Me Am Robot

I suppose the best place to start my tale would be in my office. Though, to be fair, when I say ‘office’, I mean ‘janitorial closet with a view’. It also doubles as my living space; when you don’t actually need a bed to sleep on or food to eat, you’d be surprised how little space you can live with. There is a closet for my clothes, though. There may not be anything indecent to see without clothes, but I still feel uneasy going out ‘naked’. Plenty of older models don’t seem to mind, but I attribute that to their human nature having died long ago, and their robot shell simply living on, following a route that’s been hard-wired into their motherboards until they short-circuit.

Damn, that’s depressing. I wish I could still drink and not risk a short0circuit of my own. One of the things I miss about being organic is being drunk. Sure, I can download a temporary ‘state of mind’ patch off the black market for that sort of thing, but it really isn’t the same; all of the hazy processing, none of the good times leading up to it. Granted, scotch and whiskey always tasted like shit to me, but a nice cold beer? Damn.

Sorry, sorry; I’ll get on with my tale. I just get a little sidetracked sometimes, especially when I’m thinking about being a fleshbag.

At any rate, I had just unlocked my office door and settled down behind my desk with my data tablet when a young man burst in. Like all the kids his age—early- to mid-twenties—he had a few shiny pieces of his own. Nothing as extensive as my own refurbished body, mind, but eye-catching enough that I could tell they were purely aesthetic, not out of necessity. In all likelihood, he was a Modder, and well-off by the look of it. A gleaming ring encircled his left eye, and his expensive button-up had the right sleeve torn clean off to showcase a brilliant chrome-plated arm.

“You’re A. Iverson, right? A.I. the P.I.?”

I had half a mind to shoot him right then and there, but that would have been a neat trick without a gun. He was referring, of course, to the rather unfortunate nickname I’d received after I made the mistake of helping a minor media mogul locate his missing mink. That story is exactly as sad as it sounds, so I won’t bore you with a retelling. Needless to say, I’ve avoided felines and the media as much as possible since. Instead, I rubbed my temples; a pointless gesture as I couldn’t actually get a headache, but it conveyed the message well enough.

“If you’d bothered to read the door, you wouldn’t have to ask. Please, take a seat,” I replied, pointing towards the dingy chair in front of my tiny desk. “What can I help you with?”

He fidgeted in his chair for a little while before answering. “It’s my fiancée, Greta. I think she’s planning on leaving me for someone else.”

Part of me groaned inwardly; I absolutely loathed chasing down cheating wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends, and life partners. More often than not it was pure paranoia on the client’s part, and even when it wasn’t the job entailed too much sneaking around for my liking. The only fun part of a job like this was roughing up the cheater—so long as it was a man. I don’t hit women.

The other part of me, however, saw only dollar signs. This kid had money; his top-of-the-line, back-to-the-2000s haircut reeked of a professional salon, and he had enough prominent, desirable facial features—a chiseled jaw, proud cheekbones, and perfect complexion to boot—that he had to have been engineered. No doubt his parents paid top dollar for him. Who was I to turn him away if he wanted to discover what his lover was up to, no matter the cost?

While an internal war was being waged between preference and profit, he simply stared at me with his big blue eyes. Well, one was blue. The other was bright red, and was probably capable of viewing whatever made me tick from where he was sitting. X-ray eyes had been popular since they were invented, and I’d be lying if I said I couldn’t understand why. Luckily, my outer plating is supposedly coated with something that those types of implants can’t penetrate. Even so, it made me more than a little uncomfortable. Finally, I nodded, though what I really wanted to do was sigh. I miss sighing.

“I’ll need a name before I make any promises,” I answered, though I was probably going to say yes anyways.

He gave me a funny look. “I told you, her name is Greta! Greta Schindler!”

I rubbed my temples again. “Yes, that’s all fine and dandy, but I’ll need your name, too. I need to know who’s footing the bill.”

“Nathaniel Redding V.”

When I heard his name, I was able to put two and two together a little more easily. The Reddings were an influential family in the North American Empire, and had made their fortune with a knack for knowing when to invest in stock and when to sell shares. Having a prominent Modder engineer in every generation for the past hundred years didn’t hurt, either. With all that money, they should have been able to afford the best of the best—not me, in other words. I’m not terrible at what I do, but I’ll be the first to admit there are others much better than me, at least in cases like this. There had to be some angle he was working by hiring me.

“Well Mr. Redding, I’m a busy man,” I lied. “Assuming I can take your job, we’ll need to discuss my fees.”

Before I could continue he slammed something down on the desk in front of me. It was an old paper check, though that didn’t really surprise me; the rich liked to keep around relics like that to prove that they could still afford things like paper, pens, and whatever else might have been replaced by data pads and computers. The name at the bottom was written in the sloppy hand of a toddler’s first signature. With handwriting classes replaced by keyboarding, this was to be expected, though I’ll note with some pride that I can still write the flowing, curvy, illegible signature of yesteryear as if I’d never stopped.

What was more important than the signature, however, was the number above it. My heart skipped a beat—well, you know what I mean—when I saw how many zeroes the young Redding had penciled in with his sloppy hand. This Greta girl either meant a lot to him, or his daddy really wanted him married off so he’d be someone else’s problem. Whatever the case may be, I couldn’t really afford to pass this opportunity by. Still, I had to keep my cool. I cleared my throat—or made a noise to that effect—and tapped the check.

“That’s a very generous offer, Mr. Redding, but if I may be so bold as to advise you I would suggest not giving your humble employee the full payment up front like this; half paid in advance and half paid on completion would ensure the job wasn’t simply dropped once the check was cashed.” It was a harmless little threat, and one I wasn’t sure he would be attentive enough to pick up on, as distraught as he looked, but to my delight he nodded.

“Thank you for the advice, Mr. Iverson, but that is half of your full payment. You’ll receive another check of the same amount once you’ve delivered your report on my Greta.”

Something about this kid made me like him, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was². With a final nod, I rose and extended my arm towards him.

“Mr. Redding, you have a deal. I’ll track down your fiancée and see what she’s up to. Do you have any pictures of her, or a rough schedule of her usual movements that I could follow?”

Retrieving a small slip of paper from his pocket, he handed it to me; it was a picture on photo paper. He was really pulling out all the stops to impress me, that was for damned sure. She was definitely a looker; chestnut hair, a perfectly imperfect face that I knew couldn’t have been engineered, and jade eyes that melted my motherboard. I was a little jealous, really. My chances of finding anyone who could live with my condition were unlikely; when your body is ninety-percent circuitry, romance may as well be dead. Not that I hadn’t tried, of course, but in my experience few women want to cuddle up to cold metal.

“Most mornings she stops down at Jupiter’s for coffee, but after that I don’t know where she goes,” Redding explained apologetically. “I see her when I can, but between her work schedule and my own routine we usually have to schedule dates weeks or even months in advance.”

I put the picture in my own shirt pocket, despite having already added it to my memory banks. Carrying around the physical object helped me feel at least a little more human, and I’d need to bring as much humanity with me as I could if I was going to be hanging around Jupiter’s Café tomorrow morning. As much as I missed getting drunk, I missed coffee even more. Not for the pick-me-up, of course, but more for the taste and the aroma. Losing three of the five senses sucked big time, but all in all it could have been worse.

As I showed my new client to the door, I put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry, Mr. Redding; I’ll find out what your fiancée is up to. Expect a full report by next week at the latest.”