Devana Files: Chapter 21
Ricochet
This is Part II. The Twenty-first. chapter. You may find earlier chapters here:
Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana goes off-colony to wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions and is escaping for Mars on a deep space supply shuttle. But back home, robots are glitching, killing people, and she is the target of a corrupt Federal Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up faster than she can get home to stop the killer.
On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.
While this is the 3rd novel in the series, each is designed to be read independently.
For accessibility, there is a voiceover for each chapter.
APRIL 10, 2074
PROCELLARIUM IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT, LUNAR COLONY, U.S.A.
Leyna’s phone vibrated atop a pile of evidence bags. Six nonlinear years at the University of Hawaii. Surfing, sand, and studying. Now, her biggest wipeout was the tsunami on her desk. Blood-drenched clothes, charred electronics, soggy shoes, a treasure trove bursting with everything but proof. She spooned a mouthful of Luna Belts cereal from her bowl and then pushed it aside to glimpse the message.
“Was that your boyfriend?” Troy, the token Vapor Trail human, a patchy-bearded twenty-something going on five. He swiveled the chair across the office, the one in front of Devana’s desk, like a preschool figure skater. His polo shirt was a whir of yellow and black. Arms up. Legs in. Legs out. Arms down. Faster. Slower. He would build up momentum, squeak to a halt on the balls of his feet, and then reverse. It made her dizzy. The flags behind him on the wall, the US flag, and the Texas State flag, rippled in his wake.
“It was him, wasn’t it?” He stopped twirling, his sad brown eyes and vape-stained teeth grinning, framed by the flags behind him. Like a reverse recruitment poster. Uncle Sam does not want you to be him.
The lunar colony was incorporated in Texas, ergo the Texas flag. A historical accident. It was too small to be its own state, although now it could be considered a small town. It was too big a prize to be a territory. The colony was first in money. Every billionaire in the world had a penthouse here. It was second only to Washington, D.C., in power and prestige. The colony’s original charter stipulated Texas law. That’s where the now-bankrupt company that staked the claim to build the first wing was based. So Texas got the jewel. The fancy legal version of finders-keepers.
“You are free to leave.” There was no reason for him to be here. She already took his statement. The credentials he supplied unlocked the server with Vapor Trail’s cache of videos. The download was puttering smoothly, and its progress bar read fifty-nine percent complete.
He responded by twirling in his seat.
She ignored him and pinch-zoomed the image. She forgot she was connected to the office wall display, so Jin appeared on the large monitor, dressed casually, in what looked like a five-star hotel.
“Yo, that’s no mining colony.”
“Troy, I said you can leave now.”
“I’ll stay.” He twirled.
In Texas, capital punishment was still on the books. So if she could find a justification for killing him, she’d only have to deal with paperwork. The maidbots would clean up.
She returned to the picture. It had to be fake. The room had marble floors and live-action space art on wood-veneered walls. All the materials were probably engineered moonstone, just like the colony. Even so, she’d seen rooms at The Crown Oasis, the colony’s top hotel-casino, that weren’t as fancy.
“Eclipse, authenticate this photo.”
Eclipse was their newly trained AI office assistant. But maybe too new and not trained well enough because, without hesitation, Eclipse said, “The image appears to be authentic.”
“With what certainty?”
“Your boyfriend lied to you. Maybe he left you,” Troy whirled.
“Authenticity score of ninety-nine point nine percent.”
Impossible.
Troy ceased swiveling and grinned.
“I mean it Troy, leave. I have your statement.”
“How about some of that cereal?”
Luna Belts. Click a QR code and the infobox tooltip would have: New and Improved, now with All Lunar Ingredients.Vat-grown starch, puffed into crispy moon shaped crescents, coated with blackberry flavoring. Ingredients: Premium pathogen-free vat-grown T. aestivum polysaccharides (as close to wheat as the colony got), dextrose, reformulated milk (whey protein, lactose), FDC blueberry flavor number 918, beta-hydroxyl-somethings for low gravity muscle maintenance, and whatever-pherols as vitamins. Includes reformulated milk, just add water.
Luna Belts. New lunar ingredients, same milky sugar rush. What every twirling five-year-old needed.
“Just go home. I will call you if I have more questions.”
His face fell. She waited, trying not to picture him in ice skates and figure-skating tights.
“Do you want me to call someone?”
He shook his head.
“Seeing someone killed can be traumatic. I can find a counselor.”
“I have a therapist. Or had. It was like talking to a janitor drone.”
“An AI, then.” He wasn’t wrong. What did a chatbot know about feelings? Unfortunately, a real therapist, a human with empathy and compassion, was expensive. There was a long wait for the privilege of paying thousands per hour, and even then, the therapist was Earthbound, only offering remote sessions (with a 3-second delay, and yes, they billed you for the delay). Not much therapy. None at all, really. She fired hers.
A different picture was forming in her head. Him, in the security office, alone in the dark. Vapor Trail was an all-droid club. The management was a sophisticated AI that had been granted its freedom.
“You work long hours at the club?”
“All the time. ”
“There is no other security staff?”
“I take all the shifts.”
Troy was like a vestigial human. An appendix to a sex machine. The only other people were clients, and he didn’t interact with them.
“How long has it been?”
He swiveled, slower than before, but didn’t answer.
“A week? A month?”
He stopped, facing the flags, with the yellow-on-black block letters on the back of his shirt screaming SECURITY. “I can’t remember. Months, maybe. August?”
August. Her picture of Troy sharpened. He’d become another microchip in the interconnected circuitry. This happened to some of the workers on the colony. Machines provided food, water, housing, power, heat, everything needed for humans to exist. But existing wasn’t living. Living required companionship and social interaction. The one thing machines couldn’t provide. Vapor Trail’s gynoids promised sex, but lacked empathy and warmth. It worked for some. People paid big money. But no matter how well-trained their dialogue modules were, the intimacy they offered was as gelatinous and cold as their silicone innards.
Troy hadn’t talked to a human since August. This was April. Droids could do a lot of things. But they couldn’t cure loneliness.
The office door opened. A man walked in, looked at Troy, looked at her, decided something, and then made a beeline for her desk. He had short gray hair, black pants, and an off-white shirt with a comet logo. She recognized him.
“Eclipse, have one of your butlerbots serve Troy a bowl of the colony’s finest.”
The man took the chair in front of her desk, crossed his legs, and brushed his shirt. She wanted to duck behind the mountain of evidence bags.
“I don’t know which one is the finest.”
Trained, but new and not trained enough. “Eclipse, give Troy a bowl of Luna Belts. He will take it in the conference room.”
Troy faced her with his sad brown eyes, like a puppy. He pouted, not making a move to get out of the chair.
The office already had Jade, a Silver German Shepherd drone, quietly recharging in the corner. It already had a stray, too. Her.
“If you eat it at Devana’s desk and spill a single drop—”
Christ. Now she sounded like her mother. The desktops were white moonstone, and the maidbots would clean them before Devana got back.
Anyway, maybe she needed a witness.
“Fine.” She waved at Troy and turned her attention to the man. “You run the Comet?”
“Brilliant deduction. You’re the surfer girl they hired?”
“I am busy.” She surveyed the pile on her desk, melodramatically, in case he was dense. “How shall I put this without sounding judgy? Get out.”
“Now, now. We don’t judge. We offer exotic entertainment for the whole family. It’s all consensual. We ensure the kid’s play area is separate from the adults’s play area.”
He was dense. He was also a walking billboard for everything wrong with this place, and she couldn’t remember his name.
The Comet had changed hands several times. The new experience—everything was an experience on the colony—put adults on the third floor, doing what adults came here to do, with a kid’s arcade and game room on the second floor, and a dance floor and bar on the first.
The club activities didn’t bother her. Her parents were poly. She had two mothers and two fathers. Nor did it bother her that the adults had to pass through the arcade on their way to the bar to hydrate after all their adulting. It forced them to check on the kids. To say hi, make sure they were okay, and, most importantly, refill their arcade account. Good parenting through good traffic flow, right? More than her first mother ever did.
Devana squeezed this guy’s balls to ensure that security for the kids was part of the rental agreement. She had no concerns about the kids. If she did, she could open a feed at any time and check.
No, what bothered her was the obscene amounts of money people spent for the lunar experience.
She clicked off Jin’s image on the display monitor, sighing. He was smiling. She should read his message. Did he get diverted? What was the orange tag in the suitcase behind him?
To Comet Shirt, she said, “As much as I’d love to discuss business strategies, as you can see, I am up to my tits in a homicide right now.”
Behind Comet Shirt, Troy was sitting up, rapt.
“I came to talk to you about this incident at Vapor Trail. Actually, I came to talk to your boss. Where is the Sociopathic Sheriff?
“It’s an ongoing investigation.”
“Robots.” He tsked and shook his head. “Life on the colony is nasty, brutish, and short. Shorter and more brutal for colonists who have sex with malfunctioning robots. Those things should be banned.”
“Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. That’s the full quote. Hobbes.” She flashed her Maui smile. Maybe she spent the first three years of college doing more surfing than studying, but never say the Hawaiian sun fries the brain.
“No, I think it was that rock band.” He snapped his fingers. “They played at my club last month.”
“Eclipse, who wrote, ‘life is nasty, brutish and short?’”
“Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher, wrote, ‘No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ Leviathan, 1651, part 1, chapter 13.”
She pointed to the ceiling. “The AI never lies.”
“In my experience, it does. The robots are looking out for their own kind. It’s a mistake to let them have rights. Robot rights is bullshit, if you ask me.”
“I didn’t ask you. Say what you came to say, or I’ll have Jade chase you out.” She chin-nodded towards the recharging German Shepard drone.
Comet Shirt turned, looking over his shoulder for Jade. He eyed Troy, now shoving cereal into his mouth at Devana’s desk, and then turned back and adjusted his leg cross.
“Taking a page from your boss’s police brutality seminar.”
“Eclipse, wake Jade.” Jade’s eyes opened, and it sat up. From six meters, it looked exactly like a German Shepard. It wasn’t until the drone dog was on you that you realized it was a little too heavy and dense to be a dog. The fur was a little too perfect. The eyes and tongue were dry. If Jade got really close, you realized those jaws were as powerful as a shark’s, and its teeth were ceramic.
“I heard the gynoid muttered some religious stuff.”
She looked at Troy, who shrugged. “I can’t discuss an ongoing investigation.”
“And the robot brought out some sort of equipment before crushing the man’s skull.”
A black cube. “Again, I can’t comment.”
He looked over at Troy. “Okay for the kid to be here for this?”
“Be here for what?”
It probably wasn’t okay for Troy to be here, whatever it was. She wanted a witness, but more than that, she wanted to irritate Comet Shirt.
“I am staying,” Troy said, shoving a spoon into his mouth.
“Troy, do you need another bowl? Can Eclipse get you anything?”
Troy shook his head. His mouth dripped with milk.
Comet Shirt uncrossed his legs and sighed. “A few weeks ago, a client came to me. Wanted the safety of robots. Emotional safety, that is. Something his wife wouldn’t get attached to.”
“Must be a sign of the times.”
“I tried to discourage him.”
“Translation: he lowballed you. Then threatened to leave, so you caved.”
“Comet is about the experience, Deputy Darcy. We don’t judge. But our brand is human flesh, not that droid skin that comes out of the vat, green.”
The simu-flesh, or whatever it was called, wasn’t green. That was an urban legend. It was flesh, grown from human skin cells, so it came out pink or brown, or whatever color the engineers induced by inserting the proper genes.
Although, in the case of the mermaid robot that killed Reid, it was actually green. They’d inserted seaweed genes. She shuddered, picturing the mermaid gynoid with its green eyes glaring at her as it crushed the victim’s skull.
“As long as everyone's over twenty-one, no judgment from me.” She decided not to argue the point. Her sugar rush was wearing off, and she needed him to move on and get to the punchline. Jin’s message was waiting.
“So, to please the client, I had to rent two of those gynoids from Vapor Trail.”
“Your secret off-brand foray into the capitalist wilderness is safe with me.” She looked at Troy. It was probably not safe with Troy.
“I was not happy about it. That Zia is a real bitch.”
Translation: His client agreed to pay an outrageous markup, but he still got squeezed by Zia, the Vapor Trail’s owner-manager, a ruthless AI. So he kept the client, but lost a boatload of money.
“I am sobbing.” She pointed to her heart. “Inside. Where it counts. Troy over there is sobbing into his reformulated whey protein. I fear if you go on too much longer, the Luna Belt phenols will get diluted, and he’ll die of malnutrition.”
“You are a real piece of work, you know that?” He had one throbbing temple vein telegraphing anger in Morse code.
“Service with a smile.”
“Where do you get off? I own three clubs that rake in more in a day than your bitch ass clears in three years.”
“I blame genetics. My red hair. My mother was a queen bitch. So was her mother before that. The Darcy women are bitches all the way back to the Volga Vikings who burned people like you at the stake for boring them to death.”
“If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have a job.”
“I work for Devana and the people of the colony. Not you.”
“This whole colony runs on tourism, Deputy Darcy. People like me are the colony. It’s lifeblood. What cave did Devana drag you out of?”
“That one, actually.” Leyna pointed to the conference room over Troy’s right shoulder. He was in mid-chew with milk dribbling down his chin. He turned, wide-eyed, wielding his spoon like a weapon against a ghost that might exit the conference room door any second.
“I was a stray. Seven months ago, I wandered in here, into that conference room, bawling my eyes out, babbling because my mother had just been murdered.”
She held his gaze. He fidgeted for a few seconds and then looked over his shoulder. “Oh. I am sorry to hear that.”
“Let’s fast forward past the greed is good part of the script. Blah blah blah, why are you here?”
Comet Shirt looked at his pants, like he was deciding the fate of the galaxy, but didn’t respond.
“I have a murder to solve.” She also had a missing boyfriend and his unread message. “Jade, attention.”
Jade sat up in the corner and barked. Another way to tell the difference between drone dogs and actual dogs: the bark. A barking dog's muscles rippled, its jaws clenched, and its diaphragm thrust the air through its windpipes, as if it was coiling, readying to leap through the air and maul its prey. A real dog bark conjured the threat of the bite to come, honed through tens of millions of years of evolution. When a drone dog barked, the jaws moved, but the sound came from a speaker inside the throat. Weak. Not as intimidating. Not as intimidating. But underestimating a drone was a mistake. Those aluminum jaws and ceramic teeth could break bones.
Comet Shirt looked over at Troy, who shrugged.
“Jade, growl.”
Jade growled and bared its teeth.
“You are as psycho as your boss.”
“Service with a smile.” She flashed her high-wattage smile.
Comet Shirt shook his head and then stretched out in the chair, reaching deep in his pocket. He pulled something out. Whatever it was, he set it on her desk behind a heap of evidence.
“I want you to understand,” he said, withdrawing his hand. “I had no knowledge of the assaults.”
“Assaults?”
“Did I say assaults?” He chuckled. “Alleged assaults. Barely a rumor. Mrs. Client came to me and said the droids were rough. That they didn’t obey the safe words.”
She nodded, encouraging him to continue.
“So I returned the droids and rented two more.”
“Did you report this when you returned the droids?”
“What was to report? I chalked it up to a misunderstanding. Maybe they forgot. Maybe someone reprogrammed the droids
. Nobody got hurt. Not really. The droids were a little rough, but so what? Some clients like that and then regret it afterward. So they rationalize it and say they didn’t mean to go that far and blame the droid. Or they need an explanation for the boss when they arrive at work with bruises.”
“But?”
“But later, Mrs Client came to me with—more information.”
“A video?”
“More information. Let’s leave it at that.”
She waited. When he didn’t continue, she asked, “And this information confirmed—what, exactly?”
“That the droids were off their guardrails.”
“I’d like to talk to Mrs. Client.”
“Right now, she is on a plane somewhere between Singapore and Sydney. She won’t talk to you.”
“What is her name?”
“Mrs Client. M-R-S-PERIOD-C-L-I-E-N-T. Capital M Capital C.”
“You should do stand up. What about this information? Video? Whatever. I’d like to see it.”
“You can’t.”
“I can’t? I can get a warrant. Tear your place apart.”
“You can’t.”
“There are legal ways, and there are other ways. Jin and I can get into any system on the colony.”
He stood. “You can’t because I wiped it. Erased. Twice, to be sure, because I knew you’d ask.”
“Destruction of evidence is a felony.”
“Evidence of what? There is no crime.”
“Assault.”
“Alleged assault on a client who may or may not have asked for it rough in the first place. Nobody went to the hospital. And as for Mrs Client, you will have to get through seven layers of lawyers just to get a recorded message of ‘No comment.’”
She drummed the desk, imagining leaping over it to strangle him.
“But I did save that for you.” He pointed to the item he’d dropped on her desk.
She parted the sea of bags. Between a pouch of blood-soaked pants and a charred and melted phone, a black cube. Almost obsidian. It wasn’t moving, but it appeared to glide on her white moonstone desk on a thin cushion of air.
It was the same as the one she’d seen on the video before the victim was killed. She had no doubt.
Comet Shirt was walking out. “I don’t know if the droids meant to leave it behind or their programming got scrambled.”
On the way to the door, he paused, looking at Troy. Something passed between them. More than recognition. Troy nodded. Comet Shirt nodded. Then Comet Shirt walked on.
She inspected the cube, turning it over in her palm. About two centimeters on each side and all black. It felt light and clicked like hollow titanium when she tapped it with her fingernail. It was anodized black, not painted. There was no obvious way to open it. It attracted her hair as if it were charged with static electricity.
“One more question. Which droid left it?” She asked as Comet Shirt was halfway through the door.
He turned. He pursed his mouth and then half-shrugged. “All those damn things look the same to me.”
She placed the cube on her desk. It looked like it was drifting like an air hockey puck, but she poked it, and it wasn’t. Its hovering was an optical illusion of the black finish against her polished white desk. Titanium was non-magnetic and didn't conduct electricity. But this cube was charged with something. If it was hollow, did it contain electronics? Should she use a Faraday bag?
Before she could answer herself, her phone beeped. Her boss, preparing to search NYS Vega.
She swiped to read the message from Jin. Dearest Leyna. She was flooded with panic.
