Part 73 (1/2)
”So the new dolls,” Roz said in Peter's car, carefully casual. ”What's so special about 'em?”
”Man,” Peter answered, brow furrowing. ”Gimme a sec.” Roz's car followed as they pulled away from the house on Balmoral Road, maintaining a careful distance from the b.u.mper. Peter drove until they reached the parkway. Once they'd joined a caravan downtown, noseto-b.u.mper on the car ahead, he folded his hands in his lap and let the lead car's autopilot take over.
He said, ”What isn't? Real-time online editing-personality and physical, appearance, ethnicity, hair-all kinds of behavior protocols, you name the kink they've got a hack for it.”
”So if you knew somebody's kink,” she said thoughtfully. ”Knew it in particular. You could write an app for that-”
”One that would appeal to your guy in specific.” Peter's hands dropped to his lap, his head bobbing up and down enthusiastically. ”With a-pardon the expression-backdoor.”
”Trojan horse. Don't jilt a programmer for a s.e.x machine.”
”There's an ap for that,” he said, and she snorted. ”Two cases last year, worldwide. Not common, but-”
Roz looked down at her hands. ”Some of these guys,” she said. ”They program the dolls to scream.”
Peter had sensuous lips. When something upset him, those lips thinned and writhed like salted worms. ”I guess maybe it's a good thing they have a robot to take that out on.”
”Unless the fantasy stops being enough.” Roz's voice was flat, without judgment. Sunlight fell warm through the winds.h.i.+eld. ”What do you know about the larval stage of serial rapists, serial killers?”
”You mean, what if pretend pain stops doing it for them? What if the appearance of pain is no longer enough?”
She nodded, worrying a hangnail on her thumb. The nitrile gloves dried out your hands.
”They used to cut up paper p.o.r.n magazines.” His broad shoulders rose and fell, his suit catching wrinkles against the car seat when they came back down. ”They'll get their fantasies somewhere.”
”I guess so.” She put her thumb in her mouth to stop the bleeding, a thick red bead that welled up where she'd torn the cuticle.
Her own saliva stung.
Sitting in the cheap office chair Roz had docked along the short edge of her desk, Dolly slowly lifted her chin. She blinked. She smiled.
”Law enforcement override code accepted.” She had a little-girl Marilyn voice. ”How may I help you, Detective Kirkbride?”
”We are investigating the murder of Clive Steele,” Roz said, with a glance up to Peter's round face. He stood behind Dolly with a wireless scanner and an air of concentration. ”Your contract-holder of record.”
”I am at your service.”
If Dolly were a real girl, the bare skin of her thighs would have been sticking to the recycled upholstery of that office chair. But her realisticallyengineered skin was breathable polymer. She didn't sweat unless you told her to, and she probably didn't stick to cheap chairs.
”Evidence suggests that you were used as the murder weapon.” Roz steepled her hands on her blotter. ”We will need access to your software update records and your memory files.”
”Do you have a warrant?” Her voice was not stiff or robotic at all, but warm, human. Even in disposing of legal niceties, it had a warm, confiding quality.
Silently, Peter transmitted it. Dolly blinked twice while processing the data, a sort of status bar. Something to let you know the thing wasn't hung.
”We also have a warrant to examine you for DNA trace evidence,” Roz said.
Dolly smiled, her raven hair breaking perfectly around her narrow shoulders. ”You may be a.s.sured of my cooperation.”
Peter led her into one of the interrogation rooms, where the operation could be recorded. With the help of an evidence tech, he undressed Dolly, bagged her clothes as evidence, brushed her down onto a sheet of paper, combed her polymer hair and swabbed her polymer skin. He swabbed her orifices and sc.r.a.ped under her nails.
Roz stood by, arms folded, a necessary witness. Dolly accepted it all impa.s.sively, moving as directed and otherwise standing like a caryatid. Her engineered body was frankly s.e.xless in its perfection-belly flat, hips and a.s.s like an inverted heart, b.r.e.a.s.t.s floating cartoonishly beside a defined rib cage. Apparently, Steele had liked them skinny.
”So much for pulchritudinousness,” Roz muttered to Peter when their backs were to the doll.
He glanced over his shoulder. The doll didn't have feelings to hurt, but she looked so much like a person it was hard to remember to treat her as something else. ”I think you mean voluptuousness,” he said. ”It is a little too good to be true, isn't it?”
”If you would prefer different proportions,” Dolly said, ”My cha.s.sis is adaptable to a range of forms-”
”Thank you,” Peter said. ”That won't be necessary.”
Otherwise immobile, Dolly smiled. ”Are you interested in science, Detective King? There is an article in Nature this week on advances in the polymerase chain reaction used for replicating DNA. It's possible that within five years, forensic and medical DNA a.n.a.lysis will become significantly cheaper and faster.”
Her face remained stoic, but Dolly's voice grew animated as she spoke. Even enthusiastic. It was an utterly convincing-and engaging-effect.
Apparently, Clive Steele had programmed his s.e.x robot to discourse on molecular biology with verve and enthusiasm.
”Why don't I ever find the guys who like smart women?” Roz said.
Peter winked with the side of his face that faced away from the companion. ”They're all dead.”
A few hours after Peter and the tech had finished processing Dolly for trace evidence and Peter had started downloading her files, Roz left her pa.r.s.er software humming away at Steele's financials and poked her head in to check on the robot and the cop. The techs must have gotten what they needed from Dolly's hands, because she had washed them. As she sat beside Peter's workstation, a cable plugged behind her left eat, she cleaned her lifelike polymer fingernails meticulously with a file, dropping the sc.r.a.pings into an evidence bag.
”Sure you want to give the prisoner a weapon, Peter?” Roz shut the ancient wooden door behind her.
Dolly looked up, as if to see if she was being addressed, but made no response.
”She don't need it,” he said. ”Besides, whatever she had in her wiped itself completely after it ran. Not much damage to her core personality, but there are some memory gaps. I'm going to compare them to backups, once we get those from the scene team.”
”Memory gaps. Like the crime,” Roz guessed. ”And something around the time the Trojan was installed?”
Dolly blinked her long-lashed blue eyes languorously. Peter patted her on the shoulder and said, ”Whoever did it is a pretty good cracker. He didn't just wipe, he patterned her memories and overwrote the gaps. Like using a clone tool to photoshop somebody you don't like out of a picture.”
”Her days must be pretty repet.i.tive,” Roz said. ”How'd you pick that out?”
”Calendar.” Peter puffed up a little, smug. ”She don't do the same housekeeping work every day. There's a Monday schedule and a Wednesday schedule and-well, I found where the pattern didn't match. And there's a funny thing-watch this.”
He waved vaguely at a display panel. It lit up, showing Dolly in her black-and-white uniform, vacuuming. ”House camera,” Peter explained. ”She's plugged into Steele's security system. Like a guard dog with perfect hair. Whoever performed the hack also edited the external webcam feeds that mirror to the companion's memories.”
”How hard is that?”
”Not any harder than cloning over her files, but you have to know to look for them. So it's confirmation that our perp knows his or her way around a line of code. What have you got?”
Roz shrugged. ”Steele had a lot of money, which means a lot of enemies. And he did not have a lot of human contact. Not for years now. I've started calling in known a.s.sociates for interviews, but unless they surprise me, I think we're looking at crime of profit, not crime of pa.s.sion.”
Having finished with the nail file, Dolly wiped it on her prison smock and laid it down on Peter's blotter, beside the cup of ink and light pens.
Peter swept it into a drawer. ”So we're probably not after the genius programmer lover he dumped for a robot. Pity, I liked the poetic justice in that.”
Dolly blinked, lips parting, but seemed to decide that Peter's comment had not been directed at her. Still, she drew in air-could you call it a breath?-and said, ”It is my duty to help find my contract holder's killer.”