The Precinct
“Whattya think, Lem?”
Lem’s face was stone-cold; the thing never moved an inch, but then, it was programmed not to.
Barley Ly knew he’d been programmed to talk as though he were straight out of an older-era crime novel, fitting since his creators had assigned him a job as a detective in one of the city’s oldest precincts.
“I don’t know, Barley-unit. This seems the work of a creator, not a bot.” Lem’s voice was a slow, broken stutter compared to his rapid-fire delivery. Based on the television programs he’d had pre-loaded into his memory banks for reference, he had to assume that the creators had put them together on purpose and perhaps for comedic effect; if either one of them had feelings or the capacity for irritation, he was sure they wouldn’t get along. As it was, he found Lem to be efficient and precise, so long as the bot was given a specific, uncomplicated task.
He found Lem annoying.
It was an interesting dichotomy; he was quite aware that feelings should lie beyond his grasp, but felt a jolting surge every time he looked at the other bot’s brushed nickel face-plating. At first, he’d thought it was a hydraulic leak into his powerlines and had taken himself to the repair station, but the tech there had assured him nothing was wrong. Only research into the human condition – something necessary for his job – had helped him recognize what he was experiencing it for what it was.
“Look, Lem. You and I both know the creators don’ do stuff like this.” The words were made sense, but there was no conviction behind them. His own programmed investigative sense told him something wasn’t right. “It’s bots, I’m tellin’ ya,” he went on, “probably that same bunch what knocked over that liquor store the other week.” His own imprecision was strange. In his central core, his thoughts were clear and well-articulated, but once they came out of his mouth they were nothing but gibberish. Lem barely understood the words that the creators allowed him to grate out syllable by syllable, and Barley was sure most of what went on around the smaller bot was lost to his limited sensory perception.
“Why would beings such as ourselves require liquor? Or death? Such things are the province of the creators.” Lem’s head bobbed slightly as he spoke. The dark-colored bot was two production lines older than Barley, which made him almost a relic in the precinct. Most of the detectives were from the new line that was just rolling off the assembly, and Barley had seen some of what they could do. There was no question they were stronger, quicker, and certainly more robust, but they lacked the jargon Barley and the three other 5.1s in the division had been programmed with. Jealousy was impossible for him, but he could clearly see the improvement in them, the benefit they brought.
He had Lem – and for once, Lem had a point.
“Yer right, Lemmer,” he went on, sitting on the edge of his desk and flipping a coin from hand to hand. He’d come off the assembly line with the coin stuck to his left palm, and a subroutine in his programming made sure he was flipping it casually every single time he sat down. Detectives from the archives of the creators each had quirks, distinctions that made them unique, and his was the flipping coin. Nalley down the hall smoked cigars, even though it was rotting his internal tubing, and Morry upstairs drank heavily, though there was no way he could taste the scotch he bought.
Barley flipped the coin. Heads. It had been heads for the last seventeen tosses, a personal best. He knew it was a completely random event and that his calculation of it would have no impact on the next toss, but he was confident he would see a tail appear soon. Thankfully, the Creators hadn’t made him one to gamble – he was well aware of his own shortfalls.
“Somethin’ about this doesn’t add up.” He flipped the coin again. Heads. “The liquor, I get. Some bots are programmed to be bad, and some are just bad. Liquor don’t do us a heap of nuthin’, but some are just built to steal. This murder, though. It’d don’t ring true.”
Murder was a nice word for it. A bot had been found, splayed across the lightrail tracks, its insides torn out and stretched across its metal skin. It had been running on reserve power when he and Lem arrived, and couldn’t say a thing except “failure”. That was a common cry for bots in the throes, when the creators wouldn’t give them another power shot to keep them going. Sometimes, they were a line too old to be worth the expense. Sometimes, the creators were just spiteful.
This bot, though, was different. It was a high-end model, one that had no business being in the rough part of town. What it said and the way it said it didn’t match up, didn’t make sense. A high-end bot like that was for use in a creator’s home, or in one of the parlors they ran on the south side of the city. Sure, there were the roamers – bots that had been programmed to wander up and down the streets of the city – but he’d never seen one so expensive. No one else on the scene had noticed anything out of the ordinary, but when he’d brought them up to his supervisor, his observations had quickly been dismissed.
“We ben’ told to let it drop, Lemmer.” He’d been told by the Captain to let this one lie – and the Captain reported to a creator in the flesh.
“And did those detectives you are modeled after,” Lem took a pause as his dialogue module tried to catch up, “always do what they were told?”
Barley flipped the coin.
Tails.
“Yur right, Lemmer, for the second time in yur clunkin’ metal life,” he said, slapping the coin down onto his magnetic palm and grabbing his coat from the hook by the door. “Go pull us ‘round the car. We got a murder to solve.”
- D
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