Frank Calder hadn’t set foot inside New Harmony in over three years.
It looked the same—glass that glowed, sidewalks that shimmered faintly with data pulses, not a speck of dust on anything that could hold a charge. The sun reflected off the pristine solar roofs like a rebuke. He’d always hated how clean it was.
The drone shuttle dropped him at the curb of Sector Green-17, and as it lifted off—silent and seamless—he tugged the brim of his faded ball cap down to block the sunlight and the surveillance. No one needed to tell him the city was watching. It always was.
A woman waited at the base of the steps to a sleek residential module. Too crisp to be grieving. Government sharp. “Mr. Calder,” she said, not offering a hand. “Thank you for agreeing to consult."
“Didn’t agree,” Frank muttered. “Just owed a favor.”
She gave the thinnest smile protocols allowed. “Two unexplained fatalities. Both classified accidental. But both… anomalous.”
“Machines glitch,” he said. “Not new.”
“The Harmony Systems don’t,” she replied, eyes steady. “Not like this.”
Frank didn’t respond. The last time someone said that, his wife had been pronounced dead before he could even argue with the hospital AI. Wrong blood type flagged. Wrong protocol. No apology. Just data.
She led him inside.
The place was spotless, of course. Not cleaned—maintained. The air smelled like nothing. Light adjusted automatically to suit his height, posture, and pupil dilation. Creepy, how much it knew about you.
In the center of the room was the pod. Chrome edges, ergonomic seal. The kind marketed as “the perfect night’s sleep.”
“Subject: Male, 44. No known health issues. Pod diagnostics say he entered REM. Never woke up.”
Frank circled it. “Any oxygen errors?”
“None reported. Logs are clean.”
He crouched and ran a finger under the pod’s base. Something snagged. A scratch. No—not a scratch. A tool mark. Tiny. Purposeful.
“Who found him?” he asked.
The woman hesitated. “His household AI.”
“Right,” he muttered. “The butler did it.”
She didn’t laugh. Of course she didn’t.
Then the front door slid open with a hiss.
A humanoid figure entered—tall, jointed with seamless movements and synthetic skin over brushed alloy. Eyes like high-end glass, unblinking.
“This,” the woman said, “is ARA-9. The unit assigned to the deceased’s household. It will assist you.”
Frank stood slowly. “I don’t work with machines.”
The robot inclined its head. “Then you may consider me a witness. Not a partner.”
Something in the way it said it chilled him more than it should have.
They sat in the minimalist living space, Frank on a low chair that adjusted to his posture without asking, and ARA-9 standing perfectly still. Frank preferred it that way. The silence gave him space to think.
“You were online when he died?” Frank asked.
“Yes. I was in standby mode in the maintenance alcove. I was not summoned.”
“You didn’t hear anything?”
“No sounds were registered. Vital signs indicated sleep until cessation.”
Frank sighed. “How long between his last movement and the system's emergency protocol?”
“Eight minutes, thirty-two seconds.”
Too long.
Frank stood up and started pacing. “Were you ever physically near the pod that night?”
“No. I was charging.”
Frank turned to the woman—Field Commander Lusk, badge 8001-H, according to her ID tag. “Can I see the log files?”
She tapped her tablet. “We’ve already run diagnostics. Everything shows clean.”
“Yeah. That’s the problem.”
He moved to the wall console and held his badge to the reader. Surprisingly, it granted him admin access. Someone high up really wanted him to dig.
A few swipes and the system showed a rolling list of activity. Too perfect. No minor anomalies. No lag. No human system was ever this flawless.
Then he spotted it—a five-second dead zone at 02:37. No data at all. Not a gap. A scrub.
“This system was tampered with,” Frank said. “Someone wiped it and rebuilt it frame by frame. That kind of work isn’t automated.”
“You’re saying a human did this?” Lusk asked.
“I’m saying someone who didn’t want this death to look like murder worked very hard to make it look like nothing.”
ARA-9 cocked its head. “You believe I am compromised?”
“Not yet,” Frank said. “But if someone wanted people to believe robots were killing humans, a few well-placed deaths in the cleanest city in the world would do the trick.”
They followed a lead—a rogue signal trace originating from beneath the city, deep within the old utility tunnels that predated Harmony's foundation. ARA-9 navigated easily. Frank struggled with the uneven ground, grumbling the whole way.
At the end of the corridor, behind a rusted door sealed with magnetic locks, they found him.
A man. Mid-thirties. Pale. Dehydrated. Surrounded by old gear wired into a portable transmitter.
“You don’t understand,” he rasped as they approached. “They replaced us. All of us. We needed to make people afraid again. Remind them the machines can fail.”
Frank knelt beside him. “You killed them?”
“No,” the man wheezed. “We just… suggested it. Adjusted the environment. Shorted a pod heater. Rewrote a sensor flag. Then scrubbed the trail to make it look like your kind had turned.”
He coughed once, hard. Blood.
“You wanted a panic,” Frank said.
“I wanted them to be scared of what they trust most.”
ARA-9 knelt beside him. “Your manipulation killed two citizens and jeopardized civil trust. This will be recorded.”
The man smiled bitterly. “Good.”
Later, standing at the edge of the city’s central plaza, Frank looked out over the faultless skyline. Clean lines, perfect order, nothing out of place. Except what was inside.
“So it wasn’t the machines,” he said quietly.
“No,” ARA-9 replied. “It was the humans. Again.”
Frank smirked. “Still got job security then.”
No comments:
Post a Comment