Fatboy Page 2

  But without Fatboy, they were fucked anyway, because they couldn’t go on losing to the Popeyes in this little matter of drug sales. Because that meant the cops didn’t get paid, which made them very unhappy, and pretty soon he’d have a blue and white spidery thing crawling over his shoulder anyway, telling him what to do.

  So Fatboy was the only way to go. But paying for Fatboy, keeping those payments going, that was something else again.

  A kid of about ten was coming up the street on the other side, dressed in jeans and sweatshirt. He was staring at the ground, planting his feet carefully in the slush, like he was avoiding landmines.

  KR stopped and called out. “Hey! Yo! Kid! Come over here!”

  The kid looked up and skidded nervously to a halt.

  KR gave an impatient wave. “Come on, come on, I ain’t got all day.”

  The youngster stepped cautiously over the pile of snow at the roadside and crossed reluctantly towards him, mostly watching the road beneath his feet, but occasionally glancing up in cowed anticipation.

  When the kid was standing in front of him, KR pointed down and said, “What’s this shit? You walking around in freezing weather in sandals? You want to lose your toes, dumbass?”

  “My mom said it was only for a couple of days. Until she...”

  KR was remembering stuff now, who his mom was exactly. “Your mom buying that crap from the Mexicans, instead of sticking with our program? She think it’s smart to throw money away like that?”

  “My mom says...”

  KR hit him lightly across the head. “You know where my mom lives, right? Go there now. She’ll find you some shoes. And tell your mom if she doesn’t get her shit together, I’ll report her myself. Then she’ll have a custodial C-spy sitting on her shoulder and she won’t get to do fuck-all. Got it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Beat it.”

  KR walked on without looking back. Stupid idiots. They get free medical, free transport, free food, plus the government check and they can’t find the money for a pair of fucking shoes. Another kid went by on a bicycle, giving him a cheeky, “Hi, KR,” as he went by. He turned up a cross street and passed a middle-aged couple, well wrapped up. They nodded without smiling. The man had an orange C-spy clinging on to his arm. Jesus, KR thought, that guy had been wearing that thing forever. Which made it true, what they said: you get it and you keep it. Would you rather be in jail, the custodial officials would ask? Ha ha, funny joke. Like they still had jails any more.

  He turned right into a wire-fenced empty lot, paved and swept, but cluttered with old machinery. Two of his men, wearing bobble hats and thermal overalls, were working on recent-model vehicles, a light truck and a car, assisted by robot crawlers and analysts. He stopped and called them over.

  “What you got?”

  Danny, the younger, dug in his pocket and handed over some silver coins.

  KR looked them over. “That all?”

  Danny shrugged. “Couldn’t get anything out of the Armstrong bitch. Says her gears still ain’t right.”

  “You know what? Her whole fucking brain ain’t right. I’ll pay her a call.” KR gave Danny a couple of coins from the ones he was holding. “Cheech?”

  The other man was older, smaller. He was a good mechanic, but he thought he’d earned the right to make some money on the side. He handed over some silver, but KR could tell from the little bob of his head that he was holding back. He said nothing, gave him his cut, and turned away. One day soon he’d remind Cheech what happened to guys who cheated him, but not right now. Right now he had more important things on his mind.

  He walked on through the lot and into the back yard of the adjoining home, the windows of which were boarded up. He made a sign at the door in the rear porch and pushed it open. Inside there was the smell of mildew and the whine of a generator. He went through a darkened and empty room and down the stairs to the basement. Here the door recognized him and moved aside. The workshop beyond extended fifty feet under the auto repair lot and glowed with soft pools of light. Shadowy figures and equipment on trolleys were clustered half way down. He walked quickly and tapped his fist on the arm of the youngster sitting and staring at a big screen; two others were connecting cables and moving the trolleys.

  Beyond them was the object of their attention, his new baby, a large shape, hard to configure into a familiar form, something between a giant crab and a shark, capable of camouflage to the point of invisibility, but at the moment pulsing with a purple glow. He stared at it a moment, picturing the remarkable things it had done over the last few days. And this thing, he thought with a disbelieving shake of the head, was yesterday’s news, second class gear with a lot of miles on it, the kind of thing that even lesser powers were moving out of active service.

  A lot of ancillary equipment had come with it as part of the deal, and his smartest guys were still trying to work out what everything did. Mostly it was diagnostic gear or mission setup gear. Everything conversed and explained itself, switching to English from some African tongue as soon as it heard a few words, but all the setup gear assumed a basic knowledge of military tactics, and spoke to them as though mission assignments would involve neutralizing enemy insurgents in rural African villages.

  The robot itself said nothing. Looking at it, KR couldn’t see any part of it that might be responsive. There were slots all around the main body that might be eyes, and a sort of trunk at one end where the smaller limbs were folded away. The four bigger limbs bulged out of the body in concentric folds, flexible, extendable, housing tools that could cut and saw and burn. It might have the look of a giant piece of seafood, but this thing could slice up a real shark in about three seconds and serve it for lunch.

  “Did good, did good,” the guy at the screen said, pushing back and raising his arms. Sol was the smartest he had, but sometimes he got too confident and needed reining back. “Told you, man. Got the language figured. Tell it clearly what you want, and it makes all the right moves.”

  “This is the woman with the dresses?”

  “Right.”

  “Run it through for me,” KR said.

  “Sure.” Sol ran his finger over the screen and mumbled something. “This is Fatboy’s own video.” The screen showed an alleyway, a narrow loading platform, then suddenly a pair of heavy doors, immediately ahead. Everything was suffused with the unnatural tones of infrared. “Lookit here, how it does this.” A fireball appeared in the middle of the doors, there was a muted grinding sound, and the doors opened inward. “I’m speeding up a bit, but that took it sixteen seconds. Watch this.” Now there was just a pencil of light in the darkness, swooping here and there with dizzying speed, showing a ceiling, walls, racks of colored somethings, the perspective jumping wildly as the camera moved. Then it was like a cartoon chase, scurrying mice caught briefly in the light, a close-up on slabs of concrete being cut and shifted, Fatboy’s forward limbs delving into the rubble, mice caught in a tunnel, dust swirling everywhere.

  “Just over a minute gone,” Sol said.

  KR grunted.

  Then Fatboy’s camera eye was on the move again, flying between billowing garments, checking up and down, floor and ceiling, entering a small partitioned room. For half a second, the image froze: Fatboy’s attention was fixed on a pair of pretty women, one in petticoats, one in African costume. Mannequins, KR realized. One blonde, one dark. Neither of the mannequins moved, but it seemed as though the one in African costume was looking straight into Fatboy’s camera. A green spot suddenly appeared on its costume, followed by a brilliant flash of light. It fell slowly to the floor, its limbs rigid. A brief closer image showed a round burn-mark on its costume. The upper torso of the blonde one appeared equally briefly and then was gone, as the camera swung around and continued its inspection of the warehouse.

  “Wait a minute,” KR said. “What happened there?”

  “What happened there, what happened there,” Sol said, jabbing at the screen, as though angry with it, “Fatboy felt
like kicking some ass, man, I don’t know! This cocksucker got some attitude, that’s for sure, and things get boring when it’s dresses everywhere.”

  “Run it again slowly.”

  “Backing up and doing so, just as soon as I can. Here we go, murder of the mannequin. You know what I think? I think this cocksucker thought it was in Africa, killing the natives. Kind of got carried away.”

  “I thought counter-insurgency robots didn’t kill people.”

  “Didn’t kill people? Man, what you thinking of? Of course these things got to kill people.”

  “And mannequins? Harmless robots?”

  “Okay, it made a mistake.”

  “You didn’t put anything in the mission about silencing witnesses or something?”

  “No, never!”

  “Check through it, okay?”

  “I didn’t put that stuff in!” Sol jerked a hand at the screen. “Look, this is where he’s looking at the two girls. The African one looks like she’s looking back, see what I mean? Maybe Fatboy figured this is another surveillance device, right? That’s in the mission. Remove all surveillance data.”

  “By assault with a beam weapon?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what this fucker is thinking all the time.”

  KR thought for a moment. “That was mission number five, right? Six, if you count the hit on the Popeyes. And as far as we know, all of those were cool, except for a couple of mission errors on our side. Now it’s putting things in, doing things we haven’t predicted.”

  “Smart things, for all we know.”

  “Maybe. Let’s go on.”

  Sol took the mission through to the end. KR saw Fatboy move through into a space more like a shop. It laid the five mice on the counter and popped out the memory so fast that it looked like conjuring trick: before you realized it was happening, it was done. Then it scanned the area, zoomed back through the warehouse, and that was it.

  KR stood up. He pushed his fist lightly against Sol’s arm. “You did okay.”

  “Fucking right. This stuff isn’t easy to figure.”

  KR wandered a couple of paces towards the robot and stared at it for a couple of moments. Was it really going to work, this crazy stuff? Was he going to pay back what he owed, and make a profit? So far, only one of their targeted business people had sent any money to the Nigerians, but it was early days. Reminders would be required.

  He half turned his head. “As before, let’s give it till the end of the morning. See if there’s any reports, news items, sightings.”

  “Nobody’s going to see that thing at night, in camouflage mode.”

  “They’d better not. Especially the feds.”

  “Hoo, shit, they’d blow this fucking hood into the next county.”

  KR turned all the way to look back at Sol. He was grinning with excitement. KR nodded and smiled. It wouldn’t be a bad way to go.

  “So then, if we’re good, we set up three more missions. I’ll call you.”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  Chapter Three

  The locksmith arrived a little before lunch. Sara managed a bright smile, and led him through the warehouse to the damaged doors. She knew that the latest robots were capable, usually, of repairing and replacing locks, but Frank was one of those tradesmen who had survived by making himself pleasant and keeping his prices low. Also, he used a robot assistant, a gnome-sized thing with hands like miniature toolsets.

  “Can I get you anything, Frank?”

  “Can’t see anything my size,” he said, looking round at the dresses.

  Sara laughed. “Bring your wife sometime. What about coffee?”

  “No thanks. My robot would like a beer, but I don’t allow him to drink on duty.”

  Sara glanced down at the gnome, which was looking up at Frank as though it had heard all this before, and didn’t really find it funny.

  Frank gave a dead-pan shrug and pushed open the doors. He took a quick look at the damage. “Okay if I get my truck to drive up the alley?”

  “Sure.”

  She went back to the shop and tried to deal with a couple of queries that were stacked up on her main screen. Frank and the robot returned after twenty-five minutes. He put a box containing the remains of the lock and the bolts on the counter.

  “I sent you a payment request and a short report. You need anything special for the cops?”

  She hesitated. “Not at the moment.”

  He gave her a veiled but penetrating glance. Frank might joke around, but he was quick to pick up on things. “Got it,” he said. “Let me know.”

  “Anyone else been broken into, Frank? Recently, I mean?”

  “You know I never gossip about other customers, Sara, but the answer to your question is no. Of course there’s other guys out there, fixing locks.”

  “Of course. Did you get any idea how it was done? What sort of skills, what sort of tools?”

  “Straightforward brutality, I would say. We replaced a bit of your door, as well as the lock and the bolts. My robot says the heat source was fusion, and the cutting tool blade was one of the modern synthetics. Probably done very quickly.”

  “A professional, then.”

  “My opinion is that a professional thief would have been more subtle. Like I say, this was wham bang brutality.”

  “Frank, in case you get another customer with this kind of break-in, who would like to compare notes, would you let him know I’m interested?”

  “I can see where this is going, Sara, and all I can say is I’m shocked.”

  It took her a moment, in her distracted state, to get the joke. She smiled.

  “No, sure, I’ll do that,” Frank said. “But let’s not tell the robot, okay?” He reached down and gave the robot a pat on the head. “Robots get these things all out of perspective.”

  The robot gave him the same blank look as before.

  Dennis Petersen, her security consultant, arrived towards the end of the afternoon. He was a man she knew better but liked less. He was good at his job, and she trusted him, but his inner toughness, his lack of sympathetic emotion, a legacy of his days as a cop, gave him a jagged presence that made her uneasy. The same qualities, helped along by a well-toned body and a careless smile, gave him an unsettling sex appeal. When she dealt with him, she found herself wanting to lose a few pounds and go to the hair stylist, despite the fact that she had never been glamorous, never been promiscuous, and as a married woman of 46 with two grown-up children was not in the habit of betraying her husband.

  She startled herself right at the beginning, when he was still examining the five mice that she had put back on the counter, by wanting to blurt out the whole story of the demand for money, the implied threats. Help me, Dennis, what do I do? She tapped her foot firmly on the floor in irritated revolt against this impulse: stay in charge, for Christ’s sake, the guy is just here to advise.

  Dennis opened his case and took out a handful of memory cubes, which he inserted into the mice one after the other. He went over to the controller box on the wall and conducted a brief interrogation. The mice on the counter came to life and raised their whiskers and suddenly blended into the brown countertop so that it was hard to see them. Dennis went on talking for a couple of minutes and the mice swarmed off the counter and disappeared.

  “We’ll use them to get what data we can out of the remaining evidence,” he said. “Let’s go in and take a look.”

  He tapped on the warehouse door and preceded her through it, walking down to the excavations in the concrete at the end. The mice, almost invisible, were throwing up dust and digging down through the rubble. He took a smart cylinder from his pocket and the screen unfurled. He said a few words and watched the screen.

  “You said one of your mannequins was damaged?”

  Sara led him over to her photo studio. He dropped to one knee and studied the burnt patch and spoke almost inaudibly towards his screen. The mice appeared after a moment and swarmed over the mannequin.

&
nbsp; “Did Frank have anything to say about the locks?”

  “He said the break-in method was brutal. Fusion heat and high-grade cutting.”

  He stood up. “Anything else I should see?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He touched her lightly on the shoulder and waved his other hand back towards the shop. “Do you want to sit down while we go through this?”

  She moved off quickly, aware that the view of her rear had once been better, and countering the wish to be sexy with an air of brisk authority. She dragged another chair from the changing-room, and they both sat down behind the counter.

  “Did you call the cops?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “Probably not.”

  He gave her a quizzical look, waiting.

  “Is there much point?” she said. “We both know they won’t do anything.”

  Dennis gave a half shake of the head and studied his screen for a moment. “Judging by what we’ve got here, you’re probably right. No DNA, the mice tell me. Nothing actually stolen. But there are some unusual features. What Frank calls the brutality, which is echoed in the round-up of the mice. I mean the way their bolt hole was torn apart. And the mannequin. My guess is it was struck by an artificial lightning bolt, which is a type of weapon fairly common in the military.”

  “Artificial lightning?”

  “Yeah. First you fire a high intensity laser beam. That creates a low resistance path through the air and guides a high voltage electrical discharge to the target. It would kill a human, of course, but it’s an even better weapon against a robot, because it fries all the electronics. I’m afraid your mannequin is a write-off.”

  “I figured that anyway. What are we going to do about the concrete, the bolt hole?”

  “I would say nothing, for the moment. It didn’t work last time, so it’s not going to work next time.”

  “Next time?”

  Dennis looked at her. Was that a mildly sadistic gleam in his eye? “I don’t want to worry you, Sara, but let’s think about this. What was the purpose of this intrusion? Have you got any ideas?”