If you think I’m saying this with any shock or offense, let me put that out of your mind. As I had made clear already, I didn’t trust Fin as far as I, with my non-enhanced appendages, could throw him. I knew he was being selective with his story, but as long as he had been straight enough I didn’t care if his actual motive went beyond embarrassing a friend.
And I didn’t see any reason to worry about what his ‘friend’ would do when the prank or whatever was pulled, because I know a thing or two about covering my tracks, okay?
So when a rhino in size 16s kicked in the door of my apartment/shop, there were a lot of possibilities running through my mind about why they were there, but Fin was low on the list.
“Are you Tracy Zhang?”
I was halfway through my second cup of coffee, and my door being broken down woke me up more than any amount of caffeine would, but my brain couldn’t get its shit organized fast enough for me to at least try to lie.
“It’s her,” the second man coming into my apartment, squeezing behind the rhino, said. Taller and lankier, he had a chrome-plated tablet in his hand; no protective rubber on it, this was a regular consumer product. And not a cheap one, it looked like.
Their suits didn’t come off the rack, either, least not any rack in 0B. Black, simple design, but looking very nice, not a hint of the grime or smog even tourists came to curse after a day or two in town.
The rhino leaned over to check the second man’s tablet, his eyes never leaving me, then he stood up straight again.
“You did a job for one Ernesto Gutierrez,” the first man said. Question time was paused. The second man turned his tablet around, presenting a candid street photo of Fin. “You created a program intended to be uploaded to robos outfitted with bulk-morphing enhancements, overriding their preset limitations and triggering full-body expansions of an uncommon size.”
“I also included a protocol for the robos to monitor the vitals of their… john. Or jane.” These men weren’t cops, they would have made that clear first thing (or just hauled me off to the nearest precinct), so demanding a lawyer was a waste of time. And lying wasn’t going to earn me anything except a broken nose or bruised ribs (probably the former, because a stealth visit would have ruled out kicking my door down). “If something happened to your friend it was an unintended consequence of my program.”
Was there any value in trying to deflect my part in whatever had riled up the person or persons who had sent these two? I could tell they were enforcers, so they had limited agency when it came to how to treat me. If they’d been told to turn me to hash, that’s what they would do. But I wasn’t about to beg for mercy and as I said, lying was out.
If I had any thread of a hope it was in laying out my case. Maybe, possibly, a lack of intent for whatever happened to happen would get me out of the worst scenario being plotted for me.
“We know,” the second man said, which didn’t make me any more or less anxious. “We saw plenty of edits to the code we extracted from the robos, Gutierrez didn’t try to hide it. Though we haven’t figured out what the code was supposed to do originally. I mean, as my friend said it was to trigger a full-body expansion, but what did you think it was for?”
“I…” Here’s me thinking the truth was going to sound like a lie. An obvious lie, a bad lie. But any lie I could think of wasn’t going to be more plausible, so… “I was told by Fi- Gutierrez that his friend had a thing for fat women. That a couple robos in their house were actually sexbots kept around to pleasure them whenever they wanted. He asked me to whip up a program that would make them grow as fat as possible next time their expansion was activated.”
The rhino looked at the second man, actually taking his eyes off me. They silently debated if I was lying.
“The boss does have a sense of humor,” the taller man said.
“Boss isn’t doing any laughing right now,” rhino retorted.
“No, but I think he’ll find something in this story to amuse himself. Let’s bring her in.”
“I think that’s a waste of time.”
“No, you just want to break a number of bones, puncture a lung, and call it a day. But I’m saying we’re taking her in. She’s worth more to the boss in one piece than as a warning.”
He turned back to me.
“There’s a car waiting outside. You can come quietly, peacefully, or we can drag your unconscious body to it.”
Of course I went under my own power.
The car was sleek and well-polished, just as out of place in this town as the men’s suits. But it didn’t stand out for long. As soon as we were inside, me sitting on the bench back to back with the driver (hidden by an opaque and probably bulletproof window) and the two of them facing me, the car rose straight into the air, cleared the skyline of my neighborhood, and flew off.
I couldn’t see where we were going, but fortunately the silence in the back of the car was interrupted by the lankier of the two gentlemen.
“Since you’re no doubt curious about your predicament, and to prevent you wasting our employer’s time with the usual ‘I didn’t do anything wrong, I never knew’ theatrics, watch this.”
He held his tablet out to me, a video captured by a security camera primed to play.
It was an office. Not like in an office building, I could just tell this was part of a mansion. A man in a suit was walking around in front of a pair of closed double-doors. He was talking on a phone, but the video was silent.
Flanking the door were two men. No, robos. The picture was too grainy and distant to tell at first, but after a couple seconds the robos stood erect – even more erect than they had been – their heads tilting back in that thing all robos do when they’re downloading something.
Then they grew bigger. Not fatter, like the program I had written would have commanded, but beefier, more muscled. In a couple seconds the two turned into a pair of walking HGH advertisements, their clothing ripping around their backs, biceps and thighs.
I had told Fin – Gutierrez – that activated gel wasn’t much heavier than inert, and there weren’t any enhancements to a robo besides the cosmetic. So I had to chide myself for expecting the two hulking security robos to pummel the man into red paste or rip his arms off or something.
No, they just grabbed him in a two-sided bear hug and smothered him. Obviously my safety protocols had been removed as part of whatever changes Gutierrez had done to the program. With their bodybuilder physiques they were more than big enough to trap their former charge and squish his head between their chests. I could see one arm flailing wildly, his legs kicking, but after several seconds that stopped.
The security bots didn’t let him go, even after several seconds.
Part of me wanted to ask who he was, the rest of me decided it didn’t matter. Probably the boss of these two men, and now whoever had replaced him was on a revenge kick. That was the simplest answer.
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