Time Bandits Read online

  “But I don’t know what I want it to do.”

  “Now that’s an area in which I can guide you. Just follow along with what I’m visualizing.”

  “Oh, my. I underestimated you.”

  “See, I told you. You’ll never be able to replace me.”

  EIGHT

  “Hope you’re feeling all stretched out after last night.”

  Kendra turned to see Torin who’d barged into her police precinct with his hat and his scarf and his trench coat looking all that. The man was just too dashing for words. She’d met some bioenhanced folks who weren’t quite as handsome. “I am, actually. Thanks for that.” Her perfunctory tone caused his swollen head to deflate a bit, but before she could appreciate the full effect she had already returned her attention to the monitor on her desk. “You’re going to love this.”

  “I assure you after last night, everything is pure anti-climax.” He pulled up a desk chair and rolled it beside her. She reran the footage of the woman going up in flames not too far from the gym where they found the body that had been turned into a fruit-wrap for hippos. “I hate the way you repeatedly destroy my cockiness.”

  Ignoring him, she said, “So, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this isn’t spontaneous combustion, but rather more of the work of our psychic murderer.”

  “I’m afraid I’m inclined to agree with you.”

  “All a bit dramatic, don’t you think?”

  “Not if you’re trying to destroy evidence.”

  Kendra’s eyes lost focus briefly. “So she would have had to come in contact with him, brushed up against him.”

  “Maybe all she had to do was notice him at the wrong time. If we can’t identify her then we can’t draw any connections between her and him.”

  “Only we just did owing to the bizarre nature of the crime.”

  “Maybe he didn’t realize there were cameras in the area,” Torin said, his eyes going up and to the left to indicate he was fishing for ideas in back of his brain. “If all you find is a pile of ashes in the morning, could be from anything, and not necessarily from a body.”

  “So he senses the cameras in the gym—I checked, they were fried—but doesn’t sense the street cameras?”

  “Maybe he was feeling overwhelmed with guilt, or was being overly taxed with calculating ten moves ahead to see how he was going to avoid leaving a trail behind him a mile wide, or…”

  “Fine, enough. We’re long on speculation and short on facts. Let’s see what we can do to flip that equation, shall we?”

  Torin hit her with one of his wicked smiles. “What did you have in mind?”

  “Coffee.”

  “I thought all you had to do to jumpstart your heart and mind was to look at me.”

  She stifled a smile on her way to the break room. It was a short walk from her desk, the vending machines separated by a room divider of vintage redwood from the floor up to about four feet off the ground, and glass panels up to the ceiling. Torin watched her making her coffee and said, “Why don’t you let Bob do that for you?”

  She glanced over at the droid coffee machine. “You do look like you’re trying to put me out of work, Miss,” Bob said. “I’ll have you know I’m protected by a droid union.”

  “To say nothing about your feelings,” Torin said. “Tell her about your feelings, Bob.”

  “I do feel a little put upon if you must know,” Bob said. “The last officer insisted on Thai tea, which isn’t in my repertoire. Personally, I thought she was being racist too, just in a more passive aggressive way.”

  “Boils my blood, it does,” Torin said.

  “Shut up, both of you.” Kendra took a deep breath to pull herself together. “And Bob, he doesn’t give a damn about your feelings, he’s just trying to get a rise out of me for being a luddite.”

  “The enemy of my enemy,” Bob said, handing her the coffee, his movement just a little off to spill some of the scalding liquid on her and cause her to yelp.

  “You did that on purpose!”

  “I might, but if you complain, I have this entire exchange on video. My AI lawyer says I could get you cited for psychological torment of class 1 AIs.”

  “Class 1 AIs?” Kendra turned to Torin for an explanation.

  “Human IQ equivalent of about 100.” He leaned in to whisper, “Special Needs.”

  One of the biolum lamps dotting the break room started to scream. The sound was inseparable from an infant’s wailing. Kendra jumped out of her skin at the piercing sound, and managed to spill coffee on herself a second time. “What the hell?” she said, staring at the offending lamp.

  “They’re living bacterial colonies,” Torin explained, “vaguely related to the ones living inside your favorite flavors of yogurt. “Scientific studies indicate that they communicate with one another through the odors they give off.”

  “The lamps speak to one another?”

  “To communicate distress.”

  “What kind of distress?”

  “My guess is a bulb is about to go out. The bulbs are self-contained ecosystems that feed off of themselves almost indefinitely. But they can get out of balance from time to time.”

  More of the lamps were wailing now. The reaction was spreading and spreading fast. “What does it mean?”

  Torin yanked the bulb that was the first to scream, tossed it in what looked to Kendra liked the microwave, and pressed the button. The bulb disappeared, and the screaming stopped throughout the room. “What just happened?” she asked.

  “It’s the atomizer,” he said, sounding surprised. Then his mode switched to pedantic, “It reduces anything you throw inside to nature’s most basic building blocks. Mandatory for all homes and offices to avoid having trash that has to be carted off, not to mention pollution from more primitive ways of removing waste. Kid-proofed, of course.”

  “All this time I thought mine was a microwave.”

  “No one is that clueless, not even a technophobe like you.”

  She shrugged. Not like I eat at home.”

  “The vacuum cleaner? Where do you think all the dust goes? That you never have to empty?”

  Feeling increasingly flustered, she hid as much from him and dodged, “Guess I never thought about it.”

  “Oh, so you do have a vacuum cleaner?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “A lot of people. They make a spray-on nano-film you can coat everything with that will eat dust and grime, even fingerprints. Makes a CSI’s job a living hell, I can tell you that.”

  Her face relaxing out of the grimaces triggered by his earlier remarks, she smiled finally. “You ready to stop having fun at my expense now?”

  “Depends. Did I provoke you into having any insights into how to foil our psychic terrorist, if only as an extension of putting a halt to progress of human and societal evolution altogether?”

  “God, you play me like a well-tuned violin.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  She put down the coffee, which she decided she didn’t need after all, Torin evidently far better at getting her adrenaline pumping. “Time we investigated the state of the art in psychic enhancement.”

  He whistled. “Good luck with that. Who knows how many labs are experimenting with it these days, funded by government and corporate interests, to say nothing of individuals working out of their garage on a shoestring budget as you’re fond of pointing out is even more often the case these days, now that the cost of doing science has pretty much fallen through the floor.”

  “You have a more logical place to start?”

  “No, not really. Besides, if anyone knows who the giants are in the field, it would be those attempting to piggyback on their work.”

  She sauntered back to her desk area, lifted her trench coat off the coat rack and donned her hat and scarf. “No fair stealing my look,” Torin balked.

  “You mean no fair looking this feminine and gorgeous while dressed as a man?”

  He grimaced. “Some
thing like that.” He followed her like a scolded puppy, his head down. “I don’t appreciate you ruining the view of your ass either.”

  “Just doing my part to keep you focused on the case.”

  “I am focused on the case. You’re supposed to be doing your part to keep too much blood from going to my head all at once, causing it to explode.”

  “Keep dreaming.”

  ***

  Torin whistled as the unmarked police car Kendra was driving pulled up in front of Spec City. “You and your whistles,” she chided. “I swear the only people who get more communication value out of a whistle are opera singers.”

  “They have whistling opera singers?”

  “Oh yeah. They do entire arias, chirping like some tropical bird with a little too much serotonin on the brain.”

  “Sorry,” he said, “it’s just that I read about Spec City. It’s a venture capital hub. All kinds of projects are funded under roof, not just bioenhancement. God knows everything that goes on in there and with what intentions the experiments are being carried out.”

  “You can bet very little of it has anything to do with the greater good, and a whole lot to do with making some rich bastard that much richer.”

  “No argument there,” he said, getting out of the car and coming around to open the door for her.

  “It’s the 21st Century, Torin, as much as I wish it wasn’t on mornings like this. Come on.”

  She took it on the chin that her unmarked police cruiser didn’t exactly blend. There were enough convertible sports cars and high end vehicles here to confuse Spec City with the Hearst Mansion. A lot of the Playboy bunnies getting out of the coupes had no doubt had their enhancements for their off-work duties. Power sex, like power workouts and power lunches and power vacations, was de riguer for those living in the fast lane. With little time to decompress before jumping back into the action, playing hard in short intense spurts was the only way to sustain working hard in long intense marathons.

  Some couples were having sex in their convertibles as the cars pulled up, driving for them. She might take a page from their book, considering her ride along companion, were it not for the fact that she could never give up driving for a driverless car. Driving to and from crime scenes was her high intensity, short duration, power decompressor. Other women were attending their makeup or were otherwise engaged in heated arguments in the just-arriving cars, equally oblivious to time and place with the cars’ autobots to handle those concerns for them.

  “What’s with all the female hires?” she said.

  “Oh that. Reverse discrimination. Fewer women go in for science, statistically speaking. Some corporations go out of their way to court them as part of their brand image. With women controlling fifty-two percent of the vote, and also bigger bloggers and tweeters as a rule, it’s a constituency well worth getting on the good side of.”

  She noticed he couldn’t help smiling at them one and all as they pulled into the parking lot despite his jaw hanging open. Not an easy feat to manage smiling with your mouth in the shape of an O-ring; he was talented that one.

  His phone played a cha-cha for him. He pulled it out of his pocket. “Ah, I stand corrected,” Torin said. “There are now more women scientists than men owing to the same determination to shift the scales of power from a patriarchal dominant society that started as far back as the women’s suffrage movement. And apparently,” he said, scrolling up on the screen with his thumb, “more men fleeing corporate hell, only too happy to play house husband after all they’ve endured, down to an including birthing the babies themselves. Just one more gene cocktail you can purchase at any gas station minimart these days. Not that they’re still pumping gas so much as squirting electrons into car batteries.”

  “Men having babies, huh? Not exactly my idea of setting the world right.”

  “I’d have to agree that’s taking women’s lib a bit far.”

  She snuck a closer look at his phone’s display. “You have that thing set to alert you to misconceptions about reality you’re carrying around?”

  “Duh,” he said, pocketing the phone. “It’s that or an implant to have the city AI upgrade my thoughts on the fly. I may embrace technology, but I have some serious issues with authority.”

  “You’re not the only one.” Kendra shifted her attention to the building with the Spec City logo. “It looks more like a natural rock formation than a building.”

  “That’s because it’s grown, not built.”

  “Come again?”

  “A new design process that’s the absolute darling with architects right now.”

  She held up her hand in an arresting gesture. “You know what, some other time.”

  “Don’t see why you can’t embrace the future like I do. I don’t care how terrifying it is at first blush, with a little further scrutiny it always turns out to be better than what came before.”

  “Try convincing Fruit Roll man of that,” she said, referencing the dead man at the gym that had kicked off their investigation.

  “Yes, well, no one’s denying the game gets more challenging the further into the future we go. You do wonder what ordinarily intelligent people are going to do to keep up in the absence of any enhancements.”

  “People like us, you mean?”

  “I imagine we’ll hang in there longer than most.”

  “You and your wishful thinking.”

  As they got closer to the monolith, she could tell that the “lichen” growing on the rock were actually solar panels. Or rather, she could surmise. A quick glance to the other buildings in the vicinity alerted her to the fact that this one actually served as a decorative sculpture centered in the courtyard between them, something for which the neighbors were no doubt appreciative. Perhaps Spec City’s motivations were less altruistic and more along the lines of exhausting people’s attempts to find their establishment to the point of going home. More likely, it was along the lines of what Torin had said earlier, just the corporation’s attempt to win empathy points with the public by looking more pro-environment.

  Inside Spec City there seemed to be even more distractions for the eye than in the parking lot. Torin whistled how impressed he was at the sight of scores of miniature droid helicopters flying bricks, constructing an improbable tower like an adult’s LEGO set, in record time. The tower was shooting up the lobby slash central courtyard whose height spanned the height of the building and thus rose for over a couple hundred stories.

  A hologram greeted them just when Kendra was ready to give up on spotting an information kiosk. “How can I direct your search?” the elderly man said.

  She whispered at Torin, “God forbid they actually hire a senior citizen. I suppose this is their workaround for political incorrectness of epic proportions.”

  “Play nice, Kendra. You might hurt the hologram’s feelings.” Torin shifted his attention to the tall and admittedly cogent geezer staring down at him. “What’s with the erector-set over there?”

  “We’re demoing it as yet another way to build skyscrapers, preferable for certain applications. The greater precision achieved with hive mind robots means far more daring shapes can be undertaken, freeing the designer’s imagination.”

  “Not to mention the labor savings by eliminating more humans from the picture,” Kendra said acidly.

  “Yes, well, there is that,” Geezer muttered, after coughing nervously. Apparently his analytical matrix had no trouble sorting the sarcasm in her tone from the matter-of-fact march of her words. “Of course we sell any number of bioenhancements for humans so they can apply themselves to more noble and challenging pursuits. Manual labor is perhaps no more suitable to people than it is to animals. You wouldn’t want to see a draft horse made to plow a field, why should you want to see a person risking life and limb from the heights of some uncompleted sky tower?”

  “I don’t know, something like free choice,” Kendra said, unmoved.

  “What we’d really like to know,” Torin interjected
, “is who is the leading genius in the field of bioenhancement currently? Psychic enhancement, to be more specific.”

  “I assure you there are many and they mostly work for us.”

  “Let me put it this way,” Torin said. “Who holds the most patents that the rest of these geniuses are busy extrapolating on?”

  “You can google the patents office for that.”

  “Yeah, sure, and find the key entries redacted.” Kendra let the steam escape out her ears so she had room up in her head to think. “You’ve done a retinal scan of us? So you know I head the Special Crimes unit and he does dinner with the Mayor who gives you your endless tax reprieves.”

  A moment’s hesitation on the hologram’s part. “The name you’re after would be that of Clyde Barker. He’s retired now.”

  “Current address?” Kendra said.

  “Unknown.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Kendra mumbled.

  “Why do you say that?” Torin asked, turning towards her.

  “Because you don’t let that much genius walk around off the leash,” Kendra blurted. “Either they’re working for you or they’re dead. If he’s neither, that leaves option three; he’s gone rogue and undercover. You mind me asking why he retired?” she said to the hologram.

  “He was forced into retirement. His ideas for upgrading humans were a bit too aggressive for our tastes.”

  “And he disappeared before you could put him under twenty-four seven surveillance, or worse, eliminate what you perceived as a threat to global stability?” Kendra asked.

  “Yes,” the hologram said without hesitation. His stately, wrinkly, if handsome face, was unduly expressive for a corporate type; she almost didn’t need him to verbalize to read what he was thinking. Maybe that was one more effort on Spec City’s part to overcome the image of corporate types being bigger snakes than politicians, unable to speak with anything but forked tongue.

  Torin smiled at the honesty and the candor, going by his expression, feeling a bit embarrassed for the savant who seemed to know everything except for when to keep his mouth shut.