Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [54]
The Doctor.
PS – leave the weapon at home.
PPS – you may encounter a drone called aM!xitsa. He is a friend and entirely trustworthy.
PPPS – eat this message immediately after reading.
Roz folded the paper, popped it into her mouth and chewed. It tasted of peppermint.
Roz decided to walk into town, telling herself that a good sense of the local physical geography would help maintain her situational awareness. Her instructors at the academy had been big on situational awareness, on the investigator gaining a global perception of the crime, both secular and spiritual. The crime scene, they repeatedly said, is more than just the scene of the crime. It is a space that encompasses the mind and spirit of the victims, of the witnesses and the perpetrators. It represents the amorphous and corrosive power of chaos. It is the task of the investigator to confine it and give it shape. To bring order out of chaos.
It was the routine of the investigator, thought Roz, to round up the likely suspects and mindprobe them until one of them confesses. That was how it had gone down on the street. Guilty until proven innocent, that was street adjudication. After all, the street logic went, everyone was guilty of something.
You can bet that it wouldn't work here, she thought. Too damn liberal to allow mindprobes and half the suspects were going to be robots. People killed their own kind, she knew that, not just street logic but backed up by the statistics. Wives murdered husbands, children murdered parents and scum from the Undertown murdered other scum from the Undertown. Roz was willing to bet her sister's fortune that robot boy had been offed by another robot.
Back on Earth in the mid thirtieth century if a crime was committed by a robot you went looking for its operator. The robots she grew up with weren't self-aware, or if they were they were keeping real quiet about it. A robot was usually just the murder weapon, a more sophisticated version of the traditional blunt instrument. But not here, she thought; here they had robots with attitude and Roz wasn't going to let her preconceptions get in the way of that fact. After all Mama Forrester didn't have no stupid children.
Which gave the lie to the hereditary theory of intelligence.
Roz knew that what she needed was that other staple of successful street adjudication – a local informant.
Roz met the woman at the point where the dunes washed against the base of the hill. Her very first thought was that her mama had spent a fortune trying to get her skin that dark. Her second thought was that she had surprised some kind of weird humanoid animal, but looking closer it was obvious that it was a human female she was looking at. A tall one with long limbs and a compact muscled torso, crouching naked in the middle of the track and staring back at Roz. The hair was matted into dreadlocks that hung over broad shoulders, the almond-shaped eyes were coal black, the nose was broad and close to the face. Definitely a human face. And yet there was something bestial about the set of the limbs, something animal in those dark eyes. There was something else in them as well, an expression that Roz found impossible to read; pain perhaps or pleading. Roz reached automatically for the blaster that the Doctor had told her to leave at the villa and wasn't holstered at her waist.
The woman pulled back her lips to bare white teeth.
Roz stepped back in shock and decided that this was absolutely the last time she ever listened to the Doctor's advice on personal safety.
And then the woman was running away, the turn so fast and smooth that Roz was barely aware of it.
'Wait,' she cried, but it was too late, the woman had gone.
Roz turned at a soft sound behind her. A flattened metal ovoid whispered past her and sped off in the same direction as the woman. 'Excuse me,' said the drone politely and then it too was gone.
Is everyone on this damned sphere an eccentric? Roz asked herself. It wasn't going to