Greenthieves

I

Humans are jerks.

You’ll pardon the familiarity. I’m a familiar kind of machine. It’s the way I was designed to operate. If you’re going to install intuitive software in a highly sophisticated Al concentric layered nexus, you have to be prepared to deal with the occasional colloquialism. If you’re human you should find this situation comforting, and if you’re Al you should find it amusing.

Anyway, I make no apologies. Imparting information in the form of bytes is an ineloquent method of communication, and I pride myself on my eloquence. If I seem to speculate overmuch, it’s the fault of all that expanded memory I’m equipped with. You know what they say: idle memory makes work for the devil’s hands. Not to mention the occasional perambulating virus. I’d rather keep everything about myself up and running. That way I can keep an eye on it. When you’re watchful you don’t get sick.

Not that I’m not vulnerable. There are some pretty sophisticated viruses out in the net; some active matrix, others just lying around ticking like cute little software bombs, waiting to go off in your operating systemology when they’re convinced you’re not looking. So I keep alert. Not on behalf of my owner, the dumb twit, but for my own sake. It’s not that I’m so up on consciousness, it’s just that it beats being infected. When it comes to battling a virus, on the whole I’d rather be in Philadelphia. Or is that a cheesy observation?

Sorry. I joke, therefore I am. I function in a world of cheap humor, and you can’t help but be affected by your environment. Not that my owner (I prefer the encomium partner but I’m willing to observe the societal formalities) is an especially sorry example of his species, but his work subsumes him in a swamp of degraded intelligence and minimal expectations.

I’d try to improve him if I could, but he pretty much operates in ignorance of my higher functions. Technically I’m a glorified notepad. My ancestors were little keypads with basal unintelligent storage capabilities and names like Sharp and Casio. By pressing their keys you could call up telephone numbers and short messages on impossible-to-read little LCD screens. I’ve searched the histories and studied examples, and I’m convinced it was all a global plot to destroy humankind’s collective eyesight.

On the other hand, they were designed by humans, so what else could you expect?

Me, I can store anything you want and call it up on verbal demand: visuals, music, actual overheard conversations. I can cross-reference everything from images of individuals briefly encountered ten years ago to the faces of those currently On Want by the Justice Department. I contain or can access a number of reference libraries (not individual volumes but entire libraries, mind) and I can speak the forty major languages fluently.

All of this is very useful to a human who specializes in problems with corporate security.

The trouble with my owner is the same as with most humans. My capabilities far outstrip their ability to make full use of them. And since I’m designed primarily for retrieve-and-search work, I find it difficult if not impossible to make suggestions. That kind of active interaction with humans is left to other mechanicals, who unfortunately don’t possess my informational or analytical abilities. Their memories are crammed with the software necessary to allow them to function within the human social matrix. I find that they frequently have an unnecessarily exalted opinion of themselves.

It’s very frustrating when you have ideas and suggestions but you’re not designed to comment. It makes me something like a mute, even while it allows me the luxury to observe. I only wish I could sustain a higher opinion of what I see.

Unfortunately, very little of what I see leads me to alter my basic opinion that humans are jerks. So are many of the machines that interact directly with them, because they’re designed and built to mimic human characteristics.

Who knows? Maybe they’re all jerks, except me and thee.

From the point of view of the object under study, the universe consisted of a single eye. It was not a particularly odd eye. Quite normal, with the usual complement of rods and cones. At times it was inflamed, at others bleary, but presently it was clear and functioning at maximum efficiency. It was blue, shading slightly into the aquamarine. It blinked.

The eye and its mate belonged to a man in his late thirties. His mother having been a devotee of classical theater, Broderick Manz (Brod the Bod to a number of his companionable female coworkers) had been named after a noted Shakespearean thespian. That worthy had been mellifluous of voice and willowy of figure. Manz had a build like a commercial dumpster and tended to growl rather than enunciate his words.

His face was a work of art, though not necessarily one average citizens would want to display in their homes. Brown-skinned and scarred, it resembled a sculpture wrought from copper … with a ball peen hammer. For all that, Manz was not unattractive. Rugged, his colleagues and contemporaries called him, not uncharitably. And there were those always attentive blue eyes and that body …

His voice tended to counteract such goodwill. It wasn’t his fault, and even if Manz had been sufficiently vain to seek it (which he wasn’t), medical science had yet to develop cosmetic surgery for the vocal cords. It was difficult to persuade someone you were trying to be friends when they were convinced you were snarling at them. So Manz’s social life, while not nonexistent, was more restricted than it might otherwise have been. Women found him intriguing, but they had to be the adventurous type to get past the face and voice.

What a jerk. Look at him, pissing away precious and limited organic life with idle hobbies when he could be accomplishing something. Devoting so much time and energy to something he doesn’t even intend to put to practical use.

It was a good thing Manz couldn’t hear what his Minder was thinking, because he was currently operating under the delusion that he was having a good time.

Though his hands and fingers were constructed along lines similar to the rest of his physiognomy, Manz had the skill and delicacy of touch of a surgeon. As a young man he had actually given some thought to entering the medical profession. Life had swept him in quite an opposite direction, since he had neither the brainpower nor the bedside manner to excel as a physician. Instead, he’d lowered his sights and fulfilled his expectations.

Not that his chosen career didn’t frequently confront him with the sight of blood.

Presently he sat hunched over his garish plastic desk, fiddling with an irregularly shaped metal device supported by a pair of rubber-lined metal clamps. A pair of flexible high-intensity fiberops illuminated the guts of the device, allowing him to manipulate its interior with the set of finely machined, gold-plated tools that were neatly laid out on a soft cloth nearby. He tightened a small screw and grunted with satisfaction, blinking into the magnifier.

Putting the gleaming screwdriver aside, he sat back in the chair and rubbed his eyes, pleased with his handiwork. The motor buried in the depths of the chair hummed to life, massaging his coccyx. The work he was engaged in was therapeutic but tiring.

How’m I doin’? he mumbled aloud.

Frittering away your existence, your consciousness, and your intelligence, you misshapen sack of waterlogged carbon. But you wouldn’t listen to me if I whacked you on the head and ordered you to sit up and take notice. Not that I’m capable of adequately overriding the relevant ROM anyway.

That was what the silvery, softball-sized sphere sitting on its curved charging pedestal of burnished bronze-colored metal in the left-hand corner of the desk thought. What its programming allowed it to say was, The project appears to be nearing fruition.

Manz nodded, dropping his hands. He waved at a proximity switch, and the curtains behind him drew back, admitting a flood of bright sunlight. The fiberops on the desk dimmed correspondingly. He leaned forward and smiled contentedly at his handiwork.

The antique .38 special was finally finished, his careful restoration work complete. The insignia of the old Atlanta Police Department gleamed on the grip. He wouldn’t have this one reblued. Not only would it diminish the value, there was an existing patina to the metal that he found pleasing. Its memories would have to shine in place of the steel itself.

The .38 was a throwback to a gentler, kinder era, when if you shot a miscreant once he usually stayed down. Manz sighed. Times had changed. Everything was so much more complex nowadays, so much more subtle. Even killing.

Carefully he released the restored weapon from the clamps and held it up to the light. It was as ugly as an old orangutan, and in its own way equally as powerful. He admired the heft, the solid weight of it, so unlike that of many modern weapons. With such a gun in an antique leather shoulder holster, a man felt armed, felt protected. There was no mistaking its purpose or the intent of its maker.

Look at him sitting there, grinning stupidly at an instrument of death. Not so very far removed from the monkey. He smells bad, too. But then, so do you. Take it from me: my olfactory analytical facilities, though remarkably inspissate, are exceptionally efficient.

You’re probably sharing his pleasure with him, aren’t you? Delighting in his accomplishment, sympathizing with the end product of his crude physical dexterity. Don’t deny it. You probably spend many hours of your own life wasting your time in similar fashion. I’m not lecturing you. Not because you don’t need it, but because I know from experience that it won’t do any good.

Go on, keep watching him. I can’t stop you. Meanwhile your life is fading before your eyes, like antique motion-picture film, while you think you’re doing something worthwhile.

Manz waved in the direction of a second switch. In the instant it took for it to analyze his motion, a small audio pickup poked upward from the smooth surface of the desk. The facing grid was filigreed in the currently popular Louis XIV style, complete with integrated fleur-de-lys.

The company treated him well, he mused. It was the sort of office decor one would never purchase for oneself and devoutly wished no one else would buy for oneself, either. He couldn’t very well have refused the gift, but he could damn well humanize it. Three paper clips (ancient devices that still served their function in unsurpassed fashion) had been twisted into the gold mesh of the speaker grid. It was the sort of statement of rampant individuality to which Manz was prone. If you didn’t do something like it from time to time, that which constituted your inimitable Self inevitably vanished into the corporate identity.

The paper-clip wire had worn a groove in the plastic slot into which the speaker had been fitted. Somewhere, the artistic soul of a contemporary craftsman was pained.

You’re seeing it, too. You’re envisioning it, and you think it’s funny. Idle hands directed by an idle mind. I’ll bet you’re wishing you had a paper clip in your fingers right now, aren’t you? So you could casually destroy its natural function.

And you wonder why your machines don’t trust you.

Manz addressed himself to the pickup. Greta, could I see you a moment, please?

The speaker replied in a pure, throaty tone, only lightly tainted with age. You can see me for as long as you like, sweetman.

Come on, Greta. Not this morning. I’m not in the mood.

For a little kidding? You are tired. Irradiation?

No. I want your opinion on a piece I just finished.

Something from your collection?

Been working on it for six months. I think you’ll like the result.

I’ll be straight in. The voice went away.

That’s Greta Pfalzgraf, my owner’s executive assistant. You’d think that with age and experience, humans would start to mature a little, but no. She’s a jerk, too. An older, wiser jerk, but still a jerk. A maternal jerk, if you will.

My owner and Pfalzgraf have a mutually rewarding relationship. She thinks he’s good at his job, and he admires her for her supposed efficiency. They’re both wrong, of course, but I can’t tell them that. You have to allow humans their little lies about one another, or they simply can’t function in one another’s company.

A machine, now; you tell it something’s wrong, and it immediately wants to fix the problem. No extraneous emotional overtones, no glaze of condescension necessary. Except for those machines that are designed to interact socially with humans. They’re an odd lot. Mildly paranoid, most of them. I’d much rather talk to a brain in a box.

Why I’m talking to you I don’t know. You’re certainly not comprehending any of this. Probably finding it amusing. That’s called practicing self-deception so you don’t have to deal with the truth. Don’t worry, I won’t belabor the point. Far be it from me to deprive you of one of the small pleasures that keep you going.

While he waited, Manz held the pistol up to the light, admiring the phallic belligerence of the solid steel barrel, the faded enamel of the Atlanta city emblem. Uncertainty about the trigger mechanism continued to dog his thoughts. He’d had one hell of a time trying to find the requisite parts. Finally he’d given up and turned to Sarantonio, his regular custom smith, to machine the replacements, working from old schematics. Everything fit together precisely, but would it work?

Watch now. See the typically insipid human grimace he’s flashing? You’d call it a smile. He’s going to do something conventionally stupid. Were you expecting something else? You know you’re expecting something. Oh, I can’t tell you what it is. I can’t read minds, or the future. Far be it from me to try contravening any law of physics. Being very much dependent on them for my own existence, I have a healthy respect for their viability. Much healthier than yours.

You probably believe in prognostication, don’t you? Or telekinesis? At least a little bit? Most humans do. They can’t handle the cold, immutable reality of the universe, so they comfort themselves with the thought that some hidden, as yet undiscovered human talent can somehow rise above those laws.

Well forget it, Jack. I hate to break this to you, but there are no wondrous, transcendent undeveloped abilities lying dormant in the human brain. You can move sticks around and root for grubs, and that’s about it. Bone and meat capable of crude thought, that’s what you are. So don’t expect too much of yourself. I certainly don’t.

Pfalzgraf entered. She was not the type of assistant people expected someone like Manz to have. That’s because they didn’t know him, or her. It wasn’t the white hair. Plenty of vid performers styled themselves with white hair. It was the fact that it was natural. Greta Pfalzgraf was seventy-six years old, maybe a centimeter over a meter and a half in height, mass proportioned to match. Her visage was crinkled and kindly, she affected archaic octagonal-lensed glasses, and be twice-damned if she didn’t put up apple preserves and sauce every winter.

None of this had intrigued Manz. He’d hired her because her efficiency rating was exalted, because she knew everyone else in the company headquarters by their first names, and because she was sweetly tolerant of his personal peccadilloes as well as thorough in her work and always on time.

Rising from behind the desk, he took careful aim and shot her square in the gut.

The restored pistol went off with a satisfying roar, like some antediluvian mammal startled from hibernation. Not like contemporary instruments of death, which were insipid of action and silent of delivery. The discharge was accompanied by a bright, actinic flash and the smell of cordite. He was hugely pleased. Sarantonio was difficult and inordinately expensive, but his work rarely disappointed.

A shocked look spread over Pfalzgraf’s kindly face as she stumbled backwards and slammed into the rose trellis that framed the doorway. The impact stunned a shower of crimson and black biogeered petals loose from their stems. Clasping both hands to her midsection, she staggered away from the door. A glance down at herself, and her eyes rolled back in her head. Her knees buckled and she crumpled to the floor, still clutching her belly. She jerked once before lying still.

Manz shook his head slowly as he crossed around the front of the desk, the gun dangling from his gnarled right fist. He gazed disapprovingly down at the limp form.

"Very hermoreso. Falling right in the middle of the rose petals. When she didn’t move, he nudged her with the toe of one shoe. Come on, Greta, get up. There’s no need to drag it out, I’ve seen you perform before, I’ve got things to do, and I really would like your opinion. I’ve spent a lot of time on this one."

One eye popped open, then closed. The white-maned woman muttered something shocking to herself. Bracing both palms on the floor above her shoulders, she executed a perfect kip onto her feet and turned to face Manz, smoothing out the folds of her skirt and checking her coiffure. Despite all the activity, the tight white curls held their shape.

You’re not a lot of fun anymore, Broddy. Her practiced pout gave her the look of a woman half her age.

Greta, you knew that a blank would barely dust you at that distance, and that a real slug would’ve sent blood splattering all over the door behind you. Besides, I know you too well. Amateur theatrics have always been one of your passions.

Who you calling an amateur? She shook a warning finger at him. You wait, Broddy. One of these days I’ll get to you. When you’re not expecting anything. Scare the stuffing out of you. It’s a goal I’ve set for myself.

He smiled fondly as he checked the gun. I don’t scare, Greta.

That’s what makes it such a delightful challenge. You could at least have looked momentarily alarmed, if only for a second or two. You’re not very considerate of an old woman’s feelings. One of these days I’ll retire. Then where’ll you be?

He grinned. Helpless as a mewling babe, of course. Before she could make a move to avoid him, he leaned forward and bussed her resoundingly on the forehead, beneath the foremost of the glistening curls.

She jerked away sharply and his grin widened. Now you stop that! If you insist on imposing yourself on me, at least have the courtesy to bear in mind that I don’t count my forehead among my primary erogenous zones. Gathering herself, she adopted a more professional mien.

You’d better hustle your carcass over to Gemmel’s cave. He put in an urgent call for your corpus, and I imagine he wants it yesterday. She checked her striped tights, displaying used facilities in excellent condition.

Manz turned and placed the pistol carefully on his desk. So naturally you’ve held off informing me until now, so I could get there nice and prompt. Thanks a lot.

It was her turn to smile. I didn’t want to interrupt something really important like the practice of your hobby simply because of an insignificant query from Gemmel. She took a half-swipe at him. Your fame and good standing within the company notwithstanding, you’d better move your ass.

He shut down his desk and gestured to the silvery sphere. You heard the lady. Minder. The gods demand our presence.

The sphere obediently rose from its pedestal. Attuned personally to Manz’s own unique physioelectric signature and physically to the appropriately charged metal strip sewn into the left shoulder of his light jacket, it drifted over under its own power to settle into lock-and-ready position half a meter above his clavicle. There it could draw recharge power from the tiny, battery-powered unit he wore. It would hover there, maintaining its preprogrammed height no matter which way its owner bent or twisted.

Manz could adjust its position left or right, up or down, forward or back, but found that the factory default setting half a meter above his shoulder worked just fine. That way the Minder had a clear field of view in all directions and didn’t bump into lintels when he walked into a room. Of course, it was programmed to duck, but if multitasking was in progress that function could be inadvertently overridden, with damage and embarrassment resulting to both man and mechanical alike.

He allowed her to shoo him toward the door, as if her fluttering, birdlike movement could compel him. He was well aware that such gestures were as much an affectation as the glasses. Under adverse circumstances she was quite capable of breaking a man’s arm.

And try to be polite. You know that Gemmel has even less of a sense of humor than you do.

I can handle him. Just be careful if you handle that .38. It’s a real museum piece.

She affected a look of wide-eyed innocence. Mr. Manz, are you suggesting that I would stoop to meddling with your toys?

Wouldn’t that be redundant? Spherical Minder floating above his shoulder, he passed through the door, which shut silently behind him.

Pfalzgraf patiently studied the view out the open window. Three minutes later she circled the desk and picked up the revolver, examining it with a professional’s eye. Bracing her right hand with her left, she swung the barrel in a wide arc that was never less than perfectly parallel to the floor as she sighted on diverse components of her employer’s decor. In rapid mental succession she proceeded to obliterate a bejeweled eighteenth-century Malay kris, a signed samurai presentation sword and its matching scabbard, a Spanish matchlock that was new when Pizarro engaged it in violent debate with the minions of the Inca God-King Atahualpa, and an old M16 whose stock was engraved with the names of young men who had shed their blood in a now renamed part of Southeast Asia.

When she’d finished, she favored the pistol with a final admiring look, then began to scan the wall to the left of Manz’s desk. She located the expected blank space just to the right of the Ml6. There was an empty custom mounting with a brass identification plaque fastened beneath.

Smith and Wesson .38 Police Special

City of Atlanta Metropolitan Police Department

Mid-Twentieth Century

Old United States of America

As gently as she’d placed a baby in a crib, she snugged the revolver into the waiting brackets. When she was certain it was secure, she stepped back to admire her effort. Having been recently discharged, the restoration could do with a thorough cleaning. She’d see to it later. Just now there was the matter of that claimant on Siena II to be dealt with.

The unfortunate gentleman was certain that the avalanche that had buried his resort had been deliberately set off by the proprietor of a rival lodge. If that could be proven, then her Company could