Grasping The Future

by Michael Anderle

  Ben knew this was a training tactic. He wasn’t entirely stupid, after all.

  Despite that, he resented it. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Gwyna was more interested in taunting him than she was in training him.

  In the kitchen, he took the time to warm his hands while he built the fire. Cooking was a little less onerous than he had assumed it would be as food appeared in the magical pan, but it seemed to require a consistent draw of power that he struggled to maintain and so made the heat flare or die in turn.

  The bacon had burned spots by the time he was finished and he was not prepared to remake it. He brought the food to Gwyna’s chambers and summoned the last of his good humor when she called him in.

  She raised an eyebrow at the condition of the food but said nothing. “I’ll need more water today,” she said without preamble. “Now.”

  He gritted his teeth. “I also need to eat.”

  “There’s no time to waste,” she said dismissively, but he caught the gleam of her pleasure. She wanted to inconvenience him. He decided it was an even bet whether she needed any water at all.

  Whatever instinct had seen him through the interaction with the fake runaway the other day, it seemed to be back. He responded with a smile that physically hurt, nodded silently—he couldn’t summon a pleasant tone if his life depended on it—and left.

  A few slices of bacon were his breakfast, not so bad under other circumstances, but hardly how he wanted to start the morning. He wolfed them and went to get the buckets.

  “May I ask a question?” Prima asked. Her tone was unusually somber. “I don’t want to intrude if it’s a bad time.”

  Ben sighed. “You can ask. Honestly, a distraction would be nice.”

  “Very well. It seems your physical hardship has impacted your mood negatively.”

  He waited for the question, then realized that was the question. For a moment, he wondered if this was a cruel joke of some kind before he remembered that Prima was often snide and sarcastic, but never—to his knowledge—openly cruel.

  “Yes,” he said cautiously.

  “And that is expected by you? You are not surprised by it?”

  “No.” He frowned now and tried to think where this might be going. His footsteps crunched over the gravel and rocks of the lakeshore.

  “Would that not mean that Gwyna would also anticipate it?”

  “She did, yes. It’s why she did it.” He couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his tone as he knelt to dip first one bucket, then the other in the lake.

  “I do not understand. She wanted to upset you?”

  “Yes.” On the one hand, he was annoyed but somehow, describing it this way helped his mood. “Before you ask, I don’t know exactly why. Sometimes, difficult living situations are used by teachers who want to impart a certain philosophical mindset to their students. In this case, though…” He thought of Gwyna’s warm quarters, her plush bed, and her warm bath. “I think she’s doing it to see what will happen when I lose my temper.”

  “Ah, so you must avoid losing your temper.”

  “Yes.”

  Prima considered this. “Another question if you have time.”

  Ben stood and winced when the handle of the bucket pressed against his injured hand. He really shouldn’t do two at a time, but the sheer number of trips to the lakeshore otherwise would destroy his legs.

  “Shoot,” he responded, his tone gruff from the discomfort.

  “If situations such as the one you encountered last night negatively affect your mood, wouldn’t it mean that many situations do? Lack of sleep, for instance, or hunger?”

  He frowned. “Yes. Every situation, one might say. Sometimes, the effect is good—a nice-tasting meal, for instance, or a comfortable bed. In every situation, however, one’s surroundings and experiences have an effect on mood. Surely you knew that, though.”

  “I suppose I did.” She sounded troubled. “Dotty told me she liked baths. I knew that getting things one enjoyed tended to improve one’s mood, but I suppose I never saw it as something that changed one’s mood all the time in varying ways. Is this why you’re always so grumpy when you’re injured?”

  “Yes,” he said with a smile. “Pain makes someone unhappy. Also, it leaves them feeling like they made a mistake or they couldn’t do what they needed to do. Every situation is colored by your emotions and thoughts—and perceptions, of course. A bad moment could feel okay because of the smell of your grandmother’s cookies. Or it might make you cry because someone else had baked the cookies and you were reminded of your grandmother, who had passed away.”

  She made no response.

  “Prima?” Ben lugged the water through the tunnels.

  “So much data,” Prima said finally. If an AI could sound awestruck, this one did. “I thought humans simply didn’t have the processing ability to see all the facets of a situation. Now I see they have far more processing capability than I thought, but much of it is filled with data I didn’t see. I’ll have to think about this. Would you mind if I went away for a while?”

  “Go ahead,” he said as courteously as he could. He would have liked a conversation right now, but he didn’t want to interrupt her musings about human nature.

  He wondered what it must be like to realize that so much of human behavior hinged on an experience the AI would never have.

  “Thank you,” Prima said after he had already forgotten what he’d said. “And if this is a power struggle—which it seems to be—don’t let her win it.”

  “Mmm.” He had less of an idea what game Gwyna was playing and wasn’t sure how he could win. Or if he could. “I’ll do my best.”

  “Deny the field of battle.”

  “Are you quoting The Art of War?”

  “Yes. You’ll have to explain to me how it works as an allegory, though. I understand it is primarily used that way. I extrapolated and thought it might be useful here.”

  Ben stopped and looked at where the sky would be if he were outside with a genuine smile. “Thank you, Prima. You’re a good friend.”

  “I am glad to hear it.” A distinct note of pleasure came through the words.

  When he arrived to dump the buckets of water into Gwyna’s bathtub a few minutes later, she was playing with a ball of magic, letting it swirl in her palm and bounce off her fingertips. As he did not know much about magic yet, he guessed from her pose and her expression that this was a truly ostentatious display of power—and that he was intended to ask about it.

  But Prima, whether meaning to or not, had given him his path forward. He merely nodded at her and took the buckets out of the room.

  He trudged from the lake to the cave innumerable times until his back ached and his injured hand was all but useless. At one point, he had to resort to using only one bucket and his other arm was running out of strength.

  At last, he sank onto the floor of the kitchen to rest. He had not been aware of his clumsiness all morning, which was a blessing of sorts, but he could not remember the last time he had been this exhausted. Even when he’d been climbing.

  Of course, he’d been in much better shape. His eyes snapped open and he stared at the stone wall with rage and loss fighting each other in his throat.

  Ben acknowledged that he had done this to himself. He was broken and he was lost there because he’d made a stupid choice. Worse, he did not know if he would ever recover. Would he be able to climb again, or would he always be limited in the real world? He could come here to remember what it had been like, but that wasn’t the same as living in full.

  A shadow fell across him and he looked at Gwyna.

  “You decided to stop working, I see.” She said nothing else but there was a challenge in her tone.

  A part of him rose to it—the same anger he had always been afraid of. He wanted to leave this place and run away. It would be like every other time.

  Except he was tired of his life going like that. The clarity was sudden and overwhelming. He could choose to not leave w
hen he felt anger. That was a new thought. He could channel the anger, do something good with it, and stay.

  He turned his injured hand palm up so that she could see the bandages. “If you heal this, I will be able to help you more effectively.”

  She smiled, the look of one player to another. “You’re not only a traveler,” she said quietly. “Not merely a country boy. I thought you were at the start, and I’m rarely wrong—but there’s more to you.”

  Gwyna did not like that, he could see it now. Her mind was racing ahead. If he was not a brute who could be led by his emotion, he was a rational person who might defy her and outwit her. The woman wasn’t prepared to train someone to be her rival.

  She only trained those she could control.

  More clarity seeped into his reasoning. If Prima had told him to deny the field of battle, he would.

  “If you say so,” he said and pushed to his feet. “Do you want me to heal it myself, then? Am I supposed to learn to heal?”

  “You’re supposed to remember what happens when you don’t use magic,” she said at once. “I expect the water filled within the hour. And do try to learn more quickly, will you? I’ll need your help in not too long, but untrained power will be too risky to use.”

  She turned on her heel and left, and he stared after her.

  He held a hand out to the bucket and swept his palm up. Nothing happened, but he tried again, and once more after that. A little frustrated, he cleared his mind, swept his hand up, and closed his eyes, picturing the bucket floating in the air.

  When he opened his eyes, it was floating.

  “What happens when I don’t use magic,” he said quietly. He looked at his hand and rolled his aching shoulders.

  Well, that had been considerable effort he could have avoided. He walked to the lake with the bucket bobbing along at his side and brought it back, this time filled with water. It was more difficult, but by the third repetition, he had begun to get the hang of it.

  Now the trick was simply to get Gwyna to teach him more than she realized she was teaching.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Hey.” Amber came up to squeeze Jacob’s shoulder.

  “Hey to you too.” He turned with a smile. “I’m finishing up with emails. Maybe thirty minutes left?”

  “It works out perfectly. I’ll go home, take a quick shower, and meet you for dinner?” She gave him a thumbs-up.

  He returned it with a smile and she headed out. They tried not to make a big deal of their relationship at the office, but the truth was that Amber wasn’t much of a one for PDA anyway.

  That was fine with Jacob. After years of devoting every spare minute to his company, he no longer had any idea what to do with his spare time. He and Amber had made a point to have a weekly date night, but it was a struggle to talk about anything except work.

  They only kept doing it because Nick was relentlessly on their case.

  Jacob sighed and stretched. The lab was almost empty by now. The outgoing shift of workers had completed their handoff to the incoming team, who were settling with cups of coffee and data entry. A constant stream of data came out of the pods, almost more than they could deal with.

  When he heard the click-clack of heels, he looked up. Who he expected, he wasn’t sure—but it certainly wasn’t Anna Price.

  The head of Diatek, Price had gotten into her field after she and her husband were forced to take their daughter off life support. She had vowed to find a new technology that would resuscitate comatose patients, something she knew would require significant amounts of money to get off the ground.

  Now, she worked with the Department of Defense, making the money that kept companies like PIVOT going.

  If he were honest, he had always been uncomfortable around her. She exuded the very east-coast, expensively-suited vibe that he, as a young entrepreneur, associated with people who had too many lawyers and would take you for everything you were worth.

  He probably wasn’t far off from how Price would behave if he got on her bad side, which made it doubly difficult to remember that she was in this business for good reason.

  And he always felt obscurely guilty that he was saving patients under her nose—that she was watching, over and over again, the recovery her daughter had never had.

  Tonight, he assumed, she was there to talk to him about Ben. He tapped a stack of printouts. “Ben worked through a few of the job postings before he went back in, but not all of them. We kept him busy with tests, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s no trouble.” As always, she managed to put the correct inflection in her voice and somehow also convey no emotion at all. “Mr. Ainsworth is a talented chemist with a great deal of work ethic. I believe he would have found a job with or without my intervention. I am simply offering my help.”

  “I’m…sure he appreciates it.” Jacob had begun to get the sense that she was there to talk about something else. He took his courage in both hands and asked, “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “Yes.” Her gaze was clear. “I wanted to speak to you about Prima.”

  The bottom fell out of his stomach. He swallowed and he knew she noticed it.

  There was no point in denying anything. If she knew the AI’s name, it meant she had been watching. If she had been watching, it was because she knew there was something to watch.

  Anna Price pulled a chair out and sat. She regarded him firmly.

  “Why didn’t you tell me what was happening with Prima?” she asked without preamble.

  He should have known she would cut to the chase. Wishing futilely that Amber and Nick were there—and fairly certain that Price had chosen a time when they were not—he looked at his desk. Slowly, he turned his chair to face her.

  “Because we didn’t want her used for military purposes,” he said finally. “There are many reasons that go into that one.”

  “Such as?” There was not even a flicker to say whether she appreciated his candor or not.

  “She understands our patients in a way we can’t.” With a sense of being the mad scientist whose creation had gotten away from him, Jacob admitted the one thing he was terrified the public would learn. “She’s healed people we couldn’t have healed without her. If she hadn’t become…what she is—”

  “Sentient,” Price interrupted.

  He hesitated. “Yes.”

  “And you believe it is true sentience.” It was a question.

  “Yes.” He swallowed. “There is probably a fancy—very well-informed—opinion about what makes something sentient. I don’t know if she meets that requirement. She’s aware of herself, though, is seeking knowledge, and she’s forming relationships. To me, that’s enough.” He shrugged.

  The woman said nothing for a moment.

  “We also didn’t want you to…kill her,” he said.

  Her gaze met his.

  “It would be the smart thing to do, wouldn’t it?” He said it despairingly. If she hadn’t thought of this, he was as good as dooming Prima, but there was too much risk here for him to hide behind his fear anymore. One life couldn’t outweigh billions, especially when that one life could theoretically hack nuclear launch codes. “We cut her off from everything and she can’t get outside the network.”

  “No.” Price almost looked amused. “She can’t. I took my own precautions.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Almost as long as you have, I’d guess.” She watched him. “Why do you say it would be the smart thing to do to kill her?”

  “She’s smarter than any human could be,” Jacob said after a moment. “She’s choosing to help people for now, but what happens if she chooses to hurt them? We’re doing more good than we could do without her, but she could kill everyone in those pods. I’ve…”

  It all crashed in on him now. He had spent months watching this happen, exposing people to more risk than he could ever justify.

  “I think there’s value in saying it,” she said.

  “What,
so I’m on record?” he asked wearily.

  “No. That’s not why.” She didn’t seem inclined to explain.

  “I took a risk with other people’s lives,” Jacob said finally. “I exposed them to something that could kill them.”

  “They knew that going in. It’s a new treatment. It’s unproven.”

  He frowned at her. “Not the pods, not for comatose people—Prima.”

  “So, you find your risk inexcusable because new factors of the treatment emerged during trials?” She raised an eyebrow. “That happens quite frequently, I think you’ll find. Sometimes, even after a drug has been released to the public at large.”

  “What are you saying?” he asked her.

  “I’m asking for clarity around your thought process,” she said with surprising delicacy. “There’s a theory on choices, Mr. Zachary—that difficult decisions are difficult precisely because the choices are so close to equal as to be indistinguishable. What I am asking you to shed light on is what you value, and why the choice of using Prima versus destroying her is so difficult for you.”

  “She’s a living thing,” he said finally. “I don’t know…what you’ve seen. She helped Dotty die without fear.” Tears prickled behind his eyes. “I saw the fear melt away before she died. She helped Ben learn to walk again. She’s been learning and sometimes it’s clumsy, but humans are like that, too. She does things to keep people from being in pain. She…” His voice trailed off. “She feels things,” he said finally.

  “You do not want to be cruel,” she said. “To you, that is the heart of it—not what good she might do compared to the harm or the ethical ramifications of your uncertainty on both sides. You do not want to kill a living thing or have it be exploited.”

  Jacob stared at her.

  “That is interesting.” What might have been dismissive from someone else was, instead, contemplative from her. “I will have to think about that.”

  “How do you measure it?” he asked before he could stop himself. “If you’ve been watching all this time, you must have an opinion.”