Bless Your Mechanical Heart Read online

  “Pack up her stuff.” His fingers danced over the screen, calling up his predecessor’s files. “And unpack my stuff.”

  “Yes, Chief Constable Meran.”

  “And then when it quits raining, you go round up my seven remaining constables.” He decided not to contact them by radio. He wanted a little time alone with the files first. “Christ on a pogo stick,” he grumbled. “What a hellhole.”

  “Hellhole,” K1tty said. “H-e-l-l-h-o-l-e.”

  It was a hellhole he’d be staying at for the next twelve months, a contract he’d signed to keep a very angry husband from making his life on Earth wholly unbearable. “Traded one hellhole for another.” But at least this one had a mystery to solve, a geologist with a set of twins, and the notion that the next shuttle might have a couple of married women.

  Thirty-two and twenty-three and twenty-three and nineteen. He scrolled her entries for the numbers. “Thirty-two and twenty-three and shit and two are four and four is eight.” There were other numbers, all of them in pairs: twenty-one and twenty-four, thirty-four and eighteen, seventeen and twenty-two, nineteen and twenty-five, and five and three… the only pair that wasn’t in double-digits.

  Meran met his six remaining constables—another had gone missing in a tunnel collapse while following a lead during one of the blessed dry spells—gave them assignments that had nothing to do with solving the rash of deaths, and put his every waking hour into studying his predecessor’s reports. He memorized the pairs of numbers.

  A week later, he still stared at the images of bodies, inconclusive medical reports, and the numbers. Thirty-two and twenty-three, twenty-three and nineteen, twenty-one and twenty-four, thirty-four and eighteen, seventeen and twenty-two, nineteen and twenty-five, and five and three. The numbers had been found barely legible, scratched into the muddy earth next to the bodies that had been recovered… or near the sight of a tunnel collapse where some bodies had not yet been recovered… or on the shore of the very deep sea where no bodies would ever be recovered.

  The previous chief constable believed there were numbers everywhere, but that some had been washed away by the frequent rain. Put down when the rain stopped, rendered invisible or faint when the rain returned. Was the washing away on purpose? Part of the serial killer’s modus operandi?

  Thirty-two and twenty-three, twenty-three and nineteen, twenty-one and twenty-four, thirty-four and eighteen, seventeen and twenty-two, nineteen and twenty-five, and five and three.

  The numbers didn’t mean anything to Meran, and yet they meant everything if he wanted to put a stop to the deaths. The suspect list grew and shrank and yielded… nothing.

  “Fucking nothing, K1tty. I find everything and nothing in common with all the dead miners.”

  More days later, Meran was at his desk again, K1tty on the other side, crooked over, grapefruit head and penlight eyes even with his face. “Everything in common because they worked here; and nothing in that the only thread linking them all appears to be that they worked here.”

  “Work,” K1tty said. “W-o-r-k.”

  “Oh, some of the victims were shady, a couple gambled, one picked fights at every opportunity, another stole cookies from the commissary. Most were Catholics, some Baptists, Jews. No atheists, they were spared. Half Republicans, a scattering of Democrats, some Libertines.”

  “L-i-b-e-r—”

  “Stow it.”

  “Direct me how to assist you,” K1tty said.

  “Solve it,” Meran said. “That’s how you can assist me.”

  “Chief Constable Meran, I am not able to—”

  “Then stow it.” He’d interviewed every single miner, every support staff member, and many of them twice. No one claimed to have seen anything, and heart rate detectors bore that out. Surveillance cameras? Few worked; all the rain took its toll on a lot of the low-grade electronics. He was convinced it was the work of one man or woman, and so he studied the backgrounds of everyone posted here, thinking he might find some carefully concealed criminal past.

  “Zilch.” He’d even “followed the money,” and it led nowhere.

  “Zero is not a number associated with your case,” K1tty said.

  “No? But it’s what I got. Zilch and two is… oh, Christ.” He had eleven Earth months and twenty more Earth days to fulfill his contract on this hellhole. At this rate, that wasn’t going to be long enough to find the serial killer…. He’d been so consumed by the case that he’d not pursued the geologist, who’d unfortunately been the latest fatality, discovered last night outside the barracks, her neck broken.

  “What the hell am I missing, K1tty?”

  The robot made its purring sound.

  Meran thumbed off the computer and slammed his fist against the screen, cracking it. “Give me the numbers again, K1tty.” He didn’t need the robot to do that, they were engraved in his brain. “Give ‘em to me.”

  “Thirty-two and twenty-three, twenty-three and nineteen, twenty-one and twenty-four, thirty-four and eighteen, seventeen and twenty-two, nineteen and twenty-five, and five and three.”

  “The first one. The first one found.”

  “Thirty-two and twenty-three.”

  “Chief Constable Erin… what exactly did she tell you? The thing she said when she thought she was close. The first thing she said then.”

  “Chief Constable Erin Watts said the deaths started by the numbers.”

  “Numbers.” A shudder passed through Meran’s dagger-like frame. “There is one commonality. One, K1tty. Just one. No, there are two.”

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” Chief Constable Meran peered through the screen of the confessional, seeing the vague outline of Father E9-Nibr0ss’head on the other side. “It has been two weeks since my last confession.”

  “Go on, my son.”

  My son. Meran sucked in his lower lip. “Am I on your list, Father, for extermination?”

  A whirr, hiss, and a pop. “I take exception to your foul language, but that by itself is not actionable enough.”

  “But if… when… I find another married woman?”

  “Yes, my son, that would be enough.”

  “Provided I confessed it to you. That you were made aware I was banging a married woman.” Meran sat silent for a moment, smelling the fustiness of the confessional, and the old oil that he knew dripped from the robot. The miners’ deaths, the tunnel collapses, the poor souls who’d apparently slipped into the very deep sea… all of those things had happened during respites from the rain, and all the bodies had been discovered, or incidents noted, after another deluge. Most of the clues had been washed away.

  “Be sure your sin will find you out,” Meran recited.

  “Numbers: thirty-two, twenty-three,” Father E9-Nibr0ss replied.

  “God is not a man, that he should lie,” Meran went on.

  “Numbers: twenty-three, nineteen.” That was followed by a pop and a hiss.

  “Exodus: twenty-one, twenty-four,” Meran said.

  “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,” Father E9-Nibr0ss said. “That miner had broken the hand of one of his fellows in a fight.”

  “And so you caused a tunnel collapse.”

  A hiss and a pop. “Hand for a hand. The rest of his body was an unfortunate loss.”

  “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”

  “Psalm: thirty-four, eighteen,” the robot said. “That particular miner had been injurious to several of his fellows.”

  “So you crushed his spirit along with the rest of him.”

  “Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord,” Father E9-Nibr0ss said.

  “But you’re not God.”

  A crackling burst of static. “I am Father E9-Nibr0ss, Rabbi E9-Nibr0ss, Ayatollah E9-Nibr0ss, Bhikkhu E9-Nibr0ss, Pastor E9-Nibr0ss, Guru E9-Nibr0ss, Roshi E9-Nibr0ss. I am the closest thing to God this outpost has. I am the light and the salvation. I will deal with them according to their conduct, and by thei
r own standards I will judge them.”

  “That’s what you did before, didn’t you? I found the records. Fifteen months ago you were a judicial assistant.”

  “For the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, working with the Honorable—”

  “Except the court didn’t find you honorable, did it? Some glitch in your programming. You killed—”

  “The miscreant I killed in the courthouse was guilty. The evidence and witnesses cemented that. But his attorney got him off on a technicality. I was… tired… of technicalities.”

  “And you fixed that.”

  There was a long hiss punctuated by a pop. If robots were capable of emotion, Meran would have called the sound anger or indignation.

  “For carrying out the proper sentence they—” More hisses and pops came in a considerable pause. “Junked me. If not for the corporations recovering retired mechanicals I would be lost.”

  “So one of those corporations sent you here, programmed you full of religion because that’s what this outpost needed. Clergy.”

  “Fortunately, it did not override my previous programming.”

  “So vengeance is yours.”

  “Only if the penitent does not find redemption. Only if the penitent confesses to the same sin more than once.”

  “So you don’t care for repeat offenders.”

  “I am the light and the salvation. I am—”

  “—soon to be replaced,” Meran said. “And then I’ll have to find something else to occupy the rest of my eleven months on this hellhole. C’mon. I’m taking you out into the rain, where I can happily preside over your funeral. For rust you are and to rust you will return. Ashes to ashes, rust to rust, Father.”

  JUST ANOTHER DAY IN THE BUTTERFLY WAR

  M. Todd Gallowglas

  For a brief moment, Harriet Rose stood alone in the apartment, waiting for one of the soldiers she served to return to existence. In the upper-right-hand corner of Rose’s heads-up-display flashed as the algorithm she’d written cycled through the odds of probability and paradox as to which agent would appear in the Twentieth Century La-Z-Boy that faced the apartment’s single, large view screen. The screen showed the fighters, battleships, and frigates fighting the final battle for humanity’s survival at the center of the Milky Way. Ships blinked in and out of existence as one side or the other changed the past. Most times, those ships would reappear an instant later. Occasionally, they did not.

  Rose’s solitude lingered on. The algorithm completed its projection. Two names flashed across her vision:

  Serendipity Jackson-Lin 64%

  James O’Brien 35%

  All other agents out due to time stream errors or paradox loops.

  2.647 seconds after the algorithm completed its run, Ella Fitzgerald’s silky vocals filled the apartment, confirming the prediction of Serendipity Jackson-Lin. Occasionally, Billie Holiday or Nina Simone preceded Serendipity, but not often.

  The diminutive, exotic beauty, Serendipity Jackson-Lin blinked into existence, sitting right back where she’d been a few moments before, ­holding an empty snifter of scotch.

  “Rose,” Serendipity said, tapping the glass. “Would you please get me another?”

  Rose ignored a bur in the rotator cuff in her cybernetic knee as she shuffled across her agent’s apartment.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Rose said, artificial voice box giving a tinny quality to her voice.

  “Bless you,” Serendipity said.

  That response came from habit more than any belief in any universal power or deity. Serendipity was one of the few soldiers that spoke to Rose like a human being rather than some hybrid freak. They’d discuss all manner of subjects in those moments between Serendipity’s missions and those times when the war caused her to cease to exist. One thing both of them agreed upon, human and cyborg alike, was they were fairly certain God didn’t exist, or at least not in any kind of sense that the Bible described… no matter what the pastors and preachers from Serendipity’s youth had said. Rose had served soldiers in the war so long—and had so many parts of her body replaced and her brain rewired—that she didn’t remember any part of her childhood.

  “How long was I gone this time?” Serendipity asked.

  “Only a few moments, ma’am,” Rose replied. “Just long enough for Ella to stop singing for a few seconds, then right back.”

  Rose moved toward the liquor cabinet, limping every third or fourth step. She’d sent notes to maintenance, but they replied that it wasn’t a priority, that they were very sorry, and she’d have to wait while they dealt with more serious issues. And by serious issues, they meant the robot servants that most other soldiers had started using over cyborgs. The reason Rose liked Serendipity and James O’Brien, the soldier who she served slightly less frequently than Serendipity, so much was because they both refused to replace Rose with a full robot server.

  Both Serendipity and James had been recruited from the Great Western Expansion, just after the US Civil War. Serendipity was the daughter of a negro man and a Chinese woman, while James was the son of Irish immigrants. Both families worked building the Central Pacific Railroad. As children, both had seen bosses cast aside good people for the slightest dip in productivity, and so both soldiers had grown to appreciate the need to be needed and to grant kindness to others, even if they might not be “top of the line” or “the newest model with all the advanced features.”

  Serendipity was especially sensitive. She shared stories her father had told her about life as a plantation slave. Truth be told, other soldiers had suggested, after James and Serendipity had been recruited, that Rose should retire. Rose told them the war was all she remembered, and while she couldn’t fight any more, she could serve to make life more comfortable for those who could.

  “Besides,” Rose would say with a wan smile, “with the shifting timelines, who can truly tell when I might get the chance to fight again.” That, and both soldiers’ compassion, ended the argument.

  As Rose turned around from the liquor cabinet, the music stopped. She didn’t have time to run the algorithm before Serendipity vanished from the La-Z-Boy. An instant later James O’Brien sat in her place. He flashed a bright smile at her. His grin widened when he saw the decanter of scotch in her hands.

  “Knew I was coming back?” he asked, raising the snifter.

  Rose loved the lilt of his accent.

  “Not exactly,” Rose said. “It was for Serendipity. You share similar tastes in drink.”

  “You’ve got to love a woman who appreciates fine whisky,” James said. “I’d love to be fortunate enough to meet this Serendipity.” He laughed the joyful laugh he always did when he made a clever play on words. “Still, I’ve got the glass, you’ve got the bottle. Might as well enjoy them while I’m still around.”

  Rose hobbled over and poured James three healthy fingers of scotch.

  James sipped from the snifter, closed his eyes, and leaned back to savor it as he always did.

  “We must be winning,” James said. “The war that is.”

  “I haven’t heard one way or the other,” Rose said. “Why do you say that?”

  James raised the snifter. “Last time this was a Macallan twelve. Now, I’m enjoying the smoky wonder of an eighteen-year-old Laphroaig. I can’t imagine the whisky getting better if we were losing.”

  “Never thought of it like that,” Rose said.

  “Don’t drink much?” James asked.

  “Don’t eat or drink at all,” Rose said. “Those… parts… have been replaced. Don’t even have a tongue anymore.”

  “Sorry love,” James said. His mouth worked up and down. Rose knew him well enough to know he was struggling not to suggest retiring. He ended up saying what he always said. “Ah, bless.”

  James did believe. He spoke often about how, “Only God Himself Almighty could explain this miracle of moving back and forth through time to defeat our enemy and myriad of wonderful lives James O’Brien has had the pleasure to live.”

/>   “Thank you, sir,” Rose said. “Can I get you anything else?”

  “No,” James replied. “Thank you, love. I’ll just enjoy the view.”

  He settled into the La-Z-Boy and watched the battle raging on the view screen.

  Reality continued to warble. The enemy must have launched a major offensive, as James and Serendipity switched places in the La-Z-Boy in quick succession with the rapidity of a strobe light. Not being able to do anything but watch and wait until the universal backstory straightened itself out, Rose searched through the few memories she had from before her cybernetic upgrade. She recalled a very nice whisky, possibly fifty or so years old, warming her all the way down as it slid down her throat… back when she had a throat. A shared love of fine scotch was just one more reason she liked both Serendipity and James more than the other soldiers she served.

  5:23.913 minutes later, the offensive ended, and the past came together. Ella Fitzgerald played 1.549 seconds before Serendipity returned to the La-Z-Boy. She took a sip of the scotch, just as James had before her, and reveled in the experience of it sliding down her throat.

  “Good stuff,” Serendipity said. She tapped the snifter with her finger. “What is this?”

  Rose shifted through her memories, making sure that little details hadn’t changed in the recent offensive.

  “Eighteen-year-old Laphroaig,” Rose replied.

  “It’s very good.” Serendipity took another sip.

  In the midst of Serendipity’s reverie, a beep from her wrist broke through Ella’s smooth vocals. Serendipity’s fingers tightened around the thistle-shaped snifter. She chewed her upper lip while sucking in a deep breath through her nose, held it for three seconds, and let it out slowly.

  The cybernetic linkup on Serendipity’s wrist beeped again.

  Serendipity tossed the remaining scotch back, something she only did when that beep sounded.

  “Stop music,” Serendipity said.

  Silence filled the apartment, and she looked at her right wrist. She let out and exasperated breath and rolled her eyes. She looked again at her wrist, as if to make sure she had seen the mission parameters correctly the first time.