Jay-Dub stood up, straightening and extending its legs. ‘Look around you,’ it said, flailing its arms about at the busy quay. ‘Every jumped-up monkey here has rights that a court will recognise. I don’t. I’m instrumentum vocale: a tool that talks.’
‘So what about this distinction you make so much of, between human equivalent and just a fucking machine?’
‘“Human equivalent”,’ the robot said with some bitterness, ‘is a marketing term. It has no legal standing whatsoever, except with the abolitionists, and nobody gives a fuck about them.’
‘Oh?’ Wilde looked interested. ‘That’s the people the…gynoid went off with?’
‘Yes.’
‘I want to talk to them. They sound like my kind of people.’
‘I assure you they’re not,’ the robot said. ‘They’re the kind of moralistic, dogmatic, self-righteous purists that you despised all your life.’
‘Fine,’ the man said. ‘I said my kind of people, not Wilde’s.’
He got to his feet. ‘I’m going to see them.’
‘That would be a mistake.’
Wilde set off briskly along the quay. ‘It’s the kind of mistake,’ he said, as Jay-Dub rose and followed, ‘that I died not making. Not many people get the chance to learn from that.’
Reid’s office is large. The walls are curved, made from a plain grey cement that gives an unexpected atmosphere of warmth. The window’s view adds a good percentage to the room’s price. The morning sunlight slants through it. On the desk, of solid wood polished so that it looks almost like plastic, there’s a standard keyboard and screen. Reid has contacts, which he seldom uses, on his eyes.
He’s sitting on the desk, leaning across it, paging through a search. The search is fast, and the scenes flash by in reverse order. Days of recorded phone-calls jabber and gesticulate backwards.
He stops, slows, pages forward. Freezes the scene.
He looks up. ‘C’mere,’ he says.
Collins and Stigler step over and peer at the screen. It shows the interior of the cab of some big powerful haulage vehicle. The details are quaint: a dangling mike, a peeling motto, padded polyethylene seats. A man with a lined, leathery face is looking into the camera. Beside him is a young woman with very dark eyes, very black hair, a tight tee-shirt and cropped denim shorts. She has the look of an intelligent and wary slut.
Reid fingers a key and the picture moves. There’s a flicker of interference that makes all three men blink and shake their heads slightly. As they open their eyes the screen clears.
‘Forget it,’ the man’s saying. ‘Wrong number.’
His hand moves out of frame and the screen blanks. Another recorded call begins. Reid stops and scrolls back. He pauses at the interference, runs it past again slowly.
‘Oh, shit,’ he says.
He clicks on another screen icon and pulls in some analysis software. The flicker suddenly becomes a page of symbols. Reid clicks again. The symbols expand into screens and screens of text. Reid runs his finger down the monitor, his frown deepening.
‘Son of a bitch,’ he says, sitting back.
Stigler is twitching. ‘That guy,’ he says excitedly. ‘With the skin thing, he’s –’
Reid looks at him. ‘No shit, Sherlock.’
He calls up the picture again and runs another program, which smooths and softens the man’s features.
‘Hey!’ says Collins.
Reid points at the screen. ‘Get him,’ he says.
‘Wait a minute,’ says Stigler. ‘You said we’d need a warrant, and I can’t see no court giving –’
Reid claps him on the back. ‘Don’t you worry about it,’ he grins. ‘That man is dead.’
He stalks away and leans once more on the sill, looking out through the window at the city, and smiles into the sunlight.
6
The Summer Soldier
I looked up from the Observer on the breakfast table. Outside, through the french window, our small walled backyard hummed with bees and bloomed with weeds. Ten o’clock sun slanted steeply in. Annette was sitting feet up along the bench opposite, leaning against the wall, enjoying her first cigarette and second coffee of the day. Eleanor, the main reason why we were up at this hour on a Sunday morning (and the result of a Sunday morning seven years earlier when getting out of bed was the last thing on our minds) knelt over felt-tip pens and a colouring-book.
‘What are we doing today?’ I asked.
‘Peace-fighting,’ Annette said firmly.
‘Not me,’ I said, in chorus with Eleanor’s groaned ‘Oh no, mummy.’ I’d forgotten about the CND demonstration, although it had been pencilled, then biro’d, on the kitchen calendar for weeks.
‘Please yourselves, anarchists,’ Annette said, stubbing out her cigarette. Something in her tone and gesture told me she was annoyed – having succeeded in getting us to demos before, she knew our objection was based more on sloth than principle. In this year of Chernobyl and Tripoli, we were letting the side down.
‘How about if we meet you there?’ I suggested hastily. ‘Eleanor and I could nip over to Camden market, then we’ll go and see Granny and Grandpa at Marble Arch and watch out for you, and we can all go to McDonald’s afterwards.’
As I spoke Eleanor transparently calculated whether trailing around second-hand bookstalls was worth it for the sake of seeing her grandparents and tanking up on cheeseburger and milkshake. From the way her eyes brightened it looked like the bottom line was in the black. I turned to Annette, who gave me a relenting smile.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘At least you’ll be there.’ She stood up, in a graceful slither of nightdress and negligée. ‘And come on, you,’ she added, stooping to pat the sticking-up rump of Eleanor, now back at her colouring. ‘Get yo’ little ass into some kinda decent gear.’
‘Do we have-to?’
There were times – like this, and bedtimes – when I regretted ever answering the question: ‘Daddy, what’s libertarianism?’ with anything but a lie.
‘No, we don’t have to,’ I said. ‘But we’re going to, because I bloody say so.’
‘I’ll tell mummy you said that.’
‘Said what?’
‘Bloody.’
‘Go ahead, clipe.’
‘Whassa clipe?’
‘A much worse word. A terrible word.’
By this time we were in the street, walking briskly along to Holloway Road. Even on a Sunday the trucks were lined up, honking nose to stinking tail. I blamed the environmentalists, who’d delayed the widening of the Archway road for years and inflicted planning blight on the entire neighbourhood. At least it lowered the price of a ground-floor flat. I relieved my feelings by starting to sing ‘Ten Green Protestors’ and got Eleanor skipping and singing along. By the time we’d reached ‘…there’d be no Green protestors and a road through the wall!’ we were on the Camden bus.
Top deck, branches brushing past. Smokers had to sit at the back. I blamed the environmentalists.
Chalk Farm Road and Camden Market cheered me up, as they always did whether or not I found anything I wanted. Stalls and canals and the invincible hand of the flea market, its black plastic bags and canopies the banners of an anarchist army that would still be there when the rest had done their worst, if anything were there at all.
We left with a leatherbound Lord Macaulay for me, an antique rayon bodice for Annette, a coral paperweight for my parents and a climbing wooden monkey for Eleanor. So I was in a good mood when we emerged past the lines of cops at Marble Arch and found my mother and father near Speakers’ Corner. As I’d expected, they were leafletting and pamphletting and generally irritating the first contingents to trail in after traipsing – with an entirely unjustified sense of having achieved something – from another park to this one.