She stepped back as the doll began to expand. It inflated rapidly, its arms and legs snapping out rigidly as they became round and smooth as sausages. As the smart frame used up all available memory, the torso also expanded, tearing apart the doll's dress and leaving ragged red and white squares of fabric stuck to the expanding plastic flesh.
The head ballooned outward, its facial features expanding like a logo on stretched rubber . . .
With a series of loud pops, the doll came apart. Arms, legs, and head separated from the torso and fell onto the meat couch. Bereft of the core frame that had maintained their visual integrity, the individual utility programs transformed back to standard USM icons: a joy buzzer, a small sledge hammer with a matte-black head, a simple black mask, and a smooth metallic hound dog with ruby-red eyes. The latter let out one last, mournful howl, then lay silent and still.
That was very clever.
The voice came out of nowhere and everywhere, just as it had before. It had the high-pitched chuckle of Build-It-Beaver, but the underlying tone was one of cheerful menace.
"Thank you," Timea said. Her heart leapt. She'd done it! She was communicating with the Al! But she couldn't see it. Couldn't get a sense of its programming. And that meant that she couldn't tinker with that programming. Drek!
What you did was also very naughty. You ought to be punished.
Timea gulped. "No, wait!" she protested. "Tell me why it was naughty. That's a better way of teaching me, more effective than corporal punishment. Explain it to me. Make me understand."
Frosty worked on that smart frame for a long time. Now that you've broken it, he'll have to access the Mitsuhama
pagoda himself in order to complete his mission. And that will be dangerous.
"Who is Frosty?" Timea asked.
One of my children.
"An
otaku?"
Yes.
"So you care about your children?"
Care?
There was a millisecond-long pause. Then the voice continued, speaking in a monotone as if reciting from scrolling text.
Care: a feeling of anxiety or concern; worry. Watchful regard or attention. To have or show regard, interest, or
concern. To feel interest concerning; also to have a fondness for; to like.
Another pause.
I
understand this verb-construct, but no longer experience it. I no longer am affected by emotion. I have attained
a perfect state
—
a state in which emotion no longer corrupts my programming. I no longer. . . care.
Goodbye.
"Wait!" Timea shouted. "Lady Death says you're threatening to kill. . . to crash yourself. But you can't. If you do, everyone who is in resonance with you will die or be driven insane. And that would be very, uh, naughty. It would be wrong to harm the
otaku."
The otaku are no longer in resonance with me. I will not permit it.
"So the
otaku
can no longer access the Matrix?"
They can. They do. But I will no longer speak with them. I have shut them out.
Huh. Interesting. This "deep resonance" seemed to be a transformative experience, but not one that was necessary for day-to-day access to the Matrix by the
otaku,
once they had experienced it.
"What about all of the users of the Seattle RTG whose wetware you're tinkering with?"
They are still in resonance with me. They are being . . . perfected.
Timea shivered. Those users presumably included the children at her clinic. They were being violated—mind raped and abused with their own nightmares. The thought chilled her.
"What about us—about me? Aren't I in resonance with you right now?"
You chose not to be. You remained in resonance long enough to be transformed, but not long enough to be . . . perfected. You pulled away from resonance after I created the optimum teaching loop for you
—
a loop that would
have led to your ultimate perfection. Lady Death, and Dark Father, and Red Wraith, and Bloodyguts did the same
thing. All of you rejected me.
Timea thought she heard a note of sadness in the voice of the teaching program. And that made her think. Sadness? From an AI that could no longer experience emotion?
You hate me.
The voice of Build-It Beaver sounded as if it were choked with tears. There was even an accompanying sniffle.
"No, we don't," Timea said.
You don't love me.
Timea hesitated, trying to decide if the AI could read her mind—if it could tell that she was lying.
"Yes, we do," she said at last. "We love you."
Then come into deep resonance with me. Here . . .
The cartoon figure of Build-It Beaver materialized in front of Timea. Instead of a hard hat it wore a bloodstained surgical cap. The tools hanging from its belt were scalpels, saws, clamps, and rib spreaders, all crusted with brownish stains. The beaver extended a paw to Timea.
Take my hand.
Timea was back in the school corridor with its multitude of locked doors, faced with a choice of the blindingly bright light at one end or the horror-filled darkness at the other. Build-It Beaver leaned out of the light, its fur on fire, extending a blackened, oozing paw. From out of the darkness at the other end of the corridor came a figure that was even more terrifying—an amorphous blob that Timea somehow
knew
was a human fetus.
The aborted fetus of her son Lennon.
The blob extended a protrusion that might have been an arm.
Mamaaa! Hold my hand, mama!
Timea backed against a wall, trying to press herself into it, through it.
"Nooo!" she moaned.
The two horrors closed in on her, trapping her between them.
Take my hand.
Mama!
Closing her eyes, Timea steeled herself. Then she grasped both the blackened paw and the bloblike appendage at once—and entered deep resonance for the second time.
If she was going to save the kids at the clinic, she had to keep the lines of communication open—had to keep trying to convince the AI that it shouldn't kill itself.
She just hoped she wouldn't kill herself in the process.
09:54:31 PST
Dark Father stared at the knee-deep sea of papers that surrounded him, filling this datastore from one horizon to the other. He'd been wading through them for what seemed like an hour, randomly testing his decrypt utility on one document after another. Whatever scramble IC was protecting these datafiles, it was tough.
The "sky" overhead seemed to reflect his mood of frustration. Angry red clouds roiled against one another, sparking flashes of laser-sharp, perfectly zigzagged lightning whenever they touched. The air smelled of ozone, making Dark Father's bony nasal passages itch.
Lady Death's browse utility hadn't made any headway on the datafiles, either. The winged microphones hovered uncertainly over the jumble of papers, bobbing down as if they were about to settle, but then rising up again to circle once more.
Dark Father stooped and picked up one of the documents, then turned it over in his hands. It looked the same as all the others: a death warrant, written in English on one side and Japanese on the other. Between Dark Father and Lady Death they could read both languages, but the document itself was written in legalese—an idiom that only lawyers could truly understand.
Dark Father, with his years of corporate experience, should have been able to puzzle out a proper legal document.
But the bulk of the text was gibberish—words strung together without meaning. The only parts that were in proper English were the "Death Warrant" heading at the top, the line below it that named Psychotrope as the accused, and the charge: "Crimes Against Nature." The main body of the text under these three lines was scrambled, as was the signature of the creator of the document. But part of the address at the bottom of the page that Dark Father held was readable: Divisional Headquarters, Fuchi North-west. Embossed beside the address was the five-pointed star that had been the logo of the Fuchi corporation before its fragmentation.
Odd, that the scramble IC had left the office of origin and corporate logo intact. If a decker were searching for paydata, either could be a flag that would lead the decker straight to this file.
Wait a moment. The address . . .
Dark Father rummaged through the knee-deep papers, picking up one after another in rapid succession. He heard a rustling noise beside him as Lady Death approached.
"Have you found something?" she asked.
"I'm not sure," Dark Father answered. He held out a second document that also bore a legible address. "Do you see the words at the bottom?" he asked.
Lady Death nodded.
"Hai"
He turned the death warrant over, revealing the side written in Japanese characters. "Is the address also readable on this side?"
Lady Death nodded again.
"Hai.
'Fuchi Industrial Electronics, Computer Science Division.' "
"Look for others that you can read," Dark Father directed.
Lady Death frowned. "But what will—"
"Just do it," Dark Father ordered curtly. He was getting tired of this. He was used to having his assistants jump to his bidding. He expected this girl to do the same. If Lady Death wanted to get out of this nightmare, she'd better shape up.
She did as she was told, and began scanning the files.
Dark Father worked beside her, sifting through them as quickly as he could.
A short time later, they had discovered a pattern. The majority of the addresses were corrupted, but wherever the word "Fuchi" appeared, the address that it was linked to was intact. The name of the corporation also appeared several times within the body of some of the documents.
"There's another thing that remains uncorrupted," Dark Father observed. "The original Fuchi logo—the one still used by Fuchi Asia and Pan-Europa Fuchi. And not just on these documents."
He thought back to his earlier experiences. "The landscape in which I found the urn was a corrupted version of the Seattle RTG. Its system icons—the Mitsuhama pagoda, the Aztechnology pyramid, the Renraku tower—were all edited versions of the original icons. But the Fuchi star remained pristine, untainted by death imagery.
"And later, when my smart frame retrieved that bone-shaped datafile, the Fuchi logo on it was also intact. So was the logo on the file in the board room."
"Do you think the Fuchi logo is the trap door?" Lady Death asked. Then she shook her head. "No, that would be too easy."
"Not the trap door itself," Dark Father said. "But I would be willing to wager that the artificial intelligence that is running this program has been subject to some positive conditioning of its own. That's why it was unable to corrupt or alter the Fuchi logo, but instead left it intact wherever it appeared within this pocket universe. The AI has been conditioned to approach the original logo with reverence and respect. And so any copies of the logo that were uploaded into this pocket universe were left as is. I suspect that the AI couldn't bring itself to delete the files they were attached to, either. That would be destruction of corporate property. That's why so much paydata is just lying around, waiting to be scanned by anyone who cares to access it."
Lady Death shuffled the papers at her feet. "Except for the death warrants, which you can't decipher."
"Yes." Dark Father felt a twinge of irritation. He didn't like to be reminded of his failures.
"And the addresses on these files?" Lady Death asked. "Why are some scrambled, but not others?"
"That's the million-nuyen question, isn't it?" Dark Father answered.
Lady Death looked out across the sea of hardcopy documents. "It seems peculiar that the file we accessed earlier—the one where the FTL Technologies rep talked about using a trap door to destroy the Al—wasn't scrambled," she mused.
"That was probably because we found it within a Fuchi Asia database," Dark Father continued. "The AI couldn't bring itself to alter a Fuchi file."
"But it had the NovaTech logo on it—a corrupted version of the logo. You would think that the AI would show equal reverence for NovaTech, since it was formed out of what remained of what was left of Fuchi Americas after the corporate war. But maybe it is siding with the Yamana and Nakatomi clans, and trying to make Villiers lose face." She shrugged. "My father says the war was a good thing for Shiawase—that it has already increased our share of the market. But I think—"
She stopped speaking abruptly, then rapidly switched the subject. "Do you think we'll ever find the trap door?"
Dark Father stared at Lady Death. According to Red Wraith, she was just a teenager. But she was talking like a corporate insider. And she seemed to have access to state-of-the-art decking equipment and programs, despite the fact that she was just a kid. A rich kid, as Dark Father himself had been, once upon a time.
A suspicion was dawning.