I Only Killed Him Once Read online

  The federal robot program was canceled. Every robot was recalled. The entire matter was consigned to history, and, according to my permanent store, it became something of a taboo subject to discuss.

  I was aware of all this, each day. I had the whole history of the robot program in my permanent store. Thornton had put it there. I was the last robot in the world, after all, and he knew right from the start that I was going to encounter all kinds of reactions when people saw me walking down the sidewalk. Forewarned was forearmed, the saying went, and I knew that because it was also in my permanent store. A personal piece of advice from my creator.

  But there was something else, and as I watched the shapes move in the window of the office high above, that something bothered me more than a little. Because the end of the robot program also meant the end of the Department of Robot Labor. It was closed down along with my mechanical brethren and some important people were made to resign, some even in public, and everyone else got reassigned and nobody spoke of it again.

  So quite what the defunct department was doing here now, in my office, in the computer room, most likely in my memory tape archive, was a question that came to mind readily enough.

  Thirteen minutes.

  I slipped down the alley. I was hidden in the darkness, and the forever-moving lights of all the cop cars out on the main street were doing me a favor because none of the light shone directly into the alley and to anyone out on the sidewalk the alley would just be one big black empty nothing.

  I pulled myself against the brown brick and I cast an optic over the scene.

  Something started to happen.

  The cops still stood around with folded arms and they’d been there long enough for me to hope someone had gone to get coffee and donuts. There were none of Daley’s agents around, but the three black vans were still parked at the curb with enough room between each for their rear doors to be swung wide open.

  Two black-suited agents, each with a clipboard in his hands, jumped out of two of the vans. They stood by the back doors of their vehicles and looked at the building.

  At almost the same time, the main building doors slammed open and a stream of agents emerged. Some were carrying objects, either solo or with the help of a colleague. Yet more were wheeling larger items out with handcarts. The procession made their way to the vans and the process of loading began while the ones with the clipboards began making notes.

  It was a smooth operation, the precious cargo coming out of the building and disappearing into the vehicles and the agents swinging around and heading back inside for the next load.

  And precious was the right way to describe what they were moving. There were consoles and control boards. There were boxes that were studded with lights on the front and trailed wires from the rear. Some of the larger components on the dollies included mainframe computers and data storage banks, each the size of a household refrigerator.

  They were all from the computer room. All parts of Ada, broken down into her individual, modular components. She’d always been federal property and the government had finally come to collect it back. That explained why our call had been cut. They had literally pulled the plug.

  And then there were the cardboard boxes. They were twelve inches square and four inches high and the agents carried them in stacks balanced against their chests. The boxes were sealed with yellow tape and even though I couldn’t see them I knew they had labels on the lids that were filled in with neat handwriting in black ink. My handwriting.

  The boxes contained my memory tapes—the master ones, bigger reels that could hold a lot more than twenty-four hours, the archive compiled from the small micro-reel tape that wound on in my chest and had, at the moment, just eight minutes of space left.

  I backed away from the alley entrance and I sank into the shadows. I turned down the faint glow of my optics and I pulled down the brim of my hat and then I wondered what I was doing because none of it mattered. In seven minutes and thirty seconds the life and times of Raymond Electromatic would come to an end and the world really would be without robots. I guessed that when my systems ground to a halt and I toppled over in the alley everyone out on the street would hear and when they found me they’d have the complete set.

  That was when the flare of a match appeared at the far end of the alleyway. I watched as the flame vanished and was replaced by a glowing red pinpoint of light as someone took a long, hard pull on a cigarette.

  I took a step forward. I had six minutes left.

  “Peterman?”

  There was no sound from the smoker. I took another step.

  “Ada?”

  This got a reaction. It was a laugh, and I had heard the voice it belonged to just this morning, but it was male and it wasn’t Peterman’s.

  I flipped my optics to infrared and there he was. A tall man with a strong nose and a square jaw and thin lips and the short stiff rim of a black hat pulled low.

  Five minutes and forty seconds and the last person I wanted to meet in a dark alley was federal agent Touch Daley.

  The cigarette flared. I switched my optics back to regular vision and I watched as the glowing red nub floated down in the darkness as Daley let his hand hang by his side.

  “Mr. Electromatic,” he said. “Funny meeting you here.”

  “Yeah, it’s a real scream,” I said. “Give me five minutes and eleven seconds and I can give you a whole routine.”

  Agent Daley stepped toward me and into a dull glowing cone of light cast from the windows above us. The cigarette burned between the fingers of his left hand but my attention was drawn to the other, which was holding a gun.

  At least, I thought that’s what it was. It was large and bulbous, like a glass sculpture the shape of a large pine cone filled with electronic circuitry and wires. The thing didn’t have a barrel as such, just a slightly pointed end. That end was pointed right at me.

  I held up my hands. I wasn’t surrendering to the agent. I was surrendering to fate. I was out of time. It was all over. I had a few minutes of life left and this particular chapter of Los Angeles history was going to come to an ignoble end in a dark alley.

  I tried to think of some last words but nothing in particular came to mind.

  “I guess you got what you wanted,” I said. It was better than nothing and it seemed to fit.

  Special Agent Daley nodded and smoked and nodded again. The gun stayed where it was. He didn’t speak. I measured the wattage across the positive and negative terminals of my bidirectional signal amplifier and found it was running a little high.

  How disappointing.

  Then Touch Daley said, “I guess I did,” and then he lifted the gun and squeezed the trigger and the Hollywood night was filled with blue and purple dancing stars and the sound of the ocean crashing on rocks far away.

  14

  I woke up. I turned my optics on. The image was **** ERROR 66 **** monochrome and cast in green and white !!PROGRAM BREAK!! and it was hazy at the edges, like I was looking at the world through a thin fabric.

  Light moved. I could see that much. It was dark and it was green and maybe I was looking at the ceiling of a room or maybe I wasn’t because a moment later my audio receptors cut in and I heard the roar of the ocean again and then the world shook and I bumped the back of my head against something hard and metal.

  I wanted to say something along the lines of “ouch,” even though I didn’t feel pain in the way that people felt pain, only an approximation of pain, a computerized simulation of the neural impulses that were associated with pain inside the brain of my creator, Professor Thornton, and they were associated with pain inside my own positronic central computation core because Thornton had imprinted it with the template of his own mind.

  All of which meant that when Professor Thornton hit his head and it hurt he tended to say “ouch” before rubbing the back of his skull and frowning at the world before him.

  I tried to rub the back of my own skull but my arms wouldn’t move. The green worl
d around me got a great deal darker the more I tried to move and

  And

  And then

  !!PROGRAM BREAK!!

  **** ERROR 66 ****

  And then

  **** ERROR 66 ****

  **** ERROR 66 ****

  **** ERROR 66 ****

  And then

  !!PROGRAM BREAK!! **** ERROR 66 **** SYSTEM RESTART IN 5 . . .

  4 . . .

  3 . . .

  2 . . .

  1 . . .

  And then I woke up and it was another beautiful day in Hollywood, California. Just like it always was, each and every morning when I woke in my alcove and the world was born anew.

  Something was different, though. I didn’t know how I knew it but I did. Whatever had been programmed on my permanent store about mornings in Hollywood, California, was enough to tell me that they weren’t dark and green and fuzzy at the edges and they didn’t smell of gasoline and dust and sweat and something else, something sharp and tangy and almost floral but also a little bit chemical.

  I wasn’t standing in my alcove. I was lying on the floor. There was a thin carpet and there was molded metal underneath and it shook a little. The room I was in was moving. Somewhere I heard an engine. Somewhere else I heard someone talking.

  No, two people. Two men.

  A shape moved in front of my optics. It was a greenish shadow against a greenish light and greenish static crawled around it. I could see a mouth moving and the shape—the man’s head—got closer to my face and I could smell that smell again. It was aftershave. Something familiar. Maybe Thornton had worn aftershave just like it.

  And then the shadow moved away and then

  **** ERROR 66 ****

  And then

  **** ERROR 66 ****

  **** ERROR 66 ****

  **** ERROR 66 ****

  And then

  !!PROGRAM BREAK!! **** ERROR 66 **** SYSTEM RESTART IN 5 . . .

  4 . . .

  3 . . .

  2 . . .

  1 . . .

  I woke up and it was another beautiful—

  It was green and hazy and—

  Shadows moved and as they moved they broke into more shadows and—

  Someone spoke. A man. Wearing after

  !!PROGRAM BREAK!!

  shave and talking to someone else and

  **** ERROR 66 ****

  then and

  **** ERROR 66 ****

  then and

  **** ERROR 66 ****

  then and

  **** SYSTEM RESTART IN 5 . . .

  I was out of memory tape. I could feel it in my chest, the

  4 . . .

  small reel hitting the end and the mechanism rewinding, not

  3 . . .

  much, just a few minutes

  2 . . .

  and the system instigating an emergency restart to allow the tape

  1 . . .

  to record over itself and then

  And then

  And then

  And then

  And then I woke up and it was another beautiful day in Hollywood, California. Just like it always was, each and every morning when I woke in my alcove and the world was born anew.

  Something was different though. I didn’t know how I knew it but I did.

  **** SYSTEM RESTART IN 5 . . .

  4 . . .

  3 . . .

  2 . . .

  1 . . .

  I woke up and someone was speaking.

  **** SYSTEM RESTART SUCCESSFUL END LOOP END ****

  The world was a green haze but I concentrated like my life depended on it and I thought perhaps this time it really did. The green world turned into a black and white world but this one was a little sharper around the edges.

  I was in the back of a van. I was lying on the floor. The van was moving but I wasn’t. There were two men with me. One was wearing a hat and the other one wasn’t.

  The man without the hat was not quite young but he was very good looking and he had far-away eyes. His hair glistened with tonic and curved back from his forehead in an apparently immobile arc. He was wearing a jacket made out of a patterned fabric that made red glittery sparks at the edges of my vision. It was so dazzling you could have camouflaged a battleship with it.

  I adjusted my optics and focused on his companion. He was older and also a handsome fellow but his looks were sharp and severe and he looked pretty angry about something. My guess was that he looked angry about something nearly all of the time. He was wearing a black suit and his hat was black and I could see the hair underneath that hat was also black. He had a theme going and I thought, good for him.

  For a moment I thought I recognized them both and two words rattled up and down my logic gates but they couldn’t have been their names because people weren’t called names like that. And then my vision went from black and white to green and nothing and I felt something very strange happen behind the panel on my chest as the memory tape once more reached the end and began to wind back and then

  !!PROGRAM BREAK!!

  aftershave and talking to someone else and

  **** ERROR 66 ****

  I also wasn’t standing in my alcove and

  **** ERROR 66 ****

  it was another beautiful day in Hollywood, California, and

  **** ERROR 66 ****

  and

  **** SYSTEM RESTART IN 5 . . .

  4 . . .

  and that was when

  3 . . .

  I knew

  2 . . .

  that I was in a whole world of trouble

  1 . . .

  15

  I woke up and it was another beautiful day in Hollywood, California. I opened my optics and adjusted the focus and stared at the window opposite my alcove. Across the street was a building made of rough brown bricks that caught the morning sun and cast little shadows worthy of the lunar landscape.

  Except right now I couldn’t see the brown brick building. The sun hadn’t come up yet and the window in front of me was just a flat black screen.

  I stepped forward and I stumbled. Something else wasn’t right and I knew that too, even though my relativity comparator was screaming blue murder in my audio receptors that I shouldn’t know a damned thing about it.

  There was supposed to be a little two-inch step down from my alcove and I had stumbled because I had been expecting the step but my feet found nothing but a flat floor beneath them. I reached for the cable coming out of my chest that connected me to Ada’s mainframe but I couldn’t twist the chunky plastic plug to release myself on account of there was no chunky plug. The cable was thin and without any particular weight, not like the fat corrugated cable like something from a plumber’s surplus store that should have been there. I knew about the cable because it was on my permanent store, alongside instructions about how to plug it in and what happened when I did.

  The room was still as black as a coal cellar with a blown lightbulb. I let go of the thin cable and I turned up my optics and I looked down. The cable was a thick plastic flex that split into two separate lines about twelve inches or so from a plug in my chest that was a good deal smaller than the one that was supposed to be plugged in. I felt along the cable, but it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.

  It wasn’t my cable, and I wasn’t standing in my alcove, and I sure as hell wasn’t in the office.

  I took another step and I turned my optics up and then I switched on the infrared and my world turned green but at least it was a bright green.

  I was standing in a small room with concrete block walls and the flat black window in front me was actually a flat black wall. Beside me was a silver wheeled trolley with some kind of gadget on it. The gadget was boxlike and about the size of a good-sized treasure chest. It had an angled front, where there was a tape running between two reels that were each ten inches in diameter. The tape had only just started feeding from the left to the right and it moved slowly. There were some buttons underneath the reels and
some dials above them and as I moved my fingers over the device I saw the dials move. I lifted my hand and I flexed the fingers and then I did the same with my other hand. The dials flickered when I moved and they didn’t when I didn’t.

  I reached for the flex plugged into my chest compartment and pulled it up until it got tight. I saw then that the twin plugs on the other end were connected to the back of the tape machine. There was no other cabling and the machine was not connected to anything else in the room. I checked an internal electrical map and confirmed what I thought. I was powering the machine with a standard voltage equivalent to wall socket power alongside the lower voltage being transmitted along the second cable. That one was a data cable and not a particularly high capacity one, but it was doing the job. The memory tape in my chest was still in place but it wasn’t moving.

  Someone had hooked me up to a bypass. I thought that was pretty clever and I hoped to meet whoever had done it to congratulate them on their skill and expertise and then grab them by the neck and apply pressure until they told me where the hell I was.

  I pushed the trolley. It moved silently on big, well-oiled wheels that had thick rubber tires. That was a help. I was pretty well oiled myself so it didn’t seem like moving around was going to be a problem. I checked the voltage again and then I checked the drain on my atomic battery. The draw was higher than standard and that was to be expected but I could set my turbines to speed and it wouldn’t make much difference. It was my memory that was the time constraint, not my power supply.

  The fact that I was hooked up to a memory bypass gave me all kinds of bad ideas, nearly all of which were variations on the fact that the tape in my chest had come to the end of its twenty-four-hour capacity. Which meant I hadn’t got back to the office in time and I certainly wasn’t there now.

  Either I hadn’t been able to get home—or had been prevented from getting there—or there was no longer a home to go to.

  I didn’t like either of those ideas at all but the latter gave my condenser coil a fresh coating of frost. Because if Ada had been compromised and there was no office to plug myself into then the bypass tape recorder on the silver trolley was anything but a permanent solution.