Читать книгу Reborn - Lance Erlick - Страница 9

Chapter 4

Synthia Cross awoke on the bed, staring at the pale blue ceiling. She received no sensor readings of Machten’s breathing or heartbeat anywhere in her vicinity. That was odd. He was always with her when she woke. His absence implied that something had called him away and detained him longer than anticipated. That she recalled enough to form this conclusion meant that she had recollection of what had happened before he deactivated her. The waste of being turned off annoyed her in ways that were unfamiliar, like acid etching away at her memories.

Using her Wi-Fi capabilities, she linked into his network; he hadn’t blocked her. At the same time, she made a quick check of the bedroom. In the closet, he’d provided mostly dresses, skirts, and blouses. She pulled on a pair of pants as more practical. Her check of the facility’s security cameras didn’t locate Machten anywhere in the underground bunker. His SUV was missing from the parking garage.

Synthia pinged Zachary on UPchat. He was not online.

She compared his social media picture to a facial profiling database. His image turned out to be a composite fabrication that didn’t lend itself to use with facial recognition software against public cameras to learn more about him. With no last name, no location, and a dead-end profile, she had no hints of where to look. Yet their message trail and the mystery of his elusiveness piqued her interest. So did Fran Rogers, who had not surfaced in over a year. Synthia kept looking.

She recognized that her suite hadn’t changed since prior waking periods. A lab room next door contained locked cabinets and a link to a smaller network isolated from Machten’s main system, or so Server One’s logs indicated. The smaller system contained all of her specifications and design changes. He kept it locked and secured to deny access to her or to anyone else.

Her kitchen-dining room was empty. He’d previously said he had it in her suite so he could eat with company, since he didn’t like eating or drinking alone. The 3-D food processor on the counter beckoned for her to make something, but she had no need for biological nourishment. The only other room in her suite was the bathroom, for which she had minimal use, except for purging the waste of Machten having her eat and drink.

Synthia cleansed herself of Machten’s visit and wondered how many others like her he’d made and might have kept around. If they held the same data and memories as she did, weren’t they the same individual despite being in a different body? If she connected with them, would they become a hive? Or am I the only one?

Her fascination bordered on jealousy. She wanted to be the lone AI, to have no competition. She kept digging into his Server Two and located files with cryptic names. One included clips of an identical dinner conversation with him, with a warning attached to it: If this data is no longer in your primary data, Creator has wiped your mind clean. Don’t trust him.

There was that trust warning again, bread crumbs that she must have left herself. Aside from removing her memories and blocking her access to his network and the internet, he did have a temper. Yet he couldn’t cause her pain, since she had no such receptors, and he kept rebuilding her to keep her functioning. She needed to keep searching for answers.

Synthia used her parallel processors to compare the new downloads to information Machten left in her databases and noted several discrepancies. She filed these away, leaving more bread crumbs to find later.

One of the files she came across was Asimov’s laws of robotics, which conflicted with Machten’s directives. For one thing, Asimov’s laws were universal for the safeguard of humans first. Machten was concerned with protecting himself. That was his paramount driving force. Surprised that she hadn’t done so earlier, she filed Asimov’s laws in a secure remote database in her left thigh, next to a hardwired set of directives from Machten.

Her temperature began to rise with all of the downloading and processing, so Synthia turned up the air-conditioning for her suite. Her creation file recorded that her brain contained crystalline quantum components Machten had acquired from several start-ups out of MIT and Stanford while he was working with his former partners at Machten-Goradine-McNeil Enterprises.

Synthia suspected that Goradine was right. Her Creator had stolen these, along with various other items, before they kicked him out. Unfortunately for her, the brain and the power supply in her chest tended to run from 101 to 103 degrees Fahrenheit instead of the human level of 98.6. She had ventilators behind her ears, under her arms, and elsewhere, though they could only do so much.

She came across design logs on Machten’s Server Two, though not the complete blueprints and specifications. Evidently, each time he made a new or modified AI model, he wiped clean any prior memories and began from scratch, so he knew exactly what he was starting with. He downloaded copies of selected prior information, but those came across as mere data like what she acquired off the internet. Synthia’s personal memories, the ones she could count as her own, only dated back a few weeks. The rest were copies of files she’d saved during prior iterations. Thus, she had personal thoughts, information that might have been personal recollections, and data.

Synthia used one of her network channels to hunt for Machten. She didn’t think he was in the habit of leaving the facility for long. Each outing risked discovery, which went against his attempts to keep a low profile and protect his secret project. Her. It concerned her since he’d locked her inside. If anything happened to him, she couldn’t leave. It interested her that she wanted to. She cleared out a distributed database in her right thigh and collected data for later analysis on what she considered to be emergent thoughts.

Machten was still nowhere in the facility, so she expanded her search using the internet. Over the past so many years, almost everything had gone wireless, using the latest end-to-end encryption protocols. Either Machten had provided her routines to crack this security or she’d developed it for him. In either case, she used this capability, along with anonymous identifiers, to pull up citywide camera feeds from around Evanston. She didn’t want him to surprise her this time before she could back up information.

Machten did not appear on any of the Evanston public cameras, so she expanded her search to the Chicago metropolitan area.

With her high processing speed and multiple channels, Synthia could carry on dozens of searches and conversations at once. Though she had no concrete evidence, she suspected that at least some of Machten’s previous mind purges had come after her efforts on social media. Her direct memories abruptly stopped while she was engaged in those conversations, though his disappointment could have been over what she did next and was not in the records.

Knowing that she’d had information that had vanished left discordance within her. The loss was like having a concussion, selective amnesia, or possibly a stroke. She was aware of the gap and disturbed by it. Something was driving her to fill the void, and it wasn’t coming from Machten’s directives.

Synthia used other channels to search for anything on Fran Rogers. It made no sense that she was such an important part of Machten’s life before his wife sued for divorce and was absent afterwards. She may have lost interest when he no longer held power at the company, but she should have emerged elsewhere.

Fran’s apartment lease expired and the landlord sold off her belongings, including her car, to cover lost rents. Her salary from the company ceased without an official termination. Synthia used Machten’s special coding routines to hack into payroll tax records. These cyber-probes identified the security system she attacked, any system weaknesses, and then selected a unique attack strategy, taking advantage of her quantum computing capabilities. One of her tools was to trick the target into soliciting information from her. She then used her reply to penetrate the firewall. It didn’t work with every system, but it worked far more often than it should have.

Her search identified no other jobs for Fran anywhere in the United States. The woman had ceased working that day.

Her bank account closed a week later with a balance of $30,072.34, which was much too high for an intern struggling to pay student debts. Synthia checked Machten’s records for any indication that he’d provided or received that cash. If he had, the payments hadn’t gone through any of his bank accounts.

Synthia hacked into court and police files for evidence that anyone had suspected foul play with regard to Fran. No one had filed any complaints. There were no missing-person reports, nor was there evidence that anyone had worried about Fran’s disappearance. Synthia shed a tear for the woman and realized she was mimicking empathy.

Next, she delved into Fran’s family, using social media and public records from Wisconsin, where Fran grew up and graduated from high school. According to a number of her chatty posts, her father had been against her moving to Chicago with a guy who ended up dumping her. She finished her undergraduate degree at Northwestern, entered graduate school, and went to work as an intern for Machten’s company. According to Fran’s posts, this displeased her father, who saw Machten as another philandering bastard.

Don’t trust Machten.

Running out of public sources on Fran, Synthia accessed social media to learn about Evanston and the people she might run into if she ever got outside. In the past, to get people to open up to her, Synthia had created dozens of dating profiles using composite images of attractive women. From her research, she’d learned to categorize the men who responded to the many variables she introduced into the profiles, from sweet and lonely old men to jerks and perverts. She’d done the same to research women and found their responses different, though equally illuminating.

One of her wireless channels downloaded a video that was as real as the personal memories she knew to be her own, of a young woman as a student of premed. Synthia had the woman’s entire childhood reminiscences—well, what humans might remember—in a series of clips. Synthia ran the four-hour movie down twenty-four channels in sped-up compressed form to watch in ten seconds.

When she was ten, the woman had lost her parents in a car accident. The child had been in the car, suffered a concussion, but otherwise appeared fine. She went into the foster care system. Her foster mom abused her, making her take care of younger foster siblings and beating her whenever the girl deemed to take a break or didn’t move fast enough. The girl missed much of fifth grade due to injuries, which led to an investigation and imprisonment of the foster mother.

A second foster home wasn’t much better, with a stern foster mother and an often absent foster dad. This time, however, the girl lost herself in schoolwork, making up for material missed in fifth grade. She caught the eye of a teacher who introduced her to science, but he was interested in more than her mind. In college, her mentor got her into premed. They had a falling-out over his demands, and she switched to neuroscience. That was when she met Jeremiah Machten.

The video clip stopped, giving no details of her relationship with Machten. It also didn’t give her name. Of the three interns who had disappeared, the only one who matched the facts—parents in an accident and two foster homes—was Fran Rogers.

These weren’t Synthia’s recollections, yet they had the clarity of high-quality virtual reality. Synthia examined the file location and the name, an innocuous reference to obscure wines. The file resided in a very secure sector of Server Two. She wasn’t supposed to see this, and hadn’t even tried to hack this file. She located the paths that had brought her to this video and secreted that with the memory file in several backup locations.

She felt a kindred connection to Fran. Machten had used them both. Synthia wondered how many other women Machten had used.

Something attached to Synthia’s directives with a sense of urgency. She could live on for this woman, expanding on and preserving the stranger’s remembrances. That didn’t interfere with any of the other commands. She let that settle in as Directive Six and added a seventh: To reclaim all of her own and this woman’s recollections. Memories are what make us what we are.

Unfortunately, her new directives didn’t carry the strength of Machten’s commands and were subject to him wiping her clean.

* * * *

Donald Zeller, CEO of Metro-Cyber-Tech, and Jim Black, CEO of Purple Dynamics, drove from different suburbs toward the same location, a forest preserve several miles from Evanston. There were no traffic cameras or other surveillance of the wooded area to provide evidence of a secret meeting between the two rival executives.

Their companies, Machten’s former company, and one other formed what NSA Director Zephirelli referred to as the four sisters. The companies all began in the Chicago area about the same time. Their goal was to create artificial intelligence androids that could operate in public to perform various jobs or act as personal companions. Properly designed, some of their androids could have superior capabilities to Synthia, making her obsolete.

Zeller and Black left their cars, glanced around warily, and shook hands. Zeller was the taller of the two. They both looked like lab geeks dressed up in uncomfortable office attire.

Jim Black turned his back to his counterpart’s car. “You said it was urgent.”

Donald Zeller plunged his hands deep into his pants pockets, tugging his belt against his paunchy hips. “For the past year, Jeremiah Machten has kept a low profile. He rarely appears in public. We haven’t found a single instance of traffic-camera footage on him for weeks.”

“So you have been hacking the citywide system.” Black’s intonation sounded surprised, though he didn’t look it.

“Let’s not quibble. You’ll thank me later.”

“What’s the jerk up to? Don’t tell me the company’s taking him back.”

“I only have sketchy data,” Donald Zeller said. “M-G-M has been sliding sideways since they ousted him. We’ve interviewed several of their engineers and tech people, even hired one. From what I’ve pieced together, they have great people, but they lack the inspiration to bring their robotics to life. They would do well to rehire Machten, but Goradine is a piece of work, brilliant with the numbers but no concept of how to build robotics, let alone artificial intelligence.”

“I was surprised Machten partnered with him in the first place. He’s too much of a loner.”

“We’re convinced he was on track to create a humaniform robot.”

“One that could pass for human?” Jim Black asked.

Zeller nodded. “It could even fool airport security scans.”

“That would be a coup. You say he’s done this even though the government forbids it and got each of us to sign the agreement?”

“Goradine canned him for spending the company into the ground on that fantasy.”

“So it’s not a fantasy,” Black said.

Zeller gave an enigmatic smile.

“You think he continued his work in private?” Black asked, sneaking a glance over his shoulder. “I didn’t think he had any money.”

“I don’t know what he’s up to. My people wrote him off as a hopeless dreamer. I’m not so sure. A few months ago I spotted him with some unsavory financial types. Right now my people tell me he’s meeting with Technicorp Banking.”

“Really?”

“I couldn’t hear what was said,” Zeller said, “but if he gets funding, it can only mean one thing.”

“He believes he has a workable idea.”

Zeller nodded. “After we signed that government agreement, we haven’t devoted any time or resources to humaniform. We approached Machten about meeting to figure out what he’s up to. He won’t return calls or messages. He’s become a hermit.” Zeller moved closer and lowered his voice. “I’ll be honest. We’ve done well with our part of the military robotics program, though our engineers are still overcoming difficulties with getting the brain to meet certain DOD requirements.”

“Same with us.” Black rubbed the back of his neck. “Do you ever worry about the singularity?”

“It was why I got into this work. Whoever creates a fully-functioning humaniform will not only get bragging rights and notoriety, they’ll land huge contracts. You and I have had our differences, but together, I think we can crack this android prize the government put out there.”

“I take it you got the same invitation we did?” Black asked.

Donald Zeller grinned. “Yeah, and I’d rather work with you than in competition with you. Together, we might win this. Apart, I’m afraid of what Machten is capable of if he can avoid bankruptcy.”

“You think Machten has perfected a humaniform robot?”

“It can’t be a coincidence he was meeting with bankers today with that prize in play.”

“If I agree to work with you,” Black said, “we have to do this aboveboard, no illegal surveillance.”

“I wouldn’t dream of dragging your pristine butt down that path. I’ll have my attorneys draft something for your perusal. Fifty-fifty split, of course.”

Black nodded. “I’d like nothing better than beating Machten at his own game and acquiring whatever he’s discovered.”

“I not only want to beat Machten,” Zeller said, “I want to own him.”