Authors: Lincoln Child
“You’d given her a name by then?” Lash asked.
“I kept pushing myself, trying to expand her capabilities for carrying on realistic conversations. I’d type. She’d respond. At first it was just a way to encourage her self-learning. But then I found myself spending more time simply talking to her. Not about specific programming tasks, you know, but . . . but as a friend.”
He paused a moment. “Around this time I was working on a primitive voice interface. Not to parse human speech—that was still years away—but to
verbalize
its output. I used samples of my own voice. It started as a diversion, I didn’t see any real significance to it.”
The rush of words suddenly ceased. Silver took a deep breath, began again.
“I still don’t know why I did it. But late one night, when my coding temporarily hit some brick wall, I started playing around. I ran the voiceprints through a pitch-shifting algorithm somebody left in the lab: raising the frequency, fiddling with the waveform. And suddenly the voice began to sound like a woman’s.”
Like a woman’s
. Now, Lash understood why, when he’d first heard it, Liza’s voice had seemed familiar. It was a feminine re-creation of Silver’s own.
“And her personality?” Tara asked. “Was that yours, as well?”
“Early on, I thought that hard-coding personality traits into Liza would jump-start machine consciousness. I didn’t know anybody I could ask to volunteer. So I got some personality inventories from the psych department—just the MMPI-2, really—took the test myself, and scored it.”
Lash caught his breath. “What were the results?”
“What you’d expect. Uncomfortable in social situations. Superachiever mentality, driven by low sense of self-esteem.” Silver shrugged as if the answer wasn’t important. “It was an experiment, really, to see if personality could be modeled, as well as intelligence. But it didn’t get me very far. It was only later her neural matrix developed enough to retain a persistent personality.” Then he stopped speaking, and a stricken look crossed his face.
The look told Lash several things. Silver had been exonerating himself: describing his painful past, rationalizing his crimes. It was the standard pattern. Soon he’d shift to the crimes themselves and what led up to them.
And yet something didn’t fit. Silver’s expression, his body language, still screamed
conflict
. That time should have passed. He was deep into his confession. Why was he still conflicted? Was he, even now, undecided about turning himself in? This did not fit the pattern at all.
“Let’s move on to the present,” Lash said in a calm, matter-of-fact voice. “Want to tell me what happened with the supercouples?”
Silver started pacing again. He remained silent long enough for Lash’s guarded elation to ebb away.
When Silver finally spoke, he did not look at Lash. “What you want to know began when I founded Eden.”
“Go on,” Lash said, careful not to let his voice betray anything.
“I’ve told you some of this already. How Liza eventually proved herself capable of just about any calculation that business or the military could throw at her. I’d made enough money to choose her next direction myself. That’s when I chose . . . chose relationship processing. It was a huge undertaking. But I was able to team up with PharmGen. They were a pharmaceutical giant, they had enough seed money to fund just about any start-up. And their scientists developed the early psych evaluations I used for the matching algorithms. It was subtle work, probably the most difficult programming I’ve ever done outside Liza herself. Anyway, once the core programming seemed stable, I moved on to alpha testing.”
“Using your own personality construct,” Tara said.
“Along with several dummy avatars. But we quickly realized more sophisticated avatars would be necessary. The psychological battery was greatly extended. We went into beta testing, using volunteers from the graduate programs at Harvard and MIT. That’s when—” Silver hesitated. “That’s when I had my own personality construct reevaluated.”
The tiny room fell into a tense silence.
“Reevaluated,” Lash prompted.
Silver took a seat on the edge of the bed. He glanced up at Lash, an almost pleading expression on his face.
“I wanted my own construct to be as complete, as detailed, as the others. What’s wrong with that? Edwin Mauchly shepherded me through the process. That’s how we first met. He was still employed by PharmGen back then. The evaluation was painful, horrible—nobody likes to see their vulnerabilities exposed so coldly—but Edwin was the picture of tact. And he clearly had a visionary eye for business. In time, he became my right-hand man, the person I could trust to take care of everything necessary down
there
.” And Silver indicated the tower beneath their feet. “Within a year I’d bought back my interest from PharmGen and made Eden a private company, with its own board of directors. And—”
“I see,” Lash interjected smoothly. “And when did you decide to reintroduce your updated avatar into the Tank?”
The stricken look returned to Silver’s face. His shoulders slumped.
“I’d been thinking about it for a long time,” he said quietly. “During alpha testing, my avatar never got matched. I told myself it must be something to do with the crude dummy avatars. But then Eden got off the ground, the Tank filled with clients, and the number of successful matches began to climb. And I wondered: what would happen if I placed my avatar back in there with those countless others? Would I find a perfect match, too? Would I remain that guy all the girls recoiled from in school? It began to torment me.”
Silver drew in a deep breath. “Late one evening, I introduced my avatar into the Tank. I instructed Liza to create a back-channel, transparent to the monitoring staff. But there were no hits, and after a few hours I lost my nerve. I withdrew it. But by then the genie was out of the bottle. I had to know.” Silver looked up, fixing Lash with his gaze. “Do you understand?
I had to know
.”
Lash nodded. “Yes. I understand.”
“I began introducing my avatar into the Tank for longer periods. An afternoon here, a day there. Still nothing. Soon, my avatar had logged whole weeks in the Tank without success. I began to feel despair. I contemplated tweaking my avatar somehow, making it more appealing. But then, what would be the point? After all, it wasn’t so much the match itself—I would never have had the nerve to initiate real contact—I just wanted to know that
somebody
could care for me.”
Lash felt a ripple of shock, faint but uncomfortable. “Go on,” he said.
“And then, one afternoon in the fall—I’ll never forget, it was a Tuesday, September 17—Liza informed me of a match.” As he spoke, the pain, the anxiety, melted from his face. “My first feeling was disbelief. Then the room seemed to fill with light. It was like God turned on a thousand suns. I asked Liza to isolate the two avatars, run the comparison routines again, in case there was some mistake.”
“But there was no mistake,” Tara said.
“Her name was Lindsay. Lindsay Torvald. I had Liza download a copy of her dossier to my personal terminal, here. I think I watched her initial video a dozen times. She was beautiful. Such a beautiful woman. And so accomplished. She was leaving for a hiking trip in the Alps, I remember. To think that such a woman could possibly care for me . . .”
As quickly as it had gone, the pain returned to his face.
“What happened next?” Lash asked.
“I erased the dossier from my terminal, instructed Liza to reinsert Lindsay Torvald’s avatar into the Tank, and removed my own avatar. Permanently.”
“And then?”
“Then?” For a moment, Silver seemed confused. “Oh. I see what you mean. Six hours later, Edwin called to tell me that Eden had matched its first supercouple. It was something we’d theorized about, of course, but I never believed it would actually happen. I was even more surprised when I learned that half of the couple was Lindsay Torvald.”
Lash’s uncomfortable feeling returned. “And did that exacerbate things?”
“What things?”
“Your feelings of frustration.” Lash chose his words carefully. “Having Lindsay matched in a supercouple could only have added fuel to the fire.”
“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—some
thing
—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.”