Less Than Human Read Online Free Page A

robot engineer.
    He couldn’t see her at first. She must be over the other side, past that row of minicranes and ridged tabletops. All the machines
     silent and waiting. Enough to give anyone the creeps. He had to move right down one lane and back up another—there were no
     shortcuts across the floor. Sweat trickled down the middle of his back and into his underwear.
    The single figure near the robot didn’t notice him approach. She had her back to him and was looking from a flat box in her
     hand to an upright panel next to the robot. One hand tapped keys on the panel. Chalk marks inside the robot’s enclosure were
     nearly obliterated. It didn’t matter— the response team would have taken a video scan of the scene anyway.
    Quite an attractive figure. He’d been expecting plainness. Why? He expected women working in an all-male field to be there
     for a reason—they couldn’t compete with other women.
Idiot,
he heard his ex-wife’s voice in his head.
You’re an ignorant dinosaur.
    Anyway, this figure was a pleasure to ogle. Reasonably tall, slim. Long legs in cotton trousers. Short-sleeved white blouse.
     It was the legs that gave her away. As he coughed, he knew even before she turned that Japanese women didn’t have legs that
     long. She wasn’t tall, then, not for a gaijin.
    She started in surprise and fumbled the box.
    Red hair, too. Long strands escaping from under the helmet. The skin under its sheen of sweat and smudges of grime was really
     white. Ishihara made a note to keep an eye on the constable, who’d refrained from blurting out the obvious. Tactful constables
     were rare.
    “This is …” the woman started to say in Japanese, then stopped and blinked at Ishihara in surprise. “Who are you?”
    “Assistant Inspector Ishihara, West Station Police, Religious Affairs. Who are you?”
    She brought her thoughts back from wherever they were. “My name is McGuire. I work for Tomita. We designed this robot.” She
     reached for a dilapidated brown handbag on the floor near the robot, rummaged in it for a moment, then proffered a card to
     him.
    The only accent in her Japanese was that of Osaka. Ishihara noticed she gave him only midlevel politeness. He hadn’t even
     used ordinary level for her.
    He knew enough foreigners—third- and fourth-generation Koreans, Brazilians and Filipinos on work visas—not to be surprised
     that she spoke reasonable Japanese. A relief, though, not to have to dust off his high school English. Or Russian—they saw
     a lot of Russians since the Sakhalin Treaty, but not many of them worked in big companies.
    She had gray eyes, a color he found less alien than blue. To see if it would faze her, he dropped his gaze slowly down to
     her boots and up again.
    It didn’t. She merely stopped her hand before it could begin to brush strands of hair out of her eyes.
    “Well. Nice to meet you.” She started to turn back to the robot.
    “What are you looking for here?” said Ishihara. “I thought it was an accident, human error.”
    “I’m just making certain.” She didn’t look directly at him this time. “Before we move it.”
    Ishihara looked at the robot properly. A big, ungainly cranelike thing. “This is it?”
    “You were expecting Gundam?” she said.
    He had to stop himself grinning. He’d been thinking of Mighty Atom and Sam Number Five, in fact. “What were you about to say?”
    “When?”
    “When I came in.”
    McGuire hesitated, then pointed to the robot. “This is at the wrong position.”
    “‘Wrong’?”
    “It’s at halt, not emergency stop.” She stepped closer to the robot and ran her hand along the arm and the pointy bit at the
     end. He noted how her long, grimy fingers gripped the box and the familiar way she moved among the tangle of wires and leads.
    “This part hit Mito,” she went on. “It’s programmed to come to a complete emergency stop as soon as something interrupts its
     arc of movement. So unless someone has tampered with