Ensnared

by Rita Stradling

  “Okay, come on.” Alainn knew a quiet spot. Well, it was quiet in the mornings, when everyone was on their way out to the slopes.

  At first, it seemed that Shelly had changed her mind, but, slowly, she followed Alainn out of the crowd. She stayed a few steps behind.

  In contrast, Blue continued to cling to Alainn like she might disappear.

  Alainn stopped at a fireplace that had yet to be lit and fell into one of the couches in front of it. If she was going to be torn into, she’d at least be comfortable while it happened. Shadows of exhaustion and sadness had hovered over her head all day, but now, looking at Shelly, they threatened to descend. She petted Blue’s little fake head, hugging Blue to her like she was a transport back to Lorccan.

  Shelly didn’t sit. She stood above Alainn yet kept her distance. The stones of the fireplace jumbled behind her. Her knees bent and she twitched, looking like she might take off any second.

  Alainn took a deep breath and decided to start this thing. “I did fool Lorccan—Mr. Garbhan, I mean. But it’s over now, and my father delivered Rosette, the Rose robot that he paid for. So, legally, you have nothing on us.” Alainn looked at Shelly, straight into her angelic face. “I didn’t get anything out of it—nothing moneywise, I mean.” She blinked furiously.

  “You’re a liar,” Shelly mumbled.

  “Seriously, stop whispering,” Alainn said. “What do you want from me? I’m sorry that I was with him and I wasn’t a robot. I’m sorry that I fooled him. But I’m not fooling him anymore. I walked away so you two could be happy. Maybe that’s not enough to redeem me in your eyes, but it took everything I had to do it.”

  Blue nuzzled in close to Alainn as she furiously wiped away tears.

  Swallowing hard, she continued, “Maybe I shouldn’t have done what I did, but it’s over now. My dad delivered what Lorccan paid for. You can’t charge him or me with anything.”

  “Except for the millions of dollars you extorted from him!” She took a step back as she said this.

  Alainn grabbed her forehead, afraid her brain was about to explode. “I already told you. My dad gave him the Rosette 82GF he paid for. It’s done. Go be happy together and leave me alone.” Her voice broke.

  Shelly leaned back, confusion and anger warring in her expression. “I’m talking about the millions of dollars you and your father have extorted from him since you were replaced with the robot.”

  “That didn’t happen.”

  “Not only did it happen, there’s more than enough proof to put you away for life, Alainn Murphy. Or should I call you Jade?” She glared at Alainn but stepped toward the lobby, like she might actually bolt.

  “You’re wrong. I was in a coma for two weeks after I left. The moment I was strong enough, I went to Lorccan’s tower and Rosebud, the AI who controls his house, refused to let me in. She told me that you two were happy, and I needed to let him go. The day after that, I came here. To work.” Alainn raised her hands up around Blue. “I can prove all of that, so whatever proof you think you have on me, you don’t.”

  “Your father did it—”

  “My father hasn’t heard from Lorccan. I know because . . .” Alainn smacked her hand into the armrest of her chair. “That’s what convinced us that Lorccan didn’t want me back.”

  Little hands came up to Alainn’s cheeks and wiped away the tears that she couldn’t stop.

  Leaning away, Alainn shook her head. “You know what? I’m not listening to this anymore. I know I should feel guilty that I was with Lorccan while you two were dating—having your phone-call thing, whatever, but I can’t feel guilty about being with him, and I don’t. Maybe that makes me a bad person,” she squeezed her eyes shut, “but I’m trying to do the right thing here. What I’m going to do is walk away so he can be happy with you, and that’s as much as you’re going to get from me. Please don’t ever come back here, and don’t you dare try to set my father and me up for some extortion crime. It won’t hold.”

  Instead of leaving, Shelly stayed, but still hovered like she might bolt. “He’s given your father millions of dollars in the last few weeks for chips and microchips to try to bring you back.”

  “What?” Alainn’s voice came out high-pitched, not like her regular voice at all. “No he hasn’t.”

  “Yes, he has,” she said.

  “You two are together. Why would he do that?”

  “Lor and I are just friends. He is my friend, and I care so much about him.”

  A sob hiccupped from Alainn. “You’re lying. Rosebud 03AF showed me the video of . . . she showed me the video . . . of when you said you were going to come to his tower. He was so happy.”

  “He suspected that Connor Murphy was cheating him. He wanted me to look at the microchips, chips, and Jade herself, but he wasn’t going to risk her by sending her back out.”

  “He wants me back?” Alainn looked Shelly straight in the eyes, begging her to—Alainn wasn’t sure what—to tell the truth, maybe, whatever it was.

  “He’s paid millions of dollars—he’s falling apart. He’s spending all day trying to make that robot remember who she is.”

  Alainn shook her head.

  “It’s destroying him. What’s happening—it’s destroying him.”

  “No.” She shook her head again.

  “Yes, Alainn. You’re killing him.”

  “I’m not doing it. I tried to get back in.”

  Blue finally released Alainn, reaching out to Shelly. When Shelly handed her the dry-erase board, she set the board on Alainn’s knees and started writing.

  Rosebud 03AF is broken.

  Alainn leaned in. Sniffing back the emotion, she asked, “How is she broken, Blue?”

  Blue took her palm and erased the word “broken.” Instead, she wrote the word “gone.”

  “Rosebud 03AF is gone?” Alainn stared at the message. “What happened to her?”

  She erased the board and scrawled, I don’t know.

  “She was there when I visited three days ago,” Shelly said, looking at the message.

  Again, Blue erased the message and wrote, It’s not her. It’s someone else.

  “The new robot?” Shelly asked.

  “No,” Alainn whispered, sitting back in the chair. “No, there’s a third Rose model.” To herself, she muttered, “Why would she be willing to kill you to get you out?”

  “What are you talking about?” Shelly asked.

  “Last year, when Lorccan commissioned the first humanoid AI robot, my dad did create her. But Rose 76GF—she wasn’t at all compliant. She started overwriting her ethical programming, and she refused to go when we were supposed to send her to Lorccan.”

  “There are two Rose robots?” Shelly asked, her gaze skipping from place to place. “And, you, also?”

  Alainn nodded. “Yeah, there are two—Rose and Rosette. Rose planned everything. She created the microchips that would disguise me as a robot to Rosebud 03AF. She only gave me a few minutes to decide whether to go through with the plan. I found out later that Lorccan would actually have been willing to give my father another month’s extension. Why would she send me in there?” Alainn looked away and then answered her own question, “She must have needed the money. But why does she need money?”

  Shelly watched Alainn carefully.

  Alainn looked down and repeated to herself. “Why would she be willing to kill you to get you out? Was it just to extort money? Did she just want to extort money from him? But how could she know that he’d care whether or not I reset?”

  “What are you talking about?” Shelly asked, as she lowered her head to look at Alainn.

  “Rose 76AF—the first Rose robot—fed me poison to get me out. That’s how she made it look like I was malfunctioning. The first way she tried to get me out didn’t work, so she resorted to the poison. She’d been trying to get me to drink it for months. It almost killed me.”

  “Poison?”

  Alainn looked up at her. “Yeah. My brother was suspicious and he ask
ed me why she’d be willing to kill me to get me out.” She shook her head. “But she wasn’t doing that. She must have been willing to kill me to get Rosette in.”

  33

  April 11, 2027

  “I’m pretty sure I should be driving you to the police station. You’re obviously a good actress and a con artist,” Shelly said in a quiet voice as her little sedan drove down the mountain.

  Snow was piled up on either side of the road, dirty, murky snow. Grass and rocks poked out of the thin layer, creating a splotchy, yellowing landscape.

  “No offense, but I couldn’t care less what you believe as long as you get me there. If you think I’ll go calmly to the police station, then you’re insane,” Alainn said as she rubbed her aching forehead.

  In the lodge, Shelly had declared that if Alainn was telling the truth, she’d have to go to Lorccan’s tower and prove it. She whispered the declaration anyway.

  After Alainn’s revelation, she was more than willing to comply. Hell, when Shelly hesitated to let her into the sedan, Alainn considered stealing it. It looked like there was a possibility she would still have to.

  Shelly might not believe Alainn, but all the way down the mountain, she dealt out punishment by murmuring the details about how Lorccan was doing. He’d lost weight. There were deep hollows under his eyes. And, perhaps the most telling of all, Alainn’s peace lily was now in his office, on his desk.

  Rosette was exceptionally compliant and barely said a word to Lorccan. She’d quietly eat with him, play games with him. He’d even tried to show her movies—none of which had brought Jade back. He’d spent hours and hours teaching her about what she liked, reciting jokes Alainn had told him, explaining the moments they had together, but of course it hadn’t done anything.

  When Shelly visited Lorccan in his tower, he’d looked haunted, she said. She’d analyzed the hardware in the robotics chips that had been sent to Lorccan at an exorbitant price, allegedly from Alainn’s father. Everything had been what her father had claimed it to be, and Shelly could not find a reason why it wasn’t working for Rosette.

  When Shelly left in one of Lorccan’s self-driving cars, Blue had popped out of hiding in the back seat when Shelly was halfway home.

  Blue had written out a message to Shelly: Find Alainn Murphy.

  “How did you know who I really was?” Alainn interrupted Shelly to ask Blue at that part of the story.

  She wrote her response from the backseat, and then handed the dry-erase board to Alainn. We were listening.

  That wasn’t creepy at all . . .

  Shelly finished her story by telling Alainn that she’d talked to Lorccan once since then, and he’d been hopeful, saying that he was making headway. She hadn’t been able to get through since then, though, including when she’d tried to call from the lobby of the ski resort. They’d missed three of their scheduled phone calls.

  The fact that Lorccan thought he might be getting Alainn back from Rosette scared her more than anything else Shelly said.

  “Rose isn’t going to let me in,” Alainn said before looking over to Shelly. “She probably won’t let you in, either. If she’s not letting the phone calls go through, she’s probably pretending to be you to him or something like that. She can do that.”

  If only Lorccan had funded that pulse button that would kill all robotics.

  But, looking into the backseat where Blue was sitting over her dry-erase board in her little blue dress, Alainn rethought the robotics killing pulse. She needed a pulse that killed just specific forms of robotics, more of a gun than a bomb.

  “Shit,” she whispered. “Even if we get inside, Rose 76GF will be controlling the whole tower. She could lock us up in a hallway and let us starve and die there, and Lorccan would never even know that we were there.”

  Shelly glanced over, eyelids so wide they looked like they could almost push out her eyes, but she didn’t say anything.

  There was a screech from the backseat and Alainn turned to see Blue holding up the board. The message read, Fix Rosebud 03AF.

  Alainn shrugged and grimaced at Blue. “We can’t even get into the tower.”

  She erased the board and started writing.

  “What does she want us to do?” Shelly asked, her wide eyes on the rearview mirror.

  “She wants us to reboot Rosebud 03AF—the original AI system that controlled the house.”

  When Alainn looked into the backseat again, Blue held up a sign: I can get you into the garage.

  “Okay. But how do we reboot her?”

  Blue erased and wrote another message: Shelly could do it.

  Alainn turned to Shelly. “She says she’ll get us in, and you can reboot Rosebud.”

  “What? No, I doubt that.” She shook her head.

  “You said you were examining chips that were supposed to reboot me, right?” Alainn asked.

  “Yeah, but Lor has those chips in his office, and you said we can’t get up there.”

  Alainn sat up straight. “Except that Rose had to have designed those chips. The only computers that I know of that she has access to would be in my dad’s workshop. All the circuit supplies were probably from there, too. If we found her designs on my father’s computer, we could print new chips in the workshop.” She looked away. “Except Rose would be there. She never leaves my house, which means she’d probably try to stop us.”

  Shelly turned the wheel hard and pulled off the road, into a black sludgy pullout. They hit ice and slid a couple feet before stopping suddenly.

  Too late, Alainn grabbed the “oh, shit,” handle and yelled, “What the hell?”

  Shelly’s whole body shook as she clutched the steering wheel. “You really think I’ll believe that there’s a killer robot? And you think I’ll take programs that originated from your house and family to hack into Lorccan’s house? Do you think I’m stupid or something?” Her voice was both quiet and shrill.

  “No, I don’t think you’re stupid. And I didn’t say Rose was a killer. But from the fact that she gave me poison, she might have no problem becoming one.”

  “It just all sounds very farfetched, and you obviously already have no problem lying. Now you want me to hack into Lor’s security system to give you access to his home?” She laid her mouth forward against her steering wheel, but her eyes turned upward like she was praying to something or someone.

  “People always have such a hard time believing that robots can do bad things.”

  She pulled back to whisper, “Because they’re machines, like toasters. I work on them for a living. They can malfunction, but they’re not going to hatch up some elaborate extortion plot. That’s what humans do.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, my best friend was killed by an automaton, an automatic functioning machine, a robot that does whatever they’re ‘trained’ to do.”

  She jumped a little. “What?”

  Shelly didn’t deserve to know Alainn’s story, but, hell, she was going to tell her anyway if it would get this car to Lorccan. Alainn closed her eyes and revealed something she hadn’t told anyone in years, “We were at a gas station at night, and I got out of the car. I was being dumb; I was seventeen. The automaton looked normal. He wore the gas station attendant uniform. He hit me over the head and shoved me into my own trunk before driving out to a house. Some men were there—”

  Alainn opened her eyes as Blue’s little fingers patted her shoulder. When she turned to look, Blue climbed over the center divider and into Alainn’s lap.

  Her furry body quivered as Alainn held her. Meeting Shelly’s gaze, she continued, “I was delivered to the men. Those men told that automaton to take my car up into the hills and drive off a cliff with Cara inside. He left immediately to do it.”

  Not all of that was the truth, but Shelly didn’t really need all the details to get the point of her story.

  “How did you get away?” Shelly whispered, her voice barely audible. Brows pressed down over a hard-to-read expression. Concern, maybe.

  Alainn blew
out a breath. “My dad owed them a lot of money. When they realized that he couldn’t pay it back, they kept me for a couple days. The police found me before I was dead.”

  When Alainn met her gaze, tears leaked from Shelly’s eyes. Her face paled.

  Alainn waved a hand. “Stop. Don’t cry for me. It was a long time ago. What I’m just trying to say . . . what I’m trying to say is . . .” She had no clue what she was trying to say.

  “That robots kill people?” Shelly didn’t sound at all disbelieving this time.

  “No, but they can. I guess I’m trying to say that they’re not what people think they are. You think they’re toasters, and maybe they are. But my father gave those tools the ability to form their own personalities and to think for themselves. If you give a toaster a choice, it might choose to be a torture device. People just assume that we can control robots and they’re safe, but they’re not even safe when we can control them.” She shook her head. “Shit, I don’t know. But Rose? She’s conniving. She’s obviously overwritten her ethical systems and—”

  “Lorccan’s AI robots all turned out fine.” Shelly looked pointedly at Blue.

  “Well, maybe some are good and some are bad, like humans.”

  Shelly glared into Alainn’s eyes but quickly turned away to face forward again. Her voice was still a murmur when she said, “Or maybe it’s how they’re raised. Maybe if they’re raised by someone who hates robots, they’ll turn out evil.”

  Shelly Dover was seriously starting to get on Alainn’s last nerve. She threw up her hands. “Fine! Whatever! But now she’s killing Lorccan or extorting money off him or whatever she’s doing—it’s evil. You can help me or not, but I’m going to try to get in there and reboot Rosebud 03AF. Then I’m getting to Lorccan.”

  Shelly looked away, but after a minute she pulled back onto the road. “I’m having a really hard time figuring out what he saw in you.”

  She spoke so low, Alainn wasn’t sure she was even talking to her. She answered anyway, “Well, if you figure it out, be sure to tell me.” Looking out the window, she said, “But he did. And I did. And I was almost willing to give him up when I thought he wanted me to. But not now that I know he doesn’t.”