I, Robot [12]
“There’s no visual record of her on the mall cameras, but we know she entered the mall—and the robot I had tailing you couldn’t see you either.”
“Let me explain,” the kid said, squirming. “Here.” He tugged his hoodie off, revealing a black t-shirt with a picture of a kind of obscene, Japanese-looking robot-woman on it. “Little infra-red organic LEDs, super-bright, low power-draw.” He offered the hoodie to Arturo, who felt the stiff fabric. “The charged-couple-device cameras in the robots and the closed-circuit systems are super-sensitive to infra-red so that they can get good detail in dim light. The infra-red OLEDs blind them so all they get is blobs, and half the time even that gets error-corrected out, so you’re basically invisible.”
Arturo sank to his hunkers and looked the kid in the eye. “You gave this illegal technology to my little girl so that she could be invisible to the police?”
The kid held up his hands. “No, dude, no! I got it from her—traded it for access to ExcuseClub.”
Arturo seethed. He hadn’t arrested the kid—but he had put a pen-trace and location-log on his phone. Arresting the kid would have raised questions about Ada with Social Harmony, but bugging him might just lead Arturo to his daughter.
He hefted his new phone. He should tip the word about his daughter. He had no business keeping this secret from the Department and Social Harmony. It could land him in disciplinary action, maybe even cost him his job. He knew he should do it now.
But he couldn’t—someone needed to be tasked to finding Ada. Someone dedicated and good. He was dedicated and good. And when he found her kidnapper, he’d take care of that on his own, too.
He hadn’t eaten all day but he couldn’t bear to stop for a meal now, even if he didn’t know where to go next. The mall? Yeah. The lab-rats would be finishing up there and they’d be able to tell him more about the infowar bot.
But the lab-rats were already gone by the time he arrived, along with all possible evidence. He still had the security guard’s key and he let himself in and passed back to the service corridor.
Ada had been here, had dropped her phone. To his left, the corridor headed for the fire-stairs. To his right, it led deeper into the mall. If you were an infowar terrorist using this as a base of operations, and you got spooked by a little truant girl being trailed by an R Peed unit, would you take her hostage and run deeper into the mall or out into the world?
Assuming Ada had been a hostage. Someone had given her those infrared invisibility cloaks. Maybe the thing that spooked the terrorist wasn’t the little girl and her tail, but just her tail. Could Ada have been friends with the terrorists? Like mother, like daughter. He felt dirty just thinking it.
His first instincts told him that the kidnapper would be long gone, headed cross-country, but if you were invisible to robots and CCTVs, why would you leave the mall? It had a grand total of two human security guards, and their job was to be the second-law-proof aides to the robotic security system.
He headed deeper into the mall.
The terrorist’s nest had only been recently abandoned, judging by the warm coffee in the go-thermos from the food-court coffee-shop. He—or she, or they—had rigged a shower from the pipes feeding the basement washrooms. A little chest of drawers from the Swedish flat-pack store served as a desk—there were scratches and coffee-rings all over it. Arturo wondered if the terrorist had stolen the furniture, but decided that he’d (she’d, they’d) probably bought it—less risky, especially if you were invisible to robots.
The clothes in the chest of drawers were women’s, mediums. Standard mall fare, jeans and comfy sweat shirts and sensible shoes. Another kind of invisibility cloak.
Everything else was packed and gone, which meant that he was looking for a nondescript mall-bunny and a little girl, carrying a bag big enough for toiletries and whatever clothes she’d taken, and whatever she’d entertained herself with: magazines,