As if walking his beat like there wasn’t a ticking time bomb sitting in the back of his head was awful enough on a good day, walking that same beat with a camera on legs recording his every physical movement was going to be agony.
Kal had selected easy jobs that wouldn’t take them anywhere near Lang’s coffee shop, but Nines’ alien presence still made his skin itch.
Ground rules had to be established fast. After they were free and clear of the precinct's eyes and ears, Kal beelined for the tram and opted for a two seater. It meant Nines and his knees would have to be meshed together for the trip. Nines stared at him before the tram minder buzzed over and silently ordered the bot to board or buzz off to make way for other commuters. Nines waved it away and boarded.
Kal smirked. “Shy?” he texted.
Nines chuckled out loud, but didn't reply. Instead, he spoke in his Edgelander drawl, “So, here I thought you were the one in deep cover or something, but I was wrong. You're…”
“What?” Kal prompted.
“A person who protects his friends.”
“Nines, I need you to stop following me when I'm on crew rest.”
The Medji didn’t hesitate. “Can do, Chief.”
That was easy. “And stop calling me that.”
Nines didn't agree or disagree outright. “Prob’ly f’the best. Anyone sees me ‘round your turf again, it could endanger the real UC. You, for your part, blend in like a chameleon. It’s impressive. Who knows you’re Medji?”
“Real UC? Do you even know what a chameleon is?”
Nines hummed with amusement at all his deflection, dropping an image of a colorful lizard into their private feed. Then, he said, “I don't like it, Jack. I like truth. So I don't like being an enforcer.”
Kal took a second to pick up on that errant thread. They were clearly having three different conversations, but Nines made it easy to hop from subject to subject. “Enforcers uncover the truth,” he said blandly. “Wait, is that why they keep calling you Inspector Refurb’?”
“I think it's cute. Better than shit-can or it. Those are demoralizing… MEs enforce someone else's idea of the truth. We're bullies and we're weapons. We look dashing on postcards and calendars, standing behind politicians. We make wicked villains. Look at me. Not exactly built to save kittens from trees, am I? So, no, to answer your question. I don't like it. I'd rather help people.”
“You are helping people.”
“Not the ones I want to help.”
“Who do you want to help?”
“People who need saving.”
“People can't be saved from themselves.”
“That's not what the law says.”
Kal was finding it difficult to argue with him, not because he couldn’t keep up, but because the bot was insistent about things that weren’t objective facts. It was difficult to argue logic when it came to feelings. He gestured at Nines’ whole him with a wave. “At the end of the day, you don't really have a choice. You can't be content with that? Do like humans do and take a page outta the Keeper's Handbook.”
“Which one?”
“Serenity.” I think it was Serenity. Or was it Apathy?
Nines laughed. “So I should be serene while I'm being abused? Would you be?”
Kal thought about that. Abused? I’ve never had a bot disagree with the treatment its received… but, to be fair, I’ve never really complained about anything outside of my control. Maybe I should start. Waa! Waa! Dystopian future-core society! Waa! Waa! Capitalism! Waa! Fascism! Boohoo... See? Useless. I’ll do drugs instead.
The bound Medji sniffed and wondered under his breath, “Maybe it was the Book of Apathy instead.” Nines snorted with mirth, which made him brave enough to ask, “Why did Unity program you to have preferences? Wouldn't that just make you miserable in the end?”
“Why was Cassandra cursed?”
“Cassandra?” Now Kal was lost.
Nines shook his head to forget it and asked instead, “Why did the Universe make human beings so perfect, but then give them crippling imposter syndrome?”
That made Kal giggle. “Humans are absolutely not perfect.” See personnel profile: Jackal.
Nines sent him an amused emoticon. “Y'really should lay off the good stuff right before reporting.”
Kal could feel his face begin to hurt from all his smiling. “You're not my boss.”
“But you're mine, Mate. You're responsible for me. And I intend to take after you. Y’really want that, Mate? A bipedal weapons platform wobblin’ ‘round with its ocular group screwed on backwards?”
“I don’t wobble, and you're not just a weapon.”
Nines couldn’t read his biometrics, but he sounded convinced as he declared, “You mean that.”
To illustrate his point, Kal pulled up Nines’ published schematics, the ones accessible in their Dissolution Group-made database, and uncompressed all the different modules assigned to him by Stock. Yes, Nines did have sixteen different combat class carrier packages, but he also had that aforementioned social relations module, a handful of drone-control macros, and several medical sims as well (which was news to Kal, but made sense given Nines’ concern over his physical wellbeing).
He absently wondered if Nines’ desire to help people stemmed from that bit of code, or from the social module’s bleed-over effect. Unity-made learning systems were alien compared to the machine learning Disso was still actively developing. And since the end of the war between those death-merchant entities, with Unity’s code development coming to a stand-still, everyone who knew anything about the technology was convinced it would be outclassed by contemporary work within the next ten cycle-cycles… or would eventually learn itself in obsolescence through damages that couldn’t be repaired or VCD, voluntary code death—a new, suicidal phenomenon that only affected Unity systems.
Nines went quiet. The ambient hum of the magnetized tram and the mechanized noises of the station beyond its guardrails overtook their private world for a moment.
Then the bot said, “Well… This is different.”
“What’s different?”
“You're sweet on me.”
Ew. Kal rolled his eyes. “Who's the real undercover?”
Kal didn't know if he actually wanted to know, but it did explain why Macaw hadn't exactly minded that he'd been among gangsters. Maybe Macaw had really been fishing for the higher-ups all along, trying to bait Kal into revealing who their operative was. To what end though? If that operative was in Lang’s pack, didn't that mean the precinct knew Kal was on the take?
Ah. If the precinct pursued indicting him, they would have to pull the UC for testimony.
The fact that he was still walking his beat for the time being meant Kal wasn't the undercover guy's ultimate target. That was comforting in a way, but it made him wonder what else Lang's boys were involved with besides information brokering and racketeering.
But… if it had something to do with the frack in Kal's head, that meant that Wolf was the UC. Kal didn't want to entertain that possibility.
Nines laughed. “You’ll figure it out.”
The response didn’t annoy Kal, much to his own surprise, and so they fell into companionable silence as the transport sped along to their destination.
When they returned to the precinct, Scythe-Bravo made a comment about Kal’s drastically improved metrics. “And you even got someone to actually file a comment card for once.” He’d apparently shocked the dispatcher, which in turn annoyed him.
“I am capable of doing my job every now and then,” he griped. Internally, he admitted to himself that Nines may have done a majority of the schmoozing while he ran interference with any technophobes they encountered. For the first time in nearly five years of walking Blue Side’s Section 11, nothing of consequence had happened. He fixed parking meters, serviced a street sentry near a dive bar, dealt with a teenage vandal that had retrofitted a security drone to blare heavy Janda music, and helped Enforcer-10 disable a malfunctioning valet robot.
The day had been a nice change of pace, which was why S-B’s incredulity had rubbed him the wrong way.
Nines suddenly said, “Proceeding, Scythe,” and broke away from Kal’s side, heading toward the docking area for their metal Medji. Kal pinged his job queue and saw that Bravo had dispatched him back to the charging station for an unscheduled diagnostic.
“Officer-3 said you’re good to take off,” the Scythe said.
Kal frowned. “I’ve still got another two hours. I can—”
“You’re dismissed, Technician.”
“Ooo-kay.” He took off his helmet and swiped at his PC, hoping to see a notification that he might have missed, but he didn’t see anything. “I guess…”
Scythe-Bravo canted their head toward him, dragging wires across the top of their terminal. “Usually you’d be dashing back to Stock to turn in your bag by now.”
“Well, yeah.” Kal fidgeted with his helmet. With a couple finger gestures hidden from S-B’s line of sight, he pried open Stock’s maintenance log and downloaded the latest from their database. “I just figured he’d wanna get the most out of this new set-up.”
“Officer-3 isn’t dumb. He doesn’t want you to get burned out.”
“Right,” Kal agreed dubiously.
“Jackal.”
Scythe-Bravo rarely used his casual moniker, so he almost snapped to attention as he asked, “Yes?”
“Go home.”
“Right. Yeah. Home.”
“Don’t forget to clock out!”
“Right."
[To Be Continued 2AUG25]
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