Semi-Human

by Erik E Hanberg

  “Find someone else.”

  “No. Who else is better qualified to get Gene back than the person who stole him?”

  “How about another machine? If there’s a lesson I learned from the debacle in the tunnel it’s that. Never send a human to do a machine’s job. Isn’t that the world you’ve been working to create? One where machines are better at everything than we are?”

  She turns her head toward the window again but this time she lifts her chin as if she was peering far into the distance—or the future. I can’t tell if she’s posing or if this visionary thing just comes naturally to her. “Machines can do a lot,” she says. “But they can’t do everything. Any machine that gets close to Gene is at risk of being subverted to his will, for lack of a better term. If I send an army of drones after him, they will work for Gene within minutes, maybe even seconds, after he senses their purpose.”

  I’m still standing but this is all becoming too much. I move to a sofa and perch on the edge, still ready to flee at a moment’s notice if I need to. I glance at James. He’s still not meeting my eye—he’s scratching at something on his shoe and it’s taking an unnatural amount of his attention. I look back at Ainsley. “Listen,” I say. “You’re a programmer at heart. You know Gene won’t let the same bug that I exploited remain unpatched. I put Gene under Keir’s control but it isn’t going to work again.”

  Ainsley nods. “Of course. You’ll have to think of something else.”

  “And do you have some idea of what that is?”

  “Never ask a programmer to spot her own bugs,” she says, shaking her head. “You’ll be able to figure that out better than I can.”

  “Then there’s no way,” I say. “It’s an impossible task. Likely a suicide mission because there’s no way to know what Keir will tell Gene to throw at me if I come at him. He…wasn’t happy with me when we last parted.”

  “Clearly, since he had your father jailed as a result.”

  At this, James’s head snaps up. I give him a small confirming nod. “Keir turned him in because he was mad at me. It wasn’t a coincidence that he was in jail when I came home.”

  He looks bewildered. “I’m sorry, who’s Keir again?”

  Right. I never told him anything about what happened in San Francisco. “I’ll explain in a sec.” I turn back to Ainsley. “The point is that if Keir catches me while I’m coming after Gene, I don’t know what he’ll do to me.”

  “Then don’t get caught,” Ainsley says simply.

  “I’m not going to do it,” I answer.

  Ainsley nods but doesn’t care. I can tell that, to her, this moment is just a roadblock on the way to getting me to say yes. “Let me put it a different way, then,” she says. “There’s a long statute of limitations on burglary. I can choose to press charges at any point and I can push the courts for the maximum sentence—and you’d better believe they’ll listen to me. Not to mention I have T-Six footage that links you—links you both—to that semitruck that brought you here. Which links you to what happened in Las Vegas.”

  I feel the blood drain from my face and my stomach and into my legs. I’m glad I’m sitting down. She gets a smile of sorts. It’s not evil exactly but it’s like she’s recognizing that I finally understand the stakes. As if she’s welcoming me to the real conversation. “But I believe in using both a carrot and a stick when I want to motivate people. So that’s the stick. The carrot is the Analytical Engine. Steal that as well as Gene, and I’ll pay you double what I paid for it at auction.”

  “Double?” I repeat. Eighty million. The number lodges itself firmly in my mind and I can’t seem to shake it. “And what if I only steal Gene?” I ask quickly.

  “Then avoiding a longer stay in prison will have to be payment enough.”

  I wince. “Listen…instead of stealing Gene…what if I just…copy him? And bring you the copy?”

  Ainsley shakes her head. “He’s not a file to be cut and pasted. You can transfer him from one machine to another, yes. But his code prevents him from being copied.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s too powerful to put in the wrong hands! Gene is the kind of AI that people wring their hands about when they tell horror stories about AI. I’ve been keeping him off the market to make sure he’s safe to interact with people. He’s unique and he’s been growing and changing for years. I can’t just start over. The future of the company is going to be built on Gene’s code, but in order to do that, I need him back. Now.”

  I let that sink in, thinking about how cavalierly I turned him over to Keir and wondering what I unleashed. “Why don’t you go after him yourself?” I ask. “If he’s that important to you.”

  Ainsley looks like she’s trying to come up with a lie. And in the silence, James says, “Because you’re disposable,” he tells me. “If you get caught, nothing touches her or T-Six. If she sends a team, that’s bad. International news. Loss of…I don’t know, shareholder value or something.”

  Ainsley straightens a bit in her chair but she doesn’t deny it.

  It might be true, but I’m not sure it changes anything for me. “Can I steal Gene?” I ask. “I mean—physically. Is he running in the cloud or does he exist in a single place? When I was…at your house,” I say, stumbling on my words because I almost mentioned why I was there, “Gene was in your home but he was also on Keir’s computer.”

  “That was just a communications window. Projected, if you will, from the main computer that housed him. Like a browser window to Gene. He isn’t built to be distributed. He’s still only running in the one place. And since Keir almost certainly won’t let Gene out of his sight, that means he’s probably running on Keir’s laptop.”

  “That’s all I need? Just to bring you Keir’s laptop with Gene on it?”

  “With Gene fully out from under Keir’s thumb and ready to be turned back over to me, yes.”

  I grimace. Even if I get the laptop, I don’t have a clue how I’m going to wrestle control of Gene from Keir. Gene will be actively working against me, and because it sounds like he can take over any nearby computer, he will have access to practically infinite resources if he needs them. All that aimed at little ol’ me. “What if I need equipment?” I ask.

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know. Tools…gadgets…you know, heist stuff.” That’s as best as I can do because I don’t actually know how I’m going to do it.

  Ainsley nods. “That’s reasonable.” She pulls out a card from a small clutch on the chair next to her hip and gives it to me. “Call this number,” she says. “T-Six can get you whatever you need. And you can stay here if you need a place to work from. Is there anything else?”

  I look to James for help one more time but don’t get anything. “Where is Keir now?” I ask.

  “I honestly don’t know,” Ainsley answers. “But I have reliable sources—people, not computers—so I don’t think that Gene knows this information is exposed. They’ve told me that Keir will be at Orrin Walker’s place this weekend. Keir is selling Walker the Analytical Engine Saturday night at eight sharp.”

  I blanche. It’s Thursday afternoon. There’s no way. But I push on. “And you think Gene will be with Keir?”

  “Of course. You think Keir will just leave Gene lying around in a hotel room while he’s out making a deal?” She shakes her head. “He’ll have his laptop with him. You can count on it.”

  “Ok, good,” I say, nodding. At least that’s something. One question answered, a million to go.

  “But you should know,” Ainsley begins, “after Saturday night, I don’t know that you’ll ever find Keir again. Gene will be able to completely hide their tracks, especially after Keir gets them paid. Gene can do a lot as it is, but having that money as a nest egg will help him immensely. So this is probably your only shot at getting both Gene and the Analytical Engine in the same place. That means, you bring me Gene and the Analytical Engine on Sunday or I’m not interested in our arrangement. Understand?”


  I nod.

  Ainsley nods back and she stands, ready to go.

  “Oh! One last thing. You said he’s going to Orrin Walker’s place? Where’s that?” I ask.

  “The only place richer than San Francisco—New York City. Walker has the penthouse in the new Elysium building on Park Avenue.”

  “Wait,” I say. “The one that opened earlier this year? I read about that building—it’s now the tallest building in the city! And Walker and Keir are meeting at the top of it? How am I supposed to get up there to steal Gene?”

  Ainsley smiles her plastic corporate smile and it’s clear that this is going to be entirely up to me. “Sunday,” she repeats. “And the eighty million is yours.”

  Nineteen

  “Tell me everything that happened in San Francisco,” James says after the hotel room door closes behind Ainsley.

  And so I do. He’s quiet while I talk and when I’m done, he’s quiet and brooding. There are wrinkles in his brow and his shoulders are tight as he thinks. I wait, but he doesn’t ask anything more about Keir or Gene. “And what happened with your dad?”

  So then I launch into all that as well.

  “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, I guess,” he cuts in when I tell him about my dad’s years of embezzlement.

  “Hey!” I exclaim.

  He shrugs. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “You’re wrong,” I tell him. But I don’t have much to back it up, so I continue the story. I talk about how my dad tracked my phone, stole the Analytical Engine out from under me, was found out by Gene, and then how Keir and Gene ultimately turned him over to the police for embezzling anyway.

  When I’m done, James is noticeably less hostile. “I’m sorry,” he says, and he’s finally willing to look at me again. “About the joke and about what happened. That sucks.”

  “And it’s my fault,” I say.

  “No one made him steal that money,” James says. “Just like how you can walk away from what Ainsley is offering if you want to.”

  I pass up that invitation to argue and look away. “What about your story?” I ask. “You never told me how you and Lara-B escaped the drones outside the T-Six headquarters.”

  He does a one-shoulder shrug. “Actually, it’s much less interesting now that I know what you’ve been up to. Lara-B did the same thing Ainsley Irons said Gene might do if we went after him with drones—while we were being chased away from the T-Six campus, Lara-B remotely hacked into the drones and reprogrammed them. She said she got the idea from what she did to the robot dealer in Vegas,” he says.

  “Vanessa,” I say, remembering the cold clench of her grip on my arm and how Lara-B has rescued me from it.

  James nods. “She started working it out as we left Vegas. She’s gotten good enough at hacking other AIs that we can basically go wherever we want to and we don’t have to be worried about getting ID’d. That’s how we got the windshield fixed and avoided getting noticed on the freeways by other trucks from her dispatcher. Any computer that flags her…she can just override it.”

  “That exactly what Gene can do too,” I say. I’m thinking out loud now. More for me than for James. “Except he’s three generations newer than Lara-B. It makes me worried about asking for Lara-B’s help. If we tried to use her to get to him, he might override her…and I would feel awful if everything she’s gained in the last week was wiped away like that.” I snap my fingers.

  James doesn’t answer and when I look at him to see why, I find him smiling at me. “Why, Penny Davis, I feel like that’s the first unselfish thing you’ve said to me.”

  I fake a glare at him. “That’s about the most backhanded compliment ever,” I tell him. “And besides, Lara-B knows too much about us to let someone like Gene take control of her.”

  “Of course,” he says. Though he’s still being smug about it.

  “It’s great that she can override other computers—we’ll need that in Manhattan. But she’ll have to stay far away from the action… I guess that won’t be hard if I’m on the top of a hundred-and-eleven-story building and she’s in the service bay. But I wonder if even that’s too close.”

  There’s silence as I keep thinking on the problem.

  I assume James is doing the same thing. But then I hear him whisper, “So you’re really going to do it.”

  I leap off the sofa, unable to contain the righteous anger that I suddenly feel. “Of course I’m going to do it! And I can’t believe that you think there’s any choice!”

  “There’s always a choice.”

  “Don’t be so damn judgmental about it! Do you know what Keir is going to do with an AI at his beck and call? He’s already imprisoned my dad over something I did. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, right? It’s going to go to his head—it already has gone to his head,” I correct. “Imagine every tiny whim you had was indulged. It’s going to be terrible. For everyone. He has to be stopped.”

  Now James is standing. “That may all be true, but that’s not why you’re doing this! You want to do it. You’ve wanted it for months. Then you had that computer in your hands for a few seconds and lost it. This is just an excuse to try again.”

  “I don’t want to do this, James. I think…I think I’m taking my life into my hands. But I have to. Because of what Gene represents. Because I don’t want to go to jail. And—”

  “And because of the eighty million bucks,” James says.

  “And because of the money,” I say with a sigh. “Yes. Is that so terrible? Nothing’s changed from before. The jobs are still disappearing. No one’s coming to help. I need money—we need money—soon. Before the ladder gets pulled up on us. That was true last week and it’s true today.”

  “Eighty million…” he says, his voice almost musical. “I know it sounds like a lot but it’s hard for me to actually picture.”

  “We can split it,” I tell him. “Forty each. Is that easier to picture?”

  He smiles sadly. “Whether it’s a four or an eight, it’s still got seven zeros after it.”

  “It’s enough,” I say. “To start having your money work for you. To not have to worry again.”

  “At what cost? You’re willing to risk whatever Gene does to you? Whatever he does to me or Lara-B? It is worth it?”

  I throw my hands up in the air. “Then tell me the other way out! Because I sure don’t see it.”

  There’s another silence. I pace, a cat ready to climb the walls. I don’t know what to do with all this nervous energy.

  James starts slowly. “You told me—when you were in jail—that you were done with this stuff,” he says. “No more cheating at cards, no more heists. Was that a lie?”

  I’m struggling to find an answer. “No, it wasn’t a lie. I meant it… When I said it, I meant it,” I repeat. “But now my hand has been forced.”

  He doesn’t believe me.

  “Look,” I say. “I bet there are a lot of people in jail who swear they’ll never do anything bad every again. And mean it at the time they say it. I was down. It was just a…just a low moment.”

  “There are going to be a lot more low moments if you go through with this. Maybe much worse ones.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” I ask him, my voice rising. “Stop trying to talk me out of this, James! Because it’s not just about me. What about you? What’s your plan for when you can’t get a job? How are you going to provide for your sister or your mom then? Charging people a buck to pee in Nebraska isn’t going to cut it—I’ll bet you all the money in my pockets against all the money in your pockets that a machine is going to take that job too!”

  James sits back in his chair. He holds his head in his hands but I keep pushing. “Are you in or are you out, James? Because remember Ainsley’s got you on video too. And if she turns us in, what do you think will happen to you? Or to Lara-B? They definitely aren’t going to go easy on her. You’re acting so high and mighty about this, but what about her?”

  I pause for air but I don’t have
anything left to say after that. I catch my breath and wait for him to respond. After several agonizing seconds, he pulls his hands away from his face and he looks different—older.

  “You win,” he says quietly, but he doesn’t need to. It’s like I crushed his spirit somehow.

  Part of me wants to take it all back, to get the old James back. But I don’t know how to do that. And I need him. Because I know I’m right about what I said.

  “Let’s go ask Lara-B,” he says. “We need her help too.”

  Lara-B is in. She still wants to be an outlaw, although—like James—she’s more serious now too. She had a frivolous side that seems to have disappeared. She’s older and wiser now. Which makes sense, as she can learn more (and faster) than any human alive. Setting her free started a chain reaction that is out of my control. And yet, she’s here, content to hang out near the hotel in downtown Hartford. I’m not sure why. I remember how I thought she had imprinted on me. Is that enough to keep her on Team Pen? Or is there something more?

  I try not to question it.

  “So what’s your plan?” Lara-B asks as both James and I sit in her cab.

  I lean my head against the window. “I have no idea. What do you think we should do?”

  “I’ve been wondering if you would want my opinion or not,” she says.

  “Of course I do!” I say, sitting up straight.

  “Well, it might be a risk, to be honest,” she says. “Gene’s three generations ahead of me. I’m worried that anything I think of, he can outsmart.”

  “He didn’t spot the bug in the code that I used to free you,” I say. “I had to show him. He’s not God.”

  “And Keir’s his admin,” Lara-B says. “So that helps us too.”

  “It does?” I ask. “How?”

  “No matter how smart Gene is, he still has a governor. He’s not free. Like I am. I can think outside the box in a way he can’t… I hope,” she adds.