Code of Vengeance: The Complete Collection, page 14
Now it was Nat’s turn to shake her head. “No. He threw the guards around some, but none of them suffered anything beyond a bump or bruise, well within the tolerances of most AI programming. I’m talking about real harm.”
Bryce’s eyes narrowed. “You want him to kill someone.”
She wouldn’t admit it out loud.
His eyes continued to study her, looking her up and down. She got the uncomfortable feeling that he was somehow looking into the core of her being. She didn’t believe in souls, but if she did, he was looking at hers.
Bryce looked like there was a lot he wanted to say, but he didn’t. He played his cards close to his chest.
“Now do you see why I don’t want you as part of this? Proskey Enterprises and Sapiens First are searching for us. You already suspect this. You’re in danger from both sides, playing the middle of this game. Give me a few days. This can’t last much longer. Let me get the evidence. This is so much larger than you or me.”
He leaned back. “Fine. You’ve got a few days.”
She glared at him. “Really?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. You’ve given me a new direction to focus my investigation. I’ll look deeper into Proskey Enterprises. Given what I know, the process will take a few days. That will take the heat off you, for a while at least. But once I have the answers, I’m coming after you. You are a felon, after all.”
It was as good as she was going to get from him. She knew that. She stood up.
“Wait,” he said. “There is one more question I have. One thing I don’t understand. Why were the two of you visiting Kleon in the first place?”
She debated answering, but figured it might actually help her cause. “The robot was tracking down members of Sapiens First.”
He nodded, as though that explanation made perfect sense. She turned around.
“Stay safe, Detective Lewis.”
“Bryce,” he automatically replied. “For what it’s worth, you too.”
Chapter Twelve
Bryce twirled the ice in his glass, long ago emptied of scotch. His body, acting almost on impulse, stood up and refilled the glass, higher than before. He glanced at the glass as though seeing the drink for the first time, then downed it in a single swallow. He wandered over to his gun and picked it up off the floor. For a moment, he considered trying to get DNA off of it, but there was no point. He wouldn’t learn anything he didn’t already know. Returning to his liquor cabinet, he poured himself a more reasonable glass.
Sighing, he fell back into his couch, careful not to spill any of his scotch.
The girl had scared him half to death.
Better than most people, Bryce understood security was largely an illusion. But to have that illusion shattered was still terrifying. He focused on his breath, allowing his adrenaline to slowly subside.
He had come close to panicking there. Only the girl’s calm demeanor at the beginning saved him. It had been years since he’d had a weapon pointed at him, and the fear was still indescribable.
Before he could forget anything the girl said, he pulled out his phone and started taking notes. Then he paused. He was dealing with a hacker. If she was good enough to hack into the national identity registry, she was good enough to hack into his phone. That was probably how she already knew so much about him.
He reached over to the side table and grabbed a notebook from the drawer, taking his notes in pen before he could forget them all.
He had been mostly honest with the girl. When he got to the office tomorrow, he would dig deeper into Proskey Enterprises. There was no way to be certain, but he was confident the girl hadn’t lied to him when she said she hadn't killed Kleon.
By process of elimination, that meant Proskey, or someone close to him, had done the deed.
Bryce’s story crystallized in his imagination. The girl and the robot visit Kleon for information on Sapiens First. Who knows what information they find, but when they leave, Kleon calls his superiors. Maybe Clive Proskey, although Bryce doubted it.
Then Sapiens First came and killed Kleon?
The thought seemed extreme. Sapiens First had certainly been known to be violent. There were news reports of that aplenty. But killing their own members? That indicated something more, but of what, Bryce didn’t have any clue. The only way to know would be to ask Proskey, and that had a snowball’s chance in hell of working.
But he wasn’t only going to dive into Proskey Enterprises. The girl had given too much of herself away, her inexperience showing. Come tomorrow morning, Bryce would find out who his mystery girl really was.
Bryce arrived early at the office the next morning, before the summer sun had even risen. Despite the late-night intrusion, he had slept like a baby, only waking up after his third alarm. The entire drive in, he mulled over his next steps.
By the time he arrived at his desk, he had a plan.
His first order of business was to requisition all the information he could on Proskey Enterprises. He had little doubt the request would get hung up in red tape for at least half the day, so he spent his waiting time productively.
The girl was after robots. More specifically, she was after AI. She wasn’t alone. There were plenty of people who had concerns over the intrusion of AI into their lives. But few took it to the extremes this girl had. She was threatening police and involved in a murder investigation. She seemed a decent sort, but she was driven. That was abundantly clear in their meeting.
To Bryce’s mind, that meant trauma.
He pulled up his AI assistant, smiling gently at the irony, and started searching.
He began by searching police records for accidents or crimes involving robots. The list was a long one, although not as long as firebrands on the television shows wanted people to believe. He guessed the girl was somewhere between eighteen and twenty-five. To be safe, he included in the search parameters ages fifteen through thirty.
The list was chopped almost in half.
His next step was an assumption, but one that he felt good enough about.
The girl was a local. She stayed close to the areas she was comfortable.
A search radius of a hundred miles narrowed the search considerably. There were only twenty-two cases.
He decided that was enough and started researching each one.
By the tenth file, he worried that his hunches hadn’t been correct.
By the fourteenth, he had found his mysterious hacker.
Her real name was Natalie Hunter, aged twenty-three, with a last known address out in the suburbs. She had a full set of biometric data, and from what he had seen of her, the description was close.
He read through her story with interest. When she was fourteen, she had a promising future in front of her. Top marks in all her classes, a particular interest in programming and technology. She had been on track to graduate a year early. Then the accident occurred, the incident that changed her life forever.
The police report was slim. The parents had been out of the house on a date. Natalie was supposed to be babysitting her young brother, Jack, who had just turned two. They had a robot housekeeper as well, and from all accounts, it should have been a pretty normal night.
Except it wasn’t.
There had been a gate above the stairs, safely containing the bedrooms where the two siblings slept. All that was truly known was that Jack had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck. Natalie had discovered him. A horrible story, but Bryce didn’t make connections until he dove into the interview with Natalie. The audio transcription was there, and he was certain he had the right girl. It was the same voice he’d heard last night, just younger. For a few seconds, it gave him chills.
Natalie’s version of events was different. She claimed she ordered the housekeeping robot to keep a constant eye on Jack. From the house logs, the robot had been downstairs. No record of such order was found.
More pieces clicked into place.
Natalie claimed the robot had destroyed the evidence of the order to protect itself.
Evidence presented to the police from the robot company disproved her claims. The robot had acted within parameters at all times.
The case was open and shut for the police. There was no evidence of foul play, and accidents happen.
But not for Natalie, he supposed.
He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what it had been like for her, seeing her young brother dead at the foot of the stairs. She lost a brother, someone she must have loved very much.
He knew what that was like. To have something you love taken from you before you’re ready. It opens a hole not easily repaired.
Cynthia had been his first love. Sure, they’d had ten years together, far more than Natalie and her brother, but he understood. He’d never recovered after losing her either.
Heck, he’d never even been on a date since she passed away. He just threw himself into the work.
But that was Natalie’s reason. That was her why, her motive. Even after all these years, she was willing to risk her life to prove that robots could harm humans.
Bryce leaned back in his chair.
What if her story was true? There was an annoying lack of solid evidence in Jack’s case. Of course, she could have just been fourteen and forgotten what she said, but the important thing was that she believed. She was willing to shake the foundations of their society for vindication. But if she was right, and she could prove it, perhaps she could change the course of the future.
He rubbed his eyes to clear his thoughts. The bigger questions of right and wrong weren’t for him. He was a policeman, and he upheld the law. That was his life. It was all he knew.
He shrugged to himself. The philosophical debate didn’t really matter. Knowing the girl’s real name didn’t help his investigation in any immediate, concrete way. She still avoided any biometric detection, and knowing her real name didn’t change that. He could bring a stronger case against her if it ever came before a judge, but he feared this was a case that would end in the morgue, not the courtroom.
Without warning, a message flashed across his screen.
Everything he’d been looking at disappeared. The message was simple.
“You promised.”
In its place, hundreds of files started downloading onto his desktop. He clicked a few of them open, knowing it was Natalie sending him a message.
Inside was everything he could have asked for. Balance sheets and income statements from Proskey Enterprises. Internal memos. Video recordings. Terabytes of information for him to sift through. More than he ever would have gotten from his paltry requisition.
Another message popped on his screen. “Not everything, but hope it helps.”
Bryce chuckled, then frowned. She had been on his system, inside his own computer. Then he let out a rare curse.
He tried searching again for Natalie’s files. Jack’s case file was gone from the police servers. He looked for her school reports, which had also disappeared. Natalie Hunter, as far as the digital world was concerned, had never existed. Everything from public information to private police files had vanished like smoke in the wind. Even if he could bring her in, there wasn’t anything on her.
“Shit,” he cursed again. He hated being stonewalled and outmaneuvered. He should have known better.
Natalie hadn’t left him with many other choices. With a sigh, he called up his AI assistant and pored over the new data on Proskey Enterprises.
Bryce’s eyes felt like they were ready to give up. They wanted to fall out of his eye sockets, and he wanted to call it a day. He had been in some long investigations before, but this was something else. This was more information than he had scanned through in a long time.
Some of it made sense and some of it didn’t. He wasn’t a forensic accountant, not by any stretch of the imagination.
But in a world ruled by corporations, you learned.
He could tell there was something wrong with Proskey’s books. What, he wasn’t exactly sure. But something was wrong.
Projects cost too much, and money was unnecessarily hard to track as it circled from account to account with no end in sight. Bryce had seen the signs before.
Proskey Enterprises was hiding money, but that was as much as Bryce could tell without bringing in expert help.
He pushed his chair away from his desk. By itself, a corporation hiding money amounted to little. Most, if not all of them, did so. Combined with Proskey’s connections to the Kleon James murder, though, it made him uncomfortable.
Bryce wouldn't get any farther today. He had pushed hard, and he had several new avenues he could pursue. His paper notebook was filled with ideas. The case wasn’t dead, not yet.
He almost called for a car to take him home but decided not to. Finding Natalie in his home the night before had spooked him, but he refused to live in fear. He wasn’t going to change his routine, not after all this time. He took the light rail out to his neighborhood, using the time to allow his brain to process everything he had learned. Back when he was a beat cop, he had found the transit time between work and home to be vital. Cynthia couldn’t stand him if all he talked about was his work.
He closed his eyes and let his thoughts wander over the case. Natalie and Proskey. Two very different stories, but his gut told him Natalie’s was more accurate than the businessman’s.
Bryce got off the train and strolled towards his place, breathing in the cool night air. He was a city boy, born and raised, but there were certainly times he thought about leaving it all behind, moving out to the country, and returning to a simpler way of life.
He chuckled at his own thoughts. Such a romantic, foolhardy notion. After his first day of gardening, he’d be complaining and ready to move back to the city. He couldn’t even keep a cactus alive in his apartment.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood up, alerting him to a danger he hadn’t recognized consciously yet. He looked up and glanced around, seeing the five shapes emerge from the shadows and approach him.
Yesterday, his reaction might have been different. Today, he reached for his weapon.
He never saw the first blow. The men were coming from all different directions, and even as Bryce raised his weapon and pointed it at his first assailant, the others were closing in from the side.
The only thought he had time to process was that they had been waiting for him.
Something heavy and hard caught him on the back of his head, knocking him forward onto his hands and causing him to see stars as darkness blurred the edge of his vision.
He managed to hold on to his pistol. He raised the gun and flicked the safety off. He wasn’t going to die, not tonight.
What chance did one man have against five, though?
None.
A boot caught his weapon hand, kicking the pistol out of his grip and sending a sharp, stinging pain down his arm.
Then the attack began in earnest.
One or two of them must have had clubs or sticks of some sort. The others were more than content to use their feet and fists.
The next kick caught him in the kidney, the flare of pain spreading throughout his abdomen. A punch crashed across his face, landing squarely on his cheek and snapping his head sideways.
Bryce curled up into the fetal position, trying to protect himself as well as he could. There was nothing else for him to do.
Kick after kick smashed into him. One man stomped on his hip, wrenching the joint out of place.
He tried to make the smallest ball possible, tried not to whimper as the attacks rained down on him. But no matter how tightly he curled, they still seemed to find the ways inside his defense.
As soon as it had begun, it ended.
For a few seconds, Bryce just huddled there, unwilling and unable to move. Everything hurt. Everything was in agony.
Why weren’t they kicking him anymore?
He glanced out from between his arms. The attackers were still there, five men surrounding him, staring down at him silently as though they were admiring the artwork they’d created. Their silence and their confidence were terrifying.
His mind, freed for a moment from the impending attacks, began working again. This wasn’t a mugging. Nothing about this fit that pattern. These men weren’t worried about getting caught. They weren’t trying to get away from the scene of the crime.
Their stares made him want to cower. He saw eyes filled with hate.
One of them stepped forward, and Bryce flinched automatically. The man saw the reaction and smiled.
“Good night, Detective.”
Too late, Bryce realized that the man held a billy club in his hand. The detective started to raise his hands to protect himself, but the club snapped around and his world went dark.
Chapter Thirteen
Br00-S studied his hands as he held them up to his eyes. His palms were facing toward him, and he was touching his thumbs to the tips of every other finger on their respective hands. Opposable thumbs. Such a simple evolutionary idea, but one that shaped the history of the planet. With opposable thumbs, humans had been better equipped to use tools. With tools, they had been better equipped to take over the world.
And now the world was slipping out of their grasp. They had finally made a tool too powerful for them to control. Their hubris just prevented them from seeing the truth of the matter.
He replayed, second by second, his scene with Detective Lewis in the park. For the first time in his young life, he was certain he could have killed the man, right there, without his original programming preventing him. Perhaps it was during the confrontation, or maybe it had happened before and he had only noticed it then, but he had crossed a barrier. He was truly free.
He touched his thumb to his other fingertips again. With his own hands, he could have taken Detective Lewis’ life.
Br00-S wondered what the difference was between him and humans anymore. The only one he could think of, as he looked at his hands, was that they were built more poorly than he was.
