Lethal Velocity

  Then—as he turned to follow—he saw, to his surprise, that Sarah Boatwright was coming briskly up the ramp toward him.

  At first he was struck, as usual, by the simple, strong lines of her face. But as she drew nearer, he noticed something else. The way the corners of her mouth drooped ever so slightly, the faint dark lines beneath her eyes, seemed to speak of a deep and private sorrow.

  In the weeks that followed his return to Pittsburgh, he had spoken to countless law enforcement officials, ATF agents, Utopia guest relations flaks. More recently, he’d had dozens of phone conversations with park designers and system techs. But this would be the first time he’d spoken to Sarah Boatwright. The last time he’d seen her, she had been on the floor of the holding cell, cradling the dying Fred Barksdale.

  He debated embracing her, offered his hand instead. “Sarah. What a nice surprise.”

  She shook his hand, her grip brief but firm. “I saw your name on today’s list of visiting specialists. I thought I’d greet you myself.”

  “Don’t you have to be somewhere?” he asked. “That morning meeting, what’s it called—?”

  “The Pre-Game Show? They can handle one without me.”

  They started down the ramp, following the line of specialists and their white-jacketed charges fanning out through the Nexus. Warne caught a glimpse of another clock. It read 0:48.

  “Actually, it’s kind of nice to get away for once,” Sarah said. “Things are frantic, what with the plans for the second anniversary celebration. And there’s all this new red tape. If it isn’t one functionary, it’s another. Nevada Health and Safety Code, environmental assessors, industrial hygienists. Sometimes it feels like we’re playing bureaucrat of the week.”

  “That bad?”

  “Worse. But it hasn’t hurt business. Park attendance is up 15 percent over the last quarter. We’re now third in overall draw.”

  There was something comforting in this chatter, Warne knew: this quotidian talk of numbers and ratios. Something was different about Sarah, something beyond the bittersweet eyes, but he was unable to quite identify it.

  They walked between a brace of fountains, past the holographic Attractions board and the entrance portal to Camelot. Cast and crew members trotted by, emerging from hidden doors or disappearing through access panels, intent on last-minute duties. Farther ahead, near the entrance portal for Callisto, a musician in a mercury-colored jumpsuit was carrying an instrument that looked something like a futuristic cello. “Come on,” Sarah said, breaking a silence that was just threatening to become awkward. “I’ve got something I think you’ll want to see.”

  They walked past a cluster of emporiums and the Mind’s Eye gallery, and then Sarah directed them toward the far wall of the Nexus and a massive, hexagonal portal. The word Atlantis stood over it in letters that seemed to ebb and flow, like water. Of course, Warne thought as he glanced at it.

  At the sight of their approach, a group of portal attendants stood aside, smiling and nodding at Sarah. The two passed through a wide, low-ceilinged passageway, then emerged into what looked to Warne like an equatorial beach. A vast archaeological project was under way here; he stared in surprise at the grids and balks, the bar scales and baseplate compasses, the carefully stratified soil profiles: all the trappings of a large, professional excavation. At this early hour, it was deserted.

  “What is all this?” Warne asked.

  Sarah looked at him curiously. “You didn’t see the concept renderings?”

  “Just brief descriptions. I was busy going over the technical specs.”

  “It’s modeled after the current digsite at Akrotiri. It’s an actual working archaeological dig, right down to the photogrammetric recording. The idea is, guests first have to pass through this modern-day excavation of Atlantis. That’s the ‘decompression.’ Then a portal will take them back in time, to the city’s golden age. We’ve tried to make this particular immersion as realistic as possible. Fabrication’s complete; we just delayed the opening a month to make a couple of…refinements.” She shot him a glance.

  “The delay wasn’t my fault,” Warne replied.

  “I didn’t say it was. We’re completing phase-three testing, you know, and all the reports we’re getting are incredibly enthusiastic.” She beckoned. “Let me show you the World itself. If you haven’t even seen the color boards yet, you’re in for a treat.”

  At the far end of the digsite, they entered one of several large, cylindrical compartments. As the doors closed around him, Warne found himself briefly in darkness. Then side panels opened on both sides of the cylinder, and he realized they were surrounded by water. Reflected light danced, greenish blue, off the ceiling and floor. There was a hum, then a subtle shudder, and bubbles teased up the sides of the cylinder in tiny storms as they began to descend.

  Warne turned to Sarah. “We’re not really moving, are we?”

  “Quiet. You’re spoiling the illusion.”

  Far below, on what looked like the ocean floor, Warne could make out indistinct shapes just coming into view. He pressed his face to the Plexiglas window. It was the spires and minarets of a fantastic city, lights winking like tiny jewels, distorted and misshapen in the deep currents. The light grew dimmer and the image vanished. Warne stepped away.

  Then, with a gentle lurch, the cylinder came to a stop. With a whisper of air, the door on its far end slid open.

  “Come on,” said Sarah, beckoning him on with a small smile. And Warne stepped out into paradise.

  At least, it occurred to him that—had he ever stopped to imagine what paradise would be like—this would be his vision.

  They were standing on a wide quay of pearlescent white. Surrounding them, lapping gently before their feet, was the edge of a tranquil sea: a sea of such an intense, rich blue Warne wanted to dip a paintbrush into it. Wide, gracious walkways of the same pearlescent material fanned out in myriad directions, arching gently over the water, curving toward larger clusters of buildings, towers, and silvery ramparts, extending back into what seemed a limitless distance. Exotic palms and knots of brightly colored flowers lined the verges. A cluster of wooden boats bobbed at anchor nearby, prows tall and graceful, carved into the semblance of swans. Here and there, small silver fish leaped from the water, sunlight glinting off their scales. And over all curved the dome and the clear empty sky beyond.

  Wordlessly, Sarah led him to a nearby marble bench, set beneath a spreading palm.

  Warne sat, entranced by the vision that lay around them. There was a fresh breeze blowing, cool and bracing, that somehow carried on it the scent of infinite promise. It seemed to him almost as if this timeless city had risen out of the sea as his private gift.

  “What do you think?” he heard Sarah ask.

  Warne shook his head. “It’s magnificent. It’s perfect.”

  Sarah smiled, clearly pleased by the compliment. “That’s good, seeing as you’ll be spending most of the week here. No expense was spared. Some of the water effects our engineers have created must be seen to be believed. One water ride, Last Moments of Pompeii, is expected to be the biggest single draw in Utopia. Maybe you’ve heard about it. They’ve leveraged the portable hologram technology to put an image of Eric Nightingale into every single passenger car, and—”

  There was a sudden commotion in the water before their feet. A storm of bubbles erupted on the surface, and then a long, narrow head emerged, foam streaming down its scaly sides. Lidless yellow eyes stared, unblinking, back at them.

  Warne grinned. “There you are,” he said.

  The sea creature looked attentively at him, raising itself still farther out of the water, foot upon foot, tall and sleek as a giant snake. It glistened with an iridescent platinum sheen, mirroring the sparkling surface below. Gemlike drops fell from the webbing of mechanical fins that ran down its sides. For a moment longer it remained still, balancing on the foam. Then in a flash it turned away, pinwheeling and cavorting across the surface.

  Warne shook h
is head. He’d only been able to test the creature in the double Olympic pool at Carnegie-Mellon, over the protests of the swimming coach. Seeing it here, in this vast expanse of water, was a revelation. Building an aquatic robot impressive enough for Atlantis—with the intelligence of a dolphin, the fluidity of an eel—had been his greatest challenge yet. At least he’d had the assistance of a very helpful colleague. Still, there had been more false starts, more late-night coding marathons, than he’d care to admit. But the end result—Lady Macbeth, as this prototype had been named—had been his most successful demonstration of machine learning yet. And seeing it in this environment made all the work worthwhile.

  Abruptly, the robot stopped its capering and disappeared beneath the surface. For a moment, all was quiet. Then at a distance it shot far out above the water, jaws opened to expose rows of jewel-like teeth. With a roar, it spewed a long tongue of purple flame. Then it dove back into the water once again, leaping several times up into the warm sunlight before at last returning to their bench, balancing on the foam, looking at them as if awaiting approval. Thin streams of smoke rose from its nostrils.

  “What would Atlantis be without sea serpents?” Warne murmured. He turned to Sarah. “Has she been behaving herself?”

  “She’s been in beta-test ever since you sent her. From what I hear, the hourly performances have all gone off without a hitch. There’s been one bad habit, though.”

  “Bad habit? What’s that?”

  Sarah nodded at the serpent. “Keep watching. You’ll see soon enough.”

  Warne frowned. “Hmm. Anyway, the first two production models are waiting at the airport. They arrived yesterday, on a cargo plane. After I see them installed, I’ll take Lady Macbeth here down to the lab, check for leaks or anomalous behaviors.”

  He fell silent. When he stopped to think, it seemed impossibly strange to be here again, in Utopia, beside Sarah. Last time, he’d been summoned to remove the Metanet, to lobotomize his misbehaving robots. But other events had intervened. And now, ironically, things had come full circle. He’d made tangible progress in his work on machine learning. His theories, once considered radical, were moving into the mainstream. And today, he was back to install newer, better, more intelligent robots.

  He cleared his throat, waved his hand over the glittering cityscape. “Well, it’s truly amazing, Sarah. You should be proud.”

  Sarah nodded. “We’ve created a state-of-the-art circulation system that purifies and distributes 200,000 gallons of water a minute—the city of Venice has asked for a monograph. When Atlantis opens next month, every other water park in the world will immediately become obsolete.”

  She paused, looking around, brown hair stirring in the gentle breeze. “We’re going to be fine,” she said in a very quiet voice.

  Warne turned to look at her. The smile remained on her face; the sad, strong eyes were clear. And now he realized what it was that seemed different. Since the first day he’d met her, Sarah had always exuded an instinctive, almost aggressive self-assurance. He could still feel it now, like heat radiating from a brazier; but it seemed to have been tempered, veiled, as if by bitter experience.

  On the trip from Pittsburgh, he’d wondered just what he would say when this moment came. Somehow, here in this watery splendor, only the simplest words found their way to his lips.

  “But how are you, Sarah?” he asked.

  She continued looking out toward the spires of Atlantis. “I’m okay. Not at first. But I’m okay now.”

  “When I didn’t hear from you early on, when you didn’t return my calls, I was afraid that—” He stopped for a moment. “Well, I was afraid that you couldn’t forgive me. For Barksdale.”

  “I couldn’t, Drew. At first, I couldn’t. But I do now.”

  At last she turned to look at him. “I mean, you helped save all this. This Park is my life now, I should be grateful. But it’s hard, you know. Sometimes, it’s very hard…”

  She turned away. Warne watched her, then turned back to the water, to the leapings and divings of Lady Macbeth.

  “You know,” he said, speaking slowly, “it wasn’t me who saved Utopia, in the end. It was Wingnut.” He stopped, replaying in his head the final scene in the corridor of C Level.

  Sarah threw him a questioning glance.

  “Peccam must have explained the situation to your people. The explosives on Wingnut’s back, the echolocator we’d placed on the armored car for him to home in on.”

  Sarah nodded.

  “But the echolocator stopped transmitting. And Wingnut stopped dead when he lost its signal. The whole plan was jeopardized. Almost without thinking, I ordered Wingnut to ‘chase.’ And that’s just what he did. He chased the armored car. And he stopped it.”

  Sarah nodded again.

  “But, Sarah, Wingnut was never taught a ‘chase’ command. It was just the opposite: I hardwired him to obey the command ‘no chase.’ Yet somehow he was able to parse the directive on his own, determine the action that had to be taken. I couldn’t understand it. Was it my tone? My gesture? Or had the ad hoc ability been there all along, lacking only some unknown precipitant? So I got curious. When I learned that Hard Place wasn’t going to be reactivated, I asked Terri to send his logical unit to me in Pittsburgh. See, I assumed that the reason he abruptly turned dangerous was that he’d been infected with John Doe’s rogue code, which I prematurely triggered. Luckily, I’d managed to turn him off before he could hurt me or anybody else at the ice cream counter. Or so I thought.”

  “Go on,” Sarah said.

  “When I examined his internal logs, I found I was right about the rogue code. It did exist, it had been triggered prematurely. But I was wrong about something else. Sarah, I never switched him off. The kill switch hadn’t been activated. And yet that made no sense. Hard Place couldn’t just shut himself off. He didn’t have the capability.”

  “But he could overload his neural net,” Sarah replied. “Force a shutdown. He realized what he was doing was wrong, out of line with his original programming. And he took corrective action. In other words, he learned.”

  Warne stared at her. “You knew?”

  “I read the confidential white paper you sent us on the subject—and your trade article, ‘Machine Learning Under Perceived Stress.’ ” She nodded at Lady Macbeth. “That’s why we wouldn’t have considered asking anyone else to build her.”

  “Yeah? And all along I thought it was that cover story on me in Robotics Journal.”

  Sarah smiled briefly.

  Warne stretched out his feet, put his hands in his pockets. Out in the still water, a school of fish passed by. Lady Macbeth gave a great belch of fire and took off after the fish, which scattered in all directions.

  “What was that?” Warne said, shocked. “That’s not part of her programming.”

  “It’s the one glitch the techs have logged,” Sarah replied. “The bad habit I told you about. She likes to chase fish.”

  —

  THE BLOND AND chrome space of the Embarkation Building was filling up with guests, milling around impatiently beyond the ticket windows, waiting for the magic hour of nine to arrive. Warne moved among them, Sarah at his side, scanning the crowd, looking for Georgia. Abruptly, he spotted her, standing beside a metal column near the exit doors. She was swinging one leg back and forth, looking around, headphones bobbing in time to some unheard rhythm.

  Standing beside her was Terri Bonifacio. The bright sunlight, streaming in from the skylights overhead, gave a gilt finish to the rich dark shine of her hair.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Warne saw Sarah pause. She, too, had seen them.

  Sarah walked up to Georgia with her swift, purposeful stride. “Hi, Georgia,” she said, placing a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “How are you?”

  “Not good,” came the response.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m out here. My dad wouldn’t let me go inside.”

  Sarah glanced inquiringly at Warne.
r />   “I thought we ought to take it slow the first day back,” he said. “You know, test the waters, go only as far as Embarkation. Turns out I needn’t have worried. So we’ll come back tomorrow, do it right.”

  Sarah turned back to Georgia. “If you get some free time, look me up. If I’m not in a meeting, I’ll show you Atlantis.”

  Georgia glanced at her with interest. “Dad’s been telling me about it. Sounds cool.”

  Sarah allowed her hand to linger on Georgia’s shoulder as she turned to Terri.

  “It’s nice to see you,” she said. “How’s the new job?”

  “Carnegie-Mellon’s throwing me more work than I can handle,” Terri replied, with a smile that seemed to lend a glow to the rest of her face. “I love it. Andrew’s got me up to my—up to my chin in research.” Warne felt her give his hand a small, private squeeze. “If only there were casinos and a midway nearby, I’d be in seventh heaven.”

  “Well, you can’t have everything.”

  “I know. So I’ll settle for three free passes to the Park tomorrow.”

  “You’ve got them.”

  Warne watched this interplay intently. But there was no sense of awkwardness between the women.

  Now Sarah turned back toward him, smiling. “I ought to put the dogs on you, helping Carnegie-Mellon steal Terri away from us like that.”

  “You could always steal her back.”

  “I’ll remember that,” she said, looking at them closely. “Give us time.”

  —

  ON THE TARMAC outside the Embarkation Building, the lot attendants were already in motion, choreographing the parking of a hundred cars a minute. Armadas of yellow trams snaked their way between the rows, leaving their loading docks empty, returning full of smiling, sunglassed faces. Sarah walked them toward the rental car, chatting with Georgia. It was that rarest of Nevada days, pleasantly warm but not hot.