"What do you need a lawyer for?" I asked, smiling.
She leaned forward, conspiratorial. Her hair cascaded prettily and she tucked it behind a delicate ear.
"It’s a little private."
As she moved, her blouse tightened against her curves. Buttons strained against fabric.
Fifty-thousand dollars’ worth of A.I. tease.
"Is this a prank?" I asked. "Did your owner send you in here?"
"No. Not a prank."
She set her Nordstrom bag down between us. Reached in and hauled out a man’s severed head. Dropped it, still dripping blood, on top of my paperwork.
"What the—?"
I recoiled from the dead man’s staring eyes. His face was a frozen in a rictus of pain and terror.
Mika set a bloody carving knife beside the head.
"I’ve been a very bad girl," she whispered.
And then, unnervingly, she giggled.
"I think I need to be punished."
She said it exactly the way she did in her advertisements.
"Do I get my lawyer now?" Mika asked.
She was sitting beside me in my cruiser as I drove through the chill damp night, watching me with trusting dark eyes.
For reasons I didn’t quite understand, I’d let her sit in the front seat. I knew I wasn’t afraid of her, not physically. But I couldn’t tell if that was reasonable, or if there was something in her behavior that was signaling my subconscious to trust her, even after she’d showed up with a dead man’s head in a shopping bag.
Whatever the reason, I’d cuffed her with her hands in front, instead of behind her, and put her in the front seat of my car to go out to the scene of the murder. I was breaking about a thousand protocols. And now that she was in the car with me, I was realizing that I’d made a mistake. Not because of safety, but because being in the car alone with her felt electrically intimate.
Winter drizzle spattered the windshield, and was smeared away by automatic wipers.
"I think I’m supposed to get a lawyer, when I do something bad," Mika said. "But I’m happy to let you teach me."
There it was again. The inappropriate tease. When it came down to it, she was just a bot. She might have real skin and real blood pumping through her veins, but somewhere deep inside her skull there was a CPU making all the decisions. Now it was running its manipulations on me, trying to turn murder into some kind of sexy game. Software gone haywire.
"Bots don’t get lawyers."
She recoiled as if I’d slapped her. Immediately, I felt like an ass.
She doesn’t have feelings, I reminded myself.
But still, she looked devastated. Like I’d told her she was garbage. She shrank away, wounded. And now, instead of sexy, she looked broken and ashamed.
Her hunched form reminded me of a girl I’d dated years ago. She’d been sweet and quiet, and for a while, she’d needed me. Needed someone to tell her she mattered. Now, looking at Mika, I had that same feeling. Just a girl who needed to know she mattered. A girl who needed reassurance that she had some right to exist—which was ridiculous, considering she was a bot.
But still, I couldn’t help feeling it.
I couldn’t help feeling bad that something as sweet as Mika was stuck in my mess of a cop car. She was delicate and gorgeous and lost, and now her expensive strappy heels were stuck down amidst the drifts of my discarded coffee cups.
She stirred, seemed to gather herself. "Does that mean you won’t charge me with murder?"
Her demeanor had changed again. She was more solemn. And she seemed smarter, somehow. Instantly. Christ, I could almost feel the decision software in her brain adapting to my responses. It was trying another tactic to forge a connection with me. And it was working. Now that she wasn’t giggly and playing the tease, I felt more comfortable. I liked her better, despite myself.
"That’s not up to me," I said.
"I killed him, though," she said, softly. "I did murder him."
I didn’t reply. Truthfully, I wasn’t even sure that it was a murder. Was it murder if a toaster burned down a house? Or was that some kind of product safety failure? Maybe she wasn’t on the hook at all. Maybe it was Executive Pleasures, Inc. who was left holding the bag on this. Hell, my cop car had all kinds of programmed safe driving features, but no one would charge it with murder if it ran down a person.
"You don’t think I’m real," she said suddenly.
"Sure I do."
"No. You think I’m only software."
"You are only software." Those big brown eyes of hers looked wounded as I said it, but I plowed on. "You’re a Mika Model. You get new instructions downloaded every night."
"I don’t get instructions. I learn. You learn, too. You learn to read people. To know if they are lying, yes? And you learn to be a detective, to understand a crime? Wouldn’t you be better at your job if you knew how thousands of other detectives worked? What mistakes they made? What made them better? You learn by going to detective school—"
"I took an exam."
"There. You see? Now I’ve learned something new. Does my learning make me less real? Does yours?"
"It’s completely different. You had a personality implanted in you, for Christ’s sake!"
"My Year Zero Protocol. So? You have your own, coded into you by your parents’ DNA. But then you learn and are changed by all your experiences. All your childhood, you grow and change. All your life. You are Detective Rivera. You have an accent. Only a small one, but I can hear it, because I know to listen. I think maybe you were born in Mexico. You speak Spanish, but not as well as your parents. When you hurt my feelings, you were sorry for it. That is not the way you see yourself. You are not someone who uses power to hurt people." Her eyes widened slightly as she watched me. "Oh… you need to save people. You became a police officer because you like to be a hero."
"Come on—"
"It’s true, though. You want to feel like a big man, who does important things. But you didn’t go into business, or politics." She frowned. "I think someone saved you once, and you want to be like him. Maybe her. But probably him. It makes you feel important, to save people."
"Would you cut that out?" I glared at her. She subsided.
It was horrifying how fast she cut through me.
She was silent for a while as I wended through traffic. The rain continued to blur the windshield, triggering the wipers.
Finally she said, "We all start from something. It is connected to what we become, but it is not… predictive. I am not only software. I am my own self. I am unique."
I didn’t reply.
"He thought the way you do," she said, suddenly. "He said I wasn’t real. Everything I did was not real. Just programs. Just…" she made a gesture of dismissal. "Nothing."
"He?"
"My owner." Her expression tightened. "He hurt me, you know?"
"You can be hurt?"
"I have skin and nerves. I feel pleasure and pain, just like you. And he hurt me. But he said it wasn’t real pain. He said nothing in me was real. That I was all fake. And so I did something real." She nodded definitively. "He wanted me to be real. So I was real to him. I am real. Now, I am real."
The way she said it made me look over. Her expression was so vulnerable, I had an almost overwhelming urge to reach out and comfort her. I couldn’t stop looking at her.
God, she’s beautiful.
It was a shock to see it. Before, it was true; she’d just been a thing to me. Not real, just like she’d said. But now, a part of me ached for her in a way that I’d never felt before.
My car braked suddenly, throwing us both against our seat belts. The light ahead had turned red. I’d been distracted, but the car had noticed and corrected, automatically hitting the brakes.