Excerpt from "Burning Day" by Glenn Grant
A police procedural involving sentient androids known as "cogents." This short novella first appeared in Island Dreams: Montreal Writers of the Fantastic, edited by Claude Lalumière (Vehicule, 2003, 2004 in the USA). In 2005 this story will appear in The Year's Best SF #10, edited by David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer.
"Something's missing here..." I rotate the crime scene in my mind's-eye, pan across the remaining walls of the room, tracking over concrete dust, ceiling debris, toppled rows of wooden benches, part of a small synthetic arm... "Something's missing from this model."
Overlays flicker up, then fade, data collected by a swarm of flybots at the scene: shrapnel fragments and impact sites; splatter patterns of brain coolant and myonic gel; concentrations of chemical taggants, indicating Detanit.
"For one thing, why don't we have any idents?"
"It's only been forty minutes since the attack," says Danny from the squad car's other seat. "CSU's still sweeping the place. Do try to be patient, my paranoid android." Daniel Aramaki is human, and my work-partner, and gets away with too much.
Ah, there we go -- tiny red flags and neat little labels, finally popping up all over the virtual display in my head -- annotating many thousands of pieces of the victims, large and small, positively identified and otherwise.
That's better. "We have four confirmed dead, all cogents. And -- oh, shit, no..."
"What?"
"Three of them were kids. Report says a bomb attack on the Usutu Truth Memorial Nanofabrication Facility."
Mind's-eye closed, optics open: we're wailing through the intersection of Dundas and Replicraft Drive, running strobes and siren. Rain streaks the windshield, polishes the streets into shiny dark mirrors. The car is a Persina sedan, in standard-issue Homicide grey.
"Synthephobe terrorists again," says Dan. "Humanist Front, probably, or the Organic Brigades."
"Fifty dollars says the Humanistas claim it first."
"You're a sick guppy, Mohad." Danny removes his latest designer smartshades, pockets them. He has a new pair every week; he's constantly losing the things. I once suggested that he could simply buy prosthetic eyes with the same features and then some. He seemed to consider the idea an affront to his biological heritage.
I blink back into the model. From the shrapnel impacts, the program calculates a probable detonation point: mid-air, three metres from the floor, at the center of the room. Not a body-bomb, then. A grenade? Lobbed in from the door? Seems wrong somehow...
So I expand the model, scale it down to see what buildings are nearby. Project the most likely trajectories, out through the windows and back to origin. The resulting probability-cone is centered on the top three stories of an elderly Modernist apartment block. A free hostel. The CSU team are already checking it out, apparently, datacapture flowing into the model as I watch.
I kill the display. "It would appear that someone fired a small missile into the building from a rooftop nearby."
Dan raises an eyebrow, but doesn't argue. "Which roof?"
"The free hostel. I believe I know its manager, by reputation at least -- Severe Commy Skeptic."
Dan rolls his eyes. I know what he thinks of the names cogents choose for themselves. I've also known activists who sneer at mine: Gene Engine Mohad. The first and last are slave names, they say. Anthrocentric, they say. Fuck 'em, I say. It's my choice.
West of Eidolonics Avenue, we howl out of Little Arabia and under the eaves of Cogentville. At once the rain is gone, and Dundas is an echoing halogen tunnel through overgrown masses of architecture. Buildings in Cogtown evolve constantly, with complete disregard for city regs and permits. They sprout overhead pedways, cantilevered wings, swooping bridges. Entire streets are spanned, lost under layers of nano-assembled confusion. Walls are always being knocked through, ramps built apparently at random between adjacent structures, entire city blocks domed over with great geodesic umbrellas. Every surface is covered in spectacular art. Not advertising, but luminescent paintings, tilework, bas relief, animated graphics, palimpsests of cryptic polyglot graffiti...
"And this used to be such a nice neighbourhood," Daniel mutters. He's joking; twenty-five years ago this was all abandoned office towers stuffed full of flood refugees and squatters. Not a lot of human pedestrians around here now; mostly cogents and lesser bots, walking, rolling, spidercrawling. The majority are anthropine (like me), but only a few are biomimetic, with all the pseudo-organic details. It's unpopular now, politically uncool, to mimic humans too closely. Pinocchio Syndrome, they call it. Many of today's cogents wear their mechine nature proudly: neosomatics with weird new body plans and lustrous metallic skins.
"How come you don't live in Cogtown, Mohad?" Dan's always posing these irritating questions.
"You're suggesting I shouldn't live wherever I like, monkey-boy?"
"Hey," Daniel spreads his hands, "for all I care, you could move in with my sister. Just seems as if cogents prefer the company of other cogents, y'know?"
"More like humans would rather not live next door to cogents. The city only ceded control of this area to keep the phobe riots to a minimum."
"Hey, can you blame 'em? Look at what you've done with the place."
Now I know he's just trying to spin me up. I let it go. "Actually, at one time I lived just over there, off North TelNex. Quite a long time ago. But I found it... I don't know... confining."
"Claustrophobic?" Daniel is unconvinced. "Not very cogentlike of you, Gene-baby."
"Neither, for that matter, is policework. But here I am anyway." As the newest member of the Squad, I have to put up with a lot. Such as Danny calling me Gene-baby.
Up ahead, Dundas becomes a long arcade, crammed with rapid response vehicles, pulsating with cherry and blueberry lights. Our squad car decelerates reluctantly, kills the siren, and tucks itself between two Greater Metro Area Police units and a Fire Department Mobile HQ. The street-tunnel has been sealed off for the next three blocks, and all the surrounding buildings are being evacuated. Streams of confused cogents, mixed with a few humans, are being herded along the sidewalks.
We get out. The uniforms working the cordon recognize us and wave us through.
"Forensics are still going over the scene," says Dan. "Let's hit the roof of the hostel first."
The elevator lets us off on the thirty-first. We take the stairs to the roof. It's cool but not raining up here. The top of this and several other buildings are sheltered under great waves of photosynth fabric, a retrofit tensile structure suspended from masts and cables.
Daniel and I walk through the hostel's rooftop bamboo forest, ducking under yellow tape to approach the northern edge. There are tactical units patrolling the railings, and a Constable from 52 Division is interviewing a chromefaced cogent in a Mao cap and leather jacket -- Severe Commy Skeptic semself.
"No, we don't have security cameras," sie is saying. "What would we need with security cameras?"
Xu Kelly and her technicians are just packing their survey bots away into steel cases marked Crime Scene Unit. "Ah," she says, "Detectives Aramaki and Mohad, our local counter-terror experts." She pulls back the hood of her cleansuit, revealing grey hair, tied back into a tail. Half-smiling, she shakes Daniel's hand but somehow neglects mine. "Took you boys long enough."
Okay, it's true that Dan and I collared the Marionette Bombers, but I wouldn't call myself either a counter-terror expert or a boy...
"My team's finished here," she says. "Over at the scene, give us, maybe, another hour?" She waggles a hand at the nanofab facility, about forty metres away across the gap between the two buildings.
There's no smoke over there, only a lot of wafting dust. Most of the facility's upper windows have been blown out, the 29th floor torn open at the southwest corner. White curtains billow through the open walls, like mourning sheets.
"Who's in charge?" asks Dan.
"Sergeant Moon, got here twenty minutes ago. He's at the scene."
"Sie," I say, unable to stop myself.
"Huh?"
"Detective-Sergeant Moon is a sie, not a he or a she." Humans of Kelly's generation simply refuse to adopt the new pronouns. She was born well before cogents were invented. If not for longevity treatments she'd have been retired two decades ago.
"Right, whatever." She indicates a raised meditation garden: black gravel raked into smooth waves around islands of brightly colored machine parts. "Now, over here, we've got footprints." We take a closer look. The pebbles have recently been disturbed by unshod feet, each with four broad toes. Not unlike my own.
"Cogent?"
"Well, it ain't human." Kelly watches my reaction. "No sebum, no skin flakes, no biotic residue at all. Shape of the print says anthropine, but definitely inorganic."
Careful not to disturb the prints, I step up onto the garden's tiled ledge. "A nice, clear shot from here. And these overhanging branches would have provided some concealment." Zoom in: a few of the spear-shaped leaves are brown and curled at the ends. "Some of these are singed."
"Say what?" Kelly snaps.
Daniel rubs it in: "Going blind in your dotage, Xu?"
I pull the branch toward me, slip a couple of the burnt leaves into a sample baggie, hand it to Kelly.
She doesn't seem grateful. "We'll check for traces of missile propellant."
Dan says, "Thanks, Mom, you're the best".
"Fuck you," she replies politely. Kelly takes her cases and ducks through the yellow tape.
Daniel looks about. "Okay then, let's canvas the building, see if anyone saw a cog waving a grenade launcher around."
I tell him I'll be along in a moment. He strolls off to interview Severe Commy.
Standing still, exactly where the killer stood, I study the blast damage. At 10x magnification I can see most of the room's demolished interior. It's a public ceremonial chamber, small and nondenominational, paneled in blond wood, with several gently tiered rows of simple benches, curving around a central platform. Broad diamondpane windows in the back wall presumably provide an overview of the high-security nanofactory beyond. Four mantislike telebots are picking reverentially through the wreckage. And standing in the room's broad doorway, waiting for the CSU bots to finish, is the only other cogent in the Homicide unit: Detective-Sergeant Gondwanaland Moon.
I open a vox connection. +Was it an Upgrade ceremony?+
Sie looks up, jet-black eyes glinting in a yellow-gold face, and voxes back, +Where are you, sweets?+
+The hostel's rooftop, opposite you.+ I hold up a blue-grey hand. +I take it the parents brought their kids here to Upgrade?+
+A Burning Day. They were comping a set of twins this evening.+
A pause to take it in. There is a particular chill to this crime, so deliberate, so malicious, so clearly psychotic...
+Idents?+
Sie voxes, +The adult is Deep Field Scanner, twenty-four, spouse of Jade Kilowatt and Chronic Flesh Nebula -- Kilowatt and Nebula are seriously injured but recoverable. Of their children, only Sentient Forest survived, if in several pieces. Siblings Cyanogen Cat, Cadmium Dust, and Volatile Sky were deemed unrecoverable at the scene. They were a quad, all aged five. Shit, Mohad, doesn't it just make you sick?+
It does. Even if you're not fully organic and you can't easily get ill. The myones clench across my stomach, mimicking human muscles, triggered by the same ancient instinctive responses: protect the young; ensure the future of the tribe.
A CSU teleoperator cuts in: +Moon, we've got one.+
Slowly and with the utmost care, one of the mantids draws something out from under a pile of glass shards and ceiling panels, holds it up. A fluorescent orange cube, six centimetres on a side. Pulled from somebody's chest cavity, trailing strands of fiberoptic and fullerwire.
+We've just taken a Red Box from one of the victims.+
+Intact?+ Moon voxes to the CSU team, +Get the data recorders to Dewdney at the lab, pronto.+
I capture images of the scene from my point of view, sending them on to Moon.
Sie pixes back several close-ups of the ceremonial chamber -- and tacks on three magnified seconds of an anthropine figure in a rain-wet charcoal jacket, framed by bamboo foliage. Prussian-blue skin, embossed navy eyebrows, a hairless androgynous manikin. I seem small and isolated, my indigo eyes lost in shadow.
+Don't look like that, sweets.+ Moon's voice in my head, soothing. +What're you doing after watch?+
All
content ©2004 Glenn Grant except as noted
Updated 2004.07.24