Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 (17 page)

"Limp stone," Shad muttered again from his perch at the end of the counter. He was getting quite tiresome. I turned from the window.

"Actually, Shad, the
m
is silent and the
stone
is pronounced
stin
. Lipstin."

"Brits pronounce a whole lot better than they spell."

"I don't recall that American insurance company you did the telly adverts for being such great spellers. Why wasn't your duck quacking ‘Aflass, Aflass?'"

"You mean besides how close it sounds to ‘half-assed'? Jaggs, you really think ‘The Petting Place' is a good name for a pet store?"

"Superintendent Matheson chose the name, not I, as you well know."

"It sounds like a bordello or lap-dancing salon. Why don't we just call it ‘The Cat House' and be done with it?" The parrot held out his wings, began bumping and grinding his hips as he danced on the perch, and sang out in something of a Jamaican accent, ‘Hey dere, sailor boy, you come to Mama Bimbo's Cat House for all you pettin' needs, mon." The dance stopped. "Jaggs, if you were a self-respecting crook would you go into a pet store called The Petting Place?" He sidestepped grumpily from one end of his perch to the other. "Can't believe the names around this neck of the woods: Ex mouth. Nut well. Glebe lands. Cock wood. Under Wear—"

"That's
Lower
Wear and—"

"Key off, Jaggs," cautioned Shad, nodding toward the window. "Live one approaching. This may be the kitten pickin' kingpin herself."

The bell rang as the door opened revealing a short, stocky woman in a green anorak and yellow plastic rain scarf, her feet in a pair of bright yellow wellies. In her right hand she had by the handle a small gray metal case. She walked up to the counter.

"Good morning, love," I said. "How may I be of assistance?"

"I want me parakeet fixed," she stated.

"Indeed. I regret to say we don't neuter birds at Petting Place." I glanced at Shad and he was returning my look down his beak, as it were. I looked back at the woman. "You'll have to take your bird to a veterinary surgeon."

"I means
repair
. This one's a robbie," she said. "All 'is nuts's got bolts in 'em, if you gets me drift."

"I see." I smiled brightly. "If I might take a look at your bird?"

"Nothin' much works on it." She lifted the case and dropped it rather heavily on the counter. "Salt in the air, I expect. Too close to the bleedin' ocean."

I opened the case on the counter next to Shad's perch. Inside the case was a musty-smelling robotic parakeet. There was something white and crusty dried between its toes. Shad moved on his perch until he could look down into the case.

"Ain't that cute, your parrot there looking at me bird. He's in love!"

Midway through her rising belly laugh, Shad said to her, "Sod off, you old cow."

"Here, now!" she responded, her color rising.

"I apologize for the parrot, love," I said. "I'm afraid we rescued the poor thing from a rather tragic situation."

"Aw," she responded empathetically, reaching out a hand to pet Shad's head. "Chick abuse, was it?"

With a loud squawk and a belated flap of his unfamiliar wings, Shad fell off his perch backward onto the floor.

"I didn't hit the poor thing," said the woman holding a hand up to her maker. "I swear it."

"Please don't distress yourself unduly, madam. The bird also suffers from an inner ear problem. It affects his balance." Excusing myself, I went around the end of the counter and bent over my partner. He was rolling on the floor flapping his multicolored plumage, beak open, and laughing. "
Steady
," I said to him over our wireless net, a deserved degree of menace in my transmission.

After a few gasps, Shad eventually said to me,
"Sorry, Jaggs. Ah-hah! Sorry, but check out the eyes on her bird. That's no simple robot." He stood, doubled over, shook again, and transmitted, "Should I share with her how I was never coddled as a young egg but spent my deviled youth getting fried and have since become hard-boiled?"

"Not unless you also wish to become scrambled and beaten," I buzzed back.

He flapped his wings and resumed his place on the perch, occasional unconquerable snicker spasms shaking his feathers.

I turned toward the woman and smiled brightly yet again. "Now, shall I take a look at your bird?"

Shad was correct. The creature's eyes were animated, its gaze darting about and eventually coming to rest upon me. If it was a simple rundown robot and not a mech, its eyes should not have been moving. As they were moving, however, indicating the possibility of a rather serious crime, I asked as delicately as I could, "How long have you had this mech, love?"

She laughed and waved a hand at my apparent silliness. "Oh, that's no mech, dearie. That one's just a clockwork toy. Me aunt were well off, but Auntie wouldn't pay for no mech when she could get the feathers, flap, and song by only payin' for a robbie."

"Really."

"'Course. Think she wanted to get tied up with all that red tape, wages, taxes, forms, and bother? Not me Aunt Annabelle." She frowned. "Besides, if this here bird was self-aware, it'd take better care of itself, wouldn't it?" Before I could answer, she added, "More to point, that's what the parakeet told me aunt."

"This parakeet told your aunt it didn't come under the Artificial Intelligence Regulations?"

"That's what me aunt told me years before she passed on. The parakeet told her, oh—" She frowned and looked up at the beamed ceiling. "—got to be four years ago." She lowered her watery gray gaze down until she was looking me in the face. "See, Annabelle Wallingford passed last year. Quite well off she was, as I said. Her place was in Wotton Lane by Watton Brook."

"In Wotton by Watton?" asked Shad.

She frowned at the parrot. "Cheeky bastard."

"To be sure. About the parakeet?" I prompted.

"Well, as part of Auntie's estate, she left me Ringo. That's what we called this here bird before it seized up. Shame. Only had the bloomin' thing a few days when it broke."

"I see. And you're bringing it in now because. . . ?"

"Just getting around to going through me aunt's things and cleanin' up. Found Ringo tucked away in me auntie's attic. Maddie girl, I says to meself, it'd be right homey havin' a singin' bird in the lounge next to the settee. Ringo sings real sweet's, I remember."

"I see."

"With a robbie there's no papers to clean up. No offense," she said to Shad.

He looked away, talon to brow, feigning acute personal devastation.

She poked the parakeet several times in the tummy. "I can do the feathers up some with needles and me hot glue gun, but I'm no good with chips, springs, electronics, and such. If it can't be fixed I'll just toss it in the dustbin. Maybe a jumble sale. Some little tyke might have a laugh takin' it apart. Might be worth a bob or two."

I lifted a wing and released it. It dropped to the counter with a thud. "Let me take it in back and have a look."

"Is this old parrot here for sale?" she asked, poking Shad in the belly.

"Easy, lady," he said with the voice of Huntz Hall, "you'll bruise the fabric."

"You'll have to ask the bird, love," I answered. "He's a bio."

"Oh, I wouldn't want no bio."

"That's not the issue, Chuckles," Shad said to her. "The issue is, does the bio want you."

As I picked up the parakeet and carried it around the counter, Shad began singing a rather raunchy sea shanty centered on a seductive female giraffe and her erstwhile suitor, a love struck field mouse who, for reasons unnecessary to elucidate here, ran himself to death. I took the mechanical bird into the room where we had our surveillance equipment set up. I cracked the parakeet's back and Shad was right. Although the bird was robotic, there was one slight illegal modification. Tucked among its gears, bellows, batteries, and computer was an AI chip—an illegal AI chip at that. I'm no expert in such things, but it looked as though the AI chip had worked its way loose from its improvised mountings, which had caused a microcard to partially dislodge from its tiny motherboard effectively paralyzing all motor functions save the eyes.

With a pair of tweezers I disconnected the AI chip, took it over to the workroom's computer, and inserted it into the appropriate port. All of the identification data on the chip was code scrambled. I keyed for voice recognition and said, "Hello. Hello, hello, whoever you are."

No response.

"Detective Inspector Harrington Jaggers, Devon ABCD here. I know you've just gone though a rough patch, old chicken, but it's about to get a good deal bumpier. Either you talk to me or I put this chip right back in the squab the same way I found it. Then one of two things happen: either Maddie girl will toss you in the dustbin, or perhaps she'll put you in a jumble sale and someone six years old with sticky fingers will take you all apart before he loses interest and goes on to something else. Or perhaps they'll make a Christmas tree decoration out of you. Pretty little bird. The way I read your battery consumption rate, you have another two—two and a half years you can click around those eyeballs up on some shelf until things go dark for good. But who can say? Sitting on the tree next to the candy cane once a year, looking through the plastic icicles, listening to tattooed and perforated children playing their new thunder rumbles. It might be fun listening to Dad and Uncle Mike wagging on endlessly about test matches, especially after they've gotten good and bladdered, before you go back in the box—"

"Very well," interrupted the computer's speakers in a female voice. "You got me."

"Indeed." I thought I'd give my American partner a little Don Ameche wireless moment.
"Mr. Watson, come here, I want you,"
I transmitted to Shad.

The parrot flew through the door and landed atop the computer monitor. "
The Story of Alexander Graham Bell
, Nineteen thirty-nine, and that wasn't the Watson I was hoping for."

"That's all right, Shad. Right now you don't look much like Henry Fonda, anyway." I pointed at the screen and Shad looked down between his feet. A female human CGI was on the screen.

"That's not Loretta Young."

I looked at the lovely creature. "I do believe that's Rita Hayworth." The computer generated image, indeed, looked like 1940s and '50s actress Rita Hayworth in her role as the sultry nightclub singer in
Affair in Trinidad
, with Glenn Ford. I frowned at Shad.

"Nineteen fifty-two," he said without looking up.

Insufferable bird. I looked back at the screen. Pirate AI chip manufacturers paid no royalties for images, but steered clear of using images of still living celebrities who could afford to hire the forces of darkness necessary to hunt down and prosecute trademark poachers and encroachers. Rita, as always, was looking radiant. "Your name?" I asked her.

"Lolita Doll." Rita smiled demurely. "Honest, guv. That's the name I was born with, spelling and all. I'm from Plymouth by way of Land's End. Thanks for busting me out of that parakeet."

"You're not out of the feathers yet, love," I said evenly. "I'm kind of curious how you wound up in that chip, how that chip wound up inside that bird, and especially how that bird wound up inside a wealthy woman's estate."

The image was silent. From his perch atop the screen, Shad said, "Is it just me or is Rita looking just a bit furtive?"

"What's that parrot saying?" Rita—Lolita—asked me.

"Detective Sergeant Shad opined that you appeared just a tad sneaky, Lolita. I agree you seem less than forthcoming."

Shad hopped down to the keyboard, did a little dance on the keys, and called up Lolita's previous in a new frame. "Whoa!" he exclaimed in mock shock. "Lolita," said Shad, "I'd download your complete criminal record, but this sorry shadow of a computer only has fifteen hundred megagigs of memory."

I glanced at the list. Sealed juvenile previous weighing a third the megabyte weight of her adult convictions. She was a jewel thief primarily, some confidence work, not terribly competent at either. She couldn't have done much worse if she'd spent her mornings booking cells for her evenings through the Convict Accommodation Association. Did her first stint in H.M Prison and Remand Centre Exeter at the age of nineteen. Back in at twenty-two. Back again at twenty-five. According to the record I was reading she was nearing sixty and more than half of that time had been spent as a guest of His Majesty's government. According to her library record in the nick, she'd read every piece of children's fiction in the place. Psych evaluation: Terrific liar; couldn't change a battery; at risk for becoming institutionalized, which meant she's been inside so long she'd do almost anything to stay behind walls.

"So you modified a robotic parakeet with a pirated mech AI chip capable of taking a human imprint to sneak past the security systems into some wealthy person's home," I said.

"Yes."

"You do the work yourself, Lolita?"

"Sure."

Shad whistled a bar from the Woody Woodpecker song. True. If she had been Pinocchio instead of Rita Hayworth she would have had a California redwood hanging from between her eyes by now.

"How could you be sure that parakeet would be chosen by your mark?" asked Shad.

"The robbie was already sold to Annabelle Wallingford," answered Lolita. "I did work release at Songbirds in Queen Street, Exeter. It's a tech shop sells robbie birds and accessories. You know, it's just up from Boston Tea Party, in next to the News?"

"Yes," I said. "I know it. It's owned by Frankie Statten, isn't it?"

"Mr. Statten's the proprietor."

Shad glanced at me and I shrugged. "You were on work release?" I continued.

"So?"

"Doesn't say a whole lot for the rehab program up there," observed Shad. "The parakeet robbie gimmick, Lolita: What made you think of it?" he asked her.

No answer for a while, then Rita said, "I suppose it seemed like a good idea at the time."