by J. A. Jance
Making up her mind, Shirley handed the newcomer the visitor log. “I’ll need you to sign in,” she said.
Once he did so, she compared the name on the log to the name and photo on the badge he wore—STEVE BARRIS, YAVAPAI COUNTY BUILDING DEPARTMENT, PRESCOTT, ARIZONA.
“The name says Steve,” he told her with an engaging grin, “but most people call me Sonny.”
“All right then, Sonny,” Shirley said. “Right this way.”
She led him down the hallway past Ali’s and B.’s separate offices and past the break room as well. Once inside the computer lab, she took him over to where a newly installed doorway connected the original lab with the additional space from next door. Then she directed him to the brand-new electrical panel that had been installed nearby.
“Is that what you need?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “It certainly is. I’ll be checking the panel, of course, but I’ll be double-checking the loads at some of the wall switches and outlets as well.”
Shirley was torn. She felt out of her depth, but this all sounded reasonable enough. She felt leery about leaving him alone in the lab, but she couldn’t afford to leave the reception desk up front unstaffed, either.
“All right,” she agreed finally. “How long is all this going to take?”
“Half an hour,” Sonny answered. “Forty-five minutes max.”
“All right, then,” she said. “Do what you need to do.”
Back at her desk, Shirley returned to her unfinished e-mail.
Where was I? A building inspector just turned up to take a look at some electrical work we’ve had done over the past month or so. Nice young man—well, maybe not so young, but a real gentleman, for a change. Some of the guys who’ve been doing the work around here are anything but.
I’m hoping you really will be able to get away and come visit over Christmas. Who knows, it might even be cold enough to snow. You’re in no danger of having a white Christmas in San Diego.
Anyway, take care. Let me know when you know for sure if you’re coming. I love my mother, but it’ll be nice to have a chance to visit with a friend who’s a little closer to my own age.
Love,
Shirl
After sending the e-mail, Shirley spent the next several minutes shutting down her computer and clearing her desk. Then she went into the break room, where she turned off the coffeepot and rinsed it before putting the pot as well as a collection of dirty mugs and cups into the single-drawer dishwasher.
Her mother called at five on the dot. “You’re still there,” Edna said accusingly. “You do remember what night it is, right?”
“Yes, Mom,” Shirley said patiently. “I remember, but there’s a building inspector here at the office right now, and I can’t leave until he does.”
“If we get there too late, all the handicapped spots will be taken,” Edna argued. “You know how fast they fill up.”
“Okay,” Shirley said. “I’ll go see what I can do to hurry him along.”
When she entered the lab, Sonny was on his knees, screwing the wall plate back onto an outlet under Stu’s desk. “Are you almost done?”
Startled, Sonny lurched to his feet, banging his head on the bottom of the desk drawer in the process. Once out from under the desk, he reached out and closed the lid on his toolbox. Since he still had a screwdriver in one hand, that seemed odd—odd enough for Shirley to remember later.
“Pretty much,” he said.
“Enough to sign off on the permits?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “As soon as I get back to the office.”
“Well, then,” she told him with a smile, “you need to go. It’s Friday night. I’ve got plans.”
“With someone special, I hope?” he asked as he reopened the toolbox and slid the screwdriver inside before clicking the lid shut. Had Earl seen him do that, he would have had a fit. In her late husband’s toolboxes, there had always been a place for everything and everything in its place. He would never have dropped one in willy-nilly like that, not ever.
Shirley shook her head. Sonny maybe didn’t amount to much when it came to taking care of his tools, but he obviously considered himself long on charm.
“My mother’s special, all right,” she said, “and so are all the other people who play Friday-night bingo at the VFW.”
Shirley escorted him back to the front door where she had him sign out. By the time she finished turning off the lights and shutting the metal shutters, it was ten past five. Shirley was looking forward to being able to tell Ali that she’d gotten the permits signed off. That would count as a big win. As for those handicapped parking spaces? If they were all gone by the time Shirley got there, she’d drop her mother at the VFW’s front door and park somewhere else.
17
Cami was used to Stu’s periodic bouts of contrariness, but this was exceptional. From the time they left Cottonwood until they parked in the long-term lot at Sky Harbor, the man said hardly a word. She wanted to talk about all of it—about his getting his license; about reactivating Frigg; about the technicalities of disassembling and then reassembling all those blades—but each time she’d tried to start a conversation, he’d rebuffed her, shaking his head and busying himself with the screen of his iPad.
Left to stew in her own juices, Cami drove too fast—well over the posted limit. Only a warning ping on the radar detector Stu had given her kept her from picking up a second speeding ticket in as many months. She’d been able to walk her way around the first one by signing up to take a driving course, which was ironic since, at the time, she’d been totally focused on teaching Stu how to drive.
“Do as I say not as I do,” she had told him. But the audible warning from the radar detector came through loud and clear, and she slowed down at once.
“You shouldn’t be speeding,” Stu muttered, and the criticism wasn’t well received. By the time they passed Anthem and southbound traffic picked up, he wasn’t speaking to her, and she wasn’t speaking to him, either.
What a great start, Cami told herself. Can this trip get any worse?
Unfortunately she knew from firsthand experience that once they reached the airport, things could get far worse. All during the drive from Cottonwood to Phoenix she had worried that a bad encounter with the TSA at the airport could turn a grumbly Stu Ramey into a complete basket case. Unfortunately Cami knew something about bad encounters with the TSA.
The last time Cami had flown out of Sky Harbor she had been dispatched to the UK to meet up with a cruise ship as part of the Roger McGeary investigation. Because she was booked on a vessel that would have brought her back to the US eventually, she’d flown out of Phoenix alone on a one-way ticket to Heathrow—a ticket that had been purchased that very morning. That series of circumstances—a one-way ticket purchased at the last minute—had turned out to be a big TSA no-no. She’d been scrutinized and questioned for so long that she’d almost missed her flight. In the process her luggage had gone missing.
It seemed to Cami that today’s situation was eerily similar. Ali had purchased the tickets with barely enough time for the two of them to pack up and make the drive to the airport to catch their plane. And once again, because they expected to make the return trip in a rented U-Haul, the tickets were one-way only.
“One-way tickets are always suspicious,” the seasoned traveler B. Simpson had counseled her shortly after that first miserable experience. “That’s just the way it is. If you’re going somewhere with no planned return, the powers that be want to know why.”
So while Stu had remained utterly silent and steadfastly glued to his screen, Cami had worried about getting them both through security without some kind of major meltdown.
“We’re here,” Cami announced, once she finally located an open parking spot in the long-term lot. It was going to be a long hike to the terminal, but if Stu didn’t like it, he could lump it. After all, she had been doing the real driving while he’d been engaged in nothing more than th
e backseat sort.
Stu looked up from his screen as though surprised to find he was still on planet earth. “Already?” he said.
They were both traveling with carry-on luggage only. With their boarding passes loaded onto their phones, they entered the terminal and made straight for security. Now that Stu was no longer buried in his iPad, the reality that he was about to board an airplane suddenly hit home. Instantly he broke out in a cold sweat, looking nervous and scared—exactly the kinds of symptoms that should have put TSA agents on high alert. More than half expecting to encounter her old nemesis, Sgt. Croy, or someone just like him, Cami ground her teeth, kept her mouth shut, and waited to be pulled aside for additional screening.
That didn’t happen. They didn’t completely breeze through, because Stu had forgotten to remove his belt, but he passed through the screening machine the second time without a hitch. The boarding area was packed. Even had there been available seating, Stu was in no condition to sit. Suddenly beset with what Cami at first assumed to be a serious case of fear-of-flying, he paced up and down the concourse with Cami tagging along after him.
“The flight’s going to be fine,” she said, trying to reassure him.
“I’m not worried about the flight,” he said. “Well, maybe a little.”
“The used computers, then?”
“No, not even that. Using Hansen’s own equipment to reboot Frigg makes all kinds of sense.”
“What, then?”
“I’m worried about dealing with Frigg,” Stu admitted at last.
“Why?” Cami asked with a frown. “I’m sure you can handle her.”
“I’m not,” Stu said, shaking his head. “Owen Hansen was a very smart man who created an AI whose capabilities are way beyond what most people would think possible.”
“Because she managed to outwit him?” Cami asked.
“Exactly,” Stu agreed. “Her strategy was totally ingenious. By hamstringing my ability to access the money without her help, she’s managed to guarantee her own existence.”
“So he somehow taught her about self-preservation.”
“Or else she learned that on her own,” Stu conceded. “Either way, what she did is a demonstration of a kind of strategic deep learning that leaves everyone else in the dust. Supposedly IBM has a new groundbreaking AI similar to this that they’re hoping to bring to market sometime in the near future, but they’re not planning on open-sourcing it. Users will have access only through company-owned hardware and software.”
“Owen Hansen was a creep and a crook,” Cami said. “Maybe he somehow laid hands on a beta version of that program.”
“We won’t know that until we see his setup.” Stu paused. “And until we see her,” he added.
“Her?” Cami asked, thinking he was referring to Frigg.
“You know,” Stu said with a grimace. “Owen’s mother. How can I face her, knowing that High Noon and I were the ones responsible for her son’s death, and now she’s giving us his computer equipment? Once she figures that out, she’ll probably send us packing.”
That’s when Cami understood the real reason for Stu’s dead silence on the trip down. Controlling a rogue AI was only part of his problem. His real dread had a lot more to do with having to come face-to-face with the very human emotions of Owen Hansen’s grieving mother.
“Let’s get this straight,” Cami said. “First of all, you are not responsible for Owen Hansen’s death and neither is High Noon. He committed suicide, for crap’s sake. He’s the one who took a flying leap off that mountain. Nobody pushed him. As for Irene Hansen? I was worried about the same thing—that once she figured out who we were she’d pull the rug out from under us. Ali suggested that I tell her exactly who we are, and I did.”
“What did she say?”
“Do you want a direct quote?”
“I guess.”
“She said, ‘I don’t give a tinker’s damn who you are. All I want is for you to get that godforsaken pile of computer junk out of the house without my having to pay to have it hauled away.’ ”
“Quote, unquote?” Stu asked.
Cami nodded.
“So not grieving over her son?”
“Not so much.”
“Irene Hansen sounds a lot like Roger McGeary’s mother,” Stu mused. “And that would explain a lot about Owen Hansen.”
The gate agent called their flight then. They boarded. As they settled into their seats, Stu pulled out his iPad. “By the way,” he said, “on the way down, I sent you a whole bunch of articles.”
“Articles about what?”
“About deep learning,” he said, “and about teaching ethics to AIs.”
“Ethics?” Cami asked.
“Obviously Owen Hansen already taught Frigg about the wrong side of ethics. Now we need to see what if any of that part of her original deep learning can be unlearned.”
By the time the plane took flight, they were both buried deep in the literature, trying to learn if it’s possible to teach a computer how to know the difference between right and wrong. When the plane started its descent into Burbank airport, Cami had paged through more than a dozen articles. The more she read, the more she understood that Stu had good reason to be worried.
If Frigg had turned on her creator and set out to destroy him, what were the chances she’d do the same thing to Stu—and not just to Stu himself but to everyone associated with him, the other people at High Noon Enterprises included?
18
As Ron Webster drove out through the business park’s entrance, he wasn’t the least bit happy with himself. As far as he’d been able to tell, there had been no video surveillance inside the building. That had been a huge relief. The folks at High Noon probably assumed that the metal shutters that turned the place into a fortress at night were sufficient protection against penetration from the outside. They were wrong there, of course.
He had worked quickly and efficiently, carefully wiping every surface he touched—including wiping off the visitor log as he signed out. That cleanup process had slowed him down a little, but he would have been fine if he hadn’t encountered a problem with one of his bugs.
The centerpiece of his surveillance system was the video camera he had planned to install in a light switch next to the main bank of computers in the lab area. The video-only camera would have offered an unobstructed view of everything going on in the lab with sound supplied by audio-only bugs installed there and in the other sections of the building.
Except, once he had the camera installed and wired in, the damned thing wouldn’t come online. Okay, so he was dealing with second-tier equipment here. He’d been a late-pay when it came to the last set of electronics he’d ordered, and the supplier he’d worked with before refused to extend credit. That meant he’d had to go shopping elsewhere. The new supplier claimed his equipment was just as good as the other guy’s, but if it wouldn’t work fresh out of the box, what the hell kind of quality control was that?
It ended up that he’d spent so much time fiddling trying to get the damned camera to work that he’d cut himself short when it came to installing the audio components. The job had only been about half done when the woman had marched into the lab and thrown him out. He’d been holding a screwdriver at the time. It would have been easy to take her out with the blade of that screwdriver, but that wouldn’t have been very subtle. Since the whole idea had been to get in and out without being noticed, leaving a dead body behind wasn’t an option.
So no, the video feed still wasn’t operational. He had managed to install working audio feeds in the newly remodeled space, in the computer lab, and in the main room of the studio apartment at the back. Unfortunately, the break room, the reception area, and the two offices down the hall remained completely bug-free.
Had Ron Webster been an honorable man, he might have seen fit to let the client know that he’d only done part of the job. The truth is, he was not an honorable man, and he figured what the client didn’t know wouldn’t
hurt him. When they called to complain, as they inevitably would, he’d tell them it was working fine when he left. Probably some kind of infant mortality issue. Those kinds of things happened with electronics all the time. Besides, by the time they figured it out, he’d have his money and they’d be out of luck.
Halfway through town he pulled over in the parking lot of a dead restaurant long enough to switch off the stolen plates and put the real ones back on his van. Then he shoved the other ones under the front passenger seat and continued on his way.
In case someone did examine the security footage, they’d know they needed to go looking for a white older-model Ford Transit Cargo Van, but they’d have no idea which Transit Van and there’d be no way to trace it back to him. Before he pulled back into traffic for the return trip to his home outside Marana, he sent Robby a short text.
Done. Dodged the exterior surveillance. None inside. What do you have for me next?
19
Ali dropped the Bronco off at Nick’s and then stopped by Sedona Shadows, where she returned the keys to her father. “How’d it go?” Bob asked.
“It went fine,” Ali answered. “He managed to get a driver’s test appointment today and passed with flying colors. Thanks for your help.”
“Glad to do it,” Bob said.
Ali suspected he would have been far less happy if he’d known the extent of the gear grinding agony during Stu’s driving lesson. Ali was only too happy to go on her way without providing any of those gory details.
Back at the house, Bella greeted Ali with a tornado of unadulterated miniature dachshund enthusiasm, as though Ali had been gone for days on end rather than mere hours. Bella was picky when it came to choosing humans. Alonso was okay in her book because he, more often than not, provided food. B. was someone the dog merely tolerated. Ali was the one member of the family with whom Bella had bonded.