I, Robot To Protect

Susan could not help going with him. He pulled her along at a sprinter’s pace, dodging the dazed people waiting at the bus stop, hurling her around trees and nearly sending her careening into a bench. She wanted to tell him to slow down, but she couldn’t catch her breath. Then, suddenly, she was tossed to the sidewalk and he flung himself on top of her.

Noise thundered through Susan’s ears, so loud it caused physical pain and fully deafened her. The ground seemed to buck and shake, as if the entire world had come apart. Heat washed over her, and her lungs refused to function. She struggled for breath, found it, and sucked in several acrid lungfuls. Her hearing returned abruptly in the form of strangers screaming. Remington rolled off her. “Are you all right?”

Susan wiped liquid from her cheek and discovered blood on her hand. She probed her face, without finding a source, while she took in the scene around her. Everything had changed. People ran, shrieking, in all directions. Only hunks of twisted metal remained from the shelter that had once housed the bus station. Where the glide-bus had parked, she saw only a scorched outline. Two police cars were clearly visible behind it, their windshields shattered and their front ends bashed in. People staggered up from the sidewalk, some moaning, others tottering, a few walking in crazed circles.

“Payton,” Susan said, the single name carrying all the necessary information.

Remington helped her stand. His jeans showed myriad holes with burnt edges, and a shard of thin metal jutted from his profusely bleeding shoulder. “I think,” he said carefully, “we can conclude the bomb” — he looked Susan over — “was real.”

Susan stood there a moment contemplating the scene. Then, through no intention of her own, she started laughing. It seemed strange and out of place, yet the perfect reaction to Remington’s understatement. It was an expression of joy amid depthless sorrow and fear. We’re alive! She took Remington’s injured arm. “You’re bleeding.”

“You, too.” Remington dabbed at her face.

Susan brushed away his ministrations. “I think it’s your blood on me, too.” She reached for his arm. “Let me take care of that.”

“There are people hurt a lot worse than I am.” Remington started to turn away, but Susan grabbed him.

“You’re worthless to anyone if you bleed to death.” She indicated he should sit, which he did on the sidewalk. “If you severed your brachial artery, and I won’t know till I remove this thing, you’re first on the triage list.”

Susan went to work, trying to imagine herself on call in the ER rather than on a city street, seeking normalcy in a situation that contained none. Soon enough, she could start assessing the injured and possibly the dying around her, but not until she assured herself she would not have to do so alone.

Chapter 19

Under strict orders not to show her face on the PIPU for two full weeks, Susan Calvin sat in her bed, her palm-pross balanced on her lap. Sunlight from the bedroom window cast a glare across the screen that she ignored as she poured through Payton Flowers’ history. As far as she could tell, he had never done a violent thing in the whole of his brief life, at least prior to blowing up a bus in downtown Manhattan.

Susan sat back, frustrated. She felt fine, but hobbled by the ordered recovery, though she understood the purpose of it. She knew Remington was at least as eager to return to work as she was.

It took a special kind of workaholic to worry for every moment away, the kind who had had it drummed into his head for years that doing so meant “missing all the best cases.” Dr. Bainbridge and his ilk, she realized, had affected her, and Remington, more than she had initially understood.

Susan sat back, frustrated. Payton’s actions made no logical sense, but that should not have bothered her per se. It was the very hallmark of schizophrenia to act irrationally. Irrationally, not totally rabbit-ass, over-the-moon crazy.Susan relived racing from the bus, still half convinced the bomb strapped to Payton Flowers might consist of cardboard and bare-ended wires. She felt Remington hurl her to the ground and throw his body over hers, the explosion that deafened her and quaked the ground, the raw terror that followed. She shook away those memories. She had spent the previous day focused on them, dissecting them in detail. It was already time to move on.

So now Susan found herself hopelessly intent on solving the mystery of Payton Flowers. He was not the first schizophrenic to commit murder. Once every few years the psychosis took over someone and he lashed out at a friend or acquaintance, or even a stranger mistaken for the devil or a monster or the one responsible for broadcasting his thoughts to the world. Susan had never personally heard of a schizophrenic mass murderer. Though some surely existed, that was more the realm of terrorists, religious zealots, power-hungry dictators, and antisocials.

Susan had turned to research, where she had managed to find some instances. However, all of them had shown signs of violent intent long before they committed their heinous acts. Most had killed or tortured animals, either hunting, from spite, or both. All had spoken of hallucinations of murder or compulsions to kill. Payton did not fit the pattern. Just carrying the diagnosis of schizophrenia was not enough. Millions of people had it, but killing was rare. Though, Susan had to admit, a far higher percentage of murderers had schizophrenia than the general population, nonviolent psychotics did not become mass murderers overnight.

Something happened to Payton, and we need to know what. The same frustration that had assailed Susan for most of the morning returned to strike her now. The explosion had left little of Payton’s remains and nothing of substance to examine. Could the nanorobots have had anything to do with this? Anything whatsoever? She had considered the idea several times before and always dismissed it. She understood how the nanorobots worked, at least in theory. If something went monumentally wrong, it could cause failure of the nanorobots to obtain data, headache, stroke, damage to brain tissue, or infection. Hijacking a bus required deliberate and cold calculation.

Susan’s Vox buzzed. She stiffened suddenly, nearly wrenching several muscles. Jumpier than I realized. Susan glanced at the display as she activated the voice function. “This is Susan Calvin.” The call came from Ari Goldman’s private Vox.

“Susan, what happened?”

Peters’ more mellow baritone cut in. “How are you, Susan? Are you all right?”

Susan smiled. “I’m fine, really. Just tired and a bit shaken. My date shielded me, and I’m not physically hurt at all.”

“The neurosurgery resident at the scene?”

“That’s the one.”

“I thought those guys were all inconsiderate jerks.”

Susan laughed. “This one missed his narcissism classes, I guess. He’s a keeper.”

“What happened?” Goldman said again, louder. “Did our patient really take a busload of people hostage, then blow it up?”

Susan nodded, though the men could not see her. She refused to activate visuals from bed. “He did. Luckily, he let us off first.”

“Why?”

Surprised by the question, Susan hesitated.

Peters spoke first. “I think he means why did he bring a bomb onto a bus, not why didn’t he murder you all. At least, I hope that’s what he means.”

“Sure,” Goldman said.

Susan did not have an answer for either question, but the second one had not intrigued her until that moment. Either way, she did not know exactly how to answer. “I imagine he was suffering some sort of schizophrenic break.”

“Damn!” Ari Goldman said loudly.

Susan did not know what to make of that, either. She knew Dr. Goldman tended to get caught up in the research and not consider the human element, but he had a good heart.

Before anyone else could speak, he explained himself. “Can you imagine what we could have learned if we had those nanorobots from his brain? It could revolutionize psychiatry!”