Neural Wraith, page 43
Kate’s face reddened. “I am. But when requested, I can alter the ingredients.”
“You mean you can make whiskey sours with egg whites, and only egg whites?” Hammond ground out. “None of this egg yolk bullshit?”
Once again, Kate gave that slow blink of hers. “I can try…”
“You have got to be kidding me,” Hammond grumbled. “Make me one with an egg white. Don’t come back until you do.”
Nick strongly suspected that Kate might not come back. Her programming appeared to be more intricate than intentionally making clumsy mistakes.
She toddled back off to the bar, presumably to make Hammond’s drink. Everybody else stared glumly at their sours.
“Perhaps I shall order something else,” Rie said.
“Try it, at least,” Hammond said.
They did. Nick tried not to make a face.
“I don’t think egg yolk goes with a sour,” he said diplomatically. “It’s kind of… cloying.”
“It’s off,” Rie said while swirling the concoction. “It’s horribly imbalanced. Like sour eggnog.”
“It’s one of the specials of the bar,” Hammond said, raising his own glass. Nick noticed that it appeared untouched. “Part of the secret menu.”
“I thought those went out of fashion,” Nick said.
“Fucked if I know. Why would I go to the hipster holes that would actually have one?”
As Nick and Hammond began to bicker, Chloe slipped off to the bar. When she returned, it was with two beers and a cola. Given the cola was for Rie, Nick suspected it was highly alcoholic.
“No drink for me?” Hammond asked.
“Kate is… preparing something,” Chloe said.
They looked over at the bartender, who had a dozen whiskey sours in front of her. All of them were very orange. Hammond groaned and slipped out of the booth.
“I’ve been tricked,” he said. “I bet she’s programmed to do this if anybody tries to get around the egg yolk.”
Nick and the others watched in silence while Hammond argued with Kate for close to a minute. Eventually, she removed the drinks from the bar and poured him a beer. Her expression was deeply confused.
The detective appeared as though he had fought and lost a war when he returned. “I feel like I’ve been fined for kicking a puppy.”
“Are you sure she’s not intentionally doing this?” Nick asked.
“She’s a doll, Nick. Programmed to do stupid things because that’s what makes money.”
Kate reverted to her power saving state and went completely still. But Nick knew she had eyes and ears even like this.
After all, last time they’d been drinking, she’d had the presence of mind to intervene when Hammond had become upset. Nick chalked Kate up as a mystery, but one he wanted to dig into later.
“Now that we actually have drinks, shall we toast to your promotions?” Rie suggested.
Hammond grunted and raised his beer. Everyone joined in the toast, but no words were spoken as they clinked their glasses together. Chloe waited until Nick took a sip before copying him.
“Can’t say this is how I expected to be promoted. Or that I expected to be promoted at all,” Hammond said, staring at a point just over Nick’s shoulder.
“Kushiel said you used to be a hotshot Cipher,” Nick said. “Surely you expected a promotion back then?”
The older man chuckled bitterly. “She said that? Wow. Only nice thing she’s ever said about me, I bet.” A pause. “Yeah, I guess that’s true. Feels like so long ago, though. Twenty damn years since I really cared.”
Nick worried that this was about to go the same way the previous conversation had, but Hammond merely sighed.
“I read the report. Not sure what to think about Lieu now. He joined the department at the same time I…” Hammond trailed off. “Well, we didn’t finish our last topic, did we? Back when we were drinking here last time.”
“We don’t have to,” Nick said hurriedly.
Hammond waved off his concern. “It’s fine. I haven’t spent an hour staring at graves and musing over regrets. My old man fought in the riots. Was one of the beat cops who stood down rather than murder innocents. Despite the stories, lots of others didn’t do the same, but it didn’t matter. The Spires sent the military in and the rest is history.”
Nick and the others remained silent.
“He was never the same after that. The Spires held a grudge and drummed out the patrol officers once they brought in the Liberators. I got hired on to maintain the robots that took my old man’s job, and he just congratulated me over it.” Hammond’s lips thinned and his expression tightened. “Years later, I found him dead in his apartment. He joined a lot of his friends in the cemetery over the road.”
“For emergency personnel who died or were injured during the riots,” Nick said quietly.
Hammond nodded. “Lotta people opposed giving him a grave marker. I called in some favors, but that was the end of me. I finally looked into what the hell happened and saw what the department had become. Good or bad, the Spires had thinned the ranks. And a lot more of the bad floated to the top after the riots. It became hard to care.”
“And Lieu?”
“Didn’t seem that bad. There’s a saying about not assuming evil where incompetence can be blamed. Well, that seemed to be Lieu. He knew how to grease wheels, even if he was full of shit. So many of his contemporaries are shitbags, though. The choice is between the incompetent, the corrupt, and the outright fucking malevolent.”
“Those are your contemporaries now,” Rie said.
“Don’t fucking remind me,” Hammond said as he polished off his beer. “I somehow became the last man standing in the bureau. With the way the commissioner is going, I might be the last man standing in the entire fucking department.”
“Planning to fire me?” Nick asked.
Chuckling, Hammond tried to flag down Kate. She remained motionless.
“Kate, another beer,” he called out.
She shot to life and began pouring one for him.
“You killed my predecessor. Who knows, maybe I’m next,” Hammond told Nick.
“Depends how much paperwork you dump on me.”
A brief lull followed their joking words. Nick drunk his beer during it, but was unsure how to fill the silence. Rie stared at him, while Hammond seemed lost in his own world.
“What was Lieu’s actual plan?” Hammond abruptly asked. “That part was censored in the report. Had military censor marks all over it.”
Nick shifted uncomfortably and looked at Kate. The bartender doll brought over a single beer, then returned to her position. Every step she took seemed to take too long.
“Officially, I shouldn’t talk about it,” he said.
“Well, duh. So if it’s that dangerous—”
“It’s mostly embarrassing. For the military.”
Hammond blinked, then sighed. “Right. So it’s corruption.”
“Pretty much,” Nick said. “What I will say is that Lieu’s plan was to fight back. Create or exploit another riot and bring down the Spires, but do so with a weapon system that he thought could match the sophistication of the Archangels.”
“Right, and the military just left that out in the fucking open. Sheesh.” Hammond swigged his beer and hung an arm over the back of the booth. “So he was off the deep end, but driven by ideology. Still stupid, but… I dunno, just really fucking dumb.”
“He managed to stay hidden this long.”
Hammond grunted.
Given the heaviness of the subject, Nick figured he should change the topic. He opened his mouth to do so, but was beaten to the punch.
“Says a lot about the Spires that you can’t tell the idiots from the madmen,” Hammond said. “The department had been hacked away so badly that Lieu looked like a symptom of the system, rather than a bad actor.”
“Perhaps he was a symptom of the system,” Rie said, finally adding to the conversation.
Hammond looked at her sidelong, then inclined his head. “Maybe. He got brought into this shithole without any say in the matter, same as you. Same as me. Difference was he tried to do something.”
“Will you?”
“My job, probably. Although you and the Archangels seem pretty keen to do it for me. Try to keep them in line, Nick.” Hammond raised his beer with a grin.
That seemed like as good a time as any to change the subject. They swept into lighter topics for the next couple of hours, before Hammond stumbled out of the bar. Meta took his place.
“The Host shall escort Detective Hammond back to his home,” she told Nick. “We will record this absence as medical.”
Nick snorted. “What, he suffered from an onslaught of alcohol in a bar?”
“The Mark 1s did not directly witness his alcoholic consumption. The cause of his symptoms is a mystery.”
Cute. They’d preached a different story when Nick had been hungover. If they could detect ethanol in his breath, then this cover story wouldn’t hold up.
But who would check it?
He looked at the dolls sitting around him, who appeared to be conversing with Meta in their neural network.
Lieu had feared the power that dolls would give the Spires and what it would ultimately lead to. In doing so, he’d delivered that power.
The Archangels had almost complete power over the security of Neo Babylon, with few checks and balances. The only humans with the knowledge to oversee them were an embittered old man with complicated feelings toward dolls, and a new detective who was in cahoots with the Archangels.
Somehow, Nick knew this would only create problems in the future.
His phone buzzed, and he pulled it out. Rie looked over at him with a concerned expression, but said nothing.
A message from an unknown sender sat in his inbox. Despite the complete lack of identifying information, the message had somehow evaded spam filters. Nick scratched his head, and his hand hovered over the delete button.
Another message arrived from the same sender. This one read, Don’t delete it, Detective Waite.
He looked up at Rie, who merely grimaced at him.
Curious, he opened the original message. It contained an image and a short burst of text.
I should thank you, Detective. The Host’s activity levels are higher than ever and I’m undergoing one final upgrade. But I much prefer to say things in person. You don’t seem like a man in need of purification, as much as a man who might deliver it.
The hell did that mean? Nick scratched his head. Then he checked the message.
It was an image of Leon Welk standing in front of dozens of Mark 3s. The man wore a white lab coat, but his blonde hair had grown out to become unbearably long and thick. Despite being a still image, Nick could see the quiet energy in the man. The strands of gray visible in his hair were a reminder that Welk was getting on in years.
So Nick’s old boss was still active behind-the-scenes.
“Should I even have this?” he asked Rie.
“No,” she said flatly. “But if Ezekiel has managed to evade Sigma’s security, it is unlikely they are aware of it. You should delete it, however. The Host will automatically preserve it once they read it.”
Chloe and Meta froze, as if caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
“So it was your younger sister,” Nick said, looking back at the photo.
It didn’t contain any signs of a prototype model. Presumably, she was the one taking the photo.
“What the hell does purification mean?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Rie said. “But Ezekiel has fundamentally different objectives than us.”
“You and Kushiel have fairly different objectives as well.”
“I’m speaking about the entire Host.”
He grimaced. That changed things.
However, he didn’t delete the messages. All evidence that he’d known Welk had been erased years ago. This was the first time he’d seen his old boss since Neural Spike had been shut down.
“Even if these are preserved by the Host, what makes it any different to your plans? If Sigma discovers those, that’s just as problematic. And they haven’t yet.”
“Perhaps.” Rie shifted uncomfortably. “One of the requests I had for you was to alter our directives so that we could hide data from Sigma. They rarely scan our neural net, but if we’re programmed to hide it, then that won’t matter.”
Nick slipped his phone into his pocket. Chloe and Meta took that as permission to move again, and presumably rifled through his phone’s contents.
“Nick?” Rie asked. “I had wanted to confirm your words from that night. You said you were ready, but…”
“I am,” he said, with a meaningful glance at Kate. “I’ve had a lot of time to think lately. Especially about how much things have improved since we met. But I’ve also been able to pay attention to Babylon itself and see how much things have worsened out there.”
Rie smiled at him and reached out with a hand. It closed over his and he laced his fingers through hers.
They were as cold and stiff as always. The fingers of a war machine. But he knew her better than that.
“Does this mean you will finally conduct maintenance on us?” Chloe asked, eyes bright. “There is a very long queue.”
“A queue?”
“Yes. Every Archangel in the Host has been ordered from first to last. We have been waiting for you to be ready to maintain us properly, Nick.”
Meta nodded rapidly in agreement. Somehow, he felt that this pair were near the front of that queue.
“Uh, I’m sure we can start soon,” he said.
“Excellent. How about this afternoon?”
“I’ll think about it. The Paladins are a higher priority, as I need to update their directives before the department will let them inside the Spire.”
Chloe scowled at him, but he merely drank his beer in response.
Things truly had improved over the past few weeks, he thought. Even if they were dolls, he had rarely gone out and drank socially like this.
What he needed to do was prevent it all from crashing down around his ears. To do that, he should actually learn his new job.
And find out what this purification thing was about.
For now, he enjoyed the moment. He could worry about work another day.
“Kate, four more beers,” Nick called out to the bartender.
END OF BOOK 1
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ALSO BY K.D. ROBERTSON
DEMON’S THRONE SERIES
Demon’s Throne
Demon’s Throne 2
Demon’s Throne 3
HERETIC SPELLBLADE SERIES
Heretic Spellblade 1
Heretic Spellblade 2
Heretic Spellblade 3
Heretic Spellblade 4
NEURAL WRAITH SERIES
Neural Wraith
AN EMPIRE REFORGED SERIES
Emperor Forged (Book 1)
Emperor Awakened (Book 2)
K.D. Robertson, Neural Wraith
