Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

She shook her head. “How about I buy you dinner?”

He checked the time in the corner of the flat monitor pane canted at an angle like a reading stand over the top of his desk. Elspeth found it interesting that he preferred the pane to contacts or a holographic interface. Still, she imagined he spent a lot of time staring at it. “How did it get so late? Sure, let me grab my jacket. My roommates are at a friend’s place for dinner.” He wiggled his fingers in the air to indicate quotation marks.

I wonder what quote roommates unquote are. She stepped back as he walked around the desk, rolling down his shirtsleeves and buttoning the cuffs before he brushed past her to take his coat down off the peg beside the door. “What do you want?”

“Anything’s good,” she answered, wondering if he meant — or caught — the double entendre. “I wonder if that little noodle shop on the corner by the university is still there.”

He took the knob in his hand and held the door open for her. He passed his thumbprint over the sensor as well as turning the key in the lock. “When was the last time you were there?”

She almost laughed in realization. “About thirteen years.”

“Ah.”

Elspeth could see evening light through the double glass doors at the end of the corridor as they walked. She knew he was waiting for an explanation. “I’ve been out of Toronto for a while. I’ll tell you about it if I get a couple of beers in me.”

“You do that,” he said, as the outside doors whisked open before them, enfolding them in warm autumn air like a humid exhalation.

An hour later at a restaurant still called “Lemon Grass,” Elspeth picked up her chopsticks and leaned forward over the steaming bowl of noodles, closing her eyes to inhale. “Jesus, that smells good.”

Across the table, Gabe tilted his bowl toward his mouth. Slurping noodles, he nodded. He chewed, swallowed, and cleared his throat. “I love this stuff. So tell me about your project. Our project. Do you want another beer?”

“Please. Well, here’s the thing. I don’t know how much you remember from about thirteen years back… Do you recall anything what the media said then? About my work in particular?”

Gabe signaled the waitress. He had a knack, Elspeth noticed, for catching people’s eye. “I saw you on Network Tonite . The night Alex Ugate was shot.”

“Oh.” Elspeth set her chopsticks aside. “That was a bad business.” She picked the Sapporo up before the waitress’s hand had really left it and took a swallow. Two should be my limit. You’re cut off after this one, Elspeth. “That was about the worst night of my life.”

“I imagine. I’ve had a few of those myself.” He set his bowl down and laid the chopsticks on the blue porcelain rest, reaching for the teapot. The bowls and teacups were still as mismatched as she remembered: Gabe’s cup was red and blue, and Elspeth’s was white with translucent rice grains throughout. “I remember they showed the VR feed, and you talking with some dead engineer…”

She chuckled, distracted enough to pick her chopsticks back up, fingertips fretting the splintery wood. “Nikola Tesla. He wasn’t a true AI, though — just a construct personality. A responder designed to mimic a long-dead man.”

Gabe nodded. “And then a riot broke out in the TV studio, as I recall.” As if realizing what he had said, he continued quickly. “Do you still think you were on the right track?”

After a long pause, she forced herself to keep chewing. “Gabe, I’m sure of it. It’s just a matter of creating the right construct personality. After a certain point, I believe they’ll self-generate. Given sufficient system resources, that is.”

“Ah.” He seemed pensive.

She reached out and tapped his hand. “Speak.”

His shoulder rose and fell under light-blue broadcloth. “I’m wondering if the research would still be as controversial now. Ten years later.” She didn’t answer immediately, and after a sip of beer he continued. “Course, I never much understood what the fuss was then.”

“It won’t be controversial,” she whispered, “because no one will know that we’re doing it this time.” She nibbled on the edge of her thumbnail. “And as for what the fuss was — well, what was the fuss over nanotech, or bioengineering, or cloning? People used to get shot for performing abortions, for Christ’s sake. Fundamentalists are nuts.” Self-consciously, she touched her gold cross, watching fish circle in the tank on the wall.

“In the U.S., the only reason people don’t still get shot for performing abortions is because they’re not legal anymore,” Gabe replied. He picked up his chopsticks and sucked up another mouthful of noodles. “How on earth did you wind up going to jail for sedition, of all things?”

“It wasn’t sedition.”

“I remember the trial. Military Powers Act. Something else? Not espionage, or they wouldn’t have you on this project.”

Elspeth smoothed the palm of her hand over the speckled linoleum tabletop. Dark red vinyl crinkled under her thighs as she shifted position in the booth. “There is that.” She poured herself tea so she wouldn’t finish her beer too quickly.

Gabe watched quietly while she fidgeted.

“It was — noncooperation, I suppose you’d call it. Valens wanted someone — I mean, something — I wasn’t prepared to give him.” She changed the subject none too smoothly. “Where did you learn programming?”

“Now that is a long and ugly story. I used to play around for fun when I was a kid. There’s not much to do in the winters up north. We played a lot of Monopoly.”

Elspeth glanced up at him, surprised. Her eyes met his bay-blue ones, which twinkled amid sunbaked creases. Is he kidding? Yes. And no. “And you kept it up in the army?”

He shrugged and took a pull of his beer. “Not really. I was special forces. I got shot at.” The eyes looked down, and the twinkle left them. “Then I got out, got married, and had to get a real job. Which reminds me — I think we’ve got an unusually persistent somebody poking around the edges of the intranet. He hasn’t made it in, but he’s giving me a run for my money.”

“I’m keeping all my project work on the isolated intranet. Are you?”

“Yes. Although I can’t help but feel a bigger system might provoke things. Kind of a neurons-and-synapses kind of deal, n’est ce pas?” He trailed off, poking at his food. “How did you get into this line of work?”

“I started with an MSW and decided I was sick of watching inner city kids get chewed up by the system, so I went back to school for medicine and figured out I was too scared of hurting people to be a physician. That led me into psychiatry until I figured out I could hurt them worse. Thus,” she spread her hands wide, as if releasing a dove, “research.”

He raised his Sapporo and tapped it against hers. “Here’s to winding up someplace other than where you intended.”

“I already did that, Gabe.” The words came out too easily, revealing more than she had meant to.

“Yeah.” He finished the beer and set the bottle aside for the alert waitress to carry off.

In a moment, she was back with two more. Elspeth eyed hers uncertainly. “I should stop with these.”

“Do you have somewhere to be?”

She chewed, swallowed, regretting already the need to leave the warm, ginger-scented restaurant and go back to the hospital, to the reek of antiseptic and death. “Well… yeah.”

“Hell,” he said. “Drink the beer. I’ll walk you over. It is walkable?”

“Subway,” she replied, and he nodded.

“Close enough.”

1530 hours, Friday 8 September, 2062