4
I had the ability to filter out any or all of the noise, smells or other distractions and senses that assaulted me every time I set foot in the streets of Atunis Quarter, but I let them all flow through me. My cybernetic components gave me greater range than my old human senses. But, no matter how much I engorge myself on the myriad experiences of normal human life, I never feel a part of it. Not anymore.
None of the sensations gave me any feeling of closeness to those I once protected. Passing through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, seeing people glancing my way and giving me a wide berth, I never felt more alone. They had their own lives to care about and only ever saw the bot, never the human inside the manufactured body.
Even with the constant dribble of filtration water rain, they still wandered the streets in a mismatch of clothes, or no clothing at all. Synthetic fibres brushing against real skin, while my clothes rubbed against skin as synthetic as those fibres. Street sellers, huddled beneath battered awnings plied their wares to people who could little afford what they had, standing and examining things they could never buy.
I had stopped off at Arkady's on my way here, making sure that he had secured his shop. There was no reason to think that this bot killer would target him, but I wasn't about to take the chance with one of the few beings I could call a friend. He'd be safe, so long as he hadn't got himself involved with this bot church. I hoped.
In the doorway of an abandoned shop, I rolled a cigarette with one hand as I checked my slate. I'd transferred some of the images over, preferring my own tech. Like my slug thrower. I could have got myself a better gun years ago, but the comfort of a familiar grip in my hand made up for the pea shooter's little eccentricities and inadequacies.
The alley where the last bot bought the farm sat opposite and I matched the view on my slate to that before me. Little had changed since that day. The trash looked unmoved. The rundown, derelict area had seen far better days. Maybe, some day, some fat cat with more money than sense would come down from their heavens in the sectors above and try to gentrify the place, but Atunis Quarter would resist that.
Atunis was the way it was and always would be. These stores would get new occupants, maybe legal, maybe not, and some other part of town would fall down the sewer chain. Right now, this area took the brunt of the lack of money and motivation to make things better. It all circled round, eventually, like the water in a toilet bowl.
"You, in the doorway." The loudspeaker blared its harsh call, like a pig getting slaughtered. "Step forward and identify yourself."
The bright spotlight from a department hover car blazed down towards me as I lifted the rolled cigarette to my lips, scraping a match against the doorway. With a shake of my hand, I doused the match, flicking it out into the rain and tipped my hat up, revealing my face to the cops above. They'd run my ID, laugh at the old cop brought low and move on. I get mistaken for a bot more than I'd like.
Thrusters coughed gouts of smoke, or steam, or whatever that crap was, and the cops wheeled away, rising above the lower floors of the hundred-story buildings and heading up to the next level of streets, ready to harass some other poor, metallic Joe.
The concerns of other bots weren't mine to care about. I had a job to do. A job I hadn't even decided I was going to take. Yet, here I was, ready to kick around dirt and trash to find anything that the cops hadn't even bothered to look for. Back in the day, I'd have spat bile at my Captain for giving me the dirty job cleaning up a bot kill. I understood all too well how things went.
The couple of guys taking their pleasures outdoors didn't even look my way as side-walked past them towards the rear of the alley. The furtive grunts and sounds of flesh on flesh didn't disturb me in the slightest, so long as they didn't get in the way of my examination of the area and I didn't disturb them because, well, they had other things on their mind. Past those guys, I saw the corner, around which some poor schmuck had stumbled on the bot's remains.
Not that a dismantled bot could cause nightmares, but spending time giving statements, to cops that had better things to do, was not a great way to spend an evening. The picture on my slate looked no different to the way the alley looked now. My slate didn't have a projection facility, so I had to pinch and zoom over different parts of the picture to work out the things I wanted to see.
Another thing my slate didn't have was a flashlight. In this low light, right in the middle of the night cycle, street lamps busted and flickering, I had to rely on my cybernetics instead. I factored through several wavelengths until I found one that brought everything out in sharp focus. There was probably a word for that wavelength, but I didn't care.
My first stop on this crime scene examination was that thing on the wall. It wasn't graffiti. Not the normal kind, at least. No tag that I'd ever seen before. No play on words or easy political platitudes that made the kids feel all grown up, giving it to the establishment good, in a place the 'establishment' would never see. I tore away a couple of old, peeling play bills to get a better look.
I knew it looked familiar. Dangling from the swan-like neck of a beautiful, metal and plastic broad. Except, this wasn't the same after all. Sauda's chain held an 'A' embraced by a 'C', a symbol for their Ascendent Convergence. This symbol had a subtle, but significant difference. A 'D' in place of the 'A'. Crouching, I took a few pictures with my slate, hoping the old tech could make out the symbol. If not, I'd come back tomorrow and take some during the day-cycle.
Rising to my feet, one hand fell to my hip, flicking my raincoat aside, and the other raised to my chin. An old habit that I had never seemed able to stop. The days when the feel of my fingers rasping against three-day old stubble would help me think were long gone. My synthetic skin didn't produce stubble, so my fingers moved against smooth almost-flesh that didn't feel like skin at all.
I took another look at the pictures on my slate, taking note of where all the dismantled parts of the bot had been placed after it had ceased to function. The arms and legs over there, about two feet from the bot's trunk. Chips and wires and tiny circuitboards lined up, in order of removal, right here, beside the bot. But something didn't seem right. Something had caught my artificial eyes, but my slow human brain had yet to register it.
Those few brain cells I had crushed with cheap whiskey may have come in handy after all. I took a step back, surveying the area in as wide a view as I could. Everything seemed as it should. Rats had long since stopped rooting through this trash, anything worth eating rotted away by now. People didn't normally come this far down the alley, otherwise those guys near the street would have come this far in to get their fill of each other.
My slate lifted up before my face again and I flicked between the picture on the slate's surface and the reality of the alley. Then it hit me. Like a transport tube car coming to a dead stop while in free fall. I pinch zoomed on my slate, taking a good, close look at the ground and then looked at the ground itself.
In the picture, scratches in the surface of the alley floor. In the Real, no scratches. At least, none that any normal eyes could see. I squatted down, running fingers over the area. My skin may not pass anywhere close to human, but the synthetic nerve endings far surpassed that of my old hands. I could feel changes in the surface. Slight striations that anyone else could miss. Even bots. The tech of my skin and eyes, matched with the flexibility of thought in the human brain. A match made in heaven.
I switched through the different filters on my eyes again until they highlighted what I had already found by touch. The surface of the alley was smooth. Too smooth for something of this age and location. A place where any repairs needed were ignored and forgotten, or fixed with tape and anything to hand. Someone had cleared away any sign of those scratches.
Scratches meant a struggle, but, if anyone wanted to bust up a bot, all they'd need to use was a near-field electromagnetic pulse. Illegal, but I could find five places that'd sell me a pair of gloves before I move two blocks. A tap on the back of the bot's cranial systems with NF-EMP gloves and there would be no struggle at all.
What did that mean? The bot came here of its own free will. Something happened and a struggle ensued. I circled the area, running a dozen scenarios through my mind. A bot could overpower a human. At least, most bots could against most humans. I'd seen some bots as weak as kittens and some human mooks that'd give gorillas a hard time. Not that anyone had seen real kittens or gorillas outside of centuries old Earth-That-Was media.
I needed another cigarette. As I continued to run through the possibilities, I rolled out the processed tobacco substitute in the paper substitute, twisting the end. The book of matches I found in my pocket come from a go-go bar on the other side of the Quarter and I consider visiting the place again, tonight, to think this all through.
With my mind wandering, the book of matches slips from my fingers and I remind myself to get the servos checked the next time I have enough dough to afford it. Crouching, I reach for the matches and see something that shouldn't be there, under an old plastic lid, toppled from the box it once covered. Now, that lid covered something else. Something that could just about be the most important thing I could find.
A drop of blood.