Android: Golem (The Identity Trilogy) Read Online Free Page B

inattentiveness.”
    “No sweat, partner. Let’s go catch the bad guys.”
    “Cool.”
    Shelly sighed and shook her head. “Okay, you’re going to have to stop saying that.”
    I was puzzled. “I thought you wanted me to say that.” I had started responding in that manner only a few days ago at her insistence.
    “I was wrong. Don’t. Just chalk it up as a failed idea.”
    “Why?” My curiosity was my strongest human facet.
    “Because it’s wrong.”
    “I have done something wrong?” I reflected over the forty-two times I had responded in such a manner over the last nine days. I perceived no incorrect response. The response was used in the manner in which Shelly had designated.
    “No, big guy, I did something wrong. I tried to change you. That’s how women are. We try to change the men we like. Usually, it helps, but sometimes—infrequently, mind you—we’re wrong. In this instance, I’m wrong.”
    “Perhaps if I were not who I am, it would work.”
    “If you weren’t who you are, you wouldn’t be my partner.”
    On many levels, that statement was incongruent and made no sense. It was only consistent that if I were not who I was, that I would also not be her partner. I chose not to point that out. Shelly only laughed at me when I pointed out logical things at times. I sensed this would be one of those times.
    “Your response lacks the proper inflection.” Shelly pulled on the black, thigh-length, bulletproof jacket she wore out in the field. According to Shelly, the jacket was in keeping with one of the current fashions and, along with the black suits we wore, allowed us to blend in almost anywhere, except in the poorer regions of the city. No one blended in in those neighborhoods, except the people that lived there.
    “Perhaps you could teach me.”
    “No.”
    “I am teachable as well as intuitive.”
    “I know, but this would be one of those parrot things. You would say it the way I would say it, and that would drive me crazy.”
    The “parrot things” she referred to was the mimic ability in my learning programming. Mimicry was the best way to learn things. Clones and bioroids both began with neural channel overlays, then added to them based on mimicry. We learned by doing, and from responses within our environments. So did humans, after a fashion, but they went beyond the initial learning by adapting whatever they learned into something that was more personal, and sometimes from stimuli that was never provided by an environment. That synthesis went beyond anything I was capable of.
    I nodded, one of those responses I had learned from Shelly that she had not complained about. “I will take your word for that.”
    “You should.”
    “Let’s hop.”
    I took my Synap pistol from my desk drawer. The weapon worked by shooting a bioelectrical charge that disrupted a human’s synapses and caused brief paralysis or unconsciousness. It did not cause death like the weapons in my glitch.
    Human police personnel called the Synap pistols “Gandhi guns” because they were non-lethal. They also declared the weapons ineffectual because they didn’t always bring down perpetrators. The human police officers and detectives I knew preferred to meet deadly force with deadly force of their own.
    I holstered the weapon, pulled on my own bulletproof jacket, and pulled on the knitted black skullcap Shelly gave me our first Christmas as partners. She had given me the hat because she worried that my head got cold. I had told her that only the synthskin of my face registered temperature, and I could control the temperature of all my synthskin, but she had insisted. I wore the cap for her, really, but I also knew it disguised the metal back half of my skull and made me more acceptable to humans on some level. I never wondered if it was so I would look more human for Shelly. I chose to believe that she accepted me as I was. I had never seen any indications otherwise.
    Together we left the bullpen.
      *
    In the