by SL Huang
“Or I could keep her,” said Checker.
“You can’t give her back.” The tension in Warren’s statement made it almost frightening. “You can’t.”
“Then I guess you’d better come up with my fee.” The words were automatic, and I ignored the twitch in my gut that wasn’t sure I meant them. Liliana wasn’t real—which made this just like any other job. Didn’t it? “I’m in business, not charity. I only worked on spec in the first place because I wasn’t sure you had a case.”
“This isn’t her fault.” Warren’s voice had started shaking.
I suddenly felt very tired.
“Look, I’m not going to do anything without letting you know, okay?” I told him. “Go try to raise the money. Tell people it’s to hire a lawyer or something. I’ll give you a little time.”
He nodded, turning his face away.
“Now skedaddle,” I said. “We have stuff to do, and so do you.”
“Let me have half an hour,” he whispered. “Please. I haven’t seen her in so long.”
“Fine.” I waved a hand; he rocketed out of his chair and back toward Liliana like he’d been released from a slingshot.
Checker let out a low whistle. “Holy mother of Gandalf. This is seriously—she’s seriously—? This is incredible.”
“Yeah,” I said, staring at the two of them. Liliana was pointing at one of the cats and explaining something with the graveness of the very young; Warren had all of his attention riveted to her like nothing else was in the room, his head bent toward her with a smile. “Incredible. Or something.”
“I’m going to dig out the specs on her tonight. I can’t believe—this is unbelievable. How did they keep this under wraps? What kind of AI—”
“You do that.” I stood. I didn’t want to think anymore. Every muscle felt heavy and exhausted. “I’m going to sleep. Kick Warren out after half an hour, and don’t let him leave the apartment with her. Oh, and warn him that he’s probably going to be investigated for tonight.”
“Sure. I can give him some sort of alibi, if he needs it,” said Checker, still goggling at Liliana distractedly. “Hey, are you really planning to give her back to them if he can’t pay you?”
My eyes lingered on Warren and his fake daughter. They looked like they belonged on a Hallmark card. “I don’t know.”
Checker glanced up at me, a quick, piercing look. “Go get some sleep. You look like shit.”
“Thanks,” I muttered. “You’re on babysitting duty after he leaves—wake me up if you run out of Red Bull. And no taking her apart.”
He grinned. “Oh, don’t worry. I only take things apart when I know how to put them back together.”
“Liar.”
“Okay, fair. But in this case I won’t—promise. Cross my heart and hope to die and return as a cyborg.” He cleared his throat. “Hey. Do you think there’s any chance she’s really…do you think she’s conscious?”
“I don’t know,” I said again.
CHAPTER 17
WITH WARREN and Liliana still in the living room, I crashed on Miri’s bed. I was too tired to change out of Pilar’s clothes first, though I did swap my explosives-laden utility belt for my Colt. If I don’t have a gun on me, I have trouble sleeping.
I woke in the early dawn and stumbled back out into the living room. In the morning sunlight, the first thing I saw was Liliana nestled under a blanket on the couch, her ringlets fanned across the pillow and her eyes closed in apparent sleep. The white cat was curled up snoozing on top of her.
The incongruity of it threw me.
As promised, Checker was still awake, leafing through some printouts with one hand while sipping a mug of coffee with the other and balancing a laptop on his knees. Another laptop sat open next to him, scrolling code.
“Coffee,” he said without looking up, gesturing toward the kitchen with his mug. “Miri only has soy and almond milk, though. Heathen.”
I always took my coffee black anyway. I poured myself a mug and came back out to the living room. “Find anything?”
“Yeah. Lots of things. First of all, the answer is no.”
“The answer to what?”
His eyes darted to Liliana, and he lowered his voice. “The consciousness question. Or sentience. Or whatever. The answer’s no.”
“Oh,” I said. I’d barely started considering the idea; it felt odd to have a definitive answer already. “How do you know?”
“Because I’ve been reading her code. There’s some fantastic stochastic creativity, but she’s definitely no more powerful than a probabilistic Turing machine—I’ll leave it to your math brain to figure out the exact modeling. The NLP here is something else, though—talk about sophisticated. Did I say incredible? I meant amazing. I want to talk to the people who programmed her. I am in awe.”
“Down, boy,” I said. “In the throes of your tech nirvana, did you remember to check on the fallout from last night?”
“Cas Russell, what do you think of me? Of course I’ve been keeping tabs.” He put down his coffee mug, lifted the laptop from the table next to him over to balance half on top of the first one, and hit a few keys. “Interestingly, the higher-ups at Arkacite are not making it particularly easy for the police; they’re claiming they don’t know what was taken. I think they just don’t want to say—probably either they were doing something mildly illegal somehow or they don’t want to reveal their secrets. I’m betting on the latter, considering how cutting edge this technology is. But anyway, nobody can recall your face or the name on the ID card—one of the guards said he remembered that the metal detector went off, but that was it—so this is what they have as a composite.”
He half-turned the screen so I could see it. The drawing was atrocious; it looked nothing like either me or Pilar. “They need new security guards,” I commented, sipping my coffee.
“Oh, people make terrible eyewitnesses in general. And of course there’s no digital trace of your presence, which is freaking them out just the tiniest bit, if I do say so myself.”
“Quit preening,” I said. “Who are they looking at for it?”
“Not Warren, oddly enough. The police don’t even seem to be considering him—probably because Arkacite didn’t tell them what was stolen. Arkacite’s doing their own investigation, I’m sure, but they haven’t emailed each other about it so I don’t know.”
“I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t trust their computer security this morning.”
“I am the stuff nightmares are made of,” intoned Checker, with something like a maniacal giggle.
I finished draining my coffee and set down the mug. “I’ve got errands. What should we do with Liliana for the day?”
Checker shrugged. “I can keep watching her.”
I wasn’t crazy about that idea. If Arkacite found out where we’d taken their tech…
But what was the alternative?
I’d promised Warren we’d treat her well. The image flashed in my mind of Liliana in Arkacite’s basement lab, hunched in a corner, crying.
She’s not a little girl.
I looked over at her. One of her hands had snuggled the cat against her in sleep. Jesus.
“Fine,” I said. “But stay on top of the investigation. If you get the slightest hint they’re tracking you down, take her and get out of here. And I’ll send Arthur over to you.” It wouldn’t hurt to have another gun around.
“Good idea,” said Checker. “I’ll need to sleep sometime anyway. I can call Pilar back to help, too—if she wanted to sell us out, she’s had ample opportunity already.”
I’d forgotten to threaten her. “Tell her if she does, I’ll kill her.”
“Cas!”
“Well, at least make sure Arkacite’s not tracking her. And you can also tell her I’ll pay her again. I’ll put it on Warren’s tab.”
“That man’s going to end up in indentured servitude to you at this rate.”
I turned to head back toward Miri’s bedroom. “Not my problem.�
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I retrieved my phone to find someone had left me a voicemail while I was in the living room. It turned out to be Harrington, saying he’d arranged the promised meeting with the Ally Eight rep for a park at two that afternoon, ostensibly for a business proposition. I left him a message confirming without telling him it was a real business proposition, a message for Cheryl Maddox telling her I wanted to arrange to dead-drop her some cash, and finally a message for Arthur telling him to call me back. The fact that I couldn’t reach him was troubling—I was still worried about Tegan.
Then I changed back into my normal clothes, stole Checker’s printouts on the plutonium batteries, and went out to my car. I sat in the driver’s seat for a moment considering where to go first, but before consciously making the decision I’d started for Altadena.
The hour was early enough that I beat rush hour to Denise Rayal’s house. The little cottage was still in shadow, the sun not having peeked over the mountains yet. I marched up and banged on the door. When nobody answered, I banged louder and longer.
The bolt finally scraped back, and Rayal cracked open the door a few inches—her face was the same one from the pictures, only more tired. She wore a faded pink bathrobe, and her hair was tousled with sleep. “Can I help you?”
I didn’t know.
I’d come here for some sort of answers, but I didn’t know what—we had Liliana’s code, after all; I easily could have stayed on Miri’s couch reading it and learned more than I could talking to Denise Rayal. Heck, every time I looked at Liliana I saw and heard the artificial mechanisms shimmering in the mathematics of every movement, a too-exact shadow of strings reminding me every instant that she was a puppet, even without reading through the probabilistic master that controlled her.
She was a valuable piece of technology. I should have damned Warren’s entreaties and locked her in a safe while I waited on him, and meanwhile moved on to dealing with the Lorenzos. But considering actually doing that slammed up against a churning revulsion deep inside, a sick queasiness I didn’t know how to define. Disconnected snippets cycled through my head: Liliana’s tear-stained face in the lab, her apparent delight at playing with the cats, her repeated questions about her father.
Questions that had all been asked with the same cadence.
“I need to talk to you,” I said to Rayal.
She wrapped her bathrobe around herself more tightly. “What’s this concerning?”
“Do you know what happened last night?”
Her expression twitched.
“Liliana was stolen from Arkacite,” I said. “I assumed they would have called you or come knocking. Asked if you had anything to do with it.”
“What do you know about it?” she asked after a beat.
“I work for your husband,” I said. “I’m the one who took her.”
Rayal’s whole body tightened, her posture knotting into a defensive stiffness. After a moment’s pause she stepped back, almost as if forcing herself, and tugged the door open a little wider. “Come in.”
I followed her inside. We sat down in her tasteful and comfortable living room. Rayal perched on the edge of the couch, her arms hugging herself. She didn’t offer me anything to eat or drink.
“How do you know I won’t call them?” she asked in a low voice.
“What would you tell them?” I said. “Are you going to report your husband? He’s disappearing soon anyway, along with her.”
She hesitated. “What do you want?”
“I want—I want to know what happened.”
Her face went dead. “I’m not allowed.”
I thought of the inches and inches of nondisclosure agreements in her file cabinet. “I’ve already met Liliana. I know what she is.”
She blinked at me rapidly, her eyes shining too brightly.
“I can read her code if I feel like it. I just—I guess I want to know how this happened. With you and your husband. And with her.”
She hiccupped, a sound somewhere between a humorless laugh and a dry sob. “I suppose it would be a relief—I can’t talk to anyone about it. Even my therapist, if I told him, he’d have me committed. He’d think I don’t know what’s real anymore.” She swallowed. “I…I had a son.”
“I know,” I said, thrown by the non sequitur.
“Sam. He was—he was everything to us. To me. My world. You hear about what happens when you become a parent, how much love—but it doesn’t prepare you.”
“He died, right?” I asked, and winced. It probably wasn’t a polite question.
Denise Rayal didn’t seem to notice. “Yes. Leukemia. I thought—I’d never felt so much pain. I thought I would never get past it.”
“And is that why…?”
“Why I made Liliana? No. It would be the right answer, wouldn’t it? But…I did get past it. I thought I never would and then I did. I got up one day not too much later and wanted to live again. Wanted to work. Eat good food, be happy, have sex—Sam was gone, and it didn’t kill me. Does that make me an awful mother?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said.
“Noah, though—he couldn’t move on. After a while our marriage was…empty. He used to make me laugh, so much, and…I buried myself at work, because to be around Noah was—I would have left him, but I felt so guilty. Now he would leave me, if he didn’t need my name on the case for Arkacite—he would leave me in a heartbeat.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I gave back Liliana.”
“Wait—what?”
Denise took a deep breath. “You have to understand. I didn’t build her to replace Sam. She was a project. The idea she could be anything more was—I never considered it. She was an experiment in natural language processing and machine learning and robotics and—and that was it.” She gestured helplessly, frustrated with making me understand. “But our team wanted—we needed to see how human she could be. How much she could learn. Arkacite set up a secure place off-site; it took so much to make it happen—so much paperwork, so many promises, especially for them to let Noah in on it.”
“Why did they?”
“I wanted to be living with her twenty-four hours a day, to be studying her behavior responses over the long-term. So there was some reason for me to ask that my husband be allowed into the project. But I hoped—I wanted—” She paused and steadied herself. “I had hope, that maybe bringing him into my work, sharing my accomplishments with him, that something could rekindle for us. That he could find some way back to me.”
Well, her plan had sort of worked. “And you didn’t expect he would start seeing her as his daughter?”
“Maybe I’m stupid. Maybe I should have—she looks like a girl, but I never thought of her that way. She was a toy. A very sophisticated toy. One I was proud of, but I didn’t—she wasn’t alive; how could anyone think she was?”
“Until your husband did.”
She nodded. A tear spilled over and slid down her cheek; she brushed it impatiently away. “I didn’t even realize it at first. The path we were on. I only saw that he was back. My husband, I had him back. And so help me, I started doing it, too. Treating her as a child. It was so easy, so easy to pretend, to fantasize that we were raising a girl together, and in so many ways she felt so important to me already, after so many years—you know how people will sometimes refer to their projects, they’ll say, ‘my baby’? She was that to me before this, and it just became so easy, with Noah, to tuck her in at night, to hug her when she cried, and I knew, I knew she only stopped crying because her programming said—there was no free will, this was not the Singularity, there was no child, but God help me…”
“You started to see her as one,” I said.
“I started to care. I started…I wanted to love her.”
“I don’t know if that’s a bad thing,” I said. “It’s love. That’s—you know. Good. Right?”
Right?
“Love!” exclaimed Rayal. “When the child you love is making choices on a coin toss you programm
ed in? When you know, you know, exactly how she works, that inside she’s silicon and wires and sophisticated language emulation and when she laughs it’s because her programming has been told this is when little girls laugh and when she cries it’s because we wrote in that when she falls down, her face should wrinkle up and her eyes should drip water? Is that the kind of child you would want to love?”
I swallowed. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“I know you didn’t. I know.” She lowered her head, pressing her fingers against the bathrobe over her knees, breathing hard. Her hands curled into fists, bunching the fabric. “I was building myself up to love a child I had already lost. A child who didn’t exist. She could act like a five-year-old, but she would never grow up, never have her own thoughts, never…never love me in return. I gave her back to Arkacite, and resigned, and moved out here. I’m in therapy. I’m…I’m coping.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“You know, I tell my therapist—I tell him I lost someone who was like a daughter.” Rayal’s voice had gone back to resigned. “I don’t say who. I tell him I was too attached. That she wasn’t mine to love.”
CHAPTER 18
I LEFT Denise Rayal’s house more disturbed than when I’d arrived. After standing impotently by my car for a few minutes in the cool morning, I sighed and dug out my phone. I had other obligations. Whatever was rankling me here, it could wait.
I tried Arthur again first, and he picked up right away this time. “Russell! Finally!” A cacophony of canine barking erupted in the background.
“Shit, are you still at Tegan’s?”
“You’re right, something’s wrong—the mail from yesterday ain’t been picked up, and I don’t think anyone fed the dogs, but their cars are here—shit!” More barking.
Oh, no. “I’m on my way.”
I broke thirteen different traffic laws on my way to Tegan’s and thanked my lucky stars no cops spotted me. Tegan lived with his partner in a small house on a large plot of land in Topanga; I came onto the absurdly steep street nearing sixty and careened downhill, slamming on the brake to skid to a halt less than two centimeters from Arthur’s back bumper.