Death Match

by Lincoln Child

  Mauchly was not a particularly imaginative man, but—as he slowly swivelled through an axis of one hundred and eighty degrees—he found he had to fight back vertigo. A dark metal landscape—the roof of the inner tower—ran away from him on all sides. It was studded with cabling, and its flow was interrupted by countless small equipment housings. Some ten feet above, like a titanic lowering sky, hung the steel underbelly of the penthouse structure. It was fixed to the tower’s roof by a carapace of vertical I-beams. Two metal-sheathed data trunks ran from fairings in the upper structure to the roof of the inner tower. In the distance he could make out a third, much larger boxlike structure: the shaft of Silver’s private elevator. Around the periphery ran a lattice of horizontal slats, through which the rich hues of the setting sun could be glimpsed. An observer, staring up at this decorative latticework from street level, would never know it was concealing the jointure of two physically separate structures, the inner tower and the penthouse above it. But to Mauchly, sixty floors above Manhattan, it felt like being between the layers of a huge metal sandwich.

  And there was something else: something more unsettling. Set into the walls of the long axis, midway between the two structures, were the telescoping sections of the huge security plates. Mauchly could make out three indentations in their steel flanks: two fitted to the data trunks, the other to the private elevator. The plates were fully retracted now, but if an emergency was ever declared they would slide forward and lock together, sealing the penthouse from the tower below. From his vantage point, the massive hydraulic pistons that powered the plates looked like the springs of a colossal mouse trap.

  “Mr. Mauchly?” Sheldrake called up from below.

  Mauchly roused himself, took a fresh grip on the ladder, and—turning his eyes from the baffle—climbed up through the security hatchway and into the vestibule of the penthouse.

  His first impression was the simple relief of setting foot on solid ground again. The second impression, following immediately, was of unrelieved dark.

  “Dorfman!”

  There was a rustling in the dark beside him. “Here, Mr. Mauchly.”

  “Why haven’t you turned on the lights?”

  “I’ve been looking for a switch, sir.”

  Mauchly rose, feeling his way forward until he touched metal. He felt along the wall until he reached a door—closed—then continued along the walls until he returned once again to the security hatchway. His circuit of the small compartment yielded no light switch.

  There was a clatter, and a dark shape suddenly thrust its way into the hatchway, obscuring the dim light filtering up from below.

  “Sheldrake?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Call down to some of your men. Get some torches up here.”

  The shape descended again out of view.

  Mauchly paused, thinking. The penthouse compartment was six stories high. Silver’s quarters occupied the top two stories. This huge space below housed the machines that made up Liza.

  Silver had always been easygoing about Eden’s business matters, leaving day-to-day operations to the board of directors. The one thing he was extremely possessive about was Liza’s physical plant. He’d been up here every day during construction, overseeing the installation himself, sometimes even physically moving equipment in from the cranes through the unfinished walls. Throughout, Mauchly remembered, Liza had been kept running on a large suite of rather old computers with a portable power supply; inserting the various components into place, with electricity flowing and computers online, had been a harrowing process. But Silver had insisted. “She can’t lose consciousness,” he’d told Mauchly. “She never has, and I can’t allow her to do so now. Liza’s not some personal computer you can just reboot. She’s had all this time of self-awareness—who’s to say what would be lost or altered if she lost power?”

  A similar anxiousness lay behind the precautions Silver took to guard Liza from the outside world. Mauchly knew that, for whatever reason, Liza’s intelligence had never been transferred from one computer to another: instead, newer and larger computers had simply been linked to the older ones, creating an expanding sprawl of “big iron” hardware of several vintages and makes. The powerful cluster of supercomputers that did Eden’s outboard processing—data gathering, the client monitoring, all the rest—were housed in the inner tower below, monitored by countless technical specialists. But the central core of Liza, the controlling intelligence, lay here, cared for by Silver alone.

  Mauchly had never set foot within Liza’s physical plant since earliest construction, and now he cursed himself for the oversight. In retrospect, his lack of knowledge was a severe breach of security. He thought back on what he knew about the four-story space beyond. He realized he knew very little; Silver had protected it jealously, even from him.

  Mauchly edged back to the door he’d noticed before. For a moment, he feared Silver might have locked it from the inside. But the simple knob turned beneath his grasp. As the door slid open, light at last returned: not lamplight, but a vast thicket of diodes and LEDs, winking red and green and amber in the velvet darkness, stretching ahead into what seemed limitless distance. There was sound here, too: not the banshee-like howl of the building’s power plant below, but a steady hum of backup generators and the subtler, measured cadence of electromechanical devices.

  Instructing Dorfman to wait for Sheldrake, Mauchly stepped forward into the gloom.

  FIFTY-SIX

  S ilver led the way down the corridor to a door he unlocked with a simple, old-fashioned key. Brusquely, he directed them into a tiny bedroom, spotlessly clean, without decoration of any kind. The narrow bed, with its thin mattress and metal rails, resembled a military cot. Beside was an unvarnished wood table on which lay a Bible. A single bare bulb hung from the ceiling. The room was so spartan, so unrelievedly white, it could easily have passed for a monk’s cell.

  Silver closed the door behind him, then began to pace. His face was contorted by conflicting emotions. Once he stopped, turned toward Lash, and seemed about to speak—only to turn away again.

  At last, he wheeled around.

  “You were wrong,” he said.

  Lash waited.

  “I had wonderful parents. They were nurturing. Patient. Eager to teach. I think of them every day. The smell of my father’s aftershave when he’d hug me coming home from work. My mother singing as I played under the piano.”

  He turned away again and resumed his pacing. Lash knew better than to say anything.

  “My father died when I was three. Car accident. My mother outlived him by two years. I had no other family. So I was sent to live with an aunt in Madison, Wisconsin. She had her own family, three older boys.”

  Silver’s pace slowed. His hands clenched behind his back, knuckles white.

  “I wasn’t wanted there. To the boys I was weak, ugly, a figure of scorn. I wasn’t Rick. I was ‘Fuckface.’ Their mother tolerated it because she didn’t like having me around, either. Usually I was excluded from family rituals like Sunday dinner, movies, bowling. If I was brought along it was an afterthought, or because my absence would be noticed by neighbors. I cried a lot at night. Sometimes I prayed I’d die in my sleep so I wouldn’t have to wake up anymore.”

  There was no trace of self-pity in Silver’s voice. He simply rapped out the words, one after another, as if reciting a shopping list.

  “The boys made sure I was a pariah at school. They enjoyed threatening the girls with ‘Silver cooties,’ laughing at their disgust.”

  Silver stopped, looked again at Lash.

  “The father wasn’t as bad as the rest. He worked the night shift as a keypunch operator in the university computer lab. Sometimes I’d go along with him to work, just to escape the house. I began to grow fascinated with the computers. They didn’t hurt you, or judge you. If your program didn’t run, it wasn’t because you were skinny, or ugly, but because you’d made a mistake in your code. Fix it, and the program would run.”
>
  Silver was talking faster now, the words coming more easily. Lash nodded understandingly, careful to hide his growing elation. He’d seen this many times before in police interrogations. It was a huge effort to start confessing. But once they got started, the suspect couldn’t seem to talk fast enough.

  “I began spending more and more time at the computer lab. Programming had a logic that was comforting, somehow. And there was always more to learn. At first, the staff tolerated me as a curiosity. Then, when they saw the kinds of system utilities I was starting to write, they hired me.

  “I spent nine years under my aunt’s roof. As soon as I could, I left. I lied about my age and got a job with a defense contractor, writing programs to calculate missile trajectories. I got a scholarship in electrical engineering at the university. That’s when I began studying AI in earnest.”

  “And when you got the idea for Liza?” Lash asked.

  “No. Not right away. I was fascinated by the early stuff, John McCarthy and LISP and all that. But it wasn’t until my senior year that the tools had matured sufficiently to do any real work towards machine learning.”

  “‘The Imperative of Machine Intelligence,’ ” Tara said. “Your senior thesis.”

  Lash nodded without looking at her. “That summer, I didn’t have any place to go until grad school in September. I didn’t know anybody. I’d already moved to Cambridge and was lonely. So I began banking time at the MIT lab, spending twenty or thirty hours at a time, developing a program robust enough to be imprinted with simple intelligence routines. By the end of the summer, I’d made real progress. When school started, my faculty advisor at MIT was impressed enough to give me a free hand. The more subtle and powerful the program became, the more excited I got. When I wasn’t in class, all my time was spent with Liza.”

  “You’d given her a name by then?” Lash asked.

  “I kept pushing myself, trying to expand her capabilities for carrying on realistic conversations. I’d type. She’d respond. At first it was just a way to encourage her self-learning. But then I found myself spending more time simply talking to her. Not about specific programming tasks, you know, but . . . but as a friend.”

  He paused a moment. “Around this time I was working on a primitive voice interface. Not to parse human speech—that was still years away—but to verbalize its output. I used samples of my own voice. It started as a diversion, I didn’t see any real significance to it.”

  The rush of words suddenly ceased. Silver took a deep breath, began again.

  “I still don’t know why I did it. But late one night, when my coding temporarily hit some brick wall, I started playing around. I ran the voiceprints through a pitch-shifting algorithm somebody left in the lab: raising the frequency, fiddling with the waveform. And suddenly the voice began to sound like a woman’s.”

  Like a woman’s. Now, Lash understood why, when he’d first heard it, Liza’s voice had seemed familiar. It was a feminine re-creation of Silver’s own.

  “And her personality?” Tara asked. “Was that yours, as well?”

  “Early on, I thought that hard-coding personality traits into Liza would jump-start machine consciousness. I didn’t know anybody I could ask to volunteer. So I got some personality inventories from the psych department—just the MMPI-2, really—took the test myself, and scored it.”

  Lash caught his breath. “What were the results?”

  “What you’d expect. Uncomfortable in social situations. Superachiever mentality, driven by low sense of self-esteem.” Silver shrugged as if the answer wasn’t important. “It was an experiment, really, to see if personality could be modeled, as well as intelligence. But it didn’t get me very far. It was only later her neural matrix developed enough to retain a persistent personality.” Then he stopped speaking, and a stricken look crossed his face.

  The look told Lash several things. Silver had been exonerating himself: describing his painful past, rationalizing his crimes. It was the standard pattern. Soon he’d shift to the crimes themselves and what led up to them.

  And yet something didn’t fit. Silver’s expression, his body language, still screamed conflict. That time should have passed. He was deep into his confession. Why was he still conflicted? Was he, even now, undecided about turning himself in? This did not fit the pattern at all.

  “Let’s move on to the present,” Lash said in a calm, matter-of-fact voice. “Want to tell me what happened with the supercouples?”

  Silver started pacing again. He remained silent long enough for Lash’s guarded elation to ebb away.

  When Silver finally spoke, he did not look at Lash. “What you want to know began when I founded Eden.”

  “Go on,” Lash said, careful not to let his voice betray anything.

  “I’ve told you some of this already. How Liza eventually proved herself capable of just about any calculation that business or the military could throw at her. I’d made enough money to choose her next direction myself. That’s when I chose . . . chose relationship processing. It was a huge undertaking. But I was able to team up with PharmGen. They were a pharmaceutical giant, they had enough seed money to fund just about any start-up. And their scientists developed the early psych evaluations I used for the matching algorithms. It was subtle work, probably the most difficult programming I’ve ever done outside Liza herself. Anyway, once the core programming seemed stable, I moved on to alpha testing.”

  “Using your own personality construct,” Tara said.

  “Along with several dummy avatars. But we quickly realized more sophisticated avatars would be necessary. The psychological battery was greatly extended. We went into beta testing, using volunteers from the graduate programs at Harvard and MIT. That’s when—” Silver hesitated. “That’s when I had my own personality construct reevaluated.”

  The tiny room fell into a tense silence.

  “Reevaluated,” Lash prompted.

  Silver took a seat on the edge of the bed. He glanced up at Lash, an almost pleading expression on his face.

  “I wanted my own construct to be as complete, as detailed, as the others. What’s wrong with that? Edwin Mauchly shepherded me through the process. That’s how we first met. He was still employed by PharmGen back then. The evaluation was painful, horrible—nobody likes to see their vulnerabilities exposed so coldly—but Edwin was the picture of tact. And he clearly had a visionary eye for business. In time, he became my right-hand man, the person I could trust to take care of everything necessary down there.” And Silver indicated the tower beneath their feet. “Within a year I’d bought back my interest from PharmGen and made Eden a private company, with its own board of directors. And—”

  “I see,” Lash interjected smoothly. “And when did you decide to reintroduce your updated avatar into the Tank?”

  The stricken look returned to Silver’s face. His shoulders slumped.

  “I’d been thinking about it for a long time,” he said quietly. “During alpha testing, my avatar never got matched. I told myself it must be something to do with the crude dummy avatars. But then Eden got off the ground, the Tank filled with clients, and the number of successful matches began to climb. And I wondered: what would happen if I placed my avatar back in there with those countless others? Would I find a perfect match, too? Would I remain that guy all the girls recoiled from in school? It began to torment me.”

  Silver drew in a deep breath. “Late one evening, I introduced my avatar into the Tank. I instructed Liza to create a back-channel, transparent to the monitoring staff. But there were no hits, and after a few hours I lost my nerve. I withdrew it. But by then the genie was out of the bottle. I had to know.” Silver looked up, fixing Lash with his gaze. “Do you understand? I had to know.”

  Lash nodded. “Yes. I understand.”

  “I began introducing my avatar into the Tank for longer periods. An afternoon here, a day there. Still nothing. Soon, my avatar had logged whole weeks in the Tank without success. I began to feel despair. I conte
mplated tweaking my avatar somehow, making it more appealing. But then, what would be the point? After all, it wasn’t so much the match itself—I would never have had the nerve to initiate real contact—I just wanted to know that somebody could care for me.”

  Lash felt a ripple of shock, faint but uncomfortable. “Go on,” he said.

  “And then, one afternoon in the fall—I’ll never forget, it was a Tuesday, September 17—Liza informed me of a match.” As he spoke, the pain, the anxiety, melted from his face. “My first feeling was disbelief. Then the room seemed to fill with light. It was like God turned on a thousand suns. I asked Liza to isolate the two avatars, run the comparison routines again, in case there was some mistake.”

  “But there was no mistake,” Tara said.

  “Her name was Lindsay. Lindsay Torvald. I had Liza download a copy of her dossier to my personal terminal, here. I think I watched her initial video a dozen times. She was beautiful. Such a beautiful woman. And so accomplished. She was leaving for a hiking trip in the Alps, I remember. To think that such a woman could possibly care for me . . .”

  As quickly as it had gone, the pain returned to his face.

  “What happened next?” Lash asked.

  “I erased the dossier from my terminal, instructed Liza to reinsert Lindsay Torvald’s avatar into the Tank, and removed my own avatar. Permanently.”

  “And then?”

  “Then?” For a moment, Silver seemed confused. “Oh. I see what you mean. Six hours later, Edwin called to tell me that Eden had matched its first supercouple. It was something we’d theorized about, of course, but I never believed it would actually happen. I was even more surprised when I learned that half of the couple was Lindsay Torvald.”

  Lash’s uncomfortable feeling returned. “And did that exacerbate things?”

  “What things?”

  “Your feelings of frustration.” Lash chose his words carefully. “Having Lindsay matched in a supercouple could only have added fuel to the fire.”