Take our keynames, for instance. They’re not just a way of distinguishing us at a glance; they are expressions of our individuality that sometimes extend even to our appearance. As a fan of crime novels and especially those of Raymond Chandler, I always wear a trench coat and a broad-brimmed hat like Humphrey Bogart’s. Like Philip Marlowe must have worn. Zorro wore a Cordovan sombrero, a mask, and a black cape to go with his sword and whip. Achilles had his plumed helmet, breastplate, greaves, lance, and shield. Arnold Stallone wears a leather jacket with rivets and dark glasses, after the Terminator. Mao Castro never takes off his khaki Red Guard uniform from Cultural Revolution times. And so on, all of us. It isn’t as boring and monotonous as uniforms would be (not that some aliens wouldn’t prefer that), but it serves almost the same function: anywhere in the station, if you run into a humanoid who looks like he’s stayed up late at a costume party, there’s no question, he’s one of us.
We pozzies are very democratic. No vertical military structures for us. We don’t have ranks. When one of us shows himself to be particularly skillful, judicial, and trustworthy, he’s given the honor of choosing a secondname. I suppose it’s a trivial thing and doesn’t make any difference, but I’ve always wanted one.
Why should I want anything more?
But our positronic brains are as far as our kinship goes with our virtual predecessors, the Good Doctor’s literary creations. No Three Laws of Robotics for us. Especially nothing about protecting humans at any cost. We have free will. We get bored, we have fun, some of us even fall in love (it’s never happened to me; I think it’s an aberrant sado-maso absurdity—as I’ve mentioned, we have no sex organs—and anyway, not many pozzies go for a female key-identity: the macho police tradition is hard to escape, I guess). There even was a Chacumbele who killed himself, and a George III who went mad.
It all comes with the job. We’re pretty stable, psychologically speaking. Anyway, as we like to say: maybe our lives and our intelligence are artificial, but our existence, our feelings, and our problems are completely real.
With computers for brains, our memories never fail us. We can mentally calculate 329 to the nth in an instant, whatever good that does us. What makes us special isn’t the number of calculations per second we can perform; it’s that, as true living beings, we can function in analogical mode, not logically alone. Make deductions based on insufficient data, self-induce flexible rules of conduct in ourselves, and so on.
Not belonging to any side, we should supposedly be fair and impartial judges and executioners. But even though we couldn’t be what we are without the aliens’ cybernetic technology, we all feel much closer to human beings than to our “cerebral parents.” Maybe it’s because we have free access to all of human history, psychology, and art, whereas we can only access similar data from the three alien races when they deem it useful.
Which is almost never.
Who are we, where did we come from, where are we going? That’s no problem for us. It’s good to know the answer to what humans call the universal questions. We are police officers, we must maintain order, we’re happy when we succeed; if the brain circuitry in our torsos gets destroyed we disappear, leaving only a memory of us—that’s the whole meaning of our lives. The only deep question I sometimes ponder is: What am I? Do I owe this unique, inimitable Raymond, so different from Ivan Stalin or Miyamoto, which I so enjoy being, entirely to the aliens’ detailed programming? Or does free will—or something else—really exist?
I don’t know if I’ll ever find the answer. I don’t know if there is an answer.
In any case, even in the middle of our most abstruse philosophical musings we never forget that the aliens are the ones who are in control. Tough luck to any police officer who does forget. There’s only one punishment and one fear for us: a personality wipe. Our bosses have only resorted to this ultima ratio regum once. The other stuff they do, like changing our postings or temporarily suspending us, are just administrative measures.
Meanwhile, so long as our brain casings are intact, we’re immortal. Though sometimes we have to have a new limb or system installed.
If there’s anything we run short of on the Burroughs, it’s replacement parts.
I wonder what Zorro and Achilles must have thought when they felt the impact of the microwave beam. When they realized they were about to disappear.
If they had time to think anything at all, that is.
Four
Anyway. Getting back to the story.
Or the chaos. The Burroughs was buzzing like a hornet’s nest after a brat throws a rock at it.
Of course it was. An alien, dead. An alien from one of the powerful, respected races. A Grodo, no less. (His pheromonal name, translated into Standard Anglo-Hispano, would be something like Vigilante Fixer of Alien Carroña Who Is Never Taken por Sorpresa, though the events of the day proved that moniker to be… inadequate.) The entire insectoid community was in an uproar, demanding that the responsible parties pay in blood or lymph or brake fluid, they didn’t care which, so long as they paid it all, immediately.
Turns out none of the perps stuck around to let the Colossaurs tear them to shreds, or the Cetians mutilate them, or the Grodos turn them into living incubators for their cute carnivorous larvae—quaint custom, that. Makrow 34, Giorgio Weekman, and the Colossaur (we never did get an ID on him; the brass from Colossa aren’t keen on divulging data about their people) had taken off
