Free The Automatic Detective by A. Lee Martinez

asked Winifred, whom I could now visually identify as a biological entity but couldn't recognize any more than that.
    "Statement: Running . . . diagnostic." I beeped twice for no apparent reason.
    "You don't look so good." She took me by the arm.
    "Statement: Tactile web off-line. Fine motor functions . . . off-line. Advisory: Maintain a safe . . . distance to avoid . . .incidental injury. Estimation: Full system restoration . . . in two minutes, two seconds."
    "Maybe you should sit down while you wait," she said.
    "Negative." I dug around in my vocabulary file for a less technical word. "No. It will be better to stand very still in the meantime." I hiccuped one last, "Statement." And then I waited.
    "Should I call the e-mechs?"
    Empire had the best emergency mechanical technicians in the world to service its automated citizenry, but this wasn't serious enough for that.
    "It's just a cold reboot."
    I passed it off as a casual thing, but it bothered me. I hadn't been that far off-line since first being activated. I could remember every moment of my existence, save for one-point-eight seconds after my refrigerator had exploded. But there was now a three-minute, forty-seven-second block of time in my memory log that I couldn't account for.
    What had Grey done to me?
    Fully restored, my diagnostics combed through my software and assured me it found nothing amiss. But there was still that unaccounted-for segment of time, still that peculiar notion that someone had been monkeying around with my most intimate programming. As a robot, I didn't have instincts, and my intuition simulator remained silent. There was still something wrong.
    I could feel it.
    "All better?" asked the woman.
    "Functional," I grunted as I commanded my diagnostics to sift through my electronic brain again, and set aside some of my processing power to continue to sift over and over again until it found something. "And the name's Mack."

    "So what happened, Mack?"
    "Did you see—" I started, but stopped suddenly and inexplicably.
    "What?" asked Winifred. "Did I see what?"
    "Did you see—" Again, I stopped.
    I wanted to ask her about Grey and Knuckles, but something kept the question from forming. It must've been Grey's reprogramming, a little worm of a virus inhibiting my speech software, keeping me from saying anything about Grey or our encounter. I didn't like that one bit. It was a minor problem, but I didn't want to guess at the bigger motivational impairments he might've planted.
    I scanned the broken wall where I'd thrown Knuckles. "Sorry about the damage."
    "Don't worry about it. Place is a shithole anyway." She scratched her fuzzy chin. "So what happened?"
    "Nothing."
    I didn't tell her for two reasons. First, it was embarrassing to be so easily put down. Second, that bug kept me from even mentioning Grey or Knuckles. I'd have to purge my systems top to bottom. And soon. Still topping my directives list: finding Tony Ringo, and finding him before Grey. Otherwise, logic told me I'd never find him at all.
    "Ringo," I said. "Do you know anything else about him? Hangouts? Friends?"
    Winifred frowned. "I don't know nothing about nobody. None of my business."
    "Thanks," I said with more sarcasm than I meant. "You've been a big help." I had nothing left to go on. That logic sprang up again, told me it was time to go home, and put this mess behind me.
    But there was that little girl, that family. Damn, some days I wished I'd been made a toaster.

    I'd trudged halfway down the hall when Winifred called my name.
    "Hey, Mack! Wait up!"
    I stopped. "Yeah?"
    She wasn't a big woman, but she had a strange, lurching walk that made her stained, green sundress swing from side to side. "So finding Ringo, it's pretty important to you, huh?"
    "Yeah. It's important."
    She lumbered past me. "Come on, then."
    Winifred led me to the lobby, back to her front desk. "Place doesn't have a security network set up," she explained along the way, "but Violet sees a lot of things. And