Made to Kill (2 page)

Which boils down to this: a robot has to make a living, right?

And then one day, Ada came up with a new business plan, all on her own. I tell you, Professor Thornton—rest his soul—would have been proud. Because Thornton was good. A genius. He programmed us well. The Electromatic Detective Agency was a success and even the shadow of robophobia proved to be useful. Word got around that I was good at my job. Good enough that even those wary of hiring a machine were won over, and when I was actually out on the job, the tendency of half the population to instinctively look the other way just because I was a robot meant I could get on with detecting without drawing too much attention.

Maybe that was what gave Ada the idea in the first place. I didn’t know. I’ve never asked her about it.

That thing about a robot having to make a living? I didn’t say it had to be an honest one, now did I?

I looked at the door and then back at the girl and I think she noticed and she shuffled and looked down at the bag at her feet. Now she was the one waiting for a response.

“Look, lady, I’m not available,” I said, not referring to either profession in particular. “You should have called for an appointment,” I said. Ada handled the telephone and I knew she would have told the girl to come back in six months if she still needed us. That was usually enough to put people who were looking for a private detective off and if it wasn’t then Ada just gave the spiel when they called again. It was even the exact same recording.

“There’s a famous movie star. His name is Charles David,” said the girl, and then she stopped like that explained everything. I paused and looked back at the chair as I stood beside it. I pushed it a little on its swivel.

I had my instructions. “Lady, this is Hollywood, California. Movie stars tend to accumulate in this town, whether they have two first names or not.”

“I want you to find him,” said the girl, and she said it calmly like she was ordering a beef sandwich from the deli down the road.

I held up a hand to tell her I didn’t want to hear any more. My hand was made of bronzed steel and compared to the normal kind of hand made of flesh and blood I guess it was a little big. Her black-ringed eyes fell on it when I lifted it up and they stayed on it when I put it down. Her lips parted a little like she was nervous.

In the other room, Ada’s computer banks clattered and beeped and the tapes spun and spun. The girl’s eyes wandered in that direction, but it didn’t matter. From out here Ada sounded like a secretary typing up a letter.

“Look—” I said as the start of a perfectly good sentence which was going to involve a polite request to go jump in a lake. But what she said next stopped me in my tracks.

“And then I want you to kill him.”

I stood there and felt my circuits fizz.

On my desk was a big leather-edged blotter and an inkwell with no ink and a telephone. I moved my hand toward the last item about a second and a half before it began to ring. The girl watched me as I picked up the handset.

“Excuse me,” I said to her, and then I said “Hello?” into the mouthpiece even though I knew exactly who it was. The phone clicked and hissed. The line was dead, of course.

“
Get rid of her, Ray.”

Ada.

I tucked my chin into my chest. I almost wished I had my hat on because then I could have pulled it down. Instead I cupped one hand around the mouthpiece and spoke low and kept one optical on the girl.

“Ah, hi there. Look, about that—”

“This is not how we get jobs, Ray!”

“Yeah, I know that.”

“I get the jobs. I give them to you. That’s how it works.”

“Yeah, I know that too.”

“Our business is a private one, Ray. People don’t just walk in off the street to take out a contract on someone. I have contacts. I have a chain. I have
methods
, Ray, that keep us and what we do secret to Mr. Joe Q. Public. Whoever she is, she knows what we do. She knows you’re not a detective. She knows where the office is. All of this adds up to trouble.”

“I agree.”

“So get rid of her.”

“Wait,” I said. “Do you mean—?”

“Self-preservation, Ray. Self-preservation.”

The girl was still looking at me. I zoomed in a little on the pulse in her neck and I started counting. It was fast. Too fast. I checked her pupils. They were a little small but seemed to be working. She was nervous, that was all. I didn’t blame her. She’d made a mistake, and maybe now she knew that.

Because I couldn’t let her leave the office. Not while she was still breathing, anyway.

Then she lifted herself up on her toes, like she was waiting for a long-lost love to step off a train. “I can pay,” she said.

Ada went quiet. I didn’t say anything either.

The girl bent over and picked up the leather athletic bag. She did it with both hands, and even then the bag stretched what muscles she had in her arms to their limit. She swung the bag low to the ground, like it was filled with solid gold bars. Then she puffed her cheeks out and brought it up onto the desk in one single movement.

Ada ticked in my ear like the second hand of a fast watch. “Ray…”

I held the phone away from my mouth and I looked at the girl. She was standing back from the desk, hands clasped in front of her.

“Ray!”

I brought the phone up again. “Okay, okay,” I said. Then I moved it back down and nodded at the girl. “Look, lady, this isn’t how it works—”

The girl didn’t speak. What she did was step back up to the desk and reach forward to unzip the bag. Then she pulled back the edges so I could get a good look at the contents.

I looked. As I looked there was a pause in the clattering sound from the computer room.

Inside the bag were solid gold bars. Maybe two dozen of them. They weren’t the usual kind, the kind of long fat gold bricks that sat happily in the vaults of Fort Knox. These were about the size and shape of playing cards, if playing cards were half an inch thick and made of gold. Easier to move around than normal bars, but a bag full of them still had to weigh a hundred pounds, if not more. The girl was small, too. How she had even got the bag the stairs I didn’t know, but it must have been slowly.

The clattering from the computer room started up again.

“I said I can pay,” said the girl.

I said nothing.

“I’m listening,” said Ada inside my head.

We sat opposite each other, me behind the desk in the chair that was especially reinforced, her in the chair on the other side. She sat perched on the edge and she kept her knees together and her hands clasped on her knees.

Whoever she was, she had some kind of training. Finishing school at least. Something else too. Her clothes were not flashy but they were expensive. Designer. Likewise the hair. Likewise the makeup. I figured the Egyptian princess look was part of it. Nothing about her was accidental.

I wondered who she was, because she hadn’t said. In fact, she’d refused to say an awful lot, so far anyway.

I considered again. Neither of us had spoken in four minutes fifty seconds and those seconds just keep ticking on.

I hadn’t said yes to the job yet, either. Just getting information out of her felt like a case in itself. She was fighting me and she wasn’t even trying to hide it.

“So how do I get hold of you?” I asked.

“You don’t,” she said, nothing moving except her lips. Then she blinked and she adjusted her fingers. “I’ll call every day until you have something to tell me.”

I shook my head. She just blinked at me again.

“I’m going to need a name,” I said.

Her mouth twitched. “You have it already.”

I simulated a sigh, on the inside. Ada was listening in from the computer room. I wondered what she made of it all.

“The name I’m looking for is
yours
.”

She shook her head. It was just two moves, one left, one right, and her hair swung in the same direction.

“You don’t need my name,” she said. “I’ve paid up front. I’ll call every day. You just need to find Charles David and eliminate him.”

Eliminate
. Interesting choice of word. It made Charles David sound less like a person, more like a problem. Which was exactly why she’d chosen to use it now we were talking business talk.

Charles David. Movie star. Big time, apparently. If I’d know who he was once, I didn’t know now. Being a robot had certain limitations, chief among them was one simple yet important fact.

I couldn't remember a damn thing.

Inside my chest was a memory tape. It was a work of art, an act of miniaturization that would count as a scientific miracle if only it was used in more than just me. Still, it was something my creator was proud of inventing. But squeezing so much portable storage into such a small space was difficult and while Professor Thornton managed to do it, it came with a cost: the tape could only hold twenty-four hours of data before it came to the end of the spool and needed switching out for a new old. The old memory tapes—years’ worth of the things—were stored in a room hidden behind a concealed door on the other side of the office. That room was pretty big. Or I thought it would be pretty big.

I didn’t remember.

So every day, I needed a new, blank tape. I was still
me
—my electromatic brain ran off of a template of Professor Thornton’s mind that was hard-wired into my circuits, and there was plenty of basics I had on permanent silicon storage: I knew how to speak English, who Ada was, that I lived in Hollywood, California and that the capital of Australia was Canberra.

Actually, I wasn’t sure about Canberra, and now I thought about it my knowledge of Australia was fuzzy at best.

Otherwise?
Poof
. All gone. A pain in the ass for detective work, let me tell you. At least I had Ada to keep track of everything that I couldn’t.

But for my new job? Actually, not remembering things was a nice little safety net. One we’d never had to test, of course, but still. As Ada said, ours was a private business.

So when I looked at the photo that the girl had produced not from the leather bag but a pocket on the front of her dress, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that it was of the famous star of the silver screen, Charles David.

The photo was
color and the party
on it was a sturdy looking fellow with red-blonde hair that was starting to thin on top but was still ample enough to make an effort with. He had a red beard with flecks of gray in it that were nicely symmetrical. The beard was well groomed but it was bigger than typical. The bottom of the thing touched at least the second button of his shirt below the neck.

Charles David was looking somewhere out of shot with an expression best described as wistful and that was rarely seen, so I imagined, outside of the confines of a movie star publicity shot.

As I took in the view of the target my mysterious client spoke.

“Do you want this job or not?”

I sighed on the inside. Ada kept on typing in the other room.

“I’m going to need more than a photograph,” I said. “Maybe you don’t know how this works, and I’d say that’s a good thing. Nobody should, not really. I’m just providing a service that sometimes people decide they require. That’s none of my business. But if I’m going to carry out this job to the satisfaction of the both of us, I need information.
Data
. Remember, you’re talking to a walking computer bank. You need to feed me the right kind of information if you want the right kind of result.”

The girl’s pulse was racing. She looked unsteady on the edge of the chair. I wanted to tell her to plant herself on it properly and was about ready to get up and help her off the floor when she seemed to snap out of it.

“Look,” I said. “You said Charles David is missing. Why is he missing?”

“I… I don’t know. He just is.”

I shook my head. “He just is.”

“I can give you an address.”

“That’s a start.”

“That’s all I can give you.”

I ground something inside my workings. It sounded like a car trying to start on a cold winter’s morning.

“That and the payment,” she said. She stood up and reached over the desk. From the same pocket the photo had come from she pulled a mechanical pencil and she used it to write something on the blotter in front of me. I watched her write it. Then I watched her stand up and put the pencil away.

I looked at the address. It didn’t mean anything to me.

“Where did you get the gold from?” I asked.

Instead of giving me an answer, she said: “I’ll call tomorrow.” And then she was gone and I was left steering the desk.

The telephone rang. I sat myself down and I picked it up.

“I guess our quiet patch has come to a conclusion,” said Ada.

I rubbed my chin. The sound of steel rubbing steel was irritating, even to me, so I stopped. Another of Thornton’s mannerisms, no doubt.

Huh. Thornton. It was a shame about him, and that was a fact.

“Ray?”

I snapped out of it and dropped my hand to the desk. “I don’t like it,” I said.

“She’s paid up.”

I looked at the athletic bag. It was still on the desk. It was still open. I reached forward and peeled the edge back like I expected the bag to be full of snakes. It was still full of gold. Lots of it. I reached in and picked up a bar.

The ingot was perfect. I turned it over in my hands, recognizing the dull yellow sheen that the twenty-four carat stuff had and that didn’t look quite real. I turned the ingot over and over again. It wasn’t marked. No stamp, no etching, no hallmark. I didn’t think that was right. It might even have been illegal. The small thin bar was gold and nothing but. I squeezed it a little between two fingers and made a little dent like the thing was butter fresh out of a very cold refrigerator.

“Where did she get it from?” I asked.

Ada hissed like a middle-aged woman rocking back in an office chair with the late afternoon sun coming in through the blinds behind her might hiss.

“Doesn’t matter. She’s paid up. This looks like our most profitable job yet.”