I, Robot To Protect

Susan could not scrub an image of “Princess” Valerie Aldrich from her mind. Seated beside Remington on the crosstown bus, Susan found her mind’s eye filled with images of the elderly woman in the purple silk pants and cape, the tawdry tiara perched on perfectly coiffed white hair. Susan could still picture the put-upon husband, remembered only as a butler in the mind of his beloved after fifty-four blissful years of marriage. He had come to them with great desperation and hope that the nanorobots might rescue her from the fixed delusion spoiling their well-deserved happily-ever-after. If the nanorobots did their job, and Susan believed they would have, they could have salvaged the kind of rare and perfect love rarely seen anymore. Susan knew few enough marriages that had weathered two decades, let alone longer than half a century.

“Damn it!” Sorrow and impotent rage seized her. “Damn it, damn it, damn it.”

Remington put his arm around her, drawing her closer.

“She deserved better, Remy. They both deserved better.”

Remington’s emerald eyes held Susan’s gamely. “Which ‘she’ do you mean, Susan?”

“Valerie Aldrich and her husband,” Susan said, then realized how ridiculous she sounded. “Well, I guess they all did. The victims of the explosion, and Payton Flowers, too. Not many people deserve to die.” Susan huffed out a breath. “But she shouldn’t have to leave this world as That Looney in the Princess Costume Who Blew up a Government Office.”

“No,” Remington admitted. He flipped his portable radiation detector over and over in his hands.

“They were married fifty-four years. Fifty-four years.”

“Yes,” Remington said unhelpfully, still playing with the object in his lap.

The true lunatics, Susan realized, were the ones who had reprogrammed the nanorobots, the ones willing to murder and defame. For what? She remembered Nate’s definition of the Society for Humanity, verbatim to her surprise: “a bipartisan political action group dedicated to ‘rescuing’ mankind from advanced intelligence, particularly the artificial type, and raising ethical challenges to several forms of robotic and medical technology.” Can anyone who claims to “rescue mankind,” can any group that calls itself the Society for Humanity, really be responsible for so much death and destruction? Susan realized that without the Three Laws of Robotics, the devastation would have been a lot worse. She patted her pocket to assure herself she had not lost her own portable radiation detector.

Susan raised her Vox. Lawrence Robertson had demonstrated his leadership well enough by delegating responsibilities with the confidence of a general. As Susan and Remington rode toward Manhattan Hasbro, members of the USR team, including her father, had already traced the switch to the shipping company and were penetrating it, rooting out the perpetrators, and gathering the necessary evidence. Ari Goldman and Cody Peters were taking charge of the care of those patients still presumably at Hasbro on the psychiatric ward: Neal Fontaina, the catatonic schizophrenic in permanent residence; Ronnie Bogart, the middle-aged bipolar with chronic depression; and Cary English, the violent, aging paranoid schizophrenic known to be assaultive to staff and dangerous even without reprogrammed nanorobots in his brain.

It relieved Susan to know Sharicka Anson was also safely locked away on the Pediatric Inpatient Psychiatry Unit. And, surely, Barack Balinsky, the other catatonic, remained firmly ensconced on his mother’s couch. That accounted for every patient, other than the two who had already blown themselves to bits. It should not take long to round those last five patients up, remove the nanorobots, and return them to their proper places. She and Remington would not need the portable devices they carried, except, perhaps, to make absolutely certain they had removed every single nanorobot from the patients’ CSF.

Yet, despite the apparent ease of their part of the operation, Susan felt as if she had ridden roller coasters all day. Her stomach roiled, and her mind, once released from images of Valerie Aldrich, flit dizzily and without pattern. Unable to wait a moment longer, she tapped up Kendall Stevens’ Vox.

The Vox buzzed twice before his image appeared, his ginger hair tousled and his dark eyes tired. “Ah, Susan. So you’ve heard.”

Instantly, Susan’s head began an incessant, internal buzzing as unignorable as the alarm at USR. “Heard what?”

A light flashed through Kendall’s sleepy eyes. “Why did you call me?”

“I wanted to check on Sharicka. Wanted to make sure . . .”

As Susan spoke, Kendall’s large-lipped face seemed to wilt before her eyes. “That’s what I’m talking about, Susan. Sharicka’s not here.”

Susan’s heart rate jumped a hundred beats. Sweat poured down her body. She suddenly understood what it felt like to suffer supraven-tricular tachycardia. “What do you mean” — her voice sounded strange, as if her throat had started to close off — “not there?” She tried to wet her mouth, with little success. “She has to be there. She’s on a locked ward, for Christ’s sake!”

“She’s gone,” Kendall said, articulating the impossible. “Last night, she got hold of a key and eloped from the unit.”

“No.” Instantly, images of Sharicka examining the locks filled Susan’s head. When she had taken Sharicka and Monterey to visit Nate, the girl had shown a fascination for the unit’s locks. Susan had worried that scrutiny would come back to haunt her. Now, she felt certain Sharicka had observed the disposition of the keys with the same fanatical intensity, from the moment of her arrival. The girl probably knew exactly which doctors and nurses carried them on every shift, in which pockets, and what diversion might gain her the opportunity to steal one. Susan wondered how long Sharicka had patiently waited to carry out the crime.

They know what she’s capable of now. How could anyone be so stupid! Susan knew condemnation and finger-pointing were useless wastes of thought. Sharicka could not have used direct manipulation or trickery; no one had handed her that key. The key-carriers let people in and out of those doors a hundred or more times a day. They had no choice but to keep the key in a pocket. And, amid innumerable distractions, pockets could be picked. Nothing mattered except the terrible knowledge that Sharicka Anson was free.

Susan could not think clearly enough to form coherent sentences. Young as she was, Sharicka was the most horrific danger Manhattan had faced since September 11, 2001. The Three Laws of Robotics were no match for a human being without morals, without a glimmer of conscience. The simple wisdom of a dog would serve them better. “No,” she said louder. “No, no, no!”

Privy only to Susan’s side of the conversation, Remington turned in his seat to look directly at her. “Sharicka’s loose?”

Kendall watched Susan’s reaction curiously. “She can’t cause that much damage, can she? I mean, she’s crazy, but she’s small, only four years old. It’s not like she can attack grown men or tear babies from their mothers’ arms.”

Susan looked helplessly at Remington and nodded. Then she turned her attention back to Kendall. “Get yourself excused for the rest of the day. If you can, grab two milligrams of IM Haldol. Meet us at the hospital entrance in ten minutes.”

“What . . . ? How . . . ?” was all Kendall managed before Susan broke the contact.

Susan found herself wringing her hands and rocking like a stereotypical autistic child in the days before Arketamin. “She’s loose,” Susan confirmed. “Long enough to have armed herself and —” And what? What’s she going to do? Where’s she going to do it? The ten minutes it would take to reach Manhattan Hasbro seemed like an eternity.

Remington turned Susan a curious look. “What do you want with the Haldol?”

“Antipsychotic.” Susan could not believe she had to explain something so obvious to another doctor, even one unaccustomed to violent psychiatric emergencies. “We use it for rapid tranquilization.”

“Susan, I know what Haldol’s for.” Remington kept his voice low to exclude eavesdroppers. “I just don’t see what good any chemical restraint will do ten to thirty minutes after she sets off the bomb.”

Susan took a breath to reply, then realized Remington was right. The choice of medication did not matter: antipsychotic, neuroleptic, paralytic. It would take at least five minutes for anything to work its way into Sharicka’s system by the IM route, long enough for her to detonate any kind of explosive. Susan supposed an intravenous injection might work quickly enough, but the most competent anesthesiologist in the world could never get a needle into a vein under duress in an unwilling, unrestrained patient. “Inhalational anesthetic?”

Remington’s brows rose. “Got any?”