“Christopher, it wasn’t like that at all.”
The uncomfortable feeling grew stronger. “Then perhaps you could explain it to me.”
Silver looked at him in genuine surprise. “Do you mean that all this time—despite everything I’ve told you—you still don’t understand?”
“Understand what?”
“You’re right. Lindsay was killed.”
The statement hung in the air, a dark cloud that refused to dissipate. Lash glanced again at Tara.
“But Christopher, I didn’t kill her.”
Very slowly, Lash looked back at Silver.
“I didn’t hurt Lindsay. She was the one person who gave me hope.”
Lash was suddenly afraid to ask the next question. He licked his lips. “If you didn’t kill Lindsay Thorpe—who did?”
Silver rose from the bed. Even though they were alone in the room, he glanced uneasily over his shoulder. For a minute he said nothing, as if in the grip of some internal struggle. And when he spoke, it was in a whisper.
“Liza,” he said.
FIFTY-SEVEN
F or a moment, Lash could not reply. He felt stunned.
All this time, he’d been sure he was listening to a murderer’s confession. Instead, he’d been hearing a condemnation of someone—something—else.
“Oh, my God . . .” Tara began. Then she fell silent.
“I began to suspect just after the second couple died.” Silver’s voice had begun to tremble. “But I didn’t want to believe it. I wouldn’t let myself think about it, do anything about it. It wasn’t until you were named as the suspect that—that I finally took steps to learn the truth.”
Lash struggled with this revelation. Could it be true?
Perhaps it wasn’t true. Perhaps it was Silver, still trying to save himself. And yet Lash had to admit that, no matter how hard he’d tried to pigeonhole Silver into the profile of a serial murderer, the man never quite fit.
“How?” he managed. “Why?”
“The how would be all too easy,” Tara answered. She spoke slowly. “Liza knows everything about everybody. She had access to all systems, internal and external. She could manipulate information. And because everything was in the digital domain, there would be no paper trail to follow.”
Silver did not respond.
“Was it scolipane?” Lash asked.
Silver nodded.
“Liza would have known about the reaction with Substance P, the catastrophic results of the early trials,” Tara said. “It would have been part of her dataset from the days when PharmGen was our parent company. She wouldn’t even have needed to search.”
It seemed incredible. Yet Lash had seen Liza’s power, firsthand. He had witnessed the Tank, witnessed the intelligence at work. And if he had lingering doubts, all he needed was to look at Tara’s expression.
“I understand how Lindsay died,” he said. “The drug interaction, the high-copper condition from the antihistamine. But what about the Thorpes?”
“The same,” Silver said without looking up. “Karen Thorpe had a blood disorder that caused her to take prescription vitamins. The vitamin prescription was changed to a high-copper formulation, and the dosage increased. I checked her records. Karen Thorpe had recently undergone a physical exam. Liza took advantage of that not only to change the vitamin formulation, but to add a prescription for scolipane. On the heels of the physical, Karen would have no reason to doubt the new prescription.”
“What about the third couple?” Tara asked. “The Connellys?”
“I looked into them, as well,” Silver replied, his voice very low. “Lynn Connelly is passionately fond of exotic fruit. It says so on her application. Just last week, Eden sent her a basket of red blush pears from Ecuador. Extremely rare.”
“So?”
“There was no record of anybody from Eden authorizing such a present. So I looked deeper. Only one grower in Ecuador markets that particular brand of pears for export. And that grower uses an unusual pesticide, not approved by the FDA.”
“Go on.”
“Lynn Connelly takes only one medication regularly. Cafraxis. It’s a migraine prophylactic. That pesticide contains the base chemical that, when combined with the active ingredient of cafraxis—”
“Let me guess,” said Lash. “Substance P.”
Silver nodded.
Lash fell silent. It was outrageous. And yet it explained a lot of things—including the annoyances in his own life that started out petty, then quickly escalated, as if somebody was trying to force his attention from the mysterious deaths. Could Liza have been behind everything—even Edmund Wyre’s parole? Wyre, the one person in the world who more than anything wants me dead? The answer was obvious. If Liza could have altered his own past history so radically, arranging Wyre’s parole would have been childishly simple.
But still, something didn’t make sense. “Couldn’t Liza have killed the Wilners in some other way?” he asked.
“Sure,” Tara replied. “She could have done anything. Tweaked medical scanners to deliver a fatal dose of X rays. Instructed a jet’s autopilot to fly into a mountain. Anything.”
“So why kill the couples in such a similar way? And why were their deaths so precisely timed, each exactly two years after they’d been matched? The similarity of deaths raised the alarm in the first place. It makes no sense.”
“It makes perfect sense. You’re not thinking like a machine.” It was Silver who spoke this time. “Machines are programmed for order. Since scolipane solved the first problem successfully, there was no need for further optimization when solving the second problem.”
“We’re not talking about a ‘problem,’ ” said Lash. “We’re talking about murder.”
“Liza’s not a murderer!” Silver cried. He struggled to control himself. “Not really. She was simply trying to remove what she perceived as a threat. The concept of hiding, of deception, came later, when . . . when you became involved.”
“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 f
or 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 think
ing 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?”