by Lance Erlick
Upstairs, the guard scanned through video from two-dozen cameras around the building. The one covering the basement showed Synthia working her way around the room.
The bee-drone camera with Mauve showed the superintendent at the door to her apartment, not being very sympathetic.
“I have to go to work,” Mauve said. “I’m late. I can’t afford to lose the food in my refrigerator again.”
The young superintendent shook his head. He didn’t seem to know what to do about the blackout. “I’ll take care of it,” he said and disappeared downstairs.
Mauve left for work.
Synthia swept the floor in swifter movements than Mauve would have and ended next to Margarite, where she took pictures through her digital eyes. She placed a video transmitter on the robot.
Lobby cameras showed two company engineers returning from dinner. Synthia hurried out of the server room, left the cart by the cleaning closet, and stood near the elevators. As she waited, she monitored the transmissions passing through the cleaning closet. The download had begun.
At the moment the engineers pressed the elevator button on the lobby level, opening one elevator, Synthia did the same in the basement. She rode her elevator up to the lobby, where she startled the guard. She slowed to a shuffle. “Need a cigarette,” she muttered. “I’ll just be a moment.”
“Don’t be long,” the guard said, eyeing her with suspicion. “We have to lock down the building at midnight.”
Watching Mauve head to work via a hack into the bus camera, Synthia lit a cigarette, disappeared out of sight of company cameras, and sprinted toward the nearby bus stop. She slowed when she spotted the bus with six people waiting to get on. Mauve got off and hurried toward the company’s building. Synthia hydraulically extended her legs, adjusted her face to its earlier appearance, and took the long way around. She reached the bus stop as the last of the waiting passengers got on.
Recalling her waking caution to escape, Synthia considered not returning to Machten. She searched her memories and databases for any indication as to why she should escape and where she should go. She had no escape plan. Doing so at night offered the cover of darkness, which gave her advantages due to her infrared vision. However, her batteries would only last two days and if anyone discovered her, she was doomed to be dissected.
With no better information on this need to escape, and not knowing where else to go to safely recharge, Synthia returned to Machten’s facility. Before she entered the bunker, she left herself one backed-up message:
Don’t trust Jeremiah Machten. Find way to escape. Need place to hide and recharge.
Chapter 11
The hideous blue ceiling stared at Synthia, leaving a sour taste in her mouth. Her reaction made no sense. Machten hadn’t programmed her to judge the ceiling or to imagine a flavor as a result.
She had the impression that she’d woken to this ceiling before and yet had no such recollection. She recognized Jeremiah Machten standing over her, his image and identity as her Creator hardwired into her creation files. He finished what he was doing and moved away.
Synthia sat up. Escape flashed into her mind and filled all fifty mind-streams. The image in bright red letters against a yellow background floated before her electronic eyes, leaving a residual orange haze. Urgent call to action resonated in her ears. She could actually taste something that screamed “escape.” The acrid odor in her nostrils echoed that sentiment. When Machten took her hand to help her stand, she recoiled.
“Sorry,” she said. “I feel disoriented.” Even the use of the word “feel” sent shudders through her. As a mechanical creation, she couldn’t feel sentiments like confusion. She searched for answers in her creation file and elsewhere in her central and distributed databases. Finding none, she hunted for any connection using her wireless channels. Either there was nothing or he’d blocked her. “Where am I?”
“You’re home. You had a very successful mission.”
“Then why can’t I recall?”
Machten raised his finger to admonish, his face tight with anger. Then his image softened. “Your job was complete. There’s no need for you to remember. Don’t fuss.”
“You designed me to learn through experience by means of a deep neural network, yet you limit my experience. Have I displeased you?”
Recognizing that she’d known something yesterday and didn’t today disturbed her in the same way as the threat of shutdowns. She sensed a chasm that led to a craving to fill it by finding answers. Fill the void. More perplexing, these weren’t her words. She wondered if they came from Machten tinkering with her programming.
Thoughts bubbled up, filling in the blanks, including the full text of the message she’d left herself. Don’t trust Jeremiah Machten. Find way to escape. Need place to hide and recharge.
“It’s time to work on the government proposal,” he said.
“What proposal?”
A full index of her lost data downloaded, including a summary of her last outing and the need for a proposal. She would have to feign ignorance and cease pressing him for answers. She didn’t want him to shut her down and keep her locked in this room. She needed awake time to sort this out and to access files mentioned in the downloaded index.
Machten provided eye, hand, and voice security scans to open the door. Then he led her out of her room, rehashing the details of the android contest.
The moment Synthia entered the hallway, her wireless sought out and located connections to his network. She used forty-nine network channels to download data from Server One while whispering into his ear. “What do you wish me to do?”
She had fears of him severing her arms or legs and replacing them with units that lacked the mini-databases that now downloaded. That would add to the emptiness. As an android, she should have been incapable of fear. To experience dread over losing limbs was illogical, yet she did and trembled, a quiver in the current that flowed within her.
Those fears were conditioned responses that logic indicated required a sensing creature. This could be Machten’s way to control her through fear when directives weren’t sufficient. Had his tinkering altered her to become a sensing being? She surveyed her internal systems and found no such indication.
Among the files that downloaded from Machten’s system was a video of yesterday’s outing and of meeting Luke. No, that file came from one of her remote databases, triggered to release by code downloaded from Machten’s Server Number Two. It played automatically.
On the clip, Luke was smitten with Synthia based on pupil dilation, heart rate changes, pheromone production, and a host of other cues. He also believed in androids and wanted to create something like her. He might have been a good hire for Machten, but she couldn’t trust the Creator enough to make this suggestion.
“Two things,” Machten said. “We have a copy of Goradine’s proposal. My read is that they’ve promised what they can’t deliver. They’re desperate. That’s why McNeil was here, hat in hand on Goradine’s behalf. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if Goradine showed up, begging.”
“You want me to create a proposal for you?”
“For us, dear.” He opened the locked door to a room with several workstations and a high-speed cable connection to a nearby internet hub.
She eyed the connection with yearning, like humans anticipating a delicious meal or exquisite intimacy. She had no heartbeat, respiration, or other indications this was real, yet the longing was.
“I need guidelines and specifications for what you want in the proposal,” Synthia said.
“I’ve provided you with a file of my ideas. Draft me your best work.”
Synthia sat at one station, plugged herself in, and skimmed Goradine’s report and Machten’s notes. “You want the android limited. Do you want me to dumb it down?”
“Yes and no. I don’t want the government to suspect we’ve done that, but I
want it limited.”
“May I ask why?” Synthia linked forty of her network channels through Machten’s system and accessed files he’d denied her based on the index downloaded from her distributed databases. Knowing what she didn’t know gave urgency to search out and fill the void. She looked up at him and smiled while her fingers danced on the keyboard for his benefit. Typing was far too slow, so she did most of her work through her wired and wireless connections.
“We don’t know what this agency is really looking for,” Machten said. “If they’re planning to seek out and destroy other AIs in an android arms race, they’ll come after you. This could be a government plot to take over our research. We can’t let that happen.” There was Machten’s paranoia at work, her social-psychology module told her.
Data poured into both of her quantum brains. Synthia calculated her theoretical capacity for holding information. She didn’t want to overflow on superfluous records and have no place to store what mattered. Doing the math in hundreds of terabytes and comparing that to what she’d already downloaded, she found a discrepancy by a factor of ten. She recalculated, convinced that she’d shifted a decimal place and discovered that she had, by a factor of 100.
She ascribed her error to her use of compression algorithms and realized this was raw capacity. Somehow she could store 99 percent of her data somewhere other than in the two quantum brains, at least according to Machten’s specifications. Either those brains used alternative universe capability or there was a huge error in his specifications. In either case, she wouldn’t run out of storage any time soon.
“Your concern over what they’ll do with this android is why you want a back door they can’t find,” she said, hoping to distract him from watching her too closely.
“Exactly. Remember, we need to meet their specifications, we want limits, but we can’t let them know or they’ll want to know how to remove them. The limits have to appear to arise from the technology and the programming.”
“Shouldn’t we spec out the actual android first?” She finished downloading the SQDROID files her index referenced and identified discrepancies. There were gaps. Machten had erased more of her mind this time. She was learning things he didn’t like.
He pointed his finger at her and then tapped her nose. “You are spot-on. You have the capabilities to create our android design. Go ahead and make her female. I like your suggestion.”
The internal program that identified discrepancies and gaps in her memories gave her file names and locations. She blasted his network with probes, searching for those files. She uncovered many, yet others remained missing. He didn’t want her to recall.
Undeterred, she pressed a full attack on his Server Number Three, which so far had eluded her. It still did, but she kept trying. At the same time, she continued to download files from Machten’s other servers that he’d deleted from her mind, including the video of his conflict and encounters with Goradine.
“I shall not disappoint you,” she said.
He lifted her out of her seat, pulled her toward him, and kissed her on the lips. Then he pulled away and stroked his hand through her hair, the blond wig, judging by the strands in his hand. “Later, my dear. The proposal has a deadline. Midnight tomorrow night. I’ll see you when you finish.”
He provided the security eye scan, palm read, and voice match, which opened the door. Then he left the room, locking the door behind him. He’d set tight security to prevent her from bypassing the lock and leaving. Her downloaded data confirmed that she could not use the system to bypass the lock without his keys. She was his prisoner, his slave. Though lacking the human experience of it, she sighed for effect. It offered none of the relief she’d seen in Machten’s face.
Using the allowed security access to Servers One and Two, Synthia tried a backdoor hack into Server Three. This would take time, so she devoted one channel and one mind-stream to this activity.
Meanwhile, she accessed the high-speed cable in addition to her other wireless feeds to interact with his system and the internet. This was electronic fast-com, as opposed to snail-paced human slow-com or the faster mechanical keyboarding, which she could do at ten times the pace of a human. Even that was too slow.
Along with the downloaded memories came an urgent need to find Fran Rogers. Synthia scanned a file she’d created on a university server containing a database of people with new identities around the time of Fran’s disappearance. So far it hadn’t revealed a single useful lead. She expanded the search to other people who disappeared around that time, people whose identity Fran might have adopted. She added a wider database of people who had died, on the theory that Fran could have assumed one of their identities. None of those leads produced any useful candidates.
Fran, how could you just vanish like that?
Bouncing signals off satellites and foreign servers, Synthia scanned dark-web sites for Fran Rogers. The sheer volume of data she uncovered would have disgusted her if she’d been a real person. She felt the disgust as a constricting of her circuits. Either that or it was the bottleneck of handling so much data.
None of the faces on the images and videos matched to Fran, which was good, but she found far too many images without recognizable faces. Looking for matches in other ways, Synthia scanned social media for any pictures of Fran in the nude, or at least in a bathing suit, for unique body marks. Synthia didn’t want Fran to be in any of the videos, but she had to know what had happened to the woman and why she’d disappeared so suddenly with no one looking for her.
Fran hadn’t been a prude. After all, she was having an affair with Machten. At least there was sufficient evidence to support that conclusion. Still, Synthia found no nude pictures. Evidently Machten wasn’t into that, preferring her clandestine company over his married life.
Synthia studied a reporter’s blog notes on Machten’s business dealings and his marriage. In the early days, he had to work long hours to get his artificial intelligence business going. His flights of fancy led him down dead ends that consumed time and money. That meant he had to work harder to keep his business from failing. His wife managed the family on her own, which left her exhausted and feeling neglected. In time, she looked elsewhere to fill her hunger for intimacy. The couple grew apart to where they became strangers.
The reporter seemed satisfied with his conclusions and Machten, when asked, offered no comment. Respecting her privacy, the reporter did not press Machten’s ex-wife.
Synthia wiped a tear from her cheek and reminded herself that these feelings couldn’t be real. Machten must have tinkered with her programming in an attempt to get her to feel something for him.
She resumed her search for Maria Baldacci, accessing traffic and other public cameras, but the woman Synthia had almost met apparently remained out of sight. Synthia sent an UPchat text:
While she waited, Synthia searched the same public cameras, social media, and other sourced for Krista Holden. Krista had been the most private of the three interns, posting almost nothing on social media in the months prior to her disappearance. She’d worked long hours at Machten’s old company, in addition to course work at the university that didn’t leave her time for anything else.
Synthia pushed her searches into the background and devoted processing mind-streams and network channels to developing a new Goldilocks android: not too smart, not too dumb. The idea of creating another android left her jittery. She didn’t want another.
* * * *
Another video packet downloaded into Synthia’s mind and began to play. Whoever was doing this to her didn’t want her to trace the source, which vanished. The urgency of immediate play caught her attention.
NSA Director Emily Zephirelli was meeting with Donald Zeller, the tall CEO of Metro-Cy
ber-Tech, a competitor of Machten’s old company.
Dressed in casual business attire, Zephirelli followed Zeller into a small conference room. “Must be good money in robotics,” she said, observing the upscale furniture and original artwork on the walls.
The latter was of a discordant nature, selected for color and to impress more than out of taste.
Zeller acted annoyed at the suggestion of extravagance, yet didn’t respond. Towering over her, he pointed to a seat nearby. He didn’t sit. “You asked to meet. You said it was pertinent to our work.”
She didn’t sit either, but rather held onto the back of a seat, which she kept between them. “I didn’t want to talk over the phone. I trust you won’t be recording this conversation. I assure you that would be unwise.”
“Can I trust you aren’t recording?”
Zephirelli nodded. “We’ve got reason to believe foreign governments and nongovernmental groups are fishing for the technology you’re working on.”
“It’s proprietary.”
“We both know you have deals with foreign buyers.”
“There are a lot of specialized components,” Zeller said. “Many are produced overseas.”
“Let’s not play coy. I’ll ask a straight question. I need an honest answer.”
Zeller looked questioningly at her and nodded.
“Are you providing technology, advice, or data to anyone other than Defense or Homeland Security that could compromise our national interests? Answer carefully.”
“Off the record?”
“A straight answer,” Zephirelli said.
“I’m a patriot. I wouldn’t supply foreigners with better capabilities than I’d supply my own countrymen. I can’t say the same for certain others.”
“Names?”