Rava could hardly breathe. “Fine. Hey, can you set my handy so it shows the names to go with the numbers?”
“Done.”
“Thank you.” Rava snatched the cable from the wall.
Cordelia gasped as if struck. “What are you doing?”
“Something has overwritten your memories.”
“That isn’t possible, dear.”
“No? Then tell me about the conversation that you and I and Ludoviko had in Uncle Georgo’s apartment.”
“Well . . . if you plug me in to the system, so I can access long-term memory, I could do that.”
“This happened less than half an hour ago.”
Cordelia blinked. “No, it didn’t.”
“I was there.” Rava lifted Cordelia, hugging the chassis to her chest. “I remember, even if you don’t.”
***
Rava trembled as she sat in the family council chambers. Ludoviko lounged in his chair, with apparent comfort, but she could smell the sweat dampening his shirt. The eight aunts and uncles who sat on the council had been quiet through her entire recitation. Only Uncle Georgo’s seat sat empty. Her words dried when she had finished and she waited to hear their reaction.
Aunt Fajra removed her steepled fingers from her lips. “Two years, you say?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Two years ago, buried in an update, Uncle Georgo had slipped in a program that added a law to Cordelia’s copy of the official shipwide laws. He’d seen the dementia coming and acted to save himself.
“Cordelia? What do you have to say about this?”
The AI’s cameras swiveled to face the council. “I do not wish to discredit my wrangler, but I have no records of anything she has told you except the problem with my transmitter. The rest of her statements seem so fanciful I hardly know where to begin.”
Ludoviko sat forward in his chair, eyes hard. “Would you like Uncle Georgo to respond?”
The AI’s hesitation was so slight that if Rava hadn’t been watching for it, she would not have seen it. “No, I don’t think that is necessary.”
“Can you tell us why?” Rava glanced at her aunts and uncles to see if they were noticing the same slow reaction times she was, apparent now as Cordelia adjusted her responses in accordance with the private law to keep Georgo safe.
“Because until you dropped me, Georgo was a respected member of this council. Everyone here has spoken with him. The evidence is clear enough.”
Aunt Fajra cleared her throat and pressed a toggle on her handy. The doors to the council room opened and an attendant brought Uncle Georgo in. His stride was erect and only the furtive glances gave him away at first. Then he saw Cordelia and his face turned petulant. “There you are! I couldn’t find you and I looked and looked.”
Cordelia stilled, became a static image hovering over the writing desk. Rava could almost see the lines of code meeting and conflicting with each other. Keep his secret safe, yes, but how, when it was so clearly exposed? Her face turned to Rava, but the cameras stayed fixed on Uncle Georgo. “Well. It seems I am compromised. I have to ask what my wrangler plans to do about it.”
Rava winced at the title, at the way it stripped their relationship to human and machine. “I have to do a rollback.”
The cameras now swiveled to face her. “You said you found the code.”
“I found the code that adds the law that you must protect Uncle Georgo. Not the one that overwrites your memories.” She nodded to her brother. “I had Ludoviko search as well and he also failed to find anything definitive.We think it’s modified in multiple places and the only way to be sure we’ve got it out is to rollback to a previous version.”
“Two years.” Cordelia tossed her head. “Your family will lose two years of memories and records if you do that.”
“Not if you help us reconcile your versions.” Rava picked at the cuticle of her thumb rather than meet the AI’s gaze.
Cordelia wavered and again those lines of code, those damnable lines of code fought within her. “What happens to Georgo?”
“It’s not a family decision.” Aunt Fajra straightened in her chair and looked at where Uncle Georgo stood, crooning by Cordelia. “You know what the laws are.”
Cordelia’s mouth turned down. “Then I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
“I think we’ve seen all we need.” Aunt Fajra waved her hand and with unceremonious dispatch, Cordelia and Uncle Georgo were both bundled out of the council chambers.
As the door slid shut, Ludoviko cleared his throat and looked at Rava. She nodded to let him go ahead. “Okay. Here’s the thing. That Cordelia is a reinstall after we pulled out the code we found. Every time we try to clear her we get pretty much the same answer.We tried lying to her and saying Uncle Georgo was already gone, but she knows us too well and recognizes the lie. So we don’t know how she’d actually behave in that scenario. At the moment, she’s insisting she’ll only help if we don’t send Uncle Georgo to the recycler.”
Shaking his head, Uncle Johano harrumphed. “It’s not a family decision. He should have been sent there the moment we sorted out what had happened. Keeping him like this is a travesty.”
“And will get worse.” Rava shifted in her chair. “As his dementia progresses, Cordelia will have less and less control over him.We’re concerned about how far her injunction to ‘keep him alive’ will go. That’s why we’ve kept her from reconnecting to her long-term storage or to the ship.”
“And your solution is to reboot her from a backup, wiping those two years of memory? Including all the birth records during those two years . . .” Aunt Fajra gathered the other family council members with her gaze. “That will require a consensus from the entire family.”
“Yes,ma’am. We understand that.”
“Actually. There’s one other option.” Ludoviko stretched out his legs, almost reclining in his chair. “The grands packed backups of everything. There’s another AI in storage. If we boot it from scratch, it would be able to access the database of memories without absorbing the emotional content that’s screwing up Cordelia.”
“What?” Rava’s voice cracked as she spun in her chair to face him. “Why didn’t you say that earlier?”
“Because it means killing Cordelia.” Ludoviko lifted his head and Rava was surprised to see his eyes glisten with tears. “As her wrangler, you can’t be party to it and I couldn’t chance you letting her know.”
“But wouldn’t she— no. Of course not.” Since Cordelia didn’t have access to her long-term memory, she would have forgotten the existence of another AI. Rava’s stomach turned. “Did it occur to you that she might change her response if she knew we had that option?”
“You mean, she might lie to us?” Ludoviko’s voice was surprisingly gentle.
“But Cordelia isn’t a machine, she’s a person.”
Ludoviko cocked his head to the side and left Rava feeling like a fool. Of course this reaction was exactly why he thought he was justified in not telling her about the backup AI.
“You are correct. Cordelia is a person.” Aunt Fajra tapped the handy in front of her. “A dangerous, unbalanced person who can no longer do productive work.”
“But it’s not her fault.”
Aunt Fajra looked up from her handy, eyes glistening. “Is Georgo’s dementia his fault?”
Rava slumped in her seat and shook her head. “What if . . . what if we kept her disconnected from the ship?”
Ludoviko shook his head. “And what, overwrite the same block of memory? Only remember a week at a time? Nice life you are offering her.”
“At least she’d get to choose.”
***
Cordelia’s cameras swiveled to face Rava as the door slid open. “He’s dead, isn’t he?
Rava nodded. “I’m sorry.”
The AI appeared to sigh, coded mannerisms to express grief expressing themselves in her projection. Her face and cameras turned away from Rava. “And me? When do you roll me back to the earlier version?”
<
br /> Rava sank into the seat by Cordelia’s chassis. The words she needed to say filled her throat, almost choking her. “They . . . I can offer you two choices. There’s another AI in the hold. The family voted to replace you.” She dug her fingernails into the raw skin around the cuticle of her thumb. “I can either shut you down or let you remain active, but unconnected.”
“You mean without backup memory.”
Rava nodded.
Under the whirring of fans, she imagined she could hear code ticking forward as Cordelia processed thoughts faster than any human could. “For want of a nail . . .”
“Sorry?”
“It’s a proverb. ‘For want of a nail—” Cordelia broke off. Her eyes shifted up and to the left, as she searched for information that was not there. “I don’t remember the rest of it, but I suspect that’s ironic.” Hiccupping sobs of laughter broke out of her.
Rava stood, hand outstretched as if she could comfort the AI in some way, but the image that showed such torment was only a hologram. She could only bear witness.
The laughter stopped as suddenly as it had begun. “Shut me off.” Cordelia’s image vanished and the cameras went limp.
Breathing shallowly to keep her own sobs at bay, Rava pulled the key from her pocket. The flat plastic card had holes punched in it and metallic lines tracing across the surface in a combination of physical and electronic codes.
Counting through the steps of the procedure, Rava systematically shut down the systems that made Cordelia live.
One. Insert the key.
She had known what Cordelia would choose. What else could she have opted for? Really. The slow etching away of self, with pieces written and over-written.
Two. Fingerprint verif ication.
Uncle Georgo had chosen to stay, though, and Cordelia might have followed his lead.
Three. Confirm shut down.
If only Rava hadn’t dropped the chassis . . . but the truth would have come out eventually.
Four. Reconfirm shut down.
She stared at the last screen. For want of a nail . . . Tomorrow she would visit the consignment shop and get some paper and a pen.
Confirm shutdown.
And then, with those, she would write her own memories of Cordelia.
For Solo Cello, op.12, by Mary Robinette Kowal
Mutilated in an accident, he faced a terrible choice - give up his music forever or raise a child he couldn't help but resent.
HIS KEYS DROPPED, rattling on the parquet floor. Julius stared at them, unwilling to look at the bandaged stump where two weeks ago his left hand had been. He should be used to it by now. He should not still be trying to pass things from his right hand to his left. But it still felt as if his hand were there.
The shaking began again, a tremelo building in his hand and knees. Julius pressed his right hand — his only hand — against his mouth so he did not vomit on the floor. Reaching for calm, he imagined playing through Belparda’s Étude no. 1. It focussed on bowing, on the right hand. Forget the left. When he was eight, Julius had learned it on a cello as big as he had been. The remembered bounce of the bow against the strings pulsed in his right hand. Don’t think about the fingering.
“Jules, are you all right?”
Cheri’s voice startled him. He hadn’t heard the door open.
Lowering his hand, Julius opened his eyes. His wife stood silhouetted in the light from their apartment. Her hair hung in loose tendrils around her face, bleached almost colourless by the backlight.
He snatched his keys off the floor. “I’m fine.” Julius leaned forward to kiss her before she could notice his shaking, but Cheri turned her head and put a hand to her mouth.
“No. Sorry. I — I was just sick.” A sheen of sweat coated her upper lip. Julius slid his good arm around her and pulled her to him.
“I’m sorry. The baby?” This close, her lilac perfume mixed with the sour scent of vomit.
His phantom hand twitched.
She half-laughed and pressed her head into his shoulder. “Every time I throw up, I think that at least it means I’m still pregnant.”
“You’ll keep this one.”
She sighed as if he had given her a gift.
“Maybe. Two months, tomorrow.”
“See.” He brushed her hair with his lips.
“Oh…” Some of the tension came back to her shoulders.
“Your agent called.”
Julius stiffened. His agent. How long would a one-handed cellist be of interest? “What did Leonard say?”
“He wants to talk to you. Didn’t say why.”
Cheri drifted away and began obsessively straightening the magazines on the bureau in the foyer.
Julius let her. He had given up telling her that the accident had not been her fault. They both knew he would not have taken the tour if Cheri had not insisted. He would have stayed in the hotel, practicing for a concert he never gave.
He tossed his keys on the bureau. “Well. Maybe he’s booked
a talk show for me.”
AT THE COFFEE SHOP, Julius felt the baristas staring as he fumbled with his wallet. Leonard reached for the wallet with his pudgy sausage fingers. “Let me help.”
“No!” Julius gritted his teeth, clutching the slick leather. “I have to learn to do this.”
“Okay.” Leonard patted the sweat on his face with a napkin and waited. The line shuffled behind him. Every footfall, every cough drove a nail into his nerves. A woman whispered, “Julius Sanford, you know, the cellist.”
Julius almost turned and threw his wallet at her. Who the hell was she? Had she even heard him play before the accident or had she only seen him on the nightly news? Since the accident, sales of his albums had gone through the roof.
He wasn’t dead, but he might as well be.
Julius bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood and pressed his wallet against the counter with the stump. The bandages bit into the still tender flesh, but the wallet stayed put.
He pulled out his credit card with his right hand. It was stupid and it felt good and he hated it, all at once.
As if celebrating, his phantom hand flicked through the opening passage to Vivaldi’s Sonata in F major. Jules pressed the wallet harder against the counter, trying to drive out the memory of a hand with each throb of pain. Avoiding eye contact, he took his iced latte from the barista. He did not want to know if she was the type who watched him with pity or if she stared with naked curiosity.
Leonard had already picked a table outside. Jules dropped into the chair across from him. “So?”
“So.” Leonard sipped his mocha. “What if you didn’t have to learn to do that?”
“What? Handle credit cards?”
Leonard shrugged, and dabbed the back of his neck. “What would you give to play cello again?”
Julius’s heart kicked against the inside of his ribs. He squeezed the plastic cup to keep from throwing it at Leonard. “Anything.”
The older man looked away. His tongue darted out, lizard-like. “Is that hyperbole, or would you really give anything?”
Shaking, Julius shoved the stump squarely in Leonard’s vision. The phantom twitched with inaudible music. “If the devil sat down with us and offered to trade my hand for my soul, I’d do it. I’d throw yours in with the bargain.”
“Good.” Beads of sweat dotted Leonard’s forehead. “Except he’s already got mine.” He pushed a newspaper across the table, folded open to a page in the Arts and Leisure section.
“SVETLANA MAKES TRIUMPHANT RETURN TO FIGURE SKATING”
Julius stared at the article. She had suffered from bone cancer and lost her foot. Two years ago, she was told she would never skate again. Now she was at the Olympics.
“How?”
“A blastema bud.”
Jules wiped his hand over his mouth. “I thought those were illegal.”
“Here. Yes. Calcutta? No.” His tongue flicked again, always the sign of a sticking point in negotiations
. “But the blastema has to be from a related embryo to reduce chances of rejection.” He paused. “Svetlana got herself pregnant.”
The phantom hand froze.
“I know her doctor.” Leonard tapped the paper. “I can get you in.”
CHERI SAT IN THE LIVING ROOM looking at a catalogue of baby furniture. When Julius entered, she smiled, barely looking up from the glossy pages. “Did Leonard have anything interesting to say?”
Julius hesitated in the door and then eased onto the sofa across from her. “He’s found a way to get my hand back.”
Her catalogue hit the coffee table, the pages slapping against the wood. Cheri stared at the stump. Her mouth worked soundlessly.
“It’s not legal.” Agitato beats pulsed in his phantom fingers. “It’s …” He broke off, rubbing his left arm above the bandages to ease the ache. She wanted the baby so badly. “I feel like I’m dead. Like this.”
Cheri reached across the coffee table to grab his good hand. “Whatever it takes, Jules.”
He started to shake and pulled back. “The doctors can transplant a blastema bud to the stump and regrow my hand. But we have to do it before scar tissue forms.”
“That’s not so bad.” She got off the couch to kneel beside him. “I don’t mind moving to a country where it’s legal.”
He bit his lip and nodded.
Cheri ran her hand through his hair. Cool and soothing, her fingers traced a line from his scalp to the nape of his neck. “Hey. Sweetie. What’s wrong?”
Wrong. She wanted to know what was wrong. The shaking started again. “It has to be related.”
She froze. They hung suspended, as if waiting for a conductor to start the next movement. Julius stared at the carpet until Cheri moved her hand. She slid it down his back and stood.
“Related?”
He nodded. “To reduce the chances of rejection.”
“So it might not work?” Cheri wrapped her arms around herself.
“I don’t have another choice.” He held the stump up so she could see it. “Do you have any idea what it’s like? I can’t play.”
“You could teach.”
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 365