I wasn't worried about me, and Sanchez could see that.

"Relax. I'm sure they're out visiting family or something. They'll turn up soon enough."

"Yeah. Family," I agreed, doing my d.a.m.nedest to convince my difference engine that it was a reasonable probability.

He had his pocket drone light up another cig. "Look. It's not my department, but I'll check into it."

That made me feel a little better, but he was a busy cop. I doubt he'd be able to set aside his caseload to search out one family n.o.body cared about.

"We'll work out the rest of the details later," said Sanchez. "You look like you could use a recharge. You got someplace to stay tonight?"

I had one place to stay. I gave Sanchez the number, and he a.s.sured me he'd give me a call once Julie Bleaker and her family were found. I was doubtful, but there wasn't anything left for me to do. I headed over to Jung's apartment. It was only seven blocks away, a short walk. Since every step I took added one-twelfth of a cent to my electrical bill, I caught the omnibus.

Jung answered his door dressed in pajamas with pictures of little sailing ships and pirates on them. My humor model was barely sophisticated enough to find some absurdity in the outfit, and I might've laughed except I hadn't developed that simulated reflex yet. It was only a matter of time before I did. For now, it saved both of us some embarra.s.sment.

"Little early for bed, isn't it?" I asked.

"I wasn't expecting company."

He turned and loped inside, and I took it as an invitation to follow. Jung's apartment was bigger than mine. He'd been driving a cab longer, and he was good with the customers so his tips were better. Not that much better. I could afford a place like this with an actual separate bedroom and eight cubic meters of extra living s.p.a.ce except I didn't need it so paying for it would've been illogical.

"You look like h.e.l.l, Mack."

"My apartment blew up. I'm springing for a wash and wax tomorrow, but right now, I need a place to recharge."

"Sure." He hopped onto his couch and poured himself some wine.

He didn't ask for details. He was my friend, and stuff blew up in Empire all the time. Mostly labs and research facilities, but it wasn't unheard of for more innocuous locations to go out with a bang. He swished his wine in its gla.s.s, put his flared nostrils to the lip, and sniffed. "There's a plug over there." He pointed with his right toe.

"It's only for the night," I said.

"Forget it, Mack. What are friends for?"

He sipped his wine and picked up a book. Reading was all the gorilla did in his personal time: fiction, nonfiction, anything and everything. He appreciated books enough to allot them a shelf occupying two cubic meters, crammed with volumes. I didn't have much interest in reading, particularly fiction. Doc Mujahid was dead on. I didn't have the abstract thinking required to get into it. As for nonfiction, I found a supreme lack of desire to learn anything new that didn't contribute directly to my functioning. It wasn't in my motivational directives.

According to the doc, that was a poor excuse for not trying. I had the Glitch. I could think outside of my programming, override my directives as ill.u.s.trated when I'd refused to kill on command. I held a certain vaguely defined respect for life. Exactly how high that respect rated in my personality index, I couldn't say, but it was enough to not step on somebody for b.u.mping into me on the sidewalk. It was enough that I cared a whole h.e.l.l of a lot about Julie, April, and Holt Bleaker's continued existence. Gavin, I couldn't give one-eighth of a d.a.m.n about.

"What's with the doodle?" asked Jung.

Of course, I hadn't forgotten the drawing held in my right hand, but it still seemed surprising that it was there.

"It's nothing," I replied. "Mind if I use your fridge?"

"Knock yourself out."

I slapped April's drawing on the refrigerator with the half-melted banana magnet I'd salvaged from my place. I hoped the magnet wouldn't offend Jung. He wasn't as comfortable with his ape origins as he liked to pretend and could be a bit sensitive sometimes.

"Where's your television, Jung?"

"Don't have one."

I sighed. I was doing that a little too much, but it would take a while for the affectation to find balance in my personality template.

"I didn't think you ever got bored," said Jung.

"I don't."

Biological minds craved stimulation either for stimulation's sake or to keep them distracted. Bots were generally fine, able to close those files they'd rather not access. I'd whiled away many a night in my apartment standing in the corner, honestly not thinking about anything.

I couldn't seem to do it now, and every time I tried, that d.a.m.n Glitch reopened them again. Short of shutting myself down completely for my recharge cycle, I was screwed. Even that might not work since when I recharged my housekeeping programs took advantage of the lack of input to defragment the day's new data.

I dreamed. Not in the same manner of biologicals. My dreams weren't confusing and symbolic. They were replays, tours of my memory matrix, dissections of every single nuance as my evolutionary program sought to adapt to better functionality. Normally, I didn't mind, but I didn't feel up to it right now.

I'd planned on trying to a.s.semble an allosaurus skeleton model for my next doc-ordered project, but that had been destroyed along with my other models, my custom-tailored wardrobe, my refrigerator, my apartment. My nice, uneventful existence. Unbidden, my electronic brain opened the memory file again. I fast-forwarded to April handing me that drawing and froze on those soft, purple eyes, pleading with me to save her but not being able to say it aloud.

I closed the file again, but it was only a temporary reprieve. Unthinking drones didn't know how good they had it.

"You could always read a book," suggested Jung.

"Have you got Treasure Island?"

It didn't work.

I'd never tried to read a book. Turned out, unsurprisingly, I read fast. The words flowed effortlessly into my memory matrix, and I was done far too quickly. I read it again from memory a couple of times. Good story, but not capable of keeping me from mult.i.tasking on my obsessions: Julie Bleaker, her kids, crushing drones, my exploding apartment.

I admitted defeat, trudged to the corner, and plugged myself in.

"G'night, Mack," said Jung.

"Nighty night," I replied, clicking off.

I dreamt of the fight two hundred eleven times. I repeated my meeting with the doc thirty-six times, my junkyard wrecking session one hundred fifty times. April and her drawing, that moment replayed no less than five hundred and eighty-eight times.

Three hours, six minutes later, I clicked back to consciousness. Jung had gone to bed, so I clomped my way across the room as quietly as I could. I took the drawing off of the refrigerator, turned it over.

FIND US.

I stuck it back to the fridge with those two words staring back at me.

"I'll do what I can, kid."

5.

Every pa.s.sing minute, the odds of something bad happening to the Bleakers increased. I wasn't happy about that, but I was still a logical machine (excusing a misstep here and there from that d.a.m.n Freewill). Short of wandering around knocking on doors hoping to b.u.mp into Four Arms by chance, there wasn't much else I could do but wait until morning. There were too many doors in this town for one bot to cover. Fortunately, thanks to my internal chronometer, I perceived time as a constant. Six hours, twenty minutes clicked by at a steady pace, and never once did it seem to take longer than it should have.

I'll admit I was glad when morning arrived. If only so I could tick off the first step in my current objective list. The next was to let Jung know I wouldn't be going to work today.

"Any reason?" asked Jung as he put on his jacket.

"Personal day," I replied.

He cast a suspicious glance my way. I thought it was suspicious. My facial expression a.n.a.lyzer wasn't geared toward gorillas. "Is everything okay, Mack?"

"Nothing you need to worry about."

"We're not talking about me."

He paused, waiting for me to say something. The nuances of spontaneous conversation sometimes escaped me, so I said nothing.

"d.a.m.n it, Mack. I can't help you if you don't talk to me."

I said nothing again.

Jung's upper lip twitched, revealing a single, white fang. Only once had I seen him lose his temper, after someone at work had thought it funny to hide Jung's copy of Pride and Prejudice. He'd taken it well enough at first, but the prankster hadn't ended the gag soon enough and found himself facing a frothing, chest-beating, primal beast. No one got hurt, but that might not have been true if I hadn't been there to hold Jung back. After that, no one got between an eight-hundred-pound gorilla and Jane Austen.

Other than that, I'd never seen him any other way but perfectly civilized, b.u.t.toned-down, proper. He could be dryly acerbic in expressing his annoyance with the absurdity of the world, but rarely did he actually show it.

"Since you're barely two, Mack, I'll explain how this friend business works. Friends help each other. That's one of the big things about being friends. Otherwise, we're just two guys who know each other."

"You gave me a place to recharge," I said. "I appreciate that, but you don't need to get involved any further."

"d.a.m.n it. We aren't talking about what I need." He slapped his thick gray hands against my metal gut. Hard enough to cave in a skull, but not enough to move me. "Forget it. You know, Mack. Even for a ruthless killing machine, you're one closed-off son of a b.i.t.c.h."

Jung lurched grumpily toward the door.

"I could use a coat," I said.

He turned back and nodded. "Check my closet. I've got one too big for me, but it should fit you." He grinned. At least, I thought he did. "And be careful this time. You still owe me for that vest."

"Thanks."

He waved his hands as if to brush aside the grat.i.tude. "And Mack, whatever you've gotten involved in, be careful."

"It's nothing to worry about, Jung."

"Do me a favor and be careful regardless."

I found a nice gray trench coat that was a little too big for the gorilla, but a perfect fit for me. I was taller than Jung, so it didn't fall lower than mid-thigh, but since I wasn't looking for something to keep away the chill, I didn't care. I found an old bowler that hadn't been worn in a while, apparent from the dust covering it. Clothing served no functional purpose for most robots, especially ones as weatherproof as myself, but automated citizens tended to drape themselves in one or two pieces of wardrobe if only to further distinguish themselves-beyond the complimentary red paint job that all bots received-from the other drones and autos inhabiting the city.

There was more to it, of course. Automatons with sophisticated-enough programming started to absorb affectations from their environment. Fully aware bots were even more susceptible to such quirks. I was no different. Whether it was some subconscious motivational directive driving me toward full a.s.similation or a bug in my behavioral software I couldn't say. Nor did I care. But I felt better putting something on, so the stuff wasn't quite as unnecessary as logic would have dictated.

That same odd bit of preening didn't apply to my smudged cha.s.sis. I could've stopped for a wash and wax, but I didn't care enough to waste the time. I got a few strange looks on my trip uptown, but I ignored them.

Crime was a dirty public secret in Empire. No one talked about it, and if you listened to the Learned Council, you'd think Empire was a shining utopia of order and decency. True, there were plenty of districts where a citizen could live in complete safety, where police were omnipresent, reliable, and completely effective, where no one ever got mugged or slapped around or murdered. Then there was the rest of the city. In a town where technology was supposed to be the answer to all society's ills, there were plenty of ills to go around.

Empire was too big. No matter how many cameras the city might post, no matter how many rotorcars patrolled the skies, no matter how much honest effort was put forth to drive the rats into the light, there was always another dark alley for them to crawl into. There always would be. It was human nature. I wasn't even human, and I understood that.

The hub of Empire's law enforcement was a gleaming dome of blue steel, a small city in itself, called the Think Tank. There were hundreds of precincts scattered throughout the districts, and they were fine for keeping thieves and muggers in line. But if you wanted anything done, you had to go the Tank. The doors were open to the public, but you had to go through an extremely sophisticated scanner.

I stepped through the sensor arch and was immediately tagged a threat to public safety. A chime went off: nothing too obnoxious, but loud enough to catch your attention. Two gun-drones, heavy blasters on treads, rolled forward and trained their potent a.r.s.enal on me. There was the forcefield, too, invisible to human eyes, but registering as a soft green haze to my opticals, erected around me. For good measure, the gravity plate flooring increased its pull, and I had to crank my power up to 71 percent to keep standing.

The cop working door duty glanced up from his magazine. "Hey, Mack."

"Do we need to do this every time, Parker?"

"System's automated. You know the drill."

I opened a port in my chest and a drone walked over and installed a small blinking box. With one of these on, a robot wasn't much of a threat to anyone. The city had considered installing one into me permanently, or at least for the term of my probation. Only a protest by the Mutant Protection Agency, fearing a precedent of limiting personal freedom in the guise of guarding the public interest, had prevented it. Now I only had to wear the incapacitor in high security areas.

It had some effect on me, but not as much as they thought. My systems were too well insulated. Normally, the incapacitor would beep and its light would turn red when it detected it wasn't working at full efficiency. But my shielding tech was so advanced as to feed the device a false reading. That was a big problem for the cops in Empire. Technology changed so fast, it was hard to keep up. It was my duty as a good citizen to report the incapacitor's failing, but instead, I faked it by dropping my power levels down to a meager 5 percent. I would've fallen to the floor, except it degravitized. The forcefield collapsed. The gundrones rolled back to their posts, and the siren faded.

"You could always give me the incapacitor before I stepped through the scanner," I observed.

Parker's nose was already stuck back in his magazine. "System's automated."

I clomped through the Tank on heavy legs. Though the incapacitor reduced my effectiveness to 20 percent, it had the odd effect of forcing me to burn twice as much juice as this weakened state should've. It also broadcast unpleasant static in my right audio.

I usually dropped by the Think Tank for my monthly probation check-in. Today, I lurched past those offices to a section on the third floor: the High Science Crimes Unit.

A secretarial auto fresh off the a.s.sembly line occupied the receptionist desk. The old models were strictly functional in design, spindly machines with monotone voices and minimal personality templates. This latest generation was more aesthetically pleasing to a biological's eye. They came in many varieties, but this model was a robust automated version of a platinum blonde. Although her composition was more likely low-grade steel than platinum. She had a name tag proclaiming her Darlene.

Whoever was paying the department's bills had sprung for the facial expression package. She smiled, batted her eyelashes at me. There was something terribly wrong about an auto with eyelashes. "Well, h.e.l.lo, handsome."

Terrific. She was a flirt.

"How can I help you, big guy?" she cooed.

"Sanchez," I replied. "I'm here to see Sanchez."

"Too bad. I was hoping you were here to see me."

I supposed I couldn't blame biologicals for being obsessed with s.e.x, driven by it. It was the basis for their reproduction, after all. Messy business, biological existence. All fluids and tissues and pa.s.sing DNA around in some vain hope that it'd produce something useful. It was their only option, short of cloning, and even that wasn't particularly practical yet.

I didn't mind biologicals and the necessities of their existence: eating, c.r.a.pping, sweating, and all that other jazz. But they didn't have to advertise their obsessions, and they didn't have to foist their compulsions on me and my kind in the guise of user-friendliness. It was their nature, not their fault, and it wasn't Darlene's. So I shuffled aside my annoyance.

"Sanchez," I repeated. "I'm here to see Alfredo Sanchez, Head of the High-"

"I know who he is, honey. Do you have an appointment?"

"No."

"Tsk, tsk. Well, seeing as how you're such a fine piece of hardware, I'll see what I can do." Darlene pushed a b.u.t.ton on her box and leaned into an intercom. "Officer Sanchez, there's a bot here to see you." Then she glanced up at me and winked.