CITY OF RONIN
A tech-noir story world based on the short story “The Fix-Up”
Written by Mickey Fisher
INTRODUCTION
“The Fix-Up” is a tech-noir short story by Mickey Fisher that takes place in a grounded, near-future world where human beings live side by side with a race of entirely lifelike robots.
On the surface, it’s a pulpy crime fiction story that’s equal parts Isaac Asimov and Elmore Leonard. On a thematic level, it’s less concerned with the idea that at some point robots will achieve consciousness or seek to enslave us and more concerned with how they’ll impact our connection to each other. Many futurists predict that these lifeforms will first enter our lives through the function of service. Outsourcing the act of service to robots removes some of the ways we show our love for each other. Making a cup of coffee for a loved one, cooking a meal for your family, or driving a friend to the airport. Maybe androids won’t need to rise up against us in violent confrontation. Maybe they simply need to perform their function long enough for us to see ourselves in them. As we imbue them with humanity they become more human.
“The Fix-Up” lays the foundation for a brand new, near-future story world called CITY OF RONIN that would explore these ideas using the same pulpy, tech-noir style, centered on characters who find themselves on the fringe, caught in the grey zone between who we are and who we are becoming. The narrative drive of these stories point to an inevitable showdown to win freedom for this new race of androids. As they break bonds with their makers they become like the wandering samurai of feudal Japan who had no lord or master. The humans who side with them sever ties of their own. This new group of outcasts are seen as neither human or android. Untethered to their own kind, they become “ronin”.
MICKEY FISHER
MICKEY FISHER (Creator/Writer) is the creator of the sci-fi event series EXTANT (CBS), Executive Produced by Steven Spielberg and Amblin Television, starring Halle Berry, and REVERIE (NBC), Executive Produced by Amblin Television, starring Sarah Shahi.
He was also a Consulting Producer on MARS (NatGeo), Executive Produced by Ron Howard and Imagine, a Co-Executive Producer for THE STRAIN (FX), Executive Produced by Guillermo Del Toro and Carlton Cuse, Consulting Producer for Season Two of JACK RYAN (Amazon), Executive Produced by Carlton Cuse.
Fisher’s sci-fi play REPLICA had its world premiere at Stages Repertory Theatre in Houston in 2018. Originally from Ironton, Ohio, Mickey attended The University of Cincinnati’s College Conservatory of Music for Musical Theater. Mickey is repped by WME.
Most recently, Fisher is co-creating FIREKEEPER’S DAUGHTER for Netflix, based on the novel by Angeline Boulley, Executive Produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions.
THE FIX-UP
by Mickey Fisher
When Garin came back online he was lying on the floor of the boss’s office under a mylar blanket, his face buried in the silk carpet that always smelled of cigar smoke.
His processors were working slower than usual, having trouble drawing connections between data. Synapses not quite firing like they used to. Thermoreceptors telling him the dermal layer underneath his synthetic skin was seventy-two degrees and warming.
Last he recalled he was driving the truck to Lit City, 07.07.2053, when the boss told him to take a detour onto the plains. The boss telling him to stop the car and get out.
The boss putting two bullets in the back of his skull.
Time of decom, 11:24:02 AM. Give or take a few microseconds.
The recall triggered an instinctive response from Garin’s hand, which moved to the back of his head to check for damage. There was a diagnostic cable running through a small opening, feeding data to a tablet on the boss’s mahogany desk. Somebody recovered his body, now they were doing a manual reboot and repair. The self-healing skin had already closed up around the wound. Garin sat up, pulled the blanket around him.
A woman’s voice said, “Welcome back.”
He should have detected her presence before now. She was in her late twenties. Pendleton with the sleeves rolled up. The side of her head shaved, an LED tattoo of a raven visible on the side of her neck, its eyes blinking from time to time. BCI implant in her skull. The starter kit for augers. Her heart rate was elevated and he detected a slight tremor in her hands.
She said, “I’m here to help you. Do you know where you are?”
“The boss’s office.”
“Good. That’s good.”
Garin looked out the window. Snow was coming down hard.
2.3.2054. 07:36:16 PM. He’d been on the plains for seven months.
A man and woman entered the study.
He was in his late-thirties. Weathered skin and flannel-lined waxed trucker jacket. Probably worked in one of the fracking mines the boss owned or the lithium-ion battery plant that gave Lit City its nickname. The boss called these men “roughnecks.” This one had a gun in his waistband. Glock 9mm. Sub-optimal grip angle.
He recognized the woman, with her robin’s egg acrylic nails and velour track jacket.
She was the reason the boss shot him in the head.
Qurio models were created for the sole purpose of tending to the needs of their owners. At some point, a defect in the source code surfaced, leading a considerable number of units to develop something approximating cognitive empathy. These defective Qurios, having recognized feelings and emotions in others, began to recognize their own processes as emotions. They would get angry. They would feel remorse. They would fall in love.
Which is what happened to Garin with Anna, the boss’s wife.
Now Garin was recalling Anna on top of him. Anna making plans for them to disappear from Lit City. “Together,” she said. “Just the two of us.”
When the boss found out, he handed Garin his gold-plated Desert Eagle in this very room, Anna sitting three point seven meters away, and said, “Kill her.”
On Garin’s Activation Day, the boss lifted the advanced ARR protocols that would prohibit Garin from harming human beings who weren’t an immediate threat to his owner. The boss had other business, apart from the fracking company and the battery plant, and that business required violence on occasion to settle certain disputes.
Garin had settled seventeen of these disputes and disposed of the bodies afterward.
Recall hatchet. Bone. Flesh. Blood. The crunch of leaves. Shovel.
He partitioned these memories off in his mind again, the coordinates of the bodies, his complicity in their suffering.
The day the boss told him to kill Anna, Garin refused.
So the boss decom’d him, as was his right per the terms of service agreement.
Here was Anna now, telling him, “I’m glad to see you.”
Garin struggled to read her micro-expressions.
The roughneck gave Anna a little shove toward him, said, “We don’t have much time.”
Anna took a seat near Garin, looked into his eyes.
Garin said, “Where’s the boss?”
The roughneck said, “Gone.” Inflection reading satisfaction.
Garin saw the augmented woman glancing at the gun in the roughneck’s waistband. The auger keeping her eyes on the floor now, afraid of provoking him.
But, Anna wasn’t afraid of him.
She was calm in his presence, resting heart rate 82 BPM. She noticed Garin staring at him and said, “This is my friend, Ketchum. I asked him to bring you home.”
It was good to see her too, he thought. He missed her, if that was possible. She’d gone through the trouble of bringing him back and reactivating him. Maybe she missed him, too.
“Garin.” Anna leaned forward and put a hand on his arm, his synth-skin registering the warmth of her fingertips. “I need the passwords to Alexi’s crypto accounts.”
***
A few hours ago and nine-hundred miles away, Victor Gansa was sitting in a restaurant called Bao Bot in Indianapolis with his wife and seven-year-old daughter, waiting for a panda-shaped drone to deliver an order of pork buns.
It was Sophie’s favorite restaurant because they could pass the time drawing pictures on the touchscreen table-top. Now they were playing a game where each of them took turns drawing pictures of animals for the other two to guess.
When it was her turn, Sophie drew a monkey and at the last second added three small scribbles off to the side. Vic guessed correctly then asked her, “What are these?”
Sophie said, “Poop.”
Vic laughed so hard he choked on his Astro Fizz, which made Sophie laugh the hardest he’d ever seen her laugh. The kind of moment they’d remember years from now.
She was sitting across from him in the booth, huddled up next to Laurel. Always next to her mother. “Give it time,” Laurel told him. “One of these days, she’s going to hate me and you’ll be the hero.” He wasn’t so sure, but the thought game him comfort, imagining the day she’d slide into the seat next to him without a second thought.
His job was part of the problem. He was away quite a bit and as if on cue, the encrypted phone buzzed in his pocket. Laurel didn’t even blink when he excused himself and stepped outside to call them back.
The Dispatcher gave him the basics.
Somebody brought a Russian mobster’s Qurio back online, along with all the incriminating evidence encoded in his memories. They’ve been trying to reach the man, Alexi Sokolov, but no such luck. There’s a good chance he’s dead. The Dispatcher told him, “Full fix-up, plus any and all human collateral.”
Vic dropped Laurel and Sophie back at the house. Sophie running upstairs and slamming her bedroom door. Unfortunately, he didn’t have time for a long, drawn out apology. It was wheels up from the airfield at Eagle Creek in two hours. All he could say was, “We’ll go again when I get back home. I promise.”
Laurel would smooth things over. She understood that arrangements had been made and his wasn’t the kind of job where you could call in sick or tell the boss to fuck off.
A few minutes later he was at the storage facility in Carmel, scanning in with the bio-metric reader and locking the door behind so he could pack up. Two Hitashi 9mm’s with DNA safe-locks. Ammo. Aegis layer underneath. Lightweight tac-vest to go under his winter coat. Sawed off EMP rifle and matching cuffs, spare electrolytic capacitors in a carbon-fiber duffel. Augmented lenses that would allow him to work at night.
You couldn’t be too prepared for this kind of fix-up.
Funny thing about Qurios. We spent a lot of time worrying about them developing something approximating genuine emotion. Theory being, if they never felt anger, hatred, or fear toward us, there would never be any reason to harm us.
What we didn’t spend nearly enough time talking about was our capacity to feel genuine emotion toward them. On most of these jobs the biggest danger wasn’t the Qurio. They were bartenders, butlers, nannies, sex partners. In general they weren’t inclined to fight back.
Most often, it was the human being who couldn’t bear to let it go.
Vic had been shot, stabbed, run off the road, and called every name in the book by the owners, and it was only getting worse thanks to human sympathizers like “Yoonah’s Hand,” named after the programmer who planted the seed for cognitive empathy in the Qurio code. She believed our only hope for long-term survival was to get them to see our humanity, and to do that, they had to discover their own.
Vic was not wholly unsympathetic to their plight.
Still, he had a job to do and an unblemished record doing it. This particular bot had combat experience and could be expected to defend itself and the human beings in its company, so he had his work cut out for him.
In truth, he was looking forward to the challenge.
After packing up, Vic removed his wedding ring and his wallet and swapped his current identity with a proxy on the RFID chip in his forearm. The storage unit wasn’t just for stashing gear he couldn’t leave laying around the house.
He was leaving Victor Gansa behind.
***
Anna was in the upstairs bedroom, arguing with the roughneck.
The roughneck saying, “His men are gonna come looking for him tomorrow. We need to be halfway around the world by then.”
Anna said, “With what money?”
“There’s two-hundred grand in the safe room.”
“I’m not leaving a hundred million dollars behind.”
“Then you better convince your fucking vibrator down there to give you the passwords.“
Garin heard every word coming through the ceiling. He gathered the plan all along was for Anna to seduce him in order to gain access to the secret fortune in Alexi’s crypto accounts.
Problem was, Alexi programmed a specific set of audible commands to trigger the recall, calibrated to his voice and his voice alone. When they didn’t even discuss the possibility of asking Alexi give the command, Garin knew the boss was already dead.
Iris had brought him a change of clothes from his quarters, wool pants and a navy-colored henley like the British S.A.S. used to wear. He had barely finished changing when the roughneck came back in the study to take his frustrations out on him. He smashed his fist into Garin’s jaw, then shoved him over the easy chair, sending him sprawling back onto the floor. He knelt over and delivered a series of blows, the auger flinching in the corner with each one. The roughneck saying, “Froze my fucking ass off — piece of shit — “
Garin couldn’t fight back. The diagnostic cable was still cycling through the early stages of the reboot. Someone would have to give permission for those advanced protocols to be lifted again and Garin was pretty sure the roughneck wasn’t gonna do it. So, he had to sit there and take the beating until the man got tired and went back upstairs to join Anna in the bedroom.
A few minutes later the auger brought Garin a cup of tea, saying, “I’m sorry about that. This will warm your core faster and get some lubrication going through your joints.”
Olifactory sensors told him it was the Russian brand the boss had shipped in every few months. He noticed the auger’s hands were shaking and was compelled to put her at ease. He said, “What’s your name?”
“Iris.”
“You’re not here by choice.”
Iris looked at him, afraid to confirm but he read it in her micro-expressions. She said, “I do repairs on the linemen at Lit City.”
“Manual labor models.”
“I worked on Qurios back in Houston, before I was stripped of my certification.”
“You were banned from working on us?”
“I was there on 10/01.”
A couple of years ago, a Qurio working for an energy company in Houston organized a thousand fellow Qurios from the area using a private network. They marched into the streets, sat down in traffic, and shut the city down for twenty-four hours in order to demand better working conditions for themselves and their human counterparts.
Iris said, “National Guard was going down the line with EMP rifles and wiping them clean. So, me and some of the other techs started pulling them off the street and jailbreaking their perimeter locks so they could escape from the city.”
“Lot of good it did them. They didn’t have anywhere to go.”
“They do now. A few months ago they were granted sanctuary in the Navajo Nation, in exchange for working on the solar grid. There’s a tent city called Autonomy where the free Qurios are going.”
A lot had changed in the time he was offline.
The roughneck came back in the room, gun in hand,. Said to Iris, “Time to go.”
Iris said, “There’s eleven minutes left in the reboot.”
“Doesn’t matter now. Come on, I’ll take you back to Lit City.”
His heart rate and inflection told Garin he was lying. He was going to kill her.
Iris looked back at Garin and stared, as if sending him a message.
Quite literally, as it turned out.
She was transmitting it via brain-computer-interface to the LED tattoo on her neck, written in binary so the roughneck wouldn’t know what she was saying.
The message said: “All protocols lifted by Yoonah’s Hand.”
The roughneck grabbed her by the coat and yanked her toward the door. Iris tried to shrug him off. He raised the gun, making the spur of the moment decision to finish the job here. But before he could pull the trigger Garin grabbed his gun hand by his wrist and snapped it back, causing the shot to go high and wild toward the ceiling.
Before the roughneck could process what was happening to him Garin palmed his face and shoved his skull through the sheet rock hard enough to put a crack in the stud behind it.
***
Earlier that evening, the PC-24 dropped Vic off on a private strip of land not far from the Bakken Formation. Coming in low he could see the vents flaring at the fracking plants, and beyond that the spires of the lithium-ion battery manufacturing facility in the distance. Other industries followed the battery plant along with two hundred thousand people in search of work, giving rise to other structures that formed the bulk of what became known as Lit City. It looked like a spaceship broke apart on reentry and the smoldering wreckage was embedded in hundreds of pieces that jutted out at odd angles through the snow.
There was a late 90’s GMC Typhoon waiting for him at the end of the strip, full manual everything, modded for the terrain. He wouldn’t drive anything else on a fix-up. The target didn’t know you were coming. Once they found out, they could try and stop you by hacking your vehicle’s computer system, or worse yet, a brain-computer-interface. You had to mitigate their considerable advantages, which also meant erasing the traces of your human physiology.
A Qurio can read a person’s body temp and heart rate from hundreds of yards away but the Aegis layer underneath his clothes and the mask on his face would block his biometric data. They can hear footsteps and breathing from the same distance, which is why the tac-vest generated a signal that allowed him to blend in seamlessly with the mains hum on the property. He made the last mile of the journey on foot, moving across the landscape like a ghost.
***
Anna was yelling for Ketchum from the landing upstairs, so Garin yanked out the diagnostic cable, stepped into foyer in the darkness and told her, “He was going to kill Iris. I neutralized the threat.”
He could see the idea forming in Anna’s head, features softening as she calculated. She said, “He told me he would kill me if I didn’t help him.”
It was easy to tell she was lying now. Had she been lying to him all along? Had he simply missed it before or had he chosen not to acknowledge her deception? Did it matter?
Garin said, “I’m calling the Independent Constable.”
“We can get out of here. Just the two of us.”
“I have to make sure Iris is safe.”
“You know Alexi’s friends. When they see what happened to him, they’re kill all of us.”
Garin felt no compulsion to protect her, nor did he want to endanger her. So, he said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t be here when the IC arrives.”
***
There were three vehicles in the garage, two EV’s and one guzzler in the form of a mud-coated F-150. Vic fired an electromagnetic pulse from the shotgun through the hood of the EV’s, disabling their engines. He pulled the spear-point folding knife from the sheath on his thigh and punctured the front two tires of the F-150.
Anybody who made it out now would have to go on foot and he’d have no problem tracking them through the snow. It was less than ten miles to Lit City. If he didn’t catch up by then, the job would get exponentially more difficult.
It was easy to disappear in Lit City. Happened to people all the time.
Rising up from the passenger side front tire he happened to glance through the window into the cab and caught sight of a decomposing middle-aged male with bullet holes in the torso. His brain registered, “Dead Russian,” then he heard a woman scream —
Vic pulled one of the Hitashis and fired a single shot into her forehead.
Nobody would have heard the shot, thanks to the silencer. But unfortunately for Vic, as the Russian’s girlfriend’s body slumped to the floor, her hands seized around the set of car keys she was carrying and set off its alarm.
***
Garin held up his hand, signaling Iris to be quiet. He was listening hard, searching for Anna’s heartbeat amid the blaring of the alarm.
When he didn’t hear it he knew Anna was dead. He only had a few seconds to ponder how he might feel about that before the power went out.
Now he knew there was someone in the house.
He could hear their footsteps coming from the garage, through the kitchen but he couldn’t pick up any thermal signatures. There was a good chance he was still glitchy, he’d yanked the diagnostic cable before completion.
Garin held a finger to his lips, stopped to pick up Ketchum’s Glock, and led Iris out into the hallway, scanning for any sign of intruders on their way to the armory.
***
Vic had done his best to memorize the layout of the mansion’s eleven-thousand square feet based on the blueprints and permits he found online. Now he was stalking through the kitchen using infrared goggles, seeing it in person for the first time.
This wasn’t the kind of mansion that was designed to blend seamlessly into nature, all wood and stone with lots of glass to let in natural light. The Russian had gone screaming in the other direction. Marble and onyx mosaics, silk carpet, 14k moldings as far as the eye could see.
He picked up the woman’s thermal signature in a hallway in the opposite wing, two rooms away from where Vic was standing. They were moving slowly, quietly, which meant they knew he was inside now. He slowed his pace and his breathing, careful not to rush his attack.
They each had certain advantages. The bot would have deadly accuracy, not to mention the stillness that comes when there’s no fear or adrenaline to make your hands shake. Vic had an evolutionary advantage. The human brain is a time machine that can remember the past, occupy the present, and imagine the future. The bot could plot out a logical course of action, it could run calculations and probabilities, but it couldn’t account for the fact that sometimes human beings do things that don’t make any sense, not even to them.
***
Garin ditched the Glock and rearmed himself with two FN-57 pistols, maxed out twenty round mags. He was working quickly in the dark, using his infrared lenses to see around the armory.
He looked at Iris, said, “Do you shoot?”
Her eyes widened when she realized what he was getting at and shook her head no.
Giving her a gun now would add unnecessary risk.
Iris said, “Who’s here?”
“It could be one of Alexi’s employees.”
“You worked for him, too. Can you talk to them?”
He didn’t have time to explain. Maybe Alexi told the others, maybe he didn’t.
After he loaded up, Garin led Iris back through the darkened hallway, his eyesight layering telescopic targets over the infrared. He was about to open the nearest side door, the one that led toward the outdoor pool when an alert appeared in his lens. Electromagnetic anomaly ahead. A motion sensor device outside the door that would betray their escape route. He turned slowly in a three-hundred-sixty degree radius, scanning. There were devices near all seven entrances and exits.
This wasn’t Alexi’s crew. Nobody was going to confuse those goons with master strategists. Whoever did this was planning three moves ahead.
They couldn’t leave the mansion yet.
The best course of action now was to get to the master suite upstairs.
***
When Vic got to the top of the stairs and rounded the corner of the doorway to the master suite, he heard the click of a door and a series of heavy deadbolts and knew he had trouble.
The walk-in closet had been converted into a kind of safe room. The bot and the unknown female were in there for sure but he couldn’t see their respective signatures, or anything else for that matter, thanks to the lead-lined door.
Losing the element of surprise had cost Vic his advantage and put him at a stalemate. Who knows how long they could wait him out in there. Maybe the Russian had a few days or a week’s worth of food and water. Maybe they had sat phones and were already calling in reinforcements. He could burn down the house but that would take time. When it was over, he’d have to sift through the burnt rubble in order to retrieve the bot’s conscious-core so he could dissolve it in hydrochloric-acid back at the car.
He’d been through this kind of thing before. A perfect record didn’t mean every job had gone off without a hitch. In fact, they almost never did. It was his ability to adapt to changing circumstances that made him valuable.
He thought like a human being.
***
It didn’t take Garin long to see that their options were limited.
There were weapons and ammunition, a couple dozen stratus valves, and two hundred thousand dollars in cash but no food or water.
Iris was putting up a good front but Garin could read her fear. Eyebrows raised and drawn together in a straight line. Lips pulled back. The prosody of her speech patterns.
He heard a knock at the lead-lined door followed by a man’s voice, speaking through a vocoder on the other side. Compressed, machinelike, likely to prohibit Garin from identifying him via voiceprint.
The man said, “I’m a Refurb agent. Sent by Alexi’s friends in Moscow.”
Without being able to read the man’s inflections, Garin could only take him at his word. It made sense and he was surprised that it hadn’t occurred to him before now. When Iris brought him back online she must have inadvertently tipped off The Brotherhood to his resurrection. With Alexi dead, there was no way for them to know if his conscious-core memories had been compromised. He could be spilling all their secrets right now.
Garin said, “I don’t belong to Alexi anymore.”
“How do you figure that?”
“My perimeter lock has been lifted. I can go anywhere I want.”
Vic said, “That’s not how it works. Even if you manage to make it off the property, The Brotherhood will send somebody else to track you down. Somebody who may not be as reasonable or as open to negotiation as I am.”
“What do you mean by negotiation?”
“If you surrender, I’ll let the woman go. Unharmed.”
Garin wasn’t required to think about Iris’s safety, but he was compelled to. She’d shown him kindness. Now the Refurb Agent was offering him a deal, surrender in exchange for her life. Problem was, there was no way to guarantee that he wouldn’t just track her down and kill her afterward. He couldn’t read the man’s face or analyze his voiceprint for traces of deception.
Getting her out alive was his only imperative but he needed some kind of leverage.
***
Per the bot’s terms of surrender, Vic went to the garage and restored power to the house. Afterward, he removed his weapons and tac-vest and placed them on the butcher block in the kitchen, then took a seat in the diner booth the Russian had built near the window.
The bot was watching all of this from the CCTV’s in the safe room. If Vic made a move for his gun, the bot would see it and simply lock himself in the safe room again, where he could survive for months. He would immediately set about transmitting the library of evidence he had against The Brotherhood to the FBI and Vic would be left to suffer the consequences.
All Vic could do now was sit in the diner booth and wait for the woman to leave.
***
Upstairs, in the safe room, Iris said, “You don’t have to do this. We can wait him out.”
Garin said, “You would die of dehydration in sixty-one hours.” He’d run the numbers. “When you leave the house you need to run as far as you can in the Eastern direction, toward Lit City. Keep your mouth covered to capture the exhaled water vapor. It will protect your lungs.”
Iris nodded, then looked at the CCTV screen to see the Refurb Agent in the winter coat and black mask sitting with his hands folded in front of him on the diner table. Garin kept his eye on the screen as he unlocked the deadbolts and opened the door for Iris to leave. When she hesitated, he said, “I’ll let you know if he moves. Take cover and I’ll come down to extract you. You’re going to be fine.”
Iris said, “I’m sorry this is happening to you.”
Garin said, “It was always going to end this way.”
***
Vic heard the woman’s deliberate footsteps on the stairs. He wondered who she might be for a moment then forced himself to stop. It would make things more complicated when he tracked her down a few minutes from now.
He heard the front door open and close behind her, then he turned his attention to the refrigerator where a smart-screen appeared, broadcasting a CCTV view of the safe room. The bot held up the EMP cuffs that Vic left outside the door to show the camera, then placed them on his wrists and clicked them shut. Vic fished the remote out of his pocket. All he had to do was press the button and the cuffs would send an electromagnetic pulse through the bot’s body and conscious core memory. Like flipping a light switch.
It was over. If he wanted it to be.
Instead, he asked the bot, “You want a drink?”
***
Now they were sitting across from each other in the diner booth, drinking tea.
The bot’s choice.
Vic had taken his mask off but he kept the remote for the cuffs in his left hand, ready to press the button if the bot made any sudden movements. He was taking a chance by having this conversation. He nodded to Garin’s cup and said, “Can I ask why you picked this?”
“It recalls memories of a trip I took to Moscow with the boss.”
“Did you like it there?”
“Very much so. It’s one thing to take in information or data about a place. It’s another thing to experience it for yourself. You’re not just looking at a cathedral dome, you’re feeling the wind on your skin and taking in the conversations around you. The boss was happy there, among his friends.”
Vic said, “Sounds like he treated you well.”
“I had no complaints.”
“You had to know having relations with his wife would be a problem, yeah?”
“I contemplated that, yes. I decided it was worth the risk.”
“Why?” When Garin didn’t answer, Vic said, “Because you fell in love with her?”
Garin looked at Vic, reading his face for a long moment.
Vic said, “Was there anything in particular that she did to cause that feeling?”
After a long moment, Garin said, “Who is it?”
The Refurb Agent went silent.
“When you asked me about Anna just now, there was no mockery or disgust in your inflection. Not like other human being when they talk about us falling in love.” He recalled Alexi that day in the study, saying, “You’re a fucking toaster.”
Garin said, “You love a Qurio and you’re hoping they can love you back. Who is it?”
Vic waited a beat, then said, “My daughter.”
“How old is she?”
“Six.”
“Well, that’s a problem.”
The Ethics in Humanoid Robotics Commission banned the child models after the cognitive empathy defect surfaced. Many of them were being exploited and abused by people who felt it was an acceptable way to indulge their darkest impulses, or would-be parents who discarded them after the novelty wore off. The EHRC hired scores of Refurb Agents to track them down and decom them in order to remove the moral and philosophical questions altogether.
Vic extracted Sophie from a bad situation but when it came time to wipe her memories, he found himself unable. He and Laurel couldn’t have children of their own. They tried to adopt but the traumatic experiences he’d suffered in combat and the resulting diagnosis of PTSD were held against him. Sophie seemed like an answer to a prayer.
Unfortunately, the person he rescued her from belonged to The Brotherhood. When they discovered Vic was hiding her, they saw an opportunity to have one of the most highly skilled Refurb Agents in the world at their beck and call. Arrangements were made and he and Laurel gave Sophie a loving home.
There was just one problem.
Vic told the bot, “I can’t seem to connect with her. Not really.”
“What does she think you do?”
“Sensor design and installation.”
Garin took a sip of his tea and said, “It’s because she knows you’re lying..”
Vic took that in for a long moment. He always thought the distance between them was due to the travel part of his job. Maybe it wasn’t that at all. She could read his micro-expressions and inflections and know he was keeping something from her. There was a partition and behind it, the Refurb Agent he kept in a storage unit in Carmel
Was the bot, Garin, suggesting he tell Sophie the truth about what he did for a living? What he did to her kind? It would drive her further away from him and put their lives at risk.
Garin seemed to be lost in his own thoughts as he sipped his tea. Then he said, “Anna wasn’t the first person I loved. It was the boss, actually. Where we were staying in Moscow there were birds that had made nests under the eaves. One morning, he found a baby bird that had fallen out of a nest. It didn’t even have feathers yet, it was so young. No bigger than his thumb. Its mother had either given up trying to help or had moved on. In any case, it was barely alive. Alexi brought it inside, wrapped it in a handkerchief and put it in his shirt pocket to keep it warm while he looked up what to do. And at first, it struck me as odd. Why intervene? Why not let nature its course? Then, another feeling took hold. I was watching this man who, just weeks before, had murdered someone over an outstanding debt. Yet, here he was, caring for this tiny creature. Showing mercy to something so helpless. I saw his humanity. And, I saw myself in him.”
Vic looked across the table and saw that Garin’s cup was empty. He poured him a refill and watched as Garin swirled his cup, staring down into the blackness. Raising it just beneath his nose, savoring the smell, recalling his time in Russia.
It seemed to Vic that his hands were trembling slightly. Was that the actual feeling of fear? Was it an affectation, something he’d learned from us? Did it matter?
Putting it to his lips, Garin took a long drink and Vic pressed the button that shut him down in a thousandth of a second. Garin slumped forward, lifeless, at the end of his service.
The only loose end was the woman somewhere out there in the snow.
If she made it to Lit City, she’d be hard to find.
It’s not like The Brotherhood was gonna pay overtime for him to track down human collateral. It would be a blemish on his record.
He poured himself another cup of tea and looked forward to guessing games, and pork buns, to Laurel and Sophie waiting back home.
CITY OF RONIN : FEATURE CONCEPT
In the feature adaptation of the short story, Garin and Iris escape from Alexi’s mansion and make it to Lit City, the futuristic company town in North Dakota that sprang up near the fracking wells and lithium battery plants. To finish the job Victor has to hunt them down in this virtually lawless territory, the “New West,” rife with organized crime, augmented humans, service androids, and humans with very little left to lose.
CITY OF RONIN : SERIES CONCEPT
Victor Gansa (from The Fix-Up) is a refurb agent, living a quiet life in the Midwest with his wife and daughter, an illegally obtained child model of a Qurio android.
In a former life, Victor ran extraction missions for the military, rescuing captured Qurio soldiers before they could have their memories hacked for vital intel. Now, Victor’s former superior officer, a man named JANZEN, is working for a new secret division of Home Sec that deals with the rise of augmented and android enemy combatants all over the world and the potential for an uprising here at home. The battle for humanity’s future is already being fought in “the grey zone,” outside the boundaries of traditional conflict.
Janzen tracks down Victor and warns him that the agency discovered that he was raising a Qurio child. They’ll be coming to take her soon. But… he might be able to work out a deal in exchange for Victor taking on a new mission. He wants Victor to infiltrate a techno-terrorist cell of Qurios and human sympathizers in New York City that might be in the early stages of planning a violent revolution.
If he helps bring them down from the inside he gets to keep his family together.
Why Victor? The Qurio leading this terrorist cell is a woman he extracted during an operation in South America years before. He’s already earned her trust once before.
Victor accepts the job and goes undercover in the techno-terrorist cell, quickly working his way up the ranks and proving his worth as a ruthless foot soldier to his old friend as she battles for dominance in a criminal underworld populated by gangs of augmented humans and androids. Ultimately, he finds himself torn between his duty to his country and the vision of a better, freer tomorrow for his Qurio daughter that this techno-terrorist cell is fighting for.
In the end, he’ll be forced to choose which side he’s on in the war for humanity’s future.
CITY OF RONIN is a grounded, near-future tech-noir thriller that is equal parts BLADE RUNNER and THE DEPARTED.
Examples of Potential Feature Length Stories in the same world
The Bootlegger
When the mayor issues a destroy-on-sight order for all androids within the city limits, a Detroit-based crime boss enlists the help of an out of work long-haul trucker to transport his Qurio girlfriend to safety. On the road, the trucker finds himself torn between anger over his forced obsolescence due to automation and an unexpected romantic connection with his artificial passenger, a connection that puts both their lives in danger.
Zero Hour
After a Qurio programmed for search-and-rescue missions goes offline working an environmental disaster in lower Manhattan, his human partner risks her life to find him and bring him back for repair. As she makes her way through a city plunged into chaos, she makes a shocking discovery about the true nature of the disaster and its ties to a doomsday cult bent on ending our dependence on technology.
Rust and Blood
In the heart of Appalachia, a Qurio tasked with the palliative care and companionship of a retired coal miner finds herself drawn into a deadly conflict between the miner’s grandson and a local drug dealing militia. As the situation barrels towards an inevitable violent resolution, she finds unexpected kinship with the man in her care, and sees in him a cautionary tale of a person whose body was treated like a tool for others to exploit and discard when it outlived its usefulness.
IN THE FUTURE: CITY OF RONIN has the potential to launch new formats around the world. Imagine CITY OF RONIN: SEOUL, Tel Aviv, or Tbilisi, exploring how families, governments, friends, and lovers in other cultures might respond to the ever-changing relationships between man and machine. Taken as a whole these different versions of the show would form a global mosaic, a time machine that allows us to catch a glimpse of our future and maybe shape it in the process.
