I, Robot [6]
His phone rang. It was R Peed Froderick.
“Hello, Detective. I have found R Peed Robbert. The Peed unit has been badly damaged by some kind of electromagnetic pulse. I will bring him to the nearest station-house for forensic analysis now.”
“Wait!” Arturo said, trying to understand what he’d been told. The Peed units were so efficient—by the time they’d given you the sitrep, they’d already responded to the situation in perfect police procedure, but the problem was they worked so fast you couldn’t even think about what they were doing, couldn’t formulate any kind of hypothesis. Electromagnetic pulse? The Peed units were hardened against snooping, sniffing, pulsing, sideband and brute-force attacks. You’d have to hit one with a bolt of lightning to kill it.
“Wait there,” Arturo said. “Do not leave the scene. Await my presence. Do not modify the scene or allow anyone else to do so. Acknowledge.”
“It is my—”
But this time, it wasn’t Arturo switching off the phone, it was the robot. Had the robot just hung up on him? He redialed it. No answer.
He reached under his dash and flipped the first and second alert switches and the car leapt forward. He’d have to fill out some serious paperwork to justify a two-switch override on the Parkway, but two robots was more than a coincidence.
Besides, a little paperwork was nothing compared to the fireworks ahead when he phoned up Ada to ask her what she was doing out of school.
He hit her speed-dial and fumed while the phone rang three times. Then it cut into voicemail.
He tried a pen-trace, but Ada hadn’t made any calls since her ExcuseClub call that morning. He texted the phreak squad to see if they could get a fix on her location from the bug in her phone, but it was either powered down or out of range. He put a watch on it—any location data it transmitted when it got back to civilization would be logged.
It was possible that she was just in the mall. It was a big place—some of the cavernous stores were so well-shielded with radio-noisy animated displays that they gonked any phones brought inside them. She could be with her girlfriends, trying on brassieres and having a real bonding moment.
But there was no naturally occurring phenomenon associated with the mall that nailed R Peeds with bolts of lightning.
He approached the R Peeds cautiously, using his copper’s override to make the dumb little positronic brain in the emergency exit nearest their last known position open up for him without tipping off the building’s central brain.
He crept along a service corridor, heading for a door that exited into the mall. He put one hand on the doorknob and the other on his badge, took a deep breath and stepped out.
A mall security guard nearly jumped out of his skin as he emerged. He reached for his pepper-spray and Arturo swept it out of his hand as he flipped his badge up and showed it to the man. “Police,” said, in the cop-voice, the one that worked on everyone except his daughter and his ex-wife and the bloody robots.
“Sorry,” the guard said, recovering his pepper spray. He had an Oceanic twang in his voice, something Arturo had been hearing more and more as the crowded islands of the South Pacific boiled over UNATS.
Before them, in a pile, were many dead robots: both of the R Peed units, a pair of mall-sweepers, a flying cambot, and a squat, octopus-armed maintenance robot, lying in a lifeless tangle. Some of them were charred around their seams, and there was the smell of fried motherboards in the air.
As they watched, a sweeper bot swept forward and grabbed the maintenance bot by one of its fine manipulators.
“Oi, stoppit,” the security guard said, and the robot second-lawed to an immediate halt.
“No, that’s fine, go back to work,” Arturo said, shooting a look at the rent-a-cop. He watched closely as the sweeper bot began to drag the heavy maintenance unit away, thumbing the backup number into his phone with one hand. He wanted more cops on the scene, real