Monsters of the Week

Together With Qubi - [6] -

Qubi ended up coming home in a foam insulator crate on top of two frozen kebab rounds that we had to ferry back, and the SWAT intervention meant that the Criminal Gang Battles Police With Rocket Launchers case became Anquell's, even though Ralph and I were the ones who'd actually got the rockets shot at us, but their suspects confessed to everything and tied up our two dump cases as well; they were a little reluctant at first, but Qubi had cropped out most of their cube's memory and CPU without digesting hardly any of it, and when we showed them what Forensics was able to dig out of there, they gave up and plead out. Ralph's theory on who they were and what they were trying to do was confirmed in nearly all its parts, and when one of the culprits got shanked in the city lockup waiting for trial, that confirmed my theory that they were complete amateurs who didn't know what they were doing trying to do a threat dump onto friggin MS-13.

Hanging three murders and a big complicated prohibited-DIY-weapons charge off the back of a shootout involving multiple officer weapon discharges and a ton of grenade use, including an EMP, though, generated an ever-growing mountain of paperwork that kept us off the street and mostly ignoring the fact that Qubi wasn't losing any real weight in the bottom of the fridge. It also got in the way of noticing we'd gotten a recall notice until it came around as a red-border push that we'd have to start enforcing it as the police.

It got in the way of my noticing it, that is, because I wasn't looking for biotech product recalls. Ralph, though, had actually bought it, and should have gotten the notice as soon as it went out. He just hadn't said shit because he didn't want to put his pet down. I leaned around my monitor and tried to catch his attention.

"Ralph." He hunched up and busied himself in the report he was working on. "Ralph. No. Cut the shit. When did this recall go out?" He still didn't answer. "Ralph, come on. I put up with a lot of your crap, but leaving an illegal biopet in the bottom of our fridge is over the line. Why didn't you say something? You could've taken your time, gone out to the park to play fetch or whatever, and then done a backup on your own schedule. Now we have to put it down and send the chip back by like yesterday. What's the deal?"

He looked blankly down at the desk. "I just thought – hoped – that maybe something would change, and we wouldn't have to. It's always hard, but this one was working out; you even liked it –"

"Got used to it, there's a difference."

"– and so it's harder, harder to think about what our place is going to be like without Qubi around."

"Qubi is barely around as it is; it's just sitting in the bottom of the fridge. Seriously, Ralph, me too; I wish you'd been able to get a patch together to make Qubi drop some of that weight and be able to go around without us worrying about it splitting and then having to manage two Qubis, but it didn't happen." I waved my tablet. "Nobody else could get it to happen either; that's what the recall's for: 'risk of reproduction by binary fission as mass increases', it's right there under the headline. Let's just get this over with and make a clean break, can't we?" He nodded slowly; as much as this was completely Ralph's fault, it was rough to see him in a blue funk like this.

"Come on; you can still take a backup tonight, you just got the new USB port in last week. It'll be fine. Maybe they'll put out a new version and you can restore. It could still happen." He brightened up a little at that.

"Can I get that on the record? Like –"

"Like no, Ralph; should they release another gel-pet AI chip, we can discuss you maybe getting the new version to restore Qubi onto. No dice. As long as I'm living in the same space with you, I'm not committing to shit sight unseen."