Stanley Duncan's Robot: Genesis David III (english reading book .TXT) 📖

his product line. Since they didn’t recognize him, did that mean that none of the other cyborgs had ever been registered at a hospital? It seemed logical that Shinto Corporation would have provided the information to them. Strangely, he had no memories of any other cyborg from the factory. There were troubling things about his recovered memories that didn’t make any sense, but he wanted to analyze them before worrying Stanley.

“System error.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry, but your access to the system has been disabled. Have a nice day.”

“Wonderful.”

As he continued walking down the hall to the cafeteria, he wondered what had caused the demon-cat to attack Boots. Maybe Stanley had figured it out and was working on a solution. Or maybe the whole situation had traumatized him. It was possible that Dan had been pushing him too hard when he could have been using his own resources.

Standing next to a hibernating nurse, he took out his phone to do a livestream. “Hey, guys — Dan here. I’ve got big news, and I need your help. Our neighbor and her pet cat were attacked today. Stanley and I were arguing when we heard a scream. There was this incredibly deadly cat with steel claws and teeth. It sliced one door to shreds, killed a neighbor’s pet, and nearly killed the owner. Thankfully, she is recovering. We’re at the hospital now.” He nodded toward the nurse and then gave out his contact phone number. “I need your help. Contact me here, or call me. I’d like to know if anyone has any information on — ”

The phone went flying across the room — Teddy had slapped it out of Dan’s hands.

“Why’d you do that?” Dan scanned the young man and female android in front of him. He could tell from the color of the man’s hands that he’d had cybernetic enhancements. Subtle imperfections in his movements meant that he was still getting used to them. The female android looked like a little girl dressed in a skirt. The out-of-date model made Dan wonder if they had both been infected by some virus and gone rogue.

“You were blocking the hallway, idiot.”

Taking a step back, Dan looked up and down the hall. “You had plenty of space to pass.”

Teddy took a step toward him. “But I wanted more — got a problem with that?”

“I don’t want any trouble.”

Teddy got in his face. “That’s too bad.”

Dan didn’t want to fight, but it looked like he had no choice.

Chapter 7

Stanley brought two plastic bags out into the hall. Blood oozed out of Boots as Stanley scooped her remains into a plastic bag. The demon-cat’s body lay near the door, its severed head inside the condo. Each time he bent down to pick it up, he imagined it moving. He still didn’t know how and why it ended up in the condo — or did he? He thought back to the threatening phone calls he had received. If his inaction had led to this terrible attack, …

The freezer breathed out a cloud of cold air. Stanley carefully placed Boots’s plastic-wrapped remains inside. Glenda could decide what to do with them once she’d returned from the hospital. “Leticia, the hallway outside needs to be cleaned. It’s urgent.”

“Understood. Cleaning will commence immediately.”

Stanley grabbed the broken broom. It took him a while to collect the severed head because of his perfunctory grip and inability to focus. It would have been hard enough to direct the head to where he wanted it to go while looking at it. But he was too creeped out and ended up going about it in a way that made it especially difficult. Holding the bag at full arm’s reach, he blindly slapped the head with the stick. This blood was on his hands.

High-pitched sounds buzzed outside his door.

“Leticia, turn on the holographics for the front door.”

The speakers beeped, and the holographic representation of two, short, cylinder-shaped robots buzzing across the floor appeared on Stanley’s table. Their clear plastic chamber was filled with an opaque crimson as they scrubbed back and forth between the doors. They were doing a great job of removing the bloodstains, but apparently clearing away the remains of a murder-machine was not part of their job description. When Stanley tried to move the body with the broom, it barely budged. “Damn it.” Tossing the broom to the side, he summoned up his courage and placed the cat into the bag with his hands.

Scanning the demon-cat’s head with his tablet, Stanley was directed to a Wikipedia entry as well as a registration. The machine had been reported stolen by the owner, Frank Depetrio. The security cat was a discontinued model that originally had enamel claws and teeth. It was designed to discreetly patrol and report back any suspicious activity. They could easily identify most people, quickly relaying information over 6G to be processed through distributed computing, which spit back real-time reports on whomever they saw. The technology was amazing but had been discontinued due to firmware vulnerabilities allowing the cat to be remotely exploited at the root level. If it wasn’t patched, anyone with the right program could take control of the cat, allowing real-time spying and core-functionality reprogramming.

Later models were invulnerable to firmware hacking and were far superior at analysis. Those expensive models had been discontinued as well because people had destroyed them mercilessly after the Great Layoff.

A memory device behind the demon-cat’s ear was for recording and encrypting the data, but it was accessible only through a security biometric — he needed to get a fingerprint of the owner. Brute-force entry — ripping the cat apart and prying free the memory chip — would produce only garbage data. Frank Depetrio was the only person who could open it. Googling his name, Stanley found out he was the manager of a local grocery store.

Stanley leaned back in his seat, wondering what he was getting himself involved with. The memory chip would contain not only footage of Boots’s murder but, undoubtedly, more gruesome scenes