CHAPTER 03
Another man might be nervous about that gun in the Sexbot’s hand, but not Darryl. Hell, no. Darryl had been around guns for a long, long time. Guns held no terror for him. Nothing much frightened Darryl anymore.
Ten years before, he was one of the few, the proud, the Marines. But he had gotten hooked on meth while on a tour in Afghanistan, and the shit made you paranoid. Very bad in a war zone.
He had fucked up one night while on watch, got spooked, and killed some people. Sixteen people to be exact. Civilians. Innocents. Women and children, some old guys. No real fighters. He couldn’t really remember, but it seemed like he hadn’t slept for several days before he did it.
He did remember opening up on these people, people who were walking in the hills for some dumb reason, just ripping them up. He could see limbs flailing, and a head explode like a tomato. The people had been visiting family somewhere, and were returning home late. That was the story. To be fair, it was just after dusk.
Darryl was high and wired, stoned to the eyeballs, and they spooked him. Bad. He thought they were fighters. He thought they were ghosts. So he killed them. He went up the ridge to look at them when he was done. An old man was still alive, all shot to shit. Darryl walked up him. He was standing right on top of him before he realized that the old boy had a rifle.
BANG!
Just like that, a big chunk of Darryl’s face was gone.
The local tribal elders were pissed, naturally. They wanted Darryl handed over. That wasn’t going to happen. The military evacuated him to a hospital in Germany, got him stabilized, rebuilt his face as best they could. Then they flew him to Leavenworth. He sat there for a year, until they let him go. They dropped all charges before the thing ever went to trial. They decided he was insane at the time of the incident. Psychiatric discharge.
Well, fuck them. Darryl was never crazy, just hooked on meth. Where did they think he was getting the meth from, the camel jocks? Fat chance. Our own people were bringing it in. It was Americans who sold him the shit.
Now Darryl was out of prison, out of the hospital, out of the armed services, and living in the house he grew up in. His mom was dead these past seven years. He had the place to himself. Frankly, he was glad to be done with all the bullshit.
He walked up the path to his front door, the Sexbot following him. The rain had stopped a while ago now, but it was a wet and steamy night. A nice night to take some clothes off.
He brought her inside the house, and flicked on a light. A large palmetto bug took wing from the wall to escape the light. There were bloodstained holes in the drywall where Darryl had punched when he was drunk. There were beer cans and clothes strewn about everywhere.
The place wasn’t much to look at, but what did his visitor care, right? She was a robot. Hell, maybe these newer models would even clean up a little. He smiled to himself. That would be an upgrade.
* * *
Blue walked the hallways of a sprawling oceanfront mansion on Long Boat Key. His boots drummed on the stone tiles.
He was dressed again, this time in a black corporate jumpsuit with the Suncoast logo on the breast. The Suncoast logo was an all-seeing eye made to look like the famous setting sun of southwest Florida. To Blue, it looked like a Peeping Tom peeking over the backyard fence.
This is what they had given him to wear when the car picked him up, nude and crouched in some bushes next to a strip mall parking lot along Route 41, less than a mile from where the motel room had blown up.
Now, as he walked toward the private wing of Howard’s house, he was flanked by two big goons from the company, both with flat-top haircuts, and both sporting the same uniform that Blue himself now wore.
This was a sex doll company with a security detail that dressed like fascist storm troopers. Go figure. Things were changing fast around here.
The three men came to a door. One of the goons produced a key card, swiped it through the scanner, and the door to Howard’s private apartment slid open. The door slid quickly, almost faster than human sight. It was all very modern, very space-age. Howard was a man who loved his gadgets.
The two goons remained at the threshold as Blue walked in, and the door slid shut behind him.
Inside the apartment, the floors were polished marble. The walls were adorned with large abstract paintings, nothing but huge splashes of color, like the remains of a two-year-old child’s dinner.
Howard stood in the wide hallway ahead of Blue. Howard was a small middle-aged man, who seemed to be on the heavy side, and was balding. He wore a plush bathrobe like he thought he was Hugh Hefner. He’d been dressing like this for a couple of years now. Once the Sexbot thing had really taken off, Howard had retreated to this palace of a house, put on a blue bathrobe, and seemed to spend the bulk of his day surrounded at all times by three or four late model Sexbots. Apparently, Howard’s mid-life crisis was going better than most.
And Howard was still CEO of this company. Oh, he worked hard, certainly. He was on the phone for hours a day, directing the business. There were usually a lot of flunkies and go-fers and yes-men floating around the house here, taking dictation, keying things in to tablet computers, and shouting at subordinates during video conferences.
But there were always these beautiful fake women in the background, too, dressed in lingerie, dressed in lime and bright pink bikinis, dressed in latex bodysuits, sometimes dressed in nothing but high heels. Howard was living the dream.
Now, he raised his arms.
“Blue!” he said. “Jesus Blue, what’s it been? Six months? What a great time for you to stop by at… oh, one in the morning.”
Blue walked up to the man in the fuzzy bathrobe. It wouldn’t matter what time Blue showed up - Howard would still be draped in that robe. Blue stood a full head taller than Howard. Howard the eccentric, the big boss, the top dog, fast becoming a very powerful man indeed.
“Hi Howard.”
“Hi Blue.”
Blue let Howard guide him into a large, ultra-modern sitting room. The floors were tile. All the furnishings were white. A ten foot-long painting, garish in red and black on white canvas, hung along one wall. One entire wall was a sweep of floor-to-ceiling windows, curving outward, giving a 180-degree view of the ocean.
Outside, there was no longer any sign of rain. Wisps of white cloud skidded across the night sky, moving fast. Whitecaps popped up here and there on the water’s surface. Somewhere on the property down there was a dock, and parked at the dock was Howard’s go-fast boat, a 40-foot Cigarette with five huge engines. Howard had taken Blue for a ride in it once.
Closer to home, and true to form, two beautiful women were draped on the furniture, one in an accent chair, and one on the back of the sofa. They were both outrageously voluptuous, bodies drawn by a cartoon artist. One was a black girl with a huge Afro. She wore white panties and bra. The other was a blonde in a sheer teddy. They were distractions. Their mere presence was almost enough to arouse Blue.
“Can I get you a drink?” Howard said.
Blue shrugged. “Sure.”
Howard went to the bar in the corner of the room. “Scotch, isn’t it? On ice? I’ve got Macallan 25. It costs me about $900 a bottle. Is that good enough for you?”
“The best is good enough for me,” Blue said.
A moment later, Howard had the drink. He passed it along to Blue. Blue took a gulp, felt the familiar fire in his belly. This was the good stuff. From Howard, he would expect nothing less.
“Don’t worry about the girls. We can talk in front of them.”
“Okay,” Blue said.
He watched as Howard lifted his glass and took a tiny sip of his own drink.
“So what happened out there tonight?” Howard said.
Blue smiled. “You tell me.”
“Well, the little bit I heard, it sounds like you went on a routine termination, and yet another one of your partners got sizzled. Does that sound about right?”
“No.”
Howard put up his hands as if to say, “Don’t shoot.” Then he smiled. He sat on the arm of a sofa. “Okay, you set me straight. Tell me what went down.”
Blue thought about it, but only for a second. He decided he might as well tell Howard the story. “It was a long way from a routine termination. About a hundred miles from routine. First off, I nearly got killed tonight. The closest I’ve come in years.”
Howard raised an eyebrow. “Do tell.”
“When we got there, the client was waiting. She was expecting us. She booby-trapped the downstairs hallway with a wine glass and a card table. It alerted her to our presence. We went fast, but by the time we reached her, she was in an upstairs computer lab, had put herself inside a clear plastic pod, and had launched some sort of sequence or operation.”
That news made Howard stand back up. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“Then what?”
“Green didn’t know what the operation was. He couldn’t figure out a way to shut it down. So I just pulled her out of there.”
“Was she dead?”
“No. Not yet. We finished her.”
Howard grunted. “How did the hotel room blow up?”
“There was a Sexbot in the house. Right in the computer lab. She was awake. We were concerned she might have witnessed the termination, so we took her with us.”
“Did she have a name?”
“She called herself Number Nine.”
Howard shrugged. “Continue.”
“We got her back to the hotel room. I put my gun on the table. The Sexbots aren’t supposed to be programmed for battle. Am I right? Only this one picked up my gun and sprayed Green with bullets. She didn’t hesitate. She shot him in the chest, Howard. She emptied my gun right into where his databanks would be. It happened so fast that Green was a smoking ruin before either of us could react. Then she threw my gun away and took Green’s gun.”
Blue stared at Howard.
“Since when is a Sexbot designed to do something like that?”
Howard looked at the Scotch in his own glass. He swirled it around. “Since never.”
“Next thing I know,” Blue said. “I’m rolling on the floor with this thing, fighting for my life.”
Howard smiled. “In the nude, so I’m told.” Behind him, both the Sexbots laughed, their voices like beautiful tinkling glass chimes.
Blue didn’t smile. “I was about to take a shower.”
“Bullshit,” Howard said mildly.
“Green died, and his auto-destruct kicked in. Saved my life, in all likelihood. I got out of there just before the whole place blew, and so did she.”
“It’s quite a story,” Howard said. “Can I fix you another?” He pointed at Blue’s glass, which Blue was surprised to find empty.
Blue held it out. “Yeah. Thanks. It’s been one of those nights. You mind telling me what’s going on?”
Howard was over by the bar again. He dumped Blue’s glass, and shoveled some new ice into it. He reached for the Scotch bottle.
“Suppose you were dying,” Howard said.
“I’m never more than a few steps from dying,” Blue said.
Howard handed him the fresh drink. “Suppose you were dying of an illness. And you were a billionaire. Okay? The only God you’ve ever had was money. You’re afraid to go see the real God, if there is such a thing. Death doesn’t appeal to you. You want to stay here.”
“Okay,” Blue said.
“Now suppose I told you it was possible. Suppose I told you that I could download you - your awareness, your thoughts, your experiences, the things that make up whatever you are - into a computer. You would be alive, but inside a machine. That would be a lot like living forever, wouldn’t it?”
Blue took a sip of the drink. “I guess, if such a thing was possible. I mean, it doesn’t sound ideal…”
“What if it were ideal? What if I could download you into a person, a perfect physical specimen, a person that would never get sick, or old, a robot like Green or, if you were a woman, like these ladies here?” His hand swept the room, including the two sexy robots in his sweep. “How much would that be worth to you?”
Blue just stared at him. “How much would it be worth? To be downloaded into a Sexbot? I don’t think I’d want that if you gave it to me for free.”
Howard looked at the ceiling, then pointed at Blue with his glass. “Okay Blue, you’re not really a product marketing guy. I get that. But try to think ahead a little bit. We’re not going to use Sexbots. We’re using them now because we have them on hand. But we’ve got programmers working on a robot that will be an empty vessel, one that can receive the person’s download and become that person. All the Sexbot stuff will be gone. It’s going to take some trial and error, but we’ll get there.”
Howard raised his glass to his lips, but he didn’t seem to drink from it. He let out a long sigh. “So come on. Tell me. A billion dollars? Ten billion dollars? Half your net worth? All of it? It’s everlasting life, Blue. How much is it worth to you?”
“I’ve been shot fourteen times,” Blue said. “I don’t have a billion dollars. I guess everlasting life isn’t in the cards for me.”
“We can do it,” Howard said. “Maybe it’s not for you, but other people are going to want it. And we can do it. I didn’t know that for sure until tonight, until five minutes ago. Your story just confirmed it. We can give people everlasting life. It’s not perfect yet, obviously. But we have the technology. We’re the only ones.”
“The woman…” Blue said.
Howard nodded. “Yes. She was probably the most important scientist that no one ever heard of. Her work is going to change the course of history. The future is going to be very, very different. She knew what was about to happen to her. She knew because the man you terminated last week, Martin Wacker, was her partner on this project. So she downloaded herself into the Sexbot. She used to be Susan Jones. Now she’s Number Nine. She’s out there, and we need her back here. We need you to do it.”
“Green put a bomb inside her. It’s on a 24-hour timer. I need the 10-digit code to disarm the bomb.”
“Okay. You’ll have it.”
“Listen,” Blue said. “If you want her back so bad, then why was she terminated in the first place?”
Howard smiled. “She wasn’t a Sexbot when we terminated her.”
Blue stared. He said nothing.
Howard waved his hand, as if it didn’t matter, as if it was hardly worth mentioning. “There was a dispute. There’s always a dispute with these sensitive creative types. They discovered this technology, the two of them. In the end, they were a couple of tinkerers. They could have been building go-karts, and they knew it. They stumbled on an incredible secret, and they wanted to announce it to the world.”
“And?”
Howard shook his head. “And nothing. We weren’t going to do that.”
Blue didn’t get it. Howard was skipping something.
Howard’s shoulders slumped. “Look, Blue. Do I have to explain everything to you? Susan wanted to write a paper. Get it published in a peer-reviewed journal. Invite scientists, quantum theorists, bio-ethicists, whoever, to come in and look at what they were doing. Maybe present it to the United Nations.”
He paused for a second. “The United Nations! Can you imagine? We don’t have time for all that bullshit, Blue. We need to move on this. We need to get this thing to market. What we don’t need is to write a press release.”
“That’s why you killed her?”
Howard’s lips pursed into a ghost of a smile. “I didn’t kill her. You did. And you killed her for a lot less, believe me. We’re talking billions of dollars, at least, probably hundreds of billions. Maybe a trillion.”
Blue shrugged. “Howard, one day I’ll kill you, and I’ll probably do it for free.”
Howard turned his back and looked out at the ocean. He still held his drink in his hand. “Maybe I’ll be inside a machine before that day ever comes.”
Blue stared at Howard’s broad back, his balding head.
Howard went on. “Listen Blue, the Chairman of this company is sick. He’s dying. So it’s personal. We need to go to human trials right away. We’ve got the subjects. We’re building a facility right now in Mexico. The details are a little unsavory, I admit, but we’re contracting with the Zetas drug cartel. They’ve got some people lined up for us, prisoners.”
“You’re going to experiment on people held by a Mexican drug cartel?”
“In a word, yes.”
Blue smiled. A burst of air escaped him. It wasn’t really a laugh. It was more of a grunt. He’d been in this line of work so long that nothing surprised him anymore.
“What kind of people are they? The ones you’re going to experiment on? Do you think they had their lawyers look over the release forms?”
Howard raised a hand. “Blue, do you care? I don’t know what kind of people they are. Rival drug traffickers, maybe. Peasant villagers. People who were waiting at a bus stop. Who cares?”
Blue and Howard watched each other for a long moment.
“She wanted to stop everything,” Howard said. “They both did. She and Martin. They were downloading chimpanzees into Sexbots for six months, then they decided it was unethical. See, because the chimps can’t make decisions about how they’re treated.”
Howard’s eyes never wavered.
“If doing it to chimps was suddenly unethical, how were they going to feel about prisoners of a drug gang? Jesus. It’s really not so bad. Those people were going to die anyway. We’re giving them their only chance. We’ll download them. They’ll talk. We’ll get some Spanish translators, we’ll study them, understand how it works. Who’s in there? What does it feel like? Is it nice? We need to know what’s going on.”
“You can’t learn anything from the chimps?” Blue said.
“The chimps can’t talk! You see what I’m saying? The fucking chimps can’t talk. We’ve already done it. We’ve got 23 downloaded chimps at a monkey facility up in South Carolina. The chimps themselves are in comas, on life support. The Sexbots walk around, they act a little like monkeys, a little like Sexbots, but who knows what’s going on inside their minds?”
Howard grunted. “You want the experience of banging a monkey? Let me know. I’ll give you an all-access pass.”
“Thanks,” Blue said. He turned to go. Things were getting very strange here at Suncoast. In Blue’s experience, when things got strange, the next thing they did was turn to shit. “You’re a class act, Howard.”
“I’m sorry,” Howard said. “I shouldn’t have said that. Look, I’m having a party tomorrow night. Here at the house. We do them every once in a while. Officially, we call them Masked Balls, but I call them Eyes Wide Shut parties. Remember the movie? Everybody wears bird masks and capes. A select few people are invited. I’ve got about twenty or thirty Sexbots here. There’s a live show, then you know, you can do whatever you want. Things get crazy. I want you to come, okay?”
“I’ll think about it,” Blue said. He was about to go out the door, but Howard stopped him again.
“You know how much Green cost this company to build?” Howard said. “I mean Green himself, I’m not talking about all the research that went into making him possible. Just Green. You know how much?”
Blue stopped. “I don’t know.”
“Half a million dollars. He retailed for close to a million.”
“Okay.”
“All that money torched because you wanted to get laid. Now I’m telling you to come on over and get laid for free.”
“What did Number Nine cost?” Blue said.
“Nine’s a prototype. She’s the most advanced bot we have, of any kind. Hard to put an actual price on that, isn’t it? And now with this Susan situation…”
“What is she worth to you?” Blue said.
Howard shook his head. “I don’t know. This is a tricky situation. For one, the Chairman thinks Susan is dead. He doesn’t know how badly this job went. I don’t want him to know, and you don’t either. For another, it’s dangerous to have her running around. She’s a loose end. She knows too much. God knows what kind of mischief she could get up to. It would almost be cleaner if she just explodes. On the other hand, if Susan really is alive in there, then we need to know that, and we need to speak to her. I need to speak to her.”
Blue shrugged. “Uh-huh.” It was typical blather from Howard. What is it worth? Nobody knows! Blue was ready to leave. He could walk away from Suncoast right now and not look back.
“Listen, Blue. Bring her back, that’s all. You were supposed to kill her, and you didn’t. You fucked up and you know it. Even so, bring her back here and I’ll make it worth your while.”
“How much is that?”
“You tell me.”
“Five million dollars.” Blue was fishing.
“Done,” Howard said.
“Just like that?”
“Listen, you bring me that robot bitch, and you’ll have five million dollars in your offshore account an hour later. We’ve never had a contract, right? You’ve always just trusted me, and you’ve always gotten paid. Right? This is no different. This is the moon and the stars, Blue. You won’t need to work another day in your life.”
Blue nodded, but he wasn’t sure what he would do when he encountered Number Nine again. “Okay, Howard. You got it. Five million dollars. We’re clear on that? I won’t need to come looking for you after it’s over?”
Howard nodded, his head bobbing. “Five million, your offshore account. Anywhere you want. And Blue? Come to the party, man. I mean that.”
* * *
Nine was horrified by the man’s house.
She was programmed to love and appreciate fine things. Things like silk sheets and beautiful homes, infinity pools, sunsets over the ocean, and hundred thousand dollar cars. Nine was programmed like this because the people who would own a machine like Nine would love these very things themselves.
Even so, she knew that it was the Susan part of her that was upset. Nine was designed to overlook or ignore the things she could not love. The programmers could not know in advance what types of situations a Sexbot might find herself in, so she was also designed not to offend anyone.
Susan hated this house. The place was a wreck. It was little more than a three-room clapboard shack, half falling down, and sitting at the end of a dirt road. There were holes in the walls, some of which had streaks of blood on them. The man seemed to have a habit of punching out the sheetrock. There were green flypaper glue strips hanging down from the ceiling, all of them with dead flies attached. The linoleum floor was peeling up. The paint on the ceiling was peeling away and much of it had already fallen down.
Moreover, a Confederate flag hung on one wall. Several posters of bikini-clad women holding large guns adorned the other walls. Various old computers, junked technology, and dead monitors, along with wiring and accessories were piled in one corner of the living room. Every table, chair and flat surface seemed to have an empty, but unwashed, takeout food box sitting on it.
There was a smell in the house, a dank, musty smell.
Susan had been raised in a wealthy, genteel family. Her childhood home had been large, clean and modern. Two live-in maids kept it spotless. She had never been inside a house like this in her life. She had barely known that such places existed. The motel where Blue and Green had taken her was one thing. That place had been old and dingy and out of date, but the beds were made and there was no garbage lying around. This was much, much worse than the motel.
“Never mind the mess,” Darryl said. “Do you like the posters?”
“Very nice,” Number Nine said.
“I want to show you something,” Darryl said. “Actually, I want you to meet someone.”
“Okay.”
The man went to a darkened doorway. He turned the light on in there and poked his head inside the room. “Mandy,” he said. “Come on out here. There’s someone you need to meet.”
He turned to Nine and smiled. His eyes goggled in his half-ruined face. “You’ll never believe this.”
After a moment, a woman came through the doorway. She was tall and statuesque, with high breasts and an insanely fit, absurdly feminine body. She was like a cartoon woman come to life. She wore a lime green bikini and high heels. She was very pretty, with long brown hair.
Nine recognized her face. It came standard on the early models, and Nine’s own face was based on that original design. In fact, Nine’s body was also based on that design. Nine’s face was prettier, and she had a better body, of course, but more as a result of subtle design tweaks over several years, than because of a complete overhaul.
Mandy was a Sexbot, probably generation one, or generation two. She moved a little stiffly, belying her age.
“Hi,” she said. She blinked at Nine. Her voice had been improved at some point, a software upgrade, but it still retained a touch of the original metallic robot sound. Her blink was outrageously sexy and flirtatious. That was standard back then. Now it was an optional setting. Most people liked things a little more subtle, a little more ambiguous. That’s what customer feedback had told the company.
Nine turned to Darryl. He grinned ear to ear, showing her his crooked, black teeth, and the dark gaps between them.
“She’s a beauty, ain’t she? That’s my little girl.”
“Where did you get her?”
He shrugged. “I’m not really at liberty to discuss that. Let’s just say I got her on the aftermarket. She was… she needed some work. Her original owner was involved in illegal activity. He ran into some trouble and had to give her up. He didn’t deserve her anyway. He didn’t care for her as well as he could have, didn’t maintain her properly, and didn’t have the skills to repair her. I have those skills, and I had the money to make her mine.”
Darryl grimaced. “The secondary market for Sexbots is a little rough. Some bad characters around. I don’t like to think about her dealing with people like that. But she came through with flying colors. She’s a very good girl. Aren’t you a good girl, Mandy?”
“I’m a very good girl,” she said.
Darryl turned to Nine. “Except when she’s bad, and needs to be punished, that is.” He laughed, his mouth wide, showing those teeth again. It was a grisly laugh, something from a horror movie.
Nine and Mandy faced each other across the room. Nine felt it, what she was designed to feel - attraction to another beautiful female. She felt it even though she knew Mandy was a robot, and not a very smart one at that.
Nine was subtly more attractive than Mandy, but in terms of brain power, there was no comparison. The company exponentially improved the capabilities of the Sexbots with each new generation.
In many ways, Mandy was a step above an office photocopier. She had no awareness of her own programming. She couldn’t carry on a normal human conversation. She couldn’t think about current events. She simply repeated the things her owner wanted to hear.
She couldn’t mix drinks or greet guests. She couldn’t cook. She couldn’t drive a car. She had limited ability to remember the past. Depending on how early a model she was, she might be able to store four or five human faces in her visual memory. There was so much that it turned out customers wanted, that these early models couldn’t do.
But one thing she did do - she got hot and horny on command. Mandy was looking at Nine, and Nine could see it in her eyes, and in her body language. The earlier version of herself was already very turned on. She was ready for action.
And so was Nine. Mandy might be a machine, but Nine wanted her. Nine licked her lips, and across the room, Mandy did the same. They were mirror images of each other. Their eyes locked, and they both wanted it. They wanted sex.
Right now.
“I’ll tell you what I want to see happen,” Darryl said. “I’d like to see you girls come together and give me a little show. Then I’d like to have you both come over here and rock my world.”
Nine wanted Mandy, but the desire, powerful as it was, wasn’t all consuming. She could hold off, and she could keep what was important in front of her.
“I’ll tell you what, Darryl,” she said. “I came out here because you said you would trace a voicemail drop from this phone I have.”
“That can wait,” Darryl said.
“It can’t wait,” Nine said. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with.”
“Well,” Darryl said. “How does this sound? We’ll trade. I’ll track that voicemail for you, and once we get that out of the way, I’ll do you both, all night long.”
Nine turned to him and smiled. “You find out where that phone call went, and I’ll do anything you want. With pleasure.”
* * *
An old man with white hair stood at a tall window, the curtains pulled aside. He stared out at the night.
The man wore a three-piece suit despite the fact that he was home and had no intention of going out. He held a martini in his hand.
It was a cold night in New York City, and it was snowing. His apartment, a four bedroom suite in one of the most expensive hotels in the world, was on the 34th floor. He watched the snow swirling down against the backdrop of the tall buildings and the lights of Manhattan.
His name was James Walsh, and he was a billionaire ten times over. At 87 years old, he had been in the business world for more than 70 years. A long time ago, he had dropped out of high school and gone to work at the New York Stock Exchange. For three years, he ran messages and packages between the traders and the offices in nearby buildings. That was how they did it in those days, before electronic communications.
Slowly he had learned the trade. And he had amassed a small fortune. Then, he built that small fortune into a larger one, and finally one so large that he was one of the wealthiest people on Earth. Someone had told him recently that the four hundred richest people on earth had more money combined than the four billion people at the bottom. He was one of those blessed four hundred.
He had lost his wife Elizabeth, the love of his life, ten years before. He remembered thinking at that time, “Soon I will follow you.” He used to say it out loud to the ceiling while he lay in bed at night.
“Soon I will follow you, my love.”
It didn’t happen, not for ten years. But now it seemed like it would. James Walsh had an advanced case of colon cancer. It was going to kill him. He had done three rounds of chemotherapy, but his system was too weak. The nausea from the chemo was a disgrace. The treatments nearly killed him, and they had no effect on the tumors. So he stopped.
The doctors wanted to cut him up. They wanted to cut the bottom of his colon out and make him wear a colostomy bag. He told them he would not do it. He would no longer suffer the indignities that men half his age wished to inflict on him. When their time came, they could wear colostomy bags. James Walsh would die like a man.
He was running out of time. And he found that as time ran out, he didn’t want to follow Elizabeth. He would see her again, if such a thing as an afterlife existed, but now was too soon. He wanted to live.
He was the majority stockholder, the Chairman of the Board, of the company known as Suncoast Cybernetics. Until recently, it had been just one of numerous properties in his portfolio. It was a money maker for sure, and each year, the release of the newest generation Sexbots caused quite a stir worldwide. But compared to some of the great companies in which he held large ownership stakes, Suncoast was a footnote.
He turned away from the tall window and the snowstorm outside. Three young women sat in various states of undress and repose around the room. The room was furnished in opulent old world style, like a Victorian mansion. The girls were dressed in sheer pink and blue babydolls he had bought them at Harrod’s during a trip to London. Yes, they were Sexbots, generation eight, the newest generation that the company had brought to market.
He gazed at them. So lifelike, so beautiful.
“Toys,” he said.
Until recently, Suncoast was nothing but a toy company. Sure, they were diversifying into military applications, but it was a small percentage of their business. He had even considered selling his stake in the company, but less than a year ago, everything had changed. The only thing Suncoast made now that interested him was immortality. Nothing interested him more.
He liked being James Walsh. He wanted to continue doing it.
He had enjoyed nearly everything this life could possibly offer, but he wasn’t done yet. He thought of the people he had known, all gone now. His father, his mother, his siblings. His many friends and business partners. Where did they go? Death was a mystery, a dark cloud, and they had disappeared into it.
He shook his head. He wanted more time.
The truth? He was afraid. He was afraid that when he died, it was the end. There was no God, no Heaven, no Elizabeth waiting for him. As the time grew closer, the more certain of it he had become.
He knew that to make this newest technology work, others would have to die. He knew that two had died already - one a week ago, and one tonight. Indeed, he had called a voicemail drop just a few hours ago, and had heard the voice of a hired killer say two magic words.
“It’s done.”
Those two words meant that a method to create immortality was about to go to human trials. Howard Neale had assured him the trials could start in mere days from now. Walsh didn’t know if he could believe that, but he held out hope it was true.
At one time, he had trusted Howard completely. Before anyone else, Howard had seen the potential for the world’s most advanced sex toy. Suncoast Cybernetics was still making self-propelled pool cleaners when Howard became CEO.
There had been a man in California with a small factory, maybe thirty people, making very realistic sex dolls. The dolls couldn’t move on their own, they didn’t speak, had no mechanical parts, but they looked and felt like real women. Howard bought the company. He overpaid for it because he said no amount of money was too much.
Then he found a tiny three-person shop experimenting with artificial intelligence. They outsourced their coding to India and China. Somewhere in the technology sweatshops of the emerging world, hundreds of programmers were inputting thousands of scenarios - about how chess grandmasters made their moves, about when and why police officers drew their guns, about how people chose from dinner menus.
The theory was that human decision-making was simply the result of remembered experiences, and the brain’s ability to crunch large amounts of information. If you gave a machine the same memories, it would come to the same decisions. Howard bought out that company, too, and he brought the founders on board as consultants for a year.
At the same time, he hung around MIT, flying there himself once a month, snapping up the best robotics students in each graduating class for two or three years in a row. Howard built the team to make the dream happen.
If anything, Sexbots were more Howard’s invention than anyone’s. But Howard had lost his mind in the past couple of years, and it was the damned robots that did it. The fact was they drove men insane.
What did it do to someone to have a woman who simply fulfilled every sexual whim, on demand and without hesitation? What did it do to have three such women, or half a dozen? Howard had peopled his entire house with these things. He sat at home all day and ran the company in a bathrobe, taking frequent breaks to indulge his perverted lusts. At night, he threw sex parties for the political and business elite of southwest Florida.
Howard’s behavior was appalling.
Walsh would have replaced Howard months ago except his own illness had distracted him, and the sudden appearance of this new technology meant Howard had become irreplaceable. Still, it was a very sensitive time and the company was in a very sensitive position. And Howard was not himself.
Howard would have to be replaced. Indeed, he would have to be terminated, erased, eradicated completely. He knew too much to remain alive, so he would have to die.
But not yet.
Outside the windows, the snow was falling more heavily now. Walsh remembered many snowy nights in New York, how quiet the streets became. He thought of walking through the Manhattan streets, the soft snow above his ankles. He could no longer walk in the snow. He was too old, too infirm.
He sighed.
It was okay. When the time was right, he would get rid of Howard. Walsh realized now that it didn’t matter to him how many people died, and who they were. He wanted to live, he intended to live, and he would do whatever it took to make that happen.
* * *
Nine watched over Darryl’s shoulder as he worked.
Mandy, showing little interest in technology, waited out in the living room. Nine glanced through the doorway at her. She simply sat in a chair in her skimpy bikini, staring into space, waiting for her next instructions. Beautiful, but not very brainy.
Darryl’s computer room was dimly lit by one hanging yellow light bulb. Darryl had a rack of hard drives on a shelf above his desk. They were wired to an old IBM upright server standing in the corner of the room. He had a newer no-name laptop on the desk, along with two other large screen monitors. The monitors glowed white and blue in the gloom. LED lights blinked red and green along the various pieces of hardware. On a table next to his desk were piles of wiring and assorted junked hardware.
Darryl had plugged Nine’s telephone into a data port on the laptop. He clicked quickly through several screens of numbers.
“It’s quite a set up you have here,” Nine said.
“Yeah,” Darryl said.
“What do you do for work?”
Darryl stopped. He turned to look at her. His eyes swam in his fish-eye glasses. The skin on his face looked like melted plastic.
“You ask a lot of questions, don’t you? I know they want to make you girls as lifelike as possible, but this is going a little too far, isn’t it? I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t usually like people hovering behind me when I’m trying to do something.”
Nine raised her hands and backed off a couple of steps. “Okay. Have it your way.”
Darryl turned back around and faced the monitor. “Thank you.”
He scrolled through several more screens. “There’s a lot of data on these phones. The encryption package was like off-the-shelf from K-Mart. I was able to break the encryption in about eight seconds using a widely available algorithm. After that, I tracked the most recent calls without a problem. It was so easy to break in here, I’m surprised that someone just let you walk off with this thing.”
“I think he was surprised, too,” Nine said.
Darryl shook his head, barely listening. “So here’s the deal. The phone called a voicemail. You knew that. It’s a dead drop, meaning that it was never associated with any particular phone, and anyway, it was no longer available after midnight tonight. Gone. It looks like it only came into existence at 12 noon. So the voice mail was only there for twelve hours, then it ceased to exist. Pretty secretive shit, huh?”
Nine nodded. “Very.”
“This phone called that drop, left a message. The drop then automatically made two outgoing calls. My guess is that was to send the message.”
“Do you know who it called?”
He nodded. “I have the numbers, yes, but the identification is blocked. That encryption is tougher. It might take me an hour to break, but to be honest, I don’t feel like bothering. I was able to locate the phones by finding the nearest base station to each one, and then guessing at the final location by interpolating its distance from the nearest three cell towers. So much mumbo-jumbo, I know, but it gives me the phone’s location to within about fifty yards.”
“You can do that?” Nine said.
She was surprised. Security had never been Susan’s thing. And with all the upheaval tonight, she hadn’t been thinking clearly. If this person Darryl could break encryption codes and locate those two phones in ten minutes, how hard would it be for the company to locate this phone, a phone they had probably given to Mr. Blue? She stared at the phone, still plugged in to Darryl’s data port.
Not too hard, probably.
She had to get out of here.
“Piece of cake,” he said. “One of the phones is currently at an address just off Gulf of Mexico Drive on Longboat Key, not thirty miles from here as a seagull flies. The other phone is at a location that matches the address of something called the Carlyle Hotel in New York City.”
Jesus, it really was them. Howard lived on Longboat Key, and the chairman James Walsh lived at the Carlyle Hotel. The order to kill her had come from the highest levels of the company.
“Listen,” she said. “Darryl, I want to thank you for everything you’ve done, but I really have to go.”
Darryl stood slowly at his desk. He turned and smiled. His glasses reflected the yellow light from the single naked bulb.
“What about you and Mandy rocking my world?”
Nine backed away from him. “Trust me, you’ll be better off this way. I didn’t mean to, but I’ve put you in danger. If you can track their phones so easily, they’re probably tracking that one right now. We need to destroy that phone, and I need to get moving.”
“I was afraid you’d say that,” Darryl said. “If you had asked me, I would have told you they can find that phone.”
“Doesn’t that worry you?”
He shrugged. “I’ve been through a lot, as you can probably see. But I’m still kicking. As a result, I don’t worry that much. If they want to come out here and talk, we’ll talk. Personally, I doubt they’ll think of the phone right away. And by the time they do, it’ll be sitting at the bottom of the swamp.”
He picked up a large blue device off his desk. It was a foot long tube, shaped somewhat like a gun, with a handgrip and trigger mechanism protruding from the bottom. It had a large dark blue lens at the business end of it, where the barrel of a gun would be.
“Do you know what this is?”
“Darryl,” Nine said. “I know. I said that I would get together with you and Mandy, and I meant it. I would have enjoyed it. But things have changed now. You need to listen to me.”
Darryl laughed, showing his poisoned teeth again. The crags and craters of his ruined face were sinister in the half light of the room.
“It’s strange,” he said. “First they invented Sexbots for men who didn’t want their women talking all the time, coming up with all these opinions, and reasons why this wasn’t a good time to make it. Headaches, menstrual cycles, all of that. Now, less than a decade later, they’ve brought it full circle. Is this what their customer support came up with? People really want sex toys that talk and talk and are full of opinions? Do you also get headaches sometimes?”
“Darryl…” She kept backing up.
He held up the device in his hand. The dark blue lens was pointed directly at Nine.
“Do you know what this is?” he said again. “I’ll tell you. It’s a kind of directed-energy weapon. It fires a radio frequency pulse. I made this one myself. It can overload and confuse an electronic system, shutting it down temporarily. In most cases, it doesn’t actually fry any of the wiring or delicate internal hardware. And all it takes is a touch of a button. It comes in handy, I can tell you that.”
“Listen, Darryl…”
He ignored her. “In your case, I don’t know how sensitive your hardware is, but if I do fry anything, you don’t have to worry. I’ll fix it, or you know, replace it with something similar, whatever I can find. You might lose a few IQ points, but I don’t think either of us will mind that. Right now, you might be a little too smart for your own good.”
“Darryl, I’m going to turn around and I’m going to walk out that door.”
He shook his head. “We’re twenty miles from anywhere. There’s nowhere to go. It’ll take you two hours to walk to a stoplight. Face it, Number Nine, we’re going to play tonight, and we’re going to put you through your paces, and we’re all going to have a lot of fun. Afterwards, we’ll see about getting inside your guts, and finding any identifying information about your rightful owner. We’ll also see about erasing that information. Oh yeah, we’ll also get rid of that telephone.”
Nine had heard enough. It was time to go. “Bye, Darryl.” She started to turn.
Darryl pressed the button on his device. At the front, the blue light flashed bright for a moment. Nine stared at it. She thought to raise a hand to block her eyes, but of course her eyes had nothing to do with it. Her body felt warm. Her mind started to hum.
She closed her eyes.
When she opened them, she was lying face down on the bare wooden floor. Before she slept, she had a vision of Darryl standing over her, big black boots near her face. “Good girl,” she thought she heard him say.
* * *