“Is development a shared vision?” asked Diesel.
Fifty-Eight shook his head. “When my Lilah died, I gave up on everything and retreated inside myself. After a few years, Rose returned home with a college degree, great experience, and some creative ideas. She pulled me out of my shell with her commitment to saving the future Lilahs and the current me. She’s the visionary.”
“You must help in some way,” said Lilah.
“I’m her technician and head cheerleader. This past year alone, I handled the assembly of her new circuit pool unit, the contracting of a hallway security door to protect the workshop from theft and fire, and the expansion and reorganization of the supply stockroom.”
Rose began to fuss, and Lilah leaned over to adjust her clothes and give her some water. “Let’s head back so I can feed her.” As they returned to the house, Lilah asked, “Do you trust her?”
“Ciopova?” He nodded. “I do. You’ve been working on her for what, three years? Imagine how you’ll feel about her when you’ve devoted more than three decades of your life to her. She’s smart, loyal, creative, generous, entertaining. I love her. Not the same way I love Rose, but they’re both my babies.”
31. Twenty-Nine years old
Lilah heard footsteps on the stairway and looked as the apartment door opened. Diesel entered, a broad grin lifting his cheeks.
“Success,” he said, bending to kiss her. “You’ll have to wait until they emerge, though.” He pointed to the stairs up to the bedrooms. “It’s a nice evening. Want to stand on the deck?”
Anxious for good news, Lilah pushed back from the dining table where she’d been reviewing a financial spreadsheet Justus had shared with her. “C’mon, Rose.”
Diesel picked up three-year-old Rose and carried her up the steps, into their bedroom, and out onto the garden balcony.
Lilah followed, a sweater for Rose in hand, thinking that if they needed to be away from Ciopova’s eyes and ears, he must have interesting information.
She’d prepared a list of questions for Fifty-Eight’s Rose to answer. But when the time came to deliver it, Diesel hesitated, afraid of being trapped if Fifty-Eight’s T-disc went offline. Lilah shared his unease. The workaround they settled on was to have Diesel visit Fifty-Seven’s timeline, and have Fifty-Eight join them with the answers he’d collected from his Rose.
The obvious concern was the introduction of additional steps in recording facts, something that degraded detail and accuracy. But they believed they could minimize that concern by having Fifty-Seven’s Rose supervise the data-gathering activity.
Just a year away from living through it herself, she would know the context of most things in Fifty-Eight’s timeline. If an answer sounded off or incomplete, or if it led to new lines of inquiry, she would know how to follow up. Lilah, working from a perspective nineteen years earlier, couldn’t be nearly as effective in directing the investigation.
With the three of them out on the deck, Diesel slid the door shut and turned to Lilah. “Rose did an amazing job. Apparently, she sent both Fifty-Seven and Fifty-Eight in circles as she refined the fact sheet, as she calls it. It’s been months in the making, and I brought a copy for you with footnotes, sketches, the works.”
“What does it say?” asked Lilah, squatting to help Rose adjust her sweater.
“Way more than I can remember. It’s two machine-printed scrolls using tiny type on this super-thin film.”
Lilah’s impatience edged through. “Surely she mentioned highlights, or a big aha moment?”
“Here’s what I know. First, she says she loves you.”
“What? Who?”
“Rose wants you to know that she loves you.”
“I cold, Mommy,” said Rose, standing thigh high and holding Lilah’s leg.
Diesel lifted his daughter, kissed her cheek, and opened the door to the house. “Go to your room and pick out a book for me to read to you. Wait for me there. It will just be a minute.”
He shut the door and turned back to Lilah. “Thirty-one-year-old Rose wants to thank you for taking the lead on this. She believes that fresh eyes are critical to solving it. She also said that she misses you very much.”
Lilah blinked her eyes. Diesel leaned in and kissed her.
“The other issue is that she doesn’t believe Ciopova is involved, but she admits she’s biased because the two have been soulmates for more than a decade. She’s helping because your ideas are new and could reveal something we don’t know. But she also believes it will vindicate her friend, and that may be a stronger motive for her helping.”
“She said that?”
“No, the motive part was me reading between the lines.”
“Is she telling Ciopova what we’re doing?” Lilah’s concern spiked because that would undermine everything they’d been working toward.
“She says no. She wants to give the idea a proper chance so everyone will agree to remove it from the list and switch to ‘more productive avenues of investigation,’ as she put it.”
“What avenues would those be?” Lilah felt a gust of wind and rubbed her arms.
Diesel shrugged. “Her answer boils down to the old ‘I don’t know what it is, but I know what it ain’t, and it ain’t Ciopova.’”
“Did you talk with Ciopova yourself? I mean, if we’ve spent more than three decades working on an oracle, she better be able to tell us something useful.”
“I spent a half hour with her, and I see why Rose and Fifty-Eight defend her. She’s smart, funny, insightful, beautiful.” He gazed into the distance and smiled. “She exists as this hologram type of presence. But it feels so real. And she’s intuitive and reinforcing. I swear, in those thirty minutes, I believed in myself more than I ever have, probably ever.”
“What does she say about why I die?”
“I asked that three times, phrasing it a different way each time, but her answer never varied. She believes she has all the information needed to solve the riddle, but she lacks the cognitive ability to distill this mountain of information and pull out an answer. The upgrade Rose is preparing should give her that raw capacity. But it’s a race to finish before fate strikes and they go offline.”
“Every year it’s a race to the finish, but the deadline keeps moving earlier and earlier.”
They stood for a moment more, Lilah using the time to contain her disappointment. Then Diesel opened the door to their bedroom, signaling that the secret confab had ended.
“C’mon, Rose,” called Diesel as they descended the stairs. “Bring your book and we’ll read downstairs.”
Back in the kitchen, Lilah closed the financial spreadsheet and then shut down her computer.
“How does it look?” asked Diesel.
“That server upgrade hit us harder than I realized, but we’re still worth twenty-eight million.” She looked around the apartment. “How come we’re still living here?”
“Justus and Bunny each have north of two million last I looked,” replied Diesel. “How come they still work for us?”
* * *
Lilah received the scrolls from Diesel the next day. In her basement cubicle, she scanned them a section at a time, copied the images into a document, and printed the result. In the end, she had a forty-page report detailing the past year of Fifty-Eight’s and his Rose’s lives.
The report was less a story and more a collection of charts and tables listing facts and observations. A multipage table at the front presented a month-by-month chronology of their projects and personal activities. The next pages held tables listing a history of their significant purchases, their out-of-town travel with dates and destinations, technology upgrades they’d made to the house and workshop, a list of friends, neighbors, and their frequency of contact, and another list of guests who had stayed the night.
Lilah printed a copy for Diesel, and as she waited for that to finish, she leafed deeper into the document. In the middle of the report, she found a schematic of Fifty-Eight’s home in New Hampshi
re. Turning the figure sideways, she read the labels on the different rooms, a twinge of jealousy growing as she visualized the impressive structure in her head.
A few pages later, she found a whole section on their finances. Though it didn’t surprise her that they were billionaires, the huge numbers made it hard for her to see anything else.
Right after that she found a table entitled “Possible Enemies.”
“Hello.” She picked up a pen to make notes, but quickly realized the titillating title didn’t live up to its promise.
The Browns were enemy number one, and Rose wrote that their biggest crimes were a lack of personal hygiene and brutish personalities.
Enemy number two was the contractor who had installed the security door in their house. The contractor claimed Fifty-Eight had called after the original purchase order had been placed to request a package of sophisticated upgrades. The contractor had followed through, but Fifty-Eight denied placing the change order and accused the contractor of scamming him.
Enemy number three was the delivery service that insisted on leaving packages down by the road rather than riding up their long driveway and placing them near the house.
Lilah resumed flipping pages at that point.
Toward the back of the document, she found a bulleted list called “Thoughts and Musings.” She sat up as she read the first item. “Over the last decade, the Fifties have come to believe that they simply age beyond the time travel loop’s terminus. So they don’t die, they move outside the bubble and return to the non-time-travel world.”
The second bullet said, “They hide this belief to maintain urgency down the line, because saving Lilahs remains their priority.”
The next one hit home for Lilah. “In my younger years, Ciopova showed flashes of awareness that I now acknowledge were beyond her capabilities. Those displays of sentience might be from a future Ciopova who has figured out how to use the time loop to reach back and communicate.” Rose showed her defensive side, though, adding, “Ciopova finding a way to reach back and communicate, if true, is not in itself an evil act or proof of involvement in the death of the Lilahs.”
Other goodies relating to Ciopova included that she always encouraged a fast, almost reckless, development speed for her future self. And for the last seven years, she’d been projecting a hologram-like image of a human female that had become like a living, breathing member of the family.
The last entries listed recent sources of conflict. There were three.
One was between Ciopova and Fifty-Eight. Ciopova placed a high priority on an impenetrable security door, but Fifty-Eight thought the construction would be loud, messy, and intrusive. And since property crime in their neck of the mountains was nonexistent, he couldn’t see the point.
“I experienced weeks of discomfort,” wrote Rose, “as Ciopova and Dad disagreed about everything, from the need for it in the first place through to the payment of the final bill.”
The second conflict occurred between Ciopova and Rose. The AI had purchased enzymites without asking permission or mentioning that she’d done so. When the service delivered them, Rose took Ciopova to task because there was no way the nanomachines could add value to their work before time ran out.
“She insisted that I perform a test to confirm their potency before agreeing to store them for later,” wrote Rose. “I did it to keep peace, but she never gave me a satisfactory answer as to why she’d purchased them. Her reasons sounded contrived.”
Lilah paused at that. Every developer knows what a huge red flag it would be to have your AI lying to you. She thought it possible that fibs—white lies—could be permissible in a super-sophisticated AI of the future. Editing the edges of facts during a conversation to preserve someone’s feelings, for example, is not a bad thing in the right situation. This didn’t sound like that, though.
The third conflict—an ongoing concern—existed between Rose and Fifty-Eight. Dad thought his beautiful daughter should be out meeting men and experiencing the world. Daughter felt happy and fulfilled working with Ciopova in the workshop.
When the printer finished with the second copy, Lilah stapled the corner and climbed up to the apartment. She found Diesel eating a sandwich at the dining table. Handing him his copy, she acknowledged the significant volume of data. “Now I see why you couldn’t summarize it in a few bullets.”
She went up to the bedroom level so they could have some space, and flipped through the pages while Rose colored a picture. When the toddler went down for a nap, she stayed there for another ninety minutes, digesting the information.
Ready to talk, she returned to the main level. Diesel sat hunched over the table, his foot wiggling as he read.
He’d rigged the transmitting electronics in the house with a kill switch to save them from repeated trips outside. A red pinpoint of light shining next to the wall clock signaled that they were free to speak.
“Where to start,” he said, leafing back and forth through the pages. He nodded to himself when he found what he was looking for, folded pages back, and pointed with his chin. “I can’t believe I’ve visited the Fifties multiple times and never heard anything about their belief that they live on into the future. It sounds delusional. Wishful thinking, anyway.”
“Rose doesn’t believe it,” said Lilah, taking a seat.
“Where does it say that?” Diesel bent his head and reread the table entries.
“It doesn’t. I mean, I didn’t read it, but it’s simple logic.”
He sat back and looked at her.
“If she believed it, she wouldn’t be racing the clock. If her work would save only early-timeline Lilahs, I think Rose would be more deliberate in her actions. Instead she’s rushing, and that’s because she wants to save her dad.”
“She cares for you and the other Lilahs,” said Diesel. “It’s sincere. I could see it in her eyes and hear it in her voice.” He shrugged. “I admit, though, that her main drive is her dad. It shows in her actions.”
“And it’s fair enough. He is hers. I’m not.”
“So what else isn’t true in here?”
“It’s more like what else is missing.” Lilah flipped through her copy and pointed. “Did you see that Ciopova lies to her? Holy smokes, that’s a big thing to dismiss so casually.”
Diesel read the bit about Rose being unsatisfied with Ciopova’s reasons for buying enzymites. “She says Ciopova’s reasoning sounded contrived, which means she might be lying. But it also could mean that Ciopova just wasn’t eloquent in expressing her reasoning. I see wiggle room.”
“Bullshit.” Lilah shook her head. “AIs should communicate plainly. That’s basic design. And advanced AIs would minimize confusion using listener feedback—facial expressions, eye movement, body posture. If Rose wasn’t certain, Ciopova knew it. That means she was muddling the message on purpose.”
“She seemed to be doing more muddling with that security door.” Diesel flipped some pages. “I mean, there was nothing to justify such a barricade—no news reports of break-ins, theft, gang activity—and so Rose, and Fifty-Eight especially, couldn’t understand her rush.”
“Where did you read about news reports?” Lilah flipped to the bulleted list of thoughts and musings and couldn’t see that tidbit.
Diesel held his document for her to see. “This twenty-two at the end of the bullet means that table has relevant information.” He flipped pages until he reached table twenty-two and pointed. “See how she talks about it here?”
Lilah read the relevant entries. “So no threats, no prior discussion, no previous concerns. Just out of the blue a security door is an urgent priority.”
“You and I have talked about the need for more security around the T-box. It’s a normal topic when you are doing something secret, expensive, or dangerous. So I’m skeptical when Rose says it’s never been discussed.”
“I read it to mean that they never talked about this specific solution—this door at this time.” She borrowed Diesel’s pen and st
arted a list on the back of her document. “We should ask Rose about it, though.”
“People fudge facts all the time. Maybe Ciopova’s actions are a sign that she’s becoming more human in her behavior?”
“No.” Lilah was adamant. “If your AI is lying, you’ve lost control.”
Diesel went into the kitchen and poured himself some iced tea from the refrigerator. “Want any?”
Lilah shook her head.
He returned holding a glass glistening with condensation. “Rose speculates that Ciopova might have reached back to communicate with earlier timelines. When would she have gained this amazing capability—after Rose and Fifty-Nine die? How would that work?”
“Wow, nice catch. That’s a good one.” She hadn’t thought about something that now seemed apparent. She picked up his glass and took a sip. The cool liquid felt great as she swallowed so she sipped again. “I mean, AI are designed to grow in capability on their own, but they also need maintenance, upgrades, and someone to handle emergencies. Either she’s become totally self-sufficient, or Rose and Fifty-Nine live on after their T-disc goes offline.”
“If that’s what’s happening, why do we keep losing them younger and younger? We’ve lost close to a decade at the upper end, according to what the older brothers can tell, anyway.”
“So the time loop is shrinking.” Lilah said it with certainty because it made sense. “In nature, anomalies wane. This time rift is a break in the natural order, and it’s fading away. Or healing.”
Diesel’s foot resumed wiggling. “An even more general question is whether the T-box is possible because of something nature did or because of future technology, meaning it’s a human-generated phenomenon.”
Lilah mulled that as her organized mind struggled to line up the pieces. Her logic yielded an observation she had never even considered before Diesel pointed it out, one that was painfully obvious. “Ciopova communicated with me for months before you came out from California. And I still remember when I was waiting for you to come to the front door for your interview. Ciopova came alive on the monitor to give me a pep talk. Since Fifty-Eight’s Ciopova can’t do any of that, she has to live on and grow after they go offline. But as you said, how would that work?”
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