It was one of four flats in an odd little two-story building-pink stone, white cornices, and a circular turret at each end for his octagonal dining room, all windows and wood. Fae had left the porch light on; he could see the flickering fire of the study in the window far to one side and the warm glow in the dining room in the windows of the turret. There was a twisting blue light coming from a window on the far side as welclass="underline" his neighbor, Mrs. Ellingsworth, was still watching her “telly” late into the night. The multi-colored glow of the display twinkled against her rain-spattered window.
It should have been a comforting sight. He had come to love his digs; his apartment had become a true home for him-not an easy thing to accomplish for a childless, single man in his mid-thirties.
But it didn’t matter to him. Not now. All he could see was the image of his father, smiling stiffly, hiding something horrible behind his eyes. Ha. Ha.
He had to do something about it. He had to.
THE ROOM WITH NO WINDOWS
An Undisclosed Location
The man who called himself “Blackburn” stood in the exact center of the room he had commandeered for his private communications. It was a perfectly cubical space; its walls were made of featureless, nearly translucent modules. It was absolutely silent in the room; this far below the surface, not even the movement of the air itself made a sound.
He was staring at a frozen holo-display floating in the air in front of him-a single, motionless image, no bigger than a dinner plate, captured hours earlier by a mobile security cam roaming London. A slice of features belonging to the only human in the image was barely identifiable by facial recognition software that tagged the subject’s identity and forwarded the information to Blackburn, immediately and automatically.
It was an image of one of the many people Blackburn kept tabs on at all times. The man in question was that important-and that dangerous.
“Jonathan Weiss,” he said aloud.
Mr. Weiss was a clever man. That cleverness had made him very useful to Blackburn for quite some time. But now…too clever by half. Too clever for his own good.
The camera had caught him sprinting back to his anonymously rented car in the middle of a cloudburst, fleeing from an odd and lovely British apartment building, complete with red brick turrets and fire-lit windows. It was the home of one Simon Fitzpatrick-a man that Jonathan Weiss had been ordered to avoid at all costs. Another dangerous man-but dangerous in an entirely different way.
Internal audio of their meeting was unavailable; thread interrogation had failed as well. But that didn’t matter to Blackburn. The image itself was enough, because Weiss wasn’t supposed to be in London. He wasn’t even supposed to be in that hemisphere. And his presence there-his meeting with Fitzpatrick, no matter the reason-was absolutely forbidden.
Blackburn sighed bitterly. He hated to admit it, and it had taken an unusually long time by his exacting standards, but Jonathan Weiss had finally outlived his usefulness.
Without moving from the exact center of his windowless room, Blackburn touched his right ear and initiated a call to one of the very few people who had direct contact with him. It took only moments to convey his wishes. It took even less time to receive confirmation.
The instant the command was given and accepted, he put it aside. He had far more important things to attend to. Things that would change the world.
This, at least, is settled, he told himself.
He was wrong.
OXFORD, ENGLAND
Oxford University, College of Robotics
Simon knocked on the wooden door as hard as he could. Nothing happened. Thirty seconds later, he knocked again. Still nothing.
Oxford’s College of Robotics was housed in some of the university’s oldest buildings-quite a statement for a university that was almost nine hundred years old. In fact, it was actually a collection of cottages and low-slung warehouses, some erected centuries ago, some put up as recently as a year ago. In the middle of the confusion was a two-story stone-and-plaster house with a wood-shingle roof: the office, home, and laboratory for one of the most respected and least liked experts in the field, and one of Oliver Fitzpatrick’s oldest friends.
And Simon needed to see him. Now.
He knocked a third time, waited an impatient ten seconds, then turned the knob and pushed his way in. Of course it’s not locked, he told himself. It never is.
It looked as if a small bomb had exploded in the entryway: papers strewn everywhere, teetering stacks of old books, data chips scattered like snack food. The furniture-what he could see of it-was almost as ancient as the house and remarkably ugly. The tiny-paned windows were blurred with grime, and most horizontal surfaces were dull with dust.
“Hell of a housekeeper,” Simon muttered to himself, and stumped down the hallway to the basement stairs. “Hayden!” he shouted as he dodged the debris. “HAYDEN!”
A high-pitched, young female voice with a pronounced Liverpool accent called up from below. “Down here, Dr. Fitzpatrick!”
Oh, great, Simon thought. She’s here, too.
He was careful going down the stairs-at least two of the steps were dark with rot and cracked from end to end. As he descended, the quality of light changed from the dim reflected sunlight of the untended rooms above to the blue-white glow of the workspace. It made his eyes hurt even though he knew what to expect.
He had to step over an upturned stool to completely enter the lab. The room was huge compared to the space above, at least three times the floor space and twice the height, slightly too cold to be comfortable and absolutely without scent or shadow. It was almost inhumanly tidy as welclass="underline" every piece of equipment was in its place on a labeled shelf, every worktop was clear and clean. Even the piles of printouts on the desk (and who other than Hayden still used printouts, Simon wondered idly) were stacked with geometric precision. None of that was the work of Hayden’s brilliant but disorganized mind, he knew. No, that was someone else’s doing entirely.
The robot responsible for the extraordinary organization turned part of its jumbled face-panel toward him as he entered. “You usually call ahead,” its female voice emanated from somewhere near the center of its seething metallic mass. “You did not think that was necessary on this occasion?”
“Lovely to see you as well, T.E.A.H.,” he said acidly.
He stopped short when he saw what his father’s old friend and his prize robot were doing. They were facing each other, hunched over a small rectangular panel, heads down, in deep contemplation.
Chess, he thought, and smiled to himself. I should have known.
“Why do you do that, Simon?” Hayden grumbled. “Call her by the full designation? You know it just sets her off. Just call her Teah.”
Simon blinked innocently. “Does it?”
Hayden sighed deeply. “Oh, for pity’s sake…”
Something and whirred in Teah’s sensor array. “Your pulse is slightly elevated, Professor,” she said to Simon. “Subcutaneous capillary action is above average, and detectable encephalic activity is accelerated as well. What is bothering you so?”
“I don’t believe that’s any of your business, Teah,” he said.
“Ah. Apparently I have exceeded the social paradigm assigned to casual conversation,” the robot said stiffly, “though why you would withhold such unimportant situational data begs a host of other even more significant queries-”
Simon swept up the walnut-sized AI relay that connected Hayden to his robot regardless of distance-their little dedicated intercom/cell phone. He dumped it unceremoniously into a cup of cold coffee that sat at the edge of a table.