This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, Standard-Issue Partner.
Flint and Roberts sat, thirty stories in the sky. It was raining as the other hovercars sped around them. Roberts repositioned the vehicle, moving it closer to the edge of the high-rise building, and under a short ledge, out of the rain. Flint fiddled with the controls in front of him, and an image came in, fuzzy at first, on a screen in front of them.
“I’ve got him,” said Flint.
“Are you sure?”
Images on the screen flickered. It looked as if several people were eating dinner in an Italian restaurant.
“That’s him.” Flint waved at the screen.
“So it is.”
Roberts hooked the hovercar into the side of the building, and engaged a clamp mechanism, locking the car to the side of it. Rain poured down all around them. The night was settling in, and the only light was flickering on them from their instrument screens, and from hover cars speeding nearby.
“How is the robot doing?” asked Roberts.
“Not that bad considering. It’s got a good bead on them.”
“Not like those new ones?”
“I suppose not. They aren’t right.”
“Yeah, your partner should be human at least.”
“It’s just the way things are going these days.” Flint adjusted his monitor.
“Yeah, everybody thinks the robots are the way to go.”
“But for a partner? It just doesn’t work.”
“I know.”
“Have you seen what they can do?”
“I haven’t looked. I don’t care.”
“I guess one day we’ll all get replaced.”
“Then what will we do?”
“Sit back in luxury?”
“Not likely.”
“Why, what are you going to do?”
“Become a robot repairman. What else will there be?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s funny though.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. It’s funny. You’d think they’d be nothing like us.”
“But they are.”
“I’m not so sure about that, but they’re damn good, and almost everybody is using them for a partner these days.”
“True.”
“How can you talk to a robot though?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m talking about the little things, or maybe they aren’t so little. Your little girl for instance.”
“What about her?”
“Do you think a robot could relate? Do you think they can understand what it’s like to sit up all night while their wife is in labor, or when a child gets the first tooth? With a robot, I don’t think there can be as clear a connection. You to Be able trust your partner.”
“And to do that you have to know them.”
“And if you don’t know them how can you ever trust? I mean, could you ever put your life in the hands of something made of steel rather than flesh and blood?”
“I don’t know.”
“I guess you never know.”
“Some of the other guys don’t seem to have a problem with it.”
“I’m just not sure.”
Roberts tapped the monitor. “What’s Roman up to in there?”
“Looks like lasagna.”
“There has to be a better way to do a stakeout.”
“I dunno. He’s got to move soon.”
Roberts pushed back in his seat, laying it back. “Got to stretch.”
Flint shifted in his seat and sipped from a safety sealed coffee mug. “I hate these things.” He shook the mug, a feeble dribble of coffee came from the lip. He sipped it from the side as it trickled down.
The screen chirped to life with a crackle.
Roberts sat up and looked forward.
Flint turned the screen, “He’s on the move.”
Roberts gunned the engine and released the claw from the building, bobbing the hovercar down into the pouring rain. “Good deal, it’s about time we got off of this building. Where is he?”
“Looks like he’s heading for the south street.”
“Well, one way or another he’s going down tonight.”
“Don’t jump the gun, he’ll see us too soon.”
“Nobody’s going to see me too early.”
Roberts maneuvered the car into the rain and dived into the streets below. “You got him locked?” asked Roberts.
“Locked and ready.”
“Looks like the car’s navigation is getting a bead on him. Should have a solution in just a moment.”
“I can see him!”
“Where?”
“Just over there, on the other side of that billboard. He’s gone.” The computer beeped and a screen flashed. “We’ve got a solution.”
Roberts looked down at the tangled web of turns and twists and frowned.
“No good?” Flint tapped the controls.
“I’ve got a faster way.”
Roberts veered off to the left, taking a side tunnel between two buildings usually used for garbage pickup, and twisted through a tight passageway.
The computer piped up. “Of route, recalculating.”
Roberts slapped the navigation computer. “Useless.” He switched it off.
“Hey, we need that! It’s tracking him!” Flint switched the machine back on.
“Acquiring satellite.”
“I hate that thing.” Roberts pulled the steering yoke and leveled out the aircar. “There he is.”
Flint looked up. Ahead of them was an aircar, much bigger than theirs and in the style of a limousine. It was lumpy in appearance, smooth around the edges like a large mass of plastic bubbles.
“Target acquired.”
Roberts rolled his eyes at the computer “I think I know that. Flint, can you get a picture in there?”
“Let me try.”
Flint turned knobs on his control panel and twisted dials. A fuzzy picture of Roman came into focus. “I guess robots are useful for something. I’ve tapped into one of their photoreceptors.”
“He’s got robots in there?”
“Yeah, at least five. They seem like standard bodyguard style.”
“That should be interesting.”
Roman’s face appeared on the screen, fading in and out. For a moment his face is clear and the audio of him sharpens. “And that will be the last of them,” he said.
“What’s he planning?” asked Roberts.
“I don’t know.”
“You think he knows he’s being followed?”
“I don’t think so.” The rain beat down upon them. Roman’s limousine was nothing but a wash of color in front of them trailing red brake lights.
Lighting streaked across the sky. It flashed right in front of them. Roman pulled to the right “Whoa.” they spun around, and then straightened up.
Roberts looked around, “Where did he go?”
Flint shook his head and blinked, rubbing his eyes to return his vision. Blue patches hung before his eyes in streaks. “Dammit!”
Roberts flung out a pointing finger. “There!” he turned the aircar and dived down into the sub-streets below the city. Under levels of old physical streets and bridges, the rain lessened, only pouring in around them as the bridges and streets above them permitted. It created a kind of a stained glass effect around them distorting lights and movements.
The computer came to life tracing their flight in three dimensions as they careened through the water. Warning lights blared and alarms whistled.
“You’re too close to the wall.” Flint hung onto the dashboard.
“We’ve almost got him.”
“I am too old for this…”
“No you’re not, you’re only ninety-six.”
“What’s your point?”
“You’re not too old. Hell, I’m only a hundred and two.” Roberts turned the wheel and followed Roman’s limousine down through a circular tunnel. “I agree we’re not in our fifties anymore, but it’s not like it’s time for a mid-life crisis or anything.”
Flint ignored him. Medical technology had come a long way since he was a child, that was true, but he wasn’t sure that they were in quite that good of condition. He checked his badge and the power on his laser pistol.
Roberts flipped the ship upside down, slinging it through a series of pipes, barely missing an electrified laser gate.
“I don’t know about you Roberts, but I’m looking at seventy years on the force, and I still can’t seem to get enough together to retire.”
“You’re ready to retire?”
“I didn’t say that!”
“It’s what I thought I heard.”
“It’s just that seventy years of anything gets old after a while.”
“You mean like being partnered with me?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Maybe you want one of those new robotic partners. That way you could pop in another personality cartridge anytime you got bored with them.”
“Lett’s just drop it.”
“I think you’re just tired of me!”
“Jeff!”
Roberts stopped. It had been at least thirteen years since he’d heard his own first name, and it stopped him for a moment. He wasn’t really sure how long it had been.
“What?”
“Drop it. We’re almost on Roman. Let’s bring him in, then we can duke this out later.”
“Agreed.”
“Look, there he goes.”
Roman’s limousine plunged into a series of underground caves. Roberts followed him, keeping close to the ceiling of the cave, and inverted, so they could look down at Roman’s limousine from above.
“He’s stopping, activate the cloak.”
Flint hit a switch on his panel and the car’s hull shimmered, and then appeared as if it were a part of the cave ceiling. They clamped onto the roof of the cave and powered down the ship.
Below them, The doors of Roman’s limousine opened and out stepped five robot bodyguards. They formed a line, and Roman exited the vehicle, walked past them, and through a small door. The robots followed him, and soon the limousine took flight and went down a small corridor. All was dark, save for the dripping of water from the cave ceiling.
Roberts and Flint opened the canopy of the aircar, and seat belts in place, they did not fall to their deaths. Instead, they each reached for a small latch at their side and hooked into it, then, releasing their belts, they rode a thin strong cable to the floor a hundred feet below. Twisting like bored acrobats, they touched down on the ground like it was second nature to them. They released the lines which slid neatly back up to their ship. Flint pulled a remote control from his belt and punched a button on it causing the canopy on the ship to close. The cloaking unit still activated, it blended into the ceiling and disappeared.
Roberts checked his laser pistol’s power level and tucked it away. “Ready?”
“I always am.”
They pushed through the door and found themselves in a dank corridor. Lights flickered around them, and drips from the ceiling penetrated their clothes and slipped in through gaps at their neck and wrists.
“They can’t be much farther up now. Why do you suppose they would come all this way?”
“Not sure. It can’t be for a good reason though, and what about all those robot guards?”
“How many are there?”
“Five.”
“That seems like a lot of firepower.”
“For anything except a massacre, yes, I suppose you’re right.”
Roberts smiled. “I haven’t been on a bust this big for a while.”
“Feels good doesn’t it?”
The tunnels twisted and turned. Flint opened a small device latched into his wrist, and checked to mark the progress of the guard robots he was tracking. “They’re not far off.”
“No, they can’t be.”
“It’s got to be right up there.”
Ahead of them was a door with a frosted window. Lights danced and shimmered across it as if from a great bonfire in the distance. They could smell the smoke in the back of their throats. The air began to feel warmer.
Flint loosened his cuffs.
Roberts shook his head and adjusted a visor over his eyes. It gave him a thermal readout of the scene ahead of him.
The door was warm to the touch. It blinded Roberts’s thermal relay, and he discarded it for a moment. It was warm, but not hot, it was possible.
“You ready?”
“Let’s get in there.”
They cracked the door and saw no one except a guard robot on the inside. It noticed them, and Roberts took it down so fast it never had a chance to send a relay message.
Roberts swung up and connected with the robot’s power pack, which every cop worth a paying wage knew about. It confused the robot long enough for him to pull the power, and then carefully lay the robot on the ground.
Flint knew his part in all of this, he pried open the robot’s chest plate, and dug his hands into the wires, cutting some, and twisting others, until he pulled enough of them away to get to the central hub of sensory input. He plugged in a small round device that he pulled from an inside pocket. When it connected a small green light lit up. He was in. Within seconds the chest plate was back in place, and they were hoisting the robot back onto its feet.
“You get the memory circuits?” asked Roberts.
“Not only will it not remember us, but it’s programmed to never remember seeing or hearing us in the future.”
The robot stood up and returned to its post, looking right past them. The two old men, still appearing roughly in their forties despite their real age looked over a short ledge behind the robot, with the robot’s eyes feeding into their visors.
Below them, a large bonfire lit the room. Around it stood a variety of crooks and thugs. Most of them looked like ordinary folks, and others looked like more high-profile bounty hunters and some of them looked like they were made of money and bad intentions drove their daily use of it. Roman stood at the head of the group, pacing in front of them.
Roman cleared his throat. “It seems gentlemen that this town is not long from ours. It seems to me that given just the right leverage and use of our tools and talents that we could run this town to the betterment of us all. We are useful, talented, devious people in desperate need of making a living aren’t we?”
The thugs and bounty hunters watched him with their arms folded. Some nodded. Flint watched them in his visor. It looked like they were still deciding whether or not to take the bait or turn on Roman. Roman continued to pace.
“Are there any questions?” Roman asked.
One of the thugs raised his hand.
“Yes?”
“Well, What about the robot cops?”
“What about them?”
“They are getting harder and harder to avoid.”
“The robotic cops are of no concern. They are no more than bodyguard partners for the few remaining cops that they have left to work the streets for real. They are not a threat. If anything we should thank them for spreading the local police departments as thin as they have done. Anyone else?”
“What about our bodyguard robots?”
“They are as useful as they can be, but remember that a human mind is always more devious and devilish than the robots can ever be. It’s why they are such a bad idea in the first place. The robots can only think a certain way. They don’t learn, it’s hard to program them, and the efforts to make them easy to talk to have failed miserably. There’s nothing for it. Besides, they are easy to control.”
One of the Bounty hunters spoke up. “What do you mean?”
“Here, watch,” said Roman. He pulled a smartphone from his pocket flicked his fingers across the screen, and from behind a concealed door next to him stepped an R-COP 5000. It was a slender beast, armed to the teeth with hidden weapons. Roman snapped his fingers and the robot came to attention. It stood there, a vague assemblage of parts that represented a cross between a fiberglass crash test dummy, a fashion mannequin and a work of art blown in glass. “I call him Manny.”
Roman snapped his fingers again. “Manny, show us what you’ve got.”
The Robot seemed to smile, gesturing its head in an inclination to Roman. It held up its left and right arms, and with a twitch of its elbows, two pistols appeared in its hands from hidden compartments. He showered the ceiling in bullets, then as quick as thinking he flicked his arms and the guns were gone and replaced with two flat steel blades. He sliced through the air and twirled around stopping to pause menacingly in front of one of the thugs in the front row.
“You see,” Roman gestured toward the robot. I can even make them harm themselves. He snapped his fingers again, and pressing a button on his phone, the robot looked at him with the sense of disdain, and then calmly stepped into the fire.
Next to them, standing near where Roberts and Flint were hunched down, the guard robot they had commandeered popped, and fell over, crumbling to the ground. Everyone in the hall looked up at the disturbance.
At their feet, the robot seemed to crackle with electricity. “They’ve rigged it. I should have known.” Flint looked at the smoking robot. It jerked and then really exploded sending shrapnel in every direction. Flint and Roberts ducked and the shower of parts and sparks flew over them.
Down in the hall, Roman scowled. “Cops.” He flipped a switch on his phone, and the R-COP 5000 jumped from the bonfire, landing on the ledge overlooking where Roberts and Flint had been just a moment before.
The door behind Flint and Roberts burst open, and the R-COP 5000 stormed through it.
Flint breathed heavily as he ran. “That’s the latest model, I think.”
“I think it is too.” Roberts pulled a compact device from his belt.
“If they can already control them…”
“We might be in a lot of trouble.” Roberts activated a small device, a bomb, and threw it behind him as they ran. It clicked onto the robot’s chest and stuck there, magnetized.
“Hell, we might all be in a lot of trouble.”
The robot stopped in the hall, and pulled the device from its chest and examined it about the time that a small blinking green light on its surface turned red and it exploded, taking most of the robot with it. For just a few moments the two of them were alone in the hall with the R-COP’s legs and pelvis, which took a second or two longer to fall to the ground, running without a torso for a few additional moments. A second later the eyes in the robot’s disembodied head went out.
A second after that Roman, leading a small army of thugs were right behind them.
Roberts and Flint stepped into an old elevator shaft, and pulled cords from their belts and pointed them up the tunnel, shooting razor cords into the darkness. They struck rock, grabbed on and the two of them shot up into the darkness, leaving the thugs behind them.
They discarded the cords and ran down the tunnel. They could both hear their pursuers behind them and still gaining, though hindered by the old elevator shaft.
They ducked around behind a series of overturned crates. The metal grinding of the bodyguard robot’s legs passed them by, followed by Roman, who slowed to a walk in the wake of them, and stood calmly as they continued on up through the underground passageways into the night.
Roman stood there. When he turned around to make his way back down to the meeting area, he saw them. Both Flint and Roberts stood, guns raised, and poised to strike. Roman walked up to them and stood there, his hands outstretched.
Flint bound his hands while Roberts searched him, pulling the robot controller from his pocket.
“What’s this?”
“It not illegal to own.”
“We’ll see about that Roman.” Flint pushed Roman into the wall and roughed him up, punching him in the stomach.
Roman remained very calm after expelling a forced cough from the impact. “You two don’t have a chance.”
Flint ignored him and pushed Roman forward. “Officer Roberts?”
“Shall I read him his rights?”
“You know I rather think not.”
Flint pushed Roman forward, to the edge of an elevator shaft.
“What are you doing?” Roman asked.
“Making something clear,” said Flint.
“Oh, I think everything is quite clear.”
“And how’s that Roman?”
“You are going to threaten my life.”
“Yes.”
“And then you are going to try and force me to divulge information.”
“Without?”
“Without any regard for my personal safety or the fact that I’m going to kill both of you before you have the chance to do anything of the kind.”
“You are a dog.”
“And you are a Cop. Sorry, that’s the worst that I can come up with at the moment.”
“Okay smart-ass…”
Flint plunged Roman toward the elevator shaft, keeping hold of his neck, and jerked him back. Roman yelled, but it was more out of surprise than anything else. He began to laugh. In the distance, there was a silent grinding buzzing in their ears.
Flint shook Roman, who stopped laughing and looked him right in the face. “You think I don’t know you’ve been following me for a month and a half?”
Flint let him go. It wasn’t voluntary.
“Yes, it’s true.” Roman brushed off his coat and readjusted himself. “You and your partner here are going to have to get with the rest of the century. The robots are the way of the future. Everything revolves around them these days. It’s inevitable. You’ll all be replaced, and I’ll own this town!”
“Is that what you think?”
“Isn’t it obvious? The constant inclusion of robotic technology, the way they do everything for you now, the way they clean your cars, take care of your food, shine your shoes, take your dogs out for a walk. Now with ninety percent of the police force dependent on them, trusting robotic partners who can be hacked by satellite at a moment’s notice and turn on you in an instant doesn’t work!”
Roberts stepped up and slapped Roman hard. Roman stepped back and nearly fell down the elevator shaft.
“Now that wasn’t any good at all.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“This.”
Blaster fire rang out behind them. Flint ducked for cover, but Roberts wasn’t so lucky. The shots were all aimed for him in the first place, presumably, they would target Flint in a moment and he had to act fast. Robert’s body flailed, the very gunfire itself holding him up and in place until he came to rest on the ground a mile below the surface world where the torrents of rain had been reduced to the mildest trickle.
Four of the bodyguard robots had returned, realizing that their owner and operator was no longer with them.
Flint rolled back and tossed an electrified bomb into their midst. Its fuse was short. Flint ducked for cover and the bomb exploded sending electronic shrapnel in all directions. The robots shorted out and fell to the ground. It wasn’t a terribly good solution, best for buying some time at least though. He popped up; gun trained on Roman, and cocked the firing mechanism. “I think a short walk Roman,” he said.
Roman complied, but with an expression of boredom firmly locked on his face.
Flint opened a panel on his uniform and allowed three small floating robots to hover about the scene taking pictures and photographs of the crime scene. One of them dived down and permanently dismantled the robots, and another took finger, skin, blood and hair samples from everyone in the vicinity.
Flint took Roman and pushed him forward. “Let’s go. I’m going to have to add murder to your current list then.” within moments another series of robots were on the scene to clean up. They took away the dismantled robot bodies and the remains of officer Roberts. Flint stood by and watched as they took away his partner. He jabbed Roman in the back as they took him away, and wondered vaguely if this meant the end of his career or if he was going to be saddled with one of the new robotic partners like Roman was talking about.
He pushed Roman forward and walked back to the aircar. He pressed his remote control. The ship’s cloaking device cleared and the ship lowered to pick them up.
Flint shoved Roman into the back, a compartment saved for the scum of the Earth, and took off.
“It was bound to happen,” said Roman.
“Shut up.”
“I mean, as dependent as you are these days on robotic technology…”
Flint twitched and bit his lip. “I’ll make you pay for this.”
“Pay… whatever for…”
Flint punched the Plexiglas that separated them.
Roman jumped back from the impact, but then laughed from the release of tension.
“You haven’t got a clue.”
Flint arrived at the funeral late. The wind was blowing. All of their carefully combed and color-treated hair of those there looked like wild and wooly messes atop all of their heads.
Flint stood on a small rise not too far from what was left of the cemetery. Built-in an upward spiral toward the real sky, here the dearly departed lived in concrete graves surrounded by Astroturf and circular, spiraling ceilings of blue and daylight bulbs. The wind was real as they were close to the cemetery’s apex.
A holy man, dressed in black, finished some words over the body, but they never penetrated Flint’s heart. They were lost in the wind, less than real to him. What was real was the realization that he was alone. For the first time in forty years, he was alone. Had he missed having a family? In his nineties, he was still virile, and strong. Medicine was still on an upward spiral, and the human life span hadn’t been properly measured in some time. He laughed but it was more out of nervousness.
What was the solution? What would happen when he returned to the force? What about the extra desk that was now in his office? Once his partner’s, would it become dusty, left there like the remains of a legend like in those old movies after a detective loses his partner? Would he be able to survive this at all? It had been a long time since he had been saddled with the old man. Would they just downsize him? What about robots? The new robot partners, that was definitely a thought. Certainly, they wouldn’t saddle him with one of those. Hell, one was practically responsible for what happened.
He watched. Holy words had been finished while he was thinking, and people were beginning to break up. Dianne brushed past him, Roberts’s wife, she was beautiful, but he did not speak.
“Flint,” she said.
“He’s gone for good, isn’t he?”
“Yep.”
There was kindness in her eyes, and perhaps a string of bitterness as well as sorrow, but something seemed to soften it for Flint as he stood there in front of her.
She took him in her arms and hugged him.
“I’ll get these guys.”
“You already have.”
He looked into her eyes.
“Didn’t you hear? Roman’s dead.”
“When?”
“It was last night. The shower room. We’ll never have to worry about him again.”
Flint breathed. It was like he’d been holding it for about an hour straight. The color seemed to come back into his face.
“What I’m worried about, is you,” she said.
“I’ll be fine.”
“I know you will. Still, sometimes it pays to be thoughtful. Do you know what you’ll do?”
“I want to stay with the force. It’s all I really have.”
“Don’t forget you have me.”
She kissed his cheek and took her to leave.
Chief Parkers were next in line. A gruff man with flat hair, a flatter nose, and the flattest gray eyes known to man, he towered above Flint, who was starting to tremble.
“It’s all too real, Chief.”
“I know son, It really is.” He gestured around them. “All this, the loss of a partner, it’s the scariest thing a cop can face in this day and age. Of course, pretty soon there won’t be any more partners to lose.”
“You mean human partners.”
“Of course. That’s what I mean.”
“How many are left?”
“A dozen or so, worldwide.”
“Just that many?”
“Yes. It’s an interesting phenomenon. I still remember my first partner. But that’s all in the past now.”
“In the past.” Flint thought about it for a moment. In the past… What was the future? What would it hold?
“Naturally you’ve been wondering, I suppose, how it was all going to go down after the dust settled.”
Flint couldn’t believe he was getting a job evaluation at his partner’s funeral. He clenched his fists and bit his lip.
The Chief persisted, “It just seems to me that you are too valuable to the force to let go at this time, of course, a retirement is an option, and no one would think any the less of you. You’ve had a long career.”
“If I stay?”
“First thing you’ll need is a new partner, then we can start getting you an assignment or two, get you back in the saddle, so-to-speak.”
“About the partner… I…”
“No need to worry yourself, you’ll have the best we can give you, though getting used to having a robot can be an interesting fiasco if you’re not up to it.
“What if I refuse the partner, want to go it alone?”
“No chance. Our robots have gotten our cops out of so many scrapes, it’s just not advisable. Besides they are basically walking computers at any rate. You’re used to those.”
“Yes, but…”
“Not another word. If I have to instruct you to treat this as an order, then I’ll do so. You really have no idea what these guys are like. Pretty soon you’ll wonder how you got along without one.”
“I can’t wait.”
“Good, we’ll see you bright and early at the proving grounds. It’s going to take some time to get used to this and believe me, we understand.”
“I’ll be there.”
