Night Call Page 13

  When he looked down at what had been thrown at him, his eyes narrowed. It was old — dated 1927 — but still in circulation for good reason. It was titled “The Iron Truth,” and contained information and pictures about the Automatics used in the Great War. About how many had been built and the savagery and number of deaths they’d caused. There was an image of a legion of nearly broken machines slaughtering the enemy, some caked in blood, others crawling through the dirt to strangle and slay the opposition. Another image was a sketch of Automatics standing on a pile of corpses while burning the American flag, with the words Who is next? underneath.

  Allen could see what had begun this new divide in society: fear-mongering with probable cause.

  He leaned back on the bench, deep in thought, watching the people passing by. Automatics might be shunned and frowned upon by many, but he could see a surprising number of them still interacting closely with humans. Groups of Blue-eyes walked with friends — both human and automatic — talking, laughing, drinking. No one seemed to care, as there were far worse things happening down here than humans and Automatics getting along. The ritzier humans among the crowd wore suits or dresses, and were either businessmen or mobsters — or perhaps those were one and the same down here. Allen had been told that sleek fibreglass outfits and sharp, angular designs predominated current fashion, but that didn’t seem to be the case in this area. Lower Manhattan was stuck in the late 1920s, and no “Technossance” would change that until the city cleaned itself up.

  He saw something else when he looked deep into the crowds, something that defied the history books he had read. Men and women were both equal, as were black and white. All humans were equal, all valued above the machines, who were treated like dirt, just like the human slaves of old. All transgressions were forgiven in the name of progress and scapegoating. Human nature reared its ugly head, and again, one society was built upon the backs of another. Hundreds of years of racial tension, and all it had taken to heal those scars was something else for all humans to hate universally.

  Allen was part of the worldwide excuse.

  Looking up at the towering billboards and electronic screens that had recently been unveiled didn’t deter this assumption. The billboards marketed everything from suits to drinks to the latest cars. Television was a burgeoning new technology used by businesses first and foremost to make back the money they spent on the devices. While nothing was overtly anti-Automatic, it was hard not getting that vibe from the advertisements. Ford was “Mankind’s Car.” The slogan for Land in Upstate New York was “The Eyes Are Always Greener Here.” Even postings about jobs and welfare said in big bold letters, “Help for the Working Man.”

  He got up from the bench and merged into the crowd again. He felt like something inside him had sunk down a few leagues. Now, walking shoulder to shoulder with other bipedal creatures, he felt more isolated than he had before. The sight of rust and steel was easier to pick out and identify with than the men and women who surrounded him, giving him suspicious looks because of his blue eyes. The walk to the 5th Precinct was a hard one, but it gave him all the thinking time he needed.

  “Who’s there?”

  Robins’s office was a beacon for Allen in this dark, dreary underbelly of a city. It was late, but it seemed that the commissioner spent more time in his office than he did at home. It was well beyond eleven at night, and Robins was the only one left in the station. All the lights were off except for the one in his office and the one in the hallway leading to it. Allen poked his head in, and Robins relaxed, lowering the gun in his hand down. “Oh, Forty-One. Sorry, I get jumpy this late. What are you doing here?”

  “Commissioner,” Allen began, trying to reciprocate his boss’s formal manner, “shouldn’t there be people working at this hour?”

  “Inspections, son. FBI wanted the floor cleared so they could see if my officers were hiding anything under the floorboards. They aren’t. I’d know about it, after all. But we humour them.” He sipped from a snifter on the desk that sat next to an M1911 pistol. “Can I help you?”

  “I need access to the higher levels of the General Electrics building. It’s for the case Detective Roche and I are following.”

  “I see.” The commissioner didn’t bat an eye. The alcohol was weighing him down. “It’s hard to get jurisdiction to go up there. Only when ‘absolutely necessary,’ they say. They allot only thirty minutes a month. But I’ve been saving them up in case it ever does become absolutely necessary. Best I can get you is about two hours above the Plate. Hell, what am I saying? Roche usually only needs five minutes to get his shit done. You probably won’t even need all that time.”

  “So … you’re giving us access?” Allen asked, puzzled at Robins’s behaviour.

  The commissioner reached into a drawer and grabbed a hard plastic card. He slammed it onto the desk and slid it to the far edge, then went back to his drink, turning to look out the window at the dead fountain outside. Allen approached the desk and took the card.

  “You know what that fountain is?” Allen was caught off guard by the question, but Robins didn’t wait for an answer. “That is a tiered fountain, built in 1862, and designed and crafted by Owen Jones, who helped make the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. They shut off the water back in 1925, and they nearly took the fountain, too.”

  “Fascinating,” Allen said, trying to be as supportive as possible, but unsure of how to proceed.

  “I got them to leave it there. I had to pull some major bureaucratic strings, but thanks to being friends with the mayor … well, it was worth the effort.” He took another sip. “I proposed to my wife in front of that fountain, you know, in 1918. I’d just got back from the War, and I told her that I couldn’t make it through another one if I wasn’t with her. You ever feel something like that for someone, robot?”

  Allen was at a loss, almost choking as he answered, “No, sir.”

  “Didn’t think so. Stuck here talking to a machine. Sounds like my life these days. All work and no thanks, not from no one but my officers. They do too much for this city, and for me. Roche especially. Bastard quit and still can’t get away from this place. We’ll be the death of him, that’s for damn sure.”

  Even inebriated, Robins could be a wealth of information for Allen. He took the liberty of squeezing in a question. “Why did Roche ever leave, sir?”

  “For the same reason I kept that goddamn fountain. You have your access, robot. Get to work.”

  Robins shut his mouth after that, leaving the room in silence except for the groan of the ceiling fan and the roar of passing cars outside. Allen took that as his cue to leave.

  He patted the pocket where he’d stowed the access card as he turned and walked out of the building.

  He headed south once more, toward SoHo. Perhaps Roche would spot him on his way back from his errands up north and pick him up. And then, as though Roche had heard Allen’s mechanical thoughts from across the city, the French Talbot appeared, roaring down the street. Allen waved it down.

  Roche pulled over to the side of the street, pushing the door open as he got out. He was panting and pacing around, and there was panic in his voice as he explained to Allen what had happened up north. His pants and shirt were stained with dirt and mud and other repulsive-smelling substances. An Automatic got out of the passenger seat, likewise slathered in muck, its eyes blue and its servos creaking. The mud had likely gotten into some very hard-to-clean areas.

  It approached Allen, holding out a mud-covered hand. “Toby, friend of Elias. You’re the new partner, huh?”

  Allen didn’t answer, but instead looked over at Roche, who had stretched out his back and calmed his breathing down.

  Roche looked at both machines and nodded at the car. “Get in, Allen. We’ve got some juicy stuff to catch you up on. And we’ve got the evidence we need.”

  “A Neural-Interface?”

  Allen jumped as he heard slamming and shuffling from the trunk of Roche’s car. Toby snickered as it slid ba
ck into its seat.

  Roche scoffed, wiping his nose before pushing his seat forward for Allen to climb into the small cab behind him. “Better — a suspect.”

  CHAPTER 11

  MY TALBOT SCREECHED TO A HALT outside of Karl Jaeger’s shop two hours later. I hopped out along with Toby and unlatched the trunk. The two of us pulled out the Automatic from the back. Rudi struggled in my arms, its flanging voice roaring with anger. A quick disconnection of its arm servos rendered its limbs useless. Allen stepped out of the car slowly and followed us.

  I hammered on the door to Jaeger’s shop. After a moment, we heard tentative footsteps approaching from inside. The door opened several inches to reveal Jaeger clad in pyjamas, his face pale with fear. “What the hell are you doing, Roche?” he whispered, peering behind me.

  “And what the hell is that?”

  “We got you a present. Open up.”

  He did as I asked, and we dragged ourselves in. Jaeger slammed the door shut behind us and locked it, then pulled the window blinds down to prevent anyone from seeing inside. Toby and I sat the Automatic down on a folding chair and bound its legs to the seat with belts. Allen stayed near the door, watching us work.

  “Have you any idea what this looks like?” Jaeger said. “What would any other cop think if they saw you three idiots dragging a robot in here? I’d be thrown back in prison faster than I could say, ‘Don’t look!’”

  “You’re welcome,” I retorted.

  “The fucker’s friends nearly corpsed Roche, here. Besides, we thought you might recognize him.” Toby grabbed the Automatic’s head and turned it around to reveal the faded spot where I had torn off its serial number a few days ago, along with the large identification letters that spelled out RU-D1.

  “Rudi!” Jaeger’s eyes popped wide open and he grabbed the machine’s head himself to inspect the missing voice box and tampered-with electronics. “Where on earth did you find him?”

  “It,” I corrected him. “And that is a story to tell. But I’ve got something even better for you. He’s moving, right?”

  “Of course! Red-eyed as well … how displeasing. This will take so long to reverse —”

  He fell silent as I opened the back of Rudi’s head, revealing that it was empty. “I was right. This was the Red-eye that shot up the Prince and Greene speakeasy. Seven other Automatic shells tried to do me in at the dumping ground where we found it.”

  Jaeger peered inside. As he pushed his hands into the tiny space, his eyes widened even more. “Impossible … impossible! He’s moving, acting, trying to kill you!”

  “With no brain. Interesting, huh?” I smirked with self-satisfaction and walked off to lean against a nearby desk. Allen joined me. “How’d you fare?” I asked it.

  “Good, Detective. I was able to get us access to the restricted areas of the General Electrics building. We have a Police Access Card, which will serve as our temporary warrant for anything above the Plate, so to speak.”

  “Excellent.” Things were working out — that was a first.

  Jaeger dragged a small table over to Rudi and set up a terminal and some wiring kits behind it. He pushed his fingers along the seams of Rudi’s neck, finding what appeared to be a loose plate in the back and flipping it up to reveal a hole — about one and a quarter inch in diameter. He retreated to the back to root around before returning with the appropriate plug and jabbing it into the machine. Rudi’s shell lurched once before the terminal took over.

  Jaeger held a flashlight in his teeth as he peered into Rudi’s empty cranium at what was left of the Neural-Interface’s wiring. He clearly wasn’t in an equitable mood, but we had work to do with this machine. It was Allen who took the initiative to remind him.

  “I know this might be difficult, but could you run through the possible places it’s been in the past four days?”

  Allen had tried to sound empathetic, but Jaeger would have none of it. “Difficult? Difficult is searching a two-storey house for a single termite. Trying to narrow down locations through a Cortex is like dropping a penny from five miles above the Plate into a teacup. The amount of data Rudi has collected in the last few days will be a nightmare to sift through, and because I’m the only person who knows even a fraction of what it takes to build an Automatic, you two won’t be much help.”

  “Good to see your humility is on point with your intellect.” I sat down in a chair and put up one leg on an adjacent table as I tilted back. “You’ll still do it, though.”

  “Of course I will. No one takes my machine without finding themselves in deep shit after. It’ll take some effort, though. The Cortex isn’t the easiest to interpret.”

  “And why’s that?” I genuinely had no clue what he was talking about. But any bit of information could help.

  “The Cortex detects the Automatic’s location longitudinally from the magnetism of the North Pole, reading its location east and west, but it can’t discern distances north or south. Instead, it cross-references with towers across the country which supplement those coordinates, allowing the Automatic to triangulate and receive accurate information as to its location from almost anywhere. But, if it’s outside the range of those towers, then it’s dead in the water. It would tell you it’s at seventy-seven degrees west, but its location could either be Washington, DC, or some godawful city in South America.”

  “And which towers would it use as reference near here?”

  “The one tower big enough to be picked up by every Automatic in the city is GE.”

  I stood up and went to the door, opening it just as the sun was appearing, illuminating the street beyond the blinds. I peered at the behemoth of a building looming in the distance.

  “Thankfully the Cortex is often separate from the Neural-Interface and is stored somewhere in the carapace. Bootleggers used to think they could saw off an Automatic’s head and steal the parts without being tracked. Dummköpfe.”

  “Yeah, perps tried to do that to me back in ’24. Did not go well for them.” Toby chuckled to itself.

  “That Cortex do anything else, Jaeger?” I might not have known much about Automatics, but since we had access to GE, I wanted to kill as many birds as I could with the stone Allen was holding.

  “I’ve never tinkered with it, but as it’s powerful enough to receive signals from and broadcast to the reference towers at GE, it must do something else.”

  I shut the door and walked back into the room. The workshop was silent other than the sound of Jaeger typing on the terminal. Even Toby wasn’t in the mood for talking. Maybe he’d used this incident as an excuse not to go to work today.

  I took it upon myself to wander around the shop. I hadn’t gotten the best look a few days before. As far as I could tell, Jaeger wasn’t currently repairing or servicing any other Automatics; this must be a slow season for him. He’d have to sell actual goods for cash.

  Allen finally piped up. “Would it be possible to connect his Cortex with me?”

  Jaeger glanced up from his work. “And why on earth would I do that?”

  “Because I could work with the data faster than you could manually on a terminal. After all, I have a more complex system, which may be able to parse data faster than a terminal could.”

  “You seem to doubt my abilities. What would make you more adept than I?”

  “I’m merely saying the idea is feasible, as it would save time decrypting and mapping out coordinate locations across the city. I could process the data myself and find out Rudi’s precise movements over the past several days. No offence to you, of course, but any method to achieve our collective goal more quickly would be the best method.”

  Jaeger looked stunned — likely by being schooled at his own craft by an Automatic and by realizing that his own hubris was a problem in and of itself. He beckoned to Allen, who grabbed a chair and sat down next to Rudi. Jaeger strung several wires together and prepared to connect the two machines. “You could not have mentioned this idea sooner?” he asked.

  �
�I wasn’t sure whether your plug would fit into my terminal.” Jaeger scanned the back of Allen’s head for several moments. “I do believe it would be better if I were standing for this procedure,” Allen said.

  “Nonsense. Be quiet.” I walked over to watch the two brainiacs at work. Jaeger popped open Allen’s head and froze. He dropped the cords and gaped. My jaw nearly dropped as well. Even Toby’s blue eyes seemed to open wider.

  Allen wasn’t lying — it had a brain. Or something very similar to one, at least.

  From the back, the contraption looked quite brain-like, but instead of fleshy grey mounds, the organ inside Allen’s head was luminescent and looked to be built out of brilliant crystal. The material felt as tough as steel. The crystal bumps and curves weaved through the head, electrical signals and fluids zipping through the clear tubes. It glowed like a gem, running like an engine, but moving and conforming like a living thing, learning and adapting.

  Jaeger’s eyes begged for answers.

  “He’s supposedly a Synthian, whatever those are. New robots, but … they’re different … as you can probably tell.” I backed away, leaving Jaeger and Toby to keep looking inside Allen’s head.

  “It’s miraculous. Mein Gott.”

  “Fucker’s holding out on us, huh?” Toby added.

  “I was attempting to inform Mr. Jaeger that the ports that connect me to basic Automatic devices are located on my torso and neck, but I think this has been too overwhelming an experience for him. If you could, Detective, please insert the plug into the port.”

  “Not the most comfortable sentence to hear …” I took the cords from the floor and scanned Allen’s neck, finding a node about the size of the plugs where its lower neck vertebrae would be. I jacked the cord in, saw Allen stiffen up, and gave it time to run through the immense volume of data coming from Rudi.

  Seconds later, Allen removed the cord itself, closing its head, then stood and approached the desk with the terminal. “A map, if you don’t mind, Mr. Jaeger.”