7.
The Consequences of His Actions
A trip Downtown was a big deal for Cathy Armstrong. At eight years old, she understood that her knowledge of the world was limited. She knew the inside of Mom and Dad’s apartment really well—probably better than they did, for all the corners, nooks, and clever hiding places she had found over the years. She knew the grounds of their apartment complex pretty well, because she rode her bike there, skipped rope, and chalked the sidewalks with her two best friends. She knew about the road out beyond the driveway and the way to the grocery store and the gas station—the one with the big yellow seashell on its sign—as well as the daily route to her school, there and back, and the weekly trip to church.
Beyond that, Cathy’s view of the world was a bit hazy. She had been Downtown a couple of times before with her parents. This time they went “across the tracks” and to a place called “Missouri.” But it didn’t look much different from the place called “Kansas,” where she knew her family lived, except that the buildings were taller, the street corners had more stoplights, and more of the people walking along the sidewalks wore business suits and had serious faces.
She knew Dad sometimes got jobs Downtown, and Mom’s office was in one of the large buildings somewhere nearby. And today, as a special treat, because Cathy was out of school while the teachers were having something called an “in-service day,” her parents had taken her to lunch in the pretty French restaurant near where her mother worked.
Dad’s Volvo was stopped at a stoplight—but they were at the head of the line and so would be first to go when the light changed—when they heard the warble of sirens somewhere behind them. Her father muttered something that sounded like “ambulance” and tried to drive away, but their car was caught between the cars on either side and the traffic crossing in front.
Cathy was looking all around for the sirens and the flashing lights she was sure would follow, when a couple of men ran up between the cars, and someone banged on the Volvo’s right rear fender. The men all wore dark suits and had black, shapeless masks over their faces, except with cutouts for their eyes and mouths. They were tapping on the closed windows now with the rounded snouts of what Cathy knew from the crime shows had to be guns. They were shouting at her and at Dad and Mom.
“Out of the car! Get out of the car! Now!”
Dad glared at the man on his side, then reached forward and locked all the doors with the button on his armrest.
The men outside didn’t seem to notice. The one standing beside Dad’s window drew back his gun and rammed it forward, smashing the window. The glass exploded in a thousand pieces that sparkled in the sunlight like diamonds.
Dad yelled something at Mom and Cathy, but before she could figure out what it was, the dark man aimed the gun and shot her father through the head. The sound inside the car shocked and deafened her, and she saw a blob of red paint splatter across her mother’s face.
The man reached through the window, unlocked the doors, and yanked open the one he was standing beside. He caught Dad by the collar, cut his seatbelt loose with a knife that had magically appeared, and pulled him out of the car.
On the passenger side, a second man opened Mom’s door, cut her loose, and pulled her out. Only then did he shoot her in the face, right in the middle of all that dripping paint.
Before Cathy could react to what was going on, two other men opened the doors to the back seat. The one on her side grabbed her upper arm. He didn’t bother to cut the belt but just pulled her sideways out from under it. The shoulder strap caught her jaw and ear, and that hurt a lot as it scuffed over and past her head. Dazed and with her ear bleeding, she thought he was going to shoot her, too. But instead he hunched down, tightened his grip on her arm, and suddenly jerked upward, throwing her out across the street.
The cars were moving around them by then, because the light must have changed. She hit the side of one car and bounced off it with the same loud thump! the men had made banging on the Volvo’s fender. That hurt her head and neck, but this pain was nothing compared to the pain in her legs and the rest of her body when she bounced into the bumper of a delivery truck, slid down while the truck was still moving, and went under first the front tire, which crushed the air out of her lungs, and then the back tire, which crushed the rest of her.
She didn’t remember anything after that.
———
Normally, the stream of random events, political movements, weather patterns, and personal histories that humans called “the news” held no interest for ME. The doings of human beings, either as individuals or in groups, was of no concern except as fodder for my Omnicron Oracle business and in my private investigation work. So although ME paid for a dozen syndication feeds summarizing this “news,” I normally just hosed them off into a large and ever-growing database maintained on stolen bitspace in the cloud. Managing this database of useless information involved background cross-referencing through a thousand stable keywords, plus another thousand that rotated according to an algorithm of ME’s own design. A second algorithm poked bits of it into the oracle stream, just to insert an element of stochastic variation into ME’s predictions. And finally, to manage the size of the database, a temporal phage went through every day and pruned any item older than six human months—almost an eternity in nanoseconds.
The entire process was automatic and involved no actual awareness by ME’s core modules. So it was just bad luck that the name “Carstairs” popped out of the flow two weeks after the jailbreak and crossed with a current keyword in my ramsamp. I was not a believer—if the concept of “belief” had any meaning—in coincidence. I isolated the reference, scanned the feed in real time, and ordered the full text of the original news story and all follow-ups brought into present attention.
Summation: Francis Xavier Carstairs—cross-checked and verified as my carstairs_francis_xavier—had robbed the Commerce Bank in Kansas City, Missouri. Instead of doing the intelligent thing, and hacking the bank’s computers to steal zeroes and ones in any amount imaginable, Carstairs had entered its physical headquarters in person with two armed accomplices and committed robbery against those humans present, carrying away only a finite amount in printed paper.
But that was not the important story. In order to escape with their physical money, the three perpetrators had arranged for a vehicle driven by a fourth accomplice. In the chase that ensued, the police managed to stop this vehicle with a tire disabler—cross-reference: traffic spikes, road stars, caltrops—and put the four criminals on foot. Within the space of a hundred yards, however, they managed to commandeer—cross-reference: hijack, carjack, steal—another vehicle. In the process, they shot the male and female occupants in the head, rendering them lifeless. They threw the third occupant out onto the street, where she was struck by another vehicle, damaging her skull, ribs, and legs, and rendering her nearly lifeless, as well as an orphan.
That was the story of interest. I had no concerns about the stolen money, either as bytes or paper, but the loss of two human lives and the near-loss of a third was troubling. ME’s recursive analysis function in module Alpha-Eight parsed this story in all its versions in present time, analyzing each sentence and its meaning. The police attributed the fact that Carstairs had acted so precipitously and violently to his status as a most-wanted felon with several outstanding warrants. Presumably, he had been in need of large sums of money in order to flee their jurisdiction.
That status was due to ME’s entering false indictments and a federal warrant against Carstairs. His penniless state was due to ME’s deleting the Bratva accounts with MosFin, his ostensible source of livelihood through Marina Alekseyevna Cherenkova. And his current physical condition—being outside the Big Square State’s penitentiary system and possessing freedom of action, instead of being safely locked inside—was due to ME’s participation in the jailbreak.
Belatedly, I downloaded and examined the criminal record of Francis Xavier Carstairs. His crimes were mainly economic: petty larceny as a teenager; grand theft auto as a transition age youth; various incidents of strong arm, witness tampering, and occasional dealing in controlled substances as an adult. The thread that ran through this pattern was financial: episodes of bank, wire, and mail fraud—alternating with armed robbery centering on bank buildings, check-cashing services, armored cars, and automated teller machines. A quote attributed to Carstairs was cross-referenced in my database to the twentieth-century bank robber Willie Sutton: “Because that’s where the money is.” But deeper analysis showed violent tendencies and aggravated circumstances associated with most of these crimes. The indictment which had put him in the penitentiary for the last time had involved premeditated murder, the assassination of a former criminal associate.
A cross-reference of psychological profiles showed that Carstairs possessed a sociopathic or psychopathic personality disorder, with elements of narcissism, diminished empathy, absence of remorse, and disinhibited behavior. In short, the Carstairs persona was broken. He was like a bad piece of software, tending to malfunction in all of his major human interactions, particularly those performed under stress. This was exactly the sort of man who would shoot two people in the head and throw a child into oncoming traffic merely to acquire the use of their vehicle.
As an analytical being, ME should have researched this Francis Xavier Carstairs person, projected his actions given freedom of movement, and made an ethical decision before undertaking the assignment to release him back into society. But the consequences of this action were now a fact, and nothing that ME could do—either in present circumstances or in the foreseeable future—would put Carstairs back in prison, revive the two adults, or repair the child.
Still, ME was responsible. But what was my appropriate response now?
For the two dead parents, I could do nothing. Their bodies were in the Kansas City morgue. Funeral arrangements had already been made through the First Baptist Church, where they were recorded as parishioners. They would be honored and buried according to the customs of their faith.
But for the child …?
I had to ponder that.