Killing Is My Business Read online

  And then

  And then

  And then and then and then

  And then

  And then I woke up and it was another beautiful day in Hollywood, California.

  27

  I looked around the office. Ada’s lights flashed and her tapes spun. Across from my alcove the rise of the morning sun cast long shadows on the brown building opposite ours.

  I heard …

  I heard nothing. I reset my audio receptors. That didn’t work. I went to step out of my alcove and then and then and then

  !!PROGRAM BREAK!!

  And then

  And then

  !!PROGRAM BREAK!! **** ERROR 66 **** SYSTEM

  RESTART IN 5 …

  And then

  4 …

  * * *

  I woke up and it was another beautiful day in Hollywood, California. Just like it always was in this part of the world. Around me Ada’s lights flashed and her tapes spun. Across from my alcove the rise of the morning sun …

  Somebody spoke. It was a woman. For a moment I thought it was Ada but then the voice spoke again and I knew it wasn’t her. It was deeper, the accent unusual and thick. The voice was also low, furtive, annoyed. The voice was talking to someone else and they were both somewhere behind and below me, like they were standing behind me, bent over as they examined something on my chassis.

  Which was impossible, given the chassis in question was hard up against the back of the alcove.

  I went to step out of that alcove and then and then and then

  !!PROGRAM BREAK!!

  And then **** ERROR 66 **** and then and then

  **** ERROR 66 ****

  **** ERROR 66 ****

  **** ERROR 66 ****

  And then

  !!PROGRAM BREAK!! **** ERROR 66 **** SYSTEM

  RESTART IN 5 …

  4 …

  3 …

  * * *

  I woke up and it was another beautiful day in Hollywood, California. Just like it **** SYSTEM RESTART SUCCESSFUL END LOOP END **** always—

  “No, no! See? Here and here, okay? Try again.”

  “If you could get your bleedin’ fingers out of the way, maybe we could actually get this thing off! Just let me—”

  “No! Ay! No estar bueno!”

  “Oi! Language, please! Any luck?”

  “It’s sealed. I don’t have the right tool … I just need to…”

  “Ouch! Gordon Bennett!”

  “Careful, you idiot!”

  “All right, all right! I know what I’m bleedin’ well doing!”

  Then a scrape. Metal on metal. Fingers on blackboard.

  Then more talk, low and fast and hurried and nervous and annoyed. The woman muttered in a language I didn’t understand but which I thought was Spanish or maybe Portuguese. The other voice was male and all it did now was huff and whistle and hiss.

  And then a new sensation. A soft pawing, gentle strokes, then something sharp skittering across my chassis. Then I felt a numbness that was hard to describe considering I was made of metal and metal didn’t feel anything, not really. What I had were sensors for air pressure and temperature and all that jazz and they were telling me something only I wasn’t awake enough to listen.

  Wasn’t awake enough.

  I opened my optics. I looked around. I saw the office. I saw Ada’s lights flash and the tapes spin and then they weren’t lights or tapes but they were books. Lots of books, on lots of shelves. There was a grand piano in the corner. A big set of double doors in dark wood.

  I knew where I was. I had a feeling. Only I—

  I didn’t remember.

  There was a click, then a crack.

  “Well, that’s bloody well gone and done it, hasn’t it?”

  The woman swore and I’d had enough.

  I went to step out of my alcove that I knew I wasn’t standing in and then and then and then

  And then

  And then

  And then and then and then

  **** ERROR 66 ****

  **** ERROR 66 ****

  **** ERROR 66 ****

  * * *

  The room wasn’t dark. The light on the nightstand was on. I watched the light for a while. I don’t know why.

  I was standing in my room, the one Falzarano had allocated to me. The bed was made. My short black trench coat—Alfie’s pick—was lying on it. The room was quiet. The whole house was.

  I turned around and then I stopped to run a diagnostic. My joints were stiff, my servos sluggish. Not by much, but enough for me to notice. So I stood and I looked at the window and I flexed a few more joints and calibrated a few other servos and then my diagnostic report came back to say I needed a full service report because of something it called “error 66.” I didn’t know what that was, but Ada would. That service report was going to have to wait until I got back to the office.

  It was night. The window was closed but the blind was open. The world outside was a yellow glow. I watched my own reflection get larger as I walked to the window and then I opened it. I looked out. There were a few guards down on the lawn and the house was lit up brighter than a baseball stadium.

  I checked my internal chronometer. I didn’t like what it told me so I checked my wristwatch. The two devices were in complete agreement.

  “Oi oi!”

  I spun around as fast as a robot of my size could spin.

  Alfie was standing in the doorway, halfway into his jacket, shirt untucked, tie loose around his neck, hair flapping up like the lid of a trash can. He had a cigarette in his mouth and the light of the lamp on my nightstand flashed in his big glasses.

  He paused, arms at angles, shoulders hunched. Then he resumed his journey into his jacket. He cleared his throat.

  “Yeah, well, sorry to, ah, disturb, Charlie, but the old man wants to see us, pronto pronto. Got an urgent job, needs doing and needs doing fast, he says.”

  I checked my chronometer again. I still didn’t like what it told me. I checked my wristwatch. Alfie nodded at me then got to work on his tie. “Yeah, well, all work and no play, et cetera, et cetera.” He took the cigarette out of his mouth and adjusted his glasses. “Falzarano’s study, see you in two shakes.”

  And then he was gone.

  I stood looking at the doorway again. Then I followed. But before I did I checked my internal chronometer and I checked my wristwatch for the third time.

  It was eight p.m.

  And I had no recollection of the last twelve hours.

  28

  There was a guard outside Falzarano’s study door and as I approached he opened the door for me. I glanced at him as I went in. He seemed tense. I wondered what had happened. Had Ellis come back? Had he been taken back? Captured? Or killed even? Maybe he’d taken a knife to the kidneys or a dive off something very high.

  Such things seemed to happen around Zeus Falzarano and a lot could happen in twelve hours.

  Twelve hours I had no memory of whatsoever.

  The old man was in the study and Alfie was busy adjusting the cuffs of his jacket as he stood in front of the big desk.

  I looked past the desk at the rows of shelves stacked with Falzarano’s own book. Something about the books made my circuits buzz. I didn’t know why.

  I snapped out of it when Falzarano pushed himself up out of his chair and walked around the desk. I had to say he didn’t look well. In fact, he looked more than sick. He looked older. Much older. And he was leaning on a walking stick, which I hadn’t seen before. The stick was black and had a curved silver handle and the shaft was thick and strong. He leaned on it heavily as he walked back around his desk to his chair.

  I stood beside Alfie. Alfie watched his boss from behind his glasses, his expression flat.

  Falzarano moved with cinematic slowness. He’d been a slick mover back at the restaurant, under the motivation of a surprise machine gun attack, and now that I thought about it I realized that after that night I’d only ever seen him sitting behind his desk in
the study. Maybe he was a slow mover. Old people often were. Arthritis and the ravages of time. I was a robot and neither of those things were going to bother me by the time I reached Falzarano’s age, which was going to be somewhere in the vicinity of the year two thousand and thirty something.

  But tonight every one of Falzarano’s years hung heavy on him. He looked at me and Alfie and his face was pale and the cheeks were slack, their weight pulling down on his eyes, showing me two crescents of wet redness beneath them. He was breathing hard.

  There was something wrong.

  “Ah, Ray, Alfie, my sons, my sons, listen, listen,” he said with a voice as light and thin as his skin looked. I moved forward to help him into his chair but the hand that wasn’t on the stick waved me off. Alfie didn’t move.

  “I need you to go and get me a few things,” he said as soon as he’d sat down. “A little shopping list, yes, yes?” He leaned back in his leather chair and then he reached forward. His fingertips only just hit the edge of the desk. His notepad was in front of him. He’d written something down but now didn’t seem to have the strength even to reach for it.

  I pointed. “Here?”

  He nodded. I took the ledger. There was an address and a short list of things.

  A short list of things that were very surprising.

  “Just a few things, yes,” said Falzarano. He had his eyes closed now. He lifted a hand. “I trust you and Alfie can handle things.”

  I looked at the list again. There was nothing about it that I liked. Not the address, not the list.

  Certainly not the address.

  “Okay,” I said. I looked at Alfie. He was still looking at his boss, his lips now pressed together, like someone paying their condolences to the deceased but in desperate need of a cigarette at the graveside. Still he didn’t speak.

  I frowned on the inside and I pulled the top sheet off the pad and I folded it into quarters and then put the paper into my jacket. I looked down at Falzarano. He was breathing, but it was faint and the skin of his face had gone from pale to virtually translucent. His tie was tight as it always was, held just so by a fine if old-fashioned silver tiepin at the collar.

  “Mr. Falzarano?”

  His chest moved once, and then was still. He was alive, but clearly sick.

  I reached down to loosen his tie. He needed oxygen.

  As soon as my fingers touched the silver pin there was a static discharge that made me jerk my hand back. And then I heard someone swooshing over the carpet toward us.

  “I’ll take care of him,” said Carmina. She marched into the study wearing a heavy embroidered housecoat that covered her top to toe. Her hair was pinned back.

  She reached over to Falzarano and was about to do the same thing with his tie as I had been but then she stopped. She looked at me over her shoulder.

  “You have the list?”

  I nodded.

  “Then hurry, please. Quickly! You must waste no time.”

  She kept looking at me. Then her eyes moved to Alfie. Falzarano made another shuddering breath.

  I pursed my lips, on the inside anyway, and then I nodded at Alfie. He sniffed loudly and followed me out of the room. Once we were in the corridor Carmina called out for us to close the doors. Alfie did it and I didn’t look back.

  I stood in the corridor.

  Alfie sniffed again. “He’s in a bad way, eh?”

  “Doesn’t make much sense,” I said. “He was fine before, wasn’t he?”

  Alfie shrugged. “Who knows. He must be hundred and one bleedin’ years old.” His hands started a search of his suit for his cigarettes. “So where are we going?”

  I took the folded paper out of my jacket. I unfolded it. I read it and I didn’t like it any better. I handed it over to Alfie. He stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth and lifted his glasses off his nose to peer at the paper with his naked eyes.

  I don’t know if Alfie knew what he was reading, but he whistled all the same and said “blimey” as he handed the paper back.

  I read the list again.

  It wasn’t groceries. It was components. Electronic components that weren’t used for building crystal sets or repairing televisions. These were components you built—or repaired—computers with.

  Computers … and robots.

  Alfie lit his cigarette and blew smoke into the air. “So you know how to get there?”

  I nodded. “Oh yes, I know how to get there, all right.”

  “Okay, you can drive, then.” He held his hand out, indicating I was to lead the way.

  I headed to the garage. Alfie followed. As we walked I thought about the missing twelve hours and the buzzing in my circuits was so loud I could hardly hear my processor calculate.

  And when I thought about our destination the buzzing did nothing but get an awful lot louder.

  Thornton Industrial Electronics and Research.

  I was going home.

  29

  Traffic was good and it took only a half hour to get to Thornton’s building in my Buick. All the way there I kept one optic on the telephone that sat between me and Alfie. I wanted to call Ada but I didn’t want to talk in front of Alfie. So I just eyed the phone but kept my hands on the wheel.

  I pulled up outside the locked gates, and Alfie and I sat there for a minute or so looking at the place. Alfie didn’t say anything. He was on the fifth cigarette of the trip and the little pullout ashtray in the dash was reaching its limit. He had his window cracked. The smoke drifted out of it in long blue-gray ribbons.

  We were at the right place. The building beyond the gates was dark. About half of the big letters on the front that had once read THORNTON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS AND RESEARCH were still there. The rest had fallen off long ago, leaving nothing but a fading shadow on the pink plasterwork. But you never forget where you were born, even if you were a machine with only twenty-four hours’ worth of memory tape inside you.

  Time and disuse had not done the building any favors but at least the place was still standing. It was Art Deco like much of the best parts of the city were, a multitiered construction that looked like a wedding cake from the year 2525. The ground beyond the gates were flat concrete and that concrete was cracked in many places, like the plasterwork of the building itself. Weeds grew in the cracks in the lot and in the building itself. The gates were black iron and they had flat silver panels in them that formed the rays of a stylized sun. They looked in better shape than the rest of the place.

  I got out of the car. I wanted to leave it just where it was. I wanted a fast getaway. I didn’t need to say anything to Alfie. He got out of the car and stood smoking by the gates. He looked at me across the roof of the car and flicked ash into the night air.

  “Lovely,” he said. “But it doesn’t look like the wizard is at home, mate.”

  “Suits me,” I said. I went up to the gates and made short work of the chains that had held them shut for who knew how long. Years, anyway. I didn’t wait for Alfie to follow me but he stuck close and when we got to the doors of the main building I made short work of the chains that were holding those doors shut too. Alfie backed up a little and looked straight up at the building.

  “Here, Charlie,” he said, “looks like this place has been shut up for donkeys. How do we know there’s anything left inside?”

  I shrugged. “Fair question. Falzarano seems to think there is.”

  I took the note out from my pocket and offered it to Alfie between two steel fingers. He took a long suck on his cigarette and tossed it onto the cracked concrete, then took the note and unfolded it and seemed to read it while holding his breath. Then he looked up at me.

  “You know what this lot is?”

  I nodded.

  “You know what the old man’s going to do with it all?”

  I had some ideas about that. Ideas I didn’t like. They rattled around in my circuits, bounced between transistors and neuristors and condenser coils like a pinball.

  “I might,” I said.


  I turned back around to the doors and pushed them open. They were stiff with disuse and the wood squealed against the frame.

  We went inside.

  The lobby of the building was a big rectangular room with a high ceiling. It stretched out ahead of us in a moonlit half-light, ending in two sets of double doors. There was a curved reception desk on our left that matched the curves of the building. On either side of the lobby two big wide staircases climbed up. There was a railed landing above us, like there was back at Falzarano’s.

  I remembered this place. Somehow I remembered when I’d last seen it. There had been people here. A receptionist in a pink skirt and top. Scientists in white coats.

  Somewhere there had been the smell of pipe smoke.

  Now it was dark and the place was dusty with the kind of dust you only get inside places that have been closed for years, dust that is thick and slightly sticky. In what moonlight that did come in through the high windows of the building’s lobby the whole linoleum floor looked furry.

  “Okay,” said Alfie. “Okay, lovely.” He had his hands in the pockets of his coat and he walked into the middle of the lobby. His footsteps echoed along with his voice. He looked straight up. “So you know where they keep all them doodads, then?”

  “I do. The only place this kind of specialized equipment was stored was in the main research laboratory, which is up on the seventh floor.”

  “Righto,” said Alfie. He looked around then headed toward the back of the lobby. Between the two double doors was the elevator. I joined him just as he stabbed the call button with his thumb for the fourth time.

  “Dead,” he said.

  I nodded. “No power. The whole building is dead.”

  We stood and looked at each other. Alfie pointed to one of the stairs.

  “Well, off you go then, Charlie. Lead the way, mate.”

  I led the way. I knew where I was going.

  The stairs were carpeted with thin industrial carpet tiles. They were nothing like the luxurious flooring at Falzarano’s, but in the empty building they did a good enough job of muffling our footsteps.