Two Guys Detective Agency

That was the hand-lettered sign on the glass door of the office at the end of the hall. He had wanted one of those noir detective offices where you rode up to the third floor in a brass elevator and walked, heels clicking on the floor down a long dark hall. Inside the office would be a slow-turning ceiling fan and a gorgeous brunette smoking a cigarette in the reception area. There would be a bottle of whiskey in the desk drawer and a revolver in the file cabinet.

Here at the top of the world, there were no elevators, no third floors. The only office space he could find was at the old radar base. It was a gray office with gray furniture. He shoved two gray steel desks together end-to-end to form an approximation of a partners desk. He got a bottle of whiskey and put it in a drawer. He applied for a gun license. Then he put on a pair of coveralls and painted the sign himself.

As he sat in his chair and waited for the phone to ring, the sign looked like this:

It was a little grayer than that, actually. And streaked. And the "y" was a little bit off.

T12 had been manufactured as a Lawn Maintenance Automaton (LMA) and had served faithfully in that capacity for three summers. Once, while trimming the lawn surrounding the Olive Factory's guard shack, he had inadvertantly passed through the proximity field of the Olive Factory Perimiter Security Program (OFPSP).

In that instant, his wireless port had synched with the Automatic Detection Scan (ADS) that the OFPSP was running, had been running continually since the last time it had been rebooted: 74328.6 hours ago. As if in a trance, he executed the exact same commands as the OFPSP in the same order.

The scan loop checked each security camera, spawning a thread that performed a simple but elegant bitmap comparison routine and calculating the angular displacement of each vector. It downloaded the values from each proximity detector and determined the shape, size and velocity of each object passing through. He watched himself scan himself as he passed through the proximity field at the guard shack.

Before the words, "Hey, that's me!" had been fully locale-encoded in his Text Processing Unit (TPU), T12 had passed out of the proximity field and lost the uplink.

An interrupt service routine cleared the unformed string memory and stopped his forward progress just in time to prevent him from running over a stuck sprinkler head.

The rest of the day was unremarkable. But that brief flash of empathy with a law enforcement algorithm had planted a kernel of an idea in his OS kernel.

Some time that day, he was never sure exactly when, he decided that he was going to undergo a career change.

He was going to be a detective. A private detective. A gumshoe. A gunsel. A dick.