The Automatic Detective (7 page)

I gave all the pages in the file a quick scan and tossed it back to him. "Thanks, Sanchez." I took a careful step backwards out the door and turned to leave.

"Mack," said Sanchez, "promise me I won't regret this."

This could go wrong in two-thousand-fifty-three different ways, and all of them ended with the Bleakers never found and
me on the scrap heap. Sanchez didn't want to hear that. Biologicals liked asking questions they already knew the answers to in hopes of hearing the answer they wanted instead.

"Probably, Sanchez," I replied honestly. "Probably."

Four Arms's real name was Tony Ringo. He was a small-time thug who'd been having run-ins with the law since the tender age of twelve, in and out of the joint after turning professional hoodlum at sixteen. His rap sheet showed an unremarkable career of petty theft, unproductive troublemaking, and one poorly conceived, ineffective protection racket scheme. So far, he hadn't been much of a threat to anyone, and in fact, the best indication of his ineptitude was one failed mugging attempt where the mark had turned things around and beaten the hell out of Ringo. He had no known connections, no resources, no talent. Strictly a wannabe who'd seen too many Cagney movies and thought he had the stuff to make it to the top of the world, though clearly the rest of the world disagreed.

Losers like Ringo didn't show up out of the blue with teleportation technology and squads of combat drones. There was an old robot saying: Does not compute. Of course, reality wasn't a neat and tidy math equation. It had too many variables. Despite the many advantages of my elegant, electronic brain over the squishy chemical lump of the biologicals, speculation was
not my strongest subroutine. Once the parameters became too abstract, the situation too loaded with unknowns, I couldn't piece things together.

Realizing this limitation, I didn't even try. I went with what I knew. Tony Ringo was my only lead, and once I found him, hopefully more of those variables would solidify into something that made sense.

The notion that Ringo had nothing at all to do with the disappearances of the Bleakers and the attack on my apartment did occur to me. If he didn't lead somewhere, I wasn't a sophisticated-enough machine to track the Bleakers down any other way. It'd relieve me of the responsibility. I could walk away, clear conscience, knowing I'd tried.

There was already that little blip in my motivational directives, that little nagging thought that failure was not an option. I wasn't built to back down. That little blip, the urge to smash something, had been lurking in my personality template for some time now. So far, I'd been able to suppress it because my Glitch allowed me to see no reason for hurting anyone beyond a line of code programmed into me by a madman. Even the Freewill hadn't kept the urge at bay. And Ringo's continued existence in this city meant nothing to me, especially compared to the welfare of Julie and her kids.

If I found Ringo, I wouldn't be calling the cops. My operational files opened some charming tidbits on torture techniques that Professor Megalith, thoughtful evil genius that he was, had installed into my programming. I resolved not to use the nastier ones on Ringo. At least, not right away.

Empire's various districts were arranged and named in patterns perfectly logical to the Learned Council. The upper west side, for instance, was divided and sorted exactly like the periodic table of elements. Just don't go into Oxygen after dark. It's a little dicey. Southside's boroughs were arranged along the
Greek alphabet, except for a hiccup in planning which put Omega on the other side of town. Midtown's neighborhoods were named after the Great Thinkers. Though if you'd asked me, it was a real oversight that Eli Whitney didn't even have a public school named after him in Tomorrow's Town.

And somewhere between Beta and Boron, there was a little toxic stockpile of a neighborhood officially labeled District W. It wasn't much of a name, even by Empire's standards, because the Learned Council barely acknowledged its existence. Everyone else called it Warpsville.

Lots of unwanted mutagenic sludge and radioactive leftovers ended up here. Not that there wasn't plenty to go around, and in fact, the whole of Empire was lousy with it. Warpsville was only a little worse. Mostly it got its reputation because no one bothered to hide the stuff. Leaky barrels of luminescent chemicals were piled on every corner. Most of the trash glowed as well. In fact, pretty much everything was radioactive enough to glow, casting odd hues of purple and green, yellow and orange. Warpsville was unique in that there wasn't a single functioning streetlight to be found, but it was always bright as day.

Warpsville had a bad reputation, but most of its residents were just down on their luck, trying to get by, and real estate was in such high demand in Empire, they were willing to tolerate a little genetic jumble for a place to call their own.

I'd been made here, in a little secret lab in a back alley. But I hadn't been back since leaving. Hadn't possessed the desire. But in a strange illogical way, it was good to be home.

No sooner had I stepped off the omnibus than a furry yellow ball rolled to my feet. I bent down and picked it up. The creature unfurled, fixed me with its single eye, and yipped. Furballs, a bit of genetic fluff, were half dachshund, half pill-bug. They'd been a big fad for a while, but you didn't see them much anymore.

Three kids ran up to me. A small girl with a slippery mucous coating stepped forward. "Mister, don't hurt my dog."

"Me? You're the one who's kicking him." I scratched the furball on its head.

"Hey, I know you. You're that bot," said a second kid with arms long enough to touch his feet without bending over. "Aren't you?"

It'd been a while since I'd been recognized. For a few weeks, I'd been big news, a local celebrity. A bot built to destroy trying to make good had just the right mix of forbidden science, humanoid drama, and potential disaster to set the media abuzz. It had all blown over when I failed to do anything interesting, like sign up as a spokesbot for automated citizens, become a movie star, or run amok in a schoolyard.

The third kid, a norm, remarked, "My mom says it's only a matter of time before you kill somebody."

I handed the mutt over.

"Give me an hour, kid."

The furball curled up, and they kicked it down the street, pausing briefly to splash in a radiant pink puddle.

Warpsville didn't exactly match up with the city street layouts in my navigation banks so it took a while to locate Ringo's last known residence. The Hotel Swallow was five stories of crumbling brick and mortar. Stone was an odd sight in Empire. There were a few old survivors, seven to be exact, that had qualified for historical preservation, but the Learned Council was far too fixed on their vision of the utopian future to place much value on an antiquated past. Somehow the Hotel Swallow had escaped either retrofitting or the wrecking ball, but it was falling apart fine on its own.

The lobby was a dilapidated patchwork of furniture collected from junkyards, and instead of light bulbs, there were
clear plastic buckets of radioactive slime hanging from the ceiling. The toxic rainbow of colors offended my opticals to the point that I had to switch to black and white. About the only nice thing to say about the decor was the actual presence, if only in a very technical sense, of carpeting. I scanned the various sundry individuals standing about, but Ringo wasn't among them. It was unlikely he lived here anymore. This was the kind of place people drifted in and out of, but I had to start somewhere.

There was a thin lady behind the front desk with pale, pale skin and enough of a mustache and beard to notice, but not enough to determine if she was mutant or norm. She stared at a television and didn't glance away from it.

A fuzzoid hovered beside her. Fuzzoids were baseball-shaped drones, covered in fur, with big puppy dog opticals. Like furballs, they were an attempt to improve on mankind's pets, but so far, no one had been able to replace the old standards. Too much history, I supposed.

The fuzzoid whistled. It hovered close to me, batting its shiny, green opticals.

"She likes to be held," explained the woman. "Easier to just give in."

I held up my giant mitt, and she settled into my palm. She closed her opticals and purred.

"Name's Violet," said the woman.

"Can you help me, Violet?" I asked. "I'm looking for somebody."

The woman glanced over her shoulder. "Why you asking her for? Fuzzoid is only about as smart as a dog."

"I was asking you," I replied.

"My name's not Violet."

"But you just said—"

"Fuzzoid's name is Violet. My name is Winifred." She tapped the small plaque on her desk that confirmed this. "Can't you read?"

I'd scanned the plaque, but figured it belonged to someone else when she'd announced her name. Playing back the conversation from my memory matrix confirmed that there'd been a slight miscommunication. Wasn't my fault biologicals weren't always clear, but I'd learned long ago to accept their shortcomings.

"Whadayawant?" barked Winifred suddenly.

It took my speech recognition programs two seconds to pry the words apart into an identifiable sentence.

"I'm looking for Tony Ringo."

She turned her head toward the TV, but one of her eyes remained trained on me, and again, I found myself wondering about her genetic disposition. "Why you looking for him?"

I answered her question with a question of my own. "Is he here?"

"Maybe." She shrugged. "Dunno. He comes and goes." Her errant eye slid around in its socket, studying me up and down, before slipping back toward the television. "You here to hurt him?"

"Maybe." I shrugged. "Dunno."

Her lips twitched in a sort-of smile. "Three B."

"Thanks."

"Forget it. I never liked that little bastard anyway."

Not only did the Hotel Swallow not have escalators, it actually had wooden stairs. They were cracked and in bad need of repair, but I was willing to bet there wasn't a single carpenter left in Empire. The stairs creaked and groaned with my every step, but they managed not to collapse before I made it to the third floor.

I didn't bother knocking on Three B. If Ringo was home,
I didn't want to give him advance warning. If he wasn't, then I might as well let myself in and have a look around. The door was a sliding metal retrofit, but it wasn't strong enough to keep me out. I could've walked right through, but I opted for subtlety. I wedged two fingers in between the jamb and the door and pushed it open, leaving some minor damage. There was some noise, most notably a soft protest from the door's motor. Someone in the room must have heard it, along with everyone in the hall, but none of them seemed to care.

I stepped into Three B, ready to move quickly if Ringo had been alerted to my arrival. It was a little box of a room (smaller even than your average downside efficiency), and Ringo wasn't there. But there were two other occupants.

One was a hulking robot. I recognized the design right off. He was an Evergood Mark Three Personal Security Auto. Evergood Robotics had gone out of business, but you still saw plenty of their robots in use. Eleven years of reckless technological experimentation had yet to produce the Mark Three's equal. Rumor had it all the other robotic manufacturers kept Mark Threes, and if a new design could last five minutes against one, it was deemed a success. Still, despite their superior design, the Mark Threes weren't popular with the general public. Most biologicals saw only the clunky, ugly design. They had no appreciation for the functionality of the unit. Ugly or not, Mark Threes ran practically forever with hardly any maintenance.

This auto was covered with rust and had patches of duct tape wrapped around various joints. His cranial unit, such as it was, was a square with a single optical. He was three inches taller than me, and his neck creaked like those ancient wooden stairs when he moved that head.

The second occupant was a biological in a black suit. The norm had a big bald head and small eyes buried in the shadows
under thick eyebrows. He was sitting, while the auto was standing close enough to clamp a hand on my arm. His grip was 95 percent as strong as my max, and he probably wasn't squeezing as hard as he could.

The norm folded his hands together in his lap. "Who're you?"

There was an unpleasant tone to the question, and the Mark Three's audibly clicking fingers tightened. He might've been a little stronger than me. Some unscrupulous characters could tweak Mark Threes beyond recommended operational limits. The norm in the chair struck me as likely to be one of those sorts.

"Do I gotta repeat the question?" he asked. "Slower this time, so that you can process it?"

My simulators already started running battle scenarios. It assured me the probability of defeating a standard Mark Three as 100 percent certain, but something told me this auto wasn't standard issue. I still wasn't as worried about the auto as the dubious structural integrity of the Hotel Swallow. Two big robots throwing punches was sure to do some damage, maybe even bring the place down. So I let the auto keep his grip. For the moment.

"I processed it," I said. "But I don't see how it's any of your business."

"This can be civil." He chuckled. "Or it can not be civil. How it goes is up to you. But because I'm a reasonable guy allow me to extend the first . . . whaddayacallit . . . first olive branch." He leaned forward. "My name is Grey. And this is Knuckles."