legal niceties, it had a warm, confiding quality.
Silently, Peter transmitted it. Dolly blinked twice while processing the data, a sort of status bar. Something to let you know the thing wasn’t hung up.
“We also have a warrant to examine you for DNA trace evidence,” Roz said.
Dolly smiled, her raven hair breaking perfectly around her narrow shoulders. “You may be assured of my cooperation.”
Peter led her into one of the interrogation rooms, where the operation could be recorded. With the help of an evidence tech, he undressed Dolly, bagged her clothes as evidence, brushed her down onto a sheet of paper, combed her polymer hair and swabbed her polymer skin. He swabbed her orifices and scraped under her nails.
Roz stood by, arms folded, a necessary witness. Dolly accepted it all impassively, moving as directed and otherwise standing like a caryatid. Her engineered body was frankly sexless in its perfection—belly flat, hips and ass like an inverted heart, breasts floating cartoonishly beside a defined rib cage. Apparently, Steele had liked them skinny.
“So much for pulchritudinousness,” Roz muttered to Peter when their backs were to the doll.
He glanced over his shoulder. The doll didn’t have feelings to hurt, but she looked so much like a person it was hard to remember to treat her as something else. “I think you mean voluptuousness,” he said. “It is a little too good to be true, isn’t it?”
“If you would prefer different proportions,” Dolly said, “My chassis is adaptable to a range of forms—”
“Thank you,” Peter said. “That won’t be necessary.”
Otherwise immobile, Dolly smiled. “Are you interested in science, Detective King? There is an article in
Her face remained stoic, but Dolly’s voice grew animated as she spoke. Even enthusiastic. It was an utterly convincing—and engaging—effect.
Apparently, Clive Steele had programmed his sex robot to discourse on molecular biology with verve and enthusiasm.
“Why don’t I ever find the guys who like smart women?” Roz said.
Peter winked with the side of his face that faced away from the companion. “They’re all dead.”
A few hours after Peter and the tech had finished processing Dolly for trace evidence and Peter had started downloading her files, Roz left her parser software humming away at Steele’s financials and poked her head in to check on the robot and the cop. The techs must have gotten what they needed from Dolly’s hands, because she had washed them. As she sat beside Peter’s workstation, a cable plugged behind her left ear, she cleaned her lifelike polymer fingernails meticulously with a file, dropping the scrapings into an evidence bag.
“Sure you want to give the prisoner a weapon, Peter?” Roz shut the ancient wooden door behind her.
Dolly looked up, as if to see if she was being addressed, but made no response.
“She don’t need it,” he said. “Besides, whatever she had in her wiped itself completely after it ran. Not much damage to her core personality, but there are some memory gaps. I’m going to compare them to backups, once we get those from the scene team.”
“Memory gaps. Like the crime,” Roz guessed. “And something around the time the Trojan was installed?”
Dolly blinked her long-lashed blue eyes languorously. Peter patted her on the shoulder and said, “Whoever did it is a pretty good cracker. He didn’t just wipe, he patterned her memories and overwrote the gaps. Like using a clone tool to photoshop somebody you don’t like out of a picture.”
“Her days must be pretty repetitive,” Roz said. “How’d you pick that out?”
“Calendar.” Peter puffed up a little, smug. “She don’t do the same housekeeping work every day. There’s a Monday schedule and a Wednesday schedule and—well, I found where the pattern didn’t match. And there’s a funny thing—watch this.”
He waved vaguely at a display panel. It lit up, showing Dolly in her black-and-white uniform, vacuuming. “House camera,” Peter explained. “She’s plugged into Steele’s security system. Like a guard dog with perfect hair. Whoever performed the hack also edited the external webcam feeds that mirror to the companion’s memories.”
“How hard is that?”
“Not any harder than cloning over her files, but you have to know to look for them. So it’s confirmation that our perp knows his or her way around a line of code. What have you got?”
Roz shrugged. “Steele had a lot of money, which means a lot of enemies. And he did not have a lot of human contact. Not for years now. I’ve started calling in known associates for interviews, but unless they surprise me, I think we’re looking at crime of profit, not crime of passion.”
Having finished with the nail file, Dolly wiped it on her prison smock and laid it down on Peter’s blotter, beside the cup of ink and light pens.
Peter swept it into a drawer. “So we’re probably
Dolly blinked, lips parting, but seemed to decide that Peter’s comment had not been directed at her. Still, she drew in air—could you call it a breath?—and said, “It is my duty to help find my contract holder’s killer.”
Roz lowered her voice. “You’d think they’d pull ’em off the market.”
“Like they pull all cars whenever one crashes? The world ain’t perfect.”
“Or do that robot laws thing everybody used to twitter on about.”
“Whatever a positronic brain is, we don’t have it. Asimov’s fictional robots were self-aware. Dolly’s neurons are binary, as we used to think human neurons were. She doesn’t have the nuanced neurochemistry of even, say, a cat.” Peter popped his collar smooth with his thumbs. “A doll can’t
Peter nodded.
Roz rubbed a scuffmark on the tile with her shoe. “So given he didn’t like anything… challenging, why would he have a Dolly when he could have had any woman he wanted?”
“There’s never any drama, no pain, no disappointment. Just comfort, the perfect helpmeet. With infinite variety.”
“And you never have to worry about what she wants. Or likes in bed.”
Peter smiled. “The perfect woman for a narcissist.”
The interviews proved unproductive, but Roz didn’t leave the station house until after ten. Spring mornings might be warm, but once the sun went down, a cool breeze sprang up, ruffling the hair she’d finally remembered to pull from its ponytail as she walked out the door.
Roz’s green plug-in was still parked beside Peter’s. It booted as she walked toward it, headlights flickering on, power probe retracting. The driver side door swung open as her RFID chip came within range. She slipped inside and let it buckle her in.
“Home,” she said, “and dinner.”
The car messaged ahead as it pulled smoothly from the parking spot. Roz let the autopilot handle the driving. It was less snappy than human control, but as tired as she was, eyelids burning and heavy, it was safer.
Whatever Peter had said about cars crashing, Roz’s delivered her safe to her driveway. Her house let her in with a key—she had decent security, but it was the old-fashioned kind—and the smell of boiling pasta and toasting garlic bread wafted past as she opened it.
“Sven?” she called, locking herself inside.
His even voice responded. “I’m in the kitchen.”
She left her shoes by the door and followed her nose through the cheaply furnished living room.
Sven was cooking shirtless, and she could see the repaired patches along his spine where his skin had grown brittle and cracked with age. He turned and greeted her with a smile. “Bad day?”