’t that be absolutely incredible?”
I laughed. “That would be pretty incredible, all right,” I said. “In fact, that would be downright unbelievable. Sounds to me like you really were reading science fiction.”
Branson didn’t laugh. He was staring at me, although I saw him glance over at Gunner for a second. I followed his glance, and found Gunner staring at me, as well.
“That’s really amazing,” Branson said. “Your buddy has figured it out, but you haven’t. That really is amazing.”
A chill started going down my spine, as I turned my eyes back to Branson. “Figured what out?” I asked, but it dawned on me even as the question left my lips.
Branson grinned. “Just hit you, didn’t it Sal?” His words echoed into my soul, “You’re the clone.”
Chapter 33
“No way,” I said, “no fucking way! You’re full of it! This is crazy, and you’re nuts.”
Thriller: I Am Sal - A Mystifying Crime Thriller (Thriller, Crime Thriller, Murder Mystery Book 1) Page 22
