“Oh, you promise.” I snorted. “I’ve got a feeling your promises don’t hold much weight. You promised me you’d delete all Carissa’s information if I told you I’m done, but your boyfriend says otherwise. Pardon me if I don’t take your word at face value.”
I turned my back on her, crunching through the snow, a bone-deep chill that had nothing to do with the weather sweeping across me.
Her voice carried over on the whistling wind, indignant and higher than usual. “Seriously? You’re just going to leave me here?”
I didn’t turn around, tightening my hood. “You can call an Uber, right?” I called over my shoulder.
I lied my ass off in a text to Joe, pretending everything at the office had gone splendidly. I couldn’t tell the truth because I could scarcely find words to articulate the actuality of what had happened, not even to myself. The further I drove from the cemetery, the more distance I put between myself and 311 Emery, the more ridiculous the whole thing seemed.
I mean, robots? Really? I asked myself, but it sounded like Carissa’s voice drenched in skepticism.
But instead of exiting on my off ramp, I got off two exits earlier and fired off a text to Jason, hoping he would be home. Our company shut down every year for the holidays. Odds were he’d be free for an impromptu visit.
A chorus of great booming barks greeted my knock on Jason’s front door, followed closely by a louder voice of the human variety.
The door flung open. Jackson’s wide shoulders filled the doorway as he hunched over, his hand in a vice grip around the collar his German Shepard wore.
“You remember the drill, right?” He jerked his head at his dog. “She needs the sniff test.”
I wondered briefly if I’d fail Lexi’s sniff test, positive the stench of bleach still clung to my pores, but I held my hand out anyway. Her enormous, quivering nose inched along the back of my wrist. She took so long checking me out that I had almost begun eulogizing my hand, but eventually she stopped, blinking up at me. Her eyes had always unnerved me, so solemn and intelligent, and whenever I looked into them for long stretches, I half expected her to open her mouth and speak English.
“Lexi,” Jackson chided.
She backed out of the threshold. He released his chokehold and she turned tail back into their house.
“Should have brought a pizza with you,” he said through a smile. “She loves the delivery guys. Come on in.”
“Hey Ben,” Jason called from deeper inside the house.
I followed Jackson through the foyer and into the living room, where Lexi had made camp on Jason’s lap.
“How was your New Year’s?”
As Jackson took a seat beside Jason, I sunk onto the armchair opposite the L shaped sectional they sat on. “Uneventful. I watched my cousin’s kids so she and her husband could have a night out. You?”
“We went to my grandmother’s.” Jason ran his fingers through tufts of Lexi’s hair. Her eyes rolled lazily, as though drunk on the affection.
“Seriously?” I looked to Jackson for confirmation.
He crossed beefy arms rippling with muscle across his chest and nodded. “You wouldn’t believe all the sherry those little old ladies can put away.”
“I thought she wasn’t exactly thrilled with the whole…” I cast about my mind to find a PC way to phrase my thoughts but came to the conclusion there really wasn’t any. And I doubted I’d offend them, in any case. “About the whole gay thing.”
Jason rolled his deeply shadowed eyes. “Well, recently she’s come to the realization that it’s fabulously chic to have a gay grandson.”
“She asked if we were going to get married,” Jackson offered. “And if so, who had to be the one to propose because “she couldn’t tell which one of us was the girl in the relationship.””
I suppressed a laugh, unsure whether it would be construed as inappropriate, and swiftly changed the subject, downshifting into chitchat to mask the real topic I wanted to discuss. After half an hour and three subject switches later, the lull I was hoping for finally happened.
“So I was watching this movie the other day about AI,” I said with a forced casual air, praying they wouldn’t see my pulse thrumming in my carotid.
“What movie?” Jason asked. “Maybe we’ve seen it.”
“Some shitty B movie I’d never recommend to someone of your discerning tastes. Anyway, it made me wonder how close scientists really are to creating actual artificial intelligence. Is it even possible?”
Jason pressed his lips together, looking thoughtfully up at the towering arched ceiling. “Well, I suppose anything’s possible, right?”
“Sure, but how probable do you think it is that they’ve already achieved it? You worked with robotics at MIT, right?”
“Yeah, but nothing to the extent of the stuff you see on Westworld or whatever.” His brow furled. “I wouldn’t have any idea if they’ve already achieved it, but I think the whole thing is inevitable. The strides they’ve already made in that field are pretty amazing.”
“Like what strides?”
“Well, you heard about the robot in Japan that scientists taught how to dance?” He grabbed a towel off the coffee table and mopped up the pool of saliva Lexi had dripped all over the knee of his jeans. “Just by dancing in front of it. It catalogued the information, stored it, and mimicked it back. I mean, that’s not exactly Westworld stuff, but it’s pretty fucking cool.”
“But what kinds of things would need to be incorporated into the brain to make some Westworld type robot?” I pressed. “My thought was a program that ran through search engines, but I’m guessing there would need to be some kind of advanced coding there that would allow them to improvise as well. And that doesn’t even cover the facial expressions.”
He squinted, pushing Lexi off his lap. She gave a few huffy snorts that reminded me of Kylie before settling onto another cushion on the sectional.
“Mapping the brain through search engines would give it tons of good data to sift through, but it wouldn’t know how to synthesize all that information intrinsically, someone would have to teach it how.” His gaze drifted from mine, and I imagined the gears in his brain clicking and whirring. “My guess would be the same for facial expressions, assuming the machine’s got enough motors and whatnot under the skin to achieve different facial expressions in the first place. I mean, sure, it can sort through YouTube and streaming video, watching human faces till kingdom come, but it’s not going to know what the hell to do with all that information unless it’s been taught. Even the robots in China that have the ability to make different expressions have to be controlled by a human programmer who’s written specific instructions. For a robot to be able to do it on its own without being taught seems unlikely, unless they can come up with some way to model the machine’s brain after a human brain and cause some kind of robotic synapses that would mimic ours. Or maybe they can write a program that can continually write its own code, update itself without human interference.”
“Would a self-writing program allow the machine to improvise?”
His forehead scrunched up like he’d been suddenly struck by the mother of all migraines. I felt much the same way.
“It wouldn’t be true improvisation if you had to write a code for it. I guess it might be possible to write one to plan for any given variable, any number of possible reactions to any given situation, but that’d still be a hell of a lot of work and headaches. Hours of coding and testing and rewriting for failures. I have a feeling most of those actual robots you see clips of on the news are just parroting canned responses, or else listening for specific phrases or words they’ve been conditioned to respond to. But this’s all far beyond my scope of knowledge, to be honest. Nothing but conjecture.”
“Didn’t we read somewhere that MIT and Boston University had created a human brain-controlled robot?” Jackson scratched at his stubble and withdrew a hand covered in tiny tumbleweeds of dog hair. He gave it a disgusted look and shook it off int
o the trash can beneath an end table. “It’s monitored by an EKG or something? All you’ve got to do is think about whatever you want it to do and it does it?”
Jason laughed and patted Jackson’s knee in a kind of loving condescension. “That’s why he was an art major.”
“And that’s why your decorating skills are bottom of the barrel,” Jackson shot back. “You should have seen his bachelor pad before we moved in here. Disgusting. Looked like a frat house imploded, dirty drawers and socks as far as the eye could see.”
The Tiffany blue walls, sweeping curtains and crown molding had all been Jackson’s doing, I remembered, looking around the living room. I couldn’t picture Jason expending too much effort to pick out curtains or wasting time agonizing over what kind of wood to use for the flooring. But then if I didn’t know Jackson, I wouldn’t have thought him capable of it, either. I’d had no idea he ran a large interior design firm until Carissa met him over a year ago at one of my company’s parties. It was amazing, the information she collected about people whenever I wasn’t around, as though I was some type of walking mute button that made people clam up in my presence. Apparently their platonic love affair had begun when Carissa stopped him at the bar and said, “Oh my God, your blazer is amazing, look at those lapels,” to which he’d responded, “And where did you find those shoes?”
Jason gave him a touché kind of look and carried on, elbows on his knees. “In that study, the robot was only given a really simple sorting test with only two choices, and the human tester was hooked up to an EEG—” he shot Jackson a pointed look, who rolled his eyes, shaking his head—“that detected when the human had noticed a robot error, and then the robot would ultimately correct the error. So, all you’d have to do is mentally agree or disagree with the choices the robot is making. You wouldn’t have to train yourself to think in a specific way, because the robot adapts to you. The act of noticing a mistake is an automatic thing for people but writing a program for that would be all kinds of complicated. It’s not a polished technology yet, though. Slow-going and needs a lot of concentration on the human’s part, but if they eventually fixed the errors, they could use the technology for, I don’t know, severely paralyzed people who can’t speak, or whatever. But even that’s still a long way off. Which makes me think a real-life Westworld type robot won’t be making an appearance for quite some time.”
My brain felt like a wrung sponge, useless and strained. Jason was the best programmer I knew, and if he didn’t have any definitive answers, I didn’t see how I’d ever be able to find one.
Lexi gave a great heaving sigh, her head drooping onto her paws.
“You clowns are boring my dog.” Jackson stood, patting his thigh, and Lexi bounded off the couch, ears quivering at attention. “I’m gonna take her outside. Watching her search for the tennis ball in the snow is sadistically amusing.”
“Must not have been too bad a movie to get you all interested in the mechanics of a robot,” Jason said once we heard the glass slider bang shut behind Jackson and the dog. “What’s the name of it again?”
I didn’t have the energy to invent a title for some fictional film. “I totally spaced on the title. I’ll let you know when I remember.”
T he last conference call of my first day back at work after the holidays ended at five p.m., and I was contemplating dinner options when the doorbell rang.
Dexter started mid-bath and streaked up the staircase like a tiny orange the Flash. Nobody who knew me well and visited regularly came to the front door to ring the bell; they all used the side door instead.
It wasn’t someone who knew me well, I found when I answered the bell. Nor was it a Girl Scout selling cookies, which I would have preferred over Jess.
“You didn’t answer my calls,” she said by way of greeting, shifting her feet on the welcome mat, snow glittering in wisps of her hair the wind whipped around her face.
“I was working.” And ignoring them. “How did you know where I live?”
“You put your address on the paperwork you signed.”
The paperwork where I’d allegedly signed away Carissa’s identity to a mad scientist. The thought of that made my blood roil in my veins.
“What do you want?”
“You’re not going to invite me in?” She waved her hand at the darkness swirling thickly around her. “It’s freezing out here.”
Grudgingly, I moved aside and shut the door behind her. She pulled something out of the pocket of her parka and pressed it into my hand. Carissa’s cell phone.
“You never got it back that day at the office. I thought you might want it.”
I slid the phone into my back pocket. “Thanks. Is that all?”
Her nostrils flared the way an angry horse’s would as her jaw set. “No, it’s not all. God, I drove all the way down here because I told you I’d talk to Nick, and now you’re trying to get rid of me? I get why you’re angry, but I didn’t do a goddamn thing wrong. I overlooked you stranding me in the cemetery already, so can you try to tone down the attitude?”
A long moment passed in which I glared at her and she glared right back, but her resolve faded first, the tension in her face softening.
“Can’t we just sit down and talk?”
I turned and made my way to the kitchen in silence, pulling out a chair. She stripped off her parka, hung it over the back of her chair and sat, sighing long and hard, like it had really been one of those days.
“Well, I spoke to him.”
“Yeah. I got that part. I’m waiting for the part where you start listing all the excuses you’ve made for him.”
She made to run a hand over her face but stopped suddenly, like she’d experienced an electrical shock. I’d seen Carissa do that plenty of times after she remembered she had a face full of makeup she didn’t want to smear.
“Look, I learned a long time ago that he’s going to do what he’s going to do, and I don’t have feminine wiles enough to convince him of anything. It’s not like I’m asking him to order Chinese over pizza.”
I didn’t say anything, which made her sigh once again.
“I did try. I told him he’s not taking your feelings into account and how hard it’s been for you, not just because Carissa is dead, but because she died in such a violent, unsolved way, but all he said was that he was sorry she’s dead, but she’s the best option for him to work with, since he’s got so much data on her specifically, more so than any other Lingering client.”
And that was all Lingering was, wasn’t it? Just some smokescreen to work behind until Nick found his ideal subject to force into his bastardized version of immortality.
“That’s bullshit,” I said, my voice like shattering glass. “He told me it’s because she’s “much more fun to look at than the male YouTuber.” If you’re going to lie to me, you may as well have the facts straight.”
She flicked her hair over her shoulder, cupping her chin in her hand. “If you honestly think he’s going to tell his girlfriend that, you’re crazy. He told me the data thing. Maybe it’s both. I don’t know. I only know what he told me.”
I slapped the table and pushed my chair back. “Well, thanks for coming by.”
“He wants to talk to you again. Well, more specifically, he wants to show you something. And I know you’re busy being angry and everything, but if you want a better explanation from him, I suggest you take him up on it. He’s going to do this with or without you, and Ben,” she said, ducking her head to meet my eyes, “I’m sure you don’t want him testing her all on his own.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I snapped.
“I’m not saying he’s going to do anything…untoward or whatever, it’s just that I know how protective you are over her. I thought you’d want to be involved, since Nick’s extending you that opportunity.”
As if I should be grateful he wanted to give me the time of day. Like I should be thanking my lucky stars he’d told me at all, bowled over with gratitude that he had deigned me wo
rthy to see his lab. I couldn’t help laughing, but it wasn’t just the hard, forced chuckle I’d intended. It turned into some hysterical, stomach-hurting, eye-streaming laughter that took forever to wind down, no matter the concerned looks Jess shot me. If anything, that made it worse, her ‘concern.’
“You’re cracking up,” she said, once I finally got a handle on myself. “Jesus, take a breath.”
I wiped my eyes on my sleeve, shaking my head. “You two are nuts. Fucking nuts—”
But the vestiges of laughter still clinging valiantly to my throat subsided as headlights illuminated the sheer white curtains of the dining room window I could see from where I sat. I stood to get a better look, but I couldn’t make out whose car had just pulled into my driveway.
“What’s the matter?”
I held out a hand as I headed for the side door. “Just be quiet, okay? I don’t know who this is, but keep your mouth shut.”
A puddle of light ignited the snow on the stoop when I flicked the switch. Boots navigated their way slowly through the snow, and the person they belonged to stepped into the light.
I threw a look at Jess over my shoulder before I opened the door to Detective Matthews. “No talking.”
She hissed under her breath as I let Detective Matthews inside. He seemed slightly taken aback when he saw I had company, uncertain eyes swiveling from me to Jess and back again.
“Do you have time to talk for a few minutes?” he asked.
“Yeah, sure.” I waved a hand vaguely in Jess’s direction. “This is my friend Jess.”
Her painted eyebrows rose ever so slightly, but I couldn’t very well introduce her as this bitch I kinda hate, now could I?
Detective Matthews pulled out a chair, giving Jess a quasi-smile. “Well, I’m sorry to intrude, but this should only take a minute. How’ve you been?”
“Fantastic. You?”
He didn’t answer, and I sat too, watching with mild apprehension as he once again flipped open his thick canvas folder.
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