The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue (16 page)

“
This is the hard part,
but I’ll be very gentle. I’m going to put the contacts in
now.”

Betty explained.

“
We’re giving you some new
retinas—to go with your new I.D.”

They had to break the chain of
sightings and documentations.

Yet another person, probably the male
voice in the room, grabbed him firmly by the head and held him
still as the lady worked.

New retinas. Of course. A blind man
didn’t have to see through them. She’d been doing some thinking. He
wondered how long that had been going on. Did she really love him
or did she just need a blind man?

Was Scott just an accessory—unfortunate
word, but she was obviously holding a few things back from
Scott.

“
Argh.” The first one, the
left one, was in.

It felt like someone had shoved a
damned dinner plate into his eye socket.

“
Betty.”

“
Yes, dear?”

“
You and I are going to
have to have a little talk.”

The makeup artists laughed, and then
Scott’s head was clamped in place by strong hands, tucked into the
guy’s armpit by the smell of it. His one ear felt moist.

“
Ah—ah!”

“
It’s okay, we’re done
now.”

They were done all right, there was no
way he was going to go through that again anytime soon.

He couldn’t believe people did that to
themselves out of choice.

The lady gave him some instructions on
the care and keeping of lenses, but Scott was hardly listening,
completely focused on the nagging sensation in his eyes. It seemed
kind of ironic, putting lenses on a blind man. He couldn’t think of
a line.

Maybe it was better left
unsaid.

His heart sank. He’d had a few ups and
downs over the last few days.

This was what he had been aching
for—adventure, he told himself grimly.

His life really had changed. It
couldn’t be a whole lot worse than how his life had been so
far.

It might even be worthwhile.

Scott was all too aware of what had
been taken away from him. If truth be told he now hated sports, and
even more he hated people who gushed and raved about their local
sports teams as if this was any real substitute for having an
actual life.

The door latch clicked, the noise from
outside got louder and someone stuck their head in.

“
How long?”

“
Two minutes.”

“
The sooner you guys are
on your way, the better off everyone will be.”

“
We understand.” Betty
spoke for them.

The door closed.

The male voice spoke.

“
Okay, hold still. We need
some pictures for your ID.”

The next step was fingerprinting him,
also for the ID cards.

So. Betty had a plan, then—and not
necessarily the one they had discussed back home, before setting
out. Scott hadn’t been asking enough questions. That was the price
of desperation.

More than anything, he was curious as
to how all of this had been set up. He was curious as to how Betty
was communicating with other robots, and especially how all of this
was undetectable to the authorities.

How much was all of this costing? How
did she know where to go? How long had she been planning
this?

What did she need him for?

That was one loaded
question.

And where was Betty getting the money?
In other words, who; or how was all this being paid for?

Expert criminal advice never came
cheap.

He knew that much from T.V.

Scott had always found it a bit strange
that they still couldn’t put photos on credit cards. The reasons
were supposedly technical, which was pure bullshit. Scott had
concluded that fraudulent purchases made with stolen cards were all
paid for by legitimate cardholders. The price was hidden or at
least, no one ever thought about it in those terms. It boosted
gross sales, which was good for everybody—except perhaps for all of
those legitimate cardholders. It was a volume industry, scraping
along on a slim margin of forty-nine and a half percent per
annum.

***

The silence was funereal as Dr. Piqua
snapped shut the heavy oaken slab. One or two even twitched as he
flipped the thumb-piece on the deadbolt. His shaven head gleamed in
the overhead pot lights.

A minimum of staff had been invited,
nice word, to the emergency meeting.

Doctor Piqua moved to the head of the
room, where his chair sat vacant. Features obscured with the strong
light of the floor-to-ceiling windows behind him, he regarded the
group, examining each face, one by one. He stood with
heavily-tattooed hands on the back of the chair.

Clearing his throat, he began to
speak.

“
I think it is time to
invoke Plan Nine.”

They all knew what that was. Plan Nine
was a backdoor into every unit built.

His plan was limited to passive
surveillance.

“
Basically, nothing
changes. Our units go on as before. We just take a stream of data
from each one, and run it through the machine.” When he said
machine, he meant more than one.

This was going to take up a lot of
machine-time.

All faces were turned to
him.

“
Are we sure?” Company
president Renaldo Gage was an aquiline man in his mid-fifties,
suave and sophisticated.

Renaldo took a deep breath.

“
Once we are blown, we
will stay blown.”

“
Yes, that’s very true.
But we cannot rely on the police to find Betty Blue and we must
have her back. It would be preferable if we were the first to
examine her.”

Plan Nine was only for the direst of
emergencies. With foresight, and a knowledge of the heavy
liabilities involved, it was only to be used in a worst-case
scenario. This was one of those cases.

Steve Hobbs, senior software writer,
cleared his throat.

“
Yes?” Piqua gave him his
opening.

“
We are already aware that
some units have been hacked. If we can isolate those units, I
wouldn’t have a problem with it. Unfortunately, there are no
guarantees.”

All in the room were aware of the
problem. Once a unit was hacked, its security was forever
suspect.

“
It’s a risk we are going
to have to take.”

Hobbs nodded.

“
I would prefer almost
anything but that…”

Hobbs turned to program security chief
Letitia Bennett. She was opening up her file, as if seeking
reassurance, although she could talk on this subject without notes.
Her small eyes surrounded by wrinkled flesh looked bitter at the
best of times. She was as tough as they came and her husky
shoulders reeked of physical training. It was habitual for Letitia,
completely unconscious of it, to cross her legs under the table and
dangle a clog off the end of her foot.

“
With all eyes looking for
Betty Blue and this Scott Nettles character, we have a better than
even chance of finding her before they do.”

This was confidential information
gleaned from police sources. Bennett was very good at that sort of
thing.

‘
They,’ of course,
referred to the authorities. ‘Eyes,’ of course, referred to every
robot built in the last few years by SimTech and anyone else who
built ‘bots with proprietary systems and components under
license.

“
If one of our friendly
neighbourhood hackers detects our presence, there may very well be
hell to pay.” Hobbs, a slender man in his early thirties, nodded.
“Or a hell of a lot of money.”

He blinked at them through
wishy-washy, pale blue eyes that always seemed a bit too
moist.

Piqua had other ideas.

“
I was thinking we might
use Plan Nine a little more creatively than originally
anticipated.” He nodded at Hobbs. “Once we activate the plan, we
not only have more eyes looking for our runaways, but we might be
able to locate some of the missing units, and bring the
perpetrators to justice.”

This was a loaded question as they all
knew. There was pretty good speculation that one or two would-be
competitors had grabbed some of the missing units.

Bennett shook her head.

“
What?” Piqua knew what
she was going to say, but it must be said and she might as well be
the one.

“
Assuming we do that.
We’re going to have to account for the information. How did we get
on to them? What was the source? And, furthermore, the courts are a
matter of public record. Once the genie is out of the bottle, we
can never put it back in.”

Piqua nodded. The others nodded.
Bennett looked around the table and nodded.

“
There are ways and then
there are ways.”

Several looked down at the table but
he heard no objections.

“
So we are agreed on that
much.” Piqua looked at his chair but didn’t sit down.

He wasn’t anticipating a long session,
or even a particularly stormy one. They all knew the stakes and the
risks.

Norbert Krumholtz, the company’s
resident legal specialist, shook his head. His jowls were blue with
a five o’clock shadow and his brown suit shone. He always sat there
with his hands folded in perfect repose and monitored the
conversation, rarely sticking in his own oar.

“
I’m not too worried about
the courts. We recover our property, lay a charge and the only
thing that is made public is the fact that a charge has been laid.
We can word it in such a way as to give virtually no information,
to the press, the public, law enforcement, or to our
competitors.”

Legal precedents for this sort of
thing went all the way back to the good old days of fracking,
according to him.

“
So, you are saying…?”
Hobbs raised an eyebrow.

“
We use our own security
teams to recover our hacked machines; ah, units, and make citizen’s
arrests. Once we have these turkeys behind bars, the vast majority
of them will lawyer up and make no statements they don’t have
to.”

“
What if they can’t afford
one?” Bennett’s question was a good one. “What if they waive their
rights? What if they’re an idiot, in other words?”

Krumholtz grinned, giving Piqua a
look, and receiving a nod in return.

“
Don’t worry about
that—one of our pet foundations will provide them one. If
necessary, one of our pet psychiatrists will certify them and they
can do their time upstate on the funny farm.”

Piqua stepped in.

“
Assuming they don’t waive
the right to an attorney and handle their own defense, that will
have to suffice.”

This was a smoke-screen of sorts as
Piqua and Krumholtz had been over this before, privately. But it
was the one thing that could go wrong. The idea of an idealistic
hacker with information that just had to get out was a troubling
one.

So far, the real issue had not been
raised, and Dr. Piqua was content enough with that.

With bonuses running into the hundreds
of millions each year per person, there was no great incentive to
ask too many questions.

His guts always tightened up when he
contemplated the unthinkable. To show that sort of concern to the
troops was a bad idea.

Confidence was everything, or so he
had always believed.

Chapter Twelve

Scott and Betty lay entwined with one
another. They were in a cheap motel in rural north-western Ohio.
The place was a Mom-and-Pop operation and seemed a bit behind the
times in terms of customer surveillance, or 'security.'

He was on his back and she was curled
up at his side, lips close to his left ear.

“
You were wonderful…” Her
fingertips raked the curly hairs on his lower belly, causing a
spasm to go through him. “…last night.”

His knees came up as he tried to get
away from those fingernails.

“
Ah-ah!” He grabbed for
her wrist but she was too fast and too strong for him.
“Holy.”

Her arm snaked over. She lifted a leg,
and threw it across him. With a quick slide up, she had him pinned,
hair falling across his face.

“
Oh, come on.” He smiled
sheepishly. “It’s all right for you. But I’m only
human.”

“
Scott. Scott.”

“
No.
Seriously.”

“
Oh, darling. It was ever
so romantic.”

“
Yeah.”

She giggled.

“…
poor Scott, drooling and
moaning and making me promise to stop at midnight. Oh.” She did a
perfect rendition of his voice. “Oh, Betty—you've got to promise
not to hurt me.”