Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief (2 page)

Real borzois rarely look intelligent, but this one gave him a look of sly complicity. Bernal supposed a paint chip had been knocked off by the impact with his head.

_______

Bernal had started
 going to South Dakota after the citizens of Evanston burned Muriel in effigy.

He and Muriel had watched the video of the proceedings in her living room. He’d gotten it from a station in Billings, and it was much higher resolution than the tiny one available online. People gathered along a stretch of highway and hoisted a manikin dressed in a ball gown on a cherry picker. They doused it with the gasoline/ ethanol mixture that helped support the local economy, and set fire to it. The clothing burned quickly, but the smooth plastic didn’t catch, finally leaving a naked manikin dangling on its gibbet, black streaks of melted eyelashes on its face, plastic hair smoldering. First one shoe fell off, then the other. Eventually, the crowd got back in their cars and drove home. The cherry picker swung and deposited Muriel’s effigy in the back of a pickup.

“Someone went through the trouble to make it recognizably me.” Muriel scanned back and went through the scene frame by frame. “That’s a Balenciaga ball gown, vintage, maybe twenty-five years old. They must have a hell of a consignment shop in Evanston. I’d definitely wear it, given the right occasion. But, Jesus, not with those shoes. I mean, they aren’t bad shoes, can’t focus close enough to be sure, but they look like Charles Davids. Decent for an afternoon get-together, maybe a trip to the mall, but not for evening wear. And don’t get me started on those Wal-Mart hose.. .

She crossed her legs with an expensive whisper and pouted.

“They really don’t like my mammoth idea.”

“Nope. If possible, they like it even less than having their lands turned over to bison in that Buffalo Commons proposal a few years back.”

“Bison.” Muriel snorted. “Those ruminants-come-lately? Please. Some of the most boring mammals ever evolved. Mammoths or nothing.”

Muriel had been financing a program to use bootleg mammoth DNA from a defunct South Korean lab, implanted into African elephant ova, to recreate mammoths and release them on the depopulated Great Plains. She’d expected some local resistance but not an actual riot.

So Bernal had repeatedly visited the small towns along the strips of asphalt to work things out. Bernal was naturally better at ideas and things than at people, but he had learned a few simple heuristics from Muriel—mirroring people’s postures, flattering them, doing them small favors so that they felt obliged to you—and found that they worked for him. Muriel had originally hired him for logistics and operations, but had found that he was good at getting people to understand and agree to her grandiose plans. Over the past year he’d spent a lot of time shivering on bleachers above floodlit high school football fields, packing in hot dishes in church basements, hunting prairie dogs on the rez with angry young Oglala Sioux, handing down tools while politically significant people ranted at him from under pickup trucks with transmission problems.

But the place was emptying out, and no one could really deny that. A vast region in the center of the country had dropped below the six-people-per-square-miie standard that the 19th century had defined as “frontier.” And a frontier required tenacity, imagination, and a willingness to take risks, or so Bernal portrayed it. He reconstructed Muriel’s vision as he talked with people. African elephants were under extreme environmental pressure on their native continent, but their genes might run free on the northern plains of North America. He worked out pricing schemes to give them water, migration routes that would silhouette them against the sky for compelling images, roles for American Indians, whites, and more recent Hispanic and Orthodox Jewish immigrants as hunters, herders, trainers, and nomads. Every time a light went on in someone’s eyes, or two seemingly unrelated incentives came into alignment, Bernal felt joy. He was a man with a job suited to talents he hadn’t known he possessed.

But Muriel had known. She had hired him almost out of his hospital bed and given him a new life.

Muriel Inglis had made her money the old-fashioned way: she divorced it. Actually, that was unfair, Bernal thought. She’d divorced two, but the last husband, Tommy, had died of a heart attack on the golf course before their divorce actually became final. There was a plaque to him in the clubhouse.

At any rate, in her late fifties, Muriel had found herself with an astounding amount of money and some odd ideas of how best to spend it. She already had an Italianate mansion in the nice section of the town she had grown up in, her daughter was grown and out of the house, and she’d made her requisite donations to the art museum and local artistic hip-hop troupe. Some women might just have bought another house or gotten a lot of cosmetic work done.

Instead, Muriel funded lunatic projects that would have been unable to get money any other way: urban reforestations and wild animal reintroductions in depopulating rust belt cities, negative sculptures carved into the bedrock surrounding defunct ICBM silos, the reintroduction of nomadic cultures to the Maghreb, and intelligent planetary probes, like the one Madeline Ungaro was working on right here in Cheriton.

Because of Bernal’s history, Muriel had kept him largely away from Ungaro and her Al-based exploration vehicle. At first, that had been fine with him. It had the same aura of dramatic uselessness as her other projects, but seemed much more specialized and constrained. It was the only one that couldn’t be easily put on a tourist brochure. Bernal didn’t do much more with Ungaro than manage financing disbursements, pay the lease on the lab, and make sure all the paperwork was in order. But recently, as he realized that he had created an entirely new life for himself, the interests of his old one seemed to reassert themselves, and he began to wonder if there really was a functional AI growing in a warehouse on the outskirts of Cheriton.

Now that Muriel had asked to meet him there, he wondered what Muriel hadn’t been telling him about that particular project.

Bernal pounded on the featureless metal door, hearing the thump sound through Ungaro’s lab. He’d already given up on the doorbell. A red LED blinked in the black rectangle of a card reader next to the loading dock door. Muriel might have had the card to open it, but Bernal had no idea where he’d look for it.

The marked parking spot in front was empty. He didn’t see any sign of the Mercedes Muriel had stolen, either.

Ungaro’s lab was at the end of a brick warehouse converted to light industrial and inventory uses, divided into units, each with a loading dock and an office door. It included a blacksmith and an office-supply distributor. Bernal walked across the parking lot, looking around for a concealed place Muriel might have put her car the previous night.

The rear end of a newer office building poked out of the scrub woods. Where there were office buildings, there were parking lots. He trotted down a rough track between adolescent trees, hopped a mucky stream, and

stepped over the crisp asphalt rim of the other parking lot.

At this hour of the morning, there were few cars in the lot. Again, no Mercedes. But a police car had pulled up next to a Dumpster and was taking a report from a young guy who stared sadly at a dent in his car door, not looking up.

“Why were you parked here?” the cop asked.

“What? Look at this!”

“I see it, sir. This isn’t a residential lot.”

“I told you. There was a party. I live over at the McClintock Apartments. Some bozo, last night, was having this humongous party. Filled the parking lot. And some of the grass too. I got home, couldn’t find a spot. So I parked here.”

“It’s marked ‘no overnight parking.’ ”

“I know. Jeez, I know.”

The cop looked over at the Dumpster. “Looks like something hit it. Pretty hard. Shoved it right over into your car.”

“Yeah. So what are you going to say?”

“Say? I’m not giving you a ticket.”

“Thanks.”

“But you had a fender bender with a Dumpster. I’ll just write that up. No vehicle, no evidence. This’ll be between you and your insurance company.”

“I’ve talked to them before.”

“Good. You know the drill, then.”

The world looked full of troubles this morning. Bernal was about to head back to Muriel’s, to reconsider and regroup, when he looked past the dented Dumpster and noticed something.

_______

From this angle,
 he got a view of the back of the warehouse. Whoever had been responsible for the adaptive reuse of the old warehouse had bermed and stabilized the building’s rear. The berm was planted with decent sod. A few of the tenants had fenced their back areas for additional storage, but Ungaro, at the end, had not.

A black angled line led up through the grass to the rear of Ungaro’s lab. Something had torn the grass out in a wide strip, exposing earth.

He looked down. A shopping cart lay on its side in the dark water. The stream curved along the warehouse’s rear, where it managed to hold on to a bit of its old flood-plain after everything else had been torn away. Opposite the warehouse, backyards pushed stockade fences against the willow trees. The patch of scrub woods, reeds, and weeds existed as a tiny wilderness behind the world that faced the roads.

Bernal slid down the slope. The mud was slippery and stank. Each stick and reed wore a garland of soggy grass, souvenir of recent spring floods. He stepped on the cart, which wobbled but didn’t sink any further, and made it safely across the stream.

Something had come through here. And recently. Weeds had been pressed down, their broken leaves not yet wilted. Reeds had been torn away and lay in clumps in the slow-flowing water. The mud was too soft for footprints to remain clear, but it did look like they were deep and there were a lot of them, as if two or more people had hauled something heavy through here. Had whoever it was smashed into that Dumpster? He looked back. It lined up. That hadn’t been caused by anyone carrying anything. It had been done by something heavy, a vehicle, moving pretty fast.

The rear door of Ungaro’s lab, painted metal over thick wood, was scored with bright new scratches. It hung open, revealing darkness beyond.

Bernal pushed it open and stepped in. “Madeline? Madeline Ungaro?” Then, more quietly, “Muriel?”

A combination padlock meant for the door hung on a wall hook. Bernal’s guess was that the door was normally locked. But last night it had not been.

Light streamed in through windows overhead, illuminating high fiberboard shelves loaded with motors and joints. Junction boxes hung from the shelves, strapped-up masses of PVC conduit dangling like drying laundry.

A couple of chunks of crumpled gold foil, something that might once have held and protected some piece of delicate equipment, lay on a shelf. Each shelf was neatly labeled: “Proprioceptive joint indicator.” “Visual/Tactile signal mixer.” “40 & 60 watt bulbs.” A bucket, a mop, and other cleaning equipment lay on the floor by the door, along with a shattered fluorescent tube and a transparent garbage bag filled with empty Diet Coke cans.

He looked carefully, so he perceived it, but he also took pictures, as backup. If it came down to a question of how many Coke cans had been in the bag this particular morning, he didn’t want to rely on his unaided memory.

There were fresh scrapes along the battered and stained concrete floor, along with mud and weeds, still wet. He followed the trail past a folded-back accordion door; into what looked like a vehicle maintenance and repair area.

A heavy rack against the brick wall held complex legs ending in wide pads, springy wheels, a part of a carapace, an aluminum chassis, a collection of oculars, antennae, and other sensing equipment.

What looked like a gigantic bug hung from a sling.

Crude welds marked its carapace, and its six legs didn’t quite match. Spare legs hung askew, and a toolbox had been knocked to the floor, spewing nuts and bolts.

Ungaro was Muriel’s private project, but Bernal still knew a bit about it, just from the invoices. A few years ago, a local start-up called Hess Tech had built a prototype planetary rover under a speculative NASA contract, supplemented by a grant from the state, which was trying to move some research business outside the Harvard/MIT zone near Boston. The rover, called Hesketh, was meant to explore earthlike planets on its own and had incorporated a lot of experimental technology along with its AI. Like anything that experimented with more than one thing at a time, it hadn’t worked that well, and a new administration had not renewed the contract. The company had gone out of business, and the developers went their separate ways.

But one of them, Madeline Ungaro, had acquired the company’s assets and settled some of its debts. With a further grant from Muriel, she had moved Hesketh, its various parts, and its support gear out here to this lab, and continued working on it.

Bernal looked at the mess of complex mechanical gear. Ungaro, as he understood it, was on the cognitive, not the mechanical side. She’d developed the intelligent processor that would guide the vehicle across rough terrain and, if possible, contact whatever life lived on that mysterious planet circling a distant star. More than once, he’d wanted to call her, just to chat things over. He’d been out of the field since Muriel had hired him, and he’d never managed the call.

This ugly thing had to be Hesketh itself, or, rather one of its bodies. The name applied specifically to the processing unit, which contained whatever identity a self-directing planetary explorer had. The thing was supposed to be flexible and easily modifiable.

This vehicle configuration was about six feet long and vaguely arthropod. One side of the carapace was open. A half dozen manipulator arms, very much like something you might see in an automated manufacturing facility, stood at the ready above the interior. Each arm was lipped with a different tool. They looked like they had stopped in the middle of something, but Bernal couldn’t tell what they had been working on or what had stopped them. A constellation of glowing LEDs communicated a message about the state of Hesketh’s universe that he could not interpret.