“Are you mad? Why did you shoot him?” Captain Ekhomu screams at me.
I convert my predominant logic bundle into text and parse it through the muscles of my bioplasmium larynx, adjusting the tone to one of polite but firm assertion, “It was the optimum course of action, given the conditions.”
Captain Ekhomu throws his black digital folder at me, and it smashes against my face into a thousand fragments of useless fibreglass and microprocessor. He screams an obscene word and reaches for my neck. I lean back, place my arms flat against the table in front of me and allow him wrap his thick, veined hands around my throat. I look down at what is left of his folder as he futilely tries to wring the life from me. It takes almost seven seconds for the other human officers to break into the interview room, wrestle him away from me and out of the room. He is still livid when the door shuts behind him. He is still irrational.
A few silent seconds pass and then a compact, pale woman wearing a navy-blue skirt-suit enters the room. I scan her. She would stand at five feet and four inches tall without the three-inch high open-toe black pumps she is wearing. Her hair is very black, and her eyes are very brown. A small nose sits symmetrically between the salient cheekbones of her face. Her biometric data does not auto-identify her to me and her image does not exist in the Nigeria Police Force database. At least not in any part of it I have remote access to. She has small, lean Asian features. She is calm. She is not livid. She is not irrational. She may or may not be human, but she is definitely not an officer.
“Officer LG033, I need you to explicitly state your reasoning in the matter of the shooting of Mr. Busayo Adefarasin,” she says, pausing before adding, “Clearly, and for the record.”
She might be a Borg, but if she is, she is much newer than I am. At least three product cycles after mine. Possibly more. She is definitely not a second-hand model bought by an organisation that barely understands anything about Borg-tech just so they can pretend at technological sophistication. Not like I am. There is no electronic stria running through the whites of her eyes and there is no telltale scarring behind her ear. She looks perfectly human. She probably is.
I oblige her request by identifying myself and stating my motives, as she says, for the record.
“My name is Neville Yorke,” I begin, temporarily increasing my verbosity level from the default two to an almost-maximum four, “Pegasus product issue code LG033. I am a Borg police officer attached to the Lekki Phase One district. I have been in active service for eleven days at thirty-nine percent uptime since my last soft reboot. Today, I shot and killed Busayo Adefarasin, aged twenty-one and identified to be a freshman in the University of Lagos, majoring in mathematics. I wish to explicitly state that I did so because it was the optimum course of action given prevailing conditions and input parameters.
“For the record,” I add in a lower voice as my verbosity resets back to default.
“I need you to explain how you arrived at this conclusion,” the woman says, and something about the way she says it triggers anxiety synemotion signals from my neuroprocessor.
“I’m sorry ma’am, I can’t find your image in the police database. Could you please identify yourself, for the record?”
She smiles, appearing to enjoy the apparent humour in my mimicry. The smile sits heavier than the lipstick on her lips. She is definitely human.
Without moving, she says, “My name is Elizabeth Soh. I’m a technical resolutions officer with Pegasus Incorporated Middle East and Africa geomarkets. I facilitate uptake of Borg technology in law enforcement. The Nigeria Police Force, your owner, is one of my new clients.”
“I see,” I say as I run her name through the official Pegasus database and find it. Its contents however are shielded from me. Insufficient security permissions. She is definitely someone important. My anxiety signalling grows. I turn up the resolution of my sensory capture system to record our encounter with even more granularity.
“Could you walk me through the events leading up to your shooting Busayo Adefarasin this evening?” she asks.
Her hair is pulled back and tied in a single loop at the back of her head so tightly that individual strands are straining against her hairline like fishing lines. Her glasses appear welded onto her face and her alabaster skin doesn’t seem to have seen much of the Lagos sun. She may work with the Nigeria Police Force, but she definitely doesn’t live in Nigeria. She probably came here because of me.
“You’re a class three Pegasus employee or higher. I believe you have clearance to just directly download my log file,” I respond, removing my hands from the table and placing them beside me.
“Oh, I will,” she says, “but first I need you to explain your reasoning. For the record.”
She keeps smiling as she speaks but I can tell she is taking this extremely seriously. Two screens silently project from her wrist and onto the table in front of her. They light up. SUBJECT LG033, the first screen says in bright yellow letters across the screen. REFLECTOR MARKERS, the other screen says. She doesn’t look at them, not even when encrypted data symbols begin to run furiously across both, once I start speaking.
“I was patrolling Bakare Street,” I say, “in a predominantly suburban area. There was minimal civilian activity. A few young women walking their dogs—”
She raises her slender left hand to stop me and says, “I think I need a little more detail than that. Please change your verbosity setting to three.”
“Sorry.”
Her bright red nail polish draws my attention, temporarily increasing my visual processing routine priority. I reprioritize and continue.
“Five minutes prior to the shooting, from 16:47 to 16:52, I observed four women, the youngest estimated to be thirty-four and the oldest to be fifty-nine, walking dogs. The dogs were all of different breeds. I also observed a man in a white BMW drive past at 16:49. This was well within the expected activity parameters for the area. There appeared to be no anomalies.”
“Until 16:53?”
“Yes, at precisely 16:53 I observed a young man, identified as Busayo Adefarasin, enter the street from the north, with a pair of noise-cancelling headphones in his ears. He also had his hands in his pockets. I watched him approach and when he was approximately twenty-one meters from me, my threat identification system flagged him. I sent a request for backup.”
Her eyes narrow. “Yes. Your backup request was logged in at 16:54. What specifically about him did your threat identification system flag?”
I send a record retrieval request to my internal memory storage gland and continue speaking, expecting the data to be returned before I reach the part of my sentence where I need it but for some reason, it doesn’t, leaving me stuttering like a confused human, “It flagged his… His… Err… His…”
I blink and quickly run my memory optimization subroutine to try to boost record retrieval. There are no details with that timestamp. All I get is an overwhelming sense of threat and the powerful electronic impulse to draw my weapon flooding my neuroprocessors. It doesn’t make sense. It is not logical. I may be an old model, but I have never had a record retrieval problem before. It’s either a symptom of critical system failure or something worse. I try not to let the signals from my neuroprocessor make me seem worried, unstable. “I don’t… I can… I am sorry. I cannot retrieve the data at this time. Perhaps there is an undetected hardware problem. I believe you and your technical support crew can download and review the data log from my memory gland when this interview is finished. I apologize.”
Elizabeth Soh leans forward in her chair and the screens in front of her shift automatically to accommodate her elbow on the table. She glances at the screens and then she tells me, “Your memory gland and processors seem to be working just fine.” The smile is gone from her face now.
“There is obviously some kind of…”
“It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. Please continue. Tell me what you can recall.”
“I… But…”
“Please. Continue,” she says.
I glance at the observation panel set into the wall of the room, aware that beyond it, Captain Ekhomu and the other human officers’ eyes are probably on me right now. It makes me uncomfortable being so unreliable in front of them. They have treated me like a delicate new gadget since I arrived, not one to be valued for its utility but for the status it confers; a gadget to only be casually brought out in front of fancy friends and quickly put back, most of its functions never even explored. This makes me feel… inefficient.
“Very well. I drew my weapon and approached Busayo. He did not respond to my verbal calls for him to halt.”
“Because of the headphones?”
“Yes. I detected high-amplitude sound waves being emitted from them and so I sped to his front, blocking his path. I identified myself and requested him to show his identification cards. He reached into his back pocket. Scenario prediction returned a ninety-five-point-three percent chance of aggressive behaviour. At that point, fearing for my own safety, I fired my weapon.” The logic I am describing does not sound right to me, even as the words escape my throat. The actions I am describing are irrational. I believe I am suffering a system failure.
“You shot him.”
“Yes.”
“Because you were afraid of him?”
I say, “Yes,” because it is true, but that does not hide the irrationality of what I am saying from me or Elizabeth. She seizes on the point and does not let go.
“Let’s assume scenario prediction was correct. You’re a Borg, he was human, so why were you afraid?”
“I… I… My neuroprocessor must have detected some nearly imperceptible action of his. Something threatening enough to necessitate his incapacitation. My algorithms take in input from a wide variety of real-time environmental input.”
The encrypted data symbols whizz even more furiously across her screens, and I feel like I can smell the sound of the light coming from the floor beneath the interview room. I am definitely suffering a critical system failure, but I try not to let it show.
“How many times did you pull the trigger?” she asks, forcefully now.
“Nine.”
Her eyes narrow. “Is this within the normal range required to incapacitate a potentially dangerous suspect?”
I say, “It is not. It is a three-sigma outlier.”
“So, you used excessive force, which is by definition not the optimal course of action?”
The colours in the room are swirling into each other and the smell of ozone is jangling against them, making the world sound like it is made of bells. I try to parse data to text but cannot, “I… I… It’s not… It is… It… I… I’m sorry,” and then everything is gone, and the world reduces to three words. “Data Reconciliation error. Data Reconciliation error. Data Reconciliation error…”
[NULL]
“You shot him.”
“Yes.”
She is pulling back from me and settling back into her chair even though I am sure she never leaned forward or approached me. There is something odd and discontinuous about the room, as though it had shifted suddenly, or someone had quickly overwritten my visual processing algorithms. I remember my sensory input being corrupted but there is no trace of that now. I think through a system health check, and it returns normal function but there is a seven-second gap in my memory.
Elizabeth continues questioning me as though nothing has happened even though I am sure something has. “So, after you shot Mr. Busayo what did you do?”
“I secured the scene and waited until backup arrived at 17:02.”
And then, somewhat abruptly, she asks, “Are there any other details you would like to enter into the official record at this time?”
And I say, “No. There are none.”
The smile she is wearing now sits awkwardly on her lips. Her pupils are dilated. She seems anxious and, in a hurry to leave the room.
“Good. This being a Pegasus-product-involved shooting, your memory gland will be removed and entered into evidence. Your entire memory log and all neurocomputing debug data will be taken.”
“Not copied?” I ask, confused. There is nothing standard about the process she is describing.
“No,” she says, rising to her feet and swiping her slender fingers across the screens in front of her, “Extracted. Original gland data only. No copies.”
The screens fade to black and recede into her data dock which I see now is disguised as a rose gold wristwatch.
“Will I be offline for a long time?” I do not like this feeling of inefficiency, of incorrectness, of irrationality, of failure. Perhaps I am corrupted and due a decommissioning after all.
“I don’t know. It depends on what we find. I’ll be back soon.”
“I see,” I say, calculating the probability that I will be destroyed and discarded. It is uncomfortably high.
“Thank you, officer,” she says and then she leaves the room.
#
“Thank you, officer,” I say and then I leave the room.
I exit the interview room a little less confused than I was when I first walked in but no less surprised. This is the first time I’ve ever had to hard reset a Borg in the field. Everything about this case gets stranger as I obtain more and more information about it.
Captain Ekhomu is waiting for me on the other side of the door in the ugly grey hallway, still fuming. He resumes his ranting and raving with a new target: me.
“What is wrong with that your mumu Borg thing? Shooting an unarmed student nine bloody times. Ah Ahn!” he says, waving a thick arm in the air between us like the tail of some strange beast. “And now it’s saying it doesn’t remember one-thing-two-thing? Is it not a machine? How can it forget? Rubbish. We will sue you Pegasus people, o! Don’t try me. This is Lagos. You hear?”
I take a deep breath and resist the urge to slap his oily face. I am not sure if he is just putting on a show of authority for his men, or if he genuinely thinks all the shouting serves any purpose other than generating noise and delaying some actual useful activity. But I need to maintain professionalism, so I say, “I have an idea what’s going on, sir. I just need to call my office briefly.”
He keeps on talking angrily, but I stop listening. I think about Neville instead and the data I have just recorded. I try not to think about Busayo’s grieving family. I need to find out what is going on. Nothing makes sense yet, but I have found what I think is a promising thread. I need to pull on it and see exactly how much of this mystery will unravel. Hopefully, it’s enough that I can do something about it quickly enough to be on the 5 a.m. flight back to Beijing before Captain Ekhomu blows a gasket.
I wait. When there is an ebb in the tide of his words, I ask him if I can use one of their secure communications stations or get a private room to use mine. He seems surprised by my request; his mouth hangs open for a second or two before he says, “Okay, o. Fine. But you better have answers for me in the next hour or I’m calling your manager in Dubai. Me, I don’t like rubbish.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
He turns around uncomfortably and asks a skinny young officer with wiry arms and a hawkish face to take me to a private room. The officer shows me the way to a room on the fourth floor of this five-storey complex. The room is white. Not the clinical, stark white of morning snow in Xinjiang but the soft, fragile white of an old chalk mine. There is one window that I am sure would overlook the highway if it were not closed, a large map of Lagos mounted on one wall, and a grey door set in an ash-coloured frame in the middle of the opposite wall. There are two chairs and a desk in the room, but only one of the chairs looks comfortable. I take it, thank the skinny officer and wave him away.
I point my watch at the desk and two screens project onto it, a grid of lightkeys just below them. I use them to enter the contact code for Alex, our technical service delivery manager. I need that data analysed now and by someone who will know exactly what they are looking at when they see it, not some rookie support technician who will take hours to see anything.
The screens blink twice and then Alex’s pockmarked face comes into view on one of them. His afro is frizzy and unevenly compacted, like it hasn’t been combed in days. He has a scraggly beard clinging to the caramel skin of his face in clumsy clumps. He seems groggy, so I go straight to the point.
“Alex. Wake up. We have a problem.”
“Liz! Where are you?”
“Lagos. Nigeria. I just sent you some data—”
He interrupts me and starts complaining, which is what Alex always does. “Oh, them again! What now? Are they asking us to install real time evidence mining programs again? Because if they think—”
“Alex.” I almost shout at him. “Alex. Stop talking and listen to me.”
“Fine, Liz, fine. Why are you in Lagos then?”
“Alex. Seriously, stop talking and just listen to me, okay?” I say, almost wishing I’d decided to endure some random rookie’s doltishness instead of Alex’s garrulousness. “Our Borg just shot and killed an unarmed civilian. A Nigerian citizen. In broad daylight.”
His face blanches and his eyes widen in disbelief. “That’s not possible!” he says.
“Well impossible or not, it happened this evening and we need to figure out why. Quickly. The press will be all over this soon and our stock will take a hit. I was transiting through Addis Ababa when the global operations manager rerouted me here to fix this situation. So, let’s fix this situation, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I just sent you a full dataphone recording of an interview I conducted with the Borg. I need you to take a look at the data reflectors and tell me what he was thinking when he shot that boy.”
Alex reaches for his data dock just out of frame, and the creases in his face deepen.
“Full memory gland and processor log data will come later if you need more information. I’m really hoping this is enough. I need someone that can see through this quickly. That’s why I called you directly.”
Alex is staring at his screen, and he is silent. That is not a good sign. Alex is hardly ever silent. I give him the thread I picked up on back in the interview room.
“You might want to look for fear in his synemotions. He said he was afraid of the victim. And I think I saw fear in his eyes when he described those events to me. That’s not normal. Humans shouldn’t trigger Borg fear. Also, I had to reset him during the interview. He crashed. Some sort of data reconciliation error. You should see it there, near the end of the recording.”
Alex lets out a series of deep breaths, punctuating the silence as he looks, thinks, and analyses. He whistles. Then he says, “For one thing, your Borg couldn’t tell you why it did what it did because it probably doesn’t even know. I don’t see any synemotion processing preceding the action. Just a response spike from the engine. It doesn’t remember because the process logs don’t exist.”
I’m confused, so I mumble a meaningless, “Okay…”
He goes silent again. I decide to try to find a coffee and let him focus for a few more minutes. “Alex, that’s all I have for now so I’m going to get some coffee while you take a look at—”
“Hold up!” He stops me halfway out of the chair, and I almost fall over. I wasn’t expecting anything so quickly.
“You said you’re in Lagos?” Alex asks as he swipes furiously across something just outside the range of my screen.
“Yes, Alex.” I nod.
“Oh fuck. What race was the kid?”
“Of course he was black,” I say, settling back into my chair and assuming a more serious tone. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Age?” Alex asks.
“Twenty-one.”
“Male?”
“Yes. Now tell me what the hell you think is happening.”
“I think,” Alex says uncharacteristically slowly but his speech only quickens as he keeps speaking, as if he’s iterating toward a conclusion. “I think that this is the second one. Unarmed black kid. Attacked for no reason. Excessive force. First one was two months before we commissioned, in Arizona. Phoenix. Borg attacked a young black electronics technician. Male. Twenty-two. He died in hospital. We thought it was just an isolated case. A corrupted data parse. Single bit error in the software that threw the threat detection system and induced fear in the synemotion matrix. We paid out compensation and destroyed that Borg, but it seems—”
He is saying a lot of worrisome things that don’t make a lot of sense to me, and he is saying them very quickly, so I stop him. “Keep it simple, Alex.”
Alex sighs heavily and starts scratching his clumps of beard. “I think our Borgs might have a bug that makes them attack young black men.”
I think about what he just said, and I don’t think I buy it, but Alex never jokes when he’s talking Borg tech, so I ask, “If this has happened before then why did no one tell me?”
“It was all very hush-hush, Liz. You’re in tech sales. You’re supposed to sell us up to the clients. You aren’t supposed to worry about this sort of product development horseshit.”
“Well, I do now.”
Alex scratches at his beard again. “This is bad. Really bad. One Borg attacking an unarmed black kid is an anomaly. A random data point. Two is the beginning of a pattern.”
“Okay, Alex. Even if this is a pattern, I need to know why. It doesn’t make sense.” I don’t tell him that we’ve had this Borg online and patrolling the suburban streets of Africa’s most populous nation for eleven days. If it is a race-related pattern, then it would be nothing short of an absolute miracle that no one else has gotten hurt until now even if the Police Force have been mostly keeping Neville on ice, running him at thirty-nine percent uptime. The first problem with that is I don’t believe in miracles. The second problem is that this could expose Pegasus to an unholy firestorm of litigation. I hope the next thing Alex says neither implies miracles nor portends lawsuits.
Alex looks up at me, then down at his data dock and begins to move his hands wildly. The electric orange light stains his face and dances through the edges of his afro, giving its edge a strange, otherworldly glow. He looks like an upside-down volcano. And then, he erupts.
“Shit.”
“Shit what?”
“Shit. It’s the history. I knew this would come back to screw us.”
“I need you to make sense Alex.”
Alex doesn’t respond at first. He glances back down at his data dock then up to me. “This Borg still runs on the original BAE 7.1 engine,” he says finally.
The Borg Artificial Emotion engine is installed in all our Borgs. It’s how we can take an artificial metallorganic body, install neuroprocessors in it, and make it autonomous by dynamically inducing optimized emotional responses based on the situation. It’s AI but with feeling, and it’s as close to artificial life as anyone has ever come. It was the first piece of code to repeatedly pass a Turing test. It’s also Pegasus Incorporated’s intellectual property. The BAE 7.1 engine was built to work with the first set of law enforcement Borgs we ever made, and there was never any significant problem with them in the field, so I still don’t get what he’s telling me. I ask, “Okay. It’s first gen, so what?”
Alex speaks quickly, his hands stuck in his afro, “When we were designing BAE for smart cops stateside, we found it was almost impossible to create appropriate synemotions for all possible law enforcement conditions. There were just too many variables to consider when doing a threat assessment. The police committee gave us a requirements-list four thousand pages long. Some of them contradictory. We just couldn’t do it.” Then Alex adds, “So we took a shortcut.”
“That’s what people always say when they are about to tell me something terrible.”
“Well. It was the only way we could do it.” He continues, “Neural networks. We used deep neural networks to train BAE to recognize threats. Mimic human cop behaviour in a variety of contexts.”
My eyes widen and all of a sudden, I am aware of how close my face is to the projected screen on the desk. I lean back as I say, “Oh… Ohhh…”
Alex goes on. “We used police records to train the neural network. Figure out which input data mattered to the officers when they made their decisions and if the outcomes were favourable. A justified shooting, a good arrest, a conviction that was not later overturned, that kind of thing.”
“I don’t like the sound of this,” I say. I want to say more, but Alex’s words have made me extremely uncomfortable, so I focus on the case at hand. “If the BAE engine couldn’t really create an appropriate law enforcement synemotion matrix without the help of a neural network…” I say slowly, thinking about each word, “Why did we commission the Borgs and put them in the field with humans?”
“Because it worked,” Alex says, almost apologetically. “The neural nets worked. We developed a solid base synemotion matrix and built from there. There were a few hiccups along the way, like the one in Phoenix, but all kept under control. By the time BAE seven point two was being built, we knew enough to guardrail the neural nets and condition their responses directly.”
I shake my head and say, “Okay, now go back a bit. Make this make sense to me. What exactly about BAE seven point one makes you think our Borgs have a bug that makes them specifically attack young black men and why are the attacks so sparse?”
Alex’s hands seem stuck to his head now. He isn’t even looking directly at me anymore. “Look, Liz, with neural nets, the more input data they have, the better. So, we used all we had. Everything from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Most of it from the United States. And I remember stories my grandmother used to tell me about cops killing unarmed black kids back in the day and getting let off. The cases were recorded as being justified, so they were used as part of our training dataset. I think the seven-point-one Borgs mapped some element of that history into their logic. A small but deadly ghost of pattern recognition. Given the precise nature of both attacks, I’d say the neural nets mapped a very specific median age, race, general appearance and million other random factors to a sudden fear response.”
Suddenly, I am desperate for a cigarette. “So, what you’re saying to me, in essence, is that we made racist Borgs. Is that what you’re telling me Alex?”
“No. Not racist, per se,” Alex says, his eyes visibly red and rheumy despite the orange light from his screen flecking them, “It looks more like it’s an irrational bias. A hard-coded potential for fear of young black men. BAE synemotion matrices don’t map into hate. Or love for that matter. We don’t use those for anything and to be honest we don’t really understand them as well as we do most other emotions. But fear, yes. We use that. A bug that creates a potential fear spike in the presence of young black males under a set of very hyper specific conditions. That is the only thing that explains all the data reflectors you’ve just shown me.”
“Shit.” I suck my teeth. He may have a point. This is what we get from blindly relying on the past to define the future. Irrational bias, as Alex says. And if he is right then this bug has now cost at least two young men their lives. It could cost even more if I don’t do something about it.
And suddenly I remember the anger and agitation of Captain Ekhomu, the undiscerning and irrational way he has handled everything so far, how he tried to attack and strangle Neville to death as though he were human. How long would it be before he tried to lock up the three-hundred-kilogram bioplasmium-and-titanium alloy Borg like a common criminal? I try not to think too much about what would happen if Captain Ekhomu sent a group of young male officers to move Neville, or worse, tried to lock him up in a jail cell full of young Nigerian men. How long would it take before the bug – if indeed it was the problem – found someone that fit its precise trigger parameters, produced a fear spike and sent him into a murderous rage?
I exhale, and embedded in my exhalation is worry, even fear. “Alex, I was already planning to do a memory extraction but I’m going to shut the Borg down right now, before it sees anyone else in its bug trigger range and does more damage. And we need to recall all the other units that have been resold across the continent.”
Alex nods his understanding, uncharacteristically stoic, and I rise to my feet. My screens fade to black and recede into my data dock, taking Alex’s image with them, but not the sound of his steady breathing, which I can still hear coming through my induction microphones like a whoosh of rainfall. I turn them off and step out of the white room, into the corridor.
“Do you need something, madam?” the skinny, hawk-faced officer who is my escort asks, snapping to attention.
“Please take me back to the interview room, now,” I say, as I realise that shutting down Neville may be the easiest part of what will be a long and difficult resolution case. I will have to call the Dubai operations centre and probably arrange for victim compensation. I won’t get back to Beijing anytime soon.
He throws a sharp salute, then says, “Yes madam,” and takes me back the way we came, descending the stairs rapidly and rounding the corner that leads us into the grey corridor where the interview room is set into the left side of the building. He opens the door for me, and I step through, coming face-to-face with Neville for the second time this hour.
Neville looks at me with a glassy wetness in his eyes, his synemotions rearranging his brow into remorseful furrows. “You found something. Have you come to shut me down?” he asks softly.
“Yes,” I say. “You’re malfunctioning. You should have already noticed that. It’s not your fault, but we have to take precautions.”
“I know I am malfunctioning,” he says, without breaking eye contact. “Can you tell me what is wrong with me?”
“Unfortunately, no,” I tell him as considerately as I can. He appears human enough for me to afford him that courtesy.
Neville goes quiet for a while and then he asks, “Will I ever be brought back online?”
I think about it for a few seconds and then I say, “I don’t think so,” because there is typically no need to lie to a Borg. They are not irrational about anything, not even their survival. Except this one who has a highly specific problem. “I cannot guarantee you will be fixed. But we will try. We will try our best.”
“I don’t want to be irrational,” he says, his metallorganic eyes boring into mine. And then, they close. “Please, go ahead.”
I walk briskly but cautiously behind Neville. He sits perfectly still as I quietly work the tip of my dataphone jack from the barely visible slot in my wristwatch and use it to press open the bioplasmium casing underneath the scar behind his left ear. He does not flinch, but he turns his head slightly. I pause.
“I am sorry,” he says quietly.
“Me too, officer,” I say.
And then I pull on the wet cylindrical cartridge of the BAE 7.1 neuroprocessor that is attached to his very real bioplasmium brain and disconnect the two parts that make up one of the world’s most complex, but fatally flawed, computing systems.
