“I agree,” Valery echoed. “In some ways, she seems an innocent, trying to reconcile coding imperatives that are not natural to her identity; she doesn’t have a lifetime’s worth of experiences to draw from. She’s discovered at least the beginnings of sexual attraction on her own, and not made by our programming or Richard Mills’ fantasies. One Nine is aware of her desires and she wants to understand them.”
“That’s easy for you to say; you don’t have to cross into dicey territory with a mechanical sitting on the edge of an emotional cliff!”
Jessica waved away the notion quickly.
“She’s safer with you than anyone else, Julius.”
“It’s inevitable, and she’s going to get there a lot faster than the other Lima units. It’s fascinating study points for you, but I’m the one who’ll have to deal with it!”
“We’ll take those questions up when they arrive, Julius,” Valery replied, “but nothing was going to change that anyway; she passed beyond any other consideration long ago when she decided you are more important to her than any of us.”
With nothing more to discuss, and once more on the losing end of an argument with Valery and Jessica, Trent retrieved his recorder and returned to the annex. One Nine sat silently in her chair as he settled next to her. For a moment, he pretended to consult an info pad, only to gauge her condition before he spoke. There was no difference and no sign anything had changed. At last, he shifted in his seat and smiled.
“Shall we continue?”
NOVUM–DECEMBER 2180
As the evening forecasts said they would, flurries drifting down through the harsh glow of street lamps signaled the first meaningful system of the season. When the heavy rush began in the pre-dawn hours, Novum renewed its annual shift into winter, trading one weather extreme for another.
On the surface, Flatwalkers waddled in heavy coats and scarves, stepping through fresh drifts made by the night winds with arms extended to hold their balance. Here and there, billows of steam rolled skyward from sidewalk vents, waiting until the following system would plow through beneath steel gray clouds rushing eastward over the city. With the winter, Ricky’s trade ebbed, as it always did when the cold returned, but business was better than most years and the lingering notoriety made by his Walk ensured considerable reward to a once-empty bank account.
Across the alley, Mrs. Abber’s apartment had gone dark and lifeless in the wake of her leaving. In a moment of impulse he couldn’t explain, Ricky applied some of his new-found wealth to buy her out and make real her dream to join a sister far to the south—an Agro, growing vegetables across lush fields where it never snows and the pace was calm and safe. He gave her twice what the apartments were worth on the open market, selling the property in turn to a faceless bidder from Sector 3 at an equivalent rate to pull his accounts back to neutral. He went south sometimes from his new flat in the fashionable Brooklands neighborhood, just to keep in touch and spend a few days in her company, but the hustle kept him mostly in the city and moving onward from the past.
On Saturday afternoons, Ricky and Maela formed a habit of meeting for lunch in a sidewalk café off Lo Chan Boulevard and to his surprise the practice had become a weekly event. There was little else to do about the unseen process playing itself out in a laboratory far to the west; their meetings were pleasant and uncluttered with the nagging reality waiting for them when One Nine’s release day finally arrived. The cold forced their weekly date indoors where it was warm and dry, but life returned to normal—at least for a while.
Well before noon, the crowds began to gather when Ricky took his usual seat in a booth near the window, now blurred over with frost condensed outside on the wide, glass pane. Maela typically arrived early, and her absence was a mystery until his comm chirped with an incoming message.
“Where are you?” he asked at once.
“At home,” she replied, “but I won’t be able to make it this time.”
“Should we push it out until tomorrow, or wait until next week?”
“You need to come up here right now, Richard.”
Ricky frowned at Maela’s words; there was something off in her tone and she made no effort to conceal it.
“Is everything all right?” Ricky asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.
“Just come over and I’ll explain it when you get here. Go home first and pack for a few days; we’re going out to Veosa.”
In the late afternoon, their mag train slid silently toward its cradle inside Veosa’s eastern transit portal. Half an hour later, an air car dispatched from the labs lifted them into the bright sky and Ricky looked on with wonder again at the smooth, clean streets below, scrubbed of drifts and ice and already drying in the sunlight. Here, he thought with a smile, nothing was allowed to interrupt the activities of commerce, not even the weather. Twenty minutes more and they waited for their driver to settle the machine onto the complex grounds, swirling clouds of glittering snow from Boomtown’s landing pad.
David met them at the wide entryway, handing their coats off to an assistant hurrying to keep pace. On the ride out from Novum in a private cabin she paid dearly to book so that no one would overhear, Maela’s news held Ricky in silence and now it was time to brief the others. When Valery came along last, locking the door to an upper lab behind her, Maela inserted a data stick into a vacant terminal. At once, they saw a recorded conversation between Victor Jamison and another, receiving instructions from the powerful Commissioner himself.
“You have the details?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want it done at night again, just like you did with the old man, but no gunplay this time, understand?”
“I understand.”
“Use a cord or strap, but make sure he can’t cry out and alert others.”
“I know what to do.”
“He’s not famous like Fellsbach was, so it’s likely no one will care when they find the body.”
“It doesn’t matter, sir.”
“It matters to me! We can’t have corpses piling up at the door, so make sure it looks like a robbery, and get those idiots to do their jobs from now on, do you hear? They should’ve seen this before and moved on it!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t call me direct this time; I can’t be sure, but I think somebody’s trying to hack into my office comm.”
“I’ll take care of it, sir.”
“See that you do.”
The recording ended abruptly and Ricky looked at once to Valery. She stood motionless for a time, steeling herself against the pain their words made and fighting the growing rage she tried to conceal. At last, she turned to Maela.
“Now we know for sure.”
“Yes, but there’s more,” Maela said.
“Another recording?”
“No; this is something else.”
“What do you have?”
Maela inserted a second data stick and waited for the image to load. They looked over her shoulder, but there was only a jumble of words scrolling through until it stopped and highlighted a single line. There, in a description of resident VI from a secondary system tied directly to Starlight, an alphanumeric code, followed by an alias. In quotation marks, it read “Daniel.”
Valery looked closely and it was clear she understood. Ricky moved close, knowing also what it meant because Maela explained it to him on the train, but Jessica waited in confused silence.
“What’s this about?” she asked softly.
Valery pointed and read the code aloud.
“RU-991; it’s a build identification number they use in Novum for VI constructs. The alias is meant to assign a human name to an emerging AI. It’s the person on the other end of Jamison’s conversation, and the one who shot my father.”
Jessica looked again, pausing for a moment as the truth broke through.
“No wonder you couldn’t describe this on the comm; Daniel is an AI.”
“Where did you get these?” Valery asked.
&n
bsp; “Once we knew about Daniel,” Maela said, “I had Jonny do what he does and this is what popped up from his invasive hacks into Jamison’s communications system.”
Audrey had been quiet where she leaned against the wall, but the consequences of what Maela found jolted her upright.
“A fully embodied AI,” she added, “but this one has been programmed to kill.”
“Hold on a second,” Ricky said. “I thought there were supposed to be coding protocols that prevented mechanicals from harming a human.”
“That was the plan,” Audrey continued, “and everyone followed it until the war when things changed.”
“What things?”
“Over two hundred thousand combat deaths, plus a few initiatives that passed quietly in the Veosan Assembly when no one was looking, aimed primarily at building artificial soldiers so they could let machines do the dirty work and all the humans could stay clean. We suspected as much, but this confirms it; AI can now be developed with lethal command codes and your Commission clearly had the same idea.”
Maela began to pace again and Ricky saw her frustration build.
“All that might be true, but let’s stick to the point, okay? Daniel killed Elden and he needs to be stopped before he does it again. You heard Jamison’s instructions and when they’re carried out, somebody else out there is going to die.”
“We need to accelerate the process,” Jessica declared. “We can’t wait any longer, and maybe she can help us.”
They knew ‘she’ was One Nine.
“Call Julius,” Valery replied with a nod.
Trent emerged from the elevator and joined them in the lower labs. At once, he looked only at Maela, but Audrey intercepted his thoughts.
“Julius, you remember Detective Kendrick, but with her is Richard Mills. Richard, meet Commander Julius Trent; he’s here to help with One Nine’s preparations.”
Ricky shook Trent’s hand, but Audrey’s introduction didn’t include a definition of ‘help’ and Ricky waited for more. When nothing was offered, he decided to find out for himself.
“What’s your specialty, Commander?”
“Bio-mechanical transition research,” Trent replied. “I’m a naval physician, but my area is behavioral studies.”
Audrey looked at Valery, knowing what would come next. Valery turned to Ricky and Maela.
“Since you were here last,” she began, “One Nine has progressed exponentially; her personality has developed fully now, including highly advanced linguistics programming. When you speak with her, it will seem no different than it would be when talking to any of us, so I just wanted to prepare you, all right?”
“Like it was when she was still Neferure?”
“Exactly. She has a distinct dialect, with full use of contractions and even some slang and profanity thrown in here or there. One Nine sounds just as human as you or I.”
Ricky smiled, but she reached gently for his wrist.
“There’s something else, however, and you need to prepare for it.”
“That sounds ominous.”
She shook her head to reassure and said, “One Nine is in her own body now—the unit I showed you when you first arrived. She’s no longer just a program inside a computer array.”
“Wow,” he mumbled stupidly. “I guess it was inevitable, after what she demanded back in Novum, but…”
“Also, and this might be a bit strange for you, her personality is not as it was when you knew her as Neferure; that was a separate profile and character program, Richard.”
“I understand.”
“I mention it because I don’t want you to be taken aback when you meet her; One Nine is not Neferure anymore, do you understand?”
“Yeah, I get it; she’s her own girl now.”
Valery nodded, satisfied the cautionary note had been delivered and received; Ricky wanted only to move on from a topic that held an odd sensation of embarrassment. Had One Nine described for them their private moments in the palace, he wondered? Were intimate moments laid bare for the others to see and judge? Trent watched him closely and the uneasiness had become obvious.
“Let’s go upstairs, shall we? Richard might like to see how far One Nine’s come since he spoke with her last, wouldn’t you?”
Ricky nodded quickly, grateful for the considerate and skillful shift Trent made to rescue him from the moment. They filed into the lift and waited until it stopped at the corridor leading to the inner laboratory—and One Nine’s annex. Ricky felt the moisture on his palms, wiping them quickly against his trousers as the tension began to build. Would she regard him the same way she once had? Was the new, independent personality made without memories of what they had been together inside the Starlight array? Ricky walked with short, tentative steps, watching for her to emerge and when she appeared at last, Ricky held his breath in the dim light.
“One Nine?” Valery called out.
“Good evening, Valery.”
Ricky stopped as One Nine moved slowly from her enclave. The human female he once saw on a treadmill now stood before him, but Ricky hadn’t expected one so life-like—so natural and real. She wore a pale, beige robe, tied with a sash around her waist and dark blue leggings that fit snugly over long legs Ricky guessed would make her nearly as tall as he and nothing like the petite shape of Princess Neferure. Her crystalline, blue eyes seemed to shine as if backlit from within, but strawberry blonde hair, cut short and barely beyond each earlobe was a stark contradiction to the fine, jet-black tresses he admired during evening trysts on the banks of the river at Ma’at. In every way, One Nine bore no resemblance to the daughter of Pharaoh as Valery stood close to him and motioned for One Nine. It seemed strange, but no introduction was needed.
“Hello, Richard.” She smiled as she moved toward him slowly, “it’s so nice to see you again.”
Their embrace was not forced, but it felt obligatory and alien from those moments inside the simulation. Instead, there was only a feeling of polite familiarity between two who once were close, now separated by the distance of time and a circumstance like no other. As it is for childhood friends, reunited as adults, perhaps, he looked at her and saw nothing that could move him in the way he expected. The moment pulled him at last beyond the threshold that separates a present from its past. Gone was the knowing glance and coquettish smile as they lay close on her bed. No more gentle touch of her fingers along the side of his face. Despite the hours spent with her, One Nine—Neferure—had become a stranger. With a sudden finality Ricky hadn’t expected, she had been consigned to a place only of memories.
He wanted to tell her why they no longer walked along the shore, or grasped for each other in passionate moments. Ricky wanted Neferure to understand what had become of him, but those descriptions were needless, set aside for a simulated character and not the blank expression in the face of a person he’d never met. There was emptiness, and the unmistakable feeling of isolation he battled, if only to hide from the others a loss that could never be made right. Was it expected, he wondered? Did they know and recognize so unique and bizarre a condition? Perhaps the navy doctor understood, but there was no point in lingering in misplaced remorse for what had been, now removed forever. At last, he smiled and nodded, offering a signal that he was ready to let go. Valery saw it and understood.
“One Nine is about to complete her developmental process, Richard; soon, she will walk from this lab and take her place in our community.”
“I’m glad,” Ricky said. “This is amazing to see, and…”
“Will we still be friends?” One Nine asked abruptly. The question took Ricky by surprise, but he nodded and said, “Of course we will!”
She smiled and took his hand.
“I hope we will always stay close, Richard; you were the first friend I ever had.”
Ricky felt the moment ease and it seemed as though a burden had been lifted. A strange journey had run its course, even as a new one waited to take its place. Valery motioned for them to sit near
the broad windows and when they settled, she brought One Nine quickly to the matter at hand.
“Detective Kendrick brought us disturbing news from Novum, and we wanted you to hear about it. We hoped you might be able to help us prevent something terrible from happening.”
“Of course,” One Nine replied.
“Maela investigated, using the information you provided about Daniel, but she also found its build designation.”
“Yes.”
“Before we continue, I want you to understand that nothing has changed; you will be released on schedule and free to function independently, just as we agreed.”
“I am grateful, Valery, but it makes me wonder why you feel the need to reiterate our agreement now?”
Valery paused for a moment to gather her thoughts before turning to One Nine.
“It won’t matter, and our agreement will continue as planned, but it seems we’ve made an independent discovery and because of it, your final condition for removal from Starlight is now moot.”
“I don’t understand,” One Nine replied.
Valery blinked twice and said, “Was the information revealing Daniel as an embodied AI the second part of what you had to tell us?”
“No.”
Valery’s eyes widened.
“No?”
“The information Detective Kendrick discovered—that Daniel is an embodied AI—is not the secondary detail I held in reserve as a condition of my freedom.”
The silence was immediate as the others scrambled to understand her meaning. Valery spoke for them.
“You surprise me, I must say!”
“I’m sorry if I created any confusion, Valery, but you mentioned something would happen that must be prevented.”
“Maela found a call log that led her to a recording—a conversation between Victor Jamison and Daniel,” Valery answered. “It appears Jamison has ordered Daniel to find and kill another, just as he murdered my father. We need to find Daniel and stop him.”
When the River Ran Dry Page 37