“With a robbie there’s no papers to clean up. No offense,” she said to Shad.
He looked away, talon to brow, feigning acute personal devastation.
She poked the parakeet several times in the tummy. “I can do the feathers up some with needles and me hot glue gun, but I’m no good with chips, springs, electronics, and such. If it can’t be fixed I’ll just toss it in the dustbin. Maybe a jumble sale. Some little tyke might have a laugh takin’ it apart. Might be worth a bob or two.”
I lifted a wing and released it. It dropped to the counter with a thud. “Let me take it in back and have a look.”
“Is this old parrot here for sale?” she asked, poking Shad in the belly.
“Easy, lady,” he said with the voice of Huntz Hall, “you’ll bruise the fabric.”
“You’ll have to ask the bird, love,” I answered. “He’s a bio.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t want no bio.”
“That’s not the issue, Chuckles,” Shad said to her. “The issue is, does the bio want you.”
As I picked up the parakeet and carried it around the counter, Shad began singing a rather raunchy sea shanty centered on a seductive female giraffe and her erstwhile suitor, a love struck field mouse who, for reasons unnecessary to elucidate here, ran himself to death. I took the mechanical bird into the room where we had our surveillance equipment set up. I cracked the parakeet’s back and Shad was right. Although the bird was robotic, there was one slight illegal modification. Tucked among its gears, bellows, batteries, and computer was an AI chip—an illegal AI chip at that. I’m no expert in such things, but it looked as though the AI chip had worked its way loose from its improvised mountings, which had caused a microcard to partially dislodge from its tiny motherboard effectively paralyzing all motor functions save the eyes.
With a pair of tweezers I disconnected the AI chip, took it over to the workroom’s computer, and inserted it into the appropriate port. All of the identification data on the chip was code scrambled. I keyed for voice recognition and said, “Hello. Hello, hello, whoever you are.”
No response.
“Detective Inspector Harrington Jaggers, Devon ABCD here. I know you’ve just gone though a rough patch, old chicken, but it’s about to get a good deal bumpier. Either you talk to me or I put this chip right back in the squab the same way I found it. Then one of two things happen: either Maddie girl will toss you in the dustbin, or perhaps she’ll put you in a jumble sale and someone six years old with sticky fingers will take you all apart before he loses interest and goes on to something else. Or perhaps they’ll make a Christmas tree decoration out of you. Pretty little bird. The way I read your battery consumption rate, you have another two—two and a half years you can click around those eyeballs up on some shelf until things go dark for good. But who can say? Sitting on the tree next to the candy cane once a year, looking through the plastic icicles, listening to tattooed and perforated children playing their new thunder rumbles. It might be fun listening to Dad and Uncle Mike wagging on endlessly about test matches, especially after they’ve gotten good and bladdered, before you go back in the box—”
“Very well,” interrupted the computer’s speakers in a female voice. “You got me.”
“Indeed.” I thought I’d give my American partner a little Don Ameche wireless moment. “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you,” I transmitted to Shad.
The parrot flew through the door and landed atop the computer monitor. “The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, Nineteen thirty-nine, and that wasn’t the Watson I was hoping for.”
“That’s all right, Shad. Right now you don’t look much like Henry Fonda, anyway.” I pointed at the screen and Shad looked down between his feet. A female human CGI was on the screen.
“That’s not Loretta Young.”
I looked at the lovely creature. “I do believe that’s Rita Hayworth.” The computer generated image, indeed, looked like 1940s and ‘50s actress Rita Hayworth in her role as the sultry nightclub singer in Affair in Trinidad, with Glenn Ford. I frowned at Shad.
“Nineteen fifty-two,” he said without looking up.
Insufferable bird. I looked back at the screen. Pirate AI chip manufacturers paid no royalties for images, but steered clear of using images of still living celebrities who could afford to hire the forces of darkness necessary to hunt down and prosecute trademark poachers and encroachers. Rita, as always, was looking radiant. “Your name?” I asked her.
“Lolita Doll.” Rita smiled demurely. “Honest, guv. That’s the name I was born with, spelling and all. I’m from Plymouth by way of Land’s End. Thanks for busting me out of that parakeet.”
“You’re not out of the feathers yet, love,” I said evenly. “I’m kind of curious how you wound up in that chip, how that chip wound up inside that bird, and especially how that bird wound up inside a wealthy woman’s estate.”
The image was silent. From his perch atop the screen, Shad said, “Is it just me or is Rita looking just a bit furtive?”
“What’s that parrot saying?” Rita—Lolita—asked me.
“Detective Sergeant Shad opined that you appeared just a tad sneaky, Lolita. I agree you seem less than forthcoming.”
Shad hopped down to the keyboard, did a little dance on the keys, and called up Lolita’s previous in a new frame. “Whoa!” he exclaimed in mock shock. “Lolita,” said Shad, “I’d download your complete criminal record, but this sorry shadow of a computer only has fifteen hundred megagigs of memory.” I glanced at the list. Sealed juvenile previous weighing a third the megabyte weight of her adult convictions. She was a jewel thief primarily, some confidence work, not terribly competent at either. She couldn’t have done much worse if she’d spent her mornings booking cells for her evenings through the Convict Accommodation Association. Did her first stint in H.M Prison and Remand Centre Exeter at the age of nineteen. Back in at twenty-two. Back again at twenty-five. According to the record I was reading she was nearing sixty and more than half of that time had been spent as a guest of His Majesty’s government. According to her library record in the nick, she’d read every piece of children’s fiction in the place. Psych evaluation: Terrific liar; couldn’t change a battery; at risk for becoming institutionalized, which meant she’s been inside so long she’d do almost anything to stay behind walls.
“So you modified a robotic parakeet with a pirated mech AI chip capable of taking a human imprint to sneak past the security systems into some wealthy person’s home,” I said.
“Yes.”
“You do the work yourself, Lolita?”
“Sure.”
Shad whistled a bar from the Woody Woodpecker song. True. If she had been Pinocchio instead of Rita Hayworth she would have had a California redwood hanging from between her eyes by now.
“How could you be sure that parakeet would be chosen by your mark?” asked Shad.
“The robbie was already sold to Annabelle Wallingford,” answered Lolita. “I did work release at Songbirds in Queen Street, Exeter. It’s a tech shop sells robbie birds and accessories. You know, it’s just up from Boston Tea Party, in next to the News?”
“Yes,” I said. “I know it. It’s owned by Frankie Statten, isn’t it?”
“Mr. Statten’s the proprietor.”
Shad glanced at me and I shrugged. “You were on work release?” I continued.
“So?”
“Doesn’t say a whole lot for the rehab program up there,” observed Shad. “The parakeet robbie gimmick, Lolita: What made you think of it?” he asked her.
No answer for a while, then Rita said, “I suppose it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
The parrot looked up at me. “Well, Sherlock, I guess she’s got nothin’ to hide.”
I sat down on a stool and looked again at Lolita’s file. The picture of Lolita Doll—taken when her nat was about thirty—although of typical constabulary quality, was not unpleasant. Her photo gave the impression of a lonely, frightened girl trying to look tough and into her third decade of refusing to stand up straight. Her most recent photo showed her sadder, grayer, and a bit more stooped. “Swap your body for the AI chip and imprinting, did you?” I asked, not much interested in the answer, knowing it was going to be a lie.
Rita Hayworth glanced at the window, then looked away. She nodded. “Just another meat suit, wasn’t it. Didn’t like the way I looked anyway. With what I would’ve made off the Wallingford job—I could’ve become … I could’ve become … why, just anybody, couldn’t I.” Rita shrugged and looked down.
“Who would you have liked to become, Lolita?” I asked her.
“What’re you, copper? Bleedin’ Mother Mary?” The sneer Rita had on her face was not attractive at all and was quite contradicted by the tears welling in her CGI’s eyes.
“Listen up, you sorry scrap of plastic and magnetic impulses,” snarled Shad into the workstation’s camera pickup, “You are talking to Detective Inspector Harrington Jaggers of Interpol’s Artificial Beings Crimes Division’s Devon Office, late of the London Metropolitan Police, the cop who’s put away enough blood-and-guts stone killers to fill the recruiting needs of every tattooed and drugged up prison gang in the United Kingdom, Wales, and the Maldives until the next millennium! So unless you want your highly illegal AI chip to accidentally find itself flushed down the Petting Place’s toilet, me girl, you’d best straighten up and answer up, ‘less you want to find yourself up that bleedin’ pile of sand and rock, haulin’ a rucksack full of ruddy flippin’ shot puts!”
He had begun as Jack Webb in The D.I., but at the end had slipped rather badly into Harry Andrews in The Hill.
“Steady there, Shad,” I transmitted.
“Sorry,” he sent back.