Analog Science Fiction and Fact - July-Agust 2014 Page 10

  "I need help," the judge said. "Someone to do some legwork. Obviously, I lack the legs myself."

  "What kind of legwork?"

  "The kind you already do. Asking questions. Finding out things."

  "What do you want to find out?"

  "Who killed Bonnie Bannister."

  I looked out the window at the garden beyond. The sun washed over blue and red blossoms and yellow petals. A bumblebee lurched and swayed through the air.

  "Did someone kill her?"

  "I don't think it was an accident. We have a lot of redundant systems dedicated to keeping us alive. Saturday night, one of those systems shut down and Bonnie died. If it was mechanical failure, then I want to know—because I depend on the same machines. And if it was more than that, justice cries out to be served."

  "At the very least," I said.

  "What I mean is that if someone killed Bonnie, I want to know who. And why. And am I at risk too?"

  "Good questions," I said. "Do you have any idea where to start?"

  "Are you offering to help?"

  "Uhh..." I considered my options quickly. "My first impulse is to thank you for the tour of the mansion and wish you a nice day."

  "I couldn't blame you for that," Judge Adams said.

  "But that's my first impulse with almost anyone who calls me instead of the other way around. You really think someone killed Bonnie Bannister?"

  "I've given the question quite a lot of thought," he said. "I have lots of time to think. I'm retired, you know. For the most part. Except for my hobby project."

  "Hobby project?"

  "I own a small medical equipment business. It does research into miniaturizing all the equipment you see around us right now. Someday, I'd like to get outside again. Take a ride. Look around."

  "If someone doesn't kill you first," I said. "All right. Just in case we really are related, I'll see what I can find out. So tell me... exactly what happened here Saturday night?"

  "Have a seat, and I'll tell you what I know," Judge Adams said.

  Even though she had long since shed her earthly body, Bonnie Bannister worked hard. She worked most of the day on Saturday. Mostly with her two AIs—Peter and Paul.

  "Building those two and tuning them up to full capacity—that's a job and a half for someone with a body. I told Bonnie that, and she said, 'At least I don't get tired anymore.' I told her what she was doing was like raising autistic twins. She told me it was more like raising a pair of thoroughbred hunting dogs."

  Interaction was the heart of it, no matter how you described it. Lots of interaction. The AIs had long since crossed over into the mimetic learning stage—where they learn to imitate the cognitive processes they encounter. Bonnie was their most immediate role model, their trainer, their nanny, and their mentor all rolled into one. "So she was busy all day Saturday," I prompted. While Bonnie didn't get tired, she did get sleepy. Once they put you into one of those containers, your brain chemistry finds new patterns. Bonnie could often be found napping, only to awake at once to your presence—and that was long before she was disembodied.

  The link histories from her headring IP address showed that she had spent some long time socializing, some lesser time catching up on the news, and another long time looking for news and new research in her field. About 9 o'clock, she nodded off. A link to a search page remained open for the rest of the night.

  Just thirteen minutes later, she lost power to one of the modules that maintains a lot of the brain chemistry. It's the same module that takes the place of the body—there are a lot of brain chemistry interactions that need the body chemistry to work properly. And that's even more critical once you've left that body behind.

  So critical, that within twenty minutes, Bonnie's homeostasis collapsed. Alarms went off. People ran around. Doctors arrived. An ambulance rolled in. Police showed up, but stayed outside.

  "The most excitement we've ever had in this place," the judge said.

  "So this piece of equipment is so critical that you could die too if it lost power?"

  "Yes."

  "And there's only one of them? Wouldn't you want to have a backup?"

  "There is a backup. It didn't come on line."

  I raised an eyebrow. "That sounds suspicious."

  "Tell me about it," the judge said. "That's the single most important reason I decided I needed help. This doesn't seem to be making more sense as we learn more about it. That worries me."

  "Who was in the house Saturday night?"

  "I was," the judge said. I could almost imagine him smiling.

  "For sure," I replied.

  "You've met Abigail? She was gone for the evening, but there was a night nurse. And an attendant. The two of them are responsible for all the equipment and any emergencies. One of Bonnie's work team members was here in the afternoon, but he went home when she was done for the day. And one of my clerks was here in the library with me all evening. Then there was the housekeeper. She has a helper, who gets weekends off, but she lives in. Sometimes we have guests—lots of rooms upstairs—but not Saturday."

  "And what do Peter and Paul have to say?"

  Silence.

  "Judge?"

  "No one has talked to them. Abigail has been keeping them sequestered. No one is sure how they're going to react to all this."

  "No one has interviewed them?" I couldn't quite believe it. "When will you folks get around to that?"

  "Later today," the judge said. "I'm going to insist on it. Right away."

  "I'd like to sit in."

  "I'd like you to."

  "Then it's set."

  After I left the mansion, I headed down to Town Hall to take care of my regular business.

  Rockville Town Hall is a beautiful old brownstone building with lots of high windows and a turret with a conical roof on one corner.

  My first stop was the town planner's office, where I spent a few minutes schmoozing with the assistant planner, asking her what the developers were like for the new kilotower (they were fancy designers from New York City looking to build a model project that they could duplicate all over the Northeast).

  Next I popped in on Mayor McClean, who wasn't around, but his secretary said he'd been getting calls about the kids painting graffiti on the old Amerbelle mill up the hill from downtown—they were afraid it was gangster stuff—and he was down at the police station.

  Upstairs in the Town Hall is the old Grand Army of the Republic Hall. It used to be just a Civil War museum, but a few years ago some kid from the high school put in a modern history exhibit—a big wall screen with an animated map of town that showed how it grew from the little collection of textile mills here in the center, to the suburban sprawl of subdivisions and strip malls, and then shrank back to the center with its big towers. You could zoom in on the neighborhoods and watch them turn from farms into homes, with kids in the yard and dogs and cat running around, or you could watch people zipping back and forth from place to place. What you had a hard time doing was pulling yourself away from the screen before it finished cycling through two hundred years of high-speed change.

  But I managed to pull myself away anyway and headed on to the Inquirer office.

  The Rockville Inquirer used to be a real newspaper with printing presses and advertisers and a whole network of carriers who rode their wheelies around after they got home from school in the afternoon, throwing the papers onto porches. That was when there were porches.

  Vince Hardy, my boss and editor, had worked there when it was still like that. Back when he had hair. And one chin.

  "They used to tell us that as long as there were refrigerator magnets, there'd be newspapers," he told me once.

  "What's a refrigerator magnet?" I'd asked him.

  These days the printing presses are gone, along with the carriers. But we still have reporters and editors, text and pictures. You go online and you would think everyone is an editor—they all think they know what's going on and no one else does. But you can't be an editor
unless you have reporters—someone to poke around, ask people difficult questions, look under the rocks and into the shadows. And people can't do that online, which is why I have a job.

  We do have an office, upstairs from the pool hall, on the same block as the bar and the coffeehouse and the pawnshop. The wide windows open up on the heart of town, with a view of the train station and the Paper Mill Pond dam that rises above it.

  "Whatcha got for me today?" Vince asked when I came in, letting the door slam behind me and startling him out of a catnap.

  "Could be some true crime," I said. "And you know what that means."

  "Lobster and champagne," he said.

  "Only if it pans out," I told him. I gave him the details and he wrinkled up his endless forehead while he puzzled it out.

  "So you've got this retired judge in a coffee urn who thinks someone killed his house-mate?"

  "That about sums it up," I said.

  "And you're going back later to find out for sure?"

  I nodded.

  "Don't order the lobster yet," he said.

  "I won't," I told him. Once upon a time, pennies were these little copper coins that piled up in jars in your bedroom. I had six of those jars. Nowadays, the only thing they're used for is keeping track of page views. I get a few of them for each. The more page views, the more I make. And aside from college sports, nothing gets more page views at the Rockville Inquirer than true crime. Murder and mayhem. If it bleeds, it leads.

  Vince went back to his catnap, and I went to my desk, looked up some things about the New York developers who wanted to build a kilotower, called the cophouse to see what they knew about the Amerbelle graffiti, and checked on my stocks and bonds and sports bets (so far this morning, the sports bets were running ahead of the stocks, while the bonds were holding steady).

  Around noontime, I headed on down to the coffeehouse. It was crowded, but I still found space at the counter, and ordered up a grilled ham and cheese sandwich.

  The people in the shop were a regular bunch—plain-looking with lumpy faces and bad haircuts, wearing ill-fitting clothes and weird shoes. Ordinary people. The kind who read my stories every day so that they'd feel connected to the place they lived in some way besides always buying coffee at the same place. Of course, they were already connected to their world—everyone in the place was absorbed in their devices... phones, mindpads, headrings... linked in to social networks that spanned the globe. Or the block—I'm sure some of them were texting one another across the table. I watched a girl with blonde ringlet curls who'd synched her headring with a screen in the counter. You could see her face glow with a different color each time she switched pages.

  I wouldn't trade these people for all the smart designers from New York City. They were my people and I was one of them. It was my life's work to catalog the small details of their lives and put them on the record for everyone to see. It isn't noble and it won't leave an impact on the ages. But the life of a community is lived through the news—and I'm the guy who makes the things that happen into news.

  While I ate lunch, I wrote up what I'd learned about the kilotower designers. Someone on a Manhattan newsbrowser said they were financially overleveraged and they needed to get this building up in order to keep the money coming in, so that turned it into something more than a simple planning and zoning story.

  Then I got a call from the cophouse. They had a good idea who was behind the Amerbelle graffiti. I called a dispatcher friend and got him to give me a name. I called the kid. He was between classes at school. He told me he and his friends weren't gangsters, just bored after riding their wheelies up and down the hill too many times.

  I sent the stories off to Vince. I don't post my stuff directly. Asking someone to proofread their own copy is cruel, and he insists that an editor read all the copy just in case you do something stupid. But they'd be live within the hour.

  And when I was done, it was time to go find out what had happened to Bonnie's brain.

  The twins were set up in a large room with white walls, bright lights, and lots of tables and equipment and cables and screens and processors. And two mannequin automatons seated in rugged stands that revealed them from the waist up. They looked identical—curly red hair, bushy eyebrows, flat noses, wide mouths with thick lips, wide faces that seemed more malleable than human flesh, wearing black sweaters with high necks.

  I stepped into the room and jumped when they opened their eyes, both at the same instant.

  "I'm Peter," said the one on the left.

  "And I'm Paul," said the one on the right.

  "We're still learning how to speak well," Peter said. "So don't talk like my brother."

  "And don't talk like my brother," Paul said.

  They looked at one another, smiled and winked.

  I had to admit I was impressed.

  I'd read up on these two. Ordinarily, artificial intelligence is mostly an act. It's a preprogrammed set of responses designed to fool the eye. The responses are normally keyed by apps that may not even be located in the same place. A voice-mail bot answers a question down the road. Another one picks up from somewhere in India. An accounting app in Redmond finishes up with a long interview. And you never know whether the three of them together could pass a Turing Test.

  But Bonnie Bannister had set out do something different. She wanted to make stand-alone AIs, self-contained and complete, with their own self-teaching algorithms and an interface that could convince the unwary that there was someone—or some thing—at home inside the box.

  So far, they seemed convincing. But I'd been watching them for less than a minute.

  "Boys, this is Ben Adams," announced the judge, speaking from somewhere overhead. "He's a reporter and he wants to ask you a few questions about Bonnie."

  "Pleased to meet you," said Peter.

  "Likewise, I'm sure," said Paul.

  While Judge Adams was with us virtually, I was also accompanied by Abigail and Gaby. Abigail looked a little fresher than she had that morning, but her eyes were still puffy from crying. Gaby looked sweet and innocent... until she flashed an inviting smile my way.

  Abigail fussed over the equipment and fidgeted with the panels. Gaby poured two cups of coffee and gave me one. I went for the cream and sugar while Peter and Paul blinked and nodded and acted like real human beings. Even though they weren't.

  "So I'm here to talk to you about Bonnie's death," I said, jumping right into it. "You've been told about that, haven't you?"

  "Yes," said Peter. "And we are sorry for our loss."

  "Yes," said Paul. "Though we know that saying we are sorry for our loss is only what is expected of us under the circumstances."

  "I suppose it is," I said. "How do you really feel?"

  "We aren't sure yet," Peter said. "We do have a sense of loss. We know we will not be speaking to her any more."

  "But at the same time, Bonnie always told us that we should greet the loss of old friends with good humor," Paul said.

  "That is true," said Peter. "So Paul, I've heard that they're giving baseball players such strange names these days."

  "Funny names?" Paul asked.

  "Nicknames," Peter said. "For example, on the Red Sox, Who's on first, What's on second, I Don't Know is on third."

  "That's what I want to find out," said Paul. "I want to know the names of the players on the Red Sox."

  "I'm telling you. Who's on first, What's on second, I Don't Know is on third."

  "You know their names?"

  "Yes."

  "Then who's on first?"

  "Yes."

  "I mean the guy playing first base."

  "Who."

  "What are you asking me for?"

  They went on for several minutes, working the variations on the wordplay like old pros. Abigail looked shocked. Gaby was laughing uncontrollably. I was able to keep my amusement under control, but I had an uncle once who had a collection of old movies that he made his nephew watch with him, so I'd seen the "Who'
s on First" routine before.

  "Now, when the guy at bat bunts the ball—me being a good catcher—I want to throw the guy out at first base, so I pick up the ball and throw it to who?" Paul said.

  "Now, that's the first thing you've said right," Peter replied.

  "I don't even know what I'm talking about!"

  They finished up the sketch, and Gaby and I clapped our hands loudly. Abigail folded her hands under arms and pursed her lips. She was taking things much too seriously, but it seemed to me that she must always do that.

  "That was very good," I said. "And it sounded like you were making it up as you went along. Not just reciting a recording."

  "Indeed," said Peter. "We are first and foremost language-processing systems. It is the essence of what makes one intelligent, Bonnie always said."

  "She sounded like a pretty sharp lady," I said.

  "Yes, she was," said Paul, but not with any emotion that I could detect.

  "So the night she died, what exactly happened?" I asked.

  "Her life support systems failed," Peter said.

  "And you were here when it happened?" I asked.

  "Good humor!" exclaimed Paul.

  "Yes, we were," said Peter. "We are never anywhere else."

  "So were you watching what was going on? Do you monitor these things? Keep a record?"

  "We were watching," said Peter. "We monitor important things. We don't keep a formal record beyond our memories."

  "So what happened?" I asked. "What do you remember?"

  There was silence. Neither Peter nor Paul twitched or blinked or even wrinkled a brow for a long moment.

  "I don't remember anything," Peter said.

  "I don't remember anything," Paul echoed.

  "Wait a minute," I said. "How could that be? Don't you remember everything you experience?"

  "Not at all," Peter said.

  "Bonnie wanted to be sure she could erase her mistakes," said Paul.

  "So she could order us to forget things," Peter said. "For a set interval of time. She did it quite a lot. I believe she did it when she said or did things that were embarrassing to her."