by SL Huang
“Coffee,” he said without looking up, gesturing toward the kitchen with his mug. “Miri only has soy and almond milk, though. Heathen.”
I always took my coffee black anyway. I poured myself a mug and came back out to the living room. “Find anything?”
“Yeah. Lots of things. First of all, the answer is no.”
“The answer to what?”
His eyes darted to Liliana, and he lowered his voice. “The consciousness question. Or sentience. Or whatever. The answer’s no.”
“Oh,” I said. I’d barely started considering the idea; it felt odd to have a definitive answer already. “How do you know?”
“Because I’ve been reading her code. There’s some fantastic stochastic creativity, but she’s definitely no more powerful than a probabilistic Turing machine—I’ll leave it to your math brain to figure out the exact modeling. The NLP here is something else, though—talk about sophisticated. Did I say incredible? I meant amazing. I want to talk to the people who programmed her. I am in awe.”
“Down, boy,” I said. “In the throes of your tech nirvana, did you remember to check on the fallout from last night?”
“Cas Russell, what do you think of me? Of course I’ve been keeping tabs.” He put down his coffee mug, lifted the laptop from the table next to him over to balance half on top of the first one, and hit a few keys. “Interestingly, the higher-ups at Arkacite are not making it particularly easy for the police; they’re claiming they don’t know what was taken. I think they just don’t want to say—probably either they were doing something mildly illegal somehow or they don’t want to reveal their secrets. I’m betting on the latter, considering how cutting edge this technology is. But anyway, nobody can recall your face or the name on the ID card—one of the guards said he remembered that the metal detector went off, but that was it—so this is what they have as a composite.”
He half-turned the screen so I could see it. The drawing was atrocious; it looked nothing like either me or Pilar. “They need new security guards,” I commented, sipping my coffee.
“Oh, people make terrible eyewitnesses in general. And of course there’s no digital trace of your presence, which is freaking them out just the tiniest bit, if I do say so myself.”
“Quit preening,” I said. “Who are they looking at for it?”
“Not Warren, oddly enough. The police don’t even seem to be considering him—probably because Arkacite didn’t tell them what was stolen. Arkacite’s doing their own investigation, I’m sure, but they haven’t emailed each other about it so I don’t know.”
“I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t trust their computer security this morning.”
“I am the stuff nightmares are made of,” intoned Checker, with something like a maniacal giggle.
I finished draining my coffee and set down the mug. “I’ve got errands. What should we do with Liliana for the day?”
Checker shrugged. “I can keep watching her.”
I wasn’t crazy about that idea. If Arkacite found out where we’d taken their tech…
But what was the alternative?
I’d promised Warren we’d treat her well. The image flashed in my mind of Liliana in Arkacite’s basement lab, hunched in a corner, crying.
She’s not a little girl.
I looked over at her. One of her hands had snuggled the cat against her in sleep. Jesus.
“Fine,” I said. “But stay on top of the investigation. If you get the slightest hint they’re tracking you down, take her and get out of here. And I’ll send Arthur over to you.” It wouldn’t hurt to have another gun around.
“Good idea,” said Checker. “I’ll need to sleep sometime anyway. I can call Pilar back to help, too—if she wanted to sell us out, she’s had ample opportunity already.”
I’d forgotten to threaten her. “Tell her if she does, I’ll kill her.”
“Cas!”
“Well, at least make sure Arkacite’s not tracking her. And you can also tell her I’ll pay her again. I’ll put it on Warren’s tab.”
“That man’s going to end up in indentured servitude to you at this rate.”
I turned to head back toward Miri’s bedroom. “Not my problem.”
I retrieved my phone to find someone had left me a voicemail while I was in the living room. It turned out to be Harrington, saying he’d arranged the promised meeting with the Ally Eight rep for a park at two that afternoon, ostensibly for a business proposition. I left him a message confirming without telling him it was a real business proposition, a message for Cheryl Maddox telling her I wanted to arrange to dead-drop her some cash, and finally a message for Arthur telling him to call me back. The fact that I couldn’t reach him was troubling—I was still worried about Tegan.
Then I changed back into my normal clothes, stole Checker’s printouts on the plutonium batteries, and went out to my car. I sat in the driver’s seat for a moment considering where to go first, but before consciously making the decision I’d started for Altadena.
The hour was early enough that I beat rush hour to Denise Rayal’s house. The little cottage was still in shadow, the sun not having peeked over the mountains yet. I marched up and banged on the door. When nobody answered, I banged louder and longer.
The bolt finally scraped back, and Rayal cracked open the door a few inches—her face was the same one from the pictures, only more tired. She wore a faded pink bathrobe, and her hair was tousled with sleep. “Can I help you?”
I didn’t know.
I’d come here for some sort of answers, but I didn’t know what—we had Liliana’s code, after all; I easily could have stayed on Miri’s couch reading it and learned more than I could talking to Denise Rayal. Heck, every time I looked at Liliana I saw and heard the artificial mechanisms shimmering in the mathematics of every movement, a too-exact shadow of strings reminding me every instant that she was a puppet, even without reading through the probabilistic master that controlled her.
She was a valuable piece of technology. I should have damned Warren’s entreaties and locked her in a safe while I waited on him, and meanwhile moved on to dealing with the Lorenzos. But considering actually doing that slammed up against a churning revulsion deep inside, a sick queasiness I didn’t know how to define. Disconnected snippets cycled through my head: Liliana’s tear-stained face in the lab, her apparent delight at playing with the cats, her repeated questions about her father.
Questions that had all been asked with the same cadence.
“I need to talk to you,” I said to Rayal.
She wrapped her bathrobe around herself more tightly. “What’s this concerning?”
“Do you know what happened last night?”
Her expression twitched.
“Liliana was stolen from Arkacite,” I said. “I assumed they would have called you or come knocking. Asked if you had anything to do with it.”
“What do you know about it?” she asked after a beat.
“I work for your husband,” I said. “I’m the one who took her.”
Rayal’s whole body tightened, her posture knotting into a defensive stiffness. After a moment’s pause she stepped back, almost as if forcing herself, and tugged the door open a little wider. “Come in.”
I followed her inside. We sat down in her tasteful and comfortable living room. Rayal perched on the edge of the couch, her arms hugging herself. She didn’t offer me anything to eat or drink.
“How do you know I won’t call them?” she asked in a low voice.
“What would you tell them?” I said. “Are you going to report your husband? He’s disappearing soon anyway, along with her.”
She hesitated. “What do you want?”
“I want—I want to know what happened.”
Her face went dead. “I’m not allowed.”
I thought of the inches and inches of nondisclosure agreements in her file cabinet. “I’ve already met Liliana. I know what she is.”
She blinked at me rapidly, her eye
s shining too brightly.
“I can read her code if I feel like it. I just—I guess I want to know how this happened. With you and your husband. And with her.”
She hiccupped, a sound somewhere between a humorless laugh and a dry sob. “I suppose it would be a relief—I can’t talk to anyone about it. Even my therapist, if I told him, he’d have me committed. He’d think I don’t know what’s real anymore.” She swallowed. “I…I had a son.”
“I know,” I said, thrown by the non sequitur.
“Sam. He was—he was everything to us. To me. My world. You hear about what happens when you become a parent, how much love—but it doesn’t prepare you.”
“He died, right?” I asked, and winced. It probably wasn’t a polite question.
Denise Rayal didn’t seem to notice. “Yes. Leukemia. I thought—I’d never felt so much pain. I thought I would never get past it.”
“And is that why…?”
“Why I made Liliana? No. It would be the right answer, wouldn’t it? But…I did get past it. I thought I never would and then I did. I got up one day not too much later and wanted to live again. Wanted to work. Eat good food, be happy, have sex—Sam was gone, and it didn’t kill me. Does that make me an awful mother?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said.
“Noah, though—he couldn’t move on. After a while our marriage was…empty. He used to make me laugh, so much, and…I buried myself at work, because to be around Noah was—I would have left him, but I felt so guilty. Now he would leave me, if he didn’t need my name on the case for Arkacite—he would leave me in a heartbeat.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I gave back Liliana.”
“Wait—what?”
Denise took a deep breath. “You have to understand. I didn’t build her to replace Sam. She was a project. The idea she could be anything more was—I never considered it. She was an experiment in natural language processing and machine learning and robotics and—and that was it.” She gestured helplessly, frustrated with making me understand. “But our team wanted—we needed to see how human she could be. How much she could learn. Arkacite set up a secure place off-site; it took so much to make it happen—so much paperwork, so many promises, especially for them to let Noah in on it.”
“Why did they?”
“I wanted to be living with her twenty-four hours a day, to be studying her behavior responses over the long-term. So there was some reason for me to ask that my husband be allowed into the project. But I hoped—I wanted—” She paused and steadied herself. “I had hope, that maybe bringing him into my work, sharing my accomplishments with him, that something could rekindle for us. That he could find some way back to me.”
Well, her plan had sort of worked. “And you didn’t expect he would start seeing her as his daughter?”
“Maybe I’m stupid. Maybe I should have—she looks like a girl, but I never thought of her that way. She was a toy. A very sophisticated toy. One I was proud of, but I didn’t—she wasn’t alive; how could anyone think she was?”
“Until your husband did.”
She nodded. A tear spilled over and slid down her cheek; she brushed it impatiently away. “I didn’t even realize it at first. The path we were on. I only saw that he was back. My husband, I had him back. And so help me, I started doing it, too. Treating her as a child. It was so easy, so easy to pretend, to fantasize that we were raising a girl together, and in so many ways she felt so important to me already, after so many years—you know how people will sometimes refer to their projects, they’ll say, ‘my baby’? She was that to me before this, and it just became so easy, with Noah, to tuck her in at night, to hug her when she cried, and I knew, I knew she only stopped crying because her programming said—there was no free will, this was not the Singularity, there was no child, but God help me…”
“You started to see her as one,” I said.
“I started to care. I started…I wanted to love her.”
“I don’t know if that’s a bad thing,” I said. “It’s love. That’s—you know. Good. Right?”
Right?
“Love!” exclaimed Rayal. “When the child you love is making choices on a coin toss you programmed in? When you know, you know, exactly how she works, that inside she’s silicon and wires and sophisticated language emulation and when she laughs it’s because her programming has been told this is when little girls laugh and when she cries it’s because we wrote in that when she falls down, her face should wrinkle up and her eyes should drip water? Is that the kind of child you would want to love?”
I swallowed. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“I know you didn’t. I know.” She lowered her head, pressing her fingers against the bathrobe over her knees, breathing hard. Her hands curled into fists, bunching the fabric. “I was building myself up to love a child I had already lost. A child who didn’t exist. She could act like a five-year-old, but she would never grow up, never have her own thoughts, never…never love me in return. I gave her back to Arkacite, and resigned, and moved out here. I’m in therapy. I’m…I’m coping.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“You know, I tell my therapist—I tell him I lost someone who was like a daughter.” Rayal’s voice had gone back to resigned. “I don’t say who. I tell him I was too attached. That she wasn’t mine to love.”
Chapter 18
I left Denise Rayal’s house more disturbed than when I’d arrived. After standing impotently by my car for a few minutes in the cool morning, I sighed and dug out my phone. I had other obligations. Whatever was rankling me here, it could wait.
I tried Arthur again first, and he picked up right away this time. “Russell! Finally!” A cacophony of canine barking erupted in the background.
“Shit, are you still at Tegan’s?”
“You’re right, something’s wrong—the mail from yesterday ain’t been picked up, and I don’t think anyone fed the dogs, but their cars are here—shit!” More barking.
Oh, no. “I’m on my way.”
I broke thirteen different traffic laws on my way to Tegan’s and thanked my lucky stars no cops spotted me. Tegan lived with his partner in a small house on a large plot of land in Topanga; I came onto the absurdly steep street nearing sixty and careened downhill, slamming on the brake to skid to a halt less than two centimeters from Arthur’s back bumper.
He was in Tegan’s driveway, near the high fence that surrounded their wooded backyard.
“What’s going on!” I shouted at Arthur over the near-constant racket of the dogs.
“Don’t know!” he shouted back. “I keep calling—I tried both Tegan and Reese a hundred times—finally went in, but they ain’t in the house, ain’t nowhere—”
“Did you try his workshop?” Tegan’s shop was a separate building out back, where he did most of his work.
“The dogs are out! And Tegan and Reese ain’t gonna appreciate it if I shoot ’em! I tried everything—got some meat from the grocery store, even tried calling a vet for some tranqs and she threatened to call the cops on me. Almost got bit climbing the fence—”
“I’ll take care of it,” I said, heading for the front door.
“Hang on, I locked back up,” Arthur called, drawing a set of lockpicks out of his jacket pocket and tossing them to me. “Be careful!”
I was glad Arthur had his picks on him. It didn’t seem polite to break down Tegan and Reese’s door, even to make sure they were okay.
Shit, they’d better be okay.
The dogs in the backyard became more agitated as I approached the house. The sound waves teased out to only four different animals—same as the last time I had been here—but if I didn’t concentrate on the math, it sounded like a hell of a lot more. Tegan’s place wasn’t squished in next to his neighbors like the houses in the city proper, but still, it was amazing no one had called in a noise complaint yet.
Amazing and lucky. If there was one thing Tegan would appreciate less than anyt
hing else, it was having the cops called to his property.
I slid the metal picks into the lock and felt the pins go up one after the other, the mathematics clicking beautifully into place. I twisted the cylinder and pushed the door open.
Tegan and Reese had a homey living room, with squashy furniture across from an entertainment center surrounded by shelves of books and DVDs. On the other side of the room from the door a stone fireplace formed a partial wall; behind it opened a large custom kitchen that let out into the backyard. I’d never seen any more of the house, but from the outside dimensions I knew it couldn’t be much larger, and I was right: a bedroom opened to the right of the living room with a bathroom and closet behind it, and that was it. I did a cursory check throughout the house, but Arthur was far more observant than I was and he’d already been through. It was empty.
I went to the back door. The barking escalated to deafening as I approached, along with scratching and snarling, as if the dogs wanted to burst in, tear my head off, and rip my flesh limb from limb. “See, this is why I don’t like animals,” I groused aloud. “You guys have met me before.”
To be fair, this was the first time I’d broken into their home.
I surveyed the house. I needed to get the dogs in here and get myself back out without letting them follow me. I could yank open the back door and then race out the front, but then they’d be free to return into the yard. I needed to trap them.
My eyes flickered around the space. The bathroom had doors to both the bedroom and the kitchen, so I could potentially open the back door, run through the kitchen and living room, circle around through the bedroom, and then cut back to the kitchen through the bathroom and be out the back door. If the dogs chased me through the circuit, I’d be able to get back out while they were still in the house and shut them all inside.
I peered out the back window. All four dogs were barrels of corded muscle and fur, coiled power and vicious jaws. I let my vision fade out and concentrated only on the mathematics: the oscillations of movement, the symmetry of gait, the bunching and releasing of muscles bending limbs into locomotion.
