The Automatic Detective (8 page)

Knuckles beeped. Mark Threes didn't have full voice synthesizers.

"And you are?" asked Grey.

I could've pounded both this guy and his robot to a bloody
pulp, but something told me there would be consequences. It wasn't in my initial programming to avoid conflict, but I saw no reason to make this harder than it had to be.

"Mack. Now tell this piece of tin to let me go."

Grey steepled his fingers, put his thumbs to his lips, and made a peculiar clicking sound."'Kay."

Knuckles released me. There was a crease left in my forearm chassis. It popped out almost immediately, but I still resented it.

"This isn't your room," observed Grey.

"Isn't yours either."

He nodded, very slowly, methodically, as if having just learned the gesture and not sure of its execution. I know because sometimes when I nodded, I did it the same way.

"This can mean two things," he said. "Either you broke into the wrong room. Or you, like us, are looking for one Anthony Ringo."

He let the observation hang there.

"Which is it?"

The smart thing would've been to lie, but even the best artificial intelligence screws up sometime. I wasn't going to let these guys intimidate me.

"I'm looking for Ringo."

"Thought so. What, may I ask, is the nature of your relationship to Mister Ringo?"

"We're not friends."

"'Course not. Schmuck like Ringo, he doesn't have friends. Nobody likes a loser. It's what makes them losers." Grey made a show of studying his fingernails. "I'm beginning to doubt he's coming back here."

"Then I guess there's no point in sticking around." I turned toward the door.

"One moment, Mack."

Knuckles stepped between me and the exit. He reached for my shoulder with his viselike manipulators. I grabbed him by the wrist.

"Hands off, outmode."

Knuckles growled shrilly.

"Come on, Mack. We've been getting on alright up to now. Let's not start pissing on each others' legs."

While Knuckles and I stared each other down (an automatic stalemate for two robots that couldn't blink), Grey put his wristwatch to his mouth and mumbled something. My audios weren't cranked high enough to make it out. I considered pushing Knuckles aside as Grey finished his conversation, but that could only lead to trouble.

Grey clicked off his watch and turned on me with a very slight smile. "So, Mack, it looks like we got ourselves a . . . whaddayacallit . . . common purpose. We're both looking for Ringo."

"Fine. You look one way. I'll look the other."

"Exactly what I was thinking. Both of us looking improves the odds, provided you could be persuaded to give us a call if you do."

"Fine. Give me your card. When I find him, I'll give you a ring." I would've smiled with halfhearted sincerity then. "I promise."

"Oh, I know you will. Knuckles, if you would be so kind . . ."

Knuckles seized my shoulders. He was stronger than me, all right, but Mark Threes had a design flaw. Their center of gravity was too high. It wasn't a serious flaw because few opponents were strong enough and agile enough to take advantage of it. Despite my bulk, I was graceful as a ballet dancer compared to Knuckles. I slipped my leg behind his ankle joint, kicked it out from under him, and leaned back. His clunky design couldn't
cope and he crashed to the floor, smashing his way through the wall, tearing away half the doorjamb.

I brushed Grey aside with the slightest of efforts. He went flying across the small room to bang against an end table.

Mark Threes were notoriously slow risers. Knuckles struggled to sit up. I slammed a foot on his chest. "Stay down."

The auto beeped lightly but stopped flailing.

"They always gotta take the hard way," said Grey. He sported the signs of a fresh new bruise growing on his right cheek, below his eye. "While I appreciate your desire for independence, Mack, I'm afraid the point is . . . whaddayacallit . . . moot."

I was one-point-two seconds from showing him just how relevant my impulses could be by throwing him out the window. Before I could make the move, my legs locked up. A weird buzz ran through my audios, and my tactile web tingled and prickled inexplicably. Knuckles stood, and I nearly fell to the ground save a steadying arm on the wall.

Grey's eyes were now a cold, sparkling green bright enough to cast emerald hues on the rest of the room.

"You're psychic," I said oddly. It wasn't like he didn't already know.

Not all mutants looked strange. That was the problem in Empire. You didn't always know who or what you were dealing with until after the fact. It was another one of those messy variables.

"Electrokinesis," he replied. "It's very rare, they tell me. Very useful, as I'm sure you've already figured out. The only hiccup is that I gotta first touch the device." He gingerly touched the splotch on his face. "Or it has gotta touch me. I think you bruised a rib."

I tried to get my legs to move. There was a slight twitch in the servos, but that was it.

Grey sat back in the chair with a wince. "Definitely bruised. Oh well, perhaps I didn't handle the situation as . . . howsthatgo . . . delicately as I should've. No big deal. We got it all worked out now."

I computed how quickly I could crawl over to that chair and break Grey's neck. Not fast enough.

"I see you're a stubborn one, Mack." He snapped his fingers. His eyes flared. My arm went numb and unresponsive. It lost its grip and down I fell.

Knuckles chuckled in a string of rapid pings. He scooped up my bowler and dropped it on his square cranium. He beeped quizzically.

"Looks good on you," said Grey. "I'm sure Mack here won't mind parting with it, will you, Mack?"

With my one functional limb, I pushed myself up, but Knuckles stomped on my back. He bleeped hard.

"I'd stay down if I were you," said Grey. "Knuckles isn't bright enough for citizen status, but he knows how to nurse a grudge. If you give him the hat, maybe he'll go easy on you."

"Keep it," I replied.

Knuckles knocked my working arm from under me, and I hit the floor. He kicked me once.

"Stand down, Knuckles," ordered Grey.

The auto stepped back.

Grey knelt down beside me. "Look here, Mack. You look like a robot that can handle himself. And since it's real important to me to find Tony Ringo, I think it'd be helpful to have an extra set of opticals on the street. Don't you agree?"

"Makes sense," I conceded, baiting him to move the four inches closer so I could wrap my working arm around his neck. If I got the chance, it'd take less than two-tenths of a second to break his neck. At least, that's how fast my specs assured me I
could snap an average neck. I'd never actually done it before. Felt like the right time for a field test.

He leaned closer, half an inch from a guaranteed grab. "Now, I don't know shit about you, but I'm willing to bet you're not the kind of bot to roll over and play nice. So I'm going to plant a little extra incentive into that brain of yours. See, I've got this knack for reprogramming. Kinda funny, actually, since I don't know nothing about computers." He rubbed his fingers together and tiny green sparks danced.

I was a closed system, and I planned on staying that way. I lunged awkwardly, but fast enough that I should've gotten my fingers around Grey's throat. He moved back just in time, grinning.

"Nice try, but I told'ja. I got a knack. Now that I've touched you, I know what you're going to do before you do."

He snapped his fingers, and my last functional limb went dead. I fell to the floor, five hundred pounds of useless tin. But despite his arrogance, sweat beaded Grey's forehead. His eyes were bright green with crackling psychic wattage. It must've taken a lot of effort to incapacitate all my limbs. I hoped he wouldn't have enough left over to claw his way into my operating system, but no such luck. He put his sizzling hands on me.

I went off-line.

My audios were the first sensors to reboot. A voice, distorted and heavy, trudged its way through the darkness.

"Hey, buddy. You okay?"

I would've replied, but my vocalizer wasn't running. I didn't waste any time getting it going, and instead, prioritized my opticals. The world fell into my digital awareness, but it was all mere shapes and colors without the necessary distinguishing software.

An assembly of multicolored polygons spoke. I moved another 3 percent toward functional and recognized a voice. It belonged to Winifred, the front desk woman. "Hey, you still on?"

Language can be tricky for a rebooting brain. It took three seconds to decode the four word sentence.

"Statement: I . . . am . . . functional," I replied. A full second later, I added, "Qualifier: Nominally."

"Nominally?" she asked. "What's that mean?"

"Advisory: It . . . means . . . you should . . . stand . . . back in case . . . I fall . . . over . . . as I attempt . . . to stand."

I managed to get to my feet, though it was awkward. Programs were up and running, but hundreds more subroutines had yet to reboot. My sensor array, though improving, was still a mess. I could distinguish shapes more thoroughly, but had trouble finding names for them. And my audio filters were down, meaning every little noise was being analyzed and reanalyzed. Made it hard to concentrate. Worse yet, there was a terrible ache in my electronic brain, which was odd considering it had no tactile receptors. I put a hand to my abdomen, where it was housed.

"Question: What . . . did he do . . . to me?" I asked aloud. I didn't mean to, but my verbalization filters weren't running either.

"Who did what to you?" asked Winifred, whom I could now visually identify as a biological entity but couldn't recognize any more than that.

"Statement: Running . . . diagnostic." I beeped twice for no apparent reason.

"You don't look so good." She took me by the arm.

"Statement: Tactile web off-line. Fine motor functions . . . off-line. Advisory: Maintain a safe . . . distance to avoid . . .
incidental injury. Estimation: Full system restoration . . . in two minutes, two seconds."

"Maybe you should sit down while you wait," she said.

"Negative." I dug around in my vocabulary file for a less technical word. "No. It will be better to stand very still in the meantime." I hiccuped one last, "Statement." And then I waited.

"Should I call the e-mechs?"

Empire had the best emergency mechanical technicians in the world to service its automated citizenry, but this wasn't serious enough for that.

"It's just a cold reboot."

I passed it off as a casual thing, but it bothered me. I hadn't been that far off-line since first being activated. I could remember every moment of my existence, save for one-point-eight seconds after my refrigerator had exploded. But there was now a three-minute, forty-seven-second block of time in my memory log that I couldn't account for.

What had Grey done to me?

Fully restored, my diagnostics combed through my software and assured me it found nothing amiss. But there was still that unaccounted-for segment of time, still that peculiar notion that someone had been monkeying around with my most intimate programming. As a robot, I didn't have instincts, and my intuition simulator remained silent. There was still something wrong.

I could feel it.

"All better?" asked the woman.

"Functional," I grunted as I commanded my diagnostics to sift through my electronic brain again, and set aside some of my processing power to continue to sift over and over again until it found something. "And the name's Mack."

"So what happened, Mack?"

"Did you see—" I started, but stopped suddenly and inexplicably.

"What?" asked Winifred. "Did I see what?"

"Did you see—" Again, I stopped.

I wanted to ask her about Grey and Knuckles, but something kept the question from forming. It must've been Grey's reprogramming, a little worm of a virus inhibiting my speech software, keeping me from saying anything about Grey or our encounter. I didn't like that one bit. It was a minor problem, but I didn't want to guess at the bigger motivational impairments he might've planted.

I scanned the broken wall where I'd thrown Knuckles. "Sorry about the damage."

"Don't worry about it. Place is a shithole anyway." She scratched her fuzzy chin. "So what happened?"

"Nothing."

I didn't tell her for two reasons. First, it was embarrassing to be so easily put down. Second, that bug kept me from even mentioning Grey or Knuckles. I'd have to purge my systems top to bottom. And soon. Still topping my directives list: finding Tony Ringo, and finding him before Grey. Otherwise, logic told me I'd never find him at all.

"Ringo," I said. "Do you know anything else about him? Hangouts? Friends?"

Winifred frowned. "I don't know nothing about nobody. None of my business."

"Thanks," I said with more sarcasm than I meant. "You've been a big help." I had nothing left to go on. That logic sprang up again, told me it was time to go home, and put this mess behind me.