Night Sessions, The (22 page)

Ferguson didn't sleep, although he felt like it. Instead, he called up records on his contacts, fingered his iThink like a string of worry beads, tuned out the PNAI's helpful hints and rumours in his ear, and followed his own nose.

The trail he was on now was the one he'd been diverted from by Tom Mackay's arrival in the pub the other night. It was the mention of Graham Orr's funeral that had brought it back to mind. Ferguson hadn't been at all struck, at first, by the soldier's having been given a Presbyterian funeral. In Belfast, at the time, it would have been that or Catholic, with either Episcopalian or Methodist a distant third possibility. Learning that the man or robot now known, to some, as Graham Orr had also been known as a born-again Christian flagged a new significance over that. But what Ferguson had earlier been wondering about, and was now investigating, was the fate of Graham Orr's combat mech.

He began his search with the army records already retrieved by DCs Patel and Connolly. These—eventually—led him to a model number and serial number of the robot: a Honeywell 2666, identification GBR-HLF-17-09. A search on the model number called up an old advertisement: a picture not of the big hulking thing he'd vaguely imagined but of a complex, highly adaptable modular device. The advertisement showed what claimed to be merely a sample of its variant configurations: long and snakelike for rubble-penetration work, tall and long-legged for fast running, sturdy and long-armed for close-quarter combat, flat and wide for ambushes, dispersed into a score of parts for concealment. Lasers, blades and firearms could be added or removed as necessary. Extensive IFF capacity. One of the subheads in that section of copy jumped out:
Fratricide-proof, suicide-enabled.

Startled, Ferguson read the details. The explanation, or claim, was that the 2666 never posed a danger of friendly fire, but that in case of enemy capture or any other hopeless situation it was pre-charged to blow itself up.

A robotic suicide bomber.

Ferguson felt a prickle on the back of his neck. He added the individual machine's serial number to the search. A single record came back. It had a fair number of FOIA blackouts on it, covering—Ferguson guessed from their contexts—operational and capacity details, still secret after all these years. In between the censorware marks was the account of a short and eventful life of two years and five months: from the assembly line, through combat in Damascus, Beirut and finally the field of Megiddo, where the machine's life had ended on the same day as Graham Orr's.

Damaged in action: field repair impracticable; returned to manufacturer.

The manufacturer. Honeywell. Now where had he recently seen that name? The logo on the Elevator, yes! But where else? A floating neon script, seen through dark and rain…

Ferguson sat up, opening his eyes. The car was driving up Haymarket Terrace.

“Turn around,” Ferguson said.

Hutchins, sitting beside him, looked over her shoulder. “What?”

“Turn around,
car
,” said Ferguson.

“Sorry, boss, no can do. Countermand,” said Hutchins.

“No, hang on—”

The car, confused, came to a halt at the corner of Palmerstone Place. Impatient beeps from behind began at once.

“What's the problem?” Ferguson said.

“Skulk and I have to get back. There's an Incident Room meeting at nine. You should be there too, sir.”

“So I should,” said Ferguson. “Give my apologies. I have an urgent matter to attend to back at Turnhouse. Patch me in if I'm needed, but to be honest I need to be personally where I'm going a lot more than I need to be at that meeting.”

“If you say so,” said Hutchins. She didn't sound convinced.

“I haven't just remembered a dentist's appointment,” said Ferguson. He unbuckled his seat belt.

“Do you wish me to accompany you?” Skulk asked. Ferguson realised he very much did not want Skulk to accompany him.

“It's not really necessary,” he said. “Thanks all the same.”

“A great thing, trust,” said Skulk.

Ferguson shot it a look of wry apology. “Tough, old chap!”

He got out of the car, narrowly missing a cyclist, dashed across the road and waited for the next Turnhouse tram.

The Honeywell tower at Turnhouse faced directly onto a high-rise farm, which filled the view from the outside glass lift. Ferguson faced outwards and watched twenty levels of solar-power-lit hydroponic greenery go by, and turned and stepped out as the bell pinged just after an upward glance had confirmed there were about forty still to go.

The eighteenth floor of the Honeywell tower smelled of carpet-cleaner, phytoplastics, and ionised air. Ferguson padded across to the double doors of the engineering lab and presented his card to the lock. A scan flicked across his retina and the doors opened. He stepped into a long, wide room that
occupied most of the floor. White-topped tables, high stools, black clutter, a smell that reminded him of his first car, of spark plugs and engine oil. Scores of white-coated technicians worked at the benches, at test beds and screens. The nearest, a young woman, turned as she heard him come in, and peered at him under goggles that she tugged away from her eyes.

“Looking for someone?”

Ferguson showed her his card. “I'm here to see Harold Ford.”

She stuck her chin in the direction of the far end of the room. “Harry's the guy in the recess at the back. Brown coat, burn-holes, beard—you can't miss him.”

“Thanks.”

He found Harry bending over a lab bench in a cubbyhole, poking a jeweller's screwdriver into the innards of what looked like a mechanical centipede. Ferguson didn't know whether to announce himself, not wanting to disturb some delicate operation, but the man heard him coming.

“Two minutes, copper,” he said. “Take a perch.”

Ferguson hoisted himself onto the stool opposite and waited. The low partition down the middle of the bench, and the surrounding walls, were covered with cards, stickers and posters that looked science-fictional, in an odd mix of ancient images of rockets, robots, space elevators and tower cities, and newer material depicting landscapes, ecologies and deep-sky images that might or might not have been imaginary.

Harry gave a grunt—of satisfaction or frustration, it was hard to tell—and looked up. He wore frames, contacts and a loupe, beneath spectacles pushed up on his forehead and cloudy with thumbprints, dandruff and skin grease. Amid all this his eyes were bright but oddly unfocused. His beard, and his balding head, had at first made him look middle-aged, but on looking him in the face it became apparent that he was in his thirties.

“Morning,” he said. He stuck out a hand, looked at it, and withdrew it to wipe it on his brown lab coat. “What can I do you for?”

His voice, slightly raised, emphatic, sounded pleased at this tired witticism.

“Good morning,” said Ferguson. “Reception thought you were my best bet, Mr. Ford. I'm trying to trace the eventual disposal of a particular Faith War combat mech, without launching an Ogle search. Can you help?”

“You're so paranoid about this search that you don't want to try Paranoia?”

Ferguson cracked a smile. “That's about it.”

“Hah!” Ford rubbed the side of his greasy nose with an oily finger. “Walk this way, inspector,” he said in a high-pitched quaver. “Walk this way!”

With that he hopped off the stool, clasped his hands behind his back and stalked, stooping forward, to a door adjacent to the annexe. At the door he glanced over his shoulder, smirked, straightened up and eyeballed the lock. The door let him and Ferguson in. The room was a two-metre-square cupboard, with angle-iron shelving on every wall and every shelf packed with overflowing three-ring binders. On a tiny table in the middle lay a desk slate rugged-edged in black rubber.

Ford waved an expansive arm at the shelves.

“The sacred records of the ancient company engineers,” he said, again with the quaver. In his normal voice he added: “Actually, everything's now in the slate, for obvious reasons. It's updated daily but apart from that it's isolated from the net. There's one in every company building, so they're all identical at at least one moment in every twenty-four hours. That what you're looking for?”

“Could be,” said Ferguson. He rubbed his chin. “Does it log queries?”

Ford gave him a respectful glance. “Good point,” he said. “Yes, it does. You don't want your query logged?”

“If that's possible.”

Ford swivelled a blunt fingertip in his right ear, grimacing. “Needs a hack, but yeah. Can be done. Leave it to me.”

He took an iThink from his pocket, hard-linked it to the slate, then unspooled a thin wire from an add-on device behind his phone clip and hard-linked that. He switched the slate on. The screen lit up with the default page.

“Right, you little bugger,” he said. His thumbs moved. The screen flipped to a page that Ferguson had never seen before. Ford's fingertips rattled on the table, rapping on an old-fashioned virtual keyboard for a good minute and a half, then stopped.

“Run, run, run,” he said. He peered at the screen. “Result!”

He unplugged the connections, returned to the default, called up a page, and spun the slate around to Ferguson.

“You're go.”

“Thanks.” Ferguson looked at a screenful of tiny letters scattered with obscurely labelled input boxes.

“This takes me back,” he said.

“Need a hand?”

Ferguson looked up, embarrassed. “Afraid so,” he said. “But—”

“No need to be paranoid about me,” Ford told him. “I'm the opposite of a security risk. Lots of curiosity, but like a black hole for information. What goes in doesn't come out.”

“Not even as Hawking radiation?”

Ford laughed. “Good one! No, not even that. So what do you want?”

Ferguson passed back the slate and read out the model and serial numbers.

“Ho hum,” said Ford, typing. “Armageddon, here we come…thought so! Yes. Oh. Well, well, well.”

He slid the slate to Ferguson again. “Take a look at that.”

Ferguson did. Acronyms, abbreviations and code numbers.

“Translate,” said Ferguson.

“Ah. Well, I suppose a police report screen would be just as hieroglyphic to me. What it says here is that this particular brave little toaster went to heaven. Honeywell heaven, that is.”

“What?”

“Let's take it a step at a time,” said Ford. “Our hero is wounded on the battlefield,
here
. Nothing much left of him but two mangled manipulators and a radiation-hardened brain-chip, the whole sorry mess dragging itself along by its fingertips like…like the severed hand of a blown-up robot, I suppose…anyway, you get the picture: tanks crunching past, choppers and jet fighters overhead, tac nukes going off like Satan's own Fourth of July.”

“You're reading all that
there
?” Ferguson asked.

“I'm extrapolating a bit,” Ford admitted. “Somehow, our pair of ragged claws makes it to Coalition lines and is scooped up and flung in the salvage truck. Taken to a Royal Irish Regiment workshop in the rear. Techies shake their heads sadly. Poor chap's in a bad way. For him the war is over. Couple of months later, the war
is
over. Across the Atlantic in Jeebus land, the telly preachers are sort of shuffling their feet and mumbling that maybe they got a verse or two wrong somewhere along the line but that doesn't mean you shouldn't as always
send more money
because—more exegesis is necessary, heh-heh! And our friend GBR-HLF-17-09, little Sevvie as we'll call him, is back at Aldermaston to be stripped of any remaining stuff-that-goes-bang, checked for hazmat, and the now-sanitised remains are shipped to the Honeywell factory in—aha, Livingston, West Lothian, not a million miles from here. There our engineers pick the few remaining good components out with needle-nose tweezers, chuck the broken shell into the recycle hopper, and ease the brain-chip into a test chassis. Where they run what is aptly called a battery of tests. Including, from what is by now long and salutary experience, the Turing. And whaddaya know, little Sevvie has
woken up
at some time in its epic journey and is now enquiring after its soldier buddy. Aww.”

“That's not so funny,” said Ferguson. “The soldier buddy was dead.”

“Figured. OK. Well, no doubt they managed to calm Sevvie down. Question arises as to what to do with him. Now, in most of these cases—just about all, as far as I know—the great who-am-I-what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-here-who-is-that-man-aiming-at-me-oops-he's-a-cloud-of-pink-mist-did-I-do-that-OMG-OMG moment happens in the middle of a combat situation, split-second stuff in some ruined Sunni alleyway or Druze villa or what-have-you, and moreover it happens to your big hulking roboraptor and killdozer dudes, and it's usually pretty traumatic for all concerned. Hence the great anxiety to get them into rather less lethal bodies and retrain them to a less, shall we say, kinetically intensive line of work.

“However, the Honeywell 2666 range models are new, were
designed
to try and keep them well clear of the event horizon of self-awareness, and now it looks like this design has failed. After all, Sevvie was supposed to blow his remaining bits up, not do the rational self-preservation bit. So this is something of an embarrassment. There's a quiet product recall, the brain-chips get the Turing test, and those that don't pass are discreetly junked. This leaves the company with a score or so of self-aware KIs, which they don't really want to return to the military or pass on to the cops, and which they're ethically reluctant to wave an electromagnet over and forget about. So they hook them up to a VR environment to amuse themselves and learn to socialise while the engineers figure out what to do about them. Time passes, and after a few years in the box the whole thing begins to get a bit samey and the KIs start emailing the director and demanding to be let out and do their thing in the real world.

“The long and the short of it is that these little fellas end up with a cool security gig on the big post-war and post-Civil War project the company is well chuffed to get a finger in: the Atlantic elevator and the soletas. And they all lived happily ever after, as far as the record shows, because—given a few changes of security contract—they are very much no longer our problem. So, with a drop of oil in our eye, the story ends.”