The chief’s headache had receded just enough to be nagging instead of debilitating. He kept rubbing his face to stay awake. When he saw the glow of artificial lights one street over, he exhaled in relief. “There,” he said.
Mathews looked, and then gunned the engine, pulling around the corner on screeching tires.
“Jesus, Mathews,” Laughton said.
“Sorry.”
The house was a plain, bloated, two-story box, probably a hundred years old, from a time when size was more important than style. The light escaping from the open windows showed rows of solar panels covering the front lawn and the lawns of both neighbors. Thick wires hung from the roof where there must have been another array. The solar panels explained how Smythe and Sam could afford the extravagant show of light, but that many solar panels weren’t just being used for nighttime illumination. Something was happening in the house.
“Looks like Sam hasn’t gone anywhere,” Mathews said.
“Looks it.”
“How do you want to do this?”
The chief opened his door. “We’re just going to have a conversation,” he said, stepping down from the truck. Mathews got out on the other side, and they slammed the doors. No need to worry about alerting the man. They were about to knock.
As the men made their way down the narrow path, a backlit silhouette appeared in one of the front windows, peering out to see who had arrived. It moved quickly away from the window at the sight of them. They opened the storm door, and Laughton banged on the front door with the side of his closed fist. Mathews turned on his body camera. The chief still liked to take notes with a stylus and oversize phone. “Look,” Mathews said, a smile in his voice. Laughton looked and saw the calm, slow pulses of fireflies hovering among the solar panels.
The door swung open. The chief squinted against the sudden brightness, which stabbed him in the right eye. A rail-thin man in his early thirties stood looking at them. He wore glasses with no bottom rims, and had his hair in a ponytail, stray wisps floating around his head. A tattoo graced the inside of his forearm, something in fancy calligraphy that the chief couldn’t read.
“Yes?” the man said, his tone an attempt at being calm but ruined by a note of defensiveness.
Mathews was in uniform. Laughton took his badge folder from his rear pocket, and flipped it open for the man to see. “This is Officer Mathews. I’m Chief Laughton. May we come in?”
The man hesitated, seeming on the verge of asking a question, but then stepped back and said, “Sure, okay.”
The policemen stepped by him into a small but cavernous entryway, the ceiling extending up to the second story. A carpeted room to the left was filled with industrial metal shelving laden with row after row of chunky, gamer-level computer towers, each with a small green LED eye assuring it was on. It was hot inside, despite the open windows. The combined noise of the computers’ cooling fans sounded like rushing water.
“That’s a lot of hardware,” Mathews said, turning his body so the camera was sure to pick it up.
“Yeah,” the man said with a nervous, embarrassed laugh.
“What’s your name, sir?” Chief Laughton said, getting out his phone and opening a new note.
“Sam McCardy,” he said. “Samuel.”
“And you live here with Carl Smythe.”
“We’re business partners.”
“What’s your business?” Mathews said.
McCardy looked like he could punch himself. “Computers,” he said.
Mathews snuffed in amusement.
“When was the last time you saw Mr. Smythe?” Laughton asked.
“I don’t know,” McCardy said. “Lunchtime? Right before lunch.”
“What time was that?”
The man’s brow screwed up in serious contemplation. He shook his head. “Eleven.” He shrugged. “I really don’t know. Did something happen with Carl?”
“As a matter of fact,” Laughton said, “he’s dead.”
McCardy went white, his whole body slumping, his breathing grew shallow, and his mouth screwed up, the look of a man who was refusing to allow himself to cry. He tested out his voice, and it came out cracked. “How?” Just the one word.
screwed-up lips, lower eyelids narrowed—grief
“Mr. McCardy. Could we come in, maybe sit down?” Chief Laughton said. The grief seemed genuine, but there was a flash of fear in the brow. Not uncommon given the situation, but suppressed faster than Laughton would have expected.
“Yeah,” McCardy said, nodding, looking at the ground, looking at nothing. “Sure. Yeah.” He stepped back, and then turned, leading them through a small passage into a combined kitchen–living room space. Here there was more industrial shelving surrounding two large folding tables in the center of the room, each with three flat-panel monitors, multiple VR headsets, keyboards, enormous speakers on stands, and what looked like large soundboards with rows of tiny dials. The shelving was not given over entirely to computers, though. There was a retro-gaming rig with some antique consoles going back to the twentieth century. Chief Laughton recognized a few consoles from his father’s collection with a pang of nostalgia. Confusingly, there were two racks stuffed with books—real, antique, paper books—more than Laughton had ever seen outside of a museum. More than he’d ever seen inside a museum.
But of course, the thing that drew his eye was bins filled with different-colored memory sticks, the kind that was used for sims. Each bin was marked with masking tape on which code names were written: Dikdik, Mollies, Starburst, The Bat. Chief Laughton still did not understand why sims remained a physical medium. The programming—human or robot—the manufacture of memory sticks, the distribution, the porting, the whole physical supply chain necessary for human drugs seemed like a reckless danger for something that could be handled in code remotely. He understood that sims were written in such a way that they deleted both from the memory stick and from the robot’s short-term memory as the program ran so that no copy of the program was retained, making it onetime use. That, of course, was necessary if it was going to be a salable commodity, but also, it seemed, was preferable to robots, because it meant that the experience could not be repeated, especially since a well-written sim filled in elements taken from the external environment and the robot’s memory, making each experience of the sim unique. But none of those things seemed to make physical memory sticks essential, based on his human understanding of the experience.
Sometimes Laughton wondered if the whole illegal-sims operation took the shape it did to purposely ape historical human drug trafficking, if the construct of the illegal behaviors around the act of sims use was an intrinsic part of a robot’s enjoyment of the experience.
They all looked at the setup for a moment in silence, as though even McCardy needed to take it in.
Laughton stepped into the room, and Mathews said to McCardy, “You want to sit down?”
McCardy nodded, and in a daze went to one of the desk chairs in the center of the room. “What the hell happened?” he said.
“We’re trying to figure that out,” Mathews said.
“I mean, what the hell happened?” McCardy said again.
“What do you mean?” Mathews said.