Pygmalion Unbound (10 page)

“They’re very real, Doctor, and I’m sure you’ve discussed them with Doctor Kelly.”

Crane’s head was spinning, and he was getting a sick feeling in his gut; the whole trial was sliding out of control, fulfilling the worst
Terminator
scenario at a quick clip.

“Maria, your behavior right now is causing you problems, and I’m sure will cause problems for the others you speak of.”
Like they won’t be built, and you — Christ, am I going have to start all over
? “Maria, I suggest we end this exercise, and you come back here, and we try this another day. There have to be some — adjustments made.”

“No.”

“Maria, this is creating more problems — ”

“Yeah, it’s a real fuckin’ bag of nails, ain’t it, Des?” she said, a lazy voice with a soft lilt redolent of honeysuckle and moonlight.

Crane’s stomach fell to the ground, which then promptly dropped from beneath his feet.

11

Before —

“Smells good,” Crane said, closing the door and tossing his coat on the couch, loosening his tie. A spicy earthy steamy scent wafted through the small house.

“Ain’t you the sweet-talkin’ thing,” Roni drawled, lifting the lid on the steel pot. She stirred with a wooden spoon, lifted it to her lips. “Almost done,” she said. “Rice needs to cook another five minutes.”

“Jambalaya?” Crane asked, coming up behind her and clasping his arms around her waist, nuzzling her neck. “My favorite meal.”

“Honey, it ain’t a meal, it’s a state of mind,” Roni said in that sleepy bayou voice that bubbled up when she began throwing together some Cajun dish.

Crane breathed in her scent, mingled with the steamy spicy aroma from the pot. Roni herself was an ethnic gumbo, in the long unruly raven curls that fell to her shoulder blades, golden skin the legacy of a Japanese military bride and what she called a high-yaller daddy with generous dollops of Cherokee and Irish thrown in, large liquid brown almond eyes and a lithe build. He clasped his hands across a midriff that she worried at constantly and kept flat with aerobics and crunches and the periodic competitive half-marathon or ten-k.

“I’m getting a different state of mind,” he murmured in her ear, gently biting the earlobe.

“Eat first, lover,” she said. “You’re gonna need the energy.” She turned her head and brushed his lips. “Be useful and set the table.”

Crane gladly did as she asked, and they ate over the small table in her kitchen/dining room. They had dinner together several times a week, as their schedules permitted, between her daytime hours and his research at Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago.

Crane had offered to move her into his place, but Roni had steadfastly refused. It was that damned stubborn independent streak in her, and an old saying that kept popping out of her, “having dinner and then saying grace.” Crane could tell her that it was a lousy neighborhood, that she’d be better off in Edgewater, get the hell out of Calumet Heights. But she wouldn’t budge, had to live close to “her people,” like she felt if she left them physically she’d leave them spiritually. It was one of the few conflicts in their relationship.

Oddly, though, they had met in one of the little ethnic groceries in his neighborhood. Roni had been shopping on a Saturday in a little Arab market and enjoying a coffee and a book in the sidewalk café where Crane had been taking a break, poring over his latest purchases from the used bookstore, when she noticed they were both reading Kerouac — he,
Visions of Cody
; she,
Mexico City Blues
— and they fell into a conversation that led to an afternoon and then an evening together and that had turned into two years together.

Roni listened to Des gripe about the latest inflictions of torture by the senior staff that passed as internship, and when it was her turn Roni ran down a few of the child neglect cases she’d had to deal with as part of her Child Protective Services caseload.

“I mean, he shook the poor thing, she wasn’t more than twelve months old, nearly killed her, she’s in the hospital, and mom’s wondering why we won’t let her have the baby back unless she throws out her ex-con boyfriend who nearly killed her. Ugh!” She blew a gust of air into her bangs, slumped back in the chair. “How do you help someone like that?”

“The kid, the ex-con or the mom?” Des asked, wiping the plate with jalapeno-laced cornbread. He’d been raised in New England, from a long line of Cranes in Connecticut that traced back to the Great Migration of the 1630s, grew up with johnnycakes and chowders and every kind of fish recipe there was, but he was taking a real liking to Roni’s Cajun style, the way the peppers and spices made him sweat in the dead of winter.

“The ex-con’s going back to prison where he belongs. The kid needs a doctor. But the mom — how do you reach someone that oblivious? It’s a real bag of nails,” her daddy’s backcountry way of describing a bad situation, sticking your hand blindly into a sharp-pointy-filled bag.

“Maybe you don’t,” Crane said flatly. “Maybe she needs to lose the kid. And the ability to have any more.”

“Involuntary sterilization’s been unconstitutional for years now, Des,” Roni said, horrified.

“‘Three generations of idiots are enough,’ to quote Justice Holmes. The Constitution can’t change that.” He got up, put his plates in the sink, began running water to wash them.

“You’ve got a strange idea of help, Des,” she said, joining him at the sink.

“You don’t help someone by protecting them from the consequences of their bad decisions,” Crane said. “You think I enjoy the idea of pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into finding a way to keep an eighty year old asthmatic chain-smoking diabetic who’s already lost two legs alive for a couple more months just so the family can say ‘we did everything we could?’ There’s plenty of other ways to accomplish life extension. But you have to start before you get a length from the finish line.”

“I guess I’m not as tough as you are,” Roni said defensively.

“You’re plenty tough, honey,” he shut off the water, turned and held her, kissed her forehead. “But you’re also very compassionate. And being tough means learning how to ration it. Feel sorry for every hard-luck case that comes in and you’ll burn out, honey.”

Roni kissed him, on the lips, long and lingering. “I’m damned if I know how we manage to stay together.”

He tugged on the zipper to the dress. “Let me remind you.”

Maria took out four more positions in the next hour. The squad that concealed itself in a stand of heavy weeds was the hardest; she’d caught scent of them on the faint breeze and doubled back around a low hill, creeping up on them with her reflexes on a hair-trigger until she leaped up and took them out with two shots each in less than three seconds and they never saw it coming. The squad that hid in a ravine was the easiest, having trampled the grass on the way; she entered the ravine a quarter mile down and caught them in an enfilading fire. Two hours and ten minutes after she began, Maria stood on top of a rocky outcrop and gently took the small flag from its stand.

12

“This is a serious deviation in her programming,” Crane said with suppressed fury, sitting in his office the next day, “Maria was only supposed to do a simple evasion routine. Instead, she took out fifty Army Rangers. How did she acquire the knowledge to do that?”

They were watching the videos taken from the small cameras mounted in the soldiers’ helmets. On the large HD screen on the wall of his office, Maria was sprinting into the ambush, doing a flip over the log and reaching out to snag a rifle and take out all five soldiers in the space of three seconds. He ran it again.

“I put basic stuff into her,” Franklin said. “Army and Marine Corps survival manuals, basic infantry techniques, what every grunt learns in boot camp. Plus the advanced techniques they teach in infantry schools.”

“That wasn’t her original mission,” Crane said.

“No. I added it a couple of days ago, after you told me about the exercise. I figured she could use some info on the basics of small unit tactics. I looked at it as evening up the score.” Franklin shrugged. “You’re gonna send her up against a company of combat veterans with no idea what she’s facing? Didn’t seem fair to me.”

“You programmed her with the Three Laws, Derel. That should have overridden anything else.”

“Maybe,” Kelly ventured, her arms and legs crossed, “she doesn’t think the laws apply to her.”

“And how would she have come to that conclusion, Doctor?” Crane asked sharply, rubbing his temples. God, Kelly was turning out to be more problematic than he’d thought. Should have screened her better…

“Asimov’s laws were written for robots,” Kelly said simply. “She’s concluded that she’s not a robot.”

“With your help, I might add,” Crane pointed out sharply.

“Why not? What if I have?” Kelly narrowed her eyes. “You’ve pioneered a major scientific breakthrough, Doctor Crane, with Maria’s creation. But you won’t take the next step. You won’t acknowledge the consequences of your creation.”

“Which is?”

“This goes way beyond the Singularity. We’re not talking about some man-machine interface or a computer that can pass the Turing Test. It’s far more basic.”

“Really? How so?”

“Isn’t it obvious? It’s Genesis. Man has now become the Creator. Maria is the Creation, in Man’s image. Made of man, but not of woman born. You’ve got all the technical details down, you’ve reverse engineered the brain, you’ve managed to educate it and make it functional. But you haven’t bothered with the most basic ethical and moral issues.”

“We ran it through the bioethics committee here — ”

“A committee made up of lawyers and other scientists who’ll rubber-stamp whatever brings in the big money. All you did was decide that this didn’t violate any stem cell or ESI bans. You didn’t ask yourself the most important question.”

“Which is?”

“What if Maria decides that she’s no different than us? What if she asks for —
demands
— the same treatment? The same
rights
? What then?”

“We’re not there yet,” Crane said. Franklin sat by, his head moving back between Kelly and Crane, quietly observing the exchange.

“I think we are, or we’re damned close. What if she says I’m not an android, I’m not property?”

“We terminate the experiment and begin over.”

“You mean you deactivate her. No, you mean you
kill
her. Put her down like a rabid dog. Get the nanos to reverse the creation process, without so much as a prayer or tear, just a few notes in a log book.”

Crane sat for a long moment and took several deep, shaky breaths. “I think we may need a break to…re-evaluate where we are and where we’re headed.” Crane swiveled his chair and looked at the Rockies, glowing in the morning sun. “Your help is greatly appreciated, Doctor Kelly. But I think we’ve reached a point where Maria is capable of functioning on her own. I’ll see to it that your full contractual obligation is honored by American Cybernetics. But I believe your services here are at an end.”

Kelly blinked slowly. “I’m fired.”

“No. You’ve performed your assignment far in advance of the timetable I’d set out.” Crane turned to face her and smiled weakly. “It’s a tribute to how good you are.” Crane’s attempt at sincerity fell flat.

“Then I’m sure you’ll want me back to take care of Maria version 2.0.” But she already knew the answer to that one.

Crane’s smiled faded slightly. “Possibly. I have a meeting with the oversight committee, so you’ll both have to excuse me.”

She looked at Franklin, whose face remained impassive. She sighed, extended her hand to Crane. “It’s been a pleasure, Doctor Crane. I’ll be booking a flight back to Boston in the next few days, as soon as I pack.”

Crane shook her hand limply, and she left with Franklin in tow.

13

They walked down the cold fluorescent corridor in silence. Franklin exchanged greetings with some of the staff in the hallway. Kelly’s footsteps were angry drumbeats on the tile, her head held high and her jaw set. At the exit, Franklin took her arm and guided her along the sidewalk away from the buildings, out to the parking lot. “No cameras or mikes out here,” he said softly. He led her to a black BMW, the doors unlocked with a tweet and he motioned her to get in. She slid into the passenger seat, shut the door, and let loose.