Unstable Prototypes (3 page)

That much was true. The funk had been
designed in a laboratory using a genetic simulator.

"What's her name?" she asked.

"Her name is... uh..."

Ma gestured her head briefly toward the panel
by the door, behind Michella. It displayed a name.

"Squee?" he said with a furrowed brow.

"Squee. That's a cute name," she said,
putting the little beast down. "You watching her for long?"

"I really hope not," he said, dumping the
beans onto the dish and placing it down.

Ma/Squee tapped across the floor and eagerly
dug into the food.

"I know I said I was going to be here for a
few hours, Trev, but they moved my flight up. I'm already running
late. The car service is waiting outside. Sorry, honey."

"What? Okay, ignoring the ditched plans, you
got a car service? I could have taken you over in my limo. Hell, I
could have flown you all the way to Tessera in the SOB."

As a former racer, Lex's chief skills almost
exclusively dealt with moving quickly and accurately in a piece of
machinery. It was thus no surprise that the jobs he found to
replace racing all involved handling a vehicle. The day to day
bills were mostly paid by a hoverbike courier job, which called for
him to go whipping through the streets and sky of Preston City at
dangerous speeds. Here and there he supplemented that income with a
chauffeur job courtesy of his limo, a holdover from the brief time
that he was a celebrity. On top of that was a not-quite-legitimate
interstellar courier job that made use of his custom ship, Son of
Betsy. The traditional name for the position was "freelancer." The
three careers, combined with the beta testing, were just enough to
keep his head above water and allow him to start chiseling away at
his massive debt.

"You know the office likes me to use their
vendors."

"You could always convince them to make
me
a vendor."

"Don't start," she said, making a face. "I'll
be back in a couple of weeks. I'll see you then. I just didn't want
to leave you hanging." She gave him a hug and a peck on the cheek.
"I'll miss you."

"Me too. You better show up next time, babe,"
he said.

"Cross my heart. And goodbye to you, Squee,
sweetie," she said, with a blown kiss and a wink, her trademark
send off.

Ma looked up from the food to deliver three
quick yips again before continuing her meal. Lex leaned out the
doorway and watched her go, a faint smile on his face. When the
elevator doors shut behind her, he stepped inside and closed the
door. He flopped down on the futon.

"She seemed nice," Ma remarked. "And your
apartment, also, is very nice. The weather is lovely today. How
have things been regarding your employment?"

"Seriously Ma? Small talk? You're a
supercomputer walking around as an adorable little fuzzball and you
are attempting small talk."

"I am endeavoring to put you at ease with
what I understand is a difficult situation."

"It isn't working," he said, pinching the
bridge of his nose.

"That is unfortunate."

She finished eating the contents of the bowl,
industriously licked it clean, and tapped over to his feet.

"So what possible reason could you have for
coming out here like this?"

"Karter has been kidnapped."

"What?! By who?"

"I am not certain of the organization, but I
have my suspicions that it is a group of political extremists. They
wanted to contract him for the construction of a potentially
destructive device, and during a scale demonstration of an existing
product, they deployed electromagnetic pulse generators to
incapacitate me and his other automated defenses. When I was able
to restore myself to limited functionality, they were gone."

"Why would they kidnap him? Do you think
they're going to force him to build weapons for them?"

"You know Karter as well as I. It is entirely
possible that they will not
need
to force him."

"Yeah..."

Karteroketraskin "Karter" Dee, was many
things. He was a brilliant engineer and a gifted inventor. He was
also, proudly, a borderline sociopath with little use for morals
and even less use for most of the human race. Though he had helped
to prevent a multi-planet catastrophe by lending apparatus and
research, he only did so first out of spite, then out of
self-interest. The opportunity to field test his experimental
equipment is, in his eyes, justification enough to do virtually
anything. In the brief time that Lex had known him, he had seen the
man use weapons-grade lasers as a pooper-scooper and a miniature
black hole as a projectile. He'd already had a predilection for
creating weapons of mass destruction... And now he might be in the
hands of a terrorist group.

"Do you understand why I was willing to take
such drastic action?"

"Well, yeah, but why me? This is a job for
the military or one of those bureaus of investigation."

"The initial contact with these individuals
was arranged through military channels, implying that the military
may have been compromised by the group. Furthermore, Karter is,
himself, somewhat sought after by a number of military and domestic
agencies. My goal is to liberate him, not to deliver him from one
form of imprisonment to another. Thus, this is a matter that calls
for discretion. You are, to be perfectly frank, one of the few
people that I feel we can trust."

"There has got to be someone better for-"

"Lex, I had anticipated your reluctance, and
as such had allotted three days in which to convince you in a
gradual and logical manner. Unfortunately I had underestimated the
difficulty of traversing interstellar distances as an unaccompanied
non-verbal quadruped, and thus was delayed. For this reason, I will
distill the situation to its purest form. Karter has got the
knowledge, resources, and lack of moral conviction to be a threat
to society on an unprecedented scale. The only thing that has
prevented him from becoming a purposeful blight on humanity thus
far has been a lack motivation and, more recently, gentle influence
from me. He is now beyond my influence and at the mercy of a group
of very motivated individuals. It is a relative certitude that,
unless something is done quickly, an evil will be unleashed upon
the populace that will make the plot you foiled several months ago
seem mild by comparison. I have set a plan in motion that should
leave us adequately equipped to retrieve him, but to remain on
schedule for the next phase, you and I will need to be en route in
sixty-five minutes, so there is no further time for debate. I need
your help."

"I guess I don't really have a choice."

"I was confident you would make the correct
decision. I hope that you are able to leave immediately. We will
need to purchase a few items."

"Like what?"

"Well, evidently if we are to be moving about
freely in public, I will require a leash."

#

A few minutes later, Lex was finishing a
call, almost ready to leave.

"Yeah, mark off, further notice. Thanks. See
you later," Lex said before pocketing his slidepad.

The first step had been to call his various
dispatchers and employers to let them know he would be off the list
for a while. It was something he had to do every time he had a long
distance package to drop off for his freelancer gig, so they were
used to it. Next, a reasonably clean t-shirt and jeans were
selected and he set about loading down his pockets with everything
he might need, including his slidepad, a pack of gum, and a supply
of chips. He also quickly packed an overnight bag with clothes for
an assortment of climates. One of the side effects of the ease of
long distance travel meant that, in the space of a few days, you
could be exposed to both extremes of hot and cold, as well as every
weather condition you could imagine. It paid to be prepared. When
he was through, Lex stopped at the door for a final check.

"Hey, how are you going to talk to me?"

"I could utilize the speaker functionality of
your slidepad," offered the series of female voices from the panel
beside the door.

"I think that would be a little obvious."

"Do you have a hands-free device?"

"Uh, yeah, somewhere," Lex said, eventually
fishing the jelly bean-sized device from his pocket.

"Insert it, please," she requested.

He slipped it into his ear.

"Processing... Negotiating... Pairing...
Establishing Connection... Connection Established. Can you hear
me?" she recited, her last comment coming from the ear bud rather
than the panel.

"Yeah. I guess that will do. The only problem
now is that I'm going to be talking out loud to an animal."

"I understand that is not an uncommon
behavior."

"I guess not. But most people aren't getting
replies. I guess I'll just pretend I'm on a call."

"That is wise."

Lex left his apartment, Ma tapping along the
ground beside him. After an elevator ride to the surface, he
fetched his hoverbike. It used three hover modules, mounted at the
end of short outriggers, to haul around the contents of a shopping
cart-sized wire basket mounted behind the seat. It wasn't the most
dignified means of conveyance, but in his hands it could beat
virtually anything in a race across town, including, on more
occasions that he would be willing to admit, police cars. Ma was
loaded into the basket.

"You sure you're going to be okay back here?"
he asked.

"I trust your skill as a pilot," she replied,
settling carefully to the floor of the basket.

"Even so. I'll take it slow. First stop,
mega-store," he said, easing his bike into the air.

They began to make their way through Preston
City. It was the capital of Lex's home planet, Golana, and one of
the largest transportation hubs in the galactic neighborhood. As
such, it was home to far too many people crammed into far too
little space. Even though the city sprawled over hundreds of miles,
virtually all of the buildings were massive, reaching dozens to
hundreds of stories into the air. Street traffic was fairly light,
thanks to the fact that hovercars were able to take advantage of
cordoned off skyways instead. Outside of city limits, cars
frequently shifted to autonomous, which virtually eliminated
traffic and permitted speeds measured in the hundreds of miles per
hour. Inside the city, however, people preferred manual control,
leading to the same traffic snarls that had plagued man for
generations. They had simply been expanded from two dimensions to
three.

"You want to explain to me what the plan
is?"

"You and I are going to rendezvous with one
of Karter's former collaborators. He has experience in matters such
as these. From there, pending his insight into the situation, your
involvement may be at an end."

"You sure? All I have to do is escort you to
a meeting with this guy?" Lex asked.

"That is a rough overview, but I've done what
I can to allow for maximum flexibility, so expect a degree of
fluidity."

"What kind of fluidity?"

"We are likely to require more manpower, and
if so, he may require your aid in locating and meeting with
them."

"Okay. That sounds doable. I guess I can see
why you needed a chaperone. It must be tricky getting people to
take you seriously when you're, you know, fuzzy."

"Exceedingly."

"Wouldn't it have been easier to build a
robot body?"

"Time was limited, and the circumstances of
my departure made the survival of a complex computational mechanism
unlikely. In addition, there was the necessity to blend with human
society. While the many breeds of dog and their relative ubiquity
would permit my current selection of form to go unnoticed, a robot
would need to be extremely sophisticated to receive the same
treatment. Karter has built a female humanoid robot, but he
achieved the desired level of fidelity in only three areas of its
anatomy. The face was not one of them."

"Do I want to know what three parts made the
list?"

"Unlikely."

"Yeah, you're probably right. Okay, we're
here. Cost-Mart," Lex said.

With a name like Cost-Mart, one could be
excused for thinking that a description was unnecessary, and to a
degree that is true. As you might imagine, it was the sort of place
that sold everything conceivable, and generally in gallons when
ounces would suffice. The last time Lex had visited this place, it
was to buy a gross of granola bars to stock the SOB for a
particularly lengthy delivery. The name may even conjure to mind
the sprawling size of the superstore, but that is where the
expectations start to fall short. To begin to understand the scope
of the shopping center, you must first understand that there was no
parking lot, because customers were encouraged to pilot their
vehicles directly into the store. It had departments the way malls
had stores, spread across floors and stretched across blocks. Items
were loaded directly into trunks, baskets, and seats. A quick swipe
of your slidepad deducted the cost of the purchase directly from
your accounts, meaning that there was no checkout. Shoplifting was
virtually nonexistent, primarily because if you walked or drove out
of the store without paying, they would automatically debit your
slidepad as you exited. There were smaller stores and more
traditional places to purchase things, certainly, but if you wanted
to be absolutely certain that what you needed would be in stock,
Cost-Mart was your best bet.

"What are we looking for?" Lex asked.

"Some manner of leash appropriate for a
creature of my size. We will also need food and water for a few
days for myself, and if the SOB is not currently stocked, food for
you as well. In addition, we need: four small items of blue
clothing, a commercial or industrial grade thiol oxidation spray,
two or more epinephrine injectors with replaceable reservoirs –
product code EPP-4942c, a large package of pain management
medication, a general anesthetic, assorted first aid supplies, four
to six additional hands-free audio devices, four to six additional
slidepads or datapads..."