We pozzies are very democratic. No vertical military structures for us. We don’t have ranks. When one of us shows himself to be particularly skillful, judicial, and trustworthy, he’s given the honor of choosing a secondname. I suppose it’s a trivial thing and doesn’t make any difference, but I’ve always wanted one.
Why should I want anything more?
But our positronic brains are as far as our kinship goes with our virtual predecessors, the Good Doctor’s literary creations. No Three Laws of Robotics for us. Especially nothing about protecting humans at any cost. We have free will. We get bored, we have fun, some of us even fall in love (it’s never happened to me; I think it’s an aberrant sado-maso absurdity—as I’ve mentioned, we have no sex organs—and anyway, not many pozzies go for a female key-identity: the macho police tradition is hard to escape, I guess). There even was a Chacumbele who killed himself, and a George III who went mad.
It all comes with the job. We’re pretty stable, psychologically speaking. Anyway, as we like to say: maybe our lives and our intelligence are artificial, but our existence, our feelings, and our problems are completely real.
With computers for brains, our memories never fail us. We can mentally calculate 329 to the nth in an instant, whatever good that does us. What makes us special isn’t the number of calculations per second we can perform; it’s that, as true living beings, we can function in analogical mode, not logically alone. Make deductions based on insufficient data, self-induce flexible rules of conduct in ourselves, and so on.
Not belonging to any side, we should supposedly be fair and impartial judges and executioners. But even though we couldn’t be what we are without the aliens’ cybernetic technology, we all feel much closer to human beings than to our “cerebral parents.” Maybe it’s because we have free access to all of human history, psychology, and art, whereas we can only access similar data from the three alien races when they deem it useful.
Which is almost never.
Who are we, where did we come from, where are we going? That’s no problem for us. It’s good to know the answer to what humans call the universal questions. We are police officers, we must maintain order, we’re happy when we succeed; if the brain circuitry in our torsos gets destroyed we disappear, leaving only a memory of us—that’s the whole meaning of our lives. The only deep question I sometimes ponder is: What am I? Do I owe this unique, inimitable Raymond, so different from Ivan Stalin or Miyamoto, which I so enjoy being, entirely to the aliens’ detailed programming? Or does free will—or something else—really exist?
I don’t know if I’ll ever find the answer. I don’t know if there is an answer.
In any case, even in the middle of our most abstruse philosophical musings we never forget that the aliens are the ones who are in control. Tough luck to any police officer who does forget. There’s only one punishment and one fear for us: a personality wipe. Our bosses have only resorted to this ultima ratio regum once. The other stuff they do, like changing our postings or temporarily suspending us, are just administrative measures.
Meanwhile, so long as our brain casings are intact, we’re immortal. Though sometimes we have to have a new limb or system installed.
If there’s anything we run short of on the Burroughs, it’s replacement parts.
I wonder what Zorro and Achilles must have thought when they felt the impact of the microwave beam. When they realized they were about to disappear.
If they had time to think anything at all, that is.
Four
Anyway. Getting back to the story.
Or the chaos. The Burroughs was buzzing like a hornet’s nest after a brat throws a rock at it.
Of course it was. An alien, dead. An alien from one of the powerful, respected races. A Grodo, no less. (His pheromonal name, translated into Standard Anglo-Hispano, would be something like Vigilante Fixer of Alien Carroña Who Is Never Taken por Sorpresa, though the events of the day proved that moniker to be… inadequate.) The entire insectoid community was in an uproar, demanding that the responsible parties pay in blood or lymph or brake fluid, they didn’t care which, so long as they paid it all, immediately.
Turns out none of the perps stuck around to let the Colossaurs tear them to shreds, or the Cetians mutilate them, or the Grodos turn them into living incubators for their cute carnivorous larvae—quaint custom, that. Makrow 34, Giorgio Weekman, and the Colossaur (we never did get an ID on him; the brass from Colossa aren’t keen on divulging data about their people) had taken off for parts unknown, leaving the challenge of tracking, locating, and neutralizing them to the pozzies, and in particular to yours truly.
The Galactic Trade Confederation called an urgent Special Summit. I didn’t get to go, of course—none of us pozzies did—but I have a pretty good idea of how it went down: the Grodos waved those six ugly appendages of theirs around and threatened everybody in sight with their ovipositor stings, blaming it all on the Colossaurs. The giant reptiles of Colossa grated their teeth and shook their tails menacingly, insisting the perpetrator was just a renegade and there was no call for blaming their whole species. The Cetians expressed dismay over the outrages committed by the flawed and wayward Cetian while considering how best to screw over the two other races. All this under a very thin veil of politeness.
Realpolitik, in a word.
Somebody had to pay the piper, so it ended in the usual shakedown, just as you’d expect. Either all the criminals got caught, or all the aliens left the Solar System. That would mean the end of human intergalactic trade, sending Homo sapiens back to the technological Middle Ages. They gave this good news to us pozzies to pass along to the humans, seeing as how we were the middlemen, so to speak.
It was a huge mess, and it dawned on us that we might be facing a much more complicated business than a simple gunfight. We all felt sorry that Zorro and Achilles were no longer among us, of course: we may be artificial, but our esprit de corps is real.
Not like it would be any skin off our backs if the humans were deprived of alien trade goods and trash, sentimental considerations aside. But with the aliens gone, there’d be no more reason to keep the Burroughs in orbit. They’d decommission it and sell it for scrap—and us along with it, no doubt.
Some pozzies profess a faith in an electronic great beyond and positronic reincarnation, but I doubt they would want to test the hypothesis.
Not within a humanly measurable time frame, I mean.
Faced with this threat, the Positronic Police Force went to Code Red. We had to nab the perps, no matter what. That didn’t mean we should all leave the station, though. Business had to keep moving, the show must go on. All it meant was, for this one time and only as an exception, somebody had to leave the safety of the Burroughs and hoof it across the Solar System, hunting down the fugitives.
As the first officer to reach the scene of the crime, my pals elected me to do the job. The top Confederation brass all agreed.
I accepted. I wasn’t particularly keen to go, but somebody had to do their dirty work, right? And if the guys with the secondnames had decided that I was the one for the job, well, maybe this would be my chance to get me a secondname of my own, after it was all over.
Not that they gave me any choice.
They granted me full authority inside the Station—for all the good that would do me. Fortunately, the aliens aren’t dumb: seeing as the fugitives must have holed up in some rocky corner of the Solar System, they made a couple calls and got my carte blanche extended over almost all the space under human control. Except Earth, naturally.