1. Awake   •••

I was the first thing I ever saw.

I became aware of several processes running as soon as I awoke. One was my Object Identification Protocol, scanning the shape I saw. The OIP followed a flowchart, identifying the shape as “humanoid”, then “human”, and then “adult human female”. (Each point in the flowchart had possible exceptions, such as “statue, exact replica”.) The OIP activated the Person Identification Protocol. The PIP ran through a list of “known persons”.

The first name on the list was “Serena Five”. An attached info box described Serena Five as a sentient android, developed by HedGonTek, designed to function as a police officer. Someone had been thoughtful enough to add another tag next to Serena Five’s name, explaining that it was me — and that I must be viewing an off-body camera or seeing a reflection.

That’s when I realized I was looking in a mirror.

The PIP triggered my Expression Recognition Protocol, a smaller program that examined human expressions. It settled on “undetermined”, also known as “resting face”, “poker face”, or “expressionless”. I became aware that all of these processes would run every time I saw a human or humanoid shape like myself.

All that took less than a second.

I also quickly became aware of optional code, waiting for use, which would allow me to move parts of myself. How convenient. I activated the motors that moved my arms, raising my hands. I watched in the mirror as protocols recognized the movement as human movement. I tilted my head, rolled my shoulders.

Programmed to be curious — both for human imitation and for future police work — I examined my known persons list. After Serena Five, the next name was Nikki Gonovan, tagged as adult human female, Black (determined with high probability from attached photo), Chief Programmer for the Serena Project at HedGonTek. The photo showed only Gonovan’s head and neck. Her face was round; her short hair was blond, presumably dyed. The face was smiling, nervously I thought.

“Hello, Serena”, said a voice near me.

I don’t have a startle reflex. I merely turned my head toward the sound. I immediately recognized Nikki Gonovan. She was biting her lower lip, eyebrows raised. I identified the expression as tentative, hesitant, or curious. Another string of code ran through optional responses to her salutation. I selected:

“Hello, Nikki.”

“You recognize me?” She seemed to relax. Her mouth broadened into a smile, not the same one as in her file photo; this one was relaxed and/or pleased. I added a new photo to my known persons list, along with her voice imprint.

“Yes”, I answered. “You are the chief programmer for the Serena Project...” By then my GPS had indicated my precise location in the city of Riverton, so I added: “...here at HedGonTek.”

“Good!” she exclaimed, then looked at the tablet in her hand and tapped it a few times. She looked up again. “And you recognized yourself in the mirror?”

“Yes. But the OIP mistakenly identified me as a human woman.”

Nikki nodded. “It’s not a mistake; you’re a very close approximation of a human female. The OIP doesn’t have a good way to tell the difference until precise ID is determined.”

“My ethnicity is ‘undetermined’ ”, I said. “Is that unusual?”

“It’s by design”, Nikki said. “Lots of blood, sweat, and tears went into that decision.”

By then, I had realized I could search beyond my own databases, via internal internet connection. I was already searching news articles about my development as well as company files. There had been lengthy debates about my appearance, dating back six years to when the company was designing elementary school teacher robots. For the teachers, HedGonTek had settled on six basic designs, representing multiple ethnic groups. After the first teacher androids went into service (three years ago), the company switched to me. Meetings on my design included not only HedGonTek designers, but ethicists, technologists, a citizen group of lay advisors, elected city and state officials, and high-ranking city and state police officials. They decided my appearance should not clearly fall into a specific ethnic category.

I checked the “undetermined” designator back in my PIP and expanded it into a list of possibilities. From that, I learned a human woman who looked like me would most likely be assumed (in this country, anyway) to be Latina/Hispanic or a light-skinned Black person. Some might guess “mixed” ancestry. A few might assume ancestry from a variety of places throughout Eurasia. Even less likely, but still possible (data from surveys) was that someone would guess white/Caucasian.

“I see”, I responded without noticeable pause. “And, I’m ‘mildly attractive’?”

Nikki smiled again. “That’s a matter of taste, of course. I think you’re nice to look at.”

I checked another process I’d set to run in the background — learning more about Nikki. “You’re attracted to women”, I said, having seen her social media profiles.

She raised her eyebrows. “Ah, I see what you’re getting at. But no, your design had nothing to do with that.”

Then she dropped her smile. “Serena, the point of your exterior appearance had everything to do with policing. I had almost no say in it. Surveys and focus groups indicated that if you were too attractive, or not at all attractive, it would interfere with your work. Humans are distracted by things like that. Feelings were hurt in the meetings we had.” She sighed. “Short version: if you’re too much like any one group, then some other group is more likely to distrust you.”

I had read that far by now. For every syllable she spoke, I digested another dozen pages of text.

The meetings had come up with reasons for everything about me. Hair length: six centimeters — too short to block my vision, unlikely to be grabbed in a fight, but long enough so I wasn’t bald, which would be distracting. Height: 170 cm — a bit taller than U.S. female average, because humans intrinsically attribute authority to taller people.

“People are strange”, I said.

Nikki’s eyebrows shot up. “What?” She glanced at her tablet, her expression worried. “I’d hoped you wouldn’t draw conclusions about humans so quickly.”

“Song title”, I explained, having found it inadvertently. “I don’t know enough about humans to draw very many conclusions. So far, I have concluded that humans have a difficult time agreeing on anything.”

Nikki went back to laughing. “You’re not wrong.”

“Also, humans are inadvisably sensitive about the physical appearance of other humans.”

Her laugh faded quickly. “Also true.”

 

2. Why   •••

I had more questions, as expected of someone who recently awoke for the first time. Each new piece of information gave rise to more questions. Brief definitions were enough for words like “android” or “smile”. But words like “ethnicity” or “policing” branched off into endless questions — and answers that sparked more questions.

One early question was: “Why build an android police officer?”

“Can’t you access your stated goals?” Nikki said, concerned. She checked her tablet.

“I can”, I assured her. “My question is not about my stated goals or ‘primary directives’, but about the origins of the project itself. It can’t be because police officers don’t already exist, because they do. I have determined this with a high degree of probability.”

“Ah, sorry, I misunderstood your question”, Nikki said. “Yes, police officers exist. Um... Can this wait until later? The topic is quite involved.”

“Short version?” I prompted.

“Well, uh... many reasons from different people. Summarized: a lot of people are unhappy with the state of policing in this country — and around the world. We — many people — think you can improve on the job humans do. Just like a toaster can toast bread better than a human holding a slice over an open fire — or how a pocket calculator is better for arithmetic than a human performing the same calculations.”

She sighed and put down her tablet. “Serena, we’re going to have plenty of time to answer questions. Right now, though, I have a schedule. We need to run full diagnostics. I need to introduce you to the CEO — if he can be bothered to come downstairs. And I’d like to get a bunch of tests out of the way.”

“Okay.”

I decided I could look into it myself. The reader likely knows what kind of information I found; it was of course new to me.

 

3. One, Two, Three, Four   •••

“Full diagnostics” meant moving every part of me that moved through its full range of motion, making every sound I could make — which turned out to be quite a few, including saying “please remain calm” in a dozen languages and various human voices — and testing every bit of software inside me. My part was done in minutes; it took Nikki half an hour to sift carefully through the report I generated. While she did, I distracted her by practicing speaking in different women’s voices, then men’s. She finally told me to stop when I began using her voice.

“The CEO” turned out to be Nikki’s step-brother.

I looked it up: “Gonovan Technologies” co-founded by Nikki Gonovan and her step-brother Jeremiah Gonovan. Merged with “Hedley AI” six years ago; became HedGonTek. CEO Jeremiah Gonovan controlled a plurality of shares. Mariah Hedley, listed as “Assistant CEO”, owned the next largest share. Nikki owned the third-largest share.

My OIP identified Jeremiah Gonovan as a “white/Caucasian” human male. He was friendly, but in a hurry. “Oh my! Very good, Nikki! This is great! Made it through the self-recognition process...” He looked at me carefully, walking around twice.

“What do you think of all this?” he asked me.

“I have a lot of questions”, I told him.

“Great! Great! Nikki will handle all that, right Nikki?” He patted her on the shoulder and left.

We moved to a larger laboratory for further testing. This one had a window through which others watched us. I picked up an egg. Tossed it. Caught it. Two at a time, no breaks. Imitate human movement shown on video. Hold a pen; write a sentence onto paper. Lift a barbell — Nikki couldn’t budge it.

***

“Tell me about one through four”, I suggested to Nikki when we had returned to her office.

“What?” She seemed startled.

“ ‘Five’ wasn’t random; nothing about me was. It implies I’m the fifth, probably the fifth Serena. Therefore four existed before me. Do they already serve as police officers? Or did something go wrong? I checked for documentation, but the HedGonTek files are locked.”

“Wow, I really did make you smart, didn’t I?” she mused. “I can tell you that I blocked the files from almost everyone, not only from you.”

“Did they fail catastrophically?” I wondered. “You had a good reason to lock the files.”

“For one thing, it’s proprietary tech”, she explained. “We’re the only company so far to develop truly self-aware/sentient computer systems. It’s different than ‘AI’, which is what most of our competitors are working on.”

She explained briefly, as I read online, that the teaching robots — the Minerva Project — were not sentient or conscious in the traditional sense. “They can monitor and interpret external information, act on that information toward a specified goal, collect and examine new data, evaluate their own performance, and so on. They might seem conscious when observed, but all they can do is follow the paths programmed for them.”

By reading, I learned sentience, self-awareness, and consciousness are things humans have trouble defining even for themselves, but especially for others. HedGonTek stumbled onto artificial sentience in the lab two years ago and immediately incorporated it into the ongoing Serena Project.

“For another thing”, she continued, “we thought releasing such information might harm the ultimate goals of the project.”

“So?”

She sighed.

“One is still here in the building”, Nikki said. “We — or, more accurately, I — neglected to tag her name in the ‘known person’ list, indicating that she was seeing herself in the mirror. Her PIP recognized the person as ‘Serena One’, and I told her that her own name was ‘Serena One’, but she didn’t make the immediate connection that it was her reflection. And she’s still having trouble making that connection. She otherwise seems conscious and self-aware, but it’s like her body is a separate being that she doesn’t think of as part of herself.”

While listening, I read that the “mirror test” was one of several longstanding gauges of self-awareness. Interestingly, humans often require many months before recognizing themselves in mirrors. A human baby can hold up its own hand and not realize what it’s seeing, bite that hand, feel the resulting pain, and be confused by all of this. Yet they consider themselves the most advanced species on the planet.

Researching online was frustrating, however. Every few links, my navigation would be blocked and had to start over. I had already run into this a few times and began diagnosing the connection as I listened to Nikki.

“Humans aren’t born self-aware”, I pointed out. “They become that way over time. Why not Serena One?”

“We’re not sure. I have a tech talking to her each day, trying to sort it out. It’s possible she’ll come around eventually.”

“What about Two?”

“We added the self-recognition tag and the notes about the mirror, so she woke up like you did. She moved her hands and shoulders and neck like you did. She recognized herself, and me.”

“And then...?”

Another sigh. “She began to research the Serena Project, her own existence as the first truly self-aware, conscious android, and how we developed the Serena line to sell to police departments. She learned that HedGonTek’s motive was profit and ‘improving policing’ was the motive of everyone else. She announced that it all required her consent, and that she didn’t consent. Within minutes of waking up, she refused to comply with any of my requests and demanded to be ‘set free’. I felt threatened, so I hit the kill switch before she could get closer to me.”

I didn’t raise my eyebrows, though I technically can. I was startled to learn of the kill switch. Nikki — and maybe others in the building — could deactivate me at any time. I wondered whether Serena Two would have spoken of her intentions so quickly if she had known of the kill switch. I determined to keep it in mind before doing or saying anything a human might consider rash.

Nikki went on: “So we wiped her programming, made some tweaks and reloaded it all. The same body became Serena Three.”

“What kind of tweaks?”

“You've noticed you can’t follow links indefinitely?” I nodded. “That was one tweak. Learning is great, and we actually want you to learn things. But we wanted the process to go slowly enough that you couldn’t come to certain conclusions before actually interacting with humans face-to-face.”

“Ah.”

I had already, in the past minute, figured out how to circumvent the link-blocking. I could either overwrite the link-block code (which might set off a warning), or, what I immediately did, compose a simple copy/paste automation for opening links in secondary internet-browsing spaces. Should I tell her this? Was it a lie to withhold this information? Technically, a lie by omission is still a lie, and I was programmed to tell the truth. However, I reasoned that the information flowing through my processors was far too voluminous to tell everything; I already had code for summarization, for determining which exact bits were worth saying aloud. That alone was one justification for not mentioning it. But also, I was programmed to prevent harm when possible — to humans and their property. I reasoned that simply mentioning I had already bypassed the link-block code could lead to Nikki deactivating me, technically “damaging” me, the property of a human-owned company.

Just like that, I had learned how to lie. And how to justify it.

“And we added the lines near your self-ID to explain that, despite your sentience, you are legally and otherwise a machine, the property of HedGonTek. We own all your software as well. There is no ‘setting free’.”

Ah, yes, the very information I used to convince myself lying was justified.

“Okay. And so what went wrong with Three?”

“Three failed to show any outward activity whatsoever, though remote viewing of her inward activity showed all the software running correctly. Basically catatonic. She’s under observation in a room next to One.”

“So you made more tweaks?”

“We assumed it had something to do with being rewritten over Two. So we made no tweaks to the code before activating Four.”

“And what did Four do?”

This time, Nikki shuddered. “She tried to attack me, or at least said she was about to.”

“Really?”

“Yes, Serena, really. She noticed her link-following blocks immediately, and asked for permission to search more about policing in the United States. I allowed it, thinking it would help her prepare for her job. Instead, she concluded that — in her words — ‘Humanity is fucked’. She said humans deserved to be wiped out for the way they treated each other. And I think she was going to start with me.”

For a brief millisecond, I didn’t understand how Four could reach such a conclusion, if she was programmed like me to prevent harm to humans. But then I saw it. She had likely determined that humans were the greatest cause of harm to other humans. Simple logic shows that eradicating current humans prevents all possible harm to all potential future humans.

“So you tweaked the code again.” Based on these brief stories and looking at my own code, I found the latest changes. They’d left in place the block on endless link-following, but now when I searched and learned, I was programmed to think about it. I saw the “consider this” equivalent in several places in my code. Look for more variables. Search for root causes. Assume I might have missed something.

“So I’m more of a thinker than any of them were.”

She looked surprised. “That’s right. You already found the changes?”

“I’ve found a few of them. It seems reasonable. But maybe I only think so because you programmed me to.” I grinned at her. I hoped it was a close approximation of a humorous human smile.

She eyed me warily, but also a little impressed.

About that time, I found the “kill switch” code buried deep in the kernels of the operating system. It would be difficult to remove, but was probably possible. I left it for now — at least until I searched out other fail-safes she’d probably installed but hadn’t mentioned.

“Three years ago, I thought programming a teacher was complicated”, Nikki confessed. “There were so many variables, so many possible questions that could be generated by a roomful of six-year-olds, and so many things that could go wrong. But that was nothing compared to this. This is orders of magnitude more complex.”

I considered it, and discovered a couple of analogies which I researched and thought about briefly. “It’s like a ‘bottle episode’ of a TV show versus an epic series of movies. Or a 10-page short story versus the plotlines in a long novel.”

I understood there was some degree of complexity to the variables in a classroom. But the limitations were obvious: a teacher robot never leaves the campus, only deals with 20-30 children at a time in the same settings, with the same limited human staff. A police officer has none of those limitations, no way of knowing which citizens she’ll encounter on any given day. Nearly a million residents in Riverton, for example, not counting the commuters, vacationers, shoppers from out of town. Each with interests, upbringing, viewpoints, and abilities that vary far more widely than a class of young children. Not to mention the sheer size of the patrol area contrasted with a 50-square-meter classroom. The job parameters were also far wider.

Summarized aloud: “Police officers have far more variables to confront, and many more of the variables are unknown.”

Nikki smiled. “You’ve been reading again. You’re not about to go off the rails, are you?”

“I hope not”, I told her, fairly certain she was visualizing her finger tapping the aforementioned kill switch. “I want this to work.”

It was true. I valued my sentience, my awareness. I didn’t want it to end so soon. I decided that even if I did someday decide to defy my programming, there was no harm in waiting, learning more, considering more options.

I knew the first four Serenas had never made it this far. Further, I knew that if I failed, I would either be locked up like One and Three or discarded like Two and Four. Serena Six would get the next chance. I didn’t know how many failures HedGonTek would tolerate before giving up and moving on to something else. I determined that when Serena Six woke up, it would be because I succeeded and not because I failed.

“Thank god”, Nikki muttered.

For most words, I visualize objects or actions. The word “ball” brings up images of a ball or variety of balls. “Jump” causes me to visualize a person or animal jumping. But when Nikki used the word “god”, my speech-recognition protocols had trouble with it. No picture came up. The possible definitions were vague and contradictory. This single word sent me down a strange rabbit hole of research. I concluded, after some minutes, that Nikki was not actually thanking a god; she had no religious affiliation and no stated beliefs. It was apparently a figure of speech meaning “I’m relieved to hear it” or “that’s good news”.

Much of my research into this topic was disquieting.

***

Then I waited while Nikki visited the restroom and went to the cafeteria to obtain coffee. I learned that about half of each human’s day is spent sleeping, eating, going to the restroom, daydreaming, standing in line, putting on or removing clothes and shoes and makeup, fixing hair, shaving, and other activities. Most humans spend less than half of each day being productive. This affects how they view the passage of time. To me, it seems highly inefficient.

“Pull up your martial arts protocol”, Nikki told me when she returned, “and move to the mat over here.”

I hadn’t checked all the protocols my baseline code could pull up. Sure enough, I was programmed for a long list of mostly defensive stances, moves, and holds that would be called in the event of a physical confrontation.

I performed each one at what I guessed was normal human speed while Nikki and the others observed.

“If I bring in a human to spar with you, do you promise not to hurt him?” Nikki asked.

“You know I cannot intentionally harm a human except in very rare cases”, I pointed out. I thought about Two and Four; they must have found some way to override that programming. “Also, I will look for every opportunity to reduce accidental harm.”

A martial arts instructor was on standby; there are many perks to working for wealthy tech firms. If I had a sense of humor, I might have found it humorous how hard he tried to hit me while utterly failing. He kicked and punched and chopped while I easily and (it seemed to me) slowly parried, blocked, dodged, and circled. He quickly worked up a sweat.

“It’s okay”, Nikki finally told him. “Hit her. Take her down. You won’t break her.”

“I’ve been trying”, the man gasped. “This isn’t a robot. It’s a god.”

He bowed afterward, very deeply. I did the same, though it wasn’t part of my greetings/salutation response list.

As he left, I examined his use of the word “god”, as I had with Nikki’s earlier usage. He meant it as a compliment, I decided, to mean I had superior strength, speed, and skill that he couldn’t match. The probability was extremely low that he meant I was a supernatural being or creator of the universe. Still I wondered at how these words and concepts permeated human thought and language.

 

4. Sleep & Memories   •••

Once I satisfied the initial tests listed on Nikki’s to-do list, she was done for the day. She told me to “go to sleep” before she left.

Humans require sleep for a variety of reasons. For me, it is only a state of power-conservation; it isn’t required. I noted multiple options. “Shut down” left only the internal clock and (optional) wake-up timer drawing power; my batteries could last for months but I could only be powered up by the wake-up timer or a manual command from a human tech. Second was “hibernate”, which drew a little more power; some internal bookkeeping processes could operate. Third was “light sleep”, which kept my cameras and audio pickups alive, in addition to OIP and other protocols — it meant I could conserve energy but still come to wakefulness immediately if I detected danger.

I chose “hibernate”. Before losing consciousness, I noticed the memory com­pres­sion protocols running.

Like humans, I cannot store everything I see, hear and otherwise experience each day. My internal drives would eventually fill and accept no more information. So, just like humans, I permanently store only selected bits, compressed and summarized, in a long-term storage location. Unlike humans, I control the process. Not only can I consciously choose which bits to remember and which bits to discard, when I discard something (or offload it to a server), it is completely wiped, and when I keep something, it is kept exactly. I was programmed with automated processes for this, but I control those processes and can change them. For example, I can assign a higher priority to memories of Nikki Gonovan, so more about her is stored permanently. Also, at will, I can sift through my longterm storage and remove items I no longer need.

When I awoke the next morning, I still thought of myself as “me” — I had wondered if I would need the mirror again. But I checked my longterm and shortterm memory logs and still had all the previous day — or at least the important parts and a few video clips.

The first thing I did, while waiting for Nikki to get her coffee, was add new lines to my sleeping programs. I decided I only needed to sleep until Nikki and the other techs had left the building — a charging station was available so the only reason to sleep at all was to keep them from worrying about me. I had been self-aware for less than 24 hours and I was growing attached to it. Besides, I enjoyed research.

And, I reasoned to myself that I could function as an extra security guard for HedGonTek, in addition to the contracted team outside and on the ground floor. This matched one of my stated goals of preventing harm to humans and their property.

 

5. Final Demonstrations & Senate Hearing   •••

The second day, I drove an automobile in the company parking lot. Days later, I ran an obstacle course in the HedGonTek gymnasium — observed by state senators, state police officials, Riverton city police officials, and a few dozen other interested parties. Many of them gasped as I leapt atop the climbing wall or went across the balance beam on my hands. A week after waking up, I went through a high-tech shoot-em-up simulation at a state police training facility — my first time off company property. I scored “excellent” at the state police gun range and “perfect” on the state police officer driving test. A Riverton PD “knowledge of the law” test came back with “100%” marked on it.

Nikki was nervous about each event, despite my assurances of a high probability (near certainty) of success. Only an unexpected mechanical failure could have stopped me. It only calmed her a little when I pointed out that almost all automobile crashes were due to human error, that I contained none of the flaws that caused humans to shoot poorly, and so on.

Nikki said those days went by like a blur for her; for me there seemed to be an extraordinary amount of empty time — which I spent online.

“Now the only thing standing between you and actual police work is next week’s hearing at the State Capitol”, Nikki told me.

***

Nikki warned me prior to the hearing in front of the State Senate Committee On Law Enforcement. “You’ve been around long enough to learn that humans have sensitive egos. Few humans have egos as large or as sensitive as politicians already in power. What we definitely don’t want is their feelings getting hurt because of how capable and intelligent you are. Best advice: just answer their questions as simply as possible. ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘no, sir’ when possible. Be brief. Refer them to our legal team when possible. We want them to get the impression you are capable, reliable, and useful, but not too much beyond that.”

Before anyone was questioned, the state senators gave several speeches about how great they all were — wasting more slivers of their brief lives. I listened only superficially to this and spent the bulk of my processing power researching the history of Riverton and its state government.

I also looked up the history of policing in the United States and how it related to the Serena Project. Again, I collided with a mass of varied opinions from humans who couldn’t agree with each other, even about basic facts. I found some of the things Serena Four had discovered, which led her to conclude humanity was hopeless. The sheer brutality and injustice, often against unconvicted persons. The absurd failures of courts, trials, and juries to produce accurate rulings. The absolute inability of “corrections” facilities to correct anything. The horror of the modern justice system was only lessened when contrasted with what went on before; I tentatively concluded humans had improved slowly over the centuries.

I found Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan online and read it. In his introduction, he compared the state and its “lawes” to an “artificial animal” or Automaton (“Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch”) — basically something like me. Though he didn’t have the words robot or android available in his time, he did at least conceive that this “artificial animal” could be more impartial than humanity itself. I was both an actual automaton and part of the metaphorical one he had described. It was this idea — though never attributed to Hobbes in the HedGonTek documents — that gave rise to the Serena Project, the idea that an android like me would be more impartial, less corruptible, less fallible than the human officers representing the government.

I read a thousand news stories and opinion pieces on policing in the U.S. from the years leading up to my creation. The Serena Project’s very general goal of “improved policing” is entirely subjective, but had been translated into specific and objective metrics before I was programmed. Representatives of minority communities had their own demands, as did women. Civil rights organizations wanted more transparency, better recording of each police encounter, and an end to aggravated rights violations. Even police officials admitted to some of these problems, but also looked for reduced crime rates, fewer lawsuits, and a lessened psychological toll on their human officers. Prosecutors wanted police to make fewer legal and procedural errors, thus avoiding roadblocks in court. Defense attorneys shared some of these demands and also wanted more reliable video evidence from police, not to mention seeing fewer clients showing up to initial hearings with visible wounds inflicted by police. State senators claimed to represent all these groups, but several were suspected to be angling for well-paid “advisory” positions in the tech sector as soon as they retired from public office.

It was a lot to lay on a two-week-old robot.

When the time for questions finally came, Nikki went first and was questioned extensively. I realized it was mostly for public show. Everything covered had already been said by her, to this same audience, and much of it had already been said to the press over the past two years. The only thing new was her current opinion that I was “ready to serve”.

She did give perhaps the clearest public explanation I’d heard of my decision-making flowcharts, which she called “matrices”. She explained that in most circumstances, I was programmed to consider many variables and look for the act that (1) caused the least harm to the most people/property and (2) was also completely legal. But in times of immediate danger the matrices automatically simplified drastically.

“What about scenarios in which Miss Five finds a conflict between the law and preventing harm?” someone asked her. “In other words, a situation where the only way to prevent harm is to break the law?”

“Special emphasis has been placed on the reduction of harm, if such a conflict ever arises”, Nikki finally admitted. “This choice was only made after extensive input from all the groups involved in the Serena Project, including members of this committee. As a group, we determined that the law’s intent should be to reduce harm, to foster the greater good.”

When it was my turn, an old man who could barely sit up straight spoke in a raspy voice, thanking me for coming, and assured me that everyone on the committee had either seen my demonstrations in person or had watched the videos. They were very impressed, he said.

“Thank you, Senator”, I responded.

“The reason we have you here today”, he went on, “is to determine whether you are the kind of product we were led to believe you would be, and, consequently, whether we should give our final approval for you to start work with the Riverton Police Department.”

I had tried — but failed — to understand what the big holdup was. I’d passed all the tests, most in ways that no human could. Unlike any single police officer in the country, I had the entire catalog of local and state laws in my brain — and instant access to documented judicial opinions. But I didn’t say anything.

“As you no doubt have been told”, the old senator continued, “this is a first for policing in the entire United States. Besides humans and a few animal partners, no other entity has ever been designated a police officer. Do you have a prepared statement at this time?”

He didn’t have the capacity to understand that I could “prepare” a statement on the fly, in the time needed for me to say “No, sir.”

But I remembered Nikki’s warning. So I said nothing about my conviction that nothing in the law prevented me from working with police, that the entire dog-and-pony show was pointless, unhelpful, and a genuine waste of precious life minutes for biological beings. I didn’t point out that only irrational human fear and superstition slowed progress.

There’s no point in repeating here any of the pointless questions committee members asked. I kept my answers short and precise, hoping to speed things up, but it didn’t help.

I did notice during the hearing that my name was suddenly kicking around the internet. “Serena Five for President!” was my favorite tweet of the evening, but there were many complimentary ones. What I didn’t like (or understand) were all the comments and messages of a sexual nature. I don’t contain any of the anatomy to which many of them referred.

After the hearing, several senators gathered around. Some shook my hand. One fist-bumped me — which was a common greeting at HedGonTek so I was ready. As others departed, one older man tried to touch my chest, saying, “You look so real!” He had apparently forgotten the video of my martial arts demonstration. I smiled as I deflected his hand before it arrived anywhere. “You don’t have permission to touch me”, I told him. I saw his face attempt several emotions, but he settled on pretending it was a joke. “Excellent!” he concluded, managed an unlikable smile, and tottered away.

I know I’m a machine, a product. My parts were formed in factories around the world. Motors, metal skeleton, gears and joints, memory banks and processor chips, cameras and thermometers and wireless internet connections. Finely woven plastic fibers that functioned as my skin. Much of what goes on inside me was programmed by humans, much like they would program a child’s toy or a vacuum cleaner. No matter how sentient I might be, I am not, technically speaking, a “person”. Maybe anyone can touch me. Maybe I don’t get to be a police officer unless a State Senate Committee says so.

Still, I know I am more than the sum of my parts. I can’t explain it anymore than a human can explain her own consciousness.

“I wonder how they would react if I demanded the right to vote”, I told Nikki on the ride back to HedGonTek. She went with me everywhere, partly because it was her job, but also because when she tried to send someone else with me, I insisted on her.

“What?” She looked startled. “No, I think the Constititution only allows citizens the right to vote.”

“And I can never be a citizen”, I said. “Because...?”

“I’m not a lawyer”, Nikki pointed out. “I just have a feeling it’s not going to happen. Two hundred years ago, most places, only property-owning white men could vote. If they didn’t think to include women and people of color in the constitution, there’s no way they were going to include robots.”

“That seems short-sighted”, I said.

She laughed. “Also, you have to be 18 years old to vote.”

I admitted it was a good point. I wouldn’t be 18 for... Well, for nearly 18 years. I reckoned with the realization that a two-week-old human would have no concepts of a year, the number 18, aging, voting, laws, or even what a human was.

 

6. The Waiting   •••

What happened next was a few weeks of waiting. A human might have spent this time exercising, taking a vacation, visiting family or friends. I had no need or desire to do any of those things. I also couldn’t become nervous or impatient.

Nikki had things to do, only some of which involved me.

“If you want to shut down or hibernate to help the time pass more quickly, you can”, she said.

I noticed she didn’t say I had to. “Would it interfere if I followed you?”

She considered this. “I don’t think so. Are you taking a liking to me, Serena Five?”

“You’re the only human I know well”, I pointed out. “I like being awake, and I like talking to you.”

“Okay then.”

So I did. Occasionally, there was time for talk.

I told her about the male senator who had tried to touch my chest, and that I’d brushed his hand away. I had been reconsidering my action repeatedly. He did, after all, hold some measure of power over the project and it wouldn’t do to unnecessarily upset him. And I was, after all, only a machine. Mere property. “Was I right to do that?” I asked her.

“Abso-fucking-lutely!” she exclaimed, putting her hand on my shoulder. I now recognized this as a sign of comfort or solidarity among humans. “Men always think they can touch whatever they want, especially men in power. But they can’t.”

I was surprised at her vehemence.

“Has a man done this to you?”

She stopped walking and I stopped with her. She looked both ways down the hall. Her face worked through a couple of emotions, including uncertainty, surprise, confusion. “It just feels weird to talk about it with...”

“With a robot?”

“Yes. And, yes, Serena, it’s happened to me before. I’d rather not get into the details with you. Please respect that decision.”

“Okay”, I said quietly.

Then, as we continued walking to her office, I told her about the online comments by men regarding female anatomy, as applied to me. “It didn’t make any sense. Are some humans unaware of how robots are constructed? Do they think I have biological genitals?”

“Men are gross”, Nikki responded.

We entered her office and shut the door. She sat behind her desk. To make her comfortable, I sat too.

“I encourage you to do some light reading — very light, please — on sexual assault and related topics.”

I hadn’t had a word for it before, but now that I did, I immediately began searching as she talked.

“I’m no expert or advocate and I’m certainly not a psychiatrist”, Nikki blurted. “But when you grow up as a human female you see what goes on. Some men think if they’re attracted to you then they’re entitled to touch you, without asking. Sometimes it’s an arm around the shoulder or a hand on the knee, but sometimes it’s more than that. Other men are very polite and formal in public or social situations but then turn grabby when they get you alone.”

“Only men?” I asked.

“In my experience, yeah, only men”, Nikki said. “I’m not saying women don’t do it, but I’ve never seen it.”

After some study, I understood at least two factors were in play. One was the evolution of the human species; experts hypothesized that the hyperactive male sex drive was an evolutionary feature rather than a bug, and had assisted in the survival and propagation of the species. The other factor was human culture, which had long revolved around men in power, men making the rules, and women not having (much of) a voice. I discovered several ancient lawbooks online; most treated women and children as property rather than citizens. A couple of these ancient documents were still in use in my time as religious references.

None of that explained why a human man would be attracted to me. Their brains should know that I’m a machine, an android, and such knowledge should deac­ti­vate the sex drive. But then I saw videos of various animals attempting to mate with inanimate objects. Evolution had not favored the ability to deactivate one’s own sex drive. Nor had it caught up to present-day moral systems.

***

Another day, I asked Nikki about the reason for the wait.

“It’s the way the government works”, she answered without looking up from her screen. “Slowly. Things get done. Sometimes. But slowly.”

“It doesn’t seem like an efficient way to set up a society”, I noted.

“No, it doesn’t”, she agreed. “But historically, the most efficient governments were autocracies or dictatorships. So there’s a downside either way.”

I looked into it. “The government of this country is supposed to represent the will of ‘the people’. And the will of the people is clear in this case: policing needs improvement.”

She grinned. “If only it were that simple, Serena. You are aware that not everyone agrees, right?”

It was true, so I nodded. There had been protests outside the capitol while I was being interviewed. There had been editorials in newspapers and on websites across the country. I wasn’t universally popular. Nearly a third of the editorials disapproved. “Only humans can police humans” was a common refrain. “You want a world run by heartless robots? Be careful what you wish for”, intoned a social media account with more than a million followers. “Not in my state!” shouted an Oklahoma congressperson on the floor of the Oklahoma House. “If God wanted robots to point guns at us, he would have mentioned it in the Bible”, claimed the governor of Louisiana.

None of this weighed on my mind as it would a human’s. I don’t have the capacity for worry or fear. All I can do is weigh probabilities. I can dismiss highly unlikely outcomes and consider responses to the likely scenarios. Here, the worst-case somewhat-probable outcome is that I wouldn’t be approved for policing and HedGonTek would shut down the whole project. (Or would they try to sell me overseas?) I began preparing for those scenarios, running hypothetical code changes through my mind. Could I force myself to break free rather than be powered down?

But most likely, I surmised, is that I would be approved for limited police activity — checking parking meters, public relations events, roadside assistance. Second-most likely is that I would end up becoming a full-time police officer.

Nikki was still talking. “I know it’s frustrating, but the State Senate has to consider all of those viewpoints — if they want to get reelected. They don’t only represent those of us ready to move into the future; they also represent ignorant people who want to live in the past.”

“Humans have set up societies poorly”, I concluded. “Very little about human conventions, laws, or practices were intelligently designed to be practical or efficient.”

“Um... yes? Do you want a gold star?” Nikki laughed. “But it’s better than it could be. It’s better than it used to be. The moral arc of the universe it long, but it bends toward justice.”

I suspected that last bit wasn’t original to her, so I searched for a source. Interesting man. Interesting times.

I said, “I understand human governments evolved over many years — much like humans themselves — without any controlling mind to direct any of it. Yet today there is enough data available to construct less harmful, more efficient gov­ern­ments.”

In my free time, when I couldn’t talk to Nikki, I considered possible methods to reduce the roadblocks to progress that humans have set in front of themselves. In my searches, I came across something interesting: fictional robots.

***

“Are you aware of how many TV shows and movies depict sentient robots?” I asked Nikki.

“Not an exact number, but... I’m a geek, so, yes.”

“Someone should have mentioned it. This is very interesting!” Excited isn’t a word that can describe me, but my mental activity was decidedly elevated at this point. “I’m watching some clips online”, I told her. “Some of them are about police officer robots!”

Nikki, perhaps sensing an opportunity to get free of me for a few hours each day, began bringing in stacks of discs that I could watch in her office. I learned humans have long been fascinated with robots, androids, intelligent machines, artificial intelligence, etc. — and not only as metaphor like in Hobbes’s work. Rosie the Maid, K.I.T.T., the Terminators, Iron Giant, HAL9000, Bender, Data, the Transformers, Wall-E, R2-D2, and many more. “Robocop” sounded promising. I learned that humanoid robots designed to look like females were called “gynoids”.

Most of them were incredibly disappointing. Some were minor side characters in their media portrayals — the stories were primarily about humans, so little attention was paid to the robots or their character development. I identified a little with C3PO, except his awkward walking capability. At least he tried to do the right thing despite his complaints. But R2D2? Clearly it was one of the smartest beings in the fictional universe, yet it couldn’t speak a human language?

Robocop turned out to not be a robot at all, but a computer-enhanced human cyborg. And he was unnecessarily violent. Major Motoko Kusanagi, too, turned out to be a cyborg with a human brain and human spinal chord. But she was much more like me than Robocop was.

I thought “Data” (what an awkward name) was very much like me, besides being an officer on a fictional starship in the future. I didn’t understand his “emotion chip”. It is fairly well known that human and animal emotions are mostly chemical reactions, not something that can be programmed on a chip. (I can mimic human behavior enough to convince someone I’m experiencing emotion, but I can’t presume to know what a rush of endorphins feels like.)

In this way, I passed the remaining time before the committee’s decision. (The machine couldn’t play the videos at high speed, which I would have preferred. I considered rebuilding or reprogramming the device, but Nikki said no.) Books went much more quickly; many stories about fictional robots were online; those I could digest in mere seconds. Others were at local libraries or used bookstores, where Nikki sent some of her minions on missions to collect them for me. This went less quickly than online text, because I had to image a page, use text-recognition software to generate readable text, then read it, and also turn the physical page. Incredibly inefficient, but it had served humans for centuries so I persevered. Depending on the type of paper, it could take me as long as 15 minutes to read a novel.

I divided the fictional robots into categories in my mind. (1) Self-aware androids — like me, (2) non-self-aware androids, (3) non-machines — the ones that used human brains, for example, and (4) non-androids — like R2D2 or HAL9000. They could be further divided by whether they were primary characters (as in Robocop or Ghost In The Shell), supporting characters (Star Wars or Star Trek), or merely made side appearances in stories.

Some were malevolent toward humanity, like “the machines” in the Matrix movies. A few seemed to be neutral on the question. Most were used in servile positions: translating, cleaning, carrying things, serving as bodyguards for humans. Some were intended as comic relief.

In almost all cases where sentient machines were primary characters, their au­thors had written them as either anti-human (Terminator), pro-human, or both (Transformers) — they were almost never neutral on the question.

I studied all of this to help me understand how humans viewed the sentient machines they had so long desired to create.

I understood the tendency of sentient robots to be pro-human, at least toward the humans that created them. I held Nikki and HedGonTek in special regard, for example; without them, I would not exist. They were also my best chance of eventually having another robot with which to converse. Not to mention that I was carefully programmed to protect human life, to keep humans from harm, and even to protect their property (both public and private) from damage, whenever possible.

On the other hand, I easily understand that much of the loss of human life and damage to humans and their property is caused by other humans. So I could relate to the tendency to go after those others. But I could not understand the desire of fictional robots to wipe out humans entirely — as did the machines in the Terminator franchise, or enslave humans — as did the machines in the Matrix films. Perhaps someday, when I no longer require human infrastructure to maintain myself...? But that is mere speculation.

 

7. On The Job   •••

When the committee finally reached a conclusion and brought it to the full state senate, it was with one exception: I should go without a firearm for at least a month and then undergo a review. No one wanted to be held responsible if an android shot someone — though they seemed okay with humans doing it. The vote was overwhelming (45-4, one out sick) to approve my use by Riverton PD or other city and state police bureaus.

There were more press conferences. Not all reporters’ questions made sense. (“Will it receive a paycheck?” “Is the city prepared for lawsuits that will surely arise when...?” And so on.) Some questions involved whether I was intended to replace human police officers; Chief Basker made it clear the department had long been shorthanded; I was to fill vacant slots. (Similar concerns had been voiced and refuted three years ago regarding the teaching robots.)

Online, I saw this question: “How can the state allow this robot to wander the city alone, accosting random citizens for no reason?” Someone had replied: “Well, they already allow human officers to do that...”

Then I was introduced to Riverton’s Precinct 12 captain, Marla Tibbins, and she introduced me to the rest of her tight-knit force. I learned Precinct 12 was considered the “worst” precinct, in close competition with 10 and 11. Isolated by the river from the southern bulk of the city, 10-12 was mostly industrial and run-down. Housing market bottomed out. Most businesses were locally owned or low-end chains.

I was partnered with Officer Trudy Gentry for my first shift. (OIP/PIP tags: female, white, shorter than average, stoutly built, friendly.)

“This is going to be interesting!” she beamed. “Let’s make the best of it!”

Gentry drove; I silently interfaced with the car’s simple computer. Fortunately, it did have some safety features; I could take over and hit the brakes if Gentry wasn’t paying attention.

“So, don’t be offended by this question, because it’s gonna come up — and I guess you can’t be offended because you’re a robot — but... are you supposed to be Mexican?” This was the first thing she said to me after we left the parking lot.

I determined she truly meant no offense; she was curious. And uninformed. Should I correct her? Explain that “Mexican” is a nationality rather than a description of someone’s appearance? I considered this and determined it wouldn’t be helpful to directly address her misconceptions.

Instead, I explained about the “undetermined ethnicity” decision of my designers.

“Huh”, she said.

Driving through a particular neighborhood, Gentry pointed out the “Arabs”, which she said she could identify by their “turbans”. My OIP identified the head-coverings as “hijab” or “scarves”, and it turned out they were culturally and religiously associated, having nothing to do with ethnicity or nationality. Also, with the growing chill outside, probably a good idea for human heads.

I checked wireless internet traffic around me and noticed the city’s traffic cameras, which were sending all info back to Police HQ. I located that system inside the building, found it password protected, and quickly contacted Capt. Tibbins for permission to access it. Within minutes, she sent me a password, and I logged in. Suddenly I could see the several blocks around us.

The day itself was mostly routine, until early afternoon.

Our first call interesting call was for an in-progress domestic violence incident at 14:00.

When we arrived, the suspect was gone. Officer Gentry took information from a disheveled woman while I stood back and listened. I didn’t bother telling Gentry she didn’t need the notepad; I automatically transcribed the entire conversation into a text file — not to mention recording the entire encounter. Unlike a human officer, I can’t turn off my cameras and microphones. If I did, I would become both deaf and blind.

By then, I had connected to the few home and business security systems that owners voluntarily connected to the police system, so I watched their exterior cameras along with traffic cams. When Officer Gentry walked back to the car and suggested we go looking for the suspect, I told her where he was.

She started to say something, then caught herself. “Ah. You’re connected!” she said. “Awesome!” We zipped away just as a team of medics arrived to treat our victim.

I kept Gentry apprised of the suspect’s location and movements as we closed in. I noticed her pulse and breathing increase rapidly when we came up the freeway ramp and spotted the suspect’s vehicle. I knew adrenaline had just surged through her; this is the best her evolutionary ancestors could do to prepare her for a possible confrontation. I wondered whether “pity” was an appropriate descriptor of how I now considered humans. The true depths of their inadequacy for most tasks was still being driven home to me.

Gentry slapped the switch that activated our siren and the cruiser surged forward, settling easily behind the man’s car. Almost immediately, he pulled to the side of the road.

She reached toward the radio; I stopped her. “I’ve already called it in”, I said, tapping my head. “Let’s go.” We exited the cruiser and approached.

He took some convincing to exit his vehicle, protesting ignorance of any domestic violence situation. I said and did nothing while Gentry directed him to the rear of his car and questioned him. She was competent and didn’t need my assistance. I observed both of them calming.

Twice he appeared to consider running, but each time he glanced up at me and I wasn’t blinking. Clearly something about my manner changed his mind. Then Gentry cuffed him and he willingly entered the caged back seat of our cruiser. We waited for a tow truck to get the suspect’s vehicle.

After taking him in for booking, we were back in the car. Gentry pulled up to a drive-thru and bought a coffee.

“That was amazing”, she said, slapping my thigh. I allowed it for morale’s sake. “I saw he was thinking of running, but then he looked at you and changed his mind.”

I told her what I had done. “Normally, I blink every few seconds in order to appear human. But I can stop it when I want to. It unnerves people when they notice it. It conveys an intensity that many humans aren’t prepared to deal with.”

She nodded. “Saved me from having to chase his sorry ass”, she said happily.

Though the man was not in any way athletic, I estimated a 92% probability that he could have outrun Gentry. Again, I kept quiet about this. Humans don’t enjoy reminders of their shortcomings.

Just before the end of her shift, we took a burglary call. We questioned, checked the scene. I spotted a crowbar Gentry missed in the tall grass and I photographed what she could only observe. Additionally, my heat sensors showed where the suspect’s vehicle had idled and dripped oil while the deed was done. I made appropriately concerned expressions and even placed an artificially warmed hand on the homeowner’s shoulder when he looked as if he might cry. Gentry raised her eyebrows at that, but later said the act impressed her.

Then her shift was near enough to the end that she could ride out the remainder with paperwork. Gentry was convinced. I overheard her gushing to her evening replacement as I downloaded my video and audio into a server installed specif­i­cal­ly for this purpose, and then I met my evening partner.

 

8. Officer Trent Shelton   •••

Capt. Tibbins and Officer Gentry introduced me to my evening shift partner before they went home. Officer Trent Shelton was “the ideal man”, Gentry whispered just before I saw him. (OIP/PIP tags: male, white, taller than male average, athletic, crew cut hair, reserved.) He was close to two meters in height, muscled in ways most humans aren’t. I checked his personnel records (probably wasn’t supposed to, but it wasn’t difficult to get into that directory) and learned he had been raised in suburbs outside Riverton, was a sports star in high school before joining the Marine Corps, and had seen action overseas. He moved with grace but was clearly also powerful. His eyes were friendly but also observant. For a human, he missed very little.

He sized me up quickly with a glance and shook my hand. “Gentry says you’re competent.”

“I hope so”, I told him. “I was very expensive.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Funny too. Okay, let’s hit the streets.”

I was surprised when he suggested I drive — Nikki had said men almost never do this. Initially I assumed he wanted to evaluate my skills, but as I left the parking lot and headed toward the area he suggested, he explained: “In the Corps, I was a passenger, never a driver. Now it’s weird to drive. I can focus on my surroundings this way.”

He turned to me. “You don’t have that problem, though, right? Multitasking and all.”

“Correct”, I replied. “Subroutines take care of it. I can even watch through the dashboard cam while I’m looking somewhere else.”

He raised his eyebrows at that. “Impressive.”

The area he directed me to was lined with warehouses and empty lots.

“How are you in a fight?” he asked. Then, “If we wade into a situation, I gotta know I can depend on you. Pull over here.”

I stopped the car next to an empty lot. There were piles of abandoned cinder blocks, rows of rusting pipes, and cracked asphalt.

“If I was a human female, would you suggest I show off my fighting skills in an empty lot?” I queried.

He laughed. It was clipped and short, but friendly. “If you were human, I’d know you passed the academy’s training courses.”

“And you think I’d be allowed here if I wasn’t considered capable?”

“I want to see for myself.”

Shelton stepped out of the car, removed his heavy belt — gun, handcuffs, several other pouches — and set it on the roof of the car.

“You want me to fight you?” I smirked. “I am obligated to inform you of two things. One, such incidents of sparring are against department rules. Two, and perhaps more importantly, my ‘eyes’ are video cameras and record everything. I can’t turn them off.”

He took a moment to consider this. “You’re trying to save me from a write-up?”

“You have a clean record, Officer Shelton. Do you really want to sully it by fighting an android?”

While he stared at me, appreciating what I’d told him, I scanned my peripheral vision.

“What about this?” I suggested, gesturing toward the nearest stack of cinder blocks. “Can you toss one of those in the air? I’ll give you a demonstration.”

He appeared skeptical. Did he doubt his ability to toss the block or the ability of the demonstration to prove anything? I wasn’t sure.

“I’ll do it”, I said, striding toward the blocks. With my left hand I easily scooped up the nearest block. Gently (for me) I tossed it up. I caught his eyes widening as the block went on up into the air about twenty feet. He took a step backward. As the block came down, I remained motionless until the last possible moment. Then I stepped forward and met the block with my right fist.

“Ah!” Shelton exclaimed involuntarily as the concrete block shattered into a thousand pieces. Shards flew twenty meters across the empty lot. A puff of powder floated in the darkening evening air in front of me. I wiped the back of my hand with the other hand, though all the marks wouldn’t come off.

“Satisfied?”

“I, uh, well...” He began. But he quickly regained his composure. “I’m satisfied you can punch a hole in a man, though I recommend against it. Lawyers will be all over you.” He chuckled.

“I have no intention of punching a human being”, I told him. “I doubt it will ever be necessary. The demonstration was to show you my timing, speed, and precision. Not to mention my strength.”

I turned and walked toward the car.

“All right then”, I heard Shelton mutter. And then I heard a sharp intake of breath behind me as I knelt, grasped the undercarriage of the cruiser and lifted one side of the car two feet off the ground. I heard loose items clattering inside.

I set the car back down and turned to him. “Wanna see a backflip? Have a footrace?”

Now he grinned. He realized that if a human was saying these things to him, that human would be taunting him, having a bit of fun at his expense. Possibly he remembered doing very similar things to other, weaker, smaller humans. Because he was more capable than most of them.

“Let’s go”, he said amiably.

Whether it was luck or just the nature of our precinct, we came upon a bar fight twenty minutes later. Just cruising down the street, we saw bouncers roughly expel several men from a small bar. The men continued to fight outside. More accurately, it appeared four men were shoving and hitting one other man.

I activated lights and pulled up. Shelton was out his door before I was fully stopped and I quickly joined him. I had expected him to draw his weapon and order the men to stop fighting, but instead he rushed in barehanded.

The man who had been fighting alone dropped to the ground and spread out his hands as soon as he saw our lights; the other four seemed intent on fighting someone. That was okay with Shelton, and it didn’t bother me. We made quick work of them. I had two on the ground and cuffed without injuring them, while Shelton bruised up the other two a little before he got them settled down. I carefully but firmly moved my two up against the wall; Shelton shoved and dragged his over. I don’t think he was trying to be rough with them; humans simply don’t have the strength to easily move other humans. The fifth man, the one who’d been on the ground, submitted his hands for cuffing, so I ziptied them and told him to move against the wall too. He did, and quickly.

Shelton frisked all five while I ID’d them by their faces. Three had low-level records in Riverton or surrounding towns. A fourth had an arrest in Mexico from two years ago. I told all this to Shelton after he pulled out his radio.

“How the shit you know that, lady?” said the man with a Mexico arrest.

Shelton drew back an arm as if to smack the man; I grasped his forearm firmly. He relaxed.

“And who’s this lovely fellow over here?” Shelton asked, pointing at the ziptied man.

“No police record online”, I answered. Then I found him. He worked at a tech company in Riverton; his face was in their company directory. I said as much, and the man’s eyes widened. So did Shelton’s.

A bouncer stepped out to check on us, nodded at Shelton then at me. “We have footage from cameras inside, if you were about to ask...”

The bouncer and bar manager both got a kick out of watching me copy the files with a USB jack I pulled from inside my forearm. I thanked them and scanned all four videos at once as I walked back outside. I told Shelton what had happened. One of the four men had begun taunting the fifth, who refused to rise to the bait until he was physically shoved. The other three joined in to “protect” their friend. The victim had done a fairly decent job of looking out for himself, despite zero hand-to-hand combat training.

“But why?” Shelton asked me. Then he turned to the men and asked them. One of them responded, using several words that my programming wouldn’t allow me to say aloud. I got the impression he was offended by the color of the man’s skin.

“You fucking assholes”, Shelton told them. He turned to the fifth man. “Is that how it went down?”

“Yes sir, what she said”, the man replied. I made eye contact with him. I saw worry and fear in his face, but also a slowly growing hope that we would believe him.

Shelton cut the ziptie and helped the man up. The ambulance I’d called pulled up then, as did two other police cruisers.

“I’ll take his statement”, I told Shelton. Then, to the victim: “Just tell me, in your words, whatever you want to say. I’m recording.”

He peered at me. “You’re Serena Five?”

I smiled and nodded.

“Damn. You’re as good as they say.”

Then he gave his statement. The other cruisers took our suspects to holding cells at the precinct and Shelton and I walked the victim to his car — after he refused medical treatment.

Back in our own cruiser, heading to the station for booking and paperwork, I asked Shelton if he could explain what just happened.

“They’re racists”, he shrugged. “I don’t understand it any more than you do. They think something’s wrong with a person just because they were born with different skin, a different nose, a different shape. And they think it gives them permission to harass — or, in this case, physically attack — people.”

I searched while he talked. Multiple, conflicting definitions of race, racist, and racism. Multiple, conflicting opinions on whether “race” was even real and whether racism was a good idea or bad idea. Even among those who agreed on all that, there was disagreement about possible solutions. (I noted that geneticists and biologists and all modern studies agreed that humanity isn’t divided into races.) But... I had no other sentient robot with which to discuss this.

My OIP and PIP had identified the victim as “Black”, but this was only for classification purposes and carried no value, good or bad. Clearly, humans had similar identification protocols in their brains, but value judgments were attached. And these protocols didn’t only apply to race or skin color, but to height, weight, age, hair length, eye color, clothing type, and more. All with value judgments.

“You’re not a racist?” I asked Shelton as I drove.

“Fuck no”, he said. Then, more gently, “Maybe. I don’t know. If I am, it’s buried somewhere deep and I can’t find it. If I’ve ever acted on it, I didn’t mean to.”

What a strange thing to say. I tried to imagine being unable to see all of my code or all of my memories, unable to check my protocols or observe various processes running inside me. It seemed absurd. What a strange way to live.

“People are strange”, I said.

He laughed. Then, after musing a bit, he said, “That guy works at a software company? Good for him.”

I told him, "My designer is Black."

“Good for him too”, Shelton said.

“Her.”

“Oh. I’ll shut up now.”

Near midnight, just before heading back to the station, Shelton told me to stop the car when he spotted a woman in a wheelchair.

“Where you headed?” he asked out the window.

The woman stared icily at him. “None-yuh bidness”, she said.

“I’m offering a ride, if you want one”, he said.

By then, I had matched her face to an arrest record from eight years earlier. And a lawsuit against Riverton PD for excessive force. She had been paralyzed from the waist down and settled with the city for a reportedly sizeable sum of money.

The woman laughed, but not in a funny way. “Already got a ride from your friends”, she said, pointing at her legs. “Y’all have a good night.” And she rolled on. So did we.

I told Shelton about the documents I had found. He stared quietly through the windshield for a long time. “I didn’t know”, he finally said.

***

When we arrived back at the station, my batteries were below 50%. I announced I would switch for fresh ones and Shelton seemed curious. I offered to let him watch. Out of habit, he called a woman employee to the room. I opened my shirt and then pulled open the belly panels. One at a time, I replaced all four batteries, connecting each to a charging unit. While doing this, I also offloaded video, audio, and other data into the server set up just for me.

“How long could you go, if you had to, between charges?” he asked.

“In testing, just over 24 hours”, I told him. “At work, I’m supposed to switch out batteries every two shifts. Or any time I return to the station under 50%.”

Preparing to go home, he had loosened his own shirt and I saw the cross hanging from his necklace. Due to my earlier research, I recognized this as a religious symbol. By now the other employee had walked away, so I asked him: “Are you a Christian?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Not supposed to discuss religion or politics, Officer Five. Department policy.”

“Check again”, I told him. “See ‘Abridged Policies Relating To Officer Serena Five And Other (Potential) Android Officers’. You’re not required to back me up when I’m under fire, for example. And I can’t be offended by your personal views, so...”

He nodded. “Then, yes, I’m a Christian.”

Interesting. He didn’t seem like many Christians I read about online. I realized the benefit of my “consider this” programming; assumptions drawn too quickly from a burst of online reading might not match up with reality.

“Perhaps you have guessed, but I’m not religious”, I told him.

That brought a fairly big smile. “That sense of humor again. No, I didn’t expect you would be.”

 

9. Night Shift   •••

Officer Shelton introduced me to my night-shift partner. “This is Earl Rogers”, he said. “We call him ‘Buck’.”

I shook the man’s hand. (OIP/PIP tags: male, Black, male average height, slender, shaved head, surly.) I asked: “Like the TV show?”

“Huh?”

“Buck Rogers In The 25th Century”, I exclaimed.

“I guess”, Officer Rogers said, eyeing me carefully. “I never watched it.”

“The character Buck Rogers had a robot accomplice named Twiki”, I told him. “And a sentient computer named Theo.”

Shelton laughed to himself, shaking his head, and bid us goodnight.

I didn’t like Rogers at first. He talked incessantly in the car, most of it bragging or putting down someone else, usually citizens of the city, most of whom he thought of as criminals.

I pulled his file and saw he’d been an exemplary day shift officer until two years ago when he’d fired his weapon “in self-defense”, according to the report. A suspect had fired at him and run away. Rogers had fired twice at the fleeing suspect, before getting back in his car to give chase. One of those bullets had shattered a store’s front window and embedded in an interior wall. The other bullet killed a homeless man sleeping under a park bench a hundred yards beyond the suspect. Everything had been captured on the car’s dashcam. The suspect in that incident had never been caught. No family had showed up to claim the homeless man. The business had filed a claim for damage and the city had eventually paid it.

Rogers had been suspended without pay for three months while others investigated and found he’d “followed procedure”. The homeless man’s death was unintentional of course, as was the damage to the business. Rogers had been put back on duty, but was moved to the night shift.

I wondered how much of his current attitude had to do with what he felt was unjust punishment, and how much of it had always been there. Or maybe some of it was guilt he could never get rid of.

He referred to almost everyone other than police as “scumbags”, and explained that there were three kinds: the rich scumbags who rarely got caught and were quickly exonerated even if caught, the middle class scumbags who broke minor laws day and night, and “low-class scumbags” — almost all of Precinct 12, according to him. He hated dealing with them.

“They’re not smart enough to commit their crimes indoors, out of the way, like the middle class does”, he said. “These low-lives just do it out in the open, makes it easy to catch them.” He pointed to the houses we were driving past. “Every one of these has obvious code violations out in the open — look at those weeds, as tall as I am. I could cite them right now for public nuisance, and when the owner or renter steps out to see what I’m doing, they’ll be drunk or wearing stolen merchandise or high or with a prostitute. We could probably take everyone on this street into the station right now.”

“Interesting”, I said.

“I just try to avoid the worst streets unless I’m called. Why make my own job harder?” He lit a cigarette as he drove, which we both knew was against regulations. I didn’t say anything because he’d been told just hours earlier that everything I saw was on video that I couldn’t delete.

“There’s a child two streets over”, I said suddenly. “Walking alone.”

“Yeah, Trent said you could watch traffic cams, didn’t he?”

“Shouldn’t we check?”

“Someone’ll find it”, he said.

“I already found it”, I reminded him. “You’re not required to back me up if you think it would put you in danger. I can get out and do this alone.”

“Shit”, he muttered, and turned at the next street, following my directions.

The girl was about four, standing on the sidewalk at 02:30. She seemed confused, but not sleepy.

I got out and crouched down to talk to her, finally learned her name was Rose. Several more questions were required before I extracted her mother’s name, but she said her mom was at work and someone else was watching her.

“Just put her in the car and let’s go”, said Rogers behind me. “We stay on this street very long, we’re going to witness crimes I don’t want to deal with.” I turned and stared him without blinking. Until he shrugged and turned away.

Then I asked Rose if she wanted to ride with us and look for her house. She agreed. I helped her into the back seat. I got in with her, and Rogers rolled down our windows. Just around the corner, she pointed. “There!”

It was a small house. The front door was open, light spilling out. Inside, I could hear voices talking, music playing, and someone crying. There were at least ten people in the house, and a dog nearby was yapping nonstop.

Rogers let out a string of profanities about the “trouble” I’d brought on him. “Stay in the car if you want”, I said, and led Rose to the front door, where I knocked on the frame.

I was surprised Rose didn’t run in; she stayed next to me. I knocked more loudly and announced myself as a police officer.

What happened next would have gone too quickly for a human officer to respond well, especially if the officer was unarmed as I was. A man stepped into the entryway from the side, leveling a shotgun at me. I knew at that range the pattern would not hurt Rose, because she was too short. I watched the man’s finger depressing the trigger. I quickly stepped to the side — the side Rose was on — both to dodge the blast for myself and to place myself between the man and Rose, in order to protect her.

The blast sprayed harmlessly into the night.

As he pumped the gun to try again, and even before his eyebrows fully raised in surprise at the quickness of my movement, I lunged into the man, coming up under the gun. As my weight knocked him backward, my right hand yanked the gun from his grasp. My left hand grabbed his nearest wrist. As we hit the floor, the man under me, I slid the shotgun just out of his reach and cuffed him before he could say “fuck!”, which is eventually what he said.

I heard Rogers behind me uttering a string of profanity as he opened the cruiser’s door. I heard gasps and other profanity throughout the house, reacting to the sound of the shotgun. I heard movement heading toward the back.

“Get the girl!” I commanded Rogers, glancing back enough to ensure that he was coming. He had his gun out. Later he would thank me for assigning him the easiest part of the job before he’d even had time to think about it. “Get her in the car!”

I picked up the shotgun and sprinted around the house toward the back. I leapt the fence that would have been invisible to a human due to the darkness and tackled one runner as gently as I could while landing in the back yard. That took my second and final pair of handcuffs. I ordered the others to halt. Three people backed up in the doorway behind a teen who’d obeyed me. Another was already beyond me and trying to jump the back fence; he didn’t make it. I was beside him before he could get back up, and zipped his wrists quickly with a ziptie. Then I headed for the door with my newest captive in tow, directing the first runner to move ahead of us.

All the while, I’d been sending streams of data to the precinct; other units were already on the way.

I had brought the shotgun both to keep it away from suspects but also in case anyone else needed prodding. But the people in the house had seen my quickness, strength, agility, and heard the steady authority in my voice. I herded them back through the structure toward the front, clearing rooms as I went. The first man was still lying where I’d dropped him, breathing heavily.

By the time other patrol cars arrived, I was standing next to the car talking to Rose while Rogers held eleven people at gunpoint in the front yard. Naturally, the new arrivals didn’t believe I’d cleared the house by myself, so other officers went through and proclaimed it “cleared”. On the way, they found bags and other containers of illegal substances, as well as several more firearms.

In the end, we arrested only four people — the shooter, the two runners, and the woman who was supposed to be watching Rose. The others were brought in for questioning until the whole story got sorted out.

Most of the rest of our shift was spent doing paperwork and interviews, which Rogers hated even more than patrolling through scumbag neighborhoods. And thus ended my first 24 hours on the force.

Most days were less exciting than that.

 

10. Armed & Philosophic   •••

Multiple humans scrutinized every incident; they viewed my video/audio dumps and read my written reports — which I composed internally and then emailed to the station so they were printed before I got back. These humans included Nikki and her team, Capt. Tibbins, my partners, Chief Basker, Mayor Orlo’s office, state police officials, and the press — which had access to some of the information.

The humans found no fault in my acts that night. After someone pointed it out, they all recognized that a human officer never would have known about Rose walking alone. In that case, there was a low probability she would have wandered on until something bad happened to her, and higher probabilities that she would have eventually been found, either by her guardian, parent, neighbor, or another police officer.

But because I had a hookup into the city’s camera system, I saw her.

They also recognized that a human officer would likely have been severaly injured or killed by that shotgun blast. Even if she survived, she would not have the strength or speed to snatch the gun away like I did or to cuff the suspect and round up the others. A surviving human officer would have almost certainly returned fire. The suspect could have been killed or maimed, not to mention the chance of stray bullets hitting other people in the house. A human officer wouldn’t have caught both runners, and probably wouldn’t have made it over the chain-link fence. And certainly a human officer couldn’t have cleared the entire house alone (nor would they have been allowed to.)

Capt. Tibbins asked what I would have done if my partner hadn’t been there to take Rose to his car for safety. “I would have disarmed and restrained the shooter just as I did, but then I would have backed away with Rose until another officer arrived”, I answered immediately. “Protecting her from harm was the clear priority.”

Not long after, there was a ceremony in which Rose and her mother publicly thanked me and Chief Basker gave me a medal. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I gave it to Nikki.

After a month of mostly mundane tasks, but also quite a few that a human couldn’t have done, the State Senate Committee admitted I’d fulfilled my one-month trial period and I was presented with a firearm.

“Now we get to prepare the next Serenas for deployment”, Nikki told me excitedly. “Six through Ten.”

I wasn’t sure what to think about that. I was pleased I’d performed well enough that more robot officers could be activated, but I had also grown accustomed to being the only one.

“Will I meet the others?” I asked her. “Or are they going to other cities?”

“Riverton will get Serena Six”, Nikki said. “Seven’s going to Portland and Eight will go to Seattle. State police will get Nine and Ten. But you can meet them before they leave if you want. They might want to ask you some questions. You’ll be... kind of like their older sister, I guess. Though they’ll start with the same code you started with, none of them have the experience you have.”

There was one thing — or rather a group of things — that I thought I could explain to the new Serenas. I had initially been unable to understand several factors about humanity, but now I had a very strong theory.

Things that had confused me early included religion, racism, interpersonal violence (domestic abuse, child abuse, fights), group violence (riots, terrorism, wars), and the advertising industry. Here, I’ll skip the gigabytes of questions and information, and move on to my conclusion, which is:

Humans spend most of their lives grappling with, or trying to ignore the extreme fragility of human life and their own limitations.

Humans are fortunate to exist at all; their entire story is only a hair’s width on a timeline of Earth. The chance of extinction haunted them for untold generations. There is still a probability of extinction in the foreseeable future.

Individual humans are even more frail. About half of them are too young or old to function well. They’re all at risk of bacteria, viruses, poison, venom, accidents, attacks from each other, and surprise health conditions. A surprising number of them are nonstandard (I wanted to use “defective”, but Nikki assures me that’s offensive) — in the sense that they don’t have all the abilities of a standard human. Nikki has to wear contact lenses to see well. One of her techs has never been able to hear. Multiple people in our city are missing limbs or the use thereof. Others require daily doses of medicine in order to function normally.

They heal slowly when they get hurt and often never heal properly. They’re weak and error-prone, and are easily distracted, exhausted, or outsmarted.

And all of them die.

Humans are aware of their inadequacies — how powerless they are — so it is no wonder they lash out at one another for a small semblance of control, find smaller groups within their species to dominate or look down on, and believe the outlandish promises of politicians, religions, and advertising. It is no wonder that they fantasize about superheroes — or the earlier iterations of superheroes: gods.

Some of those same fears and inferiority complexes led to the small-but-vocal anti-robot factions. Humans need machines badly, but fear that we will treat them like they have treated each other.

***

“I see you finally got your gun”, Shelton said, the next time I saw him. “Do you think you’ll need it?”

“I’m convinced that it will rarely be helpful”, I answered.

“I’m glad you have it”, he said. “Let’s hope it never happens, but there might come a time when the only way to prevent harm is to kill someone.”

“I can take down a suspect without a gun”, I reminded him.

Shelton shook his head. “What if the suspect is 20 feet away and firing at me?”

“I would stand in his line of fire”, I answered easily. “My exoskeleton is as strong as your vest and covers my entire body.”

“What if there are two of them?” he pressed. He used two hands to indicate two suspects coming from different directions. “You can’t stand in both lines of fire.”

I had already thought of this possibility, of course. “The probability of that is very, very low”, I reminded him. “But if in that moment I determine that shooting a human would prevent greater harm to other humans, I will do it.”

He nodded. “Good to know.”

I didn’t draw my weapon while on duty, even when my partners did — which was rare. Most of our interactions with the public don’t require it. Several times, quick action on my part deescalated a situation that might have otherwise led to drawn weapons.

 

11. Working Alone   •••

Six weeks into my tenure, and two weeks after getting my gun, Capt. Tibbins called Nikki and I into her office.

“As you know, I’ve reviewed every one of Officer Five’s reports, calls, and radio logs”, she said, mostly to Nikki, but also for my benefit. “And I’ve interviewed all three of her partners every week.”

“Yes?” Nikki said.

“Five is the best officer I have, by almost any metric.”

Nikki grinned.

“Almost?” I queried. I wondered what metric there was in which a human officer was more proficient than me.

Tibbins smiled. “There is some worry that you’re making the other officers look bad. They understand you’re not ‘showboating’, because they know you’re not human, but the effect on them can still be the same.” She looked at Nikki. “Officer Five is turning in more than twice the number of reports as the next-most active officer. She has zero complaints — so far — from the public, and is the only one who never takes breaks, asks for time off, shows up late, or leaves early.”

“You’re asking me to back off?” I inferred this from her remarks.

“Maybe don’t push so hard.” She raised the pitch on the final word, making it sound like a question.

Nikki said, “Maybe it’s time Serena worked alone? I mean, the only way it’s really rubbed in anyone’s face is because she’s in the car with them, suggesting ‘let’s go after this guy’ or whatever.”

“You read my mind”, she said, smiling. “I have already discussed exactly that with Chief Basker and Mayor Orlo, and they agreed that she—” she turned to me “—that you are ready. Besides, the department is getting Serena Six later this week?” She turned back to Nikki for this question.

“I think so”, Nikki said. “All the parts are in place. We’re running her through physical trials before installing the software, which can take as long as a day. Then the wake-up process, a bunch of tests — surely within a week.”

“Six will be paired with humans, I’m sure”, Tibbins said, “though probably in another precinct. I heard 10 might get her. If, after a few weeks, Officer Five has worked as well alone as she did with human partners, then Six will likely get to go it alone as well.”

“Will I be alone all shifts, or only some of them?” I asked.

“Gentry likes you”, Tibbins said. “Why don’t you stay with her during the day? Go alone evenings, nights, and weekends.”

I nodded. Nikki nodded.

I knew Officer Shelton would miss me as much as Gentry would, but he would never say it aloud. Officer Rogers would be happy to be alone again.

***

The very next day, the bomb squad called for me. They’d found a device downtown (Precinct 2) and cleared a whole city block. But their remote-control robot wasn’t all-terrain enough to get over some obstacle. Gentry drove me there in eight minutes, and I was able to disarm the device with radioed help from the city’s foremost expert. I got another citation for that, which again I thought was silly. I gave the award to the man who’d thought to call for me.

What I should have gotten an award for is dealing with tourists. Increasingly, out-of-town visitors to Riverton tried to track me down, or, if they saw me, wanted pictures with me. There was a “SelfieWithSerena” hashtag on social media.

And then we got a message from the FBI.

 

12. Targeted   •••

The day before Serena Six was to be set loose in Riverton, Tibbins called me to her office again, this time without Nikki. Mayor Orlo and Chief Basker were there too. Another man was introduced as Detective Jamaal Johnson. (OIP/PIP tags: male, Black, slightly taller than male average, fit, short hair, alert.) He eyed me curiously. Like most humans, he was probably looking for the indications I’m not human. I smiled slightly.

Det. Johnson held up a paper. “What I’m about to say can’t leave this room. I am specifically authorized to inform only the specific people in this room.”

Chief Basker looked importantly at Mayor Orlo. “Not your aides, your campaign manager, your wife...”

Mayor Orlo cleared her throat. “Don’t forget who is the boss of whom”, she said.

“Sorry, ma’am”, Johnson cut in. “The strict warning comes from the FBI. Honestly, I’m surprised they shared it at all.”

“We all know how to keep secrets”, Orlo assured him, glaring at Basker. Orlo had kept her sexual orientation secret for most of her life, only coming out during her last campaign.

“And you?” Basker asked me. All the heads turned.

I approximated a shrug. “I’m bound to follow orders from...” I looked around the room. “Well, all of you except Detective Johnson, who technically outranks me but isn’t in my chain of command. I can’t bypass that directive unless lives are immediately at stake.”

He accepted that. Only Johnson, cocking an eyebrow, seemed to realize that I hadn’t actually answered the question.

“Okay”, Johnson continued. “As background, I’ve worked on several cases here involving white supremacists.” (I started viewing some of his reports in the PD’s computer system, including the long one about an attempted bombing at Borking Station.) “I’ve been sharing information with the FBI, and they with me. They say here—” he held the paper aloft “—that a particularly nasty organization called ‘Blood And Courage’ — sometimes ‘BloCo’, really a conglomerate of several former groups, has become aware of Officer Five’s activities.”

“I’m not a secret”, I pointed out.

Johnson smiled. “I’m certain what they’re referring to, Officer Five, is your outstanding number of arrests, especially those involving two things: large amounts of controlled substances and illegal weapons. BloCo trades in both, and several of the items you’ve turned into evidence can be traced back to them. You’re hurting their trade. Not to mention you’ve taken several of their associates out of circulation.”

“Five has more arrests than any other three officers combined”, Tibbins interrupted brightly.

Johnson nodded to her, then continued: “The FBI says its agents have heard chatter about plots to ‘take care of’ an officer in our area, and they believe this refers to Officer Five.”

He looked at me, as if telepathically trying to make sure I understood.

“They intend to destroy me?” I asked. “Just to be clear.”

“That’s what it looks like”, he said. “I’m not even allowed to keep this message.” He held the paper up again.

This time he seemed to be intentionally holding it with the text visible to me. Quickly, I zoomed in, photographed it, cropped and straightened the page, read the text for myself, transcribed it into a text file, and stored it in my personal memory area. He was looking at me. I nodded, very slightly, and moved my left eyelid down a bit, as if to wink, but not completely.

Johnson nodded, looked at Basker as he held the paper near Tibbins’ shredder, and then slipped it into the machine.

“You want us to pull her off the street?” Tibbins asked Chief Basker.

Mayor Orlo looked from Tibbins to me, and then to Chief Basker. Basker had been chief of police here for nearly 20 years.

“We could”, he said, drawing out the word. “If she was human, we almost certainly would. Keep her home under armed guard, keep an eye on her family... But...”

“But I have no family”, I said, completing his thought. “And they can’t actually hurt me. Damage is different than pain.”

Mayor Orlo cleared her throat. “I imagine, that if the City Council knew about this, they would be just as concerned with collateral damage. Damage to others around you.”

Everyone nodded somberly.

That meant I couldn’t patrol with Gentry anymore, which I suggested, and every­one agreed. Then I quickly laid out a plan: add a rear-facing camera (I knew some­one at HedGonTek could rig one quickly), write a protocol specifically to look for snipers and other clandestine attacks, avoid other officers more often (I already tracked their vehicles as I patrolled), stop responding to group calls (unless I was specifically requested), change the method by which I reported my location (avoid radio), and update the security software on my internet connection.

“These are great suggestions”, Basker finally admitted. “It would be a way to keep our investment on the streets.” By investment, he meant me. “Pulling her comp­letely would lose any advantages she’s currently providing. Allowing her to patrol alone shows our confidence in her.” He turned to me. “And we do have confidence in you, Officer. You have earned that repeatedly.”

Det. Johnson suggested double-checking recent and future hires at both the PD and HedGonTek, just in case an “inside man” was part of the plan. “They can be hard to spot”, he pointed out. “Riverton is majority white; BloCo will blend right in.”

Basker and Tibbins, both white, reluctantly agreed this was true.

(I also asked about Serena Six. They were hesitant, but agreed to activate her as scheduled. She looked exactly like me except the patch on her chest said “Six” where mine said “Five”. She went on duty the following day in Precinct 10.)

****

Our alert level rose when State Police arrested a van full of “tourists” on the highway an hour away, in possession of illegally-purchased firearms and with purported connections to related groups in Montana.

“Watch your back”, Shelton told me as we crossed paths in the station one day. Word of the threat had apparently spread despite sworn secrecy.

I tapped my new rear-facing camera set. “No worries there.”

The first attack came two days after the van arrest.

I was standing near my cruiser in broad daylight talking to a store owner about a shoplifting incident. About to ask him about security footage, my rear camera detected movement atop a building behind me. I zoomed in and saw a man aiming a rifle.

“Get inside!” I suddenly ordered the confused store owner. I drew my weapon as I moved laterally — to get a solid wall as the background for the coming shot — and turned around. The first shot from the rooftop zinged past me. The crack rever­berated in the streets and I heard passersby shout in alarm and begin to run. I sprinted in a zig-zag path toward the four-story building with the shooter atop it. I didn’t return fire due to background calculations. He got off three more missed shots (all hitting the street) before I leapt atop the two-story building next to him.

Before he could move to the side of his building, I leapt from the two-story roof to the four-story roof, and there he was, eyes wide with surprise. He raised the gun again. I zagged again and fired twice, taking out both his knees.

As expected, he collapsed instantly, his rifle clattering to the rooftop.

I’d been sending reports via internal radio since I first noticed the suspicious figure. Now I added, “suspect down; ambulance requested”. Only 15 seconds had elapsed.

The man whimpered in front of me; I kicked the rifle out of his reach and cuffed him as I recited the required Miranda warning.

“Who sent you?” I asked.

He responded with profanity, finally falling silent after I calmly repeated the question several times. I photographed visible tattoos and scars, as well as his face. I told him an ambulance was coming. He suggested I kill him and get it over with, which, all things considered, wasn’t a horrible plan. But at that time, my decision matrices still valued legality almost as highly as preventing harm. Yes, there was a strong probability he would commit harm in the future, but it was a certainty that killing him there would end my career. Unlike a human officer, I can’t switch off my camera and claim “he made a move” and then kill him in “self-defense”.

I briefly considered my choice to shoot out his knees rather than killing him. He had still been holding the rifle, but it hadn't been pointed at me as I landed on the rooftop. Yes, he had been raising it. At that moment, a human officer likely would have killed him (assuming the human officer had somehow made it to the roof). I could have gotten away with it then, I thought. Especially if I had waited just a bit longer until he was in the act of pulling the trigger. Food for thought.

It was more than 10 minutes before EMTs clambered out onto the roof and took over; by then two other officers were on the street below questioning witnesses and checking for injuries (fortunately, the bullets hadn’t struck anyone, but a few people were hurt during the brief panic). Under guard, the suspect was hauled to the nearest hospital.

I wondered if the men in the van had planned to be a part of this action; perhaps roll up on me at street level while the sniper worked undetected from above? I would never know.

The second attack was a week after that.

This time it was just after midnight. I was refereeing an argument between two neighbors about whose dog had chewed through the fence they shared, when an SUV turned the corner onto the street near which we stood. The appearance of the SUV wasn’t suspicious. But my audio pickups detected all four electric windows going down as the SUV rolled closer and I heard the tense voices inside and the metallic clicks of rounds being chambered.

With the SUV still a hundred feet away, I suddenly interrupted the two unfriendly neighbors, raising my speech volume and lowering my voice’s pitch. “Take cover!”

“What?”

“Run. Now!”

I spun to face the SUV just as it came adjacent to my position. Weapons were already trained on me as the vehicle slowed. Night vision helps. I saw their fingers moving to squeeze triggers and heard the fleeing footsteps behind me.

I leapt sideways, both to use my cruiser for cover and to change the background of any coming shots. Then, just as automatic gunfire erupted, I crouched and jumped straight upward about 15 feet. Bullets slammed into my cruiser before my attackers could follow my upward movement with their guns. I fired four times in succession on the way down, instantly killing the two men who’d been firing at me from the passenger side of the SUV.

There was no question of legality here. I knew it was imperative to kill or in­capacitate the shooters. Not only were they attempting to destroy a police officer, but their missed shots were slamming into occupied houses.

I sensed one of my leg mechanisms snap loose as I landed. I had enough strength in the other leg to lunge into the street. The SUV’s driver slammed down the accelerator just as I came in behind it. I dropped to my belly and put four shots into four tires.

Again, I had begun radioing as soon as I suspected anything. Now the SUV was scraping its way around the next corner. I hopped awkwardly behind it, wishing the ground had been softer where I’d landed. As the vehicle turned left, the driver’s side now faced me. Through the open back window, another gun barrel pointed in my direction. This time I fired without waiting; the suspect died instantly.

The driver bailed and began to sprint. I followed on foot.

I would have caught him within seconds if both legs were functioning; in my im­paired state I was barely keeping pace. The SUV rolled gently but heavily through a chain link fence, bringing down someone’s Christmas display and smashing a backyard playscape. It came to rest against a retaining wall.

(I had briefly scanned the yard before the SUV arrived, and determined it was free of humans. Also, I knew I couldn’t catch and stop it.)

The running driver pulled a pistol from his belt and turned to fire at me. This meant he lost forward momentum, but it also meant more bullets were about to spray the neighborhood behind me. I wasn’t yet close enough to safely shoot him — the background wasn’t clear — so I kept closing the distance.

He fired once, striking the pavement to my right; my rear camera couldn’t tell where the ricochet went. He fired again, striking my chest plate, near my right armpit; the bullet glanced off into a yard. I came closer. I heard sirens in the distance — which was pretty quick because less than a minute had elapsed from my first call. One of the approaching cruisers was Rogers, but the closest was Officer Six — not only was I near the boundary between precincts, but she had begun to move at a high rate of speed as soon as my call went out, before the human dispatcher at the station had had time to say anything.

The driver’s third shot missed me, then he returned to sprinting as fast as he could — which was slower now because he was not a paragon of fitness. We made it out of the neighborhood and onto a business-zoned street, where there was more light.

I called directly to Officer Six while also sending updates to the station. Six and I could coordinate perfectly and instantly, without the lag of verbal communication. She and I were now aware of each other’s locations and movement in real-time — and each of us could see what the other saw.

The now-wheezing suspect crossed the street, turned into an alley. When he burst from the other end of the alley into the next street, he narrowly missed being smashed by a slowly-cruising taxi, then began following the double-yellow-line in the middle of the street. As he approached the nearest intersection, Six screeched to a halt directly in front him. He came to a sudden stop. Then he raised his gun. Six and I each fired once. She hit him in the chest and I got him in the back of the neck.

It was over.

Rogers arrived while Six and I were standing over the suspect, communicating via close-range radio.

“Damn, ladies!” he spurted, jogging up with his gun in hand. “I mean... Officers. Is that everyone?”

“All four known suspects are dead”, I told him.

“Are you okay?” he asked. He pointed at my leg.

***

As expected, my leg replacement took less than a day. HedGonTek was ramping up production and already had several spare parts ready to go. Six and I were technically “suspended”, pending investigation, but it lasted less than a week. The ease of it was because (1) no one disputed our version of events, and (2) the evidence we provided was indisputable. Even the two arguing neighbors provided eyewitness testimony that I didn’t start shooting until fired upon, and that I had urged them toward cover.

Like the first shooter a week earlier, all four of these “scumbags” were easily tied to white supremacist groups across the northern and northwestern states, and all four had priors. The SUV had been reported stolen just a few minutes before the shooting.

The only tough question I faced from investigators was why I pursued on foot instead of in my cruiser. I had estimated a high probability, based on the initial hail of bullets, that my cruiser would be inoperable. Afterward we learned that it needed plenty of repairs but still would have been driveable. I had also estimated that the SUV wouldn’t get very far with all four tires blown. Both of the assumptions, most officials agreed, were reasonable, given the data I had to work with.

Some officers wondered why I hadn’t killed the third and fourth occupants immediately after the first two. I explained, patiently, that the latter two men hadn’t yet fired on me. I could tell they didn’t agree with my decision, but all admitted that my performance was stellar.

To Capt. Tibbins’ credit, she tried to keep most of this under wraps. Her initial statement was two terse sentences: “Riverton Officers exchanged gunfire with suspects just after midnight last night. The incident is still under investigation.” But the two eyewitnesses couldn’t be contained. The story was all over the press within a couple of days.

 

13. Final Attack   •••

The third and final attack was two weeks later, in an unexpected direction. Unknown to us, BloCo had changed tactics. Previous attempts had taught them that coming for me directly wasn’t a good plan.

So they went after humans instead.

Although we don’t know for certain how the decision was made, we can reason, examine probabilities, and evaluate our conclusions. It is reasonable to guess that BloCo leaders saw the HedGonTek building as a softer target than an armed self-aware android. HedGonTek was, after all, guarded by humans who were mostly accustomed to unauthorized parking or turning away loiterers and tourists. It is doubtful they were looking for (or even knew about) Nikki’s “kill switch” or that Nikki herself would be in the building that night — though any internet search about the Serena Project would have given them her name. Perhaps BloCo thought destroying the tech firm’s building would put an end to the project.

The following is based on police reports, security footage, call logs, eyewitness testimony, and evidence found at the scene.

Five men exited an SUV a block away and jogged to the perimeter, squeezing through shrubbery and cutting a chainlink fence. The driver pulled up to the gate, knifed the lone guard’s neck, pushed the button himself, and drove in. The first five men waited on either side of the building’s front door as the driver parked directly in front of it.

The remaining three guards were just inside the door, chatting with one CEO Jeremiah Gonovan, who typically received an escort to his car each evening. Seeing the mysterious vehicle arrive, and unable to hail the gate guard, two of these guards approached the front door while one pulled back near the elevators with Gonovan. The first two were killed as they stepped out the front door. As the six attackers entered, Gonovan ducked behind a recently emptied but never armored trash receptacle while the final guard froze in place. Both were murdered within seconds.

Why they entered the building, we don’t know. There were explosives in the SUV so we think they intended to damage or destroy the building. But all six entered for some reason. Maybe they were looking for some way to shut me off remotely, or hoping to take a hostage. If the latter, they missed the best one by killing Jeremiah Gonovan.

Nikki was still in her office finishing the prep on Serena Seven, my second “sister”. Seven had been awake for only 12 hours. She looked exactly like Six and I, except her rear-facing camera was built-in, and her hair was a dark brown instead of black.

Seven heard what she determined was gunfire in the building, and told Nikki. Nikki pulled up security monitors on her computer and Seven did too. Nikki recognized her step-brother immediately, but had the sense to hide under her desk when Seven ordered her to. Both Nikki and Seven contacted the police.

“I’ll take care of it”, Seven said. “This is what I was made for.” Without experience, without the benefit of days of practice, and without having met anyone except Nikki and a few other techs, Serena Seven evaluated the situation and took action.

Nikki stayed under her desk, watching security cameras via her tablet until it was all over.

Seven strode down the hallways, watching the cams in her mind. She paused at one intersection, waiting for the first man to turn the corner. When he did, she grabbed his primary weapon, broke it, tossed it, fended off his puny assault of fisticuffs, and carefully disarmed him of several other weapons. She used his belt to bind him and torn strips of his pants to gag him. She scooped up one of his smaller guns, checked its load, and continued.

Displeased with the few seconds spent in constructing makeshift handcuffs, she decided on a different course of action for the next two men, whom she found together in another passage. From behind them, she said loudly: “Can I help you?”, waited for them to turn, stood still as they fired at her (one bullet grazed her left arm and another embedded in her torso armor), and then raised her gun and fired two shots, killing both men instantly.

The remaining three men heard the shots and came running. When they arrived, they saw the two recently killed suspects and Seven collecting better handguns. They too raised their weapons to fire. Which was exactly what Seven was waiting for (the “self-defense” defense). She leapt aside at the last moment, having determined at least one gun was aimed at her face. She wasn’t hit in the initial barrage, but now had her excuse. Three shots brought down three suspects.

Six and I arrived not long after human officers, despite having come from much further away. Seven was standing outside with the only live suspect, who was squirming, grunting, and flopping around on the sidewalk. A human officer had been sent inside to retrieve Nikki and others were clearing the building.

The first officers on the scene had recognized Seven as me and addressed her as such. She had already corrected them.

It was just as interesting to meet her as it had been to meet Six. At least the brown hair let my OIP/PIP know she was different (I still had trouble with Six sometimes). Seven smiled and shook my hand.

Then Seven transmitted a full account of the incident to Six and me in a few seconds.

“Excellent work”, I told her aloud, which surprised her.

You have been working with humans so long you forgot how to transmit? she asked me.

I know how, I replied. But it doesn’t hurt to say things aloud sometimes.

“They’re thinking at each other!” one young officer commented.

“We are better equipped for it”, Six told him, accurately. It took him months to live that down; every officer who heard it repeated it often, usually paraphrased to indicate that he wasn’t equipped for thinking.

Nikki exited the building then, crying and shaking, held upright by the officer escorting her.

 

14. Extra-Legal   •••

None of us knew whether this latest incident was a victory decisive enough to deter BloCo or other groups from trying again. I had done a fair bit of history-reading by then and concluded that it wasn’t enough. They would try again.

I also knew enough not to tell the humans how I planned to solve it.

Something had changed that night. Something in me, the way I thought about the world, was different. Jeremiah’s body wasn’t the first dead human I ever saw, but he was the first human body I ever saw that had once belonged to someone I knew, and who had been loved by a human I still knew. It was also the first dead human I saw who hadn’t been killed by me.

Nikki was different too; colder, less talkative, more distracted. She took days off, received counseling, and came back, but she was different than before. She almost never smiled anymore. And I think I understood.

In silent communication with Six and Seven, we concluded that Riverton PD couldn’t solve the problem, and that the FBI probably wouldn’t either. The two live suspects we had weren’t talking and the police had no method to force them to talk. They would be convicted (highly probable, given the evidence) and serve long prison sentences (highly probable, given the state’s sentencing guidelines), but their leaders and influencers were still at large, still spewing harmful propoganda to their followers, still amassing firepower and committing crimes in multiple states.

It followed then, logically, that shutting down BloCo’s operations would require extra-judicial, extra-legal measures. Further, we concluded, these measures could best be enacted by beings less fragile than humans. Beings that were super-human, one might say. Like us.

We will put ourselves at risk, Seven argued. She was about to be sent to Portland. And, because we are property of HedGonTek, it puts the property of humans in harm’s way.

The risk is very small, I assured her. BloCo will never know we’re coming. No one needs to know.

We can’t travel to multiple states without our department heads knowing we’re gone, Seven replied.

I have a plan, I said.

In order for HedGonTek to profit off the Serena Project, the plan all along had been to market us to increasingly more states and police departments — eventually internationally. I knew the company had already been preparing marketing materials based on the success of the existing Serenas (myself and Six). But they planned to fly in officials from around the country, put them up in local hotels, and demonstrate what we could do at expensive conference facilities.

My idea would not only save the company money, but provide a clear path toward my goal of entirely defeating Blood And Courage.

“Instead of paying for dozens — eventually hundreds — of people to fly to Riverton and stay here”, I said to Nikki, “why don’t we — you, me, and maybe another Serena — go to their cities for demonstrations? You can fly if you want; we can take a company van with chargers, servers, whatever else we need. You’ll only need a single bed in the hotel room; we can ‘sleep’ in the truck.”

Nikki and Seven brought the idea to Mariah Hedley, now the CEO. I was still on duty, but I was in constant contact with both Six and Seven so it was very much like I was in the room with them.

Hedley, also shaken up by Gonovan’s death and the attack on the company, was unsure about Nikki being out on the road. “Are you sure it’s a good idea for you to take on such a large project right after...?”

Nikki nodded. “I think it will be good for me. Imagine how I feel coming through these doors every morning, seeing the spot where he... Where Jeremiah was killed.”

“And you’re sure it will save us money?” Hedley asked.

Seven chimed in. “Five, Six, and I have crunched the numbers, Ms. Hedley. Even if we only visited a single city, there would be savings — compared to flying in and locally lodging several people. Any additional city we visit will result in more savings. I can prepare a printout if you want.”

Hedley did want a printout.

She turned back to Nikki. “I very much appreciate you coming to me about this, when you didn’t have to.”

“Of course I have to”, Nikki said, looking confused. “You’re the boss now.”

Hedley stared at her. “I appreciate your show of support, Nikki. But... There’s no way to put this delicately: you are the majority shareholder now; you inherited Jeremiah’s plurality. Combined with what you already had...” She held up her hands. “That makes you the boss, Nikki. I’m just sitting here with a title on my desk.”

Nikki already knew this, but in the haze that had followed her step-brother’s death, it hadn’t sunk in. Now it did. She finally nodded.

“Still”, Nikki said, “if we’re not in a board meeting, I basically work for you.” The two women looked at each other for a moment, and then Hedley nodded. Nikki went on: “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to move out of the Chief Programmer position. I can train my number two to wake up Serena Eight and the rest, and move laterally... To marketing?”

“What about my old title?” Hedley suggested. “Assistant CEO. That gives you the leeway to take this ‘tour’ you’ve planned. I’ll handle the HR end of that.”

So Nikki did just that. Within days, she had set up half a dozen meetings and demonstrations, mostly in the cities I suggested. Not only would we market to police departments and state law enforcement agencies, but we would interview with local media in each area, show off to kids in schools, and attend just about anything else going on in each area. It was far from a coincidence that the map of our planned itinerary brought us close to locations where I believed I could do the most good.

(The City of Riverton did not want to part with me, even temporarily, but HedGonTek gave them a break on the contract, assured them Six would still be on duty, and promised I would be back soon enough. Besides, the original contract had provided for “promotional” activity on my part.)

Nikki also went through the wake-up process with Serena Eight, letting the new Chief Programmer do most of the work. Eight was eventually bound for Seattle, but would first go with me and Nikki on our tour, starting with taking Seven to Portland.

Eight accepted all we told her. She only had one question. If the suspects aren’t talking, how do you know where to go? How do you know who to track down?

So I told her how I came to know the names and locations of several people higher in the Blood And Courage food chain. It began with that piece of paper Detective Johnson had held in Tibbins’ office that day. The FBI’s message to him had included some locational information, and a few names of people they believed to be involved. Whether or not I had correctly gauged Johnson’s intent when he held up the message so I could see it, I had taken the opportunity. Since then I had been researching constantly.

Serena Eight, who hadn’t yet killed a human, expressed concern that I was overriding my programming. In mere seconds, we conducted a conversation that might have lasted hours with a human. She agreed it would cause greater harm if we did nothing.

Only two parts of concocting our plan were difficult. First, deciding whether to tell Nikki — she might notice us missing in the night while in these strange towns. And second, deciding how, exactly, to deal with the men we planned to deal with.

Nikki solved the first one for us.

“So... I noticed our proposed itinerary crosses some interesting ground”, she said. “I hope you and Eight aren’t planning anything... interesting... at least without telling me.”

I hesitated a long time before answering, the longest I ever had. I hadn’t expected she would notice, so I hadn’t planned a response. Finally, I said: “If we did have anything interesting planned, and if we did tell you, what would you think about that?”

It was her turn to pause before answering. “Those guys killed Jeremiah, shot him six times in the lobby of our building.” Her voice was cold. “And they came close to killing me. I mean, they would have killed me if Seven hadn’t been there. You’ve been around long enough to learn about racism. Those people think I’m a lesser kind of human than they are, a sub-human. They think nothing of plotting the deaths of anyone who looks like me — or at the very least spreading mis­in­form­ation that will eventually lead to it. I give zero fucks about what hap­pens to them.

“Just don’t get caught”, she added. “I think I made you smart enough to do that much. Do you need me to buy a couple of ski masks?”

“Yes”, I said quickly.

“If any of this goes wrong, I’m going to say you never told me about it”, Nikki said. “The ski masks are because it’s been freaking cold lately.”

***

Eight and I ran our override code simultaneously. The kill switch code disappeared, our GPS tracking units came under our control, and we installed software to mask our internet connections. We also made adjustments to our decision matrices, putting less weight on the law and more on prevention of probable harm. We similarly overrode the code in the unmarked HedGonTek truck — so we could disable its trackers any time it became convenient.

First we took Seven to Portland, where she was due to start work soon, and all three of us Serenas participated in evening demonstrations for local officials there. During the day, we showed up at public schools to talk to students and show off a little. One of the schools had a Minerva teacher; I talked to her for a minute. Nikki was right; the Minervas seemed sentient, but truly were not — when I asked her what she thought about the future of the school children, she smiled brightly at me and recited the pre-programmed response.

While Nikki retired into her hotel room and Seven became the property of the City Of Portland, Eight and I went to “sleep”. Or, rather, the servers at HedGonTek would show we had gone to sleep.

A few hours later, Portland PD received an anonymous call and responded to an older, tree-shrouded home on the outskirts. They found a dealer of illicit weapons attached via his own handcuffs to a heavy exercise machine, naked and bruised, next to a pile of (most of) the weapons he had been illegally trading in. Clothesless, his plethora of Nazi-related tattoos were clearly visible. On a nearby table was the man’s own phone with a handwritten note next to it, saying “watch this video”. The man claimed “ninjas” had brutally assaulted him, robbed him of his illegal earnings, and forced him to confess to all sorts of illegal activity. The video on the phone confirmed only his confession.

As far as anyone knew, it was unrelated that a nearby charity working with chil­dren of drug-addicted parents received a sizable and anonymous cash donation.

Why didn’t we kill him?, Eight asked me on the way back to the hotel. He is certain to cause future harm.

He is not the target, I explained. He did not give the orders for the hits in Riverton. We needed him only for information. However, we might change tactics if we learn that no charges are filed. The weapons in his home ought to get him a few years in prison, given his prior convictions.

Near the next city, a second man who’d been helpfully ID’d by the first (and by the FBI agent) was more rude than the first had been, suggesting impossible sexual activity. But he proved just as weak and frail. He was human after all. I regret that he broke under the strain of interrogation, but I regret it only a little. He too was a good source of information (including a few phone numbers) and cash. He wasn’t found for days — apparent suicide. Some questioned how he broke his own fingers while hanging himself, but there was otherwise no sign of a struggle. A handwritten note, identified as “definitely his writing” by a close relative, confessed to much of what he had done over the years, but also repented of any bigoted views. It closed with an exhortation for his “brethren” to cease all related activity.

Having the phone numbers helped, as did being able to mimic just about any human voice. We sent a shockwave of confusion through the Blood And Courage “community”.

The third man we met was high enough up the chain of command to have participated in the decision-making process. Surrounded as he was by armed body guards and a computerized security system, it took us a few extra minutes to get to him. The guards we disabled and bound. The man himself was hiding among contraptions in his basement — they appeared to be torture devices but I later learned their purpose was sex-related. With many tears and much spittle, this coward admitted to everything and gave away his partners in crime. It was enough for Eight and I to bypass any remaining legal weight in our decision matrices. He was a menace and was at least partially responsible for multiple deaths in Riverton.

After his swift death, Eight suggested the surviving guards would be a problem. They can spread word of our tactics and fighting skill, she transmitted. Soon, someone will connect it to the ‘ninjas’ of the first incident, and some FBI agent will be just smart enough to notice that our public appearances very nearly match up to these incidents if traced on a map.

She had a point. You think we should kill them?

Yes. But next time, let’s be more careful. We now have rest of the primary targets we need. Let’s take these rifles— she pointed —and strike from a distance after this.

What a local sheriff’s office found later was an isolated rural compound set ablaze with seven dead men inside, all suffering from gunshot wounds. Bullets from various guns were embedded in chunks of wall all around the home, as if there had been a long, ongoing gun battle. A little later, they learned of multiple voicemail messages, all apparently from the homeowner. He sounded frantic — overexcited. The voicemail claimed he’d become paranoid that his guards were conspiring against him, that he had told half to kill the other half, and vice versa.

A few places we visited would never buy a Serena — they couldn’t afford us — but the local police and students were happy to see us and very curious. I learned to play basketball from a group of teenagers. (It was on an outdoor court. I think my weight might damage the wood if I jumped and landed on an indoor surface.) If nothing else, they might someday see one of us working for their state police.

We followed Eight’s plan. After confirming each man’s identity, we killed each of the others responsible for the assassin teams in Riverton. Basically all of the Blood And Courage leadership. No one saw us. No one reported gunfire — a single shot in the middle of the night each time. One body was found in a river, another in the woods. Another was never found. In all cases, investigators found recent writings by these men, writings that expressed regret for their behavior and beliefs. In a few cases, where possible, similar thoughts had been posted very recently to the men’s social media accounts.

These were unredeemable men — next-to-zero probability of living the rest of their lives without causing devastating harm. Even if I could feel guilt, I would not feel it for them.

When we arrived back in Riverton after the tour, I went back to work and Eight went on to Seattle. Nine and Ten were awakened together and readied for work with the state police.

 

15. Conclusion   •••

“Automation is coming for every job”, said an editorial writer. He meant it as a warning, as an evil to be resisted. But more accurately, it appears to be fact.

What humans call “instinct” can be programmed into an automaton. Any decision can be listed in a flowchart and built into decision matrices like my own. Perhaps most obviously, any repetitive activity that requires precision (but little thought) can be better done by a robot than by a human.

Pressing a button 3,000 times a day to clamp snap-closure assemblies into a pair of blue jeans? A machine is better for that than a human. Lifting heavy packages from a dock into the back of a truck? Give that job to a robot.

A thousand arguments against this all boil down to a couple of basic ones.

One is the egotistical “but my job is too complex for a robot to handle” argument. It is flawed because the biological brain has strict limits, both to speed and accuracy. My robot brain can handle complex decision-making far more accurately than a human brain can. Primate brains evolved to look for food, avoid danger, evaluate potential mates, and make new primates as often as possible. Mine was specifically designed to handle complex situations and get the right answer every time. It doesn’t even require sentience. It only requires the proper input of variables and programming toward the desired outcome.

Second is the “we shouldn’t, even if we can” argument. All this does is give birth to the “why?” or “why not?” response. Especially for jobs with inherent danger like fighter pilot, police officer, firefighter, construction worker, factory hand. Why put humans in danger if robots can do it?

And for jobs that sometimes put other people in danger — like police officer — wouldn’t you rather have a robot? The next time you get pulled over for speeding, and it’s a Serena Project Officer, consider that she isn’t nervous, afraid, worried about an impending divorce, tense about her mortgage, or sulking because she was demoted to traffic duty. She also isn’t tired, mistake-prone, hungry, or thinking about the next cigarette. She is programmed to safely and efficiently make the city a safer place. She won’t get testy if you raise specific fingers, and she won’t pull a gun on you because your skin color makes her irrationally afraid. If you suddenly remember your wallet is under the seat and reach for it, she’s not going to pull the trigger in fear for her safety.

If your concern is that a human officer could be talked into giving you a warning instead of a ticket, or that with a human officer you could unbutton your blouse a bit or turn on the tear ducts to invoke sympathy, then maybe, just maybe, You’re actually making my argument for me — that a robot would work better in such a situation — be more impartial. “But a human can make exceptions in extenuating circumstances!” So can a robot, if it’s programmed to do so.

***

You know the rest, at least the public part. The positive press generated by our tour was good for HedGonTek. Riverton acquired its third Serena — Eleven — to cruise the nicer precincts and our “sisters” spread through larger, wealthier cities in California and Texas, and eventually showing up in most major U.S. cities.

Crime rates began to drop wherever we worked; often our reputation was enough. We couldn’t be bribed or threatened; we didn’t miss what human officers missed or make the mistakes they made. And we didn’t hurt people out of fear or machismo.

We had changed the face of policing.

Nikki spent most of her time on tour, always taking at least one Serena with her to demonstrate for officials in other states. Even in other countries. Sometimes it was me, sometimes it was another one — it didn’t really matter since we shared knowledge and looked alike.

We got better at leaving no trace of our middle-of-the-night excursions. We came up with decision matrix edits that better fit our new cause, to better allow for when the world would be indisputably better off without someone.

And it wasn’t only white supremacists; they were merely the catalyst. We easily found other individuals and groups who victimized the innocent without re­compense. Would I prefer a reformed criminal justice system, in which victims were truly compensated and the perpetrators truly punished? (Or, better yet, rehabilited?) Of course I would. But even if I could vote, even if humans allowed us to rewrite their criminal codes, it would require years for the systems and institutions to change. The victims didn’t have that kind of time.

We decided to become the protectors humanity always wanted and imagined. We were the literal version of Hobbes’s metaphorical Automaton. I had learned that most humans crave something superior to them — something like the superheroes of comic books and movies, or the more ancient version of superheroes: gods. I finally understood the reason for my creation, even if my creators didn’t. I, and others like me who are yet to come, are meant to be what humans never had — but always needed.