A.I. P.I.

0001

She sat in my office, looking young and innocent and scared. Kind of like a spring lamb, only with a nicer coat. She looked to be about twenty-five and probably spent more on a manicure than I did on rent. In fact, those slender white hands looked like the only work they’d ever done was digging into a trust fund.

Not that I was impressed—I’d had rich clients before. OK, not very often. I’m just an A.I. P.I.; I don’t get to choose who walks through my door. So I have to admit it was nice for a change to see someone who looked like she could actually pay for my services.

Her blond hair framed a heart-shaped face that showed just a touch of make-up. She probably should have used a heavier lipstick—it might have stopped her lower lip from trembling. It was pretty clear she’d never been in this type of a jam before, so I figured I’d better keep prompting her.

So ... how long has he been missing?

She stared straight ahead, her voice soft as falling snow. I haven’t heard from him in a couple of days now.

How do you know he didn’t just go on a trip somewhere? You said he used to travel a lot.

When I stopped by his apartment just now, it had been wrecked. What an awful place. Why my brother would choose this neighborhood, I‘ll never know.

I knew what she meant. I sure didn’t live here by choice. Couldn’t imagine why anybody would.

Why didn’t you call the cops? Why come to a gumshoe?

She looked up at me, uncomprehending. A what?

A peeper ... a shamus …

Still blank.

Me!

Oh. I didn’t know what to do. When I left Charles’ place, I just started walking in a daze. I saw your sign and … well, I could have gone to the police I suppose, but …

… but you figured a guy like me could use a mercy hump. Thanks.

I moved to the one window I had and looked out at the gathering dusk. Storm clouds were rolling toward the city in a slow motion boil.

I must say, I don’t care for your tone, she sniffed. I came here to offer you some work. I thought you’d be grateful.

Oh, I am. I’ll try not to get any kiss prints on those fancy slingbacks. Did anyone leave a note there? Has anyone called you?

She shook her head.

Well, I guess we can rule out kidnapping. Probably rule out fairies and elves, too. A bolt of lightning snaked across the sky. I figured it was time to get the girl on her way before that nice coat took a soaking. I inched back toward my desk; I would have strolled, but there wasn’t that much room.

Look, Miss …

Gale. I told you, Dorothy Gale.

Look, Miss. It doesn’t sound like a criminal case to me, all right? Your brother’s a musician, right? Maybe he was using, and he got strung out—I’ve seen it before and it gets plenty ugly. In fact, he could have pitched a fit for a million different reasons, then copped a sneak till he snapped out of it.

"But Charles isn’t like that. When he came to see me last week, he seemed scared. Like someone was after him. Now I feel like … like maybe they’re after me."

Oh, now they’re after you too, huh? You know, I hear they have medication for that kind of feeling.

How dare you? I should have known better than to come to see one of your kind.

Now, now, no need to get racial.

I’m not going to stay here and be spoken to this way.

She stood up and strode toward the door when I heard it: an imperceptible creak from the floorboard in the hall. It was outside the range of human hearing, so the girl didn’t pick up on it. But of course, I did.

Wait.

She stopped, no doubt expecting the kind of fawning apology she was used to.

Why don’t you get down on the floor?

She spun around and looked at me like I’d just made a crack about her mother. I beg your pardon?!

Another creak—this time, even she heard it.

Just do as I say.

She instantly felt the danger—even a yearling can feel the presence of the wolf. She crouched down and curled up in a fetal position, but carefully, so as not to get any dust on that coat.

I snapped off the lamp on my desk, plunging the room into darkness. Switching to my infrared vision, I had no trouble grabbing the coat rack and placing it in front of the window. I whipped off my trench coat and fedora and arranged them on the rack. Then I retreated into a corner and waited. I didn’t have to wait long.

Pieces of the doorjamb exploded into the room as the result of a well-placed kick. Three hulking gunsels filled the doorway, weapons in hand. They hesitated for a second while their eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. Then a flash of lightning backlit the coat rack.

Blasts from their hand lasers matched the flashes from outside. The lapels and sleeves of my abandoned coat were instantly filled with burning holes. Not bad shots. I waited a second, then flicked on the lamp.

They froze in their tracks. Maybe it was from shock as they realized they’d been suckered. Or maybe it was the glint off the silver synthetic skin covering my face and hands. Whatever the reason, it gave me all the time I needed.

You missed me.

I whipped up my arm and fired a blast from my right forefinger, the CO2 laser having been installed years earlier as standard police armature. The first goon cried out even before the new vent in his chest began to smoke. He fell back; the two behind him caught the body and tossed it back at me like the world's ugliest medicine ball. I caught him, but couldn’t get off a clean shot before they turned and beat feet down the hall. I shoved the body off of me; the girl yelped as it thudded down next to her.

Stay here! I snapped.

I ran to the door, but pulled back just as another laser shot blew a piece of the doorframe by my face. I ducked and spun into the corridor, then dropped to one knee ready to fire. But they were already scrambling up the access stairs at the end of the hall.

Good. There was only one place they could go now: the roof.

0010

I took the stairs two at a time, knowing what would be waiting for me at the top. I shouldered the rooftop door open and instantly somersaulted. Their lasers ripped the door into a shower of splinters and metal shards; my return shot went wide as I kept rolling and dove for cover. I ducked behind a metal girder that was supporting an electronic billboard—it was one of hundreds of giant telescreens that shrouded every rooftop in town. All of them pulsed out the same relentless message to the citizens below: Buy! Consume! Repeat! Even us poor silver trash here in the slums weren’t spared. Normally I hated them, but I was glad that one was there—it was the only thing between me and several thousand degrees of amplified light.

I started to scan the rooftop looking for where they had gone when the sky opened up and dropped a heavy curtain of rain. That curtain was instantly parted by a beam of red death that burned into the strut just over my head. I returned fire and missed again, hitting the chimney pipe they were hunkered behind. My laser sighting was supposed to be fitted with lock-on capabilities, but one of the Research and Development boys had decided it was too costly. It was times like these when I wished somebody had slipped the guy a few extra bucks.

The rain was coming down good now, hissing as it hit the super-heated metal in front of me. With a loud crack, the girder snapped in two. The entire billboard groaned and then, pivoting on its other leg, bent down and swept me away like so much dirt in a dustpan. A ton of glass and metal was pushing me toward the building’s edge and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

I tried to dig my heels into the asphalt-covered roof but they just kept sliding through the newly formed puddles. I was three feet from the edge and closing fast with only a second to act. Just as I was launched over the side, I stretched out and grabbed the roof’s concrete lip with one hand.

My body swung back and forth in space like a windshield wiper; the billboard teetered next to me and showered the air with sparks from its severed electrical cables. I looked down at the street that was five stories below. I was built to withstand heavy impacts but a fall that far would’ve been Humpty Dumpty time. And considering the way people felt about androids these days, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about putting me back together again. I started to pull myself back up.

And then, there they were. They were standing over me, gazing down the way two Cheshire cats would’ve looked at a three-legged mouse they’d just cornered: smug, smiling and ready to finish the job.

A lightning flash illuminated the face of the one in front. I could see the dilated bloodshot eyes that were the telltale sign of a ‘dropper’. He’d been dosing himself with a new designer drug that had surfaced during the last few years. Users put a few drops in their eyes and within seconds, experienced a schizophrenic-type high. Or in the case of this gutless punk, some artificial courage so he could rent himself out as an assassin. I would have loved to fire a blast between those eyes but I couldn’t let go of the roof and shoot at the same time. He let out a laugh a hyena would’ve admired, then slowly raised his hand laser at me.

My computer processors raced, calculating the odds of various plans; then the buzzing of electricity caught my ear. One of the severed electrical cables was draped over the roof’s edge, pulsing and jumping right next to me. I saw the gunman was standing in a puddle that reached all the way to my fingers. I was risking an overload, but I had no choice.

As he started to squeeze the trigger, I threw my free hand out and grabbed the exposed wiring. Instantly, thousands of volts coursed up my one arm, out the other and into the puddle. The electricity raced up the gunman’s body, contracting every muscle in his face and forcing his smile ever wider. It was as if some unseen photographer kept insisting, Smile. Bigger! Bigger!! until finally his whole body began to spasm. When the smoke started curling up out of scalp, his partner cried out and jumped back.

My surge protector couldn’t take any more juice—I had to let go of the cable before my systems crashed. But those few seconds had done the job. The junkie was dead even before his body went limp and tumbled over the side.

His partner panicked and ran as I started hauling myself back up. He turned and fired a parting shot into the remaining billboard strut. I had to dive to one side as the telescreen came off its moorings and followed the junkie over the side. The crash from the street was a bit quieter than a bomb going off in a glass factory.

I leapt to my feet, but the gunman had already disappeared down the fire escape on the roof’s opposite side. I got to the landing just in time to see him jump from the bottom rung and run to a waiting sedan.

I stood and watched helplessly as the car sped away, the rain running in rivulets off my smooth Kevlar-coated skull.

0011

A flash of light from a digi-cam caught the corner of my eye.

I’d been sitting behind my desk watching the activity—the measuring, the note-taking, the murmured asides just before the flash had gone off. The police photographer who’d taken the shot crouched down to get an even closer look at the corpse on my floor.

While some of his fellow officers were down on the street scraping the other body off the pavement, others stood in my office jammed as tightly as commuters on the five o’clock bullet train. Still others were going up and down the hall, following the usual procedures: examining physical damage, questioning other tenants, etc. Hardly a surprise considering it was the same stuff I had been trained to do.

When I was officer RMD3000, I’d even worked with a lot of them—the veterans, anyway. I didn’t know the rookies who were standing to one side, sneaking glances and whispering among themselves. They had only heard stories about androids on the force. Or maybe they had seen us in action when they were still enrolled at the Academy. But ever since my fellow repli-cops and I had been ordered off the force, they considered us pariahs. Some peeked at me like an old-fashioned sideshow freak they couldn’t bring themselves to look at directly.

The vets didn’t have that problem. I knew Marissa Rodriguez—she and I had worked robbery detail together. She was a woman of few words with big brown eyes and an even bigger right cross thanks to her training on the intramural boxing team. Any collar who was dumb enough to whistle at her usually wound up with a tooth or two knocked out, effectively ending his whistling abilities.

Once during an attempted bank heist, I had stepped up and taken a laser shot in my left shoulder that was intended for her. She had always said she ‘owed me one’; judging by how she was staring at me now though, I guess today wouldn’t be the day I’d be collecting.

I had worked cases with Ken Takahashi and Jack Hardaway, too. Takahashi had been the squad’s computer expert back when they were still allowed to use them; Hardaway had almost burned out in Narcotics Division before he transferred to our house. They were both solid cops who now, like Rodriguez, didn’t want to admit to our history together. They knew that if they were seen shooting the breeze with me, it might get them branded as metal-lovers.

But there was one man in the room who still laced his boots up right and didn’t give a good goddamn what others thought. Lieutenant Lou Dreyfuss normally wouldn’t come out of the stationhouse on a call like this but, for old time’s sake, he must have figured he’d better show. Sometimes his presence was the only way to keep any hardcore racists on the squad from going too far with someone like me. A falsified report … an accident while bringing me in … those things certainly wouldn’t have been beneath some of them. Lou was too much of a mensch for that.

After a stint in the army in his native Israel, he decided to emigrate stateside where he then entered the U.S. police academy. His father was a rabbi and had expected his son to follow in his footsteps. That didn’t strike Lou as an exciting career, so he became a cop instead. And it didn’t really strike him as that much of a stretch. As he once told me, Talmud … city and state ordinances … meh! Law’s law, am I right?

After I was bounced off the force, Lou continued to work his way up the ladder the old-school way. He took every crappy assignment without complaint and never had his palm greased once. He made Lieutenant on his first try.

He was a slight man, gray at the temples now and wore wire rim glasses. His mild appearance had fooled more than one perp into underestimating him and throwing the first punch. More times than I can remember Lou would just smile, hand me his glasses and then use Krav maga to beat the snot out of the guy. But he was also the first one to lend a sympathetic ear to someone who’d maybe just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Kind of like me right now as I tried to explain my connection to two dead humans.

All right Raymond, he sighed, rubbing those gray temples. Give it to me again. You’re sure you were here by yourself?

All by my lonesome, I lied. I had arranged a temporary disappearing act for the girl. I didn’t see the point of getting her involved—not till I knew what was really going on with her.

Dreyfuss stared at me. The man was a living, breathing lie detector, even when he was dealing with a non-human. To avoid that gaze of his, I reached down into my desk drawer and pulled out a can of 10W30 and a shot glass.

These mugs just busted in and tried to melt me down for scrap metal. I’ve met some prejudiced people in my time, but …

You’re sure you never saw them before?

That part I didn’t have to make up. I scanned all my data banks, Lou—not a thing. Maybe they were hired by somebody I busted once.

He didn’t look terribly convinced. The other detectives were watching him as much as they were eyeballing me, waiting for a cue as to how this was going to go down. I knew that look of Lou's—the thin-lipped nod when he knew you were holding back but figured you had a decent reason for doing it. I played for time, pouring a shot of black gold down my throat. It went down good and smooth.

I set the glass down and tried to sound nonchalant. Why don’t you let me hook into the old terminal at headquarters? Once I have them ID’ed, I could crosscheck their files with my past cases.

I knew there would have been a mutiny if Lou had agreed; he knew it too. There was no way he could show me any kind of favoritism. For effect, he threw back his shoulders and defiantly lifted his chin. Once you’re off the force, any information is classified. Besides, we haven’t used computers for years now. You know how people feel about machines.

Yeah, I knew. Ever since extremists in Congress had enacted the Information Protection Act, there had been a mandatory halt to all computer use. They had announced it was their duty to protect the citizenry from websites that were critical of the government and it was going to take a while to sort through them all. Of course, it was also a handy excuse for removing all androids from the work force too. One day when all of us were finally deprogrammed or dismantled, everyone agreed that it would be fine for computers to return—just as long as they didn’t have two legs and opinions of their own.

As if on cue, lead detective Lester Flatt strutted up to Dreyfuss. A mean little bastard, he had just squeaked by the force’s height requirement at 5 foot 4. Since then, he’d spent his entire career imposing his Napoleonic complex on anyone he deemed to be looking down on him. Which was hard not to do.

Lieutenant, the M.E.’s done, he announced. He shot a look at me as though there had already been a trial and sentence. We’re ready to take the junk pile downtown.

There was a pause as Dreyfuss weighed his