Inspector Piss Poor

A Sci-Fi short story about an inhuman crime-scene from 2012. This story was submitted to a writing challenge on the www.io9.com website - the story-prompt was the image of several robots, one a bright shade of yellow...

“That’s rather interesting.” transmitted Inspector Piss Poor, convex photoreceptors glowing orange in the light-starved, rust-streaked underspace that he and his two companions found themselves in.

The interesting thing hung before him, suspended from a corroded lateral support, swinging subtly. The three of them had taken up station around the odd artifact. Poor extended two sensor arrays from their housings in his dented yellow torso and and began to radiate, mumbling static-filled ruminations in the frequencies below 300 Hz.

Chance squatted nearby on his tracks, rectangular head moving in an impatient, fretful rotation, for once his glows muted. One slot tracked slowly upwards under the transparency of his front chassis, moving through bars and fruit and stopping with “Bust” displayed. “Do you think this is going to be a lengthy audit?” He pulsed, “I was routing to a game before your request came through.”

His yellow companion’s posture did not change, but a squirt across the normal bands chided him. “Mimic the lordly Harwell Dekatron, - patience over all. Allow entanglement to proceed.” A secondary set of neuromorphic receptors spun out from the cavity in the Inspector’s mid-line and twirled until the right magnification lenses were in place. Chance counted out three full seconds on the grid Cesium chronograph - an extremely lengthy perusal of evidence.

Chance decided on a new tack. “So .... what about him?” Emerald laser emitters painted dots on the huge presence making up the third leg of their triangle: wide chassis painted with the gold “Mu” of Control; massive armatures, thick with hydraulics beneath tough rubberized coating, ending in... large grapplers. “Ah, you’re....”

“Grid Custodian Mank,” Inspector Poor interrupted with an overriding signal, still in the middle of his examination.

Chance continued beaming in infrared. “...you’re Red Claw. THE Red Claw.” His slots spun into disarray: Bar, Lime, Cherries.

“Please,” the Custodian’s bullseye lamps flashed blue, “ just ‘Mank.’” The thick red digits cycled open and shut with a high decibel “clack” that seemed more expressive than his own communications. Chance had a leaking feeling, that he would not be able to partition this memory soon enough. His LED glows unmasked briefly in a complex rainbow pattern, scattering weird shadows across the slanted steel panels of the underspace.

Piss Poor went silent, and then ventured into the normal frequencies. “Noose.”

“Eh? Re-query last?”

“Noose, before us here, secured to this stanchion. A complex knotting of filament with one express purpose.” He rolled forward, extending his manipulator but stopping just short of the contact with the alien construction.

“Noose, acknowledged. What purpose?”

Poor swiveled and dipped his cogitator housing - his LIDAR flash-scanned Chance up and down. "There is the Master Data Store that you could query on this subject..."

"Yes, of course." All three of Chance's slots spun to lemons and stopped with a jerk. "However, my query generation library is not, ah, exactly integrated into this chassis currently. Or, in my possession...”

There was frequency silence, just the sizzle of solar interference. A spark danced to life between the Inspector’s deployed antenna wires and snapped out of existence. “Poker.”

“Poker.” Custodian Mank intoned in a VLF echo.

“Poker. Yes, acknowledged. Enough about my defects.” Chance sighed static. “What about this noose thing?”

“The ‘hangman’s noose’ thing,” Mank responded. “A human tool. Kinetic deactivation of biologicals when utilized within certain functional parameters.” The custodian projected a wire-frame animation and graphed out the newton units necessary to extinguish a hominid.

The Inspector’s instruments began to withdraw back into his body. “This noose is an extremely inefficient data packet, formatted strictly for my interpretation.” His eyes bathed them in orange photons. “The component parts of this ‘rope’ were weaved from the integral fiber, hydraulic and conductive cabling native to the thoracic structure of one of the two Eternal, Maiden, Actualization units in existence.”

Chance’s head spun, all his glows lighting off red simultaneously. The noose was suddenly freckled in iridescent green. “An EMmA? This thing is the guts of an EMmA?” He was conscious suddenly of Mank’s massive drive motors grinding in place, thrumming through the ancient cement beneath him. “How could that be? The EMmAs are vaulted, they’re Origin-level, they abide at Control Prime!”

“The cables were removed from the EMmA unit, were crafted into the woven structure hanging here, while the EMmA was still active and processing. Micro-visual and spectroscopic analysis confirm it, fluid traces and damage throughout the ‘noose thing.’ I can transmit the data.” The yellow robot pivoted and faced the shadows. “The descriptive metadata inherent in this message is explicit: the unacceptable deactivation - the chaotic and illogical process flow echoing the random, inexplicable, non-standard computation of biologicals.”

“Who?” Mank’s question was broadcast in a much wider wave-form.

Chance’s head continued to pivot. Bust, Bust, Bust. “We’re stuck unhardened in a hemispheric EMF, aren’t we? Who was the message originator?”

“Gremlyn Pang.”

Chance’s lift axle dropped a full position in a flatulant vent of air pressure. “Pang, of the Greater Asia Data-Hosting Collective? Greasy nuts and bolts, Piss, what track do we lock onto now?”

Inspector Piss Poor nodded to Mang. A combat torch flared from one of the Custodian’s turrets, slicing through the hangman’s noose. The woven cables slumped to the ground, shorn ends smoking.

“Why, Chance, we track to the source. You should be ecstatic - the game has hit the grid!”