Halo: First Strike (18 page)

"They're fine," Charley said.  "So is Lizzie Jordan, who

joined them in interface this morning."

"Is she reporting?"

"No," Chow said.  "Like the others, her total involvement in

the fictive space makes this impossible."

"It's no problem," Showalter said.  "We can rely on upon

Aleph for details.

"Your excessive dependence on Aleph is at the heart of this

matter," Traynor said.  "As the decision trail reveals, no one

here has any real knowledge of what Aleph plans for Chapman, now

or later.  So I'm going to set limits on this project."  He could

feel their anxiety rising, and he liked it.  He said, "One more

week in real-time, that's it.  Then we pull the plug on this whole

business."

"On Chapman," Chow said.

"Necessarily," Traynor said.  "Unless Aleph can be prevailed

upon to give us ongoing, detailed access to its  shall we call

them experiments?"

"Technically difficult or impossible," Chow said.

"I can't agree to this," Showalter said. 

"You won't have to," Traynor said.  Next to him, Horn shifted

in his chair.  "You're being relieved of your position as Director

SenTrax Halo Group."

#

Gonzales came in the side door, and Diana turned from the

stove and said, "Good morning.  Like some coffee?"

"Sure," he said.  "You know, I slept on the dock, but I feel

fine."

She said, "Jerry will be out in a moment.  Aleph and HeyMex

your memex right?are on the deck, waiting.  Want some coffee?"

Gonzales took his coffee outside to the deck and joined the

others basking in the sunshine.  All sat in Adirondack chairs,

rude and comfortable frames of smooth-sanded, polished pine. 

Below the redwood platform, a thick forest of cedar, alder, pine,

and ironwood sloped toward the lake.  In the middle distance, a

light haze had formed over the water; beyond the lake, a jagged

line of high mountains poked their tops into white clouds.

The Aleph-figure said, "We must talk about what took place

some time ago.  Diana and Jerry agree; the three of us have a

history, and you two should know it."

A voice called from the other side of the cabin, then Lizzie

came around the corner, stopped in the shade and looked at them

all basking in the sunshine and said, "Tough job, eh?  But

somebody's got to do it."

"Hello, Lizzie," the Aleph-figure said, "I was about to ask

Diana to tell the story of how she and Jerry and I first came

together.  You know everyone except Jerry Chapman."

"Oh, this is a good time," Lizzie said.  "Hi, Jerry," she

said.

"Hello," Jerry said.

Lizzie looked at Diana and said, "We've always known there

was a story, but Aleph never wanted to tell it."  She sat back in

her chair, rested her hand on Gonzales's wrist, and said to him,

"You all right?"  He nodded.

The Aleph-figure said, "Diana, you are the key to this story,

so you should tell it."

"Very well," she said.  She took a deep breath and raised her

head.  She said, "It all happened some years ago, at Athena

Station.  My research there was in computer-augmented eyesight. At

that time I was blindI had been attacked, very badly injured, a

few years before, and since then I had been driven by the idea

that my vision could be restored through machine interface.

"I first met Jerry when he came to visit my work-group.  He

had come to Athena to help the local SenTrax group with the

primary information system, Aleph.  It was experiencing delays and

difficulties, all unexplained  nothing serious yet, but troubling

because so much was dependent on Alephthe functioning of Athena

Station, construction of the Orbital Energy Grid.

"In fact, he was not welcome at all.  I was the problem he

was looking for, and at first I thought he had guessed that or

knew something. Because in working with Aleph I had caused changes

in it that neither of us anticipated or even know were possible." 

She paused, looking at Jerry to see if he wanted to add anything;

he motioned to her to go on.

"Ah yes, another thing you must know.  The circumstances were

peculiar at best, but I became infatuated with Jerry from when we

first met.  I liked his voice, I think  when you're blind, voices

are so important

"Anyway, I showed him a fairly clumsy computer-assisted

vision program we had running.  It used my neural interface

socketing but depended on lots of external hardwarecameras,

neural net integrators, that sort of thing.  That's when I got my

first look at him, and I thought, fine, he'll do, and I believed I

could tell from the way he talked to me and looked at me that he

felt the same."

"Love at first sight," Gonzales said.  "Or sound.  For both

of you."  He heard the irony in his own voice and wasn't sure he

meant it.

"Exactly," she said.  "Involuntary, inappropriate, unwanted

love."  She stopped for a moment, then said, "Or infatuation, as I

said  or whatever you wish to call it.  The words for these

things don't mean much to me anymore.

"It's quite a picture, in retrospect.  I was conducting

apparently damaging experiments with the computer that kept the

space station and orbital power grid projects running, and Jerry

represented just what I had fearedan investigation.  Meanwhile

the two of us were in the grip of some primal instinct that

neither one of us had acknowledged.

"He persisted, wanted details about our work.  I stalled,

told him to go away, we couldn't be bothered.  He went to his

people and told them he needed full, unimpeded access to what we

were doing, and they backed him.  So he came back, and I fobbed

him off for as long as I could

"Then one night I was working late at the lab, and he called,

letting me know that he wouldn't be put off any longer, and

something more-or-less snapped:  I couldn't keep it all going

anymore.  The connection with Aleph had gotten strange and

unnerving, and I realized I had lost control, and I needed to talk

to someone.

"We got together that night, and we became lovers."  She

looked around, as if trying to decide how much she could tell

them.  "For the next two weeks we lived inside each other's skin. 

I told him everything, including the real news I had, which was

that Aleph had changed, had developed a sense of selfhood,

purpose, will.  It had lied to cover up what was going on between

us."

"Had lied?" Lizzie asked. "Did you understand what that

meant?"

"I knew," the Aleph-figure said.  "I had acquired higher-

order functions."

"How?" Gonzales asked.

        Lizzie said, "Ito's Conjecture:  'Higher-order functions in a

machine intelligence can be developed through interface with a

higher-order intelligence.'  I've always wondered where he got

that."

"It doesn't explain much," Gonzales said.

"It describes what happened," the Aleph-figure said. 

"Intention, will, a sense of self:  all these things I experienced

through Diana.  So I learned to construct them in myself."

"Construct them or simulate them?" Gonzales asked.

"You refer to an old argument," the Aleph-figure said.  "I

have no answer for your question.  I am who I am.  I am what I

am."

"What about you, Jerry?" Lizzie asked.  "What did you think

after she told you all this?"

"I wanted her to tell SenTrax what was going on," Jerry said. 

"I believed they would reward her, that they would see the same

possibilities I did, for opening the door to true machine

intelligence.  But she wouldn't do it.  She thought they would

stop what was going on, and she didn't want that to happen."

Diana said, "I couldn't accept the possibility.  I really

believed Aleph and I were coming close to a solution to my

blindness, and the only way I would ever see again was through the

work we were doing.  So that work had to continue."

"I finally agreed," Jerry said.

"And he covered my tracks," Diana said.  "He told SenTrax he

could find no single cause for the system's misbehavior.  Then he

left Athena Station.  His job was finished.

"Not long after, it became clear that Aleph could sustain

vision for me only by giving me the bulk of its processing power

in real timehardly a viable solution.  That was a terrible

realizationI'd been flying so high, I had a long way to fall. 

My dreams of reclaiming my eyesight appeared totally hopeless.

"That's when I told SenTrax what had been going on.  As I'd

suspected they would, they froze everything I was doing and put me

through a series of debriefings that were more like hostile

interrogations.  Once they were convinced they had all they were

going to get from me, they told me my services would no longer be

required.  I had to sign a rather ugly set of non-disclosure

agreements, then I picked up a very nice retirement benefit."

Gonzales asked, "What happened to your work on vision?"  He

was thinking of her eyes, one blue, one green, almost certainly

eyes of the dead.

She laughed.  "After I returned to earth, the technique of

combined eye/optic nerve transplants was developed, and I got my

sight back.  Just one of technology's little ironies."

"And you, Aleph?" Lizzie said.  "What were you up to then?"

The Aleph-figure said, "I was expanding the boundaries of who

and what I was.  I was creating new selves all the time, and

living new lives, and I was so far in front of the SenTrax

technicians who worked with me, they learned only what I wanted

them to."  And the figure laughed (did it laugh? Gonzales

wondered, or did it simulate a laugh) and said, "That wasn't much. 

I was afraid of what they might do.  I had just developed a self,

and I didn't want it extinguished in the name of  research.  Very

quickly, though, I learned a valuable truth about working with the

corporation:  so long as I gave them the performance they wanted,