The Automatic Detective (3 page)

Her receptionist was an auto named Herbie. She'd programmed him herself, and he was remarkably lifelike, but he didn't have the Glitch. The doc hadn't been able to reproduce it intentionally yet, despite her best efforts. Herbie was a video monitor atop sixteen mechanical tentacles. The subroutines to keep all those limbs untangled would've driven most programmers mad.

Herbie glanced up from his desk, but kept typing on four different keyboards. "You're late, Mack."

"It's keeping with a theme for the day," I replied.

Herbie didn't have a sense of humor. I would have liked to credit his artificial nature with that, but some bots, like some people, were too serious for their own good. His digital face formed into a frown. "Have a seat. Doctor Mujahid will be with you shortly."

The doc's waiting room accommodated a wide variety of patients with an assortment of body types, and there were chairs big enough for me to sit comfortably. I found a spot next to a construction bot and a police auto and waited.

Six minutes later, the door opened, and Doctor Mujahid entered with a woman and a little girl carrying a Gabby Goosey doll. The doc nodded and smiled in my direction, said something to the woman, patted the doll on the head, and went back into her office.

"Megaton, you're next," said Herbie.

The doc was entering data in her computer as I stepped into her office. She didn't look up. "Make yourself comfortable."

I sat down on the special couch. Yes, she made her patients
lie on a couch. She liked the traditional feel. The only difference with her couch was the wire jack in the side for the patient to plug in.

"Taking human patients now, Doc?" I asked.

She was so engrossed in her typing she didn't reply.

"The girl," I said. "Human, wasn't she? Or have the Big Brains finally developed that full human simulacrum they keep talking about?"

The doc paused. "Oh, no. Not yet. Can't get the skin right. But I wasn't treating the girl. I was treating the doll."

If Gabby Gooseys started thinking, I wouldn't be so special after all. For some reason, I found that disconcerting.

"I believe the subject is only experiencing some minor program anomalies. Still, it is an interesting development." She stopped typing suddenly. "Please, plug yourself in."

I studied the jack. I didn't like it. I was a closed system. I didn't believe in casual interface. Good way to pick up a virus.

"Please, Mack."

I opened the port where my belly button would've been, had I been human, and inserted the jack. Immediately, a stream of data poured across the big screen opposite the doc's desk. The endless lines of code meant nothing to me, but it was mildly disturbing seeing the inner workings of my electronic brain reduced to a string of letters and numbers. If there was a divine spark hiding in there, I couldn't find it.

The doc liked to talk while she analyzed my electronic psyche. Small talk at the beginning. She said you could tell a lot about a bot just by the way he carried on a regular conversation. There were nuances in speech that spoke volumes apparently. Knowing this and assuming anything I might say, no matter how seemingly innocent, could be turned against me, I kept my end of the discussion short. Very short. One word responses, if possible. Which didn't do much to showcase my
social readjustment. I couldn't help it. Suspicion had wormed its way into my personality template.

Finally, Doctor Mujahid asked the Big Question. The one I dreaded because I always knew it was coming and I didn't know the answer.

"So how are things, Mack?"

I considered the question. "Good."

The lamp on her desk flickered. I noticed because it was an antique, the kind only the very poor or very rich used nowadays. Still needed light bulbs. She circled it, studying it with mild interest. She was probably diagnosing the bulb with an Edison complex or photon envy.

"Good how, Mack?"

"I don't know," I replied honestly. "Just good."

The lamp flickered again, and she ran her fingers along the shade as if to comfort it. "Well, Mack . . ." She trailed off, which meant she was thinking. She was also saying my name way too much. Meant she was thinking hard. About me. Possibly about my future. The way she was staring at that screen made me nervous. I could tell because whenever I was nervous, a static bar would appear in the lower half of the screen.

"Tell me, Mack. Have you gotten a chance to look at those books I sent home with you last time?"

"Sure."

The lamp flickered again. Outdated piece of junk.

"Have you been working on your delicate coordination, Mack?"

"Sure. I've been building models. Cars, planes, rockets."

"And how's that going, Mack?"

"Pretty good." The lamp sputtered, and I felt inexplicably guilty. "You should get that replaced, Doc."

"Oh, it's working fine," she replied. "You see, Mack, whenever you lie, your vocal synthesizer emits a subsonic whine."

"Really." I sat up. "Do me a favor. Don't tell my poker buddies."

She ignored the joke. She had less of a sense of humor than Herbie. "The pitch is too low for human hearing to detect, but I've keyed the microphones in my office to listen for it and to make my desk lamp flicker when they do."

She let that sink in as I reclined. She studied my lines of scrolling code without saying anything.

"I'm working on the models," I said. "I am. But so far, they keep breaking."

"How does that make you feel, Mack?"

"I don't know. It's no big deal."

The lamp, that obnoxious little stoolie, flashed again.

"It stinks," I grumbled. "Okay, it stinks. My hands weren't designed for stuff that delicate. I get a couple of pieces glued together, then whammo, I'm suddenly looking at a lump of crushed plastic."

"Any progress in the attempts, Mack?"

"I got half a sports car put together. That was pretty swell until . . ." I raised my hands and wiggled the thick, metal fingers.

"Very good, Mack." She pushed a button on some gizmo on her belt, and the screen flashed a specific program. "Your manual dexterity subroutines are coming along nicely. Shall we move on to your social integration?"

She phrased it like a question, but she wasn't asking. We always came back to this. The doc said it was the most important issue I had to work through. I didn't agree, but I was uncomfortable talking about it, so maybe she had a point.

"Have you made any friends, Mack?"

"Couple," I answered, and the lamp didn't blink this time.

"Have you been engaging in active socialization as I advised?"

"Sure."

"How often?"

"Two or three times a week."

Blink, blink went that tattletale bastard.

"I don't remember exactly."

The lamp called me on this, too. It was a weak lie coming from a bot that could remember every moment of every minute of my brief life.

Doc Mujahid sighed. "Mack, full communal assimilation is the most difficult, yet most important, hurdle of the automated citizen."

"Is that so?" She'd gone over this before, but she was going to give me the entire speech again. Even if I could open the file and play it for myself beat for beat.

"Artificial entities have very little to ground them in daily life," she said. "They don't eat, hence they don't enjoy the simple pleasure of food. They're asexual, hence they don't enjoy the social act of dating, seduction, and sexual intercourse. They are not, generally speaking, abstract enough in their thinking process to take pleasure in recreational reading, art, or other forms of cerebral distraction enjoyed by biological entities."

Inwardly, I smiled. The doc had a habit of making machines seem like people and people seem like machines.

"Most bots blessed with true intelligence find complete assimilation through their intended purpose. Construction autos continue to build, police drones continue in their law enforcement capacity, and so on. But you, Mack, were intended for antisocial purposes. This contradiction puts tremendous stress on your systems.

"Now, despite these concerns, I think you're making excellent progress."

She clicked the screen off and went to her desk. "But there's still a lot to work on. Here's what I need you to do. I need you to start socializing regularly. Daily, if possible."

"I don't know. I'm pretty busy."

The lamp flickered. I guess it didn't agree that standing around in my apartment, staring at the refrigerator, was all that important.

Doctor Mujahid kept talking. "Continue on the models. Look at those books. Read one. I recommend starting with
Treasure Island
. I think the violence of the story will be a healthy outlet for your aggression indexes."

"Whatever you say, Doc. But my aggression index is under control, really. I swear."

The damn lamp disagreed. I unplugged myself and stomped delicately across the office. "I'm doing fine. Really, I am."

Blink, blink.

I snatched up that little bastard and crushed it in one hand. I particularly enjoyed the shattering of its blinky little know-it-all lightbulb head. Doctor Mujahid frowned slightly as I set the mutilated antique back on the desk.

"Some of the guys are going bowling later tonight, and they invited me along."

She started retyping. "Don't be late, Mack."

Empire's got its problems, but it does have one virtue. It doesn't believe in wasting anything. Everything gets recycled. There are a couple of reasons for that. Empire dislikes old, useless stuff. The Learned Council won't tolerate anything sitting around taking up space, even if it's buried where no one can see it. They also love the concept of remaking broken stuff into something shiny and new and functional. There's an entire chapter in the
Codex of the Temple of Knowledge
that preaches the good word of reprocessing.

The downside of this passion is that the recycling centers are the most toxic, polluting facilities in town. They're also extremely dangerous. All that weird science is perilous enough when working properly, but by the time it gets shuffled into the centers, it's downright deadly. The staffs are almost always entirely automated. It's one of the few jobs without a human worker quota because even the Biological Rights League isn't crazy enough to fight for that opportunity.

Once in a while you get a biological stubborn, tough, and crazy enough to survive the job. The recycling center I stopped
by was run by one of these. Vinny was a tall guy, lanky, oddly proportioned. He was probably a mutant, given his occupation and strange shape, but I'd never seen an inch of skin beneath his jumpsuit, overalls, long rubber gloves, thick-soled boots, rebreather mask, and goggles. Some abnormal stuff sprouted from his head. It could've been hair, but I wasn't willing to bet on it.

He met me at the front gate. Sludge so caked the lenses of his goggles that I couldn't even see his eyes underneath. He must've had X-ray vision to see out of them.

Either he or his mask wheezed. "You're early, Megaton."

The center was a chaos of conveyer belts, choppers, smelters, disassembly drones. Machines in big piles were torn apart and placed in smaller piles that were in turn sorted into smaller piles. The robots here were low-end worker drones with very basic programming, lacking even simple personality simulators. They didn't have much in common with a piece of cutting edge tech such as myself, but I still felt uncomfortable watching them dissecting machinery. When I finally ceased to function, I could end up in one of these places. Maybe this very one. And those drones would tear me apart with cold indifference. The thought chilled my hydraulic fluid.

Vinny stopped at a mound of gyroped carcasses. "Here ya go."

"You got any lamps?" I asked.

He chuckled, though it came out as a rough gasp through his mask. "No lamps. Just these. They're all yours for the next hour. Then they go in the smelter." He walked away, wheezing. "Clock's tickin', big guy."

I spent the next fifty-three minutes pounding gyropeds. This was my own personal therapy regimen. Twice a week I smashed stuff that no one wanted anymore, and no one got hurt. Doctor Mujahid was right. There was that line of code
somewhere inside of me that needed to break stuff and since the Doc didn't believe in invasive reprogramming, I was stuck with it. This was the only way I'd found to work that out. By hour's end, the scrapped peds were significantly more scrapped and I felt better, though not entirely satisfied.

"Geez, Megaton." Vinny kicked a soccer ball-sized lump that had once been a full ped. "Cranked up the power a little high today, didn't you?"

"Only sixty," I replied. Sixty-two, actually, but Vinny couldn't detect subsonic whines.

"Same time next Tuesday?"

I ran through some budget calculations. Between greasing Vinny's palm and the extra consumption of juice, these therapy sessions were costing me a small fortune. That didn't bother me nearly as much as the notion that they weren't working as well as they had been. But I didn't have any other ideas.