Half Life (Russell's Attic Book 2)

by SL Huang

  And I wasn’t even getting paid.

  “This job needs to be over now, please,” I said. The words rang pitiful and desolate. The silence in the dead lab swallowed them up.

  I found a security office in the back and yanked the video drive. I also grabbed any other intact data storage I found—a hard drive and a few flash drives, and a tablet under one of the lab tables. I still hadn’t heard sirens, so, channeling Arthur, I called the police on my burner phone and tossed it on the floor. I had another clean one back at Miri’s.

  The dispatcher’s urgent queries echoed off empty walls as I left.

  CHAPTER 26

  I GOT BACK to Miri’s apartment to find Denise Rayal standing in the middle of the living room surrounded by more reams of printouts saying, “No, that’s wrong, that’s all wrong—”

  “I’m wrong?” squawked Checker.

  “Yes, go back to the beginning!”

  I threw the drives from the Ally Eight lab at Checker. “Find out who’s on these. And give me some sort of news update.” I’d been listening to the radio the whole way back, but it had been confused, a series of disjointed this-just-ins and corrections and retractions. I gathered someone had figured out Sloan’s robotic nature, but how many of the robots had been destroyed, and who’d been involved with the rioting in the first place—or whether the mob had simply formed spontaneously—the news anchors hadn’t been able to tell me.

  “On it,” said Checker. “Are you all right? I talked to Arthur—what happened at the lab?”

  My throat closed as if I wanted to vomit. “It’s on there.” I pointed at the drive from the security office. “News, give me news. And what’s going on here?” Checker had apparently printed out another roomful of paper; he and Denise Rayal were drowning in it, along with all the laptops open and running. Liliana was asleep on the couch, Pilar curled up by her feet with her own pile of paper.

  “I don’t think there is much news,” said Checker. “At least, not that you don’t know already. There’s nothing but speculation right now, though I’ve at least been running IDs on any of the rioters caught on camera downtown. But we’re trying to put together a search program for the ’bots. If you can identify one on sight, a computer should be able to, too. If we can write the algorithm, we can scan for any of the rest of them on the news or on traffic cameras or anywhere else. I’ll need you to help with the math.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I said. I glanced at Liliana’s sleeping form.

  “Yeah, we’re in her head right now,” said Checker. “She’s, uh…unconscious, while we work on this.”

  A creeping feeling of wrongness stole over me.

  “She’s not a child,” said Checker quietly.

  “I didn’t say anything.” We’d rescued her from people experimenting on her. We’d rescued her.

  “We’re not hurting her,” said Checker. “Not that she can be hurt, but—you know what I mean.”

  He hadn’t seen the corpses of the robots downtown, or the twisted scraps of metal my senses had recoiled away from when I’d reached the lab. What did it mean, to hurt someone? I knew what Noah Warren would say, but he’d already sacrificed himself for his daughter…while trusting us to protect her.

  Christ.

  I turned away from Liliana’s sleeping form and tried to gather my scattered thoughts, to consider options. Ally Eight’s plan was beside the point now. Instead, we had a legal mess and a lynch mob to deal with.

  If the anti-robotics mob found Liliana or Denise Rayal, they’d kill them; if the government found them, Liliana would go back to a lab and Rayal would almost certainly go to jail. I could put Rayal on a plane out of the country if I paid enough money for it, which didn’t make me happy, but was doable. Liliana, on the other hand…she was programmed to be five. She couldn’t take care of herself.

  “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 won
dering 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 blockin
g 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.