We came to a sharp stop behind a beat-up Tesla, still pressed hard against our seat belts, and fell back into our seats. Mika touched her chest where she’d slammed into the seat belt.
"I’m sorry. I distracted you."
My mouth felt dry. "Yeah."
"Do you like to be distracted, detective?"
"Cut that out."
"You don’t like it?"
"I don’t like…" I searched for the words. "Whatever it is that makes you do those things. That makes you tease me like that. Read my pulse… and everything. Quit playing me. Just quit playing me."
She subsided. "It’s… a long habit. I won’t do it to you."
The light turned green.
I decided not to look at her anymore.
But still, I was hyperaware of her now. Her breathing. The shape of her shadow. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her looking out the rain-spattered window. I could smell her perfume, some soft expensive scent. Her handcuffs gleamed in the darkness, bright against the knit of her skirt.
If I wanted, I could reach out to her. Her bare thigh was right there. And I knew, absolutely knew, she wouldn’t object to me touching her.
What the hell is wrong with me?
Any other murder suspect would have been in the back seat. Would have been cuffed with her hands behind her, not in front. Everything would have been different.
Was I thinking these thoughts because I knew she was a robot, and not a real woman? I would never have considered touching a real woman, a suspect, no matter how much she tried to push my buttons.
I would never have done any of this.
Get a grip, Rivera.
Her owner’s house was large, up in the Berkeley Hills, with a view of the bay and San Francisco beyond, glittering through light mist and rain.
Mika unlocked the door with her fingerprint.
"He’s in here," she said.
She led me through expensive rooms that illuminated automatically as we entered them. White leather upholstery and glass verandah walls and more wide views. Spots of designer color. Antiqued wood tables with inlaid home interfaces. Carefully selected artifacts from Asia. Bamboo and chrome kitchen, modern, sleek, and spotless. All of it clean and perfectly in order. It was the kind of place a girl like her fit naturally. Not like my apartment, with old books piled around my recliner and instant dinner trays spilling out of my trash can.
She led me down a hall, then paused at another door. She hesitated for a moment, then opened it with her fingerprint again. The heavy door swung open, ponderous on silent hinges.
She led me down into the basement. I followed warily, regretting that I hadn’t called the crime scene unit already. The girl clouded my judgment, for sure.
No. Not the girl. The bot.
Downstairs it was concrete floors and ugly iron racks, loaded with medical implements, gleaming and cruel. A heavy wooden X stood against one wall, notched and vicious with splinters. The air was sharp with the scent of iron and the reek of shit. The smells of death.
"This is where he hurt me," she said, her voice tight.
Real or fake?
She guided me to a low table studded with metal loops and tangled with leather straps. She stopped on the far side and stared down at the floor.
"I had to make him stop hurting me."
Her owner lay at her feet.
He’d been large, much larger than her. Over six feet tall, if he’d still had his head. Bulky, running to fat. Nude.
The body lay next to a rusty drain grate. Most of the blood had run right down the hole.
"I tried not to make a mess," Mika said. "He punishes me if I make messes."
While I waited in the rich dead guy’s living room for the crime scene techs to show, I called my friend Lalitha. She worked in the DA’s office, and more and more, I had the feeling I was peering over the edge of a problem that could become a career ender if I handled it wrong.
"What do you want, Rivera?"
She sounded annoyed. We’d dated briefly, and from the sound of her voice, she probably thought I was calling for a late-night rendezvous. From the background noise, it sounded like she was in a club. Probably on a date with someone else.
"This is about work. I got a girl who killed a guy, and I don’t know how to charge her."
"Isn’t that, like, your job?"
"The girl’s a Mika Model."
That caught her.
"One of those sex toys?" A pause. "What did it do? Bang the guy to death?"
I thought about the body, sans head, downstairs in the dungeon.
"No, she was a little more aggressive than that."
Mika was watching from the couch, looking lost. I felt weird talking about the case in front of her. I turned my back, and hunched over my phone. "I can’t decide if this is murder or some kind of product liability issue. I don’t know if she’s a perp, or if she’s just…"
"A defective product," Lalitha finished. "What’s the bot saying?"
"She keeps saying she murdered her owner. And she keeps asking for a lawyer. Do I have to give her one?"
Lalitha laughed sharply. "There’s no way my boss will want to charge a bot. Can you imagine the headlines if we lost at trial?"
"So…?"
"I don’t know. Look, I can’t solve this tonight. Don’t start anything formal yet. We have to look into the existing case law."
"So… do I just cut her loose? I don’t think she’s actually dangerous."
"No! Don’t do that, either. Just… figure out if there’s some other angle to work, other than giving a robot the same right to due process that a person has. She’s a manufactured product, for Christ’s sake. Does the death penalty even matter to something that’s loaded with networked intelligence? She’s just the… the…" Lalitha hunted for words, "the end node of a network."
"I am not an end node!" Mika interjected. "I am real!"
I hushed her. From the way Lalitha sounded, maybe I wouldn’t have to charge her at all. Mika’s owner had clearly had some issues… Maybe there was some way to walk Mika out of trouble, and away from all of this. Maybe she could live without an owner. Or, if she needed someone to register ownership, I could even—
"Please tell me you’re not going to try to adopt a sexbot," Lalitha said.
"I wasn’t—"
"Come on, you love the ones with broken wings."
"I was just—"
"It’s a bot, Rivera. A malfunctioning bot. Stick it in a cell. I’ll get someone to look at product liability law in the morning."
She clicked off.
Mika looked up mournfully from where she sat on the couch. "She doesn’t believe I’m real, either."
I was saved from answering by the crime scene techs knocking.
But it wasn’t techs on the doorstep. Instead, I found a tall blonde woman with a roller bag and a laptop case, looking like she’d just flown in on a commuter jet.
She shouldered her laptop case and offered a hand. "Hi. I’m Holly Simms. Legal counsel for Executive Pleasures. I’m representing the Mika Model you have here." She held up her phone. "My GPS says she’s here, right? You don’t have her down at the station?"
I goggled in surprise. Something in Mika’s networked systems must have alerted Executive Pleasures that there was a problem.
"She didn’t call a lawyer," I said.
The lawyer gave me a pointed look. "Did she ask for one?"
Once again, I felt like I was on weird legal ground. I couldn’t bar a lawyer from a client, or a client from getting a lawyer. But was Mika a client, really? I felt like just by letting the lawyer in, I’d be opening up exactly the legal rabbit hole that Lalitha wanted to avoid: a bot on trial.