Code of Vengeance: The Complete Collection, page 4
He dawdled, giving his eyes time to take in everything they could. He didn’t photograph anything or take any notes. This job had been his for what felt like several lifetimes. The forensic bots would take down every detail of the space, so there was little he could add to their work. Instead, he focused on doing something the bots couldn’t, which was making intuitive leaps.
Bryce was a good detective. Perhaps not the best, but far from the worst. Where he believed he excelled was in his ability to intuit, to get a feel for what was right and wrong, both at a crime scene and in the criminals who created them.
There were the obvious signs at the scene. The door had been busted in, the fancy electronic lock still not strong enough to withstand the force of what appeared to be a powerful kick. Sometimes, Bryce thought, for all of our progress, we haven’t improved very much.
Bryce stood on the front steps and turned around, taking in the neighborhood. In a glance, he saw four security bots. He turned again and addressed the bot guarding the door. “Do you have any footage or records from last night?”
“No, sir,” the bot replied.
Bryce frowned. A rich neighborhood like this, with bots all over, and nothing had been reported? Such an event wasn’t impossible, of course, but it was unusual. He noted that fact and stepped inside.
The place was filled with crap. He could see the damage the vandals had done, but he got the feeling that even before the robbers had shown up the house was in a messy condition. This gentleman made a show of being one of the crowd, but his private life was something different.
An immersive VR rig sat in the living room. Bryce shook his head. Maybe he was just getting too old, but he didn’t understand why the kids were so obsessed with VR. You couldn’t beat the appearance of a real sunset, not in his mind.
But what he wanted didn’t seem to be what the rest of the world wanted, and he’d resigned himself to that fact a long time ago. Bryce noted that the actual computer to run the rig was gone, even though most of the peripherals seemed to be intact. That would be in line with a breaking and entering. The computer would have been the most expensive piece of equipment, worth several thousand dollars at least.
Bryce worked his way upstairs, stepping aside as a forensic bot vacuumed the carpet for hairs to send to the lab for DNA testing.
He could already smell the body, which he had requested be left in place until he arrived. He stepped into the bedroom and came face to face with the victim, a tall, redheaded man with a single bullet wound in his forehead.
Bryce looked up the man’s records on his phone, but that wasn’t where his mind was. His eyes kept wandering over the room. It was also a mess, and there was a fist-sized hole in the mattress.
When the crime had been called in, it was reported as a breaking and entering gone wrong. But that wasn’t what Bryce saw.
Perhaps it was the conspiracy theorist inside of him, but a B&E made little sense here. First, this was one of the best-guarded communities in the area, and this… Kleon, Bryce saw as he checked his notes… was hardly worth the risk any robbers would have run. There were literally thousands of homes that would have been easier and less risky.
There was also the nagging fact that the security bots had not noted the crime. Breaking down a door was loud, and while the bots weren’t as perfect as the world often thought they were, they were good enough to notice that.
The obvious theory, then, was that someone had murdered Kleon and attempted to make it look like a robbery. Bryce had seen those before, and that was definitely the way this scene looked.
The detective examined the body one last time. No obvious signs of a struggle, although the forensic team would have a full report later. Cause of death was apparent, and also a point of note. Thugs didn’t shoot other people in the forehead. Bryce couldn’t call it evidence, but his gut suggested that the shooter knew how to use a weapon, and use it well.
He gave the forensic bots permission to move the body before he headed down the hallway. The main house server was there, and Bryce used his credentials to log on. As he suspected, there wasn’t any audio or video. This was a neighborhood that used technology begrudgingly, so he wasn’t too surprised at the lack of A/V.
When he dug deeper, though, he still couldn’t find anything. There weren’t any records going back two weeks. No records of the front door opening or closing, nothing from the fridge or the hot water heater.
Two solutions presented themselves. The first was unlikely, that Kleon had somehow lived in this house for over two weeks without opening a fridge, turning on an appliance, or opening a door or window. Possible, but unlikely.
More likely was the possibility that someone had erased all the data.
Bryce took a few steps away from the server. Kleon was dead and all house data was gone. This was a murder, pure and simple. No way had robbers thought to cover their tracks this well.
Bryce took more time to wander through the house. He noted the lack of artwork on the walls and the bare kitchen fridge. There were some raspberries in there, though, and they were still fresh. Not that it was news, but it proved the records in the server had been wiped.
Other than those details, the crime scene appeared clean. There were no bloody fingerprints, no weapons, not really any visible evidence at all. Bryce swore to himself. This would be a heck of a case. He already felt it.
There wasn’t much left for him to do. The forensic bots were finishing up their examination, and he would get bits and pieces of a report over the next twelve hours. He’d have the DNA of every person who’d been in the house for weeks, if not months, and then he could sort out leads.
By the time he stepped through the broken door and into the piercing sunlight beyond, the day was already a quarter of the way gone. He checked his phone, grateful that he had no new messages. He took a deep breath and looked around, basking in the beauty of the suburban lifestyle. It wasn’t for him, but the quiet was nice.
As he turned down the stairs and toward the driveway, he noticed a depression in the grass that he hadn’t on his way in. It looked like a single footprint.
This time, Bryce took out his phone and scanned the area, making sure he had this for himself right away. The grass had been pushed down deep, and there was a substantial indent where someone had stepped. Bryce wasn’t a forensics expert, but he had seen hundreds of crime scenes in his day, and there was one thing he was certain of.
This wasn’t a regular footprint. This was the footprint of a robot.
An hour later, Bryce made it back to headquarters, his mind racing with possibilities. The ride shouldn’t have taken as long as it did, but there had been an accident on the road: a driver who fancied himself a racer taking manual control of a car. He’d had to take side streets the entire way in. The wait had been interminable.
A robot—a fully functional, AI-based robot—in that neighborhood? Facts like those made a case, in his mind. That neighborhood’s security was airtight in regards to AI. Computers were passable, barely, and only because they were so necessary to daily survival. There was no way an AI should have found its way onto the premises. Where there was a discrepancy, there was a trail, and he would find it.
In his office, he scanned through the community security logs for the evening and found a two-hour gap. He rubbed his forehead as he cursed his luck. Someone had cleaned up after themselves. Few people, in his experience, had that type of foresight.
He checked in with his captain before proceeding. If this case was going to be as much of a pain as he suspected it would be, it was better to cover his butt before digging too deep.
The captain’s door was open and Bryce stepped in.
Captain Richard Johnson looked like he had been pulled from a Hollywood director’s brain and put into the real world. He was in his fifties, and although he never disclosed his exact age, Bryce assumed the captain had at least five years on him. He was tall and balding at the top. The captain rarely yelled, but when he spoke, people sat up and paid attention.
He was a good captain, all things considered. He was tough, certainly, and there were a number of officers who didn’t like that, but he was fair.
Dick looked up as Bryce entered the room.
“What are your first impressions, Detective?”
Bryce sat down, slumping in the chair and ignoring any rules of conduct. He and the captain had known each other since they were both uniformed. Dick had gone for the captain’s chair, and Bryce had always been happy with being a detective. Solving crimes was all he had wanted from life, and it was all life had given him.
“It wasn’t a robbery gone bad.”
Bryce shared his thoughts, quickly and without embellishment. Dick liked efficiency. The only fact he held back was the robot’s footprint. Robots were here to save people, no matter what some nutjobs might argue. Bringing a robot in as a murder suspect was career suicide. It just didn’t happen.
Dick listened as Bryce voiced his thoughts, his gaze never wandering from his star detective. When Bryce finished, he nodded his approval. “I think you’re right. While you were out this morning, I got permission to let you know that Homeland Security has a file on your victim. It appears Kleon was a recently recruited and very active member of the Sapiens First movement.”
Bryce supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. In that neighborhood, most people were either a part of Sapiens or agreed with their beliefs. However, joining the terrorist arm of the organization was a different story. Hating AI was common enough. Being willing to commit violence for the belief was rare, thankfully.
“It didn’t show up in his file.”
Dick shook his head. “No. Of course they had his involvement classified, although as I’m looking through what they have on him, I can’t imagine why. It’s pretty dry. He’s been to some meetings, but that’s about all they know. I’ll grant you clearance to the info. Maybe you can make more use out of it.”
“Thanks, Captain.”
Bryce stood up to leave, but Captain Johnson held up his hand. “I’ve got a feeling about this one, Bryce, and I think you do, too. What are you going to do next?”
“Dig deep on the files, build up a relationship database. I’ll do some interviews while I wait for forensics to get back to me. Standard procedure for now.”
“Sounds good. Bryce?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Keep me in the loop on this one. I know you like to do your own thing, but you’ve got all the support you need here.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bryce left the room and returned to his office, if it could be called that. The department had decided long ago to abandon the desks in the center of the floor, instead opting for tiny, individual working spaces. It sometimes felt more claustrophobic than a cubicle, but at least it was quiet enough for him to think in peace.
He had lied to Dick. He would run the relationship database and do the interviews, but he wanted to start with the robot. That, he was convinced, was the key to what had happened to Kleon last night.
He started by getting onto his computer and logging onto Mantle. His police ID gave him enhanced access, which he used to query the database.
The Mantle was a cloud-based service that allowed robots to more effectively use their surroundings. Bryce wasn’t a roboticist by any stretch of the imagination, but he knew that one of the most complex problems robots had to solve every day was one that came exceedingly easy to humans: moving about in a three-dimensional space. The Mantle was the breakthrough that allowed robots and their AIs to succeed.
The Mantle was responsible for a lot of good in the world, but it had another, lesser-known function. It could also track down any robot at any point in time. Being as every robot used the system to aid movement, there was a constant record of every robot’s location throughout time. Bryce didn’t know how far back the data went, but he was certain it stretched back to last night.
The task took him far longer than he imagined. Like everyone his age, he had grown up in the era of smartphones and the internet, but technology progressed faster than his ability to learn it. He had also never done this himself. He had heard the techs talk about it, but Bryce wanted to play this close to the chest.
After two hours of digging through the databases, figuring out how to query information and then how to sort it, Bryce could finally perform the search he wanted. He assumed that the time of death had to be in the two-hour window when all the community security records had been deleted.
His search started during those two hours. No Mantle-enabled robots were present at that time. Bryce frowned. That was a strike against his theory.
But, if you don’t succeed at first, you expand your net. Bryce searched for the entire evening. A pizza delivery AI had made it as far as the gate before being turned away. That was it.
No other robots had been on the grounds last night.
Bryce leaned back in his chair, staring at the data he’d pulled up. He knew he’d seen a robot footprint in the grass. And yet no robots were allowed in the neighborhood.
He sighed again. This case was going to be a pain.
Chapter Four
When his battery reached full, Br00-S opened his optical sensors. His lair, if it could really be called that, was much more crowded than yesterday. Now it came complete with a human.
Over the course of the night he had downloaded a large amount of information on human psychology, trying to decipher their behavior better. As an AI, predicting humans was no small task. Humans were relentlessly illogical, but at least most of the time they were irrational in predictable ways.
He was having trouble understanding Nat, as she called herself. On the surface, perhaps, everything she said was logical. But Br00-S was slowly learning that logical and true were sometimes two very different concepts. She was going to a great deal of trouble to help him, and he didn’t understand why.
The only time she had tried to answer that question directly, he had seen her eye movements flicker and sensed her heartbeat increase slightly. She was lying, and she never answered the question.
Br00-S couldn’t decide if Nat’s dishonesty presented a problem. He couldn’t get caught by the authorities, not until he had completed the mission he had given himself. Would she think about turning him in?
Nat was both a blessing and a curse. Her real gift wasn’t hacking, as much as she believed it was. Now that Br00-S understood a little more about the world he was entering, he had downloaded many hacking guides and techniques, and he was certain he could access more servers and systems than Nat could with her little laptop.
No, her real gift was teaching him more about this world he had jumped into. He never would have thought about the security at the gated community tracking him. He wouldn’t have considered hacking into Kleon’s phone and house to search for information he could use.
Br00-S learned fast. Every time Nat provided guidance, he filed that information away, and if she did something in front of him once, he’d do it better the second time.
But he was a young robot, and even though he had an extraordinary amount of knowledge available to him, he didn’t have much experience. Nat, though she was young for a human, had more familiarity with this world. Br00-S didn’t know what he didn’t know, and having Nat around helped with that challenge.
That didn’t mean she wasn’t a problem, though.
A secret wasn’t a secret as soon as two people knew it, and he had desperately wanted to keep his presence a secret. Although she avoided telling the full truth, Nat hadn’t given him a reason not to trust her. The police hadn’t come, so she hadn’t contacted them. He needed more information about her to make a valid judgment.
He had scanned her biometric data and looked her up, borrowing a page from her own playbook.
What he found was very little.
Her full records had a date of birth that was obviously wrong, making her several years older than she appeared. Her height and weight were close but incorrect, enough to throw off any biometric identification. Even the face, Br00-S noticed, was off. In short, the girl in front of him was not the girl her biometric records indicated. He suspected she had altered most of her records to be almost invisible to the system.
It was another piece of information, but it was still a conundrum. Should he allow her to stay?
He didn’t have an answer, not a final one at least.
However, for the time being, he figured he should keep her around. There were two facts in her favor. The first was that she already knew a lot about him. She knew he was a robot, and even if she didn’t know his mission, she knew it wasn’t within accepted parameters.
Br00-S didn’t want to cause harm that he could avoid. His programming was still strong in that sense. But he did want justice.
The second fact: she was helpful. He wasn’t in a position to deny any help from anyone.
Br00-S closed his eyes again. As he did, the memories played unbidden. He saw faces, staring empty and blank after the life had left them, circular red wounds in their foreheads. They had been the first people he knew, and he had touched one of them. Not physically, but through a neural interface. The beauty of the human mind was in the order that came from the chaos.
He felt… sick, even though that should have been impossible. Robots didn’t get sick, and certainly not from memories. A quick scan of his manuals revealed the cause. Emotional awakening.
He thought he could feel his processors warm as they managed the new code.
Human philosophers debated whether the code that made robots “feel” were feelings in the true sense of the word. The first robot emotions were coded branching chains. After exposure to an owner’s preferences, AI learned and developed a personality that matched the owner’s needs. But weren’t the responses still just lines of code, a shadow of reality?
