* * * *
They headed to the functional elevator. Uriah stopped himself before entering, looking back at a dead Bio-Bazaar worker. Evidently this man was up there in the staff hierarchy, what with his sickeningly high-quality Libertas. He wasn’t armed as Eigel had been, but he did have a card key for classified access in the store. Not like it could hurt him, so he pocketed it.
Exiting the elevator, Uriah found a dome constructed entirely of translucent solar panels covering the roof. Power flowed downward through a web of tubes, covering the greenhouse-like room’s floor with an intricate shadow. No actual herbs grew here, rather it seemed to be a showcasing room for artificial trees and bird habitats. Uriah navigated this mess of products until he reached the emergency exit.
Outside, he found an excellent vantage point on a scaffolding, which was itself another solar panel. He stood forty feet off the ground, the Homunculi behind him. Sloan Police Department was in view, yet there were no shapes of androids exiting the building. This was unusually slow for law enforcement bots, considering the other android had sent the message at least ten minutes ago.
Uriah figured he should take a miracle when given it. He had just enough time to go find something with sufficient power to stop the flow of robotic reinforcements.
Back inside the dome, he kept his eyes open for anything useful for the job. All the store’s wares were just food, prescription medicine for animals, skill-building toys, and everything else completely unhelpful to a man with any number of police robots on his tail. He groaned, returning to the elevator.
Uriah now noticed a button inside, reading “B,” that had a thin horizontal slit down the middle. He pressed it – no light. Withdrawing the card key, he took the plunge to the basement.
His Homunculi’s footsteps made a more pronounced echo in here, for it was quite a long hallway. Doors to various storage rooms lined its walls, yet unquestionably its most intriguing portal was at its termination. That door’s heavy security was noticeable even from the opposite end, and it pulled Uriah in like Jupiter.
Elementally speaking, the door was more like the lower crusts of Earth than any gaseous planet, complete with a thick steel layer and locks that made it an impenetrable beast. The material was characteristic of a bomb shelter, but the reason for making it inconveniently accessed wasn’t so clear. Unless the former was exactly what its designer wanted people to think, and Uriah would gladly believe that, considering a facility for nuclear war preparation would likely be loaded with weapons. Weapons that could minimize his chances of meeting an absurd death.
Inaccessible as the room beyond currently was, since his card key was laughable in the presence of such protection, Uriah had at least bought himself some time. Reminding himself of the virtue of objectivity by seeing the Homunculi’s indifference to that metallic fuel of curiosity, he began to poke around the other rooms.
A pattern emerged with each door he opened. There were robotic dogs, cats, guinea pigs, birds, snakes, even fish suspended in a liquid harmless to electronics yet very similar to water. These seemed to be testing grounds that posed no threat to actual, sensitive creatures. They “seemed to be” only because no objects with which one would expect an artificial pet to interact were there.
What did litter the desks and floors of these rooms were blueprints of the fakes, notebooks and journals, and anatomical diagrams with special attention given to the central nervous system, one of which the curious student of nature in him couldn’t resist taking.
These workspaces had all the fingerprints of a mad scientist, or scientists. The paranoia of a potential anti-nuke room only added to Uriah’s unease, but thank heavens for wackos if their insanity provides EM guns for those in desperation. He felt compelled to return to the crazy’s refuge.
What’s your secret, Frankenstein? He looked at the lock more closely – nothing a paper clip could bypass, yet its protection was something even more vulnerable to the hacking mind. Three blank spaces lay in the center of a small screen. That seemed less pathetic when the virtual keyboard showed thousands of characters, including Chinese and case-sensitive Phoenician letters, and even then the password required a specific font or combination thereof.
Still, there was illegal software out there that could crack this code with a simple trial-and-error heuristic. With twenty-seven billion possibilities and a processing power of a hundred trials per millisecond, divided among a thousand “workers” in the program, the modern technological wizard could beat a system like this one within at most five minutes.
Uriah gave it a few tries. “Dog.” “Cat.” “Bio.” “Mom.” “123.”
So he wasn’t exactly Mark Zuckerberg, but he laughed shortly at the lack of an error-limit time out. If the benevolence of Moore’s Law to hackers was such a newsworthy social problem that even Uriah knew it, this guy clearly did not value the secrecy of whatever was in his gigantic safe.
He checked the time. Four forty-two. Where in the name of ironic questions were the authorities? There was no sound of searching humanoids upstairs, and even if they were particularly stealthy buggers, they would have caught Uriah by now. The last robot definitely did send an alert, acknowledged by the Triple-B, so there must have been a malfunction in the SPD bots’ transportation. Unless this was all planned.
The bomber was one step ahead of him.
Uriah flew to the elevator. It seemed insane, but it just made too much sense. The MacKenzies, Henry Lynch, his girlfriend Patricia Mallard, and now himself. All targets of systematic anti-Organic violence in the past week.
An image he hadn’t taken at all seriously a few minutes ago popped into his mind and made his jaw drop. Some graffito he’d seen on the wall not far from the reinforced door:
GET WITH THE TIMES, FUCKIN ORG
It was a password only an Organic would think to try, for Unnatural observers would pay no mind to such petty vandalism.
As he tried in vain to make the elevator go faster than normal, he remembered all the Unnaturals’ slurs and justifications of their sadism. As far as bigots like Isaac Livingston and Mr. Mystery Bomber were concerned, Uriah was an over-screwing, planet-polluting, resource-wasting Organic parasite who was too prone to apathy and too inefficient.
Never seemed to occur to these people that even if we were lazy drugged-up welfare whores, we’re only in this position because of the bodies we would gladly trade for artificial ones if we weren’t already poor. The absence of androids to greet him on the first floor was reassuring. He looked outside to make sure.
No police, but he was out of the frying pan, into the fire. There were only six Homunculi left, and time was running short. For all he knew, Bomber wasn’t going to stay north for long – he or she had simply been trying to avoid arrest, maybe even to stall him from feeding non-human “Organic parasites.”
The alternate possibility struck Uriah just as the sound of the second blast of the day did.