The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue Page 11

  “Not much.” Scott rarely listened to baseball.

  “You’re not a fan?”

  “Not for many years.”

  Not since he’d lost his vision and therefore most of the pleasure in watching a game. While aware that people had listened to baseball, football and other sports on the radio, going back a century or more, those people were of course not aware that they had missed anything.

  In a subconscious habit, Scott turned his head towards Betty.

  “So. Who are you going as?”

  There was a chuckle.

  “Your mother.”

  He laughed, a sour laugh but a laugh none the less.

  He hadn’t seen his family in ages. It’s not that they had abandoned him. Far from it. It was just that he had felt like a burden. In the early stages of losing his vision they were all in denial.

  There was some kind of blame-game going on there, an unspoken one, one where they kept asking stupid questions.

  Isn’t there something somebody somewhere can do?

  And the trouble was that there wasn’t. Not that they were in any position to go looking for treatment. They couldn’t deal with it any better than he had.

  The lady was speaking.

  “Okay, I want you to lean back and open your eyes very wide.”

  Scott complied, blinking uncontrollably as she dropped liquid into his eyes.

  He gasped.

  “What’s that?”

  “Okay. We’re just putting some drops in there.”

  “Ah…ah.” In for a penny, in for a pound. “What…?”

  “This is the hard part, but I’ll be very gentle. I’m going to put the contacts in now.”

  Betty explained.

  “We’re giving you some new retinas—to go with your new I.D.”

  They had to break the chain of sightings and documentations.

  Yet another person, probably the male voice in the room, grabbed him firmly by the head and held him still as the lady worked.

  New retinas. Of course. A blind man didn’t have to see through them. She’d been doing some thinking. He wondered how long that had been going on. Did she really love him or did she just need a blind man?

  Was Scott just an accessory—unfortunate word, but she was obviously holding a few things back from Scott.

  “Argh.” The first one, the left one, was in.

  It felt like someone had shoved a damned dinner plate into his eye socket.

  “Betty.”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “You and I are going to have to have a little talk.”

  The makeup artists laughed, and then Scott’s head was clamped in place by strong hands, tucked into the guy’s armpit by the smell of it. His one ear felt moist.

  “Ah—ah!”

  “It’s okay, we’re done now.”

  They were done all right, there was no way he was going to go through that again anytime soon.

  He couldn’t believe people did that to themselves out of choice.

  The lady gave him some instructions on the care and keeping of lenses, but Scott was hardly listening, completely focused on the nagging sensation in his eyes. It seemed kind of ironic, putting lenses on a blind man. He couldn’t think of a line.

  Maybe it was better left unsaid.

  His heart sank. He’d had a few ups and downs over the last few days.

  This was what he had been aching for—adventure, he told himself grimly.

  His life really had changed. It couldn’t be a whole lot worse than how his life had been so far.

  It might even be worthwhile.

  Scott was all too aware of what had been taken away from him. If truth be told he now hated sports, and even more he hated people who gushed and raved about their local sports teams as if this was any real substitute for having an actual life.

  The door latch clicked, the noise from outside got louder and someone stuck their head in.

  “How long?”

  “Two minutes.”

  “The sooner you guys are on your way, the better off everyone will be.”

  “We understand.” Betty spoke for them.

  The door closed.

  The male voice spoke.

  “Okay, hold still. We need some pictures for your ID.”

  The next step was fingerprinting him, also for the ID cards.

  So. Betty had a plan, then—and not necessarily the one they had discussed back home, before setting out. Scott hadn’t been asking enough questions. That was the price of desperation.

  More than anything, he was curious as to how all of this had been set up. He was curious as to how Betty was communicating with other robots, and especially how all of this was undetectable to the authorities.

  How much was all of this costing? How did she know where to go? How long had she been planning this?

  What did she need him for?

  That was one loaded question.

  And where was Betty getting the money? In other words, who; or how was all this being paid for?

  Expert criminal advice never came cheap.

  He knew that much from T.V.

  Scott had always found it a bit strange that they still couldn’t put photos on credit cards. The reasons were supposedly technical, which was pure bullshit. Scott had concluded that fraudulent purchases made with stolen cards were all paid for by legitimate cardholders. The price was hidden or at least, no one ever thought about it in those terms. It boosted gross sales, which was good for everybody—except perhaps for all of those legitimate cardholders. It was a volume industry, scraping along on a slim margin of forty-nine and a half percent per annum.

  ***

  The silence was funereal as Dr. Piqua snapped shut the heavy oaken slab. One or two even twitched as he flipped the thumb-piece on the deadbolt. His shaven head gleamed in the overhead pot lights.

  A minimum of staff had been invited, nice word, to the emergency meeting.

  Doctor Piqua moved to the head of the room, where his chair sat vacant. Features obscured with the strong light of the floor-to-ceiling windows behind him, he regarded the group, examining each face, one by one. He stood with heavily-tattooed hands on the back of the chair.

  Clearing his throat, he began to speak.

  “I think it is time to invoke Plan Nine.”

  They all knew what that was. Plan Nine was a backdoor into every unit built.

  His plan was limited to passive surveillance.

  “Basically, nothing changes. Our units go on as before. We just take a stream of data from each one, and run it through the machine.” When he said machine, he meant more than one.

  This was going to take up a lot of machine-time.

  All faces were turned to him.

  “Are we sure?” Company president Renaldo Gage was an aquiline man in his mid-fifties, suave and sophisticated.

  Renaldo took a deep breath.

  “Once we are blown, we will stay blown.”

  “Yes, that’s very true. But we cannot rely on the police to find Betty Blue and we must have her back. It would be preferable if we were the first to examine her.”

  Plan Nine was only for the direst of emergencies. With foresight, and a knowledge of the heavy liabilities involved, it was only to be used in a worst-case scenario. This was one of those cases.

  Steve Hobbs, senior software writer, cleared his throat.

  “Yes?” Piqua gave him his opening.

  “We are already aware that some units have been hacked. If we can isolate those units, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. Unfortunately, there are no guarantees.”

  All in the room were aware of the problem. Once a unit was hacked, its security was forever suspect.

  “It’s a risk we are going to have to take.”

  Hobbs nodded.

  “I would prefer almost anything but that…”

  Hobbs turned to program security chief Letitia Bennett. She was opening up her file, as if seeking reassurance, although she could talk on this sub
ject without notes. Her small eyes surrounded by wrinkled flesh looked bitter at the best of times. She was as tough as they came and her husky shoulders reeked of physical training. It was habitual for Letitia, completely unconscious of it, to cross her legs under the table and dangle a clog off the end of her foot.

  “With all eyes looking for Betty Blue and this Scott Nettles character, we have a better than even chance of finding her before they do.”

  This was confidential information gleaned from police sources. Bennett was very good at that sort of thing.

  ‘They,’ of course, referred to the authorities. ‘Eyes,’ of course, referred to every robot built in the last few years by SimTech and anyone else who built ‘bots with proprietary systems and components under license.

  “If one of our friendly neighbourhood hackers detects our presence, there may very well be hell to pay.” Hobbs, a slender man in his early thirties, nodded. “Or a hell of a lot of money.”

  He blinked at them through wishy-washy, pale blue eyes that always seemed a bit too moist.

  Piqua had other ideas.

  “I was thinking we might use Plan Nine a little more creatively than originally anticipated.” He nodded at Hobbs. “Once we activate the plan, we not only have more eyes looking for our runaways, but we might be able to locate some of the missing units, and bring the perpetrators to justice.”

  This was a loaded question as they all knew. There was pretty good speculation that one or two would-be competitors had grabbed some of the missing units.

  Bennett shook her head.

  “What?” Piqua knew what she was going to say, but it must be said and she might as well be the one.

  “Assuming we do that. We’re going to have to account for the information. How did we get on to them? What was the source? And, furthermore, the courts are a matter of public record. Once the genie is out of the bottle, we can never put it back in.”

  Piqua nodded. The others nodded. Bennett looked around the table and nodded.

  “There are ways and then there are ways.”

  Several looked down at the table but he heard no objections.

  “So we are agreed on that much.” Piqua looked at his chair but didn’t sit down.

  He wasn’t anticipating a long session, or even a particularly stormy one. They all knew the stakes and the risks.

  Norbert Krumholtz, the company’s resident legal specialist, shook his head. His jowls were blue with a five o’clock shadow and his brown suit shone. He always sat there with his hands folded in perfect repose and monitored the conversation, rarely sticking in his own oar.

  “I’m not too worried about the courts. We recover our property, lay a charge and the only thing that is made public is the fact that a charge has been laid. We can word it in such a way as to give virtually no information, to the press, the public, law enforcement, or to our competitors.”

  Legal precedents for this sort of thing went all the way back to the good old days of fracking, according to him.

  “So, you are saying…?” Hobbs raised an eyebrow.

  “We use our own security teams to recover our hacked machines; ah, units, and make citizen’s arrests. Once we have these turkeys behind bars, the vast majority of them will lawyer up and make no statements they don’t have to.”

  “What if they can’t afford one?” Bennett’s question was a good one. “What if they waive their rights? What if they’re an idiot, in other words?”

  Krumholtz grinned, giving Piqua a look, and receiving a nod in return.

  “Don’t worry about that—one of our pet foundations will provide them one. If necessary, one of our pet psychiatrists will certify them and they can do their time upstate on the funny farm.”

  Piqua stepped in.

  “Assuming they don’t waive the right to an attorney and handle their own defense, that will have to suffice.”

  This was a smoke-screen of sorts as Piqua and Krumholtz had been over this before, privately. But it was the one thing that could go wrong. The idea of an idealistic hacker with information that just had to get out was a troubling one.

  So far, the real issue had not been raised, and Dr. Piqua was content enough with that.

  With bonuses running into the hundreds of millions each year per person, there was no great incentive to ask too many questions.

  His guts always tightened up when he contemplated the unthinkable. To show that sort of concern to the troops was a bad idea.

  Confidence was everything, or so he had always believed.

  Chapter Twelve

  Scott and Betty lay entwined with one another. They were in a cheap motel in rural north-western Ohio. The place was a Mom-and-Pop operation and seemed a bit behind the times in terms of customer surveillance, or 'security.'

  He was on his back and she was curled up at his side, lips close to his left ear.

  “You were wonderful…” Her fingertips raked the curly hairs on his lower belly, causing a spasm to go through him. “…last night.”

  His knees came up as he tried to get away from those fingernails.

  “Ah-ah!” He grabbed for her wrist but she was too fast and too strong for him. “Holy.”

  Her arm snaked over. She lifted a leg, and threw it across him. With a quick slide up, she had him pinned, hair falling across his face.

  “Oh, come on.” He smiled sheepishly. “It’s all right for you. But I’m only human.”

  “Scott. Scott.”

  “No. Seriously.”

  “Oh, darling. It was ever so romantic.”

  “Yeah.”

  She giggled.

  “…poor Scott, drooling and moaning and making me promise to stop at midnight. Oh.” She did a perfect rendition of his voice. “Oh, Betty—you've got to promise not to hurt me.”

  "I was not drooling."

  "Were so."

  She laughed, her head going back and forth as she whopped him in the face with her hair.

  Oh, God, how I wish I could see her now.

  “No. I really mean it, Betty.” He sighed. “Please?”

  She was insatiable. While it went without saying that robots could and would be built to accommodate the sexual needs of a rich and varied cross-section of humanity, it had never really occurred to him that they might like it for their own sake. Or for its own sake, however one preferred to say it.

  “Aw. What’s the matter, Lover?” She pecked him on the lips, sitting up and pinning his biceps against the stiff and apparently squeaky clean linen.

  His forearms came up and he held her near the elbows.

  “Betty. We have to talk. I’m scared shitless. I can’t think straight—and, ah, some of this wasn’t exactly in the plan.” He clung to her. “I’m like a bag of nerves. Sooner or later, I’ll go and do something stupid.”

  “Aren’t we doing something stupid right now?” She stayed there, thinking. "Don't think I'm not scared either. Because I am."

  If they were caught, she wouldn't have any rights at all, and neither would Scott. Him they would probably ignore or slap on the wrist. They would make excuses for him, and try to be humane in their punishments. Within limits. He was blind and it would look good on the evening news if they rescued him from her.

  They would dismantle her, and she knew that very well.

  They would keep her brain and never let her die.

  What in the hell could she or Scott do about that?

  Keep running.

  Originally, they were going to Detroit, and if possible, cross the border into Canada. It was all they could think of. Canada had vast, wide-open spaces and wasn’t wired nearly as tightly as the States. In popular parlance, Detroit was now called Dystroit—for the dystopic end times had surely come for that city. It was the price of being a bit too liberal.

  It was even worse than in the movies, Scott had heard, in his occasional oblique manner, eaves-dropping on any conversation that held hope of seeming to be half-ass interesting.

  It was a good place to es
cape from, was the way he heard it. Stories of occasional, ‘over-winter’ cannibalism, and attempted socialism, and some sort of economic cleansing up there were hopefully just exaggerations of the underground, or liberal press. Years ago, a delegation from that city to the Federal government had been politely advised to see to their own affairs.

  “Yeah. I hear you.” The note of worry that crept into her voice was hardly reassuring to Scott.

  It wasn’t that she’d lied, exactly, it was more like she was only telling him so much.

  “Betty. If you have a better plan, now might be a good time to let me in on it.”

  Sighing, which was the first time he had ever heard her do it, she let go of his arms and dismounted.

  She lowered herself down again and he could sense her studying him. He rolled onto his left side. For what it was worth, they were eye-to-eye.

  “Come on, Babe. Level with me.”

  “Well. I still think we should go to Detroit. We’ve been sort of leaving a trail. It’s better if we end that trail somewhere logical. Right, Scott?”

  That part was right. That part they had agreed on.

  “And then what?”

  “Well, I just don’t know, Scott. It’s just that I don’t think it will work.”

  “I thought we could steal a boat and just paddle or motor across. That’s what we figured.”

  “If we did make it…our problems would just be beginning.” And Canada was so much weaker than the States.

  They would most likely be apprehended, sooner or later, and then returned. The States would push and Canada would be pushed. Scott didn’t think that was the whole story. He was sure there was more.

  “Yeah. In other words, you didn’t think I’d stick this far. But Betty. We have gotten this far. We have been doing it.”

  “No, Scott. It’s not like that. I could never do that to you.”

  Oh, Betty. If only I believed you.

  If only I could believe in you.

  “I’ve been doing some thinking. Philosophical thinking, but thinking. And this is important—what we are doing is important.”

  “And why is that, Scott?”

  If only he could look into her eyes.

  “Because we love each other. That’s why. That’s something they won’t understand. That’s something they’re not going to be able to accept. And that’s why we have to do it.”