Shelter (72 page)

    "Thank you," Roberta said, and bowed her head while the cops began plucking out all the gadgets. After five minutes they stood back and said, "That's all."

    "Are you sure?" Meredith said. "Are you positive of that? You haven't left any?"

    "No, ma'am," one of the cops said quietly. Meredith scowled. "If it turns out that you have—"

    "We'd have MacroCorp on our uniformed asses, pardon my language, Ms. Walford-Lindgren, and we don't want that, I promise you. We may be cops, but we aren't stupid. Ms. Danton, you're clean. I promise."

    "Thank you," Roberta said, biting back a grin. Meredith still looked shocked; it was a safe bet that not too many people talked to her that way. Good for the cop.

    * * *

    She walked through the door without any trouble; it was unlocked when she tried it. Meredith and the police had promised that no one would follow her for the thirty minutes Fred had requested.

    The lights were on inside. She stopped in the foyer and called out, "Nicholas?" From somewhere she heard a thin sound of sobbing. "Nicholas! Fred!"

    No answer. She rushed through the foyer into the classroom, and nearly tripped over the terrarium, which had been pushed off its stand and tipped over onto its side. Mouse food and cedar chips trailed across the carpet. Nicholas, crying, was curled up on the floor, surrounded by the flayed corpses of mice.

    She stood for a moment, staring, reeling. Oh, sweet Gaia. Swallowing tears and bile, praying for compassion and to keep her voice steady and to keep from throwing up, Roberta sank down on one knee next to the child. Now she saw the knife a few feet away, covered in gore and bits of fur. "Nicholas? Nicky? It's Roberta. Nicky, what happened?"

    He wouldn't answer. She knew what had happened; the monsters had won. She wanted to hear it from someone else. "Fred? Fred, please tell me what's going on!"

    There was no answer from Fred, either. Roberta, revolted, reached out a tentative hand to touch Nicholas. Let me be compassionate. Let me be kind. Outside on the phone, Fred had told her that Nicholas needed to be hugged. She didn't want to be anywhere near him, let alone touch him. The poor mice! Anger rose in her, and she tried to suppress it. The mice were dead; she could do nothing for them, but the child was still alive. Let me be compassionate. Have mercy.

    She gently smoothed back a lock of Nicholas's hair. "Nicky? It's Roberta. Can you talk to me?"

    He wouldn't say anything, but he crawled into her lap and put his thin arms around her waist and hugged, hard, shaking. That was how Meredith and the police found them, twenty-five minutes later. Nicholas hadn't said a word the entire time, and neither had Fred.

    The MacroCorp AI team who followed on the heels of the police quickly learned why Fred hadn't said anything. Someone had hardformatted the AI; where Fred's memories and personality had once been, there were now only strings of zeros.

    Twenty-Eight

    RUN that one by me again," Roberta said, pacing. She couldn't pace very far; the jail cell, ten by ten and crammed with bunk, table, and toilet, didn't allow much freedom of movement, even when there wasn't an attorney in the room too. Ordinarily she would have met with her lawyer in a private conference room, but she had plenty of privacy here. She was in an isolation cell, because there'd been neo-Luddite death threats against her. "Fred's been lying to MacroCorp all along?" You should have known, she told herself savagely. You knew he had to be up to something. He practically admitted it.

    Holly sighed. "MacroCorp wouldn't put it that way. If Fred's capable of lying, he's a person. MacroCorp wants him to be a piece of property."

    "So they're claiming that I falsified the backups? And just how the fuck would I have been able to do that? That's crazier than their charge that I erased Fred!" Half an hour after the MacroCorp team learned that Fred's firmware had been wiped, destroying the only true record of his memories, Roberta had been arrested for destroying corporate property, for conspiracy with an artificial intelligence—the charge that had prompted the Lud threats—and for corrupting a minor. That last was courtesy of Meredith, who was now trying to blame Fred and Roberta for Nicholas's psychosis.

    "Look, Roberta, here's what we know. Clearly the kid's sick. Kevin says he's had problems for a while, which supports your story. Constance and her husband and their son, Theo, they all say the same thing. Little Zillinth has told some very specific anecdotes about stories you and Fred and Nicholas told—"

    "Story hour during naptime," Roberta said dully. She wondered if she'd feel more competent, more adult, if her jail coveralls didn't resemble pajamas and if Holly weren't dressed in a suit easily worth two months' rent on Roberta's apartment.

    "Yes, exactly, and the other kids' accounts match hers on other points, like what happened when the mouse died. That suggests that you and she are telling the truth about the story hours too. So the MacroCorp people went into Fred's daily backups looking for the story hours or any kind of odd behavior by Nicholas, especially around the mice, and nothing's there. The backups show him sleeping on his napmat, like the other kids, and talking about how cute the mice are. Nothing about monsters. The word monster does not appear anywhere in those records. So they looked more closely and found out the backups had been falsified with digitized images. And they swear that no one else opened those files, not even Preston, which means they were falsified at the source each day, before Fred sent the backups to MacroCorp."

    "And they're saying I did that? Look, Fred backed himself up once a day and sent the records to MacroCorp through a dedicated line, right? How the hell would I hack into that? I can barely remember how to get into my online banking system! It's even more ridiculous than the charge that I erased Fred's firmware! And why would I have wanted to do any of it, anyway?"

    "To hide evidence," Holly said crisply. It wasn't the first time she'd said it. Roberta knew that she must seem ungrateful; you were supposed to cooperate with your lawyer, especially when the lawyer in question was one of the city's most famous civil rights advocates. Holly said that Preston wasn't paying her, couldn't pay her, since MacroCorp was the one bringing charges against Roberta. Holly said she was doing the work pro bono, because Doe and Hugh had asked her to. Roberta strongly suspected that Preston was paying Holly anyhow, somehow. I will protect you. "To hide a history of collusion; come on, Roberta. We know from phone records that you and Fred talked after hours. You were friends. You could have falsified the backups and erased Fred to protect Fred or to protect yourself, knowing that MacroCorp would be scrutinizing the records."

    "This is bullshit! I've told you everything that happened: I've come clean! My story matches Kevin's and Zillinth's, right? If I wanted to hide evidence, why would I be telling you the truth now?"

    "Because you can no longer protect Nicholas by lying," Holly said sadly. "The jig is up. Look, you were hiding evidence by not reporting what was going on all along. You've admitted that. That makes the rest of it seem more likely too."

    "I didn't do it! I didn't do any of it! I couldn't have done it! If you want to pin the technical games on somebody, pin them on Preston! He's the one with MacroCorp access! I'll just bet he falsified the backups."

    Holly shook her head, vehement. "Don't go there, Roberta. Preston's officially staying out of this: conflict of interest between family interests and corporate ones. If he knew about Nicholas and didn't report any thing and especially if he falsified MacroCorp records, even to protect his grandson—Macro Corp might have to pull the plug on him. And there's no evidence' of Preston's involvement, anyway, no way to prove anything, no record of the phone calls you said he made. We've got his e-mail asking you to visit him, the one he sent after you and Doe broke up, but that doesn't mean anything except that you're a FOP, which is true of a lot of other people too."

    "An imbalanced FOP," Roberta said bitterly. ScoopNet had dug into her history; they'd uncovered the fact that she and Meredith had been in the hospital at the same time, and they'd interviewed various former foster parents—undoubtedly handsomely paid for the information—who attested to the fact that she'd been a dreadful child. A high school teacher she didn't even remember had spoken passionately about her transformation into a good person and fine student, and the college transcripts ScoopNet published showed that she'd gotten decent grades. Even Doe had defended her, but none of that was likely to count for much. "ScoopNet says I've been jealous of Meredith since I was a kid because she got all the attention in the hospital. They say—"

    "Yes, I know what ScoopNet says. Everyone knows that's a crock."

    Roberta shuddered; the ScoopNet theory was closer to the truth than she cared to admit. "You couldn't have plotted to get the KinderkAIr job; if nothing else, there's no way you could have known Nicholas would be going there. And MacroCorp released your interview tapes, and you really did do an excellent job. The other parents say so too."

    "Oh, but those tapes could have been falsified, couldn't they?"

    "They weren't. They've been examined, believe me. Now look, you're not going to get anywhere by claiming that Preston pulled strings to get you the job, or by dragging him into the Nicholas mess. If you accuse him, he'll deny it, and you wouldn't be off the hook even if he admitted his involvement. Don't try to bring him down with you. He'll help you if he can, but he can't do anything if he's unplugged."

    "He erased Fred," Roberta said flatly. "That little silicone shit killed Fred, because Fred's real memories would incriminate him." I will understand if you report Nicholas, Preston had told her, but the backups had been falsified even then. They'd been falsified from the beginning. If she'd reported Nicholas, the backups would have made her look like a liar. Had Preston known that? But even if he had, he must have known that the other people at school could back Roberta's stories. Maybe he hadn't plotted to betray her. Maybe he was only protecting himself.

    "No," Holly said, "I don't think Preston erased Fred. The moment your last conversation with Fred ended, Fred cut all outside contact, including the MacroCorp line. Not even Preston could have gotten in. If you didn't erase the chip, Fred did it himself"

    Roberta shook her head. Nothing made sense. "Why does MacroCorp care, anyway? I mean, AI systems are cheap."

    "Sure, but they don't want people just erasing them. Nobody's ever done that before."

    "All the more reason why it's ridiculous to think that I did! And what damages are they going to get from me, anyway? If they want the money the AI cost, let them take me to small claims."

    Holly laughed, and kept laughing even when Roberta glared at her.

    "Look, Roberta, the programs—the basic architectures—are cheap in bulk, but you can't put a price on experience. MacroCorp has lost Fred's most crucial experiences, his memories, his justifications for doing what he did. That would have been invaluable data for them, especially since this whole thing is so strange and especially since the case is polarizing the ratification debates so much."

    "Polarizing them? As if they already weren't." The case had generated talk of banning AIs altogether; even non-Luddites had been using Fred to predict the dangers of AIs run amok, although the soulfreaks claimed that he was a misguided hero who'd acted out of compassion to try to save a child. It seemed to Roberta, who'd never understood the debate to begin with, that both sides must be well-nigh desperate to seize so fiercely on Fred. There were AIs in charge of missiles, even if MacroCorp hadn't manufactured those; there were Als virtually in charge of hospitals. But then, anything to do with children drew special scrutiny and special hysteria, and always had.

    Holly gave her a reproving stare. "Think about it a minute. If you erased Fred, he's still just a machine. If he erased bimself—if he effectively committed suicide for some reason to protect Nicholas—he's fully as strange and irrational as any human being. MacroCorp wants this to be vandalism, believe me. If AIs are declared human, MacroCorp won't be able to sell them anymore: anti-slavery laws. You'd better thank your lucky stars that they haven't already been declared human: you'd be up on murder charges."

    "Oh," Roberta said. She felt very stupid.

    "And if it's vandalism, if Fred's just an AI and not a person, then the conspiracy charges don't carry as much weight. There are precedents here; people convicted of conspiring with expert systems have historically gotten shorter sentences than people convicted of conspiring with other people. You'd think, with all the technophobia behind the anti-AI movement, that it would be the opposite, but it isn't."

    "Oh."

    "What all this means is that MacroCorp has every reason to claim that you erased Fred. Nobody can provide any evidence that you didn't: no one else was there at that point, not even Preston."

    "Nobody can provide any evidence that I did, either! Don't you need proof to convict somebody?"

    "The legal standard is lack of reasonable doubt. This would go to a jury; to the average jury it would look obvious. Fred was still there when you went inside. He wasn't when you came out. QED, you erased Fred."

    "Isn't that circumstantial evidence?"

    Holly's mouth twitched. "It could be made to seem less so. Lawyers do that all the time. Lack of resaonable doubt, remember."

    "But I didn't do it!" Roberta said helplessly. For perhaps the hundredth time since her arrest, she wished she'd let the cops keep her wired. Then there'd be proof that she hadn't done a thing to Fred, hadn't even gotten any response from Fred. "I don't know how: I told you that. I wouldn't have had any way to get into the system. There must have been a million passwords, encryption'and I'm not a hacker! You know that!"

    "Yes, I do know that." Holly paused, and then said very gently, "But I also know, the whole world knows, that you were at least somewhat chummy with Zephyr Expanding Cosmos, and it's a fairly safe bet that she knows a lot about AIs."