The Automatic Detective (21 page)

Things might've been different had I been designed properly, but I was a weapon. Search-and-rescue was not my intent. I was made for blasting and stomping my way across a battlefield. The avoidance of casualties wasn't part of the plan. If I'd been true to my original programming, I'd have crushed Julie and April without even making a file of it. But if I'd been true to my original programming, I wouldn't have been here in the first place.

Most of the security drones withdrew. Four remained hovering around Julie and April. They hummed at five extra decibels to remind me they were there. A complement of six security personnel surrounded us, mostly for show since it was the orbs that held me in check.

A thin biological in a suit and silver cape stood in the doorway since there wasn't room for all of us. He spoke, and his
voice was that vaguely British-but-not-quite that'd come out of that loudspeaker.

"Ah, Mister Megaton."

"You're human," I said.

"Am I?"

Grinning, his skin shifted from a pale pink to a bright purple. His blond hair became a shade of red that threatened to burn out my opticals. His eyes filled with black and when he blinked, his lids closed vertically.

"Some of us are better at blending in than others." He shifted back to his human pigmentation. "They call me Warner. Not my original name, of course, but we've all taken terrestrial labels to ease our assimilation."

"So you are aliens then," I said.

"I guess that would be obvious, even to a simple machine such as yourself. Yes, circumstances have forced us to make this our home. We only do what we must to ensure our continued survival."

"Including kidnapping children."

"Oh, please, Megaton. We've hurt no one unless absolutely necessary."

"Gavin Bleaker," I said. "Was it necessary to cave in his skull?"

Julie gasped.

Damn. Julie shouldn't have found out that way. Couldn't take it back now. Sometimes even my vocalizer could get ahead of my sophisticated electronic brain. "I'm sorry, Jules."

She stifled a sob. Gavin had been a louse, and she would be better off without him. It didn't change the fact that it was a hard thing to absorb, made worse by the situation. She didn't need any more troubles.

"Mr. Bleaker's disposal was deemed a necessity." Warner frowned, but he didn't look like he meant it. "I can assure you,
we do only what is best for our continued survival and assimilation."

I didn't like the sound of that.

Warner and his cronies escorted us down a series of hallways. Julie and April were kept in tow to convince me to behave myself.

"Mack, what's wrong with your leg?" asked Julie.

"It's nothing, Jules."

I'd blown my left ankle actuator stomping one of my more stubborn duplicates to scrap, and it had left me with a limp. Of course, there were plenty of other minor system failures going on, most of which weren't visible from the outside. All together, it was nothing function-threatening, but it was bad news for any possible escape attempts.

Warner led us to a lab. It was a big operation, full of scurrying scientists. There were several robots at work, too. Six assistant drones, another of my auto duplicate models, and one robot with eight legs and a thin humanoid torso. His head was a basketball with four red opticals and a pair of long crackling antennae atop it.

Holt was here, too.

"Oh my God," Julie gasped tearfully. "What did you do to him?"

The poor kid was suspended in a countergravity field. He didn't appear to be conscious, thankfully, because there were tubes running in and out of his body as various chemicals were being pumped into him and others drawn out.

"You sons of—"

I took a step toward Warner.

"Temper, temper, Mack."

The orbs around Julie and April squealed, and the security guards all leveled their rifles. Not at me, of course.

I could've killed Warner easy. One punch could've taken his
head right off. I didn't for two reasons. One was Julie and April. The other: Warner didn't deserve a quick kill. No, when his time came, I'd wipe that smug grin off his face one tooth at a time.

I stood down, but I was getting awfully sick of it.

"Your concern is understandable, Mrs. Bleaker, but quite unwarranted. Any damage your son has sustained is not life threatening."

"Damage?" She struggled with rage and fear, wiping the tears from her cheeks and snarling. "What kind of people are you?"

"You might call us visitors," he said. "But that would be mistaken. We're not just popping in for a holiday. No, we're here to stay. Instead, we've taken to calling ourselves Pilgrims, and this is our new home. And your son is instrumental to our plans. So you see, as much as you care for him, you can understand how infinitely more valuable he is to us."

The spider robot clomped its way over to us. "What is the meaning of this, Warner? You should not have brought them here."

"Oh, let them see, Doctor Zarg. They've the right, seeing as how this is the boy's family and Megaton has gone to such trouble to be here."

"You're getting careless."

"And you worry too much. Every step of our assimilation has gone exactly as planned."

Zarg emitted a harsh screech. "Enough, Warner. Your casual blathering is inadvisable. I will take this up with the Alpha Congress."

Warner's ever-present smirk faded, replaced by a cold stare. "Do what you feel is right, Doctor. Soon none of this will matter."

I didn't like the sound of that. Words like "assimilation" and
"necessary disposal" put me on edge. I should've smashed this place to bits, torn it down bolt by bolt even if I was scrapped in the process. I would've, too. Except I wasn't sure how much it would accomplish. If I successfully brought the roof crashing down, there was no possibility Julie, April, and Holt would survive. They were only one family. Their welfare weighed against the well-being of the rest of humanity was a mathematical no-contest. Every logic dictate told me to eliminate the Bleakers from calculated variables. They didn't matter.

I told my dictates to shut the hell up, and let me deal with this situation. They complied. They weren't happy about it, and the words INADVISABLE ACTION flashed across my optical readout.

"It'll be all right," I told Julie and April, but I couldn't counter my logic lattice enough to believe it. And I was a terrible liar.

Julie was doing her best to stifle her sobs, but she nodded.

April was holding up better than her mom. Knowing the future, even if only little bits of it, must've been enough to comfort her. I kept hoping she'd smile at me, letting me know she'd seen how we got out of this. Honestly, she looked a little worried. I optimistically attributed that to a glitch in my expression analyzer.

Warner gestured toward a countergrav plate beside Holt. "Please step this way."

In zero gravity, all my impressive artificial muscle would be useless.

Warner cleared his throat. One of his guards handed him a raygun. Warner seized April by the hair and put the gun to her head. She didn't cry, didn't utter a peep.

I pushed killing Warner up to third on my directives list. Right after getting myself free and getting the Bleakers out of here alive.

I stepped onto the plate. A switch was thrown, and I bobbed up and down helplessly in the air. "See, Zarg?" said Warner. "As docile and obedient as a labor drone. Nothing to concern ourselves over."

Doctor Zarg said nothing. Having that perfect poker face all us bots do, I couldn't tell what he was thinking exactly. It was obvious he didn't care for Warner or his methods. Seemed strange that the robots here were the ones more concerned about morality than the biologicals. Life was full of paradoxes.

"Now, Mack, if you would be so kind as to allow us access to your memory matrix so—"

"No."

"Oh, come now. Don't make me get ugly again."

"No."

He put the raygun back to April's brow. "Do you think I won't do it?"

"Oh, I know you'll do it," I said. "But I also know that once you have access to my memory matrix, you'll get access to the rest of my brain. When you can start monkeying around with my inner workings, there won't be any reason to keep her alive anyway."

Warner smiled, but it was not an amused smile. Nor even the self-satisfied grin he usually wore. It was cold and hard and sharp.

"Could you live with that, Mack?" he asked. "With the image of this lovely young girl lying dead at her mother's feet?"

I allowed myself a full second to run the simulation. Julie cradling her dead child in her arms while her second hovered, untouchable, out of reach. Then I shut the simulation away in a file, locked the file, and vowed never to open it again.

My personality assessor pegged Warner as ruthless, amoral, and most probably a mild sociopath. He could've blown a hole in April's pretty little head and not lost a minute's sleep over it.
But in the end, her death didn't mean anything to him either. She was a bargaining chip. So I took that chip away.

"Go ahead."

His eyes widened, then narrowed. His grin dropped away, and I realized he was going to do it. I'd miscalculated, and now April was going to burn for it.

"Enough of this." Doctor Zarg clomped over on his eight spider legs and pulled the gun from Warner's hand. "Your excesses are becoming intolerable, Warner. Megaton is incapacitated. This child's death will accomplish nothing worthwhile.

"I apologize, Mrs. Bleaker, that you should have to see this," said Zarg. "Soon, we shall be finished, and you, your daughter, and your son, unharmed, shall all be released."

Funny thing. I believed him.

Except, not really. Because Zarg was one bot, and the hint of snarl across Warner's face told me he wasn't on board with Zarg's intentions.

It made me wonder exactly what kind of alien invasion we were dealing with here. Sure, Warner was obviously an asshole, but Zarg didn't seem so bad, if you ignored the abduction of innocent families. There was Abner Greenman. That little alien had wanted to find Tony Ringo as bad as I did. There was obviously more going on here, and I didn't have enough information to make an educated hypothesis.

Zarg ordered security to take away Julie and April and to see that they were treated well. The bot apparently outranked Warner, but you could see being told what to do didn't sit right with him.

He plastered his smarmy grin back on. "Yes, Doctor Zarg. As you wish."

They marched out of the lab.

"I wouldn't trust him, Doctor," I said.

"He will do as he's told."

"Guys like that always do what they're told. Until they don't feel like doing what they're told."

"No one asked for your opinion, Mister Megaton."

"Well, this kid didn't ask to be a science experiment, and that doesn't seem to bother you."

Zarg scanned Holt for two seconds. "What we do, must be done for the greater good. It is necessity dictated by logic."

"Sure, Doctor. You keep telling yourself that."

Zarg ordered the rest of the lab to ignore me, and after three minutes of fruitless chatter, I got the hint. I passed time running various escape scenarios and without exception, they all ended before they began. No matter how the variables shifted, my difference engine put the odds of escape at 0 percent in the current situation. So I dialed down my power consumption to minimum and waited for my chance.

If I did get out of here, any information I could record could be valuable. Of course, logic told me I wasn't getting out of here, but I had a yen to make myself useful anyway. While the aliens scurried about the lab, I scanned every detail. I didn't understand much, but if I got the chance to play it back for the right audience they might make sense of it.

Zarg was in charge. That much was obvious. It bumped my pride index up a point to see a fellow robot in a position of authority. Shame he was one of the bad guys.

Though I'm not a science unit, I figured out some things. They were pumping something into Holt, using him like some kind of filter. His vital signs were displayed on a monitor as a series of spinning alien hieroglyphs and rhythmic beats. Since I couldn't read it or decipher the rhythms, I couldn't determine the information being displayed. I tried correlating any changes on the display with Holt's reactions, but he floated there beside me, unconscious and silent as a corpse.

Three hours and seven minutes passed. Finally, Zarg ordered the operation to shut down.

"Doctor, the human is stable," observed one of the braver techs, a five foot slug. "Perhaps we should continue."

"The extraction process is running according to schedule," said Zarg. "There is no need to subject the human to unnecessary physiological stress or compromise the integrity of the compound."

"But the Congress . . ."

Zarg whirled on the slug. "The Congress will understand that everything is proceeding according to my agenda." His voice remained even, but he rose up on his legs to stare down the tech.

"Yes, Doctor."