Reality 36 (19 page)

  "You do not seem sympathetic," said Otto. He stood near the door, filling half the dayroom. There wasn't an antenatally tweaked gene in Otto's body, but he was bigger than the eugene. He had to bend his neck to keep his head from bumping on the ceiling.

  "He was a disappointment to me, frankly. I was interested in grilling him for his expertise on self-sustaining digital ecologies."

  "Why?" said Otto.

  "Why don't you sit down? I'll get you a drink brought up," said Quaid.

  "I prefer to stand," said Otto.

  "Huh. Friendly attack dog you got here, Mr Richards."

  "Just Richards, Mr Quaid. Please answer my partner's question."

  "And why should I do that?" Quaid said. "You aren't even real cops. I am a USNA citizen. I'm not beholden to you."

  "We are fully licensed. We're the people they call when the cops don't have any ideas," said Otto. "We have an AllPass and a warrant from the EuPol Five to ask what we like. You are in EU waters, so I say again: why?"

  "Because I am a real ecologist, you ape," snapped Quaid, "and I like to be able to simulate what I plan to do before I do it. Qifang's pre-eminent in his field. If I could secure a means of reproducing what he sees in the old RealWorld ecologies and harness it as a testing ground, it'd mean a lot to ecosystem reclamation. Hell, forget that, forget Earth, forget Mars, Venus even, you get me a simulator that powerful, I'll tell you how to terraform the goddamned Moon with ice chips and algae. I'm expanding into planetary engineering, it's the next big thing, that's why I invited him on board."

  "Thank you Mr Quaid," said Richards, his eyes blinking out of time with each other.

Sometimes his sheath's expressions look off
, thought Otto,
it goes pantomime.

  "Was he ill?" continued Richards.

  "Yeah, I think so. Hakim, the cook's assistant, came down with the same thing, some kind of flu. That Chinese bastard better not try and sue me for picking it up off Hakim, I'd not want to fire him for letting himself get sick. Everyone gets sick sometime. He's not been himself at all, though he's kept working like a real solid trooper. He is a credit to my boat, so many people are so goddamned lazy these days. He kept on going, no matter how spaced-out he was looking. Better than Qifang, at any rate."

  "How many android carriages or sheaths do you have on board?" asked Richards.

  Quaid smiled, a sneer hid behind his perfect teeth. "Why, you looking for an upgrade?"

  "The sooner you answer our questions, Mr Quaid, the sooner we'll be gone," said Richards patiently.

  Quaid hammered a tattoo with his palms on the back of the couch. "Jesus! Just the five for the crew and one spare. I sometimes let guests use it, remote access for meetings, it can't be much fun, they have minimal sensor capability. They're here to sail the boat, not much else."

  "No more androids on board?"

  "Listen, these things are barely worthy of the name. I chose them because they look kind of nautical, don't rust and have enough hands to let a Two manage my sails. I have nothing as fancy on the
Aurora
as what a catalogue would call an android."

  "OK. Now we go take a look at them," said Otto.

  With as much ill grace as he could muster, Quaid had his crew line up on the fore deck, then he took Otto and Richards down to the crew room on the utility deck where, in a locker, was stashed an inert sixth. Without a driving mind the gaudy body looked like a broken carnival decoration. Richards and Otto went over them all carefully. They were undamaged.

  "The cops did all this already," grumbled Quaid.

  "Yes, and we do it again," said Otto. Neither his near-I adjutant nor Richards showed up anything untoward. There were no residues that should not be there, human or otherwise.

  Richards quizzed the five Twos inhabiting the active sheaths. Like the Ones, Two series lacked advanced intelligence, both classes only scraping into the UN's higher AI classification thanks to a certain dogged self-awareness. Nothing they said suggested they had seen anything, nor did their memories, which Richards accessed directly once he'd done being polite, their logs showing their occupation of the sheaths for the entire voyage, their encryption unbroken. As far as Richards could tell, nothing had been riding them that should not have been. The base units for the Twos were on board, occupying half the lowest deck fore of the engine room. He insisted Quaid open their vault up. They exhibited no sign of interference either.

  "Satisfied?" said Quaid.

  "No," said Richards. "No, I'm not. Do you have any idea of where the cranial suspension fluid in Qifang's cabin could have come from?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  Richards showed him the holo accompanying analysis. Quaid at least had the grace to look surprised.

  "You and the police have scanned this yacht from stem to stern three times already. There are no androids or other robotics here other than the ones I have shown you," he said, a little more co-operatively.

  "Hmmm," said Richards. "Hey, you, officer…" Richards called to the sole uniform on the boat. He'd been doing an admirable job of hiding in the shadows the whole time, listening.

  "Santander, sir."

  "Get onto your office will you? Have them check out Qifang's whereabouts the two weeks before he got on this boat."

  "A Gridsig search sir?"

  "That kind of thing. Oh, and perhaps see if our Californian colleagues will send someone round to check up on his house, would you?" Richards could do this himself, naturally, but he wanted the officer out of the way for a while.

  "Of course, sir."

  "Thanks."

  Richards waited for the cop to leave before he spoke to the two men filling the corridor behind him. "If there really are no other androids on board, and the ones that are there are in good condition," said Richards, "that leaves one possibility. Neither Zhang Qifang was what they appeared to be."

  "An emulant?" said Quaid. "That would have shown up on my security."

  "Your guess is as good as mine. Auto-units don't fool anyone for long; you're right. Self-governing androids are not hard to spot. But all this blood…" He turned to look at them. "Zhang Qifang was murdered by somebody on board this boat. However, when the deed was done, they were surprised to find that he was not human, but a doppelganger."

  "Way to go," said Quaid with leaden sarcasm. "What a theory."

  "It's what I do," said Richards. "I suspect some kind of advanced cydroid, an autonomous, organic emulant."

  "They can't do that yet, can they?" said Quaid, eyebrows raised.

  "No," said Otto. "No, they can't."

  "And the advent of some new technology would also explain the sighting of Qifang in the subcity at a time when you were halfway across the Atlantic with him. Gentlemen, not only has Qifang been murdered twice," said Richards. "I suspect the real Qifang has been nowhere near the European Union."

  "Bullshit!" said Quaid. But Richards was already far away, the unseeing eyes of his sheath pointed toward the inner spaces of the Grid..

In theory, it took a lot of paperless paperwork to request what Richards wanted of a foreign sovereign power, especially the Americans. As the passage of history had worn away the influence of the USA, later the USNA, the amount of bureaucracy it employed had increased to fill the gap between the country's actual influence and its collective memory of how influential it had once been. Form-filling was not something that had been helped by the AI revolution. Unsleeping eyes allowed for many more forms, and now batteries of zealous machine minds presided over an empire of tick boxes.

  Relations between the EU and the USNA had been somewhat cool since the Latin American debacle, and both powers, settling into senescence, were wary of each other's intentions with the globe's new stars. They were locked together by the past, neither giving the other much.

  That was how it worked on the human level.

  Richards filled in all the forms in double-quick time, but faster still was his request to Hughie to contact the Three Uncle Sams, the triumvirate of Fives who ran the States in all but name, to inspect Qifang's LA home. In four or five days' time, serious-faced men in serious-looking uniforms would be fulminating about this breach of protocol. They'd reach for their rubber stamps all the same.

  At 10pm Pacific Time two beat cops called round the professor's flat. His Gridsig sang out strong, saying he hadn't been out in two weeks. There was nothing unusual in that; it was only a week until term started again, and he'd have prep to do. The flies and the stench, however, were somewhat out of the ordinary.

  The cops kicked the door in and entered, pistols drawn. They found Qifang's bloated corpse slumped over mouldering dinner plates, an antique cleaning bot banging mindlessly into one blackened foot.

  He'd been dead for a fortnight.

Morning saw the corpse of Qifang's doppelganger dredged from the Medway. From his vantage point on the deck of the Aurora
Viva, eyes up to maximum magnification, Richards could make
out swags of something non-human dangling from the stovedin head as the cydroid swung up from the water in the ungentle embrace of a crane.

  Later, Otto and Richards sat in the yacht's dayroom with Quaid. Once more they asked him the same questions. Once more, Quaid bridled.

  "Of course we ran the full test suite," Quaid said. "A man in my position cannot be too careful, everyone wants a piece of me. Do you know how many people on the States' rich list had family members kidnapped last year? I have no desire to spend my time in a cell courtesy of a Mexican abduction gang, nor good money on new fingers once they're done lopping them off. It all checked out, don't you see what I am saying to you? All of it!" He threw his phone across the table. It spun on the polished wood, coming to a halt against one of Otto's massive fists. "Scans, bloodwork, vessel pattern, gait, retinals, molecular DNA. We matched his movements with the last 48 hours on the State Authority's spy-eyes, the whole damn nine yards. The yacht is shielded, we've one tight band Gridpipe for the Twos to use if they need to, anything else gets scrambled.
Everyone
gets checked. Hell, even I get checked. How the hell was I supposed to know he was an android?"

  "He wasn't an android," said Otto.

  "Did you do a cranioscopy?" said Richards.

  "Who the hell does cranioscopies on their dinner guests? Are you fucking joking? You want me to drill
holes
in the heads of my friends?"

  "That's why you didn't know," said Richards drily. "After this, I suggest you start."

  They sent Quaid away, and the uniformed PC. Hughie had many eyes and ears on this boat, but Santander was too attentive by half.

  "This is worrying, Otto," he said. "I had Hughie's fanclub run a search on Qifang's Gridsig. Any attempt to track it gave one of the two locations here in London. Nothing out of the ordinary there to the casual observer; they'd only see one. But they ran traces on both at the same time, and that cracked it. His genuine sig says he's not left his house for two weeks. There was the tiniest flutter in it before that, then it goes all crazy."

  "No one noticed?"

  "He's dead, Otto. For real; killed himself as he ate a fish supper of fugu without bothering with the careful part. His Gridware was intact – he was fully wired, should've automatically tagged his death. It is all totally dubious Gridwise. None of the usual protocols followed, he'd seriously monkeyed his chips. He covered up his own death."

  "He was one of the world's greatest minds."

  "Human minds, Otto," corrected Richards. He chewed a softgel lip as he ran over a real-time update of the crimefile, ported into his base unit courtesy of the Three Uncle Sams. "The LAPD found his body in his house yesterday. Apparently they were reluctant to go in on my say-so, but did because of the smell, would you believe."

  Otto spread his fingers, watching the bobbles of the polymer under the skin flex. "Someone has found a way of creating an android sophisticated enough to house a human mind, and human enough to foil the standard tests."

  "Yeah. It's doubtful Qifang could have come up with that on his own. According to k32's technology sine, cydroids like this – that's what he called them – are supposed to be fifty years away. It's one thing to get components to bond with tissue, another to construct an entire machine from vat-grown human body parts."

  "What did we watch being pulled out of the sea? Some kind of decoy?"

  "Maybe. Whoever tried to kill him didn't know the man was a fake, that's for sure. Three days after Qifang died, there were three separate logs of him departing the States. This should have tripped some major alarms, but it didn't, and because the logs ghosted each other, and were chased up by a data-gobbler, no one had done a full check until I requested it. There's some sophisticated ware behind all this," Richards said.

  "Where's the third?"

  "Beats me. They all hopped zeps within hours of each other, then the ghosting starts. It's only because the crew reported Qifang missing on Tuesday that Hughie uncovered this at all. If Qifang's behind this, he's certainly living up to his rep still" – Richards' eyes clicked as he blinked dust off their lenses – "but we can't discount the possibility it's nothing to do with him at all. Seeing as we have two here, I'd be willing to bet the third one is also on his way to the Londons. There's something here that he… they… damn… whoever, wants..."

  "That still leaves us with no murderer."

  "Yes."

  "This fake Qifang, this cydroid… Do they think it was vulnerable to EMP?"

  Richards went quiet for a second, his eyes fixed as he communicated with the mainframe at the coroner where Qifang's double was being expertly dissected.

  "Yes."

  "In that case," said Otto. "I have an idea. Get Quaid to bring his guests in here. I am going back to the car. I'll be back in a minute."