by SL Huang
“Rayal,” I said.
She looked up.
“Best thing we can do right now is send you out of the country, into hiding. You and Liliana both.”
She froze, her hands stilling on the papers.
“Fuck you,” I said. “You don’t want to take her, do you?”
“You don’t understand…”
“She’s your daughter.” My voice came out rough and jagged around the edges. I didn’t even know what I meant by that.
The papers in Denise’s hands crumpled where she was gripping them. “She’s my work,” she corrected quietly.
“Would you take her as your work, then?”
She lowered her eyes and didn’t answer.
“If the other choice is her going back to a lab?” I said. “Being dissected by government scientists?”
Her hair had fallen around her face so I couldn’t see her expression. “Maybe that’s where she belongs.”
I clenched my jaw together and breathed, fighting down rioting emotions.
“You can get her out of the country?” said Checker. “Stupid question, of course you can. Denise—we should at least get you—”
“No.” I didn’t care anymore where Liliana came from, what her code was. She still didn’t deserve to be torn to pieces or disassembled or killed or locked up crying in a laboratory to satisfy someone else’s sick voyeurism. She was still a child, even if she was a programmed one. “No. Not unless she’s going to take care of Liliana.”
Checker and Pilar stared at me. Rayal didn’t move.
“Cas…” said Checker.
“Didn’t you need my help with some math?” I said.
“Yes—uh, yes.” He hesitated for a moment, and I could almost see him decide to come back to this conversation shortly with better arguments. He shoved a tablet and a stack of printouts at me. “Here. The tablet’s jacked into Liliana’s programming. The hard copies are what we have so far—sorry; all the laptops are running things.”
“It’s fine,” I said. I took the stack of papers and the tablet from him and went to sit down, feeling very tired. Checker started sorting through the drives I’d dumped on him from the lab, digging adapters out of a bag next to him and plugging into his laptop.
I sat and skimmed the pages, letting my brain relax into it, the math a welcome relief from feelings I didn’t want to acknowledge. I saw why Checker had given me Liliana’s code: he and Rayal had built their algorithm off the way the natural language processing worked, trying to isolate characteristics unique to the ’bots. Ironic. Rayal and her team must have tried so hard to do everything right to make their creations sound human, and now we were hoping they’d done something wrong.
I began scrolling through the tablet, and the structure of Liliana’s brain rose up around me, her thoughts becoming probabilistic paths. I closed my eyes momentarily. This felt like I was violating her, stampeding her privacy and exposing her—which was ridiculous, because I was an incredibly nosy person and I had never felt the slightest guilt about prying into anyone’s life, but still, this felt wrong—
And for some reason it felt even more wrong as the structure took shape around me and I saw exactly how she worked, saw that Checker was right, that she was no more than a probabilistic Turing machine, that she didn’t think. The probability distributions were there, in her code, flipping a thousand million coins for every action she took. Checker and Rayal kept telling me, but I didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see.
It doesn’t matter. What could possibly justify what the mobs of rioters or Arkacite or the government would want to do to her? What could justify doing that to a child, even one who begged and cried and played according to algorithms?
I shut away the overall structure and concentrated on the natural language design. This I could isolate, pretend it belonged somewhere else, to a computer who didn’t look so damn much like a five-year-old girl.
I read, and read. And blinked.
“Checker,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“The natural language processing,” I said. “Did you know NLP had gotten this far?”
He frowned. “I was wondering about that, too. But it must have, right? NLP isn’t really my area—”
“Mine either,” I said. “But…I’m pretty sure some of this research—it doesn’t exist yet.”
Rayal and Pilar were watching our exchange. “Of course it exists,” protested Rayal. “The breakthroughs we built the software off of are almost ten years old. And they weren’t Arkacite’s; I remember when they came out—”
“That’s impossible,” I said. “The math here—I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“And from the CS side, I was still under the impression we were really bad at NLP,” Checker jumped in. “Till I saw this, of course, but—natural language is hard. And we’re just bad at it—well, we aren’t, we as human beings are great at it, but we’re bad at understanding how to program it with any degree of understanding, or nuance, or completeness. Or, well, we were…”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” said Rayal. “The project was under so much secrecy—they ordered us not to talk about even a hint of what we were doing with other researchers, because they said other companies hadn’t picked up on what the new NLP research meant. But it had to be out there in academic research, right? Nobody else was using it for industry before we were, but in academia—”
“No,” I said. “It’s not. We don’t have this. It doesn’t exist.”
“But you just said it isn’t your area,” said Rayal. “Is it possible—”
“No,” I said. “We don’t have this math.”
“Except—except we do,” said Rayal. “We used it.”
“What do you think…?” started Checker.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t like not knowing.”
Checker and Rayal exchanged an uneasy glance. I scowled and went back to Liliana’s code, but I’d barely found where I’d left off when Checker made a strangled sound.
He was staring at his screen, headphones on. “Guys…” He wasn’t looking at us, and it sounded like he couldn’t get enough air. “Guys, things might…they might be worse than we thought…”
I rushed around to look over his shoulder; Rayal and Pilar did, too. He was playing the security footage from Ally Eight’s lab. In the middle of the lab was a sweet-looking elderly lady, with white hair and a pastel cardigan and the symmetric features of one of the Ally Eight robots. And the crowd…the crowd surged in around her, monstrous, tearing at her, stampeding her, and…
They literally tore her apart.
They dug fingers into her synthetic flesh, ripped her hair from her scalp, twisted her limbs back until they bent and broke inside her. She struggled and cried out, her face contorted in agony—one of the rioters found a heavy length of pipe and smashed it over and over into her skull, metal clanging dully on metal, until the animation went out of her and she collapsed, sagging into the crowd’s ravenous grasp. Her eyes stared dead and sightless at the camera. The humans continued to crawl over her like savage jackals, peeling off her skin and mangling the metal skeleton inside her to leave her a mass of misshapen pieces.
Checker had turned away. “I hate people,” he mumbled.
“Aren’t you the one who keeps saying they’re not alive?” My voice came out too harsh. I felt numb.
“Neither was the Library of Alexandria,” said Checker.
Pilar made a small sound.
The screen showed the mob heaving the remains of the little old lady robot above their heads, waving broken metal limbs like they were deranged trophies.
I moved away. I didn’t want to see any more. Didn’t want to see what they did to the human scientists. “Get me a count of how many ’bots were there,” I said. “And run your face recognition IDs on the people involved.”
Checker blinked at me uncomprehendingly, and then reluctantly turned back to the computer.
“I can do it,”
said Pilar softly. “You’ve got more important things to work on, anyway. He taught me how so I could help with the other ones,” she added in my direction.
Checker handed her the laptop and his headphones, and she went back over to the couch with them.
“This isn’t open to question anymore.” I turned to square off with Rayal. “We need to get you and Liliana out of here. No arguments. You can take care of her for now—maybe your husband will recover later or we can figure something else out. But if anyone this crazed finds out where you are—” I broke off. I couldn’t protect them against a mob, not one like that. “You’ve got to understand this. You were the inventor of these things, or as close as it gets. They’ll want your blood. They’ll burn you alive. I’m telling you, I will help you take Liliana and run, and you’re a fool if you don’t—”
Rayal’s hand flew to her mouth. “Oh my God!” She dug at her pockets and came up empty. “My team, what about my team? I need a—a phone, I need a phone, right now!”
I stared at her, utterly sandbagged.
Checker was already grabbing another laptop off the table behind him. “Give me their names. We’ll get to them. Right, Cas?”
The world felt like it was tilting on its side. I was trying to save one little girl, and protect one woman—when had I become a knight in shining armor for wanted scientists? Since when was I protecting all of Arkacite—the people who’d been experimenting on Liliana in the first place? I can’t save everyone! People die every day—this is not my responsibility!
Checker was taking the names of Rayal’s team and working on locating them, not waiting for my agreement. He’d just assumed I’d be in. I was simultaneously annoyed at the presumption and bizarrely flattered he would think that well of me—and ashamed that he shouldn’t have.
This wasn’t in my job description. I didn’t want this in my job description.
“They’re all at Arkacite,” said Checker. “I’m tracking phone GPS, and—Arkacite must be having some sort of huddle about this, which I guess makes sense, given the situation. Oh, wait, the first guy you said, Vikash Agarwal? He’s not there. But everyone else is.”
“Vikash is the one who called me,” said Rayal. “He warned me—”
“Oh, God,” said Checker. “Cas, get to Arkacite.”
He’d brought up live news footage. A mob of protesters flooded around the building, shouting, throwing things—the police were already there, but too few, trying to hold back the mob—
Checker was flailing in a panic. “I can’t get room data from the GPS, and they took their video security offline after we broke in; it isn’t back up yet—”
“I’ll find them,” I said, and left.
Chapter 27
My car from our escape that morning was a few blocks away, so I grabbed Arthur’s again instead. As soon as I was on the 405, I veered onto the shoulder and floored the accelerator. The speedometer ticked up to ninety, then over a hundred. The rest of the freeway whipped by in a blur, the other cars motionless compared to me.
Jamming the pedal through the carpet also helped me take out my frustration. How had I gotten into this situation? Saving people wasn’t what I did. You couldn’t save everybody—if I tried, I would inevitably fail at some point, so the only logically consistent solution was not to try—right?
Fuck, it made sense in my head.
I was lucky; I didn’t pick up the highway patrol until I was well into the Westside and almost at Venice. I led them on a merry chase down the shoulder, the lights and sirens screaming after me. An LAPD car tried to cut me off at the end of the ramp, but I popped up the wheels against the curb and was going so fast I caught air and cut the corner onto the street. The highway patrol cars slammed on their brakes behind me, gridlocking behind the stopped cop car before they managed to rearrange themselves and tear off after me with more wailing of sirens.
Having the cops on my tail was a good thing today. I was leading them to where they were needed. They’d have too much to deal with at Arkacite to worry about me.
I heard the crowd before I saw it, filling the plaza and swelling into a mass of humanity in the street, entirely blocking the throughway. I pulled the e-brake and took Arthur’s car into a skid, sliding sideways to land at the fringes of the stampeding horde of protesters before tumbling out. I ducked into the swarm of people before the cop cars could scream to a stop behind me and catch a glimpse of my face—I’d have to remember to tell Arthur to report his car stolen.
The crowd hadn’t breached the police barricade, thank God, and the Arkacite security forces had come out to join their brethren in blue holding back the throng in a line across the plaza. I felt some grudging respect for them, their previous incompetencies notwithstanding—most rent-a-cops would’ve run rather than stand their ground against an angry mob.
I pushed around the edge of the crowd, ducking through the milling people to slip into the same alley I’d used two nights before. The small parking lot it led into was empty, the businesses shuttered—I couldn’t blame them. I would have cut out and dashed for home too if my behemoth of a neighbor was about to be overrun.
The angry protesters hadn’t made their way around here yet. They probably didn’t know the alleyway went through, or that there might be an entrance here—well, of sorts. The wall I’d blown a hole in had been boarded over, the rubble cleared away, but it was a simple enough matter to kick out the plywood. The screws screeched and cracked as they gave way.
Denise Rayal’s office had been on the seventh floor. I was betting most of her team had worked there too, though they would probably be in a conference room for whatever meeting they were having, wouldn’t they? Unless they had barricaded themselves in a basement lab once the mob had surrounded the building…how would I have time to search every room? How?
All the security must have been out front, leaving the building emptier than it had been that morning. I dashed to the nearest elevator banks and almost screamed—I didn’t have a keycard to call the lifts.
I kicked open the door to the stairs. All I could do was start with what I knew. I pounded up six flights, pushing my sprint until my lungs clenched and heaved.
I needn’t have worried about finding them. I burst out the door onto floor seven just as a gunshot went off.
I kicked through more doors, tearing around corners toward where I had triangulated the sound—
Three more gunshots. Four. Five.
I’d drawn my P7. I smashed the butt of it into the glass door to the back offices; it shattered spectacularly—
Six. Seven. Eight.
A conference room was ahead of me.
Nine.
I burst through the door.
Morrison Sloan stood on one side of the room, his arm sticking out with a handgun as if he didn’t quite know what to do with it. Except that he did. I took in six bodies on the floor in the first second, and Imogene Grant was the last one standing, backed against the wall, her face slack and uncomprehending—
Sloan’s finger tightened on the trigger one more time. I thrust my fingers into my pocket and then dove in front of the gun, hand outstretched, just as he fired.
I felt the impact in my palm as my phone stopped the bullet, a punch through the metal, but the force calculation was laughably simple, and I knew the layers of casing and chips and battery had been enough. I landed heavily on my side on the conference room table and twisted back up as Sloan fired twice more, but I kept the phone in line with the barrel—it dented and buckled in my hand as each slug hit—
I thought, shit, he fired more than ten rounds; that gun’s not California legal and a Glock 17 holds seventeen rounds plus one in the pipe—he’d been firing before I got here—maybe a lot—
My other hand gripped my own gun, but I didn’t know where to shoot. How did one kill a robot? Where was the weak spot? I had no idea how the hardware was set up—whether I should just Swiss Cheese him—an inane jabber in my mind wondered if this would reset my count with Art
hur—
Sloan frowned slightly. “You’re not one of Satan’s horde. You’re not one of the ones who tried to take us over with the artificial people.” His gun hand dipped. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
I had no idea what to say to that. Did he know what he was? Fuck, what even counted as “knowing” for him?
Come to that, how was he here? If his programming was anything like Liliana’s, he didn’t have the motivation, the internal drive, to decide to go and find an illegal firearm and figure out a way in through Arkacite’s security and commit murder—
The realization crystallized much more slowly than it should have. “Someone sent you,” I said. “Who? Who was it?”
“I did it for the people,” he said. He gestured vaguely at the room full of bodies. “They’re the ones who unleashed the scourge…” His eyes drifted behind me, as if only just seeing what he’d done.
I wanted to shoot his silicone skin full of holes and shake him, demand to be told who had programmed him, what was going on, but he wouldn’t know, would he? He couldn’t tell me what he hadn’t been programmed to.
Rayal might be able to find out. She and Checker could dig into his head, see who had written the code to make him come here, who had put a weapon in his hand.
“Put the gun down,” I said. I could tie him up. Take him out with me. How strong was he? Never mind; I could estimate the upper limit of tensile strength for the metal in his limbs. I wished I could knock him out, but I didn’t know how without damaging him, damaging the evidence we might need.
“Are they dead?” he said. The frown between his eyes deepened.
I didn’t look. I thought the answer was probably yes. Grant made a small whimpering sound behind me. “Grant, see to your people. Sloan, put the gun down. Now. Or I’ll shoot you.” He could understand threats, right? The AI would know how to respond. The AI would know to acquiesce.
“I killed them,” he said, sounding confused. “It’s wrong to kill people.” He raised the Glock to his temple, pressed the barrel against the artificial skin there, and pulled the trigger.
