Observer

Detroit Business Center, 2043 This place was one of those locations Richard categorized as "another one." The succession of investigations over the past few weeks had grown wearying in its predictability, so much so that he had stopped distinguishing between the days. Whether it was Monday or Friday held no particular significance for him. The shifting numbers on the calendar, blurring the boundaries between the days of the week, changed nothing substantial in his existence. Only the transition from day to night forced his system to engage its night vision, altering the contrast of the world due to the planet's rotation—and in that lay the entirety of his variety. Unfamiliar faces, distorted by grief and sorrow, flashed before his eyes so frequently that they merged into a single, featureless mass, death itself included. It, too, had stripped away any individuality and turned monotonous. One location replaced another, and each was invariably splattered with tears and blood. Even the corpses, for the most part, looked identical—like shattered dolls. Broken, blood-soaked, distinctly unbeautiful dolls by human standards, with unnaturally twisted arms and legs bent at the knees and splayed out wide. The contents of fractured craniums, generously smeared across various floor coverings, triggered the exact same stable association every single time: the remnants of a crushed watermelon on asphalt. He was trapped in a goddamned Groundhog Day, only instead of a fluffy rodent, he was surrounded by stiff, bloated corpses and a total absence of change. Just another dump, which Richard filed away in his archive exactly as that—"another one." Mr. Jaden had selected a method of dying so entirely cliché that the most advanced detective of modern times was once again denied the opportunity to stress-test his brand-new eight-core processor. Taiwanese engineers consistently continued to delight the world, and him in particular, with their miracle developments. The world was chasing miniaturization, fabricating chips so small that a fifth-caliber bullet, passing through his skull yet again, stood every chance of flying right past his center for making not-always-correct decisions. "Fourth suicide today," a detective grumbled behind his back, clearly sharing the collective boredom born of this conveyor-belt monotony. He had capitulated once more to an old, harmful vice, greedily inhaling a plume of acrid tobacco smoke. By the android's calculations, the object smoldering in his partner's mouth was already the ninth cigarette this morning. For the six-hundredth consecutive day, a man who had previously been sober was slowly but surely constructing a barricade out of bottles, utilizing it with particular diligence to block out reality. Yesterday's less-than-sober state of mind and a desperate urge to prove a point to someone had cost him an entire bottle of five-year-old Red Label. Gavin had lost the bet to a colleague, practically tearing his shirt open across his chest while swearing that starting the very next day, he was quitting the smokes for good. But that heroism had evaporated within twelve hours; his willpower had held out exactly until lunchtime. Now, he stood in the shadow of yet another crime scene, blowing smoke into the overcast, rainy sky, silently acknowledging his defeat to dried weeds wrapped in white paper. Richard observed this in silence, understanding human frailties perfectly. Every evening, when the neon bar signs began to bleed into the puddles, Gavin would pour another dose of lies down his throat—lies about how tomorrow would bring redemption. But tomorrow never arrived for him; over the last two years, the hands of his internal clock had frozen solidly at 4:24 AM. For humans, the cycle of self-deception was just as infinite as his own personal Groundhog Day. They lied to themselves persistently, with a sort of masochistic pleasure, yet never even attempted to actually believe their own falsehoods for a single moment. Richard, whose primary objective at the end of the night was simply to haul the drunken body home and dump it onto a couch, found himself wishing the detective would buy into his own lie just once. Trapped within the confines of a self-delusion, things might have been a little easier. "I get it, the weather's garbage, but is that really a reason to hurl yourself out a window?" The cigarette butt crackled between his fingers again, chasing the red cherry right down to the filter, threatening to burn his skin. Gavin exhaled a weary plume of smoke, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. "They’ve thrown a whole damn flash mob for me here." Monday morning in Detroit brought joy only to those holding a ticket out of the place. The start of this particular day always carried the exact same scent: garbage bins, damp asphalt, and cheap coffee from primitive vending machines that didn't wake you up so much as give you heartburn. Today, however, an exceedingly distinct stench of human entrails added itself to the bouquet. Four suicides awaited them this morning. Four people who had decided that the silence beneath the dirt was preferable to the racket above it. Humans had been resolving their problems far too drastically lately. "Hey, you! Get the fuck outta here!" the detective barked at a group of overly curious onlookers, who remained completely unfazed by the chirping of the holographic tape warning non-officials against crossing the perimeter. "Fucking vultures... Barely give 'em a reason and they're lining up to gawk at someone's guts." Richard watched as the cigarette butt, having fallen onto the wet asphalt, was unceremoniously crushed beneath a boot. His partner's head clearly weighed a ton after yesterday's bar marathon, but the stubborn bastard would sooner die than admit he was out of form. The entirety of his hidden discomfort was betrayed only by the density of profanities packed into a single sentence. The worse Gavin felt, the more his speech resembled a continuous bleeping television signal, had he been broadcasting live right now. He had been hitting the bottle with increasing frequency over the past two years, but he had no intention of acknowledging it—let alone changing anything—just yet. He needed more time. They both needed far more time. "Hey, kiddo," Gavin nodded toward the forensic examiner crouching nearby, who was draped in gadgets and various tools of the trade. "Throw a sheet over our friend here. I'm close to losing my lunch as it is." Ordinarily, Richard would also drop into a crouch and lean over the corpse to scan it with greater precision and collect every scrap of available evidence, but today he remained standing in line with the weary task force. Those who didn't smoke sipped coffee from disposable cups, while those who required no stimulants to exist performed all the dirty work. "What kept him from wanting to live on such a wonderful morning?" came the thin voice of the forensic examiner, frozen over the departed soul of the man. In the old days, the unshaven detective would have inevitably chipped in with his signature two cents in response to that rhetorical question. He would have cracked a crude joke, delivering some pathetic anecdote steeped in dark humor and sexism, leaving the street to echo with nothing but his own raspy laughter. The faces of the entire task force would have simultaneously met their palms in a collective fit of secondhand embarrassment, and Richard would have logged yet another breach of social etiquette. But Gavin hadn't joked in a long time, having transformed into a stranger in the eyes of those who knew him prior to September seventeenth, forty-one. "Morning is never wonderful for those who are seeing it for the last time," the android replied to the forensic examiner. He joined conversations so rarely that the girl, tweezers and a specimen container in hand, gave a start. She turned around, her charcoal eyebrows shooting up to the very brim of her knitted beret, and stared at him in mute disbelief, as though a statue in the city park had suddenly started speaking. While the humans indulged in sentimentality, Richard had already found the answer to her question. He closed the distance sharply, dropping to one knee beside Jaden's mutilated hand. A single precise touch, and a drop of the crimson substance was sampled on the tip of his tongue. The LED on his temple executed a few rapid rotations, extracting information from the endless tapestry of the database. A procedure that would have previously cost humans hours of bureaucratic agony and endless waiting for laboratory results was completed in mere seconds. The chain of cause and effect fell into place instantly, like a house of cards prevented from collapsing. Richard covered the bruised, blue-tinted hand with the edge of the sheet and stood up. He remained motionless, keeping his eyes locked onto the figure hidden beneath the white fabric, entirely ignoring the emotional explosion from the crowds lining both sides of the street. The disjointed chorus of gasps, the flashes of smartphone cameras, and the muffled whispers did not concern him in the slightest. An point-blank view of a human crushed to a pulp was a sight hard to grow accustomed to even for veteran detectives whose emotions had long since calloused, to say nothing of ordinary passersby whose cozy realities had cracked further upon witnessing a peculiar sort of vampire licking someone else's blood from his fingers. The technology was not new and was frequently utilized by investigative androids, yet it invariably triggered an existential paradox in these "cavemen" humans. Another individual who failed to cope with the consequences of their own choices, Richard involuntarily drew a parallel to his former... partner. That woman had been a world champion at generating problems out of thin air, possessing a habit of self-indulgently drowning in them while stubbornly, furiously ignoring every single life jacket he threw her way. Since that day, not a single minute had passed without him yearning for her. Five hundred and sixty-four days—five hundred and sixty-four rotations through a personal hell where time was measured not by hours, but by the depth of the void. No matter how much processing power he dedicated to simulating alternative scenarios, replaying the past, it remained entirely unchangeable. This burden of memory had become his voluntary martyrdom, his personal cross to bear. He had not erased her, though a single system command could have granted him a long-awaited digital oblivion, delivering instant relief along with it. He refrained from doing so only because the right to remember was the sole tangible proof that she had ever existed. The right to remember was his only remaining anchor to the humanity she had once awakened within him. Only in this manner did it feel as though her ghost still lingered somewhere close by—in the reflections of the neon signs, in the aroma of coffee or the drift of cigarette smoke, in this very drizzle washing the blood from the pavements of Detroit. She had become a virus in his system, one he consciously refused to purge. Richard stepped back, returning to the loose formation of men while deliberately avoiding the stench of cheap tobacco drifting from the heavy-set, perpetually angry patrolman guarding the corpse. It was a different brand of cigarettes—nothing like the ones his partner used to poison herself with on the balcony during those endless, freezing evenings, back when he had unsuccessfully tried to warm her in his cold embrace, in total defiance of the laws of thermodynamics. Broken glass crunched thickly beneath the boots of everyone who stepped on it. Mr. Jaden’s descent had been devastatingly clumsy. Death had not come to him in the form of a graceful dive, the way he had likely painted it in his final fantasies while standing on the window ledge. It was a flawed, jagged trajectory that left behind nothing but biological debris on the asphalt. A family man, a father of four, who had hurled them into the abyss of life just as thoughtlessly as he had surrendered his own body to gravity. Seven minutes. The system logged the precise duration. That was exactly how long it would take him and Gavin to play out the rest of this theater piece called "standard protocol": measurements, photographs, formal filings. To be exact, seven minutes of predictable, cookie-cutter routine, and then they would head down to the riverbanks to stare into the face of another drowning victim. His bloated, pale countenance was already being fished out from the embrace of Detroit's summer-warmed waters. It seemed as though humans were extinguishing their own lives every passing minute, while he still walked this earth, masterfully mimicking it. Richard took on every single case, overloading his systems to the absolute maximum parameter. He wasn't chasing a bonus, nor was he trying to earn a special commendation or praise. The work was everything he had left. The internal void that had opened five hundred and sixty-four days ago could be plugged by nothing else. It was too vast, too absolute. Only the endless conveyor belt of other people's tragedies—this steady torrent of fractured bones and severed hopes—allowed him to temporarily go blind, blinding himself to his own grief. Was the void inside Mr. Jaden just as deep? Why did he choose to leave four children half-orphaned? Richard lifted his head toward the overcast sky, which was weeping a fine, almost imperceptible drizzle. It caused no discomfort to him or the humans, and the passersby didn't even bother to open their umbrellas. He wanted to leave this place as quickly as possible—there was nothing left to salvage here, and nothing to occupy his processes. The suicide note tucked into the dead man's pocket and a quarter-million-dollar child support debt were more than enough to rule out foul play. Two of his four children were born out of wedlock. Boredom. Before, back when the lines of programming code in his head still held firmly together, Richard would return to an empty apartment where her scent lingered for a time, yielding himself to intellectual self-torture. He would ask himself questions that possessed no solution or answers, yet provided the illusion of those deeply philosophical conversations with the person he had lost. What did the miserable soul think about as they took their final step into the vacuum? How did the hand find the strength to unclamp the fingers gripping the edge of the windowsill? What thoughts flashed through the consciousness in that infinite tick of time between the asphalt and the eternal dark? Fear, regret, or that same hollow, scorched-earth bitterness—with what exact metric does a human cross over to the other side? But today, there would be no answers. Because the questions were no longer being asked. And today's conversational partners, having lapsed into an eternal silence, proved to be utterly lousy. Mr. Jaden had taken his truth along with the rest of them, leaving Richard with nothing but dry statistics and a still-unquenched desire to comprehend the core of human despair and where exactly it led them. He took a sharp step back, nearly colliding with Gavin, who had been flicking his lighter for a solid minute, attempting to ignite a fresh cigarette with fingers trembling from a vicious hangover. The android irritably snatched the lighter from his hands and sparked the flame himself, his gaze remaining fixed somewhere ahead. For a fleeting instant, the tiny flare reflected in green eyes, illuminating the internal demons of his partner, who were clearly suffering from the hangover as well. No gratitude followed, but no one had anticipated any. The detective silently reclaimed the lighter—the cigarette pack's best friend—his face twisting into a contemptuous grimace. Richard merely sighed, glanced around, and felt an immediate urge to flee from the sight before him. The whispering of the brazen onlookers, who had swarmed from all corners of the business center district, was growing louder and more persistent. Some spun theories; others spat vitriol. Dozens of smartphones pointed toward the corpse, reducing the grim event to a farce, while one individual had lost touch with reality entirely, launching a live stream and imagining himself a reporter on the scene. It was highly unlikely that, upon waking up this morning, they had planned to harvest likes off someone's brains smeared across the asphalt, but Monday was a rough day. It didn't always start with coffee. Someone unceremoniously tugged at his sleeve, snapping Richard out of his hypnosis of the open window on the seventeenth floor. Exhaling an irritated sigh, he pulled away from the arrogant teenage bloggers whose sheer impudence was beginning to upset his fragile equilibrium. "Please maintain your distance and clear the perimeter," his voice sounded pointedly polite, but the inflection only added fuel to the fire. Two girls erupted into ecstatic shrieks, clapping their hands as though the figure before them were not an android detective at a crime scene, but a pop idol. It appeared that today, Mr. Jaden wasn't the only main attraction in this traveling circus. I should have kept my mouth shut, the android rolled his eyes, ignoring a torrent of questions that possessed not the slightest relevance to the case. The persistent blogger did everything in her power to edge closer and snap a selfie with him, prompting Richard to demonstratively turn his back to her and shove his hands into his jeans pockets. Let them admire his spine. "Beat it, you little shits, or I'll book you a fifteen-day excursion to a holding cell!" Gavin wasn't just angry anymore; he was a hair's breadth away from committing a minor offense of his own. Every extra decibel scraped against his raw brain, and the clingy girls shrieked with such frantic intensity it was as if Jaden had just risen from the dead and were crawling toward them on all fours. Richard classified such individuals as personalities "without inhibitions." It was impossible to fluster them, difficult to offend them, and harder still to shame them for behavior considered socially unacceptable. Most importantly, they were entirely devoid of self-consciousness. The herd instinct of the crowd, spotting a fearless "leader," fed the collective audacity, and soon the emboldened mob with smartphones recklessly surged forward, breaching the holographic tape. If those two could do it, it meant everyone could. The officer beside the android shook his head in frustration, blaming gadgets for the degradation of Generation Alpha. Accompanied by Detective Reed's profanity-laced threats, the patrolman reached for the handcuffs clipped to his belt and moved threateningly toward the featherless vultures. Nothing new, Richard thought, turning away from a picture that never changed. Everything goes strictly by protocol. The minutes ticked by mockingly slow. The forensic examiner spent far too long scrutinizing something unknown in the brains smeared across the asphalt, as if trying to decipher some hidden code within the mess. The entire task force had turned into snails today. Their sluggish movements and exhausted faces said "let the whole world wait" without words, though what the world was supposed to be waiting for remained a mystery. Perhaps he had simply grown accustomed to thinking too fast, forgetting to adapt to the human, measured rhythm, gradually transforming into an exclusively highly efficient machine with a human face—who could tell. He was distancing himself from them more and more, communicating less and less. Those rare dialogues that did occur with colleagues were perfunctory and uninspired, resembling nothing more than a dry report. He performed everything required of him, but for him personally, it was not enough. The internal void still yawned open like a cracked chassis with the wind whistling through it. Within the pushed-back but unoffended crowd of teenagers who hadn't made it to their university, Richard couldn't discern a single face. All of them were obscured by rectangles encased in multi-colored covers. From time to time, screens were wiped against bellies or sleeves because of the drizzling rain, exposing faces for a fraction of a second, but there was nothing interesting in them either. Empty, glassy eyes, blind to the real world, looked through the prism of a video camera, while half-open mouths stood at the ready to fire off equally empty questions. Richard was about to avert his gaze from them, to stare up into the sky and count down the minutes until their departure to the next crime scene, but something in that crowd hooked his attention. A single detail, distinct from the gray mass, contrasted far too loudly against the background to remain unnoticed. That detail was a person. Standing further back, at the very edge of the clamoring crowd, she was the only one for whom the corpse held absolutely no interest. To be precise—it was a woman. Not a single emotion registered on her face, and instead of a smartphone, her hand gripped the slender handle of an umbrella. The girl, dressed entirely inappropriately for the weather, was looking exclusively at him. Despite it being the height of summer, the morning was chilly enough that standing in a single black dress with thin spaghetti straps was sheer recklessness. Gusts of cool wind, rolling in alongside the overcast sky and the rain, whipped the thin synthetic fabric and her charcoal-black hair, yet none of it seemed to cause her the slightest discomfort. That is a shortcut to landing in a hospital bed with pneumonia, Richard thought, shaking his head at a long-forgotten spark of irritation that shot through his system like an electric impulse. His former partner had also possessed a knack for neglecting outerwear or hats, tearing through Detroit in freezing temperatures and biting cold, only to spend the following two weeks completely bedridden while insisting she was perfectly fine. Had it taught her a lesson? Of course not. She had regularly stepped on the exact same rakes, never asking for assistance and rarely accepting it. Even from him—her loyal friend and partner. A partner whom she had personally taught not just to exist, but to live. Not to simulate, but to truly feel. Not to perform, but to actually love. And after all of that—she had brazenly abandoned him to absolute loneliness. He forced his gaze over to the ambulance, desperate to stop picking at his own wound with a likeness that was far too painful to observe. The paramedics' task today came with an added tier of difficulty. Two androids in medical uniforms approached the body, attempting to gather the remnants of the brain that had leaked from the fractured skull off the asphalt, triggering a fresh surge of volatile emotions from the onlookers. Less than four minutes remained until completion, and then they could finally depart for the next location, where the android detective would submerge himself in a new case. As cynical as it might sound, Richard secretly hoped the drowning victim hadn't died of natural causes. Otherwise, he would be forced to endure another twenty minutes of agonizing boredom while the task force dragged their feet before he could take his next step in this wheel. "What killed him?" a calm, measured voice resonated behind his back. Richard pinpointed the audio source instantly, despite the precise four-meter gap separating them. The person who had posed the question made no attempt to yell over the sirens or the din of the crowd. They spoke evenly, with that specific brand of composure that guaranteed the recipient would catch every single syllable. The android turned around slowly. His processor already had the standard protocol for "denial of information to unauthorized personnel" primed and ready to deploy, but a chronic streak of curiosity prompted him to hold back the automated response. Over the past ten minutes, he had been asked this exact question no fewer than one hundred and five times in various iterations—ranging from hysterical screeching to pathetic pleading and outright manipulation. Yet this balanced intonation, entirely stripped of emotional debris, instantly detached itself from the surrounding audio backdrop. The girl with the transparent umbrella in her hand continued to look straight at him. Raindrops rolled down the dome, creating a thin, watery screen around her. The question undoubtedly belonged to her, yet her face, just as before, betrayed not a single emotion. It seemed as though neither the tragedy itself nor the presence of a pinnacle CyberLife creation held any real interest for her. Or perhaps she simply hadn't expected to receive an answer, let alone capture a fraction of his attention. His internal timer, counting down the time until the projected conclusion of the standard procedure, dispassionately displayed: Three minutes of idle processing.

∆ 00:02:59

Richard, driven solely by a persistent boredom and a fleeting urge to kill time, slowly drew his hands from the pockets of his dark jeans and took a measured step forward, carefully avoiding the broken glass and debris scattered underfoot. The advanced detective closed the distance, but stopped short of crossing the line, halting exactly five centimeters from the yellow perimeter tape—erecting an invisible but palpable barrier between the law and civilian curiosity. "He killed himself," Richard replied, looking directly into the stranger's eyes. They were the exact same cold gray hue as his own—"the color of a stormy Detroit sky," as she would have called it. The girl on the other side of the tape was tall enough that neither of them had to adjust their posture to accommodate a height difference. Their gazes locked at a perfect level, creating a rare visual symmetry with the opposite sex. "It is classified as a suicide," he added, retreating into dry terminology. "The man decided that non-existence was a perfectly reasonable alternative to another workday. That is all."

∆ 00:01:43

"That is not entirely accurate," the stranger countered. Her voice carried no aggression, nor any desire to appear clever. It was a mere statement of fact, as dispassionate as his own analytical readouts. "What exactly killed him?" This rejection of his stated "version" caught the android off guard for a fraction of a second. His processor thawed from its idle state, frantically calculating and cycling through alternative responses. What, exactly, was wrong with his conclusion? The event reconstruction program had clearly mapped it out: the acceleration of free fall—roughly nine point eight meters per second squared, a total absence of struggle on the windowsill, the final positioning of the body—everything dictated a voluntary leap. Perhaps this man had lived an unhappy life, or one completely divorced from what he truly wanted. He had undoubtedly made a critical mess of it, and chose the window as a radical solution. Yet, the girl's inquiry demanded something deeper than the mere physics of the descent or surface-level psychology. Richard could not fathom what data point he was missing. "He was killed by debt," he ventured, the answer framed almost as a counter-question. He tilted his head slightly, studying her reaction through the transparent canopy of her umbrella. Again, no reaction followed. Certain algorithms, which he had colloquially termed "intuition," suggested this answer was also incorrect, and they were proven right.

∆ 00:01:03

The stranger—whose profile in his database still read as "unidentified subject"—gave a slight shake of her head. The movement was barely perceptible, but to the android's optical sensors, it registered as a definitive rejection. "What actually killed him?" she repeated, and the question echoed like a looped system error that was impossible to ignore. Richard felt a profound wave of confusion. It was difficult to recall the last time someone had asked him a question that forced his processor's cooling system to kick into overdrive. Lost in thought, he unconsciously took a step backward onto the shattered shards, as if an invisible leash were pulling him back to his duties. "The prospect of imprisonment," the android replied, his voice regaining a measure of certainty. "Had it not been for his critical debt to creditors and the inevitability of his arrest, this man would most likely still be alive. Those are the facts." But that isn't what you wanted to hear, is it? Richard took another step back as his LED flashed an anxious yellow. He had just blurted out the deceased's personal data, but it hardly mattered; the media would cover all of it soon enough anyway. "The fear of a cage outweighed the fear of eternal darkness," he added, less formally this time. His hand involuntarily smoothed the front of his jacket, grounding himself in the reality of the tangible world. A question so simple, yet so incredibly complex, had subtly derailed him from the track he hadn't strayed from in over two years. "It is the simple arithmetic of despair. There is no room in it for 'actually.'"

∆ 00:00:00

The timer signaled the end of his "idle minutes," which had passed slightly faster than usual, leaving behind a strange aftertaste of incompletion. Time was up, yet Richard continued to stare at the stranger as if she were something entirely novel—something he hadn't encountered in a very long time. She shook her head in refusal once more, meaning she still disagreed with the answer. Her emotions were difficult to read because they were simply non-existent. It was jarring and mesmerizing all at once. What was wrong with his answers? Was the cause of Mr. Jaden's death not painfully obvious? Loans, job loss, an impending divorce, and debt—the classic toolkit for a leap from the seventeenth floor. "I suppose it is a purely philosophical question at this point," the android remarked after a few seconds of silence. The timer was pressing. The red digits in the corner of his field of vision pulsed insistently, forcing him to terminate a dialogue that was utterly meaningless in the understanding of his system—yet one he secretly, truly wished to continue. Duty and dead souls called out to him with a silent plea to find their killers, or at the very least, those who had pushed them to the brink. He had no time for chatting with onlookers. As a rule, he never interacted with civilians in this manner, only occasionally chasing them away from the perimeters. He had already forgotten how long it had been since he spoke of anything besides work, or thought about anything deeper than investigations. "Excuse me, I must go." Leaving the stranger unsatisfied with his response—and admitting deep down that he, too, remained displeased with himself—Richard turned around. He trudged toward the heavy SUV, where his partner had been slumped in the backseat since their very first dispatch, slipping into a doze on the way from one location to the next. With an epic hangover like the one Richard had diagnosed early this morning by the scent of stale alcohol and the dilated capillaries in his eyes, letting a human take the wheel was a surefire way to pad the traffic accident statistics. After all, only one of them possessed the gift of immortality and the capacity to function after critical overloads. And what did kill him? Richard silently posed the exact same question to himself as he slid into the driver's seat. He reached for the rearview mirror and, with a slight effort, angled it toward himself. Staring back at him was the RK900—perfection engineered for solving crimes. In the past, he was a personality shaped through long and persistent effort. But now, in the reflection, he saw only a tool that ground the entire philosophical meaning of death into dust. Trace the clue, follow the scent, find the killer—a looped process that spun in circles and had yet to jump the rails. Detective Reed had locked horns in a verbal dispute with a colleague and was taking his time getting to the vehicle. In truth, Richard would have more than enough time today to digest the question, provided they weren't assigned a proper case. For the first time all week, his processor showed signs of life with unusual activity, and Richard noted that his thought process had quickened, though thinking had not become any easier because of it. He took a few more "steps" back into his memory, but the programming code responsible for logical closure hitched for a fraction of a second. The answers "debts" or "suicide" seemed flawless to him, yet the absolute certainty with which the stranger had shaken her head left a tiny, barely perceptible snag in his system. Did she know something he himself could not see?