Kiln People

As it turned out, our warning came too late. Still, the gray must have realized something independently. His last-minute dive into the foul belly of a forklift was courageous and resourceful. At least, I hoped the authorities would see it that way. If they were shown the whole story.

Waiting in the underground anteroom, Pal’s little golem soon piped up with a complaint.

“Hey! What does it take to get some meditcal attention around here? Anybody notice I’m damaged? How about a pretty nurse? Or a can of spackle and a putty knife?”

One guard stared at him, then muttered into a wrist mike. Soon an orange utility rox showed up, devoid of any features to show the sex of its original, and started applying varied sprays to Palloid’s wounds. I, too, had suffered a burn or two skirmishing near the tu

Minutes passed. A lot of them. I realized it must be Wednesday already. Great. Maybe I should have spent yesterday at the beach, after all.

While we waited, a messenger-dit came hurrying downstairs from the mansion proper, jogging on long legs, bearing a small Teflon container. Palloid wrinkled his wet nose, sneezing in distaste. “Whatever he’s got in that box, it’s been disinfected about fifty different ways,” he commented. “Smells like a mix of alcohol, benzene, bacteena, and that foam stuff they were using back at UK.”

The messenger knocked, then entered. I heard platinum Kaolin grind out, “Finally!” — before we were left again to cool our heels, decaying with each passing minute. No sooner did the repair nurse finish patching Palloid than my little friend chirped again, demanding another favor.

“Hey, chum, how’s about giving me a reader, eh? Gotta stay productive, right? My rig recently joined a book club. He wants to catch up on Moby-Dit for their next meeting. I might as well cover some chapters while we’re sitting around.”

The nerve of the guy! Suppose he actually got to read a few pages. Did he actually expect to inload anything to realPal? Yeah sure, I thought. As if you and I are ever leaving this place.

To my surprise, the guard shrugged and went to a cabinet, pulled out a battered net-plaque, and tossed it onto the gurney near Palloid. Soon the little golem was pawing his way through an online fiction index, searching for the latest best-seller about a seagoing golem so huge that its energy cells would take decades to run down … a monsterdit imprinted with the tormented soul of a half-crazed savant who must then chase his dire creation as it runs amuck across the seven seas, smashing ships and denouncing its adamant pursuer for about a thousand pages. There’s been a rash of stories and films like that lately, featuring dittos in conflict with their archetype originals. I hear this one’s well written and full of arty existential angst. But Albert Morris never had a taste for high literature.

In fact, I was kind of surprised to learn that Pal had a weakness for that stuff. A book club, my ceramic ass! He was up to something.

“Come,” one of our guards said, answering some hidden signal. “You’re wanted now.”

“And it’s such an honor to be wanted,” Pal quipped, always ready with a feel-good remark. Dropping the plaque, he scampered to my shoulder and I strode through the now-open door of the conference room.

A solemn Kaolin-golem awaited us. “Sit,” he commanded. I plopped into the chair he indicated — more plush than anything needed by my inexpensive tush. “I am very busy,” the magnate’s duplicate enounced. “I’ll give you ten minutes to explain yourselves. Be exact.”

No threats or inducements. No warnings not to lie. Sophisticated neural-net programs would be listening, almost certainly. Although such systems aren’t intelligent (in any strict sense of the word), it takes concentration and luck to fool them. Albert had the skill, and I suppose that means I do, too. But sitting there, I lacked the inclination to try.

Anyway, the truth was entertaining enough. Pallie barged right in.

“I guess you could say it started on Monday, when two different groups of fanatics came to me, complaining that my friend here” — a ferret-paw waved at me — “was harassing them with late night visits …”

He proceeded to jabber the whole story, including our suspicion that someone was contriving to frame the hapless fanatics — Lum and Gadarene — along with realAlbert, setting them all up to take the blame for this evening’s sabotage at UK.

I couldn’t fault Palloid’s decision to cooperate and tell everything. The sooner investigators were steered onto the right track, the better — one way to clear Albert’s name, for whatever good that would do him. (I noticed that the little ferret artfully avoided naming his own rig. realPal was safe, for now.)

And yet, my clay brain roiled with misgivings. Kaolin himself wasn’t above suspicion. Sure, I couldn’t imagine why a trillionaire might sabotage his own company. But all sorts of twisty conspiracies can look plausible after a day like the one I just had. Wasn’t it right here, at Kaolin Manor, that Tuesday’s gray number one mysteriously vanished? Anyway, Kaolin was one of the few who possessed the means — both technical and financial — to pull off something so ornate and diabolical.

Foremost in my mind was this: Why aren’t any cops present? This questioning should be handled by professionals.

It implied that Kaolin had something to hide. Even at risk of thwarting the law.

He could be in real trouble for this, I thought, if even a single real person was harmed by tonight’s attack. True, the only people I saw getting damaged at UK were dittos … The thought hung there, unfinished and unsatisfying.

“Well, well,” our platinum host said after Pal’s ferret-dit finished its amazing recital about late night visitors, religious fanatics, civil rights nuts, and secret tu

“Thanks!” Palloid panted, wagging his rearmost appendage at the compliment. I almost hit him.

“I would normally find your story preposterous, of course. A tissue of blatant fantasies and obvious distractions.” He paused. “On the other hand, it corresponds with additional information I received, a short time ago.”

He motioned for the messenger, who had been standing patiently in a corner, to come forward. The yellow golem used disposable gloves to reach into his box and remove a tiny cylinder — the smallest and simplest kind of unpowered audio archive — slipping it into a playback unit on Kaolin’s conference table. The sound that emerged wasn’t one that our grandparents would have called a voice — more like an undulating murmur of grunted clicks and half-tones. That turned into a warbling whine as the messenger dialed the playback unit to higher speed. And yet, I knew this language well. Every word came across perfectly clear.

I always hate getting up off the warming tray, grabbing paper garments from a rack … knowing I’m the copy-for-a-day …

Ugh. What got me in this mood? Maybe Ritu’s news about her father. A reminder that real death still lurks for all.

… Some days you’re a grasshopper. Some the ant.

Recognition went beyond hearing familiar rhythms and phrases. No, the very thoughts themselves struck me with a haunting sense of repetition. The person who had subvocalized this record began his parody of life just minutes before I started mine. Each of us commenced existence Tuesday morning thinking along similar lines, though I wasn’t equipped with a gray’s fancy features. Made of coarser stuff, I rapidly diverged across some strange boundary and soon realized I was a frankie. The first one Albert Morris ever made.

The fellow who recorded this diary was evidently more conventional. Another loyal Albert gray. Dedicated. A real pro. Clever enough to pierce the schemes of your regular, garden-variety evildoer.