The Android's Dream Read online

  The missing fabricator in question was a General Electric model CT3505 Dual Metal/Ceramic Fabricator, a nice fabricator if you can get it; it was typically used by defense contractors to model prototypes of proposed defense systems. Like all fabricators it came with its own accessory sets, extensible modules, and proprietary material powders. One couldn’t just toss an aluminum can or a pile of sand into a fabricator. Fabricators are programmed to reject any material that’s not a powder blend made by its own manufacturer. In the tried and true business model of selling the razor cheap and then jacking up the price on the blades, fabricators themselves were sold at near cost while the profit was made from selling the stuff that let the fabricators make things. In the case of the GE CT3505, that would be the CTMP 21(m) and CTMP 21(c) powder canisters, both available only by direct shipment from GE, and both pretty damn expensive.

  If you had a GE fabricator, you could only use a GE fabricating powder. But the reverse was also true: If you were buying GE fabricating powder, you could only use it with a GE fabricator. All Creek had to do now is find out who was buying GE fabricating powder in DC without owning a GE fabricator.

  GE was many things, including a government defense contractor; its core system was pretty tightly guarded. Creek had little chance of getting into that. But like many companies, GE handed off its ordering and fulfillment services to subcontractors whose network security was of a standard commercial level, which is to say full of holes and back doors. GE’s order fulfillment was handled by AccuShop; Creek had his agent search for news stories about AccuShop and security breaches, and found a couple involving a back door accidentally left in the fulfillment code by programmers. Creek cracked open the GE shop and found the back door right where it should be. IT people really needed to patch more often.

  “I’m obliged to tell you that what you’re doing is illegal,” the agent said.

  “I thought I got rid of that subroutine,” Creek said.

  “You got rid of the subroutine that requires me to inform the appropriate authorities,” said the agent. “The warning subroutine is still in place. Would you like to reset the default mode to not tell you when you are breaking the law?”

  “Yes, please,” said Creek. “Anyway, I think I’m covered.”

  “Yes, sir,” the agent said.

  Creek downloaded the purchase orders for the last year, and had his agent cross reference the purchase orders with owners of fabricators. They all checked out: Every powder order came from a registered fabricator owner.

  “Crap,” said Creek, and tapped his teeth again. The missing fabricator had been out in the world for a number of years; it could be that whomever was using it loaded up on fabricating powder years before. But if they’d been using the fabricator all that time they’d still need to reload the powder. Creek just didn’t know how often one of these fabricators needed to be resupplied. Hmmm.

  “Agent,” Creek said. “Is there a pattern to when fabricator owners purchase their materials powder?”

  “They buy it when they require more,” the agent said.

  “Right,” Creek said. Intelligent agents, even a bright one like the one Creek made, are not terribly good at deductive leaps. “I’m asking whether there is a general repeating cycle for purchases. If most fabricators are used for the same tasks on a repeated basis, they might run out of powder and need to be restocked on a fairly regular cycle.”

  “Let me think,” the agent said and spent few milliseconds processing the request. It then spent a couple hundred milliseconds waiting before responding. This was part of the psychoergonomics of intelligent agents; programmers discovered that without a slight pause before an agent gave an answer, people felt the agent was being a pushy showoff. “There is typically a rough pattern to purchases,” the agent said. “Although the period of the cycle is specific to the individual fabricator and not to all the fabricators as a class.”

  “Are there any fabricators which show irregular purchasing cycles, or purchases being made outside of its cycle?” Creek asked.

  “There are six,” the agent said.

  “Show me the fabrication production logs for those six,” Creek said. The agent popped six windows; Creek glanced at them for a second before realizing he couldn’t make heads or tails of them. “Agent, tell me if for these six logs, there is a corresponding rise in production to reflect the additional purchases,” Creek said.

  “There is for five of the six,” the agent said. “The sixth shows no increase in production.”

  “Go back into the GE database and pull the purchasing orders for that fabricator for the last six years,” Creek said. “Then pull the production logs for the fabricator for the same period of time. Tell me if there’s a difference between the amount ordered and the amount produced.”

  “There is a difference of about fifteen powder orders over six years,” the agent said.

  “Give me a name,” Creek said.

  The name was Bert Roth, a chubby car restorer in Alexandria who specialized in late combustion and early fuel cell-era models. Demand for that era of cars was spotty at best these days, so Roth augmented his income in mostly harmless ways, including ordering fabricating powder for a certain client and selling it to him at a 200% markup. Selling the fabricating powder wasn’t technically illegal, and Roth’s client never used so much of it that it aroused anyone’s interest before Creek. It was a nice set-up for everyone involved.

  For these reasons, Roth was naturally reluctant to give up the name of his client when Creek came to visit him early the next morning. Creek first assured him that the client would never know Roth had given up the name and then secondly suggested to Roth that his client was tangled in some bad shit and that Roth, in selling him the powder, might be held accountable by the authorities.

  Creek held back his third piece of persuasion, which was a security camera capture of Roth banging his secretary, who was not his wife. Creek suspected Roth didn’t know it existed, where it might be stored on his computer, or that his network connection was like a wide-open screen door. It was heavy weaponry; best not to haul it out unless needed.

  It wasn’t. Roth did some internal calculus, decided he could live without the occasional cash infusion, and coughed up his client: Samuel “Fixer” Young.

  Creek thanked him, and after a moment’s reflection, scribbled down the directory path of the incriminating security camera capture. As he slid the information over to Roth, he also suggested gently that it might be time to update his network.

  Fixer’s address was directly across from the Benning Road Metro stop; Creek headed toward the Blue Line, swiped his Metro card, and got on the train.

  Creek started his trip in Virginia on a Metro train car filled with humans and one nonhuman, a Teha middlesex in its customary blue sash. But after traveling through the heart of DC, the Metro Blue Line then travels through nonhuman neighborhoods, most created at the time during the Earth’s probationary CC membership when nonhumans were strictly confined to the city limits of Washington DC, Geneva, and Hong Kong. Even now, most nonhumans lived in major urban areas, in neighborhoods with others of their own kind. In many ways, nonhuman aliens recapitulated the classic immigrant experience.

  The Benning Road stop was in a neighborhood populated primary by Paqils, a race of mammaloids with a carnivorous genetic past, a highly gregarious but hierarchical social system and sunny, manic natures. Entirely unsurprisingly, the Paqil neighborhood was known universally as “Dogstown.” In the early days, this was of course meant as a slur, but the Paqils embraced the name, and not coincidentally became huge dog fanciers.

  This affection was returned by the Paqils’ pets. It’s a basic matter of dog psychology that dogs see their owners merely as strange-looking pack leaders; having Paqils as owners got rid of the “strange-looking” part. Dogs were so thoroughly integrated into the Dogstown community that it was the only place in Washington DC where dogs were permitted in every place of business and allowed to walk around with
out a leash. Humans and other species members who took their dogs into Dogstown weren’t required to take them off the leash, but they got some very nasty looks if they didn’t.

  By the time Creek reached the Benning Road stop there was only one other human in the train; the rest of the car was filled with Paqils, Nidu, and other races. As Creek got off the train he glanced back at the other human; she sat nonchalantly engrossed in her paper while aliens jabbered around her in their native tongues. If her great-great-grandmother were on the train, she would have thought she was on commuter train heading toward the fifth circle of Hell. This woman didn’t even look up. The human capacity for being jaded was a remarkable thing.

  The sign at the address Creek was given read “Fixer’s Electronics and Repair,” and hung above a modest storefront shop. Through the window, Creek saw a small man who matched the picture he had on his communicator for Fixer, standing behind a counter and discussing something with a Paqil. On the store floor a Labrador and an Akita loafed extravagantly. Creek went through the door; the Akita lifted up its head, looked at Creek, and barked once, loudly.

  “I see him, Chuckie,” Fixer said. “Back to sleep.” The Akita, on command, rolled back over on his side and mellowed out.

  “Nice doorbell,” Creek said.

  “The best,” Fixer said. “Be with you in a minute.”

  “No rush,” Creek said. The man went back to his conversation; Creek looked over the shop’s sale floor, which was populated primarily by repaired entertainment monitors awaiting pickup and a few second-hand electronics on sale.

  The Paqil finished her conversation, left behind a music player to be repaired, and called to her dog; the Lab popped up and both headed out the door. Fixer turned his attention to Creek. “Now, then,” he said, smiling. “How can I help you?”

  “I have a rather unusual piece of equipment that I need to have looked at,” Creek said.

  “How unusual?” Fixer said.

  “Well, the last place I went to for it said that I’d probably need someone with a fabricator to make the parts,” Creek said.

  “I don’t know that I’ll be able to help you, then,” Fixer said. “Most of the stuff I fix is mass-produced. I get all my parts on order.”

  “Take a look at it anyway,” Creek said. He reached into his pocket, pulled out Moeller’s apparatus, and placed it on the counter between the two of them.

  Fixer stared at it for a minute and then looked back at Creek. “I have no idea what this is,” he said. His voice was calm, but out of the corner of his eye Creek noted that the Akita had looked up after hearing his master’s voice and was hoisting himself into a sitting position.

  “Really,” said Creek. “Because I had it on good assurance that you might be someone who could help me with something like this.”

  “I don’t know where you get your information,” Fixer said. “Whoever gave it to you was misinformed.”

  Creek leaned in a little, which caused the Akita to get up on all fours. “I don’t think so. Something like this takes some real talent to create, not to mention an unlicensed GE CT3505 Dual Metal/Ceramic Fabricator,” Creek said, and noted Fixer’s quickly suppressed look of surprise when Creek rattled off the fabricator model. “I’m willing to bet you have both. In fact, I’m willing to bet if I got some of my friends at Metro Police down here with a search warrant, they’d find that fabricator and probably a mess of other stuff you don’t want them to know about. And I bet that if we put this device under a microscope, we’d find that it came from your fabricator.”

  “Who are you?” Fixer said.

  “Someone unofficial,” Creek said. “Someone not looking to get you in trouble, or to make trouble or who cares about your extracurricular hobbies. But someone who needs some answers, one way or another.”

  Fixer chewed on this for a minute. The Akita was now fixed on Creek and ready to take a good chunk out of him.

  “No trouble,” Fixer said.

  “No trouble,” Creek said. “Just information.”

  Fixer chewed on this for another minute.

  “If you could answer before your dog rips out my throat, I’d really appreciate it,” Creek said.

  Fixer glanced over to the Akita. “Down, Chuckie,” he said, and the dog immediately sat but kept an eye on Creek. Fixer grabbed the music player on the counter. “Give me a minute to put this into the system and put up the ‘out to lunch’ sign,” he said. “Then you and I can go down to my workshop.”

  “Great,” Creek said. Fixer pulled up his keyboard and typed in the information for his work order. Creek stood back from the counter and looked over at the Akita, who was still staring at him intently.

  “Nice doggie,” Creek said.

  “There’s been a ‘Fixer’ in this neighborhood since before it was Dogstown,” Fixer said to Creek, as he handed him a beer from his workshop refrigerator. “I was supposed to be the one who finally left the shop behind—I went to Howard and got an engineering degree—but right after I graduated, Dad had a stroke and I tended the store for him until he died. After that, I kept on. As long as you don’t mind living with aliens, it’s a great neighborhood. The Paqil are good people and they’ve been good to my family; they’re incredibly loyal to the shop. The family stayed here when most humans moved out all those years ago. So they keep bringing their stuff in to be repaired, even when it’s cheaper just to buy something new. I make a good living.”

  “Augmented by your side business,” Creek said, motioning at the workshop. The fabricator was in a corner, hidden by a tarp.

  Fixer grinned ruefully. “Which has also been a family tradition,” he said. “One of the nice things about Dogstown is that it has almost no crime and almost no human police presence. That makes this shop a very useful place to run a side business out of.”

  “Like making this,” Creek said, holding up the apparatus.

  “Like making that,” Fixer agreed. “Or any other number of activities that need to get done without much attention. The ‘fixer’ part of the name has more than one meaning.”

  “Nothing bloody, I hope,” Creek said.

  “God, no,” Fixer said. “Even a nice quiet address in Dogstown wouldn’t help with that. No. I make things. I also arrange things. Occasionally I find things. Victimless crimes. Well, mostly,” Fixer said, nodding in the direction of the apparatus. “From what you tell me, that one wasn’t so victimless.”

  “How does one get into your side business?” Creek asked.

  “In my case, one inherits it,” Fixer said. “After my father had his stroke, I got paid a visit by some nice men in the employ of the Malloy family, who detailed my father’s relationship with them to me, down to the ‘loan’ my dad took out to pay for my college education. I fell into the job the same way I fell into running the shop.”

  “And you don’t mind working the shady side of the street,” Creek said.

  Fixer shrugged. “The Malloys have people like me all over,” he said. “I do a few things for them a year, but never enough to pop on the radar. And even if I did, the Malloys pay the right people to make sure that I pop right back off the radar. I’m still trying to figure out how you found me.”

  “I use nontraditional means,” Creek said, and held up the apparatus again. “Now,” he said. “Tell me about this baby. Is this something you did for the Malloys?”

  “If it was, you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Fixer said. “This was a true extracurricular. I was approached for this one by a man named Jean Schroeder.”

  “How did he know about your side business?” Creek asked.

  “I’d arranged some travel documents for him once at the request of the Malloys,” Fixer said. “Schroeder went to college with Danny Malloy. Anyway, a few weeks ago Schroeder called me for a repair job on his home network and then sounded me out about the job while I was there. I typically don’t do extra work. The Malloys don’t like it. But I’ve worked with this guy before and I had more on him than he had o
n me. And I decided I could use the money. So I charged him an outrageous rate for the work on his network, and two weeks later, this was ready to go. I helped install it—and unpleasant experience, I assure you—just a few days ago.”

  “You’re not worried about telling me about his now?” Creek said. “Being that Schroeder is a friend of the Malloys.”

  “I never said they were friends,” Fixer said. “Schroeder just went to college with one of them, so he knew they could be useful. And in that one particular case, their interests coincided. This doesn’t have anything to do with that so far as I know. I’m sure Schroeder was planning on using my relationship with the Malloys as a guarantee I wouldn’t talk, since if I ever talk officially, some of the Malloy boys are going to pay me a visit, and not a friendly one this time. But since you’re threatening to expose me if I don’t talk, he loses. Very sneaky of you.”

  “I do my best,” Creek said. “You seem to be handling this well.”

  “Do I?” Fixer said, and laughed. “Yes. Well. Don’t be fooled by this calm exterior. Inside I’m shitting my pants. If you can find me, so can someone who isn’t just looking for information. It’s sloppy shit like this that gets people like me killed. I’m telling you all this because short of killing you, I don’t see another way out. You’ve just made me very, very nervous, Mr. Creek. And between you and me I don’t think I’m out of it. The minute you leave this shop is the minute I start waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

  “Any messages?” Creek asked his agent when he returned home.

  “Three,” the agent said, a disembodied voice because Creek had not put on his monitor glasses. “The first is from your mother, who is wondering whether you’re planning to come visit her next month like you said you were going to. She’s worried about your father’s health and she also has a nice young lady she’d like you to meet, who is a doctor of some sort or another. Those are her words.”

  “My mother was aware that she was speaking to an agent and not me, right?” Creek asked.