“I fucking HATE you,” Ada screamed, her eyes bulging, her neck standing out in cords. “HATE YOU!”
Natalie gathered her to her bosom, stroked her black curls.
One robot put its arms around Natalie’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze. The three of them, robot, wife and daughter, looked like a family for a moment.
“Ada,” he said, and held out his hand. He refused to let a note of pleading enter his voice.
Her mother let her go.
“I don’t know if I can come back for you,” Natalie said. “It’s not safe. Social Harmony is using more and more Eurasian technology, they’re not as primitive as the military and the police here.” She gave Ada a shove, and she came to his arms.
“If you want to contact us, you will,” he said.
He didn’t want to risk having Ada dig her heels in. He lifted her onto his hip — she was heavy, it had been years since he’d tried this last — and carried her out.
It was six months before Ada went missing again. She’d been increasingly moody and sullen, and he’d chalked it up to puberty. She’d cancelled most of their daddy-daughter dates, moreso after his mother died. There had been a few evenings when he’d come home and found her gone, and used the location-bug he’d left in place on her phone to track her down at a friend’s house or in a park or hanging out at the Peanut Plaza.
But this time, after two hours had gone by, he tried looking up her bug and found it out of service. He tried to call up its logs, but they ended at her school at 3PM sharp.
He was already in a bad mood from spending the day arresting punk kids selling electronics off of blankets on the city’s busy street, often to hoots of disapprobation from the crowds who told him off for wasting the public’s dollar on petty crime. The Social Harmony man had instructed him to give little lectures on the interoperability of Eurasian positronics and the insidious dangers thereof, but all Arturo wanted to do was pick up his perps and bring them in. Interacting with yammerheads from the tax-base was a politician’s job, not a copper’s.
Now his daughter had figured out how to switch off the bug in her phone and had snuck away to get up to who-knew-what kind of trouble. He stewed at the kitchen table, regarding the old tin soldiers he’d brought home as the gift for their daddy-daughter date, then he got out his phone and looked up Liam’s bug.
He’d never switched off the kid’s phone-bug, and now he was able to haul out the UNATS Robotics computer and dump it all into a log-analysis program along with Ada’s logs, see if the two of them had been spending much time in the same place.
They had. They’d been physically meeting up weekly or more frequently, at the Peanut Plaza and in the ravine. Arturo had suspected as much. Now he checked Liam’s bug — if the kid wasn’t with his daughter, he might know where she was.
It was a Friday night, and the kid was at the movies, at Fairview Mall. He’d sat down in auditorium two half an hours ago, and had gotten up to pee once already. Arturo slipped the toy soldiers into the pocket of his winter parka and pulled on a hat and gloves and set off for the mall.
The stink of the smellie movie clogged his nose, a cacophony of blood, gore, perfume and flowers, the only smells that Hollywood ever really perfected. Liam was kissing a girl in the dark, but it wasn’t Ada, it was a sad, skinny thing with a lazy eye and skin worse than Liam’s. She gawked at Arturo as he hauled Liam out of his seat, but a flash of Arturo’s badge shut her up.
“Hello, Liam,” he said, once he had the kid in the commandeered manager’s office.
“God damn what the fuck did I ever do to you?” the kid said. Arturo knew that when kids started cursing like that, they were scared of something.
“Where has Ada gone, Liam?”
“Haven’t seen her in months,” he said.
“I have been bugging you ever since I found out you existed. Every one of your movements has been logged. I know where you’ve been and when. And I know where my daughter has been, too. Try again.”
Liam made a disgusted face. “You are a complete ball of shit,” he said. “Where do you get off spying on people like me?”
“I’m a police detective, Liam,” he said. “It’s my job.”
“What about privacy?”
“What have you got to hide?”
The kid slumped back in his chair. “We’ve been renting out the OLED clothes. Making some pocket money. Come on, are infra-red lights a crime now?”
“I’m sure they are,” Arturo said. “And if you can’t tell me where to find my daughter, I think it’s a crime I’ll arrest you for.”
“She has another phone,” Liam said. “Not listed in her name.”
“Stolen, you mean.” His daughter, peddling Eurasian infowar tech through a stolen phone. His ex-wife, the queen of the super-intelligent hive minds of Eurasian robots.
“No, not stolen. Made out of parts. There’s a guy. The code for getting on the network was in a phone book that we started finding last month.”
“Give me the number, Liam,” Arturo said, taking out his phone.
“Hello?” It was a man’s voice, adult.
“Who is this?”
“Who is this?”
Arturo used his cop’s voice: “This is Arturo Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, Police Detective Third Grade. Who am I speaking to?”
“Hello, Detective,” said the voice, and he placed it then. The Social Harmony man, bald and rounded, with his long nose and sharp Adam’s apple. His heart thudded in his chest.
“Hello, sir,” he said. It sounded like a squeak to him.
“You can just stay there, Detective. Someone will be along in a moment to get you. We have your daughter.”
The robot that wrenched off the door of his car was black and non-reflective, headless and eight-armed. It grabbed him without ceremony and dragged him from the car without heed for his shout of pain. “Put me down!” he said, hoping that this robot that so blithely ignored the first law would still obey the second. No such luck.
It cocooned him in four of its arms and set off cross-country, dancing off the roofs of houses, hopping invisibly from lamp-post to lamp-post, above the oblivious heads of the crowds below. The icy wind howled in Arturo’s bare ears, froze the tip of his nose and numbed his fingers. They rocketed downtown so fast that they were there in ten minutes, bounding along the lakeshore toward the Social Harmony center out on Cherry Beach. People who paid a visit to the Social Harmony center never talked about what they found there.
It scampered into a loading bay behind the building and carried Arturo quickly through windowless corridors lit with even, sourceless illumination, up three flights of stairs and then deposited him before a thick door, which slid aside with a hushed hiss.
“Hello, Detective,” the Social Harmony man said.
“Dad!” Ada said. He couldn’t see her, but he could hear that she had been crying. He nearly hauled off and popped the man one on the tip of his narrow chin, but before he could do more than twitch, the black robot had both his wrists in bondage.
“Come in,” the Social Harmony man said, making a sweeping gesture and standing aside while the black robot brought him into the interrogation room.
Ada had been crying. She was wrapped in two coils of black-robot arms, and her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy. He stared hard at her as she looked back at him.
“Are you hurt?” he said.
“No,” she said.
“All right,” he said.
He looked at the Social Harmony man, who wasn’t smirking, just watching curiously.
“Leonard MacPherson,” he said, “it is my duty as a UNATS Detective Third Grade to inform you that you are under arrest for trade in contraband positronics. You have the following rights: to a trial per current rules of due process; to be free from self-incrimination in the absence of a court order to the contrary; to consult with a Social Harmony advocate; and to a speedy arraignment. Do you understand your rights?”