21st Century Science Fiction (32 page)

(Nadia’s eyes slide to Paul, never move.)

“How so?” asks the other marketing guy.

Paul grins, leans forward; Mason sees the switch flip.

Then Paul is magic.

He uses every catchphrase Mason’s ever heard in a pitch, and some phrases he swears are from Mori’s own pamphlets. Paul makes a lot of eye contact, frowns soulfully. The Marketing guys get glassy and slack-jawed, like they’re watching a swimming pool fill up with doubloons. Paul smiles, one fist clenched to keep his amazing ideas from flying away.

Mason waits for a single concept concrete enough to hang some code on. He waits a long time.

(The nice thing about programs is that you deal in absolutes—yes, or no.)

“We’ll be working together,” and Paul encompasses Mason in his gesture. “Andrew Mason has a reputation for out-thinking computers. Together, we’ll give the Vestige model a self-sustaining critical-thinking initiative no other developer has tried—and no consumer base has ever seen. It won’t be human, but it will be the nearest thing.”

The Marketing guys light up.

“Self-sustaining critical-thinking” triggers ideas about circuit maps and command-decision algorithms, and for a second Mason is absorbed in the idea.

He comes back when Paul says, “Oh, he definitely has ideas.” He flashes a smile at the Marketing guys—it wobbles when he looks at Nadia, but he recovers well enough that the smile is back by the time it gets to Mason.

“Mason, want to give us tech dummies a rundown of what you’ve been brainstorming?”

Mason glances back from Nadia to Paul, doesn’t answer.

Paul frowns. “Do you have questions about the project?”

Mason shrugs. “I just think maybe we shouldn’t be discussing confidential R&D with some stranger in the room.”

(Compliance sets up stings sometimes, just to make sure employees are serious about confidentiality. Maybe that’s why she hasn’t said a thing.)

Nadia actually turns her head to look at him (her eyes skittering past Paul), and Paul drops the act and snaps, “She’s not some stranger,” like she saved him from an assassination attempt.

It’s the wrong thing to say.

It makes Mason wonder what the relationship between Paul and Nadia really is.

• • • •

That afternoon, Officer Wilcox from HR stops by Mason’s office.

“This is just a random check,” she says. “Your happiness is important to the company.”

What she means is, Paul ratted him out, and they’re making sure he’s not thinking of leaking information about the kind of project you build a market-wide stock repurchase on.

“I’m very happy here,” Mason says, and it’s what you always say to HR, but it’s true enough; they pulled him from that shitty school and gave him a future. Now he has more money than he knows what to do with, and the company dentist isn’t half bad.

He likes his work, and they leave him alone, and things have always been fine, until now.

(He imagines Paul, his face a mask of concern, saying, “It’s not that I think he’s up to anything, it’s just he seems so unhappy, and he wouldn’t answer me when I asked him something.”)

“Will Nadia be part of the development team?” Mason asks, for no real reason.

“Undetermined,” says Officer Wilcox. “Have a good weekend. Come back rested and ready to work on Vestige.”

She hands him a coupon for a social club where dinner costs a week’s pay and private hostesses are twice that.

She says, “The company really appreciates your work.”

• • • •

He goes home, opens his personal program.

Most of it is still just illustrations from old maps, but places he’s been are recreated as close as he can get. Buildings, animals, dirt, people.

They’re customizable down to fingerprints; he recreated his home city with people he remembers, and calibrated their personality traits as much as possible. It’s a nice reminder of home, when he needs it.

(He needs it less and less; home is far away.)

This game has been his work since the first non-Mori computer he bought—with cash, on the black market, so he had something to use that was his alone.

Now there are real-time personality components and physical impossibility safeguards so you can’t pull nonsense. It’s not connected to a network, to keep Mori from prying. It stands alone, and he’s prouder of it than anything he’s done.

(The Memento model is a pale shadow of this; this is what Paul wants for Vestige, if Mason feels like sharing.)

He builds Nadia in minutes—he must have been watching her more than he thought—and gives her the personality traits he knows she has (self-possessed, grudging, uncomfortable), her relationship with Paul, how long he’s known her.

He doesn’t make any guesses about what he doesn’t know for sure. It hurts the game to guess.

He puts Nadia in the Mori offices. (He can’t put her in his apartment, because a self-possessed, grudging, uncomfortable person who hasn’t known him long wouldn’t go. His game is strict.) He makes them both tired from a long night of work.

He inputs Paul, too, finally—the scene won’t start until he does, given what it knows about her—and is pleased to see Paul in his own office, sleeping under his motorcycle jacket, useless and out of the way.

Nadia tries every locked door in R&D systematically. Then she goes into the library, stands in place.

Mason watches his avatar working on invisible code so long he starts to drift off.

When he opens his eyes, Nadia’s avatar is in the doorway of his office, where his avatar has rested his head in his hands, looking tired and upset and wishing he was the kind of person who could give up on something.

(His program is spooky, when he does it right.)

He holds his breath until Nadia’s avatar turns around.

She finds the open door to Paul’s office (of course it’s open), stands and looks at him, too.

He wonders if her avatar wants to kiss Paul’s.

Nadia’s avatar leaves Paul’s doorway, too, goes to the balcony overlooking the impressive lobby. She stands at the railing for a while, like his avatars used to do before he had perfected their physical limits so they wouldn’t keep trying to walk through walls.

Then she jumps.

He blanks out for a second.

He restarts.

(It’s not how life goes, it’s a cheat, but without it he’d never have been able to understand a thing about how people work.)

He starts again, again.

She jumps every time.

His observations are faulty, he decides. There’s not enough to go on, since he knows so little about her. His own fault for putting her into the system too soon.

He closes up shop; his hands are shaking.

Then he takes the Mori coupon off his dining table.

• • • •

The hostess is pretty, in a cat-eye way.

She makes small talk, pours expensive wine. He lets her because he’s done this rarely enough that it’s still awkward, and because Mori is picking up the tab, and because something is scraping at him that he can’t define.

Later she asks him, “What can I do for you?”

He says, “Hold as still as you can.”

It must be a creepy request; she freezes.

It’s very still. It’s as still as Nadia holds.

• • • •

Monday morning, Paul shows up in his office.

“Okay,” Paul says, rubbing his hands together like he’s about to carve a bird, “let’s brainstorm how we can get these dolls to brainstorm for themselves.”

“Where’s Nadia?” Mason asks.

Paul says, “Don’t worry about it.”

Mason hates Paul.

• • • •

The first week is mostly Mason trying to get Paul to tell him what they’re doing (“What you’re doing now,” Paul says, “just bigger and better, we’ll figure things out, don’t worry about it.”) and how much money they have to work with.

(“Forget the budget,” Paul says, “we’re just thinking about software, the prototype is taken care of.”

Mason wonders how long Paul has been working on this, acquiring entire prototypes off the record, keeping under the radar of a company that taps your phones, and the hair on his neck stands up.)

“I have a baseline ready for implantation,” Paul admits on Thursday, and it feels like a victory for Mason. “We can use that as a jumping-off point to test things, if you don’t want to use simulators.”

“You don’t use simulators until you have a mock-up ready. The baseline is unimportant while we’re still working on components.” Then he thinks about it. “Where did you get a baseline with no R&D approval?”

Paul grins. “Black market,” he says.

It’s the first time Mason’s ever suspected Paul might actually care about what they’re doing.

It changes a lot of things.

• • • •

On Friday, Mason brings in a few of his program’s parameters for structuring a sympathy algorithm, and when Paul shows up he says, “I had some ideas.”

Paul bends to look, his motorcycle jacket squeaking against Mason’s chair, his face tinted blue by the screen.

Mason watches Paul skim it twice. He’s a quick reader.

“Fantastic,” Paul says, in a way that makes Mason wonder if Paul knows more about specifics than he’d admit. “See what you can build me from this.”

“I can build whatever you need,” Mason says.

Paul looks down at him; his grin fills Mason’s vision.

• • • •

Monday morning, Paul brings Nadia.

She sits in the back of the office, reading a book, glancing up when Mason says something that’s either on the right track or particularly stupid.

(When he catches her doing it her eyes are deep and dark, and she’s always just shy of pulling a face.)

Paul never says why he brought her, but Mason is pretty sure Nadia’s not a plant—not even Paul could risk that. More likely she’s his girlfriend. (Maybe she is an actress. He should start watching the news.)

Most of the time she has her nose in a book, so steady that Mason knows when she’s looking at them if it’s been too long between page-turns.

Once when they’re arguing about infinite loops Paul turns and asks her, “Would that really be a problem?”

“I guess we’ll find out,” she says.

It’s the first time she’s spoken, and Mason twists to look at her.

She hasn’t glanced up from her book, hasn’t moved at all, but still Mason watches, waiting for something, until Paul catches his eye.

For someone who brings his girlfriend the unofficial consultant to the office every day, Paul seems unhappy about Mason looking.

Nadia doesn’t seem to notice; her reflection in Mason’s monitor doesn’t look up, not once.

(Not that it matters if she does or not. He has no idea what he was waiting for.)

• • • •

Mason figures out what they’re doing pretty quickly. Not that Paul told him, but when Mason said, “Are we trying to create emotional capacity?” Paul said, “Don’t worry about it,” grinning like he had at Mason’s first lines of code, and that was Mason’s answer.

There’s only one reason you create algorithms for this level of critical thinking, and it’s not for use as secretaries.

Mason is making an A.I. that can understand as well as respond, an A.I. that can grow an organic personality beyond its programming, that has an imagination; one that can really live.

(Sometimes, when he’s too tired to help it, he gets romantic about work.)

• • • •

For a second-gen creative guy, Paul picks up fast.

“But by basing preference on a pre-programmed moral scale, they’ll always prefer people who make the right decisions on a binary,” Mason says. “Stockholders might not like free will that favors the morally upstanding.”

Paul nods, thinks it over.

“See if you can make an algorithm that develops a preference based on the reliability of someone’s responses to problems,” Paul says. “People are easy to predict. Easier than making them moral.”

There’s no reason for Paul to look at Nadia right then, but he does, and for a second his whole face falters.

For a second, Nadia’s does, too.

Mason can’t sleep that night, thinking about it.

TO: ANDREW MASON

FROM: HR—HEALTH/WELFARE

Your caffeine intake from the cafeteria today is 40% above normal. Your health is of great importance to us.

If you would like to renegotiate a project timeline, please contact Management to arrange a meeting. If you are physically fatigued, please contact a company doctor. If there is a personal issue, a company therapist is standing by for consult.

If any of these apply, please let us know what actions you have taken, so we may update your records.

If this is a dietary anomaly, please disregard.

The company appreciates your work.

They test some of the components on a simulator.

(Mason tells Paul they’re marking signs of understanding. Really, he wants to see if the simulation prefers one of them without a logical basis. That’s what humans do.)

He pulls up a baseline, several traits mixed at random from reoccurring types in the Archives, just to keep you from using someone’s remnant. (The company frowns on that.)

Under the ID field, Mason types in GALATEA.

“Acronym?” Paul asks.

“Allusion,” says Nadia.

Her reflection is looking at the main monitor, her brows drawn in an expression too stricken to be a frown.

Galatea runs diagnostics (a long wait—the text-interface version passed four sentience screenings in anonymous testing last month, and something that sophisticated takes a lot of code). She recognizes the camera, nodding at Mason and Paul in turn.

Then her eyes go flat, refocus to find Nadia.

It makes sense, Nadia’s further away, but Mason still gets the creeps. Someone needs to work on the naturalism of these simulators. This isn’t some second-rate date booth; they have a reputation to uphold.

“Be charming,” Mason says.

Paul cracks up.

“Okay,” he says, “Galatea, good to meet you, I’m Paul, and I’ll try to be charming tonight.”