Philip Kerr - Gridiron

Curtis took a pace back and shook his head with confusion.

'Wait a minute. Wait just a minute. You said something there. You said it would be a shame just to wipe it out. Are you saying that you can put a stop to all of this? That you can destroy the computer?'

Beech shrugged coolly.

'When we built the Yu-5, naturally we considered the possibility that it might end up competing with its creators. After all, a machine doesn't recognize normal sociological values. So we included a tutelary program in Abraham's basic architecture. An electronic template called GABRIEL. To deal with the unpluggability scenario.'

'The unpluggability scenario?'

Curtis grabbed Beech by the necktie, and thrust him hard against the boardroom wall.

'You dumb asshole,' he snarled. 'We've been breaking our balls trying to save the lives of three men stuck in an elevator controlled by a homicidal computer and now you're telling me that you could have unplugged it all along?' His face became even more contorted, and he seemed about to strike Beech until he was restrained by Nathan Coleman.

'Cool it, Frank,' urged Coleman. 'We still need him to turn it off.'

Beech pulled his tie free of Curtis's fist. 'They were dead anyway!' he yelled. 'You said so yourself. Besides, you don't trash a $40 million piece of hardware without checking the subsumption architecture. An accident is one thing. But A-life culpability is another.'

'You piece of shit,' sneered Curtis. 'Dollars and cents. That's all you people can think about.'

'What you're suggesting is absurd. Nobody in their right mind would dump a Yu-5 down the toilet without first attempting a proper verification.'

'There are five people dead, Mister. What more verification do you need?'

Beech shook his head and turned away.

'Now you've got your damned verification,' said Curtis, 'what are you going to do about it?' He glanced impatiently at Coleman. 'It's OK, Nat, you can let go now.' He tugged his arms free of his colleague's slackening grip. 'Do more of us have to die before you get it through your stupid skull that this isn't some half-assed experiment at Caltech or MIT or whichever petrie dish mould you sprang from? We're not talking artificial life now. We're talking real life. Men and women with families. Not some tin fucking man without a heart.'

'Bob?' said Mitch. 'Can you turn it off? Is that possible?'

Beech shrugged. 'By rights I should get Mr Yu's permission to do it. There's a proper protocol for doing something like this, y'know?'

'Screw Mr Yu,' said Curtis. 'And screw his fucking protocol. In case you'd forgotten, it's not that easy to get hold of anyone right now.'

'Come on, Bob,' Mitch urged.

'OK, OK,' said Beech and sat down in front of the terminal. 'I was going to do it anyway.'

The walkie-talkie buzzed. Coleman answered it and stepped out of the boardroom into the corridor, heading towards the balcony.

'Hallelujah,' said Helen. 'Now maybe we can get the hell out of this multi-storey lunatic asylum.'

'Amen to that,' said Jenny, 'I've had a bad feeling about this place all afternoon. That's why I came here in the first place. To rid the place of its bad spirits.'

'Whatever floats your boat,' said Arnon and flopped down on the sofa.

'But the sooner we get out of here the better.'

'Yeah, well, don't hold your breath,' said Beech. 'It takes time to pour programming acid into the equivalent of a thousand ordinary computers.'

'How long?' said Curtis.

'I really couldn't say. 'I've never trashed a $40 million computer before. It took thirty-six minutes to kick Isaac's ass into touch, and that program was only a couple of hours old. You remember, Mitch? The SRS?' Beech started to type some transactions.

'Yeah, I remember.'

'Well, this mother has been running for months. Even before we installed it in this building. God only knows how much data it's acquired in all that time. We could be talking several hours here.'

'Several hours?' Curtis looked at his watch.

'Minimum.'

'You're kidding.'

'What's to kid? Hey, you want to take over, Sergeant, be my guest.'

'Just get on with it, Bob,' insisted Mitch. 'Please?'

'OK, here we go,' sighed Beech as his hands clattered over the keyboard. 'A dirty job, but someone has to do it.

'This is the end.' Beech was singing the line of a Doors song. 'The end.'

'I never liked that song,' said Arnon. 'It's depressing. And the book. Nobody gets out of here alive. Appropriate, huh?'

'Abraham?' said Beech. 'We are rolling out the black carpet and aiming you at oblivion, my silicon friend. Speaking for myself, I'd like to have gotten to know you a little better. But ours is not to reason why. Ours is but to make you die. There's a cop here who says you're out of here, pal, or I'm Rodney King II. So it's bedtime for Bonzo. Capisce ? The Big Sleep for the Big Beep. EOD. EOL. EQJ.'

Nathan Coleman leaned over the glass barrier that gave on to the atrium and stared down at the ground floor. It was like being on a ship's mast looking down at the human insects that crawled on the bleached white quarterdeck. Three of them. The walkie-talkie snapped like the sound of a loose sail and one of the insects waved.

'Hey,' said Richardson, 'what the hell is happening up there? We're feeling like we've been forgotten: marooned, or something.'

'It's a long story and I'm not sure I understand most of it,' said Coleman. 'There's been a lot of heavy philosophy talked about artificial life and stuff. But the sports report is that your computer has been acting on its own initiative. It's gone haywire or some shit like that. Anyway, the play is this: Mr Beech is about to terminate it,' said Coleman, well aware of the possibility that this might well upset the Gridiron's architect. 'With extreme prejudice.'

'Well, Jesus, what the hell for? We've got to sit tight, that's all.'

'I don't think so, Mr Richardson. You see, Abraham cancelled your flight tickets to London. And he got the LAPD computer at City Hall to suspend me and Sergeant Curtis. And a whole lot of other things too. The bottom line is that no one is expecting us home tonight. It looks as if the computer might be making plans to become Silicon Valley's first serial killer.'

Coleman heard Richardson relay the news to Joan and Dukes. Then Richardson said, 'Whose dumb idea is that, for Chrissakes? No, don't tell me. That bagel-headed Sergeant of yours. Put me on to Mitchell Bryan will you? I need to speak to someone who appreciates what is being suggested here. No offence intended, son, but this is a $40 million piece of hardware we're talking about here, not some Casio personal fucking organizer.'

Nat put two fingers in his mouth and made as if to vomit over the side of the balcony and on to Richardson's head.

'I'll get him to call you, OK?'

Coleman switched off the walkie-talkie and started back towards the boardroom. Now that it looked like they were getting out he was thinking about the girl he was planning to see the next day. Her name was Nan Tucker and she worked for a real estate company. He'd been introduced to her at the wedding of an old girlfriend who was convinced that two people called Nat and Nan were a match made in heaven. Coleman wasn't sure about a match, but he had arranged to take Nan for brunch at the most romantic restaurant he knew, the Beaurivage in Malibu, even though it was way too expensive, even though he suspected they would have little in common besides the very obvious physical attraction each seemed to hold for the other. At the same time, brunch was all he had planned. Nathan Coleman left the sexual initiatives to women these days. Often, in these politically correct times, it was safer that way. And the old perfect gentleman routine? It hardly ever failed.

Coleman slowed for a moment as he heard a muffled noise from behind the washroom door. He was about to go and investigate when he saw Mitch coming up the corridor towards him. Coleman walked on a little and handed Mitch the walkie-talkie.

'Your boss wants to talk to you. I told him Mr Beech was pulling the plug on the computer.' Coleman shrugged laconically. 'He sounded kind of pissed about it. Guy sure does like busting the balls of the people who work for him, doesn't he?'

Mitch nodded wearily.

Coleman had been about to say something else about Ray Richardson, but instead he turned around and was looking back up the corridor at the washroom.

'Did you hear something?'

Mitch listened and shook his head. 'Not a thing.'

Coleman walked back to the washroom, paused outside the door for a moment and then pushed it. The door didn't move.

Certain he could hear something now — a muffled cry for help?

Coleman pushed again. This time the door opened easily and as he entered the men's room the cry, now a scream, was immediately curtailed by a short report, more of a loud pop than an explosion, like a tyre blowing out on a wet road surface, or the eructation of a hot lava pool. Coleman felt something collide with the exterior side of the door and a warm wet spray hit his face and neck. He heard Mitch call out to him but did not hear what was said as slowly he began to realize that he was covered in blood.

Like most policeman in LA, Coleman had often been involved in a shooting and for a second or two he thought that he had been hit, most probably with some kind of high-velocity round. He staggered forward, wiping the blood from his eyes and braced for the pain. It never came. A moment later he understood that the sound of hammering he could hear was not gunfire, it was not even his own heartbeat, but Mitch banging on the other side of the door.

'Are you OK? Nat? Can you hear me?'

Coleman pulled at the door handle and found that the door was locked again.

'Yeah, I think so, but I'm locked in.'

'What happened?' And then, 'Sergeant? Come here. Coleman's trapped in the washroom.'

Coleman wiped some more blood off his face and, looking about the washroom, felt his jaw start to drop. There was blood everywhere, whole gouts of clotted gore: dripping from the ceiling, smeared on the cracked mirror, collected in a shallow pool on the shelf of a wash-hand basin and running in a stream towards his feet. Like a red tide had risen and fallen in the washroom in the space of a few seconds. Coleman stiffened his jaw and looked to the source of the flow.

A pile of blood-soaked rags stood like a range of small mountains in the corner of the room. Nearby was a human leg, to which a penis and testicles were still attached. A neatly severed hand was frozen in the action of turning on the faucet. Hanging on one of the cubicle doors was a pink silk tie, except that when Coleman reached out and touched it he realized that it was not a tie at all, but a length of human intestine. Turning away he slipped in the blood and fell to the floor to find himself face to face with the owner of the still steaming body parts that now littered the Gridiron washroom like a shark attack. It was Tony Levine. Or, rather, his decapitated head, complete with pony-tail.

'Holy shit,' exclaimed Coleman pushing the head away with revulsion. It rolled across the floor like a broken coconut, and came to rest on the ragged edge of what has once been his neck.

The eyelids in the head lifted, and penetrating, undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on Coleman, with a mixture of indignation and regret. Then the nostrils flared and, instinctively, Nathan Coleman addressed the severed head.

'Jesus, what the fuck happened to you?' he said, shuddering.

Levine's head made no reply, but for another ten or fifteen seconds his eyes stayed on Coleman's own, before the lids drooped and life finally departed from the dead man's brain.