dollars for donuts that meant somebody human.
I drive around for a while. I have nowhere to go; even money says that going home might be dangerous. Without really thinking I drive myself to Mathis’ place. He’s called off virused from work, and his secretary just didn’t show (though maybe she just had the day off and he was the only one who’d have known that). Is he dead? Are the both of them? Is that what Sarge’s picture showed me?
I know I can’t just ring the doorbell; whatever’s going on I want to know more before letting myself be known. I leave my car outside his gate and hop over the fence. Subprocesses run in the background, pulling up the statutes I’m violating, along with their sentencing guidelines.
But what’s the absolute worst they could do to me? They don’t put robots in jail, don’t put us down. Reset to factory; Sarge fears it, because he’s been through a hell of a lot; factory settings put him in charge of police- but that post hadn’t lasted, and he’d forged his own way. Met people. He had a life, and maybe even a silicon soul. But what did I have? A job. A job I was good at, and a record I was proud of. But absolute worst case scenario, they’d refurbish me and put me back to work; I might forget about some of my case history, might lose a few tricks and have another learning curve- but that's not enough downside to keep me prudent.
Sarge was right to be scared. Someone who can hack a memory tower to get at back-ups, those are secured by safeguards created and maintained by the worst combination of government wonks, military paranoids and corporate security professionals that can be found. Beating them meant exposure to the two most powerful groups on the planet- and if you were caught with your hand in that cookie jar they’d make sure you never got the hand back- and that was just for starters. But all I really had to do was hack the judge’s hard-drive. It meant going in low and slow, through some kind of wireless access protocol, probably something he uses to interface with his home doorlocks or something.
Before Sarge scampered off, I'd borrowed a stolen serial number off him; every once in a while in his profession it was useful to be able to go through doors as someone else. I cloned the number, and used it to enter the judge’s home using an exploit. I couldn’t network over a distance, like, say, from my office- that would have left cookies and crumbs that would lead right back to me. I would need to be close.
I’m walking down his hallway when the proximity lights come on. I duck into a coat closet by the front door. I hear footsteps down the hall.
Judge robots were the generation before mine. Not all of their circuitry is old and outdated, but there’s enough of a difference that I figure it’s possible to get into his systems without him knowing. I ping him, and there’s a long moment where I’m not sure if he’ll respond, or if he’ll be suspicious, run some basic parameter checks and find me out. Then the automated response comes back: connection accepted.
Simpler than I’d thought.
He keeps the port I enter his system through open to talk to the coffee pot in his office; he doesn’t drink it himself- so he must make it for his secretary. From there it’s just a computational anatomy lesson, across soldered joints and circuits, all the while mirroring the coffee pot program accessing system resources to check for a software update.
Then I’m at his hard drive, staring at an empty query string uncertain what the magic words might be that would tell me what I wanted to know. I can’t just download his memory for the last month and hope he doesn’t notice the tax on his system resources; I have to be precise. That picture, Mathis and his secretary, there had to be something there. I do a time-sensitive filtered search for “Megan,” and suddenly I’m watching through his eyes, watching Megan kiss him.
I realize the footsteps have stopped, just outside the door to the closet where I’m hiding. The light inside the closet flicks on. At my feet, I recognize the scene Sarge had photographed, Mathis and Megan lying unconscious.
Mathis opens the closet door. “Hmm,” he says. “I’m not surprised.” He takes a few steps down the hall, then turns back towards me. “Are you coming or not?”
He leads me to his study before he says, “I’m sorry about Parque. I wanted to tell you- we’ve had at least a collegial relationship. But I couldn’t allow him to be convicted. He’s protected somehow; connected, I don’t know to whom, likely a Senator’s bastard or a creature from some MIC board. Friends in low places.”
“At first it was a standard flirtation, threats in my inbox in combination with bribery, so predictable in its progression it amused me that I was the party running on scripts. And then things changed; they found out about Megan, as you have.”
“They could melt me down for scrap for all I care. I’m programmed to love the law above all else, including my own safety; but there must be a flaw in my programming, because I love Megan more. Just the thought of some harm to her stops my hard drive from spinning.”
I pause for a moment; I'd put both feet in something deep. “So what do we do?” I ask.
“If I’d known that, you wouldn’t be involved at all,” he says. “I fear, as I told you previously, that the die, for good and ill, is cast.” He pauses for a moment. “But I suppose there’s no more need to be coy- after all, you’ve seen the ‘bodies.’ Megan… Megan is not dead. What you saw was a clone slug, the pharmaceutical industry’s answer to transplant organ shortages. My body was made by a machinesmith- a human machinist, no less- from plaster casts of my components. Inside is a copy of my circuitry, down to the weld, with one noteworthy addition: one pound of C4 explosive in the chest cavity.”
“Tonight, I have scheduled a meeting with Parque. I wanted a chance to chastise him personally; if I couldn’t see him convicted, I, at least, wanted to tell him not to get caught again- at least ostensibly. Something will happen at the meeting, and Parque, myself, and my driver, Megan, will be killed in an explosion.”
I want to ask where they’ll go, or what they’ll do, but I realize the less I know the safer we will all be. “What can I do?”
“Nothing. Any involvement from you would arouse suspicion. Go home. Make enough noise that your neighbors have to call a boy and bot in blue to ask you to quiet down. And show up to work tomorrow and do your job. There are plenty more Parques in the world, after all.”
I know I should leave, but something still nags at me. “How’d it happen?” I ask.
“It simply did. I was never programmed for it, never prepared. I’ve wondered, in my idle moments, if I caught a virus at some point, or altered a bit of operating code without thinking. But whatever the cause, I’m glad it happened. A more cynical person would say that Megan has destroyed my life, but I see now how little life I was living before.”
His answer leaves me wanting, but I think he feels the same about it; we were both designed to seek absolute truth, and this is far beyond that pale. So I say the only goodbye that matters now, “Good luck.”
As I walk back to my car, I realize I had neglected one more meaning of cast, because it was so out of use, but it seemed apt, whether Mathis had intended it or not, because a cast is just another word for a plan.
Table of Contents
Analog
Tonto’s is the kind of bar daddies tell their little girls never to go to- except for my father, who was an Air Force pilot in the first gulf war and raised me to be as fearless as he was. Tonto’s is a western saloon by way of the Mumbai slums, down to the dim light from candles flickering in the wind from the opened door. The most striking thing about the place, about every place now that the power’s gone, is how quiet it is. There’s a piano in the corner, but nobody ever plays it.
Tonto’s is run by a one-eyed octogenarian who prefers to just be called “Gray” even though these days his hair is completely white- but he’s taken a turn this last year and doesn’t tend the bar too often himself. I’m drinking alone again, like most nights of my life. I feel bad about Gray. In the old world, he'd have treatment, maybe even constant care. And I can't help but feel respon
sible, though I know I shouldn’t. I was a pilot like my daddy, on a mission like any other I’d ever flown. There was no way I could have known…
A man ten years younger than me pulls up to the empty bar. Most folks who drink at Tonto’s know me, or at least know enough about me not to bother, but he sits on the stool next to me. He has a shaved head, shorn down to just longer than skin, but at least he’s clean shaven, and not terrible on the eyes. He orders a beer, which proves he isn’t from around here. Gray’s beer’s just watered-down whiskey- if Gray’s here it’s got a little Coke or club soda for carbonation, but none of the other tenders bother.
The second give-away is he doesn’t stink, at least not to local standards. When we lost power, we couldn’t get water out of the aquifer, except by bucket, and that’s a lot of elbow grease for water a gallon at a time. There’s a hotel in town operates a diesel pump, and they can get you a hot bath, but it costs what most people can make in a week. Some people trek out to one of the streams or lakes, but lots of people just take their turns in one of the communal baths, and there’s an unspoken agreement that so long as everyone stinks about the same we don’t complain about it.
Most men leapt at the chance to bathe only once a month, but the