Selected Short Stories Featuring Cinderella Shoes Read online

automated long before the legal system. It was one of the bigger auto plants in its heyday, and after that it was used to pump out robots, first the judicial models, then prosecutors like me; it spent a few years out of commission while trial lawyers lobbied to keep at least the defensive side open to human litigants, then screamed back into production for policing robots before the police unions lobbied to keep those jobs for humans, too.

  People expect any day now for the factory to be booted back up to make robots for the army; it's the logical progression, really. And with every new model comes a new cast, with upgrades and specifications, but each new generation also creates their own caste, a separate, branched-off social entity. It's not like the milbots will be able to retire and join the civilian workforce (okay, maybe an MP model could join the police). Inadvertently, even amongst robots, we're becoming segregated.

  The factory is where I was born and booted; it's where QA made sure I didn't have any outstanding flaws, where they fixed that heatsink problem we'd inherited from the previous gen's motherboard layouts. And it's cold, quiet, and lonesome, the perfect environment for computation.

  I just can't wrap my processor around it. I've argued before Mathis-53 before, and never had an issue (the “Mathis” series came about from an error in the algorithm for the serial numbers; it's a shortening of “Math is hard,” an engineer joke, and he was the 53rd off the assembly line in that series). I've argued cases that were on a shoestring, and usually the jury's more likely to call me on the technicalities than a judge (since we usually know exactly where the line is, down to the decimal, even if subjectively there's wiggle room).

  That’s when I decide I need to call Sarge. He was a Sargebot, one of the protos they'd planned to use to fill out the police brass, until the police union pitched a fit, and demanded they give existing human officers a shot at the Sergeant exams before putting bots in the slots. So Sarge served interim during the tests with the city police, and after got an early retirement, which meant early obsolescence.

  He went into private detective work. He'd made a lot of friends at the department, including a few humans who thought it was a little racist giving the preference to humans (and Sarge was polite enough not to correct them that robots are at best a different species- though even calling us that ignores some things).

  Sarge was the person to go to when you needed off-the-books help; sure, the bots in blue who partnered with human officers, as was the case anymore, wanted to be loyal, but as one of them told me, “I download my system updates from City Hall.” Which meant if something had gone sideways with a judge, there was a good chance we'd never find it through the normal channels- anybody in the system had a bias towards protecting that system hard-coded in.

  Sarge hated the factory. He’d been one of the first of his make off the line, which meant he had all kinds of bugs and imperfections QA had to massage out. And there had been a problem with his pressure sensors. “It wasn’t that I was programmed to feel pain, but when they were tinkering around in my torso it sure as Hell hurt,” was how he explained it to me. He liked to meet here, because it was desolate and empty; anybody coming into this corner of the industrial park was going to make noise, and he was professional enough he cared about that, however he felt about the place.

  I smell Sarge before I hear him; he’d been one of the first models designed with a sense of smell, but the only smell he seemed to enjoy was a burning stogie, (I’d been retrofitted with chemical scent detectors during some maintenance on one of my boards- not that I understood why, aside from maybe to increase parts commonality with the newer models and decrease inventory costs).

  Sarge is big; focus testing showed that police preferred a superior who looked like bullets would bounce off him; he wasn't actually bulletproof, unless he put on a reactive plate armor vest, but the appearance was the key. I’d used him a few times, usually on investigations involving the cops, where the normal players had closed ranks around their own.

  “This about Mathis?” he asks. “Downloaded the headlines on my drive over here. There are too many angles to check with Parque, but Mathis- he’s usually good people.” I nod. “Anything I should be aware of?” I shake my head. “Want to walk me back to my car, then?” I shrug.

  As soon as we hit night air he starts talking. “It’s funny. This place, the last time I was here, at least the last time when it was running, the techs finally fixed that pressure sensitivity- took the pain away. But do I associate it with that? No. Every time I see this place I shudder, and I remember being new, and scared, and hurt. All the goddamned prodding and soldering. Makes me wish I could rewrite my AI. I’m programmed to stand in front of a loaded gun, but I’m scared of a building, of all things.” I put my hand on his shoulder; I want to tell him we’re all scared of something, but I can’t: my pride tells me real robots aren’t afraid of anything. Maybe that makes him braver than me, since he can at least admit it.

  We get in our cars and drive separate ways. I head home and put myself in standby. Around 3 in the morning I get a picture through my inbox from Sarge: Mathis and his secretary laying in a pile on the ground, like somebody knocked them out and stacked them. I try to call Sarge, but he’s disconnected from peer to peer; that doesn’t raise much of a flag, though, since he usually powers it down on jobs to keep himself discreet.

  I try him again in the morning, but there’s nothing. I put in a call to the desk sergeant at the city PD, a human named Mel. She remembers Sarge from back when she had a beat to herself, but hasn’t heard from him; she promises to give me a call if she does.

  I call in to work, say I found some spyware I have to remove before I can come back to court. The DA calls me back twenty minutes later, to see if I think someone deliberately tampered with me- which is a serious and punishable offense. I lie, tell him I probably got it taking shortcuts on the web.

  It’s late in the afternoon when Sarge finally gets back to me. “You called?” he asks.

  “What the hell? Where are you?” I’m pissed. I’d started thinking I’d have to build a case against his murderer; I want to kick him for not at least texting me back.

  “I’m at a mechanic. Was I working a case for you?” Hell. “My black box got shot up. I’ve restored my system to about seven last night when I made a backup. My phone says you and I talked, and you been leaving messages. So you’re the one got me shot up, right?”

  “Send me your address. I’m coming to you.”

  Sarge is laid up in a hole in a brick wall of a garage, the Dr. Frankenstein’s lab of robot repair. He's sitting up on a reinforced table. “I’ve been coughing up oil; it’s not a pleasant experience. But what I found out since we talked is even less pleasant. I checked my memory tower; my system is set to create a backup automatically at midnight. That backup is screwed up, and at a glance it would seem like there was a transmission glitch or a write error, but when you look at the data that’s corrupted and couldn’t be retrieved, it was all specific stuff relating to the errand you had me on. Conversation with you, headlines I grabbed, all that was intact- all the things I could independently get ahold of. But everything about where I went, what I did- I got video of most of that, but any kind of road sign or distinguishable landmarks are missing.”

  “They hacked my memory tower, and deleted only certain files off my back-up. That takes connections. Either someone high up, or someone with enough roots in the black hat community to mean trouble. So I'm done. Just to fill in the missing files I'd have to go shake the same branches that got me shot to pieces- next time I might wake up a ballerina, if they don't just delete my back-up completely. On a normal job, I could always just boot from an annual archive disc, but these guys, they might’ve already pulled the location of my discs off the tower. I could be reset to factory. And you know that- it's virtual death. I'm sorry. But even I've got my limits, and throwing away what little I've got just so we can half solve a likely-as-not conspiracy, no. Just take my advice and bow out.”


  “Parque’s a stupid, stupid kid, and he’ll make another mistake, and you’ll be able to staple his balls to the wall then. This, this ain’t worth what it might cost ya.” I don’t say a damn thing to him; oh, I had a prosecutor’s speech or two in my RAM, but he wasn’t some witness going soft when they realize they have to live in this world after a trial- he’d brushed up against something nasty and I couldn’t blame him for wanting out.

  But what Mathis said still has me bothered, “the die is cast,” alea iacta est. It was attributed to Caesar by way of Menander, spoken when he crossed the Rubicon to take Rome. A common misconception is that the phrase refers to forming molten metal into dies, meaning that the die’s shape is complete and permanent once cast. But diecasting only dates back to 1838, and was first used to create moveable type for the printing industry. Caesar’s die was a game piece, six-sided. But the phrase was originally in Latin (maybe Greek, if you want to get technical). And enough of the law still uses Latin that the judge and I are both fluent- so why the English? The only reason that even licked sense was that he’d heard it, and recently, too, from somebody who wasn't up on their Latin- and