“He’s got a fucking robot in there,” Caleb Mathieson was saying from out in the squad room.
Kir said, “We could let him come.”
“No,” Laughton snapped. He stood up, and went to the door. The three men were heading out the front.
The text came through a second later. The meeting was at the national cemetery in Beaufort. “We’re on our way to Beaufort,” he said to Kir, opening the contact list on his phone. “I better check in with Tommy Tantino first. He’s chief of police down there.”
“All right.”
Tantino picked up himself. “Police?”
“They have you answering phones out there now?” Laughton said.
“Jesse. Jesus. You sure hit the jackpot. What’s happening?”
It was real concern in Tantino’s voice. They’d spoken over the phone a few times in the last nine months and met in person twice, and Jesse really liked him. Former New York City police, a good guy. “I’m on my way onto your turf. Meeting an informant. Hacker. Based out your way.”
“Name?” Tantino said.
“Just an online handle: Crisper. I was hoping you could tell me more.”
“Means nothing to me. Can’t think who that would be.”
“You got names for any of your hackers?” Laughton said.
“I treat that as ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ ” Tantino said. “I know there’s some sims business, but I’m busy enough worrying about local crime to worry about that. We’ve got a couple of groups that like to fight when they’re drunk, which is always. I think it’s just entertainment for them.”
That sounded about right, Laughton thought.
“You want some backup while you’re here?” Tantino said.
“I don’t want to scare the guy off,” Laughton said. “It’s got to be me.”
“I hear you,” Tantino said. “This murder sucks. Puts everyone on edge.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Place was a beautiful dream, wasn’t it? Guess we should have expected a wake-up call.”
“Drinking and fighting’s not much of a dream.”
“Small price for kids playing with other kids.”
Laughton tried to measure the two against each other. He wasn’t sure the math worked out. “I guess we can only hope they’ll learn a different way,” he said, thinking about Betty and her school.
“All we’ve got is the future,” Tantino said.
“Plenty of ways to muck it up today.”
There was a pause as both men thought about that. Jesse wondered when he had gotten so cynical. One of his main gripes with his father was the way he disparaged Jesse’s optimism. But in this case, maybe it was evidence that the preserve had been a dream, and that robots were not humanity’s problem. It was each other.
“We just do our best,” Tantino said.
“What else you going to do?” Laughton said.
“Well, Jesse,” Tantino said, “you let me know if you need any help.”
“Will do.”
“Call anytime.”
“Thanks, Tommy.” Laughton broke the call. To Kir, he said, “He’s got our back if we need him.”
“We’re going to be late for Erica,” Kir said.
“Half hour there, half hour back, maybe an hour with the informant: should be plenty of time before picking up Erica.”
“Just as long as you tell Betty I tried to tell you.”
“I’m ignoring you,” Laughton said, heading out the door.
“I’m not the one you have to worry about,” Kir said.
“Are you kidding?” Laughton said. “I’m worried about everybody.”
Beaufort had remained the picture of a southern town from several hundred years ago, the robots having turned it into a tourist destination, cultivating an image as Charleston’s little brother. Large houses with screened-in porches fronted marshland. A historically preserved, brick downtown, built long ago around what was once an important harbor, had persisted, right up to the opening of the preserve, as a vibrant commercial center. Old robots, as they found themselves phased out, had congregated there, creating a quaint community that had added to the town’s charm. The town had also been home to one of the larger human populations on the East Coast, a result of the military’s former presence, a training camp and air base nearby. Unsurprisingly, the elderly robots were the ones who had been most resistant to relocation for the creation of the preserve, and their human neighbors had even argued for a dispensation, or more radically, to have the preserve’s borderline drawn around the town. But it had proven too good an opportunity for the government to squeeze the elderly, seen as pathetic sponges by most of society, and many of the aged robots had chosen deactivation over relocation.
The cemetery was on Boundary Street, which must at one time in the distant past have been the northernmost road in town. Now if it served as a boundary at all, it was only between the northern and southern parts of town. A long, low brick wall ran along the street, protecting the dead from wayward visitors, or perhaps protecting any children walking by from imagined terrors. It was a national military cemetery, stark and imposing. The uniform white pillars that marked the graves were laid out in orderly rows, which played optical illusions as the truck drove by, almost like a Hoberman sphere, seeming to come together, expand outward, and come together again as the pillars lined up at different angles. The main entrance was flanked by two stone reliefs of the Seal of the United States, the self-divided bald eagle perpetually caught between war and peace. In the center of the road, a flagpole flew a worn, sun-bleached US flag at the customary half-mast.
Laughton took manual control of the truck, guiding it at a crawl up and down the roads that cut through the burial ground. He had never been in a cemetery before. Ever since the first plague, all humans were cremated. Looking at the vast number of monuments spread out around him now, it was hard to associate them with actual people. It was like an antiseptic garden filled with indifferent flora, pretty, but not particularly interesting to him. The noise of at least two lawn mowers driving themselves invisibly among the graves challenged the cemetery’s silent gravity. He tried to make out his quarry, but nobody was visible anywhere.
“Getting anything?” Laughton asked Kir. The robot’s thermal vision would see the hacker, even if he was hiding behind one of the many trees interspersed with the graves. Robots ran hot only in the head or the torso, but humans ran hot all over.
“No,” the robot said.
Laughton checked the forwarded text from Crisper again. “He said the cemetery. And we’re on time. Should I text him?”
“Give him time,” Kir said.
The truck came to a sudden stop as what Laughton first took to be a bird almost hit the windshield. As it flitted around to the driver’s-side window, Laughton saw that it was a quadcopter the size of a sparrow. “Goddamn it,” Laughton said, mostly at the shock of having the truck’s auto-safety measures wrest control of the truck from him. “Fucking idiot.”
The drone hovered outside his window, a quarter-inch, spherical camera mounted to the top of the copter taking his measure before flying around to take a look at Kir.