Laughton was surprised by the smile he could feel spread across his face. He felt lighter. “Son of a bitch, it’s good to see you,” he said, and stepped forward. The old partners hugged. It was always disconcerting how cool a robot was to the touch. It made Laughton feel ridiculous, this upwelling of feelings.
“It’s dead in here,” Kir said.
“Only have two officers.”
“I saw the one on the phone. The other’s out in the clown car?”
“Fuck you,” Laughton said, noticing his language, the cursing around Kir. It reminded him there was a reason why he had left. Kir was a bad influence. That had nothing to do with whether or not he was a robot.
“Sit down,” Kir said.
Laughton tried not to bristle at being given an order in his own office. There were a lot of reasons he had left Baltimore, and it didn’t take long, apparently, to remember what they were. Kir might have considered himself pro-orgo—he voted for the preserve, solved human cases no one else would, didn’t mod his body, and now worked for the Department of Health and Human Services—but it was impossible for him to not still carry an intrinsic attitude of superiority.
Laughton felt the ire rankle across his shoulders, his muscles tightening, but he tried to not let it get to him. It was just Kir. The thought filled him with exhaustion, and there was a wave of pain through his face.
Kir caught it, the thousands and thousands of hours of Laughton’s face recorded in his memory giving the robot the ability to read his ex-partner that far exceeded most robots’ abilities, even Kir’s own abilities to read other humans. “Pain still bad?”
Laughton nodded. “Yeah.”
“And my niece?”
“Perfect,” Laughton said.
“So where are we?”
“I was just about to go to Charleston to see the postmortem.”
“How long has it been since you found the body?”
“Fuck you. I’ve been busy.”
“I wasn’t saying anything.”
“You were, and I don’t want to hear it,” Laughton said.
“Hear what?” Kir played innocent.
“Kir, this whole thing’s such a goddamn mess.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Kir said.
“I saw Brandis.”
“Let’s go. You can finish filling me in on the way, and then I’ll fill you in.”
They went back out to the squad room, and Kara Letts was talking to an anonymous hacker over an open phone line on the TV. Laughton had a moment of regret at having let Jones go, just when the man might have identified the caller. He snapped at Dunrich and pointed at the television. “Find out who she’s talking to,” he said.
Dunrich started to hang up his phone, then put it back to his ear, unsure if he was supposed to keep after the autopsy or drop it for this new thing.
“When you’re finished,” Laughton said.
On the television, Kara Letts was asking the hacker, “Did you ever worry about your safety before the preserve?”
“No,” the voice of the hacker said. “I’m not saying I’m worried now…”
At least someone was thinking straight.
Outside, Kir said, “How have you been, though? The family? What’s life on the ground like here?”
“Until yesterday, boring.”
“That bad, huh?”
“I don’t know that it’s a bad thing. It is what it is.” He let them into the car. “How are things at the federal level?”
“Have you seen the killer app?”
“What do you mean, have I seen it?” He punched “The University of South Carolina Medical Center” into the GPS.
“It’s pretty horrifying, the pictures. Just burnt and melted plastic and metal.”
“Isn’t it a DOJ problem?”
“They think it came from the preserve, so…”
Laughton thought of everything he’d learned about Smythe so far. “Yeah, well I think that’s why my man got killed.”
“And that’s why I’m here,” Kir said.
“Got any leads?”
“Maybe,” Kir said. “Our first body was fifty-two hours ago. There’ve been at least five total. All had ported sims, the same red memory stick.”
“When you say ‘body,’ what do you mean? They’re robots.”
“This sim fries their hard drives, literally. The memory, the operating system, completely burned out.” A slight pause. “Check your phone,” Kir said as Laughton’s phone buzzed.
Laughton looked. “Shit.” It was an autopsy photo, the access panel at the back of a robot’s head was open, revealing a black melted mess inside. “Shit.”
“You swipe, you can see the memory stick.”
Laughton swiped to the next photo: a simple, undistinguished red memory stick, about the size of a thumbnail. It didn’t match any of the ones he’d seen at Sam and Smythe’s. He handed the phone back to Kir.
“Plug-and-play sims have been growing in popularity over the last year or two. They run automatically, no chance to scan for a virus. Junkies like the unpredictability, the abandonment. The risk is real, it turns out.”
“I don’t want it to be true, but my vic is your man.”
“What do you know?”
“Smythe’s partner said that he’d developed safeguards for his computers: if anyone tries to hack in, the machine fries, literally.”
They sat in silence for a moment, considering the implications.
“Then it’s damn good I’m here,” Kir said.
“And I just fucking let his middleman go,” Laughton said. “We’ve got his car info, and he wasn’t going to tell me shit, so I thought it might be nice to see where he went.”
“Look, we work the case. With humans, it can always be personal, even with all of the other stuff swirling around.”
“Personal,” Laughton said. He grabbed the wheel and disengaged the auto-drive, pulling the car over.
“What?”
Laughton nodded toward the building across the street. “Let’s see if it’s personal.”
The Liberty Fertility Clinic was located in what had long ago been an enormous house. It was three stories high with thick white columns holding a veranda above the entrance. A porch wrapped around the side. A sign in the front yard, rising out of a well-kept hedge, announced the clinic’s name and hours, but nowhere on the house proper was its current use apparent. It seemed an appropriate building for the propagation of the human race, a house harkening to a time of human splendor.
The sight was marred by a pair of figures in yellow hazmat suits standing out front. As Laughton came up the walk, they turned toward him. One was a man in his midforties with a soft, wide face and a sandy mustache, his thin hair awhirl in his baggy helmet. The other was a lean woman, about the same age, her cheeks shrunken and her lips chapped. They held a butcher-paper banner that said in red paint, “Get thee to a quarantine.”
“Chief Laughton,” the man said, his voice muffled by his mask. “Haven’t seen your wife yet.”
“Hi, I’m Aileen,” the woman said, holding her hand out to Kir, who shook it.