Android: Golem (The Identity Trilogy) (10 page)

“Leave that man and go to your partner.”

“I can’t do that, sir.”

“You don’t leave your partner.”

“Sir, she left me.”

Ormond cursed. “Detective Nolan. Shelly.” He knew her on a personal level, not just from work. He had trained her as an investigator. And he’d been the first to protest her acceptance of me as a partner.

“Stay out of my head, Emil. I’m busy.” Shelly was breathless, hurried. “Drake, when you get free, the perp has reached the hopper pad.”

She knew the man I was tending was going to die. So did I, but I was locked to him and couldn’t move. The programming was relentless and unbreakable.

I mapped the egress to the hopper pad from the hotel schematic. The buzz of the nanobots remained constant and my leg’s articulation slowly crawled back toward normal.

With a final cough, the man I was tending to died. His life signs flatlined. I suspected the aortic arch had been nicked after all, as I had feared.

I pushed myself to my feet and hurried toward the hopper pad egress. My damaged leg slowed me and threw me off my balance. “Dispatch, the perpetrator is dead. I am en route to Detective Nolan.”

“Hurry.” That was Ormond, not Dispatch.

I took hold of the rungs that led up to the hopper pad. The route was an emergency entrance for firefighters that might need access to the water standpipes in the top floor. I hauled myself up. “How far out are the support units?”

“Uniform hopper ETA is one minute thirty-seven seconds.”

“Affirmative.” The emergency door overhead had been left open. Rain sluiced into the duct and spattered my face as I crawled out onto the rooftop.

*

The rainstorm had grown stronger and now whipped across the rooftop. Despite the gutters built around the roof, water stood two centimeters deep in most places.

Lightning flared across the sky, searing the darkness like a brand. The rain diluted the Synap’s effectiveness, range, and strength because it had been designed as a passive weapon. The charge automatically began powering down under the existing conditions.

I ran as best as I could with the damaged leg. I dodged hoppers and chased moving shadows created by the lightning and the surrounding neon lights of other businesses.

Halfway across the rooftop, I spotted Shelly running along the building’s edge. She held her weapon in both hands, concentrating on the line of hoppers to her right. I focused on the hoppers as well, and I saw the third man before she did.

He stood in the shadows of a large luxury hopper. His back was to the vehicle. Panic etched his face. He was a man with no way out and he knew it, but he couldn’t go down without a fight. He lifted his pistol and took aim.

“
Shelly!
” My voice amplified to public address loudness, tearing across the rooftop in a deafening boom. I’d hoped to startle the man as I lifted my Synap.

TARGET IS BEY—

I ignored the script and fired. The Synap pulsed and the blue bolt leaped across the intervening distance. The man lit up bright blue, but he remained unaffected and on his feet.

He squeezed the trigger of his weapon as Shelly turned.

The bullet struck her. I saw her jerk backward and tumble slowly over the roof’s edge.

Calculating the distance and the necessary effort, I threw the Synap at the same time I changed direction and raced toward Shelly. The weapon flew through the air and struck the assassin in the head, rendering him unconscious.

I flung myself forward the last few meters as Shelly went over the side head-first. I locked a hand around her ankle, stopped her fall, and gently drew her back onto the rooftop.

She didn’t move. She didn’t say anything.

The pulse in her foot was already gone.

When I got her onto the rooftop, I saw the bullet hole in her forehead just above her left eye.

The support team arrived forty-nine seconds later. I held Shelly until they took her from me.
 

Chapter Eight

The day the NAPD buried Shelly, rain filled the city.

I don’t know what prompted me to go to the funeral. There was nothing I could do, no benefit to be gained by anyone. I could not replace what Kurt Nolan and his two daughters—Shelly’s children—had lost, nor could I offer them solace.

I didn’t have the words, other than the impersonal responses I had in my cache dedicated to dealing with victims at a crime scene. Once I made contact with bereaved victims, my first order of business was to find them appropriate human counseling.

At the church, I sat in the back row and reviewed my personality index, looking for something that might have crept through the neural channeling that would guide me in what I was supposed to do. I didn’t truly
feel
anything. My emotions had been effectively negated during the personality transfer, allowing me to operate coolly and calmly within the parameters established by the Three Directives.

Shelly was gone and there was nothing I could do about that. I accepted it the same way I accepted the sun coming up. Her death was a fact.

I missed Shelly. With her, I’d had a certain amount of stimulus. We’d had work to do. For the last three days since her death, I’d shown up at work and sat at our desks. I’d talked to no one and no one had talked to me. I’d waited for assignments that didn’t come.

On the day of the funeral, Lieutenant Ormond told me not to come in. Since I had nowhere else to go, I went to the funeral. Sitting at home by myself had seemed…incomplete. I couldn’t explain it any better than that.

Everyone dressed in black. Kurt was there in a black suit. His two daughters, in black dresses, stood at his side. The youngest daughter, Susan, came to me and took me by the hand. Not wishing to hurt her feelings, I let her pull me up to join the family.

During the graveside service, Susan pulled me down so she could speak in my ear. “I know you can’t cry for Mommy, so I’ll cry for you.”

“Thank you.” I didn’t know what else to say. I stood at Susan’s side and we got through the service.

After the service, Kurt took Susan by the hand and looked at me with pain and anger. “You should have been there for her. She should have had a real cop at her side.”

I didn’t argue. A real cop would have had a real gun and would have killed the man who had killed Shelly. But, a real cop would have died earlier in the building. If things had been different, they would have been different, but there were no guarantees that the outcome would have been affected. If the man’s aim had been better with the 20mm rifle, I wouldn’t have been there either. No one seemed to acknowledge that.

I continued standing at the gravesite, not knowing what to do, as the rain pelted the ground and streams ran through the grass and into the open hole. Soon, everyone left and I stood there and watched the casket lowered into the rainwater and mud. A backhoe scooped sloppy dirt into the hole and covered Shelly’s body.

It seemed like a bad place for her body to be, but I knew Shelly was no longer there.

When night came, I went home. I had nowhere else to go.

*

The next morning, I showed up at work again. I checked the bulletin board where all the assignments were listed. I had no work to do. I had no new partner to do it with. I didn’t know what was to become of me.

There was a possibility that I could be deactivated, sent back to Haas-Bioroid, and repurposed. I didn’t care for that scenario. Everything that was me, everything that I had become, would be erased. Even though I knew the feeling was illogical and couldn’t really sway me, I felt unsettled.

I exchanged one office for another, slipping away into the virtual reality inside my programming where I sat at another desk and didn’t know what to do.
 

During the last seven years of my life, I had never seen a single day when I didn’t have an agenda or a plan.

I needed work.

*

Craig Dormoth, one of the newest detectives, talked to me that afternoon. He was young, blond, and in good shape—one of the men that other detectives didn’t care for so much because he was constantly pushing to achieve. Shelly had told me that Craig was a detective that would move through the department quickly. I thought other detectives realized that, too, and many of them were jealous.

“Drake, can I talk to you for a moment?”

“Of course.” He was already talking to me.

He started to get Shelly’s chair, then hesitated a moment and got a chair from a neighboring desk. He sat and looked at me. “I know this has to be hard.”

“Are you referring to Shelly’s death?” Sometimes it was confusing trying to understand what humans were talking about in their conversations. Shelly had always taken the time to spell out the things I needed to know, making sure I comprehended what she wished me to.

“Yes, I am.”

“All right.” I waited.

“How are you doing?”

“I am fine. Thank you.” That was one of the earliest programmed responses. Humans liked to think that everyone was fine so I always answered that I was fine.

“Have you thought about talking to anyone?”

The question confused me. “I am talking to you.”

Craig shook his head. “Not me. Someone else. Someone…someone you might need to talk to.”

“There is no one I need to talk to. I have no assignments. There is no investigation to pursue.”

“I mean, someone to talk to about Shelly’s death.”

I thought about that for a moment. “I don’t think so. As far as I’m aware, everyone that needs to know Shelly is dead knows this is the case. I have filled out all the requisite forms, made all the vid tapes, and I’ve outlined that night and its events for the forspec teams. Everything that could be known about that night is known.”

Except for who hired the assassins that killed Cartman Dawes. And Shelly. I found myself caught in an endless loop regarding those loose ends. The assassins had been bought and paid for through a prepaid credaccount. So far, none of the cybtech specialists had been able to penetrate the shell companies to ferret out the source of the payment.

I wanted to work that angle myself, but I had not been assigned to the case and my programming disallowed independent investigation of cases dispersed to other detectives. Many of the subroutines within bioroids serving corporations or departments dealt with no-competition parameters. Bioroids had been created to assist and augment human effort, not supplant it.

Craig remained focused on me. “I’m talking about you—someone you could talk to in order to get this all sorted out for yourself.”

“I don’t know anything that needs sorting.”

“I know that you two were close.”

“Yes.” I knew he was talking about more than merely physical proximity.

Craig hesitated. “You have to be feeling something about losing her.”

“I don’t have feelings that way. Thank you for your concern.”

Still, he didn’t give up. “Isn’t there someone at Haas-Bioroid that could work with you? To make certain you’re okay?”

“My leg and side have been repaired. I am once again operating at one hundred percent efficiency. Thank you for your concern.”

“I’m not talking about your physical well-being. I’m talking about your emotional state.”

“I have no emotional state.”

Craig peered intently at me. I had seen Shelly do this at times, too, as if somehow doubting what she saw before her. “Part of you used to be human, Drake. Isn’t there anything of that left?”

“I was never human.” On the day of Shelly’s funeral, when I saw how greatly her death affected her family, I saw how disabling an emotion complex could be. I did not wish for it.

“The neural patterning, or whatever it’s called, started from a human.”

“Yes.”

“None of this touches that part of you?”

“That part was a foundation for me. It no longer exists.”

Craig stood, looking weary. He placed his hand on my shoulder, and that small gesture reminded me of Shelly. I did not remove his hand, though I wanted to.
 

His voice was soft when he spoke. “If you decide you do need something, someone to talk to, let me know. If I can help, I will.”

“Thank you.”

Craig walked away and I knew that somehow I had disappointed him. Around me, the other detectives made disparaging comments about me, bioroids, and Ghandi guns.

I sat at my desk and continued to wait for work.

*

The following morning, I left my flat at my usual time and was confronted by a group of hard-faced men just outside my door. I stood there with my arms at my sides, but I automatically uploaded their images to the facial recognition database.

Four of them were Human First members who had criminal records for illegal demonstrations and property damage. The property damage in all cases related to the attempted destruction of bioroids.

The Human First movement was a growing concern in New Angeles, on the Moon, and on Mars. They stood against all forms of androids integrating with the human world, bioroids as well as clones. The men in this group had a history that focused on bioroids.