Mirage

Derec backed away. He felt himself tremble. "Is there some place I can sit down?"

Sathen frowned, but nodded. "We can talk back here."

Sathen took him to a commissary at the end of the hall. He fetched two cups of coffee from the dispenser and set one before Derec.

"Thanks. Sorry. I've been up since… what day is it?"

Sathen nodded. "I know what you mean. Thanks for coming down."

Derec swallowed a mouthful of too-hot coffee. It shocked him into more wakefulness. "Was anybody else hurt?"

"One of our agents was found strangled by the nurses' station." Sathen's voice was edged with anger.

Derec blinked at him, startled. "I'm sorry."

Sathen waved a hand as if to say, "Never mind."

"Why did you ask me down?" Derec asked.

"I have questions about the robot. I understand you built Bogard."

"Yes. Look, if you're wondering whether or not Bogard did this-"

"No, not exactly. I'm wondering if a robot-understand, Mr. Avery, I don't know a lot about robots-I'm wondering if it's possible for one to malfunction in such a way as to explode. They go-what? insane?-when they have a conflict over protecting humans. When they get like that"

"No," Derec said firmly.

"They do operate on a small nuclear battery, right?"

"Did you check for radiation?"

"Yes."

"And?"

"Zero."

Derec frowned. "Zero?"

"Near enough to make no difference. A bubble nuke would eat up its own radiation in the course of the blast. But if the robot blew up… I didn't know what their power supply was. So is there any other way for it to do this?"

"No, Agent Sathen, there is not. Bogard certainly would not have strangled someone beforehand. That would be impossible."

"I never count anything as impossible, Mr. Avery."

"Count on this. Bogard could not harm a human being. And it had no self -destruct function."

"You sound very certain. "

"I am. Look, Bogard runs-ran-on a positronic brain. All positronic brains are built with the Three Laws already encoded. Before anything else is loaded into a positronic robot, the Laws are there. They cannot harm humans or allow humans to come to harm."

"But they also have to obey humans, too," Sathen countered.

"Not if it results in harm."

"Bogard was different, though, wasn't it? A bodyguard. "

"No, even Bogard was constrained by the Three Laws. Whatever happened here, Bogard had nothing to do with it." Derec drank more coffee, feeling his impatience and weariness begin to turn to anger. "Bogard had a slightly wider range of interpretative freedom when it came to defining harm, true, but nothing that would allow deliberate self-destruction, especially if it meant killing a human at the same time. If it had malfunctioned that severely, it, as with all positronic robots, would have simply shut down."

''I see… so it's possible it shut down before the explosion happened, which would explain why it didn't prevent it?"

"That's… reasonable. But without its brain or any of its recorders, there's no way to tell now."

"Recorders?"

"It was a security robot, after all, Agent Sathen. We built in several accessory recorders not directly tied to the positronic brain. Admissible in Earth courts, since you don't allow for robotic testimony."

Sathen narrowed his eyes, thoughtful. "Interesting. So, this malfunction-how likely would that be?"

"It wasn't behaving according to normal operational standards when I talked to it," Derec admitted. "Having failed to protect Senator Eliton, witnessing the deaths of other humans, it was likely in the first stages of a collapse. That's why I told you to leave it alone. It might have been salvageable if it weren't pushed. I suppose-I'm just guessing, now-that it could have continued to break down after I left. The pathways under breakdown aren't well understood, only the cause and effect."

"So when whoever set off this charge did so, Bogard may very well have been completely inert."

"Could very well have been."

The silence stretched then, while Sathen worked through the information. Derec finished his coffee.

"This Agent Daventri… did you know her?" Derec, asked.

"Hm?" Sathen shook his head. "No, not very well. She'd just been assigned to Eliton's team. Before that she worked a different district than me. I knew about her, though. Good agent. A little green, but we all are once or twice, eh?"

"I suppose so. Some of us fairly often."

Sathen grinned briefly. "So, how is your investigation coming?"

"Mine?"

"On the RI."

"Phylaxis was taken off of that."

Sathen frowned. "You were? But I thought that's what you people do-analyze positronics."

"It is and normally we would, but apparently your people decided that this time it should be handled completely internally." Derec heard the bitterness in his own voice.

"That's… huh." Sathen gestured to Derec's cup. "More coffee?"

Derec peered into his empty cup, shook his head. "Do you have more questions?"

"Probably, but I suppose they can wait. Is there anything else useful you could tell me about Bogard?"

"Relating to this? No, I don't think so."

"Then, no."

Derec got to his feet. "Oh, you might remind your forensics people that Bogard was partially constructed out of amalloy. It has a distinctive molecular signature."

"Right." Sathen remained sitting. "Thanks, Mr. Avery. You don't mind if I give you a call later?"

"No, I'd be interested to know how this is going." Derec glanced over his shoulder, in the direction of the destroyed room. "This is crazy, isn't it?"

"I haven't seen anything like it," Sathen admitted.

Derec left the hospital, the muzziness of too long a day smothering his thoughts. He let his transport carry him back to his apartment this time while he dozed along the way.

At home, he entered the darkened space, not troubling to call for the lights. He stumbled against a chair on the way to his bed before he finally stretched out.

"Zero radiation…" he mumbled to himself, just before sleep took him.

Nine

Mia's hand trembled with the knife as she sliced through the meat patty. The aroma seemed better than anything she had ever smelled before. She had not eaten since before the incident at Union Station and had not thought about it till Ariel asked if she were hungry.

"Maybe I shouldn't say this until you're done eating," Ariel said, "but… I thought you were dead."

"Almost," Mia said around a mouthful of bread. It was warm, fluffy. She wondered if it were freshly made. She did not ask, not about any of it. She wanted to pretend for the moment that it was authentic beef, natural potatoes, garden-grown greens. More than likely it was the same processed, reconstituted, vat-grown molecules everyone on Earth ate except the very wealthy and powerful. She swallowed and washed it down with milk.

"Bogard got me out. I can't go back to my apartment, it's being watched. I can't go-" She laughed wryly. "I can't go anywhere."

Ariel nodded slowly, the crease between her eyebrows deep with worry and puzzlement. "So you came here. Why?"

"Because you have no reason to turn me away and no reason to turn me in. "

"Are you a felon?"

"Victim."

"Risky assumptions, though. I'm Auroran and several of my people, important people, were murdered by Terrans yesterday. People whose safety should have been guaranteed by you. Why would I now trust any Terran?"

"That's a good question. I've been asking myself exactly the same thing." Mia tore off a piece of bread and pushed it through the sauce remaining on her plate. She ate it slowly, not looking at Ariel, and drank the last of the milk in her glass. "Thank you. Now I have to ask: Are you going to turn me in?"

Ariel frowned. "Should I?"

"If you do, you'll never find out who killed Ambassador Humadros."