Division Zero (8 page)

“If you hear voices calling you, go to them. They are waiting for you,” said Kirsten.

“In Heaven?” asked the ghost.

Kirsten tried hard not to scowl. “I… have no idea, it’s…” She sagged, defeated. “I don’t think it’s the Heaven you’re thinking of, but it is a place of happiness.”

“Who’s to say for sure?” asked Dorian.

Kirsten smirked at him. “What do you mean?”

“Well, what if this supposed ‘god’ is beyond any mortal’s ability to comprehend? The sublime light they see; it may very well be God. Who are we to say what it is?”

“Felix?” the housekeeper called off to the left.

Kirsten turned back to her. “Who is Felix?”

“My husband, he was killed years ago.” The housekeeper sobbed.

Kirsten patted her on the shoulder. “You have no reason to be sad. If you hear him calling you, go to him. You can be with him again.”

The spirit turned and wandered off, calling out for her husband. Kirsten watched her go about twenty yards before a glimmer of shifting silver light obscured her form and faded to nothing. The word Felix repeated several more times, growing fainter with each occurrence until it stopped. Kirsten cried a little, vicarious joy at the woman’s reunion with her family.

“Can you say that’s not Heaven?” Dorian grinned.

She frowned. “Yes, there is true evil, and yes, there is its opposite. I don’t think man-made gods and satans have anything to do with it. No more than Old Man Winter makes it cold in December or a rabbit runs around and craps eggs on your holographic lawn in the spring.” Her face reddened. “Cold is cold because that’s how nature works. The light and the dark are the same thing… just intangibly so.”

Dorian grinned. Kirsten got as passionate about debunking religion as her mother had been about beating it into her. He stopped short of saying it, not wanting to make her that angry.

“Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

After she calmed, she walked up to the techies crowded around what remained of the doll. A number of portable machines ringed the area, connected via wires to points inside the open faceplate. Forensic techs lifted blood samples from its arms and holovids from the surrounding area. Dorian followed her over to the pack of techies, busy among a milieu of various scanners, wires, and portable workstations.

She walked up and looked them over. “Who’s in charge of this?”

A thirtyish woman in a grey-blue jumpsuit stood up to clasp hands, throwing some of her black hair off her face with shake of her head. “Chief Technical Officer Li Xiao.”

Ugh. CTO… we’re the same rank. Am I supposed to salute? Shit, she’s shaking hands. Run with it.

“Agent Kirsten Wren,” she replied. “What have you found?”

Li folded her arms over a datapad. “It’s an Intera Corporation Model 3A domestic; a fairly run of the mill unit for this sort of work. Rudimentary AI, no personality, It’s basically a Vac-Droid with legs. The system logs indicate an Abend occurred about two minutes before the security vids show the doll going crazy. The recording of internal memory stopped with the Abend; like it powered off.”

Kirsten lifted a single eyebrow. “Abend?”

Tech Xiao rolled her eyes. “Abnormal end, unexpected shutdown.”

“Couldn’t a hacker have killed the onboard systems? These dolls have a wireless connection to the hotel network, don’t they?”

“Yes, that’s possible… but if a hacker was involved, the memory would still have recorded the event. Most dolls save audio and video logs from their surroundings for liability reasons; this model keeps the most recent three hours.”

“You sound like you’re trying to will the situation into
not
being something for you to handle.” Dorian teased.

Kirsten sighed. “Just being thorough.”

“Understood,” said Li. “Anything else you need from me or my team?”

“Are these A3 domestics often equipped with motor boosts that make them strong enough to crush a person with one punch?”

Xiao’s eyebrows lifted as she shook her head. “No way. It’s illegal for a sub-sentient unit like this to have its strength boosted to such levels. Even the self-aware AI’s, with citizenship, have to get permits. I’m not sure why you’re asking. This particular unit has no strength augmentation, just basic Myofiber. It’s only about as strong as an average adult man.”

Kirsten looked at the spot where the housekeeper’s ghost had been. “Did you review the security footage? It killed the housekeeper with one punch. I could see the wall through the hole.”

Hesitating, Li’s eyes traced to the main door and then back to Kirsten. “But the body was removed an hour ago… how did you…”

“Her ghost was still over there.” Kirsten pointed over her shoulder with a thumb.

Li’s voice traced off to a whisper. “They said old lady… I figured her for a frail older woman.”

“She might have been fifty, and far from frail. She took one heck of a punch. What about the other victims, the survivors? Do their injuries line up with how strong this doll
should
have been?”

“I haven’t seen any of the victims, Agent Wren, I’m picking through circuits. The medical crew left with the bodies before I got here. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Not right this second, but please give me a minute before you take off in case something comes up.”

Li chuckled and stooped over the wreckage. “Oh, we’ll be here for a few hours yet.”

Kirsten paced around the doll. The frame sprawled on the ground with two large holes scorched through the chest. From the extent of the damage, one of the Division 5 crew must have tagged it with an ABR20. Kirsten frowned, shaking her head at how they never hesitated to point a gun made to take out Class 5 military-grade cyborgs at things like this.
They should call them Division Overkill, not Five.
She squatted and put one hand on the doll’s shoulder, careful not to put her knee down in the fluid saturating the carpet.

She closed her eyes and reached out with her mind, searching for any strange feelings. While she lacked talent at clairvoyance, and had no ability to take psychometric readings, her sensitivity to the astral realm allowed her to detect a residual presence on the parts. It gave her the impression a paranormal force had touched it within the past few hours. Granted, it could also be latent psionic energy. Either way, she knew Division 0 had to be involved.

“Yeah, there’s something here…”

“The survivors look like hell.” Dorian returned from the other side of the lobby. “My guess is you’re right. This thing couldn’t have been strong enough on its own to inflict those kinds of injuries.”

Kirsten pulled out her NetMini and thumb-typed some notes. One of the male tech-twos examining the doll looked up.

“Don’t you have an M3? It’s faster to think than type.”

Kirsten shook her head. “No. I don’t do the whole cyberware thing.”

Dorian held a finger up. “It interferes with psionic ability.”

“Wow, really, no ‘ware at all?” He sounded shocked. “How can you survive these days without it?”

“I get by.”

“That’s hot,” added an obvious rookie. “Pure girls are the best. No metal, nothing messing up their perfection.”

The tech-two sighed, looking embarrassed at the rookie’s comment.

She braced for the inevitable pick up line, but he just shrugged and went back to work. Kirsten appraised him with an unprepared blink, surprised at her disappointment in the lack of a direct come on.

“He’s probably gay.” Dorian folded his arms.

She snapped at him in a whisper. “Dorian! That’s rude.”

The rookie, about the same height as Kirsten or perhaps an inch taller, looked up again and smiled. She lapsed into a staring daze and found a silly smile on her own face. For once, she thought that she would accept if he asked her out, but he just seemed happy to have met her.

She turned, lamenting how the ones she would consider dating found her intimidating. Scrolling through the files on Eze’s datapad, she rechecked the notes. This would make the fourth time a doll flipped out under mysterious circumstances. Division 2 command made the decision to punt after they came up with nothing three times. This one looked like a repeat of the others, but escalating.

“Tech Xiao?”

“Yes, Agent?” Li looked up from where she knelt.

“Regarding the other dolls that went nuts, was there anything they had in common?”

Xiao pondered. “Well, the first one was a umm…” She fidgeted and broke eye contact.

Kirsten blushed. “I can guess, one of
those
dolls.”

“Yeah.” Li seemed thankful Kirsten spared her having to say it. “It killed the man it was with and then went through the wall to attack two live girls, but they got away. The second unit worked as a baggage handler at the starport. It tried to detonate a tank of Cryomil being pumped into a Mars shuttle, but only caused minor injuries to about fifty people before they put it down. The one right before this worked as a receptionist at an office building. That one tore its clothes off and walked into a board meeting where it stabbed a VP in the chest with a light pen and started dancing on the conference table.”

“I thought this was the first fatality? The love doll is missing from the report.” Kirsten tapped her fingers on the datapad. “So there’s no pattern? This all sounds very random.”

“Well, all four dolls were manufactured by Intera. They were different models though, different ages. The sex doll, a Lily 2, was made more than ten years ago. The receptionist was two weeks old, Maya 6 I think, and the others were all within one to three years from the date of manufacture.” The tech looked through her notes. “They had different firmware revisions, different AI levels but only the receptionist was self-aware.”

“Oof.” Dorian coughed. “Ten years in service, bet she had a lot of spunk.”

Kirsten glared, unsure if her disgust arose from the implication or from the pun.

Shaking her head, she looked back to Tech Xiao. “What happened to the receptionist?”

“She’s still being held at the lab for observation.”

Dorian glanced over. “Don’t you mean ‘it’?”

Kirsten frowned. The law considered self-aware AI’s to have gender. “I’ll need to interview her.”

“No problem, ma’am. I’ll set it up for you.” Li turned and spoke to thin air, making a vid call on an implanted comm unit.

Kirsten shot the tech a jealous look. That woman could talk to herself and no one thought her nuts or on drugs. Then again, they stood in a room full of people used to cyberware, and she did not look at an empty seat on a bus while talking to it.

A long trip around the hotel provided no new additional information. No other witnesses saw anything other than the doll going nuts. No living person could have seen what she suspected; she hoped some other ghost here had caught a glimpse. Alas, after an hour, this turned out to be the one hotel in the city with no resident haunts.

A tentative male voice came from behind. “Pardon me, Agent?”

Kirsten spun to find one of the Division 2 crime scene techs trying to act like she did not scare him pale. Her reaction to his trepidation served only to make him more fearful. Relaxing the glare, she looked off to the side.

“What.”

He could not make up his mind between a serious face or a disarming smile, and flashed a chimera of both. “There’s something you need to see.”

potbellied man in a cheap black suit stood by a dark synthetic mahogany desk trimmed with fake gold. Bald on top, with a horseshoe of white hair around his head, he pestered the technical crew to get out of his hotel. Threads of spit flew from his lower lip each time he shook his head to add emphasis to what he said. At Kirsten’s approach, his eyes shifted, though he continued his verbal assault on the technical team.