Sunrise Alley

by Catherine Asaro

  "Not everyone sees it that way."

  The cushions shifted under her. "Are you claiming someone decided you are a machine and therefore no longer have the rights of a human being?"

  He met her gaze. "Yes."

  The idea appalled her. It epitomized one of the reasons she lived on this lonely coast instead of down in the heavily populated biotech corridors around San Francisco. "If that were true, you should want the authorities here. That's so illegal, it reeks."

  A muscle twitched in his cheek. "Tell Charon."

  "Who is Charon?" She knew the mythological reference: he was the ferryman who took dead souls to Hades. Out of nowhere, a phrase popped into her mind: He can only take you across once. A person could only die once.

  "Charon is my guardian," he said.

  "Your aunt and uncle?"

  "Not them." His jaw worked. "Charon took me."

  Took him? "I don't understand."

  "He rebuilt me and imprisoned me in his lab."

  "Good Lord." The cushions shifted even more under her. "You should get a lawyer. Go to the police. Talk to a reporter."

  He flushed. "I can't go to any authorities.

  So now the other shoe dropped. "Why not?"

  "They think Turner Pascal is dead."

  "Dead?" Good lord. She had expected to hear he had committed a crime. "Are you Turner Pascal?"

  "Yes. I was in a hover car pileup."

  Sam blinked. "You don't look dead to me."

  "Well, I was. Charon stole me from the morgue and remade me." His voice grated. "Now he says he owns me."

  Sam struggled to get her mind around what he was telling her. She couldn't imagine this vital young man in a morgue, besides which, what he described was barely in the grasp of current science. "Even if that were possible, he couldn't own you." She rubbed the back of her neck, which was developing a muscle kink. "Surely you could go to a lawyer or the police. They can prove your identity."

  "Charon changed all that."

  She could see how his eyes or skin could have been replaced, but not his genes. "Even if he altered your fingerprints and retinal scan, they can do a DNA analysis."

  "He fooled with my DNA map just enough to confuse my identity." Turner sounded as if he were gritting his teeth. "Then he registered me as an android."

  "That's nuts! You can't do that."

  He spoke wearily. "I have no proof I'm human."

  "Do you look like Turner Pascal?"

  "Exactly. Except in better condition."

  Sam turned it all over in her mind. "This has to be impossible. Anyone able to do what you describe would be an incredible biomech surgeon, one with access to a world-class facility. I can't think of anyone in that rank who would so thoroughly violate ethics the way you describe." She knew all the major players in her field. Yes, some of them were capable of taking the word "cutthroat" to whole new levels of meaning. But that was in business. She couldn't imagine anyone going this far outside the bounds of human decency.

  "Charon works with the underground," Turner said.

  Sam had, too, in the biomech movement that pushed the envelope on the definition of the word "human." "What underground? That's a generic term."

  He lifted his hand, then dropped it. "I don't know details. I'm not sure I want to."

  Sam studied his face, trying to pick up clues from his expression, hints of his thoughts, but she couldn't read anything. His skin had no flaws, no lines, no scars, no moles, nothing. It looked unreal. "How long were you in the morgue?" Saying the words chilled her.

  "A few hours."

  "And yet when this Charon brought you back, your brain was intact?" It was easier to be skeptical than horrified. "I don't think so."

  "He rebuilt my brain."

  Sam folded her arms, creating an invisible barrier of doubt between them. "That is impossible. We can make a synthetic liver or bone. But a brain? Not a chance."

  He slumped on the couch. "I'm an EI."

  Whoa. Hold on. Sam had worked for two decades on the leading edge of research in machine intelligence. The term EI had come into use for the exceptionally rare machines that achieved sentience. It separated them from run-of-the-mill AIs, or artificial intelligences, which weren't self-aware. Only a handful of EIs existed. Scientists weren't even sure why they became aware. Some existed in machines; others had android bodies and minds that more closely resembled human intelligence.

  Her specialty was in designing EI intelligences. Some people called her an EI architect; others used "EI shrink," though that wasn't truly accurate. She didn't do therapy; she developed EIs, she hoped with stable personalities. Her second area of expertise was in the construction of biomech components for EI bodies. Although she didn't work on implants for humans, she often talked to people who carried them. Turner wasn't the first one to express disquiet about his biomech; other people with far less than he carried had told her they no longer felt completely human.

  She spoke quietly. "I thought you were a man."

  "I am. Was." He looked ill. "Charon sliced up my brain and imaged those slices."

  "Turner, good Lord."

  He was clearly struggling to present himself calmly. "He got it soon enough to map out most of the neural connections. My personality is basically intact. I have memories of my life. But I've no idea how accurate a match I am to my former self."

  Sam wanted to deny it, but it wasn't beyond current technology. Doctors had known even in the twentieth century how to image the brain. The method Turner described required slices as thin as a few molecules to map out the neural structures needed to re-create a mind. However, noninvasive methods had improved dramatically over the past two decades. Techniques existed that didn't cause harm. She wasn't familiar enough with the field to know how they all compared in accuracy and precision, but this much was obvious: the process Turner described killed a person.

  Sam was starting to believe his story. It was horrifying, the theft of his internal identity, of his intellect, even of his soul. She folded her arms, covering her dismay with a shield of doubt. "Now you're going to say it's coincidence you washed up on the beach belonging to a semi-well-known biomech shrink."

  He spoke dryly. "Calling you a semi-well-known biomech shrink is like saying Einstein sort of knew a little science. You're the leading biomech architect in the world, Doctor Bryton."

  "Far from it." She wanted no reminders of what she had left behind. "And if you know who I am, that makes it even harder to believe you're here by accident."

  He averted his gaze, looking at his hands where they rested in his lap. "I came to see you."

  "All the way from Oregon?"

  "Yes. I stole Charon's yacht." A yellow curl fell into his eye.

  She wished he would stop looking so much in need of help. It evoked her protective instincts, which invariably led to trouble. "What did you do then?"

  "I told the yacht's AI to come here. I programmed myself so only your voice would wake me, and then I put myself to sleep."

  It made sense in its own gruesome way. She spoke quietly. "You were committing suicide. Except you left yourself an out. Me."

  "Yes." His voice was barely audible.

  "But why?"

  He finally looked up at her, a plea in his gaze. "What Charon did, you can undo. Help me regain my identity, memories, life. My peace of mind." Softly he said, "Help me. Please."

  What could she do when he looked at her that way, so vulnerable? She had come here to escape the lack of ethics in the exorbitantly lucrative universe of biomech research. In these heady days, technologies were expanding so fast, the field was exploding. Endless opportunities existed for firms that controlled the industry that made androids and EIs. With all that wealth and power came equally powerful corruption. Sam wanted nothing more to do with it. She had fought against the sleaze and she had failed, again and again. So maybe she couldn't stop it, but damned if she would ever work for any of them.

  The worst of it was, his story could be true.
If the yacht had a top-notch guidance AI, it could conceivably have made it here and broken up this morning on the rocks.

  "Listen," she said. "Get a lawyer. Tell them what you've told me. I'll verify the science. If your story holds up, no one in their right mind would let Charon take you."

  He clenched his trousers at the knee, making a fist. "If anyone examines me, they will find an android with an EI brain. A forma. I have no proof I'm human."

  That gave Sam pause. She often worked with biomech-formed constructs. The word "forma" had come to mean any construct with biomech components and an AI or EI brain. If he was simulating desperation, he was doing a better job than any EI she had worked with. She found it hard to believe he could be anything but a man.

  "You tell me that I'm the leading biomech analyst in the world," she said. "Yet even I couldn't do what you claim this Charon did with you." That wasn't exactly true; if she worked hard enough, she might be able to manage, given enough time and resources.

  His gaze never wavered. "You could do it."

  "Not if I wanted to live with myself." Yet already her mind was considering possibilities, how she would approach such an EI, could he remain stable, would he be more or less likely to endure than an EI developed from scratch. It wasn't impossible.

  They had other worries, too. "Can this Charon track you here?" she asked.

  "I've deactivated the signalers in my body."

  It didn't surprise her, if he could do it with the yacht. In one of her mutinies against technology, she had done the same to all her cars. "Are you sure you got every one?"

  "I think so." He watched her warily. "Are you going to call the police?"

  Sam wanted to know more about him before she made that decision. And she couldn't bear it when he looked at her like a beautiful but injured wild animal, ready to run at her slightest move.

  "You can stay tonight," she said.

  He closed his eyes. Then he opened them again. "Thank you."

  She shifted position, inspiring her couch to resume its attempts to relax her. "Don't thank me yet. My help comes with a condition."

  His expression became guarded. "What?"

  "Let me examine you. Also, I'll need to do a search on the world mesh and see what I can verify of your story."

  He didn't so much as flick an eyelash. "All right."

  "Do you want to rest first? Shower or eat?"

  "No. The sooner we get this over with, the better." He hesitated. "But where will we find a lab?"

  She indicated the floor. "There."

  "Under your house?"

  "That's right." She motioned toward the stairway by the entrance foyer. "In the basement."

  "Wow." He looked more like a schoolboy than a master criminal who stole million-dollar yachts. Standing up, he added, "Then let's go."

  II

  Alley Cat

  Glow-tiles on the ceiling shed light over the lab. Sam had designed this place based on the lab at her first job, sixteen years ago, after she had finished her Ph.D. at Yale. She had gone to MIT as a postdoctoral fellow to do research with Linden Polk. He had a knack for setting up work spaces that inspired people. He had been that way as her boss, too, challenging her to do her best, an example she had tried to follow when she had taken a job at the BioII Corporate Labs.

  Supposedly she had given all that up when she retreated here to the redwoods six months ago. But she hadn't really. With the income from her patents and the royalties she earned on her development of EI brains, she could have built a palace. Instead she gave herself a state-of-the-art biomech lab where she could develop EIs to her heart's content without having to fight anyone. She had installed a mech-table, too, since her research might require work on formas. A burt-wall curved around the table, named for Andrew Burt, the genius who had designed the prototype of intelligent surfaces. The room gleamed, all silver and chrome, bright, polished, shining, and new.

  Turner stood in the middle of the lab, turning in a circle. "This is incredible."

  "Thanks." Sam liked people who appreciated her work spaces. Her research was so much a part of herself that if someone took a shine to her lab, she figured they had to be her kind of person. Granted, she was no more objective about her work than most people were about their children, but she felt that way nonetheless.

  She indicated the mech-table. "You can lie there." The floor tiles felt smooth under her bare feet, reminding her of the boots she was carrying. While Turner went to the table, she sat down at a console and put on her boots, discreetly watching him. His gait had smoothed out enough that she wouldn't have noticed his stiffness if she hadn't known he had biomech legs.

  After he lay down, Sam spoke to the console. "Hello, Madrigal."

  A woman's melodic voice came out of the comm. "Good morning, Samantha."

  What the blazes? "My name is Sam."

  "I've decided you don't mean it."

  Sam had been developing this EI since she came here, but it had never pulled this before. "Why, pray tell, wouldn't I mean it?"

  "I have been analyzing your personality. You call yourself Sam out of habit, but you like your full name more than you are willing to admit."

  Sam didn't know whether to growl or laugh. "I call myself Sam because I like it. I use Samantha in formal situations. If you call me Samantha, you make me feel like I'm about to deliver a paper at a scientific conference. I don't want to feel that way right now."

  "I see." Madrigal paused. "I have integrated that data into my impressions of you."

  "Good." Sam hoped Madrigal didn't come up with any more brainstorms. The EI hadn't yet mastered the nuances of social interactions. At least it hadn't called her Samantha Abigail.

  "What can I do for you today?" Madrigal asked.

  Sam glanced at the mech-table. Turner had stretched out on his back and was staring at the ceiling with his hands behind his head. In repose, his face seemed more alabaster than skin. A burt-wall about six feet tall curved around the other side of the table, embedded with mesh-panels and holoscreens.

  Sam turned to the console, a response that came from habit rather than necessity. Madrigal could see her from any direction, through monitors in the lab. "I'm going to examine the man on the table."

  "I have a fix on him," Madrigal said. Holos of Turner's body formed in front of the burt-wall, floating in the air between the table and wall. They showed his muscles, organs, skeleton, circulatory system, and more. Even with just the rudimentary scan that produced those holos, Sam could tell a great deal. His skeleton wasn't bone. Some of his organs were in the wrong place. Instead of a brain, he had neural filaments throughout his body. He was an android. A forma. Had she not heard his story, it would never have occurred to her to think otherwise.

  Turner stared at the images, his gaze bleak.

  Sam went to the table and dragged her finger along its edge. A rail rose up under her hand on both sides.

  "I won't panic," he said.

  "I know." It impressed her that he understood so fast. The rails would keep him from rolling off if he began to thrash. "I just want to make sure you're safe." The holos disoriented her. He seemed human to her, but those scans labeled him as a forma. She went to the wall and studied the data on its screens. Then she pulled a robot arm out from its surface and unfolded it over Turner.

  He watched her, tense and silent.

  Most of the exams could be done externally, but Sam had to pierce his skin for blood tests. His circulatory system was synthetic, as was his "blood." It carried nanomeds, tiny molecular laboratories designed to repair and maintain his internal components. His skin was a marvel unlike anything she had seen before, a type of synthetic plastic so finely made that it was indistinguishable by touch from the real thing. She didn't recognize its structure, but when she had more time she intended to examine it on a molecular level. She analyzed results of his exams using the burt-wall to reduce the data. The entire time, Turner watched with preternatural stillness. She made no attempt to hide the data from
him. She suspected he already knew what she would find.

  Finally she turned to him, her earlier intensity subdued. He sat up then, pushing down the rail and swinging his legs over the side of the table.

  "It's true," Sam said. "You are more biomech than human. Your brain is an EI matrix of mesh filaments."

  "I'm a man." His grip on the table tightened until his knuckles turned white. "Not a forma."

  Sam pulled her fingers through her curls, lifting the mane off her shoulders. "Charon imaged your brain and reproduced its map in a sixth-generation neural network."

  Turner folded his arms and rubbed his hands up and down his arms, though the lab wasn't cold. "When he activated the matrix, I 'regained consciousness.' I couldn't believe how great I felt. All my aches and pains were gone." He lowered his arms. "Then I tried to move. I couldn't."

  Paralysis? She could guess what had probably happened. "Your EI brain couldn't coordinate the muscle movements of your body."

  "Apparently. Charon didn't recover everything in the imaging process." He fisted his hand, then opened it, watching the movements. "I never realized before how much I took for granted my ability to communicate with my body."

  "But you relearned how to move."

  "Reasonably well." His gaze never wavered. "Are you convinced now?"

  "Your brain is definitely an EI." She rubbed the back of her neck, where the muscles felt like steel bands now. "Your body is rebuilt, but you have human components. Charon couldn't have changed their DNA on a fundamental level and still have you be Turner Pascal. A full analysis should reveal your true identity."

  Turner slid off the table and stood next to her. "He will just claim he used the genetic blueprint of a dead man to design an android. How can I prove otherwise?"

  "Your teeth."

  "Synthetic."

  Sam looked over the data on the burt-wall. His teeth were beautiful, perfect, too perfect, but they seemed human, not a construct. "Are you sure?"

  "Yes."

  "This Charon is good." It was the understatement of the century. Whoever had done this was a genius. "So how come I've never heard of him?"