Sanchez agreed to see me. His private office was a box barely big enough for his desk, some filing cabinets, and a wall full of awards from the city. I managed to squeeze in, but I made sure to stand very still to avoid crushing anything.

I'd never visited Sanchez at work before. Actually, I'd never visited him anywhere. Our paths crossed, but never by appointment and never by intention. He didn't seem the least bit surprised at my unprecedented come-to-call. He continued to fill out reports. His typewriter clicked nonstop.

"They make drones for that, y'know," I said.

"City budget allows me either a typing drone or a coffee machine." He paused, held up a paper cup full of the steaming brown liquid. "Anyway, I don't think it's good for a man to rely too much on automation. No offense."

"None taken."

Sanchez sipped his coffee and winced. "d.a.m.n secretarial auto doesn't know how to make a d.a.m.n pot of coffee."

"You could make it yourself."

"Don't have the time. Too busy typing reports." To demonstrate, he hunched over his typewriter and started banging away. "What do you need, Mack?"

Sanchez didn't believe in small talk. He liked to get to the point, and I could appreciate that.

"The Bleakers," I said.

His typewriter skipped a click before continuing its job. "Report's filed, Mack. Like I promised."

"And?"

"And the gears are in motion."

"What's that mean exactly?"

"Means everything that can be done is being done."

Which meant Julie and her kids were in the hands of the system now. A system that cared more about keeping the zip trains running than filtering out the mutagens in the waterworks. And it wasn't all that good at keeping the zip trains running.

"Did you run my memory file through the system yet?" I asked.

Sanchez nodded.

"Get a hit on Four Arms?"

Sanchez nodded again, curtly.

"Did you pick him up yet?" I asked.

"Not yet. We're looking."

My next request was awkward, absurd. But I said it anyway, and I didn't hesitate because I'm a bot and I appreciate directness.

"I need his name," I said.

Sanchez stopped typing. He took another sip of coffee. His pink nose twitched in disgust. "Who programs these d.a.m.n robots?"

"Four Arms's name," I said. "I need it."

"Heard you the first time." He leaned back in his chair, which in the cramped quarters was quite an accomplishment. "You're not getting it."

We stared at each other across the office.

"Somebody needs to do something, Sanchez."

"Somebody is doing something, Mack."

"Who? You?"

He opened a drawer and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. "Not my beat."

"Tell me whose beat it is, so I can talk to them."

He stuck the cig in his mouth, rolling it around without lighting it. "Go home, Mack."

"It's just a name."

"It's trouble, is what it is." He tossed the unlit cig into an ashtray. "You're concerned, I can see that. But the Bakers aren't your problem."

"Bleakers," I corrected.

"d.a.m.n." He hunched over, rubbing his eyes with his hands. "You can't get involved. In the first place, you're a private citizen. In the second, you're not even that if your probation falls through. And it will fall through if you get in the middle of this."

"That's my problem," I said. "It's only a name, maybe an address."

"It's more than that." He took another gulp of coffee, lit up his cigarette, and puffed like a steam engine. "This is my problem, too. I put my a.s.s on the line for you."

"I know."

"Doctor Mujahid put her a.s.s on the line."

"I know."

"There are a lot of important people watching you, Mack."

"I know."

He drummed his fingers on the desk. His little black claws pinged on the metal.

"I'm not going to change your mind, am I?"

I didn't bother answering the question.

"They mean that much to you?" he asked.

"They should mean something to someone," I replied.

Sanchez drew in a long mouthful of smoke until his cheeks bulged. He blew it out his nostrils in a slow, steady stream.

"Can't argue with that, Mack. Didn't think Megalith programmed you with such a warm, fuzzy side."

"He didn't. Must've been something I picked up along the way."

Sanchez turned his chair eighty-six degrees, opened a drawer in his desk, and tossed a file in front of me. I reached for it, but he slammed his tiny paw atop the folder.

"This isn't in your best interests. But since you're dead set on doing it, I have to lay down one rule before I let you look at this."

The folder was so close now I could easily brush him aside and take it. My battle predictor said the chances of him stopping me were nil.

"When you find this guy-if you find this guy," he said, "do not confront him. Report his whereabouts to the Tank and let us pick him up."

I said nothing, and Sanchez pulled the file away.

"Mack, that mess at your apartment wasn't easy to smooth over. If you go out on those streets looking for trouble-"

"I won't touch him. I won't talk to him. I won't even scan him for more than six seconds."

Sanchez handed over the file skeptically. Whether or not he trusted me, he cared about the people of this town. All those little folks who slipped through Empire's system bothered him. That was why he gave me this file. He knew d.a.m.n well that I couldn't be trusted. h.e.l.l, I didn't even trust myself. I was untested hardware, heading into a delicate situation. I wasn't programmed for delicacy.

I gave all the pages in the file a quick scan and tossed it back to him. "Thanks, Sanchez." I took a careful step backwards out the door and turned to leave.

"Mack," said Sanchez, "promise me I won't regret this."

This could go wrong in two-thousand-fifty-three different ways, and all of them ended with the Bleakers never found and me on the sc.r.a.p heap. Sanchez didn't want to hear that. Biologicals liked asking questions they already knew the answers to in hopes of hearing the answer they wanted instead.

"Probably, Sanchez," I replied honestly. "Probably."

6.

Four Arms's real name was Tony Ringo. He was a small-time thug who'd been having run-ins with the law since the tender age of twelve, in and out of the joint after turning professional hoodlum at sixteen. His rap sheet showed an unremarkable career of petty theft, unproductive troublemaking, and one poorly conceived, ineffective protection racket scheme. So far, he hadn't been much of a threat to anyone, and in fact, the best indication of his inept.i.tude was one failed mugging attempt where the mark had turned things around and beaten the h.e.l.l out of Ringo. He had no known connections, no resources, no talent. Strictly a wannabe who'd seen too many Cagney movies and thought he had the stuff to make it to the top of the world, though clearly the rest of the world disagreed.

Losers like Ringo didn't show up out of the blue with teleportation technology and squads of combat drones. There was an old robot saying: Does not compute. Of course, reality wasn't a neat and tidy math equation. It had too many variables. Despite the many advantages of my elegant, electronic brain over the squishy chemical lump of the biologicals, speculation was not my strongest subroutine. Once the parameters became too abstract, the situation too loaded with unknowns, I couldn't piece things together.

Realizing this limitation, I didn't even try. I went with what I knew. Tony Ringo was my only lead, and once I found him, hopefully more of those variables would solidify into something that made sense.

The notion that Ringo had nothing at all to do with the disappearances of the Bleakers and the attack on my apartment did occur to me. If he didn't lead somewhere, I wasn't a sophisticated-enough machine to track the Bleakers down any other way. It'd relieve me of the responsibility. I could walk away, clear conscience, knowing I'd tried.

There was already that little blip in my motivational directives, that little nagging thought that failure was not an option. I wasn't built to back down. That little blip, the urge to smash something, had been lurking in my personality template for some time now. So far, I'd been able to suppress it because my Glitch allowed me to see no reason for hurting anyone beyond a line of code programmed into me by a madman. Even the Freewill hadn't kept the urge at bay. And Ringo's continued existence in this city meant nothing to me, especially compared to the welfare of Julie and her kids.

If I found Ringo, I wouldn't be calling the cops. My operational files opened some charming tidbits on torture techniques that Professor Megalith, thoughtful evil genius that he was, had installed into my programming. I resolved not to use the nastier ones on Ringo. At least, not right away.

Empire's various districts were arranged and named in patterns perfectly logical to the Learned Council. The upper west side, for instance, was divided and sorted exactly like the periodic table of elements. Just don't go into Oxygen after dark. It's a little dicey. Southside's boroughs were arranged along the Greek alphabet, except for a hiccup in planning which put Omega on the other side of town. Midtown's neighborhoods were named after the Great Thinkers. Though if you'd asked me, it was a real oversight that Eli Whitney didn't even have a public school named after him in Tomorrow's Town.

And somewhere between Beta and Boron, there was a little toxic stockpile of a neighborhood officially labeled District W. It wasn't much of a name, even by Empire's standards, because the Learned Council barely acknowledged its existence. Everyone else called it Warpsville.

Lots of unwanted mutagenic sludge and radioactive leftovers ended up here. Not that there wasn't plenty to go around, and in fact, the whole of Empire was lousy with it. Warpsville was only a little worse. Mostly it got its reputation because no one bothered to hide the stuff. Leaky barrels of luminescent chemicals were piled on every corner. Most of the trash glowed as well. In fact, pretty much everything was radioactive enough to glow, casting odd hues of purple and green, yellow and orange. Warpsville was unique in that there wasn't a single functioning streetlight to be found, but it was always bright as day.

Warpsville had a bad reputation, but most of its residents were just down on their luck, trying to get by, and real estate was in such high demand in Empire, they were willing to tolerate a little genetic jumble for a place to call their own.

I'd been made here, in a little secret lab in a back alley. But I hadn't been back since leaving. Hadn't possessed the desire. But in a strange illogical way, it was good to be home.

No sooner had I stepped off the omnibus than a furry yellow ball rolled to my feet. I bent down and picked it up. The creature unfurled, fixed me with its single eye, and yipped. Furb.a.l.l.s, a bit of genetic fluff, were half dachshund, half pill-bug. They'd been a big fad for a while, but you didn't see them much anymore.

Three kids ran up to me. A small girl with a slippery mucous coating stepped forward. "Mister, don't hurt my dog."

"Me? You're the one who's kicking him." I scratched the furball on its head.

"Hey, I know you. You're that bot," said a second kid with arms long enough to touch his feet without bending over. "Aren't you?"

It'd been a while since I'd been recognized. For a few weeks, I'd been big news, a local celebrity. A bot built to destroy trying to make good had just the right mix of forbidden science, humanoid drama, and potential disaster to set the media abuzz. It had all blown over when I failed to do anything interesting, like sign up as a spokesbot for automated citizens, become a movie star, or run amok in a schoolyard.

The third kid, a norm, remarked, "My mom says it's only a matter of time before you kill somebody."

I handed the mutt over.

"Give me an hour, kid."

The furball curled up, and they kicked it down the street, pausing briefly to splash in a radiant pink puddle.

Warpsville didn't exactly match up with the city street layouts in my navigation banks so it took a while to locate Ringo's last known residence. The Hotel Swallow was five stories of crumbling brick and mortar. Stone was an odd sight in Empire. There were a few old survivors, seven to be exact, that had qualified for historical preservation, but the Learned Council was far too fixed on their vision of the utopian future to place much value on an antiquated past. Somehow the Hotel Swallow had escaped either retrofitting or the wrecking ball, but it was falling apart fine on its own.

The lobby was a dilapidated patchwork of furniture collected from junkyards, and instead of light bulbs, there were clear plastic buckets of radioactive slime hanging from the ceiling. The toxic rainbow of colors offended my opticals to the point that I had to switch to black and white. About the only nice thing to say about the decor was the actual presence, if only in a very technical sense, of carpeting. I scanned the various sundry individuals standing about, but Ringo wasn't among them. It was unlikely he lived here anymore. This was the kind of place people drifted in and out of, but I had to start somewhere.

There was a thin lady behind the front desk with pale, pale skin and enough of a mustache and beard to notice, but not enough to determine if she was mutant or norm. She stared at a television and didn't glance away from it.

A fuzzoid hovered beside her. Fuzzoids were baseball-shaped drones, covered in fur, with big puppy dog opticals. Like furb.a.l.l.s, they were an attempt to improve on mankind's pets, but so far, no one had been able to replace the old standards. Too much history, I supposed.

The fuzzoid whistled. It hovered close to me, batting its shiny, green opticals.

"She likes to be held," explained the woman. "Easier to just give in."

I held up my giant mitt, and she settled into my palm. She closed her opticals and purred.

"Name's Violet," said the woman.

"Can you help me, Violet?" I asked. "I'm looking for somebody."

The woman glanced over her shoulder. "Why you asking her for? Fuzzoid is only about as smart as a dog."

"I was asking you," I replied.