He would not lose his cool, though. Sometimes you won, sometimes you lost, but the walls always came down if you chipped at them long enough. New detectives weren’t very patient. They relied on the technology, expected a case to be solved before lunch. Not Bryce. He would wait as long as he needed.

  “Thank you, Counselor. I appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to be here.”

  “My pleasure, Detective. My pleasure.”

  Bryce got the distinct feeling that the lawyer wasn’t lying.

  Bryce walked. He could have called for a car, but he needed time to think, and something about walking had a tendency to shake loose his thoughts and reorder them. He could name at least three major cases in his history that he’d solved with an aimless walk, his consciousness taking in the sights while his unconscious worked on the problem.

  A simple assault and a murder. Linked by a girl’s DNA and little else.

  And then there was the mysterious robot footprint. Bryce’s questions refused answers, spawning instead more questions.

  He didn’t know what to think, and it occurred to him that he was out of practice. It had been years since a truly challenging case had come his way.

  The same questions kept running through his mind.

  Who was the girl?

  How were the cases connected?

  How did a robot fit into everything?

  Why were so many important people involved in cases that didn’t seem to matter on the surface?

  Bryce sighed and forced himself to notice the details of his walk. The new construction, fueled by the economic growth of AI. The glut of homeless people on every corner, far-off stares in their eyes. The glass towers that stood above them all, corporations the gods of the age. He thought about anything but his case.

  He crossed over the river and found one of his favorite parks, providing a gorgeous view of downtown Minneapolis. The skyline always impressed him, and it was no different today.

  Bryce sat down on an old park bench. Half of the bench was covered with graffiti, gang tags that let him know whose turf he was on.

  The other half seemed clean enough, and he sat on it, listening to the soft wind through the trees and the sounds of the river as it flowed towards the manmade falls downstream. For a few blissful minutes, he lost himself in the beauty of his city.

  A few families enjoyed lazy afternoons on the trail system that ran through the park, kids riding their bikes next to their parents. As always, Bryce felt a brief pang of jealousy, but it passed quickly. Here, in this park, the world was a different place. It wasn’t marked by violence and confusion. This was how the world was supposed to be.

  Bryce closed his eyes and allowed his mind to wander for a while. Then, as it always did, his mind clicked into gear, the subconscious throwing an idea to his waking mind. He didn’t have an answer, but he had inspiration.

  Instead of asking the same answerless questions, he asked himself to come up with a story, a story that could explain everything that happened. Sometimes the mind worked better if it thought about problems as a narrative instead of a string of unrelated events.

  Both Kleon and Walt were connected to Sapiens First. Walt had visited prison once already because of his membership, but Kleon hadn’t been in the organization that long. Bryce didn’t believe in coincidence, but he hadn’t thought much about their affiliation yet. The same girl was at both scenes, but it was clear from watching the video that she wasn’t the aggressor in the assault case. She had fled from Walt.

  Sapiens First were after her.

  Because of what she did to Kleon?

  It had to be. Somehow, they knew the girl had been involved in Kleon’s death.

  Either the girl or someone she knew had to be a talented hacker. Otherwise she’d be easier to track down. So she had connections or skills. After losing her on cameras twice, Bryce was leaning towards skills.

  A talented hacker and a robot get caught up in the murder of a member of Sapiens First. The story was a guess, but all the pieces felt right to him. A hacker would be pro-technology, as would her robot assistant. The person in the hoodie hadn’t been a person at all. It had been a robot. The robot. Bryce felt dumb.

  Why hadn’t he seen that earlier?

  The girl was a vigilante. She had to be. She was a violent vigilante hunting down members of Sapiens First, and they were pushing back.

  Bryce opened his eyes as a wave of new approaches to the case hit him all at once. He pulled out his phone and dictated to it as fast as the ideas came to him. Not all of them would work, and some of them were silly, but he didn’t censor himself. He could edit later.

  Now he had several ways to crack the case.

  He needed to get back to the office so he could search.

  He would blow this case wide open.

  Chapter Seven

  Br00-S returned to listening to Nat’s arguments, even if he found them to be without merit. She had earned that much, at least, from him. He was using most of his processing power to scan video from the building they had been chased from the day before. Nat had spent a fair amount of the morning hacking into their video feeds.

  “B, you can’t just walk into this building! You need to take a deep breath and think this through.”

  “I don’t breathe, Nat.” She knew this as well as he did, but she became endlessly frustrated when he used her language against her. The technique was rudimentary, but from the way she briefly clenched her fists, he thought it would work.

  “Come on, B! You know that’s not what I’m talking about. You need to take some time to think about this.”

  Br00-S was forced to dedicate more of his processing power to dealing with his human compatriot. Every process he gave her was slowing him down, and he felt his own frustration building.

  “I can get through their security.”

  “How?”

  “They are human. I’ll just keep walking.”

  Nat groaned and pushed the palms of her hands into her eyes. “No! You can’t! Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been saying?”

  The truth of the matter was that he hadn’t. Video processing and biometric recognition, the processes that were taking up most of his mind right now, were incredibly demanding, and he had shut off his audio inputs temporarily so he could focus on the task at hand.

  Now that he had paused those critical processes, he could give Nat more attention.

  “What do you mean, I can’t?”

  She spun her laptop around so he could see the screen. “That building isn’t some run-of-the-mill corporate office. These are organizations serious about their security, and it’s been designed to not just prevent human intruders, but robot ones as well.”

  He reached over and quickly scanned through the information Nat had uncovered. Memos, requisition forms, payroll and personnel files. He could intuit the same patterns that Nat had found. The men and women who worked security in the building were professionals. They were ex-military, and in some cases former Special Forces, people who had lost jobs to the robotization of the military.

  They carried enough weapons to deal with any kind of threat. Stun batons and handguns for humans, and electronic weapons for use against robots.

  Br00-S admitted that Nat was right. Getting in would not be as easy as he had predicted. His model had been based on typical security in a corporate building.

  “Can we enter through the basement levels?”

  Nat shook her head. “There’s a chance, but it would be a hell of a risk. As near as I can tell, there’s some heavy security on those doors, and while I might be able to hack it, I can’t guarantee it.”

  “Even if you used my processing power?”

  Nat nodded. “The system isn’t just about processing power. It’s top of the line, so it even detects the different ways other electronic systems interface with it. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it would be risky.”

  Br00-S tried a different approach.

  “What about the roof?”

  Nat looked at him with one of her nearly unreadable expressions. Br00-S’ software tried to determine what she was expressing, but struggled.

  “What about the roof?” she echoed. “What the fuck are you talking about? Is your plan to climb the building without someone spotting you?”

  Br00-S didn’t even bother trying to explain it. Language was too slow. He pulled up some city schematics she’d found and panned and zoomed until he found what he was looking for. Physics equations ran quickly through his mind, and he zoomed in on another building.

  “Here. This is what I mean.”

  Nat shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Would you check the security on this building? And the rooftop security of our target building?”

  Br00-S’ plan finally made it through Nat’s slower human mind.

  “You mean you want to jump from this building to that one? That’s a three-story drop and twenty-five feet across.”

  Br00-S turned away from her and went back to his video processing tasks. “You keep forgetting, Nat, that I’m not human.”

  Br00-S wondered sometimes about the concept of beauty. He had programming that dealt with the topic, of course. There were entire libraries of art and images he had access to, and he also understood some underlying concepts. He knew the golden mean, the photographic rule of thirds, and the laws of symmetry that led humans to find one another attractive.

  But for everything he knew about beauty, he was certain he didn’t understand it.

  Br00-S stood on a rooftop. It wasn’t the highest around. Downtown Minneapolis was filled with higher buildings. But it was high enough that he could overlook the city. When the setting sun pierced through the occasional cloud, its light reflected off the dark glass of the taller buildings.

  The number of colors he saw in the visible spectrum was wide, ranging from the dark blues of the early evening sky to the pinks of the sunlight.

  But was it beautiful?

  That was a question that no amount of information would provide the answer to. For all his knowledge, he felt as though there was something still missing. He considered asking Nat for her opinion on the view, but decided against it.

  Trust was an emotion, not something he easily comprehended. He didn’t think Nat would betray him. Although he didn’t know her reasoning, their aims seemed to be the same. If she was going to betray him, she’d already had plenty of chances. He trusted her that far. But there was still much he wouldn’t tell her.

  She didn’t like his plan. But she couldn’t separate reason from her human emotions. For anyone made of flesh and bone, the jump he was about to take was tantamount to suicide. But Br00-S had done the math and calculated the impact force. It was within his tolerances.

  But back in the lair, she had tried something, a secret that neither of them was going to talk about.

  When Nat had understood she wasn’t going to follow him on this mission, she had sulked. But when she went off to her corner, she tried to hack into his visual system.

  It wasn’t much as far as hacks went, almost like the light brush of a hand against someone’s arm. Br00-S’ background security dealt with it easily.

  He didn’t say anything to her.

  For some reason, she wanted to see everything he saw while he was on his mission.

  That was the other reason he didn’t want to open his visual input to her now. She was a talented hacker, and he didn’t know the limit of her capabilities. He feared, perhaps illogically, that if he opened his visual input to her at any time, she’d be able to force it open and distract him from the task at hand.

  So he gave her an audio feed only. She’d complained a little, but not as much as he would have suspected.

  The time was approaching. Br00-S had allotted plenty of leeway in the planning of this mission, perhaps even too much. But he’d rather deal with too much time rather than not having enough and missing his window.

  Throughout the day, he had processed video files from building security. He had faces now. During the chase, he had recorded the faces of the two men who pursued them, and he recorded Kleon’s face before that. Scanning back through the video, he tried to find where they met.

  There was only one location, a conference room on the fifth floor of the building. That was where the Sapiens First meetings took place. That conference room held the answers he was looking for. Who had killed those he cared for? As he got closer to the answer, Br00-S’ impatience grew.

  Once they knew which room to go to, the rest was elementary. It had been little trouble to find the meetings, labeled “Maintenance Oversight Committee” in the schedule, and to find the date and time of the next one, which would be held the next day.

  While the way inside had been Br00-S’ idea, the rest of the plan was Nat’s. He trusted her.

  Br00-S took a couple of steps back and found where he had calculated that he needed to reach his full running speed.

  The run to the edge of the building would be awkward. Several pipes and small exhaust ports littered the roof, and he’d have to plan every step carefully. He hadn’t said anything to Nat, but this was the part of the mission he was most worried about.

  Movement, especially movement like this, was hard for him to handle. The Mantle, the cloud-based service that helped all robots navigate the world, was a help, but due to the nature of his hack of the system, there was a small lag. It wasn’t an issue if he gave himself enough time to plan his movement, but he was still nervous.

  To the best of his knowledge, a jump like this had never been attempted before by a robot. At least, none that he could discover in the Mantle libraries. It was a shame none of his peers would ever know what he would accomplish today.

  He planned out his steps one last time, calculating how much power he needed to put into each step, thinking again about exactly where each foot would need to land. He would only get one chance.

  Br00-S ran, his powerful legs driving into the roof, propelling him forward, faster and faster.

  He focused all his processors on his steps, making sure each one landed perfectly and pushed him harder.

  He stepped over a pipe that ran across the length of the roof, making sure his feet reached high enough.

  On his last step, Br00-S reached up with his left foot, planting it on the small ledge that surrounded the rooftop. His servos and actuators whined as he pushed them all to one hundred percent, the muscular fibers in his legs contracting and expanding at full power.

  Then he was in the air.

  He had calculated the time he would have, almost two full seconds. For a human, that was no time at all. For him, it was an eternity. His processor didn’t have any other tasks to complete, so he took in all the information he could: the birds flying a block away, the pedestrians underneath who had no idea the historic event happening above them.

  Br00-S extended his legs for the landing, ensuring he would absorb as much of the impact as he could.

  The roof grew larger and larger, and Br00-S saw his calculations had been nearly perfect. He was going to land about two inches short of where he had planned, well within the range of error he had given himself.

  He landed, his feet making solid contact with the roof. His legs whined again, forced to absorb an impact greater than they had ever been asked to in their young lives. His knees bent as the synthetic muscles expanded and contracted appropriately.

  And then he felt himself slipping, the surface of the new rooftop not having the same amount of friction as the one he’d left from. His feet came out from under him, and no amount of processing power could save him. He fell on the roof, hard.

  There was no pain, of course. His sensors registered the impact, and he quickly ran a self-diagnostic, but he was fine. His hoodie and jeans had ripped, but that was of no consequence.

  Br00-S’ primary worry was that the sound of the impact would alert security. He got back to his feet and crouched behind an air conditioning unit, watching the door that led to the building below.

  “What happened?” Nat asked.

  “I made the landing, but then slipped.”

  There was a moment of silence. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.”

  When no one came up to investigate, Br00-S decided it was safe to move forward with their plan. He readjusted his hoodie and gloves to make sure none of his metallic surfaces were showing. Then he went toward the door.

  This was the second test, although easier than the first. Br00-S opened his wrist and let his connecting plug extend from it. He pulled it out and connected to the door.

  From the roof, Nat had suggested that Br00-S try to convince the building he was a serving bot. There were enough sensors in the building that any non-authorized robot would immediately be noticed. Nat’s code simply registered him as a maintenance bot with almost unlimited access. There were a few parts of the building that were off limits to virtually everyone, even maintenance bots. Fortunately, the conference room they were looking for wasn’t one of them.

  After only a few seconds, the connection was made and Br00-S’ status was authorized. He heard the faint click of the bolts being drawn back, and he pulled the door open. It opened without even a squeak. If the hinges on the rooftop maintenance door were this well-maintained, the rest of the building would be even more so.

  Br00-S made his way down the stairwell, opening the door on the fifth floor. According to the building calendar, the meeting should have started about fifteen minutes ago.

  It was time for Br00-S to find his answers.

  Br00-S studied his surroundings carefully before proceeding. The hallways were white and barren, not even a single picture decorating the walls. An industrial-style carpet was the only real color, if one considered gray a color.

  Each of the offices had a window to the hallway, but as Br00-S peeked through a few he noticed the offices seemed almost as sterile as the hallways.

  He wondered if there were even people here, or if this was an abandoned floor. He hadn’t researched this building enough, he realized.

 

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