Мэтт Рихтел - Dead on Arrival

At the door to the Project X building, Jackie, sensing something, turned to look behind her at the bike rack. There stood Adam wearing his yellow slicker. As soon as he saw her, he looked down. Then he peered back up and gave her a look she interpreted as a challenge of some sort. She looked one more time at Adam, found her better angels, cleared her throat, and turned inside. After passing security, she walked through the cavernous hall with scattered pods of desks and sixty-foot ceilings. It couldn’t possibly feel cramped in here, even with a dozen driverless cars on mounts, their wheels spinning as engineers put them through various simulations. Easy to get lost in here, which was fine with Jackie. She walked by unnoticed, not that she really knew anyone here, then behind the well-stocked kitchen, into the foyer that protected Denny’s office, where she was let through by a receptionist to the elevators. Key card, voice recognition to “B,” and a retinal scan and she let herself into the “lab.”

Anyone at Google who asked was told this room kept some internal servers, redundancies cooled by an alternate generator system, blah, blah, blah. Nonsense that fell on deaf ears. Not that the term “lab” was any more appropriate or accurate. The room downstairs was rectangular with built-in desk counters lined against the walls, computers at every second seat. A floor-to-ceiling screen hung on the far wall, receiving a bland Google logo from a projector mounted on the ceiling. Any accountant would be proud to work here. Denny sat in a chair at a conference table in the middle sipping tea. Jackie glanced at crumbs next to the button of his plaid shirt. She pulled out the chair where she usually sat. A blue folder sat in front of her.

“Take a look,” he said. “New formatting but same idea; AI mode on the X-axis, varied by its response time, and then on the bottom are individual responses. The dotted lines map response by key word and the bars by duration of interaction.”

So today they were doing the AI project. The idea was to develop and tweak new artificial intelligence modes and then map them against human response intensity and duration of interaction. They’d learned that certain words and fluidity of responses by humans could indicate the extent to which people thought the programs were “real.” Over the months, Jackie had found some interesting patterns but, on the whole, she couldn’t understand why this merited secrecy or was considered particularly valuable. Maybe the AI was that profound. She looked at the first piece of paper.

It caught her attention.

Could this be right?

She looked at the second, and the third. All similar results. She flipped through the pages again. Duration had spiked, the rhetorical measures were off the charts. But with some heavy zigzags. Her first thought was that something marked had changed in people’s responses to the computer. She wondered whether the study subjects had, for the first time, started to really be convinced that the program was another human being, not an algorithm. But the zigzags threw her off. Maybe people felt the computer was alive, then got confused, then felt connected again. Or maybe that was how people—

Too many questions. She looked up at Denny, who was studying her. She felt a flutter of uncertainty, tinged with anger.

“What do you need me for, Denny?”

“What am I missing?” he asked.

She looked back at the pages.

“What do you see?” he asked.

It was how he always asked her about patterns. The answer hit her hard, finally. She swallowed. She put her hands underneath the table and she gripped her legs. It kept her from screaming.

She stared down at the pages. They had nothing to do with artificial intelligence or human response time and rhetorical measures. Denny had been lying to her the whole time.

What the hell was this project about?

She looked down, forced herself to count to ten and fought to find a smile. It wouldn’t come. Before she knew it, her legs took over: she stood up and made for the door.

“Jackie. Stop.”

She kept walking to her bike. Her stomach ached. Where had Denny appeared from? She’d seen the numbers on the paper, the bullshit diagram he’d tried to pass off as related to their artificial intelligence program. She indulged him with a few platitudes and then said that she was feeling ill, which was true but also owed entirely to the fact she was almost sure he was lying. Denny, Christ, even Denny. No, count, Jackie.

“Jackie,” Denny said, lowering his voice, “I can tell that you know. I was hoping you’d figured it out.”

She turned. “I trusted you.”

The virulence in her voice caused him to step back.

“You have to come back inside. I’m not purposely…” He bowed his head in her direction and he spoke even more quietly. “Please, come back inside. I’m glad we’re at this point.” Now at a genuine whisper. “I can justify the clearances. We need you. Come inside.”

She stared at him blankly. Denny assumed she was thoughtfully calculating. She felt a rush of the distrust that pervaded her thinking, her cross to bear.

Jackie first noticed it in elementary school, this pattern. At first, she got attention. Wow, Jackie, how did you divide those numbers? Where did you learn that? Or: Did you see that little girl, clearing the entire memory board? There was the time she talked two boys out of a fistfight over an orange-and-blue Nerf football by pointing out some or another common interest, and another time where she realized her little sister was in the other room eating the whole jar of Flintstones vitamins and called 911 on her own because her parents were too busy fighting to pay attention. Nice job, young lady. Bit by bit, she saw a different side to these remarks. They implied some responsibility. Was she supposed to be something great, or do something great? Her gifts felt like liabilities. That’s what she once told her drunken father.

Impressive, Jackie, where did you learn that word?

Fuck you, Dad, you somnambulating bottom feeder.

Well, look, another pseudointellectual dipshit! Don’t you ever—

Shut your mouth, Alan. She’s not one of your whores! Jackie’s mother had gripped a vase from the table like it was a baseball.

As years had passed, Jackie tried to stay beneath the radar. She took every effort to not be noticed so she wouldn’t have to be misunderstood, underestimated, overestimated, estimated at all. No platitudes, and no expectations. She wore dark knit hats and baggy clothes to make herself indistinguishable. It was hard because she not only was so smart but attractive, with doll-like features. Delicate, a beautiful petite, if she’d have allowed it.

“Jackie?”

She settled on a wry smile.

She nodded. She thought about Dr. Martin, both flexible and firm, ultimately a model of how to be decisive, how to challenge, and be challenged, without being thrown off course. In Nepal, in that moment that could’ve gone either way, he’d saved her life, physically, even spiritually; absent his treatment, she’d not only have died, but even embraced it.

She felt light wind blowing through campus. It carried with it the feeling of uncertainty.

“Okay,” she muttered.

Downstairs, he set out two cups of coffee.

“Lantern,” he said.

Her small hands wrapped around the warm mug.

“Yes, another terrible code name from the company that brought you Project X,” Denny said. He hoped she’d smile but she wasn’t there yet.

“Bottom line, Jackie, we’re studying memory.”

She met his eye and saw truth there. He let her gaze at his sincerity until she looked down.