The Robot and the One You Love | Page 5

might choose and so have untraceable means. Jerome, Connie, and the diener might have to move in a hurry, and in an almost pure credit economy, cash in any significant amount would attract unwanted attention.
Jerome wanted to buy a rose from the old woman, but she had gone.
Nighttime is usually when the deal goes down, so Jerome wasn't surprised when he heard the message relay chirping around three A M Coming in through electronic dead drops in Europe, switched through the West Coast, it was I.G. Biochemie's reply. Then came an unexpected series of nonsense syllables. Jerome was wondering what they would have encrypted and why, when the system alarm went off--beeps and screams laced with urgent subsonics, the kind of message your central nervous system knows it never wants to hear.
Then there was FATAL ERROR on every screen, words that died even as he looked, as the machines were burned down to the ROM level, "eaten by the weasel" it was called, and Jerome had never seen it done--had not believed really that it could be done. But there it was: a whole system trashed, chips fried, CROME disks and WORM memories wiped.
The diener's bulbous front poked through the door with Connie just behind. "What's up?" she said. "What's wrong?"
"Grab what you've got," Jerome said. "But make it quick."
The door slid sideways as the elevator sighed to a stop at the first floor, and the stocky, sallow-faced man in a dark suit who waited just outside pulled his coat back and took a Colt Magnamatic from an upside-down shoulder holster.
There was an electric crackle, and the man collapsed. A small silver dart high on his left cheek led along a nearly invisible wire to a port in the diener's nose.
"Nice work," Connie said.
Jerome said, "A man's got a right to defend his property." Flip, cool, false: more shock than anything. Jerome was already much deeper into bad shit than he'd ever dreamed of being. Connie was on her knees by the prone man, taking the gun from his hand. She put the dark Kevlar barrel to the man's mouth and whispered, "I ought to just kill you." Paralyzed, he looked at her through hatred and pain. "What's going on?" Jerome asked. Connie looked at him, something crazy in her eyes. "No!" the diener said, its small-voiced cry punctuated by one subsonic pop as she fired. Back spatter put red lacework on her white sleeve. Blood and fluid leaked across black-and-white tile.
"Come on," she said. "Don't just stand there, come on!"
Carrying emerald-green methamphetamines and a handful of bogus credit chips in more names than either of them could remember, they were ready to run. The rented Pontiac sat in bright morning sunshine, silver clamshell doors sprung open, ceramic engine clattering as it came up to operating temperature. Dust motes danced in the light, and Jerome stood looking at the white plastic bag emitting its soft hum. He pressed down on the trunk lid, and it hissed shut.
Somewhere in Pennsylvania, where the sky was a dull gray that filtered the light and leached the color out of rolling farmland, Jerome said, "You've got to explain that... what you did."
Connie lay with her seat back, reclining almost on top of the diener, which filled most of the rear. Her face was toward the car's ceiling, her eyes closed. "David," she said, "I had to kill him. Christ, he knew what we look like, what we were wearing... he even saw the robot, which by the way is going to be a big liability."
"Never mind that. Him or us, right?"
"That's what I'm trying to tell you."
The diener burned with a new set of perceptions. Over and over, it saw itself freezing the man with a taser dart, dropping him to the ground, and Connie Stone killing him over and over. Who is responsible, and what could I have done? it wanted to know.
They bypassed Chicago, where the black Sears Tower sat in a foul petrochemical haze, looking like home base,se for the Evil Empire. Interstate 80 had become a hot magnetic tube that sucked them along. The pilot was off, and red numbers on the dash flickered in the nineties--hopes for invisibility not forgotten exactly, just mislaid in the moment's burn.
By the next day the Midwest had been chewed up, and so had they, as the miles rolled under the Pontiac, and the chemicals they were eating fired a million tiny darts up and down their spines and dumped huge glass vats of acid into their stomachs. Jerome figured they had to stop sometime. So in Wyoming, in a shitty little town that was half neon fast-food strip and half lunar landscape, they pulled in under a clear sky that was rapidly fading into twilight and stopped at the 80 Autotel.
The diener followed