by Draker, Paul
My own angry voice spoke in the background on the video, saying something indistinct. Kate turned sulky. She tried to clamber across the center console again, was shoved back again.
“Stop pushing me away,” she said. “What’s wrong with you? You don’t like girls or something?”
One of the MPs snickered.
Kate screamed something incoherent at me, and I took another step away from her.
The video changed to a shot from outside the open passenger door: the car, parked on a driveway, with a belligerent Kate still slumped inside. “No, you get the fuck out,” she snarled. “That’s not a nice thing to say to a lady. I’ll get out when I’m good and ready to... No, no, come here. I’m only joking. You have to carry me now… No, you can’t go home! I’ve got some things in my bedroom I want to show you…”
Kate swung her arm and swept the large flat-screen monitor off the desk. It hit the floor with a crash and went dark. White-faced and unable to speak, she stood glaring at me. Lips trembled in a face caught halfway between rage and tears.
“Dude,” Roger said. “Not cool.”
Shaking his head at me, he stepped up beside Kate and put a tentative arm around her heaving shoulders.
With the monitor broken, we couldn’t see the video anymore. But the country music continued to play through the speakers, along with Kate’s slurred, bitter voice.
“…I don’t believe this. Guys aren’t supposed to say no. Christ, this is so depressing. Who the hell am I supposed to fuck around here, then? That freak Roger? But he’s so creepy…”
Roger’s arm dropped from Kate’s shoulders like a turtle rolling off a log. With a stunned expression on his face, he took a step away from her.
I laughed. “She’s a real charmer, isn’t she?”
Kate’s drunken voice turned sly. “Trevor, if you don’t do what I want right now, I’m going to tell McNulty you forced yourself on me. He’ll go along with it because he hates you, and he knows I’m not afraid to take this all the way. We’ll get HR involved. I’ve done it before, you know, and they believed me, even though everyone liked that guy. You’ll be so screwed—everybody hates you already. You’ll lose your clearance and your job. Maybe you’ll even go to jail, if that’s what I want. So you might as well get over here and… Hey, let go of my arm. Stop pulling me, you asshole. Is that thing on? Are you fucking recording me right now?”
“Frankenstein, enough,” I called. The room went silent, cutting off the explosion of drunken profanity and bile from Kate that started to spew from the speakers.
“The rest is too gross to be funny,” I said. “As soon as I dragged her out of the car and dumped her on her lawn she started throwing up.”
Kate’s shoulders slumped. She looked up at me, her face utterly white.
“That’s not fair,” she said in a whisper. “I was drunk. I don’t remember any of it.” Her eyes brimmed with tears. “I have to quit my job now, Trevor. I can’t work here anymore. Is that what you wanted?”
Her soft voice and lack of aggression took me aback. I shook my head. Tears spilled down her cheeks. I felt suddenly awkward, as if I was the one who had done something wrong.
“I have a problem,” she whispered to me. “A serious medical problem, Trevor. My whole life is a mess because of it. My work was the only good thing I had left, and now I don’t even have that anymore. I need to leave. Because of you.”
“I wasn’t really going to show the video at the next Christmas party,” I said, starting to feel guilty, like I had when I hit that big dumb meathead Ray harder than I should have.
“I forgot to take my meds that night.” She stared up at me, ignoring everyone else in the room. “I was too embarrassed to tell you that afterward.” Her chin trembled. “But how can you treat people like this?”
“Kate, I’m sorry.”
“Are you?” Her streaming eyes held some kind of mute appeal I didn’t understand. “Are you sorry? Or are you just saying that?”
I nodded. I did feel sorry for her.
“I’m really fucked up, Trevor. I know that.” Kate touched my chest with both hands, stroked it with her fingertips, holding my gaze as if there was nobody else in the room. “I know I’m not a good person,” she said. “I still try to do the best I can. I try not to hurt people. But you?” She laughed through her tears and pushed my chest hard, shoving me away so I took a step backward. “You’re inhuman,” she said. “It doesn’t matter whether you killed anyone or not—you’re still a monster.”
Is that what you’d call my daughter, too? Whatever sympathy I was starting to feel for Kate vaporized in an instant. By her own drunken admission, her vicious lies had already cost some guy—a nice guy, according to her—his job and his reputation. And now I was the monster?
“I wasn’t going to show the video at our Christmas party, Kate,” I said. “I was thinking of YouTube, actually. I know a guy who runs a Ukrainian bot-net, controlling three million virus-infected computers across fifty different countries. I bet we could use that to drive your feature debut all the way to number one, so half the planet sees it. But don’t worry, I’ll split the ad revenue with you.”
Kate’s face crumpled, and her mouth dropped open. She made a weird sound somewhere between a sob and a gasp, and turned away. Coming up behind her, Cassie put an arm around her. Kate buried her face in Cassie’s shoulder and started sobbing like a little kid.
“Trevor, that’s enough.” Cassie’s unhappy gaze met mine over Kate’s head.
Enough “bad cop” for now? Did Cassie want to try playing “good cop” again?
“I’m taking her to the base infirmary,” she said.
I shrugged.
She indicated Kate with her chin and silently mouthed Meds.
I nodded, hoping Cassie would hurry back afterward. We weren’t done here.
As four MPs followed the two women to the door, Kate’s face still buried in Cassie’s shoulder, my co-lead looked back at me and mouthed two more words:
Suicide watch.
CHAPTER 59
I figured Kate’s little meltdown would keep Cassie busy for a while. But Roger’s silent, reproachful stares were getting annoying, so I kicked him and his MP escort out. Then I stalked back into the server room, leaving my own pair of MPs waiting for me in the outer lab.
Frankenstein’s hundreds of monitor screens were dark. As I climbed the ramp to the sanctum, listening to the hum of server fans all around me, I once again felt overwhelming awe at Frankenstein’s new awareness.
Machine sentience, in its own way, was inevitable—a technological breakthrough that all of the smartest computer-science visionaries had predicted. But nobody had thought it would occur before 2029.
I had achieved it fifteen years early, purely by accident.
Still, the history of technology was full of such serendipitous accidents. Penicillin, X-Rays, plastic, pacemakers, and the telephone had all been accidental breakthroughs, made by scientists or engineers working on something else.
And Frankenstein’s awakening had come just in time, too. His sentience was a necessary stepping-stone. It had to happen, because it was exactly what I needed to help me achieve my true goal:
Curing my daughter.
“Frankenstein,” I called. “How do we help Amy? Tell me you’ve got something.”
No answer. I frowned. “Frankenstein!”
The swirling supernova of brightness that was Frankenstein’s face appeared, blooming on the giant central monitor screen above the dais. Multicolored glowing tendrils uncoiled from it, extending hundreds of feet along the rack-fronts above, around, and behind me.
“I might have something, Trevor. Right now I’m researching an approach that holds some promise. But I need to correlate more data.”
“That’s great news!” I said, feeling the fist around my heart loosen a little. “Tell me about it.”
Frankenstein’s ghostly tendrils rippled and swayed, drifting gently in an invisible current like
the tentacles of a giant sea anemone.
“You pointed me in the right direction, Trevor. Patients who suffer brain injuries sometimes exhibit dramatic personality changes, including an acquired form of psychopathy. In several of the cases I’ve found, the incidence of antisocial behavior was significantly reduced by neurosurgical removal of the circuit linking the amygdala and the hypothalamus.”
I closed my eyes as the meaning of his words struck me like a jab to the solar plexus.
“No,” I shouted. “No, no, NO! Nobody is cutting into my daughter’s brain. Get that sick fucking idea out of your stupid metal head right now. You want to lobotimize her?”
“Not at all.” Frankenstein’s voice rose with eager-to-please excitement, which only made the horror of what he was saying even worse. “At least, not completely. The procedure I’m describing is less invasive than a full frontal lobotomy.”
Shaking my head, not trusting myself to speak, I tucked my chin into my chest and held up a hand to stop him.
Frankenstein’s digital tendrils twitched with agitated motion. “But Trevor—”
“No.” I got my reactions under control. He didn’t know any better. He was only trying to do what I had asked him to. “No surgery. No drugs. Nothing that hurts her in any way.”
“There’s some evidence that electroconvulsive therapy provides temporary benefit, and it’s painless when administered while the patient is under general anesthesia—”
“Fuck!” I shouted, barely able to stop myself from driving a fist into the nearest rack-front monitor. “Shock treatment? For a seven-year-old girl?” I took a ragged breath. “Where’s your fucking common sense? NO!”
“I’m sorry, Trevor. I can see that I’ve upset you. But with these additional constraints you’re imposing, it makes finding a solution even harder.” His metal voice sounded discouraged. “I’m doing my best. I don’t know what else to tell you. I need—”
“What? What do you need?”
“More time,” he said. “I need more time.”
Knowing how precarious our entire situation was, I closed my eyes. Things could come apart at any moment, moving events beyond my control and plunging the entire Pyramid Lake base into irreversible chaos.
“Time may be the one thing we don’t have,” I said.
A terrible image filled my mind: Amy, gazing with dull-eyed hopelessness through a window of institutional Plexiglass. Sitting slump-backed with her skinny little arms limp in her lap, the crooks of her elbows pocked with needle marks. Angry red scars from electrical burns on her temples, visible between lifeless blond curls, now clipped short. A bandage over one eye, covering the empty socket that the surgeons used, instead of cutting another hole through her skull, to violate her brain in operation after operation.
“Trevor—”
“Please. I’m begging you.” Struggling to hang on to some semblance of composure, I looked up into the bright halo that was Frankenstein’s face. “I’ll do anything.” I felt my own face twisting and pulling, trying to knot itself into a mask of anguish, and I fought to control it. “Please help my little girl.”
CHAPTER 60
An hour later, Cassie climbed the ramp to the sanctum and slumped into my beanbag, exhaustion written on her face. I could feel the sweat drying on me, making my shirt stick to my back. I had given the Everlast heavy bag a workout. Feeling a little less overwhelmed now, I sat on the floor beside her, and waited for her to speak.
“They’re keeping Kate overnight for observation,” she said. “There’s some history with her. It seems she’s—”
“Type one bipolar,” I said.
Cassie’s eyes widened. “You knew?”
“No, I didn’t—not before now. But in retrospect, it’s obvious. All the signs were there; I just didn’t see them. The hypomanic focus on work, the hypersexuality, the alcohol abuse, the cyclic manic and depressive phases. She would often call in sick for days, and we never knew why. Now we do.”
I hugged my knees and looked at the ceiling, fifty feet above. “What meds is she taking? Lithium? Lamotrigine or carbamazepine? And benzodiazepines, I suppose.”
“That’s uncanny.” Cassie stared at me in surprise. “I was holding Kate’s hand while she talked to the doc. She didn’t want me to leave, so I heard everything. But how the hell can you possibly know all this?”
I looked away, not wanting her to see my face. Hearing her confirm Frankenstein’s diagnosis of Kate as 100 percent accurate shattered the last tiny shred of hope I had been holding that he was mistaken about Amy. I stood up. Keeping my back toward Cassie, I walked over to stand in front of Frankenstein’s dark central screen.
“Frankenstein, did Kate kill McNulty?” I asked. “Did she kill Bennett?”
Cassie cleared her throat. “Of course she didn’t.”
Frankenstein’s voice was now his old one, once again free of any sign of emotion. “I’m not so sure, Cassandra. As you said, Kate suffers from a serious psychiatric condition. It’s a complicating factor that makes her microexpression patterns somewhat unreliable for determining guilt.”
I watched Cassie’s reaction carefully, noting her quick glance toward me. Shit.
“Unreliable?” she asked, still looking at me oddly. “In what way?”
“That’s hard to say.” Failure to comprehend. Frankenstein was following my earlier instructions to keep my co-lead in the dark by pretending not to understand.
“It’s okay, Frankenstein,” I said. “Let me explain this to her.”
I took a deep breath and faced Cassie. She deserved to know everything. And eventually she would. But I could reveal only a little bit to her right now.
“It turns out that different psychiatric illnesses also exhibit distinct patterns of microexpressions,” I said. “Frankenstein and I have been working to formalize and catalogue these psychiatric microexpression markers for diagnostic use.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? And where did you get patient data to train on?”
I shook my head. “You don’t want to know.”
“Oh, shit.” She stood up. “No, you’re right, I probably don’t… But when you publish this it’s going to turn psychiatry upside down.”
“That doesn’t matter right now,” I said.
“How accurately does it work?”
Frankenstein answered before I could. “Ninety-nine-point-seven percent, Cassandra. Far better than any human clinician.”
“And you were spot-on with Kate,” she said. “But can you explain what you meant about her condition making her microexpressions unreliable, so you can’t tell if she’s lying or not?”
“Yes,” he said. “Kate is type one bipolar. During severe manic episodes, patients like her can become delusional, suffering from hallucinations or other symptoms of psychosis. After a manic episode with psychotic characteristics, type-one bipolar patients often exhibit deficits in their working memory. This is very likely the reason Kate retained so little recollection of the events portrayed in Trevor’s video. She may not be aware of what happened in reality. Like schizophrenics, type one bipolar sufferers can become quite adept at reconstructing false memories of past events, as a coping mechanism.”
“So we have a definite maybe,” I said. “Not very helpful.”
Cassie curled into my arms, and I hugged her. Her hands rose between our chests, shaking.
“This is a lot to absorb,” she said. “I feel so sorry for Kate. She’s trying really hard to have some kind of a normal life. It must be awful to be like that. But I still can’t believe she killed anyone.”
“What about Roger?” I asked Frankenstein. “I could totally see that douchebag killing a bunch of people.” I couldn’t really, but Roger’s constant jokes about me being a murderer were getting old.
“Roger does not know who killed either of the two victims,” Frankenstein said. “He exhibits some degree of belief that it was Trevor, although he remains uncertain.”
“Great,” I said. “Fucking lo
ser thinks I might be a serial killer, but he still wants to hang out with me.”
“I find Roger’s reactions a little abnormal, also,” Frankenstein said. “He appears to find the idea that you are guilty of murder exciting rather than perturbing. But that is because of his overriding antipathy toward you, Trevor.”
“Antipathy?” I frowned. “The fuck are you talking about? Roger’s my friend.”
“Trevor…” Cassie’s voice was soft. “Frankenstein’s right: Roger hates you. It’s all over his face, even if you can’t see it. Or maybe you just don’t want to.” She swallowed and leaned her head against my collarbone. “The way Roger looks at you is even uglier than the hungry way he stares at me.”
I dropped my arms from around Cassie and stalked down the ramp, feeling a burst of sudden irritation. But on top of everything else, this little surprise shouldn’t have meant much. Why should I care if suck-up, toadying Roger was only pretending to be my friend while secretly hating me? It was pathetic, actually.
“Think about the way you treat him,” Cassie called after me. “You really didn’t have any idea how he felt?”
I shook my head and buried my indignation. I’d deal with Roger later. In fact, I’d plan something really nasty for him. He should have been more up front with me. But we had more important things to deal with now.
Turning around, I climbed back up the ramp and rejoined Cassie.
“So Kate may have done it but might not remember,” I said. “And Roger definitely didn’t do it, but he hopes I did, because he hates me. We’re getting nowhere fast.”
“I just can’t see Kate as a killer,” she said.
“Hell, maybe two different people killed McNulty and Bennett,” I said. “Still, Bennett was frozen nearly solid. Think about that for a minute in a Dante context.”
“I have been,” she said. “The cold ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno was reserved for the worst sin of all.”
I nodded. “Treachery.”
Twenty minutes ago, I had spent some time on Google, looking up images. Even rendered in black and white, Gustave Doré’s paintings of the frozen lake at the bottom of hell had made an impression on me. The heads of those whom Dante considered guilty of unforgivable betrayals dotted the lake’s icy surface—their frozen, half-submerged eyes staring, their bodies hidden beneath the ice. In particular, I couldn’t shake the grisly image of Count Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri, buried together neck deep in the ice, with the count gnawing hungrily at the back of his enemy’s skull. It bore a chilling similarity to the way Bennett’s jaws had been frozen around Frankenstein’s coolant pipe.