* * * *
“Who’s dead?” said Uriah when the agony dissipated. The question was profoundly dumb, but he had just suffered a brain injury.
“Mr. Uriah, just how many murders do you plan to have committed in a week?” said Zolnerowich, who was back to her screen on the desk.
Cursing at himself in his thoughts, Uriah looked at his own corpse and said, “He’s pulling some strings here. There’s no way that one punch killed –”
“Must you keep defending yourself?” She typed something at about one hundred twenty words per minute and continued in a faintly shaky voice, “If what you told me two hours ago is correct, the law is hardly your biggest threat at the moment.”
His innards plummeted to somewhere in the Earth’s mantle. Jane was shaking Marshall in a feeble attempt to wake him from a coma. He bit his lip and tried not to look away from the pathetic sight. “Jane –”
“Bring him back,” she demanded with neither anger nor desperation, just insistence. “You can, can’t you?”
“Jane, I think he did this to himself. There’s nothing I can do.”
“That’s a lie. You just … didn’t know your own strength. You can bring him back.”
She wasn’t blaming him at all. Responsibility made no difference, as long as she could have Marshall. And giving her false hope would only make things worse. “Okay, let’s take a closer look at him.”
Uriah waited until Jane had turned her back on him, thinking back to when he’d first met her. She had awakened like a human, so his chances of putting her to sleep in anything other than the corresponding way were slim. Notwithstanding, he scanned for an off button, to no avail, and joined her by the body before she could suspect anything.
“No pulse, but there doesn’t seem to be any actual damage to the skull that could’ve killed him.” He was only barely bleeding. Uriah tried to look as if he knew what he was doing, when in fact he was premeditating robocide. How would Marshall have programmed her? Unless he was comfortable with letting people shut Jane off easily, he’d probably made the process password-locked. Something only he would know.
The problem was that if Marshall really had killed himself on purpose, there was no reason to suppose he would leave a trail of crumbs to the secret to subduing Jane.
Everything else that Marshall had spoon-fed to Uriah had an underlying utility. Not killing him outright tortured him psychologically. Giving him the Libertas challenged his prejudices and allowed Marshall to impregnate Sabrina without his knowledge of this until after she’d left Nevada. This also created the torture of the “who killed Marshall?” scenario, the Libertas normally being suicide-proof. Letting Jane get him out of the house served the same purposes and permitted Marshall to examine her interactions with him further.
Uriah stepped back from his autopsy duty to consider the ultimate motive. Now it was clear. If Jane’s hard-wired faithfulness to her creator wasn’t truly hard-wired after all, the easiest way to test this was to separate the variables: perhaps the only reason she’d ever trusted Uriah was that he was capable of reuniting her with Marshall.
Currently that was impossible, which only raised the question of why Marshall would design an experiment whose results he could never evaluate by definition. Unless …
He stood, giving Zolnerowich a reassuring nod. Knowing perfectly well he could have terminated Jane right there and ended part of this chaos, he said, “Jane, I’m not gonna promise you anything, but I’ll do my best to find a way to get Marshall back.”
In fact, he had promised her that, but Jane, for better or worse, had forgotten it.