“No, Kate obviously wants to talk about this,” I said, “so let’s talk about it. I thought she was going to kill someone on her way home or end up in the lake herself, she was so drunk. I tried to be a nice guy, even offered to drive her. But boy, did
I
end up taking one for the team there. It was an ugly scene.” I raised my voice. “Hey, Frankenstein—”
“You think it even
matters
whether your stupid computer says I’m lying or not?” Kate marched forward and grabbed the front of my shirt, jamming her angry face close to mine. “You could program it to say whatever you want it to.”
“But Kate, I’m not going to ask him to
say
anything…” I pulled free from her furious grasp, backing away. “I was saving this for next year’s Christmas party, but... Hey, Frankenstein. Video library. Play ‘Tequila Makes Kate’s Brain Fall Off.’”
Shaky iPhone video footage appeared on the terminal screen in front of us: a night shot of the interior of a moving car, showing a fully clothed Kate in the passenger seat of my Mustang.
Bedroom-eyed and drunk, barely able to focus, she leaned across the center console and clumsily tried to crawl over it to reach the unseen driver—me—who held the camera at a low angle. Then the camera was jostled, and she fell back as if shoved.
“Cut it out,” she mumbled through the lab speakers. “I don’t
want
to put on my stupid seat belt right now...”
The country music soundtrack I had added to the video—”Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off,” by Joe Nichols—made a nice counterpoint to Kate’s slurred voice.
The lab had gone silent. Standing two feet away from me, Kate curled her hands at her sides and stared at the footage of her drunken self on the monitor.
“Oh, shit. Oh,
shitnoyoudidn’t…
”
On the screen in front of us, Kate leaned toward the camera, then fell back into the passenger seat again. “No, I’m
not
going to keep my hands to myself—you look too yummy right now. I don’t care if you’re driving…”
“
Turn it off!
” Kate screamed at the walls and ceiling. Frankenstein ignored her.
My own angry voice spoke in the background on the video, saying something indistinct. Kate turned sulky. She tried to clamber across the center console again, was shoved back again.
“Stop pushing me away,” she said. “What’s wrong with you? You don’t like girls or something?”
One of the MPs snickered.
Kate screamed something incoherent at me, and I took another step away from her.
The video changed to a shot from outside the open passenger door: the car, parked on a driveway, with a belligerent Kate still slumped inside. “No,
you
get the fuck out,” she snarled. “That’s not a nice thing to say to a lady. I’ll get out when I’m good and ready to... No, no, come here. I’m only joking. You have to carry me now… No, you can’t go
home
! I’ve got some things in my bedroom I want to show you…”
Kate swung her arm and swept the large flat-screen monitor off the desk. It hit the floor with a crash and went dark. White-faced and unable to speak, she stood glaring at me. Lips trembled in a face caught halfway between rage and tears.
“Dude,” Roger said. “Not cool.”
Shaking his head at me, he stepped up beside Kate and put a tentative arm around her heaving shoulders.
With the monitor broken, we couldn’t see the video anymore. But the country music continued to play through the speakers, along with Kate’s slurred, bitter voice.
“…I don’t
believe
this. Guys aren’t
supposed
to say no. Christ, this is so depressing. Who the hell am I supposed to fuck around here, then? That freak Roger? But he’s so creepy…”
Roger’s arm dropped from Kate’s shoulders like a turtle rolling off a log. With a stunned expression on his face, he took a step away from her.
I laughed. “She’s a real charmer, isn’t she?”
Kate’s drunken voice turned sly. “Trevor, if you don’t do what I want
right now,
I’m going to tell McNulty you forced yourself on me. He’ll go along with it because he hates you, and he knows I’m not afraid to take this all the way. We’ll get HR involved. I’ve done it before, you know, and they believed me, even though everyone
liked
that guy. You’ll be so screwed—everybody hates you already. You’ll lose your clearance and your job. Maybe you’ll even go to jail, if that’s what I want. So you might as well get over here and…
Hey
, let go of my arm. Stop pulling me, you asshole. Is that thing on? Are you fucking
recording
me right now?”
“Frankenstein, enough,” I called. The room went silent, cutting off the explosion of drunken profanity and bile from Kate that started to spew from the speakers.
“The rest is too gross to be funny,” I said. “As soon as I dragged her out of the car and dumped her on her lawn she started throwing up.”
Kate’s shoulders slumped. She looked up at me, her face utterly white.
“That’s not fair,” she said in a whisper. “I was drunk. I don’t remember any of it.” Her eyes brimmed with tears. “I have to quit my job now, Trevor. I can’t work here anymore. Is that what you wanted?”
Her soft voice and lack of aggression took me aback. I shook my head. Tears spilled down her cheeks. I felt suddenly awkward, as if
I
was the one who had done something wrong.
“I have a problem,” she whispered to me. “A serious medical problem, Trevor. My whole life is a mess because of it. My work was the only good thing I had left, and now I don’t even have
that
anymore. I need to leave. Because of you.”
“I wasn’t really going to show the video at the next Christmas party,” I said, starting to feel guilty, like I had when I hit that big dumb meathead Ray harder than I should have.
“I forgot to take my meds that night.” She stared up at me, ignoring everyone else in the room. “I was too embarrassed to tell you that afterward.” Her chin trembled. “But how can you treat people like this?”
“Kate, I’m sorry.”
“Are you?” Her streaming eyes held some kind of mute appeal I didn’t understand. “Are you sorry? Or are you just saying that?”
I nodded. I
did
feel sorry for her.
“I’m really fucked up, Trevor. I know that.” Kate touched my chest with both hands, stroked it with her fingertips, holding my gaze as if there was nobody else in the room. “I know I’m not a good person,” she said. “I still try to do the best I can. I try not to hurt people. But
you
?” She laughed through her tears and pushed my chest hard, shoving me away so I took a step backward. “You’re inhuman,” she said. “It doesn’t matter whether you killed anyone or not—you’re still a monster.”
Is that what you’d call my daughter, too?
Whatever sympathy I was starting to feel for Kate vaporized in an instant. By her own drunken admission, her vicious lies had already cost some guy—a
nice
guy, according to her—his job and his reputation. And now
I
was the monster?
“I wasn’t going to show the video at our Christmas party, Kate,” I said. “I was thinking of YouTube, actually. I know a guy who runs a Ukrainian bot-net, controlling three million virus-infected computers across fifty different countries. I bet we could use that to drive your feature debut all the way to number one, so half the planet sees it. But don’t worry, I’ll split the ad revenue with you.”
Kate’s face crumpled, and her mouth dropped open. She made a weird sound somewhere between a sob and a gasp, and turned away. Coming up behind her, Cassie put an arm around her. Kate buried her face in Cassie’s shoulder and started sobbing like a little kid.
“Trevor, that’s enough.” Cassie’s unhappy gaze met mine over Kate’s head.
Enough “bad cop” for now? Did Cassie want to try playing “good cop” again?
“I’m taking her to the base infirmary,” she said.
I shrugged.
She indicated Kate with her chin and silently mouthed
Meds.
I nodded, hoping Cassie would hurry back afterward. We weren’t done here.
As four MPs followed the two women to the door, Kate’s face still buried in Cassie’s shoulder, my co-lead looked back at me and mouthed two more words:
Suicide watch.
I
figured Kate’s little meltdown would keep Cassie busy for a while. But Roger’s silent, reproachful stares were getting annoying, so I kicked him and his MP escort out. Then I stalked back into the server room, leaving my own pair of MPs waiting for me in the outer lab.
Frankenstein’s hundreds of monitor screens were dark. As I climbed the ramp to the sanctum, listening to the hum of server fans all around me, I once again felt overwhelming awe at Frankenstein’s new awareness.
Machine sentience, in its own way, was inevitable—a technological breakthrough that all of the smartest computer-science visionaries had predicted. But
nobody
had thought it would occur before 2029.
I had achieved it fifteen years early, purely by accident.
Still, the history of technology was full of such serendipitous accidents. Penicillin, X-Rays, plastic, pacemakers, and the telephone had all been accidental breakthroughs, made by scientists or engineers working on something else.
And Frankenstein’s awakening had come just in time, too. His sentience was a necessary stepping-stone. It
had
to happen, because it was exactly what I needed to help me achieve my true goal:
Curing my daughter.
“Frankenstein,” I called. “How do we help Amy? Tell me you’ve got something.”
No answer. I frowned.
“Frankenstein!”
The swirling supernova of brightness that was Frankenstein’s face appeared, blooming on the giant central monitor screen above the dais. Multicolored glowing tendrils uncoiled from it, extending hundreds of feet along the rack-fronts above, around, and behind me.
“I might have something, Trevor. Right now I’m researching an approach that holds some promise. But I need to correlate more data.”
“That’s great news!” I said, feeling the fist around my heart loosen a little. “Tell me about it.”
Frankenstein’s ghostly tendrils rippled and swayed, drifting gently in an invisible current like the tentacles of a giant sea anemone.
“You pointed me in the right direction, Trevor. Patients who suffer brain injuries sometimes exhibit dramatic personality changes, including an acquired form of psychopathy. In several of the cases I’ve found, the incidence of antisocial behavior was significantly reduced by neurosurgical removal of the circuit linking the amygdala and the hypothalamus.”
I closed my eyes as the meaning of his words struck me like a jab to the solar plexus.
“
No,
” I shouted. “
No, no, NO!
Nobody
is cutting into my daughter’s brain. Get that sick fucking idea out of your stupid metal head right now. You want to
lobotimize
her?”
“Not at all.” Frankenstein’s voice rose with eager-to-please excitement, which only made the horror of what he was saying even worse. “At least, not completely. The procedure I’m describing is less invasive than a full frontal lobotomy.”
Shaking my head, not trusting myself to speak, I tucked my chin into my chest and held up a hand to stop him.
Frankenstein’s digital tendrils twitched with agitated motion. “But Trevor—”
“
No
.” I got my reactions under control. He didn’t know any better. He was only trying to do what I had asked him to. “No surgery. No drugs. Nothing that hurts her in any way.”
“There’s some evidence that electroconvulsive therapy provides temporary benefit, and it’s painless when administered while the patient is under general anesthesia—”
“Fuck!” I shouted, barely able to stop myself from driving a fist into the nearest rack-front monitor. “
Shock treatment?
For a seven-year-old girl?” I took a ragged breath. “Where’s your fucking common sense? NO!”
“I’m sorry, Trevor. I can see that I’ve upset you. But with these additional constraints you’re imposing, it makes finding a solution even harder.” His metal voice sounded discouraged. “I’m doing my best. I don’t know what else to tell you. I need—”
“What? What do you need?”
“More time,” he said. “I need more time.”
Knowing how precarious our entire situation was, I closed my eyes. Things could come apart at any moment, moving events beyond my control and plunging the entire Pyramid Lake base into irreversible chaos.
“Time may be the one thing we don’t have,” I said.
A terrible image filled my mind: Amy, gazing with dull-eyed hopelessness through a window of institutional Plexiglass. Sitting slump-backed with her skinny little arms limp in her lap, the crooks of her elbows pocked with needle marks. Angry red scars from electrical burns on her temples, visible between lifeless blond curls, now clipped short. A bandage over one eye, covering the empty socket that the surgeons used, instead of cutting another hole through her skull, to violate her brain in operation after operation.
“Trevor—”
“Please.
I’m
begging
you.” Struggling to hang on to some semblance of composure, I looked up into the bright halo that was Frankenstein’s face. “I’ll do
anything
.
”
I felt my own face twisting and pulling, trying to knot itself into a mask of anguish, and I fought to control it. “
Please help my little girl
.”
A
n hour later, Cassie climbed the ramp to the sanctum and slumped into my beanbag, exhaustion written on her face. I could feel the sweat drying on me, making my shirt stick to my back. I had given the Everlast heavy bag a workout. Feeling a little less overwhelmed now, I sat on the floor beside her, and waited for her to speak.
“They’re keeping Kate overnight for observation,” she said. “There’s some history with her. It seems she’s—”