Made to Kill (23 page)

“You’re pretty smart for a movie producer,” I said. “Taken a night class?”

Rockwell laughed again and this time Bobrov joined him as he made adjustments to the other chair.

“Your creator, Professor Thornton, was a very talented man, my friend,” Bobrov said in an accent thick enough to hang wallpaper on. “Do you know we tried to make him turn, several times. Each time he refused. Such misguided loyalty from one so great. Fortunately for us, those in his laboratory were not so, how shall we say,
committed
to this failed experiment you call a country.”

While he spoke, Bobrov’s old army buddy Artem stood next to his boss with his big arms folded and his mouth firmly shut. I wondered if he spoke English.

“So the magic crystals are from Thornton,” I said. This made me feel a little better. Not much but I was happy to take what I was given. Maybe if I hadn’t killed Thornton I would have got an upgrade at some point.

Shame.

“Funny,” I said, “I thought you were a robot scientist yourself. Why did you need to go stealing someone else’s work?”

Bobrov had finished his set up and made a show of wiping his hands very slowly on his long black smock. He turned to face me.

“A wise man once said,” he said. “That talent borrows and genius steals.”

Bobrov seemed pretty pleased with that line because he did some more of his old man cackle. I ran his words around a few times but they still sounded fishy to me.

I nodded at the empty chair. “You know, I saw a chair like that at the Ritz-Beverly? I didn’t think it matched the curtains very well.”

Bobrov shrugged like he couldn’t have cared less, and I’m pretty sure he couldn’t have.

“Did you know,” I said, “that there was a break-in at Thornton’s lab? I have a feeling you’re not the only one with an eye on his gear.”

At this, Bobrov said something to Artem in Russian and Artem nodded and moved out of my field of vision. Then Bobrov returned his attention to the empty chair and made some more adjustments before turning back and clapping his hands. He looked as pleased as punch. I guess I didn’t blame him. His plan seemed to be running pretty smoothly, after all.

I wondered about Rockwell. He hadn’t said much. I wondered what was left of him underneath the bandages.

Bobrov clapped his hands again and moved to address the bunch of actors I knew were still standing behind me.

“Take your places, Comrades. The moment is near. Soon phase three will be initiated and the program can move to the next phase. You have your instructions.”

The A-listers didn’t say anything in return, but I could hear them leave and I could imagine them all slipping their protective goggles off, tucking them into tuxedos and slipping them down dress fronts. Time was ticking down to the premiere and they were all needed out front. Even the Soviet agents didn’t want to disappoint their public. Maybe they were getting a taste for it.

As they all left, one tapped me on the shoulder.

“Good luck, Sparks,” said Fresco, right into my audio receptor, and then he joined the others.

I looked at Rockwell. “So you going to tell me about phase four, then?”

Rockwell was completely still. When he spoke I had to admit, it was eerie, the way that voice came out from what was otherwise a completely inanimate object.

“
YOU WILL NEED TO DO BETTER THAN THAT
,” he said.

“Oh, okay,” I said. “So what else can we talk about? Defected to any good enemy states recently? Oh, say, how about you tell me about how I killed you three years ago and then you came back to life as a mummy. I love a good horror story.”

And then Rockwell performed his next trick, one that took me and Bobrov both by surprise.

He stood up.

“What are you doing?” asked Bobrov. He reached for Rockwell but Rockwell knocked his hands away. Rockwell pushed himself up out of the wheel chair with hands that were simple metal clamps. He stood and the blanket dropped to the floor.

His lower half was mechanical, just a simple set of levered and jointed struts that served as legs and two rectangular plates with a hinge in the middle that served as feet. Rockwell’s shirttails hung down nearly to his knees like he was a well-dressed country gent who had been caught by the butler doing something he shouldn’t have been.

Rockwell took one step toward me. Then another. It was slow, the walk of someone learning to walk again after a bad road traffic accident. Bobrov hovered nearby with a frown on his face and his arms held out behind Rockwell like he was shepherd repositioning his flock.

“
OH, YOU KILLED ME
,” said Rockwell. “
MAKE NO MISTAKE, ROBOT. CHIP ROCKWELL DIED THAT NIGHT THREE YEARS AGO
.”

“Well you’re doing pretty well for a dead guy, Comrade,” I said. “All things considered, anyway.”

“
MY CONDITION IS A TEMPORARY ONE
,” said Rockwell. “
I WAS FORTUNATE TO BE PART OF A GREAT PLAN AT THE TIME OF MY MURDER. AN EXPERIMENT DESTINED TO CHANGE THE COURSE OF HUMAN HISTORY
.”

“I like a dead guy with ambition,” I said. “Don’t tell me, your Russian buddies found you just in time and had you copied off onto a magic cube before you died.”

Rockwell swung another step toward me. Bobrov backed away and checked his watch. He looked up at the big machine towering above us all and then he went to one of the consoles. He hissed between gritted teeth. Rockwell’s little performance was clearly unexpected.

“
I WAS THE FIRST
,” said Rockwell. “
THE TRANSFER PROCESS WAS EXPERIMENTAL AND NEEDED TESTING. THAT TEST PROVED TO BE A RESOUNDING SUCCESS
.”

“Pardon me for saying,” I said, “but you don’t look much like a resounding success. But sure, experimental, huh? Is that why they kept you around? Because it seems to me that your Russian buddies have a good grip on your studio and would be able to run it pretty well without you. You’re a test subject. Because otherwise you’d be walking around in someone else’s body instead of this contraption, right? Something tells me Bobrov’s experiment is still going. But look, if you plan on ruling the world with your friend here it seems you’d want to be more mobile.”

“
AS I SAID, A TEMPORARY SITUATION WE ARE ABOUT TO RECTIFY
.”

Rockwell swung around on the edge of one of his flat metal feet and nearly fell backward as he did so. But he kept his balance and pointed with one claw at the empty chair opposite.

“
PHASE FOUR IS ABOUT TO START
,” he said.

I looked at the chair. I looked at Rockwell. I looked down and saw the pinkish glow of the digital crystal installed in my chest.

Phase four.

Now I finally got it. Chip Rockwell didn’t want to make his new home in just anybody.

He wanted
me.

Just like Charles David had said, only I hadn’t understood what he meant.

Rockwell buzzed quietly to himself. He was laughing again or maybe his temporary shell of a body was shorting out after all that exertion.

“Okay, I get it,” I said. “Very nice. Your mind, my body. Neat. But why here? Why now? Haven’t you got enough on your plate with phase three without trying to fit in a little mind-swapping at the same time?”

“Power,” said Bobrov. He continued to work but he at least nodded at the machine that stood above us all. “Transferring a mind into an artificial system like you requires a greater energy flow. The transmission system can provide that power without compromising its own function.”

“Huh,” I said. “Well, fancy that.”

Rockwell swung back around to me. For a moment I thought he was going to keep going and fall right onto me, but he stopped in time and wobbled for a few seconds. He was close, his dark glasses practically touching my face. Now I could see what was on the other side of them, and it was nothing, just more of the cream bandages wound tight as you like.

“
IT IS MAGNIFICENT, MAGNIFICENT
,” he said and I knew he was talking about me. “
THORNTON WAS A GENIUS. A SHAME HE COULD NOT BE TURNED, DR. BOBROV. HIS WORKMANSHIP BORDERS THE DIVINE. UNLIKE YOURS
.”

Bobrov didn’t look up from his console. “Yours was a temporary solution, Rockwell. You know that. I had not the facilities nor the equipment to build you a better form. The master program took priority.”

Rockwell managed something close to a nod, the bandages covering his head rubbing against my face.

“
DON’T WORRY, DR. BOBROV, I WON’T HOLD THAT AGAINST YOU. THIS TEMPORARY SOLUTION IS ABOUT TO BECOME PERMANENT
.”

He turned to the Soviet scientist and pointed with a claw.

Bobrov nodded and bent down to slide a case out from next to one of the consoles. The case was big and square and had a heavy lid with a catch that he flicked. With the lid swung back he reached in and took out one of the digital crystals. He looked at the thing, smirked to himself, then went back to the empty chair and slid the cube into the claw that hung on the articulated arm. Then he wiped his hands off and walked back to the console while watching his watch and moving a finger in the air like he was counting a beat.

Then he gestured with both hands to the big machine behind the screen.

“Phase three begins.”

He threw a lever with a dramatic flourish I really couldn’t blame him for, and the disc mounted on the front of the machine began to spin. It picked up speed and began to whine loud enough to be heard out in the auditorium. Bobrov took a step back and wiped his hands with what looked like unnecessary vigor as he admired the workings of the machine in front of him.

There was a blast of music, a brassy fanfare followed by tumbling violins and a roll of thunder from the kettle drums. The screen was lit in bright silver and shadows moved across it.

The premiere of
Red Lucky
—a.k.a. phase three—had started.

Rockwell looked up at the moving shapes, and as the orchestra swelled he turned back to me.

“
AT LAST PHASE FOUR BEGINS
.”

That was when Artem Rokossovsky stepped up behind Rockwell and slammed a heavy wrench into the back of Rockwell’s bandaged head.

Rockwell went over cleanly while wailing like a detuned radio. He crashed to the ground next to my chair and lay there twitching and sparking and buzzing like a wasp trapped under a glass.

Artem looked down at this piece of handiwork. He smiled a smile of intense professional satisfaction then he looked at the wrench in his hand like he didn’t know what it was before dropping into onto Rockwell’s body.

The music was still playing, as loud as you like. The shapes on the screen moved and people began to speak. Their voices were deep and booming. So close to the front of house speakers it was liable to give you a headache.

“
Now
we can begin,” said Bobrov. He laughed and his laugh was caught in the swell of the music and was carried away by it. He moved around to the other chair and stepped up into the footrests then lay back. He reached up and positioned the disc and the claw with the cube in it over his face.

The consoles winked. Their lights wouldn’t be seen from the auditorium proper. The audience sitting just yards away would have no idea what was going on behind the scenes they were watching on the mammoth movie screen.

I looked down as best I could. Rockwell was rocking on the floor but he couldn’t get up. I don’t know if he was trying to speak but all that came from him was something that sounded dangerous and electric.

“You were very useful, Comrade,” said Bobrov as he got himself comfortable. “But as you said yourself, this was a temporary arrangement.”

It took me a moment to realize he was talking to Rockwell, not me. Bobrov lay back in his chair.

The digital crystal hanging over his head was glowing pink now and I couldn’t see his face beyond it.

“Something tells me Rockwell wasn’t quite in the picture,” I said.

“Rockwell and his studio were necessary for a time,” said Bobrov. “His studio already had a system in place for money laundering that was perfectly suited to our needs. And with his untimely demise he provided us the final proof that the transfer process was possible. Stepping stones, Raymond, stepping stones.”

I tuned into my Geiger counter and turned it up. It crackled like bacon in a pan. As Eva had said, the whole process resulted in significant radiation exposure. Not enough to be fatal so long as you took precautions, but I wondered how far a daily diet of potassium iodide tablets would stretch.

Particularly for someone who had been working on the equipment and the technique for a long time. For years, in fact.

Like Bobrov.

Bobrov was old and frail but there was something else I’d noticed when I first laid my optics on him. The vampire pallor, the thinness to his cheeks.

He was on the way out, but he thought he’d found a solution.

“You think you’ll be able to live in a chassis like mine, huh?” I called out over what seemed to be a Western gunfight taking place on the other side of the screen. I thanked the composer of the musical score for his over-indulgence, otherwise the auditorium would be listening in to our conversation too. “I get it, comrade. Radiation sickness. Too much exposure over too long a time.”

I could see Bobrov shake his head but that was about all I could see.

“Cancer,” said Bobrov. He laughed. “Tell me, robot man. We can build machines that can land on the moon. We can build machines that can walk and talk and think like a man. We can build a machine that allows one mind to be transferred into another. We truly live in an age of miracles.”

“I sense there’s a but coming.”

“But,” said Bobrov, and I had a feeling he hadn’t heard me, “there are still some problems we face that cannot be solved. The cancer I have is incurable, inoperable. My own body has failed me. And yet here I am, about to make a great transcendence. I shall become immortal and I shall lead the program for the next thousand years.”