Three Laws Lethal

by David Walton

  She blushed, pulled her head even farther between her shoulders, and looked at the floor. “This conversation,” she said.

  The topic of Naomi came up one evening in their apartment. Abby and Brandon sat practically on top of each other on one side of the sofa, passing a lollipop back and forth between them.

  “She never opens up to anybody like she’s doing with you,” Abby said. “All through high school, she was my shadow. She got to know my friends better than anyone in her own class, because she never willingly entered social situations without me. If I went to a party, then she would come along, but if I wasn’t going, she would stay home. It’s not that she was completely unsocial—she could get crazy and have fun with the rest of us. But she never initiated conversations, and she never went anywhere without me, if she could help it.”

  “Is that why she came to Penn?”

  “Because I was here? Yeah, I think so. I mean, Penn has a great program for the stuff she was interested in, so it was a good fit for her. But the fact that I was here helped, I’m sure. I’m only a year older, so she only had one year in high school without me, and I don’t think she got out a lot that year. Not that she minded, probably—she’s always happiest at home, in her room, writing software for hours on end.” Abby licked the lollipop and handed it back to Brandon. “So when are you going to ask her out?”

  “I don’t know,” Tyler said. “I’m kind of afraid to scare her off.”

  “She likes you,” Abby said. “Heck, for Naomi, this is like renting a billboard with blinking, neon letters. She talks to you. She hangs out with you instead of reading a book. She actually looks forward to seeing you. Do you know how unusual that is?”

  “So, what, I should take her out to dinner?”

  Brandon handed the lollipop back to Abby and spoke up. “Naomi doesn’t seem like a dinner and flowers type,” he said. “You should take her to NerdFest or something.”

  Tyler raised an eyebrow. “NerdFest? Is that a thing?”

  “You know what I mean. Something creative that she’d enjoy. A Doctor Who convention or a science fiction film festival or something.”

  Tyler considered. “I think the Quidditch World Cup is in Philadelphia this year. Across the river, anyway, in Cherry Hill.”

  “What’s the Quidditch World Cup?” Abby asked.

  Brandon rolled his eyes. “NerdFest,” he said.

  “Okay, Mr. I-go-to-the-Maker-Faire-every-year,” Tyler said. To Abby, he added, “Quidditch, like in Harry Potter.”

  “I know what quidditch is,” Abby said. “Even if I hadn’t read the books—which I did—I couldn’t have grown up with Naomi without knowing about quidditch. But it’s a fantasy game. It’s played on flying brooms, with enchanted balls that fly around by themselves. And, if I remember correctly, the game’s rules didn’t even make much sense. You’re telling me people actually play it, as a sport?”

  “For almost twenty years now,” Tyler said. “With a national championship that moves around to different cities. I’ve played it casually, at cons and stuff. It’s pretty fun. Somebody came up with clever ways to make the rules work for non-magical people running around a field. Like, if you get hit by a ball thrown by a beater, you’ve got to drop any balls you’re holding, run back to your side, and tag a goalpost before you can play again. And the snitch is a person, dressed in yellow, who runs around the field trying not to get caught.”

  “And the flying brooms?” Brandon asked.

  “Yeah, well, you’ve got to run around with a broom between your legs.” Tyler grinned sheepishly. “Just one of the rules of the game.”

  “That sounds fantastic,” Abby said. “Naomi would love it.”

  “I’ll get some tickets,” Tyler said. “Do you two want to come?”

  “It’s supposed to be a date,” Brandon said. “Just the two of you go. Buy her some butterbeer and go snog behind the bleachers.”

  Tyler snatched an empty plastic cup from a side table and hurled it at him, but it hit Abby in the leg and bounced off. “Sorry,” Tyler said. “I was aiming for the sneering Muggle over there.”

  “Right, I’ll do you for that,” she said, putting on a high-pitched British accent.

  Tyler grinned, picking up on the Monty Python reference. “What are you going to do, bleed on me?”

  Abby extricated herself from Brandon and stood up, stretching. She looked Tyler in the eye. “Seriously, though. If you ever hurt Naomi, I’ll kill you.”

  Tyler chuckled. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “I’m not kidding. This is a first for her. When other guys have tried to get close to her, she’s stopped talking to them until they went away. You’ve gotten past her defenses somehow, and she’s vulnerable. If you treat her badly, she might never let anyone in again.”

  “I won’t—”

  “I’m not saying you will. I’m just saying, if you’re going to pursue this, you’d better mean it. It’s not a game for her. I don’t mean you have to marry her. But if your plan is just to get in her pants and then move on, I swear, I will track you down wherever you go, and I will kill you. Slowly. You get it?”

  She spoke with such quiet ferocity that it took Tyler’s breath away. “I got it,” he said. “I’m not just toying with her, honest.”

  “You’d better not be.”

  Brandon broke the tension with a loud, hearty laugh. “Wow,” he said. “That’s my girl. The vigilante of broken hearts.”

  Abby threw a backwards kick at him, catching him in the chest. “And you’d better remember it. I’m not above killing you if you treat me badly, either. Or maybe I’ll just cut off those little bits you’re so proud of.”

  Brandon gave a gasp of offended pride. “What do you mean little?”

  “This is where I exit stage left,” Tyler said, laughing. “Leave him a few of his parts, will you?”

  As Tyler grabbed his keys and turned to go, Abby called after him, using the British accent again. “Oh, I see. Running away, eh? Come back here and take what’s coming to you!”

  Tyler went searching for Naomi. It had become a private game of sorts, trying to find her. He could message her, of course, and ask, but when he did, she invariably told him she was in the library. Which made sense, given that it was Naomi. If they then decided to meet up, she would suggest a spot inside the library— the lobby, say, or one of the study rooms—and when he arrived, she would already be there. Which suggested that she actually was in the library. The odd thing, though, was that if he went to the library, just assuming she would be there, and tried to find her, he never could. It was a big building, combining what had previously been several different libraries on campus, so it had a lot of rooms and a lot of shelves. But it wasn’t that big.

  Once again, he couldn’t find her, so he messaged her with his glasses, and asked if she was busy.

  she wrote back.

 

 

  He was already in the library, not far from the room, but sure enough, when he got there, she was there waiting for him.

  “That was quick,” she said.

  “I was already here, looking for you. Couldn’t find you, though.”

  She grinned. “I was in fairyland. It intersects the real world in any place I like.” She tapped her glasses. “And speaking of fairyland, I’ve got something to show you. I, well . . . you’ll see. I didn’t exactly sleep last night.”

  He synced his glasses with hers, and she began walking him through the changes she’d made to the autocar software. It took a long time to show him everything, both the way the software had changed and the results of her simulations, but he wasn’t bored. He was amazed.

  She had done something new. Not just new, revolutionary. At the core of his autocar software was an artificial intelligence, not in the HAL 9000 sense of a self-aware, thinking machine, but in the computer science, machine-learning algorithm sense. An
algorithm that was trained to learn experimentally, like a child might, instead of being directly programmed. Naomi had swapped the AI out entirely.

  He might have been annoyed, except that her replacement was so obviously better than his that he was too impressed to feel insulted. His algorithm had required painstaking retraining and configuration every time he threw a new type of problem at it. It learned and improved, but Tyler had to hold its hand every step of the way. Over time, it had become adept at most common traffic encounters, but Tyler had always been afraid of how it would respond to rare situations, when it encountered something out of the ordinary or bizarre in real life.

  Naomi’s AI, on the other hand, flew through their simulations without a hitch. That wasn’t surprising in and of itself, since she must have spent days training it on that data. What was really amazing was how well it generalized. He threw all kinds of unfair tricks at it—traffic lights that changed color far too rapidly, cars that drove suddenly in reverse, tanker trucks that intentionally tried to run cars off the road. It performed beautifully, not just with one car but with whole simulated fleets of them, sliding them out of danger like a fast-paced game of mahjong.

  “This thing is incredible,” Tyler said, meaning it. “How did you come up with it so fast?”

  Naomi gave one of her classic sheepish half-shrugs, an endearing little-girl gesture he had come to recognize. She didn’t twirl a lock of her hair or twist one toe on the floor, but the gestures would have fit. “The AI part I’ve been working on for a long time,” she said. “Before I met you.”

  “Wow. And it generalized to this problem? This is A+ work.” He looked at her appraisingly, a little awed. “You could work anywhere with talent like this,” he said. “Or you could just write your own software and make a mint. If you stay with us, with our company, I’ll make sure it’s worth your while. Once we can pay you, that is.”

  He could tell he was embarrassing her, so he stopped gushing. “What did you originally build it to do?”

  “Play games,” she said. “Like those Atari games they taught DeepMind to play back in the day.”

  “Nice. What games?”

  She shook her head. “I think it’s enough to publish. Until I do, though, I’m keeping it a secret.”

  “It must work well, then. Not even a hint?”

  “I haven’t told my advisor yet. I haven’t even told Abby.”

  “Okay, Miss Mysterious. Does this Marvelous general AI of yours have a name? Deep Thought, maybe, or WOPR?”

  Her brow furrowed. “Deep Thought is from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, but what’s Whopper?”

  He spelled it out. “W-O-P-R. WOPR. It’s from Wargames. You know—” He put on a monotone robotic voice. “Shall . . . we . . . play . . . a . . . game?”

  “I think I saw it, a long time ago,” she said. “This kid, like, hacks an NSA computer or something, and asks it to play Global Thermonuclear War, right? Only the computer can’t tell the difference between a game and real life, and nearly wipes out the planet?”

  “That’s the one. Hopefully yours isn’t planning to start any wars.”

  “Not on the agenda,” she said. “It’s trained to save human lives, not take them. Three Laws Safe, remember?”

  “That’s a relief,” Tyler said. “So what do you call it? It has to have a name.”

  She nodded. “I call it Mike.”

  Eventually, Tyler had to leave for a class. As a graduate student, he didn’t have many classes, and at this point, his grade had much more to do with Professor Lieu’s opinion of their autocar project than with what he learned or didn’t learn in class, but he still felt obliged to attend. He complimented Naomi on her software again and left the study room.

  Tyler felt like the pieces of his life were falling neatly into place. They hadn’t even graduated yet, but they were already getting the attention of investors. He had no doubt their company would take off. He could see himself and Brandon joining the storied ranks of tech entrepreneurs. Gates. Jobs. Page and Brin. Bezos. Zuckerberg. And what were the chances he and Brandon would fall for two sisters, one a crack programmer and the other a business expert? It had a storybook neatness to it. It was almost too good to be true.

  Tyler stepped into an alcove for a drink of water. As he was wiping water from mouth, he saw Naomi leave the study room and walk past toward the stairs, though he was pretty sure she hadn’t seen him. This was his chance to solve the mystery. He was curious where Naomi hung out at the library, and why he could never find her. He imagined a secret door somewhere, like the four-plate door in the archives of the library in Patrick Roth-fuss’s The Name of the Wind. He followed her, staying back and stepping quietly.

  When she reached the landing of the stairs going down to the first floor, he thought she might just be heading back to her apartment, but then she stopped and looked quickly around. Tyler hadn’t quite made the turn, so she didn’t see him. As he watched, she squeezed behind an angled bookshelf that didn’t quite reach the wall, and disappeared from view.

  He ran quickly after her and stuck his head around the corner. “Aha!” he said. “So this is fairyland.”

  He realized his mistake almost immediately. The expression on her face was not one of surprise or mild embarrassment, as he might have expected, but one of panicked horror. He took in the beanbag chair, the pillows, and the stack of Harry Potter books, and he knew her well enough to understand. This was her refuge.

  “No,” she said. “No, no, no.” The look on her face had melted into such an expression of sadness and loss that it made his heart break. He realized that nobody knew about this place, nobody at all. She had hid from the world here, probably for years, and felt utterly invisible. It was her hiding place. He had never been able to find her in the library, because she was always here. It was private, and safe, and now it was ruined.

  He remembered, belatedly, the line from The Name of the Wind concerning the four-plate door: This was not a door for opening. It was a door for staying closed.

  He pulled his head back. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Naomi, I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

  If she were someone else, she might have screamed at him, or thrown something at him, but she was Naomi. He could still see her face in his mind, see the feelings of violation, of betrayal. He should have asked her instead of sneaking around like this. He hadn’t imagined it was really a secret; this was a public place. He just thought of it as a mystery. And now he had blundered in where he didn’t belong.

  “I’ll go,” he said.

  He had almost reached the stairwell when she said, “Wait.”

  He turned back. Her voice came from behind the bookcase, out of sight. “You can come in.”

  He came hesitantly, reverently, as if entering a throne room or a church. The space was triangular, formed by the angle of the bookcase away from the curve of the stairwell, and barely big enough for both of them. He noticed a few other details: sealed Tupperware containers on the back of the shelf, filled with crackers and raisins and other snacks; a picture of Naomi and Abby with their arms around each other, taped to the wall; a tiny porcelain statue of Hedwig the owl.

  “A book is a door, you know,” Tyler said. “Always and forever. A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.”

  A smile slowly dawned on her face, lovely and intense. “Valente again,” she said.

  It was the right time. He kissed her.

  She returned the kiss hungrily, pressing him back against the bookcase until he was afraid they would push it over. He wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her even closer.

  When they finally came up for air, she said, “You’re late for class.”

  He didn’t care about his class, but neither did he want to wreck this tenuous moment by overstaying his welcome.

  “We’ll continue this later,” he said, grinning. Then, more seriously, “But this is your place. I’ll never come in here again. And I’ll never tell anyone about
it. You’re safe here.”

  She rewarded him with a brilliant smile and another kiss. Then, careful that no one saw him squeezing around the edge of the bookshelf, he left.

  CHAPTER 7

  “How was the Quidditch World Series?” Brandon asked.

  “World Cup,” Naomi corrected. “And it was great. The Harvard Horntails beat the Tufts University Tufflepuffs 130 to 100.”

  “Tufflepuffs?” Abby said. “Really?”

  “If you’re trying to set yourself up as the cool kid here, no on201C;I was more shocked by the ‘Harvard’ part of that sentence,” Brandon said.

  Tyler rolled his eyes. “If you’re trying to set yourself up as the cool kid here, no one’s buying it.”

  They had gathered at the athletic fields parking lot after dark, testing their fleet of cars yet again, now a nightly habit as the day of the demo grew near. Tyler had to admit that four cars cut a much more impressive picture than two. The two Accords roared up to speed, their combustion engines straining to accelerate, while the two Alexis could silently leap from zero to sixty in under four seconds. Together, though, they were a coordinated fleet. They could zip along side by side as if bolted together, or in a line like a snake only inches apart. At the appearance of an obstacle, they swerved perfectly, braking or speeding up to avoid both it and each other. The obstacles were still imaginary, but with glasses, you could see them: a virtual person or a vehicle suddenly appearing on the road.

  Today, they were testing the emergency kill switch. At Tyler’s insistence, they had bought a separate switch with a separate receiver for each car. Tyler had wired these up to pull the plug on the computer, disengage the accelerator, and slam the brake down hard. It was an emergency measure they could use to stop a car dead, no matter how badly haywire the programming went. It circumvented the computer entirely. Brandon thought it was an unnecessary waste of time and funds, but Tyler preferred to play it safe.

  They tested it over and over again. Brandon would take the cars through their paces, and Tyler would, at random intervals, hit the kill switch for one or all of the cars. It worked beautifully. The moment he pressed the button, the chosen car would screech to a hard stop, disconnecting the computer from its power source so it couldn’t try to do anything else. Finally, Brandon got fed up with the interruptions and told Tyler that it worked already, so knock it off. Tyler grinned and gave him a thumbs-up.