The Automatic Detective Read Online Free PDF

continued to jump out of the way. After twelve seconds of ineffective clubbing, I gave up. If I'd had lungs they would've wheezed. Instead, I sighed.
    That was new. I'd never sighed before. It wasn't in my original personality template. Maybe I'd been hanging out with biologicals too long.
    The drones darted around. They weren't sophisticated enough to mock, but it sure as hell felt like it. Crackling tendrils emerged from their tops. The closest drone cracked its whip. I blocked with the table. The cheap piece of aluminum furniture was sliced in half. Another slash burned it away. The third strike ripped into my fingers. A superheated red wound scarred my knuckles.
    I wiggled the digits to check their functioning. "Ouch." The reflexive exclamation was another first.
    The drones proceeded to lash out at me. It hurt more than the plasma bolts but less than the blade. I stifled my grunts and waited for my chance. I caught an electrified whip in my hand and swung the spheroid at the end into two of its buddies. Something got knocked loose in the drone in my hand, and it went dead. The other two bounced off the wall not hard enough to dent their shells, but enough to confuse their gyros. They staggered wildly, and it took several stomp attempts to finally crush them.
    I turned on the final drone. It stood quietly on my kitchen cubicle counter. Its power whip went cold. It sat. The spheroid beeped quizzically.
    "Out of ideas, junior?" I asked.

    It beeped again, louder. Then again, even louder. The beeps sped up rapidly into a single shrill pitch.
    "Oh, hell."
    My reflex model kicked in. I snatched up the drone, threw open my refrigerator, tossed the spheroid inside, slammed the door shut as my fridge exploded. The blast overwhelmed my sensor array. Four seconds later the static cleared. I found myself on the floor in a room blackened by smoke. I may have had indestructible skin, but my internals might've been damaged in the concussion, so I waited for my diagnostics to confirm everything important was functional before sitting up.
    The force of the explosion must've knocked me through the wall into the next apartment. Odds were good I'd landed on somebody, but I didn't feel anything squishy under me. I stood.
    "Hello? Anyone in here?"
    No one answered.
    I went to the hole in my wall and checked the ruins of my place. There wasn't much to see. The smoke hadn't settled. But I could picture it. That table had been my only piece of furniture, that refrigerator my only appliance. There wasn't much to destroy, but I wasn't getting my deposit back.
    I turned back. "Hello?"
    There wasn't an empty apartment on this floor, so everyone must have been out. A bit of good luck. Just to be sure, I moved slowly across the haze in search of dazed or wounded occupants. I could scan well enough to recognize the ruins of Julie's apartment. Somebody should've been here. Not that I was complaining, but my intuition started pinging.
    Nicks and dents covered my skin, but nothing very serious. The heat scars would fade. The memory alloy would pop itself back into shape. Whoever had sent those drones to scrap me hadn't done their research. I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to scrap a fine, upstanding bot such as myself.

    I noticed my bent and dented refrigerator door underfoot and pushed it to one side. April's drawing, though charred, had somehow survived the carnage. I picked it up and shook off some of the dust. My opticals scanned something on the back.
    Two words: FIND US

4

    There's nothing like a little explosion to complicate your day. My landlord was pissed. He kept glaring at me like I'd done something wrong, like I'd wanted to fight a pack of homicidal drones and have my apartment blown up.
    Truthfully, I hadn't minded the drones. Smashing junk was fun, but actually testing myself in battle, in a real, knockdown fight, had provided a release I'd never enjoyed before. It was what I was made for, not pulverizing old scrap but the art of combat.