Isaac Asimov's I, Robot: To Preserve Read online

  Also by Mickey Zucker Reichert

  Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot: To Protect

  Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot: To Obey

  ROC

  Published by New American Library,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  This book is an original publication of New American Library.

  Copyright © The Estate of Isaac Asimov, 2016

  Interior art by Eric Williams

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  eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-99025-4

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Names: Reichert, Mickey Zucker.

  Title: To preserve / Mickey Zucker Reichert.

  Other titles: At head of title: Isaac Asimov’s I, robot

  Description: New York: Roc, 2016. | Series: I, robot; 3

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015035294 | ISBN 9780451242303 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Robots—Fiction. | Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | BISAC:

  FICTION / Science Fiction / High Tech. | FICTION / Science Fiction /

  General. | GSAFD: Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3568.E476334 T625 2016 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/EJGvBqc2YwLRIR

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Also by Mickey Zucker Reichert

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  To Isaac Asimov, who taught so many so much and entertained so many more. It is an honor to walk in his footsteps.

  Acknowledgments

  I am, as always, grateful to Pat Rogers, chief warrant officer 3, U.S. Marine Corps (retired), sergeant NYPD (retired), who put up with, and answered, the types of questions that scare most sources away. Also to Sergeant Keith Romp, firearms training coordinator, Polk County Sheriff’s Office, and assistant commander, Metro Tactical Unit. In addition, I want to thank Mike Fisher, vice president, Magtech.

  I’m also grateful to my superlative editors: Susan Allison, Sheila Gilbert, and Marty Greenberg (posthumously, sigh).

  To Mark Moore, my anchor, confidant, and a genius in his own right. I am truly blessed.

  And, as always, to Janet and Robyn Asimov. Thank you!

  Susan Calvin has hyperspace where her heart ought to be and liquid helium in her eyes. She’d pass through the sun and come out the other side encased in ice.

  —Nigel Ronson, Interplanetary Press, from Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot

  Chapter 1

  September 1, 2037

  The brightly lit hallways, cheery blue walls, and one-way mirrors of Manhattan Hasbro Hospital’s Pediatric Inpatient Psychiatry Unit had changed little in the two years and two months since Susan Calvin had begun her psychiatry residency. But it was the smell that brought the memories flooding back, a combination of musty basement, standard hospital cleansers, and art supplies that defined the unit affectionately called the PIPU. Susan doubted she would have recognized herself as the fresh young intern who had walked through these same sequentially locked doors on July 2, 2035. Then, uncertainties had consumed her. She had worried about her diagnostic acumen, her observational skills, and her inexperience, which might result in a misdiagnosis and suffering or death for a patient.

  Now that all seemed like childish naïveté. Since beginning her psychiatry residency, Susan had lost her father and the love of her life to murder, survived two explosions, and watched helplessly as the policeman who had defied orders to assist her sustained severe head trauma. Not only had Susan witnessed the violent killings of healthy people; she had even shot a man herself. The life-and-death routine of the hospital no longer seemed so dire, and she sought nothing more than the quiet reality of everyday diagnosis and treatment, preferably with cures. If she never experienced another extreme emotion, positive or negative, she would consider herself the luckiest woman in the world.

  Susan headed for the central staffing area, hoping she would find it quiet, at least for the next half hour. The Vox on her wrist read 2:19 p.m. The fresh group of medical residents and the staff psychiatrist should be completing afternoon rounds. The nurses would be assisting patients or busily charting before the next shift arrived. This time, Susan had come to the PIPU to acquaint herself with the patients who would become her charges the following morning, when she officially took her place as head resident on the unit.

  As she passed, Susan glanced at the array of artwork taped to the cinder-block walls. Though clearly intended to personalize and cheer the otherwise bleak hallways, they filled Susan with a sense of foreboding instead. Simple black-and-white images intermingled with intensely complicated paintings with colored swirls, flowers, and flourishes filling every bit of the page. Intricately detailed roses in rainbow vases perched beside bulbous, scribbled monsters or slashes of color that resembled nothing in nature. One piece consisted entirely of six small blue dots confined to a single corner of the page.

  For continuity, the senior resident, the R-3, remained on PIPU rotation for three days after the arrival of the new attending, five first-year R-1s, and one R-2. When he had passed the mantle of supervising PIPU resident to Susan earlier that day, Monk Peterson had given her a brief summary of the current patients, some of whom he had covered for his entire month and others who had arrived during that time: three teenagers with brain damage from drug use, a kindergartner with hysterical blindness, four schizophrenics with inadequate responses to medications, two youngsters with psychotic depression, one with post-psychotic syndrome after resectioning of an astrocytoma, and six with severe conduct disorder deemed dangerous to caregivers or society at large.

  The last group bothered Susan the most. They reminded her of Sharicka Anson, one of the youngest known children with antisocial personality disorder in the history of medicine, and also one of her first patients. The bomb Sharicka had detonated in a shopping mall had killed Remington Hawthorn, Susan’s beloved, as well as a security guard who had tried to stop him from leaping upon what appeared to be an innocent preschooler. Remington had sacrificed his life to spare Susan’s and those of the nearby shoppers. A he
ro, Susan reminded herself for the millionth time, but could not help adding bitterly, a dead hero.

  One of the few people with a key to the locked Pediatrics Inpatient Psychiatry Unit, Susan had not needed anyone to escort her through the doors. As she entered the staffing area, a bubble of one-way mirrors, she found one first-year neurosurgical resident, probably following up on the astrocytoma resection, and five nurses quietly finishing their shift duties. The R-1, a tall and slender woman, diligently typed notes into a palm-pross computer. She seemed to take no notice of Susan’s discreet entrance. However, a willowy blond nurse Susan knew as Saranne squealed out, “Dr. Calvin!”

  In a flash, Susan found herself surrounded by nurses, male and female, some crushing her into embraces, others standing with smiles plastered on their faces or calling encouragement to her. They remembered her for the “lifers” she had diagnosed and discharged in her R-1 year and for standing up to a neurosurgeon who considered himself the “greatest in the world.” They knew what had happened to Susan subsequently, the deaths of Remington and her father, the struggle to make up the grieving time missed from residency so that she could enter her R-3 year only a month or two behind her peers.

  Susan had to struggle to return their greetings with a wan smile, to mouth the appropriate platitudes. She felt wrung out, physically and mentally, and the exuberance with which she had greeted her first rotation so long ago seemed misplaced, the life of another woman in a parallel universe. She almost appreciated it when her Vox, and those of everyone around her, beeped wildly in an emergency tone. A man’s calm voice intoned in megastereo: “Code Blue, seventh floor Hassenfeld Research Tower, room 713. Code Blue, seventh floor Hassenfeld Research Tower, room 713.”

  For a moment, Susan’s heart stopped beating. Vertigo assailed her, and it took inordinately long for her brain to comprehend the words. Code Blue: cardiopulmonary arrest. Pain flashed through her chest, eliciting a sharp cough; then her heart started pounding again. She did not usually respond to emergencies so viscerally. In the past, she had most often been the calmest person in the room. Only then, the last part of the call reached logical consciousness. Room 713. Cody Peters and Ari Goldman’s lab.

  Susan shook off her well-wishers so abruptly that one gasped and some had to catch their balance on various desks and chairs. Susan found herself running down the hallway, spinning to miss a gawking child, and nearly careened into the locked unit door. She fumbled the key from her pocket and stabbed it into the lock.

  The delay allowed one of the nurses to catch up to her. “Dr. Calvin, where are you going?”

  The question seemed absurd. Every health-care worker knew a Code Blue required the attention of anyone nearby with advanced cardiac life-support training. The lock clicked, and Susan slammed her body against the heavy door, jarring it open enough to slip through. Trusting the nurse to keep any patients from leaving with her, Susan rushed down the bare gray hallway to the second locked door, key still clutched in her fingers.

  The nurse’s voice chased her through the closing gap. “You’re a psychiatrist! There’re closer physicians with more code training.”

  Now full understanding struck Susan. If every trained staff member arrived at the scene of every Code Blue, they would fill the room and all the surrounding hallways. Only those nearby needed to respond, particularly those on crash-cart units: Cardiology, ICU, Pulmonary. Yet Susan did not even pause as she thrust the key into the second door lock and shoved through it into the bleak hallways of the lowest level of Manhattan Hasbro Hospital.

  Susan knew the way without having to consider it. She had walked the route in both directions multiple times while working on this same unit two years before. Drs. Goldman and Peters had requested her assistance with a research project that used nanorobots injected into the cerebrospinal fluid of patients with resistant psychoses. Manhattan Hasbro’s lead researchers had collaborated on dozens of studies and articles in all the major psychiatry journals, and Susan had considered herself lucky to work with them, even if only at the “scut” level. Eventually she discovered they had chosen her mostly because of her father’s association with United States Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc.

  Another alert shocked across Susan’s Vox. “Code Silver, Hassenfeld Research Tower, room 713. Code Silver, Hassenfeld Research Tower, room 713.”

  Thoughts of John Calvin brought tears to Susan’s eyes, and her focus on him stole details from the emergency call. She had loved her father with a loyalty that knew only the boundaries of propriety. She had never met a man kinder or wiser, gentler or more intelligent; no one could have served as a better guide and guardian. For so many years, she had believed him to be the epitome of humanity, only to discover at his death that he had never been human at all.

  Had Susan not been racing through the corridors at top speed, weaving in and out of the hordes of patients, staff, and visitors, she might have realized two different types of codes had been called to the same room, one blue and one silver. She might have noticed the different colors flickering back and forth across her Vox display, might have observed the hesitation of most of the staff to rush to the scene, and would certainly not have knocked the crutch out from under a surgical patient with an enormous medical boot on his left foot.

  As Susan crossed from the main hospital to the research wing, she found that she no longer had to dodge patients and that most of the traffic was headed in the same direction. Images of Drs. Peters and Goldman replaced those of her father. Cody Peters, tall and skinny, with auburn hair and a crooked nose, had a sharp wit, friendly voice and features, and dangerous inattentiveness. In direct contrast, Goldman was dour and impatient, older than Peters, meticulous and detail focused. Despite their differences, they formed a solid team that had lasted for nearly twenty years and boasted many of the greatest breakthroughs in psychiatric medicine.

  Susan forced herself to consider the situation logically. Just because the emergency had occurred in their laboratory did not necessarily make Goldman or Peters the victim. Hundreds of scientists worked in the tower, and they walked freely in and out of one another’s rooms. Visitors, reporters, superiors, and curious health-care workers checked on the status of interesting research all the time. Perhaps the fumes from some haphazardly mixed chemicals had caused a maintenance worker to collapse, striking his or her head on one of the many tables. More likely, an elderly man or woman had succumbed to a cerebrovascular accident or a myocardial infarction, the location of the occurrence of his or her malady nothing more than strange coincidence.

  Arriving in Hassenfeld Research Tower, Susan ignored the elevators, charging up the concrete stairs instead. Notwithstanding the likelihood of her currently imagined scenario, she knew it was wrong with the same sickening certainty that had struck her when she had discovered police barricades at her apartment building in July of the previous year. Despite the Independence Day holiday, her father should have been at work. He had headed for USR that morning, and Susan had no reason to believe he would have left there early. Yet he had; and she had known with an unshakeable dread that he was the reason the police had cordoned off their building. Now Susan knew, without need for further consideration: Something terrible had happened to Ari Goldman, Cody Peters, or both.

  A third alarm shrilled over Susan’s Vox. “Code Blue, Hassenfeld Research Tower, room 713. Code Silver, Hassenfeld Research Tower, room 713.”

  The proximity of the two similar but different calls finally struck Susan. Code Silver? What the hell is a Code Silver? Like most hospitals, Hasbro used colors to designate different scenarios in order to alert staff without alarming patients and visitors. She could pop up a cheat sheet on her Vox, but that would require her to focus on something other than her wild flight up the tower staircase and the sense of dread overtaking her. A misstep might cause her to plummet down several flights of metal and concrete steps.

  Instead, Susan ran the possibilities through her mind.
There was some basic logic to the color codes, though they varied among hospitals: blue for lack of blood flow, red for fire, pink for infant abduction, black for severe weather. During medical school and residency, she had attended her share of cardiopulmonary arrests, but never once had she heard another code called. She searched her mind for anything silver might stand for and why it might get called at the same time and place as a Code Blue.

  Silver. Susan reached the seventh-floor landing all but breathless, feeling as if she might require pulmonary resuscitation herself. Metal? Metal object? She burst through the fire door into a hallway filled with milling, whispering medical personnel and at least two portable crash carts. Gun? Gasping from the top-speed climb, she staggered into the hallway. Blood seemed to drain from her body just when she needed it most. Not another shooting. Please, God, not another shooting!

  More than a year had passed since Susan’s last ordeal. She had thought everything was settled, that the police and the Department of Defense had crippled the Society for Humanity, the SFH, beyond resurrection, that the secret governmental agency she knew by the code name Cadmium had given up on trying to weaponize positronic robots. Susan rushed toward the familiar research laboratory, barely noticing the staff she shoved aside in her haste.

  Finally, someone caught her elbow. An unfamiliar voice hissed into her ear. “Doctor, wait. Code Silver: combative person with a weapon!”

  Susan tore free of the other’s grip. Code Blue meant someone potentially salvageable, probably a victim of assault, and she would not allow them to die for lack of aid. Especially if the attack had anything to do with positronic robots. Anything to do with her. This was over. Finished! No one else was supposed to die!

  Susan no longer cared if she shoved through the crowd too forcefully, if she stepped on any toes. This was no time for timidity or curiosity. Looky-loos could only delay the action necessary to defuse a mortal situation, to rescue a patient in deadly crisis.