Read A Toaster on Mars for Free Online

human?’
    ‘Beats me. Robots use the basement entrance.’
    Blake looked pointedly at the badge in her hand. ‘She’s got the badge,’ he told the guard. ‘That means she comes through here.’
    The guard backed off.
    ‘Thanks,’ Nicki said to Blake as they entered another elevator.
    ‘It doesn’t make us pals. If you’ve got the badge, you use the same entrance as everyone else.’
    They stepped out into a room filled with hundreds of office cubicles. It was almost a duplicate of Nicki’s office in the south-west. The ceiling was lined with old-style flat bulbs that cast a faint nicotine-stained light over everything. The booths were big enough to swing a cat, but not much else. Most of the agents had picture vids on their desks or walls. The computers were standard: thirty-six-inch semicircular screens with 3D projection.
    Some bright spark in personnel had decided to decorate the other walls with a mural of a forest setting. It was probably a good idea in the beginning, but agents had made adjustments to suit themselves. Video cut-outs of dinosaurs, monsters and ghosts peered from behind trees. Agents used them for target practice when they were bored.
    ‘Where’s Pomphrey?’ Blake asked an agent as they passed.
    ‘In a meeting with the bigwigs on level 700,’ the agent said. ‘Who’s your girlfriend?’
    ‘None of your business,’ Blake said, and turned to Nicki. ‘A lot of the guys here don’t get out of the office much,’ he explained. ‘If in doubt, check for a pulse.’
    Zeeb says:
    In case you’re thinking Blake is joking, he isn’t. The PBI actually brought in a policy a few years ago known as Bronski’s Law, instigated after an agent, Abe Bronski, was found deceased at his desk. This wouldn’t have been much of an issue, except he’d been dead for six months.
    When asked why no one had noticed he was dead, his co-workers said they just thought he was quiet. Fair point. I mean, how much of a ruckus does a dead person make?
    So now there’s someone employed to check that everyone at a desk is alive. Not active, mind you. Just alive. Expecting some people to exhibit more than a pulse is probably expecting too much.
    Nicki glanced around the room at the other agents. Most were at their computers, taking calls or speaking to criminal informants, whose images were silhouetted on the screens to protect their identities. A few agents were displaying pictures of the Elbow.
    Blake led her down a corridor.
    ‘You’re not in here?’ she said, in surprise.
    ‘I’ve got my own office,’ Blake said. ‘An advantage of seniority.’
    Or the rest of the team can’t stand working with you , Nicki thought.
    The office wasn’t big, but it had a window, which was almost unheard of in the PBI. A mechanical pigeon with three eyes had huddled outside the glass, but flew off when it spotted them.
    The room contained two desks and two chairs, a pair of computers and half a dozen filing cabinets. Nicki hadn’t seen filing cabinets before, so she checked her datapad—a tablet with lightning fast access to the Hypernet—to see what they were.
    ‘You still need one of those?’ Blake asked, nodding to the datapad. ‘I thought you had a super-brain.’
    ‘I do,’ Nicki said. ‘I don’t like to clog it up with rubbish.’
    The computers were ancient, probably not from this century, and buried in stacks of paperwork—another anomaly in most offices.
    One of the desks was grimy, but the other was pristine.
    Nice to see it isn’t a complete dump , Nicki thought.
    Unexpected items hung off the walls, including a giant rubber hammer, a plastic ostrich, three purple eggs the size of footballs and a piano accordion.
    Nicki could recall the homes of five serial killers that had looked similar.
    ‘So this is your office,’ she said, trying not to sound offensive.
    ‘This is it, tin girl.’
    ‘Nicki.’
    As Blake sat down, Nicki noticed his chair was made of leather and timber. Where does a person find