Less Than Human (3 page)

Sakaki shook his head. “We gradually widened the job parameters, but the safeties haven’t been touched.”

Eleanor ducked under the orange tape, which was merely looped over peripherals. The welder stood beside the long bench that
was its workstation, arm outstretched at the point the emergency stop function cut in, end-effector dangling forlornly. As
far as she could see from a safe distance, the force of the blow had knocked the manipulator half-off, leaving some connective
wiring exposed.

Judging from the height of the arm at its stop position, the dead man had been standing when he was hit. There were chalk
marks on the floor, just like in televid police dramas. The marks didn’t tell her much—unlike in the dramas, they didn’t form
a neat outline, just a squiggle. The white chalk had mixed with dust to become orange.

“Anyway, I don’t adjust the controller.” Sakaki stopped outside the tape. “I only do routine stuff. Check batteries and connections,
keep an eye on accuracy ratings. You know.”

There was no other sign of disturbance at the workstation. The peripherals—the positioners that fed the pieces onto the line
and held them for the robot to weld—and the pieces themselves, waited for work to resume.

“Your Japanese is really good,” he added shyly. “Better than mine.”

Eleanor gritted her teeth and smiled through them.

If nothing was wrong, why did Mito come inside the robot’s work envelope? The control panel was here on the perimeter if he
wanted to adjust anything. The teach pendant with its portable stop button was in its place. Factories like this couldn’t
afford the latest instruction software—they still relied on sims followed by teaching, like they’d done since the late nineties.

But sensor-based safety measures had progressed since then, and why didn’t they function last night? Eleanor didn’t design
robots in which you could turn every safety off. The operator was always protected.

“Were there any tools nearby when they found him?” She glanced back at Sakaki.

He met her eyes briefly then looked down. “No. But the controller was unlocked.”

So Mito intended either to pause or adjust the robot’s program. Maybe so he could move into the work envelope. It should have
stayed paused. Her robots didn’t have minds of their own.

At least, she smiled to herself, thinking of Sam back at the lab, these ones don’t.

Maybe Mito made a mistake, thought he’d disabled the robot properly, went to physically check something and got hit.

Why didn’t he have his tool kit, then?

“Was he a cautious kind of fellow?”

Sakaki was staring at the blurred chalk marks, and she had to repeat herself before he heard properly.

Sakaki paused and bit his lip. It wasn’t a fair question—for him to admit Mito was careless might be interpreted as admitting
Mito was to blame for what happened.

“He was very careful. He was a very serious fellow,” said Sakaki eventually.

Eleanor sighed and turned back to the only real witness. The robot’s controller opened easily.

“Uh-oh.” She frowned at the screen inside, where neat rows of code displayed the robot’s status. They bore out the hypothesis
that Mito had adjusted the robot’s program, as normally the screen would be set at operator interface, in ordinary Japanese.

The robot should have gone to emergency stop as soon as Mito breached the security devices. But it stood at halt. The police
would have switched off the power as soon as the body was discovered, so the robot must have gone to halt after striking Mito.

That, Eleanor told herself crossly, is impossible.

As the police and their engineer were satisfied Mito’s death was an accident, all she had to do was add her stamp to the papers,
and the whole thing would be over. The robot would be recalled and because it was an old model—nearly eight years out of date—it
would either be scrapped or resold on the secondhand market.

And she could get back to her budget committee preparations, never knowing why the robot went to halt instead of emergency
stop.

Sakaki caught her eye. “Excuse me, but I need to go and log in. I’ll be back soon.”

“You’re on duty tonight?”

He nodded. “Normally there are two of us, but everyone’s gone away for Bon.” They both averted their eyes awkwardly until
Sakaki sidled away.

She walked around the robot enclosure again, slowly, with half-closed eyes, plotting its arcs of possible movement from what
she remembered of the program. Even the most experienced technicians can make mistakes, become too familiar with their charges.
An industrial robot could be unpredictable. Signals from surrounding machinery and its own sensors could get scrambled; it
might get confused by electronic noise from other robots, peripherals, neons, trains, and phones. All the new factories were
noise-proofed, but you couldn’t expect that in a place this old.

The problem was probably a glitch in the display. She unscrewed the casing and checked its wiring. Perfect. Not a glitch in
the display, then.

Nothing wrong with the physical safeties. All on a different power source to the robot, as specified. All active, as specified.

She’d give herself one hour to find the answer. If she couldn’t find it, she’d get a train back to the office and forget about
the whole thing.

ISHIHARA
             

A
ssistant Inspector Ishihara of Osaka Municipal Police slammed the car door. The automatic closing mechanism
booped
in outrage and he grinned. He preferred to shut his own doors, thank you.

Saturday of the Bon weekend, and he had to go out in the heat. Why did he have to be on call during Bon? When he was a young
constable, he’d been the one on call all holidays because the older men thought they’d earned the rest. Now they let the young
ones with a family have the time off because otherwise they might quit the police force for a better civilian job. A niggling
internal voice pointed out that if he’d had more time with his family when he was younger, he might still have a family, but
he ignored it.

Anyway, in three months it wouldn’t be his problem. Retirement loomed, an endless vista of formless days, and he was finding
an obscure pleasure in the discomforts of duty that he would undoubtedly miss once he’d left.

Dock loading zones and small factories covered most of the old harbor town. One skylink ran from the center of the city to
the nearby harbor complex where big companies kept showrooms; around it clustered high-rise blocks of casual labor apartments,
cheap diners and tiny bars, family factories-cum-homes, trodden dirt parks with dusty trees and outdated concrete play equipment.
Not enough money around to attract big investors in entertainment like the gangster clans. A sense of community still clung
here, unlike in the wretched Bettas.

Damn, but it was hot.

This factory was like those he remembered from his childhood in an industrial area of Fukuoka City. A big iron barn. Piles
of scrap towered over a side fence. In a flower bed below a side window sunflowers grew tall against a neatly tied lattice
of bamboo.

Someone had been found dead in there, hit by an industrial robot. The medical report said dead between one to four hours.
Security scans showed that nobody went in or came out. The man must have thought he’d turned the robot off but didn’t do it
properly. At least someone else had been working over Bon. Ishihara just had to check the local police report and stamp it.

The constable at the door of the factory stiffened to attention at the sight of Ishihara’s ID. He swiped it carefully in his
phone to confirm and gave it back to Ishihara with a bow. His face was shiny with sweat, and an empty water bottle stood against
the wall.

Ishihara nodded by way of greeting. “Hot job out here.”

The constable relaxed at Ishihara’s informal tone. “It’s the humidity that gets you. The manager’s gone to arrange the funeral,”
he added. “There’s one technician overseeing the floor. One of the maker’s engineers is still looking at the robot. She’s
been in there over an hour.”

“She?” Ishihara paused in straightening a cigarette from the half-crushed packet in his shirt pocket.

The constable started to say something, changed his mind. “Yessir.”

The engineer would want to make sure the manufacturer doesn’t get blamed, thought Ishihara. He’d check the scene. Never met
a female robot engineer.

He couldn’t see her at first. She must be over the other side, past that row of minicranes and ridged tabletops. All the machines
silent and waiting. Enough to give anyone the creeps. He had to move right down one lane and back up another—there were no
shortcuts across the floor. Sweat trickled down the middle of his back and into his underwear.

The single figure near the robot didn’t notice him approach. She had her back to him and was looking from a flat box in her
hand to an upright panel next to the robot. One hand tapped keys on the panel. Chalk marks inside the robot’s enclosure were
nearly obliterated. It didn’t matter— the response team would have taken a video scan of the scene anyway.

Quite an attractive figure. He’d been expecting plainness. Why? He expected women working in an all-male field to be there
for a reason—they couldn’t compete with other women.
Idiot,
he heard his ex-wife’s voice in his head.
You’re an ignorant dinosaur.

Anyway, this figure was a pleasure to ogle. Reasonably tall, slim. Long legs in cotton trousers. Short-sleeved white blouse.
It was the legs that gave her away. As he coughed, he knew even before she turned that Japanese women didn’t have legs that
long. She wasn’t tall, then, not for a gaijin.

She started in surprise and fumbled the box.

Red hair, too. Long strands escaping from under the helmet. The skin under its sheen of sweat and smudges of grime was really
white. Ishihara made a note to keep an eye on the constable, who’d refrained from blurting out the obvious. Tactful constables
were rare.

“This is …” the woman started to say in Japanese, then stopped and blinked at Ishihara in surprise. “Who are you?”

“Assistant Inspector Ishihara, West Station Police, Religious Affairs. Who are you?”

She brought her thoughts back from wherever they were. “My name is McGuire. I work for Tomita. We designed this robot.” She
reached for a dilapidated brown handbag on the floor near the robot, rummaged in it for a moment, then proffered a card to
him.

The only accent in her Japanese was that of Osaka. Ishihara noticed she gave him only midlevel politeness. He hadn’t even
used ordinary level for her.

He knew enough foreigners—third- and fourth-generation Koreans, Brazilians and Filipinos on work visas—not to be surprised
that she spoke reasonable Japanese. A relief, though, not to have to dust off his high school English. Or Russian—they saw
a lot of Russians since the Sakhalin Treaty, but not many of them worked in big companies.

She had gray eyes, a color he found less alien than blue. To see if it would faze her, he dropped his gaze slowly down to
her boots and up again.

It didn’t. She merely stopped her hand before it could begin to brush strands of hair out of her eyes.

“Well. Nice to meet you.” She started to turn back to the robot.

“What are you looking for here?” said Ishihara. “I thought it was an accident, human error.”

“I’m just making certain.” She didn’t look directly at him this time. “Before we move it.”

Ishihara looked at the robot properly. A big, ungainly cranelike thing. “This is it?”

“You were expecting Gundam?” she said.

He had to stop himself grinning. He’d been thinking of Mighty Atom and Sam Number Five, in fact. “What were you about to say?”

“When?”

“When I came in.”

McGuire hesitated, then pointed to the robot. “This is at the wrong position.”

“‘Wrong’?”

“It’s at halt, not emergency stop.” She stepped closer to the robot and ran her hand along the arm and the pointy bit at the
end. He noted how her long, grimy fingers gripped the box and the familiar way she moved among the tangle of wires and leads.

“This part hit Mito,” she went on. “It’s programmed to come to a complete emergency stop as soon as something interrupts its
arc of movement. So unless someone has tampered with the controls, it should still be in that position. But it’s at halt.”

“What’s halt?” Ishihara could guess from the pronunciation of the characters used for the word, but he wanted to be sure.

“Halt is when the robot pauses in its job. It doesn’t go back to the beginning of the sequence. None of the peripherals”—she
pointed at the machines around the robot— “should be affected.”

“So were they affected this time?”

She nodded, her long, bony features exaggerating the serious expression. “They were all off-line. Which is what I’d expect
in emergency stop.”

“So someone turned it from stop to halt?”

“It’s not a matter of turning the switch back,” she retorted. “Once it’s at emergency stop, the robot’s got to be completely
restarted. That leaves a record in the programming file. But there’s nothing.”