The Real-Town Murders

by Adam Roberts

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

Alma is a private detective in a near-future England, a country desperately trying to tempt people away from the delights of Shine, the immersive successor to the internet. But most people are happy to spend their lives plugged in, and the country is decaying. Alma's partner is ill, and has to be treated without fail every 4 hours, a task that only Alma can do. If she misses the 5 minute window her lover will die. She is one of the few not to access the Shine. So when Alma is called to an automated car factory to be shown an impossible death and finds herself caught up in a political coup, she knows that getting too deep may leave her unable to get home. What follows is a fast-paced Hitchcockian thriller as Alma evades arrest, digs into the conspiracy, and tries to work out how on earth a dead body appeared in the boot of a freshly-made car in a fully-automated factory.

Release date: August 24, 2017

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 241

Sample

1: The Body in the Boot

Where we are, and where we aren’t. Where we can and cannot go. So, for example: human beings were not allowed onto the factory floor. The construction space was absolutely and no exceptions a robot-only zone. Human entry was forbidden. Nevertheless, and against all the rules, a human being had been there.

Not an alive human, though.

Alma said: ‘Let’s go through the surveillance footage one more time.’

The factory manager, whose surname, according to Alma’s feed, had just that moment changed from Ravinthiran to Zurndorfer, said: ‘You think you’ll see the join. You think you missed something, and the solution is right there. Believe me, it’s not. The solution is not in this footage.’

Alma nodded, and repeated: ‘One more time.’

And Zurndorfer, as she was now called, scowled. ‘It’s all here. You see everything. You see all the components delivered to the factory. You see the robots assemble everything. There are no human beings, there are no closets or hidden spaces, no veils or curtains. It’s all in full view – a minimum of three viewpoints at all times. Isn’t that true, FAC?’

The factory AI was called ‘FAC-13’. The reason for the number was not immediately obvious. It said: ‘All true.’

‘Do you know of any way in which a human corpse could have gotten into the trunk of that automobile?’ Alma asked.

‘There is no way such a thing could happen,’ FAC-13 said.

‘And yet,’ Alma pointed out, ‘there it is. At the end of the process there it is. A corpse in the car.’

So they all watched the surveillance footage one more time. It was exactly as the manager said: slow it and pause as Alma might, look at it from whichever angle, the process was seamless. There was no way a body could have been cached in the trunk. Ergo there was no body in the trunk. Except, at the end, there it was – a body in the trunk.

She watched the whole run of the footage. She watched the supply packtruc deliver raw materials, and toggled the p-o-v three-sixty as the materiel was unloaded and prepped. She watched old-school robots, fixed to the floor, pick up panels and slip them into the slots of various presses. Not a person in sight. Blocky machines spat smaller components down a slope, chrome nuggets tumbling like scree. She watched other robots, nothing more than metallic models of gigantic insect legs, bowing and lifting, moving with a series of rapid sweeps and abrupt stops like bodypopping dancers. Not a human being in sight. Rapidly the shape of the automobile assembled; a skeleton of rollbars and supports with – here Alma froze the image, swung it about, zoomed in – nothing inside. Restart. The panels were welded zippily into place. The body of the car rolled down the line. It was a process familiar, traditional, as old as manufacture itself, and it went without a hitch. And Homo sapiens was Homo absence throughout.

The wheels were fitted. The car rolled in front of a tall cranebot that twisted its narrow pyramidic body, bowed to its task and inserted the engine. Before the body panels were soldered on, various printers inserted their nozzles and printed interior fittings: dashboard, mouldings, hubcaps. The seats were dropped deftly in and the side and rear panels fitted.

‘We like to build cars the traditional way,’ said Zurndorfer. ‘What you’re seeing, this is pretty much how Henry Ford made the very first automobiles. We’re proud of that fact. It’s basically the same system that Stradivarius used in his violin workshop.’

‘I’m guessing Stradivarius’s robots were smaller,’ Alma said.

Zurndorfer scowled. She looked as though she was trying to work out whether Alma was joking or not. ‘Traditional robots, though,’ she said. ‘All our robots are facced according to carefully enhanced traditional blueprints. We at McA build artisanal automobiles for the discerning driver. Sure, maybe that means we’re a little pricier than some others, but you get what you pay for. People say to me: “But this Wenxin Tishi car is cheaper”, but I’ll tell you what I say back. Over seventy-five per cent of any Wenxin auto is printed. You really want to rely on a car that’s basically extruded in a lump? We assemble the whole car, according to traditional practices. It makes it more robust, the car lasts longer, it is more reliable.’

Alma looked at the manager. It was hard to tell in sim, but she sounded nervous. Did she have something to hide? Then again, a dead body had been discovered in her factory, a fact which was presumably enough to make anyone nervous. No need for the full-on sales pitch, though.

‘Do humans never go onto the factory floor?’

Zurndorfer blinked. ‘What? No! Not if we can help it. I mean sometimes we have to send someone in. Sometimes it can’t be helped. But then we have to reseal and decom, and that’s expensive.’

‘Time-consuming?’

‘Not so much that. And not very expensive, if I’m honest. But it’s an extra cost, and you can imagine how narrow margins are in today’s world. How few autos get …’ Suddenly she dried. Put her hands over her face. When her sim-face re-emerged it looked more serious. ‘I apologise. I’m gabbling on.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Alma.

The remainder of the surveillance footage played out. The last components of the car were put in place. Alma had watched the whole process, from nothing to complete car, and there wasn’t anything unusual to see at any point. The car was complete, and rolled to the end of its line. ‘FAC-13,’ she asked. ‘Just to confirm: there was nothing unusual about this? No extra robotic activity, for instance, except for what you’d expect for a vehicle like this?’

‘None,’ said FAC-13.

‘And your oversight is …?’

‘Well, I’m not omniscient,’ the AI’s avatar said laughingly, with a flawlessly copied and perfectly empty chuckle. ‘I’m not God. You guys programmed us all to make sure of that. But I oversee every worker, every stage in production, and at no point did a human being enter the factory.’

‘You wouldn’t be lying to me, now would you?’

‘I am an AI,’ the AI said, in an affronted tone. ‘I am incapable of mendacity.’

The designated auto, with a dozen queuing patiently behind it, rolled forward off the line, drove itself along a green-painted line and out through the main entrance into the dilute sunlight of a Berkshire spring day. The external yard was large enough for a thousand vehicles, although there were only a couple dozen visible (her feed gave her the exact number: twenty-eight). The auto rolled to a halt, and for the first time in the entire process a human being entered the footage: a tall woman in a blue hard hat, with a tablet cradled in the crook of one arm. She peered at the car, opened the driver’s-side door, leaned in, pulled herself out. It was the third time Alma had watched this footage, and her attention wandered. Sky the colour of an old man’s hair. Trees standing blackly isolated against the light. Cypresses, were they? She nudged her feed and discovered they were cyprelms, a new hybrid.

The quality checker was walking around the car, opening each door in turn. Advertising regs were clear enough, and this was the bare minimum of what had to be done to justify the ads – artisanal autos, built the old-fashioned way, not just squirted out of an industrial printer, each detail checked by hand. The QC stepped to the rear and unsnibbed the lid of the trunk. It swung up, slowly, and the expression on the face of the woman – Stowe was her name, said Alma’s feed – froze. Or glitched. Or underwent some subtle process of realignment that did not entail any actual change of expression. Something altered, though. Footage from a different angle could look over her shoulder at the corpse: recognisably human, obviously dead, the man’s expression the tragic one from that two-mask theatrical icon. Stowe stood for eleven seconds, leaned forward, touched the skin of the dead body on the neck. Then she stood upright and the feed informed Alma that she was calling in an anomaly to the next up in her chain of command. She didn’t look away. She was staring at death, and she couldn’t take her eyes away. We’re so used to looking backwards, into memory and the rosy past, that when the future intervenes – all our futures, yours and mine and hers and his – it is a coldly mesmeric experience.

‘There we are,’ said Zurndorfer. ‘A dead body.’ There was a dreary tone in her voice, and it occurred to Alma that they were all underplaying the reveal. It was a conjuring trick, a ghastly piece of stagecraft. Murder always meant intent, malign focus and will, and this murderer had arranged for their victim to be discovered with a dramatic flourish that was, presumably, designed to give the finger to the people tasked with investigating the crime. It brayed: Solve this! You had to admire the ingenuity, however it had been worked. And it had been worked; the trick was complete. Yet none amongst the small audience of people watching the show were impressed. It was surprisingly demoralising, actually. The reveal was not a bunch of flowers, or a white rabbit with rose-coloured eyes, or a sawn-in-two woman restored to smiling wholeness. It was death. It was life’s denouement.

As with any death, natural or unnatural, the existential chill was forced to coexist with mundane practical considerations. The police had to be called. And so they were, and the factory shut down, and the company higher-ups informed. It had been they who hired Alma: a licensed adjunct to official investigation. For Zurndorfer’s factory it meant at least loss of profit, possibly closure (it might be, given the modern world’s ever-diminishing demand for automobiles, that the former would lead to the latter anyway). For Alma it meant, at least, work, although the sort of work that would only depress her spirits. Death, and deceit, and hatred, and the bitter root of oblivion. She zoomed in to get a better look at the expression on the body’s face: an open-eyed blankness of unapprehension.

Her feed said: Adam Kem, male, age 50, height 173.5 centimetres, worked as a civil servant, married, two children. A blinking sigil that promised a sheaf of further data if she wanted it. Time for that later. It wasn’t a name she recognised.

‘I’ll have to come over,’ she told Zurndorfer.

‘What – in person?’

‘Yes.’

Zurndorfer’s simface goggled at her. ‘I’m sorry to be dense, but, you mean physically shift yourself from over there to … you know. Here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I say, well of course. I mean. If you think that’s necessary. Is that necessary?’

‘You’ve been to the crime scene yourself?’

Zurndorfer’s sim visibly flinched at the phrase crime scene. ‘No, no. I mean, what would be the point? FAC-13 has everything.’

‘I’d like to see the place with my own eyes.’

‘You just did.’

Alma said nothing.

‘The body’s not here,’ Zurndorfer said. ‘You know that? Of course you do. They took it to the morgue. Well, they took it to the hospital first, though there was nothing a hospital could do. The ambulancewoman said she could see straight away that the cadaver was dead. But apparently that’s procedure: first to hospital, then when death is confirmed to the morgue. I’m sorry: you know all this. I’m sorry. I can chatter on. When I’m upset. And this is very upsetting.’

Alma nodded. ‘Who called the ambulance, by the way? Was that you?’

‘Chuckie did that. I mean, she’s no medic, she couldn’t, couldn’t be sure he was. You know. Couldn’t be sure he was actually.’

‘Chuckie?’

‘Chuckie Stowe. The QC. She comes onto the site daily, and does a check of all the autos in person, after they come off the production line. It’s so we can say they are hand-checked by humans. It’s an advertising thing, really. But she’s alright, Chuckie. I suppose you want to talk to her?’

‘In time.’

‘We pride ourselves on our hands-on artisanal automobile assemblance.’ The company boilerplate bubbled from Zurndorfer’s mouth as she rubbed the heel of a hand into her left eye. ‘Each product is carefully checked by a real human being before being shipped to …’ Abruptly she began to sob.

Alma waited, and the little hiccoughy noises slowly faded away.

‘I’m sorry,’ Zurndorfer said. ‘It’s been a shock.’

‘I would like you to meet me at the plant,’ Alma said.

‘Of course. How long will it …? I mean, you know. I mean: right now?’

Her feed said the place was thirteen minutes away, depending on traffic, but of course there would be no traffic. ‘A quarter-hour,’ she said.

‘Well. Well alright. Well.’ Zurndorfer signed off, and Alma swept the rest of the digital rendering away.

Now that she was alone in the bare room, Alma addressed the hidden observer. ‘You were watching,’ she said. Not really a question. She eschewed avatars, but Marguerite was watching through Alma’s feed. Of course she was.

‘Murder as conjuring trick,’ came Marguerite’s voice.

‘Could you sound more bored?’

‘Boring stuff bores me. I yearn to be de-bored. Unbored. This, though? Puff.’

‘Puff?’

‘Pff.’

‘I thought you liked the properly puzzling ones,’ Alma said.

‘There’s puzzling, and then there’s trying too hard. So: there it is.’

‘Somebody is dead,’ said Alma.

‘It’s always the puzzle,’ Marguerite countered. ‘It’s always that. But death is nothing. Death is the most ordinary thing in the world. It’s the one thing we’re all guaranteed to experience. Puzzles are different. Puzzles are special. Special isn’t a word we can use of a thing that literally everybody experiences.’

‘Somebody died, Reetie. And I’m now officially contracted. So I’m going to have to block you out of the actual investigation. In case my testimony comes to court and so on and so forth.’

‘Allie, my dear Allie! Be honest, now. You’ll need me to help you figure it out. You’re not the puzzle-brain. You’re the bish-bash. You’re the plod-plod. I’m the Mycroft here. You’re not the Mycroft. You’re the Yourcroft, at best. At best.’

‘The police will puzzle it out, if anybody does,’ Alma muttered, not pleased by this disparagement, however comically offered. ‘And, in fact, probably nobody will puzzle it out, and nobody will care, and that will be that will be that.’

‘So long as we get paid,’ said Marguerite.

‘So long as I get paid,’ Alma returned, with asperity. She im-mediately regretted saying so.

‘Spoilsport,’ said Marguerite. ‘Still: you can tell me all about it in person, can’t you? At any the end of your long plod-plod day.’

Alma checked the timer, always there, in the corner of her eye. Three hours and forty-one minutes. Counting down.

2: Madame Michelangela

Alma’s car was not one of the artisanally crafted autos that Zurndorfer’s factory produced. She couldn’t afford anything so fancy. Instead she drove a standard plastic vehicle made 90 per cent of printed parts, a heap that rattled and hummed when she got up to fifty klicks. The shocks were wearing down saggily under the rear wheel arches. Climbing into the driver’s seat her nostrils were stung by a smell of mint so strong it had an acid tang and made her clap her hand to her face. It actually burned her throat. Gas, gas, an ecstasy of fumbling. The airfresh unit was low in the dash, partly hidden by a heap of junk and various detritus she had accumulated since her last big clear-out. It took her more than a minute rummaging around and deprogging the unit, and another minute until unscented air blowing hard and all the windows open meant that the space inside became bearable. That turned her thirteen-minute drive into a sixteen-minute drive.

The roads, though, were mostly clear. The car piloted itself smoothly onto the western artery, heading over the river and out of R!-town. The freeway was like a diagram from a textbook, white under a cool grey-blue sky. Soon enough, though, the car took a left turn onto a smaller road, past a decommissioned brick factory whose loading yard was littered with what looked like dusty avantgarde sculptural discards – a rusting truck cab, a stacked heap of metal casings, a large metal cube the colour of Marmite brailled all over with weathered pockmarks. The next plot along was a still functioning storage unit, and the one after that a car-recycling company that, judging by the stacks of decaying autos sitting unprocessed in front of their building, had gone out of business. Teeter totter. A solitary bot moved very slowly over the weedy concrete.

Then the road took Alma past a residential block. A few people were out in the warm afternoon air. She spotted one meshed-up individual plodding along the road – a bold individual to be out in such a run-down district. Fitting yourself with a mesh and having your body put through the automated motions to keep it limber, to avoid bedsores, stretch the muscles a little: most people did all that in the privacy of their own homes. You could walk up your down stairs, or down your up stairs, if you had stairs. You could pace from room to room if you didn’t. It hardly mattered where you went whilst the body’s consciousness was wholly concentrated in-Shine. In the richer parts of town it might be danger-free to have your mesh take your zonked-out body for a walk in the fresh air. But in a district like this you were almost begging nogoodniks to come steal your clothes, shave your head, or worse: kidnap you and whisk you away. You wake up pretty quickly if they actually hurt you, of course; but coming out of Shine and into the real world was, like any wake-up, not the best preparation for fighting off muggers. Of course, it was true plenty of people couldn’t afford real-world apartments large enough to plod around in, never mind staircases. For some in-Shine workers home was a space literally large enough only for a single bed. In such cases your mesh might have to take you out of your private space. Life is all about the compromises people make between desire and finances. Or, more precisely: life in the real world was all about those compromises. The Shine was different.

As the car drove, Alma took another look through the FAC-13 surveillance files. There was, she had to concede – there really was – no way anyone could have snuck into that facility unseen and deposited an adult human corpse in the boot of that car. For one thing, the footage showed the whole auto being built up from scratch, with no corpse being interposed at any point. For another, any human presence on the factory floor would have flagged up about a dozen safety, trespass and anti-theft protocols, some of which would have automatically alerted the police. For a third: well, it was all just crazy.

Nobody got into the factory. Except that Adam Kem, dead, somehow had done. Either he got into the factory, somehow unnoticed, alive and later became dead; or he entered the factory dead, in which case somebody else must have carried him. Conceivably some several bodies else.

How, though?

Alma ran an eye over FAC-13’s archived feed, though she was not sure what she was looking for. There were thick threads of interaction with the parent company AI, which is what you would expect. There were also thick threads between FAC-13 and the hospital. Presumably some of this was the factory AI alerting the Health authorities of the crime. Maybe it hadn’t known whether Kem was dead or only injured. Maybe it was a protocol to swiftly and heavily link in the hospital in the event of human accident or death on the premises. Although that possibility didn’t make a lot of sense in a wholly automated factory. Then again, Alma reminded herself, there was more to the factory than the factory floor. Outside was company space in which human beings sometimes worked. The protocols would have been written to cover the whole property. The only puzzle about the Health threads was that some of it seemed to predate the discovery of Adam Kem’s body. Alma made a note on her feed to look into it. Perhaps some other employee had called in sick. Maybe that was a coincidence, and maybe not.

Otherwise the FAC-13 archive was full of unexceptional operational gubbins, up until the moment the police had come and McA had hired Alma. One minor point of interest: that hiring had been – Alma could see, from a partly redacted data filament – instigated at the suggestion of somebody with a Govt tag. Maybe she had friends in high places, eager to put work her way. She didn’t recognise the tag, though. Maybe McA was angling for a government contract, and the government was in the habit of telling it what to do. Why her, though?

It didn’t matter.

The car shuddered and coughed as it turned left once again, and Alma looked out at her surroundings. They passed three clean-looking cubic business buildings, perfectly blank and non-logoed, presumably housing servers. And at last she was coming up to McA’s car manufactory: wide and long and low-roofed, daffodil-yellow walls and a hologram logo twisting and bulging over the roof, McA Artisanal Autos. There was a single vehicle in the visitor’s parking lot as Alma pulled in. Zurndorfer – in the flesh – clambered out of this other car. She looked uncomfortable, being in the open air.

Alma got out and walked up to her, the feed pinging that the woman’s name was no longer Zurndorfer: it was Collins. The sun came out from behind the hazy cloud: a smile in the form of light. Alma matched her expression to the brightness.

‘Your name keeps changing,’ she said. ‘Why is that?’

Collins, as she now was, made a sour face. ‘It has nothing to do with the cry the crime the matter under our,’ she returned. She tried again: ‘Nothing to do do do with the matter under.’ She stopped.

Alma said nothing. People often got nervous in face-to-face interactions. Talking to someone in the flesh was, of course it was, weird. Hers was a world where most interactions were in-feed or in-Shine, of course.

A breeze drifted across the lot. It imparted the slightest of Medusa motions to Collins’s mass of curling hair.

‘I mean,’ Collins said, eventually, ‘I’m sure police files have everything about me on their. In their data. On their databases.’

‘Ms Collins,’ said Alma. ‘Permit me to explain my status once again. I am not police, nor am I affiliated with them. I am a licensed private security agent, and I am being paid by your company bosses to look into the matter of Adam Kem’s death.’

‘They are worried it will impact profitability,’ said Collins, sulkily.

‘Of course they are.’

‘They’re going to fire me,’ Collins said, her eyes brimming liquid.

‘I don’t know if they will or won’t.’

‘It’s not illegal,’ Collins said. ‘The name thing.’

Alma waited.

‘It’s a marriage chain. I’m registered with an in-line company that arranges it. I get paid per marriage.’

This was a new one on Alma. ‘You’ve been married three times in the last hour,’ she said, trying, and mostly managing, to keep the surprise out of her voice.

‘Technically – only technically. The company is registered in Simferopol citystate, and there’s a kink in the marriage law there. One need only be married thirty minutes before divorce becomes possible. I signed up, and the company processes everything. It’s legal. My file is always updated when I marry somebody new. I never meet these people, you know. It’s men and women from . . .