The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue Read online

  “Oh. My, God.”

  Her fingers flew across the keys.

  “What, is the one common element in each and every one of these discrepancies?” Mister Carlson, his voice rising in a kind of triumph, paused, and looked at his employer.

  She was not only dumbfounded, but deeply hurt by this revelation.

  Her eyes bored into the screen, and then came up and she searched his face.

  “Betty. Betty Blue.”

  Betty Blue, whom she had loved and trusted and taken into her own household as if she was her very own daughter. Betty Blue had been systematically ripping off the household accounts, and for all they knew, this might be just the tip of the iceberg.

  “It’s a good thing I spotted it.” Mister Carlson couldn’t keep a note of smugness out of his voice and his demeanor.

  Looking back, he had to admit that there had always been something just a little bit different about that one.

  True, he had made allowances. They had made her feel welcome, a valued member of the household. It wasn’t just her obvious and latent sexual qualities. As a professional, he could rise above all of that. He’d had one or two qualms. After all, young girls had crushes and all that sort of thing. In the end, nothing had come of it, and he had come to terms with her to some extent.

  She had her independent streak, and yet deferred to him in a respectful fashion when it was appropriate, not least of which was in front of junior staff.

  No, it was just her sheer intelligence, the competence…her coolness, and her poise. There was always that mysterious something, call it humour, call it a sense or spirit, in behind those crystalline eyes. He’d sensed a certain kind of trouble there, and if the trouble that came wasn’t exactly the same as the trouble you expected, it still goes to show you…

  It seemed as if his instincts had been pretty good, right from the start.

  Olympia’s jaw worked back and forth.

  Her hand stabbed forth and she shut down that page.

  She gave Mister Carlson an angry look.

  “Get me that insurance broker on the phone.”

  “Yes, Missus Cartier.”

  No wonder they were so eager to settle the claim—there was no telling how much damage an out-of-control robot might cause. She was still seething after that last little incident to show any mercy this time around.

  Her mind raced. She knew all about business from listening to Doyle, of course, and she was not entirely without experience on her own.

  Betty Blue hadn’t been recovered. She was still out there, somewhere—Olympia’s gut instinct was pretty adamant about that. If she had simply failed or malfunctioned, she would have been found by now.

  It’s what she honestly believed. That Betty was out there, somewhere, all on her own. And that she could be found, and brought home, and that maybe, just maybe, things could get back to normal.

  Olympia was determined to get to the bottom of this if it frickin’ killed her.

  “Argh.”

  She slumped back in the seat, heart pounding.

  And if they weren’t careful, they would be liable for whatever damage Betty did…

  “Hold on. Belay that order.”

  “Missus Cartier?”

  Her mouth was a firm line, lips closed and working back and forth against each other.

  “No. We’d better talk to Doyle about this. And maybe our lawyer.”

  “Yes, that’s a good idea. Would you like me to call the police?”

  “Yes!”

  S.O.P.

  Standard Operating Procedure, as Doyle called it.

  She really couldn’t think of what else to do. Somebody over there was going to get a real blast of shit.

  ***

  Betty had done her homework. With her extensive database, and her quick mimicry of what she saw around her, she took extra pains with Scott’s appearance.

  She had dandified her man. Scott had no idea of what he looked like these days, small consolation for his worries.

  Scott smelled wonderful, something he never would have said about himself. That was his old life. No matter what happened, he would never go back to that life. How in the hell had he endured it?

  It was a tough question.

  Everything from the mousse in his hair, to the silky-smooth shave, to the powder on his neck from her trim and styling, everything augured for success.

  “Okay. Let’s get this little escapade on the road.”

  As usual, he was taking her word for a lot of things. If Betty said it was three o’clock in the morning, then it was. If Betty said this particular funeral director, a justice of the peace and minister of this particular roadside wedding chapel wasn’t too particular on details and that all he really cared about was getting paid, cash up front was best, Scott wasn’t inclined to ask too many questions.

  Questions just lead to heartbreak.

  On Scott’s insistence, they had faked up another identity, only in this instance there was a twist. He was listed as Scott Nettles, of Scottsdale Arizona. There actually was such a person, only three years older than himself. To their good fortune, according to Betty the gentleman bore a passing resemblance to Scott.

  With Betty’s eyes having a built-in scanning feature, and her innate ability to hack in and around almost anything, because after all it mirrored her own inner self, they could change the image, the code, the ID scan and pix to anything or anyone they wanted.

  It was another good omen, but that other Scott Nettles was unmarried. It voided one possible pitfall. According to Betty, the State and the states had never really achieved the promise of full integration of all network resources. For one thing, it would have made the delivery of social services a little too efficient. Also according to Betty, it would have prevented corruption. Since any crime that was not committed by private individuals but government employees and their contractors was by definition corruption, it was easy to see why that full integration must never happen.

  It would have made things a little too difficult for them. And of course, they were the ones most familiar with the systems—and they had the most access to them and the vast cash flow that sustained this fermenting nation through good times and dark. There might have been a few legitimate issues as well, including mis-matched hardware, software and operating systems. Then there were all the usual privacy paranoias.

  “So. Are you sticking with Betty Blue?”

  “Yes. Scott. I am. That’s my name, and…I guess maybe that’s all a person really has sometimes.”

  “We got each other, Babe.”

  She was just a blur to him. His guts churned but he had to trust to something. Pure luck, or God, or something.

  She took his elbow, closing the hotel room door behind them. He bent and found a suitcase. Scott was getting really good at acting as if he was sighted. With her fussing nervously and tapping along on her usual high-heels, it wasn’t as hard as it looked—another one of those damned sight puns, he thought.

  There were altogether too many of those in the world already.

  Why don’t people come up with some deaf puns, or dumb puns, or fucking lost my penis in an unfortunate smelting incident sort of puns—anything, really.

  Almost anything would do.

  ***

  “Well. I’ll be damned.”

  “You said that already.” Francine looked over Parsons’ shoulder.

  He had just gotten off the phone with Olympia Cartier, hopping mad and demanding some sort of precipitate action.

  To watch Parsons fawn and ingratiate and supplicate with the old bitch was an inspiration.

  She had new respect for him with each passing moment.

  Gene was expected momentarily, held up for forty minutes so far by a high-speed monorail accident. Due to a spate of such suicide incidents, trains were equipped with what amounted to a cow-catcher on the front. Unfortunately, the crowd of hopeful suicides was a bit bigger this morning than the makers had anticipated, nor the government oversight
committee for that matter.

  One of the fortunates had gone in through the windshield, which, even at seventy-five millimetres thick, could not withstand the weight of a human body striking it at an effective two-hundred-forty-five kilometres an hour.

  Suicide was (of course) a criminal act when the state needed all hands and bodies to feed the gaping maw of the economy. As someone once said, every crime is a political statement. As for the interest rate on all of those unpaid student loans, that was all nice and legal. They chatted back and forth as they checked their devices and a plethora of paper memos. That was one dinosaur that just never seemed to die.

  Gene came in just then. He slung his coat at the rack and sauntered over.

  Francine knew instantly he’d gotten laid last night. They’d given him a birthday cake just the day before.

  ‘Best we can for you—unless we can find a deaf, dumb and blind volunteer.’ Nudge-nudge, wink-wink. Say no more.

  It was always an occasion.

  “Hey. So. We have a breakthrough.”

  Parsons spoke first and Francine nodded brightly.

  Gene looked intrigued.

  “Explain, please.”

  They looked at each other and grinned, but Parsons took it as a matter of course.

  Francine already liked the guy and thought he might do well in the unit.

  No problemo.

  His weird accents, occasionally thrown in, and out-of-decade slang terms brought a certain spontaneous charm to working with him in the field.

  “Your hot and sexy, three-point-eight million dollar robot girl, uh, Gene, has embezzled herself a tidy little dowry. Out of the household accounts.”

  “What!”

  Francine nodded sagely.

  Olympia had been reluctant to send the data, but on the advice her her lawyer, she had no choice. The insurance company was insisting and she was trapped. Parsons for one would like to see the look on her face next year sometime, when they went to renew their household policy.

  Yeah, fuck, eh.

  Who says there is no God?

  “And if you look at the time-line, it all fits nicely. Not only that, but it looks as if our girl Betty bugged out at a convenient time. See, she’s given herself a few days head start. But she knew, knowing their accounting system as well as she did, that the year-end balance would catch all of this.”

  “And the Cartiers have to do their income taxes.” Gene nodded.

  “True. But they do that separately. No, it’s just a quarterly thing, and since they moved into that residence during the month of June, that is when their year-end balance would strike. Ah, the thirtieth of June.”

  “Ah. Okay. I get you.”

  “Here’s where it gets a little sick. Betty also had access—possibly still has, access to all sorts of other information. Financial information—”

  Gene gaped a bit.

  “What…kind of financial information?”

  “It’s not just the household, but anyone who dealt with the household. Suppliers, bank account numbers, just imagine with her capabilities. She has partials on all of them. She might not be able to hack the big-box PIN numbers. But she might be able to figure it out, you know, some other way around the problem, just by studying the outer layers.”

  And they all knew what a sieve the internet was in terms of prohibited information, not to mention under-the radar private networks.

  Gene’s mind boggled.

  He wondered about Betty Blue.

  It was a good question, really.

  But he wondered just exactly how much she knew.

  Even more so, he wondered just exactly what she thought of all this.

  Seriously, robots (or to be more technically accurate, cyborgs) were supposed to be incapable of insanity. They were supposed to be incapable of irrationality.

  She must have something going on in her head. There had to be some little thing that her manufacturers had just plain missed or something.

  “What’s next?”

  “Ah.”

  Francine sat up straight.

  Parsons went back to their time-line.

  “Connect the dots.”

  It showed a series of car-thefts, more-or-less exactly as predicted, once the vector settled down into a straight line.

  “Nice.”

  Gene reached to his belt pouch and pulled out his device.

  A short squirt of something very cold shot through his gizzard.

  “Holy crap.” He looked up at them. “But, I do have to call the chief.”

  They nodded encouragingly. Make the call, Gene.

  Chapter Sixteen

  SimTech security chief Letitia Bennett was working in her office when the call came through from Edwin, supervising Plan Nine activities down in the classrooms.

  “What’s up, Edwin?” Informality with junior employees was one of her strengths.

  They loved her for it.

  “Bingo. I think we’ve nailed it.”

  “Oh, really.”

  “Yes. We have confirmed they are creating new IDs and credit cards. So far they have not been reported for fraud.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Because they’ve been paying them off just as quickly—wirelessly, electronically, from a host of identities.”

  Letitia sat up, and had to stop herself from reaching for the icon showing Boyd’s desk.

  She hesitated.

  “Go on—please.”

  “She’s got a shit-load of bank accounts. We’ve only been able to crack a small number of them. She’s got a few hundred here, a grand there, ten thousand somewhere else. It’s a good trick if you want to travel incognito. With her memory, it’s no challenge. A human crook would almost have no choice but to keep extensive notes and records. If an account gets shut down, which hasn’t happened yet, as far as we can determine, she just tries another. All the retailers want to get paid, and the bank just wants to see the transaction go through so they can get the fee. No crimes have been reported. Ergo, no crimes have been investigated because no crimes have been committed. No credit numbers banned or blocked or prohibited. The list of bad things that don’t happen is extensive. They’re off the radar insofar as that goes.”

  “What about the IDs?”

  He shook his head in awe.

  “Making them up as they go along, adding in back history and entire family trees. And, as we well know, her internal capacity is vast—and very, very quick.”

  It was a jolt, all right, but SimTech had built her—and their own resources were considerable. Now that they had something to go on, it was only a matter of time. The real challenge was to nail her first, ahead of the cops, ahead of the crims, ahead of the competition and the hackers.

  “Interesting!” She had questions, and Edwin, with his short, thick black hair and bland face, every inch the professional educator, looked at her with alert blue eyes of the darkest shade from behind his red, horn-rimmed, spectacles/Googgs.

  She thought for a second. Taken along with the fact that Betty Blue had been stealing her employer blind, it made sense. She hadn’t shared that with the Plan Nine team or their supervisors as there was no real reason to do so. The source of that data was highly-confidential, but with a secure and private window inside of Mister Carlson’s head, not to mention every cop-robot ever made by the firm, it was simple enough.

  “What about the cars?”

  “The cars were stolen, used as briefly as possible, and then abandoned where they wouldn’t be found too quickly.” He glanced at his notes and then over his shoulder, giving someone, presumably their team, a smile and a nod. “The one where they tumbled it down an overgrown ravine was classic. She knew exactly where she was going on that one. When they stole a car, it was from one of several sources. Our team has some good imaginations. Yet we’ve confirmed enough of these. They stole from high-theft areas, information freely available from any number of sources. Betty could access that, under a false IP. They stole cars from fol
ks who were not using them or out of contact. One was camping, one family was on a canoe trip, one was from someone sleeping in the very motel-room it was stolen from…er, outside of.”

  “Okay.”

  He went on. Some of the trips were very short, which implied extensive knowledge and planning.

  “One car was taken from a used car lot. It was a Saturday night. It was a small town, and the vehicle was taken from a back row—not the shiny, big-ticket items lined up along the street. It was just a beater no one was interested in.” They were long gone, the vehicle already abandoned before the crime was even reported.

  “Hmn.”

  “One of them was an old car, a valuable antique. That was in a storage unit. The owner didn’t know it was gone until the police contacted them.” That car went about forty kilometres and was abandoned according to the available records.

  “So. It can be done then—”

  “Yes. If you had access to reams of personal data, data of the most obscure and trivial kind, quite frankly, you could run circles around the system. And if you had time and resources to sift through it.” What might be difficult for one human being would be child’s play to one such as Betty.

  She had more questions.

  “But going from one jurisdiction to another, using public roads—how are they doing that?”

  “Ah. Yes.” Edwin took a breath, again consulting his notes. “Surprisingly, there are long stretches of secondary roads with no cameras. Some are dirt, some are clay, and some are not maintained in winter. Hell, some are not maintained even in summer. Not even product and delivery trackers. Those are all satellite, right? The real trick is to link the sections up and stay on them for any distance. But this explains the remarkably eccentric track they’re leaving.”

  He showed one mysterious track, where a vehicle left a road, drove across a corn-field, and then popped out onto another secondary road.

  According to Edwin, Betty must have been aware that the next intersection had a camera.

  It was only over the course of many hours, several days in fact, that they had been able to get a general trend. There was no telling when they might zip off on another tangent. Since the team were still looking backwards, it was hard to guess forwards, although fuzzy logic would dictate to some extent.