Shelter (33 page)

    Constance had almost lost Merry to CV, but she'd gone ahead and had Theo. No wonder she'd had him rigged. How could you stand the idea of losing your child?

    Theo. Theo was safe; Theo had GPS cells, just like Merry and Jack and Constance did. Kidnappers would never be able to hide any of them. GPS cells worked even after you were dead. The only way to get rid of GPS cells was through a total blood change, and that took more than long enough for anyone who was looking for you to find you before it was over.

    It didn't matter. Theo could still succumb to CV, or a bullet, or any number of other things. He'd succumb to something, in the end. You just had to hope you died before your child did.

    I'm glad I can't have kids, Meredith thought, still staring out at the water. I'm never going to get married. I'm never going to have a child. It hurts too much when something happens.

    "I can't think about any of this right now," she told Matt and Gwyn. "I can't think about anything except Raji. If Raji survives, none of this matters. And if he doesn't ... "

    If he didn't, none of it would matter, either. But some obscure impulse kept her from saying that to Matt and Gwyn, who were, after all, trying to be kind to her.

    * * *

    The AI Project building at Berkeley was demolished by the Luds' deadline: no small technical feat, given the size of the building and the density of other campus structures around it. But a wrecking crane and judicially placed explosives successfully destroyed the building without serious damage to any neighboring ones. MacroCorp delivered the monetary chip to the drop point on time. Questioned by journalists about the wisdom of acceding to the terrorists' demands, MacroCorp maintained staunchly that Raji was more important than either money or a building. "Contrary to what the kidnappers apparently believe," read the official press release, "we care more about people than we do about machines."

    None of it mattered. It had never been meant to matter. At the precise moment of the useless drop, the police received an anonymous and untraceable encrypted call directing them to a deserted alleyway in Oakland, where they found Raji double-bagged in plastic. Taped to the outside of the bag was a DVD, which illustrated how Raji had been transformed from the person his friends and family loved to an assortment of body parts wrapped in trash bags. The Luds, in their efficiency, also distributed copies of the disc to the same networks and servers who had been given copies of the original tape.

    Meredith and Constance were sitting in front of the television, watching ScoopNet coverage, when Preston's face flashed on the screen. Simultaneously, the phone began ringing. Meredith's stomach heaved. Oh, Goddess. Something's happened. Raji!

    "Meredith, Constance, turn off the television." Preston's voice was gentle, and very quiet. "You must not watch this."

    "What?" If she asked him, if she made him say it, maybe it wouldn't be what she already knew it had to be. "Why? What—"

    "Hello?" Her mother had answered the phone. Meredith saw Constance's hand go to her mouth, saw the blanched look of horror. "Oh, Goddess. Goddess Goddess Goddess—"

    "Merry!" Jack ran in now. "Meredith, oh, sweetheart, I'm so sorry—"

    "What happened?" She was standing, screaming at them, unable to care if Theo heard or not. Raji was dead. The certainty pooled like ice water in her veins. Raji couldn't be dead. "He—they killed him, didn't they? Didn't they? Answer me!"

    No one said anything. They didn't have to. The looks on their faces told her, and she didn't need those, either, because she already knew. The Luds had said they'd release him; they'd never said they'd release him alive. She swung back around to face the television. "Daddy, let me see it."

    "Meredith, I do not think—"

    "Let me see it. I have to know what happened!"

    "All right. Constance, stay here with Meredith. Jack, Thea is asking for you to read him a book, because I will not let him watch the television. He wants to sit on someone's lap."

    Constance let out a whimper. "Oh, my baby—"

    Time had shifted into slow motion now, moving slowly as syrup. Theo.

    Theo was rigged. They didn't want Theo to see anything because he'd always remember it. Raji had wanted to be rigged, but he wasn't yet. He hadn't saved enough money. If he'd been rigged—if he'd been rigged, would he still be alive now? Would they have been able to save his memories?

    She heard Jack saying something, and time snapped back into its normal passage. "Connie, I'll go up to Theo. Preston's right. Stay here with Merry."

    And then Jack was gone, and Constance was gripping Meredith's hand in hers, and Preston's face disappeared, replaced by a heading that read, "Artificial Intelligence in Action." It began with Raji standing alone in a small room: no door, no window, smooth walls. He wore baggy jeans and an "Earth First" T-shirt; the jeans were his, the ones Meredith had last seen him in, but the Luds must have given him the T-shirt. He never wore anything with slogans. That was all they had altered, though; this image was untouched, the Raji Merry knew. They hadn't made him look mean in this one. They didn't have to bother with that anymore; he'd served their purposes, and been discarded.

    As the tape began, the camera looked down at him as he made his way around the little room, feeling the walls, pounding, yelling, trying to find a crack or a weak spot or a hollow place. He must have become aware that the camera was on, because he turned and looked up at it.

    "Hello? Is someone there?" He blinked up at it and tried to smile. "Who's watching this? If you're the people who took me, I'm on your side, really I am. I believe in ecology. I was a novitiate in a Gaia temple for a year, ask anybody who knows me." Hopeful pause; when no one responded, his face fell, and he said, "If anybody else is watching this, I hope I'll see you all real soon." Shrug. "The food's okay. I can't sleep because I'm too worried. I want to get out of here." Pause. No response. "Well, I guess nobody's going to talk to me, huh?" Raji shrugged again and went back to circling the room.

    That was when the first bot dropped onto the floor. It was a MacroCorp bot, one of the new two-legged ones being marketed as toys: Murphy Mouse. It looked harmless. Raji jumped, turned, saw the bot, looked up, ducked, and covered his head. The first bot was followed by a cascade of others: Dumpling the Dwarf, Racquel Raccoon, Gigi Grasshopper—that was an older model, and Theo's favorites—Lorenzo Lobster, Patty Potato. Soon the floor of the little room was nearly covered in bots; Raji bent to pick one up, but it scuttled away from him. He frowned, looked down at the bots, said, "You guys have voice chips?"

    They all spoke at once, then. "We are here to serve you," they said, chirping and trilling and squeaking according to their programmed voices. They began to move toward him. "We are here to serve you. We are here to serve you." They said, in unison, only that one thing, the voices becoming more and more metallic, until they sounded like the pinging of raindrops on steel. Their voice chips were programmed for that single phrase; Raji's voice must have been the trigger that broke their silence.

    By the time Meredith and Raji's parents and everyone else on the planet with media access saw the clip, there was no doubt about how the bots would serve Raji, no possible suspense. And Meredith, watching, could tell from the look on his face, the terror with which he backed into a corner as the bots advanced toward him, that he had no doubt either. To Serve Man. It was such an old, stupid, corny joke. The bots moved slowly, and as they approached him he turned, and began to try to climb the smooth walls. When that didn't work, he turned and began kicking out at the bots, punting them across the room, lashing out.

    There were too many of them, though. Meredith turned away when they began extruding knives, ice picks, round buzz saws. Constance had let go of Meredith's hand and begun rocking herself, sobbing; she couldn't seem to take her eyes off the television. But Meredith stopped looking, refused to look. She wrenched her head away and fled the room, even though the sound of Raji's cries, and then of his screams, followed her wherever she ran: into the dining room, upstairs to her own room. She had insisted on watching the clip, and she was glad she had seen the beginning of it, seen Raji in his last moments of being whole and unhurt. But she wouldn't watch him being dissected by the bots, couldn't watch; it was too much like the nightmares she'd had in isolation, in Honoli's office.

    Running from the horror made no difference, not to her, and certainly not to Raji. She knew, even as she fled, even as her grief tore the breath from her lungs and turned her blood to molten lava, that those images would live inside her forever now, would live in her longer, perhaps, than her love for Raji would live. She could only imagine what seeing them must have done to Sonia and Ahmed.

    Thirteen

    NEARLY everyone realized that the bots had been programmed to do what they did, that their horrific task was an outcome of human intent, rather than any malevolence inherent to AI. MacroCorp launched a public information campaign to educate consumers about the difference between true AI—"autonomous individuality," as Preston had dubbed it, or "the ability to say 'I' "—and the comparatively primitive self-modifications performed by most bots. Bots could evaluate certain aspects of their environment to perform their work, but they had no sense of self, no emotions, no ability to hate or plot against the beings who had created them. Bots were harmless.

    Nonetheless, Raji's death quickly acquired the status of cultural trauma. Meredith had once told herself that if Raji died, she'd want there to be someone in the world who remembered him. Now he was branded into the memories of anyone with access to news media. If the Luds had intended to inculcate a horror of the machine and of MacroCorp, in many quarters they succeeded all too well. There were reports of small towns banning bots altogether, of small children becoming violently ill at the sight of the cartoon figures they had formerly loved, of the most innocuous bots, gunmetal spheres on wheels who did nothing but eat dust, being hunted and destroyed. Such hunts rarely lasted long. Bots were too stupid to flee, even in self-defense. They were only machines.

    The hatred against anyone proclaiming Lud tendencies was uglier. In Berkeley, the sale of Lud bumper stickers dropped overnight, and drivers who didn't scrape their bumpers clean of the offending items often found their tires slashed and their windshields broken. Across the country, in the Berkshires, an ecotourist wearing a Lud T-shirt was tortured and killed by a group of local hunters, although some cynics observed that the hunters might simply have seized the easiest excuse. In response to the killing, Raji's parents made a dignified public plea on ScoopNet. "Most people with Luddite sympathies had nothing to do with murdering our son," Ahmed said quietly. "Most Luddites abhor what happened to Raji as much as we do. Hurting others will not bring Raji back. Please learn to live in peace." Sonia, standing next to him, broke down and wept, Ahmed's hand on her shoulder. ScoopNet ratings went through the roof.

    Sierra-Audubon experienced a notable upsurge in donations. MacroCorp, after again emphasizing its humanitarian and nondestructive business practices, announced that the AI Project building would not be rebuilt; instead, the space would be dedicated to a memorial garden in Raji's honor. It was, of course, the last thing Raji would have wanted, but it was good PR. Sierra-Audubon donated trees and rosebushes, and Matt said a blessing over the greenery.

    The memorial service and garden dedication were hideous for Meredith, almost worse than watching the kidnapping clips had been. She didn't want to go, but Jack and Preston and Constance insisted. She had to go, they told her. She had to go for Sonia and Ahmed, if nothing else. So she went, under heavy sedation, draped in a black mourning shawl Sonia had given her. The shawl had belonged to Raji's grandmother, the one who had died in the United States after telling him stories about animals. Meredith knew how generous a gift it was, knew she owed Sonia more than the grudging thanks she managed to squeeze out. All she could think of was Raji's description of his grandmother's death, which had been so much like a birth.

    Raji's death had been nothing like a birth.

    Despite extensive efforts, the police never caught the terrorists, who had left nothing behind for anyone to trace. Law enforcement had no previous record of the Human Alliance, a name which seemed to have been invented for the kidnapping. Several members of Luddite cells, subjected to strenuous questioning, admitted to the existence of a shadowy leader named Gina Veilasty, who might have masterminded Raji's death. But no one had ever seen her in person; the first Luds who were questioned knew people who knew people who had spoken to her, but only online; and those contacts, once they had been brought in for questioning themselves, had no way to contact Veilasty. Her webpage no longer existed, and police could find no record of an actual person by that name. They concluded that Veilasty was an online persona, constructed as a blind. Several of the Lud informants had reached this conclusion themselves, especially once they realized that Veilasty's name was an anagram of "staying alive."

    Commentators observed that the lack of closure was one of the most unsettling things about the incident. Not only had Raji Abdul-Allam been horrifically tortured and murdered, but the forces responsible were still at large, "boding their time until their next atrocity," as one ScoopNet pundit put it.

    Meredith observed it all from within an icy shell, a brittle carapace from which all efforts at sympathy rebounded with a faint chiming sound. She couldn't stand being on campus, and Temple reminded her too unbearably of Raji, so she moved back home. Jack and Constance never reactivated their own herd of bots, not even Theo's toys, and Meredith never found out what had happened to the devices. She supposed that they had been stripped down to their metal shells and reprogrammed, but she never asked.