Made to Kill by Adam Christopher Read Free Book Online Page A

metaphorical wrench, I mean.
    Because it turned out that Thornton had been too good. Ada was programmed to make a profit and whether the Prof had meant it to be or not, that program was her prime directive. Thanks to the detective agency, she’d accumulated a lot of contacts—on both sides of the law—and in me she had a robot who was big and strong and who could get into places without drawing attention, despite being six feet ten of bronzed steel in a hat.
    And a robot she could control .
    See, we were a team. Ada did the thinking and I did the legwork. Which included that surveillance I was so good at, on account of the fact I didn’t need to breath or eat or drink or shift my ass around on the seat to get more comfortable. Stick me in front of a suspicious house and I could watch it all day. Just so long as I was back at the office by midnight, otherwise the memory tape in my chest would run out and I’d be no good for anything anymore.
    That’s what Ada had said, anyway.
    The truth was somewhat different. She’d always told me to be home by midnight because the memory tape in my chest needed to be copied off to a master reel and my batteries needed a recharge. Both of these things took six hours.
    Except they didn’t. The batteries and the memory tape both lasted a full twenty-four hours and charging up the former and transferring the data from the latter hardly took any time at all. That gave several hours in the smallest part of the day for Ada to get to work.
    What she had been doing was this: at midnight, she switched the conscious part of my electromatic brain off. And then she gave me new instructions, ones which usually involved sneaking up on people and throwing them out of windows or down stairs or squeezing them in the front seats of pick-up trucks, lime green or otherwise. Turns out I had quite the knack.
    During the day I was a private detective and during the night I was a private killer and I didn’t even know it.
    And I didn’t know it for quite a while. There I was being all private dick and being good at it when really all my poking and prodding and questioning and investigating had another purpose, one for a job that only happened at certain hours when the captain was not, shall we say, at the wheel.
    But then I found out.
    The thing with a magnetic tape system is that the wipes aren’t always perfect, no matter how strong the magnet you wipe over them is. Good enough, sure, but never one-hundred-percent proof.
    So I started seeing things.
    They were afterimages, really—flashes, I called them—of people and places and jobs . And the thing was that I really was a pretty good detective so when I started remembering things I shouldn’t have been remembering, I started investigating. Once I started putting things together and seeing a pattern I put things together a little more and then I went to visit Professor Thornton.
    I’d identified the problem, and that problem was Ada. A problem, I hoped, that Thornton would be able to fix.
    Except Ada fixed me first. She let me in on the secret—I guess she felt she had to, as I was about to blow the lid on our new operation to the very man who had created us. Not only did she lay it all out for me, she very kindly came up with one or two little adjustments to my own master program that made me see things the way they really were.
    See? A team, I tell you.
    And let’s just say when I turned up at Thornton’s lab the meeting didn’t go quite as I had originally planned it.
    How did I remember any of that? Well, someone starts adjusting your electromatic brain and the computer code it runs, you remember it whether you have a twenty-four hour memory tape in your chest or not. The whole kit and caboodle had been flashed into my permanent store to give me a new prime directive. One that told me what my new job was.
    It was a shame about Professor Thornton, it really was, but I’d had no choice in the matter. We couldn’t let anyone—myself