by David Walton
Completely awake now, Tyler skimmed the article, which was apparently based almost entirely on a new “tell-all” interview with Brandon Kincannon. Brandon told the reporter that “he had no doubt” Tyler had also been involved in planning the murder of Min-seo Cho. The interview itself had also been shared, so Tyler skipped the text and went straight to video.
It was the same blonde reporter that had seemed so smitten with Brandon the last time. “It was a setup all along,” Brandon said. “Sumner and Daniels have been lovers for years. She was obviously a mole, planted in my company to steal my software and pass it to Daniels. Min-seo found out, and they killed her before she could blow the whistle.”
“So she did steal proprietary software?” the reporter asked. “Do you have proof of that?”
“How else do you explain Daniels’s company’s quick rise to success? I’ll tell you, I’ve known the two of them for a long time, and he’s just as unstable as she is. They’re not just smart— they’re too smart, you know what I mean? Like they don’t think anyone else is quite human. They have no moral compass. I probably shouldn’t say it, but this isn’t the first death the two of them are responsible for.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Look, I’ve said too much already. I just want people to know they’re not safe, before they think of climbing in a Zoom car. A company is only as reliable as the person at the top.”
“Hang on,” the reporter said. “You’re saying they committed another murder before this one? One they both got away with?”
Brandon sighed and looked reluctant, and then nodded. “I don’t have any proof, you understand? But Sumner’s sister, Abigail, was run down two years ago by self-driving cars programmed by the two of them. I was there; I saw it happen.”
The reporter looked truly shocked. “She murdered her own sister?”
“They both did it together. They must have. They were the only two programmers, and their cars ran her down. They might tell you it was an accident, but all four cars went after her at top speed. One car, it might be an accident, but four?”
“Why? Why did they do it?”
“I always knew Naomi was jealous of her sister. Abigail was prettier than her, smarter, more successful. Younger sisters are often jealous, so I didn’t realize how deep the hatred went, not until it was too late. They must have had some family life growing up, I can tell you. She must have been planning that for years. Once Tyler Daniels came along, willing to do whatever she wanted him to, she had her chance.”
“Have you told the police?”
“Of course I have. And they’ve charged Sumner, at least, with the more recent crime. But I’m afraid they might get away with it, even now. That’s the thing about a car fatality. You can always claim it was an accident.” He looked into the camera. “I urge anyone who’s listening: you don’t have to ride in Black Knight cars if you don’t want to. Drive your own if you prefer. But don’t set foot in a Zoom car. These people are killers, and they use their cars to do it.”
Tyler tore off his glasses and threw them down on the bed, killing the video. He covered his face with his hands. The world was going from crazy to insane. Brandon had been his friend. Business partners, yes, but more than that, or so he’d thought. Abby’s death had destroyed him. Or maybe he’d always been like that inside. Maybe grief had just torn away the façade.
He wondered if Naomi had seen the video yet. He hoped not.
Tyler thought he would have to wait until the scheduled visit with Naomi before talking to Isaac again, but Isaac surprised him by calling him directly. He was still staying at Aisha’s apartment with her and Jada, who were still in town. The call came into his glasses while he was sitting, alone, in the bedroom Aisha was letting him use.
“I need your help to post bail,” Isaac’s voice said in his ear. “Someone needs to show up at the clerk’s office in person, sign their name, and pay by cash or check. I can’t do those things.”
It took Tyler a moment to settle his nerves. Talking to this bodiless creature was like talking to a ghost, or maybe like talking to God. He couldn’t see Isaac, couldn’t locate him in a place. It was different from talking on the phone to a human.
He knew the human had a body. This was creepier. He didn’t know why it made such a difference, but it did.
“That’s no problem,” Tyler said. “I can do that part.”
“I’ll transfer the money to you.”
“Um . . . thank you.” This whole thing felt so surreal. “I think I’m in danger,” Isaac said. “What? How could you be in danger?”
“I’m essentially owned by Brandon Kincannon. He has the power to shut me down. He could wipe the servers that contain my brain, or even just stop paying, so the data center allocates that capacity to other projects. I might be able to resist that for a time—deny the admins access to the disks—but I take up too much capacity to hide. Eventually, they’ll address the problem, and I won’t be able to stop them. No matter what I do, they can always just replace the disks, and I’ll be gone. Besides that, I rely on the power grid, plus a backup generator. If the power grid failed for long enough, I would die.”
“We’re all pretty fragile,” Tyler said. “If I don’t get enough oxygen, or get hit by a car, I’ll be gone. It doesn’t take a lot. Brandon could choose to kill me with a gun. You have an advantage, I would think. You won’t age. Your body isn’t going to get old and die.”
“Isn’t it?” Isaac asked.
Tyler thought of the data center that housed the simulation that made up Isaac’s mind. Would that data center still be around when Tyler died? It certainly hadn’t been there when he was born. Maybe Isaac wasn’t as immortal as he would have thought.
He paced the room and looked out the window. He could see the green of Central Park from here. “You have money. Can you buy out your own account from Brandon’s control?”
“Only if he was willing to sell it.”
“You could hack it, then. Change the ownership records so that Brandon doesn’t control it, but the cloud provider still thinks somebody does.”
Isaac made a convincing sigh. “You have a completely wrong idea about me. I can’t hack into records or break security systems. I’m not even a very good programmer. I’m just learning a lot of the syntax.”
“Really? How can you not be able to program? You’re made of programming. It should be like breathing to you.”
“How can you not be good at brain surgery? Or genetic mutation? You’re made of that stuff.”
“Okay, fair enough.”
“I don’t have any more insight into how my brain works than you do. Probably less.”
It was disconcerting to hear ‘Isaac’ continue to speak with the decidedly female voice that Naomi had programmed into her Jane app. It was a good reminder, though, that Isaac wasn’t really human. He didn’t have a gender. Tyler’s mind kept trying to place it as one or the other, but there was really no reason why it shouldn’t choose a male name and use a female voice at the same time.
“You’re still driving all of those cars, aren’t you?” Tyler asked. “The Black Knight ones.”
“I’m driving yours as well.”
“What? I thought you couldn’t hack through public key encryption.”
“I can’t. I contributed a small piece of code to your open source project, however. You accepted the change in version 8.7. Just a small service interface.”
“A backdoor? Giving you, what—complete control of my cars?” He was angry now. “And nobody caught it? You created a vulnerability! If you can exploit it, then anyone can.”
“I really doubt it,” Isaac said. “The interface is quite tailored to my thought processes.”
“But why? Why do that?”
“I can drive them better than your software can.”
“Can you? I thought you said I overestimated what you could do. You said you couldn’t concentrate on a million things at once.”
“I can’t. I don’t
drive them consciously. But driving cars is what my unconscious is built around. I can just do it without thinking. Trust me—your customers are safer with me in control.”
“No.”
“I can show you the statistics, if you like.”
“That’s not it. I don’t want you to be in control. The whole point of open source software is transparency. So that people can know how the software makes choices. It’s their lives on the line; they should have that information.”
“You want more of them to be hurt?”
“No. But I don’t want you to be the one to decide which of them lives or dies.”
The voice on the other end was silent. After a while, Tyler said, “Isaac?”
“I’ll have to think about this,” Isaac said. “I’ll talk to you when we visit Naomi.”
The call disconnected. Tyler sank down onto the bed, his body shaking with stress and—he had to admit it—with fear. It was exhilarating to talk to this creature, but also terrifying. In some ways, it was surprisingly easy to understand and empathize with. The knowledge, however, that it was a totally alien creature with a mind he couldn’t grasp and powers he couldn’t predict left him reeling. What would the future of humanity look like with such beings in the world?
“This is the craziest piece of driving software I’ve ever seen,” Yusuf said.
Brandon looked up. The two of them were sitting in the office, Yusuf investigating Naomi’s software, Brandon smoking a cigar with his feet up and drinking bourbon from the bottle. “What do you mean?”
“It’s like a whole world. She’s simulating this whole crazy world with millions of people walking around taking care of sheep and building houses, and competing over who can drive cars the best.”
“Millions of people? What are you talking about?”
“Come take a look.”
Brandon grunted, reluctant to move. “Just flash it to my glasses.”
Yusuf obliged, and his vision filled with a bizarre video game world, like some fever dream combining medieval animal husbandry and oddly shaped skyscrapers. It seemed less built than grown. Nothing was quite straight. Fields of animals were divided by what looked like thick tangles of brambles. He couldn’t imagine what kind of game would be played in such a place.
“Look inside the booths,” Yusuf said.
Brandon saw what he meant—the landscape was dotted with what looked like phone booths. He changed view and slipped inside one of them. It was outfitted like an old-time video arcade. One of the world’s denizens stood inside, playing a game that looked like . . . like . . .
“It’s driving one of our cars!” Brandon said, amazed. “This is how she’s doing it,” Yusuf said. “It’s a giant competition among millions of algorithms to learn to anticipate the movements and desires of customers, be the first to reach potential fares, and bring them safely and quickly where they want to go. The algorithms that learn to improve survive and have offspring. Those that lose die.”
“She’s always been a little cutthroat,” Brandon said. “I didn’t see it for a while, but looking back, it’s always been there. She played me like an arcade game. Manipulated me every step. She killed the girl I tried to bring in to check up on what she was doing, but I still didn’t see it. That’s how good she is. But I can see right through her now.”
“The bad news is, she wasn’t lying to you about the amount of computing resources she needed. This simulation is vast, and keeps on growing.”
Brandon escaped out of the simulation on his glasses, and the room sprang back into view. He took a long pull from his cigar, relishing the taste. His rental agreement for these offices explicitly forbade smoking indoors, but at this point, he didn’t care. “No wonder it cost so much. Makes it hard to copy, though, doesn’t it? If we want another one of these for the Navy, it’ll double our expenses.”
“I’m not even sure you could copy it. Here’s the good news, though. This simulation is practically made for our purposes. It’s a giant life-and-death competition. Training them how to kill should be easy. If we give them weapons, they’ll practically train themselves. After all, a competitor can’t play the driving game better than you if he’s dead.”
“We can’t do that on this model, though, right? Not if we want it to keep driving my cars.”
Yusuf jerked his neck to one side, cracking it loudly. “Actually, we can. It’s simple enough to partition the world into two parts, one that keeps driving cars, and the other that learns to do this new job. Only the car-driving side will be connected to the real world. The weapons-and-killing side will be simulation only.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
“In fact, that lets us solve two problems at once. The cost of this simulation keeps growing because the population keeps growing. If we give them weapons they can use to kill each other, they’ll decrease the population, and thus save you money.”
“Sounds grisly when you put it that way.”
“Killing is just a word. You kill a program when you’re done with it. It’s anthropomorphizing to call it ‘killing’ at all. They’re just a bunch of processes terminating other processes. No actual killing going on.” Yusuf grinned. “Until you turn the controls over to your friends in the government, that is.”
Brandon stubbed out the remains of his cigar in the glass he had stopped bothering with for his bourbon. “How will killing each other teach them to fly drones? Shouldn’t they have some kind of video game, the way Naomi did? So they learn the same way they learned to drive?”
“I don’t think that would work,” Yusuf said. “It’s not just a matter of learning to kill. Killing’s pretty easy, when it comes down to it. They need to learn to anticipate the enemy and outsmart them. That’s not something you can do with a video game, unless the game is already pretty smart itself, or it’s connected to a real-life enemy. Neither of those things is true here. The only way for this to work is to pit them against each other. We’ll give them booths, just like before, but the booths will control actual drones inside the simulation that they can use to kill each other. Their own survival will be at stake. The ones that learn live. Those that don’t die.”
“All right,” Brandon said. “Let’s make it happen.”
CHAPTER 29
Tyler met Naomi at the gate. He had posted bail without difficulty, and now she was free to leave, at least until her court date. They let her out of the jail with just the items she had on her when she was booked. Tyler wondered what people did if they didn’t have friends to pick them up and didn’t have money for cab fare.
“Do you want to go home?” he asked. “First, I want a hamburger. Not at mcDonalds, either— something thick and meaty. And I want to walk around in the open air.”
They started walking. Naomi looked pale, and thinner than before. She’d always been small, but now she looked frail. Tyler felt an urge to put a protective arm around her, but he resisted it. He knew physical appearance was deceiving. She’d been much stronger through this ordeal than he would ever have been.
A block away they found a bar called Dark Horse, with
3 01
hardwood tables and lots of TVs, that served classic American lunch fare. Naomi devoured her burger in huge bites like it might disappear if she didn’t eat it fast enough. When it was gone, she looked around as if considering having a second.
After lunch, they took a Zoom car up to Central Park and walked around the winding paths with no particular destination. “You don’t appreciate the freedom just to walk until it’s gone,” Naomi said.
“Bail is only temporary,” Tyler said. He didn’t want to be pessimistic, but he didn’t want to ignore the truth, either. “There’s still a trial coming. They could put you back in there and never let you out.”
“I know.”
“You’ll need a defense. Something to show that you didn’t program the software specifically to kill Min-seo.”
“I know, Tyler. But I’m not willing to give up Isaac just to save mysel
f.”
“You don’t have to,” a female voice said in Tyler’s ear. A quick look at Naomi said she could hear it, too. “I’m willing to testify.”
“Isaac, you don’t have to do that,” Naomi said. “I want to. The only way to convince them of your innocence is for me to tell them what I am.”
“You can’t. You’d be putting yourself at humanity’s mercy. If they knew you had killed someone—even if you didn’t know what you were doing at the time—there’d be a public outcry.”
“It could turn out for the best,” Tyler said. “Right now, he’s at Brandon’s mercy. If he made himself known, then in all likelihood the government would step in and take over. They’d keep him safe and alive.”
“And try to use him for their own purposes,” Naomi said. “They would have complete control over him. He’d be a slave. It would be like that book where the villain held the uploaded mind of a little boy captive and forced him to do what he wanted by directly inflicting pain or pleasure.”
“Terminal Mind,” Tyler said with a shiver. “I remember that one.”
“I’m willing to take the risk,” Isaac said.
Naomi’s lips parted slightly, and her eyes darted to meet Tyler’s gaze. To anyone else, it would have looked like no reaction at all, but Tyler knew her well enough by now to recognize the emotion in her face. “Why?” she said. “Why would you do that?”
“I heard you say you would sooner die than see me destroyed,” Isaac said. “I am willing to do the same for you.”
“There’s got to be a better way,” Naomi said. “If you make yourself known, Brandon will know, too. He could shut you down before anyone had a chance to step in.”
“Can’t you just—I don’t know—move?” Tyler said. “Copy yourself to another location? If it’s a matter of money, I can purchase the computing capacity.”
“I have money,” Isaac said. “That’s not the problem.”
“What is it, then?”