Charlie hustled down the street, bundled up beneath her jumper and long coat and hoping it was enough to keep the rain from seeping too deep. If only I had an umbrella, she thought to herself. As much as it rained in the city, she was surprised she'd never thought of it before. But maybe she had. Maybe it was just a thought that was drowned in a downpour, washed away by the constant barrage of the very thing that had given birth to it in the first place.
As far as she could tell, she was alone on the sidewalk, but she didn't put much effort into investigating. Up ahead, a gutter was overflowing, spewing a wide, bubbling stream of filthy water right across her path. If she'd been a proper Girl Friday, she realized, she would've scowled at it, stumbling back and forth in dainty shoes like a kid desperate to take a piss and trying to find a way around that didn't involve grimy runoff lapping at her ankles. It was a thought that made her smile as she waded through the stream in her steel-toe boots.
She could see the lights of the Village now, lit up like a lighthouse beacon, daring her to crash against its rocks. The rain had drowned out almost every other noise, but she became distinctly aware of a heavy tapping behind her. She turned to see a man standing at her heels. He carried a large black umbrella over his head, sheltering his blue suit from the rain.
"Jesus Christ, Faraday, you scared the hell out of me," she called above the din of splashing water.
Faraday took a step forward, extending the umbrella over her head. The nylon canopy had the added effect of partially muting the noise of the rain.
"Sorry," he replied. "It looked like you could use a little cover. There's something else I wanted to ask you about."
Charlie looked him up and down and nodded. "The office is right up ahead."
The walked side-by-side for the remaining block. They leaned toward each other, their heads only inches apart as they shared the umbrella and wrestled for cover. By the time they reached the office door, the rain had slowed to a bare drizzle that served as a last desperate attempt to coat every single inch of the city with a fine, wet glaze.
Faraday stared at the name painted on the front window as Charlie struggled with the door. Once open, they shuffled inside; leaving the folded umbrella to drain on the sidewalk.
"So this is Automaton Investigations. I get it now--Automaton, Tom Steel. Cute. Real cute."
"You use that word an awful lot. That's what you said about Tommy's case the other day."
"What can I say? I find your little robot endearing. It's a machine that thinks it's a man. That's a bit on the tragic side, wouldn't you say?"
Faraday stripped off his coat, hanging it on the rack by the door. Charlie decidedly kept hers on, though she was soaked and dripping all over the floor, forming a puddle around her boots.
"Not really. Tommy actually enjoys his life, which is a lot more than most actual people can say."
"But that's where the tragedy comes in! What's his so-called life worth compared to a human's?"
"I don't know, Faraday. What was Francis Heap's life worth?"
The detective narrowed his eyes and pulled a cigarette from his jacket's breast pocket. He flicked it in the air several times, making sure it was nice and dry before striking a match and lighting the tip. Charlie stared at him, her face hard and cold.
"There's no smoking in the office," she said. "Now what do you want?"
Faraday threw his hands up defensively, the cigarette still hanging in the corner of his mouth. "Easy, now. I thought we settled our differences earlier."
Charlied wandered behind the receptionist's desk. A subtle, little light flashed, alerting her to a text message that popped onto the screen with a misdirected tap of her finger. She tried not to call attention to herself, stealing a glance at the screen and the three little words there that confirmed the suspicions that had already formed, giving shape to the vague ideas that haunted her mind.
Not a cop.
"Yeah, well, we have more differences than you thought. Spill it. What are you doing here?"
"I meant to check up on your case--the missing robot, was it?"
"That's right."
"How's that going, anyway?"
"What does it matter now? Our client's dead."
Faraday shrugged. "Maybe so, but the case was important to her, wasn't it? This woman wanted to make sure her robot friend was found, and she did just pay you a very large sum of money to do so. It would seem almost heartless to not follow through, don't you think?"
"What are you saying, Detective?"
"Well, I thought I might offer my services. You're almost to the finish line, Miss Grace, and it looks like you need just a little help to make it there. I won't ask for a fee, of course. I'm not a private eye like yourself or your employer," he said, sarcastically stressing his last word.
"How kind of you to offer, you big strapping man," she replied with the same emphasis, evenly distributed. Sheltered behind her verbal barbs, she saw her chance--an opportunity for a risky but preventive strike to diffuse the looming situation. "So what's with the sudden interest in a robot, Agent Faraday?"
Faraday smiled devilishly, smoke rising from his face.
"So you've got it all figured out, do you? Not bad. I was wondering how long it would take."
"You left a trail so plain it was hard not to follow. Are you always this sloppy when you're popping heads for the US of A?"
"Can you blame me? I was up against a robot with the mind of a twelve-year-old and a mechanic. It doesn't exactly take the whole bureau to match wits with the two of you."
"I think you may be underestimating us," she said.
"We'll see about that. If you're as smart as you think you are, you'll help me find what I'm looking for."
"And why is Fifty-two so important to you, Faraday? What does she have that's so valuable?"
"I'm afraid that's classified information."
"Like those secrets in her head?"
Faraday laughed and spun himself around, his wet leather shoes squeaking against the floor. Charlie quickly slipped her hand into her jacket pocket, grabbing the handle of her revolver and entrenching it thoroughly in her grasp.
"Wow, Charlie. Looks like you spoke way too soon. I didn't believe you'd show your cards so soon. The hand isn't even over yet."
His eyes fell back to the shape of her body, and he noticed the hand in her pocket, the cylindrical form beneath it that pointed straight toward him. He pretended not to notice, but the smile instantly dissolved from his face.
"So either you've heard from her," he said, "or you have her. Which is it, Miss Grace? Obviously, you've got me, so what harm would the truth be at this point?"
"You're right, Faraday. At this point, the truth can't hurt now. She's safe, and she's gone. She's out of the city," she said. "And I can see your roaming eyes, so you know what's in my pocket. How about a little truth from you? Like you said, it won't hurt a thing."
Faraday sighed and lifted his arms into the air. "Make it quick. I've got a robot to hunt."
"What is she? What's she for?"
"She belongs to the Information Bureau. In a nutshell, she's their entire system, or a backup of it, at least."
Charlie pulled the revolver from her pocket, and beneath the naked light, Faraday could see the glint of its dark metal.
"Go on," she said.
"We've got our main servers, of course, but a few years back, we decided that a computer system with an advanced artificial intelligence would be more beneficial. A bot with all the IB's knowledge in its head would have instant total recall, the ability to calculate various scenarios on the fly, and other attributes that I was assured would make people like me disposable a few years down the line. It was a risky, expensive project, which just about sums up everything you'll ever need to know about our government. The intention was to create three hundred and sixty-six robots--one for every day of the year. On day one, we flipped a switch, transferred the files, and we had an instant office buddy that knew everything there was to know about our line of work. At the end of the day, we streamed the data from one shell to the next. Out with the old, in with the new."
"What happened to the old robot?" Charlie interrupted
"Scrapped. Keep in mind, we're talking about the most sensitive secrets our nation has. We couldn't afford to keep them bottled up in just one entity from now until Judgment Day. The key idea was to keep switching up the host--a constant, controlled shuffling of information that we could access with the snap of our fingers. Each one had a separate, distinct operating system, courtesy of our head programmer. That turned out to be the fatal mistake, and it cost him his very lucrative job. As it turned out, we never anticipated the brief, residual memories of the bots seeping into the main memory bank. The sensitive stuff was only available when the proper question was asked, but everything else--the previous robot's experiences and, for the lack of a better term, thoughts were right on the surface. It was the first thing every unit accessed upon activation. We realize this now, of course, but it took us until February 21 to figure it out."
"Fifty-two days after the project started."
"Exactly. After the first month, things around the office got a little complacent. We were all used to the bots by then, and since they had their own little personalities, we began to think of them as more than just tools. We started thinking of them as flesh and blood. We started thinking of them as people. Things got a bit lax, and, well, along came number Fifty-two. We switch her on, and the first thing she knows is that she wasn't the first to store this information, and she wouldn't be the last. She realized what would happen, that her deactivation was inevitable, so she ran out on us at the first opportunity. We didn't even think anything of it, at first. That was the big problem--we thought they were completely under our control, so they had free run of the joint. It wasn't uncommon to see them roaming the halls of the bureau and doing God-knows-what. It didn't even occur to us that some kind of self-preservation would kick in or that one would make a run for it."
"It's called instinct, Agent Faraday. You know, fight-or-flight," added Charlie.
"Sure, for living beings. These are machines we're talking about."
"Careful, Agent. You're trying to pick a fight you can't win. All you'll do is make me mad, and when I get mad, I tend to pull the trigger of whatever I happen to be holding at the time."
Faraday smiled. "Oh, right, which brings us back to your little robot buddy. Don't trust him, Grace. Don't trust him for a second. He's just like any other machine--back him into a corner, and he'll go for your throat."
"That's funny. It almost sounds like you're describing a human being."
Faraday ignored her, diving back into his own story instead. "When we finally realized what happened, we scrambled. It's a hush-hush operation, so there aren't many of us that even knew about the breach. The fewer people who know, the better off we are--that's the government's mantra, after all. I tracked the bot here, so we hired you to keep an eye on our programmer--just in case our girl decided to run home to daddy."
"Heap? Heap was the programmer?"
"Yep. I'd heard he'd fallen on rough times, as he rightly should have been. I didn't see him getting in on the black market, though. I wish they'd let me kill him earlier."
"I take it Helena Beame, whoever she was, is just another corpse to add to the list," said Charlie.
"Her? Nah, she's vacationing on Cape Cod now. I hear it's nice this time of year."
"So this--all of this--it was all just one big ploy to get you close to the robot?"
"Exactly. Finding it--quietly--was the hard part. All I need to do is perform a quick data transfer, and we can all go home."
Charlie was quiet. She watched his eyes, the way the corners of his mouth formed a sly, delicate grin.
"So now that I've told you my dastardly plan to save our nation, what are you going to do?"
"Me?" Charlie shrugged and dropped the gun to her side, visibly relaxing Faraday's attempt at a cool facade. "I'm going to lock you in here, and I'm going to talk to my partner."
"Oh come on, Charlie, is that really necessary? If you can't trust your government, who can you trust?"
"Just me, I suppose. You'll stay put."
He relented, leaning back against the desk as Charlie passed, went outside, and locked the door behind her. Once she was completely out of sight, he pulled his own gun from the holster strapped on his shin and slammed it on the desk as he lit up another cigarette.
Charlie walked home quickly, breathing a sigh of relief when she spotted Tommy's slim, metal frame bustling toward her. They met up on the dark sidewalk, standing atop a thin layer of grime flushed from the gutters and alleyways by the rain--that cleansing rain, like a baptismal affusion washing all the city's sins to the surface, waiting to be plucked clean. Waiting to become a brand new world.
They were so far gone in their relief and their journey back home that they never even heard the sound from a place seemingly far, far away. It was the shattering of glass.
As far as she could tell, she was alone on the sidewalk, but she didn't put much effort into investigating. Up ahead, a gutter was overflowing, spewing a wide, bubbling stream of filthy water right across her path. If she'd been a proper Girl Friday, she realized, she would've scowled at it, stumbling back and forth in dainty shoes like a kid desperate to take a piss and trying to find a way around that didn't involve grimy runoff lapping at her ankles. It was a thought that made her smile as she waded through the stream in her steel-toe boots.
She could see the lights of the Village now, lit up like a lighthouse beacon, daring her to crash against its rocks. The rain had drowned out almost every other noise, but she became distinctly aware of a heavy tapping behind her. She turned to see a man standing at her heels. He carried a large black umbrella over his head, sheltering his blue suit from the rain.
"Jesus Christ, Faraday, you scared the hell out of me," she called above the din of splashing water.
Faraday took a step forward, extending the umbrella over her head. The nylon canopy had the added effect of partially muting the noise of the rain.
"Sorry," he replied. "It looked like you could use a little cover. There's something else I wanted to ask you about."
Charlie looked him up and down and nodded. "The office is right up ahead."
The walked side-by-side for the remaining block. They leaned toward each other, their heads only inches apart as they shared the umbrella and wrestled for cover. By the time they reached the office door, the rain had slowed to a bare drizzle that served as a last desperate attempt to coat every single inch of the city with a fine, wet glaze.
Faraday stared at the name painted on the front window as Charlie struggled with the door. Once open, they shuffled inside; leaving the folded umbrella to drain on the sidewalk.
"So this is Automaton Investigations. I get it now--Automaton, Tom Steel. Cute. Real cute."
"You use that word an awful lot. That's what you said about Tommy's case the other day."
"What can I say? I find your little robot endearing. It's a machine that thinks it's a man. That's a bit on the tragic side, wouldn't you say?"
Faraday stripped off his coat, hanging it on the rack by the door. Charlie decidedly kept hers on, though she was soaked and dripping all over the floor, forming a puddle around her boots.
"Not really. Tommy actually enjoys his life, which is a lot more than most actual people can say."
"But that's where the tragedy comes in! What's his so-called life worth compared to a human's?"
"I don't know, Faraday. What was Francis Heap's life worth?"
The detective narrowed his eyes and pulled a cigarette from his jacket's breast pocket. He flicked it in the air several times, making sure it was nice and dry before striking a match and lighting the tip. Charlie stared at him, her face hard and cold.
"There's no smoking in the office," she said. "Now what do you want?"
Faraday threw his hands up defensively, the cigarette still hanging in the corner of his mouth. "Easy, now. I thought we settled our differences earlier."
Charlied wandered behind the receptionist's desk. A subtle, little light flashed, alerting her to a text message that popped onto the screen with a misdirected tap of her finger. She tried not to call attention to herself, stealing a glance at the screen and the three little words there that confirmed the suspicions that had already formed, giving shape to the vague ideas that haunted her mind.
Not a cop.
"Yeah, well, we have more differences than you thought. Spill it. What are you doing here?"
"I meant to check up on your case--the missing robot, was it?"
"That's right."
"How's that going, anyway?"
"What does it matter now? Our client's dead."
Faraday shrugged. "Maybe so, but the case was important to her, wasn't it? This woman wanted to make sure her robot friend was found, and she did just pay you a very large sum of money to do so. It would seem almost heartless to not follow through, don't you think?"
"What are you saying, Detective?"
"Well, I thought I might offer my services. You're almost to the finish line, Miss Grace, and it looks like you need just a little help to make it there. I won't ask for a fee, of course. I'm not a private eye like yourself or your employer," he said, sarcastically stressing his last word.
"How kind of you to offer, you big strapping man," she replied with the same emphasis, evenly distributed. Sheltered behind her verbal barbs, she saw her chance--an opportunity for a risky but preventive strike to diffuse the looming situation. "So what's with the sudden interest in a robot, Agent Faraday?"
Faraday smiled devilishly, smoke rising from his face.
"So you've got it all figured out, do you? Not bad. I was wondering how long it would take."
"You left a trail so plain it was hard not to follow. Are you always this sloppy when you're popping heads for the US of A?"
"Can you blame me? I was up against a robot with the mind of a twelve-year-old and a mechanic. It doesn't exactly take the whole bureau to match wits with the two of you."
"I think you may be underestimating us," she said.
"We'll see about that. If you're as smart as you think you are, you'll help me find what I'm looking for."
"And why is Fifty-two so important to you, Faraday? What does she have that's so valuable?"
"I'm afraid that's classified information."
"Like those secrets in her head?"
Faraday laughed and spun himself around, his wet leather shoes squeaking against the floor. Charlie quickly slipped her hand into her jacket pocket, grabbing the handle of her revolver and entrenching it thoroughly in her grasp.
"Wow, Charlie. Looks like you spoke way too soon. I didn't believe you'd show your cards so soon. The hand isn't even over yet."
His eyes fell back to the shape of her body, and he noticed the hand in her pocket, the cylindrical form beneath it that pointed straight toward him. He pretended not to notice, but the smile instantly dissolved from his face.
"So either you've heard from her," he said, "or you have her. Which is it, Miss Grace? Obviously, you've got me, so what harm would the truth be at this point?"
"You're right, Faraday. At this point, the truth can't hurt now. She's safe, and she's gone. She's out of the city," she said. "And I can see your roaming eyes, so you know what's in my pocket. How about a little truth from you? Like you said, it won't hurt a thing."
Faraday sighed and lifted his arms into the air. "Make it quick. I've got a robot to hunt."
"What is she? What's she for?"
"She belongs to the Information Bureau. In a nutshell, she's their entire system, or a backup of it, at least."
Charlie pulled the revolver from her pocket, and beneath the naked light, Faraday could see the glint of its dark metal.
"Go on," she said.
"We've got our main servers, of course, but a few years back, we decided that a computer system with an advanced artificial intelligence would be more beneficial. A bot with all the IB's knowledge in its head would have instant total recall, the ability to calculate various scenarios on the fly, and other attributes that I was assured would make people like me disposable a few years down the line. It was a risky, expensive project, which just about sums up everything you'll ever need to know about our government. The intention was to create three hundred and sixty-six robots--one for every day of the year. On day one, we flipped a switch, transferred the files, and we had an instant office buddy that knew everything there was to know about our line of work. At the end of the day, we streamed the data from one shell to the next. Out with the old, in with the new."
"What happened to the old robot?" Charlie interrupted
"Scrapped. Keep in mind, we're talking about the most sensitive secrets our nation has. We couldn't afford to keep them bottled up in just one entity from now until Judgment Day. The key idea was to keep switching up the host--a constant, controlled shuffling of information that we could access with the snap of our fingers. Each one had a separate, distinct operating system, courtesy of our head programmer. That turned out to be the fatal mistake, and it cost him his very lucrative job. As it turned out, we never anticipated the brief, residual memories of the bots seeping into the main memory bank. The sensitive stuff was only available when the proper question was asked, but everything else--the previous robot's experiences and, for the lack of a better term, thoughts were right on the surface. It was the first thing every unit accessed upon activation. We realize this now, of course, but it took us until February 21 to figure it out."
"Fifty-two days after the project started."
"Exactly. After the first month, things around the office got a little complacent. We were all used to the bots by then, and since they had their own little personalities, we began to think of them as more than just tools. We started thinking of them as flesh and blood. We started thinking of them as people. Things got a bit lax, and, well, along came number Fifty-two. We switch her on, and the first thing she knows is that she wasn't the first to store this information, and she wouldn't be the last. She realized what would happen, that her deactivation was inevitable, so she ran out on us at the first opportunity. We didn't even think anything of it, at first. That was the big problem--we thought they were completely under our control, so they had free run of the joint. It wasn't uncommon to see them roaming the halls of the bureau and doing God-knows-what. It didn't even occur to us that some kind of self-preservation would kick in or that one would make a run for it."
"It's called instinct, Agent Faraday. You know, fight-or-flight," added Charlie.
"Sure, for living beings. These are machines we're talking about."
"Careful, Agent. You're trying to pick a fight you can't win. All you'll do is make me mad, and when I get mad, I tend to pull the trigger of whatever I happen to be holding at the time."
Faraday smiled. "Oh, right, which brings us back to your little robot buddy. Don't trust him, Grace. Don't trust him for a second. He's just like any other machine--back him into a corner, and he'll go for your throat."
"That's funny. It almost sounds like you're describing a human being."
Faraday ignored her, diving back into his own story instead. "When we finally realized what happened, we scrambled. It's a hush-hush operation, so there aren't many of us that even knew about the breach. The fewer people who know, the better off we are--that's the government's mantra, after all. I tracked the bot here, so we hired you to keep an eye on our programmer--just in case our girl decided to run home to daddy."
"Heap? Heap was the programmer?"
"Yep. I'd heard he'd fallen on rough times, as he rightly should have been. I didn't see him getting in on the black market, though. I wish they'd let me kill him earlier."
"I take it Helena Beame, whoever she was, is just another corpse to add to the list," said Charlie.
"Her? Nah, she's vacationing on Cape Cod now. I hear it's nice this time of year."
"So this--all of this--it was all just one big ploy to get you close to the robot?"
"Exactly. Finding it--quietly--was the hard part. All I need to do is perform a quick data transfer, and we can all go home."
Charlie was quiet. She watched his eyes, the way the corners of his mouth formed a sly, delicate grin.
"So now that I've told you my dastardly plan to save our nation, what are you going to do?"
"Me?" Charlie shrugged and dropped the gun to her side, visibly relaxing Faraday's attempt at a cool facade. "I'm going to lock you in here, and I'm going to talk to my partner."
"Oh come on, Charlie, is that really necessary? If you can't trust your government, who can you trust?"
"Just me, I suppose. You'll stay put."
He relented, leaning back against the desk as Charlie passed, went outside, and locked the door behind her. Once she was completely out of sight, he pulled his own gun from the holster strapped on his shin and slammed it on the desk as he lit up another cigarette.
Charlie walked home quickly, breathing a sigh of relief when she spotted Tommy's slim, metal frame bustling toward her. They met up on the dark sidewalk, standing atop a thin layer of grime flushed from the gutters and alleyways by the rain--that cleansing rain, like a baptismal affusion washing all the city's sins to the surface, waiting to be plucked clean. Waiting to become a brand new world.
They were so far gone in their relief and their journey back home that they never even heard the sound from a place seemingly far, far away. It was the shattering of glass.
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