Half Life (Russell's Attic Book 2) (17 page)

She hesitated. “What do you want?”

“I want—I want to know what happened.”

Her face went dead. “I’m not allowed.”

I thought of the inches and inches of nondisclosure agreements in her file cabinet. “I’ve already met Liliana. I know what she is.”

She blinked at me rapidly, her eyes shining too brightly.

“I can read her code if I feel like it. I just—I guess I want to know how this happened. With you and your husband. And with her.”

She hiccupped, a sound somewhere between a humorless laugh and a dry sob. “I suppose it would be a relief—I can’t talk to anyone about it. Even my therapist, if I told him, he’d have me committed. He’d think I don’t know what’s real anymore.” She swallowed. “I…I had a son.”

“I know,” I said, thrown by the non sequitur.

“Sam. He was—he was everything to us. To me. My world. You hear about what happens when you become a parent, how much love—but it doesn’t prepare you.”

“He died, right?” I asked, and winced. It probably wasn’t a polite question.

Denise Rayal didn’t seem to notice. “Yes. Leukemia. I thought—I’d never felt so much pain. I thought I would never get past it.”

“And is that why…?”

“Why I made Liliana? No. It would be the right answer, wouldn’t it? But…I did get past it. I thought I never would and then I did. I got up one day not too much later and wanted to live again. Wanted to work. Eat good food, be happy, have sex—Sam was gone, and it didn’t kill me. Does that make me an awful mother?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said.

“Noah, though—he couldn’t move on. After a while our marriage was…empty. He used to make me laugh, so much, and…I buried myself at work, because to be around Noah was—I would have left him, but I felt so guilty. Now he would leave me, if he didn’t need my name on the case for Arkacite—he would leave me in a heartbeat.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I gave back Liliana.”

“Wait—what?”

Denise took a deep breath. “You have to understand. I didn’t build her to replace Sam. She was a
project.
The idea she could be anything more was—I never considered it. She was an experiment in natural language processing and machine learning and robotics and—and that was it.” She gestured helplessly, frustrated with making me understand. “But our team wanted—we needed to see how human she could be. How much she could learn. Arkacite set up a secure place off-site; it took so much to make it happen—so much paperwork, so many promises, especially for them to let Noah in on it.”

“Why did they?”

“I wanted to be living with her twenty-four hours a day, to be studying her behavior responses over the long-term. So there was some reason for me to ask that my husband be allowed into the project. But I hoped—I wanted—” She paused and steadied herself. “I had hope, that maybe bringing him into my work, sharing my accomplishments with him, that something could rekindle for us. That he could find some way back to me.”

Well, her plan had sort of worked. “And you didn’t expect he would start seeing her as his daughter?”

“Maybe I’m stupid. Maybe I should have—she looks like a girl, but I never thought of her that way. She was a toy. A very sophisticated toy. One I was proud of, but I didn’t—she wasn’t alive; how could anyone think she was?”

“Until your husband did.”

She nodded. A tear spilled over and slid down her cheek; she brushed it impatiently away. “I didn’t even realize it at first. The path we were on. I only saw that he was back. My husband, I had him back. And so help me, I started doing it, too. Treating her as a child. It was so easy, so easy to pretend, to fantasize that we were raising a girl together, and in so many ways she felt so important to me already, after so many years—you know how people will sometimes refer to their projects, they’ll say, ‘my baby’? She was that to me before this, and it just became so
easy,
with Noah, to tuck her in at night, to hug her when she cried, and I knew, I
knew
she only stopped crying because her programming said—there was no free will, this was not the Singularity, there was no
child,
but God help me…”

“You started to see her as one,” I said.

“I started to care. I started…I wanted to love her.”

“I don’t know if that’s a bad thing,” I said. “It’s love. That’s—you know. Good. Right?”

Right?

“
Love!”
exclaimed Rayal. “When the child you love is making choices on a coin toss
you
programmed in? When you know, you
know,
exactly how she works, that inside she’s silicon and wires and sophisticated language emulation and when she laughs it’s because her programming has been told
this is when little girls laugh
and when she cries it’s because we wrote in that when she falls down, her face should wrinkle up and her eyes should drip water? Is that the kind of child you would want to love?”

I swallowed. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I know you didn’t. I know.” She lowered her head, pressing her fingers against the bathrobe over her knees, breathing hard. Her hands curled into fists, bunching the fabric. “I was building myself up to love a child I had already lost. A child who didn’t exist. She could act like a five-year-old, but she would never grow up, never have her own thoughts, never…never love me in return. I gave her back to Arkacite, and resigned, and moved out here. I’m in therapy. I’m…I’m coping.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“You know, I tell my therapist—I tell him I lost someone who was like a daughter.” Rayal’s voice had gone back to resigned. “I don’t say who. I tell him I was too attached. That she wasn’t mine to love.”

C
HAPTER 18

I
LEFT
Denise Rayal’s house more disturbed than when I’d arrived. After standing impotently by my car for a few minutes in the cool morning, I sighed and dug out my phone. I had other obligations. Whatever was rankling me here, it could wait.

I tried Arthur again first, and he picked up right away this time. “Russell! Finally!” A cacophony of canine barking erupted in the background.

“Shit, are you still at Tegan’s?”

“You’re right, something’s wrong—the mail from yesterday ain’t been picked up, and I don’t think anyone fed the dogs, but their cars are here—
shit!”
More barking.

Oh, no.
“I’m on my way.”

I broke thirteen different traffic laws on my way to Tegan’s and thanked my lucky stars no cops spotted me. Tegan lived with his partner in a small house on a large plot of land in Topanga; I came onto the absurdly steep street nearing sixty and careened downhill, slamming on the brake to skid to a halt less than two centimeters from Arthur’s back bumper.

He was in Tegan’s driveway, near the high fence that surrounded their wooded backyard.

“What’s going on!” I shouted at Arthur over the near-constant racket of the dogs.

“Don’t know!” he shouted back. “I keep calling—I tried both Tegan and Reese a hundred times—finally went in, but they ain’t in the house, ain’t nowhere—”

“Did you try his workshop?” Tegan’s shop was a separate building out back, where he did most of his work.

“The dogs are out! And Tegan and Reese ain’t gonna appreciate it if I shoot ’em! I tried everything—got some meat from the grocery store, even tried calling a vet for some tranqs and she threatened to call the cops on me. Almost got bit climbing the fence—”

“I’ll take care of it,” I said, heading for the front door.

“Hang on, I locked back up,” Arthur called, drawing a set of lockpicks out of his jacket pocket and tossing them to me. “Be careful!”

I was glad Arthur had his picks on him. It didn’t seem polite to break down Tegan and Reese’s door, even to make sure they were okay.

Shit, they’d better be okay.

The dogs in the backyard became more agitated as I approached the house. The sound waves teased out to only four different animals—same as the last time I had been here—but if I didn’t concentrate on the math, it sounded like a hell of a lot more. Tegan’s place wasn’t squished in next to his neighbors like the houses in the city proper, but still, it was amazing no one had called in a noise complaint yet.

Amazing and lucky. If there was one thing Tegan would appreciate less than anything else, it was having the cops called to his property.

I slid the metal picks into the lock and felt the pins go up one after the other, the mathematics clicking beautifully into place. I twisted the cylinder and pushed the door open.

Tegan and Reese had a homey living room, with squashy furniture across from an entertainment center surrounded by shelves of books and DVDs. On the other side of the room from the door a stone fireplace formed a partial wall; behind it opened a large custom kitchen that let out into the backyard. I’d never seen any more of the house, but from the outside dimensions I knew it couldn’t be much larger, and I was right: a bedroom opened to the right of the living room with a bathroom and closet behind it, and that was it. I did a cursory check throughout the house, but Arthur was far more observant than I was and he’d already been through. It was empty.

I went to the back door. The barking escalated to deafening as I approached, along with scratching and snarling, as if the dogs wanted to burst in, tear my head off, and rip my flesh limb from limb. “See, this is why I don’t like animals,” I groused aloud. “You guys have met me before.”

To be fair, this was the first time I’d broken into their home.

I surveyed the house. I needed to get the dogs
in
here and get myself back
out
without letting them follow me. I could yank open the back door and then race out the front, but then they’d be free to return into the yard. I needed to trap them.

My eyes flickered around the space. The bathroom had doors to both the bedroom and the kitchen, so I could potentially open the back door, run through the kitchen and living room, circle around through the bedroom, and then cut back to the kitchen through the bathroom and be out the back door. If the dogs chased me through the circuit, I’d be able to get back out while they were still in the house and shut them all inside.

I peered out the back window. All four dogs were barrels of corded muscle and fur, coiled power and vicious jaws. I let my vision fade out and concentrated only on the mathematics: the oscillations of movement, the symmetry of gait, the bunching and releasing of muscles bending limbs into locomotion.

Christ, they were fast.

Faster than I was, if we were talking a dead sprint. In my head, I extrapolated through opening the door, and the variable values of the dogs’ sheer power crashed against me in hypothetical, tearing me to shreds. Well. That seemed like a nonstarter.

Unless…

I counted out the split seconds between when they scratched and pounded against the door trying to get to me. I could buy myself maybe a quarter second’s delta by forcing the dogs to push open the door themselves. But it still wasn’t going to be enough to keep me from getting ripped open.

I cast my eyes around the kitchen, and my gaze fell on the polished hardwood floor.

Hmm.

I scuffed my boot against it, estimating the coefficient of kinetic friction. Then I started pulling open cabinets.

Either Tegan or Reese was quite the chef, because I found seven different types of oil in glass bottles. I collected them along with the dish soap and the dishwashing liquid and shook out a droplet of each one in turn onto my fingers, wiping my hand off on a paper towel in between.

The oils won hands down. I took the slipperiest one with me and returned to the back door.

I emptied the entire bottle in a broad slick right in front of the back door, taking care to keep my boots out of it and leaving a tiny strip of dry wood against the wall. Then I stood on my toes on the very edge, creeping along the dry bit I’d left until the door was within reach. I leaned across the puddle, put my hand on the knob, and took a deep breath—my equations here were not exactly ideal, and had far too many variables I couldn’t control.

The dogs pounded against the door, untiring. Bam. Bam. Bam. Scratch. Bam.

I unlocked the knob. Bam. Bam.

Just as the next beast hit, I turned the knob ever so slightly so the latch disengaged, leapt over my slick of oil in the other direction, and ran like hell. A quarter of a second later, the next dog threw itself against the door in my wake, and it burst open.

I flew forward, toward the front of the house.

The dogs piled in on my tail with a roar of barking, leaping forward with a terrifying amount of velocity—and slipped.

I heard them behind me, their claws scrabbling for purchase as their burst of power turned them into cartoon figures bicycling against the floor. And then they clambered through it and gave chase, right on my heels, the deafening roar of their barking enough to rend me to pieces all by itself. My adrenaline spiked into overdrive as I swung into the bedroom. I wasn’t sure I was going to be fast enough.

The dogs skidded after me, all four of them, and the definite
snap
of jaws closing on air rang right behind me—the only thing that saved me was that they tried to take the turn too tightly and their oily paws slipped again, sending them into a pileup against the bedroom door—

My vision tunneled. I sprinted for the bathroom, head down, legs churning. I wasn’t going to make it to the back door. They were too fast.

I dove into the bathroom and kicked the door shut behind me as hard and fast as I could. The monster at the head of the pack slammed into it, snarling.

I didn’t have time to breathe—they would come back around through the living room. I practically leapt over the width of the bathroom and back out into the kitchen, then over my oil slick and to the door.

The dogs burst back out into the living room and shot at me. I fell out onto the deck and took the knob with me, slamming the door so hard the window panes rattled in the wall. Something very heavy, very angry, and very vicious pounded into it from the other side an instant later. And then another.