CHAPTER 6
Morning came. Nick slept a hell of a lot better this time. For the first time in a long time, he felt rested.
Despite that, his phone alarm still blared and annoyed the shit out of him. He turned it off, got up, and ambled into the bathroom. After a cold shower where he thought about the police files he’d nearly fallen asleep reading, he brushed his teeth. Figuring he should check the news, he wandered into the main room of his three-room apartment, half-dressed.
“Good morning, Nick,” Chloe greeted him from the dining table.
He stared at her, aware that he was wearing little more than a pair of briefs and an old t-shirt. Then he noticed the other doll in the room, who was busy ironing a brand-new suit. She was a newer model, although Nick didn’t stay up to date on domestic dolls. They tended to be fairly boring, due to their predictable annual release cycle, incremental updates, and reliance on cashed up spenders eager to have the latest dolls to show off.
“What the hell is this?” Nick asked, pointing at the service doll.
“Your suit is finished. It seemed wise to ensure it was presentable, given you were not awake,” Chloe said.
He stopped short of saying that maybe she should have ironed the suit herself. Did the Archangels even have the functionality programmed into them? They could probably work it out.
Nick suspected the problem was more that Chloe felt that the job was beneath her. Somehow, he felt offended by this imagined fact, as he’d ironed his own clothes for years. Ever since his mother had enrolled him into a fancy school that supposedly catered to his lack of an implant—it hadn’t, by the way.
Deciding that coffee was a great way to calm down from confected slights, Nick returned to his morning routine.
His apartment was more spacious than most, simply due to its age. He might not have reliable hot water, but he at least had room for a dining table, a sofa, and a kitchen. He knew Ciphers who paid triple his rent for studio apartments the size of a matchbox. Property had always been expensive in Babylon, but he’d been hearing a lot more complaints lately.
Chloe’s eyes tracked him while he stood in front of his coffee machine.
“You are unhappy,” Chloe said, dispensing truly sage wisdom.
“I guarantee that the suit came pressed,” he said. “And I can iron my own clothes.”
Chloe’s eyes flashed. Was this really something so complicated that the Host needed to be involved?
“Are you unhappy because we hired another doll to help, or because you wish to iron your own clothes?” she asked.
“Is this really an important question?”
“It is necessary for us to know how much assistance we should lend, and how.”
Oh no. Nick suddenly realized what Chloe was really asking.
If he said that he didn’t like that she hired the doll, then would the Archangels invade his apartment and start doing things for him? The idea seemed ridiculous, but Chloe was here in person at like seven in the morning.
But if he told her that he wanted to do everything himself, would he be left to fend for himself even when he wanted assistance later? The Archangels seemed like the overly literal type.
He could lie, but rumors abounded that the Archangels could tell truth from lie. They had extraordinarily advanced sensors, after all. Although Nick sincerely doubted they could read somebody’s pulse from across a room without using their implant.
“It’s a case-by-case thing,” he said. “This is wasteful. Like I said, I can iron my own clothes.” And he preferred not being ambushed by a doll he barely knew while half-naked, but he left that unsaid.
Chloe nodded, and her eyes flashed. “Understood. Additional testing shall take place in the future.”
He withheld a groan and instead chose to switch on the TV. The news showed little of interest, other than some speculation about Tartarus. Sigma and RTM were in a continued battle over doll sales, and apparently there had been some fancy new mainframe product line announced by RTM. Nick made a note to investigate it later.
“You will have some time before your meeting this morning,” Chloe said suddenly. “I can show you around the department if you—”
“Did you find somewhere for the Tartarus security dolls to stay?” Nick asked, shifting gears while he sipped his coffee.
Chloe blinked. “Yes. They are in worker dormitories on the outskirts of the dockyards, and maintenance and power terminals have been installed in a nearby warehouse. You can commence your investigation whenever you wish.”
“How about this morning?” he asked. “We can grab some breakfast on the way.”
“There is time.”
Being productive sounded much better than walking around the police department in a fancy suit all morning. Although Nick sincerely doubted that Chloe would allow him to be late.
He dressed after the service doll finished and did his best to ignore the obsequious bowing she did as she left. The fact she tried to dress him was bad enough. As if he didn’t know how to put on a suit.
“Your tie is loose,” Chloe said, before undoing his knot and then redoing it.
“No, it wasn’t,” he said, staring at the Windsor knot she’d done his tie up in. He’d always used a simple knot, but apparently the Archangels had preferences.
At least she hadn’t tried to suffocate him with it, although he wasn’t sure if he appreciated her clinginess.
Chloe ignored him as he struggled to find a comfortable way to wear a gun the size of his leg. Afterward, Nick was finally ready to leave.
“Your coat,” she said, stopping him at the door with a baggy coat that fell to his knees.
“I didn’t buy one yesterday,” he said, fingering the faux wool lining.
“We did. This coat is waterproof, weatherproof, fire-resistant, heavily insulated, and stab proof,” Chloe said. “The Host chose it by consensus, for priority delivery.”
Nick decided that made it a gift. “Is it bulletproof?” he joked.
“No, but we are,” she said.
“I’ll be sure to let you take all the bullets, while I get stabbed then,” he said while slipping the coat on. It was heavy as shit, but that was probably a good thing if it needed to stop a knife.
“I recommend not getting stabbed.” Her tone was light, but her expression suggested she was very serious.
“Noted.”
They finally left.
A pair of Mark 1s stood guard outside of his apartment. The moment he wandered out of the hallway, he heard several doors open. Evidently, they were scaring the neighbors. Two Mark 3s waited by an SUV, just like yesterday.
Nick checked the model numbers as they entered the SUV. The Mark 1s were different, but he had the same Mark 3s as yesterday and the day before.
They rolled on out of the city proper, heading north-west, toward the industrial port. Before they pulled onto a highway, the vehicle pulled into one of the automated drive-thru joints that dotted the city.
A long building arched overhead, containing a robot kitchen that made orders for the dozen drive-thru lanes. Robot taxis pulled in and out during morning commute, rarely stopping for barely more than a second as food dropped down a chute to a window.
“Breakfast,” Chloe said, staring at him.
He tried not to snort. This hadn’t been what he had in mind, but it was largely the same as what he got in the city itself. “Get me a burrito.”
Her eyes flashed. About twenty seconds later, a cardboard box dropped down a chute beside the SUV and Chloe dumped it in his lap.
It wasn’t a bad breakfast burrito, all things considered. Fast food tasted the same basically everywhere, given it was all made by robots these days.
While he gobbled down his food, they pulled onto the highway. The outer metro spilled out beyond them, sprawling all the way to the sea wall that kept the Pacific Ocean from sending them all into the depths. Wave generators and sophisticated tide control systems supported the levees farther beyond.
The outer metro itself was a crowded sea of mansions, townhouses, and condos. Greenery was exceedingly rare outside of the trees planted along the streets. The isles had only been built so large, and expanding them was increasingly cost prohibitive, so vacant space was taxed at extortionate rates—and that included yard space and lawns. Some of the towers and mansions sported green spaces on their rooftops instead.
Traffic poured into the inner city in the form of trains, robot taxis, and a smattering of private vehicles. Buses and streetcars moved people around the outer metro itself, where they could then be shuffled toward the inner city. The complete automation of the transportation network made getting around Babylon fast and reliable, even if it wasn’t always cheap.
The towering warehouses and factories of the industrial port approached rapidly. Nick had been told that basically everything that entered Neo Babylon came through this port. Container ships the size of smaller cities dominated the skyline as they unloaded their cargo, and many more could be seen along the horizon.
Babylon had three ports in total. This one in the north-west, which handled all international cargo and serviced the northern industrial sector of the city. A second, smaller, domestic cargo port in the south-east, which also handled what little passenger traffic took place by sea. Finally, the military maintained their own port along the southern tip of the island and used it for most government affairs.
Once they vanished inside the towering warehouses and factories, the omnipresent taxis finally vanished. In their place were automated flatbed container “trucks.” These took the form of little more than a flatbed trailer with an electric motor and self-driving system, just large enough to carry a container. Thousands of them flitted about the narrow streets of the docks.
Nick noticed that the SUV took it much slower than usual. Private vehicles were banned outright here.
Even with self-driving systems, these dodgy little container trucks had a high accident rate. Private businesses cared a lot less about safety when passengers weren’t at risk. The result was that a shiny sports car became little more than modern art when slapped by a hundred-ton container cutting a corner.
Realizing this might be his last chance for most of the day, Nick checked his social feed. He’d neglected it last night.
Everyone seemed a lot calmer now. His parents especially were happy that their son wasn’t being locked up beneath the Spires for the second time in his life. Nick noticed that there was less activity than usual, but chalked that up to the fact most of his former colleagues had been arrested. Outside of Cipher circles, he mostly used Altnet social apps to keep up appearances.
But in those Cipher circles, matters seemed different. Nick hadn’t been banned from any yet, but he had several blunt messages asking if he was cooperating with the Archangels. The other two Ciphers who had escaped the fall of Neural Spike had reached out as well, and were a little more sympathetic.
Travis was nowhere to be found. Figures, as it was well known that the Archangels trawled the Altnet. The main reason nobody had banned Nick was probably because of how pointless it was. Even if the Altnet was distributed, it was still firmly in the grip of Neo Westphalia’s elites.
The car came to a sudden stop. Nick looked up and immediately tensed.
Chloe and the other dolls gripped their guns tightly. They peered out the windows, but he knew they would be tapped into nearby cameras. The SUV was covered in them, but so were the nearby buildings.
“Something’s wrong,” he said.
“Stay here,” Chloe said, her voice far more authoritative than he’d heard it.
Her eyes flashed. Then she and the Mark 3s got up, but remained inside the cabin. Their seats bent forward, revealing an armory of weapons hidden in plain sight. Nick stared at the array of death-dealing devices.
No wonder the SUV only had a single passenger cabin. It used all its space on guns, guns, and more guns.
Chloe and another Mark 3 slid their rifles into racks. The Mark 3 picked up a bulky automatic shotgun that looked more like a toy than a gun. Nick doubted its ammo switcher was for non-lethal shells.
By contrast, Chloe picked up a portable railgun. She easily held the gargantuan weapon in one hand while attaching its power cable to a port in her hip. The railgun let out a menacing hum once plugged in.
Turning back to him, Chloe’s expression was oddly serious. “The cameras in the warehouse and dormitories are offline. Their online feeds are forgeries. We cannot establish a connection with the Tartarus security dolls.”
Nick nodded, rapidly understanding the situation. “All our security dolls had wireless neural hubs. You can’t get through to any of them?”
“We overrode their wireless directives and hard linked them to the warehouse neural link,” Chloe said. “That appears to be offline. However, we cannot even detect the backdoor we left in their neural hubs.”
“Damn,” he said, choosing to ignore his feelings about the Archangels modifying his security dolls.
Somehow, he had a feeling that the Archangels had learned from his actions yesterday. Rie had hired him to train the Mark 3s as Ciphers, but that didn’t require him to conduct lessons. They were super-advanced AIs and could just learn from what he did.
“So, what are we doing?” he asked, feeling a little out of place. Day two, and he was already in a dangerous situation.
“You will remain in the vehicle, under protection,” Chloe said. “We shall call for assistance from a nearby unit of Liberators and survey the area on foot.”
For a second, Nick wanted to protest.
But he didn’t know much about engaging in firefights. If the enemy were the same people that had shut down Tartarus, they were likely highly capable and had their hooks into the Spires. They might have heavy weaponry, cybernetic enhancements, and even military dolls.
Nick knew that their adversary had illegal neural mods. The Archangels hadn’t identified their targets, which meant they had closed themselves off from the network—and likely not just the security bands.
As Rie had told him, it was illegal to modify electronics to cut off the security bands. Doing that to a neural implant required a specialized device called a neural mod. These were heavily regulated, but Babylon overflowed with illegal and shady mods for various purposes.
But if there was any type of neural mod that the Spires couldn’t stand, it was any that cut off their access. Without access through the security bands, the Archangels couldn’t override the neural implant of their targets. That made them harder to detect and forced violent resolutions.
This was a “shoot first, ask questions never” situation. Nick hadn’t fired a gun for years, let alone at a person. Letting the war machines handle things seemed wise.
The car doors slid open and the Mark 3s leaped outside. They scanned the perimeter, weapons raised. Once they confirmed it was clear, Chloe turned back, stared meaningfully at the Mark 1s, then turned to Nick.
“I will see you shortly,” she said.
The doors slid shut.
Nick let out an explosive sigh. The Mark 1s didn’t allow him to rest, however.
They pulled him up as they rose. He brushed them off and crouched in the center of the cabin. His bank of seats bent forward, revealing even more guns. One of the Archangels exchanged her SMG for a railgun, while the other switched hers out for a fairly large rifle. Nick didn’t recognize the model, but it looked to be a large enough caliber to blow holes in dolls.
Chloe hadn’t said as much, but it was clear that she expected any resistance to come in the form of other dolls or bots. The Archangels were switching to anti-doll weaponry, when they normally carried small arms suitable for tackling humans.
The Mark 1s didn’t say anything. They took turns to stare at Nick, as if he might vanish into thin air if they took their eyes off him.
Then again, from their perspective, he might. As he lacked an implant, the only way they could confirm his presence was visually.
Staring at their massive anti-doll weapons, and then at his own oversized handgun, Nick abruptly felt very naked. This fancy new coat of his was explicitly not bulletproof. By contrast, the Archangels wore ballistic vests despite being made of materials tough enough to shrug off small arms fire.
“Uh, is there a bulletproof vest in here? Somewhere?” he asked the Mark 1s.
They stared at him. Their eyes didn’t flash.
Then one of them reached behind a seat and retrieved a vest. The other rushed Nick and began pulling his coat off, so that they could strap the vest up.
“I can—” he gave up as the Archangels put the vest on him faster than he could complain at them. They stopped molesting him and went back to alternating between guard duty and staring at him, which presumably were the same thing in their eyes.
Minutes passed in silence. Nick pulled his hand cannon out, and it felt much heavier than it had yesterday.
Maybe it was the fact he might have to fire it. Or maybe it was because it was now loaded with six stupidly huge anti-armor rounds. The bullets this thing used were nearly as long as his hand.
No gunshots rang out in the distance. If there had been a firefight, it had ended with the Archangels shutting down the neural implants of the aggressors.
Eventually, the Mark 1s turned toward the doors and they slid open. As they moved to exit, Nick stopped them.
“What’s happened?” he asked.
They froze, then stared at him. It seemed to take a few moments before they realized that they needed to communicate verbally with him.
“Officer M03-NB00004 has requested that we join her,” one of the Mark 1s said. “You are to come with us. The Liberators are en route.”
Nick recognized Chloe’s serial number—it helped that she was basically number four of the Mark 3s. Did the Archangels seriously think of each other in terms of serial numbers?
Nodding, he got out of the SUV. The dolls scanned the perimeter and practically clung to him, moving as slow or as fast as he did.
Nothing moved. Not even containers swung through the nearby streets. Presumably, the police had shut down the streets and the navigation systems of the trucks avoided the area. A lot of the district was completely automated, but it remained an eerie sight.
Nick felt exposed. He darted across the concrete toward the closest building, but realized he didn’t have a clue where he was going. Or where any enemies might be. The Archangels gently guided him one warehouse farther along.
The building looked large enough to fit a few apartment blocks into. Next to it were several long demountable structures. Worker housing that could be shifted to any work site that needed human workers.
A lot of Babylon’s industrial workforce were the genuine dregs of society. They typically worked for next to nothing, in squalid conditions, under near-absolute corporate control.
Such were job prospects when competing against automated factories.
These demountables were likely where Tartarus’s security dolls had been housed. As shit as they might be for humans, they were a huge step-up for dolls, who almost never had anything nicer than a charging bay in a basement or the closet in their owner’s mansion.
The Mark 1s led him to one of the side entrances to the warehouse. Several large roller doors stood beside it, presumably for trucks and containers.
Inside, they found Chloe and the Mark 3s. She gestured him inside.
“There is no sign of intruders. It is possible they have left,” she told him.
Nick grunted while looking around the obscenely large warehouse floor. Right now, it contained far less than it could hold.
But what it did contain was of great interest to him.
A half-dozen of Tartarus’s security dolls stood next to a massive green hunk of steel. The dolls were clearly offline, their eyes lifeless and heads tilted downward.
The hunk of steel was familiar to Nick. Despite its crude appearance, he knew that it was a doll maintenance terminal. It had a small display on the front, plus an actual keyboard. If he cracked open a side panel, there’d be a myriad of cables.
Inside the box would be a series of transformers and converters that allowed it to safely interact with the hardware of a huge variety of dolls and mainframes. This model was older than Nick, but the standards it relied on underpinned every logic engine in mass production.
“This is almost the same as the one we used back in Neural Spike,” he mused. “Tartarus didn’t have enough dolls to make this worth investing in.”
That, and Neural Spike had also been making dolls on the side, unlike Tartarus. This machine was the price of a small house, given how specialized it was. Newer ones ran for far more.
“We procured an all-in-one solution, given your abilities,” Chloe said. “You are familiar with it?”
Nick eyed this terminal, then looked over at a similar one a hundred feet away. It looked newer, but was smaller and painted black. All the security dolls were next to this one.
“Any idea what happened?” he asked, booting up the green maintenance terminal.
“No. None of the security dolls show signs of tampering, other than being forced into shutdown. The neural link can be reestablished, but I wanted to confer with you first,” she said.
While they spoke, the other Archangels patrolled the exits of the warehouse. Given how large it was, that put two of them pretty damn far away.
“What about the terminal?” he asked, while staring at the command line-style menu in front of him. Everything looked right, but the time showed as several hours prior.
Unlike everything else involving AIs, dolls, and mainframes, the maintenance terminals were incredibly dumb devices. Intentionally so. International standards had been crafted with an eye for security. They required the terminals to ship without neural links or any form of AI assistant, and they tended to be the definition of “read the fucking manual.”
Any idiot with access to a maintenance terminal could brick a doll faster than an Archangel could switch his brain off. Making it harder for them to connect to dolls and mainframes wasn’t truly safe, but was still wise.
“It shows no signs of access, and its security appears to be intact,” Chloe said.
“Uh huh. Where’d you procure this from?”
She frowned. Her eyes flashed, and he doubted it was to answer his question.
The Host were likely suspicious of the question, and were trying to anticipate why he was asking it. Of course, if they could work that out, he wouldn’t need to ask the question to begin with.
“One of the other companies we raided alongside Tartarus had it.” Chloe rubbed the top of her railgun, which he assumed was a nervous tic and not an implied threat. “We restored it to factory settings and established our own security protections atop the enterprise settings.”
He nodded. “Well, it’s good to know the police don’t know all our tricks. This thing is almost certainly compromised. Without a network connection, it’s showing the slightly wrong time.”
Chloe stared at the terminal, then scowled. “Timekeeping devices are often inaccurate.” But her eyes flashed, and her scowl only deepened.
“When did the cameras start getting fed a false feed?” he asked.
“We get it,” she said abruptly. “The time difference matches the period between the start of the camera disturbance and our arrival. You correctly surmised this instantly?”
“No. If I didn’t know somebody had been here, I would have shrugged the problem off. But this is the sort of thing you assume is malevolent. Especially as black companies have been modding maintenance terminals for decades. Neural Spike used this model for prototyping for exactly that reason.”
She nodded, then gestured at the security dolls. “Are they compromised?”
“We should assume as much. Until I can go through all of them myself, it’s unwise to turn them back on.” Nick hated the words coming out of his mouth, but he’d hate even more to see the Archangels blow apart his security dolls.
With a sigh, he stood up and wandered over to the other terminal. “We’ll use this one. It’s a newer model.”
“We should leave,” Chloe said.
“No. I have some time before this stupid meeting. That’s time I can use to find out what happened in Tartarus. Somebody came here for the same reason.” He stared her down.
She relented and gave him the login details. Afterward, she and the Mark 3s pulled the other maintenance terminal open and begin poking at it. Presumably, they suspected some sort of hardware bypass.
After a few minutes, the Mark 1s stepped outside. They returned with four Liberator police dolls. Each looked like a perky brunette, with a tall, busty figure that gave them an approachable appearance for most of the public. Although they received their fair share of complaints as well.
The four of them approached Nick, then snapped off salutes. “Reporting for duty, Detective Waite.”
Chloe and the Mark 3s glared at the Liberators, while the Mark 1s smirked. Evidently, the Host did not agree on their feelings toward their fellow police dolls.
“Chloe, do you need extra eyes outside?” he asked while going through a ream of low-level diagnostic data from one of the security dolls.
“Yes,” she said. “This district has relatively few cameras. Even with their functionality restored, only loading docks and interiors have any. Few vehicles possess any that we can use. There are more blind spots than I like.”
He turned and faced the Liberators. They stood at attention with far-too-cheerful smiles plastered on their faces. Especially as their hand cannons dwarfed his own and could probably turn him into chunky salsa faster than he could blink. At least they had ammunition-switchers.
“Conduct an exterior patrol according to Chloe’s directions,” he ordered them.
The Liberators collectively blinked. “Who is Chloe?”
He sighed, then read out her serial number. This time, they understood. Several seconds later, they trooped out the front door. Chloe and the Mark 3s joined them, presumably more interested in finding possible perpetrators than uncovering the mysteries of the maintenance terminal.
Over the next thirty minutes, Nick slowly made his way through the reams of data he pulled from the Tartarus security dolls.
None of them showed signs of modification to their code. Not that another Cipher hadn’t tried—most likely they just hadn’t succeeded. A long list of error messages, conflicting directives, and esoteric hardware codes meant somebody had failed to overwrite Nick’s own directives.
Which made him feel pretty good about himself. The Tartarus dolls were about as advanced as dolls with logic engines got. They didn’t have a formal model name because they had been produced as a proof-of-concept prior to working on the initial Archangel prototypes.
As for the shutdown during the night of the raid, he found no directly useful data. But there were a large number of clues before and after, and they left Nick cold.
He had the information he needed, but he also needed confirmation. For that, he would need to talk with Rie again.
Throughout this process, he remained on edge. He was reminded of all the years he spent in Neural Spike, doing shady shit because the police dolls ignored him. But every time a Liberator questioned him back then, he had half-expected to be locked up.
He felt those same nerves now. At any moment, would somebody burst through the door with a railgun?
So when the Mark 1s abruptly rushed over to him, blocking his view of the entrances, Nick shot to his feet. He fumbled for his handgun.
The door slammed open and a half-dozen people filed in. The Archangels didn’t immediately gun them down with their inhumanly high accuracy.
Four of the new arrivals were dolls. Specifically, they were RTM Strategic’s Guardian G2 models. These had been in use when Nick had been a teen and remained popular among black companies across Babylon. They all carried semi-automatic shotguns, wore unmarked gray uniforms, and had the mix-and-match appearance the Guardian line was known for.
The other two were humans. Both wore helmets and baggy clothing, likely to prevent visual identification. One had a stubby SMG in his hands.
The other had no gun, but instead held his jacket open to reveal a series of flickering disks. Explosives. He was the reason the Archangels hadn’t gunned everyone down instantly.
He was rigged to blow the entire warehouse at any moment.