Half Life (Russell's Attic Book 2) (26 page)

“That’s all I can do,” I said to the suddenly-much-emptier room. “If Rayal cuts and runs, that’s her call.”

“I hope she doesn’t,” said Checker, and his voice sounded funny. “For all our sakes.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We’re in trouble.” He was multitasking in another window, skimming through hacked emails. “Arkacite’s throwing us under the bus, too, along with Denise Rayal. Pilar and Noah Warren are mentioned by name. Fortunately, Grant never knew your or my name, but I’m guessing that won’t stop the Feds for long, at least when it comes to me—I’m sure I’m already on a list somewhere. This could be really bad, especially once they figure out there are other AIs out there Sloan hasn’t taken apart. Whatever this conspiracy is, people are going to be blaming you and me for it, too. And they’re talking about Liliana like she’s some sort of patient zero. We’re not going to get away from this.”

Shit.
I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment. “What does this have to do with Rayal?”

“Well, she might be able to help us figure out what the hell is happening. She’s been working on these AIs forever; she knows their programming. I’m playing catch-up.”

My head was starting to pound. “Okay. What’s going on with Warren? What are they charging him with?”
Crap,
I realized,
he knows where we are.
Would his loyalty to his daughter keep him from revealing it? He’d been willing to get shot for her, but still…

We had to switch to another location anyway. Checker might have stellar security on this place, but too many people knew about it.

“He’s…” Checker searched his screen for a minute. “Uh…Cas, I—it says here Noah Warren’s in the hospital. It’s bad. I don’t—”

“
What?”

He scrolled, skimming, his eyes flicking back and forth frantically across the screen. “I—I’m not a doctor, but it looks like it’s serious—I don’t know if it was the Tasers, or if he hit his head or something, but this seems to be saying he’s in critical condition—I think—I assume they’ll arrest him after he comes out of it. If he—uh—if he does. They don’t know if he’s going to wake up.”

I closed my eyes. He’d been trying to help us escape. He hadn’t realized his pointless heroism had been unnecessary.

Sixty-six and nine-elevenths days. Not that Warren’s death would be my fault—it wouldn’t be, I told myself. The math had said there was nothing I could do.

Nothing.

C
HAPTER 24

W
HEN
A
RTHUR
arrived back at the apartment, with Denise Rayal amazingly enough in tow, Checker and I were watching Morrison Sloan reveal another android live. This one was a young man in a suit and tie who had waved jovially at the audience, cheerful and nonthreatening, until the so-called oil tycoon electrocuted him and pulled apart his skull.

“Um, hello again,” Rayal said to me, her voice subdued. “Is Pilar—is she here?”

“She’s watching Liliana in the bedroom,” I said. Pilar had remained on babysitting duty, keeping Liliana out of our hair. Miri, meanwhile, had cheerfully bid us good-bye and left. Checker had refused to let me threaten her, making me feel less secure about keeping our base here than ever. After dark, I’d work on moving us to a new location—getting our eclectic and very identifiable group under wraps somewhere else was going to be an endeavor.

Rayal’s face closed. “Oh. Oh. Okay.” She looked over to see what we were watching on the television. “Oh my God, another one?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Did Arthur fill you in?”

“Yes, and I—this is—I can’t believe it. The programming we—it’s not advanced enough for this,” she said haplessly. “That was part of the point in building our prototype as a child in the first place. That’s where we are with the technology. We can build an AI that acts like a five-year-old; we can’t build one that acts like an adult. At least, we couldn’t…” She stared at the television. The screen had changed to news commentators making wild conjectures.

“We think they’ve been sending them out with pre-programmed speeches,” I said. “I don’t know how they think they’ll keep up the charade, or what their master plan is, but so far the ones we’ve ID’d as artificial haven’t done any very complicated adult interaction, so they might not be any more advanced than Liliana.”

“Ain’t kids even more sophisticated than adults, though?” objected Arthur. “The way children learn is damn near a miracle.”

“Yes, but you’re misunderstanding what we—that’s not what we were trying to do.” Rayal started to become more animated, her hands coming up to gesture along with her words. “Passing a Turing test momentarily is different from showing learning over time. You’re right: kids’ brains are just as complicated on the inside as adults’ brains—maybe more so, I don’t know; that’s not my area—but it’s easier to mimic how they present in the moment. It’s the whole idea of a Turing test—it’s not about true artificial intelligence or learning so much as it’s about imitation—mimicry—and getting the best imitation we can.”

“So you’re saying…you can’t build a person, but a young kid would be…I dunno, childlike?” asked Arthur. “So you can fool folks into thinking you built one?”

“Yes, exactly.”

I turned away from the television and slammed my palm against the wall next to me. “
Why?
Why did you do this in the first place?”

Rayal jerked around in shock. “What—what do you mean?”

I refused to meet her gaze. Liliana’s face swam in my mind’s eye. “Why in God’s name would you want to build a poor copy of a human child?”

Rayal flinched at my word choice, but she still sounded more shocked than offended. “How can you say that? It’s
research.
The Turing test has been a Holy Grail of AI since 1950. Once we had the breakthroughs in neural networks and NLP, well…why not?”

“I don’t know how you of all people can say that,” I said. Harshly. “This project ruined your life. You played God and you’re paying for it.”

“Stop it, Cas,” said Checker, a sharpness to the words I wasn’t used to hearing from him.

“We got a situation to worry about right now,” murmured Arthur. “No one tried to make this happen, right, Russell? We just gotta deal with it.”

“Arthur’s right,” said Checker. “We need to figure out what’s going on
now.
This is the era of the twenty-four hour news cycle, and this thing is exploding in public opinion—social media is blowing up, people are shouting at the White House do something, and McCabe is whipping his followers into a frothing mob. At least two Singularity think tanks have already had their funding suspended, and there are people demanding the government review every single research proposal that has anything to do with AI, which would include, hello, everything from search algorithms to computer games to most modern
cars—
are you grasping how insane people are getting over this?”

“Rayal,” I said. “Who’s doing this?”

“I don’t—I don’t know,” she stammered. “Arkacite told them it was me—but I didn’t, I swear, I hadn’t—”

“Who else?” I said. “Who had access to the tech, or has a beef against you or Arkacite? Who was the leak?”

“I—I don’t know!” Her hands flew to her face. “I don’t; I swear—anyone on my team would have the knowledge, but they wouldn’t do this. I know them. They wouldn’t! And I don’t know who else.”

“If we want to head off whatever’s happening, we have to figure out the endgame,” I said. “Can we use Liliana some way? Do they, I don’t know, network or something?”

“No,” said Rayal. “But if I had access to one of the other ones, I could look at the code—I could figure out what they’ve been programmed for already, maybe? But I don’t know how—”

“Done,” I said. “Who’s most useful? Sloan, I assume?”

“Yes,” said Checker. “So far we have five identified—the two they’ve splintered apart on camera, the two witnesses who gave interviews about the Liliana copy, and Morrison Sloan. I’m betting there will be more witnesses to this new guy’s existence, but Sloan is at the center of everything.”

“How can they afford to build so many, only to destroy them?” wondered Denise. “The funding I had to acquire just to construct a prototype was astronomical.”

Checker’s eyes lit up. “Good point! Maybe I can use that in the searches I’ve got going. And I’m looking for some indication of who might have wanted to steal from Arkacite. Other than us.”

“They were so hyper; they had to be worried about
someone,”
said Pilar, coming out of the hallway into the living room. “Liliana’s taking a nap. Denise! Are you okay?”

“I don’t really know,” she answered, with a hollow sort of laugh, but her posture relaxed a little now that Pilar was in the room. “You’re right, though—um, you’re right about Arkacite. They were having a serious problem with corporate espionage. They told us secrets had been leaked, but not what, and I don’t know who stole them or who they were sold to.”

Corporate espionage. I grabbed a clean burner and dialed.

“It’s Cas Russell,” I said when Harrington picked up. “I need some information. I’ll pay whatever you want for it, but it’s urgent.”

“What information do you seek?” he asked, after a slight pause. One of Harrington’s chief values was discretion. It was part of the reason I liked him.

Well, too bad. “Are you familiar with Arkacite Technologies? Professionally, I mean?”

“Yes.”

“I need to know who would be stealing from them.” Everyone was watching me. Rayal and Pilar were tense enough they should have been vibrating.

Harrington hesitated.

“Come on, I looked into the plutonium thing for you,” I argued. “You owe me this.” Of course, I’d ended up making a lot of money off acquiring the atomic batteries, but I didn’t tell him that.

“If I disclose this to you,” he said slowly, “we are even.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re even. Who is it?”

“I am not your source for this information, you understand.”

“I get it. Now
who?”

“Arkacite…has been involved in an escalating industrial espionage battle with Funaki Industries, a Tokyo-based technology company. It began decades ago. The tactics have become vicious.”

Harrington had a strong stomach, so that was saying something. “Thanks,” I said. Something inside me unclenched. Finally, a lead. “I didn’t hear it from you.”

I hung up the phone.

And then it hit me.

Tokyo.

Oh God. Ally Eight represented a bloc of Japanese companies. They’d wanted batteries identical to the ones Arkacite had. And immediately after they’d acquired them from me, the robots had hit the airwaves.

But Checker said—the amount of energy—

I dug in my pockets for the battery specs like a madwoman; I still had the papers I’d brought for Okuda the day before. I’d read them to assess the value of the amount of plutonium, but I hadn’t really
looked
at them—

“Cas,” said Checker. “Cas, what is it?”

I flattened the rumpled papers in shaking hands. I didn’t know all the engineering shorthand in the diagrams, but I could make some guesses—references to materials—equations—

The power capacity leapt and spiraled, up one order of magnitude, then two. Then
three.

Holy crap.

Funaki Industries had stolen all of the robotics technology from Arkacite. The designs, the programming, everything—they must have. Hell, they must’ve already had the androids built, to swing into action this quickly. The only piece they’d been missing was the power sources, the ridiculous revolutionary
plutonium
power sources, and I’d gotten those for them.

I had made all this happen.

“Russell?” Arthur touched my shoulder. “What’d your guy say?”

“It’s my fault,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” asked Pilar.

I turned to Rayal. “The robots. They run on a new type of alphavoltaic nuclear battery. Don’t they.”

“Oh—uh—yes…” Her answer drew out into almost a question as it rode the tension in the room. “It was the hardest—we’d tried everything. The material scientists at Arkacite only made the breakthrough two years ago, and—and the enormity of the technological leap—we had to be sworn not to say a thing; they’re not even being developed for commercial purposes yet because the consumer cost would be too high. Just military contracting and—and internal special projects, like us…”

“Holy shit,” said Checker. “This
is
our fault.”

C
HAPTER 25

A
RTHUR DROVE.

Sloan had been holding his press conferences in a small theatre downtown. At the rate he was “revealing” new ’bots, we figured if we showed up where he’d been we had a better-than-even chance at…well, kidnapping him.
When did this situation get so out of control?

“You ain’t to blame for this,” said Arthur, as we sped down the 101.

“You’re wrong,” I said. “I am literally the one responsible.” Now I had to get Liliana, Denise Rayal, and Pilar out of it, not to mention Checker and me—if they managed to ID us. And I had no idea how.

“They was planning this for ages,” said Arthur. “Had to been. They had the whole thing set up—if you ain’t got ’em their power sources, someone else would’ve.”

“That’s awfully rationalizing of you,” I said. “Nobody had this battery technology except Arkacite. And what happened to telling me I should take more responsibility for what I do?”

His lip twitched in something like humor. “No point when you’re already beating yourself up. This is when I get all supportive instead.”

I grunted. I hate it when people are inconsistent.

Arthur, as usual, had the classical station playing on the radio, today with the ringing vibrato of an opera in some other language. I leaned forward and twiddled the search dial until I got to a news station. The way things had been going, we’d be in a robot war by the time Arthur and I reached downtown.

“
—and this is just what these so-called ‘scientists’ want you to believe. Haven’t I always said it was a conspiracy? I’m telling you, this is domestic terrorism. It’s only a matter of time before…”