Half Life (Russell's Attic Book 2)

by SL Huang

  I harnessed every bit of mathematics I could, found a shred of purchase to launch myself off, and threw myself at Agarwal.

  I tackled him back into a crumpling wall of equipment, his enormous gun flying out of his hands as we crashed to the floor. I managed to make the casing on my right arm take the brunt of the fall for me, metal clanging on metal.

  The ground pitched again, and Agarwal squirmed away, scrambling for the door with the speed of a panicking animal. If he thought the volcano was going up, I didn’t know how he thought he might escape—perhaps he hoped the eruption would have a delta, some amount of seismic activity before it burst through the crust and extinguished us all. Or perhaps he wasn’t thinking at all anymore.

  I lurched into the hallway after him, the math changing faster than I could track it as the walls and floor decided not to be where I thought they were. The whole corridor shifted a foot to the right and the wall slammed into my shoulder. I battled to find my footing again.

  I should have been worried about rescuing Denise. I should have been trying to get us both out of there alive.

  Instead I plunged after Agarwal, the floor alternately catapulting me forward and sending me to the ground. We were nearly at the stairs when I caught up; I plowed into him in another full-body tackle, and this one cracked his head against the wall as we went down. Without sparing a moment, I smashed my metal-cased arm against his temple.

  He collapsed, bleeding, his body contorting in pain.

  The tremors in the earth were lessening, not obviously, but I could see it in the mathematics. One knocked me down again; my hip landed on a hard edge that slammed through my flesh and bruised me to the bone. The pain dazed me for an instant, and then I realized I’d fallen on Malcolm’s gun, the sleek little Browning I’d left in the corridor. I scooped it up in my left hand.

  Agarwal was twitching on the still-shivering floor, his unruly hair matted with red. I kicked him in the face.

  His nose crunched as it broke. He tried to scream, but choked on his own blood.

  I got up, my body smacking against the wall as the earth lurched one more time. Then I stepped over, put one boot on Agarwal’s neck, and aimed the Browning at his skull.

  “I killed the last person I saw murder a child,” I said.

  He moaned. The quake gave a last murmur, loud and at the same time more felt than heard, as the earth settled. I didn’t think Agarwal was aware of me.

  My finger rested lightly on the trigger, my heel on his throat. It would be so easy. It would feel so good.

  He and Denise were right that he’d be able to break out of prison. Pointing it out had been a bargaining chip for his surrender, but in truth, he was smart enough. He would escape, and he’d hurt people again, kill people again, destroy human lives with his technology, all with his mocking, insane, sociopathic smile. And we’d made ourselves his targets now—he’d have reason to come after Denise, after us.

  Killing him was the smart thing to do. Killing him was the right thing to do.

  If I let him live, I might be signing our own death warrants.

  CHAPTER 38

  I CLIMBED back down into the lab, my eyes flicking around the creaking structure as I measured the mathematics for any danger of collapse, and found Denise kneeling next to Liliana’s remains.

  It hadn’t been right for me to leave her earlier, but I didn’t have any emotion left for guilt. “Are you injured?” I asked.

  She shook her head. Her arms were wrapped around herself, her expression numb. “Vikash. Did you—did he—”

  “He’s in custody,” I said shortly. I should have killed him. “I left him with Arthur and Malcolm.”

  She took a shaking breath.

  I slumped down beside her, next to Liliana’s tiny, charred body. The blue party dress was seared with black now, half turned to ashes. I felt like I should reach out, should check—check what, check how, I didn’t know—but my fingers recoiled away from touching her.

  “Is she dead?” I said.

  Denise didn’t answer. Her hands were fisted in her clothing, her body corded with tension, her eyes unfocused.

  “Denise.”

  She flinched. “She was never alive,” she said flatly. “You know she was never alive.”

  I wanted to hit her. “You still say that after she saved—after she sacrificed—you saw what she did. I know you did!”

  Denise sniffed, very deliberately. “She saw me as a mother. We told her to, programmed in the—we taught her, it, to act out love—”

  “How can you say that?” I cried. “How can you not be upset?”

  Her eyes flashed in anger, the first sign of energy I’d seen from her since coming back down. “Of course I—! She was over a decade of my life, and a year of behavioral—of course I care! But if you think this compares in even the smallest way to losing a child—”

  She turned away abruptly.

  “Is she repairable?” I asked quietly.

  Denise stayed facing away from me, and her voice was muffled. “You could build another one. The learned processes, the current state, they would be gone.”

  In other words, the new Liliana would be a blank slate, with no memory of her father, and no affection for him, real or mimicked.

  Noah Warren’s daughter was dead. Part of me thought he’d be happier if he never woke up to hear the news.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  AGARWAL’S CLONES were all inert, but some of his Liliana-style ’bots were still moving, dazed and frightened. Denise tried to find an interface to shut them down from, but the screens that still worked were all locked, and too well for her to crack quickly. Knowing the ’bots might have been programmed to attack anyone who came down later, we didn’t dare leave them here still animated, so I shot them all in the head. The too-humanlike bodies fell one by one, surprise and fear mixing on their features. The last one tried to run, but my aim was too good.

  Denise turned away, unable to watch.

  “You’re the one who said they aren’t alive,” I said, the words pinched and ugly.

  She didn’t answer.

  Whatever Agarwal’s security measures were, they’d either been broken by the quake or he’d planned to re-enact them before leaving and never gotten the chance. Denise and I climbed back through the hallway, stepping over pitched flooring and chunks of rubble, and scaled a metal stairway twisted in on itself until we pushed out into the pine-scented night.

  Arthur was waiting. “Was getting worried,” he said with relief. “Thought the ceiling might’ve fallen on you.”

  I hadn’t allowed him back down with me in case of aftershocks or structural collapse. “No,” I said. “Just dealing with the ’bots. Everything up here okay?”

  “Agarwal’s tied up and passed out, but your sniper buddy still ain’t took his gun off him. Not a real trusting guy.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “You two okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Denise nodded.

  “Go with Arthur,” I ordered her, not entirely kindly. I turned to him. “You can handle this bit, right? Take her in, hook her up with a lawyer, make sure she’s set up to make a case against Agarwal so she’s got a bargaining position.”

  “Course,” said Arthur. He’d probably already assumed he’d be the one doing it.

  “Make sure the cops don’t underestimate Agarwal,” I said. “They will, but try to pound it into their heads.”

  “Got it.” He put a protective hand on Denise’s elbow and added to me, “We’re a ways out from civilization. Let us drop you, at least.”

  “No.” I didn’t feel like human company right now.

  Dawn was just breaking when I arrived back in LA, though the day was already too warm, promising a late-summer scorcher. I ditched the car I’d stolen in Mammoth and made my way to one of my bolt holes, where I collapsed and slept for over fourteen hours. When I woke up night had fallen again, though my skin was damp with sweat, itchy under my metal-encased cast, and t
he city was still too warm for comfort.

  The urge to go find a drink was swelling in me, a deep and compelling need, but I still had loose ends to tie up on this clusterfuck of a job—I had to check in with Arthur and make sure Agarwal was safely in police custody and Denise wasn’t getting screwed over by the system, find out from Checker if we were still on the run from the law, and get an update on Warren’s condition.

  In the last case, I didn’t know whether I wanted good news or bad.

  I drove to Checker’s house. The light was still on in the Hole; I opened the door without knocking.

  “Hey, I—oh my God, you look terrible. Are you all right? Arthur didn’t—”

  “She’s dead.” I hadn’t realized I’d needed to say the words until I’d already spat them, jagged and accusing.

  “What—who?”

  “Liliana,” I said. “She sacrificed herself to save her mother.”

  “Oh, uh—yeah, Arthur told me what—”

  “I know you say she wasn’t a real person, but to Warren she was.” My voice was cold. Part of me knew that this wasn’t Checker’s fault, but I couldn’t seem to stop. “And he just lost his child. Again.”

  “Hang on—”

  “Even if we rebuilt her, there’d be no way to make every single minute of her experience the same, and even if we could, there’s no way we could make every coin flip in every probability distribution match, no way to ensure the exact same learning—”

  “Cas!”

  “Which means she’s gone! She was unique! And I don’t know, maybe that makes her as alive as anything else! We can’t tell if she’s self-aware, so what’s the difference, really? What makes her death any less tragic? Tell me!”

  “I backed her up!” cried Checker.

  I tried to speak, but my brain wasn’t linking up to my mouth correctly. My tongue made a sputtering noise.

  “‘Thank you, Checker, how brilliant of you, you are ever so prepared.’ That’s what you’re trying to say, isn’t it?”

  “I—you backed her up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everything? Everything that made her who she is?”

  “If you mean all her state variables, yes. I essentially imaged her.”

  “Why didn’t you mention this?”

  “Sorry—sorry! I just, I didn’t think it had worked! Denise thought it was impossible—they’d never been able to run backups successfully; that was why we couldn’t duplicate her in the first place back when we were talking to Arkacite. But, you know, my specialties are pretty completely opposite to Denise’s, and if there’s one thing I’m good at it’s getting around bitrate problems. Only I didn’t actually think it had worked at the time—but I double-checked the cloud when I got back from Mammoth, since, well, you know, and I wasn’t really hoping for anything, but it turned out—”

  “When? When did you do this?”

  “When we were trying to figure out how to write the ’bot recognition program. Which I still want you to look at, by the way.”

  “So she’ll revert back to that moment.”

  “Yes, if we build her a new body, which from your reaction I can only assume we will, she’ll be at that instant and then go on from there.”

  “You backed her up,” I repeated, dazed.

  “Yes, Cas.”

  “We can rebuild her.” The words felt disconnected from reality. Alien. Absurdly, my brain wasn’t sure whether to leap in elation or rail at having been sandbagged. What did it mean, that her loss could end up so utterly meaningless?

  “We can rebuild as many of her as you want,” answered Checker. “Do you think Warren would be into having some extra daughters? More is better, right? We could even copy her into a few different models. How bizarre would that be?”

  “I think…I think just one will do.” I leaned heavily against the door, trying to process.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.” The world was starting to turn right side up. Make sense again. “Yeah.” We can rebuild her. That was all that mattered.

  Who cared about the existential questions? They could wait. The corner of my mouth involuntarily twitched toward a smile.

  “There’s more good news, if you think you can handle it,” said Checker. “Noah Warren came out of his coma—he’s still in the hospital indefinitely, but he’s going to be okay. Of course, he’s under arrest, but Arthur hooked him up with a good lawyer, and considering the circumstances he can probably get off light. Speaking of Arthur’s lawyer contacts, Pilar’s already off the hook—nobody from Arkacite’s around anymore to press charges, and Denise’s testimony absolves Pilar of any involvement with the ’bots. We still don’t know how Denise is going to fare herself, but the authorities seem pretty excited she can give them Agarwal’s head on a platter.”

  “He’s going to go down for all the murders?”

  “It looks like it. They salvaged enough of the ’bot who did the killing at Arkacite for Denise to recover most of the programming, and I’m sure Agarwal’s mountain lair will provide a lot more evidence once it’s deemed safe to enter and they can get Denise to comb through the code. It looks like the government is publicly scapegoating Agarwal for everything, in fact, which is fantastic—if people can point to a human villain they won’t be clamoring against the AI so much, though of course there’ll still be some anti-science fallout from this. Though Arthur…”

  “Arthur what?” I asked.

  He cleared his throat. “He got Mama Lorenzo to lean on some media companies they’ve got influence in, and in particular on Reuben McCabe, of all people. She’s forcing them to be vocal in a backlash against the anti-AI people. Arthur told her it was, uh, a favor to me.” He fidgeted slightly.

  “It’s a good thing, you know,” I said. “Like Malcolm said. If she felt like she owed you, that might be more dangerous. Now she can forget you exist.”

  “I very, very much hope for that,” said Checker fervently.

  CHAPTER 39

  I DROVE back to Mammoth that night and slipped through the police tape to retrieve a plutonium battery from one of the ’bots I’d executed—fortunately, I managed to pull one that was still undamaged. Since Denise was in government custody, I tracked down Okuda the next day—she had managed to duck FBI notice and disappear back to Japan with her remaining people as soon as she was out of the hospital—and got her to commission Funaki to build a new version of Liliana’s body. They already had all the specs, after all; the first ’bot they’d built had looked like Liliana precisely because it had been so easy to work from the stolen Arkacite plans.

  They balked at first, but large sums of money are good at eroding objections. Luckily hoarding cash had always been part of my MO.

  Of course, all this meant I’d lost a ridiculous amount on Warren’s case. I’d never ended up in the red on a job before; I guess I decided to go big my first time out. I told Arthur I never owed him a Christmas present ever again.

  At least I had made a little back on the batteries. Even if I’d given it all to Cheryl.

  We waited to activate Liliana’s clone until Warren was discharged from the hospital. Her programming wasn’t aware anything had happened, and we didn’t tell her. We didn’t tell Warren what had happened either, only that she’d had a memory glitch Denise had fixed before she turned herself in. Warren had ended up with the charges against him dropped for much the same reasons Pilar had; we ignored the subpoenas listing him as a material witness in several pending cases, and I paid Tegan to forge some very pretty passports for him and Liliana. Then I set them up with a way out of the country.

  “You’re being downright charitable, Cas Russell,” Checker teased.

  “The authorities would figure out he has her eventually,” I said. “You know they’d come for her. And he may be an incompetent welcher, but she’s just a kid.”

  He gave me a measured sort of look but didn’t correct me.

  Checker and I saw them off. Liliana came up very formally and shook ou
r hands—well, with me she shook the left one, since my right arm was still in a sling. “Thank you for helping us,” she said to each of us, with perfect eye contact. The intonation was exactly the same both times she said it.

  “Yes,” added Warren. “Thank you.”

  His gratitude was heartfelt, but I liked hers better. “I didn’t do it for you,” I said to him.

  He nodded. I knew he didn’t care.

  “Daddy says we have to go,” Liliana chirped. “Good-bye.”

  “Bye,” I said.

  Warren reached out and took her hand. Liliana looked up at him, her face glowing with childlike joy.

  They walked off down the street together to the white van waiting at the corner. Warren gently helped boost his daughter inside and climbed in after her. The van rumbled away.

  “I wonder what kind of life they’ll have now,” mused Checker.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I guess they get to find out.”

  I had client meetings lined up so I could jump onto my next job, but I hadn’t scheduled them till evening. I returned to the apartment I was currently using, feeling oddly good about the way this case had turned out, to find a tall Asian man in a long tan duster leaning next to the door.

  “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know you were in town. Hi.”

  “Grab a bite?” asked Rio.

  “Sure.”

  We headed back out to the street, where I led the way to a nearby café with outdoor seating. Rio’s coat made him stand out among Angelenos still dressed for the ongoing fall heat wave, but he paid no notice. He probably preferred its weapons-hiding capabilities to being comfortable.

  We settled with some iced coffee and generic pastries at a table a ways away from any other customers. I’d barely seen Rio a handful of times in the past year, since he had saved my life and my sanity from Dawna Polk and then refused to tell me why.

  “Are you still keeping your promise to Dawna?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “I am certain you would know if I were not.”

  Because she would come after me. She’d agreed to ignore me only because he’d set aside his private war against her.