Half Life (Russell's Attic Book 2) (22 page)

Still, it felt like a long shot. A very long and dangerous shot, with a high probability that he was only drawing me in to try to double-cross me. And even if he wasn’t, I’d be ensnarling myself in a Mafia coup as a hired assassin, which did not sound like a position with a lot of longevity.

But considering my other options, or lack thereof…

“Hypothetically,” I said, “you have someone in mind you’d want to blame for this? I’m not going to take out Mama Lorenzo for you if it means this target on my back is going to become permanent.”

“Right! Of course!” Benito said, way too fast. Paragon of competence and forethought, this one. Fuck me. “Of course. Uh—the Madre, she has enemies. Many enemies.”

And fuck me twice. This was ridiculous. If there was one person I didn’t want to depend on in a plot against one of the most powerful women on the West Coast, that person was Benito Lorenzo. “Come up with a plan,” I said shortly. “I like it, I’ll think about it.”

“But this would solve all of our problems, for both of us—”

“I said I’d think about it. Come up with a plan that has a chance of working.”

I hung up on him and texted Cheryl’s phone the number for my permanent voicemail box, just in case Benito later had something worth saying to me. Then I popped the battery out of the phone in my hand in case he was already double-crossing me and swerved down the next off ramp. I needed to switch cars. And phones—I’d left the spares at Miri’s.

Shit.
Was
there a way I could use Benito’s hunger for power? A way that kept my back covered in case he was about to stab me in it?

I’d have to think about it while getting ready for the Arkacite meeting. Checker hadn’t been mistaken when he’d asked whether it was a good idea to be meeting Grant on her own turf—we needed to be prepared. Not that I was expecting anything to go wrong; Grant might have a hell of a lot of private security, but at the end of the day, Arkacite was a corporation. They lived in the civilized world, a place where people didn’t shoot each other on a regular basis. If she turned on us, her game plan would be getting us handed to the police.

Which we didn’t want to happen, obviously, but I didn’t think it was much of a concern. Grant would go a long way to protect Arkacite’s secrets, and she seemed as loathe to let the authorities in on this matter as we were. Compared to my other problems, the Arkacite meeting felt about as dangerous as going up against an aggressive flatworm.

But that didn’t mean I didn’t need a backup plan.

I thought about the Arkacite building schematics I had swallowed the night before. I had until nine a.m.

C
HAPTER 21

I
ARRIVED
at Arkacite at 9:12 the next morning and recognized Checker, Warren, and Pilar waiting for me outside in the plaza. As I approached, Checker detached himself from the group and came over. “Everything good?”

“What’s Pilar doing here?” I said.

He shrugged. “Eh, she wanted to come. They treated her like crap here; I figured she deserved to see them taken down a few pegs. Besides, you never know when it might be useful to have someone on our side who can call them out if they try to bullshit us.”

He did have a point. But…“Wait. Who’s watching Liliana?” I’d tried to get Arthur back, but he was still at Tegan’s.

“Nobody needs to watch her,” scoffed Checker. “I just disabled her movement capabilities for the moment.”

“You
what?”

“I’m joking! I’m joking. Calm down. Miri’s looking after her. She’s home for the weekend.”

I took a breath, unsettled by how strong my response had been.

“I made some noise about an abusive stalker parent and warned her not to leave the apartment or open the door, which she was frighteningly blasé about, by the way. My phone will get a ping if the security system detects anything.” He waggled the smartphone at me.

And thanks to Checker, Miri’s security was about as good as it was possible for a civilian apartment to have. Still, I would have felt a hell of a lot more comfortable with Arthur. Given Checker’s talents, I was less worried about the efficacy of Miri’s security system than I was about trusting Miri
or
Pilar, but it wasn’t like I had a lot of people on call to babysit a five-year-old girl.

Or something that looked like one. What I should have done was turn her off and lock her in a vault.

“In a few hours it won’t matter, anyway,” I said, more to convince myself than Checker. “We’re going to hash this out right now.”

“We hope,” said Checker.

“Yeah.” I fished into my pocket and pulled out a compact shape of rubber and metal about the size of my hand. “Speaking of, stick this in a pocket.”

“What is it?”

“A gas mask.”

“A
what?”
he yelped.

“It’s a contingency plan, genius. Next time tell me if you’re bringing an extra person.” I relented at the horrified look on his face. “We’re not going to need it. They’re a corporation, not a crime syndicate—the worst we have to worry about is them calling the police, and they won’t. They want to deal.”

He took the mask, fingering it nervously. “I hope you’re right.”

We all walked into the broad lobby together. It was remarkably quiet, with only the security guards at their posts and nobody else. Come to think of it, the plaza outside had been empty, too.

“Did they send everyone home just to meet with us?” I wondered aloud.

Pilar gave me a funny look. “It’s Saturday. I mean, some of the hardcore engineers still come in on weekends, but not many other folks.”

Oh. Right.

Three people waited by the elevators. One was Lau, wearing an exceedingly sour expression and a surgical dressing over the gash on his face. The other two were women. One was a heavy white woman with a drab fashion sense and the type of fluffy haircut only older women seemed to get; I guessed she was Grant. The other woman was much younger, had longer hair, and was far too thin, as if someone had wrapped a business suit around a pencil.

The security guard at the desk made an abortive movement as we walked by. Pilar’s stride hitched a bit, but the rest of us kept going and she hurried to keep up.

I led the way through the accessibility gate. When I went through the metal detector it went off spectacularly; I ignored it and marched up to the group by the elevators. “Grant?”

The older woman stepped forward. “Are you the person I spoke to on the phone?” She didn’t offer a hand, and her tone was not quite hostile.

I matched it. “Yes, I am. You already know Noah Warren. These are my associates.” I waved at Checker and Pilar.

Grant nodded at her people. “You and Mr. Lau have…met. Clarise Hryshchuk is the head of our legal team.”

“Good,” I said, “since I intend you and Mr. Warren to sign something by the end of this meeting.”

Grant’s face twitched.

“Shall we?” said the lawyer, looking back and forth between Grant and me. When neither of us answered, she stepped over and swiped a guest pass to call the elevator, her heels clicking on the lobby floor. “We have a conference room prepared,” she announced to us as we followed them in. Grant and Lau seemed disinclined to be civil; the lawyer glanced at them and shifted uncomfortably, transferring her briefcase from one hand to the other. I didn’t blame her. The tension was palpable.

As the elevator slid smoothly upward, Lau sidestepped closer to Pilar. “I knew you were up to something, you little sneak,” he said snidely, talking down his nose at her.

Pilar scooted backward so he was no longer in her personal space and turned to me. “Can I kick him in the balls, or will that mess everything up?”

Checker snorted with laughter. A vein started pulsing in Lau’s forehead.

“I’m normally not opposed,” I said. “But hold off for now.”

Lau and Grant glowered at us. The lawyer had a bizarre expression on her face, as if this sort of interaction was so far outside her realm of experience she didn’t even know how to react.

We made it to the conference room. I commandeered the side of the table facing the frosted glass door for my team, and the Arkacite folk seated themselves across from us. The lawyer opened her briefcase and took out some papers and a pen, as if she thought this was going to be a normal business meeting.

“Let’s cut the bullshit,” said Grant, making her lawyer’s eyes bug out. “We need the prototype back.”

Warren stiffened in his chair, his hands clenching on the edge of the table. The reaction could not have been more obvious if he had shouted. The tension in the room ratcheted up about a thousand notches.

“Okay!” I said, holding up a hand to give Warren pause. “Ground rules. For the purposes of this discussion, she’s a girl and her name is Liliana—all right, everyone?”

Grant’s mouth pinched.

Checker jumped in before anyone had a chance to boil over. “You have all of Denise Rayal’s notes and designs, right? And most of her team is still employed here. I’ve read the specs; you can build another, uh, another prototype. Why not let Mr. Warren keep his daughter? Why can’t he buy her off you or something?”

“The, uh,
Liliana
is privileged information,” said Grant acerbically. “Having it floating around out there while we develop for commercialization is unacceptable.”

I could feel Warren tensing even more beside me, the hurt and anger rolling off him in waves. “‘She,’” I said. “Let’s call her a ‘she,’ okay?”

“Well, we don’t need a reason to want—her—back,” said Grant. “If we don’t want to give away our own technology, that’s our decision, and stealing from us in this farcical attempt to leverage a deal is despicable.”

“So is taking a guy’s daughter,” I said.

Grant opened her mouth, then glanced at Warren and pressed her lips together.

“You’re also discounting the value of the data we’ve been acquiring from her extended trial,” put in Lau. “We have no way of predicting what types of responses we’ll get from an AI with machine learning algorithms of this complexity. After Liliana was activated, Denise Rayal led a team of seven engineers who built up an extended behavior study that this department has poured resources into for over a year. If we stop those observations now, we lose that year. Any other prototype would start at the beginning.”

“Come on,” I said. “What does Arkacite even want with this technology anyway? Why would anyone buy one?”

“She belongs to us regardless of whether you believe we would want her,” said Grant. “As to applications, they could be considerable. We have many avenues to explore.”

“Like what?” I demanded. “It
is
relevant here, because this is a negotiation and she has a value to you. I’m trying to figure out why that value’s not zero.”

Lau and Grant exchanged a glance. Her expression was still pinched, but after a moment she waved him on.

“Children who act realistically could help parents prepare for real childrearing,” Lau recited, turning back to us. “Some people might be inclined to buy human-like company as a companion, the way they might a pet—something to love, if they need or want that. Others might consider one of our products for certain specific tasks, if we could program them to be proficient—to be nannies or tutors for their children, tasks a computer might be capable of but be otherwise considered too harsh, or administrative positions that do not require human intellect but benefit from a human face. And if we could upgrade the Turing mimicry to approximate something close to an adult woman…well, there are less savory applications that could be very lucrative. The prototype is
very
valuable to us.”

“Wait, you finally created a machine that passes the
Turing test
and you’re going to reduce it to producing
sex dolls?”
cried Checker.

A slight flush rose up Grant’s neck. “Of course we are. Palatable or not, it’s an obvious market.”

“I dunno,” said Pilar. “If I could buy a hot guy who would know when to shut up and how to please a woman and I could keep him in a closet between times, I’d be all over that.” Everyone stared at her. She shrugged and pulled a face. “I’m just
saying.
It’s not a totally bad idea.”

Checker choked. “I—okay,” he said. “Point taken, and, yes, maybe the market for it is obvious, and I’ve always been as pro-kink as it’s possible to be, but—well, I’ve been literally forced to do a lot of self-reflection this past week, and I’m just saying. Maybe training all your customers to treat women as objects who only say what they’re programmed to is something you should at least
think
about?”

“Commercial applications are years away from development,” said Grant, a sharp edge in her voice. “We will consider all we feel we should. This is not the time for that discussion. Nor is it, frankly, any of your business.”

“Well, it sort of is,” said Checker. “If we’re concerned about the integrity of what you’re going to do with the technology—”

“I’m not concerned,” I cut in. Checker shot me an annoyed look, but I ignored him; the last thing I needed was for him to get into a knock-down drag-out with Grant and Lau about ethics. I’d made a solid career out of flexible morals. “I couldn’t care less what you do with your tech. That’s your call. I’m concerned about one little girl and her relationship with her dad.” Warren let out a quiet breath beside me. “Grant, you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t willing to shift a few inches. You said we’d cut the bullshit. What are you willing to give?”

Grant folded her hands on the table. “We would be willing to allow Mr. Warren to…uh, visit.”

“No.” Warren’s voice was so quiet I wasn’t sure Grant heard it, but I put a hand on his arm regardless, warning him back again.

“That’s not going to cut it,” I said. “How about this. Why can’t Warren live with her and you observe her at the same time?”

“We need to keep her in a secure, controlled environment, not off-site under someone else’s purview. Remember, we
will
go to the police if—”

“That’s not what I meant,” I cut in. “What if Warren lives in your controlled environment with her?”