The Vandal's Shadow Page 3

this Pendulum thing."

  "Pendant. Sure, I'm done with her if you are. She doesn't seem to have anything to do with it, anyway."

  "You're joking, right?" Kask glared at the Sheriff. "She may be right in the center of it."

  "What? How do you know that?"

  "Don't take too much offense to this, but how long have you been sheriff?"

  "Almost twenty years. Why?"

  Kask paused and then said "Ah, you know what, nevermind. Don't worry about it. I have my process, you have yours. Let's just get on with it."

  "Well alright then." Hakihea walked back to Cai. "You're free to go now. We'll contact you later if we think of any more questions. Thanks for your help."

  "And when can I get my camera back?"

  "Oh, right. Well, it'll probably be a couple days. We'll ring you." He smiled.

  Cai did not change her face. She rose and walked out, her eyes fixed on Kask as she went past him.

  Hakihea picked up the camera drone and exited the building, with Kask following. They watched Cai disappear down a path, and then Mahuru approached them.

  "Chief Haratua has decided that the sheriff will assist you throughout your investigation," Mahuru said to Kask. He walked away toward the sundial. "Oh, and you have two weeks to close the case," Mahuru said over his shoulder.

  Hakihea extended his spear and tested the shocking prongs before collapsing it again, then looked expectantly at Kask.

  "I plan to be done long before then," Kask said quietly.

  12:26 AM >

  "Are you sleeping? We're almost there."

  Kask lifted his head from the headrest and blearily looked toward the cockpit of the transporter. He was in a backseat, with Hakihea at the forward controls. The white interior of the transporter was red with night-time controls, but appeared to constantly change form with the sliding city lights.

  "Hm. I guess the scotch got me," Kask said.

  "Scotch?"

  "Which building is it?" Kask asked. Hakihea pointed to a skyscraper that was taller than the other skyscrapers immediately surrounding it.

  There were no worded signs that he could see--merely a small golden symbol on one face. Their patrol car decelerated swiftly into a high floor docking station. As at Kask's hotel, they emerged from underneath the public line. They approached arched doors from the platform and got a clearer look at the golden logo of Pendant Industries, which was circular with a gear motif. They entered a lobby or conference chamber with curved walls and ceiling, between which columns arced at odd angles, surrounding them like a giant rib-cage. Everything was an egg-shell white, except for a red bulb near the opposite wall.

  "Get the feeling we're inside a huge whale carcass, bleached by sun," Kask commented. Hakihea nodded.

  The bulbous red object which sprouted from the floor turned out to be a desk with inlaid computer terminals, and sitting behind it was a secretary in a white uniform.

  "Hello, I'm Sheriff Hakihea, and this is Detective Kask. The police contacted you earlier ...."

  "Of course, Sheriff. President Wright is waiting for you in his office. You can go right in." She indicated a wrinkle in the wall, off to the side. Hakihea nodded thanks, and they headed to the door. A soft membrane folded open as they approached.

  The president of Pendant stood from behind his desk to greet them. His office was a similar style to the lobby, but tusk-like spikes seemed to naturally sprout from the wall behind the broad desk. The three of them exchanged bows.

  "I'm sorry to disturb you so late at night," Hakihea said, "but we have urgent police business."

  "Of course, I'm happy to help. It's no bother; I never leave the office, anyway. Have a seat." They sat.

  "We would like to see a list of your employees. We have reason to believe that two or more of them were killed at the Carter Observatory earlier this evening," Hakihea said.

  "What?!"

  "Now just a moment," Kask interjected, "we're not entirely certain about that." The president looked back and forth between them confusedly. Hakihea glowered at the detective. Kask pulled up a display on his arm-comp.

  "Mr. Wright, do you recognize this nucleotide sequence?" Kask angled the display so the president could see.

  "No ...."

  "If you do a web search on this, you'll find it contains some flagged sequences linked to a database of yours." This statement caused Wright to jolt upright and grip the edge of his desk.

  "Wait, you sequenced this yourself? Where did you find it?"

  "Yes, at the Sundial of Human Involvement," Hakihea said. "It's quite a mess. Gelatinized flesh strewn about."

  "What happened?" Wright asked forcefully.

  "Perhaps you should tell us what we're looking at, first," Kask said.

  Wright leaned back in his chair. "The flags belong to a copyrighted genome we developed. It's a robot grown from biological materials." He spoke quietly, looking at an empty portion of his office.

  "Oh, that's a relief," Hakihea said. "Then there was no murder. Nobody was killed."

  "Well now, just a moment," Kask said. "At the very least we have destruction of company property. And at most, I think we might still have a case for murder."

  Hakihea frowned. "How do you figure?" he asked Kask.

  "Just go with my line of questioning for a bit," Kask responded. To Wright he said "What is the body mass of this biological robot?"

  "About one hundred-sixty kilograms."

  "That corresponds to what we found at the sundial. And how developed is its nervous system? Does it have a brain comparable to mammals'?"

  "Well, that model has a large cerebellum because of the complex motor skills we wanted it to have. But the cerebrum is not as advanced as the mammalian cerebrum. It's more comparable to a reptilian. We didn't base the genome off any particular animal, more or less developing it from scratch, though of course we looked to nature to see how to implement certain designs. Nevertheless, it is an unusual creature in that there are features you probably wouldn't see evolve by natural selection."

  "I'd like to see a living specimen, if possible," Kask said.

  "Sure, we have several in our lab."

  "Alright, hold on," Hakihea said. "As of this moment, I'm declaring this a case of vandalism, since clearly no murder occurred. I'll put a couple police lieutenants to look into this, Mr. Wright, but I'm pulling away the resources of a murder investigation, which means Detective Kask and I will be taking our leave now."

  "Sheriff, may I speak with you privately for a moment?" Kask said.

  "Sure."

  "Mr. Wright, would you please join me outside your office in a couple minutes? I'm still interested in seeing your lab," Kask said.

  Wright nodded. "Very well."

  Kask and Hakihea stepped outside the office. The secretary had disappeared.

  "Now what?" Hakihea said after the membrane sealed itself.

  "Sheriff, I'm not so sure a murder didn't occur," Kask said as he crossed his arms.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Well, how do you define murder?"

  "The unlawful killing of a person."

  "And according to Global Unity law, a person is any sentient being. A couple decades ago, a group of poachers were successfully prosecuted for hunting some resurrected species, like elephants and mammoths, for their tusks. A similar case happened near the Japanese archipelago, when several fishermen were executed for whaling. That's even back when fishing was legal."

  "You can't compare elephants and whales to this. We're talking about robots. A human creation."

  "Does the creator have absolute moral authority over his creation by the mere circumstance that he is the creator?"

  "I don't know what you're getting at," Hakihea said after a pause.

  "Parents cannot do whatever they wish to their children. Humans cannot do whatever they wish to mammoths and moa, even though we brought them back from extinction."

  "You sound like a lawyer."

  "Exactly. We sh
ould let the lawyers argue about what to do with the facts. But first it is our job to gather the facts. Right now we don't know enough about these ... bio-bots ... to know whether they can be classified as 'people' under the law, and thus whether destruction of them can be called murder."

  "I guess I see what you're saying. I just have a feeling this is a dead-end case."

  "Let's put our feelings aside for the moment and--" Kask was interrupted by the contraction of the membrane. Wright stepped out.

  "Pardon me," Wright smiled. He handed a dissoluble information tablet to Kask. "Your list of names. Every employee. So are you fellows ready to have a quick gander at the lab?"

  "Where is it?" Hakihea asked.

  "All the way down on the ninety-fourth floor. Don't worry, we have fast elevators."

  "Mr. Wright, my colleague has convinced me that it is perhaps better if we continue investigating the case, rather than handing it down to police lieutenants. But I am treating it as a high-level vandalism case until evidence suggests the contrary. I assume the robot was expensive?" They were heading across the lobby as Hakihea talked.

  "A single unit is extremely cheap to manufacture," Wright said as they got into the elevator. "But we have spent enormous sums of time and labor in its development. Floor Ninety-four." The doors folded shut and the elevator began descending.

  "How many of these bio-bot units have you made so far?" Kask asked.

  "Four," Wright said. "If, as you say, one has been destroyed, then there are two left in the lab, and one is actually being employed as a window-cleaner on a trial run."

  "But how did one of them end up running free in downtown Wellington? Was it also cleaning windows, or did you take it for a walk in the park?"