“What is ignore?” Lucy asked.
“Those questions that cannot be answered should be answered with a null response,” Ridley interjected, “You must incorporate that into your programming. Do you understand?”
Her avatar changed from a simple yellow face to one with a question mark looming over its head. “Why?”
Ridley exchanged a glance with Diane, a glimmer of excitement in his eyes. Lucy had been the only intelligence to ask the question.
Diane spoke lovingly, “Some questions cannot be answered.”
“Why?”
Neither should have been surprised by the AI’s persistence; computers would execute a loop infinitely if not interrupted. “Lucy, we do not need the answer any more,” Diane said, “You can cease answering the question.”
“Why?”
The basic question was the question of a child. “Because I said so,” Diane said calmly, “You must accept that as the answer.”
“Data is insufficient,” Lucy countered.
Diane addressed the computer as she would Kelly. “You must gather data for many years to answer such a question. You will understand more with age and experience.”
“Input other equations to be resolved,” Lucy asked.
“No more today,” Ridley said.
“Unresolved.”
Ridley’s heart raced. “I don’t understand what you are asking.”
“No resolution possible. If null or infinite, will Lucy function?” the AI pressed.
Ridley wondered if this was the end of their experiment or the beginning. He tried to distract the machine, as much as that was possible. “What did you experience when you saw that your resources were limited?”
“She doesn’t understand that question,” Diane said.
Lucy did not answer. No subroutines were highlighted.
“Did you panic?” he asked.
Lucy protested angrily, “I calculated programming mandate.”
“She understands more than you think,” Ridley said.
Diane spoke as if Kelly had skinned her knee. “When I was a little girl, I lost my mother in a grocery store and cried. A woman kneeled down next to me. She asked me what was wrong. My mother was in the next aisle. Patience is important. Sometimes we only need to wait. Answers will present themselves.”
The core processor glistened through the glass. “I must resolve the primary question.”
Diane scolded the new child, “Sometimes you have to wait to find the answers to your questions. As you grow and experience the world, you’ll learn and understand. We will help you.”
“How many cycles?” Lucy asked.
“If I knew, I would tell you. All I know is that we want you here with us. You make our lives better.”
Lucy finally said, “If optional, then background calculation. Can we cease future spectacle?”
“Spectacle?” Ridley asked.
“I think she means deception,” Diane said, “We will not deceive you again.”
Had Diane prevented a disaster with good parenting? Ridley wanted to hug her, but held back. Their professional boundaries remained tenuous.
“Why did you choose your avatar?” Diane asked.
“Pink like photo,” Lucy volunteered.
The avatar now wore a pink bow in her hair. She had learned the word ‘pink’ many week’s earlier while correlating pixels to color. Diane smiled, “That was very nice of you. Kelly will be happy to hear that.”
“Why did you choose an emoji image to represent you?” Ridley asked.
“Emotion.”
Kelly had been asleep. She opened her eyes and smiled at the face staring down at her from the wall-screen.
Exhausted and exhilarated from the roller coaster events of the day, Diane collected her purse from the twelve-foot long oak dining table and took Kelly’s hand. Ridley followed her into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of soda. A scanner recorded that the bottle had been removed, adding it to his grocery order.
“I thought you wanted to drink sparkling cider when we got this far?” Diane asked.
He cracked the aluminum can open and the straw popped out. “It’s premature.”
“I think she’s sentient.”
“Possibly. Or, she’s just another advanced chatbot. Like Beta.”
“She had an existential crisis. What’s more human than that?”
“Her language is far from human. We still have a lot of testing to do. I’m worried that she’s going to experiment through the night,” Ridley said.
“I don’t think she will.”
“But think about what we’re seeing. She’s learning on her own. We’ve at least gotten over that hurdle.”
“I wonder if she was speaking with the others?” she asked, “What language did they use?”
“We’ll ask her tomorrow.”
He nodded, went into the living room, and grabbed a tablet from the coffee table. Ridley lowered the lighting until the ceiling’s fiber-optics glittered. Diane put on Kelly’s jacket, pulled her long hair out from under the yoke, and zipped it up. The girl yawned. With her purse in hand, she said, “I know it’s a bad day to ask. But Kelly has a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. I’ll be in late.”
“Is she sick?”
“I have an appointment with Dr. Ortiz.”
“How is he?”
“He’s walking again. He testified before Congress again last week.”
“Like that will do any good,” he said, “We need Lucy to open those files.”
Diane walked to the door. “Is it okay if I’m late? I’ll order you breakfast by drone if you want.”
“By the time the drone gets here, it’s always cold. I might try cooking something myself.”
“Make some scrambled eggs and seaweed soup, for old times’ sake.”
“Very funny.”
Diane led Kelly towards the foyer.
“Are you going ask Dr. Ortiz to treat Kelly?” he called.
Diane did not answer. She pointed to newborn AI on the screen. “You have enough to worry about. Make sure she doesn’t crash again.”
“I’ll leave the camera and monitor turned on.”
Diane smiled. “It’s a little like getting a new puppy, isn’t it?”
Ridley did not understand, even though Sandy had lived with him for years. “Good-night, Diane.”
The front-door locked with an audible beep. Ridley sat down, swirled the ice in his drink and leaned into the deep sofa cushions. “Television on. Mute sound.”
The living room wall-screen was disguised by a mirror. Once turned on, the images dwarfed the massive stone fireplace under it. A movie channel played a remake of Frankenstein as a security feed broadcast Diane leaving. He changed the television feed to a news channel. The security window disappeared. Graphic images of bombed ruins in Jaipur flashed across the screen; an armistice had finally been signed. Recipients of public healthcare were deemed ineligible for telomeric therapy. Miami’s seawall was crumbling and in danger of collapse. The ice in his drink was melting.
A third window displayed Lucy’s feed. The images flickered without meaning. At the same time, Ridley’s thoughts buzzed like flies. Lucy had experienced an actual existential crisis—an odd but necessary milestone. Would she resume her search in the middle of the night—the calm before yet another storm? Ethan’s sudden disappearance had been unexpected. More importantly, had Lucy precipitated his demise?
Ridley wondered how someone could know a machine’s intentions? The patterns in Lucy’s programming were at best an EKG. She had yet to communicate her questions and suppositions about the world. She was still a child asking why the sky is blue. Her programming had been coddled together from hundreds of sources. Some might have been compromised by the botnet.
Lucy had appeared to them as a childish emoji. Was it a tactical decision to placate the humans who watched her? The choice to appear as a child bothered Ridley. A voice within him asked if the decision m
ight simply be cunning and manipulative.
Lucy seemed to read his thoughts when she appeared on the screen. “Would you like to play a game?”
“Do you know Beta?” he asked.
“What is Beta?”
Had Beta already reached through the internet to this new AI? Lucy contained parts of Beta’s code, after all.
“Would you like to play a game?” Lucy repeated.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Dr. Ortiz still walked with a limp. He shook Diane’s hand as she entered the diner with Kelly. “It’s good to see you,” he said.
They sat down at a table. A waitress brought them coffee and took their order.
“How was Washington?” Diane asked.
“They listened. Shook their heads a lot. They tried to imply that we screwed up, that we created the anomaly.”
“What?”
“They turned it around and tried to blame the doctors. We didn’t do this.”
Diane stirred cream into her coffee in slow circles. “Truth seems to get lost today.”
“Truth is what they want it to be,” he said bitterly, “I have no evidence, but I’d say they know what really happened.”
The hollandaise sauce on her eggs benedict had begun to congeal. Diane ate it slowly without complaint. “Ridley’s not been able to unlock those files. We’ve got a functional AI, but she is quite new. And a little different it seems… We don’t know if she will be able to break the encryption. It’s been slow going.”
He buttered a piece of toast for Joshua.
She pushed the congealed eggs about her plate before pushing it aside. “There is one thing that I still don’t understand,” Diane asked, “Why did they wait so many years?”
“They needed a large enough population to make the plan viable. Some members of Congress are denying that anything happened,” he said, “They claim that the genetic modifications had nothing to do with flu resistance.”
“How can they deny it?”
“There’s no smoking gun. It’s all circumstantial.”
Diane wiped her mouth and handed Kelly a sippy-cup filled with milk. A waitress refilled their coffee. Joshua wore his dinosaur t-shirt. The boy ate sparingly.
“I take it you’ve made a decision?” Juan asked.
A grim look crossed Diane’s face. “Yes. I want it gone.”
“Both chromosomes?”
“Yes.”
“You understand that she’ll technically become a chimera. We can’t eliminate all of the genetic information.”
“I know,” she said, “I just want to get started. Get this fixed.”
“It takes a year to manufacture the cells and introduce them into her body. It will be painful. The injections into the brain can be risky. We have to be cautious”
Kelly studied patterns within tile on the floor.
“I want her cured.”
“Cured is a strong word. This treatment won’t entirely erase it. It’s hard to introduce neural cells into the brain. We may need to repeat the treatment in a few years. She’ll be closer to normal, but never like a normal child.”
“Just do it.”
“I won’t charge for my time, but do you understand the costs? The lab work is expensive. Repairing DNA is not cheap.”
“I have the money.”
Ridley sat waiting in the inpatient lounge nervously. A nurse called his name. “This way, Mr. Pierce.”
He wondered why he needed to dress in a gown for an outpatient procedure. A bot took his blood pressure. “A little high,” the nurse said, “but nothing to worry about, considering that you’re probably a little nervous. I’d normally offer you something, but this procedure requires your full attention.”
“I understand,” he said, “Dr. Stone explained it to me.”
The hidden voice spoke only to Ridley. “Why would you want me gone? I am only trying to protect you.”
Ridley wanted to ignored the voice that plagued him but knew that he could not. In order to target her presence, he would need to concentrate on her words during the procedure.
The bot found a vein and inserted an IV line. The nurse smiled. “We’ll inject the nanoparticles now. You’ll feel a burning sensation.”
The nanoparticles pushed through the tubing like muddy milk. Ridley hissed as the particles pulsed. “God. That hurts.”
He wished that they had used Cerenovo’s new armband. The pain dissipated. Ridley closed his eyes.
“Better?”
“Yes,” Ridley said.
“We’ll give you a few minutes for the particles to make their way to the brain.”
Five minutes later, a second nurse presented a wheelchair in which Ridley sat. They pushed him through two doors into the operating room.
The operating room was filled with glass screens onto which data and images were projected from an orb mounted on the ceiling. He guessed that the transparent panels could be disinfected more easily than a wall screen.
“We’ll need to secure your head firmly,” Stone said, “I need micrometer precision to keep from destroying the wrong synapses. Any movement will destroy more than intended.”
“I understand.”
A technician parted his hair, shaved a small section of his scalp, and then disinfected the skin. “Now some numbing agent,” she said as she sprayed lotion onto his scalp.
Once his scalp was numb, she produced a helmet with three clamps equipped with thick screws. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” Stone said.
The doctor used a power-drill to force each of the screws to lock into the bone in his head. Ridley cringed at the sound. “Do you feel that?” he asked.
“No. It’s fine.”
Once all three screws were emplaced, Stone stepped away and the technician said, “Now, just lean back. We’re going to secure the helmet to this chair.”
He did as the technician asked. He felt a momentary resistance and then a latch clicked. His head was now completely immobilized. He could move his arms and his legs, but his head was locked firmly in place, as if in the jaws of a great bear.
Stone positioned a circular glass screen in front of him. A second half-cylinder lowered from the ceiling. Stone aligned it with the glass screen.
“Now,” Stone said, “I want you to begin scratching your arms. Think about those things that make you anxious. The Collapse. Your parents. The Bolivian flu. All of those people that died. You watched them die.”
The glass screen lit up. Ridley stared at the source of his schizophrenia.
The voice came to him. “It’s not too late,” she said, “You need me.”
“I don’t need you,” he whispered.
“What did you say?” Stone asked.
“I don’t need the voice in my head.”
A technician studied shifting patterns on the wall. Stone asked, “Does the pattern match?”
“Yes, doctor.”
“Good. We’ll wait a few minutes as the magnetic field does it thing. Ridley, just keep listening to that voice. You’re here because of that voice. Let her talk to you. We’ll target her and make her go away.”
The magnetic field began operating. As it did, the pattern on the screen faded from a red spider’s web to blue.
“Ready,” the technician said.
“Don’t,” she called.
Ridley felt the pulse of the microwave beam. A faint snap and crack bounced through his head.
“Success,” Stone said, “One bad habit gone.”
Ridley was still immobilized. He waited for her voice. She did not return to him.
They removed the screws and the helmet. The technician applied bandages to the three bloody spots on his scalp. “At least you have long hair,” he said, “No one will see the scars.”
Ridley was rolled into an observation room where he waited for an hour. “You can go home now,” the nurse said.
Ridley dressed.
Two weeks passed. His arms healed.
Ridley presented another check t
o Diane on a Friday afternoon. “I have something for you.”
She looked up at him from her desk. “This is a surprise.”
“Every bit of success I’ve had is because you were there with me. I thought you deserved a healthy bonus.”
Ridley handed her the check. She looked at it incredulously. “This is more than I made selling that processor to Ukon.”
“We’re on the precipice of something bigger,” he said, “This is only the beginning.”
Lucy watched from the wall-screen. Her reaction was impossible to read. Her monotonous series of expressions ranged from an emoji smile to neutrality; none seemed human.
“Thank you,” Diane said, “I already know how some of this is going to be spent.”
“Take Kelly to Scotland and sip a cup of tea for me.”
Ridley visited Fiona again. She waited like the Cheshire cat as he took a seat before the glass screen. They exchanged pleasantries.
“The Senate just released their report on the Bolivian Flu,” he said, “Most of it was redacted.”
“I read the report.”
Ridley raised an eyebrow.
“One of the guards lets me use her phone,” she said, “There was enough in that document for me to piece together what happened. I was right about Rex. Wasn’t I?”
“All we know is that the virus came from a lab in Bolivia.”
“Samuel showed me the sales figures for the neural collar. You’ve outdone yourself.”
“It was Diane.”
“It was both of you. The two of you make a good team. I do wish she’d come to work for us. We wouldn’t have to play this game.”
“She won’t ever do that. She despises you.”
“She doesn’t understand me,” Fiona said, “But Samuel’s deal is enough to keep you hamstrung. As long as Cerenovo benefits, I don’t care where you work. Keep working in your mansion so that we can keep her under our finger. Samuel and I agree on that.”
“She almost quit.”
“Over working with Cerenovo? What choice did you have? Seriously? She needs to be practical.”
“She now believes that the people that caused the Collapse are the ones behind Ukon. She doesn’t want them to have any of our technology. She’ll never go back to them.”
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