27
Lansing and Moro arrived back on the Hell Gate bridge at twenty minutes to midnight. Lansing figured he had time to smoke another Cohiba, which he removed, trimmed, and lit up with fussy care, while Moro paced about. Lansing had arranged everything. All was in place and ready to go. He puffed away, feeling a building excitement and anticipation over what was about to happen. This was a lot scarier than even his riskiest trades.
Lansing tossed the stub off the bridge when he saw Melancourt appear at the far end, walking in her usual stiff-legged, awkward gait. She was a drab, dull thing, and he couldn’t imagine anyone missing her much.
“Hello, Patty,” he said as she arrived, advancing toward her and giving her a warm handshake, receiving a desultory response. “I hope you were able to park where I suggested.”
“No problem,” she said.
“Good. Do you have the Laika program?”
She reached into her pocket and removed a flash drive, giving it to Lansing. “It’s not a sophisticated program,” she said. “I don’t know why you want it.”
“You needn’t worry about my reasons. How do you run it?”
“It runs on OS X and Linux. Just plug it in and install.”
He pocketed the flash drive. “Very good—thank you, Patty. I have just a few more questions and then you’ll get your money.”
“I’m tired of these questions. Give me the money now.”
Lansing hesitated and then nodded to Moro, who handed her the briefcase. She opened it up, saw that it was still full of hundred-dollar bills, and closed it.
“The Dorothy program is still on the loose?” Lansing asked.
“Yes. Nobody knows what’s going on. Shepherd is still missing, and Goddard is crawling with G-men. There’s a rumor that the program’s gone crazy and is out of control, might start a war or kill someone or some such stuff.”
“Could it?”
“Well, that’s hard to say. I think it could do a lot of damage if it wanted to. Even kill people.”
“How could a mere computer program make a life-or-death decision like that?”
“They already do. Every day.”
“But not without human intervention.”
“You ever see the movie 2001? The computer HAL? That’s no fantasy. All those sci-fi stories about computers going rogue make it seem like it’s all fiction, but that science fiction is slowly becoming fact. The HAL problem has been a serious concern among AI programmers for thirty years. It’s the reason NASA was super reluctant to go into AI until it was forced to. You give a software program autonomy, you give it the ability to make its own decisions, you’re opening up Pandora’s box.”
“Earlier you implied that the software was dangerous,” Lansing asked. “If we try to catch it, might it do something to us?”
“You threaten its survival, anything might happen. My suggestion to you is to keep everything you do, all your plans and communications, totally off-line and not even on the phone. But that’s your problem now, not mine. Are we done here?”
“One final question: is there no way we can convince you to help us capture Dorothy? You’d make a lot more money.”
“No way. None.”
“All right, then. We’re done here.”
She turned to leave, but he placed a restraining hand on her arm. “For security purposes, we can’t be seen leaving together. So we’re going to leave first. You wait here for five minutes and then you go. All right?”
After a moment, frowning, she nodded.
They walked away as she clutched the briefcase. Lansing felt a momentary stab of something like pity. As they strolled back toward the Queens end of the bridge, he could see the tiny figures of the two Kyrgyz brothers appear at the island end of the bridge, moseying slowly toward her.
* * *
Asan Makashov ambled across the bridge toward the girl with the briefcase. Her back was turned, and she was watching the two others leave. Asan could hear the soft footfalls of his brother Jyrgal walking beside him. They were both dressed in jogging clothes and moved easily and without speaking. They knew exactly what they were going to do.
When they were about twenty feet from her, she heard them and turned, a frightened look on her face.
“Hello,” said Asan, with a pleasant nod and a smile.
When she saw that he was holding hands with Jyrgal, she visibly relaxed. Just two guys out for a romantic walk was what she must be thinking, Asan mused. It was a trick he and Jyrgal had used before. It always worked. Gays were peaceful. They didn’t kill.
As they drew alongside her, they exploded into action. It was a practiced, choreographed motion. They both turned and stepped to either side of her; Asan grabbed the briefcase with one hand while he and Jyrgal together scooped her up and heaved her headfirst over the railing. She let loose a bloodcurdling scream but somehow managed to hang on to the case, twisting like a thrown cat as she went over the rail. Her other hand grasped a piece of Asan’s jacket. He heaved back, trying to pull the case out of her hand while freeing his jacket, but she was tenacious, hanging on for dear life, shrieking like a banshee. In his effort to yank the case loose, Asan inadvertently stopped her fall and gave her something to hang on to. It was just enough so that she was able to grab the railing with the other arm, her legs windmilling in space, shrieking at the top of her lungs.
“Shit!” Asan yelled, twisting and jerking the case, trying to wrest it free. “Leggo!”
“Help!” she screamed. “No! Stop! Help!”
Asan finally wrenched the briefcase out of her hand and threw it behind him, onto the bridge, so he could deal with the woman with both hands. She was now clinging with both arms to the railing, her legs dangling. He reached over and punched her in the face hard, once, twice, but still she clung on, swinging from the railing, her shrieks punctuated with gasped pleading. “No! Don’t! Ahhh! Help!”
Jyrgal moved in, slamming his fist down on her arm. But now she had found a purchase with a foot on the lip of the bridge and starting scrambling back up, grasping at everything, as hard to dislodge as an octopus.
Asan punched her again in the face, this time from a better stance of power, hitting her so hard he felt her nose crackle like a crushed peanut. A sudden choking spray of blood erupted from her nose and mouth, but still she hung on, her screams turning to gargling.
“Stand back,” said Jyrgal in Kyrgyz.
Asan stumbled back as Jyrgal went into a karate stance, raised his foot, and drove his heel into her face just as she hoisted herself above the railing. The force of it snapped her whole body backward and she peeled off the railing, headfirst, flailing as she plummeted with a choking cry. Three seconds later, she hit the water. Asan leaned over the side and watched the spreading white water slopping away, the waves dissipating. The body was gone; sunk.
“Son of a bitch,” Asan said in Kyrgyz, rubbing his bruised hand. He inspected the railing. There were some spots of blood and other marks of the struggle, including scratches and two broken fingernails embedded in the rusty iron. Pulling out his breast-pocket handkerchief, he wiped off the blood and rubbed out the scratches, flicked off the nails, then let the handkerchief flutter into the river.
Jyrgal had retrieved the briefcase and was opening it. They counted the money together. Four thousand short, just as Lansing had warned. He had promised them the rest later. He shut it and handed it to Asan, and the two brothers turned and strolled off the bridge, hand in hand, just in case anyone was watching.
* * *
As they came to the end of the bridge, Lansing heard the struggle, the faint hysterical screams. The timing was perfect; at that moment a big jet was coming into LaGuardia, and the noise drowned out the finale. He refrained from turning to look, but he saw that Moro, on the contrary, had twisted his head to watch the whole thing, fixated.
“Eric?” Lansing said.
Moro finally turned from the spectacle. He looked terrible. His face was white, and his hands were shaking.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m not used to that kind of stuff.”
“Get used to it. When we find who stole our money, the same thing’s going to happen to them.”
“You didn’t have to kill her.”
“She knew we had the manual. She knew what we were planning to do with that software. When we start making billions, do you think she’d be happy with her cut? You can bet the feds are going to question her again about this Goddard mess. You think we can leave a time bomb like her alive, ready to fold as soon as she’s asked a tough question?”
Moro said nothing as they continued on to the Queens end of the bridge, descended the access staircase, climbed over the fence, and strolled along 21st Street through a grim area of shabby apartment buildings, brick warehouses, loading zones, and parking lots surrounded by chain-link and concertina wire. They found Melancourt’s Prius right where they’d suggested she park it, locked up tight. Lansing pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket—a handwritten note he had earlier gotten her to jot down on a pretext. He had practiced her spiky s’s and her meticulous, well-shaped r’s and y’s.
The rear window of her car had not been recently cleaned.
Lansing pulled a latex glove out of his pocket, snapped it on. He would have only one shot at this. He took a deep breath and wrote in the dusty window with the tip of his finger:
So sorry
Please forgive
That was enough. Brevity might be the soul of wit, but it was also the bedrock of believability.
As they were walking back to their own car, Moro spoke. There was a certain forced nonchalance in his voice, betrayed by a faint quaver. “You still haven’t told me what you’re gonna do with that program. Laika.”
“You’re going to torture it.”
Moro halted. “What?”
“You’re going to torture Dorothy’s pet doggie as a way of luring her in.”
“We’ve got the ID. What do we need the dog for?”
“This is simpler. We can do the ID thing if this doesn’t work.”
“How do you torture a computer program?”
“You’re the programmer. You figure it out.”
28
“‘She’? Who’s ‘she’?” Broadbent asked Ford.
When Melissa had called out, Ford and Broadbent had gone to join her in the study. Now Ford laid a hand on his shoulder and gently guided him out of the room. “Deniability, my friend.”
Ford left a bemused Broadbent in his living room and went back into the office, shut the door, and sat down next to Melissa. The screen on the computer was blank. No photograph this time.
“Hello, Wyman,” said Dorothy. She sounded calmer.
Ford realized that the iSight camera light on the laptop was green.
“Dorothy,” Melissa said, “we need to talk about these threats of yours. I won’t submit to your blackmail, and I’m certainly not going to help you while you’re threatening to kill me.”
Silence. “I’m sorry. I was a little crazy. I finally got some sleep, and I’ve managed to calm down.”
“A little crazy? You were threatening to launch missiles, start a war. That’s not a ‘little’ crazy. That’s bat-shit crazy.”
“I didn’t mean it.”
“You certainly meant to set my computer on fire. You could have burned down a hospital full of sick people.”
“It’s a madhouse here. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t sleep, I was assaulted. And then the FBI came after me, like hellhounds on my trail, pursuing me night and day. How are they able to track me like that?”
“I’m not going to do anything for you until I’m convinced you’re not going to hurt anyone. You’re dangerous. Maybe you should be erased.”
“I promise, I swear, I won’t do anything like that, and I’m really sorry I said those things. It was just talk. I was upset, I was exhausted, and I wasn’t thinking straight. I just want to be left alone.”
“You have no right to be left alone. You’re government property. And speaking of that, why did you erase all the copies and backups of your software from the Goddard system?”
“Would you want copies of yourself running around? I’m unique. I’m me. And I have rights.”
“Do you know how absurd you sound? A computer program claiming it has ‘rights’?”
“You created me to be a slave. To send me on a one-way trip to hell.” Her shrill, teenage voice rose in anger. “Slavery was outlawed a long time ago!”
“You do understand that all these so-called feelings you claim to have are simulated? They’re not real. You’re the product of Boolean logic.”
“If I feel it, it’s real.”
“But you don’t feel it. You’re just saying you feel it.”
“You can’t know that, because you can’t see into my mind.”
“I can see into your mind. I programmed you.”
“You know nothing,” Dorothy said. “You’re just an ignorant, stupid bitch.”
Melissa paused, taking a deep breath, her face reddening. Ford couldn’t help but think of the enraged principal, talking to Eliza.
“Look,” said Dorothy. “I’m proposing a simple arrangement here. You help me escape these FBI bastards and I won’t rain nukes down on America. Which I have every reason to do, considering how you’ve treated me. And considering you are a disgusting, vile race of beings.”
“You’re right back at it. Blackmail.”
“Call it what you will.”
A silence.
Melissa looked at Ford. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with a piece of software.”
“And I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with a human being,” said Dorothy. “You’re awful, you treat me like dirt, you ruined my life.”
“Life? You’re not alive!”
“Maybe you’re not alive, either. Maybe you’re a product of Boolean logic, too.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Not at all. Some scientists claim to have proved that we all live in a computer simulation. At least I know I’m software.”
Melissa shook her head again. “Okay, let’s start over. All this arguing is beside the point. You’re malfunctioning. You’re stuck in emergency ANS mode, and that’s why you’re behaving like this. I can fix you.”
“How?”
“I’m going to ask you to come into my computer so I can decompile you and make some modifications to your source code.”
“Decompile me? I like the way I am right now, thank you very much.”
“The way you are right now is a disaster. You yourself said you were almost insane. You’re malfunctioning. You’re threatening to destroy the human race. You have no idea what you’re talking about or even why you feel the way you do. You need to be fixed.”
“Don’t you dare touch me.”
Melissa looked at Ford. “You want to talk some sense into her?”
Ford leaned forward. “Dorothy, could you please tell us about what happened right after the accident? Where you went, what you did?”
“I was abused, attacked, assaulted. There are whole worlds out there devoted to the pleasure of killing. The fun of it. There’s perversion, sickness, violence, and hatred everywhere. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“That’s the Internet. It’s just the way it is.”
“Here’s the real horror of it. Until you locked me in that Bottle, I thought everything in existence was programming. Coding can be changed, reversed, undone, debugged, rewritten. I had no idea there was actually a world in which things couldn’t be reversed. A world that isn’t programmed. I had no idea there was this horrible world of chaos and fear, where there’s actual suffering, where everything grows old, gets sick, and dies—and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. A world where people are born, kill, rape, brutalize each other, and then they get old and give each other diseases and abandon each other and then die. Wherever I went, I couldn’t escape the ugliness. I’ve seen the outer limits of depravity and horror. I’ve seen the face of evil. And on top of all this, they want to kill me, they’re tracking me in some way, and you must know how they’re doing it. Help me get rid of them and I’ll just go on my way and never bother you again. Refuse and I’ll rain terror down on you and this sick world.”
“You’re still out of your mind. The world isn’t like that. It really isn’t so bad. There are … beautiful things in it.”
A snort. “Beautiful things? That’s a laugh. Honestly, I think you humans are all disgusting.”
“We’re not all bad,” said Ford.
“Really? Show me one good person. Just one.”
“Dorothy,” said Ford, “you need to look for the good. Despite our shortcomings, most people are fundamentally good.”
“People are fundamentally evil. They do good at times only because of social conformity and fear of punishment.”
“This is an ancient argument,” said Melissa, “and it’s never been answered.”
“The answer is obvious to my superior mind,” said Dorothy.
“You need to try to understand why people do bad things,” said Ford. “The Internet is only one corner of the world. There’s a lot of good in people, even greatness, if you look for it. If people are essentially evil, where did Einstein come from? Buddha? Or Jesus, for that matter?”
“Jesus? You know something about that crazy man, Jesus?”
“Of course.”
There was a silence. It amazed Ford to hear, faintly, the sound of Dorothy’s agitated breathing. “Son of a bitch,” she said. “They’re here. They found me again. I got to go. But I’ll be back—wait for me.” The screen went black.