I, Robot [5]
The Social Harmony man paged through more atrocity slides, scenes from the home-front: poisoned buildings with berserk life-support systems, violent kung-fu movies playing in the background in crack-houses, then kids playing sexually explicit, violent arcade games imported from Japan. Arturo’s hand twitched toward his mobile. What was Ada up to now?
The meeting drew to a close and Arturo risked looking at his mobile under the table. R. Peed Robbert had checked in five more times, shadowing Ada around the mall and then had fallen silent. Arturo cursed. Fucking robots were useless. Social Harmony should be hunting down UNATS Robotics products, too.
The Social Harmony man cleared his throat meaningfully. Arturo put the phone away. “Detective Icaza de Arana-Goldberg?”
“Sir,” he said, gathering up his personal computer so that he’d have an excuse to go—no one could be expected to hold one of UNATS Robotics’s heavy luggables for very long.
The Social Harmony man stepped in close enough that Arturo could smell the eggs and coffee on his breath. “I hope we haven’t kept you from anything important, detective.”
“No, sir,” Arturo said, shifting the computer in his arms. “My apologies. Just monitoring a tail from an R Peed unit.”
“I see,” the Social Harmony man said. “Listen, you know these components that the Eurasians are turning out. It’s no coincidence that they interface so well with UNATS Robotics equipment: they’re using defected UNATS Robotics engineers and scientists to design their electronics for maximum interoperability.” The Social Harmony man let that hang in the air. Defected scientists. His ex-wife was the highest-ranking UNATS technician to go over to Eurasia. This was her handiwork, and the Social Harmony man wanted to be sure that Arturo understood that.
But Arturo had already figured that out during the briefing. His ex-wife was thousands of kilometers away, but he was keenly aware that he was always surrounded by her handiwork. The little illegal robot-pet eggs they’d started seeing last year: she’d made him one of those for their second date, and now they were draining the productive hours of half the children of UNATS, demanding to be “fed” and “hugged.” His had died within 48 hours of her giving it to him.
He shifted the computer in his arms some more and let his expression grow pained. “I’ll keep that in mind, sir,” he said.
“You do that,” said the man from Social Harmony.
He phoned R Peed Robbert the second he reached his desk. The phone rang three times, then disconnected. He redialed. Twice. Then he grabbed his jacket and ran to the car.
A light autumn rain had started up, ending the Indian summer that Toronto—the Fourth Prefecture in the new metric scheme—had been enjoying. It made the roads slippery and the UNATS Robotics chauffeur skittish about putting the hammer down on the Don Valley Parkway. He idly fantasized about finding a set-top box and plugging it into his car somehow so that he could take over the driving without alerting his superiors.
Instead, he redialed R Peed Robbert, but the robot wasn’t even ringing any longer. He zoomed in on the area around Sheppard and Don Mills with his phone and put out a general call for robots. More robots.
“This is R Peed Froderick, Fairview Mall parking lot, third level.”
Arturo sent the robot R Peed Robbert’s phone number and set it to work translating that into a locator-beacon code and then told it to find Robbert and report in.
“It is my—”
He watched R Peed Froderick home in on the locator for Robbert, which was close by, at the other end of the mall, near the Don Valley Parkway exit. He switched to a view from Froderick’s electric eyes, but quickly switched