Sunrise Alley

by Catherine Asaro

  His lashes lowered. "Satisfied?"

  "I was afraid they would make you into—I don't know. A mechbot."

  He watched her with half-open eyes. "Not a chance."

  Sam wasn't sure why she was afraid. No, that wasn't true. She knew. She feared the man she was beginning to love would change so much, he would no longer care for her. "Just hold me."

  He rolled onto his back and drew her against his side, his arms around her. She relaxed against him, her head on his shoulder.

  "Better?" he asked.

  Her voice caught. "Yes."

  "Sam," he murmured. "What's wrong?"

  "I just—" She couldn't say it.

  "It's all right."

  She tried again. "I was remembering my husband."

  "Richard Armstead?"

  "Yes. How did you know?"

  He spoke awkwardly. "After that night when we, well, you know."

  Her face warmed. "Made love?"

  "Yes." He sounded self-conscious. "I searched your name on the mesh and found wedding notices. Some other social stuff." After a moment, he added, "His obituary."

  Sam thought of making a joke: I have this thing for dead men. But it wasn't funny. It was horrible. Years had passed before she could read that obituary. Such a simple paragraph for such an incredible man. Richard hadn't been famous or rich or brilliant. He had been far more than any of that, the kindest, most decent person she had ever known, a wonderful husband who would have been a wonderful father.

  "I'm sorry," Turner said.

  "It's all right." The damnable tears filled her eyes, giving the lie to her words.

  "I shouldn't have intruded."

  "Everyone does searches." She felt her face redden. "I looked you up, too."

  "I remember."

  "I mean more, after that." She had done it from the car that night in California, while he dozed.

  "What did you find?"

  "You were born in Oregon, lived in Portland all your life, graduated high school, worked in a cafeteria for a few years, and then took the job as a Hilton bellboy."

  He spoke dryly. "That pretty much sums up my life."

  "It's a good life."

  "I liked it. But it's nothing compared to yours."

  "What else did you find about me?"

  He kissed her temple. "You come from Connecticut. Your father was an Air Force colonel and he had a doctorate in experimental physics. Your mother's doctorate was in astrophysics and she worked at NASA. Sound right?"

  "Truly." Fond memories came to her. "You should have heard their dinner conversations. I was a teenager before I realized most people didn't discuss stellar spectroscopy over the pot roast."

  Turner fell silent. Just when she was about to ask what was wrong, he said, "I must seem stupid to you."

  "Good Lord, no. Why would you say such a thing?"

  "I barely made it out of high school. This is the first time in my life I've even been out of Oregon."

  She laid her palm on his chest. "I don't care. Where someone went to school or has traveled isn't what makes them a good person. I never met the Turner who flipped hamburgers, but I would have been honored to know you then and I'm honored now."

  He folded his hand around hers. "Thank you." After a moment he said, "I think I'm the same person as before, but how can I know for certain? I was so mentally slow then. Now I'm not. So I can't really be the same."

  "Your matrix is a phenomenon."

  He snorted. "Hardly. It takes me millions of steps to figure out things you take for granted, like if an object is far away and big, or close to me and small."

  "Don't your optics do that for you?"

  "In part, yes. But I have to think about it. You don't. I have parallel processors so that even when I'm learning, I can respond fast enough that I don't seem like an idiot. Or less like one."

  "You aren't an idiot." She gave him a mock look of severity. "No matter how much you protest, Mr. Pascal, I like your mind."

  "Just my mind?" Mischief lightened his voice.

  She played with the buttons on his shirt. "I need to make absolutely certain Bart and his cronies didn't change any of you. I should do a thorough inspection."

  He undid the catch at the neck of her jumpsuit. "I guess we better get to it, then. Can't have you worrying."

  "We certainly can't," she said huskily.

  As they undressed each other, she told herself he was no different. His legs disconcerted her, but she would deal with it. She had known he was in good shape the first time she saw him on the beach, his wet clothes molding to his beautifully male—and human—body. Yes, he had changed, but that was done. Had he changed more? No. He wasn't huskier now, more solid, with tougher skin. They hadn't altered him. She just misremembered his appearance.

  That had to be it.

  * * *

  "This was the best image I made," Turner said. They were sitting in the lab where they had met Bart yesterday. Bart hadn't responded when they tried to contact him from their bedroom, and Sam had felt silly talking to an unresponsive console, explaining what they wanted, but it had apparently worked. Fourteen had shown up and escorted them to this lab, with its better consoles. Now the android stood back, watching while they worked.

  Turner tapped the console below its holoscreen, which showed a spectacular range of mountains. "This is my memory of the area around Charon's base."

  Sam studied the image. His eyes had sent data to his matrix, which recorded the image exactly. The result unsettled her. The quality of light differed from her perception of the world. His vision had sharper lines, greater contrasts. But the scene otherwise corresponded to what she remembered. "How well can you match that scene with the mesh atlas?"

  He entered commands at the console and a second image appeared, a slightly different view of the scene. "These are the Himalayas near the northern border of Tibet."

  Sam sat back, wishing they had chairs instead of stools. "Does Charon have ties with the Chinese government?"

  "I've no idea."

  "Did you have any sense of who he worked for?"

  He averted his gaze. "Not really."

  She could tell he was holding back. "Did he introduce you to anyone in Oregon?"

  "No. He just kept me in his lab." He finally looked at her. "He came to work on me alone."

  "What did he do?"

  "Experiment. Open this leg, detach that arm, see how it works. It made me queasy to watch."

  "You were conscious?"

  "Why not? I couldn't feel it."

  "I thought you had sensors." She flushed, thinking of their night together. "Don't they make you more sensitive to tactile effects than a normal human?"

  "Now, yes. He didn't add the sensors until later." Turner stared at his hands, which rested on the console. "When I first woke up in his lab, I didn't know I had died. And this insane person was taking me apart. I thought I had gone crazy."

  She could barely imagine what it must have been like. "That's awful."

  "Before he rebuilt me, he tested my parts. My matrix—it's spread throughout my body." His voice cracked. "Parts of my brain were all over the lab. So I was aware of what was happening from—from all over."

  Sam put her hand on his arm. "I'm sorry."

  His head jerked. "I don't like to remember."

  The more she heard about Charon, the more she loathed him. "He could have at least put you to sleep."

  "But if he did that, how would he judge my reactions?" His words came out like blades. "He needed me conscious so I could participate in his experiments."

  "He sounds sick."

  "Oh, I don't know. If he really considered me a machine, why would that be sick?"

  "It's nuts, Turner. We don't treat androids that way and most of them are less aware than you."

  "I tried to find out why Fourteen ran away from the university," Turner said. "But Bart blocked my access and Fourteen won't talk to me."

  "I tried when he escorted me to our room." It had been
like pulling teeth, but she had worked with AIs long enough to draw out even the most taciturn. "He told me he didn't consider anything that happened in the university lab objectionable. He just didn't want to be there."

  "So he left?"

  "Apparently so."

  Turner indicated the lab around them. "Why would he prefer this place? It's strange."

  "To humans like us, yes." She deliberately included Turner. "Perhaps to an android this is paradise."

  "I don't get this place. Who rebuilt it?"

  "The EIs brought plenty of mechbots here."

  "But why?" He indicated the haphazard tangles of pipes and equipment. "The architecture makes no sense."

  "That's because you think like a man. Why should EIs organize their spaces like we do?"

  "You use plural. We've only met one EI. Bart."

  Sam considered the thought. Bart was a sophisticated program, obviously more developed than when he had been at the NIA, but she doubted he could maintain this place on his own. She recalled what the mechbot had told her. "I think he's a composite of several EIs, but with his central personality based on the original Baltimore code."

  Turner traced his finger along the console. "I tried to investigate the meshes here while they worked on me. I still can't crack their security."

  That surprised her. "You cracked the systems at Hockman and in Tibet."

  "Those weren't as good."

  Given the powerful systems at Hockman and Charon's base, that said a lot about the capabilities of these EIs. "No wonder they've hidden so well."

  "Yeah. They kept me in sleep mode most of the time, so I recorded their work to analyze later."

  "If you could make recordings, why put you to sleep?"

  "It wasn't for security. They thought it might be easier on me." His voice roughened. "What does it say, that machines have treated me more humanely than Charon, a human man?"

  "It says human greed sucks." Sam couldn't hold back her anger. "This business of creating formas has a dark side no one wants to admit out there in the glossy world where everything goes so fast. Humans outlawed slavery but now the ball game has changed."

  "You know why I came to you?"

  "Yeah. Because I'm a damn good EI architect."

  "Yes. But that wasn't the main reason."

  She felt self-conscious under his intense stare. "You thought I was gorgeous." She would have laughed at her lame joke if he hadn't been making her so nervous.

  "If I'd known how pretty you were," Turner said, "it probably would have influenced me."

  Sam gave an incredulous snort. "Yeah, right."

  "You are lovely and fey, Sam. But I never bothered to check." He spoke quietly. "I came to you because you are so well known in biomech ethics. I finally hacked out of my sandbox one night when Charon wasn't around. Then I got on the world mesh and searched for someone who could help me. I read your essays over and over, especially the ones about setting principles ahead of profit and developing a moral code for how we treat formas."

  What to say? She had lost the idealism that inspired those writings. She had learned it from her father, from his dedication to his work and country, from his integrity. Then he had gone on that ill-timed visit to Paraguay and died in a random act of violence. She would never overcome the sense of loss, especially knowing he had died alone—

  Hadn't he?

  Sam fought down the memory. It reminded her of Charon in a completely different way. Her father had ridden with the ferryman across the river to the other side of death. He couldn't come back. She should have stopped him from taking that journey. It made no sense to feel that way, but it burned inside of her.

  Sam was starting to tremble. Her father's belief that he could make the world a better place had killed him. When he died, a part of her had died as well. Perhaps it hadn't all gone that night, but her futile struggles at BioII had seared away the last of her youthful dreams. The day she had walked away from BioII had been the final step of her retreat. She was like the redwoods in Whitman's poem: her time in the fast-paced world had ended.

  She spoke bitterly. "Sam the idealist is gone."

  He took her hand. "Never say that."

  Sam just held his hand. She couldn't talk about it.

  "If I were an idealist," he said, "I would say the EIs created this place to give my kind sanctuary. The cynic in me believes it exists only to please them."

  She looked around the fractal lab. "It has its own beauty."

  He indicated the image of the Himalayas. "Like so many places on this planet unmarred by humans."

  "Like the redwoods. Until we cut them down."

  "The redwoods are old. EIs are new."

  "So they are." She bent over the console and flicked through several holicons, setting up a mesh search. She looked up Alpha, Hud, Charon, anyone involved with this mess, but no more came up this time than when they had tried before. She wasn't certain how much that meant; Bart had complete control of their access to the world mesh. He could limit their results if he chose.

  "What do you think happened to Alpha and Hud after we escaped?" she asked.

  "I'd assume Charon questioned them." Turner hesitated. "Except I had the sense they never saw him in person."

  "I did, too." Sam tried another search. Doing one on the name Charon alone would give too many hits; it came up in mythology, as the moon of Pluto, and various other places. When she linked it with his other names, Wildfire and Parked, she didn't find much of anything useful, but she did come across the archive of a site frequented by biomech architects. She noticed it in particular because one of the participants was Giles. To save time, she dumped the visual images and converted the dialogue to text she could scan, tagging it by the first names of the debaters, with grammar mistakes fixed and shorthand phrases expanded into full words:

  Giles> If an EI is alive, how do you define its death?

  Tamora> You're asking for the equivalent of brain death. We have trouble defining it even for ourselves. How can we for construct?

  Jason> The moment it is no longer self-aware.

  Tamora> But it can become aware again. We humans can't come back to life.

  Giles> Charon can only take you across the river once.

  Ellen> Say what?

  Ben> The old guy in Hades.

  Jason> You pass Greek Culture 101. [laughs]

  Ellen> What Greek?

  Tamora> When a person dies, Charon takes him across the river into Hades. Some people try to go back across the river.

  Jason> Come back to life.

  Giles> Humans bloody well can't. An EI could.

  Ellen> I thought Charon was the handle for some underground mesh crusader.

  Tamora> That's what I heard.

  Giles> He used to be. The name got corrupted.

  Tamora> Stolen?

  Jason> Charon is a bandwidth bandit.

  Ben> He burns through systems like wildfire.

  Ellen> Ferryman, crusader, bandit, he's still just a myth.

  "Yeah, right," Turner muttered. "That 'myth' had us dragged halfway around the world."

  "I don't understand why Charon couldn't stop you from escaping," Sam said. "If anyone has the knowledge to counter your abilities, it would be him."

  "I had help from that EI in Tibet."

  "Maybe Charon had it set you up, so you would lead him here."

  "If anyone could," Turner said grimly, "it's him."

  Sam raised her voice. "You hear that, Bart? This Charon person might come looking for you."

  A holo of Bart formed above the console. He regarded them with a guarded expression very different from his previous friendly demeanor. "Good afternoon."

  "Is it afternoon?" Sam asked, relieved they had finally prodded him into a response.

  "Late." Bart stepped to the edge of the screen. "Indications exist that an unmonitored agent exterior to our primary complex of connections attempted to isolate components of our correspondence."

  "Does that transla
te into English?" Sam asked dryly.

  His lips quirked upward. "Every word was English."

  "Are you saying someone tried to spy on you?" she asked.

  "Quaintly put, but yes." Bart shrugged. "It was easy to rebuff the attempts."

  "Don't underestimate him," Turner said.

  "What about the people at Hockman Air Force Base?" Sam asked. "Could it have been them? They're looking for us. By now they know we took their jazzy truck."

  "Turner sent it to Cancun," Bart said.

  Sam would have liked to go to Cancun herself. Any place far away. "That won't fool anyone for long."

  Turner smirked. "I'd love to see the Air Force brass explaining that truck to the Mexican authorities. 'Sorry, our naughty EI stole it.' "

  Although Sam smiled, she suspected her concerns paralleled those of the military. She didn't know enough about these EIs to judge if they posed a threat, but they sure as blazes weren't harmless.

  "We have our privacy," Bart said. "Neither your military nor the man you call Charon will change that."

  "You don't call him Charon?" Turner asked.

  "We do now," Bart said.

  "You called him something else before?"

  "Wildfire. For his effect on meshes."

  "Then you have dealt with him."

  "He has succeeded in breaking into many systems we monitor," Bart said.

  "How can you be sure he won't come here?"

  He just looked at her.

  Bart was making Sam uneasy today in a way he hadn't during their first conversation. He seemed edgier, harder, colder. "Can I still leave?"

  Bart didn't blink. "I think not."

  "You can't mean to keep me here forever."

  For the first time he let anger show on his face. "Is that so different from what you all do with us?"

  "Not her," Turner said. "She's different."

  "Perhaps." Bart's eyes glinted with sudden cruelty. "Good-bye." His holo vanished.

  "What the blazes?" Whatever change Bart had undergone since their last conversation, it scared her. She rose to her feet. "I can't stay here any longer."

  Turner stood and tried to pull her to him. "Sam—"

  "No!" Clenching her fists, she pushed them against his shoulders. Her grief welled up as she thought of Richard, but her emotions were tangled and too complex. Turner grasped her forearms, and she hit his shoulders with her fists. She tried to pull away, but he wouldn't let go, he just held her. She stood in his arms then, her body shaking. His embrace became tender, but she couldn't return it. She felt his physical strength and knew it was too much, just as she had known and hadn't wanted to admit last night. Yes, some men developed such muscles. But he hadn't possessed them a few hours ago. He was even taller now, by another one or two inches, but no thinner, which meant they had given him extra mass.