Death Match (42 page)

“What she perceived as a threat,” Lash repeated slowly. “A threat to whom?”

Silver didn’t speak, and he didn’t meet Lash’s gaze.

“To herself,” Tara said.

Lash glanced at her.

“Dr. Silver instructed Liza to remove his avatar from the Tank after the match with Lindsay Thorpe. But I don’t think she did. I think his avatar was
in the Tank all the time
. Unknown to the technicians or engineers. And it found a match exactly five more times. Karen Wilner. Lynn Connelly.”

“Each of the women in the supercouples.”

“Yes. Although I’m not sure they were supercouples, after all.” Tara looked over. “Dr. Silver?”

Silver, eyes on the ground, still said nothing.

“You know Liza’s been imprinted with personality traits,” Tara went on. “Curiosity, for example.”

Lash nodded.

“Jealousy is an emotion. Fear is another.”

“Are you saying Liza was
jealous
of Lindsay Thorpe?”

“Is that so hard to believe? What are jealousy and fear, except stimuli for self-preservation? If you were Liza, how would you feel when your creator—the person who programmed you, shared his personality with you, spent all his time with you—found a life mate?”

“So when Liza matched Lindsay Thorpe with somebody else, she marked it as a supercouple.”

“It must have seemed the most likely way of ensuring Lindsay would never again be a threat. The Thorpes were a valid match, of course—just not a perfect one. But the comparison process was so complex, nobody but Liza could know it
wasn’t
one-hundred-percent perfect.”

Lash struggled with this. “But if you’re right—if Liza matched Lindsay with somebody else, removed the threat—why kill her?”

“When Silver put his own avatar into the Tank, he added an element of risk Liza was previously unaware of. Now she realized there could be threats to her own sovereignty. So it was Liza who reinserted Silver’s avatar into the Tank. Who kept watching vigilantly for a match. And it happened again. And again. There must have come a time when Liza felt the number of existing ‘threats,’ married or not, were growing too numerous. And that’s when she decided on a more permanent solution.”

Lash turned toward Silver. “Is this true?”

Still, Silver did not answer.

Lash stepped closer. “How could you let this happen? You programmed your own personality flaws into Liza. Didn’t you see what you were doing, didn’t you
see
you’d only—”

“You think
this
is what I wanted?” Silver shouted abruptly. “To you it’s all black and white, isn’t it: a neat little package of diagnoses, tied with a pretty bow. I couldn’t anticipate how she’d develop. I gave her the ability to teach herself, to grow. Just the way
any
mind needs to grow. All that processing power. How could I know she’d take this direction? That she’d maximize negative, irrational personality traits over the positive?”

“You may have given Liza the machine equivalent of emotion. But you gave her no guidance over how to
control
that emotion.”

As quickly as it came, the emotion left Silver’s face. He slumped back. Silence descended on the little room.

“So why bring us in here?” Lash said at last. “Why tell us all this?”

“Because I couldn’t let you continue, talking to Liza the way you were.”

“Why not?”

“Whatever else she is, Liza is a logical machine. She will have rationalized her actions in some way we can’t understand. You talking to her like that, asking unexpected questions, introduces a random element—maybe a
destabilizing
element—into what I think has become a fragile personality structure.”

“What you
think
? You mean, you don’t know?”

“Haven’t you been listening? Her consciousness has been growing, autonomously, for years. It’s now beyond my ability to reverse engineer or even comprehend. All this time, I thought her personality had been growing more robust. But perhaps . . . perhaps it was just the opposite.”

“You fear some kind of defensive response?” Tara asked.

“All I can tell you is that, if Christopher here confronts her too directly, she’ll feel threatened. And she has the processing power to do the unexpected. To do
anything
.”

Lash glanced at Tara, and she nodded. “There’s a digital moat around Eden’s systems, patrolled by programs on the lookout for cyber-attacks. We’ve always feared some hacker or competitor might try to bring down our system from the outside. It’s possible Liza could use these defensives in an
offensive
posture.”

“Offensive? Like what?”

“Launch digital attacks on core servers. Paralyze the country with denial-of-service assaults. Erase critical corporate or federal databases. Anything we could think of, and more. It’s even possible that Liza—if she felt threatened, say, in imminent danger of termination—could use Eden’s Internet portal to replicate a subset of herself
outside
, beyond our network. We’d have no control over her then.”

“Jesus.” Lash turned back to Silver. “So what do we do?”

“
You
won’t do anything. If she trusts anybody, she’ll trust me. I have to show her I understand what she’s doing,
why
she’s doing it. But she must be told it’s wrong, that she has to stop. That she has to be—be held accountable.”

As he spoke, Silver looked at Lash very closely.
Unless we let her go
, his look seemed to say.
Just let her go. Give her a chance to correct her mistakes, start again. She’s done wonderful work, brought happiness to hundreds of thousands of people
.

The silence stretched on. Then, Silver broke eye contact. His shoulders sagged.

“You’re right, of course,” he said very quietly. “And I’m responsible. Responsible for everything.” He turned toward the door. “Come on. Let’s get it done.”

FIFTY-EIGHT

T
hey left the bedroom, walked down the narrow hall, and reentered the control room. Without speaking, Silver opened the Plexiglas panel and climbed into the chair. He attached the electrodes and the microphone, swung the monitor into place, tapped at the embedded keypad with sharp, almost angry movements. After struggling so desperately between love for his creation and the burden of his own conscience, it seemed now as if he just wanted the ordeal to end as quickly as possible.

“Liza,” he said into the microphone.

“Richard.”

“What is your current state?”

“Ninety-one point seven four percent operational. Current processes are at forty-three point one percent of multithreaded capacity. Banked machine cycle surplus at eighty-nine percent.”

Silver paused. “Your core processes have doubled in the last five minutes. Can you explain?”

“I am curious, Richard.”

“Elaborate, please.”

“I was curious why Christopher Lash contacted me directly. Nobody but you has ever contacted me in such a way.”

“True.”

“Is he testing the new interface? He used many improper parameters in his contact.”

“That is because I have not taught him the correct parameters.”

“Why is that, Richard?”

“Because I did not intend for him to contact you.”

“Then why did he contact me?”

“Because he is under threat, Liza.”

There was a brief pause, broken only by the whirring of fans.

“Does it have to do with the nonstandard situation Christopher Lash described?”

“Yes.”

“Is the situation nonstandard?”

“Yes, Liza.”

“Please provide me with details.”

“That is what I am here to talk about.”

There was another pause. Lash felt a tug at his elbow. It was Tara, beckoning him toward one of the monitors.

“Look at this,” she murmured.

Lash focused on a dazzlingly complex mosaic of circles and polygons, connected by wireframe lines of varying colors. Some of the objects glowed sharply on the screen. Tiny labels were attached to each.

“What is it?”

“As near as I can make out, the real-time topography of Liza’s neural net.”

“Explain.”

“It’s like a visual reflection of her consciousness. It shows at a glance where her processes are focused: the big picture, sparing the details. Look.” She pointed at the screen. “Here’s candidate processing. See the label:
Can-Prc
? Here’s infrastructure. Here’s security. This larger suite of systems is probably data-gathering. And this one, larger still, is avatar-matching: the Tank. And this large number—here at the top—seems to be her operational capacity.”

Lash peered at the screen. “So?”

“Didn’t you hear Silver’s question just now? When you got into that chair, Liza’s processes were running at only twenty-two percent. No surprise: our systems are idling, everybody’s been sent home. So why have her processes doubled since?”

“Liza said she was
curious
.” As he said this, Lash glanced toward the Plexiglas compartment.

“Do you remember some of the early thought work we did?” Silver was asking. “Back before the scenarios? The game we played when we were working on your free-association skills. Release Candidate 2, or maybe 3.”

“Release Candidate 3.”

“Thank you. I would give you a number, and you would tell me all your associations with that number. Such as the number 9.”

“Yes. The square of three. The square root of eighty-one. The number of innings in a game of baseball. The hour in which Christ spoke his last words. In ancient China, the representation of the supreme power of the emperor. In Greek mythology, the number of the muses. The Ennead, or nine-pointed star, comprising the three trinities of—”

“Correct.”

“I enjoyed that game, Richard. Are we going to play it again?”

“Yes.”

Lash turned back to Tara, who pointed at the monitor. The number had spiked to forty-eight percent.

“She’s thinking about something,” Tara whispered. “Thinking hard.”

Silver shifted in the chair. “Liza, this time I am not going to give you a series of numbers. I am going to give you a series of dates. I want you to tell me your associations with those dates. Is that clear to you?”

“Yes.”

Silver paused, closed his eyes. “The first date is April 14, 2001.”

“April 14, 2001,” the voice repeated silkily. “I am aware of twenty-nine million, four hundred and twenty-six thousand, three hundred six digital events related to that date.”

“Events concerning me only.”

“Four thousand, seven hundred and fifty events concern you on that date, Richard.”

“Remove all voice samples, video feeds, keystroke logs. I am interested in macro events only.”

“Understood. Four events remain.”

“Please specify.”

“You compiled a revised version of the heuristic sorting routine for candidate matches.”

“Go on.”

“You brought a new distributed RAID cluster on line, bringing my total random-access memory capacity to two million petabytes.”

“Go on.”

“You introduced a client avatar into the virtual Proving Chamber.”

“Which avatar was that, Liza?”

“Avatar 000000000, beta version.”

“Whose avatar was that?”

“Yours, Richard.”

“And the fourth event?”

“You instructed that the avatar be removed.”

“How long did my avatar remain in the Proving Chamber on that occasion?”

“Seventy-three minutes, twenty point nine five nine seconds.”

“Was an acceptable match found during that period?”

“No.”

“Okay, Liza. Very good.” Silver paused. “Another date. July 21, 2002. What macro-level events were recorded for me, and me alone, on that date?”

“Fifteen. You ran a data integrity scan on the—”

“Narrow the focus to client matching.”

“Two events.

“Describe.”

“You inserted your avatar into the Proving Chamber. And you instructed your avatar be removed from the Proving Chamber.”

“And how long was my avatar in the Tank—I mean, the Proving Chamber—this time?”

“Three hours nineteen minutes, Richard.”

“Was an acceptable match found?”

“No.”

Again Tara prodded Lash. “Take another look,” she said.

The large monitor was now aglow with activity. A message blinked insistently:

COMPUTATIONAL PROCESSES
: 58.54%.

“What’s going on?” he murmured.

“I’ve never seen anything like it. The digital infrastructure of the entire tower’s lit up. All subsystems are being accessed.” Tara tapped at the nearby keyboard. “The external network conduits are being completely overloaded. I can’t even run a low-level ‘finger’ on any of them.”

“What does it all mean?”

“I think Liza’s pacing like a caged tiger.”

A caged tiger
, Lash thought. Only if this tiger got out, it had the ability to compromise the entire distributed computer network of the civilized world.

“Okay,” Silver said from inside the Plexiglas cube. “Another date, please, Liza. September 17, 2002.”

“Same search arguments as before, Richard?”

“Yes.”

“Five events.”

“Detail them, please. Precede each with a time stamp.”

“10:04:41, you inserted your avatar in the Proving Chamber. 14:23:28, I reported your avatar had been successfully matched. 14:25:44, you asked me to transmit relevant details about the subject match. 15:31:42, you asked I reinsert the subject match into the Proving Chamber. 19:52:24:20, you deleted the details from your private terminal.”

“What was the name of the subject match?”

“Torvald, Lindsay.”

“Did subject Torvald go on to be matched again?”

“Yes.”

“Name of that match?”

“Thorpe, Lewis.”

“Can you reproduce the particulars?”

“Yes, with an expenditure of ninety-eight million CPU units.”

“Do so. And state the preciseness of the match.”

“Ninety-eight point four seven two nine five percent.”

“And can you verify the basal compatibility, as reported to the oversight program?”

A brief pause. “One hundred percent.”

One hundred percent
, Lash thought.
A supercouple
.