I, Robot [11]
Arturo stepped out and held up his badge as he bridged the distance between them in two long strides. “Police,” he barked, and seized the kid by his arm.
“Hey!” the kid said, “Ow!” He squirmed in Arturo’s grasp.
Arturo gave him a hard shake. “Stop it, now,” he said. “I have questions for you and you’re going to answer them, capeesh?”
“You’re Ada’s father,” the kid said. “Capeesh—she told me about that.” It seemed to Arturo that the kid was smirking, so he gave him another shake, harder than the last time.
The R Peed unit was suddenly at his side, holding his wrist. “Please take care not to harm this citizen, Detective.”
Arturo snarled. He wasn’t strong enough to break the robot’s grip, and he couldn’t order it to let him rattle the punk, but the second law had lots of indirect applications. “Go patrol the lakeshore between High Park and Kipling,” he said, naming the furthest corner he could think of off the top.
The R Peed unit released him and clicked its heels. “It is my pleasure to do you a service,” and then it was gone, bounding away on powerful and tireless legs.
“Where is my daughter?” he said, giving the kid a shake.
“I dunno, school? You’re really hurting my arm, man. Jeez, this is what I get for being too friendly.”
Arturo twisted. “Friendly? Do you know how old my daughter is?”
The kid grimaced. “Ew, gross. I’m not a child molester, I’m a geek.”
“A hacker, you mean,” Arturo said. “A Eurasian agent. And my daughter is not in school. She used ExcuseClub to get out of school this morning and then she went to Fairview Mall and then she—” disappeared. The word died on his lips. That happened and every copper knew it. Kids just vanished sometimes and never appeared again. It happened. Something groaned within him, like his ribcage straining to contain his heart and lungs.
“Oh, man,” the kid said. “Ada was the ExcuseClub leak, damn. I shoulda guessed.”
“How do you know my daughter, Liam?”
“She’s good at doing grown-up voices. She was a good part of the network. When someone needed a mom or a social worker to call in an excuse, she was always one of the best. Talented. She goes to school with my kid sister and I met them one day at the Peanut Plaza and she was doing this impression of her teachers and I knew I had to get her on the network.”
Ada hanging around the plaza after school—she was supposed to come straight home. Why didn’t he wiretap her more? “You built the network?”
“It’s cooperative, it’s cool—it’s a bunch of us cooperating. We’ve got nodes everywhere now. You can’t shut it down—even if you shut down my node, it’ll be back up again in an hour. Someone else will bring it up.”
He shoved the kid back down and stood over him. “Liam, I want you to understand something. My precious daughter is missing and she went missing after using your service to help her get away. She is the only thing in my life that I care about and I am a highly trained, heavily armed man. I am also very, very upset. Cap—understand me, Liam?”
For the first time, the kid looked scared. Something in Arturo’s face or voice, it had gotten through to him.
“I didn’t make it,” he said. “I typed in the source and tweaked it and installed it, but I didn’t make it. I don’t know who did. It’s from a phone-book.” Arturo grunted. The phone-books—fat books filled with illegal software code left anonymously in pay phones, toilets and other semi-private places—turned up all over the place. Social Harmony said that the phone-books had to be written by non-three-laws brains in Eurasia, no person could come up with ideas that weird.
“I don’t care if you made it. I don’t even care right this moment that you ran it. What I care about is where my daughter went, and with whom.”
“I don’t know! She didn’t tell me! Geez, I hardly