I Only Killed Him Once Read online

  But I did know one thing. The notes were mine. I didn’t remember making them but I knew my handwriting when I saw it. I must have left the notepad out in the open on the seat like that to get my attention the next day. Given how much of the pad was used it occurred to me that I had been doing it awhile.

  If only I had written something a little clearer. Ray’s Little Book of Secrets would have been more useful.

  So I sat in the car and I kept the notepad on my knee and I switched my attention back to the diner. As I watched Touch Daley and his buddy I ignored the growing desire for a carafe of coffee of my own. I pondered getting a container to go, but that would mean getting wet and the coffee would steam up my windows, which would make surveillance more difficult than it was right now, so I let it slide. And besides, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted Touch Daley—or anyone else in the diner, for that matter—to see me. A robot walking into a restaurant in the middle of a storm and asking for coffee to go was something I could imagine people would tend to remember when asked, and in my line of work it was fairly important that people didn’t remember me at all.

  So I sat and I watched. Touch’s coffee must have been getting cold. The guy in the jacket had finished his food and got a carafe of his own. That seemed like a waste but then it wasn’t on my dime so what did I care.

  Touch Daley. He had an interesting name. A nickname perhaps. Or perhaps not. This was Hollywood, after all. I didn’t know what branch of the federal government he worked for but he looked like the kind of man who worked for a certain kind of agency, the ones that were full of a certain kind of man and had a certain kind of way of dressing them, all black hats and black coats and narrow ties. The kind of agency where smiling was forbidden, where the training program involved practicing an array of expressions from mildly annoyed to slightly angry.

  At least, that’s what came to mind when I watched him, and I didn’t know why it did so I just put it down to another little gift from Professor Thornton. I was doing a lot of that today. It was an easy explanation and maybe a lazy one, but the truth was that in order to give me a mind and a personality all of my own, Thornton had used his own as a template. How that actually worked I didn’t know because that information was locked away in a part of my permanent store that I didn’t need to access, the area that was filled with raw program codes and machine algorithms that told my microswitches which way was up.

  But having Thornton’s template meant that I had a part of Thornton with me all the time and it meant that I enjoyed the smell of pipe tobacco and had opinions about baseball and the Fermi paradox. And maybe Thornton had watched too many cheap TV thrillers, ones filled with actors wrapped in black suits doing the best interpretation of men like Touch Daley.

  Or maybe Thornton had dealt with his fair share of government agents in dark suits during his time at the lab. Given the nature of his work, that seemed a distinct likelihood—maybe he’d even dealt with Touch Daley. Because the name certainly rang a bell.

  That was also something that happened sometimes. I called them fragments, and they usually rose up in my circuits like a slowly increasing voltage, giving me hunches or vague ideas. Less often they came as flashes that for a nanosecond took over all my sensory inputs and put me somewhere else, sometime else.

  These fragments and flashes were an artifact, nothing more than electric dreams caused by my memory systems operating at the very edge of technology. The small tape in my chest was one of only a small number and they were all reused in rotation after being copied onto larger archive tapes. These big tapes were stored in a secret room hidden behind the office. But the erasure of the smaller, portable tapes was never perfect, and sometimes data got stuck in the cracks and sometimes I could read that data and I got ideas.

  Or feelings. Like now. Because there was no flash and no vision but I had a feeling that I knew who Touch Daley was. But it didn’t matter anyway. Not to the job. All I had to do was find Touch Daley and make sure he never had another cup of coffee after tonight.

  So far I was halfway home.

  But I wrote some notes anyway. As I wrote them I wondered where the rest of the pad was. I must have written a hundred pages and hidden them somewhere. And I knew that each and every day I would have made the same discovery and come to the same conclusions.

  I looked up at the diner. The rain had eased and the diner was empty now apart from Daley and the guy in the jacket and the man who had previously been running the grill. He was now standing behind the counter and watching his last two customers. He was dressed in an apron and garrison cap sharp enough for a parade at West Point and he had a neat little gray moustache. He must have been the legendary Pepi himself. The lips under that moustache of his were twisting this way and that and he had his arms folded and he sometimes checked his watch. He was clearly eager to shut up shop and get back home to punch out a few army drills.

  My target didn’t seem to notice. He was still talking and maybe his peripheral vision was being dazzled by the other guy’s jacket. The other guy just grinned and jammed the last of his French fries into his mouth. He shook his head while he grinned. Something was amusing. Whatever Daley was selling, the guy in the jacket wasn’t buying.

  I think I liked him, whoever he was. Apart from the fact that he was making a short job long and I had to get back to the office by dawn.

  But then some of that luck I had been thinking about knocked on my door and walked right in. Touch Daley stopped talking and he picked up his hat and adjusted the brim with two long fingers and then he put the hat on while the other guy sat there watching and chewing his fries and enjoying the show. Then Touch Daley stood up and left the table and his coffee carafe and his untouched coffee mug and he turned and headed to the door. Pepi didn’t move from the counter but he watched him go. The other guy started to get busy with napkins and then he waved a hand to get Pepi’s attention.

  But my optics were on Touch Daley. He paused at the chromium hook to get his black coat and then he put it on and then he opened the doors and he tripped down the steps of the diner without any particular concern for the weather. I found myself putting the notepad back on the passenger seat and leaning forward over the wheel as I watched him.

  But he didn’t head for the parking lot. Instead he skirted the silver side of the diner and walked right past the window where my guy was giving Pepi another order. Then Touch Daley hit the street and he turned his back to me and he walked off into the night under the flashing colors of the neon sign. A moment later he had vanished into the hazy dark.

  I was surprised he hadn’t come by car. The diner wasn’t far from anywhere, but the night was not a friendly one and I was of the opinion that people didn’t walk anywhere in Los Angeles.

  Showed what I knew.

  But then again, he could have parked his car around the corner. The meeting hardly seemed a secret and my guy had parked his sportsmobile practically by the milkshake machine, but maybe Touch Daley was just following procedure. I glanced around the parking lot. There were still several cars around mine but none of them belonged to anybody in the diner, given that there was only Pepi and the other guy left and it seemed unlikely that Pepi kept a fleet of mid-priced sedans lined up outside his restaurant so he could look out over his automotive empire while he worked.

  Touch Daley had either stashed his vehicle in a dark and narrow alley or maybe he had a comrade waiting, accelerator gunning, headlights low, sitting tight until his boss came back and gave the order for blast off.

  Or maybe the damp had got into my neutronic ignition line and was giving me funny ideas. I had a job to do and sitting in the rain in a parking lot was not the way to do it.

  I started my car and I kept the headlights off as I eased back clear out of my slot and then I danced a leather-clad bronzed-titanium toe on the gas as I rolled the car as quietly as I could to the exit. Out of the glare of the neon the night opened up around me and looking right I saw a tall dark shape I knew was my target walking down the sid
ewalk, his back to me, the rain bouncing off his hat and his shoulders like he didn’t have a care in the world.

  He was about to have a care, all right.

  It was late. The street was clear. As was the sidewalk. I knew this part of town well and I knew just the right kind of places nearby that would come in handy for a job like mine.

  I turned left and turned the lights on and turned my speed up and the shape of Touch Daley loomed bigger in my windshield as I came in for my final approach.

  3

  Later I sat in the car awhile in the garage underneath my office. The rain had picked up again and I could hear the roar of it on the street outside even from down the garage ramp. There were still a few hours until dawn. I had some time left.

  Time to do some thinking.

  Maybe even time to do a little of that detective work I used to be good at in a previous life.

  In point of fact I sat in the car long enough for the telephone at my elbow to ring twice. I knew who it was and I ignored it both times. It wasn’t that Ada was worried. She might have been the boss, a computer the size of a good-sized room who ran the operation and got me to do the legwork, but despite my not insignificant limitations I was a big robot and I could look after myself and Ada knew that.

  But she would also know that I was in the garage. She would be wondering what I was doing down there, sitting in my car with the engine off, listening to the rain, contemplating the night.

  Contemplating the job.

  I felt a condenser click. I felt a logic gate flip. I felt the voltage surge in a circuit or two.

  The job.

  I wasn’t in the habit of laughing. In fact, I wasn’t programmed for it. But there was something there, an itch at the back of my vanadium-lined vocalizer. There was a little flap behind the grille that formed my mouth and when it opened, the sound that came out was more like a truck with a desperate need for new brakes than anything you’d recognize as an expression of mirth.

  The job.

  Oh brother, the job.

  I glanced down at the passenger seat. Sitting on it was a hat and it wasn’t mine. It was smaller than my usual fedora. It was a trilby and it was black and it was wet and it had once belonged to the dearly departed Touch Daley.

  I’d removed it from his head after the job and I had decided to keep it and I still didn’t know why. It wasn’t a souvenir. It couldn’t be. Part of the reason why I was so good at my job is that as well as not remembering things I didn’t leave clues and I didn’t leave fingerprints or evidence and I sure as hell didn’t take evidence with me.

  But the hat was something. It meant something, it symbolized something.

  The hat was a reminder. Call it a memory fragment, only one you could touch.

  I had the strangest feeling I was going to need it.

  I looked at the hat some more and the rain continued to fall and then I returned my attention to the yellow legal pad on my lap. I cast an optic down the page, skimming the small penciled writing to make sure I’d covered all the salient points, and then I pushed the button at the end of the mechanical pencil in my hand a couple of times and picked up where I’d left off.

  I was on to something. I only had two problems.

  One, if I was on to something then I had no idea what it was. I could only hope my notes would make some kind of sense to my newly awakened self in the morning.

  Two, by making the notes I was breaking my own rules about not leaving clues. What I was writing was incriminating to say the least. Now I understood why the previous pages had been hidden. My only option, once I’d finished, was to do the same again.

  I wondered how many times I had sat in the garage. How many times I had found out something I didn’t really like. How many times I had written that down and then hidden the notes, just in case.

  I reached the end of the page and then I reread what I had written and I thought I’d got it pretty well right. Then the telephone rang again and this time I picked it up but not before turning the legal pad upside down and sliding it underneath the black hat on the passenger seat. I wasn’t entirely certain how much the party on the end of the line knew about what I was doing at any particular moment in time but having the pad out of my sight felt a good deal better.

  I put the receiver against the side of my head and the empty line buzzed in my audio receiver. And then I heard her voice, loud and clear inside my head.

  Ada let out a puff of electronic smoke from her imaginary cigarette and then her voice purred like movie star trying to get a free drink from a reluctant barman.

  “Asleep at the wheel, Ray?”

  I said nothing.

  “You work too hard, chief,” said Ada. “You could use a little shut-eye. Come up and see me.”

  I pursed my lips, or at least it felt like I did. I liked how it felt so I kept doing it for a second and then I said, “Sure, I’ll be right up.”

  Ada made a noise you might take as approving and the line went dead. I put the telephone receiver back where I found it. I looked at the black hat on the passenger seat. I picked it up by the crown and turned it upside down and read the label. I thought about taking it with me and then I thought twice and I put it right back down on top of the notepad.

  Then I turned the key in the ignition and the car growled and I backed out and I aimed for the rain.

  I had about an hour left and I was going to use it. I knew I wouldn’t remember a thing about to night. Come the morning—well, come six o’clock—my world would start anew and I would be back to the proverbial square one.

  But I had an idea. All I needed was that last hour of my day. And then I could forget about the hat and the legal pad and the job.

  And I could forget everything I discovered about the late Touch Daley.

  4

  It was late when I finally reparked the car and made my way up the stairs into the office. But I had a few minutes to spare and if Ada knew anything was wrong I couldn’t tell and she didn’t sound any different from how she normally sounded.

  But of course she knew. My little extra trip out hadn’t been wasted. Far from it. It had confirmed what I had suspected.

  Of course she knew.

  But she knew something else too—that no matter what I had unearthed tonight, no matter what secrets had been revealed to me, I wouldn’t remember a single thing in the morning.

  Then again, I had a little secret or two of my own, and as I stood in the computer room behind the main office and I took off my hat, I couldn’t help but feel my ohmmeter twinkle just a little at the thought of it.

  Ada made a noise that might have been a sip of a very late cup of coffee but other than that there was only the whirr of her data tapes and the steady tick of her processor cores, the sound of the fast hand of a watch ticking ever onwards.

  I put my hat on the small round table that stood in the middle of the back office and I slipped off my coat and put it over the back of the chair.

  Then Ada lit a cigarette, or maybe she only did in some far distant recess of my computational comparison matrix, and she spoke at last.

  “Busy night, chief,” she said.

  “You’re telling me,” I said.

  Ada laughed. It was the laugh of a smoker and it echoed around the computer room a few times.

  “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it, Ray,” she said when she was done. “A good night’s sleep and everything will be just peachy pie, sweetie pie.”

  “Whatever you say, Ada,” I said. I wasn’t in the mood to argue and more than that I didn’t have much time left. My priority was to get into my alcove and plug myself in and let the world fade away.

  Was I the same person, when I woke up? Sure, I wasn’t a person. As far as I knew, robots—even ones that looked like people—had only ever acquired the same legal rights as the automobile parked in the garage several floors underneath my feet. But I walked and I talked and I thought about things and I thought that made me a person of a kind.

 
; But was I the same person when I woke up? Was the Ray Electromatic that was looking out of my optics at this very moment the same one that would be viewing the world in the morning? Or was he erased along with his tape, and another Ray Electromatic came along? Just the same as the original. Someone once said that we’re the sum of our experiences and our memories. If I started each day with neither of those things, then what did that make me?

  I got into my alcove and I put those thoughts out of my mind. My dynamic regression analyzer was churning away and getting a little hot for this late in my day.

  I plugged myself into the main computer bank and I told myself not to worry about it. If this particular Ray Electromatic wasn’t going to solve the mystery then maybe the next one would.

  “It’s the rain, isn’t it?” asked Ada. “The weather. You never did like this kind of weather. It’s not natural for Hollywood. This town runs on sunshine. I’ve always said so.”

  I lay back against the gentle slope of the alcove and looked up at the corner of the room where I more or less thought Ada was watching me from. I don’t know why I thought that. There was no electric eye up there looking down on me but I just had a feeling in my diodes. On the two opposite sides of the room Ada’s master computer banks hummed, the reel-to-reel tapes on them spinning slowly, the lights next to the tapes flashing in sequences that were meaningful but unknown to me. On the wall opposite my alcove was a window that looked out at the building opposite. There was no blind or shutter or curtain and with the lights on in the computer room and the sun yet to make an appearance the window was nothing but a dull black mirror.