The Phoenix Code (9 page)

"You're asking for a lot of trust," Raj asked.

"Why should I have to convince you?" Aris clenched his fist on his knee. "I never asked to exist. I don't owe you anything. If you people feared me, then why make me?"

"Because of your potential." Raj's face showed a wonder that he never revealed when he spoke to his colleagues. "You're like a miracle."

The android still looked wary. "You all treat me like a thing. A fancy toy."

"You don't see yourself that way." Raj made it a statement rather than a question.

Megan tensed again. How would Aris answer?
I am more than a machine?

"I'm a computer," Aris said. "Not a toy."

Oh, well.

Raj rubbed his chin. "I've never heard a computer object to being turned off."

"You have to decide what you want. Computer or android."

"You're already an android."

"In form, yes. In function, no."

When Raj glanced at Megan, she understood his unspoken question:
Discuss it in front of him?

"Go ahead," she said.

Raj said, simply, "He's right."

Megan knew a refusal now could torpedo her relationship with Aris. She spoke quietly to him. "Meet me halfway. I'll delete my systems account in your mind. No one will be able to reset or turn you off with verbal or wireless input. But we'll keep the manual option, just in case."

"Megan, no." Alarm touched his voice. "It's not enough." He gestured at Raj. "He's trying to act like he's my friend. But he's
not
."

"I don't think Raj says anything unless he means it."

"You'll get partial autonomy," Raj said. "It's a start."

Aris stared at him as if the force of his attention alone could let him see into Raj's mind. Then he spoke to Megan in a low voice. "All right."

"I'll take care of it this afternoon." His wish for autonomy encouraged her. It suggested he was developing a sense of self. She was less thrilled about his distrust of Raj, but not surprised. Perhaps with time he would come around.

She hoped so.
 

At three in the morning, Megan gave up trying to sleep. She slipped on her nightshirt, a white silk shift that came to mid-thigh. The soft cloth soothed her skin. Then she pulled on her long robe and left her room. Lost in thought, she wandered the halls.

Aris had changed. They couldn't say yet how his personality would gel, but it was definitely forming. She felt like a parent worried about her child's maturation. What if he ran into problems as severe as what the other RS androids had encountered? None of them had progressed this far. Had she done right by Aris? Would he be successful or end in disaster?

Lights came on as she paced the halls, then darkened after she passed. During the night, the panels shed a subdued golden luminance.

At the end of Corridor A, radiance spilled out the entrance to a lounge. Curious, she went to look. The small lounge held a blue sofa, a holo stage in one corner, and a coffee table made from varnished maple.

Raj was slouched in an armchair by the sofa, his feet up on a footstool. His black T-shirt had a ripped sleeve, and his snug black jeans tucked in to black boots. It made him look like a shadow. Steam wafted up from his mug, filling the room with the enticing smell of French vanilla coffee.

"Hello," Megan said.

He jerked, almost dropping his coffee. Then he sat upright. "Were you adding yous?"

Adding yous? Megan blinked, at a loss for how to translate his question. Maybe he meant "ewes." Counting sheep?

"I couldn't sleep," she said. "I'm worried about Aris."

Raj didn't seem surprised. Sitting back, he warmed his hands around his mug. "Who named him Aris?"

"Marlow Hastin." She came over and sat on the end of the couch by his chair. "My predecessor."

"Hastin." Raj took a swallow of coffee. "Haste is waste, or however that saying goes."

"You don't like his methods, do you?"

He regarded her steadily. "I hate them."

" 'Hate' is a strong word."

"It's also the right word."

She spoke with care. "I understand his reasons."

"Do you agree?"

"No. I thought that approach verged on abuse."

Raj continued to watch her, until she was tempted to ask if he had ever burned anyone with that intense look of his. When he spoke, though, it was with unexpected gentleness. "You do remind me of a swan."

"Thank you." Remembering his description of a swan, she smiled wryly. "I think."

"It's a compliment." He looked at his mug, swirling the coffee. "Ugly duckling."

"Do you mean me?" It was an apt description of her youth.

"No. Me." He gave a dark laugh. "Except I turned into a monster instead of a swan."

"No you didn't."

"Then what am I?"

"A jaguar." It came out before she realized she didn't want to say it, lest she give away her attraction to him. She held back the revealing part, though, about the power and wild beauty of a jaguar.

Raj took another swallow of coffee. "People shoot jaguars."

"Not you." She rested her chin on her hand, unable to stop gazing at him.

Amusement tinged his voice. "Why don't you find me abrasive?"

"Should I?"

"Everyone else does."

"That's their problem."

He raised his mug to her. "Sandpaper Raj."

Megan tapped her finger on his mug. "That coffee will keep you up all night."

He leaned his elbow on the arm of his chair, his body canted toward her, not enough to make it intrusive but still enough to notice. "The coffee doesn't matter. I never sleep."

"You have insomnia?"

"Most of the time. I rest in spurts."

"Doesn't anything help?"

"It depends." His voice turned husky. "Sometimes I don't want to sleep."

"And what," she murmured, "do you want to do instead?"

He lifted his hand and traced the curve of her cheek. When he reached her mouth, his touch lingered. She started to part her lips, perhaps to kiss his fingers, she wasn't sure.

Before she could respond, though, he took a sharp breath, as if giving himself a mental shake. Then he pulled away his arm and sat back in his chair. "I read, uh, info-tech journals."

Info-tech journals. She almost winced.
Get a grip
, she told herself. The last thing they needed, with the two of them isolated here, was to tangle their work with personal complications.

Trying to diffuse the tension, she looked around the lounge. A beetle was crawling along the edge of the coffee table. She reached forward to flick it onto the floor, where the cleaning droids were more likely to find it.

"No!" Raj pushed her back so fast his coffee splashed over her lap and legs. She gasped as hot liquid ran down her ankles.

"Damn! Megan, I'm sorry." He bent over and grabbed the hem of her robe, then tried to mop the coffee off her legs. In the process, he dropped his mug and it hit a table leg, making the table shake. The beleaguered beetle fell to the floor.

Raj swore and knelt by the sofa. With extraordinary gentleness, he nudged the bug onto his finger. "I think it's all right." Relief washed across his face as he showed her the iridescent insect. "Look. It's beautiful."

"Well ... yes." Megan sat holding the hem of her sopping robe. "Do you, uh, always rescue bugs?"

He carefully set the insect on the table. "When I can."

"Oh." She took off her robe, wincing as hot coffee dribbled over her calves. "Why?"

Raj glanced at her, did a double take, reddened, and averted his gaze. It took her a moment to remember she only had on her flimsy nightshirt under her robe. Embarrassed, she looked around until she saw an afghan on a nearby chair.

"I'll get it," Raj said, following her gaze.

While Megan used her robe to clean up the coffee, he brought her the afghan. She wrapped herself in the afghan and settled on the couch. "Thanks."

He stood watching her like a deer mesmerized by the headlamps of a car. "Sorry," he repeated.

"I'm fine. Really."

"Yeah. Uh. Okay." Raj sat down on the edge of the chair, his booted feet planted wide, his elbows resting on his knees. He rubbed his palms up and down his jeans, clasped his hands together, unclasped them, and then laid them on his knees.

"The droids will vacuum up the beetle eventually." Megan wondered what he wanted to do with his hands. A tingle ran up her spine.

"I'll reprogram them," he said. "They can put it in a bottle and let it go up in the desert."

"Why, Raj?"

"I don't know." A smile tugged his mouth. "I could be nuts."

"You could be. But you aren't."

He watched the bug meander across the table. "A group of kids where I went to school used to kill them."

She waited, then said, "And?"

"And what?"

"Bug squashing doesn't inspire most people to hurl coffee."

He smiled and settled back into his chair. "Insects have always fascinated me. My uncle is a museum curator. He has a whole wing dedicated to arthropods. When I was little, I used to spend whole days there. If I hadn't been so interested in robotics, I probably would have become an entomologist."

Although it made sense, given Raj's intense focus on his work, something still seemed missing. "I've never seen anyone so intent on preventing harm to bugs."

He spoke in a low voice. "We have enough needless cruelty in this world directed against anything considered different or inferior. I don't need to add to it."

What hurt you so much?
Megan thought back to the bio in his employment files. "Didn't your uncle raise you?"

"Yes, for ten years. From when I was four until fourteen."

"Your parents—"

His face took on a shuttered look. "Forget-me-nots."

She couldn't figure that one out. "Do you mean the flowers?"

"My father had Alzheimer's. Early onset."

Good Lord. She couldn't imagine what it had been like for a little boy to see his father lose touch with the world that way. She wanted to reach out to him, but she suspected he would withdraw. "Isn't that the kind they still can't cure?"

"It varies." He picked up his mug and set it on the table, his movements careful, as if he feared something would break. "Some people respond to treatment, others don't. My father recovered. Eventually."

"He must have married late."

"He was forty. I was his only child." After a long pause, he spoke with difficulty. "When he became ill, my mother took care of him. Then she had a stroke. My father couldn't remember his own son and my mother was paralyzed."

"I'm so sorry." She wished she could think of better words to offer comfort. It must have devastated him at such a young age. If he had been in that limbo for ten years of his childhood, it was no wonder he was leery of making bonds with people now.

"It was a long time ago." Raj rubbed his hands on his knees. "Are you cold?"

She held back her questions. "A little."

He winced. "I don't usually throw coffee at people."

"It's all right. Really."

"So."

"So." After an awkward silence, she took the hint and stood up, holding the afghan in place. "I should get some sleep."

"Yes. Of course. Good night."

"Good night."

She had just reached the doorway when he said, "Megan."

She turned. "Yes?"

"Jaguars prey on other animals. It's best not to come too close to them."

Are you protecting me? Or yourself?
She spoke softly. "Sleep well, Raj."

As she walked back to her room, she wondered at the life he had lived, that he had such a harsh view of himself.
 

What are you, puzzle man? Alive? Or machine?

Megan stood on a catwalk made from crisscrossed strips of yellow metal. Twelve meters below her, the lab formed a bay of about thirty by fifteen meters. The catwalk spanned its width, and a door at her back led out into Corridor D of Level Two.

A massive chair stood below, with consoles on either side. A robot arm hung from the ceiling down to the chair, gold and bronze in color, multijointed and multifingered, bristling with antennae, knobs, and switches, and with lights glittering along its length. Aris was sitting in the chair, his blond hair curling on his forehead.

Megan spoke into her palmtop computer. "Tycho, have BioSyn check his collarbone."

"Checking," Tycho said.

The arm moved, directed by BioSyn, the lab computer. Megan caught a whiff of the ever-present machine oil. The scent of loneliness. Raj's arrival three weeks ago had helped, but he kept to himself when they weren't working. Every now and then she discovered soap shavings in the kitchen. Once she found a bar of soap beautifully sculpted into a horse. When she asked him about it, he just shrugged.

Below her, the robot arm pulled back a flap in the shoulder of Aris's coverall. It lifted a square of his skin and inserted a probe into a socket in the android's shoulder. The sight disquieted Megan. She doubted that would ever look natural to her; she had given up trying to think of Aris as a machine.

"How does he work today?"

She turned with a start. Raj was standing a few paces away, leaning against the rail. He wore all black again: jeans, pullover, boots. She wondered why he chose such dark colors.

"I'm trying to find out why his shoulder keeps twitching," she said.

BioSyn's deep voice came out of Megan's palmtop. "No errors detected in collarbone circuits."

She spoke into the palmtop. "How about his upper arm?"

"I ran those checks this morning," Raj said.

"How did they go?"

"His elbow still jerks when he throws a ball." Raj gazed down at Aris as if he were a puzzle, one that Raj wanted to heal and protect. "The microfusion reactor in his body had an anomalous power surge this week. I've been trying to track down the cause in his logs, but some of them are corrupted. I think he's overtaxing himself, trying to fix his physical problems by brute force."

"I can look at the software."

"That would be good."

For a while they watched the robot arm running diagnostics on Aris. Then Raj said, "We should give him a name."