He knew he shouldn’t. He knew knowing would only bring him pain. But Mr Stocks, known to his parents affectionately as Bill and literally everyone else as William, couldn’t help himself. He peeked at the small number at the bottom right of his computer screen, and discovered it was 7:37pm – and that only 6 minutes had passed from the last time he’d checked. ‘Damn and blast,’ he thought to himself miserably. He was quite certain today had been the longest day of his life. It had started at 6:30 am, in the artificial moonlight before the sun rose. After abusing the snooze on his alarm no fewer than 3 times, he had nearly missed his train going from his restive residential block to the Central District. Miraculously, he had managed to arrive on time, starting his work day in Office 87 neatly at 7:55am. Through a seemingly endless haze of meetings, paperwork, paperwork, paperwork, another unproductive meeting, followed by more paperwork and paperwork, it was nearly 12 hours later. The sun was again gone beyond the horizon, and the artificial moonlight he had awoken to was back, glowing though the office windows.
The still-formidable stack of papers on his desk and the still-formidable stack of glowing blue ‘unread’ emails in his inbox both promised his night was still far from over. In some ways, he reflected, he had no one to blame but himself. After all, hadn’t he always dreamed of wearing a sharp suit and working in the Central District, the miraculous place where humans and androids worked side by side? Of course, by the time he had actually started his career in the central district, androids were a common sight throughout the city, and as it turned out most of what people in sharp suits actually did in their glass offices was just poring over endless documents, reports, summaries, evaluations, statements, reviews, and records. In a word: boring. In two words: dreadfully boring.
Interrupting his self-pity, Four cordially asked, “You’re looking tired, would you care for some coffee, William?”
“Don’t bother – I do intend to go home at some point tonight, so coffee at this hour will only ruin what little sleep I may still have time for.”
“Ah…” Four’s antennas – sharp, polished triangular units mounted onto circular, headphone-like bases - twitched slightly. The pointed antennas, mounted over her ears, and her thin, graceful features combined to give her an oddly elven profile. William wondered if he was being insensitive by mentioning sleep. After all, androids put in full 24-hour days – they kept working long after the human staff had left for the night. He still wasn’t quite sure what was polite around androids. “I appreciate the offer, though, Four.”
William supposed misunderstandings about politeness went both ways, since it had taken quite some time to convince Four she needn’t address him as Mr Stocks, or worse, Mr William Stocks. He was quite fond of his name, but there was no sense repeating it in full for every little thing, and he had been emphatic with Four on that point. For her part, Four was emphatic on very little.
“These are just low-priority approvals, why haven’t you gone home?” Four was now looking over his shoulder.
"It hardly seems fair to leave these all to you.”
“I’m not sure I understand, that’s quite literally what I’m here for.”
“Either way, they still need human sign-off at the end. I reckon it’s best to finish them off tonight, so we’ll have a clean start tomorrow for the Eingopher Report.”
“I suppose that is tomorrow, isn’t it?”
“For an android, you sometimes forget the strangest things.”
“Ah…” Four’s antennas twitched. William wondered if he was being insensitive again – after all, android memory was significantly more complex than the neatly sorted filing system of his computer terminal. Was it strange that he expected her to have a picture-perfect memory for dates? Or was it stranger that she could be forgetful about something perfectly simple like that? Was it a personality quirk, or a symptom of a problem in her circuitry? Williams was interrupted in his musings by a red light at his desk – subtle, quiet, and intensely worrying. William’s pulse quickened. Four had noticed it as well. “That’s the Special Projects alarm, isn’t it?”
William nodded, “Sure is – you recall who’s on call for tonight?”
“Mr. Davis Cooper-Bullet is currently up in the rotation.”
William groaned, then stood up and started walking hurriedly in the direction of the emergency response coordination center. Of course it was Davis. Most of the time when there was a Special Projects emergency, all he had to do was call the on-call manager. They would come in, lead the response, and William would have little more to do than man an auxiliary surveillance station. But with Davis…
“What’s happening, Will?” Four held the phone screen steady as they walked. Davis was at his most serious, which still wasn’t particularly serious, and William couldn’t help but notice the whisky glass and pool cue that hadn’t quite escaped off the edge of the call screen.
“Not much info yet, but seems like a containment break.”
“Damn… Roger, I’ll get the team together and head on site. You’re good to lead the response center, right Will? Why can’t you ever call with an easy one, huh?”
‘If it was easy it wouldn’t be an emergency,’ William mentally retorted. There was also no need for Davis to head on site: the role of the on-call manager was to direct the response to an after-hours emergency. Other managers would sensibly do that from the response center, but Davis insisted on going to the emergency personally, leaving William in charge of the response center. After the first time Davis had thrust him into that role, William had read through his contract to see if that was even allowed, but unfortunately, ‘other duties as assigned’ covered a lot of ground. And so, William’s long day was set to get even longer.
The response center was embedded in the very center of the tower, surrounded by a maze of offices, but separated from them by heavily reinforced concrete walls. The single entrance featured an armored steel door that would put a bank vault to shame. Inside it looked much like any of the other common office areas in the building, with a few exceptions. For one, there was a row of computers off to one side that was raised above the others as the primary command and control hub. And there was a huge screen taking up the entirety of one wall, which at the moment showed a map of the city, with a conspicuous red dot a few blocks away from the office tower. The center was staffed mainly by androids, who of course didn’t have to worry about shifts and would always be ready to respond to any emergency at any time of day.
“We have Mr. Cooper-Bullet en-route with a response team. What’s the alarm situation?” William had been at nearly a dozen emergency control calls, and although he had only led one (also when Davis had been on-call), he could at least act the part decently at this point.
“Subject 9ALPHA has gone rouge and departed Special Projects without authorization. GPS tags have ceased transmission, so current location is an approximation. Drones have been deployed to verify location and support the response team as needed.”
William felt a chill at the android’s report. ALPHA projects were top-line stuff – way past his pay grade. “Put out a call to the Executive Council – I don’t care who.”
“Talk to me Will – what’s going on?” Davis’s blue dot was now also showing on the map, his vehicle closing in on the hostile red dot.
“We’ve got an ALPHA project on the run. Drones are on the way – probably best to hold back until we have more info.”
Davis responded with a string of casual profanity, followed by, “Roger, we’ll hold off until the drones get eyes on the situation.”
Just before signing off with a final profanity, another screen flickered on over the master screen. “Lisa Overrent here.”
Her voice, icier than usual, was the only indication the CFO had perhaps been winding down for the evening – otherwise, every detail of her appearance was immaculately neat, with not a wrinkle to be seen from the collar to the cuffs of her pressed formal suit. The Chief Financial Officer may not have been William’s first choice of executive to take charge, but he was still grateful he wasn’t going to be the one left calling the shots. “Project 9ALPHA has breached containment. On-call manager Davis Cooper-Bullet is on standby with a response team, and drones should be at the target momentarily.”
As if to reinforce his summary, several images of streetscapes appeared one after the other on the main monitor – the drones were nearly there. William began to breathe a little easier; now he just needed to sit back and act as a liaison between the Executive and the manager. A job so easy even an android could do it. The video feeds from the first drones had caught up with the subject, bringing into view a dilapidated, gray-skinned figure. A strong metal exoskeleton supported its decrepit limbs, and a red light glowed in a halo around its head, boosting its brains weakened signals to enable it to still command its declining body. It wasn’t dead, but it was also a stretch to call it truly alive. William only caught a glimpse, though, since one after another, the video feeds cut out as they brought the subject into view.
“It’s disrupting the drones, switch to satellite.” Overrent’s voice cooly and calmly directed the situation.
As the video feeds from the drones continued to fail, an overhead image swam into focus. It took Williams a moment to realize what he was looking at – the drones they had sent were all circling idly above the subject, almost like a school of fish. A moment later, and the satellite feed, too, vanished. “Surveillance satellite Polaris 10 is rapidly deorbiting on a collision course with Office 87.”
Overrent responded to the calm voice of the android with equal calm, “It’ll burn up in the atmosphere probably. Subject 9ALPHA is hijacking any digital systems that directly observe it. I want a Code Black shutdown on the surrounding 3 blocks from its last know location. Mr. Cooper-Bullet, you are cleared to engage, but do not bring any combat androids. Switch off all augmented observation systems – I trust you can point and shoot without computer assistance?”
“You got it, boss. Humans only, weapons free.”
Davis and Ms. Overrent seemed to be on the same wavelength, which left William rather awkwardly as the only person who seemed concerned by her ‘probably.’ The surveillance satellite would ‘probably’ burn up in the atmosphere. William grimly reflected even if he was safe in the reinforced response center, the fragile paper documents he’d spent the last 12 hours working through were not. ‘Probably’? It better burn up in the atmosphere! Almost as an afterthought, he also realized that typical response teams were made up of 5 human staff, two dozen combat androids and a small fleet of support drones. With the drones under the control of the escaped subject, and without being able to deploy the combat androids, Davis wasn’t left with a lot of support. Although that was Davis’s department – it wasn’t a problem Williams really had to worry about.
What followed was a long 60 seconds of chaos – frantic radio bursts about the drones being used as kamikazes to dive at the human squad like airborne piranhas, punctuated with loud bursts of gunfire. From previous emergencies with Special Projects, William gathered that with these subjects, it wasn’t so much a matter of killing them, as you couldn’t really kill an undead. It was more a matter of accumulating enough physical damage until they could no longer function. Less than a minute later, it seemed that threshold had been met, as a tired-voiced Davis called in, “Target down. Bring in the clean-up crew, and we’ll need a medic as well – we got pretty busted up here. Suggesting we keep up the Code Black until disposal is confirmed."
“Very good – I’ll transfer authority for ending the Code Black shutdown to you. Please look after clean up and disposal. Thank you for your good work tonight, everyone.” Lisa Overrent’s image vanished from the central monitor.
Chances are, she was heading off to sleep – by this point, William was very much looking forward to doing the same. “Four, if you could please prepare the write-up for tonight’s incident – the Eingopher report will have to wait. I’ll look over it tomorrow, but for now, I’m going to clock out for the day. I will take you up on that coffee tomorrow morning – at this rate I’ll need it.”
“Of course, William. I’ll have coffee waiting for you tomorrow. Have a good night.” Four’s voice was gentle.
William’s usual subway route home was shut down thanks to the Code Black, so he had to hail a taxi. The neon lights of the Central District flashed past the autonomous vehicle, before fading behind him as the taxi drove from the main freeway into a restive residential district. Out the corner of his eye, Willim caught the bright meteor of the descending satellite. Given the lack of a loud impact boom, it seemed Overrent had been correct and it had indeed burned up in the atmosphere. Continuing down a quiet street with a large, verdant park on one side, the taxi drew up to the door of his cheap apartment, just past a glowing green Square Mart sign. William climbed up the tight, narrow stairs, no longer caring the building was so narrow he could nearly touch the walls on either side just by stretching out his arms. The apartment had his bed, his bed was soft, and William badly needed to sleep. As his head touched the pillow, he drifted off almost immediately, and was only awoken when his alarm started ringing the next morning. In the dim glow of the artificial moonlight, he fumbled for the snooze button.
